November 17, 2005

Energy transfers

By Herm Card

Editor's note: This column chronicling Herm Card's musings as he began this, his last year of teaching, launches a recurring special feature in New York Teacher. Watch for excerpts in future issues of the newspaper; full installments will be posted here at www.nysut.org/herm. Add your comments and observations through e-mail to: retiring@nysutmail.org.

According to my friends in the science department:

• Energy is the ability or capacity to do work.
• Potential energy is the capacity for doing work that a body possesses because of its position or condition.
• Energy can be neither created nor destroyed, but it can be changed from one form into another.

These are very scientific, practical definitions - neither poetic nor given to much interpretation. There are also myriad non-scientific definitions of energy that relate to spirit, creativity, compulsion, drive, etc. I am of the opinion that there is a middle ground that relates to me, to all teachers.

Of the energies I have experienced and expended in my life, the potential for doing work - the work of teaching, the work of writing, the work of motivating, the work of caring - all have come from the position or condition in which I operate from day to day. This position, this teaching position, has put me, for 30 years, in the center of the most amazingly energy-based situation one could imagine. My immediate surroundings are inhabited by some 850 students in grades four through eight, and 100 or so adults, all of whom are focused on one grand goal: successful public education on an infinite number of levels with an infinite number of possibilities.

Flying monkeys

For all practical purposes, scientific or otherwise, we educators are trying to constantly change energy from one form to another, turning their potential energy, and ours, into work energy.

I had a conversation recently with my former assistant superintendent, Dave Taddeo, who retired a couple of years ago and is working as a consultant in our district. Dave was an outstanding administrator and a New York State English Council educator of excellence. He is a lover of Bob Dylan's music and a kindred spirit. Above all, he is a man of great enthusiasm and energy.

I told him that I was writing this series and how energizing it is. He said that his last year in education was his best, as I have planned mine to be. He told me of the amazing freedom and energy in a "last year."

We will both be playing flying monkeys in a faculty presentation of The Wizard of Oz, come February. What this has to do with retirement may not be easily seen, but it has a great deal to do with the energy of the process. There was a time when the idea of playing a flying monkey would be totally ridiculous. Now, it is only minimally ridiculous, and in a pleasing sort of "what have I got to lose" way.

Another curiosity of this last year in teaching is that the finality creates its own odd sort of energy, something of a daily one-too-many-espressos buzz, possibly brought on by one too many espressos, but more likely by the need to fit everything in by the end of June.

Part of this energy, deep in the recesses of my brain, has to do with the freedom of the "What are they going to do, fire me?" idea of one's last year on the job. Of course, I would never entertain that as a serious philosophy, since I have always maintained a substantial degree of professionalism and the bearing that goes with it.

What that does allow for is the freedom, and ensuing energy, to experiment, to take risks that success and perhaps a bit of complacency have precluded.

Two years ago, we shifted from classroom observations to an Annual Professional Performance Review. I was amazed at how many people, myself in particular, were eager to create entire projects for themselves rather than simply pull out the same lesson plans, year after year. (Mine was "symbolism," which sustained me through four principals and five assistant principals.)

In creating my APPRs, my underlying goal has been to create something that would be useful in the future, "next year" as it were, something that would create some energy for my teaching, something useful for my classroom.

The APPR that I put together this year relates to the fact that this is my last year in the classroom, yet is not tacitly focused on that. It is an anthology of poetry my students have written in the last 12 years, an ambitious project designed to ensure that I stay in motion while my students are expending their own substantial share of energy.

Pursuing this type of major endeavor may seem a little strange, considering that I am trying to decelerate, but it is designed to keep me doing the things I have always done by keeping me aware of just what it is that I am doing. As convoluted as that seems, given that I should be slipping quietly out the door, it makes perfect sense to me.

My theory is that it will allow me to move at full speed and maximum energy toward a goal that, by itself, is a stopping point. When the anthology is finished, so will that 12-year-long chapter. Though an ending point for me, it will be only one of my students' creative endeavors, a conversion of my energy to theirs, energy that, I hope, will gain momentum as they move forward.

This year, as always, I have created new material and improved old work. Whenever I hit the "save" button, I involuntarily ask myself why; what am I saving it for? The answer varies, but usually it involves future workshops, a possible book, or something to pass on to younger teachers.

The real answer, most likely, is that I enjoy doing it because it is energizing and creative. It keeps me connected to what I do - energy converted from one form to another.

The irony (my favorite literary element) is not lost on me. I am energized daily and fighting the tendency to remind myself that "this is the last time I'll …" partly because superstition enters into it and partly because I'm looking into a future that will continue to make such material useful.

Newton's First Law of Motion states that an object at rest tends to stay at rest and an object in motion tends to stay in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force. I am a firm believer in this law, and its meaning to me in a greater than literal sense. There actually is something poetic to it, an intriguing metaphor about the application of energy to move forward - the goal of teaching, the goal of day-to-day life.

Also, according to the laws of physics as I understand them, in order for something that has momentum to come to a stop, there must be a period of deceleration before the actual stopping takes place. This disregards, as I read it, situations like a skier slamming into a tree.

I am not very good at the slowing down part, but I also don't want June to be the tree and me the skier. On the other hand, I need to keep in mind that there must be an ending point to this part of the teaching business.

So I am approaching it as I always have, looking at the end of the year as something of a holding pattern - previously, a breather before school restarts in September, now a segue into the next expenditure of energy.

Herm Card, a member of the Marcellus Faculty Association, teaches English at Chester S. Driver Middle School in Marcellus.