A little perspective

I just returned from five weeks of travel in Nicaragua and Costa Rica with an old high school friend. With no particular goal set other than enjoying one another’s company and speaking Spanish, we ate rice and beans, rode in the back of pick up trucks, woke up early to catch the sunrise on top of hostels, and slept soundly under bug nets after regular games of cards. (For a teacher who awakes to race the clock to work, this was pure heaven.)
This trip reminded me that I choose how much stress I chose to take on--no one pushes it on me. I realize now that the past two years of teaching I have felt a huge amount of pressure (probably self-imposed) to work more, think harder, out-do other teachers in my department, and sacrifice my personal well-being in the name of "doing it for the students." While the pressure served as a motivator, I didn't make time for myself or my friends, I didn't sleep well, and I didn't exercise as much as I like to. In the rush of the school year I get sucked in the microcosm of MY lesson plan and MY students, forgetting the larger purposes of thinking, reflecting, appreciating, and digesting.

On our journey Eden and I met a ton of ex-pats who took advantage of the cheap land prices and re-invented themselves in Central America. Business executives became eco-lodge managers, construction workers became beach bums, college students became international observers over peace tribunals, and bartenders became ice-cream shop owners. "You think of something you want to have in Costa Rica that you had back in Israel," one friendly restaurant owner told me, "and then before you know it you are an importer! I love how wide open it is with possibility."
This reinvention obviously doesn't come without socio-economic costs. The ex-pats and tourists raise prices for locals who sold their land for quick cash and, now homeless, flock to the slums outside of the capital. Many Nicaraguans don’t indulge in domestic travel because bus prices are too expensive. On the other hand, as one Nico reminded me, we are all equally trying to make meaning out of this life and these ex-pats, with their golden haired one-year-olds climbing freely in the back of old Land Rovers, seem incredibly happy in the “frontier.”


After befriending these global entrepreneurs, acupuncturists, and parents I realized that the central career question is not, as I have mistaken it up until now, "how am I going to make money in this lifetime?" but rather something more like "how much risk will you take to live your dreams?" or "how can I create a life that I find emotionally, spiritually, and mentally fulfilling?"

Tomorrow I start work at a smaller private school in its fifth year, and I see it as another test run. Is it possible to be a teacher and maintain personal balance? In this role as teacher can we realize the change we hope to see in the world? This past week of orientation felt creative and fun so I am hopeful, but if it doesn't work out I am no longer scared to start afresh and do something else. There are a few beaches in Costa Rica that still need yoga-hostels…

Saying Goodbye

Last Monday I went to the retirement party of a beloved French teacher who has taught at my school for many years. I didn’t expect to, but I cried. I cried after four students played Chopin on the cello and collegues read The Little Prince aloud. I cried during the speeches and the photo montages, cried at the hand-made center pieces on the tables and the group of retierees who surrounded Jack for a photo. I cried at all the mommies and babies in the wings, bouncing and cooing. This school is such a family—it is really hard to divorce yourself from the cyclical ceremony of it all, the comfort of feeling part of something larger than yourself.

Everyone feels the year winding down; it’s like reading the last few pages of the favorite book you want to read quickly and slowly at the same time. Does so much emotion bubble up annually at jobs outside of academia? Do people cry when they leave boardrooms for the winter holidays? When they retire from 25 years of ibanking? When their airline goes bankrupt and it’s time to seek a new management job?

I’m leaving too—off to work at a small private school in Kapolei which, new and unformed with regard to tradition, is the polar opposite of the established school I now part from. So perhaps my tears came partly from selfish attachment, or a sense of personal loss. But I mostly just felt overwhelmed by the evidence that careers unexpectedly end and begin and take sudden turns. Therefore, the time we spend together is finite and must be honored and relished like a dragon fruit devoured with a spoon. I am grateful to have been at my school for two years (the second really helped me to ground myself in the classroom) and awestruck by the opportunity I had to work with such talented faculty and students. I hope I teased the fruit's flesh from the rind, munched through the seeds, and cleaned my plate.

Teacher 1, Teacher 2

My friend Nick wrote me a great email in which he described two of his favorite high school teachers.

