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The Haywood Gap Stream Discovery

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View from Tennent Mountain of Black Balsam, Mount Hardy and Little Sam's Knob (Ross Peters)

In the summer of 2000 I drove into Pisgah National Forest almost everyday. Living in Asheville, NC at the time, I decided I would focus 6-12 mile walks in those parts of Pisgah that I either hadn’t been in a number of years or had never been at all. Having suffered a back injury a couple of years earlier that made it difficult to sleep on the ground or rock climb, I resorted to long walks. I had simple rules, the most central of which was to avoid walking the same route or even more than a half-mile of the same route twice. I carried a map roughly worn at the edges on which I traced my routes with a blue ballpoint pen, and I carried a compass so that I might bushwhack my way in order to avoid retracing previous approaches when necessary. I was always back home by dinner.

I rested in places like Pea, Squirrel, Butter, Bennet, Cat, Club, and Coontree Gaps; struggled up Perry, Pilot, Horse, and Saddle Coves; wandered along creeks such as Slate Rock, Clawhammer, Avery, and Buckeye. I saw a small bear after making a wrong turn, which led me toward Yellow Gap instead of back toward Turkey Pen Gap, and I saw a large rattle snake headed out of Picklesimmer Fields toward Long Branch. For the first time in a long time I spent a great deal of time alone, and I was fully entertained as well as often out of breath and somewhat sore.

View of Pisgah National Forest from Tennent Mountain (Ross Peters)

I initially thought that these hikes would provide me with time to reflect on a school year that challenged me in new ways and offered reward and frustration in remarkably unpredictable rhythms. I even carried along a ratty old composition book just in case I decided to jot something down. Instead of profound revelations about my life in general and specifically my life as a faculty member at Asheville School, however, I found I did stunningly little thinking at all. I stopped thinking and started observing. I watched my step. I made no plans for my classes—I created no agendas for my department meetings. I clearly needed this time—this summertime, and I felt fortunate to have it.

My final walk that summer was near Mount Hardy, one the few peaks over 6000 feet in Pisgah and probably the least visited (the others in the vicinity are are Black Balsam, Sam’s Knob, Tennent Mountain, Black Balsam and Cold Mountain). After hiking about three miles down Buckeye Gap, I came to a perfect campsite next to a beautiful stream. It struck me as a great place to take a group from school someday. The Haywood Gap Stream was replete with outstanding places to soak and wade and explore—enough in fact that it could easily entertain a group for an entire day. As I was thinking about the possibility of returning there with students, I realized that for the first time in many weeks my thoughts were turning back to school, and given that it was already early August, it was time.

After eating lunch I started up Haywood Gap. The walk was rigorous and technical, and at times it was so narrow and overgrown that I could imagine being the first person ever to scramble up those rocks. The spell was broken as I stepped over some of the rusted two-inch cable that is not an uncommon sight in that part of Pisgah. Several steps beyond there was an iron rail wheel in the ferns and between chair-sized rocks ten feet or so above the trail. Both the cable and the wheel are artifacts of the extensive logging that ravaged those mountains a century ago. I clearly was only one of many that had gone up this trail, but this fact does not negate the fact that I was a discoverer that afternoon.

The idea of discovery fascinates me, whether it is the discovery of a beautiful place or it is the discovery that appears wherever vibrant discussions of literature take place. I love the feeling of discovering something, and as an educator and administrator, I wonder more and more how we can best create that powerful feeling of discovery in our students, knowing that some traditional pedagogical approaches are more apt to dull the spirit rather than to enliven it. Perhaps, given the fact that my hikes took place during the first summer of a new century, it is appropriate that the idea of discovery feels so relevant to me in the context of 21st Century learning. It strikes me that there is much work to be done in in schools in order to provide the richness we seek for our students' education. It also strikes me that it will be worth it. Here's hoping the view we find at the turn around in the trail will be good!

