On being nice.

Another thing that I miss about Corky that I realized today was that she was my only single friend at work. Sunny, Henrietta and I stayed late again, right up until lockdown time, and they both came to my room which was congenial, especially since I usually feel like I am the only psycho who somehow didn't manage to get it all done on my preps and therefore has to spend five extra hours there on a Friday.

But anyway, quittin time eventually came, and I realized with immediacy that all my besties at work were going home to a live-in significant other who was eagerly awaiting their arrival and to celebrate the successful completion of the first full week of school. And I... wasn't. An uncomfortable knot formed in the pit of my stomach knowing I was headed home to a probably empty apartment. I like being around people, and it's especially hard to get used to being alone after spending a whole summer completely surrounded by friends and family.

Luckily, Corky hasn't left the continent yet, and in fact she's still right here in the neighborhood, so we are going to be each other's significant others tonight and I will go to her house and we will sit on the couch and drink beer and watch a movie, which is exactly what I would've wanted to do anyway, just not by myself.

You'd think by now I wouldn't be working working 11- and 12-hour days anymore, or at least not twice in a row... and the truth is I didn't *have* to stay and level all those books to get them out of the closet, nothing terrible would've happened if I hadn't. But I think I might've gotten used to working in that this way, the all-six-cylinders, running on empty, sprinting towards the finish line way. Everything always felt so close to the brink of collapse, so dire, such a monumental and colossal mound of work... it's hard for me to feel okay about just walking out at the end of the school day. I'd feel like I was shooting myself in the foot and that I would regret it later. But at the same time, one of my personal goals is to try and balance my personal life with my working life... up until now, my personal life was kind of incidental. It pretty much consisted of whatever I could squeeze in between meltdowns and deadlines and crises of faith. Now, having a personal life is totally manageable and conceivable, but I think I may have kind of forgotten how to do it...

But my reward for the day was reading another student's "letter to my future self," in which I was described as "really, really, really nice." And at first I almost took affront, since everyone always threatens new teachers by telling them that being too "nice" will most certainly spell their ultimate destruction and doom.

But then I thought, you know what? I am pretty nice. And acting like a grinch makes me feel like a grinch, and I don't like that. So I'd rather take my chances.

And I have more to say on the subject of coo-coo town, letting it all hang out, and embracing the chaos, but now I feel I should keep that promise to myself about trying to maintain a healthy personal life. So here I go.

The Perks of Paying it Forward

Another solid day. No mistakes.

We had recess for the first time -- for the kids who have spent their educational careers at PS OO, for the first time in their lives! The ear to ear grin on N--'s face pretty much summed it up as she went skipping by in her navy blue uniform dress.

And I am reaping the benefits of having befriended the (young, dedicated and very hip) school librarian last year, because I am borrowing her smartboard projector while she doesn't need it as I wait for my replacement bulb to come in. I could hardly remember how to teach the old-fashioned way, so I had to be resourceful! The teaching fellows talks about "building alliances" with the people in your school, and I think that's a good way to think of it... not so much a "you scratch my back i'll scratch yours" scenario, but like an entire invisible economy built on paying it forward -- lending a hand when you've got one to spare in return for the many kind ways that you have been helped by others in the past. The teachers at P.S. OO really do look out for each other.

So I'm trying to pay forward a bit of what I received from Corky last year by trying to make sure that Sunny does not get totally overwhelmed or left in the dust... and, I reiterate, she is in excellent shape compared to other new teachers, and a very bright and a very hard worker, so it's actually easy, and she's lovely, so it's fun, too.

I went to Pequena with Sunny after work to do a bit of planning for next week and the coming month over a beer and some yuca fries, and just as we were settling in and I was beginning to gesticulate wildly and start speaking very intensely about the phases of the writing process, I glanced outside and the air was literally white and blowing sideways full of leaves and debris, gale force gusts like I have never seen or experienced before...

We were in the eye of a hurricane in the center of Queens! And enormous chunks of trees fell off, and one of them fell onto the tracks of the 7 train! Men in white trucks with flashing lights came with chainsaws... no train, no buses, more or less gridlock on Roosevelt Avenue... Sandra and I walked about 30 blocks to her house, where I borrowed her bike and rode home (in my dress, in the rain).

But as we walked we talked about how that segment of Roosevelt reminded us of Latin America or of some developing country, and how nice and convenient it was to live in a place where, in general, the trains and buses do run on time, and regularly. And even despite a hurricane, I was thinking that coming home from grad school it would still be later, and I would feel worse.

After all that, I can't help thinking, just the job? That's it? Is that all? No more?

And even after all this, after a 12-hour workday, I felt fine. Like, unflappable. I guess the more flaps you're in, the less they get to you. People are adaptable. And on the bridge on my way home, with wet hair plastered to my forehead, I still even felt happy as I gazed over at the Manahattan skyline, the Empire State Building all lit up.

Winning.

So much!

Worked late today, but we got a memo letting us know of the new policy that all the doors will be locked at 7pm, so at least that will reign in the most severe of the workaholics. What will Ronnie do, she practically sleeps in her office!

The little darling P-- was (again, this time for real) removed from my class, by virtue of many bureaucratic forces at work. They recounted and re-shuffled, and the union says 32 heads is the max, and she was the last one in, so she's now the first one out. And again, she was a total sweetheart about it, although I could already tell that she was getting used to me and the rest of the class. She's not moving far, though, only next door to Sandra's class, so we'll see her around, and I gave her a special flower pen to remember us by. I bet her first day was a little crazy, though, because Sandra's class had a sub so that she could attend the New Teacher Orientation all day. The information presented there is pretty vital, but it's tough to have someone brand new in your room before you have even gotten comfortable in it yourself.

I saw a poor little kindergartener who also had a substitute teacher today on his way to lunch who looked up at me (a stranger, but perhaps a friendly one?) forlornly as his eyes filled with tears and squeaked, "I want my mommy!" I rubbed his head and tried a distraction tactic, but that was about all I could do for him.

Other semi-crazy bureaucratic forces at work: Rumor has it they hired a new ESL push-in/pull-out teacher, possibly three.

The knife-twist, of course, is that at the end of last year the administration practically begged and grovelled at Henrietta's feet to take a classroom position, though she was hired as a push-in/pull-out teacher. They turned out their proverbial pockets, crying that no one new could possibly be hired and she was the only one who could save the day by taking over a third grade class. Henrietta was asked because she is a PHENOMENAL, hard-working push-in/pull-out teacher who gets good results. And Henreitta, ever so reluctantly, out of the kindness and generosity of her big heart, simply wanting what was best for the kids and probably also feeling like there was no way to say no, finally agreed.

So it was kind of demoralizing for her to see that, in fact, somewhere, they did manage to find enough change in the couch cushions to hire another teacher or possibly even three. It just feels a little dishonest, or a little lackadaisical that they managed to pull this miraculous 180 with their hiring crisis. She felt that it sends a pretty strong message that no one there is bending over backwards to accomodate her (very strong, very clear) professional preferences. In fact, they were pretty bluntly disregarded.

It also shows how undervalued ESL is a branch of teaching. See, they "put you in the classroom" because they trust you, because they know you will work hard and are competent and attempt to follow all the rules and try to give the kids a fair shot at learning. And I get it, I do... It makes sense to want to put your stronger teachers in the "spotlight" and keep the weaker, less experienced ones on the sidelines where I suppose the reasoning is, they will do less damage. It's not meant to be a punishment, but let's face it, it's just a lot more work. A lot.

And the truth is, it's a completely different skill set. Henrietta excelled at her work as an out-of-classroom teacher, everyone said so. Her assistant principal has wished out loud for more just like her. But being a "classroom teacher" is less of being and ESL teacher and way, way more of being a systems analyst/child psychologist/data monkey/one man circus show. So now she has to learn how to drive the circus train, and believe me I know how that feels...being trained to do one thing and then asked to do something completely different. Does that happen in other professions? Do you hire a waitress and then ask her to be a cook?

And just imagine, if all the teachers - in and out of classroom; sideline; spotlight; everywhere... imagine if EVERYONE did an outstanding job...what if being great at your job didn't actually stand out that much. Imagine if classroom and out-of-classroom teachers worked together instead of apart, as Henrietta was starting to do last year, and if every ESL teacher worked as hard has she did and came as prepared and was as in tune with the kids as she was... then I think maybe you'd start to see some things happening in schools.

