The Colles Fracture

In the late 1770s or, more likely, the early 1780s, young Abraham Colles is said to have found an anatomic textbook floating in the river Nore in Kilkenny, Ireland. Apparently the river had flooded, and the local physician’s textbook had been carried away only to arrive, fortuitously, in Abraham’s hands. Abraham tried to return the book, but Dr. Butler gifted it to him, and thus was born a great physician.

In 1790 Abraham and his brother William enrolled in Trinity College in Dublin. At the same time Abraham became an apprentice at Dr Steevens’ Hospital. When he wasn’t working or studying Abraham could be found sleeping in dark corners of the hospital, perhaps not unlike medical students today who snooze where they can. Once he had finished his degree in Dublin, Abraham moved to Edinburgh where he trained as a graduate student at what was perhaps the best medical school of the time. He graduated from Edinburgh in 1797. From there, stories tell us that he walked to London, a journey of 10 to 14 days.

***

While I have never walked from one place to another for 14 entire days, I have walked every day but one for 2029 days in a row. I started walking daily during the pandemic. A friend suggested a challenge to walk every day from Victoria Day to Labour Day, in part to combat the malaise of those pandemic days. From Labour Day we pushed to Thanksgiving then Christmas and soon our goal became a year of daily walking. After a year, seeing no reason to stop, we continued. And so it went. I walked after work and sometimes in the neighbourhoods around work if I had to stay late. I walked while travelling and while on vacation. I walked through good weather, but also through rain and, in the middle of Canadian winters, through snow and even ice. Walking, in many ways, became part of who I am.

***

After his walk to London, Abraham Colles worked on dissections with the well-known doctor, Astley Cooper. From there, he returned to Dublin and was elected as a member of the Royal College of Surgeons. He was a practicing doctor and beloved professor who published three books and over a dozen surgical papers.

As a physician, Dr. Colles was particularly devoted to the importance of dissection. He wanted to show his students “the connection between anatomical structures of each part and the surgical diseases and operations to which it is subject.” To this end, he was known to dissect for up to two hours a day and he kept careful records of what he found.

There’s a lot more to his career, of course, but what’s interesting to me is that all of this careful observation led to Dr Colles’ name being given to a particular fascia, a ligament, and a fracture. In 1814, decades before x-rays came into use, Dr. Colles published a paper about the characteristic “dinner fork” formation of the fracture and showed ways to treat it. Colles fractures usually occur after a person falls onto an outstretched hand*. We often call a Colles fracture a broken wrist, but it is truly a break at the end of the radius bone near the wrist. They are among the most common fractures seen in emergency rooms.

A “fall onto an outstretched hand” is so common that it’s known in Emergency Rooms by the acronym FOOSH. I find this acronym particularly apt as it imitates the sound that happens when you fall. In a way this is an onomatopoeic acronym that causes a fracture which is, itself, an eponym. This is oddly satisfying.

***

I missed one day of walking during those 2029 days because I was truly sick. While my streak had ended, I felt better the next day, so I went out and started walking again. I’d gotten used to it. My daily walks had given me new awareness of the things around me. I now noticed changing flowers and leaves, the way the ice froze in different patterns in the winter, and how the world changed day by day. Somehow observing made me feel more connected to the world and to myself.

But on Sunday morning, my observations of ice and my connection to the world didn’t prevent me from slipping and falling on a patch of ice hidden under the snow. FOOSH! I went down hard, and even though I’m fully an adult, I cried when I landed. After a few minutes, a woman who had been standing across the street wandered over, cigarette in hand, and asked, “you okay?” I very clearly was not.

She seemed vaguely sympathetic but disinclined to help, so I pulled myself up using my left hand on the stop sign next to me. I limped back to my house, tears still in my eyes, holding my right hand against my chest. There, I realized that for the first time in some years, I was home alone: My spouse and older child were visiting universities; my youngest was out with friends. I tried to convince myself that I wasn’t badly injured, but I didn’t need to have years of dissection work under my belt to know that my hand did not look normal. I called an ambulance.

The paramedics were as gentle as possible. Given the prevalence of this sort of break, they must have seen it a hundred times before, so I think they knew. When I finally talked to a doctor, he told me that not only did I break my wrist, I “super broke” my wrist: the X-ray at the hospital revealed that I had sustained the fracture that Abraham Colles identified well over 100 years ago.

The good news is that, while I will need surgery and then have a cast for six weeks, I should heal well. The bad news is that it hurts. And, while I have taken advantage of this injury to show my creative writing students how to write an essay in the style of John Green’s Anthropocene Reviewed I have had to dictate the whole thing and have learned that I do not like dictating essays.

I am impressed with Abraham Colles work and grateful to the medical professionals who are treating me. Nevertheless, I give the Colles fracture one star.

Man vs Max

Our dog Max is a rescue. What he was rescued from, we don’t exactly know, but we do know that he came to Canada from Lebanon, we assume in a large dog crate. This explains many things. First, Max is an anxious dog. Second, he does not love crates. According to our dog trainer, his anxiety presents as aggression – so, she assures us, he’s not really an #$@hole; he just acts out because he’s nervous and doesn’t know what’s expected of him. As a teacher who often works with students who need a little extra attention, I feel like this is something I should have picked up, but the dogs I grew up with were decidedly not anxious, so I had no idea.

