Giving Thanks

Dear Students,


I'm thankful for you.  Happy Thanksgiving!


Love,


Ms. D


PS Please take the first five minutes of class to study for your vocabulary quiz!  Thank you!

--Overhead Greeting for Wednesday

It bears repeating, this thankfulness for the people with whom I spend most of my time.  Perhaps because I think I've complained more than usual this year, if not committed to permanence here in the transience of conversations.  Or perhaps because this year is harder and more confusing than last.  I forget what I love about teaching at times like these, when the trees of details mask the forest of people who make this excellent.


But I'm still thankful for everyone here, for the young people who fill these days with energy, hope, confusion, laughter, and curiosity.  For the educators from whom I'm still learning, inspired by their love and passion and creativity.  It's a good place, a good time.


Thanks.

Legos

My students are playing with toys at the front of the classroom.  


Lego people, to be specific, mostly of the maritime variety.  There are several dressed in the red and white of the British navy, one with an identical uniform in blue (French?), a few pirate-esque gentlemen, two ponytailed ladies and a kid in a tux and baseball cap.  Right now, lunchtime, four or five boys are huddled around the table, posing this motley society a variety of martial (and dubiously sexual) positions.


"OK, you can play with the people," I accede from my desk, where I'm pretty busy with the warm and delicious leftovers from my first ever whole roasted chicken and the Myspace profile that a clever student created for a character from Othello.  "You can play with them, but don't change their hats and weapons around.  That's annoying."


No, I haven't been reassigned to an elementary school mid-year, as amusing as that would be. This is still ninth grade English, and the Lego people are fairly important--if rather quiet--members of our class these days.  They are, you see, the characters of Othello.  There is a Lego Iago (standing out in villainous blue, with forbidding jagged mustache), a Lego Cassio (with glasses and a backpack, as all lieutenants good at math are prone to have), and of course a Lego Othello.  


This title character posed something of a problem to me last year, as a search through Noah's bin of Legos produced only white (actually canary yellow) Lego people, whereas Othello is the most dynamic and powerful African character in all of Shakespeare's works.  After criticizing me roundly for my lack of cultural sensitivity, last year's journalism students took it upon themselves to color my Lego Othello's head and hands with a brown marker.  While that might have been a lateral move, sensitivity-wise, we now have a distinctly African Othello Lego.


My students thought the Lego people were funny the first day, as we began to read out the play aloud and various students bravely waded through the complex blank verse.  I set them up beneath the document camera--these days projecting so much more than documents!--with a black and white photograph of Venice as a backdrop.


"Why do you have these?" they demanded.  "Do you have kids at home?"


"We've been over this.  I don't have any kids."


"Then where did you get them?"


"They're my brother's."


"Your brother?  You took your brother's toys?  That's hella mean."


"My brother is twenty-three.  He'll be fine.  Plus, he has more Legos at home."


Now, a few weeks into the unit, we all accept the toys as a matter of course, a legitimate visual for a complicated book.  We don't start reading a scene until the characters and setting are up there to see.  We've moved on from Venice, and now we look at a castle that is, of course, the fort that Othello & Co. are busy defending in Cyprus.  As characters enter and exit, I set the people on the table or pull them off, tossing them into the blue plastic bowl that serves as backstage.  Students occasionally demand impossible acting from the characters, whose range of motion is admittedly limited, but mostly they glance up once in a while from the tricky syntax, resting their gazes with amusement or consternation on the primary-colored people projected on the screen.


"Why didn't you do this for all of the other books?" some students ask when Period Five begins and we start assigning parts for the day.


"Because the other books weren't full of Italian names that sound the same and written four hundred years ago.  This helps us remember who's there and what's going on.  Now, who's reading Roderigo today?  Short part, and today is his smartest day ever."


"Isn't he the really dumb one?" a student asks.


"He's the guy in the tux with the Dumbledore beard," another responds, pointing to the screen.  "A tux cause he's rich, and a beard cause he's in disguise, right?"


"That's the guy," I respond.


And I love my job.

Snow Days of the Soul

My friends, ask gladness from God.  Be glad as children, as birds in the sky.  And let man's sin not disturb you in your efforts, do not fear that it will dampen your endeavor and keep it from being fulfilled, do not say, "Sin is strong, impiety is strong, the bad environment is strong, and we are lonely and powerless..." Flee from such despondency, my children!"

Fyodor Dostoevsky, from The Brothers Karamazov

Friday afternoon.  This is the middle of my third day off from work this week, lurking indoors under self-imposed quarantine with a dilatory fever and various other halfhearted versions of the H1N1 symptoms that most of us in Seattle know by heart now.  A miserable Monday and Wednesday at work (yes, I went back to work on Wednesday, to teach a lesson on quotes in essays, be irritable and come home feeling far worse than before), and three quiet days at home, spent mostly on my computer.

Craving human contact, I've composed a few emails, engaged in some IM conversations, read narratives written by my two talented substitutes (trying to link names to the unfortunate quotations and habits relayed), and lingered on Facebook more than is healthy.

On the media front, I've watched half a season of The West Wing online, along with a few rental movies.  I've had several meals consisting only of soup, orange juice, and rice cakes, along with endless cups of tea and Nalgene bottles full of water.  It's all very busy, caring for myself.

It's the end of the quarter at school.  Grades are due in a week, and I dearly hope that most of my students turned in their final essays today.  The days for which I was present were full and fast-paced, taxing and demanding.  I wasn't kind or terribly patient, and neither were my students.  I didn't want to miss this week, but only because there was lots to do, I realize now.  Not because I particularly wanted to be there.

I always think of snow days as God's way of getting lots of people to stop and listen and do something different, all at once, at least here where snow is extraordinary and inconvenient.  These days have been like that, a mandatory slowing down and looking around.  Taking time to tend to things I haven't bothered with in a while, like reflection and reading and prayer for the people I love and serve.

As I finish what I hope will be the last sick day, considering another West Wing episode and what kind of tea to make next, I'm struck by the necessity of rest.  The sabbath was a commandment, a time for worship and community and restoration.  Without it we fall apart and have to stop anyway, eventually.  For a week or so, to wait while we're put back together.

I've been thankful for these three days, thankful for the people who've been teaching for me while I recover sufficiently to reenter society.  And with this perspective, a time apart, I'll be happy to return. 

Teachers and Introverts

Several people have asked me in the last few years what it's like to be a teacher and an introvert.  I've been thinking about this more than usual lately, as this year is especially people-intense.  In the midst of prayer and reflection on a retreat to the mountains last weekend, I stumbled on this analogy.  It seems like the best description of these days.

By day

I’m a bucket of water balloons,

expanded to bursting a while ago. 

Sloshing life and knowledge

bound in fragile walls.

I’m desperate to be thrown,

made to break merrily,

extravagant and poured out.

I’m spent,

splashed,

broken open. 

I’m vivid as electricity

each explosion an introduction

word sentence correction

complaint sigh

smile tear apology

farewell.

I’m made to be broken.

I’m an empty bucket each night,

fragments left behind,

scattered on the path,

soaking into the background.

I’m a million pieces now.

Start over, you tell me,

there will be more tomorrow.

More water (love patience peace hope),

more balloons to hold it.

Please promise to collect me,

and begin again.