Retiring Some Old Friends

I get attached to things.

Dilapidated furniture that I no longer sit on but which I loved back in college.  Keys to places where I used to live.  Old mix tapes that I don’t even have a way to play anymore.  (That is rather alarming now that I think about it.  Note to self:  Must get cassette tape player and spend one more glorious night pretending it is 1988.)  Sometimes I get attached to things simply because of the memories they bring with them.  I keep my copy of Bridget Jones’s Diary, not because I loved the book, but because the book reminds me of my flight to London to meet my cousin and on-again-off-again boyfriend for the Reading Music Festival.  Looking at that book reminds me of driving to Walmart at 6AM to buy a tent (long story) and the hour-long delay on the plane waiting for it to take off.

So hopefully this will help you appreciate why getting new hiking shoes is (for me) more than just an errand.

Today I walked into the New Balance store on Burnet Road, held up a pair of dirty, frayed, literally falling apart hiking shoes and said to the salesman, “I bought these shoes here in the spring of 2001.”

“And… you want to return them?” he asked.

“No,” I replied, “I love them.  I want to take a time machine back eleven years and buy another pair.”

Instead, he showed me the current version of my beloved shoes and, after a record low number of times trying them on, I bought them.  (They are on my feet now and my feet are happy.  My feet had forgotten what cushioning felt like and are hurling muffled curses up at me for not going shopping sooner.  My feet, oddly enough, do not get as attached to things as I do.)

Now… what to do with the old pair…  (If your brain just said, “Uh, throw them away, DUH,” then you have no soul.)  No, I think I’ll toss them in the trunk of my car and tell myself that I’ll be happy to have them some day when I stumble upon the perfect hiking trail while wearing flip flops.  I’m pretty sure there is a 20-year-old pair of Converse in there somewhere to keep them company.

But I can’t retire these old friends without first reminiscing a bit about the memories they bring to mind. 

I bought those shoes during my second year of teaching, a few months before I took a two-week trip to Peru with my friend Maggie, my friend Emily, and a tour group that included five high school girls.  I bought them specifically for that vacation, knowing that I needed something sturdy and supportive and comfortable for all the walking and hiking we would do.  Those shoes traversed the streets of Lima and the stones of Pisac.  They carried my feet through the Amazon jungle and up the steps of Machu Picchu.  I wore them on planes, trains, busses, and boats. And they were perfect.

Me laying in a grave in the
Museum of History and
Archaeology in Lima...
wearing the shoes

Me hiking at Machu Picchu,
wearing the shoes

Me getting healed by a
curandero, wearing the shoes

 

There was one Peruvian memory that only my shoes and I knew for quite some time.   Thinking about it now makes me laugh, but when it first happened, for some reason I was embarrassed to tell it. 

Me holding a sloth
in the Amazon
and although you can't
see them, I can promise
you that I was
wearing the shoes.

It was about halfway into our trip.  I was having a great time, but was having trouble absorbing it all.  Every day was jam-packed with sightseeing and cultural activities and we never stayed more than one night in a hotel before moving on to somewhere else.  My friend Emily and I shared a room most places and generally hung out together, but on this day we split up.  She went to the hot springs with some others and I went back into town to do some more shopping alone.  Afterwards, I headed back to our hotel to put my stuff away, change clothes, and meet the group at the springs. 

When I got to the hotel, I realized we had only been given one key to the room and Emily had it.  I explained the situation at the front desk and the lady said “No problem” and asked for my room number.  I told her 217 and she gave me the key.  I had been in a rush, but the moment I stepped into the room, I thought about how nice it would be to just sit down for five minutes and relax by myself before meeting up with the others.  So I sat down on my bed and took a deep breath.  Then, several thoughts entered my brain in rapid succession.

Why did Emily put HER backpack on MY bed?  I didn’t realize Emily was reading THAT book.  Where is MY book?  What’s that sound?  It sounds like a shower.  Why are there men’s shoes in our room?  Wait, no, that was the sound of a shower turning OFF.  OH MY GOD THIS IS NOT MY ROOM IT’S SOME GUY’S ROOM AND HE’S ABOUT TO COME OUT OF THE BATHROOM!!!!

My new hiking shoes had never moved so fast and so quietly.  I grabbed my shopping bags and the key, leaped to the door, snuck out, shut it as silently as possible, sprinted down the stairs and then, with my heart pounding in my ears, forced myself to calmly walk up to the desk and say, “Actually, I just remembered, I’m in 712, not 217.  I got the wrong key.”

