Smoothing Out the Kinks

The Path

I’ve sustained an injury that has prevented me from running most of this summer, and in some ways, the story of that injury serves as an adept allegory for larger issues ongoing in my life.

First, for those of you (i.e. ALL of you) who haven’t been following this blog since 2005^[1], I’m a runner. Not a marathon running-check-my-heart-rate^[2]
kind of runner, just someone who runs. Because it brings joy and fosters well-being. I don’t run far, but I run fast, and I like running alone and somewhere peaceful, like by the water or in the woods.

I had major shin splints in high school while running track and cross-country, and discovered (thanks to a well-informed employee at my local shoe store) that I was over-pronating, so I got a shoe that fixed me right up and has served me well in the 15 or so years since, such that I haven’t ever sustained ANY injuries until now. Pretty amazing for a runner, apparently. That shoe is the Brooks Adrenaline GTS, and I highly recommend it if you are a runner and require more support in a shoe.

Two years ago, I got swept up in the barefoot running craze, as I have documented on this here blog, and shucked my ample GTS cushioning for the unsupportive, callous inducing barefoot lifestyle of running. Not completely barefoot, mind you — I’ve been running in Vibram FiveFingers. It was rough at first–it took me a whole summer to adapt– but once I broke in my feet and adjusted my form, I fell in love. Not only does barefoot running appeal to my philosophical biases for self-sufficiency and natural principles, but it also just feels really good, as it seems to better stretch and work out your feet and legs during a run.

The injury that has reared its evil head is a muscle strain in my right leg, which tells me that something has been wrong for some time in the way my right foot has been striking the ground. The symptoms are inflammation right under my kneecap and–especially–on point of my hip. When this started up, I first tried to run through it, but it only got worse. So then I gave in to the inevitable and stopped running to see if some R&R would make it go away.

It didn’t. I tried running after a break of 2 weeks and it flared right back up, as if it had never subsided. The frustrating part about this is that the summer is the one time during the year that I can finally run consistently almost every day and get myself back into shape. What happens when I don’t run? Beers go straight to my belly. It’s disconcerting how quickly my gut begins to protrude. Now, yes, I COULD go to a gym, but that goes against my aforementioned philosophical bias for self-sufficiency. Plus, I just think they are nasty and don’t want to be around a bunch of stinky strangers when I work out.

So my belly has been slowly distending as I’ve been waiting, fruitlessly, for my injury to subside. I finally realized that I had to do something about it. But I’m wary of doctors, and I’m skeptical of the ability of a doctor to tell me much that I don’t already know. I decided that I would find a good deep tissue massage therapist, instead. I like getting deep tissue massages, and I get them for myself as a treat once a year or once every 2 years, depending on my budget. I see it as a necessary “defragmenting” of my body, a way to purge built up tensions and knots that accumulate over time. But I’ve never gone specifically to a masseuse for the purpose of physical therapy for an injury, so I wanted to make sure I got one who was decent.

I found one via a quick Google Maps search for “deep tissue massage,” and after checking out her website and seeing that Trey Anastasio had given her a positive review, I figured she must be aight. She was. She pinpointed some major knots in my back I wasn’t even cognizant were there, as well as introduced me to the incredible pain that is the IT band massage.

She informed me that as an active person, I should really be getting a massage more frequently. When I delicately let her know that I can’t afford such luxuries, she charitably gave me an insider tip about using a “foam roller” to give self-massages^[3].

I don’t know about you, but I’d never heard of these things (probably cuz I’ve never gone to the gym). Given my proclivity for self-sufficiency, it certainly seemed right up my alley, so I went ahead and ordered me one. They’re cheap.

I’ve started using it, and let me tell you, rolling around on your IT band is no joke. It’s incredibly painful^[4]. It brings tears to my eyes. But it’s made it fairly apparent to me that my right IT band must be getting strained and perhaps at the heart of my injury, because there is major pain all along it. I’m thinking that if I continue to iron it out, it should do much to alleviate the strain keeping me from running.

So I ordered me a new pair of Brooks Adrenaline GTS 12. I’m not giving up on barefoot running completely, nor do I blame it for the injury, though I think it played its part (I’ll get more into that in a moment). I plan on easing back into running with daily foam rolling as physical therapy, and the increased cushioning of my running shoes to help to ease the strain. Once I’ve gotten back into rhythm, I want to go back to my Vibrams, though I might never go back to full-time barefooting. I’ll see how it plays out. All I care about, at the end of the day, is that I’m running.

What are the causes of the injury? Is barefoot running to blame?

There’s a number of factors that could have played into it. They are as follows:

• During the school year, I run more and more inconsistently as the year progresses, due both the shortened days and coldness of winter, and because of an increasing exhaustion. Teaching special education in the South Bronx, in case you didn’t know, is demanding work
• When I did go out for a run, I was most likely going out harder than I should have, given the time that might have elapsed since the last run
• I wore old dress shoes with heels to work intermittently, and I had a bit of a walk from the train station. I generally tried to wear a barefoot style shoe that I have, but they look kinda funny, so when I wanted to look good for whatever reason, or if there was ice on the ground, I wore my dress shoes
• I am getting older. I know 33 isn’t that old, but I ain’t no spring chicken anymore, neither. I may not be able to get away with the same level of body stress I once could
• A few months ago, I sliced open my big toe on my right foot, had to get 7 stitches, and apparently severed some kind of nerve, because I can no longer bend the toe completely, which may have subtly altered my running form
• I think either my legs are different lengths, or my hips are askew^[5]

Any or all of these factors, combined with the reduced support of barefooting, could have easily resulted in the strain that I have incurred.

Well, OK, so now that I’ve thoroughly bored you with the details of my diagnosis, how does any of this serve as an allegory for other life issues, as I suggested at the outset of this post?

Basically, it has to do with the principles of myofascial release that I’ve learned from my massage therapist and from foam rolling. When you hit a point of stress, you press on it until it relaxes, then you iron it out through the length of the muscle, kind of like rolling out dough. It’s akin to exorcism. By calling out the point of stress that had been hitherto unnamed and stepped daintily around, you then force it to abandon its temporary abode. The longer that you’ve ignored this encroaching negative spirit, the more painful it is to dispel.

How apropo this concept is to our emotional lives, is it not? In terms of my own life, I’ve been under a lot of stress. This year in my job was easier in some ways, but harder in others. This is something I’m still trying to work through and write about. And I’ve been letting many of my feelings remain unvoiced. And over time, those feelings began to get knotted, and embedded, and tangled, and then began to seep into and infect other areas of my life, such that eventually all I knew was that I felt tired, unsuccessful, unsensual, unmotivated, and uncentered.

