Tous les Matins du Monde

We spent a lovely weekend at the beach with our friends, who have really become family — and due to a lucky aligning of the scheduling stars, were able to stay an extra night and drive back this morning.  My husband, the human traffic sensor, did not want to chance the morning rush hour, however, so we were on the road before six, when the world was still dark — speeding across the farmland of the Eastern Shore with the highway mostly to ourselves.

I started to think (because I couldn’t do much else at that hour) about how seldom I had had to wake that early.  5:30 is normal for a lot of people, including many of my students, who attend swim practice before school or face hourlong commutes from other states.  My own commute is walkable, and I’ve never had a homeroom, so the earliest I’ve had to face the world is several hours after they are up and running.  What a blessing, to wake with the sun or well after it!

Yet, as I watched the white fog settle in pillowy sheets on the flat fields, and the ghostly, dark forms of cattle moving among the newly-plowed grasses, I wondered at the beauty of the early morning that I almost, again, missed — and that was even before the sun started to rise.

A lot must depend on where you are in the world, I suppose.  When I lived in New York I would sometimes walk to church for a midweek Liturgy in the early morning, and the dark alleyways and still-drunk residents of the street seemed awfully sinister.  Even here in the suburbs, the most I could hope for would be the romantic drone of the trash truck or the shriek of school-bus brakes.  Maybe it’s just out in the wilderness where we can watch morning unfold as God intended it to.

True Grit, and Other Virtues

The recent education issue of the New York Times had lots of great fodder for discussion and / or blogging. After the Russian pieces, I read an excellent feature that brings together two highly-rated headmasters — one from a charter school in low-income Harlem, one from a staggeringly expensive country school in Riverdale — to discuss the difference between great students and great people.

The difference, of course (of course!) is character.  And they have admirably narrowed down that nebulous category to eight key ideas like zest (enthusiasm,) grit (perseverence,) and my favority, curiosity (wanting to know just for the sake of knowing.)  They promote these virtues with posters, lessons and even a character report card on which each student is ranked by all of his teachers.

Can you teach virtue, as such? It’s a perplexing question, one I’m sure every parent would love to be able to answer.  Children need to see examples of it in action, of course, but they also need to learn what “it” is and why it is not only honorable, but useful (the charter program first began studying character in an effort to learn why more of their students didn’t go on to finish college.)  Maybe this is the way, or the way to the way.

Beyond the Call

Between construction delays, two hurricanes and an earthquake, things were off to a slow start this year, and administrators pleaded with us to be flexible in rescheduling events whose dates had already come and gone before classes began in earnest.  One casualty was Back-to-School Night, which was rescheduled twice and finally combined into one massive evening of upperclassmen, underclassmen and teachers.

The fun part of Back-to-School Night is watching the parents rush around, confused and harried, trying to find the classrooms their daughters use every day.  They take the stairs and arrive, huffing and puffing, with just as much anxiety as the students.  “Am I in the right room?  Did the bell already ring?  What did I miss?”  This is supposed to make them empathize with the students, but I think it has the same effect on us — when we see how difficult it is for an adult to keep pace, we’re a little more forgiving of the children of whom we expect so much.

This year, however, my grad school schedule interfered with the event, and I didn’t want to miss the second class after (due to an e-mail problem) I had been completely unprepared for the first one.  My principal was kind enough to excuse me once I told her I was planning to let the families of my students know ahead of time.  

So I wrote a letter and made sixty copies of it to send home with my students.  Their parents read and signed (and some even added a “Thank you” at the bottom, which warmed my heart.)  In compiling the notes, of course, some were missing, so the afternoon of the event I sat down with the school directory and spoke to about a dozen answering machines and one slightly-confused relative.

For the handful whose phone service wasn’t working (full voicemail, no voicemail, dead end) I resorted to e-mail, sending out a note with the same message: I was sorry to miss them, I had posted a copy of my class policies online, and they should feel free to contact me if they had any questions.  All told, the communication took at least as long as the event itself.

So it was lovely, the next morning, to receive an e-mail from one parent who was grateful for the communication, which she said was “beyond the call.”  She added that her daughter, typically a math person, was “actually looking forward to English this year, so you have made a great impression.”  

Sometimes one little note is all it takes.  This one is going in my portfolio for sure.

My New Favorite Brazilian Revolutionary

Dialogue cannot exist without humility.  The naming of the world, through which people constantly re-create that world, cannot be an act of arrogance.  Dialogue, as the encounter of those addressed to the common task of learning and acting, is broken if the parties (or one of them) lack humility.  How can I dialogue if I always project ignorance onto others and never perceive my own?  How can I dialogue if I regard myself as a case apart from others — mere “its” in whom I cannot recognize other “I”s?  How can I dialogue if I consider myself a member of the in-group of “pure” men, the owners of truth and knowledge, for whom all non-members are “these people” or “the great unwashed”? How can I dialogue if I start from the premise that naming the world is the task of an elite and that the presence of the people in histosy is a sign of deterioration thus to be avoided?  How can I dialogue if I am closed to — and even offended by — the contribution of others? How can I dialogue if I am afraid of being displaced, the mere possibility causing me torment and weakness? Self-sufficiency is incompatible with dialogue.  Men and women who lack humility (or have lost it) cannot come to the people, cannot be their partners in naming the world.  Someone who cannot acknowledge himself to be as mortal as everyone else still has a long way to go before he can reach the point of encounter. At the point of encounter there are neither utter ignoramuses nor perfect sages; there are only people who are attempting, together, to learn more than they now know.

