A Place at the Table

“What a shame, he missed breaking the world record on that one!”

“Well, I just don’t know if it was good enough..she had a balance check after that double back flip and then she took an awfully big step on the landing!”

“Oh man, he missed that rebound? He’s got three inches on that guy!”

As you can surmise, I’ve been spending some of my last lazy summer evenings watching the Olympics. My husband and I lolled in our easy chairs with a chilled beverage in hand and make uninformed judgments on diving and gymnastics. “The Thrill of Victory and the Agony of Defeat” makes for great entertainment.

But I wonder—What happens to these athletes after the Olympics are over? Because whether a competitor never made it past the first round of eliminations or stood on that center platform with gold while the national anthem played, it’s still over. It was two weeks of entertainment for us, but for the competitors, a lifetime of commitment was invested in a performance that lasted only minutes. So, was it worth it? For Michael Phelps, boy wonder, there will be multimillion dollar endorsement contracts. He earned it. For Kobe Bryant and the rest of the basketball team, there is redemption for the NBA’s tarnished reputation. They were fierce athletes and gracious sportsmen, they made us proud.

And then there are Shawn and Nastia, who held us all breathless with their physical grace and their steely poise under pressure. They made impossibly difficult feats of strength and agility look easy, and they did it on a piece of wood four inches wide and about three and half feet off the ground. At ages sixteen and eighteen, they have won gold medals, the hearts of viewers, and big endorsements so what comes next for these two? Will Shawn start her junior year at Valley High School and will Nastia begin her collegiate experience at Southern Methodist University?

For two weeks we watched, cheered, groaned and, as a country, shared their success and felt their pain. But I wonder about all the athletes all over the world who trained for years and dreamed of gold, but who didn’t make the team. I wonder about all the Olympians who trained for years and carried the responsibility of representing their nation, but never made it past the first round eliminations. I wonder those who were contenders but watched a medal slip away because of a muscle cramp or a torn tendon. What is it like to lose by .001 of a second? How does it feel to come in fourth? What keeps an also ran marathoner going long after the winners have finished?

Part of what makes the Olympics so riveting is the stakes. What are the odds of a little girl in Iowa becoming a world champion and how often does a young man with attention deficit disorder maintain such intense focus and become the “Greatest Olympian”? Unless they are self deceiving, it’s not about the money, because odds of turning a quest for Olympic gold into a pile of cash are not good. Most Olympians will go home with some nice souvenirs, some wonderful memories and the satisfaction of having tried their best.

We talk a lot about high expectations and high stakes in education circles these days. There are few situations that set higher expectations and higher stakes than Olympic competition. So here I am I wondering again:

What if we could harness that kind of energy and motivation toward learning?
What if our culture valued learning as much as winning?
What if we honored perseverance and celebrated “personal best” in learning as well as sports?

Posted by Susan Graham at 8:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It’s wonderful to discover people who share your secret indulgences. My fellow blogger Donalyn Miller writes of reading in airports -- and I had to smile because I, too, have been reading my way back and forth across America this summer. I left Virginia in the morning and arrived in California in the afternoon. Along the way, I wedged in a trip to Ireland where I spent the intervening hours with a flock of sheep as they avenged the murder of their shepherd in Three Bags Full. Not only can we take books with us, books can take us places we might not have the chance to visit.

While I physically returned to the East Coast by plane, my mind was taking the train west with the circus in the 1930’s as I read Water for Elephants. I’m old enough to remember the excitement of the Ringling Brother’s Greatest Show on Earth under a big top. I could smell the animals, hear the midway, and taste the dust. And I recalled the thrill of bareback riders, tightrope walkers, and the trapeze artists. My mother always warned me about the danger of the “carnie” people, but now I could roam behind the tents freely and without fear as I attended the circus by book. By book, I have been to places far more dangerous than the circus. Books let us go places we dare not venture in reality.

Books also allow us to travel through time. A week after I got home from California (via Ireland communing with the sheep and the Midwest with my pachyderm companions), my husband and I left to drive to Texas to visit our families. On the way to Texas I finished another book (ah, summer). Although Wolfe warned us that You Can’t Go Home Again , neither we escape Dreams from My Father. Books allow us to journey into the heart of our most personal relationships whether fictional or biographical.

I was taken by surprise by the intimacy of traveling through time and into the private spaces of my own family as we returned from Texas. For the better part of two days of the return trip, I read aloud from my maternal grandmother’s journals. She passed away on Christmas Eve the year before I was born, and I have always regretted not knowing this woman that I am said to closely resemble. Last week I spent 1942 with my grandmother. As I read her journals, the house that I remember so vaguely came alive as she did her church work and visited with a constant stream of friends and neighbors. In this story, my mother is a 17-year old, in her senior year, flitting in and out from school to church to social events. She is a flirt, a clotheshorse, a night owl and something of a spoiled princess—so different and yet not so different from the eighty-three year old mother I know today.

So why does a Family and Consumer Science teacher write about reading? Here is what I notice as I read. In every case, the characters and their world, whether fictional or historical, are shaped by the everyday experiences of the homes they make, the clothes they wear, the food on their table, and the relationships formed around these most common of daily domestic circumstances and experiences.

Donalyn writes that “Books build connections between readers.” They also build connections between people who live in places and under conditions that we will never experience. They invite us to reach across time into the past, and we develop an understanding of others by walking in their shoes, living in their homes, and joining them at their table. In doing so, we come to understand them and the world that we have shared. Along the way, we also come to understand ourselves.

Posted by Susan Graham at 11:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)