Day 29: Planting the Seeds

Depending on your personal belief system there are a lot of ways to take this introduction. I’m just going to describe what happened and let you decide what to think:

I was at my desk correcting spelling tests one late winter afternoon this year while my students were out at recess. I came across one test littered with mistakes that were too indicative of the kind of work all of us in 5th grade had come to expect from that particular student, the sort of spelling test that has made a million teachers roll their eyes a million times throughout educational history. An existential shudder ran through me as I thought about the numerous challenges that student would face upon entering middle school and how woefully unprepared he would be to face them. My first reaction was to think, “God help that kid” and shake my head as I flipped to the next test in the pile. But for whatever reason, I instead added one mental comma into that thought and reframed it as “God, help that kid.” And in the following half-moment, quicker than I honestly think I would have had time to come up with it myself, a thought of response came to me: “That’s why I gave him you.”

With that I sat up a little straighter and thought, “Oh. Okay then. No pressure there.”

From that moment I began making a concerted effort to resist giving in to the several frustrations related to working with that kid, and consciously going out of my way to provide him with the patience and support he deserved. For whatever moments of disconnect from his work he showed or whatever lack of organization fed into the excuses he dreamed up, I made it my personal mission to keep him accountable for his learning and make sure he felt as happy, comfortable, and safe as he possibly could while at school. The sad thing is I had to force myself to put aside my frustrations to do what should have been automatic for me to be doing all along.

As I look back over the the time I’ve spent teaching, it’s too easy to think of the times I’ve failed: the moments I’ve lost my temper, the shortfalls that have led me to spend an entire weekend second guessing myself, things that have come out of my mouth I wish I could have taken back the moment they were said, the times I’ve selfishly cut corners on something just because it was easier or more convenient for me. I know I’m not the only one who feels this way. I can think of many times over the years I’ve had to talk some of my colleagues back from the ledge when they’ve felt like they had redefined the word “mistake.” I think it’s easy for teachers to be too critical of ourselves because the stakes of what we do are so high and there is such a slight margin of error. Over my two decades of teaching I’ve seen or heard too many stories about former students that left me deflated and depressed: Addictions. Homelessness. Deportation. Suicides. Pregnancies. Abuse. Any variety of personal turbulence or educational crisis that I would never wish on anyone. When these stories get back to me I always wind up asking myself the same questions: Did I do enough? Could I have been that one person they needed to make the difference, but I side-stepped the responsibility when it was in right front of me? Did I give them the support they needed to be successful, or did I push them hard enough to ensure they would learn, or did I lazy my way through?

Logically I know I can’t own all of this myself, and for me to wonder if I could have been the one to make the ultimate difference in someone’s life takes a special kind of arrogance. I know that when considering the entire scope of all the lives that have passed through my classroom I’m just a small chapter in a school career or a life story, or one thread in the tapestry, or another brick in the wall. I know that no matter how critical things can seem in the moment and how often they truly are, there are just as many if not more times when all I’m able to do is plant the seeds and hope someday they’ll take root.

So much of elementary school is about the maybes. I feel it almost tangibly in 5th grade. In most cases when I send the kids home on that last day of school, I’m never going to see them again and I’m never going to know how their lives turn out. I can only hope that the time I spent with them made some difference. Maybe the boy who is so disenfranchised with school might listen to some things I say just because I can speak the language of video games as fluently as he can. Maybe the girl who writes notes to herself about what a failure she is will feel a bond to me if it turns out I’m the only person in her life that tells her she’s important and I’m proud of her. Maybe the kid who winds up in a different school after anger and depression overtake common sense will remember the running joke we had during spelling. And maybe any of the tiny connections like these will open up the window of opportunity I need to just give them the idea that they can be successful, or they are worthwhile, or they’re able to achieve more greatness than they themselves yet realize. All we can do as teachers is plant those seeds and hope that something will someday come of them. To try and to hope and to blindly trust is a lot to take on, but it’s really all we can do.

As a teacher you rarely know down the road if what you did made any difference. You hope it does. You still do it anyway just because it might. You keep throwing things at the wall with faith that sooner or later you’ll find something that sticks. You don’t know if that kid is going to remember you or anything you did beyond the moment, but maybe they will remember something you taught them. Maybe they will carry your thumbprint on the direction they follow as they move forward, without even realizing where their motivations came from. Maybe me biting my tongue and quietly releasing the all too frequent deep breath will eventually come together as something that influences that kid who needs extra encouragement just to get the day started. I’ll probably never know. And that’s just something I have to accept.

But you know, there are also lucky instances when sometimes I do get to see when the seeds took root and grew. Just today I found an envelope in my mailbox in the office. Inside was a photo card invitation from a girl about to graduate from high school who had been one of my students a lifetime ago and was inviting me to her open house in a couple of weeks. I smiled when I opened it, marveled at how much she still looks like her younger sister, and read her short message on the back: “I cannot believe it’s been seven years since I would cry almost every day of school from laughing so hard! Thank you!”

