On Teaching as Letting Go

            In October of 2009 a group of Tibetan Monks came to MU to create a Mandala out of sand.  This involved spending 24 painstaking hours creating a beautiful work of art only to blow each carefully crafted image into the atmosphere never to be seen again.  I remember being fascinated by the practice.  “There is a lesson here for you,” I kept telling myself.  “Pay attention.”

            The symbolic act doesn’t require a whole lot of interpretation.  Nothing is permanent.  Don’t get too attached.  There is beauty in the now.  There is beauty in letting go.  The power is in the doing and not the finishing.  Change is inevitable. 

            I thought of my own weaknesses a lot during the three days these monks inhabited our campus.  I tried to tell myself that I could write even if no one read it.  I reminded myself not to hoard.  I questioned my own resistance to change, my instinct to dwell, my inability to let go.  I kept wondering the lesson, but really the lesson was there in front of my face.  I just wasn’t letting it into my heart. 

            This week has been hard.  In addition to the grief over losing a dear friend and colleague, I find myself pondering the inevitable shifting of relationships in all areas of my life.  I think of other coworkers who I have grown apart from, not by choice but by circumstance.  You go from literally knowing what they eat five days a week, what they wore each day, who is driving them crazy (both at school and at home), who is burrowing into their heart (again in both places) to catching up quickly while passing at the copy machine after a content or grade change -  or worse - as you bump into each other at a district meeting after a building shift.  Coworkers share an intimacy that is deeper and yet often more impermanent than many relationships that don’t even begin to scrape the surface the way the safe anonymity and shared existence of doing the daily grind in tandem allows. 

            More importantly, I find myself thinking of the students who come and go and the discomfort I feel with my comfort with these goodbyes.  There are few spaces like that of a classroom.  The people that inhabit it build and love and collide and negotiate in similar ways to families.  There becomes a shared history, a need to coexist.  As I read the plethora of stories both funny and poignant from my colleague’s former students, I find myself less emboldened by our impact and more saddened by the inevitable goodbyes necessary in the teaching world made apparent in these stories.  

            I feel this weighing on my heart especially this year as I get down to the final stretch with a group of children who have truly burrowed their way into my heart.  I am not sure what it is about this year.  I came very close to making the permanent switch out of the middle school classroom last year and into a college level position.  The affection I feel for these kids might be my heart’s way of making sure my brain doesn’t get disillusioned by my degree again. These children have been a gift, but the impending goodbye confuses me.  I usually understand the necessity of these temporary bonds, but today I find them troubling.  I find myself forgetting how this cycle I’ve experienced 18 years (another eleven when you count my college students) works.   I keep thinking back to my very first group of 6^th graders who I was lucky enough to teach as 6^th and 8^th graders.  A very small few occasionally touch base, but for the most part they belong to other teachers now.  It’s how it should be.  I accept it.  I miss them. 

            Teaching is blatant metaphor for those monks and that sand art.  We work so carefully for one, maybe two years with these little grains of sand.  We shape them.  We shift them.  We get to know them in such genuine ways.  We care about them deeply.  Then May comes and we must destroy the mandala.  I am not sure I get the lesson in all of this other than to say there is no other way.  The only way to play a part in over 2,500 students lives as my friend did is to create and move on, create and move on, over and over again, year after year. 

There is beauty in the now.  There is beauty in letting go. The power is in the doing and not the finishing.  Change is inevitable. 

On my absence from blogging and my love for 6th graders...

Friday I hosted the Middle School Writing Conference at MU.  I was surrounded by words and passionate drafting all day.  The next day a friend, and parent of a participant, messaged me wondering what writing she has been missing from me lately.  The sad truth was absolutely nothing.  I haven't been writing at all. It made me think of one of my favorite lines from the Prophet, "We speak when our minds cease to be at ease."  Maybe the same is partially true of writing.  This year I have had a contentedness in teaching and therefore parenting and marriage that has been absent for some time.  No one wants to read about how great someone's life is (and the parts that aren't great are the mundane we all experience).  All good stories require a good conflict.  Anything I wrote about teaching would just feel like bragging.  I have felt compelled to draft but the well has been dry content wise. After my friend's message, I told myself I would not go to bed Sunday until I had written something.  It seemed only fitting to force myself to engage in the writing activity I asked the writing conference kids to complete on Friday.  Likewise, it only seemed fitting to make them the subject.  This lesson is inspired by Ellen Wilson who was inspired by Ian Frazier's Crazy Horse which can be found below my original writing:

