Killing the Writer

Teaching is not conducive to writing. I have come to this conclusion after three years of in-depth research, research that was entirely unnecessary but which, having been completed, bestows on me the authority to say that teaching is most definitely not conducive to writing. A good friend of mine reminded me of this fact last week when he wrote concerning a recent decision I've made: "What do you need an MFA for? You want to teach? Cyril Conelly once said that teaching had killed more writers than alcohol had--no small feat." Alcohol having never really been my thing, I suppose that leaves me with death by teaching, an option that I find entirely plausible, though not preferable. I'm not quite ready for the writer in me to head to that great used book store in the sky. I'm not done with her yet; that's why I've applied to an MFA program.

Part of me says that this scheme is entirely laughable, after all, I'm forty-three and have been out of school for nineteen years, I'm working a full-time job that requires more than full-time hours, and in one more year The Older Daughter will be filling out her own college applications. Nevertheless, there are reasons to try, as well: I have to have a certain number of professional development hours each year to maintain my teaching certification, hours which might as well count toward a degree; an MFA will allow me to teach per course or eventually even full-time at the college level should I ever change my mind about teaching high school; and I feel rusty and definitely lack discipline in my writing habits, so the challenge and accountability of a graduate program will be good. Ever since I have known there was such a thing, the MFA has been the degree I've wanted badly enough to be afraid of, even if it might kill me.

The application has been dispatched. Now I wait. We'll see what kills me first.

Closing out Year Two

School is out for the summer. Scores for the state End of Course (EOC) exams are in, and my grades are finalized and posted. I have turned in tutoring logs, professional development hours and inventory. My room has been straightened and labeled and locked.

It has been a year.

When I checked out today, my principle told me that she was very glad I had stayed, had come back a second year. It was a small thing to have said, but it meant a great deal to me.

The first year was rough, now that I look back on it. Staying until midnight wasn't uncommon. Staying until 3 a.m. happened more than once. It was the first year of our state's EOC exams. I had to prep for 5 different classes a day (7 different classes for the year, all told), I had 50 extra hours of eMINTS training to complete, and I was sponsoring or helping to sponsor 3 different extracurricular groups plus the freshman class. Being hired two weeks before school began (with only that much warning) and being totally unfamiliar with the curricular materials was another factor, although this one was "helped" since I was also assigned to be on the team to write our school's curriculum right away, as well. One of my fellow communication arts teachers (who is one of my own former teachers) told me last year, "I don't know how you're doing it; anybody else would have quit at semester."

I had forgotten all this, much in the same way that the details of childbirth are often smudged in a mother's mind, I suspect. So when my principle told me today that she was glad I had come back, I stared at her blankly for a moment. Why in the world wouldn't I have come back, I wondered.

Human beings are remarkable. We often have no idea of what we can accomplish until we have done more than we ever imagined we could. I despise being pushed--more than I could possibly convey to you without physical violence and perhaps regurgitation. In fact, I will NOT be pushed by anyone...but myself.

This summer I hope to write a lot of lesson plans down and create some new ones. This last year I had 80 students, all told. Next year I will have a little over 100. Next year I will push hard again, but for now I'm going to sit for a bit and reflect on the two years behind me.

Who IS This Person?

Tonight I have been sitting here updating my resumé to include in an application to the Ozark Writing Project's Summer Invitational Institute. When I finished saving the updated file, I raided Great Scott's desk for suitable paper--the really nice stuff--and printed out my creation.

It frightens me. It looks so official and...impressive. Who is this person, and what in the world am I doing impersonating her?!

House

No, not the television show.

Last week as I sat in my schoolroom trying to force myself to use my summer wisely by writing the curriculum that the state is going to review next fall, a tapping came at my window. Fairly sure that the tapper was most likely to be a family member or a student, I sent The Younger Daughter to go check the outside doors and let the tapper in, should my assumptions be correct. They were. It was my father. He had come to share with me the news that a house with some acreage had come up for sale near town, and he thought I might like to take a look at it.

We'd not been looking for a house, really. Oh, we knew that we really ought to before long, but we were thinking more in the time frame of 1-2 years, not 5 days.

"What?!" you ask, as well you may. Yes. Five days. It was going up for auction in five days.

The short version of this story is that Great Scott, The Daughters and I attended the first auction I'd been to since I was very small. My father did the bidding for us since we felt too inexperienced to do this well ourselves, and shortly after noon last Saturday, we had a house with a field and woods. We are still reeling in shock, even as we finalize preparations to (hopefully) close on the place next week.

