The daily meanderings of a teacher

Bird Droppings November 10, 2026

When the Students Tell Us Whether It Is Working

I have been wandering back through some memories of teaching in Warner Robins in the mid-1970s. Funny how a conversation today can take me back fifty years and leave me thinking about something I am still trying to understand. I had encountered Foxfire in a bookstore in Pennsylvania a few years earlier. I bought Foxfire 2, and somewhere between reading it and working with a group of teenagers, I began wondering what would happen if I gave students more say in their learning.

I taught at a private school, working with teenagers who had learning disabilities. The school’s beginnings were personal. The principal had a son who was profoundly deaf, and she wanted educational opportunities for him that she had struggled to find. A mother saw a need and acted on it. That seems a pretty good place for a school to begin.

By the time I was there, I was trying my own version of what I understood from Foxfire. The students chose books they wanted to read. We worked on magazines. Their interests gave us somewhere to start, and we went from there. My reading scores went up tremendously. Looking back, I cannot assign every bit of that improvement to one decision or one approach. I do know that giving students a choice mattered. Reading became connected to something they wanted to do.

Another part of that experience struck me as I talked about it today. I had considerable freedom in that classroom. No one was continually coming in to evaluate whether I was following a prescribed sequence. As I remember it, much of my appraisal came down to what the principal’s son thought of the class. He was one of my students. That sounds a little corny when I say it aloud. Yet it leaves me with a question. What did that child experience in my classroom?

Since then, I have spent many years filling out paperwork, attending meetings, examining scores, and trying to explain what was happening with students. Those things can provide information. But I keep returning to the child sitting in the room. Did he find a reason to read? Did he find a reason to read? Was I paying enough attention to recognize it? I was learning to teach, and the students were giving me information every day. Their choices told me something. So did their interest, their frustration, and the work they were willing to take on. I had to decide what to do with what they showed me.

Years later, I began using the idea of the osmotic teacher—a teacher who facilitates and learns alongside students, who remains open to what comes into the room. I did not have that language in Warner Robins. I was beginning to experience something I would spend decades trying to name. Giving students choices also gave me responsibilities. I had to help them find their way into the reading. I had to notice where they struggled and consider what might help. Their interests were a beginning. Teaching still required thought, preparation, and a willingness to change direction.

Perhaps that is one reason Foxfire stayed with me. It gave me a way to think about the relationship between a student’s life and the work of a classroom. There was room for curiosity. There was room for the teacher to discover something, too.

As I look back across the years, I realize how much of my teaching has grown from those encounters. A student chooses a book. A story catches someone’s attention. Something happens that asks me to reconsider what I thought I knew. I am still reconsidering.

This morning, the tree I photograph every day stood against a sky that changes every day. I return with my camera, often to nearly the same spot, and still find something worth noticing. Familiarity does not mean I have seen everything. I wonder whether I could carry that same expectation into every classroom. Would it be better if, alongside asking how much material we covered, we took time to ask students what helped them learn and listened long enough to let their answers influence tomorrow? After all these years, I still have something to learn from their answers. Please keep all in harm’s way on your mind and in your hearts, and please always give thanks, namaste.

My family and friends, I do not say this lightly,

Mitakuye Oyasin

(We are all related)

docbird
Bird Droppings November 9, 2026

When Teaching Gets in the Way of Teaching

I have been thinking a great deal lately about teaching, learning, and the strange things we sometimes do in the name of education. After more than fifty years of wandering in and out of classrooms, I am still learning what it means to be a teacher. Perhaps that is the most important lesson of all. A teacher friend recently shared a thought about not having enough time to really teach because of all the curriculum she was required to cover. I suspect many teachers understand exactly what she meant.

Somewhere along the way, we began confusing covering material with teaching children. We began measuring how much information was presented rather than how much understanding was developed. We started watching clocks, pacing guides, and test scores, sometimes forgetting to watch the children sitting in front of us. I have often wondered how many children we leave behind in our efforts to leave no child behind.

Over the past several days, I have reflected on practical principles that have guided my teaching. They did not come from a textbook or a professional development seminar. They came from children, from mistakes, from conversations, and occasionally from those wonderful moments when something happened in a classroom that I never could have planned.

One of the first things I learned was that trust must come before performance. A child who doesn’t trust the adult standing in front of them is unlikely to risk making a mistake, asking a question, or admitting they don’t understand. I remember students who arrived in my classroom carrying years of failure, frustration, and labels. Some had become remarkably good at avoiding anything that might expose another weakness. Their behavior was often described as defiance, disruption, or noncompliance. I began wondering what happened before the behavior.

In behavior analysis, we often speak of antecedents, behaviors, and consequences. For years, schools have devoted tremendous energy to consequences: detentions, suspensions, lost privileges, and various reward and punishment systems. But what happens when we change the antecedent? What happens when a child walks into a room where they feel safe? Where someone knows their name, listens to their story, and offers a place to sit without immediately demanding something?

My classroom gradually became something of a living room. There were sofas, tables, animals, aquariums, and occasionally the sounds of a flute or water moving through a small fountain. Some colleagues thought it was cluttered. Perhaps it was. But the children found places to work, talk, think, and sometimes be. I called it a sanctuary.

It was never about the furniture. It was about the relationships and the atmosphere we created together. The classroom changed as the students changed, and I changed along with them. That brings me to another lesson. We need to teach the child standing in front of us, not some imaginary average child described in a curriculum guide.

I once worked with a student who was selectively mute. Traditional reading assessments required spoken responses, which created an obstacle before we even began measuring what the child knew. By allowing pointing rather than speaking, we discovered abilities that had been hidden by the assessment itself. The doorway was there all along. We had to recognize it.

I have also come to believe that we spend far too much time asking children for answers and not nearly enough time asking how they arrived at those answers. In mathematics especially, the thinking is often more valuable than the answer. A wrong answer may reveal an extraordinary thought process. A correct answer may reveal little more than a memorized procedure. When we ask a child to explain their thinking, we are inviting them into the learning process rather than simply judging the result.

Sometimes the hardest thing for a teacher is to remain quiet long enough for a child to think.

Learning should also be something children experience. I have always appreciated the Foxfire approach because it recognizes that learning is not simply transferring information from one person to another. We construct it through experience, reflection, conversation, and participation. An aquarium can become a biology lesson. A garden can become mathematics. A walk through the woods can become literature, science, history, and perhaps even philosophy. And sometimes a child teaches us something we never knew we needed to learn.

Years ago, I began thinking about three kinds of teachers: parasitic, symbiotic, and osmotic. The osmotic teacher, as I envision that person, doesn’t merely deliver information. The teacher is participating in an ongoing exchange of ideas, learning alongside students, watching, listening, and adjusting. Teaching becomes less about controlling every moment and more about creating the conditions for discovery.

That does not mean abandoning instruction or expectations. I have long believed in a simple process I learned through experience: tell, show, test, and check. Explain something, demonstrate it, invite the learner to try, and then check for understanding. If it does not work, find another way.

My late Aunt Margaret participated in an adult literacy program years ago that used the expression, “Each one teach one.” I have always liked that thought. It recognizes that teaching and learning are human exchanges, not simply institutional procedures.

