My grandfather loved Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. There was something about the tale of a doomed sea captain that, though written by an American, could have easily passed for achy Irish storytelling. For a family holiday a few years ago we rented a house in Nanoose, B.C. On the coast of Vancouver Island, the house’s rocky vistas struck me as hauntingly Melville-esque as we watched for whales that never showed.
The English teacher in me appreciates literary life metaphors. One thinker feels so connected to Melville’s quotable reach that he coded a whole twitter account to share daily lines from Moby Dick. If you follow the account you’ll join the 90,000 of us who appreciate random bits of watery wisdom that help to counter our own lives’ versions of Ahab’s whale. Melville made it very clear that we should NOT follow the Captain’s example—that self-obsession and single-mindedness will inevitably take the boat down with us in it. Yet, for too many, such wisdom takes time and painful life experience to sink in.
David Kolb’s theory of experiential learning has helped me to better understand my own tendency to learn not simply through literary quotables but through living and doing. One definition reads: “By engaging students in hands-on experiences and reflection, they are better able to connect theories and knowledge learned in the classroom to ‘real-world’ situations.” In some ways Kolb’s theory defined the last five years of my time with the Toronto District School Board, but it took leaving the classroom to understand why.
In those last few years I taught in the School Within A College program. My students were a curated group selected to leave their home schools and work with me to finish their last few high school credits in a new setting. SWAC students needed a fresh start! Beyond the credit recovery courses, they were also attempting one or two college credits to see what academic life would be like if they chose to go on to post-secondary. The program was funded by the government in what was a decade-long effort to boost college attendance. The hope was that they’d like the college experience so much that they’d make the eventual leap after high school and dive right in (with all their tuition dollars).
Setting wary anti-capitalist opinions aside, what was one of the most impactful parts of my job was the time spent coaching and mentoring the college professors. SWAC instructors were expected to teach the already reticent high schoolers with no real training offered by their faculties. I remember when one prof in frustration said to me, “You care about these students so much. I don’t have time to care!” She wasn’t wrong. It was an impossible situation for them, chasing after too many courses for an ever-elusive sense of institutional security. The art of teaching at any age, let alone to 14 to 18 year-olds, is not easily mastered. And in the SWAC classroom those profs were living out ‘real-life’ lessons that I was supposed to help translate. Unfortunately, in their learning-by-doing-debacle much beauty and nuance were lost in translation.
For the profs the great whale being chased was the promise of a secure job. For the students their Moby Dick was the anticipated freedom of life beyond high school. The reality, of course, was that nothing of what either party was chasing existed. And reaching the limits of their single-mindedness, what they both missed out on was the beauty of new waters they were sailing through together.
With both Reframeables and my own writing, the experiential learning I am living out these days is giving more Ishmael than Captain Ahab vibes. Instead of sticking to a life path that was on its way to cracking my ship wide open, I find myself floating in new waters waiting for a different sort of boat to pass by and pick me up. Though maybe a third option is the most true version of my story right now: I’ll work to build a new boat and offer a ride to those who are floating out here with me.
Thanks for reading and sharing Good Enough. When I started this newsletter at the end of the summer I didn’t realize how important sharing words in community would come to be for my own learning journey. To know that readers out there are interested in teaching and learning beyond the classroom with me is so encouraging. And then sharing it with others — what a gift!
Natalie