A "Start of School" Message To School District of Milton Educators

A Message For All School District of Milton Staff Members - 

 First, let me state that I admire all of you so much.  Your skills, your knowledge, your dedication, and your caring for our kids gives them such an advantage.  Our community is so fortunate to have you. 

 While educators do experience some wonderful highs observing students respond, achieve, and grow, I also know that there are those dark times when you feel totally ineffective and impotent. This year, 2020, presents with unprecedented challenges; challenges which most are finding daunting and looming large.

 The excerpt I have attached is lengthy so you may choose not to read it.  I get that.  I have chosen it for you because, to me, it speaks eloquently to the wonder and power of people like you.  Wallace Stegner is my favorite American author and this selection is from his novel, Crossing To Safety.  It would be best read aloud but I have found that I cannot read this passage aloud without being overcome with emotion. So, for you, Aunt Emily’s porch.

 Aunt Emily’s Porch – Crossing To Safety – Wallace Stegner - Book One, Chapter 6

 Aunt Emily's porch is less porch than command post.  It is fifteen feet deep and runs across the entire front of the cottage, railed and low-eaved and sheltered even in the worst weather.  I never saw it empty of people, never saw it without a partly solved jigsaw puzzle spread out on a card table and the swing full of dominoes, rummy, and Chinese checkers, rarely saw it without someone playing bridge, either Aunt Emily teaching some children or Aunt Emily and George Barnwell engaged in their intent, competitive afternoon rubbers with Uncle Dwight and Aunt Heather.

 The bridge table is at the far end, out of the traffic, which is incessant.  Though the Ellis daughters are grown, Charity out of Smith, Comfort halfway through. There are innumerable cousins, nieces, nephews, grandnieces. grandnephews, neighbor children, and the children of visitors and guests.  Just inside the door is a circulating library of wholesome books, among which I have noted The Wind In The Willows. The Boy Scout Handbook, the entire Pooh canon, Black Beauty, Little Women, The Yearling.  There are also piles of the National Geographic.

 Aunt Emily believes in the freedom of summer.  She doesn’t much care what the children do so long as they do something, and know what they are doing.  It is idleness and randomness of mind that she cannot abide.  When the children go on a hike, she packs bird and flower guides into their knapsacks, and quizzes them on their return to see if they have learned anything.  When she accompanies them on an overnight camping trip, sleeping in her own worn pup tent, they can count on instructive fireside talks on the stars.  And on rainy days such as this she sits like a confident spider in the midst of her web until boredom drives all the children on the Point to her porch, where she reads to them or teaches them French.

What she is doing now is reading Hiawatha.  She is fond of Longfellow, whose house is a landmark on Brattle Street hardly a block from her own, and she perceives the rightness of Hiawatha in this setting of northern woods.  She reads loudly, to be heard above the rush and patter of rain.

By the shores of Gitche Gumee,

By the shining Big-Sea-Water,

Stood the wigwam of Nokomis,

Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis.

Dark behind it rose the forest,

Rose the black and gloomy pine-trees,

Rose the firs with cones upon them;

Bright before it beat the water,

Beat the clear and sunny water,

Beat the shining Big-Sea-Water.

 All the little Indians in a half circle around Aunt Emily are getting an imprinting that will last for life.  The sound of her voice reading will condition how they look upon themselves and the world.  It will become part of the loved ambiance of Barttell Pond, a glint in the chromatic wonder of childhood.  These small sensibilities will never lose the images of dark woods and bright lake.  Nature to them will always be beneficent and female.

 When he heard the owls at midnight,

Hooting, laughing in the forest,

“What is that?” he cried in terror.

“What is that?” he said.  “Nokomis?”

And the good Nokomis answered:

“That is but the owl and owlet,

Talking in their native language,

Talking, scolding at each other.”

 Some of those children, years later, may awaken in the night from a dream of that strong voice chanting Iroquois myths in Finnish trochees, and their souls will yearn within them for the certainty and assurance and naturalness and authority of the time Aunt Emily dominated.

Please, do not ever sell yourselves short.  You are providing Milton kids – our kids – an imprinting that will last for life.  Your voice, your lessons, your treatment of them will condition how they look upon themselves and the world.  Their souls, too, will yearn within them for the certainty and assurance that you provided in your interactions with them.

 Have a great year!

After all, Kids Matter!

 Jon Cruzan 

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