On The Romance of Teaching

            I don’t usually romanticize teaching.  Most days I don’t feel like I change anyone’s life.  I feel like I misfire more often than not.  Much of our time is spent wrestling copy machines, asking students to stack chairs, reminding adolescents not to run in the hall, and dodging groans as you torture kids by requiring them to read eight pages on their own.  It’s kind of like parenting in the mundane repetitive tasks required to care for little people.  But every once in awhile I have a moment where the magnitude of what I do on a day to day basis takes my breath away. 

            I started this year a little grumpier than I would like to admit.  Twelve days before the students showed up I learned about Amendment Three which will show up on Missouri's ballot come November and which will allow many people with very little understanding of how teacher tenure really works to vote to eliminate it while tying teacher evaluation to student performance.  As someone who solely serves students who perform below grade level this scares me.  Because you know I love a good medical analogy, I quickly decided that being a reading intervention teacher is kind of like being an oncologist.  Yes – success feels that much better when the stakes are high, but it’s harder to come by, and we fail more often than we would like because of factors often out of our control.  I spent the next few days talking to Sephus about the absurdity of the assumption that there were these amazing potential teachers who could save us all waiting in the wings foiled by sucky teachers with tenure standing in the way…  Nine days before students showed up I found out that I would not have the salary step that was frozen in 2009 restored despite believing all summer that this would finally be made right.  Many of my colleagues will finally be earning the minimal amount more that they should have been making for over four years now, but I won’t.  I am being punished through a technicality for taking a little bit of time off to better myself through earning my PhD.  This came on the tail end of six volunteer days for the district during what should have been my last days of summer with my own children.  Four days before the kids came I realized that the set up of my classes would prevent me from using the units I worked so hard to plan last year.  All this plus a lack of time to really get my room and lessons ready left me feeling stressed and under-supported and under-appreciated. 

            Don’t get me wrong.  I was not grumpy with the kids for a second – well except for maybe once during my overfilled seventh hour on a brief occasion when I had to ask too many times for their attention.  I truly enjoy my students.  I lit up when my advisory students returned to me a year wiser and taller.  I fell in love all over again with 6^th graders who asked me adorable questions like “what do you do for a living” and “are you new around here because I don’t recognize you” (after setting foot in the building for the first time).  I smile and exuberate energy all day, but when the kids leave I slump in my chair overwhelmed by what the year holds for me.  Some of this came from juggling Maggie being sick the first week of school, but a lot of it came from how incredibly unromantic and taxing teaching can be,

            I often sit at teacher of the year presentations and think how desperately I want to win a recognition like that some year – not because of the accolades, but because as I hear the winners described I want to be them.  I want to care that much and work that hard.  I teach classes at MU each year  about being a teacher, and I share all the secrets to being great  while knowing how impossible it can seem to be all those things at once.  It was easy to talk about when I was not in my own classroom.  But this year, I am teaching five hours a day – I haven’t done that since 2006 – and I have about twenty more students than I did last year.  I decided this would be the year that I gave it my all every hour.  I lesson plan for two hours a night after my own children go to bed; I have already conferenced with my students one on one to give them formative feedback; I implemented cooperative learning that required a new room set up during week one; I have asked for letters from parents about children and read them voraciously.  I am trying to be the teacher I would want for my daughters, and it’s exhausting, and I came home grumpy today…          

