Reading Workshop? Classics? What?

So, a friend and former professor of mine facebooked me this New York TImes article: A New Assignment: Pick Books You Like. It’s about reading workshop, a concept pioneered by Nancie Atwell in the late 1980’s, where students choose the books they read. I have some thoughts on this article, which, should you choose to read them, I’ll share with you here.

First, it figures that it would take the outside world over 20 years to begin to discuss what cutting-edge teachers have been doing in their classrooms for so damned long. Nuf said.

Secondly, hving taught in title I and not-so-title-I schools over the past five years, I am becoming skeptical of such approaches only because I feel that they are utilized most frequently by teachers who work with poor students (defined as being those students who take free or reduced school lunches) as a means of engaging them with the material. I can say this because I’ve done it. While it is a glorious feeling to see all of your students willingly engaged with text that they have selected themselves, it’s also one more way that we (perhaps) sideline “these” kids away from more rigorous academic tasks. Yes, they are engaging with text in a much more meaningful way than they would if they were reading a novel with an entire class if the conditions of a whole-class reading are such that students are forced to read at a particular pace (generally set by the teacher and the slower readers) and are then held hostage while the teacher rambles on and on about themes and ideas represented in the text which bear little to no relevance on the student-victims in this scenario. However, the problem as I see it is not whether to give students choice about what they read or to assign “classics” to students. Rather, we should be blending the two approaches and lobbying for more wiggle-room when it comes to the titles that state curriculums, AP tests, and graduation exams compel us to teach. The problem that I’m running into now is that my Pre-AP/IB kids, who willingly engage with text in meaningful ways both in and outside of school, have to read a dozen novels in a year! And these are not books for the poor in spirit: Great Expectations, Les Mis, Farenheit 451. We’re doing some independent reading in those classes, but I feel a bit ridiculous asking them to read even MORE than they’re already being asked to read. If we could expand our notion of what constitutes a “classic” beyond that it be old and about some significant topic to include more modern classics written by people who our students can relate to, then I think we’d be making some progress.

Read the article for yourself and let me know what you think.

Painted Smiles and Iron Guts

This morning, my classroom is buzzing with the taptaptaptapping of students’ fingers on keyboards. I thought I would miss the sound of pencils and pens scraping against paper, scratching out ideas and shaping words. The tapping has much more energy–it’s a sound you can almost ride, and I do. And I almost feel like I’m cheating in a way, drafting off these young minds punching keys with the conviction that they have something to say that matters.

Anyways, this morning we’re tapping about objects. The kids brought in autobiography boxes, which they construct from pictures, drawings, artifacts, newspaper clippings. One student brought in a box that lights up, another chose to adorn his with a plastic mound of spaghetti. They’re all shapes and sizes and they contain all kinds of magical talismans: wands, Eiffel Towers, rubber duckies, pom-poms, dog collars, movie tickets, pigs made out of yarn. So the prompt was to write about an object–tell the stories or ideas that your chosen object represents.

My object is a gummy worm. Last week, when I went to pick up Ruthie, she came charging towards me with a strange, lopsided gallop. Usually, I get knocked over with a hug, especially on days when she’s particularly good, but on this particular day, she ran towards me and took a knee. And then, my little buddy reached into her shoe, where she’d been “keeping it all day so it’d be safe.” There, in the toe of her baby blue croc, she had been hiding a plastic baggie containing a single yellow and red gummy worm. She proudly handed me the baggie, proclaiming, “I sabed it for you, Mommy! All day I sabed it for you! It’s a treat for you for being so good.” Her little eyebrows arched with the seriousness of what she was saying. Of course, I had no choice but to take the treat from her with a wide, affirming smile. “Go ahead, Mom, you can eat it.” So I did. It was very warm. I didn’t really think much about it until the teacher tells me, with the worm half-eaten in my watery mouth, that she’d had it in her shoe since they received goody bags that morning. Mid-chew I realized that I was consuming a worm which had endured the playrgound, the toddlers’ bathroom, naptime, lunch, and all of the godforesaken places that toddlers put their feet. Then, having made the decision to not-think about where this worm had been, I swallowed. Hard. With my eyes shut.”Thank you, baby. That was, er, delicious.”

