Restaurante Los Ticos: A Friday in the Life

Posted on October 26, 2014 by Keely

6:30 am
“You have five minutes to get out the door, Keely!” I’m still in bed, struggling to lift my limbs, exhausted from a marathon week:

Wednesday, we went to Memphis and picked up food from the restaurant supply store for the fundraiser dinner we’d planned for Friday. The restaurant supply store was awesome: it had a room the size of a normal grocery store, but refrigerated! They provided jackets by the door and kept 40 lb boxes of chicken on the shelves. By the time we’d unloaded everything into the refrigerators at school, it was 10:30 and we still had a long drive home.

On Thursday we prepared Mexican food in the home ec room. Two of my awesome juniors came to help. That part was a lot of fun, but kids have curfews and sometimes pork cooks slower than you want it to and you leave the school at 11:30 and still have a long drive home. When you get there, you have two messages from unhappy parents who’ve just gotten report cards.

Then suddenly, it’s Friday morning and I’m pretty sure I can’t make my body move, but I do it anyway and throw on a dress and brush my teeth and make it out the door just in time.

7:00 am
“Crap” I say aloud in the car: I’ve forgotten to put on a bra, and that ship has long-since sailed.

7:35 am
“You guys know you have a mariachi band in my room, right?” Vanessa says to Paige and me. We stare at her blankly (see aforementioned exhaustion). “Yeah, W has been coming in and working on it during his free time since Wednesday. It has a cutout to stick your face through.” We look at each other in wonderment. He’d suggested it at the Spanish Club meeting, but we hadn’t thought much of it. I guess I said “Make it happen, W” and he did. Some kids are too cool for school.

8:45 am
I am suddenly so glad that I got the better of the sandman and made it to school today: a group of my students has completed a rigorous linear functions project entirely in Spanish. They’re all over smiles.

9:30 am
I spend my prep period talking to the woman who runs the cafeteria about how not to burn down the school during the Spanish club dinner.

All morning long
teachteachteachteach. My 12th graders complete their video projects, and they’re awesome. We had a heck of a time figuring out how to send video from cellphones to the computer, but the results are pretty good. Some are outstanding. My 9th and 11th graders suddenly seem to be understanding linear functions, and they’re having fun doing creative math while I monitor and facilitate: a good formative assessment day, and not too demanding for an exhausted Ms. O.

1:19 pm
I receive the following communication from my superintendent:

High School Teachers:

I am sorry that I have to send this email; but it seems that many of you are taking a very laid back approach to the job description of teacher. I am seeing way too many kids not engaged in the learning process. I am seeing way too many kids on cell phones, way too many TVs on in classrooms, way too many kids in the hallways and way too many kids sitting in groups talking while the teacher is sitting at his/her desk looking at the computer.

The bottom line is this: THESE KIDS ARE NOT LEARNING BECAUSE YOU ARE NOT TEACHING!!!!

I expect you to teach bell to bell from 8:00 a.m. to 2:58 p.m. for 178 days beginning in August and ending in May. If you can not do this or choose not to do this, please come see me.

I told you at the beginning of school, we do not have “free days” or “just find you something to work on” days. We have student engaged learning days-178 of them.

We only have one chance to teach our students-please make sure that they are receiving the education that they deserve…..the quality of education you want for your own kids.

Please ignore this email if it does not apply to you.

Thank you for your time.

Keep in mind that this man pulled teachers out of the classroom to work a baseball tournament last spring. If that isn’t the definition of hypocrisy, I haven’t ever seen it in action.

All afternoon long

teachteachteachteachteach. More awesome work from 9th graders and more fabulous videos from 12th graders. I’m proud and impressed, even if I am steamed over the email from he who must not be named. I eat a lot of chocolate during classes.

2:30 pm
Band and Cheerleaders are dismissed from my 7th period. That’s about half the class, so we have fifteen minutes of chaos while the remaining students struggle to understand that they’re still expected to work on their projects.

2:50 pm
Pep rally! The cheerleaders look grumpy: nobody’s getting excited for these things anymore. Frankly, everyone knows we’ve had a terrible season and there’s just not much school spirit left in these parts.

3:00 – 7:30 pm
Kitchen time with high schoolers: We used every dish in the cafeteria, I think, and made a tremendous mess, but the food was, by all accounts, muy delicioso. J made a delightful and energetic host, and all of the servers had a blast. W was a committed kitchen helper, always there when needed and unafraid to take on a challenge. A and C were devoted sous chefs, hollering over the fans and the hustle and bustle to Sean “Chef! what can we do now?” Morgan and Mallory turned up and joined the enchilada express line, and I finally took off my jacket when someone gave me an apron to wear.