            Then I went to Avery’s softball practice.  She has the sweetest coaches.  They exemplify the passion I hope to emulate in the classroom.  They are cheerleaders, and instructors, and buddies.  They redirect with kindness.  And the best part is that one of them was my student my second year of teaching.  I watched him today as he (in my opinion) gave Avery the tiniest bit extra attention as her coach.  He was concerned when she didn’t get to bat when it was her turn.  He quietly offered suggestions after each swing with a voice that implied he wanted her to make a hit as badly as she did.  It occurred to me that he did this because of a relationship – the relationship between teacher and student.  Maybe she means a little more to him because I knew him at age 14.  He is not a student I have really thought about much after he left my room because he came in and did his job without making a big splash.  Plus, after 15 years of 80-100 or even more kids a day it is easy for them to run together.   We meet too many students to maintain ongoing relationships, but for the year we have them they are ours and we are theirs.  I started thinking about how wonderfully unique teaching is, and I was moved beyond words.  You see your doctor once or twice a year, your banker maybe once a week, your waiter maybe only once period…  but teachers and students are together five days a week, 180 days in service.  Who else can you claim that about?  I felt so blessed this evening when I realized I am in the business of building relationships and therefore, building people.  And I looked at this student and the good man he had become – not because of me or Oakland, but because that’s what most of them go on to do.  They become good people, people who are kind enough to volunteer coach ten little girls in softball, and we get to meet them and spend meaningful time with them along the way.  Someone that lucky has no right to be grumpy. 

What a blessing my job is.  What a joy teaching can be.  What a beautiful romance to be a part of.

            

On not marginalizing fatherhood

            I must start this post with my sincere hope that no woman who has suffered infertility feel offense.  I know the tiniest bit about what that pain might feel like.  I lost my first baby 12 weeks into a much welcomed and celebrated pregnancy.  In the 18 months of failed attempts that followed that loss I had a brief taste of what living by cycles did to the psyche – two weeks of hope followed by two weeks of despair…  over and over again.  Then I felt the fear and insecurity the 9 more months that I waited to actually hold Avery in my arms.  Three little girls later much of that pain has been replaced with the acceptance that any other timeline would have meant three different humans, and I love desperately the ones I have.  Ultimately, those months were moments compared to what many face, and I would never want the thoughts I share to diminish the reality of that hurt. 

            But… taking the plunge anyway…

.           This past Mother’s Day I noticed a plethora of links and status updates asking that we remember the women filled with pain on Mother’s Day who had never experienced the gift of a child.  When I read the first few I was moved.  The point was initially well taken.  But as the sentiment became viral I found myself frustrated.  I wondered if motherhood was so characterized by guilt that we had to admonish ourselves for accepting any gratitude in light of someone else’s potential pain.  I remember real bitterness over the ease at which some became mothers in surprise day to day moments, but I don’t remember feeling that bitterness on Mother’s Day.  I was too filled with joy and respect for the woman in my life such as my own mother, wonderful grandmothers and generous aunts.  I was inclined towards celebration on those days.  I considered asking this past Mother’s Day if anyone else had similar thoughts about our own unwillingness to take the spotlight for a moment.  I am genuinely sad for anyone who wants to be a parent and can’t, but I hoped that hyperfocus on woman without children this year did not prevent any mother from giving herself her day last May.

            I was reminded of this analysis when I scrolled through facebook today.  I saw tribute after tribute to husbands and dads that made a difference, but no reminders to dads to celebrate cautiously today as all over the world there were men who ached because they could not be fathers.  Come to think of it, I have never heard one conversation about men who worried that they might ultimately lead childless lives despite their lasting desire to father children.  I do not believe it is because this ache is not there.  I know men young and old who wanted kids but for a variety of reasons didn’t (or haven’t) seen that dream come to fruition.  I think it is just one of the many ways that we marginalize fatherhood. 

            I have a wonderful father.  He catches people’s attention because he is so willing to share his emotions.  Jason recently joked that some men go their whole lives waiting to see their father cry while we rarely have to go 24 hours.  Though his job took him away from us much of the work week, I remember him getting up with me at night to clean up puke and comfort me back to sleep.  I remember him taking us to parks every Sunday and writing us stories to tell us as we fell asleep each night. 

