Survival Is Insufficient

Saturday night at midnight, the 22 young writers in my first block class will launch  into the National Novel Writing Month, known as NaNoWriMo, a thirty-day gauntlet to write 50,000 words of a novel. The past two weeks, we’ve crafted character charts, tested out working titles, designed book covers, and written popping taglines and loglines. We’ve plotted dozens of scenes and sequences to sustain us through the month. We even read about the habits of novelists. On Monday, we talked about different plotting systems, and I told them about visiting William Faulkner’s home in Oxford, Mississippi. My favorite part was seeing the plot of his 1954 novel A Fable sketched out on the wall in his study.  As we prepped  for this gauntlet, there’s been a palatable excitement in my students. They’re nervous about whether they can do it, but excited about the prospect of challenging themselves.  

I’m glad they’re looking forward to it. This week has been difficult. The school district where I teach has been 100% virtual since August. We’ve had two will-we-or-won’t-we board meetings on Facebook Live, and finally, on Monday night, the board said, enough.  We’ll be virtual until January with some targeted intervention services for kids who are really struggling. 

With the exception of a group of protestors who are still pushing for a return to in-person school, there was a collective sigh of relief that passed through the district. We are in a rhythm online now. Students are showing up; they’re participating. Parents have called me and sent encouraging emails; they’ve had their child up, fed, and ready to roll at 8 am.  It’s not ideal, but it’s better than the nightmares we’ve all heard from teachers in other districts teaching hybridly. 

And yet, Tuesday morning on Zoom, it seemed to dawn on my students they wouldn’t be back with their friends for the rest of the year, which in high school time seems like forever. They seemed weary like I’d never seen them before. 

The days are getting shorter; it’s getting darker earlier. This week, the remnants of Zeta moved into central Kentucky, and a cold steady rain has been knocking fall leaves to the ground.  Our state’s COVID-19 cases have exploded. On television, political ads are relentless. The most contentious political election of my lifetime is four days away. No one knows when any of it will end. 

All of these stressors coalesced this week. Several asked to stay after class and talk about the pressure they were feeling. Two students told me they’d reached out to our school’s mental health services. Another student told me she feels like all she does is school all day. She goes to bed overwhelmed and gets back up the next morning to do it all over again. 

This summer my book club read Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, a novel that follows the Traveling Symphony, a group of actors and musicians, as they travel around the United States after a pandemic has wiped out most of humanity. The Symphony visits outposts and settlements, performing Shakespeare, keeping the arts and humanity alive in a world dominated by merely surviving. Kristin, one of the performers, gives voice to a line that has haunted me during our own COVID lock down: “Hell is the absence of the people you long for.” Another theme of the book and the reason that the Symphony keeps traveling and performing even though it’s dangerous to do so is summed up by Dieter, one of the actors, who quotes Star Trek: “Survival is insufficient.” 

This year has been too much about merely surviving. This week, two different teacher friends sent me this article: “Your Surge Capacity is Depleted.”  It was published in August, a lifetime ago.

I, too, am overwhelmed. 

Which brings me to NaNoWriMo. 

Yesterday I met with each of my students for ten-minute Zoom conferences to discuss their writing goals and to field any last minute questions, to quell any anxiety. It was a long day, sitting in front of my computer for four straight hours, but it’s an important part of what I do. Touching base, keeping connected. 

One of the last students I met with was Marie, a passionate, energetic, and totally game ninth grader who has never done NaNoWriMo. She was slow to come up with an idea and told me she didn’t even like plotting all that much, but in the last two weeks, she got an idea for a novel that featured two of her favorite things: the 80s and child actors. 

The Zoom doorbell rang as she connected to the call. I clicked Admit to move her from the waiting room. Her audio connected slowly, then her blank video feed stabilized, then opened. I fiddled with my USB port, waiting for my wireless headphones to connect.

“Hey.” Her voice was small and far away. 

“Hey Marie. What’s up?” I smiled into the webcam. 

She waved. She was sitting on her bed in her bedroom. 