View of Mount Hardy and Little Sam's Knob (Ross Peters)

The Role Models We Need For Our Students

I have always looked and continue to look for role models. By the time I reached my senior year in an all-boys school, the teachers that seemed to have found a way to create their own space within and somehow separate from the school itself fascinated me most. Nothing seemed to surprise them; they had seen it all. I was someone who spent much of high school surprised and appalled, so they represented an attractive contrast. By placing themselves apart, they placed themselves above the rest of the school community. My admiration expressed itself every time I parodied the way they talked or the way they rolled their eyes at disappointing behavior of their charges.   

Perceptions are funny things though, and I have come to see this kind of teacher quite differently.  I now believe that their approach to our profession will only leave them tilting at windmills. If this teacher-as-silo approach was ever a good teaching strategy, those days are gone.

            These days I admire a different kind of teacher most. Great teachers have the ability to reveal to students that we all should be in the process of becoming—becoming thinkers, writers, mathematicians, scientists, speakers, listeners, challengers and leaders. The self-isolating teacher is by this definition handicapping him or herself because he or she becomes merely an artifact of learning. Students deserve more than that.  Great teachers must be willing to embrace the process that leads to change; they must ask the hard questions; and they must take the steps necessary to ensure that the change is in fact progress. Our students are fortunate to go to a school where there are many such teachers, and as we take steps toward creating more and more dynamic learning experiences for our students, we are going to need every one of them.

Scholarship as the Antidote to the Addiction of Comfort

(After a brief welcome, I gave these remarks earlier this evening at the National Honor Society and Cum Laude Induction Ceremony at The Westminster Schools.)

If I told you that I could take you to a place right now where every desire you ever have, EVERY DESIRE YOU EVER HAVE, would be immediately satisfied and where you would never be unhappy, would you go?  Would you even bother to ask any questions before signing up for the trip?  What would you be willing to give up in order to gain entry to such a place?  Please keep these questions, particularly the last one, in mind for a couple minutes.

This evening, while we celebrate the individual accomplishments of a number of our students, we also celebrate the role of scholarship in our school.  When I have the opportunity to speak to people about Westminster, I speak of a place where teachers and students get to do the things that teachers and students should get to do—learn, reflect, and contribute.  Though we might take the opportunity to learn, reflect, and contribute for granted at times, our opportunity here at Westminster is actually both rare and important.  We are able to spend time seeking knowledge that stands beyond our plain view.  We have the chance to look for something more.

For a number of years my AP Literature students read a novel by Aldous Huxley entitled Brave New World.  The characters in the novel live in a world where every comfort is provided to them.  Almost every desire is sated instantly for the inhabitants of this futuristic world, and when desires can’t be met, the characters have access to a drug called Soma, which provides them with what Huxley calls a “holiday” from reality.  Denizens of this world awake from their “soma holidays” refreshed, without a care in the world.  They never have homework, tests, or essays; right now I bet many of our honorees this evening are fantasizing about this no tests or essays idea, but before you all get carried away…

Think about our world.  We are often tempted toward the addiction of comfort; however, such a life might not be as wonderful as its seductive siren voices would have us believe.  The messages of our culture, ubiquitously placed before us, teach us to prefer getting a lot rather than giving a lot.  We are told we have a right to expect a life without struggle, search, or turmoil…now...right now.  My advice is…do not buy it, friends, and do not regret that it is not true.  Even brief glances behind the curtain of our protected world here at Westminster point in another direction.  The world needs more than glances…it needs our full attention and it needs our voice.   

As an educator teaching under the large umbrella of the Humanities, I have spent a great deal of time as a teacher addressing “What is Beauty? And what is Truth?”  My students and I bump up against this question often as we have study works such as Brave New World.   Engaged students run face first into the same question whether they are reading the opening of The Iliad or they find themselves momentarily lost within the brushstrokes of a painting by Monet.  The questions to which we seek answers are not limited to Truth and Beauty, however.  We seek to know more in many areas.  As scholars we attempt to see beyond ourselves and beyond our powerful desire for comfort.  The searches that take place in our classrooms at Westminster every day are not always comfortable, and they are certainly not without real demand…hence the celebration of achievement that brings us together today, but these searches that allow us to discover the joy of solving a proof elegantly, or the eloquence of Martin Luther King’s “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” or the graceful form of a brush on canvas, or a striking connection between our language and the language of the Cicero, Ovid, and Virgil, or, finally, the value of acceleration due to gravity, these searches, are far too valuable to give up for comfort and superficial happiness.

