Dangerous Inconsistency

Alert:  This is going to ramble and probably get into ranting in some spots.  The events of the last few weeks have been . . . a lot, and I have too many thoughts to know how to organize them into any kind of coherent flow.  You've been warned.

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Students sometimes ask me if I am bothered when a movie is not scientifically accurate.  It depends on the purpose of the movie.  In a superhero movie, of course not.  We couldn't have superhero movies if we required that.  What does bother me, I tell them, is when they are internally inconsistent.  Once they have established something in their universe, it drives me nuts if they contradict it.  The writers of Interstellar wrote an interesting plot point about the relativistic effects of a black hole's gravity on time and then ruined it when the same characters were surprised by the tidal waves caused by the same gravity.  The Flash defined absolute zero differently in two episodes that aired three weeks apart because it served the plot better.  I could go on, but this post isn't about movies (the fourth Indiana Jones movie and magnetism - no, I'll stop).

Inconsistency in a movie or tv show is annoying.  In real life, it is more dangerous.  In the past few weeks, this has been more evident than ever (at least in my life).  The same people who celebrated the apparent end of Roe v. Wade because they believe in the sanctity of human life have responded with far less compassion when the killing of 3rd graders and black people in two mass shootings within ten days time led to a call for a solution involving gun control.  Apparently, the sanctity of human life matters less when held up against the second amendment.  When it comes to abortion, they want laws changed; but when it comes to gun violence, they want anything but that.  They claimed "All lives matter," but it doesn't seem like they really believe it.

While this is the most recent example, it is far from isolated.  The investigation into the SBC showed that the very people who stand in pulpits and speak at length about sexual sin were stepping off the dais to perpetrate sexual assault and that the very people who claim that the doctrine of submission is about protecting women didn't use their authority to do so.  They re-victimized women who spoke out and protected the abusers.  

For the past year, people who have screamed at and threatened the lives of school board members over the safety masks and the ideas in library books, those who have demanded to see a teacher's lesson plans so they can scrutinize them for any ideas they don't like have suggested the arming of those same teachers.  Apparently, masks are psychologically damaging, but having your teachers strapped is healthy.  Books are dangerous, so they must be removed from schools.  Guns are dangerous, so they should be added to schools?  They don't trust teachers to teach because of "their agenda," but they trust us to wield a weapon.   

In case you think I am only able to recognize the inconsistencies of conservatives and evangelicals, I am not.  They are just the people I know the most about.  I also recognize that many pro-choice individuals only think a fetus is not a baby when it is unwanted.  Otherwise, they are posting sonograms and throwing gender reveal parties at the same rate as anyone else.  The same people who don't believe gender is real will still ask pregnant women if they know what they are having.  Inconsistent thinking isn't confined to one party.

A few weeks ago, I was teaching my 8th graders about the history of our understanding of the nature of light.  Democritus called light a solar particle, and Aristotle called it a disturbance in the air (a precursor to wave theory).  I explained that neither of them had proof of what they were saying, and the people decided who they wanted to believe and just became a follower of theirs.  They were acolytes.  This was understandably a weird thought for my kids, but I asked them to think about whether we are truly different from that now.  We do have science and experiments and proof, but on many issues, we just decide what we think about a thought based on who we associate it with or which celebrity or athlete promotes it.  When one of our party's leaders talks about prayer, we cheer that he isn't afraid to show his faith publically.  When someone from the other party talks about prayer, we assume she is just saying it for political theater.  

We blame the President we didn't vote for when gas prices go up, but when our guy is in office, we understand that the President doesn't have control over the price of gas.  When some issues are brought before the Supreme Court, we insist they rely on precedent (because we like that precedent), but on other issues, we recognize that there is no such thing as "settled law" and remind people of the times precedent has been overturned.  It takes months for an asylum seeker from Guatemala to go through the process of entering our country while it can take only hours for Ukrainian refugees (I'm not saying it should take longer for Ukrainians, but it shows that we have had the ability to do this more quickly all along and have chosen not to).  

I was taught by conservatives throughout my early childhood, and one of the primary things I was taught was that the ends do not justify the means.  I was taught it frequently and passionately, but now many of those same teachers are posting that desperate times call for desperate measures.  I was taught about the 10th amendment as an important restraint on the federal government, but those same people want federal laws when it comes to the issues they care about.  One of the most frightening moments of the early pandemic was when the President said, "I'm the President; my authority is total."  While this should have freaked out my libertarian friends, they remained remarkably quiet.  

