The Day After

“Have you talked about the election in any of your classes today?”

Most heads shake no. Interesting.

“Do you know who won last night?”

Now a few heads nod. A few voices venture an actual response: “The Liberals.”

“Right!” I push on. “Great! So… who knows the name of the Prime Minister?”

Hmm… harder. Murmurs move around the room. Maybe it starts with an “M”? Someone is sure there’s a /k/ sound. One confident student says “Not Trudeau” and everyone laughs.

“Mark Carney,” I tell them. A few fingers snap, a few heads nod. Yes. Yes, that’s right. They knew that.

And now for the tough question, “What else do you know?”

I know I teach English, not Civics, and I know these students are only 14 and 15 years old – far from voting age, at least as far as they’re concerned. Still, last night was a federal election, and I believe that school must be about more than the assignment of the moment. In fact, in the last few years I’ve come to recognize that a big part of my personal “why” in teaching is to help students become thoughtful citizens. I want to help them learn to think deeply. I want them to believe in their own inherent value and to understand the value of others – and of compromise. In a world that tells them that they are valuable mostly as consumers, I want them to feel agency. So here we are, talking about politics in English class.

A few minutes later, we’ve put together some basic facts: the Conservative Party actually performed very well last night, even if they didn’t win; this means the country is divided; the NDP, which is more liberal than the Liberals (“that’s weird”) lost official party status; the Green Party still exists; people’s votes mattered because the vote in many ridings was close.

Someone asks if the Conservatives are “against human rights.” I assure the students that they are not.

Someone asks who I voted for. That’s private. Why? I explain the idea of secret ballots and the idea that someone like a teacher might have undue influence, even unintentionally, on students. Nevertheless, I acknowledge my bias and encourage them to challenge me if they think differently than I do.

Someone asks when the next election is. We talk briefly about minority governments and why that makes the date of our next election a little less predictable.

The class, usually extremely energetic, is somewhat subdued. I know they know some of this information already, and I know that sometimes inviting the outside world into the classroom can feel odd. Their focus holds for three minutes, maybe five, and then we’re back to the regular routines – requests for pencils, for water, for the washroom, for someone to move their desk, to pay attention, to “say that again” to “just be quiet already”.

Still “Mark Carney” stays written on the board until halfway through class when we move on to brainstorming evidence from our book. If I’m lucky, some of them will remember his name and how we talked about the election, even in English.

The student (prose poem)

April is Poetry Month, so I’ve been occasionally stopping over at EthicalELA to participate in Verse love and write some poetry. The people who write there are incredibly supportive, which encourages me to keep playing even though writing poetry intimidates me. Today’s prompt suggested writing a prose poem (a poem that looks like a paragraph but reads, somehow, like poetry), something which has fascinated me for a few years now – ever since I discovered Nicole Stellon O’Donnell’s book of poems You Are No Longer In Trouble – specifically, the poem “Marriage,” which makes me giggle. Here, see what I mean:

Marriage

The rash of weddings at recess continued until Mrs. Provencher had to give a talk. You are third graders. You cannot be married. Parents had called to express their concerns. The margarine tubs full of violets in your desk were bouquets and the flower girls had carried them, stems pressed into foil pilfered from the kitchen drawer. She can say what she wants, but you were married to Doug M. all those years ago, bound by asphalt promises over the screech of the swings’ metal chains.

Margaret Simon suggested that we use Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello’s prose poem, The Houseguest as a model and personify an emotion, so I gave it a go. Here’s what I wrote.

The student

Curiosity pops into your classroom before the first bell. You are writing the date on the blackboard – neatly, in the upper right-hand corner, in cursive. You finish, then place the chalk in its tray. Next, you connect the cord to your computer then cast about for the remote control. Curiosity discovers it over near the bookshelves and brings it to you. You continue your morning routine, aware that Curiosity is watching: straighten the student desks; sift through the papers. You want to settle in, but Curiosity has found the magnetic poetry in the back corner and is busy creating crude verses – and cackling. You hesitate, trapped in the fun house mirror as you pretend not to watch Curiosity who is pretending not to watch you. Should you interrupt the word play? Stop the game? Once, you would have sidled up next to Curiosity and, snickering, added an “s” to “as”. Once, you would have scrawled the verse on the walls in permanent marker. Once, you would have grabbed Curiosity’s wrist and run out of the classroom before the bell, after you had both arrived early. Today, you quietly allow Curiosity to continue writing poetry.