We also need to respect the many different ways children think. Some need to see something. Others need to touch it, hear it, discuss it, or move through it. Some need more time. Others need a different question.

A teacher’s responsibility is not to make every child learn in precisely the same way. It is to keep looking for the doorway through which that child can enter. Perhaps principals have an especially important role in all of this. A principal can create the conditions in which teachers feel trusted enough to take risks, adapt instruction, and know their students. Or a principal can create an atmosphere in which everyone is so concerned about compliance that little room remains for curiosity. Teachers need sanctuaries, too.

Recently, I have been thinking about artificial intelligence and the way conversations develop. What we say, what came before, and the context surrounding an exchange can change what happens next. It has reminded me again how important antecedents are in human learning. We cannot always control what a child brings into our classroom. But we can influence what happens after they arrive.

I wonder sometimes whether the greatest obstacle to learning is not a lack of information but our failure to notice what is happening around us. We move so quickly to the next standard, the next assessment, the next lesson, that we overlook the child still trying to make sense of the last one.

Perhaps we need to slow down.

Perhaps we need to listen before we explain.

Perhaps we need to remember that education is not simply preparation for life. It is life happening in front of us.

After all these years, I still believe the most important quality a teacher can possess is a willingness to remain a learner. The moment I believe I have nothing left to learn from a child is probably the moment I should stop teaching. And perhaps that is the heart of those ten practical principles I have been thinking about. Build trust. Understand behavior. Create sanctuary. Value thinking. Know the child. Make learning experiential. Listen. Adapt. Respect differences. And never stop learning. They are not ten separate rules so much as ten ways of looking at the same human experience.

I keep coming back to one question. How many children do we fail to see because we are moving too fast? Perhaps the answer is not another program, another test, or another curriculum. Perhaps it begins with simply seeing the child. Please keep all in harm’s way on your mind and in your heart. Namaste.

My friends, I do not say this lightly,
Mitakuye Oyasin
(We are all related)
bird
Bird Droppings November 6, 2026

The Moon Was There All Along

Some mornings the sky simply takes your breath away. This morning was one of those mornings. I started out in the darkness, following roads I have traveled hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times. The crescent moon hung in the sky, and there was just enough light along the horizon to suggest something special might be coming. Over the years, I’ve learned to pay attention to those little suggestions.

As the morning unfolded, brilliant oranges, pinks, and golds stretched across the horizon. Fog settled into the valleys and drifted across the reservoir, softening the landscape and giving everything an almost mystical appearance. I hurried toward the reservoir, hoping the colors would hold long enough for a few photographs. That is always a gamble. Sometimes the most spectacular colors disappear in seconds. Other mornings they linger, changing almost imperceptibly as the sun climbs. This morning they lingered.

I have photographed the same places for years. Once, I spent a month or two photographing virtually the same view every morning. Not one photograph was identical. The trees were the same, the road was the same, and the horizon had not moved. Yet every morning offered something different. Perhaps that is one reason I continue getting up before sunrise.

Something new is always waiting to be seen. I drove along Deer Road, looking at the pastures and fence lines. Initially, there were no deer. I had almost resigned myself to a morning of beautiful skies without any wildlife encounters. But something told me to go back.

I returned toward the pasture, where the old board fence had several missing boards. Just as I approached, a doe suddenly came through the fence and crossed the road in front of me.

I stopped and gave her a moment to settle before taking her photograph. Then I turned and discovered another doe on the opposite side of the road. She appeared ready to follow.

Another photograph. Another unexpected moment. It reminded me of yesterday’s encounter with the doe and her three youngsters, grazing beside the road on a morning when I had not expected to see any deer at all.I sometimes wonder about these little coincidences.

Carl Jung used the term synchronicity to describe meaningful coincidences that seem connected even when no obvious causal relationship exists. One of his best-known accounts involved a patient describing a dream about a golden scarab. As she talked, Jung heard a tapping at the window. When he opened it, he discovered a beetle resembling the one in her dream.

The event became meaningful because of its timing and its connection to what they were discussing. I am not suggesting that the deer somehow knew I was coming or that the universe arranged their appearance for my benefit. Deer have their own reasons for moving through the woods and crossing roads.But I do find myself wondering about the relationship between being present, paying attention, and recognizing moments that might otherwise pass unnoticed.

Had I continued driving instead of turning around, I would have missed those deer. Had I stayed in bed another thirty minutes, I might have missed the sunrise. Had I been preoccupied with everything waiting for me at home, I might have driven past without seeing much of anything.

Perhaps what Jung called synchronicity sometimes begins with our willingness to notice.

I think about that in terms of teaching as well.

For years, I tried to create classrooms where students could discover things for themselves. I filled rooms with books, animals, aquariums, plants, and opportunities to explore. I wanted students to ask questions, make connections, and occasionally find something they had not been looking for. Learning seldom follows a perfectly straight line. Sometimes the most important lesson is the one that interrupts the lesson we had planned. John Dewey understood the importance of experience in education. But experience alone is not enough. We must reflect on what we experience, make connections, and let those experiences shape what comes next.

Perhaps my morning drives are a little like that. I go looking for deer and discover a sunrise.

I go looking for a photograph and find myself thinking about Jung.

I watch the fog drifting across a pasture and remember students who found something meaningful in a classroom full of living things. One experience leads to another.

And I have come to appreciate something else. The landscape does not need to change dramatically to offer something new. Sometimes all that changes is the light, the clouds, the fog, or the angle from which we are looking. The same might be said of people. We can encounter someone day after day and still discover something new if we are willing to look carefully enough.

This morning, the sky was crisscrossed with aircraft condensation trails. They added another pattern to an already remarkable sky. Even those changing atmospheric conditions became part of the morning’s picture. Nothing stays quite the same. Eventually, I headed home for breakfast, my morning medicine, and the responsibilities waiting for me. Photographs to sort through, schoolwork to complete, and the ordinary concerns that seem to accompany every day.

But for a little while, none of those things mattered quite as much as the light spreading across the horizon and two deer appearing unexpectedly along a familiar road. I have often written that the deer don’t wear watches. Apparently, neither does the sunrise. Both arrive on their own schedules, whether I am ready or not.

Maybe the lesson this morning is simply that we cannot control every moment, but we can learn to recognize the beauty in the moments we are given. The moon was there all along. The deer were somewhere beyond the fence. And the sunrise was waiting for anyone willing to look.

Perhaps the greatest discoveries are not always found by searching harder, but by paying closer attention. Please keep all the children in harm’s way in your hearts and on your minds. Namaste.

My family and friends, I do not say this lightly,

Mitakuye Oyasin

(We are all related)

docbird
Bird Droppings November 5, 2026

The Deer Don’t Wear Watches, and Neither Does the Journey

It was a gloomy morning in northeast Georgia. The clouds hung low, rain threatened, and I tried to finish my morning routine before the weather changed. I had dictated my daily Bird Droppings and stopped at one of my familiar places along the road to upload it. Nothing particularly unusual about that. I have stopped there hundreds of times. But this morning was different.

