Rowing with Kierkegaard, Part I

Sunday morning, 8/21/17

I’ve been looking backwards a lot this summer- literally - and now, this morning, figuratively. 

The literal stems from rowing 695 miles in July, from Lake Huron to Lake George. Rowing entails facing backwards, of course, and as I row I often don’t know what I’ve passed until I’ve already passed it. I’d wave back to that friendly couple on the pier who had been watching me coming for the last ten minutes. Or I’d pull up lightly to observe a heron that I’d just passed as he stood motionless in the reeds not wanting to have to abandon a sweet fishing spot. Or I’d pause gently as a furrow-browed osprey would eye me from her nest above the light tower. “Keep going,” she’d blink. “I’ve been watching you. Don’t make me have to leave this nest.” I’d cease my labors as loons popped up behind to the boat or to allow a threatening wave to slide under the hull or to simply stretch at least once each hour. Sometimes I’d ram a buoy, a rock, or a dock through inattentiveness or just bad luck, and at other times I’d sigh the relief of the reprieved fatalist as a Kevlar-piercing iron bar lurking just under the surface would slide past the hull with just inches to spare. 

There are ways to remedy this kind of blindness when rowing, but each entails compromise.  One can stop and turn around by twisting in the seat and looking forward, a practice that affords a glimpse ahead but painfully knots up the neck by Day 2 and bleeds hard-earned momentum from the boat. I had experimented with an assortment of mirrors before I’d embarked, but a mirror in a rocking boat is ineffectual if it is too small and, if its large enough to be useful, it creates drag in a headwind. 

Besides, an Adirondack guide boat ought not to look like a Peterbilt. 

I soon adopted a technique familiar to pilots who fly tail-wheeled airplanes that block a view directly over the nose when taxiing: the S-turn. I’d pull on only one oar three or four times, yawing the boat in one direction or another to allow for a view ahead over the opposite shoulder without much of a twist of the neck, maintaining some boat speed in the process. This system worked well except when a buoy or rock lurked in the yaw. And they do.  

For three weeks this summer, the world ahead of me was always behind me. I could savor the slowly receding vista over the stern for hours at a time but not avoid the unseen rock ten feet off the bow. I’d recall Kierkegaard’s reflection, “Life can only be understood backwards, but we have to live it forwards.” When you’re in a rowboat for ten hours a day for three weeks, you think about things like Kierkegaard and Shakespeare and life and love. You have to. And you sing. Try Willie’s Sonnet 29 as a country western song. It passes the time.

This morning, in recalling my gratifying adventure from the comfort of this easy chair here in the kitchen, I feel a figurative blindness as I pull towards the opening of school next week. As I look backwards over the chronological fantail, I can survey fifteen years of teaching experience, wonderful colleagues as mentors waving from the pier, and even a curriculum as a rudimentary chart. But considering what I’ve been watching and hearing since I climbed out of my fifteen-foot Kevlar bubble in July, the waters ahead seem turbulent, angry, uncharted. Teaching English will be easy- even joyful, I think- because learning to read thoughtfully and to write honestly and well are enduring life skills, the tools of responsible citizenship. But times being what they are, I ask myself, if rhetorically, “Really, what will I teach this year? What should I teach this year? What do my students need to learn this year? What do they want to learn this year?” As I write this, the TV on the kitchen counter blathers on as the Sunday pundits grapple with the junctures of freedom and censure, history and ignorance, fact and fake news, principled and institutional loyalty, love and hate. 

I wonder what’s ahead. Are the boys paying attention?  These cultural waters are choppy, murky, threatening, and unpredictable. But they are also exhilarating, instructive, and inspiring, calling on our better natures to become our best selves, compelling us to examine who our best selves really are.   

This is an unprecedented presidency in many ways, but these are not unprecedented times in tone, tenor, or intensity. I was a high school sophomore in 1967. A lot happened then, too- you can look it up on your Google machine- and I well remember teachers whose respect for facts, knowledge of history, sensitivity to our malleable natures, patience to listen, and self-discipline not to preach made those waters safer if not calmer, navigable if not comfortable, manageable if not controllable. They were guides in our journey but not determinants of our intellectual or moral destinations, and they trusted us to pull those oars. Their capacities for navigating angry, confused waters with empathy and grace coupled with urgency and conviction inspired us to want to try.   

I hope that I can be that kind of teacher this fall. 

At the end of my row I’d seen each of 695 miles, but not until they were behind me. What’s ahead this year promises to be another grand adventure, and crewmate Kierkegaard might advise me to be patient: to live it first and to learn along with the boys…and to try to understand it later.   

    

Rowing with Kierkegaard, Part II…counterpoint.

