What to write in a rough patch

I’ve been having a bit of a rough go of it these past few weeks. I’m a teacher and it’s mid-October, so this is not really a surprise. But it does mean that I’m having trouble deciding what to write. I skipped posting last week in the hopes that sometime this week a post would magically appear. And one did – then another and another. Each day offers me another opportunity to catch a moment and pin it down. Still, I’m having trouble choosing: each one feels like I’m lying a little. Do I tell you how hard things feel right now? Do I talk about my students and our struggles? Or do I capture the ephemeral grace of a moment of connection? Where do I focus? The positive or the negative? Each day, each class period, each activity, each minute is full of ups and downs. Teaching is astonishingly emotional work.

I try to count my blessings – I really do. My classes are small, my colleagues are supportive, my family is amazing. My students are doing their very best (even when it doesn’t look like they are). I have so much.

But sometimes counting my blessings feels like ignoring the complicated reality of my life. For example, I am overwhelmed by the literacy needs in my classroom and the trauma so many of my students have experienced in their lives. What happened to result in these children reading and writing at these levels? How is it that they have come this far and cannot visualize what they read? How is it that reading and writing are chores they do only when forced, things that are completely unrelated to their lives? At what point did we decide that these children – their unique thoughts, their singular purpose – were expendable? Because I’m pretty sure that someone gave up on them a long time ago. And it wasn’t their parents. How can I possibly convince them that they are important to our world when all I have are 90 days?

Can I be grateful for my colleagues and appreciative of the good will of those who run our school board while still being disappointed when our precious professional development time is sliced and diced into pre-chosen bits that don’t nourish our actual professional lives? Can I be a critical friend to my employer? Who do I ask for the support that we desperately need in order to become the educators our students deserve?

Even outside of school things are complex. My family lifts me up, but I need space to talk about the complicated bits of my home life – like the four of us (plus the cats) living in a two-bedroom apartment for months while our home is being renovated.

I know I will look back and laugh. I can even tell you some of the things I will laugh about because there is humour in all of this. I could tell you about the amusing conversation I had with a student about a book (let’s just say that he does NOT know what he’s reading), about the staff’s subtly terrible behaviour during an unproductive PD moment (we really are worse than our students), about how a sex worker buzzed our apartment door repeatedly last night because her client was not picking up. Sometimes laughter is all I’ve got.

But I’m so tired. I’m tired. And I guess that’s my slice of life right now.

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[Post-script, added by husband: What Amanda has neglected to mention and which I view as highly relevant to this post is that, up until last week, she was taking four courses simultaneously. She’s down to one, but it involved a super-human push. Picture the most recent incarnation of Wonder Woman, but with less armour and combat and more research and writing. This, on top of all of the above. And still she’s there 100% for her students. I would tell you she’s amazing but she would be too shy to include it in her post.]

Hats off

Somewhere in the middle of the assembly, I realized that I had become someone I didn’t want to be. I was fuming, so angry I couldn’t appreciate the talented students that I was supposedly watching. I had spent more minutes than I care to count glaring at the back of my students’ heads, wishing that there was some way I could get them in trouble.

Oh, I had every right to be angry: their behaviour was terrible. This was the first big assembly of the year – at our Arts School we have four talent shows each year – and I was responsible for bringing my class. In the precious moments before we were called down to the auditorium, I had quickly tried to review assembly etiquette: we sit together as a class, no hats, no catcalls or whistling, no phones, leave your bags in the classroom. The rules seemed so simple to me that I hadn’t even bothered to plan how to introduce them. I just sort of reeled them off. That’s when the trouble began.

Or, wait. The trouble had begun the day before. Thursday. That was the day that one of the students in this class had been at his worst – disruptive and angry, almost trying to get himself sent out. But I had expected this from him because… well, maybe the trouble had begun the day before. Wednesday.

