Life Will Surprise You: Reflections One Year Out

It's been a while since I've had a really great birthday celebration.  In college May 21st always seemed to be a day when people were scattered, when it was only possible to get a handful of close friends together at the same time.  So over the years I learned not to have the highest expectations for birthdays.  And that was really alright with me; I rarely spent the other 364 days wanting for companionship or appreciation.

This year I planned to let my birthday come and go without much fanfare.  A couple close friends insisted on making me Sunday brunch and asked that I keep the rest of my day free, so I complied.  We spent the afternoon at a music festival before returning to one friend's house to drive somewhere secret, I was told.  I only barely registered five large bowls of crawfish sitting on her dining room table.  My though process went something like this:

Thought one: "Oh!  Crawfish!  They're surprising me with crawfish!  How nice of them."

Thought two: "Wow!  That's a lot of crawfish.  How are we going to eat all that crawfish?"

Thought three began: "Wait a minute..." but was aggressively interrupted as eight hidden people burst from behind a curtain screaming "Surprise!!!"

And there they stood, smiling with arms open, a group of friends I couldn't have handpicked any better had I planned the surprise myself.  And there was kale salad, without nuts.  And sourdough pancakes with chocolate chips, blueberries and coconut shavings.  And a delicious apple tart and decadent chocolate cake.  And a brand new pre-seasoned cast iron combo cooker.  Also beer, lots of beer.

Soon more people arrived.  A collection of friends from work, from Americorps, from around town.  Some of them had put in a lot of effort to make sure everything came together to make me feel really special.  And it worked, spectacularly.

The next day at work our curriculum coordinator showed up to our morning staff meeting with two warm pumpkin pies, my favorite dessert.  The whole staff sang happy birthday to me.  A close friend and colleague had students hand-deliver assorted snacks to me throughout the day, eight in all, each with a handwritten birthday rhyme attached.  As I stood outside a door waiting for a Kindergarten class to line up the students began handing me folded sheets of colored construction paper.  I teared up right there in the hallway as I realized the entire class had made me birthday cards.

Maybe there have been a couple of times in my life when I've felt so appreciated and loved.  High school and college graduation come to mind, but it's hard to compare.  Each of those were rites-of-passage moments, grown out of years-old relationships with family, friends and place.

This year not one of the people around me had known me for even nine months.  None of the people that made up the first 22 years of my life were there with me for the best birthday celebration I'd been given in 23 years.  It got me thinking: how did any of this come to be?

Last May I remember just feeling unbearably sad.  Not depressed - not like sadness flowing beneath a bridge as you stand above and gaze down at it.  Sadness like a surge smashing through a thick concrete dam, sweeping you unforgivingly up in its current.  Sadness like smacking you in the face and not apologizing though you did nothing to deserve it other than live your life.

Four years I spent building my life in Claremont, California, slowly locating friends and mentors, curiosities and passions.  Four years and only in the last couple months did I finally feel settled, like I could live this life happily a while longer.  Four years and in a matter of hours Claremont lost all meaning for me as each goodbye drained a little of the place as I'd known it.  What made it even harder was that I was the last to leave.

My life went up in the smoke of airplane jets and car exhaust pipes as friendships stretched across the world; friendships that for so long had existed within a few square miles of suburb.  I remember feeling so completely and despairingly alone.  I remember taking off for my last flight out of Los Angeles, not knowing if I'd ever return but feeling certain that years would pass before life would feel quite so full again.

Sadness like starting over against your will.  I don't even remember what I was doing on May 21st, 2011.  I spent the first part of the summer at home, wallowing and wondering about what would come next.  My routine had been pulled out from under me and the thing I did the most last June was nothing.  I had spent the past four years wishing for more time, more hours in the day.  Last summer I couldn't burn time fast enough.

New Orleans loomed in the distance.  I knew I'd be going but I didn't know why or for what.  At least I had landed an Americorps position, barely a week before I planned to leave New York.

I woke up early on a mid-August Monday to finish packing.  Finally managing to fit most of my life into my station wagon, I left just a couple hours behind schedule.  Mom hugged me then teared up as I pulled out of the driveway.  I lost it by the end of the block, and cried on and off most of the way down the Jersey Turnpike.