And there, on the wall behind her, were rows upon rows of index cards taped above her bed. My heart caught in my throat. 

“What’s that on the wall behind you?” I said. 

“My plot.” 

Every year, my students jump into NaNoWriMo together in Room 303 on the third floor of Lafayette High school. But on Saturday night at midnight, 22 writers, separated from each other and isolated in their homes, will be sitting in their bedrooms all across Lexington. They will open their laptops and join each other and thousands of other writers all across the US to create something in spite of it all.

Survival is insufficient. 2020, we’re coming for you. 

The Last Day For A While

I turned on my lights. I powered up my computer. I made coffee. Then I sprayed down the door knobs, the light switch, and wiped off all my tables.

Downstairs in the English hallway, students were singing, laughing, typical shenanigans.

It felt like a normal Friday.

My students trickled into Room 303. They were quiet.  Shayda told me her knee was flaring up. She’s a ballet dancer. “But it doesn’t matter right now anyway. Our show’s cancelled.  Dance SCAPA’s cancelled. Everything’s cancelled.”

Erica, who was sent home yesterday by the nurse with a fever, bounded in, looking fit as a fiddle. “It was just seasonal allergies, guys! I’m not going to die.”

Soon the bell rang. The PA system squeaked on, and our PE teacher Mrs. Howard led our school in its Mindful Minute, a contemplative practice we’ve been doing every morning since August.

“Breathe in. Calm,” she said. “Breathe out. Relax.” I planted my feet on the floor, put my hands on my knees, and closed my eyes.

It had been exactly one week since the first coronavirus patient had been confirmed in Kentucky:  a 27-year-old WalMart employee from a small rural town about 30 miles from Lexington, where I teach. It was a week of will-we-or-won’t-we. A week of rumors. A week of jangly energy in the cafeteria. A week of “Have you heard anything?” when teachers congregated in the halls.

Just yesterday as I drove home through downtown Lexington past Rupp Arena, it had been announced that our girls state basketball tournament, which had already started, would be suspended indefinitely. People were standing in clusters on the sidewalks, looking dazed. Girls were hugging and crying as they boarded their busses to go back to their hometowns.

Last night, we finally got an email from our superintendent: we would be out of school for three weeks. Friday would be the last day we’d be together for a while. Districts all over the state were making similar decisions about how to best serve their students, how to deliver instruction, how to keep kids engaged, safe, and fed.

I opened my eyes. A lot of my students had not come to school, but those who did were ready to go.  We spent the first 20 minutes or so discussing how surreal everything felt. I tried to answer questions as best I could, making sure they knew that everything I was saying right then might change by tomorrow.

My students are smart consumers of current events. They are politically and culturally engaged. Nobody was panicking. Nobody was crying. But I knew they were shaken a bit.  It felt like the last day of camp had arrived, and we weren’t ready for it.

“Let’s do some poetry,” Evelyn said.

“That’s the spirit.”

We started off with storyboarding Matthew Zapruder’s poem, “Birds of Texas.” Then we read a bit from Gregory Orr’s essay, “The Four Temperaments,” on the story, structure, music, and imagination of poetry. Then I opened the podium up for an anything-goes-poetry reading.

Everyone in the room shared. They read poems about grandparents and eyes and lust and death and sardines.  My colleague Mr. McCurry popped in and read a poem from his first book of poetry, which was launched today, Open Burning.

We snapped and read and clapped. We made jokes about the apocalypse.

“I won’t see you guys again until April 6. Let’s take a selfie!” I said.

“Coronavirus!” we all yelled.

“I’m already missing you guys,” Erica said.

The bell rang and it was time for them to leave. We bumped elbows, and I promised to see them on Google classroom Monday morning.

I don’t know what the next few weeks are going to look like. I don’t know how we’ll make up the lost time. I don’t know how to plan for any of this.

“This is us against the coronavirus,” our governor has reminded Kentuckians this week in his twice-daily press conferences. “We will get through this, and we will do it together.”

