What there is to say I have said. I’ve written over 22,000 words in my blog over the past two years. Add words spoken at the dinner table, in hospital beds, over a sweaty phone, on walks with the dogs, in the passenger’s seat, to acquaintances at hometown parties, and written in my portfolio. I always say too much and never enough.
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| This is an image of the 150 most common words said in my blog over the past two years, compiled using a website called Wordle. Here's a link to the original version. |
I present to you the fifteen most common words in all my blogs, revisited:
students
Moments hit you when you realize you’re just a blip in each other’s lives.
The end of my first year was incredibly anti-climactic. There was not one emotional, hugging, nostalgic, cathartic day to say goodbye to my students. A few of them finished exams here and there, so they didn’t have to come the last two days. The rest of them charged the buses on the last day of scheduled exams in a mutual wave of excitement and good riddance. Then a dozen trickled back for make-up exam day, and we sat around cleaning the classroom, putting together puzzles, and watching Kung Fu Panda. Then they ran away toward their summer.
In the middle of the year, they float from school to school, district to district. They come and go in a flash, and yet one student can make or break your day. One day a student could be the biggest disruption in the class, and the next day she brings you a sheet to initial saying that she’s returned all her books and this is her current grade.
On these days, they wander through the halls in jeans and flip flops with a parent you’ve never met or many times all alone. They knock on the door in the middle of your lesson and just hand you the paper. No words. You know what the paper means.
I never know exactly what to say in these interactions. “Have a good rest of the year.” “Good luck.” “I hope you like your new school.” “We’ll miss you.” Sometimes they say, “Thanks” and wander to the next teacher’s door, and sometimes they turn without a word and bounce giddily down the hall.
In my first year, a girl left my room cooly with one of these papers only to return a couple minutes later. Tears in her eyes, she ran up to me and threw her arms around me. “Bye, Mrs. Gray,” she got out. A real goodbye. The only real goodbye I’ve shared with a student.
think
All my thinking energy has gone to situations in the past two years. I spend very little time thinking about why I’m here, if I’m helping, and the future of education. What I used to consider “thinking,” thinking about ideas, is in very short supply these days. My thoughts are related to decisions. I answer so many questions during the day. “Can I go to the bathroom?” “Can I get a book?” “Can you tell me my grade?” “Can you help me?” “Can I call home?” My thinking goes to a million of these tiny decisions and the vast responsibility given to us to decide what is important enough to teach our students every day.
Sometimes I have been so overwhelmed by this type of thinking that the question, “Do you want oatmeal or eggs for breakfast?” is simply unanswerable. I have no more words.
day
Twenty-six days left as a teacher. Days have become a countdown in my teaching life. When I have morning duty in the gym, I have the same interaction with an older teacher every day. He strides through with a smile on his face and proclaims in a raspy voice, “Four days till Friday!” “Three days till Friday!” “Two days till Friday!” “Whew, we made it to Friday! That’s the life of an educator. We live for the weekends.”
I’m tired of living for the weekend. Counting down days cannot be my life.
kids
I work with sixth graders, so it is easy to see them as kids. For that I am thankful. In my first year, I allowed myself to become so angry and frustrated with my students. I would get so worked up that I would yell at them and be a participant in their antics. A particularly annoying and disruptive student stuck his tongue out at me one time, and I actually stuck my tongue out back at him. I may have been kidding and fed up with consequences, but it was a low moment. When I returned for my second year, rage still welled up within me when I saw some of my students from last year. Irrational rage. Sometimes I need to remind myself, “Remember, these are kids. You’re the adult. They need you to set the standard. They should have no emotional power over you in this classroom.”
much
Too much. This job is too much for one human to be expected to do thoroughly and well. How is it possible? Planning the lessons, managing the classroom, documentation, differentiation, calling parents, grading, meaningless paperwork, meetings with consultants, plans for failing students, “covering” the whole curriculum. Too much. How can teachers have any life at home and do their job well?
like
Listening to music with my students. Teaching them French words while we’re in line. Reading the hilarious and priceless stories they write. Hearing them exclaim, “You’re here! We missed you!” after I come back from being sick. Doing activities with them that involve cutting, gluing, and folding. Eating brunch with Mr. Gioia at 9:00 a.m. during our planning period. Seeing my third period class voluntarily bring their work to lunch to finish their assignment.
classroom
A very personal space. I spend several days setting it up at the beginning of the year, carefully arranging the rows and hanging posters on the wall. But it’s just a room until the kids arrive. Then it turns into a living, breathing creature requiring daily maintenance and taking on different moods. Each class gives my room a different personality during the day. My classroom is a peaceful portal to the school day in first period, the giant still asleep. Third period it tosses and turns in a lazy, restless space between activity period and lunch. Post-lunch in fourth period it quickly grows into a hydra, one giant body raging with 25 heads. Fifth period the monster divides and transforms into a den of delirious hyenas. By sixth period we’re an energized chorus devotin’ full time to floatin’ under the sea.
