REWARD: $1000 for Lost Marbles

I have lost my marbles.

This phrase plays on repeat in my mind. Particularly around 1:58 p.m., when 6^th period starts meandering in. I can feel my internal eyes roll as I greet the 10^th graders.

“Ms. Daily, do we have to do vocab today?”

“Ms. Daily, can I go to the bathroom?”

“I really hate reading Oedipus; can we skip reading today?”

“Does everyone need a Chromebook?”

I don’t know how many times I’ve said to each class, “Come in and read the board. When we are all here I’ll go over our agenda for today.” All the classes, but especially 6^th period, are like herding cats that have each had a pot of coffee. While they work on their vocabulary exercises, I walk around the room glancing at desks to see who is actually working. My mind wanders through the last several years…

I have two kids, a thirteen-year-old and a ten-year-old. I have worked at a daycare for the last five years. Now, I am student teaching. I am surrounded with children 24/7.

I have lost my marbles.

I look at the next desk as I pass and see that Marvin doesn’t even have a pencil out. I pass the next desk and see Rebecca asleep. My blood starts to boil.

“Okay guys, pass up your vocab. I’ll be grading not only for completion but for accuracy!”

In unison the voices groan, “Nooooooooo, Ms. Daily! That’s not fair!”

“Then wake up and do your work.”

The silence stays and my mind wanders again. Can I do this? Can I really make students feel like their thoughts are important when I really want to shout at them that they’re idiots?! Every time I see a phone I want to throw it. Every time I see a student asleep in class I don’t want to just shake their shoulder to wake them up. I want to slap them upside the head and force them to listen to a lecture about how they don’t know how good they have it.

I have lost my marbles.

But then…

Alyssa, who is the bane of my existence, who lives to see just how long I can hold my patience, approaches my desk. I look up and ask her if she’s okay. Alyssa smiles at me. I brace myself for some sarcastic comment.

“I just wanted to tell you I have actually been excited about coming to class. Normally I hate lit. But this has been pretty sick. Like weird and twisted. But sick. You know what sick means, right?”

I laugh, nod my head yes, and give her my best smile.

Inside my head, I break down crying. I hand her $1000 and tell her thank you for finding my marbles.

How To Move On When It Just Isn’t Working

Joe and I were in a serious relationship for a number of years. When we met, I had no intention of getting involved. I honestly thought that Joe was overrated. I’d heard all of the rumors. People either loved him or hated him. I’ll be honest, he had a reputation. Once people spent enough time with him, they were hooked. I knew I’d be stronger than the masses. Joe wasn’t going to break me. As I tried to avoid him, he somehow found every single way to show up. I’d run into him in the mornings and as I ran errands–literally everywhere.

Anytime I saw him, I’d avoid contact. I used every excuse in the book. It’s not you, it’s me…I’m just not ready for something like this…You’re not my type…and my personal favorite…I’m just not that into you. Nothing worked, so I found myself caving.

I kept it casual at first because I didn’t want feelings to get too strong. We saw each other once a week at the most. That only lasted so long. I soon got so attached that I felt I needed him to even function. If I wasn’t with Joe, I was thinking about Joe.

Our relationship soon turned into a rollercoaster of emotions. One minute we loved each other, and then the next minute we were fighting. One of his exes reached out to me–she said “run while you can.” I started having my doubts. He seemed so great. Joe could make you feel like you were capable of anything as long as he remained by your side.

The days Joe wasn’t around were hard and long. I couldn’t take it. There were days when I would stay in bed because I couldn’t function without him.

My friends sat me down one day and told me that this relationship needed to stop. They let me know that life was not meant to be lived being this dependent on someone as terrible as Joe. I was in denial. I let them know Joe and I were fine because I truly believed we were. My friends decided to challenge me to something because I just wasn’t understanding what they were saying.

In January of 2018, I was challenged to give up caffeine. Yes…Joe is a cup of coffee.

Queue the groaning, eye-roll, and sighs.

I had never truly been hooked on caffeine until student teaching began back in August. I used to be the person you wanted to punch in the face in the morning. You know what I’m talking about. The person who sings with the birds, cooks an elaborate breakfast, exercises, and usually reads for fun…all before 7:00am. I’ve never been the person that needs coffee in order to wake up. But between edTPA and early morning commutes, I found myself needing that extra pick-me-up.

