Making the Last Day a Good First Step

My favorite photo, Santa Barbara Botanical Garden, Dec. 31, 2008
Wish it was larger.

I thought about it and decided to go to Santa Barbara today with the family and walk in the woods to say goodbye to two students I lost this year. Goodbye to so many days in the cycle around the sun. Goodbye to yesterday. Time to let go the pain of 2008.
Embrace a new path. Another cycle. I contemplated the beach and changed my mind. Trees. Better.

And to the year I say a fare thee well.

I usually look at years as way, way too complex to contain in any thought I could ever hold onto. Like a wish it starts, like a prayer it ends. This was no exception, but I did suffer feeling so horribly drained and down in the summer over the loss of the child I taught, Larry King, over the job situation which is too stressful and not good, the horrifying realization that my tummy intestinal mess was back once more to square one. My intestines are not really working, gastro bleeds, pain; it all got to be a bit much to carry. Vomiting is a daily life way for me until I get to an answer (on insurance that is ever more precarious that I do have) in a world ever more precarious and I worry. Too much to see through. I suspect that's a very human condition. Muck.

In the children I taught over many years.....these two that left us this year.... that died.... I gave everything I had to give. And loved them as a teacher does for who they are, who they would be....very much. You should have the chance to know them too. It is impossibly hard to tell you that. I really did try, but cannot live it well, very ill over it actually, but I do know a little of what happened in their brief life. Good kids. No one should ever die as a child. I should never outlive these kids. Sad that is. All wrong.


From teaching Larry to crochet and love music, in our raising butterflies, giving songs to our air, to having my other child from her wheelchair teach me how to interact and be a person, helping her find art and then be a teacher through it all, it rebounded within my soul, being, core like the tree that falls in the forest.

If only for this year I was the tree in the forest. The one no one sees. I accept this.



I was awfully afraid this park might have burned in the fires. The ones devastating Santa Barbara this year. So I've been dreading going, but it was actually fine where we walked on a couple mile hike. It looked beautiful and I enjoyed it immensely for the sound and the dampness. The cool of a forest is remarkable. It speaks into your heart and anything you want to say is unutterable. It just knows perhaps. Or you lose the need for "word."
Much of 2008 was clouded by this for me. No words for it. It was so deeply felt. A lot of pain. As I was walking and talking pictures, taking images, I realized how deeply you become intertwined when you work with children that are growing up with serious issues, carrying essentially the unresolved societal burdens on slim shoulders.
You are not heard, if you speak into silence, you are invisible, and if seen then silenced by any means necessary by the reasons that got the kids into these places. I found that out.

No one is listening enough to teachers. Not the best we've had. They are all TELLING. One thing teachers are told is they are irrelevant or just old. It's a problem this silence besides the absolute silence required now of the child. I once read a great piece on who writes history, boy is that accurate. Wish we could use the $ for art supplies, laptops, real innovation like maybe a state of the art facility like you get in Finland where evidentially they care enough to care.


( this picture is a tree gargoyle)

I learned this year some people will hurt you intentionally, not by some oversight, no INTENDING IT, but that also happens all the time too I'm told, especially when you can least deal with it and when it is the least "fair." "Job" kind of stuff. (biblical Job, not job)
.....How does the song go they mock you, they'll take your life if you let them......they destroy you, misinterpret, flame, twist for reasons that remain unclear to me. In part the internet brought that to me in an Amazon review situation from someone who appears completely unscathed, blithely going on to do it again to someone new.....with a complete circle of support in tow, the other situation through my work was mostly the same. I learned that. Look at the real world.
It boggles the mind. Happy 2008. Sorry.

I'm still struggling to "get it." But I felt this in 2008. Deeply. I should have felt support and kindness, you too.
Maybe if you teach a note expressing appreciation for our dedication to this work we do and to the lives of these kids, as like a candle lit in darkness. At the least. At the least. And I still care, and I did my work with integrity the best i could. It was a searing lesson.
A tree fell into the dark silent night.
Into the absolute silence.




That was 2008.


Then I noticed that it was September , four months just gone and I have no real memory of my days, as my father's birth date hit on the 29th so did "the fall" and it recycled back to the year of his birth. Dad was raised in the Depression. He called it, himself, the lost generation. (Read Galbraith, I did this summer.) When everything had crashed. I thought it sort of shook me out of a personal sense of defeat into looking around at other's grief and pain too that seemed to balloon in front of you like these mortgages I can't get...looking out only when my blocked intestine hasn't required my presence over a toilet bowl.