So much of parenting requires an iron gut and a painted smile. There are so many things you have to do has a parent:  maintain a calm and even voice, place your screaming-squirming-kicking-thrashing toddler on her “angry spot” with a stoic face and a gentle grip, create a dinner out of nothing at the end of a 12-hour day. Being an adult is not so glamorous or powerful-feeling as I’d always thought it would be. I never thought I’d find myself standing, in a dress and heels, consuming candy from my child’s shoe.

“I didn’t even guess that I was happy”

There is this wiggle-shimmy-dance-thing that I do whenever I am enjoying what I’m eating. It’s subconscious. I never knew I did it until I caught Ruthie doing it one day across the dinner table from me. We were positively inhaling sugared strawberries from a bowl between us. She started wiggling her little booty on the seat and shimmying her shoulders, her mouth closed in the shape of mmmmmmm. Even now, I can remember the way those strawberries felt so cold and so new on my tongue; the way they bled that sweet, pink syrup; the way they melted into the insides of my cheeks.

Today, as I sit down to write, I catch myself doing that dance of satiation. Why? Because I have three glorious hours of quiet writing time spread out before me like an empty glass lake. Because ever since I woke up this morning, my mouth won’t stop smiling and my toes won’t stop bouncing in time with the music I’ve been listening to. Because my coffee is the perfect temperature. Because today, I am my friend.

Mornings like this make me wish I were a poet, which I am not. So I’ll share a few lines from the poem that captured my attention this morning. Linda Pastan, in her poem “The Happiest Day,” writes

I didn’t even guess that I was happy.
The small irritations that are like salt
on melon were what I dwelt on,
though in truth they simply
made the fruit taste sweeter.

Early Morning Vignette

This morning, we left the house at 6:45 a.m. (right on time). Ruthie insisted on waiting until we were in the car to put on her socks and shoes, and I have learned to pick my battles, so I said Fine! and carried her little Keds to the car with the pinkies of my already-full hands. Once we got in, we headed to Starbucks for coffee and apple juice. We took the “secret road,” which is just a new, more direct route to Starbucks.

The conversations that I have with Ruthie in the car are always the best, but, since we’re usually bustling from place to place, I forget them. This morning, I was fortunate enough to remember it.

me: Who wants apple juice in a box?!

Ruthie (Raising her hand): Me! I want apple juice in a box! See? I’m raising my hand for apple juice.

me: I see that. Nice work, kid-o! Do y’all raise your hands at school?

Ruthie: (Still with her hand in the air.) Ha! Yeah. We always raise our hands for school.

me: Well, you can put your hand down for Mama, because we’ve still got a little ways to go before we get there. Your arm might get tired.

Ruthie: Look! Look how long I am! I’m gettin’ really long, aren’t I, Mama?

me: Yeah, baby. You are really, really long. We need to measure you in the doorway when we get home and see how much you’ve grown.

(Okay, in order to understand these next words from Ruthie, you have to know that her favorite thing to watch right now is the home video of her first 2 weeks. She is especially entranced by her first days in the hospital––namely, the part where the nurse measures her. She made me replay that one for her several times over the weekend, which I didn’t get until this morning.)

Ruthie: Little babies have zippers in their booties so that the doctors can measure them, huh?

me: What, baby?

Ruthie: (Whispering) Babies have zippers that come from their booties so that doctors can see how long they are.

me: Er. Kind of. Uhhh… those are really measuring tapes. Like rulers that bend.

Ruthie: Oh. Why do they do that?

me: Because babies can’t stretch out nice and straight like you.

At this, Ruthie becomes very quiet and still until we get to Starbucks, where she raises her hand again for apple juice and yells that I’m going to jail because my seat belt’s not on.

