"What's a pendulum?" one of my students asked, looking ahead from where we had left off in the science book. "I like that word. It's cool."
"Pendulums are cool," I said. "It's basically a weight that hangs from a string. The weight is actually called a 'bob.' If you pull the bob to one side, it will swing back and forth until it eventually rests back at its center. What do you think eventually makes it stop swinging?"
"Gravity!" another called out proudly.
"Exactly! And you know who discovered the pendulum? Galileo. Remember when we talked about him?"
"Yeah. That guy with the huge beard."
* * * * * * * * * * * *
On Friday, I found out that, come August, I will officially begin a brand new teaching chapter of my life: Upper Elementary School. I am overwhelmingly excited, and absolutely could not be genuinely happier with the prospect of what's to come. I know this upcoming school year will be a wonderfully crazy whirlwind of chaotic organization and elementary bliss. I feel honored and lucky and ready.
It seems fitting then, that the night before I received this news, I attended Carlsbad High School's graduation. While I did teach one class of sophomores last year, 4 out of my 5 classes were 11th graders, and therefore members of the class of 2012. Friday morning interview or not, I wasn't about to miss watching this extraordinary group cross the stage and receive their diplomas.
Being back on the Carlsbad campus was, in a word, bittersweet. According to the online dictionary, the definition of bittersweet is "pleasant but tinged with sadness," which is a spot-on way to describe how it felt to walk the eerily familiar halls of the 3000 building and peer through the windows of my former classroom. My logical mind, of course, understood why the colorful Lit. Circles posters no longer adorned the white walls, why the powerful East of Eden quotes didn't shine on the back whiteboards, and why the Lord of the Flies projects no longer grazed the ceiling on top of the storage cabinets. Nevertheless, I won't deny the tug on my heartstrings that escaped when I was offered visual proof of their non-existence. Later, sitting in the audience in anticipation offered a similar feeling of nostalgia. The culmination of hundreds and hundreds of hours of lectures and projects and chemistry labs and late nights and analysis and scientific calculators and prom dresses and let downs and field trips and broken hearts and first kisses and PowerPoint presentations and school plays and essays and and and was culminating in this; the glorious feeling of a high school graduation ceremony. A symbol of accomplishment; a closed chapter; a new, fresh start in the great big world of Real Life. And as I sat there, I'm certain I know why this one hit so close to home for me: While I absolutely am not certain what the future holds, there is a very real chance that I will never teach high school English again. For years, Steinbeck and Twain, Poe and Whitman, Thoreau and Angelou, Plath and Salinger were all the keynote speakers of my life, exploding off of pages and into ready hearts and minds. As my former students turned their tassels and closed a pivotal chapter in their lives, I may have very well been doing the same. And while change and transformation are expected and healthy and necessary, it doesn't change the fact they're also hard.
When you're a teacher, you're offered the rare chance to see life, every day, through the eyes of a variety of young people. Most of the time, their perspectives and perceptions haven't been marred or tainted by too much exposure to the atrocities and realities of the world, and instead they believe in luck and fairness and magic. Perhaps this is part of the reason that it's easy to love this profession-- whether we like it or not, we're surrounded by individuals who, more so than most anyone, sincerely believe in Possibility and Making a Difference and Brighter Tomorrows. It calls to mind for me, always, a passage from Robert McCammon's Boy's Life:
You know, I do believe in magic. I was born and raised in a magic time, in a magic town, among magicians. Oh, most everybody else didn’t realize we lived in that web of magic, connected by silver filaments of chance and circumstance. But I knew it all along. When I was twelve years old, the world was my magic lantern, and by its green spirit glow I saw the past, the present and into the future. You probably did too; you just don’t recall it. See, this is my opinion: we all start out knowing magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked out, washed out, and combed out. We get put on the straight and narrow and told to be responsible. Told to act our age. Told to grow up, for God’s sake. And you know why we were told that? Because the people doing the telling were afraid of our wildness and youth, and because the magic we knew made them ashamed and sad of what they’d allowed to wither in themselves.
After you go so far away from it, though, you can’t really get it back. You can have seconds of it. Just seconds of knowing and remembering. When people get weepy at movies, it’s because in that dark theater the golden pool of magic is touched, just briefly. Then they come out into the hard sun of logic and reason again and it dries up, and they’re left feeling a little heartsad and not knowing why. When a song stirs a memory, when motes of dust turning in a shaft of light take your attention from the world, when you listen to a train passing on a track at night in the distance and wonder where it might be going, you step beyond who you are and where you are. For the briefest of instants, you have stepped into the magic realm.
So today, armed with my own version of a magic lantern and--without any doubt in my mind--afoot in a magic town, I set out into this next official chapter of my professional life. I willingly (excitedly!) trade gothic poetry for Tuck Everlasting. Anticipating the Opposition paragraphs for photosynthesis. The Great Gatsby for the Math Superbowl. Whether 11th grader or 5th grader, teacher or student, adult or child, each one of us is, above all else, human...born with "whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us." How lucky am I, then, to be appointed the job of doing my damndest to prohibit those things from withering in the human spirit?
Life is a pendulum. Constantly in motion and centered around an invisible force much greater than ourselves. Sometimes it pulls us in one direction, and other times-- sometimes when we don't even see it coming-- it pulls us in another entirely, swinging us out of our comfort zones and blindly into the unknown. Never too far, but still far enough for us to catch our breaths and wonder at the sight of unfamiliarity and unexpected enchanted moments. And yet, always, we're forever brought back to center by that invisible and inescapable force--of fate, of faith, of coincidence...or maybe, even of magic: that inevitable foundation that offers support and, ultimately, guides us home.
