PHigh

The people are the biggest mirror. Whatever is brought to the classroom from the teacher is often reflected in the students. If the teacher has cultivated a true rapport with the students, this reflection is such that if the teacher is sleepy, the students will be.

As a second year teacher, there is no lack of changes that need to be made for the next year. I am glad there are as many years as there are to improve. I feel sorry for the students in these early years. They are getting my mistakes and regrets and the beginning of ideas. It is difficult to explain to them that, much like anything else, this requires practice and time. There are so many ideas that just cannot be brought to fruition in the time and ability with which I am currently working. I now have a closer understanding of why laws take so long to pass, or medicines approved, or men to the moon. I started out the year concentrating my efforts in the one particular area of classroom management. I would like, now that much has been cultivated concerning that, in the future to incorporate certain projects, through painting, crafts, poetry, and filmmaking. There is one particular idea of having students make a short film about the life of Emiliano Zapata, the Mexican revolutionary. As time pressurizes, and the length of the year draws out its burdensome clamp, I look around and try to remember these ideas in between maintaining a legitmate classroom environment, academic and behavioral. I forget. Where’s that scene where Zapata is in a field, watching the sun move quickly now in the west, its light sliding narrowly through the shadowcast crops? Where did I put that?

The first year of teaching, if you are honest, is a broken heart. The idealist is swiftly defeated by the realist and the edges of your heart to where everything attaches, are, each day, freshly splintered. It is with this dynamic that I know I will always struggle and explore. I imagine that idealism is so often overlooked or dismissed by the rational mind, the mind that narrows itself into, “That cannot happen,” or, “That cannot be,” because it is too difficult. It requires something more. But the idealist will tell you that you are not actually doing more; rather, you are doing what you are supposed to be doing, fulfilling any and all potential. If we have reached this point, we have learned the scales, but not bothered to learn how to improvise. We have raised the crops, but not bothered to harvest them. The idealist would say that we are not thinking hard enough. That there are solutions, and for those solutions we have to be willing to sacrifice as much time and effort as it would take. Because everything that opposes knowledge certainly does not rest nor concern itself with any cost. An example of an opponent of knowledge: Any number of large American corporations, McDonald’s, Nike, Wal-Mart. Such corporations forsake knowledge as it is counterintuitive to their bottom line. Especially local knowledge, entrepeneurship, and local culture. As opponents, we may seem out matched with their ubiquitous marketing and advertising funded by and for dollars, cars, CEO homes, stocks, personal islands. The teacher though, engages something more organic, that cannot be assembled or bought. He/She has the walk from the classroom to the car at the end of the day having known hard work, having engaged poverty, fruitlessness, anger, fear, frustration, insecurity, uncertainty, untold distractions, and untold defeats. He/She walks with the endless cultivation of a working resurrection. Raising the swollen tyranny of teenage priority. Raising the ache of the shattered family. Raising the stench of ignorance and despair, moving the stone, and calling out, “Come forth! You are unbound!”

Tomorrow I will read the following to my students:

