Spring Swings

I will miss spring in a high school.

I am in my portable at lunch, trying to keep ahead of the marking, looking out the window at the abandoned swing set from the elementary school that use to occupy the site.  It is a spring day that makes me want to leave this musty classroom and run full speed backwards to my days at university and playing baseball when I should have been studying for finals.

They appear like forsythia, the first flowers of spring.

The boy arrives at the swing first.  He sits down and curls his legs underneath him, shortening them so that just the tips of his toes are dragging on the ground.  She arrives shortly after and sits on the swing beside him.  I should return to my marking, shouldn't be watching from my desk in the corner of the room but the essays are not as compelling as this.  They begin to talk, each facing forward.  The wind blows her hair in front of her face and she pushes it back into place. His swing begins to spin, as his toes touch down and move it in a spiral moment.  It is very gentle.  She does the same and as they twirl, their feet begin to touch.

The swings slow down and the two slowly come to a stop, facing each other.  I pick up my pen, glance at the papers.  I have miles to go.  The swings move slightly in the breeze with their feet, toeing and brushing towards each other.  They talk and glance and move slowly in the breeze.  She touches her hair again and he looks away and then towards her again.

Finally they both stop.  Their knees are touching, they are laughing in that spring sunshine.  The swings move slightly, as they toe the ground, swinging towards each other.  The school bell sounds and they walk hand in hand back to school.

They make me think of Robert Frost's poem:

Earth's the right place for love:
I don't know where it's likely to go better.
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

Youth in spring have, over the years, lifted me toward heaven.  They've become a daily reminder of my own youth, they've demanded that I remain with them.  I could have done worse than be a swinger of birches.

Flight Deck

As I write this I am high above Canada, flying home from my last March Break.  I am secure in my seat, but the thought does creep into my head; is my pilot any good?  How do I know that the static filled voice that tells me the weather in Toronto, knows what he is doing?  Ultimately, I am relying on the other professional that sits to his or her right in that cockpit.  I am trusting that each is evaluating the performance of the other.  I trust that, while they are flying the aircraft, each has an eye on the other.

To compare flying a plane to piloting a classroom may on its surface, be perverse.  However, we lock children, vulnerable people, in classrooms with teachers for up to six hours a day for ten months at a time. And while a teacher rarely  makes a life or death decision in his or her daily business, a teacher can have a large impact on the well being of a student.  So it seems to me, that an evaluation and improvement of a teacher is as important, in the long run, as an evaluation and development of a pilot.

The most meaningful evaluation of my work has not come from the standard performance appraisal I have had once every two to three years as mandated by my contract.  Most of these were monotonous affairs, where an administrator, who may know little about my area of curriculum and in some cases had far less experience in a classroom than I, filled out a form created out of a union negotiation.  Ultimately, this produced a performance appraisal that was as helpful to me as the food service on this plane is to its navigation.

Evaluations of me by students haven't been any better.  Some blow smoke at me as they look for a higher mark while others carry out vendettas on-line.  Helpful insight has been rare among parents as well, who know as much about teaching as I do about flying this plane.  After all, I've been on a plane before, so how hard can it be to fly it?

Setting aside the stale jokes about airline food and lost bags, there is a lot to admire about the aviation industry.  There are regular checks on pilots and most importantly, each professional demands the best out of the person next to them.  This is what the evaluation and improvement of teachers needs to be like and I have been lucky enough to work in such an environment.

The best evaluation, the most important professional development, has come in a workroom not much bigger than the flight deck of this aircraft.  The nine teachers in that windowless room have managed to create a professional work environment that encourages constant improvement.  We read widely outside of school.  We develop and share resources.   We talk constantly about our courses, techniques that work and over our weekends and holidays use a "group chat" to augment our teaching practices.  Finally we are in and out of each other's classrooms and  like the pilots here, we help each other make subtle course corrections as we go about our daily work.  We share all of these things and in so doing, we demand a better performance from each other.  This may not be the case in all schools but my hunch is that it is as common in education as it is for a plane to land successfully.

I have to return my tray to its upright position now and fasten my seat belt.  The lights of Toronto are below and with the care and attention of a  team of professionals, I will be on the ground shortly, heading into the last leg of my career.  I'm looking forward to seeing those teachers in that windowless room.

On Coaching

I really like the picture that accompanies this week’s blog.  It is a picture of two of my former players, one a coach at Humber College and the other an outstanding shooting guard on a very good high school team I coached a few years ago. They are celebrating a college national championship.

Coaching was a major part of my teaching life.  I figure I coached somewhere around 50 teams, over 1000 games and around 4000 practices.  I think I coached nearly 500 players.  I started coaching basketball because I loved the complexity of the game, as many of my former players know, I often called it "high speed, moving chess."  I enjoyed the intricacy of it and I enjoyed breaking it down and having each player master skills that made them part of a successful whole.  I felt like it was a moment in my work where I could see if my skills were as good as I thought they might be.

There's a fair bit of ego in that last statement.  When I first started, I saw it about me, my ability, my teaching, my coaching.  When I finished, I was a little better at letting the performance of the athlete be theirs and theirs alone.  While winning remained an important part of my coaching, at the end of my career, it became more than that.

