Bangs #SOL24 10/31

On Friday, my best friend from high school texted me a picture of my high school yearbook senior photo.

Look at those bangs! They started about ⅓ of the way back on my head. Every morning, I carefully curled them, brushed them to the side, and then hairsprayed them until they were stuck together in one giant flap of “feathered” hair. And, though you can’t tell here, that blue sweater has sparkles in it. Sparkles! Oh, the 80s.

That picture was still on my mind on Saturday when I went for a hair cut. Chuckling, I pulled out my phone and showed my stylist. I couldn’t quite tell if he was horrified or impressed. He chatted on about 80s and 90s clothes and hairstyles, while I stifled a laugh: He wasn’t around for those eras, so what does he know?

The picture must have stayed on his mind, too, because after my colour was done, as he was starting the cut, he said, “You keep saying you want something different. How about bangs?”

It was my turn to look horrified. “No, no,” he reassured me, “not like in the picture. You know, something more modern.” I still looked doubtful. “I wouldn’t recommend it if I didn’t think it would look good.”

So I said yes, and now I have bangs again for the first time, I think, since that high school photo. Way back then, in English class, Libby had once declared, “everyone looks better with bangs.” (At least I think it was Libby. It could have been Anne. At any rate, one of the stylish girls.) I haven’t thought of that comment in a long time, but she might have been right. If nothing else, I like the new look: it hides some of my wrinkles.

Учителката #SOL24 8/31

We had only been talking for a few minutes when her phone rang. She glanced at the screen and said, “I have to take this. It’s my father. I’m so sorry.” With an apologetic look, she answered. I looked down at my notebook to give her what little privacy the conference room afforded.

“Говоря с учителката на И”

I looked up, startled. I had perfectly understood that sentence. She said it again, adding “да, да но…” Yup, my student’s mother was definitely speaking Bulgarian.

She hung up and started to apologize again – after all, she’s the one who had asked for this parent-teacher conference – but I interrupted and said, “Are you Bulgarian?” She looked at me quizzically, so I added, “I speak a little Bulgarian; I could understand what you said.”

Soon, the parent-teacher conference had taken a decidedly friendly turn. We talked about Bulgaria, which city she was from, where I had lived, and more. She told me a funny story about getting married in Canada: Bulgarians nod their head up and down to say “no” and side to side for “yes.” As she stood in front of the judge, answering questions so she could marry her fiancé, she kept saying “yes” but, in her enthusiasm, moving her head “no” – to the point where the judge decided he couldn’t accept her verbal answers. They had to call in an interpreter to verify her responses. “I tried to explain,” she laughed, “but I could tell the judge was worried.” In turn, I told her about trying to gauge students’ understanding during a lesson and finding myself completely bewildered by the sea of heads shaking all different directions.

“But… when did you live there?” she wanted to know.

I had to calculate. “Um… 1995? Nearly thirty years ago!”

“And you still remember the language?!” Her astonishment was clear.

“Oh no!” I laughed. “You just said about half of what I remember. The first half of what you said was more or less what I memorized so that I could leave phone messages for people. And the second part was about teachers.”

I spent a year teaching in Bulgaria. I loved it – the teaching, the country, the people, the language. As I started to make friends, I also started needing to call people. The problem was, no one lived alone in Bulgaria, so I always needed to ask to speak with the one person I knew – who was almost always the only English speaker in the home. I quickly learned to say, “May I speak with…?” (Мога ли да говоря с) Then, I waited. If there was silence followed by a familiar voice, I’d found my friend. If instead there was a long string of what was gibberish to my years, I took a deep breath and said, “Кажи му, че Аманда се обади”… “Tell him that Amanda called.” And then I hung up. Because that was all I could say. I was pretty much terrified every time I made a phone call all year, which means that those two phrases are tattooed in my brain.

I can also still remember bits of what I used to call the “train conversation.” That’s the conversation you have when you take the train from your town to the next one if you’re a blond foreigner in a sea of dark-haired Bulgarians. It’s pretty much always the same: Where are you from? What are you doing here? How long have you been here? How long are you staying? Do you like our country?” The whole train conversation lasts just under 10 minutes, and I must have had the conversation dozens of times in several languages.

All of this came together this week when the parent was speaking because what she said was, “Dad, I’m speaking with I’s teacher.” And I can 100% remember all of those words – apparently even 30 years after I last needed them.

