Neems' Random Ramblings

Questions of Faith (but not the religious kind)

I know that I'm not a faithful person by nature. I'm fickle, cynical, and hyper-critical, and when it comes to system-level change, on some level, don't necessarily even know that I think it's possible... I fight for it even as I doubt that it ever really, deeply happens.

I couldn't say that I know what faith feels like, even. I grew up believing in very little besides what I could experience in the most tangible of ways. I trust the things I can see, feel, hear for myself. Everything else, I question. Everything else, I doubt. (To say that this has caused me problems in life would be an understatement. To say that it has also made joyfulness easy to find would also be an understatement.)

But since I got the email below last night after a long conversation with Sarah about the need for patience and faith in the change-making process, I've been thinking about it, and our conversation about faith, a lot. Because reading this email from Freddy Mendes, who emailed me on his Friday night to tell me that he's already started studying for a test he has NEXT Friday...that makes me feel something that I think is what faith probably feels like for people who possess it.

So the question, then, is this: How do I take my faith in Freddy Mendes, and Soranyi Luna, and Troy Williams, and Adelina Pires, and Fabiola Moquete, and Championney Dona, and Joisi Vizcaino, and all of these incredible young people who continually inspire me, and translate into faith and patience with a system, and a school, that is failing them? My faith in these young people, and in their ability to succeed, and to transform the world, is boundless. And they are the people who populate the very system whose flaws presently overwhelm me.

I don't know how to contain these two notions in my mind--a complete lack of faith in the present system, and an abundance of faith in young people--in a way that makes sense. I know that charters and pilots and market-based systems are not the solution here. That they, in fact, only serve to abandon the young people who I admire so deeply. But I also know that what we're doing right now is not working, and that every minute that we allow it to remain dysfunctional is a minute in which young people are being wronged by us. And how do I continue to participate in that?

-----Original Message-----
From: Freddy Mendes [mailto:----------@yahoo.com]
Sent: Fri 12/7/2007 9:34 PM
To: Avashia, Neema
Subject: Test

am studying 4 my test 4 3 hours cause my mom told me to lol see you monday

I Miss Bob.

It's a funny thing, collaboration. It doesn't happen all that often in schools. When it happens, you know it's happening because of how much better everything works, and how much less tension there is in your shoulders, and how much faster the cogs in your head are turning as you puzzle through shared questions. And when it was your reality for the first 4 years of your teaching career, you are very, very aware of how much harder things are without your partner in collaboration.

For four years, my friend Bob and I worked side by side to continually be better teachers to our students. We matched each other stride for stride in our development as teachers--our kids scored highest in the district in both Social Studies and Science during our 2nd and 3rd years teaching. We debriefed lessons, watched each other's teaching on video, vented about our frustrations, and brainstormed solutions to the challenges we faced in our teaching. We also played a lot of trivia, ate a lot of good food, and told a lot of really cheesy jokes.

It was an incredible four years. I wouldn't be the teacher I am right now if it wasn't for Bob. And now that Bob has gone off to play in 4-inch deep rain puddles in Seattle, I'm left pondering how different it is to work in a school when you don't have any deep collaboration with colleagues. How much less fulfilling the work is. How much harder it is to improve in your own teaching, because you are the only one pushing yourself.

When Bob first told me that he was moving to Seattle, I grieved it the way I grieve everything. Prematurely, and excessively. But it's only in the months after this school year started that I've really started to feel what it means to lose out on your partner in collaboration. And during the past couple of weeks, when school has been especially chaotic, and I've been trying to make positive changes, only to get them shot down, I've felt especially at a loss for what to do without him here. My whole grief theory--that if I grieve it early, then I'll grieve it less further down the road--has been turned on its head, and the grief I feel now has set in for the winter.

And then, tonight, while I was doing laundry, Bob called and left a message on my phone. Turns out that, sitting in Seattle, he's having the same trouble I am. Without each other, we're 3/4 of the teacher that we are capable of being... We know we can be better. We know that we're better when we work together. But 3000 miles of distance, and a 3-hour time difference, and entirely different school contexts, makes that work all the more difficult.

Move back to Boston, Bob!!!

Let's Talk About...

