The Bosses' Boss

In an unprecedented stroke of well-timed bad weather, New York City Public Schools saw their second snow day of the winter - and on a Friday!! When I heard my phone "bling" at 5:30 in the morning, I knew it would be from Rosie, and I knew there was only one thing that text could say...

I feel at least partially responsible for our bonus three-day weekend because I made a bargain with the snow gods as I was leaving my thesis class Thursday night that if we received another snow day I promised to actually do some work on my Thesis. (And I know those snow gods want me to succeed.)

I did technically keep up my end of the bargain, though the deal was sweetened by the fact that I did it while simultaneously eating baked goods and homemade soup and spiked apple cider at Jafa and King's house... (Buuut not before I spent several hours in bed watching episodes of The Office on Hulu... I figured that was what Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein intended when they gave us the snow day, and who am I to go against their wishes?)

Also, the unanticipated day off was a nice reminder that, as invincible and all-powerful and unstoppable as the Great Bureaucracy sometimes seems, Mother Nature can still force everything to grind to a halt long enough for everyone to remember that she's still the boss.

Paper-shufflin', pencil-pushin' and book-cookin'

It's funny, the variety of statements from the kids that I must sift through and sort each day. A winner for the week, pursuant of nothing: "Ms. D, I have a scab on the outside of my ear and another one on the inside!"
That one defies categorization.

***

I administered reading tests this week, which I generally have mixed feelings about. Sometimes it is a relief to set up shop in the hallway with my assessment binder and accordion folder and get a reprieve from the classroom grind.

Other times that feeling is overshadowed by a certain anxiety level, inversely proportionate to the substitute's ability to communicate in English and/or manage the captive hoard of pre-pubescent wildebeests that I've loaned her for the day. (It is hard to concentrate on Running Records when you fear that your room is being shredded to bits just an arm's reach away.)

Sometimes it is a mixture of frustration and anger, when the kids aren't showing enough "progress," or when I start thinking of the percentage of time out of this so-called noble profession that is devoted to paper-shuffling, book-cooking, and meaningless pencil-pushing.

But this time around it was immensely positive. I enjoyed having a few minutes to spend with the kids away from everybody else, one on one, there was a competent sub, and they seemed to make good progress! Again I was astounded by the fact that this "education" stuff actually works - my gosh! Something's happened! It's sinking in! You couldn't read this three months ago, and now you can... could that really have had something to do with me??? It seems weird to take credit for stuff that's going on inside somebody else's brain. But it is kinda cool to see evidence that, one way or another, learning has occurred.

Rain

I woke up sad yesterday. I blame it mostly on the rain. I was running to the bus stop and resented the fact that I was rehearsing my parent meeting in my head and trying to come up with the Spanish word for "test score" so early in the morning. I resented the weather for blowing needles of rain sideways into my face, and I resented the bus for being seven minutes late.

As I walked wetly to the subway from the bus stop I began thinking about the last really rainy day at school. My new boots had turned out to not be waterproof at all, so my feet were soaked, and there's nothing worse than squishy socks in wet shoes. So I took them off and told all the kids they could take their shoes off, too, and I was remembering the sheer joy and delight in their faces as they slid and shuffled around in their sock-feet. None more joyful or exuberant than N--. Thinking about N-- when he was in a good mood made me remember the first time he came up to me while wearing my coat and said, sincerely and matter-of-factly, "You know Ms. D, green really is your color. " And I also remembered the many times he said it to me subsequently, (also not shy about notifying me that my winter coat was an inferior shade of green that didn't suit me quite as well. )

And thinking about all that, and what he might be doing that day,and whether or not his feet were wet, made me even more sad. It's certainly quieter in class without him...

"I'm not in good shape today," I told Corky as we rode up, soggy, in the elevator, shuffling our attendance papers and sorting through mail. As I walked into my darkened classroom (it, too, was still asleep, with its jungle of chair legs pointed up at the sky) I felt some furtive tears escape without warning.

But my darling beloved co-teachers give such heartfelt hugs, it felt ok to be sad without giving a good reason. They understand about these things.

Knowing they are there makes it feel like there is more than just me up against this crazy world. The strength they bestowed, and knowledge that the kids would be waiting downstairs with penetrating eyes and always a tide of questions lying in wait was enough for me to pull it together. (You try to avoid showing them unnecessary cracks. It just creates more work for you.)

Predictably, the day went on as scheduled, as days have a tendency to do. Getting them started is almost always the hardest part.

