Having been overseas for the last three autumns, I have reveled in every shopping trip that has taken me by a seasonal display. Even back in August, I turned a corner in the store and grinned at the rows of fake pumpkins stretching down the aisle, reassured by the seasonal decorations that I was truly back in America. In the grocery stores, I nod approval as I pass by seasonal displays of “fall” foods and occasionally drop a seasonal treat like a Reese’s pumpkin into my shopping basket. (Logically, I know that Reese’s pumpkins are the same as Reese’s cups, but illogically, I believe they taste better.)
And now in October - the epitome of autumn, I find walking a far safer mode of transportation for me as my eyes are drawn to the yellow and orange stands of trees lining the freeway or a spray of red leaves in the middle of clump of green. One morning, with the fog still sleepily clinging to the fields, a blip of orange off to the right snagged my mind as I sped by. A half a mile later, my mind realized what I had seen as I blurted out, “Pumpkins!” like an excited seasonal greeting. Only my sense of duty (okay, fine, and my sub par driving skills) kept me driving on to school instead of backtracking to visit a sleepy pumpkin patch. I know that small, woodland creatures exist year-round, but as I walk through the park’s bike trails, I feel as though each bunny, mouse, chipmunk, and chickadee I see is another example of October’s wonder. And after three years of seeing no other animals except for ubiquitous magpies, I consider spotting even a squirrel as proof that October is amazing. (After my instinctive Doug-like reaction of “Squirrel!” I remind myself that squirrels are normal in North America and that the other people enjoying the path didn’t hear my internal excitement so I won’t go down in their histories as “the weird bike-path squirrel lady.”) The last three years, spring has been indescribably beautiful with the lazy cherry blossom “snow” that drifts down with each puff of wind and lines the streets. A part of me felt disloyal to autumn as I reveled in those displays of spring’s beauty. But this week, I got to experience the autumn equivalent to that. A blustering wind kicked up as I was leaving school Friday, and the yellow birch leaves lining the road fluttered down in an autumnal flurry that rivaled any cherry blossom snowfall. I’m not sure which of L. M. Montgomery’s characters said, “I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.” Even if it were the insufferable Josie Pye, I’d still heartily amen that sentiment. And this year, I’m so glad I live in a region where Octobers are a wonder.
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Even though I had the phone on silent, the call still woke me as the glowing screen lit up my room. I rolled over and ignored the phone. A good sleep the night before the first day of school was of greater importance than chatting with a friend from a different time zone. A few minutes later, the room lit up again. My friends rarely call and would never call repeatedly like this, so I peeked at the screen, saw the unfamiliar number, and set the phone screen-side down.
A minute later, I got a message: “Are you dead, sir?” Ominous question to start my thirteenth year of teaching. Part of me contemplated replying to the message with some quip like, “No, but if you interrupt my sleep again, you will be.” But mostly, I just stared at the message and heard Marcie’s matter-of-fact voice asking Peppermint Patty this. Now a month into the school year, I feel like this was the most fitting question to start the year. In many ways, I feel like I traded places with my students from this spring. Last semester, I was teaching middle school second-language students who couldn’t navigate the technology needed for online learning at all. After a semester, I had a folder of over a thousand screenshots I had sent to students to guide them through the cyber labyrinth. Now, I’m the one using a new system that my non-language learning students are marginally more familiar with. I constantly check for reassurance: “Can you see my screen?” “Can you hear me?” “Can you open this document?” Rather exhausting. And the students ask even more questions: “How many words are required in this paragraph?” “Can I read the car manual for my required outside reading pages?” “My wifi cut out; what did you talk about in the last half of class?” From that first ominous question, the questions have continued piling up. Fortunately, from my students last year, I learned the answer to every question: yes. (Occasionally, “maybe” is an acceptable substitute.) Me: What did Pinocchio do? Student A: Yes Me: Did you listen to the chapter or did you read the chapter? Student G: Yes Me: Why did the flying monkeys obey Dorothy? Student M: Yes Me: Can you see me? Students A-Z: Maybe (An exception to this “one answer to rule them all” is questions about lunch. How was lunch? Noodles.) Maybe I can try this ultimate answer with my students this week. At least, I can amuse myself with in the afternoon when I am tired after teaching to a screen for three straight hours and that ominous text message pops into my head again. “Are you dead, sir?” Maybe. Maybe. For many, 2020 has become like “that class” or “that student”—the one you endure as you count the days till graduation or summer break. Yet, until recently, I would have smiled and sheepishly admitted that I was enjoying much that this year had brought into my life.
