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Blogging During Reading Buddies: A School Story

The Story:
It is the last day before Spring Break and I am at school but no one cares at all what is going on so I have escaped from Reading Buddies, commandeered Pirate Girl's computer, and am sitting in the hall outside the kitchen dressed in pajamas for Spirit Day. Awesome. Just when I get pissed off about parents who give me shit about nothing in particular all the time, about being overwhelmed and underpaid, just in the nick of time it is Spring Break and I'm wearing a brand-new set of green pajamas (including new green flip flops) from Old Navy and my kids are in with Pirate Girl's kids watching Happy Feet while eating the four dozen Krispy Kreme doughnuts I drove to Daly City to buy this morning after commandeering Pirate Girl's TA's car.

I don't care about anything right now which is a nice change from caring and worrying and agonzing about everything. The drugs help to some extent as far as dealing with the recent paralyzing anxiety, although yesterday night the dosing got a little off and I slept in the bathtub for about an hour and a half, waking up cold and pruney and certain that it was morning when really it was only 11:45 p.m. In recent weeks there has been professional drama, relationship drama, housing drama, and I am just sick of it and ready to get some sleep.

My vacation plans are shaping up to be quite different than I had thought. Until Tuesday I was planning to go to Santa Barbara with Ani after the seders, then maybe surf camp in Mexico or some other southwest road trip in the Subaru. Everything changes with the passage of time...now I look forward to recycled-clothes shopping with Batsheva, buying a new bike with Voldemort and T-Money, seder with Alef and Dr. Animal, and doing the research needed to begin the design and implementation of my Cool New Life.

The Lesson:
Many more things are back on the table that had been set aside for awhile: Stanford PhD, a year at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and then there's still the New Leaders fellowship for which I'm being considered. To this place I've been, physically and spiritually and metaphorically, I say...I'm outta here. It's about time.

Three Years, $750,000: A School Story

The Story:
I have become completely disconnected from my real life, my friends, whatever form of relationship Ani and I are in, my family (no big change or loss) and my students because I have been working diligently the past weeks on a fellowship application for a program that begins this summer.

After twelve years in the classroom I finally feel ready to move on and I am applying for a three year, $750,000 fellowship from an organization called New Leaders for New Schools.  I have almost no chance of being awarded this, as they only accept something like 7% of those who apply.  However, one of my superpowers is making something out of nothing and 7% is way more of a chance than 0% so I have been writing essays and revising my resume and hopefully they'll give me an interview and then a practice day as an administrator and then they will give me this fellowship.

In the first year those accepted work as an assistant principal at an urban public school, as well as take classes towards their administrative credential.  The second year the coursework continues and the fellows work to plan either their transition into the role of principal at an existing urban school or their design and implementation plan for a brand-new charter school (my choice).  In the third year, you begin your new school.

The Lesson:
I really want to do this.  It means I will not get to be part of the community of my own school any more, not in the same way at least.  This is challenging because I have been there for six years now, I have grown into myself significnatly.  When I first arrived I was Catholic and straight, since then I have become Jewish and queer.  During the time I have taught in my classroom I have lived in three different apartments.  My students and their families are there, the families who by extension have become my own.  Many of the teachers I count among my dearest friends. 

And I am, I will say in an egomaniacal way, a large fish in a small pond.  I have learned many things, asked for new and different and more responsibilities and opportunities, and I think I just may have outgrown my place there.  When I came I was that cutting-edge young progressive educator slated for big professional things, and since then I have spent six years in elementary school.  I do not want to waste my potential, I do not want to lose sight of the fact that there is more for me in this world than explaining year after year how to follow the five steps of the Writing Process and that the easy way to remember which one is the Denominator is that it is the one Down Below, since Denominator and Down both start with D.  We'll see what happens.  I'm trying not to get my hopes up...

A Bird In The Classroom Is Worth Two In The...?: A School Story

The Story:
Wednesday afternoon, in the middle of Writers Workshop, one of my students noticed a hummingbird hovering outside the window of our classroom.  Entranced by its petite size and its rapid movements, all of my writers crowded up against the shelf behind the teacher desk underneath the window to watch the bird zip back and forth, seemingly dining on the spiderwebs that accumulate against the outside of the glass.

Finally the novelty wore off and everyone went back to their seat, including myself who during lessons has a desk in between two of my students where at this time I was sitting with one writer at a time to edit the biographies of one another that we are currently publishing.  Outwardly I was calm but inwardly I was very distressed, remembering an old wives' tale or an urban legend or something that I had heard from a TA at my previous school.  He told me once at recess duty that each person only sees a certain number of hummingbirds in their life and once they have seen their lot, they die--a terrifying thought to me I must say.  So while I was trying to pretend, for the sake of the individual student with whom I was editing, to be actively engaged in seeking out errors of grammar or mechanics all for the purpose of publishing a more polished piece of writing I was actually worried my death was imminent.

