I'm writing from my dining room table, the early evening light filtering through the sliding glass doors, casting long shadows across the wood floors. The washer and dryer are humming. When I look out the window, across the backyard, I can see that two yards over, the neighbors appear to be having an Easter egg hunt with their kids--either that or they're picking up dog poop, but since all three kids are carrying sacks, I'm going to go with my first assumption. (This weekend my children wondered when we'll get another dog. I said, "Who will pick up the dog's poop?" "Daddy," they said. I told them that when they were ready to answer that all of us would share in that chore, we would discuss it again. So we're...waiting.) The birds are singing. The light lingers.
We were up early this morning. We went to church--Easter is my favorite service of the year, even more than Christmas, and second only to Easter Vigil, which we attended last night--and brunch with my sister-in-law. Back at the house I curled up on the couch for the afternoon nap I've been planning for days. Matt took the kids outside, then to Home Depot. They're still out. Dinner tonight is going to be simple; I have this frozen vegetable curry thing in the freezer I plan to bake with cauliflower rice because tonight I cannot handle even chopping an onion.
This week has been three weeks long. Is it just me? Because I feel like I've spoken this sentence several times in the last few days (to my favorite barista, to my son's kindergarten teacher, to my fifth period class) and everyone has heartily agreed. I guess it's March.
This past week was Holy Week, a week in which it's expected to feel a spectacular range of human emotion. I wanted to go to Good Friday services on Friday evening, but I admit: I also really just wanted to put on sweats and drink wine. I went for a run first, though, and that was maybe the best thing I've done for myself all week. I think. I can't be sure; the week started so long ago. On Monday I felt so sick I nearly went home during my planning period. I rallied, though. I was honest with my sophomores and told them I felt terrible and so could they please be nice, and then I experienced one of the wonderful benefits of teaching: they called me out of myself, and I forgot that I'd been doubled over an hour earlier. I do love those kids. On Tuesday, I didn't feel much better. I think I blame eating too many grains over the weekend. I did a Whole30 in January--absolutely no dairy, grains, or sugar for thirty days, which is its own entry sometime, maybe--and since then I've relaxed on the strictness a bit, but during that month I also realized that my body feels pretty great when I'm not eating those things, especially grains, so I eat them sparingly. Mostly. Except for last weekend, when I ate things like chocolate croissants and a whole bunch of homemade macaroni and cheese. On Wednesday and Thursday I felt physically better, but I also had two late nights at school, nights that left me exhausted and furious to the point where I couldn't go straight home afterwards even though I was beyond exhausted. Well, I could have, but I would have stormed in the door raving like a crazy person in real need of some anger management, and that isn't the best way to jump in and help with bedtime. My husband is kind and loving and is a wonderful person to process with when I need perspective, which is often, and oh my heavens am I usually grateful that I am not married to someone who also works in public education because that would be an awful lot of...energy. In the same house. My husband is also more patient than I am, and probably much smarter, so he suggested I go ahead and go out with the friend who sent me a text asking how things went at this terrible thing I had to do. I called her back from the parking lot and remember yelling incoherently; the next thing I knew she was meeting me at a nearby restaurant to sit with me while I drank wine and ranted angrily.
Sometimes, or maybe even most of the time, I think that's why I believe God's hand is in the world. Truly. Because of these nights when I am exhausted and angry and sad, when I yell, "I don't even fucking know why I just wasted my time doing that," or "This is so absurd I don't even understand why I'm doing this job and I should just quit and I hate everything," and my friends who are in the trenches with me will sit for two hours over a couple of glasses of wine and just listen, even though they, too, are tired and it is a school night, and they will validate, and they will offer the perspective that I need, and they will hug me in the parking lot before I drive home, and I will remember exactly why I am doing this job and why I don't quit and why, in fact, I don't actually hate everything.
And then I will go home to my husband who will hug me and suggest, gently, that I have tea instead of more wine even though I'm still yelling a little bit. And then I will tip-toe into my children's rooms, into these rooms that contain children who are sleeping because of the gentle man who said yes, go, I've got this, and I will kiss their faces and smooth back their hair and I am able to be present in that single, beautiful, ordinary moment. Of all the moments in my day, all the ridiculous absurd horrible hilarious moments, the ones that I literally live for are these. I wish I could find my fumbling way back to appreciating them all by myself, but the truth is that I need a lot of help, patience, and grace.
