Lincoln Blizzard 2009
A blanket of chastity covers
this city tonight. I've never
seen anything so pure, laced
with a burning dynamo. I stop
for a moment to let the cold
fill my lungs. December has been
kind to me for the first time
in years.
Mere hours separate this moment
and all the rest. This valley
becomes a bog as white fades
to gray. I walk along the
disappearing sidewalk listening
to the muffled sound of our
steps. Our footprints give
nothing to nothingness.
You're gone, and I continue
alone on the glass surface
of the night. I'm glad one
of us remembered I have
to do this on my own. In a
blink I'm 7:34 of a
Sunday evening in late July.
Sweat beads softly where my
hair meets my face, and
no one should feel this
comfortable in their own
skin. Somewhere in the
distance a baby is crying,
or laughing. It's hard to tell.
And just as I turn my head
to the milky, summer sunset,
I'm back. Back in my
brief, little, crystalline jungle.
Lay down with me, feel the
heat of your body melting
the world around you.
I'll need your help to
keep my angel safe, I don't
have much left to protect.
This hollow night calls home
a million haze-filled memories
of weighted branches and
chapped lips.
And we've reached our
destination just in time for
the wind to uproot the dust
from its rooftop dwelling.
It showers me in a shimmering
coat moments before it's
gone forever.
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Friday, December 11, 2009
What I Learned in the Woods
http://www.acacamps.org/campmag/1007/what-i-learned-woods
Originally published in the 2010 July/August issue of Camping Magazine.
I spent the las t four summers of my life hidden behind a mass of trees and rolling hills. Separated from civilization by mere miles, I entered a world that sent my imagination whirling and my sense of reality to a screeching halt. As I woke every morning to the reminder of hundreds of trees waving and undulating over the expanse of nettles and clovers, I somehow had to convince myself that this place really existed. My heart still owns much of those 200 acres, where even the smell of rotting forest only serves to remind me of what it will become.
Somewhere in that chasm of breathing soil and trees, I started learning; and I found a library of knowledge more expansive than I imagine I will find for a long time. I learned books upon books about life and people and myself. Camp has this way of changing people, aiding them in some strange evolution . . . helping them grow. You can see it in the rouged skin of children who have discovered poison ivy for the first time or in the wide eyes of those who didn't know there were so many stars. Sometime within their week at camp, those children become startling images of themselves, untarnished by fear or misinterpretation or technology or judgment. And even if it's just a moment, the impact leaves the mark of a coal train. The all-encompassing universe that embodies camp is a frightening and awe-inspiring thing to find one's self in. But once you do, it's hard to make yourself leave. You become a part of the atmosphere. It seeps into your skin; your soul finds shelter in a gravel- and mud-filled gully. And all of this happens before you get a chance to realize what's really going on.
The effect you're having on hundreds upon hundreds of young lives, the effect you're having on your peers, the effect all of this is having on you . . . it all starts out masked behind cookouts and song singing and capture the flag. And then, maybe if you're lucky enough, you'll be sitting on the porch of your cabin, surrounded by a silence that has taken weeks of getting used to, and you'll come to the dizzying realization that you are at an institution of learning. What's going on inside this open-air classroom is something that could never be captured by the walls of any "proper" educational establishment. It's too organic, too natural, and too accidental to happen elsewhere. And, in many ways, that's why it's so necessary.
Within the ten-foot radius of a pond, a seven-year-old learns science and maybe even a little bit about respect. "Nicky, please put the tadpole back in the pond . . . A tadpole is a baby frog . . . Look, that one by the rock has tiny back legs . . . Really slowly all of those tadpoles in the pond will become grown-up frogs . . . Well, there are so many because the pond is their home; they live here . . . Yes, you can catch the grown-up frogs, but you need to be careful with them and put them back in their home afterward."
On an embankment overlooking the Platte River, several preteen girls learn history. They compare cabin names, bragging about what they know about their cabin's tribe — Blackfoot, Arapahoe, Tonkawa. And perhaps one of them mentions something about Native Americans losing their land, and another brings up civil rights.
And maybe they're a little a too young to have an actual discussion about civil rights. A few feet away their counselor looks up from patching a skinned knee and just listens. Later, she'll talk to them about what it is to be fair, how it feels to be different, and how their differences make them special. Below a mid-July sun, eighteen teenagers tackle math and science as they calculate how to get eighteen people over a twelve-foot wal l with only a certain number of lifts per person. Some aren't allowed to talk. Some aren't allowed to help. And they all must gain one another's t rust. Through an activity of team-building and trial and error, they come to know one another and their strengths and weaknesses.
And everything sounds a little corny and a bit unrealistic. That's because it is. When you compare camp with other places of learning or life, it's surreal by definition. This is not your traditional classroom. It doesn't have the same goals, rules, or practices. But in many ways it does the same thing — causes productive learning and social skills in chi ldren. Children create friendships in the span of a week that at home could take years — years of calculating social risk and social standing, years of fearing rejection from a "cooler crowd."
At camp there are people, individuals, and that's it; and then they're friends. Some of them have never had real friends before. Some of them consider camp home. In this land of invisible backgrounds and muffled personal histories, children judge one another on their depth of character and how kind they are. When ten nine-yearolds are covered from head to toe in mud, it's hard to tell how many toys they have, what school they go to, or where they shop. It's this stripping of material identity that allows these children to become open to the idea of acceptance, friendship, and growth.
"There are no bullies at camp." It's a rule every child who enters camp hears. It's a rule that is imperative to creating a safe environment in which the relationships mentioned before can thrive. "If you're a bully, you don't belong at camp." It's a part of the one and only rule we enforce at camp — respect. Respect yourself, others, other's belongings, counselors, and the earth. This lack of strict, manufactured rules and guidelines offers a lot of leeway for children. It allows them to say to a young girl sitting on the edge of the pool who doesn't have anyone to play with, "Do you want to play color tag with us?" Or it prompts them to start a "Save the Frogs" campaign and picket the pond because people have been throwing rocks and trash into it.
And these children have no idea that they're learning about convictions, social inclusion, networking, or character. This learning becomes more authentic because of how and where it appears — facilitated but not forced by authority figures, privately created between groups of children who don't notice adults standing just a few feet away (otherwise these stories wouldn't be told). It's an organic form of learning that lacks authority unless authority is called for — and when it's called for, authority comes in the form of conversations, reasoning, and questions. "What happened? Why did it happen? What should we do about it?" Authority shifts from enforcement to mediation as children take more responsibility for their actions and the actions of others.
Over the wood chipped trails and spongy grass, children gain a sense of empowerment. They hold within their hands the choices of what their week at camp will yield. And as they mature in age, so do their decisions. Ages ranging from seven to seventeen coalesce to form a community where learners of all ages interact.
Learning occurs where role modeling and audience are taken very seriously. Every situation at camp has an audience. Every day, hundreds of little eyes track counselors' every movement; and those eyes also watch campers who are older than them. Older campers are taught that they are role models, that their attitudes will influence the attitudes of those campers younger than them. This is shown at an early morning announcement where older campers aren't yet awake enough to react to anything, let alone the news that they will be having a picnic lunch. However, an evening announcement about cookout dinners gets them on their feet and bouncing around the room as 200 younger campers follow suit. And you can feel the excitement in the room by the vibrating of the windows as hundreds upon hundreds of feet move with anticipation.
Counselors, typically between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one, aren't too old to relate to their campers. They can understand where their campers are coming from and where they're going. And they're able to connect on a level that's accessible and meaningful. The relationship between camper and counselor rides a fine line of friend, role model, and teacher. It is a difficult job to create education in a way that can't be found elsewhere. At camp, as the "teachers" facilitate education, they also learn in this circular, never-ending wheel of self-improvement and self-discovery and life. Just as camp is a stepping stone in the social and intellectual development of its campers, camp is just a stepping stone to what its counselors hope to someday achieve. I'm a walking, breathing, living example of the educator being educated. Learning what I learned at camp has brought me to the realization of what I want from life — to have a family, to be a teacher, to continue to educate, and to continue to learn.
And maybe this type of learning and growing isn't exclusive to camp. But it is unique. It is uncommon. It is special. It's a type of education that surpasses the walls of schools and the assistance of technology and importance of subject matter. It's a type of education that comes from people. I've been at camp during the school year; and I'll tell you the truth: Without kids and staff there, it's just 200 acres of trees and dirt. It's beautiful but it's empty. It becomes camp when a community of people is living in an atmosphere that reflects a feeling of mutual respect. The teachers don't look at the deficits in their students; rather, they trust their students to exhibit positive behavior and positive decisions. In turn, the students find trust in role models who have finally seen them as not what they have done but what they are doing, who they are. The type of learning that occurs at camp could occur anywhere. But it doesn't. Some type of magic lives in those hills during the summer, and it's what causes so many tears to fall from the eyes of campers as their week at camp ends and later from the eyes of staff members as early August rears its ugly head. I think it's the fact that leaving means the magic goes with them; and who knows where it will reappear?