  

Tuesday, 8/23/17

Kierkegaard was pretty much right in his thought of how we understand life backwards but have to live it forwards and last Sunday, as I wrote about my row, I couldn’t resist employing this low-hanging philosophical fruit as a metaphor for teaching and learning. But today, as I re-read Rowing with Kierkegaard, Part 1 while also digesting the national news and even some of my summer’s reading, I’d like to apologize for Sunday’s intellectual- and even moral- Pablum. Kierkegaard has no place in a rowboat and rationalizing his one-liner as a framework for teaching is cheesy at best and dangerous at worst.

Here’s the cheese….and a confession, of sorts.

It’s true that while I rowed, I hit things that I couldn’t see from my stern-facing vantage point, but the fact is that I hit them for one of two reasons: either I wasn’t paying attention to what I could and should have known (I carried charts that demarked buoys and hazards to navigation and depths), or I got lazy when losing situational awareness to the thought in my head, the rhythm of the strokes, the heat of the day, or the fatigue of late afternoon. Using Kierkegaard as a moral bumper for the crunch of my bow against rock or concrete does not excuse my complicity; as an episodically negligent rower, I could and should have known what was ahead had I paid more attention or if I’d taken the time and made the effort to do so. Taken literally and argued as I did in Part 1, Kierkegaard’s statement excuses me, suggesting that I could not have known what I did not know and that I could only “understand” the lesson of hitting that dock or rock by actually hitting it….and then contemplating the why. That faux moral high ground does not pass the sniff test. I should not have used K as a cover.

I hit what I hit because of my own inattention, sloth, or negligence, and here’s the confession: I fully knew (“understood”) that I wasn’t paying attention even while I wasn’t paying attention. I was willfully playing the odds, gambling that I’d miss most of the obstacles, calculating that the price of constant vigilance (the sore neck from constantly turning around, the diminished boat speed by doing so) was too high, not worth avoiding the occasional ding, scratch, or dent. 

And here’s the danger in bringing Kierkegaard into the boat as a metaphor for teaching.

As a teacher, I also have charts: charts of experience and prior learning that, as imperfect as they may be, suggest a responsibility to “understand” while simultaneously “living” life forward. While I see the logic of Kierkegaard’s “understand it backwards but live it forwards” precept, teaching calls for constant vigilance, the application of prior experience to the moment, the anticipation of the crunch or the crash as – or even before- it’s happening; I may decide the fate of my hapless Adirondack guide boat and accept the negligible consequences, but the consequences of a teacher’s inattention, lack of engagement, or of ‘letting things roll’ for his or her students are far greater, infinitely more important, and laden with consequence. In this way my students and I should not share a boat propelled by Kierkegaard’s idea of “understanding life backwards but living it forwards.” Teachers are the composites of longer and more reflected experience, and my Part 1 suggestion that I’ll voyage with my students as a fellow crewmember equal in “living it forward and understanding it backwards” is profoundly negligent. I’ll travel the year with them as a fellow learner, as an equal in honoring the importance of - and in honing the practice of - lifelong learning. And yes, I’ll share my own experiential charts with them when doing so might be helpful for context and to facilitate their own voyages. But the implied wisdom of “living…then understanding” discounts what teachers can and should add to a student’s journey. Teachers know the weight of injustice, the dangers of bullying, the price of passivity, the power of empathy, and the potential of community, among other things, because we have learned through living and reflection. We can hardly ignore our ownership of these charts, charts which carry much detail and depth not yet possessed by our students.   

Early this month I picked up a copy of It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis (1935), “a cautionary tale about the fragility of democracy…an alarming, eerily timeless look at how fascism could take hold in America.” (In June I’d re-read Orwell’s 1984 and, times being what they are, I was interested in reading an earlier foray into this topic.) Lewis’s protagonist, Doremus Jessup, heroically endures the consequences of fighting the republic’s slide to fascism and concludes,

“I am convinced that everything that is worthwhile in the world has been accomplished by the free, inquiring, critical spirit, and that the preservation of this spirit is more important than any social system whatsoever. But the men of ritual and the men of barbarism are capable of shutting up the men of science and of silencing them forever.” 

The cultivation of “the free, inquiring, critical spirit” evokes the generic mission statement of the educational community…..and ought to inform the responsible oarsman as well. If I‘m going to foster “the free, inquiring, critical spirit(s)” in my students, I’d better get out the metaphorical charts and remember that the “understanding” gleaned from the wakes behind us always informs our journey forward. We can understand what’s ahead, or at the very least anticipate and be better equipped to influence the future, by paying wise attention to the past in explaining and expanding what we know to be true even as we redraw our charts for the future. 

It’s what the responsible oarsman…and teacher…must do.

So…out of the boat, Kierkegaard!