Se Hace Camino Al Andar

It’s 7:50 am and I’m home, watching the news. Usually, I’d be rushing out the door at this point because I’d be super late. I thought I would feel like I was taking a sick day for awhile but I definitely have a sense of finality. It’s a weird feeling, especially since I know what I’m missing. I have the school schedule down pat, so when I look at the clock, I can’t help but think, “Oh, it’s first period now,” and so forth.

I had a whole plan for my first day off, but that went out the window when my husband came home from work yesterday with the flu. I’ll do what I can go around the house without disturbing him. I am definitely not on vacation, though!

My goals for February:

1. Clean out the apartment in a major way. This is for two reasons: one, to make room for the baby and two, because the kitchen is being remodeled in March. Also, we just have a lot of crap.
2. Make my wedding album. Yup, I got married four months ago and I haven’t gone anywhere near the photos nor attempted to organize them at all.
3. Take meetings with my various contacts, and talk about my freelance/contracting options. I already have two things lined up with the New York City Writing Project, but those are weekend/one-day things.

I also have to think about what direction this blog will go in. A friend asked me what I’d write about now… and it’s a good question! What will I write about? I’m still very interested in education, so I’ll still have my finger on the pulse of things…just not in the classroom. Maybe now I’ll actually have time to read the paper and my English Journal and a few books that I purchased but never got around to reading…

There’s always a straw that breaks the camel’s back.

In my case, it was a comment that someone left on this blog that I couldn’t respond to. I tried and I tried but I couldn’t because I knew he was right. The fact that I couldn’t respond deepened the despair that I was already feeling. More than once, someone has challenged my use of the Freire quote in my header. This comment, which alluded to the quote, made me realize that I’d become the very teacher that I swore I would never be. I first learned of Freire’s banking concept of education in high school, when we were assigned Lives on the Boundary, by Mike Rose, as our summer reading for SUPA English. The banking concept excerpt from Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed was a follow-up reading that Fall when we returned to school. By that point, I’d already decided that I was going to be a teacher, a decision that came after borrowing Savage Inequalities from my social studies teacher, Mr. Milligan, the year before and reading Rose’s book that summer.

Maybe that’s the problem. I got into teaching for all the wrong reasons. I was idealistic… I didn’t think I would change the world, by any means, but I thought I would infuse enlightenment into the neglected minds of these inner city kids. What can I say? I was 17. I was a senior, I’d applied to NYU early decision, the only school I’d applied to and I’d gotten in. I was coasting on Beat idealism, I was going to live in the Village, wear black, go to poetry slams, drink cheap wine and listen to the terror through the wall or something. I was going to be the radical English teacher that taught the kids to subvert the system and refuse to surrender to their destiny.

In some ways, I was the radical English teacher. I advocated for my kids like nobody’s business. When a kid had an IEP meeting and no parent could be there, I showed up and asked all the questions a parent should ask. When a kid got pissed off about a grade from another teacher they felt was unfair, I told them to fight, to get their parents to call the principal and complain loudly, because after all, that’s what suburban parents do. I told them they had rights as students, that their parents had rights as parents–they didn’t have to take anything lying down. I was frank with my kids, we talked about sex and drugs and poverty. We read poems that were not in any school-sanctioned anthology. I refused to lie to my kids when it came to life. I still do all these things. I think some of them appreciated it.

But what happened? I don’t know. I lost my sense of purpose. What was I doing? Why was I here? Was I getting through to anyone? Were they learning anything? Why was I spending my evenings and weekends writing these stupid lesson plans? A few people have suggested that maybe it’s all related to environment. If it is, it’s not because of the kids, it’s because of the administration; more like a confluence of factors that stem mostly from the physical and bureaucratic environment of where I teach/taught.

The idea that school, as an institution, stifles learning was always an uncomfortable one for me. I always loved school. I had great teachers, especially in high school. So, I don’t necessarily believe that idea to be true but after seven years in New York City, I know it can be true for a lot of kids. So, maybe I hated being part of that system, schooling as an institution. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again–I’m a hippie at heart. Maybe I should be working at the Brooklyn Free School. Who knows?

It’s 6:30 and if I don’t stop blogging, I’ll be late to work. More on this later, maybe.

I predict that I will become more crafty, in my newfound free time. Since my last day with the kids (but not my last day of work), I have made baby shower invitations by hand, and baked a yogurt cake. Next week, I’m learning to knit, if Julie and her friends don’t stab me with their needles out of frustration at my ineptness.

At least I’m doing something useful with my time, no?

Today is my last day with the kids, and I’m neither here nor there about it. I expected that I would feel a little emotional about it but maybe I’m repressing. I’m just waiting for those feelings of doubt and regret to set in, but so far, nothing. I feel incredibly at ease with my decision and don’t feel sad about today. To me, these are all signs that I’m doing the right thing. I’m a very instinctual person, and I like to be reassured that following my gut was the right thing to do, so these emotional signs are important to me. (I’m a closet new age hippie, didn’t you know?)

