Listen, can I just say that there is nothing wrong with having free lunch? Plenty of people had free or reduced lunch in high school and that doesn't mean a thing about your school's quality or the people you're teaching because we are not determined by our socioeconomic status. I know how much your home can affect who you are and I know how difficult having any kind of financial disadvantage can make, but I also know the wonderful ability of the human body and the human spirit to heal and recover and overcome the problems we face.
And listen, I know and understand that my students have other issues that are stopping them from learning, that they're not just lazy and they're not just spiting me. I know and I understand and I'm willing to work with them but I also know that I need something from them. I need them to try. I need them to work a little bit. Give me an inch, just somewhere to get my grip, and I'll pull you along until you're where everyone else is in the first place. And it's hard, I know, I know, I know. But I also know that you can do it. And I'll work harder. I'll be more prepared, I'll have problems prepared, I'll have ways to explain things, I'll understand the topic as best I can and I'll work until I can't keep my eyes open anymore to make things clear to you, but you gotta give me something. I don't care where you're from or where you've been or what's holding you back. You can do it. You gotta have confidence in yourself, regardless of your situation. We choose who we are and you can choose to be better. You can choose to work hard so that there's nothing standing in your way. And I'm not just saying that- I know that if you want this, it's going to be a lot of hard work, a lot of hours before or after school, a lot of time spent beating your head over these problems but they'll get you where you want to go, I promise. You'll learn to think and work and I don't care if you want to go to college or work or join the military, thinking and working will get you places other people aren't going to go. It's your life here. It's your choices and you gotta choose them. Choose to be great, like I know you are.
Ain't nothing wrong with free lunch anyway.
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Flooded In Light
I want my life to be a story.
No lie. I really, all my life, have wanted it to be something worth writing about, something, I dunno, spectacular and interesting, with perfect dialogue and wonderful emotion. I'm really quite fixated with the idea. Besides the fact that stars are emphasis-adding-expletive awesome and I'm good at math and generally bored with humanities, being an astrophysicist just sounded cool. Good life choice, right? But once you're in, physics has this way of sucking you in deeper until it's a battle for your soul that you have to win before you can move on. I'll graduate with a BA degree in physics but that piece of paper is really just a testament to my stubbornness. I could have changed majors sophomore year. I just hate running away.
Maybe I just wanted the heads to turn, to continue to be unique. After a while, it becomes a badge of courage or a point of pride. Why yes, I am a physics major. I do insanely hard math and apply it to the world around us to decipher its secrets and unlock its mysteries. I also don't sleep much and spend hours writing on boards and reams of paper, working on problem sets and studying derivations time and time again, hoping it'll make sense. Don't you feel sorry for me? Aren't you amazed at what I can do? Don't I just astound you?
And then, of course, after I figured out that I wasn't going to be an astrophysicist, I had to pick something else, something doable and yet impressive, a conversation starter. I'll go to seminary. I'll be a pastor, and a woman pastor at that. I love being in front of a crowd. I love it when they listen to me, to all the knowledge I have to impart. Don't forget all that thankless work as well, those long hours talking to people, caring about people, visiting in hospitals, talking people through their issues, imagining the next great mission project, working out the details for another new discipleship program, hours spent working with schedules, planning meetings, writing letters, all giving me a backstage kind of unspoken glory. Best of all, this would be a great story to tell, how I went from the sciences to religion, how I changed from studying the universe through the secular lens to thinking about it with the lens of faith. People would ask. I'd still be a novelty.
Even the stories I tell, I tell for recognition. I have a friend who's student teaching right now, and he says that God is working great things through his students, or at least working with him through his students. I would love to have some encouragement, love to hear his stories, but like either one of us has time to sit down and write these out. And would it mean anything once you had removed all the details to make sure you protected kids' privacy? It's not fair to them and I understand why he doesn't share his stories. I don't share mine because they're not exciting enough, I haven't gleaned a lesson from them, I don't have a gem of a tale to tell, and so I don't tell them. They're not interesting enough. They don't generate attention.
The saddest bit it, I know it's wrong. I know I shouldn't be seeking all this attention (I about die when I get some- a post from someone I want to hear from, a compliment from a friend, appreciation from students) and I know my life isn't the important one here. But it takes such strength to be humble, so much energy to back away and give someone else the chance to be wonderful, so much effort to remember that I'm not the one in charge here and I'm not the one that's blessing this situation. But the worst thing, the hardest thing? The hardest thing is to know that these words, these things that I'm most proud of, these strings of sentences that give me so much attention and praise, these aren't mine. Someone gave them to me and I send them out, but they are a gift and they aren't mine. Do you think less of me yet?
I know you didn't need to hear all of this, but I wanted you to. It gives me much more of a nuanced character, don't you think? I do so want to be nuanced and complex, with layers to analyze and understand. Just think of it: that awkward girl who laughs too much and can't stand to be stared at is actually an attention-grabbing engineer of her own fate, making her life choices with precision to create the utmost impact on the drab yet poetic scene around her. For all of her quiet moments and inappropriate humor, she is silently weaving a tale of great interest and intrigue with her daily choices, colored with importance and symbolism. She lives a double life with an inside world of such complexity you can't even begin to guess at the truth of its existence until you spend hours in conversation, picking up hints of the greater wonder hidden away behind the never-pretty-enough face. Don't you want to meet her, to get to know her, to understand her? Doesn't she intrigue you? Aren't you curious to see who she is?