Originally published in the 2010 July/August issue of Camping Magazine.
I spent the las t four summers of my life hidden behind a mass of trees and rolling hills. Separated from civilization by mere miles, I entered a world that sent my imagination whirling and my sense of reality to a screeching halt. As I woke every morning to the reminder of hundreds of trees waving and undulating over the expanse of nettles and clovers, I somehow had to convince myself that this place really existed. My heart still owns much of those 200 acres, where even the smell of rotting forest only serves to remind me of what it will become.
Somewhere in that chasm of breathing soil and trees, I started learning; and I found a library of knowledge more expansive than I imagine I will find for a long time. I learned books upon books about life and people and myself. Camp has this way of changing people, aiding them in some strange evolution . . . helping them grow. You can see it in the rouged skin of children who have discovered poison ivy for the first time or in the wide eyes of those who didn't know there were so many stars. Sometime within their week at camp, those children become startling images of themselves, untarnished by fear or misinterpretation or technology or judgment. And even if it's just a moment, the impact leaves the mark of a coal train. The all-encompassing universe that embodies camp is a frightening and awe-inspiring thing to find one's self in. But once you do, it's hard to make yourself leave. You become a part of the atmosphere. It seeps into your skin; your soul finds shelter in a gravel- and mud-filled gully. And all of this happens before you get a chance to realize what's really going on.
The effect you're having on hundreds upon hundreds of young lives, the effect you're having on your peers, the effect all of this is having on you . . . it all starts out masked behind cookouts and song singing and capture the flag. And then, maybe if you're lucky enough, you'll be sitting on the porch of your cabin, surrounded by a silence that has taken weeks of getting used to, and you'll come to the dizzying realization that you are at an institution of learning. What's going on inside this open-air classroom is something that could never be captured by the walls of any "proper" educational establishment. It's too organic, too natural, and too accidental to happen elsewhere. And, in many ways, that's why it's so necessary.
Within the ten-foot radius of a pond, a seven-year-old learns science and maybe even a little bit about respect. "Nicky, please put the tadpole back in the pond . . . A tadpole is a baby frog . . . Look, that one by the rock has tiny back legs . . . Really slowly all of those tadpoles in the pond will become grown-up frogs . . . Well, there are so many because the pond is their home; they live here . . . Yes, you can catch the grown-up frogs, but you need to be careful with them and put them back in their home afterward."
On an embankment overlooking the Platte River, several preteen girls learn history. They compare cabin names, bragging about what they know about their cabin's tribe — Blackfoot, Arapahoe, Tonkawa. And perhaps one of them mentions something about Native Americans losing their land, and another brings up civil rights.
And maybe they're a little a too young to have an actual discussion about civil rights. A few feet away their counselor looks up from patching a skinned knee and just listens. Later, she'll talk to them about what it is to be fair, how it feels to be different, and how their differences make them special. Below a mid-July sun, eighteen teenagers tackle math and science as they calculate how to get eighteen people over a twelve-foot wal l with only a certain number of lifts per person. Some aren't allowed to talk. Some aren't allowed to help. And they all must gain one another's t rust. Through an activity of team-building and trial and error, they come to know one another and their strengths and weaknesses.
And everything sounds a little corny and a bit unrealistic. That's because it is. When you compare camp with other places of learning or life, it's surreal by definition. This is not your traditional classroom. It doesn't have the same goals, rules, or practices. But in many ways it does the same thing — causes productive learning and social skills in chi ldren. Children create friendships in the span of a week that at home could take years — years of calculating social risk and social standing, years of fearing rejection from a "cooler crowd."
At camp there are people, individuals, and that's it; and then they're friends. Some of them have never had real friends before. Some of them consider camp home. In this land of invisible backgrounds and muffled personal histories, children judge one another on their depth of character and how kind they are. When ten nine-yearolds are covered from head to toe in mud, it's hard to tell how many toys they have, what school they go to, or where they shop. It's this stripping of material identity that allows these children to become open to the idea of acceptance, friendship, and growth.
"There are no bullies at camp." It's a rule every child who enters camp hears. It's a rule that is imperative to creating a safe environment in which the relationships mentioned before can thrive. "If you're a bully, you don't belong at camp." It's a part of the one and only rule we enforce at camp — respect. Respect yourself, others, other's belongings, counselors, and the earth. This lack of strict, manufactured rules and guidelines offers a lot of leeway for children. It allows them to say to a young girl sitting on the edge of the pool who doesn't have anyone to play with, "Do you want to play color tag with us?" Or it prompts them to start a "Save the Frogs" campaign and picket the pond because people have been throwing rocks and trash into it.
And these children have no idea that they're learning about convictions, social inclusion, networking, or character. This learning becomes more authentic because of how and where it appears — facilitated but not forced by authority figures, privately created between groups of children who don't notice adults standing just a few feet away (otherwise these stories wouldn't be told). It's an organic form of learning that lacks authority unless authority is called for — and when it's called for, authority comes in the form of conversations, reasoning, and questions. "What happened? Why did it happen? What should we do about it?" Authority shifts from enforcement to mediation as children take more responsibility for their actions and the actions of others.
Over the wood chipped trails and spongy grass, children gain a sense of empowerment. They hold within their hands the choices of what their week at camp will yield. And as they mature in age, so do their decisions. Ages ranging from seven to seventeen coalesce to form a community where learners of all ages interact.
Learning occurs where role modeling and audience are taken very seriously. Every situation at camp has an audience. Every day, hundreds of little eyes track counselors' every movement; and those eyes also watch campers who are older than them. Older campers are taught that they are role models, that their attitudes will influence the attitudes of those campers younger than them. This is shown at an early morning announcement where older campers aren't yet awake enough to react to anything, let alone the news that they will be having a picnic lunch. However, an evening announcement about cookout dinners gets them on their feet and bouncing around the room as 200 younger campers follow suit. And you can feel the excitement in the room by the vibrating of the windows as hundreds upon hundreds of feet move with anticipation.
Counselors, typically between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one, aren't too old to relate to their campers. They can understand where their campers are coming from and where they're going. And they're able to connect on a level that's accessible and meaningful. The relationship between camper and counselor rides a fine line of friend, role model, and teacher. It is a difficult job to create education in a way that can't be found elsewhere. At camp, as the "teachers" facilitate education, they also learn in this circular, never-ending wheel of self-improvement and self-discovery and life. Just as camp is a stepping stone in the social and intellectual development of its campers, camp is just a stepping stone to what its counselors hope to someday achieve. I'm a walking, breathing, living example of the educator being educated. Learning what I learned at camp has brought me to the realization of what I want from life — to have a family, to be a teacher, to continue to educate, and to continue to learn.
And maybe this type of learning and growing isn't exclusive to camp. But it is unique. It is uncommon. It is special. It's a type of education that surpasses the walls of schools and the assistance of technology and importance of subject matter. It's a type of education that comes from people. I've been at camp during the school year; and I'll tell you the truth: Without kids and staff there, it's just 200 acres of trees and dirt. It's beautiful but it's empty. It becomes camp when a community of people is living in an atmosphere that reflects a feeling of mutual respect. The teachers don't look at the deficits in their students; rather, they trust their students to exhibit positive behavior and positive decisions. In turn, the students find trust in role models who have finally seen them as not what they have done but what they are doing, who they are. The type of learning that occurs at camp could occur anywhere. But it doesn't. Some type of magic lives in those hills during the summer, and it's what causes so many tears to fall from the eyes of campers as their week at camp ends and later from the eyes of staff members as early August rears its ugly head. I think it's the fact that leaving means the magic goes with them; and who knows where it will reappear?
Thursday, December 10, 2009
An Ode to My Education
As I walked down that dimly-lit hall, stained from years of use and misuse, I knew that I knew everything. Within the six classrooms of my tiny high school I conquered all. And someone, somehow, allowed me to believe that was all true. Granted, my high school experience was a bit abnormal. I graduated with a class of twenty, many of whom I had started kindergarten with, from a K through 12 school. I moved twenty feet down the hall from junior high to high school. It was within the walls of this small school that I spent 13 years building up some false impression of what life was… what learning was – true/false quizzes over To Kill a Mockingbird, poorly facilitated group discussions that led to offensive name calling, dates of the Vietnam war with little to no explanation of social changes that came along with it. Then I left. And when I left, I left for good. As I entered the university, I saw for the first time what education could be, what learning could be, what social interactions could be – professors wanted me to constructively challenge my peers, literature had historical context, answers didn’t come in the form of a yes or a no.