Once a week in Social Studies class, we tackle a present-day issue that is controversial. We read about it, write about it, and then debate. This isn't a cool-Neema thing (although I like doing it). It's actually an initiative mandated by the district, the goal of which is to build kids' academic language by engaging them in high-interest topics that also have embedded academic vocabulary and high cognitive demand. Pretty smart, if you ask me... Each week, the students are introduced to a new topic, and they do content-related work with that topic in Math, English, Science, and Social Studies. In weeks past, we've covered topics like affirmative action and high-stakes testing. And I've really enjoyed doing it, and being a part of the conversations that result. Kids are smart and opinionated, and love getting to use their strong voices, and this is an awesome way to do that.

This week's topic, as you might have guessed from the slightly-censored title, was sex education. The question posed to kids was whether or not it is appropriate to have sex education in school, and relatedly, whether the education should focus on abstinence, or on safe sex.

Can I just say? I haven't said the word "sex" that much in a classroom EVER in my life before. Ever. I think I said the word sex at least 150 times today.

Wow.

But I'm glad that I did, because the conversations we had today were really powerful. Some of the data kids learned was as shocking to me as it was to them. For example, did you know that close to 1 million girls between the ages of 13 and 18 get pregnant every year? And did you know that 1 in 4 teens will contract an STD by the time they are 21 (imagine the look on kids' faces when I said that, if that statistic held, 7 kids in our classroom could end up with an STD!)? And kids responded to the data with really strong opinions. Some felt convinced that they wanted conversations about sex to happen at home, with their parents, and that they wouldn't feel comfortable having those conversations at school. Others felt precisely the opposite--they said they would rather learn about sex from a teacher than from their parents, because they thought their parents would be shy and hesitant about giving them the facts. Most agreed that, in the absence of adult sources of reliable information, they ask their questions to their friends...and buddy, if you knew the myths about sex that fly around a middle school...(e.g. boys aren't capable of contracting stds; you don't get pregnant if you pee after sex; etc.). Every single child in each of my classes raised their hand when I asked if they knew someone who had gotten pregnant as a teenager.

Personally, this is a topic that I'm really concerned about. I've been teaching 5 years, and have already seen 4 of my former students get pregnant. One of those students has a 3 year old daughter who she was physically abusing last time I saw them both. But if you're sixteen years old, and alone, and your baby is screaming and won't stop... It wrecks me to think about those girls. It wrecks me to know that we, as a school, are letting young people leave our school doors ill-equipped, and ill-informed. Maybe they get information from other sources, maybe they don't. But we certainly aren't doing our part to educate them about being smart and safe when it comes to sex.

Listening to kids today, the one thing that was patently clear was that kids need to know where they can go to get answers to their questions. And I'm proud to say that I at least was able to tell them one really clear source of information: their doctor. I told them that their doctor can answer all of their questions, and that they should never be shy about asking. But I wish that the answers to their questions didn't just come at biannual visits to their pediatrician, or behind closed doors in hushed whispers at school. I wish we adults were honest about our responsibilities to young people, and to our communities, who are being destroyed by our inability to tell the truth.

Lars and the Real Girl

Wintertime, for me, is all about movies. My favorite movies inevitably come out between November and February...but this year, I think the first movie of the season that I've seen is going to be my favorite of the year. I went to see "Lars and the Real Girl" tonight. If you live in Boston, it's playing at the Kendall. If you live anywhere else, figure out where it's playing, get a friend to watch your baby if you have a baby, and go to see this movie. The premise is simple, but totally captivating: Lars brings home a girlfriend to meet his family. The problem is: Bianca, the girlfriend, is actually a blow-up doll. Needless to say, hilarity ensues...but so does some amazing tenderness and tension. It walks the line between funny and poignant artfully, and manipulates your emotions as a viewer in all of the best ways.

Go watch, then tell me what you think!

Castles in the Air

One of my students, Jerome, told another teacher the other day that in his ideal school, he would have "gym, lunch, and Social Studies all day long." I was pretty puffed up about the Social Studies part...but it also got me thinking about what I would want in my ideal school. Before this year, I would have listed a hundred things, from better resources to smaller classes, to promotion and grade-level policies based on demonstration of skills and understanding, instead of age... This year, my list has been reduced to two items. My ideal school, the place where I would give anything to work right now, would have the following:

1) A skillful, inspiring, competent administrator.
2) A school community where people--teachers and students alike--treated each other with humanity.