I said in my last post that I needed to get Mrs. Lawson out of my system. Well, this should do it, although how in the world I'm going to find time to write curriculum now, while moving twelve years worth of stuff, I've no idea. It's funny, really, funny in the way that inspires one to run around in circles in the front lawn waving one's hands above one's head and screaming, "Aaaaaahhhhhhhh!!!" before falling flat on one's back and twitching slightly while watching the sky spin above one's head.

Seriously. It's all good. It will be fun.

Have I mentioned the barn? Yes. A barn. With a hayloft for The Younger Daughter to fall out of! Whee!

(Disclaimer: Please do not misread the tone of the above. I am very pleased with the place, and while moving will require a great deal of work, there couldn't be a better time to do it than right now, before school starts up again.)

Official

It's official. The teaching certificate from DESE is on my desk. I am a teacher.

Actually, I have always been a teacher. The moment my hapless younger brother was born, the teacher within sprang to life fully formed, like Minerva. Just ask him. I taught him lots of things. If you put tape on the bottoms of a cat's paws, it will dance; if you spray the hardwood floor with furniture polish and slide on it, Mom will, too; if you trust your big sister, you will end up eating rocks covered in mud after having been told it's chocolate.

Not all my early teaching experiences were as successful as the ones involving my brother. My first spanking in school (Yes, Virginia, there once were such things as spankings in school.) was on the occasion of my bending over another student's desk to help him with his first grade phonics. The target my posture afforded had evidently been too tempting to pass up. I recall being indignant: I had NOT been giving away answers; I had been explaining a principle! Mrs. Herman had remained unmoved.

This past year, my first bewildering, amazing, and utterly exhausting year of official teaching, I have doubted not only my own sanity but whether or not I had any business in the classroom at all. To my surprise, I think the answer is yes. Last Friday night was graduation, and as I sat in the nosebleed section at the back of the gym and watched our seniors crossing the platform and descending, diplomas in hand, I felt a tremendous sense of pride and accomplishment. Some of them were my students, and I know that a few would not have walked that aisle if I hadn't have gone above and beyond what the job required of me--if I hadn't mercilessly badgered and hounded them, cajoled and cheered, teased and encouraged, reminded and ultimately demanded more of them than they had originally been willing to give. The grins on their faces as they hugged me after the ceremony helped restore the faith that had been slipping in the face of the last grueling week of classes. Yes. I can do this. And for them, I will.

They're worth it.

Teaching Certification: Step One Complete

Tonight an e-mail arrived in my inbox telling me that I have successfully completed the requirements for ABCTE certification; I can expect ABCTE's certificate to arrive within the next ten business days. This is not the same as being certified by the State of Missouri's Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE), which will require a few more forms and probably a blood sample of my firstborn. Nevertheless, this e-mail lifts a large weight from my shoulders. The school district in which I've been teaching on a temporary certificate this year has hired me for next year--pending the acquisition of a state teaching certificate--and as I gasp my way through the rapidly rising crest of end-of-the-year duties, forms and activities, it is a comfort to know that I'll be doing it all over again next year, the dry erase and SMART boards, filing cabinets, bookshelves, tables and bulletin boards having become familiar friends by now, friends that I will be seeing for years to come, God willing and the creeks don't rise.

In the Woods: Part Two

I do not answer naturally to the name "Mrs. Lawson." For substitute teaching purposes, I learned to do so last spring, but it wasn't a quick thing. Mostly I was used to being called, "Hey, [The Older Daughter]'s Mom!" This will change. A lot is going to change.

A week ago one of the high school English teachers resigned unexpectedly from my daughters' school. This last Friday evening I was approved by the school board for the position. In three weeks I will be responsible for seven classes every day. The final schedule is not yet in my hand, but the preliminary one has me teaching creative writing and folklore/mythology as well as multiple sections of sophomore English and a couple of other classes.

Thus, it is settled. I have looked into the woods and there I have seen my fate: great looming grizzlies of state requirements, acres and acres of towering stacks of papers to grade, ROUS's (Ridiculous Oratory and Uncomfortable Shoes) and in the deepest, darkest depths of the educational forest, Julius Caesar himself lurking sulkily in a cave while Brutus lumbers about with the conspirators making reassuring and flattering noises to draw him out.

Someone hand me the bag of breadcrumbs. I'm going in.

