Jim Burke: The English Teacher's Companion

Senior Moments: Permission

As I watch the seniors in my class and at home, the young seniors and the elders, and consider my own place on that continuum, one word comes to mind again and again: permission. 

We cannot reach or teach those in our care, whether older or much younger, if they will not give us permission to say or do anything; nor can they get where they want to go, become what they want to be, if they do not find a way to give themselves permission to listen to us, but also to themselves.

Permission is subtle, often not even spoken; yet you can tell when someone gives it. They yield, they listen a bit more, look a bit longer.

All the more difficult, however, that those we care about most--our own children--often withdraw that permission, revoke our library card, telling us that they are now closed for a time and not interested in checking out the wisdom we have spent our lives gathering to give to them.

During such times, these young seniors move into a new season, a winter where they must often wander alone through the long white days they have given themselves permission to endure. 

Under such circumstances, we must give them permission to do this; we must also give ourselves permission to look on, often while they suffer in some way we find difficult to watch. It is during such seasons, however, that they are making themselves. 

Remember when our children were young, entering into those periods between one stage and the next, when they slept longer and later? And the doctor would say that during that sleep they were growing, preparing themselves for the self they would wake to, the one that was a little less ours and a bit more their own? And if we tried to help, to do things we once did for them, they would say with that huffy voice, "I'll do it myself!"

So it is with the young senior who is trying on that early adult self, the one that doesn't fit them so well yet, but into which they will grow. So it is with the elderly senior who must, after a lifetime of doing for others, permit those people to now do things for them, permit themselves to be cared for, provided for, as they move into their own next season.

And those of us in the middle, who shuffle between caring for parents in the morning and kids in the evening, as we all grow older together? We must give ourselves permission to look for and listen to those who know the territory ahead, whose voices can assure us we will make it through to the other side of this season where the days fall like leaves too many to catch. We must give ourselves permission to still listen to ourselves and to live out all those stories we have told but not yet lived.

Senior Moments: The Work of Men

During my senior/18th year growing up in Sacramento, I pumped gas, washed cars, parked cars, waxed and rented skis, photographed properties for my uncle's real estate business and girls at my high school who needed photos for their modeling portfolios, and, as mentioned in a recent blog, collated-folded-sorted-stuffed papers in the bindery at a printing plant. (I should note that at 18 I assumed I was going to be a professional photographer....)

My son Whitman has no job but sells things through eBay and other venues, demonstrating a sometimes shockingly modern entrepreneurial ability to buy, trade, sell---and earn. On a good day, he makes more with a few keystrokes than I ever earned in an eight-hour day. It somehow represents the changing nature of work. When I ask him about all this, he grins and takes an almost paternal tone of patience while trying to exlpain the modern world of digital commerce to me.

But an article in today's San Francisco Chronicle about men and work in America today really shocked me as it described the trends in the workplace in general and with men in particular. 

The article paints a portrait of a world  that could not be more different than the world my father stepped into at 18, taking a job at a place (the Office of State Printing) where he would work for the next 38 years until he retired (early due to cancer). And shockingly different than the world my father-in-law Melvin occupied at 18 as he prepared to ship out to China during World War Two (his brothers going to Omaha Beach and the Alusian Islands).

I want to say I am worried about the young men I teach, and I suppose I am; but I also find them all good young men who seem not to turn away from work. What I do know is that the world is not waiting with open arms and easy jobs as it was for me, my father, or my father-in-law when they were the same age.

It was, of course, a different world then. Now we must help our sons and students learn to live in this world, a world where women and my female students appear to be much more at home and willing to do what they must to make a living so that when the work day's done they can then make a life.

Senior Moments: What Do Seniors Want?

An article in yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle reported that the Millennial Generation (which includes current high school seniors) would rather have a cell phone than a car. 

When I was a senior in 1979, I wanted a car the way today's kids apparently want a cell phone. 

Then I thought about Ann, who would have been 18 in 1941, just as the war getting under way, her brother about to head off to fight in the European theater, her future husband eventually going to the Far East to fight there, and the boys all around her in high school leaving daily to join the war effort. She and all those around her would simply have wanted their family, friends, and fellow Americans to return home as soon as possible and all in one piece.

Senior Moments: Where the Past, Present, and Future Meet

Friday night and most of Saturday morning, I read the essays my seniors wrote on the theme of separate worlds. Yet all weekend I could only think how impossibly connected these worlds we live in and move through are.

