Nerds

Posted on March 10, 2014 by Keely

I came this close to eating a ladybug just now, thinking it was a stray candy. I noticed just in time to avoid putting it in my mouth. Misery averted! Those things taste terrible.

Lately, whenever I think the word nerd, I hear it in J’s voice. J is a student I taught last year, and at least once a week he comes up to me while I’m reading on lunch duty and comments, “You still reading that book? Reading’s for nerds.” or “What did I tell you about reading?” He’s one of those kids who doesn’t realize he’s going to be smart for the rest of his life and had better get used to it.

I finished A Thousand Splendid Suns today. I’m surprised I didn’t have nightmares last night. It was beautifully written and tragic and hopeful and gut-wrenching and it made me angry at everything and then it made me understand, which made it worse. I didn’t tell C about this one. C is the student I’m closest with: we spend a class period one-on-one each day, usually on geometry, but sometimes on life. I’ve been reading a lot of Alaska memoirs, and he loves to hear about the danger of ice and cold, hunting for moose, and building log cabins. He’s not a big reader, but he’s a great thinker, and I value his perspective. Usually I like to chat about my books with him, but I couldn’t even start that conversation today.

I’m bringing The Great Gatsby to school tomorrow for a student. He came by after school to ask for it, and I had the good sense to marker it onto my arm. He laughed at me, but I know how scattered I can be after school. Another student has my paperback copy of A Game of Thrones and has been spinning theories about Jon Snow’s real parents to me between classes. Sometimes, I really love my job.

Speaking of nerds, check out the photo below: just a typical Sunday night at the homestead. Alyssa came over last night and did work with us. She’s up on the futon, snuggled among her papers with the kitties. Sean’s computer is on the dining room table, and I made a little office nest for myself on the floor. Work work work foreeeever.

Pterodactyls

Posted on March 8, 2014 by Keely

In Arkansas, birds in chevrons unzip the winter sky, always on their way to some finer place. Maybe they’re going someplace with topography. From time to time, on my way home, I’ve seen whole fields carpeted with white acres of snow geese, invariably melted by morning. One day this winter there were hundreds of seagulls fishing in the lake. On Thursday, there were a handful of handsome white pelicans, drifting like dignified marshmallows in the fog over the water.
I had a praxis in Helena this morning, so I took the low road and drove slow with the radio up and the windows down. I’ve come to love country music since I came to live here: I like songs about badass ladies, loving men, bare feet, dirt roads, skinny dipping, hard work, and campfires. I also like bad puns. There are still no leaves on the trees, but today had the feel of a spring Saturday, and with Sean on a field trip, I had the world to myself. After my test, I picked up snacks in town and had a picnic at the rookery. The rookery is miles of pitted dirt from anything, and the sun was shining on Carro’s roof like the bat signal. I heeded the message and hopped up, snacking on chips, basking in the sunshine, reading, gazing up at the blue sky framed by the bare cypress and water tupelo, and tuning in to the barred owls, the absence of human noise, and the occasional cry of a prehistoric monster from the treetops.

We think they’re wood storks, but we haven’t gotten close enough to be sure. They nest in the bald cypress and they are magnificent. They’ve been gone all winter, and I’ll take it as a sign of spring that they’re here again. One of my summer ambitions is to paddle out to their trees and collect a feather. I want to feel the panic and the cool shade on my shoulders as a pterodactyl shadow flows over me, muting the sun for seconds as a time.

P.S. Sean found a dead possum in our garbage can yesterday, and neither of us put it there! It’s a mystery: did it crawl in there before the ice storm and then die of exposure? Did it choke on some particularly nasty bit of refuse?

Snow Day

Posted on March 4, 2014 by Keely

The plastic blew off of our garden in the night. Poor baby greens are under an inch of ice. Goodbye, spring salad.

As predicted, the daffodils were hit hard by the ice storm. They’re beautiful as they are now, a lesson in impermanence and a study in fragility.

We went for a hike in the woods this morning. Our house was cold, and we knew we’d have to leave the country until our power is back on, so we decided to take advantage of the day off and spend some time out in the woods. We don’t get to enjoy our back yard often, and during the last ice storm, we had to settle for driving through the sparkling forest on our way to and from school. It was painful, spending our days indoors and watching the sun set behind the frozen tree sculptures all week. By Saturday, the ice was gone.
Sean and I bundled up in long underwear and layers of sweaters and jackets. I put on two pairs of socks to wear under my sneakers. We don’t really have winter attire here in Arkansas.

