Grace vs. Three Tries

“Oh, good news! The District is pre-registering you all for the WASL!”

Such declarations, no matter with how much enthusiasm I introduce them, invariably bring groans of angst and rage from my Academic Reading students. Perhaps they have forgotten that “Academic Reading,” even though it looks excellent as an elective on their transcripts and even though their teacher explains that “reading is an essential part to living a full and successful life,” is primarily a preparation for the Washington Assessment of Student Learning, or WASL. Most of them are eleventh graders and have taken the test already. They do not relish the thought of returning again to a room full of sophomores and revisiting the test that threatens to keep them in high school indefinitely.

“Wait, we have to take it again?” one student jokes.

There it begins, an onslaught of questions about the test, which will take many minutes to untangle. I hope that this is a testimony of the focus of their learning, that they are becoming lifelong readers and writers and that the test will merely be a blip in a year full of such pursuits.

“Hold on,” one girl interrupts, as I explain the testing schedule for the seventh time. “What if we don’t pass it this time?”

None of them have verbalized this fear yet, though it certainly keeps me awake at nights. I look at all of them, waiting expectantly for some loophole that will whisk them and their diplomas magically off to college in eighteen months. I understand why we must have standards, understand the dangers of inflated diplomas and backsliding schools, though perhaps they do not. Still, I wish I had a better answer.

“You can take it during the summer. At the WASL college. You know, summer school.”

They don’t like this, but they seem to grasp the gravity of the situation.

“But what if we don’t pass it again?” another student sighs. She quickly realizes the answer, and gasps, “Senior year? We have to take it again senior year!”

“Three more tries!” I cry optimistically. “You can get there. Just don’t panic! And the good news is…”

“…the District is pre-registering us!” someone finishes, imitating my excitement.

“Exactly. Now, let’s take the practice test. Always practice.”

They get to work, and I try to imagine that their pencils move more fluidly than they did a few months ago. Certainly some of them have gained confidence, which will be a valuable ally as they approach the fearsome exam. Perhaps, like little Davids, the sundry pebbles of reading and writing skills they have learned this year will be enough to conquer the Goliath test.

This test invariably takes me back to thoughts of grace. These students have three tries to complete this requirement before their graduations are delayed. What if I had only three more tries to become proficient in love, to master forgiveness, to achieve grade-level patience? How marvelous does this endless supply of grace, this new-every-morning-faithfulness, appear as I continue to work in a place where chances for success are few, and too many failures can alter forever the course of their lives. How thankful I am that I can learn the same lesson again and again, in the circuitous paths of my life, each time seeing more, rubbing away at the fog of insecurity, fear, and pride to reveal the clear windows of truth. How precious does this grace appear...

The Snowman

The day has been short, as most days after these snowstorms have been. Classes are reduced to a meager 35 minutes, an awkward amount of time that is just enough that I have to plan something meaningful, but not enough for the students to focus on it. The memory of a pleasant Tuesday, spent basking in front of a woodstove in the company of friends, is not fixing this Wednesday. By fifth period, I am in a hectic mood, juggling the tasks of teaching with the tasks of stretching, twisting, and cramming the material of the last week into a few days.

It is into this fell mood that one of my students unwittingly stumbles. Though he comes to class sporadically, he is quiet and amiable and I am glad to see him here today. I know little about him, except that he loves chicken and passes most of his time with video games. He looks up from the book he has been non-committally reading and stares at the laptop computer on the table.

The laptop, perhaps as a concession for the lack of desk, chair, bulletin board, clock, overhead projector, and other classroom amenities, was granted to me by some mysterious district funding early this year. It is a Dell, speedy but unreliable, riddled with enigmatic error messages and random "breaks" from the nextwork connection. Still, the laptop is brand new, and as such it is a revered object for all of us. My student now watches it intently, and I follow his eyes.

"What are you looking at?" I finally ask.

"The laptop. Does it play DVDs?"

"Yes. They all do. All of the new computers."

He smiles, a rare occurrence, and looks back at his book for a moment. Only a second later, he looks back at me.

"Hey."

"Hmm?"

"Can I play a DVD on your computer?"

