A Different Kind of August: Inputs and Outputs

So already, it's that part of August when the dates are still in the single digits. In Massachusetts, where schools generally open their doors to students after Labor Day, the earliest days of August usually signal that there's plenty of summer left before the inevitable return. Still, one of my Pilot School colleagues once remarked that for teachers, August is like a month of Sundays: that metaphorical Monday hangs in the air like a sheet on a clothesline, snapping now and then on the breeze to remind even the most summer-immersed teachers that fall's out there and coming.

Meanwhile, Facebook is awash with indicators that despite August's relative newness, summer vacation is ending for many of my educator colleagues who teach in other states. Though they're completely dedicated teachers who express excitement and optimism about the upcoming school year, surrendering the freedom of summer--or maybe it's just the difference of summer, since many of them work as well as play during the summer months--makes some of them sad and anxious. Great teaching always involves an intense outpouring of self and energy, and teachers hope that their reserves of both, cultivated and stockpiled over the slow stretch of summer, will see them through what will sometimes feel like one more endless school year.

It's a new kind of August for me as a still novice Cambridge Public Schools retiree. Or maybe it's really an old kind of August for me: the last full month of summer is feeling a lot like it did when I was in grade school, when the imminence of September was a last-week-of-August realization. I haven't experienced an August as stretching out before me, long and lazy, for a very long time.

Perhaps this August seems particularly peaceful and promising because it's following right on the heels of an exciting, intense, and demanding July. I had official teaching and learning responsibilities three of July's four weeks: as a session leader in the Right Question Institute's East Coast Teaching Students to Ask Their Own Questions Summer Institute during the second full week, as a mini-course co-presenter at the Project Zero Classroom Summer Institute during the third full week, and as a learning group co-facilitator at the Project Zero Future of Learning Summer Institute during the last week. These faculty stints were punctuated by a beautiful wedding, some good visits with old friends, and several exquisite sunsets. It was a month that took and gave a lot of energy.

Now that July is in the rear view mirror, I am recognizing that there's so much I want to think about, read about, and talk about that I've encountered through these summer institutes, particularly the Future of Learning Summer Institute. I'm also realizing that I'm tired from the intensity of the last few weeks and eager to relax and recharge. It seems like a good time to recognize and keep track of what I'm wondering, what I want to learn about. But it doesn't seem urgent, necessary, or maybe even advisable to plunge in right now. Frankly, I've got some goldenrod to watch. I don't want to miss August. 

And this year, in September, for the first time in several decades, I will have time--and choice. At the moment, I have no idea about where to dive into that pile of educational inspirations that are calling to me. Maybe by September, I'll know where to begin.

Also calling to me are new books stacked on a nearby table, including The Warmth of Other Suns, Difficult Conversations:  How to Discuss What Matters Most, and other books that others have recommended to me. In progress are E.M. Forster's A Passage to India and several texts about the history and teachings of Chasidism. 

I think that there may some important connections among these various directions in which I'm feeling myself pulled. It's only a hunch right now, but it's a compelling hunch. So I hesitate to let go of any of this right now.

That said, I did do some letting go this past weekend.

Since the beginning of last January, the area near my bedroom window has been dominated by the eleven cartons I brought home with me from my thirty-four-plus years in public education. Together, they contain books, folders, and other resources that I believed were of some value and might be again in the future. I'm not dismissing what the cartons contain; rather, I often think that much of what they contain can probably be found quickly and easily on the internet or on one of my several hard drives.

For some reason, right after I arrived home after the last faculty meeting of the Future of Learning Summer Institute last Friday, I suddenly felt that it was time to get these cartons out of my house and into storage. So Sunday morning, Scott moved the cartons to his studio in Rockland, where they are away from me but not completely inaccessible to me: at Scott's suggestion, I numbered each carton and made a detailed list of what it contains. Also, because much of what Scott stores in his studio can be seen, it wouldn't be hard to locate a carton and, with the aid of a nearby ladder and some muscle power, retrieve it.

It's interesting to be feeling both a need and desire to think deeply about education, and a need and desire to put away the boxes that contain so much of my career in education. For the first time since I retired, I'm feeling not so much obligated to speak out critically against trends, policies, and practices that worry and/or appall me, as I am inspired to explore some new tools, frameworks, and ideas that I currently think really could change the conversation about education, and by extension, education itself. Frankly, the weekend has been about making physical and mental space for those new ideas, and I'm already having preliminary thoughts about how to combine certain ones of them that may need one another, but not yet know one another.

But before I plunge into them and introduce them to one another, I intend to enjoy August. Today's Writer's Almanac poem, "Summer's Elegy" by Howard Nemerov, was poignant and beautiful--but too mournful for a single-digit August date:  great for the twenty-fifth of August, but not for the fifth! I'll hope for some seasonal poetry that portrays August as calmly, solidly, but gently reigning rather than waning and dying (please send along any August poems you especially like!). And meanwhile, I will give myself permission to be and not to mean, because some months in some years, being is more than enough.

#HGSEPZFOL