Summer

Summer has brought new life for me. Since getting out in June I have helped create new flower beds, read through four, maybe five, new books, recreated our office space and gone to the movies. And already I dread August.

But, and that's a large size "but," I am concentrating on staying in the moment as much as I can. One of the great certainties I discovered this spring is that I must begin to retool for my eventual last day on the job. In fact, I realized that all of us must, sooner or later, retool for that first day of the rest of our lives.

I retired once in St. Louis. Mistake. Had we stuck it out, our life would have been drastically different from our life now. Better or worse? No doubt that cannot be determined. But every new experience is an opportunity for adventure. And I am definitely up for adventure. Which explains why retooling has now entered my vocabulary and mindset.

But retool to what? Here in our retirement community the ladies take water aerobics in early morning classes. They play bridge on Wednesdays and golf on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Anyone who knows me knows this is not my direction!

But my physical health requires certain limits. I can't hike the Pacific Crest Trail like I once wanted to do. I could finish several half-begun-and-better-off-never-finished novels. But I'll leave publishing to my students. (Derek Blasberg just published his first and it is marvelous!) The hiking I'll leave to Amy Compare who is religious about the natural world. (I wish she would discover Yosemite. She has no idea how beautiful mountains can be!) Former principals have become consultants, but if schools listened to me, there would be this radical shift in a paradigm so old and ingrained, it would be apocalyptic. Who's going to pay me for that advice?

So like everyone else who is faced with this conundrum, I must create my own map and direction. Just like life in the classroom, I have to get organized. I have to dig through "file cabinets" for old "lessons" and find new stimulus in them for me, the student. Probably the hardest teaching I will ever do now lies in front of me. The test is going to be a matter of life and death.

Dreams

I know it's been some time since I last posted. School has a way of blocking out all light and life. It sucks up the energy that comes with each new day and dissipates all hope by sundown. We are asked to do more and more for less and less. In Florida the line has been drawn. What will teachers do with changes being sought after in the state legislature? How will any of us find our way through these really dark options? If you are sitting at home these days thinking that our job is all joy and sunshine, check out what is going on around the country with education. Who would want to be a teacher at these costs?

But I digress...I am bound for London tomorrow. I have been in love with English anything since I was a child. Tea, crumpets, Dickens, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Christie, Byron, Keats, Browning, Poets Corner, Westminster, Big Ben, Tower of London, Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII, Elizabeth I and II, Charles, Diana, Camilla. I remember going to the drive-in as a five year old and watching the coronation of Queen Elizabeth. I collected every magazine picture and article I could find.

Why is this important? Because we all have dreams. We live our lives in such a way that some moment in time will find us celebrating the dream. We hope. We yearn. Then we go to college; we get jobs; we have children. We have money for mortgages and loans. We buy new winter coats and shoes which they outgrow at amazing rates. We manage a trip here or there but we never quite get to the dream. Well, some of us do. We have a head start with parents who teach us money management which is easy for them since they actually have it to manage and give it to us to manage as well. We never doubt that our family trip will be somewhere exotic, some port of call beyond the borders of our state, our country. We take it for granted. Yes, we do. But me? It happens tomorrow.

Not good with money and too generous to boot. But now it has happened and I am off. Who will I become on this trip? Will I become intoxicated with all things English? Will I forgive them their arrogance toward my Scottish heritage? Will I forgive them their arrogance against the Irish, the Indians, the Muslims, the Jews, the Afghans, the Americans? They do have a lot to answer for.

But in my fervor I will find joy and fulfillment as I look at the Magna Carta and the stones of Stonehenge. The shrine to St. Thomas a Becket at Canterbury where the pilgims stood--the wife of Bath, the yeoman, the knight. The spires of Westminster Abbey and the burial sites of so many names I know. The glorious Easter service of St. Paul's. The British Museum will not lose its charm for me. I am bound for home--the English part of me beckons and I will find more of myself than I knew. And that is the glory of dreams rendered real.

Chaos is winning.

I have just finished teaching Lord of the Flies by William Golding. Yesterday at the end of my power point I used the quote from the last page of the book when Ralph cries for "the loss of innocence, the darkness of man's heart and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy." And this morning I opened my New York Times.

