I Believe in Santa Claus

The great American caricaturist and cartoonist, Thomas Nast, published the first sketch of Santa Claus in Harper’s Weekly, in 1862, during the early, dark days of the Civil War.  Matthew Brady tried to get photographs, but he could never get the old elf to stay still long enough for those early cameras to get a clear image.  Of course, Nast’s most famous image is from his illustration published in 1870 of Clement C. Moore’s 1823 description in “A Visit from St. Nicholas.”

Every Christmastime brings hundreds or thousands of essays (like this one) about dear old Santa.  Is he real?  Do you believe?  Children ask the same question of their friends and parents and grandparents.  The answer usually varies depending on the age of the person asked.

My answer has always been the same: YES!!  Only the rationale have changed as I have grown older.

When I was a kid, it was easy—in my family—to believe in Santa.  My parents were children themselves when my brothers and I were born.  When you’re a nineteen year-old mother of three little boys, or their twenty-three year-old father, just promising to pay the rent or knowing that there will be food on the table next week requires belief in the improbable!  Believing in the magic that is Santa Claus isn’t much of a stretch from there.  Every year we told one another, “I believe!”  The more you say it out loud, and the more people who are willing to say it with you, the easier it is to continue your belief.  [It’s sort of like voting….]

Neither public school nor Sunday School taught the belief out of me.  In fact, it did just the opposite.  I learned about other cultural versions of Santa: the historical Saint Nicholas, Father Christmas, Pere or Papa Noel, Kris Kringle, Shendang Laoren, Grandfather Frost, Babbo Natale, Black Peter, På Norsk, Sinter Klaas, Jultomten, Kerstman, Joulupukki, Christindl, and others.  The lesson I took from this?  People all over the world believe!

I have most noticed in the last decade or so that despite these world traditions from so many other cultures, the image and details best known around the globe come from Moore’s and Nast’s Santa Claus.  It can be disconcerting.  I wonder how little children in the southern hemisphere, in the equatorial tropics in particular, justify or rationalize Santa in his heavy red suit, boots, and mittens and arriving on a sleigh.  I mean, believing in flying reindeer is one thing, but understanding how an “adult” would dress like an Eskimo when it’s over 100°?  Even a two year-old knows that’s silly.  I guess that’s proof of the influence of the United States in the world.  No matter what else those in other countries might think of us, if Santa is part of our image in the world, it’s not all bad.

Actually, I just answered my own question and explained why I can easily say that I believe in Santa Claus.  Children don’t have to justify or rationalize.  That isn’t believing.  Children believe in magic, especially the magic of Santa—a giving heart.

Any time I feel like the magic is waning, that maybe Santa Claus isn’t real, all I have to do is look into my grandsons’ eyes….  Do you want to enjoy the holiday?  Believe like a little child.

Thanks Giving

Thanks.

What a small, inconsequential word.

“Thanks for…

…holding the door for me.”

…passing the butter.”

…the ride to school.”

…your help raking the leaves.”

…doing the dishes and taking out the trash.”

How about “Thanks for…

…creating the flu vaccine that will save my life.”

…putting out the fire that engulfed my home.”

…stopping the thief who stole from me.”

…fighting the enemies that are attacking our country.”

Thanks.

What a small, inconsequential word.  Not at all important.  Right.  Tell that to my mother.

No.  Please.  Tell my mother.  She’s the seventy-five years young lady at the nursing home.  The stroke victim who hasn’t been able to speak for the last seven years, or hold her great-grandsons or go to her youngest grandson’s wedding, or tell me that I have to say “Thank you” when someone does something for me, no matter how small and inconsequential.

Or tell my father who has sat by her side daily just to keep her company and bother the nurses and harass the doctors so that Mom has received special attention because he’s such a nuisance.  Why does he refuse to leave her side unless my brothers and I all but load him in the car and force him to go to dinner with us?  I think it’s his way of telling Mom “Thanks” for sixty years of marriage.  For thousands of the best meals.  For clean homes.  For three successful sons, three wonderful daughters-in-law, four terrific grandkids, two healthy great-grandsons.  For being the love of his life.

They’ve had quite a life.  We all have in the last 50-60 years.  Fortunately, we’ve lived here, in this country and in the Midwest where we take care of one another.  We work hard, sometimes at awful jobs (sometimes two or three at the same time), so we can one day do better or give our kids a better chance.  And we’ve helped others, too, because you never know when you lend a hand to others that they will one day be helping you up.