Paolo Friere, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

A Different Way of Thinking

So my first-period students are handing in their essays, and one doesn’t have hers.  Only she doesn’t say that; she speaks the words I dread most. “Did you get my dad’s e-mail?”

I didn’t, because her dad e-mailed me around midnight the day before.  I log on after class and it’s seven or eight paragraphs, articulately detailing his daughter’s new diagnosis of ADHD.  She didn’t finish the paper because she left part of it at school, and she tried to restart it at home but ran out of steam and worked herself into a frenzy. He finally told her to go to bed and he would talk to me about it.

I don’t even think about writing back.  I pick up the phone and call him at work.

The thing about parents is that most of the time, they just want to talk.  I hardly said a word during what turned out to be a 20-minute conversation.  When I did speak, I affirmed his feelings: I, too, want his daughter to be successful in spite of her disability.  I agreed that there was nothing wrong with his daughter, and mentioned that girls often receive a later diagnosis than boys because they tend to lack the hyperactivity that’s a telltale sign of the condition.  I pointed to the online syllabi that spelled out every single assignment for the quarter.  I explained that late work would receive a 10% penalty each day unless the student had requested an extension before the due date.

And then I told him that, just this once, I would accept the paper late with no penalty.  Because I could already see that his daughter was a special person, one who wanted to do the right thing and needed some extra help to be able to do so.  I offered to meet with her during lunch one day to discuss how I could help her best.  I didn’t rush him off the phone, even when the late bell informed me my class was waiting.  

This is what happens when teachers are educated: last year, I would have rolled my eyes at what I viewed as indulgence and coddling.  Now I know something now about ADHD and the stigma that comes with it, about the struggles families have to keep their kids afloat with a diagnosis they don’t fully understand.  

Yes, school’s been underway for less than two weeks.  But even so, this is an extraordinary amount of patience for me, the world’s biggest blowhard.  I suppose it comes from understanding the father’s point of view: he loves his daughter and wants her to succeed.  That means that sometimes he doesn’t know when to stop talking.  Other times, as Ron Clark pointed out yesterday, it may lead to uglier actions, more offensive words, barriers that are hard to break down.  But last week, it was harmless.  My class was glad for the two extra minutes of study time.  They had a quiz to take.

Joyful

Yesterday was tough, disappointing and tiring. It was also exciting, cathartic and joyful.

I'm choosing to focus on the joyful part. When I saw how my hardworking student and her mother had prepared the refreshments table for her recital, my heart was lifted. They'll never know how much.

Something about that ritual, the one I've performed countless times for students whose names and faces are now blurred by time -- the one I can perform by heart, including the speech at the beginning, the silly story punctuated by repertoire and the encore bow at the end -- never fails to help me face the trials I am called to bear with renewed strength. And even with joy.

The Endless Summer

My school raised several million dollars for a major addition to the building, which was to take place over the summer.  Anyone who’s ever observed an ongoing construction project knows that deadlines are seldom met, so when the first day of school got pushed back several times, now holding at 10 days later than the original, our gleeful gratitude far eclipsed our shock.  However, the gift of a week and a half, just when I’m starting to get depressed about all the things I didn’t accomplish this summer, is nothing to sneeze at.  Here’s my plan:

• Clean the house from top to bottom.
• Organize all the junk in the basement.
• Sell one or two more unused pieces of furniture (I’ve had pretty good luck with Craigslist, despite a preponderance of flaky people who simply stop responding when they’re no longer interested.)
• Weed the gardens and harvest remaining produce.
• Go through my piano and vocal music; purge and reorganize.
• Catch up with friends I missed all summer. 

The real surprise? An earthquake that unleashed widespread devastation in the area this afternoon.  We’re slowly digging our way out from all the havoc.

Savings for Students (and Teachers)

When Rob goes away, I have to keep myself busy.  For the last week-plus I’ve been sanding, scraping, varnishing and painting the upstairs and planting the garden: projects that are eleven and three months later (respectively) than I meant to begin them, but at least they’re done now.  And, clearly, at the expense of my blog!

I promise to post something more meaningful soon, but I thought these bargains deserved their own private shout-outs:

1. Amazon Prime: free two-day shipping and $4-per-item overnight shipping for a year, plus special sales and promotions.  $80 per year.  Or, if you have a .edu e-mail account, completely free.  No joke!  As of now, they’re saying it’s at least a one-year membership; they “might choose” to extend it. Either way, it’s quite a deal, and they have an alternate method for non-edu e-mail addresses.
2. Scholastic Warehouse Sale: All educational materials are on sale, most around half of their normal price, through this weekend.  Search for a location (the closest to me is in Odenton) and click the “Sign Up” button to register and receive a coupon for an additional 10-25% off.

