The back-to-school buzz on newscasts, in retail advertising and in the scheduling discussions of town boards and committees is no longer as personally relevant since this will be the second school year I will not be readying a classroom. Ah … retirement.
However, retirement does not preclude thinking about school preparations. It does not remove the fizzy thrum of excitement about how meeting a group of young learners opens the possibilities linked to being joined collaboratively with an emerging community.
All those hopes and dreams converge like streams within a watershed and, with a riff on the many flood warnings and watches we’re experiencing, prompt an educator’s exhale/inhale practice that all will flow gracefully within natural and safe boundaries. In waterways it is fascinating to observe the vagaries of flow, as measured by cubic feet per second (CFS). CFS is seasonally variable and can be a call to action for those who recreate in, near or on water.
That natural variation (I am not tackling human-controlled meddling here, like dam releases and pump storage facilities) can be immensely beautiful, exciting, calming and challenging to experience. Would anyone who feels a connection to one of our four elements want water to be completely predictable? Not I, for where is the wonder in that?
I’m going to think of a public education-based CFS, because education does not yet have enough acronyms! When families, like a vibrantly nourishing stream, readjust to accommodate external schedules, and drivers, like a gently trickling creek, respect and honor sharing roads with buses and vans, the forces are gathering.
When school personnel are again working in spaces rocked with the deep energy of young people, it may feel like spending time at a lake, sometimes placid, sometimes white-capped, beset by insect hatch-outs, swiftly moving storms, so many motors, or graced by the gentle ripples of moving creatures, by splendidly tinted reflections of days’ opening and closing, by the carried sounds of laughter and conversation. As students, like a swiftly flowing river, are swept back into school routines, we may each have our own version of a colloquial watershed experience.
Community Forging Scholarship: Those are the words to my acronym CFS. The humans of our communities converge to buoy what I have a powerful thirst for: more humans interacting kindly, problem solving, sharing questions, exploring how facts can bring us from what we do not yet know to what we can know, looking to the future as we evolve as thinking, sentient beings on a uniquely personal journey into scholarship.
Together we embark on another school year, focusing on the stuff of the mind but with heart and hand to the task as well, because forging is arduous work requiring coordinated effort. Forging educational experiences depends on the skills of many and on substantive materials from all swaths of our human watershed.
Like the CFS of water, the new school year’s CFS will shift within the flow of the school calendar. No matter the measures, the pace, the scale, I sincerely hope that the underpinnings of community, forging, scholarship take hold and support all children within the banks of safety, joy ( well, perhaps the kind that knows no bounds, let there be a flood of it!) and learning. With a healthy watershed we can better cope with fluctuations of flood and drought, literal and figurative. Our civil society needs this.
Barbara Buschner of Northfield is formerly a kindergarten and preschool teacher, currently an Eventide singer, bemusedly navigating retirement and wondering how it is she once followed info on the cfs of local rivers for open boat tandem whitewater canoeing.