presents and presence

Look what my roommate Eva brought me from Portland!

She's a good egg.

Reader survey: memorable teaching

Today I tried something different with my students - a seemingly risky simulation of Shay's Rebellion. At the outset, I felt markedly more nervous than on a typical lesson day, because there were so many details, so many moving parts, and so many ways that organically evolving student cognition could shift the activity into waters I could not anticipate. And really, all of those things sort of happened, but no moment of it spun out of control. And Marionye, an awkwardly cautious and softspoken sophomore who rarely picks things up the first time round, told me, "I'm glad we did this activity. I understand now what the people suffered."

So I suppose I'm glad I gambled.

It makes me wonder, when you scan your memories of school (both primary and secondary), are there any lessons that particularly stuck with you? I wonder if any patterns emerge.

To be perfectly frank, the first lesson series that springs to my mind is a series of stations, largely focused on different artforms in Jamestown, my class explored during... second grade maybe? Perhaps I remember this because so much of me thrills at the opportunity to be creative.

Which sorts of activities have left a lasting imprint on you? Why do you think that is?

#15 - canoe or kayak on the Charles River

One goal down.

My back aches... as if dozens of sharp-nosed insects were dragging their little snouts along the edges of my shoulder blades, grabbing small bits of flesh and dragging as they climb along my bones with their scratchy little feet.

And my shins glow with an angry pink... a shade that never did look at home on me. Apparently the nozzle of my spray sunscreen does not work properly when inverted. Good to know now.

And my eyes are glazed over, staring at the lesson plans I've outlined but not yet completed, minutes from midnight and tedious hours from the end.

But for the ache, there is Tiger Balm. For the shins, there is minty aloe gel. And for the work, there is coffee.

For the imprint left from this, though, there is no cure. Except, perhaps, more of the same.

thirty things to do before i'm thirty

I love the waiting: the night before Christmas, the last day of school, the interminable hours before a long-awaited date. These days before seem a celebration unto themselves, as important as the Main Event because they lay down a floor of silence upon which the new thing may gingerly step forth.

So perhaps it is natural that I have begun to think of myself as hovering on the edge of thirty, though I'm not yet even twenty-nine. I know I am edging closer and closer to a year that is defined by what it precedes. I want this to be a year of joy and life and creation.





And to that end, I've made a list of thirty things I'd like to do before I turn thirty, thirty things that represent the person that is being revealed in me, more warm and welcome to me than she was at twenty, though she is even now a stranger to me:

1. Take an art class.

2. Knit something I like enough to wear.

3. Publish something I’ve written.

4. See fall in Maine.

5. Apply to three graduate programs I like.

6. Take a road trip somewhere I’ve never been.

7. Find and make a great granola recipe.

8. Create art in a public space.

9. Read five books on the list of 1001 Books to Read Before You Die.

10. Act in a play.

11. Hold a dinner party in our backyard with candles in the trees.

12. Model nude for an art class.

13. Record a song.

14. Go on a picnic.

15. Kayak or canoe on the Charles River.

16. See the Northern Lights in Iceland.

17. Travel around Europe.

18. Sell two of my photographs.

19. Learn to reupholster chairs.

20. Leave encouraging messages in public places.

21. Paint a mural.

22. Kiss someone worth kissing.

23. Attend a writing conference.

24. Go camping.

25. Tattoo myself with a message I need to hear.

26. Write on my blog every day for a month.

27. Write real letters to seven friends.

28. Plant a garden.

29. Memorize two poems I would like to whisper in someone’s ear.

30. Do something that surprises even me.

.

diagnostic tests are my favorite

Class: Sophomore US History

Question:

• What do you already know about each of the following topics?
  

Answers:

• Northern pre-Civil War economy - came from clothes, and tea napkins
  
• World War I - Germans
  
• World War II - Germans
  
• Reconstruction - process US used to re-use Confederate States in the Union
  
• Civil Rights Movement - the stuff that dealt with the blacks
  
• World War II - Vietnam, bombed somewhere in the Bahamas
  

Question:

• How is the American government structured? Who is in charge of what functions? Explain in words or using a diagram.
  