One thing that helps nervous dogs, apparently, is having a space in the house that is their safe space. Before we knew what he was doing, Max had chosen under our kitchen table as his space, which is not ideal because, well, that’s where our feet go. He’s generally ok with feet being there, but “generally” is not really enough when it comes to where your feet go while you eat. So… we are trying to help Max find another safe place in the house.

Max’s absolute favourite place to sleep is on our couch – with a stuffie

We started with a large hard-sided crate, which we put in the TV room by the sofa where we often hang out. Max was not impressed. He absolutely, 100% refused to go in the crate. Heck, he would hardly go near it. He growled at it and, when we put his favourite toys inside, whimpered a little, but he did not go get them. He spent weeks steadfastly refusing to go near the crate, giving it a wide berth while giving us the side-eye. Finally, we realized that he had probably flown from Lebanon in a crate, so we retired it to the basement (a place too scary for him to even contemplate; he will barely look down the stairs).

Months later, we put a dog bed in the kitchen near his table-lair. We have been trying to teach him the “place” command, and he will kind of do it, especially if treats are involved, but it’s out in the open, and he’s made it clear that he might go there to humour us, but this is not where he intends to sleep. So two weeks ago, we got *another* crate – this one with metal sides that he can see through. (Thank goodness for friends and family who are supporting us and our anxious dog by providing us with various types of crates and beds in our quest for calm.)

We set up crate number two in a different corner of the TV room, and this time he didn’t growl or whimper. Then we got smart: we put Max’s food dish in the far corner of the new crate. To eat, he would have to go in. He’s half Lab, so he loves food, but he’s still Max, so he was tentative: he tested things out with one paw… then two… then he s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-d in to eat his food. Such a brave boy!

We added a towel to make the bottom of the crate more comfortable, and two days later, Max managed to put three paws in the crate. Then, yesterday, he discovered a better solution. When Andre put a treat in the far corner, Max pawed at the towel and pulled the whole thing towards the door. Once he’d pulled the bowl close enough, he grabbed the treat and triumphantly trotted back to his safe space under the table to eat in peace.

Anxious, but not dumb, this dog. Sigh. In the question of Man vs Max, I think Max is winning.

Update: tonight he put all four paws in the crate!

PD Day Agenda

9:30 sharp (as per the email to staff)- PD Day begins
Teachers wander into the library and mill about, slowly noticing that we have assigned seats. Some people try to switch groups. One entire table switches locations because they have been placed so far to the front and side that they cannot see the screen.

9:33:30 – Principal address
“Today’s PD will be extremely useful.”

9:35:12 – First speaker.
Topic: substance abuse
Y’all, it is happening: kids are still abusing substances. You know it, I know it, they know it. Sure, the overall stats are pretty good and, yeah, we *could* invest in vape detectors for the bathrooms, but that costs money, so instead someone will tell you about marijuana and cannabis as though it is still the 80s. We will not talk about things like phones, social media, opioids or fentanyl. Stay focused.

Some time later – Break – supposedly 10 minutes but now 5 because we are already behind

10:47:08 – Teacher-led presentation about [Literacy/ Numeracy]
Note that this session will begin just late enough that the staff who worked like crazy on this presentation will have to cut something important, and every minute extra will shorten our lunch.

10:48:00 – ICEBREAKER
Today we will either be annoying the Humanities teachers and boring the Science/ Math teachers or annoying the Science/ Math teachers and boring the Humanities teachers. Roll the dice.

10:59:21 – Chipper staff members (confession: I am usually one of them) begin desperately attempting to convince other staff that they should stop saying that they “hate [math/English]” and that they really should not tell their students that [any subject but mine] won’t be useful after high school.

10:59:42 – If the school is providing lunch, (unlikely but possible) it arrives. It is set it up in the back of the room as staff continues to learn about [math/English] and why we should integrate it into our classroom. The smell of lunch now fills the room as the staff presentation continues.

Special note: today’s lunch is scheduled to begin 30 minutes later than on a normal school day. The smell of food should permeate the room long before teachers can eat.

11:12:37 – The buzz of teacher talk suggests that everyone is on task and excited to use [math/English] in our classes next week. Or maybe it suggests that Mr. X has pulled out pictures of his twins – now 6 months old! – and everyone is cooing over them. Well, everyone except the AP Physics teacher, who is still marking tests, and two basketball coaches who are hunched over a playbook. “Look!” says a harried teacher-presenter, “That playbook is a perfect example of [math/English]!”

11:28:16 – Everyone applauds the teacher-presenters. One of them is visibly sweating; another has just wiped away tears; a third is still looking at pictures of the twins. The principal announces that all 17 afternoon sessions are now “self-directed learning” to honour us as professionals. To prove we have “engaged with the content” teachers are required to complete a “proof of engagement” after each session. This may include Google forms, e-signing a document, taking an online test, a spit shake, swearing on a religious text of your choice, taking a blood oath, offering up your firstborn unless you guess the name of a short bearded visitor, hopping on one foot for exactly 2 minutes and 16 seconds, and other activities to show that we have completed each session.

