Three bullets says it all

I love to read out loud to my students. One of my favorite books is Jeremy Thatcher Dragon Hatcher, by Bruce Coville. It’s a gripping tale of love and loss, friendship, family, pets, bullying. It pretty much covers all the big issues middle school kids face, and does so with plenty of humor and a ton of heart. 

I’ve gone through at least a half dozen copies of the book, in the dozen years or so that I’ve been reading it. Mainly because once I lend it out to one of the kids to read on his or her own, I usually don’t ever see it again. 

I just finished reading the story to my current class. They burst out in guffaws when I read the first chapter title, Love Letter of Doom, partly because of the phrase, but also because I’ve gotten really good at reading the book pretty dramatically. I know it almost by heart. As I read, I do my best to channel some of my favorite comedic actors, like Tina Fey, Amy Poehler,  William Shatner.

  

See, that’s yet another thing the public doesn’t get about teachers. We’re actors. Some days, like on state testing days for example, we get to follow a planned script. But that’s rare. Most times, we’re improvising, doing our soft shoe singing/dancing/ juggling, part of our brain focused on the words we need to say,  the other part gauging the audience reaction, and re-adjusting according to kid body language, eye messages, comments, and so on.  One minute I’m Cookie Monster, reminding kids that C is for characterization. The next I’m Beyonce telling kids to look at the board, to the left to the left. 

According to Google, David Scott set the world record for stand-up last year in Dubuque, Iowa, performing for forty hours and some change. Please. That’s minor league stuff.  Teaching IS stand-up. It is as mentally and physically exhausting as performing on Broadway, but without the glitzy after parties, the multi-million dollar contracts, the respect.

When I finished reading the Coville book, I went back and reread my favorite section, like I always do. We talk a lot in class about big ideas/ themes. This one particular paragraph is the heart of the book. The speaker, Hyacinth Priest, is trying to soothe Jeremy, who doesn’t want to let his pet dragon, Tiamat, leave his world for her new home, her ultimate destiny, the world of the dragons.   

Here’s the section:

Nothing you love is lost. Not really. Things, people—they always go away, sooner or later. You can’t hold them, any more than you can hold moonlight. But if they’ve touched you, if they’re inside you, then they’re still yours. The only things you ever really have are the ones you hold inside your heart. 

It makes me cry every time I read it.

We talked a bit about this quote and why it’s important. As in other years, the ensuing conversation left me shaken, sad, worn out, hating my job, loving it at the same time. Because I need to respect boundaries, I can’t say what my students said. But because I’ve had a dozen or more conversations about this particular paragraph over the last decade or so, I feel comfortable relating previous responses. They don’t leave your head.

Sometimes you get students who’ll talk about deaths of a loved one, like a grandparent who died way back when the student was teeny. Sometimes kids will talk about longing to see family members who live thousands of miles away. I’ve taught many kids over the years from families that immigrate to the United States one at a time; for example dad first, then mom, then oldest sibling, next oldest, etc. It can take five, six, seven years for those families to re-assemble here in Massachusetts. You see the sadness in their eyes as the kids talk about living with aunts, uncles, family friends either here or in Ghana, Colombia, wherever, while they spend their childhood waiting for their family to be whole again. 

 You make mental notes of the kids who are nodding their heads in understanding, the kids who add in their own stories. You tattoo on your brain the names of the kids who hide their eyes, look away, pretend they don’t care.  

Sometimes a kid will catch you off-guard with this: “The man next door killed a cat just because he didn’t like it. He put it in a bag. I saw him.”

Or will make you dizzy with this: “Miss, why do people have to kill pets? It’s so mean, isn’t it?”  Then in a rush of words the student, I’ll call him Jake, told all of us how his dad had given him a pitbull puppy that he’d named Silverman (not the real name). At six weeks old Silverman’s fur was solid black and so soft. Jake talked about how he loved patting his dog, how he still remembers the feel of that fur. 

The puppy got in the habit of cuddling up next to him in front of the television. They slept together every night. The puppy grew strong and big. In class, Jake stood up to demonstrate how massive that was. He sucked in his stomach and pushed out his chest to show just how powerful Silverman had become. 

Then one day, Silverman bit a kid who was tussling with Jake in the fenced in yard. Jake is convinced the dog was just doing what he’d been trained to do – protect his owner. 

“Miss, my dad had to use three bullets to kill the dog. He was such a strong dog. Three bullets to the chest. One bullet wouldn’t do it. Why did my dad do that? Why did he kill my dog?”