I raise my eyebrows pretentiously and shake my head without giving it much thought. We are too busy for DVDs I have not seen. Anything could be on that DVD. Of course not.

"Probably not. We have class to do today."

He looks back at me skeptically, then at the other students, who are reading next to him, but he wisely remains quiet. "If we have time? At the end of class?"

"We'll see," I answer primly.

Class passes by in all of its reading glory, and I cling to the feeling of frantic hurry. We have to fill every moment reading, because we have already lost FIVE DAYS to the capricious weather. I finish reading Jerry Spinelli's Stargirl, which we have been reading for months, and ask them questions about the end of the book. Oddly enough, their input dies down several minutes before the end of class. The patient student brightens.

"Can we watch it now?"

I am out of excuses and, amazingly, out of activities. "What is it? Will this get me in trouble? Is it appropriate for class?" My questions are naive, perhaps, but I have to ask.

"It's just a movie I made yesterday," he hesitates, then adding. "It's what I did on the snow day."

"What is it?" I repeat.

"We... we knocked down a snowman. It's just two minutes. Please?"

I have never seen him so interested in anything, and I am curious, so we put in the DVD, dubiously titled "Snowman Gets Owned." I can't get the sound to work on the laptop, so we watch a silent film of my student and his neighbor. It is edited, with repeated clips and slow motion scenes of the two boys, building, jumping on top of and against, and finally tackling a giant snowman. I can tell he is proud of it, proud to show his work to this small class, proud of the giggles he recieves from his classmates.

I am humbled by my skepticisim, properly rebuked for my arrogance. Again I ponder the balance between academics and community, the balance I saw so clearly in college and again struggle with here in high school. So easy to feel too busy to listen, too busy to pause, too busy to laugh. The lesson was important, but perhaps not the only important thing. Where is the equilibrium, a classroom in which students are both challenged and safe, learning new skills and honored for their gifts?

The bell rings as the credits roll, and students head for the door. "Hey," I call after him. "That was nice work. Thanks for bringing it." He shrugs, seventeen again and shy of success and retrieves his masterpiece with a smile.

But I Have Promises to Keep

The woods are lovely, dark and deep
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Robert Frost is on my mind as I trudge through eighteen inches of new snow at the Lake Wentatchee YMCA camp, where I am staying with the Bethany Community Church youth group over New Years'. Silent woods surround me, grey and black, barren trees conferring together on the pale, glowing ground of snow, mysterious woods calling with almost audible voices. But the plastic sled I drag behind me reminds me that I have a task to complete, that I must stay on the path and save wandering in snowy woods for another night. I am going to the woodshed.

"How did you sleep?" I asked a fellow youth leader at breakfast this morning.

He yawned and responded, "Oh, not good at all. I was up all night, keeping the fire going in our cabin. It was worth it, though," he nodded, smiling with satisfaction. "We were warm this morning. You?"

I grimaced at the memory of waking up to a below-freezing temperature inside my insulation-free cabin, pulling on icy jeans in my sleeping bag. "We were a little colder."

"Did you let the fire go out?"

"I... well, I was expecting... yes," I muttered. Excuses were plentiful. Yes, I spent many years in homes with wood heat, learning all the principles of not touching hot stoves and hauling split wood onto the porch, but at age eleven my responsibilities had ended there. I knew nothing about fires--how could I be expected to make one last through the whole night?

Excuses aside, the cold-morning truth was that I had gone soundly to sleep after I shoved a log into the woodstove at midnight, and did not wake until I could see my breath in the dim light of dawn. I, and no one else, had let the fire go out.

Like Frost's wanderer, I now have a promise to keep--I have promised four high school girls that they will pass a better night, and wake to a warmer morning. I pull the sled along the path and weigh it down with logs and kindling. I return to the empty cabin and carefully arrange the many sizes of wood, blowing and fanning the flames, gaurding the hot iron box as if were the only test of my responsibility, my adulthood, my love for these students.

I wonder who was waiting for the forest-loving traveler, what promises he had to keep, and if he regretted leaving the snowy woods behind him? As I sit near the warmth of a glowing fire and listen to the crackle of burning wood, knowing that people I love will be warm in the morning, I have no regrets.

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.