Ms. D returns

I am really wound up right now.

Just went to see Scott Pilgrim vs. the World with Corky. While I thought it was a bit long on epic video game-style battle scenes, I did take away from it a valuable positive visualization. From now on, whenever things go my way, like if I nail a mini-lesson for example, or think of a really witty response to something and people laugh, I am going to imagine them exploding into gold coins. And when things don't go my way, I'm going to re-imagine the whole event as a video game sequence where the right moves and nimble thinking will cause the enemy to be destroyed in some titillating and graphically appealing way.

Today I also dropped some cabbage at The Strand on some really awesome non-fiction "boy" books that I found in the dollar rack -- famous quarterbacks, shortstops, paintball, dinosaurs, dune buggies, military bomber airplanes (which I feel conflicted about, but who am I to censor their knowledge based on my own pacifist leanings), surfing, snot, pee, spiders, scorpions... these types of books (that kids, especially boys, actually might want to read!) always seem to be in short supply.

Now the only thing is that in order to actually incorporate these books into my classroom library so that the kids can read them, I have to bend the rules a little. See, the kids read leveled books (A is wordless picture books, Z is like, Hemingway, I suppose, if an elementary student were to make it that far) and the idea is that they read only books on their own level in school (as defined by a reading test that is a whole other can of worms). This is so that they don't waste time reading books that are way too easy or way too hard.

In general I agree with this concept. Seems logical enough, although I do maintain that no one ever suffered that much from reading a book that was a little hard for them or a little too easy...but the bottleneck in this particular highway to literacy is the leveling of the books.

In order to make our lives theoretically easier, you can find out the levels of books by looking them up on various online databases - a bit tedious, but luckily fifth graders can be trained to do this.

The bigger issue is that, of the bajillion-thousandteen children's books in the world, a relativly small percentage of them have been officially leveled by whatever invisible literary scientists make the calls. So that leaves at the very least, half of a bajillion-thousandteen "unleveled" books to languish in closets and on bookshelves and out of the hands of eager burgeoning young readers. Like undocumented citizens: there in the flesh and ready to work, but without any bureaucratic backing and devoid of their official stamp of approval/existence.

I don't know if the formula is like really super-secret, or if the powers that be think that teachers maybe aren't smart enough to figure out the criteria for book leveling, or if it's just an oversight, but some of us have been known to take matters into our own hands. I like to think of it as guerilla leveling. Corky's preferred method is to save really cool books until she finds out a student has a passion for, say, outer space, and then find out their level and then the sharpie comes out covertly and voila! Five great books about outer space that just so happen to appear on that level! Ta da!

Personally, I just eyeball it by comparing these bastard "unleveleds" to the other books in the levels - length, words per page, pictures, subject matter, vocabulary, complexity of sentences - and then estimate. (And naturally I weight my decision in favor of levels happen to be a bit skimpy on cool books in my room.)

At the bookstore I also found some AWESOME books about migrant workers, the 50 states, The Gettysburg address. Even though it's more work in planning, I hope I am assigned to teach social studies to my class rather than leaving it to a string of incompetent long-term subs like they did last year.

So, aside from book shopping and movie-watching, I also did a triathlon today! This taught me many valuable life lessons about learning and goal-setting and failure and success, but I will have to share those with you another time. I have to get some rest so I can wake up tomorrow, crawl out of my summertime chrysalis and get ready to face the world again as Ms. D.

Tomorrow I return to PS OO to start preparing my classroom, like a salmon returning home to spawn...

Whiskers on roses and raindrops on kittens

I just had another school dream but one of a completely different kind -- I was back in high school, only I knew then what I know now. The annoying upshit ( -- haha I meant upshot, but upshit works too) is that the first four measures of "My Favorite Things" is stuck on repeat inside my head. augh!

