Small Streams
“I know you don’t believe me, but your class really was my favorite class I’ve taken all year. If you make a fishing EBC next year (which I don’t think anyone will sign up for) I’ll join you and you can teach me the slightly boring art of fishing… I also searched up Georgia, and it isn’t as yeehaw as I thought which is sad, but that’s okay because it’s still more yeehaw than Seattle” -Emma, 9th grade
“The importance of small and very small streams to the maintenance of regional sea run cutthroat populations cannot be overemphasized. Small streams are the backbone spawning and rearing habitat for all regional populations of sea run cutthroat trout” (Stoll, 2017, p. 28)
My move to Washington and starting my teaching role at EPS also coincides with my introduction to another great passion of mine: fly fishing. Along with the storied waters of the Skagit, the Stillaguamish, and the almost mythological lore of Steelhead fishing on the Olympic Peninsula, Washington is home to another completely unique and enticing fishery—the Puget Sound. For the fly angler, the beaches of the Puget sound offer thousands of miles of shoreline, a sprawling expanse of tidal areas, cobbled, strewn with oysters, and otherwise animated by an entire ecosystem of marine life.
At their best, these beaches provide a secluded, lesser-known fishery where an angler might wade in solitude, searching for the elusive, wild coastal cutthroat trout. Unlike their more esteemed and prestigious cousin, the rainbow trout, coastal trout move mysteriously between freshwater rivers and streams and the saltwater shores of the sound. Even more, they wander from beach to beach depending on tidal movement or migrating bait. One morning, one beach might reveal a flurry of fish activity, feeding, boiling, slashing at bait on the surface where the next morning turns utterly silent, a fishless void.
Trying to decipher the maddening variability of these wild fish and their ever-changing habitats, with over 2,500 miles of shore and endless possibilities for locating fish feels a bit like trying to drink from a firehouse. Now, in my third season of chasing these incredible fish, I have come to a system for narrowing my search, a strategy to make manageable the impossible expanse of habitation—small and very small streams.
As noted in the epigraph to this section by biologist and lifelong steward of the cutthroat trout, Richard Stoll, the streams where cutthroat spawn, sometimes no more than tiny blue lines on a map, something you step over in a single stride, create ideal holding water and a likely starting place for finding fish. After endless days of frustrating and fruitless searching, with this deeper understanding of the species, their tendencies, their food sources, and their relationships within larger estuarian ecosystems, I find fish much more regularly.
As I look back at the breadth of my portfolio, the vastness of inquiries I have posed about myself, the classroom, students, our school, and society more broadly, I find a useful metaphor in that majestic fjord of the Puget Sound, ancient and deep. And so this is where I want to conclude, the thought to carry with me into the summer and looking ahead to next year—the small and very small streams of my teaching practice. That is, I don’t want to cast across every mile of shoreline, but to focus carefully and consistently in those most productive, most likely waters, to learn them well, across seasons—through the shorter tidal swings of winter, to those first frenzies of the chum fry hatch in spring.
The first small stream of practice that most occurs to me now is relationships, specifically the relational and communal quality of the classroom, those intertidal areas where all that moves comes into dynamic interaction. Viewing the classroom as an ecosystem also reminds me of my position as one among many, in humility and interdependence. Amid the various upheavals of a teaching career—shifting classes, curriculum decisions, or the advent of new technologies—the core of teaching, connecting to young people in order to nurture in them a love of learning, an autonomy of being, and a sense of caring for the world—remains.
After my relationships to students and making primary my role as an adult in their lives who wants to invest in their learning and success, I think about my relationship to practice, to the literature classroom, and the magic of what has always captivated me about language, and writing, and stories. In the increasingly administrative character of the school year, weeks ballooning continually with meetings, I want to protect a space (sphere) for poetics and wonder, to remain ever excited for the content that I teach. If I can not control the forces that threaten to squeeze out the spaces for creativity, I can endeavor preserve my inner life, to walk carefully along the shores of practice.
I am also aware of my relationship to place, my position within the larger organism of the professional community, and I think of how much time and commitment it takes to know a place well and I am reminded of the value in returning to the same place and continually trying to see it anew with the pull of changing tides. Here, rather than constantly searching for a quick fix, easy solutions, or the promise of better waters further down the shore, I am reminded of the value of patient commitment and careful observation. I am guided by the ambition to work the productive waters of practice carefully, diligently, and attentively.