This dim feeling and lethargy has pervaded even my summer, and in this way, my injury serves as its allegory. As if the strain in my leg embodied the strain in my heart. I had gotten to a point where I felt as if I could no longer write, no longer run; in short, I had lost my mojo. This wasn’t any form of overt depression, by the way. It was more like something that lurked behind every day, but was easily subsumed behind the hustle and bustle of my busy mind and life. In this way, it gathered. It gathered, and I ignored it. This is how storms gather in our bodies and in our hearts.

And so the allegory of this injury is the allegory of an emotional life. We must go to our points of pain, and we must lay them bare, push them down until they run. And that alone is not enough. We must then pursue them, all the way down along the path from which they’ve mounted, until we have pushed them out, evicted them, banished them. But we must be ever vigilant, for each new day brings new barbs of tension, and the longer we ignore them and wish them away and pretend, the deeper they embed themselves. Until we find ourselves, one day, in that place of hopeless despair, and must reach for help from another, and others reach down their hands to us and help us back to our feet, and then inform us, gently, that the path to healing is our own, and we must go back to that place of darkness alone, but here is a gift of knowledge to support you on your journey.

Here, this is my gift. Thank you for following me thus far.

1 Before blogging, I sent out emails of my writing. I have most of those logged here as well, dating back to 1998

2 I did purchase a heart rate monitor recently, but I’ll post more on that later

3 Just as a side note, now that I’ve found her, I will certainly go back to her when I am able to afford it. I highly recommend her if you’re in NYC.

4 Painful doesn’t quite do this feeling justice. It’s not quite pain, so much as being extremely uncomfortable and wanting it to stop. It reminds me of the feeling of sitting in an ice bath up to your hips. Our gym at my high school had a giant ice bath, and after a few minutes, right before you go numb, the same feeling of burning discomfit hits you. You have to force yourself to stay in until it goes away.

5 Interestingly, I haven’t really thought about it until now, but when I was younger, I ran to jump over a tennis court net, and my foot got caught in it, so I landed right on my hip. I was too embarrassed to tell my parents about it, and though it hurt for a while afterwards, eventually it went away. That’s the exact hip that is hurting now. Possible I may have fucked it up that long ago and it just showed up now after moving to unsupportive shoes.

The MLK Memorial and Me

In February, I went to a conference in D.C. My wife came down to join me since I hadn’t been there before (update: wait, I have been there before, once as a young ‘un long ago, and another time for a brief few hours for a meeting. Forgive me, I have a really bad memory!), and we wanted to take the opportunity to explore. We don’t get out much, and I’ve barely seen much of my East Coast environs, barring last year’s visit to Philly. At the top of our list of things to see was the Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial. It was the newest memorial, and also slightly controversial.

As we approached the memorial, we read quotations from MLK’s speeches that are engraved along a wall that leads up to his statue. We then walked around the central monument, which depicts Martin Luther King with his arms crossed, embedded in a chunk of granite mountain that appears to have slid forward from its face (“Out of a mountain of despair, a stone of hope”). His hands are sinewy and strong, veins bulging, and his eyes gaze stoically across the water. There is a sense of calm and might, but also a sense of tragedy. The somewhat unfinished look of the overall work contributes to this sense.

We took our obligatory picture of his statue, and then my wife asked if I could take her picture in front of one of the quotations we had passed earlier along the wall. “It reminds me of you,” she said, somewhat shyly. We walked back over and I took her picture in front of the quotation, which read

“I have the audacity to believe that people everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education for their minds, and dignity, equality, and freedom for their heads.”

I asked her why it made her think of me. She seemed to feel that the reason why I am a teacher and work hard every day aligned with that quotation. I couldn’t quite see myself in it, however, and told her so. I realized I seemed brusque, but I couldn’t think of a reason at that moment to explain why. This post is my explanation.

A little further down the wall, I saw another quotation that did speak to me and about what I am passionately committed to in my work everyday:

“If we are to have peace on earth, our loyalty must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Our loyalties must transcend race, our tribe, our class, and our nation; and this means we must develop a world perspective.”

I took a picture of this one as well. We then walked away from the MLK memorial towards the Roosevelt memorial, which is a long, meandering wall and pathway of red stone with many niches and spaces for reflection along the way. Quotations from F.D.R. are sprinkled next to reflective pools, waterfalls, and scattered stones. But it was a quote from his wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, in a little niche that reached out to me. In fact, it linked together in theme with the earlier quotation from MLK that had spoken to me:

“The structure of world peace can not be the work of one man, or one party, or one nation . . . It must be a peace that rests on the cooperative effort of the whole world.”

This theme of common purpose, of a struggle for a global, overarching vision through cooperative effort, is what drives me and motivates me to do the work that I do. I was flattered by my wife’s belief that I do what I do because of a passion for human rights, but when I read the quotation she linked to me, there was a cognitive dissonance I didn’t feel comfortable with. I can’t quite place my finger on it, but it seems to have to do with a sense of martyrdom (“I have the audacity to believe. . .”), a stance of personal virtue, nobility, and challenge, that I can’t quite identify with.

An almost messianic passion, in fact, is a trait of many that enter into teaching as a profession. It is common for teachers to speak of teaching as a sort of “calling,” as if they have been drawn into the vocation by some higher purpose. I am frequently talked to by others who are not teachers as if I have entered into a sainthood, and given the respect and sympathy attributed to a monk — that is, with an incredulous, I-would-never-do-that-myself-but-god-bless-you kind of attitude.

This has always rubbed me the wrong way. Teaching is a profession. It is a job. And yes, it is a tough one, and it is especially tough when teaching special education in a high needs school in an impoverished inner city area. But I went into this tough career not simply because I wanted to make my world a better place, but because I wanted — purely selfishly — to develop myself as a leader, to learn firsthand the ground level effects of policy decisions, and become a part of something much greater than myself. I have no illusions that I am changing the world simply because I may impact a few childrens’ lives in the confines of one classroom. This is important work and the impact on one child’s life cannot be diminished. But I believe strongly that the system within which I work impacts our nation’s future greatly, and that I can learn how to work together with others to change the world by altering components of the system we work and live within. Teachers, parents, children, policymakers, state legislatures, mayors, citizens, these are the people that collectively will change the world. We must learn to look beyond our individual selves and work towards a common, global purpose.

This is why the second quotation from MLK and Eleanor Roosevelt’s quotation spoke to me. I’d like to think that I as an individual can effect great change, but realistically speaking, I know that whatever impact I can have on my own is nothing in comparison to what we can achieve when we work together.