We have not come very far, I would say, since the publication of that book. We are surrounded by children's loss of innocence. (How will the children of Haiti ever find sustenance and nurture after this? How will the children of the Congo ever feel safe and childlike again after rape and death?) And the loss of innocence is as close as the television, movie theatre, the living room couch.

As for the darkness of man's heart, well...look around. How much money does one CEO of Goldman Sachs or Bank of America need? How much partisanship does it take to risk the health and welfare of millions of people? On the other hand, how much money could build new schools, hire enough teachers, coaches and aides (notice I did not include administrators)to make a difference in children's lives? Test scores have robbed us of the opportunity to cast light into the darkest corners. We are too busy with high stakes testing to talk to children about basic right and wrong. We are strapped into the rocket that leads us to school grades and bonuses rather than to healthy, nurtured, character- driven children. We must test and test and test, and yet the results have nothing to do with the greater tests they will all meet as young adults and as new members of our communities. We have no fondness for stop now and talk about decision making. (It's not on the test.)

My mother, in studying for her Ph.D., did an analysis of values, attitudes and beliefs. She would discuss this with us at the dinner table. I came away with the notion that all teaching is based on this. You can take any literature you want or social situation, or moment in history and analyze it from those three perspectives. I suspect it would be true in science and math as well. And when you ask students to identify these three critical aspects in any situation, they begin to think and discover issues that had never before occurred to them.

I did this one year with a class of freshmen at Affton High School. They were reading Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton. It was astounding to me the comments they made as a result of their analyses. But this was before high stakes testing. Those students went on to powerful opportunities in this country--the White House, state government, leadership in education and banking and even a few teachers.

But what do I accomplish now? It behooves me to say not as much as I would like. I curtail discussing ideas and move on to practical matters. In the novel we know that Piggy symbolizes intelligence, insight, thinking. And so with Golding and Ralph, I weep for "the fall through the air of the true, wise friend Piggy." I weep.

Memphis, Martin and Me

In 1967 I graduated from Southeast Missouri State College in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. Most of the classmates I finished with would leave Cape and go north to St. Louis. Me? I went south to Memphis, Tennessee. My experiences there were the most deliberate and consuming in education I have ever had.

First there were my students. Out of the over 100 I saw everyday, only six were white. Interesting integration, I thought. My teaching was at South Side High School. We were the Scrappers because the year before our football team continued to play in a game where they lost forty something to nothing. Scrappers, indeed. In my classes I had cousins of Stax recording stars and street walkers. I had middle class black families, which was a surprise to me. I thought all blacks were poor. One assumption down. I had thieves and murderers. The police actually came to my door one day and arrested Alonzo right out of his desk. He had shot a woman on the bus. He always addressed me as "Miss." Absolutely polite and protective of me. What did that woman on the bus do to rouse him to shoot a gun at her? I discovered another way to conjugate "to be." And I discovered that black children did not "live" at home but "stayed" somewhere. Transience was ingrained in the language. Can you imagine a life so temporary as to refer to home as a place to "stay" rather than "live"? I never had.

Then there was the administration. Our principal was white and had a red neck. Really. He was also very red faced much of the time because he was frustrated by students and families who did not seem to understand his middle class approach to life. His assistant principal was a wonderful black man--Otto Lashley. He was a comfort to someone like me trying to learn the ways of a culture absolutely foreign. He and Mr. Edmunds. Perfect administrators working for a man and a system that had no clue what or where or how to get the job done. Memphis City Schools were a nightmare of organizational red tape. Every school taught from the same set of books regardless of the school population or needs. The text I used had an eleventh grade reading level. My students read, at best, at the fourth or fifth grade level.

So I became an interpreter of not only language but culture. The short story "Snake Dance" was impossible for my students because they had no idea what a "snake dance" was. So we pushed back the desks and joined with each other, hands on hips and "danced" around the room. I created small group grammar sessions and tried my best to convince them that they needed to learn standard English, different from what they would use at home or with family and friends often. I discovered that some of my students didn't need my help as much as others. So in the second year there we created honors classes. That was the year I took them to see Romeo and Juliet at the theatre.