But my kids and I were all going our separate ways, to hunker down against the looming pandemic.  We had been doing our innocent, every-day school stuff that we love – and suddenly we are not. Maybe it’s just a brief interruption. Or maybe it’s not. Maybe a mystery of COVID-19 is that it’s not clear whether it’s causing us to pull together or pull apart. This is somewhere we’ve never been before.

If teaching has taught me anything, it has taught me the power of community. And even though Americans may pride ourselves on our independence, our rugged individualism, community is the thing that will serve us well in this moment. When we sacrifice, when we love each other, when we give grace, and when we do it together, we can thrive.

And let’s not forget about poetry – and art and dance and song and theatre. Poetry takes on new meaning as well, as we walk out into this strange territory. Poetry becomes how we stay connected. It becomes life.

“Be well. Take care of each other,” I yelled after them.

When I left school later that afternoon, the sun was shining. Yellow jonquils and purple crocuses were everywhere.  Spring had sprung, and it seemed like a normal Friday afternoon.

Except it wasn’t.

Teachers, Remember What It’s Like to Be 17

It’s Labor Day, and I’m on my back porch catching up on school work. Cup of coffee in hand, cats at my feet, I open Google Classroom and the first student assignment I read is Kailie’s analysis.

I do not actually know if the 1985 hit song “Sussudio” by English musician Phil Collins is a “good” or “bad” song. I am forever blinded by the light of emotional attachment, with this track being one my dad played for me from a very young age. Which is odd in itself– my father, who cringes at the sound of Wham! and spent his 1980s buried in Van Halen cassettes, is a fervent appreciator of “Sussudio.”

In one raw, unfiltered moment of memory, my senior year comes rushing back to me. My life-long friend Leslie and I are in her living room, MTV on full blast, and we are Molly Ringwald-jump-dancing and scream-singing, “I feel so good if I just say the word, su-su-sussudio.”

Leslie and I thought ourselves some edgy sorts because we loved Duran Duran, The Clash, and Flock of Seagulls. So ardent was our identification with these reckless, poppy 80s Brits, that if Sting had been our English teacher, we would have been wet-bus-stop-waiting every day.

But there’s something more than just the memory of a song. I remember the joy and sorrow that marked so much of high school. I remember being free and being scared. Wanting to grow up and wanting to stay small.

Leslie and I had lost one parent each- my father to leukemia in ’82 and her mother to breast cancer in ’83. As Cold War babies, we knew the world was an uncertain place. We were sick of high school with all its petty rules, but scared to death about what came next.

Even though every adult in our life was telling us to think about the future, we wisely knew The Moment was to be savored. So there we were, just for the moment, delirious, sweaty, out of breath, and that song – we never had any idea about who or what Sussido was – told us if we’d just say the word, we would feel so good. Such fizzy pink pop. Such mindlessness. It didn’t matter. It felt good to be young and alive.

I tell every first-year teacher this: Teaching high school is a non-stop memory of your own adolescent pain.  Which is why, principals, when you’re hiring new teachers, instead of asking what John Maxwell quote best exemplifies their classroom management style, ask this question: do you remember what it’s like to be 17?

Do you remember how everyone told you to just be yourself, but you didn’t have any idea who or what that was? How every inspirational speaker they drug us into the gym to listen to told us to be unique and different when all we wanted to do was to blend in enough to not get singled out for anything?

Do you remember what it was like not to understand polynomials but everyone else seemed to be getting it, so why raise your hand?  Do you remember avoiding the loud girls in the hall because they might single you out, to make fun of your hair, your shoes, your teeth?

Do you remember what it was like to have every adult telling you the decisions you made in the next two years would determine the rest of your life? That if you didn’t make the right decision, you’d be screwed. If you didn’t go to college, you couldn’t get a good job. If you didn’t get a good job, you wouldn’t have a family. If you didn’t have a family, you’d end up hustling aluminum cans at the scrap yard.

Do you remember what it was like to no longer be a child, but not yet an adult? How one moment you wanted to crawl back into your bedroom and play with action figures and the next moment you were taking the ACT and filling out college applications? Leaving your parents? Leaving your childhood?

