sofa-jumping and literary interpretation

They all seemed so precious and special today. Truly! Not in a sarcastic or ironic way.

Even when one of them literally vaulted his body over the couch I have in the classroom after coming up from lunch, it didn't seem like he was trying to be naughty or difficult (even though he clearly should have known better). He just seemed exuberant and full of life... Granted, that much life is just not admissible in a classroom environment, but I couldn't help thinking, man, if I wasn't your teacher I bet we'd have so much fun.

The Teacher part of me naturally had to admonish the culprit. I qued the lecture on impulse control and dispensed appropriate consequences. But the human being part of me marveled at his dexterity and chutzpah. The human being part of me wanted to go and see if I could do it myself.

Often the kids will say smartass things that, as a self-proclaimed coniosseur of smartassocity, strike me as really funny. It is both a learned skill and a delicate art form to be able to pull myself back from the line of inappropriate laughter that would not only totally derail any modicum of order I've been able to maintain, but also send the wrong message about what is generally considered acceptable in school.

Today, though, I got to have myself a hearty belly laugh, the likes of which I hadn't had in ages. I wish I could've had a video camera, because I'm sure words can't do this moment justice, but I'll try.

Dutifully, I was trying to instruct my class on how to find out the "author's message" in their reading by looking at the story's problem, solution, what the character realized from this ordeal and trying to put that "life lesson" into words. Sh---, totally one of my smartest kids, was moaning and bellyaching that his book really didn't have a lesson. I went over to him and he started to argue "Yeah, there's no lesson! Stuff just happens. The problem was that she didn't want to climb the tower, and the solution was that she climbed the tower and ---" he stopped mid-sentence, eyes wide, and looked almost crestfallen as he conceded, "Oh... Bravery."

Ha! Take that, Sh---! Betrayed by your own intelligence and gift for literary interpretation! Learning against your will and in spite of yourself! Author's message: 1, Sh--: zip.

God, it was so adorable, and at the same time it was like, holy crap, this "reading strategy" stuff actually works?

Same thoughts were going through my head as I conferenced with A--, my newest ELL [English Language Learner], who is celebrating one year in the U.S. this month. She totally blew me away with the level of thinking and understanding and literary interpretation that she did. I was like, shit, someone was actually listening as I was blabbering and gesticulating away up there all these months? And doesn't it figure that the one who was probably listening the most was the one with the least amount of English! I truly got a little verclemped, I'm just so proud of this girl.

So yeah, ask me again tomorrow and it could all be different. Some other day, I know, I will turn around and say that they are spiteful beasts and ungrateful brats. But for now, let it be known that 5-315 is the temporary home of some remarkable, ridiculous, absolutely preciously precocious individuals.

Note to self: eat and sleep

I've stayed till six or past every night this week, not because I wanted to, or even because I meant to. I just don't know how to leave. There was a time when I was getting better at just walking away from it all, but I feel like I've regressed from that point. What's frustrating is that I'll stay and work but feel like I'm spinning my wheels, nothing gets accomplished. Although today I did finally accomplish two tedious tasks that I had been insistently avoiding since the new year.

Yesterday I got SO MAD when I realized I had saved over a lesson that I'd spent a good 30 minutes on. Usually I'm a little more zen about things like that, but I could not let it go. As I rode home under the train tracks on Roosevelt Avenue and the 7 clattered and roared above me I screamed into the wind just to hear my voice get lost in it. It was like the old days, the period I refer to as the "dark times," when I would ride home from work repeating to myself over and over again "Forget! Forget! Forget!" like a crazed, desperate mantra, hoping the wind in my face would somehow clear the clutter from my mind.

I realized later I hadn't eaten for hours and then probably not enough, and that was a large source of the problem. I fell asleep at 8:30pm and slept for ten hours and, miracle of miracles, today was a lot better.

I loved them today, they all seemed so precious and unique. Sh-- did an extra credit report on Gandhi (by report, I mean printing ten pages off the internet, but it's initiative nonetheless, and made me happy since he's Indian, too). N--- noticed symbolism in the read aloud. A--- returned from a month in Bangladesh and clung to me when I hugged her welcome back. She seemed wide-eyed and dazed and still far away, as anyone might after returning from such a journey, and after meeting all those relatives for the first time. Later she threw up, probably more from anxiety than from any kind of virus.