In the spirit of Easter, I've been rereading some of my favorite things by Anne Lamott, Rachel Held Evans, and Nadia Bolz-Weber. Today, this resonates:
“Matthew once said to me, after one of my more finely worded rants about stupid people who have the wrong opinions, 'Nadia, the thing that sucks is that every time we draw a line between us and others, Jesus is always on the other side of it.' Damn.” --Nadia Bolz-Weber, Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint
It resonates, but I'm still stubbornly me. Maybe it resonates precisely because I'm still stubbornly me. Unfortunately. I feel like I spent my entire week not only drawing a line but building a wall out of bricks and concrete and spikes dipped in poison, and I've been both a.) absolutely certain that Jesus approves of my wall because I am fighting for the light and b.) feeling pretty pissy about the fact that we are all children of God, including Donald Trump and whackadoo Ted Cruz and this other person for whom I feel nothing but loathing contempt. Because if I'm honest, I hate that. I truly believe this person who has twisted my gut all week long is incredibly damaging, and I have pretty much zero desire to work with this person--in fact, I believe it can't be done. It's futile. And I don't want to use the word hate because I don't want to hate anyone, ever. The word makes my teeth hurt. But I used it this week, out loud, more than once. And I suppose that's only one more reason I need Jesus.
So tonight, on this lovely Sunday evening, on this beautiful Easter, I'm reading and rereading words from people who draw me into the light through their own honesty and brokenness. I have a lot of work to do. I can't do it on my own. And thankfully, I know I don't have to.
Sunday, March 27, 2016
Sunday, March 13, 2016
"The water is wide and he has now passed over..."
We took a quick, spontaneous overnight trip to Portland last month. The kids and I had a couple of days off for midwinter break, and we found a cheap hotel, and we Winslows are always up for little weekend getaways. We could easily spend a week in Portland (apologies to those of you who live there who we didn't connect with; it truly was so last-minute!), what with the books and the beer and all the other awesomeness--food, outdoors, OMSI, whatever. The trip was mostly perfect: we spent hours at Powell's, we ate wonderful food, Matt sampled good beer, we played in the hotel pool. It does not take a lot to make us happy to just hang out together.
In the morning, I woke up and casually checked my phone. It wasn't my week to abstain from Facebook, so I checked that, too. And that's when I read Pat Conroy's announcement:
...but that day I handled the news by hunkering down in a coffee shop and writing him a letter while Matt took the kids to the park. I'm thirty-seven years old, yes, and I am writing a love letter to a man I will likely never meet. I sat in a coffee shop and wrote and wrote and wrote, sipping my little almond milk latte. I didn't pause until a young woman sitting near me said, "Excuse me, but do you mind if I ask what you've been writing?" And that little exchange launched an entire conversation about literature and death and philosophy. It turns out this woman was a former IB student from Quebec who is currently studying in Ontario. We talked about writers and exchanged book lists. She left a note in my journal.
Pat Conroy died three weeks later. I thought I'd have time to mail him my letter, as silly as that might sound. I even wrote it in my planner, for God's sake--to remind myself to do it. But last Friday night, on March 4, he died. And I grieve his loss.
During the summer of 1994 I was fifteen years old, staying with my grandparents in Gildford, Montana for a few days. One stifling afternoon, we drove to Havre, the strange little town in which I was born—it’s about 30 miles east of Gildford, and my grandparents did all their grocery shopping and errands there. Somehow, my grandmother and I wound up at a used bookstore downtown. I'd never known it was there; I didn't think Havre had any bookstores. As a matter of fact, the only bookstores within a hundred miles were B. Dalton and Waldenbooks in the Holiday Village mall in Great Falls. I can still smell both of those bookstores; they were all I knew for years and years. But somehow, we found this little bookstore, and my grandma asked if I'd like to stop. She knew I would; she still likes to tell the story about how once, when I was a little girl and she came in to say bedtime prayers with me, she asked if there was anything in particular I'd like to thank God for. According to her, I just gazed at the bookshelf in my room and said reverently, "My books.”
I've never been back to that bookstore. Sometimes I question whether or not it really existed at all; I wonder if we wandered through some mysterious door that no one else could see, like Narnia through the wardrobe, and we wouldn't be able to find it again if we tried.
We went inside. The bookstore was cramped and musty, thick with the smell of old books. There was no particular organization that I could follow, but my grandmother is unfailingly patient, so we just wandered slowly through the crowded stacks. Both of us discovered plenty of treasures that afternoon. My grandmother ended up buying a sackful of old books simply because she thought the covers were elegant and "someone might like to have them someday," and I ended up with two ratty old paperbacks that took root in my heart that summer.
The first one was Ordinary People by Judith Guest. I wouldn't see the film starring Donald Sutherland for another fourteen years, and I'd never heard of the book, but something about it grabbed me. I read most of it on the way to a family reunion in Cypress Hills, Saskatchewan -- a little oasis of trees and a lake in the middle of the prairie, a place my relatives still gather every few years. I still remember specific passages from that book, and it's still tucked in the closet of my bedroom at my parents' house.
The other one was The Prince of Tides, by Pat Conroy.