So yeah. Henrietta is brave and strong and she will persevere, and I want to and will help her in any way I can, but the truth is, it's going to be brutal. I only wish I could do more for her...

As for me? I feel fantastic. Everything is going great, which is to say, nothing is really going wrong. In that age-old competition of teacher vs. students, not only have I been "winning" the days, I know the kids don't even stand a chance -- maybe they'll get an inning or two before the year is up, but the game is mine.

This year, now that most of the Smartboard lessons are already prepared, now that I actually know how to use the Smartboard, now that I have at least a vague idea of what the various math concepts are, now that I have saved all these materials -- spelling words and vocabulary and the "math word wall," and since I spent so much of last year eliminating parts of routines that totally do not work....

I feel... competent? I looked around the quiet room today as the kids were working diligently on letters to their future selves, classical music playing in the background, and I literally felt something like an adrenaline rush. Like, oh my God, oh my God, we're doing it! I'm doing it! I'm flying! Which was funny, because all I was doing was looking at a bunch of kids writing letters. But it was meaningful because I knew what a long hard road it was to get them there.

I got two amazing compliments today -- me and my "crew" eat lunch in my room now that I have inherited the mini-fridge and microwave from Corky. And he said that my room was so clean that it looked as if I hadn't even been teaching in it! Because I will tell you, a room with 32 kids in it does not stay clean for long unless there is some serious drill-sargeanting going on.

Also as I was alphabetizing the kids' baseline writing tests, I glanced down at one that fell out of the pile and I saw that J's story was about the first day of school, and meeting his new teacher Ms. D, and that he had been afraid that his teacher would be mean because he has had a mean teacher before, but actually she is not mean, she is fun and funny!

Did you hear that?? Fun and funny! Hell yeah. Making them laugh feels awesome but happens almost accidentally. I suppose after you get into that 10-year-old mindset it comes easily... farts and boogers and funny faces, that type of thing. Fish in a barrel.

This year, I feel no guilt or trepidation about abandoning the whole no-smiling-until Thanksgiving adage. It's just not me. I tell the kids I'm tough but I'm fair. And my sneaky plan is to insidiously cause them to love and respect me without even realizing it, and then they will be defenseless against me and bend to my will.

Also, I am playing a game with myself. The game is called Get that Paperwork Off My Desk and Onto Someone Else's As Fast As or Faster Than a Flaming Bag of Poo. The object of the game is to complete and hand in paperwork before it has the smallest speck of a chance to clutter up my desk and inner tranquility. That's the whole game.

I have won several rounds, wherein various school aides and other personal have come to me room to collect XY and Z form, and not only did I HAVE it, it was also COMPLETED, and not only that, I KNEW WHERE IT WAS!!!

And, all in all, the kids have been so quiet and well-behaved I've been wondering where their personalities are... it's like knock, knock? Hello? Anybody home? Emote something!

But I know they are just stunned, and I can already see some of them letting down their guard and letting some of their color show. Which is kind of exciting, like watching a plant bloom or unwrapping an oddly shaped present.

I know it's early. I know there's plenty of time for things to go South. I know I'm still in the three-week grace period of relatively good behavior before the kids let their real selves loose. But it just feels different this time. Like going up to bat and feeling like, ok, I'm not promising myself a home run, but I'm sure as hell not going to strike out this time.

Lumps of clay, 2010

Monday!

It makes me very happy to see the happy swarm of kids buzzing around the new playground equipment in front of the school like a colony of bees in a bustling hive.

It makes me a little annoyed and kinda creeped out when I get holla'd and whistled at by neighborhood men on my way to the train, knowing that I could very easily be teaching or have taught or one day teach their little nieces or nephews or their cousins' kids or maybe even their own children. But I'm sure they're not thinking about that.

***

I do get to teach Social Studies once a week, which is great. We started out by making passports to recognize them as citizens of 5-315, and discussed what it means to be a member of a community. My theme for the class (or at least, for the door) is Citizens of the World, so I have world maps displayed and the tables are named after the continents. (Last year they were NYC boros. Next year maybe endangered species? If I'm still around?)

As promised, starting out my (almost) fourth year of teaching, things are not quite so trying as they once seemed. (Praise be!) Having attempted to do various things in any number of extremely ineffectual, crazy-making, backwards ways, I am now able to pre-empt all of the various ways that definitely don't work, and just cut straight to a version that probably will work. That's all this "experience" really is -- knowing in advance all the different ways your plan is likely to go wrong, and choosing the least problematic variant. A hard-won prize, but invaluable.

Every tiny detail of "ritual and routine" whittles down the logjam of wasted time in a day... how many pencils to have out at a time; a system for sharpening pencils; a system for handing out and collecting papers; where to put collected papers; how to keep track of papers that have and have not been collected; what to do if they finish something before everyone else; what to do if something is forgotten in a backpack or at home or in the cafeteria or just disappears without a trace; a system for cleaning up after projects that involve scissors and/or glue; for organizing notebooks and workbooks and folders; for sitting down and lining up; when to check homework and how and how often. A system for hanging up backpacks and displaying work and sending kids to the bathroom, systems for arrival and dismissal. Systems for distributing shared materials. Systems for getting their attention and keeping it and letting go of it... Every mundane detail must be planned for and prescribed and streamlined. It's like being a puppeteer with 33 marionette lines that mustn't get crossed.

I think the teacher that figures out how to waste the least amount of time is the one who ultimately wins the race. Whichever race that is.

So my big reward after all this time, my 27-months-in-counting of blood, sweat and tears as an active-duty public school teacher is that things feel pretty...regular. Second day of school: a lot of shuffling around of people and desks and chairs and books and papers. But I am confident now that the dust will settle and we will take off at a good clip once we've established ourselves.

What I'd forgotten was how physically exhausting it is. I came home today and couldn't figure out why my muscles were aching... and then realized that I'd essentially been walking in slow but deliberate circles for 1o hours straight, zigzagging back and forth across the classroom and up and down the Escher-like staircases throughout the cavernous school.

Another thing that feels strange, after getting to know my kids last year so well, is how blank and anonymous the kids are at this point. They are still a little awed, perhaps. Afraid of making the wrong move, wanting so badly to get it right, and not to stand out too much. Still so little, compared to my remembered images of last year's graduating fifth graders, hulking over the desks they'd outgrown while I wasn't looking. This year's kids seem tiny and foreign, almost out of place. They don't know me yet, and I hardly know them. We're strangers still.

The skinny on M-- last year was that he was kind of a rebel without a cause, but I am sneakily trying to win him over with the old 'kill him with kindness' tack. Certain kids almost seem surprised when you make an effort to listen to them.

B-- is probably going to be a trip. He's new to the school, but very smart and loves Legos or rather, some kind of new-fangled, highly-technological version of Legos. Loves to touch things, prone to calling out. I guess in other worlds it would be called curiosity, and engagement with learning...

N-- is the daughter of one of our own ESL teachers, bubbly and outgoing, and slow at finishing things.

H-- is new to the country last year from Colombia. She seems withdrawn and reserved, I suspect she might be having a hard time following what's going around her. (She will flourish, by gum, I will it!)

A--, on the other hand, was also new last year, but slightly less recent, and is already acting as translator for H--, and volunteered to be table captain on the very first day. Quite brave!

And P-- also came in from another school and was the picture of calm, good-natured cheerfulness when she first had no desk on the first day since I hadn't been expecting her, then was taken to be put into another class (until admin realized that ALL the classes were full, not just mine, and gave her back to me). I was surprised how quickly I had taken ownership of her, and was glad to have her back.

So what if most of them are still amorphous, personality-less blobs to me.... they are now MY amorphous, personality-less blobs! Mine to mold and shape, mwahahahaha, and knowing what's happened every other year, it won't be long at all until they come to life.

Unity, not uniformity

So I wrote this last night, right before my computer died. Having left my charger in camp this summer, I have been experiencing some difficulty, well, keeping my computer charged. But anyway...

I went to an inter-faith rally yesterday in support of the mosque they want to build near ground zero (or perhaps, in opposition of the opposition) and was inspired in several ways. Of course the first and most obvious was the confluence of people of many different creeds coming together to support a cause whose voice echoes so many people's struggles in America, trying to find freedom -- the struggles (and triumphs) that I am reminded of daily by my students, in broader or narrower ways.