I saw a lot of silent trees falling in the forest. A friend lost a job, others lost homes, family members, pride, security, health coverage, stocks, we lost and lost in this year. Private desperation grew. A President that never was quite brilliant suddenly was....going... an election that cost so much my mind is still boggled. While kids still died fighting the wars that go on and on. Loss of the thing that is so precious. Life.
Loss of the proportion so needed.
A mess. We see it now.



My job as a 1st grade teacher is rather tricky. I've always seen it as a bridge. It's my persona to look that way, a language to my heart.
I coax kids into reading, bridge family to school, built confidences, find ways to help children cope, use skills others don't particularly respect or see . I could look pathologically, with the tests I'm required to do but I choose personally to look optimistically. What might be. What can we do. How can we. ..What I do is sense potentials and see them into happening. Yep. What is there to care about and celebrate, that is a lot more meaningful to me and I don't see that model yet in place. I choose to think of the work differently. I do consider myself "old' at 50, but not brain dead not conforming to do something that sheers away children's confidences. Nope. I was called a jumped shark in the internet experience here two years ago, I resent that, of being therefore less qualified implied and dismissed for calling out in the darkness once down.

I still call out.

But wiser, more adaptable, able to deliver, able to finesse, shut up, be silent, and yet in a system you can't shine too sparkly. I never will shine for you, neither will far too many of my kids, and I ask out nationally why is that ok?

Some schools still are vacuums to the development of a love for learning, discipline, pride, hard work and resiliencies and a desire to use them as ways to grow. And communities need them to be powerful places. Not models of decay, inbreeding and decision by firing squad. Higher standards? How about finding a way to do this work a bit more ethically? Like treating each other respectfully. How about that as a real thing.

I am pretty sure 2009 can be the creation of hearing the trees falling in the forest. Hearing the pain, caring, building from the ground up by admitting stuff...like greed isn't so very good. Not good for some of our kids at all. It isn't good to sabotage another, it feels badly to invent tests to pathologize, yeah, it requires owning up to some "stuff."

So, anyway, I walked in the forest recalling all the beautiful kids with real problems I've taught and how much the art, music , the science, math and that beautiful literature meant to them, really changed the kids. Being a vehicle in that change, this has been an honor. So that went on in 2008 too maybe more than the other stuff that careened me around. I enjoyed this. Will hope conditions knock down the impediments the last few years threw up.

Yes. It was a very strange year. Mossy.

I turned to the forest.

At some point I heard on NPR a writer and he said something like you read to try to connect to someone. Never before had I really realized that. You write the same. To be wanted, to feel supported, connected, listened to, heard, helped. Yeah. I would imagine schools need this. Technology could do the work I think. It must do far better to HELP kids where I am. I could barely write a sentence that was worth anything this year of 2008. Speaking to my father about this student's death he said about the only thing of comfort I heard, "There isn't anything to say, it's a sad tragic thing." At least he was straight about it. So was my heart.
It broke in pieces in 2008. And scattered.

I have yet to write the tributes to these children they deserve, but I will one day write that year we had of life as my notes re-frame it for me. Thank goodness I keep field notes. My only real advise is write for an hour a day everything you teach, make time. Everyday.

But we are resilient, humans, we suffer and we try to make a better day for our kids, for ourselves, we even delude ourselves that we know something or speak or think something unique. I do. Boy is that foolish. It's just news to me. I realized my art exists out of my pain, out of the beauty of creating forces, love forces. I reconnected with that in a different way. I understand that my way of being , reacting, going into teaching really hasn't been pathological. It's been to create, structure, see future in children, eschew as much of the limitations and nonsenses as I could, get beyond stuff move forward.

And so here we go into 2009. Let's listen better to those who fall around us. Let's be kinder and care more.

I took a few little clips today and got a slideshow's worth of pictures to lead you through the forest. The light today was magnificent and there was a lot speaking to me of what an agent love can be in our lives. Pretty nice walk into a new year.

This is a video of the beauty of the water we all need. Talk about amazing. Water really is a powerhouse. The Origin of Life....chemical and practical....let's preserve it.
(I like this on water...yep...

Mayonnaise and the Origin of Life: Thoughts of Minds and Molecules by Harold J. Morowitz)

This is my son and he's rock jumping.




I think this is a water run.....




The slideshow