You hear these stories, and you get overwhelmed, because it’s just so sad. You never endured, until adulthood, the grittiness some of these kids live with every day.

But on the flip side, you’re glad the kids are talking about this tough stuff, because you know you got to them. They’re showing empathy and compassion. They get the story. They showing you they're starting to understand how to relate to good literature. Your teacher instincts tell you that they are on their way to falling head over heels in love with reading, which means that maybe Jake and kids like him will stay in school, go to college, grab those lives they want to live.  

And then there's the other reality. You think about the MCAS, the MAPS testing, the WIDA, Fountas and Pinnell, PARCC, and all the other time-sucking assessments that your city and state insist are so important, and how none of those reflect much at all about authentic learning and what it means to teach the whole child. 

Good books teach us how to live and help us figure out who we want to be.

 

  

Innocence lost: In the elementary classroom the day after 9/11

This is what I remember about September 11, 2001, and the day after.

I was standing at the front of the classroom at the chalkboard, teaching a lesson on subjects and predicates. We were using a textbook that was copyrighted 1988, one year before my oldest student was born. Kids were raising their hands to go up to the board to add the subject/predicate slash mark to the sentences I'd written.

A teacher friend came into the room and nudged me over to the bank of windows, out of kid earshot. She whispered something about two planes hitting the World Trade Center Towers, first one then another.

How I responded: “What’s the punchline?” I thought it was some sick joke. 

She said it wasn’t a joke and that the principal was sending her around to tell all of us teachers. We weren’t supposed to say anything to the students. There was a chance that some of our students might have lost family members. We had tons of kids who had family in the five boroughs. In an elementary school, panic and rumors can spread as fast as lice.  

As soon as she left, I opened the door that led to the adjacent classroom, I made a face at my colleague, one that asked, "Did you hear?" He nodded. His face was pale. He looked tired. I wondered if I looked that way too.

A few seconds later, a message over the intercom told us to turn off all classroom computers immediately. For the next three hours, like most of my colleagues, I received no updates. I didn't know about the Pentagon or Shanksville. I didn't know if Boston had been hit. I didn't know if my own kids were safe.

At my lunch, I scooted upstairs to the audio visual supply room, where no students were allowed and where the principal had temporarily set up a television for faculty. I saw for the first time what most everyone else across the country had been watching for hours: the flattening of the towers, the chaos in DC, the horror in Pennsylvania.

Our principal sat with us in a room that was silent, except for gasps or brief exclamations. She was retiring the next day after over forty years in the education profession. I wonder now if she was thinking back to when she started her career. Wonder if she was thinking about her own starry-eyed innocence as a young teacher. Perhaps she was considering what she'd lost over the years, due to the sights she'd seen, the personal stories of abuse and violence that students had shared.  

"This is just the start," she said. I remember wondering what she meant by that.


It was hard going back to class. We teachers struggled to keep our emotions reigned in. We all had trouble focusing.
 

After work I drove home in a stupor, listening to the news but unable to absorb any of it. I stopped at Dunkin' Donuts to get a coffee because I thought maybe caffeine would sharpen my senses. I remember standing in line behind two high school-age girls who were gossiping about he-said-she-said kinds of things.  The store folks had turned on a radio, and were waiting on us silently so they could listen to the news. The mindless chatter of the girls drowned out everything.  

At home my daughters, who were in high school at the time, told me they'd watched the news all day. "You know you're safe," I said.

Each of them gave me big sighs, eye rolls, and versions of: "We know. We know. We heard that SO many times."

Neither of them wanted to watch any more of it with me on TV. I watched the news for only a few seconds. The sights were too gruesome, the grief overwhelming. I sent out some emails to friends to ask if they were okay, and thankfully everyone I knew was fine.

One friend who lived in Jersey City watched it all happen from a window in her condo. She had a late morning appointment in one of the towers. She was heading to take the subway into Manhattan when the first plane hit. She turned around, rushed home, and watched the horror from her patio.   

Next morning, I stopped at a couple of stores on my way to school. I picked up the Boston Globe, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal. I wasn’t planning on reading these with the kids. I bought them because I wanted to read them later, on my own. I wondered how the day would go. I wondered what to say to my three groups of 11-and 12-year-olds. 

I decided to find out what they knew first. I stood in front of the classroom, watching carefully for body language cues. "So, what should we talk about today?"

