In our school’s seventh year, I taught the 7th/8th grade literature class. My brother (also a teacher) had once recommended taking students to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland Oregon, about 140 miles away. So we studied A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream and then drove up to see an evening performance. The kids loved it. They wanted to put on a play (and the 7th graders wanted to do another Shakespeare play the following year). I had planned the Ashland trip as the culmination of our work with Shakespeare and was planning on moving to another topic, so I wasn’t quite sure how to respond to their enthusiasm.
That week, our field study went to a restoration site to help plant oaks. We had brought meter sticks for an afternoon stream discharge equation exercise. During lunch, I started balancing one of the meter sticks upright on my finger. Soon I had several kids balancing meter sticks on their hands, chins, and toes. And suddenly, as I watched my students respond to this spontaneous example of feedback and I thought of their enthusiasm for Shakespeare, I realized how important it is that schooling respond to the students’ level of interest. A teacher is like me balancing the stick and the kids are like the stick. I have the power to shape their experience but they also have the power to shape my experience and, through me, their own experience. This interplay allows the stick to rise into the sky, something impossible for it to do on its own.
As people high in the educational hierarchies push for national standards and standardized tests, a system is being created that is unaffected by the feedback of students’ enthusiasm or boredom. It is as if the teachers are being made to say, “Your emotional engagement will have little shape on this class because we are going to move through this textbook at a certain rate whether you like it or not.” It’s like the difference in awareness between a person driving to work and a person riding a bus. If students’ attention is not needed to help shape the lesson, their minds can slip off elsewhere and disengage. But if their excitement can change the lesson in a way that makes it even more exciting, then a dance can begin between the students and the teacher that is as enthralling as a meter stick balancing upon a finger.
The next year I taught the 7th/8th grade literature class again with different literature, since I couldn’t repeat the same literature that the 8th graders had read in their 7th grade year. At the end of that year, one of the eighth graders gave me a thank-you note at graduation.
“…you taught the class the great side of literature. It was so amazing how much the whole class has matured and grown both in their writing and in their true character. When I look back on this year I can just see the class grow from a bunch of individuals that don’t really know each other that well (or themselves, for that matter) into a thriving group that is really very unified. I can just see everyone becoming so much of a better person.
“…I think when we did have tons of organization in the class we were like the frozen fish – just sitting there, fearing the next test and the next boring assignment. [The “frozen fish” is a reference to a wonderful poem we had read: “On Reading Poems to a Senior Class at South High” by D.C. Barry.] But when you let us go on our own and learn on our own, each member of the class became so in tune with the rest that it was like we were each one string, together making an instrument that could play beautiful music.
“Being in your class taught me more than reading and writing. It taught me so many things about life – the fun, the laughter, the astonishment, the worry, the human nature, and so many other things. I learned so so so many lessons about life – and none of them were from a text book! All of them were taught to us by, well, us. And that is what rocks!”
In our school’s ninth year, the school had grown enough that my literature class was just for the eighth graders, most of whom I had taught the year before. One day we were reading excerpts of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self-Reliance. As they read Emerson’s words, I asked them to choose one sentence and give voice to the words, not just read them. They did so, with increasing energy, going around the circle until it came back to me. I could have gone on with the lesson from there but then came the thought that I, too, should give voice to his words with as much authenticity as I was wanting from my students. So I went up to the first student and, looking into his eyes, sincerely spoke “Trust thyself.” To the next I said, “Every heart vibrates to that iron string.” “Trust thyself.” “Insist on yourself; never imitate.” Around I went, looking each student in their eyes as I spoke, and they saw the trust shining in my eyes and I saw the light within their eyes shine brighter.
That led, a few weeks later, to sharing with them my dance company experience with “eye shine.” I explained how our eyes contain this beautiful light that can shine forth or be hidden and how our eyes are engaged in a feedback spiral with each other’s eyes. Do we ever let our eyes shine? Do we make eye contact with others? Why are we cautious? Do we allow our eyes to shine only if the other person’s eyes are shining, or do we initiate? Talking about this together made it easier for us to look into one another’s eyes and see one another’s spirit shining within. This nourished respect and trust which led over the months to exultant reading of poetry, especially e.e. cummings.
