Growing Awareness of History

Public school door knob

I recently did a research writing unit with my students, in which they explored the history of their school building and neighborhood through an interview with our school janitor, on-line web searching, and a trip to the public library across the street. Our janitor, who has been in the building for over 20 years, told us that our school was 126 years old (I don’t know how accurate that figure is, but I have no reason to doubt him). We learned that our building used to be connected with the firehouse next door. The firehouse part of the building was a church, while the school part used to be a psychiatric hospital for children. Also, we learned that our cafeteria used to house a pool!

We weren’t able to find much on-line. I hadn’t realized how complex and difficult finding out the history of any given building in NYC was. So I then expanded the scope of our research to our neighborhood.

The library across the street has also been around for a hundred years, one of the original Carnegie libraries. The librarian showed us historical pictures of East Tremont, and we discussed pictures of the old police precinct headquarters, which looked like a mansion, and pictures of Italian immigrants dressed in hats and formal attire, all lined up to get into the library. Pictures of farmland and fences. A Texaco gas station with gas for 11 cents a gallon. At first, the students said they didn’t see much of anything in the pictures. Then as we began discussing it, the history opened up before them in all of the little details, the old cars along the side of the road, the cobblestones in the streets, the pigtails the girls wore, the way their dresses were cut.

Richman (Echo) Park

It opened up history for me as well.

I’ve begun paying more attention to the sights around me as I walk from the subway station at Grand Concourse down the hill. The glaciated rocks at Richman Park. The Tremont Baptist Church perched on the winding hill above the chaotic traffic circle of Webster Ave and East Tremont. The stone masonry at the base of some buildings that seems to denote historical longevity. It has made me begin to appreciate the Bronx in a new context. I don’t just see urban decay anymore (though my growing awareness of the impact of the Cross Bronx Expressway has set a context for that as well). I see a community of newer immigrants, striving to make their way, just as generations of immigrants before them have done. I’ve begun to become aware of a rich, underlying framework of history all around me, requiring only attention to become aware of. This growing awareness of the cultural beauty of this community somewhat assuages some of the gap left in my heart after living for years in the natural beauty of Lake Tahoe,

Tremont Baptist Church

California. When I used to bike the 9 miles in and out of work in my last year there, I remember always reminding myself to try to absorb the beauty of the lake and surrounding mountains, ringed in pine. I knew that someday I might not live in such pristine beauty and wanted to try to savor it while it was there, and hold it in my mind, however fleetingly. That has turned out to be prescient, and those images come back to me still.

Similarly, I know I may not always live or work in a place with such a rich and dynamic history, and it is my task now to savor it, to take it in and build my awareness of it.

Simultaneous to this growing awareness of history all around me, I have begun reading The Narrative of The Life of Frederick Douglass to my students. I had downloaded the book from Project Gutenberg, waiting the 2 months it took to receive print-outs from my school, and downloaded free questions and vocabulary for each chapter from The Core Knowledge Foundation. The language of the book may be well above the reading level of my fifth graders, but they comprehend the content deeply, in a way atypical to much of the content that I teach them. The oratory grasp of the power of words emanates from Douglass. There are two paragraphs in Chapter 2 in which his articulate voice rings through the ages, impassioned, as he reflects on the songs that slaves traveling through the woods would sing. These songs of the slave, Douglass wrote, “represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears.” And suddenly, his outrage at the inhumanity of slavery lashes out from the page, lashes out from history. It’s a powerful moment.

There is never enough time to teach much of anything deeply in school. It’s hard to be consistent when schools are disorganized, schedules change on a moment’s notice, and there are constant interruptions from phones, loudspeakers, and children’s emotional outbursts. But reading this book is one thing I want to follow through on, because at some point, our children require us adults to make a decision on what is most important, and home in on that thing and stay true to it.

I have begun to feel the weight of history, and appreciate the power of a narrative in conveying the sense and awareness of that history. Our children, just like most of us adults, suffer from a disconnectedness from the wider context they live within. Though I may not be an inhabitant of their community, I can certainly make it my goal to become more aware of that community’s history and to help grow that awareness in my students.

Like much of the things I teach, I find that I learn the best material alongside of my students, discovering new ways of looking at the world and growing my own awareness.

I Will Defer to Women

I, like probably a healthy contingent of folks out there, am self-centered, and thus largely perceive the world through a deluded lens of self-importance. Every now and then, however, I gain a sliver of insight beyond the immediate realm of the distance between my cheek and my nose.

I like to magnify the spare, menial bits of glory that I may happen to stumble into now and again and celebrate the small triumphs of character or will. But the reality is that on the whole, I am deeply flawed, as I believe most people really are, when their externally syndicated mantle is peeled away.

There’s one simple way for me to maintain my humility: to re-focus my attention on the fact that for every extra effort that I extend, there is a woman doing the same thing — while simultaneously raising a child (or children). And because she is thus additionally employed, chances are that I will receive some kind of external recognition or compensation for my effort, while she may not.

Which reminds me of a quote from Barbara Kingsolver in The Poisonwood Bible about how women “carry on.”

Given the choice between my ego and sense of self-importance or a reality check grounded in history, I will defer to women.

Reflections on 2011 and Beyond

It’s the end of another year, and rather than compile a numbered list of the best of 2011 or make predictions about the year to come, I’d like simply to reflect on what this year has been, and ruminate on what my goals might be for the oncoming year.

My sense of this year–in the traditional sense of a year–is somewhat skewed, since January through June was still “last year” as far as school life is concerned, and that last school year was vastly different than my current school year. So I’ll start there. For that stray, wonderful soul out there that already knows this information, just skim over it.

I am now in my third school year of teaching special education at an elementary school in the Bronx. My first two years, I was in a self-contained setting, which meant that I was the sole teacher with the assistance of a paraprofessional in a classroom of up to 12 kids (I think my first year I had 9, then last year I had 8, so I guess I was fortunate in that sense; though something you quickly learn in special education is not to gauge solely by numbers) some of whom were undergoing acute emotional or psychological stress or dealing with early childhood trauma. So at the beginning of this year, 2011, I was struggling with meeting the needs of my second class of students. Compared to my 1st year, these students were collectively less aggressive and they were generally a pleasure to be with, though we certainly had some rough days. I had two very challenging students in the emotional sense, though they all presented great challenges in the academic and social needs sense. Some refused to do any work at all, and some worked very hard, yet demonstrated little progress.

I obtained my master’s degree in June from The City College of New York. Not really an accomplishment in and of itself, but an accomplishment in the sense that I was taking those classes on top of the already plentifully demanding work as a full time teacher in a high needs school. So that’s my first personal milestone of 2011.

