Tag: #SOL21

In the playroom #SOL21 14/31

This month’s poetry prompts on EthicalELA have blown open my writing brain. I think it’s the combination of the book that Dr. Kimberly Johnson chose for mentor texts – Nicole Stellon O’Donnell’s You are no longer in trouble and Kim’s gentle guidance on form (which I find comforting when I’m writing poetry). This, of course, makes me think about what I can take into the classroom: perhaps some of my students will also appreciate some structure, a gentle form to help them corral their wilder thoughts right now. I am inspired to offer that during our writing time this week. Until then, here’s a slice of memory as a pantoum.

In the playroom
for my sister

You no longer need to hide
with me behind the old blue armchair
where we hold each other so tight our memories mix
as the storm blows through.

With me behind the old blue armchair,
our words create worlds where little girls reign
until the storm blows through,
until we can come out and play again.

Our words create worlds where little girls reign,
your emotions are mine, mine yours
until we can come out and play again
I hold your fear.

Your emotions are mine, mine yours.
We hold each other so tight our memories mix.
I hold your fear.
You no longer need to hide.

First Snow #SOL21 12/31

Every month I peek at EthicalELA‘s Open Write prompts. Often, I try one or two. Sometimes I share. Trying my hand at poetry – even when many of my poems end up being only for me – has changed my attitude towards poetry. I liked it before, sure, but now… well, now I think I might be starting to get it.

Today, Dr. Kimberly Johnson chose a mentor text from You are No Longer in Trouble by Nicole Stellon O’Donnell and encouraged writers to share a vivid memory story with words & images, possibly in a prose poem. Well, I’ve never officially written a prose poem before, but I’ve got lots of memories, so I gave it a try. It’s not really a poem, I don’t think, but it’s poem-ish.

****
Someone – maybe Stacy – whispered the word first: snow. Eyes shifted. Heads swiveled. Then someone cried “Snow!” and old Mrs. Rish’s quavering voice could no longer keep us in our seats. 24 bodies tumbled towards the windows and flattened their fingertips against the frigid glass. But Mrs Rish believed that magic could not co-exist with mathematics: “Children! Sit down! You have all seen it snow before!” Spell-broken, children trudged back towards their desks, but I was frozen in place.

“I haven’t.”

My teacher melted. “Oh yes. That’s right. Everyone but Mandy, back to their seats.”

For one day in fifth grade, fractals were my math and magic.

Ask again #SOL21 12/31

In January, in a fit of – what? frustration? overwhelm? a desire to make someone somewhere happy? I wrote to the authors of the books my 12th graders were reading & thanked them. I explained that during yet another lockdown, yet another round of remote learning, the students were finding interest and pleasure in their novels. Then, I took a leap and invited each author to my class to talk with us, if they ever had the time. To my astonishment, Lawrence Hill, the author of The Book of Negroes (known as Someone Knows My Name in the US and Australia), The Illegal and Any Known Blood, among others, wrote back and said yes. (I wrote about this here.)

Hill’s virtual visit was a highlight of this year – heck, of many years! – not least because my students prepared well and led the entire visit by asking thoughtful questions. Hill himself was a delightful guest: he took each student seriously, writing notes as they spoke, addressing them directly by name and engaging them in thoughtful discussion. I think we all left that class feeling a little more connected, a little more like a part of a larger community of discourse.

That should have been enough. The story should be that I sent a note & something wonderful happened, but it turns out there’s more. This quarter (ugh) I have a new group of students who are reading many of the same books. I don’t quite have the nerve to ask Lawrence Hill to visit us again, but many of the students I’m teaching now know many of the students I taught last quarter, and they know he visited. I’ve also shared my decision to write & the results as an example of the power of writing – and the idea that it’s ok to fail. After all, only one author wrote back – but what would have happened if I hadn’t written at all? Consider it evidence, I told them, that writing well really can make a difference. This new group nodded politely, but between the masks and the screens, I couldn’t tell if they believed me. Too often what they hear is that the teacher’s words matter, not theirs.

This week, they’ve been working on understanding the context of their novels. How does the author’s biography influence their writing? How does understanding context help a reader understand the text in a different way? Heady stuff, but after their initial nerves, many of them got deeply involved in their research. So I shouldn’t have been surprised – though I was! – when two different students mentioned that they had emailed the author of their novel. Nevermind that Lawrence Hill and Ruth Ozeki are big names with plenty of awards and whatnot, each student had a burning question and decided it was worth asking. And then did it.

