Kids in the Woods

This week, I donned a piece of mattress foam rolled into a odd cone shape and covered in blue felt to lead 2^nd graders on an adventure through the water cycle.  When you have little time to prepare, even less sleep, and your first group shows up early, enthusiasm trumps content.  I was indeed fortunate that the visiting hurricane left sunshine in her wake, making running around with the kids pretending to be evaporated dew drops both possible and wholly congruent with the day’s agenda for these 7 year olds.  As an added bonus this activity also ate up much of my allotted 20 minutes.  “Let’s do it again, my watery friends!  The water cycle never stops, you know, it just keeps going!”  Lucky for me, 2^nd graders will give you a pass when it comes to teaching if you are dressed in blue felt covered foam and acting like a complete idiot.  My older students are a little more demanding. 

This day of dress up as the ubiquitous aquatic quantity, the drop or drip or the adorable “droplet” as I prefer, was all part of my internship with Acadia National Park’s environmental education program.   Over the last 7 months, Shari and I have spent 4 as Educational Rangers for the park’s day and residential programs in downeast Maine.  Most recently at the Schoodic Educational Research Center, we’ve hosted nearly 4 schools a week, for almost 10 weeks and are now officially tired.  Shari spent the day showing off the park’s marine touch tank dressed as a Monarch caterpillar – no real connection between the two other than her costume fit and she loved to talk about the creatures in the tank.  The kids loved it. 

Our rush to greet the 2^nd graders was caused in part because we needed to get our older students fed, bag lunches made, moved out of dorm rooms and off to their last class on the other side of campus all before 8:30 am.  We made it, but just barely, hence my rush into the blue foam and to my excited little kids on their Halloween field trip.  Or, as our boss calls it, the annual Eeek! of Ecology program.

Most of the time here on the grounds of a former Navy base, we deal in the higher stakes of the peri-pubescent 5^th through 8^th grades.   They come for 3 days and 2 nights, and thankfully for us, are accompanied by their teachers and chaperons who keep them from going completely feral in the bunk house at night.  That would have been a deal-breaker for me.  I can take them at breakfast, take them to discover the morning tide pool, even take them on the night hike, but trying to get them to calm down as I try to get some sleep?  I have my limits…and know them. 

These students are amazing, awkward and bizarre little human beings; and if I couldn’t recognize myself in at least half of them, I would be sure they came from another planet.  It’s as if they are tiny aliens in human skin just trying to take it in and pass as one of us, but they don’t quite have it yet.  One of our first teachers to visit commented, “They’re kind of like working with the mentally ill… you have to be very literal, concise, and repetitive.”  Equal parts brains, id, hormones and raw energy, they can focus on what I’m teaching but only as long as I keep shucking and jiving.  And if that fails, there’s always yelling, cajoling and guilting – I’m not above any of that, and don’t you judge me unless you’ve worked or lived with middle-schoolers.

This is what I’ve l learned how to do over the past few months.  To try and keep the programs moving and the tasks changing, often building on the previous activity, is the coin of the realm.  The lecture, the intellectually stimulating tangent, and the abstraction are anathema to a well honed middle-school program – and good luck getting them back once they’ve check out.  It’s not like they aren’t smart, it’s that they don’t yet understand nuance and subtlety, and we forget this.  As many times as I steered clear of these pitfalls, I have also failed and found myself leaning on the crutch of the university classroom.  I find myself blathering about as they begin digging their toe into the dirt and staring off into space. Then they start to eat each other.    

Our days are long here, far longer than the normal school or work day.  The rangers usually put in a 10 hour shift; but the students, they go from 6 am wake up call to 9 pm lights out.  Both the staff and the children are exhausted and neither stays on their best behavior I’m afraid.  I know that 12 year old boys can be sweet, engaged and attentive, but there's something almost "lord of the flies" that takes over when they get outside.  Sometimes the excitement is contagious, and other times it's just plain feral.   However, seeing city kids stare wide-eyed at the Milky Way, the ocean, or a shooting star for the first time is truly awesome.  We muck around in tide pools searching for creatures, we hike and explore geology on the cliffs above the crashing sea, map out places on the headland with GPS units, test the acidity of soils, and study lichens and trees.  The kids have zero idea how lucky they are to be here, and I guess that's the way it should be.  I would have given my 12 year molars to be a participant, and so would you all. 

I wish that all of the teachers felt this way.  Far be it from me to start pointing fingers at teachers.  We’re in an election cycle and I expect that there will be enough derision of the evils and exaltation of the merits of teachers to fill a couple of swimming pools.  I will not wade in there.  However, I do wonder sometimes what makes a person choose to be a teacher when it’s clear he doesn’t give a shit. 

It’s not like it’s a glamorous or easy job.  There have to be a thousand better-paying, less demanding, or fraught with landmine career tracks out there where the resume bullet point of not giving a shit is going to land you in the promotional “15 items or less.”   Not one of these careers is likely to impact the development of growing human being in the way that a good teacher can, and yet we give the evening shift supervisor at Best Buy more take home pay than a 30 year veteran of the whiteboard trenches.  So the rewards must be worth something, right?

Still, I can tell the good teachers in about 5 minutes.  It’s not just how they themselves act but also how their children respond to requests by someone else of authority.  Now, I’m wearing a volunteer National Park Service uniform which carries some clout, but it’s not like I’m carrying a side arm, so the clout that it throws around is minimal.  I learned my lesson from my niece and nephew to whom I am a complete goof – they love me for sure, but they won’t listen to a damn thing I say about anything.  So, I come on like a little bit of a hard ass and call out some early shenanigans – just so they know that I’ve got their number.  

Most of the teachers are 100% with me, they’ve got my back and play bad cop like a pro.  But there are a few who act like, “Let’s just hurry it up here , the sooner these kids get done looking at these sea stars, the sooner I can get back to nodding off in the back of the room while they watch Discovery Channel.”  They act like being here on this once in a lifetime field trip is an inconvenience,  all a big load of nuthin’ special.  That’s the take home message for these kids, looking to their teacher, nothing is special. 

Here’s my soapbox.  Give a shit, in fact give two.  If you can’t do that, go find something else to do and quit wasting everyone’s time.  Texting while following a group up the mountain on a hike with amazing views all around does not count as giving a shit.  I realize you have a life outside of here, but you need to realize what message you are sending your kids, especially since you have taken away their electronics for a couple of days. 

Maybe I’m falling into the trap of letting the few bad apples ruin the bunch, overly focusing on the schools or the kids who didn’t quite get it, and that is fair criticism.  It is a trap that we fall into when we really want our programs and teaching to be effective. Most of the kids and teachers who came here are completely on point, totally present in the awesome experience happening in their National Park.  

Editorial note:  My original ending to this essay/blog/whatever has been troubling me.  Originally I closed with a nice tight ending, dripping with heavy-handed sanctimony about a society which should give more of a shit about its teachers. Of course, we all want that, but it's more complex that that, isn't it?  As I finished, feeling smug and satisfied about my piece I went outside to work on Hamlet (that's our trailer), polishing him up and re-shellacking the interior and I motivated my elbow grease by listening to the podcast of "This American Life" Episode 562: The Problem We All Live With; Part 1 & 2  and I started to feel like a  a bit of a phony.  It's not that my sarcasm and criticism are at all out of place, we do need to care about this.  It's just that they are just such small drops in the bucket of the problem with our education system.  It made me wonder what I'm doing to help.  In the big scheme of things, I guess I'm trying to connect a few kids with a natural resource and the science which understands that resource.  I guess that is doing something at least for the kids I teach for the 3 days I have them.  But it doesn't stop me from wondering, what more can I do?