Parenting: A War of Attrition

This claim implies children are the enemy, and that sounds so, well, mean...and also true.  In my case, the war is being fought with boots on the ground firmly in the kids' favor.  Kid Army-5.  Parent Army-2.   Granted, I conceived, gave birth to and have chosen to continue feeding and housing said boots, but instead of writing me off as a crazy person who deserves her war, imagine my position.  I am fighting a war with an enemy I arm and fund.  I pass the appropriations bills in Congress.  I send them MREs, and I build assault rifles and fighter jets for them.  It's absurd, so let's not quibble over blame here.  I am in a uniquely disadvantageous position, militarily speaking. 

One of the places that steady, relentless parenting pays off is in church.  Sweet, grey-haired  women approach after Mass to congratulate me on how well behaved my children are.  The war of attrition means learning to modify their behavior without the laying on of hands.  I live in California, so I can't spank in public because I might be turned in to the authorities.  (An attempt to pass a law making spanking in California illegal back in 2007 failed to pass, but it is probably only a matter of time). 

Beyond the danger of someone speed dialing CPS in a parking lot, it's also that I don't want to spank them; I shouldn't have to.  I do not enjoy it, and it is a last resort, but if rare enough, an effective one.  I want to encourage in them appropriate behavior in public places.  My daughter's wonderful preschool teacher once reminded me that how they behave at home is not nearly as important as how they behave in public.  The latter is the true test.  Therefore, I am heartened when retired parishioners take note of their good behavior in church.  I can trust the oldest three to sit still without making weird noises, and that is no small victory.

The three year old still has occasional moments that try Mommy's soul, like the time I approached the altar for communion and she said, "Can I have a cookie."  Not wanting to miss an opportunity to teach our Catholic faith, I replied, "No, you're not old enough, and it's not a cookie.  It's Jesus.  It just looks like a cookie."  While this may be an admirable preschool level catechism on the doctrine of transubstantiation, it only made my daughter immediately shout "I want a Jesus cookie!"  This kind of outburst is the exception, not the norm, thank you Jesus, and when people compliment my children's good behavior, I do usually credit Catholic masses every Sunday since the womb, not to mention Palm Sunday and the Easter Vigil.  Whenever they start getting antsy, I just whisper to them fiercely and with feeling while pointing at the very crucifix pictured below:

"Look up there at Jesus.  He died on the cross for you.  I bet he wanted to get down and get a drink and he was probably hungry, too, but did he quit?  No, he didn't.  He stayed up there so that you can go and live with Him in Heaven someday, so it's not too much to ask that you sit still for the next few minutes.  God only asks for an hour a week of you sitting still.  It's the least you can do."

If you're Catholic, you are laughing and nodding your head right now, and if you aren't, you probably think that is outrageous guilt.  Well, we all should feel more guilt and less selfish indulgence, thank you very much.  The Oprah-tization of our culture has meant a bit too much glossing over of the importance of sacrifice and guilt if you ask me. 

Despite the praise my angel babies may get in public sometimes, their behavior is almost never up to my standards and often, especially in the grocery store in the late afternoon after I have worked all day with teenagers and just want to get something for dinner and more granola bars and milk to get us through the school week, sometimes, they become the enemy and those aisles are a battlefield. 

There is a possibility you are not familiar with grocery shopping with five children, ages 11, 9, 7, 3 and 1.  You are really missing out on a whole range of frustration and chaos that you do not currently experience.  Come, come.  Look, look, and think of this story next time you see me.  Perhaps you will take pity.  The following details come from an actual trip to the store.  I did not invent anything.  If you listen closely you may hear the artillery and smell the acrid smoke.

Most people think the trouble with kids in the grocery store is that they ask for things.  Most people are absurdly superficial in their understanding of how deep and wide are the skills to annoy that children possess. 

Kids do not just beg for cookies and Cheese-Itz and ice cream and yogurt raisins and every item featured prominently on an end cap at Von's .  Let me just take this moment to thank grocery store market research for knowing exactly how to market to me and my family so as to completely defeat and contradict all good parenting.  If you do not believe me, check out this article on Psychology and the Supermarket.  There is a scientific reason why the Coco Pebbles are on the bottom shelf and the unsweetened Shredded Wheat is on the top.  It is no accident that Little Debbie cakes are displayed on the end of the aisle where you have to stop your cart to grab milk and eggs.

Beyond begging for treats they bicker with each other over who touched whom.  They try to push the baby in the cart while ignoring his screams.  He can't believe his sisters' nerve in trying to steer his cart.  "Who do they think they are?" his red-faced squeals and fat, pounding fists seem to say. An equally popular approach to tormenting Mom while shopping is to try to explain to me every detail of the day.  All four of the children who can talk do this at once, of course, as they be-bop behind angry cart baby and I, in various states of distraction.

One child tries to tell me a funny thing her best friend said when the cafeteria lady threatened everyone with detention if they continued to throw their tater tots at each other. 

Meanwhile, that inspires younger sister to tell me (at the same time) how much she loves tater tots.  She then continues asking if we can buy tater tots for dinner tonight, even after I've said no three or twelve times and am now two aisles further in our shopping odyssey.

Child #2 keeps asking about the tater tots with only slight variations like "Well, then can we get french fries?" 

This request is followed immediately by contributions from the seven year old who has only partially been paying attention.  She will, at this very moment,  pipe up with "Ooohh, I love french fries and you know, Mommy, they have them right over there at the deli and they're already made ...awesome!" A cheery fist pump seals her certainty that I will, of course, go buy three pounds of french fries for them.  The logic is inescapable.  Mom is here looking for food, right?  We're all hungry right?  My sister has just suggested a perfect solution, and I know they're right there because I already asked if I could have some when we first arrived.  It makes sense that mom will do this.

But don't worry, while this inane conversation continues, in fact throughout the entire previous exchange about tater tots and the cafeteria lady and the logic of french fries at 4:45 in the afternoon, my three year old has been touching boxes and asking for any number of things she sees flitting past her antsy, bubbly, rapid- fire, passionate, loving, blink-and-you-miss-it-focus.  She has been trying to
push the cart,
                     pull the cart,
                                       climb the cart,
                                                             ride the cart,
                                                                                 and play chicken with the cart. 

She has also started two likely tantrums and several perfectly pitched whines whenever you have threatened to put her in the cart.  As long as she's not in it, the cart is Scooby and the Gang's Mystery Mobile.  It's Herbie the Love Bug and Thomas the Tank Engine all combined.  However, she doesn't want to actually sit in it!  "Nooooo, I don't waaaaaant to go in the caaaaaaart."  Vowel extension is a predictable feature of three year old angst.  Look it up in a linguistics text; I'm sure it's there.

In fact, let us pause here to enter the mind of a three year old because it really will deepen your appreciation of the grocery store battlefield.  A three year old can best be understood by studying this crucial and oft used phrase,

"But I don't want to  _____________"  Insert whatever you like here:

• go to bed
• eat broccoli
• clean my room
• put on underwear
• come inside when it's raining
• go to bed
• put down the hammer
• stop watching that dancing mouse over and over and over again
• go to bed
• stay off the grocery cart

It does not matter what or when the request is, a three year old does not understand why she should do ANYTHING unless she wants to or feels like it.  "I don't want to" is as soundly argued and reasonable as any sober pronouncements from the Supreme Court.  It makes perfect sense, and it is shocking that you, Mommy, continue to think I should do anything if I don't want to. 

I don't want to go in the cart.  I want some Fruit Loops.  I don't care that they're packed with enough sugar to dissolve my teeth in one bowl.  I don't care that the fruit flavor has been sprayed on in a factory or that cereal that tastes like Pez probably isn't the best choice, nutritionally speaking.  They are at my eye level (thank you, again market research) and they are the latest image in my View Finder. 

Every second is precious and long in the life of a three year old, so simply saying "I am not buying you Fruit Loops" is not enough.  You will have to say it every time you come to the store and you will say it at least once a minute for the rest of this particular shopping excursion. 

