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.

Q & A

Thursday, in Unmatched Questions Asked and Answers Given

Q: Is there a tree map I could borrow?  Whose is finished?

A: Yes, I text.  Sometimes.  Not much.

Q: What's the difference between writing for school
 and the other writing that you do?

A: It's smoked salmon and cream cheese on rice cakes.

Q: OK, should we listen to Icelandic music
 or French music during work time?

A: You have to use the evidence from the play to support it. 

You've already found it; now you just have to use it!

Q: Has anyone seen M?  Her binder's here, but she is not.

A: Yes, I understand some Spanish.  Enough to

know that I don't like what you're saying.

Q: What are the rules of that other writing? 
What does a winking symbol really mean?  I mean, really? 
Or LOL?  Does it really mean that you're laughing out loud?

A: Thesis and essay and paragraph

are like the bones of your writing:

I should be able to tell that they are there,

but I don't want to see those words in your writing. 

Can you actually see any bones right now? 

If you see bones, there's a problem.

Q: "Out the cut"?  What does that mean?  Where is she, really?

A: You don't need "I" in the essay. 

It's not about you.  It's about characters. 

Q: Do you have any evidence for that statement?  Show me.

A: I do believe you.  I'm sure you can do a front-flip.

  I just don't want you to right now.  We're inside.

Q: Do you want tea?  I'm making some.

Two Debates

The Question:  You have bought a house in a neighborhood whose ethnic makeup is different from yours.  Just as you are about to move in, with your spouse and two young children, some of your new neighbors threaten to harm you, motivated by racial prejudice.  Do you still move in?

Modeled after one of the problems of Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, the question and its implications are clear to my students, who wrote for five minutes before dividing into sides based on their decisions.  They know racial prejudice, both in fiction and in life; to them the scenario is both feasible and manageable.

In theory, this debate should be just about the same in all five of my ninth grade English classes, which are composed of demographically similar students, balanced by gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status to reflect the ninth grade as a whole.  Today's debate, the first of the year, is an experiment, a benchmark maturity test.  If they are able to form two coherent positions and then argue them without yelling, the debates will happen.  If not, I'll draw them to a screeching halt and plan less difficult communication exercises until we reach the tipping point where civilization wins over savagery.

Numbers for Thursday:

Classes Who Started Yelling: 1, 3, 4

Arguments Involving Weapons: 3

Arguments Involving Civil Rights: 1

Debates: 2

Mediocre Debates: 1

Best Debate I've Ever Witnessed: 1

Period Five: Fear and Fantasy

This debate isn't going well.

It's not terrible either, Period Five with their after-lunch energy, not as bad as the cancelled debates of Periods One, Three and Four.  They divide to the two walls of the room with minimal squealing, nominate their speakers and move on from opening statements to general discussion.  This is when it starts to break down.

"I mean, it's better to feel safe in an OK place than really scared in a good house, right?" reasons one advocate of staying.

"No, man, we're moving in!" argues a classmate across the room.

"We know you're moving in," I remind them.  "That's the side you picked.  But why?  You need to respond.  They're talking about safety.  This isn't a safe place.  What do you say to that?"

Getting students to connect arguments, to arrange counter-arguments, has never been my strong suit.  Not a great persuader myself, I value debate more for the exercise of disagreeing with civility than the salesman rhetoric that wins converts to my position.

"OK--OK.  We're not scared cause--cause we're strapped."

Based on the knowing laughter and pantomimes of his teammates, I assume this means he's armed and ready to counter prejudiced neighbors.

"What about your kids?" someone asks.

"Um, my kids are strapped, too!"

And that's how it falls apart, talking about children with weapons and the value of living your whole life indoors so as to avoid the possibility of harm.  A team of mostly teenage boys, stuck in the invincibility that they learn from action movies, believe that they can defend themselves and their self-respect with weapons, while the girls across the room shrink away in horror.

Period Two: The Best Debate Ever

I don't expect my second class to like debating.  They are the quiet group--I've had one every year--and they tend to shrink from tasks that involve one student talking in front of all the other students.  In small groups or alone, they quietly and efficiently complete whatever tasks I set to them, but I expect them to balk at debating.