My last, last day is the 29th, so I’m around for Regents Week and gone by the time the kids come back for the second semester, on the 31st. I’ve already formed a mental list of projects around the house that I need to get done. I’m looking forward to having the time and space to get the house ready for the parasite-slash-alien’s imminent arrival, and to take care of myself.

I told y’all awhile back to save the date for the New York City Writing Project’s 10th annual Teacher to Teacher conference. An official announcement has been put up on the NYCWP site, so for more information, click here!

Midterms are SO boring. The first day was a little exciting because the kids wouldn’t shut up and settle down but by the second day, they were buckling down to work, rendering an uncommon quiet over the room, so I just sit/stand there and proctor, waiting for the bell to ring.

I’m not looking forward to grading them but they have to be done quickly because the powers that be always schedule midterms right before report cards are due. So it’s grade, grade, grade for a few days. At least, this time, I know this will be my last round of testing and grading for awhile.

Weirdly enough, I haven’t had any anxiety dreams about leaving. If you know me well enough, then you know this is quite a feat. Though it is possible that my weird baby dreams are overpowering my school anxiety dreams. Speaking of those weird baby dreams, I had a dream that my friend Sue gave birth to an American Girl doll, and a different dream in which I threw a baby shower for that same friend but there was no food or cake or anything, despite all my hard and earnest planning. Baby on the brain, much?

I don’t know how many of my readers know this but I was born with a severe-to-profound hearing loss. This means that without my hearing aids, I’m lucky if I hear a siren wailing or other similar high-pitched, loud sounds. With my hearing-aids, I do pretty well, especially if I have a good pair of hearing aids, combined with lip-reading. In my family, my mother has a progressive hearing loss and my little sister is hard-of-hearing. My two older sisters have normal hearing. This means, for me, that our baby will have a 50% chance of being born deaf.

Henry and I have been having lots of “what-if” discussions and last night, we watched Sound and Fury, a documentary about two families (the husbands are brothers, one deaf, one not) divided by the issue of cochlear implants. The arguments are emotional and defensive on one side, and rational and pragmatic on the other side. My mother would like me to get a cochlear implant but I’m not keen on the idea. For one thing, I’m too old and I don’t have the patience to relearn language, which is what happens when a person gets the implant. Second, my hearing aids work for me. It’s no miracle device but I can hear little sounds like fans blowing and horns honking.

As for our kids, we’re on the fence about cochlear implants. What we agree on at this point, is that if we have a deaf child, he will be taught both speech and sign. My parents made the decision to teach me only speech, and it was the right decision at the time but to this day, I have no deaf friends and I don’t know sign language. I don’t necessarily need deaf friends but when I was a kid, my social life existed in a state of limbo. I straddled the hearing and deaf worlds, not fully accepted by either until I was much older, after college. I guess I had to wait for everyone to grow up! Being deaf also made me socially retarded in a lot of ways. Hearing people, I think, take for the granted the social cues they pick up just by listening and being able to hear what’s going on. For deaf people, social cues have to be taught or witnessed visually.

Education and schooling is another issue. I went to the Clarke School for the Deaf in Northampton, for a year, in 5th grade. The Clarke School is an oral language school, so no sign was used or taught (by the teachers, anyway…I learned plenty from my dorm-mates and classmates!) It was a great social experience for me, but I only stayed for a year because academically, it wasn’t rigorous enough. I’ve been mainstreamed since 1st grade, so I was in “regular” classes moving at the same pace as my hearing peers up until that point. One of the subjects in Sound and Fury expressed the oft-stated sentiment that schools for the deaf are horrible, and the average deaf high school graduate reads on a 4th grade reading level (did you know that most major newspapers are written at a 6th grade reading level or higher?) These are statistics I grew up with and these are the statistics that drove my parents to choose an oral-language program for me. These are the statistics that I want to avoid for my own children. A deaf child with educated parents is much better off in this situation, and as a teacher, I have the advantage of being able to confidently and knowledgably assess the strength of an educational program. Henry and I are moving to the Pioneer Valley area next year, where the Clarke School is located. If we have a deaf child, most likely, he will attend Clarke’s early-childhood program and receive speech therapy there but we will also seek out programs to learn sign language. I don’t want my child to straddle. I want him to be able to leap the fence at will, and be comfortable on either side.

The documentary was interesting and thought-provoking. I recommend it to anyone, regardless of their experience with deaf people. The arguments and emotions will be familiar to anyone who comes from a deaf family, has a deaf child, sibling or parent.

DonorsChoose.org: LCD Projector to Model and Enhance Writing Skills

My friend Tamara, out in LA, who teaches high school English, needs a projector for her classroom. She’s submitted a proposal on DonorsChoose. I urge you to check it out and donate, if you can. A little bit from everyone goes a long way!