As a class, we’ll get to the essay in a week, and I’m not a bit worried about it. My students have begun to see themselves as people worthy of participating in discourse, as people whose have questions worth asking. That’s really all I need to know.

(Though, it would be fun if one of them got a response.)

Come. Write. Learn. Laugh. twowritingteachers.org welcomes you!

In the air #SOL21 11/31

It was obviously something I ate. I mean, usually I’m as inoffensive as the next person, but last night as I was marking student infographics, I knew something was not quite right. Still, I told myself that I was probably imagining that it was worse than it really was. I was wrong.

While our family snuggled together to watch a show, it happened again, and this time there was no pretending: one of my children turned and grimaced, “MOM! That’s disgusting! SOOOO stinky.” He waved his hand in front of his nose and disentangled himself from my legs. The other child got a whiff and added, “Yeah, silent but deadly. Gross.”

Surely, I told myself, this would – ahem – pass quickly. Surely in the morning all would be well and I would proceed to school smelling practically of flowers.

Alas, morning brought no relief. My body was clearly expressing its disapproval of yesterday’s food choices. I tried to control the emissions, but I was stuck with stink.

There is no worse fate for a school teacher: you can call it flatulence or passing gas or breaking wind, but one way or another, enthusiastically stinky farts are a classroom problem, and not one I usually face. As a former Southerner (though maybe never quite a Southern belle), I was already horrified. This, my friends, is not ladylike. I quickly opened a search engine and typed “How to stop stinky f…” Google filled in the rest. There was plenty of advice, and I took some comfort in knowing that I was not alone, but there was no quick solution. I was going to have to make it through this disaster as best as I could.

I made a plan. First, while our school is just as poorly ventilated as any other school, we were expecting unusually nice weather. I could open the windows – and both classroom doors – under the guise of Covid prevention. Then, though the students’ desks are nowhere near two metres apart, *I* am two metres from them. Distance = dilution. Finally, I could use masks to my advantage. I reasoned that they would surely, um, mask the smell. This was a dilemma I could deal with.

And I did. By the time the first hour ended my tummy had settled and the danger had, well, passed. Still, I think I’ll be extra careful about dinner tonight. Wouldn’t you?

Come write with us! No need to share your tummy troubles at twowritingteachers.org

Forgotten #SOL21 9/31

It’s 3:34 and I have forgotten something. I know I have forgotten it because I remember that I was going to be late to my weekly online teacher knitting group (we are lots of fun – for real). I’m pretty sure that the thing I’ve forgotten must start around 6 or 6:30. It’s not the gender reveal party for my brother & sister-in-law’s baby: that was Sunday & I remembered it. It’s not the doctor’s appointment I forgot on Friday and re-scheduled for Wednesday. Dang it – tomorrow’s Wednesday – I’d nearly forgotten. Thomas’s hair cut was on Friday and mine is scheduled for Saturday coming up. The next book club isn’t until April. Marks were due last week and Parent-Teacher interviews aren’t until Thursday night…

No idea.

I have an agenda and I use it. I used to even think I used it well, but that was before the pandemic. With all the craziness of Covid, I’ve started writing *everything* in pencil, but still: it’s usually mostly there. My bigger problem is that the days insist on running together right now. I regularly spend three or even four days convinced that it’s Wednesday. Usually I’m right at least once.

And now it’s after 4pm. I’ve updated my CV, answered some emails, talked on the phone… I still don’t know what I’ve forgotten, but whatever it is, I’m getting closer to having missed it. Soon, I’ll be past the feeling of dread and segue right into a feeling of regret about whatever it is. Oh sure, there’s a chance that someone will call me between now and whenever the thing I’ve forgotten is supposed to happen. Maybe they’ll remind me before I miss it. But probably not. Pretty much everyone I know isn’t quite sure if today is Wednesday. Or Thursday. Or Monday. Or maybe Tuesday? Who knows? One way or another, someone will be at whatever event I’m about to miss. I hope they take good notes.

Update: 5:02 and I’ve remembered what I forgot but I have, indeed, already missed it and, as predicted, have moved directly into regret. SIGH. The good news is that I have plenty more opportunities to forget meetings in the coming weeks, and maybe next time I’ll remember what I forgot before I miss it.

With gratitude for https://twowritingteachers.org who facilitate this fabulous community – and keep track of the days!