Trying to remember those positive moments, I’ve been rereading my own writing from this year and found this letter I wrote on the day I traded one uncertain “in-between” for an even more uncertain one: “Today marks one hundred days for me since life was ‘normal.’ One hundred days since I left the house without thinking ‘Where’s my mask? What will security measures be today? Will the guards let me into the store? Will the walk to the store raise my temperature too much? Will the guards let me back into the apartment complex?’ “One hundred days since I could visit a friend. “One hundred days since I could go to work and see my students. “One hundred days since I started having mini praise fests every time the grocery store restocked the staple Western luxuries like cheese, salami, yogurt, and cream. “One hundred days since I began to see one of my biggest prayers—that the disconnecting, numbing power of technology would loosen its grip on my students’ generation—being answered as He glutted us all on our craving until we turned away from the semblance of ‘connection’ and began to look forward to seeing each other in person again. “Through all of this, I have seen what I call ‘glimmers of light.’ Students who were marginalized or underachieving in the classroom have suddenly become motivated and are making up for slacking in the first semester. I had a professional development opportunity almost no other teacher has ever had—daily feedback from a teacher friend who was an unobserved fly-on-the-wall in my video class. I had a wonderful friend just ‘happen’ to need a place to crash at my place for fifty-five wonderful days of healing fellowship during the height of the quarantine. “And this week, these glimmers gave way to a sunburst: I lost my job. This fall, I was rereading Paul Miller’s A Praying Life. In it, he mentions praying about his hopes and dreams. I started doing that. And He brought to mind dreams I had put away in a mental drawer, thinking they were just happy daydreams. And He kept bringing them up, as people would mention this or that opportunity in the States that match those dreams. But I was locked into a two-year contract. Yet, I kept Asking about these dreams even while accepting that I would stay overseas for another year. And then, Monday morning, I was called into a meeting and quite suddenly, found out that they were cancelling my contract for next year. “I walked home alternately laughing and singing ‘Blessed be the Name of the Lord.’ ‘He gives and takes away. He gives and takes away. My heart will choose to say, Lord, blessed be Your name.’ And, oh, how He gives. In the most unexpected way, He gave me what I had lacked the faith to ask for. “So, I’m coming home. I don’t know where that home will be. But I know when. I’ll be moving Stateside in July to start another adventure.” It has been four months since I penned that letter. Four months filled with change and uncertainty and countless decisions made on too little sleep. And although the sunburst has been crowded out by some ominously dark clouds, I still see glimmers of light. As a writer, I am easily distracted. As this year has removed any sense of normal and structure from my life, finding a “writing spot” has been challenging. One of my goals this fall was to enjoy the ease of using Western internet again by resuming regular blogging (it’s hard to stay motivated when posting a blog requires several tries to load the webpage and a half a dozen refreshes to get the edit button to work). And yet, now that this fall has arrived, I still am in an “in-between” with no routines beyond go to work and go to sleep.
