Read the story
so we can hear what it looks like.
Heidi Crowley (Age 5)
Growing up, from age eight on, from the moment I snapped my first photo (a lobster) I felt certain I’d become a photographer when I grew up. At 12, my uncle helped me convert our bathroom into a darkroom—where I processed my own photos for the next 25 years. I considered it more a hobby than a career. I took portraits, photographed weddings, and other events in high school and college, and always served on the yearbook and newspaper staff. Though photography has been part of every day of my life, the closest I came to calling it a career was when I became a photographer for The Big Sur Gazette, a paper I co-founded with publisher and Coast Gallery owner, Gary Koeppel. I also wrote for the paper, and was its Executive Editor; so even then, photography was secondary, a near career.
I left college to become a flight attendant, which gave me the opportunity to visit 25 countries and all 50 states. Would I recommend flying? Absolutely! It's hard work, frightening at times, but nothing else could provide you a better overview of the world. For a few years, you have limitless possibilities to study languages, cultures, history, geography, geology, meteorology, astronomy, you name it! It's an opportunity to visit museums and landmarks worldwide, to go to world class ballets, operas, concerts, and plays. Flying puts the world at your fingertips. For a few years of your life, I strongly recommend it. At a recent flight attendant reunion, I found these then and now photos in the group scrapbook.
I returned to college following those years, to become a teacher, a change of careers I’ve never regretted. Teaching demands an enormous amount of time, training, patience, creativity, and endurance. It kills off the weak, it’s said. But in all the years I taught children (kindergarten through third grade, and even high school), the day never came that I didn’t want to go to school, that I didn’t love seeing that sea of faces. For me, teaching was a calling, a passion, never a job. Leaving it to begin a new career was the most agonizing decision of my life. I was not sure I’d know how to live without teaching. I wrote “By Heart” for the children and parents in an attempt to express what those years of teaching meant, how deeply touching they were, how personally significant. The teaching profession offers far too little time for reflection. Teaching engages the full measure of one's being, strikes a resonant, life changing bell that rings throughout time, one voice to the next, one generation to the next. Writing follows teaching as a natural progression on the one hand, and a way of going back, on the other. It was the right next thing! Writing simply extends the joy of whatever you love.
Over a period of years, on school breaks, I worked as an educational consultant on primary literacy projects, including a first grade handwriting program for Harcourt Publishing, a kindergarten reading readiness program for Houghton Mifflin Company, and three kindergarten programs for Silver Burdett Ginn, now Scott Foresman. At The Hampton-Brown Company (acquired by National Geographic in 2006), I worked on Días y Días de Poesia, an Alma Flor Ada Anthology of Spanish poetry charts and a teaching guide. At the Asilomar Reading Conference for five years, I spoke on journal writing and photography in the classroom. For the Bring Me A Book Foundation, I joined four other teachers, participating in a teaching video to promote literacy through the overnight book program launched by Judy Koch in honor of internationally acclaimed educator, Kay Goines. Other links to these companies and organizations appear on the Literary Links page, under Teachers.
Work of any kind, without someone to work for or work with, offers a diminished reward. The chance to share trials and triumphs with family, and with close friends, makes every aspect of one’s career more meaningful. The support of family and friends outweighs monetary gain, and enhances every aspect of any career you choose. I have endless photos of the newspaper years, flying years, and teaching years, but everything I did in life, I had in the back of my mind these two, even before I knew them. How very lucky I've been to call them family!
 |
Click here to see images and commentary about Doug Walling's world voyage.
Noel revisited his 1994 Eagle Scout Project, a George Washington fence
built for Captain Cooper School in Big Sur. Noel works for Trion World Network as Lead Content Designer
for Everquest II. |
I know by heart the expectant eyes that greet each day
Mischievous maybe, yet innocent
Welcoming
Loving
On occasion tearful.
I know by heart the gentle touches and happy hugs
of thirty-three years of children who touched me from the inside out,
whose lives intersected and interacted with mine for a short year or two
to expand like a universe.
I know by heart, and to the touch, the size and shape and message
of the hundreds of hard earned books on our old library-lined wall.
Books snuggled, loved, lost, memorized, read again and again, internalized,
peanut buttered, repaired, and rediscovered in the hands of sisters and brothers,
carted home each day, homework to open the child’s soul,
carried in red padded bags so lovingly made by caring parents.
Second only to the children, the books brought me back
day after day, year after year, decade after decade,
always promising a new adventure or reliving an old one:
A raccoon taking the children with him to hunt for his first crayfish, teaching a lifelong lesson:
“ Go back to the pool...But this time do not make do not make a face. Do not carry a stone.
Do not carry a stick. Just smile.... This time just smile at the thing in the pool.”
Books about a pumpkin, a piñata, and a dead tree can show how to be useful, even in death.
Rain books, rain poems, rain paintings, rain songs, rain dances and chants
helped us celebrate the dark winter days when the wildflowers were but sprouts.
Picture books: The building blocks of a child’s heart and mind!
The authors, the illustrators: Classroom heroes! Heroes who teach without preaching,
who practice the age-old art of story, married with pictures,
pictures designed to pull children in and hold them spellbound,
walking wide-eyed through pages with wizards and walruses, elves and elephants.
I know by heart where to reach for the book to comfort the little ones who first sighted
the dead bird, and after, the homemade ceremonial burial, the hugs and sometimes tears,
all buried there in my memory where your small faces stay forever young.
These collected works were what helped me teach from the heart.
As sure as your children are your essence, I know you by heart
and thank you from that Artesian part of me for each joyful day that you
entrusted me with your greatest gifts, your children.
It was my honor and privilege to help them break down sounds and build up a world of words,
all the while hoping I’d handed them some of life’s alphabet and order, without taking away
the wonder, the sense of adventure, and linguistic uniqueness they brought to school.
I know by heart what children love about their world, that they are in equal awe of
the Monarch and the Blue Whale, that if children are touched deeply by things too delicate
and too distant to actually touch, they seek ways to protect them.
I know that you mustn’t miss that early opportunity to encourage caring,
be it about creatures or cultures, that when a child identifies with others on earth,
their empathy reaches distant lands. They cradle the classroom globe as if it were their child.
And it is.
Children so long to look after something, to nurture earth’s fur and feathered creatures.
Given the slightest chance, they risk such tenderness. Their love shows in every sketch.
Once children truly care about the world around them, they will strive to learn anything.
I know by heart this lesson:
that if you decide to teach, no two years will be alike,
no matter the materials, no matter the swing of the pedant’s pendulum.
your place is to keep to the rhythm of your internal metronome
and learn to conduct each instrument of the little classroom orchestra you’ve been given,
until they have the beat and can read the music for themselves.
What I don’t know is what I’ll do without their small hearts beating nearby, day
after day,
infusing me with their spirit, amusing me with their wit, and amazing me with their talents.
Listen to the words of your children.
Value them.
Recognize their magic.
Hear them sing.
Watch them fly!
With love for the child in everyone, but especially for the children of Big Sur,
(Paula Anita Walling)