Being a Whole Person

Note: I'm trying really hard not to write about current events, so this is a topic I've kept in the draft folder for a while. I just didn't want y'all to think I was unaware of the crazy in the world right now.

I was getting ready for class to start one day, when our Latin teacher came down to ask a question about math. It might have been about prime numbers, but I don't remember as he often had a math question he lingered over for a few months before finding another one.  As he walked away, I said to my students, "He says he has a 'crush on math' and comes down here to ask questions."  They looked befuddled as they said, "But he's the Latin teacher." I paused for a beat and said, "You should tell him that. After all, they don't let us like things we don't teach." 

I hoped that bit of gentle teasing would reveal the silliness of thinking that someone can only be interested in things that are directly related to their jobs. But that conversation also revealed something about how students view their teachers - as sort of one dimensional content delivery devices.

I'm not sure when it happened, but somewhere between my school days and now, we stopped valuing well-roundedness in students.  When I was a student, that's what colleges were looking for. I wrote many college recommendation letters highlighting that very quality. 

Then, there was a shift; they wanted to see "passion." Don't get me wrong - I'm all about being passionate. But I think their definition of passion and mine are different. In my life, passion looks like throwing myself into whatever I am doing. Whether it is listening to a sermon, making a yearbook, participating in a fitness class at the Y, or attending an exhibit at an art museum, I want to do as much as I can and learn as much as I can. That's how I have always defined passion for myself.

The colleges who were looking for passion seemed to think it meant singularly focused. Have one interest or cause and pursue it with all of your being. This was their expectation of high school students. I don't think I would qualify for scholarships now because they expect students to have built a life around one thing, starting a non-profit or business around that one thing. To them, being well-rounded appears to be unfocused or non-zealous.

I think that's sad, not just because it is the opposite of the way I am built, but because it comes at a cost. Helping student find something they are passionate about is great, but the implicit message is that they can only be passionate about one thing. Students who are passionate about engineering would benefit greatly from enrolling in art or theater. Talented musicians can find additional passions in the study of history or math. People are not ONE thing, and we aren't meant to spend our entire lives caring about ONE thing.

One of the reasons I chose to attend ORU, a school 1200 miles away in a state I'd never set foot in was their philosophy of educating the whole person - spirit, mind, and body. While I often questioned this motive during my graded 3-mile "fun run" each semester, I knew it was good. I liked taking general education classes and choosing to take classes outside my major because it was making me a more complete person. 

When my students balked at the idea of taking classes they "didn't need," I often said, "What if the only thing I could talk to you about was physics?  Would you like me at all? No, I would be insufferable." For that reason, I talked to them about books and art and plays and even what little I knew of sports. GRACE had a math teacher who also taught Irish Dance, a history teacher who also taught anatomy, and a science teacher who was into photography enough to become the yearbook advisor (that one is me). 

Being 3-dimensional whole people makes us more interesting, but those things also inform each other. If your passion is art, you will be better at it by understanding some chemistry. They aren't mutually exclusive. If your great love is history, you will benefit from learning how to analyze literature. If you devote yourself to people, a knowledge world languages and culture will enable you to serve them better. No knowledge is ever wasted. 

Most of the people we admire in history had multiple passions. Mendel, the father of genetics, wasn't a career scientist. He was a monk with a garden. His love for the Lord and his need for sustenance drove his interest in pea plants, and we still benefit from it.  Another monk, St. Francis, knew scripture well because, of course, he was passionate about them. But he was also an animal expert and a poet. Thomas Jefferson not only penned the American Declaration of Independence, he was an architect who played the violin. While we think of George Washington Carver as being solely focused on the peanut, he cared deeply about education and took his traveling classroom to farmers while developing methods of crop rotation because he understood soil chemistry.

Teachers, be passionate about the content you teach. It's important for students to see that.  But if you want to broaden their horizons, you have to broaden yours as well. Talk to them about things you are learning outside of your field. It will help you build relationships with them and will make them view you as more human, but it may also allow them to lead fuller and more joyful lives. 

