On any nice day during the school year, my students beg to go outside. I usually tell them, fine, we’ll take a walk in January and read Wallace Stevens:
One must have a mind of winter…
And been cold a long time…
They groan and we go on. There is always much to do.
Their urge to be outside is an important impulse, however. With the school committee’s decision to get students back early before this year’s late Labor Day, I hope these final few weeks of August can be spent in out-of-doors renewal.
The poet Emma Lazarus writes of the fall as fulfillment after the growth of summer. In a poem about the wisdom of Rosh Hashanah, the “mother of months,” she explains how by the last days of the season “the grape glows like a jewel, and the corn/a sea of beauty and abundance lies.”
Summer should be a time of readying ourselves for that harvest. As a teacher, having the summer to do so has been the great perquisite of my profession.
I can see the eye rolls now.
I do still work in the summer. I’ll write some 20 or 30 college recommendations before school starts. Each student deserves consideration in quieter moments that enable me to think about their qualities and accomplishments.
The break also lets me consider the school year as a whole without the next class to think about or to discuss an idea with a colleague without the disruption of a bell. There is time for the coursework required to keep my license up to date.
Many of my younger colleagues work second jobs all summer long to make ends meet. My job as newspaper adviser ends the summer early as my students prepare the first issue of the Newtonite. Coaches will get their teams ready for opening games. Committees will come together to hit the ground running with new initiatives.
Maybe I am defensive. Perhaps this show of busyness is merely justification for this great reward of time.
One reward is uninterrupted time to read (note this column’s excess of poetry). Much of that reading is for school. Books added to the curriculum must be mulled over and old standards reconsidered from the point of view of students reading them for the first time. I do also try to tackle something difficult, which I’d never otherwise get to, just for myself.
But there are days I slip away to the White Mountains to walk, bring a book with me, and leave it unread. This summer I enjoyed several long hikes from valley to valley through Ireland with just a slim volume of poems.
For me, the freedom of summer presents a tension between a passion for books and a draw to the outdoors. The growth Lazarus praises calls us out there. We should make sure kids experience occasions to feel that same drive.
A Robin Wall Kimmerer essay my students read considers the Potawatomi word “puhpowee” to articulate this powerful force. Kimmerer writes, “In the three syllables of this new word I could see… a world of being, full of unseen energies that animate everything.”
Summertime should be the time to tap into these “unseen energies.” They sustain all of us, kids and teachers alike.
As with my earlier defensiveness, some of us try too hard to maintain our busy indoor lives during these months. Obviously, many people simply must, but I worry that the anxiety of not wanting to get caught resting is foisted upon children in the merciful weeks away from their studies.
Now, I think working a summer job, particularly one involving physical labor, is a grand addition to any education. And, if gathering with other kids who love math is a child’s jam, go to it. However, some students told me of summer plans that sounded just like the school year’s treadmill, of dragging themselves to club team practices and taking extra courses to “get ahead,” whatever that means.
I assign summer reading, myself. Students should stay in the habit. Hopefully, though, assignments are medicine taken in small, sweetened doses. Instead of the excess of uniformly compelling kids and their disparate families to complete academic spadework, summer assignments should be fortified by the energy that fills us from being outside.
“A truly good book,” Henry Thoreau tells us, “is something as natural, and unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wildflower discovered on the prairies.”
Reading and a sense of industry are essential for school success. But so is the restorative of oceans and rivers, forests and fields. My teacher summer contains much reading and much time outdoors. A summer outside provides this same sustenance that much more for my students. Hopefully these last few weeks grant them a little more time to move and breathe with no walls around them.
One last poet. This is Walt Whitman:
“I think heroic deeds were all conceiv’d in the open air, and all free poems also,
I think I could stop here myself and do miracles.”
Tom Fabian is an English teacher at Newton North High School and faculty advisor to its student newspaper, the Newtonite. He can be reached at tfabianteaching@gmail.com.