Rage against the dying of the light.

1.
Last Thursday, we traveled to The First Academy for the Region Meet. Our girls 4x800m team was seeded ninth, which meant that we were the fastest team in the slow heat.

The top four teams advance to the State Meet, so that means that we had to win our heat and run faster than five of the teams in the fast heat. The slow heat runs first, so the girls were running against the clock, but they were also running against a time which hadn't been established yet--whatever our time was, the runners in the fast heat would know it and would try to beat it.

2.
The girls ran well. Very well. They took twenty-one seconds off their best time of the season and broke the school record by twelve seconds.

3.
Then came the waiting. If everyone in the fast heat ran their seed time, we'd be headed to the State Finals. But as the fast heat's race developed, it was close--a matter of a couple of seconds.

Everyone watched the fast heat run, timing fourth place to see if we'd be making the trip. When the race was over, ten and a half anxious minutes later, it looked like we had it, but we didn't want to celebrate until we heard the official word.

4.

There we are, just ahead of Mount Dora Bible and Trinity Prep in fourth place with the seed time of 10:50.93 and a final time of 10:29.74.

5.
After the results were official, Doctor Bob from DistancePreps.com interviewed the girls team:


6.
So tomorrow after classes, we're headed north to Jacksonville for the Big Show on Friday. We're also taking a sprinter and a triple jumper, so it's the biggest group we've had advance to the State Finals in recent history. And by recent, I mean the last decade, probably longer.

7.
In other running news, I ran a 49-second PR on Saturday in the Zoe 5k out in Oviedo. I finished in 20:08 (so close to sub-20 I could almost see it, but I couldn't quite get there this time) and brought home third place overall.

8.
This afternoon, we were running the lake loop, just an easy run before the State Finals, and as I came along the bike trail headed back toward school, I passed an older gentleman. As I came alongside him, I said hello, and he looked at me and said, "I can't do it like that anymore."

Suddenly, the sore hamstring I've been nursing for the last twenty-four hours didn't seem like such a big deal. What was a big deal was the beauty of the fact that I could run today, and seeing my future, everyone's future, really, in that man, knowing that one day, probably, I will no longer be able to run made the wonder of today's run all the more real.

9.
I thought first of the Dylan Thomas poem, about fighting to hang on to life, about relishing the light, about not giving in to decline and death, about not surrendering to the end, even when it's obvious, even when it's inevitable.

And I thought about the end of track season, about how all we have left of it now are these next two days, and about how those two days are such a gift.

The end of the season always makes me feel a little sad.

1.
Tomorrow, we go to the Region Meet, and what I'm feeling today is very much what I've felt at the end of the last several seasons. I'm excited for my runners, looking forward to seeing them run well, a little anxious about their possibilities to advance, happy about the great progress they've made this season.

2.
But it's also a time of ending, and these feelings of joy and excitement are not tempered by but combined with a simultaneous feeling of sadness at the ending of things.

A few will move on: graduation will take some to another place, and some may decide that they no longer want to be runners. And many people will stay.

But I know that, maybe tomorrow night, maybe next weekend if we make it as far as the State Finals, things will be different.

3.
And mostly, along with all of that, I feel incredibly blessed and grateful to get to work with such a great group of young people.

4.

This song has nothing to do with the rest of this post, but it's too good not to share.

5.
I'm racing on Saturday morning. I've been sick this month, so I didn't get to do all the specific workouts that I had planned, but the good news is that I'm feeling better.

Here we are now. Entertain us.

1.
I mentioned earlier that I've been reading Kafka's "In the Penal Colony" with most of my classes this week. What I didn't tell you earlier is that on Tuesday, in two of my classes, there were so many students who hadn't completed the reading that we couldn't have a meaningful discussion.

2.
Which brings us to yesterday. Many of the students who hadn't read on Tuesday had read the story by Wednesday, even if they admitted to having difficulty understanding it. But when I asked one student about the story, he told me that he hadn't read. "At least he's being honest," another student was quick to remark, as if honesty somehow excuses bad behavior.

3.
Another student compared reading "In the Penal Colony" to reading Titus Andronicus, which we read earlier in the year. With Titus, he said, at first he thought it would be boring, but then he found it entertaining after he started reading. When he tried to read "In the Penal Colony," he said, it never entertained him.

4.
Much to my chagrin, several students agreed with this assessment.

5.
As if the purpose of education were to entertain.

6.

Kurt Cobain got this right, if nothing else.

7.
From Amusing Ourselves to Death:

You will find it said--Plato and Dewey emphasized this--that reason is best cultivated when it is rooted in robust emotional ground. You will even find some who say that learning is best facilitated by a loving and benign teacher. But no one has ever said or implied that significant learning is effectively, durably and truthfully achieved when education is entertainment (146).

Neil Postman got it right, too.