MindSpinner

I am not from one place, but a variety of places. This heritage has doomed me to a certain rootlessness and saved me from seeing the world as narrowly as I might otherwise have done, though I wish I could see it from a broader perspective still.

One of the places I’m from is North Georgia, where I graduated from high school in a school system that found its way into the New York Times this morning, by way of a story about one biology teacher’s struggle to teach the theory of evolution. It’s a compelling story wherever you are from. See “Evolution’s Lonely Battle in a Georgia Classroom.”

A couple of months back, the family movie (a ritual fading to rarity these days) was indeed Donnie Darko. It was dark, weird, intriguing and compelling - definitely worth watching, probably twice because once isn’t enough to enable you to put all the pieces together and make sense of them.

My kids downloaded one song from its soundtrack, called “Mad World,” written by Gary Jules and performed by Tears for Fears. It’s a haunting song. There’s a certain age at which thoughtful teenagers come to see through institutions and absurdities and shrewdly assess what the future holds for them in the world as we’ve made it; moreover they come to recognize that institutions and absurdities (all too often being one and the same) frequently do not value them for the unique individuals that they are but only reward or dismiss them according to how well they measure up to expectations. They struggle to find psychologically safe and supportive places in which they can work out who they are and who they wish to become. This song reminds me of how rare those places can be and of how often school fails to be one of them. We’re so busy making students conformable to and functional in this world so that they can succeed in it that we can miss meeting them, knowing them, and valuing them for the inner lives that they lead. It’s those inner selves that need to breath in order to make their lives worth living.

Mad World

Verse
All around me are familiar faces
Worn out places, Worn out faces
Bright and early for the daily races
Going nowhere, Going nowhere
Their tears are filling up their glasses
No expression, No expression
Hide my head I want to drown my sorrow
No tomorrow, No tomorrow

Chorus
And I find it kind of funny, I find it kind of sad
These dreams in which I’m dying, Are the best I’ve ever had
I find it hard to tell you, I find it hard to take
When people run in circles it’s a very very
Mad World, Mad World

Verse
Children waiting for the day they feel good
Happy Birthday, Happy Birthday
And they feel the way that every child should
Sit and listen, Sit and listen
Went to school and I was very nervous
No one knew me, No one knew me
Hello teacher tell me what’s my lesson
Look right through me, Look right through me

Chorus
And I find it kind of funny, I find it kind of sad
These dreams in which I’m dying, Are the best I’ve ever had
I find it hard to tell you, I find it hard to take
When people run in circles it’s a very very
Mad World, Mad World

I’ve done it, you see, muddled through a hectic day and looked right through them, talked at them, processed their papers, thinking the day’s lesson was my object. What they needed most of all from me is that I should come to know them and to bring them lessons that can help them to live - to live deeply and authentically in an admittedly mad world (not forgetting that they have much to teach me). I can’t bring them anything worth having if I’ve forgotten how to live deeply and authentically myself. The other stuff will have its meaning and worth only if we begin with this. What strikes me with equal force is that the same is true for parenting as for teaching.

I’ve resolved to renew a promise every day, “I will not look right through you. I will know and value you instead.”  Even when there’s a yearbook deadline and grades are due and stacks of papers pile up.

Once upon a time in a small town some distance from you and from me today, it was the boy’s grandmother who came to the meeting at school, the grandmother who had moved her family out of the city where neighborhoods are dangerous and young people die violently. She wiped a tear for the grandson in boot camp, for the child in prison. She wiped a tear for the girl in the city who’d been murdered and burned. Grandmother herself had sustained injuries at the hands of the angry children she was trying to save. Clearly there was no one else she could turn to. Though she was not enough alone, though the boy spurned her in the meeting, she had brought her family to the small town in hopes that they might be saved from what might become of them - or from what they might become. Afterward, she walked away down the hall slowly, love soldiering on.