I find myself looking to the past for perspective and reminders of truth. Today, determined to resume a writing life, I reviewed my unpublished writing from this year and stumbled on this post I wrote for Easter: At first, when I tucked myself away inside for a presumably brief isolation, I secretly relished having unlimited, guilt-free alone time. Time to reflect, write, feel, think, grow, heal. Eighty days later, I still appreciate this time in the in-between, but I am aware of the consequence of passing time. A few weeks ago, a friend asked me whether we were going to have to go through culture shock again when we re-emerge from isolation. A disheartening thought. But she’s right. Reintegrating with society, rebuilding routines—we will have to remember parts of the foreign culture we have forgotten; we will have to adjust to parts of that culture that have changed. As with most experiences in the in-between, a new normal awaits on the other side. And a new normal, of course, means change. I’ve experienced many transitions in life, but this prolonged in-between is unique; I’m not in the process of changing locations or jobs with clearly defined parameters. At times, I feel like I’m paused mid-scene and waiting for the viewer to press Play again. But we aren’t really paused, so when He presses Play, we’ll jump to new scenes without finishing the old ones. Usually, I view change with antipathy, odd considering how often I see the flaws in the normal and try to fix it. But during this in-between, I have been musing on two ideas: the comfort of His immutability and the mercy of my mutability. In the midst of constant change—moving to new homes, gaining and losing friends, colleagues, and students, switching jobs—He remains steadfast, a sure anchor for my soul. That comfort of His unchanging nature often deludes me into wanting everything else to stay in the familiar safety of a broken normal. As I stare out the window at a world slowly unpausing, wondering what it will look like when this interlude is over, part of me fears the changes that will be. But today, Easter Sunday, we are not just celebrating God’s immutable love, justice, and grace. We are celebrating the new normal He brought us—the gift of change. Now, as we wait in the in-between, we are made new, changed from glory to glory. Those changes, though difficult and gradual, are possible because we are mercifully mutable. No matter what life looks like next, I can and will change with it while He remains the same. Even better, we look forward to a far more blessed new normal that awaits us. In the past sixty-seven days, I’ve heard repeated the admonition to reach out in our time of isolation to encourage others. Still learning to build healthy boundaries, I’m almost hyperaware of things that rub me wrong. And from the beginning, I found myself slightly irritated by this mantra of “encourage others.” It seemed to assume two things: 1. That Others needed encouraging and 2. That even though we were in the same situation, the encouragers didn’t need to put their own oxygen masks on before assisting the Others.
That irritation grew as I started getting encouraging messages from people. I continued monitoring my reactions, gathering a pile of puzzle pieces, not quite sure what picture they would create. Why did I feel completely encouraged when a friend I rarely text sent me a “Hey, I miss you. Hope you’re doing well” message, but I felt like a squashed bug when someone messaged me that she was praying for me and included three verses on trusting God? A message clearly designed to encourage me didn’t, while a brief chat conversation with an acquaintance about how many days I had been inside left me uplifted. Then this weekend, Brene Brown gave me the linchpin, and the puzzle pieces fit into place. Explaining the difference between sympathy and empathy, Brown uses the example of falling into a pit. Someone with sympathy stares down at you, acknowledges that you’re in a pit, and moves on. Someone with empathy see you in the pit and joins you there. Sympathy puts you in a position of weakness while assuming its own position of strength. Empathy connects you to those outside the pit which ultimately helps you out of the hole. The truly encouraging messages I’ve received are just normal connections with people--empathy. We talk at the already established closeness of the relationship. The messages have not presumed a lack in me, a need for encouragement, a struggle on my part the way that the “encouraging messages” have. Rather the messages referenced our past normal interactions or, better yet, engaged me in conversation. C. S. Lewis talks about the skeptic always seeing through things, forgetting that the point of seeing through things is to see something: we look through the window to see the garden (or, in my case, my neighbors in my isolation). The window is for looking through. In the many hours I’ve stared through my window in the past two months, I look at the window only when it needs to be cleaned. Looking at the window defeats the purpose of its windowness. I think that’s the problem with this push to encourage others. So focused on the window of encouraging, we forget its nature. We send verses to address the presumed (or projected) struggles of others without connecting with the person, who may or may not be in a deep hole. By focusing on the goal of encouraging, we miss the target. Encouragement—empathy—comes through connection. Connection comes from sharing, not wisdom from a stable position above the pit, but rather sharing yourself. Connection comes from asking sincerely “How’s it going?” and accepting the answer even if it’s not what you expected. Connection could even come from admitting your own position in the deep hole. Truly in the past sixty-seven days, the more encouraging messages I’ve gotten were “Hey, missing you on another Thursday. Hope you’re doing well.” Or better yet the continuation of an ongoing conversation, “Hey, I just finished that book you recommended. It was awesome!” Balance—that ever so elusive goal. I struggle with overwork and overcorrect into laziness. I accept criticism that I am too opinionated and overcorrect into having no opinions about anything. The pendulum swings from talking too much to not talking at all, from being independent to being overly dependent, from too open to too aloof. Exhausted, I glare at the gauntlet of teeter-totters and wonder why it’s so hard.
