Skiing

“No, you have to plant a pole when you turn!”

My father’s words are adamant and sound easy, but I know better than to fall for such simplicity. He has just watched me fly down a steep slope off of the highest chair lift at Mount Baker Ski Area, arms and poles flailing like wings as I weave drunkenly between moguls and steer away from the precious powder that will surely swallow me whole. I am not a great skier, and the infrequency of days like this one has made for little progress between seventh grade and now.

Plant a pole. I could respond that I am going too fast for a pole to stick into the snow for any useful amount of time, or that I have tried planting poles before and it has betrayed me as a turning technique, led to despairing crashes in forgotten corners of ski runs, tangled messes of skis, poles, and limbs. I have plenty of arguments, but I know it will not matter. The conversation will end, like so many others, with my asking “How?” and his responding “You just, you know, do it!” We speak different languages. His, the sparse words of the athletically gifted, who can see and do in one smooth motion. Mine, the careful expository steps of the uncoordinated, who must watch and listen and explain and practice and, yes, crash again and again.

I think about this athletic coaching—hours of trying to throw, shoot, or hit balls in the backyard, hours of frustration followed by long sabbaticals from sports—as I teach literature to high school students. “But how do you make yourself finish a book? How do you write something that you love?” they ask me every day, though never so directly, and I struggle for an answer. Who am I to teach them that? I read to experience another world and time, not bothered by the unfamiliar and bizarre encounters in literature. I have spent spare evenings reading Shakespeare and Donne aloud, around fireplaces or beside lakes, and I have burned away hours writing for the pleasure of arranging words into poems and stories. Reading and writing are, for me, as natural as skiing is for my father, an extension of self that is, to a point, unteachable.

As a teacher who pursued literature because I have always loved it, I can never fully relate to the challenges facing some of my students. I began this career hoping to make my students love literature as I do, but am beginning to realize that some of them may never pick up a novel after they graduate from high school. Passion for a subject is a nice treat to a teacher, but perhaps it is not a fair goal. How discouraging for all of the brilliant math teachers I have had over the years, if they were trying to lure me into an engineering career! No amount of explanation could make the numbers line up for me the way they did for those math-loving teachers.

I have instead begun to respect the moments that I catch students listening to the words we read, whether or not they enjoy the reading that gets them there. Students from North Seattle consider the dangers of the Salem witch trials, trying to apply the concepts of a small Puritan society the societies of family, school, city, and nation with which they are familiar. American students consider what life is like for Cuban immigrants in Florida, or twenty-first century students realize that the quarrel between the Montagues and the Capulets mirrors the Israeli-Palestinian feud. They learn empathy in these books; they are beginning to draw analogies between themselves and the fictional worlds we enter together. They may never read for pleasure, but if they can recognize the relationship between past and present, between art and the life it mirrors, then they have learned a more important skill. These students will become educated actors in a complex play that requires of them critical minds and wise decisions.

I pause as my father speeds down the slope ahead of me. The Cascades are shining to my right, smooth hills broken by black trees, branches weighed down with new snow. The grey sky promises more snow tonight, though the sun glows steadily behind the farthest hill. This is what I have learned from my mountain-obsessed dad, not a passion for skiing or hiking or climbing, but a love for the beautiful places they take me. I could stand here all day, watching this sky and these mountains. But my fingers are growing cold inside snowy fleece gloves, my toes freezing in plastic boots, and I know the view will be better from the swinging benches of Chair 8. With a shrug I push off down the slope, scratching the surface of the snow with my downhill pole in a vague attempt to turn left.

To Do: Hang Christmas Lights

Pulling the tangled lights out of the J. Crew shopping bag, I carefully plug the entire mess into the classroom wall. I give the knotted lights a cursory glance, admiring the multicolored sheen that they case on the sterile room, before laying them aside to attend to the business of hanging them. I have picked plastic light hooks from among the nails and screws in that chasm of a desk drawer that overflowed with useful and unused things, and now I begin, with overdone concentration, to stick them to the window frame.

It is my prep period, and I am hanging Christmas lights in my classroom. Experienced teachers must know how to maximize their prep periods, how to plan, grade, conference, and email sufficiently in this meager hour a day. I, on the other hand, often use this time to buffer the scratches of the morning, and to prepare for the wails of the afternoon. Today, I have retreated to the cool quietness of the empty library classroom.

If my library classroom were a normal classroom, the kind entered by only one door and visible only from the outside windows, I might have been less concerned by my light hanging mission. But this long, narrow space was once two luxurious conference rooms, with two doors and windows not only out to the courtyard, but also back into the library. As I stand on the chair and wrestle with knotted twinkle lights, I look out at hundreds of high school students, busily working away at research or peering back at me, that bizarre young woman who teaches in an annexed classroom and spends her planning period hanging lights. I feel childish and capricious, and I am convicted that I should in the future limit my prep period fare to dry state standards and tasteless lesson plans.

