Being Schooled

I think there is exactly one person following my blog that hasn't had a post since 2011, and today he is rewarded.  Organizing file folders, I stumbled upon this old, random reflection that I must have written at some point during graduate school, and though it was written entirely without purpose, and needs editing, I'd love to give it an audience. ( Hi, George.)  

My meandering point in the found writing piece takes a new significance now, in my third year of teaching.  It reminds me of my love of learning...beckons me to return to school, and persuades me that I am in a unique position as a teacher, to give a certain gift.

#selfaggrandizing 


Being Schooled
 
It’s a reflective time of year, with final grades being posted and dorm rooms being sorted and stuffed into plastic garbage bags serving as luggage.  I’m an outsider for the first time this May: though I’m graduating for the second time in two years, Graduate School has none of the breathless incredulity that Undergrad did.  Now, I feel I’m walking the shaded paths of the university not as a student but as an employee (thirty-five hours a week staffing the desk at the writing center) and though I’m now on the receiving end of my monetary relationship with Rutgers, there is less joy in it then you might think. 
 
I watch the students with a melancholy resignation, not quite wishing their position but vividly recalling my own: those early morning walks to a coffee shop and then class, the thrill of a hard written essay affirmed and lauded by a respected professor.  I miss the early semester trips to the bookstore with reading list in hand, the lovely possibility of each title.  I miss the time spent procrastinating with West Wing re-runs I can’t imagine I’ll soon again have the pleasure of watching, in my pajamas, at nine in the morning.  Getting my English degree was full of incidental perks- now that it’s got, it stands alone. 
 
I’ve always enjoyed school- perhaps because I’m less of an independent thinker than I like to admit.  My training to be a teacher  has discouraged me from thinking of students as sponges, even as I see myself as a porous, wide-eyed and passive little creature, soaking it all in.  Why drag me into small group activities when I want nothing more than to sit and listen, prettying my sparkling clean page with lines of ink.  The overall quality of my professors have run the gamut to be sure- a pontificating, sweating Poli-Sci instructor with a crush on Justice Scalia comes to mind on the low end- but the ones who have awed me have had to do nothing more than speak with the quiet passion that envelopes their expertise. 
 
Some of these professors built wonderfully fulfilling semesters out of the most icky of period requirements- walking me down literary roads I doubt I would have traveled without a push.  I remember the indignant disbelief with which I hefted the 816 page Longman edition of The Faerie Queene now as a milestone- a “when we first met” moment that grows sepia-tone in retrospective context.  That first night I performed a dramatic reading to the amusement of my roommates, waving my hand theatrically as I accentuated the Old English.
 
“So soone as day forth dawning from the East/ Nights humid curtaine from the heavens withdrew/ and earely calling forth both man and beast/ commaunded them their daily workes renew.” 
 
Their amusement waned when it came time for The Hills, and I was left alone with Spenser, armed only with a highlighter.  To no one’s greater surprise than my own, the weeks that followed were fantastically engaging- my fear and struggle rewarded in full.  In my previous courses I had always written papers without much effort, and now for the first time I drafted and re-drafted, printing stacks of secondary sources and purging hours worth of work to try to clarify my argument.  By the end of the semester, I had found within those archaic lines some powerful notions about time, virtue and memory- I had found some meaning that was both wholly relevant to my experience and deliciously alien. 
 
Another semester and another return from the bookstore: this time holding not Edmund Spenser, but Lynda Barry, Daniel Clowes and Phoebe Gloeckner.  My disbelief this time around was not in the heft of the text but in the scope of the pictures:  I couldn’t quite believe that my undergraduate studies included this full page homage to the naked male form.  Neither could my roommates.  The Hills was a snooze-fest compared to page 43. 
 
So it was understandably difficult, weeks later, to persuade them that in fact the graphic novels weren’t pornography, they were volumes in an exciting genre that blended visual and textual representation to arrive at a new form of telling.  (I lost them somewhere around “textual representation”.)  That semester I studied these books, among others, with a keen interest in the ways that they attempted to make private traumas public, and fell deeply in love with such authors as Alison Bechdel and Marjane Satrapi.  Once again, my coursework had changed me; had so swiftly and exponentially expanded my knowledge that I was left with a contradictory notion of ignorance that has lingered long since.  The more I learned, the more convinced I felt that I could never know enough.
 
