"... the brightest, the most imaginative, the most committed ..."

It’s the LAST DAY OF SCHOOL!  Which means that, as I write, my students are checking out of the building, and heading off into the bright, warm, sparkling freedom of summer.  I’ll join them shortly, but not without one final project completed in my classroom, overlooking my sea of desks.  It’s the project I’ve been procrastinating for the past 2 solid years as my creative space and time were hijacked by lesson planning, grading, reteaching strategies, website updates and parent emails.  I can now officially say, from personal experience, that teaching is hard.  I always knew it would be, but in a different way.  I never anticipated the livid parent reactions to students who earned a less than perfect grade, or the rampant acceptance (and even encouragement) of cheating.  I somehow missed the memo on how assigning anything of value will result in hours upon hours of horrid grading time.  Teaching is difficult.  And I’ve finally found a hero worthy of representing the time and energy it takes to be a teacher … a good teacher.

Meet Miss Stacy.  I know.  She’s fictional, and therefore, never experienced the reality of teaching in a modern age, but when my world sunk under a barrage of parent or student attacks, she was my muse.  For those of you not lucky enough to recognize her happy face on sight, she is the teacher from Anne of Green Gables (who I’m sure will inspire her own imaginative post in the future).   When things get hard, I can be dramatic, rather like Anne.  But when it's teaching related I can always count on a good pep talk from Miss Stacy to get me back on track.  Things I love and learned from Miss Stacy:

1.        Have high expectations.  Miss Stacey said that she wanted to look back on each class as the brightest, the most imaginative, and the most committed.  Despite feedback from the rest of the world, teenagers are smarter and are more capable than we think they are.  They can do hard things and will rise to expectations.  But it takes the brightest, most imaginative, and most committed of teachers to see through the teenageryness.

2.       Teach by experience.  One of my favorite scenes (in the movie at least) is of her charging up a hill side with her students in tow.  She taught them about nature by taking them to nature.  She taught about physical health by doing exercises with them.  And she did it all with a smile on her face.

3.       Have confidence in yourself.  It takes courage to start new classes and expectations in a place where change is rarely accepted.  She may have been scared, but it never showed in her demeanor.  She knew that what she was doing was good, and even though I now know she probably had some terrible students and parents who threatened her sanity, she taught for the Annes – the ones who were there to learn and grow.  And do you want to know something cool?  There are Annes in the world.  And they are awesome.  And they are worth the effort.

4.       “Tomorrow is always fresh with no mistakes in it … well with no mistakes in it yet.”  If things don’t work out today, it’s okay because tomorrow is new.  You don’t know what it holds.  You will probably make mistakes, but as long as you learn from them, they are good.  You will probably have to face lots of change, but as long as you grow, that change is good too.

Yay for teaching.  Yay for teachers who are still brave enough to do hard things.  Yay for the Miss Stacys of the world.  And yay for a much needed Summer Break!

Statistic: 620,000

I am a connoisseur of refined things. Things like microwave popcorn and Christmas lights and children’s books. You know, things that matter. It was in one of these children’s books, that I discovered the subject of this next post, a young man named Pinkus Aylee.

Allow me to paint a picture for you:

“The twilight of evening had begun to gather as a precursor of the coming blackness of midnight darkness that was to envelop a scene so sickening and horrible that it is impossible for me to describe it. "Forward, men," is repeated all along the line. A sheet of fire was poured into our very faces, and for a moment we halted as if in despair, as the terrible avalanche of shot and shell laid low those brave and gallant heroes, whose bleeding wounds attested that the struggle would be desperate. Forward, men!

‘The earth is red with blood. It runs in streams, making little rivulets as it flows. Occasionally there was a little lull in the storm of battle, as the men were loading their guns, and for a few moments it seemed as if night tried to cover the scene with her mantle. The death-angel shrieks and laughs and old Father Time is busy with his sickle, as he gathers in the last harvest of death, crying, More, more, more! while his rapacious maw is glutted with the slain.”
(Click here to see the source of this eloquence which is definitely not mine. It’s a true historic treasure, and the story of a real life hero, definitely worth your time, but I digress).

The middle of the Civil War, arguably the bloodiest war in all American history. And the scene in which Pinkus Aylee first met Sheldon Curtis. Both boys of about 15, and originally meant only to be drummer boys or flag bearers, but the butchery of the war forced them to fight. After one battle, Sheldon was left by his company with a severe leg wound when he was found by a “boy with skin the color of mahogany,” his soon-to-be friend and savior, Pink.

Pink took Sheldon, now dubbed Say, home to his mother, still living in her old slave quarters, who fed and loved the young man from Ohio back to health. As the war became more and more desperate, the boys formed a bond closer than family.