I had never spent any time with a black person before. (My mother's maid Myrtle Gholson does not count. As a child I would never have asked her the questions I asked my students.) I was deprived physically and culturally. In my second year at South Side, I was the only white person in the room in every class, except when the Latin teacher's son was in my room. For the first time in my life, I was the only person of my ethnicity in a room. A very eye opening experience to say the least. So that is what it feels like to be the only one? I had to put ear drops in Donny's ears one day. I touched his head to tilt it to the side for the drops. (No teacher would be allowed to do this now.) And there it was. His hair was stiff and coarse. I admitted out loud to the class, before I realized what I was saying, that I had never done that before--felt a black person's hair. They giggled and then admitted to me that they had never felt a white person's hair. What a moment.

I sponsored the Y Teen volleyball team. Me--coach; you--player. That was how that went. At the end of the season, having come from a sports family, I thought it would be fun to have the girls over to my apartment for lunch and celebration. (No teacher would do this now either.) We ate sloppy joes (a white cultural treat they enjoyed) and chips and soda. They tried to teach me some dance moves. (White female failure--me.) Then their parents arrived and picked all the girls up. A knock at the door minutes after the last student and parent had left. My landlord. "We are asking you to leave. We don't do "'this,'" she informed me. I asked what "this" was. "We don't have colored in our apartments. You'll get your deposit back but you must be gone by the end of the month." Another assumption gone.

Then the morning in April came when the lights went out. Driving to school that day, I listened to Dr. King's speech from the day before. He had inspired such righteous anger in the garbage workers. Memphis was about to heat up. By the end of the day, I had no idea how hot it would get. My friend and I were at supper that evening when the news came that he had been shot and killed. By the next morning school was a mess. First we were called to a faculty meeting and told we would be escorted out by police at the end of the day. Then as soon as students arrived, their parents started pulling them out of class. The rumor was that black gangs were insisting that students stay home and they were going around to all the schools and clearing them out. Our students starting leaving around noon and by the last period of the day, we had 60 kids in the gym shooting hoops and sitting and talking.

We were escorted out only so far. Then we were on our own. I lived in the school neighborhood. As I drove home I was not necessarily nervous or fearful. But at a red light, a group of young black men starting yelling at me and for the first time in my life I heard the word "honky." I did not wait for the light to change.

I can't remember what happened after that day. The school year continued. I fell in love with a sailor who was deployed out east instead of Viet Nam. And at the airport one day waiting for his return, I talked with a young black man, a professional civil rights organizer. It was curious that he thought I needed to visit local eateries and have collards and neck bone.

I ate those in my younger years. I had been raised in the South right along with my students. I valued the foods that most of my students valued. I valued church and faith much the way my students did. I valued parents and my mother much the way my students did. I valued music and its spirit that lifts us when everything else is dark and desolate much the way my students did. Why had I ever felt the rift that divided us? Why had they and I been deprived of the knowledge of the common ground we shared? Generations of bigotry, rancor, ignorance, greed and illiteracy...we were all victims--Memphis, Martin and me.

Next?

I have relaxed. The new year has found me far less stressed about their (students) energies for learning. Why I ever got in a knot about any of this I don't know. It may be fellow teachers. When I work closely with other faculty, I find myself too readily drawn into their unhappiness with students. Usually my relationships with the same students they fight with are rather benign and even friendly.

Take Charise. She is an attractive ninth grade girl who has found herself in classes she was never prepared for. Teachers last year gave little homework, little study skills, little practical approaches to learning so that this year she is in a hole at the end of first semester. But she talked with me this week. "I want to do better. I had no idea how to approach this year. But I do want to do better." Can't say no to that. However, I realize that this statement from her depends absolutely on our relationship. She has not made this announcement to any other teacher.

Then there is Jacob. I am protecting him from some district rules. He is almost homeless and where he sleeps some nights does not qualify him for my classroom. I can't lose this child. He is ever so smart and articulate at 14. He deserves none of the misfortune which has visited his family. I must be a shining light in this young person's life despite the extra burden. I worry if he gets lunch. If he has warm clothes. If he has a chance to do his homework for all of his classes. If he is troubled by his family situation. No one outside of one other teacher knows this truth.

Then there is Dale. How do I help this child? The smile that greets me every day in class is genuine, but behind it I fear great insecurity lurks. Dale cannot keep up with classmates as well as he should. Yet when we have study group, Dale never shows. What to do? Other teachers have written him off.

