This Shirt

Mary Chapin Carpenter wrote and performed an excellent song entitled, “This Shirt.”  It is a song about the travels of her favorite shirt throughout monumental times in her life. Over time, this flannel shirt becomes old and ragged and is a good candidate for the scrap heap, but there is just too much sentimental value attached to it. “So old I should replace it, but I’m not about to try.”  Maybe you have an article of clothing that you hold dear to your heart.  A dress that you made for your high school Prom.  A jacket that was your Dad’s favorite.  The outfit that your first child wore coming home from the hospital.  Your wedding dress.  A jersey that you wore in the championship game.  I still have my #2 Little League jersey that I wore in several games leading up to the World Series in Williamsport and a shirt that has a tag reading ”Made with Love by Mary” in 1977.  Whatever the reason you hang on to those pieces of clothing, I would encourage you to keep holding on to them.  Sentimental value on a personal level is all well and good.

Sentimental value on a professional level can be good or bad.   This may not seem like a timely message, but as you begin to look toward the next school year (and you know that you are), this is good food for reflective thought.  In terms of instructional activities, everyone has their favorites.  Think of those activities that you do in your classroom year after year.  Not just the big ticket items, but those smaller activities as well. Do you keep using them for sentimental value like an old shirt or should it be discarded?  Here’s the litmus test in determining if an activity has more than sentimental value.  Step 1 = you have to ask yourself just what the purpose of the activity is.  Is it related to the daily goal?  Is it related to the long-term goals?  Is it just a time filler?  Is it something that is just “busy work?  Step 2 = be honest with yourself.  Is the purpose real or just imagined?  Is the activity something that is a high-yield strategy?  Is it essential for the further understanding of your students?  Step 3 = if the answers to the previous steps are  not in the affirmative, then toss it in the circular file of activities not worth your time nor your students’ time.  Sentimental value doesn’t mean a thing in this regard.

Time Capsules

One thing I neglected to do when our school was built was to collect some artifacts and bury a time capsule.  Shoulda.  Woulda.  Coulda.   Recently, I saw an episode of M*A*S*H, where the members of the unit buried a time capsule with items that would tell those who opened it perhaps one hundred years later something about their installment in 1953.  Among those items buried was a broken fan belt from a helicopter representing a pilot’s courage, boxing gloves representing an alternate way for countries to settle their differences instead of using live ammunition, a fishing lure representing soldiers who never made it home, a bottle of cognac that would only improve with age and should be savored and a teddy bear.  That latter represented “All the soldiers who came here as boys, but left as men.”  This 255^th episode of M*A*S*H* was aired in 1983 and is touching.

What would you put in your personal time capsule?  What do you want others to know about you as a teacher, counselor, paraprofessional, clerical staffer, custodian, speech pathologist, school psychologist, lunch lady or administrator 100 years from now?  What would you like for generations in the future to know about what you did?  Serioously, think this one through.  What would you put in that capsule for people to open in 100 years?  Would it be your favorite novel that you taught?  Would it be a piece of sports equipment?  Would it be a musical instrument?  Would it be a diorama that represented an important historical event?  Would it be a copy of the food pyramid?  Would it be a lab tray?  Would it be the latest technological device?  Seriously, give that some thought and let me know. As we study history now about others, in a hundred years someone will be studying about us.  What will they learn?  Maybe it’s not too late to bury that time capsule.