Chef Chef!

pork tostadas

chicken enchiladas

7:31 pm
We officially closed for the night. A had to go to be the drum major for the marching band, so we sent him with a message for the halftime announcements: $5 takeout trays available in the cafeteria! Somehow, by this point, all of the kids had vanished. They are involved kids, so they aren’t just in Spanish club, they’re in band or in cheer or color guard. Only W stuck it out with us. My love for this kid is totally boundless. He packed up all of the food in takeout trays and loaded them onto a cart, then got down to the business of dishes with me.

9:30 pm
W left and Paige rolled the cart out to pick up some business from the fans leaving the game. I joined her after a while, and we did a steady trade in chicken enchiladas, even after the lights on the field flicked out with a quiet hum and we suddenly felt shady, hawking unmarked boxes of Mexican food just outside the gate of a sporting event.

10:00 pm

He who must not be named is one of the last to leave the game. He stops by our cart.

“You girls still trying to sell this stuff?” He didn’t come to our dinner.
“Yes sir,” Paige says, ever cool in the face of naked evil. I force a smile.

“well how much are they now?”
“Five dollars”
“Still?!” He chuckles and walks off.

Asshole.

10:30 pm to 12:30 am

Dishes. Mopping. Putting stuff away. It’s not fun. By 11:30 I have salsa all over my face.

We are about to become a pumpkin patch and this kitchen still ain’t clean, y’all.

Somewhere in there, we count the money and discover that we have made five hundred dollars, which is pretty crap if you think about the time and effort that we put into it, but pretty good if you think about the kids having a blast and the fact that we really needed the money to make our next payment on the Costa Rica trip.

12:31 am

We still have a long drive home.

When we left the school at 12:30 am, we found this dirt-graffiti on our ride.

When we left the school after midnight, we found this dirt-graffiti on our ride. Makes everything a little better.

Sex Ed

Posted on September 27, 2014 by Keely

“They should be paying you by the mile,” she said, as I flew by the office for the fifteenth time that hour. I had students in the library using the laminator, students in the copy room, students in the computer lab and students in my classroom. Supervision was impossible without superdupervision (which I don’t have). I had to settle for intermittent supervision and superduperspeed (which I can at least try to have).

The boys’ sex-ed class was meeting the library this week, and on one trip to the laminator, I overheard the following from the teacher:

If you know someone who’s having an abortion, you should talk to her. Ask her some of the questions we talked about. If she’s planning to have an abortion, that’s bad. She’ll regret it.

I almost hurled. I hate that I work for a school that allows these contractors to come in and pass off utter crap as information. I now wish that I had stopped and said something to them, even just “I absolutely disagree with the blanket statements that you just made. Reality is far more nuanced.” My kids deserve better, and I should have spoken up just to let them know that I’m comfortable with the topic and that they can come to me.

I’ve found kids reading flyers with the stunning title “Is Virginity What’s Missing in Your Life?” about how you can restore your virginity if you’ve lost it. There are five or six very unsettling things going on there.

At a bake sale this summer, two of my former students opened up to me a little about their sex-ed class. It’s abstinence only, and they don’t feel adequately informed. I asked them if they knew what “consensual sex” is, and they said “is that when you have your parents’ permission?” We’re really missing the point here, folks, if kids are led to believe that abortion is always bad and that consensual sex is when you have your parents’ permission. I don’t know how much information those two (both were boys) had about birth control.

Some of Sean’s female students seem to have a lot of information about birth control (he overheard them comparing the pill, the patch, the ring etc.), but one of them explained that she doesn’t want to use birth control because she’s afraid she’ll get fat. Sean fields a number of fairly interesting inquiries about sex because he’s a science teacher. His badass feminist self handles them beautifully. A 7th grader once asked him if a baby could have more than one daddy. They were learning about reproduction in class, so the kid drew a picture to illustrate:

My students don’t ask me those questions outright. Occasionally, in a quiet moment in the afternoon, they’ll ask me personal questions that relate to sex. It’s not hard to tell the difference between idle curiosity and a desperate need to know something.

