Public Property

It was my first year in the classroom and for some reason, my room was also the location for after school care. Nearly ten minutes after the last student headed for the parking lot, I found myself inundated with over thirty children across grade levels and with politics of their own. It bothered me that I had no time at the end of the day to settle my thoughts or set up my classroom for the following day. I’d always come back the next morning and find crackers crushed on the floor or cups of juice among the books in my classroom library. Desks would be crammed to one side or the other. Student work could never be left out. My supplies were taken from my desk and lost or damaged.

It was frustrating to be a new teacher in a space like that.

When I mentioned to a colleague that I felt crowded out of “my room” she looked at me sharply and said, “It’s not your room; it belongs to the school. You’re just given permission to teach in it.” I let that sink in. It stung to be put so sharply in my place, and it altered the way I saw myself as a professional.

Since then, I always feel a bit homeless. No matter where I teach, my classroom never feels like my own space. I’m just visiting–even five years or more down the road. I get it. I’m an employee. This is my “office.” It is no more mine than my husband’s desk and cubicle are his. Still, the mental image of myself as a mendicant or itinerant won’t quite leave. My classroom, the materials provided (such as they are), are public property–as public as a courthouse or DMV.

At the same time, it’s striking how often my status as a teacher also seems to be a slice of public property to be traded, ranked, or used as someone else sees fit. It’s not that I mind being an employee or that I don’t think I should be managed. It’s deeper than that. It’s the sense that who I am as a person is less than who I am as a piece of public property.

The real issue is that I feel dehumanized.

It’s hard to function in a political climate that insists I am a commodity whose value is variable. It’s even harder to function when personal stresses, griefs, and pain have to be pushed aside. Being a public figure in this way means that I have to sacrifice my private self until the school doors close.

I remember when I was a child in middle school, I judged my teachers harshly when they failed to live up to my childish expectations. I heard my parents make judgments, too. Now that I have spent a good portion of this school year hiding private wounds and crying lonely tears, I wonder what personal burdens my teachers were carrying that they too could not share.

I Wore My Coat in Class Today

It has happened at least once in every school–public or private–where I have taught. At some point the furnace goes, and it’s always on the coldest day of the year. How strange to keep working with gloves, scarves, and winter jackets wrapped tight. I resisted the peacoat until I made a trip into the hallway and realized the hall was warmer than my room.

My classroom is often uncomfortably cold in the winter and stiflingly hot in August and late spring/early summer. It’s one of the harder parts of maintaining such a sprawling complex. It’s more barn than building, more mall than office park. We bleed energy from every gap in the double doors and around every warped-seal on a window. All I can do is dress in layers when it’s cold and bring a fan from home to stir the air when it’s hot. To the person who solves the energy efficiency/heating and cooling problem for schools–you will be one very wealthy person.

Please get on that. Soon.

Another down side to the cold weather is that it has driven a few mice into my desk drawers. My principal likes to give teachers a chocolate bar and card for birthdays and I hadn’t taken a nibble of mine before a mouse squirmed its way into my desk and gnawed nearly a third of it while my students and I were away from the room. How impertinent! That happened before the holiday break and I managed to clean out the “remains” my visitor had left. Today I found that another “friend” had attacked a sealed bottle of vitamin C in the opposite drawer. Is there anything worse than wondering when you reach into a desk drawer for a pen or note pad that you might come in contact with a mouse–or its leavings?

I’d like to laugh. To shrug it off and say, well–these things do happen and can happen to anyone–but I wonder. I wonder.

Lockdown, 2001-2012

The first time I participated in a school lock-down, it wasn’t a drill.

It was 2001–just before 9/11–and I was student teaching in a sophomore English class. My classroom faced the main road and there were five or six large windows spanning the length of the room in order to let in natural light. My cooperating teacher and I got word that the local bank branch just down the block from the school had been robbed by a rifle-wielding gunman and police were in pursuit. As a precaution, we were to pull down the window shades and lock our doors in case the fugitive attempted to take refuge (or hostages) at the school.

My students started getting up from their seats as I casually lowered the shades.

“They’ve got guns!” One girl said, noting the armed and ready officers already standing guard outside, black rifles pointed across their bodies, tense and watchful.

