Hold fast

A wise, wise woman once told me to hang on tightly to the rewards of teaching when you find them, because they can seem awfully meager compared to the raging cyclone of work-related BS you’re forced to put up with.

Teaching, like life, is filled with peaks and valleys. In my experience, the valleys are low – devastatingly, heart-breakingly, soul-crushingly low. And while there are, occasionally, career highs to match - those breathless, tingling, heart-singing moments of transcendence - they are quite rare (this is, of course, why they stand out).

What come around more often are these other, lower-altitude, more run-of-the mill peaks… The thing about them is that they often seem, well… not quite high enough. Maybe not worth the effort. Nice, but not exceptional. Pleasant but imperfect.

So the trick is savoring the highs, any and all of them. Holding on to them reallyreallyreally tight, enjoying them as long and as hard as you can. Imbuing them with meaning and significance that may or may not exist in reality. If that’s all you get, you want to make it count.

***

In the past, I’ve felt a weird, conflicted sense of guilt when people would commend me for my teaching or compliment my work as a teacher. I didn't feel proud of my work. My internal response was thanks, but what do you know?

Almost every day after lunch my first two years, I would get love notes from my students in careful but crooked first-grader scrawl, filled with hearts and flowers and professing their eternal and undying love and proclaiming that I was the best teacher ever to have walked the earth… and while I certainly appreciated their displays of affection, it sort of felt like rubbing salt in a wound, like receiving a medal for some feat that I hadn’t really accomplished, or like getting an A on a quiz I’d cheated on. I knew in my heart that I wasn’t the best teacher ever; I sincerely hoped I wouldn't turn out to be the best teacher they’d ever have, and I also knew that I wasn’t even the best teacher that I was capable of being.

First graders will break your heart with their unconditional love, and their easily bestowed but un-researched superlatives. Six-year olds don’t have much basis for comparison, after all. I felt I was undeserving of their love and devotion.

But this year, when a chocolate easter bunny appeared on my desk under a post-it note that said I was the best teacher ever, I was able to accept the gesture more graciously. I didn’t have to suppress the deisre to try and disabuse A--- of her misguided notion about my teaching prowess.

I thought, if she feels that way about me, then I should bask in it - whether or not I deserve it, whether or not it is empirically true. If she felt compelled to express her love and appreciation in this way, then it’s only polite to feel appreciated and loved…

This is in stark contrast to my reception of the guilt-inducing rainbows and flowers and crayon-portraits bestowed on me by my first graders. How come? I guess part of me feels that fifth graders are slightly more discriminating, that they know better, and they’d only say it if they really meant it.

But I think the real difference is that for the first time, I feel like I am deserving of this type of post-it note praise... Not that I actually AM the “best teacher ever” – that title probably belongs to someone more along the lines of Jesus or Socrates or Ron Clark or the Dalai Lama… but if I look for the kernel of truth in A’s kind hyperbole, what I see is recognition that I am striving to be the best Ms. D ever…and for that, I feel nothing but gratitude.

So I choose to interpret my chocolate Easter bunny as a "peak," a reward, a hard-earned prize that I am trying hard to deserve. I choose to accept this gift in acknowledgment that I'm not, nor will I ever be, the best teacher, but that aiming for our ideals helps us strive to be our own best, whatever that means.

Confidence

Confidence is based on evidence of past success.

I believe I read this in a running magazine, and I believe it is the truth. It's true for me today as my muscles are complaining about my re-entry into running after several over-booked weeks away from it. But knowing that I've started before with less makes me feel like it's not impossible to start over again. I know enough to start small, not to push myself so hard I hate it, and that the most important thing is just getting out there, and letting momentum do the rest.

I feel this way about teaching, too. More confident, that is. Besides basking in the cuddliness of my niece-y and nephew, I'm also trying to use this time to, if I may use a disgustingly over-used buzzword, "reflect."