The rest of the conference went swimmingly. Shared language can do that. I’m confident that we can work as a team to support her child for the rest of the semester. And I get to spend a few days reminiscing about a year of amazing experiences – and trying to call up a few more words.

(Written for “Multi-Lingual Friday”)

Marching through the years #SOL23 25/31

I first saw this format on Elisabeth’s post, and she, in turn, got it from Erica. And Molly, too, wrote about how having her phone available has changed how she takes note of the world. If you follow me on FB or Instagram, you know that I have been walking every day since early in the pandemic and that I started taking pictures not long after I started walking, so I was intrigued by photo posts. Today I had the time to go through my photos and choose from all the March 25th pictures available. Talk about a slice of life!

March 25, 2023 (today)

I walked 5km this morning & took a few pictures. There are a few green shoots here & there, but mostly we still have a lot of snow & ice on the ground. Yesterday, I wrote a haiku that matches today’s picture.

Ice stretched thin across
the mud puddles in the road.
Crystalline beauty.

March 25, 2022

Reflection – tree & wires in a piece of glass on the ground. I remember this being one street over and near our friend Laura’s place. Today (2023) she has an article in the Globe and Mail. I can’t get over how lucky I am to live in this neighbourhood with these people.

March 25, 2021

This makes me laugh because I took a picture almost exactly like this yesterday. Apparently I often spend March looking for colour.

March 25, 2020 – pandemic March

We had spent 8 months in a two-bedroom apartment while our house was being renovated. We finally moved back in the weekend of March 13. (Yes, the weekend things started shutting down – how lucky were we?) The boys were happy to be home & very close after spending a long time sharing a small bedroom.

March 25, 2019

Sometimes, you get home from school, throw your backpack on a pile of snow at the end of the driveway, and go play in the backyard with your friend – just because you can. (Squint & you can see two boys playing in the background.)

March 25, 2018

On the move. Mr. 7 was ecstatic about his newfound ability to get to the top of the doorway. Both boys started parkour classes (and one is at parkour right now as I write!).

March 25, 2018

Meeting our friend’s baby. Just got a hilarious video of that baby – now a kindergartner! – doing a butt wiggle yesterday.

March 25, 2017

Mr. 6 snuggled up with his buddy. Little did we know that the ipad was prep for the pandemic to come.

March 25, 2012

I can do it myself!

What happens in Arizona… #SOL23 23/31

Today is parent-teacher conferences. As I got dressed, I put on a particular necklace – not a necklace, really, more an amulet, maybe – and I immediately felt a little stronger. Let me tell you a story that I don’t quite believe…

About six years ago, we were visiting my in-laws in Tucson, and my mother-in-law scheduled our whole family for an energy work session with someone she knew. I didn’t really believe in energy work, but I did (and do) really believe in my mother-in-law, and I pretty much always believe in spending time lying down and letting people try to make me feel better, so I said yes.

I’d never tried anything like this before, but I figured it wouldn’t hurt anything. The kids went first, and I was frankly astonished when the therapist (? energy worker? I have no idea) hesitated and then focused on a place on my child’s body that did, indeed, require healing, but that he could not possibly have known about. There was more, but afterwards, when he explained what he had felt and done during the session, he commented about that part of his work. I was intrigued. Nevertheless, when it was my turn for energy work, I wasn’t expecting much. I lay down, assuming I would feel nothing, anticipating thirty minutes of quiet.

Now, the thing is, that I’m not in Arizona anymore and this happened a while ago and I’m still largely a reading/science type of person, so when I talk about this it all feels like a bunch of hooey. If I were reading this, I would probably not believe it, and if you don’t believe this, I’m ok with that, but let me tell you, whatever that man did, I could feel it – and he never even touched me. It was intense. At the end, he told me that he had pulled a sword out of my gut (which, again, is ridiculous) and I shocked myself by looking directly at him and saying, “Give that back. I need it.” Well.

He did not give it back – because even an energy-work-person will not put a metaphorical energy sword back into your belly because that sounds like a terrible idea, even if it had previously been metaphysically there – and I felt oddly bereft for the next day or two. Finally, my mother-in-law (who, as I said, I fully believe in) found me and offered me a necklace-type thing: a green and white spheroid stone set in an odd elaborate metal bezel and fixed to a brown cord. She told me that she had bought it years ago; it had been sold to her as an amulet of protection and she felt that it had called her. Now, she said, she thought it was mine.

