The Lessons of Gun Season

My dad hated guns. It happened over time, but it is in many ways understandable. When he was a teenager, he would hunt pheasant and rabbit with my grandfather in the fields near Niles, and he has very fond memories of those hunting trips when they would walk for miles, enjoying the sport and time spent in one another's company.

            But then my dad grew up and joined the Marines, then the Michigan State Police, and guns became a constant threat to him. He was shot at many times, during the 1967 riots in Detroit, and in several dangerous interactions with criminals, and he investigated countless gun crimes, including children who took their own lives or others accidentally or on purpose with a gun.

            My dad had a private routine when he came home every evening with his service revolver, which included disassembling it and locking the pieces in several areas around the house. It would have taken me a week to find the pieces, let alone unlock and assemble them. To this day I don't know where he kept his gun parts. He did take my brothers and I out to shoot a couple of times at a range, though what I remember about those experiences was the awesome respect he had, and required of us, for the firearm and the process of handling it.

            As a result of my dad's experiences, I have never hunted, and as an adult, I don't really have a relationship with guns. The average teenage hunter in Gobles has far more skill and knowledge than I do, and I have great respect for those young men and women who have been given that opportunity by a father, uncle, or grandfather who hunts. More than that, I have great appreciation for the dads and others who take the time to share hunting with their children. My own stepson comes from a strong tradition of hunting on his father's side, and the time he spends with his dad is often in the woods, squirrel hunting, or setting up for deer hunting, or walking the wildlife trails. I see the responsibility and appreciation for guns and wildlife he is learning from his dad, and recognize it as a good and wholesome thing.

            As gun season commences and people take to the woods in thousands, it is a great time to think about the tradition of guns, and how to pass on the good lessons to the next generation of young people in this country. My dad saw the worst of guns in his work for more than thirty years. Those who hunt or shoot for sport, and who have been taught to be responsible with guns, have been given a great gift of wisdom and power and respect.

            The ones who would use guns as a weapon are almost always the ones who never had a mentor take them out and teach them about respect and responsibility, about what power is, and what it isn't. About good and deliberate choices. About our wider world. The more any of us can do that with the young people in our lives, the better off we all will be.         

"Hello, Brother"

Original art by Fenville High School student Quinna Perkins for the 2018 "Un Mundo" Celebration  

I don't know his name yet, but as I type these words I am full of love and gratitude for him and his act of Grace, though it's mixed still with sadness and shock and horror and grief felt more than 8,000 miles away. 

He was the first victim at the mosque shooting in Christchurch, NZ, a man shot and killed where he stood simply because he had answered the call to prayer, and because for him those prayers were offered up in a mosque.

When this man saw the other enter the mosque, full of hate and burning with destruction, he welcomed him, greeted him, extended the grace and love of his religion. He looked at the man who would kill him an instant later, and in a simple gesture of humanity said "hello, brother." 

"Hello, brother" were his last words on this earth. His last act was one of brotherhood. Of all the outcomes of yet another brutal day in our human history, this man's words were the ones I would have endure. In them is the secret power we've all been wanting to come and save our world. These words should be the first words any of us say when we look at any other human being. 

Hello brother,  marhabaan 'akhi,  مرحبا اخي, hola hermano, היי אחי, salut frere, hallo bruder, Ni hao xiongdi, Privet brat, nwa m nwoke, ... and on and on and on. The sound of them being spoken should be so familiar that we recognize it in every and any language spoken in our world.

Hello, brother. Hello, sister.

The weight of this world has felt so heavy to me since November, 2016, when America promoted the darkest legacies of our past to the highest office in our land under the deception that it would make us great again. Anyone who studies the history I study and who has dedicated now almost half my career teaching students and teachers that human history includes episodes of mass murder, even genocides like the Holocaust that grow from seeds of hatred, indifference, ignorance, division, and fear, is more apt to recognize those seeds for what they are as the first weeds that sprout in small ways in our local places and classrooms, and in large ways across our country and world. Those are not the seeds of greatness. 

Since 2016 the hatred multiplied by social media and magnified from those in power have seemed so overwhelming to me because they are as ubiquitous and all-consuming as fire when it sweeps across our parched lands, be they national, international, or local: Antisemitism. Islamaphobia. Xenophobia. Racism. Nazism. White Supremacy. Violence. Violence. Violence. 

The fires of the past burning with fresh fuel, consuming and growing: Heather Heyer, a 32-year old woman, murdered by the other, a neo-Nazi driving his car into her at a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. A Nazi murdered a woman in the United States in 2017 because he believes in white supremacy and she did not. Let that sink in, if you can even get your mind around it.   