Then there is Alice. Beautiful, slender, vivacious, failure--except in our ROTC program. She has found her niche. How do I get her to value the rest of her day and recognize how important it is to her enjoyment of ROTC? We have talked--her tears were poignant and her concerns genuine. Family life has been very difficult but now is improving--parents are now working. She, too, has been written off by others.

And then there is John. He wants to succeed in the worst way. His father has made him take my class because he recognizes the value of the program I teach. He knows it is a way out of the cycle of poverty and illiteracy that he will become part of without a good education. But John has brought to my class almost no skills. He has spent the first eight years of school doing as little as possible and now the perfect educational storm has happened. How do I explain this to his well meaning parents?

Thousands of us have days like this. Thousands. And the children number in the hundreds of thousands. So I have come to the conclusion that the 3R's need one more. The R of Relationship. If I can maintain my relationships with these students, and more like them, I might reach a few. And maybe, the stress other colleagues experience will dissipate like mine if they see my example--thoughtful reflection on the really important part of teaching--relationships.

Why Don't She Write?

I borrowed that question from the film Dances With Wolves. Although I am not a pioneer headed out across the vast prairie of the Midwest, I sometimes feel that isolated and alone. Teaching can make a person extremely singular in vision.

This has been Christmas once again. As usual my tree went up after we got out for break. My cookies got baked Christmas Eve and our presents under the tree appeared at the same time. I sent out Christmas letters just before Santa's visit in the hopes that my friends would appreciate the events of our past year. I certainly enjoyed theirs. And in the midst of all that frivolity, I graded papers.

And that theme resonated throughout these past two weeks--grade papers, have a little Christmas, grade papers. Now I know that many teachers don't grade papers at holiday time. They successfully or unsuccessfully have a schedule that allows them some freedom from this during this optimum family time. Not me. I am doomed to always see those two weeks off as time to get some grading done.

So my comments here have been put on hold because the paper load is overwhelming. But, as you can see, I have one resolution for the new year. I will only work as hard as my students work. For years I think most teachers have worked twice as hard as their students. We overachieve in a thousand ways. They show up and ask "What are we doing today?" I think I will start answering that question with "What can you learn today about >>>>>> (fill in the empty space)? Their achievement will depend on them, rather than me. Jim Fay always says that it is not our job to motivate them. So the new year will find me waiting for them.

In the meantime, I have this weekend to finish grading essays exams, book reviews and re-grading essays. It will actually go fast as I have relaxed my standards a bit. After all if they wrote the perfect paper and completed the work as assigned, what would I do as a follow up? My job depends on their failure to act. Interesting dilemma....

Rainy Days

Rainy school days have always been a source of conflict for me. Looking out my window at the dark skies, I would imagine myself on a ship crossing some ocean headed for some port of call, unnamed and uncharted. I was the captain and this was my vessel and adventure waited. Then the bell would ring and a hundred voices would fill the door of my room. In vain, all day, I would try to return to my imagined journey. The salty spray striking my face; the wind burning my lips and cheeks. Then the bell would ring. My romantic voyage always came crashing to an end with the advent of each class period.

Can teachers have imaginations? Can't we escape our desks, computers and white boards? Why can't we run away? Even for the five minutes between classes. We are trapped by the immediate needs of adolescents and their emerging imaginations. We feed theirs and deny ours. We plan for delayed gratification daily, hourly. They taunt us with "a poem" they "wrote last night." It's subject some n'er do well male who doesn't get the "love" word. They tempt us with "please read this." They never know how much we would prefer to read anything but what they have written.

Oh, yes, there are those teachers who will tell you they "love" reading student creations. They will say that young people can really surprise you with their writing. They can; it's just not the surprise you were hoping for. But I think they have lost their imaginations to power writing and six plus traits. I want to read and escape on my ship. But the anchor of obligation and responsibility is heavy. I turn from the window and face them.

Imagination will have to wait until three o'clock and dismissal. But I have a meeting to attend about a student who never comes to school. Maybe the student doesn't come because he likes rainy day, imagined adventures too. And I have essays to grade. When I get back to my room, it is still raining. I pull up at my desk, shut out the rain slicked view and hunker down over a neatly written, double-spaced, in blue ink essay on sledding hazards in Ethan Frome.