At first I was confused. Then I was angry. Then I was sad. To have 13 years of your life diminished into mere nothingness comes swift and hard. Jaded, I delved into my life at UNL, and I never looked back… until now. Four and half years in the university system have taught me a lot. I owe much to my professors who taught me more about learning than just books and problems. Sure, some of my classes and professors have been solely bent on cramming as many facts into my head as possible. And, as I did for years in high school, I have continued to purge myself of such information as soon as the time came that I no longer needed it. But my college experience has been much more than that. My knowledge has been questioned, my mental abilities challenged, and my investment in my education confronted. Not only have I learned to doubt what I know, but also I have been taught to doubt what others know – to ask questions, to be skeptical, to be unwaveringly curious. When I think of my four years of disenfranchised high school education, I look at it in utter confusion, utter disgust. Why didn’t anyone tell me I was allowed to disagree with what I was being taught? Why didn’t anyone teach me to look deeper than the simple explanations and summaries presented by my teachers? Why did they leave so much out of my education? Mostly, it hurts. It hurts that many of the people I trusted during my adolescence didn’t see fit to give me or my peers the opportunity to flame the fire of inquiry. And it hurts to know they probably never considered it, never realized what they weren’t doing.
As educators, my high school teachers taught what they knew. Often, they did so well. However, their knowledge was limited to the two square miles of Falls City, Neb. Many of them had lived there their entire lives, disappearing for four or five years to experience “the world” before scurrying back to the haze of normalcy surrounding Falls City. They came back to what they knew. Living in a place like Falls City, living anywhere, a person comes to lives as a part of its culture. It affects the way they speak, dress and behave. It affects their values. My high school teachers were Falls City. It had created them, and they were now creating it – endless cogs in the machine of rural Nebraska. Then I entered school, and I too became a cog, the next step in the continuation of Falls City education. Much like taking a long look at myself in a mirror after years and years of disillusioned education, I must also take a look at the community I came from. That community shaped the school, education and young adults that came out of it. And with the good (moral values, a sense of belonging and value in your roots) came the bad (close-mindedness, a lack of societal context and arrogance.) High school education reflects the school’s community; and, in doing so, it prepares students for life within the strict confines of that particular community.
Coasting through my high school education, I learned everything that I would need to know living in Falls City, Neb. Do your best – years of straight A’s will pay off eventually… just not now, the football team is playing. Keep your head low if you disagree – suggesting that there may be flaws in the death penalty system will label you as a democrat, and that’s a dirty, dirty word in this town. Who you know is who you are – and “Honey, why don’t you run around with that Hullman boy? He seems nice” doesn’t allow you to really ignore the fact that he can be found in the luxury of a cornfield any weekend with 30 drunken friends and a Keystone Light in his hand. Yep, like the Keystone Light, my education went down smooth every time. Honestly, armed with this knowledge alone, I could spend the rest of my days in Falls City, blissfully ignorant of anything too far off of the county grid. Just think… I could be mayor. But then again, there could come a time where I needed to leave my fair town. Perhaps due to the economic struggles that seem to plague rural communities or perhaps due to the declining population brought on by the rural “brain drain” (don’t worry, we’ll get to that), I would have to leave. Who knows where I would go after Falls City? I would have to claw my way out of years and years worth of disgruntled lies that I told myself about where I was and what I knew. And then I’d end up some place where the names are unfamiliar, the customs are strange and the beliefs are downright scandalous. Perhaps in reality it would only be a short two hour drive to Lincoln or Omaha, but it might as well be a foreign country for how unprepared I would be.
I think perhaps what gets me most frustrated is how completely unprepared my high school education made me in my aspiration. It’s not so much about the information I didn’t learn in high school; instead, it’s about the fact that I wasn’t asked to learn. Not really. Not anything beyond the textbooks sitting on the etched desk in front of me. My greatest fear comes from realizing that this can’t be true for only me. How many students graduate from high school without learning how to learn? How many come to the same stark realization I did? And even more frightening, how many never realize? Never realize that those four years should not be their four best years. Never realize that there’s more to learning than just plot summaries and pop quizzes. Never realize that after you get into college, your ACT score is just another number that doesn’t mean much of anything. The system of high school curriculum used widely throughout the United States falls short on what it offers the nation’s youth. The teaching methods, which are continuously challenged and altered, still fail to prepare students for life outside of high school, whether that be within the job market, within society or within college. Where the high school education system fails its students, it fails itself. Year after year, schools send unsuspecting, diploma wielding teenagers into the world, the same students who are the future leaders of America. Yet, their mission is tainted by the early conditioning that they “have a voice” and the painful and baffling realization that they have no idea how to use it. They’ve been taught to have the same voice as their teachers, who have the same voice as everyone else, who all came together to form a community. This idea of community has so many positive aspects – togetherness, team building, family. However, somewhere along the line the importance of community starts to squelch individualism, creativity and, dare I say, a little anarchy. Without forming a strong and firm sense of self, how can one fully and actively contribute to a community in which he or she has any investment? By tailoring education to teach students how to live in a community, educators are doing those communities a disservice by not allowing them to grow and evolve in new ways.
Certainly the problems within the U.S. education system abound; and, without doubt, they have contributed to the problems I have encountered with my high school education. A lack of funding to many public schools throughout the nation leaves them few resources with which to build a curriculum. Tattered textbooks in hand, underprivileged students learn about Macbeth. While across town students sit at desks with personal computers and research the themes found in Shakespeare’s writings. Surely a disconnect in the quality of education occurs here, but not necessarily in the quantity. Still students are learning about Shakespeare, about his writings, about his themes. Regardless of the medium being used to educate these students, they continue to learn the basics. And later, “the school takes literature and makes it a matter of study and testing” (Purves, 8). What was Macbeth’s wife’s name? Who died in Macbeth? The questions, no doubt, will look the same as students mindlessly recite information they have stored in their memory banks just long enough to make it through the test. No, while funding my be a problem. It is not the problem.
The real problem rests not in curriculum, not in funding, not in location. The real problem with secondary education is educators who continuously sell their students short, underestimating their students’ abilities, imaginations, cognitive reasoning skills and yearning to learn. “The more serious problem therefore, is not the failure to teach some specific aspect of thinking, but the profound absence of thoughtfulness in classrooms” (Newmann, 110). Where is the process of inquiry? Where is the curiosity? My teachers said time and time again, “There are no stupid questions.” But, there were no questions period. My classmates and I wouldn’t have even thought to question our teacher. We had never been asked to. I have this strange, surreal feeling when I realize what I thought my education was when it was happening and to understand its reality now. My teachers allowed me to feel brilliant by understanding the simple concepts that they placed in front of me. They applauded me for doing everything they asked, but what else was I going to do? They “boxed [themselves] into this kind of teaching – where [they] want students to think for themselves and to get the right answer” (Applebee, 1). What these educators fail to account for are the countless problems and questions that cannot be answered with a yes or a no. Not everything is right or wrong. Heck, some questions don’t even have answers. But these types of questions, the ones that ask for deep, cognitive reasoning and discussion, seem to be conveniently absent from most high school classrooms. At least, they were from mine. My classrooms steered clear of anything that could have stirred us from our academic malaise.
In our static educational sphere, my classmates and I took information from one location and placed it in another. We were forklifts for the educational and community ideals set up by those who came before us. This type of learning “tends to reinforce attitudes and beliefs rather than to effect conversions.” (Purves, 10). And there we writhed, as students all over the nation must writhe, like drowning worms, incognizant of the cesspool of learning they have found themselves in. “What we learn is in large part a function of how we learn it” (Applebee, 6). We, as high school students, learn by being told; therefore, we learn what we are told. All the while, nothing else is asked of us. It has a numbing affect that is hard to notice until it starts to go away, like the tingling of an arm that you’ve been laying on for far too long.