The pregnancies that I’ve been closest to as an adult have been teen pregnancies: Girls growing bellies that no longer fit in the chair-desks in my classroom, standing by a bank of lockers holding their wondering friends’ hands flat against their tight-stretched shirts to feel the baby kick, and missing day after day of school for doctor’s appointments. A young mother that I teach bribed me with a cupcake to let the class share her birthday snacks a few weeks ago. She was turning sixteen. Another, a promising math student, dropped out of the tenth grade last year. It’s the same way for Sean. I remember him standing in front of a shelf at the pharmacy, reading labels and selecting prenatal vitamins for a middle schooler.

If I haven’t said something controversial yet, here it is:

Despite the misinformation and lack of information provided at school, I think some girls get pregnant not out of absolute ignorance (this is the age of the internet, and I know they know the basics of where babies come from), but out of emptiness. Accidents happen, but I think that girls are taking greater risks than they do elsewhere (Arkansas has the country’s highest teen birth rate) because they want to feel needed. They want to be of value to someone. It’s a pretty dismal outlook for girls here. They’re second-rate citizens, and they know it. A baby fills the void that should be filled with aspirations and plans and confidence and self-efficacy, all of which have been forced down or stunted by the time girls reach high school. Additionally, when a girl gets pregnant, there’s no great stigma. The hard conversations are for her family: at school, we try to be supportive and loving and excited about the baby. Besides, many of our students’ parents had children in high school. One girl told me that her mother was married at fourteen. Sean teaches a sophomore whose mother is only a few years older than Sean himself.

At homecoming last night, I watched for the boyfriends of the girls in the homecoming court. They followed the girls like devoted puppies, almost sad-eyed. They wouldn’t let the girls swish out of sight in those bright, flowing dresses.

Homecoming

I intercepted a note at summer school, where I taught rising ninth graders, that contained the charmingly sexist phrase “I’m gonna put a baby in her.”
After school one day recently, a boy (now a junior) that I taught in ninth grade came to visit me.
“Ms. O’Connell, you know I’m gonna be a daddy?”
I glared at him, waiting. We’d had a conversation or two about the responsibilities of fatherhood last year.
“Okay. I was just kidding.”
“Good. You dink.”
“I’m gonna be a baby-daddy before I graduate, though.”
“You know I think you’re better than that. I think you’re father material. Don’t be a baby-daddy. Be a Daddy.”
On the flip side, one tenth grader expounded in my classroom during lunch (he had been debating the morality of abortion with a female student)
“If you’re not prepared to be a father, don’t have sex. I accept that risk, but I’d rather wait to have kids. That’s why I use a condom every time I have sex with my girlfriend.” The debate went on, but I stopped listening. I’d heard those two argue over that subject before.

What is there to say here? What conclusion can I draw? This is just one more spoke in the wheel that turns the world here. It’s connected to poverty and health care access and education and racism and environmental injustice and sexism, and you can’t repair one without stopping the wheel and fixing them all.

In the hallway of the schoolhouse at sunset

I’m not yelling!

Posted on September 21, 2014 by Keely

It was sixth period. The noise level in my classroom slowly ratcheted up and stayed up. The leader of this particular, subtle coup sat with a smug little grin on his face and chatted with his friends while he tried (perhaps pretended to try) to do his work. I should have spoken to him sooner, but I was preoccupied by helping students who really needed help at the other end of the classroom. Have you ever noticed that they group kids with behavior issues and kids who need a lot of support together, to the effect that nobody in that period learns anything at all? by the time I reached the now loud and totally off-task child, I was frustrated and I jumped a rung on the consequence ladder. After an initial outburst before I reminded him of protocol, he kept his feelings to himself and stayed after class to talk about it, which is exactly what I want kids to do when they think I’m being unfair.

“Did you want to talk to me?”
“Yes I did. You treated me unfairly.”
“You were not following directions.”
“Neither was anyone else.”
“That’s because you’re a leader! You’re smart and respected! When you’re off-task, people think it’s okay to be off-task. Help me lead this class in a way that allows people to learn”
“Just because I’m a leader doesn’t mean you can treat me differently. I didn’t even get a warning!”
“I spoke to you several times, though.”
“What about [he named several students who had been talking]? They didn’t get detention.”
“I couldn’t hear them talking from the other end of the room. They didn’t start a shockwave of off-topic chatter”
“It’s not my fault I have a loud voice!” (he was yelling)
“Please don’t yell at me.”
“I’m not yelling!”
“You will be here for your detention on Monday” (I was yelling)
“Okay” (he stalked out with a look of total disgust)