So,  I have helped you understand where your three year old is coming from.  It won't make your strong-willed firefly less annoying; she is just now placed in sharper relief.  A clear, maddening picture of her. 

But wait, there's more.  Just like the Ginsu knives, we aren't finished yet!  Let us recap:

Child #1:  Continues to give details about friend's HILARIOUS comment  -- "No mom, this is sooo funny!"
Child #2:  Loves tater tots and wants to make sure you understand.  She's busying lobbying for tater tots while continuing to expertly scope out the store for anything else she can get you to agree to buy in your feeble state.  Her sister is not far behind her:
Child #3:  Lobbying for real live already fried french fries, "Right over there! Don't they smell good, Mom?"
Child #4 Is flitting around the store, playing with the cart and begging for sugar.

Fear not, Dear Reader, in addition to the free shipping and handling, you also get Child #5

Child #5:  Whining, reaching, grabbing, whining, screeching, smearing fig newtons into the cart cover.  Yes, I grabbed fig newtons and started feeding him.  Don't judge me.  At least they weren't Oreos, and fig is a fruit.

Like I said:  war of attrition.  It requires patience in the moment and a long focus.  To yell, to hit or do something big, bold and memorable could end the gadfly questions about french fries, but what will that create in her, later in life?  They do not understand that I am trying to meal plan for seven people while replaying mistakes I made at work and thinking about the housework and grading that wait at home.  They live in the moment.  We adults, we Five Star Generals, do not live in the moment.  We suspend many moments and responsibilities together in ourselves, and my three year old butterfly won't understand why Fruit Loops cause Mom to be so angry.  My seven year old didn't mean to make me cry and spank anybody; they're just french fries.  What's the big deal?  I cannot snap.  I have to breathe and keep coaxing and discussing and loving them into good behavior.

Scary. We wield a lot of power as parents.  The world will tell you that you don't.  They will say Rhianna and Lady Gaga and Facebook and Twitter wield all the cultural power.  Keep telling yourself that, World.  I see young people who respond to the healthy fear of not wanting to disappoint their parents.  It's alive and well in some of them, just as it was in us.  Where a healthy fear and respect of parents is not operating, I will show you drug use, sex, and drinking.  I will show you defiance, detention, and bad grades.  Harvard will not be calling, but you might awaken one night to this on the other end of the line,

"Good evening, ma'am, I am sorry to wake you.  This is Officer..." and your world immediately swirls into sweating and panic.  I do not want to live that life in a few years, so I continue to hold them accountable.  I did not buy french fries or tater tots.  I did not yell at anyone, or sit down on the pharmacy chair and weep, although both sounded appealing.  My three year old ended up having to ride in the cart.  She screamed for a bit, and then she stopped because I said I would leave the entire cart there, march all of us home and put her to bed with a spanking.  She believed me.  Would I have done it?  Yes, if I had to, but when you fight the war of attrition and you try to be consistent and firm, you rarely have to resort to such drastic measures.  They know you mean business. 

In my role as a high school teacher, I often like to say my favorite idea for a bumper sticker is:

Good Teaching Can't Fix Bad Parenting

Our culture often reviles teachers and bemoans the education system at the same time that it asks us to fix all sorts of cultural and psychological ills that come from family, not school.  The boy smoking cigarettes and glaring at adults like they personally deserve nothing but scorn was once that cute three year old begging for Fruit Loops.  If you teach him that "No" means "No" and it does so because you love him and want him to be a good person, perhaps he will not sneer and smoke outside Starbucks in a few years. 

I believe the bumper sticker is true.  However, as the mother of five children who have not reached high school yet, let alone junior high,  I'm holding off on putting it on my own car.  I have high hopes that my children will be good students and citizens far into their futures, but the war continues, and I don't want to declare a premature victory.

S'mores, Like Gold in My Hand

A Lesson in Point of View.  Too much of the time I look around my house and see mess--an Everest of laundry, an embarrassingly persistent pile of “wash by hand” dishes stacked on the counter, a full diaper pail, bathrooms that need scrubbing, a carpet of cheerios, dirty socks and toys where a carpet should be.  My point of view is often tired, cranky and self-loathing or self-pitying depending on the time of the month.  Often as I'm racing to work or frantically trying to get home from work (see Transition Words for a reminder of this chaos) I hear the voice of Katharine Hepburn in my head as she confesses in the best movie ever, The Philadelphia Story: 

"I'm an unholy mess of a girl."

When you are a mother of five who works full time outside the house, you can start to feel like a hot mess, start to resent the perky stay-at-home moms who have time to go for a walk around town in the morning, bouncing past the window with their dogs on leashes, their Starbucks cups and their cute workout shorts from Kohl's. You start to envy the women who get their hair done more than twice a year and who have the time and treasure to actually take their kids to Disneyland.  It's a slippery slope when my point of view starts to see the glass not just as half empty, but as a sippy cup tipped over and leaking milk all over the counter. 

Sometimes though, in unexpected and desperately needed moments, I’m given brief glimpses of the messiness of my life that seem pleasing and comforting, if not downright romantic. 

Yesterday was Memorial Day.  This was the detritus of my life:  Hershey’s chocolate wrappers scattered on the counter, graham crackers smashed on the floor, bamboo sticks with marshmallow stickiness, dishes stacked in the sink, wet laundry languishing in the washing machine, clean and rapidly turning sour.  Yet it was also linguica basted in beer, charcoal smoke, buttery garlic bread crusts on the high chair, Giants baseball--"3-2 pitch and Bumgarner strikes him out…"Grab some pine, meat."

I watched through the window as four children, gathered together in the back yard burying Joey’s chubby leg in the dark soil while making dirt castles and picking dandelions. 

After dinner, I saw four matching ballerina buns through my living room window, four buns perched on the top of four heads while they waited patiently over the Weber, marshmallow sticks in hand, twisting them slowly to achieve the perfect toast.  Marshmallows because, well, have you ever eaten a s'more?  If it's warm and it's a holiday, I am fairly certain there's some kind of local ordinance or maybe even a state law that requires s'mores.  Ballerina buns because Daddy threatened, “Any girl who has her hair down, doesn’t get a s'more.”  If I could use the promise of s'mores for clean rooms and speaking kindly to your siblings without my daughters weighing two hundred pounds each, I would do it. 

S'mores Recipe

Anyway, a quiet family day that ends with grilling and copious consumption of s'mores can make a girl feel downright warm and fuzzy.  The disaster of my house, the bickering of my children, the unholy mess of my life miraculously became a sanctuary from the world that houses beautiful human beings whose very existence keeps me inhaling and exhaling. 

No grand change took place last weekend.  Despite my ferverent prayers, we did not win the Mega Millions or even A Million.  Alice the Maid did not move in, nor did the DIY Network come to rescue my yard or remodel my kitchen.  Heaven knows my daughters are probably bickering like old women right now: 

"No I didn't."
"Yes, you did."
"No, I didn't!"
"Yes, you did!"
Altogether now with feeling...

"MOM!"

The plot didn't change, just my point of view.  In teaching literature point of view is essential and complicated.  First person, third person, omniscient, limited omniscient.  A novel isn't a newspaper or chapter summaries on Pink Monkey Notes; you have some work to do, Dear Reader.

Reading great literature requires an understanding of point of view.  To Kill a Mockingbird is about Scout’s point of view.  If not, it's an entirely different novel.  Mayella Ewell's novel or Tom Robinson's novel or even the memoir of Atticus Finch is not the same.  The best line in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn loses all power without point of view:

 "I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:  'All right, then, I'll GO to hell.'"  (Chapter 30)

In the hands of a naive or passive or lazy reader, those lines may not make you tear up like I do.  Okay, perhaps I'm a bit of a literary nerd, and I'm the only one who cries every time Charlotte dies or Elizabeth Bennet realizes she loves Mr. Darcy, but believe me:  point of view is powerful stuff.  If you need outside evidence, here's a link for you.  As Annie Savoy in Bull Durham would say, "You could look it up."  Literary Point of View

This blog is about point of view, and about my job.  I haven’t posted about my work lately.  Given the title of this blog, I really should.  Basically God has given me bountiful blessings this year: rehired into a job I never would have dreamed I could love so much, a new perspective on my profession, a profession I had grown too comfortable in, a point of view on teaching that had become too routine, even jaded.  My job this year renewed my practice and made me belive this is what my layoff was for, this was what God had in store for me, this wonderful new teaching life. 

