amy loves books

..and these children that you spit upon as they try to change their world...

11/07

I never pretended to be a princess. I imagined being a brave orphan, a cowboy, a soldier. I played with toy guns, wore a holster, loved the concreteJuly smell of smoking caps. I gave myself alien powers, visions of the future, the ability to deflect. I communicated telapathically with animals. Under my clothes, I wore Batgirl Underoos. I wrapped foil around my wrists to be Wonder Woman, tied a bandanna around my neck to be the Lone Ranger. I sought secret hideouts: granddaddy long-leg and leaf-filled drainage ditches, hollows under bushes, branches high enough to be a lookout. I built fires and dug holes.

It was always about saving the world.

I never grew out it: this longing to have a batphone, a phantom toll both or half-magic ring. A charm to set things right, make secret gardens grow, let me walk through walls.

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There's a long-term sub in our department right now. He's very smart and perceptive. He's thinking about maybe becoming a teacher.

And I tell him, "You should be a teacher!" And I don't really know how to tell him why someone would choose to be a teacher. There are all the sound bytes: it's rewarding, you touch the future when you teach, teachers make all other professions possible, JUNE JULY and AUGUST! But those are all very stupid and scary reasons to teach.

I end up saying something stupid like, "because it's
GREAT!". Which is actually not true, because sometimes it absolutely sucks. So I say, "You don't have to be a teacher, you could go into advertising or something."

Earlier this week, he asked me to evaluate one of the kids in his class. This child is in a special education class, but she's been completely unresponsive and difficult. She won't do anything. I checked her records saw that she actually tested well and was a straight "A" student at one point. Which was strange. He said he'd like me to observe her, and so I walked outside to her portable classroom and asked her to come with me.

Her teacher at the time told me to take her. Please don't bring her back, he said. He said this in front of her. The other kids almost cheered when she left.

But, in my room, I told her that her English teacher was worried about her, and that I wanted to find out how to help her. She seemed willing to talk with me, so we talked. I asked her to read out loud (something she made it appear she was unable to do in her classes) and gave her an elementary-level book. She read it without skipping a beat. I gave her a harder book - a 9th/10th grade level book - and again, she read it without trouble.

I mentally checked reading off as not being a problem, and I gave her a poetry outline for an I Am poem. As I guided her, she began writing about how she is two people (with two names). She is two people, and she was able to clearly articulate to me that it has been the "other" her that attends classes. "Can I get this person that I'm talking to right now to go to English class today?" I asked. She thought about it, and nodded.

I took a deep breath. Would you read your poem aloud to your English teacher and let him meet you? She said yes, and I almost ran to get him before she changed her mind and, once again, disappeared.

In nine years of teaching, I have never experienced anything like this - but this girl is fascinating to me. Everyone thought she was a goner, a lost cause, hopeless - a kid for the really special special education classes. All because the real girl stays locked up. Invisible.

The truth is, I would love to have this difficult kid in my class - because she's interesting, she's a puzzle, she's a lock with a key we've just started to find. It's these kids that make it all worth it to me, and every single year, there are a few. Maybe not to this extent, but there are a few that need unlocking.

And I suppose it is daunting to think about her, because truthfully, there's no way to fix things or keep all the tigers quietly at bay. And it's overwhelming to even begin to imagine the trauma and pain that must have lead to her calculated decision to take on an alter ego so completely. There are no charms for the easy life, and to assume that the world at large is going to do anything other than continue to be unkind is, frankly, disrespectful of the reality these kids inhabit.

To be a good teacher is to be made aware of the weight of the world, and to, somehow, make peace with the maddening background drip of its constant faucet that threatens to forever take away your ability to sleep unaware. It's a job that I can understand why people would not want.

But I also believe that there can be grace and strength and hope even in the most broken places, that it is no small thing for him to have seen this invisible girl. I know, undoubtedly, that the most insidious and damaging aspect of mental illness is the secrecy. I am grateful that he knew to look out for her, to look for her. I believe that seeing, and listening, and caring are not mere tokens; our pitiful widow's mite in the face of such emptiness is, somehow, received.

So I suppose this is what I can say about why anyone, especially someone smart, and interesting, and well-educated, and with so many options, would ever want to do something as mundane as become a teacher.

Teaching is cool. It's a gift. It's interesting, and challenging, and every once in a while, you'll get to be one of the really good guys.

And you'll save the world. You really will.

graduation

I have never lived in a place where I could not hear the distant whistle of trains. I live now in the only house I have ever owned; from the front porch, the trains are visible. They are double-stacked now, graffiti-covered. They are the color of blue that Silly Putty would be if it were not pink. They are stamped in large white letters : China Shipping.