know
There are endless things I know now that I did not know two years ago: how to craft a lesson, how to get kids in a line, how to write a test, how to balance fun and order in class, how to get my students on my side, how to conserve paper when making handouts, how to blend my own personality with my teacher persona, how to go bed early. Then there are things I used to know that I have lost: how to give my undivided attention to one person, how to appreciate each day, how to be patient with the people I love the most, how to be delighted by silliness, how to feel like a young person.
school
In fourth grade I hated school. I had an elderly teacher who gave us a ream of worksheets at the beginning of the day, and we worked straight through it until the end. I dreaded going to school. I started getting migraines and waking up in the middle of the night. My mom would make me a cup of sleepytime tea, and I would drink it while watching Le Ballon Rouge or a re-run of Baywatch. Each morning was a fight to get to school.
My MTC experience has made me think about my fourth grade year, a miserable anomaly in my schooling. I’ve had that fourth grade feeling many nights and mornings in Teacher Corps. How many of my students have felt this way about school for the majority of their education?
want
Lazy mornings with breakfast in bed, to live in a place with young, educated people, more grocery options than Walmart, to walk my dogs every morning, to go out dancing, to process what just happened these two years, to feel light and spry, to be remembered by my students.
time
When you’re a kid, time seems expansive--at times a thick forest to swing through and explore and other times a vast desert to trudge across until adulthood. When I joined MTC, I saw a forest before me. I didn’t know how to get through it, but it stood before me rich with life, full of discovery and adventure. I trusted that I would find my way to the other side and that by the end, I would be able to identify all the plants, to pull myself up a tree at a moment’s notice, to wield a bow and arrow. I would have skills. I would finish stronger than I started.
In reality, it has been a desert. I’ve been stumbling toward the horizon, trying to prevent overexposure, conserving my energy, constantly in pursuit of that which will sustain me. When I look back on my two years, I can’t tell the difference between memory and hallucination.
feel
We train ourselves to feel less and less. At first you think feeling can be isolated. I’ll feel at home, but I won’t feel at school. Be careful. Not-feeling is a disease that spreads and penetrates every tip of your life. Either you feel everywhere or you feel nowhere. Choose carefully.
teacher
One day we’re magically given power and control. We go from being the passionate, procrastinating students to the all-knowing, line-in-the-sand teachers. We’re terrified but want to appear as if we know how to run a class and that we’ve been teaching adjective and adverb phrases for years.
Look in the mirror and practice saying, “No,” “That’s irrelevant,” “That’s a warning.”We don’t want them to see us flinch. “Can I go to the bathroom?” “No.”
We want to make them believe we don’t have an age. If we could only convince them we don’t have anything that would tie us to human emotion, such as divorced parents, a half-brother, a grandma who died of cancer, or a new husband. I am above human emotion because I am your teacher, and what you say does not affect me.
But guess what? Your students want you to be human. Your students are more likely to respect a human than a robot. Your students are more interested in a human. God bless the day when I was comfortable enough to give up a little bit of control and let them see that their teacher, the person who is supposed to be a role model, is human like they are.
Yes
Yes, I love my students.
Yes, there are days when I drive away from school with the windows down, favorite song playing, a silly grin on my face.
Yes, my classroom can be so comforting after-school, not just a room I sit in to get some work done but a place where I stay, blasting my music and singing to the dark hallways.
Yes, I absolutely love it when my students start to become familiar with one of my songs and sing the wrong words.
Yes, I enjoy making fun of them.
Yes, I am charmed when they show up at my door begging to come back in when they’ve already been to my class that day.
Yes, whenever I hear Gillian Welch I will taste mint juleps and remember my roommates sitting on our porch gazing at majestic magnolias.
Yes.
go
Yes, I will go. All the tears, the $5,000 in medical bills, the “Don’t make me go to school” mornings--those won’t follow me where I’m going. They will stay tucked away at the foot of a magnolia in a corner of Holly Springs or trampled under the football field at Marshall Academy.
All the raucous first-year walks back from lunch, the desks slammed against the walls, the “fuck you” notes found on my floor--those are already dead and festering in the dumpster, nothing more than a foul scent that wafts past my old classroom.
The train will come and go through Byhalia every day, its whistle audible when the windows are open on the sixth grade hall. The bell will continue to ring, ending a teacher’s planning period every hour, and the kids will rush around the corner too soon.
I will go, and I will thrive. After all, I got skills.
