Words from WW Blog

I am 55 years removed from my year as a seventh-grader at Williamstown (WV) Junior High. That means I could get the senior citizen discount simply from the time I’ve lived SINCE seventh grade. Things were different back in 1966…and yet they weren’t much different at all.

Oh, yes, there weren’t the “devices” that kids have today. I watched an episode of The Andy Griffith Show last night where Floyd, Barney, and Andy were bemoaning all the new devices that were invading their lives. Opie walked by about that time holding a transistor radio next two his ear. “See, what did I tell ya!”, said Barney.

I wonder what they’d say today as Johnny comes to school “all hooked up” with his ear AirPds and iPhone? What would they say about the $1,000 he is displaying in order to listen to some group I’ve never heard, whose name could also be an assault on the advancement of correct spelling?

Anyway…as I survey the hallways, classrooms, and athletic fields of Timberview Middle School, I see the faint image of myself leaking through the personalities and insecurities of the students. Back in the day I was a 4’8″ skinny kid who wore eyeglasses and had a buzz haircut. That year I had been the quarterback on the Williamstown “B” Squad that was the equivalent of today’s Pop Warner competition. I was so short I couldn’t see over the offensive line. If we did a pass play, I pitched it back to Tommy Station, my fullback, who then threw the pass. My voice resembled a baby robin squealing to his mama for a worm. But I was fast!

In other words, I was a mixture of uncertainty, self-doubts, potential, and constantly being misjudged by others. You know…the kid on the playground who gets picked last when teams are chosen, but then zooming by the competition.

I walk by kids at TMS who are present-day carbon copies of that. They’d been doubted for so long by their peers and instructors that some of them have come to believe they have no talent or any possibilities for success. They’ve come to believe they are mediocre, destined to be labeled as “C” students in the classroom and standing on the sidelines of the athletic field.

I can remember my own “settling”, being convinced of the impossibilities of possibilities. I don’t remember anyone at school telling me the importance behind the subjects we were learning. They were just “filler facts” and information to make sure our lives were occupied from 8 AM to 3 PM. School was what you did, not part of shaping what you were to become.

I was one of those students who tried to go to the restroom or get a drink of water in as many classes as possible, a hall-wanderer to gain a few moments of relief from the lesson of the day about dangling participles, latitude and longitude, and subtracting a negative number from a negative number.

And so I see myself now in the kids, unsure of who they are and, in some cases, frightened of who they might become.

In this era of masks and diminished hearing, it’s easy to reply in nonsensical ways to a comment or question directed at you. In my recent excursion into the world of seventh-grade language arts it happened to me quite often. A student would say something to me that got funneled through the translation colander on the way to my ears.

It was like this!

Student: Mr. Wolfe, can we get a little more time to work on the short story?

ME: That’s not my decision. If you want salad for lunch, go for it!

Student: Huh???

Yes, it’s probably a sign that my hearing has deteriorated a bit. Add to that a growing number of students masking up as they attend class. It always seems to be the ones who are as quiet as church mice who turn their volume down another level with their mask. It’s confusing to a senior citizen who sometimes wants to hear what he wants to hear.

That’s another angle on this communication confusion. We have a tendency to want to hear what we prefer to hear. There were a few times in my youthful years where I wanted to hear that a certain young lady was interested in me. I’d take any positive comment from her and sift it through the translation colander for what it meant. She said hello to me in the school hallway = “She’s interested!” She sat two seats over from me in chemistry class = “She wants to be close to me!” Our elbows touched in the crowded cafeteria = “Please call me!”

We have the need to hear what we’ve already decided is the right answer. It’s the ravenous hunger of our times, to not hear words correctly and rearrange the pieces accordingly.

My students would giggle and laugh as they listened to my distorted responses. I could translate “better” into “peanut butter” and “graded assignment” into “great climbing”.

Student: Mr. Wolfe, will that be our next graded assignment?

ME: I don’t know. I’ve done a climbing wall once, but I wouldn’t call it a great climb!”