I just kept pulling down window shades and tried to distract them with a half-fictional personal story. Anything to get them away from the windows and any potential stray bullets that might be fired. It was terrifying to think that a gunman was on the run in our neighborhood and that we might be vulnerable to a gun attack. Instead of feeding their fear or giving in to mine, I kept moving with the day’s lesson.

Eventually the man was captured and life went on. I still think about that day and how quickly the world seemed to crumble in the weeks and months that followed. Lock-down became policy, then procedure, then annual practice alongside fire drills, severe weather drills, and earthquake drills.

As a teacher, I think about lock-down and school safety every school year:

• What’s the best way to cover the three large windows that allow me to see into the hallway, but might let a shooter look in to find us?
• How should I deal with the broken window shade that maintenance taped at the top to keep the heavy roll from falling onto our heads? There’s a four-foot wide and eighteen-inch tall section of window that cannot be covered by a shade. Should I paper over it?
• If we needed to escape through the windows, will they shatter if I smash them with a chair? Do I have a screw driver that will allow me to remove a window from its casing so that students can fit through the smaller openings?
• What’s the safest corner of the room to avoid gunfire or sight lines? How many twelve year-old children can I expect to fit into that corner before we run out of room and are so many sitting ducks?
• What do I do if an attacker shoots out the glass in my door or beside it and reaches in to unlock the door from the inside? Where do we run without compromising the interconnected classrooms on either side, which (by the way) have no locks or securing mechanisms, so that if one classroom is compromised, the entire wing is compromised?
• How quickly could I move my file cabinet to barricade the door? Would I realistically have enough seconds to do it by myself?

I think about what I would do if an attacker came into my room–what I would do, what I would say. I think about the futility of buzzers and plastic ID name tags whose only use (as far as I can tell) is to help police identify the bodies once it’s all over.

Then I think about how absurd it is that I have to think about these things at all as a regular part of my job as a teacher in a democracy such as this one. This is not a border land of some long-standing war. This is not Gaza or Belfast or Tel Aviv or Bosnia. Why is it okay for American children to practice what to do in case of a shooting?

Why is it that the rhetoric about teachers in America says that I am a union thug, a moocher from the lower third of my class when it comes to academic performance. I am not to be trusted as a professional, but managed, micromanaged, tested, and measured to mastery. I can’t even get access to worthy YouTube videos because I can’t be trusted to use internet access responsibly, yet I hear governors, mayors, and other political leaders saying I should be trusted with a gun. I should be armed and dangerous so that if an assailant makes it past the buzzers and paper-covered windows, I can stand my ground and kill before I or my students are killed.

It’s too much to ask.

It’s time for lawmakers to find their spines and protect American citizens from the violent, irrational behavior. Don’t hand me a gun, wish me luck on my VAM score, and go back to your office and shut the door. Don’t make me personally responsible for one more thing about a child’s life and future.

Am I the only one who finds this maddening?

EQ, IQ, I Quit

People who care about me say that I am too hard on myself. Relentless perfectionism is something I rail against in students. I encourage them, make them smile, and then refocus on healthy mental choices. Why then is it so hard for me to take my advice?

We haven’t had a full week of classes in weeks. From scheduled half-days for professional development to field trips, the hurricane, and student-led conferences, my days have been packed with meetings, paperwork, preparations, bag lunches, late nights, shortened preps, report cards due, observations, and the technological resistentialism of broken copiers and spotty internet access. I’m frazzled–and the kids who miss the comfort of routine–are itching for more breaks. The school year honeymoon is over and reality is setting in: seventh grade isn’t going to just let you show up and get an A. This is going to take some effort.

Today, though, was a last straw. Not because of any one particular moment, but the weight of caring for so many at the expense of my own mental health overtook me. Teaching requires human connections and being real, being human with someone who is in a heightened state of emotion requires self-possession and an ability to compartmentalize that I lose when my batteries are low. One of those conversations? Ok. Two…and we’re stretching it. Three? Four? More. Relentless need. Relentless want. And I want to say, “Yes, I teach your child, but I spend less than five hours a week in your child’s presence. The average American spends more time in front of the television in a week than I spend with your child in a month. My attention and energy is divided among all the students I have in every class. Yes, your child is important to me, but so are all the rest.” But I don’t say that. How can I?