6^th Graders

Personally, I love 6^th graders, because they want more than anything to be seen and be loved; because even after being told countless times that life isn’t fair, they still have the audacity to believe that it should be; because it makes them happy to bring you chocolate covered strawberries, cookies made by their grandmas, and sea turtle pens from the Grand Cayman Islands; because they still lose their baby teeth, because when they lose these teeth in class or at camp they sometimes collect them in little treasure boxes and bring them home to show mom or dad; because it’s really hard to be mad at someone who is young enough to loose baby teeth; because even though they want to giggle and gossip about boyfriends and girlfriends they also sometimes bring bath toys to school and ask to play miniature basketball in your class before school in the morning, because when you accidentally refer to their future as ‘real life’ they look at you with the perfect blend of sarcasm and wisdom and say, “Oh – and I thought this was real life.”; because when you lose your patience with one of the tougher boys in one of your tougher classes they are willing to raise their hand and say, “You are always telling us to be kind, but what you just said wasn’t really kind”;  because they love their parents and families fiercely and want you to know everything you can about them; because they sometimes come to you frustrated with their parents and want you to coach them through how to have a hard grown up conversation when they get home; because ultimately they are often too scared to have those hard grown up conversations, but they can recognize why things would be better if they could; because if they can tell you genuinely know them and care about them, they will do just about anything for you; because if you find a book that speaks to their soul they will start to trust you with their heart;  because they can clean your room faster than the entire crew of Hoarders for the promise of a Jolly Rancher; because even the boys still cry at school sometimes; because when you say some of your mantras in passing like, “if you own who you are others will accept you too” or “we have to love people because they are flawed not in spite of their flaws” you notice some of them scribbling these words of wisdom in the margins of notebooks; because they make you feel important; because they still find life beautiful and exciting and shocking and scary and full of promise; because they have only walked this Earth for eleven or twelve years; because they survive daily among all of us who forget what it is like to have only walked this Earth for eleven or twelve years.  Sixth graders are delightful, exhausting, expectant, and impressionable preteens in the throes of the one of most accelerated developmental stages of their life.  If you pause you can make a mark, and in turn, be forever changed by them. 

Inspired by Crazy Horse by Ian Frazier

Personally, I love Crazy Horse because even the most basic outline of his life shows how great he was; because he remained himself from the moment of his birth to the moment he died; because he knew exactly where he wanted to live, and never left; because he may have surrendered, but he was never defeated in battle; because, although he was killed, even the Army admitted he was never captured; because he was so free that he didn't know what a jail looked like; because at the most desperate moment of his life he only cut Little Big Man on the hand; because, unlike many people all over the world, when he met white men he was not diminished by the encounter; because his dislike of the oncoming civilization was prophetic; because the idea of becoming a farmer apparently never crossed his mind; because he didn't end up in the Dry Tortugas; because he never met the President; because he never rode on a train, slept in a boardinghouse, ate at a table; because he never wore a medal or a top hat or any other thing that white men gave him; because he made sure that his wife was safe before going to where he expected to die; because although Indian agents, among themselves, sometimes referred to Red Cloud as "red" and Spotted Tail as "spot," they never used a diminutive for him; because, deprived of freedom, power, occupation, culture, trapped in a situation where bravery was invisible, he was still brave; because he fought in self-defense, and took no one with him when he died; because, like the rings of Saturn, the carbon atom, and the underwater reef, he belonged to a category of phenomena which our technology had not then advanced far enough to photograph; because no photograph or painting or even sketch of him exists; because he is not the Indian on the nickel, the tobacco pouch, or the apple crate. Crazy Horse was a slim man of medium height with brown hair hanging below his waist and a scar above his lip. Now, in the mind of each person who imagines him, he looks different.

From In Short: A Collection of Brief Creative Nonfiction edited by Mary Paumier and Judith Kitchen Jones

 

On the ultimate high of success - reflecting as one year gives way to another...