That book started a sacred commotion in my heart that changed the way I read, the way I looked at the world. I count that day as one of the most significant of my life. While I have been a voracious reader since I held the barest awareness of language, that was the day I began to understand the power of discovering and choosing books on my own, books that led me away from those chosen by my teachers or selected under my mother's eye at B. Dalton. I picked up The Prince of Tides and flipped through the pages. It was a tattered, mass market copy--the one with Barbara Streisand and Nick Nolte on the cover. It would require a few glue jobs in order to keep it attached to the binding.
I landed on the part of the story where Lila Wingo has given birth to her yet another stillborn child, and she calls her children in, one by one, to tell them that they alone are the only ally she has. She is utterly broken, and in her brokenness, she still manages to manipulate and confuse her children, perpetuating that grand Wingo tradition of telling lies and keeping secrets. Standing in that quiet, still bookshop, surrounded by thousands of dusty pages, I realized the power of perfectly crafted sentences. It is no exaggeration to say that falling in love with Conroy's has been one of the most important driving forces of my life.
I read it a month or so later. I started it in the backseat of a mini-van, on a roadtrip with my mom and two family friends—a friend of my mother's and her daughter, who was one of my best friends. We drove from Montana to Minnesota and spent a week there, and while I remember so many things about that trip, right down to my badly-permed bangs and green plaid Union Bay shorts that haunt me from the pictures my mother took, I can't think about it without remembering what it was like to look up from my book and see the fields of sunflowers in North Dakota or the bridge between Mandan and Bismarck. I finished the book shortly after we returned to the northern Montana hi-line, deep in August harvest. When I read the ending of the book even now, Tom Wingo's journey over the bridge above the Charleston harbor, his whispered "Lowenstein, Lowenstein," is superimposed over the way the fields look at dusk, the blinking lights of town two miles south of the farm, the heavy sweet smell of freshly-cut grain on the air, and the sound of the freight trains that pass through up to thirty times a day. There is nothing, really, that should connect these images, but there they are, no matter how many times I read the book. (I usually don't read it straight through; it's one of those books I turn to when I need a quiet moment, or an inspiration, or comfort. I used to carry it around in my backpack at school sometimes, and I'd pull it out and read random passages if I had a moment during Algebra class.)
My parents traveled to South Carolina a few years ago, and my father managed to get me an autographed hardcover copy of The Prince of Tides. It was one of the best Christmas gifts I've ever received, and that's the one on my shelf now, but my ratty old copy still resides in my old closet in Bozeman. Almost every time I'm home, I find myself pulling it out and flipping through it. Sometimes I need it for the beauty, sometimes for the catharsis that comes with raw pain, sometimes for the humor. The scene with the Wingo kids and their grandmother Tolitha? At the funeral home, when she insists on trying out the caskets because she's sure her death is imminent? One of the funniest passages in any book I've ever read. Other parts I read through pain, through anger and loneliness. That book cleanses me every time I read it, and never have I known a book as intimately as I know that one.
I devoured Beach Music in my dorm room at Concordia a few years later. I read The Water is Wide the next year as I began my teaching program. Ron, my fabulous mentor from my first year of teaching, has said more than once that it should be required reading for any first-year teacher.
I read South of Broad during the last days of my pregnancy with my second child. I read My Losing Season halfway through my pregnancy with my daughter, my firstborn. If The Prince of Tides serves as a foundation for everything I believe about literature, about why we write, why we read, and the power of language to connect us, then My Losing Season serves as the foundation for one of the most important friendships of my life. My father read it first (side note: I have always though my father looks like Pat Conroy) and passed it along to me. By then I was a few years into my career as an English teacher, and one of my favorite colleagues also happened to be a basketball coach. I thought he might like it as well, and I wasn't wrong. The following Christmas, I gave him The Prince of Tides, and when we returned to school in January he simply said, "Winslow, Winslow, Winslow," echoing Tom Wingo at the end of the novel--that gorgeously heartbreaking "Lowenstein, Lowenstein." Sometimes I think ours is an unlikely friendship. He's a coach, and now an assistant principal and athletic director. I'm the mother of two young children, and I like basketball because it's a big deal in small town Montana, but I mostly don't follow or understand sports. But Coach and I taught English together for awhile, and we share a love of sentences. He still texts me when he reads something that stirs him. We've shared other others--John Updike, Richard Ford, Frank Deford, Brian Doyle--but I really believe Pat Conroy is at the core of our friendship, which has become one of the best and most important of my life.
The day after Pat Conroy died, Coach sent me a long text message. He'd been at the high school basketball championships with some coaching friends, and one of them is a writer who has connections to Conroy as well. He forwarded that friend's text about Conroy's passing, and ended with this: "And Winslow, it puts you, by association, connected to our coaching fraternity." I love that so much.
