Love Is The Way

A quick note: despite publishing this at the usual time & day, I am still contemplating extending my newsletter hiatus. As I mention in here, the school year starts on Monday, so the likelihood of me getting out anything worthwhile by next Wednesday is near zero. You can subscribe, if you haven’t already, so that you get the next one whenever it comes out!

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Yesterday I went back into my classroom and my office for the first time since early March of 2020. 

There was a lot in both places that really threw me for a loop. Student papers with names on them that I had completely forgotten, attached to faces I couldn’t picture. A few as-yet ungraded packets from our aquarium field trip, less than two weeks before everything shut down. Drawings of octopuses on the back white board and on the chart paper adorning our door, inspired by that same field trip. 

But what threw me the most was that the main white board was empty, save for a single line drawn up there by a student after a class that none of us knew would be our last together in person for almost two years. It read, simply: “Love is the way”. 

I don’t know which student of mine wrote that. At the time I would have been able to tell you, based on the handwriting, but that depth of knowledge has gone from me, along with so much else in these 19 months away. It’s better that way, maybe. Not all the loss of knowledge but the possibility that it could have been any of them, which means I can believe that all of them, even the ones who are no longer my students by dint of graduation or slow hemorrhage, are out there moving through the world with great love. 

My gut reaction to simple truisms like that one is often suspicion. The world is created in complex and multifarious ways and I am usually dubious that it can be distilled down to anything so bare and essential. 

But if you’ve read any other issues of this newsletter lately (the last, political one notwithstanding) you are probably aware that I have not been especially kind to myself lately. And the beauty of these truisms, when they are in fact true, is that they can be turned inward or outward and still make sense. The school year is starting next week, with all its attendant headaches and stresses, perhaps even more than usual now that we will be back together attempting to navigate a new reality together. Surviving that, for me, is going to mean loving myself enough not to give in to self-loathing when things inevitably go wrong. And it will mean loving my students enough to remember what it was like to be their age, which will prevent me from wanting to strangle them when things inevitably go wrong. 

The message is gone from the board now. (It did, perhaps fittingly, take quite a bit of work to erase. EXPO markers really set in over time, I guess.) But it’s one I want to carry with me into this new school year, and one I intend to bring to my students as well. Maybe it will help you to carry it with you, too. 

Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next time.

-Chuck