To my surprise, when asked to choose a position they neatly divide themselves into almost even side, discuss their positions without much prompting and select natural leaders from among their ranks.  After I ask the two opening speakers to stand to deliver their one-minute addresses, the rest of the students charmingly follow suit, standing by their desks to make arguments until I feel like I'm teaching in Victorian Britain, watching my proper students engage in scholarly discourse.

At first, the debate goes smoothly but not remarkably.  One side argues for the value of safety above all things, while the other defends the rights of all people to own land and live where they please.  Then, all at once, they come to life.

J stands on one foot behind her desk.  I don't know her well; she seems popular and comfortable here, but in Language Arts she is as reserved as the rest of her classmates.  "But it's your family," she insists. "Can you really bring your children into a place that isn't safe?"

Across the room, E rises from her desk.  She is the younger sister of a rather difficult student I taught last year, but thus far she has also been sleepy and reticent, only occasionally uttering spirited remarks to match her heritage.  Today, though, she is worked up, energy in every inch of her formidable frame.

"But what does that say?  That you're OK with things the way they are?  How can anything change unless someone's willing to take the risk?"  She sits down, arms folded, convinced she's said it all.  Her teammates nod in appreciation.

"It's not just someone!" J replies.  "It's your family.  Your kids.  Are you really going to bring your kids into this?  Just because you want to make a statement?"

Undaunted, E stands, shakes her arms like a boxer about to deliver the deciding blow.

"What if Rosa Parks thought that way?  And she actually just went to the back of the bus?"  From both sides come murmurs, of approval and comprehension, students torn between the immediacy of family and the ideal of civil rights.  E knows she's made an impact; beaming, she continues.

"Or what about Martin Luther King?  What if he tried to just protect himself and his family and stay safe?  We wouldn't even be here!  We'd all be in different schools.  We wouldn't even know each other."

I'm breathless, at the edge of the stool that I've placed in center of the room, and aware of the great weight of history and knowledge--past, present and future--that they've brought here today.  They bring their education, a series of schools with students from all over the world who taught and continue to teach them more than their teachers can.  They bring their hopes for the future in which things will be better, turning to justice and peace and equality in a way that even their parents couldn't imagine.  They are the students who are growing up with an African American president that they love, students who believe that the world will change only if they are willing to take risk to change it.

And they bring their own histories, the love of parents who protected them or didn't .  They bring their vows to do it the same or differently when it's their turn.  We all do.  So easy, I remind them when they finish and go back to their seats to carry on whispered mini-debates at the close of class, so easy to live for ideals as individuals, when our decisions affect only us.  How can we live our lives in community, in families, when the risks we take aren't just ours, but are carried on to another generation?

It reminds me of the struggles of urban schools all over the nation.  As affluent young people return to city centers, buying homes and starting families, they bring hopes of urban renewal.  But when it's time to find schools, no one seems eager to make a statement with their child's education.  It may improve, but it will take time, longer than the four years parents and students invest in a school.

As the class ends, I congratulate them on the Best Debate Ever, but it's not over.  And not in the ridiculous, "we'll carry this in our hearts" sense that we teachers usually use wistfully when we hope our lessons will be remembered.  They leave the classroom talking about it, taking the conversation into the halls.  "This isn't over!" they declare.


This is going to be excellent.

A Birthday, Fully Present

3. ___ Accomodate

E. To make space for; to allow


-from A Raisin in the Sun Vocabulary Quiz 1


2. Tomorrow=My Birthday! All I want from you is that you turn in your Dream House Vignette on time! It's due tomorrow!


-Monday Announcements


I had mixed feelings about using my own birthday as a reminder for ninth graders to turn in an essay. In theory, they should turn them in anyway, simply because they were assigned a week ago and are due tomorrow. They should have started last Monday, composing lyrical vignettes about their ideal houses, habitats they create only out of imagination, whether or not they are grounded specifically in the mundane world of reality. Along the way, I asked them to "toss in some poetic language" and "use good--no, brilliant--words" to make it interesting. With a week to get it done, they should be well on their way.


