Work: The graduation speech I won't ever give

There is just over a month until graduation, and I stand before the students in my English 12 class gushing about the I-Search paper, our department-wide senior project.  You come up with your own question --about anything you want to know!  You tell your own story about where you looked for answers and what you found!  This paper is about you!  I'm selling it, but they aren't buying.

Because I really like every one of the 24 students in that class, I find all the lethargy and apathy, the heads resting on desks and fingers texting below desks, endearing rather than maddening.  My fondness for them may also explain why this year more than any other I've thought about my own senior year.

One vivid memory from those dwindling days is of sitting in my English class with an open copy of Light in August on my desk. It was just after lunch and the windows were open, the lights were dimmed, a mower hummed outside. Our desks were arranged in a circle that wrapped from where my teacher stood at his lecturn.  He rattled off analysis, and I mechanically entered into the margins gems like JC=Jesus Christ. 

When I sat down later to write my essay, all those notations may as well have been in Aramaic because, though years later I would strain to remember all my teacher had shared in order to pass it on to my own students, I hadn't really been in that classroom.  My head was gone from that place; it dwelled in the uncertainty of my prom plans, the dread I felt at the final pathetic death throes of my first serious relationship, the anxiety that oozed from my ridiculous need to keep secret my weekend job at McDonald's.  But mostly, I had moved on to college, which I just knew would be the answer to everything.

My students have moved on, too, but had I caught them back in January when they were still wholly present, I might have told them a couple things I learned when I was in their place. 

First, I could have told them that as much as they saw graduation as an escape, they would never fully leave here because this place would never fully leave them.  Despite the 10-hour drive, leaving home put no distance between me and the insecure high school girl who'd worried what her friends would think when her father pulled into the school parking lot seemingly jammed with Mercedes and picked her up in his rusted Ford Escort.  Yet, from my vantage point 500 miles away I was for the first time able to see that my parents' sweat and sacrifice was at least as responsible for my success as my note-taking and paperwriting and I cherish that to this day.

I could also have told my students not to cling too tightly to that mental image of college they've been chasing for the last four years. That day in English class I imagined college to be a beer-soaked bacchanal, and every weekend when I worked my secret job at McDonald's I'd bare the sighs and eye rolls of unappreciative customers by surreptitiously crushing their burgers as I bagged them and muttering under my breath Someday I will buy and sell you. 

In the end college was both so much less and so much more than I could have predicted.  There was, of course, beer, enough for a freshman 20, for a sagging GPA, and some situations dangerous enough to make me consider homeschooling my own girls for college. Truthfully, all that partying was a lot of fun at times, yet I know that in my dogged pursuit of the college experience promised me in movies and on tv I missed out on a lot of actual experiences.  And I never did end up buying or selling anybody; instead I met the man I would marry, convinced him to follow his heart and teach history to high schoolers instead of marching grimly into the world of business, and --to the surprise of the girl who zoned out in English-- decided that my own best fit was in the classroom.

Be open to anything, I could have told them, but make sure that you hold on to something.  Even as I write this, it sounds familiar, and it's possible that someone said it to me back then.  There was no shortage of advice.  My teachers, my parents, other people's parents, old men on scholarship boards, I recall them all telling me things that I could clearly see they considered very important.  I smiled politely, nodded gravely and listened to not one word, and for the same reason my students could care less about the I-Search: I already had the answer.

Even if I could break through my students' pre-graduation haze and force them to take heed, I wouldn't.  Right now, they all have the answer.

I really like them, and I want them to be able to enjoy that feeling for the few months it lasts.

Work: And now I know...

I have been a teacher for ten years now, and in that time I have attended many special education meetings for my students, so many, in fact, that I assumed that I knew pretty much all there was to know: the jargon, the protocol, the flow charts. 

And then I found myself on the other side of the conference table.

Two weeks ago my husband and I sat in a special education meeting for Little E, the result of an evaluation she'd had with the school district's occupational therapist after her pre-school teachers had echoed my own concerns about her fine motor skills. 

I knew from my time on that side of the table that the people who sat across from me were professionals there to do their jobs, which, ultimately, was to help my child. Still, I couldn't ignore the fact that they were also there to tell me that she was decidedly flawed; worse, I was there to agree with them. 

Committing this betrayal while my daughter played happily at home filled me with a gnawing guilt.  This feeling was compounded not only by my mental list of the ways I'd already failed my child (pacifier, bottle, overzealous swaddling, liberal TV policy, extended period of denial), but also by my understanding that every day mothers cared for grown children with the needs of infants, slept on cots in their children's hospital rooms and birthed babies who would never take a breath. I was pretty sure that all of them handled their circumstances with more grace than I'd managed upon learning that my daughter was really not good at coloring.

