Inside 537

Homework on the Weekend? Mr. Brooowwwwnnn!

Yes it's true.  In an unprecedented fit of meanness under my a.k.a. as "El Maestro Malo" I assigned my fifth and sixth graders homework over the WEEKEND!  The payoff for me was the change in their expressions when I announced that the assignment was...

SPIDERMAN III!

In honor of my priceless friend and superhero mentor, JRocka!

So where do I get my cut of that 140 mil?

The Balance

 

 

 

 

Scientists pointed the Hubble telescope at a spot in the sky that seemed completely devoid of stars.  It covered about the area of the circle of a soda straw.  There are no single stars in this photo.    Every one of those little dots is an entire galaxy.  And many of them are more than 13 billion light years away.

Now our own Milky Way is a modest galaxy of somewhere between 100 billion and 1 trillion stars.  In the photograph, if you are very patient, you can count around 10,000 galaxies.  Some are much bigger than ours.  You may be wondering how many soda straws you would have to look through to cover the whole sky.

That would be about 12.7 million.  Are you doing the math yet?

Now you might be thinking that I'm letting an opportunity to make a political point pass right by here.  You'd be wrong.  I'm going to close with a quote from Al Gore himself.  But before I do, I want you to pick, at random, one of those galaxies in the picture above.  Got it?  Now imagine one of the billions of stars in that galaxy.  O.K.?  O.K., you're ready.

Now hold that thought and consider the wisdom of the Emperor of Emissions himself as he sonorously intones, "We are altering the balance between our planet and the rest of the universe."

So when you start up your SUV tomorrow, that star you're thinking of will never be the same.  Can you live with that?

It's the Kids that Get it Best...

I got this from a friend in one of those forwarded email things I almost never look at.  I doubt that it's a true story and it doesn't claim to be, but this blog is about the pursuit of True Compassion so I'm posting it anyway.  Here it is:

"Come with me to a third grade classroom..... There is a nine-year-old kid sitting at his desk and all of a sudden, there is a puddle between his feet and the front of his pants are wet. He thinks his heart is going to stop because he cannot possibly imagine how this has happened.   It's never happened before, and he knows that when the boys find out he will never hear the end of it. When the girls find out, they'll never speak to him again as long as he  lives.

The boy believes his heart is going to stop; he puts his head down and prays this prayer, 'Dear God, this is an emergency!  I need help now!  Five minutes from now I'm dead meat.'

He looks up from his prayer and here comes the teacher with a look in her eyes that says he has been discovered.  As the teacher is walking toward him, a classmate named Susie is carrying a goldfish bowl that is filled with water.  Susie trips in front of the teacher and inexplicably dumps the bowl of water in the boy's lap.

The boy pretends to be angry, but all the while is saying to himself, 'Thank you, Lord! Thank you, Lord!'  Now all of a sudden, instead of being the object of ridicule, the boy is the object of sympathy.  The teacher rushes him downstairs and gives him gym shorts to put on while his pants dry out. All the other children are on their hands and knees cleaning up around his desk. The sympathy is wonderful.  But as life would have it, the ridicule that should have been his has been transferred to someone else - Susie.

She tries to help, but they tell her to get out.  'You've done enough, you klutz!'

Finally, at the end of the day, as they are waiting for the bus, the boy walks over to Susie and whispers, 'You did that on purpose, didn't you?'  Susie whispers back,  'I wet my pants once too.'

May God help us see the opportunities that are always around us to do good."

Got MLK?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s that time of year again.  The celebration of Martin Luther King’s birthday is my favorite holiday, probably because I’m a teacher and have very strong political beliefs and opinions.  Also, because I’m a teacher and have my own 6th grade classroom, I get to teach it my way.

Dr. King is one of the Great Triumvirate, along with Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington.  The contribution of these three men to American history and to the American conscience is immeasurable.  They were, every one of them, true Americans and they loved this country enough to devote their lives in the betterment of it.

In his time, each one of them stood in contrast to another who sought to accomplish the same purpose, but who in fact had a very different message.  For Frederick Douglass it was William Lloyd Garrison.  Garrison was a white abolitionist who first brought Douglass to the attention of the American people.  They both fought slavery, but Garrison hated the U.S. Constitution and saw it as a pro-slavery document.  He orchestrated demonstrations in which he burned copies of the Constitution publicly.  He was one of those myopic individuals who set themselves on a good course, but fail to think things through thoroughly.  As a result, his policies did more harm than good. 

Douglass, on the other hand, saw the U.S. Constitution as a powerful weapon against slavery.  He said, “the Constitution of the United States, standing alone, and construed only in the light of its letter, without reference to the opinions of the men who framed and adopted it, or to the uniform, universal and undeviating practice of the nation under it, from the time of its adoption until now, is not a pro-slavery instrument.”  This still stands in contrast to the assertions of many self-appointed, self-anointed “civil rights leaders” even today.  Douglass had actually been a slave, held by a cruel master, and certainly had the more reason to hate the country his master represented than the white Garrison who claimed to have the slaves’ best interest at heart, but execrated the government document that made it possible to set them free.

Booker T. Washington stood in contrast to W.E.B. DuBois.  The argument here was Washington’s plan that slaves should gradually assimilate into the mainstream society by means of education and hard work, against DuBois who felt that such assimilation was too slow and advocated a more militant and immediate approach.

According to Washington, “Our greatest danger is that in the great leap from slavery to freedom we may overlook the fact that the masses of us are to live by the productions of our hands, and fail to keep in mind that we shall prosper in proportion as we learn to dignify and glorify common labour and put brains and skill into the common occupations of life... No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top. Nor should we permit our grievances to overshadow our opportunities.”  While one may debate that Washington’s goals may have been better realized had they been seasoned with a little civil disobedience, he certainly had the more accurate assessment of American philosophy and opportunity in the face of adversity.

