Porch Swing

Growing up my house had a front porch swing. I spent hours on that swing. I went there to read. I went there to catch lightening bugs. I went there when I was mad. I went there to cry. I went there to have long talks with my siblings or either of my parents. The swing was my safe place. I remember waiting on that swing for my prom date to pick me up. I am sure they existed, but I don’t remember a day that I didn’t spend some time on that swing.  I find it interesting that while I have an ideal porch for it, I do not have a front porch swing in my own home.  I started thinking about that this weekend. It didn’t made sense to me why I have some amazing memories of something; yet, when given the opportunity, I didn’t replicate it as a grown up.  And in many ways I miss that swing.

I started doing my research. I started with my husband. He cleared things up for me. He reminded me that when we moved into our house some 12 years ago, I fell in love with the large deck out back. I wanted to decorate it with outdoor furniture (which ended up being from a clearance sale at the Walmart), beautiful plants (which have all died), have an herb garden on a palate (which I’ve never done), and create an outdoor living space where we could grill, eat, hang out as a family, watch TV (we’ve never installed one), and watch the stars (I’m usually in bed before the clouds clear enough to see the stars). He reminded me that my parents gave us the rocking chairs that still sit on the front porch and that I was worried that a swing would be too dangerous for Rosebro2 who had (luckily it has subsided) a wild streak a mile wide and I was sure he would dive off the porch and break an appendage or two.  It started to make sense again in my head. It isn’t that the swing is bad or my memories were not great-it is just that it no longer fit into what I my family needs.

As I was doing some school reading last night, I thought about that swing. I thought about our school. How many things do we do because it is what we’ve always done or what we know? Do we even know why we do it? Does it fit our pedagogy? Do we do it because it was done to us when we were in school? Do we do it because that is what the teacher before you did?  As a child and as a teenager, I held a steadfast belief that the swing on my front porch was magical and could solve all my problems. Yet, as an adult, I now know that it wasn’t the swing, it was the calmness of swaying back and forth, the soft words of advice from my parents, the scenic view of a corn field as the stalks swayed to and fro with the wind.  Challenging our beliefs of what we’ve always done is not always easy. It is a struggle to change, to grow, to believe something different than before.  Yet, if we are accountable to our students, we must be reflective and pedagogically strong educators. We must make our practice match our pedagogy-even if it has always been done a different way. We sell our students short if we don’t do this. We also hurt ourselves when we continually look at what’s next and don’t focus on what’s new.  As Henry Ford stated many years ago, “if you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.”

I loved that porch swing. My memories are strong. I can feel the wind on my face as I pushed my feet off on the floor of the porch, but my dinners on my deck after grilling burgers followed by smore’s on the fire pit as just as wonderful-if not even more.