Steps

Yeah, in this line of work there's a lot you can feel embittered about. But the sweetness is that, as a teacher, you are uniquely positioned to take some those cranky, downtrodden, victimized urges and turn them around into positive, empowered, force-for-change urges, no matter if they are incremental, even imperceptible to the naked eye.

On Friday I went to Happy Hour (well, many hours actually) with my MBC's (Most Beloved Colleagues) and we all got REALLY REALLY fired up and impassioned about ESL, and the right way to do it and the wrong way to do it. The bitter part is having so much to get fired up about - ineffective teachers, ineffective ways of providing ESL instruction, ineffective use of teachers with ESL licenses...* But, incremental step in the right direction: pin-pointing exactly what is not working and why. Thinking of a better way, even if you don't yet have the means to put it into practice. Caring enough about what you do to talk about it after hours.

We also recruited the new(ish) but totally awesome and incredibly hardworking school librarian to join in our hour(s) of happiness... I knew she was one of us when I saw how impassioned she was about Sh-- reading The Wizard of Earthsea, which she had ordered for the school library specifically because it is one of the few fantasy series in children's literature that has a non-white protaganist. She was delighted to hear that Sh-- is a sneak-reader (as she had also been in school)... The other day I caught him reading a book about about penguins when he was supposed to be doing ELA test prep... and who could blame him?

But little changes, as small as ordering a particular book for the library, are the ones that I think will matter in the end, when you begin to tally up the usefulness of the kids' education. Exposing kids to literature that reflects their realities and their life experiences, reading about real-life and made-up heroes who grew up as they are now, who face some of the same challenges and obstacles as they are facing and will face, knowing and believing that they can become the heroes of their own lives... this is how people manage to accomplish things, to achieve. The first step is being able to imagine your own success. Kids need heroes to model themselves after, and they need heroes in which they can recognize parts of themselves.

School librarians are heroes, too.

***
I also had an opportunity to up-end a bit of bitterness. This particular bitterness was knowing that, as a result of the great AIS restructuring of aught-nine, (Academic Intervention Services) J-- and D-- now miss their only periods of science and art in the week. Instead they are pulled out for periods of extra reading instruction with Ms. Snatch...

Ms. Snatch, by the way, is quite a character. She's a loud-voiced, aging reading teacher, who is always out of breath from climbing the stairs, and whom I also suspect of being a narcoleptic. Though I know she doesn't mean any harm, I've seen her, innocently but repeatedly unravelling my hard work at encouraging gender neutrality by saying things like "The blue turtle is the boy turtle and the pink is the girl turtle! I can't give you this pink one, can I, because it's the girl turtle!"

I also can't help feeling biased against her because she kind of bad-mouthed S-- in front of my whole class, saying that he is hyperactive and his behavior was "bordering on obnox--" and stopped herself. But the kids aren't stupid, they knew what she meant, and that type of comment coming from a teacher sure doesn't help the peerless and inimitable S-- (who is, in fact, both hyperactive and occasionally obnoxious, but doesn't mean to be) to be accepted by his peers.

Anyway, needless to say, J-- and D-- were less than thrilled to be missing out on science and art from now until the end of the year to spend time with Ms. Snatch. And, though I sincerely wish I could, I don't have any power to change any of this...

But, newly inspired to "be the change" by the happy outcome of the Pep Rally, I had a little idea. And I did something I consider to be small but significant. I went to the dollar store and got colored pencils and modeling clay and little paints and paint brushes and put them in a manila envelope for each. And I took them aside one day and told them they had extra homework, which was to use what was inside these envelopes. I told them, "Never being able to go to science and art sends you the message that they're not important. But I think they are important, just as much as reading and writing."

Will having a pack of colored pencils turn them into Picassos or future Fine Arts majors? Highly unlikely. I think both of them are more into soccer and baseball than they are into drawing and painting.

But who knows what they one day could or couldn't be... I surely wouldn't presume to say. And I surely wouldn't want it on my shoulders to have had a hand in stifling a budding artist's creative urges. I think the parameters of education these days are limiting enough as it is, and I think it's pretty effed up to limit even more their potential by taking away art and science. As an educator, I'd rather not have that on my shoulders.

