Everyone Will Accomplish Everything

There's a copy of Chicken Soup for the Teacher's Soul in one of the staff bathrooms at my school.

Chicken Soup books were second only to Beanie Babies in terms of things I was excited to buy from the Hallmark Store when I was a kid. But I haven't touched the Chicken Soup book in the staff bathroom--in part because why would I read a Chicken Soup book in a bathroom at work, but also because if this edition fits my memory of the genre, the stories will all be about teachers who feel like they are floundering but then one day their toughest student comes in and says hey teacher, that inspiring poem we read really got me thinking, and now I realize that I have great potential and that everything you do is because you care about me and my future, and even though I never believed that I was worth anything or that there was any good in the world up until now, you have transformed my life and I have just received early admission to college despite still being a sixth grader. And the kid becomes a poet himself and in the dedication of his first book of poems he thanks the teacher. And all the other kids in the class become astronauts.

I don't think I can handle reading that most days. Most days I feel nothing like that teacher. Most days there are no life-changing breakthroughs delivered via poetry. More likely the poem was turned into a paper airplane. Most days there is no Chicken Soupy turning point, and I don't want to read about someone else's.

Yesterday was parent-teacher conference day, and while most conferences were delightful, I left in the evening having a hard time getting a couple tough conversations out of my mind. I was waiting for the train to go meet some friends, but the longer I sat and waited, the deeper I fell into the vortex of negative thinking. There's nothing like a student's parent questioning everything you do day in and day out to make you... question everything you do day in and day out.

So I did what everyone does when waiting for the train and slipping into a black hole of anxiety and self-doubt, which is check my email on my phone. I had one email. It was from a student I'll call Mary. 

Mary is a passionate writer and as of yesterday my favorite student of all time. She has recently taken to creating random writing projects for herself in her free time and sending them to me on Google Docs. This is all the more heartwarming because Mary, though awesome, is not a teacher's pet type. We've had our fair share of tough conversations, and I love that she can bounce back from those and still want to send reflections to her writing teacher.

So obviously my spirits were lifted a little just seeing that I had a new document from Mary. But when I opened it, it only got better. Mary's latest piece is titled "Never Give Up." It has every quality that I love in student writing: Written out of personal motivation, on a significant topic, and just off-kilter enough in terms of sentence structure and word choice to remind you that the writer is a twelve-year-old finding her way in the world.

It begins, "In life, everything is gonna be hard." SO TRUE.

She goes on: "Sometimes you just have to look around and notice that you’re gonna make it through whatever it is." A little cliche? Sure. Deeply moving when written by your student and sent to you at the end of a rough day? Extremely.

The best part might be this perhaps unintentional Marvin Gaye reference: "Every mountain is not too high for us to jump over. No streams are too high to swim in."

There's a nice section in the middle on the importance of turning to friends for support, which is exactly what I did when the train finally came. The piece concludes, "You have to stand up to fight it and be strong. When you’re strong then you’re already winning. You’re saying I will get through this no matter what. I will fight until I win. If everyone has that type of thinking in life, everyone will accomplish everything."

I wrote Mary back and told her how much her words had moved me, and suggested she submit her writing to the school newspaper. Maybe she should write in to Chicken Soup for the Preteen Soul. And if Jack Canfield is accepting submissions for Chicken Soup for the Teacher's Soul Part II, and if he doesn't mind those submissions being meta-essays that start by mocking his book series, I hope he'll consider this blog post.

Dispatches From The Snow Emergency

plastic snowman engulfed in real snow

Typically, I come here to write about the daily project of attempting to teach the 27 young people whose education has been entrusted to me. And typically, the limiting factor in the frequency of these dispatches is time: The children fill each day with shocks, delights, and occasional horrors, which my lack of time management skills prevents me from sharing regularly.

This month, the equation is flipped: I have had abundant time, but little source material. Boston has had eight snow days this winter. Add that to this past week's February break (the timing of which at first felt like a joke, given that the whole month of February has been a break, but turned out to be fortuitous: The latest blizzard hit last Sunday and almost certainly would have led to another day or two of cancelled school, had there been any school to cancel), and we have had six days of school in the entire month so far.  I have seen my students only six times in February. I am currently supposed to be writing report cards comments for children whose faces I can barely remember.

