Classrooms without walls

Highsmith, Carol M, photographer. Park bench for resting along a path through the Polk County portion of Big Thicket National Preserve, a U.S. Park Service area set aside to protect plants and wildlife in the swampy Big Thicket, a heavily forested corner of Southeast Texas. United States Polk County Texas, 2014. -03-28. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2015630009/.

We all learned lessons from textbooks in the classroom as we grew up.

Picture the classroom you are most accustomed to . . .

Those small desks with the drawer for books and supplies.

The teacher at the front, leading the lessons for the day.

Chalkboards for the teacher wanted to write out for the class.

The bulletin boards the classroom.

All within the walls of the school building.

Now picture a different classroom . . . one without walls

Those desks could be the chair at the barbershop, a park bench, backyard swing. Those chalkboards and bulletin boards could be the lake on an early morning or the sun setting in the backyard on a summer evening. That teacher would be . . . the silver-haired wise men and women that walk among us – grandparents.

You see, grandparents represent a generational wisdom that isn’t taught in any conventional classroom. It’s an education that offers no diploma, no degree . . . just a lifetime of enriching life lessons. The world around them is their classroom and life is their curriculum.

Our grandparents and great-grandparents offer a perspective on life that we won’t be able to sure for decades to come. They’ve gone through the life stages we haven’t seen yet and have had the opportunity to reflect on those memories. So it’s no surprise that some of the best life lessons come from them.

The best “field trip” in this educational experience: dinner at grandma’s. As you sit and digest a home-cooked meal, you get that “grandma knowledge”. I can remember the simple life lessons and stories from my great-grandmother, as she rocked in her rocking chair, making sure we didn’t leave anything on our plate and shared stories (whether I’d heard them once or 20 times . . . didn’t matter . . . it was always like hearing them for the first time). The simple sayings, just a few words that didn’t seem like much at the time, but now speak volumes. One of my great-grandmother’s favorite sayings was “Right is right, and it never wronged nobody”. So true.

I can still remember my great-grandmother telling me what it was like when "the boys came home from the war", World War 1, that is. She was a little girl then, playing on the playground at school when word came out that some of the men were coming home on the train. She told me stories about the fevers and sickness that would hit the town hard, when she, as a young woman, would go around helping to tend to the sick. She also spoke about what it was like when boys and girls would begin working at a much younger age than what we know today, because that's what families had to do.

So many "lessons". My great-grandmother has long since left us (not in spirit, of course), but the memories of those stories remain.

The good thing is that we can stop now and think about the lessons our grandparents were trying to teach us. We can take the time to appreciate what they were saying when we had them with us.

Life runs by you in a hurry. Timeout can’t be stopped, and tomorrow isn’t guaranteed. But we can and should slow down to enjoy the present. So many times, my grandparents would smile and shake their heads at some of the things that worried the younger generations. They knew. We were (and still are) trying to learn. We worry too much and that’s one reason we struggle with the lessons our grandparents passed on to us.

You’ll live ‘til you die, and you can’t beat that

That’s something my great-grandmother said quite often. Can’t say that I got that at all as a kid, but it makes more sense now. If you still have your grandparents or great-grand parents around, don't waste the time you have.

We don’t know how long we have and our tomorrow’s aren’t guaranteed. I believe that’s what our grandparents tried to teach us. Make the most of what you have today. It might not be here tomorrow. Realize what you have been blessed with in the present. Spend less time worrying about what might go wrong in the future.

None of this will ever be included in any textbook. We need to keep these lessons in our hearts and minds to continue the teaching of the next generation and beyond. It’s school that’s in session year-round, every year. Let’s enjoy every moment in class.