Tag: reflection

Quiet #SOLC26 18/31

Part of the magic of writing a daily slice of life is that I’m forced to notice small moments every day, and – somewhat less obviously – allowed to reflect. The noticing is clear: whether I’m writing about something that happened that day or stumbling across a memory that has sudden relevance, I pause to collect the moment and then provide structure via words. In this way, writing is an attempt to capture and share an impression. Writing also shapes the moment, insisting on a start and an end, a form, the importance of some details over others, and an expected or desired effect. As I shape each moment, writing gives me a slender sense of control by ordering my thoughts and making moments into stories. Anything can be a slice of life because I can notice it and fit it into my own understanding of who I am or am not. When I capture these moments, I affirm my identity.

I can imagine writing daily moments and leaving them unconnected – loose beads, rolling on the basement floor – but that’s not my experience with this month. Instead, at some point, I start to pick up those written beads and string them together in new ways. I recognize that one moment is temporally distant from another, but as I shape my larger story, I examine them and mentally place them together. The more I write, the more patterns I can create with my captured moments. I can see myself in different ways. The more I read other blogs and comment on them, the more I am able to understand which patterns are universal (or at least universal to educators) and which are personal.

Somehow the hurried pace of March, the steady march, if you will, of write, read, comment, read, comment, read, comment, write – and my sense that I cannot keep up, can never keep up (have I missed your blog? I’m so sorry. I wanted to read it. When did I stop responding to comments on my blog? I apologize. I cannot even begin to tell you how much I appreciate them.) In the rush, March becomes an exercise in looking for ideas, of looking at what I’ve already written, of restringing the moments. In other words, amidst the chaos, I reflect.

Every year at the end of March people reflect on the month. I get double the reflection time since March Break always happens in, well, March. Here, in this third week, while I’m away from my normal routine, the noise of the school year and my family life and even my writing quiets. Sometimes the quiet is fleeting, but it’s almost always there. 

20 seconds of calm

Today, I am in my favourite place in the world: my aunt and uncle’s cottage on the North side of Grand Cayman. Familiar with the comfort of this place, I allow myself to relax more readily than I might elsewhere. The boys I’m accompanying are at the beach and I am alone. The breeze shushes through the trees, the birds call – grackle, mockingbird, dove – and, from the nearby pool, children shriek in delight. I am no longer the mother of shrieking children. My mind wanders as I sift through the memories, the slices of life that come up. I am a newly minted teenager, exploring the island, spending hours with my sisters, draped over a raft in this very bay, astonished at the giant starfish. That night, my aunt and my mother will rub soothing aloe into our badly burned backs; as an adult, I check my back regularly for signs of skin cancer. I am a high school senior on her first solo trip with her best friend. Driving on the wrong side of the road, listening to the soundtrack from Cocktail, thinking Tom Cruise is sexy, wishing we were Elisabeth Shue. While Kokomo and Don’t Worry, Be Happy blast from our tinny speakers, I feel both sexy and mature – though I am neither – in my strapless blue and bathing suit with a ruffle across the bust and a cut-out back. Now I watch my younger sister get married on the beach as my grandfather wipes away tears, and today I glide over the jealousy I felt back then, choosing to remember instead that my uncle noticed and took me out for secret drinks afterwards, reminding me that he and my aunt met when they were a bit older and had (have) a strong happy marriage. I am here with friends, and as a newlywed, then, later, snorkeling while pregnant and then again with my firstborn, who enthusiastically eats sand, and my second, who does the same. I am here with another family as we watch our older children create a scavenger hunt for the younger ones and we play games on the porch. I am here and here and here. I have written these moments in my journals, captured them in photographs, published them on this blog. 

What moments have I forgotten? Which have I chosen not to share today? Why not mention the Olympic swimmer I met here (ahem) or the time we forgot to defrost the turkey before what must have been Christmas dinner? The way my dad never really did get along with my aunt or the times my sisters and I fought? The time we met a celebrity on a snorkel trip and invited her over? Swimming with turtles and stingrays and dolphins? Being stung by jellyfish or cut by coral? 

Today, in this quiet, I string together moments of comfortable happiness. I know from what I’ve written this month that my mind and memory need this. There will be a time for exploring new places, for highs and lows, for petty jealousies and wild ecstasies. But for today I am content with the quiet of this story and this storytelling. I know that I have plenty of moments to string into different patterns another time.

When I write, I become more conscious of the stories I tell myself about who I am – and I am better for it.

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.