It won't make the less passionate. On the contrary, it will make them passionate about more things.

Do The Next Thing

Elisabeth Elliott is known for being the wife of Jim Elliott and for her authorship of Through Gates of Splendour, Passion and Purity, and many other books about living the Christian life through the most difficult of circumstances.  My strongest memory of her, however, will always be the time I heard her speak in person.  A group of friends and I took a road trip from Tulsa, OK to Little Rock, AR to see her speak at a church.  During the speech, she spoke little of the grand moves we make in life and much of the mundane - feeding your children, doing laundry, etc.  This was interesting for me as a college freshman, even though she was discussing things I had not experienced.  It is rare to hear a speaker talk about regular, everyday worship acts rather than the big stuff, especially someone who has experienced as much big stuff as she as.  At the end of the night, there was a question and answers time, in which someone asked what to do when they felt overwhelmed by how much they had to do.  Every college student in the audience perked up their ears, expecting profound advice on how to give your worries over to God.  Her advice was this, "Do the next thing.  Since it isn't possible to do everything at once and sitting there thinking about it just makes even less time, do the next thing."  I went back to my dorm room that night and printed, "Do the Next Thing" on a sheet of paper.  It hung above my desk for four years, and it is still in my mind today.

This is a time of year when I have a lot on my plate.  Our school does a lot of activities at the end of the year because everyone wants to do their thing for the last time.  There are senior night games, final concerts for band and chorus, and that one last time a club will get to meet.  There are NHS inductions, senior dinners, and of course, graduation.  As the yearbook teacher, I am involved in most of these to varying degrees.  Whether I am there to take pictures at the senior game or enjoy a strings concert, I am there.  In preparation for the senior dinner, my staff and I make posters with each senior's photo and the logo of their college/military/job choice.  This takes a fair amount of time, and some of the students don't make their choices until the day before the dinner.  I also speak at this dinner, so it is important to write the speech.  The yearbook staff also constructs the senior slide show for graduation, which incorporates music, photos, and quotes from each teacher.  Pulling all of that together takes time and must be copied onto a jump drive for each student so it can be included with the gift they will receive at graduation, a Bible which all of the teachers have written in.  Oh yeah, add to the list that I need to go sign the Bibles.  We hold a fine arts pep rally for the day of yearbook distribution, and that is a big day.  Every year, I forget something, like filling out the event request so that the IT department will know what I need (note to self:  do that today). We are changing the way we do that event this year due to the explosive growth of our student body, so I'm still trying to figure out how to deliver all the books between rallies.  This is all in addition to the regular teacher duties and exam writing and blog posting and faculty meetings and lunch duties.

Please understand that I am not complaining about ANY of this.  They are some of my favorite parts of the job and a big part of what makes GRACE so special.  It's just a lot of stuff in a short amount of time, and it can get overwhelming.  You have times like that too.  It may not be the same stuff, but it we all experience times when we have too much to do and not enough time to do it (or at least, it feels that way).    Let me expand a just a little on the advice of Elisabeth Elliott.