A doe and her three youngsters stood beside the road, quietly grazing. I suspect they were the same four deer I had encountered earlier in the spring, when the little ones were considerably smaller. Here they were again, months later, going about their morning without the slightest concern for my schedule. The doe noticed me and began to move. I stopped completely. No sudden movements, no effort to get closer, no attempt to interfere. I simply watched. For a few moments, our world overlapped.

The light was terrible for photography. The delayed exposure made it hard to capture a clear image, but I managed to get all four deer in one photograph. It wasn’t a perfect picture, but it was a perfect moment. I have written before that the deer don’t wear watches. They don’t concern themselves with appointments, deadlines, or the thousand little obligations we humans construct to organize our lives. They live within the rhythms of the natural world. I sometimes wonder whether we have become so concerned with managing our time that we have forgotten how to experience it.

Carl Jung wrote about synchronicity, those meaningful coincidences that seem to connect events in ways that go beyond ordinary cause and effect. I have been thinking about Jung quite a bit lately. Perhaps these encounters are simply coincidences. Perhaps the deer were grazing where deer have always grazed, and I happened to arrive at precisely the right moment. But does explaining an encounter diminish its meaning? I don’t think so.

Over fifty years of teaching, I have found that some of the most important moments in a classroom happened when I stopped trying to control everything. A student would ask an unexpected question. A conversation would wander away from the lesson plan. A child who had remained silent for weeks would suddenly offer an observation that changed the direction of our discussion. Those moments rarely appeared in the curriculum guide.

John Dewey understood that experience was central to learning. Learning was not simply transferring information from one person to another. It emerged through interaction, reflection, and engagement with the world around us.

I have often described three kinds of teachers: parasitic, symbiotic, and osmotic. The osmotic teacher doesn’t merely deliver information but participates in the learning experience, allowing ideas and understanding to move in both directions. Perhaps watching deer requires something of the same disposition. If I had moved toward the doe, she might have taken her youngsters into the woods. If I had insisted on getting the perfect photograph, I might have lost the experience entirely. Instead, I stopped and allowed the moment to unfold.

I think about the children I have taught who needed precisely that kind of patience. Children whose behavior challenged conventional expectations, whose learning did not follow the prescribed sequence, whose trust could not be demanded but had to be earned. Sometimes the doorway was there all along. We adults simply kept knocking on the wrong door.

I travel a gravel road regularly, winding through trees that change with the seasons. In the spring, the woods awaken with new growth. Summer brings deep green shadows. Autumn scatters leaves across the gravel, and winter opens views that remain hidden during the warmer months. It is the same road, yet it is never quite the same journey. Perhaps that is true of education. Perhaps it is true to grow older.

At seventy-seven, I am still a student, still taking graduate courses, still considering opportunities to teach, and still trying to understand the pieces of a puzzle I have been assembling for most of my life. Just this morning, I was thinking about an application I submitted to teach an online undergraduate special education course. A long shot, perhaps. But then again, I have never been particularly good at deciding that the journey is finished. There is always another possibility, another question, another road to explore. And sometimes, when we least expect it, a doe and her three youngsters are waiting beside that road. I have been thinking about how much of life we spend looking for answers when perhaps we should be paying more attention to the questions. How much time we spend searching for meaningful experiences when meaning may already be standing quietly beside us.

The deer were not there for my benefit. They were simply living their lives. Yet their presence changed my morning. The clouds were still there. The rain was still coming. My obligations had not disappeared. But something had shifted. I drove away feeling better than I had when I arrived. Maybe that is enough. Sometimes observation is participation enough. And sometimes the most important lesson of the morning comes not from a book, a classroom, or a carefully prepared lesson plan, but from four deer grazing quietly beside a country road. The deer don’t wear watches. Perhaps, every now and then, we shouldn’t either. Peace, my friends, please keep all in harm’s way on your mind and in your hearts, and please always give thanks, namaste.

My family and friends, I do not say this lightly,

Mitakuye Oyasin

(We are all related)

docbird
Bird Droppings November 3–4, 2026
Sometimes the Lesson Is in the Interruption