This morning Ann sat in a chair at a bend in the Russian River where as a girl our daughter's age (12), Ann herself fished and rowed down the river. This morning Whitman, fishing the same stretch of water, sat in the shade of a bridge that carries us over to the side of town where Ann's childhood past lives in memory and mind. 

Those are the moments she remembers most vividly and cherishes: fishing, boating, playing at the river, camping with family. These are the moments she recalled over dinner last night in Jenner where the Russian River meets the Pacific Ocean. 

Those are the moments we are trying to give our own children with a greater urgency as this senior year begins for Whitman, at the end of which he will pass from this life with us to the next one he will create for himself.

Thinking of the past as I listened to Ann speak of it there beside the river this morning, I could not help but recall Faulker's remark that "the past is not dead; it is not even past." 

Senior Moments: Separate Worlds

The summer reading assignment for one of my senior classes (AP Lit) was to find two books that somehow explored the idea of separate worlds. 

This turned out to be a much better assignment than I even realized as seniors are, by virtue of their status, living on or moving toward the border between one world and the next.

So it is with elders, one world (of family, work, comfort, security, and more) giving way to another world where one comes to live more and more; for many, though, including Ann, they move back and forth across those worlds. Thus what often appear to be totally separate worlds are, in most cases, much more integrated, something like the image at the top.

This process, of moving from one world into the next, is almost a law of physics when it comes to high school seniors: they are supposed to grow tired of and even resent school, home, family, and sometimes friends. It requires a lot of steam to get oneself up and out of the world of the familiar and into the world of the future you must begine to create responsibility for yourself. 

To get students to think about this idea of separate worlds, to goad them beyond the obvious thinking of either/or, I gave them images like the one above and the painting below by Edward Hopper. Art bring together so many forces; it needs a bigger place in the curriculum. 

Artists and writers, such as Jonathan Franzen in his book Freedom, which I just finished yesterday, remind us through their depiction of us lost in our separate worlds just how connected our worlds are. One might go so far as to say that the more separate we imagine our worlds to be the more obvious it is how similar we all are.

Today, the kids came in, having spent the last couple periods developing their ideas about this theme through spirited, intelligent discussions, and spent the period writing the year's first essay. Judging by a quick scan of the papers, they did the sort of thinking and writing (about their reading) that we hope to see all our kids doing as they prepare to leave the world of high school for that other, seemingly separate world of the real world.

 

 

Note: I entirely understand if you decide to unsubscribe from the blog this year as I post nearly every day. If you do, stop back by now and then to see what's up and check in; then come back next summer when this year's "Senior Moments" thread has concluded.

Senior Moments: The Dinner Table Test

First day of the semester in all senior classes: described the year as a "conversation with yourself" about the future.

To begin that conversation, I put up Friedrich's The Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog and asked them to generate questions to help them make sense of the painting and to connect it to their lives as seniors on the cusp of early adulthood.

The most important test of the first day is the Dinner Table Test, which we had in our house last night. The DTT happens when parents ask what happened at school that day. Stories are told about the teacher, the class, and what they did that day. First impressions---of teachers, students, and parents---are crucial at this stage.

I want students to say they felt challenged, intrigued, and confident they would do work that mattered in the year ahead.

In our house yesterday, the DTT involved two seniors: our son and my mother-in-law (Ann). Whit played it cool senior all the way: nothing to report. Ann attended her first day at a program for seniors at the Center for Aging here in San Francisco. Her day was what most high school seniors wish theirs was like: they sang, played games, talked, were fed a nice lunch, and had a guest come in to sing, accompanied by an accordian, an instrument Ann played as a young girl in the bandstand in Golden Gate Park.

Why The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog? Because we are all seniors this year looking ahead to a future shrouded in fog, through which we move carefully, uncertainly, guided by the faith that on the other side of it is a clarity we can all claim as our own.

 

Senior Moments: Reaching Out

The opening minutes, hours, days of any class are crucial for the teacher, but also the student. Thanks to the frequent use of school management platforms like Schoolloop, this window of opportunity extends to the days before school even starts now. 

So what was my very first move for my seniors this year? To reach out--both to them and their parents. As the parent of a senior, I know this is a tough stretch for parents, many of whom are beginning to prepare to send their child away the following year. Thus I see myself as a partner to both parents and students and want to convey that before the first bell even rings (12 hours from now...).