Baby steps, baby steps. Spoonful by spoonful, if we keep at it, we might one day be able to dig ourselves out of this deep dark cave we're in. Book by book, pencil by pencil, we strive to walk toward the light, rather than away from it. Maybe I'll never get to see the end of the tunnel. But there's always the hope that the kids will.




*If you're interested in the nitty-gritty of this issue, my license is ESL, so theoretically my entire class could be made up of ELLs - English Language Learners -, who are mandated to have a certain number of hours ESL instruction per week... Technically, all of my hours of instruction are considered ESL. But, the way it panned out this year, I have eight ELL's in my class, and twenty non-ELLs - which I believe technically is against the law since I don't have a general ed license... Meanwhile, my good friend Henrietta, an ESL push-in/pull-out teacher, is overburdened with sixty ELL's, and she runs around the school trying to provide them with their requisite hours of ESL instruction per week, which even given her superhuman efforts, is physically impossible. On paper, it looks as if we're "in compliance" with the state mandates, but in reality, only if she can be in two places at once.

On mattering

I've been ruminating a bit more about these trade-offs, the sacrificing of one thing for another - the paradoxical, oppositional conundrums of teaching.

Over spring break I had a really great, validating discussion with my sister about the nature of my work. She reminded me how lucky am, at the tender age of 25, to be doing something that more or less matters in the day-to-day. If I don't show up to work, it matters. People miss me. When I funnel my energy and brain power into endless hours of crafting my Smartboard lessons; when I strategize with Corky and Rosie about the best way to get a particular point across, I get to see the results, the fruits of my labor. The kids end up knowing things they didn't know before... When I go to work, I spend the day with eager livers of life, who are excited about all the possibilities the world can offer them.

Compared to so many of my contemporaries, this is a relatively useful and fulfilling way of spending my working life. So many people of my generation are no less capable, hard-working motivated, or ideal-driven than me and my colleagues. And yet, due to the cruel reality of being a new admit to the working world, their time and talents are funneled into filling up the entry-level chairs of cubicle-world: filing insurance claims; "researching" fruitless fundraising possibilities for poorly managed non-profits; administratively assisting various law firms and financial institutions; entering data for contractors and corporations. Gaining that frustratingly intangible "experience" you need to do something more like you wanted to do when you were in the fifth grade.

I know I am tremendously lucky to have been afforded the opportunity to do a job that doesn't entail me staring into a computer and checking Facebook half the day - that is its own brand of 21st century torture.

But the upshot of all this mattering, all this meaningfulness at my job?

It's exhausting. Like, deflated balloon, boneless puddle, brain-mush exhausting. In teaching, there is no day when you get to "phone it in," there is no way to work from home, there is no way to just lay low and check your email or surf the web for a minute or two when you get tired. There is no way to take a coffee break or eat a snack or even pee unless it falls into your previously arranged schedule.

Some weekend days, like yesterday, my body just rebels, and my mind, too, I guess. Even after a short work week, I slept and slept and couldn't stop sleeping. I was hard-pressed to leave my bed, much less my apartment. This happens to me from time to time, and when it does, I feel frustratingly, frighteningly powerless. My body just shuts down and refuses to be anything but horizontal, and my brain feels fuzzy and dull. I'm not sure if I can blame it all on my work - some of it could just be my own psychic idiosyncracy - but I know it's related. When you spend most days on all eight cylinders, every now and then the engine just gives out.

All told, I suppose I would million times rather be an exhausted lifeless school teacher on weekends than an energized but underutilized office worker. But I guess this is all to say, what I do matters... But mattering ain't easy, and meaningfulness has its price.

Salty, bitter and sweet

Teaching is a series of trade-offs. Everything sweet has a bitter underbelly or a salty side.

Yesterday we sacrificed a whole precious day of test prep - the ELA test looms up in a near distance of less than a month - to go on a field trip to see a theater performance of The Diary of Anne Frank, a picture book version of which which we had read as a read aloud. It came at the price of a couple possible percentage points on the test, and the also at the price of $10 a ticket. It was hard to ask the families to spare that money, especially after all the expensive graduation-related stuff I've had to ask them for this year. Bitter: knowing what giving up $10 means to some of these families. But I think it is a testament to the families' dedication to their kids that they all came up with it one way or another - I think it shows how much they care about giving their kids the best education possible... sweet.