          Recently while scrolling through Facebook I saw a family being celebrated for dropping all mainstream American notions about living well to travel the world in a van turned home.  Praise was abundant for this family.  How brave!  How bold!  How non-conformist!  The implication on some level was that the rest of us got it wrong and that we should be reflective and maybe even regretful at our own complacency.  But as I read the article, though proud of any family who can truly live out their values, all I could think about was all the people who had to be okay with a more mundane life in order for their dream to be achieved -  In the most obvious sense, the guy (or gal) who fills the gas tanks that run underground so they could pump the fuel needed for their sense of adventure… in less obvious ways the people who built the roads they drove on or sold the food they consumed on their nomadic trek.  We can’t all toss caution to the wind.  Our lives are too carefully intertwined for this to happen.

            This story seems a fitting way to start off a blog I have been contemplating since early October after watching Scholastic’s Ambassador of Librarians, John Schumacher, speak to local teachers at the annual TAWL conference.  As I sat listening to this dynamic man wax poetic about the joy of books and his job, I was filled with this overwhelming sense of comfort and satisfaction realizing for the first time in years that I had no desire to do what he does.  While becoming a professional PD expert had been my passion for quite some time, this year filled me with such pride and fulfillment that I had no desire to do anything other than what I am doing – teaching 6^th graders to read, write, and speak better than they did before our time together.  I was no longer looking for any escape from teaching.  I was no longer counting down the days to the weekend. 

            So what makes this year different?  Quite simply it is that I have experienced ongoing tangible success for the first time in a long time.  While my job as an intervention teacher surrounded me with signs of failure – kids who felt trapped in a program that wasn’t working for them, stagnant test scores, and faces I loved seeing but whose presence alone told them and me that we hadn’t accomplished our goals - this year has been marked with signs of success in the form of kids leaping from book to book, emails from parents thanking me for helping their child fall in love with reading, and beaming faces as students saw charts of their reading growth after years of being told too often of their deficits.  The reasons for this year’s successes probably deserve their own post and might only be interesting to teachers, but let it suffice to say that I didn’t realize how much I didn’t like my job until I started loving it.  I didn’t know work could feel so good. I didn't know how beaten down I had felt by failure.  

            As I sat there listening to the librarian ambassador it occurred to me how very important success is to happiness.  When I am unhappy at work it is because I feel like I am failing at my job.  When I am overwhelmed with parenting, it is because I feel like I am not what my children need.  When I feel worst as a spouse, it is when I have disappointed my husband and not when he has disappointed me.  Success makes me happy.  Success makes me feel good.  Success gives me the energy it takes to get up and keep going. 

            I had two very important aha’s that morning.  The first was about how crucial it is that we create opportunities for those we care about to feel and note success.  There has been a lot said about the power of failure.  I would argue that this is only true if is sandwiched in lots of opportunities for success.  I realized that my biggest fear for my children (both my own and of the student kind) is not that they won’t get to grow up to do something that they love.  It is that they won’t get to grow up and do something that they are good at.  Failure is demeaning.  Pride in work makes you hold your head high with your shoulders back as you stride in confidence.  You could replace work with any number of endeavors we take on.  There is simply no high like the buzz of success.  

            My other aha came in the realization that the most revered jobs are not possible without the hard work done in less appreciated or esteemed jobs.  Mr. Schu told us that warm, safe and loved starts in the office.  I couldn’t help but think of how incredibly true that is of the women whose smiling faces fill our school office.  These successful women run our school.  It’s unfortunate that we see jobs in a hierarchy tied to pay when a spider web of interconnectedness and equal importance would be a better metaphor.  No one can be successful alone.  Whereas I used to crave a position as a teacher educator, I realized that without teachers in classrooms teaching rooms full of kids, the need for a PD expert falls completely flat.  Every job matters.  Success at any point in system leads to greater success in the whole system. 

So, my wish for you this New Year is not that you live your adventure as much as it is that you find or recognize your very important place in this web.  That you spin and hold your line well.   That you feel successful more often than you don't in your relationships, commitments, and industry.  And that you go home at night and crawl into bed with a smile on your face and the sense of pride that can only come with feeling that you matter and that you are good enough no matter how big or small your adventure is.  