I’m reminded again that teaching is dependent on our ability to remember the answers to these questions. So, thank you, Kailie, for taking me back and helping me remember what it’s like to be standing on the edge of the rest of your life, thinking every decision is life or death. I wish I could go back and tell my 17-year-old self that everything’s going to be okay, but I can do the next best thing: I can extend that grace to my students. I can make my classroom a safe place to feel free and to feel scared. I can make writing an exercise of self-discovery and solace. I can act with wisdom when my students act like five-year-olds one minute and thirty-year-olds the next.

That we recognize ourselves in our students is invaluable. When they remind us of who we once were and who we are now, we can reach out again, through joy and pain, and help each other along the path. We must allow them to see us, not as authorities on life, but fellow travelers on this journey. Treat them with the same kindnesses with which we wish some wise teacher would have treated us. Strive every day to remember what it’s like to sit in that cramped school desk.

 

 

Teaching is Relentless; Be Extra

Last year I took four of my high school students to a nearby middle school to talk about writing. We had a great time, and on the way home, they started talking about new teachers in our school.

“It’s always an interesting social experiment when you get a brand-new teacher,” said Michael. “You can just see them wear out before your eyes.”

“Yes, yes!” they all chimed in.

I laughed.  “Oh surely not. They’re young. They have boundless energy.”

“No, it’s not like that. They’re enthusiastic up to a point in the semester—” Katrin said.

“—and then they just give up,” David said.

“Do you mean the kids are mean to them?” I asked.

“No, it’s not even that,” Jenna said. “They just give up.”

“They literally break down by degrees,” said Katrin.

As I return for my 24^thyear, I think about all the new teachers who will be entering the classroom for the first time.  Lots of optimism, nervous anticipation, maybe a little dread. You’ve prepared your plans, you’ve arranged your room. What is waiting for you, however, is something you cannot possibly plan for, arrange, or anticipate. The first year of teaching is like the first crush, the first heartache, the first roller coaster, the first house fire all wrapped up into one.

Managing a classroom of teenagers for the first time is a difficult thing; managing a class of teenagers in order for them to learn something for the first time is on the dismantling-a-bomb-blindfolded-with-one-hand level of difficulty. You don’t learn how to do this well your first year. Or even your second year. To be honest, I’m still learning.

Many people who aren’t teachers don’t know what it takes to motivate a mob of disaffected fourteen-year-olds. Most people might think we just stand up and deliver some kind of Remember the Titans speech and everyone falls out on the floor and starts learning. When, in fact, it’s more like preparing, then delivering six 50-minute interactive sales presentations back-to-back with 30 + clients in each session, some openly hostile and disruptive.  And you have to convince them to trust you, follow you, to buy what you’re selling. That’s only the first day of the first week. You’ve got 174 more. It’s an unscripted, non-stop, relentless performance of exaggerated proportions.

But here’s what veteran teachers know:  teaching is overwhelming and can, if you let it, overwhelm you. It can bury you. And your students can watch as you collapse.

Or you can be extra.

Extra is one of those words that’s been around the teen smack vernacular for some time now, but doesn’t seem to have abated in usefulness. On Urban Dictionary, my favorite definition (as posted by Performingfartist ) is “Doing the absolute damn most. For no reason.”

I like this definition very much.

When you look at veteran teachers, you have to think: what’s their secret? How have they hung on so long? And I think the answer is in their ability to be mind-bendingly, odds-defyingly EXTRA.

Good teachers are the absolute damn most.  All the time. In your face. Good teachers are sold out to knowledge. They are stoked about the path. They love to learn, and they want their students to love to learn as well.

Can’t understand a concept the first time it’s explained? Extra breaks it down, uses a different approach. Maybe a third or fourth time. With hand puppets. Extra reads a new book over the weekend and can’t wait to tell her students about it. Extra high fives the struggling. Extra learns how to pronounce all the names correctly. Extra knows your mom has chemotherapy this week. Extra collaborates with other teachers, reads professional books, always strives to get better at teaching.