And then Ron and I wrote back and forth a bit. Ron said, "Oddly...it feels good to know that this day sucks for someone OTHER than me."
(I believe it is no coincidence that the universe sent me a mentor who also loves Pat Conroy. Or that two of the best, most important men who've shaped my life read Pat Conroy.)
Sometimes Conroy's sentences are so perfect they almost hurt to read. His gift is using language to carry the reader through the entire spectrum of human emotion. I’ve never read one of his books without laughing hard, and not one has ever failed to move me to tears. I knew somehow, even at fifteen, that I was reading perfect sentences, that I would learn something about the art and necessity of storytelling and the sheer power of language, both to hurt and to heal—even if I couldn't articulate that at the time. That's what Conroy has always been about for me.
In the morning, I woke up and casually checked my phone. It wasn't my week to abstain from Facebook, so I checked that, too. And that's when I read Pat Conroy's announcement:
Hey out there,Dear Internet: I do not know how to express my actual, real-life devastation. Pat Conroy changed my life. I never met him, but I fully intended to. I thought I would fly to Minneapolis if I had to the next time he went on tour (his tour for The Death of Santini didn't bring him to Seattle but it did take him to St. Paul) and I would tell him this. And then I would have him sign a book to one of my truest and dearest friends, a coach, because Pat Conroy made the word Coach so beautiful to me...
I celebrated my 70th birthday in October and realized that I’ve spent my whole writing life trying to find out who I am and I don’t believe I’ve even come close. It was in Beaufort in sight of a river’s sinuous turn, and the movements of its dolphin-proud tides that I began to discover myself and where my life began at fifteen.
I have recently been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. With the help of the wonderful people at M.D. Anderson I intend to fight it hard. I am grateful to all my beloved readers, my friends and my family for their prayers. I owe you a novel and I intend to deliver it.
Much love,
Pat Conroy
...but that day I handled the news by hunkering down in a coffee shop and writing him a letter while Matt took the kids to the park. I'm thirty-seven years old, yes, and I am writing a love letter to a man I will likely never meet. I sat in a coffee shop and wrote and wrote and wrote, sipping my little almond milk latte. I didn't pause until a young woman sitting near me said, "Excuse me, but do you mind if I ask what you've been writing?" And that little exchange launched an entire conversation about literature and death and philosophy. It turns out this woman was a former IB student from Quebec who is currently studying in Ontario. We talked about writers and exchanged book lists. She left a note in my journal.
Pat Conroy died three weeks later. I thought I'd have time to mail him my letter, as silly as that might sound. I even wrote it in my planner, for God's sake--to remind myself to do it. But last Friday night, on March 4, he died. And I grieve his loss.
During the summer of 1994 I was fifteen years old, staying with my grandparents in Gildford, Montana for a few days. One stifling afternoon, we drove to Havre, the strange little town in which I was born—it’s about 30 miles east of Gildford, and my grandparents did all their grocery shopping and errands there. Somehow, my grandmother and I wound up at a used bookstore downtown. I'd never known it was there; I didn't think Havre had any bookstores. As a matter of fact, the only bookstores within a hundred miles were B. Dalton and Waldenbooks in the Holiday Village mall in Great Falls. I can still smell both of those bookstores; they were all I knew for years and years. But somehow, we found this little bookstore, and my grandma asked if I'd like to stop. She knew I would; she still likes to tell the story about how once, when I was a little girl and she came in to say bedtime prayers with me, she asked if there was anything in particular I'd like to thank God for. According to her, I just gazed at the bookshelf in my room and said reverently, "My books.”
I've never been back to that bookstore. Sometimes I question whether or not it really existed at all; I wonder if we wandered through some mysterious door that no one else could see, like Narnia through the wardrobe, and we wouldn't be able to find it again if we tried.
We went inside. The bookstore was cramped and musty, thick with the smell of old books. There was no particular organization that I could follow, but my grandmother is unfailingly patient, so we just wandered slowly through the crowded stacks. Both of us discovered plenty of treasures that afternoon. My grandmother ended up buying a sackful of old books simply because she thought the covers were elegant and "someone might like to have them someday," and I ended up with two ratty old paperbacks that took root in my heart that summer.
The first one was Ordinary People by Judith Guest. I wouldn't see the film starring Donald Sutherland for another fourteen years, and I'd never heard of the book, but something about it grabbed me. I read most of it on the way to a family reunion in Cypress Hills, Saskatchewan -- a little oasis of trees and a lake in the middle of the prairie, a place my relatives still gather every few years. I still remember specific passages from that book, and it's still tucked in the closet of my bedroom at my parents' house.
The other one was The Prince of Tides, by Pat Conroy.
