Laughing With

An editor, a food columnist and two reporters are laughing at me.

At the end of the day, the newspaper staff is finally and busily engaged in meeting the first deadline of the year. My role as adviser (spelled with an "e" because the Associated Press delights in ugly spelling), last year fairly peripheral to the happenings of the newsroom, this year has taken a more definite shape. Part of the change has come with experience. After a year I know what I should do--and what I shouldn't do--as the one adult between the newspaper's production and its dissemination to a thousand students, faculty, parents and community members. I should encourage students to become active, curious and outgoing members of our community, teaching them how to ask the right questions, and keep asking them, until they are the true voice of the student body. I shouldn't write their articles, express too much of my own opinions in school controversies, or tell them all the answers to the questions I make them write.

The rest of my adviser transformation resulted from the graduation of ten staff members last spring. With only four students who remember "the way it was last year," Because of this, I have remarkable freedom to mold class policy and procedure, as well as the responsibility of creating an interdependent team from a group of near-strangers. And unlike the passionate but essentially homogenous cadre of writers who left, I have begun this year with a near-perfect cross-section of our school. Some have come because they are new to Ingraham looking for a place to get involved. Some are making up Language Arts credit. Some love writing more than anything, and have added this elective to a collection of other writing electives. Whatever the motive, this newspaper staff comes from three grades, five countries and all levels of skill and experience.

So it is with a sense of relief that I am able, today, to sit down at my desk in the corner, melting into the background of advisership, while students who didn't know each other a few weeks ago live out a commercial for teambuilding games. They're brainstorming and writing, going over notes from interviews and snapping headshots. All is well.

I feel invisible for a while, in the corner of my classroom I've turned into an office, and pull out a stack of papers to grade. I never graded much in sixth period last year, since I usually did most of that during my planning period. This year, though, I am teaching all six classes, and thus have no more planning time during the day. It was a decision fraught with ambitious bravado ("I'm young and invincible!"), passive greed ("I guess it would be nice to make more money") and dubious altruism ("It really is better for he kids to be in five small classes than four huge ones"); but for better or worse, it's done and I am teaching all the time. No more planning periods for busy scheming, tea-aided unwinding, the rest of not saying any words for a while. No more mid-day writing myself back into love with students and teaching; all of it will have to wait, now, for mad lunches and listless after school hours.

Now, with sixth period going so well, I risk some multi-tasking. It's only after about ten minutes that I remember I'm still technically teaching a class, and I only remember because the table of girls nearest me starts to laugh at me. They're only laughing, I realize, because I was laughing first.

"What are you giggling at?" Food Columnist demands.

"The ninth graders. This assignment," I reply, holding up the papers.

"I didn't think teachers liked grading."

"Well, these are really funny. They were supposed to write a letter from an object in the room. And this one is from this kid's cell phone. 'This shouldn't come as a surprise to you, man. You know how you push my buttons.'"

The girls laugh, and Opinions Editor recalls when she did the assignment as a freshman, what she wrote about. I go back to reading. They are funny. This is the fourth time I have taught this class, this book, and by now I have saved only the assignments that I love, including this personification of an inanimate object in the room. I've read letters from the newly-installed carpet, demanding better treatment from careless, paper-shredding kids. Students have given voice to the clock, who is insecure because everyone is always looking at him; to the plastic crown that hangs above the white board and doesn't get along with the American flag next door; to the rubber duck that wishes I'd rotate him ninety degrees so that he could look back at the classroom instead of out the window. Yesterday we spent a solid twenty minutes sympathizing with things that cannot feel.

In strictly standards-based, literary language, I'm not sure that I could save this lesson from the coldness of an aligned curriculum. Yes, they have a better sense of personification, but more as the opposite of objectification than as the "description of non-humans in human terms." I could loosely connect it to letter-writing form. In terms of the soul-building that is tacitly inherent to most English classes, if we spend time searching for how something else might feel perhaps we will be able to do the same with one another. How would I feel, think, act if I were in that person's shoes? Yes, I justify after the fact, I'll connect back to this when we return to perspectives, again and again, throughout the year.

But as I'm reading letters from shoes and white boards, I feel like the chief value of this assignment is that it made us laugh for two days. It's been an exhausting beginning, this year, so much so that at times I've lost my footing of care and compassion for my students in the winds of weariness. Yesterday as I offered the beginnings of stories and characters, and now as I read them at the end of a long day, I'm filled with gratefulness for the creativity of kids who are still young enough to take an odd assignment and make it into something wonderful and unique. When I'm laughing, in sixth period, reading bits of the letters aloud at the request of Food Columnist and Student Life Editor, I'm not tired. Or it doesn't matter that I'm tired.