Just when it all made sense, I was laid off again and rehired again.  Wonderful right?  Let's have some s'mores and celebrate!  Not so fast.  Here comes a plot twist that would make Charles Dickens proud. My district has not yet decided what position I will return to in the fall.  In fact it's looking like I will be back at my old site. They want me back at the campus I left, the “main” campus, the “comprehensive” school, the Big House. 

Now, to you, Dear Reader, this may sound like I got sent down to the minor leagues but am now being called back up for a starting position in The Show. I am Crash Davis, and I finally get to go back to the bigs.  I should not have to explain this movie reference, but I will for those of you who, in the pretentious, post-Dances with Wolves-director-of-Waterworld-Kevin Costner-era have forgotten his great earlier films.  If you want to understand baseball and watch good movies, you can't go wrong with these:



Great film, even if it's the Dodgers.

But I digress.  Like Crash, I am a veteran.  I’ve done my time in alternative education, and now I “get” to go back to the “real” school.  That’s probably what they thought I would feel.  Before my epiphany year in alternative education, it is what I would have thought I would feel.  [Someone save me from my own syntax!]  Instead, I said, “No thank you.  I’m happier here.” 

Now my point of view becomes crucial.  I can be upset, sad, and frustrated.  I can be daunted by too many students, too many preps and returning to a more stressful job.  Or, I can be resigned to see the beauty in both options.  No matter where I end up next year, and as of this writing I still don’t know, my point of view is the only thing that matters. 

It must be positive and enthusiastic because my students deserve nothing less, and life is too hard to live any other way. 

Unfortunately, my point of view about where I should teach next year does not matter anymore than it did when I was laid off the first two times.  If my point of view had any power, then in the last two years I could have just said, “Wait, I’m a really good teacher.  You don’t want to lose me,” and they would have kept me.  Silly girl.  That’s not how education works.  It’s not how life works either.  Therefore, after dutifully explaining all of the reasons why I should return to my current position next year and generously acknowledging that I would go wherever I am placed, my superintendent offered some more polite version of "Damn straight, you will, Sister, and you'll like it."

Next fall, I will still feel like an unholy mess of a girl because the daily chaos of my life won’t change. Life is messy. The s'mores my children enjoyed last night were messy.  I probably still have marshmallow squished into the couch, and I know there are still graham cracker crumbs on the floor.  They stayed up way too late on a school night, and I know at least 3 of the 5 didn’t brush their teeth before collapsing for the night into a diabetic coma. 

However, those s'mores, those moments with them yesterday, are gifts, colorful jewels.  What would my messy house and chaotic life feel like if I was suddenly diagnosed with cancer or my house burned to the ground or one of my children got sick?  Would I care about Laundry Everest or the three mystery bowls of leftovers at the back of the fridge?  Not likely.  Every messy, crazy stressful moment would be a jewel, or as Joe Banks said of the days he had wasted in worry instead of living his life, they would be “like gold in my hand.” 

If you don’t know this reference you aren’t alone, but I encourage you to watch Joe Versus the Volcano an easily overlooked romantic comedy starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan.  (Yes, Janeane Garofalo, I do wish every movie could star Tom and Meg, and you would be a lot less cynical if you embraced that philosophy, too).  Anyway, it has some of the best speeches and sweetest messages about living in the moment.  Like this gem of  a speech when Joe finally quits his miserable job and explains to his boss why:

Either way, alternative education or the Big House, each day will be a sweet, delicious s'more because I have, not just a job, but a profession I love in a beautiful mountain home in the best state in the best country in the world.  My students, my children, my husband and I all deserve a point of view that can generate joy, share love, and embrace adventure.  The Lord has not abandoned me yet, so He must have more important work ahead.  If He finds an unholy mess of a girl to be the place to start, I'm up for the challenge, and happy to be a

Teacher Still Teaching Somewhere

Where Did the Bad Kids Go?

Do you know about "Alternative Education"?  Perhaps you are like I was--a general ed teacher who had a vague sense that there were several other "educational options" for the students who couldn't cut it in the "real" high school.  These places were undoubtedly easier, probably just passing students without making them do any "real" work.  Said students were the "bad" kids---behavior problems, attendance problems, attitude problems.  I and other regular ed teachers would just shake our heads sadly or smirk knowingly when we found "that kid" ended up switching to alternative ed.  My own district has several alternative sites.  I didn't know the differences among them.  They were all the same.  Those "bad" kids were all the same. 

Now, don't get me wrong.  I am not now, nor have I ever been a heartless teacher.  I worked hard to reach all of my students, to differentiate instruction, to reach out to parents and try to help whoever struggled.  However, as I've said in another blog, the kid who desperately wants to learn and might be successful, but has immense personal struggles to overcome, often looks just like the jerk who doesn't care.  My new job in alternative education has made me begin to realize, there actually isn't any jerk who doesn't care.  That kid doesn't exist.  I just thought he did.  I thought he was the one who ended up going away to alternative ed, and I couldn't be bothered with worrying about it.  I worked at the main campus. 

Well, the good Lord has a way of opening our eyes, even when we think we have nothing else to learn on any given subject.  After fourteen years of success as a secondary teacher, I'm pretty smart.  What am I missing?  What could I possibly have to learn aside from some tinkering with my practice here and there?  One layoff, six terrifying months, and one blessed, beautiful rehire later, I realize I'm an idiot thank you very much. 

I now work in alternative ed.  In fact, that "general ed" term I just threw around like an old vocabulary shoe, is a relatively new term for me.  I was just a teacher before; now I realize the distinction.  I have come to undertsand the differences among each of my district's several alternative sites.  I am beginning to see the tensions between the main campus and alternative ed. with new eyes.  Most importantly, I see with glaring clarity the arrogance I possessed toward these places and these students...now my students.  I know where the bad kids went.  They came to me, and they were never "bad" to begin with. 

That kid who was pugnacious every morning?  He has never had one positive adult role model.  More to the point, no one has said anything helpful or loving to him...in years...maybe ever.  Does that excuse his behavior?  Nope.  Does that mean he isn't my problem?  Double nope.

The girl who sleeps with everything on campus and sees every female as a threat and every sexual encounter as some twisted kind of love?  She was abused and has never been loved the right way, so the wrong way has become a sad replacement for the real thing.  Does this excuse spreading STDs and ugly rumors?  Nope, but I can't just roll my eyes back at her either. 

The girl who never came to class?  She's living in a car. 

The boy who always fell asleep in first period?  He works nights to feed his family..really he does.  He's not working to pay for car insurance, but oatmeal and diapers for his baby brother. 

The kids who can't focus?  They're hungry.  Ask them; they'll tell you, and people who are really hungry don't lie about it. 

The one who does brilliant work but is on the verge of dropping out because of attendance has chronic migraines. 

The other one is taking care of his disabled mom. 

Still another has been smoking pot since age ten because his Dad thought it would be okay, and the other one who's an alcoholic started drinking because she was so sad about her mom's addiction. 

Really?  Yeah, really.

I thought it was just ABC after school specials.  Wait, no, those were tame by comparison.  I think in my former job there were a lot of valid reasons for my being less empathetic and more cynical about the kids who now make up my entire day. 

The main reason is that I had to be.  Self-preservation dictated that when I had to serve almost two hundred students per day, I didn't have the luxury of getting to know each one's story.  I saw so many that I had to insulate myself from the knowledge of how bad some of their lives could get.  Plus, there seemed to be very little I could do when considering how few minutes of one-on-one contact I actually had. 