The movie, Return of the King, came out that year and in it, there is a stirring sequence when Gondor calls for aid from Rohan by lighting a succession of mountain-top beacon fires. The signal of the beacon fires passes from mountaintop to mountaintop into and through the night into the next morning while soul-stirring music triumphantly blasts the heavens. That was the image that I wanted them to feel in their hearts as we learned together so I came up with the expression, “my beacon fire is lit,” which they enthusiastically took up.
At some point, I feared I might be overreaching. As this doubt arose, I felt a clenching body memory of a golf shot back when I was fourteen or fifteen. It was on a long, 225-yard, par three hole. It was the ninth hole so one was shooting towards the clubhouse beyond. My drive was short but I was within a moderate seven iron of the hole, a club I could hit fairly straight. If I could approach the ball close enough, a par three was possible, something I rarely achieved on that hole. I looked the situation over and developed a sense in my body of how strong the stroke should be. I took a few practice swings, feeling that intended strength flow through the shot, realizing I could place this shot right near the hole. I stepped up to the ball and started my backswing. At some point near the end of the back-swing, an image flashed of hitting the ball too far and having it land among the golfers on the practice putting green in front of the clubhouse. Within a split second, my resolve for the swing crumpled and I hit a lame shot pathetically short of the green.
My sudden doubt about my class felt just like that crumpling golf shot. Better to fall short than overshoot in an embarrassingly public way. Feeling that body memory again made me resolve that I wasn’t going to let it crumple me this time. I wanted to find out how far this class could go. I shared my golf story with the kids, describing that onset of doubt and my resolve to not let that happen with this class. I was committed to giving my fullest.
For months, I had wanted to give this class the opportunity for a profound quiet sit in a spacious place. I wanted to take them out where the Pacific Crest Trail runs along the Hat Creek Rim. Out there, I would space them out along the trail facing out over the rim and just have them be there for an hour or two, each on their own, gazing out over a vast space with Mt. Lassen close at hand to the left and Mt. Shasta beckoning in the distance to the right.
April looked like a good time. And then I had an additional idea. The beginning of this class’s adventure really started when we had read Plato’s Allegory of the Cave back in September. They had understood the allegory and talked about what coming out of the cave meant and what that would be like.
Below Hat Creek Rim is Subway Cave, a relatively smooth-floored, quarter-mile lava tube one can walk through. A dim green of ferns and algae grows in the shade of either end but the cave then fades into absolute darkness in the middle section. I had taken a group of boys to Subway Cave once and we discovered that (except for one tricky spot) we could walk back through without a flashlight if we held one arm up in front (to detect low ceilings) and felt our way along the side of the cave. Remembering this, I decided that walking with my class through Subway Cave without flashlights might be an additional experience just as powerful as sitting up on the rim. And so in late April, that’s what we did.
On a Saturday, about half the class came. We climbed down into the cave and started walking into the darkness. An excitement swirling with scared apprehension and bold adventurousness unified the group. The light faded behind us. Only sound and touch of an invisible wall remained. We could not see one another, but we could hear our voices, resonating cathedral-like in the stone-enwrapped space, voices fully vibrating with scary excitement. “Where are you?” Nervous giggles. “This is so cool!” The sound of our voices inspired the kids to stop and sing.
At some point in the darkness, in homage to Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave”, I lit a small votive candle and we danced with the shadows on the cave walls. Then I blew the candle out and we waited for our eyes to dilate. We then slowly kept working our way through that darkness until a strangeness in the blackness gradually resolved into dim shapeless light, which we walked toward, until we crept past a bend in the passage and there, a hundred feet ahead, dim indirect light lit the passage beyond. At the other end, the kids asked if we could turn around and go back through the cave in the dark again, so we did, this time without fear.
