“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.
Thursday, November 30, 2006
Tuesday, November 28, 2006
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.
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.
Monday, November 27, 2006
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.
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.
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