11:30 – Teachers leave for lunch

12:30ish – Some teachers return

Afternoon – 43 voluntary meetings are available for teachers to attend this afternoon. None of them are about any of the 17 required afternoon topics. They are voluntary so we do not have to be there because this is the time scheduled to complete our required self-directed work. If we choose to attend the voluntary meetings, we will have to complete the required work at home. Oh, and the Principal will be at all voluntary meetings and will take attendance. Just in case.

Partial list of the 17 Mandatory Self-Directed Training Sessions

From the Ministry of Education: The total video time of this training is 7.25 hours, not including the time required to prove you did the work. We have allotted 3 hours for you to complete it. We have disabled your playback speed options on some – but not all – of the videos. If you figure out which videos allow you to change the speed, AND if you skip slides on the boring slideshows and just go straight to the tests, you can probably finish by the end of the school day.

Note: all training will be identical for all staff K-12 at all sites. There will be no differentiation.

7 minutes, 8 seconds: Equitable and Inclusive Schools

14 minutes, 12 seconds: Child Abuse Prevention and Reporting

8 minutes, 47 seconds: Appropriate sign-offs for professional emails

4 minutes, 3 seconds: Cybersecurity, Part 3

21 minutes, 32 seconds: Ladder skills

3 minutes, 54 seconds: Concussion Symptoms

3 minutes, 2 seconds: Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires

18 minutes, 7 seconds: Stop, Drop and Roll

5 minutes, 4 seconds: Shoe Tying – Reverse Chain or Bunny Ears?

1 minute, 44 seconds: Self-care to Prevent Burnout – You Are Responsible for Your Mental Health

Conveniently, no one knows when the teachers go home.

Storytelling

“We all have stories to tell,” I say to my Creative Writing class. “We tell stories all the time. We swim in them.” I draw their attention to the Thomas King quote I’ve put in our Google Classroom: “The truth about stories is that that’s all we are.”

Students bob their heads up and down. They are nodding, but they are also wary. After all, we’re starting our “Narrative” unit, and they know they will soon be writing “a story” that they will have to share with others. This is terrifying.

I have been where they are, I tell them, so I am confident that they are brimming with stories – both real and imagined. To prove this, we do an inside/outside activity (also known as concentric circles) – two circles of students, facing each other – and tell each other stories for nearly half the class. A time I was embarrassed, a time I felt proud, a wonderful gift I received or gave... The classroom is alive with voices and laughter. Stories fill the air; we are joyous.

“The stories we tell define who we are,” I say afterward, and I believe it. Then we try to capture some of what we’ve just said, to put our voices on paper. The mood in the room changes. I write, too. It’s hard.

Some days, I write quotations on the board:

“The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller.” – Steve Jobs

Even as I scrawl the words on the chalkboard – in yellow or white or pink – I am telling myself secret stories about my own writing, about my own power. At first, I don’t notice these subconscious stories. I write all the time, I think. I am, after all, writing nearly every day. I jot down ideas in random places and tell my students that I am collecting story kernels and poem fragments. I write in front of my students: I start poems and essays; I leave them half-finished to “show my process.” The students have (mostly) turned in their poetry assignments. My best poem sits, unfinished, covered with notes and nudges. I tuck it away.

Meanwhile, Monday evenings come and go. I tell myself that I’m too tired to write anything up, that I will write tomorrow. By Tuesday evening, I tell myself that it’s too late to publish a “Slice of Life” on the Two Writing Teachers blog (my writing haven). I tell myself I’ve missed the window this week, that no one will want to read this late. I will write next week.

Weeks pass. I think that I am not writing in public because I am busy or bored or boring. I think that I have already written about this or talked too much about that. I whisper to myself that a particular story is “not mine to tell” or “will get me in trouble” though I don’t know what for or by whom. One day, I manage to catch hold of a thought as it darts through my mind; almost immediately, its brethren make themselves known: not good enough, not funny enough, not interesting enough, everyone knows this, too many people are reading this, not enough people are reading this…

Ah! Well. I give myself a little lecture about writer’s block and allow myself a little laugh about having been here before. Then I set myself a writing deadline – which I happily ignore. But my self-imposed deadline doesn’t disappear. Instead, it lingers in odd places, growing bolder: “Your students have turned something in,” it says, “why do *you* get to skip writing?” “Writing is reflecting,” it cajoles, “and reflecting makes for good teaching.” “This won’t get easier,” it scolds.

Finally, today – Tuesday, not Monday – in class, not at home, I cave. I ink the word WRITE in my calendar. I come home, play games on my phone, do a little training with the dog, chat with the children, tidy… and then I make myself say the thing out loud, even if it’s under my breath.

“I am a writer.”

And I write.

After all, “We become the stories we tell ourselves.” – Michael Cunningham

Next week, I will write again.

Read aloud

I’ve already handed out the papers – forty words neatly divided into two columns with checkboxes next to each word; forty words we read aloud earlier this week as a group; forty words that should be easily accessible to high school students, although I am well aware that they will not be easy for the students in this room – and the students are calmly looking them over. Calmly, that is, until I say, “So, today’s challenge is to read these words out loud in your small groups.” As the words “out loud” leave my mouth, a hand shoots up.

“Um, I can’t read out loud because I’m dyslexic.”

