Twenty-Three to One

Almost noon on a Thursday, and I am walking off the high school campus, coat and purse in hand, while several of my students call, "Hey, where are you going? Will you be back for fifth period?"

"No," I reply. "I told you about this yesterday. You have a sub. I'm going to a class. Be good, now!"

I always laugh when preparing the class for a substitute, placing brightly-colored labels and writing detailed notes about the lesson, the students, the classroom. It's as if I am talking to a babysitter (the babysitter that I was only a few years ago. "Now, they will want to talk during this work time, but they shouldn't. They get too loud if you let them change seats..."

While the training, held at our district headquarters, would prove to be tragically dull and redundant, falling far short of the last two exciting classes of my school day, it does afford me a reason to drive ten miles south through no traffic at all. This autumn has been full of dramatic and unpredictable weather, so cold that the leaves have turned early, but so dry that they stay on the trees, dropping delicately and hesitantly, in twos and threes, to lawns or sidewalks. Being outside or on the road in any circumstance is a treat, to witness the seasonal spectacle that we are fortunate enough to see in our city.

This day, however, I pass through two torrential rainstorms on the drive down, when I fear for the state of my broken windshield wipers. All through the training, I envision the monsoon traveling south to where we were, and dreaded the rush-hour commute home. I am stunned to silence when I instead emerged into the late afternoon to see the sky a pile of majestic white clouds.

I often, rather unreasonably, think of the sky as a flat backdrop to our world, and consider that it is probably near enough to touch, that cool blue or wooly grey. Today, however, the buildings of downtown are dwarfed in comparison to the vastness of the sky, like a dollhouse inside a cathedral. How small and fragile they look, these geometrical blocks scattered on the streets, underneath the almost supernatural vastness of the titanic clouds above. It is almost funny to think that on an ordinary cloudy day, I marvel at the height of these "skyscrapers." Today, they do not scrape the sky; the buildings are toddlers on tiptoes, and they only come up to the sky's knobby, cloudy knees.

I have been considering, lately, the balance between my place as advocate and mentor in an urban school with much more brokenness than I am often prepared to admit, and the deep and overwhelming feeling that I am a tiny block of a building spinning out in a universe of trouble. I see my students for only one out of their twenty-four hours, and I am just beginning to see and hear how they occupy the rest of their time. Some return to houses of chaos, while others while away evenings alone while parents work to support them. A few don't come to school much at all, popping in just enough for me to remember their names and faces, and be haunted by thoughts of what they do when they are not here.

Before school began, I wrote of wanting Room 120 to be a safe place, a refuge from the darkness of the world outside. I still so deeply desire this peace, for them and for me, despite the clouds looming overhead. I'm beginning to realize my size in the world, understanding the limits to what and who I can change. In the end, I know that while I can call and persuade these students to come to school, my responsibility is to the day-to-day business of loving the ones who arrive. I may never take on the clouds, may never be big enough to battle the systemic evils of humankind that find their way into my students' lives, but I strive to offer what shelter I can, in my hour a day, from the scrapes and bumps they may find in the other twenty-three.

The Joy of Joining

It is 6:17 PM, and we are standing in a dark hallway, purple mood lighting interrupted by flashes of the battery-operated strobe lights duct-taped to the ceiling. Half a dozen eleventh-graders remain, sighing with pleasure at our handiwork.

"All the stress," the class vice president sighs. "It's so worth it!"

I look around and nod in agreement. We have swathed the lockers, walls, and floor in about four hundred yards of colored butcher paper. Stuffed paper Disney characters dangle from the ceiling, along with several glowing planets, some shooting stars, and a dozen tikki paper plates that I proudly hung myself. They've covered parts of the floor with sand, carted in by wagon and skateboard, from the beach four miles away. Soft Hawaiian music floats up from somewhere. THe library doors are covered in a beach tablecloth, and the adjacent classroom is also inaccessible, barricaded with red paper. Cutout stars, the hard work of two girls, three hours, and some very sturdy scissors, are scattered over the black paper floor, so that we float in outer-space as we survey the other-world our hallway has become.

Perhaps if I had shared in much of the actual stress--borne mostly by three ingenuous student officers--I might not think it was worth all the trouble. Apparently, my mere presence as the class advisor lent legitimacy to the proceedings, but I was a figurehead, a puppet leader. I was an extra pair of hands this afternoon (and several extra pairs of scissors), an obedient worker who happened to have a room full of stuff at her disposal. A teacher convenient for her tall stools for standing, and the occasional listening ear. And that's fine with me.

The instructional duties of my day ended four hours ago. I taught my last chaotic lesson, shut the doors, and entered Homecoming Land, where my only task was to cut out Disney characters and talk to students. A merciful break from planning--they had planned it all, already. I think about the relative weights of these two parts of my day, curricular and extra-curricular. Cognitive and affective, they would have called them in college. Leading and following. Teaching and being taught.

"You'll learn so much more than what they tell you in the classroom."

That's what I heard about college, and I remember laughing at it. In high school, I was Classroom Girl. Blessed with no more impressive skills than an endless capacity for memorizing facts, it is no wonder that I valued academics most. This business, the decorating and cheerleaders and football players yelling in the halls, I never noticed. "Secondary," I would sigh over the wasted resources.