Student: Huh???

And so it goes! Confused communication. Wrong ways to reword. Not hearing the truth and not wanting to hear the truth.

Now it makes me wonder what that young lady, a few decades ago, really DID say about me? Did she even know who I was? Was she saying hello to me or to a taller guy who happened to be walking behind me? All disturbing questions to ponder…so I’ll just keep thinking she was interested!

A couple of years ago I was filling in for our middle school art teacher one day. My last class of the day was a group of frenzied and squealy sixth-graders, their anticipation of the closing bell causing them to resemble a New Year’s Eve countdown party. One boy got my attention because of his shoes. His shoestrings flapped up and down like the trailing tails on a kite. I was surprised his shoes could actually stay on his feet.

I said to him, “Tie your shoes!”

“Why?” he responded. “They’re just going to come untied again!”

Telling the kid, whose hair hadn’t met up with a comb for a few days, that it was why he had shoestrings, was met with eyes glazed-over by the punishment of having to be in school for the last six hours of his life. I was unrelenting in my expectation and he finally kneeled down and tied the strings as loose as they could possibly be.

I remember that encounter vividly and have thought of it often in recent times as I’ve seen a shift as a part of our cultural philosophy. It is signified by the idea that offering a reward will change a person’s actions and decisions. It’s an idea that has been around in various ways for quite some time, but has now been recreated as a way to influence the hard-to-convinced and slow-to-come-around. I remember schools would use this technique in getting students to show up for the “official count day”, the day in October when their state funding was dependent on how many students were in the building to be educated that morning. There would be ice cream, pizza for lunch, balloons, trinkets, games, throwing pies at the principal, and any other creative activity that could entice Johnny and Janey to show up. Coming because education is important for their future success was not even in the ballpark.

Whatever your thinking is about vaccinations, it seems that the same philosophical roots have been seeded into the pressure for people to be vaccinated. From May until July, Colorado was drawing a weekly winner of a million dollars of those who were getting vaccinated. National polling by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that one-third of those who hadn’t been vaccinated would be more likely to be vaccinated if they were entered into a lottery with the chance to win a million dollars. Colorado’s officials had the mindset that dangling the possibility of becoming a millionaire would alter people’s decisions. It did not apply to those who had been the early adopters, receiving the vaccine shots back in the first few months of 2021. It only applied to those who had been hesitant, suspicious, and unconvinced. Like the long lines of people waiting to buy lottery tickets when the jackpot was around 700 million, the state thought being rewarded for being slow to come around would work. The findings were mixed as to whether it did, but the philosophy behind it was evident.

This week there was a story coming out of San Francisco, and being okayed by the California state government, of a program that rewards addicts with money, usually given in gift cards, for each week they stay clean. It’s seen as an incentive to get people clean and back on the right track.

I’ve got mixed feelings about both of the states’ initiatives. I’m just a little uneasy for trying to get people to change their minds or getting unconcerned folk to be concerned by rewarding them.

Back to the middle school culture for an analogy, when I give an assignment to a student and tell him the due date is two days from then but he doesn’t turn it in, I cringe at the thought of rewarding him if he turns the assignment in late.

I covered that sixth-grade boy’s health class a few weeks after I had him in class the first time. He came in with shoe strings flopping once again and the laces only going through one eyelet on each side of each shoe. The shoe tongues looked like they were trying to make a break for it. I told him to tie his shoes again and he offered the same resistance as he had before. The class was going outside for the period, so I told him he wouldn’t be going out until he had tied the laces. He was still fussing about my demand, when a classmate stepped up and said, “I’ll do it.” He knelt down at the boy’s feet and tied the kid’s shoes.

I’m a bit uneasy when our mindset becomes “If you stand close to me, I’ll not only tie your shoes for you, I’ll give you a new pair to slip on.”

This past week I had a great unplanned-for conversation with a friend of mine about the frustrations of being a moderate in regards to politics. In all the sludge that gets thrown back and forth between conservatives and progressives, it seems that those us positioned in the middle being observers at a tennis match, looking side-to-side at each shot that is volleyed.

