If you are a teacher preparing a classroom, your hands are full of tools: busy moving books and desks, labeling folders, decorating bulletin boards, perhaps organizing your laptop computer. At any rate, arranging the things

you will need for the task of teaching and learning that will soon commence. And your thoughts are also preoccupied with the intellectual tools you’ll use in the process. And then there are those August “Teacher Dreams” to contend with.

At this moment of complex anticipatory delight and tension, I’ve always loved the lesson in a poem by Gary Snyder. It grows in resonance for me each year that I prepared for school, as I come to understand it more completely.

In “Axe Handles,” Snyder describes a moment of apprenticeship. He is teaching his boy to throw a hatchet and make it stick into a tree stump. The boy remembers that they have a hatchet-head missing a handle in their shop, and he fetches it, wanting it for his very own tool.

There is a broken axe handle which will suffice, and the pair proceed to the wood block to fashion the new hatchet handle with the help of the old axe handle. Form follows function: The old handle will both model and make the new one. And then, for Snyder, the father, the poet, words from a wordsmith come to mind – a sentence from Ezra Pound: When making an axe handle the pattern is not far off.

Pound was an axe,

Chen was an axe, I am an axe

And my son a handle, soon

To be shaping again, model

And tool, craft of culture,

How we go on.

How does a poem about father and son fixing an axe, poet mentoring poet, father shaping son, relate to a new school year; teachers preparing for students?

For one thing, in this era of multi-media avenues to information and communication, I’m glad to be reminded of the hand tool – a Stone Age one, at that. Furthermore, it eloquently and simply reinforces the notion that models of thought are the greatest tools we employ with the young learners in our midst. “It’s about” thinking, after all – whether it’s digital code or agrarian implements or long division. And the simpler functions of thought have not become less, but rather more, important: to accurately name things and ideas and actions; to say “yes” and “no”; “good,” “not-so-good,” “bad”; to make judgments that protect us, advance us, inspire us. To know who we are – and who we are not.

And most of all, to know where our ideas come from.

For me, the lesson in Snyder’s poem is how easily one can forget the ancient model at hand. In our own education, in our own prior teaching; in the education and teaching of our colleagues; we have models for all that we hope to do this year. We are never cut off from the wisdom, lore and past success that enable us to make “axe handles” with straight, strong grain that will survive rugged use and even misaimed blows; the sure, individual grip for each user’s hand; and the beauty and elegance of any form which follows function.

Teaching is brave, strong, enduring work, and more significant to the future of our culture than the advent of the next big thing out of Silicon Valley or reality television shows. If we look to the model of good tools, we are well-equipped to be new as well as familiar, accustomed and unaccustomed, innovative and traditional in ways that are exactly right for each child we welcome through the school doors.

For all of us in this partnership, may the future months of moments cleave unto this wise purpose. Good tools are always at hand.

Todd R. Nelson writes the “Learning Curve” column for the Maine Association of Middle Level Educators. He lives in Castine.