Yes.  I say thanks every chance I get.

I give thanks.  It’s a small gift, but not in the least inconsequential.

I hope you take the time, too.  And thanks for reading this.

To Each His Own

Many years ago, on a very cold November evening, I happened on a scene similar to the one described here.  That experience was the eventual inspiration for the following narrative essay that I have used as an example of both narrative and descriptive writing in my writing class.

“To Each His Own”

After the supper hour on a late December evening, the small Iowa town was winter dark. Leafless trees reached to one another for warmth and companionship across a silent street on the edge of town. At the end of the lonely avenue, a single streetlight struggled against the darkness.  No moon silvered the snow-laden clouds.  Flickering shadows cast by a front-room television were ghost dancers on the dirty snow in front of the single house in the middle of the last, long block.

I was out for a walk, believe it or not.  I suppose I was young enough then to ignore the cold.  For another fifty yards or so I would have the taunting north wind at my back, but soon I would have to turn around and force my way home against its frigid hammering.  The wind shouted at me, deriding me for my foolishness, cutting through the seams of my heavy coat, snatching at my wool cap, pushing me, taunting me, daring me to turn and face it.  It wasn’t the wind that was making me shiver, though.  A desolate, despondent loneliness assaulted me there and chilled more deeply than the icy wind.

I had driven this street before, but it wasn’t a neighborhood that invited site seeing.  I felt a stranger there.  Despite the temperature and the wind and the occasional needle sting of driven snow or dust, I found my steps slowing as I carefully took in the details of the small, one-story house that was the last evidence of the community.  Just beyond the streetlight’s dim glow, barbed-wire fences and corn stubble also marked the city limits.

Since there wasn’t a garage, there was no need for a driveway, but a rusted-out Duster sat forlornly near one corner of the house.  Without wheels and nothing else to support its sad weight, the hubs were buried in the old snow.  The car seemed to be sinking into the earth.  In contrast, a companion pickup truck faced the street nearby.  A heavyduty electrical cord ran from under the front door of the house to the grille of the truck, a life-sustaining umbilical in the cold.  Nearly new, the monstrous F150 must have been recently washed despite the weather.  Not a speck of dirt marred its glossy black finish.  Although I couldn’t see into the cab—the headlights were almost to my shoulder height, the body elevated on oversized tires and lifts—I assumed it would be spotless and state-of-the-art.  The gun rack in the rear window was empty but ready.

The house itself must have remained upright through stubbornness alone. It seemed to lean into the wind in old defiance.  Tarpaper shingles clung desperately to the roof.  If the clapboard sides had ever known paint, it was a vague memory.  One ill-fitting door was centered in the porchless front.  I did not need to move any closer than the curb to see inside.  A window, curtained by streaks of dirt, showed all of the single room.  Only the television provided illumination, but the huge screen seemed to fill an entire wall.  Next to it, like the trophy case of a perennial champion, proudly stood a gun cabinet even larger than the television, its prizes gleaming: an assortment of shotguns and rifles, scoped and strapped and, no doubt, lethally effective in the skilled hands of their proud owner.

He was seated close by, feet raised high in his La-Z-Boy, a magazine—Field and Stream or American Hunter most likely—open across his wide middle.  Head back, eyes closed, mouth open in a contented snore, he was unaware of my impolite observations until I coughed.

He couldn’t have heard me over the noise of the television and the wind whistling through the doorframe and around the window, but the dogs did.  I moved on as their clamor rose against the gale and discovered their kennel on the other side of the house.  Almost as large as the master’s home, the doghouse was a spotless palace with walls so thick they must have been insulated, a well-maintained roof—unlike the house nearby—carefully drained away from several runs and doors that provided at least half a dozen hounds access to their warm beds or their exercise yard.  They bayed me on my way.  As I walked into the shadows a few yards away, I heard them quickly silenced with precise commands shouted from the door.

I turned to face the remaining distance home.  At my own fireside would be my loving family and pampered pet, probably oblivious to the wind and cold.  I wondered, as I battled on, at the priorities I would have if circumstances forced me to choose between necessity and appearance and what impressions I would give to the world peeking in my windows.