That book started a sacred commotion in my heart that changed the way I read, the way I looked at the world. I count that day as one of the most significant of my life. While I have been a voracious reader since I held the barest awareness of language, that was the day I began to understand the power of discovering and choosing books on my own, books that led me away from those chosen by my teachers or selected under my mother's eye at B. Dalton. I picked up The Prince of Tides and flipped through the pages. It was a tattered, mass market copy--the one with Barbara Streisand and Nick Nolte on the cover. It would require a few glue jobs in order to keep it attached to the binding.
I landed on the part of the story where Lila Wingo has given birth to her yet another stillborn child, and she calls her children in, one by one, to tell them that they alone are the only ally she has. She is utterly broken, and in her brokenness, she still manages to manipulate and confuse her children, perpetuating that grand Wingo tradition of telling lies and keeping secrets. Standing in that quiet, still bookshop, surrounded by thousands of dusty pages, I realized the power of perfectly crafted sentences. It is no exaggeration to say that falling in love with Conroy's has been one of the most important driving forces of my life.
I read it a month or so later. I started it in the backseat of a mini-van, on a roadtrip with my mom and two family friends—a friend of my mother's and her daughter, who was one of my best friends. We drove from Montana to Minnesota and spent a week there, and while I remember so many things about that trip, right down to my badly-permed bangs and green plaid Union Bay shorts that haunt me from the pictures my mother took, I can't think about it without remembering what it was like to look up from my book and see the fields of sunflowers in North Dakota or the bridge between Mandan and Bismarck. I finished the book shortly after we returned to the northern Montana hi-line, deep in August harvest. When I read the ending of the book even now, Tom Wingo's journey over the bridge above the Charleston harbor, his whispered "Lowenstein, Lowenstein," is superimposed over the way the fields look at dusk, the blinking lights of town two miles south of the farm, the heavy sweet smell of freshly-cut grain on the air, and the sound of the freight trains that pass through up to thirty times a day. There is nothing, really, that should connect these images, but there they are, no matter how many times I read the book. (I usually don't read it straight through; it's one of those books I turn to when I need a quiet moment, or an inspiration, or comfort. I used to carry it around in my backpack at school sometimes, and I'd pull it out and read random passages if I had a moment during Algebra class.)
My parents traveled to South Carolina a few years ago, and my father managed to get me an autographed hardcover copy of The Prince of Tides. It was one of the best Christmas gifts I've ever received, and that's the one on my shelf now, but my ratty old copy still resides in my old closet in Bozeman. Almost every time I'm home, I find myself pulling it out and flipping through it. Sometimes I need it for the beauty, sometimes for the catharsis that comes with raw pain, sometimes for the humor. The scene with the Wingo kids and their grandmother Tolitha? At the funeral home, when she insists on trying out the caskets because she's sure her death is imminent? One of the funniest passages in any book I've ever read. Other parts I read through pain, through anger and loneliness. That book cleanses me every time I read it, and never have I known a book as intimately as I know that one.
I devoured Beach Music in my dorm room at Concordia a few years later. I read The Water is Wide the next year as I began my teaching program. Ron, my fabulous mentor from my first year of teaching, has said more than once that it should be required reading for any first-year teacher.
I read South of Broad during the last days of my pregnancy with my second child. I read My Losing Season halfway through my pregnancy with my daughter, my firstborn. If The Prince of Tides serves as a foundation for everything I believe about literature, about why we write, why we read, and the power of language to connect us, then My Losing Season serves as the foundation for one of the most important friendships of my life. My father read it first (side note: I have always though my father looks like Pat Conroy) and passed it along to me. By then I was a few years into my career as an English teacher, and one of my favorite colleagues also happened to be a basketball coach. I thought he might like it as well, and I wasn't wrong. The following Christmas, I gave him The Prince of Tides, and when we returned to school in January he simply said, "Winslow, Winslow, Winslow," echoing Tom Wingo at the end of the novel--that gorgeously heartbreaking "Lowenstein, Lowenstein." Sometimes I think ours is an unlikely friendship. He's a coach, and now an assistant principal and athletic director. I'm the mother of two young children, and I like basketball because it's a big deal in small town Montana, but I mostly don't follow or understand sports. But Coach and I taught English together for awhile, and we share a love of sentences. He still texts me when he reads something that stirs him. We've shared other others--John Updike, Richard Ford, Frank Deford, Brian Doyle--but I really believe Pat Conroy is at the core of our friendship, which has become one of the best and most important of my life.
The day after Pat Conroy died, Coach sent me a long text message. He'd been at the high school basketball championships with some coaching friends, and one of them is a writer who has connections to Conroy as well. He forwarded that friend's text about Conroy's passing, and ended with this: "And Winslow, it puts you, by association, connected to our coaching fraternity." I love that so much.