DuBois, on the other hand, eventually embraced communism, extolled the virtues of Nazi Germany, and called Stalin “great” and “courageous”.  While Mao Tse Tung was busy murdering 60 million of his own people through torture and hard labor, DuBois saw in that country, “a sense of human nature free of its most hurtful and terrible meanness and of a people full of joy and faith and marching on in a unison...inconceivable in the United States.”  It is hard to imagine how one so intelligent could be so grievously wide of the mark.

King’s thorn in the side was the Nation of Islam, the chief spokesman of which was Malcolm X, who was later murdered for turning against that organization. (Malcolm X was no sheep, and the “Nation” was in want of sheep.)  Elijah Muhammed characterized King’s efforts to unite the races in a bond of mutual respect and love as “ignorant.”

It is most interesting that, at the end of Malcolm X’s life, he and King were beginning to come together in their ideals.  King was beginning to see that his purely Ghandian approach lacked a much needed edge; “I am not sad that Black Americans are rebelling... Without this magnificent ferment among Negroes, the old evasions and procrastinations would have continued indefinitely,” he wrote.  Personally, although he advocated violent means “when necessary,” Malcolm was essentially a man of peace, and never personally used violence himself to achieve his ends.

How might our country look today if Martin and Malcolm had been allowed to live, to talk, to perhaps even reconcile?  They had a mutual respect for each other even when they were bitterly opposed. We’ll never know.

But Martin’s dream can still be accomplished in those who believe, as passionately as he did, that the power of True Compassion trumps the natural evil that men create.  We must bend our efforts to the same task, winning the war against racism not by meeting hate with equivalent hate, but by overcoming evil with good (Romans 12:21).

Confusion

I've been giving some of my "beginning-of-the-year" lessons to my fifth/sixth graders.  One of the first ones centers around the banner in my room that says, "If you're not confused, you're not learning anything!"

I want them to understand that being confused is not the time to give up, it's the beginning of the learning process.  If I'm teaching a new thing, and you already know it, it's easy and you're not confused.  If you don't care about learning what I'm teaching, you're still not confused, you're just bored.  The only time you can be confused is if I'm teaching something you don't know yet and you want to learn it.

Kids always think that if they don't know something, they must be stupid.  Especially if they hear someone else say, "Hey, this is easy!" when they're still struggling with it.  "Oh, that person must be smart.  It's easy for them.  I don't get it, so I'm just dumb."

So I'm trying to teach them how their brains work.  I make them chant together with me, "Sometimes it's tough, but it's not as tough as me!"  And, stealing from the movie, "Remember the Titans" I yell at them, "How smart are you?"  and they have to yell back,"Too Smart!"

So much of success is about attitude. I hope I can help them develop an attitude of persistence.  I'm going to need lots of prayer in this.  It's a good class this year, but some of them have already begun the process of giving up.

Back to School

School starts in a few days and this year I've got a combination class with 10 5th graders and 24 6th graders.  So I'm standing here on the shore of life watching this tsunami rising 100 feet over my head and blotting out the sun, its white foam spray just now hitting my face as September 5 approaches. 

Now Sandals is a church largely (I've discovered) composed of teachers, retired teachers, and becoming teachers.  So after 20 years in the biz here's what I've got to say to the new guys.

Teaching is an act of love.  If you're wondering about it as a profession, then know that to be successful you've got to have two innate things.  They must be a part of you before you begin.  Everything else can be learned.  First, you've got to have a passionate love for the art of teaching itself, from the dry theories of linguistic analysis to your performance in the theater of the classroom stage.  Second, you've got to have a passionate love for your students.

The degree to which you have these two things determines whether or not you suffer burnout in your job.  When you have one of those years that feels like it's the last year that you can give to the profession because it's just too much and you can't take it anymore, you ask yourself these two questions:  Do I love the art of teaching? and, Do I love the kids?  If your answer to both questions is still, "Yes," or, "Yes, but..." you're not burned out.  You're just exhausted.  Get some rest.  You'll be back.

Every child in your classroom has one question for you that lies beneath everything they say and do.  You must keep this question in the forefront of your thoughts every second of every teaching day in every interaction that you have with each one of them.  I've talked about this question before on this blog, but for teachers it is most paramount and bears continual reiteration.  The question is, "What am I worth?"

The one thing that determines whether or not your students will learn anything from you is your relationship with them.  If they perceive that they have value in your eyes they will give all they've got to learn anything you want to teach them.  If they believe that they have value in your eyes, they will begin to have value in their own.  If, then, you can nurture that value successfully before they leave your class, they will go on to succeed in life and they will remember you as the cause.

There is no greater reward than having a student come back in 10 years, walk into your sixth grade classroom, tower over you and say, "Mr. Brown, I did it.  I made it, and it was because of you."  No amount of fame, fortune, or worldly power can match that feeling.  And when it happens you wouldn't trade it for anything.  Not for twenty million dollars.  Not for a hundred million.  Not even for a badly overdue cost-of-living raise.

Teaching is more rewarding than any job I can imagine.  As they used to say in the Peace Corps ads, "It's the hardest job you'll ever love."  Well that's about right.

So love the art.  Love the kids.  Everything else you can learn.  For me, burnout is a loooong way down the road.

Well, the tsunami wave is breaking now and I'm looking straight up as it curls 10 stories above my head.  I've got this big stupid grin plastered across my face, and with my eyes closing, I take one last breath.  As the water thunders down, crushing and engulfing me into its deadly maelstrom, I have only three final words.

Bring it on.