More on that later, because it sounds like my niece-y needs some cuddling!

transfiguration

Now I have put a couple hundred miles between myself and my school and the grown-up life I lead there, and I am comfortably ensconced in the safety of my family cocoon. Here at my cousin's house, the baby monitor provides some quiet white noise, a bowl of brightly colored toys festoons the kitchen counter, and conversation drifts around poop schedules and the various quirks of newer and older members of the family. It feels as if I have been transplanted to another world. From the pressure and hubbub and whirling, legs-flying pace of my strictly scheduled concrete-bound city life, to an unfamiliar, leisurely, soft suburban cushion. Here, naps happen and the Flow of the Day is dictated not by segmented, budgeted, properly apportioned down-to-the-minute chunks of instructional time, but by hunger and tiredness and shifts in mood or desire. It feels very quiet and orderly and still. It feels different, but good.

A couple months ago, when I realized that my impending thesis deadline and my budget would preclude a trip to Peru or some other exotic locale, I thought about what I would like my break to be. I decided that I would like to spend it in the vicinity of children that I can pick up and hug and kiss and hold. Cuddling my niece in her onesie with slobbery mouth and sticking-out belly is a welcome change from scolding and molding and shuffling soon-to-be adolescents in uniform back and forth from their desks to the rug and up and down 4 flights of stairs.

It is nice to be able to enjoy children, to just appreciate them, and not have to try and make them be or do any particular thing. That's why I still love working at camp in the summer - the kids get to move and play and scream loudly and run around. My role is to facilitate their kiddishness, not prevent it or stop it. Being a teacher is way different from being an auntie or a camp counselor or a babysitter. As a teacher, you have an agenda, you have bullet points and checklists and criteria. You are constantly evaluating, instructing, intervening. I am now much more aware of how precious it is to just step back and watch them be, to enjoy them as they are, to interact with them human-to-human, not as sculptor and sculptures or actor and objects.

the snowball effect

I write to you now from the Other Side! I finished my frantic 500-meter dash towards Spring Break and at 2:10pm on Friday afternoon finally managed to break the bright orange ribbon waiting for me at the end of the line.

It won't sink in yet, because it's only Sunday. It will take a few days of not having to go to work, and still not having to go to work, and STILL not having to go to work, for me to realize that it truly is Vacation. But I am doing my best to make it feel festive from the get-go by gallavanting with my Cuz and going to Spa Castle to indulge in saunas and hot tubs and swim-up bars and pedicures and shiatzu massage!

February and March was a long run, but now we're kind of over the hump. When we go back it'll be full steam ahead towards the state tests, then NYSESLAT season and then graduation season and then those hot June days at the end that don't even feel real, then pack up the room and shove it in the closets and get the hell outta Dodge.

Last week I was walking (nay, running) around in kind of an elevated state -- I don't know if it was the fact that I got less sleep each successive night of the week, or that I had more or less tripled my daily caffeine intake to make it through, or if I can just blame it on the usual whims of womanhood or the fact that I was fried like an egg... But I felt raw, open, susceptible - like a flesh wound without a band-aid. Events struck me with perhaps unintended force. When A & A and Jules met me for my name day dinner with a blaze of orange, yellow and red tulips bursting like fireworks and sang to me on the sidewalk, I felt overcome with the beauty and kindness and goodness of people in this world, and with the good fortune of having these people as my friends. (I reassured them that mine were tears of joy, not of desperation, humiliation and failure like when we used to meet for dinners a year or two ago.)

Then the next day when I came into work, breathless from being almost-late, what awaited me on the floor of my classroom when I walked in but a seltzer-shrine, adorned with Name Day card and candy and a Cadbury egg! Corky was the culprit and engineer, since I'd mentioned it the day before, and since she is the queen of Random Acts of Kindness. Again, this gesture struck me hard, like an injection or a blow to the gut.