Anyway, my 25-year old high school self still sucked at the trumpet, but didn't try to hide it. In fact, on my way out I gave the band director some constructive criticism on how he could adjust his teaching style to better support me as a musician. I tried out for the spring musical (hence the raindrops on roses --at this point in my internal refrain I think the roses are pretty much drowning), but it was on a whim and I wasn't scared, and I hadn't invested a whole lot of my identity into the result of the audition. I rolled my eyes at my soporific AP English teacher and sassed back when reprimanded, declaring that I hadn't known eye-rolling was against the rules.

If I had kept dreaming, I would've let my biology teacher know that text books really don't work for me as a learner and that's why I didn't do the reading, and had he considered some other ways of addressing different learning styles? And I would've taken woodshop (or metal shop or whatever it was we had down there) and chatted up all the delinquents who were also taking it to find out what's inside their heads, and I would've cut class a lot more and worried a lot less, and not lost sleep over unfinished homework.

Anyway, it was a very satisfying dream, and I feel like there's a message in it for me somewhere.

Possibly in the sense of taking the advice I'd give to my former self and applying it to my life now - hey self, RELAX! ENJOY! Don't worry so much, because it all turns out fine!

I've always taken myself pretty seriously, and as I learned from hanging out with my favorite uncle, am the daughter of "accomplishment junkies" which pretty much makes me one, too, by heredity. But I think I can accomplish things and be laid back about it, too. At least, it's something to strive for.

Now, it's plenty easy to be relaxed in August. The demands of my job are at their weakest, just whispers and intimations, vague notions of a more troubled time, when there are other concerns besides where I could go swimming today, and what type of new bicycle I should buy and when, and did I drink too much wine last night?

The trick will be maintaining my cool Dude-like attitude when reality crashes down like a worn-out refrigerator pitched over a cliff for disposal. Smash!

For the moment, though, I will take the time to bask in the glow of the best part of the school year: right before it starts. Everything is rosily colored by anticipation and unbounded potential. Right now, I am convinced I will have the energy to do all the things the Rafe Esquith and Esme Codell in me want to do... Another pep rally, but with superheroes! Roof garden! Recess! Better field trips! Cooking projects to help with fractions! And also I will have a social life! And extra-curriculars! And enough sleep! This year, of course, I will finally be Jaime Escalante! I will be Michelle Pfeifer in a fictionalized and simplified version of reality, I will know what is right and what is wrong, and I will only do what is right!

This year I will not lose my temper. This will be the year when I finally get organized. This year my Teaching Points will be standing at attention in their ready positions on the Flow of the Day. This year my students will be quiet in the halls. This year I will not die of public humiliation by forgetting how to do long division while teaching it to the class. This year I will not come to school grumpy and sleep-deprived, and just a liiitle too amped up on Dunkin Donuts coffee. This year I will not work through lunch. This year I will not forget my lunch, or eat meals out of the vending machine, or have to beg food from my friends. This year my conference notes will be pristine. This year will be planned ahead of time and paperwork will not be overdue. This year I will not lose anyone...

The beginning of the year is sharpened pencils, crisp folders, fresh paint and newly waxed floors. Blank empty notebooks ready to bear the burden of knowledge...

Now part of me knows that those marble notebooks can't stay empty or clean, it's simply not in the nature of education. Superimposed on top of my mental image of fresh notebooks with military-sharp corners and pages all lined up in formation is another notebook: the end of the year notebook. The dog-eared notebook that has been scribbled upon with sharpie and ball-point pen, that has been lost and found and lost again, that is missing a cover and the other is ripped, exposing cheap brown cardboard underneath that black-and-white marble, and with papers falling out and someone else's science notes hastily mixed in and maybe used bubble gum wadded up in there somewhere...

I know the chewed up end-of-the-year notebook exists, is inevitable. I know there will be wasted efforts and forgotten ideas, horrendous mistakes, broken promises, bad days. But it is part of the function of the summer, and my duty as a teacher, to forget all that. If I didn't I'd never be able to face it all again.