On Wednesday during reading time, I began using an informal version of Collaborative Problem Solving to talk with him about why he hadn’t been reading for the past week. I ignored the other students (all reading quietly!) and focused on him. Nine minutes and thirty seconds into our conversation, he said, “Why do you keep asking me questions? I feel like you know the answers already.” I assured him that I was asking the questions because I really had no idea what his answers might be. He asked if we could talk in the hall. There, much to my surprise, he opened up – briefly – about reading and school and how much he hates it all. At one point I thought I saw his eyes well up. He looked away and said he needed to get some water. He was quiet(er) for the rest of class.

We’ve been together for over a month now, so I knew what to expect next: Thursday’s angry outbursts were no surprise. Every breakthrough is followed by a day or two of bad behaviour. Which I guess means that this all started well before last week because he and I have been in this cycle since the second week of school. And from what I have gathered, he’s been in this cycle since, well, forever. He says he has never read a chapter book. His school records are full of drama and bad grades. It’s not a pretty picture.

In so many ways, then, Friday is on me. I thought he would have settled down, but he is nothing if not mercurial. Why on earth did I think I could just list off a bunch of rules and have him comply? Why didn’t it occur to me that I was asking him (and others) to do something hard? These assemblies are effectively theatre. Students sit for an hour and we ask them to adhere to social norms that may not be familiar. I didn’t introduce these ideas ahead of time. I didn’t explain why we take off our hats or why we can’t use phones or whistle. I just said this is how it is and expected compliance.

In case you are wondering, he did not comply. He wore his hat. He tried – twice! – to sit with others in another part of the auditorium. He talked during every act. He used his phone. Worse, his behaviour and charisma were such that other students followed suit. My class, right in the middle front section of the auditorium, was terrible. (Moment of recognition: not all of them. Not even most of them. But enough to be noticeable. Plus, did I mention that I was angry?)

I know I know – my expectations were reasonable in many ways. If nothing else, we expect students to do what teachers ask. But, here’s the thing: I know better. I know these expectations are cultural. I know that some students need to understand the reasons behind rules. I know that our students are children who need to practice – and that an assembly is a great place to practice. And I tell the students that I value their engagement over their compliance, that I want them to ask questions, that we’re all here to learn. I also tell them that they are responsible for their own emotions. If I had really thought about this particular student’s needs, I would have realized that I needed to let this go. That the young women behind him who told him to be quiet were far more effective than I could ever be.

Instead, I was angry for most of the assembly. About a hat and some talking. That’s not what it felt like – I felt *very* justified – but that’s what it was. My emotions are on me. He just wanted to know the parameters and to have some control. He wasn’t angry. He had a great time. I think he actually enjoyed the show.

On Monday he was his normal ebullient self – too loud, too active, too much. But he had forgiven me. And he will forgive me over and over if I can keep *seeing* him. By the end of the year, he probably won’t wear his hat to assemblies, especially if I remember that I am the kind of teacher who cares more about the student than the hat. Sometimes that is incredibly hard, but I can get better.

PS – Over the weekend I re-acquainted myself with strategies for dealing with ODD in the classroom. No diagnosis here, but I’m betting the strategies won’t hurt. Number one strategy? Don’t get into power struggles; ignore unwanted behaviour whenever you can. I’m on it.

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Exam

On Saturday, I took a three-hour exam to finish up one of my on-line courses. Since I only took this undergraduate composition course for credentialing purposes, I was quite literally 100% certain I would pass. I mean, I teach students mere months before they are supposed to be prepared to take this course. If can’t pass this course, my problems are bigger than a test.

Before I even began the exam, and despite all my preparation, there was a problem with my computer. Someone named JM showed up in a chat box and politely asked if he could take over my computer from a distance. I said yes, then sat and watched as my cursor moved around and things clicked on and off for over half an hour. JM worked it all out in the end, but I started my exam knowing I really am old because I found it all very disconcerting. And, even though I got the full time allotment, I started 45 minutes later than I had planned. This was problematic because a friend was watching my children for three hours – and now I needed four. But now I’d started my exam so I couldn’t use my phone… Oops.

