The other reason is that I got called to sub on the second day of school. I was a substitute teacher, when I could, for half days last year (while my daughter was in school). With her starting Kindergarten this year, I'm available for full days (when I'm available), but I never expected to get called the first week (teachers tend to want to be there to get the year started well). One of the local schools has a teacher out on maternity leave and they were having trouble finding a long-term replacement and needed some extra help in the classroom.
It was great - same kids every day for a couple weeks - students I had subbed with pretty frequently last year. Smooth sailing. Then the school went through two long-term subs in about four days without much hope on the horizon. I got offered the chance to take over the class for two months, so I thought I'd give it a go.
Listen, I only signed up to sub last year because they were short. I wanted to fill a need and help the public school system, which has become the community space our family is pretty heavily invested in. I've served on district committees. I try to make most school board meetings. It makes sense. I knew the kids; I'm ok with seventh grade math. Shoot, I've lived with a middle school teacher for more than a decade.
Despite having lived with a middle school teacher for more than a decade, I just simply had no idea the skills and abilities one really needs to teach. I don't know many people who have more respect and admiration for public school teachers than me - but I gained a whole lot more over the weekend. Trying to get a handle on everything required to even take over a class for a few weeks was literally overwhelming. I couldn't sleep,
riddled with anxiety (not something to which I'm prone - it took me some time to even realize what was happening).
I also learned the difference between someone who can teach and a teacher. I've done Sunday School classes and tutoring - I've even taught actual classes in the ministry training program on two districts. It's a lot different getting a class of kids through the day and being a consistent,
positive presence there with everything on your shoulders.
I knew this. Of course I knew this - but knowing something intellectual or through observation is a lot different than knowing through experience.
I'm a wimp, for the most part. I don't tend to attempt things I'm not certain I can complete. Risk is not my thing. However, when I'm pretty convinced something has to be done, I buckle down and do it. There aren't a lot of things in my life that I've attempted and failed. Yes, that's because I'm cautious, but it's also because I'm a pretty quick learner and I'm good with systems and organization.
In the end, I probably could've done it. I could've taken my lumps, endured sleepless nights, learned from my many, many inevitable failures and possibly survived. My sanity might not have been intact, but it could've technically been done. I opted out though. There's a sense of shame in that. One, I don't like to admit defeat. I've gotten less obsessed with winning over the years, but I'm still darn competitive. This feels like a loss to me, and that's a big ego hit. I also feel like I'm letting people down who work hard and a tremendously difficult job. My not being there created extra work and more headaches for people who have an impossibly tough assignment to begin with. That stinks.
It was a good lesson in limits, though. Just because I can do something or something needs to be done, doesn't mean I have to do it. I probably should've known this was a bad idea from the beginning. I'm not a teacher; I don't really want to be one. I can fake it through a day or two -
which is really useful and helpful in its own right - but that's about it. So many great people have a passion for it, and skills to be really good - and, despite my close proximity to one of them, I'm not sure I ever truly appreciated that, certainly not as much as I do now.
My life is not where I thought it'd be. I'm not upset at all; I really like my life. It's just that I don't really have a job description.
I find great joy in being "of use," although I never know from one season to the next exactly what or where that will be. I keep trying to jump into new thing where I'm needed, but I learned over the last few weeks that perhaps a little more self-reflection might be important in figuring out where that is.
Even more so, other people might have a different perspective of what I am (or should be) capable of doing. I need to trust myself a little more. It's a difficult balance between challenging one's self (or accepting the challenge of others) and knowing one's self well enough to say 'no.' Hopefully I got a little better at that this week - and maybe it'll mean I can make more of a difference in the right places moving forward.
Anyway, we should be back to a better posting schedule now - at least until basketball games start November 15th.
Reading the article immediately made me think of Israel. Both are struggles over how we handle land and, more specifically, how we claim and identify with a particular piece of land.
It's fairly foreign to me. Delaware is the tenth state in which I've received mail in my life. I like to be comfortable in my home, but I don't altogether mind moving from place to place. I've sort of had to be good at it.
Don't get me wrong, I want to stay where I am. I'm happy in Delaware and ten states is more than enough. At the same time, if I found myself priced out of the community or driven away at gunpoint, I might be upset for a day or two, but I'd get over it. I'm not at all connected to place in that way.
Some people are.
What does it mean for someone to be connected to a place? The complaintants in San Francisco argue they know no other neighborhood, something should be done to allow them to stay. Our economic system generally states that housing is sold for market value and if a lot of people want to live in a small space, you either have to build up or raise the prices.
But is there something deeper than economics at play?