Beyond self preservation, I also knew I wasn't the last option for students.  When a student began slipping through the cracks, I would contact the counselor and eventually, if the student was unsuccessful enough, he or she would just disappear from my roll sheet and end up somewhere else.  I could be safe in the knowledge that the system had somewhere for that kid to be.  I didn't know if it was the best place, but it was another place after I failed, after the "main," "regular," school failed. After the students fail here, they can still perhaps succeed somewhere else. 

Today I now work in that mystical "somewhere else."   I am the place the "bad kids" went.  I am the last stop, or close to it.  There are a few options in alternative ed, but really we're the last line of educational defense before dropping out, giving up, moving on without a diploma.  There is nowhere else to go; we're it.  As a result I spend a lot more time on the phone coaxing my students to come in when they are absent.  I know more parents by their first names than I ever have before.  I know where most of my students physically live and with whom they live.  I'm learning to read subtle clues about what they aren't telling me, about whether contacting the parent will be helpful or end up in abuse. 

I made an English muffin with peanut butter this week because my student announced when she arrived that she was hungry.  Students used to say that all the time, but it wasn't really my problem.  Today, we had extra English muffins in the kitchen, and we always have some peanut butter, so she munched on breakfast while we discussed quadratic equations.  Later, we took a "field trip" outside to get some fresh air and walk up and down the lawn as a physical representation of adding and subtracting positive and negative numbers.  Those signs are just directions, and passing over zero is a magical journey where addition becomes subtraction sometimes. 

Nevermind the strange miracle that I'm teaching algebra.  My new position allows me to teach algebra for an entire hour if I need to, and my student will not be spacing out from lack of breakfast because I made it for her.  How is this possibly the sad "continuation" place I used to think it was?  How can this be anything but a wonderful place where students are saved, one by one, hour by hour? 

It seems to me the mission of my new alternative universe is to undo all the damage high school has done to my students, and to be there for them in ways that all good teachers long to be and try to be, but are prevented from being because of the factory-like necessities of a comprehensive high school.  When you have 200 and the school has 900 students, they somehow cease to be students in the same way that I cease to be a human being to the lady at the DMV.  They are units, ADA,  or test scores.  He's "below basic," she's "an AP kid,"he's "ELL" and has an "IEP", and on and on.  I know most teachers in my former place don't feel this way, but for every general ed teacher "the system" can generate an insidious callousness that is hard to ignore.

Lest this blog become a simplistic endeavor that champions the miracle workers in alternative ed and condescends to the comprehensive site I used to occupy, let me reassure you:  my revelations are about me, not everyone.  This epiphany was personal.  My new position has reminded me why I wanted to be a teacher in the first place.  The small, crucial moments so hard to find and celebrate as a general ed teacher (see my attempts to teach rhetorical devices in A Problem Like Maria) are much more frequent when you teach one student at a time.  The drug problems, or relationship crises that I used to try to push beyond my classroom doors cannot be pushed aside here; they are the glaring reasons why my students are here in the first place.  I have to work with my students' disabilties, their poverty, their crumbling families, and their poor attendance.  It's messy work, often sad work, and always exhausting work. Yet it's still one of the most important jobs in our society. 

I like my new job in ways I could never have imagined.  When my former colleagues seem surprised by this, I remember how I used to feel about "alternative ed," and am reminded of how little I knew even after fourteen years of teaching.  One of the reasons for choosing teaching as a career was that I wanted to be a lifelong learner.  Teaching in alternative education has uprooted all I thought I knew and reminded me of how much I do not know.  Not just math or how metamorphic rock is formed.  Not just why Newton is important or why the acronym FOIL is my best friend when factoring.  I am learning again how much power my profession can generate in a student's life.  Unfortunately I am also learning how much more need and sadness and injustice exists in the world around me, than I thought there was, even in my small, beautiful mountain place.  I learn everyday at work.  I laugh everyday at work.  I think deeply everyday at work. I am challenged and victorious and a miserable failure everyday at work.  So my new place in education is challenging and scary and a miraculous temblor that has shaken me up and made me so glad to be a

Teacher Not Teaching Now Teaching

Transition Words

One of the important moments for student writers is when they learn to use transition words.  I do not mean the way they use them when we scaffold it in elementary school.  My first grader recently wrote a paragraph on her morning routine, complete with misspellings and awkward transitions, clearly inserted by the teacher to make students aware of their existence: 

"First, I wake up.  Next, I eat breakfast.  Then, I get dressed.  Finally I get my backpack and go to school."

Unfortunately, many students in high school have long since forgotten these elementary attempts to make the use of transitions conscious and smooth.  Instead we see a lot of run on sentences, comma splices, and sentences that start with "then."  By the time they reach sophomre or junior year, we can expect the reliably stilted, "In conclusion" to start the last paragraph of any piece of writing.  However, for a student to achieve appropriate, precise transitions that move a reader smoothly through her essay, is a rare and impressive accomplishment. 

All of this thinking about transitions led me to ponder metaphor.  Most things in life lead me to ponder metaphor.  I didn't end up as a literature major and English teacher because I enjoy the linear.  If smooth transitions in writing are difficult to achieve, they are virtually impossible in life.

I race from work to home each day, never feeling I've put out all fires and cleaned up all messes.  It's usually a panicky glance at the clock, followed by a sprint to the car and a quick text to reassure my family, especially the husband part who needs to get to work...now...that I didn't forget to come home.

The transition home is loud.  Granted, most things with five children are loud, and my daily welcome home is no exception:  a chattering hen house of school updates, questions, hugs, kisses, permission slips and exclamations.  Then,  I close the front door and actually come inside.  Despite many attempts to have a few moments of calm before leaving teacher person and putting on the full armour of mommy person, this frenetic welcome home goes unchanged.

My early morning routine isn't much better.  Every life needs a soundtrack and my mornings these days are accompanied by strains of "Chuggington," a colorful animated show for preschoolers whose theme song, for whatever reason, is completely enthralling to my eight month old.  Complete with wobbling head and wonder-filled "o" of the mouth, he sits mesmerized while a cloying children's chorus sings the following: 

"Chuggington.  Chugga, chugga, chugga, chugga Chugginton!" 

I know.  It's hard to believe my kids can't get perfect scores on the SAT someday if I just set them in front of this kind of quality programming all the time.  Fortunately, he's only interested in the monotonous theme song.  Afterward, we switch over to the beloved Arthur.  This part of the morning is crunch time-- the transition from Mom to Teacher, from Children to Students.  No matter how early I rise, the last half hour is still, always, slightly chaotic.  I should probably just record my voice shouting the following:

"Did you brush your teeth?"
"You have to wear socks."
"I don't know, check the dryer."
"Did you pack your lunch?"
"Someone pick up your brother."

Weekdays are one thing.  Saturday mornings are another.  Soccer Saturday offers its own transition challenges.  Now, you don't just have to get your children to school.  You must get them there on time for an event involving several other families.  It is a timed event.  It requires special clothing, and sports equipment.  Sometimes you even have to bring a meal for everyone involved.  By the way, if you think the phrase "bringing snack" doesn't sound like a frightening summons to provide a full meal that pleases both sugar hungry mini-athletes and healthy minded parents, you are not a soccer mom. 

I've been a "soccer mom" for four years now.  Four years to know when each of my three children have to be at their respective pre-game warm ups.  Furthermore, this isn't the first week of soccer season when the transition to the routines might have some starts and stops.  It's the middle of the season, so our Saturdays should move like at least a relatively well-oiled machine.  Instead, this was my recent AM:

After an early morning session of chores, cuddling and Cheerios, I was lounging on the couch with said Cheerio eater, my six year old, and a cup of coffee. We were watching "Arthur,"a show I would watch by myself.  I want to hang out with my friends at the Sugar Bowl after school everyday and make big plans with Buster in Arthur's treehouse, and I'm not even sure what Arthur is.  My eldest says he's an anteater; I'm not seeing it. 

But I digress. 

Suddenly and for no clear reason, I realize the six year old is supposed to be at the field much earlier today.  I check my email for her coach's weekly update (Thank you, Lord, for coaches who email; otherwise I might never find any soccer communication) and realize we are supposed to be at the field in 30 minutes!