I wore it for days and, placebo or not, I felt better. Eventually, I put it away and only pulled it out every now and then. Even today, when I put it on, I feel powerfully protected – and I know for sure that whether that protection comes from the universe, or the stone or the depth of my mother-in-law’s love for me, it doesn’t matter. One way or another, the energy is there.

Parking #SOL23 17/31

I used to drive a school bus. Yup, you read that right. When I taught in Washington DC the school was so small that PE requirements were fulfilled through after school teams and young teachers got our commercial drivers license so we could drive the teams we coached.

Most of the school’s bright blue fleet was short buses, but Amy and I coached the (giant) middle school soccer team, so we drove the full-sized bus all over the DC area. We regularly garnered startled second looks from drivers as they passed us on the highway, but that didn’t bother us: we knew we were more than competent. Mel, Head custodian and general fixer of everything (who was also in charge of the buses) knew it, too, which is why he trusted Amy and me to park the size bus after all the kids had been picked up.

Because the school was in the middle of one of DC’s downtown neighborhoods, there was only one nearby space that could accommodate the big bus. The operation required two people and a lot of nerve. We negotiated narrow one-way streets until we arrived perpendicular to a long alleyway. Here, we maneuvered our blue behemoth in a fifteenish-point turn, then threaded our way between two buildings, the sides of the bus mere inches from the brick walls on either side. About a third of the way up the alley, a pipe snaked up the side of the building on the right; a few feet further on, a meter jutted out of the building on the left. There was no room for error.

Once we made it through the alley, we emerged into the relative freedom of a very small parking lot, where we slid the bus into a spot right against a wall. Finishing was always exhilarating.

Which explains why I blushed with pleasure tonight as a group of us left the restaurant and the woman at the next table touched my arm and said, “I watched you park your minivan. It was amazing.” I looked out the window, suddenly realizing that everyone inside had been able to see me parallel park in a very tight spot, then I grinned, “well, I used to drive a school bus.”

Compliments #SOL23 11/31

Years ago, my colleague, Aaron Bachmann, walked into our office one day and told us that he had learned that people don’t get enough compliments and that, when they did, something like 90% of them focused on appearance. He was determined to change that.

Aaron set about giving us all compliments – real ones. It was hilarious and cheesy, but it also felt good. And he kept it up. He gave compliments all the time, to the point where even now, years later, whenever I think of him I smile. Sure, I remember him fondly (we haven’t worked together in almost two decades, more’s the pity), but it’s more than that: when I think about Aaron, I feel better about myself.

There’s tons of research about the power of compliments (here, for example) and, naturally, about how to do it “right” (here), but you already know the truth: voicing your sincere appreciation of someone else does all sorts of wonderful things.

Now, I have *no* research on this next part, but I think most teachers don’t get a lot of compliments – or at least not the kind we can fully believe. I mean, I love when a student gives me a compliment, but most of the time a part of me is also a tiny bit wary because students have a clear interest (grades) in telling me that they like what we’re doing. (This is why students who stay in touch and say nice things later on are really meaningful to me, even though I’m pretty terrible at writing back in a timely manner.) But the truth of our job is that we spend most of our days alone in a room with students. We spend our days trying to meet the needs of many humans, and we are often all too aware of the ways in which we don’t live up to our high standards. Parents are rightly concerned about their child’s development and happiness, so they don’t often give compliments either: when things are going well, they leave us alone; when things aren’t going well, we hear about it. As for administrators, well, that is highly dependent on the administrator, but my experience is that most high school principals are not big on compliments.

This week, our Literacy Coach, Xan Woods, came to our school. When she wasn’t assessing students or compiling data or supporting other people, she had time to watch me teach. This is one of her go-to supports: whenever she can, she observes, then provides feedback. Xan knows that these past few weeks have been extraordinarily difficult for me, and she knows how I’ve struggled with my own concerns about my competency in the Reading class I’m teaching. I was excited to have her sit in because I knew she would have good feedback and new strategies to help me improve.

But here’s what actually happened: at the end of the day, she complimented me. She noticed that the students in the class are starting to respond to the instruction. She told me about the various ways she saw them support one another. She pointed out that they were willing to write on the board (a huge step forward), and that every student read aloud – not just in choral and echo reading, but at least one sentence on their own (a miracle) – for the first time. She was genuinely excited for me and said, “You’re amazing! You’re really doing it!” then talked about strategies that were working. Later, she posted a short video clip of me, teaching, on Twitter and outlined things that were going well. I almost blushed. She does this for many of the teachers she observes, so that we can learn from each other as we teach in our separate classrooms. It’s incredible.

