Daylight Savings Time

Its November in Maine (well its November everywhere) and we’re heading into the long season. We’ve moved from explosive color to bare branches and from crisp breezes to cold winds. Its only a matter of time until the snowflakes start flying.  Its a time of transitions, from light to dark, from a colorful fall to a stark winter and its those changes that  I’m feeling that pretty deeply this week.

We started daylight savings time, meaning that we fell back, now instead of waking up at 4:45 and being out the door by 5:15 I am waking up closer to 4 am. Instead of transitioning my body clock into the new time I have been using this hour to slowly and intentionally get ready, drink a cup of hot coffee and center myself with a little quiet time. The house is still. I’m still.

I have come to really love these moments in the morning, I didn’t know that I would. Its a moment of morning darkness that has created some calm space for me. Its an unintentional change that I am letting bring me happiness. I am choosing it now but I didn’t choose it first.

Now, as I drive to work in the dark- the thick nighttime dark not the hopeful half-light of pre-dawn- I am thinking about how these changes in our lives and in our teaching sneak up on us and how sometimes new changes mean letting go of older things, and accepting that those times are now over. 

I have a student who has been a buddy of mine since his first day of 5th grade. The band room has been his safe and welcome place. He used to come in every morning, early, and sit and practice the drums or the guitar. He would check in with me and tell me about his life. Open up about things that would bother him or that he was hopeful for. Every morning he’d come in, sit down and talk to start his day.

 I found out as the years went on that school was not a very kind place for him. He struggled and there wasn’t a lot there that was reassuring and calm for him. It was lots of teachers chasing him about back work, failing grades, and responsibilities that he had a hard time meeting.  He used me and my room as a safe and grounding space.

The relationship that we had was different, he would work hard on his music assignments, he would put in the effort and though he sometimes had difficulty meeting the standards he wasn’t neglecting the classes. We used the morning as practice and conversation time, He had a relationship with me of caring and kindness and love of music. And during the dark times of covid’s beginning the emphasis in my classroom was SEL and not necessarily content knowledge and rigor (directive from above) and so I didn’t have to join the chorus of teachers who were constantly chasing, cajoling, and trying to motivate this student. His experience with music was joyful even if the music was often discordant. 

This year however things have shifted, this student is in the 8th grade and now is coming head to head with the prospect of high school next year. I don’t have mornings free anymore , I have to cover bus drop off duties, so my buddy doesn’t have a place to go or a person to talk to about his life anymore. I can tell he wants to. He keeps trying to make it happen by showing up early and coming to me instead of going to Cafeteria like he knows he is supposed to and I keep having to turn him away as I walk out the door to do my morning duty. 

He wants to show me the new musical things he can do. He used to be able to show me in the morning and now they are coming out during class. “{Student} I recognize you have been working on playing enter sandman on the drums, right now- during our band warm up- is not the time for it. {student} I realize you have been working on playing Smells Like Teen Spirit on the guitar, but while I am giving instructions for the playing test is not the time to play it.” I’ve gone from saying things that are encouraging to having to constantly police boundaries and expectations.

I keep having to chase him for late work, grade him on things he has not practiced, hold him to account in ways that he didn’t face in years past because the work was easier, the rigor wasn’t as tough, he wasn’t about to head to high school.

Our relationship has begun to transition. My primary focus with this student before was finding a place of belonging and fostering their love of music with encouragement and openness. Now it is moving to a place where my responsibility to this student is to help them develop the skills they need to channel that love and drive in productive ways, to help them develop the executive skills to keep organized and be successful in their next step, to help them move from the child they were at 10 to the young adult they are at 14. The student in front of me wasn’t the same student they were, I needed to accept that student on their terms and move to where they needed me, even if that wasn’t where they had needed me before.

I don’t feel comfortable in that place yet. Zareeta Hammond called this the role of the ”warm demander”.

 I  think back on our student-teacher relationship and sometimes miss the mornings when my little buddy would come in and tell me about his weekend and try to learn a rock beat, when he’d share his personal victories and play the cool new song he was trying to learn, when I wouldn’t have to chase him for work because I could offer the space for growth in the morning and scaffold it in.

As I had to remove those supports and rely more on his own efforts the growing has been difficult. Its hard to have new responsibilities. It’s hard to have to be responsible for making sure someone else is responsible too. 

It’s offering me something else though, its showing me that caring and openness aren’t limited to opening the door and being soft. Caring and openness can be there in creating opportunities for success and for failure. Caring and openness are there when a student totally whiffs an assignment and you look to them to take responsibility for lack of practice but offer the retake, the extra help, the review.  Care isn’t just soft words, its in setting up a place where responsibility and failure can both be investigated and incorporated into a student’s mindset. Where uncomfortable truth and consequences can be confronted and conquered within that caring environment. Thats the warm demander, the warmth is in your care and connection, but the demand is for effort and growth and it doesn’t go away just because the processes of growth can be uncomfortable. If we were always comfortable we would never grow.

So the relationship has shifted and I have shifted, moved to where this student’s needs have been leading me. Though I thought I knew this student, I knew who they were and now I am working with who they are. I have been changed by thinking through and developing my own understandings. This new context and relationship building isn’t better or worse than the old. Its a different thing all on its own.

Daylight savings time means I drive to work in the dark, alone but not lonely, listening to the music play and thinking about the day to come. It offers me quiet reflection over a silent coffee in the morning. 

It also means that as I make my way home the sun is setting at the golden hour. The world looks like a painting, and it’s early enough that most folks are still at work. I’m alone on the road, driving through an oil painting. Driving past golden fields and vivid colors of the last few trees in their fall foliage. Sometimes its so beautiful I swear I see brushstrokes.  

The changing seasons and sun mean I can see something so familiar with a new perspective, a new view on something that I thought I knew. And while the change that shows me this new and deeper beauty wasn’t comfortable, it has offered me more than I expected, once I was able to accept it on its terms and move where it was leading me.