Here is a subject I feel much closer to a the moment: Snow.

sidewalk in my neighborhood

It is strange how much a landscape can change over the course of a few days. I have seen icicles I can't describe. I have seen car antennas peeking out of perfect domes of snow. I have seen shoveled parking spots marked with space-savers which, after another night of snow, are themselves in need of shoveling out. Speaking of space-savers, I have seen all manner of them: milk crates, stepping stools, plastic chairs, wooden chairs, end tables, and my personal favorite for its practicality--the shovel itself. Sidewalks, where they exist, are single-file. Every commute takes twice as long as it used to; even with the roads cleared, there are fewer lanes, more accidents, and snow banks that completely obscure the view of oncoming traffic.

my foot on top of a full-sized fence

Within this new landscape, we build a new society. There are new rules to learn, new norms to establish. Which one of us steps aside on the sidewalk? Where do you put the snow you are shoveling? Is this unmarked spot really up for grabs, or will it result in a vitriolic note or a keyed car--both have happened to friends. We ruminate on the metaphysical, the moral, the morbid: how can so many microscopic flakes add up to so much? Should I help push that stranger's car out of that snow bank? Why did humans ever settle here?

Like any dystopian hellscape, it can bring out the best in people as well. Neighbors shovel for neighbors. I saw an employee of the auto shop next door hoist an old lady over a puddle like a sack of rice. It was strangely lovely.

From the inside of this weather event, I am not yet sure how to interpret it. "Weather Wisdom" weatherman David Epstein calls it meteorologically incredible. This op-ed calls it a FEMA-worthy natural disaster. My new favorite Tumblr simply lays Beckett quotes on top of it. Like the global warming that underlies its existence, it is slow-moving but not slow-moving enough, beautiful but insidious, and disproportionately harmful to the poor and the marginalized. 

From my position of relative privilege, this winter is navigable. Public transit shutdown are annoying, and cold weather is... cold. But I have enough little shops in my neighborhood to keep myself nourished and enough friends nearby to stave off seasonal affective disorder. I have sturdy snow boots.

My students think they love snow days, but they come back from each one complaining of how bored they were. Their parents stress about getting them to and from school, about arranging childcare when school is cancelled. I worry they are forgetting how to read. Roofs are collapsing. Soon the snow will turn to water, and ice. Houses will leak. Hips will break.

roof rakes are a thing

School is back in session tomorrow. Hopefully we are done with snow days for the year. It is hard to imagine, but I am told that eventually, somehow, all the snow will be gone. It will probably be August, when the new school year is starting. I will try to make time to write before then.

*   *   *

Loyal readers, as a reward for reading to the end, you are invited to play a game of  "Snow Pile or Car?":

A.

B.

C.

Answers: a) car, b) car, c) I truly do not know.

Riddles

Many things have happened since I last blogged, blog. A school year ended. A school year started. I directed another musical, vowed once again never to direct another musical, and have since started the process of planning our next musical. I got a bike and became moderately proficient at the ukulele. I have a new class of 27 pubescent darlings and so far I have had zero phone mishaps with their parents.* We have had three field trips, including one that was overnight and one where several kids fell in a river. We just sent home first trimester report cards and I'm in that weird brain space where everything I think turns into a third-person report card comment about my own life (M. is making steady progress in her dental hygiene. Her main goal moving forward is to develop a consistent habit of flossing every day). And, somewhere in there, I ran the following experiment on the children.

My co-teacher and I posted this on the projector:

Your goal: Every single student in the class will have the correct answer to the riddle written clearly on their own piece of paper. Your teachers will not answer any questions or make any comments.

The Riddle:

• A man has to get a fox, a chicken, and a sack of corn across a river.
• He has a rowboat, and it can only carry him and one other thing.
• If the fox and the chicken are left together, the fox will eat the chicken.
• If the chicken and the corn are left together, the chicken will eat the corn.
• How does the man do it?

Then we walked silently to the back of the room and sat. And they started raising their hands. And we sat. And more of them started raising their hands. And we sat. And they turned around and looked at us and raised their hands more aggressively. And we sat. They were more silent than when they are supposed to be silent.

Eventually, they remembered that they are capable of talking, and they tried to collaborate to solve the puzzle. All in all, they worked together better than last year's class, to whom we posed the same challenge, and who just yelled at each other for fifteen minutes despite the fact that several of them had done the puzzle the year before in a special math group and knew the answer from the beginning. So, it was better than that. But did they achieve their goal? I will let you judge that for yourself based on this selection of my favorite responses:

That is specifically the thing he cannot do.

Such a seamless transition from meticulous logic to animal cruelty.

This one is sideways because I don't know how to use a computer, but I love everything about it and you should turn your head to read it. Are you also picturing a giant ear of corn wearing water wings?