I pause. In retrospect, I will be able to articulate some of the myriad thoughts that run through my mind before I speak, even though in the moment I respond immediately. Later, I will feel my hesitation, the laughter that wants to bubble up behind my shock, even the bit of the sadness that eventually seeps into my consciousness. Right then, however, I say casually, “Everyone in here is dyslexic. That’s why we’re here.”

Suddenly all eyes are on me. I stumble. “I mean, I guess you’re not all technically dyslexic, but every person in the room – including me, actually – has a reading disability. Literally. All of us. You’re here to get better at reading. If you were already good at it, you wouldn’t be here.”

As I finish speaking, I am briefly worried: am I being mean? But I know I’m not. I’m being honest. And I’m surprised. We’ve been together for almost a month. The class is called “Reading”. We’ve spent weeks working on basic phonics, practicing short vowel sounds, encoding phonemic word chains, and decoding three- and four-letter words. I can’t imagine even a casual observer who wouldn’t understand what we’re doing: Everyone is here to get better at reading.

In the classroom, students look around. I can’t catch all the various emotions, but I start to realize that they were not, in fact, all aware of the truth of the class. I remind them (again, I swear!) that we are here to support each other, that mistakes are normal and part of learning, that this is practice, that this is how we get better. I reassure them that they will not die from reading aloud. I promise that, as far as I know, there is no recorded history of students dying purely from reading – even reading aloud. They start to laugh. Soon enough, everyone is reading out loud, round-robin style, in their circle, and they are, as predicted, helping each other. Mistakes are made. Everyone survives. There are smiles and laughter and we are learning rather than worrying. By the end of class, people are willingly writing on the white board to practice encoding. When someone says, “I can’t really spell” someone else replies, “neither can most of us” and there are plenty of giggles.

But after the students leave, I can’t shake the feeling that this moment needs my attention. What was happening when the student announced that they could not read out loud? Why were they still self-conscious in a room full of striving readers? At first, I think of how my co-teacher and I have worked to make this class respectful of the learners: students who are still striving to learn to read in high school are typically students who have not been well served by our system; they are not dumb, they simply haven’t received the instruction they need. The reasons behind that are as unique as our students, but it’s still true. We designed this class to honour them and treat them as the intelligent beings they are, so maybe we should take some comfort in the fact that they did not realize that they were all here for reading instruction. Still, as much as I like a good pat on the back, the moment continues to gnaw at me.

Long after school ends, I’m walking the dog when I suddenly realize what I witnessed: despite having a learning community of support and care, our students have been working so hard for so long to hide their reading struggles that they haven’t had time to notice that others are struggling, too. They spend much of their social and cognitive energy protecting their identity and sense of self, and as a result they cannot easily focus on others. I imagine spending my work day trying to cover up something that I see as a major deficit – as if all I did all day long was try to hide a giant stain on my clothing. I imagine being so busy covering that stain in creative ways that I don’t have time to see that others have stains, too. No, worse: I am so concentrated on hiding the stain that I don’t really look at others; I just assume they are wearing much better clothes than I am. I keep one hand on that spot and sometimes miss things going on around me because I’m worried. If I relax and my hand creeps away from the stain, I have to quickly put it back down, maybe glance around and make sure no one else saw it. By the end of the day, I am exhausted and not able to remember everything that happened.

All of this explains why, at the end of September, the students in our Reading class haven’t fully understood that they are in a class where everyone is learning to read better, a class where, ideally, they can relax a little. It may be a while before they believe that everybody else in the room is making mistakes, too. It may be even longer before they trust each other enough to get things wildly wrong, to make outrageous guesses, and to allow themselves to do the hard work of learning to read. I realize, too, that I have more work to do to make this a space of hope and freedom, to let reading class help students be more fully themselves.

I reflect for a while and consider ways to tweak the class for increased student agency and more time for relationship-building. Clearly, I decide, we need more laughter. Clearly, we need more talk. And yes, clearly we need more read alouds. I’m on it.

The Lights are On, but…

As I approach my classroom, I glance down at the crack between the door and the floor. “Wait – is it dark?” It’s Monday of the third week of school. I shouldn’t get my hopes up, and yet I can’t help it. I call out to my colleague, who trails behind me, somewhat less obsessed. “I think it’s dark!”

As I get closer, reality sets in, “Nope. It’s still light.” My shoulders slump and my pace slows. The lights are still on – exactly as they have been 24 hours a day since some time during the week before school started. I sigh, “Guess it’s another day without the projector.” Her laugh is somewhere between commiseration and desperation. We turn into the stairwell – where the lights automatically flicker on – and make our way to our permanently lit office.

Over the summer, most of the lights in our school were replaced. This was a much-needed renovation: most of the old fluorescent fixtures – the kind with the long bulbs and the plastic covers – had long since lost their coverings. Last year, students in one of my classes managed to accidentally shatter one of the bulbs, and the fixtures were, in general, well past the end of their useful life. We welcomed the idea of new lights.

We should have known better.

We found out on the last day of the school year that we needed to empty our classrooms before the electrical work started. If we didn’t, we were warned, the construction crews would “try” their best to get things back in the right places, but they made no guarantee. Since it was the very last day we were allowed in the building, and since both time and boxes were in extremely short supply, most of us threw our hands up and left. I figured I could come in the week before school started and get things sorted. This did not happen.