I collected the kids and as we marched upstairs, I also saw my friend Vee with her troupe of tiny kindergarteners in tow, and she waved and smiled across the hallway. And I felt inspired just to see her, because I have never heard her speak an unkind word or say something that wasn't positive. And I remembered, ah yes, I must strive to be more like the people I love, the ones who bring light with them even on a rainy day.

the alien parade and the haunted house

At a certain point, you'd expect to know what to expect coming back to school after being away...
but I suppose it's like a haunted house.. you know that shoddily-made mummies and cardboard ghosts or painted actors are going to pop out at you as you turn the corner, but that doesn't actually stop you from screaming...

So I suppose a part of me anticipated tossing and turning all night and dreaming nonsensical half-lucid dreams about co-workers and forgotten cupcakes...the revelation was a familiar one: Ah yes, that's right. School tomorrow. No sleep. Half-cracked.

And then there's that moment after picking up the kids from the cafeteria in the morning and watching them trudge up the stairs, in the customary scattered parade of bulky coats and heavy backpacks and and spiky hair and sleepy eyes and illicitly traded Pokemon cards (even at 7:30 in the morning...). The procession happens every single day I go to work (I generally try to use it as an opportunity, however brief, to look into their faces and see what I can see) but time off makes it alien again.

Yes, half of me anticipated my slightly addled confusion... how did we all get here? Do I know you? Who are these kids and what am I going to do with them all day? And what has become of the comfort and leisure that was all mine only a very few short hours ago??

But, just as in the rickety roller-carts of the haunted house, the other half of me was blindsided yet again.

saavvee mmmeeesdfhsdjgfgjk

aauuggghhh it's haaappppeeeenniiiingggggg... If you're reading this, tell my family and friends that I love them and will miss them, and will speak to them again in June... I am Jekyll turning into Hyde, unless it's the other way around...

The clock has struck 9:30pm on the last Sunday of vacation and my stagecoach is, as we speak, turning into a pumpkin... I can feel my sweatpants and slipper-socks being torn metaphysically from my body and being exchanged for "slacks" and a sensible shoes... boarding pass has been cruelly shredded and lain to rest in the recycling bin, and my once-winged feet are slowly sinking into the ground, weighted down under a hideously multiplying stack of to-be-completed paperwork..(oh the humanity)... ugh, teaching points, writing goals ::shudder::, math assessment data, small group instruction planning sheets... THESIS papers in pathetic disarray...The closer I get to the witching hour (7:35am precisely) the heavier the stack becomes... Help me, friend... I am no longer able to defer my burden or ignore its bulk... It presses down on me and I stagger and bend Quasimodo-style, shouldering my anvil-shaped load of Very Important Papers... disgusting mass of administrative foulness...so...heavy...can't breathe... slipping away!

(wish me luck, dear friends. I will soon be lost completely... I shall hope to see you on the other side.)

Reflections (fueled by airplane travel)

There was a child went forth every day,

And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became,

And that object became a part of him for the day or a certain part of the day,

Or for many years or stretching cycles of years.

-Walt Whitman

I found these words in the first pages of a book my sister gave me, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, a book I’m hoping will profoundly impact my life as an educator.

Old Walt’s words made me think of something I’ve often thought about, now that I’m a transmitter rather than a receiver, taking in the view from the other side of the desk.

When I think back to my memories of school, say first and fifth grades, I notice that they are patchy and incomplete. If you think about the total number of hours I logged behind desks and in front of chalkboards, I feel like the majority of that time is unaccounted for in the annals of my mind. Any concrete memories exist only as moments: brief flashes; random pictures; moving images like a film clip, repeating the same motions again and again in perpetuity. They exist also as pinpricks of feeling – shame, fascination, frustration or pride – blunted by time but still recognizable…

As a first grader at a public school in Brooklyn in 1990 or so, I remember being completely perplexed and befuddled by the big yellow clock Mrs. G--- was using to teach us to tell time (notably, the exact same model I used some two decades later to perplex and befuddle my first graders on the topic.)

I recall chasing classmates through the schoolyard in a never-ending game of tag, and finding little colorful plastic pieces that I later discovered were related in some vague and fearful way to “drugs.”

I can remember sitting in class, twisting and twisting a tenacious loose tooth that later became referred to by my family as “the snaggle-tooth;” being confounded by the effort of trying to distinguish my left from my right as I muddled through the Pledge of Allegiance; and the exact moment in kindergarten when I discovered I could tie my own shoe.

Fast-forwarding into my awkward adolescence, I can remember seeing my unusually tall fifth grade teacher climbing out of her tiny Volkswagen Rabbit, and her telling us about warm-fuzzies and Random Acts of Kindness (concepts which have, in diluted form, trickled down into my current classroom). I can remember building a model geyser out of crayon wax with my Best Friend and her mom for the science fair; pinching pinch pots and a racing to complete Cloze passages (I never could get ahead of that brainy Angela); staring at beige flecks in the green linoleum floor; being amazed by my math teacher’s rubber chicken. A moment of horror and shame and also mercy when I realized that the teacher knew that I was the one who had made that mess on the floor by picking the black rubber off my shoes, but had chosen to let it pass with a wink and a knowing smile.