Life has a way of arranging lessons we never planned to teach or learn. Over the past two days, I have been reminded repeatedly that the most meaningful experiences seldom fit neatly into a lesson plan, a calendar, or even the expectations we have for ourselves. I have been thinking again about Carl Jung and synchronicity, those seemingly unrelated events that somehow find their way into the same moment. Perhaps there is no mysterious explanation. Perhaps we simply become more aware of the connections when we slow down enough to notice them. Yet I continue to find that the pieces of my life have an interesting way of coming together.
Yesterday morning began with the sky, the lake, and my usual wandering through the countryside. There is something about those early hours when the world has not quite awakened. The deer, the birds, the changing light, and even the absence of a spectacular sunrise offer their own lessons. Nature does not operate according to my schedule. The deer do not wear watches, and the sun does not rise for my camera. I have spent much of my life watching, listening, and wondering. Perhaps that is why I have always believed that observation is at the heart of good teaching.
Over the past several days, my grandson Henry has provided more than a few reminders of that belief. Henry spent the night with us, something he managed to arrange with considerable persuasion. He is becoming quite skilled at negotiating with his grandparents. The agreement included a bath, though that was hardly a sacrifice since he loves taking baths.
The next morning, we looked through books, including one we had created together with illustrations and caricatures of Henry and me. He quickly noticed that Grandma looked realistic while he and I looked more like cartoon characters. His questions were genuine, and his observations were remarkably precise. I have often said that children see things adults have learned to overlook.
Henry had also been making a tractor-trailer from cardboard boxes. That simple activity brought back a memory from more than seventy years ago, a red metal Tonka livestock tractor-trailer my father brought home from a National Safety Conference in Chicago around 1954. That truck is still upstairs in our toy room. Think about that for a moment. A toy given to a little boy in Pennsylvania more than seventy years ago is still part of the world his grandson explores today. My father could hardly have imagined that his gift would become a connection between generations.
Henry was also selecting toys to take to his father’s new apartment. Many of those toys had belonged to his father when he was a boy. Watching that little process brought tears to my eyes. Childhood moves along, sometimes quietly, sometimes far too quickly. The toys remain, but the children grow up, have children of their own, and begin making new homes. Perhaps this is another form of synchronicity, or perhaps simply the continuity of life.
Meanwhile, I have been immersed in mathematics. At seventy-seven, I find myself once again a student, working through fraction models, division strategies, mathematical discussions, and journal reflections. I sometimes wonder how many people my age are sitting at a computer struggling with virtual pattern blocks and trying to understand why a particular representation makes sense. The fascinating part is that I am not simply learning mathematics. I am watching teachers and children think about mathematics.
One third-grade student, Siena, was solving a problem involving a turtle eating one-sixth of a cucumber each day for twenty-six days. She organized the sixths into groups, finding four whole cucumbers and two-sixths remaining. What interested me most was not the answer but the teacher’s questions. How did you do that? How did you get that? How did you come up with that? The teacher didn’t rush to demonstrate the correct procedure. She listened, asked questions, and let the child explain her thinking.
Another student, Ariana, worked through a problem involving bags of sunflower seeds and bird feeders. She found that two and one-fourth bags could fill eighteen feeders when each required one-eighth of a bag. Again, the teacher wanted to understand the thinking behind the answer. I keep returning to that idea.
For years I have described three approaches to teaching: parasitic, symbiotic, and osmotic. The osmotic teacher doesn’t simply deliver information; they create an environment where learning can occur through interaction, observation, questioning, and shared experience. Watching these mathematics lessons reminded me of classrooms I tried to create over the years, places where students could think aloud, make mistakes, and explore ideas without fear of embarrassment.
But being a student again has also reminded me how frustrating learning can be. I spent considerable time trying to manipulate geometric shapes on a computer screen. I knew what I wanted to accomplish, but the technology did not always cooperate. I found myself thinking about the children who become frustrated when the tools we provide get in the way of the thinking we hope to encourage. There is a lesson there for teachers.
Sometimes the obstacle is not mathematics. Sometimes it is the way we have asked the student to demonstrate understanding. I thought again about my son John in eighth grade. He had been moved into another mathematics class after difficulties with his gifted mathematics teacher resigned. His new teacher questioned how he solved a problem. Only later did John recognize that he had approached it using calculus. He eventually earned fives on both AP Calculus examinations.
What might have happened if his mathematical thinking had been dismissed simply because it did not follow the expected procedure? How often do we confuse compliance with understanding? These thoughts have been running through my mind as I try to finish my own assignments. Deadlines, journal entries, problem sets, reflections, and projects fill the space. I understand the importance of accountability, but I also recognize the tension between completing an assignment and genuinely exploring an idea.
I have spent fifty years trying to help students discover that learning is more than producing the expected answer. Now I am experiencing that tension from the other side of the desk. Life outside the classroom has not been particularly cooperative either.
Yesterday, exhaustion caught up with me. Poor sleep worries about an approaching IRS letter, and the ordinary demands of family and school left me feeling overwhelmed. I struggled to concentrate on things I ordinarily enjoy. Then I took a nap, using my CPAP, and woke up feeling remarkably different.
The problems had not disappeared. The letter was still coming. The assignments were still waiting. Yet my ability to face them had changed. I sometimes forget that the mind and body are not separate entities. We can become so absorbed in our responsibilities that we overlook the simplest requirements of being human. Rest matters.
This morning brought medical appointments, a blood draw that bruised my arm, and a frustrating adventure involving hearing aids and insurance coverage. I’ve had my hearing aids since 2017. They are nearly nine years old, and replacement parts are no longer available. The price of new hearing aids was staggering, and the insurance benefit wasn’t what I understood it to be. After considerable frustration, I returned to the people who had originally helped me. They got my old hearing aids working reasonably well again. They are not perfect, but I can hear. There is something rather symbolic about that. Perhaps hearing and listening are two very different things. I have spent much of these past two days thinking about teachers who listen to children, grandparents who listen to grandchildren, and the importance of listening to ourselves when exhaustion tells us we have reached our limits.
Henry reminded me of that during an earlier mathematics activity. After counting marbles and exploring different ways to represent eighteen plus seven, he eventually announced, “Do it by yourself, Pop Pop.” I had pushed beyond the point where his curiosity was carrying out the activity. That was not a failure of learning. It was a lesson in teaching. Sometimes the best teacher move is to stop.
I have been thinking about the sanctuaries I tried to create in my classrooms over the years. The sofas, aquariums, animals, music, and opportunities to talk were not simply decorations. They were part of an effort to make students feel safe enough to learn. Perhaps what I was really trying to create was a place where someone would listen. As I finish these thoughts, I am reminded that the past two days have been filled with apparent contradictions. Frustration and discovery. Exhaustion and renewal. Old toys and new beginnings. A grandfather teaches a grandson and a grandfather learning from children on a computer screen.
I am still trying to finish my mathematics assignments. I am still waiting for answers to questions that have nothing to do with fractions. I am still watching the sunrise, looking for deer, and wondering about those little connections that seem to appear when least expected. Perhaps Jung would have found something interesting in all of this. Perhaps John Dewey would simply have reminded me that education grows out of experience. And perhaps Henry would have told me to put the computer away and come play. That suggestion may hold more wisdom than we sometimes realize. The lesson is not always where we planned to find it. Sometimes it is interrupted. So, for today, CARPE DIEM, and as always, please keep all in harm’s way on your mind and in your hearts, and please always give thanks, namaste.

My family and friends, I do not say this lightly,
Mitakuye Oyasin
(We are all related)
docbird
Bird Droppings November 1–2, 2026

Gathering the Pieces: Along the way, thinking about the puzzle

Another morning, another sunrise, and another opportunity to wander through the pieces of a life. I found myself looking across the pasture, hoping to see a deer. The sun was coming up, the trees were beginning to show their autumn colors, and the world seemed to move along at its own pace, quite indifferent to the schedules and deadlines we humans impose on ourselves. The deer were nowhere to be seen. Perhaps they had other plans.

Yesterday was my birthday. Seventy-seven years of wandering through this world, meeting people, losing people, learning from people, and occasionally discovering that what I thought I knew was not quite what I needed to know. I have been thinking about connections lately. Carl Jung used the term synchronicity to describe meaningful coincidences, those seemingly unrelated events that intersect in ways we never anticipated. I wonder sometimes whether the connections were always there and we failed to recognize them.

Over the past few days, memories have been drifting through my thoughts like leaves carried along a mountain stream. Former students, old friends, family, teachers, and people I encountered briefly but who somehow left an impression that has lasted decades.

This morning I was thinking about a former student who graduated nearly twenty years ago. He spent considerable time in my classroom during high school, and we stayed connected as he moved through college and into his first career. Then a tragic accident changed his life. A close friend was killed, and he suffered injuries that required years of recovery and rehabilitation. Life has a way of changing the lesson plan. After years of recovery, time spent in the North Georgia mountains, and several attempts to find work that fit his circumstances, he returned to college and eventually became a teacher. We still talk, sometimes about curriculum and teaching, sometimes about almost anything. I wonder how many educators realize the relationships they build with students may continue long after the grades are recorded and the classroom doors close.

Another thread carried me back to Foxfire and the mountains of Rabun County. I thought about some of the original Foxfire students and the people they interviewed more than fifty years ago. Those young people traveled through the mountains listening to stories, documenting traditions, and learning from individuals whom conventional schooling might never have recognized as teachers.

One older woman, Aunt Aerie, living alone in a mountain cabin, became a particularly important source of stories and knowledge. She shared her experiences of gardening, cooking, and everyday mountain life with students who were genuinely interested in what she had to say. She had no elaborate curriculum, no standardized assessments, and no educational technology. What she possessed was a lifetime of experience and a willingness to share it with young people willing to listen. Perhaps that was the lesson all along.

Now many of those original Foxfire students are themselves growing older, and some have passed away. The young people who once preserved their elders’ stories have become the elders whose stories need preserving. There is a certain symmetry in that.

I have also been watching a documentary about the struggle to preserve Mexican American Studies in Tucson, Arizona. Listening to students describe classrooms where their histories, families, and communities finally mattered, I was reminded again of Foxfire: different places, different cultures, different generations, yet the same fundamental question. Whose knowledge matters, and who gets to decide?

John Dewey wrote about education growing from experience. Foxfire demonstrated what that might look like in practice. The students in Tucson discovered that learning could become meaningful when their own lives and communities were part of the curriculum.