I’m not saying new teachers should do extra things, like stay at school until midnight or spend all weekend lesson planning. That’s madness. I’m saying whatever dream led you to chase this profession, major on that. Social change, writing, reading, community, empowerment, whatever – be that thing.

Extra is a sense of humor, a deep, abiding love for students, a clear-eyed sincerity and earnestness that builds trust. Extra uses tech or gaming or poetry or music. Extra is any means necessary. Extra is every child, every day.

When I think about my colleagues, especially the veterans who have thrived and survived in this profession, it’s because they have fun at their job. They are #ALLIN. My veteran colleagues at Lafayette (Exhibit A: Our science department) break out in song in the middle of class, bring their guitar to class, wear funny hats, make up crazy mnemonics to help students remember content.

In Teachers (1984) my favorite teacher movie, (and by favorite, I mean, most ridiculous), the best teacher in the whole school is a mental patient who is mistaken for the history teacher substitute and spends the whole movie pretending to be George Washington.  How much would you learn about the Revolutionary War if you were being taught by someone who literally believed he was George Washington?

So here’s my Remember The Titans speech for new teachers:   You will get through it.  This, too, shall pass. But don’t give up. Don’t dissolve, wilt, or crumble. Go out with other teachers. Find a tightly-knit, sacred support group where you feel safe.  Wail and scream over iced coffee or buckets of beer if that’s your thing, then get up the next morning, brush your teeth and get after it. Get crazy after it. Get so extra after it that you become the teacher who is the absolute most.

For the best reason ever.

 

 

To See Each of My Students

Within the next few weeks, most of America’s teachers will return to their classrooms and attempt to do this increasingly difficult job of teaching young people to think. Right now, many of us are printing our rosters and figuring out what non-lame opening day activity will welcome everyone to step inside.

As I’ve been thinking about returning to school, a post by one of my former students showed up in my Facebook memories. Several years ago, she had thanked me and two other teachers who she said “believed in me when I was being self destructive and was not at all doing what was best for me.”  She said we had encouraged her until she “started to make a future for myself.” It was–as my friend Elizabeth phrases it–a  teacher paycheck. I love getting those.

Her post reminded me that one of our jobs as high school teachers is to not just see the teenager sitting (sulking, beaming, pouting, bouncing, slouching) in my classroom. We also must see an adult in the process of becoming. If we have the eyes to see it, we can envision that future for all our students.

The ability to see the successful adult inside the petulant teen is not something they teach you in teacher college. Perhaps they teach that in seminary. Some days are harder than others to love the kid who is spitting in your face. In most cases, parents can do this with ease – wipe the spit off and love their children over the top of insolence, but they’ve got DNA and familial fuzzies on their side.  Teachers? Not as much.  In my teaching career, I feel like I have not done a great job with this, even though I know that each year this is my number one goal:  to see each of my students as an individual. Really, really see them. Not just as a mass of faces, as a teen stereotype, as a data point, but as a real living, breathing, hoping, fearing human.

Here are a few ways I can do that:

• Do the inner work necessary to be a calm, non-reactive presence in the classroom. Despite what the inspirational Pinterest posters might have you believe, we teachers are mere mortals with petty egos, who experience fear, shame, and pride just like our students. When a student lashes out at us, our first instinct might be to lash right back. Or to belittle them. Or to silence and exclude them. But all of these responses come from our ego, from our fears. If I feel targeted, triggered, angered to the point of lashing out, I need to ask myself where this reaction is coming from. We must be the adult in the room, not by virtue of our chronological age, but by maturity and equanimity, the one that responds with a calm, kind word formed in love and grace.
• Carve out a distinctive, personal connection with every kid on your roster. This is difficult when you see 150 kids a day, but it is so important to know our kids beyond the beginning of the year interest inventory. Ask questions about their lives, their families, their neighborhoods. Tap into their passions, get curious about their delights, their past times. Challenge yourself to curate one or two positive facts about every student on your roster and then capitalize on those. Be genuine in this practice as students know when a teacher fakes concern for self-interest. If your life-work balance permits, go see your students on the stage, on the court, on the field. If your daily schedule permits, pop into their math class where they are a whiz-kid and watch them shine. See them in different environments to know them completely.
• Create an inclusive classroom that celebrates each student’s gifts, community, heritage, diversity. This practice too is about seeing the student, not as a little cog in the big wheel of your classroom, but as a unique person contributing with other unique people to form a community of learning. This will feel impossible on a Friday before a holiday, but if you prioritize learning and its power, plus the equal access that all students have to this power, the community will happen.
• Believe in your students so much, they begin to believe in themselves. See their potential so clearly that they can see it too. My students are already thinkers, readers and writers, but they are not yet the kinds of thinkers, readers, writers that they can become. As Anne Lamott says, “We begin to find and become ourselves when we notice how we are already found, already truly, entirely, wildly, messily, marvelously who we were born to be.” (Oprah Magazine, 2012)
• Practice compassion. I find it helpful to remember those who showed me grace when I was a squirrelly, self-absorbed little flibber-di-jibbet teen. I remember my teachers, my band directors, my older female neighbors, my Aunt Tilly and Auntie Adele indulging me when I jabbered on self-importantly about this or that. When I sulked, I remember they encouraged me with their laughter, their interest, their genuine questions. When I am compassionate toward my students, through the legacy lens of the gifts my elders have given me, I can see them, not just as they really are, but who they are meant to be as well.

Right now, I’ve just had a leisurely second cup of coffee, sitting on the back porch, listening to the birds chirp and the bees buzz. I’m as chill and as magnanimous as I will ever be. But that’s because I slept until 9 am. And the lunch-nap potential of my day is promising. In ten days, all that will change. I’ll be getting up at 5 am and I’ll be “on” from 7 am until around 4pm, then I’ll drive home and work another hour or two after dinner on school things. Teachers become harried and stressed, strung out and taxed by myriad burdens.

I want to remember this: my number one goal is to treat each student in my classroom with humanity, with dignity, with respect, no matter how hectic the year becomes. To see them, as they are now, and as they will be in their most successful future. And be satisfied when I go home at night that I had a small part in that success.

 

 

Here’s a Radical Thought: Admit to Your Students You’re Human

“I’m not self-actualized on all these myself,” said Dr. Caryn Huber, Dean of Students, to a faculty of 200 teachers during our opening day professional development. She was introducing a powerpoint that featured the prescribed behavioral qualities we would like our students to master to achieve social, emotional, and academic success.

It was a surprising admission. So surprising, in fact, that I wrote it down. It’s the first time I’d ever heard an administrator (or any one in front of a PD) say this out loud:  that every day we ask kids to act in ways that we ourselves as adults haven’t mastered yet.

We ask kids to set SMART goals, manage their time well, bounce back in the face of failure, interact with peers not of their social group, be compassionate, be responsive, be engaged and curious, be driven and goal-oriented.  But the truth of the adult world is very few of us have that list in the bag.  How many of us have our anger truly in check? How many of us respond with compassion every single time? How many of us sit with  new people at faculty meetings?

Dr. Huber’s admission was a rarity,  yet it shouldn’t be.  Admitting our humanness should be on center stage in every classroom and every PD.  Our shortcomings or weak spots or unevolved selves are some of the most powerful things we could share with our students. That our own struggle to learn is not on display every day in every classroom is a waste of a powerful demonstration on the notion of growth mindset.

I’m not suggesting you talk to your students about your addiction, your divorce, or your abysmal financial situation.  I’m suggesting you share the hills and valleys of your own intellectual journey, the one you’re still on.  My colleague Vickie Moriarity wrote a blog recently about failing her Google test, and the empathy she developed for those students who try and try again to learn content they just can’t master.  Vickie’s own failure and her continued journey to gain Google certification will be a powerful model of resilience for her students.

