Work

The strawberry field that once hugged the highway east of Altamont will be etched in my mind forever.  Unfortunately, that plot of land does not occupy a pleasant, melodic, Beatlesque sort of memory, but rather one of brute childhood labor.  On more than one occasion, believe it or not, my own mother forced my siblings and me to join her in that field, stooping low to the hot summer sun, sweating, cursing, picking the red fruit that none of us particularly liked. 

We complained about this atrocity, or, as my father often called it, we bellyached, but to no avail.  Still we picked.  Slowly, poorly, we picked.  Many years later I would recall the scene to my grandfather, claiming that we were treated like sharecroppers out working our daily chores.  He laughed, and at the time I thought he was amused by my cleverness.  In retrospect, I suppose, considering he had grown up on a farm during the actual Great Depression, he was most likely laughing at me because he found my comment remarkably stupid.

The years have passed, and I am still not a big strawberry person.  However, the real memory of strawberry picking is actually one of the more valuable of my childhood.  For one, it was time spent with my maternal grandmother mere years before she passed. She lived in Altamont and often joined us out in the field.  For another, the labor taught me a most powerful lesson:  Sometimes in life you will be expected to pick strawberries, and it doesn’t really matter if you like strawberries or not.

This is a lesson lost, unfortunately, on a few.  I have been teaching school for over seventeen years, and each year a handful of students do not “pick their strawberries,” so to speak.  One way or another, they do not earn the sixty-nine and a half percent average that will allow them to “pass” my class. Sometimes these students will approach me and ask the obvious question.  “Why?  Why didn’t I pass?”  Or, they will ask the slightly more common yet more curious, “Why didn’t you pass me?” as if I am Santa Claus handing out letter grades from a big fat sack.

 The answer, almost always, is basically the same, and it is almost always unwelcome. 

“You didn’t do the work.”

Perhaps the problem was assignments incomplete or tests for which they were unprepared.  Regardless, it always comes back to work, really.  School assignments are work.  Studying is work. 

Perhaps too many days were missed.  Getting up in the morning is work.  Going somewhere we might not want is even harder work, particularly when we aren’t feeling well.

Perhaps the student was removed from school because of boorish behavior, but this, too, is basically a question of work.  Following rules is work, especially the ones we don’t like or might not understand.

It goes without saying that I cannot speak for every teacher, but in all my years in education, I cannot remember a single student who honestly tried hard in my class but still failed.

Now, that statement might seem anecdotal and perhaps even irrelevant, but it’s worth noting for the following reasons.  For one thing, there is a dangerous trend in education that suggests that in order to be effective, teachers must entertain their students.  Now, to be sure, there is nothing wrong with having fun in school, and it is true humans generally do learn better if they are engaged.

However, we also need to keep in mind that although our young people may supposedly learn differently than we did, these same young people will someday, quite soon, be filling prescriptions, building houses, fixing sewers, removing tumors, and running our country.   All of these tasks require hard work, and none of them are inherently entertaining in and of themselves.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, hard work can be edifying.  Accomplishing a difficult task can be emotionally gratifying.  Why in the world would we want to deny such a gift to our young people, particularly when, if we are honest with ourselves, reflections of jobs well done punctuate so soundly the memories of our own younger days? 

If a student fails, we should not make the assumption that so, too, fails the school.  Schools do not and should not exist to entertain.  At their core, schools ought to prepare students for success in society.  At their best, schools can teach students to improve that society.  However, neither of these goals will come easy, and thus a school that fails a student for not trying may actually be teaching that student one of the more valuable lessons they will ever learn:  effort counts.

The flip side of that, of course, is that the effort should be coupled with purpose.  I did not like to pick strawberries and I did not like to even eat strawberries, but somebody did.  Those strawberries were eaten; my efforts, bellyaching aside, were not in vain.  That also counted for something.

Without such a purpose, I may as well have been picking weeds.