Laying Brick

A number of years ago, while flipping around a rental car radio in the rural Midwest, I accidentally landed on a Christian radio station where the speaker was talking about parenting. She compared being a parent to building a cathedral. I  caught a short snippet and didn't think much about it at the time. But several weeks later, I was talking to the Mama of one of my students, and the metaphor made sense. I knew her son as a silly, cheeky, sharp, athletic middle schooler with a big, loving family and an irreverent sense of humor after my own heart. Too often, school knew him as a weak link, a sorry case, a struggling kid with a crazypants mom with advocates and lawyers and tutors always in tow. She was fretting, as Mamas tend to do, about everything that wasn't happening for her son in school.

I wanted to offer her encouragement, and the cathedral comparison rushed into my heart. "You have to take the long-range view," I told her. "School's job is to lay brick. Day by day, week by week. Sometimes a really great teacher will build a flying buttress or a feature wall. But your job is building the cathedral."