            I have an equally wonderful husband.  He adopts a true co-parenting model.  He hates when females say they have to see if their husband can baby-sit so they can grab drinks with the girls.  He says things like, “do they mean can their husband parent on Friday night?”  He fixes the girls hair like it’s his job.  He fills plates at family barbecues.  He has combed lice out of hair and painted nails.  We both remain surprised by the attention he draws from others as he completes the mundane jobs of parenthood.  I told him once that I shouldn’t feel this way, but I often perceive all the attention he gets from females as hidden insults to me.  Do I look like I am shirking my parenting responsibilities?  I was comforted that he also felt some offense.  He wonders why it should impress people that he 50/50 parents our children.  He wondered why he gets compliments for things mothers do unnoticed on a daily basis.  He explains that he takes joy in these acts, and would feel denied if he didn’t have the opportunity to attempt to be as much of an influence in our girls’ lives as I try to be.  They are lucky to have him, and he is lucky to have them.            

            I think we don’t always expect enough of fathers.  In turn, we disempower them and disrespect them.  Sephus gets so frustrated at the sitcom portrayals of fathers and the Papa Bear narrative found in so many short stories.  Dads are great for playing airplane with or making you chuckle, but in the end they just don’t really matter as much as moms and aren’t nearly as capable.  I know many people will initially disagree with this idea.  That’s good.  It means your experience is not coherent with the dominant messages about fatherhood present in the media.  It means that we should expect fatherhood to be celebrated so much that if we regret wishful woman without children on Mother’s Day, we must also lament wishful fathers without children.  Knowing that unique situations lead to wonderful upbringings without one parent or the other, we must still not sell either parent short.  We need to bring fatherhood out of the margin.  Dads have too much to give to be perceived as sideline parents. 

On The Very Life of Life - 9 months later

Remember when I said this:

All change does involve loss… and gain… it is our job to find ways to roll down the windows during that change and enjoy the here and now for all its scariness and glory.  I hope I can live that this year.  I hope I can grow while still respecting the past.  I hope I can watch my friends do the same. 

It was the night before the current school year started and today that school year ended.  I find myself wondering if I lived that goal this year. 

It was a hard year.  I taught two new courses at MU.  I had my own students at Oakland for the first time in three years.  I held two new positions at OMS.  We battled strep throat, ear infections, an appendicitis, the stomach flu, the real flu, a UTI, lice, lice again, and pure exhaustion.  We lost loved ones.  We tried to maintain friendships across space and time.  We woke up most mornings still surprised that we had a third baby.  We managed three drop-offs and three pick-ups every day and germs from five different locations our family spent time in.  Our house was trashed most of the year.  Making lunches sometimes felt like climbing Mount Everest at the end of a long day.  We adjusted to new work start and end times.  We lived in chaos and stress. 

It was a long year.  Sometimes I remember something that happened eight or even two months ago, and I wonder if that event really happened this year.  It’s crazy to me that at the start of the year we were still living the adventure of sharing our home with friends.  I stumbled across a menu plan for Maggie’s birthday and had to remind myself that party was within this school year.  Disneyland at Christmas seems like years ago.  At the same times, I was constantly saying, “when did it become 2:30… Thursday… April.”  It was the shortest and longest school year of my life. 

It was a good year.  I passed smiling people everyday and lived off the high that new coworkers experienced as they too fell in love with my building.  I fell in love with a group of future teachers who shared their reactions to media each week.  I fell in love with 6^th graders who I found out hug teachers as they say goodbye the last day of school.  I fell in love with my daughters and husband daily – especially during the morning crib retrieval time.  I watched students truly get engrossed in books like The Watsons go to Birmingham, Among the Hidden, Crash, and Witness.  I got to travel to Boston and New Orleans to hone my teaching skills.  I stood in the fake snow in front of Sleeping Beauty’s Castle while I shivered soaking wet from a nighttime ride on Splash Mountain.  I watched a seal twist and turn close to a shore in the Pacific Ocean the day before the year turned.  I took part in a faculty book club that allowed me to devour books and then share them with others.  I gained relatives.  I made new friends.  I felt joy and engagement this year. 