Pick Me Up #SOL21 8/31

A few days ago, Terje wrote a slice about her name. And then Elisabeth followed suit. And in her book Being the Change, Sarah K. Ahmed suggests having students write the story of their name as an identity activity. AND I’ve been working with my own students on how our identity affects our interpretation of information. So how could I resist? It’s time for a name story.

My name is Amanda. When I was little, it was an unusual name. In fact, I have a fill-in-the-blank journal from 4th grade where I wrote that my name was “old fashioned.” During the middle school name-sticker phase, I had no name stickers. A nurse named Amanda who worked with my father once bought me stickers because she, too, was excited to see our name in a store. (Amanda tchochkes abound these days; the generation behind me has no idea how we older Amandas suffered.)

I liked Amanda – though everyone called me Mandy and I like that, too. It was just unusual enough to be mine, but it was still easy to say. And it was certainly better than another choice that lurked in my baby book: Jemima. I used to imagine a whole different life for Jemima-me. I assure you that she wasn’t not doing nearly as well in life as I was. In college, Amanda was written on the door of my freshman dorm & Amanda I became. These days, I go by both.

But that’s not the story.

During my junior year abroad, my friends and I traveled over Spring Break. We left France and headed to Salzburg, Vienna, Prague and Budapest. We were four young women: a tall redhead, a willowy brunette, a blue-eyed blonde and a curly-haired brunette. I’ve seen the pictures; we caught the eye. We can (and will) tell story after story from that trip. For example, in Prague,we followed our guidebook’s dubious suggestion and “found” a room offered by someone who met the train at the quai. We ended up staying in an apartment owned by a fast-talking British (?) guy who decided to go ahead and stay the night with us. (I know, I know. It’s a miracle any child of the 70s or 80s survived.)

We settled in, drank some cheap Russian champagne, and then happily agreed to go dancing with our new friend. Once we arrived at the club, he quickly found friends for each of us to chat with, while he stayed with the willowy brunette. I had a boyfriend in France, thus making me harder to match, but he managed: I soon found myself deep in conversation with an incredibly handsome Swedish man named Torin. He was in Prague to collect art. He spoke French, English and heaven only knows what else. Our conversation ranged from books to art to travel. Soon, he asked me to dance, and there I was, at a club in Prague, dancing with a gorgeous Swedish intellectual who leaned over to me and said, “Amanda. Such a name. Do you know what it means?”

I did. I do. But I still let him tell me.

“Amanda, worthy of love.”

I mean, who derives the Latin root of a name as a pick up line? I was very nearly swept off my feet. But not quite. As he leaned in to kiss me – of course he would, after that little gem – I turned my head. “I still have a boyfriend.” He smiled ruefully, “and your constancy makes it harder to let you go.” (I’m not even kidding – he talked like that.) We danced and talked all evening. We did not exchange information and this was long before the internet. One night was one night.

My French boyfriend, wonderful though he was, did not collect art or speak multiple languages. He had no idea what my name meant in Latin. He was, nevertheless, my first love. We stayed together for a while, and then we broke up. I’ve never been back to Prague, and no one else has ever tried to pick me up with such an urbane pick up line. Sometimes, I still think about Torin and Prague and that carefree trip. After all, while I’m now a middle-aged wife (Honey), mother (Mama or Mom), and teacher (Miss), I remain Amanda, worthy of love.

With gratitude to twowritingteachers.org who host this challenge annually

Bloody Sunday #SOL21 7/21

My son and I are sitting at the kitchen island, working together. His 7th grade teachers are very big on projects and presentations, so he spends a lot of time creating slideshows – exactly what he’s doing right now. As it turns out, hybrid teaching also requires quite a few slideshows, so I’m doing the same thing.

He loves it when we work together, laptops side by side. Mid-afternoon on Sunday, and he’s still shirtless, wrapped in a blanket. Right now he’s looking up information about Selma and the March to Montgomery for a presentation on John Legend and Common’s song “Glory”. He’s already confused and unhappy, and he has not yet gotten to the worst of it: he’s just about to learn about Bloody Sunday, 56 years ago today. And… here it is.

“Um, Mom, there’s something I don’t understand,” he begins.
Me neither, my love
“Didn’t the law say they could vote?”
“Yes. Yes, it did.”
“So why did people elect a racist governor? Didn’t they know he was bad?”

The pandemic means that I have had the privilege of watching my son’s racial awakening this year, and also the burden. Since my children were small, we’ve read books with protagonists who do not look like them – who are not white boys – and my son’s friends own many identities. Still. There’s knowing and then there’s knowing, and right now he’s starting to grapple with whiteness.

