Everybody’s Workin’ for the Weekend…
The school year is completed, and that includes my grading of over two hundred essays. If there was ever better proof of the fact that I have not taught high school in a while, it is that I assigned a 3-4 page essay to accompany a final project in all five of my English classes, and then proceeded to give my students a final exam consisting of two essay questions. 69 students X 3 essays each = 1 naive teacher. Yet, somehow, I survived and now live to blog about it. And I have been reminded of the subtle irony of teaching. You make mistakes in Year A, and attempt to fix them for Year B, only to make brand new mistakes in Year B that you must fix for Year C. By the time Year Z rolls around and you are staggering down the home stretch toward the tape of retirement, you realize that you have never had a perfect year of teaching. If ever someone needed proof that pobody’s nerfect, tell ‘em to spend a few years in the field of education.
Of course, the best release for such stress is a little thing I have dubbed Fantasy Construction Camp, or FCC for short. Every BFA missionary who hangs around Kandern during the summer is required by the school to give two weeks to assist with the many projects that always take place during June and July, such as dorm renovation, school repairs, landscaping, and, without fail, the transfer of excrutiatingly heavy pieces of furniture up or down a minimum of two floors. Granted, some of the more merciful of you readers might think, What does he mean ‘required to give two weeks’? Hasn’t he given up ten months working at that place for no pay?
Now, now, don’t be cynical. To be indignant on such things would be to miss the beauty of Fantasy Construction Camp. I just completed my two week stretch yesterday. And during it all, my thoughts were, as George Bluth Sr. remarked excitedly to his son, “I’m having the time of my life!” Over the past two weeks, I have gotten to chisel, bust apart and shovel tile and cement from three dorm bathrooms (I had no idea three little bathrooms could produce so much debris!), – I even got to use a jackhammer; I have shop-vacuumed a dirt floor (not to be confused with a dirty floor); I have moved countless pieces of furniture from one residence hall to another (the only similarity in these pieces of furniture was the fact that they all weighed way too much to ever be moved); I have swept, scraped, Spackled and painted; I have built things and torn down other things in the same day (the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away); I have picked up and handed off at least a hundred boxes of tile; and I have pitchforked thorny weeds that bit back at me so much you would swear they were straight out of a Harry Potter book. Perhaps my favorite task is best illustrated in the pictures below.
My friend Isaac and I were assigned the wonderfully surreal task of smashing out an entire wall at the Black Forest Academy elementary school last week. We made two little classrooms into one big one. I now consider myself a pro with the sledgehammer, and while I am not yet willing to seek out a career in demolition, that particular field has definitely rocketed to the top of my “Most Fun Jobs to Do for a Maximum of Two Weeks” list. Heck, I only stepped on one nail during the entire process.
It is interesting what a little change of perspective can do for a person. It can serve as a kind of release if you are careful enough to pay attention to the differences. I tried to do just that over the last two weeks. I am certainly happy that my FCC tour of duty is over, but I don’t regret the two weeks I was pulled away from lounging on the couch or hacking away at my novel. It was good work, and I was glad to be a part of a collective effort, of white-collars made momentarily blue.
Most days, a few of us would hike up the road from one of the dorms in which we were working. We would carry our bag lunches out to a little bench that sat in the shade amongst high grass and overlooked the 18th hole of the golf course in Kandern. There we would eat our food and watch a number of folks – some elderly, some young – whack their drives, hack their chips and smack their putts (very few read the green properly). Oh, they thought they had chosen the correct way to get the most out of their summer days. If only they knew…