Now, considering the drive is about five minutes away, you might interpret this as good news.  However, you would be wrong. Stupidly sunny in your optimism in fact.  Even Superman and Wonder Woman together could not get three children ready for soccer games and two more ready for watching soccer games in that time.  After rousing sleeping Dad to ask if he can bring Child 1 and 2 to the field in two hours, I go to work on the youngest Mia Hamm and the babies.  As a family we enter Red Alert mode where I shout orders, Dad does triage on some blisters and shoes the two year old.  While I pack the bag that will serve as changing and water station, cell phone dock, snack shack, bank and baby toy box, hair is brushed ("I don't know where your purple ribbon is; you'll have to go without it.  I'm sorry."), teeth are brushed and water bottles filled. 

Soon I'm flying out the front door, yelling for older sibs to move car seats from Dad's car to mine, and I begin to think we just might make it on time.  Well, maybe a few minutes late.  We can be those cool parents who think the start time is just too early, so we arrive a bit late, knowing that things at the field never really get going as soon as the coach likes to claim.  Just as my sunny confidence begins to flame, it is quickly extinguished, and I realize I will probably cross that tenuous "fashionably late" threshhold and instead, again be the manic mother of five, racing in late and apologetic.  I hate being that chick.  It's sooo predictable!  Anyway, the source of my new distress comes from this conversation:

Mia Ham (heading out the front door)

Eldest:  Are you wearing one of my shin guards? Mom, she's wearing one of MY shin guards!
Mia (with a slight but growing whine):  I NEED it!  I can't find mine!
Eldest:  They're not YOURS!  I need them, too!  I have a game, too!

Dad and I quickly realize that we have three soccer players and only five shin guards.  It's kind of like the time-honored dryer conundrum where two socks go in but only one comes out.  What happens to the other sock?  Coincidentally, the T.V. show "Arthur" has a cute episode that explains the sock mystery: 

At any rate, I am now clearly one shin guard shy of soccer Saturday.  I refuse to race to the store to buy more shin guards.  My six year old has the chronic habit of losing everything she wears that falls below the knee.  We are often reduced to tears before school, before church, before birthday parties because she can't find socks or the other shoe or any shoes that fit.  Today is just the latest in this predictable and frustrating habit.  While I might want to dwell, wallow even, in the misery of this realization, I must forge ahead. 

Soccer waits for no mom! 

Please tell me this sad shin guard sharing is not the pathetic experience of just my soccer family.  Do shin guards go missing in your house, too?  Probably not.  You're probably a super organized working mom who has special wicker baskets with canvas lining that match each child's team uniform color.  After each Saturday, you dutifully wash the uniforms and socks and lovingly fold and place each uniform along with its cleats and shin guards in the basket for each child.  Are their water bottles color coded as well?  Of course they are.  You are the master of soccer Saturday, and your essays all have delightful transitions.

Meanwhile, back in the increasing H-E-Double Hockey Sticks that is my Saturday, we charge out of the house and into the car.  Dad's executive decision is that they will share their shin guards because only two of them play at the same time.  I realize no one has had breakfast, so I throw a granola bar back to my soccer star (Yeah, that will fuel her until almost the half) and a bag of goldfish crackers at the two year old, whose total devotion to me is sealed with this immensely cool breakfast choice.  No oatmeal with sliced bananas.  No pancakes with flax seed.  No scrambled eggs with broccoli and cheddar cheese.  She gets "Fishy Crackers?!" 

Predictably, we are to late to warmups, but luckily there is another Mom who arrives slightly later than me.  Victory.  Everyone plays.  Only one daughter wins her game, and yes, we keep track of these things in our house.  Don't get me started.  It's another blog unto itself.  They collect their snacks.  We trudge to the car, and when we get home, we're far too exhausted to do anything but collapse en masse on the couch. 

Dozing with the baby on my shoulder, I sense the two year old is grazing on the snack leftovers from her sisters.  The six year old kicks off her cleats and socks which are almost immediately inhaled by the couch, hider of all needed things.  Soccer uniforms end up in one pile or another, but they don't go into the wash for at least two more days.  Let's be honest, they may still be dirty somewhere next Friday.  I'm not even sure I own any wicker baskets.  I know my five children have nothing color coded.  All of this will either make them resilent and calm in a crisis, or at the very least, it will fuel some productive therapy sessions when they reach their late twenties and realize I am to blame for everything.  Either way, Saturday is waning and relatively successful, and I still haven't learned how to transition from Mommy to Soccer Mommy. 

Tomorrow, there will undoutedly be at least some chaos between home and church.  Even though I am a veteran working mother and a teacher who can guide students through any number of good choices to create smooth transitions in writing, my shift between home and work on Monday will undoutedly still be difficult.  Transitions are hard.  Smooth transitions are almost impossible to achieve, both in the classroom and in life as a

Teacher Not Teaching Now Teaching

 Transition Words Handout

Merit Pay

Merit pay. Isn't pay supposed to reward merit? Doesn't it do so in other professions? The automatic $138 per month raise each year in my district is little consolation for watching Joe Mediocrity lecture from literally yellowed notes, and pass out the same mimeographed vocabulary assignment he first made in 1981, all while making the same pay as I do. Actually, he makes more than me merely because he has been physically occupying space here longer. Truthfully, he makes much more than me because my union has been consistently building up the salary and benefits packages for these admirable elder statesmen in the district while young, dynamic teachers, still humming "Eye of the Tiger" on their way to work, can't pay their deductibles and vacation at the local park populated by tweakers and stray dogs.

The Washington state teachers union was widely credited with killing a bill in 2009 that would have simply swapped out a years of service pay structure in favor of rewarding "teacher competency."  In defending the actions of WEA, union president, Mary Lindquist, illuminates the very problem unions create.  She claims: 

"There’s some good reasons for our existing salary schedule. I think it’s one that has stood the test of time. It’s a clear, transparent, predictable way of paying school employees and I think by and large they’re pretty receptive to the current system. I don’t see a lot of need from inside the education community to change that.” (Jenkins, Austin, "Washington Teachers Union Kills Merit Pay Proposal." OPB News. March 23, 2009). 

This is precisely the problem!  Of course there isn't a need from inside the education community.  After decades of knowing you will get an automatic raise, no matter what kind of teacher you are, where's the incentive to suddenly be held accountable? 

While I do not usually agree with the teachers unions who claim to represent my interests, they do have a point when it comes to concerns about merit pay.  Its implementation is daunting.  If we tie the third grade teacher's pay to her students' test scores, what about the teachers before her who prepared those kids?  Furthermore, why should teachers in the poorest, urban districts have their pay tied to test scores that result from socio-economic factors largely beyond their control, while those who live in affluent districts reap the rewards earned by good parenting and high economic status?  Should base salaries be derived from merit based criteria or only bonus money?  Furthermore, is our only measure of successful students the results of their multiple choice tests at the end of the year, or do our claims to educate the "whole child" mean anything?  How do we quantify success?  As teachers, we all know it usually cannot be recorded on a scantron, no offense to you math teachers out there.  Despite legitimate concerns about how best to implement merit pay, the answer cannot be merely to reject it outright.

As is always the case, we teachers make the worst students, and what do we see in our students when the bar is low and "predictable"?  Most rise only to the low standard.  If you raise the bar in the classroom, the limbo party stops and students stretch themselves beyond what they perceived their capacities to be.  Competition is healthy!  It's true in the classroom and in our profession.  Excellent teachers are not afraid of merit pay.  In fact, many great teachers welcome the chance to be both held accountable by their profession and rewarded for their hard work.  My master teacher told me many years ago that the best teachers constantly doubt how well they are doing, reflect upon their teaching and search for ways to improve.  Those who don't probably aren't doing a very good job.  As a teacher, if I don't want to question my own practice or challenge myself to improve, why would I be calling for the people writing the paychecks to do so?