A friend suggested that the secret isn’t balance at all. It’s alignment. When working on a balance pose in yoga, I choose a mark in the room to focus on: a drishti. The fixed point doesn’t move as I bob around like a weeble-wobble. As I focus on the drishti, I become more balanced, steadier, even stable. When I aim for balance itself, I fall, but when I focus on something that never wavers, it creates alignment in me, and I become balanced. Instead of trying to hover between overwork and laziness, I could focus on the only One is permanent and unchanging. For a while, I was satisfied with my friend’s idea. Alignment sounds saner than balance. But it still leaves a remarkably heavy burden on my shoulders. And as I fail at aligning myself with Him just as much as I fail at balance, I find myself toying with another idea coalescing from many books I happened to be reading simultaneously. We all are made with different fundamental temperaments, grow up in different home cultures, and are the products of different larger cultures, so it is no wonder that parts of Scripture resonate with some of us more than others. Collin Hansen, the author of Blind Spots, says that is how we react to Christ as well. Some of us love the Christ who is compassionate; others are strengthened by His courage; others are consumed by His commission. At first, I cataloged this as another area in which I needed to seek balance, almost missing the author’s point. But then Jen Wilkin reminded me in None Like Him that I am not omniscient; my mind has limits. I cannot successfully always remember that my Messiah is both courageous and compassionate, let alone always remember also that He commissioned His followers to a great work. In Misreading the Scripture through Western Eyes, the authors remind us that for generations, reading the Scriptures was primarily a community or family activity, not the private, solitary activity it is today. That reminder nudged me to think about the community’s role in my balance or alignment. In both Blind Spots and Misreading the Scriptures, the authors encourage us to remember other ways of thinking through interacting with others. Instead of surrounding myself with only close friends who see the compassionate Western Christ, which reinforces that skew, I could engage with friends who see His courage, embrace His commission, and understand what the Scriptures look like in another culture. This idea especially reinforces Drs. Cloud and Townsend’s premise that having multiple strong relationships is key to being healthy and forming new relationships. One good friend cannot give me all the perspective missing from my view. One good friend is just as limited as I in maintaining balance and remembering the manifold wisdom of God. There’s an interesting study by Wenger on memories of couples in close relationships. Over time, in the relationship, the couple divide the labor of remembering in the same way they divide household chores, except this division is done tacitly. The result of the study demonstrated that this transactive memory “is greater than either of the individual memories.” With transactive memory, members of a group do not need to remember every detail. The husband and wife do not both need to save in their memory which cupboard the Windex is in, which road the doctor’s office is on, or the details of that funny story that eases awkward moments at dinner parties. Transactive memory is reminiscent of Paul’s analogy of the Body. As the Hands appeal to the group about a need, a way to show His love to others, the Mind considers the cost, the Mouth shares Truth, the Muscles give strength and courage. The Hands don’t carry the burden of all the great work; the Hands do what Hands do. We use that analogy when it comes to actual service at church: who should teach, who should greet, who should never help in the nursery. But what if transactive memory is how the Body is supposed to work with knowledge as well? As we come together, we each bring the part of the Scripture that resonates with us, that has become engrafted and in coming together, we remind each other of the parts we forget. We each have something to offer and something to receive. What if the answer isn’t a never-ending struggle for internal alignment or personal balance? Maybe the answer is honest, loving connection to a varied group, a Body. Alone, I will forget parts of Who He is and what He asks of me. Together, we can remember far more and do what He asks of us. Teachers, both real and fictional ones, often work to create school cultures devoid of cruel teasing. In many ways, teasing is rejection, which we try to shelter our students from. But lately, dealing with junior highers contemplating the adults they will become, I’ve been mulling over whether we threw a baby out with the bathwater when we decided that rejection and teasing were completely bad. We laud difference so much in our topsy-turvy Enlightened culture that we have stopped considering whether the differences that students are teased for are worth defending.