In the inspirational speeches, someone brought up JFK, and how before he was elected he was questioned about his Catholicism, (and then went on to be one of the most popular presidents ever) and how somewhere out there, maybe even in Queens, maybe even in PS OO, a little Mohammed or a little Fatima is waiting to grow up to be president. And maybe in 40 years, being Muslim will be as much of a non-issue as being a Catholic now is. And maybe we will have by then figured out how to deal with our natural predilection towards xenophobia, and realized that every new wave of immigrants, be they from Ireland or Italy or China or Mexico or Pakistan or Bangladesh or Ecuador, seems to undergo the same sort of hazing and mistrust from the Americans that were here first - (even though, of course, really very few of our families were here "first," and those that really were here were sent to Oklahoma by Andrew Jackson and his ilk.) And their scandalous new religions and ways of doing things are so shocking and controversial for a generation or two and then... we get over it.

The pithiest take-home message was "Unity, not uniformity." I spend so much time trying to teach the kids about tolerance, and, as the speakers today were saying, at least how to co-exist but at best how to embrace and welcome and be enriched and inspired by each others' existence. It bothers me that the opposite message is so easy to come by. That it is so easy to write off others as unwanted and not belonging, and that it is so easy not to distinguish between a violent, wrong-headed few among an entire group of peaceful, life-loving people.

Last spring I had an interesting conversation with one of my colleagues in grad school who is Muslim and has school-age children, wondering what she tells them about their "Western" teachers... I mean, I try to keep it professional, and take some pains not to dress like a ho. But I wear skirts without stockings, and tank tops when it's hot, and I certainly don't cover up my head or my hair, and I always wondered what the Muslim kids and their parents think of that. And my colleague explained that she tells her children, simply, "They have their way and we have ours."

Wouldn't it be nice if everyone could be okay with that?

hope v. heartbreak

There's this new advertising campaign around the city for the Red Cross, "Turn Heartbreak into Hope." At first I didn't totally understand what they meant, but I guess they are referring to all the disaster relief stuff they do.

As I was on my way to meet up with Henrietta to go to the teacher store, I got to thinking about this thing we call hope. What is it exactly?

It's a very human concept. A fundamental instinct of self-preservation. We believe in hope because to cease to believe in it would equal certain annihilation.

A cynic would say that hope is often delusion. Then again, I have also heard that nothing good has ever happened that didn't start with a dream.

Hope is not naive, but necessary. It is the beacon, the green light across the water, the improbable bloom in the darkened window sill.

If we can seek out and find just one particle of this hope, then we can keep going. Despite everything against us, we can keep going if we believe that one day, we could get it right. One day it might all be the way it was supposed to be.

Now I'm all paranoid that I've given you the wrong impression, starting the year off with a sad song and a crazy rant... I feel great. Uniformly, unequivocally happy! Already jumped in, no looking back. I think it's going to be a great year. I don't think, I know! Sandra is absolutely fantastic, light years ahead of where any other new teacher would be right now. Smart, organized, outgoing, enthusiastic and quickly becoming a friend as well as a colleague. I am her designated "buddy" but I would've been unofficially anyway because having a fifth grade team is so amazing. And this year is going to be amazing. I feel incredibly positive about it all. The field of education still has problems and it most likely always will. But bring it on, NYC public schools! Do your worst, because I am prepared to counter it with my best!

Try try again

First day back... It came and went. And that's huge.

Sure, I was sweating bullets. Sure, it was hectic. But again, I wasn't a maniac. I didn't feel as if my head were about to start spinning around exorcist-style. I didn't feel as if my mind was going to explode. I actually slept the night before, I even made it out to dismissal on time. The lack of that panicked franticness is another significant absence.

For the first time, I kinda knew what to expect on the first day. I knew I'd need space for their giant tri-fold, shoebox, poster-board summer projects. I knew the closets would have to be cleared to make space for the reams of paper and legal pads and pens. I knew enough to have name labels prepared, with some blanks for kids that register day-of or get shuffled around into my class. I knew enough to have over-planned, but to be flexible about what does or does not get done that day.

As always, it was a haze of collecting and distributing supplies and taking attendance and gazing out over a sea of brown faces, thirty-three of them at last count, that's one more than the legal limit. I wasn't especially differentiating among them, just kind of talking at them, narrating the minute-by-minute play-by-play of the school day. It's weird how quiet and wide-eyed they are on the first day. Scared, unsure. They don't have personalities yet. They will.

***

I never heard back about last year's test scores. A few kids had to go to summer school, so I guess they failed? To be honest, I don't really care. If there is one idea my parents instilled in me it's that grades don't matter. Learning matters. Education matters. Being secure in yourself and your attitude towards school matters. Being a good person and staying happy and healthy matters. But the grades themselves, they don't matter. They are air; ink on a page; pixels on a screen. Nothing more.

So you'll forgive me if I kind of tuned out when we did our annual review of all the cumulative test scores during the faculty conference. But one thing caught my attention, confirmed by the NY Times...

So apparently, according to the chancellor and his cronies, here in New York City the "bar" is "set too low." So the solution from the district's data monkeys, (whom I can't help imagining clicking away on their computers in their hermetically sealed air conditioned offices with no child around for miles and miles) is to make the grading scale tougher. Therefore a percentage of the students that last year were "on grade level" are now, with a wave of the magic data wand and the exact same answers on the page, "below grade level." And a percentage of schools that would have met their standards for No Child Left Behind all of a sudden, ummm, don't anymore. Sorry. Psych! You were doing fine, but now you're not.

Basically, the big solution, the big raising of the bar, is to mess with "the curve," manipulate the numbers... We need results? We need smarter kids? We need to make it look like we give a damn? Hear this, news media, look at us! We're adding "more topics" and making the test "less predictable!" See how TOUGH we're being? We're taking a stand in education!

It seems as if they are assuming that by making the tests harder the teachers will just start teaching better. Maybe they just weren't teaching hard enough. Maybe now they'll really kick it into overdrive and stop holding out on everybody.

And you know what? I bet scores will improve. Teachers will work their magic, they will train their students even more closely to the test and drill them on their testing strategies and sacrifice a little more art and a little more music and and a little more social studies time, and a few more of their hairs will turn from gray to white. And the kids will walk away with slightly higher scores, just as ill-equipped to function in the world as they always were. And the politicians will claim the credit for having "raised the bar" in education and increased test scores by such and such margin, and wouldn't we all just love to contribute to their campaign?

I can't help wondering if they realize how empty and hollow that type of change is. Dressing up like a pilot doesn't mean you know how to fly a plane. Holding a scalpel doesn't make you a surgeon. Scoring the tests tougher, making it harder... won't have any impact on what the students actually know. It won't make the kids smarter. It won't help them learn more. Because neither the test nor the score defines the student, they never have and they never will.

If politicians really wanted to raise the bar in education, I wouldn't have 33 kids in my class this year. (It's beens said, that's not teaching, that's crowd control.) The school would have money to buy new book baggies for the students. There would be enough special ed classes in the school to accommodate the demand for them. There would be enough money to hire the (government mandated!) correct amount of ESL teachers. Guidance counselors and reading and math and speech teachers wouldn't have their offices in broom closets. Assessments wouldn't happen in hallways and stairwells. Even the "old wing" would be able to turn on some AC when it gets above 95 degrees. There wouldn't be defenseless, under-trained, unprepared, bargain-bin novice teachers staring a classroom of trouble in the face all on their own, waiting to err and try try again. I can say that because I was one, and I shouldn't have been where I was.

So that's my rant, for now. The truth is, I'm proud of my school. We do what we can, sometimes it seems like more than that. It is trying to improve despite cards stacked against it. When the neighborhood kids show up for their constitutionally promised free and public education, we do not turn them away. We find them an extra chair and a desk somewhere, and we let them join the fray.

Oh My God, Charlie Darwin

Heard the song, had to wonder... did this guy ever teach public school?

"Set the sails I feel the winds a'stirring
Towards the bright horizon set the way
Cast your reckless dreams upon our Mayflower
Haven from the world and her decay

Who could heed the words of Charlie Darwin
Fighting for a system built to fail
Spooning water from the broken vessels
As far as I can see there is no land

Oh my God, the water's all around us
Oh my God, it's all around

Who could heed the words of Charlie Darwin
Lords of war just profit from decay
And trade the children's promise for the jingle
The way we trade our hard earned time for pay

Oh my God, the water's cold and shapeless
Oh my God, it's all around
Oh my God, life is cold and formless
Oh my God, it's all around"

A very important note, because Oscar got the wrong impression... The first day of school was great! The song doesn't represent my current state of mind, just the way that it has felt in the past. I just thought he said it eloquently. I feel great! Right now I am floating at the very top of my bucket full of holes.

