More Resolve

Resolution: resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.

This is my second round with this Franklinian virtue, and it’s more difficult than my first go at it thirteen weeks ago. The time of year makes it difficult: April and May are the months when my mistakes as a teacher are made plain. The end of the year looms, as do the high-stakes tests and the concerns about the future. Almost no one is present in the moment – there’s too much left to be done and not nearly enough time to do it. Students are most needy in the spring. Some are concerned with grades. Others are overwhelmed preparing to move to another city, country, and school. A few are learning that their psycho-social issues are not just phases and need to be dealt with directly. When plans are made for this time of year back in the fall, there’s rarely an accounting for how emotionally taut the school climate is in the spring.

Amidst this swirling and second-guessing that is typical in Semester 2, tragedy emerged. One of my colleagues lost a long battle with cancer last weekend. She’d been on leave since December. She was intensely private; she did not want people to see her suffer. I didn’t know her well, but she mattered to the students, parents, and other teachers in this community. She fought hard to live, and then let go when it was time. The empty space she left is noticeable, and my school officials made space in the school day to memorialize her on Monday, and again on Wednesday as they delayed the beginning of classes three hours so community members could attend her funeral ceremony. I have never been in a community that has made such clear gestures about what matters in a time such as this.

The Hindu image of the vessel has emerged several times this week. One of the beliefs handed down from the Bhagavad Gita, which perhaps the most important sacred Hindu text, is that the human body serves as a carrier of life force. My colleague, for example, literally carried life from her mother to her daughter. It was also apparent that she metaphorically carried life force to her students and the families she engaged with over the twelve years she worked at my school. She mattered to a lot people; she left her mark on others by filling them with knowledge, inspiration, and pride in their own work. Vessels are more fragile, though, than the contents they carry, and when she recognized that her body had become too ravaged from her illness to continue she finally accepted that with the grace with which she lived.

One of the silly things that we adults in the privileged world do to our young people is suggest – so often that we all start to believe it – that we can just decide what we will do with our lives. Implicit in our messaging is the fiction that if we have enough will power we can create the things we want, just as we want them. The reality, as I see it, is that this world view leaves no space for this thing called life, which can include suffering and setbacks that severely alter our priorities and our course. It doesn’t take into account the quality of our own vessel, nor the preciousness of the contents inside it. AP tests start next week, IB exams follow, and seniors have their final assessments the week after. Then come Finals for the rest of the students. All of this “matters” to the machines of college and the future. But none of it matters as much as making space to acknowledge that these things we are studying – arts and letters, sciences and mathematics – are only creations to help us make sense of both the vessel and the life force. It pains me, for example, that I feel pressure to use every moment of limited time in our last day together with my AP students to prep them for The Test, when what feels right is to read some of the wonderful pieces of literature devoted to understanding what happens when this all ends, and how death affects the living. The right thing to do is clear to me, but this is a data-driven world now, and months from now the scores for my students will stand on their own. Perhaps I’ll be judged by those scores, perhaps not. Perhaps my students will get to explain why they were so distracted during exam week, but I doubt it. It may take them years to realize that these tests are a fiction that don’t matter, at least not nearly as much as learning to live, which is what my departed colleague manifested better than anything else.

I didn’t know Indrani well, but I miss her.

So back to Resolution and performing “what I ought.” More time thinking about the vessel. Fewer assessments.