Yet I doubt any of this internal mess was visible from the other side.  I knew my role in this meeting: small talk about the weather, conscientious note-taking, studious head-tilting and clarifying questions.

The occupational therapist who had evaluated Little E read from her report.  I knew from having been there that the people on the clean and clinical side of the table could separate the challenge from the child.  The fine motor delays that the evaluation had revealed were simply a problem to be solved and we were there to determine the best course of action.  But from my side, the view was a little hazier and the distinction not quite as simple.

Since the day of the evaluation when I'd sat at that very same conference table and watched my daughter, grim-faced with determination, fail to color properly, to cut with scissors properly, to form a letter, lace a card or trace a line properly, I had struggled with a measure of grief.  I wasn't exactly grieving for Little E, who was still the same sweet and silly, delightful and exasperating girl she had been before that day.  I grieved more for the fact that so early I had to retire the notion that she would travel the clear path I had imagined for both my daughters.  I grieved for knowing from experience that in school achievement is measured with pencil and paper, that preparation for standardized tests starts in kindergarten, and that none of this would come as easily to her as I wanted it to.

As the meeting neared its end, the chairwoman turned to the flow chart that is used to determine a child's eligibility for services.  From sitting so many times on the other side of the table, I knew that this was a matter of legality, of filling out paperwork and applying the appropriate jargon so as to get on with the real work of fixing problems and helping children.  She read aloud:  Is there a disability? Yes.  What type? Physical.  I felt my husband's hand on my knee.  My breath stuck in my throat, my stomach lurched, my head swam.

And I knew then that this was more than words and paper, jargon and protocol.  I knew then that despite my ten years on the other side of the table, there was a whole lot that I didn't know.

Dream: The fury of, um, fury...

 Under your bed
sat the wolf
and he made a shadow
when cars passed by
at night.
They made you give up
your nightlight
and your teddy
and your thumb.

(from "The Fury of Overshoes" by Anne Sexton)

Last week, I read Anne Sexton's "The Fury of Overshoes" with a class of nearly checked-out second semester seniors.  They grimly worked through the analysis, dutifully noting the symbolism of the protective overshoes, the speaker's yearning, the poet's use of line breaks.   Then I asked them to write about their own childhood furies, fears and frustrations.

Suddenly, the rows of eye-rollers, furtive-texters and across-the-room-pantomimers were scribbling furiously, lips pursed, brows furrowed.  When I stopped them after 10 minutes they bursted with their torments: unfounded fears of parents moving away in the night, anxiety about possibly vampiric brothers, confiscated nightlights begetting sleepless weeks, embarassed parents packing away beloved blankies.  After the bell rang, their comparison of traumas continued down the hall.  The consensus: what seemed big then is small now.

In preparing the lesson, I had, of course, thought of my own girls, of monsters under beds and the fury of pacifiers packed away.  But my students, distanced from childhood, not yet engulfed in adulthood and years from parenthood, were at the perfect age for this kind of reminiscense, and the way the topic ignited them, the clarity of their memories, made me think some more.

It has been a long winter.  Things have gone wrong. Feet of snow are sapping my patience, and freezing temperatures have already slurped up our heating oil budget. I recently plugged in the vacuum cleaner and inexplicably blew out the electricity to half of our poorly-wired house. One dark morning last week my husband went out to start the car before work and...nothing. And all of this has birthed a frustration that in certain moments has presented itself as fury.  I have hurled my fury at my husband, he has blasted his at me, and we've both freed it on the house.  Though never directed at the girls, the fury has certainly been flung all around them.

My students' stories, told with much hilarity but a hint of solemnity, centered largely on fears, rather than frustrations and furies, and reminded me that that I really don't want to be responsible for spawning my girls' nightmares or constructing the monsters under their beds. Yet even as I ruminated on this, congratulating myself for drawing such a neat line from words to work to life, I found myself late for an appointment, stuck behind a creeping plow, shaking my fist and shouting at the stream of cars that whizzed past without letting me change lanes.  When I glanced in the rearview mirror, I saw Little E strapped into her seat behind me, her eyes and mouth three shocked O's.

The things that have been plaguing us are only marginally more real than the rats that one of my students was convinced would emerge from the walls as he slept in his upper-middle class suburban bedroom.  We can put on another sweater and call an electrician and a tow truck.  It is stuff and we are fine; I should know this.  And still I keep coming back to more of Sexton's words:

Oh thumb,
I want a drink,
it is dark,
where are the big people,
when will I get there,
taking giant steps
all day,
each day
and thinking
nothing of it?

