What I Deserve

Conversation:

Setting: Home after a very rough day, hugging The Daughters gratefully.

Me: You are the best daughters in the whole world! I have done nothing in my life to deserve such great girls!

The Older Daughter: We know. That's why God made you a teacher.

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.

Friday Quote: On Meaning and Escape

"For the true writer...there is some distance, some remove, that allows for the shaping of the work...Every reader can sense the difference between a writer who embodies meaning through the events he describes and the writer who seems simply mired in those events. It is that struggle for meaning that lets the writer escape the tyranny of what really happened..."

---Sue Miller

Thirteen Things I Need to Remember When My Students Drive Me Crazy

1. Some of my students didn't sleep last night.

2. Some of them haven't eaten anything since yesterday's school lunch.

3. Some of them are trying to find the right balance of anti-depressants and/or anti-psychotic meds.

4. Some of them are seniors and are beginning to feel a bit crazy about getting to leave school and having to leave school, and they can't decide whether they love or hate these things.

5. Being cooped up in a computer lab when it's 80 degrees and sunny outside isn't anyone's idea of fun.

6. Some of these kids know a whole lot more about livestock and motors than I could ever dream of knowing.

7. Some of them are taking care of mentally ill parents at home and may not get to class on time because they had to wait for the ambulance...again.

8. Some of them are so smart that they're bored out of their minds and coming up with trouble to keep themselves entertained.

9. Some of them look scroungy because they had to get younger brothers and sisters ready for school this morning, and they put little sister's hair in ponytails instead of brushing their own before catching the bus.

10. Some of them laugh and joke because they're afraid of anyone figuring out that they care very much that they're failing, and they're covering up.

11. Not all of them HAVE to like me or like my class.

12. I can love them, anyway.

13. Crazy isn't such a bad state of mind if you're in far enough.

NaPoWriMo 2010 Begins!

I have a horrible track record when it comes to any kind of regular writing, and teaching school the past two years has only exacerbated the situation. Nevertheless, better to try than not to try. At least, that's the line I feed my students. I don't have time for revision, however--at least not now. You'll have to settle for rough drafts splattered down on the page.

Let the scrawls begin!

Orchids

Fat buds wing into full bloom and float
in arcs above my monitor. Students drop
their shove and scuffle, stoop to touch trembling
petals, one slow finger at a time. I've watered them
for months, watched them stretch
new growth and now, although their roots
still tangle, gnarled amid dead wood
and sphagnum, they are opening
along their lengths, lifting
fragile faces toward the light.

A Few Minor Changes

I am making a few minor changes to Quotidian Light for the purposes of preserving privacy. I do not think any of my students are interested enough to go looking for me online, but on the off chance that they might become so, I am changing my username and profile picture. Most of my readers know me well enough to not be phased in the least by this. I love you for it.

Perhaps with this added layer of semi-anonymity, blog entries will happen more often. I'm hoping so. I miss the writing and reflection that blogging provided for so long.

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?!

Language and Listening

For my birthday this year, Great Scott gave me The Best American Essays 2009, which was edited by Mary Oliver. The language in the chosen essays of this volume seems to me richer than that of most contemporary essays. Many of Oliver's choices echo the style of some of her own favorite writers, Victorians such as Emerson and Whitman, whose writing require readers to slow down and immerse themselves deeply in the flow of words rather than skimming merrily over the top of them. The Younger Daughter and I have been reading George MacDonald's Phantastes on weekend mornings and snow days, and here, too, I've been struck by the richness of the words and wording of the Victorians. My students--most of them--would never be able to follow sentences like these, sentences which wind and curl like vines up pillars or large-trunked trees, sprouting side branches and arabesque tendrils before finally growing into comprehensive maturity and blooming gloriously into full, many-petaled meaning.

