None of this is to say that today was a such terrible day, by any means. But is it really only Monday?
It's just hard to come off such a great weekend and get smacked around by reality. Especially a weekend where we went to go see Avatar, a movie which comes with my highest endorsement, but with the caveat that it also might make you want to quit your job and move to the rainforest and start chaining yourself to trees or fighting for truth and justice in some equally urgent way. (In the shadow of a full-on flying face-off between balance-loving tree people and evil corporate forces of destruction, Read Aloud and Word Study seem like kind of weak and watered-down ways to "be the change" everybody's always looking for.)
However, despite the noted lack of flying lizard-creatures and glowing phosphorescent mushroom forests in my daily life, there was some more mundane magic that I experienced today. It took the form of a "moment" today, when a book club came together and did a bunch of the things I'd been teaching them, and they and I had a real, live, meaningful conversation about a book, and the significance of that is not to be taken for granted.
And I declared it Civil Rights week in my classroom! So any minimal spare time not already claimed by the Hegemony of Groupthink and Arbitrary Sanction, as I like to call our mandated curriculum, will be devoted to the likes of good ol' MLK, Rosa Parks, Ghandi, Ruby Bridges and whoever else I have time for. I did the thing where you give some of the kids candy based on some random physical feature and then see how long it takes them to figure out why you did that and what it was they were supposed to learn from it... they caught on pretty quick.
Planning stuff like this is what I like, and it's what I feel I'm good at - organizing information and presenting it in an engaging way. That's kind of why I decided to get into this whole teaching thing in the first place. Trouble is, there's not much of me left to plan for peace and justice education after I get done planning for spelling and guided reading and book clubs and and finding common denominators and using periods and paragraphs...
The other reason I got into teaching is messing around with the kids. I'm noticing that my favorite moments are kind of squished in between everything else... they happen while standing in cafeteria-crush foot traffic, or with my after-school kids during snack, or while packing up to go home, or on the rare occassion that I let down my guard during class and forget the clock, get off schedule and just listen and maybe laugh. Teasing C--- about being an alien, hearing M--'s musings about triceratops, watching JP's amatuer magic tricks, getting fashion advice from earnest pre-teens and finding out their perceptions of the world around them - that's what I had thought teaching would feel like. Like connecting to kids in some way and nurturing them through your presence. Turns out it does feel like that some of the time. Just a lot less than I had expected.
I've been told to hang on tight to those moments that matter, but the truth is, it so often feels like grasping at straws.
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