My second personal milestone is that during the summer, I got married to a wonderful broad from New York City who crossed my star out in Lake Tahoe 5 years ago, and who ended up lugging me out here to the East Coast. We were fortunate enough to get the chance (thanks to my parents) to honeymoon in Kauai. Truly a marvelous cap to a challenging 3 years since moving out here to NYC.

Then I commenced my 3rd year teaching. In all respects, it’s been something of a honeymoon there, too. I was shifted from a self-contained setting to an inclusion setting, where I now am a co-teacher in a mixed classroom of 19 special education and general education students. These students might be far behind academically speaking, but they do not have the kind of aggressive behaviors I was dealing with prior. I have not been assaulted, and they only rarely get into verbal tiffs with each other. They are truly sweet, lovely children to be around (though they can’t stop talking), and I know I am lucky this year and I try to cherish it as much as I can while in the thick of things.

Working with another teacher presents its own set of challenges, but it provides a relief from administrative burdens. I’m not good at communicating with parents on the phone, and she’s great at it. She helps plan lessons and grade assignments. I also learn from my co-teacher and appreciate the perspective she brings to our classroom, given that she grew up in the same neighborhood as our students and can tap into that experience to connect with them. We have lunch together and I learn just from listening to her crazy stories. All in all, I get the impression that the South Bronx today–though it certainly isn’t topping any Yahoo lists of best places to live–ain’t nothing like it used to be.

My third personal milestone this year was that I turned 33. Nothing special in particular about that, except that 3 is my lucky number. Hoo-rah!

But now it’s a new year (almost), and I know that I am not the best educator nor person that I can be. I feel like I’ve reached some sort of plateau, in which I am in danger of falling into complacency. If I am not challenging myself, nor being challenged, then I question my purpose, my identity, my integrity.

So I enter the new year with some trepidation, but also with the firm resolve to do better. Better for my wife, better for my students, and better for myself. I’m not going to burden you with a laundry list of my personal or professional goals, which I’ve already done plenty enough of throughout this year, but there is one goal that I would like to share with you:

This year, I am going to write a book. You heard it here first.

Happy New Year to all.

Buddha Nature

In order to write something, anything, my mind strives for some overarching purpose. But what is the overarching purpose of my life? Could this be defined? And if it could be defined, would it be worth writing?

It is better, perhaps, for me to recognize that writing itself, like life itself, is purpose enough, worth enough, to enact for it’s own sake – for my own sake – here within this very moment of being. I can write, so I will. I am alive, so I must live.

Writing is an act of transcribing waves of thought into the structured symbols our ancestors developed to amplify their minds. Through this amplification, they – and all their subsequent generations to the point of me at this point of now – enabled this text that sits directly before you on your phone or your tablet or your laptop or your desktop monitor, ferrying this current of my thought to you.

There are so many ways to amplify our minds in this day and age – due only to become ever more exponentially electrified – that it bears questioning as to what occurs when there is much amplification of little mind? Springing from that visualization (big waves circling outwards from a small pebble) comes the possible insight that the eventual zenith of all of this streamlined jetsam and flotsam is no mind. No mind as the end game of much effort applied towards mind amplification. This sounds koan enough that there must be some truth to it.

And as Meta as all of that sounded, it really is just an outgrowth of the overarching purpose from which this thought flow had begun, which of course could not be uncovered until I had allowed it to unfold without consciously steering myself to it. I commenced writing here on this post in order to calm my mind, which was preventing me from achieving the “no mind” of sleep. And in allowing myself to tap, however superficially, into the wellspring of my existence within the here and now, which is being for the sake of being, via writing for the sake of writing, I have found a sort of quietitude that will hopefully allow me to slip into the cover of my dreams. Buenas noches.

Insomniac Thoughts On Hard Work and Practice, and Some Goals

I’ve been struck, unfortuitously, with a bout of insomnia tonight, which I have been fortunate not to have had in quite some time. Before moving to NYC and plunged headfirst into a whirlwind of frenetic work and survival, I used to get insomnia a fair amount. I tended to utilize such times for writing. Which may be one reason, come to think of it, why I no longer write as frequently as I once did as a West Coast whippersnapper. During college, I wrote sometimes multiple short pieces a day. Now, many moons later, it’s more like once a month.

While I can’t really help that my cognitive and emotional space is spent on other also fairly important things, like teaching kids, I do miss delving into this personal creative space, just as I miss other creative or emotional outlets I used to devote some time to, such as playing my hand drums or hiking/running up the sides of mountains. And I know that every day that I no longer do these things, I am slowly losing the chops that I once had.

I’m reading Malcolm Gladwell‘s Outliers at the moment, and his argument about success as attributable mainly to extensive practice, as opposed to talent, made a lot of sense to me. I remember my cross country coach in high school (a terrible math teacher, but an excellent running coach) telling us that after two days of rest we would begin losing a certain percentage of our fitness. And I remember reading an interview with John McLaughlin–one of my favorite musicians and world renowned for his lightning fast licks on the guitar–in which he stated that he could tell that he was losing his skills after only two days without practice.

While at a conference recently in Seattle, during a roundtable discussion with other educators about “hybrid” roles for teachers, one teacher who was currently in that role (1/2 time in the classroom, 1/2 time doing policy related work) commented on how during time spent away from the classroom, such as the 2 days we had spent at this conference, he felt his connection to classroom practice slipping away.

I don’t know if 2 days is some magic number, but the big idea here is that without nearly daily practice in something, we begin to lose the skills and capabilities (one could even call it a type of ‘muscle memory‘) we had worked so hard to build. Furthermore, I’m reflecting on the notion that mastery is not some peak that one reaches and plants a flag in and retains from there on out for the rest of one’s life. Mastery has to be built through a lot of hard work and practice (Gladwell says roughly 10,000 hours), and then sustained.

Though I do think that there are certain tracks and pathways that, once formed, can be more easily re-awakened, even if they haven’t been practiced in a while. For example, I’ve been running for many years, but l’ll go through sometimes long periods where I don’t run at all, for reasons such as work, the season, or travel. But when I do begin running again, after a short period of initial soreness, it’s pretty easy for me to ease back into it to the point where I was before. Of course, I ain’t a “master” runner. I don’t run races or anything. But my point is that if you’ve invested a fair amount of time in something in the past, if you begin doing it again, after a short re-learning period, you’re back on track fairly quickly based on where you left off.

All of this is essentially to say that I’m realizing that I have to get much more disciplined about investing more time back into activities and practices that are important to me to develop and maintain, such as writing as an avenue of self-exploration, reflection, connection to a larger community, and expansion of thoughts and feelings.