But it was true, as I see today. The classroom is not the end of learning, even when it is my classroom. I see students learning to listen, learning to work together and to organize and take real pride in their work. And I am learning, year by year, what it means to "enter in" to the lives of my students, sharing in their passions as I ask them to share in mine.

"Yeah, Harry dies in the end! Gandalf stabs him."

-Student trying, unsuccessfully, to reveal the ending of the Harry Potter book he obviously didn't read

Things My Students Say #1

On the overhead:

Protagonist: Yertle the Turtle (wicked turtle-king)
Antagonist: Mack (small turtle at the bottom who questions Yertle's political strategy, i.e. "I am the ruler of all that I see")
Secondary Characters: mule, cat, blueberry bush, nameless turtles, butterflies, cow

We have just finished reading Dr. Seuss's Yertle the Turtle--a text that, I explain carefully, has a great deal of complex characterizations, given that the protagonist, Yertle himself, is a greedy dictator, content to build his kingdom literally on the backs of his fellow turtles. This is deep stuff, and they know it. We have a list going of characters.

Student: Cow? Where was the cow? I didn't see no cow.

Me: The cow was back with the cat and the bush. You know. Things that Yertle can see.

Student: There wasn't a cow. That was a cat.

Me: No, remember? He was "king of a cow, king of a mule."

Student: Whatever. I don't see why there had to be a cow. And a cow can't be a character, anyway.

But turtle kings, a throne of stacked turtles, and a ninth grade literature lesson based on Dr. Seuss are completely plausible...

Any Age?

If you could be any age for the rest of your life, what age would you be? Write a multi-paragraph essay for your teacher identifying the age you would be and explaining why you would choose this age.
-Tenth Grade WASL Writing Prompt


"OK, so I have good news and better news for you," I say wearily to my last class of the day. I'm not feeling well, so I'm sitting down at a table at the front of the room. The usually-wild class is compassionately calm and receptive.

"What?" someone asks.

"Well, we're doing our last beginning-of-the-year thing today. That's the good news."

"Can't wait for the better news," one disgruntled ninth grader mumbles to his neighbor.

"Oh, right," I say, as I start to pass out the writing assessment. "The better news is that tomorrow I'm going to read you a story. You know, relaxing Friday storytime."

"So much better," they roll their eyes, passing the tests backward along the columns of desks.

"So here it is," I answer, sitting back down. "Here's the question. Who's seen 13 going on 30?"

A few girls slide their hands in the air. One snatches it down again, realizing she was thinking of some movie infinitely more cool.

"It's a good movie!" I say defensively. "Anyway, that's the deal here. If you could wake up tomorrow and be any age you want--for the next 65 years or so--what age would you choose?"

Squeals of delight coem unevenly as they realize the implications. Several start writing immediately.

"Hold on!" I cry. I know I'll have to read these later, and I have glanced down at too many of one number today. "Don't just write '21' right away. Think about it a little. Can you think of more than one reason? If not, you'll be pretty worried after you've written 'So I can drink' on your paper, and you have a one-sentence essay."

Some of them protest, but they all get to work. I consider their most obvious choice, thinking that it's madness. At 21, I had mounds of homework, a job that paid me next to nothing for some of the hardest work I've done (perhaps until now), and a bleak uncertainty about the future. I was grateful to enjoy this youthful lostness for a year and move on. Stay there forever? No, thank you.

Hours later, I am sitting at home and breaking one of the looser rules that I've made about teaching by reading their essays by candlelight in a pleasant, quiet living room. Grading at home often feels too much like homework. But I had glanced into them in the afternoon, and found these particular essays so interesting that I was willing to dip into them for sheer enjoyment's sake. Between baking cookies and watching a rerun of The Office, the essays provide some excellent diversion.

And once again, these assignments that I approach with such casual expediency ("Well, I guess I should get a writing sample. Here, this should be fine.") floor me by giving me real and honest glimpses into my student's hopes, dreams, fears, and passions. I barely know them now, only a week into school, and I have been dismayed to find myself thinking of them as a teeming mass of questions and needs, rather than individuals. As I read their essays, faces and voices come to the fore and, as usually happens, I like them more than I ever have.

I laugh when I see a student wants to be 19--a particularly awkward age for me--until he explains that 19 is the age that Mexican soccer scouts seek out up-and-coming players. Another wants to be a pro bowler, and feels that 21 is probably the best age to try for it. Several want families, and place their eternal ages in their mid- to late-twenties, allowing for comparative youth but plenty of relationship and responsibility. A few would rather simply be four or five, so that they can sleep as much as they want and be the smartest and strongest students in their elementary schools. One student coaxes me into letting him choose to be 300 years old; he explains that he wants to see what happens to the world in the next few hundred years. I envy his courage.

Several of them, scared away from the 21 stereotype, write that they want to be 22. This, they believe, is the ideal age. Finished with college, at 22 they would have excellent jobs, the beginnings of families, and the cars and homes of their dreams. They believe that the early twenties are times of wisdom and maturity, the golden "middle age" of life. The twenties are their paradise, a hoped-for era of freedom and pleasure.

