Skip to main content

Old Dogs

I have been teaching in Howard County for eleven years. When I first started traveling from school to school I sat at a desktop computer and went on Yahoo maps and printed out every single connection. Timing is important. If I can't get between schools in well under thirty minutes, I can't make my schedule work. I kept all my printouts in a folder in my car until I memorized the routes. Now I have a smartphone and an ipad and directions are much easier to come by.


This year I got to travel to a brand new school: Ducketts Lane. I figured a route from Oakland Mills to Ducketts Lane in only minutes. It's a beautiful school; the teachers and staff I work with are great. The kids are wonderful. But due to a fluke in scheduling, I have to teach there an hour earlier than I normally teach. Not the end of the world, but I almost always arrive wishing I had more coffee.

Every other week as I would follow my plotted route I'd grumble that there was no convenient place to quickly grab coffee. "This place is in the middle of nowhere," I'd be thinking. "How can you build a new school with no access to coffee?"

Friday I left extra early to scrutinize each place along the way for coffee possibilities. Nothing. And I arrived at my turnoff with a good half-hour to spare. "Well, heck!" I thought. "I'll just keep going for awhile on Route 1 and see what's out there."

In less than five minutes, to my right: Dunkin Donuts. Boom.

Right up until that moment I would have sworn there was no place nearby to get coffee. Why? Because I had plotted my route, I only drove one route, and it wasn't there. Not to make a religious experience out of this, but the solution to my problem appeared only after I looked at things in a new way.

People coming to the school from the other direction, for instance, would have easily seen the answer than I was looking for. But, of course, I never asked because I already knew the answer.

Also on Friday, I participated in an online discussion about Frank Hecker's series of blog posts on Symphony Woods. Overall, the discussion was thoughtful, and the tone civil. However, it was clear that one of the participants was capable of looking at the topic in only one way. He had plotted his route, and he only traveled that one route. He was not open to other routes because he already knew the answer.

It made me think of myself and how I had been so sure I knew everything when I had never bothered to drive even five minutes beyond my turnoff. How often do we do that in life? How often do we forget that things can be approached from more than one direction? How easy is it to plot one route and forsake all others, even in the face of obvious drawbacks in our choice?

Pushing myself off my route actually made me a little nervous. What if this makes me late? What if I can't find a good place to turn around? But the reward for going "off-map" was more than an energizing cup of coffee. I learned something I had been wanting to know for a long time:

"Hey! That's where Cindy's Soft-Serve is!"

And now, a whole world of possibilities is open to me, just in time for warmer weather.

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Teacher Gifts

Today is the last day of school before the Winter Break. It’s a good time to remember the far-reaching nature of our public school system. You may not have children. You may have sent your children to independent schools. It matters not. You will be impacted one way or another. Yesterday I read a long thread on Facebook about several waves of illness in the schools right now. There’s influenza A and norovirus, I believe. And of course there’s COVID. Apparently in some individual schools the rate of illness is high enough for school admin to notify parents.  When I was little the acceptable holiday gift for a teacher was one of those lovely floral handkerchief squares. (I don’t know what it was for male teachers. They were rare in my elementary years.) These days the range of teacher gifts is wider and I have fond memories of Target gift cards which I have written about before. I think it’s safe to say that giving one’s teacher Influenza, norovirus, or COVID is not the ideal holiday...
1 comment
Read more

F ³: We Are Not Entitled

  A college student went missing. His family and friends were distraught. The community was encouraged to be on the lookout and spread the word.  Days passed.  They must have been agonizing days for those who cared about the missing student. Thoughts that foul play had been involved cannot have been far from their thoughts.  Then, at last, the student was found. Alive. The news was shared with the public.  So. Much. Relief. A family had been reunited with their child. Even though we know that life is complicated, I think it is okay to accept this as a happy ending and leave it at that.  But the world of social media says no. For every expression of joy at the news came questions and even judgement. It became clear to me that some folks felt entitled to an explanation. They wanted the backstory. It’s as though they felt that, by enlisting the help of the public on social media, the authorities now owed them all the details. Television dramas often weave curr...
2 comments
Read more

Separate and Unequal

  Remember “Separate but equal”? Remember how that really meant that Black schools languished in  broken-down buildings without adequate heat or toilet facilities, with cast-off, ragged learning materials, underfunded and largely ignored? The Supreme Court struck that down in 1954. The evidence was clear that separate was not equal. Plessy v Ferguson had led to - - no, endorsed - - deeply unequal schooling and opportunities. We tend to think of Brown v Board as being purely about racial integration. It was not.  It was about the logical consequences of segregation. And they were not, not, not equal. The ruling in 1954 didn’t transform public education for non-whites into a land of milk and honey by any means. But it articulated some essential truths in a way that made including everyone a legal precedent which could be relied upon and built upon. It was better than what came before it but it rested upon unsteady ground. It did not necessarily change the hearts or minds ...
1 comment
Read more