Mr. Miller, who taught physics and AP Bio, was renowned as the coolest teacher in the school. He was about 50 and skinny, with a wily black beard and a ratty blue lab coat. His room had a piano and herbariums, and full-spectrum lights and classical music always playing softly on the stereo. Every student in his classes was required to read the entire NYTimes every day. He always told us about how he had taught in every possible kind of school-- private, public, big, small, boarding, Quaker, catholic, Jewish, hippie, suburban, inner city, middle of nowhere--and that that was how he learned how to teach. And he was damn good. I got a 4/5 on the AP bio exam without memorizing a single thing. I don't even remember taking a single test in his class, just drinking tea and dissecting squid and talking about evolution and the anatomy of the eye. He came to my school during my sophomore year and after my senior year his "contract was not renewed." The administration always thought he was kinda unconventional.

The other teacher, Mr. DallaGrana, taught recent American history, global issues, and American political systems. Except for the survey intro to American history class, all the classes he taught he designed himself. "Global Issues" was devoted to the influence of one country's history on another, with special emphasis on the history of apartheid and democracy in South Africa. DallaGrana organized charity 5K run/walks, took students on trips abroad (even took my brother to South Africa junior year), was an ultra-marathon runner, and lived a block away from school with his wife and kids. He was and is still an institution at the school---took a bunch of kids to Obama's inauguration this fall. He was also a peace corps volunteer in the 70s in Lesotho, and goes back to the village where he lived EVERY YEAR! He did a 1 year Fulbright exchange a few years ago, where a South African teacher brought her family to live in his house and teach in his classroom and he took his family to live in her house and teach in her classroom. The guy is completely committed to TWO communities on opposite sides of the earth---and for most of the time he was doing it the internet didn't even exist.

They really both sound wonderful and raise questions about what it means to be a teacher rooted in place. I originally thought teaching was attractive as a profession because it would facilitate world-travel, but it is becoming clearer to me how central tradition and culture are in schools and how being a part of that takes physical presence. There is a "this is how we do it" feel in schools that I'm not sure pervades in other institutions and it takes a while to learn that, become part of that, and then shape it in some way. I don't know which teacher (#1 or #2) I aspire to be, but I'm thankful there is more than one way to be good at this job.

Great Read

In three days flat I read A Changed Man by Francine Prose. The thing I like about it is that it raises questions students ask themselves (Can people really change? Can you help another person change or does change come from within? Where does hate come from? Should we forgive people who do bad things? Should we forgive ourselves?) in well-written, digestible language.

For example, read this passage between Vincent--the ex- neo-Nazi turned NGO worker-- and Danny, the teenager at whose house Vincent stays while transitioning from his past.

"Wait a minute," says Danny. "Back up. Let me get this straight. Are you saying that Hitler killed six million Jews because he was gay?"

Vincent taps the side of his head and lets his jaw go slack. "Excuse me? Did I say that? That's your conclusion, my man. Personally, I don't care what the guy did behind closed doors. I don't even want to think about what Hitler did or didn't do. In bed. My point was something else. My point was: all these guys I used to hang with...you couldn't even bring it up. They'd kick your ass if you hinted that Hitler was a little light in the loafers. Because they dug Hitler and hated fags. They couldn't handle the contradictions. That was their number-one problem. They couldn't deal with the gray areas. They couldn't get beyond the point where everything has to be black or white, one way or the other." (165)

Well said, my man. I don't mean to suggest that the language is always gentle or even student appropriate (although that is a whole different blog post in its self) but it is concise, accurate, and convincing, especially for the characters involved. All good literature raises meaningful questions about the world, but diction deeply affects how much those questions resonate with students. Books like The Catcher in the Rye --which still brings up good questions for me, even on my eighth read--sends students to look up words like "highball" and "galoshes." A Changed Man tackles similar questions but with the the zing of fresh language. Bravo Mrs. Prose.

Quality Education

Last week over spring break I took a few days of my vacation to visit schools in the Seattle area. At Seattle Academy of the Arts and Sciences (SAAS) and University Prep I took campus tours, met with department heads, observed the use of technology in the classroom and chatted with students.

The most shocking revelation of these visits was that two prep schools could have such different philosophies about what a quality education looks like. You ask someone what makes a good piece of pizza and they might mention the crust’s thickness, the variety of toppings, or the amount of cheese. But what makes a quality education? The number of variables alone is staggering (class sizes, commitment to the arts, homework load etc.). On top of that, you aren’t working with mushrooms and pepperoni—these are people filling your classroom who each have their own ideas of how education should be. How should the school order its priorities? The two schools I saw answered this question differently and therefore have very different school cultures.