Assaulted

It was a Saturday afternoon, 3:30. I was returning from a long overdue run, a habit I have difficulty maintaining in winter. I could tell something was going on in the courtyard in front of my apartment building, because people were ambling over to it, as people are wont to do when drama is occuring in public spaces. I circled around them and approached around the side. Some guy in a baseball cap was screaming at a girl.

My mistake was in not taking the situation seriously enough. It was my building, after all, on a Saturday afternoon. This guy and his problems were in my way.

These are mere excuses.

Think of how I must have looked to him. A white boy, wearing strange running clothes, my old lightweight jacket much too small. Vibram FiveFingers on my feet. In the midst of the gathering handful of Dominican men, I was the one who stood out. I’ve learned, since moving to NYC, that I am much smaller than the average city male. I was a perfect target in that moment.

In that moment, as men gathered to watch him in his turmoil, his eyes locked on mine. His face was bloodied. He had been in an altercation. He was charged with anger and shame. He was taller and heavier than I.

“What the fuck are you looking at, white boy?”

He charged. I backed up, not quite believing that anyone would just begin assaulting a stranger without any reason. He did.

I ducked and backed up and ran a little bit. Apparently, this was an invitation to him for full on onslaught. On hindsight, the smart thing would have been to run completely. I would have easily outpaced him. But part of me was outraged. This was my building! So I stopped and faced him, as he commenced swinging. He missed most of his punches, but grabbed my jacket and threw me down on the sidewalk and dragged me down to the corner of the street.

I managed to mostly maintain my balance and get back to my feet after landing on my knees, but he was on me, kicking and punching. I was able to avoid any serious blows, but I could sense in that moment that I was utterly overpowered. I was a victim.

“Fuck you, cracker! Fuck you, cracker!” he shouted with every attempted blow. I was the representation for him of everything that had gone wrong in his life. The vessel for his release of anger, shame, and fear.

Before he could cause any serious damage, a couple of the bigger bystanders chased him away.

“Never come back here again!” two of them shouted, as the guy backed away down the street cussing them out.

One of them made sure I was OK, and continually assured me that this sort of thing doesn’t happen around here (unfortunately, not entirely true. My neighborhood isn’t exactly the pinnacle of peace. My wife witnessed a man stabbed in broad daylight last year). I nodded and shook his hand. I wasn’t all that shaken up, all things considered. In my last 2 years in the classroom, aggression and violence were unfortunately somewhat common, so perhaps I wasn’t as prone to getting emotionally aggravated (at least, not immediately). I was bleeding in places, but otherwise intact. He seemed to have landed a kick or punch to the back of my head, and a few on my body, but nothing on my face.

It turns out that he had been in some kind of fight with his “friends” who lived in my building, and had been beaten up with a glass bottle (hence the bleeding face).

Later that night, as I lay in bed, I kept reliving those moments in my mind. “Your heart is racing,” my wife told me.

This was the worst aftereffect of senseless violence, the replaying, over and over. Asking myself why I didn’t immediately attack. Angry at myself for letting myself get into the space of a person who was obviously in a heightened state of aggression. I recognized that if this hadn’t happened in the middle of the day, I knew that I would have been seriously hurt.

I could tell myself that I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, but the fact is, I let my guard down and I walked into a situation without better assessing the danger. This could have been avoided.

Lesson learned.

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.

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.

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.

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!).

Thoughts at the End of a Rough Day at the End of a Rough Week

Down In It

Had a bad day and couldn’t fully breathe due to the tension, so I went for a walk after work–still dressed in my formal attire–out into the park near my apartment, passing by the inevitable gaggle of teenage boys standing huddled together in the trees near the entryway, going up the stairs and passing the stray couple dry humping on a rock and smoking pot, and finally immersed myself deep in the park with no one else around. Interesting how few people, other than the scattered runners and dog walkers and bird watchers, are really willing to walk deep up into it. Not that I’m complaining. I sat up at the top overlooking the Hudson River and a thought came to me that finally calmed me and let me breathe again. I was thinking about the sort of paradox that the further away we can pull our vision from humanity–such as by looking down at the planet from outer space or simply walking solitary out into nature, out into the woods, up on top of a mountain–the more interconnected we recognize ourselves with others; whereas the more densely we embed ourselves in human culture, such as in megalopolises or in nightlife or what have you, the more disconnected and isolated we can often feel from other people.

Maybe this was the thought that finally centered me and prompted me to return home because it articulated my sense of loneliness in the midst of my life in this here giant city while reminding me of the bigger picture. It allowed me to cast aside the self-importance that lies at the other side of stress and remind myself of the beautiful insignificance of being a part of something much greater than myself.

Planet Earth

The Gift

Life lets us know in subtle and unsubtle turns that we must be attentive to our innermost selves, or else we place ourselves and others in danger when we lose our way. That moment in which we are taught this lesson is dumb agony, ripe with tragic comedy, dripping with a depth that is ironic in its vacuity. We stand revealed in our humanity, bathed in blood, upset by regret but relieved by a renewed sense of a terrible divinity that somehow threads our solitary fragility back together again, humpty and hallowed.

All it takes is one spare moment of inattention for the glass to shatter on the precipice of the sink.

Such a simple act, imbued still with such force of meaning, unveiled only thereafter in the throbbing blood from the gaping wound. Reaching for the glass, the dishes done, already lost in anticipation of sitting on the couch with whiskey in hand–it was within that moment that darker forces aligned, necessarily, against me. For I had allowed myself to fall asleep while still awake. There is no greater crime against life than to deny its full terrible beauty and reside in unnatural complacency.

I was then reawakened, as the blood swelled out unstoppered by any pressure I could apply. It seemed silly, how frail and fragile my body really was. I was overwhelmed with annoyance, a deep frustration that now my shallow dream of a productive afternoon on the couch with a glass of whiskey and a netbook was ruptured. The reality of the swiftly ending spring break set in. The dark shadow of work, sleep deprivation, and high stress loomed like storm cloud guillotines above the one day that was left. There was no going back, now. I was bleeding too much to pretend that I could sit there staunching it with a paper towel forever. Fat globs of dark red blood, almost beautiful in surreal insistence, splattered out unerringly onto the kitchen floor.

But I also felt a sense of relief. Now I was awake again. And in a cosmic light, that could be seen as a gift. The 7 hours in a late night ER with criminals and crazy people, the stitches, and the pain were a small price to pay for that reminder of what life is about.

Philly and Futurity and Stuff

Right now I’m stationed down in Philly. I’m in the midst of what is known formally to the populace as “Mid-Winter Recess,” informally to the populace as “Ski Week,” and to teachers and students as “Party Time”–although truth be told, for teachers that really just translates into “catching-up-on-curriculum, IEPs, graduate school work, blog posts, and-other-related-miscellany, such-as-sleep.”