Aren't I such a great storyteller?
No lie. I really, all my life, have wanted it to be something worth writing about, something, I dunno, spectacular and interesting, with perfect dialogue and wonderful emotion. I'm really quite fixated with the idea. Besides the fact that stars are emphasis-adding-expletive awesome and I'm good at math and generally bored with humanities, being an astrophysicist just sounded cool. Good life choice, right? But once you're in, physics has this way of sucking you in deeper until it's a battle for your soul that you have to win before you can move on. I'll graduate with a BA degree in physics but that piece of paper is really just a testament to my stubbornness. I could have changed majors sophomore year. I just hate running away.
Maybe I just wanted the heads to turn, to continue to be unique. After a while, it becomes a badge of courage or a point of pride. Why yes, I am a physics major. I do insanely hard math and apply it to the world around us to decipher its secrets and unlock its mysteries. I also don't sleep much and spend hours writing on boards and reams of paper, working on problem sets and studying derivations time and time again, hoping it'll make sense. Don't you feel sorry for me? Aren't you amazed at what I can do? Don't I just astound you?
And then, of course, after I figured out that I wasn't going to be an astrophysicist, I had to pick something else, something doable and yet impressive, a conversation starter. I'll go to seminary. I'll be a pastor, and a woman pastor at that. I love being in front of a crowd. I love it when they listen to me, to all the knowledge I have to impart. Don't forget all that thankless work as well, those long hours talking to people, caring about people, visiting in hospitals, talking people through their issues, imagining the next great mission project, working out the details for another new discipleship program, hours spent working with schedules, planning meetings, writing letters, all giving me a backstage kind of unspoken glory. Best of all, this would be a great story to tell, how I went from the sciences to religion, how I changed from studying the universe through the secular lens to thinking about it with the lens of faith. People would ask. I'd still be a novelty.
Even the stories I tell, I tell for recognition. I have a friend who's student teaching right now, and he says that God is working great things through his students, or at least working with him through his students. I would love to have some encouragement, love to hear his stories, but like either one of us has time to sit down and write these out. And would it mean anything once you had removed all the details to make sure you protected kids' privacy? It's not fair to them and I understand why he doesn't share his stories. I don't share mine because they're not exciting enough, I haven't gleaned a lesson from them, I don't have a gem of a tale to tell, and so I don't tell them. They're not interesting enough. They don't generate attention.
The saddest bit it, I know it's wrong. I know I shouldn't be seeking all this attention (I about die when I get some- a post from someone I want to hear from, a compliment from a friend, appreciation from students) and I know my life isn't the important one here. But it takes such strength to be humble, so much energy to back away and give someone else the chance to be wonderful, so much effort to remember that I'm not the one in charge here and I'm not the one that's blessing this situation. But the worst thing, the hardest thing? The hardest thing is to know that these words, these things that I'm most proud of, these strings of sentences that give me so much attention and praise, these aren't mine. Someone gave them to me and I send them out, but they are a gift and they aren't mine. Do you think less of me yet?
I know you didn't need to hear all of this, but I wanted you to. It gives me much more of a nuanced character, don't you think? I do so want to be nuanced and complex, with layers to analyze and understand. Just think of it: that awkward girl who laughs too much and can't stand to be stared at is actually an attention-grabbing engineer of her own fate, making her life choices with precision to create the utmost impact on the drab yet poetic scene around her. For all of her quiet moments and inappropriate humor, she is silently weaving a tale of great interest and intrigue with her daily choices, colored with importance and symbolism. She lives a double life with an inside world of such complexity you can't even begin to guess at the truth of its existence until you spend hours in conversation, picking up hints of the greater wonder hidden away behind the never-pretty-enough face. Don't you want to meet her, to get to know her, to understand her? Doesn't she intrigue you? Aren't you curious to see who she is?
Aren't I such a great storyteller?
Monday, February 7, 2011
Star Life
Stars form out of giant clouds of dust and gas in space. Something disturbs the cloud, maybe a wind of particles from a nearby star or the shock wave from a supernova, and the cloud collapses and when gravity and the internal pressure from the compressed gas learn to get along and balance one another, a star is born. Like anything that spins in space, the newborn star has an accretion disk, a swirling ring of gases and dust that gets pulled into the star or thrown out into space by the twin jets coming from the poles of the star. Clearly, young stars are equivalent to elementary school girls, twirling with tutus or hula hoops, spinning with their arms above their heads and their feet dancing on the ground. It must be quite the sight to see, these huge amorphous clouds beginning to dance over millions of years. Stars never do anything too quickly.