It’s getting harder and harder to go to work these days. Besides the usual not-feeling-well-in-the-morning thing, every day reminds me how much I’ll miss my kids and my co-workers. I’ve yet to feel twinges of self-doubt that I’m making the wrong decision, though. My kids, they don’t get it and I don’t know if they ever will. All they see is a nice teacher that they can talk to. I don’t know if they understand that it’s not enough, that they need a teacher who will come in there everyday, organized and ready to go and getting them engaged in learning. To be sure, I’m chockful of ideas and I give those ideas away all the time, but when it comes to implementing those ideas in my own classroom, I hit a wall.  A very hard wall. (You should see the bruises on my forehead!) A few kids have blamed other kids for my leaving, citing their behavior and saying I should ignore them. I wish it were that simple, kids!

Some co-workers have suggested being an Assistant Principal. I think I’m way too passive-aggressive for that but it’s surprising how other people can such a different perception of me, than I do of myself. Apparently, I’m not passive-aggressive at all. Go figure. In any case, I think being an administrator would make me pull my hair out. I do not envy my AP and all the pressure he is under. Just like we teachers sometimes resent being accountable for kids whose situations are beyond our control, APs are accountable for teachers in the same way. Anyway, I don’t see myself going in that direction.

So, people are upset that I’m leaving, especially the parent of one of my students who works in the school. I think they are just surprised. To them, it feels like it came out of nowhere. Of course, it didn’t and an very observant person probably would’ve seen it coming.

This week and next week are about wrapping up loose ends.  As the staff adviser for my school’s Opening Act program,  I needed to find someone to take my place (done!). I have teachers’ choice money to spend (joy! staples, here I come!). I plan to get lots of goodies and supplies for my fellow department members. I need to clean up my room and throw away massive amounts of paper. I need to put my class texts back into the book room. And on and on. I’m sure I can think of more things I need to do before I leave.

I also need to step up my search for a part-time job. I’ve put a few feelers out there to contacts that I have, including the Writing Project and NBC (where I did freelance work last Spring). I wonder if there are actual literacy coach jobs out there? From what I hear, they are few and far between. If your school needs a literacy coach, e-mail me!

I’ve been sharing both pieces of my news with the kids. They are super-excited about the baby (“You gonna name it Dave, right, after me?”), and a range of emotions emerge in response to my impending leave, from disbelief (“You dead ass?” “Why!?” “I don’t like you no more, miss!” “You can’t leave us!”). It’s hard to explain it to the kids without making them feel that it’s their fault, which it absolutely isn’t. I choose my words carefully and be sure to frame it in terms of “me,” “I,” etc. I tell them, “you deserve a better teacher, someone who wants to do their job.” They say, “But you’re a great teacher. You’re a good teacher.” My response: “Just because I’m nice doesn’t mean I’m a good teacher.” And it’s true. They want to know who will teach them and they make threats to drop out or stop coming to class if it’s this teacher or that teacher. I say, “there will be a new teacher hired to replace and whoever it is, will do her job a lot better than I do mine, and you will get the learning you deserve.” That is usually met with a chorus of moans and grumbles. My sweet kids. They love me, they do and I love them back, even the pains in the asses.

Ultimately, though, it’s not enough. My dissatisfaction grows with every passing day, I develop psychosomatic symptoms, I feel despair creeping in, as much as I try to keep it at bay. I get closer and closer everyday to being ready to articulate the feelings that drove me to quit.  I know that I will have to deal with a loss of identity, in a way. Here I am, having thought that teaching would be my life’s work, and at one point, I really and truly felt this way. I had many, many days in which I sat at my desk, staring at an empty classroom, and felt overwhelmed by the feeling that, “yes, I am a teacher and I want to spend the rest of my career teaching. I belong here.” I haven’t felt that way in a long, long time and so now, comes the hard work of grappling with that loss and finding a new purpose, which is somewhere in education, to be sure, probably in the vein of coaching and consulting.

A teacher yesterday said to me, “Where would Martin Luther King, Jr. have been if he quit?” I laugh at the idea that anything I do can be even remotely compared to the work of MLK, Jr.  My response: “The biggest difference between me and Martin Luther King, Jr. is that I have no desire to change the world.” True, maybe MLK, Jr didn’t have that desire in the beginning but he surely did at some point. Otherwise, why crusade? Why subject to yourself to hardship and danger? You do those things when your conviction that the world can be changed is so strong, that there is nothing else to do but press on in the face of hostility. That is not me. That is not my reason for teaching. (Don’t ask me–”So, what is your reason?,” because I certainly don’t know anymore.)

Anyway, I’ve said a lot more than what I intended to say when I started this post. I’m sure there will be more to come, as I continue to process my decision. I can identify exactly the straw that broke this camel’s back but I’m still working on how to explain that without making it seem like I’m assigning blame. Bear with me.  Your (constructive) comments are welcome.