Though unhappy with neither my twenties nor the shape my life is taking in this third decade, I do smile to see my own age flashing up from the page. I wonder what they would think if they knew, that life might hold things better than fast cars, more liberating decisions than purchasing alcohol, and more rewarding payment than an hourly wage that exceeds $10. They must not know that I am still seeking wisdom and maturity-that my ideal age is floating somewhere in the forties or fifties, when life settles a bit and relationships are rich and deep. Probably none of us will ever be quite satisfied with where we are, always hoping to push on a bit--to learn more, experience more, grow more.

"But I don't want to be one age forever!" cries one student, jabbing a period at the end of an impassioned essay.

Thank goodness we don't have to be. The joy is in the journey...

The Wildernesses

Returning home from Dr. Doug Thorpe's reading of his recent book, Raptures of the Deep, his words about wilderness haunt me. As someone commented on his lack of "urban oases" in this book full of outdoor ruminating, I felt rather smug. I, of course, appreciate the wilderness. It is home for me, daughter of island, mountain, valley, with no fear of heights because no one told me about the terror of falling from those dizzy heights, only the ecstacy of seeing the ocean from this pass or that summit, just over there. I have spent many pieces of summer on this wilderness, chasing down the natural world, as I try to remember its stars and smells and quiet through the dripping pre-dawns of winter in the city. Oh yes, I know this wilderness, this apartness of which Dr. Thorpe writes so well.

But no, says the professor softly. Though nature provides a metaphor for wilderness, his wilderness is more and even other than simply exisiting outside. "It is your edge," Thorpe said, bobbing his head emphatically. "Your place of vulnerability."

I think of my edges. Of the cities where I wandered alone. Of the crowds of high school and college freshmen in which I have been lost, shorter and quieter than the rest. And then, another wilderness, I remember the quiet classroom I shut at 3:15 this afternoon, the classroom that will tomorrow fill with 160 ninth graders.

A room full of strangers: this is my wilderness, my edge. Oh, they will be friendly strangers, mostly, eager to please and be pleased. They are at their edges, too, these new high school students. They have left behind places they knew--perhaps precious and perhaps painful--places in which they were known. As I leave the comfort of a summer with people who know me, people with whom I no longer worry about impressions, I am comforted to know that we enter this wilderness together, my students and I. Let it be as nourishing, as challenging, as beautiful, as the wild places I leave behind.

Dust and Shades of Peach

Don't you love New York in the fall? It makes me want to buy school supplies. I would send you a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils if I knew your name and address.

You've Got Mail

Room 120 is holding its breath.

In a way, this is almost literal, as they are glued shut. The thin, half-century-old windows on the south side of the school building were condemned in June, after another spring in which classroom temperatures topped 90 degrees. Apparently, my library annex was not the only warm place last year. A few weeks ago, I stepped into the empty room that has become my new home, and marveled to discover that a few of the windows had no panes in them at all. I tiptoed across the room and pushed my head way out into the courtyard between the main building and the one next door. The following day, the hole was replaced by a board.

With new key in hand, I struggle with a bundle of Ikea merchandise and plastic letter trays, trying to push my way into the door without dropping all of my parcels. This would be a good time for a useful colleague or construction worker to offer help, but no such person arrives, and I stumble into the room.

Though all of the windows have been replaced, today it is still in the upper 80s inside. The windows, never opened, are caulked shut. It smells faintly of chemicals and a thin layer of old window dust covers floor and desk tops. There are only 25 desks in the room (I have 34 students in my largest class) and no desk at all for me. The walls are exactly the shade of my legs in the dead of winter, while the beams are painted to match the worst sunburn I got this summer.

I couldn't be happier with Room 120.

I set down the packages, which I will unpack tomorrow, struggle with a window until it opens stickily, and sit down in a student desk. The desks will have to be rearranged, and pictures hung on the walls. I will write my name on the board and, if I'm allowed, repaint at least the sunburned beams. When we can, we will paste up projects and dance photos. Maps and assignments, grammar reminders and expectations. I will become familiar with the view from these tall, sticky windows. I will sit on that table and stand in that doorway, drinking tea and learning.

I am happy with this new place, and eager to make it my own. How easy it is to believe, now, that I can create a microcosm of safety in this little room, where I will protect myself and my students from the dangers we face outside, in the halls and the streets. How deeply I desire, as I enter a second year in the whirlwind of high school education, to be a person of peace, and to reflect that in an oasis of a classroom.

Another voice, the tired and nervous one, scoffs, "Oh, that won't last long. They'll mess up your clean desks, break the new windows, shout while you're trying to drink tea. There is no peace in teaching." There will be arguing and crying. There will be doodles on the desks and crumbs on the floor. The inevitable pain of the world outside will come in with all of us, like the November mud on our shoes.

Of course it will never be perfect, never the ideal of a summer dream, I tell myself, bracing against disappointment. And yet, here in this student desk that will fill five times with a still-unknown teenager, I pray for peace. For them. For me. For Room 120 and the school around us.