Classic literature #SOLC25 30/31

The text from the young teacher comes in on Saturday. They want to start reading Lord of the Flies or maybe Hatchet with their intermediate ESL class. They’ve looked into purchasing copies, but it’s expensive. Maybe they could just print the pdf of the book, chapter by chapter? How do I buy books for kids?

I am quietly stunned. I sit with this for a few minutes, trying to decide where to begin my response. Finally, I point out that printing the entire book for 20 students is still expensive – we just transfer the expense to the school. Then, I suggest that the school has books – in both the ESL and the English departments. Then I pause.

In my next series of messages, I say that I find LOTF and Hatchet to be at very different levels. I casually note that neither of them has any female characters. (To be fair, in Hatchet Brian at least has a mother; no women exist in LOTF – just British schoolboys as far as the mind can fathom.) I wait again before adding that LOTF makes some “weird” arguments about the importance of British schooling for a civilized society.

I do not say that LOTF has a peculiarly western view of humans as inherently selfish and vaguely awful. I do not say that when a group of school boys were actually marooned on an island, they did not descend into chaos or madness. Instead, they worked together, supporting one another through hardships. I do not say that perhaps students from around the world will not be intrigued by stories in which western boys fight to dominate nature. Instead, I offer to brainstorm some other options and take the teacher on a tour of our tiny book room. They say yes.

Later that day, I read an article in the New York Times about The Great Gatsby turning 100. I love Gatsby and I love teaching it, though I haven’t taught it in a while. I have my reasons – its casual racism, its core critique of the American Dream in an era when that is all too easy – though I would probably teach it again if I could shoehorn it in somewhere. Still, I’m struck when the article reminds me that, upon the novel’s publication, “Reviewers shrugged. Sales were sluggish. The novel and its author slid toward obscurity.” I disagree with the early reviewers, but I find it interesting that the novel was not immediately seen as “classic” or even very good.

LOTF was similarly poorly received at first, and I can reel off a list of other books English teachers love that had rough starts – from Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights to Animal Farm and The Handmaid’s Tale with plenty of others in between. I’d love to point this out to those who wander through English offices saying things like, “there’s a reason they’re classics.”

In fact, someone said exactly that in our English office not too long ago. My most effective approach to these platitudes is a lot of listening seasoned with a well-timed word or two, so I let the teacher talk. Eventually, they pointed out that part of the reason that it’s hard to find new “classics” is because books need to be “just right” to work in a classroom – not too long, not too spicy, not too hard, not too dull. They need approachable literary devices and characters that are relatable.

By this metric, Gatsby, LOTF and even To Kill a Mockingbird are classics in no small part because of their length and lack of curse words. They have a plot and characters we can remember, so, assuming we ignore the racism and sexism and similarity in their world views, we can’t really go wrong.

I point out that “not too hard and not too long” means that our list has to keep changing. When I started teaching, The Scarlet Letter was on every high school bookshelf; now, the language makes it extremely challenging, so it is taught much less frequently. When I was in high school, everyone read Dickens. Now, his work is just too long and wordy. What has replaced these “classics”? I toy with the idea that The Outsiders is on the list; in the 70s and early 80s, it was just a good book to read. What about The Handmaid’s Tale? Atwood is Canadian, but we don’t teach her novel too often – too political or too long? I don’t know. Why has Their Eyes Were Watching God not made it into rotation in Canada? I have no idea.

I love to say that when we read everything, we can read anything, but many of our students are not reading everything or even very much at all. As a result, the books schools choose to offer take on outsized importance; each book is expected to do the work of ten: catch student interest, teach something worthwhile, be a paragon of “good” writing, reflect what our society can/ should be and more. Sadly – or maybe happily – no one book can be everything we want because good stories are, by design, problematic. To really use literature as a teaching tool, we need lots of it.

I don’t know how to make that happen, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t start by teaching students who are learning English in Canada in 2025 about shipwrecked British schoolboys in the 1940s. I’m going to suggest we start somewhere else.

Being the Parent #SOLC25 25/31

I parked in the tiny parking lot and sat in my car for a few minutes, hoping that the rain would let up. While I waited, I texted a friend to let her know I had arrived; we made plans to meet in a bit. That taken care of, I darted out of the car and towards the well-lit building. A young man – one of Mr. 16’s friends – said hello to me as I made my way up the stairs. There, a couple I’ve known for years were standing near an open door, so I paused to chat for a few minutes – kids, work, life. Luckily, no one was in no rush.