And I think back to my own classrooms, the aquariums, animals, sofas, talking sticks, and students who had been told too many times what they could not do. Perhaps teaching was never simply about delivering information. Perhaps it was about creating a place where people could discover that their lives had meaning, their experiences had value, and their voices deserved to be heard.

Over the past few days, I have also been thinking about solitude and loneliness. These two experiences may look very much alike from the outside but feel remarkably different from within. I remember walking alone as a young boy, following creeks, watching wildlife, and discovering places where I could be myself. Those walks were not necessarily about escaping people. Sometimes they were about finding a place where the world made sense.

Perhaps that is part of why I still find myself driving along country roads at sunrise, looking for deer, listening for birds, and watching the light change across a pasture. Some things change very little in seventy-seven years. Yesterday I turned seventy-seven. This morning I watched another sunrise. Somewhere along the way I have accumulated a rather large collection of stories, some joyful, some painful, some unfinished.

I am beginning to think that life is not a puzzle we eventually complete. It is a collection of pieces we continue turning over, discovering connections we had not noticed before. And sometimes, if we are fortunate, someone sits down beside us and helps us see how a few of those pieces fit together. Perhaps the greatest gift we give another person is not an answer, but the willingness to listen to their story. The deer did not appear this morning. The sun came up anyway. And there are still stories waiting to be told. Please keep all in harm’s way on your mind and in your heart. Namaste.

My friends, I do not say this lightly,

Mitakuye Oyasin

(We are all related)

bird
Bird Droppings October 31, 2026
The Journey and looking at puzzle pieces

I have been reminiscing the past few days and a thought came up this morning I wanted to share. I had the opportunity to visit and observe a classroom many years ago. Visiting and seeing this particular class had been a dream of mine for some time. I have been a fan of Foxfire for many years since I first picked up the Foxfire 2 book in 1973. I used Foxfire ideas in my own teaching for many years, even before I knew it was an actual teaching method. Foxfire had been a class at Rabun County High School for over forty years, until a slight shift in the dynamic two summers ago. The current class has continued the tradition of producing the semiannual Foxfire magazine of articles and lore of Appalachia, but it is more of an internship than a specific class now. After my visit, I went to lunch with the liaison between Foxfire and Piedmont College, then went to the Foxfire museum to research my dissertation, which, of course, is in part about Foxfire.

Years ago, as I wrote about and did significant research on hand spinning and sheep production in Georgia, I had the opportunity to meet many of the folks the magazine has written about over the years. Needless to say, it was a busy day and a heartfelt and great time for me as I photographed and wandered about North Georgia. If all goes well, I’ll be heading back up during the holiday week of Thanksgiving; hopefully I will be able to get around. Later in the fall and winter, if all goes well, several more visits, and hopefully as next semester comes round, quite a few visits.

“And how high can you fly with broken wings? Life’s a journey not a destination, and I just can’t tell just what tomorrow brings. You have to learn to crawl before you learn to walk.” Steven Tyler, Aerosmith

For so many years, I have seen a line from this Aerosmith song, taken from the context of the song “Awesome”: “Life is a journey, not a destination.” I think back to when I first saw it posted on my computer after spending the night at the Athens Regional Hospital in Athens, Georgia, holding the hand of a sixteen-year-old young man who had been hit by a semi after doing a U-turn on a back road. My oldest son and his band often played and covered Aerosmith tunes at the time, and he knew the music and words well. But this line was from a song that, in and of itself, was significant for him and for me at that moment in our lives.

For me, it evolved as I saw how my own life was a journey each day and each moment. As we see each aspect of life as crucial to the next, and that one to the next, as pieces fell into place. In the days prior, I had been reading numerous books on the purpose of life and/or finding Meaning in life, trying to find a focus for myself; also, as I engaged teenagers, this is always a topic that comes up. When I first saw this quote, I was floundering in business and trying to get a foothold, and a yellow Post-it note on a computer after sitting with a dying teenager became a life-changing, life-refocusing moment. My blurry vision seemed to clear.

It was perhaps a moment to piece together the few days before. This young man was a clown, the life of any party, a real character, and all felt that way about him. I knew him from a youth group at a local church where my own children were involved, and I helped out periodically. The weekend before the accident, we had all been tubing in North Georgia. We stopped for dinner after being on the river all day. I think it was a Colonel Sanders fast food sort of place. As we were getting ready to leave, this young man walked up, extending his hand to me as he always does, and always at the last minute he pulls it away and makes a joke, just not fast enough: Mr. Bird or something along that line. But this time the hand doesn’t move, no laughing and no jokes; he commented to me, “Not this time.”

We shook hands for a longer moment than normal, and it did not sink in, as that was the last I saw him till I sat with him at the hospital. That was a number of years ago, and when I returned to the house to write, as I do every morning, a small yellow note attached to my computer read, in my son’s handwriting, “Life is a journey, not a destination.” Tears welled up in my eyes as I thought how profound it was for my son, barely older than the young man who was killed, to have found this concept, and I had been searching for nearly fifty years and still had not seen it. My own life started to focus and clear, and ideas and thoughts seemed to flow and make sense. Earlier in the week, I was answering an email from someone I had never met. During my visits, I talked with several teachers, professors, and students about how, in today’s electronic age, we can communicate with so many people with just a touch of a computer keyboard or a mouse click.

Often, that message includes photos, graphs, PowerPoints, and other attachments; we are into multimedia. But the message is still so clear; it is about the journey.
Another email answered was “If you believe in God, respond,” sort of; if you do not, you are going to hell. As I read the note, I thought how easy it is to respond one way or another, perhaps in a theological dissertation on the ramifications of believing or not, and/or of what it is you do or do not believe in. Then the journey hit me again: it is about the journey, not the destination. So, I offered the writer: it is so easy to say you believe in God or the Tooth Fairy; it is far more difficult to live the life you say you believe in, but this is what others see and feel. Others see your journey, not your destination. So I wrote on and wandered, as I did in several previous quotes I had used about the journey, parents, teachers, friends, and that it is the example we set, the picture we paint for others to see, that has significance and meaning.

What would a child learn from a teacher who yells at an extremely high decibel other than to cover their ears? What does a child learn from a parent who abuses them other than abuse? What does a friend learn from a friend who betrays them, other than distrust? Within the fragility of our experiences, we need examples of direction of positive journeying. I am still fascinated with a friend who had been doing work with eldering, helping young people along the pathway in life.

Each day I wonder why kids used to come by my room just to smile and say hi, and other times to ask for a word or two of advice. Thinking back nearly twenty years, as I addressed the Foxfire class, I asked how many of you want to be in this class right now. All raised their hands, and I said when students want to be in a class, they learn and cannot help it. Those who don’t want to be in that class make it hard for everyone else. Even staying in Loganville, I journeyed yesterday, and every moment was a new experience. Life is about the journey and may we all clear the pathway rather than drop boulders for others to trip on. Please keep all in harm’s way on your mind and in your heart. Namaste.

My friends, I do not say this lightly,
Mitakuye Oyasin
(We are all related)
bird
Bird Droppings October 28, 2026
It is said dreams do not stand alone.