And to my mind, it was absolutely worth it. I grew up in a family where theater and music were priceless and where trips (field and otherwise) were considered just as essential a part of your education as learning to read and write. So when D-- said on the school bus that the only other show she had ever seen was with her last year's teacher, part of me felt sad that she doesn't get to have what I had, but part of me also felt proud and privileged to introduce it to her. A tiny bit bitter, but also sweet.

Another sweet: my AP Candy came up to me at dismissal asking if I needed a new rug and what else did I need for my classroom because she's about to place an order... I said, "Wow, what a great question to hear!"

To her credit, she has always been very good about getting her teachers what they need. She has often come around to my classroom with an armful of books or some other resource she'd gotten her hands on, asking if I could use them. I've always felt like she has my back, which is so crucial -- when shit went down with N-- and the other boys, I never felt blamed for it in any way - I blamed myself for it more than anyone else blamed me. I never felt that it was taken as a reflection of my ability as a teacher. And thinking back to my first year debacle of a post-observation conference with the Big Cheese -the one where He made me feel about 2 inches tall, and ridiculous for even having ever tried to become a teacher since I was so preposterously ill-suited and incompetent and undeserving of the job - Candy sat on my side of his big imposing desk, and fielded the blows with me.

The consensus in my academy of the school is that we're lucky to have her as our assistant principal - for this reason, and because she's kind of hands-off, and just lets us do our thing.

The salty side of this is that although I've always felt supported by Candy, there is danger in falling out of her good graces. I've heard from others like Nessa last year who made the mistake of crossing her in some way - well, Nessa's back was no longer had, and she no longer works at our school. I've heard it expressed that when Candy comes in to do a formal observation, the outcome is already decided when she walks in.

And although she has only ever been sweet with me, I do have another rather bitter complaint about her: I think she and Principal Peeves are a bit too quick to blame the kids and their families. I've heard her say things about kids and families, especially when it comes to up-close-and-personal topic like bedbugs and lice, like "they're dirty..." When Jafa and I were mentioning how much we like tamales, she asked incredulously if we buy them from the ladies with shopping carts who stand outside the subway station. When we said yes, she said something along the lines of "Ew, I can't believe you do that." And when Jafa told her that he and his partner are fostering a baby and that he might be taking some paternity leave, she made a comment that was totally supportive of him, but kind of made him cringe when she used the opportunity to derisively call into question the parenting capabilities specifically of Mexican families...

So yeah. I suppose every person has their underbelly. And how does that quote go? Let the person who has not sinned cast the first stone... I'm not trying to say I've never thought an unkind thought about a child or a parent, or that every comment I've made has been morally unassailable. Thinking mean thoughts and feeling forced into saying unkind things from time to time is almost a hazard of the job...but I try not to. I will say that it's disconcerting to work under a supervisor whose worldview appears to be so different from mine.

All in all, I think she's a good person, that she really does appreciate the kids and want to help them. And I really appreciate being left alone and allowed to do my job in peace.

But I also I know that when I started, what I really needed was NOT to be left alone - I needed someone to come in there and help me, save me, show me what to do and how to do it. Instead I bumbled painfully through, and cost some first graders, who really could've used a strong teacher, an important year in their educational lives... I felt like no one even knew I was in there most of the time. When Peevie finally remembered that he'd hired me permanently and not as a long-term sub and walked in to do his observation in May or June, I was the only one who wasn't surprised how much I was struggling.

I think the mark of healthy management is that the leaders of the school are really in touch and in tune with what goes on there day to day. I think most of our school leaders (not all) look at what goes on at PS OO through admistrative binoculars... And I'm not saying I would like to be visited more often by the administration, because I most emphatically do not! But I am kind of saying that I wish the culture of my school was one where seeing your administrators walk in the room wasn't so surprising, and wouldn't stop your heart and make your stomach drop down to your ankles. And one where you knew for sure that everybody's heart was in the same place as yours.

Same as it ever was

I guess each time you return someplace it feels slightly less foreign, less jarring to the system to switch from one life to another.