“No problem,” she replied and handed me the key to MY hotel room.

I will never know who was in that shower or what might have transpired if he had walked out of the bathroom and seen me sitting on his bed leafing through his book.  I may have altered the entire course of my life by high-tailing it out of that room at that moment.  But that’s ok.  Because things have worked out pretty well for me.   Here I am on a gorgeous spring day in Austin, Texas, and the biggest problem I’ve faced today is how to appropriately honor an old pair of sneakers.

I mean really, put yourself in my shoes.  

On a Lighter Note... Oh What an April Fool I Am

[Thank you for all of your comments and kind words about my last blog post.  I appreciate all of the support I have received.  But now it’s time for a chuckle instead of a cry.]

This morning at 6:43AM I awoke to my husband shouting, “Get up!  Broken glass!”  Thinking that someone was breaking into our home, I opened my eyes and began searching my mind for a weapon / defense mechanism / plan and (sadly) came up with nothing.  It’s nice to know that in my state of sleepy panic, I could not think of the baseball bats in the corner, the ferocious hound snoring in his crate, or even the cell phone on my night stand.  Nope, I drew a blank.  It didn’t matter much anyway because my husband was already opening our bedroom door and confidently striding out toward whatever horror lay beyond without hesitation so, with some vague notions of We are a team, we must stick together, I followed him.

Don’t worry.  The only terrorists in our house were the ones who live here.  Our cats had knocked a basket containing random crap off our kitchen counter onto the floor, sending screwdrivers, old cameras, jar lids, binoculars, and cell phone chargers scattering across the hardwoods.  (See?  Random crap.  Why, what do you keep on YOUR kitchen counter?)

Hubby sighed and said, “Whew.  It was just this.  I thought they had broken a glass and maybe someone got cut.”   He started cleaning up the mess until he noticed that I was in a teary ball on the floor, trying to grasp the concept that I would, in fact, live to see another day.

This led to an early-morning conversation between hubby and me in which I stressed that he should probably insert the word “cat” or maybe even “minor non-life-threatening incident” into his next wake-up call, and he pointed out that, A) he can’t believe that I slept through the sound of a crash ten feet from the bed, and B) if someone does ever break into our home perhaps I should call the cops instead of collapsing into a ball on the floor.

Me:  “Whatever.  You scared me.”

Him:  “Pretty good practical joke, huh?”

Me:  “Do you even know what today is?”

And then we both laughed, because of course, today is April 1^st, the day of foolers and fools, and my husband got me without even meaning to.

The reason why that annoys me so much is because in my family, April Fool’s Day is not taken lightly.  It is planned for, developed, schemed, and executed.  If you have to take a day off work, so be it.  If you have to hide in your car between the hours of midnight and 3AM to make it work, that’s what you’ll do.  It’s serious business.

Last year on this day, my dad (the original prankster) and my brother (perhaps the most dedicated) spent their time double, triple, and quadruple crossing each other up in Dallas, while I (4 hours away in Austin) convinced myself that I was their target and spent the day trying to discern truth from lies on the telephone and flinching every time I opened a closet door.  I basically, after a lifetime of having to be on my guard, pranked myself.

But my husband comes from one of those strange families who don’t scare each other or lie to each other or try to make each other look like idiots.  (I feel sorry for him sometimes, thinking about what a sad childhood he must have had. ) So he doesn’t get into these holidays, never thinks to pull a prank or plan a trick.

 

And that’s why it irks me that he scared me so bad this morning.

That’s ok though.  The joke’s on him.  Because when he finally wakes up and tries to get dressed, he’s going to realize that he can’t find any underwear.  Nope, the only ones left in the house are the comically small Spiderman undies that I once bought him as a gag.  Guess he’ll have to be my superhero today if he ever wants to see his boxer-briefs again.

“We're fools whether we dance or not, so we might as well dance.”  

~Japanese Proverb

Why I am Leaving Teaching

As most of you know, I am a teacher.  And as many of you know, I have decided to quit teaching.  This week, I officially declined my contract for next year.  The district then sent me an “Exit Survey” which amounted to about 10 multiple-choice questions and a small box which asked, “Do you have any additional comments?”  It turns out, I did.  Below you will find my “additional comments” to my district.