I can’t even begin to express how much this meant. She didn’t say I was perfect. She didn’t say that there were no improvements we could make. She simply noticed where I was doing a good job, and for a while, the difficulties that have been dogging me felt less heavy. When I taught the next day, I was a bit more relaxed, a bit more confident in my choices. Xan made a difference.

This writing challenge, too, lifts me up. Yesterday, a high school friend, Katie, told me she loves the time of year when I publish every day. I glowed. Maybe Stacey and Melanie and the others at Two Writing Teachers knew this would happen. Maybe they knew teachers needed this space. Every March so many teachers use their precious time to write something and publish it every day. We make ourselves vulnerable in ways I don’t think we always share: Who will read (and maybe judge) our public writing? What if, as a teacher, I publish something that is not very well-written?(Um, I do this every March. 31 days in a row is a lot of published writing; some of it is necessarily not great.) Whose story can I share? What may I reveal about myself? Others? The school? It’s a lot. Yet every day, people reply to our posts and say wonderful things. We write to each other, sharing connections, observations, thoughts and, always, compliments. For one month, we lift each other high and say what Xan said to me: “You’re amazing! You’re really doing it!”

Aaron knew it all those years ago: compliments change everything. So, to Aaron and Xan, to the people behind Two Writing Teachers, and to everyone who is writing and everyone who is commenting, thank you. Your words change the world for the better.

Try to remember

Last night, I went into Mr. 12’s bedroom to give him a kiss goodnight and found this

That is a trash can balanced on the edge of his bed. Naturally, I asked him if he wanted me to put it on the floor. “No!” he sat up. “It’s for my memory.”

Pardon? I must have looked at him funny because he answered my unspoken question.

“You know, like Dad does.”

I was still confused. As far as I know, my partner has never placed a plastic garbage can precariously close to the edge of our bed in honour of his memory.

“Like the clothespin.”

That little tidbit was no help at all. I wondered if perhaps he was sleep-talking.

He sighed, “You know how Dad does weird things so he doesn’t forget something else? This is to remind me that I owe D money and I have to bring it tomorrow.”

Ah-ha! Andre has recently been using a memory technique where he does one thing to help him remember to do another. So we have a blue clothespin on our dishwasher detergent to remind him to… something. He’s also trying to create new habits by placing something we want to remember near something we already use. So, this is happening in our kitchen

And, while parents hear the platitude that “your children are watching you” so often that it is banal, I realized that somehow I had begun to think that my preteen and teen were, in fact, no longer watching us at all. Turns out, I was wrong in the best of ways.

But I still don’t know what the clothespin helps us remember.

Grief #SOL21 6/21

The first time I understood someone else’s grief was the second time I fell in love with a poem. The day after our beloved Calculus teacher, Doc, died of cancer, the principal announced her passing over the PA.

Doc loved teaching and, I think now, loved us. After her diagnosis, she had taken a summer trip and then decided to keep teaching for as long as she could. We would be her last class – not something we understood at all.

Sometimes, when we were struggling with a concept or deep into a problem, she’d order pizza to be delivered to the school’s back door & sneak it up to the classroom. We’d stay in and do math through lunch. No one ever complained.

Once, when my home life was falling apart, she asked me to come to her house and babysit her granddaughter. I still remember the long quiet afternoon away from home, swaying with the baby as Norah Jones sang “Don’t Know Why.”

After the principal’s dry announcement, Mrs Jackson – 9th grade Algebra – came on. In a voice that quavered at first, she began: “Do not go gentle into that good night”

With each line, each verse her voice grew stronger, until the end: “Do not go gentle into that good night./ Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

Was there silence then? It was high school; experience tells me that most of the students went right back to talking. But that’s not what I remember: I remember silence. I remember Dylan Thomas’s words reverberating through homeroom, through the hallways, through the school. I remember knowing that I would cry when I got home.

I had no idea that a poem could stop the world like that. I had no idea that grief could echo in empty spaces. I know now.

Now I know.

*Thanks to* https://twowritingteachers.org for hosting this annual challenge

A nighttime visitor

I was reading Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane. It isn’t a properly scary book – not like scary movies, anyway – though I suppose I wouldn’t know since I don’t watch scary movies – but it is vaguely terrifying. It’s about being a child and, well, let’s call it “menacing”: no jump scares; lots of tense terror. Whatever it was, I could not put it down because I was too afraid to stop reading.