I Can Do Hard Things #SOLC25 31/31

Not for the first time this month, I nearly forgot to write. Tonight seems egregious, since it’s the last post of the March Challenge, but there it is. I’m the mom who would forget to leave the house with a spare diaper, even with the second baby – even when the second baby was over a year old. Apparently I have trouble forming new habits.

Of course, part of the reason I almost forgot to write is that I’ve been thinking about this post for a while. Wrapping up a month’s worth of daily writing and publishing is definitely part of the challenge, and this year is no different. I’ve been trying to put into words what I’ve learned this time around, or at least what I experienced. In my head, I’m close to knowing; in writing, I’m a little farther away from conclusions.

This March, I’ve sort of shoehorned writing in around other things. Some years I feel like it’s been more central to the month; this year it’s been more part of the fabric of my days. Predictably, some days have been tough, but mostly I had something to say when I sat down to write. As usual, I feel that I haven’t commented on nearly enough blogs, and I’m missing reading some of my “regulars.” I’ve come to recognize that this is ok.

Mostly, this March has been a reminder that I can do hard things – and I’m allowed to do them in a way that works for me. Write in the evening instead of in the morning? I can do that. Some days comment on only three or four other blogs? I can do that, too. Write a two-sentence post? Sure. Or use almost all pictures? Ok. Heck, accidentally post about extremely similar dinner conversations in the space of three days? Go for it. This month I have forgiven myself over and over for things that, as it turns out, others don’t even notice. Who knew that writing every day would help me continue to shed the shoulds that have governed my life for so long.

Tonight, I went to a class at my gym that I have never tried before. It “includes a little more intensity and choreography than our usual.” Since I can barely keep up with the “usual,” I wasn’t sure that I was making a good choice, but I did it anyway. I had to stop a few times, and for one entire “choreo” track, I gave up and just did my own basic steps. No one cared and I got a great workout. Once I got home, I had to wait a while to stop sweating – which is part of why I nearly forgot to write. The whole thing was more than my usual, but I can still feel the buzz of energy from having finished.

March is like that: it’s more than my usual, but the buzz – from the writing, from the community, from the challenge – lingers long afterwards, and it’s totally worth it. 

See you on Tuesdays! (Um, yes, that’s tomorrow.)

Reflection-ish

The three of us sit around a small table near the windows in the back corner of Peter’s French classroom. It’s the middle of the school year, so the afternoon light is dim. Peter, my “cooperating teacher”, and Bev, my Masters supervisor, and I have each filled in a questionnaire about my strengths and areas for growth after my first semester of student teaching. So far, we’ve all agreed on the ratings and the whole meeting has been lovely, but now we’ve discovered an area of where Peter and Bev agree and I am the outlier: reflection.

Peter and Bev have rated me as not especially reflective; I’ve given myself the top rating. No-nonsense Bev is almost incredulous. “I just don’t see it,” she shakes her head. Even Peter, always calm and quiet, looks perplexed. My own expression must mirror his. I struggle for words. I am always, always reflecting. How do I explain? Maybe always reflecting doesn’t count. Maybe I’m doing it wrong. 

We talk for a few minutes, compromise on a midway point for the question, and move on. 25 years later, I’m still reflecting on that moment.

What I’m not reflecting on is this school year. I’ve tried. Believe me, I’ve tried. 

Even as I write this I realize that I taught my last class one week ago today. Is that even possible? I have to check the calendar to be sure. Yes. One week ago. Surely that was a lifetime ago? Or at least a few weeks? I knew that time was spooling out unevenly during the school year, but I had honestly hoped that it might straighten out once the chaos of classes ended. Perhaps, I tell myself, this is merely summer time, delightfully different than school-time…but no. I know it’s not. My thoughts spin.

Reflect! I tell myself sternly. It’s important to reflect. I try the exercise Kate Messner suggested for Teachers Write this week: I go outside and breathe deeply. I close my eyes and try to remember a time when I felt peaceful and whole. Just when I am about to give up, the loud voices from my neighbours’ backyard fade and the oppressive heat lifts just a little.

I am on a cliff on the Aran Islands. I am alone. Though I am nervous about it, I have inched my way to the edge and now only the slate gray ocean exists beneath my dangling feet, only the limestone cliff walls fill my peripheral vision. I have never been so completely alone. I breathe with the sea. I breathe in the sea and the wind that slides up beside me. I am alone alone alone. I think of nothing for as long as I can and I watch the water.

Many thanks to TwoWritingTeachers.org without whom I might be tempted to skip writing altogether.