The day before the first day of school.

Something I realized, or perhaps reconfirmed, from the reunion-like wedding I attended this weekend, is that people never stay the same, and yet they never really change.

The same is true of my commute this morning - a construction project here, a new storefront there, a fresh coat of smooth black pavement on Roosevelt Avenue... but mostly it was just very familiar: The sun in my eyes as I crossed the Greenpoint Avenue bridge, the bouncing through potholes on my aged bike, the restless intrusion of the of the 7 train clattering hurriedly above my head. And the parade of smells, city smells, smells you don't get from inside a car... the early morning cloying sweetness that drifts around the spice factory, like sticking your head in with the cookies in the oven; earthy produce from the corner stores; fresh coffee bakery smell; rancid garbage juice from the back of the garbage truck; spicy tamales from the re-purposed grocery-cum-tamale-cart; bus exhaust; a whiff of after-shave from the early shift waiting at the bus stop.

And back at school, the same cast of characters awaits, almost the same, yet not totally unchanged. Trixie, our vivacious payroll secretary, always ready with a smile and a vibrant animal print outfit... the cluster of ancient tenured "cluster teachers" populating the plush sofas of teachers' lounge...Good old Principal Peeves, talking up a snooze-worthy storm at the faculty conference about standards and percentage point improvements and test scores and data graphs... MoLo, my favorite administrator, who came trotting down the hallway calling after me the first time she spotted me this year and embraced me warmly and gushed about how excited she was about the school year... Ronnie, the literacy coach, dressed all in purple with purple eyeshadow and purple accessories as always, in accordance with her long-standing purple fetish...

All of these characters, more or less just as I left them two months ago. Of course, with the significant absence of Corky, plus the new addition of Sunny, Corky's replacement, whose credentials and capabilities I am more and more impressed with every day.

There are also some noticeable positive changes at school. The playgrounds are (finally) finished and their completion has transformed what was the pathetically barren tumbleweed asphalt schoolyard wasteland into a real playground, like for real children! With a gazebo, a jungle gym, brightly colored maps and patterns painted on the ground, vegetation, pachysandra, even a bike rack, and a coat of paint that makes the tall fence seem decidedly less prison-like. Plus the air conditioners are working again (for those of us lucky enough to have them) for the first time probably since February or so. And the best, most positive change? Drumroll please.........

RECESS!

One period per week per class... but still. Way way way more than nothing.

At the end of the year we do "focus groups" and Rosie and I spent some time making sure that our suggestions were fairly and adequately represented... and you know what? They listened. They listened! They ordered an extra book that we had asked for. They incorporated grammar instruction into the curriculum. They got us some recess. They are getting teachers (including yours truly!) involved in leading Professional Development... if they keep making changes like this, they're going to end up making me want to stay at this school, or in teaching!

And you know what I think is the most significant difference? The change I notice in myself! Somehow, surprisingly, shockingly, I don't feel nervous, really at all. Excited, sure. But not panicked. And today was busy, of course, but not frantic. And what I really really enjoyed was helping Sunny and Henrietta get their classrooms ready for the first time, and trying to walk them through the first day because this time, I actually know what that first day will look like and feel like! It feels great not to be the most clueless person on the floor anymore, to have at least some of the answers and be able to share them, to offer my opinion and have it be listened to. What a great feeling! And to know what MUST be done for tomorrow, and what can continue to wait and be done on one of the other 179 days of school, or which things might end up being pipe dreams, or which things I should just wait and see about...

Now the other big change will be training myself to go to sleep on time and wake up early. But again, without grad school in the picture... just doesn't seem that hard! None of it, as impossible as it once was, seems quite so out of reach.

"Maybe this time I'll be bulletproof..."

So I'm actually kind of excited about starting the school year? (What a geek!)

I've spent this week at school, playing tetris with the furniture trying to fit in the extra desks somehow, with rivulets of sweat pouring down body parts I didn't even know could sweat, as the radio reminds us all juuuust a tiny bit redundantly about the record-breaking heat wave.

Truthfully, it's kind of fun. I mean, not the part where you're wrestling with the backing paper and the stupid borders and end up totally tangled and balancing on three toes and an elbow to try to staple something a foot and a half above your head. And not the part where you develop carpel tunnel cutting out, like 8,000 of the same shape something-or-others. And also not the part where "organizing" your library equals the room regurgitating rando books all over itself until you give up and throw it all back in the closet anyway...

So yeah, some of it sucks. But in other ways it's kind of a great week because it's the one time all year I know I'm ahead of the game. My classroom is the most organized and in tact that it will be all year, before the kids come and (heavens!) start using everything and and putting things back in the wrong places and breaking things and bending them and indulging their graffiti-artist impulses. You can focus just on the "stuff" of teaching, which there's a lot of, without worrying about the hows and whens and wheres and whys. And everyone is all excited to see each other again and you can take long lunches whenever it is that you get hungry. Plus, I'm not gonna lie, I totally love having a reason to spend money at fun places like Dollar Deal$ and Michael's... (although I still maintain that the bigwigs in charge have no idea how much of their precious public school system is based on the charitable spending of their employees.)

And all the fussing with the room gives you lots of time to acclimate yourself to the thought of being in there all day again, and to try to arrange things to make it more bearable.

The new Corky is great - She doesn't have a nickname yet, but she's the best possible second best. She's taught in Ecuador for five years and in the Bronx for one, and is young and energetic and uses the Smartboard. Couldn't have come up with a better replacement if I'd ordered one off the internet...

The playground renovation looks good, all they have to do is take the chain link fences off and (fingers crossed!) tell us we're allowed to use it...

I wonder if N-- has any idea how often I still think of him. Can't think too hard or it makes me a little queazy, but I wonder if he remembers standing in the doorway after some lunchtime incident, and I wonder if he remembers me imploring, "You're a good person! So why are you acting this way?" And I wonder if that will be his take-home message from me. That he's a good person. I hope it is. It could easily be the opposite...Fifth grade. Hovers just before the doorway to the Dark Side. Decisions are made that might impact a lifetime. Or not. No way to know.

I wonder if maybe this year it could be "just a job." Like maybe I will think about other stuff as much as I think about teaching. Like maybe it won't consume me, maybe I will walk out the door at 2:37 and be able to leave it behind. Maybe it won't be draining, maybe just... stasis? Part of me wants that. Part of me doesn't.

And as I write this, Pandora radio has been sort of eerily voicing my general thought patterns. La Roux started it with "Maybe this time I'll be Bulletproof," repeated over and over again like a mantra, and Kate Nash, too -- 'This time, it will be different."

Better. It will be better. Than ever before.

Ms. D returns

I am really wound up right now.

Just went to see Scott Pilgrim vs. the World with Corky. While I thought it was a bit long on epic video game-style battle scenes, I did take away from it a valuable positive visualization. From now on, whenever things go my way, like if I nail a mini-lesson for example, or think of a really witty response to something and people laugh, I am going to imagine them exploding into gold coins. And when things don't go my way, I'm going to re-imagine the whole event as a video game sequence where the right moves and nimble thinking will cause the enemy to be destroyed in some titillating and graphically appealing way.

Today I also dropped some cabbage at The Strand on some really awesome non-fiction "boy" books that I found in the dollar rack -- famous quarterbacks, shortstops, paintball, dinosaurs, dune buggies, military bomber airplanes (which I feel conflicted about, but who am I to censor their knowledge based on my own pacifist leanings), surfing, snot, pee, spiders, scorpions... these types of books (that kids, especially boys, actually might want to read!) always seem to be in short supply.

Now the only thing is that in order to actually incorporate these books into my classroom library so that the kids can read them, I have to bend the rules a little. See, the kids read leveled books (A is wordless picture books, Z is like, Hemingway, I suppose, if an elementary student were to make it that far) and the idea is that they read only books on their own level in school (as defined by a reading test that is a whole other can of worms). This is so that they don't waste time reading books that are way too easy or way too hard.