Somewhere around Philly it started to rain.  A Northeast summer downpour, a sunshower, the kind I dream about when I'm away from home.  On one side the sky loomed black; on the other bits of blue poked through bordered by sunlight's golden lining.  A gray double-wheeled pickup skidded in front of me for a moment before regaining its traction.

Thunderstorms are are by far the most dramatic kind of weather: big flashes, loud noises, hazardous conditions, dark and foreboding clouds.  When I get emotional they tend to put me over the edge, however I'm feeling.

This time instead of getting more upset, all of a sudden I stopped feeling sad and alone.  I actually started to feel kind of giddy.  A big, stupid smile crossed my face and though I can't remember what music I was playing I know I started belting it so loud that I made myself dizzy.  An invisible, undetectable something was making me feel not-so-desolate.

I arrived in D.C. and had dinner with a friend from college who I had met through Cultivating Dreams.  That night I slept in the apartment of a close friend from high school.  The next day I drove to Boone, NC to spend time with another friend from college whom I hadn't seen in over a year. Then onward to Columbia, SC for a day with an old friend followed by a couple of hours in Batesburg-Leesville with yet another college friend.  Here I was on a 1500 mile drive down the East coast, and someone wonderful was waiting for me at every stop.

In the last 24 hours of the trip I was totally alone but not even a little lonely.  As I approached New Orleans I didn't know the next time I'd see a familiar face, but the journey down was a reminder that good people will pop up wherever you are.  Not just good people - the people who form you, reform you and transform you.

In every part of my life I've been surrounded by people who've seen more in me than I've seen in myself.  Anything good in me has been born out of someone else's imagination, and has grown out of their loving insistence that I can be who they see.  It still surprises me when I find these people, even though they're everywhere.  They were there for the 18 childhood years that I spent in New York.  They appeared again in California.  They were at every destination on my summer road trip in 2010 and at every stop on my drive down here.

This year they were all over the world: New York, California, Oregon, Texas, Illinois, South Dakota, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Washington, D.C., Spain, Armenia, India, Indonesia, Malawi, Germany, and even a few in Claremont.

So of course they were here, too.  Of course we'd find each other, like always.  They tend to show up when your soul is alone but your heart is open.

That eight people ran out screaming from behind a curtain to bestow me with hugs, food and gifts wasn't my real birthday surprise.  It was the people themselves.  Each one found their way into my life, some gently and some aggressively, some slowly and some in an instant.

Seeing more in me that I could ever see.

Holding me upright and stretching me a little at a time.

Guiding me gently, gracefully into who I will become.

It's hard to explain how much I love you all.

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NUGGETS OF POST-COLLEGIATE WISDOM:

1. Spend time with people who are not your age.  Nothing has helped me grow up as much as working with children.
2. Dishes matter.  Life gets cluttered enough without the added stress of a dirty kitchen.
3. When a woman asks you how she looks, "fine" is the wrong answer.
4. Go to your workplace Christmas party.  You never know who you'll end up talking to.
5. Do new things for the hell of it.  If you don't break your routine it will break you.
6. Small acts of giving go a long way.  They mean a lot more to people than you might realize.
7. Make time to process your thoughts a little bit every day.  If you don't do it a little at a time you'll end up doing it all at once, and that can be really hard.
8. Expect to fail, a lot.  Especially if you are not used to it.

Teaching to Learn, Part 5: Who Will be Left to Hug?

So I recently decided that the old title of this series of posts was kind of pretentious sounding.  "The Many Faces of Education"?  What does that even mean?  I have so little authority to talk about what education looks like.  All I have is this tiny little lens of a classroom in this tiny little school in this relatively tiny big city.  The new name, "Teaching to Learn," reflects my own realization of how little I know about education.  Almost a full school year into it, I realize that my experience teaching has really been an experience in learning: not only how to teach, but how to connect with people cross-culturally, how to navigate a confusing and problematic system, how to overcome barriers to being an effective educator, and how to stay positive when I can't find a way over them.  It's funny, a year ago as I was finishing up at Pomona I had serious doubts that real life would be as captivating and as stimulating as college had been.  Turns out, real life blows college out of the water.


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One thing I love about kids is that they haven't learned to be adults yet.  They haven't learned when to run and when to walk, when to whisper and when to shout, when to play and when to settle down.  My favorite thing they haven't learned yet is not to hug everybody all the time.


Kayla (not her real name) hugs everybody all the time.  Saying Kayla hugs is like saying lions purr.  This little lady could suffocate you if she were any older than six, and for now she's just a highly effective tourniquet.