And then Ron and I wrote back and forth a bit. Ron said, "Oddly...it feels good to know that this day sucks for someone OTHER than me."
(I believe it is no coincidence that the universe sent me a mentor who also loves Pat Conroy. Or that two of the best, most important men who've shaped my life read Pat Conroy.)
Sometimes Conroy's sentences are so perfect they almost hurt to read. His gift is using language to carry the reader through the entire spectrum of human emotion. I’ve never read one of his books without laughing hard, and not one has ever failed to move me to tears. I knew somehow, even at fifteen, that I was reading perfect sentences, that I would learn something about the art and necessity of storytelling and the sheer power of language, both to hurt and to heal—even if I couldn't articulate that at the time. That's what Conroy has always been about for me.
Tuesday, March 1, 2016
English Teacher/Feral Kitten Tamer
By lunchtime today, I was feeling fairly discouraged. So were some of my colleagues. Sometimes teenagers can be tough, to put it politely.
This is the time of year when sophomores often start to be awesome. No one told that to my classes, though, and a class I normally love to pieces was decidedly less than awesome. I was all, I DON'T EVEN KNOW YOU. I made an Annoying Adult Speech about their terrible choices and disappointment and other things I'm pretty sure they 100% ignored, and then sent them to lunch. Piss off.
To be blunt: sometimes teenagers are asses.
Most of the time, I can weather this with relatively good humor. I can manage not to take it personally, because I know it's really not about me. It also helps to remember that I could be a perfect ass myself when I was a teenager. Most (all?) of us were asses at some point, to a teacher or to a parent or both, probably daily. But sometimes it's just exhausting, and teachers are human beings who often feel more like punching bags. (I thought of some more interesting metaphors, but I got a little carried away, so...I'll just leave it there.)
I ate my lunch, which was at least delicious because my cauliflower enchiladas are even better the next day -- at least there was that. At least I had time to eat lunch today. Trust me when I say that this matters. (And a huge shout-out to the colleague who covered my last class of the day for 15 minutes the other day so I could finally wolf down leftover soup while returning a phone call from an administrator at a different school who had questions about the MYP program.) Right now we are operating on one functioning stall in the faculty bathroom, our entire school is out of paper, and even if we had paper it wouldn't matter because all the damn copiers are always broken. ("Let it be a challenge to you." --Up the Down Staircase.) Eating delicious leftover cauliflower enchiladas was basically the highlight of my entire day.
Until!
Until eighth period.
Eighth period has been rough for me this year. It's a class I could normally teach in my sleep, but this year's kids have blown that complacency to smithereens. I have shed actual tears over this class, once just on the other side of the door. I've felt that I don't know how to reach them, or how to motivate them. My usual expectations have been met with confusion, or apathy, or a level of defeat I'm not used to seeing in a higher level class. I've thrown up my hands and said to the kids, "This isn't working guys. Help. I literally have no idea what to do here." (I think they actually felt sorry for me that day.)
These are not bad kids. These are actually kids I like quite a lot; none of them are terrible to me or anything. But there's something about this class. I don't know what it is; I have felt, on several occasions, that they don't quite trust me and they definitely don't trust themselves, and none of us have been quite able to find our groove. This is something I'm better able to handle early in the year. By second semester, I pretty much sound like a deranged person every time I talk to them because THIS IS A HIGHER LEVEL IB CLASS AND WE HAVE SHIT TO DO, PEOPLE.
Anyway, I took Friday off because I was busy turning 37 and I decided that I would practice radical self-care that day by NOT sitting in the middle of the sophomore section during an assembly and I would take my sweet time eating lunch that someone else made, and I would drink wine with that, thank you very much. In my absence, I left a letter to be distributed to each one of my juniors. I begged them--really, literally begged them--to prepare for today's discussion on the novel we've been reading. I begged them to do work. DO SOME WORK. ANY. JUST A LITTLE. FOR MY BIRTHDAY. Yes, I went there, because I am not above emotional manipulation. Basically my letter begged them not to suck. It was the letter of a crazy person. For good measure, I e-mailed the entire class yesterday afternoon. I do not think I sounded any more sane.
When class started this afternoon, one of my sweet junior girls danced in (she really does seem to bounce or dance wherever she moves and I cannot look at her without smiling). She hugged me and asked how my birthday was. I had the kids move their desks into a circle for our discussion. I busied myself with a flurry of taking attendance and printing some of the work one or two kids had e-mailed me. And then my sweet junior girl said, "Can I--I have to do a thing before we start, is that okay? Just a really quick thing." She vanished into the computer lab. A moment later she reappeared with a bouquet of flowers, a box of cookies, and a card signed by everyone in the class. And then they all sang "Happy Birthday." I nearly cried. I'm nearly crying now just writing this.
