The Wheels On The Bus

The wheels on the bus go round and round
Round and round, round and round
The wheels on the bus go round and round
All through the town.

Remember this song we sang as little children? As we come to the end of the first term of the school year, a ditty as silly as this seems perfectly in tune with my mental state at the moment! I have just finished reading 96 exam essays for AP World History, figuring out grades, and sending the boys from my dormitory home for the holidays.

Due to quirks in the Muslim calendar and the Christian calendar, it turns out KA will enjoy the longest mid-year break it will ever have. The Eid holiday during which the faithful make their pilgrimage to Mecca, has begun, and by the time that period of celebration ends, it would almost have coincided with the Christmas holidays. So we lumped them all together, and here we are—a month-long break. As our headmaster warned us, “this won’t come along together like this for another 33 years.”

By that time, come 2041, I may be retired.

But this song, now on an endless loop in my head (just try and escape it!), also works as a metaphor for the stage in child development infamously labeled, the “terrible twos.” “No one looks forward to the terrible twos,” writes a psychologist on one of the websites associated (I did a google search and it came up with 1.6 million sites!) with the ‘terrible twos.’ As we all know this stage is characterized by toddlers being negative about most things and often stamping feet and shouting “No!”

As my brilliant psychologist friend Sue would remind each of us, the child isn’t trying to be defiant or rebellious on purpose. He is just trying to express his growing independence. Moreover language skills have not been perfected yet.
But we all have to live through this stage fraught with tantrums and testing limits. As we came to this end of our first term, in spite of the many positive and wonderful things about life at KA—it seemed this autumn we had definitely entered a stage in school development that mirrored these notorious “terrible twos.” There have been scenes of antagonism, backbiting, frustration, some employees resigning, negativity and emotional wobbliness. Indeed, the school is in Year #2, and why shouldn’t there be some problems as we adjust to the intermingling of languages, cultures, religions, classes, backgrounds, nations? But there is a gnawing fear sometimes that the wheels have fallen off the bus.

Vision is one of the hardest things to implant or to nurture. Pyramids, cathedrals, and rockets exist not because of geometry, theories of structures or thermodynamics, but because they were first a picture—literally a vision—in the minds of those who built them. King Abdullah, in my mind, is certainly a visionary in how he imagined and worked to create this school. But some people do not realize that a school, or any of the aforementioned projects, does not emerge fully complete as Athena did out of Zeus’ head.

And so, at the moment, we are suffering through, aching through the “terrible twos” of a school project. I suppose it is inevitable that with such a heady project hoping to stimulate world peace, that there would be a clash of ideals, and a clash of egos. The limits and tantrums of a small child stretching through the second year of life is mirrored in the struggles at our wonderful school. It also comes at a price trying to find financial aid money so that half of the KA students can be supported and the school can be need- blind. We can look to another verse in the school bus song, reminding us of pressing needs in a time of economic dislocation:

The money on the bus goes "Clink, clink, clink,
Clink, clink, clink, clink, clink, clink"
The money on the bus goes "Clink, clink, clink"
All through the town.

Just this week I suffered through the worst night in the dormitory in my 17 months at KA. Exams had ended Wednesday by 11:00 a.m. and there would be a truncated day on Thursday to return exams—but somehow it escaped all of us to plan anything with the students. So for almost 24 hours there was nothing for them to do. That night, on one of five forays out of my apartment after midnight on a rampage, I encountered one of the nicest students, and I asked him why in the world they were still running around at 3:15 a.m.?!?!?!? He said they felt “entitled” to stay up all night and run around. Just as you want to do with an inconsiderate two-year old, I wanted to shake some sense into him.

So on our last day of the term, yesterday, there was a scarred and defiant attitude, among everybody I think.

Here is where you, the adult, need a time-out. It is not only instructive for the two-year old, but the adults, and the school community as a whole. Here is where we need to seek some wisdom from sage philosophers. I am reminded of writer H.G. Wells, who commented, “Civilization is a race between education and catastrophe.”

This has been an extraordinary fall, with great progress made, but we sometimes gripe about the imperfections. Why isn’t there more money for this, or why can’t we just get past the writing difficulties, why can’t the Americans do this, or why can’t the Jordanians do this??????? BREATHE PEOPLE! We need to look for that moment instead, and it might be a quiet moment, when the door opens and the future comes in. For while there are certainly flaws in this human endeavor, we have touched children’s hearts. If we can reach a child’s heart we can reach the world’s heart.

In the midst of our exam period (seemingly endless!) my dear friend Tiffany initiated a project of charitable giving in the last 12 days, a project enormously successful in giving back to our staff, to a nearby school, sheep for a village, clothes, food, money, and time to help younger students learn to study. One day students were asked to send thank-you notes to teachers if they wanted. It is interesting that one of the kindest notes I received was from that dastardly defiant boy who met me in the hallway night before last refusing to go to bed. His note, in part, reads, “Thank you for making sure I am on the right track and doing things the way they should be done. Thank you for caring. I know it isn’t going to make you rich if you care about us, but you do…”

Oh, the terrible twos! Just when you think you should give up, you see the future, you sense the greatness beyond the exhaustion, beyond the silliness. I looked on-line at the lyrics of our schoolbus song, and there is a cloying last verse:

The mommy on the bus says, "I love you,
I love you, I love you"
The daddy on the bus says, "I love you, too"
All through the town.

So as I profess in my bio, that Yeats quotation that “education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire,” sometimes the kindling is just difficult to assemble and the fire is slow. But just as with every two-year old, we live through that stage, we sing the silly songs, we discipline, we hold our tongue, we hope and we must revel in the madness.

I recently saw that Pete Seeger, that iconic American troubadour, has another album out, commemorating his 89 years on earth. One of his tracks picks up on a theme to which he has devoted his life—trying to urge us to make the world better. Pete Seeger and King Abdullah have a great deal in common, and for those of us fellow lodgers living in this house, we need to keep the faith to survive the stage of “terrible twos” and all the other growing pains in life. Here are the words Pete offers us, hoping we continue to try as hard as we can:

“If This World Survives”
If this world survives,
And every other day I think it might,
In good part it will be
Because of the great souls in our community.
There are a lot of them.
I've seen them walk
In lonely thousands down the city streets,
Or stand in vigils in the rain,
Or turn the handle of a print machine,
Or empty their purses as the plate comes by.
Or gaze into the camera's eye,
And answer the question: ‘Will the world survive?’
And they have said,
’We'll try. We'll try.’