Draw your own conclusions about the conditions in the place where I work right now.

Proof

Troy Williams was, hands down, one of the hardest students I've ever taught. He was also, hands down, one of the smartest students I've ever taught. But it was my first year teaching, and I couldn't figure out how to teach him so that he could be successful. Sometimes he would be amazing in class. He would push the level of conversation to depths that other kids couldn't get to on their own. He would critique and analyze and question in ways that made me feel like I was getting to have an intellectual conversation with a peer, instead of a student. And yet, other times, he would scream at me if I even asked him, quietly, to do something in class. Hardly a week went by without a situation in which Troy and I were in the hallway outside my room, he was screaming at me, his eyes so huge with rage that I could see the whites in their entirety, and I was standing there thinking, "What in the hell did I do to make this boy so angry at me?" Sometimes it felt like breathing too loud was enough to set Troy off. He got suspended several times; I sent him out of the room at least once a week; I had his uncle's cell phone number programmed into my speed dial. None of it had any positive effect, and we were both miserable. He was miserable being in my class, and I was miserable about what a horrible teacher I was for him.

I remember re-reading Herb Kohl's essay, _I Won't Learn From You_, several times that year with Troy. Eventually, through much reading, journalling, and complete obsessing, I realized that Troy was smart enough to see through the failings of our school, and our public school system, that he was pissed off about those failings, and that, in a very Learning-to-Labor/Willis-esque way, he had made a 'partial penetration' (still hate that terminology). He could see through the system, and its perpetuators, far enough to resist it, but not far enough to realize that resisting it, and thereby failing, would basically yield the precise result that the perpetuators of the system wanted... And one day, in the middle of a screaming session, I told him that. I told him that I understood his anger, but that it wasn't helping him--that in fact, by getting so angry, and by doing so miserably in school, he was basically giving the people he was angry at exactly what they wanted.

It didn't get all better right away after that, but I started just having really frank conversations with Troy where I acknowledged the injustices that he was raging about, and tried to help him see how he could be active in resisting those injustices, instead of just feeling completely aggrieved and overwhelmed by them. And over time, Troy stopped seeing me as an authority figure trying to oppress him, and instead came to see me as "Ms. A", one of the few people he knew would always advocate for him at school. This became much, much easier after Troy finished 6th grade, and I was no longer responsible for his day-to-day learning.

Through 7th and 8th grade, Troy and I remained close. He would stop by my room after school at least once a week for some philosophical talk, he would let me talk him down when he was angry, and he listened, or at least didn't fight back, when I lectured him about getting better grades... I went to all of his basketball games, and would talk through the successes and failures of the team after games with him.

Troy graduated this past June. I wasn't sure what would happen to us after that. But since he left the McCormack, he has continued to keep in touch. He sends me text messages asking me to go to his football games, and I go. He sends me links to websites where I can see pictures of him playing football, and I check them out and tell him what I think. Last week, he texted me to tell me that he'd made honor roll for first term at East Boston High School, and I basically floated around my house for the rest of the night, totally giddy with his success. And tonight, with the cheers of his teammates providing the background noise, he called me to tell me that his football team is going to the Superbowl (high school football championships) at Gillette Stadium, and that he made some key tackles in the game.

He called me, his terrible 6th grade teacher, in the first rush of excitement after winning that game. And I, bursting with pride for him, and for myself, bumbled my way through that joyous conversation in 2 minutes flat, promising, promising, promising to be at the game on Saturday to watch him play.

It will be cold. It will be miserable. It will probably, if it's anything like the games I've already seen, be really slow-paced and boring. But I will be there--for Troy, and for me, in some random sort of celebration of the kind of teacher that Troy has helped me to become.

Summer's End

Today is the last day of my summer. Teachers are back to school for two days of professional development, and then kids come on Thursday, and then the wonderful madness of teaching school will take hold...and all of my accumulated laziness from this summer will soon be exhausted.

I thought it made sense to celebrate this last day of summer--to say goodbye to the season by appreciating all that it has to offer. So I drove out to Lincoln and wandered through the sculpture garden at Decordova, then drove a little further north to Walden Pond, where I paid homage to Henry David, and the beauty of a late summer afternoon. On my drive back home, I stopped at a farmstand and bought berries, which I proceeded to eat, one by one, as I flew back to Boston.