 At the end now, I wonder about the sacrifices.  The countless hours in gyms and weight rooms, on road trips, driving vans full of tired or cranky or hungry  kids, was  it worth it?  This is an easy question to answer when my own children were on the teams.  I wouldn't change a thing of that but the other years? What about the countless seasons where I coached other people's children and was away from my own?  What about the sacrifice my wife made? She saw little of the reward and a lot of the pain.

Dutch thinker and historian, Rutger Bergman argues that in our modern economy many of the jobs we have are what he calls "bull shit jobs."  He goes on to define a "bullshit job" as one where even the person employed in such a manner sees it as "superfluous".  He lists PR advisers, Human Resource managers, telemarketers and most administrative jobs in both the private and public sectors.  I've been lucky, there's been very little bull shit in my job.  Some, but probably not enough to completely cover the bottom of your shoe.  My work has been meaningful in many ways that I hadn't predicted.

In a melding of the two sides of my work life, I now, more than ever, see basketball as a metaphor.  Faulkner in his essay "On Receiving the Nobel Prize" writes about writing as the only thing "worth the sweat and the agony."  He also worries that modern writers will write only of "victories without hope and worst of all without pity and compassion." He also is afraid of  "defeats in which no one loses anything of value."

High school basketball  gave me these things.  It gave me the chance at victories where I could teach compassion and the value of the agony and the sweat.  The insulting balm that non-participants use to sooth players and coaches after a loss is "it's just a game."  No it is not just a game.  It is a metaphor for our dedication to each other.  A symbol of what we are willing to sacrifice for each other.  It is covenant between a teacher and a player, each committing completely to the other and when we failed, we knew we had lost something of value.

Look at that picture again.  Coaching has given me this.

Reflections in a Window

I wonder if you've ever considered just how much music a high school coach has to listen to as he or she drives teams to and from games and tournaments.  If you ever did consider this, you would be far kinder to your teachers.  Over thirty years of teaching and coaching, believe me it adds up to a lot of music.

It hasn't always been pretty.  There's been some dry years.  There was Milli Vanilli on the way up to Algonquin Park for a camping trip. Three hours of  "Blame it on the Rain" does something to you.  Not quite sure what it does but it does something to you.  They don't even do that to detainees in Guantanamo.

The millennium wasn't much better.  Katy Perry's  Hot 'n Cold coming back from a tournament in Kingston was a difficult time.   "You're in and you're out, you're up and you're down".  You don't just shrug off insight like that.

Then there was Blind River (Old Neil sings about her ya know), who could forget Blind River.

I'm driving a van full of boys to Blind River. I don't know why it's Blind River...just accept that as our destination.  It's the early '90's and we leave the school at 6 am.  This basketball trip, like all basketball trips, past, present and future begins with the fight over who rides shotgun and by default, who controls the music. The '90's  is the decade of the mix tape and each player wants to take his turn playing his favourite music. This will be a trip dominated by The Tragically Hip.  We will listen to it in one form or another in one mix tape or another, on both legs of the journey.

When I check into the Mom and Pop motel after a long, long drive, the owner keeps looking over my shoulder and asking "Are they are good boys?".  I reassure him but he seems nervous.  And then I see what he sees; the van is rocking side to side, two wheels off the ground in beat, as the boys jam to Little Bones. The windows are fogged and they are singing at the top of their lungs.

It could be quite a weekend.

There's the games themselves, which are endless and relentless.  There's the host school, W.C. Eaket,  inviting all the teams to a dance on the Friday night.  There's me, in my pajamas, clearing every teenage girl in Blind River out of the motel parking lot after the dance.  There's my point guard developing a throat abscess, collapsing after the semi-final game.  There's his trip to a Sault Ste. Marie Hospital, in an ambulance, and my co-coach having to borrow a car and stay for two nights on a friend's couch in the Soo until the parents arrive.  To this day I have no idea how the coach got home.

There's the Innkeeper on Sunday morning asking "if I'd like to take the empties back to the beer store?"  It's one of the few times there is absolute silence in the van.

Then there's the knifing snowstorm home; a white knuckle drive along old highway 69.  We are asked to leave a Pizza Hut in Parry Sound because the boys have devoured the entire Hut. Serves them right to advertise "all you can eat for $5.99."  The van at this point is a rolling compost pile encrusted in road salt; food wrappers, empty cups and of course the unmistakable smell of adolescence having played four games and not having showered.  Did you know sometimes players think that not changing your socks brings you luck? True fact.

It is very late now.  The van is quiet.  Most of the players are asleep except for Matt in the shotgun seat.  He begins to talk.  They always begin to talk at this moment.  It's Matt this time but it could be Daniel or Katie or Pat or Kelly or Phil.  Each will stare out the window, while the music is low and will ask me questions or will tell me about his or her family or his or her dreams.  I won't say much, nod a bit, shift in my seat. They'll talk and talk, coming to conclusions about themselves that they will only find in the reflection of a window at night.

I drop the last player off.  It has been a twelve hour drive.   He turns to me,"Sir, you are so lucky."
"Why's that?"
"You get to do this every year."

Yes, yes I do.