Revise and Edit

     I see my flaws more clearly, having taught. I am a natural educator; I was not a natural teacher. My students understood big ideas, or they at least understood how much I wanted them to learn. But teaching isn’t just planning, or thinking, or dreaming; it’s execution. I struggled to become bigger than myself. I learned slowly how to act and put on armor while leaving some soft spot reachable. These kids made me grin, tear up, and feel warm with pride. Their behavior also made me feel more insecure than any adult has ever made me feel. I relished the days when they didn’t touch my sense of self and instead all of me was enveloping them, guiding them, nudging them forward. On those days, my doubt, fear, frustration, insecurities, assumptions, worries didn’t exist. I felt like a teacher and an educator. Other days, sometimes the days where I had my best lesson plans, my coolest projects - all those inhabitants of Pandora’s Box came out clear and ugly anyway. I judged my students, I felt mad, I raised my voice, I judged myself. 

     My essential mistake, early this year, was wanting it all to be easy. My first year teaching had been so hard - 115 ten year olds, a state test on my shoulders, charter school expectations, all in a part of the United States that was, to me, a foreign country - that I just wanted a little space. I just wanted to leave school without my shoulders pinched to my ears in stress. I wanted the time to get to know my students, even though there were 113 of them. I wanted a few moments to pause the lesson and laugh with them. I wanted my days to flow with some calm momentum. 

     But you don’t teach because it’s easy. There's not much of anything that you should do because it's easy. I realize now that I needed to lean into the challenge of this group of kids, crack the code that would harness their strengths. This group of nine- and ten- year olds had some wild energy that shocked the rest of the school when they saw the kids grow into it. Girls who rolled their eyes at teachers. Boys who ran around the cars at drop-off in the early morning when the other kids sat sleepy against the walls of the hallway. But these boys and girls also had an eagerness to debate, a competitive spirit, a desire to push the limits. An experienced teacher would have known to harness that. I didn’t. There were early moments when I yelled instead of listened, sought control instead of respect, over-analyzed my actions but didn’t change them. 

     I had physical barriers, too; starting in September, I had sinus issues that affected my voice, whittling it down to a harsh whisper on some days and a cracked bullhorn on others, until I had surgery in March. But I can’t help but wonder if this broken voice would have mattered if I had started the year leaning into the challenge. Trying to de-escalate, engage, hold accountable. The disconnect between what I did, and what I recognize that I should have done, reminds me that teaching is a craft that takes years to perfect. With another year, I could have revised my style, edited it. 

     By the end of the year, I did find space at school. Not a lot - but some. When all four hours of state testing was over, I got to plan our days with intentions broader than multiple choice questions. I got to set up and see half my kids compete in a social entrepreneurship "shark tank." I got to stop my lesson and laugh with them when someone said something funny. I got to see them take the structure I gave them - find a problem, think of a solution, write a pitch, deliver it - and run, create shooting safety bracelets and litter collection clubs and anti-bullying apps. 

     One of the hardest things about teaching is forgiving the past - reflecting on but not harping on mistakes. The end of the school year invites so many questions that can drag you down. Have I taught my students anything? Have I been strong but kind? Do they feel loved? Your answers could pull you into your next future. The wedge of space I found after state testing made the idea of teaching another year whisper to me - do it.  I saw the things I fixed by the end of the year, and I understood what many circumstances I could not change.  I saw the mistakes I made, and I understand what I could have done better. But I saw, too, that my skill, my privilege, is in being able to connect worlds. To give my students and kids like them a bigger, richer range of opportunities, I can't stay in the classroom. I crave one more year of this thirsty challenge while knowing that it's not quite mine. 

     And so this essay is, in a way, a love letter to the teachers returning to the classroom. Cultivate that grit you want your students to have. Lean into the challenge. Revise, and then edit; reflect year after year on what you could do better, and then go back there and do it.

Doodles

     In March, I bought a plant from a local nursery. It had a ruffled rainbow of flowers - red, orange, yellow, and pink - sprouting from one root system, colors nestled between brown and green succulent leaves. It's a native plant, the farmer told me; doesn't need much water, can withstand sun and heat. Nevertheless, a few weeks after I brought it home, I thought I had killed it. The first flowers fell; news ones still hadn't sprouted. I left it outside on our patio as April brought 90, 100, 105 degree days.

     The heat has been rising; the past month or so has been testing season, five weeks of bootcamp for teachers and students alike. We're preparing for the state tests that determine our school's rating and our district's money and our students' passing to the next grade. Despite the stress of these tests, the preparation period can bring amazing gains. You figure out how to push things. You have no time to waste so classes become urgent, efficient, joyfully competitive, even just joyful on the best days. I've found trackers to be an essential tool for guiding and encouraging student achievement. I track my kids' growth, their behavior points on ClassDojo, and their percent passing by class and post it in real time on a big scoreboard in the middle of the classroom. They come into class fired up to beat the class before them and shriek with excitement if they win. On their own, they track their daily exit tickets, their weekly tests, the number of words that they've read, and whether or not they've completed their in-class assignments. The last is my favorite tracker. If they finish their work, I give them a sticker on a star for that day. I want them to know that effort, above all, is rewarded. On Fridays, a sticker on all five stars means ice cream and extra playground time. Just two children have left trackers incomplete over the past month. As a grade, our reading scores, which were low in March, have improved by one measure by 20%.

