What if someone wants crescent rolls?

I hope you’ll accept this brief invitation to join me for Christmas dinner at my granparent’s house. I promise you won’t be the only unrelated guest. You see, I have one of those families that takes in anyone who wants or needs to be there. This philosophy extends to twice-removed-family, friends, occasional strangers, and absolutely any stray animal (we don’t care if we’re late or have to risk getting run over–that dog is coming home with us). So, join us. You’ll walk in a stranger and leave with ten new Facebook friends, too much personal knowledge of those new friends, a twenty-pound plate of leftovers, and a stocking with your name on it.

My Grandmama is the voice of welcome behind these invitations, and it shouldn’t surprise you that she’s an educator. She has dedicated her entire life to making sure that the people she loves (especially her students and grandchildren) have every opportunity to be happy and successful. Long before differentiation became a trendy education term, she mastered it.

I’ve always been comforted by the understanding that my Grandmama in many ways teaches her family the way she taught her students. She taught me to love reading, and then she read aloud to me when Red Badge of Courage threatened to beat that love out of me. She doesn’t make us raise our hands at dinner, but she does make us stop to appreciate life’s teachable moments. So I can’t say it surprised me when, over a conversation about Christmas dinner with my roommate, I realized that my Grandmama differentiates for her family — right down to the menu.

Last Christmas, I stood in the kitchen with Grandmama and my dad (and probably ten other people) as we stole tastes and made the final preparations for our meal. The small kitchen somehow functions like Mary Poppin’s purse: the more people and food and laughter we cram in, the more room we have. With warm dishes on well-loved trivets concealing every inch of counter space, our menu included (but was not limited to) the following:chicken-n-dumplins, chilli, green bean casserole, mashed potatoes, mac and cheese, squash casserole (because carbs are a vegetable on Christmas), brocoli salad, regular salad, probably pasta salad, honey ham, country ham, rolls, biscuits, etc. This is not to mention the table of appetizers and desserts downstairs.

Our excitement for the feast that was about to send us all into Christmas comas was interrupted by Grandmama’s sudden,

“Oh no! I forgot to make the crescent rolls!”

My dad, trying to at least partially conceal his amusement, looks around and reassures her, “Momma, we’ve got regular rolls, biscuits, and crackers; I think we’ve got plenty of bread.”

“But what if someone wants crescent rolls?”

With soft chuckles of understanding, none of us protest further. We pull out the cookie-sheet, and dinner is served while the crescent rolls turn brown and perfectly flakey in the oven. Sure enough, between the initial carnage and my brother’s three trips back to the kitchen in the next few hours, the crescent rolls are gone by the end of the day.

Did someone at Grandmama’s house really need crescent rolls? The weight we all gain each Christmas suggests not. But Grandmama made damn sure that there was something at Christmas dinner for everyone to love.

That, my friends, is why it takes me so long to write lesson plans. I may already have the engaging short story, the guided notes, the group activity, the chalk-talk, the journal, and the funny video to seal it all together,

but what if someone needs the graphic organizer?

I am genetically predispositioned (thanks, Grandmama) to not rest until I am sure that each student has had multiple opportunities to understand, and perhaps even enjoy, my lessons. Sure, planning takes a while, and my students may end up throwing away empty graphic organizers. But I never know which piece of material will change the way they understand literature, so I prepare them all.

I can save the biscuits for leftovers if no one wants them today; go ahead and make the crescent rolls.

Fifty Shades of Absolutely Not

As young teachers, we are constantly warned about the looming disaster that will inevitably strike our classrooms if our students are ever reminded that we are young.

From those who mean well but know nothing about teaching, the “advice” sounds something like this:

“Oh, you don’t want to teach high school. You’re so young and small, they’ll eat you alive.”

“Wow, high school? Really? Aren’t you worried they won’t respect you?”

From experienced teachers who are truly looking out for our best interest, the advice takes on a more practical nature:

“Don’t let them see you smile until Christmas.”

“Don’t tell them how old you are.”

“Go in like a lion.”

So I did. Last semester, I was given a particularly potent batch of “challenging” students–and by “challenging,” I mean they had accepted the challenge of making my job as hard as possible and challenged me to come up with a new kind of “mean face” daily. This, combined with my new-teacher fear of disrespect, made for a rough semester. I’m fairly certain that those students had no idea I actually liked them. I spent so much time combating chaos that I never got to just be nice. I didn’t want to do that again.