The inconsistent thinking isn't just annoying like it is in a movie.  It is beyond upsetting or infuriating.  It is dangerous. It is dangerous, not only in what it does to our society at large because we can't agree on anything, even if we would have were it not for the acolyte problem.  It is also dangerous for us as individuals because deep down, we know that we are sellouts, but we can't address it because we would never say it out loud.  We are subjecting ourselves to the stress of cognitive dissonance because we are unwilling to do the work of deep thought.  We need to respond from our values, but instead, we respond from our party (and those aren't remotely the same thing).  We need something external from us to provide stability and to serve as North Star for guidance, but instead, we have made ourselves and our in-group the measure of all things (which would frighten us if we reflected on our own hearts more).  

Before the next bombshell news event, sit down and make a mental top ten list of your values.  Don't make it from a party platform.  Ask yourself what you truly believe.  Then, respond to the events of the world based on that rather than which politician you love or hate.

Mental Recovery

I didn't blog this weekend.  I posted that I didn't have any wisdom to share.  And I didn't.  Between the kidney stone I was battling and the atrocious week I had had, there was nothing in my head that I would have wanted in a public space.  It was dark in there, y'all.  

Here's what a long career does for you, though.  It gives you perspective.  Bad days end.  Bad weeks come and go.  Bad years feel crippling, but they don't have to be if you take steps to recover.  Recovery is important for our students to see because they have to do it too.

I'm not for living your life out loud with students.  There are professional boundaries to be set.  I do believe in being genuine and authentic with students.  Finding the line is tricky, and I have sometimes found myself on the wrong side of it; but my ultimate feeling is this.  If they go home worried about me, I've crossed the professional line.  They might say at the dinner table. "It was weird how upset Miss Hawks was in class today."  That's fine.  That's noticing something human.  They should not be losing sleep over it.  They should not be coming in the next day worried that I'll be that upset again.  Then I've shared too much.  

Recovery probably looks different for different people.  For everyone, I assume it involves sleep.  There's some kind of magical power in sleep that I've never really understood.  The Bible says, "His mercies are new every morning."  That may be Jeremiah's poetic way of recognizing that sometimes things seem better after a night's sleep.  (I'm sure there are Biblical scholars who know what it really means, but I do know that I have often been really upset about something one afternoon and wake up with a different perspective.)  Sleep well after a rough day.  It helps.  

Gratitude is helpful as well.  Recognizing that there are many things for which you are thankful can put those few things that are upsetting you in perspective.  It doesn't make them okay; it doesn't make them go away.  It helps you recognize balance in your life.  (On Twitter, where people have a very unbalanced view of my thoughts, I have been accused of toxic positivity.  I'm not talking about pretending everything is fine when it isn't.  I'm talking about recognizing life is not one day/issue/problem.  Life is more interesting than that.)  

The last thing is this.  Keep going.  The easiest thing in the world is to give in to the dark stuff and hide, but it doesn't work.  Darkness reinforces darkness.  Feelings of worthlessness are only made deeper by shirking responsibilities and not accomplishing goals.  You might adjust the goals or give yourself more time, but accomplishing something gives us a sense of . . . well, accomplishment.  One of the lessons I've learned from unfortunate grief is that the rest of the world keeps moving.  Bills are still due, and some stuff has to get done.  Will you do it more slowly?  Yes, it may feel like you are walking through water.  Keep walking.  Move slowly, but keep moving.  One of the reasons I am writing this now is that doing the thing I didn't do on Sunday will be better than not doing it at all.

Our students have been raised to either numb their feelings (medication) or soak in them (self-care).  Neither extreme is healthy.  We must model feeling them and recovering from them.

Alumni Visits

I'm pretty tired from yearbook distributions and exam prep this week, so this one will be short.

This time of year, colleges are getting out for the summer while high schools are still finishing up.  At GRACE, that means one of our favorite things, visits from alumni (we missed these so much last year when visitors weren't allowed in the building).  In the past two weeks, I've had hallway chats or long conversations with students who graduated last year, graduated in lockdown, or graduated so long ago that they are now graduating college.  In some ways, these conversations are all the same.  "What classes did you take this year?  What are your plans?  Do you feel like you were well prepared?"  Yet, each conversation is different because each student is different.  One boy has changed his major because he realized his hobby would stop being enjoyable if he tried to make a living at it.  One girl has changed her mind five or six times and may be in college a couple of extra years.  One girl found her passion early and stuck with it.  Some are still searching because their first year of college wasn't exactly normal.  

What they all had in common was a sense of joy in talking to us, their high school teachers, about what they are doing now.  They understand that we meant what we wrote in their yearbooks - that we want to know how they are doing.  We are invested in the adults they are becoming, and they remember that enough to spend some of their free time coming to their old school building to talk to us.  We don't take that for granted because most of us did not return to our schools to visit.  I think I went one time, but it was to talk to one specific teacher, but some of these students spend hours traveling down the hall, stopping into room after room and return if one of the teachers they wanted to talk to wasn't there when they stopped by.

