“Why I teach” – guest post by Jennifer Dickie

For the past several years, we’ve taken time at our gatherings of our full K-8 faculty and staff to hear from a few teachers and staff members about why they teach and choose to work at ANCS.  It’s a tradition borrowed from some other schools, one that serves to remind us of the passion we all hold for our students and the work of teaching and learning.

A few of our teachers and staff who’ve given such a talk have generously agreed to let me share their words to a wider audience, and so, every so often, in place of a blog post by me, I’ll post instead one of their speeches.  Here is a “Why I teach” speech given by middle campus Math/Science/Technology teacher Jennifer Dickie at our faculty/staff retreat this past July.

“Why I Teach” by Jennifer Dickie

I teach because I seek.

Why do I teach?

Because . . .

It’s what I do

It’s what I’ve always done

It’s who I am

 

So why do I do it?

Ultimately I teach because I seek.

I seek the truth (small t) and the Truth (capitol T)

 

But I could do this without teaching.

I would still be a seeker without being a teacher

I could seek and not teach

So why do both?

 

My path is long. It started long before me and continues forward to a time beyond me. Perhaps as a geologist I might say it started at the big bang and will continue to the end of time . . . but that’s too big to start with . . .

So I start with the seeking. In the spring of 1991 I took my last credits toward my Bachelor’s Degree. One of the classes I chose, because my best friends Kim and Michael were also taking it, was Introductory Geology. It was supposed to be my last easy “A” of my college career.

Here’s the thing . . . I fell in love. I swooned with identifying minerals and imagining the early earth’s terrain. I found mountain building beautiful and mantle crust interactions fascinating . . . I ended the term in Dr. Helen Hay’s office in tears saying, “I’ve made a mistake . . . I should have been a geology major . . . four years wasted . . . “ But her voice of time and experience said “Nonsense!” She shared her own story of teenage bride and motherhood. Raising children and sending them off to college before she started her own education. She made it through her bachelor’s degree, her master’s degree, and her PhD, landed her first teaching appointment and by her late 50s she was here to say–it is never too late to do what you love.

Jump forward 15 years to a lecture room at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. Two and a half hours from my then home on the Navajo reservation. I was taking my second geology class.

In front of us the professor was explaining in elementary terms Bowen’s Reaction Series.

Here, briefly, is what I heard.

Start with a magma. A dense magma rich in iron and magnesium. The kind that typically forms ocean basin rock or mantle rock. Cool it over millions of years. As it cools certain minerals will crystallize, but then as conditions change the mineral will react with the remaining melt and create a new mineral entirely. Then as the magma continues to cool the resulting mineral will react again with the remaining melt to crystallize into another mineral altogether. Each time the mineral created will be less mafic or iron/magnesium rich as the atoms reconfigure into new lattice forms. Ultimately from this mafic magma, theoretically one could get quartz–a most definitely NOT- iron-rich mineral . . .

This may sound a bit Charlie Brownish, “whaaa, whaaa, whaaa” to you, but to me a 30 something year old, mother of two who had traveled 2 ½ hours for this 60 minute lecture, 15 years after falling in love, Bowen’s Reaction Series was a revolution. It turned things upside down. I had to leave the classroom. I wept, too embarrassed and confused to cry in front of all those 18 year olds. In the restroom where I sequestered myself I let the awesomeness of this truth settle over me.

It seemed so fundamental. The magma is not what it appears–it is a whole made of many parts and under certain conditions those constituents act and react again and again to give us everything we could imagine and things that we couldn’t even imagine looking at the original source!

The bottom line . . . nothing was as it appeared and anything seemed possible.

Fall back 20 years (early college) to the first time I thought of myself as a teacher. It was an outdoor education program called Earlham College August Wilderness. First year students could register for this pre-college course and travel in remote Canada by canoe or backpack in the Uinta Mountains for 21 days with peers and student leaders and one adult instructor. As a student at 18 I participated and discovered strength, ability, leadership I had not known I possessed. I couldn’t get enough of this place and this experience. I was selected as a student leader the following year and every subsequent year of my college career.