All the learning we do here, and certainly that which we recognize today, is important.  It makes us students, searchers, and explorers, and it allows us to be teachers, solvers, and builders.  It allows us to develop our own views and learn to assert them.  In the end it makes us human.   To me, that it makes us human is the most essential point.

The inhabitants of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World compromise their humanity in order to have sedated comfort and numb happiness.   They become, as a result, blank, hormonal facsimiles of human beings.  The inhabitants of Westminster should have none of it, for there is too much work to be done in order to live toward our potential for achievement, in order to project our voices into the conversations that affect our shared life on this planet, and most importantly, in order to live toward the promise for which our maker made us.  This final sentiment is beautifully expressed in the philosophy of Westminster, which seeks to help students become life-long learners and truth seekers who will be good stewards, caring for and serving the world in accordance with Christ's example.

Finally!--A Name for my Blog

From http://www.psdgraphics.com/backgrounds/blank-world-map/

Last week I finally gave blog a name--Ross All Over The Map. Since starting it almost two months ago I have simply called it Ross' Blog in part because giving it a real name might obligate me to keep it up for the long term and in part because I could not think of a title I liked.  To be frank I am uncertain I will stick to this title; however, I picked it because my interests are indeed "all over the map," and my family and I have a desire to continue to travel--quite literally to go "all over the map."

My wife's scholarship, writing, and teaching has taken us on some wonderful adventures "all over the map."  We had a great chance to travel abroad to North Africa for several weeks during the summer of 2010, and it was amazing the extent to which my daughter Eleanor’s experience defined the meaning of the trip for Katie and me.  Eleanor has had some amazing birthday locations—Cambridge, England when she turned two and three, Vogogna, Italy when she turned six, and Tunis, Tunisia when she turned seven.  On the North African trip, her ability to rise to new challenges awed us—in Egypt, she even rode a camel with me around the pyramids!  The way she expressed excitement and joy made the trip extraordinary.  She is so awake and forever ready for what is next before she even has a clue about what exactly is coming next.  Her questions are endless—she goes to sleep asking them and when she wakes up she picks up where she left off.  I want her to be this engaged forever.  I want her to be challenged like this forever.  And I want the same thing for the adults and students at the school where I work.

After years spent wishing I was a prodigy of some sort—a world-class tennis player or perhaps a musician as comfortable with a guitar as most people are with silverware, I have discovered that I am a generalist. To be honest I was quite slow to own this truth, for the evidence was in and was in front of me for a very long time.  When in my mid-twenties I became Director of a boys camp in the mountains of North Carolina, I had already held virtually every job in the camp short of owning the place.  I had been a counselor, Senior Counselor, and Head Counselor, and I had taught tennis, rock climbing, ultimate frisbee, orienteering, riflery, skeet shooting, white water canoeing, and…wait for it…I had even taught a few overly enthusiastic nine year old boys how to tie-dye cheap white t-shirts (it was no small mess!).   I also drove the bus, and I was in charge of the Fourth of July fireworks (amazingly enough, I have all my fingers and no visible burn scars).  Hence, my work was "all over the map." 

My generalist tendencies followed me into my career in education though it is easy to identify common denominators—my love of reading, my devotion to my students, my desire to seek out the best teachers and learn from them, and, most powerfully, my ambition to help the school where I work become better.  From my first year as a teacher, I have enjoyed being the one who said “yes” when the question began with, “Would anybody be willing to…?” or “Does anyone know how to…?” even when, though I might have been “willing,” I may not have known yet exactly “how to.”  

To me, a generalist is "all over the map" but that in no way means he or she is aimless.  Instead "generalist" refers to a person who has interests in many areas and purposefully seeks connections and meaning from the intersection of those interests. For instance, my love for folk pottery grew out a recognition that a great piece of folk pottery is an emblem of timelessness and authenticity--two ideas that have driven my love for great literature.  

So "Ross All Over The Map" it is...until it becomes something else.