So here is an action plan, which I am hesitant to lay out as I hate promising things that I don’t follow up on, and I also doubt that anyone really cares about my personal goals, but I feel like it’s better to lay out concrete, explicit goals if this is really important to me:

• I will write by hand in my journal 2 nights a week before going to bed (writing by hand forces me to produce a substantially different style of thought and writing, since I’m mainly accustomed to writing on a keyboard)
• I will publish 1 blog post a week
• I will play my hand drums once a week
• I will hike at least twice a year

There it is. Now I’ve got to do the much harder work of holding myself to it.

The Great Bathroom Debate

Recently Newt Gingrich made some remarks about poor children learning the value of hard work through janitorial duties that has generated some commentary in the Twitterverse and on blogs.

My first thought in reaction to this, aside from a general distate for Gingrich’s firebrandism in general, was that he’s got it completely backwards: it’s in fact the rich kids who must be taught the value of hard work. These are the kids who will most likely never have to really struggle, and that have been raised with the expectation that the world caters to their needs and whims. Though poor kids may struggle with developing a strong work ethic in the menial jobs that many of them are unfortunately slated to endure (more on that below) — they hold no illusions that the world centers around them.

But after hastily posting something to this effect on my Twitter, which I botched since I was using a junky old phone, I rethought the classism inherent in both of these positions.

The fact is, as Andy Rotherham points to in his take on Newt’s statements, ALL kids need to be “systematically taught life-skills.” This doesn’t have to be a poor vs. rich kid conundrum. But the issue it does raise is whether in our frantic push to get all kids “college ready,” we are neglecting those character building experiences that help children to learn the value in hard work. We have a tendency in the United States to demean the challenge and value of technical skills and craftsmanship. Recently, I watched the Kings of Pastry, and was inspired by French President Sarkozy’s speech, in which he wisely advises not to consider ”manual knowledge to be less noble than academic knowledge, less capable to create wealth and well being.” This is advice we should learn to heed here in the United States.

I personally learned the value of hard work by cleaning bathrooms. I cleaned a lot of them over the 5 years that I worked at a camp and conference center in South Lake Tahoe, and trained others in how to clean them as well. And I believe that cleaning a bathroom truly shows the nature of one’s character.

To clean a bathroom well, you have to be committed to the personal experience of a complete stranger, whom will most likely not even appreciate, let alone notice, your work. You have to struggle to pick all the hairs out of the crevices of the tile, stuck to the edges of the tub, caught in the base of the toilet. You have to get down on your knees to scrub the grime out of the shower curtain, and the soap residue caked onto the soap dish. Not to get too in depth here, but you sometimes have to witness and clean up the extremely unpleasant aftermaths of a stranger’s digestive issues. That’s a deep commitment to the service of your fellow man.

I don’t think it’s such a terrible idea to suggest that all children should learn to serve others, not merely themselves. Perhaps cleaning bathrooms is a bit too unsavory to expect them to have to perform*, but certainly engaging them in tasks that better their school or community environment, such as cleaning their classrooms, or collecting recycling, or picking up garbage in their local park, or planting gardens around their school, should be considered an essential part of their public school experience.

But let’s remove the prejudice that only certain children need to be taught the value of hard work. And in this recognition, let’s further recognize that we must stop demeaning the value of vocational education and technical skills. We all need to learn to value and appreciate those who serve us, every single day, stocking our supermarkets and convenience stores with produce and products, cleaning our bathrooms and hotels, serving our food and maintaining our cars. There is nothing wrong or undignified with being a plumber, a car mechanic, a janitor, an electrician, or a housekeeper. My grandmother came from Sweden and worked her way around the country, as a single mother, cleaning houses and serving families. In my personal work experiences, I have cleaned bathrooms, made beds, stocked shelves, and served customers in both retail and hospitality industries, and now as a teacher, I serve children and their families. And I value this work I have done and am proud of it, because working hard and serving others is the foundation of our economy.

Until we learn to stop demeaning such work, most children will naturally never learn to see the value in working hard to serve others or to take pride in working their way up through a trade or industry. Especially when it’s perceived as menial labor with no positive outcomes. And while some of our children will be “college ready,” until we teach them concrete skills and the values they will need to succeed, most children will not be “life ready.”

* One of the things Rotherham points to in his article in Time is that cleaning bathrooms is too dangerous for children to perform due to the chemicals that are used. Having cleaned many bathrooms using chemicals, I am acutely aware of this danger, and so as housekeeping manager, I researched and developed my own non-toxic cleaning solutions to protect the safety and health of myself and my employees. These solutions are cheap to make, just as effective in cleaning as the chemicals we unnecessarily invest in, and scalable for larger operations. Please visit my website, Environmentally Sound Solutions, for the specific solutions I used.

Thanksgiving

We don’t really know for sure because we have nothing else to compare our own existence to, but it seems evident that if you wish to end up as a moderately advanced, thinking society, you need to be at the right end of a very long chain of outcomes involving reasonable periods of stability interspersed with just the right amount of stress and challenge (ice ages appear to be especially helpful in this regard) and marked by a total absence of real cataclysm.

– Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

As I read this passage, I thought how transferable this idea of the evolution that led to the existence of humanity et al is to a healthy individual adult existence. How we require just the right balance of challenge, stress, and stability. How when I look back at my formative years, I am somewhat amazed by the journey that my life has undergone to arrive at the point of now, knowing that one slight step off the path during one of those crazy tangential ice age depressions of loneliness may have resulted in a person substantially less blessed.

Pushing the Walls Away

It’s the most challenging students that you carry with you long after they’ve moved onto the next grade. That student who threw a desk at you, the one who cursed you out every day, the one who experienced schizophrenic hallucinations in the afternoon, the one who punched a hole in your wall, the one who cried and went into hysterics whenever you asked her to complete a task, that one who walked out the classroom throughout the day, the one so hungry for attention that you couldn’t get through an entire lesson, the one who ripped up every single piece of writing before he could finish, the one who used a laptop as a weapon and made sure you never left the room during your prep period again, the one who couldn’t stop talking for more than one minute . . . These are the ones that keep us up at night, the ones that often have undergone childhood experiences so unfathomable that even to speak of them out loud makes tears spring to our eyes and our voices so thick we stop ourselves from even bringing them up in conversation, even to our loved ones.

Such students drive us nuts while they are in our classrooms (and all too often, in our hallways). They are the ones rarely absent, the ones that disrupt the entire class dynamic and rivet everyone’s attention. They always demand immediate answers, they do not accept our authority unless it stands up to their own notions of justice, and they make fun of pretty much everything that crosses their radar, which usually includes students unable to stand up for themselves.

But it is these students that come back to me when I swap stories with other teachers. These are the students that teach me how to be a better teacher, and a better person. They have been teaching me what they had been put through, from their earliest days. They were sharing — in the only way they knew how to communicate it — something deep, and fundamental, and raw. And as I have grown to recognize those lessons, I have learned how to better love all of my students, and even — at the risk of sounding cheesy — how to better love humanity.

