Kayaking

Station Maine went kayaking yesterday.  Nothing involving major planning.  We just got into our respective kayaks and paddled Rockland’s South End.  It was a way to be social while maintaining social distance.  it wasn’t an eventful trip, but learning piled on top of learning.

We started heading south.  The wind was blowing from the south and we figured it would be easier to come downwind at he end of the trip when we’re tired.  We made it to Seal Ledge and found out that’s where the ducks go to rest at low tide.  Dozens of them.  We didn’t dare get too close because the osprey nest was full of chicks and a very protective mother who did not look kindly on us.  We watched the sky turn from brilliant blue to a thousand shades of white, blue, and grey.  Fluffy white against angry straight purple making all of us wish we could paint.  But could any painting be as beautiful as what we were experiencing.  Thunder bumpers were rolling in.  We saw the rain pouring in straight lines from the clouds to the far islands.  

We watched the wind change.  The directly due south wind clocked around within minutes to west.  We felt more than heard the rumble in the sky that signaled us to head for home.  We hit the shore and stowed the kayaks before the rain hit.  We were very pleased with ourselves.

There was more learning here than I am able to describe.  I suppose some book or web site could explain to us the territorial habits of nesting osprey or the pressure patterns that formed a thunder sky and changed the wind.  But this was more than knowing.  We learned from primary sources in a way that we will never forget.  We learned because we lived it.

Window Shades

I really looked forward to all those little home handyman chores that come with owning a house.  They are, each of them life, affirming in their own way.  But I find as I do the simple tasks that homeowners have enjoyed, or not, for years, that there are a few things missing.

For one thing, self-respect.  In my antiquity I’m finding that simple things like getting on top of the counter involve more than just a hop.  A stepladder.  Seriously, I used a stepladder to get on my counter.  I would have thought myself clever, as I had all the tools and fastenings lined up and within reach.  Except now that I’m up here I can’t help but notice how greasy the top of the microwave is.  Now that I know I can’t simply work around all that grease as if it wasn’t there.  So, OK, climb down, soapy water, clean and beautiful.

Next I need to mark and place the brackets.  The very thorough directions in two languages fail to tell me why two screws are bigger than the other two.  The blistering heat which actually inspired me to hang these sun shading wonders in the first place requires that at least one window be left open.  I was lucky, so very lucky, that the first time I dropped the screw, when it bounced on the counter, that it stopped itself a mere inch from jumping outside to be forever lost in the pucker brush two stories down.  The directions with the list of necessary tools might have included a pair of needle nose pliers to hold the screw in this tiny corner at this ridiculous angle.  Are all home handymen ambidextrous?  I happen to be, to my great good fortune.  But I am not a contortionist, and squeezing into the right place to position these brackets is not doing my aging back any favors.

What every home worker needs is a young apprentice.  No more than three feet tall.  Long arms with two elbows each, reedy fingers at least eight inches long, with the middle finger the same length as the first and ring finger.  Cheerful of demeanor, willing to run and fetch and hold.  Tireless in the face of getting the measurements right and the brackets lined up.  Observant of mistakes, tactful at drawing attention to them.  Oh, if only.

As you have certainly noticed by now, I am kind of new to all of this.  Yet with all the above hyperbole and nonsense running through my head I managed to mount two shades in my kitchen.  They’re probably not perfect, but they will block the eastern sun.  They seem to make the kitchen cooler, because everything seemed cooler when I climbed off that counter with the sweat dripping in rivers down my forehead.  Still, for all their lack of perfection, these shades are mine.  I did this.  This is experiential education, a new skill learned by doing.  It feels really, really good.

A Small Oops

I delivered a gig and trailer to another program yesterday.  This isn't a huge deal.  The bigger deal was the unloading.  The lot where we put her was sand.  Because I should have focused more on the blocking under her the trailer and gig fell off her supports.  This is not a tragedy, merely an inconvenience.  The tragedy, in my eyes, was that there were no kids there to see.  They would have seen the blocking shift and the rig fall.  Somewhere in their minds they would have imprinted to always check the supporting ground before you unload.  They would have sensed no anger or cursing.  They would have seen myself and another program director accessing the situation, sharing ideas, laughing, supporting one another, resigned to the amount of work involved, resolved to simply enjoy the puzzle presented us in the physical world.

I often think how much learning is to be had in everyday experiences in the physical world.  I often think how selfish it might be to haul and launch and trailer these boats alone.  OK, it was certainly not worth taking a kid's entire Sunday just to see an accident that we certainly wouldn't have planned.  But how rare is it these days that youth get to see adults working together.  How rare is it that they get to see adults make collective mistakes.  How rare is it that kids get to see adults resolve these mistakes with joy and humor.  Don't get me wrong.  Adults work together and make mistakes together all the time.  But where are the kids who might profit from it?

So I wish, and will continue to wish, for opportunities for kids of any age to work with competent adults.  I wish for laws to be revised so that those younger than sixteen can participate in real work experiences.  I wish for less focus on money and more on learning.  I wish for expended apprenticeship programs where all of the above becomes a natural part of growing up.  I wish and I dream and I write that some day we will realize how much education can and must take place outside of the classroom.

Practice Art

In 2006 a high school English teacher asked students to write a famous author and ask for advice. Kurt Vonnegut was the only one to respond - and his response is magnificent: “Dear Xavier High School, and Ms. Lockwood, and Messrs Perin, McFeely, Batten, Maurer and Congiusta:

I thank you for your friendly letters. You sure know how to cheer up a really old geezer (84) in his sunset years. I don’t make public appearances any more because I now resemble nothing so much as an iguana.