I’ve ventured down to Philly because I just wanted to get the hell out of NYC. Originally, my fiancee and I envisioned somewhere warm, sunny, and most decidedly “un-city,” but alas, we realized that train rides out to such locations would be both time-consuming and costly. So, eventually, we settled on Philly, since at the very least, it would be an entirely new city, and as a novitiate East Coaster, I felt obligated to begin exploring my regional vicinity and environs a bit more. It’s still kind of mind boggling to me just how close major cities on the East Coast are to one other, yet each with their own distinctive and unique cultures. On the West Coast, our cities are generally pretty spread out, and when they are relatively close to each other, they tend to just kind of merge together in the suburban interstitial spaces, such as between San Diego and Los Angeles.

I’m fighting a tenacious cold/flu/brain tumor or something that just won’t let me free. This always seems to happen to me when I get extended time off, as if my immune system has been just staving off complete collapse. It’s also that time of year, right around when the pressures of test prep and quality review (or as in the case of my school, an ELA “audit”) hit the fan, right around when you’ve pretty much stopped exercising, right around when you’ve pretty much worked yourself down to the bone with constant 70+ hour workweeks (think I’m joking? Think again. Welcome to teaching, with a wee bit o’ grad school and after-school sprinkled on top, my friends).

Anyway, enough whining, I just wanted to clue you in to where I am at this particular moment in space-time. Next up on my agenda is that I 1) want to lay out how this blog (and my life) is shifting in nature and 2) what specific issues in education I’ll attempt to tackle here and elsewhere over the next few months.

1 ) It’s been apparent for some time that the nature of my blog is shifting. One cause is that since I’ve moved out to NYC and begun working like a dog—first at Trader Joe’s as a novitiate manager, and now as a novitiate special education public school teacher in a “high needs” school—I simply don’t have the time to post much anymore. Similarly, my posts aren’t generally of the self-reflective nature of the past for the same reason. But that’s OK, because that’s a reflection of my life now. What’s also changing are the subjects of my posts—I’m moving from posts of an inherently personal nature to more professional concerns. Much of my life now is embedded in public education. I can’t escape it. I dream of my students. I am “on” all day, performing for them, delivering instruction for them, reading to them. I spend my nights preparing lessons, writing papers, writing IEPs, or keeping up with the latest in educational news and policy. It’s become the bread and butter of my daily existence, and hence, it will become the overt subject of many of my blog posts hereon. However, I’m going to continue to write here the way I’ve always wrote; this blog has always been first and foremost a spontaneous and formative template for my thoughts, and in that respect, it will not change. And not to worry, I will continue to post “fun” pieces such as questing for furniture in NJ. The pieces on education that are specifically written for a wider audience I will post to GothamSchools in their community section.

I am well aware that the times that my blog has gotten the most random incoming traffic has been when I post pieces on popular topics such as “love.” Alas, now that my love life is stable (I’m getting married this summer, BTW—so add planning a wedding on top of the list above), I just don’t have much of that impetus from loneliness or angst to post on such matters frequently. As I’ve noted before, passion can—and should—be everyday, but it’s simply not always going to find it’s way into my posts, as much of my focus right now is on the outer realm. Such is the life of work. You can blame our Puritan forefathers for that (I think. If you know of some better targets to blame, please notify me).

2) The topics which I will begin exploring in more depth will be a continuation from where I began in a very general and abstract sense—with the notion of public schools as ecosystems. What I would like to now explore are the concepts of:

• Curriculum: the “hidden curriculum” in addition to the actual curriculum (or the absence thereof), and how those two things tie in together, as well as how the ideas of achievement and equity tie into curriculum. I will couple this discussion with the exploration of “open source curriculum” that I have already begun here, and then tie that in with a current project of mine to begin the open source process with other teachers
• How I am progressing towards goals I set forth earlier this year for my school
• Information Technology: how online collaboration can potentially level the playing field somewhat and empower teacher voice in education policy (this goes along with my open source project and work with VIVA, which I will also do a post on)
• Further discussion of how my written voice is changing in tandem with my professional development, via such concepts of diplomacy vs. opinion
• Qualitative Data vs. Quantitative Data: I would like to challenge the prevalence of quantitative data in our research and policy frameworks, as well as to challenge assumptions behind debates of teaching as an art or a science
• Measuring the intangibles: how do we move our limited focus beyond that of an individual teacher or student and onto the more important idea of measuring the trust, relationships, and contexts within a school?

Stay tuned for all this and more, such as my thoughts on Philly.

Goin’ Crazy

Image via Wikipedia

Sometimes I feel like this profession is driving me crazy. Just about 80% of the other educators I meet I find either plumb crazy or I just simply can’t relate to them. The very few I can relate to are still pretty darn weird. Now, I ain’t exactly making any claims to normalcy myself. I have what could politely be called eclectic tastes. I drink weird herbal liqueurs and hate watching anything but depressing movies and listen to Norwegian electric guitar jazz or Senegalese mbalax. But I have worked with a pretty diverse amount of people in my time on this here earth, and once I got through my bitter misanthropic phase after college, I’ve mostly gotten along pretty well with the folks I’ve worked with. And I get along with most of the people I work with now, too. But I secretly find them all just frankly weird. I mean this in the sense that I just don’t find much of their actions nor dialogue intelligible.

I’m still confused about whether that’s because teachers in general are crazy or if it’s because public education is crazy and it drives people crazy. But it must be the latter, because now I think I’m goin crazy. I mean, how could you not? There’s so many conflicting values and directives and ideas being thrown at me that I never know which way is up. And I try to do what I do best, which is to examine the system as a whole and then enter into the fray with a structured vision which I then seek to implement. But then it’s like the rug gets pulled out from under me just when I think I’m achieving something.

Eventually, I’ve begun to understand why so many of the teachers I’ve met are such hot messes. They’ve become focused narrowly upon that point on which they know they can achieve something positive, and they lash out at anything that might threaten that unstable piece of manna. They cradle it like a flame from the wind. Because the fact is that the world outside of the classroom–even within the school itself–does not generally have the best interests of the teacher nor students therein in mind. And even when they do–the fact is that some things get very gray when they enter into the realm of classroom reality. People want to go on and on about “students first.” And no one would disagree, of course. But most of these folks have not actually stepped foot into the reality of a classroom in a high poverty district. Try it, folks. Please. See if you can take the abuse that many teachers undergo for an entire working day. Then step back and see if you can keep talking about accountability and high expectations from such a pristine moral vantage.

Schoolwork is messy, in the same manner that work in the ICU unit of a hospital is messy. At least in the NYC public school system in the South Bronx it is. Does it have to be? No. But in the meantime those of us who are crazy–or who are destined to become crazy–are the ones out on the front lines trying to dredge out a garden in the midst of a hailstorm on the precipice of a cliff. Welcome to reality. It can drive you mad.