Sometime after midnight, I gave myself a stern talking to – I was a grown woman with children for heaven’s sake. I gave myself a little leeway since my husband was away on a trip, leaving me alone in our bed, but my visiting in-laws were asleep in the guest room right next to my room. They would expect me to wake up tomorrow at a normal hour, and I needed to get some sleep.

I turned another page. And another. I could not look away from the darkness that wormed its way out of the book and into my mind. Eventually, my eyes drooped closed. I had just enough consciousness left to reach up and turn off the reading light.

As my mind slipped fretfully towards slumber, the pocket door that led into our bedroom scraped open. My eyes flew open and the rest of my body shut down: I could no more move than scream. A tall, pale figure came slowly into view, almost stumbled – just there! – hovered for a moment, then turned and glided away, scraping the door closed as it left.

My lips had gone numb; so had my fingertips. I remained paralyzed in the bed, listening for some indication that what I had just seen was real, afraid that what I’d just seen was real. After seconds, minutes, hours had passed, I raised a trembling hand to the chain above my head and pulled. The light came on, though it now seemed nearly powerless against the dark. My hand groped towards the bedside table. I found the book and opened it again.

I read all the way to the end. I cannot remember when I was finally able to sleep, when the characters were as safe as they were going to be, when pure exhaustion overtook my fear.

I stumbled down to the kitchen the next morning. Everyone was chipper, everything was bright: Grandpa Jim’s beard practically glowed white; Grandma Shirley hummed and sang while she made breakfast. Hollow-eyed, I watched, wondering if I should say anything about last night’s visitation. Would they believe me? Had I imagined it?

As we settled in to eat, Grandpa Jim started to talk, “A funny thing happened to me last night.” My head snapped up; my sense were wildly alert. Had he seen it, too? “I got up to go to the bathroom, got turned around and walked right into your bedroom before I realized it. I’m just glad I didn’t wake you up.” He returned to his granola and I stared at him for a full minute before I burst into hysterical laughter.

Not a ghost; just a grandpa.

I’ve never forgotten the book. You could do worse than to read The Ocean at the End of Lane as Halloween approaches – or anytime, really.

Many thanks to TwoWritingTeachers.org for hosting this weekly gathering of writers.

In the closet

When I had my second child, I was teaching at a relatively rural high school. Sure, some of the kids lived in the town, and more lived on large properties, but a fair number lived on farms, too. There were stories of kids coming to school on snowmobiles in the winter or sneaking off to go fishing or hunting when the season opened. I am pretty firmly a city girl, so a lot of this was new to me.

This was also the school where I started working in a program euphemistically called “Student Success.” The students in my room had not, in fact, met with success. The class was small, but every student was there to catch up on at least one and usually two or more subjects which they previously had failed.

I loved every minute of it. The room was full of all kinds of kids who were there for all kinds of reasons. The small number of students meant that I could get to know them and that they could get to know one another. The fact that they had already failed a course meant that any movement forward was a success. We shared a lot, laughed a lot, and celebrated a lot.

For those same reasons, I used myriad strategies to help students stay focused, persist through difficult moments, and generally learn how to learn. One of those strategies involved using the small office/closet/storage space next to our classroom so that a student could have some quiet. This was *never* a punishment, the door was always open, and we didn’t use it often, but sometimes it was just what we needed when someone was looking for focus.

I was particularly grateful for that little space when I returned from parental leave. I was still nursing, so having a private place to pump was fantastic – no more hiding in the corner of the classroom away from the door or hoping no one looked over at me in the staff room. Ah, the luxury of my own small room. It was heaven.

Of course, I still used it with students sometimes, so I carefully packed away the various plastic bits and bobs and zipped everything back into place every time. Or almost every time. Except, apparently, for the time when K went in there to finish up a test in peace. He was a particularly exuberant kid, not known for his ability to sit still or focus for any length of time. He worked on his family farm and regularly regaled us with tales from his daily life. He loved to talk. So I wasn’t at all surprised to see K’s face at the door mere moments after he had left for the quiet room. But I was surprised that he was, momentarily, speechless. His face was red and he was hopping from foot to foot, sputtering.

Alarmed, I jumped up. “K! What is it?”

He stared at me, eyes wide with horror, “You put me in the MILKING ROOM? THE MILKING ROOM! Miss, I CAN’T WORK IN THERE!!”

I nearly fell off of my chair laughing – so did everyone else. K took a while to settle down again. Needless to say, no tests were written for the rest of that class period and that particular room was no longer in use for the rest of the school year.

The milking room. Still makes me laugh.