Life’s Many Shades of Gray
I set the chalk down and turned to face my AP students.
“All right.” I said. “I deliberately waited until the end of class to pass these back because I wanted to give you some general feedback on them before you read your individual comments.”
I set the stack of essays on the center table and pulled over a stool from a lab bench.
“Oh, oh. It must be serious,” joked Catherine. “He’s sitting down with us.”
“Ha. Ha.” I retorted.
“Yeah, Mr. Brock, we all already know what you probably wrote on all of them anyway.” Olivia fretted impatiently. “I just want to see how badly I disappointed you and get it over with.”
I looked at her and replied, “Actually, that’s what I wanted to talk with all of you about.”
I held up the papers and scanned the room, studying their faces.
“Many of you did exactly what I have come to expect on this assignment.” I announced. “You told me you’d buy a new prom dress anyway and then spent the rest of the paper talking about how awful a human being that makes you.”
I shook my head with a bit of a melancholy smile.
“I don’t give this assignment each year to make you all feel guilty.” I told them. “And I don’t have you write this Issue’s paper just to force you to wrestle with the responsibilities you have for how your choices impact the environment. Knowing what you have learned these last few weeks, I actually challenged you about whether to buy a new prom dress when you don’t need one because I wanted to see if you could understand the real nature of the question.”
That produced puzzled looks and even a frown or two.
“It’s not a yes-no question, people.” I asserted. “It only looks like one. Several of you came close to seeing that as you attempted to justify buying a new dress because you could reuse it for formals in college or share or donate it. But most of you treated the assignment as a binary, either-or, black-white, yes-no question, and it isn’t.”
“What do you mean, Mr. Brock?” Lucy asked, brow solidly furrowed.
I had to stop to search for words.
“Look.” I changed gears. “For the past few weeks, you’ve had to learn just how badly humans have managed to damage nearly the entire natural world…to the point where it is not exaggeration to say our own survival as a species is threatened. But that’s precisely why you cannot treat questions such as ‘Do I buy a dress I don’t actually need?’ or ‘Do I drive when I can walk?’ as if the answer is merely ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ You can’t treat ‘Are we doomed?’ as a yes-or-no question.”
“Of course you can, Mr. Brock!” Sara politely objected.
I was quick to reply.
“Look, what happens if you say the answer to that question is ‘no’?” I asked her. “We’re not doomed.”
She was clearly thinking about it for a minute, but it was Lucy who then raised her hand.
“We no longer have to be morally responsible for how we treat the world.” She replied.
“Exactly!” I said. “If you truly believe that the answer to the question is ‘no,’ then you absolve any responsibility to attempt to cope with the problem.”
I scanned their faces again. “And if the answer is ‘yes’?” I asked.
“Then the problem is beyond solving.” Sara responded. “And it doesn’t matter what you do.”
“Precisely!” I concluded, acerbically. “We might as well all eat, drink, and be merry while the getting’s good because nothing else we do is going to matter anyway.”
“Either way, nothing happens.” Olivia mused thoughtfully.
I gestured emphatically.
“Exactly!” I said again. “If we treat ‘Are we doomed’ or ‘Do I buy a prom dress’ or ‘Should I walk instead of drive,’ etcetera as yes-no questions, then we never have to do anything to address the situations that created them in the first place.” I asserted. “Only by recognizing that questions like these are not actually yes-no questions can we have any hope of genuinely answering them the way we need to.”
I studied their faces and decided I needed to respond further to the concerned worry I still saw there.
“Take the prom dress question.” I stated and pointed where Quincy, Winnie, and Noor were all seated. “The three of you are roughly the same size.” I said. “So you might decide that you’ll each buy one dress for one dance, and then trade dresses for two other dances. You basically get three different looks for the price of one and save the resources needed to make six additional dresses.”
Sara protested again.
“But Mr. Brock, even you’ve pointed out it’s more complicated than that.” She argued. “Those extra six dresses kept someone employed.”
“Okay,” I responded, nodding. “So you start a dress exchange for the area schools, using donated dresses, and girls ‘rent’ their dress by paying for the necessary alterations. Then you’re not only saving resources; you’ve employed someone as well.”
