One of my favorite mornings of the year was always the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend. When my boys were little, we would go to the national cemetery in our area with their Cub Scout pack and walk the rows, placing hundreds upon hundreds of flags in front of the headstones.

One year, another dad, an enlisted Pararescue trooper, gathered the kids around at the end of our flag placement, huddled them up, and told them that in the military they always talk about how we each have two deaths. 

He said our first death occurs when our heart stops beating. 

Our second death, he told the kids, occurs when we stop telling stories about someone. 

Stories keep memory alive. They sustain someone’s spirit. They honor a life. Memorial Day was the national reminder to tell stories and preserve someone’s legacy.

Teaching, too, is an act of sustaining. It keeps something alive. 

We do this when we honor a mentor’s influence, share a poem we love, pass along an idea, carry forward a tradition, open up a new way of seeing, or keep alive something that might otherwise disappear.

We don’t just teach a curriculum. We teach the things that have come alive for us. We find what Liz Gilbert calls Big Magic by uncovering “the strange jewels deep within us all.” Teachers who understand this have classrooms that feel different. Their rooms are joyful, expansive, and a hell of a lot more interesting.

My first AP Summer Institute was at Molloy College in Farmingdale, New York. Larry Scanlon was my instructor. Sitting in that week-long workshop, I was filled with the same wild surmises that Keats describes in “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer.” Larry wasn’t just a skillful reader with a sonorous voice, he was a source of inspiration for the type of teacher I wanted to be. He knew his poetry. He asked big questions. He respected our voices and honored our presence. He saw us for where we were in our teaching journey and gently encouraged us to embrace what we could become. 

Each day in his workshop was a discovery, a first-time glimpse into the vastness of possibility. My first-day lesson, an excerpt from Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” was inspired by a technique I learned in his workshop. I adapted a technique he gave us for poetry, but suited it to my passions and my classroom. That lesson has been a part of my classroom for the past 20 years. I use it in my AP workshops to show to turn the CED skills into a rich learning experience. I have presented it at a Lunch and Learn series at College Board headquarters. It is in the book Susan Barber and I wrote, 100% Engagement. It is a thing I carry. 

I teach that lesson because it sustains the legacy of Larry Scanlon, who is still strumming his guitar in upstate New York, reading great poems, and raising hell every so often. Sustaining something doesn’t mean preserving it exactly as you received it. It means carrying it forward. In this way, good teaching doesn’t become a carbon copy. Good teaching finds a bit of inspiration somewhere and takes it back to the classroom. It does it in new terms, In this way, influence continues. It doesn’t end when the lesson ends. It travels. It lives on through the people it impacts. 

As he impacted me, I try to impact my students by perpetuating an idea I deeply believe – that seniors may be the old people in the building, but the year doesn’t have to be a forced march to graduation. “Some work of noble note may yet be done.” They, like Odysseus, can gather the people that matter most, push off from the docks, and strive, seek find, and not yield. I want my seniors to believe that their story isn’t over simply because the school year is ending.

We carry so many things into our classroom that never appear in the curriculum. Basketball isn’t just a sport that I coach. It influences how I move through the world. At a young age, it gave me an identity when I was struggling to figure out who I was. It enabled me to attend a college that was beyond my reach. It allowed me to travel the country. It fostered a responsibility to pay it forward by and teach the game to a younger generation. I bring that spirit into the classroom each March with my Poetry March Madness unit. I merge my passion for basketball with a love for poetry. 32 poems compete head-to-head in an NCAA-style bracket to determine which one they love most. Students feel that love. It becomes contagious. They get emotionally attached to some of the poems and are visibly thrilled when they advance or distraught when they lose. 

If you look across the lessons I’ve written about over the years, you’ll find the same impulse. My September 11th lesson is a love story. It sustains the story of when my wife and I first fell in love. Pride and Prejudice gives my students a different literary perspective than the male-dominated authors and storylines they have encountered for years. The Romantic poets speak to us today. As they tried to refocus the eye on beauty in a world that was making rapid advances in science and technology, we feel this need now as well. An old way of seeing remains relevant today.

This is the magic that sustains me. These are the stories I want to perpetuate. 

Every Memorial Day, I am reminded that this is what it means to sustain something. The spirit of the day is carried into the following weekend. The Cub Scouts return to the cemetery to pick up the flags they placed. Once the flags are gone, the idea remains: memory lives on. 

This is true in the classroom, as well. Each time we place a poem, a story, or an idea in front of our students, it is one of those flags. It keeps something alive. But eventually, the bell rings. The lesson has to end. But our students are the ones who will carry it forward.

This makes me wonder: what are you keeping alive? Liz Gilbert asks whether we have the courage to bring forth the treasures hidden within us. I think teachers answer that question every time they bring something they love into a classroom and invite someone else to love it, too.

I want to know the treasures hidden within you. I want to hear from you. I want to know your stories. 

It’s not hard to find me. Many of you have my email or know where to find me on social media. Drop me a note. Write me a letter. Spellbind me with your magic. Share the things you carry into the classroom. Speak your story. Tell me what you keep alive.