When people talk about celebrating Thanksgiving, they talk about who is coming or who came to dinner as much as they recall the memories of certain foods. Baba’s pear salad, Mom’s chestnut stuffing dressing, Dad’s gravy, Aunt so and so’s pie….we connect with people and the food and the stories that accompanied them like so many side dishes. “Do you remember when Dad caught the pan out of the oven with his bare hand?” “Do you remember when we burnt the gravy and the whole house smelled?” “Do you remember when…” insert the one time someone had to go to the hospital during the long holiday.
The feast day is about coming together as a family, extended family, as much as it is about the turkey or the ham. It is the reconnecting of the past to the present, through gathering, eating, and story telling as much as story creating.
As I sat in my classroom on the last day before the long holiday weekend, a friend dropped by and we mused over the joys of commuity that happen in a school –friendships that wouldn’t exist otherwise. Thanksgiving for the community, for the connections, for all the stories that fold over each other every year as we watch students grow, mature, make great and poor decisions, get injured, get heart broken, get accepted, graduate, all of it, is a time to recognize, as teachers, we get to uniquely witness this time of growth and self discovery. We the teachers, get to be like the books on the shelves, holding whole chapters of stories of their lives, as small components of ours.
Meanwhile, a student brought in an old book from an abandoned building and I told him, “that’s a treasure,” even being published in 1931 and falling apart. For someone, that book was a gift, a thing of beauty that spoke to the soul. Someone wanted that book, read that book, even treasured it as they put it back on the shelf. That’s what books are supposed to be –and teachers too. Float the ideas that make people’s minds perk up and decide to go deeper than we ever did. That my student knew of whole rooms filled with abandoned books felt like a deliberate decision by society to close doors on ideas, on souls, on becoming more educated.
I sat thinking about the purpose of school, which isn’t to beat the test scores or even teach the basics, it’s to help children become more the people they are called to be –to introduce them to all the best we can, and invite them to build upon that best. We’re to help craft community here, and for the bigger community out there, so it becomes more just, more kind, more merciful, more understanding, more expressive, more artistic, more wonderful.
It doesn’t take a wizard, it takes all of us inviting each person to be the more they are, than the less they are perceived or perceive themseleves to be. Teens are particularly good at seeing themselves as less than. It’s a teacher’s job to show them their absolute value, and to convey the deeper truth that all of them are equal in dignity and worth, magnificiece and wonderfulness, and each of them is of infinite necessity to the world and each other. We are all needed, we are all necessary, we are all part of the beautiful mosaic that is, that God willed into being. We’re all called to be the stories people remember, the books they return to, that they unwillingly put down.
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