01/18/04

Simplify

In Walden, Thoreau admonishes us to “Simplify.”  He explains that our lives are “frittered away by details.”  For someone who built himself a cabin in the woods in an age without electricity, simplifying meant not owning a horse and refusing to pay his poll tax. It’s still an interesting concept.

When I was younger, I used to pride myself on my independence.  I learned to cook (I had terrific grandmothers and my mother learned from some of the best), and then taught myself to prepare most of those recipes over an open fire.  Talk about simplification.  Even Henry had a stove.  He did cut his own wood.  He wasn’t living in a tent, either, but then, I was only roughing it on the weekends.  Still, “back in the good old days” meant someone had to raise or stalk the meat, do the butchering and curing, cut the wood, build the fire, then cook the vittles.  Some even had to make their own utensils, including the plates.  Pioneer women had it so easy….

These days, my simplifying usually means finding a tool that makes the job easier.  It is a bit of a conundrum that the simpler the device, the larger and more complicated the instruction manual!  Some of the newest don’t even have a manual—they rely on the entire Internet!  Just think about trying to print an instruction manual for your iPhone or other SmartPhone.

Yesterday I needed to get the leaves off the backyard.  When that colorful carpet gets to be too thick, it starts smothering the grass. Also, today my lawn service came to apply fall fertilizer and it needed to penetrate that layer of deciduous droppings.  Luckily, the weather cooperated and it didn’t rain.  There was even some sunshine.  On top of that, I had a three-day weekend.

Hauled out the Black and Decker blower/vacuum and went to work.  Plugged that thing in and spent a good hour creating a wonderful pile of brightly colored leaves.  Hello, Linus.  My son brought the grandsons over later in the afternoon.  That’s why I left the pile.  I planned to mulch the leaves with the vacuum and spread them around the shrubs that line two sides of the fence.

The boys had a great time jumping in the leaves and burying themselves.  They chased Dad around the yard, played some catch with the football, and threw a Frisbee.  When they were worn out and having a snack, I went back to clean up.  I couldn’t get the power cord out of the blower/vac.  I pulled and pulled.  Finally, it came out, along with one of the blades, which was still stuck in the plug.  I went after the rake and basket.

Next thing I knew I was going after more rakes and baskets.  Everyone pitched in.  Even the youngest picked up a leaf or two and put it in the pile.  We laughed at one another, reminisced about past episodes in the yard, and wondered what the little boys would remember of days like this one.  In short order, the pile was gone and spread around the shrubs along the fence.

I can’t remember the last time I didn’t do all of that work by myself with my simple machines.  I don’t think I’ll forget doing it the hard way yesterday; all that talking and laughing and loving every minute of it.  Simple.  (Where’s the Ibuprophen?)

Recent Graduates 101

How will you know if the objectives have been reached and the students have learned?

This is one of the questions I’ll be asked this week as part of my professional evaluation for continuing employment.  Think about this.  How do you measure success in your profession?

Did the corn you planted come up and the market allow you to make some money on the harvest?

Was your customer able to drive away in the car you repaired?

Did your patient recover?  Your client receive a fair judgment?  The diners enjoy a good meal?

My answer to that question about my success as a teacher has always been a delayed reaction.  Sure, my students can pass quizzes and tests, write well-constructed essays, intelligently analyze a piece of literature.  Now.  When they’re in my class.  They meet the objectives for our curriculum.  But does that really prove they’ve learned what I’m hoping to teach them?

Not really.  For me, those are indicators that these kids are paying attention, reading the material, experimenting with the techniques I’m teaching them, testing their intellects against one another and me.  I hope I’m teaching them a bit more than that, however.

My objectives include helping my students understand that they are learners, that they have the tools necessary to succeed in whatever they try, or at least to learn from the challenges they accept whether or not they are successful.  I hope they learn to manage their time since most of them are busy in so many extra-curricular activities, both for school and in their community.  I’m forever amazed by the extent of their involvement.

Teachers have always prized any communications from students who have graduated.  When I started teaching almost forty years ago, that meant now and then running into a former student at a school event or just around town.  Once in a while someone would come back to school just to say hello.  My, how things have changed.

I’ve been receiving occasional emails from students for a few years.   That’s been nice.  Some have sent me papers to review for them during their first comp classes.  Some have just written to say they’ve been studying something we went over, so they felt very prepared.

