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| Crossing Lake Champlain into New York State... |
Earn your Freedom.
6/29
Last week I found an assignment that I had started this past September, but never finished. This particular assignment had never made it to completion until the last day of school ten months later. The assignment was part of a learning expedition that one of the other teams in my building had done with their middle schoolers. In this learning expedition, called "Rules to Live By”, students focus on what rules, pontifications, or quotations that inspire them. As part of this expedition the staff was given an assignment - to place a rule, pontification, or quotation outside their doorway describing what “rules” we, as a staff, live by. The expectation was that the children would find inspiration from the staff… Nothing from my list, intentionally, made it past the idea phase.
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The New Rack.
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I did complete the assignment. I just never handed it in, or in this case, posted it outside my doorway. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to, I just didn’t find any of my rules, pontifications, or quotations fit for middle school consumption. As much as I tried, they just didn’t seem appropriate. Anyway, here’s my list: ”Don't be fooled, independence can be a curse", "Dreams are not always shared", “If you think conformity makes for an easier life - try it for a couple years and embrace the depression", "The Cinderella Complex will ruin your marriage", “Live, work, consume, die” (not an original), “No one cares what you think, you’re thirteen”, and "The norm is a track that anyone with any sense travels, and only eccentrics jump". Role modeling has always been a bit of a struggle for me, yet I continue to try…
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| Allegheny National Forest - 'for outdoor pastimes'. |
So last week, after the students had left the building, and the district had sufficiently tortured me with a senseless meeting, I posted the following “rule” outside my classroom door: "Earn your Freedom”. To me, that boils this whole education thing down to one clean and simple rule and it has been my motto for a long time.
After I left school I stopped by to visit with a long time friend. She would be my last visit before I hit the road west. I inherited her from my parents. She is a mother, grandmother, widow, former neighbor, and fellow adventurer. She also embodies two very important words: grace and dignity. This is not just my opinion, this is the consensus amongst my friends and family. She, much like my parents, has been a steady force in my community as long as I can remember. From my early years, I remember her laugh and my adventures with her two youngest children. During my late teens and twenties I remember her well warranted looks of distress. In my late twenties and thirties her seasonal absence - she and her husband of sixty-three years lived for over twenty years on a sailboat in the Caribbean. Even though I never saw them in the deep winter during their seasonal absence I remember hearing about their adventures.
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| Dark Star Orchestra happens to be visiting Kansas City, Kansas as well. Go figure? |
I also remember little details from their time at sea: their house being empty so we could throw parties, their son creating a data base for them so they could match the names and details of the various people that they met to the boats that they sailed, stories of failed propeller shafts and hazardous reefs, and their seasonal returns to Maine which were highlighted by amazing pop overs and home ground sausage.
Now she lives alone in a small, but comfortable, retirement community in Falmouth. And when I visit we talk of life. We talk about the benefits of drinking and smoking, how best to introduce freedom to teenagers ready to travel abroad, art, travel, food, and mutual friends both present and past. I listen carefully to her memories. She is a good friend who often reminisces of past adventures and regrets none of them. She too has earned her freedom. So after a couple years of planning, I am, once again on the road….