Take for example a student teased for enjoying books. People questioning his decision should cause him to question his decision. Are they teasing him because he reads books, or because he traps people into listening to him recount the minutiae of a complicated plot? (Sorry for doing that repeatedly, Dad.) Reading is great, but having someone challenge him about it is also good, even if just causing him to establish what role books have in his life. Or what about the student who chews with her mouth open? Sweet, “nice” classmates will merely avoid her; others might complain about having to sit across from her without explaining why they don’t want to. Both behaviors will make her feel bad in the moment, but her poor table manners can alienate her if it persists into adulthood. Having a peer teasingly say, “Gross! I don’t want to see that!” once or twice could help her see a need to improve, which could save her from more rejection. People can change these behaviors. I think that’s where we well-meaning teachers lost sight of the issue. Jordan Peterson tells of a species of bird in which the male creates art to court the female. If the female rejects the male, he will destroy his art and improve it until a female accepts him. The bird doesn’t give up after one attempt; the bird doesn’t pout, defend his art, or call everyone else haters. He accepts the rejection and improves because of it. (This process of giving feedback to produce improved work is something we teachers are trained for, incidentally.) Students teasing others about things that they cannot change is wrong; students teasing others about things that they can change is an opportunity for growth, just like the bird’s art getting rejected, just a student getting a low score on a quiz. We could brush the rejection aside and assure the teased student that he is better than the bullies. Or we could talk with all students involved about why one group thinks the behavior is teasable and whether the teased student thinks that behavior is worth keeping in the face of rejection. If it is worth keeping, the discussion will encourage him and may challenge naysayers’ thinking. Last week, my roommate told me about her evening, which gave me a hint to my students’ future. She had gone to a party where a mutual friend tried to set her with a friend. As we hashed out the night, I asked, “Do you think you’ll see this—wait, is he a man or a boy-man?” Perhaps an odd question unless you, like my roommate and I, are a woman who has dated in the adultescence era. Even though the guy in question was a man, the question prompted a continuation of an earlier conversation: why are women just supposed to accept that many guys don’t become men until they are married with kids? Every church I have ever attended has a men’s group. Do they really just talk about the Bible and never apply it to practical moments of telling the boy-men how to become men? Do the older men really never come alongside the younger men and guide them into socially appropriate interaction? And if not, why aren’t they? Students check each other’s behavior through teasing. Adults seem less sure about how to address social ineptness. Most often, we ignore it, avoid the person, or complain about it to another person. A truly brazen person might tease the socially awkward person, but then reduce the truth by claiming it’s just a joke. A student doing something not normal in that social setting will have someone ask, “What are you doing? with the subtext of “That’s weird. Are you sure you want to do that?” I don’t think adults should behave like students, but I wonder what we are missing that we have so many stuck in adultescence. I remember my mother when, as a child, I hovered on the edges of her conversations, telling me to go away. She taught me that my behavior was not polite: either join the conversation or leave, but don’t stand there creepily watching others have a conversation. It’s easy to do that with your child; it’s hard to do that with a peer. But unless we step up and kindly say, “That’s not okay; try this instead,” they won’t have opportunity to learn. They aren’t learning from rejection. And unless we guide our students through teasing and rejection, they will become the socially awkward of the future. The man was desperate and cried out to the Teacher, “Lord, I believe.” And in honesty, he added, “Help my unbelief.” I memorized those words over twenty years ago, and they resonate with me even more now than they did then.