In general I agree with this concept. Seems logical enough, although I do maintain that no one ever suffered that much from reading a book that was a little hard for them or a little too easy...but the bottleneck in this particular highway to literacy is the leveling of the books.

In order to make our lives theoretically easier, you can find out the levels of books by looking them up on various online databases - a bit tedious, but luckily fifth graders can be trained to do this.

The bigger issue is that, of the bajillion-thousandteen children's books in the world, a relativly small percentage of them have been officially leveled by whatever invisible literary scientists make the calls. So that leaves at the very least, half of a bajillion-thousandteen "unleveled" books to languish in closets and on bookshelves and out of the hands of eager burgeoning young readers. Like undocumented citizens: there in the flesh and ready to work, but without any bureaucratic backing and devoid of their official stamp of approval/existence.

I don't know if the formula is like really super-secret, or if the powers that be think that teachers maybe aren't smart enough to figure out the criteria for book leveling, or if it's just an oversight, but some of us have been known to take matters into our own hands. I like to think of it as guerilla leveling. Corky's preferred method is to save really cool books until she finds out a student has a passion for, say, outer space, and then find out their level and then the sharpie comes out covertly and voila! Five great books about outer space that just so happen to appear on that level! Ta da!

Personally, I just eyeball it by comparing these bastard "unleveleds" to the other books in the levels - length, words per page, pictures, subject matter, vocabulary, complexity of sentences - and then estimate. (And naturally I weight my decision in favor of levels happen to be a bit skimpy on cool books in my room.)

At the bookstore I also found some AWESOME books about migrant workers, the 50 states, The Gettysburg address. Even though it's more work in planning, I hope I am assigned to teach social studies to my class rather than leaving it to a string of incompetent long-term subs like they did last year.

So, aside from book shopping and movie-watching, I also did a triathlon today! This taught me many valuable life lessons about learning and goal-setting and failure and success, but I will have to share those with you another time. I have to get some rest so I can wake up tomorrow, crawl out of my summertime chrysalis and get ready to face the world again as Ms. D.

Tomorrow I return to PS OO to start preparing my classroom, like a salmon returning home to spawn...

Whiskers on roses and raindrops on kittens

I just had another school dream but one of a completely different kind -- I was back in high school, only I knew then what I know now. The annoying upshit ( -- haha I meant upshot, but upshit works too) is that the first four measures of "My Favorite Things" is stuck on repeat inside my head. augh!

Anyway, my 25-year old high school self still sucked at the trumpet, but didn't try to hide it. In fact, on my way out I gave the band director some constructive criticism on how he could adjust his teaching style to better support me as a musician. I tried out for the spring musical (hence the raindrops on roses --at this point in my internal refrain I think the roses are pretty much drowning), but it was on a whim and I wasn't scared, and I hadn't invested a whole lot of my identity into the result of the audition. I rolled my eyes at my soporific AP English teacher and sassed back when reprimanded, declaring that I hadn't known eye-rolling was against the rules.

If I had kept dreaming, I would've let my biology teacher know that text books really don't work for me as a learner and that's why I didn't do the reading, and had he considered some other ways of addressing different learning styles? And I would've taken woodshop (or metal shop or whatever it was we had down there) and chatted up all the delinquents who were also taking it to find out what's inside their heads, and I would've cut class a lot more and worried a lot less, and not lost sleep over unfinished homework.

Anyway, it was a very satisfying dream, and I feel like there's a message in it for me somewhere.

Possibly in the sense of taking the advice I'd give to my former self and applying it to my life now - hey self, RELAX! ENJOY! Don't worry so much, because it all turns out fine!

I've always taken myself pretty seriously, and as I learned from hanging out with my favorite uncle, am the daughter of "accomplishment junkies" which pretty much makes me one, too, by heredity. But I think I can accomplish things and be laid back about it, too. At least, it's something to strive for.

Now, it's plenty easy to be relaxed in August. The demands of my job are at their weakest, just whispers and intimations, vague notions of a more troubled time, when there are other concerns besides where I could go swimming today, and what type of new bicycle I should buy and when, and did I drink too much wine last night?

The trick will be maintaining my cool Dude-like attitude when reality crashes down like a worn-out refrigerator pitched over a cliff for disposal. Smash!

For the moment, though, I will take the time to bask in the glow of the best part of the school year: right before it starts. Everything is rosily colored by anticipation and unbounded potential. Right now, I am convinced I will have the energy to do all the things the Rafe Esquith and Esme Codell in me want to do... Another pep rally, but with superheroes! Roof garden! Recess! Better field trips! Cooking projects to help with fractions! And also I will have a social life! And extra-curriculars! And enough sleep! This year, of course, I will finally be Jaime Escalante! I will be Michelle Pfeifer in a fictionalized and simplified version of reality, I will know what is right and what is wrong, and I will only do what is right!

This year I will not lose my temper. This will be the year when I finally get organized. This year my Teaching Points will be standing at attention in their ready positions on the Flow of the Day. This year my students will be quiet in the halls. This year I will not die of public humiliation by forgetting how to do long division while teaching it to the class. This year I will not come to school grumpy and sleep-deprived, and just a liiitle too amped up on Dunkin Donuts coffee. This year I will not work through lunch. This year I will not forget my lunch, or eat meals out of the vending machine, or have to beg food from my friends. This year my conference notes will be pristine. This year will be planned ahead of time and paperwork will not be overdue. This year I will not lose anyone...

The beginning of the year is sharpened pencils, crisp folders, fresh paint and newly waxed floors. Blank empty notebooks ready to bear the burden of knowledge...

Now part of me knows that those marble notebooks can't stay empty or clean, it's simply not in the nature of education. Superimposed on top of my mental image of fresh notebooks with military-sharp corners and pages all lined up in formation is another notebook: the end of the year notebook. The dog-eared notebook that has been scribbled upon with sharpie and ball-point pen, that has been lost and found and lost again, that is missing a cover and the other is ripped, exposing cheap brown cardboard underneath that black-and-white marble, and with papers falling out and someone else's science notes hastily mixed in and maybe used bubble gum wadded up in there somewhere...

I know the chewed up end-of-the-year notebook exists, is inevitable. I know there will be wasted efforts and forgotten ideas, horrendous mistakes, broken promises, bad days. But it is part of the function of the summer, and my duty as a teacher, to forget all that. If I didn't I'd never be able to face it all again.

Yup, the teacher clock juuuust kicked in again -- last night I had my first school dream of the 2010-2011 school year. (Typically, I was unprepared for the first day of school and the kids were out of control. )

Funny how cyclical and, now that I've done it a few times, how predictable it all is. By the end of June you don't care if you never see the inside of a classroom again, and in July, the part of your brain that deals with school has more or less be lobotomized. But here it is... sometime in August your brain wanders back, you can't help it.

Two months a year I think other people are crazy for not being teachers...

Little Perennials

I've always associated this Indigo Girls song with teaching...

Perennials are the ones that have a new crop come up every year, right?

Back in the long stretch of loneliness

I have come to call a living,
I'm getting something for all this love's labor,
even when I am forgetting.

Oh we oh oh little perennials
where'd you come from?

I look for words to fill the empty spaces,
all the life revealed in these back stages.
I reach for names like little puzzle pieces;
oh perennial, come to me.

Oh we oh oh little perennials
where'd you come from?

I like to hope my stretch of loneliness might be ending now. I like to think it was a noble sacrifice. And more than just making a living.

i hope you dance

Something about the fading light in the back patio of my favorite coffee shop; the sappy country songs on my internet radio station issuing life lessons to all those who will listen; the gentle heat ushering late spring into early summer...

makes me feel nostalgic for a time that hasn't even quite passed yet. Part of me really needs to zip through this last week of school stretching before me, break through the neon tape over the finish line, don my silver heat blanket and begin the recovery and celebration. Put it all behind me.

But the other part of me is reminding me to stop and take a sip from my life's cup and savor the flavor. This year, my 25th, has been one-of-a-kind, unrepeatable, and marks an important shift in my adult life. For the first time since crawling out of college three years ago tender and unaware, I was consciously, sustainedly happy. It's so weird how you often don't realize happiness until after it's been there for a little while. Takes some time to sink in I suppose.

I try to think about the things that have made me happy, what has separated this year, a year I consider successful, from the other two that were, well... less so. I know I'm a broken record, fawning over my newfound friends, but these things, these people, are not to be taken for granted. I am so thankful for having gravitated to them, and they to me. Maybe there is an order in the universe after all, maybe there is some sort of gravitational pull between people who are meant to be together.