In our school board this year, both teachers and students started on the Tuesday after Labour Day. There were no PD days, no time to meet or plan or – crucially – set up our rooms after the summer’s chaos. And chaos it was. Teachers weren’t allowed into our building until the Friday before the long weekend. (Well, that’s not quite fair: on Wednesday we learned that if we had classrooms on the first floor, we could get in on Thursday afternoon.) I went in all day on Friday, but I had to help new teachers (who were not officially employed until Tuesday) find their way around the school – all while trying to figure out why I had a heat lamp of sorts while I was missing most of the student chairs from the classroom. And then there was the question of what had happened to the teacher desks from the English office; they had migrated into the Business office, where they huddled into a corner, hiding. I worked all day, and didn’t come close to being ready. I noticed that we didn’t have light switches – heck, I even laughed about it – but I was so busy that I didn’t quite register what it would mean to have super-bright LED lights on all day every day.

This is where the light switches *used* to be.
Don’t worry; the wires aren’t live…

On Labour Day, while others enjoyed a day off, I cajoled Mr. 17 and his friends into the school building to help haul things around. Desks were moved; chairs were located; books were carted from one room to another and, after several hours of sweaty work, the office, the classroom and the book room were functional, if not organized. The teens commented on the brightness of the lights and asked how I would manage without being able to turn them off, but I was mostly focused on making sure that students would have a place to sit on Tuesday.

School started. The lights were on. By the end of the first day, my eyes were tired, but then I was generally tired because it was the first day, so I ignored it. By the end of the second day, my eyes were dry. By the end of the week, I was a little headachy. Imagine: every room has lights on at full brightness ALL THE TIME. There is no respite. I have tried to use the projector to, you know, teach, but the lights are so bright that students can really only see text. No images. No video clips. No nothing. Mostly, I try not to use it because it’s not worth the hassle – or the extra light from the bulb.

The rest of North American schools are trying to figure out how to deal with AI in the classroom. Me? I just want to turn off the lights.

Last week, a few upstairs classrooms got light switches. Today, as we left school, electricians were in our office. They had removed some of the ceiling tiles and were fiddling with wires. I didn’t dare ask – because I didn’t want to jinx it – but I’d swear they might have been installing a light switch. It’s not as good as having a light switch in my actual classroom, but I’ll take dimmed lights in the office if it’s all I can get. Maybe I can go in before school and sit, blissfully, in the dark for a few minutes. Rumour has it that the whole school will have light switches installed “in the next few weeks.” Until then, the lights are on.

What happened on Tuesday

What happened was a thunderstorm with a massive burst of lightning and a thunderclap so loud that I jumped out of bed even before I understood that the dog was barking.

What happened was that the dog went crazy, running and barking and shaking, after the thunderclap that shook our house and shook me out of bed, so now I was wide awake and went downstairs to the kitchen, where I talked to my visiting in-laws about the much-needed rain that was pouring pouring pouring down.

What happened was that the rain started coming down so hard after that giant clap of thunder that it took us a second to register the blaring of the fire alarm. “FIRE! FIRE! FIRE!” a vaguely female electronic voice stated with an oddly calm urgency. She managed to time her words in between the deafening blares of the alarm. Lights flashed from every unit, the already nervous dog went wild, and even my father-in-law, who’s lost a lot of his hearing, had to cover his ears, while my mother-in-law jumped up, and I ran to the back door to let the dog out, then both of my children came loping downstairs, blearily asking what was going on as if our house was not suddenly and obviously full of noise and strobe lights and chaos. “It’s the fire alarm!” I yelled, and my voice was not calm or electronic and my words were not timed to fall between the blaring blaring blaring of the alarm, so I had to repeat myself several times even though what I was saying was painfully obvious.

What happened was that I ran down to the basement to try to turn off the insistent incessant alarm, and the frantic dog escaped from the backyard and tore down the driveway, seeking refuge anywhere that was not our shrieking, strobing house, so my son ran out the front door and intercepted him, then somehow the terrified dog and my somewhat-less-terrified mother-in-law ended up in the backseat of her car, trembling and meanwhile I dragged a chair into the basement and stood on it, ineptly pushing and jabbing at one unit, trying to stop the noise.

^{*What happened was that one week earlier, Max had encountered a skunk and even though we had washed him and washed him, his wet fur now smelled distinctly of skunk, even as my mother-in-law sat with him in the back seat of her decidedly not skunky car, calming him.}

What happened was that I could not make the alarms stop screaming, maybe because they’ve only gone off twice in five years and both times Andre was the one who stopped them, but now he wasn’t home, so I called him at work and when he didn’t pick up, I kept calling and calling while I pushed and held and twisted and pulled and tried everything I could think of to stop the sirens. When that didn’t work, I got off the chair and threw all the fuses, desperate to make the noise stop, but then I was in the dark with the strobing lights and the blaring noise.

