If you’re anything like me, and your winter is proceeding anything like mine, the woodpile is a kind of barometer. Things are looking good. It’s been fairly warm, despite a few Arctic blasts. And then we hit the customary January thaw and one can begin to imagine that the woodpile will hold out for as long as it needs to.

There’s still February, I know. But the rate of draw-down of fuel is working hand in hand with time and temperature.

I like to think of the school year as being a bit like a woodpile. It started with 175 school days, stacked up tidily like so many cords of logs, to be drawn down and burned hand in hand with time and learning temperature. That’s right: Learning makes heat. As of this week, schools have burned through about half the pile. What I liked to call “Middle Day” will take place near the end of January, say, Jan. 28, right around lunchtime.

Perhaps you’ll feel the tipping as you “summit” and then shift over to the “western slope” of the school year. The educational watershed will then run toward the Pacific (summer), and gently descend to accomplishments and finales. The students will have fully inhabited, say, “fourth-graderness” and can start to anticipate the next year and impending “fifth-graderness.”

But learning burns at an unpredictable rate and temperature, like birch versus oak; green or seasoned. There’s actually more heat in the second half of this learning log pile. And you just never know when a smoldering coal is going to ignite. That’s a special kind of school day. Perhaps you can remember one in your own career – a day that made all the difference for every succeeding day, month or year. Such combustion just might have made you who you are.

Back to February. Yes, we can grow the pile by adding more days if we lose a little time to snow. It’s like the proverbial glass that’s half full … or half empty. Pouring in, or pouring out? Building up or drawing down? Or both, simultaneously.

OK, let’s just throw out the metaphor because it’s so confining. We’re always adding up and counting down something. But there are so many other variables at work beside time and wood supply! Like the path we’re taking on the next part of the hike. Are you seeing those planets in the morning sky? Orion? That humongous moon in January? Are you starting to envision lupine in the field? Bird migration? Bears awakening? Raspberries and blueberries to pick and bake with? Open-water fishing! Anticipation is its own kind of fuel and combustion.

 

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