To Tell You the Truth

I have a confession to make: I am an English teacher (that's not it) who (I'm not sure I can put this in writing) very rarely (Oooh, it makes me wince just to think about it) finishes a book.

There. It's out. I don't really feel any better, but let me explain. I just don't have the attention span to read books anymore. I'm not sure where it went; when I was a kid I read avidly. Now, I start lots of books, and I skim tons of books, so that I can discuss them intelligently with my students, and I certainly read all sorts of articles, both in print and on the internet, but I just don't read many books all the way through.

Of course, in my profession, I am surrounded by readers, and I have learned to dread the question, "Have you read it?" because I won't lie, but I will allow people to assume that I have read whatever it is we're discussing. My family reads, too. My mother and brother always find time in their busy lives to read a kazillion books; how, I don't know. I have a student this year who reads at least 4 or 5 books a week, and today she came in after spring break with Little Women. " I read that when I was in sixth grade!" I told her. "Did you love it? Don't read Little Men next-- you'll only be disappointed." It was a great conversation, and it reminded me that I want to read, I really do. I want to recapture that feeling I remember so well from when I was a girl, curled up in the green chair, pounding through book after book, lost in the story and the setting and the characters.

One strategy I use to up my page count (so to speak) is to listen to audiobooks. Often, they will get me hooked, and since I don't really have that much time to listen (my commute is eight minutes, if there's heavy traffic), I lose patience and go ahead and finish the book. That's what happened with both the Twilight and City of Ember series. I try to find unabridged recordings of books read by the author, which is usually an intense and magical experience, even apart from my non-reading ways. Most recently, I listened to The Kite Runner on a roadtrip to and from Atlanta over spring break. Here's what I wrote to my friend, Leah, about it:

We spent yesterday barreling through the Carolinas, listening to The Kite Runner. My eyes were on I-85, crossing the Tugaloo River and changing lanes to avoid somebody's clothes that were strewn across the road for miles (did a suitcase open in the back of a pick-up, or did someone throw them out the window, maybe in the heat of an argument, just to make their point?), but my mind was in Afghanistan and Pakistan: Kabul, the Khyber Pass, Peshawar and Islamabad, wondering how Amir would ever find redemption.

About thirty miles out of town, I called to order take-out from the Afghan restaurant. We picked it up on the way home and then sat at our dining room table eating mantu, palau, sabzi, and kadu, and listened to the last thirty minutes. For you, a thousand times over.

Wow. What a great book. But have I read it?

Back to the Bus

On the morning that we boarded the charter buses for Cape May, Leila made it a point to sit next to me. With ten days left in the school year, I guess she figured it was now or never if she wanted to mend our friendship.

I recognized that it took a lot of courage to approach the wounded me: It could have been very unpleasant, but it wasn't. We passed the seven hours in polite small talk. In fact, the thing I remember most about our conversation on that trip was when she told me about a new TV show that she and her husband were hooked on. "You would really like it, Tracey. It's called Survivor." It took her a few minutes to explain the premise of the show... reality TV was in its infancy, and I had never heard of these strangers marooned, by choice, evidently, on a deserted island in the Pacific.

She was right. I did like the show-- the mixture of conniving, false alliances, physical strength, and sheer force of will was riveting. I still watch today, although I confess that there comes a point in every season where I declare my hatred for the show and its premise, and I swear I'll never watch again. It's ageist. It's sexist. It's racist. Contestants are forever getting their feelings bruised by others who excuse their hurtful behavior by insisting that it's just a game or that there are a million reasons why they've done what they have. There's no such thing as trust in Survivor. It's not fair. It never turns out the way I want it to. Still, I watch.

I think one of my strengths as a teacher is in recognizing a good lesson when I see it. Websites, books, presentations, professional development, you name it, if there's half a good idea there, I can find the value in it, adapt it, and use it to help my students learn.

Here's where this story ends: We got off the bus in the warm, golden light of an early June evening. Tired and happy, our students dispersed like seeds from a dandelion, floating across the parking lot to their waiting parents, murmurs on the breeze about the trip, the ship, the ocean, the dolphins, all the things they would never forget. A few days later, Leila cleaned out her classroom and moved her stuff to her new school.

Ten

Blind-sided. Shocked. Blown away. Amazed. Astounded. Knocked for a loop. Dumbfounded. Never saw it coming.

That was me when Leila left my room one Friday afternoon in the early spring of that year. She had applied for a job at another school. Her interview was the next week, but she was pretty confident she'd get the position. She didn't want me to hear it from anyone else. She'd been unhappy in her job for a while now, and this change seemed like what she needed.

Disappointed. Hurt. Angry. Confused.

That was me the more I thought about it. After all those years of waiting, we finally had our own team, and now she was leaving. Why? And just what sort of change was she looking for, anyway? She had applied to teach the exact same thing, but at one of the north county schools.

Silent. Resentful.

That was me whenever I was around Leila after that, which was as little as I could manage and still do my job. "Just give her time," I heard one of our colleagues whisper to her as I gathered my things immediately after adjourning our team meeting, and left the room, head down.

Lost.

Never in my whole career had I been without Wes or Leila on my team. What was I going to do without them?

Nine

Leila was the type of person to take almost everything to heart. I always considered that one of her greatest strengths, but I wonder if it may have been a weakness, too. A devout young woman, she told me once that she prayed for each student in her homeroom, by name, every night. Maybe it was naive of me to think so, but it didn't seem that our religious differences divided us. I know that Leila genuinely liked and respected me, and I never felt judged by her.

The failings of our students were a different matter, though. Leila really struggled with the students who didn't do as they should. When kids don't do what they're "supposed" to do, there are only so many places a teacher can put the blame: Is it the students? Their parents? Or is it, somehow, you?