This poor fox!

You got it.

It is good to remember, when I am starting to feel frustrated at a student who is behaving in a counter-productive or illogical way, that logic can be subjective. Perhaps the student who perpetually loses her homework and then insists that it is actually being stolen from the turn-in bin is just stuffing the fox in the sack, so to speak.

Or, you know... pig.

* However, if last year is any indication, I am due for one soon. A couple months after the pilgrim incident, I called a different student's mom, thinking I was calling back my own brother, and led with "Sorry, I just had to Snapchat a picture of a vanity plate" rather than, "Hello." These people trust me with their children.

When teachers text

Here's a text I sent last night:

I'm taking the cheese outside. I'm a pilgrim.

This was a pretty weird text to send my friend Sarah.

It was a REALLY weird text to send, by accident, not to my friend Sarah but the parent of one of my students.

I mean just inconceivably, mind-bendingly, authority-jeopardizingly weird.

Now I will over-analyze this situation in six paragraphs.

First, some context, which is more of a luxury than I provided to Ms. P, my student's parent: A couple weeks ago the fridge in my classroom broke. I came in one morning to find a grayish-brownish puddle on the floor and when I opened the mini-fridge it emitted a smell that made me question every life choice that had led me to that moment. I spent a few minutes trying to clean it out, but then I got light-headed from the combination of holding my breath and thinking about fungus, so I gave up and just posted a sign that said "Do not open! It will make our classroom smell!!" with a sad face. Of course the kids all begged to open it, but, seeing my pallor, even they eventually understood the gravity of the situation. The fridge was removed and disposed of. Yesterday afternoon, after many fridgeless days, our fantastic building manager brought in a brand new mini-fridge and we were good to go.

Then I came home and the fridge in my apartment was broken.

Luckily, it being winter in New England, my roommate and I were able to preserve our perishables by putting them in a bucket on a snowy ledge in the back of our building. I thought the night had reached its apex of absurdity when I was placing my food in a bucket outside. I was wrong.

Please note that I am very careful about texting. I am not exaggerating, for once, when I say that I have not texted a wrong number by accident since I was maybe fourteen, if ever. I had a traumatic situation on AIM once as a preteen (though wasn't every situation on AIM as a preteen traumatic?) and it taught me nothing if not mindfulness. If I have sent a mistext ever since, it has been mundane enough to not even register in memory. It surely did not include the words "cheese" or "pilgrim," certainly not both of them, and it was not sent to the parents of any of my students.

Why was this parent's phone number in my text log, you ask? Well, we'd been texting the day before about her son's grades on his recent reading quizzes, which none of us were pleased with. I love when parents choose to communicate via text or email, since I feel like it allows us to check in with each other more frequently, and being a millennial, I never learned to communicate with other humans using my voice; the whole concept makes me uneasy. But this text exchange had actually become slightly tense, due to some unimportant and uninteresting logistical misunderstanding about my class' reading quizzes, and we had decided we should chat in person when she came to pick up her son the next day. The chat was quick and productive and resolved all prior tension and confusion. We left with a plan of action, and all of us, student, parent, and teacher, were on the same page.

And then, three hours later, I texted Ms. P that I was a pilgrim who wanted to take the cheese outside.

Here are some more thoughts I have about this text: Cheese is the cheapest joke-fodder in the Western hemisphere. If I were trying to make up a scenario about a parent-teacher text gaffe, I would be tempted to invent a text message about cheese, and then I would say no, too cheap. I never even buy cheese! I'm, like, 73% vegan and this is the first time I've bought a block of cheese in about six months. But sometimes, I see now, the cheese joke finds you. You wake up one day and you realize you were inside the cheese joke all along.

To answer your final question, I don't know what I meant about the pilgrim. Putting your cheese in the snow just seems like something a pilgrim would do? I think I read that once? It was just the kind of thing you say in a text to your friend Sarah when you're not thinking very hard or paying very much attention to what you're typing... or whom you're typing it to.

Now if you'll excuse me I am going to eat some olives from a snow-bucket. I'm a caveman.

The Stirrings

The time has come.

My sixth grade ELA class is reading The Giver.

If you have been to middle school in the past 20 years, you have read The Giver and it has changed your life. If you don't think it changed your life, you just haven't realized yet. I didn't know The Giver had changed my life until I reread it a couple months ago (having not read it since seventh grade) and it dawned on me that all of my ideas about what the future (or, now, present) should be like have come from this dystopian little gem of a YA novel.