Just when I think I’m getting the hang of this teacher role, I have a day, a week, a month like this last one that leaves me gasping for breath and wanting to turn in my classroom key. I know it will be better, so all I can do is dust off the remains of the day and seek comfort in the oblivion of exhaustion-induced sleep.

Essayer means “to try”

The essay as a writing form came into existence relatively late in the whole scheme of things. It wasn’t until writing could be easily reproduced (printed) and paper became an inexpensive way to share ideas that the essay was born.

The term for these focused pieces of nonfiction writing comes from the French verb essayer which can be translated to try; to experiment; to explore. That is because, from the start, the purpose of an essay is to allow a writer to try and explain something–to make her thinking visible–and to communicate her thinking to another human being.

Essays are:

• both formal and informal
• humorous and serious
• playful and irreverent
• academic and fact-bound
• written to inform, persuade, entertain, and describe–Sometimes essays do more than one of these elements at one time!
• written for an audience of one, an audience of millions, or an audience somewhere in between
• supported with facts, examples, quotes and other kinds of details
• communication
• making thinking visible

Essays are NOT:

• just five paragraphs
• a report, article, or encyclopedia entry
• meant for “regurgitation”–or simply repeating what another person has said or taught
• flat or boring
• for “the future”

Of all the misconceptions about the essay as a writing form, the one that bothers me most is that it is a form of writing that will help students “in the future” instead of right now. Learning how to sift through your thinking to arrive at a conclusion is a life skill that can help you be a better thinker and learner NOW. You don’t have to wait for some imaginary future before it’s all worth the hard work!

In the digital age, we are no longer limited by paper and place. We can share our essays with the world through social media sites or by email. We can blog. We can comment on the writing others do. It’s an exciting time to be a thinker because ideas are so freely available and every voice can be heard.

P.S. Did you notice? This is an essay!

(Cross posted from my private classroom blog.)

Why I’ve Held My Tongue

Since I started teaching again in August, my blog has been lying fallow. Part of it has to do with the overwhelming newness of being back in the classroom at a different grade level in a new state in a new school and a new district three towns away from where I live. I’m spending a little over an hour a day on the road just going to and from school. Getting a handle on all of those things while trying to feel competent has been a challenge. Some weeks have been better than others and most of my blogging energy has been directed toward my private classroom blog. I’d love to be able to share and cross-post, but there it seems is my second problem.

I teach in a district whose philosophy toward technology and social media can be best described as a mix of fear, distrust, and ambivalence. Granted, my students are middle school children and most of them are not old enough to sign up for anything online. This is a technicality many of my students overlook on their own and frequent Facebook squabbles spill over into the school arena, fueling the fear and suspicion of all things digital or social. I chose a classroom blogging platform that allowed me to set a relatively weak, but memorable password in order to allow students to post and comment without compromising their identity or exposing their work to the prying eyes of strangers.

In my school, teachers and students are not officially allowed to bring their own digital devices from home for any reason, though the classroom computers are nearing a decade of continuous service and are no longer supported by the manufacturer. The ban also encompassed eReaders until a month ago. Now students are allowed to bring the original Kindle or the Nook as long as they promise to keep them set on “airplane mode” and not bring them to classrooms where teachers have the right to maintain the ban. iPads and iPods are not allowed at all–even though they may be used as eReaders. The official reason teachers were given was that iPads and iPods can compromise our aging network should students find a way to access the school’s limited wireless network.

As for the network, no one–including the Administrators–has access to the wireless password. This problem came to light after several iPads were purchased for use in the special education support rooms but they could not be used effectively without wireless access for sharing files or accessing programs like Dragon dictate. Setting up a wireless hotspot for those classrooms was considered out of the question. Wireless access for the building? Unthinkable.

I don’t mean to sound elitist or ungrateful. I’m starting to see small changes in terms of equipment upgrades for the school labs and access to netbook carts, but it’s going to take more than replacing hardware for our school and our district to really change. The real reason I haven’t been blogging has been my own unease. I’ve been afraid that if I were to write honestly about my frustration with certain attitudes and policies, it might be taken as an attack rather than constructive criticism. As of now, there is no standing social media policy for teachers and since I’m a new kid on the block, there is nothing to keep me from swinging in the wind if my words are taken the wrong way.

How can I be a teacher leader when it feels as though the direction I want to go is upstream?

2011 in Review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 2,000 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 33 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.