The last five months or so have been unique.  I have been accepting some Facebook “friend” requests from graduates.  Because of this, I’ve been keeping up with their activities and they have stayed in touch with me.  I’ve still read a few papers, but I’ve also been asked for advice about their classes, their frustrations, some choices they’ve made…and offered encouragement when being a freshman and away from home has been almost too much to handle.

So how do I measure my success?  I pass my “test” when I receive messages from kids in college who are receiving accolades from their teachers for the excellence of their writing; and the email about how they’re seeking and accepting roles as campus leaders; or the visits at school from those who graduated two or three years ago but make a point of stopping in to tell me about their plans for the future.

No, they don’t “ace” every test or always make the best decisions.  I’ve never met anyone who has.  But they learn from their mistakes.  I’m proud of all of them.

Current technology is making it easier for me to “test” myself.  I’m getting more immediate feedback.  I almost feel as if I have another class—Recent Graduates 101.  It’s one of the most fun, and it meets 24/7/365.  And I don’t mind at all.

Excuse me, my phone is ringing.

Let me get that.  I have an email from one of my sons.  My nephew just sent a text message asking for directions to my younger son’s next performance—I’ll send him a map…from my phone.  My wife wants to know what kind of bird is perched on the deck.  I’ll check the North American bird guide.  On my phone.  What was the score of last night’s Broncos game?  Let me open my ESPN application.  I need to know the yardage to the bunker from here and then to the green.  It’s available on the gps along with all the other courses I play.  What does that word mean and how is it pronounced?  Let me check the dictionary.  On my phone.  I don’t know.  Is it supposed to snow in Silverthorne this weekend?  I’ll search the weather forecast.  Where did Longfellow teach before Harvard?  I’ll Google that and let you know.  I’ll look it up on my phone.  I have a quiz over his life and poetry.  It’s a Word document on my desktop computer at home.  Let me get it.  On my phone.  This conversation is taking a little longer than I’d thought.  Excuse me, my phone is ringing.  I’d better answer.  It’s my wife.

I’m glad it’s not 8:00 AM yet.  When school starts, I have to shut off my phone just like the students do.  It’s against the rules for me to use it during the day.  Don’t tell anyone, but during my planning period and lunch (which I eat in my classroom) I check email, call my doctors’ offices and the pharmacy, sometimes check in with my wife….

I had my juniors write a persuasive essay recently.  They were to present arguments on a thesis concerning cell phone use in school.  Not surprisingly, my Honors students almost unanimously expressed well-developed rationale in favor of cell phone (especially “smart phone”) use during school hours, but recognized the need to restrict use primarily to lunch, passing periods, or down-time during class when the teacher would permit it.  They also described educational uses similar to those I have facetiously presented here.

The reality of cell phone use—again, smart phones in particular—make them today’s handheld computer, PDA, and telephone all in one handy device.  I’ve already violated school rules on several instances by using my phone enabling students to get to their email (not allowed on the school’s computer system) in order to establish accounts on the class blog; looking up information from district-blocked web sites; and finding documents I needed that were on my desktop computer at home.

I’ve been complaining about the obsolescence of available technology in schools since the personal computer was invented in the 1980s.  We’re still a decade or two behind philosophically even if we’re not that far behind with hardware.  It’s difficult to explain to students that we’re preparing them for their futures when we can’t even get them up to speed with our past.  I think they’re laughing at us.

Constellated Memory

I read the other day that currently the majority of those using Facebook are people from my generation (OK, a bit younger) instead of the teens and twenties most would think might make up users of a social networking medium.  The younger folk are Twittering (I will not call them "twits"...yet).

Facebook has been the vehicle of choice for several recent reunions I've had with friends from many years ago.  Just this weekend we attended an informal class reunion for my wife's high school class.  It was informal because no one did the traditional organizing.  Someone posted a message about getting together on what is the usual alumni weekend in her small Iowa town, and it grew.  Of course, when there are fewer than 40 in the class, it doesn't take much to "grow" a get-together.  Still, there were people there we hadn't seen in at least five years and some came from one coast or the other back to their Midwestern roots.

Although I didn't graduate from that town, I know many people from her class and from my own year.  I did run into a friend from my hometown.  We had been childhood friends and playmates along with our several brothers and her cousins.