Children are constantly looking to the adults around them for guidance on how to navigate the constant bombardment of stress, anger, and anxiety, as well how to deal with conflicts with others. The sad thing is that we often are not ready to provide that guidance, whether due to competing demands on our attention, lack of professional therapeutic training, or simple lack of life and soul experience. Yes, I said ‘soul experience.’ This is that deep, dark place of grit that comes from overcoming life challenges that can not be faked and for a lack of which challenging children will call you out on within a moment in a classroom setting. If you can’t meet their challenge consistently, decisively, and with complete integrity, they will take you down into that wounded place of raw, bereft, acute despair within which they have had their formative experiences.

It takes a whole school to reach our most challenging students. It takes a staff willing to do whatever it takes to address that child’s needs, rather than abandoning them to a teacher already overwhelmed with the only slightly less immediate needs and demands of their other students. It takes a community that supports, nurtures, and cultivates emotional literacy. It takes a school that has the courage to acknowledge that for some students, the rules must be broken, and we can’t just punish our way into compliance, but rather must work carefully to cultivate warm relationships and a supportive, nurturing environment that slowly coaxes motivation from that student.

Though it’s hard to see it at the time, in the midst of all the negative conflicts and stress they put us through, we should cherish these challenging students. The students with exceptional learning needs. The students who have lived in shelters. The students abandoned first by their mothers and subsequently by a string of foster parents. The students who challenge us to love them, challenge us to care for them, challenge us to be the kind of educators that can believe in them no matter what — unconditionally — because that’s the kind of educators that they need.

Unlocking Wilderness

We tend to lock ourselves in our own devices, then blame others for their design. Fits of animal lucidity that may appear madness to the habituated — such as going out for a run in the middle of the night, fasting for no external reason, or simply typing unpremeditated words into the stillness and emptiness of a blog — are perhaps wholly necessary to maintain some freedom from our own tendency toward confinement.

In the flurry of my working urban existence, as if that were any excuse, I have grown complacent, as I am wont to do, being human, in a perpetually exhausted consumptive silence, threading endlessly through the vision of others amplified on my outdated laptop screen. But there is a wind that speaks from deep within that cuts through concrete and forest alike, past and present, a sort of primal divulging light that trumps all, if it could just be heard. . .

I once struggled to understand the language of the ocean as it laps relentlessly against the shore, like a fish-eyed harbinger of hunger, desire, and the wild thrall that lies just at the boundary of death, a  3D sinuously pixellating sound of the loss of everything that had previously been defined, yet comes back again, never to be fully known except perhaps, fleetingly, as beauty.

Like San Narciso expulgated of meaning, there is simply, terribly what lies here, before us, utterly barren, utterly beautiful, utterly unknowable yet wholly tangible through shizophrenic descent into frenzied sensory and metaphoric experience. Here we touch the subway shuddering plastic lights that flash the graffiti of someone who has long since passed onto their way into everyday. . .

The image words of the ocean wind, cutting through the forest mountain of my mind, take me away to your place of desolation.

My 3rd Year in Teaching Special Education Commences

A new school year hath begun. Thankfully, this year portends to be dramatically different then my last 2 years of 5th grade special education teaching in the S. Bronx have been. This difference is largely attributable to a change in setting: I’ve been shifted from a self-contained classroom to an inclusion classroom. On top of this, I have more experience now — even though it sometimes doesn’t feel like it — and I have a co-teacher to help alleviate the burden. I am also no longer taking Master’s classes during the week. All of this has converged to provide an experience that is substantially less stressful and emotionally/physically devastating.

Realizing just how big a difference in challenge the change in special education setting really is, it makes me all the more appalled that we send our most inexperienced educators into classrooms with the students with the greatest needs. It’s a disservice to new teachers, but more importantly, it’s a disservice to our students.

But such is the crash course into the dire reality that exists at the core of a loosely run and obesely large educational system. I’ve gained a newfound depth of respect for the public educators and social service workers who are out there in the trenches everyday doing their best to carve out spaces of safety and sanity for children with exceptional learning needs. And I’ve gained a newfound respect for the families and children that live under conditions that test their strength of character and resolve in ways unfathomable to those who have not struggled with the chronic and acute stress of poverty combined with learning challenges. I’ve learned that we have to be simultaneously systematic and radical in our approaches to working within these conditions. Rigorous and flexible. Unwavering, yet relaxed. Loving, and firm. In short — tight-wire balanced. Kind of like running barefoot.

My goals this year for my school:

• Push for democratically appointed grade level team leaders who will act as a liason between the team and the administration (distributed leadership)
• Leverage grade level teams to develop curriculum collaboratively on the Google Docs infrastructure I set up last year

I’m leaving it at that this year, because I’ve realized that less is more when it comes to trying to implement change within a school. The marathon battle begins.

Gatekeeping Points

. . . pretending that gatekeeping points don’t exist is to ensure that many students will not pass through them.

 

–Lisa Delpit, Other People’s Children

Maximizing the Minimal

Image via Wikipedia

The minimal footwear experience experiment commenced last summer with the Vibram FiveFingers KSO. I’ve been running monkey-footed and ballerina-like through the wooded park next to my apartment for over a year now, off and on, dependent on how exhausted I am after the school day or how snow-laden the street, and I can now level some experience at the topick and bear witness to the wonders that constitute the minimal sole running experience.

Without the easy comfort of the shod foot, the cushioned heel, I’ve found that I have to run paradoxically completely relaxed coupled with a profound awareness of form. There’s no getting away with sloppiness. Now, you may think, you who have run for some time, that you don’t run sloppy t’all. I didn’t think I did, either. But until you’ve run barefoot, you don’t realize how lazy your stride and body mechanics have become, encased as your dogs have been in their little pillowy houses.

I’ve always been amazed, when casually observing runners at a park, at just how much some runners seem to get away with. Some practically falling over forwards with their backs hunched over, many slapping their feet down against the pavement, each foot an obese child belly flopping into an asphalt pool. But according to statistics, these undisciplined strides inevitably pave the way to injury.

Running with minimal footwear will not magically dissipate the danger of faulty running mechanics. Unsurprisingly, podiatrists report an influx of folks arriving at their doors with barefoot running related injuries. Nerds such as I that have breathlessly drunk of the intoxicating legend of barefoot running and immediately began banzai barefoot running on concrete after a decade of running shoe wearing . . . like lambs to the slaughter went our little pigs.

It’s a compelling story, you see. Told elegantly and grippingly by Christopher McDougall in Born to Run, it’s a tale of a method of persistence hunting that was developed by our distant ancestors and whose embers are barely kept alive by the traditions of a small tribe in the mountains of Mexico, but that has been rediscovered and rekindled by modern running heretics that were crazy and tough enough to challenge culturally ingrained habits and comforts. Ironically, these heretical runners have led to a surge in a new consumer trend towards the high-tech product known as the Vibram FiveFingers. Barefoot running but better, it could be said. Now you can find a minimal shoe made by every major running shoe manufacturer.

