My seacoast New Hampshire high school afforded a few extra privileges to eleventh grade students, and one of them was to eschew regular Physics in place of Environmental Science courses. Like most math-phobes, I look them up on the offer and signed up for Ecology, Marine Biology, and Ornithology. These “nature classes” required an hours-long early morning field trip once each week. Those trips imprinted in me the kinds of memories that are so vivid you can jump right back into them.
We would leave, usually, just after 5 a.m. Except at the very start of the fall and the very end of the spring, this meant we met in darkness. We would load our materials – black gum boots and buckets, birding binoculars and notebooks – into the back of the van. Mr. Matlack or Mr. Aaronian (or, often, both, as the teachers were friends who both enjoyed this sort of thing) would drive that van somewhere students would never be able to find on our own. The dew would darken the bottoms of our sweatpants as we walked through meadows. The sun would bake the pine needles on the forest floor, a sweet New England perfume. The king eider would bob on the slate-gray November sea at Odiorne Point. I never cared much where we went, but I couldn’t believe how unbelievable what we found would be.
It struck me then, as it strikes me now, that those mornings felt like the way that life should be: communities of people coming together to retrain or recalibrate their eyes to see what beauty crowds in around, between, and among them.
I return to those memories often. I wish that life, and school, could feel make me feel the way those trips did every day. I wish, I think, that it could be that simple. In many ways, writing here can feel like it pulls me away from that simplicity. The instinct to take an issue, a conversation, a question and yank its threads until I can see the way it connects to the bigger picture of the problem can be exhausting. Moreover, it doesn’t always (or maybe ever) lead me to a real solution. Some people find this analytical instinct annoying.
Take, for example, what I originally intended to write about here: the phenomenon of teacher school suppy lists. A few weeks ago, I headed to the Union Square Staples for my TSA Pre-Check interview. I saw the following sign setup:
The idea alone rattles my cage: a company fuels consumerism among kids and families, draws upon the American instinct to compete, ultimately earns for itself a tax break (for its generosity) and also lot of money spent on binders that schools will use to gauge a child’s ability to organize the papers that’ll be obsolete technology by the time they’re in high school. The richer kids will be the only ones who even know to apply, anyway, because Staples is fancy, and most parents wouldn’t take their kids there for binders.
The next layer of this topic would be the school-supply lists, which influencers like Deb Perelman, my absolute favorite food blogger, shares at the start of each school year. Each list accompanies a robust description of the teacher and her (usually her) class of kids, who usually qualify for free lunch year round or lost half their school in a fire or any number of other tragedies because the tragedy of teachers trying to entertain seven-year-olds every day without markers or crayons is almost always nested within some bigger tragedy, some bigger network of tragedies, because, as myriad thinkers (especially from Asian American Studies and Latinx Studies) remind us, in America, if you want help, people demand the testimony of your pain. But I’m not writing about this problem – not today.
None of us can get to the bottom of a problem like school resourcing, which emerges from a complex set of political, economic, and social issues. That’s why, this summer, I took a break.
I’ve taken breaks from writing here before. I never announced or explained them. The longest came just after the the Uvalde shooting last spring. So often, and importantly (I think), I know that no one especially needs to hear what I have to say. I don’t love heated arguments, either, and I struggle to discern whether it’s wise judgment or just fear that holds me back from writing. On the subject of school shootings, I don’t have nothing to say, I have lots to say. Like every teacher, I have stories to tell and conclusions to draw from them. But it’s important to know when to write and when to rest.
I’m back to writing this fall, renewed in my desire to use what I do know to understand the things that I don’t. I see, in my approach to writing about education and society, the residue of Mr. Matlack’s and Mr. Aaronian’s teaching. Writing about education and society – a whole ecosystem, interconnected, never easy to simplify – is a process of calibrating and recalibrating my proverbial binoculars, adjusting my sound level, learning to look at the texture of the leaves in the wind in a new way. If I find the warbler I’m looking for, if I land on the prize, I’m surely missing something else. But the joy is in the trying, trying together; this is what living should be.
One of my smartest acquaintances, who is a resident physician at one of the big Manhattan hospitals, told me about his work a few weeks ago: “I’m realizing every day how little I know.” That’s what learning sounds like. As I return to the teaching and writing that so often wears me out, I’m working to remember that what I’m in pursuit of isn’t certainty or completion. As I remind my students each year, the origin of the term “essay” is the French word “essayer,” which means not “to prove” or “to explain,” but “to try.”
Earlier this month, theologian and writer Frederick Buechner, on of my heroes, died. The college professor who introduced me to Buechner broke the news to me. As I think about fall, and as I think about those classes in the woods, and as I think about the purpose of writing, I think about what Buechner might say to me. Here’s a passage from his memoir The Sacred Journey:
“Compassion is the sometimes fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else’s skin. It’s the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too.”
There’s never a solution or an end to the pursuit of peace and joy – and if mine depends on yours, there’s never a reason to stop pursuing it. This is the labor of life: to seek and shift and explain and hope, together; to give it a try.