Modern Community

Better Living Through Modern … Community

What is a community?  Where can anybody find one in this new age of digital semi-reality?  Do they still exist?  Are places where people care for and look after one another actually extant in modern society?  Communities today are yet created through the hands, hearts, and hard work of committed people, edifying both the single member and the group as a whole.  Communities are more fluid now, perhaps, than they once were, but they are still a tangible source of support and encouragement. 

What is a [modern] community?  

How do you build one?

They tell you it will be difficult, but really, you have no idea.

It is August.  It is hot.  You are surrounded by an amalgamation of pint-sized and adult-sized furniture, dust motes, and a curious, but palpable nostalgia.  The room is swathed in primary colors and the alphabet.  Large windows line the walls.  Hope and light filter into the room, into your soul, and out through your fingertips as you craft bulletin boards, seating charts, and lesson plans.  You hear:  “Oh!  You have so and so?  I’ve had every sibling in that family!  Watch out!” and “Do you know what happened in that family last year?” and “He’ll never learn.  Not worth the effort.”  After a while of sorting through the data-debris that defines these young lives, though you still read the files carefully, you learn the value of meeting and engaging with the students.  You come to care for the people behind the OshKosh and overalls frames of excitement and mischievousness, and you build relationships.  Together.  

The kindergartners come in September.  Crying.  Clinging.  Bouncing.  Running.  As the seasons bind the year together, there are messes on top of messes within messes.  Every possible situation involving … the bathroom.  Little is predictable.  Those perfect lesson plans you spent hours envisioning, writing, and pouring all your idealistic passions into?  Well, they don’t seem to be meeting this crew’s needs.  So, you rewrite them.  Daily.  The children do not, cannot, will not ever learn to write independently.  But they do.  They’ll never seem to read.  Will /k/ /a/ /t/ finally become, simply “cat”?  It does.  You learn to envision the future in the everyday.  You become less afraid of being on Plan N when you were sure that Plan B would suffice.

Little is predictable, but that you will meet each other every day in your classroom community and choose through numbers, letters, playtime, sharing, arguments, and discussions to be there for one another by creating a safe and happy place, amidst the struggles that define your private lives.  The biggest surprise?  That they teach you.  Another stunner?  That kid you couldn’t wait to see head out the door?  You want to keep him.  He just has the best sense of humor!  And then … some time in May, you are the one crying, because you just don’t want them to leave.  Later, in June, you look around that now packed up classroom and realize that something ordinary, yet transcendental has happened here.  The classroom didn’t just feel like a classroom; it felt like something permanent, like coordinates on a map with its own geography.  

The years go by.  It is another August.  Hot yet again.  Confident, soft-spoken, driven, intuitive you has gradually learned about leadership, how to defend your ideas, and execute appropriately risky, merit worthy approaches to primary education, in the context of amazing collegial support.  You have concocted Plans A - Z and can defend the credits of each, though effectively planning for successful school years is a family affair.  The high degree of teamwork and cooperation is uplifting, instructive, and stabilizing.  By now, your idealism is your servant, not your master.  You know that perfect lesson plans don’t actually exist; thinkers do.  

By now, you’ve witnessed your own brother in a hospital bed, dying from cancer, your father fighting kidney disease throughout dialysis.  You love science, and you read all you can about the world of medicine and the human body.  Primary colors are as enticing as P. aeruginosa becomes interesting.  You often have to pass up professional development opportunities in your field in order to log hours with your family’s medical professionals.  Upon further review, you are uncertain about the longterm implications of these trainings, anyway.  You long for opportunity beyond a collection of certificates.  Knitting bodies and lives together with talented coworkers is a must.  The joyful enthusiasm for creating a classroom community still pulsates through your veins, but you wonder about building community in other locales.  Could you change careers? 

They told me it would be difficult, but really, I had no idea.

Nine years ago when I began teaching, I could not possibly know how difficult, and yet, how rewarding life would be living in daily community with twenty-plus little people and a host of wonderful colleagues.  The process of teaching others, caring for, and observing my own family being cared for so expertly, culminated in a love for science and a desire to provide that same level of service relationally.  After years of helping children take their first steps in becoming who they will be, I finally know, like tectonic plates of long separated continents suturing back together, what I want to be when I grow up.  I want to be a nurse.  

Leaving behind my fantastic school community is a challenging decision, but the quality community and experiences afforded by the University of Virginia’s CNL program is well worth the sacrifice.  I look forward to being able to use the CNL degree to obtain a difficult job in healthcare that will challenge me as I weave my teaching background together with science to formulate a new life in the ER, the ICU, infection control, teaching nursing, pursuing an NP, research, and, in my ultimate dream, of helping to establish a community clinic of some kind.  

UVA’s CNL degree makes the dreams of community minded people possible.  Thank you for considering mine.