It’s nice to be reminded that sometimes the seeds you plant do take root. And even though there are always going to be times when you don’t meet your own expectations, there are also the times when you manage to get things right. I guess in the end that's what keeps us going.

Day 28: The Summer Ahead

Every year at the end of May, a lot of signs start appearing to signal the school year is coming to an end. My birthday comes and goes; the final round of standardized testing ends; Memorial Day weekend and its predictable crap weather passes; more of my non-instructional time at school is spent packing and doing inventory instead of grading papers; the daily temperatures (usually) begin to get warmer and everyone at school starts crossing their fingers really, really hard that we'll manage to get in another Track and Field Day with no rain. And when all of these signals start appearing, it becomes impossible to not think about the approaching summer.

Every school year I've taught through has come to an end with mixed feelings, and this one won't be an exception. But let's be honest here -- one of the undeniable perks of teaching is summer break. I won't even try to pretend otherwise. I am happy to say that in the forty combined years of my life I've spent as first a student and then a teacher, I've never known a summer without a break. It's truly a beautiful thing. The rules and routines that dictate everything about how life operates for the other nine and a half months fall away and are temporarily replaced with new ones, many of which are at your discretion. Do you want to work? Summer school, or tutoring, or curriculum writing? The opportunities are there if you're interested but you certainly don't have to. Your relationship with the alarm clock becomes more casual. You can actually be outdoors instead of just admire it through a classroom window. Everything about life can either slow down or speed up to whatever pace you decide you want. I know someone who once had decided her project for the summer was to discover the recipe for the perfect strawberry margarita. I know another who made a point of reading every article in the newspaper every morning while drinking her coffee. For me, I find that my normal amount of drive spins down to a level where accomplishing one thing in a day is more than enough to make it feel like my time was used productively.

So staying true to the title of my li'l corner of the Internet, here's roughly what I plan on doing with my summer vacation this year....

Writing: It always begins and ends with this for me. I've had summers when I've written manuscripts in my head while walking my dog through the neighborhood in the evenings, then staying up and typing out my ideas between midnight and 3:00 A.M. That would be physically impossible for me to pull off anymore, but it's fair to say that this summer more than most is going to see me spending a great deal of time living the life of an aspiring author. There are a total of three projects in the rotation in the coming weeks -- the first is a manuscript I love dearly that I plan rewriting to make it even better, the second is the one I started back in November last year that I'd finally like to finish off, and the third is one that's already done which I'll be trying to push back into the agency market to see if I can get anyone to take a look at it and hopefully represent it so I can finally make my millions and win my Newbery Award. This will mean some early mornings, some late nights, and some long afternoons, and a whole bunch of stir-crazy. My fingers are crossed that there will be some summer get-togethers scheduled for the school crowd so I don't have to rely on Facebook as a substitute for interacting with actual people. But with the kind of work I want to get to this summer, there might be times I'll have to settle for that. If anyone does cross paths with me in the summer and something about the way I carry myself seems a little off, this will probably be why.

House: I had a nice run of some redecorating last summer but didn't get to everything on the list, so maybe I'll be picking up where I left off with that. Other than that there will still be the obsessive level of cleaning and organizing I can take care of while I have so much time to take care of it; when you feel like you've had a full day for only getting one thing done, it can become really easy to stretch cleaning the house into a month-long project.

Travel: I've never been a big traveler, mostly because I think that where you go is less important than who you go there with, and even though I can navigate a single life fairly well most of the time in the every day, traveling without someone to share the experience with seems to defeat the purpose. That said, I'm giving some serious thought to taking a trip or three this summer. Depending on how the scheduling and the airfares come together, I've got some friends in the Pacific Northwest it would REALLY do me some good to see this year. Additionally I've got relatives in other corners of the country that I haven't seen in a long time it would be fun to visit, and it goes without saying that the Turtle Lake Fair is on the schedule already. That would wind up being a lot of getting around, but it feels important to do it this year, because.... talk about burying the lead... a very big announcement coming for the people who understand how big of an announcement this really is, coming from me... I'm starting to think that next summer might be when I decide to get a new dog. I'd only ever get a dog during the summer, and if I do that would make everything about traveling much more difficult. And of course because this is me we're talking about, this is something I'll need at least a year to overthink before I decide anything. So it kind of feels like a now or never deal this year.

Routine: I am most definitely a creature of habit, so I'm looking forward to discovering exactly how my routine for the summer will evolve this year. A lot of the typical checkboxes will make it on the list: morning trips to the YMCA after eating breakfast and reading the newspaper and finishing the Sudoku puzzle, taking naps whenever I damn well please, books to read, movies to anticipate and then finally see and usually find a little disappointing, awful reality TV shows to numb my brain in the evening (God bless the human experiments who volunteer to work through their personality defects while appearing on "Big Brother"), magazines to read cover to cover in one sitting, games to play, maybe even a television series or two to watch all the way through if I can figure out how to get Netflix streaming through my Blu-Ray player (I'd had enough of scratched discs showing up in the mail). But now that I think of it, my sister has a ton of shows on DVD at her house... I might have to browse over there... but anyway. You get the idea.