1.  Do the next thing.  I'm going to start with that because it is so powerful in its practicality.  As long as you aren't doing anything, you have the same amount of stuff to do.  Let this be the time when the urgent rules and do whatever is due next.
2.  Start whatever you can as early as you can.  I cannot start working on the senior slide show in August, but I can start it in March.  Doing a few students a day throughout the month of April is much less daunting than doing it all in May.
3.  Do whatever you can whenever you can.  This seems like the same advice as #2, but it isn't.  There are times when I am sitting in the car, waiting to meet my parents for dinner.  This is a good time to work on the slide show.  If I have ten minutes before my next class, I can cut out a few college logos for the posters.  During achievement tests, I stole the Bible pages (don't tell anybody because I wasn't supposed to do that) and signed them during the Language Mechanics test.  I am writing this blog post while subbing for another teacher who is on a field trip.  Making use of any time you have to do small things helps them not add up to big things.
4.  Remind yourself that you won't die.  This time period happened last year and the year before that (and for me, the ten years before that), and I'm not dead yet.  Exactly zero death certificates have read, "Cause of death: too much to do and not enough time to do it in."  Keep doing it, and you will eventually get a weekend to sleep in an extra hour.
5.  Decide what is important.  This can be tough because we often convince ourselves that it is all critical.  Maybe it all is, and maybe it isn't.  For each thing, decide not only if it is important but at what level.  It is very important to me that I speak at the senior dinner, but do I need to speak about five students and give each of them a personalized gift - probably not.  This year, I have chosen to speak about two.  It is important for me to write in every student's Bible, but they don't all need to be a long and drawn out message.  The fine arts pep rally matters, but the power point may not need to be as cute and "on-theme" as I usually make it.  We do some of this to ourselves, and it isn't always necessary.

You Aren't Born With Your Passion - Part 1

If you had asked me at this time in my junior year what I wanted to do with my life, I would not have had an answer.  It wasn't that I had no interests; I had many interests.  I had too many interests and didn't know what I wanted to do with them.  When it came to choosing a career or college major, I felt like God had lost my phone number.  If you are a high school student being told to "follow your passion" but don't know what it is yet, this post and the next one are for you.

Let me back up to elementary school.  If you had asked me in third grade what I wanted to be when I grew up, it would have looked something like this:

Yep, that was my plan.  I was going to have a husband and three kids.  I was also going to pilot the space shuttle.  For those of you that say, "Yeah, everybody wanted to be an astronaut," notice that I didn't say that.  My goals were very specific; I was going to pilot the space shuttle.  I had a plan for this.  In fourth grade, I somehow got my hands on an application to the air force academy.  I had it completely filled out (you have to imagine the fourth grader handwriting to fully appreciate this).  I had people lined up to write me recommendation letters and was getting advice on how to have a congressperson provide me with an appointment.  I carried around pictures of the shuttle next to my pictures of Michael J. Fox and had photos of the moon in my notebooks.  This was going to happen.  Until . . .

Have you ever looked up the requirements for astronauts?  If you do so today, you can be 6'3" regardless of gender, but in the 80's, a female astronaut couldn't be taller than 5'8" tall.  I passed that height in fifth grade and kept growing until I reached 5'11" at the age of fifteen.  I was not going to pilot the space shuttle.  Well-meaning people who were honestly trying to be helpful told me some very stupid things.  Among them, I would be so good that NASA would change the rules for me (seriously?).

The most dangerous thing that several people told this disappointed fifth grader was that God wouldn't have let me want it so much if it wasn't His plan for me.  I had read enough of the Bible at that point to know that was garbage.  As an adult, let me just say that not matter how well meaning you are - This. Is. Heresy.  The advice to follow one's heart is ridiculous when put up next scriptures that tell us the heart is desperately wicked.  The idea that God won't let you want things He doesn't want for you flies in the face of Paul asking to have his thorn in the flesh removed.  Don't say this to children; don't say it to anyone.

So, I was a little aimless for a while.  As I mentioned earlier, I had many interests.  I loved animals, theater, science, music, television, church activities, and books.  I played the piano, the clarinet, and the handbells.  I participated in school plays and babysat and volunteered for the NC Right to Life.  There wasn't a lack of interest; there was a lack of focus.  I was interested in everything (except sports - I never could seem to get psyched about that).  I considered all kinds of careers.  If I had become everything I considered during this time, it would have looked like this:

Yes, I would have been a writing, photograph taking, elementary school teaching, pharmaceutical, veterinarian, physical therapist.  And, oh yeah, I still wanted to have a husband and three kids.  

I was a little lost, not knowing what I wanted to do or what God wanted me to do.  I remained in that wandering state until my senior year, but remember the line from JJ Tolkien's poem, "All That is Gold Does Not Glitter."  He reminds us that "not all those who wander are lost."  

More on this in my next post.