Entangling Details, Words of Worth

Wednesday afternoon, I’m missing track practice to finish up final details for Friday’s Junior-Senior Banquet. It has traditionally been the responsibility of the junior class to fundraise and then plan this event, BFA’s version of prom.

(And by “junior class,” I mean about a third of the juniors, two endlessly hardworking class officers and ten adults to supervise. And by “supervise,” I of course mean quite a bit more.)

Event planning has never been my forte. Four years ago, I helped to plan Ingraham’s prom, and of the responsibilities of class advising, this came perhaps the least naturally. I’ve always liked the events themselves–young people dressed in their finest for an evening that feels several shades more luminous than ordinary life–but the detail-rich discussions beforehand tend to overwhelm me. This time around, I was blessed with a talented team of co-sponsors, who did much of the decorating and programming, corralling their student committees to help. As head sponsor, I did my share of message-carrying and meeting-calling, but took on just one task myself: Senior Tributes.

Each year, every senior receives a letter written by a junior. The juniors fill these letters with stories and encouragement, often expressing admiration for the seniors’ roles here and exhortation for them to use their gifts well in the future. The letters, once complete, must be proofread, formatted to be uniform, and then printed onto “nice paper” for delivery at the banquet. My job: the collecting, proofreading, formatting and “nice papering” of the letters.

It was supposed to be simple. And while the complications would no doubt be amusing to retell, I’ll shorten it by asserting that collecting 66 extra written assignments from my students in the midst of soccer, track and AP test season–no matter how brief or informal the letter–was decidedly complex.

Which is why today, Wednesday, two days before the event, I’m still in my classroom, rolling fancy paper into scrolls, attaching gift tags, and tying it all together with curly ribbon. 66 times. Actually, 64 times, because four of the tributes won’t be complete until just hours before the event.

I struggle with the whole mess of blue and silver curly ribbon, thinking again about the rituals of the end of the year and reassessing this one’s value as I become literally entangled in it. It’s important to question ritual, reasons my young-adult self. Should we be doing this? Or do we just keep doing it because we always have?

But I’m reminded of a sermon from Bethany Community Church that I heard this week on James 3, reminding me that “words matter.” James spends a great deal of time warning against the harsh words, the curses and lies that “set our lives on fire.” Yet in the sermon, my father reminded us that the good words–encouragement, exhortation, celebration–are of equal weight.

And that’s what these scrolls are, I realize. I still remember letters like these, now that I think about it. Departing from schools, homes, jobs, these were letters written to me from those I was leaving, treasured and taken along to wherever I was going. Letters I can still recall on darker days, letter that still make me smile. Encouragement matters, deeply.

It’s what motivates most of our year-endings, really, the hope that we send our students into the wide world knowing that they are made in God’s image, uniquely excellent and deeply loved, each of them. Banquets, awards ceremonies, tributes, gifts and graduation all work to build that reminder, a foundation from which they can leave this little village where they spent part of their lives.

Timmy with his small group of senior boys.

In the midst of planning these events, I find it easy to forget their importance, to get lost in the details, to get irritated and tangled up in ribbon. How thankful I am, then, for nights like this banquet–lovely and extraordinary, or even the more ordinary interactions of teaching and coaching, where I see, every day, the critical part that encouragement plays in shaping all of us in our journey to be more like Christ.

We Didn’t Always Live in Kandern

As often happens, I have words stuck in my head. These ones aren’t the common song lyrics, though. I’m the only person I know who is haunted by lines of prose.

“We didn’t always live on Mango Street.”

Those used to be first words I  read to my students, back at Ingraham, nine thousand miles and almost eight years ago. They are the beginning of Sandra Cisneros’s lovely novella of urban childhood, The House on Mango Street, words that always resonated with my also-urban students in Seattle.

I don’t think of this book often anymore, but my Honors American Literature class is reading just this first chapter, starting with those words. “We didn’t always live on Mango Street,” the narrator begins, before proceeding to retell her last few homes in reverse. Before that it was here, before that it was there, before… and I can’t remember any more.