FOCUS!

Sometime during hour one, I began to wonder when I had last taken an actual exam. Grad school? Probably, but I don’t remember any exams then – mostly essays. Could it have been undergrad? Let’s not consider how many years ago that was. (It was a lot of years.) At any rate, I now remembered how little I like timed endeavours. I really don’t like them. I found myself checking the timer more often than was necessary. At one point my internal voice scolded me for editing when I should have been writing. I wondered how strict the word limits were. There was no one to ask.

FOCUS!

And let’s talk about the exam itself. I give exams every semester. I try to be completely transparent about what will be on the exam and to have the exam mimic classwork as nearly as I can. Nevertheless, my students are always stressed out. I tell them that I understand, but now I definitely get it because on Saturday, I was stressed. In three (short!) hours, I had to…

Write an essay on a topic that I did not know ahead of time (structured but personal, thank heavens),
Read an essay
summarize it
*and* write a rhetorical analysis
Identify a quote and explain how it fit into an essay I’d read during the class
Answer 20 grammar questions.

Thank goodness I remembered my personal time-use strategies: I headed straight for the grammar questions and worked backwards from there. Because I was at home and being proctored remotely (also weird), I drank tea the whole time I wrote, and then I had to ask permission to go to the bathroom – in my own home!

When I got back from my bathroom break, I found myself assessing the exam: the multiple choice questions were ok but some gave away the answer. The essay provided on the exam was too old (2002 – so the statistics were seriously out of date) and had clearly been edited for length, meaning that it was a bit jumpy in places. I wondered if it was really fair to have students write a rhetorical analysis on an incomplete essay. Wouldn’t have been my choice, but length matters. The quote analysis was straightforward enough, but I was unconvinced that it effectively tested much beyond memory. But, hey, at least I had no complaints about the essay portion – except that I kind of liked what I was writing and wondered if there was a way I could save it…

FOCUS!

I finished that dang exam with three minutes to spare. Three minutes. And now I have to wait ten days for the grade. I’m lucky because I know I did well, but I have renewed empathy for my exam-hating students. Apparently exam-writing is a stressful experience no matter how well I am prepared. I have been comforting myself by thinking that it may have been my last exam ever. At least I hope so.

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Equinox

This year there was a harvest moon on Friday the 13th. Someone knew that in one of my classes, but no one was really sure what a harvest moon was. There were a lot of theories – when there are two full moons in one month? when the moon looks really big? or maybe orange? or maybe that’s the sun? Once the guesses got wilder, I suggested we look it up.

A harvest moon, it turns out, is the full moon that occurs nearest to the Autumn Equinox. Everyone knew what autumn meant, but equinox presented another conundrum. (Groans.”Stop with the big words, Miss. If you mean problem then say problem.” I mentally added conundrum to our list.) Equinox is when day and night are equal. (Ok, it’s technically the instant of time when the sun crosses the equator, but we stuck with the equinox/equal idea.)

The autumnal equinox this year occurred at 3:50 am on Monday, September 23. I’m not sure if that means that day and night were equal on Sunday or Monday, but Sunday was my equinox. I spent the weekend at a cottage with friends. On Saturday, we spent the morning floating on the lake and laughing. Sunday morning was different. I woke up early and tiptoed out of the house in my pajamas. From the tiny dock – really just a few pieces of wood and a narrow ladder – I watched the sun rise. A loon called, long and lonely. I expected the sun to bring warmth, but instead a breeze came, insistent. I could imagine that the trees across the lake, backlit by the sun and mostly dark, were deeply green, but the trees near me revealed the truth: their leaves were already showing gold and red. I relished the moment between morning and day, the last bit of vacation that reminded me that the school year was well underway. It felt like a moment of balance.

Then I remembered my tea was waiting, probably already cool. I tried to memorize the moment, to catch what was already behind me, really, then I went inside to read.