What I had to say to you, moreover, would not take long, to wit: Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.

Seriously! I mean starting right now, do art and do it for the rest of your lives. Draw a funny or nice picture of Ms. Lockwood, and give it to her. Dance home after school, and sing in the shower and on and on. Make a face in your mashed potatoes. Pretend you’re Count Dracula.

Here’s an assignment for tonight, and I hope Ms. Lockwood will flunk you if you don’t do it: Write a six line poem, about anything, but rhymed. No fair tennis without a net. Make it as good as you possibly can. But don’t tell anybody what you’re doing. Don’t show it or recite it to anybody, not even your girlfriend or parents or whatever, or Ms. Lockwood. OK?

Tear it up into teeny-weeny pieces, and discard them into widely separated trash recepticals. You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what’s inside you, and you have made your soul grow.

God bless you all!

Kurt Vonnegut

The Bait Shack

Stephen Betts of the VillageSoup recently published a photo of the last remaining bait shack in Rockland.  It was built by Sulo Grundros many years ago.  This tumbledown old shack was the first office of Station Maine.  It had a door then, and windows.  The char was from a fire that destroyed the old Rockland Boat, where many beautiful boats were built back in the day.

There was no heat in this little shack, and no insulation to keep the heat in once we brought in the wood stove.  We wore our coats and gloves when we stuffed envelopes for mailings.  But it came with dock space for our gig.  It came with a great deal of encouragement from our community and from the early risers at Journey’s End offices who watched us row out at sunrise.

I guess I’m showing this by way of illustration.  Station Maine had very little to start with.  A borrowed boat, a bait shack, a handful of very, very enthusiastic adolescents.  From these humble beginnings we built the program that not only built us, but built generations of kids who followed.  We were told it couldn’t be done.  No seed money.  Insufficient population.  Insufficient business training.  We persevered because we knew we had to if we wanted to build the vibrant program that we ultimately did build.  We are stronger, each of us who have pulled an oar with Station Maine.  But I think there is an added level of pride for those of us who began a program in this shack and built something worthy.

Find your dream.  Whatever it is, embrace it.  Talk about it.  Plan the work and work the plan.  Then find your bait shack.  However inadequate, it will give you a wonderful sense of moving forward towards changing the world. 

                                            

The Net

I have the great good fortune to live near a boatyard.  Several of them actually.  There is never a shortage of interesting things to see.  There is never a shortage of questions to ask.  I rarely take the time out of a man’s work day to interrupt him with questions.  The internet is really helpful in helping me both formulate questions and discover answers.

So, let’s take a look at the great black blob in the photo below.  It is a net.  A very, very big net.  Depending on the age and experience of the learner in question I can ask a hundred questions that are of genuine interest.  What is it made of?  How does it work?  How is it rigged?  How many fish can it catch?  What sort of fish?  What are the fish used for?

If the learner is not actually interested in any of these questions then maybe they have questions of their own that want to be answered.  If they are just not interested in the net, move on.  Not everybody is interested in everything.  But when you get outside and learn to look with eyes of wonder there is almost always something worth asking questions about.

CDC Guidelines

This morning I stumbled upon the Maine Center for Disease Control guidelines for opening schools.   

 https://www.maine.gov/doe/covid-19/reintegrate?fbclid=IwAR1WWU8U9nIFsbU7He3JG63fkBMG50eYU5qyYyU1AWUjeKMduRUqRbaFNgY

I’m saddened, as we all are, to see such strict and dehumanizing guidelines thrust upon us.  Yet I see the need.  We are at war, the enemy is this virus, and until we can create the weapon that will destroy it we must protect our children from it.  This is our new reality.  This is our new normal.

I did find, however, one shining beacon of hope.  Part III, Section A, Paragraph 3.  

Encourage visionary risk takers to create nontraditional models and plans.  This is a time for innovation and big thinking.

The old model of public education may have served well 150 years ago when it was created.  But the world has changed.  We have blithely accepted this model because it was already in place, warm and comfortable like an old shoe.  Maybe we haven’t noticed that the sole is so worn that we are being crippled by that shoe.  Maybe we won’t know until we try on a new shoe how crippled we have allowed our old shoe to make us.

Now, buried in Part III, comes the call for visionary thinking.  Let us answer that call.

An Open Forum for Thought

Many of us have read the Maine CDC guidelines for re-opening schools, day care centers, and summer camps.  No one here is going to blame the CDC for trying to keep us safe and prevent the spread of disease.  Still, we’re all looking at this list and thinking the same thoughts.  How can we teach our children in a classroom with other children and not allow them to socialize?  How can we even pretend we’re educating them to take their place in society if they have not learned to work together with their fellow students?  How can we talk diversity but not let “groups” mingle?

I don’t have answers to any of these questions.  But it occurs to me that a very, very large component of education must now be self-motivated Experiential Education.  Children and parents must learn to fill in the gaps of experience that schools can no longer provide.

It is my hope that for the next few weeks or months to provide and solicit ideas on how to expand our education and our children’s education.  We want to seek out and explore experiences that we can enjoy within safe guidelines that will add some meat to the formal education being offered by schools both in the classroom and on line.

I hope you will join me.