What happened was that Andre called back, alarmed and annoyed, and he told me to unplug each unit until I found the one that was the center of the storm of sound, and then, if they still wouldn’t stop sounding to just “throw them in the freezer” and I thought that sounded odd, but we’d once put a bat in the freezer (it’s a long story) and the noise was so loud that I didn’t think too much about it: I stood on the kitchen chair and unplugged one alarm then another while the kids did the same upstairs until suddenly, mercifully, the noise stopped, but when one of the units let out an errant “beep,” I threw them all in the chest freezer in the basement.

What happened was I had planned to meet up with colleagues for lunch, so once I had four alarms in the freezer and the dog coaxed out of the car and everything more or less back to normal, I left. As I drove to the restaurant, I wondered about those frozen fire detectors, but they were there now and quiet, so I continued. And all was well. I came home, took them out of the freezer, and took my younger child to the dentist to talk about braces. It took awhile.

What happened was that as the fire detectors defrosted, they decided they were not done: they started to scream. My mother-in-law put the (still slightly skunky) dog in the backyard, and he tried to escape again. My father-in-law decided enough was enough so he put the alarms back in the chest freezer, and when I came home I decided that I was done with alarms for the day, so even though I’m off for the summer and even though Andre was working, I ignored the clearly unsolved problem.

What happened was that Andre came home and said, incredulously, “You put them in the FREEZER?” and swore that he had said to put them in the cooler which is the ice chest and which does not actually freeze things – especially not fire detectors – and while I can admit that he might have said that, I also reminded him that we have put weirder things in the freezer, so he shook his head and went upstairs to change his clothes then went downstairs to take four frozen fire detectors out of the freezer.

What happened was that freezing the alarms (twice) had caused condensation to build up and the batteries to get low, but this time I knew better so, barefooted and disheveled, I took the dog outside before the chaos (re)commenced.

What happened was the dog treed a raccoon and one of our cats got into a fight with a neighborhood cat, and as I tried to calm things down, two little boys, brown as berries and attracted by chaos, wandered by and stopped for a chat. One told me that he was four and he could lift this rock and he could spell his own name. He was astonished to learn that I was a teacher and wondered why I was sitting on my front steps with a dog. I said, “because it’s summer” and he didn’t ask about the thin sound of fire alarms seeping up from the basement and only wandered away with his cousin when Andre came up and asked if I knew where the compressed air was. I did not.

What happened was that Andre, looking somewhat wild, begged me to go ask our neighbours if they had compressed air while he went downstairs to blow dry the fire detectors and even though this request was patently insane because who has compressed air, I got up from the porch and went door to door, barefoot and trailing a dog, asking. The two oldest neighbours laughed out loud and delightedly asked how our fire alarm was holding up. I didn’t tell them that four units were frozen and dying and currently being blown dry in an attempt to bring them back to life but in a silent sort of way because that was even more insane than asking 75-year-olds for compressed air on a Tuesday night. I tried four houses; no one had compressed air.

What happened was I came home empty-handed and finished blow-drying the four dead-ish detectors, leaving one after another on the basement floor, dazed, with their poor half-dead eyes winking weakly on and off until Andre fetched them and put them back in their places – except for one that we dubbed the “problem child” and put back into the cooler (not the freezer) until further notice.

As far as I know, one week later, it is still there.

Basic kindness

“Mom,” he says, “there’s some lady outside who needs water.”

Mr. 17 is back from soccer practice, standing in the front hall, holding an unfamiliar water bottle.

I blink. What?

“She was going to use our hose. She was walking down our driveway. She seems really thirsty, so I told her I’d get her some water.”

Our house is not large, so he’s already in the kitchen by the time he finishes this uncharacteristic rush of sentences. I hear ice cubes clink against metal, then running water. He lopes back towards the front door, screwing the lid onto the water bottle.

Before he goes out, he pauses and runs a hand through his sweaty hair. He looks at the water bottle in his hand and looks at me. “Do you have maybe $5 we can give her, too? So she could buy some water or something? She seemed really thirsty. Everybody should have water, you know? It’s like, basic.”

I nod, find my wallet, and hand him $5.

“Thanks, Mom.” He hugs me, takes the water bottle and the money, and disappears out the front door. I catch a glimpse of him handing someone the water. She has certainly seen hard times. Seconds later, he’s back inside, saying, “Oh, I’m going to [my friend’s] house. They’re waiting outside. I’ll be home later.” He looks around for a bathing suit, finds a towel, and he’s gone.

And I’m left, quietly stunned.

My children don’t follow the news. I wish they did, I guess, but the news these days is so often unsettling that I don’t push. Sometimes at dinner, we bring up various topics for discussion, but mostly our teens are happily ensconced in a world that is immediate to them. Mr. 17 probably doesn’t know that right now the world is arguing about who is or isn’t providing aid to people in Gaza, pointing fingers and laying blame while allowing children to starve. I doubt he’s seen the images that make my stomach hurt. He certainly doesn’t know that I was just talking to a friend about feeling helpless, overwhelmed and almost constantly unsettled. And yet, when someone was in our front yard, thirsty, he got her water and gave her a little more than she asked for. He did it without even pausing. I am stunned by his easy kindness, by his clear statement: everyone should have water.

Worldwide solutions are, of course, far more complicated than this interaction; but really, the idea that everyone should have water (and food) seems like a reasonable place to start.

What does it mean to be American?