The rewards in public education are always intrinsic in the current system, and that just doesn't encourage greatness.  When a teacher takes on outside tutoring, advises one or more clubs, or designs curriculum that requires students to engage in higher level thinking and rigorous work, the rewards should not just be an occasional grateful parent phone call or a superficial, "Keep up the good work!" and insincere chuck on the shoulder from the principal.

People often speak of teaching in elevated, moral terms, like it's a religious calling. Certainly there is truth to that. In fact, students, parents, and administrators should rejoice in that reality -- most teachers are in it for all the right reasons. People often cynically assert that we're in it for the summers off, but that's like saying young men and women volunteer to serve in the armed forces for those great "Welcome Home" parades. The fact that becoming a teacher requires a bit of self sacrifice, perhaps a bit of a calling, doesn't mean the job does not deserve compensation.  If this were truly a religious calling, then our housing, food and expenses would all be paid for by the church, and I wouldn't have any children to feed because of my vow of chastity and poverty.  Just because we want to inspire out students, just because we didn't seek fame and glory in our career choice, doesn't then mean that we should be shut out of financial reward or compensation for a job WELL done, not just a job done.

Don't get me wrong--I love the Facebook message from a recent grad who thanked me for her senior English class. She said it was clear I put my heart into my teaching and that despite my reputation for being "mean" or "hard", she quickly realized I just wanted to prepare them for the proverbial "real world".  I treasure the flowers and card I received last June from a senior girl who wanted to thank me for helping her when she was being bullied as a freshman.  I'm tickled by the 19 year old boy working at the local smoothie shop who bemoans how much he misses "this place" when he comes by to visit. Those are the carrots that keep teachers moving forward, no matter how heavy the burdens we bear. But those don't pay for soccer or Disneyland for my kids. They don't repaint my house or fix my car when it suddenly decides it won't get me two miles to my job one morning. However, just increasing teacher pay won't make public schools suddenly and uniformly successful anymore than Oprah's generous checks to a few successful charter schools will save the system.  Furthermore, charter schools, while often wildly successful endeavors, still aren't the pillowy manna from heaven we might wish them to be.

The link below is to an interesting article that points out how limited a mere focus on merit pay is.  The problems in public education are geographical and local, socioeconomic, and complex.  Can merely paying teachers more create widespread success?  Probably not.  Michelle Rhee in Washington, D.C. has made bold attempts at reform and been met with Oprah celebrity and union scorn.  A pilot program in Denver that has been mandatory for new teachers and voluntary for veterans, has been fraught with controversy and ambiguous results. 

http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=is_merit_pay_a_distraction_in_the_fight_for_meaningful_education_reform


Merit pay can't be the only solution to the systemic problems in public schools.  My argument is not the traditional teachers-need-higher-salaries mantra. Instead, an entire shift needs to occur in public education.  We need to reward models that work instead of politicians and yes, teachers unions, denigrating any movement toward compeititon.  We need to liberate districts, allowing more local control over how their funding is dispersed.  The recent film Waiting for Superman presents the terrible angst of parents living in low performing districts, just hoping to win a random lottery slot for their children in a successful charter school.  Instead of opposing charter schools, as many unions and traditional schools have, why not see them as a way to change what doesn't work in all public schools?  Why tie the hands of administrators with rigid rules about how money can be spent?  California is one of the worst offenders there.  Merit pay is only one element of reform, and the influx of homeschoolers and charter schools in the last two decades demands that traditional schools change or become obsolete. However, once Oprah moves on to discussing her favorite new scarf and Julia Roberts's latest comedy, once the public school question again can't be fixed by a two minute slot on CNN, we in education will again be left with these problems to solve. 

I'm not sure how to fairly achieve merit pay; implementation is fraught with peril. However, just because we aren't sure how best to reach our destination, doesn't mean we just give up on the journey.  Do you tell your struggling students in danger of failing to just forget about graduation and give up when they come to you deflated and ready to quit?  No, you don't.  Physician, heal thyself!

Teacher Not Teaching Now Teaching

Yes, it's true.  My district officially rehired me on Friday afternoon!  It is not in my previous position, but it is full time.  I will be working in alternative education at two different sites in the area.  It will be a new challenge, and I always like those.  I do not know yet how to juggle teaching seven subjects, but I am excited about the opportunity to help students one on one, and as a mother of five, I'm really looking forward to working with teenage moms, recent and soon-to-be.  If you are in alternative ed. I'd love to hear your stories and advice!

For my family this means I no longer need to know the daily balance of my bank account and the dates when the water and garbage payments deduct automatically.  Well, let's be honest--I'm still a teacher, so I may need to know some of that, but I may not feel my heart racing as much when the recorded voice at the bank says "Your available balance for use is..."  Those words can feel like a terrible, frightening reversal of a game show finale where I do not win the beautiful dinette set [what the hell is a dinette? Does it just mean small, cheap dining room?].  Instead the automated voice finishes her phrase with some number much lower than my worst guess, and I still can't figure out how the bank makes a computer voice sound more judgemental and condescending depending upon how small my balance has become since I last called.  When there is a recent deposit she sounds positively chipper, almost as if I'm more worthy of allowing them to house my paltry income. 


So, while the title of my blog may not be the most accurate one anymore, it still works I think.  After all it is plural, and, as you know, there are still way too many teachers not teaching right now.  Too many of us who did everything right.  We valued education.  We obtained college degrees, dedicated ourselves to a difficult, oft-maligned profession, and didn't put financial gain ahead of helping others.  Despite that, many of us are still losing our homes, facing bills we can't pay, and a bleak immediate economic future for our families and our school systems...especially in California.  Therefore, I will leave the title unchanged because there are still many teachers not teaching, even though I am again lucky to count myself among those who are.  Furthermore, I am learning not to trust the security of any job.  The chilly winds of March may yet find me "pinked" and pushed again into the same spiral I just weathered.  Only time will tell.


For now, I am grateful, thankful and counting my blessings, and I don't care if those are all the same thing--this kind of moment needs redundancy.  As the Lord has shown me in every period of my life:  He wants us to trust Him and know that He will provide, even when it seems most disheartening and difficult to do so.  I think I'm doing really well, then I lose hope and begin to become frustrated and impatient.  Then, He makes me wait a bit longer before coming through gloriously and with the kind of out-of-nowhere gifts that can only be attributed to Him. So, I'm humbled again...in every sense of that word.  I don't seem to learn the lesson very well, so I keep having to experience it again and again! 


I have a dear friend who has been teaching for many years in Oakland, California.  She and I have enjoyed Giants games and Christina Rossetti poetry together.  We have debated whether or not the conclusion of Jane Eyre is really happy or a sad compromise for a woman who would have been better off as a missionary than as the wife of a blind liar..albeit a dashing, terribly rich blind liar.  I admire her talents in the classroom and cherish her friendship.  You probably have similar friends, those you turn to when prayers are needed because they always have your best interest at heart.  She texted congratulations to me on Friday and quickly sent a second text saying "Keep blogging tho."  I shall take my old friend's advice and continue.  I hope you will be there, too.  I like knowing you are out there.  It has helped me enormously the past few weeks, and I'm sure it will continue to do so in my new role as a

Teacher Not Teaching Now Teaching*

*My ten year old demands credit for this new title.  It was entirely her idea.

Half Full or Half Empty: At Least I Still Own the Glass!

I've been thinking a lot these past few weeks about the benefits of my new unemployed status.  Let me correct that:  I'm now underemployed.  I believe that is the official term for someone like me who currently works fewer hours than I desire.  All the platitudes have been running through my head.  When life hands you lemons, make lemonade!  Whenever God closes a door, He opens a window!  Those phrases are so life affirming, albeit hackneyed, when applied to others.  Being laid off is a grand adventure!  New opportunities are just waiting to burst forth!  Have you seen the handbills?  Jobs and money all over California!  Let's head west! [I apologize for the overuse of Steinbeck references.  I'm a native Californian high school English teacher for crying out loud!  What do you want?] The sunny optimism seemed reasonable when it was advice for my friends laid off last year.  That's because it came while I sat comfortably behind my desk, students in front of me, salary directly depositing once a month like it had for the past thirteen years.

