Working with veterans and active-duty military folks every day is such a privilege. None of us can ever find the words to thank these people for what they have done to keep us free and safe. While the web is full of touching videos honoring their sacrifices, this one embodies the can-do spirit that I see in the students at Fort Campbell.
So enjoy your weekend, and thank someone who made it possible for you to do just that.
Troop numbers swell when a war escalates, leading many young people enlist. Not only do they train as soldiers, they often travel widely and become culture savvy. However, upon leaving the military, one adversity is transition to civilian life, simply for the fact that the two worlds often don’t overlap vocationally. Pilots and mechanics transition well, but many specialties do not.
Going to college helps with the transition. An education is the common pool. Of course, most career military personnel can’t advance without moving ahead simultaneously with a college education since military promotion boards at every level look at education. However, lots of young adults exiting the military didn’t do much, if anything, with college because of deployments, family, and just growing up from a teenager into an adult.
It’s fun to see these veterans, now civilians, dig in with college work and career goals. Many at the Hopkinsville Community College campus at Fort Campbell, KY, are women who enlisted out of high school, met and married a spouse, and begot children. They want to get an education in order to grow and take on a career, which also increases their motivation to urge their children to study hard in school. Others getting out of the military are men with families now ready to do the same.
Going to college right out of high school may be an ideal, but many teenagers haven’t seen education modeled at home, or they haven’t awakened to the model set before them by parents, teachers, or mentors. The military offers a maturing opportunity, one for which to be thankful.
Another interesting feature is the multiculturalism of a college classroom at the Fort. Many women from other countries enter the classroom by virtue of being married to a soldier. They tend to value education and work very hard, becoming role models for students with no military connection who are still immature. It’s inspiring to see the accomplishments in class by those speaking and writing English as a second language.
It’s funny too that many who are born and brought up right here at home think of English as a second language. Actually, it’s a first language not yet learned, not from lack of ability, but from still being in a haze. Since the classroom at the Fort is a mix of military and some from the area with no military connection, it’s good to see the example of discipline and desire of those on active duty , or those now out but still connected by family. A few of these military or former military students are lethargic, but in the main, it’s clear that education is a good wake up call to some necessary mental PT to get on with life.
“I’ve got to hang up or they’ll shoot me!” The friend on the other end of the phone just laughs when I say that, because she knows that it means I’m approaching the gate here at the military base where I teach for our college. (Yes, I know I shouldn’t be on the phone….just another of my many bad habits…trying to quit, I promise.) The morning ritual at the gate sometimes involves getting out of the car to display the contents of my trunk. Occasionally, I may be asked to open all the doors and the trunk, then step aside after presenting my credentials. On one really exciting morning, a canine officer gave my car a thorough sniff, casting apologetic looks in my direction all the while.
Military Working Dogs search vehicles at 401st AFSB August 25 (Photo credit: 401st_AFSB)
However, most mornings I simply hand over my ID card, and a shockingly young MP (does he even shave yet?) waves me on with a brisk greeting: “Have a good day, Ma’am,” or “Have a blessed day, Ma’am,” or “Air Assault!” I never know the proper reply for that last one. I just smile and say a quick prayer for the mama sitting far away who misses and worries about that young face.
Earlier this week, the MP on duty offered a new twist that I loved. “Enjoy yourself, Ma’am!”
Ha! Has he been reading our little blog? I’ve been driving onto this base every morning for six years, and no one has ever urged me to enjoy myself. My day took a decided turn for the better from that moment on. That started me wondering. If an exhortation from a gun-toting soldier made such a difference in my day, could I influence my students in the same way? After all, if the leader of the classroom doesn’t seem to be enjoying herself, students aren’t likely to have a lot of fun either. Perhaps I should issue a deliberate invitation/order.
“Enjoy yourselves!”
heart model (Photo credit: zen)
Keeping that in mind, I bounced into my A&P II class and announced, “Today we are going to master the anatomy of the heart and learn how it pumps blood to the lungs and the body. This is always fun for students, and you will leave today really knowing something that you can use for the rest of your careers. Let’s grab these big heart models and get down to work.”
And so we did. And so they learned. And so we all enjoyed ourselves.
I hope to drive through that MP’s checkpoint more often.
Ms. Matthews was the high school Trig teacher. She was quiet but firm—somewhat understated in demeanor with her low voice—but enthusiasm for math vibrated beneath the surface of her mildly stoic way.
One test came back with every problem wrong since I had mislabeled the sides of the right triangle that has sides of 1, 2, and square root of 3. Having drawn only one triangle to use for all of the calculations, everything depended on starting right. Reversing the two longer sides meant a moment of teen drift (which some say can grow into adult drift).
After a moment of shock, reeling from prospects of a zero test score, Ms. Matthews called me up to her desk when the class got busy on the next exercise. She had a faint, pithy smile that radiated compassion as she explained that all calculations had been performed correctly, just not using the triangle’s correct value for each of its sides. “You were consistent,” she said, “and so you made an A on the test, but be more careful next time.”
This is the moment in the course that stands out in memory. All else long ago faded, except of course Ms. Matthews the person.
Greater Winnipeg Tentative Airport Plan (1946) (Photo credit: Manitoba Historical Maps)
Twenty –five years later in 1991, during a lull at work in a lab for testing asphalt samples from trucks hauling the asphalt to Fort Campbell for construction of an aircraft runway, I noticed a book on surveying on the supervisor’s desk and looked through it. It was trig. What a late awakening to what had only left an imprint in high school as mathematical abstraction. “So that’s what they use this stuff for!”
