A Short Story About Coloring and My Childhood Smart Mouth

My job as an elementary teacher means I probably spend more time coloring than most other adults. I have to make a lot of examples of projects to model student work, I make a lot of posters to post behavioral prompts and background information, and so on. I have an entire desk drawer devoted to markers and pens and dry erase markers and pencils and coloring tools of all variety. It's really somewhat out of control.

I don't mind coloring at all. It's often very calming, and gives me a nice break from having to think about nine different life-or-death school issues at the same time like I usually do. Some projects take longer than others, and when I find myself caught up in one of the longer ones, my mind almost always wanders back to a particular memory:

My history as a rule-following school toady goes all the way back to kindergarten. I loved school, I loved my teacher, I wanted to do well and worked very hard every day I was there, which was every day except the one sick day when I had to stay home. I remember there was only one sick day because it broke my heart that I couldn't be at school and was so excited the following day when I was allowed to go back.

Two years later it wasn't the same story. School was something to survive more than anything else because I had the worst teacher of my entire life. Seriously. She was the embodiment of every bad teacher caricature that has ever been illustrated in any comic strip or middle grade graphic novel. One day we were doing a second grade project that involved drawing and coloring flags from countries all around the world -- I think it had something to do with a school wide play or festival or musical blow-out or something. I was given Switzerland. I though this was great. All I had to do was draw a big plus sign in the middle, leave it alone, and fill the rest of my paper by scribbling my red crayon into oblivion. I didn't have any real attention span to speak of as a child (which is so different now, of course), so I literally scribbled. Everywhere. In all directions. It looked less like a flag and more like a piece of paper that had recently held four pounds of spilled spaghetti.

The teacher was stalking the aisles to evaluate our works in progress with her best impersonation of the animated schoolmaster from Pink Floyd's "The Wall," and when she reached my desk she stopped, stared, clucked accusingly, and sighed angrily.

"Didn't you learn how to color in the same direction like everyone else did in kindergarten??" she barked.

I looked at my paper, which I thought looked fine, and noticed that, yes, my red streaks were all over the place. Not knowing what else to say (and, frankly, a little tired of her at that point in the school year) I looked up and innocently said:

"I guess everyone else learned how to do that on the day I was sick."

And then the look on her face. If she could have legally gotten away with smacking me upside the head....

Back to School: Building a Legacy

When the 2015-16 school year comes to an end, I will have been teaching at the same school for 24 years. For perspective, this means that out of the approximately 80 people I currently work with, only three of them have been at that school longer than I have. Additionally, this 24th year is also something of a personal landmark for me, since I’ll be turning 48 years old within weeks of the school year ending.

It doesn’t take a math teacher to see this means I’ve now been at the same school for half of my life.

So far this 24th year has started like so many of the others have. The first week back was all about scrambling to get ready, attending various meetings and staff development sessions, and reconnecting with the colleagues we haven’t seen in months while starting to get to know the new people. One of our new teachers this year is someone who had been at our school years ago and was returning for a new position. I had some time to briefly catch up with her one morning. While we were talking, she mentioned how whenever she thought of me or heard my name, she immediately thought of the bunny suit I’ve worn at Halloween for the past ten or fifteen years.

This wasn’t a big surprise, since that costume has always stirred up quite a reaction. Since I started wearing it, there have been more yearbooks with pictures of me in that bunny suit than not. But her comment got me thinking later in the day: When my time there finally ends, will that costume be how I’m remembered?

I’ve taught 1st, 3rd, 4th, and 5th grades there, and have been the cooperating teacher to at least five student teachers. I’ve been invited to see students play any number of sports, attend their dance recitals and band concerts, and see their plays, sometimes years after they were in my class. I’ve been the school patrol advisor, the broadcast team advisor, the web site manager, the technology lead, and a union representative. I’ve served on the child study team, the crisis team, the building leadership team, along with so many other committees I can’t even remember what several of them were even called anymore.

But what are the things that would really stick with the thousand-plus students I’ve worked with by now? Would I really be remembered for a Halloween costume? Or just for fun times and jokes, or the books I used for read aloud? Or the times when I lost my temper, or found some powerful and unique way to completely screw up someone's day? Sure, there are always going to be a handful of students and parents who remember some positive difference you hopefully made, but there are probably just as many who retrospectively see you in an opposite light. And of course, there’s a huge group between those extremes who would need to stop and think to even remember anything about you only ten years after you were an integral part of their daily life. 