I tapped on the table.
“The point,” I told them, “Is that you’re going to have to start thinking outside the confines of a strict yes-no box if you’re going to have any hope of addressing the environmental crisis your generation faces–or for that matter, any of the other issues we have studied this year. The world desperately needs people who know how to do more than answer a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to life’s really tough problems, and if I’ve done anything at all of value in this class this year, it has been to challenge each of you to become such a person.”
I noticed Keziah was fighting to suppress a grin, and I suddenly realized how strident the tone of my voice had become.
“Sorry.” I apologized, rolling my eyes at myself. “It’s the danger of being a preacher’s kid.”
“It’s okay, Mr. Brock,” said Helen. “We even kind of enjoy that you get so passionate about such things.”
“Hm, hm.” Maryam added. “We really do appreciate that you care.”
Others nodded and exchanged knowing looks, and I chuckled and shook my head at my own sermonizing.
“Anyway,” I continued. “I simply wanted to you to see with this assignment that just because a problem looks black-and-white doesn’t mean that it actually is.”
I passed back their papers, then, and everyone except Lucy and Olivia started to pack up to leave. The two of them walked over to where I was standing, with Lucy looking clearly agitated.
“Mr. Brock, I have to ask.” She pleaded desperately. “Learning all of this has made me literally terrified. You can ask my mother! I’ve actually been having trouble sleeping this past week. I have to know: do you think we’re doomed?”
I turned to see that some of the others in the class were now hanging back, and I knew I needed to be quite intentional in my response.
“Lucy, I want to show you something.” I said and went over to where my laptop was located. Quickly googling Follow the Frog, I brought the short video up on my screen to play it. “Watch this,” I said.
They all did, and soon there was some laughter and chuckling, and even Lucy smiled a bit.
“I know how overwhelming it can feel.” I said, turning to face her. “I get it. But that’s why I always start this unit with that quote from Leopold that I shared with all of you. As he reminds us, just because we will never achieve perfect justice in this world doesn’t mean we stop working toward it; likewise, just because we cannot repair all the environmental damage all at once doesn’t mean we stop fixing what we can.”
“But there’s SO much, Mr. Brock!” Lucy bemoaned.
“Which is why we always have to keep perspective,” I responded. “It’s why I keep a copy of this video. To remind me whenever things start to feel too overwhelming that I still have power to effect change. Follow the frog, Lucy; it’ll help you feel better.”
She took a deep breath, then, and let out a huge sigh, while Olivia hugged her, and I knew we had walked the abrupt emotional quandary back away from the cliff.
“Can you send us that link, Mr. Brock?” Maryam asked.
“Sure.” I answered. “I’ll send it out to the entire class. And Lucy? Get some sleep.” I encouraged.
Everyone who had remained now started to leave, but when she got to the door, Olivia turned back.
“You never answered Lucy’s question, Mr. Brock.” She challenged, politely but firmly. “Do you think we’re doomed?”
I sighed and pursed my lips.
“A species that kills for pleasure and consumes simply for the sake of consuming does not leave me optimistic.” I stated flatly.
“Then why do you work so hard to teach us the way you do?” She requested sincerely.
I answered truthfully.
“Because I can.”