“Why were white people so mean? Why couldn’t they just understand that everyone is a person?”

I badly want to tell him that there were good white people. I want to reassure him, to make him feel better. I want him to learn about James Reeb in the same moments that he is learning about John Lewis, but that’s not the truth. “Not all white people” isn’t what he needs to know.

So we talk about the violent history of whiteness. Briefly, he says, “but not in Canada” and I explain that Canada, too, has systemic racism. This talk is not easy. He does not want this to be true. But it is true, and he needs to know. Eventually, he goes back to his presentation. “What is Ferguson?”

I explain. He feels like Ferguson is long in the past; after all, seven years is over half his lifetime. Isn’t it better now? I remind him of George Floyd’s murder. “Right,” he says, “right.”

This child, this white boy of mine, will need to be part of the solution as our society changes. He needs to know about history – and not just what shows up in his textbooks.

Later, he’s working on a different slideshow, this time about Canadian politician Lincoln Alexander. He asks me to check his work, and I see that he’s written that Alexander “had to work very hard to excel, even harder the I would have to work because of the color of my skin.”

Yes, my love. Exactly. The struggle is with the colour of our skin, not with his.

With gratitude to https://twowritingteachers.org for hosting this annual challenge

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

Unfounded #SOL21 5/31

One way or another, I thought we should get out of the kitchen. 

Earlier that day, the construction crew had excavated in order to waterproof our kitchen foundation. But instead of a true foundation, all they’d found was a cinder block wall just casually supporting our kitchen, approximately 14 inches back from the edge of the walls. It was as if, at some point in the past, a couple of guys decided to dig out a basement, and while they were at it one of them looked around and said, “Hey, whaddya think about throwing a few cinder blocks up here? Just in case, ya know?” And the other guy said, “Think we should dig on over to the actual edge of the entire house above us?” And the first one said, “Nah, what’s a foot or two? It’ll still hold things up for now.” 

Which meant that now, in 2018, when the foundation crew stopped for the day, we were left with a trench and a flimsy wall rather than the soil that used to help support the kitchen. We also had a small mountain of dug-out dirt towering over the trench. Not ideal, but before they drove off, the guys assured me it was “solid enough” until we figured out what to do. 

The tornado threw us for a loop. We don’t have tornados here: this is a government town, and things like that are just a little too dramatic for our tastes – and Ottawa isn’t exactly Tornado Alley. In fact, we were so surprised when the radios and cell phones started blaring about a tornado watch that we kind of ignored it. It just didn’t make any sense. One of my friends hopped in the car with her child to come over to visit. Even if there was going to be a tornado, she said, which seemed ridiculous, it wasn’t due for another 30 minutes. As my friend walked in, she commented that the wind and rain had really picked up.

She was right about “really picked up” given that it had been a lovely day right up until the tornado came. We sat down in the kitchen, our usual gathering place, and poured a “nice to see you” drink. Andre walked in a few minutes later – he’d biked home from work – and he, too, commented on the wind and the rain. “It was so pretty earlier,” he mused as we handed him a drink.

Did I mention that our kitchen was no longer supported?

Mere moments later, through occasional wind-blown gaps in the rain that was now sluicing down our kitchen window, I could make out cascades of water gushing down the pile of mud and directly into the ditch next to our definitely-not-to-code kitchen foundation. “You’ve got to see this!” I gestured my guests over to the window. 

We looked out, gasping, and at that moment, as the wind howled around us, we realized that we were watching torrents of water flow into the trench below us next to the sort-of-supportive cinder block wall. Standing next to the window meant we were standing over the trench – which meant we were standing over thin air. The lights flickered. One way or another, I thought, we should get out of the kitchen. 

As we settled into the (well-supported) playroom, the lights went out. The kids were horrified and delighted. We rounded up the flashlights and the candles. Within minutes, the winds died down and the rain stopped. From what we could see, the trench had quite a bit of water in it, but there wasn’t much in the basement. Nevertheless, once the tornado had passed, we decided we were better off at a friend’s house for a while. In the end, we were lucky: our house held up, probably because the tornado – which turned out to be several tornadoes – didn’t directly hit our part of town. Our power was out for a while, and school was cancelled the next day, but the foundation crew had been right: that old cinder block wall was, indeed, solid enough. Somewhere in the early 1900s whoever dug out our basement must have known what they were doing after all – thank goodness.

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