Once I was keeping a student from P.E because he hadn't done his work. I was frustrated, and he was furious, and he looked me dead in the eye, his own eyes bright with tears, and he shook his head and told me that it that didn't matter what I did, I couldn't make him do anything he didn't want to do, and at that moment, I understood he was right.

How different he was than I was when I was a kid: I did what I was asked because I was afraid to get in trouble. That wasn't the case with many of our students. I'll never forget the first time I called home and had a parent hang up on me, nor the first conference where I heard a parent say, "I don't know what to do; he just doesn't listen." Often we found ourselves in a losing game of escalating consequences.

Add all of that to the fact that we weren't the kind of teachers who threw candy bars at our students when they did what they should; we believed in intrinsic motivation and right for right's sake. We wanted our students and their parents to do what they should because it was the right thing to do, and when they didn't, it was maddening. We complained to each other and did our best to problem-solve, but at the end of the school day, I guess I just dismissed it as another of the challenges of the job, but Leila had a hard time letting it go.

Eight

I live and work in one of the smallest counties in the United States. It is 26 square miles, not more than 10 miles, end-to-end, at its farthest points. We are a densely populated county, though, located adjacent to a major U.S. city. My county is very affluent, and with one of the highest per-pupil expenditures in the country, we are widely considered to have a first-rate school system. Newsweek Magazine consistently ranks all four of our high schools in the top 2% of the nation.

That is an overall picture of our success, and you would think that it would be an accurate depiction of all the schools in our district, as small as we are. But in the 8.14 miles it takes to make it from the northernmost school in our county to the southernmost, the difference in ethnic, racial and socio-economic demographics is startling, and so, not surprisingly, there is a discrepancy in test scores as well.

The perception that the north-county schools are somehow better because of their superior test scores stings a little to those of us who work in the more diverse, less affluent neighborhoods. There is an underlying sense of elitism that we resent, even though teachers all over the county debate about which type of student is more challenging-- those with over-involved parents or those who would probably benefit from some more parent support. Many times, throughout my career, I've had people tell me how admirable I am to work with the population I do, and when those words come from fellow educators, they are often followed by, "I don't know how you do it... I just want to teach, y'know?" as if what I'm doing is somehow more or less than that.

Lucky Number Seven

I wish I could point to one specific thing that went wrong that year, but when I search my memory, I don't come up with anything. Was it hard? Yep. The leadership learning curve was steeper than it looked from the safety of the sidelines. Teaching is a profession where, not only do they expect you to come in and do the exact same job that a veteran of 20 or 30 years does, but there are also extra duties that we are encouraged to accept with little or no preparation. I was managing a team of adults, in addition to my already demanding full-time job, yet I had zero management experience or training. In retrospect, I guess I should be happy it wasn't worse.

There were the usual disagreements about field trips and activities, some conflict about student schedule changes, different philosophies of discipline and consequences. Did we try to implement some consistent behavior and homework policies across the team? Maybe so; I honestly don't remember, but if we did, we were not successful. Another true thing about teaching, especially in our district, is that teachers have a lot of autonomy, especially when the door is closed, and they don't give it up easily. Once again, there were some strong personalities on the team, Leila and the math teacher often went head-to-head, but now the hands that were full with keeping the peace were mine. It turned out that I wasn't the type of leader to lay down the law and coerce my teammates to go along. I wanted consensus, and when people didn't agree with me, I was surprised to discover that I was willing to compromise.

I assume the kids that year were challenging; I know they weren't any easier than usual, but, again, nothing stands out in my mind. I do know this: One time Leila and I were discussing classroom management. She was telling me about a book she had read in which the author had described four distinct management styles. The one she was drawn to was well-defined, with rules and consequences specific and clear. Another was called "with-it-ness", or something like that, where there were minimum formal guidelines and the teacher relied on her own awareness of what was happening in the room and her subsequent judgment. "I think I'm with-it-ness," I laughed, to which Leila readily agreed, and the conversation ended there, but I wonder now if that was a clue to a big difference between us.

Part 6

For some reason, we had always taken it for granted that when the time came, I would be team leader. In addition to that one year of seniority, I was older than Leila by nine years, and I guess that's a lot of extra living when you're in your twenties and early thirties. Our long-range plan was to take turns as team leader once we got things established, but when the next school year started, it was I who was formally in charge.

That first month was filled with promise and opportunity. In one of our very first team meetings, Leila proposed changing the name of our team from the High Flyers to the Dolphins, and that seemed like a perfect inaugural gesture and the prelude to all we hoped to accomplish. For years we had gritted our teeth whenever the students had asked why we had to be the High Flyers when the other sixth grade team had a cool name like the Turbo Tigers, and we quickly grew tired of being forced to defend a lame nickname that we had had no part in choosing. "Seriously?" we'd ask each other, "What the hell is a high flyer anyway?" The other team had ferocious predators or cute images of Hobbes the tiger as their mascots, and we were stuck with random airplanes, hot-air balloons and the occasional UFO as our symbols. Plus, there was the unfortunate association of illegal intoxication when using "high" as an adjective. Unanimously, the team jumped in favor of the name change.

As far as the personnel changes that year, there were a couple of interesting ones: the Dolphins became the home to our school's Category II Special Education Class-- a self-contained program for severely cognitively impaired kids-- so their teacher was on our team, and in addition to her, the science teacher who had so abruptly left our team after my first year, the one Leila had been hired to replace, rejoined us as the math teacher. That gave us two more strong women who did not hesitate to speak their minds.

(yes, there's more on the way, but we're getting close)