“You are never given a dream without also being given the power to make it true. You may have to work for it, however.” Richard Bach

Today, after a morning of moping, I can mope about doing computer work, reading, and house chores. I was focusing all morning on being alone and started a drop, basically focused on that. Then I recalled a book. It has been so many years since I first read and experienced the whimsical book Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Bach’s tale follows a seagull who dreams of more than simply eating fish entrails at the pier. I was going through my computer files, and the only eBook I have had for more than five years is this one. Occasionally, when I’m in a quiet place and not too tired, so my eyes work, I pull up JLSG and read a few lines, thinking back to when I first read the hard copy.

A few years back, I walked out of my physical therapy session when a voice called me over. It was my son’s former middle school band director, now retired. He had done the same thing; I had ruptured his Achilles tendon. We old farts are fragile. As we reminisced, he mentioned he had dreamed about one of our many Disney trips with the band the night before. Usually, when middle schoolers were invited to march in parades at Disney, the band director would bring along a couple of high school students to support the middle school kiddos. My oldest had helped with the drumline a couple of times, and in his senior year, he had a goatee. My band director friend mentioned he woke up from a dream in which he was asked about the middle school drummer with a beard, as my son led the drumline. Synchronicity; perhaps we are all connected—even me writing about this today, my son’s birthday.

Each day, I hear and listen to the dreams of others, friends on Facebook, folks during the day, and former students, and I ask where and when. Some say whatever, and that is hard for me to understand. Having experienced so much in my life, good and bad, hearing a young person with no concept of tomorrow, because today was dashed, often takes me back. I recall several years back, on the first day in a class, when a student answered a simple goal sheet. Question one: Where will you be in a year? Probably still in school. Question two: Where will you be in five years? Probably in jail. Third Question: Where will you be in ten years? Dead was his answer. That is not the case, as I still have contact with him almost fifteen years later, and he is a motorcycle racer and mechanic in Texas, although he got the jail part right. I have been keeping in touch with him more indirectly recently, since he spent the better part of four years in jail and is now out, so he’s reached his five-year goal. He saw no future, and when I talked with him about his answers, he said he didn’t want a future because of the present he was experiencing.

“Here is a test to find whether your mission on earth is finished: If you are alive, it isn’t.” Richard Bach

“I have heard it said that the first ingredient of success — the earliest spark in the dreaming youth — is this: dream a great dream.” John A. Appleman

So often, when I meet people and/or students who have little thought of a future, a significant past holds them back; I recently wrote a paper on an idea I had about funneling. Our past is a major antecedent that drives our behaviors. The fellow above in my questions and answers was in this situation. Years ago, as I did the research for a graduate school paper, I found that in looking at twenty-eight Emotionally Disturbed children in my study, only two were still with biological parents and had not had trouble with law enforcement and had not been adjudicated. Only four were not on probation at that time.

“A man is not old until regrets take the place of dreams.” John Barrymore

“If there were dreams to sell, what would you buy?” Thomas Lovell Beddoes

I had not thought of this, but what a question to ask young people if dreams were for sale? What would you buy? Often, those who do not want to think ahead only see more of the same, for my young man above death was actually something he was looking forward to.

“The moment of enlightenment is when a person’s dreams of possibilities become images of probabilities.” Vic Braden

“You’ve got to create a dream. You’ve got to uphold the dream. If you can’t, go back to the factory or go back to the desk.” Eric Burdon

For some of you, the name Eric Burdon is insignificant, but for a few of us, back in the sixties, three British bands crossed the Atlantic and stormed the United States: The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and The Animals. Eric Burdon was the lead singer for The Animals. He is still around 80 years old now, living in California and often performing solo or occasionally with his new band, The Eric Burdon Band; he has gone back to his roots, blues. But as I read Eric’s quote and look at Bach’s quote from a fictional character, the idea of dreaming and possibilities ties into you having to do something. You have to work to attain the dream. Here is a possibility: the dream and the opportunities in life in general. Just Do it, as it is scribbled on your shoes.

“When you reach for the stars, you may not quite get one, but you won’t come up with a handful of mud either.” Leo Burnett

“There couldn’t be a society of people who didn’t dream. They’d be dead in two weeks.” William Burroughs

William Burroughs’ name in literary circles often falls alongside Allen Ginsberg as part of The Beat generation, which was spawned in New York’s coffee houses and universities. But he is also often associated with Timmy Leary and Andy Warhol. In the early nineties, before killing himself, Kurt Cobain recorded an album with the then nearly 80-year-old Burroughs reading his own words over Cobain’s guitar chords. A drug addict for most of his life, Burroughs tried to write himself out of where he was. Many of his most significant efforts are reflections of his addictions and reflections on the addictions and limitations others impose on themselves.

“Follow your bliss.” Joseph Campbell

“If your dream is a big dream, and if you want your life to work on the high level that you say you do, there’s no way around doing the work it takes to get you there.” Joyce Chapman

Getting teenagers to accept the idea of going from point A to point B takes more than saying it; it can be a challenging sale. Several weeks ago, I sat down with two former students who dreamed of going to college. One of the fellows said he was going to college and getting a scholarship to play football. I thought and said, “You had never played in high school. How will you get a scholarship? He thought for a minute and said he would go out for the team. He thought he could play football because of his size and build. Ok, but you would still have to go to class, study, and read. His dreams were dashed by him. College was simply a football scholarship, and playing football was the Forest Gump approach. I also tried to explain that playing football meant practicing four or five hours a day, no TV, no video games, and no four or five honey buns and a Coke for snacks. He quickly decided to change his goal; it was too much work and not much fun. He wanted the glory of being a football player but not the work.

“When your heart is in your dream, no request is too extreme.” Jiminy Cricket

I have always thought it interesting that a cartoon insect could be one of the world’s great philosophers. When you believe you can, you can; I have always been told.

“We’ve removed the ceiling above our dreams. There are no more impossible dreams.” Jesse Jackson

“There are those who look at things the way they are and ask why? I dream of things that never were and ask why not.” Robert F. Kennedy

I often find myself drawn back to an idea or quote; Kennedy’s quote is one of those, as is dreaming. Each time I find something new, a new piece to the puzzle, a new thought as I am rambling through my day, pondering those moments of new ideas and direction. Today, reading about William Burroughs and Kurt Cobain, who both achieved immortality through fame and genius, one lived to barely 30, and the other to almost 90. Only slight differences kept their lives from being identical. I often speak of following a path; sometimes we have choices to make, and how far can we veer off it? How many times can we make a new path without getting lost?

Mathematicians hold that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line; however, if points A and B are next to each other, that line forms a circle with no beginning or end.

“Now, I say to you today, my friends, even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I dream that this nation will rise and live out the true meaning of its creed one day: — we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Perhaps this is a great point to end on this morning. Over the years, well past forty now, I have heard this phrase. My father had a worn-out tape recording of the entire speech. Maybe “sermon” is a better word, for it was a sermon to humanity, not just the United States. I am subscribed to Russell Means’s website, “It Is a Good Day to Die,” which is not pessimistic but about approaching life without fear and knowing you believe in what you are striving for. I believe Dr. King would have embraced the Lakota statement and approached life as if every day was a good day to die. Sadly, his life was cut short by an assassin’s bullet, as were many great men over the years. Dr. King, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull did not fear death, for they knew in their hearts they were right.