For so long I could not get my mind around it. 

The last time Nazis murdered people it took a world war to stop it and perhaps as many as 85 million deaths. How many will have to die this time? There were at least 50 more in New Zealand last week.

What can we do when the hatred grows so huge and any individual one of us can feel so alone and so powerless in this world. 

We are brothers, because we are human.

Years ago I had the opportunity to miss home from the other side of the world. I was a college student studying abroad in Spain for several months, and one day, feeling homesick and adrift, overwhelmed by differences of language and culture that made it so hard to do simple tasks in a language and city that was foreign to me, I had a chance encounter. An older man approached me as I sat alone in a cafe, I remember him to be in his 70's or perhaps early 80's, and asked me who I was. This man who could not have looked or lived his life any more different than I had. Still, he found me and crossed the space between us in a few beautiful words. 

I had a brief conversation with him in my elementary Spanish, the only language bridge available between us. I told him I was a student who had come to Spain, to learn about the heritage, the language, the culture, the people. When I said that he sat down next to me, smiled, and said "You are here to study us. Then we are brothers. We are brothers because we are human." 

In his native Spanish it sounds so much more beautiful and poetic. He said "Somos hermanos porque somos humanos. 

And my homesickness was immediately replaced with brotherhood, and my loneliness turned to wholeheartedness and gratitude. I was suddenly sitting next to a brother who thirty seconds earlier came from a time and place and language that was foreign to me, but now felt like home.

I see you.

Six weeks ago I attended a seminar in Lansing for several hundred school administrators. At a day-long session led by Calvin Terrell, an educator from Arizona who would talk with us about Decolonizing Pedagogy: Using Education as a Social Healer, the first thing we were asked to do was to introduce ourselves to some other people in the room. It was a standard adult learning task, pretty much the way every seminar starts, but still I was a little stiff when he asked us to do it. I had just settled into my chair. Had just connected to the free Wifi network and started nibbling on a cheese danish. But still, it was the right thing to do, so I set my coffee and danish on the table and tipped the top screen of my laptop down to see who else was in the room, to do my civic duty. 

But Terrell had a different idea about how it would go. He asked us to stand up, to walk around, to look people in the eyes, and to say "I see you." He told us to actually look at and see people as we greeted them, to be present, to stand inside where our shoes stood and not be distracted like most of us are so much of the time. To shake hands, to look in the eyes of one other person at a time, and with simple humanity, tell that person "I see you." 

It was a beautiful five minutes. I connected more with a dozen strangers with those simple three words than any ice breaker I'd ever done. When I sat down again, the room was full of warmth and energy.

Terrell then told us our schools, like the world our students live in, like the world we live in, is hungry for connection and suffering for the lack of it. So many of our students, so many of us, go through our days and lives not seeing others or being seen by others. If we could make our classrooms places where every person sees every other person, we would change lives, and might just change the world. He had my full attention now, and I knew that he was right. He had already changed a room from a standard seminar into the beginning of a community, in just five minutes, with just three words.

The Other. 

Polish travel journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski summarized his most important lessons from a lifetime spent traveling the world, encountering humans who are different than him, and writing about it in a small, powerful book called The Other. The other, as I've written several times in this essay, is that human who we do not recognize as sharing our same humanity. The other is an alien, an invader, an infidel. Kapuscinski writes "We treat the Other above all as a stranger (yet the Other does not have to mean a stranger), as the representative of a separate species, but the most crucial point is that we treat him as a threat." 

A witness to the Second World War of the 20th-Century that killed so many tens of millions, Kapuscinski warned us as we approached the 21st Century that race, nationality, and religion still divided people in ways that were dangerous, and our destruction, or our salvation, lied in the way we were dived by or united across these divisions. Would we see difference and make that difference Other? Or would we look in the eyes of someone new to us and see in them our common humanity?  

These days, too often, we choose division. Or we see division and feel fear and remain silent and indifferent. This division feeds the fire that can only consume and destroy us all. All of us. After all, Kapuscinski writes "Not only is he an Other for me, I am an Other for him too." Kapuscinski warned us to be careful in this world, because Others "have arms (weapons), and no alternatives."  

But Kapuscinski ultimately had hope after his lifetime of travel, after countless experiences of finding brothers and sisters in places and cultures and languages so different than his own, of seeing and being seen for the human he is and seeing the human in those he met. He wrote that "if we can make the Other familiar, (into family), then history does not have to be destiny." 

So hello, brother. Hello, sister.