On Parenting Oldest Children - an apology and devotion to my daughter on the morning of her 10th birthday

There is a running joke among veteran teachers about finding the students you taught your first year and apologizing to all of them.  We all did our best, but we really had no idea what we were doing.   Eventually we grew.  Things like classroom management became second nature.  We had more strategies to meet the struggling learners.  This joke helped me realize it’s normal to wish I had a second chance with that first memorable group.  At the very least, I hope they are no worse of the wear. 

I have been thinking of that running joke more and more in the days leading up to my oldest daughter’s tenth birthday.  I realized that she is perpetually that first class.  She will never reap the benefits of my confidence in parenting.  Each new stage that we stumble through together I am experiencing for the first time.  Even though I get better at parenting, I never will feel like I know what I am doing with her.

When she was an infant, and my mom drove off and left us after 8 days of live in help, I was convinced my child’s ability to breathe was intricately connected to my mother’s proximity.  I sat there nearing a panic attack watching her little chest go up and down and fearing her fragileness alongside my inadequacy.  I didn’t think I had the skills to keep this delicate thing alive – this person whose wellbeing had become the only thing that could possibly matter in this world. 

            As she grew I read her books every day and homemade all her baby food and worked like mad to make sure the first time she tasted processed sugar was via her birthday cake the day she turned one.  When her Parents as Teachers facilitator came to our house to make sure she was developing appropriately she asked me how well she did with feeding herself cookies, I felt like a failure.  I had never given her a cookie so now she lacked cookie-eating skills!  What kind of repercussions might this hold for her future?

            When she was a toddler I carefully planned her transition into her new room and big girl bed two months before her sister was born petrified that she might view this family transition as an assault on her relationship with us.  When it was time to start dance classes I called and toured every dance school in town to make the best choice.  When we had to make the decision about which school to send her to I sobbed and stressed overwhelmed by the power each decision I made had in shaping her life. 

            I could tell stories like this for each stage of parenting she has ushered us into.  As school age parents, I worried about the balance between advocate and helicopter parent so I failed to speak up for her and her learning needs.  As we entered the angsty stage I didn’t realize that leave me alone means I need you more than ever so I took the wrong step of giving her space and hurting her feelings.  I have zero ability to help her navigate the friendship drama of upper elementary school. 

            Simply put, all the things I get better at through experience are benefits only her sisters will reap.  I will never really know what I am doing with my oldest.  While I can take a relaxed, almost flippant, “they’ll be fine” approach to her sisters, rooted in the belief that kids are resilient, with my oldest I have never quite shaken the fear that plagued me as my mom drove off almost ten years ago – that fear that I am messing up.  When I snap at her, I feel like it is often really out of frustration with myself and my incompetence.  Our oldest children are our first chance to show the world we know what we are doing.  We want them to be perfect so we can hide our insecurity from the world, and then maybe from ourselves.    

            Because I can’t change any of this, and because it is surely to only get worst as my oldest becomes our first high school student, our first driver, our first to apply to college...  I am trying to take comfort in the same thing I tell new teachers to take comfort in.  You will never be less prepared than you are for your very first class, but you will never care more.   No class will ever reap the passion and excitement you have for teaching like the one that made you a teacher. 

            Ten years into this parenting gig I am trying to fixate as much on the right steps as the missteps.  Yes I would stare at Avery as an infant petrified she would stop breathing; but also, I stared at her as an infant.  By baby number two there was a toddler to potty train and two sets of children’s clothes to wash.  We would sit in our clean house (though we didn’t appreciate it as clean at the time) and just stare at this perfect little human.  During our first summer together I would dress her in her little swimsuit and take her to the pool with no other distractions and just splash and play feeling a contentment I never knew was possible.  When she first learned to sing a song off the radio I forced my brother to let my precious four year old on stage at his high school as part of his student talent show.  I knew how special she was, and I committed my life to making sure others see just how special she is as well.  I love all my children, but there is a special adoration for someone whom you get to enter each fascinating, challenging and enamoring stage with.  Your first child brings a new love, first crush giddiness to parenting that makes it all bearable. Though I surely owe her many apologies, I hope that like my first set of students, she isn’t really any worse for the wear.