Explorers, Pt. II

Someone gave me a mysterious gift subscription to National Geographic. I have no idea who it was; the magazine just started showing up in my mailbox a month or two ago. But it was an excellent gift! I love NG. That magazine, along with Smithsonian and my trusty dictionary, accounts for nearly half my high school education, when I think about it.

Last weekend, on a flight back from Atlanta, I read with quickened pulse about polar explorers and their gripping close encounters with death as they attempted to reach the North Pole by foot in the dead of winter. Earlier that same day, in her closing remarks to the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics 2007 Annual Meeting, astronaut Eileen Collins—first woman to pilot and command an American spacecraft—spoke about “leadership lessons” to be learned from the Columbia shuttle disaster and the subsequent “Return to Flight” mission, which she commanded. At the end of her talk, she showed a can-you-name-this? slide show of famous geographic features of Earth pictured from orbit. It was inspiring. In the question-and-answer session afterward, I stood up and asked if America will ever, in our lifetimes, give space exploration the priority we once did in the 60’s, and if so, what would have to change in order for that to happen. She had no quick answers. She mentioned that some members of Congress are interested in the space program only so we can keep ahead of the Chinese. She justified space exploration as a source of scientific discovery and technology, and she encouraged us, as teachers, to inspire our students.

As I sat there on my flight, flipping through National Geographic and wishing I could be one of those polar adventurers or astronauts, pushing against the boundaries of collective human experience and individual human will, I came to realize something. These people are professionals, and perhaps this has always been so. After all, if it were easy for amateurs to make remarkable ventures into the unknown, someone would have done it already. Certainly Lewis & Clark, Columbus, Magellan, and Polo—just to name a few—were all professionals in their own times. All of them dedicated years of their lives and considerable resources to the ventures which immortalized their names. So where does that leave the rest of us?

I may never, in my lifetime, break away from the footsteps of others. Everything I have ever done or ever will do has been done many times before. But there are other ways to explore: (1) I can pursue personal exploration, by traveling and reading, by doing uncomfortable things in uncommon ways—by writing about them. (2) I can teach, and by teaching hope to inspire a few individuals of the next generation, who may someday become the explorers of tomorrow. Even if none of my students will ever become the next generation of astronaut, they can still be personal explorers. They can learn to see the world with wonder and curiosity. They can learn to see the world as offering almost limitless possibilities and variety far beyond the immediate surroundings they know. Seen in that light, teaching becomes an awesome responsibility. I almost choke up when I think of it that way.

I think I want “explorers” to be a theme of my classroom. I know I am doing a piss-poor job of enhancing my students’ curiosity, but I want to do better. I think I will start bringing my old copies of National Geographic to the classroom and offering them as an in-class extra-credit reading opportunity. I might give the students some bonus points for every article they read and turn in as a short written report. I think I will require them to find two new vocabulary words in each article, look them up, and include the definition with an example sentence. Also, I just need to live up to the ideals of the IB Middle Years Program and look for more inspired contexts to make my lessons more relevant and interesting. I need to hold that theme of “explorers” high in my mind at all times, because it is something I feel passionate about, and it is something I can learn to impart to my students as I improve myself as a teacher.

The NCTM conference was awesome, by the way. I suppose I should be grateful to my school for paying my way there. My colleague said it was her first time to go in 15 years! But it actually made it harder to come back. Being in Atlanta with 14,000 other math teachers, sitting in on those sessions and realizing those teachers, while accomplished in their professions, are mortal just like me—and I could be doing the same thing in a few years—and strolling across the exhibition hall bigger than three football fields, made me realize how much I am sacrificing to be here in the Mississippi Delta. I mean, I like my school alright. It’s not perfect, but there is plenty to like about it. I get along with my administration, I admire some of my colleagues, and I like most of my students most of the time. I just hate living in the Mississippi Delta. It has so little to offer me, in terms of culture and intellect, in terms of exciting recreational opportunities, etc. I want to live in New York City—or abroad. I visited a recruiting booth for international schools (essentially where the children of diplomats and other expatriates enjoy Western-style private education in capital cities all over the world) and woke up the next morning exited about that possibility. Then I visited a booth for the Fulbright Teacher Exchange and got even more excited about that. I suppose the Delta has its charms if you really want to be generous about it, but it is a very, very small world. The rest of the world has so much more to offer me. In that sense, I look forward to the end of these two years in Mississippi about as much as anyone, but perhaps for different reasons. I am a math teacher, and I love my job. I even like my school. I just hate where I live.

Lately thoughts have turned to the summer break. We have to be here for summer school in June, then we have the month of July off. One of my favorite ideas recently has been to find a fishing job in Alaska. I know it would be hard work, but in my mind, I crave that experience of something new and challenging, something physical, in a place and setting I have never really been before. Plus the money might be nice. But I have no idea whether I could find a job within the timeframe I need, as a deckhand (because I really do not want to work as a fish processor in the bowels of a factory fishing vessel) with no experience. Then this week, as an indirect result of my signing up for the Fulbright email list, I stumbled upon a summer program sponsored by the East-West Center for teachers to travel to Cambodia this July and participate in cultural exchange. I have long thought how much I would like to visit that region of the world, and this sounds like the perfect opportunity. The only problem looks like the price tag. Besides the flight to Bangkok, which I would have to come up with, the program comes at a $1500 price of admission (covering most expenses while there). Then the idea came to me to ask my school, particularly the IB Middle Years Program magnet grant money, to help pay for it. After all, we are supposed to be promoting internationalism as part of the program, and that is precisely what this summer program is designed to do. And would it not look really good for our school to say we sent one of our teacher’s all the way to Asia for staff development? So I plan to pitch my proposal soon this week. Wish me luck!