Turning the Last Page

Book lovers know how bittersweet turning the last page of beloved story can be.  If there is a sequal, it isn't as sad, but I always hate to finish a really good book, the sort that I have lived and breathed as the left the page and became internalized.

I feel that the end of this school year is a bit like the end of that book. Don't get me wrong.  I was so beyond ready for the end of the term.  I had given up writing real lesson plans by the first of April and just had assignments/project steps jotted on a calendar around all the days we were out of class for this and that.  I definitely don't feel like I did any real meaningful teaching the entire month of May except perhaps to my juniors who did the This I Believe project. I had my classroom packed days before the semester tests.  My inventories were done.  I was ready to walk out the door.

 Really the last day for me was going to The Oklahoma Foundation for Excellence  banquet with one of my seniors who was awarded Academic All State. I was so honored to get to see her accomplishments acknowledged.  Haley is one of those really special students that I will miss, though I can't wait to see all the amazing things she will do next.  I am also saying goodbye to the best sophomores and juniors I have ever had.  I don't think I have ever enjoyed a group of kids more.   But these kids leaving means that my window of opportunity for teaching them what they need to know is closed.  There is something bittersweet about the end of something we work hard on.  It feels good to reach the end, but I also wonder how much better I could have done in this and that.  It's also anticlimactic. We work so hard to get them to pass state tests, to get our at risk kids to simply pass the class, and then, POOF! they are just gone.

It was also the last year of elementary school for Bell.  Compared to elementary, middle school seems daunting, threatening all sorts if pitfalls from mean girls to mean teachers.  I remember very little good from my own years in those grades and I worry that my already awkward kiddo will get lost in these years.

It was also the end of a job for Jack.  He was discontent with his job for various reasons, but it was a pretty stable pay check for three years.  The job market is a scary place right now.  My dad has been out of work for over three months with no prospects.  Jack is almost at the two month point.  He did go to an interview for a job he wasn't sure he would want or be able to take because of the distance from home.  Of course now, he really wants it and they haven't called back.  I am praying the boss just took a long holiday weekend instead of deciding they needed someone closer and younger.

I Teach You. You Teach Me. This I believe.

Earlier this week, I sat through an agonizingly long awards ceremony at our highschool. While I admit that it is a totally boring way to spend one's morning, it was also rewarding and encouraging to see so many of my former students excelling.  Teens do a lot of stupid things, really stupid things.  Many don't at all care about education and only graduate because we drag them kicking and screaming through their school years.  But not all, not nearly all.  An astonishing amount of scholarship money was awarded.  Students who placed at area scholastic meets received medals.   We have a young man who was awarded a spot at the Air Force Academy.  We have a National Merit Scholar and an Academic All Stater. Another student was just elected State FFA President.  These students all sat in my class.  They worked their hearts for me and let me teach them instead of resisting education with all their might.

My point is that teens get a bad rap sometimes.  Look on the news or on social media.  It is full of images of teens making poor decisions. While  I do honestly worry about this generation's ability to make wise voting choices and to contribute meaningfully to society, it is our job and perhaps our pleasure to spend time with these same kids making sure they learn to think.  A lot of my friends interact with young people all the time.  They are in education or other professions or programs that center around kids, like ministry, Girl Scouts or Duncan's Teen Theater.   We have so many opportunities to be with kids in a positive way, and while many kids surely need some guidance, others just need to be encouraged in the already good things they believe and do.

As our end of the year project, my AP Lang classes worked our way through the This I Believe personal essay project.  Think back to those broadcasts of This I Believe speeches on NPR.  That is just what we did minus recording our speeches and sending them to someone. We did lots of small reflective journal writings, some collaborative work, and finally wrote and presented  essays on some personal philosophy they held about an aspect of life.  They wrote about everything.  These were painful, soul  searching essays.  Students wrote about success and defeat.  Fear.  Aspirations.  Coming out. Mental illness.  Faith. You name it and we probably heard it.  We went through a box of Kleenex during presentation days.