The yellow dock leaves were frozen so solid that when we kicked them, they shattered. The ice in the trees tinkled like crystal.

The grass was frozen solid, and the hill was slick. There was a huge part of me that didn’t believe that we’d actually get the sleds to move. I sat on a saucer, not expecting much, and then suddenly I was bumping down the hill, crackling the ice and shredding my gloves on the frozen grass.

We took our daffodils to town with us to remind everyone that it is, in fact, springtime.

Ice Lightning

Posted on March 3, 2014 by Keely

Our house totally just got struck by lightning. There was a flash of light and a crack in the kitchen, and then a shock of thunder that rattled the glass in the windows. That is not cool at all. The power’s still on and hopefully it will stay that way.

We went to town for a while to coldproof the plant babies in the greenhouse at Lee and to do laundry at our friends’ house (our washer froze solid a week or two ago, then busted). On the way home, we dodged downed limbs and listened to the rattle of sleet falling on the roof of the car. There was a message on the machine when we came in: no school tomorrow. I did a kitchen dance.

Today has been all about getting ready for the storm. I put on my mud shoes this morning and made sure the chickens had plenty of food and water, then turned on the lamp in the coop. I cut daffodils from the woods and brought them in so that we can enjoy them a little longer. After warming up for a while, Sean and I went out together into the nearly-freezing rain and covered a row of our garden with a sheet of plastic to help keep the fragile baby greens alive. Hopefully the wind won’t tear the cover right off like it has in the past.

In the greenhouse at school, Sean and his students have planted flats of flowers and veggies for spring gardens. Last cold snap the soil froze solid, and, though the plants survived, we decided to take steps to prevent it from happening again. We used some sheets of styrofoam and constructed a sort of insulated box on the ground for the flats. We had boiled a quart of water and wrapped it in a jacket to keep the heat in, and this we tucked into the insulated box to help moderate the temperature.

I’m ready for spring, but I love storms, and I’m looking forward to having a day off to walk in the ice-chandeliers of our woods.

High Expectations

Posted on March 2, 2014 by Keely

Yesterday was pro-sat, one of Teach For America’s professional development requirements. The entire corps gathered at a charter school outside of Little Rock for general training and content-specific sessions. The theme of yesterday’s professional development was “how have you found yourself lowering expectations for your students?” and this rubbed me the wrong way. In a discussion about the power and importance of teachers’ maintaining high expectations, shouldn’t the organization hold those teachers to the expectation that they are constantly reflecting and seeking to improve? This isn’t to say that I am not guilty of lowering my expectations for certain students. I am still new at this, and improvement takes reflection, time, trial and error. I am aware of many things that I could do better, and I’m trying to do them, but I am trying not to burn myself out. Yesterday’s pro-sat felt like a giant guilt trip, like TFA was trying to shame us into working ourselves to death by the end of the year. Hard work should come from a place of love, and, to be sustainable, constant hard work requires a huge amount of emotional energy that can’t all come from teaching. Work-life-balance, yo.
In the book that I’m reading, Arctic Daughter, by Jean Aspen, she writes about canoeing into Alaska’s Brooks range with her sweetheart to build a cabin and overwinter with nothing but the supplies they can carry in the canoe. At one point in the summer, long before they reach their cabin site, they are both losing weight quickly and growing weak and sick. They’ve burned through a third of the food in the canoe and have been unable to catch any fish or game.

I guess any way you look at it, it’s a gamble. Use up all of our supplies and keep strong to find more, or ration food and starve longer.

TFA gave the impression of being thoroughly in the “starve longer” camp. It felt like they want us to use up every drop of our energy and enthusiasm before we quit, instead of building the skills to make this work a lifestyle. Framing the day around “setting high expectations” would have made all the difference to me. We could have discussed communicating goals with parents and students, what constitutes a high expectation and whether or not these high expectations should seem achievable to our kids.

Generally, I am fairly pro-TFA. I am grateful for the opportunity to teach here, and I know a lot of people who are going to be powerful career teachers (shoutout to B!) because they had an opportunity to safely try it out without committing to graduate school or putting some weird blip on their resume. I have also met people who are never going to teach again, but whose experiences here have changed them for the better. Here in the Delta, there are positions filled by TFA that would not be filled otherwise, and even an inexperienced teacher who wants the best for the kids is better than most long-term subs.

I’m done with this topic now. There are daffodils blooming outside that need to come in and sit on my dining room table before they get smashed flat by the sleet and ice we’re supposed to get tonight.