During my first year of teaching I had the most wonderful mentor, someone who can realistically claim a great deal of credit for my survival in this job (that's you, Ron). He told me that students would give me things like this sometimes--little notes of appreciation, or cards, or whatever. And he told me to save them, to put them in a place where I could find them on the hard days, the days when teaching is exhausting, defeating, frustrating, enraging, sad. These are the things, he said, that would remind me why I'm doing this.
This card, from this class, is going straight to the top of the stack. I read the notes later, after the kids had left. I don't even have words.
But even better than that was the class itself. For the first time, I had 100% participation. No one skipped class. No one. Everyone talked. Every. Kid. Participated. One girl e-mailed me last night and said, "If you could...I would really appreciate it if at the beginning of the discussion, if you can put me on the spot first. Because let's face it, I am not the one to speak at these things." So I did. I asked her to start, and she just took off. She spoke several times throughout class and I hugged her ecstatically afterwards. Another girl, who has literally never said a single word during discussion all year long, jumped in without any prompting. Another girl, who actually loves to read quite a lot but had a really rough first semester, was just on fire today. And a boy I've butted heads with for two years (I've written about him here before) was so phenomenal today I felt like I was teaching a different kid. He had his book out, he referenced pages numbers and quotations to support his claims, he didn't look at his damn phone all period, and it was all I could do not to burst into happy tears. I didn't, though, because that kind of thing would probably confuse the poor dears more than my desperate e-mails.
These kids are still working on their written work. Their performance on paper, so to speak. But today represented such a huge shift from the beginning of the year that I'm sailing on nothing but optimism and fierce love for these kids. Are they beginning to trust me? More importantly, are they beginning to trust themselves? Their own voices?
Sometimes teaching them reminds me of taming wild kittens. When I was little, spending lots of time at my family's farm, I spent hours and hours and hours trying to coax feral kittens out from underneath the playhouse in the yard. My mother tied a piece of lunchmeat on a string, and I squatted there until my legs ached, waiting for these kittens to bound out and become my new friends. When that didn't happen immediately, I trudged inside, defeated. When I returned to the yard, the meat, naturally, was gone. I was so indignant. But I persisted, and finally, finally, one kitten came close enough for me to stroke her furry gray neck under the watchful eye of her mama. I never tried to pick her up, because for her, for us, that was enough, and I didn't want to push my luck. Over the years I got better at kitten-taming, and by the time I was Suzannah's age I'd managed to turn a couple of feral kittens into annoyingly attached pets.
I'm not new at teaching, but each year brings new students, and we have to figure it all out together. For some kids, I will celebrate the fact that they feel comfortable speaking aloud to the peers, unprompted. For others, I will catch them in a hug when we have a really great day together. All of them matter. And sometimes I just need them to remind me that I am the lucky one when they get close enough for me to meet them where they're at.
This is the time of year when sophomores often start to be awesome. No one told that to my classes, though, and a class I normally love to pieces was decidedly less than awesome. I was all, I DON'T EVEN KNOW YOU. I made an Annoying Adult Speech about their terrible choices and disappointment and other things I'm pretty sure they 100% ignored, and then sent them to lunch. Piss off.
To be blunt: sometimes teenagers are asses.
Most of the time, I can weather this with relatively good humor. I can manage not to take it personally, because I know it's really not about me. It also helps to remember that I could be a perfect ass myself when I was a teenager. Most (all?) of us were asses at some point, to a teacher or to a parent or both, probably daily. But sometimes it's just exhausting, and teachers are human beings who often feel more like punching bags. (I thought of some more interesting metaphors, but I got a little carried away, so...I'll just leave it there.)
I ate my lunch, which was at least delicious because my cauliflower enchiladas are even better the next day -- at least there was that. At least I had time to eat lunch today. Trust me when I say that this matters. (And a huge shout-out to the colleague who covered my last class of the day for 15 minutes the other day so I could finally wolf down leftover soup while returning a phone call from an administrator at a different school who had questions about the MYP program.) Right now we are operating on one functioning stall in the faculty bathroom, our entire school is out of paper, and even if we had paper it wouldn't matter because all the damn copiers are always broken. ("Let it be a challenge to you." --Up the Down Staircase.) Eating delicious leftover cauliflower enchiladas was basically the highlight of my entire day.
Until!
Until eighth period.
Eighth period has been rough for me this year. It's a class I could normally teach in my sleep, but this year's kids have blown that complacency to smithereens. I have shed actual tears over this class, once just on the other side of the door. I've felt that I don't know how to reach them, or how to motivate them. My usual expectations have been met with confusion, or apathy, or a level of defeat I'm not used to seeing in a higher level class. I've thrown up my hands and said to the kids, "This isn't working guys. Help. I literally have no idea what to do here." (I think they actually felt sorry for me that day.)