Down in the Dumps, and Climbing Out

Pascha is always the high point; after it, everything seems to tumble.  End-of-year deadlines approach with alarming speed.  Carefully-made professional plans unravel left and right.  Weekends pass in a frenzy of social events and dump me abruptly back at Monday morning, where class after class seems to have lost all interest in learning:

• Yesterday one (out of fourteen) students got one (out of eight) geometry problems right.  In case math isn't your thing either, that means there were 111 wrong answers and just one correct one.


• Other classes struggle with Fitzgerald (Did he have to spend a whole paragraph describing a drunk, weeping singer?) and Eliot (Would Prufrock please stop mooning over mermaids and just make a decision for once?)


• This evening I asked a piano student, who wore a slightly-sullen expression, whether she was all right. "Yes," she replied.  Then, thoughtfully: "Well, my nose itches."

Somehow it's still only Tuesday, though this week is a short one (we leave Thursday for five glorious days of travel in the South.)  So in case your week is going anything like mine, I wanted to share my best advice for climbing out of the deepest of fogs: friendship.

• Have pulled pork at Little Havana with people who love you too much to care (or even notice) that your eyes are swollen and red from the atmospheric pollen.  Laugh a lot.  Optional upgrades: coconut custard, Flying Fish Summer Ale and half-price entree night.


• Watch an episode of Anne of Green Gables.  Preferably one of the first ones, in which her rare and precious friendship with Diana saves her from a life of loneliness and despair.


• Read this heartwarming portrait of two teachers who stuck by each other through personal and professional difficulties and remain the closest of friends.  In New York, of all places.

Don't get me wrong.  True love is grand.  But friendship is what makes this all worth it.

 

Thirty by Thirty

Although I rarely have the chance to read them, I'm really inspired by the articles in my professional association's quarterly journal.  They always have some interesting writing exercises that I'd love to be able to pull into my class.

A recent article about life goals brought me to a sort of bittersweet nostalgia.  A teacher explains an assignment given to him in junior high -- thirty things he wanted to accomplish before he turned thirty -- which was memorable enough to repeat in his own classes much later:

I wish I had that list today. I distinctly recall how that silly assignment really stretched my brain, asking me to look beyond that which was right in front of my nose, year after year to what seemed like an eternity. Thirty was old. Really, really old.

What do I remember from that list? Not much except wanting a fancy car and hoping to parachute from an airplane someday. I’ve had a few cars, none nearly as nice as the one on my list, and I wouldn’t throw my body out of a plane if you paid me. I still long to see my entries, especially the ones after the first ten, the entries I really had to think about, the quiet ones.

I do the same exercise with my Creative Writing class; I ask students to write thirty things they’d like to do before thirty years old with no category repeats. In other words, they cannot just write thirty different cars they’d like to someday own (some could actually do this). I also ask them to consider items outside consumerism and money—what they’d like to learn or know, whom they’d like to meet, love, or help. This assignment should be a little difficult, I tell them, if they invest some time to think about it.

Of course this made me a little sad.  I wonder about my own middle-school self: what would she have wanted me to accomplish by now?  On the other hand, what would I have done that really impressed her?

So I decided to create a list of thirty things I've done of which I'm still proud, honoring the parameters of the original assignment (no category repeats).  However old you are, I encourage you to do the same; if there are any surprises on my list, I'm sure you can find a few for yours.

1. Passed (briefly) for a native in several foreign countries.


2. Graduated cum laude from college.


3. Learned how to use a real film camera, and took some great photos with it.


4. Got paid to write.


5. Been a godmother to five lovely girls and one sweet, cuddly boy.


6. Survived two years of architecture school and many more of aftermath.


7. Taught lots of children (and a few adults) how to read, write, think and play.


8. Cooked many amazing meals from scratch.


9. Treasured those close to me.


10. Been interviewed on television.


11. Failed a class. Fought back.


12. Ran a 5K.  (Well, mostly ran.)


13. Aced standardized tests.


14. Made my cat purr just by talking to her.


15. Earned scholarships to pay for my education.


16. Planted a kitchen garden.


17. Sang (prayed) the most beautiful music in church.


18. Stayed to help when things came apart: folders, dishes, marriages, lives.


19. Took actual voice lessons from an actual voice teacher.


20. Lived and worked in Manhattan.


21. Discovered I love yoga.


22. Asked forgiveness. Constantly.


23. Married the right person.


24. Watched 70 perfect movies. (Most of the other 1842 belong on another list.)


25. Sent flowers, gifts and handwritten letters to lonely friends all over the world.


26. Played a spontaneous concert on Frank Lloyd Wright's concert grand.  Shocked tourists.


27. Read these.  And others.


28. Surprised my husband twice (party, guitar) and my father once (engagement.)


29. Arranged flowers for brides.  Made them smile.


30. Written 472 posts on a blog that's been lots of fun.