A Final Ascent

It seems as if this blog has been populated with an overabundance of eulogies and remembrances for fallen and passed individuals. It is odd. I don’t think of myself as some sort of morbid gatekeeper, nor as some self-important public archivist. However, I suppose my profession of teaching history pulls my attention to stories like this particular one when surfing the information super highway.

I just read the Sir Edmund Hillary has passed on at the age of 88. I think a moment of reverent silence is in order, but I am not that presumptuous to think I can call for it. No. But, how is it that a junior high school teacher in the center of Central Texas is affect by the death of this man? I cannot honestly claim that I am weeping grieving tears as I compose this missive, but a little twinge in my heart did happen when I read the story of his death. Sir Edmund Hillary saved my life one day, not all that long ago.

It was nothing dramatic or daring. Never did it involve an actual cliff or include any rope of any sort. It was during my first year of teaching. I was desperate for a job after dropping out of seminary and moving back to Texas with my tail between my legs. I had thumped my bared chest before God and duly put in my place…Thankfully. This experience found me not only awash in Dallas ISD’s alternative certification program for those of us who had a college degree but nor certification, but also in an inner city urban campus.

I was the only male teacher in the sixth grade, and the only ESL teacher to boot in the upper grades of the school. No worries, right? Nothing was hanging in the balance, except for my livelihood, shelter, food, and essentials for my family and I. Trying to teaching students who were in the sixth grade with second and third grade reading scores was the norm. Try getting them not just to read, but to comprehend and retain information from grade-level social studies textbook. Nothing short of Herculean. But, that’s where Sir Edmund Hillary comes in.

It was his helping hand as I dangled off of a proverbial sheer cliff with jagged rocks of failure and insanity waiting to pummel me should I slip and fall. I was trying to follow the district scope and sequence as I taught social studies and language arts to disinterested and disaffected urban youth. I would have done better in giving a lesson on metrical feet in hip-hop compositions, or wire tricks from martial arts movies. To think of it, I might have enjoyed the experience more had I done that. But standards were in place and objectives had to be met.

Painfully coursing our way through southern Asia and India in the social studies curriculum, we hit a major snag. How could I make this information pertinent to inner city youth in South Dallas? The answer lay in the literature textbook. It just so happened that the curriculum specialists aligned the reading assignments in language arts with the social studies lessons. Yes, we had a narrative of Sir Edmund Hillary’s ascent to the top of the world, the peak of Mount Everest.

Being a good guide, Hillary did not do all of the work for me. I had to add a little excitement and drama to the already thrilling text. It was the best passage the textbook had to offer. And, it actually caught the students’ attentions. I have rarely expressed the amount of thanks for simple blessings as I did that first day of reading. I saw my own journey as a grueling uphill ascent to mastering the classroom. That in itself was a treacherous route with only one path. The orders were to keep moving. I could see Hillary’s hand in the blur of doubt and confusion that swarmed around my mind at the end of each day. I could make, he seemed to tell me. And, I did. I just had to move to a different mountain, so to say. Dallas was a failed ascent. But other mountains awaited me, and I met with success.

I know it sounds corny and sentimental, but I wanted to thank this man for making a few weeks in the first year of my teaching career sane and positive. Those few weeks kept me going long enough. I read about his death tonight and shared it with my wife who talked about the NPR story. She thought the fact that he was a bee keeper was charming and striking. Reflecting on it, I have to agree.

Perhaps this final facet of this man’s incredible life is the last lesson he is leaving for me…all of us. Even though we may achieve wondrous heights in our undertakings, sometimes quite literally, we need to remain grounded, also quite literally. Hillary climbed other mountains in other parts of the world, but he always returned home to his bees. Insects who seemingly mundane existence of doing what they were created to do, give us sweet, golden honey and beautiful scented flowers teach us to do what we were created to do with the same determination and gusto. We just need to figure out what peaks and which ranges to scale. So to you, Sir Edmund Hillary…Thank you…