This reminded me of thoughts I have had since my first college/fraternity reunion a few years ago.  These gatherings seem to be less reunions of people than reunions of memories.  We sit around reminiscing...very little "catching up" or getting to know the people we've become after forty years.

I like reuniting with old memories, for the most part.  I have to constantly check myself, however, to see if I'm remembering what actually happened or what I wish had happened or what I regret happened.  My brothers and I were talking with our mother years ago about our favorite Christmas.  She listened to the three of us for a few minutes and just started laughing.  That perfect holiday with several inches of immaculate snowfall, the best-wished-for gifts under the tree, the long-missed relatives arriving just in time, the mouth-watering dishes...was not one Christmas but the collected separate memories of several different years.

I think of mis-remembered events like this as "constellated" memories.  They are the brightest memories all gathered together to form the collection that is the best of times: the best Christmas, the best birthday, the best family vacation....

Today's technologies move us into the future at such a rapid pace, but, like powerful telescopes peering into the darkness at bright galaxies millions of light-years distant, perhaps the best thing they do for us is bring our pasts to light.  I hope that in our rush to tomorrow, we continue to reflect the very best of what has gone before and brought us to this time and these possible futures.

In the meantime, I hope everyone experiences frequently the bright moments that become your life's constellation.

Labor...a Midwesterner's Saga

Labor Day weekend has been good.  Busy, but fun.  The fact that it’s Labor Day and helping my younger son move today got me to thinking about work.  My students often ask me about all the jobs I’ve had.  They like to hear my stories about the different things I’ve done.  One of them told me a couple of years ago that I needed to make a list.  Here goes:

My first job—getting paid by someone other than a relative—was teaching private swimming lessons.  I was eleven.  My first student was four years old, I think.  That same summer I started mowing yards.  Dad let me use his mower in trade for mowing our yard.  I probably had half a dozen yards that summer.  Usually I was paid for the individual yards, but sometimes worked by the hour.  The most I think I ever made for mowing that year was about $2.00.  I got fifty cents for a half hour swimming lesson.

I spent several years at the pool in Rock Port.  I taught private lessons and eventually Red Cross.  I was a lifeguard from the time I was twelve.  Eventually I was the head guard and in charge of maintenance.

During high school I put up hay for years, even after I was married and had kids.  I enjoyed it, actually.  Sure there were barns that were beastly hot and dusty, but sunny days and good friends (and traditional farm food!) made the days fun most of the time.  I had a schoolmate who lived on a farm, of course.  His parents were friends of my parents.  I worked for his dad off and on: moved cattle (on horseback—I always wanted to be a cowboy!), milked cows, cared for horses, mucked stalls, walked beans, detassled corn, raked, baled, and put up hay.  Of course, living in the Midwest, I traded mowing for shoveling snow in the winter.  I was probably twelve when I started that, too.  One summer we had a thunderstorm that dropped thirteen inches of rain in about two hours.  I was at the movies and we couldn’t get out of the theatre for a while because the water was two feet up the doors and ten rows of seats high inside.  The next day I helped clean houses.  I've also worked cleaning up after tornadoes.  What a mess they leave behind.  Not many boys in small towns escaped work in a grocery store.  I carried groceries, stocked shelves, mopped the aisles for sixty-five cents and hour.  When I was promoted to butcher's apprentice, I hit the big time!  I got a raise to $1.10 an hour and learned to make hamburger, cut meat, and be nice to the customers.  It was one of the best jobs I had during high school.

When I started college, I was only eight miles from home.  I was running projectors for the local movie theatre.  That was a great job!  Then I worked maintenance and housekeeping at the college and for one year worked in the kitchen at the cafeteria.  Before I graduated, I also was part of campus security.

After my freshman year, my roommate and I went to Boulder.  I worked as a day laborer, showing up at the employment service to get any work I could.  I moved office furniture for Mayflower at the National Bureau of Standards.  Pulled weeds in someone’s garden.  Moved refrigerators and stoves into new apartments.  Shoveled wet sand into a hopper with concrete to spray on a huge water tank (try doing that for eight hours a day when you’re more than a mile above sea level!).  It was a great five weeks.  Later that summer I was staying with my cousin and we got jobs helping to set up carnival rides at the Harrison County (Missouri) fair.  I was a carney!