By this time, my 7th period had come in. They were seated, silent and bug-eyed. My eyes welled up. “Get to work on the do-now, guys. I’ll be right back.” I stepped into the hallway and slumped against a bank of lockers with a clang, trying to keep myself from howling. Two kids stopped in the hall to ask what was wrong and to tell me they loved me. When I went back to my class, face all blotchy and puffy, a girl got up and hugged me tightly. I took some deep breaths and taught, but I felt sick with self-loathing, and every once in a while my eyes would spill over. That class was dismissed early for a pep rally, and I sat with the kids in the bleachers, trying to be inconspicuously devastated while the cheerleaders got fired up.

“We’ve got spirit, yes we do, we’ve got spirit how ’bout you?”
“…”

I spotted my young insurrectionist a few rows behind me, and when I felt I had some dry-eyed minutes, I nudged another ninth grader aside and sat down next to him.

“I’m sorry I yelled at you. I shouldn’t have done that.”
“Y’know, don’t worry about it Ms. O’Connell. I’m used to it.”
“That doesn’t make it okay. Besides, you were right; I should have given you a warning.”
“It’s okay. Just don’t worry about it.”
“I am worried about it. It’s important to me that I treat people fairly, and it’s important to me that you feel respected. I’ll do better on Monday, so be ready for those warnings. They’ll be coming down like rain. Forget about that detention.”
“Okay.”
“Have a good weekend”
“You too.”

I went back to my seat and, mercifully, the pep rally ended. The kids trickled out of the bleachers to their cars and buses and I sat alone at the top of the stands, letting the scorching sun dry me up. When it got too hot, I walked across the grass and unrolled a yoga mat on the floor of Vanessa’s classroom trailer, and she and the color guard said sweet things and soothed me. A student of mine found me there. He got down under the table next to me and asked if he could have his confiscated phone back. I told him where it was, and his casual manner and good humor made me laugh. Soon I was vertical, and after a while I went back to my classroom, fed Buggy (the baby mourning dove that I’ve been looking after), visited with A (my second little brother from last year) and hopped in the car to go home.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t muddy up the dusty dashboard with some tears on the road.

I can think of a hundred ways that I could have prevented or defused the situation with the loud young man, but I was exhausted, both physically and emotionally, and I didn’t have the presence of mind to stop digging myself a deeper hole. I think I did right by apologizing. I don’t feel sick when I think about it, and I’m not dreading seeing the kid tomorrow. I know he’s clever and I know he has a strong sense of right and wrong. If I treat him with dignity and respect, I think I’ll have a great ally, and I think he’ll learn more from me than he would if I just smashed him flat with my consequences every day until he behaved out of fear. I hope he won’t take my apology as a show of weakness. I think humility takes considerable strength, and I try to recognize that in people, but that’s a realization I came to well after ninth grade. We’ll see.

I love teaching, even on days when I don’t get to eat my lunch because I’m tutoring, or I’m on duty, or someone has challenged me to a Stratego show-down. I love it even on days when I can’t find time to pee so I have to hold it for half the day, and on days when I can’t be alone to bawl for a five minutes, so I spend two hours pushing down sobs. I love it on days when it feels like no one else is doing their job, and I love it on days when it feels impossible to do mine. I have the chance, every single day, even (especially?) on the worst ones, to humanize and to empower and to be humanized and empowered in return.

I have taught and loved every cheerleader and football player in this photo; the fellow with the sousaphone, too. Thanks for the hugs on Friday, guys. You don’t know what it means to me.

Balance

Posted on September 3, 2014 by Keely

I have thought a lot this summer about quitting my job. If I were to quit, I could stop slogging through variables and decimals amid the wails of the oppressed youth of America and do something that enchants me for a change. I could learn woodworking or go sailing or live abroad. Quitting wouldn’t cause any major financial hardship if I took on occasional substitute gigs and tutoring opportunities. I could lace up my boots and get my fingers all sticky and frown over art problems and remember what it feels like to be free.

We’re two weeks into this year, and already I can feel a growing knot of stress under my right shoulder blade. My stomach has stopped recognizing familiar foods and has turned gizzard on gravel over red onions and pineapple. School exhausts me: I come home tired, and I don’t sleep well. The emotional drain is a 72 inch pipe in the bottom of my reservoir, and my hundred and twenty kids are Dallas. I hate that even in a good week, I can only hope to fail well every day. In a bad week, the Sisyphean nature of teaching takes its toll and I get smashed flat as everything I’ve worked for unspools at the feet of a school system already so bewildered by bureaucratic inefficiency that it can offer up only the feeblest of support.