You see, being in the middle is seen as being indecisive and indifferent. It’s as if we don’t really care, but the fact is that we care a whole lot. We wish there was someone who understood that. We wish there was someone who cared about the poor, and the military, and not making everything free, and helping the elderly, and not really caring an ounce about LeBron’s or Trump’s opinions, and willing to hold someone accountable for their decisions, and being wise and honorable, and more worried about our nation than reelection, and willing to put a pair of khaki shorts and a tee shirt on and pass out bottled of water to people who have just been devastated by a disaster, and willing to sit in the Bob Uecker seats at the baseball game. We wish there was someone who understood that he/she wasn’t always right and is sometimes unsure on what the right answer is, someone who would therefore be willing to listen to all sides of an issue and vote the way he believes, not just what is the flavor-of-the-month opinion.

But we’re middlers who, despite what people say about us, are more concerned about the communities we live in and the unity of the country. We don’t want anyone to be left behind mentally…physically…spiritually…economically…socially…and education-wise.

We want everyone to be able to vote, but we also want the right to vote to be valued and seen as a privilege to hold dear. We applaud sacrifice and cringe at entitlement. We appreciate passion and patriotism.

As a moderate, I believe I have the ability to hear different views and see the merit in both. And as a moderate, I believe there can be compromise, that bantering and belittling do little to bring resolution.

However, as a guy in the middle, our view doesn’t get much airtime. It doesn’t heighten the drama and raise the ratings.

It is, however, usually the place on the spectrum where common sense takes up residence!

The middle school cross country team I coach had its first meet this past week. What an experience! 6th, 7th, and 8th-grade boys and girls, many of them running their first race ever…if you don’t include their video games ventures. We had less than two weeks of practice beforehand to prepare us for the mess. All of our races are one and a half miles, a mire trot around the countryside, right? For some it was! Unfortunately, only a couple of those runners were wearing our team shirt.

We had gradually been increasing the mileage of the runners, running 2 miles and then 3 miles. The day after our race we challenged many of them to complete a 4-mile run, and next week we’ll throw a 5-miler into the mix. But on Wednesday our objective was to run the first race and learn from it.

Here’s the thing about middle school athletes! You have some who grit their teeth, have fire in their eyes, and resemble pint-size Marines giving it their all. The race is a battle for them, a personal battle to quiet the inner-doubts and voices and a battle for honor pitting them against their opponents. Grit in an athlete is a coach’s dream! On our team there is a small-sized fiery redheaded girl who fought off the doubts and all those who looked at her and hadn’t expected much. We expected a couple of other girls from our team to appear over the last ridge before her but she had that look that said she thought she was leading the charge on Iwo Jima.

And then there were others who let the struggle defeat them, turning a ten-minute race into a twenty-plus minute ordeal filled with whining and complaining. A few hobbled across as if they had just finished the Leadville 100-mile Ultra-marathon. Faces showed the agony, looking for sympathetic parents who might soothe their wounds with a post-race shaved ice treat from the Kona Ice Truck parted behind the stadium. One young lady turned her ankle and was helped across the finish line by one of her teammates in a scene resembling the Confederate retreat from Antietam.

I forgot to tell our runners that I had an instant cold pack in our first-aid bag. It may have been a good thing not to mention since I only had one. I’m envisioning a line of runners laid out in a makeshift triage area, moaning for ice to be applied to their ankle, knee, calf, thigh, head, lower back, finger, etc.

Middle school athletics reveals more about a student’s strengths and character than it does their athletic ability. Oh, yes, you have the male athletes who reached puberty about five years before anyone else. Chiseled biceps are a sign that they have probably reached their max. High school may be a disappointment for them since they’ve dominated all the pint-sized competitions all through middle school. Other than those deviations from the norm, middle school athletics reveal who has heart, who’s coachable, who will be a great teammate, and who understands what makes up sportsmanship. It shows who has the ingredients to be successful, not in athletics but rather in life. Who can be counted, who feels entitled, and who will disappear?