And this is why what endures out of the shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand have to be the words of humanity, and not hateful, destructive acts of the other. The two words of a beautiful human in his last act on earth have to hit the world with more force than a bullet ever could. 

Let those words be the legacy that changes our world, the answer we have been looking for, the simple one that actually cuts right through the complexity and confusion and frustration and fear and heartbreak of these times, to find each other again. 

All it takes is for us to see our neighbor, to actually see our neighbor, no matter how that neighbor looks, and say "Hello, brother. Sister, hello. I see you." 

Deal with the Devil

Twice this week my heart was broken by teachers. Twice in the same day, actually. Twice the same hour.

It was PLC Monday, early release day, the day we send our students home one hour early so teachers have time and opportunity to meet in small Professional Learning Communities to discuss data and progress on SMART goals, RTI, MTSS, or other arrangements of the alphabet soup of educational reform. As Director of Teaching & Learning for the school district, I was making the rounds, talking and listening with teachers in their PLC groups about whatever it is they had to say. I love this time of talking and listening, and especially listening. If I have learned anything in my twenty four years in this business, it's that teachers are the best teachers of other teachers, and the best teachers are always teaching. If I want to be good at my job, it starts with being good at listening.

So this week I made it to two PLCs, and listening to teachers broke my heart a little each stop. 

At the first PLC I listened to teachers talk about upcoming professional development and aspirations for curriculum development and invigoration, and one teacher said, with all the sobriety of a doctor delivering the bad news, that we have to keep our aspirations in check because they may be too much for our kids. "We have to see if this can really work for our kids." This was a coded way to say "I don't believe my kids can succeed at this."

At the second PLC stop a teacher described the difficulty he was having moving students through a curricular objective to higher levels of achievement. His assessment of the problem was that it was beyond the reach of most of his students; after all, he reasoned, how can kids missing basic skills reach higher levels of thought. It was just another way of saying "let's keep the expectations low."

I believe so much in the power of teachers to do good: to transform lives and help students lift themselves to places they couldn't go otherwise, that I find these attitudes especially destructive. Teachers can also do the opposite of good, when the impact they have on students is defined by limits they have for students, preconceived notions about what students can be. Research is clear on the negative power of low expectations, and the positive power of high expectations and belief in the ability of all kids to learn. It's not new research. But still...here we go again.

I had the opportunity to be humbled by the challenge of teaching recently when I did a two-week stint teaching eighth grade social studies full time for a teacher out on maternity leave. I came in the big bad administrator in charge of teaching and learning in my district, a confluence of neck tie and grey beard meeting under a couple of comfortable chins, and within five minutes of my first period on the first day of teaching, the students reminded me how little anything I had ever done mattered prior the bell ringing that morning. One good eye roll from a disinterested student had more power than every framed piece of paper nailed to the wall of my office. I had to earn their attention and engagement, and I had to dust the cobwebs out of my teaching chops. By the end of that first day, I was a first-year teacher again, and I had to scrap my good intentions and plan to teach the kids in front of me, not the ideal kids I had in mind when I designed the lesson, or the kids I taught back in the late 1990's when I was in my prime. I had to roll up my sleeves and meet these kids where they were with what they needed from me. And by the end of the first day I knew I had not entered the classroom with any idea of what that might be, but I had to figure it out, and quick.

The deal with the devil was right in front of me, and I could have taken it and blown through my two weeks with no real problems. The kids wanted to make the deal with me that is at the meeting place of teachers and students every day in every classroom, the crossroads on the way to hell. They were offering me the "we'll leave you alone if you leave us alone" deal. The terms are understood: Don't expect too much. Don't pry. Don't get personal. Don't ask us to read more than a few glances at the surface of a text. Don't ask us to write. At all. Just don't. In return, we won't make it hard for you. This deal is the same one that makes it possible for students and teachers to mostly avoid one another in the classroom, for both to send salvos of minimal effort across the battle lines, to call it good enough.

I won't lie and say I was completely successful in my short teaching gig, but I didn't take the deal. I worked hard, and asked them to read and write and talk and share and get personal, and I had some real challenges and a couple of complete belly flops. But on the last day of my two-week gig, I stood in front of the same kids, joking, laughing with them, telling them I had enjoyed the time and that I would miss them. I meant it. That same girl with the professional eye roll held out her knuckles for me to bump, and I wish I could hang that moment on my wall as a real measure of my bonafides.

The two teachers who broke my heart with their attitudes were reading from the fine print in the deal they made with the devil of good enough. Their kids deserve better than the road to hell, paved with the good intentions of teachers who dare not expect too much.