Today, I must deliberately force myself to see the positive.  I have to actively push aside terror-filled thoughts of what will happen next year if my district still has no job for me.  I cannot focus on tomorrow; I must only see today.  Tomorrow is frightening and unknown.  Today, at least, I can control.  Well, let's be honest, as a mother of five thinking I have much control over anything is probably naive delusion, but you see my point. 


Here are some blessings I would not have in my pocket today, if I was still teaching full-time:

• This morning I had time to make fried eggs and toast with my two-year old.  While the baby slumbered, we dipped our toast in the sunshine yolks and talked.  I learned where each scrape on her knee originated, and she learned that when I was little I ate eggs just like she does.

• Last night I collapsed on the bed at 9:30 PM and didn't even bother to set an alarm for 5:00 AM.  No alarm needed!  I could still begin my day with relative sanity, even if I didn't rise until 6:36 AM when my eldest daughter said, "Mom, do you need to get up?"  That's right.  I had a human alarm clock this morning, and it wasn't followed by abject panic at the thought of thirty-five seniors waiting at a locked door while I yanked copies out of the jammed machine, cursing and sweating as the late bell rang.  I was frying eggs when the late bell rang, thank you very much.

• When my husband goes to the hospital on Friday to have a "routine procedure," I will be there.  I will not have typed any detailed sub plans trying to duplicate what I do for my replacement.  I don't need a replacement.  My current self can just be where she needs to be without enlisting a Mommy-doppelganger, or a wife-doppelganger to do the work I cannot do.  No matter what the doctor says afterward, I will be there to hear it.

• I have made brownies, oatmeal cookies with raisins, and three new recipes this month, and I have not driven my children to a drive-thru in quite some time.

• When this year's soccer practice schedule started coming into focus, I did not hyperventilate.  

Child #1:  "Mom, I have practice on Monday and Thursday from 2:30-4:00.  
Child #2:  "Mine is on Tuesday and Friday from 4:30-5:30."  

I don't know when Child #3 has practice yet, but I remain calm.  I can do it because I do not have any meetings or papers to grade or lessons to plan.  My children can have my undivided attention whenever they need me.  

• I will not overhear my two year old this year saying what her older sister said a few years ago.  Back then, my eldest was "playing school."  She was the teacher, and her little sister was the daughter.  In her best, exasperated imitation of me, she said, "I can't help you now!  I have to grade all of these papers!  Please go play in your room right now!"  Ouch.  I can still feel my stomach lurch and my chest tighten with guilt.  Working Mom guilt.

The lack of Working Mom guilt is a blessing beyond measure.  Its absence is ironic since I'm still working almost everyday.  However, you teachers who are teaching know:  our job is not like other jobs.  It is a flurry of executive decisions, putting out fires, manic talking and constant interaction with close to two hundred other human beings.  It's that for at least seven hours a day followed always...always...by prep and assessment work that needs our attention.  We are either attending to it, or we are distracted by the thought of it.  We are surrounded by stacks of ungraded papers, or they are resting ominously in our teacher bag near the door like some heavy, simmering beast with bad breath, just seething there, attempting to get our attention.  

No such beast currently resides in my home. 

• I mean, I braided hair and read Olivia and Dora books at bedtime more than once this week people!  My six year old has had, not one, but two pre-tests on her spelling words!  Pre-testing was not pre-empted by backwards mapping for sophomore English.  
• I know my eight year old didn't write D'Nealian "k"s on her homework and had to do it over at recess.  [It is a sign of my high school teacher status that I had to look up the spelling of said cursive style--elementary teaching is a whole wonderland of things I do not know!]  I also do not know the current boyfriend status of any of the junior class girls, let alone their penmanship struggles, and I'm fine with that.  
• My beginning flute player daughter is concerned that she can't also take choir because it coincides with her Thursday soccer practice.  Working Mom probably wouldn't know that until she had been reminded of it at least three times, but I only heard it once yesterday, and it's still in there!   No parent phone calls or department meetings have taken its place.  

• I will leave this campus today and calmly go pick up my children at school down the street with only my purse in my hands, and I will not return here late tonight after the baby falls asleep to make copies for Friday's sub, so I can leave for the hospital with my husband on time.  I will not lie awake worried about the boy who seems angry all the time, going over what I said to him today in case I added to his melancholy.  If I lie awake, it will be to worry about my husband, or my daughters, or my baby boy.  I may even worry about the nation's economy or the lack of world peace.  Why?  Because I can!  

This optimism won't last long.  It's quite possible that I have only $3.62 in my checking account right now.  I haven't received a paycheck since the end of July.  Eventually I will have to deal with the fact that my ten year old wants an iPad for Christmas but isn't at all worried about the expense because--and I quote-- "It's okay Mom, I'm just going to ask Santa for it."  Oh, good.  Glad I don't have to worry about that then!   By next summer I may cringe when the phone rings because I will know it is my mortgage company, and I do not have what they want. 

However, those are not worries for today.  The glass can be half empty tomorrow or the next day.  Today it is half full, half full of orange juice leftover from a breakfast with my daughter because I'm a...

Teacher Not Teaching


Recipe for Eggs in a Hole

A Problem Like Maria

How do we improve public education?  Strains from The Sound of Music fill my mind..."How do you catch a cloud and pin it down?"  The answer depends on who you ask.  A public system, dominated by a union system that protects mediocrity and discourages excellence is the problem.  An administrative structure that too often protects its own power at the expense of other stakeholders is the problem. Helicopter parenting is the problem.  Ineffective discipline resulting from a culture that wants everyone to have a trophy and no one's inner child to be wounded is the problem.  And yes, bad teaching.  Lazy teaching.  Exhausted, overworked educators who are dispirited and all-too-often compromising their own high standards because the system won't reward it anyway.  That's also the problem.  It doesn't happen to all of us.  It certainly doesn't always happen to most of us.  If you are a teacher, the day chronicled below will be familiar, and hopefully illustrate the complexity of the systemic problems we face in educational reform:


8:17 AM, an American classroom
Papers are piled up in precarious towers on your desk.  The angry red light flashes on your classroom phone.  You know it contains at least one parent who has to speak with you urgently, and if it has been 24 hours since the first call, that same parent may have already left three messages and called the principal by now because "You don't return phone calls!" 

Your email inbox has seven new messages in the past hour because your district has now linked your gradebooks to all students and parents.  Unfortunately, the same district has not educated parents about the codes in your gradebook system.  Therefore, you will be explaining to the first of three parents that the zero in his son's column is not counting against his grade and isn't even a zero really because you just haven't finished grading the essays.  It's just listing the assignment.  He should know this, but the projector for the Powerpoint presentation by the principal on Back-to-School Night wasn't working properly, so the parent doesn't know not to worry.  He logs on to his son's grades, sees zero,  and hits send before he exhales.   God bless him.  He cares.  The system doesn't.   

But emails and phone calls must wait because Danielle Drama in first period has broken up with her control freak boyfriend yet again, and while her friends comfort her in the bathroom, you have to quickly email her parents (divorced, so two emails) and set in motion a CPS report because her sister told you before class that Danielle mentioned wanting to kill herself  last night.  She won't.  She's just sad, confused, and in love with a guy who texts her seventeen times before first period.  She'll eventually dump him when she goes to college and realizes she deserves better, but for now she's weeping in the bathroom stall and texting everyone she knows that she "just can't take it anymore...she'd rather be dead." 


As a teacher you don't have the luxury to ignore this.  Drug use, violence, suicidal thoughts--these things have to be reported.  You must do a Tag-You're-It on someone else in the system.   It's not just school districts that get sued, but individual teachers personally get sued, and as a colleague of  mine likes to say, "I'm not losing my house for you or anybody!" 


