Letter to my daughter – Jan. 3, 2009
Darling Kim,
I’m about to chain myself to a mountain of essays which must be scored before the arbitrary Thayer Central Community School deadline of Monday, Jan. 5th (Dad’s birthday) 8 am. It’s probably a good thing somebody inflicted this deadline on me, as preposterous as it is, in the reality of life on earth, because I would never look at those papers again if it were my personal choice. The aging, precious faces of my family around me seem so fragile, and I am pulled to concentrate on them, celebrate them, honor them. Most students in my classroom are not curious. They are comfortable, electronically entertained, or bent on winning whatever status exists in the odd social fabric of high school. The number grade I will put on their papers means only that their parents will be happy or unhappy with them because of making or missing the honor roll this semester. In all my decades of teaching, I have never enjoyed shrinking their growth into numbers and percentages, judging the pace, judging the outcome of the efforts of one day. How do I know what they’ve learned that will matter? How does school learning matter in these years of abundance and greed, of war and paranoia? While I yearn to escape the confines and clock faces of my job, I know, too, that this job puts me in contact with children and makes me want to watch and nurture them. Without this necessary employment, I would be so content to spin the hours out in my pj’s, in my little prairie house, gazing out the window at busy birds or heaving grasses, mentally painting them in watercolors, enjoying the depths of silence and peace. Of course, I’d be gazing out the window about noon, and daily miss the splendor and variety of 180 sunrises, billowing colors east at dawn, opening the flat darkness into realms of light, never the same, the dizzying surprise, the landscape of atmosphere, the spiritual paycheck for steering faithfully into the day’s arbitrary schedule. So, here I go. But I go, thinking of you. My heart is with you. The woman in the street who grabbed you safe from truck tires, shares my soul. I wore her arms for a moment. I wore her laughter.
~Madre
Darling Kim,
I’m about to chain myself to a mountain of essays which must be scored before the arbitrary Thayer Central Community School deadline of Monday, Jan. 5th (Dad’s birthday) 8 am. It’s probably a good thing somebody inflicted this deadline on me, as preposterous as it is, in the reality of life on earth, because I would never look at those papers again if it were my personal choice. The aging, precious faces of my family around me seem so fragile, and I am pulled to concentrate on them, celebrate them, honor them. Most students in my classroom are not curious. They are comfortable, electronically entertained, or bent on winning whatever status exists in the odd social fabric of high school. The number grade I will put on their papers means only that their parents will be happy or unhappy with them because of making or missing the honor roll this semester. In all my decades of teaching, I have never enjoyed shrinking their growth into numbers and percentages, judging the pace, judging the outcome of the efforts of one day. How do I know what they’ve learned that will matter? How does school learning matter in these years of abundance and greed, of war and paranoia? While I yearn to escape the confines and clock faces of my job, I know, too, that this job puts me in contact with children and makes me want to watch and nurture them. Without this necessary employment, I would be so content to spin the hours out in my pj’s, in my little prairie house, gazing out the window at busy birds or heaving grasses, mentally painting them in watercolors, enjoying the depths of silence and peace. Of course, I’d be gazing out the window about noon, and daily miss the splendor and variety of 180 sunrises, billowing colors east at dawn, opening the flat darkness into realms of light, never the same, the dizzying surprise, the landscape of atmosphere, the spiritual paycheck for steering faithfully into the day’s arbitrary schedule. So, here I go. But I go, thinking of you. My heart is with you. The woman in the street who grabbed you safe from truck tires, shares my soul. I wore her arms for a moment. I wore her laughter.
~Madre
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