Eventually, a door down the hallway opened, and an old colleague gestured to me. I made my excuses to my friends and headed over to him. We embraced briefly and then caught up. He shared photos of his son – already two and a half! – and we laughed a bit about my youngest, now 14, and some of his antics in English class. Time flew; soon it was time to go.

This is how parent-teacher interviews go for me now that both of my children are in high school.

The next interview was across the courtyard, and I ran into several people I knew as I made my way to the classroom. There, a semi-familiar young teacher greeted me and reminded me that we had worked together a few years ago. “I’ve gained weight,” he said ruefully, “Imagine me, thinner.” Again, we used some of our ten minutes to catch up and some to talk about Mr. 14. When time was up, the next parent was a friend, so we all talked for a minute before I left them to their discussion.

Being the parent in these meetings is odd. I’ve taught in this school district for seventeen years now, and I’ve worked in four different high schools. Since I take pleasure in both collaboration and mentoring, and since new teachers often move around a bit before they get a contract, I’ve gotten to know a lot of teachers at a lot of schools. More than that, a few of my former students are now teachers (!!). These days, much to my children’s dismay, parent-teacher conferences are a semisocial event for me.

The third teacher on my appointment sheet was not able to make interviews – too bad, really, because she was the only person I didn’t already know. After I figured out that she was absent, I made my way back to the front hall of the school to wait for Mr. 16. He was serving as a guide for the evening, and it was still cold and rainy, so I had offered him a ride home. This meant I was free to stand in the lobby and chat with an old friend/colleague and talk about books, the upcoming PD Day, and changes in the school board. Soon, one of Mr. 16’s teachers joined us, and we began an animated discussion of AI and how it’s affecting learning. By the time Mr. 16 was released from his duties, we were gesturing with enough enthusiasm to be completely mortifying.

Eventually, parent-teacher conferences wound down. Before we left, I found the friend/ neighbour/ colleague who I had texted when I arrived, and we all walked out to the car together – of course we were also giving her a ride home. After we dropped off my friend, my child said, “It’s kind of cool that you know so many of my teachers.”

I’m glad he’s ok with it because apparently this is what it means for me to be a parent who teaches.

Using every minute #SOLC25 24/31

Their discussion is winding down. Though several students have presented thoughtful arguments and backed them up with evidence from the text, no one has switched sides. What’s really bothering Hamlet in Act 1? According to my students, it’s not really his father’s death or his uncle stealing his crown; in fact, they are firmly split on whether Hamlet is more upset because his mother remarried so quickly – not even two months! – or because she married his uncle. Is the problem her “dextrous speed” or the “incestuous sheets”? Hmm…

I check my watch. Seven minutes to go. Too much time to sit; not enough time to… wait! What am I thinking? There’s always time to do something; it’s just a question of what. My brain whirs. Got it.

“So,” I say, “want to hear about some spying?” I waggle my eyebrows and pull up Act 2, scene 1 on the screen in the front of the classroom. No need for copies of the play; we can do this on the fly. Without warning, I lean in to M – poor kid came in late and ended up in the front row – and ask him how he would feel about spying on my son. Using lines from the play, I encourage him to share a few small lies to see if anyone bites. Maybe they’ll tell him something interesting if he starts off with some slight exaggerations. I suggest to M that he, you know, can pretend that my son drinks and gambles and drabs…

Drabbing is glossed in the text as “whoring”. Not my favourite word, but the students jump on it. WHAT? They are as outraged as Polonius’s servant (unwittingly played by M) is. Why would any father sully his son’s reputation in this way?

“I’d be pissed if my father said that about me,” says one. Others agree.

Ha! I’ve got them where I want them. Quickly, with one eye on the clock, I find a student wearing a zip-up hoodie and ask her to come play Hamlet for a minute. Next, I recruit an Ophelia to “sew” in her “closet” and a Polonius to read a few lines from her seat. Hamlet “unbraces” her “doublet” by unzipping her hoodie. She rolls up one leg of her jeans. She’s wearing boots because it snowed this morning (hello, winter in Ottawa), but we pretend her socks have fallen down. She follows Ophelia’s narration of Hamlet’s actions and the class laughs along. Hamlet’s gone mad.