Up on Hat Creek Rim, we had our quiet sit. After about 45 minutes, I called them together. I tried to have a talking circle about something else but they wanted to talk about the cave. At some point about a month earlier, we had started videoing our class as a way to create a memory of our special time together. I turned on the video camera partway into this discussion. What follows is several pages of transcribed dialogue. I include it partly because our culture has lost touch with how wonderful eighth graders are. I resent movies that portray adolescent school culture as mean, conformist, anti-intellectual…. We get kids transferring in from Chrysalis who begin that way and start changing as they realize they can be themselves. I wonder whether our adolescents get trapped by a culture that projects (or milks for laughs) a certain low expectation of that age that then comes to be the presumed role model for how they should behave. What follows is real eighth graders discussing their experience.
M: I seriously want to go back.
C: Yeah
?: Yeah
C: Maybe we should.
M: I want to.
J: Not today but on the last day of school, we could come up here.
M: With all of the 8th graders.
J: When you’re in the cave, it’s like, I don’t know, it’s just pulls in everything that did matter, you know, everything that like didn’t matter we left at the opening of the cave when we walked in, you know. It was really cool. It was like (M: We did kind of leave our lives behind, didn’t we?) You were like stepping closer to each other, you know. That was like the one step close, everybody got a little bit closer today. Now we’re all better friends today. And tomorrow we’ll be better friends than we were yesterday or two days ago and it’s because we took that step into the cave and we needed each other, you know, I think that was really cool.
C: One of my favorite things about the cave, just one of my favorite things… I liked everything about it… but it was really amazing when you first walked in, you could see the darkness and then you could see the light behind you. And we walked in and your friends just faded into the darkness. And once you went in, everybody was just not there. (B: Yeah) Also, holding someone’s hand or being next to someone and like feeling them was so weird because you can’t see them and you can’t see yourself, how ever hard you try. You wave your hands in front of your face and you can’t see them. It’s like your spirit is there but you can’t see yourself. It’s so weird. It’s like you’re in a dream or something. Just like amazing.
J: And also, I think another thing was… When you were next to somebody, it felt so much more comforting. When you thought you were lost because… I had several times where like it sounded like you guys’ voices were really far away and then I was like… kept on walking and I was like “oh oh, this is bad” and then I’d call out and then they’d like walk over and be only a few feet away and I was like “whoosh, I’m not lost” or something, you know. I guess in our lives, we are always scared and afraid of losing our friends when really they’re really just close by. We just have to call out for them.
M: What I liked most about it was the fact that I was no longer conscious of the world around me. I was just here and now. I wasn’t thinking about tomorrow or the future or anything else (J: That’s a good point) but being there in the darkness with my friends trying to find a way out. Being a spirit.
B: Also I think that in the cave, like M said, you don’t see the world around you, you don’t pay attention to any fine details because obviously you can’t see them (M: You don’t think about anything else.) so you more, what you do is you have to cling to something, I guess, so you go in thought and you think, “Ok”. You go deeper into yourself. You go, you get closer to other people, to the sounds and to like the feeling of people’s hands because obviously I mean that’s your… really only one of your only senses in there, your sense of touch and sound, for knowing whether or not people are there. And I think you get to know, OK, the world is not always bright and sunny. There’s dark places too and you have to go through those places.
J: It really puts things in perspective, you know like people are like “Boo the president” or “this is bad” or “this is bad.” It really put things into perspective. Like look at how small we are compared to the whole world. I mean, that was just a cave and when you were in there you were like, you weren’t thinking about that stuff. You were just like, “Oh, oh, it’s dark, I can’t see, I’m scared, I hit my head, Oh, hell.” It really lets you see how insignificant (B: Yeah) by ourselves we are, but together like we, as a whole, humans make… (reaching for a connection but not being able to reach it) I don’t know. It didn’t work out.