I suppose there are lots more things tucked away in the folds of my brain that I could dredge up if I had a reason to, though separate times and places tend to blend themselves together in the swirl of memory. But my point is, when you are in school, it seems all-consuming and permanent. The current iteration of your life is the only one you could possibly conceive of.

And yet, in the fog of time, what really sticks? What do you really remember from these formative years?

Nothing of consequence it would seem… the color of the floor? Crayon-wax geysers and rubber chickens? Shoelaces and snaggle-teeth? Why are those the things I remember, and not something more, you know…important? (Or maybe, if I thought about it, I’d figure out reasons why those things were important after all.)

I don’t get to choose what my students will ultimately remember, and neither do they. I realize that my school memories don’t actually revolve around my teachers very much at all, though I know I must’ve learned a great deal from them. And if I were to tell any of my little memories to my former teachers, I doubt they’d have any recollection of them, as by now I’m sure they’ve been absorbed into the vast spongy recesses of time.

I suppose that, if you start out kind of as a lump of clay, the teachers you encounter all have a hand in subtly and slowly shaping whatever it is you eventually become. It may be hard to distinguish one teacher’s influence from another, and the process of molding and shaping happens so gradually that maybe you don’t even realize it’s happening at all. (Until you wake up one day a quarter-century later or more, and look down and say to yourself, hey! Will ya look at that – I have a shape! I’m something!)

The scary part as a teacher and molder of clay-lumps is knowing that every kid has these moments that will stick with them – the ones that will remain very, very clear forever, like flies in amber. I know there will be certain things they will always remember, but what’s unsettling is that I have no way of knowing what they will be!

When my students are writing the stories of their lives in years to come, if they have occasion to look back on their moments in 5-315, I can only hope that I will be remembered in my kinder and gentler and more forgiving moments. And always there is the possibility that the words of mine that the kids will ultimately remember will be ones spoken too quickly in anger or frustration; that a snide comment escaped from my lips and quickly forgotten by me will slide under their skin and stay there and fester.

I have to face up to the fact that there’s no guarantee that they will remember the placid and laid-back Ms. D of extended Read Alouds and joyous field trips… That Ms. D must contend with the bug-eyed, frantic, vein-popping, lobster-faced, sputtering, spitting werewolf-Medusa-monster that I hate to admit I sometimes become.

I have a grad school professor who has a remarkably deep respect for the power of words. He tells his students that he would never consider working with children for fear of the damage he could unwittingly inflict.

Although I’m careful and think before I speak, I speak an awful lot of words in a day, (and more than two dozen pairs of ears are meant to be listening to them at all times.) Despite my best efforts, I’m afraid ugly or wrong or misbegotten words are bound to slip out and make their way to my impressionable young charges’ ears, and possibly make a permanent impact on their psyches, becoming a dink in the perfect clay mold.

I suppose, since it’s too late to back out now, all I can do is hope the kids are smart enough not to listen to everything I say.

crime and privilege

The school across from D's house has several fields and a garden, basketball courts, soccer goals, jungle gyms with slides and monkey bars, picnic tables and other objects of innumerable imaginative possibilities for kids. (Walking by, I heard a girl instructing her playmates, “The red is hot lava!” I also spied two boys in a less-trafficked corner of the grassy schoolyard climbing into an empty garbage can, throwing furtive glances behind them to see if their activities were being monitored....Ah, the art of play..) I was thinking, wow, bet these kids don’t know how lucky they are to have recess. And most of all, they get to have grass and trees.

Growing up in tree-lined, white-picketed Pleasantville, those precious things always seemed a given for me. I think those things should be a given for every child. It never occurred to me to consider kids privileged for having access to those things, until I realized that childhood can, in fact, exist without them.

I think play is a human right for children, and I think that not having time for kids to play and be active is criminal. So, technically speaking, given the lack of recess, green spaces and playtime at PS 00, and the intractable, hard-nosed, “data-driven” curriculum that I do my best to adhere to every day, that makes me an accessory to the crime.

I’ve been thinking, given my ample down time at the moment, about what my ideal school would look like (and sound like and smell like and be like.) I can’t say I have a precise picture in my mind, but there are certain fundamental things I already know...

Cement-block walls in a concrete jungle: no. Grass and trees: yes.

Scantron sheets: no. Recess: yes.

Test-prep: no Music, art and dance: yes.