This is a busy time of year, not one conducive to writing or indeed to thinking of anything but the to-do list. Conquering the to-do list is something like trying to put out wildfires with an arsonist on the loose. The yearbook’s done, but the list of add-ons has to be double-checked and the nameplates ordered. (I had sent a list, but it never made it to the right desk at the publishing plant.) Books are coming in soon, and those that are paid for have to be distributed while payment for orders with outstanding balances has to be collected, and another 60 or so books sold so that we can actually pay for the publication of the book. Arrangements for formal portraits of upcoming seniors need to be finalized. As senior sponsor, I’m in charge of both prom and graduation. I shouldn’t neglect to mention the senior luncheon, baccaulaureate arrangements, the senior picnic, and heaven knows what details I haven’t even envisioned yet. Let’s see, oh yes - I need to put together the senior class and yearbook budgets for next year, help hire a literacy coach for a Striving Readers grant for which I’m the District Contact, and complete 12 hours professional development before May 15, mostly in planning new curriculum for next year as we implement year-long block English classes. I must also whip up a course outline for Senior Topics, a course which has come into being within the last two days, replacing Speech and Drama, simply because I’m the only teacher who can teach something for the seniors third period. (Another teacher will teach drama another period. This is a tiny high school - scheduling is a formidable challenge.) I’ve got to remember, too, without fail, that updated scanner software has to be ordered on May 31, the first day the upgrade is out and the last day certain grant money can be used to that end (also the day of graduation practice). Teaching and paper grading, the concoction and photocopying of exams are also supposed to happen, of course, and the grass still has to be mowed at home and laundry washed and dishes done. I’ve really got to get my new license plate screwed on to the back of the car, too, before I get pulled over. I’ll be darned if I don’t have to buy some sort of dress I can wear to the prom, too, unless I want to make an entrance in one of my daughter’s party dresses, in which case I’d look as if I were misguidedly trying to seduce somebody.

In short, my brain is brimful of stuff to remember, and any number of systems for keeping up with it all are just too time-consuming and unwieldy to manage efficiently (including the Hipster PDA, however elegant a concept it may be). Hence once in a while I forget something, despite copious list-making. Or I wake up at 4:30 a.m. with a start, thinking, “Do hours parents put in working on Project Prom count as volunteer hours I’m supposed to report?” Orchestrating constant task triage siphons far too much mental energy.

I need an instantaneously updatable to-do list that alerts me as to what needs doing when, just to let my over-taxed memory off the hook a bit, and so I’m thinking hard about buying a PDA. I loved keeping an action list on AquaMinds NoteTaker, and that worked well, except that it doesn’t issue reminders. But I’m not carrying the new laptop (a gift) back and forth to school as I did the last one, and so NoteTaker can’t come with me until the Windows version debuts. (Even then I’d have to talk a school tech into installing it for me.) A computer-based program is less than ideal, anyway, because I need all sorts of information available (and editable) with me on the go, all the time.

The conundrum that annoys me is that I took on certain extra tasks in order to earn a salary on par with what I had at my last school (you know, before fuel prices went up). If I turn around and buy a Palm Tungsten E2, bring the kids meals I can pick up on the way home all too often, and buy a dress, then I’m spending a fair-sized chunk of what I was trying to earn.

The students are quite worth the investment of extra time and effort in and of themselves, and the school, too, but that truth in which I fervently believe does not make bills go away when I fritter away a chunk of the stipend to make life more manageable.

What Works

Tonight I got my oil changed at the Express Lube downtown. Fifteen minutes flat. Beautiful.

What Doesn’t (#1)

Today I was handed 50 pencils to sharpen for tomorrow’s state testing. This will take a little time. It’s not as if I don’t have another thing or two (or 50) to do. But unsharpened pencils are cheaper than sharpened ones, right? We teachers are on a salary, and our job description is infinitely extensible, so buy us unsharpened pencils and $5 pencil sharpeners and set us to work. If we are making more than fifteen copies, we are supposed to use the Riso machine instead of the photocopier. The Riso takes two or three times as long if we are copying front and back, as we always are, to save paper, but it’s cheaper, and time spent collating handouts apparently doesn’t count. But the joke is, I have only so many hours a week I can devote to this job or any other, so if I spend those hours sharpening pencils and collating handouts by hand (my textbooks being older than my students), I have not so much time to do pesky little tasks like grade papers or plan well-thought out lessons.

What Doesn’t (#2)

My laptop doesn’t. Apparently, the hard drive is a goner, and with it 1 GB of lovely pictures from Shaker Village and the wildflower trail there. The machine should be resurrected and returned to me by the end of the week, but my data is toast. From now on, I burn a DVD every time I take pictures and before I delete photos from my camera, even if my computer is brand new, as indeed it is. The good news is that next spring I’ll just have to go back to Shaker Village for my birthday and take all those gorgeous pictures all over again.