Behavior Is Information

We teachers engage in bravado around our abilities to control the behavior of our students. Teachers in conversation with other teachers will brag about how well they control their classes. They have rules such as "show respect".  I have that rule. I also have been a teacher long enough to know that things sometimes break down in ways that puzzle and trouble us and make us feel disrespected.

Most teachers, whatever the outcome of their lessons, are doing the best they can in any moment. The alternative is akin to turning your back on the ocean. Criticism on the art of surfing the big waves is rarely useful unless it comes from veterans who have been rolled once or twice.

From one who has banged her head on the reef too many times: The behavior of your students is not a matter of your pride or even that overused word “respect”. The behavior of your students is information. What a teacher does with that information is what is important.

Over a year ago, I ruled over a group of eleventh graders taking a California Standards Test. The school was a charter with an emphasis on academics. The students were “chronically under-served” in the education lexicon. This means poor and hailing from backgrounds that make Charles Dickens look like a guy who might write for Chicken Soup for the Soul.

In the middle of the test, Gabe started fidgeting and making noise. Mary yelled at him to knock it off, and she and Gabe engaged in a brief but highly escalated and profanity-strewn argument that Gabe cut off by storming out of the classroom. “You better control your class,” Mary said to me.

My immediate reaction was to feel slighted by Mary and ashamed in front of the other kids. I  wanted to go outside and shout at Gabe to go to the Deans for a punishment that would involve suspension. I would not stand for this kind of disrespect in my classroom. I was a professional, after all. I had better control my class.

But instead, I took a breath. Then another. On the second exhale, I looked at the information. Gabe couldn’t be still. Mary was tense and unhappy.

The kids were two hours into a test that made some of their teachers nervous enough to lie to them that the score would have bearing on their college transcripts (it would not). Their daily schedules were disrupted, including school meal times that for some of the students were their only meal times.

The surface information was helpful but I knew even more. Mary’s family put enormous stress on her for high achievement. She was anxious and angry most of the time.

Gabe had divots in his head from gunshot wounds incurred during his past life as a criminal.  He was a successful, high achieving drug dealer back in the day, but for the past eight months since his release from incarceration he was trying to be a student. This with gaps in his math education, post traumatic stress, an ADHD problem (a true one) the likes of which I have rarely seen in twenty years, and his belly filled most of the time only with what he could get at school.

In other words, none of it had to do with me.

For the next two days of testing I arranged for Gabe to take his test in the library with the special ed teacher.  In a private conversation I told Mary that her comment was unhelpful given the circumstances and hurt my feelings. (No swelling violins in the background, she really didn’t care but at least she was “respectful” about it.) After two days I took Gabe aside for a long talk where he did all the talking about the solutions he had been thinking about for his anger and his old ways of behaving. We agreed that in the future when that happened, he had my permission to go outside and remove himself from the situation. I complimented him for doing this in the first place, but maybe next time he could do it before all of the naughty words and yelling. We finished the final days of testing together as a group without incident. We ended the year without incident.

Most students will be their best selves in your presence if you get to know them as much as you can. I use journals as a built-in cheat to their inner lives, but I also engage in conversations and ask them questions and pay attention to what goes on in the hallways and in the rows.  I ask questions and listen more than I talk in conversations with students. I don’t know everything, but I know enough to understand some of the bigger picture when something goes wrong. 

In a best-case scenario, I use the information pro-actively. When I think back on the Gabe and Mary fight, I realize that the time I was weak was not afterwards, but long before. Gabe and I should have had a trouble shooting chat beforehand. I should have passed Mary the secret that nobody in college admissions gives a fig about the CST, and she with her proficient and advanced scores on everything, her high GPA and her decent ACT numbers had little to fear from Gabe being a fussbudget.

Student behavior is information. No more and no less. Use the information to make decisions that solve or prevent problems.  Turn off the criticizing voices in your head, because those voices aren’t the ones facing the big waves, you are.

Hang ten.

The waters are sometimes not this calm and peaceful.

Summer Me

I have two women living inside of me and they are Summer Me and Schooldays Me. When I have long days without a structured job to attend, I turn into a person I would not be able to stand under normal schoolday circumstances. Schoolday Me would scoff at Summer Me and privately feel not only superior in character, but mildly offended at the other's self-indulgent aimlessness. Summer Me admires Schoolday Me in every way but also knows that she could never ever be that busy.

For example,

Schooldays Me: I better get up at 5 in order to exercise so I can get in my strength training as well as my aerobics and still have time to meditate.

Summer Me: I better get up at 7 or else I'll be too tired to get around to exercising at some point before noon and maybe I'll just take a meandering walk instead of going to the gym anyway.

Schooldays Me: I wear a pedometer to track all of the steps I take during the day in the course of work.

Summer Me: Maybe I'll go this way. I don't know. Whatever.

