Children Are Our Role Models

I have spent my whole adult life with children–aiding, being a stay-at-home mom, and teaching. On occasion I have wondered what my life would have been like if I had taken a different career path. Who knows? But there is one thing of which I am sure. I would not be the person I am today. Children are role models for how we should live our lives.

Children are hoping, believing, engaged, contributing, loving, creative, forgiving, enthusiastic, exuberant, unafraid, humble, trusting, and I could go on and on. How could we ever learn these things without children? They are our role models.

Jesus said children were our role models of faith. When his disciples tried to keep the children away from him, Jesus became livid, “Don’t push these children away. Don’t ever get between them and me. These children are at the very center of life in the kingdom. Mark this: Unless you accept God’s kingdom in the simplicity of a child, you’ll never get in.” (The Message, Mark 10:13)

And another time, he warned them: “…if you give [the children] a hard time, bullying or taking advantage of their simple trust, you’ll soon wish you hadn’t. You’d be better off dropped in the middle of the lake with a millstone around your neck. Doom to the world for giving these God-believing children a hard time! (The Message, Matthew 18:6)

What a humbling and sobering warning! I try to take this warning seriously as I learn and grow with my students. (And praise God for his grace when I make mistakes.)

Overall, today I am just feeling so lucky to be spending my career with children.

Ah, Friday…

I had been looking forward to Friday all week–not only is the weekend coming, but today eighth graders and I went on a field trip to a harvest festival celebrating local and regional history.

My students and I have been studying local history. Among other things, we have laughed at the antics of the early grifters who made money electing themselves to county offices and then faking the building of schools and bridges to get bond money.

We have also been creating an online museum of artifacts belonging to our grandparents’ generation (or an older generation). Some of the photos in the collection are just beautiful, contributing value to the world of images available with a Creative Commons license. I am so proud of them! Check out these gems from Becca and Paul and Paris.

At the harvest festival today we saw apple cider pressing, blacksmithing, rope making, a peg barn, a one-room schoolhouse and a sod house. We talked to historian interpreters who shared much about the history of our local area. I took many photos that showed life on the prairie one to two hundred years ago, but my #TFotoFri favorite was one that conjured a laugh outloud family memory for me. It’s a picture of a syrup pail, which when emptied would have been cleaned out and used as a lunch pail.

I grew up hearing this story of a lunch pail:

When it was (great) Aunt Sally’s turn to make the lunch, she took leftover biscuits and made sandwiches. The filling she used? Leftover dumplings, which in my family means biscuits cooked in chicken soupy gravy. That day when the older boys, including my grandpa, took the lunch pail out of the coatroom and dug in for lunch, they found their sandwiches–basically biscuits on biscuits. How does that sound for a meal loaded with carbs? The family of five siblings ate their dry sandwiches, but they never forgot the day their little sister made that lunch. My siblings and I were the third generation who laughed about that one.

Here are a few more pictures from the Harvest Festival.

Prayer on 9/11

When the World Spins Crazy
By Walter Brueggemann

When the world spins crazy,
spins wild and out of control
spins toward rage and hate and violence,
spins beyond our wisdom and nearly beyond our faith,
When the world spins in chaos as it does now among us…

We are glad for sobering roots that provide ballast in the storm.
So we thank you for our rootage in communities of faith,
for our many fathers and mothers who have believed and trusted as firm witnesses to us,
for their many stories of wonder, awe, and healing.

We are glad this night in this company
for the rootage of the text,
for the daring testimony,
for its deep commands,
for its exuberant tales.
Because we know that as we probe deep into this text…
clear to its bottom,
we will find you hiding there,
we will find you showing yourself there,
speaking as you do,
governing,
healing,
judging.

And when we meet you hiddenly,
we find the spin not so unnerving,
because from you the world again has a chance
for life and sense and wholeness.
We pray midst the spinning, not yet unnerved,
but waiting and watching and listening,
for you are the truth that contains all our spin. Amen.

From Awed to Heaven, Rooted in Earth: Prayers of Walter Brueggemann. Prayed at the Lay School of the Pentateuch on September 17, 2001.

And today, like Walter Brueggemann did ten years ago, most of us have reflected on 9/11. Among other things, I read two interesting articles comparing the ten-year anniversary of Pearl Harbor with our commemoration of today. One post was by Nate Everett and one was an L.A. Times editorial by Jon Wiener.

It seems “the day which would live in infamy” was fairly bypassed on December 7, 1951. America was shivering into the Cold War, fighting Korea, allying with Japan, and didn’t have the time or the resolve to remember too much about Pearl Harbor.

What is different today? We certainly have taken the time and resolve to remember.

Today the memorial service in New York was somber, meaningful, and beautiful. The waterfalls–largest man-made waterfalls in North America–fall into emptiness, yet somehow fill the void. Our memories have remained strong.

My students remembered 9/11 this year. However, this is the first year my students don’t really remember. They were just two or three or four on September 11, 2001. They have absorbed the ethos of 9/11 from their older siblings and parents. Shiann is a good example. She is a serious student of 9/11, an event that continues to mark her generation as it did her all-grown-up siblings before her. This weekend Shiann wrote two posts about it–here and here.

We lost many things after 9/11. I want to remember, but I don’t want important things to be lost forever.
Did we lose…
…hope?
…the resolve to make sense of spinning?
…the power to forgive?
…the ability to make allies of our enemies?

I pray we have not lost these.

Each candle across the gym represented 60 people who lost their lives on 9/11.

Foto Friday

“It’s Friday, Friday!” (OK, that’s all!)

It’s actually Foto Friday. Having not posted photos for nine days now, I have been going through photography withdrawals. I fell in love with taking pictures over the summer as I participated with many wonderful educators in the June-July-August Project (My post about #JJAProject)

Now I’ve decided to post a photo each Friday showing something from my week, most likely school-related since that’s what keeps my head spinning and my shutter snapping these days.

Here today is a photo of an old swingset, edited on BeFunky.com. It’s an old wooden swingset with lichen growing on the seats. Life can be found in many places.

I am so excited that my science students are joining me in making a life science photography portfolio this year.

Today is our first day. Third period we will walk to a nature trail in town, geotag a special spot we will “adopt”, take photos, make sketches, press leaves, identify species. Then throughout the various seasons, we will visit our special spot noting changes.

Can’t wait to get started!

Does anyone else want to join a Foto Friday Challenge with me?

P.S. I have just been looking around and there are many Photo Friday and Foto Friday challenges (Here’s one for dog lovers). Maybe some teachers would like to start a new one!

Saturday followup…Thanks, Sheri (@grammasheri), for an excellent post about a new #TFotoFri hashtag for teachers. Next week, my Friday post will be entitled, “Ah, Friday…” too.

Now we also have a Flickr group to collect all the participants’ Friday photos. It is at http://Flickr.com/groups/TFotoFri