I met the other five teachers over the course of the following week. They were busy prepping for the school year. I waited patiently for someone to hand me the textbooks I’d be using. No one ever did.
The Farm School at UCI (University of California at Irvine) was not your typical school. Fifty years before, when Los Angeles was much smaller and Orange County was a rural county of orange groves, this area was the large Irvine Ranch. Now urban sprawl had carried LA out across Orange County. (A student’s mother asked me how I liked Irvine. I said, reluctantly, “well, it’s LA.” She said, “No it’s not. It’s Orange County.” To an outsider like me, it was part of LA.) What was once open rangeland was now incredibly prime real estate. The Irvine Ranch was now the Irvine Company which used all the cutting-edge, state-of-the-art development tools of the trade to turn rangeland into high-tech and corporate business parks, upper middle class housing, carefully laid out curving streets, and large shopping malls where freeways intersected. One way they enhanced the value of their land was by donating some of it to the University of California system for a high-tech university. The university began small but by the time it would eventually be built out, it would be a large, powerful member of the UC system. Young idealistic professors were hired.
Three professors in the Social Sciences department were interested in how children learn and how elementary education could be improved. They got permission from the university to use three small green wooden bunkhouses from the Irvine Ranch days to house a small, experimental K-6 school. Since the buildings were out on the undeveloped part of the campus, next to red barns, white stables, and pastures that the Irvine 4-H used, they named it the Farm School. It would serve as a laboratory for them to do their research on child learning as well as be the setting for an undergraduate class on creative teaching and learning.
The Farm School was neither a public school nor a private school. It was part of the university system. The University of California fiercely protects its professors’ academic freedom, so any educational regulations the state wished to apply to schools did not apply to the Farm School. For example, a teaching credential was not required to teach there. The school could do whatever the professors wanted it to do. The three old buildings could hold about 50 kids. Many of the students’ parents worked at the university. Since the university did not fund the school, it had to charge tuition to pay its bills, including the meager salaries for whatever interested teachers were called to the place.
On the first day of school, we offered a smorgasbord of afternoon activities for the kids to choose from. I offered a walk up into the undeveloped fields surrounding the school. I had lots of kids come with me and I used my Socratic-questioning ranger ways to create a fun, learning-filled experience for the kids. I remember walking back at the end of the school day knowing that this job was going to be easy.
In the next three months, I lost ten pounds. For the first time in my working life, I was incompetent. I, the ranger of uniform and badge, had no experience in getting a strong-willed kindergarten child to do what I wanted them to. I came close to getting fired for swatting a boy in frustration who threw a rock at a building after I told him not to. The textbooks I was waiting to be given did not exist within the Farm School. There was not even a copy machine to run off copies from other teaching curriculum because the director did not want us teaching generic lessons. We were to create every single lesson for our specific students. The school did have a mimeograph machine so we could write out a student assignment and run that off for students. I only had twelve students but I was floundering. I felt unworthy the entire year. Four things, fortunately, helped me get through that year.
The first was the hundreds of acres of open fields behind the Farm School. Though I could see the city encroaching from the northwest and hear the distant freeways and jets landing at John Wayne Airport (and at night see distant fireworks over Disneyland), I could walk alone in open grassland stretching around me. After an agonizing day in the classroom, I could sit in the grass and settle into that moment and be rebalanced by nature.
The second thing that helped was the director of the school. Michael Butler, the dean of the social sciences division, was the most fully intellectual person I have ever met. Every single word he spoke was precisely the right word in order to communicate the complex ideas that conversations with him involved. When he wanted to make a point, he would emphasize each key word with his right hand pointing, like the baton of a symphony conductor gently beating out the precise timing for the triangle. After a few months, I found myself adopting this gesture and hopefully a more precise choosing of my words. I couldn’t help it. He inspired me to rise to my best in thought and speech.
He spoke with the same precise complexity as he wrote. Here is a sample of his writing to introduce you to my mentor.
“We wanted a school where children would learn to do what finders and makers do, not just master more or less badly and mechanically some scattered things they had worked out. The students would ideally acquire some of the skills and habits of mind of mathematicians and historians and writers and scientists and artists, and even learn to do what good thinkers do when they are thinking well, independent of a particular practice; and they would learn to find matters of interest in and around themselves, and to develop and sustain those interests, as creators of new art and knowledge must do. These were not the only aims of the school, called the Farm School, but they were central. In this sense we were elitist in our ambitions for children, but populist in our belief that most children could realize those ambitions.”
One of the points he made over and over again was to “take delight” whenever a child demonstrated the above. Our delight was the most powerful tool we had. Grades weren’t needed. Take delight. He not only said that; he did that. His face and entire being would light up if we shared a good teaching interaction. Sometimes he did a little jig, he was so delighted. Not only did he take delight, he intently watched every teaching interaction for opportunities to fan a student’s comment into understanding – and pointed it out to us afterwards if we missed the opportunity.