We are less brave in this reality, but we can still fulfill our dreams; we have to do the work and strive to make them real, whether small or monumental. We choose where we place points A and B and whether our paths become a line or a circle. So, this morning, please keep all in harm’s way, for one of my dreams is a world at peace. So please keep all in harm’s way in your minds and hearts and always give thanks. namaste.

My family and friends
I do not say this lightly,
Mitakuye Oyasin
(We are all related)
docbird
Bird Droppings October 26, 2026

A morning meander while the Hunter Moon is glowing orange

Early this morning, as I looked out at the night sky, I honestly wasn’t sure whether the moon was glowing. I drove over to the reservoir, and the Hunter Moon was bright orange. Interestingly, I didn’t see a deer today, the first time in many days I hadn’t seen five or six every morning. The Hunter Moon might have kept them hidden. I have been chasing the moon for several mornings now. Yesterday, traffic, timing, clouds, and the angle I was looking from seemed to interfere with every attempt to get the photograph I wanted. This morning, it was there, glowing orange above the reservoir.

The moon had been there all along. Perhaps I simply hadn’t been in the right place to see it.

That thought stayed with me as I began thinking about education. How often do we look at a child and decide something isn’t there simply because we haven’t found the right way to see it? We administer a test, ask a question, or assign work, and when the response isn’t what we expect, we start making assumptions about the child. Yet the understanding may already be there, hidden behind circumstances, language, fear, experience, or simply the way we ask the question.

I started thinking back to tutoring a student, trying to catch up and return to public school. Eventually, she took a different route and finished homeschooling. This morning, I started by reading several old emails from friends in my doctoral and graduate cohort, most of whom have now defended their dissertations and officially completed the program. In another set of emails about an article on teaching memory that several teachers reviewed, they noted that the readings offered insight into the program’s successful educational adaptation.

I found I enjoyed reading it, and it reminded me of a teaching principle I learned from my father, who applied it in the steel industry many years ago. I learned this concept in a Red Cross instructor course in 1968. It is called the FIDO principle: Frequency, Intensity, Duration, and Over Again. If you repeat something often enough, it will sink in.

Granted, in today’s educational system, we might be using FIDO a bit too much.

There is a difference between repetition that reinforces learning and repetition that simply reinforces the method of instruction. If a child doesn’t understand something the first five times we present it, perhaps the sixth time shouldn’t look exactly like the first five. Maybe the question isn’t how many times we repeat the lesson, but whether we have discovered how that particular child learns.

I have been thinking about something Rob Silver and I used to do on the first day of school. We handed our students index cards. It was a simple practice, but looking back, I wonder how much more we might have learned from those cards if we had continued adding observations throughout the year. What interests this child? What questions does the child ask? How does the child approach something unfamiliar? What happens when the child encounters difficulty?

An index card could become a living record of our growing understanding of a student, not a permanent judgment about who that student is. An observation is not necessarily a conclusion, and an opinion certainly isn’t a fact.

The cards wouldn’t be meant to make children predictable. It would be to keep teachers curious.

I wonder when teachers stop asking questions about the children they teach. Is it when the curriculum becomes overwhelming? When the testing schedule takes over? When previous teachers’ opinions become accepted as facts? Or perhaps when surviving the school day becomes more important than understanding what happened during it?

I know how difficult it can be with twenty or thirty children in a classroom. Schedules, interruptions, standards, testing requirements, and countless other demands add to the pressure. Teachers have to make decisions continually, sometimes with very little information. But perhaps that is precisely why we need to remain curious.

The card should be a point of reference, never a point of fact.

“I believe that the school is primarily a social institution. Education is a social process; school is simply that form of community life in which all those agencies are concentrated, which will be most effective in bringing the child to share in the inherited resources of the race and use his own powers for social ends. I believe that education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.” John Dewey, My Pedagogic Creed, 1897

I look at John Dewey’s ideas from nearly 130 years ago and how we still call them progressive education; it amazes me. With all the educational materials now available, many are only a few years old. Compared to Dewey, they still feel traditional.

One of our topics was comparing performance and social support. I’m leaning toward the social support direction, as it is an integral part of my day when I teach, even with general education students. This is how I see kids and deal with kids. I return to the idea I read about earlier today: move away from the pendulum swing and instead move toward a pulse. No swing either way, but a steady beat or energy.

A pendulum swings between educational philosophies. We emphasize academic performance, then social development, then accountability, then individualization. Every few years, someone announces a new approach that will finally solve education’s problems.

But children aren’t pendulums.

They are living, breathing individuals whose needs don’t conveniently change when educational policy changes. Perhaps education needs a pulse rather than a pendulum, a continuous awareness of the child, the learning environment, and the relationships that make learning possible. We should move away from the right-or-left swing and focus on what best serves the child, not always what is most convenient for society or the educational system.

I have worked with many children from a nearby low-income housing area. Many are very bright, and all are very poor. The sixteen-hour syndrome, as I call it, is alive and well in that area. As I go by several times a day between my mother’s house and my own, I see kids I have had, and often new ones, but the similarities always remain.

Looking back on my years teaching EBD students, I see that I have had more students from that one spot in the county than from any other specific location. Sadly, many are marrying within that small community. More kids are being born there. Many are on the fringe of society. Some have struggled with drugs, alcohol, unemployment, and behaviors that have brought them into conflict with schools and the larger community. As I drove by, I wondered why, thinking of kids from this enclave in the past. Several face serious hardships; some have escaped and moved away, and many will attend our newest high school down the road next year.

I wonder if anyone in that community was approached about their participation in the greater good. I also wonder how many of those children entered school already carrying expectations that had nothing to do with their actual abilities. How many were seen through the lens of where they lived, who their parents were, or what an older brother or sister had done? How many teachers were handed an opinion about a child before they ever had an opportunity to know that child? There is a difference between recognizing the circumstances in which a child lives and allowing those circumstances to define the child.

That brings me back to my index cards. What would we discover if we approached each child without assuming we already knew the answers? What if we spent the first few days of school learning about the children rather than immediately measuring how much they already knew?

And perhaps an even larger question: Are we educating children to escape their circumstances, or are we helping them develop the ability to change those circumstances?

I have been thinking about professional development as well. We spend considerable time and money developing programs, attending meetings, discussing test scores, and introducing new initiatives. Yet how much of that effort actually helps a teacher understand the children sitting in front of them? Teachers need opportunities to experience learning themselves, to experiment, ask questions, make mistakes, and discover new approaches. We expect children to learn through meaningful experiences, yet too often we expect teachers to improve through paperwork and presentations.

Are we improving education, or are we improving the machinery that surrounds education?

Interesting, as I am having a difficult time getting started this morning, wandering off a bit as if I had just driven by that community. I am always trying to keep up with my youngest son. I remember a day he decided to do a Godzilla marathon of the old Godzilla movies. I did not make it through the first one. When I got up the next morning, the video was still on, and he had crashed sometime after five, watching the twenty-eighth movie featuring the man in a monster suit.

