Parched

In my over-twenty years as an educator, very few school years have passed where I did not introduce a new course to my line-up of students. I love the vibrancy and urgency of a new course! New courses have an unusually consistent birth and life—in the first year of introducing a new course, I am just thrilled that I survived the ups and downs of the new course; in the second year, I find I am painfully aware of all the mistakes I have made and bothered that I can’t return to the simpler magic of that first year of the course; in the third year of the new course, a little wisdom and serenity and pragmatism prevail, and a calm settles in. Time and again, with courses on United States history, World History, AP this and AP that, a course follows that three-year pattern.

Hmmmm….as I come to the end of June, the end of my second year at KA, and I look back on this second year of this high-flying, high-profile, high-ideals and high-hopes school, it is following that same pattern as a new course.

I looked back in the blog archives to what I wrote in June of 2008. As we came to the end of that inaugural year of our school, there was such excitement and wonder—we had survived the year! Students had improved! Four bad boys had exited the school and we were left with the fruits of our worry and labor—a solid, growing, intellectually stimulating school. We put mementoes into a time capsule, we hugged and shed tears at the summer separation we faced. I reflected on sauntering in the Holy Land. It was all heady and meaningful.

This year—our second year, had bumps along the way. The school more than doubled in size, and of course that changed the dynamics of our little intimate school of 110 students. Several faculty suffered health issues during the year resulting in sudden departures and the need to find new faculty immediately. The school endured the growing pains of adjusting to AP curricula. The school realized that the sports program just wasn’t cultivating a competitive roster of teams. The school suffered from the pangs of economic decline just like everybody else. The school agonized over whether we were a Jordanian or an American school, a day school or a boarding school, a regional school or an international school. The school will lose several high-profile administrators for next year. Towards the end of the year, maybe due to spring fever, the school witnessed a burgeoning growth of inappropriate adolescent behavior—nothing unusual, just a rash of dumb, immature behavior. Several faculty came to the end of their tenure at the school with a resentful, bitter edge.

Yep—exactly like the contours of a new course…much less of a “thrill” to end the year, and more flailing, wondering, and awareness of the difficulties of running a school, any school, even a school with such lovely guiding principles as Respect, Responsibility, Love of Learning, an Integrated Life, and Global Citizenship.

So here I am, at the end of June, and ready for a summer vacation from the blog. After this blogisode, I will take time off from the blog—with a check-in blog entry in July—until I return to Jordan in 45 days.

Last year I created a showcase of the year from A-Z—a little like watching the Tony Awards and enjoying the highlights from the nominated musicals. (Okay, that was just ridiculous—it was nothing like watching the Tony Awards!)

As I look back over the year, I wondered what image or metaphor (or Broadway show or situation-comedy) I would invoke as my emblem of the year. Well, when I was in Egypt two weeks ago with Anne and Martha, I learned of a shocking story about a man killed in early June for water.

Our tour guide Mohammed and I were talking about the story, and Mohammed told me of an important movie in Egyptian cinema, The Good Earth as it is called in English, made in 1962, about the plight of the Egyptian farmers under the British occupation. At that time the soil went thirsty because the British colonists and their allies, the feudal aristocrats, had priority for irrigating the land, at the expense of the small farmers. As Mohammed reminded me, the 1952 Revolution brought to an end the British occupation of Egypt as well as the feudal system, but as has turned out, the fight over water has never ended.

We discussed how shocking it was that a man was killed over irrigation rights. You know, maybe it shouldn’t be shocking—experts have been warning us about the water poverty in the world and the possible eruption of wars over water resources in different parts of the world.

But it seemed strange to me that such a murder would take place near the banks of the mighty Nile with its legendary rich waters and fertile soil. We are so close to what we need, but it doesn’t always get there.

That seems an apt metaphor for us this year at KA—we are so close to what we need, but it doesn’t always get there.

We are parched. I am parched. I left Jordan left week, eager to spend my summer in the United States, parched. Parched for a sense of calm; parched for rigor; parched for civility. How to quench that thirst?

When I come home there is always that week of odd jet lag—I am tired earlier in the evening, and then wake up rarin’ to go—first around 4:00 a.m. and then 4:15 a.m. and then after a week, I arise at a more civilized 7:00 a.m. But in that week I need some good books to get me through that down time when no one else is awake in my circle of friends and family. I always go to the library for a stack of biographies or potboilers to help me make it through the inky part of the night.

