Dreaming Big

It is now 10 days since I have landed in Jordan—hitting the ground running with a spate of meetings and dinners and brainstorming sessions and counseling and help sessions. Ten days and no blog entry! Hey, I was busy dreaming big!

Today is when I finally unpacked even though I had been back at KA for 10 days…again, I have been busy dreaming big!

Last week I arrived on Tuesday after a perfectly easy flight to JFK and then Amman. Since this is Year Four, this flight is almost old hat after numerous trans-Atlantic flights. In New York I met up with old KA colleague Tristan, who was coming back after a year of graduate work at Teachers College in New York. He had left the summer before, dreaming big of grad work and the possible career change to college professor. We regaled each other with stories of last year, catching him up on what all had transpired (I guess he doesn’t read the blog!) and then I heard that he hadn’t loved his experience at TC as much as he had imagined he would. He was thrilled to be coming back to KA—he felt he belonged here. Good! He kinda felt he hadn’t had the right dream…au contraire Tristan! He had dreamed big and decided that one place wasn’t right and another was right…how great to figure that out. The dream had taken him to where he needs to be.

Not that one needs reminders of how time flies, but 20 years ago exactly I had dreamed those same big dreams too—a chance to study at an Ivy League Institution and work on a Phd and probably teach at a prestigious college. Tristan had such a similar experience to mine, but in the end, 20 years ago, as I started at Charlotte Latin School, in the fall of 1990, I knew I was in the right place. I was where I needed to be. The ivy league thing had disappointed me, but not the field of education. I dreamed big and found it was a different dream. And I have loved the secondary school world ever since.

In these last 10 days we have not even had the old faculty return yet. In the last 10 days it has been department heads and senior staff working with the new faculty. Just them! Soon the returning faculty will join us, and then student leader proctors, and finally the rest of the student body. Besides the new faculty and new students, we have a new headmaster. So much dreaming big going on around here!

John Austin is our new head and as another reminder that I am not twenty-something anymore as I was at Latin 20 years ago, now the head of the school is just a couple of years older than I am. And the exciting mood on campus is palpable. Remember in the last blog entry I spoke of the hopes that infuse teachers in August every year, and the seal on my diploma from Brown offering the appeal, In Deo Speramus, In God We Hope…well that vibe is apparent around campus. There is a refreshed excitement about school, with all the newbie teachers, and new veterans, and a new head.

I miss our old head, the venerable Eric Widmer. There are so many things about him that I admire, namely his insistence that schools are only successful when the school community cherishes one another. It is in the mission statement of the school. He has codified this wish, this urgent hope, this big dream. He told me once of a discussion with a trustee who disagreed on the language of that phrase. The other man had suggested the word, “respect,” but Eric said that the quality of “cherish” is deeper and different and more challenging and more rewarding. He is right. I wrote to Eric the other day, expressing how I missed seeing him. I got a response that he is off for a trip to China, but that for the first time in 65 years he was not preparing to go to school. He turned 70 this past January, so he looked back over his career, and then way back to when he started school, and as he remembered, for the first time in his life since 1945, he wasn’t heading off to school. I will miss this wise man.

Besides my 20th anniversary of beginning of my teaching at Latin, I noted that this is also the 10th anniversary of the trip I made to Mississippi in 2000. That trip is significant for a number of reasons—it was my first trip with God’s Gift Anne Siviglia, but also the memorable trip with a few students where we really dug into the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi. It was a life-changing trip as we met among others, Unita Blackwell, a mover and shaker in the 1960s, and then mayor of her town for 25 years. Back during the Civil Rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s an old African-American spiritual became popular with those who engaged in the battle: “Keep Your Eyes On The Prize.” One of the most humbling and exciting elements of that trip was an up close audience of those who had dreamed big, dreamed so big for themselves and the United States. The source of that song is the Bible verse from Philippians 3:4-14, about the inner prize to which Paul urged the fledgling church in Philippi to hold onto. The meaning of the spiritual is clear: Don’t get distracted by the obstacles along the way! Don’t get depressed by the failures of the past! Don’t be consumed with the opposition that comes in the present! Find out where you need to be! Dream Big! And keep your eyes on the prize, hold on, hold on!

The prize that Unita Blackwell and countless other foot soldiers in that movement sought was equality, justice, freedom, access, and respect for all people—not just a privileged ethnic majority. The prize for Paul is coming to the end of the race and being called up by the highest judge and told, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant.”

“Eyes on the Prize” means focusing on what you want in life. “Dreaming Big” involves figuring out what road you need to travel to get to what you have deemed so important.

This is a good beginning of the year here. The new guy, the new head honcho John, is a good listener. He asks questions. He pays attention. He seeks out insights. He also commands a meeting well. He is very activist but not in a reckless manner. I can tell he will be a strong leader. In his first speech with the new faculty he explained the origins of the school. When Eric offered this speech every year, of course, he was one of the big dreamers about the school a decade ago after His Majesty first proposed the idea. But John wisely took another path: he created for us a context of the history of private education in the United States in the last 200-some years. He explained how the newest dreams propelled the private school world into the future. He did a marvelous job of showing how this school is at the forefront of something new. He did not do, as some others have done, the old propaganda of announcing that we are, or just about to be, one of the best schools in the world. No, what John did so well was encourage us to see how exciting it is to be at this school at this moment in history. If we keep our eyes on the prize our hopes and energy will transform this school, maybe even the world.

A child once reported to Archbishop Desmond Tutu that her prayer in life was simply this: “I pray for all of God’s dreams to come true.” A simple, faithful and straightforward prayer that contains within it a fascinating question—what exactly are God’s dreams? Archbishop Tutu has an idea. He writes that the dreams of God are full of amazing transformations. God’s dreams include the transformation of the ugliness, squalor and poverty of this world into laughter, joy and peace. God’s dreams include the transformation of war and hostility, greed and disharmony into justice and goodness, compassion and love, caring and sharing. It is a powerful and big dream.

Transformations. That is the stuff about which teachers dream big for their students.

Of course the reality of our world is that those who dream these big dreams will be confronted by others who do not share the same dream. Breaking down barriers is dangerous and contentious work. Conflict is part of the faithful journey, but it is not the destination, it is not God’s ultimate dream for us.

It has been an exciting beginning of the year. I am sure I will tell you about the new teachers as I get to know them. I am in charge of the youngest of the new faculty, the ones just sprung from college and these seven who dared to come to the Middle East and try teaching at this school.

I also spent time this summer dreaming big for me---where am I supposed to be? Oh my, weighty thoughts and dreams. But for right now, it is plain to me—I am where I need to be. I have my eyes on the prize!