But caution must be advised. To run barefoot after a lifetime of shoe wearing is to become a naked babe in the wilds of the unknown again. New neural pathways, muscular memories, and blood bearing conduits must be hewn. Callouses must be formed. A whole new way of experiencing, a new cultural awareness, a new method of seeing the world must be created. This is not easy nor comfortable to someone accustomed to mindless, zoned out running.

When I wore shoes, I used to run fast — short and hard. I ran to escape myself. Now, I tend to run slower, though my cadence is quicker. My stride is tucked in, my feet fall underneath me rather than in front of me. I jog, I see where I am, I take in the sights, I feel the way the pavement presses against my soles, the weight of my body falling forward borne in my hips and knees, carried through by my arms, centrally balanced by my skull sitting erect upon my spine. Now, I run to find myself.

Sometimes, I miss the mindless running that I used to be able to get away with. I just want to zone out, just run, not have to be aware of how my feet are falling at every single step. But there’s a payoff. It feels good to run in minimal footwear. When my feet keep nailing that sweet spot, and my body is balanced, I swear that I can feel my tendons releasing some kind of happy chemical. My body rings with it afterwards. I’ve never done yoga, but it’s how I imagine a good yoga session must feel — like it releases unknown toxins and tensions from pressure points in your body. No, I’m not just talking about the runner’s high — I’d been running for over 15 years before I began this barefooting thing. It’s like runner’s high and then some.

Over the last year I’ve also been wearing minimal footwear all day while teaching, a brand called Vivobarefoot. Strangely, I’ve found walking in minimal footwear more challenging than running. Sometimes, for no reason that I can discern, it’s just incredibly awkward and difficult. I don’t know why this is, but I suspect it has to do with my state of mind and level of tiredness.

Here’s the great thing about barefoot running: you don’t even require shoes to do it! For someone who opposes consumerist culture, or is simply poor, this is good news. But if you prefer to wear minimal footwear, there’s still a benefit, which is that since you aren’t wearing heels anymore, you don’t really have much to wear down that will alter your footwear. So you could potentially just keep on wearing it until it completely falls apart. It’s a better investment in shoewear, in other words.

Now that the minimal footwear phenomenon has caught on, and pretty much every running shoemaker has some style of minimal footwear, I’m noticing that there’s an interesting evolution in running shoe making. Vibram is slowly developing slightly more structure and padding into their soles, while traditional shoemakers are slowly developing less. It seems that there is a happy medium that we are moving towards between technology and natural running mechanics. I think this is why geeks have become so enamored with the FiveFingers. I mean, let’s be honest here: technology can make our bodies perform feats not achievable through natural means. Witness tennis rackets of today vs. the wooden ones of yore. However, what we’ve also been learning is that technology should not preempt nor distort natural mechanics, but rather support and enhance those mechanics. Our feet and soles were developed the way they were for a reason. All those sensors we naturally have must be there to guide us into balanced footfall.

I just purchased the Vibram FiveFinger Bikila LS, as I suspected that the new style would afford a bit more padding in the forefoot area that would allow me to pick up my speed a bit. I’ve gone out for a few runs in them now, and I was correct. After the minimal KSOs, the Bikilas felt amazing. It almost feels like cheating.

Is barefoot running for you? Only you can answer that question. But as for me, I’m clearly sold.

That D-Day on the Event Horizon

Image via Wikipedia

As a public school student, I recall dreading the first day back after the summer vacation long before that fateful day arrived. Its shadow loomed large and ever increasingly ominous over the last few weeks, tainting my prolonged nocturnal fiction book reading marathons. The sight of back-to-school sales were enough to make my stomach recoil. I imagine that this is how soldiers preparing to storm a certain beach in Normandy would have felt, readying themselves to plunge into an uncertain future that contained at the most death, and at the least, certain horror — though I suppose mixed in there is that unique elated excitement born from the headlong rush into a danger that you know will change you irrevocably.

As a public school teacher, the feeling as the first day of school draws nigh is disturbingly similar. It’s different, of course, because now I am an adult, and I am the teacher, and I am much more in control of certain variables of myself and my situation than I was as a hormonally charged and overly sensitive adolescent desperately scrounging for social and emotional currency. So there’s a bit more of a positive edge to this adrenaline coursed pulsing of nausea that edges and nips at my stomach as I think ahead to that swiftly approaching D-Day, but otherwise it feels more or less the same. It’s not exactly something I relish, as you can probably tell.

It seems to me that there is something odd about some of the traditions and rituals that we cling to in our society. One of them being this prolonged summer vacation between different grades (another being our adherence to daylight savings time). Most of us are aware that disadvantaged students lose a significant portion of their academic gains in learning over the summer. The students that I have been working with, whom are not only disadvantaged socio-economically speaking, but furthermore cognitively speaking, lose nearly all of their learning if they are not practicing their acquired skills during the summer. Which was pretty far back (2-4 grade levels behind) to begin with.

This has been the first summer since I began teaching that I’ve fully enjoyed, as the last two I’ve spent most of taking trainings, exams and classes. And therefore I can state that having extended vacations — during which I am still getting paid — is a very nice thing indeed. But I can also say that I think it’s just a tad overlong. Since coming back from my honeymoon, I’ve been trying to get back into the swing of things: waking up early, staying on top of my Twitter and news feeds, responding to emails, putting together to-do lists and checking off items. But it’s really bloody hard when you’ve just completely gone off the whole map of what it means to be in a structured schedule and environment.

I’m not whining. I’m bringing this up to make the point that I don’t think having prolonged summer breaks is good for either students nor adults. Both students and adults may say that we enjoy 2-3 month long summer breaks on principle, but the fact is that even students — except for those sent away to posh summer camps — begin to flounder in the over abundance of free time and get just a little bit, well, bored. Or perhaps just a bit directionless. We all need to have some kind of structure in our lives to help keep us developing and healthy. During the long summer, that structure, unless maintained by strict parenting (on the part of students) or self-discipline (on the part of teachers), tends to fall to the wayside. And much that had been built during the school year is therefore left to fester.

I would much prefer to have more plentiful but shorter vacations, as Kathleen Porter-Magee suggests in this Room for Debate post from a while back. Something on the scale of 2 weeks, as opposed to 2 months. Just long enough to really enjoy it and ease up the pace and tension, but not so long that I’ve forgotten what it means to work entirely. But more importantly, this would much reduce the severity of that adrenaline inducing sense of nausea that the first day of school brings after an overlong summer vacation.