Once we get to school, I realize that I have forgotten her bag, her blanket, and her bear. So I dash inside with Ruthie, confess to the teacher that I’ve forgotten, well, everything, and scurry out the door to call my very dear friend who helped me break into the pool last weekend to see if she’ll pick up Ruthie’s things and swing them by the school before noon. She says she can, and I remember how much I’m going to miss her when she moves to Athens in a few weeks. Not just because she helps me out when I’m totally brainless, but because she’s the one person I can depend on in Auburn and because talking to her is just like thinking. By now, I’ve hit the train tracks, and there is a train crossing them, which gives me just enough time to have a little weep over my friend and her moving away. I tell myself I will only cry until the train is gone. And I stick to that. When the train passes, I turn on NPR, where Steve Inskeep is interviewing Secretary Sebelius about the nation’s health care plan system, which you can find here, and made a mental note to email this to my dad.

By the time I get home, the story is over and my brain has wandered so much that I realize I didn’t really hear any of it, let alone understand it. I park the car, run in, gather up Ruthie’s bad, blanket, and bear in one fell swoop, and head out the door. I chunk the bag on the futon on the porch and race through the screen door, down the steps, and off to campus.

I decide to walk today to clear my mind before my work began. The air is cool, and as I pass by Pine Hill Cemetery, I am thankful for its old, old trees with their obscenely green leaves that look positively electric after last night’s storm. Just then, Sufjan Stevens’ version of “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing” comes up on my iPhone, and I am all teary-eyed again.

That is, until a call from the Director of our Writing Project site interrupts my moment of worship with news that she is running late. By the time we finish chatting about Writing Project stuff, I’ve made it to the library and I’m sweating. I all but run to the Haley Center, up several flights of stairs, to room 2474, where I am delighted to find my favorite breakfast: fruit and sausage-cheese balls.

PJ Rides

Ruthie touches the wind.

My Saturday morning begins with the heavy sounds of Ruthie barging down the short  hallway that joins our rooms, still half-asleep, blanket and bear in tow, her hair teased a solid four inches out from her head by what I call sleep-traveling. She’s almost always smiling, proud of herself for spending the night alone and happy to be jumping into my bed, where she not-so-patiently waits for her chocolate milk as I fumble for the remote control. Once I get the t.v. on, I can usually steal a few kisses on her forehead, right along her hairline, which has the sweetest smell I’ve ever known.

Every morning, she has two chocolate milks. On Saturdays, I let her drink the first one at home, then we go to Starbucks for the second. This past Saturday, we loaded up at the wee hour of 6:40-something to make our weekly coffee schlep: Ruthie wearing panties and a chocolate milk stained butterfly t-shirt my parents bought her at the zoo when she was less than a year old, me in my pajama pants and Hanes tagless undershirt. Neither of us had on shoes. I picked her up and thunked her into her car seat, buckled her in (so she wouldn’t “go to jail”), and tucked her blanket in real tight around her legs. With Allison Krauss playing and the windows rolled down, we crept out of the driveway. I caught Ruthie’s eyes in the rear view mirror to see her mouth pulled into a tight smile that only children in a state of heightened anticipation can manage. As we picked up speed down the street, she squealed, “We’re goin’ on anudder PJ ride, aren’t we, Mom? Only girls go on PJ rides, huh?” She laughed and laughed from her gut and so did I. In Alabama there aren’t many days when the air feels cool on your skin, but on this Saturday morning in June, the air felt delicious. We spent the rest of the drive in awed silence, both of us with a hand out “touching the wind,” as Ruthie put it.

Until Ruthie gave it a name, I hadn’t really thought of our PJ rides as a ritual––they were just what we did. Since then, I’ve been thinking a lot about rituals, how they’re made, and why they’re so comforting. At what point does one aspect of a daily routine begin to shape itself into a ritual? What’s the difference between a ritual and a routine? Why are rituals so satisfying? And what are they satisfying?

So I picked up an old friend (Robert Fulghum’s From Beginning to End: The Rituals of our Lives) and began reading. Again. Here’s what he says:

To be human is to be religious.
To be religious is to be mindful.
To be mindful is to pay attention.
To pay attention is to sanctify existence.

Rituals create sacred time.
Sacred time is the dwelling place of the Eternal.
Haste and ambition are the adversaries of sacred time.