One month ago, I sat on the football field during graduation ceremonies at my high school. The stands were filled with balloons and families in t-shirts and jeans. When the sun went down, the breeze was still cool enough to feel like spring, but there were no stars visible in the sky, only the lights of airplanes.

Sitting on the field in the faculty section at graduation is a surreal experience. I am behind the graduates, and the flatness of the field obscures my ability to view the stage. The PA equipment is made for indoors, and the names and speeches drift into the air, audible but not comprehendible. My mind wanders. Teachers around me bring cell phones tucked into the folds of their academic robes, and as the ceremony drags on, they surreptitiously check their messages. I play games with the program: Count the Names Based On Liquor. I find a Pinot this time, which is one I'd never seen. I don't know the kid in question, and I wonder if it's pronounced like Pie-Not.

One-third of the way into the ceremony, a kid has a seizure on the field and everything stops while paramedics are called. They push the careful rows of folding chairs out of the way for an ambulance and clusters of robed girls stand near the fence, their heels of their best shoes sinking into the dirt. By the time it is determined that the boy that had a seizure can stay and walk and receive his diploma, and the chairs are replaced, and the calling of names begins again, it is solidly dark outside. The ceremony started late to begin with: it always does.

I assume that it is this delay that runs graduation directly into the train schedule. Right around 9pm, a freight train makes it's slow, rumbling progress on tracks just on the other side of the fence. Before school began last fall, I went to lunch with my department head - a thirty year veteran who taught in my school before it was given a new building and a new name. She told me that one year, a group of boys were taking a shortcut across the tracks, between two stopped trains. As the last boy climbed between the cars, the train lurched to life without warning. While his friends watched, he was knocked down and crushed under the slow, deadly giant. I think about this nameless kid, who should have been older than I am.

It is impossible to hear anything over the grating steel and thunder of wheels on tracks. The boxcars roll by. China Shipping. I imagine the blue boxes being unloaded at port. I think of them on ships, surrounded by water. I realize that they were once in China, they will be emptied here and then returned. Those boxcars, I think, have been more places that I have ever been. None of my students, I think, will travel as far as these trains.

advice to a first year teacher

Remember once upon a time when you wanted to be a teacher?

Your first year is not going to be easy. You've heard this before, but it's worth saying again and again: Your first year is not going to be easy. It's a little like having a newborn baby - you're sleep deprived, and your schedule is all messed up. You have all this responsibility for caring for little people that need constant care and attention and tend to emit loud, howling cries despite your best attempts to anticipate and respond to them appropriately. Add to this the fact that you are probably spending 8 hours a day in a flourescent-lit, institutional grey or yellow, cinderblock room that may or may not even have a window. There ought to be a new diagnosis for PNTD: Post New Teacher Depression. Brooke Shields could bring it into the public awareness by appearing on Oprah and Tom Cruise could tell all new teachers just to take vitamins.

You can expect about 25-30% of what you try to do this year to actually work. If you are lucky, about 10% will work better than you ever would have imagined. If something does not work, throw it out of your mental filing cabinet. Keep trying new things. Next year, 50-60% of your lessons will work. You should have 20% of your lessons work fabulously. That works out to two good days and one incredible day a week - just by next year. I promise that there is a light at the end of the proverbial tunnel.

You are probably making the mistake of teaching over the student's heads. You remember your college classes, or your 11th and 12th grade Honors and AP classes, and, naturally, you tend to teach that way. There is nothing wrong with setting your sights and standards high - but you need to remember that your students probably don't have framework to learn what you want to teach them. Keep your standards and sights high, but really, really listen to the responses your students give when you ask questions. If they are not keeping up and mastering the concepts (and the ability to simply repeat what you've said is not mastery), then you need to break things down into smaller steps.

You may also be making the mistake of assigning too much homework. Chances are, you don't have school age children yet - so there's no way for you to know how long homework takes. Whatever you assign, double the amount of time you think it "should" take and use that doubled time as your gauge of the right amount.

Don't be afraid to call home. It's scary. I don't know for sure, but I imagine that it's probably worse than calling a girl and asking for a date. All a girl can do is turn you down. There's always the chance that a parent will get you on the phone and realize that YOU'RE ONLY TWENTY-SOMETHING AND YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THE HELL YOU'RE DOING OR WHY ANYONE THOUGHT YOU COULD BE PUT IN CHARGE OF ALL THESE CHILDREN. That thought alone is enough to make your heart beat so fast you don't even think you can dial the phone. Still, as terrifying as it is, you just have to force yourself to do it. It really does make classroom management 100% easier in the long run, not because the parents actually "do" anything; Because the kids know you care.

Don't spend more time grading an assignment than your students spent doing the assignment.

Give yourself time off. You've got lessons to plan and a stack of papers to grade. The students keep asking for their tests back. There are never enough hours in the day. BUT, if you don't give yourself days and nights off you will burn out and stress out and become one of the walking, teaching dead. Start with two nights a week and one weekend day when you refuse to look at anything school-related. You need it.