I forgot that I aimed to embrace individual moments this year, but looking back I think I did.  I have started trying really hard to say, “things are good right now…  your knee doesn’t hurt right now… Maggie is happy right now…  none of your students are going crazy right now”  When we think too long and hard about what went wrong in the past, or what could go wrong in the future, we forget the moment that has been presented to us at the moment and in the moment.  Being obsessed with change, loss, and gain can make it harder to live in the present.  In my early days of teaching I stumbled across a thoughtful quote and plastered it across a bulletin board from many classrooms ago.  As I remember it  once again I hope to carry it into the summer and all my days ahead:

“Look to this day for it is life.  The very life of life.”  - Kalidasa

This overwhelming and wonderful year of change and ups and downs has been the very life of life.  I am lucky to have lived it. 

On No Longer Being Able to Keep My Mouth Shut about The Common Core

            You know what would really suck?  Being a doctor and having to get online only to risk seeing your profession under constant attack.  It would be so annoying to have the standards that dictated your action under constant scrutiny.  Can you imagine having researched practices like keeping insulin levels stable during trauma be ridiculed on talk shows and posted by political parties so people could guffaw over the stupidity guiding your daily commitment to patients? Can you imagine politicians demanding that the objectives for patient care adopted by the board that oversees medicine in your state being overturned by politicians because they were never consulted as those objectives were written?  Oh wait…  That doesn’t happen very often, because we appreciate and respect medical professionals as experts in a field who have access to information and expertise that we do not possess.  Though we engage them in conversations where we might question a practice or ask for extra insight because we have heard contradicting information we ultimately yield to them as people who took a really hard test to get where they are today.  We trust them to put in the hours and hours of research both in the library and in the field so that we can confidently hand ourselves and our loved ones over to them when only their special training will do.

            I have the utmost respect for doctors.  My husband had an appendectomy last week.  While we were there, the young surgeon explained that burst appendixes (appendices? J) are one of the leading killers around the world where access to medical care doesn’t mirror what we are fortunate enough to have in America.  I felt so lucky and blessed by this young man and the time and commitment he put into becoming a person that could ultimately save my husband’s life.  And this is one of the more minor stories of how medical intervention spared the life of someone I love deeply.  I have watched one of my best friends sacrifice physically, emotionally, and socially so she could become a doctor.  I am in awe of doctors.  This post is in no way an attempt to undermine them.   It is an appeal to the general public to help me understand why teachers are not always held in the same light.  Why is our field not also considered one built on research?  A field that you cannot practice in unless you pass a test and are certified by a board…

                   I tried…  I really tried…  I just can’t keep my mouth shut anymore in regards to critique of the common core and other rants about public schooling in general.  I have watched post after post from friends who seem to be against them because some people they align with are against them.  My gut tells me these posters have not read the common core.  My gut is frustrated. 

                I have read the standards.  (You can too if you click here: http://www.corestandards.org/read-the-standards/ )  Not once, not twice, but at least ten times I have read these standards.  I have read them in a room full of teacher representatives from all over the district.  We read them and underlined them and annotated them and placed them side-by-side by grade and side-by-side by topic.  We asked questions to tease out the subtle differences from one year to the next.  We did everything we could do make sure they were right for our kids.  I read them again in a room full of teachers from around the state as we considered how to use them to improve the reading and writing of students in all content areas.  I met with teachers in Lake of the Ozarks, Boston, and New Orleans to see how to implement these standards in a way that best prepared children to be productive adults.  If you take some time to glance over them you will see they are pretty benign.  They ask that students use textual evidence to support an opinion.  They ask students to read both fiction and non-fiction texts so that they understand the literal and inferential meanings in the passage.  They ask students to consider media with a critical eye.  Math wise, they ask that students understand how tens work and not just to perform calculations with no understanding of why and how numbers do what they to.  After all, any old phone can calculate. 

