Thursday, December 31, 2015

Kindness Resolution

I have, lately more than normal, been reflecting about the the burdens weighing on those around us.  As a teacher, I see this in other teachers and teenagers, but it is applicable everywhere to everyone.

A few weeks ago, another teacher and I were discussing a promising young lady who seemed to be overextending  in clubs and activities to the detriment of class work.  We weren't annoyed or angry or even disappointed.  The conversation was more about if we should intervene.  On one hand, we felt we should but on another we felt that this uber busyness on the student's part was a coping mechanism to deal with some big big sorrows life has handed her.

Yesterday, I took Bell to a shoe store to replace yet again sneakers that she outgrew rather than wore out.  A young man greeted me at the door with a friendly and cheerful hello and smile.  He was a former student who in the past wouldn't have had a smile for me.  When I first met this young man, his mother had died and he had been sent to live with a step mother while his dad was deployed.  His mother had been terminally ill and had refused to extend her life, choosing to die sooner than later, and the boy felt she had abandoned him.  Angry young man indeed. It was a long, trying year and I was glad yesterday to see a smile on his face.  I am sure he still has problems, but it was a nice change.

I encounter another boy frequently at school who has lost a father who also has had a difficult time though he has a wonderful mom.  Many of my students have parents who are deployed in the Middle East.  Others are alone and on their own because they aren't wanted or have no families.  And while I teach in a fairly new, nice modern building, I also have students who live in deplorable poverty - the kind where running hot water is not a given.  The kind with a trailer house with holes in the floor.  The kind where it turns out the house I thought was condemned and abandoned still has a family in it.  The kind where the gross school lunch was maybe the highlight of the day.

To be sure, I also have a large number of affluent students who wear brands I only dream of.  To be sure, some of them wear that sense of entitlement  I find insufferable.  There are also a lot of students who come from the same background I grew up in. Always just enough but never extra.

Some of these students who carry all these burdens excel in academics and some fail. I am not advocating a free pass to these students - at sometime in our lives, we must all choose what we want and who we will be, no matter our circumstances.  I know that teachers tend to try very hard to work with students who face difficulties.  We know that if we were facing poverty or loss, we wouldn't hold up well and these are just children, children in big bodies, but still children.

What worries me is that I can't possible know all that my children encounter. No where in my attendance program does it say "mother died last year" or "father has terminal illness" or "lives with abusive alcoholic parent."  Sometimes, a parent lets us know or another teacher who is acquainted with a family will let us know when problems arise, but so often, students arrive in my room with baggage that is kept in the dark.

I am not sure what I want you to do with all this rambling except be kind.  Extend that smile, that gentle gesture to everyone.  We know we are to help the homeless.  We are to take in the stray dog.  We are to take a casserole when someone dies.  But I want us to be cognizant that those around us, those seemingly ordinary people, may also be in need of our kindness for their burdens may be far greater than our own.

Sunday, December 27, 2015

The Stories of Being Us

Normally, at 7:46 on a Sunday morning, I would be poking Bell, trying to get her up so we could get ready for church.  This Sunday morning finds me snuggled into the recliner, coffee laced with rum and cream in hand, while Jack and Bell are still mostly asleep on the air bed where they did their weekly living room camp out.  The windows are glazed with ice and the weather can't decide if she wants to sleet or rain.  The forecast promises that I will have at least a glaze of ice to contend with later so no churching for us.

The animals have been very unwilling sent out to do their morning thing.  The tv sits silent. The lamps are dark.  The only sign of life is the occasional sound from the coffee maker.  My thoughts drift, reviewing the week, thinking of the stories we make.


Perhaps nostalgia is to blame, but my favorite moment Christmas Day was picking pecans.  After dinner but before presents and dessert, my dad asked if anyone wanted to go shake the pecans trees.  My mother and sister declined, having already picked the day before, and Ian was waiting on his girlfriend to get there, but the rest of us loaded up and went down to the creek bottom where dad had cleared areas under some of the trees.  Soon, the kids were playing some convoluted game involving nuts.  Tucker was up in a tree shaking the limbs while the the other men moved tarps around and made burn piles of fallen limbs and  Ben's friend Crystal and I scavenged for nuts that had fallen before we got the tarps down.  This sounds so mundane, but we were working and visiting and laughing.  It was a Wilson thing.  I thought of all the times when I was a child that after a meal, Grandpa would load everyone up, taking us down to the creek bottom where we would cut wood and pick pecans.  Sometimes, we would, instead, shoot clay pigeons  if the town cousins  brought some or bottles and cans if they didn't. If it had been a white Christmas, someone would hook the big sled to the tractor and pile the children on for a ride.  Looking back, maybe Grandpa was just getting us out of the house so the women could have a bit of peace, but sometimes the women came too.  Whether we were working or playing, we were together, all these strands of family that saw each other only once or maybe twice a year.  There are a lot of family pictures down on that creek bottom, smoky with bonfires and ringing with  laughter.

