The preoccupation with what should be is estimable only when the respect for what is has been exhausted. ~ Ortega Y Gasset
The wild grapes are out.
It’s the time when I am usually starting to experience that jumbled, panicked high of the approach of the first day of school, but this year seems different. The quote above catches it about right.
It’s in the book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which, completely by accident, I just finished back to back with Barbara Kingsolver’s lovely Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, and then watching the documentary Supersize Me. Holy crow. If you’re looking for a complete overhaul of your perspective on eating, that’s the way to do it. A nice summation of the philosophy of these three pieces can be found here. It all comes onto my radar when health issues in my immediate family have taken a serious turn. Adds a whole other dimension to this line of thinking.
Another unexpected summer event was a meditation practice that I fell into at our renowned local Zen Center, with a small group affiliated with Thich Nhat Hanh. Although I’m a rank beginner and a bit of a skeptic when it comes to this kind of thing, even the two or three times I’ve managed to sit has been a powerful experience. If Barbara Kingsolver and Michael Pollan ask the physical question (”How is your health– really?”), and my family’s challenges ask the mental/emotional question (”What’s important to you– really?”), then Zen asks the final, spiritual one: “Are you completely present in this moment– really?”
What does all this navel-gazing have to do with school? Well, primarily, I’m recognizing that succumbing to some ill-defined, self-gilding need to “prove myself” in this last year before tenure may very well throw the answers to all three of these questions out of whack, fueled with a Starbucks venti red-eye cappuccino. Or two hundred of them, rather. Phew.
So. I’ve started to think of the best approach to 08-09 as a quiet one, a kind of hibernation. More revisiting the foundations, less trying to save the world. The Art and Science of Teaching by Robert Marzano looks like it’s going to be the practical guide for this. It’s a bit pedantic/prescriptive for my tastes and I don’t agree with all of it; but it’s clean writing, meticulously researched, and will be much of the springboard for reflective blogging on basic practice.
As far as basics in theory go, I also hope to chart progress through my professional reading for the year: the 2004 Handbook of Adolescent Pyschology, which could crush a small pony.
Thus are the plans of mice and (wo)men. And when the spring rolls around, as it has always done, I’ll wander out of my cave, stretch my legs, and we’ll see what we will see.