I guess that’s probably why I’m most thankful that I left. Now I can feel all of the things I didn’t realize were happening to me. But now, I feel like I’ve been wronged too badly that even if I wanted to, I couldn’t go back. It would be too painful to watch the youth of the town go through the same incredible, delirious, ignorant moments I went through as a teenager. Helpless in my ability to make a change so great, with just one person so small. Perhaps I am a contributing factor to the “brain drain” of rural Nebraska. I wish that weren’t the case, but I fear it must be. “In just over two decades, more that 700 rural counties, from the Plains to the Texas Panhandle through to Appalachia, lost 10 percent or more of their population” (Carr). The brain drain theory states that rural communities are losing their brightest minds to larger cities because they convince their brightest minds that rural communities have nothing to offer them. I beg to differ. My small town drove me away after years and years of convincing me that it could give me everything. It drove me away with its lies. It drove me away, because it didn’t really want me or my abilities. It just wanted another cog, another mindless body in the machine of normalcy that is Falls City. It never wanted me to learn new and exciting ideas or theories. The brain drain theory will tell you that rural communities should send their students out into the world to bring back ideas that will allow the community to grow and thrive. And while all of that looks nice on paper, it’s a little too explosive when it reaches home. Just as a confused teenager struggles against change to keep the innocent tag games of childhood an adolescent reality, so do communities throughout the nation. While preaching growth and tolerance, they quietly take a passive role in their own evolution. Mimicking that sense of complacency, schools teach their students to fall in line with what they are taught. Think, but not too hard. Try, but only enough. Strive, but don’t do anything too radical, and maybe you too can be the mayor.
Works Cited
Applebee, Arthur N. Toward Thoughtful Curriculum: Fostering Discipline Based Conversation in the English Language Arts Classroom. Rep. 1994. ERIC document reproduction service no. EJ480971. Print.
Carr, Patrick J., and Maria J. Kefalas. "The Rural Brain Drain." The Chronicle of Higher Education [Washington D.C] 21 Sept. 2009. The Chronicle of Higher Education. 21 Sept. 2009. Web. 2 Nov. 2009.
Newmann, Fred M. "Chapter 6: The Prospect of Classroom Thoughtfulness in High School Social Studies." Teaching Thinking: And Agenda for the 21st Century. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc., 1992. 105-32. Print.
Purves, Alan. (1991). "The Ideology of Canons and Cultural Concerns in the Literature Curriculum." Washington D.C.: Report for the Office of Educational Research and Improvement.
At first I was confused. Then I was angry. Then I was sad. To have 13 years of your life diminished into mere nothingness comes swift and hard. Jaded, I delved into my life at UNL, and I never looked back… until now. Four and half years in the university system have taught me a lot. I owe much to my professors who taught me more about learning than just books and problems. Sure, some of my classes and professors have been solely bent on cramming as many facts into my head as possible. And, as I did for years in high school, I have continued to purge myself of such information as soon as the time came that I no longer needed it. But my college experience has been much more than that. My knowledge has been questioned, my mental abilities challenged, and my investment in my education confronted. Not only have I learned to doubt what I know, but also I have been taught to doubt what others know – to ask questions, to be skeptical, to be unwaveringly curious. When I think of my four years of disenfranchised high school education, I look at it in utter confusion, utter disgust. Why didn’t anyone tell me I was allowed to disagree with what I was being taught? Why didn’t anyone teach me to look deeper than the simple explanations and summaries presented by my teachers? Why did they leave so much out of my education? Mostly, it hurts. It hurts that many of the people I trusted during my adolescence didn’t see fit to give me or my peers the opportunity to flame the fire of inquiry. And it hurts to know they probably never considered it, never realized what they weren’t doing.
As educators, my high school teachers taught what they knew. Often, they did so well. However, their knowledge was limited to the two square miles of Falls City, Neb. Many of them had lived there their entire lives, disappearing for four or five years to experience “the world” before scurrying back to the haze of normalcy surrounding Falls City. They came back to what they knew. Living in a place like Falls City, living anywhere, a person comes to lives as a part of its culture. It affects the way they speak, dress and behave. It affects their values. My high school teachers were Falls City. It had created them, and they were now creating it – endless cogs in the machine of rural Nebraska. Then I entered school, and I too became a cog, the next step in the continuation of Falls City education. Much like taking a long look at myself in a mirror after years and years of disillusioned education, I must also take a look at the community I came from. That community shaped the school, education and young adults that came out of it. And with the good (moral values, a sense of belonging and value in your roots) came the bad (close-mindedness, a lack of societal context and arrogance.) High school education reflects the school’s community; and, in doing so, it prepares students for life within the strict confines of that particular community.
Coasting through my high school education, I learned everything that I would need to know living in Falls City, Neb. Do your best – years of straight A’s will pay off eventually… just not now, the football team is playing. Keep your head low if you disagree – suggesting that there may be flaws in the death penalty system will label you as a democrat, and that’s a dirty, dirty word in this town. Who you know is who you are – and “Honey, why don’t you run around with that Hullman boy? He seems nice” doesn’t allow you to really ignore the fact that he can be found in the luxury of a cornfield any weekend with 30 drunken friends and a Keystone Light in his hand. Yep, like the Keystone Light, my education went down smooth every time. Honestly, armed with this knowledge alone, I could spend the rest of my days in Falls City, blissfully ignorant of anything too far off of the county grid. Just think… I could be mayor. But then again, there could come a time where I needed to leave my fair town. Perhaps due to the economic struggles that seem to plague rural communities or perhaps due to the declining population brought on by the rural “brain drain” (don’t worry, we’ll get to that), I would have to leave. Who knows where I would go after Falls City? I would have to claw my way out of years and years worth of disgruntled lies that I told myself about where I was and what I knew. And then I’d end up some place where the names are unfamiliar, the customs are strange and the beliefs are downright scandalous. Perhaps in reality it would only be a short two hour drive to Lincoln or Omaha, but it might as well be a foreign country for how unprepared I would be.
I think perhaps what gets me most frustrated is how completely unprepared my high school education made me in my aspiration. It’s not so much about the information I didn’t learn in high school; instead, it’s about the fact that I wasn’t asked to learn. Not really. Not anything beyond the textbooks sitting on the etched desk in front of me. My greatest fear comes from realizing that this can’t be true for only me. How many students graduate from high school without learning how to learn? How many come to the same stark realization I did? And even more frightening, how many never realize? Never realize that those four years should not be their four best years. Never realize that there’s more to learning than just plot summaries and pop quizzes. Never realize that after you get into college, your ACT score is just another number that doesn’t mean much of anything. The system of high school curriculum used widely throughout the United States falls short on what it offers the nation’s youth. The teaching methods, which are continuously challenged and altered, still fail to prepare students for life outside of high school, whether that be within the job market, within society or within college. Where the high school education system fails its students, it fails itself. Year after year, schools send unsuspecting, diploma wielding teenagers into the world, the same students who are the future leaders of America. Yet, their mission is tainted by the early conditioning that they “have a voice” and the painful and baffling realization that they have no idea how to use it. They’ve been taught to have the same voice as their teachers, who have the same voice as everyone else, who all came together to form a community. This idea of community has so many positive aspects – togetherness, team building, family. However, somewhere along the line the importance of community starts to squelch individualism, creativity and, dare I say, a little anarchy. Without forming a strong and firm sense of self, how can one fully and actively contribute to a community in which he or she has any investment? By tailoring education to teach students how to live in a community, educators are doing those communities a disservice by not allowing them to grow and evolve in new ways.
Certainly the problems within the U.S. education system abound; and, without doubt, they have contributed to the problems I have encountered with my high school education. A lack of funding to many public schools throughout the nation leaves them few resources with which to build a curriculum. Tattered textbooks in hand, underprivileged students learn about Macbeth. While across town students sit at desks with personal computers and research the themes found in Shakespeare’s writings. Surely a disconnect in the quality of education occurs here, but not necessarily in the quantity. Still students are learning about Shakespeare, about his writings, about his themes. Regardless of the medium being used to educate these students, they continue to learn the basics. And later, “the school takes literature and makes it a matter of study and testing” (Purves, 8). What was Macbeth’s wife’s name? Who died in Macbeth? The questions, no doubt, will look the same as students mindlessly recite information they have stored in their memory banks just long enough to make it through the test. No, while funding my be a problem. It is not the problem.
The real problem rests not in curriculum, not in funding, not in location. The real problem with secondary education is educators who continuously sell their students short, underestimating their students’ abilities, imaginations, cognitive reasoning skills and yearning to learn. “The more serious problem therefore, is not the failure to teach some specific aspect of thinking, but the profound absence of thoughtfulness in classrooms” (Newmann, 110). Where is the process of inquiry? Where is the curiosity? My teachers said time and time again, “There are no stupid questions.” But, there were no questions period. My classmates and I wouldn’t have even thought to question our teacher. We had never been asked to. I have this strange, surreal feeling when I realize what I thought my education was when it was happening and to understand its reality now. My teachers allowed me to feel brilliant by understanding the simple concepts that they placed in front of me. They applauded me for doing everything they asked, but what else was I going to do? They “boxed [themselves] into this kind of teaching – where [they] want students to think for themselves and to get the right answer” (Applebee, 1). What these educators fail to account for are the countless problems and questions that cannot be answered with a yes or a no. Not everything is right or wrong. Heck, some questions don’t even have answers. But these types of questions, the ones that ask for deep, cognitive reasoning and discussion, seem to be conveniently absent from most high school classrooms. At least, they were from mine. My classrooms steered clear of anything that could have stirred us from our academic malaise.