My elation also gave way to whatever you'd call the opposite of that feeling. On the subway on the way to my thesis class, I ran into Negative Nancy from the Teaching Fellows, who complained from Times Square all the way up to 137th St and said things that made me question why she even became a teacher at all, and whether or not she even deserved to have access to the children. She said she "felt bad" for the kids, that everything was "so sad," and came up with every possible excuse for why she couldn't do the things that she is asked to do (the very challenges, I might add, that she signed up to take on as a Teaching Fellow.)

It is so damn easy - and uncreative and boring and weak - to point out all the things that are stopping you from doing what you said you'd do. How does that saying go? Even if there are a million reasons why you can't, all you need is one reason why you can...? I felt personally insulted by her negativity. I felt like her arrogance and bad attitude were unravelling the work that my colleagues and I have been fighting so hard for.

But all this made me realize something. Something about momentum; about the nature of my work; the nature of human beings perhaps? That once you get your little snowball rolling down a certain hill, it gathers strength and speed more rapidly than you could've anticipated. That kindness begets more kindness, the same way that complaining begets more complaints. Just like training for my theoretical traithlon - exercize begets more exercize. Gluttony and sloth beget more gluttony and sloth. But once you stop the momentum and swing it around the other way, it force is just as powerful.

I have more to say on this topic, but after all it is Spring Break and I should get my priorities aligned: brunch awaits!

soul shakedown

Today I went to the dollar store to restock the Prize Box for all the Jedi Rewards I will be needing for the new incentive program (presuming the Jedis can manage to stop annoying the crap out of me long enough for me to award them enough points.)

Buying prizes is something I love doing, for lots of reasons. Partly because it really doesn't take much to make a kid happy, and because who in their right mind doesn't love a brand new box of crayons (even if they are the cheap waxy dollar store kind)? Also I like to think that the items I choose are infinitesimally small notches into the giant climbing wall of social justice and equality -- this jumprope shall combat childhood obesity! These bubbles shall spread joy and wonder among children who may or may not have enough of it in their lives! This stencil shall make its mark in the service of art where art has been forsaken!

Also, I like to mentally multiply my excitement by like 25 to equal that of a 10-year-old confronted with a treasure box full of these riches.

Clearly, kids don't NEED prizes in order to learn, and I don't NEED them in order to teach. But they are kind of fun... I liken this expenditure to, say, buying doughnuts for your cubicle-mates, or springing for coffees one morning, just to be sociable. It's a personal contribution to your place of work in order to make it a more genial place for you to be in eight or more hours a day.

But when I dropped my thirty six bucks on my plastic made-in-China loot in the name of cheap material pleasures, it made me think about other stuff that I regularly shell out my hard-earned shekels for.

I wonder if the government that oversees public education knows just how much they receive in charitable contributions from teachers... I don't know of any teacher in the school who doesn't spend hundreds of dollars on their kids and their classroom every year. Compound that over years of service, and per teacher, per school - it adds up.

Many things we buy as teachers could never be considered budgetary necessities - pizza parties, prizes, snacks for celebrations, gifts for holidays, decorations for the classroom, "sponsoring" kids' field trips whose parents can't scrape up the cash (like D--, who almost couldn't come on the $9 bowling trip because her little brother needed asthma medication that week)... I'm pretty sure none of these things are tax deductible. But the thing is, if we don't buy those things for our kids? Then the kids just don't get to have them. And as a teacher it's very hard to see your kids not getting the things you feel they deserve and should be entitled to.

But it's not all frivolity that we reach into our pockets for. If you were wondering if budget cuts are real and whether or not they affect teachers' and students' daily lives, they are and they do.

Last year, every teacher got a whole box of paper to use for copies, and Mr. P was able to spring for printer ink. My AP Candy, who is quite gifted at getting us things we need, ordered me a brand new rug (a requisite for the kids to sit on as part of the TC Workshop model) when she noticed that mine was dirty.