Part of the reason for the fear and nervousness that accompanies the first day of school is not only that summer is ending — it is because you know that you are about to be plunged head-first into a long and seemingly never-ending tunnel of frenzied efforts to stay on top of a pile of emotionally and cognitively and physically demanding tasks during 70 hour work-weeks that never stops piling up in front of you, with only the occasional 3-day weekend or stray “winter recess” or “spring break” to keep you functionally sane and from developing scurvy. If we had more vacations in lieu of a long summer break, these could help keep both the students and adults capable of functioning in a somewhat rational and civilized manner and from developing strange growths in their necks and holes in their stomach linings.

Sigh. Well, yes, I’ve rather been enjoying this summer. Lots of beer (and subsequent belly distending, which I attempt to counterbalance with running) and wine, hanging out with beautiful and wonderful friends and family, savoring fresh pineapple, papaya and coconut. Learning how to cook again. Reveling in my new marriage and amazing catch of a wife. I’ve even been reading fiction books! That have nothing to do with education! Just for the fun of it! (Can you tell that I feel vaguely guilty?)

And as that first day draws ever nearer, I attempt to fight back the eddying fear of the unknown by beginning to prepare in whatever way I can. But here’s the thing, folks. In the world of public education, you can never be fully prepared. So you are just left with that nauseous, sinking, fluttery feeling every morning until suddenly you wake up several weeks after the school year has hit you, and you’ve become fully immersed in your professional self once again . . .

To Be Wed

Ring Ceremony

As of Saturday, I am forthwith a married man. My wife and I have been living together for 5 years, so married life will not be substantially different for us, but I admit that walking around with a ring on my finger does make me feel different. More confident, perhaps, more adult. (We’ll see just how long a feeling imbued by a material object lasts!)

I’ve always loved weddings, because they seem to be one of the few venues where people of all walks of life and ages can come together and celebrate. I am pleased to say that my own wedding was a beautiful celebration, and I am not saying that just because I’m biased. I’ve never seen my parents dance so hard. My nieces and nephews were running around and having a blast and being adorable. My wife and I have incredible friends and family, and they were the ones that made this experience so wonderful. If there’s only one thing I regret about my wedding, it was being unable to spend lots of time with each and every one of them there.

As we were planning the wedding and grimacing over the money spent and the inevitable stress of event planning, I began wishing that we’d just eloped and been done with it all. But now that the wedding has finally occurred, I can say honestly that it was all worth it, no matter how quickly it swept by. It was worth it because it served as a critical reminder of just how fortunate and blessed we are to have our family and friends. Without them, we would be unable to cherish and sustain our commitment to each other over the long haul.

Relationships aren’t magic — they require a lot of hard work, dedication, and compromise. We move into our marriage with full awareness of what real love requires, and with the models and sustenance of our parents and our families and our friends to look to for guidance.

We’ll be going to Kauai for our honeymoon next week. I know I’ve been delinquent in posting here since summer has began, but I think I’ve got a good excuse for it! ;) Keep your eyes peeled for more junk on public education later.

Obama’s Transparent Donor Sourcing Rakes in the Moolah

I’m contributing to this campaign. It’s my small way of acknowledging that this is the kind of leadership that I want to see in our country. Diplomacy beyond ideology, integrity, and intelligence.

https://www.youtube.com/v/hlypjw9i7Vg?version=3

Something to Write About

I don’t know what to write. I spluttered out a few meagre sentences that fizzled before they could even hit a period. And as I stared at the blank screen, bereft, I recalled observing this struggle in my 5th grade students as they sat “brainstorming” something to write in class. It’s all right, I would tell them, this is something every writer experiences. There’s even a name for it: writer’s block! Just write down anything that comes to you, the first thing that comes to mind, and keep going with it. You can always go back and edit it or start something new.

And perhaps there is some smidgen of wisdom in those encouragements, even though all I’m really doing is trying to force them to write because I need something to quantify, something to show, something to assess. The wisdom being that we can’t wait for genius divine inspiration to strike – we have to just put it out there, now, while we have the chance, however imperfect and trivial it ultimately may be, or else we risk saying nothing at all, and holding it in, and losing an opportunity to better develop our capability to articulate what is within and to be understood. These opportunities seem like they should be legion, yet they really are quite rare. There is always something demanding our immediate time and shallow attention. Errands, family, TV, Facebook, email, video games, news, books. Something for us to become immersed in, for us to consume. For us to not be lonely, bored, depressed. For us not to confront the dire reality of our own solitary existence.

To create something out of nothing is indeed tough work. It demands humility. It demands that I lay down my pretensions and measure my distance from my own self and from others and step forward into the light of temporary understanding, thus opening myself to misunderstanding and belittlement. But beyond this threshold of fear lies love. An acceptance of my frail attempts to formally communicate myself. An acceptance of my humanity, however proud, however blind, however imperfectly stated. An acceptance that even though I don’t really know quite what to say, or how to say it, somehow I’ve still arrived at a better shore than the one I left but a moment before. And can now go to sleep feeling better relieved, slightly more whole, like I’ve taken one small step towards re-finding myself in the dark empty night, renewing the self that had been sleeping, hidden in the everyday veil of my movements. Enough. I think I’ve found something to write about.

Reflections On My 2nd Year Teaching Special Education

My students graduated from elementary school on Friday. I’m not one prone to getting emotional from formal ceremonies, but I do admit to feeling a touch of pride mixed with sadness that they were leaving me. I felt as if I had demanded a lot from my students over the year, and they had tried their best within the limitations of their own learning challenges and often stressful personal lives.

As I think back over the year, it’s hard to think that I have had much of an academic impact on my students. I think this is one of the most challenging aspects of teaching in a self-contained special education setting: you don’t typically see substantial academic growth. You most likely will not propel student performance on standardized state tests from Level 1s to Level 2s. When all the other teachers get their students’ preliminary test results in June (merely outlined as Met the promotional criteria or Did not meet) and celebrate their successes and mourn the few students who must now attend summer school, I’ve thus far in my teaching experience just sat glumly with a list of mainly ‘D’s (did not meet the promotional criteria). And even as I know that my students have met their own Individualized Education Program (IEP) goals and thus have met their modified promotional criteria, it can still sting bitterly. As a teacher who holds myself accountable for my students’ performance, despite the substantial challenges of their learning disabilities and environmental conditions, I know that I am failing my students. I can be a better teacher. I can be more knowledgeable and fluent in all content areas and use more systematic and effective pedagogical practices. I can be more empathetic and understanding of their cultural differences and better build a home-school connection. I should be able to reach through to that one completely unmotivated and aggressively defiant student who I wasn’t able to reach.

Knowing this, I have only one option: to learn from my mistakes and shortcomings and work to become a better teacher.