So often my inner cynic doubts the value of what I do. As a teacher, I sometimes have only a semester with students. I feel like I teach so little course material in that time, let alone add anything positive about how to be human. Sometimes my heart hums with pride when I read a student’s essay and marvel at how far she has come. Then that cynic reminds me that before ever joining my class, that student already had an aptitude for writing and would have made progress with any teacher she had. At times, I find that thought comforting as the weight of my students’ success no longer bears down on my solitary shoulders. At other times, I’m left thinking, “Does it matter?” Even more disheartening is volunteer work. I’ve worked at camps many summers. I love summer camp. (One of my friends who recognizes my tendency to withdraw was surprised by my enthusiasm for summer camp, but yes, this withdrawal-prone introvert loves summer camp.) This last summer, I volunteered at a camp specifically for children who live in orphanages. The camp gives them a week of fun and love, urging the volunteers to advocate later for the children’s adoption. At the end of the week, it’s heart-breaking to put the kids back on a bus and send them back to a hopeless future (because in their country, they legitimately do not have a future). It’s easy to think, “Does it matter?” Does five days of camp really make a difference? I felt like Longfellow in his bleakest of Christmas lyrics, written from the brink despair. But then, he heard the bells ringing hope: “God is not dead; nor doth He sleep.” No bells pealing jolted me from my doubt, but sweet memories did. I had stable, loving parents, who also had stable, loving parents, who also had stable, loving parents. My teachers at both school and church were encouraging and invested in me. Growing up, I went to camp for only five days every summer. And twenty years later, I still remember people from camp, who, for a couple days or even a couple hours, took time to care for me. I remember guest lecturers in university, chapel speakers, regular customers at Donut World who brightened ten minutes of my Saturday morning shift. These precious memories are not of grand sacrificial acts. They are small, routine even. But do they matter? Yes. Most definitely yes. Man was made in God’s image. And God took man’s form to be God with Us. Perhaps an odd topic to meditate on in December, but I have been thinking this month on the nature of God. I realized how much I was believing a “Christian myth”—a lie that sounds Biblical but is still a lie. In response to that lie, I have been focusing on Truth: Who is God? And how have I been made in His image?
God, a distinct entity, states clearly His likes and dislikes, what He will accept and not accept, and how He will respond to things He will not accept. He does not force others to follow His way; He merely invites them to and states the consequences if they cross His boundaries. Complete in Himself, He still enjoys relationships. This isn’t astounding. All of Scripture communicates these ideas. But what I just realized was that since I am made in that image, those things (boundaries) are good for me, too. Somehow, I started believing the lie that taking care of my own needs was selfish. After all, love sacrifices, and love should care more about others than self. The model for sacrificial love is God: the Father loved us so much that He sacrificed His Son; the Son loved us so much that He sacrificed Himself. But, note the verb tense: not sacrifices. Sacrificed. Yes, Christ came, becoming man, but He was still fully God. His sense of Who He was never changed. He did not, nor does not, change for His loved ones. His likes and dislikes stay the same. His position changed temporarily (heaven for earth), but His character does not waver. His actions changed temporarily (sleeping, living as a human), but His boundaries of acceptable and unacceptable remain steadfast. Love came down to die, but He lived before dying. He did not lead a life of negating every need, emotion, and opinion in the name of sacrificial love. That isn’t living. A person with no needs, desires, emotions, or opinions—that person cannot love anyone because that person is dead. I believed that sacrificial love was constantly denying myself for others. But, my rational mind cried out, where is the line? I could not sustain a lifetime of sacrificing all of me. Christ sacrificed once; His public ministry, although physically taxing, lasted only three years. How could I, a mere mortal, expect to last longer than God with Us? How could I distinguish between others’ needs and others’ wants? When I voiced concerns about knowing where the line was, I heard criticism about being too used to getting my own way and that if I spent more time serving others, then I would feel better. So, I continued to act on those lies, ignoring my physical comfort for someone else (because love sacrifices), ignoring my true needs for someone else (because love sacrifices), and denying my own desires (because love seeks not its own). With no needs or desires, I felt like I ceased to be. Mercifully, not all my relationships succumbed to these lies. I noticed that in these relationships I was wholly myself, a glaring contrast to the fragmented shadow I was in others. Desperate to be whole again, I turned to the model of sacrificial love. Who is this God Who can sacrifice Himself and not lose Himself? When did He sacrifice? What did He sacrifice? Christ did “what we could not do for ourselves,” I read one day and then read it again. “Denying ourselves to do for others what they cannot do for themselves is showing the sacrificial love of Christ. This is what Christ did for us. . . . he saved us.” All this time, I was sacrificing myself for others’ whims, things they could get without my sacrifice. Looking at what Christ (and His followers) sacrificed for added more clarity: they sacrificed most often for the sake of the gospel. Especially around the holidays, I sacrifice time, energy, rest, and money in the name of love, spurred by sweet stories of sacrifice, but I can place a boundary around that sacrifice—what am I sacrificing for? I can still agree with the reformed Ebenezer Scrooge that “mankind [is] my business,” but I can temper that sentiment with my true responsibility to mankind: sacrificing for true needs, sacrificing to point to Christ. Last week, I had one of those teacher moments that I will waffle over for years: Did I do the right thing? We had a school-wide event in which each class had to present or perform something. My students had pushed back against my attempts to prepare them. And since the event was extra-curricular, I couldn’t assign homework or give a score to “encourage” participation. So, on the day of the event, our three-minute performance lasted about fifteen second (forty-five, counting the walk to and from our seats). As we waited for our turn watching other classes perform, my students’ embarrassment grew.
“Miss Lane,” a student in my row leaned over to whisper while first-graders wowed parents by adorably existing on the stage, “do we have music to play while we’re up there?” “No,” I whispered back. “Your table was in charge of choosing a song.” Third graders trying not to get their feet tangled up in their costumes passed us as another student behind me leaned up: “Miss Lane, did you get music for us?” “No,” I replied. “It was your table’s responsibility. I don’t sit at your table.” Similar whispered inquiries about props and signs and such snaked up to me through every other class’s performance. To each inquiry, I reminded them of moments in our preparation when I had asked if they wanted me to order props or print signs, and they had assured me that they didn’t need or want them. (At the time, I had been tempted to order them anyway, but I didn’t think that would respect the students’ part in our collective decision-marking.) By the time we stood, my students were painfully aware of how their performance, or non-performance, would rank. Could I have sheltered them from the embarrassment? Yes. I could have stayed late at school for a week and cobbled together something to save face for them. I could have ignored their input in our collective planning and done what I thought was best. But I didn’t. Too often we shelter students from minor consequences trying to be nice. But Consequence and Failure are my students’ teachers, too, perhaps more than I am. In my first drama competition ever, I won. That elation at winning was wonderful and dangerous, and it was the best thing for my future in drama that I lost in the next competition. When I got home from the competition, Mom came into my room with a small gift and hug to celebrate. I burst into tears of shame. We talked, and I learned some important lessons that had nothing to do with drama and had everything to do with hard work, striving for excellence, and accepting that my best is not always The best. Failure was a good drama teacher: I won and lost again and enjoyed the experience each time. In case a squadron of lawnmower moms are outraged by my callousness at letting my students fail publicly, rest assured that after their fifteen seconds of fame, my class and I had a good talk back in the classroom. Like my mom, I helped Failure and Consequence do some teaching, discussing what they could have done differently and what other areas of life they exhibit the same potentially negative behavior so that they can avoid future shame and concluding with praise that they still have the courage to get up and perform even though they knew their performance wouldn’t shine. I’m still waffling on this moment. The funny thing about reflection is that whether something is a success or failure, I still end up asking the same questions: what worked, what didn’t work, what could I have done differently, what can I apply to future similar situations. |
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