Maybe some do brush off  these comments, but you know, conscientious teacher that you are, you couldn't live with the guilt if you were wrong.  You also know your district would (after consulting with their lawyers on speed dial) dump you like a hot, uncaring teacher potato if you knew she said the "S" word and failed to alert Mom, Dad, her counselor, the school psychologist, and the campus police officer.  Paperwork must be filed even if she and Bruiser are already back together again next period. 


Oh wait, the counselor with the immaculately clean desk (except for her heel marks and Starbuck's ring) has just sent a new student to your class of 38.  This student comes highly recommended:  a 1.3 g.p.a., an expulsion hearing scheduled, and here in mid-September, he has already missed seven days of school.  A quick glance at his current schedule shows that he has two "academic" classes in a schedule of seven.   He hands you the schedule change and slouches into the last empty seat in the back row with Spicoli and the cast of Half Baked.  You've not been given a courtesy call about this new arrival ahead of time, so you must now stop just as your class starts to share examples of how they use ethos, pathos, and logos on a daily basis without even realizing.  The art of persuasion is important when they want something from parents, teachers, or friends, and it doesn't hurt that it's also California Content Standards 2.1 and 2.6.


You were listening to the sweet girl in the third row who usually doesn't speak.  She says she only makes logical appeals with her father when she wants something because pathos wouldn't work on someone who thinks it's weak to cry at funerals.  We learn more than parents realize.


Listening to her must wait.  You will now have to send Newboy out for his textbook which requires writing a hall pass.  If you don't write a pass, the campus security agent in his shiny electric golf cart will drive Newboy right back to your doorstep and demand answers.  "Why didn't you write a hall pass?"  In the time it takes to return him, question you, wait while you write a pass, and return to the goft cart, Newboy could have gone to the library, checked out The Grapes of Wrath and already be heading to the California border with Granny's corpse tied to the jalopy.  This logic wouldn't reach golf cart security, so you won't bother to demonstrate the art of persuasion for your class. 


However, you will use this incident right after the golf cart leaves to return to your class discussion of ethos, pathos and logos.  After all, even the most frustrating moment is a teachable moment.  But that will have to wait; you can't even send out your newest arrival to the library just yet.  You must first try to put in a quick call to the counselor, who never answers her phone,  in order to discover the careful, logical reasoning for adding a 39th inmate to the insane assylum that is your class today.    You leave a voicemail, and just as you're about to return to Sweet Girl, Row 3, the phone rings. Parents are usually (not always) prevented from calling you during class, but anyone in the front office can ring through to your room.   

Counselor (in a sunny voice, feet firmly planted on desk):  "Hi, sorry to interrupt you.  Can you talk for a minute?"

The next moment is crucial.  Wait, no it isn't.  The next moment is endlessly variable.  And the moment after the next moment is completely predictable.  No matter what you say:

A.  You (voice dripping with sarcasm):  "Why sure, I can chat!  This is a great time!  I mean I'm just doing this thing called teaching.  You've heard of it?  It's the reason for the building you're sitting in with the clean desk upon which you're resting your feet."

B.  You (voice strained with increasing frustration):  "I can't really talk right now.   After the interruption of the new student you sent without warning, I now have less than twenty minutes to convey the concepts of ethos, pathos, and logos to my class, so they will understand how to mark examples in the article I am giving them to read for homework.  It must be read for homework if I have any chance of getting them ready to write their scheduled in-class persuasive essay by Friday's long period, which they must write because it is the glorious "Benchmark Day" that occurs to the fanfare and flourish of the administration.  In fact, I also need that day, so I can have one solid hour to grade three or four essays in the Leaning Tower of Pisa on my desk, in order to complete progress reports due to my principal by next week for all of my 205...no, wait for it...206 students! I can't talk right now! The educational clock is ticking! Can it wait?"  [I do realize the irony of chewing out Clean Desk Counselor after telling her I can't talk, but there's only so much a girl can take.]


C.  You (calmly, but back to sarcasm):  "Oh, no problem.  Let me just discuss the unannounced student here in front of him and the other 38 while they silently stare at me through our conversation.  I'm sure no one will figure out who I'm taking about, and I'm sure I'll feel completely comfortable asking questions about his g.p.a., expulsion hearing, and personal life."


It doesn't matter.  A, B, or C will all be followed by this response, or something almost like it:  



Counselor:  "Oh, well it will just take a second.  I know your class is huge, but he really has nowhere else to go in his schedule.  He was in Mr. _____'s class, but you're so much more easygoing, and they had kind of a personality clash, so I just thought this would be best for him."


Counselor-with-feet-on-desk (that's her Native American name, don't laugh) is no dummy.  It takes years of practice to achieve the sheen on that empty desk. 


She knows you won't use the f-word in front of students. 


She knows you love students, so you won't pitch a fit about the fact that they are slowly dying from lack of oxygen due to the number of bodies exhaling in here.  It's quite possible mating is going on.  You wouldn't know, as there isn't any space between bodies anyway. 


She knows you will swallow your anger and save it for an email later that she can just delete. 


She knows that you know that Mr._____ of the personality clash fame deliberately clashes in order to shrink his class size. 


She knows you do not engage in this practice. 


She knows it's often the lowest g.p.a.-pot-smoking-anger-management-needing-heading-for-multiple-felonies losers who are your favorite students when all is said and done. 


She knows you are a squishy mommy-person at heart who may howl and roar, but in the end who will acquiesce for the sake of the kids.  (Think:  Reverend Lovejoy's wife on The Simpsons:  "Think of the children!").


Even apathetic stoner boy with the 1.3 g.p.a.  needs someone to stop shuffling him along and just teach him already!  Therefore, your response is equally predictable.  You sigh dramatically and make some sarcastic remark about needing more desks, but you laugh, so your colleague doesn't feel too uncomfortable.  You politely end your conversation in favor of returning to Sweet Girl in Row 3.  You do this because it's easier. 


Because that counselor's desk will always be swept clean.  Because you really want to hear how Sweet Girl used logos to convince her Dad to let her go to the midnight showing of Twilight last Friday.  Because you want your students to have a relatable example to tie to this abstract Aristotelian concept.  Because you want them to understand their homework, write well-argued, polished essays on Friday, and, most importantly, persuade others when necessary.  Because you want them to enter adulthood with competence and confidence. Because what happens in this stuffy, overcrowded, chaotic, room is important!  It's the beating heart at the center of democracy's most important system, and you are too busy keeping the heart beating to do much else.  You just let it go, like you have to let so many things go in favor of the faces in front of you.

Because Danielle Drama has returned, puffy-faced and hiccuping loudly for attention, and she needs to know that you think what she does here is important.  She needs to know that she is important, that her thoughts and persuasive skills matter.  She might need them when her hovering jerk-of-a-boyfriend tries to convince her in a few months that she's nothing without him and that no other boy will ever want her.  She will need to know logically why that doesn't make sense.  She will need to know emotionally why this is unfair, cruel, and simply not true.  She will need to realize her own ethos...the expertise, trust, and value she has to offer the world, so she can dump him once and for all. 


Stoner boy may never rise above his g.p.a. and achieve great success.  Sweet Girl may never volunteer to speak in class again.  Danielle may marry her boyfriend and live happily ever after with unlimited text messaging service.  You don't know. 


You do know teaching in a public school in America may not be humanly possible...at least to the standards you expect for yourself, the standards the students deserve.  The problems are systemic.  Would a phone call to stoner boy's Dad about his recreational activities help?  Probably not, especially since another teacher at lunch will inform you that his Dad is in jail on drug charges.  Ahh, the proverbial apple and tree.  Would a rational discussion about unprofessional choices change the Personlity Clashing teacher or the relaxed counselor with not much work?  Nahh, they are who they are.  It is what it is...That, by the way, was a staff motto where I work, coined by the leadership, no less.  That, and "Suck it up!" and "Do more with less!"  It's morale boosting mottos like these which make me wonder why more people don't go into education. 


 It's a terrible, wonderful mess of a place, my profession.  I don't have the answers, but ask any teacher, and we know the problems, whether we're in the trenches today or temporarily a...


Teacher Not Teaching