Category: #SOL19

Gratitude at work #SOL19 5/31

Today’s post was inspired by Tammy over at Tammy’s Reading/Writing Life. Her gratitude list felt like just the right way to start a day. 

What I am grateful for at work

I am grateful that my English department colleagues are some of the smartest and most well-read people I have ever worked with and that they offer students a wide range of ways to approach texts.

I am grateful for raucous, hilarious lunchtime conversations about everything from Hamlet to hell-raising.

I am grateful that we have a kitchen in the English office, and I’m grateful to the custodian for giving us a cast-off round table a few years ago so that everyone can sit around talking at lunch and to a department that welcomes all comers – especially supply teachers (Canadian for “substitute teachers) and those new to the school.

I’m grateful for the freedom to teach my class in ways that are supported by research but which are new to me. I’m grateful that my administration and my department trust me enough to let me try new ways to encourage growth in our students.

I am grateful that our librarian is incredibly enthusiastic about books and reading, that she shares the library with me all the time, lets my class have first dibs on new arrivals, will work with my struggles one-on-one and generally supports my crazy literacy ideas

I’m grateful for a principal who loves to talk pedagogy, who believes that relationships are what make education, and who always – even when he drives me crazy – starts with the question, “will it help the students learn?”.

I’m grateful for vice principals who demonstrate respect for the students they encounter – and who are effective and supportive.

I’m grateful for a partner teacher in Spec Ed (Canadian for Special Education) who is committed, dynamic and visionary.

I’m grateful that the EAs (educational assistants) are some of the best I’ve ever worked with: smart, funny, and deeply focused on our students.

Good heavens, I am realizing that I’m grateful to work with so many amazing people -and I can’t possibly enumerate them all here (but I’ll start): our head custodian who provides laughter and counsel, our office staff who are ridiculously competent and have the best Halloween costumes, our Guidance Dept who are tirelessly supportive of students, our IT support who is constantly on the go & saving our bacon, my colleagues who share complaints & compliments freely. I feel like I could write whole posts about person after person.

I’m grateful for the dynamism that is generated by the Arts programs. Our school is full of kids dancing down the hallway, singing in the stairwells, painting on the walls (sanctioned!). I’m grateful for the student performances that inspire: music, dance, words and images permeate our every day. And I”m grateful to the teachers for providing the structure and the time to make that happen.

I’m grateful that our school actively works to make spaces for all sorts of students – physically disabled, talented in the arts, behavior challenged, gay, trans, LD, newcomers to Canada, kids from down the street. We take our commitment to welcoming all very seriously.

I’m realizing as I write that what it comes down to is that I am grateful for a team of people who believe deeply in the potential of all of our students and who hold each other up as we strive to offer our students the best that we can.

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Sing! #SOL19 4/31

Where did this start? Do I blame the very enthusiastic gym teacher who came in and jokingly shamed the English Department into participating in Buskerfest? “It’s for a good cause,” he said. “Your department didn’t do anything last year.” But what should the English teachers do? Declaim poetry? Offer our services to write love letters? We are a bookish crowd, not well suited to busking.

Maybe I should lay the blame more firmly at the feet of my 75-year-old colleague, who has never met a crazy idea he didn’t want to try, and his partner-in-crime, a former drama teacher with a penchant for performance? Either way, when the Phys Ed teacher told us that the French department was singing French folk songs in the lobby, one of those two said that we would do karaoke. WE.

I had never actually done karaoke, though I’ve watched in awe as others sing with great enthusiasm in front of complete strangers. And, while I have been known to dance to the songs that play over the PA system before classes begin, I had certainly never done karaoke in front of my students and colleagues.

But here I stood, next to a jerry-rigged home karaoke machine in the middle of the main foyer, belting out “I Will Survive” in front of the principal, my laughing colleagues and an alarming number of students. I’ll admit, I was having fun, but I was also mortified.