Or maybe I was just lucky.

Either way, I would say this is the number one factor in overcoming the isolation I felt in my first 1.7 years of teaching. Identifying my people, zeroing in on them, pouncing, and not letting go for the life of me.

I had the realization, as I was sitting with my posse in Pequena, our favorite after-work watering hole, that this, this was what I will remember when I look back on the year: yucking it up over Henrietta's stories about her wacky family and precocious students, fogging over the day's disappointments with a well-timed class of sangria, a plate of yuca fries (cut small) and sincere commiseration from others who really know.

And the sangria also helps us celebrate our successes, like the Pretzel Club show last Friday. The celebration brought our at-risk students' parents and families to school not to be the recipients of not-good news about their kids' academic shortcomings, but to celebrate the progress they have made and their potential.

J-- taught the audience how to draw a comic. A-- made a quiz on facts he's learned about sharks. D-- and C-- became game show hosts for math games they'd done with Rosie. K-- showed photographs she'd taken with Vee, and S--, a shy, self-conscious struggling reader at the beginning of the year, read a poem she had written based on an R. Kelly song out loud to the entire audience, and beautifully.

After the performance there were awards and pictures and flowers, and when everyone finally left, Corky and I hugged, and my eyes threatened to overflow. I'm going to miss her so much. I have learned so much from her. Her presence has allowed me to become more than I was before.

This year was about empowerment.

The first two years were daily reminders of everything I couldn't do - things I wanted to do but wasn't capable of, or was afraid to try. This year, I felt like I did something. This year, when the kids signed my oversized graduation t-shirt with exclamations that I'm the "best teacher ever," I didn't feel guilt, I didn't feel like a big phony impostor. This year, I felt I had earned the title, subjective and temporary as it might be.

I'm doing it! I'm doing it! It's like riding without training wheels for the first time. It's like flying. Finally: the pay-off. After wading through a shit lagoon that was wide and deep, I've made it to the other side.

And it's nice here.

unwritten

In the grand tradition of graduation songs, the kids' song is extremely corny, and made all the more corny by the choreographed hand motions... I've been overwrought and under-slept with increasing severity as my intensive summer grad class wears on. (5 to 10pm twice a week for four weeks.) So I know this is what's at the root of my weepiness and hyper-sentimentality this week.

But as the kids' graduation gets closer and closer, something about their boisterous enthusiasm, their slightly off-key but extremely earnest belting strikes closer and closer to my heart. We told the kids they had to smile during the happy songs, and S-- seems to have taken it as his personal mission in life to smile the hardest he possibly can for the entirety of the song. His face is contorted, it's almost more of a grimace. But it is so prototypically S-- of him, he is so unselfconscious and innocent and wacky, I get choked up when look at him, even though he does it every single time. It is like he is trying to emote the song through his body, rather than singing it with his voice.

(S-- is pretty unforgettable. He is a tiny kid with a gravelly voice and a lisp, one of these kids that is just a constant hurricane of movement and energy, always falling out of chairs because he sits with his legs gnarled up behind him in seemingly impossible gestures. He is clumsy and uncoordinated, always tripping or walking into things or knocking things over ... His hair is always slicked down sideways on his head, his glasses are always falling down his nose. He talks a mile a minute and never runs out of things to say, and perpetually has some kind of snack food either in his mouth or his hands or on his shirt.)

As a teacher, especially an all-day every-day elementary school teacher, you know kids in a deep, yet in some ways strangely superficial way that is unlike any other human relationship in existence. Looking around at all their faces as they sing their song is just such a window into who they are, now that I know them inside and out. I see I-- with his big goofy smile, eyes wandering around the room, only aware in the very vaguest of sense of what is going on around him. B-- is staring intently at Rosie's conducting, ramrod straight, hands at her sides, and diligently making a note of every instruction we give and carrying out all orders efficiently, silently, obediently. K-- is surreptitiously making eyes at the boys off to her right, whispering secrets that are doubtless of critical importance to her best friend seated a row in front of her, trying her best to evade the steely gaze of the teachers. D-- just singing with his heart and soul.

I'm going to miss them so much. Because after they leave P.S. OO it's entirely possible that I will never see some of them again... these people, who have been at the center of my life for ten months, who I have worried and fretted over and who have made me overflow with pride as much as they've filled me with blind, white-hot rage... I just won't see them anymore. Maybe in passing, maybe out in the neighborhood, maybe they'll come by and say hi or write me an email. But there will be a clean cut. On June 28 this cast of characters will simply be removed from my life. It's a bizarre break. Just the nature of teaching, I guess, spread your wings and fly and all that. But it's a little jarring nonetheless.

The graduation song (best enjoyed if you imagine it sung at top volume by a motley collection of pre-adoloscents all lined up in the auditorium in captivity, wearing red ties and name tags):

Unwritten - Natasha Bedingfield

I am unwritten, can't read my mind, I'm undefined
I'm just beginning, the pen's in my hand, ending unplanned

Staring at the blank page before you
Open up the dirty window
Let the sun illuminate the words that you could not find

Reaching for something in the distance
So close you can almost taste it
Release your inhibitions
Feel the rain on your skin
No one else can feel it for you
Only you can let it in
No one else, no one else
Can speak the words on your lips
Drench yourself in words unspoken
Live your life with arms wide open
Today is where your book begins
The rest is still unwritten

Oh, oh, oh

I break tradition, sometimes my tries, are outside the lines
We've been conditioned to not make mistakes, but I can't live that way


Feel the rain on your skin
No one else can feel it for you
Only you can let it in
No one else, no one else
Can speak the words on your lips
Drench yourself in words unspoken
Live your life with arms wide open
Today is where your book begins
The rest is still unwritten
The rest is still unwritten
The rest is still unwritten

tag teaming

Once again, my matchless friends come to the rescue.

Today, the first clerical half day, I found myself cankle-deep in unfinished cumulative records and other paperwork that had to be finished TOday, only up the the D's in alphabetical order, with time ticking down before I had to leave before my (5-hour) class.

"I think I'm in trouble," I said to Henrietta as I passed her in the hallway.

And, minutes later, no questions asked, she, Corky and Rosie were assembly-lining through my stack of folders like they were on a mission. Even though they had spent the entire afternoon on their own tedious paperwork (just at a more efficient rate)... In no time, the deed was done. I was stacked, sorted, alphabetized and color-coded, and had just enough time to print my paper and make the train up to Harlem.

I wonder when I might get to a point in my career when I don't have to be bailed out with some time-sensitve, overwhelming task that has me totally marooned... but until then, I am absolutely wordlessly, bottomlessly, inexpressibly grateful for what they did, and what I know they would be willing to do for any one of us, any number of times should the need arise.

next?

The thing that's different about teaching from other jobs is how cyclical it is. There are distinct starting points and end points, and every year there is an opportunity to reinvent yourself.

I keep thinking, "What's next?" There's the cruise then carnival then half day then International Day then graduation... then what?

Then a long delicious expanse of getting to be someone else for a while. And by someone else, I mean me, unfettered by my responsibilities, my 28 ball and chains. I get to be *not* Ms. D for a while. And I think that break will do me good.

The Organization Sheet came out yesterday... Next year I'll be teaching the same grade in the same room, which is great for me because I don't have to pack up my entire classroom and move it down the hall, which I've had to do the past two years now. Only difference is the big bold "Vacancy" next t room 317 where Corky would've been. That and, my roster will be up to 32 kids. Don't even know where I will fit four extra bodies!

letter from a past self about wild geese

Wild Geese

by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

*****

Dear Self,

You don't have to be good.

You don't have to repent and crawl on your knees.

You don't have to apologize for who you are...

Please don't punish yourself...

Love what you love, trust your instincts.

We are all just human animals.

Tell people what they give to you. Let them know they will be missed.

Bear change gracefully, like the seasons. The wild geese will return. You will find love again, and friendship. You can do it on your own - you always have. Persist. Persistence has paid off manyfold. The most important thing about humans and animals is that they are adaptable. Be brave. Adapt with grace. Make the most of what you have -- you are lucky in that you'll never be alone. Follow the road as it stretches out before you.

finding happiness in a six-foot sub

Of the things I have learned this year, one is that exercise makes me a more productive person... I realize that, somehow, in some way I don't fully understand, if I can make to to the gym or the track first thing in the morning, or if I go on my way home from school before I do anything else, I can accomplish all sorts of important things afterwards that guaranteed would have been pushed under the rug and procrastinated away if I hadn't gone... Good job, me! Perhaps there is hope of becoming a functional human being after all...

