 |
Making
things happen - with integrity. A weekly CyberMemo designed to keep you on task. Monday August 12, 2002 Volume IV Number 33 |
FOCUS - The Monitor
Two of our three children are school teachers. They’re good, too. They like their students. They care about kids. They listen. They laugh easily. They celebrate the children’s successes and achievements. They notice when a child picks up a new skill, or breaks through to a new level of understanding, or simply “gets it.” They are winsome and playful, and do the things good teachers do, without fanfare or applause, day in and day out.
I’ve always believed there is a certain nobility about the teaching profession. Good teachers, people for whom education is more than a paycheck, those who stay out front in the battle against cynicism and defeatism, play a central role in a student's development towards personhood. There are so many gifts a teacher can give. A teacher’s outlook on life is transferred in the daily interaction in the classroom. If the teacher views the world as an interesting place, filled with wonder and mystery, drama and curiosity, the child will catch it, and think so, too. If the teacher is also a learner, the joy of discovery gets passed on as well. A teacher models the value of books and the rewarding discipline of reading. A teacher digests and affirms the words a child puts on a page, and cultivates an appetite for writing as a primary form of expression. A teacher encourages problem solving, and in the math exercises, helps a student see that there is a correct answer, that accuracy matters, that certain systems exist and formulas work, and with diligence and practice, they can be mastered. A teacher who loves language, who knows the magic of a witty phrase or an engaging narrative or an emotion packed paragraph, will have students who feel the same.
It’s a shame, really, that all of us can name those ineffective teachers who blundered their way through those long classroom hours, and somehow kept their job in spite of the blank stares and the yawns and the incessant disruptions from the back of the room. Back then, we called it tenure. It was guaranteed employment for burned out educators. Tenure is not necessarily a bad thing, except when it assures the permanence of incompetence. The teaching profession is susceptible to most all of the human maladies that infect all those who choose to pursue noble endeavors. Weariness tops the list. Discouragement, a close second. Long hours, unreal expectations, unreasonable parental complaints and unwelcome bureaucracy all take their toll. Teachers maybe better than the rest of us understand how cynicism can eat away like a cancer at the high hopes of an aspiring young apprentice. Some teachers eventually adopt the philosophy of despair as a coping mechanism. Freidrich Nietzsche’s detached skepticism starts making sense.
In my era, the teacher’s lounge was filled with smoke. Both real and metaphorical smoke.
But this week, I learned that it is a whole lot easier to write with some degree of eloquence about the nobility of the profession than it is to capture the attention of a seven year old.
I was a teacher for a week. We had well over one hundred and fifty students. They came at nine o’clock in the morning, and remained with us until noon. Many arrived early and stayed late. All five days. Monday through Friday.
Each day we had a different age group come and visit. And each day, we repeated the same lesson – tweaking it some to adapt to the different learning levels.
It was Carolyn and me. They called us “Ma” and “Pa.” We hosted them in our makeshift “home” under a quick-set canopy in the shade of an old oak tree along Woods Valley at a place known all over our region called Bate’s Nut Farm (no, it’s not a psychiatric hospital – they sell nuts – you know, like walnuts and cashews and peanuts, that sort of thing).
There were five such stations in Veggie Town. There was a retirement home where Grandma Dottie presided, and a beach house; a diner, and a church.
The eight foot tall Styrofoam façade at our house was painted brightly like the front of a cartoon cottage, with an interior backdrop for a kitchen complete with refrigerator and cupboards and a window over the double sink. We added a couple of touches like ladles and spatulas and sifters and scoops hanging from the ceiling, a spray of fresh flowers in a vase and a bowel of vegetables (green peppers, tomatoes and squash) fresh from the garden. We had a “carpet” on the grass, and two chairs for Ma and Pa inside.
We called it VeBS.
Very exciting Bible School.
* * * * * * * *
When President Lincoln ordered a blockade of all Confederate ports in 1861, the Union Navy successfully cut off critical supply lines for the Confederate Army.
The Southern Navy hatched a plan. They raised a wooden steam frigate named the Merrimack from the Elizabeth River off Norfolk (it had been sunk and was abandoned some months before) and covered the hull with steel plates and gave it a new name – The Virginia. The weighty steel made the vessel top-heavy, but impenetrable. The Union Navy had never seen anything like it. It attacked the wooden ships standing at the entrance of the harbor as sentinels, enforcing the blockade. As the Virginia approached, the Union ships fired cannon. The heavy steel balls bounced off the deck like pebbles. Unchallenged, The Virginia plowed full-steam broadside into two Union ships, sinking them immediately. Union sailors screamed and dove off the bow, swimming to safety.
The harbor re-opened to Confederate supply ships. The Union felt defenseless against the steel battering ram of a newfangled Confederate battleship.
So the Union brought in a Swedish American engineer, John Ericsson. He hastily designed the Union’s first “ironclad,” and fashioned it with a revolving turret with two heavy guns. They called it, The Monitor.