The gaps of my studies blare too brightly- it is with shame that I admit I failed to take a single college course on Shakespeare, and still aim to call myself An English Major.  There is a file on my iTunes, an unabridged audio recording of The Tempest, that suggests I was required to read at least this one play for some survey course, but my complete lack of memory regarding the details should tell you just how far that plan got.  I didn’t make it through The Quiet American, and there is some British Literature from the 19th century (particularly of the sensational variety) that I skimmed, and that’s putting it generously.  Sometimes, in the layers of my hard drive, I’ll happen across an essay I wrote and read it through to the end without a single moment of recognition- it’s my writing style, sure, but when did I ever have so much to say about Borges?   If I was only able to retain all that I have learned, these authors and theories and contexts, I would know everything about art, and the human experience, and why I love to study literature in the first place.  Or at least I’d know what the hell Borges was talking about.
 
Maybe. 
 
When I think about my time in college, it presents in montages of scenes like that of reading The Faerie Queene or watching mid-morning television.  I’m walking to my Intro to Creative Writing course at 9:45 on a Thursday in late April.  I’m holding an iced-decaf- French Vanilla coffee with just a little bit of milk please and it’s basically the weekend, because I haven’t taken a class on Friday since my Freshman year. Obviously. There are those little pink blossoms littering the street, the ones that make you feel like you are living in the final scenes of a romantic comedy, and there are four poems in my bag, the first I’ve ever written.  I probably won’t be able to bring myself to read them out loud today, but that is alright because I’m not intended to deliver.  I’m being schooled.  I’m here to learn.

Marriage!

Hey, friends.  I totally got married.  I'm not sure where this post is going from there.  Let's cut right to a photo.

It was a lot like that.

It was also a little bit like this...

Meaning awkward and sweaty  but clearly awesome.  That's my brother, not my husband.  My husband looks even cooler when he dances.

The wedding was the most surreal experience I have ever had.  No one told me that walking down the aisle would feel like an episode of "This is Your Life."  I honestly felt surprised that I could draw a crowd of 160 people who would look at me that happily.  Should I start using plural pronouns?  Yes, obviously, the mister had a few fans there as well.  But he was not wearing such a pretty, pretty dress.

It rained during our ceremony, which was held outdoors at Grounds for Sculpture in Hamilton, NJ.  Everyone gushes that it was so atmospheric and quiet and magical and this is all very true, now that we know it didn't downpour and ruin my hair.  I mean our vows.  There was the slightest drizzle through the whole twenty or so minutes, and I have to credit myself by saying that I managed not to be seized by panic and wish away the whole experience.  Which is good, because it was an incredible experience.  Standing in front of all of those people, there were moments where it really did feel as if it were only Mike and me, really well dressed, grinning away and doing this crazy, hopeful thing.

Good Ol' Fashioned Reflections

It's 2 pm and I'm sitting in my classroom, awaiting dismissal time.  The students have half days this week, and they leave loudly at noon.  I've taken down the posters from the walls, and recycled thousands of pieces of paper from filing drawers and piles around my desk.  Looking through the handouts and the student work from the beginning of the year makes me feel as strange as does sitting here in this quiet and emptying classroom.  Some of the papers are evidence of lessons and units that seem misguided now- and I can see that they have done nothing more than sit in piles for seven or eight months.  I can already feel September crowding in on me, expecting much better. 

But what an overwhelming feeling it can be: to finish one year and dust your hands of it, but to know that only two short months separate this finish line from the starting gun, and come that time you are meant to outperform your present self.  What have I learned?  What will I do differently and so be better?

I'll try and make a list.

1. Simplify.  Teach skills first as simply as possible.  Then try some big ideas.
2. Lock my books up.  Sign them out to the students.  Sign them back in.
3. Establish a clear authority immediately, even when I want to just be nice so that the kids will start the year liking me.  Remember that they need to feel safe, and that that means there needs to be expectations and consequences.  Remember that they will like me eventually, and it will be because I am fair and help them learn.
4. I don't want to keep student notebooks in my room anymore.  Students should just bring them to class every day.  Make this a graded assignment for the first month until they learn they have to do it.
5. Read every day.  And at the beginning of the year, it should be for at least twenty minutes.  Keep telling the students why it is so important.  Show them evidence.  Don't let them leave the classroom or put their headphones on or write a note. 
6. Make them hand write rough drafts before we go to the lab! Period 2 did that this year for their Kindest Thing essays and theirs were so much better than every other class'.
7. Tell them they will never be allowed to go to the bathroom during the first five minutes of class, or anytime I am teaching.  They may go during independent work, but if it starts to become a habit I will dock this privilege. 