Go with this weirdness, I told them yesterday as they wrote. It will be fun.

It is.

Red Fern Meets Manual Math

More kids than I had ever seen were playing around a big red brick building. I thought some rich man lived there and was giving a party for his children. Walking up to the edge of the playground, I stopped to watch.

The boys and girls were about my age, and were thick as flies around a sorghum mill. They were milling, running, and jumping. Teeter-totters and swings were loaded down with them. Everyone was laughing and having a big time.

Wilson Rawls, from Where the Red Fern Grows

Walking around with my thumb in a paperback library copy of Rawls's classic, I'm proctoring a test in the library computer lab today. Students have rolled lazily up to the banks of computers and are now staring at screens, mostly quiet. It's the time of test-giving--after I've read all the material for my next lesson and sketched out the shape of the next few weeks of lessons--when I run out of things to do. Since I'm feeling neither tired enough to stare blankly at the Seattle Weekly online nor adventurous enough to peruse the T encyclopedia like my co-proctor, at the suggestion of a friend I'm reading about Billy and his two "hunting hounds" a few paragraphs at a time between my rounds of over-the-shoulder digital eavesdropping.

With outspoken scorn for "dog stories where the dog always dies," I've been resisting Where the Red Fern Grows for a while. It's a pity, actually, because I probably would have loved it if I'd read it when everyone else did, back in the fifth grade. Replete with vernal descriptions of the Ozark Mountains and thrifty, no-nonsense characters, the story would have fit well on the heels of my Little House on the Prairie obsession. As it is, I'm reading about the boy saving up for two hunting hounds and remembering not what it felt like to desperately want a dog (I've never wanted that), but instead the thoughts of the fifth-grader who read about prairies and schoolteachers and Indians and horses and sighed that her mountains, the mundane Cascades, could never be as interesting as the magical Dakota Territory.

It's the silence that first makes me look up from the novel, which has stalled for pages and pages at the love at first sight that Billy bears for his new dogs. For a room full of kids on computers, the lab is actually mostly quiet, and I watch the noiseless labor of the test takers. Everywhere I look, students are clearly in action, and after a second I remember the reason. They are taking a math test.

Watching students do math reminds me more of being in school than any other subject. Perhaps it's because most of the circumstances in which this happens are, like this one, tests on which I'm forbidden to help. There are other times when I'm vaguely aware that their homework assignments are beyond me and don't venture into the embarrassing territory of technique I've forgotten or--sometimes--never really knew. On occasion, though, when I decide to wade into a math problem, offering the much-caveated help that I can, my problem solving looks just like theirs right now.

My students' fingers are counting corners and angles on the screens, manipulating shapes by turning them in thin air and trying to imagine their path, and adding up averages manually. They scribble down whatever they know they must remember, making hesitant columns of long division and uneven geometry sketches. Their processes are on the surface, not mysterious or hidden, like with each new problem they evaluate and then roll up their sleeves, holding their breath and dodging obstacles as they arrive.

This is how I do math, too. Since there are no more tests, for now, I can enjoy the clean and ordered challenge of occasionally assisting on an algebra problem without fear. Writing has sunk below the surface for me, so saturating my thoughts and fingers that sometimes it seems to just happen, but with math the learning and the labor are still just as visible. I remember what it's like to pull on an equation like a gigantic knot, testing it for weaknesses that will lead to its untangling, or how sometimes the best way of thinking about a triangle's rotation is just to squeeze your eyes shut and twist your head around. It's not scientific, not the intuition that my calculus teacher always hoped to instill, but it worked for me as it seems to work for them.

As I go back to the book, just as Billy finally stows his puppies in a sack in order to transport them home, I pause in the intersection of my childhood passion--books about the country and hard living--and my childhood nemesis--math problems--and for a wildly nostalgic instant I'm intensely grateful for both, ghosts of school that remind me what it's like to be here.

Reading and Riding

Once an approaching dog is spotted, a good rider response is to slow, including a downshift, then accelerate past the point of interception. Don't kick at the dog because it will make controlling the motorcycle difficult.

from "Basic Rider Course" (Washington Motorcycle Safety)

“So complete this sentence—write it out on the card—‘The best book I’ve ever read is…’”

Some students laugh nervous, first-day-of-school laughs. Unwilling to point out their issue with my premise—the “best” of the sentence—they giggle and look anywhere but at me. Unwise to reveal on the first day, they must reason, our essential skepticism about the entire subject of Language Arts. But still how, they demand in their red-faced giggles, could any book be good enough to deserve to be called the best?