In our static educational sphere, my classmates and I took information from one location and placed it in another. We were forklifts for the educational and community ideals set up by those who came before us. This type of learning “tends to reinforce attitudes and beliefs rather than to effect conversions.” (Purves, 10). And there we writhed, as students all over the nation must writhe, like drowning worms, incognizant of the cesspool of learning they have found themselves in. “What we learn is in large part a function of how we learn it” (Applebee, 6). We, as high school students, learn by being told; therefore, we learn what we are told. All the while, nothing else is asked of us. It has a numbing affect that is hard to notice until it starts to go away, like the tingling of an arm that you’ve been laying on for far too long.
I guess that’s probably why I’m most thankful that I left. Now I can feel all of the things I didn’t realize were happening to me. But now, I feel like I’ve been wronged too badly that even if I wanted to, I couldn’t go back. It would be too painful to watch the youth of the town go through the same incredible, delirious, ignorant moments I went through as a teenager. Helpless in my ability to make a change so great, with just one person so small. Perhaps I am a contributing factor to the “brain drain” of rural Nebraska. I wish that weren’t the case, but I fear it must be. “In just over two decades, more that 700 rural counties, from the Plains to the Texas Panhandle through to Appalachia, lost 10 percent or more of their population” (Carr). The brain drain theory states that rural communities are losing their brightest minds to larger cities because they convince their brightest minds that rural communities have nothing to offer them. I beg to differ. My small town drove me away after years and years of convincing me that it could give me everything. It drove me away with its lies. It drove me away, because it didn’t really want me or my abilities. It just wanted another cog, another mindless body in the machine of normalcy that is Falls City. It never wanted me to learn new and exciting ideas or theories. The brain drain theory will tell you that rural communities should send their students out into the world to bring back ideas that will allow the community to grow and thrive. And while all of that looks nice on paper, it’s a little too explosive when it reaches home. Just as a confused teenager struggles against change to keep the innocent tag games of childhood an adolescent reality, so do communities throughout the nation. While preaching growth and tolerance, they quietly take a passive role in their own evolution. Mimicking that sense of complacency, schools teach their students to fall in line with what they are taught. Think, but not too hard. Try, but only enough. Strive, but don’t do anything too radical, and maybe you too can be the mayor.
Works Cited
Applebee, Arthur N. Toward Thoughtful Curriculum: Fostering Discipline Based Conversation in the English Language Arts Classroom. Rep. 1994. ERIC document reproduction service no. EJ480971. Print.
Carr, Patrick J., and Maria J. Kefalas. "The Rural Brain Drain." The Chronicle of Higher Education [Washington D.C] 21 Sept. 2009. The Chronicle of Higher Education. 21 Sept. 2009. Web. 2 Nov. 2009.
Purves, Alan. (1991). "The Ideology of Canons and Cultural Concerns in the Literature Curriculum." Washington D.C.: Report for the Office of Educational Research and Improvement.
Saturday, December 05, 2009
It's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah
Something about the newspapers strewn across my carpet and bed, something in the way I can hear my florescent light bulbs humming, something that causes my pillow to smell like nostalgia tells me that all of this is about to change. It certainly is a year for changes.
As I gracelessly stumbled and weaved around the ice-skating rink tonight, it's all I could think about. I mean, aside from using almost all of my energy to keep from falling. On a rink full of people, many of whom I knew well, I was alone. Happily alone. I found myself some place I seldom do - calmly in my mind. Starting a few months ago and ending in August, everything around me is changing. Marriages, moving, graduations, ... everything. And it's terrifying, you know? To know that soon, very soon, a new stage of life starts. To be quite honest, I've been pretty comfortable tucked away in my little cocoon of normalcy, stability, sanity. (Sanity is a strong word for what my normal life is... but let's stick with it anyway.)
So, here I am, I still haven't taken my boots off, and I've been home for hours. And it's cold. And I'm overcome with this terrified, yet excited, sense of reality. And 2 a.m. is not a convenient time for reality or blankets or straws with umbrellas or the sound of a t.v. seeping through the ceiling. And for a moment I place my hands under my laptop to warm them up.
What am I saying? I wish I had a good answer for that. How about this - I'm going to make some promises. To you to me to whoever... I doesn't really matter.
1.) I'm going to start on my thesis over winter break... I swear.
2.) I'll stop selling myself short that second you do. (That's a lie. I'll do it before you.)
3.) Ninety percent of the newspapers in my room will end up in the recycling bin.
4.) I'll put aside more time to write.
5.) I'll invest in a coat that is not a couple of hoodies layered. (And gloves.)
6.) I'll turn the heat up. (That's a lie too... I kind of like to need my covers.
7.) I'm going to stop worrying. I've never been a worrier. Now seems like a pretty dumb time to start.
As I gracelessly stumbled and weaved around the ice-skating rink tonight, it's all I could think about. I mean, aside from using almost all of my energy to keep from falling. On a rink full of people, many of whom I knew well, I was alone. Happily alone. I found myself some place I seldom do - calmly in my mind. Starting a few months ago and ending in August, everything around me is changing. Marriages, moving, graduations, ... everything. And it's terrifying, you know? To know that soon, very soon, a new stage of life starts. To be quite honest, I've been pretty comfortable tucked away in my little cocoon of normalcy, stability, sanity. (Sanity is a strong word for what my normal life is... but let's stick with it anyway.)
So, here I am, I still haven't taken my boots off, and I've been home for hours. And it's cold. And I'm overcome with this terrified, yet excited, sense of reality. And 2 a.m. is not a convenient time for reality or blankets or straws with umbrellas or the sound of a t.v. seeping through the ceiling. And for a moment I place my hands under my laptop to warm them up.
What am I saying? I wish I had a good answer for that. How about this - I'm going to make some promises. To you to me to whoever... I doesn't really matter.
1.) I'm going to start on my thesis over winter break... I swear.
2.) I'll stop selling myself short that second you do. (That's a lie. I'll do it before you.)
3.) Ninety percent of the newspapers in my room will end up in the recycling bin.
4.) I'll put aside more time to write.
5.) I'll invest in a coat that is not a couple of hoodies layered. (And gloves.)
6.) I'll turn the heat up. (That's a lie too... I kind of like to need my covers.
7.) I'm going to stop worrying. I've never been a worrier. Now seems like a pretty dumb time to start.
Monday, November 23, 2009
Jagerbombs! Jagerbombs! Jagerbombs!
I'm kind of afraid of a lot of things. A lot.
1. Not being able to see.
2. Bugs.
3. Finding out that this is all a joke.
4. A clean room.
5. Disappointing the people I love.
6. Disappointing myself.
7. Hangnails.
8. Hair in my food.
9. Sleeping in a bed bigger than twin size.
10. Death.
11. Dirty socks.
12. Scary movies.
13. Boys.
14. Always being considered "one of the boys."
15. Forgetting.
16. The dark.
17. Rejection.
18. Not knowing where exits are.
19. Too much pavement.
20. Being misinterpreted.
So, so, so much.
1. Not being able to see.
2. Bugs.
3. Finding out that this is all a joke.
4. A clean room.
5. Disappointing the people I love.
6. Disappointing myself.
7. Hangnails.
8. Hair in my food.
9. Sleeping in a bed bigger than twin size.
10. Death.
11. Dirty socks.
12. Scary movies.
13. Boys.
14. Always being considered "one of the boys."
15. Forgetting.
16. The dark.
17. Rejection.
18. Not knowing where exits are.
19. Too much pavement.
20. Being misinterpreted.
So, so, so much.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Meteor Showers
My hair smells like intimacy tonight. I'm not comfortable with it. And it feels like a thousand feathers that were misplaced somewhere behind my sweatband. And it's reminding me that everything is just about right.
A friend asked me recently, "Do you ever just have this impending sense of doom? That something bad is going to happen?"
No. Never.
I kind of skate through life on this wild, crazy-person ride that everything is just going to fall into place. And even though I know (from experience, from a million things I could tell you right now without even trying to think) that's not true, I keep skating like my life depends on it. Because my life depends on it. Believing that eventually everything will fall into place makes me help that process along. The idea of doing it alone, without some cosmic aligning aura... well, that's not something I'm quite ready to accept.