That's all for now.  I'll get back to this.  I think it's helping. 

But now it's quitting time :)

Home Stretch!

That's right sports fans, today and tomorrow I am meeting with my classes for the last time before finals begin.  I still feel stressed!  There is no reason to be stressed this week: I am not teaching anything, I have done all of the good I can possibly do for their adolescent brains, and I will not be teaching them ever again!  And yet, my man had to talk me through a string of anxiety-ridden topics yesterday before I could calm down enough to brush my teeth.  (I don't mean that I need to be especially calm to brush my teeth.  That's just what I do before I  go to bed.)  What is my problem?  Why can't I relax?  I feel very angry with myself when I think that I might already be getting stressed about next year.  Chill out, me!

The mister thinks it might be wedding planning too, encroaching on my anxiety hideouts now that teaching stress has subsided.  But mostly I am just excited about wedding stuff. 

!

One last thing before I go back to grading: my annoyance with the incorrect pronoun usage on facebook has reached a critical mass.  It's Paul's birthday?  No I do not want to write on their wall!  I understand that this is a difficult problem to fix, because FB officials can't very well start saying "his/her" without totally undermining the sentiment of community they have so carefully constructed.  But maybe it could just read:  "It's Paul's birthday.  Write on Paul's wall?"

I know you are weary, but we all must live within the confines of good grammar. 

Teaching Poetry

It was last period on a Friday afternoon and April was finally warming up.  I had finished reading Wilbur's "The Writer" to my class, and finished coaxing out every last comment on metaphor and meaning that this crew was capable of on such a fine spring afternoon.  Cruel to hold them captive in my classroom, and crueler still to ask them to follow this reading with an attempt at imitation.  If it had been within my scope of authority to dismiss us all for the day, you can be sure I would have.  But as it wasn't, I continued my month-long work of guiding these kids to finding their poet potential.

Most of the kids had settled in to write their own metaphor poems without much reluctance, but J, sitting front and center, had been squirming in his chair for the better part of ten minutes.  When I finally made my way over to him, I leaned down to his level, resting my hands on his desk, and asked him how it was coming.

"Miss," he widened his eyes at me, "I'm not made for this."

I laughed, collapsed my head into my arms rested on his desk, and laughed some more.  The delightful surprise of his dramatic (and poetic!) confession was the cherry on top of a long week of comically trying individual conferences and class-wide lessons.  When I looked up at him again, he was gazing at me unamused, resigned to wait out my silliness until I was prepared to take him seriously and excuse him from this and all future creative writing assignments.

I share with J a looming suspicion that I am ill-suited for writing.  Each day I wish that I was writing, and think about things I could write about, and how I could write about them, and how I might write the writing I'm reading better than it's written. But I hardly write.  And so I keep this possibility in my mind that I could write something, maybe even publish something, and maybe by never actually pursuing it I keep it safe as an option. 

My students mostly don't care about being writers, and feel certain that they aren't.  But they are, I tell them every day.  You can even be a good writer!  The only thing you need to be to be a good writer, I tell them, is honest.  I say this like it is easy, and as if this knowledge alone will produce words.  But you've got to write too.  You've got to write even when you suspect you might not be made for it.

Adios

Day One of the Poetry Unit and I am that gooey teachery pie filling that I turn into when my students spend a chunk of time bent over their desks writing intently.  I mean, suffice it to tell you that I am writing this in eighth period, which is usually completely impossible because I have to keep shooting students death stares and getting out of my seat to stand intimidatingly close to the baddies.  There are days where I have "written" in my notebook only for the show of it, scribbling incoherent nonsense about getting. myself. together.

But today is not one of those days.  I read "Adios" by Naomi Shihab Nye to the students, and modeled an approach to poetry designed to help them understand and appreciate poems that can at first seem impossibly dense.  Of course, I chose a poem that was not impossibly dense, so that they could master it.

Now master might be a strong word here, but they did contribute insightful analysis, in addition to the usual randomness.  Best of all, when I asked them to imitate the poem's form, they did. 