This is the fifth first day of school for me at IHS, including the one I spent during my student teaching, and they’ve all been very much the same, an energetic tangle of happy greetings and frantic rehabilitating of classroom management techniques from their summer atrophy.

It’s true, this one is a little more chaotic usual. Our entire school day has shifted fifteen minutes later, so that we watch our familiar class-ending times slide by, no longer momentous. Irate fellow teachers are still looking for furniture and boxes lost in the summer move, necessitated by new carpet that was an extremely unpopular district mandate. Scheduling and staffing upheaval has forced many of us to teach new subjects or, like me, to take on extra classes entirely. Though I’m bothered by neither the new schedule nor the carpet, I’m exhausted by the time I get to my fifth ninth grade Language Arts class. I’m missing the kids I know—now in tenth and eleventh grade—and weary of meeting new people, even the spectacularly interesting ones that have come through the doors today.

“Do like kid books count?” someone asks me.

“Definitely. One of the best books I’ve ever read is Yertle the Turtle.”

They return to their blue cards, the cards that introduce them to responding to a prompt, talking in small groups, and sharing in the large-group setting. I can see some of them still frowning, trying to remember a time that they liked a book.

I’ve written before about the disconnect between struggling students and the teachers who instruct on the subjects that they love best. Though I can try to imagine not liking a book just because it’s a book, I’ve never experienced the prejudice myself. Nor have I ever began an English class with a certainty that I won’t do well. Even in disciplines I care little about, I’ve always come to class with confidence that I can succeed. At the end of the summer, though, I stumbled upon humility—even empathy—in the unlikeliest of places.


On the last Sunday in August, pristine and splendid, I found myself terrified and fourth in line to take the final riding exam for my Washington Motorcycle Safety Course. If I passed, I could get a motorcycle endorsement on my driver’s license and legally drive the 125 scooter that I desire. If I failed, I couldn’t do that. I also, obscurely, would add this non-skill to a long list of other driving ineptitude. The near failure of driver’s education, the two attempts to learn manual transmission and numerous minor dents and scratches loomed large in the disappointing background as I considered this next hurdle. As I’d done poorly on those, so I must be headed for disgrace here.

The class itself, several hours of classroom and riding instruction over the two previous days, was an overwhelmingly good time. After electing to learn the simpler scooter and not the more complex motorcycle operation—requiring the mastery of the wicked clutch that’s haunted me for a decade—I enjoyed every minute of driving instruction. I wove through cones with ease, eeling elated at the weightless fluidity with which I could turn the little machine. The instructors, good-humored experienced riders on their elegant cruisers and ponderous touring bikes, showered us in encouragements, from thumbs raised in approval to the mysterious comment, “Kristi, I think you’ll be riding a big Harley in about five years.” Right, I thought. But still.

I’m wondering today, as I watch these students I don’t know try to remember a book they’ve read and liked, about the failures we carry around with us. Wondering what mistakes or dismissals my students bring with them to high school when they arrive in Language Arts class and believe—one the first day—that they can’t do it. It’s easy, I want to tell them. Just show up and keep doing what I’m telling you. Just read the book. Just write!

Just roll a little on the throttle to make the curve faster. Just slow down a little and your turns won’t be so wide. Just press down on your handlebar and lean in the direction you’re going. Just don’t look at the cones!

Just, just, just. So simple to just give advice about the thing that you know and love.

I passed my riding test with shaky grace, hitting none of the cones but taking some corners with a hesitant slowness that lost me three points. Out of one hundred. I left the motorcycle class feeling like I had just learned a new language and grown another few inches. I thought I couldn’t and I did. I left thinking about the value of encouragement, having learned as much about teaching as I did about riding a scooter, and thankful for the instructors who didn’t comment on my uncertainty, didn’t focus on the confidence I didn’t have.

The first day of school is new territory for all of us. For the ninth graders, poured into one class from different middle schools and cities, states and nations, it is a new school, one or several subjects that they’ve never succeeded in before. For me it’s 160 new voices and faces and stories and habits, strangers when I have trouble believing that I could possibly love any class as the ones I taught last June. (It’s always been like that, and I always have.) And yet, as I read over shoulders and see in unfamiliar letters the names of books enjoyed or merely tolerated, I can suddenly remember how it felt, ninth grade and meeting people and trying so so hard to figure out what’s going on all the time. I remember some of it from motorcycle class, and most of it because things change for me, too, every fall. For better or worse, we stand together on new carpet, fifteen minutes later than last year, united in uncertainty and, perhaps, in the hope of a new beginning.