Work: Looking a gift horse in the mouth

My students have been really nice to me lately, and their benevolence concerns me.

I've experienced this before.  Years ago, when I returned to work still shaken after travelling to my grandmother's funeral, one student quietly spent an entire class period organizing and arranging every messy, overstuffed cabinet and shelf in my classroom.  In the last swollen, lumbering days of both of my pregnancies, an immediate hush would spread over the room any time I hoisted myself from my chair.  If anyone failed to quiet quickty enough, I could count on someone to come through with an angry hiss, "The baby!"  And of course, there was last year when among the various kind gestures from my students, there were countless back pats and shoulder squeezes.

In my experience, my students' solicitousness is directly proportionate to my own piteousness.  Only I'm not currently mourning, pregnant or fired.  Lately, I'm just a little...batty.  I'm trying to keep up with new curriculum and mountains of grading at work; I'm mounting Big E's dog-themed birthday party complete with homemade puppy cake, dog bone cookies, and tableclothes handstamped with pawprint paths; I'm replicating the same party for Little E this weekend --with the addition of the in-laws and a grilled cheese-themed dinner; I'm shopping for Christmas; I'm writing and losing lists; I'm trying not to think about the untouched stack of Christmas cards that must be addressed; and I'm kind of losing my head. 

The messy collision of work, birthdays and Christmas has me feeling frantic.  I find myself speaking at a pace my seventh grade English teacher once compared to a runaway train.  I am running down hallways and across parking lots, and --because as I am busy lately, I am vain always-- my rapid little high-heeled steps only make me look all the more deranged.

Recently, a student in my senior class cocked her head at me as I fumbled for a pen just before I started class.  "Are you...okay?" she asked, prompting me to launch into a rapid-fire recount of the previous evening's cookie-baking and tablecloth-stamping.  She has gently asked me the same question every day since. 

On Monday, after flying through Act II, scene i of Othello with a class of sophomores, I stopped for a breath and somehow managed to knock over my entire bag full of papers.  I waved off the students who rushed up to help and instead proceeded to tell, from my hands and knees (and like a runaway train), the story of how the dog had gotten into the birthday party trash, then my husband had set the alarm clock wrong, then he stepped in dog vomit, then he walked the dog vomit around the carpet... Since then they have eerily quiet and disconcertingly polite.

This year is supposed to be about equilibrium, but lately I feel like I'm hustling through life trying to balance a heavy tray cluttered with brimming glasses, overcompensating with every attempt and making a mess of everything.  I'm just hoping 2011 brings steadier hands ...and a lighter tray.

Work: Flight Plans

The secret of success is making your vocation your vacation.

Mark Twain said this.  I was introduced to it on an MCAS practice test that I gave my students in my first year of teaching in an urban high school.  I stood in my windowless classroom full of teens, some struggling with poverty others with adjusting to the climate and language of a new country, trying to convince them of the relevance of not only Twain's aphorism but also of this test that would decide their academic fate. I wondered where this experience fell on the range of vacations.  Was this Hawaii or was I in Beirut?

 I alternately, and at times simultaneously, loved and hated what I was doing that year, but I always knew that it was no vacation.  Ten years later, work is no longer the wild ride that it once was.  I have grown more comfortable with my abilities and sharpened my instincts in the classroom.  I had children of my own and recalibrated my priorities.  My students have rewarded me much more often than they've punished me  And still, it is a vocation and never a vacation.

There are things that I love about my job: the students, the chance to read The Catcher in the Rye  on endless loop, the fact that it helps to pay the mortgage.  There are other things that I don't like as much.  The mounds of grading come to mind, along with the general lack of official recognition of my efforts, which when coupled with my duties at home sometimes feel Herculean.  There is also the fact that I am an introvert who cringes at conflict, and I am working in a position that calls daily for hundreds of personal interactions, each fraught with potential for discord and misunderstanding.  I sometimes feel rubbed raw.

Maybe nothing can be a vacation once it is tied to a paycheck.  When I read The Catcher in the Rye, I tell my students to pretend that I am not giving it to them, that they just pulled it off the shelf on their own.  I know that obligation saps enjoyment.

And yet, especially lately, I believe there's more. I just don't know what it is. So I sit here in the terminal, hands folded in my lap, patiently awaiting my vacation flight.  Unfortunately, I am forgetting that I am not only tour director but the pilot, as well.   If I don't get out of my seat, the plane will never pull up to the gate.

I am thinking about drafting some flight plans.

