Help Wanted

A big chunk of of my day yesterday was spent in a conference room as part of a committee interviewing for a teaching vacancy on my team. There were several candidates, and I would have been happy to work with any of them, but obviously the whole idea was to pick the best one. With that in mind, we asked a series of questions about planning, assessment, differentiation, philosophy, discipline, technology, teaming, inter-disciplinary units, and what the students should take with them at the end of the course. After a while, it all ran together, and if you asked me to described the people we interviewed without referring to my notes, I might say:

energetic undisciplined creative inexperienced polished rambling well-versed uninspiring knowledgeable clueless thoughtful unprepared student-centered short intense-eye-contact tall young firm-handshake thirsty

All four of us on the committee were women, as were four of the six applicants for the job. Three of the people we spoke to were applying for their very first teaching job, two straight out of school, and one as a "career-switcher." The others had between 3-11 years of experience.

The interviews were informative, but the conversations we had in between were way more interesting. So often it seems that a person will have an advantage in teaching because he is male. This was true with at least one member of our interview team: "If we can get a qualified man, we should," she said. There was discussion about our professional responsibility to encourage and support new teachers, and the time it takes to do that. We talked about the programs that expedite certification for career-switchers and whether or not they properly prepare their participants for the classroom, and what made a new colleague a "project" versus somebody who might fit right in.

In the end, I think we made a sound choice, but only time will tell. I'm in no hurry to apply for a job, though, of that I am very certain.

Happy Birthday to Me

I spent my eighteenth birthday at Heathrow Airport. I was working as a counselor at a summer school outside of London, and it was my job that day to collect the students flying in from some forty different countries and direct them to the school van circling outside. We had names and flight numbers, of course, and there I was, that person holding that sign when you exit customs.

In between flights, I was on my own at the airport, which wasn't an unfamiliar place at all for an airline brat like me. I browsed the bookshops and kiosks, and made myself comfortable in hard orange plastic chairs nibbling chocolate and reading magazines. The weirdest thing about the day was that no one but me knew it was my birthday. I wasn't sure what to do with the information: I hadn't known anyone I was working with for longer than a couple of days, and it didn't seem like it was relevant, so as I wandered the airport shepherding nervous kids, every now and then I'd startle myself with the reminder that this day was my birthday-- I was 18. It was like wiggling a loose tooth-- I would forget all about it when I was occupied with something else, but once I remembered it, I couldn't leave it be. Alone, doing my job in the middle of thousands of strangers from all over the world, I wondered if this was what it was like to be an adult.

That night after all the new students were checked in with lights out, I sat in one of the other counselor's room playing cards and drinking warm ale that someone had fetched from the pub down the road and feeling pretty grown up having made it through my first solo bithday. There came a merry knock at the Tudor diamond glass window we had pushed open to the cool night air, and there was my mom and dad and brother and sister! They had re-routed their flight home from vacation in Portugal to stop overnight in London and surprise me. We spent a happy ninety minutes celebrating with my new colleagues-- "Why didn't you tell us it was your birthday?" they scolded me-- and then at midnight, my family left to get a few hours of sleep at the hotel before their flight, and I went off to bed, too, still feeling pretty grown up, but also really glad that I hadn't been alone on my birthday.

Volunteers

Back from a week away, the dog and I took a walk around the neighborhood to see what's new. I noticed right away that the Golden Rain trees are a bit past their bloom and dropping their tiny flowers in bright yellow puddles beneath their boughs. This is another tree that reminds me of my grandmother-- they grew tall and shady in her backyard, and when she died, my aunt pulled a seedling from a crack in the patio and planted it in her own garden. Years later, when they were reviled as "trash trees" by the person I loved, my eyes fell, and I felt my face go stony with disloyalty when I did not speak up to defend them.

One of my neighbors has a sweet little gardenia flowering by her door. I stopped earlier today to smell one of the fragrant blossoms and was sad to see that it was gone when I went by again this afternoon. That's the thing about common landscaping: some people act as if it's theirs alone. Another of our neighbors regularly cuts luxurious bouquets of day lilies from their beds. That doesn't seem right to me.

The strangest thing I noticed today, though, was that scattered all over the complex in odd beds here and there are some huge squash vines. They are flowering but no fruit has set, so it's hard to say exactly what they are. My theory as to how they got here involves free mulch from the county that probably never got hot enough to kill any stray seeds, but I also favor the notion of some kind of modern-day Johnny Squashseed hijacking our well-manicured condo gardens to cultivate some seasonal local produce. Such an act of renegade sowing might provide a nice counterbalance to those who reap without regard for the rest of us.

On the Road (Again)

Saturdays are never a good day to travel, especially if you're trying to use anything close to the I-95 corridor in the mid-Atlantic states, and, if your route involves a tunnel? Forget about it. Last Saturday it took us 5 1/2 hours to make a trip to the beach that used to take a little under 4 when we lived there. Today was even worse.