This morose vocational crisis has distracted me from the dreary fact that only half of the lights work. Wretched lights. I know that there is one rebellious blub in the far half, one bulb that is ruining everything, but as so often happens I have run out of time. The first bell has rung. I have decorated only one of my two library windows, and half of the decorated lights are sneering back at me with their beady, unlit bulbs, daring me to pull out each one and discover the problem. In exasperation I instead stretch the good half over the top and sides of the window, rolling the rest of the lights into a tight ball in the bottom corner. As I scrunch them tightly into the corner, the wicked lights wink on. I unravel them out to finish the window and they flash off again. Roll them together, they return to brightness. In exasperation, I push the lights back against the edge of the window as the bell rings, and my students meander in with Sunday brunch nonchalance.

The fourth period students do not acknowledge the lights except to mention, near the end of class, that "Christmas lights still won't make this fun." I reply that the lights were not meant to be fun. I put them up because I like them. The end. They shrug their boxy shoulders and slink back into their vocabulary tests.

Soon even I have forgotten the lights, lurking in their stubborn, tangled state on the wall. The small rooms become full of visitors, who observe, comment, and ask questions. Fifth period needs more time for the test. A new student demands attention. The day is nearly over when one of my students, a recent immigrant from East Africa, points to the messy decorations.

"Hey, why those lights like that? Fix them." I glare at the tumorous ball that the fickle half of the strand has become.

"No, I can't fix them." I walk over and unroll the ball, and the lights flicker out. The students giggle, each looking up from their work as I frown in frustration and squeeze the lights together until they come back on. "See, they have to stay like that."

"You buy us these lights? You have much money?"

"No," I shake my head again. "The lights are from my mom. Thank her if you see her."

As they finish their tests, I begin to drape the second strand around the remaining window. As I stretch to the top edge of the window, the curious Somali student looks up from his work.

"Hey, le' me help you. I can reach top."

"Help me by finishing your vocabulary test," I answer absently.

I look back at the lights, my chief adversaries of the day. They were the extra item on my to-do list, that task that took longer than I had expected or hoped. They were the trinkets that made me feel childish and inadequate. They were the fickle and perverse representatives of a depraved race of electronics. I despise the lights for their uselessness.

I notice that all six of my students are looking at the glowing lights. What are they thinking, high school juniors and too old to be excited about most things? Some of them celebrate Christmas, while others do not, and all are new to the overwhelming phenomenon of Christmas in America. What do the lights mean to them? Really, what do strings of Christmas lights mean at all?

Suddenly I am seeing my mother, draping delicate branches of twenty-one Christmas trees with white lights. Did she do it because she had to, because decorating the tree was the first in a long line of arduous holiday tasks? No. I have recently heard her proclaim that this was her favorite time of all, these hours spent with the lights, the tree, and her family. She lit the tree out of love; she lit it because we liked it.

Again I notice my students, guiltily stealing glances at the colored lights and I remember that, before the lights became a task or a holy war in the library classroom, I had cared, too. I had wanted to decorate this room we shared, because I thought my students might enjoy it. Buried in my busyness was a sliver of love, which I pulled out to examine and appreciate as my last set of students glowed in the colored lights.

"Are we getting a Christmas tree?" comes one voice, no longer able to contain her reminiscences. I sit down with them at the large, square table, ready to listen to their distraction and get lost in my own. It will be fine; there are only five minutes left of class.

"In Mexico, at Christmas," they begin, remember, "We had great bonfires..."

Notebook Paper

“So, I have some questions for you to answer here,” I begin after they read the passage. I slide the half-sheet handouts around the table to my seven students. They are unimpressed, and they sit staring at the half-sheets, as if they are wondering how small they can write to fit their answers into the small papers. “You’ll need to get out a piece of paper,” I prod. I get less of a reaction than I could hope. They sigh—deep, adolescent sighs that somehow shrink them a few inches, making them more a part of the furniture—and make vague, unreadable movements with their hands.

The whole process of paper aches with their burning, dull-eyed resentment. She asks so much, that reading teacher. A piece of paper every day. I try to remember if I have requested anything huge—their lunch money, their cell phones, their youth or beauty or souls—but I come up with only the piece of paper. “C’I get a peica paper?” one boy mutters to the pretty girl next to him. She shrugs and slides one over. He shrugs, writes his name on the top. I smile. All of this takes longer than I could have imagined.