Work: In praise of kindness

When I was in school, I never thought much about my teachers' kindness. As a parent, I realize that kindness is a teacher's most valuable gift, better than experience, humor or knowledge.

As a kid, I defined my teachers as "nice" or "mean."  While they were mostly nice, the mean ones stuck with me.  There was the elementary school nurse who stood me up in front of my fourth grade class as an example of poor grooming due to my wild, thick hair and the seventh grade art teacher who noted that I might just have worms because I was fidgeting in my seat. 

More damaging was my senior year history teacher who listened politely as I nervously ran through my oral report on Roe vs. Wade.  When I'd finally shuffled past my last index card and asked if there were any questions, she raised her hand, cocked her head and asked if it wasn't uncomfortable to wear a skirt so short and tight.  She couldn't have known that my boyfriend had dumped me over the phone the night before, that I'd been so crushed that I'd crawled my seventeen-year-old self into my mother's bed, or that she had laid out my clothes for me that morning.  My teacher might have guessed that as a shy scholarship student, I didn't need to be singled out.  She must have known that what she'd said was unkind.

When I became a teacher ten years ago, I carried this experience with me and knew I would never be so mean.  I never was, but in those years before I was a parent I never fully grasped the importance of kindness.  In my first year I had to meet with an assigned mentor teacher once a week, a woman with teenaged children of her own. Once, as I tearfully lamented my frustration with a group of difficult students, she told me that she found some solace in reminding herself that they were all someone's children.  At the time I was baffled by her non sequitor, a random statement of biological fact.  Now, as a parent I can appreciate the perspective she offered; they are near-adults, but once were helpless infants, nervous kindergarteners.

My understanding of the importance of kindness has grown as Big E has.  To the bus driver who made sure she had someone to sit with on the way home from kindergarten, the school secretary who stopped her first day sobbing, the skating teacher who patiently gave her try after try to pass out of her group and, when she didn't make it, explained her strengths and prospects so optimistically that we both left happy: Thank you, thank you, thank you.  As a mother, I feel such huge gratitude for such small acts.

Before students reported for school, the faculty at the school where I teach was prescribed top priorites for the year: things like Rigor and Excellence, euphemisms for more impressive test scores. These are important and somewhat quantifiable.  There are procedures and steps and suggestions published by PhDs and generated by blue ribbon panels that outline how to meet these objectives. 

But kindness will be my unofficial priority for the year, and the steps to achieving it are not as clear cut, its results not so easily translated to numbers.  I'll start by allowing the mother in me to crack my professional facade from time to time.  I'll remember that even though my students are near-adults, even at their least lovable, they are each someone's child.  And you never know who among them crawled crying into her mother's bed last night...or who just wanted to.     

Work: With my pink pen in my pocket

As the daughter of blue-collar parents who has spent her entire working life in public schools (save for a warehouse temp gig here and a maternity leave there), my perception of life in the corporate workforce is informed entirely by what  television has shown me.  And, oddly, the television show that has most influenced my vision is Melrose Place.

As such, when I fantasize about an office job, I see myself strutting into work in a perfectly tailored suit with a mid-thigh length skirt, three-inch heels, sexily tousled hair and a very important leather briefcase.  My desk would be a huge mahogany number, nearly bare except for a vase of fresh flowers.  I would eat lunch in a white-tablecloth restaurant and use the bathroom --whenever I wished!-- surrounded by pristine marble.  This is all pretty far from my reality.

Teaching  is a profession rife with sensible shoes, khaki pants and ponytails.  Grown ups (myself included) carry back packs.  Lunch is a 22-minute affair and the general aroma is less fresh cut lillies than teenage perspiration and Axe body spray.  It is not glamorous and paperwork abounds.  Every year, though I swear I won't, I spend a portion of my salary on supplies as basic as tissues and tape.  Oh, and it is fraught with power struggles from all angles, multiple highly charged interactions each day, and always looming budget cuts. 

And despite the grungy paper towel-less bathrooms, I am going back in a week.  My new pink pen is one reason why.

Along with gentle pats on the back, genuine concern and a sweetly personalized copy of the The Catcher in the Rye, the pen is one of the gifts I received from my students in response to a tough time I went through last year.  On the last day of school a student thrust a notebook paper card and a box containing a pink Cross pen onto my desk.  "I googled 'nice pens' and this is what I came up with," he said.  "I guess it's the best.  You better use it next year."

So I will return, to the less than glamorous surroundings, the uncertainty of my position, the trepidation that comes from leaving my own children to attend to others'.  But this year I will return with my pink pen in my pocket...even more important than a briefcase.