One afternoon Michael and I engaged in a discussion about how the gravitational forces of the Earth-Moon system could create two high tides a day. We had different understandings. I knew I was right so I was delighted that I had a chance to show this very intelligent professor that I, too, could be just as smart. I savored being able to “win” the discussion. But at some point, I suddenly felt that Michael was coming from some other place and I suddenly felt rather small. A few years later at a reunion of Farm School teachers, I shared this experience. Michael replied with something like “If your intent in a discussion is to help uncover truth, then you have an ethical responsibility to help your opponent frame the strongest argument possible.” You might need to reread that reply to really understand what he was saying. That is the kind of person Michael was. His mind was miles beyond ego.
Michael taught a university class where the undergraduates came to the Farm School each week to teach something to a group of kids and for a weekly seminar. This was one of those ‘more than a textbook’ classes that undergraduates who already knew their life paths wouldn’t bother with, but if you were uncertain, exploring, it could lead you into new ways of seeing yourself within the world. The ideas about teaching and learning that Michael presented at the seminars matched the teaching style I had roamingly evolved in the national parks. This created an interesting frustration for me. I felt that I understood perfectly what the Farm School was about. I totally agreed with what it wanted to have happen between teacher and student, but I couldn’t produce it.
The third thing that helped me through that first year was Alysia, the lead teacher. For example, she advised me to focus on developing relationships with my students. Jack had a love of nature so he and I would go up into the fields and sit quietly, watching the male red-winged blackbirds doing swooping dogfights with all wing guns blazing red and orange.
I made a tiny little sign that I would periodically post unannounced in some random place of the school. The first student who saw it, I would take to sleep under the stars up in the fields.
I taught the older kids how to play “Kick the Can” and it became a lunchtime favorite with kids hiding all around the school.
I took three of the boys in my class backpacking out to Joshua Tree. We hung out in the desert the next morning and in the serendipitous course of our time, we started making atlatls (throwing sticks) from old yucca stalks, improving our designs with each new atlatl. We had a wonderful, Huck Finn time flinging rocks and I started developing my own relationship with my students, rather than trying to fit into a stereotypical teacher-student relationship.
As Alysia helped me, we fell in love. Alysia (in her early thirties, same as me) was honest about her desire for children and I realized I had aged to a point in my life where, if I wished to have an honest relationship with such a woman, I needed to be willing to commit to all the responsibilities underlying fatherhood. Otherwise, I was stealing her limited time, not loving her. Up to that time in my life, I had always drawn back from that commitment to a woman. I could always imagine how – maybe – someone even better might come along so let’s wait and see. But this time, like the rosy finch, I hopped off my comfortable ledge into a full free-fall commitment to the flight beyond. Accepting the other “for better or worse, until death do us part” is profoundly different from enjoying the good until, possibly, something better just might come along. At the end of my second year at the Farm School, we married. We wrote our own wedding vows. One line from our vows has entered into the next generation of family weddings: “I promise to help you keep your bow into the wind.” Our vows ended with “I vow to keep this vow for the sake of all that shall grow from it, including my faith and my integrity.” That commitment has made all the difference. Much of the life path stories that follow would not have grown without Alysia and that vow.
Thirty-five years later, our vow has changed my understanding of love. Through my twenties and thirties, I was looking for the Perfect One. Any falling short means the woman is less than perfect so the theoretical Perfect One might still be out there somewhere. Therefore, I hesitated. In hindsight, this way of thinking looks for and devalues imperfections.
All this changed with our wedding vows. A wedding vow is an accepting of the imperfections within the other. Alysia and I help each other with our imperfections. For example, Alysia has taught me to “share the muddle.” Often times I get tangled up while trying to sort my way to a decision. I go around and around in my head, not able to find the answer. I keep this muddle to myself. Alysia has taught me to share this muddle. I resist because the words I utter can be misinterpreted and I’m not sure which fact needs to be spoken first and which follows after that. When I speak, it does come out a muddle. But it’s also amazing how it starts slicing through the confusion. Often, speaking to Alysia for ten minutes will reveal what I need to do better than all the days of spinning the muddle in my mind. (Perhaps trying to hold problems in my head and speaking only when I have an answer is a consequence of schooling where you are supposed to have the right answer when you speak up.)
Helping one another with our imperfections leads to a completely different destination than critically judging imperfections. Some of the strongest ties between us have arisen from our imperfections; gratitude for the other seeing the potential within us and helping us bring it into the light to grow or, more humbly, loving and accepting us even with our imperfections.
Alysia and I became the caretakers of the Farm School, living in one end of the largest ranch house, sharing the other half with the kids during the school day, so we never had to commute after that. Kids collected the eggs of the chickens that strutted and scratched around the school grounds. Alysia raised pygmy goats. We started a garden.
The fourth thing that helped me through that first year requires its own chapter.
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