But there was still a moment this morning, (in the exact same spot on the stairwell as the last 'first day back') of who..? wha...? where am I? who the hell are you people?

I'd been hoping to come back all refreshed and rejuvenated, ready to tackle it all again with newfound enthusiasm and gusto. But in reality, I think I'm just picking up where I left off.

The customary sights and sounds were, in a way, comforting in their familiarity: the klickety clack of trendy shoes (not mine) on the shiny, freshly buffed checkered hallways; the morning moose-call of "ELVADRRRR!" as we collect the third floor teachers to go down and pick up the kids; the shrill ring of the phone just as you take your breath to make the final culminating point in your carefully structured mini-lesson; the sighs of defeat in the ongoing search for the working copy machine; and the rhythmic, frustratingly slow chunka-chunk of double-sided copies (when cooperating machinery is finally located.)...

Mouse poo in the same offending corners of closets, only more of it than when I left. The same Himalayas of disheveled papers layered topographically on and around my desk. Same goofy kids with their goofy grins and snide remarks and clumsy sprawling limbs .

Despite my best intentions, I ended the day feeling claustrophobic and grouchy (seven straight hours of test prep will do that to a person.) So I had to call in the best antidote I know - Corky, whom I really missed over break. I lured her to our favorite neighborhood cafe after school under pretense of doing more lesson planning, but really we ended up hashing out our latest life revelations and ponderings and plannings over yuca fries and Colombian beer. And I realized that, as invaluable as she is to me as a coworker, she's become even more important to me as a friend.

Of all the stuff at school that is the same as it ever was, I am most grateful for my friends.

Like clockwork,

the school dreams arrive.

Their little round faces are there when I close my eyes, letting me know it's time to go back to work. (No matter how long the vacation, it never seems quite long enough.)

Last night dream Pretzel Club fell to pieces under a dream administrator's gaze, erupting into barely supervised dream chaos.

The night before, dream N-- passed by my class, crying.

Trying again

A letter came while I was away, from my former self, care of Inner Resilience:

Dear Self, ( I wrote, some 27 days ago...)

Have you sat with stillness today?

Have you let yourself feel silence?

Have you let yourself realize what you have accomplished?

Some days, like today, you are strong and brave and powerful, like a volcano erupting or a match igniting. Some days you can take on the world. Some days, like today, you are enough.

***

Again, the letter from myself has come at an apt time, because I've been thinking about my past and future selves.

A couple years ago, (after the particularly long and dark winter of my first year of teaching, when I really needed something to look forward to) I started a yearly ritual of life goal-setting in March or April, from a book called Best Year Yet. It’s the perfect time of year to do it, because looking ahead comes naturally, and you can believe it when you tell yourself the worst is behind you now.

April really is the start of a new year, not January. There’s nothing new about January or February. Snow gets old, cold gets old – the calendar might be new but winter keeps getting older by the day. Things are dead and dark, inside and out. March is the end.

And after the end, comes the beginning, again: the yearly miracle. No less miraculous for having rescued us the same way every year.

Spring is relief (we shall live to see another day) and promise (a full round golden summer on its way).

My favorite poet says of spring,

even though

it was hard times sometimes it’s nice

to know I can depend on the crazy

yellow of that forsythia to remind me

of how much I can forget in a year.

I've been thinking about everything that's changed in a year, how many things I've gained. Around this time last year things were looking pretty different. I was still suffering through first grade, drilling letter-sounds and sight words, resolving petty disputes, losing my patience and wearing myself thin day after day. I'd started to know Jafa and Corky and Shanaynay and Jade through last year's Pretzel Club, but we were still just familiar strangers and I had no idea they'd become pillars, centerpieces in my life.

I didn't know I'd do a triathlon and start to like running a little bit. I didn't know I'd move to Brooklyn to find a livelier neighborhood and escape my sad, empty Queens apartment. I didn't even know I was empty and sad at the time (though in retrospect, it should've been obvious.)

I didn't know how quickly or how fully my mom would recover from her surgery, or my dad from his. I didn't know if their business would get booming once again. I didn't know I was going to teach fifth grade, and that it would feel completely different. I didn't know how much my life would change in a year, though now if feels as if it has always been this way.