I haven’t quit yet, and the reasons why are all between the ages of fourteen and eighteen. This is hard, stressful, unsatisfactory, unsupported work, but it is a labor of tremendous love, and the kids make me smile, even on the worst days. Until recently, there could have been no question at all of my quitting.

For the past two years, my kids easily outweighed all of the hardship attendant with the job.

Now, I’m teetering on the edge of a choice that I don’t want to make.

I’m not sure which weighs heavier on my heart.

At what point do the personal consequences outweigh the value of the ethical work that I’m engaged in? At what point does self-sacrifice become needless and stupid? I love teaching kids, but I feel that I’m being asked to do it under untenable conditions, and that my willingness to go all-in is being abused. Kid-love is a variable, and some days it’s abundantly clear that it’s not enough. Other days, a sweet bit of graffiti blows the k-factor through the roof. modd

Scorcher

Posted on August 25, 2014 by Keely

“Hey Ms. O, what was that?”
“I’m sure it’s nothing, Darlin’. Don’t you have something you need to be doing?” I looked pointedly at his project.
Suddenly there was a whoosh and a crackle. I could see flames shooting up just beyond the windows.
“Let’s get out of this room and move into the hallway for now, guys. No, just leave it. Let’s go.”
The lights flickered and died and my kids scattered. I didn’t think to encourage them to make for the front door, away from the fire. Fire drill protocol sends them out the back, so some had gone one way, knowing the rules, and others had used common sense. I heaved a sigh, went back into my room to grab the stack of homework and watched through the window as Coach hit the fire with an extinguisher from the cafeteria. I chased the kids down, one by one, to give them their homework (by this time, there’d been an all-call for students to head to the front of the building, though some of mine had escaped out the back door and were watching the drama) and I made it out back just in time to witness another small explosion and the spectacle of Coach lighting out for the hill country.

My classroom has a nice view of not much on a good day, but it was a front row seat for the drama of a transformer blowing out at high noon on a Monday. The initial fires suppressed, the area was roped off and the kids lost interest and stopped being a nuisance. Workmen showed up quickly and looked over the problem. They left, and we learned that they’d have to cut the power supply to the school to fix it, so they’d deal with it after the last bell. After lunch, the kids went back to class. My room was dark, lit only by the projector, and full of the smell of that smoking hole in the ground.

I taught a full 55 minute lesson in there, and I nearly slipped in a puddle of my own sweat about halfway through. The kids dragged, but they were wonderful, graceful seniors and they didn’t complain too much. I inquired in the office and learned that the a/c was out all through the building. For the last two classes of the day, I taught an abbreviated version of the lesson in the hot-tub of my classroom. The smell of the 25 ninth graders oozing began to replace the smoke smell. As quickly as possible, I moved the class into the little air-conditioned gym in the elementary school next door. The echo was bad, but it beat the heat.

It’s been unbearably hot and humid for a week or so. We’re actually under a heat advisory right now (who doesn’t cancel school under these conditions? No lights+no air+heat advisory=sendthemhomedangit). Sean bravely goes out to the garden every day or two to harvest tomatoes and do the absolutely necessary chores. He planted potatoes, carrots, parsnips, rutabagas, turnips and beets yesterday like a freaking gladiator. There is no time of day or night when it’s cool outside. There is no “early enough” that I can get up to beat the heat and go for a run. Sunrise is sweltering. I hate sticking to the bedsheets. Our friends in town had balloons melt into their upstairs carpet over the summer. I burn myself on the metal fastener of my seat belt every afternoon, and I have to handle the steering wheel with care for the first ten minutes of my drive. Gladys (Carro’s a/c) whistles and groans to life after a while, but not before I’ve felt a few more brain cells explode like pop-cans all over the interior of my skull. The pigs lie in their wallow and squeal for fresh cool water. The cats don’t set foot outside the house. Bear creek is just a bathtub full of alligators and cottonmouths (at least in my imagination) and I bet they’re irritable from the heatwave too. Besides, the lake is as warm as the air, and getting wet is hardly worth it: evaporation can’t cool you when the air’s as wet as you are.

Wish me a cold front, folks.