I went to school for a long time to be a good teacher.  There is an art and science to it. I now teach younger people the methods for my field.  Together we read up to 100 pages a week over the course of 16 weeks together in just ONE class.  These pages represent the best research available in our field so that when we make a decision about a child we make it based on what is proven to work.  And sometimes it still doesn’t work because we deal with human minds which are complex, beautiful and at times unpredictable so we try another strategy or we read another book in hopes that we can do our job well.  And at the end of the day we are often emotionally and physically exhausted so we hop on facebook to “numb out” for a bit and see common core bashing filling up our newsfeed or standards based grading being called the potential end to all that is good in society by people who have not read a single article about either of those things.

 Don’t get me wrong.  I would hate a world where we did not question things like the common core.  In fact, I even find some faults with the standards.   I heard lead reading researchers share similar concerns over the past weekend.  But our concerns are based on both qualitative and quantitative research.  Our concerns are over the demands that are simply too intense for some young readers.  What used to be expected of 8^th graders is now expected of 5^th and 6^th graders. This decision came from people outside of the field of education who thought we were doing a piss poor job of getting kids ready for the workplace so they placed arbitrary and perhaps impossible lexile expectations on youth.  We also fear the absence of poetry, creative writing and other humanities that there was little room for after the cramming of objectives necessary in our push to be constantly better than other nations. 

I will engage in a thoughtful debate with anyone armed with information.  If you enter in the conversation with research you have done yourself I stand to learn from you.  I can question my standing beliefs and weigh them against my knowledge from in the field and out so I can consider adapting my beliefs.  If you simply forward a link, a meme, or a quote because it came from a party you support so you assume it is unquestionably true I will just get defensive.  (The funny thing is that the people most opposed to the common core tend to fall on the far left and far right of the political spectrum.  I find myself wanting to yell, “Hey!  Look you guys!  You agree on something.  Let’s hold hands J.) I hope this post encourages critical conversation.

Dr. Anthony Muhammad helped me best understand the phenomenon of every man as expert when it comes to education by explaining that you begin the apprenticeship for public school teaching when you step foot in your first classroom at age five.  Everyone’s years spent in the classroom seats afford an inside look not common regarding other professions.  (I have no idea what my good friend does all day at Edward Jones though I know she works hard).  But things look different from the other side, I promise you.  We know things on the other side that we don’t expect you to know.  We get paid the “big bucks” in hopes that you will yield to us.  Please, question and push us as you would anyone caring for your loved one, but trust and respect us as well.  There is simply too much work to be done in this world for us all to carry the burden of all the necessary human preservation tasks.

Because I am having trouble bringing this full circle, let’s go back to a comparison with doctors.  It might help you end with a little chuckle:

“If a doctor, lawyer, or dentist had 40 people in his office at one time, all of whom had different needs, and some of whom didn't want to be there and were causing trouble, and the doctor, lawyer, or dentist, without assistance, had to treat them all with professional excellence for nine months, then he might have some conception of the classroom teacher's job.” Donald D. Quinn

And I love that job…

Disclaimer – So many people in the world have made me feel respected and appreciated as a classroom teacher.  Either way, I hope this is food for thought J

On losing (and finding) Grandpa

The morning after Grandpa died a colleague of mine casually asked a table of my co-workers if any of us liked apple butter.  Rapidly a smile spread across my face, and I said, “My Grandpa loved apple butter.  He was the only person I know who ate it.  He would have it for breakfast with a glass of prune juice.  He never grew tired of trying to convince me that it was soda so that I would take a drink.  It only worked once, but it became a favorite one of his tricks from that point on.”  I felt no sadness as I recalled this little fact – just surprise at how long it had been since I took the time to remember things like that about Grandpa, and suddenly a list of memories came flooding back…

Memories of buying fudge covered grahams and fudge striped cookies whenever he came to visit us in Chicago.

Memories of slow dancing with him in his living room before I headed off to my Uncle Tom’s wedding – him in his classic white tank top undershirt and me in a white and blue flowered dress with a red pearl necklace.  And him in those same undershirts getting up every morning and doing his swift twist at the waist and stretch as part of his morning exercises. 