Yup, the teacher clock juuuust kicked in again -- last night I had my first school dream of the 2010-2011 school year. (Typically, I was unprepared for the first day of school and the kids were out of control. )

Funny how cyclical and, now that I've done it a few times, how predictable it all is. By the end of June you don't care if you never see the inside of a classroom again, and in July, the part of your brain that deals with school has more or less be lobotomized. But here it is... sometime in August your brain wanders back, you can't help it.

Two months a year I think other people are crazy for not being teachers...

Little Perennials

I've always associated this Indigo Girls song with teaching...

Perennials are the ones that have a new crop come up every year, right?

Back in the long stretch of loneliness

I have come to call a living,
I'm getting something for all this love's labor,
even when I am forgetting.

Oh we oh oh little perennials
where'd you come from?

I look for words to fill the empty spaces,
all the life revealed in these back stages.
I reach for names like little puzzle pieces;
oh perennial, come to me.

Oh we oh oh little perennials
where'd you come from?

I like to hope my stretch of loneliness might be ending now. I like to think it was a noble sacrifice. And more than just making a living.

i hope you dance

Something about the fading light in the back patio of my favorite coffee shop; the sappy country songs on my internet radio station issuing life lessons to all those who will listen; the gentle heat ushering late spring into early summer...

makes me feel nostalgic for a time that hasn't even quite passed yet. Part of me really needs to zip through this last week of school stretching before me, break through the neon tape over the finish line, don my silver heat blanket and begin the recovery and celebration. Put it all behind me.

But the other part of me is reminding me to stop and take a sip from my life's cup and savor the flavor. This year, my 25th, has been one-of-a-kind, unrepeatable, and marks an important shift in my adult life. For the first time since crawling out of college three years ago tender and unaware, I was consciously, sustainedly happy. It's so weird how you often don't realize happiness until after it's been there for a little while. Takes some time to sink in I suppose.

I try to think about the things that have made me happy, what has separated this year, a year I consider successful, from the other two that were, well... less so. I know I'm a broken record, fawning over my newfound friends, but these things, these people, are not to be taken for granted. I am so thankful for having gravitated to them, and they to me. Maybe there is an order in the universe after all, maybe there is some sort of gravitational pull between people who are meant to be together.

Or maybe I was just lucky.

Either way, I would say this is the number one factor in overcoming the isolation I felt in my first 1.7 years of teaching. Identifying my people, zeroing in on them, pouncing, and not letting go for the life of me.

I had the realization, as I was sitting with my posse in Pequena, our favorite after-work watering hole, that this, this was what I will remember when I look back on the year: yucking it up over Henrietta's stories about her wacky family and precocious students, fogging over the day's disappointments with a well-timed class of sangria, a plate of yuca fries (cut small) and sincere commiseration from others who really know.

And the sangria also helps us celebrate our successes, like the Pretzel Club show last Friday. The celebration brought our at-risk students' parents and families to school not to be the recipients of not-good news about their kids' academic shortcomings, but to celebrate the progress they have made and their potential.

J-- taught the audience how to draw a comic. A-- made a quiz on facts he's learned about sharks. D-- and C-- became game show hosts for math games they'd done with Rosie. K-- showed photographs she'd taken with Vee, and S--, a shy, self-conscious struggling reader at the beginning of the year, read a poem she had written based on an R. Kelly song out loud to the entire audience, and beautifully.

After the performance there were awards and pictures and flowers, and when everyone finally left, Corky and I hugged, and my eyes threatened to overflow. I'm going to miss her so much. I have learned so much from her. Her presence has allowed me to become more than I was before.

This year was about empowerment.

The first two years were daily reminders of everything I couldn't do - things I wanted to do but wasn't capable of, or was afraid to try. This year, I felt like I did something. This year, when the kids signed my oversized graduation t-shirt with exclamations that I'm the "best teacher ever," I didn't feel guilt, I didn't feel like a big phony impostor. This year, I felt I had earned the title, subjective and temporary as it might be.