I realized during my first in-class reading of the day that I had chosen a poem that reminds me of losing my dad.  I do that pretty often- fail to realize that the reason I love a poem or a passage is because it connects with this most intense emotional memory and experience.  And then I'll be reading it again, sometimes in front of a classroom of students, and think: Oh shoot.  No crying.

No crying today; lots of writing and reading.  And that's really all that I can ask of a Tuesday.

Professional Development

I attended a writing conference on Saturday and even though I wasn't really looking forward to it, I still felt disappointed.  This is so commonly the case with any PD I engage in.  When I complained once about faculty meetings and department meetings and the lack of meetings that address the things I actually would enjoy some meetings about, my mom seemed confused as to why this would be.  I felt frustrated when she asked about it, because I feel like people have been complaining about faculty meetings since the beginning of time and she should just understand that they are intrinsically useless and infuriating.

But actually, why?

Why is it so hard to address things of actual consequence?  Why can't the people in positions of leadership in my field present practical and relevant information that I could use in my classroom?  Or in my life?  I would settle for information that I could just use in my brain, instead of the usual variety that squeezes into my vulnerable, open ears until my brain rejects it, violently.
When you have a captive audience, shouldn't it be a crime to lecture about minutia and run ragged the same tired, old party lines?

Two Teaching Stories

#1. My class of comedians was in rare form yesterday.  I'm starting a research unit on the current upheaval in the Mideast, and I wanted to introduce the topic to the whole class yesterday so that we all had a basic foundation of knowledge before they broke away into their groups for the rest of the unit.  This is all to say that I needed a small degree of attention and quiet.  It was clear from the bell that it was going to be a bit of a wrestling match.
Before I share with you my most impressive move, I'd like to say that I did ultimately subdue them, and they ended up completely engrossed in the lesson.  But before that, I articulated this little gem of a direction:
"Guys. I'm not going to tell you a million times to stop talking.  I'm going to...tell you less than a million times.  And on the millionth time...I'm going to ask you to leave."
I was getting a few giggles before I even hit "less than a million times," probably because it was clear I had no idea what I was saying.  One of my very well behaved girls shook her head at me and quietly said: "I really don't understand."
She sounds sweet, but she had a hint o' self satisfied smirk.  Unfortunately, as she was 100% correct, there was nothing I could do but smile, raise my eyebrows and pretend that their little pee brains simply couldn't comprehend the divine wisdom of my words.

#2. I was giving a quiz on source reliability, which was fantastic because I never get to give quizzes.  About ten minutes in, one of my students raised his hand and asked, in a leading tone, "We can make up a website, right?"  "Yes," I answered offhandedly, eyeing a suspicious pocket of students who hadn't studied and looked pretty capable of cheating or charging out of the classroom to pull a fire alarm to avoid failing.  But after a minute of them doing neither, I thought: wait, what? and went over to my desk to pick up a copy of the quiz.  The only question that called for a website was one that asked students to identify an example of a credible source and explain why.  When I got to the student's desk I found him writing "facts.org" and giggling a little to himself.

Names for the Blog

Right now Bloggie's name is Schooled- but that is just a little too cliched.  I'm very sensitive to things that are cliches and I would hazard a guess that 85% of the things that I write but I delete almost immediately are banished because they are really super typical and overdone.  The other 15% that I delete is super original but really sucks.

Anything about being a first year teacher and being crazy stressed about it is out for the same reason.  And also because I'm less stressed about it now, so I'm not in the mood for any title that reckons a Cathy cartoon Aak!  Even as played by Liz Lemon as played by Tina Fey.

Also out are the multitude of simple, straightforward and generally perfect titles that have already been claimed because I am really, really late to Blogger.

Let's think.  I usually like to turn to authors more accomplished than myself.  I read this essay by Mark Doty years ago about composing one of his poems (A Display of Mackerel) that always stuck with me because he described the experience of writing something and only coming to understand what it was you were writing when you finish it- that your metaphor knew more than you.  Could that work as a title?  MymetaphorknowsmorethanI.blogspot?  Oh man.  It's trying too hard, and also- there is a phork and a smore in there and they are hogging the stage.

I'm back to thinking about titles that involve rulers and apples and lessons learned.  Gag, gag, gag.