After they analyze the form and theme, then write thesis statements like proper honors juniors, I tell them we’re being creative. I tell them to emulate the author’s style, as best as they can, picking up her minimalism and childish diction and writing their own version of the chapter. It’s an old assignment, one I usually set to ninth graders early in the year; I don’t expect almost-seniors to have much trouble with it.

“Has everyone moved in here, at least once?” I joke. Seeing nods, rolled eyes and raised hands all around, I continue, “Then you’re all qualified. Let’s go. This is due…ten minutes before the end of class.”

I ask them to share excerpts of their finished chapters in the last minutes of class. We read around the room, hearing fragments of much longer stories. Stories of foreign languages and sudden moves. Stories of loss and exhilaration, of family that came along, friends left behind. Later, as I read through the chapters, I learn more. About a dream house abandoned, the perfect house with a pomegranate tree in the yard. About the family who once lived in a castle. About the day that the gas station exploded next door, breaking all the windows in the house. About evictions and upheaval, sleepless nights shared with insects in frightening new homes.

As I read, I’m struck with longing in between the lines. The pomegranate-tree dream house was number three of seven homes on a long list. There are beautiful homes like it scattered across these pages, places of safety and certainty that my students have mostly left behind. My students are adventurous and curious, infinitely brave and complex, but they long for home. Some of them are still trying to decide–or remember–where it is.

I haven’t lived their lives, I know. At twenty-five, I packed up and decided to live the way they have their whole lives, planning only a few years ahead and hesitating to get attached to this apartment or that piece of furniture. But in their stories I hear mine, too. I didn’t always teach in Germany. I won’t always teach in Germany. There will be a new chapter, someday. I can only know, like my student who always–in China and Bangladesh and Germany–shared a room with her older sister, that wherever God takes us next, we’ll never go alone.

May: News, Thanks and Prayers

With the Junior Class Representative at Sadie Hawkins Hoedown

News and Dates:

• May 4: Home track meet in Lörrach
• May 17: Junior-Senior Banquet
• May 18: Track meet in Heidelberg
• May 24-25: Track European Championships
• I recently purchased plane tickets home for the summer! I’ll be in Seattle beginning June 22, through August 9. Email me if there are specific times you’ll be around; I’d love to catch up!
• Timmy leaves for commissioned officer training at the end of this month, and will be spending the summer training to be a reserve chaplain with the US Air Force.
• Curriculum for May: Postmodern Literature, A Raisin in the Sun, College Admission Essays

I’m Thankful For:

• The greens of spring, which after a long, grey winter have finally draped itself brilliantly in our deciduous Black Forest.
• 2013 Track and Field Team, which is a small but committed group of athletes, delightful to coach on all manner of wet spring afternoons.
• May holidays, unpredictable in their relationship to the church calendar, which allow for time to catch up on grading and correspondence.
• The junior class officers, who are working hard to head half a dozen committees for the upcoming Junior Senior Banquet.

Please Be In Prayer For:

• Junior Senior Banquet. The most glamorous formal event of the spring, this evening is our equivalent to a prom, and this year it’s our junior class’s turn to plan it. Pray that all details go smoothly, and that the evening is honoring to all the students involved.
• Summer Plans. This summer in Seattle is looking quieter than last, but pray for wisdom as I look ahead to what support-raising, wedding planning and education I should pursue in my time at home. Pray also for good communication between Timmy and me as we spend the summer in different parts of the country.
• Small Group. As we wrap up the third year with our small group, I’m so thankful for the growth that God has allowed us to see this year, both in relationship with our five girls and their relationships with Christ. Pray that we’d finish the year well, and for continued wisdom for Emily and me in our interactions with these great young women.

I’m so thankful for the encouragement and support so many of you are to me. Please email me at kristi.dahlstrom@gmail.com with news, prayer requests, or if you’d like to partner financially with this ministry.