What do they learn in these slow moments, I wonder? I am always asking that right now, in my first weeks of teaching. Are they learning to share, to trust and to help one another? Are the givers encouraging laziness from their peers, or are they even now learning generosity? Are the receivers grateful, or simply entitled?

The paper springs up magically, covering the table like snow. I am exploring their wordless world, their language of glances and hidden smiles and twitching hands. Just a piece of paper. The paper peace.

Snow Daze

6:03 AM. The clock radio springs to life beside my bed, humming its dingy wakeup call one hour later than usual. I emerge from my blanket cave to check the school closure report on the news. Even though I read on the Internet last night—both on the newspaper and the school district websites—that “all schools will be closed due to adverse weather conditions,” in a panic of insecurity I fear that some district official, the ghostly figure who gets up at 3:00 AM to decide the weather is “inclement” will have changed his mind.

The district official, whoever he is, must make a difficult call. He is thinking of those extra days in June, of accreditation, of our state’s reputation and our nation’s standing in comparison to Japan. If he closes school, the United States might lose her grip on the world. He is thinking about tomorrow. I, youthful Epicurean teacher, am thinking about today. More specifically, I am thinking about now, the two extra hours I will sleep in an ice-encrusted city.

Having trusted the optimistic website at eleven the night before, I just might sleep through my first class, leaving thirty students stranded in the halls. They will start a snowball fight in my absence, and I will be fired. All because I was too lazy to get up and watch the news like a less Internet-savvy employee.

I stumble into the frigid living room and turn on the fuzzy and decrepit, cable-less television to wait for “Seattle Schools” to flash across the bottom of the screen. San Juan. South Kitsap. Stanwood. I’ve missed it! I must have blinked. Running back to the bedroom, I check an updated list on the news website—for some reason I trust the news station more than my own district headquarters—and when I see our school district’s name with the plain “Closed” under it, I return to a nervous sleep.

Storm in the Library

Last Tuesday afternoon, Period 6. My tiny Library classroom had been annexed and pieced together from two conferences rooms, filled with red crates instead of bookshelves, IKEA clock ticking merrily on the wall. The latest expansion led to our acquisition of a bank of tall windows which open to a central courtyard. These windows have proven incredibly useful for the moments when my small classes have actually busied themselves with academic pursuits, a bizarre circumstance that leaves me, the teacher, essentially extraneous to the classroom. In these long times of uselessness, I stare out of the window.

Today I have been watching two eleventh graders write essays. After micromanaging for a few minutes, I decide to stop bothering them and turn to the rescuing window. I see the class across the courtyard busily working away, and feel a pang of insecurity. That teacher looks busy, helping her students, and the students look like they are engaged in actual learning. What am I doing, assigning essays? I am a fraud, and the teacher across the courtyard must know it, when she glances up from her relevant lessons to catch me staring out the window.

Tiring of the convicting window, I turn my gaze to the sky, which at 1:45 is nearly dark. The trees beyond the last row of classrooms are tossing like grass, uneasily swaying in the wind. The clouds have wrinkled into layer upon layer of muted grey, until little of the afternoon light shines through. Rain in Seattle must be extreme for me to notice it after weeks of incessant drizzle, but now I look up and take note of the near-horizontal stripes of rain that batter my window. When the hail starts, I rise from my chair to watch.

Weather has always fascinated me, and now is no different. I realize that the storm is too good for these students to miss. They have been good today, I justify to myself as I cry, "Hey, come look at this, you guys!" In an instant all five of them are beside me at the window, their seventeen-year-old faces pressed in wonder to the glass.

In this particular class, I am the only one born in the United States, the only native English speaker, and the only one for whom hail is a fairly regular occurence. The boys in the class shout wild exclamations at the sky, one girl tells about a hailstone the size of a golfball, which once fell on her head, and another girl, from the Philippines, has apparently never seen ice of any kind falling from the sky. I glance out and see my neighbor across the courtyard, frantically competing with the storm for the attention of her students. She smiles when she sees us, the tiny reading class, lined up at the window with delighted faces. I suppose it might be an indulgent smile, the smile you give to a cute puppy or a toddler ballerina--or a first-year teacher--but it is a smile. For a moment I forget that this isn't reading, that this might not help them pass the WASL, and I know that they are learning.

"What is this?" my international students ask. "What's it called? How do you say it?""Hail," I say, trying to salvage a concrete vocabulary lesson. I spell it in purple capitals on the board: H-A-I-L. "Hail," they say to themselves and each other. "Hail," they repeat as they watch the pea-sized stones bounce on the cement of the courtyard. And I know that they have, once again, learned more than I have taught. I was just the one who let them leave their seats, let them run to the window and learn from the world.