And I miss Minnesota. The way it never got quite as warm as I'd want it to. The way long socks had purpose. The way time seemed to run together when I was there. The way it felt like going home. The way thinking back on it makes the tears fall thick and heavy on my sheets... I'm not sure where they're coming from. The way that makes this moment beautiful in its simplicity.
Credo ut intelligam
Intelligo ut credam
I believe so I can understand.
I try to understand so I can believe.
A friend asked me recently, "Do you ever just have this impending sense of doom? That something bad is going to happen?"
No. Never.
I kind of skate through life on this wild, crazy-person ride that everything is just going to fall into place. And even though I know (from experience, from a million things I could tell you right now without even trying to think) that's not true, I keep skating like my life depends on it. Because my life depends on it. Believing that eventually everything will fall into place makes me help that process along. The idea of doing it alone, without some cosmic aligning aura... well, that's not something I'm quite ready to accept.
And I miss Minnesota. The way it never got quite as warm as I'd want it to. The way long socks had purpose. The way time seemed to run together when I was there. The way it felt like going home. The way thinking back on it makes the tears fall thick and heavy on my sheets... I'm not sure where they're coming from. The way that makes this moment beautiful in its simplicity.
Credo ut intelligam
Intelligo ut credam
I believe so I can understand.
I try to understand so I can believe.
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
The sky is red with snow...
"How I see poetry, it's built on uncertainty. It lives in pauses and gaps and things unsaid. It lives inside the tears that turn highway lights into hallucinations. You can't ever be sure of it."
"But tonight, a tiny part of me felt an immense connection with a complete stranger. A small, small part of my heart leapt out and fell in love with a girl I had never met; never even seen; knew only in tiny plain-text fragments."
"But thank you. Thank you for writing. And keep writing and living and enjoying life, and stay wonderful and amazing and beautiful.
Because you are."
Thank you HiQKid (Alex)
"But tonight, a tiny part of me felt an immense connection with a complete stranger. A small, small part of my heart leapt out and fell in love with a girl I had never met; never even seen; knew only in tiny plain-text fragments."
"But thank you. Thank you for writing. And keep writing and living and enjoying life, and stay wonderful and amazing and beautiful.
Because you are."
Thank you HiQKid (Alex)
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Why isn't Palindrome a Palindrome?
"Dammit I'm Mad" - Demetri Martin
Dammit I’m mad.
Evil is a deed as I live.
God, am I reviled?
I rise, my bed on a sun, I melt.
To be not one man emanating is sad. I piss.
Alas, it is so late. Who stops to help?
Man, it is hot. I’m in it. I tell.
I am not a devil. I level “
Mad Dog”.
Ah, say burning is, as a deified gulp,
In my halo of a mired rum tin.
I erase many men. Oh, to be man, a sin.
Is evil in a clam? In a trap?
No. It is open. On it I was stuck.
Rats peed on hope. Elsewhere dips a web.
Be still if I fill its ebb.
Ew, a spider… eh?
We sleep. Oh no!
Deep, stark cuts saw it in one position.
Part animal, can I live? Sin is a name.
Both, one… my names are in it.
Murder? I’m a fool.
A hymn I plug, deified as a sign in ruby ash,
A Goddam level I lived at.
On mail let it in. I’m it.
Oh, sit in ample hot spots. Oh wet!
A loss it is alas (sip). I’d assign it a name.
Name not one bottle minus an ode by me:
“Sir, I deliver. I’m a dog”
Evil is a deed as I live.
Dammit I’m mad.
Dammit I’m mad.
Evil is a deed as I live.
God, am I reviled?
I rise, my bed on a sun, I melt.
To be not one man emanating is sad. I piss.
Alas, it is so late. Who stops to help?
Man, it is hot. I’m in it. I tell.
I am not a devil. I level “
Mad Dog”.
Ah, say burning is, as a deified gulp,
In my halo of a mired rum tin.
I erase many men. Oh, to be man, a sin.
Is evil in a clam? In a trap?
No. It is open. On it I was stuck.
Rats peed on hope. Elsewhere dips a web.
Be still if I fill its ebb.
Ew, a spider… eh?
We sleep. Oh no!
Deep, stark cuts saw it in one position.
Part animal, can I live? Sin is a name.
Both, one… my names are in it.
Murder? I’m a fool.
A hymn I plug, deified as a sign in ruby ash,
A Goddam level I lived at.
On mail let it in. I’m it.
Oh, sit in ample hot spots. Oh wet!
A loss it is alas (sip). I’d assign it a name.
Name not one bottle minus an ode by me:
“Sir, I deliver. I’m a dog”
Evil is a deed as I live.
Dammit I’m mad.
Monday, October 12, 2009
Remember the Mundayzzz Bear?
This is something my professor wrote about some journal entries that I have written in my English 354 class. I think this may be the best compliment I have ever received.
In my Stories and the Human Experience class I’m teaching we’re studying James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” today. What reading across your journal entries so far made me think of is a scene in the story where the heroin-addicted brother of the straight-laced narrator hears a woman sing and compares it to shooting up. He says,
“When she was singing before, her voice reminded me for a minute of what heroin feels like sometimes when it’s in your veins. It makes you feel warm and cool at the same time. And distant. And sure. It makes you feel- in control. Sometimes you have to have that feeling.”
You posit in your last installment that writers don’t necessarily write to live, but instead life writes them. This powerful idea has me thinking that in most of the good writers I’ve been experienced with, both things are simultaneously true. Not only are writers, as you claim, aware enough to makes sense of the world while it happens, but getting these ideas down on the page functions for them like music functions for Sonny in the quote above.
The sense I get from reading your writing so far in this course makes me believe that the same is true for you. The sense-making catharsis of the Falls City collection and the way you’ve pushed your thoughts so far in the first project lead me to believe that in some way, you’re also doing both- writing to live and letting life write you at the same time. While the emotional energy this taxes a person with is a great sacrifice, my sense is that for some people (namely you and me in this case) we don’t have much of a choice.
:-)
In my Stories and the Human Experience class I’m teaching we’re studying James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” today. What reading across your journal entries so far made me think of is a scene in the story where the heroin-addicted brother of the straight-laced narrator hears a woman sing and compares it to shooting up. He says,
“When she was singing before, her voice reminded me for a minute of what heroin feels like sometimes when it’s in your veins. It makes you feel warm and cool at the same time. And distant. And sure. It makes you feel- in control. Sometimes you have to have that feeling.”
You posit in your last installment that writers don’t necessarily write to live, but instead life writes them. This powerful idea has me thinking that in most of the good writers I’ve been experienced with, both things are simultaneously true. Not only are writers, as you claim, aware enough to makes sense of the world while it happens, but getting these ideas down on the page functions for them like music functions for Sonny in the quote above.
The sense I get from reading your writing so far in this course makes me believe that the same is true for you. The sense-making catharsis of the Falls City collection and the way you’ve pushed your thoughts so far in the first project lead me to believe that in some way, you’re also doing both- writing to live and letting life write you at the same time. While the emotional energy this taxes a person with is a great sacrifice, my sense is that for some people (namely you and me in this case) we don’t have much of a choice.
:-)
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Friday, September 25, 2009
A Stroke of Insight: The Education of Aging
Slouched in a chair next to a synthetic, dusty hibiscus, I sat impatiently in the
Growing up, my grandma Jeannie and my grandpa Don never lived more than two miles from my home. They are my mother’s parents, and their guidance, support and love have always been a constant part of my life. But Grandpa was always my hero. Evening rides in the back of his rusty, green truck, daily jaunts to a nearby pasture to feed carrots to the horses I would never have, lullabies of Lead Belly’s “Rock Island Line” and Arthur Fields’ “Abba Dabba Honeymoon” are the most poignant memories of my childhood. He let me and my sisters call him “Crappy.” He sat at the bottom of his crimson-carpeted basement stairs for hours as I rolled plastic fruit down the banister into the ancient strawberry box in his hands. Don was a man so strong that I barely noticed his triple bypass heart surgery or the subsequent recovery that came with it. And as I grew older he became my confidant. He knew how to make me feel better when I was down, and I learned how to react to him and calm him down as my eight-year-old cousin vomited in the back seat of his new Cadillac on the way to
Now comes the painful acceptance that I’m writing about him in the past tense. I’m writing about a man who is very much alive. On Dec. 9, 2008, Donald Leon Coupe suffered a severe hemorrhagic stroke. I remember the sobering call well, “Sarah, Grandpa had a stroke this morning. He’s in
I spent a large portion of the next five months in hospitals. As Don recovered at
Over time the bond I shared with my grandpa slackened, but I still went. My visits became less and less about catching up with my grandfather and more about keeping my grandma company and helping her in any way that I could. Often, assisting her came in the form of tube feeding him into his stomach, doing physical therapy, readjusting him, and cleaning phlegm out of his throat. I was forced to learn and to push my boundaries much farther than I would have liked. A person afraid of doctors, needles and medicine, I had a fear that started sometime early in my childhood, which had never faded. Suddenly I was talking to RNs, med-techs, specialists, speech pathologists, occupational therapists and CNAs; and I didn’t know what any of them did. I had to learn. Each person who entered the room was new. Each person took a new level of understanding. In the course of days, I went from being someone who avoided hospitals at all costs to someone who was immersed in medical knowledge.