Happy B-Day, Me!

Well, I’ve hit the big 3-2! I don’t feel old at all. I’m tired, but that’s just cuz I work my ass off. I’m pretty healthy (excepting the secret cancer I’m convinced is invisibly eating away at my soul), since I’ve kept any vices I’ve had so far in check. For example, I once became somewhat enamoured with cigarettes (Kamel Red Lights) when I was in college, really just because it was something to do at parties, but I would always get to this point where one day they would suddenly taste incredibly disgusting, and I would quit for a few weeks before I started up again (due to the desperate need to keep myself looking occupied even when having nothing interesting to say). This kept me from ever getting dependent on them. This is how it’s been for most things in my life. Before I ever become dependent on something, I have some innate need to reject it and switch things up.

The only thing I’ve become dependent upon is my fiancee. She is there for me, doing all kinds of things to ensure that I am on track physically and mentally, such that she really knows me better than I know myself in some ways. I’m notoriously absent minded, so she helps me take care of some of the things I need to take care of (God, I sincerely hope I’m not succumbing to early Alzheimer’s!) only becoming exasperated with me on a bi-daily basis. She puts up with my need to zone out on my computer when I crawl home to escape from the grind of my stressful work life, and she endures my proclivity towards moodiness and reclusiveness. She continually assumes the best in me and keeps trying to engage me in discussions of things I have not the slightest bit of interest in. She cooks amazing meals for me every week, which I happily shovel down my gullet without comment. She sort of endures my neverending supply of gaseous emissions. (But I would like to formally and publicly log the complaint that she steadfastedly refuses to fix me an alcoholic beverage, pack the nargile, or give me a back massage.)

I never would have foreseen myself making my living here in this vast and alien city of New York, not in a million years. But here I am, pushing myself beyond any expectations I would have once set for myself. I was once a shy, introverted, pimply-faced narcissistic simpleton with a tendency to write grandiose and bellicose ramblings. Well, the narcissism, the grandioseness, and the bellicose ramblings still continue, but otherwise this San Diegan native son has made some progress. I’m alright with my age, I’m alright with where I am in life spiritually, mentally, physically, and otherwise. As far as I’m concerned, life just keeps getting better.

My aim is to never get stale, to never be complacent, to always keep growing and pushing myself and developing. The good news is that no one has ever discovered my amazing talent and thus I’ve never become overexposed and drained by stardom and fame. Lucky me! And lucky you, dear reader! I’ll continue to jissom out random blog posts into the night with the absolute guarantee that not many people will ever read them (aside from all the folks that do searches for guns and stumble upon my most famous post of all time, on my grandfather’s gun collection). But that’s what makes people like you and me so special. We’re not verified and vindicated by the status quo. We’re deviant simply by the nature of our anonymity, by the fact that even though we are quite certain that we are geniuses in our own right, we will never be officially sanctioned and recognized and blessed by any archdeacons of societal norms and powers.

On this day, 32 years ago, I managed to get pulled out of my mother’s belly via C-section. Please, don’t congratulate me for this accomplishment. It really didn’t take much effort. Honestly, I should be sending a card and monetary gifts to the doctor that performed that operation, as well as to my mother, of course, for having nurtured and grown me to the point of my individual conception. Thanks mom. I should probably also send a card to the nurse whose face I pissed upon as I was cleansed of birthing blood.

In other words, I didn’t really do much to get to this point of time. I’ve just been coasting along via the pathways of the inevitable, headlong push of gravity, with some intervening forces of human benefaction along the way. Thanks, universe! Thanks, humanity!

Another Jolly Night in Ye Olde Neighborhood

If you amble down Broadway at 10 o’ clock at night on a Thanksgiving eve in my neighborhood–Inwood, Manhattan–you may be treated to some heart-warming, charming visual delights from some colourful local characters, such as by the thrilling sight of a half-naked older overweight woman with cropped hair lumbering extremely inebriated and/or drugged through the middle of the street, swinging her shirt brazenly, her wrinkly breasts bobbling in the frigid cold.  Or perhaps the pleasant sight of an old homeless woman frantically grabbing a roll of paper towels from her rolling suitcase and hurriedly waddling over to the most well-lit, visible window in front of the Bank of America and popping a squat, her white ass emblazoned in the franchise bank’s flood-lit display.

It is sights such as these that make me oh so very delighted to be living in New York City. Truly a phantasmagoria of inspiring humanity!

Making Things Happen

It’s been a while since I last posted, which is because I’ve been swamped. My life could be seen as kind of dismal, I suppose, except that I’m excited by what I’m doing right now, so all the hard work and no time to play is all right, for the time being at least. I’m starting to get a bit burnt out, which is not good, but there’s a few spots of days off this month which I think will allow me to squeeze through it.

I’ve been keeping up with my ‘barefoot’ running regimen, and it’s helping me to keep more physically in tune, and also serves as precious decompression time. My feet have fully adapted, and it feels great! It took me all summer to get broken into it, but now it’s like butter.

I’ve realized that the school where I’ve been working, for all its many problems and dysfunctions, is actually the perfect place for me to hone my skills and grow as a professional. It’s a disorganized and often chaotic school, but everyone in the building means well and tries their best. Meaning that for all its dysfunctions, the place is ripe for change. All it takes is some applied pressure.

I’ve been talking on this blog for a long time about a holistic, whole systems design approach to change, and for the first time, I’m really getting to gain practical insight into that theory. I’m discovering that true power is about seeing opportunities in problems and seizing those opportunities to advocate for greater systemic change. Furthermore, true power is working in collaboration with different types of people and harnessing their skill sets as resources.

I may only be a second year teacher, but I have skill sets from my management experience that I’m beginning to draw more upon, now that I have had some space to grow into my current role. I’ve become the go-to-guy for attending workshops (simply because I’m willing to go to them, really), and as I’ve been going to all these different workshops (Common Core State Standards, Response to Intervention, Inquiry, Quality Review, Therapeutic Crisis Intervention, just to name a few), I’ve been thinking of ways for how to synthesize and apply the information in the school.

I want to accomplish these goals this year:

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

My first strategy was to create a team of special education teachers. It was something I had put on my agenda since last year, but with all the other things going on, especially with my growing awareness of the Response to Intervention model, it made sense to finally get it put into place first thing this year. In tandem with that team, I came up with a short vision proposal and presented it to the principal, which included utilizing the inquiry team and the special education team to begin implementing school-wide interventions to move the school into the Response to Intervention framework, in addition towards implementing the Common Core State Standards. She agreed, and the plan I put in place has begun picking up steam.