Every group started yelling out about the attacks. Signalling for silence,I passed out paper and asked kids to write down everything they'd heard or seen. As they wrote ferociously, I paced the room and read their responses.

The amount of erroneous information was overwhelming. It was obvious that most grown ups hadn’t talked to their kids at all. Most of the students either knew about the events from kid word-of-mouth and thought that the entire city of New York had been destroyed and we were next, or had stayed up most of the night, unsupervised, watching graphic scenes of mayhem and death on television.

I’d gone to school thinking that I was just going to affirm for these kids what I'd told my own at home the night before and that morning before we left for school: "You are safe."

I never expected to have to deal with a question like this: “Are we going to die today?”

Or this: “Miss, did you see how those planes hit those buildings? Wow! It was just like a movie!”

Or this, from Miguel, who'd stayed up all night watching the news with his younger siblings. Miguel jumped up on a chair, flapped his arms like they were wings, and landed neatly on the floor, as most of his classmates laughed. "Did you see those people jumping off the buildings and flying through the air? That was so cool! I'm going to try that!"

From his buddies across the room: "Yeah! That was amazing. How'd they do that?"

It took several seconds to quiet down that class, as I thought, "What do I do now?" In my head, flickering like a black and white newsreel, I saw Miguel and his friends running home from school to their third- and second-story apartments, giggling as they rushed to their rickety front porches, hopping onto the railings, balancing for split seconds fifty feet up, diving, then breaking onto concrete pavement. 

I don't remember what I said, except I was stern and matter-of-fact, even while my head was spinning. I talked about height, velocity, moving objects, stationary objects, brains, spinal cords.  I did the best I could without getting overly graphic. I leaned back against the blackboard and pressed my palms into the chalk trough to keep the room in focus.


To this day, I can still picture Miguel hopping onto his chair, flapping his arms like the pigeons that roosted outside our classroom windows every morning, then jumping to the floor. But I still don't have words to describe what it felt like, watching innocence fade from young eyes, as I explained the reality that day, and the next day, and the next.  

Sometimes the best lessons are the human ones

Teaching isn’t just reading, writing, arithmetic. Kids aren’t just numbers.   

Here’s what I mean. 

Early into this school year, a couple of students chose to fool around during the Pledge of Allegiance, which comes over the intercom most mornings, about fifteen minutes into the school day. The class stood, and most of the kids were quiet. They followed my lead when I put my hand over my heart. They mumbled along when I recited the Pledge along with our assistant principal a couple of floors away.

Then there was this small itch of a group that chose that quiet, solemn time to giggle, whisper, shove. 

Last time I checked, the Pledge and why it’s important wasn’t on any state test I’ve had to administer. I’m not teaching Social Studies this year, which focuses mainly on geography at my grade level anyhow, so technically, I wasn’t required or expected to spend any part of the school day talking with the kids about our flag and why we respect it. 

But I put my planned lesson on hold and spent a while talking about our flag. First I yelled a bit though, starting with a killer teacher eyeball and a deep and guttural “How dare you.”

Then I made my kids cry.

I told them about Anthony, a student I had one of my first years of teaching. Best. Kid. Ever.

Great smile. Sparkling eyes. Polite like you dream of.

Anthony had some big-time learning difficulties but he never gave up. He always smiled. He always tried the hardest. He was the kid I picked for errands, because he was more responsible than most adults I know. He never missed a day of school. He never once had to be directed to pay attention. I gave him some big award at our end-of-year recognition ceremony. Most Improved maybe? If there’d been a best kid ever award, he would have gotten it, hands down.

We kept in touch through his junior high years, then high school, where he wrestled and played varsity football, was elected a class officer, was adored by all his classmates and teachers, and further developed his immense talents in graphic design.

After he graduated high school, Anthony enlisted in the Army. He was sent to Iraq and went proudly. I don’t know how long he was stationed there before tragedy hit. I think it was several months, enough time for him to forge deep bonds with his fellow soldiers.  

One day, while acting as a landmine lookout on the lead tank in a long convoy, he was blown up. He woke up days later in a hospital in Germany. He’d been wedged under the tank for about a half a day. He learned that his best friend had died in the attack. Anthony will tell you even today that he wishes he’d died instead of his friend. He carries a lot of guilt on his broad, young shoulders.  