My brother, who was about a half an hour ahead of us sitting in stop and go traffic, told me that my nearly 17-year-old nephew asked him when we were going to get hover cars. "Haven't they been promising them your whole life?" he asked, and my brother had to admit it was true-- starting with the Jetsons on forward, flying cars have definitely been one of the glaring unkept pledges of those white-coated technocrats with their horn-rimmed glasses who starred in all the science movies we saw in school. Beyond that wild dream though, my brother also observed that this was evidence that the infrastructure we have now can't really support the population who uses it regularly.

Back in our aging station wagon, the threat of overheating encouraged us to try various alternate routes. On those less-traveled roads, my eye landed on the likes of Two Frogs on a Bike Antiques, plenty of Queen Anne's Lace and escaped orange day lilies decorating the side of the road, three or four of those long and low old-fashioned motels whose single doors lead to tidy little cubes of rooms, so organized and space-efficient (how are they still open so far from the interstate?), and a hundred mimosa trees in full bloom-- their flowers always remind me of my grandmother's pink slippers.

By far, our two biggest mistakes today were the times we decided to get back on the interstate in the hopes that it was clearer, and we made those choices because we were so focused on our destination-- home-- but the journey was spoiled, and we didn't get there any quicker.

Seaside 7: Sunset, Sunrise

On the east coast, the sun does not set over the ocean. There are lovely sunrises for those who get up early enough, but for a sunset over water, you have to be on a mighty big lake or bay. Tonight, as the sunset washed the sky behind a bunch of houses and trees to our west a faded pink, we bid the first farewell of our vacation. My mom has a 6 AM flight in the morning, and so she left to stay with some friends who live closer to the airport. After yet another perfect day at the beach, some late afternoon Wii Karaoke, and a great dinner of crab cakes, homemade slaw, and salads (it pays to have high-end leftovers), there were tears-- as there always are when our family parts-- and the gray light of the dusky evening seemed to reinforce the undeniable fact that all that was left of our vacation was the packing up and getting out of the rental place by 10 AM.

A week ago I mourned the passing of another school year, despite the happy prospect of summer vacation, and tonight I'm sorry to see this time with my family end, although I look forward to the pleasures of summer at home. How lucky I am to have so much of value in my life that I can't even choose what I would love best.

Seaside 6: Death Does Not Take a Holiday

I remember the day that Elvis died. Our neighbor, Lisa Marie, who had been named for his daughter, cut through the hedge that separated our yards and appeared at the back door all dressed in black. Even aside from that spectacle, at 15, I was aware enough to get it that something big had happened, but honestly? The guy was my dad's age, and that seemed old enough to die at the time.

Ten years later, when my father did indeed die, here at the beach, after a long illness, 52 years seemed like an awfully short life, and any doubt I may have ever had about that steadily erodes with every passing year that brings me closer to that age.

This week while we've been on vacation, we've received word of the deaths of three celebrities. These days, I'm not a person who pays a lot of attention to celebrity news, but the passing of Ed McMahon and the seriousness of Farrah Fawcett's illness made their way into our meal time conversations. The shock of Michael Jackson's death today at 50 is in another category altogether. The mostly 40-something adults in our group grew up with little Michael and the Jackson Five, Thriller, and moonwalking, and although we weren't really fans, he was an icon of our generation.

In later years, his unhappiness and the strange choices he made seemed to eclipse his accomplishments; in fact, his name was like a universal punchline to my students-- it never failed to elicit a snicker or a giggle-- but I guess it all contributed to the "legend." Even so, I have to wonder if my teenaged nephews will recall his passing at all.

I, on the other hand, would like to revise my own reaction to the death of the King as well as go on the record about the death of his son-in-law, the King of Pop: those guys were way too young to go.

Seaside 5: Daily Devotion

Or... If You Lived Here, You'd be Home

What do you do every single day? My list is not extensive, but it was on my mind as I closed the door to my room in our vacation rental house so that I could write a blog entry. I brush my teeth and shower every day, too, and drink coffee in the morning, but that's about it.

When you're on vacation, it seems natural to think about what your life might be like if you lived in this place instead of just visiting for a week. You walk the beach or sit on the deck enjoying the view and think how wonderful it would be to do this every day. On the flip side, I'm notorious for packing too much whenever I travel, especially if it's a road trip. I just know I can fit all the comforts of home in the back of my station wagon, because you never know, I might need that.

This trip is a little different, because it involves trying to feel at home in a place that actually was my home once. (Minus the ocean view-- when I lived here before, I had to walk two blocks to get to the beach.) After twenty years, the waves and the wind seemed to have scrubbed the town clean for me-- no ghost crabs of the past have scuttled across my path. This week has helped me realize that whether I'm home or on vacation here or somewhere else, it's not the place that makes your life what it is, but rather the other way around.