I feel good about what is happening, because there are many points that are currently converging in the building: 1) the Common Core State Standards, which are getting rolled out statewide this year, have been examined and discussed school-wide already in an authentic, collaborative way; 2) technology, which many teachers have been highly resistant towards using last year, is now being increasingly used, such as our Google website for inputting team meeting minutes; 3) grade level teams now have discussed and implemented a team protocol, which will help to structure and build accountability for team meetings; 4) the special education teachers are already beginning to be viewed as leaders and pioneers; 5) I have successfully advocated for an assessment for reading to be used in the building that more accurately targets foundational deficiencies, which many of our students–especially students with IEPs–lack, and I subsequently designed and implemented the headers to be used in a tracking spreadsheet that is being created for our school (I had a timeline of about a week to do all of that, from advocacy to spreadsheet!); and 6) I was able to include lexile measure correlations on the spreadsheet, which will position our school to be ready for the Common Core State Standards use of lexile measures.

And this convergence all happened practically within one week! There is a momentum in the building that is exciting to see. Obviously, I am taking some credit for it (why not, I get to celebrate myself sometimes, don’t I?), but the reality is that I simply took the first steps towards putting it together. The actual implementation only has been able to occur because there are great people in the building who want to see things get better just as much as I do and who have been willing to step up and put themselves on the line to make it happen.

It remains to be seen whether this momentum is sustainable, but it’s a great start. I’m chugging along through my graduate work and if all goes according to plan, I should only have two classes left in the Spring semester. Here’s to making things happen.

Victories

As a Teaching Fellow I attend grad school simultaneously to being bombarded and overwhelmed with the daily responsibilities of teaching itself. Last semester in the Spring, I came up with a plan for research in one of my classes. Since my students last year presented extremely challenging behaviors, I often found myself losing my self-control and becoming angry. There was one day in September when I started yelling, and I essentially never stopped yelling thereafter for that year. So it was a no-brainer for me to focus my research on the concept of self-control–both for me and for my students. My idea was, if I could identify what methods and strategies of self-control would work for me in the face of a constant barrage of tantrums, cursing, personal insults, and other forms of misplaced aggression, then I would be able to not only model self-control for my students, but be able to explicitly teach it to them.

This semester I am in the process of gathering results from the plan I created in the Spring. My students this year present much less extreme behaviors, but they can certainly benefit from the instruction and strategies nonetheless. One of the interesting things that I am finding is that the more I build and cultivate my own self-awareness regarding my self-regulation of emotion, the less that students behaviors even present a challenge. In other words, it is within myself that I find the solution to my students’ problems. Another way of stating that would be that I find that if I really listen to my students and to myself and look beyond and through their behavior, I discover that what is really going on is that they are trying to teach me about what it is that they need.

Perhaps that sounds fairly self-evident to you, dear reader, but let me tell you, when one is not trained professionally in the art of therapy, it can be extremely daunting when you are faced with a classroom of students who are all emotionally damaged in various and sundry ways. To see through the surface behavior and into the child is not as easy as it seems. It might be easy if you were sitting with that child in a clinical setting, analyzing them and probing them. But in a classroom, you don’t have that luxury of distance. You are confronted, nearly every single moment, with the challenge of a student who needs far more than you yet know how to handle.

So I have become slightly more adept at being a good listener. When a student is demanding my attention, even if that demand comes in the form of an insult to me or a chair thrown across the room, I try to find a way to give it to them. I sit with them and talk to them until they are calm and understand how their emotions have caused them to behave. And in the process, I discover that the very process that I have walked them through is the process that I needed to walk through within myself in order to truly teach and care for them. There was no other way.  Otherwise, I would have been pretending. I would have just gone through the motions. And they would have chipped off and away like an iceberg out into the sea, and they would have been lost.

In general education classrooms, they can mostly get away with authoritarian methods. They beat them down until they do what they are told. In self-contained classrooms and residential treatment classrooms, however, once you have lost that trust and respect with a student by telling them–in one way or another–that your agenda is more important than what they are feeling, it’s gone. You may not ever be able to win them back.

There are times, of course, when I simply just do not know how to help a student. Some of their behaviors can be extremely challenging, and when you have a classroom full of students with divergent needs, sometimes you can’t address all of their personal crises. It’s just not possible. But those moments when I am able to help them and guide them through the storm, it’s truly a beautiful feeling.

Let me conclude this with a specific anecdote of when such a moment occurred. This was last Friday. One of my students, L., is a pretty smart kid, but he grew up in the Dominican Republic and thus not only has an intellectual disability but is an English Language Learner (ELL). He is reading and writing almost at a pre-kindergarten level. He is aware of his deficiency and will give up when faced with nearly any academic task. He is also extremely poor. He is a big fan of the apples that I have begun providing to my students every week. The rule is, they get one apple a day in the morning if they are hungry. I go through two bags of apples a week now.

Anyway, I was trying to teach my students how to play a game that came with our city curriculum, Everyday Mathematics, which is a curriculum that is really just not suited for special education at all, let alone anyone who struggles with mathematical concepts. The game involved finding factors. I had taught all my students how to find factors by building rectangular arrays, and all students could do it successfully to varying degrees (some require manipulatives, some don’t, some know their multiplication well enough to do it in their head). But when I began trying to show them how to play the game, they all just started acting out in various ways, either by saying something like “this is boring”, or “this is work, this isn’t a game!”, talking, or drawing, or in L’s case, by pulling his chair away and sitting in a corner. So I gave up, and got frustrated, because I just thought they were not listening, and told them to do another page in their math journals. L. was obviously upset, so I called him over to my desk and sat with him.

At first, I was still just upset because none of my students had even tried to perform the game. But as I talked to L., I learned that he just felt that he was stupid and couldn’t possibly play the game. He said his teacher last year had also tried to teach them the game and had given up because no one could understand it.

“But L., you can do it!” I protested. He disagreed. I told him to go get his slate and I went and got the manipulatives. We built rectangular arrays together, and listed factors, and he realized that he knew very well how to find factors. So we played a couple rounds of the game, and suddenly he was brimming with excitement. “Hey, this is fun!” he exclaimed. Together, we came back over to the class and L. taught the class how to play the game.

The problem had not been that my students weren’t listening or weren’t trying. I just wasn’t explaining it well. So to them, it was just another time in school that they were being made to feel stupid because they didn’t get it. The excitement from L. was infectious. He had learned that he could do something that even all the rest of the class felt they couldn’t do! The most excited person in the room, however, was not L. It was me. Just as I tell my students over and over again, I learned that I can’t give up, even when I get frustrated. I just need to listen to what my students are telling me and find a better way to teach it to them.

That’s what I call a victory.