This year I asked Candy, now that I had 29 kids and needed 29 spots on my rug instead of 20, if there was any chance of getting a new one. She said, no, not really, but ask around...I did, but wound up anyway with a third of my kids sitting on dollar store bath mats for the mini-lessons.
This year, Mr. P did the best he could by giving us two reams of paper each, and the ink request was negatory.

So what are the choices? Use the printer less? Stop making copies two months in? Or spread the burden to kids and their families by asking them to bring in reams of paper, which we do, along with tissues and ziploc bags and scissors and calculators and crayons... or we spring for it ourselves.

In recognition that teachers have a lot of unique supplies they need, they get "Teacher's Choice" money every year ( at least, we have been and hope to continue doing so - last year $250, this year $150). And we appreciate the sentiment, we really do. But to me at least, it kind of feels like spitting in the ocean.

So when the bigwigs in their offices make their budget cuts to public education, I wonder if they realize: schools don't all of a sudden start needing less money to make them go. It's just that the people in and involved with the schools, who care about schools, start footing more of the bill.

Test Prep Jedis Use the Force!

Okay. So. Today was the Test Prep Pep Rally...



It was spectacular. Worth every second of angst and doubt. If I ran my own school we would do stupid stuff like this on a regular basis, because actually, it's not stupid! It builds community, it de-stresses, and it motivates, which is, to my mind, the number one factor influencing whether or not a child will reach their academic potential.

You should have seen Principal Peeves laughing his head off in the back of the auditorium! And the kids laughing and shouting and cheering... just like in real life, and jollier schools.

It has everything to do with my totally amazing colleagues, who were willing to put in that extra effort, to all pitch in and put themselves out there, even though some of them they were shy...

Our literacy coach, who's evil test-maker analogy sparked this whole crazy idea, did an absolutely chilling job as Test Prep Vader. She is now well known for her evil laugh... Tev saved the day with her sister-in-law's Darth Vader mask and light saber, Y. pitched in with a cape, and the piece de resistance was a homemade Yoda costume by Mannie, who used to be a prop mistress! It was a white bathrobe with foam elf-feet attached to the knees - so the wear-er walks on their knees and Yoda is like 3 feet tall, with these amazing Yoda ears that she made out of a green t-shirt and green foam. I was so touched that she took the time and care to make something so incredible. Just like at camp, just like so many teachers I know - this amazing resourcefulness, the ability to make something out of nothing. Everyone just rolled with it, I told them my vision and they made it happen. Actualization! Everyone lent a hand - downloading music, helping with costumes and props, ideas, scheduling logistics, spreading the word, giving up lunches to practice, and overall enthusiasm and good spirit.

And it really was just as I'd envisioned... Star Wars theme playing as the kids entered the auditorium, then Vader takes the stage threatening with the trickiest, most complicated, most confusing test in the history of Standardized tests mwaaaaahahaha and leaps off stage into the audience. Enter the teachers, dressed as students, loaded down with backpacks and test prep books and moaning and complaining about all the work they have to do, hystrionic crying... when one of them remembers Test Prep Yoda...

...who trains them (and the audience, of course) to be Test Prep Jedis! Testing Jedis must be have strength, courage and willingness to work hard. Were they up to the challenge? (Guess...)

Step one: RELAX! (dancing in the aisles to Eye of the Tiger) Step Two: Use your strategies (That he leaves to the teachers) and Step Three: learn the Secret three-part Test Prep Jedi cheer.

Part 1: Test Prep Jedis Use the Force!
Part 2: Oh yes we can, yes, yes we can!
Part 3: Test Vader goin' down!

Then Yoda tells the crows that that just might be the best Test Prep Jedi cheer he's ever heard! And that they should challenge their principal that they will do better on these tests than any other group of kids in the history of PS OO! Heads turn to Principal P, who has descended from his leather-furnished lair to make a rare appearance with the masses and is still standing in the back. As planned, a chant is instigated: "Mr. P! Mr. P! Mr. P!" (Brownie points for me to get an auditorium full of kids chanting the principal's name? Hee hee. Highly unusual occurrence for P.S. OO.)