Peace in Christ,

Kristi

On Surprises

We’re sitting in a rectangle of desks on Friday afternoon, ready for Round Two of poetry presentations in American Literature class. Yesterday, the class was a showcase of teenaged creativity. I’ve arranged their projects on the low bookshelf that runs along the back of the room:  a model village to illustrate E.E. Cummings’s “anyone lived in a pretty how town;” a hand-drawn children’s book about friendship to go with “Your Catfish Friend,” by Richard Brautigan; leftover rhubarb cupcakes to remind us, like Robert Frost’s “Road Not Taken,” that even unattractive options–like rhubarb–can make “all the difference.”

Today, my students treat one another to further delights. Several of them have made videos to represent the tone and imagery of their poems, a project that I described as “kind of like a music video, but for a poem.” And four of them, boldest of all, wrote music to accompany the words of their poems. These songs vary from cheerful to haunting, and it’s the last one that strikes me most.

The student, a typically sleepy boy who sits near the front of my class, shyly plugs in his iPod to play the song he wrote for E.E. Cummings’s “Chansons Innocentes.” It is airy and gentle, acoustic guitar accompanying two vocal lines. It sounds like Jack Johnson, a bit, but the voice is unmistakably him.

“Did someone else sing this with you?” I whisper to him as the class listens in awed respect.

“Huh?” he replies.

“There are two voices.”

“Oh, yeah. Those are both me.”

I’m no musical technician. For a few seconds I’m imagining this student in his dorm room, composing and recording this music–music which so artfully represents the fragile cheerfulness of the poem–then layering guitar with melody and harmony. Hours of work too complex for me, from someone who doesn’t always embrace complexity.

I’m struck, listening to these songs, by how often my students still surprise me. Having only been a teenager relatively recently myself, I like to think my expectations of them are just. Yet here we are, a long way through the year, and I’m delighted to speechlessness by their interpretations of poetry, each speaking in his or her own voice–whether in sculpture or cooking, song or videography–the discoveries they’ve made about words that they love.

A long time ago, I wrote these words about teaching ninth grade in Seattle:

Lately I’ve decided that if I can’t destroy every wicked “ism” in the world—racism, sexism, classism and the like—I can at least defend the two beleaguered groups that concern me: ninth graders and those who choose, nay, love to teach them….

Most of all, however, I tell the critics about the surprises.  The students who start class by surrendering iPods so as to avoid distraction.  The way that these ninth graders learned to critique the imagery and metaphors in one another’s poetry, pulling out specific phrases and analyzing them with constructive grace and ease.  Of course they sometimes throw paper, forget instructions instantly, use “your” and “you’re” without recognizable pattern, and flirt unabashedly through many an English lesson, but they surprise as often as they exasperate, the ninth graders who fill my days.

Now, in a new school with older students, they’re no less surprising. Reminding me that I don’t know it all, that even as a somewhat experienced teacher I have a great deal to learn, I’m honored to share my days with these creative, unique, and interesting young people. May I never cease to be surprised.

Home is Wherever I’m With You

Brighton

Brother Tom nodded understandingly. “It’s the memories, the old loyalties; they are so precious,” he said. “Things that meant so much, that stay present in the wood and stone of a place. If you let go of the place and the things that belong to it, you feel afraid that you’ll lose hold of the memory.” The Hardest Thing To Do, Penelope Wilcock

The window of this cafe offers a familiar view. I look out on an intersection, four corners beside a steep city street. I watch from one corner. The remaining three corners feature a vinyl record store, vintage clothing shop, and organic cafe, respectively. The weather is slate-grey and windy, but every so often a pair of pedestrians–dressed in the bold colors and thrift-store chic that is its own urban uniform–forges up or down the hill.

I’m in Brighton, a city on the southern shore of Great Britain, but it looks like Seattle. I close my eyes and hear the barista and servers speaking the French that is native to this patisserie, while the other customers converse in a million shades of British English. But when I open my eyes, I could be on Capitol Hill, having just ducked in from a tempest in another rainy city.

I’m reading Travels With Charley, Steinbeck’s memoir of his camper-and-poodle adventure across America in the 1960s. He recalls a conversation he had with an old friend in Monterey, arriving at his old California home after many years. He finds it different, predictably, irrevocably altered from what he remembered and knew.

“Let’s not fool ourselves,” he writes. “What we knew is dead, and maybe the greatest part of what we were is dead. What’s out there is new and perhaps good, but it’s nothing we know.”