The anxiety worsened the next day, yesterday.  I left the class under the watchful and diligent eyes of Ms. Sydney for only a few minutes to go next door to the library in order to make sure our use of the Reading Room for Author's Chair was confirmed for Friday morning.  Upon walking back out of the library and into the hall I was quite surprised to see my entire class camped out against the wall, math books and pencils and checking pens in hand, hard at work with Ms. Sydney going over their answers from the day's lesson. 

"Why is everyone sitting in the hall for Math right now?" I asked Ms. Sydney.

"The hummingbird came back!  It's inside our classroom!  It pooped on Miss Japan!" all the students were shouting with a mix of glee and horror.

The next hours were consumed with coaxing the hummingbird outside through one of the three narrow windows behind the teacher desk.  Everything from sugar water to bright red plastic trays hung out the window with yarn to our classroom's Magic Wand were used to try and shoo the wee thing back out into the world. 

The Lesson:
Finally a team effort between Ms. Sydney and the new middle school Science teacher, whose name no one seems to know and who as a result is referred to constantly as That New Teacher Who Wears Jeans Every Day, met with success and the hummingbird was on its merry way on beyond Third Grade.  Just in time, because learning in the hall was beginning to wear on everyone's nerves--including my own.

As an aside, about half an hour after the hummingbird made its way free from our classroom the receptionist got on the All-Call to announce that if any class had lost its gerbil, one had been found downstairs in the Art Room and could the class to which the rodent belonged please come quickly with the cage since the Art teacher had put it in a large empty bucket and it was quite distressed as a result (understandably).

Only at school.  Many of my friends make so much more money than me working for The Man but gourmet cafeterias and onsite allergists, however sexy, just don't make up for the joy that comes from freeing a bird from your classroom or finding your lost gerbil in a pile of paint smocks. 

Compost: A Neighborhood Story

The Story:
In the backyard of my building there is a compost bin.  Not like the kind with worms that you turn over with a pitchfork and water with a hose, nothing quite that authentic.  This is just the big green plastic bin that the city comes to pick up once a week along with the trash and recycling.

I compost, usually.  Not every snack, not each time I cook, but for the most part yes.  I am the type of composter, as Ani describes, who takes a double-thick Trader Joe's bag and fills it up with all my food scraps from any given meal or fridge clean-out, throws the bag into the green bin, and is done with it.  True enough. 

Ani, however, has a somewhat different relationship with the earth than I do and is a much more diligent and detail-oriented composter.  She is pro to my amateur, she is veteran to my novice and as my more competent compost peer she brought me a present a month or so ago: my very own white plastic compost bucket to keep in my kitchen.

I tried, I really did.  I put banana peels and coffee grounds into the bucket.  I put the tops of carrots and the bottoms of celery.  But the bin smelled yucky and ants got inside and I told Ani I was not going to deal with it, I would put stuff in but she would have to take stuff out to the compost bin in the backyard.

The Lesson:
She took it out once but then it got ignored for awhile until the stench was so horrific I was sure the refrigerator had died and something had crawled up half-drowned out of the drain and breathed its last in the sink, all in the same day.  Finally I insisted that Ani take it out, not to the compost bin but to the trash, and just throw the whole thing away.  I am back to my paper-bag composting ways and I couldn't be happier.

Friday Night At The Fights: A True Story

The Story:
Voldemort has been boxing lately, working out with these asshole Irish dudes five mornings a week for the past six or so weeks, all in preparation for an actual match.  The eVite came awhile ago declaring March 2nd as the big night and of course I planned to be there to cheer the man on.

Two nights ago I drove down to Dogpatch, a completely revitalized (and completely gentrified?  hmm...) neighborhood off 280 not far from China Basin, where the streets meet the streets and there at the corner of I think it was 3rd and 23rd I found the main event.  It turns out Third Street Gym is quite the popular fight night venue, packed with people alternately screaming at the top of their lungs in favor of their fighter of choice or recoiling in horror, gasping and hiding their faces from the unabashed beatings taking place in the elevated ring above us.  In one moment of profound classism, I leaned over to Voldemort's girlfriend T-Money and shouted in her ear that what I wished I had worn instead of a dress over jeans was a t-shirt that said "I Went To Graduate School--No, Really, I Did".  Awful, I am awful.

The Lesson:
Our man V, in his blue trunks and black padded "spleen guard" as Ebn called it, resplendent in blue and white checkered socks that Will swore up and down were from H&M ("I just saw them there last week!"), used the first of three rounds to warm up much to all of our dismay.  His opponent was a dirty fighter and we were all battling the urge to climb up there between the ropes and help do him in.  I myself can deal out a swift yet effective kicking when need be.  In rounds two and three Voldemort rallied and despite the fact that he and his opponent were *both* declared the winner at the end--"He said it's like Special Olympics that way, that everyone who tries gets a medal," T-Money confided at the beginning of the evening--we all left knowing who the true victor was.  Indeed, that's our boy.