Maybe my obvious combination of enthusiasm and embarrassment was just what the crowd needed: soon, one of my former students stood and joined me and my colleagues – a little vocal support or just wanting to be part of the fun? I’ll never know. As we finished, two more students, both new to our school and struggling to fit in, were at the mic, and the student who had joined me, joined them. Next, a quiet grade 9 student offered up an Ariana Grande song (“It’s the clean version, Miss,” she whispered, just before she took the mic and sang to the crowd). More and more people came – another teacher, some dance students – and my personal favourite: one of our students with a physical disability sang Shawn Mendes’s “It’s In My Blood” from his wheelchair as an EA held the mic. His delivery of the lines “Sometimes I feel like giving up/ But I just can’t/ It isn’t in my blood” sent shivers down my spine.

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Shawn Mendes had better look out!

In the end, the English Department karaoke busking raised $123.65 during that lunch – but what it really did, somehow, was give everyone a place to sing. It’s the first time I’ve ever really understood karaoke, and I’m already thinking about a song for next year.

 

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Country girl? #SOL19 3/31

This summer my sister and I stayed at my dad and stepmom’s lake house for a week while they went camping with our children. It was delightful. I have been a city girl for a long time now, so I relished my time in the “country.”

Since the grandparents had all the kids, my sister and I generously did a few chores during our week off. We watered the plants, tidied the house, fed the cat, did all the laundry we could find, even went through old canned goods and got rid of the ones that were seriously expired.

But no one had said anything about the chickens. And clearly living creatures needed to be looked after. So… how much do you feed chickens? How often? We didn’t want to bother our stepmother, the main chicken keeper, and we really didn’t want them to come home early with all the kids, so the internet was our friend. At no point did we pause to realize that our extremely competent stepmother probably did not leave her beloved chickens to starve while she was gone.

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Chickens are fun to watch.

Once we’d finished our basic research about chicken feeding, I let myself into the coop, confident that I could handle this chore. As I entered, I noticed that the top of the wire mesh roof was covered in rotting leaves, and I decided to clear the leaves as an extra bonus to my super-daughter work. I started poking and pushing at the decaying debris and, of course, it rained down all over my head, into my eyes, onto my shoulders, and right down into my bra because, of course, I was wearing sundress. As I stood there, covered in itchy, smelly leaf rot, the thought “I am not stupid. Why did I do this?” ran through my head.

I probably should have just left the coop then, but I was worried about those chickens, so I brushed off what leaf pieces I could and continued with my mission. It turned out that the chickens had a feeder, so I assumed they had enough food, but what about water? I looked around the coop – my stepmother is no slouch: these chickens have multiple rooms – and eventually found a small water bottle. It honestly looked like something I’d put on a hamster cage, not nearly big enough for four chickens, but I filled it anyway. Still, I continued to worry: there was no way that was enough water. I noticed the chickens milling around a white bucket precariously perched on some cement blocks. A water bucket! When I looked in to check the water level, I noticed lots of green mold growing inside, so… I decided to continue my super-daughter act and clean it. I was still wearing my cute sundress.

How hard can it be to clean a water bucket for chickens? I looked up at the mess of hoses attached to the garage spigot. There were at least five along with some sort of crazy thing that you move around to make water flow out of one hose or another according to your needs. But, they were just hoses, how hard could it be? About five minutes later, after some curses and some water spraying in unexpected directions, I finally managed to get water into the bucket. The mold did not come off. I made the hose spray harder. The water rebounded out of the bucket and all over me, but the mold held on.

At this point my city thinking clicked in, and I went inside, got a kitchen sponge to clean the bucket, noticed the dish soap, and grabbed that, too. And, voila!, my city solution worked: the bucket was clean. Hooray! I stood back to look proudly at my handiwork and had a terrible thought: Are chickens sensitive to dish soap? I had no idea. I did a very thorough rinse of the bucket.

This process took at least 15 minutes, and the chickens glared accusingly from their coop the entire time. They knew that I had no idea what I was doing. I had taken their water and was clearly incompetent. They clustered around the door, watching, waiting, judging.