Hope is a Verb
Very early in my career, my mother–who is also an educator–shared with me the analogy that teaching is a lot like sowing dates. This particular fruit-bearing palm is notoriously labor intensive, requiring copious amounts of watering and regular tending in an arid environment conducive to neither of these activities. Yet in its famously long lifespan, it does not produce usable dates to eat until after at least seven years and often many more than that. Hence, those who plant date trees must cultivate them with the knowledge that they may never see the literal fruits of their labors and that what they do, they do for future generations. Of course, teachers must also do their work trusting that their efforts will make a genuine difference in the lives of the people who come after them, and they must believe in the power of the individual to better a world they may never see. Hence, the analogy: to teach is to plant a date seed in the sometimes-arid mind of another and to water and care for it there in the hopes that its fruit will someday nourish the future. Teachers, like date farmers, are investors in infinity.1
Today, though, it can feel rather futile at times to be an investor in the infinite, especially if you’re an ecologist like I am. As I suggested in the introduction, it is not possible to teach in the life sciences as I do and not be intimately aware of just how dramatically dangerous ignorance and irrationality can be. Any biologist will tell you that extinction is the actual norm for the natural history of this planet, and the equations modeling human populations all agree that keeping our ever growing, ever expanding populace alive is only possible at the expense of permanently consuming resources that cannot be replenished to sustain the process. It would, in fact, takefour additional entire Earths to provide everyone the quality of material life we in this country take for granted,2 and I know from my background and training that if we don’t do something about the path we’re currently on, then collapse into mere economic devastation and social turmoil is the optimistic outcome of where the population models say humanity is headed.3 It is not hyperbole to say that we are facing the gravest crisis of our species4 because the bottom line is that “homeostasis” is biology’s equivalent of physics’ “Law of Gravity” and the concept of homeostasis says there are finite limits for every organism—even ours. Sadly, and scarily, my student, Lucy, had every right to be as anxious as she was.
Why, though, start my final thoughts on teaching and learning and authentic engagement in the classroom with what amounts to a biology lesson—and a depressing and rather disturbing one at that? I do so because it dramatizes nicely the existential dilemma we all must face if we wish to strive to be more authentically engaged as teachers: even if I try to attempt everything suggested in Chapters 1-6, will any of it really matter—especially given the obstacles presented in Chapters 7-9? Not all of us will necessarily see a letter such as the one I shared from my student, Mark, and for those who do, think of how many hundreds of other kids got taught that never said a single thing. Therefore, just as each of us must face the possible futility of our own mortality, those of us who teach must ask ourselves whether the effort to help children develop their mind’s capacity to “speak” serves any truly meaningful purpose or not.
For example, when I first started teaching environmental awareness 30 years ago, I harbored the hubris that this knowledge would inspire my students to become agents of change who would go out and transform the world. In fact, I can remember as clear as if she were in the room as I write this, one of my students, Parilee, saying “Well, now that we know, we’ll fix it, right?” It is 16 years since she graduated, and Southeast Australia is burning to the ground; while people in the Southern states in this country are recovering from January tornadoes that are the new normal. I no longer harbor my hubris and, instead, teach environmental awareness today in the hope that some remnant of my students successfully pass through the coming evolutionary bottleneck to rebuild the world more wisely on the other side.
I still teach it, though, and the critical word in that last sentence is “hope.” As I continued my conversation with Olivia that morning, I told her something that I have shared with my students for years: hope is not something we possess or have; hope is something we do. Hope is not a noun; it is a verb. Because to genuinely hope for something is to do the work to make it happen. Hope for a better world? Roll up those sleeves and start the messy work of fixing it one patch of dirt at a time. Hope for better schools? Use what’s been written here to authentically engage in the actions necessary to improve what happens in the classroom. Hope for better lives for our children? Invest the necessary time and resources to accomplish it. The simple truth is that the only effective response to life’s existential dilemma about futility is to act as if what we do has purpose and meaning (to do otherwise would be to fall into despair). Therefore, each day, every day those who would be good teachers hope actively. Hope, do. Hope, do. Hope, do.
Yet all that doing requires hope’s sibling, love, and we all know that love is never easy. Indeed, the kind of loving that nurtures “date trees” is arduous, uncertain, and often painful. It means risking lofty ideals such as disclosing who we are to share part of life’s journey, and it means showing up regularly to support the more mundane things like dance concerts and sporting events. It means caring “always at least a little bit more about the children” than we do about whatever subject we teach, and yet it also means holding them accountable for living out what they learn in their lives. It is feeling joy and pride when we watch a child overcome and learn from a mistake, and it is knowing the agony of when we have realized that we have failed them. The love that plants the “dates” of human understanding and selfhood is all these things and more, and it is why each spring, I always cry a little when my seniors–many of whom I have taught more than once–say their goodbyes. For where pain is absent, no genuine relationship has been lost, and where there was no relationship, there was no learning. Tears, in a way, are education’s very soul: where the heart has not gone, no one will follow.
Light a Candle 