On Monday I asked “Who remembers equinox?” Most of them raised their hands.

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Ask for help

Since day 1 she’s been glaring at me. By day 5 I work up the confidence to ask if something is wrong. “No,” she says casually, “I just have resting bitch face.” She’s 16. I laugh with her, but seconds later wish I had pushed back. I wish I had said, “No, not bitchy. You look sad, scared, wary and maybe just a little doubtful. You look like you and you are not a bitch.” But I didn’t.

Every day I say, “I need you to put your phone away.”
I say, “I know this is hard, but the phone is keeping you from doing your best thinking.”
I say, “Maybe you could create a 20 minute reading playlist so that you can read without touching your phone.”
She puts her phone away politely, but it always comes back out.

She has already failed English once. She does not like to read. She does not write. Still, when she wrote her goals in her notebook on Friday, the first one was “Read every day for the assigned time with no phone distraction.” She doesn’t say a thing about it, just hands me her notebook at the end of class, like she does every day.

We’ve read memoirs almost every day since school started. We’ve read poems and essays and picture books. We’ve looked at craft moves and done our own mini-writes. She doesn’t do much. “Resting bitch face” I remind myself when I look at her. I want so badly for her face to tell a different story.

Today we start 100-word memoirs. She checks her phone several times. She goes to the bathroom. Then she starts to write and does not stop until time is up. She shares a line with the class. As class ends, I ask students to write down one or two things they want to work on in their memoir tomorrow. She calls me over.

“I think it’s good the way it is,” she says. I feel my protest rising, then squash my first reaction. “Ok,” I say. We pause.

“Will you read it?” her eyes go down, her face turns away from me.

Her memoir is beautiful and powerful. She will edit it – we will edit it together – but her words, her story… it blows me away. I tell her so.

She says, “I want to enter that contest, the one about ‘One Strong Woman.'”
“Yes,” I say, “I think you should.”

In her notebook, her other goal is “actually ask for help.”

“I’ll help,” I say.

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Words to describe the love

This summer, my father-in-law had a heart attack as he walked home from picking up a newspaper at a corner store. He and my mother-in-law were visiting family in Massachusetts, thousands of miles from their home in Arizona. By rights, Jim should have died. He literally collapsed on a neighborhood street.

But he didn’t die. Angels intervened. Neighbours sitting on a porch, enjoying the morning, saw him fall. An off-duty EMT was home and began effective CPR almost immediately. The ambulance that came for him was from a major trauma center.

For a few days, things were chaotic and unclear. Family drove in, flew in, called in and stayed close in every way that they could. And then, miraculously, Jim was ok. There were some cuts from the fall, some broken bones from the CPR and a defibrillator implanted for his heart, but in large part, he’s just fine. By the end of the summer, he was walking around, wondering when he’d be able to get back to his long hikes in the desert canyons of Arizona.

There are no words for this sort of miracle. I couldn’t write about this when it happened in July, and I can barely gather all the threads now: the wrenching loss; the nearly unbelievable salvation; the incredible rebirth; the emotions and experiences of so many people.

Today I received a beautiful letter from my mother-in-law, thanking her family for our support. My father-in-law wrote about his experience almost right afterwards,and I found his account equally moving. Each letter is haunting, so I’ve turned them into found poems. It’s the only way I can capture those few weeks in July.

My Strange Disappearance
I didn’t return in a reasonable time.
I have no memories
so I’m reconstructing
from what people have told me.
I presumably stopped breathing,
my heart presumably stopped pumping.

Some force was certainly at work
to bring two strangers to my side
to bring me back from sudden death.

Unless I imagined this
family mysteriously appeared.

Do I believe in angels?
I sure believe in something.
I like the word angels.

-found in a letter from Jim Perry

Words to describe the love
I’ve been looking for words
But each time I thought or spoke
I felt raw and open.