These are not bad kids. These are actually kids I like quite a lot; none of them are terrible to me or anything. But there's something about this class. I don't know what it is; I have felt, on several occasions, that they don't quite trust me and they definitely don't trust themselves, and none of us have been quite able to find our groove. This is something I'm better able to handle early in the year. By second semester, I pretty much sound like a deranged person every time I talk to them because THIS IS A HIGHER LEVEL IB CLASS AND WE HAVE SHIT TO DO, PEOPLE.
Anyway, I took Friday off because I was busy turning 37 and I decided that I would practice radical self-care that day by NOT sitting in the middle of the sophomore section during an assembly and I would take my sweet time eating lunch that someone else made, and I would drink wine with that, thank you very much. In my absence, I left a letter to be distributed to each one of my juniors. I begged them--really, literally begged them--to prepare for today's discussion on the novel we've been reading. I begged them to do work. DO SOME WORK. ANY. JUST A LITTLE. FOR MY BIRTHDAY. Yes, I went there, because I am not above emotional manipulation. Basically my letter begged them not to suck. It was the letter of a crazy person. For good measure, I e-mailed the entire class yesterday afternoon. I do not think I sounded any more sane.
When class started this afternoon, one of my sweet junior girls danced in (she really does seem to bounce or dance wherever she moves and I cannot look at her without smiling). She hugged me and asked how my birthday was. I had the kids move their desks into a circle for our discussion. I busied myself with a flurry of taking attendance and printing some of the work one or two kids had e-mailed me. And then my sweet junior girl said, "Can I--I have to do a thing before we start, is that okay? Just a really quick thing." She vanished into the computer lab. A moment later she reappeared with a bouquet of flowers, a box of cookies, and a card signed by everyone in the class. And then they all sang "Happy Birthday." I nearly cried. I'm nearly crying now just writing this.
During my first year of teaching I had the most wonderful mentor, someone who can realistically claim a great deal of credit for my survival in this job (that's you, Ron). He told me that students would give me things like this sometimes--little notes of appreciation, or cards, or whatever. And he told me to save them, to put them in a place where I could find them on the hard days, the days when teaching is exhausting, defeating, frustrating, enraging, sad. These are the things, he said, that would remind me why I'm doing this.
This card, from this class, is going straight to the top of the stack. I read the notes later, after the kids had left. I don't even have words.
But even better than that was the class itself. For the first time, I had 100% participation. No one skipped class. No one. Everyone talked. Every. Kid. Participated. One girl e-mailed me last night and said, "If you could...I would really appreciate it if at the beginning of the discussion, if you can put me on the spot first. Because let's face it, I am not the one to speak at these things." So I did. I asked her to start, and she just took off. She spoke several times throughout class and I hugged her ecstatically afterwards. Another girl, who has literally never said a single word during discussion all year long, jumped in without any prompting. Another girl, who actually loves to read quite a lot but had a really rough first semester, was just on fire today. And a boy I've butted heads with for two years (I've written about him here before) was so phenomenal today I felt like I was teaching a different kid. He had his book out, he referenced pages numbers and quotations to support his claims, he didn't look at his damn phone all period, and it was all I could do not to burst into happy tears. I didn't, though, because that kind of thing would probably confuse the poor dears more than my desperate e-mails.
These kids are still working on their written work. Their performance on paper, so to speak. But today represented such a huge shift from the beginning of the year that I'm sailing on nothing but optimism and fierce love for these kids. Are they beginning to trust me? More importantly, are they beginning to trust themselves? Their own voices?
Sometimes teaching them reminds me of taming wild kittens. When I was little, spending lots of time at my family's farm, I spent hours and hours and hours trying to coax feral kittens out from underneath the playhouse in the yard. My mother tied a piece of lunchmeat on a string, and I squatted there until my legs ached, waiting for these kittens to bound out and become my new friends. When that didn't happen immediately, I trudged inside, defeated. When I returned to the yard, the meat, naturally, was gone. I was so indignant. But I persisted, and finally, finally, one kitten came close enough for me to stroke her furry gray neck under the watchful eye of her mama. I never tried to pick her up, because for her, for us, that was enough, and I didn't want to push my luck. Over the years I got better at kitten-taming, and by the time I was Suzannah's age I'd managed to turn a couple of feral kittens into annoyingly attached pets.
I'm not new at teaching, but each year brings new students, and we have to figure it all out together. For some kids, I will celebrate the fact that they feel comfortable speaking aloud to the peers, unprompted. For others, I will catch them in a hug when we have a really great day together. All of them matter. And sometimes I just need them to remind me that I am the lucky one when they get close enough for me to meet them where they're at.
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