After I graduated from college, I waited to start my full-time teaching career while my wife tried to finish school.  I drove a truck for Kitchen Klatter products—south Missouri, Oklahoma, Iowa.  Then I sold advertising for a local newspaper for a while.  Worked at a service station—pumped gas, changed oil, fixed tires.  For nine months I ran a bowling alley and did substitute teaching.  The summer before I got my first full-time teaching job, I worked on a construction crew.  We were building a grain elevator.  I tied steel, shoveled sand (again), and did odd jobs.  When we started pouring concrete, during the day I counted cement trucks and hired night crew and at night was part of the night crew—moving concrete or running a vibrator to get the bubbles out.  We worked for something like eighty hours before a lightening storm and downpour forced us to quit.  We were only 100 feet in the air with another thirty to go.

Since I started full-time teaching in 1973, I haven’t done much else.  Some hay work or bean walking when I was younger.  I’ve taught high school English most of the time, but I spent thirteen years teaching teachers at UNL, Peru State, and Midland Lutheran College.  I taught freshman composition one year at Iowa State.  One year I taught a night class in composition for Iowa Western Community College.  At one point I was the Midwest Regional director for the National Council of Teachers of English.

One of my best friends and I helped our Optimist Club put on a three-day bicycle stage race fundraiser for several years.  In order to save some money, we qualified as Category One officials for the United States Cycling Federation.  We worked three or four other races each year for three or four years.

When my sons were part of our community swim team, I was the coach one summer.  I learned why parents are the worst part of coaching.

I got paid for writing a piece about the author Julian Thompson for a book about literature for young adults.

No wonder I’m tired.

I tell these stories to students to encourage them to stay in school.  I'm glad I did.

Past and Future

I spent several hours with my two grandsons yesterday. Contemplating what their futures will hold got me to thinking about the past and the family foundations on which their lives will be built. The connection between the past and the future has always intrigued me, and I don’t think anything is more fascinating than the changes in technology that become basic to our lives, yet essential, core values don’t seem to change.

I was lucky to know not only all of my grandparents but also three of my great-grandparents. My family memories, therefore, include the turning of the nineteenth to twentieth centuries and the twentieth to twenty-first. In the very early 1980s, before the advent of personal computers, my maternal grandfather, Sherm, and I sat one afternoon with my oldest son (he was about four) and discussed the changes Grandad had seen in his lifetime.

During his life, he had been a farmer—plowing and planting behind a team of mules. He was my mother’s first “school bus” driver: a horse and wagon or sleigh. Then he bought a car . . . and eventually paid a quarter for a driver’s license. He survived the influenza epidemic, and that kept him from service overseas during WWI when his fever caused him to pass out during formation as his unit was boarding ship.

One of my uncles—Mom’s brother-in-law—was a bomber pilot in WWII and after. He was in Paul Tibbetts’ squadron. My paternal grandfather helped build those bombers in the plant here in Omaha and saw the Enola Gay leave the line.

Grandad Sherm and I talked that day, while my son listened, about cars and jets and landing on the moon and the space shuttle and telephones and computers and television. A year or so later I sent my first email over ARPA-NET and bought my first Mac. And lost my grandfather.

I wonder what my grandsons will see. With all of the changes of the last one hundred years, and the speed of those changes, what is coming could be even more incredible. My oldest grandson even now, at four, knows that his favorite cartoons and movies are available to him any time. He can talk to Grandma from anywhere on Daddy’s cell phone.

One of my former students is a junior “rocket scientist” at USC. His ambition includes the possibility of helping to build and live in the first habitations on Mars. I hope my boys get to see him launch and hear his reports from the red planet.

Lots of changes. What has remained the same? In my family, it’s family. Since my great-great-great grandfather founded a small town in northwest Missouri, we haven’t spread out too much, at least my branch of the tribe. We value the connections, the combined wisdom of the family. We talk to one another frequently; visit as often as we can.

Our physical proximity is unusual in families today, and phone calls don’t really take the place of face-to-face conversations, but communication technologies today have added to our abilities to stay in touch. I doubt very much that the family will continue to stay within 100 miles of one another, but we can talk often, even see one another in real time. It will more than likely get even easier in the years to come. We need to trade stories and continue to benefit from other’s experiences, both good and bad. My grandsons need to hear about the mistakes I’ve made and how I worked my way out of them. I hope I can tell them about more successes than failures, but both provide good lessons. I hope they learn from both sides of the family and carry on some of our traditions of togetherness and appreciate some of the family treasures we’ve saved for them. It will be even better if we can share these memories along with some hugs.