     But man, a month is a long time to be tracking a child's every move. A month is a long time to read nothing but test passages, no matter how many rounds of jeopardy or "prove it" we play. A month is a long time to quantify learning, to put percentages on understanding, to calculate comprehension to the decimal. The kids were dragging this week. I was dragging this week. Then I made a mistake. I forgot to make this week's copy of the star trackers for completed work. So I scrambled. I gave them blank paper and planned to plop the stickers down. But in a fourth grade classroom, paper isn't blank for long. They started sketching and doodling on the sly, in between multiple choice questions. Some drew their own five stars; I started seeing hearts, triangles, emojis, Gatorade signs, basketballs, trolls. Today, there were full-color envelopes with bubble-letter names and a zoo of different animals, each with a designated circle for the sticker. In my last of four classes, as I prepared to review the same story for the fourth time of the day, I marveled at the creativity sticking out from under black and white testing packets. 

     And just like that, I came home to find my little plant blooming again on the patio, a pink, a red, and an orange flower under leaves I thought had already shriveled dry. 

Valentine's Day

Time travel, scraps pulled together courtesy of Sick Day. 

February 13, 2016 -- On holidays, before the school fills with kids and candy, the hallways hush. Like the calm before a storm, it’s a precursor to the sugar rush that amplifies attention deficits and reminds us that our students are children who spend a lot of time inside and receive very little recess. 

On Valentine’s Day, the noise level in the hallway - despite our best efforts - reached jungle status 5 minutes after the kids started arriving. They were still talking about who had talked to whom at the Valentine’s dance; they wondered who had bought whom a goody bag; they started trading sweet gifts and notes they had prepared for their friends. Some of the boys proudly sat with teddy bears on their desks, ready to give them to their crushes. SHHH don’t spoil the surprise dude!

You couldn’t tell them otherwise - they were going to give out candy to their friends and they were going to eat the candy their friends had given them. Starting at 7:15 am, I had kids run in and leave DumDums and heart shaped chocolate boxes and candy roses on my desk (no complaints). During class, they surreptitiously dipped candy sticks into sugared chile powder, left FunDip in their desks, and pulled notes off of Reese’s Cups and candy hearts. They traded chocolate hearts with their friends. They had chocolate around their lips. 

This sweet goodness, this excitement, should be celebrated. I saw the shoebox Valentine’s mailbox one of my girls had created and remembered the extreme care and thought I had put into my own Valentine mailbox. In 4th grade, I think I actually followed the instructions from Martha Stewart Living. And yet - there was something toxic about this sugar rush. I stress ate mini Kit Kats all day because it felt like I was putting out fires without pause:

A hit J, who had red sugar around his lips, and E pushed L who hit him back. I and D chased each other around the classroom and R came and sat in the back of my room because he didn’t want to go to math, eventually joining the fray between D and I once I had gotten them to calm down. I said bad things about A’s mom across the room. 

I practically pushed them outside for recess, picked up candy wrappers with two students while watching them run and play soccer. I talked with I about his behavior. He appeared to see me for the first time all day. “I’m sorry, miss,” he said. “I just feel like I have all this extra energy to get out.”

After lunch, the swell appeared to have calmed. Then R started sweating and making loud noises. This made O stop working. J wandered around the classroom working his way to the bottom of a box of candy hearts, teasing N for liking Josh (because, as I later told N, who was crying, he really has a crush on her). 

“R is hyper,” one of the kids observed, sounding hyper himself. “He was eating chocolate in the bathroom.” R., who is pre-diabetic and may carry more serious psychological diagnoses, was making loud noises and picking up and putting down a desk. On his way out of my classroom, he pushed into a child and broke his glasses. 

I had set a goal to be quietly firm, after a week in which my kids had seemed to forget how to follow instructions. I was tired of chit chat, so deeply wanting to push them to work hard and think critically. I told them they’d get one warning, and then detention for any choices to misbehave. When it turned out, holy moly, I was serious (Miss Parker is undergoing a transformation), they protested. Pues no. Arms crossed. I won’t stay. In my last period class, a student who has diagnosed anger management issues stood up three times and started to pick up his chair, shaking furiously. He yelled at another student. The class roared, called him a dinosaur. Ricky got too close and got three hits to his stomach. 

At the end of the day, 12 hours after it had begun, I ran out of my candy coated room. I felt stubborn, hyper with reaction; I had said no all day, called parents, given detention, moved desks to face the wall. I hadn’t backed down; it had sort of worked. But I felt a sad disbelief at the poor health and disobedience. I wondered if I had been too mean. How could I not have told them how much I love them on Valentine’s day? I thought I was showing them by holding them accountable to high expectations, but maybe my firm energy was toxic too. 

We had a teacher’s work day the next day. Thursday’s chaos, harshness, had vanished. The school was quiet and my room looked a lot cleaner than I had remembered it. We did a training on English Language Learners in the computer lab. Something was missing. I walked to our 4th grade hallway, where 35 kids were sitting in a special writing training with a fantastic consultant who projected joy and energy. The room was calm and quiet. The kids sat in their street clothes, no uniform. Some of the boys had gotten fresh hair cuts, some of the girls wore dresses. The group by the door smiled when they saw me and a few kids whispered Hi Miss Parker! Shh, I said, work hard, and left, melting a little. I was so happy to speak to them with love. 

I snuck out of our training again when I heard them in the hallways going to lunch. They ate pizza and hugged me, sang a new song about pronouns. I felt so proud of them, then, and so in love. I remembered all the things they had done well that day before - kids sitting tall, listening, answering questions on sticky notes about their books. 100s on vocabulary quizs, two bold kids who performed the bonus question raps they had written about their best friends. Kids who used to tell me they were bad at reading who had told me, Miss, I’m getting better.

At home, I opened one girl’s Valentine’s Day note to me. She had packed it in a sheet protector inside a teacup that says Siempre juntos, always together. She had asked me twice, have you opened it? Do you like it?

I have loved very few things more. 

Dear Miss Parker, the note says. Thank you for always supporting me. I know someday our hard work will pay off!