I'm doing it! I'm doing it! It's like riding without training wheels for the first time. It's like flying. Finally: the pay-off. After wading through a shit lagoon that was wide and deep, I've made it to the other side.

And it's nice here.

unwritten

In the grand tradition of graduation songs, the kids' song is extremely corny, and made all the more corny by the choreographed hand motions... I've been overwrought and under-slept with increasing severity as my intensive summer grad class wears on. (5 to 10pm twice a week for four weeks.) So I know this is what's at the root of my weepiness and hyper-sentimentality this week.

But as the kids' graduation gets closer and closer, something about their boisterous enthusiasm, their slightly off-key but extremely earnest belting strikes closer and closer to my heart. We told the kids they had to smile during the happy songs, and S-- seems to have taken it as his personal mission in life to smile the hardest he possibly can for the entirety of the song. His face is contorted, it's almost more of a grimace. But it is so prototypically S-- of him, he is so unselfconscious and innocent and wacky, I get choked up when look at him, even though he does it every single time. It is like he is trying to emote the song through his body, rather than singing it with his voice.

(S-- is pretty unforgettable. He is a tiny kid with a gravelly voice and a lisp, one of these kids that is just a constant hurricane of movement and energy, always falling out of chairs because he sits with his legs gnarled up behind him in seemingly impossible gestures. He is clumsy and uncoordinated, always tripping or walking into things or knocking things over ... His hair is always slicked down sideways on his head, his glasses are always falling down his nose. He talks a mile a minute and never runs out of things to say, and perpetually has some kind of snack food either in his mouth or his hands or on his shirt.)

As a teacher, especially an all-day every-day elementary school teacher, you know kids in a deep, yet in some ways strangely superficial way that is unlike any other human relationship in existence. Looking around at all their faces as they sing their song is just such a window into who they are, now that I know them inside and out. I see I-- with his big goofy smile, eyes wandering around the room, only aware in the very vaguest of sense of what is going on around him. B-- is staring intently at Rosie's conducting, ramrod straight, hands at her sides, and diligently making a note of every instruction we give and carrying out all orders efficiently, silently, obediently. K-- is surreptitiously making eyes at the boys off to her right, whispering secrets that are doubtless of critical importance to her best friend seated a row in front of her, trying her best to evade the steely gaze of the teachers. D-- just singing with his heart and soul.

I'm going to miss them so much. Because after they leave P.S. OO it's entirely possible that I will never see some of them again... these people, who have been at the center of my life for ten months, who I have worried and fretted over and who have made me overflow with pride as much as they've filled me with blind, white-hot rage... I just won't see them anymore. Maybe in passing, maybe out in the neighborhood, maybe they'll come by and say hi or write me an email. But there will be a clean cut. On June 28 this cast of characters will simply be removed from my life. It's a bizarre break. Just the nature of teaching, I guess, spread your wings and fly and all that. But it's a little jarring nonetheless.

The graduation song (best enjoyed if you imagine it sung at top volume by a motley collection of pre-adoloscents all lined up in the auditorium in captivity, wearing red ties and name tags):

Unwritten - Natasha Bedingfield

I am unwritten, can't read my mind, I'm undefined
I'm just beginning, the pen's in my hand, ending unplanned

Staring at the blank page before you
Open up the dirty window
Let the sun illuminate the words that you could not find

Reaching for something in the distance
So close you can almost taste it
Release your inhibitions
Feel the rain on your skin
No one else can feel it for you
Only you can let it in
No one else, no one else
Can speak the words on your lips
Drench yourself in words unspoken
Live your life with arms wide open
Today is where your book begins
The rest is still unwritten

Oh, oh, oh

I break tradition, sometimes my tries, are outside the lines
We've been conditioned to not make mistakes, but I can't live that way


Feel the rain on your skin
No one else can feel it for you
Only you can let it in
No one else, no one else
Can speak the words on your lips
Drench yourself in words unspoken
Live your life with arms wide open
Today is where your book begins
The rest is still unwritten
The rest is still unwritten
The rest is still unwritten