I still think the transporter should be a national priority. “Beam me up, Scotty.”

USS (Ultimate Secondary School) Enterprise

Someone once asked me to describe my perfect classroom. As a science fiction/fantasy fan (I love special effects, for one thing), it is easy for me to wish I had as a classroom the holodeck from Star Trek's USS Enterprise. Remember that room? Not only do the walls, floor, and ceiling generate 3 (and 4) dimensional images but everything has substance--you can sit on a chair or climb a tree.

What an amazing place that would be. Imagine reading about Olaudah Equiano's frightening voyage on the slave ship and being able to drive home his terror and helplessness with firsthand experience of the stifling darkness, the nauseating stench, and the incessant, surrounding sounds of despair. His narrative may be a primary source document, but his 19th century style requires a good deal of imagination.

Maybe that is actually an argument against this type of instructional environment, though. If we experience literature literally on a holodeck and not virtually in our imaginations, do we lose our personal reaction to the literature? It's an interesting reversal of circumstance since the holodeck experience is truly virtual reality! At the same time, is our imaginative recreation of a scene or experience literal or virtual? I think I should have paid more attention in my philosophy class!

In my literal classrooms, however, I do try to help my students approach their reading from both directions: First, to appreciate the details of imagery in the writings so they can imagine what the author is describing; and second, to go beyond the words, to learn more about the situation being described, to understand the cultural, political, social, as well as physical environments.

Even though we don't have holodecks available, technologies change rapidly and teachers continue to use whatever we can get our hands on to help our students learn. Since I first sat in a school desk over 50 years ago, the world has become much more immediate in classrooms. Sometimes schools put up barriers because no one can figure out how to "protect" children from the improper uses of new devices. Carbon paper was once an evil thing, but so once was the lead pencil. Now we have to block instead of embrace smart phones and miniature movie cameras.

I'm still waiting for my Dick Tracy "wrist radio/TV" (How many remember that futuristic device?), but my iPhone has even more features!

Starting a New Year of School

I had a terrific school year in 2008-2009, due in large part to the Class of 2009. Since most of my teaching assignment is with Honors eleventh graders and Advanced Placement English with twelfth graders, I do have "the cream of the crop" most of the time. This group was pretty special, though. They are as involved in their lives--school, community, family--as most of my students, but they seem to have an extra enthusiasm for life as well as an understanding of the gifts they have and the opportunities available to them. When I hear or read about all of the negative things it is so easy to convey about teenagers today (just today?), I remind myself of the great promise I see in my students each year and especially with this group.

I have been writing poetry for years and originally wanted to be "a writer" instead of a full-time teacher. For 37 years most of the writing I've had time for has been lesson plans, policy statements, and curriculum materials. Now and then something happens that inspires me: the 1986 Challenger explosion, my oldest son's marriage, and the FHS senior class of 2009. The beginning of this new school year (and every new school year), makes me hopeful and anxious to greet the promise of new students.

The Promise

An enthusiastic hand waves

expectantly

questing, demanding, hoping

pleading

today

tomorrow

Help

An encouraging heart smiles

knowingly

acknowledging, prodding, permitting

hoping

today

tomorrow

Help

DJC (for S.B.)

4/13/09

In the beginning....

I have always been interested in the available and current technologies that could and should be used in teaching/learning. This year the state of Nebraska succumbed to the federal pressure it's exerting on all 50 states and "revised" all the state standards. They do, finally, address students' need to know how to use technology, including social networking software. So...here I am blogging; I have a MySpace page, a Facebook account, and an iPhone. OK. I'm a Mac Addict, so it was a no-brainer that I'd get an iPhone. I'm working on revising my curriculum (we also adopted new textbooks this summer) to incorporate some of this. Unfortunately, the district's tech policies block social networking sites. I'm not even completely sure that my students will be able to log into this blog site. At least we're trying.

I'm also trying to make this a successful endeavor for myself as both a teacher and a writer. From here I hope to post my own work--poetry, essays, short stories--and have a version that gets my students writing about our classroom conversations and their responses to literature assignments. Teaching is always an experiment...collections of experiments, actually. Some of them are successful. Others...not so much. We'll see how this goes.