Into the Woods

Funny, isn't it, how lives are lived in chapters, how changes can be effected in a matter of weeks or days, turning the order of our comfortable (or excruciating) lives around, flipping them upside down and leaving them resembling nothing we would have ever anticipated? Sometimes our own actions precipitate those changes; sometimes they're entirely out of our control. Either way, there's no going back. Things have been altered permanently. Even if we try to undo whatever action opened the chapter--such as getting a divorce or giving the child up for adoption--we're now someone we weren't when the first page was turned. We can't write it over; we have to go on as the characters we've become.

Here at Possum Box Lane, big changes are afoot, changes we (mostly I) set into motion, but certainly not changes I ever expected to come about as quickly as they are. It's dizzying. At more than one point I have found myself blinking in stunned confusion somewhere beyond not only words but also comprehension. By next week the plot will almost certainly be set in its new direction, although whether I'll find myself in an enchanted forest or a thorny maze remains to be seen. Either way, it's into the woods.

(Disclaimer: I might add here that neither my marriage to Great Scott or the familial status of our children are in any way at risk. Not even a jot.)

How I Got into this Business and Where It Went Thursday

I didn't intend to do anything but start a writing club at our school. In November I was given permission to do so for the Jr. High and high schools provided I find a certified co-sponser on the current staff and that I obtain a substitute teaching certificate myself. I didn't even have to sub. You know the outcome of the substitute certificate (see the last post). Here continues the story of the originally intended writing club.

Thursday was our first meeting. I knew we'd have 9 students or so. I hoped we might get as many as 12-15. Before the afternoon's club schedule I went into the tiny half-room at the back of the library where we were to meet and waited to see who would arrive. To my amazement, 37 kids managed to cram themselves into that little space. The tables were quickly filled. More lined the walls, standing. Others leaned in the doorway or sat in what little floorspace existed. What's more, they are excited not just about starting a club, but about writing itself. They want to compete. They like the idea of running in-house writing contests not just for the Jr. High and high school, but for the elementary students. Mostly, though, they want to workshop papers with each other, to read each others' work and comment, to have feedback and find ways to improve their writing. They listened to our ideas and hopes for the club; they shared their ideas (good ones) and listened to each other and were in agreement about their goals. They wanted to have after school meetings to workshop, and then someone said, "What about over the summer? Can we do something this summer?" and was echoed.

You could have knocked me over with a feather. I was stunned. Stunned and utterly humbled.

The Plan...or...Am I Out of My Mind

Lately a question one of my readers asked a long time ago has been haunting me. Seeker once asked if I would ever walk the halls of academia again. My answer was a pretty definite no.

I'm reconsidering.

The last week of January I began substitute teaching in a local high school. While I thought I might survive it pretty well, I did not expect to enjoy it past a vague satisfaction, so I was taken entirely by surprise when after subbing for our French/English teacher for three days running, I found myself bewilderingly and entirely in love...with the kids. This was not supposed to happen. This was not in The Plan.

The Plan, as much as there is ever a plan in my INFP life, was to eventually go back to school to finish a MA or if I was very lucky and somewhere found the energy and self-confidence, an MFA, and acquire a job teaching per course for a college or university in the area, maybe even landing a full-time job with a community college, perhaps in a writing center. Teaching secondary school was not even a consideration. Notta. Notta. Notta.

Yet here I am with an application to admittance to a teacher certification program sitting in an envelope on my dining room table, check enclosed, addressed and stamped. Granted, I put a note on it this morning--"Wait until after Friday to mail this, you fool!"--just in case my four day sub stint in the Family and Consumer Science room this week changes my mind about exactly how much punishment I'm able to take. Nevertheless, my instinct, that deep down knowing at the center, tells me that, yes, indeed, I am going to do this.

I am going to do this, and it will change my life, and there will be no end to it. It will be difficult and hair-pullingly frustrating and utterly exausting and shatteringly glorious beyond my wildest imagining. It will be good.

Forty

In my blog wanderings and perusals over the past three years, I've seen many lists of "Forty Things to do Before I Turn Forty." By the time I thought of composing my own, my time was seriously running out, and I was faced with either making a list of "Forty Things to Accomplish in the Next Nine Minutes" or of finding a creative alternative. (Allow me to offer a small bit of advice: given a choice between Lots of Potentially Emotionally Unhinging Work or a Creative Alternative, go for the latter.)

My alternative to the "Forty Things to do Before I Turn Forty" list? It needed to be something positive, something affirming, something that would help me appreciate the life I've had already and the one I have now rather than laying on the pressure to do more, accomplish more, be more. I needed not a list of things to do, but a list of wonderful things I have done in my first forty years, a list of appreciation and celebration. Therefore...