I learned valuable things as I spent time at the hospital; however, the things I learned were not nearly as important to me as the bond that started to grow between me and my grandmother. I never knew my grandma to have a job, and I never knew her without some type of malady. But watching her rise to the occasion of taking care of my grandfather during rehabilitation and afterward when he went home is one of the most inspirational things that has happened in my life. Visiting my grandpa became more about helping my grandma with errands, taking her to eat and getting to know who she was behind all of the orthopedic shoes and rosaries. As my ability to communicate with my grandfather dissipated, the bond between me and my grandmother grew. I came to see her not only as my caring grandmother but also as a strong woman with even stronger convictions, who silenced her concerns for her own health in order to fully commit herself to the type of caring my grandfather needed. All those years that I thought my grandpa was doing things for my grandma because she couldn’t, I was wrong. He was doing them because he loved her, and now she does the same for him. My sisters and I started secretly to refer to the little things she does for him daily as “miracles” that will get her to sainthood. I’m incredibly thankful for the opportunity to get to know my grandma better. But the joy that comes from being closer to my grandma leaves a bitter taste in my moth when I remember why I know her so well now; because what I want to remember, what I can’t help but remember is the way things used to be – Christmases retrieving beer from the basement for Grandpa, his sure and steady footsteps as he power-walked through school hallways at speech meets, taunting the seals at the Henry Doorly Zoo.
I sat around a table in late July with various loud members of my extended family, and together we cried and then laughed till we cried as we recounted the endless stories about my grandpa – how he and my grandma dropped everything when her sister miscarried a baby from a marriage that few people approved of just to be there for her, when no one else would, or how on every family vacation one of his children or grandchildren would manage to get sick in route. We could have reminisced for days, weeks even. But instead we reminisced as we put off telling my grandma why we were really gathered there – to tell her that Grandpa needed to go to the nursing home … that she couldn’t take care of him alone.
It’s truly astonishing what people can learn from one another when they are forced to look at a situation honestly. Who will be there when there are no easy answers? Who will take responsibility when there is so much to be had? Who will give their time when there is none to spare? I learned a lot about my family members in the last year, a lot about who they are when the gloves come off. I learned how they got there as they told stories about the “good old days.” I learned my family history. In a way, we all had to do some type of recovery. We still are. For both my grandpa and my family, recovery does not mean going back to where we were. Neither he nor we are ever going to get there. Instead, it’s about finding normalcy, even a new normalcy. Things that are now normal – dreading the seemingly meaningless moments I share with my hero, giving my grandma a little more respect for the things that she does, finding little humor in stroke jokes and thinking about the future in a whole new way.
In a world full of the glorification of youth, fear of the elderly and an attitude of focusing on one’s self, it’s pretty easy to lose sight of the big picture – the spectrum of life. Whether from fear, disinterest or ignorance, a lack of communication and the ability to relate have wedged themselves in between the elderly and the young. For me, it has always been fear – fear of the unknown, fear of not knowing what to say, fear of change. Listening to my mother chastise me for years about remaining silent during visits to my great-grandmother in the nursing home makes me certain that this fear is not unique to my grandfather, but it is ever present. The truth is, it’s scary. It’s scary to know that you’re losing touch with someone you love very much. It’s scary to think that it might be the last time you see him or her. It’s scary to face someone with the guilt of your fear. It’s one giant dose of reality.
Spending time with elderly people, whether they be family members or not, is an incredibly important part of life. It creates opportunity for a completely unique form of learning that is only acquired through experience. Too often I think young people look at the elderly and think, “What could they possibly have to teach me?” It’s a type of ignorance that comes from questioning authority and arrogance that comes from discovering the world – two things that people have gained for centuries as a part of coming of age. But that same ignorance and arrogance will limit them and bind them to a close-minded outlook on life. What they don’t understand is the fact that it’s not about what the elderly have to teach; it’s about what we can learn from them.
In a way, aging must be considered from infancy until death. The people on either side of the spectrum are the ones who need us most. We innately have a responsibility to care for those who can not care for themselves, and as we neglect them we neglect ourselves and one another. From adolescence, people strive to gain autonomy, a type of freedom that one can only earn through years of fighting away the dependence that has been thrust upon them from birth. Then, without warning they come to a point where they are asked to give up the freedom that has become their lifeblood – settle down, have a family and restart the cycle. Lose your autonomy. Similarly, this age brings about the need for people to give back to those on whom they depended. The dependent must become the provider. Lose your autonomy. We are asked to give up the one thing we have fought most for. But in doing so, we can gain infinitely more. Not only do our dependents need us, but also we need them. “The children are the future.” This saying has been thrown around for years, and it’s easy enough to see that it’s true. So, are the elderly our past? If so, they are just as much a part of our future. A healthy relationship with the elderly allows us to gage ourselves in preparation for our futures. The elderly act as virtual, wrinkled and silvering soothsayers of our destinies.
While sitting with my family in late July, I learned about my family history. But I learned much, much more than that. I learned about overcoming hardship. I learned about supporting people. I learned about the future – what I could one day become. To tell you the truth, being on fraction of the person either of my grandparents are would be a privilege. My relationship with my grandparents, relationships with the elderly in general teach us about life. And these lessons are integral because we need to know more than what the simple experiences of our own lives can teach us. We owe it to ourselves to take an active role in the lives of the elderly.
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
I see God in Birds and Satan in Long Words
"And we sing this morning that wonderful and grand old message. I don't know about you but I never get tired of it. Number 99 - Just as I am."
I'm a mountain that has been moved.
I'm a river that is all dried up.
I'm an ocean nothing floats on.
I'm a sky that nothing wants to fly on.
I'm a sun that doesn't burn hot.
I'm a moon that never shows its face.
I'm a mouth that doesn't smile.
I'm a word that no one ever wants to say.
From Brand New new album Daisy. Title song.
I'm a mountain that has been moved.
I'm a river that is all dried up.
I'm an ocean nothing floats on.
I'm a sky that nothing wants to fly on.
I'm a sun that doesn't burn hot.
I'm a moon that never shows its face.
I'm a mouth that doesn't smile.
I'm a word that no one ever wants to say.
From Brand New new album Daisy. Title song.
Monday, September 14, 2009
You go where it goes...
First list of the year.
- Brand New's new album comes out soon... very soon.
- It's been a good month... interesting.
- Can't believe it's my fifth and last year at UNL.
- Fall would be a lovely time to be in love.
- I've added more pillows to my bed, for safety.
- I have more friends than anyone would ever want or need. Thank God.
- Everyone has a crush. If they tell you they don't, they're lying.
- I will play the part of a hipster at some point this winter, funny.
- I don't have a crush.
- I'm afraid of not being able to see.
- I can often not see.
- I never stop meeting people I'm incredibly fond of.
- I'm very close to being better.
- Grandpa is not.
- I'm so glad that it almost smells like Autumn.
- Pumpkin carving.
- My life NEVER slows down.
To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Brand New's new album comes out soon... very soon.
- It's been a good month... interesting.
- Can't believe it's my fifth and last year at UNL.
- Fall would be a lovely time to be in love.
- I've added more pillows to my bed, for safety.
- I have more friends than anyone would ever want or need. Thank God.
- Everyone has a crush. If they tell you they don't, they're lying.
- I will play the part of a hipster at some point this winter, funny.
- I don't have a crush.
- I'm afraid of not being able to see.
- I can often not see.
- I never stop meeting people I'm incredibly fond of.
- I'm very close to being better.
- Grandpa is not.
- I'm so glad that it almost smells like Autumn.
- Pumpkin carving.
- My life NEVER slows down.
To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
Monday, August 31, 2009
Your Kid Ate What?
Psalm III
To God: to illuminate all men. Beginning with Skid Road.
Let Occidental and Washington be transformed into a higher place, the plaza of eternity.
Illuminate the welders in shipyards with the brilliance of their torches.
Let the crane operator lift up his arm for joy.
Let elevators creak and speak, ascending and descending in awe.
