I've been a teacher for 16 years, but I still know who I want to be when I grow up.
My second year of teaching, I attended the summer invitational at the Red Cedar Writing Project. The director of Red Cedar at the time was Janet Swenson, and she still embodies to me what I want to be as an educator. Besides being brilliant and reflective, insightful and intellectual, she has this really rare gift of helping other people see what is good in themselves. Even though I was only a 2nd year teacher, and basically did not know at all what I was doing, she picked out the good from all the wrong headed ideas I had about teaching and helped me to see them too. She didn't focus on what I needed to improve (basically everything), but helped me to feel empowered to build on my strengths. Over the years, I saw her do this for every teacher she came in contact with. Her celebration of what a person does well makes it much easier to be open to work on aspects of teaching that are not so perfect. Being able to see the best in my students is one of the guiding principles in my effort to be more like Janet. I try to remind myself of that in times like now--the grey days of Farch (February/March--one big, long, never-ending month) when I'm buried in grading and meetings and question if students are making progress or if Spring Break will ever come. I try to reset my vision to see the beautiful phrase, the smart argument move, the leap in reading. I try to look at my students with gentleness and love, and I try to look at myself that way too. Seeing what is best in others is a practice that takes a lot of courage. I am still trying to be the teacher that I want to be when I grow up, but I'm hopefully getting there thanks to powerful mentors like Janet.
4 Comments
Here it goes--a whole month of writing everyday. Here is another poem in process, currently untitled, that I wrote after reading "Heavy" by Mary Oliver.
The things of the world that are kind and maybe also troubled: A pond with wind whipping the water into ripples. Teenagers who love to play Ping Pong Poets--some of them. My hands, dry and aging, looking like my mother's hands. My mother, who would have loved Mary Oliver, who maybe did love Mary Oliver before she forgot the things she loved and did not love. My mother, whose easy tears spring up in my eyes, who took people in to stay in the not-so-spare bedroom, who slept in a fold-out couch to make room. My mother, who loved flowers and hands in the dirt. Did she even own gardening gloves? Who never painted her nails or wore red lipstick but still loved a flowered dress. My mother, who loved me so much she let me go. For my own good. For my good. Here is a draft of a poem I am working on about our beach by Lake Huron. I don't feel like it is done yet, but it is my slice of life in that I am working on it, and it tries to capture an image memory from this month.
In February the beach is movement stilled. Waves frozen in motion. Dunes that seem fixed, pinned by ice but change every night. Under the relentless wind that speaks in a million languages, silence presses on the dark cottage windows. It tucks itself in like the colorful chairs and umbrellas stacked in grey garages. In February the beach is texture -- ice as sharp as jagged teeth and ice as smooth and voluptuous as a body. This post is inspired by this blog, which I've adapted into a writing prompt that I do with my Seniors. This is just a start...
This is 42 42 is the very essence of bitter and sweet. The bitter is easy to find. Your age shows. You are now a Ma'am. You parent an adolescent who is quickly growing away from you. Old identities: sexy young thing, wild child, mama. No one will ever call you these again. The sweet is also easy to find. 42 is being invisible to the world but more visible to yourself. You know what good taste is and have the money to have it. Competency builds a nice, cozy armor that you wear like a fashionable shawl. 42 is having dozens of selves nestled inside one another like Russian dolls. Selves that peek out and haunt current moments. What would 20-year-old, smoking, vintage heels wearing Alaina think of my current obsession with running? What would 11-year-old Alaina, who dreamed of being a missionary, think of my current job 1/2 mile from my house-my life that mostly fits inside a 5 mile radius, a life grooved with routine? I spend my days with the judgements of these little Alainas, and I smile at them sweetly. They knew so little. My thoughts are ruffled and crashing like waves on a windy beach. Each idea jumps over the previous, pushing emotions' buttons, playing me. I'm looking for a calmer self, the part that watches above, below or somewhere in all this chaos, but wherever this self is, if it even exists, it keeps getting subsumed by an urgent need to add an item to the grocery list, or plan what I will say to my 7th grader about his grades, or wonder if turned my phone off.
Through the noise, I walk into the studio. It's morning so the sun shines in chunky blocks on gleaming blond floors. I try to notice. My shoulders hunch forward, like my heart is waiting for a blow. I try to notice. An idea for a lesson plan for tomorrow shoots through my head. I try to notice and let it go. The class starts hard: planks, body shaking, arms feel like sticks trying to heft the weight of a body full of stories. There's no room in this head now for anything but breath that shakes through my body. I hear the inhalations and exhalations of other bodies. My own breath is a whisper, a message from some other self that exists below, above, beyond. Finally here. |
Archives
March 2020
Categories |