Forty Things I've Done Before Turning Forty

1. Learned to see God as a very real and compassionate Person rather than a Lurker with a Big Board.

2. Convinced my brother to willingly eat mud.

3. Slept in trees.

4. Jumped out of a barn loft.

5. Earned a writing degree, had success with creative pieces, publication, readings, two Pushcart nominations and served a week long term as Poet in Residence at Bryan College.

6. Been proposed to or seriously co-considered marriage five times.

7. Had a sixth man fall to his knees dramatically before me in a public place, spread his arms wide and sing loudly, "Besa me! Besa me mucho!"

8. Promptly married him.

9. Stayed married 17 years to the above to date.

10. Gave birth to two children with a midwife presiding and no meds.

11. Learned to enjoy poetry. Learned to detest poetry. Learned I can't live without poetry.

12. Enjoyed mathematical theory.

13. Pieced and hand-quilted a quilt from dress scraps.

14. Found out what happens when one puts one end of an electrical cord in one's mouth while the other end is still in the outlet.

15. Learned to cook, yea, even unto a complete Thanksgiving meal for company.

16. Played the piano and the oboe.

17. Walked barefoot through snow.

18. Danced.

19. Put my brother in a tractor tire, rolled him down a hill and survived my mother's wrath afterward.

20. Attended wonderful Renaissance festivals.

21. Played the lead onstage in "Once Upon a Mattress."

22. Sang a solo in Handel's Messiah.

23. Learned to live without medication for an affective disorder--something a diagnosing doctor said I would never do.

24. Lived amid a passion for learning.

25. Discovered a passion for teaching.

26. Learned to live in the midst of prayer.

27. Made peace with an ongoing and difficult relationship from my past.

28. Learned where I fit in my family.

29. Read thousands of astounding, wonderful books.

30. Tutored and taught writing to amazing people.

31. Moderated for the beautiful ladies of LHM's Lighthouse and Covenant Women for several years.

32. Given up an addictive and self-destructive way of "coping."

33. Found the courage to keep/enforce my own boundaries while remaining unruffled.

34. Learned jewelry making.

35. Mentored some incredible young women.

36. Learned to recognize and name flowers, trees and other native plants.

37. Taken up yoga.

38. Kindled a love of books in two children.

39. Laughed nearly every day.

40. Been a student of grace.

Publication: Goblin Fruit

This morning a wonderful email waited impatiently in my inbox to be discovered. The Winter '08 issue of Goblin Fruit (which I wrote about earlier) is out at last, and in it, "Night Augur", a poem of my "own pure brain." To my surprise and deep pleasure, the Editors Who Shall Be Adored have even used it as a prologue to the issue, may-their-names-be-praised-forever.

Seriously, I am very happy and very grateful.

(There's even audio!)

I Just Did WHAT?!

This week I went to the superintendent's office at school and after a meeting with her and the Jr. High principal, took home an application packet for a substitute teaching certificate and position. What's more, when I arrived home, I immediately got online and made an appointment to have fingerprinting done for the required background check. Immediately as in before I could change my mind.

What could possibly drive me to do such a thing? I, who swore I would never teach (especially at the secondary level, not to mention Jr. High) and could not foresee a return to "walking the halls of academia" ever again? I, who cringe at mispronounced words, bad grammar and misplaced commas--my own and everyone else's--and grimly remove myself from the vicinity of mouthy children in public lest I be tempted to "help" their parents? I, who am familiar with the discipline plight of the public schoolteacher, who hear about it and see its result every night when Great Scott arrives home, head bowed, shoulders slumped, dragging his six foot three inch frame over the threshold, his soul nearly sucked from his body? What, indeed could possibly entice me to enter that world, even on an intermittent basis? Especially on an intermittent basis, without the authority a full-time teacher holds over her own classroom?

Passion. Something I don't talk or write about very often or very much. I am passionate about the written word, and I am passionate about helping others find in themselves some good, some hidden potential previously unrecognized. Substitute teaching will very likely NOT give me the opportunity to indulge either of these passions, I realize. However, a substitute teaching certificate will enable me to begin a writing club for the high school and jr. high school in our district. The one condition I was given was that I find a full-time faculty member to help sponsor it, and this afternoon a quick conference with horror writer and H.S. English teacher, Matt Cardin met that condition, may-his-name-be-praised-forever.

We shall see where this goes. I anticipate beginning substitute teaching in early December and beginning Writing Club meetings in January after the break. I am more grateful than I can say to Matt, who is already staying after school several nights a week, and I am both excited and apprehensive about the venture. Wish it luck.