Teachers sometimes present themselves as having arrived at guru status. Perhaps I have presented myself as a master of things of which I am not because pretending to have all the answers is reassuring to me.  If kids can figure out things on their own, why am I even in the room?  But isn’t that the key consideration in all project-based learning, namely,  what is my role in an educational landscape where the answers are not solid, objective realities, but fluid, in-progress creations?

We often speak through our ego, which manifests itself as dictatorial control when we’re in front of our students.  We have the answers.  We have mastered this content.  Really though, when was the last time I have participated in the kinds of thinking I am demanding of my students?

Am I asking students to write an argument on a controversial claim? When was the last time I wrote an argument on a controversial claim from start to finish with evidence and works cited and clear organization? Am I asking students to write a poem? When was the last time I attempted to channel human experience into figurative language?

Being real about our struggles is a powerful teaching tool.  And more importantly, we need to talk about it.  Dr. Huber tapped into that on opening day:  confession is good for the soul. Admit that we don’t always have our act together.  Make that admission into a testimony.  Our stories will connect us more tightly to one another when we share them with our students.  Sharing the story of your own attempts to learn something, or hey, actually writing and mathing with your students (what a concept!) and letting them see you struggle will be the biggest (and most long lasting) lesson they will learn all year. Be the thing you teach. Show students how it’s done by doing it with them, and sometimes failing. Show them that too.

 

 

 

 

First Week Lesson: Demographic Grouping

During the first week of school, my goal is two-fold:  I want my students to see self-discovery through writing as their main goal, and I want to build a community based on story.  I use activities that encourage students to meet each other through the details of their lives. These stories and details eventually serve as the fodder for personal essays, arguments, and informational texts they will write later in the year. 

Demographic grouping is one activity which asks kids to group themselves by various identities and meet the other people in the room who share that characteristic.  The key to this activity — for both community building and self-discovery– is to ask kids who find themselves in a demographic group to argue for or against their own inclusion based on their life experience, hence stories. When they find themselves in a circle of Capricorns, for example, they need to tell stories and trot out evidence as they share the details of who they are or who they think they are.

For a 90-minute block class, I use three demographics: Myers-Briggs, Western astrological signs, and birth order.  I want students to share stories about what it’s like to be a part of these subsets of the larger population, and I want them to challenge or confirm their placement in these groups.  Do they agree or disagree with their “label?” What stories in their lives support or negate this assessment of who they are? Do the definitions fit?

The first demographic congress we convene is around the 16 personality types founded in Carl Jung’s theories on psychological types as listed on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.  Students take a 10-15 minute quiz which will then place them in one of the sixteen possible combination of four paired personality traits: 1) Introversion or Extraversion; 2) Intuition or Sensing; 3) Thinking or Feeling; 4) Judging or Perceiving.  Based on their answers to the personality quiz, students will be given a four-letter personality, such as INFJ.  

Before class starts, I post the 16  individual personality types around the room along with a brief explanation of each type.  Once students have their types, they migrate around the room and find their Myers-Briggs compadres.  For fifteen minutes, I ask them to trade stories that confirm, negate, or qualify the personality type by which they’ve been labeled.  

In addition to being a fun, engaging activity which generates numerous narrative opportunities, I also get to see where my dreamers, my leaders, my risk takers, and my nurturers are. 

After that,  students divide themselves by their zodiac sign.  The Western astrological signs are based on which month of the year you were born. According to astrologists, planetary formations at the time of birth can determine a person’s individual character.  I’m surprised every year by how many students do not know their zodiac sign.  

Before class, I print off a generic description of each of the 12 signs and post these around the room.  Students migrate to the mini-poster that bears the symbol for their sign and join the others in the room who were born under the same sign.  As they did with the Myers-Briggs grouping, students spend about 15-minutes reading the descriptions of their sign (they especially love to read the section about relationship compatibility) and share stories in these groups as to how they are alike or unlike their sign. This is a great activity because it immediately creates kinship among disparate students in the class based on their birth month.