For all the reasons I mentioned above, I never really got the theological significance to the land in my Old Testament studies. I recognize it's importance and the ways in which Hebrew society and religion centered around this concept of land - it's the same motivation that makes Israel a difficult place to figure out today - but I never really got it. I have no comparison.
Maybe San Francisco is a start.
I've never been to San Francisco. I think I only know a half dozen people who even live within 100 miles of it. At the same time, I can sympathize with people forced to relinquish part of their identity. I've never been associated with a place all that much. When we moved to Colorado I was "the kid from back east" with all the cultural and social oddities that came with it. I went to college in Boston in 1999 as "the kid from Colorado;" I was the only one on campus. I wasn't a fan of being lumped in with my (temporary) location.
But I can understand a little those people who have no choice, but to associate themselves with a place. If you've never been anywhere else, or you spent significant time in one place, it is part of you. I suppose that's why so many place names in the US mirror those from the old country. My identity, in a way, has been formed as a man without a country, so to speak. In the absence of a place, I'm defined by no place.
I think, and I'm not sure I like this intellectually even as I believe deeply in its truth, that our places do influence us in profound ways, ways that cannot and should not be so callously disregarded.
I spent six years in Vermont. Any Vermonter will tell you, that's about six generations too few to be a "real" native. Yet the nuance of place has forever seared Vermont to my psyche. I still expect winter to start in October and last until May, even though it's been 20 winters since that's been true in my life. I can only eat pancakes with real maple syrup (in a pinch I'll take stuff from Quebec or New Hampshire, but not New York!). As much as I've moved and changed and adapted and been shaped by all sorts of varied geographies and experiences, the place in which I lived during many of my formative years was, in fact, formative, in profound and in real ways.
I can only imagine that runs deeper and thicker and more important with greater years and longer family connections.
I wonder if our reluctance, as a society, to attach real, permanent connection to place comes from our unseemly history. A lot of us (our genetic forbears, anyway) gave up place to come here. It was a sacrifice of identity to forge a new one. Those people were brave. Unfortunately, part of that new identity meant ripping other people from their connection to place by force; it meant killing others and taking their place. Our historical connection to location-based identity is a mixed bag, at best.
What does it say if we grant San Franciscans the right of connection to place, given our past? What does it say for Israel and Palestine - when even the historical chain of occupation is convoluted and likely indecipherable?
I don't think any of us will argue we have a right to live wherever we want. If we did, there would be even more structurally questionable dwellings dangling precariously from the cliffs of southern California. But I wonder if we don't have to accept a person's right to live where they have been living.
I know sometimes unforeseen forces make people move. Rivers change course, volcanoes happen, we dig all the natural gas out from under a neighborhood thus sinking it a dozen feet below sea level in the midst of a terribly hurricane prone marshland, you know, natural disasters and the like.
Perhaps it's time we recognize (or, I suppose, re-recognize, since our ancestors understood this far better than we probably ever will) that place matters. When people lose their identity-defining place, we must mourn. I don't think I'd go so far as to continually rebuild Jersey Shore beach-houses with federal money simply because three generations have vacationed there every summer, but I, for one, must take into account the profound effect of place on people.
For better or for worse, you are where you live - and I think we can all take that a bit more seriously going forward.
One of the things I love about this world God made for us is that things don't have to be real to be real. There's no truth to the fact that this plaque or the man it memorializes ever existed. However there's great truth in the idea of making and placing a plaque commemorating the local curmudgeon.
This fictional park can stand in for any community, any place where people gather and live their lives together, whether intentionally or not. Roger Bucklesby hated the park, but he was an essential part of it. He may have wished, loudly, that the park didn't exist and that its inhabitants were sitting at home... or dead (we can make our fictional Roger Bucklesby as mean and angry as we'd like - I picture him as a retired, near-penniless member of the British upper-class, always wearing a dapper suit, a bowler hat, and a ghastly frown).
What the plaque represents, however, is how essential he was to the ecosystem of the park he loathed. His animosity must have been public or else no one would be able to memorialize it. There's some truth to the idea that visceral hatred like Roger's helps to bring out the positive aspects of the park experience for those who may otherwise take it for granted.
We are all involved in lots of communities - families, workplaces, teams, coffee shops, bowling alleys, churches and yes, parks. We all know those people who like to complain and drag their feet, those people who we're not sure why they stick around. But they are around. Roger, may God rest his soul, was around. They participate. Even if it's begrudgingly or menacingly or agrivatingly. They're present.
It's good to remind ourselves that everyone has a place. Everyone deserves to and must be included. In our efficiency obsessed world we often steamroll the slackers and the malcontents as useless for reaching the goal. Sometimes we steamroll the weak and the slow, when they really don't deserve it.
Everyone has a place. It's often those who seem most out of place who can best remind us for that fact.