Let the mercy of the flower's direction beckon in the eye.
Let the straight flower bespeak its purpose in straightness - to seek the light.
Let the crooked flower bespeak its purpose in crookedness - to seek the light.
Let the crooked and straightness bespeak the light.
Let Puget Sound be a blast of light.
I feed on your Name like a cockroach on a crumb - this cockroach is holy.
(written by Allen Ginsberg in Seattle, June, 1956)
To God: to illuminate all men. Beginning with Skid Road.
Let Occidental and Washington be transformed into a higher place, the plaza of eternity.
Illuminate the welders in shipyards with the brilliance of their torches.
Let the crane operator lift up his arm for joy.
Let elevators creak and speak, ascending and descending in awe.
Let the mercy of the flower's direction beckon in the eye.
Let the straight flower bespeak its purpose in straightness - to seek the light.
Let the crooked flower bespeak its purpose in crookedness - to seek the light.
Let the crooked and straightness bespeak the light.
Let Puget Sound be a blast of light.
I feed on your Name like a cockroach on a crumb - this cockroach is holy.
(written by Allen Ginsberg in Seattle, June, 1956)
Monday, February 23, 2009
There's no place like home
Speckled with streetlights, lined by pleasant homes and hidden in a few hills, Falls City teems with activity. But you won’t see it. Grandma Keithley follows the grocery boy out to her car, making sure the eggs go in the front seat. Mr. Oliver stands on his front porch, obsessively watching his grass grow. Those might be the only sights gracing the eyes of a person merely passing through town; but don’t be deceived. Just past the main road, the fuel of Falls City’s existence, its youth, spins the cogs of this small town. But where Falls City nurtures its youth, it neglects them; where it teaches them, it leads them astray; and where it empowers them, it leaves them helpless.
Proud people live in Falls City. They breed proud babies, who grow into proud teenagers. Stones etched with family names litter yards to advertise who owns which house. The O’Gradys power washed their house last week, planted flowers and forgot to put their basketball away. They’re athletes. The Hullmans added another room to their house over the summer, pay to have their lawn mowed and built a house to hold their hot tub. They’re rich. The Thompsons left their bicycles in the yard all week, let their dog loose during the day and decorate their driveway with side-walk chalk daily. They’re creative. Parents teach children confidence through knowing where and what they come from, who they are. And these names that label houses start to label people. And they’re right. The confidence spurred and kindled by the adult population, without careful regulation, evolves into arrogance and haughtiness. Children are taught to grow into their name; and those who strive for something more, something different, are made to feel as if they are wrong.
Churches line streets like fried-Twinkie-toting vendors at the state fair, and everybody wants to buy something. Students feel the two block gap between the Catholic school and the public school. It seems like miles, because they’re so “different.” But neither will ever hear much about evolution or civil rights or safe sex. Those topics are too explosive. It leads to heated debates in tiny classrooms about the death penalty. The word democrat becomes an insult. Ideals instilled and fostered by the people in a good, Christian community turn into discrimination. And young people are never asked to question their morals, their beliefs or their opinions, even if only to grow stronger in them. In the mix of soup suppers, bible school and craft fairs, things get pretty homogeneous, like the thick layer of elm trees that blanket the town in leaves each fall. Instead of horizons being broadened, they are hindered, by close mindedness, by ignorance, by misplaced values.
Before any of this fails to sink in, Falls City’s youth have freedom, the type of freedom only allowed to those younger than 12 and loathed by those too old to remember. They ramble through the woods on the edge of town for hours, days without a single brow raised. Bicycle gangs roam roads finding adventures the other side of town has to offer. And parents find comfort as their children meander home through the dimly lit streets of dusk, awe-struck and enchanted by the shimmer of fire flies.
That type of freedom, it’s intoxicating. But age dilutes the high that childhood fancy once provided. A search for excitement takes advantage of freedom, and the intoxication of hide-n-go-seek changes into the intoxication from drugs and alcohol. And there are a lot drugs and alcohol. Rambles through the woods become drunken wanderings through cornfields and over levies to late night drinking fests for the underage and undereducated. With prairie grass blowing gently against the sides of dusty Chevrolets and half-crushed beer cans shining in the moonlight, adolescents in small-town Nebraska drink their “troubles” away: a lack of perspective in the world, a lack of intelligence and a lack of reserve. And the only one not invited to the party is Consequence. It’s just like him to miss a party. Without him, Falls City’s teenagers get their first tastes of the future: failed attempts at community college, a discharge from the Air Force, alcoholism at age 20. Parents blind themselves in a thick haze of delusion that comes from years of fooling their children into thinking that the two mile radius of this town could somehow offer them everything.
These young people, they’re not hopeless; they’re helpless. They live in a town with no questions and, therefore, are given no answers nor are expected to give any. Things just are. If you’re just passing through, roll down your window. You can smell the stagnation that hangs in the air like the smell of wet grass. Leaving yields the only escape for the youth of this town. It’s the only way to see Falls City as it really is, and to come to appreciate it for what it was, when you were young and disillusioned. It’s the only way I can call it home without getting squeamish. Because, the nurturing is real; the teaching is real; the empowerment is real. But without other options, those things start to corrode, and when it’s over, they end up where everything else ends up, the rummage yard just north of town.
Proud people live in Falls City. They breed proud babies, who grow into proud teenagers. Stones etched with family names litter yards to advertise who owns which house. The O’Gradys power washed their house last week, planted flowers and forgot to put their basketball away. They’re athletes. The Hullmans added another room to their house over the summer, pay to have their lawn mowed and built a house to hold their hot tub. They’re rich. The Thompsons left their bicycles in the yard all week, let their dog loose during the day and decorate their driveway with side-walk chalk daily. They’re creative. Parents teach children confidence through knowing where and what they come from, who they are. And these names that label houses start to label people. And they’re right. The confidence spurred and kindled by the adult population, without careful regulation, evolves into arrogance and haughtiness. Children are taught to grow into their name; and those who strive for something more, something different, are made to feel as if they are wrong.
Churches line streets like fried-Twinkie-toting vendors at the state fair, and everybody wants to buy something. Students feel the two block gap between the Catholic school and the public school. It seems like miles, because they’re so “different.” But neither will ever hear much about evolution or civil rights or safe sex. Those topics are too explosive. It leads to heated debates in tiny classrooms about the death penalty. The word democrat becomes an insult. Ideals instilled and fostered by the people in a good, Christian community turn into discrimination. And young people are never asked to question their morals, their beliefs or their opinions, even if only to grow stronger in them. In the mix of soup suppers, bible school and craft fairs, things get pretty homogeneous, like the thick layer of elm trees that blanket the town in leaves each fall. Instead of horizons being broadened, they are hindered, by close mindedness, by ignorance, by misplaced values.
Before any of this fails to sink in, Falls City’s youth have freedom, the type of freedom only allowed to those younger than 12 and loathed by those too old to remember. They ramble through the woods on the edge of town for hours, days without a single brow raised. Bicycle gangs roam roads finding adventures the other side of town has to offer. And parents find comfort as their children meander home through the dimly lit streets of dusk, awe-struck and enchanted by the shimmer of fire flies.
That type of freedom, it’s intoxicating. But age dilutes the high that childhood fancy once provided. A search for excitement takes advantage of freedom, and the intoxication of hide-n-go-seek changes into the intoxication from drugs and alcohol. And there are a lot drugs and alcohol. Rambles through the woods become drunken wanderings through cornfields and over levies to late night drinking fests for the underage and undereducated. With prairie grass blowing gently against the sides of dusty Chevrolets and half-crushed beer cans shining in the moonlight, adolescents in small-town Nebraska drink their “troubles” away: a lack of perspective in the world, a lack of intelligence and a lack of reserve. And the only one not invited to the party is Consequence. It’s just like him to miss a party. Without him, Falls City’s teenagers get their first tastes of the future: failed attempts at community college, a discharge from the Air Force, alcoholism at age 20. Parents blind themselves in a thick haze of delusion that comes from years of fooling their children into thinking that the two mile radius of this town could somehow offer them everything.
These young people, they’re not hopeless; they’re helpless. They live in a town with no questions and, therefore, are given no answers nor are expected to give any. Things just are. If you’re just passing through, roll down your window. You can smell the stagnation that hangs in the air like the smell of wet grass. Leaving yields the only escape for the youth of this town. It’s the only way to see Falls City as it really is, and to come to appreciate it for what it was, when you were young and disillusioned. It’s the only way I can call it home without getting squeamish. Because, the nurturing is real; the teaching is real; the empowerment is real. But without other options, those things start to corrode, and when it’s over, they end up where everything else ends up, the rummage yard just north of town.