30 seconds before the bell, I shoo them back to their seats. I look at the class and say, “Now, who was Ophelia talking to again?”

“POLONIUS!” They’re starting to put this together. Wasn’t he just the *#!hole spying on his son? He’s not especially trustworthy – and now he knows about Hamlet…

“Oh, this is not good,” says one student.

And the bell rings.

“We’ll find out what happens tomorrow!” I announce as the class leaves, muttering – another good reason to use every teaching minute I can get.

Say it again #SOLC25 21/31

Inspired by Sherri’s post with the same title. Things I say on repeat…
(And if you were here yesterday: I FINISHED THE BOOK!)

Good morning! You awake? Time to wake up! Hey, kiddo, if you don’t get up your brother’s going to get the first shower.

I’m leaving! Have a good day!

No, I don’t know who has the Chromebooks. Have you checked Richard’s room?

Books and notebooks out and open! Make sure you have a pen or pencil available.

You know where the pencils are. The pencils are where they have been all year. I’m sure you can find a pencil. Yes, that is where the pencils are.

Please make sure your phones are away. Headphones and air buds, too, please. Away means in your backpack. Your pocket is not a backpack. I see a few phones out. Make sure your phone hasn’t accidentally snuck into your hands. Phones are sneaky like that.

If the teacher writes it on the board… you should write it in your notebook.

Is anyone else hot or is it just me?

You can’t read and talk at the same time; that’s not how brains work.

Listen first, then move.

Ok, you know the drill: SLANT! Sit up, lean forward… look, even if you don’t ask questions you can nod your head and track me when I’m speaking.

Ok, but you need to be back in five minutes or less. Five minutes is reasonable.

No one else is hot?

Bye! Bye! Nice work today! Bye! See you tomorrow! Bye!

Hi! How was school? Has anyone walked the dog? Ok, I’m going to walk the dog. Did anyone feed the dog? Have the cats been fed?

No, dinner’s not for a little while. Try a healthy snack. It won’t be long.

Please make sure your dishes end up in the dishwasher. Do you have any homework? I’m just going to mark a few things. Please make sure that plate ends up in the dishwasher.

Goodnight, my love. See you in the morning.

A good day #SOLC25 19/31

Today was a good teaching day, the kind that makes me keep grinning off and on right through the evening. At first, I was going to write something else, but then I wanted to capture this.

First period:
In grade 12, we’ve just started Hamlet. I am always torn about teaching Shakespeare, but I really love teaching this play. And today was amazing. We finished up yesterday’s rhetorical analysis of Claudius’s first speech and students cited lines from the play without being prompted. In my head, I was jumping for joy, but on the outside I played it cool, like, “yeah, my classes always just naturally use lines from Shakespeare to back up their points. Nothing to see here.” My super-cool teacher persona just took notes on the board and nodded her head.

Then we moved on to Hamlet’s first soliloquy. I’d planned a soliloquy buster (which I clearly got from somewhere at some time, but I no longer remember where or when), and even though we’ve only been together for six weeks, and even though it wasn’t quite 10am, and even though it’s Shakespearean language, the students happily moved their desks and sat in a circle and read aloud. Then, the real miracle occurred: no one protested (I mean, I heard a groan or two, but that’s just normal) when I dragged the class into the school lobby to “walk” the soliloquy. I stood on the risers and read the lines loudly while students held their copy of it and walked, turning 180 degrees every time there was a punctuation mark. By the end, we were breathless. When I asked how they thought Hamlet was feeling as he gave this soliloquy, students knew immediately: agitated, frantic, upset.

The energy in the room was high when the bell rang; I could almost *feel* the learning. They were jazzed.

Second period: Planning. And I actually got things done. I even sent a suggestion to the principal: what if we invite the public library to set up a table during parent-teacher conferences and help people get library cards? (He said yes!)

Third period:
Literacy support. Another teacher actually invited me into their classroom to support students. I used AI to almost instantly convert the assignment (which is a *great* assignment but which has a LOT of words) into a checklist. I photocopied that and handed it out within minutes AND managed to sneakily support two students who really needed support. HOORAY!

Fourth period:
My, ahem, energetic grade 9 class started Long Way Down today. Their reactions to seeing the books piled on desks were decidedly mixed: “Are we going to read that?” can be said in many ways. But Jason Reynold’s novel has a magic that has never failed me – not since the first moment students unboxed brand-new copies of the book a few years ago d, and started to read. Today, Reynolds’ voice filled the room, our hearts beat as we heard that Will’s brother Shawn was shot, and we waited the horrible millisecond while we turned the page and read the words “and killed”. Someone gasped.