It’s been three years since I decided to leave Seattle. In August, it will be three years in  Kandern, a place that has become a home, rich with community and simple familiarity. I often miss Seattle, but it is relationships that draw me most, seldom the city itself. Yet here in Brighton, a brief stop during spring break, I’m reminded of the one city I truly love, thousands of miles away but always close.

After only two visits in three years, I’ll return to Seattle twice this year: once in the summer, to bask in the best of Pacific Northwest seasons, and again in December, to get married. I hear Steinbeck’s warning: you can’t really go home, not to the home you knew. How tempting to believe that our homes and lives exist just as we left them, like a playroom with the light off, all the toys waiting for us to return and pick them up. But it’s not like that, I know. As I’ve changed in this time, so have the people I know and love in that faraway home.

It’s an experience I share with our students, and one I appreciate more the longer I live here. I see them oscillating between continents, these flexible young people changing languages, relationships and cultural norms half a dozen times a year. For many of them, there is Kandern, the country in which their parents serve, and the North American country of grandparents and supporting churches. If these places have any space in their hearts, being anywhere is a balancing act of longing and appreciating, seeing where they are and missing where they’re not.

Three years is different from a teenage lifetime, but I’m beginning to understand. Sipping coffee in Brighton, I miss the city it reminds me of, six thousand westward miles drawing me to itself. Paradoxically, in this grey and busy city I also find myself longing for the warm green hills of Kandern. Surrounded by strangers, I miss seeing people I know every time I go outside. I’m always missing somewhere.

The challenge, then, becomes living fully where I am. Waking each morning and remembering that God has made this day, that He’s here in this place, and that I live to serve Him. In Brighton, in Seattle, in Kandern. He is still my home, everywhere.

Seattle

April: News, Thanks and Prayers

On the Junior bus to Winter Retreat, 2013

News and Dates:

• April 7: Marathon Relay in Freiburg
• April 9: Classes Resume
• April 12: Sadie Hawkins Hoedown
• April 20: First track meet at Kaiserslautern
• Curriculum for April: Modern Drama: The Glass Menagerie and A Raisin in the Sun

I’m Thankful For:

• Winter Retreat 2013, which was a rich time of challenge and relationship-building with our small group of junior girls.
• The International Christian Educators’ Conference (ICEC), which brought teachers from all over the world together in Kandern for four days of learning, encouragement and reflection on our vocation.
• Hospitality of Steve and Renee Grubb, who generously hosted us for a restorative Easter weekend by the seaside in Worthing, UK.
• Spring Break, which has allowed time for rest, reading and reflection, and is long enough that I’m delighted school is starting again on Tuesday.

Please Be In Prayer For:

• Quarter 4 at BFA. With the busyness of sports, AP tests and the planning of Junior-Senior Banquet, pray that students and teachers alike will rely on Christ for strength, joy and good attitudes in all of our commitments, while making time for the closure and transition that this time of year requires.
• Travel. Pray for safety for students and staff who are getting ready to return to BFA this weekend.
• Future (and Wedding!) Plans. Pray for Timmy and I for wisdom, as we make plans for our wedding in December and seek guidance for where God is taking us next.

I’m so thankful for the encouragement and support so many of you are to me. Please email me at kristi.dahlstrom@gmail.com with news, prayer requests, or if you’d like to partner financially with this ministry.

Peace in Christ,

Kristi

Marble Cake and Maugenhard

Maug boys on Thanksgiving.

“Well, you should probably just make a dessert. Any kind of dessert, for Sunday night,” the Maugenhard RA tells me after a supper of spaghetti, during which we watched snow fall outside on the not-yet-green hills of the Black Forest. Spring is delayed this year, after what’s been called “the darkest winter in 43 years.”

I shudder to imagine winter 1970 in Germany.

I’ve come to Maugenhard Dorm this evening after already working in some capacity with students for the last nine hours, hours filled with classes, meetings, observations, bus rides and track practice. It’s the end of a long day, at the end of a long week, at the hoped-for end of a long winter. Spring break is only a few days away, and though we can see past the hurdles of papers to write and grade, tests to pass and mark, lessons to plan and absorb, we still have to jump the hurdles. We’re weary these days–teachers, staff and students–ready to rest before returning to the busyness of spring at BFA.

