history lessons

So we're studying Ancient Greece, in our first grade classroom, and yesterday we started a segment on daily life in Athens, specifically, the birthplace of democracy and processes of citizenship. Smart kids that they are, they picked up on some interesting aspects of ancient life, no matter how blandly I tried to present it.

Keep in mind, the demographic of my class is at least 75% black, with a smattering of hispanic kids - as is the neighborhood in which I'm teaching. So, you can imagine, the parts of our lesson that mentioned slavery were hotly discussed by my seven-year-olds. I mean, kids will be kids, right? Most of my kids think New Jersey is another country; they have that elastic sense of place and time that every kid has. But these kids sure knew their history when it came to talking about slaves.

Krissa: So, it says here that only free men could vote. What does that mean, free men? What's the opposite of free people?
Sally*: Black people.

I was almost shocked into laughing, which rivals a certain mispelling of the word "house" as the hardest moment of forced maturity or composure I've faced. I went on to explain, as best I could, that although here in the U.S., black people were the predominant ethnicity forced into slavery, ancient Greece would have had slaves of different skin types, and that not all black people were slaves. And I was proud of her, of all my students - quoting Martin Luther King at me about freedom and knowing as much as they did about their own history. When I so often find huge gaps in their knowledge, here was an unexpected mine of information that our schools are doing well to drive home.

But MAN. This must be what they mean when they say out of the mouths of babes.

* name changed, OBVS.

the new year

Today is a few minutes longer than yesterday. I was thinking about that as I walked home last night, on the winter solstice, which also marked my last day of the fall semester at my new job. I wondered, can I still call it my new job? When do I have to start living a normal life again, when does the bombshell of all the newness stop radiating?

But today is a few minutes longer than yesterday. If the year is a curve, today is the first turn-up of the line. I have a week long break - the longest since I started. I have a new semester starting, where even though the weather won't get warmer for a while, the days will keep getting longer and in some metaphor, perhaps this means teaching will get easier.

Oddly enough, I have had the best worst two weeks possible. For much of them, my priceless teaching assistant T wasn't in because she was taking her finals. So I was essentially on my own, with replacements wandering in and out but very passively, not being assertive and sharing the discipline-maintenance like T does.

So, the past two weeks have been very difficult on my nerves, on my blossoming authority and classroom management skills. But I have actually handled them. I have even had good moments. I have picked up new tricks, changed my tone and gotten results, figured out when to pull the line taut and when to give them a little slack. I've worked out new systems - with kids, I have found, systems need to be constantly revised because the great danger in getting them too accustomed to a method is that it will cease being effective.

So you can see, they were the best two bad weeks I could possibly have. One of the challenges has been prepping my first graders for the Christmas concert we held yesterday, where 21 wriggly, squirmy little bodies were meant to get up on stage and sing Santa Claus Is Coming To Town for their families and friends. You can bet the wriggling stopped when they first rehearsed it on the Big Stage, I've never seen my chaotic first graders more interested in literally toeing the line out of fear. FEAR IS A GREAT MOTIVATOR, I added to my list of Things I Swore I'd Never Consider Teaching Tools But Actually Really Are.

So now, on this upswing day after an entire semester of rollercoaster moods and crying jags and self-doubt, I am feeling pretty good about surviving it and feeling pretty bad about the toll it's taken. I haven't written with any consistency this semester - my whole plan of writing in the mornings and teaching in the afternoons just fell apart when teaching in the afternoons clouded my mornings, too. I haven't blogged enough because the major thing affecting my life - these children - is difficult to talk about and fraught with complications. These are two things I'm swearing to improve, in the upswing of today, with a whole week of rest that I've earned ahead of me.

I'm not one for New Year's resolutions, finding often that it's an arbitrary time to make promises. But actually, falling as it does smack in the middle of my school year, I'll go ahead and take that very convenient tradition to heart. The days are just getting longer from here, right? Surely I can start putting them to better use.

tiny children and the remedies necessary

So, if you haven't noticed, blogging is hard. Mostly because at least three days of every week, I come home too exhausted to do anything but sit on the couch and be waited on hand and foot by Stuart (I know.*) and then sleep really late the next day** because getting up and facing all the non-teacherly things I need to do reminds me of all the teacherly things I need to do and both make me sort of want to cry a little bit.

Sometimes, I do. It's very depressing, constantly feeling overwhelmed. As I'm sure many of you know. My family and friends sure do, it's all I ever talk about. Sick of it yet, guys?

Teaching is hard because I love my kids to distraction and I see so much potential in them begging to be nourished and encouraged and I'm trying so hard to do it but the need to manage and discipline them comes first. I'd say that it was getting better - and it is, and it will - but there are days that feel like two steps forward and one and a half steps back, which is slow progress. I feel unequipped to do what they need from me, and it feels like a huge mountain that I'm trying to climb with a toothpick. I am assured this will get easier. Mostly by fellow teachers and Stuart.

But enough! Short of regaling you with cute stories about little _________ and that INFURIATING ___________ of his, or _________ and how proud I am of her ___________, I should stop talking about teaching now.

How about writing!

Oh, that isn't going so well either. Every day is a new chance, right? Right.

Outside of teaching and writing: I'm not seeing my friends enough, and this is because I am constantly wiped out, every day, and it takes half the weekend to recover from it. Last weekend, I stayed home all day on Saturday and read The End and napped and made apple cake and red beans and rice for dinner and watched LOTR with Stuart. And then after pottering around the house until Sunday late afternoon, we went row-boating in Central Park. We saw a turtle. It was sort of incredibly awesome and beautiful, and it was the nicest thing I've done for weeks.