I wake in the middle
of the night or
on my early morning walks.
I am swept away.
The heart-distance is non-existence.

How tender and fragile life is.

Please know that
if you need me,
I will come.

-found in a letter by Shirley Dunn Perry

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Ready, again

Monday evening, 8:30pm

School starts tomorrow. Again.

Heaven knows I am not a new teacher. I’ve done this before. In fact, I’ve done this more than 20 times. Before that, I think I count at least 18 starts as a student. And I can add in the years my own children have started school.

I’m still nervous.

Today, I took a long walk with my husband, took another walk with my oldest child, chatted with a friend, read with my youngest, tidied the house. I went online to look up one little thing and ended up reading more than one article about the structure of The Scarlet Letter. I cannot explain how this happened. I don’t even teach The Scarlet Letter anymore.

But since I was online, I took the tiniest of peeks at my class lists. Again.

That done, I tried to read my book. No dice: I was way too distracted. So, I sewed. Doesn’t everyone make pencil cases the day before school starts? And since I was at it, I made *lined* pencil cases. Which I think we can all agree is a little on the ridiculous side. At least my children are happy.

Now, I’m on the computer. Again. Should I change my lesson plans? Nope. Have I missed something? Maybe. I think I should look up one more possible mentor text. But I won’t. I’m going to take a bath and try – again – to read that book.

I’ve chosen my outfit; my husband has packed my lunch. My bookbag waits by the door. The breakfast table is already set, just in case. The children are similarly prepared. I’m ready for another first day. I’m ready to meet the students. I’m ready to be in the classroom. I’m ready to talk about books, to write, to struggle through the hard parts and celebrate the successes.

I’m ready to fall head over heels for a group of young people I don’t even know yet. Again.

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Hera

Hera has trapped a black hairband and is yowling insistently. “Come!” she bawls. “I, the intrepid hunter, have rescued you from your carelessness! I have caught another of your discarded objects! I must be admired!”

Between her squawks, meditation music trickles serenely through the floorboards. Our upstairs’ neighbor’s dog has anxiety and will bark all day without the music to keep him calm. Hera is nonplussed by this feeble attempt to lull her into complacency. She yowls again and trots toward me, hairband firmly in her jaws.

As I open the door to let her take her treasure to the porch, a black squirrel chitters indignantly, its paws scrabbling over the wood railing to the safety of the next porch . Hera eyes it disdainfully: she will not lower herself to chase such a creature, not when she has already vanquished this fearful foe. She turns back to me and drops the band. I know what is coming: she must be adored.

She leaps to the back of the couch, inches from the desk where I’m trying to write. I know better than to ignore her, but I don’t demonstrate my fealty quickly enough, and Hera is in my lap, prodding my typing hands, stepping on the keyboard, purring loudly, insistently. ADORE ME NOW!

And honestly, how could I not?

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Join the Slice of Life Community on Tuesdays at Two Writing Teachers to read other slices of life and post your own.

Summary of Debate

I am close to finishing my summer writing courses. So, so close, and yet… so far. One long piece of creative non-fiction, one 1500-word research essay (with a proposal – how is that long enough for any real research? Whatever. I’ll take it.) and one 500-word close reading. I can get this done.

In the meantime, I am amusing myself and, hopefully, the poor “tutors” who have to read these assignments day in and day out. It was with them in mind that I wrote the following slice of life. The assignment calls for a one-paragraph summary of both sides of “a specific, local debate” in under 250 words. I had to present the two sides in an objective, neutral manner. I decided to go extremely specific and local…

Debate: What Is That in the Sky?