My heart hurts to think that those days are  gone.  The strands of our family have scattered like leaves swept by the winds.  With my aunts and uncles gone, there just isn't a reason for the family to gather anymore in that part of the state from which we ventured out. 

Friday afternoon was a different day, but it was day of promise for this new family we are, this family of Wilson children now bringing our own children home to grandma's house on the farm.  Later as we sat for presents and desserts and playing with Tuck's baby, I was satisfied with easy flow of conversation around me even as we had two new comers to the group.  We will create our stories.

Stories in general are the other thing I have loved this week.  Jack and I have been together in some form or fashion, first as friends then later as a family, for eighteen years. Even when we were just friends, he was my anchor in so many ways. So few people are able to build a story, write their own family mythology. .  People fall in and out of relationships carelessly and those relationships crumble.  Loved ones die.  Others haven't yet found a soulmate.  I am lucky to have not only found mine, but been by his side long enough to have a little bit of history. We have spent a lot of time lately saying "remember when . . ."  Bell sometimes seems bored by all this reminiscing, but she also says " tell me about the time when . . ."  I love that we have built this history.  The time we stole a cedar tree.  The time we got lost on the mountain.  The time I threw flowers out the window.  The time we . . . The time . . .

 As we drove south Friday, I held Jack's hand while he drove, easy in the silence between us, satisfied with thinking of all the stories we have shared, pondering the stories we will make in the coming year. Our time together is nothing compared to the lifetime my grandparents and his parents have spent together, but it is a good beginning to the lifetime of stories ahead. 

Saturday, December 19, 2015

words, words, words

For the past three weeks, I have been counting down days, partly assuring myself I could make it that long until break (which is silly since it was right after a week off at Thanksgiving) and partly in a panic that I wouldn't get everything done at school in that amount of time.  This Monday, I was still grading rhetorical analysis essays.

I wasn't really in a panic about my on-level classes, but we are pertually behind where I want them to be in AP.  There are just more of them than me, and I can't get all I want done in a day and answer questions and scaffold for slower students at the same time.    I started out the year short twenty books of every single book we use and it took almost month and a half to get them in . . . So that was a month and a half of no homework, no outside reading.    Though there was much pulling, wheedling, cajoling, nagging, and downright forcing on my part and much angst on their part, we are officially caught up writing wise and only a bit behind  in what we should be reading.  I am excited that over break, they are to read the first chunk of The Poisonwood Bible.  When I first read it back in 01, I knew I wanted to teach it someday and the time has come.  

One of my big mental fights this semester has been this great hole in my students' vocabulary and general knowledge of history.  I have always pushed the idea that great literature is often a reaction to something a writer experiences or something going on in society, but that means one needs a bit of history.  My kids constantly say that they don't know what words mean when they skim answer choices in multiple choice or when we analyze a passage.  They are stymied that I don't need a dictionary. I am stymied because I am pretty sure I knew what those words meant when I was their age.  I am pretty st sure that my nine year old's vocabulary is as good as my juniors and seniors in AP.  And how, oh how, do they have so much blank space where knowledge of world history should be?  How did I know when I was their age?  I took the same classes they do.  And certainly they are encouraged to read more than my generation was thanks to Accelerated Reader programs.  But maybe, just maybe, that encourages quantity over quality. 

I did have a really good history teacher in highschool . . . though my English teachers were ineffectual at best.  More importantly, I read.  I came from a family who read.  We talked about what what we were reading.  We talked about current events.  Through my dad's job, he knew many people from other countries and we learned about those places when he brought them home to dinner.  My father doesn't have a prestigious job - he is an oil field chemist and we lived in Velma that was so urban and progressive that my class had 26 people in it. My mother who was a special Ed teacher before she became a home school mom read the Wall Street Journal every day.  For every book of fiction, she also devoured a book of essays, a biography, a history . . . 

As the semester wound down and parents saw that their child who has never had less than an A might be getting a B, the emails came flooding into my inbox. Invariably, they all boiled down to "what can I do to help my child be a faster reader, be a more sophisticated writer, and have a better vocabulary?"  And my answer is obviously to actually take note of all those suggestions I leave on the essays, but more importantly, read well written books.  And then we hit a wall because they often don't know what they should be reading, what constitutes well written. 

"What do you read, my lord" "Words, words, words."  

And so, I am making a list of those books that shaped me, shaped my my conscience, my world view, my essence.  They were fiction, but they piqued my interest enough that I then read non-fiction to further explore those ideas, places, and people.  To be sure, it will be an evolving list that includes authors and titles from now but also, more importantly, ones I discovered when I was sixteen and seventeen.  It is a wide and disparate list of genres and names, but perhaps it is a starting place.  Perhaps a student will fall in love with Bojalian or Kingsolver or Uris.  Perhaps the words will be seared into their minds and souls and leave a more important mark than just a bigger vocabulary.

If you have suggestions for this Rucker Reads list, be it classics or contemporary, please share.