A New School Year, Renew Energy

Just got through my first full 2 weeks of my 2nd year teaching 5th grade self-contained special education in the S. Bronx. I’m exhausted. But this year is nearly radically different than last year, thank heavens. My students this year have had a solid teacher for the last 2 years and somewhat involved parents. They’ve certainly got their problems, but they aren’t constantly aggressive, deviant, manipulative, and violent in the way that my students last year were. Every day someone in my building comes up to me and says something to the effect of “it’s a lot better this year, huh?”

I’m not only a better teacher this year–now that I know what to expect and am slightly more competent in meeting the myriad and ever-present demands of teaching–but I also finally have a chance to connect with my students and build a positive learning community. They like me, and I like them. That’s the way I plan to keep it. I’m keeping my cool, keeping it positive. I’m trying to keep up my running routine and keep mentally and emotionally healthy.

Last year was a tough year. If I had been a special education teacher with 10 years under my belt, I could have done more for those kids, but I wasn’t. I was a 1st year teacher thrown into the fire, and I did my best. I kept them mostly in the classroom instead of in the streets or in the hallways, and I got some work out of them, even if it took a lot of kicking and screaming (literally). The good thing about having a tough group of students your 1st year is that it is all good from there. It can never be that bad again.

This year I came into it focusing more on the bigger picture. I am trying to give my students what they really need, such as lessons on how to control their emotions when they are upset, or lessons on values like integrity and empathy. And of course, I’m developing a stronger ability to plan and deliver core content lessons that students that are struggling can connect to.

I’m still overwhelmed every single day, but having that positive energy and respect coming from my students makes all the difference. I am now certified in Therapeutic Crisis Intervention, and I have already performed two full Life Space Interviews with my students, which is when a child is in crisis and you support and guide them to gain insight into how their feelings connect to their behavior. It’s an amazing feeling, to know that you have just made the difference between being just another adult who doesn’t understand and can’t be trusted, to being an adult who has helped to foster new self-awareness in a child struggling to cope in an overwhelmingly stressful world.

I’m not a great teacher yet, but I will be.

‘Barefoot’ Running and Me

I was fortunate enough to have grown up with a pool in my front yard. To get to it, it was a walk over the asphalt and onto gravel rocks my dad used to cover the driveway. At the beginning of the summer, I recall how much it would hurt to walk in my bare feet down the steaming hot asphalt and then onto the loose rocks. While walking on that gravel, I would pick my feet up hurriedly like I was tiptoeing through the house at night and trying to be quiet. But by the end of the summer, my feet would be toughened up and I could place my full weight on each of my bare feet as I wended my way down to the pool. And then the cycle would begin anew in the next summer, after my feet had grown soft again over the course of the school year, in their encasement of sandals or sneakers.

Now, as an adult, I’ve been toughening up my bare feet again, but this time deliberately, without the chlorinated reward of a jaunt down to the pool. I’ve become a disciple of ‘barefoot’ running, with the word ‘barefoot’ apostrophied because I’m not fully barefoot, though the slip-on shoe I’m wearing gives no arch or heel support, and thus maintains the mechanics of fully barefoot running and walking. These slip-on shoes have become all the rage within a certain sub-set of back-to-the-earth and wannabe revolutionary yippie types and you’ve most likely heard of them or seen them being worn and ridiculed them: Vibram FiveFingers. Little monkey feet shoes. They do feel pretty sweet, even if they admittedly look ridiculous.

One might wonder what the point of wearing shoes is at all if one truly ascribes to the barefooting ‘aesthetic’. If you are eschewing reliance on modern industry (vis-a-vis the running shoe), then isn’t using synthetic ‘barefoot’-ing shoes just the same thing, with different mechanics? Well, if someone really wants to trump capitalism, and be completely anti-industrial or whatever, then run completely naked, dude. But for those of you who are on the Spectrum, have some kind of OCD aversion to filth, or are otherwise simply terrified of trotting on syringes or something, the VFFs serve the purpose of effectively protecting your sensitive soles from stray bits of glass, while still allowing for the full range of impact sensation and motion that barefooting entails. The VFFs can also be viewed as a fashionable concession to our New Millenial times: we are technologically savvy, but hipster in a back-to-basics manner. We sport sweat-wicking REI clothes and hike to work. We sprint through subway tunnels, Chacos and laptop bearing manpurses aswing.

So I’ve elected to give the barefooting a go over the summer, and I purchased myself a pair of VFF KSO. And I knew that barefooting was not something to take lightly. I read the cautionary passages from researchers and doctors stating that you should ease into barefooting merely as a supplementary procedure. And I really did mean to go easy into that dark unknown. But on my first ‘run’, almost immediately my calves started killing. Not to mention that the bones underneath the balls of my feet hurt everytime they hit the concrete. Cuz this is New York City, by the way, so these bare feet are hitting pavement.

Adapting to this new form of running has been much harder than I foresaw. I have had to take multiple days off after almost each attempt. First it was the calves. Then the feet themselves. Then a heel. Then a side of the foot. Then the bottoms of the feet. Then the calves again. Until I realized that I’d been doing it all wrong!

I did my research, as I am wont to do, and had read that barefoot running mechanics generally entails a switch from heel strikes to the forefoot. So, earnestly, I began running up almost onto my toes. It was killing me. This is why my calves were turned into burning knots of pain. Then I read some more up on it, and realized that I had been over-compensating. I needed to come down a little more balanced on my feet, not all the way up on my toes or just on the balls of the feet. Plus, I just needed to just relax and stop dreading each and every footfall and thus tensing up and unnaturally altering my gait (thanks, by the way, to Barefoot Ken, over at The Running Barefoot, and Barefoot Ted, for their insight into the mechanics of barefoot running on their respective web sites).

What I can say is that every single run I have done barefoot over the last few months has been a wholly new and intense experience. My form is finally beginning to adjust (naturally), and my calves and ankles and other supporting muscles that are not worked out in ‘normal’ shoe-clad running have been strengthened enough not to hurt every time out.

If something on my foot hurts too much, then I just plop my running shoes on again and go out for a run with the extra padding. But even when I run in shoes now, I still adhere to the barefooting form, which actually makes running in shoes more strenuous, given the extra weight. And when I land inappropriately, I almost cringe thinking about the impact that might have caused had I not been ensheathed in that extra padding!

There are times when I grow frustrated, because barefooting takes away that complacent layer of comfort, where you can kind of ease into a run and just zone out. You have to be incredibly aware of yourself while barefooting, aware of every foot strike, aware of your posture and form, aware of what is on the path ahead of you.