It’s been twenty years since I taught American Lit to 11th graders in a high school in Washington, DC. After I’d taught the course a few times, I used to start the class with the question students would answer on the final exam: What does it mean to be American? In September, students answered glibly: duh, you have to be born here. But even as they said that, they could feel that it wasn’t right, so they would hack away at the edges of the answer: you have to have an American parent, or maybe an American passport. But a cursory look showed that didn’t work, either. First, not all Americans have passports and second, does the passport make a person American? The rest of the school year just made things more complicated.

Were the Pilgrims (born in Europe) and other early settlers American? We read some of William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation. Ok, the students said, the Pilgrims count as American (even though “America” didn’t exist at the time and obviously the original settlers weren’t born here); if you came to America for a better life, that counts. I complicated things: So, if people who fled their homeland in search of freedom count as American, what about people who do the same in modern times? We read short stories by Edwidge Danticat (American, born in Haiti) and Jhumpa Lahiri (American, born in England to Indian parents). Are their characters American?

What about the people who already lived on the continent when the colonists arrived? What of the Native Americans? (Honestly, I’m a little relieved to realize that even 20+ years ago we read at least one speech by a Native American, though we should have done much more.) And what if you didn’t choose to come? What of people who were enslaved? Surely Jim in Huckleberry Finn was American.

Maybe being American is about a set of values? We looked at Puritan leader (born in England) John Winthrop’s “City upon a Hill” (from his essay “A Model of Christian Charity”) and considered what he calls on fellow Puritans to try to create: a community of virtue, effort, and compassion. We read the beginning of the Declaration of Independence (written by Thomas Jefferson, born in the colony of Virginia) and excerpts of (French author) de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America.” Does he see in the mid-1800s what Winthrop dreams of two centuries earlier? Is that what Huck Finn seeks when he decides to “light out for the Territory”? Is it what Jay Gatsby is striving for as he reaches for the green light? What Janie longs for in Their Eyes Were Watching God?

Gatsby is definitely American – no question about it – but there is the pesky concern of the “foul dust [that] floated in the wake of his dreams.” Perhaps, students thought, Americans had strayed from important original values, as Jonathan Edwards (born in America) thundered in his famous 1741 sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Again, this gets complicated. In The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne’s (born in Europe) sin is the impetus for the whole novel, but in the end, (like Gatsby? unlike Gatsby?) she is the best of them all, except for maybe her daughter Pearl (born in America) – but Pearl takes her riches and moves to Europe. Hester stays in the New World. So who is American?

But, those are just characters, the students protested. True enough. But many real live Americans, good Americans, I insisted – Americans who shaped our nation – were sinners and criminals. Some students were doubtful – 20+ years ago was, I think, a more innocent time. Still, I said, Roger Williams (born in England) was banished from Massachusetts for advocating religious tolerance and the separation of church and state. We read Thoreau’s “On Civil Disobedience” and Martin Luther King, Jr’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” We read Walt Whitman, Zora Neale Hurston, Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, and more. One year we read My Antonia and made popcorn balls. Always we came back to our central question.

(How did I get them to read so much? I have no idea.)

By the end of the course, no matter what we read, we had a massive tangle. Americans, it seemed, could be born anywhere and live anywhere. They could be Americans by birth, by choice or by force. They could be saints and sinners, criminals and leaders. And then it was time for the exam. We ended where we started: “What does it mean to be an American?” The answers were always complicated.

****

Last week, on the 13-hour drive from South Carolina to Buffalo, my two sisters and I had plenty of time to talk. We usually see each other only once a year, and we never run out of conversation. This year, after a gas stop in West Virginia and a possible sighting of ICE agents, our talk turned to politics and family.

I guess you could call our family “blended,” but mostly I think of it as chaos held together by love. Even if I just tell you about the children (my six various siblings) who go with my dad and stepmom, things get complicated. My step grandmother was born Dutch and became an American; my stepmom is Alabaman through and through. I was born in the US but am now a dual citizen. My children, born and raised in Canada, are dual citizens. My partner is pure Canadian, but his mother, my mother-in-law, is a dual citizen; my father-in-law is 100% American. One of my sisters was born in Panama on an Air Force Base, but she doesn’t remember it at all and does not speak Spanish. Her daughter, my niece, born in the US, does speak Spanish and is dating a young man whose family is Mexican (his dad was born there; I can’t remember about his mom); he is American. My sister-in-law is a naturalized American who was born and raised in Cuba. Her mother is living with them (very legally) but is not yet a citizen. My brother, her husband, is pretty much a good ol’ boy (in the best of ways), but his kids have olive skin and dark hair and speak both Spanish and English. Except for my sister-in-law’s mother, I would say all these people are American. Even she may be a future American.

Adding in my mom’s side – she has four siblings – doesn’t make things any more clear. My uncle married a Filipina woman who is now American. One of their two sons, my cousins, just got out of the Marines, so definitely American, right? But when he was on tour, children in Saudi Arabia made the “slant eye” face at him, annoying him to no end. My mother’s sister married a Brit, and they live in the Cayman Islands; their child, my cousin, is American-British-Caymanian. He went to college in the US and worked in NYC before meeting an American woman and moving back to Cayman. Their children were born in Cayman. All except my uncle have American passports.