And yet, I thought yesterday as I put up the announcement, we all need reminders.


My birthday, so awkwardly late that every year in school the most common question was "Wait, you're how old? How did you do that?" As if I'd somehow fast-forwarded a year off of my life, or was lying to them. Yes, I'm really that young. This is also why I've never really mentioned my birthday to students. I turned twenty-one about a month into my student teaching, and for the next few years being twenty-two, twenty-three, and twenty-four didn't seem like much to brag about. Only much later in the year did students do the math to discover that their teacher had less than a decade more knowledge than they. Up until this year, I've made it through whole school days with only sparse mentions of birthdays, which like contemporary music, dates on Fridays, and procrastination are deemed by students to be outside of Teacher World.


The students, seeing the connection of birthday and due date, exploded into a cacophany of complaint and inquiry.


"Wait, tomorrow's your birthday? Really?"


"How old will you be?"


"Wait, what do you want for your birthday?"


"I told you," I replied, pointing back at the announcement. "All I want is for you to finish your vignettes tonight and turn them in on time. Best birthday present ever."


"What if... what if," began a student in the front row.


"What if what?" I prodded.


"What if I got you a big plasma screen TV instead? Would you give me a good grade?"


"Plasma screen?" I scoffed. "I don't want that! That's ridiculous."


"What if I got you the best book in the world?"


"What if I called that--what's her name?--that Cisneros lady and asked her to write, you know, House on Mango Street 2? What would you do then?"


"Ha ha.  Tempting, but no.  I'd still rather have your essay."


Though it's a month into school, we're still mostly strangers, my students and I.  They are the whirling tornados of dismay and elation, spinning in from the halls and bringing their noise and their energy.  I am the one who likes books more than TV.  Other than that, our relationship has been largely transactional; time for knowledge, attention for achievement.  It's a state that bothers me slightly, at the beginning of every year, and even more so this year, as I've been using spare minutes to plan ahead, rather than look around and get to know the people in the room.


Now, twenty-four hours later, it's raining at lunch, the first rainy lunch of the year, and my classroom has filled with students.  This frequently happens when it starts raining, as all of the kids who've spent lunches outside begin to explore the halls, searching for new shelter.  Today they come in hordes,  not just the two young girls who usually gossip about youth group in the back, nor the sporadic ones who wander in and out with books and games and loneliness, looking for somewhere to anchor themselves.


I've been thinking of accommodation lately, what it means to truly "make space" for these people with whom I share my days.  When I am weary, as I've been so often this fall, it's tempting to be a teacher who just opens the door and lets things happen.  If I'm good enough at it, I tell myself, then it doesn't matter so much that I'm not paying terribly close attention to details.  We'll still learn, and maybe that's good enough.  It's sharing space--allowing information to rent property in our imaginations--but it's not accommodation.  If I ask my students to be fully present in classes, bringing minds, souls and bodies to school with them every day, then I must be, too.  Leaving the computer, whose information daily pulls me away from teenage world, I take my lunch to my desk and turn to face the room.


One girl sips peppermint tea while her friends decorate the white board with birthday messages.  Across the room, a boy types up poetry that he's written. I tell him a story I heard this weekend, about how in Nigeria each class elects a "love letter writer," the most eloquent of them to share his talent with lovestruck peers.  He declares he's discovered his calling.


In the space in front of the desks, half a dozen break-dancing Filipino students show off moves to music from a cell phone.  Many of them are quiet in class, docile students who haven't yet gotten in trouble, students I don't yet know very well.  I learn more about them in a minute of watching and listening than in the last month of classes. They laugh and dance and teach each other, cheering and calling to my attention the especially difficult windmills of flying arms and legs.


It's all so full, so terribly genuine in its disorganized and many-directioned energy.  And it's only through participating--asking questions and applauding and reading poems--that I can appreciate it all.  It's only when I am fully present, living entirely in the busy exhaustion of a twenty-fifth birthday lunch, that I can see the beauty of this place, this life and the people who fill it.