The successes I can with certainty and pride point to this year might not seem to be very impressive to someone who doesn’t know my students and the challenges they face in their personal lives. This is what I am most proud of accomplishing this year:

• Pressuring the parents of 2 my children to finally (after years of inaction) obtain glasses for them.
• Understanding that one of my students was experiencing severe anxiety when around too many people, and getting his mother to seek counseling for him
• Working with a sometimes defiant grandparent and a medical treatment center to obtain needed medication and therapy for one of my most behaviorally challenging but cognitively capable students

These may seem small victories, but they were substantial in the lives of my students and their families. I feel like I have learned how to better reach out to community agencies to assist my students. I’ve learned that the parents of my students often suffer from the same challenges that their own children face, such as dsylexia, anger management issues, or difficulty navigating formal society.

Overall, this year was substantially different from last year — my first year. These students (except for that one, highly challenging student) actually liked me, which makes a pretty big difference in the way it feels to head down the stairs every morning to pick them up. Instead of being greeted with “I hate you,” or “I want to punch you in your face,” and running away from me down the hallways, I was greeted with students who ran to line up in front of me and shake my hand. Most of these students were incredibly sweet and caring, and I enjoyed seeing them help each other in class. I only had 2 students who exhibited consistently challenging and aggressive behaviors this year (cursing me out, threatening me), as opposed to a class full of them last year. And yes, those 2 were pretty challenging alright: I had a desk and a trash can thrown at me this year (thankfully, the desk missed me — only the trash can connected), and by the end of the year, one student could no longer sit in my class all day, as he would become so disruptive and aggressive that I was unable to work with the other students.

I really enjoyed this group of students and despite the sense of having failed them as a teacher, I know that they mostly enjoyed being with me as well. As part of my end of the year reflection, I administered a student survey to my students that I made on Google Forms based off of a student survey (go to pages 12 and 13 in this report to see the survey) created by Ron Ferguson’s Tripod Project. My students rated me highly in all areas (such as creating a caring environment and in challenging them), except classroom control (not surprising, given the behaviors aforementioned), and as I reviewed the feedback, I selected a few simple and achievable points for my focus in the next school year:

• Making it always clear that I really care about my students
• Keeping them busy at all times
• Not allowing students to disrupt each other’s learning
• Ensuring students learn from mistakes
• Making schoolwork more enjoyable
• Asking questions to make sure students are following along
• Posting and explaining clear objectives for each and every lesson

Next year will be a new and exciting school year for me. I will be changing from a self-contained to an integrated co-teaching setting, which means that I will be working in the same classroom with a general education teacher, and thus I will have a mix of higher functioning general education students and special education students. The teacher I am slated to work with (you never know at this school when things will change) is from the Bronx and understands her students’ lives in ways that I am unable to–she will help me create a much more culturally responsive and therapeutic environment for students. Plus, simply having another teacher in the classroom ensures that I will have support in lesson planning and curriculum development, as well as other administrative classroom tasks. I’m also excited to get the chance to teach students who will show greater evidence of academic growth. And I will have a brand new SMART Board in the classroom I am moving to! The SMART Board I have been using is an old jerryrigged one that only worked half the time.

So that bittersweet feeling I felt as I watched my students sitting on stage and singing a pop song to the future accurately matches my feelings on the year as a whole: I loved my students, but know that I can become a better teacher.

Now that I have graduated from my own schoolwork, I am looking forward to a summer spent loosening up and enjoying my life a bit more — something I have not often been able to do since moving to NYC. Of course I’m still going to be working on some projects and hopefully a little bit of curriculum, but my main aim is to allow my head, heart, and body to get re-centered (oh, and to get married!).

Progress Towards Goals

In November, I posted some of the efforts and goals I was targeting within my school for the year. As promised, I will now review how I’ve done. I had a wide range of goals and they were kinda lofty. Over the course of the year, I’ve learned more about the challenges that are faced in the actual implementation of systemic changes. Some of the targets I originally began with have shifted as my school’s priorities have changed, as well as my own priorities and interests. Some goals I dropped not because I didn’t believe they were important, but because I saw that I’d be fighting a losing battle. I attempted to focus my efforts in areas where I knew I could make some headway or that I had earned enough political capital to advocate for.

As a review, here were some of the goals I’d outlined in November:

1) Begin tackling the Common Core State Standards in our school

2) Begin coordinating school-wide systems of academic interventions

3) Advocate for a PBIS system for behavior

4) Advocate for a system of referral tracking (SWIS or OORS)

5) Build emotional literacy in the building (understand student acting out behaviors, not simply punish them)

6) Implement the Response to Intervention model

7) Make the process of inquiry and using data authentic

I’ve encountered substantial frustrations in working towards my goals. These hurdles have taught me that for real change to occur, you have to spend a significant amount of time and effort working on the most basic foundations that will sustain that change. For example, one of the systems we were working to put into place in our school was structured grade level team meetings, held according to a consistent protocol. We envisioned these teams successfully performing inquiry into student work and collaboratively designing instructional units, interventions, and assessments together. And some teams did achieve this to a degree that was quite substantive in comparison to the past. However, the reality is that sustaining a focus amongst a group of teachers over the course of a school year requires some fundamental components in place that was all too often lacking. It requires a strong facilitator, consistent and frequent meetings, planning and preparation for the meetings, well established roles and responsibilities, an administration willing to hold teachers accountable for their meetings, and open channels of communication. When these components are scattered or missing, running meetings that are productive can be highly difficult. It’s also difficult when the majority of teachers view the meetings as an encroachment on their time instead of as a useful opportunity to collaborate as professionals.

Despite these challenges, however, progress was made. Some goals we’ve made substantial headway on, such as introducing the Common Core Standards and making the process of inquiry more authentic. Others, we’ve only begun to lay down the groundwork for. For example, thanks to the help of our network STOPP team, we now have an in-school team established for behavior referrals, and we have an official behavioral referral form. The fact that the groundwork has been laid is in and of itself noteworthy, because now there is a basis for renewed effort towards achieving real progress in the next year.

One of the biggest challenges I now am aware of that we face is that of the specters of external accountability, in the form of state testing and reviews of the school. In both circumstances, shit hits the fan. The administration freaks out and runs around like chickens with their heads cut off, and this induces the teachers and their students to assume an unhealthy dose of stress as well. I am not opposed to standardized testing nor to school quality reviews or state audits, but I think that the high stakes attached to them are blown far out of proportion to their actual value. All of the hard work our teams had been making fell to the wayside once we began gearing up for testing and an audit was being performed on our school (we hadn’t made AYP for some student populations). Teachers spent their time drilling in test taking skills and making sure that they had student portfolios neatly accessible for adult visitors. The administration spent its time making sure the halls were decorated and bulletin boards looked pretty. These things are perhaps a necessary evil, but I don’t think that long-term sustained efforts such as team meetings should be allowed to fizzle due to these external pressures. I am beginning to see why teachers become jaded and lambast the systems of accountability that produce this kind of short-term hysteria and frenzy, which is ultimately detrimental to real learning and progress.

