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Community

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Tonight we had a truly kickass meeting at P-W. This was a TFA-mandated thing, but it was meaningful because we had the opportunity to make it our own. Shoutout to my awesome MTLD for that. Tonight’s was easily the best session I’ve ever attended.

Three of our seniors came, one with a parent. Our principal attended, and several veteran teachers spoke. The students spoke passionately about feeling unprepared for college, betrayed by and suspicious of the revolving door of young teachers, and unaware of the realities of a world outside of our community. We heard teachers speak about feeling uninspired, unsupported and isolated.

I have never felt like a part of a professional community at P-W. We don’t have vertical alignment meetings and we’re not actively encouraged to plan across content areas. Expectations for students aren’t consistent among classrooms, staff meetings are always perfunctory, and most of us do not feel empowered to make changes to the way that our district operates. The students and the one parent present echoed the sentiment that something is missing, that they don’t feel involved.

We discussed a variety of plans to build community and involvement. I loved the idea of a mentoring program. In my vision, this is a program that assigns each student (or targeted students) a teacher with whom they are required to meet once a month to discuss their aspirations, accomplishments, and challenges. I’d do this during lunch, and require students to keep a portfolio or a video log chronicling their growth throughout high school. Each mentor would be limited by time to a few students, but I think we could find ways to build our capacity to do this. In other folks’ visions, mentoring took a very different form with seniors mentoring freshmen. Maybe some combination of the two ideas would work best.

Someone suggested polling teachers and students to determine interest levels in clubs or extracurricular classes or events to provide the enrichment that our small size prevents us from providing.  One of our seniors brought up the idea of a student government, which would kick ass and feed wonderfully into my scheme for community meetings (like the one we had tonight! The student council could present…) before parent-teacher conferences. This would happen only twice a year, so it wouldn’t require much additional effort for anyone, and would probably increase attendance and candor at our conferences astronomically.

Regarding improvements within the teacher community, we discussed the need for vertical alignment and new teacher mentoring. This stuff needs to happen: these are simple improvements that could have big impacts.

I felt so clueless when I started teaching at Palestine last year. I didn’t know any of the procedures, expectations or norms, I was in over my head just planning lessons, and I didn’t have anyone I felt comfortable confiding in or asking for help. I heard rumors that any field trip requests or after school club ideas would be nixed, and I felt discouraged and isolated and stressed. I feel all of those things much less now, and after tonight I’m feeling ready to take on some additional responsibilities.

I haven’t felt this inspired in a long time. On my ride home, I actually considered asking Sean to move closer to my school so that I could be more involved next year. I love my homestead on the ridge, but the 45 minute commute is draining and I don’t feel like a part of the social community that the P-W teachers have. I usually decline invitations to go to dinner or to hang out because I carpool with my partner, and I can’t leave him without a ride. I can’t make it home and then back to school before events, so if I have commitments after five, I wind up working 12 hour days with no dinner (this is because I’m picky and don’t eat Subway). Sometimes, I think that if Sean were more a part of my school community or I were more willing to sacrifice my time with him, I’d have a totally different experience and I’d be better at my job.

I’m probably not going to move. This place is my home for now, and I have put a lot of work into making it awesome, but I want it to speak to the excellence of this meeting that the thought crossed my mind. I will find other ways to be more present in my work through the end of this year and into next year, starting with tomorrow.

Big thanks to everyone who came out tonight, you’ve got me feeling excited about school!

Hair: When it’s on your head or isn’t.

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Standing in front of a mirror in a white t-shirt, I thought I looked really, really white. And shiny. My scalp felt tight and tingly and, when I ran my palm over it, a little raspy. I was fifteen, and I’d just shaved my head for the first time. It was a nice enough head: not lumpy or pointy at all. Everyone told me I looked like Sinead O’Connor, which I didn’t. Over the next few weeks, a waitress mistook me for a boy in a skirt while I was at brunch with my family, and a kid in my class mistook me for his brother. My motives for shaving my head are long-forgotten, probably because they were weird and convoluted motives, but I learned something: I didn’t see the world any differently from inside a bald head.

My mother once said something to me about the way that femininity is tied to hair, something like “A woman without hair isn’t seen as a woman.” She was right, though her statement came from an experience very different from mine. People make assumptions and judgments about your gender identity and your sexuality when you don’t have a “feminine” hairstyle. Inside, I was still me: a mostly straight, mostly cisgendered person.  Outside, I was decidedly queer. For me, this was empowering. I was able to shrug off any negative experiences because they didn’t apply to my real identity, and embrace the escape from female stereotypes. People stopped assuming that I’d be submissive, ditzy, or emotional. I wasn’t objectified.
The positive, if superficial, feedback I had been used to receiving on my looks was missed. Sometimes, I was really self-conscious about my bald head. I’m not immune to social pressure, and I remember feeling hideous and embarrassed. With practice, I learned to see some new kinds of beauty in myself; I found the bunny-soft half-inch stage of growing my hair in and the arch and expression of the thick eyebrows that suddenly dominated my looks. I learned to really notice and appreciate being valued for my intelligence, though not yet for my kindness: I was not a kind teenager.
I wasn’t appropriating a symbol of some counterculture that didn’t apply to me or pretending to be something I wasn’t. My identity is complicated and I wear it in my heart, not on my skull. My skull I reserve for triumphs and mistakes in self-expression, convenience and daring. I’ve rocked a bald head, blue hair, a Mohawk and a buzz-cut. I’ve rocked bangs, spit curls, and long, mermaid hair. Sometimes, in the grow-out phase, I’ve rocked a mullet. There’s something to be said for all of it; Long hair is beautiful, wonderfully feminine and smooth to the touch; when I have short hair, I don’t have to wash or brush it every day, let alone keep track of hairties and bobby pins. I often look like a doofus, but I don’t care much.  My appearance is something I control, and if I feel like making the effort I can be gorgeous, tough, playful, lush, practical, feminine, androgynous, professional, alternative or look like a young Leonardo DiCaprio.

High Expectations

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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.