Using the school-wide email program within Schoolloop that allows us to communicate to students and their parents, I sent the following email a few days ago:

Date: 8/11/11 7:55 PM  Subject: Welcome!

Hello! I am so glad to see you in my English class for the coming year! I love teaching seniors (and my son will be a senior, too, so it's all seniors all the time for me this year!). I have so many exciting things I can't wait to get busy doing with you. We will get to meet each other on Tuesday but if you have any questions--you or your parents--do not hesitate to write me in the coming days.  I am very committed to having a great year with you and doing all I can to make you learn so much your head hurts---but in a good way, right? See you soon. Until then, enjoy the days. Mr. Burke

There is another side to this idea of reaching out, though, from the student side of the enterprise. In the end, we must all be our own best teachers, making those adults at home and school give us all the best they have to offer when we are young. The kids that realize this ask, send emails, meet with you. They enter into a long conversation with you that takes all year to conclude and, if it is particularly satisfying, continues into the college years and beyond.

Today I got an email from a student who will be in one of my classes. She wanted to know what I thought about the topic for the summer reading (the theme of separate worlds). I told her she was not coming into my class for me to tell her what I think but to learn how to come up with her own thoughts. But we had a good, if brief, connection which will ensure that when I meet her in the morning, I already know her a bit better than the others. She even showed me the respect of capitalizing letters and using punctuation (as opposed to writing it like a text message as too many often do).

So much gain from so small an effort on both our parts by just sending a short email.

In the morning, it all begins.

Me, 180 days, and 100 seniors entering this room and launching out. Bring it!

 

Senior Moments: Declarations of Independence

For most seniors, including my son who lounges in the next room on the last evening before beginning his senior year, independence is a bit like a car they inherited but must learn how to drive, often, it seems, by crashing or least denting and scratching it a few times.

They want to try out this idea that they can do (or NOT do) things they have not been able to do before, pretending they know all the consequences of their actions. They are so eager to declare their independence (most of them anyway) that they often fail to notice the errors in judgment. 

They are a little like I was some years ago around this time: I had fallen down the stairs carrying a huge bag of clothing I swore I could handle on my own. (NO, I don't need any help! I can do this...). So I began school in a cast and on a cane. After a week, I just knew the cast was not needed. I was fine on my own. (The cast felt like a moist sock and seemed to offer as much support: how could it possibly be serving its intended purpose?).

So I went into my woodshop, hunkered down on the floor, and cut it off. Having boldly declared my own independence, I stood up and immediately fell to the garage floor in pain after one (failed) step. I immediately realized I was not quite as independent as I thought. 

The problem: I would have felt like an idiot calling the hospital and saying I accidentally (on purpose) cut off my cast because I thought I did not need it only to realize I do, in fact, need it. 

No doubt, when I am a senior (citizen), I will feel the sharp ache of the bones that did not heal correctly. I have learned, however, to let myself depend on the wisdom of others when my own is incomplete or just plain absent. I can only hope my seniors, including my second son, do the same.

Senior Moments

So I will be teaching all seniors and have a son who is a senior this year. I like to think at the beginning of each year about something to pay attention to, perhaps take notes on or otherwise observe. 

Would like to focus my blog primarily on the story of this year, these kids, my own son, and the journey we'll all take. The idea of "senior moments" is intriguing for other reasons: reflections on my own senior year, turning 50 this year (AARP, really, already?), caring for a senior (my wife's mother).... Seems like too many stars aligning themselves for a writer to not pay attention to for the year.

Will try to post regularly but with short impressions that give us all, myself included, something to think about as we help these kids through this liminal moment.

Weeding and Mowing in the Dark

It takes very little, really, to reset ourselves, to reboot our spirit. Sometimes we are so overwhelmed with the swarm of our worries we have no room to hear the hive of wonder buzzing around us all the time.

Tonight, after a long day of intense work, I sat on the deck, drank a glass of red wine, grilled steaks, and read Virginia Woolf. When dinner was done, I went into the yard, still hours of work ahead of me, and mowed our tiny lawn and pulled these enormous weeds that grew like metaphors for the trials of the last few months. 

And it was good. And I felt the heart reset itself once again, so that sitting in the quiet of my deck in the dark after I was done, smelling of fresh cut grass, the stars spelled out across the nightscape, I could hear the birds singing tree to tree and was reminded how quickly we can become human again if only we take the time to try.