Let me just say that I was in awe of the collective wisdom in that room.  They may just be sixteen and seventeen and eighteen year olds, but they know a lot.  They have strong and solid beliefs that will help guide them.  They know themselves far better than I did before I went off to college.  One would think they had just came out of Ann Frankland's class on Campbell.  I was really afraid they would blow this assignment off as an easy A, go through the motions, and turn in trite easy essays.  A few did.  Perhaps three out of fifty. Most were well written, had gorgeous style and dug deep.  These were from the heart and I couldn't have been prouder of them.  They badgered me to write one too - it was hard.  How do I pick just one philopshy and make it relatable?

Through out the year, I learned so much from this group of kids.  It was honestly the best year ever.  It was just a wonderful group of kids.  I poured my heart into the class and they did to.  I learned from them all year - what ever we read or wrote, they always had some new perspective, some new slant I hadn't thought of. I learned a lot about teaching and just people this year.

I think sometimes I get so caught up in teaching what the state department or College Board mandates, that I put teaching the important things on the back burner. I did a better job of making them look at important issues and face difficult "life" issues this year.  In the process I was reminded of how much they teach me when I am supposed to be teaching them.

One of my seniors gave me a card a few days ago.  I stood in my room reading it, tears tracking down my cheeks.  She said that she hadn't planned to take my class but that it was a God thing that she had and that we read what we did.  Of course it was - I know she and others were put in my room to teach me a thing or two this year.  I may be on the door step of middle age and she may be young, but I believe if we are listening and paying attention, we teach each other.

April Showers

I need May flowers.  I need May to burst forth in a riot of color and life and vigor, literally and figuratively.  

I am not overly fond of the word "suck" but I can think of no other word I am willing to publish to describe the month of April than that it was a purely sucky month.  I know.  I have a degree in English and am always on my kids about an enriched vocabulary.   I can surely do better.

I am sure most of our friends know that about three weeks ago Jack was laid off.  No severance package.  No pay for unused vacation.  Just cut loose. There have been some hiccups with unemployment paychecks, but they are in the process of happening.  In the meantime he has spent whole days online searching for work, applying for jobs.  The thing is, we are stuck.  He doesn't feel we can leave here because of his parents needing us as caretakers and I at least have a job, one that I like.  And he is not the most employable - a theater degree is close to worthless here.  Since then, we have had to replace an air conditioner, had a major malfunction that resulted in a flooded house and a new hot water heater, discovered termites, Jack has to have a cavity dealt with, and we are still cleaning up tree debri from last weekend's tornado that went between our house and his mom's.  Today, I have a sick kid.  If I were a drinking woman, I would be in a stupor.  Ann Frankland once said something to the effect that kicking a flat tire and loosing a few good curse words was effective.  I am not there but I will totally admit that April sucked. 

A co-worker has suggested that it was a way to keep me on my knees before God, humbled and prayerful.  I think there may be something to that.  It does feel like a test and I am not sure how much my faith is holding up.  I am not panicked, not nearly.  But I am concerned.  I am organized, a planner, a worrier. And certainly not a risk taker . . . Yes, it is time to be prayerful, to listen.  To ask that the doors meant for us be opened and the doors to distractions and wrong paths be closed.  

It is also a time to reexamine what I do have.  This time of no work lets Jack be of more help to his parents.  It meant he was home to deal with ruptured hot water heater and flooded carpets and walls.  It meant he was home during tornados to be with us. I have that gorgeous view of the lake morning and evening.  I have a husband I am madly in love with who still loves me and who is a great dad to our child.   I have had the best year ever at school. We are mostly healthy.  My shoulder seems worlds better - I am thankful that God has given relief there since he knows I can't afford the surgery I was sure I had to have.  Maybe these are coincidences.  Maybe they are little miracles.  I rather think they are.  