And as my caffeine-less mind reflects upon teaching and coffee and everything good in the world, I think I’ve found a connection. Too much of anything isn’t great, and the excess of whatever that thing is can turn into a bad habit. Five cups of coffee a day isn’t the best habit to have (before you say anything, I know five cups is a lot). I’d argue that five worksheets in one class period is also a terrible habit.

Teaching routines and practices are a lot like a bad caffeine addiction. It starts out harmless, and it honestly feels good. Then that new thing becomes the new normal. The tough reality of habits is the fact that they are hard to break. The breaking of a bad habit takes work, takes time, and usually involves a bit of pain and discomfort along the way. As I watch veteran teachers doing their thing, I’ve found myself making comments like “I’ll never do that” and “they don’t need to teach.” As I continue to discover my teacher identity, I’m realizing that making those comments may be the most dangerous thing to do. As Justin Bieber says, “never say never.”

Again…queue the eye-roll and internal groaning.

I told myself I wouldn’t drink coffee, but when I started drinking coffee, my life felt like it was getting easier. If I promise to not do x, y, or z while teaching, I may very well end up doing those things because they make my life feel easier.

Just like I had to have a tough (and humorous) conversation about my caffeine addiction, I think we (as educators) need to have similar conversations about our teaching practices. We need to ask ourselves what we are dependent on. We need to evaluate what is healthy and what needs to go. We need to be okay with change, even when it hurts.

Do I still drink coffee? I’d be lying if I said no. I may or may not be drinking a GRANDE from Starbucks at the moment. The difference now is that I’m not dependent on caffeine. Studies show that coffee is actually good for you. Just like a little coffee is okay, I do believe that a worksheet, workday, independent work, and any other questionable teaching practice every now and then is okay too. The moment when a worksheet day becomes our new normal as teachers is when we probably (really) need to have that tough conversation.

So, how do you move on from teaching practices when they just aren’t working? How do you get rid of those bad habits and inaccurate beliefs about students and learning?

Community.

I most definitely did a WebMD search on how to get rid of a caffeine addiction, but I don’t believe teaching habits are broken by weaning off of worksheets or quitting things cold-turkey. I believe lasting change and transformation for educators happens within professional communities.

It’s organizations like NCTE and GCTE. It’s professional development days. It’s those teaching friends you make in the hallways of your school. It’s this cohort. These communities are the ones that allow us to break those bad habits. Why? They demand accountability. They offer new perspectives. They hold friendships. They inspire creativity. They keep education alive. They call you out when you can’t see what’s wrong.

But most importantly…they believe in the same thing–that education still changes lives.

 

In Other News, the Biathlon Event is a Thing

In a lot of ways, I hate the Winter Olympics.

The weirdly tight snow suits, ski jumpers flying through the sky at an ungodly, parallel-to-the-ground rate, and moguls begging to tear the ACLs of anyone who approaches.

In so many other ways, I can’t help but to love the Winter Olympics.

That same strange-ness begs me to watch with glued eyes as I have that sick feeling where you can’t help but watch if a snowboarder has a fall or a figure skater completely eats it on a jump. There is something wistfully enjoyable about watching these Olympians mess up while you simultaneously deal with a pit in your stomach. The Olympics are sort of twisted, when you think about it. These people are the world’s best athletes. Yet, they mess up all the time, and to make it even better, it is televised for seven billion people to see.

The Olympics never fail to surprise me.

For instance, Is a Biathlon event really a thing? Trust me, I’m going somewhere with this.

Apparently, it has been around for quite some time. One hundred and fifty-seven years, to be exact. It combines the seemingly contradictory elements of skiing and shooting. The exhausting, cross-country skiing mixed with the immediate accuracy and control through shooting proves to conclude that this sport is one of the most challenging that exists. Switching from intense, high power endurance to exact control requires an obscure sense of marksmanship.

I learned about this sport when two of my students turned around and one asked me, “Ms. L, have you ever heard of a biathlon?” In my head, I was thinking, a bath lawn? Lawn that you put in your bath? What is this kid talking about? Then he spelled it out for me. B-i-a-t-h-l-o-n. Ohhhh. I see. “No, I’ve never heard of it. Is it a sport?” I proceeded to Google search this event. Mind you – this was a Friday, my students were working in the computer lab to finish the Write Score test (no comment), and there was some down time. I swear, it isn’t every day that I Google this kind of thing for one of my students.

We proceeded to watch a YouTube video, because, that’s what you do when you’re a teacher and you don’t have the answer to a question.