We’d lost touch in the years after Anthony graduated high school.  I only learned about his travails a few years ago, when he was driving through the neighborhood and on a whim stopped in at school to visit. He showed me where they’d had to graft skin over the burns on his arms, back, and stomach. He told me about the six months he spent stateside in a hospital outside Washington, where they told him he’d never walk again. He bragged about how he’d proved the doctors wrong. As soon as they told him he wouldn’t walk again, he was determined that he would.

His eyes clouded over a little when he talked about how there have been bumps in the road. There was anger, substance abuse. But now he’s doing better, so well in fact that he was honored by his rehab facility for overcoming the psychological and physical hurdles that had been thrust in his path. He even went to the White House once and got a medal from the President for being such an outstandingly positive role model for his fellow wounded warriors.  

Among other, many other things, I told my students I said that when they talked during the Pledge, it was like they were telling Anthony that what he’d gone through didn’t matter and that they didn’t care at all that our brave men and women all over the world, were putting themselves in dangerous situations so that they, these kids, could have a safe life.

Just so you know, when I told my students about Anthony, I held back on some of what I’ve just written. I have to be careful about boundaries and I have to align what I say to what is appropriate for their ages.

I told the kids whenever I say the Pledge, I always think of Anthony and thank him. I suggested that maybe they could think about Anthony too.   

When I was done, the kids asked some questions and started sharing about their own families. Turns out many have family members serving in military organizations, some with the US, some in countries in South America, Central America, Africa, Asia. As students spoke, their classmates sat tall, asked questions, responded appropriately. The room was alive with kindness, curiosity, shared passion.

Since then, you don’t hear a peep in my room during the Pledge. The kids enunciate as they say the words. Sometimes they search out my eyes and pat their heart area a little to show me that they understand.

This class I just wrote about? It’s every class I’ve had going on ten years. Anthony is in his 30s now, married with a couple of kids. I tell his story because I need to. It’s my way of thanking him for being so brave and willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for me and for our country.

Every single time I've told this story, the class responds the same way: hushed silence, sniffles, then a tentative question, then another, then sharing, lots of sharing. What we all get out of it is largely immeasurable but supremely important: clarity, respect, unity, appreciation, a sense of a bigger world than us out there.

Sometimes, the most important lessons don't come in expensively prepared curriculum guides. And there’s a lot about kids that you just can’t measure.  

Charter Part Too Much: In Which I Release the Kracken

Before they were Charter techs. . . 

I eagerly looked forward to a visit today from yet another Charter tech, who I immediately associated with Harry Potter dementors, due to his incredible aptitude to suck out, ever so excruciatingly slowly, any hope I had of getting internet from Charter sometime this century. 

He arrived in a cloud of cheap cologne/ despair. The visit went something like this: 

I take five minutes to explain all that I’d dealt with all week, including that I am beyond irate and that once I used to be a nice person but that person died last Wednesday, during a five-hour wait for a tech that apparently never existed. 

He looks at his clipboard and his eyeballs move a little, so I know he’s conscious. 

“Says here there’s something wrong with the modem.”

“The router. The router. I just got finished telling you. It’s the router.” I cough. And cough again. The stench is killing my soul and nasal passages. 

“Oh, yeah.”

I lead him down to the dungeon of terrors AKA where the cats sometimes sleep and the router purrs and winks. I wonder if we’re all pawns, insignificant players in some big cosmic joke being perpetrated  upon us by the head honcho of the great cable company in the sky.  Perhaps this is all some sort of a test.

The Master D pulls out his cell phone. He pushes some buttons. “Says here I can get online. It’s not your router.” I cough again. Three cats cough in reply. 

I explain again about being on the phone with Charter for not one hour, not two, but two hours and TWENTY MINUTES yesterday, whereupon the kind and patient soul on the other end of the line, determined the router was being an asshole, or as she put it, defective. 

Hence, today’s appointment. To replace the defective router. I say this slowly so he can take the time to absorb each word. 

He says she’s wrong.

I think about all the time I wasted on the phone yesterday with that soulless, heartless succubus. I am in danger of swooning due to the tidal wave of broken teenage dreams flowing from Doofus’s pungent, open pores. I step back and suggest we go to the kitchen and double-check on my computer, which is near a fan and several open windows. 

He follows me upstairs. I am impressed by his ability to walk upright, but rather than compliment him, I cough. 

At my computer, he pushes a couple of buttons and says, “Yeah, it’s your computer.”

I beg to differ. 

“I’m telling you it’s your computer.”

I say I want my old machinery back. Everything worked just fine on Tuesday, before the moron at Charter fucked up my account. I don’t use words like moron or fucked up with the big D. Not yet. 