As I was reading to The Younger Daughter earlier this week, I began wondering if she might be better prepared to read and comprehend such sentences on her own for having heard them read aloud by someone else. The human mind is a great recognizer of patterns. If, when it begins a complex task, it has some basic patterns in place, basic patterns that will aid in the comprehension and execution of the complex task at hand, that task will be accomplished much more easily and with better results. My students have all acquired the skill, the pattern knowledge, of word-calling; however many to most of the students in my classes have not developed an ear for written language. They don't hear the words in their heads as they read. The rhythms and melodies of the written word blow past them like so many dry, leaves; inflection and the subtle meaning it carries is lost. I wish all children were read to aloud. Written words are symbols for our quickened breath passing between tongue and tooth, for living human spirit shaped into transmissible entities leaving our lips. Expecting a child to read well without her having experienced the breath of life blown across the pages of books and into her waiting ear is like handing her a bird from the taxidermist and requiring her to comprehend and demonstrate flight.

Another Year

I am still writing "2009" on checks and attendance slips.

Last Friday on my birthday an old friend and fellow Douglas Adams reader reminded me that I am now the answer to life, the universe, and everything. Age-specific ads at the side of my Facebook page tell me that forty-two year-old women wear Ug boots, buy iPads, and publish their own poetry. My students ask if I rode the pterodactyl to school or took the mammoth. Outside stars billions of years old burn so fiercely that their light still reaches us, and the patient moon grows old and young again. Why should I fear?

Friday Quote: On Resilience

"In the depths of winter I discovered in myself an invincible summer."

--Albert Camus

Stasis

Most of my blog readers will already know this, but I'll post here anyway: my grandmother died this weekend. Tonight was visitation; tomorrow is the funeral.

I feel very much as though time is suspended right now. As a family, we're talking and catching up, trading stories, taking care of details, and doing the things that need doing, but it feels as though we're in a strange sort of time between times...as, I suppose, we very much are.

Friday Quote: On Imagination

"With all my ideas and follies I could one day found a corporate company for the propagation of beautiful but unreliable imaginings."

--Robert Walser

Friday Quote: On Forgiveness

"Forgiveness is the release of all hope for a better past."

--Alexa Young

Halloween Reflections

After much research and deep reflective consideration, I have come to a conclusion: Halloween candy is the devil.

Consumed today in the name of scientific inquiry: Skittles, Tootsie Rolls, Nerds, Peanut M&M's, Hershey's, Butterfinger, Twizzler, Jolly Rancher, and a KitKat.

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.)

Getting the Teacher Out of My System

The first week of summer vacation is drawing to a close. I am not yet accustomed to it. To tell the truth, I still feel pressured and harried. Granted, I have things to do this summer, but none of them are of the daily deadline variety. Probably I need to start getting up early (I've been sleeping in) and taking walks again to get open skies and rustling green leaves back into my system.

It's odd how easily we adjust to new identities. I've been Mrs. Lawson for 9 months. It's time to reacquaint myself with Lucinda/Cindy again, time to get back in touch with who I am at the core of me.

That sounds like such a horribly INFP thing to say!

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.

On Green Beans and Household Appliances

When I was a child, all my toys and stuffed animals had names and distinct personalities. What's more, they were all creatures of real being to me; they each had feelings. I used to worry about hurting them if I treated them badly or even if I favored one over the others. My brother and sister tell me they had the same sort of perception and that, like me, they were slow to lose it. Even today we occasionally have to remind ourselves that the last head of lettuce left in the produce bin at the grocery store is only a head of lettuce, that is doesn't really feel abandoned or unwanted. Even so, it is sometimes difficult not to take it home out of pity.

We lay this bit of dysfunction at the feet of our mother, partly because as everyone knows, that's where one lays the credit for one's dysfunctions, and partly because she's the one who used to wheedle us to eat all our vegetables by moaning sadly, "Oh, look at the poor little green bean! All his friends are gone down in your tummy! He wants to be with his friends! Don't you feel sorry for him? He's wondering what's wrong with him that you won't eat him. Pooooor green bean!" Part of the time we thought she was a little loopy, but most of the time it worked. Well, it worked for awhile. Eventually my brother discovered that if he held out long enough, she'd offer him money to eat the poor little green bean. As for me, my initial eagerness to cooperate quickly turned into obstinate opposition when I figured out that there would always be another green bean, another bite of spinach, another bit of something to feel guilty over. My sister, eleven years younger than I, traversed the distance between sentimentallity and logic without my observance, and although she has obviously done so with success, I do not know by what path she traveled.