And then there’s the staff. Teachers share great camaraderie and commonly develop close personal bonds, but there are always conflicting ideas and personalities whenever people are tossed together into any kind of environment that relies on any degree of cooperation to succeed. I’ve been there long enough to see several close friends come and go over the years, along with people I never really got to know. For my part, I feel like I’ve had good personal and working relationships with the large majority of my colleagues, both current and past. Having said that, though, I’m neither naive nor arrogant enough to think I’m one of those rare exceptional people universally loved and respected by everyone I work with.

So where does all of this leave me after half a lifetime, or any of us, regardless of where we are in our lives? Is a legacy defined by the difference we make in the world around us, both in the people we help and the ones we hurt, whether we intended to or not? Is it something so intangible as to evade even a superficial concrete definition? Is a legacy really anything more than a one-dimensional punchline of remembrance, or a way to conveniently label a collective memory?

I think everyone does have a legacy, but none of us really get to directly determine what ours will be. Perhaps instead of wondering about what legacy we might leave behind, it’s more important to live presently, and be aware of what words and actions we insert into the lives of the people around us — and, particularly for teachers, the lives of our students. 

In just a couple more days I’ll have my 24th First Day of School, and the kids will be showing up with different levels of enthusiasm and readiness to be guided through another year. In the end, what they learn and if they feel cared for will be far more important than who did the teaching. But that ‘who’ part is going to matter as well. Even if we teachers don’t always get to see it, we need to remember how far our reach extends.

Our legacy isn’t really what we leave. It’s more about what our students take with them.

The Summer of the Fridge

Tomorrow brings an end to the Summer of the Fridge, when I took a multi-colored stack of Post-Its and turned my refrigerator door into a massive mosaic of a to-do list, made up of summertime adventures and the sorts of tasks I keep procrastinating away during the school year. It was a fairly productive idea, to the point where I added more items in early August to keep the momentum going while I still had to take care of my less adventurous chores. Altogether, including both the original tasks and the ones added later, I had some sixty to seventy items on my list.

Here's what it looked like at the start of summer break...

...and here's what it looks like today, on the last day before I report back to school:

As driven as I usually am regarding to-do lists, I never seem to completely finish them off, and instead end up making compromises with myself about why the last few items don't get done. Even though there's nothing remaining on the fridge that requires emergency attention, I do look at those last few lonely notes in the second picture and feel some slight mental bruising; I seem to process my ideas of success and failure in terms of absolutes more than I probably should. But that's a topic for a different post.

It's likely I'll give those last few notes an asterisk and extend my available summer until the day the kids start school, so I can get more done and hate my failings a bit less. It wasn't such a bad summer after all, so why end it on a defeatist note? I did get a lot of things done I'd been wanting to for years, and I had some good times along the way as well. I read some good books, listened to some great music, and had a couple of good weekend extended family trips in July. I watched some great (and not so great) television, got into a habit of long morning walks, and did a remodeling / redecorating / reorganizing of my home office that I've wanted to do for years (even if I was nudged into that pretty strongly when the hard drive on my computer crashed and burned).

I didn't immerse myself in writing as thoroughly as I had last summer, but I did get some good work done on revising a second manuscript some of you may know -- The Ghost of Lake Emily. It's about as different from Following Infinity as I could probably get while staying in the middle grade range, and with any luck those stories will turn out to be my first two published works. Even though I've put a lot of thought and work into the Emily revisions, there wasn't much pressure to get through them quickly, but of course I'm still working on them because when writing is a job, Rule #1 is you show up and do the work. The things I'm working on right now -- restructuring parts of the story, reinventing relationships between characters, even redefining some of the characters, all of that beautifully frustrating and painstaking work that makes other people tell writers they don't understand how we can stick with it -- are all tasks that shouldn't be rushed. And anyway, I decided at some point to pull back just a little and follow my agent's advice from earlier in the year, when she and I talked about all of the waiting going on right now. "Enjoy the lull," she said, "because it will be the last one you have in...forever." I've had over a year to learn how consuming it can be to maintain a balance between two different careers, and since I suspect that's only going to become more pronounced as things progress, I thought enjoying the lull wouldn't be such a bad idea. Still, I suspect that someday I'm going to enjoy NOT having a writing lull even more.

And so ends another summer vacation. I'm going to spare all of us any summative statements or force-fed wisdom about beginning a new school year and all the promises and challenges that come with it, and instead just say I'm vaguely optimistic about it. I'm not happy to see break end, but I'm not completely dreading the idea of going back, either. I'm just hoping to successfully navigate my way through all of the highs and lows of the next ten months, and do some good along the way.

Now there's nothing left for me to do but show up tomorrow morning and start discovering what the next year has in store.