In the Blood

I landed in Jordan on August 15 and on Sunday morning, August 16, the work for school year 2009-10 started. And right now, in these moments of Friday, September 4, I am enjoying the first break in the action. I am not whining about it—working in a school like this, a boarding school still tweaking and honing is, I guess, much like parenthood, you just gotta get the job done. So I am just observing that after 19 straight days of work all day every day, today is a true weekend day.

What am I doing? In about an hour, I am headed down to the Dead Sea with my Hackley peeps in attendance in Jordan (there are four of us now!) and getting a massage. Oh yeah.

But when we came back in mid-August, there were about 5 days of new teacher orientation (you know from previous blogs how much I enjoy them already) and then Julianne wanted us to prepare student orientation, then returning faculty zoomed back into town, and before we knew it, student orientation was underway and so was the first week of classroom teaching. So, on Tuesday of this week when I thought, “Gee, I am a little tired,” it was more than just the first week.

Anyway, that is not the subject of the blog—I got sidetracked justifying my drive to the Dead Sea for a massage—note to self: there is never a need to justify that decision!

In the sweep of it all in the last week, I was reminded of something our headmaster Eric shared last June as he gave a “State of the School” address. If you remember, it was a challenging year, and by June, we were a little weary limping to the finish line. The pace can be staggering here. But as always, Eric casts a brighter light on things reminding us where we have been, and that we must continue to fight the good fight. He quoted a passage from Macbeth, that reads, “I am in blood, stepped in so far, that should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o'er.” And in tones much like General Eisenhower in the Second World War, Eric reminded us that we must stay “in the blood.”

It is an arresting passage. On the surface, of course, Macbeth is saying that he is so far into the situation that there is no turning back and he had to continue with what he was doing despite the consequences and immorality of it. Going back would be as difficult as going on with it.

I’m not sure, but that may have been the first time in my teaching career that a headmaster had summoned an image of somebody standing in a river of blood! The metaphor, of course, represents Macbeth’s crimes: and rather than stop committing crimes (presumably, for fear of damnation) Macbeth says that he might as well continue to commit them. One is as pointless or boring (“tedious”) as the other.

But what a provocative metaphor—I mean, here it is 10 weeks after he referenced it in a faculty meeting, and I am still rolling the idea around in my head. Eric went on to say that while there are still problems (logistical, emotional, pedagogical, cultural) in moving our school forward, we have come too far to turn back. He repeated the phrase a few times, “We must think that we are ‘in the blood,’ and we wouldn’t dare abandon the project or each other now.”

And he is right. We are too far in just to pack up the Persian carpets, digital camera scrapbooks and go back to wherever home is. I love his steadfastness and inspiration. So last week as we pressed forward into a third week of work without a legitimate break, the phrase came back again—we are too much ‘in the blood’ here, we have had some great successes (if you wonder, go back and read the blogs from the first semester in 2007 and compare them to our first AP scores this summer!) and we must continue the work.

By and large it was a glorious week. I have over-stuffed classes in AP Art History, but they are exceptionally well-behaved and engaged. We are about the business of surveying and experiencing the art that our world has produced. We spent two days thinking about themes in art (like power and authority, and abstraction, and the tree of life, connecting Heaven and Earth, masculine power and feminine power) and then we made a beeline back to the Pre-Historic times and we will spend the next 132 school days inching closer to the 21st century. These guys are punctual, ready, and even enduring the hotbox that is my room.

The dormitories are calm at night—we have new student proctors to help model good behavior and keep the peace, and it was a nice week.

There were a few bumps along the way. On Orientation Day, a family came about 8 hours later than the scheduled check-in and demanded to see the new Dean of Student Life. Julianne happened to be in a meeting with 400 students, and I figured the father would understand. Oh, no! He demanded—after all he drove hundreds of kilometers, and pays a king’s ransom (whoops, bad pun) to send his daughter here. I reminded him that the Dean had stood on the front lawn greeting people for six hours and he missed that chance. He stepped toward me, plump finger about to invade my personal space, and I heard myself say, “Back up, sir. You will not tell me what to do.” I guess I got a little New York up!

And I broke up a fight. And I discovered fourteen people had left their dirty trays lying around the dining hall after some meal.

Puny things really. Eric’s right—we are too much “in the blood” to let the mundane things bring us down. It may be trite, but sweating the small stuff is for suckers. It’s the good stuff, the real learning, that is happening that makes this place invigorating.

I had an email from dear friend Tracy the other day—it was for her also the first week of teaching in Ohio. She teaches music to little ones, and she wrote about how the day had been perfect. She had planned classes well, the students had enthusiastically helped execute the lesson well—she just glowed in the email. Teachers don’t share those things enough. We don’t let ourselves get excited about if an explanation of a cool phrase, like sacerdotal intermediary, works well in class. We get bogged down by administrative snafus and untucked shirts.

I clipped a page from an in-flight magazine three weeks ago on my way back to being ‘in the blood.’ It was a column by, of all people, Joan Rivers. She discussed how much she has loved her life’s work of mining comedy out of life. She concluded:

“Runners, skiers, surfers, football players and wrestlers report experiencing an intense ‘high’ when they feel they are performing to their maximum potential. When we make people laugh, we experience our own version of runner’s high. Thrilled and energized by the feeling and drenched in laughter, at that moment we are on top of the world, we are invincible and there is no limit to what we can achieve.”

Joan should have talked to teachers too—add them to that list! It was clear when Tracy wrote the other day that her music classes had produced just such a feeling. And walking around campus this last week, greeting new students, enjoying the endless hugs and hand shaking, and “habibi” comments with old students that in spite of problems along the way, there are palpable moments here just like Joan shares.

There are some inconveniences, headaches and language barriers, but Eric is so right. We are too much ‘in the blood’ to turn back now. It is thrilling. It is energizing.

Time to pack the sun block and head to officially the Lowest Point on Earth.

Get the metaphor? There are moments that are like the Highest high a teacher can enjoy. Time to relax with a little R&R at the Lowest Point on Earth.