The kids let me pause to ask a few questions here and there, but mostly they begged to keep reading, so we read right to the bell. As they piled the books back on the desk (we have to share books with other classes), several of them said, “That’s a really good book, Miss.” I just nodded and said, “I know. I know.”

Then one darling child stayed after and whispered the story of the book she finished over March Break, the one she really wanted to tell me about, even if it might spoil it if I decide to read it. (Reader, I will not; it is “romantasy” – virtually all she reads – and sounds extremely silly, though just right for her.) I nodded and oohed and aahed until she realized her bus was coming and ran out the door.

For just a minute, I sat in the quiet classroom, completely satisfied with a day when learning felt almost tangible, when almost everyone was engaged almost all the time. I don’t always write about these days, but they happen – they really do – and I wanted to capture today. It was wonderful.

yr move #SOLC25 17/31

hey

im returning thisessay 2U cuz u haven’t done any of th things i asked like for example u didnt capitalize i & u forgot that u half to use spellcheck and um punctuation cuz this is something u wrote for school also i specifically asked u to, you know, spell words out instead of using txt shorthand again cuz this is for school

yah & how fast can u get it back 2 me cuz i need it for report cards? Sry! I know its late but if u cd be fast that wd be grt. Also ur parents will freak on me if ur marks r low so id rlly appreciate it if u wd do this solid

I no writing formally might seem whack, but trust, its the move – or at least, it’s ur move if u want to level up

yr tchr

27 #SOLC25 16/31

Twenty-seven. I have twenty-seven “This I Believe” essays to comment on, ideally before tomorrow morning. And that’s just for one class. It is 6:17. Wait, let me be clear: it is 6:17pm.

Y’all. This is not going to happen.

I would like to write “How did I end up here?” but I’ve been teaching too long to pretend I don’t know. These were due before March Break and I should have been done before I even left. But some people wanted extensions and some students were late, and I put things off, and here we are.

I would like to pretend that this is because our flight home was delayed yesterday, but I’ve been teaching too long to believe it. I was never going to get through these in one day. Getting home earlier would have made no difference.

I would like to think that the students know how they did or that it won’t matter to them or that this isn’t a big deal, but I’ve been teaching too long to fool myself about this, either. They want their essays back, with a grade.

The good thing about “teaching too long” is that I have learned to forgive myself for this. Am I a fast grader? Sometimes. Thorough? Pretty much always. Right now that has to be enough because there is little I would change about the past ten days, even knowing where I am right now. I loved my March Break – I loved travelling, seeing family, learning to scuba dive. I loved swimming, walking on the beach, and hanging out with my kids. I loved writing and reading in ways that were not completely focused on work (although anyone who knows me knows that I am pretty well always half-thinking about teaching). All of those bits – plus a few hours of lesson planning – mean that when the bell rings tomorrow morning I will be ready to teach again, focused and interested and excited for what each student brings.

After all this time, I’ve finally realized that teaching is an impossible job. There are not enough hours in the day or days in the week for me to learn and plan and teach and care and mark. I could work all day every day and still there would be more. In fact, sometimes the better I get, the more work I have to do. This doesn’t mean that I don’t feel guilty about work I haven’t finished, but it does mean that I handle it better, and I have a much stronger understanding that I am responsible for taking care of myself.

So here I am, reminding myself – and all the other teachers heading back to work – that it’s ok not to have everything done. Tomorrow, we will show up in all our imperfect ways, and the essays will (sadly) still be there on Tuesday.

P.S. And this is why I don’t assign homework over breaks. Everyone needs time off.

The Language of Flowers (Cayman Version) #SOLC25 14/31

For multilingual Friday, I’m trying a photo “essay.” As I’ve worked on this, I’ve realized how little I know about this as a form. I have struggled for a theme, tried to figure out organization, made choices about what to keep and what to cut. I thought I was just going to play and share pretty pictures – and in the end, I think that’s what it looks like – but it turns out, given a new language, I had to work to understand form and learn how to manipulate things. Also, it looks different on a laptop than on a phone. Gah! If I had been at home rather than on vacation, I would have given up because this took so long. Makes me think of what I’m asking for when I ask my students to “just” write an essay or some such. Interesting.