I came home, took a little nap, and made swiss chard and potato tacos for dinner, with razzleberry pie for dessert. Jules came to visit, we spent a few hours chatting, and now it is time for bed. Time to say goodbye to this lovely day, goodbye to this lovely summer, and hello to a challenging, fulfilling school year. And while I'm sad to say goodbye, I'm also very, very excited about the days to come.

On Hold

I hate being on hold on the phone. Especially when I'm on hold listening to an atrociously awful musical composition that makes my head hurt! Especially when that atrociously awful musical composition is just being played over and over and over again.

The things we have to do to change flight reservations... Ugh.

Sunshine on the Rainiest of Days

This afternoon I went to see "Little Miss Sunshine." It was an amazingly well-done movie that had me crying, and then laughing so hard I was crying, all within the span of two minutes. I will never, ever hear the song "Superfreak" again without thinking of little Olive Hoover dancing on stage at the Redondo Beach Suites.

People Who Vanish

It is very, very difficult to vanish in the world today. Between cell phones, which make us accessible at all times, even when we don't want to be, the people search function on Lycos, websites like Friendster and Facebook, and the miraculous wonder that is Google-stalking, it is, in my experience, virtually impossible to disappear. That's what the internet is supposed to do, right? Make the world smaller? Make staying connected easier?

Given the technological realities of our world, I am stubbornly determined to believe that no one is unreachable. And yet, today I was reminded that there are indeed some people who do just disappear. Who move and don't leave a forwarding address. Whose names are too common to turn up anything viable in Google search. Who vanish from your life, leaving artifacts of their existence in your past, but no method for keeping them a part of your present.

When I was in grad school in Wisconsin, my first friend was a woman named Kate Sullivan. She lived right up the street from me, and we used to carpool to class together. The transition to graduate school was hard for both of us, and we bonded pretty quickly. Kate was not just my ride to class--she was my sounding board, my guide to all things Wisconsin, my supplier of amazing artichoke pizza, and one of the most thoughtful, most committed educators that I've ever had the pleasure of meeting. For two years, the two of us, and our friend Angelina, were really close. For me, Kate and Angelina were the only two things that made being in Wisconsin bearable, in a lot of ways. Without them, I think I might have dropped out...

At the end of graduate school, I moved to Boston, and Kate moved to Chicago with her fiancee, Andrew. She'd decided to go back into teaching, and was really excited about the prospect of living and teaching in Chicago. She promised to send me a phone number as soon as she had one.

I never got that phone number. And her cell phone? It was disconnected. I got her address at one point and wrote a letter, but I never got one back. Angelina saw her once after Kate moved to Chicago, and after that, never heard from her again. Based on their brief encounter, Angelina got the sense that teaching was not going well for Kate, and that she was in a pretty low place. Kate mentioned to Angelina that she and Andrew were moving to Iowa so he could go to graduate school. I wrote another letter, still heard nothing back. September of 2004 came and went with no news of Kate's move, and no forwarding address.

And just like that, she was gone. She disappeared, leaving no tracks, no clues, no easy way for me to find her. Which makes me wonder: Are there some people who simply don't want to be found? Maybe she was too busy to worry about sending a forwarding address. Or maybe she was too sad. Or maybe she just didn't want to stay in touch. Whatever the reason, she has disappeared from my life, and no amount of google searching has been able to fix that.

Sometimes I wonder if I dreamed Kate. If I needed a friend so much in that moment in Wisconsin that I effectively made one up. I know that's not true because I have a picture of her, me, and Angelina sitting in my library, because the cd she made me for my birthday was just spinning in the player tonight, because her red, curly hair and classic Wis-cahn-sin accent are etched into my memory in a way that is too deep to have been imagined.

I wish I could respect her desire to disappear. I wish I could just leave this alone, stop looking, stop wondering, stop worrying. But I can't. Because the thing is, when Kate vanished, she took part of me with her--the part of me that was her friend. And I can't get that back. I didn't stop being her friend because she disappeared. I didn't stop caring about her because I couldn't find her. That accumulation of history and emotion is still here, inside me...and I don't know what to do with it.

What do you do when someone disappears? Do you grieve their disappearance, the way you would a person's death, and try to move on? Do you continually search for them, hoping to find them, full well knowing how futile it is to search for someone who doesn't want to be found? I've spend the past 3 years doing the latter. I'm beginning to wonder if maybe it's time to start grieving instead.