So, I resolved to take a new approach this time. On day one, I smiled–a lot. My maternal-but-not-patronizing side came out,  and suddenly before me sat sweet, well-meaning babies where last semester’s monsters never wanted to be.

The moment that I showed myself to my students, I became a teacher.

As it turns out, I’m a sweet teacher. One who laughs, who lets students get a little rowdy for a few minutes, who occasionally looks the other way when a cuss-word slips out of an apologetic mouth. Don’t get me wrong: I manage my classroom. My students know which little sins I can overlook and which will immediately turn our fun conversation into a come-to-Jesus meeting. I keep Mean Ms. B waiting in the corner of the ring to be tagged in any time I need her. But after she does her job, I like to tag her back out. And this works for me.

Until something like this happens:

Picture a tranquil, managed classroom: piano music plays softly as teenagers work (somewhat) quietly answering questions about chapter three of The Great Gatsby. The student teacher stands at the podium engaged in casual conversation with the collaborating teacher, pausing every few minutes to raise an eyebrow at a student who pulls out their phone.

Tearing right through the grip I have on today’s lesson comes a confident (and LOUD), question from a group of my favorite girls:

“MS. B, HAVE YOU SEEN THE NEW FIFTY SHADES OF GREY MOVIE??”

Looking back, this should have been an AW HELL NO moment in my head, but I was too settled in the comfortable relationships I’ve established with these girls to notice, so I replied with a somewhat amused tone, “I am NOT talking about that movie with you.”

This half-hearted dismissal opened the opportunity for a chorus of girls to respond,

“Why not?? We’re old enough to see it!”

Again, when I should have shut it down, I let them suck me in:

“I’M not even old enough to see it!”

Cue the boundary-testing:

“Oh, come on, we just haven’t seen it and we wanted to know if it’s good,” “We’re not talking about anything bad or illegal,” “It’s just a movie.”

Just as I was opening my mouth to bring out my serious voice and shut down the conversation with a lecture about the difference between age-appropriate and school-appropriate, my CT jumped in and did it for me. And I was embarrassed. She shouldn’t have had to say anything because I should’ve established authority more quickly. I got sucked in because I genuinely enjoy these girls, and I forgot my responsibility to maintain a comfortable  and safe environment for my other students. I slipped.

But I learned. I know now that I cannot let my new-found comfort in actually enjoying my students distract me from the structure that I owe them. So I’m working on my code-switching and constantly reminding myself that, even though I’m a fun grown-up sometimes, I’m a real grown-up all the time.

But you know what? I don’t see my age as something to overcome anymore. Young is not something I have to pretend not to be. In fact, it’s something I can use. Today, my kids asked me why Gatsby threw his shirts all over the bed, and when I compared it to the meme of a guy throwing money, light bulbs turned on all over my classroom. Today, my age helped my kids learn. And I’m not sorry.

There will always be “advice” thrown at us about jumping over the hurdle that is teaching as a twenty-something. But I’m starting to understand that my age is more like a step-stool: I don’t always need it, sometimes I forget to put it away and trip over it, but other times it helps me reach the students I couldn’t reach otherwise. So I’ll keep working on this balance thing–one step at a time.

The teacher who (almost) cried witch.

I am not proud of this. And yet I am not embarrassed either. I am scared. And I share this because, whether you admit it or not, you are scared, too.

How do we find the line between healthy fear and mass hysteria? I asked my students this question last semester as we worked through The Crucible. Arthur Miller made it look so clear: the residents of Salem were Bible-thumping, witch-crying lunatics, so people died. Joseph McCarthy cried communist instead of dealing with America’s real issues, so people lost their jobs. My students have a hard time understanding how events like these can happen–how can people become so afraid that they latch on to conspiracies? So I explain to them that fear has a way of clouding the line between real and imagined. That our job as smart readers is to think carefully about that line and consider how our own fear influences our actions. Way to go, Ms. B., you snuck in a life lesson.

Except I almost cried witch this week. More horrifically, I almost cried shooter.

I have a student who all semester has demonstrated a lack of joy and perhaps an undiagnosed battle with depression. Let’s call him Eeyore. I don’t name him this to make light of or belittle his emotional struggles. Trust me, if you knew the student, you would understand the comparison. In the beginning of the semester, he looked for opportunities to answer my questions sarcastically, insult other students, and just generally be a miserable human. The only smiles he graced my classroom with were smirks resulting from the satisfaction of finding himself funny. The most frustrating part? He is so smart. He participates in discussions and adds valuable insight. With a little joy, he would be one of those students who just makes your day better.