The debate in our car is heated: is the giant glowing white orb that we see in the sky above us the moon or is it something else? The person taking the affirmative position states that it is the moon and develops her argument relying almost exclusively on logos. She begins with a concession, acknowledging that the glowing orb does, in fact, look larger than usual, which is part of what attracted the attention of the passengers in the car. She continues to support the affirmative position by pointing out that, despite its size, the orb is in the place where the moon is usually seen, looks like the moon, and appears to be moving along the moon’s expected trajectory. Finally, the person in the affirmative attempts to use ethos, pointing out that years of experience in observing the moon makes her a credible source for determining if the orb is, in fact, the moon. For these reasons, the affirmative asserts that this is the moon. The person defending the negative position contends that what they are seeing is not the moon. This argument, too, relies largely on logos. For one, he argues, what they see in the sky right now is clearly much larger than the moon. The person assuming the negative position points out that he has never seen a moon this large. He then refers to authority, maintaining that “someone” recently read him a book about planets and that planets are, in fact, very large. He concludes his point by reminding his opponent that he, too, has seen the moon many times, which gives him vast experiential knowledge, if not quite as much as the other side. He closes with a clear statement of position: “I know a lot about moons, and that is not the moon.” In summary, the affirmative position is that the large, white, glowing orb in the sky is the moon; the negative position is that it is not the moon but, more likely, a planet.

In case you are wondering, it was the moon.

3d17d-screen2bshot2b2014-12-152bat2b7-37-262bpm — Join us at https://twowritingteachers.org every Tuesday.

Writing and writing

I have been writing A LOT for the past two weeks. For reasons that are both complicated and idiotic, I have to take three English courses in order to be allowed to take two courses which will officially make me “fully qualified” for the job I’ve been doing for seven years. Short explanation: don’t move countries mid-career.

At any rate, with some (ok, a lot of) cajoling and support from my (wonderful) colleagues and husband, I finally decided to get this credential issue out of the way this summer. I had it all planned out, but… someone made an honest (and costly to me) mistake, and I ended up registered for three on-line undergraduate composition courses in August. (Side note: The reason Comp 101 is not on my transcript is because I effectively tested out of it – when I was 17.)

I’m not going to lie, I spent more time than was healthy feeling sorry for myself. Then I spent a fair amount of time doing the whole 1990s “rage against the machine” thing – just another version of feeling sorry for myself, really. My friends and family practically achieved sainthood merely by listening to me explain how dumb this all is. Finally – finally – I got down to work. I’ve been writing A LOT.

It’s been fascinating.

Not unexpectedly, first year university composition classes have little to do with five paragraph essays. I love that I’ll be able to go back to teaching high school with this knowledge firmly in hand. I’ve written descriptive paragraphs, a summary of debate, a personal essay with research and an argumentative essay. Next up? A rhetorical analysis (which I’ve been putting off). Second year comp includes an expository essay, an argumentative essay, a persuasive essay, and a research essay. Creative non-fiction is making me write about place and culture.

I resent some of the assignments. I don’t want to write a rhetorical analysis of Frank McCourt. I have no desire to write a persuasive essay about heroes. “Who cares about this?” I grumble. Still, I mold and shape the topics, find the ideas, search for the words. I write.

It has been a long time since I wrote essays. Suddenly, I am in my students’ shoes – and not just in my memory or via my (sometimes dwindling) empathy. Writing essays day after day reminds me what a complex a task this really is. I read models, try to discern the teacher’s expectation, choose a topic from among those offered, and then I almost always pause. Sometimes I need research; always I need to brainstorm. Some days I walk around the house or the neighborhood to get my ideas in order. Good essays require good thinking.

When I started, one of my colleagues said, “They’re a bunch of 1000-word essays. You can write that in an hour or two.” But I can’t. I have to pare my thoughts down, write my “shitty first draft” (oh, how Anne Lamott’s words comfort and guide me). I have to observe and consider. I have to rewrite and then reread and rewrite again. I have to be a writer.

I’ve written eight essays so far. I have seven to go. I have drafts for four. I have ideas for all of them. I have three weeks until school starts, and one week with the kids off of camp. Can I get it all done? I don’t know. But I am going to be a much better writer for trying. That’s not an outcome I expected from this exercise.

Wish me luck. That rhetorical analysis awaits.

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