Acres

 

When I was a boy I told my dad I was going to be a real farmer. This meant I would do everything he did but also have chickens.

Before long I changed my mind and decided to be a stuntman, like Lee Majors, and then a baseball player, like Cardinal second baseman Tommy Herr. After a few innings of Little League I switched again and instead chose the much more reasonable profession of archeology. (Like Indiana Jones, I also understood the importance of museums.)

As the years passed even this idea faded, but I never did go back to wanting to be a farmer. Dad was OK with that, though.

“You should be what you think,” I remember him explaining, seemingly at peace with my decision and perhaps relieved he would no longer have to worry about me bumping tractors into power lines.

By the end of high school I thought I was going to be a journalist but then chose to study history, and along with history I enrolled in SIU’s College of Education. I was well into my last semester, however, and still had no intention of actually teaching. My plan was to go to grad school, perhaps, or maybe publish a trashy novel. Regardless, I wasn’t thinking much about running my own classroom at all.

Then one day in April of 1998, twenty-five years ago this past spring, I experienced what I now consider a noisy moment of clarity. I was student-teaching my boisterous crew of 8th grade geography students at Marion Junior High School, having just finished a clumsily executed but meticulously designed lesson on European borders. The students were smiling, I was smiling, and I knew--finally--what I needed to know.

I was not going to be a teacher.

I was a teacher.

Teaching just made sense and it was fun. Besides that, I had gifts that seemed to lend themselves to the profession, such as patience and a sense of humor, along with the desire to be blamed for setting but also help quench society’s never-ending list of dumpster fires.

I understood at that moment that teaching was simply part of what I was designed to be.

(Fortunately I figured this out before I graduated a few weeks later!)

Now as a high school teacher, part of my job is to help students find success on their own path. As an English instructor this means teaching them ways to enhance their own writing, but, perhaps more importantly, it means convincing them that writing is a craft that can help them regardless of what path they end up choosing.

This is often a tough sell.

As a parent, though, one of my biggest jobs is to simply help my own children find their way in the first place. This takes time, of course, and is done partially by helping them discover their own gifts.

 As the apostle Paul wrote to the Romans, “We have different gifts, according to the grace given to each of us.” Granted, Paul was referring to spiritual gifts more so than talents, but God has blessed all of us with certain skills and dispositions that - in the right environment - will allow us to live full, fruitful lives.

Unfortunately, this “discovering of gifts” often requires a certain level of quiet that seems to be increasingly difficult to find in our modern schedules. The tighter our calendars get, the less time there is for reflection. We sometimes schedule our lives up to the last minute, and when we do get some “downtime,” what is one thing we often have at our disposal to make certain we don’t use it to just think?  If we’re going to organize their days, at the very least we should also offer our children the space to consider their calling—among other big ideas—away from distractions, away from the poison and barnyard noise most of now carry around with us in our pockets.

Although we never did get chickens, my brother is now the real farmer, working the soil that’s been in the family for generations. I don’t regret my own path, but I do often envy the relative solitude that comes with farming; the hours alone in the tractor driving up and down the rows, surrounded by blue sky and various shades of green. Decades ago, somewhere in those acres, I imagined myself following all kinds of paths, and I likely planned out at least one future where I followed in my mother’s footsteps to become a teacher.

 I’m thankful I had all those acres to just think. Now I need to offer my own children the space to ponder the rows in front of them.