The System is Down

The easy answer to why I am leaving the district after 13 years of teaching 7^th grade Language Arts, the one everyone likes to hear, is that I am quitting my job to pursue a career as a writer.  It is true, and it is exciting and scary and inspiring and all those wonderful adjectives that people use when they hear it. 

                 It is true that I have always wanted to write.  It is true that I am at the right place in my life, personally and financially, to take a stab at my dream.  But the bigger truth lurking behind my decision is that I no longer love being a teacher.  And that makes me so sad. 

For 12 years, I loved my job.  I loved it DESPITE all of the craziness that comes with it.  I loved my students (well… most of them), and the few parent issues I faced were easy to laugh off later.  I talked about my students to anyone who’d listen, telling silly classroom stories and describing the antics of those select few every year that make themselves memorable in one way or another. 

I spent too much time during those 12 years working at home and grading wherever and whenever I could, but for the most part I loved that too.  I loved reading my students’ poems and essays and, especially, their memoirs.  I loved helping them to dig deep into their stories to find the real feelings and themes and life lessons stored there and seeing them emerge on the page.  I can still remember the cartoons that D.S. used to draw in the margins of his work in 1999, the story N.H. wrote in 2004 about accidentally hitting his brother in the head with a shovel, the poem about electrons that L.C. got published in 2009 and read in front of a large audience at Ruta Maya Coffee House.

I have so many wonderful memories of teaching at both of the middle schools where I was employed.  And in any other year, I would have never taken a break from loving it long enough to realize I wanted to do something else.

But this year… is different. 

This year, I went from teaching 56 students 90 minutes a day and getting to know each and every one of them as readers, writers, and people, to teaching 126 students 52 minutes a day and having almost no connection at all with any of them.  Believe it or not, I don’t know what books my Language Arts students are reading.  I can’t remember which ones have dogs or cats or little siblings at home.  I get mixed up about who is in choir and who is in cheer, and I am having trouble bringing to mind what most of them wrote for their personal narratives two months ago.

This year, all the “little things” that used to be easy to shrug off after a quick happy hour are staying with me, weighing me down.  Common assessment score due dates that I have missed yet again, standardized test rules and regulations that change (literally) every single day, 29 students that I am supposed to keep detailed documentation about weekly, a computer grading system that doesn’t allow me much control over my grades, writing that has to be condensed into 26 handwritten lines, pointless meetings held by people who are too out of touch to understand how much we are suffering and how valuable our time really is, and parents emailing to tell me that their son wouldn’t clean his room for weeks so finally his mom cleaned it for him and it made him really happy- oh by the way, how is he doing at school?  (Yes, that was a real email—you should see the whole thing.) 

This year, our school’s focus is student ownership of learning, but I don’t even have enough time to teach them to write a metaphor, much less teach them the valuable accountability and time management skills they so desperately need.

I know I sound like a complainer.  I know that other districts have been teaching more students than this in a tighter schedule than this for years.   I know (now) how very spoiled I have been.  But we were doing it RIGHT.  And those other teachers, in those other districts?  There is no way that they are using the same in-depth curriculum with authentic assessments that we are.  No way.  The only bubble test my students have taken this year is STAAR.

So, yes, I am quitting being a teacher so that I can try to be a writer.  And (fingers crossed) someday you may be able to buy my novel at Book People, and that would be awesome.  But the bottom line is, I wouldn’t be venturing out into this new endeavor if this school year had not been so terrible.   People have asked me, would you stay if things went back to the way they were last year?  No.  This year has damaged me.  I need a break.  Besides, my trust in the system has been shaken, and I wouldn’t believe in the perfect schedule even if they promised it.  People have asked me, are you just taking a year or two off, or are you quitting for good?  I don’t know what the future holds.  It’s possible that I’ll be back in the classroom in a couple of years.  But that is not my plan.  I know that I will miss teaching, but I do not believe that I will miss schools.  

For now at least, I am done.   Although part of me still can’t believe it, after forty-three readings of The Outsiders, I have survived my final rumble with the Socs, seen Dally crumple under the streetlight with a look of “grim triumph” for the last time, and will tell Ponyboy to “stay gold” no more.  And now, I leave the lives of S.E. Hinton’s gang, and the fate of my students in your hands.  Don’t let them down.