My first year as a leader at 19 with a group of fifteen 18 year old students what set me apart–the only thing that set me apart–was my ability to do hard work and my knowledge of what to do and how to do it.

At one point in our adventure we reached the boulder field–a ¼ mile of giant boulders across which we carried our gear. The giant Old Town tripping canoes we used weighed upwards of 100 pounds and were carried on the shoulders of a single person.

On this day in particular, I woke feeling sick. When we got to this monster portage I could only carry the bits and pieces–PDFs, paddles, daypack. I felt weak, I felt like a failure. I was failing my brigade by not being strong enough in the moment to carry my canoe. I was letting down the young women who already doubted they could do this thing, and the young men who were certain this was man’s work. As my co-student leader, a 200-pound football player hoisted my canoe and headed across the boulders I was left with Margaret Lechner, the lone adult instructor. I was frustrated and sad. But her voice of time and experience said, “What about the student who thinks she can’t live up to you? How important to show her that even the strongest most capable leaders will manage this small gear with grace. There is great value in walking slowly and carefully with others, in taking care of yourself.”

And there it was . . . something new, previously unseen, unknown. Teaching and learning happen in our best and worst moments. Teaching can happen when you know and can do, and also when you wonder and feel unable. Anything was possible.

Now forward again 20 plus years to Georgia State University–two years into my master’s degree in geology. Igneous and Metamorphic Petrology class. Revisit Bowen’s Reaction Series–but with a depth and understanding that time and experience bring.

What crystallizes out of any melt in reality (not theory) is extraordinarily complex. It is ultimately dependent on many conditions including the bulk composition–what atoms the magma starts with. Not all magma has everything you need for everything you want and even if it does, the conditions may never lead to all the possibilities in the series . . . of course . . .

For anything . . . for everything to be possible, you must start with the right stuff and subject it to the right conditions . . . ahhh, right.

So I seek . . .

Because there is so much joy in knowing and in wanting to know; in the wondering, and because we live everyday on this planet in this solar system in this galaxy in this universe and the bulk composition of ALL of it is the SAME yet from this has come stars and dark matter, and celestial bodies and life! And as I see it–the conditions to seek the truth in all these things are knowledge and wonder.

It’s all out there and I need to have just the right knowledge and just the right wonder to start a reaction . . .

. . . To stop when I look down at the beach say, “Where did this grain of sand come from?” or when I walk across the parking lot ask, “Where did this puddle originate? Is it really old dinosaur pee?” or when I stand on the field out back wonder, “Why is the wind blowing today?” or when I read the news of global climate change ponder, “What happens if all the ice melts?” or when I hear on July 15 about the New Horizon space probe and explode with, “How did they send a probe 3 billion miles into space to intercept very possibly the only other geologically active planet in our solar system? Is that really just algebra?”

So, back to that long path . . . my seeking extends back into our deep past to the formation of Earth’s mountains and oceans and to life itself; to the coalescing of planets and the capture of moons; to the first spinnings of this galactic arm we inhabit . . . and forward into our distant future in the expanding universe, to what fills that space and back to now and how the very building blocks of us and of everything are both here and on the other side of the universe seemingly simultaneously. Some call it science, some call it math, some call it God . . . no matter what its name . . . I seek to find the Truth of it.

So why do I teach when what I truly am is seeking?

I don’t know everything. I can’t do everything; and it is with grace that I see the only possible response is to walk side by side and to share this wonder.

I teach so you will also wonder at these things . . . and then think . . . “I can seek to know this.”

No one is required to know these things. It is by our choices alone we pursue this knowledge and so what we choose to seek is based fundamentally on our bulk composition, and if I can take that and help to create conditions that improve the odds that wonder will steer you toward seeking the truth about these and all things, then in some small way, I am part of knowing Truth (with a capital T) even when I myself am part of a distant past.

Self-serving perhaps–but what greater gift than to know that through teaching, seeking Truth is eternal?