I am very excited and happy about my Summer Potluck Picnic/BBQ this weekend. I just ordered a six-foot sub and bought five cases of beer, and this makes me very happy. I am excited to make use of the backyard! I'm excited to prove to myself that, if you think of ways to make yourself happier, and then take steps towards making those things happen, you actually *get* happier!

Exhibit A: my apartment with lovely roommates and natural light and a backyard for barbecuing in a neighborhood where friends are easy to access. (Compare to sad, lonely apartment of last year)

Exhibit B: Fifth grade is awesome. (Compare to grueling hardship of first grade.)

Exhibit C: My new computer is awesome. (Certain happinesses can be bought, especially when they replace frustration and low-grade but persistent rage, as induced by my ancient crazy-making PC)

Exhibit D: Visiting Corky next summer, ALL summer, wherever she ends up, will help me to miss her less.

Score point? Personal happiness: plus four. Anxiety trepidation and doubt: plus zero.

You hear that, life!? I'ma figure you out one of these days!

My smart Twister (twin sister) taught me about the arrival fallacy.

You will never arrive. The destination is a mirage. This, right now, is all you get. Distant Eden will not appear around the corner if you strive harder or wish for it more. Your surroundings will never transform suddenly of their own accord into some sort of utopian dream. No matter what you do to them, even if you are very very patient. The transformation happens from within...

That's what they mean when they say happiness is a choice. You can decide to see the good around you, to appreciate whatever there is to appreciate and just love the bejeezus out of everything you can possibly find to love. Or you can live a life with less love and less good and less light in it. Those are the only choices you get - Believe in the good and let it in. Or refuse to see it and do without.

These musings were inspired by the letter I got from Escape, the "grassroots" Inner Resilience founded by Corky that she holds at her apartment with all the essential elements, plus wine!

We did an exercise where you write about a person or other entity in your life, and you think about what you have received from them (or it), what you have given to them (or it), and what difficulties or troubles you are having with it or them.

It turns out, Corky and I both wrote about each other. Both of us thought we received much more in our relationship than we gave. Which I guess is how you know a friendship is really strong... kind of like synergy, though I know everyone hates the word... we are complements to each other, and simply by being who we are in each other's presence, we make each other better people.

Not a bad deal. Pretty special. in fact.

This just in...

A+ on my thesis!

Validation feels great.

Speaking of validation...

Today was also the carnival (of Test Prep Jedi fame.) The carnival itself was not my inspiration, but it probably did result, at least in part, out of my instigation...

So, kiddies, suck up those snowcones and pop that popcorn, delve face-first into your clouds of cotton candy. Bounce high, high HIGH in that bouncy castle, win games and prizes, dance to the DJ and observe, in awe, the juggler. Be amazed. And don't think this isn't advice for life...

Dance and be amazed. Take in the sweetness when it is available. Bounce high and higher, keep trying til you win the Big Game, learn how to beat the odds and then enjoy the rewards you reap. Observe the world around you with awe.

Maybe life won't always be unlimited treats in the enclosed courtyard under the watchful eye of your devoted teachers. But pretend that it is.

Fighting Violets

Field trip to NYU today, did the tour, it was very good! Maybe it's early to have them think about college, but maybe not. In fact, I think it's only fair -- kids in other schools (read:wealthier ones) have a lot more exposure to college, they know more college-educated people and professionals. I think it's beneficial for them to know it exists, know what it looks like and what you do there, why people decide to go to college and also how you get there.

These last two ideas are slightly delicate because I don't want to seem like one of those college pusher-people, or inadvertently send the message that you're a failure if you don't go to college, because I don't believe it's true. The fact is, many of the kids' family members and loved ones have never been nor are likely to ever go to college... A college degree to me is not necessarily a criterion of a successful life. But I want the kids to know what their options are, and I want them to have options, as many as they want or need.

Part of me felt guilty taking them to see one of the most expensive schools in the U.S., knowing first-hand how hard it is to afford it. But another part of me thought, you know what? They deserve the best, and they deserve to know the quality of schools that are out there. The whethers and hows and how much's are for later.

For now, on the hot, sweaty, bumpy bus ride home, it was enough for me to overhear two kids say: "I'm going to NYU when I'm in college." And the other responded "Me too!"

A seed has been planted. The rest is up to the universe.

the end is not nigh enough

My posts have been dwindling, along with my general interest in anything and everything school related. The hot weather comes and all I’m interested in is barbecues and swimming pools and watering holes.

Spent memorial day weekend with my cousins and it felt like summer already. Softball game: check, parade: check, pool: check, barbecue: check and check… I thought to myself, cool, what are we doing tomorrow? And then I was forced to remind myself that I will be at work tomorrow.

Now, it’s not so bad because tomorrow is our field trip to my alma mater, NYU, and Wednesday is the carnival, plus graduation practice takes up a period every day until the last week of June.

I just think that if the month of June were, for some reason, cancelled… the kids really wouldn’t be missing much. Especially now that it’s getting hot and the AC is broken it feels like we’re just running out the clock. We show up, we go through the motions, but especially now that the all-important Standardized Tests are done, it’s hard to feel like what we’re doing matters. I mean, of course it matters, in an inspiring the youth of America kind of way. But the last few weeks stretch like taffy. The end is near, but not near enough.

Three things you can say to piss off a teacher

Today's lunchtime conversation: things people say about teaching that infuriate us

#1. The "Aw, that's so cute" attitude.

I think people think elementary school teachers sit around all day singing the abc's and having story time and eating snacks. The truth is very far from that. When you think teacher, don't think Mother Theresa. Think Stalin. We are not puppies and kittens. We are tigers and wolves.

Sure, a good teacher makes it look effortless, but that doesn't mean it's easy. Basically if you're a classroom teacher, you have to bend a small army of (small) people to your will. You must be a dictator, to know exactly what will happen at every moment of the day, to dispense about a thousand instructions a day and to predict what every student's response will be to every thing you say and your possible responses to all their possible reactions. You must have an answer for everything. You must know what to do when a kid rips his pants wide open, when one loses her keys, when they pinch someone or call each other racial slurs or say that they will get beat for bringing home a bad grade, or they can't find their notebook or the notebook has run out of pages...

You must squelch mutinies before they arise and walk the subtle line between benevolent monarch and ruthless gestapo. You must live each day knowing that every move you make, every sound that escapes your lips is being closely monitored and scrutinized by impressionable, yet surprisingly judgmental young minds. You have to make your classroom run with discipline and efficiency, all the while making your subjects believe they have autonomy. They sit when you say sit, they stand when you say stand, they listen when you talk, they march when you say march. (None of this fits with my idealistic, individualized Montessori fantasy about how school SHOULD be. But the education crisis in this country isn't here because things are how they SHOULD be.)

You must be aware of the actions and whereabouts of 29 individuals at any given moment... I like to think it's like being in charge of 29 extremely needy and dependent employees (who are totally and completely id-driven, impulsive, clueless, irresponsible and who don't have the best judgement in general) and make sure they are doing the same thing at the same time and understand what to do and understand what to do if they don't know what to do

#2 The "You must love kids... I don't know how you have the patience."

Fact: many teachers don't love kids. Some love the act of teaching. Some love the ideals of education. Some love their subject matter. Some love immigrants. But I bet almost all would agree that kids can be a pain in the ass. Loving them is not actually a requirement of being a good teacher.

But what bugs me (and others) about this comment is the underlying condescension... Yeah, it takes patience. But if you mean patience like in Family Circus cartoons when someone draws on the wall with crayons, patience like when the baby spits up on your new outfit, patience like reading the same bedtime story over and over again, or counting cheerios for an hour, that's not what I'm talking about.

I'm talking about the patience that you use to build a civilization or plan a war. I'm talking patience like withstanding torture. Like building the pyramids or being wrongfully imprisoned. Patience like what was behind the Civil Rights movement. Patience to confront waste and disaster and injustice and utter helplessness every day, to look the monster square in the eye and not balk or shy away, even though you know it's not going anywhere. Patience like getting up Everest or Kilimanjaro.

