teaching/learning: an intimate pursuit

I just found the post below saved as a draft.  I can't figure out how to see when I originally wrote it, and I can't remember exactly how long ago the visit I describe happened.  It's at least a couple of years old.

Getting my stuff from my classroom Saturday morning was really, really hard.  Viscerally.

It's funny that as I was packing shit up, I got a text from J, just checking in.  I've been trying to get in touch with him for months but haven't been able to.

I asked him how he was.  He responded, "Tryna get on ma feet, but itz hard."  Me, too.

Still not alone.  Dang.

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Whenever I'm asked (which isn't that often but often enough actually) who influenced me to be a teacher, I always tell the asker about my former student, J.  Obviously, by the time I met J, I was already teaching, but he, I'd say, had the most major impact on the kind of teacher I became or tried to become.

I visited J in jail this morning.  I'd lost touch with him, but I saw his name in the paper, looked him up using the country clerk's website, and found out where he is.

He didn't look good.  He looked skinny, and his skin was all broken out.  His hair was a hot mess.  He was talking really low, keeping his head and eyes down.  "You seem depressed," I told him, "Tell me what's up with you."  He told me that he wasn't depressed, just that he'd been sleeping before being pulled for my unexpected visit. "Yeah, yeah," I responded, skeptical, "Listen.  Takes one to know one.  You seem depressed, J.  Sluggish or something."

"Yeah, you would know..." he trailed off.  He remembered when I was depressed a few years ago when I was his teacher for the second year in a row.  "You were so messed up and skinny.  I didn't even wanna come to school."  We both laughed at that.  Yeah, I was pretty messed up then.  He would know; he was there.

When we take our students human-ness seriously, and when we try to find ways to humanize ourselves in spite of our institutionalized authority, I think an intimacy emerges that is risky for sure (I'm not sure how I feel, as a young woman, about having a male former student commenting on my body at all, even if it's to refer to my mental/physical health) and that is also warm and persistent.

In the traditional high school setting, we spend hours each week with our students.  That's more time than I get to spend with my close friends, my family, or even my colleagues.  We know things about each other, both the things that explicitly get shared in class and the things that we pick up through observation and interaction -- ticks, facial expressions, values.  J's comment then, in a way, told me "I know you.  I know you made it through a difficult time.  I remember."  It's a variation of "You're not alone," the sentiment that brought me to a sense of faith after a life of atheism.

still thinking

I went and saw Selma last night.

Two of the parts that were most poignant for me: this and this.

not sure what the point of this is

Things what I like:

Watching/napping through Law and Order for several hours at a time

Bad black coffee

TJ Maxx and Marshalls

Buying picture books for my brothers’ kids

Reading long books
Earnestness

My brothers’ taste in sisters-in-law for me

The Indian pizza place at the bottom of the hill I live on

Wearing my slippers to the coffee shop in the morning

The owner of this coffee shop always telling me to take my shoes off the seat, but they’re slippers

My own handwriting

Watching the fiddle be played

Talking on FaceTime

Sitting really close on the couch to any family member

When Ricky Gervais farts on Karl Pilkington and then lays on the floor laughing starting at 17:51 in this video

Sending people packages

Gold

The Memorare

When people say “Word.” And ‘Word?”

Gendered insults for dudes (e.g. quit being such a dick)

Videos of my niece and nephews doing cool things

When my roommate says things are “fantastic,” but they don’t seem fantastic to me

All cheeses

The song they sing at the beginning of Glide services

Friendship bracelets
Eavesdropping

Things what I don’t like:

The smell of drool

ROSS

My hair being wet

Frozen peas

Mingling

Those Converse shoes that are high-tops but more like boots (Ew.)

Receiving/responding to (most) email and (all) voicemail

When things end

Flying

Running

This mustache trend with all the mustache shit everywhere

Gendered insults for women (e.g. what a bitch)

When my brothers send a thousand texts about sports when I’m trying to take a nap
When people say boring, obvious things and I have to act interested

Amy, you're next.

why I quit

Later this morning, I’ve got to go to my classroom, pack up my stuff, and move it out. 

I’m sad.

When I moved here, I filled up one of those U-Haul containers (and that is a story…), and half of it was classroom stuff.  A couch, a rug, some lamps, hella YA books. I’m gonna leave most of it.

The teacher who is replacing me is super smart and an all-around badass.  I’m glad my kids will have her.

I liked my kids a lot.  I liked my co-workers.  I liked my principal.  I liked the families, the community. 

It’s hard to explain why I finally gave up, without, I fear, sounding like a real bullshitter, but here it is.

Definitely, part of it was just the chemical stuff of depression.  Dealing with a major depressive episode like this one was horrendous at home, surrounded by my people.  I just couldn’t take it anymore here, without any people.

Beyond that, when I feel the way I’ve felt the past few months, I can’t teach the way I want to, the way I think kids deserve.  I felt every hour, every day like I was mediocre as hell.  I could see what needed to be done; I would lie awake in the middle of the night with my mind racing about what each of my kids deserved, but I couldn’t do it.  I could barely make myself brush my teeth in the morning.  I would stand in my classroom as the kids worked away, trying to hold in my tears (many times unsuccessfully) while I counted the hours left until I could get home and back into bed, until I didn’t have to be awake anymore.

I knew it would get better with time.  My friendships with my co-workers would deepen, as would our collective capacity to collaborate.  I love collaborating with co-workers, designing visions for learning and responsively adjusting as we go along.  I knew that my relationships with kids and with their families deepen, too. It would get better.

But I also knew that I would get better at shit that I not only don’t care about but actually think makes the world worse. 

Use "the district's" curriculum.  Forget your own expertise.  "We did all the heavy lifting for you," I was for real told by one of the trainers.  I heard: "We determined what you should teach and how because you're probably not clever enough to do so yourself.  All that intellectual hoo-hah!  Leave the thinking to us.  You're just a data collector.  Here's a script, but don't worry, you can tweak it!" (I should say, my seriously lovely and brilliant principal really pushed me to take that "tweaking" to heart and do my thing.  But the only professional development available always came back to the scripted curriculum.)

“Managing.”  I’m all for discipline, and I’m deeply grateful to the people who helped me develop it.  But I couldn’t turn my brain off to the ways that school – even a school as seriously badass as the one I was at – is like prison.  Hall passes, and straight lines, and do what I say when I say.  The carceral state extended.

Take these tests, not because they matter to your humanity, to the sadness or excitement or hope or whatever you’re feeling about what’s going on in your life, but because they facilitate the surveillance of what we’re up to by people who don’t know or really care about either of us.   Don’t bring up the fact that the assessment is neither theoretically sound nor culturally sustaining.  Get them their data. (Who the fuck is them?)

Rt-fucking-I.  Uncritically take the goals handed to us by the system – goals for what to know and how to behave – and identify kids for intervention based on the ways they’re not up to snuff.  Label them by their deficits, not their assets, their dreams.  It’s more efficient that way.  Easier to pick out the ones for whom the best intervention is incarceration.

I can’t do it anymore. 

My therapist told me this week that there are some places where people spend years learning a practice, but that to actually be considered a master, they have to first leave their practice for at least twice as long as they spent studying it.  

Maybe I'll come back to teaching.  But for right now, something else.