The last grouping I do is birth order.  All the first born, middle, youngest or only children get together in groups. I will have printed off descriptions of the characteristic of that particular birth order, and the groups discuss whether they agree or disagree with the definition of their particular rank.  Birth order is a great nugget of teacher information for me as well.  I know first and only born kids are often my natural leaders, and when I select group leaders for inquiry sessions later in the year, this information will come in handy.

Once we’ve circled through three demographic groups, I ask students to return to their seat and write a reflection of the activity, such as what surprised you about the descriptions? Did you strongly agree or disagree with any of the demographic groupings in which you found yourself? What was the best story you told today? What was the best story you heard today?   

 

Back-to-School Nightmares

“What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only describe the specter which had haunted my midnight pillows.” – Mary Shelly, upon waking from the nightmare that would inspire Frankenstein

I cannot get the copier to work. I stand in the copy room where the thermostat registers: surface of the Sun. My dress dissolves. The copier jams again. The beeping, the jamming. The red arrows. And I have 250 kids (or more)  in my class, standing on desks, chanting mayhem and anarchy. I race into the room and am screaming, hissing, and spitting, between 30 and 150 Hz, but to no avail. My throat bleeds. A brick slams into my head, and I lose consciousness.

They start right after July 4th or when Wal-Mart parks their Back-to-School display in the front of the store.  At this moment, a teacher’s fear circuitry is activated, locked and loaded, and offers up a nightly terror.  The patterns are similar: loss of control, running late, losing lesson plans, your classes, your mind.  

According to Psychology Today, nightmares provide a way for our subconscious to deal with trauma. Other stressful vocations (ER nurses, EMTs, public defenders, air traffic controllers) may also have similar dreams, but since I’m a teacher, I’m very familiar with this annual nocturnal visitation. The stressors in teaching are relentless and myriad, which is why a staggering 30%-40% of teachers exit the profession within the first five years due to stress. Once you’ve experienced this stress in your waking life, the probability that your subconscious will try to warn you of the coming onslaught is high.   

Here’s a sampling of nightmares from my teacher friends:

• I had an anxiety dream last week starring a middle schooler who would not let me help her learn how to do her combination lock on her locker, even though she was crying in frustration when I found her. She refused to listen and just walked away.
• The kids revolt on Day One. They hate me and they won’t cooperate in any way whatsoever. For some reason, it feels dangerous, like they’re saying, “Just try your techniques on us, Mrs. Classroom Management.”
• I’ve dreamt everything from teaching in a tube top to not having the syllabus copied to farting in front of my class to getting lost and teaching the wrong subject!
• I’ve dreamed there is only one copier working and I have to body check a colleague to get to it.  Also, I have too many students and not enough seats or materials for them.
• I was away somewhere, enjoying one last mini vacation before school started back, and my teeth began to fall out — like, a few at a time. I was mortified, but not entirely, until my two front teeth disappeared.  In my dream, my hope was that I would be able to get home from the trip and have my friend (who is an oral surgeon) help me find a solution for the next day, which was the first day of school.
• Our counselor kept showing up at my door with a new student every few minutes. I am sure this has to do with the large class sizes I have this year with no block scheduling.
• I get to school and they’ve moved my classroom, and I can’t find it and then get in trouble for leaving students unattended while I am desperately searching for my room.
• I’ve occasionally had the “horror movie in a school” dream, where I was having to either get myself or myself and students out of the building due to a threat. Those may be fueled by the “live shooter” training we’ve done a few times recently.

School starts on Wednesday for me, and even though I loop with my students for four years (no surprises), I recently had two teacher nightmares, featuring both loss of control of my classroom and getting to school three hours late while my students ran wild through the halls.

If you’re having back-to-school nightmares, take heart. It’s a profession-wide annual visitation. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad teacher or that you’ll have a bad year.  It only means that your subconscious is probably working out the back-to-school jitters.  If you are seriously plagued with these nightly frights, there are ways to conquer them. In the meantime, practice self-care:  exercise, eat right, hydrate, and treat yourself to a stress-reducing massage every month.  Talk out your fears with colleagues who suffer similar anxieties, and practice leaving your school worries at school instead of taking them home with you and catastrophizing them into a daily reality.