And today, here in RI, we walked to Seven Star Bakery in the morning for coffee and croissants, scored lots of yummy genre-y paperback fiction at the Rochambeau Branch Book Sale (plus awesome tote bag, sort of making up for this) and plus also, played frisbee in the waning afternoon sunlight.

Oh, and mom gave me the Perfect Red Wool Coat. So, really, I can't complain too much about teaching and writing (comma the terror thereof slash comma the lack thereof) because my weekends have been pretty relaxing.

They have to be, right?

So how are you?

* let it be known that I fully understand that I don't actually have it bad here - I actually have it good. It's just unlike me to feel so incredibly dependent on being taken care of - for which I am very grateful indeed.

** ditto.

sinking under the watermark

So, I've been doing this for a week and a day. I'm still struggling with how much to say about my actual pupils, but I have a lot to say about teaching and my head-first dive into it, so here goes nothing.

Thing the first: I am insane. Does anyone else know anyone who, with absolutely no prior experience teaching actual children, decides to take a job teaching actual children? First graders? Here's the thing. I've spent an enormous amount of time care-taking for children. Two solid years, in fact, of part- to full-time childcare. And I'm damned good at it. Because the way I always approached working with children is to show them interest, respect, and a sense of fun off the bat, and win them over with sugar and a firm sense of consistency.

Imagine me, then, in a raft in the middle of the ocean, and that firm sense of consistency is all I've got left. I can't get these kids under my rule with respect and a sense of fun. I've got to be tough as nails. Has anyone noticed that I'm not actually tough as nails?

Thing the Second: I remember being a child. I remember the seemingly arbitrary judgements thrown on us by teachers, the "No!"s and the "Not now!"s and all those things. I REMEMBER thinking they were unfair and thoughtless.

Guess what? One week and one day and I'm throwing out "Only if you sit DOWN first!"s and "Did I tell you to do that?"s with the BEST of them. And do you know what it feels like? It feels like there's a middle line of ineffective, ineffectual teaching that straddles the divide between Good Teaching and Bad Teaching (that is to say, NOT Teaching). It feels like I'm constantly being tugged down onto the level of Ineffectuality by these pronouncements and judgments that classroom management forces me to make.

I want to be a good teacher. That is to say, I genuinely care about these kids and I KNOW I have something to offer them and more than that, I know they deserve it, possibly twice as much as their more well-endowed counterparts across the East River. And I know they can do it. And I know I can help them. But everytime I have to sink back down to the level of snapping my fingers for attention, or raising my voice (even if I'm raising my voice in a controlled way), I feel like I'm veering from teaching into corralling.

And you veterans out there, I know you will tell me that corralling is necessary for classroom management. And I know you will probably tell me that a stern hand and follow-through on consequences is vital, and in this neighborhood, chances are that school might be the only place they're getting structure.

But I want to actually teach them. I don't want to just herd them into lines all the time. I want to share with them.

Thing the Third: Forget everything I've just said. I know I'm getting through to them, but it's little tiny battles all the time and it's harder and more challenging than every single thing I've ever done, including writing and the learning curve is impossibly steep. I've made some stupid mistakes - not giving full weight to the incomprehensible heirarchy of a child's understanding of fairness is one. Saying yes simply because I was being badgered by a child is another.

But I'm learning, and learning requires setting up all these almost nonsensical rules and processes for the classroom that really seem to get in the damned WAY of teaching. So I'm trying new things all the time, which is inconsistent.

Didn't I start that section by saying I know I'm doing well? I'm trying to trust that I'm doing well. It's hard.

Oh, Thing the Forth: Kids? They're cunning little things. And sometimes, I need to remember that it's not that I'm not getting through to them - it's that they're not letting me. But they will.

Relatedly, I read some Shel Silverstein poems to them today and they loved it. Baby steps.

madness

Every morning for the past week I've been slogging through dozens of listings that I'm copy-editing. This is sort of mentally exhausting but it pays well.

Yesterday was my first day of classes. I was very lucky to come home to the kind of guy that brought flowers and cooked dinner and let me vent, because people, I was a wreck. An utter, and complete, wreck. Teachers out there, please tell me that the first day which felt like a two-hour drug trip is normal. Tell me first days are always exhausting and draining and terrifying.

Or is it just terrifying for teachers with absolutely no experience, thrown into an adorably chaotic den of 6 year olds?

So if you've called me recently, or just miss my blogging, this is why.

Today will be better because today, I am reading Where The Wild Things Are to my class and goddamnit, everyone loves Where The Wild Things Are, even if the Wild Things are actually in my first-grade classroom.

Send reinforcements and cupcakes.

getting ready for the onslaught of apples

Between training for my teaching job (!!) in the afternoons and copy-editing in the mornings, I have suddenly found myself short on time.

Time being something I learned to use and waste to MAXIMUM awesomeness this summer.

The training is going well - the steepest learning curve I've ever faced, but every day that I hear practical tips from experienced teachers and look over sensible and motivating lesson plans, the less terrified I am about the entire prospect. Twenty-two kids! In my care! Oh! My! God!

I'm excited, though. Which is a niiiiiiice feeling.

This weekend I'm: going to Rhode Island. Being Stuart's co-pilot while he practices driving on the mean streets of Providence with his shiny new learner's permit. Learning how to make rice pudding. And reading a lot of material about kids, literacy, and teaching.

Holy cow, people! Four days to Go Time.