When I think of the word ritual, I think of churches and candles and chanting or reciting words that I don’t understand. Fulghum’s interpretation of the word is so comforting to me because it’s so personal. In a sense, we make our own rituals out of the things that we do on a regular basis, out of the routines and habits that structure our daily lives. Having a three-year-old around makes it much easier to recognize sacred moments when they happen, because three-year-olds are mindful. Always.

Sink or Swim… Er, Float

Ruthie floating not-on-her-own. Notice the cuteness. And the pinkness. And the ruffles. Oh, the ruffles!

Last Sunday, Ruthie and I, along with a very dear friend, broke into a local neighborhood pool while its patrons were at church. Thankfully, there was only one family there, and they were lounging at an angle that would allow us (and by “us,” I mean my dear friend) to inconspicuously jiggle the gate in just the right way with just the right amount of pressure so that it would open without the key. Once I saw the gate swing open, we plowed through and set up camp in a nice, shady corner where we could eat lunch.

Ruthie loves the pool, but I’m trying to break her into her floaties this year and have been, thus far, unsuccessful. I’ve gone to great lengths to find cute, pink ones; they even have a ruffle. She’ll put them on and wear them in the baby pool, on the steps of the big pool. She even ate lunch with them on. But she won’t let them hold her up. I’ve tried coaxing her to simply stand on the third step and lift her feet, I’ve tried luring her out into the middle of the pool with motor boat sounds and bubbles, but always she is stubbornly resistant to the very notion of using the floaties to FLOAT! I finally got her to let me hold her in the pool and drag her around with her arms out “like an angel.” For a solid half hour, I pushed and pulled her all over the pool, but as soon as she felt my grip loosen, she’d freak out and pull her arms down to her sides. Which made her sink. Which made her swallow water. Which made her even more fierce in her determination to not let me go. I even tried just pulling away real fast, but she had a death grip on my index fingers and I didn’t have the heart to rip them away. All I could think of was that swim teacher who told me to swim to him and kept walking backwards, all the way down the pool. I thought I was going to drown. When I tried to pull away from Ruthie, her face had the look of sheer terror that must have come over my own face when that jerk wouldn’t stand still.

I wanted her to see that she could trust the floaties, that they would keep her up. Having seen tons of kids her age positively leaping into other pools that I’ve high-jacked this summer, only to bob right back up to the surface with those floaties sticking up out of the water. I thought kids just knew that floaties would keep them up. While I can remember being afraid to swim, I can’t ever remember being afraid to float. The problem is that Ruthie has no confidence in her floaties. Her refusal to rely on them to help her float actually makes her sink. In order for them to work, she has to kind of relax into them. But because it’s new and scary, her whole body tenses up at the possibility of me letting go, she jerks her arms down, and her head goes under.

This whole experience struck me as somehow significant and metaphorical, but I couldn’t quite pin it to anything until I came across this passage from Oswald Chambers:

Naturally, we are inclined to be so mathematical and calculating that we look upon uncertainty as a bad thing… Certainty is the mark of the common sense life, gracious uncertainty is the mark of the spiritual life. To be certain of God means that we are uncertain in all of our ways, we do not know what a day may bring forth. This is generally said with a sigh of sadness; it should rather be an expression of breathless anticipation.

And brilliant E.L. Doctorow insight  that Anne Lamott quotes in Bird by Bird:

Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

I, like Ruthie, am on the cusp, the brink, the brim of lots of unknowables. I have a new job in a new school system teaching a grade that I haven’t been with in over four years. In recent months, I have experienced tremendous changes in my personal life as well. I have no idea what my life will look like in the fall, or even in, say, July. For the past six weeks, my shoulders have been in knots and I often catch myself holding my breath for no particular reason. I am tense because my life is new, different, and, well, scary.  When things seem out of control to me, my tendency is to run straight through as fast as I can. This tends to send my life spinning even more out of control. And so, as I quelled the frustration that I felt at Ruthie’s resistance to letting go and trusting the floaties, I realized that I may need to do the very same thing in my own life: trust more and fight less.

Ruthie resigns to the baby pool (with ponies, because ponies make everything more Fashionable, and thereby, more fun.)