Last month our new washer and dryer were finally delivered. As I stood in the utility room looking at them, I realized they were looking back at me hopefully, eager to please, wanting to be liked. I patted the washer awkwardly on its top and ran my hand over the dryer's door gently. Nothing is quite so charming as an appliance that can't wait to be helpful. The Younger Daughter walked into the room and gave me a cheerful hug. "What are you going to name them, Mama?" she asked.

"I don't know," I replied, somewhat surprised. I've tried not to play the Poor Green Bean card with my children, and the fact that they persist in naming inantimate objects and treating them like people casts serious doubts upon the theory that personification of the inantimate is entirely my mother's fault. "What would you name them?"

She thought about it a minute. "Claudio and Hero?" she offered doubtfully, her brow knitted in thought.

We discussed a few more options, and after a short synopsis of the tale of Odysseus, we settled on Syclla and Charybdis.

Scylla and Charybdis have been working for me in the back room for a month now, and I have to say that they seem to work better for having been named. Certainly I've heard no complaints, and when I answer the urgent beepings that signal the ends of their cycles, their red LCD screens beam proudly up at me. Maybe there is something to the theory that inantimate objects can have some form of sentience.

But I'm still not eating cooked spinach.

Resurfacing

Yes. Second semester finals are over, and Christmas break is here. The school year is halfway complete.

Friday night I staggered out of the car for the house, the sacred laptop and my trusty bag of ungraded papers in tow (we don't have to report final grades until the fifth of January), in a state of shock, weariness, holiday cheer and reckless, heady glee. The Older Daughter was spending the night with a friend; The Younger Daughter had a friend spending the night with us, and ahead stretched two blessed weeks of Christmas break. I was finally going to get enough sleep (no more 16 hour days at school!), be able to leave a pencil or ballpoint pen out on my desk without someone borrowing it interminably, and make headway on the pile of laundry threatening to swallow the cats.

Today I discovered that the washer is broken. I squeezed water out of the clothes and threw them in the dryer, blessing my husband for having brought home a new drying rack this afternoon and wondering if everyone has enough clean underwear to make it until someone can fix the poor washer. Great Scott complimented me on my calm reaction to the discovery that the spin cycle is now nonexistent. Truthfully? That washer has worked well for seventeen years (save for the time it ate a baby sock and got indigestion). It's had fewer breakdowns than I have. It deserves a few days off, too.

I suppose if I need to visit the laundrymat, I can take the opportunity to journal while I'm waiting. Oddly enough, I've not been journaling, although not for lack of material. Like blogging, journaling has been difficult to find the time to actually do. My head has been full of students (I even dream about them or their assignments, often), but many of the things I've observed or experienced or had shared with me, I've hesitated to write down, even in my journals. I struggle with determining what things belong to me to write about and what things should forever belong simply to my students. According to a great many writers I've read, this excludes me from writerhood most absolutely, since writers should supposedly respect no one's experiential privacy when good material is concerned. I do not know if I can go along with that. I suspect I can't. Several times a week I pick up a pen or come here to post, consider the things my students share, the lives they live, the people they are and are becoming, and I lay the pen aside or sigh and delete the half-written post. (Blogging, of course, presents a particularly complicated ethical dilemma, since some of my students know about Quotidian Light and occasionally check in.)

Plenty of quirky things go on everyday that are perfectly bloggable, however; I just need to take the time to write them. Hopefully the break will help. Thanks to those of you who wrote comments or e-mails of encouragement, letting me know Quotidian Light's posts were missed. You were welcome reminders that life outside Mrs. Lawson's classroom still exists.