Me: One thing I’ve been thinking as you’ve been talking about this too is I think there’s this facial dance that goes on. Like in this class, it took two or three months ‘til we were comfortable looking at each other’s eyes cause there’s this “I’ll let my eyes shine a little bit more if I see your eyes shine a little bit more.” There’s this little negotiation of “Am I safe with you,” etc, etc. But you go in the dark, you can’t do that at all. I mean, pfft!
B: You can shine your eyes as bright as you can and nobody will be like …
Me: Or it’s not in your eyes or it’s something else. (B: Yeah) But somehow, I found it interesting how open everybody was to singing, how open everyone was to “this is an adventure.”
M: When the light turned on, we were all a little shy.
B: I think A. mentioned this. You actually did feel the warmth from the light even though the flame was so small… and like everything felt warmer.
J: Another thing I was going to say was, When you’re in the cave, like, this is just me but like, I liked to sing in the cave because when you’re singing out here, people are looking at you like you are strange, weirdo. But like when you’re in the cave, you know, you can’t see me, I’m going to sing out loud. It’s like,
M: (a sing-song, teasing sound) Nah, nah, nah nah nah.
J: Exactly, That’s how it was, you know.
Me: I wonder if vision intimidates us. We let what other people see…
J: Exactly. It’s all about our dignity and all this stuff.
B: Braces!
J: Where in the cave, nobody really has dignity; we’re all blind. (group laughs) Exactly. In the cave, it’s not all about dignity. It’s about being yourself. Everybody else is as blind and helpless as you are so it’s not like you have to show off to them or they are any better than you.
C: Yeah, I really, really, really felt the same thing like when we were dancing around the flame, it was like I could do that. It was no big deal. I could just dance and I could sing and there was no pressure. It was like “You can’t see my face and I want to sing, so “hey, I’m going to do it” (M: Nah, nah, nah, nah) and you know, I think you’re right, facial expressions and stuff really do intimidate you, like what people are going to think about you, but if they can’t see you, hey.
M: They don’t want to see.
Me: And yet, we knew exactly who everybody was. (B: Right) If it’s C singing, we know it’s C singing.
B: But it doesn’t matter.
C: Cause, yeah, maybe, I don’t know, it will make us all more open when we’re in the light.
B: You can’t see their faces if they do look at you as if you are retarded so…
J: Exactly, and they don’t know where you’re at so…
B: They can’t look at you as if you are retarded. So…
J: Exactly!
M: They can’t even see!
A: I think nowadays, people get so wound up in like “oh my hair has to be perfect and I have to look like this and I have to be really, really thin to fit in” and all this stuff and they kind of lose themselves kind of. They kind of lose themselves. They lose their personalities because they think “oh being this way nobody will like me so I have to change who I am in order to fit in.” I think that when we go into the cave, you don’t have your looks or anything like that. It’s just you.
B: It’s your own personality. That’s all that left.
A: It’s your personality, who you truly are, is all you have left and if you lose that to looks or material things then really if you go in the cave, you have nothing to hang onto. (B: Superficial people, watch out.) Yeah, and so I think it made us all more aware – Boy, it doesn’t really matter what we look like and our personalities don’t have to be perfect you know and because being who you truly are is really the only thing you have to hang onto there and your friends. (B: Yeah) So, I think that it all made us aware that you can’t see me, I can’t see you. I can be my true self and it was just easier.
M: Another thing that I really want to do is take all the 8th graders inside that cave and just sit there and walk around for awhile and do whatever we want and try to get to know each other’s personality not by what we look like but by who we are.
B: That would be a great first day of school, like say with all the new kids…you don’t know anybody and then you get to know everybody.
J: Exactly. You wouldn’t know who they were. You would go in there thinking you’d be like walking up, you’d be “Hey, B” and they would be “I’m not B” and you go “Oh sure you’re not” and then you start talking to them. You find out everything that they are, you know, you find out their self; they’re completely raw in the cave. And then you walk out and you go “Wait, you’re not B! Sweet!” That’s how I think it would be.