I am interested in the American story. In particular, America’s ideals, the way we say things should be, as opposed to America’s reality, the way things are. Before we begin again with the monotony of the six weeks, I want to address a few things briefly, regarding the purpose of education; why we are here. As students and teachers, we come to school for a number of reasons, mostly though, either to see friends, or because we have to (legally), or to gather a paycheck. There are some of us though that are here because of a love of learning. At times, we may be here for all of these reasons. We are complicated.
But it is safe to say that a significant number of us, and all of us, on certain days, students and teachers, are not here to engage knowledge, to anticipate learning. It is to this element within us that I want to speak today. It is to the dull ache or sharp impulse that rises within us and prompts us to ask ourselves, “How much time is left in class?”, or “What time do we get out of here?” It is that feeling that I want to address, and attempt to counteract.
Education is one of the few hopes that this world has. It is one of our few and strongest of defenses. With it, you and I can defend ourselves against all ideas, persons, and enterprises that attempt to exploit us, to take advantage of us, to take advantage of anyone who will accept falsehood for truth. With it, we can be shielded from all the forms that man’s corruption may take. With education, we are able to fight racism, poverty, fear, our government and it’s politicians, religion or more specifically, religious fanaticism parading as spiritual truth, war, our venomous dependence on technology, corporations, such as the music industry and the food industry, and people in general who lay in wait, to take advantage of anyone who will accept falsehood for truth.
Racism, brought to us by, in this country, men who partnered themselves with ignorance, for greed’s sake, for the sake of more land, natural resources and property. The taking of lands occupied by Native American tribes was justified through ignorance. (Ignorance, again, is a not knowing. It is not stupidity. It is not knowing. Absence of knowledge.) Many Native American tribes were seen as savages, mindless barbarians, who did not deserve the land they lived on, or anything else for that matter. Were time taken to learn about these people, the truth that would have been found, would not have sustained a conscience so bent on superiority. If the early Americans knew more about those tribes, it would have made it more difficult and unjustified to destroy them. Also, brought to us by men who needed cheap labor in order to maximize profit and so bought slaves from Africa. It became much easier to enslave another man if he was not considered a man at all, if he were an animal. The conscience can only justify such an act if it is ignorant of another person, if it does not know, the other person. It can be easy for us today to consider immigrants from Mexico in a negative light, as have most immigrants in this country been considered (we are a nation of immigrants). But if we learn about their lives, particularly the living conditions from which they are fleeing, we will find that any one of us would be coming to America as quickly as possible.
Poverty, brought to us by a number of contributors. National and local economies that are grossly disproportionate. One household may have three new cars in the driveway, and a freshly remodeled kitchen that looks out onto a heated swimming pool in the back yard, and one hundred feet away, the next street over, another household may be struggling to keep the lights on.
Fear, brought to us by certain segments of our government. Curbing any sense of security we may have so that we may fall in line. They may say, “Acts of terrorism can happen anywhere. Terrorists are everywhere, you are not safe wherever you are, so listen to us, we will protect you but at the cost of some of your freedoms.” There are several people in the world that would like to see the destruction of this country, and the threat is very real, but that does not mean we should allow the curtailment of our freedoms. That threat should not so consume us, that we sacrifice the best of who we are. We should not respond to such an enemy with unwarranted phone tapping, monitoring, or holding individuals indefinitely without any formal charges, or questionable interrogation techniques, torture. If anything, our response should be a galvanized resolve to uphold the liberties that we have always known, as set forth in the Constitution, that sets us apart from the rest of the world, and that demonstrates the true treasure of American citizenship.
Religious fanaticism, brought to us by fanatics who are consumed with the idea of religious attendance, filling collection plates, or donations. Those for whom true religiosity is lost. Those for whom cultivating the spirit is secondary to maintaining appearances, et cetera.
Technological dependence, brought to us by our ever-growing obsession with convenience and ease. From machines that sweep the floor for us to crops harvested by larger machines, we have become so dependent on technology that we no longer know how to do things ourselves. Many of us here, if not all of us, including myself, would not be able to survive if told to go live in the woods or to grow your own food on a farm. These once ubiquitous elements of our American life, these traditions and this knowledge that was so commonplace has been replaced with machines and technology that do it for us. We no longer have to know the difficulty of the work of raising our own food and the reward and the joy that follows. We can go to Wal-Mart at three in the morning, get a can of prunes, a clock, and some toilet paper. We have lost something valuable in that process.
Corporations, brought to us by Marlboro, Nike, McDonald’s, Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola, Radioshack, Sony Records, Jive Records, etc. Each of these enterprises and countless others have teams of people dedicated to one thing: getting our money. And they will do it at any cost. If it happens to contribute to the destruction of any particular community, or the destruction of an individual’s health, or the destruction of one’s credit through unnecessary spending, or the destruction of good taste in music, but maximizes profit, and makes money; they don’t care. They do not care about you and I. Money is their god and they will kneel at its alter until their bellies full and even longer because greed is a circle. Their tactic? How do they get us hooked? If they can get us to associate happiness, or pleasure, or a sense of belonging with their product, then they can get us to buy anything at any cost. Example: I saw a magazine article for Radioshack. It was just the Radioshack sign with a woman posing next to the sign, in fewer clothes than anyone would wear that goes into Radioshack. That was it. Nothing about you’ve got questions, we’ve got answers, or remote control cars, or cell phones. If they can get us to associate physical attraction, one of the most primitive impulses, with their product then when we are buying a stereo, in the back of our mind, somehow, this is like being with a beautiful woman. Another example: McDonald’s puts toys in its happy meals so kids will associate that feeling of happiness with their food so when they get older they will always associate that food with happiness, which in fact, as our bodies will tell us, is anything but happiness-giving or life-giving.
These persons, ideas, and enterprises listed, and there are plenty more; are all vying for our attention, at times, without our best interest in mind. You and I, as people, have a need to belong somewhere, to someone, to something. The world exploits that need in us. Tries to take advantage of it. We must think for ourselves.
Each one of us will encounter moments of ignorance in our lives, consistently. As with Rich Robinson Sr. that we heard from, in the radio program. His white wife, and her white world, he was, to some extent, ignorant of. He didn’t know it. He was not familiar with it. And when he and his wife had opportunities to spend time with his black friends and family, he chose not to include her. He never took her, “to a black function.” Leaving her to be ignorant about his family and friends. So this ignorance ultimately contributed to the division between them. As we discussed with the recent events in Jena, Louisiana, the six students assaulting the one student; if they knew, who he was, not just his name and what he looked like, but who he really was, that conflict might have been avoided. If in that moment of ignorance, whatever form it may take, if in that moment you feel the impulse to act out, to cause conflict or division, to give up, to fight out of frustration or anger, or to say, “I don’t know, and I don’t care.”, when that time comes, I encourage you, I admonish you, I implore you, I ask you, I dare you, to let it go, blow out the cherry bomb, and try to learn why, why it is the way it is, to gain that knowledge, that understanding, and if you do that, then I promise you, whatever it is that you are experiencing will make much more sense and you may even gain something where you would have lost something. Union, not division.
When the civil war broke out, Abraham Lincoln knew nothing about war, but he read as many books and did as much research as he could to gain the necessary knowledge which certainly contributed to the North winning the war. With knowledge, the corruption of these people, ideas, and enterprises can be defeated, and their true purposes restored. These things must be addressed, with honest questions of ourselves and each other, through discussion, debate, and discourse. It is not the degree of corruption or the severity of its problems that define a country; it is the citizens’ response that makes real the true worth of a nation and its principles. And as citizens, and students, and teachers of this school, our response is knowledge, to learn from one another, and that brings the prospect of a fruitful future for our town, our state, our country, and ultimately, the world.