Seven more days with the students and one more work day afterward, but truthfully that last workday without the kids always has such a different dynamic that I barely think of it as work. And after that day is over and my staff friends do whatever it is we'll wind up doing to cap off the year before we go our separate ways, I'm ready to wake up on that first Saturday morning knowing there are seventy-nine days ahead of me filled with nothing but options.

Like I said -- it's a perk.

Day 27: Songwriting

Back at the end of April when I decided to try this posting marathon, I asked for topic ideas anyone would be willing to share. Since the regular Summer Vacation readers only number in the dozens on a good day, I didn’t get many suggestions. But I did get a few, one of which was for me to try writing a song. “You love music, so why not give it a shot?” Valid point. But it’s probably never going to happen.

Around the same time a friend of mine gave me a CD from a band her husband had been in years ago; I’d put a picture on Facebook that reminded her of one of the songs and the album cover so she brought me a copy. I played through it a few times, knowing  those songs had once been important enough to someone to write, learn, practice, record, and share them. This is very much what I feel like at the end of a manuscript. Knowing that I hope people who read my writing will direct some time and considerable thought into it, I was going to do the same thing. The recording had a distinct garage/bar band quality and the drums really jumped out of the mix (being a drummer I tend to notice that) but there was a lot about it I liked, particularly in the playing. I’m still not entirely sure what all of the songs are about (which I’d argue isn’t always a bad thing), but I can respect they each have a cohesive musical/lyrical quality that the guys in this band put some work into achieving.

Which kind of explains why I can’t see myself ever really tackling songwriting. A song needs both the words and the music. I play drums, and on a grading scale of people who know how to play drums but won’t ever get paid to do it, I’m probably a B- drummer in my rare best moments. I used to play piano and I’m confident I could teach myself most of the way back to the modest level of proficiency I once had, but that isn’t enough to write a song. I love guitar and would like to learn it someday, but even if I did and learned enough to try writing songs, where would I go from there? My singing voice is fine if I’m the only person in the car, but it’s not meant for performance. Would I start a band and play the drums? Be the lyric-writing Neil Peart of the group? I don’t see myself putting together the kind of pop ditties that have a good beat you can dance to, so the bar-and-party circuit would be out. So where’s the reason to try and express myself with that kind of economy, especially if I don’t have the ability to create the music to accompany the emotion I would be trying to capture?

If I ever did try writing a song I’d aim for the direction of the music that matters to me, and songwriting is a key element in much of the music I’m drawn to. To name a few.... Let’s start with The Airborne Toxic Event, since I listened to them almost all day today: Most of their songs are infused with so much raw emotion they just break me in half every time I hear them. Or take Bruce Hornsby, or Mumford and Sons: So many of their songs travel the breadth of a novel, with at least half of the story being told through the music. And take more of a pop band like Fun.: Even with the “oh-ooo-whoa-oh” hooks and the autotune overkill, a lot of their songs have a strong storytelling elements that gives you just enough to leave you filling in the blanks on your own. Someone like Todd Park Mohr mumbles through his lyrics while playing so effortlessly it almost seems as if he’s just making it all up as he goes. And all of this is to say nothing of prog-rock giants like Dream Theater and Neal Morse who write songs with such virtuosity and complexity that they’re more closely aligned with the structure of classical music than pop. I could go on for another three thousand words citing examples of songwriting that connects with me, but I’ll let these suffice. (You’re welcome.)

One of my best friends is a professional musician who’s performed all over the world and has had his compositions turn up in television shows and Disney theme park showcases. Every few years I’ll throw out the idea of us trying to come up with something and we talk about it some, but it never goes beyond that because I keep hitting the same block: If we did write a song, who would ever hear it? What’s the point of saying something if nobody will ever hear you say it? And yeah, I know the response some people might have to that question would be along the lines of writing the song for the sake of the challenge -- climb the mountain just because it’s there. But don’t the people who climb the mountain want to tell others about the experience? I feel I almost trip over myself with excitement whenever someone asks me if they can read one of my manuscripts. Even if I decided long ago that I won’t ask people to read something I’ve written (click here if you’re curious about the reasons why), I rarely write something just to keep it to myself. Take this post -- even if only a few dozen people wind up ever reading it over time, it’s out there for the whole Internet to find and I wouldn’t publish it here if I wasn’t okay with that.

So as for writing a song? I have too much respect for the process of songwriting and the people who do it well to even try. I know my wheelhouse. Why try to make a point in four minutes when you can do it in 70,000 words?