A few weeks into the semester, Eeyore broke his hand, and his outlook on life got worse. He instigated arguments with other students, stopped caring about his work, and just seemed miserable. He also wrote some concerning thoughts in his journal, which I of course reported to a counselor. According to Eeyore’s journal, he had no friends because no one liked him now that he couldn’t play basketball. In truth, I imagine that his lack of friends had more to do with his lack of friendliness. His outlook on life only worsened when he got the flu and missed over a week of school (after bragging about how he never gets sick).

It goes without saying that I took extra care to look out for this student. I made an effort to greet him with kindness while also maintaining strict expectations for his academic misconduct and for how he spoke to other students in my class. My relationship with him led me to reflect on that delicate balance that teachers must learn between tough love and compassion. Many of our students either need someone to love on them or a good kick in the pants; the real challenge is the student who needs both, and I was determined to learn that balance for him.

Over the break, I graded a constructed response assignment that students wrote after reading “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Eeyore had been absent that day, and when he got back he told me, “Ms. B., I couldn’t find examples of rhetoric in the letter, so I wrote mine about the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. Is that okay?” While I was concerned that he must have misunderstood the material if he could not locate rhetoric in the letter, I happily accepted this substitution and promised to go over the concepts again with him to make sure he understood. As fellow teachers, you can imagine how disheartened I was when I realized that he had copy and pasted the entire assignment from a web page about rhetoric in Dr. King’s speech.

On Monday, I pulled Eeyore into the hallway to discuss his plagiarism. First, though, I checked in with him to see how he was doing and let him know that I cared about him. He at first insisted that he was fine and had nothing he needed to talk about, but after a pause, he said, “Actually, yeah. I’m scared.” He went on to explain that the recent shooting in Florida had shaken him and that he could not stop thinking about an issue that happened in his classroom two years ago. Apparently, a student in his class cut his wrists and threatened to hurt other students, and that student still attends our school. I talked through this fear with him, let him know that he is not alone, and encouraged him to talk to his counselor. It was a good conversation.

Why have I told you all of this? What does it have to do with mass hysteria?

In the shower Monday night, I reflected on my day (because showers are without a doubt the best place for reflection).  The more I reflected on my conversation with Eeyore, the more I realized that I should have reported his concerns to a counselor. At the time, I took his concerns as normal fear. We discussed the shooting in class that day, and all my students were afraid.

But what if this was more dangerous than normal fear? This student has a history of concerning behavior. I should have reported immediately. So, I texted my CT, and she agreed that we should inform the counselor on Tuesday morning, but she assured me that the reporting was precautionary and that she saw no reason to be worried.

Oh, but I worried. I worried and worried. And then I got irrational. And then I panicked.

What if he told me those things as a cry for help? As a warning? What if he was the student who threatened to hurt other students? I didn’t know the story. What if I missed that? What if he was actually telling me that he was thinking about shooting up the school? What if I missed something? Had he said anything I’m not remembering? Were there clues?
*No, there were not clues.* But here comes my irrational hysteria:

I went to bed afraid to walk into school the next morning. I woke up in a panic. I was sure that people were going to die that day. I might die. He might shoot me first because I gave him a zero for plagiarizing. I might never see my family again. What was the last thing I said to them? Worse, I might be the reason other people die. Students. Just babies. They might die and I might go to jail forever for failure to report. I’m either dying or going to jail today. Forget getting married, forget becoming a teacher or a mother, forget everything because it’s over. All because I missed a clue.

Breathe.

Everything was fine. I went to school. I reported it to the counselor. Eeyore came to class that day and was more pleasant than he had ever been. He smiled, a real smile. For the first time. He asked me questions politely. He was wonderful. Our talk worked. He knew that I cared about him, and the counselor promised to check in.

I didn’t cry shooter, but I was ready to. I was ready to criminalize an innocent, hurting kid. Because I am scared. Every day, every moment, I am scared.

How do we discern what threats are real and what is merely our imagination? How do we remain watchful without falling into the hysteria? How do we see the best in our students while preparing for the worst?

I am not proud of this. And yet I am not embarrassed either. I am scared. And I share this because, whether you admit it or not, you are scared, too.

 

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.