And so we’ll go at it again this coming Wednesday on a different course against the same teams of runners, looking for that grit and fire in our 11, 12, and 13-year-olds that will bring smiles to our faces about what they’ve discovered about themselves?

Sometimes we take things for granted, like that there will be a driver for the school bus, a teacher for the class, or football helmets for the team. In our middle school, all of those “common occurrences” were discovered this past week to be unrealistic expectations. Sports teams from any school in our district, middle and high, won’t have buses to travel to their contests; not all classes have a hired teacher, and some of the football players will be sharing the same helmet. Gross!

I’m one of those unqualified people who is filling a teaching position. I love doing it, but I’m probably a little too old school, like expecting students to be able to write a complete sentence and spell correctly. I did the same teaching position last year and was called in a few days before school started to teach the same subject in the same classroom at the same school…at least for the first few weeks!

One week has come and gone. My back wall is outlined, once again, with old Far Side cartoons that spell out the word SMILE. A poster in front of the class is titled “Wolf Teacher” with a picture of the animal looking much more fierce than me. What an experience it has been so far to banter back and forth with about 110 students during the course of each day, learning names and some of their interests, discovering their personalities…or lack of!

This school year is so much different than last year, and now, what they were accustomed to two years ago is a distant faded memory. One of the differences, dare I say new experiences for just about all of our students, is learning how to open a combination locker. I’ve dubbed one of my team teachers, Aiden Tiernan, as being the “Locker Guru”. He patrols the hallways between classes like a tow truck driver looking for stranded motorists. His customer base is so massive that I’ve picked up some of “the business” he can’t take care of.

Opening a locker seems like such a simple task on the same level as boiling water and tying one’s shoes, but we discovered it’s an acquired skill.

Turn to the left. Turn to the right one complete rotation until to reach the second combo number. Turn back to the left. The Locker Guru even made a demonstration wheel made out of cardboard (that resembled the spinning wheel on “Wheel of Fortune”) to help students understand. Each passing period, however, there were stranded and stumped students standing in the hallway with pleading faces.

I was somewhat mystified by it. That is, aren’t these the same students who master Level 78 on some video game that requires extreme concentration and coordination? Aren’t these the same testers that can text 100 words a minute in “partial language”?

But turning a combo lock on a locker is a bit too old school. I’m sure some were looking for a “passkey locker”, like they were getting into their room at the Holiday Inn.

“Mr. Wolfe, I can’t get into my locker!” cries one teary-eyed seventh-grader.

“Okay! What’s your combo?”

“17-33-5.”

I spin the wheel to the left, right, and left, and…click! He’s amazed, like I’ve just performed a magic trick worthy of a spot amongst the America’s Got Talent finalists. I blow on my fingers, as if they’re on fire with my proficiency.

Once again, things we take for granted are new dives into the unknown for others. Of course, on the other hand, several things that are common knowledge for them that they talk to me about this past week I am completely clueless about. When my cluelessness is discovered they shake their heads in disbelief. They can’t believe I’m still alive and don’t know what “Boba” tea is!

I was talking to a dear friend of mine recently about a topic that had been puzzling to both of us for a long, long time. It revolved around someone who has had a spiritual conversion experience. That is, they’ve experienced a spiritual transformation and become a devoted Jesus-follower.

Jesus, also known as “The Bread of Life”. Jesus, the One who in John 6:35 identifies Himself as such and then says that anyone who comes to Him will never go hungry. Jesus, the One who took a few small loaves of bread and fed a multitude with them. And Jesus, the One who took a piece of bread and said to His disciples, “This is My body broken for you!”

Bread is a frequent object lesson that Jesus uses to communicate nourishment, freshness, and provision. In Jesus’ time, as it is now, it was one of those objects that awakened a person’s senses…the smell of fresh-baked bread, the smoothness of the outside crust to touch, the taste as a person’s tongue experienced it. It was also a simple and common part of a person’s food supply. Everyone could identify with the meaning and value of bread.