They do follow you home, though. You close your eyes, and there they are. You try to eat dinner and check your email and you hear their voices. They sneak up on you, get into your head and won't get out. Scenes from the day or last week or last month swirl around in your mind as if they're trapped - a bee who can't find its way back to the open window, or a tornado inside a jar.

triceratops and magic tricks

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.

swing of the hatchet

Trying to think of an apt word of the day... frustration? inefficacy? impotence?

Frustration like putting down the papers somewhere in the classroom and being unable to find them (or do anything else) for a full twenty minutes.

Inefficacy like staying until six and being unable to account for that time other than a few dozen photocopies, an empty bag of Cheet-os and some fuzzy mental notes on the week ahead.

Impotence like the school-wide memo, landed in our mailboxes today from out of nowhere, about the complete reorganization of AIS (extra help programs during the day) that will change everyone's schedule in the school and disrupt any routine anyone might've managed to establish so far and be basically a big pain in the neck for everyone involved. Clearly based on the last round of reading test results.

Not enough progress in those January scores? Not fast enough or steep enough curves on that fancy-looking data graph? Down comes the hatchet and reading programs in place for almost half the year now are slashed and burned, replaced with other new ones, different ones. Perhaps THIS will be the magic one, the panacea that will teach all the kids to read "On Grade Level" instantaneously; yes perhaps THIS one will be the one that will make all the difference. THIS must be the one with the right formula that will permanently eliminate the sub-category of below average kids, the one that will get those struggling readers not to struggle anymore...

Find me a reading program that gets S--- a full 8 hours of sleep at night, or his own bed maybe. Find me one that makes K--- more interested in writing than she is in making eyes at boys from across the room. Find me one that makes A--- do his homework or makes Sh--- able to sit down in his seat for more than thirty seconds at a time. Find me one that keeps N---'s fists away from other kids, or one that can make the class be quiet all at once so the B---'s and the P---'s and the J---'s can just do their work and learn something, which is all they want to do anyway. Find one that will write my conference notes for me so I could spend that time with the kids, listening to them, talking to them, being with them, like humans do. THAT would be a reading program I could get behind.

Let me know when you hear of one like that.

I just can't help feeling like they, the administration, are trying to wring out percentage points and test scores from the students as if the kids were so many wet rags or dry lemons. Rather than cultivating an environment where students might grow and be nourished, they prefer these knee-jerk, out-of-the-blue, no-questions-asked mandates with no warning... And to what end? To improve our ratings? To convince the Chancellor we are more effective than we are? To bump their salaries into the next bracket?

it's push push push but don't they know our backs are already up against the wall?

The problem is not the reading program we use, it's not the number of minutes of literacy instruction per day, it's not the students or even the teachers. It's nothing so simple as that. I wish I could say exactly what it is... the problem is the paradigm. The problem is the mind-closing of America, the mashing of brilliant young brains and limitless potential into undersized molds; the transformation of individual humans into mass-market performance machines, trained to fill in bubbles and follow the flow-chart of probabilities. It has to do with underestimating what people are capable of (both students and teachers) and insisting on conformity and sameness while willfully disregarding everything we know about the way we learn and the diversity and elasticity of the human mind.

I blame it on short-sightedness, small-mindedness and capitalism.

goooool!

I am just so incredibly grateful for my work friends, for Friday afternoon happy hour at La Pequena Colombia, taco night at Corky's, and for sometimes being able to just walk out the door and leave it all behind.

Highlight of the day, after my epic revision lesson: D---, one of my most struggling students, especially in writing: " I like revising!"

As they say on Univision and elsewhere, GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLLLLLLLLLLLLLL!

Clap on, clap off

I was ON today. If it felt like that every day, there'd be no reason not to teach.

Being on feels like you're funny, you're cracking jokes, bantering with kids about this and that. Kids are paying attention in spite of themselves, your lesson was THAT interesting and THAT engaging - they just couldn't help it! They tried to pick at their shoelaces or make post-it origami or shoot rubber bands at each other, but in the end, their curiosity won out! They wanted to hear what it was you had to say.

When you're on, when you're meeting with them, it's like you know exactly what to say, the words just come to you from someplace, they just flow. Unlike some days when you feel like you're talking at them from behind a scrim, like your words have to travel far and wide to make their way to the kids, and by the time they get there they are unintelligible or obsolete, like a long-distance phone call. When you're off, you feel extraneous. You feel like an impostor. When you're on, you are a guru.