When I'm having a tough day with students, I find it helpful to think of them as half-baked (in the sense that they aren't done maturing yet).  No one would eat a cake halfway through the bake time because that would be gross.  This is true with kids too.  They are not yet who they will become, so it isn't fair to judge them when the process isn't complete.  These visits show who they are farther into the process, and they are a good reminder to have a broader view of students.  

Waiting Out the Silence

"I'll ask the questions, or I'll answer them, but I won't do both."  

I say this a lot in my classroom.  It is usually 30 seconds or so after I've asked a question, and a room full of physics students stare at me, hoping someone else will answer so they don't have to.

There was a time when this wouldn't have happened.  In fact, one of the first pieces of feedback I ever got after a classroom observation was that I didn't give kids enough wait time after asking a question.  Like most Americans, I was uncomfortable with silence; so I filled the time with hints and guidance (in a way I now know was interfering with their thinking).  This isn't unusual.  I observed this morning in church.  Between the first and second songs, there is a time in which we are meant to spend time in silent reflection and repentance.  The music leader spent the entire time talking about what this time should and should not be and then went right into the next song.  Even in what was supposed to be a time of silence, he was so uncomfortable with silence that he filled it with words.  

Silence is uncomfortable, but I now know that it is the most important part of the time I spend in retrieval practice with my students.  If they answer too quickly, it likely means that I have asked them to retrieve information too soon after their exposure to the material for it to be effective.  The best time to ask a student to retrieve information is just before they have forgotten it (knowns as the spacing effect).  The time it takes to search for the answer is important to the myelination of the neuron.  If I interrupt that process by filling the time with words, I am wasting my time and theirs because they won't have time to engage in the act of retrieval.

The advice I was given after that observation 23 years ago was to count to three after I asked a question.  That was good for young me.  I had no intuitive feel for how long was long enough, so counting to three was helpful.  Now, I have a different method.  I look at the kids.  I can tell when they are thinking, and I can tell when they have given up on thinking.  There is a moment in between those two times, the moment of awkward silence.  What I have found is that is the time when I should reword the question or give a guiding thought.  It's just before they have stopped thinking about the question.  I don't know how to explain what that moment looks like to younger teachers, but if you do it right, you might not need to use it much.  if you are willing to wait longer than the students' comfort level, you will usually get an answer before that point.   They will fill the silence for you, and they might do it by giving the correct answer.  If not, they might at least give an answer you can help them build upon.  

Learn to wait out the silence, and there will be more thinking in your classroom than all of the words could ever produce.

Ode to the Last Place Runner

In my role as yearbook advisor, I photograph a lot of sports and many other kinds of events.  One of my favorite things to photograph is track and field.  Part of that is because people look interesting when jumping hurdles or doing the Fosberry Flop; part of it is that they make unintentionally hilarious faces when hurling a shot put or discus.  But what I find most inspirational is watching distance runners.  The endurance it takes to run lap after lap on a track is unreal, even for the person in first place; but I am the most impressed by the kid who is running behind the pack, far behind the pack, the kid who knows he is dead last and keeps running anyway.  The winners may win the ribbons and get the praise, but the last place runner builds character and grit that will transfer to other areas of his life as well.  He will be the one pushing down brick walls for the rest of his life because he has built those muscles through perseverance.  Here's my best effort at honoring you as you should be honored.

Ode the Last Place Runner

To the runner who knows you are last
Half a lap behind the rest 

I see you.

I see you continuing 

To put yourself through pain

Both physical and emotional

Just to finish.

Thank you.

To the student who is barely passing

Knowing you'll never receive an award

I see you. 

I see you continuing 

To ask questions and study hard

Coming to help classes

Just to make a D.

Thank you.

To the team who is up against your most difficult rival

Entering the game wondering whether you will even score

I see you.

I see you training and watching game tape

Listening to your coach and doing your best

To put your heart and soul on the field

Just to lose by a lot of points

Thank you.

To the actor who auditions for the lead

Always getting a role in the chorus.

I see you.

I see you learning your lines

And everyone else's, so you'll know your cue

Putting your all on the stage

Just to keep getting non-speaking parts.

Thank you.

You don't know it now,

But what you are doing matters.

It won't win you today's trophy,

But it will make you strong 

For the challenges of the future.

You don't know it now,

But you will tell the stories of your losses to your children.

When they suffer their own.

When they need you to understand,

You will.

Keep running.

Keep studying.

Keep playing your best on the field and the stage.

The people in the stands see you

And they are inspired by you.