Schooldays Me: Now that I'm done with my eight-hour workday, I think I'll clean the house, do the grocery shopping and cook a meal. Then I will make sure my daughter is bathed  and ready for school tomorrow and that everyone has the laundry they need done for the next day. Before bed, I will make my lunch and my daughter's lunch. I will also prepare my breakfast and grind my coffee beans to be ready for tomorrow morning.

Summer Me: I can't believe I went to the gym AND the drugstore this morning. I better take a nap.

Schooldays Me: Did I get my 1,000 words written today?

Summer Me: Have I done anything besides write today?

Schooldays Me: I am wearing Spanx and control top pantyhose under my pants and blazer and high heel shoes. Always important to look professional.

Summer Me: I am wearing my husband's old pajama pants. Always important to at least wear pants.

My Summer Me looks up to my Schooldays Me as if from the bottom of a pool. There Schooldays stands, waving her arms around and looking too hot in her long pants and high heels. She should stop working so hard, maybe. She should maybe jump in the pool.

My daughter, who much more resembles Summer Me than Schooldays Me in every particular.

The Ghost Daughter (What I Was Thinking About)

Two years ago I stood in the check out line at the grocery story, Casey Anthony staring at me from the cover of the People magazine. I don’t follow crime stories usually, but this one followed me. I couldn’t help it. I was fascinated. Do you remember this thing? A young woman claims her little kid went missing a full month after anyone has seen her. The authorities find the thoroughly decomposed body of the child months later in a pile of duct tape.

But the prosecution is inadequate to the task of conviction and the judge lets her go. Everyone thinks she did it. But free she goes.

I looked at that magazine cover and I thought, huh. Well, what if the little girl was never found? What if she disappears and then pops up eighteen years later as a grown woman looking for that terrible mother?

The archetype of the terrible mother is fascinating. There’s nothing scarier than your own mother having it in for you. At first I wrote the mother character as a sociopath. I did tons of research on sociopathy in preparation but then I found out in the writing that sociopaths are boring.  They’re narcissistic one-hit wonders. Writing pages and pages from the point of view of a sociopath was like eating a gourmet meal with a stuffy nose.  Nothing tasted like anything without empathy, desire, concern, and love.

So I scrapped the 25k words I started with and rewrote the whole thing from scratch. I don’t know Casey Anthony and the story wasn’t about her anyway.  The story is about the terrible mother inside all of us, and about the life-giving earth mother beside her. It is about sociopaths, but about how people cope and survive in the wake of true evil, and about how survival is the ultimate revenge.

The Ghost Daughter is about the staying power of true love, even when it comes at too young of an age to bear it with justice and respect. It’s about trying to have power over others as a way of forgetting when you were powerless. It’s about being homeless in one way or another your whole entire life and then finally arriving at a doorstep that you can call your own.

It’s about religion and loneliness and music and the desert. It’s about mothers and daughters and babies that are lost but still haunt you forever and forgive you for being terrible before you knew how to be good.

So I sent out queries and partials and one whole and I hope for the best for this baby that is The Ghost Daughter. Once more into the breach, my friends. Wish me luck.

Kali, goddess of time, change and death.  Pretty much the most unmotherly person ever.

Wild Thing

I wrote this for Open Salon two years ago. It seemed timely for graduation season, so here it is again.

I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself.

A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough

Without ever having felt sorry for itself.

            D.H. Lawrence

I thought of the D.H. Lawrence poem “Wild Thing” today while my Advisory student Issac gave his senior portfolio presentation.

Before you think I’m smart, I only thought of this poem because one of my favorite actors  (Viggo Mortensen) quotes it in one of my favorite movies (G.I. Jane). The poet evokes the thoughtless courage of a bird losing to the elements without complaining.  The poem implies that while birds do not complain, people do, and complaining is neither brave nor useful. At least that is what Viggo and I got out of it.

The senior portfolio is a series of reflective essays, college acceptance letters, awards and other evidence of the four-year walk across the childhood-to-adulthood bridge that is high school.  Many of our students have been through so much crap that the stories they tell during presentations can make their teachers cry.  Panels get boxes of tissue along with the folders of rubrics and schedules.

I admire my students more than they know for their perseverance despite drug-addicted and/or incarcerated parents, gunshot wounds, homelessness, crushing poverty, family members lost to violent death or suicide or disease.  I’m not as strong as they are and never will be, but I’ve been teaching long enough that I thought I was immune to the boo-hoo.  Tears don’t help anyone anyway.  Tears are embarrassing and misplace attention onto the crier.  I am most helpful to my students if I model the example of the poet’s bird.  I am stoic and I hold on to the bough. 

Enter Issac, the last of my Advisory students to present today.  All of my guys did a great job. I was ready to enjoy Issac’s final presentation.  He is an accomplished scholar, an exemplary school citizen.  We live in the same neighborhood so I see him at the pool looking after his brothers in the summertime.  I know that he has spent the past four years recovering from getting hit by a car, and that his college acceptances will have to wait while he works to make money to support his six siblings.  I know Issac’s parents have abdicated their responsibilities to an extraordinary degree.  I know Issac.  I do.