It's true, people who go into teaching tend to do so with compassion, with some respect for human beings and what they are capable of. At least I hope most of them do. It's true we take on a nurturing role, we deal with tears and hurt feelings and all that crap. But you can't be soft. You're not necessarily comforting crying kids. You're dealing with them. Dealing with them in the context of a bunch of other needy kids who need to be kept occupied at all times, and a long list of impossible things you're expected to get done this year, and the never-ending power struggle of teacher versus entropy.

Sometimes that means letting the precious tearful child cry, or telling them to suck it up and pull it together, or ignoring them altogether. Being a teacher is different from being a parent or an uncle or a kind friend... You need to calculate your decisions based on the needs of the class, sharpen your knife on the rough edge of always having to be the boss (willingly or not). You need to be right even when you are wrong. And you must defer to the perpetual and unmerciful drive of curriculum and standards and limited time.

If you let your heart bleed it will quickly be bled dry.

#3 cause of teacher vitriol: "You're so lucky to have summer vacations!"

To which I say, we earn that shit. It's not about luck. If you calculate the hours of actual "work" we do - which is, for most teachers I know, the second you walk in to the second you walk out, plus some extra work you take home, I'd wager against an office worker any day... We schedule in our bathroom breaks at the beginning of the day... (Better go now, I won't have another chance until 1pm!) No coffee break, no facebook, no surfing the web, no extended lunches or water cooler conversations. We are on stage, front and center, every scene of every act of every show. And if you want to see 45 minutes stretched to maximum capacity, come watch me on my prep. We battle anarchy and we battle hard, and we reserve the right to bask in our hard-won vacation time.

Tune in tomorrow for tales of teachers who *don't* actually work that hard, but whose jobs are steadfastly secured by seniority.

But the other part of this question of whether to stay a teacher is more than just getting tired of all the paperwork or the repetitiveness of it... The bigger question is, how much does it really "matter" in the long run. Ultimately, what difference do I make as a teacher?

The education system is a leaky boat. Do you stay inside and keep on bailing water with your bucket full of holes? Or do you jump ship and swim for a different boat?

I'd have no problem bailing water to the end of my days if I thought it would save it in the long run. But it really sometimes feels as if "the system" is beyond saving.

Absence

The weather is weird, and matches my mood. It is bright, but not sunny, warm but not hot, almost drizzling but not actually raining, gray and muggy as all get out. It is non-committal, indistinct. Make up your mind, weather. What do you want to be?

You'd think with the lifting off of my thesis from my shoulders, I would be taking advantage of this opportunity to get my life in order, make use of all this spare time in my two-week reprieve before the final set of grad classes begins in June to get organized! Run miles! Clean the bathroom! Polish the floors! Plan ahead! Do errands! Dot i's and cross t's that I'd previously been ignoring...

But it's almost unnerving not to have the excuse of grad school and the constant threat of the thesis deadline -- I could hide behind those things, and my overstuffed schedule could explain the dirty-clothes carpet in my bedroom, the empty cupboards, why I never seem to have energy for anything but Hulu and Netflix on weekends.

Without my big excuse, evidence points uncomfortably towards me just being generally not an effective human being domestically. Maybe it's not some external force that's throwing my life off balance -- maybe I'm just not that good at balancing in the first place. Now the overbearing presence of the thesis has become an absence, and I have no more groceries or clean laundry than I ever did... I kind of feel absent from my own life, school too. The unintended side effect of all that emphasis on the state tests is that now that they're over, it feels like what we're doing really doesn't matter. I'm just trying babysit them through 'til June, when we can all go our separate ways and forget, for a while, that any of this ever happened.

I feel stuck like flypaper, like I'm doing laps in a wading pool. Waiting for a bus or a train that I'm not convinced is even coming.

***

My thesis is not the only absence I am feeling. I spent the entire weekend with Corky, playing connect-the-dots all around the boros with various friends' social events. I'm in love with our friendship, do you know that feeling? I am trying to capture her sunshine and bottle it up to stash away for later. And even though I am doing my best to love the fleetingness and impermanence, and to appreciate the present of her presence right now, and to be excited for the adventure that she absolutely deserves to have next year... every time she says something witty or clever, and every time we have the same thought at the same time, I am reminded what a gaping hole is going to be left in me when she leaves.

Her leaving is making me think about my next big step. Ending grad school is kind of a watershed moment. Once I have the degree, my commitment to the Fellows will be finished and my life is mine again to rearrange as suits. And I know I'll be going back to PS 00 next year, the immediate future is sorted. But what about after that? I promised myself I wouldn't become a "lifer," that I won't just wake up one day and find that ten years have gone by. I promised myself wild adventures and excitement and travel and the taking up of ambitious challenges... And not that teaching isn't challenging or meaningful...

But where do you go with it? I believe that's part of the trouble, part of the reason that a really big percentage of these driven young people that join Teaching Fellows and Teach for America tend to leave it after a few years. After you learn to be a teacher, what then? After ten years, you're still hot-gluing Word Walls and re-organizing your bookshelves and deciphering bad handwriting and typing up teaching points and making infinite copies of things. Pretty much the only place to go career-wise is administration, which is actually a totally different profession, since the best part of teaching is the kids, and administrators spend way more time shuffling papers and answering telephones and holding meetings than they do with any children. A conundrum.

For now, I am content with the responsibilities, great and small, that running a classroom entails. I'm 25 - chances are, any job I'm likely to get will involve some measure of tedium... stapling 29 folders to the wall, taking them all down again, walking kids up and down the stairs, copying things onto chart paper, hanging up bulletin boards, rearranging furniture...all that's part of the job I'm fine with all that now. And some people are really great at all those things and don't mind doing them in perpetuity. I just don't think I'm one of those people.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/magazine/23Race-t.html

Interesting article about Race to the Top and teachers' unions in the New York Times magazine...

I recently received notification that I've been recommended for tenure.

Interestingly, Mr. P has seen me teach exactly twice. Three if you include the time he walked into my classroom for a couple minutes last fall.

finishing

Woke up last Friday feeling empty and out of sorts. No particular reason, I think it's just that time of year - like mile 21 of the marathon... where's the finish line already??! Am I STILL doing this? Is it really going to end as they promised?

It's so easy to love my job in the summer -- I remember thinking last year, as I rode down a dusty road far far far from New York City, you'd have to be crazy not to be a teacher! I can't believe I'm being paid to be on vacation for two months!

And in the fall you can love it too, there's possibilities and potential to get excited about, sharp pencils and juicy new markers.

But your drive and ambition get spottier towards the end of the year, as you're worn down to a nub, and pencils are short, chewed-up, blunt and eraserless and all the markers are either dried up or lost.

And you're still in the boat rowing and rowing though your arms are getting tired and the shore doesn't seem to be getting any closer, at least not with any discernable speed.

What can you do?

Just keep showing up to work, I guess, one foot in front of the other. You make the most of your weekends and afternoons. Try to outrun your dispassion. Make plans for next year. Maybe a mental health day is in order, too. Drink sangria and sit in the sun. And you keep leaning on your friends.

A three-hour tour (three hour tour)

Today is the day of the fifth grade cruise... Yesterday the kids were buzzing with excitement, to the tune of not settling down for more than eight seconds at a time.

I have misgivings about the cruise, namely that I think it's a bit presumptuous to ask a community like ours to spend $40 on a luxury like a 3-hour boat ride. But Sh-- was walking around yesterday telling everyone what a 'milestone' it was going to be... they amaze me sometimes... milestone? where'd he get that word?

Milestone or not, it does mark the fact that the end of the school year is fast approaching and my class, my kids, all the intrigue and drama will evaporate before I know it like a long and very involved dream.

Part of me cannot wait to banish them from my psyche and to say so long, kiddos, go bug somebody else for a while. Part of me is DONE, boiled like a twenty minute egg in counting.

But part of me grieves the inevitable loss. They grow on you like a tumor, you know? Part of me feels so protective of them, like I would defend them to my last breath, even the ones who never seem to listen or who are completely oblivious and never know what's going on. Maybe especially them, they're the ones who are most likely to need defense. Part of me dreads letting them out of the careful homeostasis maintained within my four walls, to let them out into that big uncertain world where anything can happen. Exiting elementary school means exiting the bubble - no more safe zone, no more bumper lane. This group of kids have changed me like no other. Letting go of them will mean letting go of a part of myself.