My Grandma told me to.

I sincerely apologize for my extended absence from blogging. I won't make excuses except to say that I am once again caught up in the whirlwind that is school and coaching and I was completely unaware that it had been 4 weeks since I last posted on the blog. Seems much shorter.

Never-you-fear, I will spare you the play-by-play of the last few weeks and skip to a more concise glimpse of where my heart and mind have been returning over the past few days - our tendency to choose comfort over challenge, to choose defense over trust, to choose the safe-but-cheap over the rich-but-hard.

One reason I love teaching high school is that in high schoolers we see humanity at one of it's most delusional yet vulnerably real times. The division between self-perception and reality is so blatantly obvious to the observer (aka the teacher). I learn truths about my own actions by observing pieces of me in my students. It's that point in the year where the newness is wearing off and students are beginning to view the work required of them as an inconvenience at best and a personal attack at worst. Cries of "you gave us too much homework!" and "We'll each pay you $5 if you move the quiz to Monday" echo from classroom to classroom, filling the hall and leaving all involved in an obvious state of annoyance. Being a person who never likes to let the chance for a deeper discussion of morals and behavior slip away, the complaints of my students led to several lengthy, full-class heart-to-hearts this week.

"Let's get this straight: my class is a privileged, not an inconvenience, so don't let me ever hear you complaining again."

I said that today to my 9th grade boys, who were complaining about having to take notes...as if I have some way to upload the information into their brains without them having to do any work for it, but I'm choosing to make them work because I enjoy watching them suffer.

Just because something requires effort does not make it bad. Zero homework is not good, it is wasteful - a wasted opportunity to "work at [what ever you do] with all your heart" (Col. 3:17).

About the choosing defense over trust thing.. I've been learning that one both in and out of the classroom, it's just that I see it so often in the classroom it makes it glaringly obvious outside of it. When I'm teaching, I estimate that I get no more than 80% of a given student's attention at any one time in the class. The other 20+ percent is given to monitoring the behavior of his peers, making sure there is nothing else going on that he should comment on or laugh at. This, I am convinced, is a defense mechanism against failing and against rejection. Several times students have expressed to me that they do not try in school because if they were to try and fail, they wouldn't be able to handle the failure. They care so much that they devote themselves to proving that they don't care at all.

Sarcasm is the most readily available defense mechanism for all of us.

Safe-but-cheap leaves us sickened, feeling disgusted or disappointed in ourselves, wishing we could just be genuine.