The Rest of the Story

On Friday morning, Matt was in a classroom, so I took over the morning pledge.  During the moment of silence, you may have noticed the ticking of the clock that hangs on my office wall.  Several students did, and during the passing period joked with me about it and asked what made the noise.

Paul Harvey, a fixture on the radio of my youth and longtime newsman, had a distinctive staccato presentation.  His radio program I remember most was called “The Rest of the Story.”  My guess is that if you ever heard his show, you would remember him as well.  What follows is the rest of the story about the strange ticking noise coming from my office.

As you can see, in a total juxtaposition of eras, I have an old hand-wind Regulator clock on my wall just to the right of the computer screen.  As I’m writing these words, I catch the movement of the pendulum out of the corner of my eye and hear the ticking of its inner workings when I stop to listen.  If I don’t pause intentionally to listen, the passing of time still ticks away, but it does so outside of my conscious hearing.  

This clock comes with a key, and on Monday mornings, like clockwork—sorry, I couldn’t help myself—I wind both the main spring and the chimes.  At five minutes before the hour, some internal mechanism trips with a clunking noise that only those in my office can hear, but people walking by at the top of the hour can hear its chimes mark the passing of another sixty minutes. 

From Free_Picture.co

This clock is significant in my life, and it has a long and varied history in educational settings.  In the late 60s or early 70s, my parents took a trip north using byways more than highways.  They wandered through the Badlands of South Dakota and on up into North Dakota.  Even with the Wall Drug billboards, the old Burma Shave signs, and the stark beauty of the region, their drive through the Dakotas became monotonous.  So when they came upon a country auction in the middle of nowhere, they pulled over to see what they could see.

The auction was taking place at a recently closed one-room schoolhouse that had reached the end of its usefulness to the local farm community.  As we can relate so well in Fishers, time moves on and bigger and newer will inevitably replace rural traditions. 

In the midst of the items being auctioned that day, was the Regulator that hangs in my office.  My dad placed the highest bid, took the clock to our home in Kansas, and had it repaired by a local jeweler.  In my junior high and high school years this clock hung in our living room.  In the 80s, it moved with my parents to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and then sat in storage for the years they lived in Belfast, Northern Ireland.  Eventually, they moved from Northern Ireland to Northern Indiana, taking the clock with them.

When I left the classroom and first became a high school administrator, my parents let me return the clock to its roots in a very different schoolhouse from that of its origins.  For over a decade it hung in my office at Goshen High School, and it was one of the first items I put up at Hamilton Southeastern.  Here it will stay until it is time for both of us to move on. 

I tell you this story because of my hallway conversation with students Friday morning and because of a quiet moment in my office earlier in the week.  Both events started me thinking about the clock, about education, and about the passing of time. 

Last week felt like an especially busy one, both in school and after school.  I was transitioning between tasks and trying desperately to check more items off my To Do list.  I have found that at times it pays to do less before doing more, so I stopped and sat and did nothing for at least a minute, with only the ticking of the clock and its faint echoes disturbing the silence of my office.  During this time, I glanced up to check the time and found myself looking closely at the old Regulator. 

From Free_Pictures.co

I saw again the dings in the wood, the fading gold paint on the glass, and the slightly yellowed face with the bold Roman numerals. I couldn’t help but wonder about who bought the clock originally and placed it on the walls of the schoolhouse in North Dakota, perhaps as many as a hundred years ago.  Who were the kids who sat in the one-room school?  What did they think, do, and become?  How did what they learned play out in their lives and the lives of their children?  Those students and their teachers all had hopes and dreams, and I wondered about where those might have taken them.  Perhaps their children or grandchildren or great grandchildren live around us or even walk the halls of Hamilton Southeastern.  We all know of stranger coincidences than that.

Hamilton Southeastern is very different than a one-room schoolhouse in North Dakota.  Much has changed, yet much stays the same.  We do our best to prepare students for what is to come, but the reality is that we have no idea what our world will look like a hundred years from now, fifty years from now, or even twenty years from now. This was certainly the case for those students in North Dakota as well.  Could those children who listened to my clock tick off the passing seconds long ago possibly have imagined a school like Hamilton Southeastern or the world in which we live?  And yet here we are, living in this world and educating the next generation.

So today, HSE, I am feeling a bit nostalgic and a bit optimistic.  The clock that you hear during announcements has seen lots of changes in the world of education.  Time is passing, but the results of our efforts and those of educators who came before us endure.  When you hear the ticking of the Regulator over the intercom, perhaps you, like me, will find comfort from the sound of the past and hold tight to the conviction that we are sending echoes of hope into the future. 

From The Atlantic

Paul Harvey, pictured above, once said, “In times like these, it helps to remember that there have always been times like these.”  And then I’m sure he signed off, as always, by saying, “And now you know the rest of the story.  This is Paul Harvey…. Good day!”

I agree with Mr. Harvey.  It is a good day…to be a Royal.  

Phil