The boys clear the table and start the dishes, and I pull out a Better Homes and Gardens cookbook, its red- and white-checked cover familiar to me from childhood. What to make? I flip around aimlessly, and finally settle on yellow cake, my perennial favorite and most-missed cake mix now that I live in Germany. Yellow cake with chocolate frosting. It will be easy.

Following a recipe doesn’t take much mental energy for me, which is helpful tonight, because I’m not left alone to do this work. Every few minutes, a different student arrives in the kitchen to ask a question about the term paper that’s due tomorrow in Honors American Literature class. Meanwhile, the RA and her fiance are preparing tomorrow’s lunch across the kitchen, sharing tips on gift registry. Twenty minutes into this project, I’m switching between four or five different conversation strands at once.

Add dry ingredients together… Um… yes, I’d say Vonnegut counts as a postmodernist. A huge one… Bed, Bath & Beyond is the worst in the world! … 5, no 5 and a half cups of milk. Alternate with dry mixture… What kind of “fiery poem” did Frost send his girlfriend? … No, you have to personify Bordeaux. Like, make it into a character. If Bordeaux were a person, who would she be? … My favorite place to buy wedding gifts is Crate & Barrel. Beat on high for 2 minutes.

It’s how my week has gone, many disconnected shards of work and conversation making up each busy day. More often than not, I’ve felt like a basket of rubble at the end of them. I’ve been impatient and inattentive, anxious and short-sighted. As so often happens, I’ve lost perspective in weariness.

I finish with the cake batter, and the bin of cocoa powder in the pantry gives me an idea. I scoop a few ladles of batter into another bowl, and toss the cocoa liberally on top. As I stir it up, RA comes over.

“Ooh, what are you doing?”

“Marble cake.”

For a moment, the dorm disappears into a memory, and I’m about six, standing on a chair next to my mom as she mixes up two colors of batter, asking the same question. What are we doing? This is different!

RA watches, awed like six-year-old me, as I dollop the brown batter on top of the yellow, then draw a knife through it in serpentine lines, first vertically then horizontally. The batters swirl but don’t blend, and the ordinary cake is suddenly special.

“We’re eating this tonight!” RA cries, setting out milk and glasses in preparation for the marvelous cake. “Make some frosting, but don’t put it on. This cake looks too cool to cover it up.”

With some satisfaction I slide it into the oven, then go to the living room, where my hardworking students are finishing their assignments.

I’ve spent almost all day with some of them–in class, track and now home–and still it doesn’t get old, listening to them tell stories about authors and compose poems aloud. I proofread a paper and offer some advice to the poet, but mostly I just listen.

How different this is from school as I knew it in Seattle, where we lived in separate worlds from our teachers. They never got to see just how much we cared about what we were learning, and we never really understood the depth of their care for us. Here, both cares are out in the open, as I listen to my students tell one another stories about authors–Frost, Safran Foer and Vonnegut–while I bake a cake for them to eat later.

Living in community like this is sometimes intimidating, realizing that every decision is public, every relationship on display. Still, it’s refreshing to live and work in a place without pretension, where we can see one another in all seasons, from vibrant to weary, and appreciate the God-given uniqueness that makes up a brilliant whole.

And I’m back to the shards, a zillion topics and trains of thought that have brought me to the end of this week. Yes, to me it can seem like a basket of rubble, but if I’ll only let them go, in the hands of my Creator they can form something marvelous, a stained-glass window of broken pieces.

The marble cake comes out of the oven after a while, and for a few minutes the boys abandon their papers and poems to gather around the warm, two-toned deliciousness. We slather it in chocolate frosting and stand around the counter, all of us glad for a break.

“Ms. D made you this cake,” RA tells them. “Just because she loves you.”

I laugh, and they laugh, too, but it’s true. No matter how tired we are in these days before break, I love these kids immensely. And marble cake, that’s real love.