As a family, we are Lutheran, Catholic, Presbyterian, Jewish, atheist. We are white, Asian and Latino. We speak English, Spanish, Tagalog, and French. We are gay, straight and bi. We are addicts and we abstain. We have committed crimes and been arrested for them or gotten away with it. We have done good things and been recognized for them or overlooked. We have high school diplomas, bachelor’s degrees, master’s degrees, MDs or PhDs. We are business owners, doctors, teachers, CPAs, hourly employees, unemployed, researchers and more. We were born in six countries, and we currently live in three countries; we have lived in many, many more. We voted for Harris or for Trump or not at all. We are all American.

In the car, my sister worried about a friend who is married to a US permanent resident who was born in El Salvador. His parents brought him here when he was a toddler. As a young teen, he got involved with a gang and committed “a bad crime” (yes, it is bad). He was arrested and went to jail. He served his time, got out, got a job and got married. Now in his mid-40s, he has never committed another crime. As we drove north, he was on his way south to his annual check-in with immigration, and they were terrified. The family has money and a lawyer, and a no-deportation order. But they had no idea if, after he followed the law and went to the courthouse, he would come back out or be disappeared. “We talk about ICE deporting ‘criminals,’” my sister said, “and everyone seems to think that is ok; but he’s a good person who did an awful thing. He’s here legally. Should we deport him because of something he did when he was 15? Why can’t we talk about the human cost? When did we stop thinking of immigrants as fully human?”

As we drove through the mountains of West Virginia, I mused, “What does it mean, then, to be an American?” I still don’t know, exactly, but I am sure the definition should be rooted more in love than in hatred. If there’s one virtue that my loving, chaotic family and all those texts I used to teach have in common, it is compassion.

Well, maybe not “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” but really, that one is kind of over the top.

There, their, they’re

I’m losing them and there’s no time to think this all the way through. The class is smallish today because it’s Eid al-Fitr. Split-second decision: I go for it.

“Let’s play a game!” I clap my hands together. Faces look up. At least one cell phone gets pushed into a desk.

“A good game?” someone asks.

I shake my head. “Always a teacher game.” They’ve heard me say this so many times, I half expect them to chime in, but they don’t. Wow. We are really disengaged. Before they have time to complain, I start counting them off. “Remember your number. Use your fingers.”

Six groups of three. I tell the students to push their tables towards the back of the room. As the metal legs scrape across the linoleum floors, I write there, their, and they’re on whiteboards – one up front and one on either side of the room.

I turn around and clap again: “Everyone to the centre of the room!”

I wish I could tell you that they are excited, but mostly they sort of drag themselves suspiciously into what is generally the centre. Hmm… I am going to have to be the one to light this fire.

My brain churns. Clarity is key. On a good day, I’ve pre-planned the activity and thought through the steps, so I can give directions efficiently and effectively. Today, however, I’m winging it. Exams loom, the Chromebooks aren’t available, it’s a Monday…and it’s raining. The students are standing in the centre of the room, looking at me warily.

“Ok! Each group has three people. For every round of this game, one of those three people has to move AND it has to be a different person for each round. You can consult with each other, but every team member has to take a turn being it.”

Oh, now they’re paying attention. “It?” Yup.

I explain that I will read a sentence that uses one of the forms of there/ their/ they’re. The team whose runner touches the board with the correct form first will get a point. Then, we’ll do it again with new runners and a new sentence. I indicate the whiteboards with the various forms. I tell them that I plan to move fast, so they should have the next runner ready to go once the first one is done.

Chaos ensues. We whip through the sentences I had originally planned for us to do as a worksheet, then keep going with another handful. Students are laughing and sweaty. Heck, I am laughing and sweaty. I have to settle a few near-arguments about which form is correct. We pause for everyone to catch their breath, and I change the words on the board to its/ it’s. We play another round. Eventually, class is nearly over. We have just enough time to move the desks back. The winning team gets to choose a gift from the “box of terrible prizes.”

“These really are terrible,” one of them mutters, but it doesn’t matter. We’ve reviewed, and the students are ready for the homophones that I know are on the test. Plus, it was fun.

****

(Pull back the curtain)
“But… how did you think of that?” my younger colleague asks when I tell the story after school. It’s a good question. In the classroom, we often have to think on our feet, and I’ve realized that I have a series of questions that help me make choices:

What do the students need to know?
Tricky homophones
Why do they need to know it?
For the test
- Why is it on the test?
  Silly or not, using these words correctly is an entrée into a certain level of education/ standing in the world; this is clout.
What’s standing in their way?
Boredom, widely varied levels of knowledge, lack of urgency (they don’t care about this)
What options do we have to learn this material?
Worksheets (boring), computers (someone else booked them), independent work (won’t hit the Goldilocks zone in this class – it will be either too easy or too hard), pair work, group work…
How does this group of students learn?
They like talking and moving, but they don’t 100% trust each other.
They do well with competition and speed but not too much pressure.
What would make this memorable for them?
Movement, working at the board
How can I put all that together?

It doesn’t always work, but this is more or less where my brain goes when I’m planning. What? Why? How? What would make this stick?

And, of course, it never hurts to embrace a little chaos.