I'll get back to The Giver in a moment, but I have to digress to share my most deeply held belief. If you are reading this you are probably a person I know, and if you are a person I know, we have probably had this debate. And you have strongly disagreed with me. But you have not diminished my resolve, and now I am going to write this on my blog and I'll fight the whole internet over it. Here is my belief:

It is super weird and archaic that we still give birth to babies.

Imagine that you were cryogenically frozen in the 17th century. Now look around you in the year 2014. Everything is absolute magic. iPads! 3D printers! People wearing spandex clothes, like astronauts! Astronauts! Cryogenic technology! It is all just impossible.

"How do you get from place to place?" you ask.

"Well, we have these airplanes that can fly across the entire country in like 6 hours, and rapid transit systems that can cross an entire city in 30 minutes," answers the spandex-wearing person.

"How do you nourish yourselves?" you ask.

"We take this one box and put it in this other box and press a button on the second box and it comes out as food. It takes about 90 seconds," says the ostensible astronaut.

"How do you perpetuate the species?" you ask.

"Oh... we carry our young in in our wombs for 9 months and then birth them out of ourselves... basically the same way it's been done for all of human history," responds your crazy new future friend while capturing a moving picture of herself on her mysterious glowing brick. Womp.

Another thing that is super weird and archaic is weather. If I haven't mentioned this yet, we are living in the year 2014. We can clone mammals. I don't understand what the Higgs Boson is, but we discovered that. And yet we still have to deal with rain?

I'm not saying these are easy problems (yes, childbirth and weather are both problems) to solve. I'm just saying, this is not how I pictured life in the mid-teens of the third millennium AD.

Which brings me back to The Giver. Namely this:

"The first Ceremony began right on time, and Jonas watched as one after another each newchild was given a name and handed by the Nurturers to its new family unit."

And this:

"But what happened to those thing? Snow, and the rest of it?"
"Climate Control. Snow made growing food difficult, limited the agricultural periods. And unpredictable weather made transportation almost impossible at times. It wasn't a practical thing, so it became obsolete."

Oops. All of my ideas about how an advanced society should operate are dystopian. And were planted in my head at age twelve by a YA novel.

And now, as a reading teacher, I proudly pass this baton to a  new generation of twelve-year-olds. The dystopian future is now.


Speaking of twelve-year-olds, another great thing about The Giver is when the preteens in the book start having wet dreams ("the Stirrings") and have to take pills  for them. Sometimes I can't tell if my kids are so mature that they don't laugh at things like this, or if they're so immature that they don't realize they should laugh at things like this, or if they have really poor reading comprehension, which is more concerning. In any case, I posed this question in a class discussion on Thursday: "Does Jonas want to keep having these dreams, or does he want them to stop?" I knew I needed to call on a child strategically, so I called on a sweet boy whom I am going to refer to here simply as Kitten, because that is what he is. Kitten's response:

"I think Jonas wants to keep having these dreams because they give him pleasure. Jonas is pleasured by the dreams."

No. One. Laughed.

(Except for the two other teachers overhearing my lesson, who laughed a lot.)

Are the kids amazingly professional and mature? Nope. They're just sort of bad at vocabulary. Neither Kitten nor the rest of the class understood the nuanced difference between "pleased" and "pleasured." So to everyone in the room under thirteen, all Kitten had said was that the dreams were pretty nice.

You guys get to work on the childbirth and weather issues, and I'll start making my class some vocab flashcards.

An Open Letter To The Three Parents With Whom I Had Discipline Conversations Today While Wearing a Polka Dot Bow Tie

Dear The Three Parents With Whom I Had Discipline Conversations Today While Wearing a Polka Dot Bow Tie,

First, I'd like to thank you. All three of you came in without me even asking to discuss behavior issues that your children have been having in school. You took the time to not just return a phone call, but to physically come into the school and prove to your child how seriously you take their education and anything that might threaten their education, such as, at times, their own choices. You joined me in sending your child a consistent message about what we expect of them and what they are capable of. Although I've know some of you, in the past, to question the fairness of consequences in front of your children, today you kept the conversation productively focused on their behavior and clearly communicated to your child that their parents and teachers are a united front and that we know they can do better.