Her approach is devious.  She'll walk up to you slowly with her arms at her sides or folded behind her back, smile wide and eyes scrunched closed with the effort of using so many facial muscles at once.  Then she'll pounce, lifting her arms and throwing them around whatever part of your body she can reach.  If you're standing tall that's probably your hips, and if you're short or bent over she will go straight for your neck.  Then she'll just hang, giggling hysterically until you tell her to please get off for the seventh or eighth time.


A couple months ago we started taking our first grade garden class to recess at the same time that Kayla's kindergarten class is on the playground.  It's usually not more than a minute or two before she locks in on her favorite target, my right leg.  Recently she's taken to swinging her arms around my thigh and criss-crossing her legs around my ankles, forming a pretzel out of her body.  We make a game out of it.  "Uh oh, is that a Kayla on my leg?  Where did it come from?  How am I going to get it off?!"  I'll shake my leg, lift it, or jump up a couple times in a feigned effort to remove her.  Finally I'll pretend to give up and start walking around with her still hanging on.  She never gets tired of this.  She never gets tired ever, really.


Kayla seems like a pretty happy kid.  She's lucky to be part of a really exceptional classroom led by a really exceptional first-year teacher.  The whole circumstance is really exceptional, since I'm told almost nobody teaches really well in their first year.  Teachers tell me it usually takes at least a year to feel comfortable in a classroom, and at least a couple more before you really figure out how to teach to your potential.


Most of the teachers in my school have less than 5 years teaching experience, meaning very few of them have even come close to their potential as educators.  Many of them are doing a really incredible job with their students despite limited experience.  Several have already bloomed into great educators (in this layperson's judgement), and others will undoubtedly do so in a few years' time.


Unfortunately, almost none of them will be around to benefit Kayla and her classmates.


Like so many charter schools in New Orleans, my school demands more of teachers than a standard public school would.  Between data collection, lesson planning, classroom preparation and weekly professional developments it's not unusual teachers to work a 70 hour week.  Most of my co-workers get to school around 6:30 AM and leave around 4:30 PM, then go home and work even more, sometimes late into the evening.  More than a handful come in to school on Saturday or Sunday as well.


It's a pace that's just not possible for most people to sustain for more than a year or two.  It's not a coincidence that most of the teachers I work with are young, unmarried, and without children.  People with families to support struggle to make such a lifestyle work, and my heart goes out to those who try.


Out of the 15 homeroom teachers in our elementary school, only four will be returning to their classroom next year.  A couple intend to stay with the school in different capacities, but most are leaving to teach elsewhere, to go to grad school, or to find another career.  It's an extremely high rate of turnover, but it's not unprecedented in New Orleans public charters, the type of school that enrolls nearly 80% of the city's students.


By the time a first-year New Orleans teacher becomes pretty good at what she or he does, she or he will probably be teaching somewhere besides New Orleans, or not teaching at all.  She or he will be replaced by another young and extremely hard working person, a year or two out of college (if that) and already a year or two away from burnout.


It may strike you as absurd to have a school system that burns through teachers on such a consistent basis, but it's actually by design.  Since Hurricane Katrina New Orleans has become ground zero for charter-based school reform, a movement which seeks to improve education by handing public schools over to be managed by independent, private organizations.


(A more thorough and big-picture recent history of New Orleans schools will follow in a later post.  Suffice to say that it's complicated.)


Many charter schools follow similar educational philosophies and strategies, emphasizing data collection, teacher innovation, frequent and ongoing professional development, a "no excuses" school culture, and following the latest trends in educational research and curriculum development.  Hence the 70-hour work weeks.  Hence the burnout.  Hence the need for teacher training pipelines like teachNOLA and Teach for America which recruit bright, young, motivated individuals for one- or two-year teaching commitments.


For some schools, turnover is actually a big part of their strategy.  A 2010 article in the Times-Picayune reported that, "A growing group of educators and policy wonks say they are not particularly concerned about chronic teacher turnover in urban schools, as long as there's a pipeline of bright workaholics to fill the vacancies."  Even if it's not desirable, some believe it can be sustainable.


In my school this high-turnover system actually seems to be working along the standard metrics.  Test scores increase every year, the overall school grade goes up as well (D+ this year is our all-time high), and the school continues to receive more funding in the form of grants and state aid.


