Nine

On the day that I received the phone call telling me that I finally had a teaching job of my own, I was babysitting my oldest nephew, who was a little over a year old at the time, and it was with him that I celebrated my new career-- we went out to lunch and got balloons. Hooray Aunt Tracey! Since then, I have had the great privilege of teaching both him and his brother when they were in sixth grade.

I have no children of my own, and it's likely that these boys are the closest thing I will ever know to that. Both of them are smart, thoughtful and inquisitive people who demonstrated curiosity and a genuine delight in learning from the earliest of ages. When they were little, it seemed as if they were destined to do well in school, and they have. Neither one of them particularly likes school, though, and that's a fact I find hard to dismiss. They are intelligent, compliant and successful, but they don't like school.

Eight

The other day I was in the computer lab when another class came in. It was at the end of my teaching day, and my students had gone on to P.E. and electives. I was gathering my things and straightening up the lab when a small group of eighth graders arrived. Their teacher gave the directions, and they logged in and were waiting for their settings to load when someone said, "Why do we have to do that?"

"It's school, Dummy," another student answered.

"Man! I HATE school," the first student replied in disgust.

The other students laughed. "EVERYBODY hates school, Dummy," one of his classmates told him.

"I wish I could have my own school," another student added. "Nobody would ever have to come."

What's the objective of compulsory public education anyhow? Is it for the good of society or for the benefit of the individual? I suppose most people would agree to a middle ground where the purpose of education is to prepare the individual for success which in turn will benefit society by adding one more productive citizen to our numbers. That's the theory, anyway. How, then, do we resolve it when the needs of the individual clash with the needs of the group? Or when the school doesn't prepare the individual for success? What then?

When it came time for Ruth's boys to go to school, they didn't like it. For three years she tried switching schools and changing programs, but they were profoundly unhappy and chronically complained of having to go, and so she resolved to try homeschooling them, instead.

Intermission

And now a brief respite from the tale of my teaching trajectory:

I decided to do a Slice of Life Story Challenge with my students for the month of May. I started writing this blog as part of such a challenge, sponsored by the Two Writing Teachers website (which is an excellent resource). My goal in participating was always to find an application for my classroom, although I've discovered much more over the last 70 days. In our state, May is usually chopped up by standardized tests and the like, and so I figured that a dependable activity on those days when we do meet this month might be helpful in maintaining consistency for my classes, especially in the face of that test craze that has a way of taking hold.

One of my objectives for this activity is for students to practice writing a conclusion that explains the significance of the experience they're writing about. I've told them that sometimes they won't understand why they remember these events or what they mean until they have written about them, and that's another of my objectives, to show kids that they can use writing to make sense of things.

So far, it seems like my students are enjoying it, and they have done some wonderful writing. One boy wrote of visiting his grandmother in Bangladesh last summer. Bored, he folded some paper airplanes and launched them off the balcony of her apartment. Watching the planes glide to earth, he saw another boy, close to his own age, who was working as a street cleaner, lift one from the ground and then look up, searching the skies for its origin. I looked at him, and I knew he wanted to learn. So I made more planes and wrote instructions in each of them and sent them down to him. In his conclusion he reflects on how lucky he is to be able to go to school and learn when so many children in Bangladesh can't afford the same opportunity.

I think he's getting it.

(And that's what I mean about writing for discovery. It wasn't until I posted this entry that I realized it wasn't an intermission at all.)

Seven

Sometimes I find it hard to believe that I am the product of private schools. When I was thirteen, my family moved to Saudi Arabia, and that was the end of my public school experience. I went to an international school there and then on to boarding school in Switzerland for high school.

Living overseas was life-changing: I think it's hard for Americans to develop a true international perspective any other way, maybe because our culture is so dominant-- so loud and brash-- that it's nearly impossible for us to hear any other voices but our own. I don't mean that in an entirely critical way; it's simply that the vibrancy of our American life preoccupies us, leaving very little room for anything else.

As a teenager abroad, I missed the din of the States, and I brooded about how deprived I was living in the foothills of the Alps and traveling all over the world. I was convinced that all I wanted was a "normal" kid's life with Doritoes and Dr. Pepper and Friday night football games.

Yeah, I was an idiot (and on so many levels!), but losing out on all those things also meant that I never suffered through the downside of American public schools. Maybe that's part of the reason why, that to this day, I carry a fierce idealism about public education, despite how well-acquainted I have become with its flaws.

Six

I won the pool when Ruth's first baby was born. It was during the pre-service week of my second year of teaching, and my guess was closest to his weight and date of birth. The year before, her principal had pulled through right at the end of August and hired me to teach sixth grade English (mostly on the merits of my spaghetti cooking, I think), and it was he who stepped to the mike during one of those endless faculty meetings we have before the students return and announced the good news that our colleague was a new mom.

Sometimes, the longer you know someone, the more you find that you agree on, but the opposite was true for me and Ruth. Don't get me wrong: the longer I knew her, the more I liked her, and our disagreements never got personal, but we had some distinct political and ideological differences. Ruth's empathy for the students was unparalleled, though, and I wasn't at all surprised when she took a high school job at the end of that year. I understood that theater had always been a safe place for her when she was a teenager, and she wanted to provide that for other kids. And so we parted ways again.

Five

The kids in my class turned out to be rising first graders, which just means that they were really kindergartners who could benefit from summer school. I'd done half of my student teaching in first grade, and so I set up a routine like the one I knew. My class was mostly boys, all Latino and Black, but it was one of the three little girls, Cecilia, who challenged my authority on that first day.

I gathered the children in a circle on the carpet. "Welcome to first grade," I started.

Cecilia frowned and shook her head; then she looked me straight in the eye. "No, miss, we're in kindergarten," she corrected me. There were a few nods from the group assembled around me.

"Kindergarten's over," I said firmly. "You're first graders now. Let's get to work." And that's how it went for the next four weeks. If any students said they couldn't do what we were doing, I told them that they simply had no choice-- first grade demanded it from them.

And, whichever it was, a high tide of either confident inexperience or inexperienced confidence, fifteen little boats were raised a bit that summer. Even so, I cried as I carried my box of books and classroom supplies out to the car on the last day, because as great as summer school had been, it was August, and I still didn't have a teaching job.

Four

After the foundations course, my path diverged from Ruth's. With a resume as a professional actress, she was working toward being a high school drama teacher, and I was more interested in elementary, so we didn't have any more classes together. Then, before we had even finished our degree program, Ruth was hired mid-year to replace the drama teacher at the same middle school that she had attended. Meanwhile, once we graduated in December, I was taking any sub job that they called me for, working all over the county, trying to find a toe-hold in what was turning out to be a very tricky job market for me. In February, Ruth organized a dinner theater at her school, and as a favor, I did the cooking with a crew of middle school kids. After curtain call on the last evening, she introduced me to her principal, who shook my hand, complimented the spaghetti and meatballs, and promised to keep me in mind for any openings.

The school year ended, and I didn't have a teaching position. I was just about to take a summer job as a tourmobile guide, when I got a phone call offering me a summer school class-- four weeks of first grade language arts. On a hot day near the end of June, I walked into my first real classroom: 15 desks crammed into a tiny room off the library with bookshelves covered in brown paper. The place had a decidedly "pardon our mess" vibe, but I couldn't have cared less. There was a chalkboard and me, and students on the way.