Now I'd like to explain why I was wearing a polka dot bow tie. See, today our middle school decided to participate in the informal holiday Bow Tie Monday, or #bowtiemonday, if you will. It is, as my colleague and the architect of this occasion referred to it, "the only thing we do for no reason." And I would definitely say it contributed to building a positive culture in our middle school. The thing about wearing a bow tie, though, is that it is very easy to forget you are wearing a bow tie, even if said bow tie makes you look like Winston Churchill. So when you came in to discuss your child's suspension/ detention/ double-detention, respectively, I did not realize I was wearing one. The apparent silliness of me wearing a bow tie might have been mitigated had your own child, or a critical mass of other students, also been wearing bow ties... but of course, Bow Tie Monday, being a Monday, was forgotten about by 95% of our students -- the classic folly of anything on a Monday. And so, when you came to find me, and I shook your hand, and we gravely discussed your child's recent challenges... I looked like Pee-Wee Herman, or a 19th century aristocrat, or a zany teacher who explodes things a lot. And yet you didn't react in any way, and we carried on our serious conversation like two adults, not like one adult and one male toddler dressed for a wedding.

So I guess my point, again, is thanks.

Respectfully,
Your Child's Teacher

Damn you, Roald Dahl.

I'm going to tell you a story about something that happened at school the other day, but first I have to tell you this:

I have a phobia of stinging insects.

I'm pretty sure it's a real phobia. I have several pieces of evidence, which I will now publish here because I don't think I'm currently doing enough to contribute to my generation's reputation for over-sharing on the internet.

• I think about bees all the time. Any time I walk outside, I am thinking about bees. In any area that I walk around often, I can tell you all the places where bees are prone to be. Whenever possible I walk in the street instead of on the sidewalk because there are fewer bushes and flowers, and therefore fewer bees.
• I cannot look at pictures of bees or wasps.
• When I go to a beach or a lake or a pool, I take towels that are muted colors because bees like brights colors.
• Once there was a bee in my house and I left my house and refused to come back until my roommates promised they had physically seen it fly out the window, though I still suspect they were lying.
• I once refused to go on a date to a botanical garden.
• Once in college I was conducting interviews for new members of a program that I was in charge of, and the only space we had available was at these picnic tables outside, and I kept having to get up to run away in the middle of conducting interviews because there were bees. We still had a remarkably successful recruiting season.
• I have had more than three dreams where I am being forced to eat a bee. Stinging insects are probably my third most nightmared-about topic, the first obviously being my classroom. (The second is that I'm in the musical Rent and don't know any of the lyrics.)
• Typing this much about bees and wasps is making me antsy.

Legitimate phobia. Case rested. Whenever I am with some people and a bee or wasp is nearby and I become unable to behave like a normal human, people inevitably give me a judgmental glare, or, on a good day, a pitying glare, and remind me that "it's more afraid of you than you are of it." Nope. Definitely not. It is an insect with a stinger on its butt and a brain too primitive to process the emotion of fear. I am a human with a phobia.

I share this with you so you can understand the significance of the events that occurred in my classroom on the afternoon of Thursday, September 19, 2013.

My sixth graders and I were reading a passage from James and the Giant Peach and discussing the elements that make it fantastical. We were in the section where James first finds his way into the Peach and meets all the gigantic anthropomorphic insects. So there we are, discussing the fantastical nature of over-sized insects that behave like people, when who should join our reading lesson but a WASP THE SIZE OF MY HEAD. Roughly. And not just that, but this was not your typical hang-out-by-the-window-and-look-for-a-way-out wasp. This wasp had some sort of agenda. Like, to get really close to my students' faces while they are trying to read, and move in a rapid and unpredictable way, and be really scary.

Guys, it was all my nightmares at once! (Except Rent, thank god.) It was literally my nightmares. But guys, I was so good. The wasp was trying to assume control of my classroom; what the wasp didn't know is that you cannot manage a classroom through fear tactics. The wasp hadn't read Teach Like a Champion. I maintained my authority and most of my composure. The kids lined up in a calm fashion to continue our reading in the cafeteria. I assured them that as long as they didn't flip out, the wasp would not sting them. I told them it was more afraid of them than they were of it.

While we were in the cafeteria, one of my amazing colleagues trapped the wasp and sent it out the window, which is actually for the best because dead wasps can release a chemical that tell other wasps to come defend it's legacy by launching a coordinated attack, which is either a fact that people who have a phobia of stinging insects would know, or a myth that people who have a phobia of stinging insects would believe.

It turns out we had a wasps' nest in the heating unit outside our window. It's times like these that I am so so thankful that we have an amazing responsive building manager who gets wasps' nests destroyed as soon as they are discovered. Don't tell the kids, though. Now when they leave trash on the floor after snack, I tell them, "This is why we have wasps."