I remembered him telling me not to order chicken at Ponderosa because they didn’t specialize in it, and it might not be fresh. 

I thought of the memories of him and Grandma being borderline rude to waitresses because they knew just how they liked things and were not afraid to ask – and the generous tips and friendships with waitresses that followed when they delivered.  They had waitress friends all around St. Louis. 

I remembered how he used to always pay when he took the whole family out to dinner but only after razzing my dad for offering to pay and then forgetting his wallet.  For the record, I think my dad only did that once, but Grandpa and I got years of entertainment out of reminding him of it. 

Memories came back of Grandpa’s stern voice that made him sound just a little more menacing than my dad so that he commanded our respect.  He was a little more set in the traditional gender roles so that despite his small stature he came to represent masculinity to me in a similar way that my Grandma represented femininity.  So set were they in their gender roles that as Grandma became sick and he had to do a lot more of the work around the house, he didn’t even know you were supposed to use detergent when you did a load of laundry.  And one day when left in charge of caring for me he took me to McDonald’s for breakfast and lunch because cooking just wasn’t his thing. 

As I remembered our giddiness over those two trips to McDonald’s I thought of another trip to McDonald’s in Tennessee with Uncle Dave where Uncle Dave just wanted a Quarter Pounder without cheese and the trouble they had to go through to get it and the ceaseless teasing of the employee when she told them they should have asked for a Quarter Ham which immediately fueled the fire for the shows he and Dave loved to put on.  These usually ended with Grandpa looking on with his big yet somewhat silent laughter as her put his hand on his belly.  He cried in a similar way to his laughing – somewhat frequent and somewhat silent as he was moved to both kinds of emotions with those he loved. 

I remembered the woman in his life trying to get his hand out of the cookie jar, the MnM’s bag or even the bushel of pistachios at Schnucks but how he would return for another bite regardless and how he would later conspire with my girls to sneak them treats in the same way.  In fact, when he lay in the hospital bed in my parents dining room just a week and a half ago, Maggie kept running into the room and yelling, “Papa!  Nack?  Nack?” 

I remembered The Duck Tape, and playing with a bouncy ball at the Botanical Gardens, and “Shut that Kid Up!” on the Hill in St. Louis, and oohing and ahhing at fireworks and driving 55 miles an hour on Highway 40 after taking me to see Fiddler on the Roof at the Fox on a school Night – and I was so appreciative but soooo tired and I just wanted him to go a little faster, and I remembered how he wanted to run for school board and make science optional, and eating Salisbury steak on an airplane with him as he bravely flew Jason and I across the country to California when we were still practically toddler, and so so many more…

And these stories helped me learn about my love for my Grandpa – I realized how all these stories showed his intense desire for routine, his extreme desire for practicality and his intense generosity towards those he loved, both in physical things (I remembered how he would tell you what he was giving you as if it was an order, “Dani!  I am buying the baby a dresser and that’s that) and more importantly his generosity through time, love, and laughter.  He got so much pleasure taking care of anyone he loved. 

And as these memories flooded back to me I realized how we have been living in limbo for so long as Grandpa’s dementia worsened – in limbo between enjoying Grandpa in his fullness and enjoying the memories in their fullness.  This is not to say that were not good times these past few years – you will see in pictures that there were birthday cakes and meeting babies and smiles – but Grandpa was slowly becoming a little more lost… a little less like the Grandpa in these stories.  Though part of us will always long for the tangibleness of worldly bodies for the souls we love, losing Grandpa has shown me that sometimes a person’s passing allows us to embrace their soul even more.  As Grandpa’s mind began to leave him his body simply asked to follow suit.  In one of our recent conversations he told me he loved me and then asked if the house had been shut down so he could go to sleep.  When I told him that the lights were out and the doors were locked so he could go to sleep, he asked if I would get some sleep too and then drifted off peacefully.  This past week, as he entered eternal slumber, he became whole to me again, and I realized how whole our love for him has been and how whole is love for us.