On March 9, 1862, the
two ships met head on for combat in Virginia just off Hampton Roads. They
fired volley after volley at one another, neither doing
substantial damage to the other. After a few hours
of tense combat, steel ringing up and down the coast as cannonball struck
massive steel plates, like the ringing of the bell, the two captains called it
a day, and the cumbersome ships turned back to port.
It marked the first battle between steel-equipped ships. There would be many more.
The Monitor sank not long afterward. Not as a result of enemy fire. Rather, a raging storm set the top-heavy boat rocking ominously off-shore at Cape Hatteras in North Carolina. She turned over in the wind and waves and sank like a stone, taking sixteen crew members down with her.
She sat undisturbed at the bottom of the harbor, a curiosity for scuba divers and other treasure hunters… until in 1944 she was mistaken for a German submarine and blasted by torpedoes.
This week, as a special project of the US Navy and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the turret of the mighty Monitor was raised from the bottom of the ocean. All one hundred and twenty tons of it.
A good friend and popular history teacher at our local high school told us the story this week, and he made a good point. He said, “You know that turret is an incredible story of recovery. But consider this – those guns on the turret of the Monitor will never again be put into the service for which they were created. The turret was built to be a weapon of war. But now the corroded steel will be polished up and set behind a glass display in a museum somewhere.”
“God is in the business of recovery, too,” he continued. “But when God does a restoration, he doesn’t have a museum in mind. When he brings a person back into harmony with his created purpose, he gets him ready for action. God equips us to be ready to engage life.”
“You are no museum piece on display in God’s air-conditioned sanctuary,” he told us. “You are a warrior – equipped to win.”
Well said, Tom.
* * * * * * *
It took me awhile this week to grow accustomed to the many times I heard “Good morning, Pa!” from that pack of kids we got to know and love this week.
It’s a little more than unsettling to think that I could be a dad to many of those kid’s parents, and they look at me as a grand-pa. Pa, in Veggie Town, is pronounced, “Paw.” And when they gathered under the canvas, my role, along with Ma’s, was to teach.
I’ve engaged in no small amount of coaching for our two daughters, as though they need my help, giving them all manner of advice on how to grab and hold the attention of the little rascals and accompany them into the world of “Ahah” and “NOW I get it” and that moment in time when the light goes on and a new level of comprehension is achieved. Our two young women have feigned interest in their father's theories and pontifications, but I know now it is more a matter of courtesy than anything else.
I stood for awhile in their shoes this week.
Shouting instructions like a drill sergeant didn’t work real well. Focusing on the perennial trouble maker didn’t either. And when we started the craft, holding up the sample didn’t inspire much response.
Here’s what did work.
When I sat down next to the student and simply looked at his or her work, asking questions, probing a little bit for more meaning, the kids just opened up like a morning glory. I read what they wrote – out loud. They couldn’t get enough.
Kids need to be noticed.
So they played and memorized and sang and teased and laughed at Ma and Pa’s place. And by the end of the week, exhausted (no wonder our daughters cherish their weekends so), we started to think a little harder about those long hours in the classroom where they are known as Mrs. Duncan and Mrs. Ostrander.
By week’s end, we felt this strange attachment to this gang of summertime kids.
We’ll probably give it a year. But we just may be available next time Veggie Town comes ‘round.
* * * * * * *
It’s Monday morning. You are a leader.
As a leader, you are a teacher. It is a noble profession. You understand your subject, you’ve mastered at least the basics. You speak well. But take away the caring, and your words float out there into empty space and go nowhere.
When The Monitor broke the surface this week, nearly a hundred and fifty years after it sunk, it triggered applause and wonder and shaking of heads. An extraordinary feat. Within the structures, researchers found the remains of a couple Civil War veterans, men who perished in a storm during a mighty conflict when the nation turned in on itself.
It’s a kind of restoration. But not exactly the kind of restoration you need.
Tom was right. The Monitor will never see another day of battle. But you will. You need to be restored physically and emotionally. Spiritually, too.
This summer, spend some time with the children. They’ll remind you of the less complicated things you’ve let slip away. They’ll thank you with a hug, and a “Good Morning, Pa” because you know their name. You’ve read their stuff. You liked their drawings and their singing.
She was a fourth grade girl. I can’t remember her name. The moment came and went by quickly.
“I’ll see you in church,” I said as we bid farewell at week’s end.
“We don’t go to church,” she stated flatly.
“Oh,” it caught me off guard. “Well, we still want to see you some Sunday. You’ll always be welcome.” My response was lame.
And then later I thought about this little girl. I watched her sing the songs, repeat the memory verses. They are now a part of her consciousness. I thought about the people she met, and the friends she made. I knew the things talked about that week would not be reinforced by her parents. She heard something here she doesn't hear anywhere else. I wondered, what if she’d never seen Veggie Town? What then?
Good thing. Good seeds have been planted in that little girl’s heart.
Someday, the sprout will appear. And the flower will grow.
How do I know?
I just know.
Posted in Valley Center, California
© Copyright Kenneth E. Kemp 2002
Special Thanks to my good friend David Belcher, owner of Rhino Media Group and creator of WisdomGram
LeaderFOCUS is a service of Good Stewardship Associates
|
|