Trying to Name That Which Doesn’t Change
By Helen Sadler
By Helen Sadler
I feel sorry for my cousin in Asheville. She has been a
teacher for over 30 years, mostly in kindergarten, and always in a private, not
public school, environments. When she and her husband moved to Asheville
ten years ago, she found employment at the private school, a place
that was perfect for her sensibilities and approaches as a teacher. She was so
proud showing us the school and telling us about it when we first visited in
2006. Even as a veteran teacher, she was still taking expensive self-paid
Waldorf trainings to improve her techniques. Fully committed.
But all that has changed.
In the last couple of years a new principal came with a new
vision: sell the brand. The teachers’ jobs became one of standardizing
everything they do, and documenting everything so a straight line from A to B
in teaching could be established, documented, written as curriculum, and sold. My cousin could not
stomach the documentation process, so took herself out of a lead teacher
position, and accepted the lower-paying position of assistant. Her love for
teaching, her ideas of what it can be sit locked up inside her as she watches
the profession she loves sift away in the name of standardization.
Change.
I took the title of this essay from a poem by Naomi Shihab
Nye. Her poem is a bit of debate between friends about what doesn’t change. It
begins:
Roselva says the only
thing that doesn’t change
is train tracks. She’s
sure of it.
The train changes, or
the weeds that grow up spidery
By the side, but not
the tracks.
This line of thinking finds its rebuttal in the second
stanza:
Pete isn’t sure. He
saw an abandoned track
near Sabinas, Mexico,
and says a track without a train
is a changed track.
The metal isn’t shiny anymore.
The wood is split and
some of the ties are gone.
The conclusion to all of this is that change is always happening,
whether we see it or not. It is happening even when we are completely unaware.
When we think of change, we don’t think of the kind of
change we don’t see, like stars exploding or railroad tracks losing their
shine. We think of changes in our work situation, in our families, in our
environment. It is these changes that threaten us and cause us to rebel in
angry, controlling, and fearful ways. We resist. We fight. We can’t help it.
Buddhists teach of impermanence – it is one of the key
principles in Buddhist philosophy. We are taught to look at everything as mere
phenomenon that is ever-changing – since there is no permanence, no reason to
get pulled into suffering.
It takes practice to view the world this way. Fortunately,
we get a lot of opportunities – like every minute of every day.
Pema Chodron in her book When
Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times, explains it this way:
Impermanence is the
goodness of reality. Just as the four seasons are in a continual flux, winter
changing to spring to summer to autumn; just as the day becomes the night,
light becoming dark becoming light again – in the same way, everything is
constantly evolving. Impermanence is the essence of everything. It is babies
becoming children, then teenagers, then adults, then old people, and somewhere
along the way dropping dead. Impermanence is meeting and parting. It’s falling
in and falling out of love. Impermanence is bittersweet, like buying a new
shirt and years later finding it as part of a patchwork quilt (60).
Everything becomes something else. Life does not move in our
ways, but in the ways that it is meant to move. The trick is to see this as
“the goodness of reality” – but, oh how we fight that thought. How can it be good if it isn’t the way
I want it?
Because we don’t know everything, and God, we hate to admit
that!
One of my favorite sayings from the 1990’s was this: Resign
your position as Manager of the Universe.
Once done, can be freeing.
I found this sentiment in the article I read and wrote about the other day. Singer Ashley Monroe says she doesn’t understand country radio,
but that she has pursued her dreams in the face of it, even as it hurt. She
chose to look at the goodness of reality, rather than fight it.
It was a good lesson for me, and spoke to my life. The
players in the larger scheme of things – in standardizing education to programming
radio play – have an agenda. Losing our mind or our dreams over their decisions
doesn’t hurt them one bit. We need to keep on keeping on, even in the face of
circumstances we find distasteful or even disgusting.
When I read about Ashley, I found myself curious about my
own evolving journey. What did I think I wanted as a teacher? Have my dreams
come true? I immediately knew that
many of my dreams have come true. Many of the outward signs anyway.
But inwardly, I’m not there yet.
I pulled out a reflective journal I had to keep for a
graduate level class that coincided with my first semester of teaching. The first
thing I found was a prompt the professor had given us. We were to write about a
teacher that influenced us. Here is my response, unedited from the scratchings
in the journal:
Written 8/28/04
In my 8th
grade year, I had a nun for a teacher who was mentally ill. By October they had
taken her out of the classroom, and we embarked on a long series of
substitutes. I am not exaggerating when I say that by early May we had had 23
different teachers, many of who were no more than warm bodies in the room.
By April, we had to be
moved downstairs away from the other 8th grade classes because they
had finally decided to have the principal be our teacher and she needed to be
close to the office. This made our class feel even more inferior because we
were with the “baby grades” on the first floor.
But in the month of
May they found someone to help with the class for a couple of weeks. Her name
was Karen Sawchek, a recent college of education graduate whose mother taught
at our school. She was young, vibrant, and beautiful. But that is not what I
remember most. What she did was connect to us immediately. On the first day,
she let us spill our guts about how rough our year had been, how we were looked
down on by the other 8th graders, and how depressed we felt. She
LISTENED and not only did she listen, she helped us form a plan to help us out
of our rut, and then went to bat for us.
She arranged a time
for us to use the auditorium for an afternoon, and we went to work producing a
show to showcase our talents. I don’t remember much except that everyone could
choose exactly what he or she wanted to do. An example I remember was a boy
named Philip reciting “Casey at Bat.”
Those left over (like me) were grouped together to put on a mimed skit.
It was performed against the Beatles “Hey Jude,” and showed a class slowly
going out of control as the music ascended. At the end of the song, the class
settled back down. It was the story of our year, and even though it was pretty
abstract and I didn’t really get it at the time, it felt powerful and wonderful
to perform for the other 8th grade classes – something only we got
to do.
Of all the teachers I
had K-12, she stands out the most. I draw more inspiration from two weeks with
Karen Sawchek than I did from all my other teachers combined. Karen Sawchek is the reason I teach
middle school today. Her example showed me that young adolescents need someone
to listen and take them seriously. She is the teacher I want to be.
Every single time I read that last paragraph, I get a huge
lump in my throat. You see, this was one of the most important lessons of my
entire life. It is what I constantly strive for as a teacher. It is what I am
once again committing myself to this year.
I don’t think of Karen Sawchek every day, but maybe I
should. She is that little piece
living in me and driving me, even when I’m not aware of it. I have no
idea what she did for the rest of her life, but I can feel pretty certain she
touched a lot of lives.
Finding my story this week was like finding that favorite
shirt in a patchwork quilt. It is there – I just have to see it. Remember it.
Touch it sometimes.
And here I discover I can
name that which doesn’t change: the goodness of reality.
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| The stained glass panels displayed here were created by my uncle based on quilts our grandmother had made. |
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