At the same time, what makes coastal trout exciting is their constant movement and migration. Alas, as with any artful endeavor, the classroom and professional development require a willingness to slow down and attend deeply to an area of focus. At the same time, a vital art must take risks, explore new places or experiment with the unexpected. Here I find a useful reciprocity between the structures of method and the spontaneity of intuition or inspiration.
When I first introduced the seasonality of the cutthroat, I noted their hyper attention in March and April to the salmon fry. During these months, you can see schools of fry all along the nearshore, punctuated every so often by a ravenous fish. Common sense dictates that a baitfish imitation, closely resembling these schools, might most entice a strike and often it does. But just the other day, amid schools of bait swarming in every direction, fish refused my fly for hours. At last, in pure madness, I tied on something completely opposite to convention and common sense and landed two fish in five minutes.
And so, surprise, novelty, and risk – anything to break the monotony—are equally useful strategies that I employ alongside the small streams approach to my teaching. In my short time at EPS, I have taught eight different literature preps (sometimes vastly different versions of those courses between years) and four independent studies. In those classes, I have designed dozens of major assessments with incredible variety and complexity to give students a wide range of options to approach material and demonstrate their learning.
Next trimester, I teach three additional new preps, all of which will require the study and development of new course materials. The sheer expanse of reading, preparation, and course design that I undertake trimester to trimester and year to year is baffling. The output of labor and resource simply staggers. Who else, but a half-mad angler, casting against 10 mph winds, trudging along oyster beds and cobbled shores might sustain such a frenzied pace?
When I think of the complexity of teaching in the English discipline, I am reminded of the writing corner in my apartment which has evolved into a kind of Frankenstein. My bookshelf overflows with dizzy collections, volumes teetering atop one another, spilling onto my desk, in a nebula of ideas and possibilities. Now, the tendrils of my book collection compete with another body of materials, my fly-tying vise and the accompanying tinsels, threads, marabou, squirrel tail, feathers and furs of almost any shape, color and variety. Naturally, I have come to see this area as a sort of laboratory. After I tie a new fly, the excess materials gather in a nearby waste bin, glittering and shimmering in a gaudy bundle. In these strange bedfellows of material, the excess, the leftover, the detritus, captures for me the extent of iteration, the trimming away, sifting through, and density of design.
Alas, both teaching and tying, require an infinite variety of possibilities—no two versions exactly the same. What happens if we tie in a poem here with a bit of Jungian theory over here, a flash of pink atop some pearl braid for the body, dumbbell eyes—whip finish.
After that, even the most immaculate fly, a perfect arrangement of feathers, undulating delicately behind the hook shank, tinged with just the right amount of flash, an irresistible amalgamation of invention and inspiration, perched nobly in the vice, still must be fished. It doesn’t matter how spectacular a fly looks in the vise or in your box—the only way to test it is to see how it swims, what the materials do in the water, how they catch the light, how they contrast against the gray and beige and green of rocks, shells, and eel grass.
Earlier this year, a student, understandably puzzled by this endless rumination of angling, asked, in a way—what’s all this about anyways? I directed them to a passage I recently read because it seemed mostly true and contained some notes of headiness and eloquence, which is always good for finding zingers:
I fish mainly because I love the environs where trout are found: the woods; and further because I happen to dislike the environs where crowds of men are found: large cities; but if, heaven forbid, there were no trout and men were everywhere few, I would still doubtless prowl the woods and streams because it is there and only there that I really feel at home (Traver, x.).
As long as I can remember, I too have sought environs, wooded and streamed, not always for trout but always to feel at home. From summers in the cool, greenish waters of Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin to the rope swings at Vickery Creek and the Chattahoochee. From the woods behind our house, where we built forts and waged wars to the rugged Northwoods and the waters of the mighty smallmouth bass.
In the life of the mind, likewise, I am drawn to the wooded, overgrown, and wild—driven by the same breath-catch of discovery, bewilderment. During my secondary school experience, which felt at times barren and empty, I found my small streams in literature and writing, the creative expressions of the spirit. Here I find them still in my life and in my teaching.
Throughout the preceding portfolio, I hope I have illustrated or clarified the wellspring and streams that inform, nurture, and flow into my classrooms and my life. Just as crowds of men continue to impact the precious streams that feed the Puget Sound, sometimes my own streams feel equally precarious. In my commitments to sustainability and growth, I might measure all against this principle: what flows and nourishes and where and how to tend the gentle murmur.