But stars form in these huge clouds of dust, right? The clouds block out most of our attempts to see the stars- the dark patches in the Milky Way in our nighttime sky are dust lanes. The Orion Nebula is a stellar nursery. But we can't see inside these clouds and in a field of science where the only information you get is light, seeing is crucial. So we scan the spectrum and hypothesize, but new stars aren't perfectly understood, especially the first new stars. Astronomers used to think that all of the first stars in the universe were giant stars, hundreds of times the size of our Sun. The bigger the star is, the faster it lives its life. Bright blue giant stars, like the brightest of the Pleiades or Sirius, may outshine something smaller and average, but their life will end sooner and more explosively than the smaller stars who will patiently shine, grow, sigh and fade as the millenniums pass by.
But these first stars, these bright bright giants that first let light into the Universe, we had always thought that these stars had formed alone, sowing the cold of space with their seeds of oxygen and carbon to make the battle between gravity and thermal pressure easier for the stars that came afterwords. Now, there's an idea that they may have formed with low mass companions, smaller stars collapsing out of the giant's accretion disk, living on for much longer and giving us hints about the early universe. The great thing about astronomy is that the farther away you look, the farther back in time you get to see. The most distant things we've detected are also the earliest. Seeing gamma rays from these earliest stars could give us hints about how galaxies form, snapshots from the childhood scrapbooks of the Universe.
Can you imagine being one of those stars, though? You spend your entire life revolving around this huge star that dies and leaves you to wait out the long lonely days of your life in the cold of space. You stay there and shine until there is absolutely nothing left that you can do and you peacefully send out the last rays you have to give. You are left to linger, to point the way to something bigger, and your last effort is to tell a story that is not yours, to smile as you pass on the information that another will need to better understand the beauty around him. To such a tiny other, with such a short life! Can you imagine?
Stars are so much more patient than me, so much more kind. They shine indiscriminately. They stay there, to help generations tell the stories, to remind us that we're connected, that we're small, that we're loved. I feel like the background character in my own life, waiting for happiness to happen to me. Stars don't get to choose- they take the mass, the elements, the space that is given to them and they do as they're supposed to do. They move according to their laws, they live and die according to their prescribed times and when they complain or throw a last, final tantrum, we're left with a stunning picture of their mess. Even in destruction, they're beautiful. But us, we're impulsive. We have these emotions, this free will, this real sense of life. Our days are so short and we get to choose and so we do. We reach for things we wouldn't normally reach for, if we were given billions of years to make our choices. Just because I can live without something doesn't mean that I want to- I want try many things, feel many things, step out of this cloud that I live in and say many things. Give me a shot. Let me live and in so living, let me shine. I already point to Someone brighter than me.
But stars form in these huge clouds of dust, right? The clouds block out most of our attempts to see the stars- the dark patches in the Milky Way in our nighttime sky are dust lanes. The Orion Nebula is a stellar nursery. But we can't see inside these clouds and in a field of science where the only information you get is light, seeing is crucial. So we scan the spectrum and hypothesize, but new stars aren't perfectly understood, especially the first new stars. Astronomers used to think that all of the first stars in the universe were giant stars, hundreds of times the size of our Sun. The bigger the star is, the faster it lives its life. Bright blue giant stars, like the brightest of the Pleiades or Sirius, may outshine something smaller and average, but their life will end sooner and more explosively than the smaller stars who will patiently shine, grow, sigh and fade as the millenniums pass by.
But these first stars, these bright bright giants that first let light into the Universe, we had always thought that these stars had formed alone, sowing the cold of space with their seeds of oxygen and carbon to make the battle between gravity and thermal pressure easier for the stars that came afterwords. Now, there's an idea that they may have formed with low mass companions, smaller stars collapsing out of the giant's accretion disk, living on for much longer and giving us hints about the early universe. The great thing about astronomy is that the farther away you look, the farther back in time you get to see. The most distant things we've detected are also the earliest. Seeing gamma rays from these earliest stars could give us hints about how galaxies form, snapshots from the childhood scrapbooks of the Universe.
Can you imagine being one of those stars, though? You spend your entire life revolving around this huge star that dies and leaves you to wait out the long lonely days of your life in the cold of space. You stay there and shine until there is absolutely nothing left that you can do and you peacefully send out the last rays you have to give. You are left to linger, to point the way to something bigger, and your last effort is to tell a story that is not yours, to smile as you pass on the information that another will need to better understand the beauty around him. To such a tiny other, with such a short life! Can you imagine?
Stars are so much more patient than me, so much more kind. They shine indiscriminately. They stay there, to help generations tell the stories, to remind us that we're connected, that we're small, that we're loved. I feel like the background character in my own life, waiting for happiness to happen to me. Stars don't get to choose- they take the mass, the elements, the space that is given to them and they do as they're supposed to do. They move according to their laws, they live and die according to their prescribed times and when they complain or throw a last, final tantrum, we're left with a stunning picture of their mess. Even in destruction, they're beautiful. But us, we're impulsive. We have these emotions, this free will, this real sense of life. Our days are so short and we get to choose and so we do. We reach for things we wouldn't normally reach for, if we were given billions of years to make our choices. Just because I can live without something doesn't mean that I want to- I want try many things, feel many things, step out of this cloud that I live in and say many things. Give me a shot. Let me live and in so living, let me shine. I already point to Someone brighter than me.
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