Every day you are becoming a better teacher. The learning curve for this job is brutal at first, but you'll grow into it quickly as long as you are self-reflective, learn from each failure and each success, and don't give up.

Remember once upon a time when you wanted to be a teacher?

Remember that.

mythology

My classroom has a storage closet with a large window and bookshelves along one wall. I love this closet. I spent days in it, clearing out the years of accumulated files and coffee mugs. I found a single stalk of plastic silver flowers, dusty posters that students had turned in with projects, a box of half empty bottles of tempera paint, and one of those small black combs that school photographers give out on picture day.

Against one wall, there is a large, two-door, wooden cabinet. It is like a wardrobe, except that it is in a school storage closet, so it could not be. One door of the wardrobe is open, revealing a neat row of yellow shelves, and I put the tempera paints on the top shelf. The other door is padlocked shut.

I want it open.

Each classroom comes with one locking cabinet, a place to secure the things you don't want to disappear. I think to myself that I would really like to have two locking cabinets. I'd like to have my own lock on the door, my own key around my neck.

I found the teacher that had my room last year and asked her about it. "Is that your lock?" She shook her head and said it wasn't, that it was locked when she moved in. She said she thinks that the room once belonged to a social studies teacher, but that he retired years ago, leaving his locked cabinet behind. I was suprised. "Didn't you want to open it?", I asked. She shrugged. I pressed on. "Didn't you wonder what was inside?" She said it was probably old test keys, because the retired teacher used to do after school tutoring.

But why would he leave and not unlock his cabinet? I imagine all the things that might be inside. Books. Number 2 pencils. Staplers. Bones. Treasure. It's a secret, a mystery. A lock without a key.

I want.

I want it open.

Across the hall, there is a teacher that I adore. She is a veteran, but she is one of those veterans that I want to be. A thirty-five year marriage, a son in college, and she still loves to teach. Last year, I heard her during the school mandated "moment of silence". Her students had been rowdy and difficult to settle down. She spoke her prayer out loud. "Lord, help me not kill 'em today." She is smart, and kind, and I admire her.

I offered her space in the small dorm fridge I moved into my closet. While she was there, I showed her the curious locked cabinet, expecting to find a kindred spirit to puzzle over it with. I told her that I wanted to ask someone to cut the lock off.

"You can't do that", she said. "Don't you know what happens in stories when people open things they should not open?"

I laughed with her at the joke, because it's not like I'm Bluebeard's wife. This is not once upon a time. The cabinet is not a rabbit hole. It's just a normal piece of storage. It probably holds nothing more exciting than stacks of answers to forgotten tests.

A week later, she overheard me asking the janitor if he could come and cut the lock. "I thought I told you NOT to open that cabinet", she scolded. I smiled and laughed. She just shook her head in disgust.

"You know you are living up to the stereotype", she said. She saw that I had no idea what she was talking about and so she explained. "You ever notice how in scary movies, it is never the black people that get killed? A black person would know not to open that cabinet." She paused to let her words sink in. "You want that cabinet open, but we know that bad things happen when you unlock cabinets like that."

I realized she is not joking. She is dead serious. She is warning me.

I've been thinking about what she said, about my compulsion to find out what is inside, my sympathy for Bluebeard's wife. Me, with my little apron pocket holding ring of forbidden keys that jangles and tempts when I walk. I wonder. What if?

What if I opened the cabinet and bad things did start to happen? The blame of opening would be on me. The guilt of Pandora and Eve, the shame in the color of my skin, all the arrogant sin of the world. The cabinet may be nothing more than a cabinet - but what about the thing that is in me? This thing, this compulsion, this craving to open after others have spent years quietly leaving it locked and well enough alone?

My husband brought a box of books over to my room yesterday. He saw the cabinet and offered to cut the lock. But I've become convinced that if I open it, I'll let something loose. I've read the stories. I know what happens when people unlock cabinets like that: a whoosh of ghosts and dust and despair unleashing and hope stuck like cobwebs to the void.

I told him that I've decided to leave it locked.

show me show me show me

I've always struggled with finding ambient music to play in the classroom - mostly because my students have such a wildly different musical landscape than I do. I am not a huge fan of classical music, jazz was distracting, new age-y stuff like Enya was okay, nature sounds were okay. I am personally not able to work/concentrate with music that has words, the language is a distraction that I can not tune out.

But I've stumbled on ambient nirvana with Rockabye Baby. No matter how unfocused my students are, five minutes of lullaby renditions of The Cure and they are totally mellow and zoned. I'm not kidding. Even after lunch. A little Plainsong and in minutes they are all quietly writing deep poetry.