Ruthie never did float on her own in the big pool. She resigned to the baby pool, where she kept her floaties on and bobbed around like a little shrimp. That is until she confessed that she needed to go “poopee” (however you spell that) and we realized that you have to have a freaking key to get into the bathrooms. It was nap time anyways.

Where I’ve Been and What I’ve Been Doing

Sun Belt has begun, and, as in years past, it has been all-consuming, exhausting, and exhilarating. We have a nice mix of folks in the room this year from all parts of the education spectrum: elementary teachers, secondary teachers, English teachers, Social Studies/History teachers, media specialists, a principal. Every year, the first week surprises me. There is so much getting-ready and cutting-through-red-tape that by the time the first day rolls along, I am pretty well spent. But by the second day, I am looking forward to the third and the fourth days. Teaching is a lonely profession–– you spend all day in a room with students, which leaves very little time for collaboration and conversation with adults. I never realize how isolating it can be until the first day of Institute. That first day is like a slingshot into teacher heaven, where there is thinking that you can see, where there are conversations that are full of the kind of energy that comes from being understood, where there is tangible evidence of the integrity of our profession. I spent an hour after everyone left on Monday crouched over a green piece of butcher paper, armed with tempera paint, and in that hour, I got that tingly feeling that you get when you’re where you know you’re supposed to be. I really believe that the Writing Project is magic, and I’m happy to be a part of that magic these next three weeks.

So, if you’re wondering what exactly we do for three weeks, check out our blog: Sun Belt 2009.

Super Fruity

Fruit selection is not my strong point when it comes to grocery shopping. Bananas especially stress me out. I feel like they’re always either all green or beginning to turn brown, and I can never gauge how long it will take for my bananas to spoil, which attracts those annoying hovering fruit flies that take me days to get rid of. I see these people at the grocery store who can just walk up to a bunch of bananas and stick them in their carts with a sneer of confidence on their faces, like ha! how bout these bananas, bitch! It takes me a good two to three minutes to figure out which bananas will work for me. Sometimes, when I notice a person who takes the time to sniff and kind of squeeze peaches or lemons or whatever, I’ll go behind them, careful not to pick up the ones that they put back. All of my own sniffing, squeezing, and general fruit fondling leaves me feeling kind of pervy and ridiculous since my own fruit selection is completely arbitrary. Aside from, you know, avoiding apples with severe bruising, I just pick the prettiest ones. The trickiest part about fruit selection is that they trick you with their tricky fruit and vegetable lighting that enhances the greens and oranges and yellows to make them look all luscious until you get them home. And then there’s the worst trick of all: the strawberries that are moldy on the inside of the crate, but all red and smelly-good (as Ruthie would say) on the outside. That fuzzy stuff totally gives me the creeps. I wind up double bagging it and taking it out to the garbage. Sick. 

Ruthie loves fruit, so I usually wind up making several trips to the grocery store each week just for fruit. Yesterday I was doing my little banana routine (analyze the entire selection, pick one up, turn it over, put it back, reach for one then change my mind, rip three off of a group of five, put those back, finally grab some random bunch of three or four and walk off in a huff), when it struck me how much parenting is like picking out fruit. No matter how much I know about it, no matter how many times I see people do it, I find myself doing with Ruthie what I so often do with the bananas and all of my arbitrary fruit selection in general. You can’t ever be prepared for what you’re going to have to deal with, and whatever it is that you’re going to do, however you’re going to handle it, you can’t take more than a few seconds to make up your mind or all hell breaks loose. And the most difficult things to handle are usually the simplest. Topics like death or illness or male/female genitalia or basic hygene or, I don’t know, body image can leave you so dumbfounded that you wind up explaining something with the pitiful refrain that left you insatiable as a small child as well: “because that’s the way it is.” This phrase is the equivalent of my huffy grab at a random bunch of bananas because I’m sick of trying to figure out which ones will last longest and taste best. Why does Sam tee-tee standing up? Because he has a penis. Why? Because he’s a boy. Why is he a boy? Because he is! And there you are, with your bunch of green bananas that will never ripen in time for you to eat them in one hand, and your toddler in the grocery cart mulling over the word penis, which will probably have to be explained to her again once you get home at about the same time you realize that you just bought a bad bunch of bananas AGAIN.