And, in a typically long-winded, thickly Queens-accented inspirational speech, Principal P eventually gets around to telling the kids about the Caaaarrrniiiiivaaalllllll! The crowd goes wild.

I will commend old Peevey, because although his delivery was as dry and stuffy as one might've expected and the energy of the crowd dropped off a cliff as soon as he started talking, his message really was inspirational. He talked about a woman with Multiple Sclerosis who, after her diagnosis, has climbed mountains on every continent. And what does she eat when she gets to the top? Gummi bears!

So he will also be sending Gummi Bears to the kids on the day of the test to remind them about challenging themselves and exceeding their personal limits and believing in themselves .... I thought that was quite a sweet and thoughtful sentiment.*

Cue "We are the Champions." Exeunt.

So. That was that. A tremendously positive and empowering experience. I led my little Jedis back upstairs, where I issued them their official Jedi Rewards Cards (blank index cards) which I will hole-punch when they are behaving like good little Test Prep Jedis - being brave and cooperative and working hard, 10 holes equals a prize from the prize box.

Then G-- came up and said "Look! I wrote on my arm!" And I was about to begin my lecture on the questionable dermatological health effects of ball point pen ink on skin, when I read what it said: "Believe in yourself. You can do anything you set your mind to."

All in a day's work.







*It represents a tiny shift in my way of thinking about our Feuhrer, a hair-line crack in my stone-faced villainous characterization of Himself, and I will try to use this perspective to counteract the bilious knot that still forms in my gut whenever I see or interact with him.

What it takes

This morning as I strode purposefully to the bus stop, I felt determined, resolute, powerful and strong. "Whatever it takes!" I said (isn't that the motto of some branch of the military?) I visualized myself at batting practice, like in high school swinging away at whatever obstacles hurl themselves in my direction, lest I miss one and end up with a honey comb-patterned ball imprint on my forehead. Yes, I confirmed. I'll do whatever it takes!

I was reminded, it takes a lot. A lot of patience. A lot of swallowing your anger and frustration. A lot of pretended charisma and fake enthusiasm for Kaplan test prep strategies.

With the beginning of test prep unit, the kids didn't know what hit 'em. What's this? No more Read Aloud? No more independent reading? ALL test prep ALL day? I think they felt the switch, maybe sensed my internal tension as well, and it manifested itself in generalized increased pain-in-the-assitude. Even the ones who are not normally pains in the ass were painful today, and the ones who usually pains in the ass really outdid themselves. K--, for example, hit another kid upside the head with a book and broke his glasses? Like, not in a violent way, and the glasses weren't broken on purpose, but still. This is not how things are supposed to run in my classroom. K--, I think has reached an early adolescence and should be shipped of to a desert island with all the other attitudinal adolescents and only permitted to return when she's 18 or shows a record of better judgment. She gets under my skin like none other.

The other blow came with the after-school program I work on that's geared to helping high achievers maintain their high scores or do even better on the test. We got their test results
back many of my students went down over the course of the program. Which kind of shakes my confidence in whatever the hell we've been doing for three months but also confirms my belief that the tests are just so frustratingly temperamental and coincidental... it's not like the kids un-learned stuff, it's not like they got dumber or forgot what they learned... so why are we so bound to these scores? Can we take credit for a four point improvement? Can we penalize ourselves for a four-point drop? Like Corky says, if we're talking about margins that slim, it probably has more to do with whether or not the kid ate an extra cheerio that day than it does with anything in particular that we're doing
or not doing...

Anyway, partly I think as a result of the monthly festival of womanhood, and partly because of the rain and partly because of stuffing my round soul into ucomfortable square-shaped test prep shoes, I felt all out of sorts come 5pm. And, noticing this, in a touching and undeserved display of empathy and affection, Corky invited me to sleep over and get my grad school paper done in the company of a friend, leftover appetizers from her party and night-time mimosas. So it looks like once again, all will be well after all.