But then there are things that aren't measured.  How much time and how many resources go towards teachers who won't impact the long-term success of the school, or any school for that matter?  How much pressure is put on administrators that have to train and acclimate a new and inexperienced group of teachers year after year?  What does it mean that its almost impossible for schools to attract skilled veteran educators?  What are the long-term effects on New Orleans and its students of a teaching workforce that's overwhelmingly young, highly educated, unmarried, and culturally white?


It all seems so wasteful to me.  Just as teachers begin to hone their craft they move on to something else.  And that's only scratching the surface of wastefulness.  After Katrina, the Orleans Parish School Board lost control of the majority of its schools to the state level and fired 6,800 district employees as a result.  Thousands of people with thousands of years of collective educational knowledge are located all around New Orleans, doing something other than teaching.  Charters generally are less interested in hiring those people because they have families, lives outside of school, or differences of opinion about what constitutes fair working conditions.  I'd surmise that many of those educators would rather find work elsewhere than return to the same career but with more hours, less pay, fewer benefits, and far less job security.*


Then there's the effects on students: what's the emotional toll on them to see new faces every year?  What about the ones who don't have a consistent and supportive adult present in their home life?  What does it mean for them that none of the grownups they've ever known have believed in them for more than a few years at a time?


I can only guess at what kind of effect this turnover-based system might have on them.  I've tried considering what my schooling would have felt like if every year a quarter or half of the faculty left and was replaced.  I think it wouldn't have been so bad since I got a new teacher every grade anyway.  Would I really have noticed that much?


And then I consider that I had a mom and a dad at home every day for 18 years to make me dinner and ask how my day was; to take me to the movies or baseball practice on weekends; to hug me when I felt lonely or overwhelmed.  I'll never fully grasp what a profoundly good job they did in making me feel loved and supported for my whole childhood.


I don't know the home situations of most of my students.  Probably a lot of them are really terrific and caring.  Probably a lot of them are really tumultuous.  Whatever the breakdown, I'm sure that many of my students don't have their emotional and developmental needs met at home, meaning it's crucial for them to have those needs met at school.


In a way that's the driving logic behind the charter model.  Make up the difference with our students by being ultra-prepared, ultra-cutting-edge, and ultra-hard working.  No doubt that some schools like mine have shown results, but it still leaves me wondering if the school system could be a little less ultra-stressful and a little more sustainable.  Maybe we could ease up a little on our younger teachers in the hope that they'll stay a while longer.  A fifth-year teacher can probably do a better job in 60 hours a week than a comparable first- or second-year teacher can do in 80 hours a week.  It's getting them to year five that proves difficult.


A charter school leader would argue with me, saying that accepting more reasonable hours would mean lowering expectations for what students could achieve.  But I don't think it's a question of lowering expectations so much as recognizing that maybe we can reach even higher expectations if we exercise a little patience in getting there.  A school leader might counter by saying that there isn't time for that, since state funding for next year depends on their school's performance this year.  And she'd be right.  The school system in Louisiana is run on market logic: spoils to the winners, school closures to the losers.


I don't want Kayla to end up on the short end of that logic.


I don't want her to go to a school where suddenly one year everyone decides to leave, and the next year she doesn't recognize any of the adults.  I don't want her to think that she can't be a teacher because she's black, or that certain people must not have anything to teach her because they're not young, white and highly educated.


I don't want my school or any school in New Orleans to fail because the only people willing to take jobs there are people who have never taught in a classroom before.  I don't want anyone to have to choose between another year of work and starting a family.  Or between lesson planning and taking their kid to the park.


In just a few years Kayla will be tall enough to hug her teachers above the waist.  She'll be strong enough to really do some damage but wise enough and kind enough to know when to ease up.  Someday she will probably learn, as most children do, not to hug everybody all the time.


Let it not happen so soon, though.  Let it not be because all her favorite targets have gone away and been replaced by new names and faces, new legs and waists.  Let her always find solace in the contours of a familiar body of a teacher who loves her.


Let her stay a kid, at least for a little while longer.


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*Another consequence of firing 6,800 teaching employees: United Teachers of New Orleans (UTNO) lost much of its membership and former leverage.  Teachers in New Orleans currently have no collective bargaining agreement.  The Louisiana Legislature also recently passed a law changing the provisions of tenure that makes it far easier for schools to fire teachers who underperform.