Chalkboard Lessons
June 5th, 2009This piece, written by First Churches member and trustee Bill Childs, was published in the Daily Hampshire Gazette in their Hampshire Life section.
We had a chalkboard in our dining room.
It took awhile for me to realize that this was unusual. Even after going to lots of other kids’ houses, it still seemed fairly ordinary, until someone (no doubt someone chalkboard-deprived) asked me about it. Evidently not every family had dinner conversations that regularly — frequently — required charts or drawings to explain. We did, and so there was a big green chalkboard dominating one wall of the dining room at 1504 Harris Drive in Bartlesville, Oklahoma.
I’ve been thinking about that chalkboard a lot the last couple of days. I’m writing this on Friday, May 29. On Wednesday morning, I was in my office at the law school, preparing for the move to the deans’ suite for my new job. Along with packing boxes of books and decorations and toys, I took the chalkboard off the wall.
The chalkboard made the move with the family from Oklahoma to Minnesota back in 1983, but there was no appropriate wall for it, so it lived in the basement. I took it with me to college, and then it was with me in law school, and it was on my wall through my time in practice in D.C., and it’s been on the wall of my office at the law school since I started there in 2004.
I usually use the chalkboard-in-the-dining-room concept for laughs. But as I took it off the wall of my office and erased it — ideas for articles, explanations of torts doctrine from office hours, my kids’ doodles, and so on — I thought, just for a bit, about how the oddity of a chalkboard in the dining room had affected me. Not that I think it is exclusively responsible for, well, anything in my life except for some chalk dust on my clothes, but it is indicative of how we were raised: to ask questions, to learn, to challenge, to always — always — think.
On Wednesday afternoon, not long after coming home from the office and taking the kids to their violin lessons, I got a call from my mom, telling me that my dad has pancreatic cancer.
After a moment of shock, my reaction — and I expect the rest of the family’s — was to sit down and research pancreatic cancer. I (and I bet my siblings) found the Mayo Clinic’s site, we found the site about the chemo treatment that looked promising post-surgery (we don’t know as of this writing whether surgery will be an option), we probably all giggled, and then felt a little bad for giggling, at the name of the surgery (“The Whipple Procedure” — c’mon, you giggled a little too).
Back to the call, though. My mom told me the news and gave me a quick overview, then handed the phone to my dad.
After pleasantries and such and a brief acknowledgment of the diagnosis, he turned to what he was really wanting to talk about, which was not his prognosis — no, he wanted to talk about a global warming skeptic’s column that had been published by the local paper. As usual, he was going through multiple iterations of a response to the column’s silliness. We talked about how best to get his views out there, where the author had gone wrong in his assumptions and his thinking, and so on.
Always think, always challenge. That’s what the chalkboard was about, at least in part. (To be fair, we also used it for messages.) That’s what my father has taught his kids and grandkids, to the extent that I have a graph on my desk from my daughter and him testing the widespread (but, they showed, wrong) notion that hot water freezes faster than cold water.
And thinking and challenging is what we’ll be doing with whatever comes.
Bill Childs of Florence is a law professor at Western New England College (and a part-time DJ on WRSI, 93.9 The River).