SAAS (where I attended 7th and 8th grade in the mid-nineties) is expanding like a cherry blossom mid-March. The student body has grown to nearly 600 students and plans for a new building are in the works. The students were sociable and I interrupted a girl in her biology lesson (she was reading a poetry blog on-line while her testing experiment ran) and we ended up discussing her independent poetry study. She meets twice a week with a teacher she selected to discuss her poetry and reflections: a neat arrangement that came about because she came up short of one English credit. I like that both school and teacher would accommodate her this way. I like that she had been on Semester at Sea. I liked how little prompting it took to coax this girl into talking to a foreign teacher about her passions. In almost every classroom I poked my head into (visual art, French, Algebra, choir, English) I saw students pursuing their interests and taking a risk in front of their peers, be it by reading an essay aloud in English or opening their mouths to sing in choir.



Not everything worked perfectly. I observed some classes where students were supposed to be working independently but cruised Facebook instead, and one where the teacher helped one student while the rest chatted about an upcoming senior trip to Alaska. I saw a student sleeping on his break and heard one complain about overly-committing to lacrosse (“Dude, it’s like a part-time job!”). But in general, I had a sense that the school is committed to teaching the whole child--mind, body, soul--and providing opportunities for students to take risks, thereby discovering the wealth of strength inside themselves.



University Prep is a slightly smaller school (485 students) with breathtaking facilities that let in a lot of natural light. I arrived near the end of the day so I didn’t get to see class in action, but a discussion with the English department head clearly outlined the focus of the school. He pointed out that the school’s name is “University Prep” (perhaps as opposed to artistic prep?) and that they deliver exactly what they promise—preparation for a 4-year university. The required four-years of English culminates in a 5000 word essay on a topic of the student’s choosing (SAAS sends seniors to intern at the non-profit of their choosing) and I have no doubt that the U-prep student can write an excellent persuasive essay. The day I visited the school had suspended class for a music day, and an outdoor trip was planned for the Olympic peninsula so the school certainly doesn't limit its self to academics alone. But I did come away with the sense that the school is primarily focused on providing an academic environment that will prepare students for the challenges they will face in college.

The schools are different, and I wouldn’t want them to be the same. Some students excel more in the structured environment of U-Prep, some thrive on the artistic opportunities at SAAS. Both schools have students that struggle as well. I think the larger lesson here is that each school has its own culture and that students (and teachers!) should be at the school whose idea of a quality education matches their own.

The Brain and creativity

I showed this video to my freshman class before we started a poetry unit. They enjoyed Taylor's storytelling and were shocked by her picture at the end. The 18 minute clip serves as a nice reference point for us now when discussing where poetry comes from, how to foster creativity, and what a grounded "sense of self" is in our writing.

You can’t skip my class

Something is going right in my freshman English class. It feels amazing. I look forward to teaching all three sections whenever they meet, which is rare for me the week before Spring break vacation.

What is working:
1. We spent time building a class culture. We used the first two weeks of the quarter to do activities that addressed the essential question of the course (who am I and how does voice shape my identity?) and students bonded. The payoff is better peer-feedback amongst students and more laughter in the classroom.

2. More large projects. Student feedback from last semester suggested that they prefer fewer large assignments over nightly assignments that count for a lot. Now they have Big Great Works, Little Great Works, and Process works which are the nightly assignments worth 5 points. The assignments build on one another, so after around seven Process works of writing different kinds of poetry, for example, they have a BGW of polishing three poems and submitting those with a reflection. They sense there is a purpose to the homework while it allows a little more space to play and fail (you can goof up your process works and still rock your BGW grades).



3. I spend more time planning class than I do grading. Last year I stayed up late to turn back papers the day after I received them. Now I may turn papers back two classes later, but I know class will be engaging (and I am well-rested!).

4. Start every class with them. Students can they read their free-choice paper to a neighbor, share a story of what they did after school yesterday, or write an overheard line of poetry on the board-- anything works. I just try to start class with something from them so we are all invested together. It’s a little scarier than starting with my example story or model-able essay; it requires adaptability and thinking on my feet. Their creation doesn’t always link seamlessly to the lesson of the day, but it adds an element of surprise for both of us that keeps things fresh.

A mentor told me that class should feel like there is some kind of plan, but anything can happen. I like that.

One strange result of this spontaneous, student-started class is that it makes it unpleasant to re-hash past classes with students who missed class for sports or illness. Last year I could easily upload my lesson plan to the website or email them what they missed because it was the same in every class: fueled by me. But now rehashing class is like dissecting a joke for someone who wasn’t listening. What is there to say? You had to be there.