He looked handsome today in his pressed shirt and tie.  He opened his portfolio and started with the story about the day in ninth grade when he walked with his friend along a busy street.  A speeding car lost control and the last thing Issac remembers seeing is a “flash of white”.  After that all he remembers is pain.  His femur was broken in half.  His face was shattered.

His friend remembers that day differently.  He remembers walking with Issac along a busy street.  Then Issac pushed him out of the way and took the full force of that speeding car onto himself.

Issac rarely tells this story.  When he does talk about it, he does so with no trace of self-pity.  I know it’s hard to imagine.  I feel sorry for myself when my lips are chapped.  Meanwhile my student Issac suffers daily physical discomfort from an act of courage he doesn’t even remember and yet he never once feels sorry for himself.   

Issac works hard in school and he is a highly capable student.  He deserves his college acceptance to a university two hours away from his hometown, and the financial aid and scholarships that come with it.  But he is staying home to care for his siblings.  If he doesn’t, they will surely be scattered to the vagaries of foster care. He will go to a community college then transfer to the local university.  As his Advisor, I would love to be able to tell Issac to cut ties and follow his dreams. Yet I admire and support his decision to keep his family intact.

There won’t be fraternity rushing or years studying abroad for Issac.  He isn’t getting any carefree young adult years.  He hasn’t even had a childhood.   His brothers are having theirs, though.  I’ve seen them at the pool.  They are healthy and playful and reasonably happy.  Issac pushes them free of the path of out-of-control destruction every day of his life.

Issac shared his portfolio with the panel while I sat in the back of the room.  He loves his family. He is proud of his accomplishments and he looks forward to graduation. He isn’t humble because he doesn’t see his actions as special enough to be proud of in the first place.  He clings to the bough of life with a stoicism that finally, after he left the room, made me break down and cry.

Many of my students go about the functions of their daily lives with a selflessness and devotion to family that I hardly every think about because if I did then I would lose hold of my own bough.  My guys don’t need my tears or even my admiration. They need me to edit their essays and bring them donuts and remind them to tuck in their shirts. They need me to be as wild as they are.

I get just tonight to reflect on Issac and his Advisory brothers.  Tomorrow, I will nag them about their grades.  They will make inappropriate jokes and I will yell at them for being gross. 

I will hold in my tears.  I will hold in my sorrow that life was not more just and fair to these young men who deserved better.  I will shake hands on graduation night and I will smile.  I will say congratulations and I will say good-bye.

I will be the wild thing too

On Self-Reliance

One of my favorite books when I was a kid was called Out In The Wilds: How To Look After Yourself. It was a slim paperback full of dead serious survival instructions. The premise was that if you kept your wits about you and were prepared, independence from grown-ups was yours. The very idea was intoxicating.

The houses across the street where I grew up backed into hundreds of square acres of private ranch property. Barbed wire marked the border between the suburban backyards and wild lands, a border which my parents forbid me from crossing. It was land riddled with rattlesnakes, guarded by horned bulls, protected by ranchers with guns. Though my friend lived across the street and her backyard accessed wild rolling hills that went on forever, I was an obedient kid. Despite my fascination, I never ventured into those wilds.

By the age of seventeen I was gone off to college. My parents paid my tuition and in a few short years I equipped myself with a degree, a teaching credential and a full time job. I took the education they bought me and turned it into a life. I knew how to support myself in the world, and incidentally I knew how to backpack and survive in the wilderness as well. The power of self-reliance meant everything to me then and it still does.

So of course my daughters are self-reliant. It shouldn’t surprise me. But the shadow side of having independent kids is that you become obsolete as a parent pretty quickly.  My daughters do almost everything for themselves. Have you ever heard of the term “helicopter parent”? Here is the opposite: I don’t know my teenager’s Powerschool code. I have never checked it, not once in three years. I’ve also never once contacted a teacher to “advocate” for my children. They advocate for themselves.

Both of my kids can cook their own food, do their own laundry, complete their homework without my help. Now that the older one can drive, the only thing they really need me for is to make money for the mortgage and tuition, but soon enough that won’t be the case. The older one already makes her own spending money and more of it than I could ever provide.

My nine year old found she was having a hard time getting to sleep at night so she decided to get in the habit of making herself a cup of chamomile tea at bedtime. She made one for me too last night, urging me to try it. “It’s good for you,” she said.

At least a helicopter mom is aware of her role. The helicopter mom is the advocate, the grade checker, the tea-getter. My own way is less clearly marked. Perhaps my job is to sit quietly and listen to my children, accept their gifts of tea, and remind them that they have always had what it takes to survive in the wilds.

Out of print now, but one of the best books for kids ever.