He’d just found the latest installment, which features every other major monster and a walk-on by the computer-generated Godzilla. I often wonder if Godzilla has a hidden meaning: the powerful beast that always has a weakness in the end. Sort of the David and Goliath of nature and humanity, and my youngest, of course, came to the rescue, offering that the original concept of the monster was an anti-nuclear effort.

It is interesting how something that seems like simple entertainment can carry a much deeper meaning. Perhaps we do the same with children. We see what is happening on the surface without always considering what lies beneath.

“The depth of darkness to which you can descend and still live is an exact measure of the height to which you can aspire to reach.” Laurens van der Post

For many years, I have been intrigued by this man, whom I hadn’t heard of until I found a quote several years ago. His writing about Africa, nature, and the people he encountered has continued to interest me. His life and interpretations of the world have also sparked controversy, but I remain intrigued by the relationship between human experience, adversity, and the natural world that runs through his work.

“It’s easier to go down a hill than up it, but the view is much better at the top.” Arnold Bennett

“What is to give light must endure the burning.” Viktor E. Frankl

As I sat this morning, conversations and yesterday’s events often drove my thoughts and inspired me as I wrote. Yesterday, I talked with some friends about where they had been and where they were going; as we spoke, adversity was a good word. It is about looking a lion in the face and walking away, knowing you have survived.

Only a few days ago, I was talking with a former student. She graduated from a respected associate’s program and was floored when a four-year school rejected her. She attended the two-year program on a full athletic scholarship and struggled academically to play on a nationally ranked junior college team. As graduation time approached, she had to quit softball and forfeit her scholarship to raise her grades and devote more time to studying. She had conquered her adversary and was now trying to move on. After graduating with a four-year business degree, she was still working as a waitress. However, just a few days before our talk, she was interviewed and landed a job she had dreamed of. I wonder how many people along the way saw her struggles and assumed they represented the limits of her abilities. How many looked at her grades, her athletic scholarship, or her difficulties and decided what she could or couldn’t accomplish? She didn’t stop learning simply because the path became difficult. She found another way.

I keep coming back to that moon above the reservoir. It was there whether I could see it or not. My inability to photograph it didn’t diminish its existence. How often do we mistake our inability to recognize learning for an absence of learning?

“Turn your face to the sun, and the shadows fall behind you.” A saying often attributed to Māori tradition

“Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right.” Laurens van der Post

“The chief condition on which life, health, and vigor depend is action. It is by action that an organism develops its faculties, increases its energy, and attains the fulfillment of its destiny.” — Colin Powell

Overcoming adversity begins with action: take a step forward, remember that shadows are cast by light, and know growth comes from effort. Itis hard to cross a stream if you never take the first step.Borrowing from the ancient philosophical idea that you can never step into the same river twice, I was sitting here remembering old stories and thoughts from the past.

We would hike up Toccoa Creek in North Georgia, and during that hike, we’d traverse about 500 feet uphill over rocks and boulders, climbing up the creek. As you go, water continually flows against you, and depending on the rainfall, it can be substantial. Cracks and crevices abound, and more than once you swim uphill through rock channels ten feet deep and eighteen inches wide, but at the top is a waterfall. I have been thinking about that climb this morning. The waterfall was always there, but the journey to reach it was never quite the same. Sometimes the water was shallow, sometimes deep. Sometimes the current was gentle, and other times it took every bit of effort to move forward. We couldn’t change the waterfall, but we had to adjust to the creek’s conditions.

Perhaps that is what teaching should be about. We have educational goals, standards, and expectations, but the conditions under which children learn are constantly changing. We can insist that every child take the same path, at the same speed, under the same conditions, or we can learn enough about each child to recognize when a different approach is needed. And perhaps teachers need the same consideration. We cannot keep adding expectations, paperwork, testing, and programs while wondering why so many teachers are struggling simply to make it through another day. Education should not be about making children fit a system. The system should respond to the children it serves.I think Dewey understood that more than a century ago.

Maybe the greatest problem in education isn’t that we’ve forgotten how to teach. Perhaps it’s that we’ve forgotten whom we’re teaching. The moon was there all along. So was the waterfall. The question was never whether they existed, but whether we could find our way to them. And perhaps the same is true of the children who enter our classrooms each morning. Keep all in harm’s way on your mind and in your hearts and always give thanks.

Namaste.

My family and friends, I do not say this lightly,

Mitakuye Oyasin

(We are all related)

docbird
Bird Droppings October 22, 2026

The Deer Don’t Wear Watches

Every morning I can get out, I try to catch the sunrise. I drive around looking for photographs, often following the same route day after day. My grandchildren and I call one particular spot “the deer pasture.” And true to its name, we’ve seen deer there almost every day. Sometimes, as many as twenty-one at once. Generally, around sunrise, four or five deer will be grazing near the bottom of the pasture. The other morning, I looked at my watch. It was 7:42, and there were deer grazing in the pasture. So this morning, at 7:42, I looked across that same pasture, expecting to see them. Nothing. Where were the deer? Then something occurred to me.

The deer hadn’t missed their appointment. I had invented the appointment. The deer weren’t watching a clock. They were responding to the sunrise, the changing light, and the natural rhythms of their environment. Today, it wasn’t until about 7:51 that the I deer appeared.

Nine minutes later by my watch. Right on time by theirs. And as I sat there watching them, I began thinking about children.

“In the process of ongoing education of teachers, the essential moment is that critical reflection on one’s practice. Thinking critically about practice, of today, or yesterday, makes possible the improvement of tomorrow’s practice.” Paulo Freire

How often do we establish schedules, expectations, and standards before we ever meet the children who are expected to follow them? We decide when they should read, when they should write, when they should understand a mathematical concept, and sometimes even how quickly they should demonstrate what they’ve learned. When they don’t follow our timetable, we start looking for what’s wrong. But perhaps the problem isn’t always the child. Perhaps sometimes it’s the timetable.

“A primary responsibility of educators is that they not only be aware of the general principle of the shaping of the actual experience by surrounding conditions, but that they recognize in the concrete what surroundings are conducive to experiences that lead to growth.” John Dewey, Experience and Education

I’ve spent more than fifty years working with children, many with emotional, behavioral, and learning differences. I’ve learned that children don’t develop, respond, communicate, or learn on the same schedule. Some need more time. Some need different experiences. Some need a different approach. And some simply need someone willing to watch and listen long enough to understand how they learn. That doesn’t mean children don’t need structure. They do. But structure should help children learn, not become the measure by which we decide whether they can learn. This morning, I could have driven away at 7:42 and concluded there were no deer in the pasture. Instead, I stayed a little longer. And there they were. How often do we mistake a child’s inability to follow our schedule for an inability to learn? Maybe sometimes we need to put away our watches and spend a little more time watching the children.

For all my former students and teacher friends, may peace be with you and yours, and may we, as a nation, find a point of reference to draw us together. For twenty-plus years now, I have ended my morning sojourns with this line: Please keep all in harm’s way on your minds and in your hearts. Namaste

My family and friends, I do not say this lightly,

Mitakuye Oyasin

(We are all related)

docbird

When the Students Tell Us Whether It Is Working

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