And then Jesus says that He is The Bread of Life. He is the sustenance, all that is needed.

Back to the conversation that my friend and I were having, we are perplexed by someone who experiences the Bread of Life, the Best of Life, and then walks away from it. In essence, why go from the Bread to crumbs that have been dropped off the table and ground into the dirt?

If someone has experienced life with Christ how does something less fulfilling so easily take its place? It’s a question with a multiple points answer. Scripture tells us that we all fall short of God’s perfection. That is, we all have focused on the temporariness of the crumbs at some point and missed the Bread of Life. Our fallen nature makes the staleness of life seem more appealing than the freshness of God’s presence.

There is also the disappointment that others have brought into our lives that has caused us to question the validity and value of our faith. If the worshipping community I have become a part of becomes focused on other things instead of their spiritual journey with God it can boring disillusionment and even bitterness. Sometimes the people of God have a way of getting in the way of the connection with God.

And, maybe one more answer to the question is that the lure of the world, the things that we are continually told are to be sought after and highly-valued…possessions, experiences, prominence, popularity, and position…cause us to think that The Bread of Life isn’t as great as the things of life.

Which takes us back to that confusing question that my friend and I are ealing with. We hope that those who have wondered away from the faith are having Simon Peter moments, denying Jesus for a time before re-identifying with Him. The sorrow that Peter experienced after he had walked away from Christ made him realize who he was, but also Who he needed to be following.

And then he took the Bread of Life within him again and truly became the Rock on which the church was built.

I received the looks layered with grins and slight head shakes. The looks came from several of the teachers at Timberview Middle School who were wondering if they were seeing things. I was back to start the new school year teaching the same class that I taught last year, seventh-grade language arts.

When the principal called me the week before school started in mid-August of 2020 and asked me to fill in for this class he was thinking, and indicating, that it would be for the first month of the academic year. The first month was then extended to the first quarter…and then the first semester…and then the whole school year. It was an amazing experience that I thoroughly enjoyed, but it was for…the one year!

This past week I received a communication from our new principal’s administrative assistant asking if I would fill in for the same position…for the first week! I started yesterday. The assistant principal thanked me for my willingness to help for the first week, and then she added, “Or maybe two!”

In sharing that news with a few of the teachers who were asking me what I would be doing I kept getting reactions like this: “Isn’t that how it started last year, Bill?”

Yes, but…but, well…this year is different!

And it is! Students will be in the classroom five days a week. There’s no hybrid learning model that will be occurring. Masks aren’t mandatory…at least, to begin with, so we won’t need to go outside and take mask breaks. Teachers won’t have to deal with the frustration of kids being online at home and have to keep asking them to turn their laptop cameras on. Side Point: There seemed to be so many broken laptop cameras that happened last year. It could have been a new entrepreneurial business venture for someone.

What seems to resemble the last school year is the shortage of teachers. There were more teachers who left the profession than new teachers coming into it. Schools are no different than the restaurant industry, commercial businesses, that term we keep hearing…”the supply chain”. I heard on the news this week that our city’s food bank supplier, Care and Share, was having to consider eliminating some of the food bank deliveries they make because of a shortage of drivers. In essence, those who depend on receiving food from one of the food banks may go hungry because there’s not someone to take the food to them.

Our educational institutions are encountering the same labor shortage. An email from our district went out this week urging coaches of our school’s athletic teams to get certified to drive one of the school district’s smaller buses because there aren’t enough bus drivers. Our school has custodian, para-professional, office assistants, and teaching positions that still need to be covered…and Monday is the first day for students.

So…here I am! Sharing my non-institutional-based teaching education, spiced with homespun humor, with inquisitive, hyper twelve-year-olds. They don’t realize my lack of qualification. They just assume my greying hair makes me qualified.

Maybe it will be for just the first week! Maybe it will speed into the second! All I know is that one of the 8th grade social studies teachers does not want it to be long-term. She’s expecting me to cover three weeks in September for her!