Days when you're on, you feel like, "Shit, I really did something here today! I think somebody actually learned something. I guess I really do come here for a reason..."

If all the moments could be like that. There are precious few of them, so you have to hang on tight to that feeling. Moments to hold onto:

+ Sh--- while analyzing song lyrics, referencing the Cesar Chavez Read Aloud from months ago. He said, "It takes more guts to fight with words than to fight with your fists." And in my head, I said, "HAHA! I am winning! Holy crap I can't believe he said that, like internalized it, because of what I did, what I chose to read to them!" Really I didn't have time to fully appreciate it in the moment, but that's got to be a career highlight right there. (All the more of a victory since the kid's shown some tendencies towards physical aggression.)

+hanging out in the library as the kids choose books, just seeing what they chose, telling them random thoughts and talking about life and literature

+talking to them freely for a few minutes after school as we dismiss - interesting, the slivers of lives that are revealed in those few moments, like S--- jumping up and down, his tiny frame and crooked glasses vibrating with hyperactive energy, playfully shouting "Maggot! maggot!" at the much bigger but meek and mild-mannered Y---. (The class pipsqueak becomes a powerful drill sargeant through play.)

+ voices aflutter during an exciting part of a read aloud, begging for one more chapter

+ the field trip to museum of the Moving Image, and the look of realization and excitement in Sh---'s eyes when he said, in answer to the tour guide's question, "The moment of rest!" - experiencing the magic of how movies are made as if he himself had discovered it

+today, cracking up unexpectedly -

Ms. D: "N---, why are you always late?"
N---, matter-of-factly, without missing a beat: "I take long showers."



Laughing makes me feel connected to the kids like nothing else. I wish it would happen more often. I should try to let it happen more often. Interesting how the funniest ones are also the most exasperating, and how the most exasperating ones somehow still become my secret favorites.

How innocently N-- hugs me, even sometimes when he's been misbehaving...

They reach out for you. They all need you, they all crave your attention, some more than others. (And really, 1/29th of the teacher's attention -or even less considering all the bureaucratic bullshit that also competes for my attention - doesn't amount to very much at the end of the day. Certainly not even close to what they deserve.)

But even on the bad days, even on your off days, even after harsh words have been spoken, even when you've been communicating long-distance through the scrim, they reach out for you. They still need you.

Maybe that's part of what I'm teaching them, too: we have good days together and we have bad days together, but we either way, we come back. We keep on going. We laugh, then we yell, then we find a way to forgive. We rely on each other. We don't stop relying on each other just because we are upset or angry or just "off." We are happy and sad together. We do the best we can. And when we fail, or flail, or suffer setbacks, we know that everyone will show up again tomorrow, and tomorrow might be different, and we'll all still be there at the start of a new day - good or bad, near or far, off or on.

Names have been changed to protect the innocent

Here's a gem of an illicit epistle that I rescued from the ruthless sweep of the janitor's broom today:

Did you know that at the rug j--- saw me talking to a--- and then she tells me to be quiet and do my work. if she likes him maybe then I think she is jealous with her man. Agree

yes no

But write what you think

and then, the illuminating response:

Maybe the teacher was looking at you two



Yes, no doubt the teacher was looking at them two - glaring, more like - probably staring daggers in a futile attempt to get them to pay more attention to whatever vitally important reading strategy she was trying to convey than they do to each other. Likely to no avail.

It's amusing, almost, to know that as I'm doing backflips and cartwheels and Elvis impersonations up there, as I'm scaffolding and differentiating and active-engaging away in desperate attempts to get my students to somehow understand fractions or figurative language or non-fiction features, that this is probably a more representative picture of the edifying avenues of thought down which my students are travelling... gives you some perspective, at least.

But more to the point, my dear K---, whose handwriting and subject matter are unmistakable, I'm sorry to tell you that it only gets worse from here... Compound and multiply your 10-year old angst and jealousy and exhaustive yet fruitless analysis of the inscrutable behaviors of the opposite sex, and there you have the next 10 to 15 years of your life, I'm afraid... already laid out for you within the confines of a little yellow post-it. Welcome to the wide, wonderful world of womanhood, my friend. Take a number and have a seat.