FILE–Five-month-old AIDS sufferer Kgomotso Mahlangu, lays in a hospital bed in the Kalafong township near Pretoria, South Africa, Oct. 26 1999. The AIDS epidemic is so overwhelming South Africa that some public hospitals are turning people away, limiting treatment and forcing doctors to make hard decisions on whom to save. (AP Photo/Themba Hadebe)
The saddest patient I ever had was dying of AIDS, before we knew what was going on. Her family was afraid of her, and much of the staff.
Truth be told, I was a little bit scared, too, but was so deep into a ward full of children dying back in the early 90s that I figured if it was that contagious, I was doomed as well.
So I spent a lot of time with her.
And I did a lot of things to her that hurt her anyway.
And now as I slowly descend the same arc she traveled too quickly, as we all are traveling, I think of her.
Her name was Daphne.
I can blather on about how I learned from her, how she was heroic, how what we learned from her helped us help other children later.
But that’s all noise.
The Christmas story is a powerful one, and part of its power is the juxtaposition of a baby and a fate we know too well.
I am not sure what the point to this story is–maybe there is no point.
But I know this much–what we do not do matters as much as what we do.
5:23 P.M. here–the sun stands still, shifts*, and heads back north.
6 months ago, when we sat on the opposite side of the sun, I celebrated the summer solstice, a joy tinged with the weight of knowing the sun would start its slow, long course southward.
Winter is only hours old, and winters can be brutal here. The light, however is returning.
When I was a child, winter meant cold, summer heat. I did not, could not, grasp why the elders got so excited late December, at the cusp of winter, when we faced long wintry days.
I get it now.
I stood outside last night in the chill with my youngest, now a quarter century old, watching our shadow drift across the moon, a wavering copper-gold washing in from the moon’s left.
My mom used to tell me she could see me as an infant even as I stood before her as a man. I laughed, of course. I am big–over 200# big.
I get it now.
I still give tests, more out of habit than sense now. Performance on science tests a few days before the Christmas break follow a predictable pattern, and my students did not fail to fail.
We do a lot of things because we do them. If mastery’s the goal, then a class average of low 70’s with a bell-shaped curve, a science teacher’s dream a generation ago, marks my failure.
On my board today two-foot numbers announced the time of the solstice–5:23 P.M. Solstice literally means the sun stands still.
Very few students notice how far the sun has shifted since class started just 3 1/2 months ago. There’s no need. Food comes in boxes, heat in radiators. The whole world of technique is magic to them.
In Ireland this morning, the sun rose, as it has, as it will. A shaft of sunlight flashed
through a chamber in Newgrange built thousands of years ago, before the Great Pyramids, before the Celts arrived, before Stone Henge.
We will not study this in science, nor will our students study this in history class. We will create a class ready for the 21st century, for the abstract, for a culture that confuses bank profits with economy.
If children owned the winter solstice, the dying light, knowing what waits for each of us before a 100 winter solstices pass, would they come to school?
Would you?
I believe schools can be worth the time children invest in them. I am not convinced we’re there yet.
At least not as long as I keep practicing education as religion, using a script written generations before me
An essential quality of technology, from the spear to Skype, is action at a distance. Technology enables us to have an effect on people and things far away. In general, the more advanced the technology, the further away it is able to impose an effect.
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