And So It Begins

Today is my first day back at school... No kids yet, just spending a few hours starting to set up the classroom that I just took down a little over two months ago. The only difference between then and now, really, is that my floor is very pretty at the moment.

Throughout August, I've been working on school stuff based on the theory that if I do a little bit at a time, I won't be nearly as overwhelmed at the beginning of the school year as I have been in years past. We'll see if the theory holds. I'm hoping it will...

Garden Art

Check out the new photo album--Chihuly at NYBG--for pictures of some of the coolest glass you'll ever seen in a garden. Normally I'm a flower and plant girl, but Dale Chihuly manages to make glass in a garden seem like the most organic, natural happening in the world.

Side Note

Just a quick warning about over-zealous tomato consumption: Don't do it. A pint of cherry tomatoes consumed over the span of a 4 hour drive is not as good for your stomach as it is for your soul. Which is to say, your soul might be happy when your fingers finally hit the bottom of the thick, green cardboard tomato crate, but your stomach definitely won't be.

And The Daffodils Look Lovely Today...

I was emailing my friend Sarah the other day, and I noted that I felt like this summer is just flying by...but in the best kind of way, where my eyes are wide open for every minute. Driving to New Jersey yesterday, listening to lots of old favorite cds, loudly, with the windows down and the wind blowing at high speeds, popping cherry tomatoes into my mouth at random intervals just so the acidic gush of seed and juice would help keep me awake, I felt as though my eyes simply couldn't get any wider.

And now I'm in Jersey, visiting my cousin-might-as-well-be-brother, and his radiantly pregnant wife (people really do glow when they're pregnant, huh?), who listen to the Edison-version of All-India Radio as they eat breakfast in the morning, and have the same sense of wonder about the world that I do. In 30 minutes, I'm off to Montclair, NJ to visit my good friend Steph. Tonight we eat amazing Indo-Chinese food. Tomorrow we're going to the NY Botanical Gardens to see the Chihuly exhibit. Tomorrow night, we're having dinner with Q. Sunday we're doing Rakshabandhan at home.

It's a long list of things to do. And my eyes will be open for all of it.

This summer is quickly coming to an end, and I suppose that part of me should be sad about that. But to be honest, I'm not. I feel like I've lived every moment of this summer right so far. I've rested enough, seen lots, read lots, written lots, cleaned lots, eaten lots, visited and been visited lots... My summer, my brain, my heart, and my eyes and ears and stomach, are, quite simply, full.

So it's ok to go back to work. In fact, it's perfectly wonderful to go back to work. To get to meet a whole new batch of kids, and re-connect with my former students. To start teaching a grad-level course on how to teach Social Studies. To be out on the soccer field with my girls. To live the school year with my eyes peeled just as widely as they've been this summer.

To be completely honest, I don't even want to blink.

Dancing Fool

My entire face is salty with sweat. My skin is tinged red, though I haven't been out in the sun today. My knees are absolutely killing me. The soles of my feet are caked with dirt, worn coarse from hours of shuffling and spinning and whirling on a dance floor barefoot. There is a pot of hot water boiling on the stove so that I can take a bath to wash the night's accumulation of grime off myself. (I have no hot water at the moment, so I'm taking baths out of a stockpot. Yeah...I need to buy a bucket, I know.)

Sometimes I wish I could see what other people see when I'm on a dance floor. I don't have any scope. Once I find the beat, I lose myself. It doesn't matter who's around me. It doesn't matter what music is playing (for the most part). I dance with the kind of abandon that I think most people can't achieve without the aid of chemicals. Me? All it takes is a glass of water.

I got called a "dancin' fool" tonight. I don't know if the person who said it intended it as a compliment, but I'm going to take it as one. Because the rush I get from dancing...the adrenaline that courses through me when I'm on the floor...it's an addiction of its own kind. One that I don't get to indulge nearly as often as I'd like to. And the lack of inhibition that I feel when I'm dancing, the lack of insecurity about my body, the lack of fear of what other people will think of me...if I could capture that, bottle it, and take a dose of it every morning before leaving my house, I would be a much, much happier person than I already am.

Dancin' fool? Hell yeah I am.