Life is pretty good here… we just need to remember it sometimes

I love the cliché of the double-edged sword. I know it is overused, but it so true, so often. As I was driving home this evening I was remembering so many conversations I had while at NETA last week. I realized that I come from a very rural community and that is not always looked upon favorably. Now don’t get me wrong, I love where I live. I love where I teach, and I love that we are different. However, I don’t love that others usually start sentences with “Really?” and then they usually get into a numbers thing. These number things I am talking about usually involve the number of students (only 150 in our K-12 district), or the number of miles I travel one way to get to school (which is 38), or the number of classes I teach while also being the technology coordinator (which is 4 in an 8 period day). Sometimes the “really” centers around conversations when they get interested and ask questions like: how many miles are you from a large town? (50 miles) How many miles is it to the nearest town with a grocery store? (15 miles) When was the last time you saw a live production/play that wasn’t done by the school students? (several years… well, more like 8… if we are being truthful)

Here’s the funny part… I answer all of those questions with a grin, a giggle and a shrug. What do you say when they get that funny look on their face that almost seems like pity? The pity makes me feel like we are inferior in some way. The smile is my lame attempt at covering up that feeling. This is when the double-edged sword comes in. What these people and these statistics don’t show is that small numbers are great. We have a low, almost non-existent drop out rate. Our ration of computers to students is 1:1. Our ratio of teachers to students is 1:15. Our number of divorced families is below 30%. The number of crimes committed in our town in the last month involving teenagers is 0. The number of police officers who are needed to monitor our town is 0.5 (he is only part time). The number of students the teachers don’t know by name is 0 – and that includes most substitute teachers as well. The number of teachers teaching outside of their endorsed discipline. And those numbers are great!

I could go the other way as well, and show some really high numbers. Our average ACT score is over 19, and the number of students who go out for some kind of extracurricular sport or activity is 95%. The number kids who go to a higher education school following graduation is 90%. But the inferior lesson to be learned here is just this: we should be proud of living rurally. We live in the clean air. We can see stars at night, they are not hidden by smog or light pollution. We have plenty of room to move without hearing everything our neighbors are doing. We can hang our laundry on the line outside without fear of it being stolen, or of others seeing our “unders.” We can trust that our kids can ride their bikes around town without worries, and they can go to the grocery store for us and simply charge the bill to the family account. We can get an on-the-spot loan from the bank “just until payday” without filling out the paperwork. We can shop online – and get things cheaper. We can watch any movies or television shows online because we share wireless connections between homes. We can watch plays, borrow from libraries, take virtual museum tours, and find great ethnic recipes. We know ALL our neighbors and we don’t have to plan a block party to meet them, they just come to the fence or we go knock on their doors. We even have the skills to make friends of all shapes, sizes, genders, ethnicities, and locations. Life is pretty good here… we just need to remember it sometimes.