No wonder the blue collar work force used to chide folks who only had “book learning.”
Students from many parts of the world and many professions attend Hopkinsville Community College at the Fort Campbell campus. One is a seasoned carpenter, probably close to forty, who is artistic about his work, as his memoir paper at the beginning of the course had showed. No element of the weather or observation of human nature gets missed by this poet hidden inside of a carpenter who never went to college until now, who has learned though how to make boards and nails into a craft as well as a job.
Reading about his experiences, houses became literary, and tradesmen classic characters. But isn’t this what drama does, either on paper or in film or television? Despite extravagances or the unlikely, most characters emerge nonetheless from ordinary life and grow larger than life by the eye that sees them this way.
Switch now to a lesson on how to cite sources in a draft theme and imagine the instructor at the board with the dry erase marker, trying to convey a strategy for taking information bytes from reference articles in order to integrate them into a draft while maintaining a writing voice that doesn’t lose itself amidst all the borrowed information. What will this instructor do?
Before class, he had been driving along, enjoying farmland views on a rural road, when bam!—the carpenter comes to mind, and integrating source information becomes an artistic venture and not a tedious duty. Later, dry erase marker in hand, he turns to the class; “There’s a carpenter in the class. Can anyone guess who it is?” Silence ensues uncomfortable seconds until a front row student turns, and pointing to the seasoned looking man with the ball hat on, says, “I think it’s him.” She is correct.
The instructor then goes into a tribute to the carpenter’s memoir on how construction is an art and then uses that as an analogy for constructing quality theme style with source information worked in. It takes artistic skills, voice, and management to work sources in and make the feel and flow of a draft become natural—make it livable and solid—inviting and credible.
200510 carpenter’s tools (Photo credit: iambents)
Students (more than he anticipated) take this in. The analogy stretches to engineering—how to engineer a research paper—then back to carpentry and how to keep the paper from sounding lumpy, mismatched, without drywall or a roof as it were.
Even for the instructor, a new moment of insight takes place. The hitherto boring has gained an elevated and appreciated level of craft. It’s how one sees it, even if a bit late.
St. Johns River, Astor, FL (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The beginning of fall term approaches, and I will be heading home to Kentucky from my Florida vacation home tomorrow. After considering which of our walking routes to take this last morning at the beach, Julep and I headed off down the sandy jungle trail that leads through the tropical forest to the long dock bordering the lagoon of St. John’s River at the back of our community. We always enjoy checking out the tracks of the creatures with whom we share the island: the zig-zags left by snakes, the “hands” of the opossums and raccoons, the paw prints of rabbits, the distinctive tail drags of the tortoises. I envy Julep’s corgi nose that allows her to process messages indecipherable to me. We usually see herons, egrets, and pelicans along the edges of the lagoon, and occasionally the manatees are lolling about in the water among the buoys that mark the crab pots.
While we often see dolphins out in the ocean or gliding along in the river, I had never encountered them along the dock. As Julep and I approached the long stretch of weathered boards today, 2 dorsal fins appeared side by side not 10 feet from where we stood. 
When we heard the distinctive whoosh of air that accompanies breaching, I worried that Julep would bark and frighten them, but she seemed as mesmerized as I was. For several minutes we watched them glide together, their movements perfectly synchronized, around the lagoon. I felt that I had received a gift…a sacred gift.
I was reminded of Andy Goodman’s talk at New Horizons 2012 and his counsel that people are not moved by graphs and statistics but rather by stories. Those few precious minutes with the dolphins were a more persuasive and convincing argument for habitat conservation than any book or program could ever be. When it’s personal, it matters. As I head up I-75 in the predawn darkness tomorrow morning, I will be wondering where those dolphins are and what they’re up to. I imagine that when I climb the stairs of the Ed Center at Fort Campbell in February, I will think of them and hope they are still together, still swimming happily.
I believe our students need dolphin-spotting experiences, first to help them learn the material that we present, but also to care about what they are learning. It needs to be personal. As I teach anatomy & physiology, I try to show pictures and videos and tell stories that show my students why what they are learning is important to real people. Lysosomes are just another cellular organelle to memorize until I show a picture of a child with Hurler’s Syndrome. The retina is just part of the eyeball until they see a video of a young women with retinitis pigmentosa. Cheating on an exam may not seem to be much of a crime until I tell them stories illustrating the consequences of falsifying medical records or taking shortcuts in care that had tragic results. It needs to be personal.
Cover via Amazon
Personal is a two-way street. The moment that I remember most from the movie Avatar is not one of its many dazzling effects but rather 3 short words: “I see you.” The best of humanity, and perhaps all of art and literature, can be summed up as “I see you.” There are many ways that we can tell our students that we “see” them. Sometimes it is in simply knowing their names, as Pat has said so well in an earlier entry in this blog. Sometimes it takes the form of making an exception to a policy; other times it may be holding a student accountable. “I see you” may mean “I know you can do better” or “I realize that you are struggling and need some help.” “I see you” may mean “I know that your husband just left for Afghanistan and you are overwhelmed with your responsibilities” or “I know that your husband just returned and you are overwhelmed with the readjustment.” In my classroom and lab, “I see you” must always mean “I see you trying to learn this difficult subject and I understand your struggle because I struggled, too.”
A lot to think about…thanks, Dolphins….see you next summer. —-Karen 
pleasureinlearning 