Triumphantly returning the chickens’ glares, I returned to the cage and placed the now-clean, thoroughly rinsed, and completely refilled water bucket on the uneven cement blocks. And it leaked. A lot. Water went everywhere. The chickens were visibly delighted, clucking and pecking at the wet ground, at the stream of water, at my toes. I repositioned the bucket. No dice. I fiddled with the spouty-bit that was supposed to let the water out only when they pecked at it. More water flowed, and the coop turned into a muddy mess.

Finally, soaked, rotten leaf debris still in my hair and bra, sweat running down my back and cleavage, and flip-flops covered in mud from the mess I’d made in the coop, I gave up. My stepmother was returning tomorrow. I would just have to ask how to take care of chickens.

P.S. She had left the coop completely prepared for her absence, and I had broken the water bucket beyond repair. She made a new one and I haven’t been in that coop since.

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Phone home

“Da-an’s in trouble!” A young girl’s voice echoed through the phone on my end; I could only imagine how it echoed through the house on the other end. There was a brief rustle as someone else picked up the receiver, and I overheard a muffled curse.

“Hello?” His mother’s voice was wary.

I launched into my spiel. I was so nervous that I talked without pausing until I finished with “…so that’s why I called.”

Silence. Then she muttered, “Well, thanks.” I hung up.

I was doing my student teaching. In our Classroom Management class – a label, by the way, which I dismissed as euphemistic. “Just call it ‘discipline,’” I groused. – one suggestion was the “positive phone call home.” I can’t remember if the professor suggested calling about the hard kids or if I dreamed that up, but that’s what I decided to do: I decided to find something good about the toughest kids in the class and call home. I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

Dan was in my French class and he had approximately zero interest in learning French. In fact, given that we were in a poor neighborhood in Portland, OR, I would guess that most of the students were in that class because Spanish didn’t fit in their timetables and the teacher was relatively new. Dan was a big, athletic kid who came to class most days sweating and heaving from his lunchtime basketball games. He could not sit still, talked constantly and was mostly a royal pain in the tuchus. On any given day, Dan could easily send the whole class sideways.

I was ridiculously young and enthusiastic, so I had made a few changes since I took over – thank you, Classroom Management class – and Dan was responding well. We’d redirected his unending comments into French and he was leading the class in actually speaking French. So, I called home.

After his mom hung up, I was stunned. That had not gone as I had planned. Chagrined, I turfed my plans to call a few more kids and reflected that not all good theories work well in practice. Boy, was I wrong.

The next day, Dan came bounding into class and gave me a big sweaty hug. “I GOT ICE CREAM!” As it turned out, no one had EVER called home to say something good about Dan. His mom had called his Dad, a trucker, on the road and had taken him and his siblings out for ice cream. He was one of my best students and a class leader right up until my student teaching ended.

And I was hooked. Since that day the “positive phone call home” has been one of my secret weapons. I use it all the time. Knowing that I want to call home and say something nice about each of my students means that I watch them differently. I actively and regularly look for what they do well. When I see it, I call. I can always find something good. Always.

Parents are regularly stunned by this call. Even parents of the best students rarely get positive feedback outside of report cards. Almost never do they get a call to tell them something kind, proactive or thoughtful that their child has done. I am regularly greeted by stunned silence, though by now I have learned to slow down while I speak. One father cried because his son – who, to be fair, was *really* struggling with all things related to school – had never heard a teacher say something nice about his child. One mother whooped and laughed, “You made my day! Heck, you’ve made my week! This is the best.” Most just say thank you.

And the kids? Well, like Dan, a few mention the call. Monday comes (because I love calling home on Fridays and making the whole weekend start well) and a quiet voice will say, “I can’t believe you called my mom. That was great.” But many – often the least engaged – never say a thing. Still, they keep coming back to class. They keep learning. And someone somewhere in their life knows that I am trying to really see their child.

We all want to be seen.

When should you call home to say something nice? Here are a few suggestions…
Call in the first few weeks.
Call when you’re upset with your class. You will remember what they do well.
Call when you see something good happen. Call that day: at lunch, right before you head out the door to go home, whenever. The calls are rarely long.
Call on a Friday. Or a Monday. Or whenever. It does not matter: just call. It might just change YOUR life.

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