My dad had this quote on the wall of his office- the office he moved into after taking a hiatus from his established law career to pursue a more creative one in development- and I remember this conviction in him: "Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it.  Boldness has genius, power and magic in it."  I remember him signing his emails "Be bold," even though my mom has no such recollection and so like so many things it is forever unknown.  But maybe that- being bold.  Beginning Bold.

In Faerie Queene there is this too: Be bolde, Be bolde, and everywhere,  Be bold.

Even Shakespeare: Virtue is bold, and goodness never fearful.


I seem to have found a preoccupation, at the very least.

I could always name her Jane.

That was a little joke.

In the cellars of the night, when the mind starts moving around old trunks of bad times, the pain of this and the shame of that, the memory of a small boldness is a hand to hold.
John Leonard

Bag Packing Event

Last night I woke up at 1:36 all grumpy and uncomfortable.  Like I was disappointed to see that it was only 1:36 because I was ready to be done with this sleeping thing.  So I did a mental check of my fluids and temperature, rolled out of bed and shuffled into the kitchen for a glass of water.  It wasn't until I was standing at the open fridge, gulping at my glass by the light of the microwave clock that I realized why I was in a bad mood.  I had been having a dream about school.

To be clear, it isn't the very thought of school that sends me into a funk.  I really don't dislike the job that much.  Really.  It's these terribly mundane dreams I have about the school day! To the best of my memory, last night's dream contained a 54 minute lesson in which I struggled to get my 7th period class to stop talking to each other about whether Q was on drugs and instead focus on their work.  Which is exactly what I did from 1:14-2:10 of my waking Friday.  And while it wasn't terrible, it really didn't bear repeating.  I believe the dream then continued to include a slowed down packing-up-my-bag event.  That's right, in my dream I had trouble packing up my bag at the end of my school day, and so I had to do some rearranging that induced a low grade frustration connected to my eagerness to be done with work for the day, rather than standing at my desk trying to make all of my folders fit in my shoulder bag. This seemed to last for 45 minutes.  (In real life, I'm way better at making my stuff fit in my bag.)

So you see?  I'm cuddled warm in my soft bed on a Friday night, all the time in the world to sleep, and I'm dreaming in such a manner as to deprive my unconscious mind the ability to enjoy the time away from the classroom.  It's self inflicted!  And it's not even exciting stuff, like a fight in the lunchroom or a slow motion montage of me getting kids who hate teachers and hate school to read books and write poetry.  You know what would be great?  If instead of the 45 minute bag packing event, I could have a dream that featured me in front of the class, handing out hilarious jokes and bathing in raucous and delighted laughter.

Anyway, the glass of water and the bathroom visit helped my bad mood, and in the end I did feel grateful that it was still the middle of the night and I could climb back into bed.  I gave my unconscious mind a stern look before I fell back asleep, to try to discourage this behavior in the future.

One of the things I'm having trouble coming to terms with is the feeling as if this profession has stuck me forever in high school. When I was in high school I wanted to get the f out. I distinctly remember, though I repress it on an almost daily basis, looking at one of my younger english teachers as a sophomore student and thinking: She seems cool, but nobody who was actually cool would choose to be a teacher- to stay in school forever.

So how is it that I am slouched at my computer checking weather.com compulsively and pretending I don't think there is any chance we could get a snow day tomorrow? At least when I was 16 and slouched at my computer I had the comfort of feeling superior to my sucker teachers.

To further complicate my baseless sense of annoyance at myself, my students, simply by mirroring my own inclinations, are annoying the crap out of me too. Today a student in my fourth period class raised her hand and asked me if we will have off tomorrow. Not even did I THINK we will have off tomorrow. Will we. "We will," I nodded at her. Twenty six pairs of eyes widened in unison. "WE ARE???"

We aren't. We won't. But Ms. Smalley will be sleeping restlessly tonight anyway, having little dreams about automated phone calls from the district office.

Its a good place to start to say that I spent most of my Study Hall duty creating this blog instead of grading assignments, planning lessons or even posting attendence. My total inability to use my prep periods for anything constructive is only one of the unfortunate realities of this teaching gig. I've made great strides since September, where I mainly passed the 54 minutes of prep or hall duty staring at a blank space in my own vision and panting. "You're ok, you're ok."

Now I'm funtioning at a level high enough to feel the itch to do some egocentric, indulgent story telling. Signs of life.

But not now. Suddenly the thirty-five minutes of Blogger time seem horrifyingly irresponsible- back to work. Consider the blog begun.