One of the books I picked up this last week was a new work about folk singer and activist Pete Seeger. I have heard him perform twice in the last 15 years, and he is a marvel of a leader. When Pete Seeger started traveling and listening to American music in the 1930s, he heard a hundred voices in those stories and ordinary songs of folks, from across the span of American history—parlor music, church music, tavern music, street and gutter music—and he felt the connection to the music. Somehow in those pre-dawn hours I feel a connection to Pete Seeger and his goal to understand Americans. He thirsted for understanding, and he fueled that curiosity with some
19th century and Calvinist habits of mind, blended them with a New England sensibility, sprinkled in some Emerson and Thoreau and finally resulted in a wholly original reverence for nature, regard for human life, something like a scorn for materialistic values, and a belief in the worth of right moral behavior. This biographer commented about Pete Seeger: “His nature is unflaggingly hopeful, but there is a line of melancholy that runs through it.” Hmmm...Pete Seeger himself once said, “I seem to stagger about this agonized world as a clown, dressed in happiness, hoping to reach the hearts and minds of the young.”

I came home from a wearying year in Jordan, aware of the dark corners, aware of some problems, aware that it is neither always an adventure nor a romance, but still buoyed by the hope that this school can make our young people feel themselves to be the elements of a collective identity, can intensify their learning experience—and can enlarge and encourage them and help hold oblivion at arm’s length.

Toward the end of the book, Pete Seeger remarked, “I always hated the word career. It implies that fame and fortune are what you’re trying to get. I have a life’s purpose. These days my purpose is trying to get people to realize that there may be no human race by the end of the century unless we find ways to talk to people we deeply disagree with. Whether we cooperate from love or tolerance, it doesn’t much matter, but we must treat each other non-violently. The agricultural revolution took thousands of years, the industrial revolution took hundreds of years, the technological revolution is taking decades. We need a moral revolution.”

I came home parched. I am enjoying that re-charge of batteries that comes with a little distance, an absence of duties and meetings, and I can reflect on how I can be a part of that moral revolution that KA aims to jumpstart. I am also reminded of a great poem, “Directive,” by Robert Frost that a young colleague introduced me to in the spring of 2008. The poem speaks about a road that leads to an obscure house, and an obscure spring. The poem ends with the grand announcement, or should I say, directive: “Here are your waters and your watering place. Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.”

We will get lost, the poem reminds, and the finding-in-losing is the poem’s crucial paradox and climax. We must not be scared of our own desert places. We will find ourselves lost in the generations of humanity. And just when our ordeal seems unbearable, and we are indeed mazed by primitive fears, we learn in drinking where we have been and where we have finally arrived. The poem astounds me because it doesn’t minimize our dashed expectations, and it doesn’t provide answers. It simply stays defeat by bettering being lost.

This would have been a great place to end my blogisode (Happy Birthday yesterday Sue who named it thus!) reflection of the end of our second year. But last night I got an e-mail from Abdullah, one of the most exciting and urgent students I have known at KA. He is teaching younger students grades 6-8 at KA this summer. He wrote me of his frustrations in teaching these younger students:

I’m writing you to tell you that something just happened to me that firstly angered me, and secondly made me really admire you.

Some of the SEP kids, I regrettably announce, have become just like some of the King’s Academy students. They do not appreciate being here and act all snobbish, etc. Well, today we decided to let the 8th graders (the oldest might I add) off play practice (I know, we’re crazy) and play a few games with them instead. These games were theatrical games of course, and so, it involved some sitting down and listening on behalf of the students. Some of them, however, could not sit down and listen. We therefore had to go through the usual “go and sit at the back” and things like that. The kids, however, did not stop. They continued doing things like making fun of the people on stage, who were already too shy to get up on stage in the first place. It even went to the extent where I sat next to a group of them and they started joking around with me expecting me to join them. I was just about to get up and yell at the whole group…In the end I just left the children for the other counselors to take care of them.

This just happened to be the last straw for me after a serious of similar events that occurred today and days before. My patience grew unbelievably thin and I am now locked in my room, trying to escape them.

At this point right now I really really admire you.

All the things one has to go through, whether it’s gauging how angry to be at what moments, or whether or not to let this one slip, or just sending people to they’re rooms. I actually made a little girl cry today! And I wasn’t even angry at her! I still don’t get how I did that! I would also really like to know if you find us as annoying as I find some of them. If so, then I not only admire you, but I feel your pain as well. The clingy annoying children I personally find the worst, even if they didn’t to anything wrong in particular.

I don’t know how you survive it. The real mystery is how you not only survive it, but end up changing them. You actually manage to change kids’ lives and go through all that hell, and I’m finding trouble just surviving two weeks of this. Wow.

Well, I’m terribly sorry that my first email to you this summer is complaining. I do not like to complain much, but it is the “I admire you” part that I really wanted to get across.

Yes, the cycle of the “new course” is continuing—let us look for the wisdom and serenity of the third year. Abdullah has certainly helped to slake my thirst.