It's nice to know that I finally feel like I am enough sometimes...

I remember so clearly having lunch that first year with my officially assigned mentor, and breaking down in spite of myself. I remember trying to talk through pressurized tears, saying that even if I could do everything "they" wanted me to do, even if it weren't so impossible, it still wouldn't be enough. I felt, back then, that the kids had so much working against them -- I was a broken band-aid on a severed arm, a pathetic defense against unfathomably larger and stronger forces. Though I wanted to, I didn't know how to help them. I felt I was making matters worse, that my inexperience and ineffectiveness were robbing them of the education they truly needed and should've been entitled to.

So it's like this gorgeous Japanese magnolia the neighbors were kind enough to plant outside my window long ago. I've seen it in wind and rain, I've seen the branches bare and weighted with sleet and snow and covered in sleeves of ice. I noticed the buds when they first came out and now I see the blossoms fully, richly, thickly blooming. Today, the tree is exploding with possibilities and potential. Today it is brave and strong and powerful like a volcano or a match igniting. Does it know what it has accomplished? But that strength is always in there, just sometimes you don't see it... it's the same tree whether its branches are green or pink or white or bare. The same potential exists in the dead of winter as does in the height of spring... it's just a matter of sticking around long enough to see it.

So yeah. I'm the tree, the tree is me and all that.

It's not that the kids have changed, or their challenges, or the dark forces that are working against them. I know all that's still there. But I've changed in that I see things differently now, or maybe it's that I feel things differently now. I don't let immutable, immovable things like that hurt me in the same way. I don't care about the dark forces; dark forces be damned. Dark forces can go jump in a lake. I only care about me, and my kids, and my classroom.

So, take-home message: keep going. You cannot know what lies ahead. All will be well - the proof is there, under the surface. You will reap the rewards of what you sow. You are strong and brave. Today, you are enough.

Keep going.

It’s like my favorite poet says: there is something in this time of year that wants me to try again.

Easter promises

Easter is such a great holiday.

As the trees fly by the railroad tracks, en route from one home to another, my mind feels saturated with sunshine. It is imprinted with the rich vibrant yellow of daffodils, forsythia, and a family gathered around the Easter table spreading a warmth even the newly liberated sun doesn’t match.

It makes sense that Easter is a holiday largely about kids – Kids are nothing but balls of unrealized potential. Everything about them says Grow! Look to the future! I can hardly wait to see what happens next!

I got to be the Easter bunny for my niece and nephew this year. After I’d snuck out barefoot into the cold morning dew to hide the eggs I was struck by a feeling… There was something both exciting and comforting about looking into that great wide green backyard right before it all began – before all the cooing and clucking aunties and grannies and friends arrived, before the hubbub of stirring gravy and warming things in the oven and pouring drinks and finding chairs for tired legs…

I looked through the kitchen window out into the yard and saw happy little bubbles of pink and pastel yellow and purple and blue – Easter eggs in hiding, waiting to be discovered. Some of them were really very close by (Eddie’s not even three, after all), peeking out from behind blades of grass and perched on low-hanging branches. Little secrets, right there out in the open if you took the time to look for them. And I knew the precious little surprises they held inside, and the “treasure” under the pine tree, as my nephew later called his Easter basket.

It was heartwarming to see little EdBear stoop down to pick up the eggs and add them lovingly to his collection. He’d call out “a egg!” when he spotted one, reaching out to receive the things that had been put there to be found by him, and put them in his basket.

It seemed like a living analogy for life… Easter eggs: bright spots in the lawn of life, gifts soon to be realized. A trail of little treasures leading up to a great big basket of goodies! All you have to do is look, and you will find them, because they are there… Follow the trail and it will lead you to unexpected joy.

And sure, maybe the goodies in life are too big or amorphous to fit inside a plastic Easter egg. But that doesn’t mean you can’t hunt for them all the same. I have a feeling there are things waiting for me out there that are even better than cashews and pastel rainbow m & m’s, and even crayons and coloring books.

So that’s going to be my mindset going forward – life as an Easter egg hunt. Looking for treasures scattered all around ahead of me, just waiting to be revealed.