St. Patrick’s Episcopal Day School
In preparing to welcome faculty and staff back for the new school year, I wrote to them in early August, “One of the many things I like about being in a school like St. Patrick’s is that there is a real sense of rhythm that shapes our lives in schools.
From the very first days of school in the fall . . . through to Thanksgiving and then Christmas . . . on into spring . . . and then all of the excitement of finishing up in June and looking ahead to the next grade level as school resumes after the change of pace that summer brings . . . those rhythms move us joyfully through the year.”
I continued, “One of the hazards of such a reality, of course, is that rhythms can become routines, and routines can become ruts, and I’d like not to think about what ruts become. One of the other things that I like about being in a school like St. Patrick’s is the determination and creativity you bring to your quest for vitality and freshness in our shared work here, qualities that keep those rhythms joyful and inviting, and always challenging, for the young people with whom we are privileged to spend our days.”
That quest for vitality and freshness must always guide us in our work with young people—and with each other—so that the cadences of the schoolhouse shape without constraining, reveal rather than obscure, so that they don’t become mere routines or, worse, ruts that force eager wheels into tracks cut long ago, now hardened and unyielding. So, as we ready for the return of colleagues and students, we are always on the look-out for language that reminds us of why we chose to do this work in the first place, language that recalls us to its importance in our own lives as well as in the lives of the young people who will soon, once more, breathe life into this August-muted place, language that sustains us when accumulating demands threaten to crowd out a sense of possibility.
I’m not sure just how the Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning author and poet Mary Oliver would react to that search leading us to her Long Life: Essays and Other Writings. (“I make little use of the schoolhouse,” she observes at one point. “[I]t is the natural world that has always offered the hint of our single and immense divinity—a million unopened fountains.”) But we are nothing if not opportunistic in our ongoing search for language that helps us understand our work better and sustains us in that work, relying not only on educational research but on fiction, poetry, and proverbs.
Contrasting the work of the poet with that of the writer of prose, Ms. Oliver writes, “Poets must read and study, but also they must learn to tilt and whisper, shout, or dance, each in his or her own way, or we might just as well copy the old books. But, no, that would never do, for always the new self swimming around in the old world feels itself uniquely verbal. And that is just the point: how the world, moist and bountiful, calls to each of us to make a new and serious response. That’s the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning. ‘Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?’”
Isn’t that just the point for educators as well as poets? For all of its challenges, contradictions, even threats, the world is a “moist and bountiful” place, one that offers endless fascination to our young people and that we have chosen to help them understand better, even as we endeavor to understand it better ourselves. And that world “calls to each of us to make a new and serious response,” not to remain uninterested or passive or to respond only as those around us are responding. We have chosen to make a comment: We teach. In doing so, we “tilt and whisper, shout, or dance, each in his or her own way,” striving to invite young people to make their own comments on the world and to enable them to do so with intelligence, understanding, compassion, and purpose.