April wasn't so much showers of difficulties.  It has been more like monsoon season.  I need patience, wisdom, faith that in May or June or in God's timing, there will be relief, reward.  Flowers. 

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.

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. 

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.

Finding my voice, getting in the groove

I haven't written in months, in ages.  I would love to say it is that I have been busy, but that doesn't fly because we all lead such busy, busy lives. I could tell you that I have been depressed, but that isn't really it either, at least not the sorts of depression I have lived in the past.

I have simply been in a funk that has stretched on far too long.  I wasn't unhappy.  I wasn't sad.  I wasn't discontent per say.  I was just in a mental funk.  For months. Probably, a  lot of factors  each fed this negative spirit, but I need to be done with it and feel that I am ready to set it aside, ready to reach back in and find myself again.

This shift away from me didn't happen suddenly and I doubt it ends suddenly either.  I don't even know when it began, though I am sure some of it started when I couldn't garden or clean or exercise like I wanted because of my shoulder most of the summer.  Just now, is it getting better, though the bursitis/tendonitis problems are still not gone. When you give up aerobics, you gain weight. Then your clothes don't fit. Then you realize you don't have a stockpile of jars of garden produce because the garden was a bust.  Then you . . . Then . . .and of course now that I am doing physical therapy for it, I am not getting home until supper time and still have no time to exercise or cook the way I want.

At work, things are good.  Bell is having a better year that she has in several years.  But.  There is always a but.  At home, Jack and I have been out of sync. Not fighting, not mad, just out of step.  Bell and I have been out of sync.  Maybe it is the stress that comes with being caretakers.  Maybe it is Jack 's uncertain job (the oilfield is all about uncertainty).  Maybe, just maybe, I am the one who has been out sync.

A few weeks ago, Jack and I left a very unwilling and unhappy child with my parents and went to Shiloh Morning Inn near Dickson. I think it was a good reset button for us.  Just us, no one else.  We only manage this once a year.  We never, never get away even just to go see a movie.  It seems we are closer to being in step since we came home, though we have had a few bad days since then.  Not truly bad, not the sort where there is door slamming and shouting - just that inability to communicate that ends with someone annoyed, but most days found us back to reaching out to touch each other as we passed through a room.  They found me falling asleep on Jack's shoulder, tucked into his side.  This makes me sigh with relief as those gentle gestures seem to let all the stress escape like air hissing out of a punctured balloon.

   We didn't manage to get that elusive picture this fall - the one that tells the world that we are still a happy family, that all is right within our household.  Either it rained or blew or we had a sick kid almost every time Jack was home for the last month.  I find myself not even wanting to send out cards this year.  Maybe we will manage an in front of the tree picture, maybe we won't. Perhaps I don't really need to do cards.  I am okay with that now though I was frustrated to tears about it just days ago. It will just be what it will be but it is not worth stress.


I needed this week off.  We spent a day with Jack's family and a day with mine.  I spent a day with Jack's mom in town stocking up at SAM's and Aldis.  Really, something was going on every day until yesterday and today.  The world is frozen, sheeted and slick with crystals.  A branch the size of Bell's bedroom came down right outside her window.  But it didn't hit the car a few feet away.  It didn't damage the house.  Jack is not on a drilling site or sliding into a ditch on a northern highway.   We are home, warm with hot tea, a sparkling Christmas tree, an Elf watchful from an upper bookcase, snuggly blankets cocooning us.

I find myself wanting to sing out my thankfulness for this life I have been given.  I know that we are supposed to be thankful during the holiday season as we remember our Lord's sacrifices and care for us, our families who hold us dear, but it is more than that.  It is that deeper satisfaction in what we have, that deeper knowledge that we are given what we need and are to use it, to be joyful in it.  And  I am thankful for so many things big and small  - for the gift of speech my daughter was granted that allowed her to confidently to give a speech this year, the jobs that provide for us, the warmth of my house today, my family who forgives and is patient with me.  I am thankful for you my friends who are still there reading a post from a blog that seemed to have died months ago.