TEN IMPORTANT THINGS YOU DIDN’T ASK BUT NEED TO KNOW:

(And I have a hunch there are quite a few others out there who could say the same.)

1.  Most days, I use every single minute of my “off” periods and usually every minute of my lunch to work.  Then I work after school.  Then I work at home. 

2.   Here’s a math problem for you.  I have 126 students.  If they all turn in an essay and it takes me 3 minutes to grade each essay (which would actually be quite a fast time for me!) then it would take me 378 minutes, or 6 hours and 18 minutes to grade them all (assuming I did not have to eat, sleep, or go to the bathroom during that time).  If you add up all of the contract time that I have during the day that is not automatically taken up with teaching (i.e. before school, conference periods, lunch, and after school) you get 214 minutes, or 3 hours and 34 minutes.  So… in order to NOT have to grade that assignment at home, I would need TWO FULL work days where I did not have any meetings, ARDs, tutoring, or any other tasks to complete, in which I could spend EVERY SINGLE MINUTE THAT I WASN’T TEACHING to get those assignments graded.  Ok, I did the math for you, but I hope you can still see the problem.

3.  My stress is making me physically ill.  By 10:00AM on the Monday of spring break, my backache, constant indigestion, shortness of breath, and acne had all gone away.  By the Tuesday following spring break, most of it was back.

4. I believe in the standards-referenced grading system.  I think it works and, when it is properly administered, is the best thing for kids.  But I do not see HOW to properly administer it with our current schedule, student load, and curriculum demands.  I hope it can be saved, but it is going to take a lot of hard work and a lot of flexibility.

5.  The new APS class isn’t working.  And it never will.  I would hate to see teachers lose jobs, but you’ve got to give that time back to the core subjects. 

6. I firmly believe that it only takes 3 years out of the classroom to be out of touch with the reality of teaching.  Whether you just forget what it’s like day-to-day or whether the curriculum/technology/culture changes and passes you by, it happens to everybody.  I have seen it happen to principals, counselors, and facilitators, and I know it is going to happen to me, and I dread it.  Even though people have good intentions, after a few years out of the classroom they start too many sentences with, “Well, why don’t you just…” or “It only takes a few minutes to…” and we sigh and try not to roll our eyes.  A counselor at my school (an excellent counselor who is compassionate with the students and supportive of the staff) once asked the Language Arts teachers to complete a non-academic task with our classes to help with the upcoming open house.  When we politely grumbled later about how it took 20 minutes of our time, he was flabbergasted.  “Are you serious?!  I thought it would take about 5!”  No, sorry, but you’ve forgotten the speed of the 7^th grade animal.  To his credit, he did not ask us to do it again.

7. Following up on #6, I believe that every single person who works in the district should be required to spend at least three hours a year observing in classrooms.  I mean EVERYONE.  From the Document Production Center Employee to the Help Desk Person to the Facilitator of Facilitating, if that exists.  (And if it does, do we really need it?)  And I don’t mean a 5-minute snapshot either.  Sit, stay, listen, watch.  Note:  I did NOT say that they should schedule outside meetings with teachers to take up their time with random feedback.  Just go, just be, just observe.  No dog and pony show, no big ordeal.  Just get in the classrooms and be reminded what it’s like.

8. I have the utmost respect for my principal.  I admire and appreciate my assistant principals.  I adore my campus Language Arts department.  All of the adults I work with at my school are amazing and I will miss them dearly.

My door for the decorating contest last year

9.  My coworker J.S. is one of the most incredible people I have ever worked with.  She is a creative, dynamic, dedicated teacher who pushes her students to perform at high academic levels.  I am in awe of her as a person and as an educator.  She teaches 140 students this year, and she works ALL THE TIME for them.  Teachers like J need a break.  They need someone to listen to them and to give them the freedom and the time and the adequate technology they need to create their magic.  Be careful, because if you keep pushing our teachers to the brink, they will keep leaving.  And losing someone like her would be a much bigger loss than losing me.  Take care of her.

J.S.'s door for the decorating contest last year

(Yes, real steam came out of it.)

10. I have wanted to be a teacher since I was in the 9^th grade.   Until September of this year, I had never seriously pictured myself doing anything else.  I thought I would teach until I was dead and love every second of it.  I hope there are still plenty of others out there who feel that way.  I hope they are staying in this profession, not because they have to, but because they want to.