One goal which I have expanded upon is the idea of making the process of inquiry more authentic. As it was rolled out to us by the DOE, inquiry was all about these rather dry and academic methods of looking at student data. Which I think can be extremely valuable–but it requires a foundation of professional teams with an established protocol, a culture of professionalism and collaboration. And building that foundation in a public school, as I mentioned above, is significantly harder than it sounds. It also requires that the school has a process of curriculum mapping in place, or at least an acknowledged and shared curriculum map in general. When this isn’t really there, inquiry work becomes hollow and useless, because here we are, looking at our students’ deficits and targeting those deficits, but we don’t have any guide to refer back to when we acknowledge that we need to collectively bolster our instruction in certain areas. Once I realized this, I focused most of my efforts towards the end of the year on building a foundation for curriculum development in our school.

I’ve written at length already about my views on the importance of curriculum, so it should be obvious that I place extreme value on it. I also place a lot of weight on the value of professional learning communities. I believe that curriculum must be developed within the forum of professional learning communities. So I focused my main efforts during the school year on promoting the structures for a professional learning community to develop and in developing the technological resources for curriculum development to occur.

Over the course of this year, we’ve been encouraging teachers to begin actively using our school’s Google account to share documents, record meeting minutes, and communicate and collaborate. Even simply getting teachers to log on has proven to be a significant hurdle, and I don’t say this merely to criticize non-technologically savvy teachers. Most of our computers are clunky and old, running Internet Explorer, which does not operate well with Google Doc functions. It makes it pretty hard for folks not accustomed to troubleshooting on computers to get a handle on. These obstacles to merely gaining access to the online resources are significant, because it reduces the efficiency of being able to simply email all the staff and know that people will respond online. Instead, in order to organize things, we’ve had to rely on a combination of word-of-mouth, printing out memos to place in mailboxes, and email. And since I and other teachers have extremely limited time, this greatly decreases the likelihood of us collaborating outside of the venue of scheduled meetings.

Anyway, I’m realizing that I could go on and on about this all day, but it’s probably pretty boring stuff to an outsider. So let me just wrap this up by stating the things that we did accomplish:

• The Special Education Team met at least 14 times over the course of the year, and discussed issues critical to special educators in NYC, such as implementing the new IEP system (SESIS), understanding Response to Intervention, understanding Phase I special education reform, issues of compliance with state law, building communication amongst all special education service providers, and conducting Functional Behavioral Analysis
• The Inquiry Team and corollary grade level teams met fairly regularly until state testing rolled around, and began the process of establishing a more consistent protocol
• I introduced the concept of core domain knowledge to the school, as well as the concept of developing a structured and systematic approach to developing curriculum within the forum of a professional learning community
• Technology was utilized more widely and some basic issues of access were addressed

Book Review: Sometimes We Walk Alone

Sometimes We Walk Alone by Ankur Shah

A delightful travelogue that carries the reader on a journey through the self, in search of the heart of love. Ankur Shah’s notes on his journey through Gujarat, following in the footsteps of Gandhi, are spiritual, simultaneously brooding and ecstatic. He peppers his narrative of events with introspection on modern existence and its travails, but never loses his focus on the very real and tangible beauty of the everyday, the glory of the hospitality of strangers, the wonder and joy of food bestowed by friends never before known until that moment, and the everpresent internal struggle between ego and non-violence. This is a tale that can thrill pilgrims of any stripe. And most importantly–introduce the uninitiated to the teachings of Gandhi.

View all my reviews

Only The Best Every Day

I finished my last graduate courses on Tuesday. As I walked to the train talking with a colleague who had begun the Fellows program at the same time as me, he remarked on how different we had become since that first summer during our initial training before entering the classroom. How innocent we were then! Teaching changes you, indelibly. I remember how on top of the world I felt at that time, even as I knew the challenges that awaited me. I had been a manager at a demanding and innovative grocery retailer and was physically fit, accustomed to breaking down pallets of heavy groceries, dealing with crazy customers, and working on one full meal a day with 4-6 hours of sleep and a 1 1/2 hour to 2 hour commute each way on what was generally a middle of the night series of subway trains. Yes! I finally had adapted to NYC after a recent move from Lake Tahoe and felt I was ready to tackle anything. Phew. Folks. What hubris, what folly.

See, the thing is that teaching takes much more than simple ambition, physical drive, stamina, and dedication. It takes deep internal spiritual and emotional wellsprings to maintain composure and constancy. Every facet of your being will be challenged, every hidden assumption, every underlying prejudice, every underdeveloped part of your psyche and soul, every trigger of anger or annoyance will be released and exposed and prodded and overturned. You will be scraped hollow. You will be on the verge of mental breakdowns–or actually have them, depending on your level of mental stability. You will nearly break into tears–or actually break into tears, depending on your level of stoicism–in front of other adults or students. Oh yes. Teaching changes you.

And there will be days when you wonder, given how close to the breaking point you can come, just at what point a human mind becomes broken and can no longer be made whole again. And at the verge of this question is a rift of despair and anguish so deep that you can’t really quite go there–you have to wall off the reality of the lives of your students from your own life in order to protect your own emotional and mental well-being. Your students. Some of them living lives so unfathomable that you have to build a wall of professionalism in order to protect yourself. Or risk craziness, despair. Breaking down into tears at the mere mention of their name. Because it’s not about you. It’s about them. It’s always about them. And even during the most challenging moments of confrontation, even during the worst days of acting out behavior, you know that this is all about serving them. About becoming a better person so that you can better serve them. Becoming a better teacher so that you can negotiate the land mine pathways of the heart and mind and guide them there by proxy.

Anyone who thinks that they can step into the midst of this situation and create a revolution will not survive. Idealism has little place in the day-to-day marathon battle of seeking to transform the very soil that these children are rooted within, confined within. Only steady, patient, nurturing, every day, constant, consistent, repeated love–love–love. Tough love. Real love. Love that does not accept mediocrity. Love that does not accept falsehood. Love that does not accept anything except the best from your beloved. Because you know that’s what they really are. The best. No matter what they tell themselves. No matter how much they try to show you the worst in them (and they will–it’s a child’s way of testing your commitment). Every day. The best. Only the best. The best in you. The best in them. Even when neither of you have it in you. You come the next day to try again.

Until one day, there is a moment when you look around you, into their eyes, into their hearts, and you feel it. You can feel it. Again, you almost begin crying, but this time, for another reason. It’s love. It’s real. And it is changing you. And if it is changing you, it must be, it must be changing your students, too. This is what you came here to do. And that is the only thing that can keep you going. That hope. That wish. That love.