“To fight aloud, is very brave”

There is nothing more irresistible to me than a bookstore on Saturday morning. I spent the better part of an hour at Books A Million this morning, roving the shelves, armed with a cup of coffee. I get lost in the titles and the covers and the sheer number of books. Getting lost is something I’ve been very keen on this past year. I can’t ever quite tell what will make me lose myself until I’m doing it. I positively swam through the store, hanging on as many words (that were not mine) as I could. It was a relief, to read and not to write or to think of writing. For the past year, I’ve thought of nothing but writing, but I have written virtually nothing. Meandering through that space crowded with words meant to incite, capture, invoke me, the reader, I could feel my shoulders loosen and my stance shift. My knees grew bendier and I rested on my joints. My face became open, and I began to craft some writing in my mind. While I would normally rush somewhere to put it on the paper before the words left me, I tried to relax into the words, repeating them over and over. And then I came across the Dickinson poem that is the title of this post, and the words became cemented in my mind. I left with six books and the resolve to write. Something. Today.

I came home, put on some music, then decided against it and opened the windows, and began reading my earlier posts. I didn’t realize I began this venture two years ago, when Ruthie was only 18 months old. My third or fourth post (Taking the Long Way) speaks to the way I feel now. And it occurred to me that my life is terribly, wonderfully recursive. I keep coming back to the same places, and each time I revisit them, I am a little stronger, a little braver, a little older. I am trying now, even as I type this, to be okay with the possibility of coming off as a complete fool. I am also trying not to write what might be considered a bit of an over-share without compromising any of the truth of what has led me to the key board today. The truth is that I am exactly where I was two years ago, only less afraid and more alone. Scared and alone are two of the shittiest aspects of the human condition, if you ask me. And I am always both. But today, as I sifted through those titles and browsed the books I had selected, it occurred to me that everyone is scared and everyone feels alone (which, of course, is why it’s a part of the human condition and not the Whitney condition). All of my favorite things–- books, films, music, art –-capture those two features of what it means to be human. It is a painful condition, the human one. Which is why I found myself in the bookstore today, seeking a connection, through language, to humanity. Which is why I am writing today, seeking to establish my own connection, in my own words, to humanity. 

I’m finally reading The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing, as per Emma Bolden’s recommendation. At the very beginning, Anna, the person who keeps the notebooks that she (unsuccessfully) divides herself into, has an insight that I can’t stop thinking about. It is during a conversation with her best friend that Anna has this sort of epiphany:

But now, sitting with Molly talking, as they had so many hundreds of times before, Anna was saying to herself: Why do I always have this awful need to make other people see things as I do? It’s childish, why should they? What it amounts to is that I’m scared of being alone in what I feel. (Lessing, 10)

It is this thought that has kept me from writing through the past year. When I write, my thoughts are permanent and vulnerable, pulsing under the lens of my readers’ discerning eyes. If I simply think my thoughts, then they are mine, and mine alone, and I have no way of knowing whether or not I am alone in those thoughts. When I put my ideas and experiences into writing, then I risk knowing that I am alone in my thinking. But with that risk comes the possibility of being affirmed and understood. It is with hope and trepidation that I continue to write, even now, when there is so much at stake (namely, myself).

Undoing Unteaching of “Those Kids”

I’ve been meaning to post a link to this article that really every educator, and every person whose tax dollars go into public education, should read. During my tenure as a teacher in a rural community where 12% of the adult population has a college degree and just over 65% have a high school degree (data taken from census.gov), I have often felt misunderstood by my colleagues and my peers. In this article, Kylene Beers, the president of NCTE, brilliantly (and succinctly) captures the cultural beliefs governing so many “underachieving” schools. The tricky thing about cultural beliefs, those because it is beliefs, is that they are usually taken for granted and thereby invisible. Beers stares down some pretty damning evidence of the kind of deficit thinking that has tainted the public educational system since its inception in the mid-1800s, when Horace Mann and his contemporary cronies established public education as a means of educating the poor. Please, please, please take a moment to read this. It’s short (only 4 pages), and it will rawk your brain!

The Genteel Unteaching of America’s Poor