Despite Say’s fears of returning to the war, Pink insisted they rejoin their companies. They had to rid the land of the “sickness” of slavery and he would do anything, even fight with rocks and sledgehammers to contribute.

By the end of the war, Pink gave up everything. He lost his mother to marauders, his freedom to a Confederate camp, and his very life at the Confederate gallows. But almost immediately his acts of bravery disappeared in the wash of statistics batted around the Oval office.

Are you ready for my favorite part of the story: It’s all true! He was one of those thousands of brave individuals whose story was lost to time and history, only to rise generations later in a children’s book written by Sheldon Curtis’ great-granddaughter.

Say made it out of the war alive. He was rescued from Andersonville, one of the worst of the Confederate POW camps, and went on to get married and have a family. But he always remembered Pink and what he sacrificed for his friends and country. He told his experience to each successive generation and now Pink’s story is available where millions can hear it.




Can you imagine fighting in a war where your military leaders advised you to not shoot until you could see “the whites of your enemies’ eyes?” In a war where your ability to load a musket faster than the man across from you was the difference between life and death? In a war where the people around you are dying so fast that they started making their own rudimentary dog-tags in the hope that their bodies could at least be identified? That was reality for thousands of Americans. Most of them, like Pink, who fought, sacrificed, and died for something bigger than themselves, but who will never receive the honor they should. Pink helps me remember this population of lost heroes who all deserve to be remembered. We might not have their stories, but we have their statistics. So next time you read the seemingly emotion-less fact that over 620,000 people died in the Civil War don’t let it just slide past without recognition. Grab hold and try to remember. Try to picture that many faces, that many stories, and that many sacrifices. Try to remember and don’t let yourself forget.

"Show a Little Backbone Will, Ya?"

I know. After I get you all set up thinking this would be a culturally uplifting place to visit, I go and start with this. But I just couldn’t resist. It is now my honor to introduce my first heroic find:



Push play on the video to experience just part of Dr. Jones' Epicness.


He is who I want to be when I grow up. A historian with enough determination to know exactly what he wants, with enough backbone to risk his life to protect ancient artifacts and with enough coordination to make ridiculous stunts look easy. He is the perfect blend of humor and common sense. Plus, he wears a super neat hat.

But the best part of Indiana Jones is his weakness, one that I relate to on so many levels it’s not even funny. Snakes. He hates snakes, thus I feel justified in hating them as well. He faces everything else without breaking a sweat, but isn’t it just a great truth of life that your greatest fear will be the one thing you face over and over again. He can avoid countless booby traps, swing over chasms of death, and outrun a boulder bent on crushing him to pulp without a single negative expletive. But when he freaks out to find a snake in his chair he is accused of not showing enough backbone.

I think we all feel like there are days when we have to sneak into enemy camps, decipher our way through indistinguishable problems, avoid countless explosions and still we end the day by being flung into a snake pit. It’s on those days that we can’t afford to roll over and give up. Instead, hoist yourself to your feet, grab a torch and “wave it at anything that slithers.” We are never trapped into a certain fate unless we allow ourselves to believe we are. Truth from my main man, Indiana Jones.

Prologue

Socrates penned his “dialogues.” Shakespeare created his “sonnets.” Ovid dreamed up “the heroides.” And despite all our modern progress we choose to name our personal musings “blogs.” I suppose there are worse words out there, but I think I can safely say that “blogging” wouldn’t have even made my top fifty choices for a creative title.

Yet, here I am, in all my nearly graduated glory taking a step that has practically become a cultural rite of passage: creating a blog. Something I swore I would never do unless driven to by a conviction so strong it forced its way out in word form splattered across my computer screen. That newly found conviction can be summed up in one word: heroes.

Life changes. Problems come and go. And sometimes the heroes you loved as a child no longer seem to help. As my days of forced research come to an end, I’ve decided to create a new research project just for myself. One that I can love and nurture with all my heart. One that I believe can make a difference, if not in other’s lives, at least in mine. I’ve decided to research people, and have created this as a place to remember those I deem worthy of the title: hero. I plan to record their individual songs here as a reservoir of courage, wisdom, and strength for when my own is spent. A place where, as Longfellow said, “a forlorn and shipwreck’d brother, seeing, can take heart again.”

Fair Warning: this means anything is up for grabs. I’m going to pull people from anywhere I find them. This includes history, literature, fact, fairytale, myth … because I believe that nothing is more motivating than real experience that borders on the fantastic or more inspirational than the fantastic that borders on real experience. So here it goes, the research project that will either flop or fly … one that will either carry me through hard times or fling me into insanity. Either way it will be an adventure.