A: Could you imagine if everybody if when you first met them, what they looked like or how they dressed or that kind of stuff just didn’t even matter. You looked at everybody as if the lights were turned off?
J: That’s how blind people are. You know I think blind people are privileged (Yeah) they don’t see color, they don’t see race, they don’t see any of that. It’s like …
B: But they also don’t see the beauty of the world.
A: Look around you, J, they don’t get any of that.
J: That’s true.
Me: It’s kind of strange. This class began back in October or November with me going “Want to go out of the cave?”
M: I want to stay in the cave
B: And now we’re saying we want to go… Me: You want to go into the cave.
B: I think there is two different meanings to going in and out of the cave though because there’s in the cave… like ignorant and well you don’t know anything…
M: …hiding your personality.
B: Hiding behind the cave but then there’s another one, another perspective of the cave which we hadn’t known until today which is not hiding in the cave but…
M: finding yourself
B: finding yeah, like
A: finding each other
B: shining out in the cave. I mean…
C: Oh my gosh! Like when A said before how a lot of people judge you on how you look. It’s like when you’re in the cave all you have is your personality and your voice to guide the people through the cave. It’s like you really do have to shine in the cave to get out of the cave. Because if we didn’t shine, if we didn’t show our personality, if we didn’t try to get out, we’d probably all still be in there right now if nobody tried… and part of shining is trying to get out of the cave, you know, like showing your personality helps you get out. I don’t know…
B: It lights your beacon so you can see the light.
C: Right. It like guides you. It’s really cool.
One of the girls asked if she could let her spirit out. She walked to the edge of the rim and gave two amazingly spirit-filled wolf howls out into the world.
Later I gave them another poem by e.e. cummings, when faces called flowers float up from the ground… We read it and they got into it and we ended up chanting it into a sky that held a rainstorm on the top of the mountain across the valley. “the mountains are dancing, are dancing with me” We ended with each student standing on the rim, giving exultant voice to “My beacon fire is lit!”
It was the most perfect teaching experience I had ever had. I knew then that I might have just had the high point of my teaching and that never again would I reach such a height, but that was okay. I had done it. I had finally hit that golf shot on the ninth hole right.
Back home I noticed in our church news that Doug von Koss (www.dougvonkoss.com) was coming to town on a Friday night a couple of weeks away. He does amazing things, giving voice to poems and leading people into group songs and chants in a way that brings people together in a nonreligious but deeply spiritual way. I emailed him and told him about what was happening within this class and asked if he could come a little earlier that Friday afternoon and do poetry with this class. He said he would be happy to. We carried chairs down into an out-of-the-way park by the river and, sitting in a circle, were guided into poetry by a master of poems and songs of life.
I was working with one of my students on a description he had written about one of our class experiences. His first draft stayed on the surface. I was asking him questions, focusing him on the experience itself. He kept circling around, avoiding the deeper point. As I kept probing, he started walking around, growing more animated. And then his words went right into the center, saying the experience made him feel “alive.” More important than the words was the voice with which they emerged. His words vibrated like a drum booming from its center. Yes!
His voice was vibrating within me for the rest of the day. The emotional intensity of his shift in voice sings of the difference between a life that circles and a life that explores the core. We circle our purpose, reluctant to draw nearer. A power vibrates there that scares us and yet, when we approach, a joyous excitement resonates within us.
So in the next class, I described (with his permission) the process by which he wrote that piece and talked about the voice. Then I read his writing.
“The feeling that I got was so great and fantastic. It was a feeling that was just like animals feel the storm coming. It was the best feeling that could be felt. Because you just felt so alive and thriving. Throughout the group it was like a pulse pumping through the veins of life. I think that the others agree that it is a memory unreplaceable in our heart, souls, and minds.”