Answer (exactly as written):

• The American government system is a demorancy. We Have Presdients, vice Presdinents, legislatives and sectorys. The Presdient is in charge of everything and the vice Presdient is incharge of everything that the Presdient is in charge of getting. the legislatives deal with the laws and taxets and other things. lastly the secterys help everyone keep track of there scedudle.
  

Clearly, there is work to be done here.

"where is my mind?"

I just wrote a comment on a student's paper.
I asked him if he'd run out of time or if he was confused about a concept.
Except I spelled it "thyme."

This type of error takes a special sort of stupor.

"your flowers will grow without you"

I work on Sundays. I know that strict biblical constructionists will censure me for this, and I suppose that's a thing I'm willing to accept. The problem of keeping Sundays holy is one of pragmatism: I cannot possibly get all my work done in five days, and I cannot maintain my sanity (nor any sort of efficiency) if I work on Saturday.

So I've worked most of this day, most of it at a coffee cafe, and a bit more of it at a soup cafe, and then the rest of it slouching on my newly made bed. And I'm not done. Not even close. But I'm calling it good for tonight.

I just got off the phone with Chelsea Meyers, the woman who took over my position at Whitko. Before I turned in my keys this July, I left her a note with as much information as I could about technology and professional hierarchy and newspapery troubleshooting. Why reinvent the proverbial wheel, right? I told her to email if ever she had questions. And she has. Several times. Questions on computer programs, questions on classroom motivation and management. Today, for the first time, she called me to clarify a few things.

 I think I was able to help her on the critical issue of photo resizing in InDesign, though I'm certain that she would have eventually figured it out on her own. She told me about the ten or so students who are still involved in the newspaper, some of whom I expected, though some of the diligent journalists of last year have opted not to continue with the paper. I cannot help but feel a twinge of guilt and pain at this. I cannot help but blame myself some. But things continue. Chelsea is exhausted, as all first year teachers are, but she's working out kinks. She is, most importantly, still publishing the paper. I had so worried -- selfishly -- that all my work would be for naught, and less selfishly, that the students' work would be so. 

It was a nice conversation. Pleasant.

And as I mopped our wood floors with Murphy's Oil, I listened to The Lovely Sparrows on my ipod, and I heard the following lyrics from their album Pulling Up Floors, Pouring on (New) Paint:

"Please don't take this the wrong way --

You're just a ghost with a body...

And your flowers will grow without you,

Your flowers will grow without you."

And it's true, you know? Such a sweet delusion it is, that we're irreplaceable. Paradoxically, we are very much and not at all. 

I love Frederick Buechner's words:

Humanity is like a giant spiderweb. If you touch it anywhere, you set the whole thing trembling. As we move around this world as we act with kindness, perhaps, or with indifference, or with hostility, toward the people we meet, we too are setting the great spider web a-tremble. The life that I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and that in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place and time my touch will be felt. Our lives are linked. No man is an island.

I vacillate between understanding my life as a fable of community and one of the solitary nomad, and perhaps my life as all others is neither and both. Dichotomies always break somewhere. Yet, if I were to choose, I do begin to feel that I'm more of the latter than the former. Though my arms and my thoughts yearn to be held, though I long to pour out of myself as an intellect and as a woman, does not each one enter and exit the world and walk around in it alone?

The lyrics of the song in some way accused me of self-importance and absolved me of some measure of guilt. I left Whitko because of a choice, not a moral imperative. Don't ascribe to me some sort of disinterested benevolence. But, to consciously mix metaphors, though I have and do set webs a-tremble, I also know that flowers bloom without my presence. They did in Japan. They did in Huntington. They do in South Whitley. And I know that in the end, we each of us must walk our own winding paths with whatever measure of grace we can muster - my students as well as me.