He says he doesn’t have my old machinery and I can’t have it back anyhow because he doesn’t know what I had. 

I politely point out that most companies keep records on stuff like that. They’re called inventory records. We can make another appointment and he can bring it all back. He looks at me like I have five heads, so I add, “I mean really. My internet was fine until that idiot at Charter changed my billing. It is NOT my computer. I am sure of it.” 

In truth I wasn’t totally sure, but I’d been on the phone the day before with a nice lady for one hundred forty minutes who put me and my computer through all kinds of calisthenics and only then determined that I in fact needed a new router. She seemed competent. Surely, I hadn’t wasted an entire Saturday morning for naught? Plus, this guy had been in my house all of six minutes, if that.

I cough. I give him my best are you sure you want to go there buddy boy look.

He blinks. He goes there. “It’s your computer.”

I realize at that point, that this has all most definitely been a test sent down from ye technology gods to see if I can go a whole ten minutes with a Charter person and refrain from swearing. I fail.   Awesomely, I might add.

“You’re full of shit,” I say. 

Mr. Smells Like Decomposing Teen Spirit puts his phone to his ear. He walks from the kitchen to the dining room to the living room and then out the front door. He gets into his van. He starts it up. He drives away. I am momentarily concerned that our state laws are so lax. This guy makes ME look like a tech genius. With an IQ like that, he has no business driving.  

Then, as fresh air replaces the taint of dying hopes, I think more clearly: Crap. What if it IS my computer?

I close the windows. I shut off the stove, the fan, load the computer into my bag, and hop into the car. I drive the two miles to Best Buy. I wait in line for a Tech Geek. He is sweet. He smiles a real smile. He is surrounded by goodness and light. He doesn't stink to high heaven. 

I explain my tale of woe. I come clean about the full of shit part.

He says exactly what I need to hear: “Do you have any idea how many Charter customers we get who have the exact same issue?” He’s not talking about my anger. He’s talking about Charter blaming it all on me, and by me I mean all of us Charter customers who end up at Best Buy because idiots like smelly tech guy blame their incompetence on the customer.

“I dunno,” I say. “He could be right on this one.  I’m not exactly Bill Gates when it comes to computers” or something equally erudite that doesn’t involve the use of swear words.  

“See. It’s not your computer,” he says.

Yup. In the amount of time it takes for me to say I’m not good with computers, the Best Buy Geek Squad guy gets my computer connected to the store internet.

“Nothing wrong here,” he says. “Your computer’s in great shape.”

“So you’re saying that I can access my computer from any internet? Yours? Starbucks? Anywhere?”

“There is absolutely nothing wrong with your computer. Nothing whatsoever. You have excellent connectivity.”

I ask him if I can give him some money or maybe my credit card.  Like a true superhero, he declines any temporal reward.

As I exit, I tell the store manager to give that guy a raise. “He’s the only tech person who’s actually been able to help me all week,” I say.

“You must be a Charter customer,” the manager says. He nods, knowingly.

In the parking lot I am on the phone with the dumbest Charter customer service rep ever. We talk for a half hour, mostly about how he can’t schedule another tech appointment for me because his records show I still have an “open work order” which apparently means that Drakkar Dipwad never finished his paperwork after he left my house.

“For all I know, the tech might be coming back to your house with more equipment.”

I assure the guy, who speaks slower than my grandmother did when she was at her worst and having trouble forming even the most basic of thoughts and sadly I kid you not here by the way, I assure the guy that Mr. Death by Stink will not be returning to my house. We go through a routine that would put Laurel and Hardy’s Who’s on First act to shame only it’s truly not funny.

I ask to speak to his supervisor and he puts me on hold. I get in my car and drive home. I am in my house on my computer STILL on hold – yup, a half hour, when my brain finally kicks out of default-to-victim mode and I hang up and call again.

The next guy is polite and patient. Five minutes later I have yet another tech appointment. This time I make sure it’s with the regional supervisor. I’ll settle for no one else.

Absofuckinglutely. No. One. Else.  

Though I do get pleasure out of writing these updates – it’s a great way to burn off steam -- all I really want is what any customer wants: respect. Maybe tomorrow I’ll finally be treated with some semblance of professionalism. Stay tuned.

Total hours dealing with Charter, including waiting on hold, waiting for Wednesday's no-show guy, and trip to and from Best Buy: 13+, over the course of five days. Talk about sinful.