March 24 , 2006
The Big Dig
By Herm Card
Editor's note: This column chronicles Herm Card's musings in 2005-06, his last year of teaching before retirement. Future installments will be posted here at www.nysut.org/herm.
Add your comments and observations through e-mail to: retiring@nysutmail.org.
The "big dig" has begun.
With the aid of two students working to avoid potential detention time, I began to clean out my classroom. I straightened out two large cabinets and discarded enough extraneous paper to fill the large recycling barrel in the hallway twice.
This was remarkable for two reasons. One, it's only March, with the end of the school year still three faculty meetings away. Two, I was relatively ruthless, throwing away things I hadn't used for years, but rationalized keeping them by thinking that I might use them in the future, or that they might be good workshop material, or they might be a good backup in case my computer died. This last problem also assumed that my laptop, home computer, and several thumb drives and CDs where they are stored would also suffer catastrophic failure.
I opted to live on the edge, and recycled the papers. I also managed to organize a boxful of curriculum-based books to "donate" to our ELA/AIS and cross-curricular writing teachers without even thinking they might come in handy one day. Well, OK, I kept one copy of each.
The cleaning OUT process is difficult.
An informal inventory turned up more than 800 books in my room. There are also some 500 school books — my classroom reading library and sets of novels and short story and poetry anthologies.
There is also a large quantity of dictionaries, thesauruses, atlases, almanacs and other miscellaneous materials to provide background material for the study of language.
The other 300 hundred or so books are my personal collection, mostly to do with poetry, or the English language, but also plenty having to do with pirates, the American Civil War, and America from the 1930s through the 1970s, all geared toward providing historical perspective for novels we read about those times. There are a few baseball books, a great number of works about the act of writing and a few humor works. There are also a number of Zen-based volumes designed to help me be more reflective in my teaching, my writing and my behavior in general.
The only fiction in the whole bunch is in some James Herriot books that I loan to students who have a penchant for animals. (I have often been asked why I read so little fiction, being an English teacher, and I know that it is because I have a belief in eliminating the middleman as much as possible. One sign on my wall says, "Literature is a reflection of life." So why bother with turning fact into fiction just to make it more interesting?)
Dealing with the books themselves will be easy. The schoolbooks will remain on the shelves. The ones that have a chance of being read or will look good on my shelves will go home with me. I will sort through the personal books and give some to teachers and include some in my end-of-career "garage sale."
Along with the books, I will sell the personal property (and there is plenty of it) I have accumulated to make my teaching comfortable, and donate the proceeds to the local SPCA.
Here's a partial list, hitting some highlights:
- 1 traffic light/decibel meter
- 2 radio-controlled cars
- 2 containers of sidewalk chalk
- 2 bags of aquarium stones
- 1 microwave oven
- 1 dorm-sized refrigerator
- 2 color printers
- 1 scanner
- 6 bottles of anti-bacterial hand wash
- 23 volumes of American Heritage
- 12 2005 calendars
- 1 plush parrot, with voice
- 18 sets of scissors (15 right-handed, 2 left-handed, 1 universal)
- 280 " Reading is Magic" wrist bands
- 238 used transparencies
- 43 used pencils, 46 new pencils (unsharpened)
- 3 bud vases
- 4 poetry CDs
- 8 poetry cassettes
- 8 DVDs of classroom literature
- 4 VHS tapes of "Twilight Zone" episodes
Quite a collection.
Scrapbook
The cleaning out process turned up a number of items that might go nicely into a scrapbook — articles about me, brochures for workshops I have done, thank you notes from organizations and individual teachers, notes from parents (mostly good) and other interesting items related to my teaching career.
These bits and pieces seem to indicate a trail of successful endeavors over 30 years.
I say they might go in a scrapbook if such a scrapbook existed. I never kept one, for several reasons. The fact that I am less organized than keeping a scrapbook would require is one reason. And I never considered I would have ANY material, let alone enough material to make a scrapbook worthwhile.
Teaching is not the kind of job one enters into thinking that there will be evidence of success. Certainly, one does not anticipate honors or praise of the type for a scrapbook. It is not the type of job where one "works his way up the ladder" by steps that would merit recording. There is no ladder to work one's way up.
It is, ultimately, sort of a level job, potentially involving doing pretty much that same thing year after year. Fortunately, I've been allowed to insinuate a great deal of variety into the process — to approach tasks in a way that fits my own style rather than a style that was dictated to me.
Occasionally, these bits of my past came to the surface. Reading through them distracted me from the task at hand, but provided an interesting nostalgic break from the reality of cleaning and disposing. So, packrat that I am, whenever such a piece came my way, I threw it in a box (not always the same box) in case it would come in handy some day.
Of course, I know there are several such boxes at home already, waiting for me to go through them, organize them, figuring that given enough time, I might eventually get them all into one box, in case someone, maybe a grandchild, might someday find them interesting.
Interview
I was interviewed for the yearbook today. I believe it is a "feature" on those of us who are retiring. The questions were typical of the "how long have you been teaching?" type. I gave answers designed to be clever, witty, to the point, without rambling. Two questions, however, caused me to postpone the response until I could write it out. The interviewer thought that would be fine.
So, here are those responses.
To the question, "What will you take away from teaching?" my response is simple. I will take away far more than I put in. I will take away an energy built on common bonds, kindness, caring, pain, empathy, laughter, sharing, angst, trust, on the absolute wonderful energy of this building and the people within.
To the question, "What have you learned from your students?" my response is that I have learned far more than I have taught. Despite the poetry and creativity and expressive energy, there is still a literal sense to teaching. There is a path that must be followed and a goal that must be reached. I have learned that the path is not straight, the goal not always clear. I have learned that not everyone travels at the same pace, and not with the same stamina or commitment or ability. I have learned to wander a bit, perhaps leaving the path for a while just to see what other routes there might be. I have learned the power of caring, of seeing through their eyes, of reflecting on what our goals really are.
I have learned to teach.
Herm Card, a member of the Marcellus Faculty Association, teaches English at Chester S. Driver Middle School in Marcellus.
Herm Card