But the added sensory dimension of barefooting makes up for that. I find myself joyfully gunning for soft dirt patches and spongy grass like a dog, savoring layers of fallen leaves. And I’ve discovered that the faster I run, the less impact I make on my feet. I literally can fly while barefooting, and it feels crazy, like I’m falling headlong forward without brakes. I can also shoot up hills, without that extra drag of heavy shoes.

I’m still trying to figure out how to best handle steep downhills, though. Without that extra padding with which to sink into my heels, I find myself gingerly padding my way down, frightened of going too fast and coming down too hard.

The worst barefoot run I’ve had was when I was visiting a friend down at the Jersey Shore. I thought to myself, “Perfect! I’m on the beach! This is what barefoot running was made for!” So off I ran, pretending to ignore the myriad seashells strewn every which way. I went a ways down the shoreline, and then turned around and started back, and began noticing that the bottoms of my feet were smarting. I picked up my foot and took a look, and lo and behold, I’d been scraping the skin off my feet on all those shells and wet sand! I had giant blood blisters bubbling up on every contact surface. I began hobbling my slow way back up the shore, and then my sunscreen–mixed with sweat–began running into my eyes. So now not only could I barely walk, but my eyes were stinging so much I could barely open them to see. Compounding that, I realized that I had no idea where my mate’s umbrella stood in a vast sea of umbrellas. It really was a nightmarish trudge back up that shore, in which I felt the full weight of my hubris and folly. Oddly enough, though, I went on a barefoot run again two days later, and it was the first barefoot run I had that actually felt good. It’s been easier ever since! (Calluses, calluses, calluses)

So why did I elect to commit myself to re-learning how to run, even though I’ve been running–injury-free–since high school? It really has to do with the philosophy of barefooting. Thanks to a great little book called Born to Run, the concept has really caught fire. The core idea is, we didn’t evolve with running shoes. We evolved to run barefoot. So in padding up our feet, we are in fact severing one of our primary feedback systems into sustainable running form. All those natural sensors in our sensitive little soles are triggering us to balance and center our weight, pull in our flailing limbs, and reduce sloppy high impact footfalls.

It’s not for everyone, and it’s not something that is easy to adapt to after a lifetime of shoe wearing. But once you’ve developed the correct form and supporting muscles (and calluses), it really does add a whole new dimension and awareness to running.

The barefooting ethic does not only apply to running, of course. Walking around barefoot is also just as enlightening. For those people who feel silly wearing Vibram FiveFingers and looking like monkeys or ninjas, there are shoes out there that give the barefoot experience but look somewhat more socially acceptable, such as Terra Plana’s Vivo Barefoot line of footwear. I went to their Manhattan store and got a pair of slip-ons that look almost nice enough to wear with my dress pants while teaching. Wearing fancy dress shoes every day nearly destroyed my feet last year, so I’m going to try mixing it up with my Dharmas to give them some respite. But it remains to be seen how ‘barefoot’ mechanics will serve me after standing on my feet in the classroom all day, going up and down the steep flights of stairs, and walking to my grad classes later.

So the verdict? ‘Barefooting’ has become a cherished part of my life’s repertoire. I caution anyone who is ready to dive on into it that it is not something to take lightly, and that in the course of transition, you are in danger of injury if you don’t listen to your body. Tread lightly, and go with joy.

The City Mouse and the Country Mouse

Being back in Tahoe has been more than just a trip down memory lane–it’s been practically magical. While talking with old friends, drinking great West Coast microbrews, hiking up rocky, wildflower speckled mountains, or chilling out on a sailboat on a lake, I’ve felt an almost visceral pain. It’s that bittersweet awareness that this is a special place for me that I won’t probably see again for a long time hence.

There are many benefits to living in New York City, which mainly consists in its plenitude of social offerings. But though I’ve been there for over 2 years, I have few close friends to chill out with on a frequent basis. Coming back out here and hanging out with good people is what really makes me miss Tahoe. Not to mention the looming pine laden ridge-lines and dry, boulder strewn mountains.

One of the reasons I left was that I was craving metropolitan human culture–things like museums, live music, and multifarious places to wet your whistle. And this is one of the great draws of the big city. But now that I’m on the other side, of course now what I miss is the lonely midnight sound of the sierra wind rushing down the trees. That surrounding, everpresent quiet sentience of nature.

In the city, you not only have access to the pinnacles of human accomplishment, but also the constant, in-your-face reminders of human struggle. The rude, the loud, the aggressive. Sometimes I just want to get away, but there’s nowhere really to escape to. No 3,000 feet to climb to a nearby mountaintop.

Is it possible to get the best of both worlds? Some place that has all the cultural benefits of the city, but immediate access to the solitude of nature? I don’t know, but when I find it, I’ll know I’ve found a place I might more readily call home.

To Tahoe

Fallen Leaf Lake and Lake Tahoe

I left South Lake Tahoe nearly three years ago to embark on the journey of adulthood. I’ve been meaning to go back for a while, but adapting to NYC and trying to keep my nose above the water has kept me busy. Now that I’m a teacher and I have the summer off, I’m taking this occasion to return to Tahoe. It’s a beautiful place, and while I don’t regret leaving, I certainly do miss it. I went through a lot of experiences and met a lot of people there that directed me to the path I am now on. So I am excited to go back because Tahoe holds a lot of meaning for me. It’s where I really began to find my own strength. It’s where I developed a stronger work ethic and began to develop professionally, where I fell in love with hiking, where I learned the value of solitude, where I learned how to create an environment where people could hang out and have a good conversation, and it’s where I made a lot of lasting friendships. It’s a place where I experienced the extreme depths of loneliness and sorrow, but also where I experienced the deeper ecstasy in love, nature, and self-awareness. I think about it a lot–who couldn’t reminisce about the pristine mountain air and pine trees and placid lakes while immersed in subways and ghettos, stress and exhaustion?

I’ve successfully adapted to New York City. I’ve survived working my ass off for 9 months as a new manager at a highly successful national grocery retailer and earned the respect of people who had every reason to dislike me, since I was an outsider to their community and their business. I’ve survived months on little sleep and long middle of the night commutes. I’ve survived a school year with some of the most challenging students in the city in one of the most poverty stricken areas of the city. I’ve survived being cussed out, insulted, and otherwise abused on a daily basis for the last 10 months, yet succeeded in keeping my students in their seats.

So yeah, I think I can confidently say that I’ve adapted to this city. Going back to California and seeing that giant beautiful lake at 6,300 feet surrounded by glaciated mountains and taking in a fresh breath of that pure air again. . . It will be like a little taste of sorrow of what I have left behind, and a little taste of victory of what I have accomplished. But most importantly–I just can’t wait to see some old friends again and share a glass of New Belgium beer or Chartreuse with them. Here’s to Tahoe.