I asked the class, “How many of you feel his piece describes your experience?” Most hands went up. To those who raised their hands, I offered the opportunity to read his piece aloud, giving their voice to his words. The first person who read it had tears in her eyes by the end. This writing, I pointed out, has the power to bring tears to a person’s eyes. An eighth grader’s writing, your writing, has this power. The words aren’t particularly big. Where does this power come from? That led to a wonderful literature discussion that filled the rest of the classtime.
Later, I was having a conversation with Virginia, our office manager and a devout Christian. I shared these experiences and the effect they were having on the kids. Because of my awareness of her religion, I used Jesus’s image of not hiding a lamp beneath a basket but putting it on a stand where its light may be seen. That is what I felt was happening with this class. She and I talked about this “light” and how it could be integrated into public education.
One of the things that Virginia did every May was put up a display for Chrysalis in the mall during Public School Week. She made a banner that said “Chrysalis – a community of kindness, respect and love of learning that makes the light within each student shine brighter.” I saw the banner when it came back from the exhibit and at some point I realized, “that is our mission statement.” We talked about it at a staff meeting and agreed on a mission statement, the heart of which was “encouraging the light within each student to shine brighter.”
Our Mission
I am still amazed at the profound difference those nine words have made for Chrysalis. I had been burned out on mission statements back in my museum days by those hundred of wasted person-hours and tens of thousands of wasted dollars. But this mission statement had not been created by some committee in one or two days. This one grew over several years in a spiral with the students.
Every parent knows whether their child’s light is shining or not, whether it is growing stronger or weaker. A good teacher is aware of this. It’s like balancing the meter stick; it’s this dance of feedback between the teacher and the students. The teacher is hoping to teach in a way such that their students’ lights are growing stronger, where the kids are giving back, helping the spiral rise upward. That’s what we wanted, that’s what we were navigating the school’s path by. Not on test scores. Not on grades but, “Is your light shining? Are we successfully doing that? Do I need to change something to help your light shine more?”
Decisions are made on that basis. We kept class sizes small, even though that significantly reduced our salaries, because it’s important for helping the kids. Ten years later, Laura, our science teacher, said at one of our staff meeting that our actual mission statement was “encouraging the light within each student to shine brighter… and we really mean it. It isn’t just some words on the wall.”
I led the eighth-graders on a night hike during our school’s annual spring camping trip. That year was to Patrick’ Point State Park, a park of ocean beaches, cliffs and forests. We walked along in the moonshadows of the roadside pine trees towards the road’s end at a dramatic overlook and trailhead down to the ocean. We followed the trail down to the observation point, breeze in our hair, the night waves below, exulting in the firmament. We returned to the road. Beyond the parking lot lay a small moonlit meadow. “Can we dance in the moonlight?” they asked. Off the leash, we danced in the moonlight and then they wanted to go bounding after the scent of the wild.
They found an informal trail leading down towards the sound of the ocean. Enchanted by their initiative and courage, I followed. But within 20 yards, the path felt too dangerous in the dark. So I called them back and we walked back to camp.
Graduation that year was very special; that class had created and given us our mission statement. They will always remain very special to me. One of them sent me an email four years later at the end of high school.
“I haven’t been sucked into the high school drama of trying to change yourself. I mean that I have our class within me, really forever. I know how important it is to be yourself. I know the main point of the class was to ‘light your beacon fire’ and in a way, that means the same thing as BEING yourself. If everyone’s beacon fire had a strong flame burning, we would never try to copy other people, or become like someone else (like girls and boys try to do in high school). Individuality is a strong and important characteristic that IS inside everyone, whether discovered or still a mystery. Sometimes I look around school at all the girls; fake, confused, plastered in makeup, slutty (if you will), and unhappy. They put on a fake face to seek the approval of their peers. They know no better than to act like everyone else around them because their beacon fire is not yet lit. The wick is within them; it’s simply dry and unlit. I’m different from these girls because my beacon is lit. I am not afraid to be myself, whether the approval of girls is on my side or not. I frankly think it’s stupid to live your life around someone else when they are doing the same thing. That is a sick cycle. Our best role model is ourself.”
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