We watch as these athletes intensely sprint through a track on skis and stop, lay down, pull the gun off their back, and shoot at a target. Our eyes were fixated. It all started making sense. As I watched, I realized something: Biathlons are a lot like teaching.

As teachers, we are always sprinting. Around curves, uphill – sprinting to the finish line that is our “lesson.” We plan in advance, train for these big desires to make our students better people, teach them a lesson, and sometimes miss the target when we stop to shoot and follow through. It requires so much trial and error. We have to figure out which skis fit us best and will be effective enough to efficiently teach. We have to prepare our content and know it like we know the gun on our backs. Sometimes, after sprinting so hard, it becomes worth it when you realize that it’s possible to hit all of your targets.

In essence, we as teachers are Biathlon competitors. Striving to win the gold, every day.

I Didn’t Get the Flu Shot

It seems that flu season has turned my classroom into a hospital waiting room.

Picture a square, cinder-block room with encouraging posters hung on the wall in an attempt to dispel the boring lack of paint and old furniture and to perhaps insulate the room with enough color to ward off the cold. But for the student teacher, I mean nurse, whose desk is next to the window and too far from the heater, the cold creeps in anyway.

Outside that window, a beautiful courtyard designed to provide comfort for the institution’s inhabitants sits still, lonely, save the occasional passerby on their way to another corner of cinderblock. The sun hides behind a cloud, spilling a fuzzy white halo over the opposite wing of the building.

Back inside, only half of the fluorescent lights are turned on, another attempt to make the room more inviting, causing confusion for the inhabitants’ eyes: they squint in the middle of the room and widen as they gaze off into a dark corner to collect their thoughts, only to squint again when they return to the lit screen in front of them.

The room’s inhabitants are in a peculiar state of collaboration; little in common that they know of, they become companions in this place as they wait to see their loved ones and proceed with their lives at the end of the day. And the nurse at the desk by the window watches, wondering how she will transform that day of waiting into something memorable for them. You see, she has been put in charge of the waiting room. Her job is to take care of the waiters, to provide what they need, which means something different for each one.

Some of her waiters are simply bored; they know that they will leave that day, “graduate” if you will, and go on to whatever they feel like doing. They need to be challenged. Others know that their lives are about to change forever because they are here for something important. They need to be celebrated, encouraged. Still others, usually those who sit in the back with headphones in their ears, pretending to drown out their surroundings, are broken with doubt and uncertainty. They forget or refuse to take care of themselves, so the nurse has to constantly remind them to eat, drink water, and know that they can do this. She has been at this job for a little while now and has begun to feel comfortable, capable. She knows how to see what her waiters need and help them get it.

Enter flu season, slithering through the cold window to remind her that she still has so much to learn.

Now, in addition to the nurse’s usual responsibilities, she has to keep her waiters safe from sickness, constantly wiping down tables and passing out hand sanitizer. The waiters are dropping like flies, and each day the nurse sends another one home because they need rest and because they are endangering those around them. The hospital, where people are supposed to be healed, is now a breeding ground for the ick.  And on top of keeping her waiters healthy and taken care of, the nurse has to protect herself, which has begun to inhibit the way she usually cares for them. Suddenly the young man who needed compassion and encouragement (and who feels the need to stand too close when he talks) is a threat because he had the flu last week.

For the sake of not overdoing the metaphor, let’s transition back into my classroom.

In addition to the usual chaos, my days now include the following duties:

• Sanitize everything.
• Lecture students about hygiene and insist that they STOP TOUCHING EACH OTHER
• Talley the day’s casualties
• Sanitize again
• Reteach yesterday’s material to recovering wards while dodging their poorly-covered coughs
• Write passes to the nurse
• Realize they coughed on the pencil I just used and sanitize again
• Figure out how to condense today’s work into a makeup packet that students can teach themselves.
• Grade make-up assignments for half of my class.
• Sanitize again.
  

I’m doing my best to stay healthy. I’m writing the lesson plans, staying hydrated, taking airborne. But inevitably, I will miss something. Some germ, some problem, some intruder will get through my freshly-wiped wall. I decided not to get the flu shot, and that may come to haunt me. But I can’t cover every possibility.

So instead, I am prepared to embrace whatever germs break through and congratulate them on a job well done. There is a bottle of robitussin in my bathroom closet and a bottle of red wine on top of my refrigerator to remind me that, come hell or high fever, I will make it work.