The Other Half

Remember when you were a child, and used to spend hours tying lanyards into intricate patterns that you would then loop as a choker or give to your bff as a friendship bracelet until forever? It’s my last full week in Charlotte, and I feel desperate to tie up the past two years into a neat anklet I can take with me. It’s a gradual process—I started saying goodbye after exams last week, and will finish next week at graduation. In every area of my life, I’m twining memories and people into farewells.

Last week, I showed my classes the video I’d made of them. The sillinesses, the pranks, the jokes and laughter of the year, threaded through with cries from each student when they spotted themselves.

“We really do dance a lot,” noticed one.

“Put it on youtube! Put it on facebook! Put it on all of the internet!” the rest cried.

“Will you show this to your new students?” somebody in each of my classes asked me. By the last class, I understood—“will you tell your new students that we came first, that we matter? Will you forget us in your new school?” was what they meant.

Students o’ mine, you are enmeshed in my teaching for the rest of my life. I will use you as archetypes, remember your reactions, reflections, and realities, and coast off of your jubilance, for the rest of my teaching days. Your personalities wreath my teaching. I will not forget you.

Friday, some of the teachers sat out on a restaurant patio, clinking drinks and toasting the end of the year.

The Teacher of the Year asked us, “what are you going to miss the most about teaching at our school?”

“The students.”

“The stories.”

“Knowing my job matters, that I make an incredible difference.”

“Introducing students to things they might otherwise never have seen. Like smores made in tinfoil solar ovens.”

I thought about it, since, certainly, all that had been said was true. “The intelligence of our students—the real-world experience they have that they bring into the classroom, that I certainly didn’t have at that age. Their degree of reflection and intelligent compassion.”

I feel knots forming in my throat as I think of leaving them. Their wisdom will form a tightrope upon which I will balance as I cross an ocean to my new classroom.

On Shabbat day, the community—nay, family— that has adopted me here sat in the Charlotte Torah Center, eating the kiddush that they’d sponsored to say goodbye. I stumbled through a dvar Torah, thinking that every second of it couldn’t possibly express my gratitude for their warmth and moral guidance and the feeling of belonging they’ve given me over the past two years.

Several of the people with whom I have built the closest bonds spoke after the meal. They forgot that I’m very much alive, and I felt like Tom Sawyer, eavesdropping on his own eulogy. It’s an experience I’d much rather be dead for. I wanted to crawl under the table, but I also appreciated what people had to say, especially the rabbi, who in the course of his encomiums managed to praise my future husband at great length. He seems to know a lot about him—maybe he can introduce me to him.

At the end of the kiddush, a man from a couple whom I consider in the closest part of my Charlotte Torah Center family came up to me and referenced a blog post I’d written after Simchat Torah, about not belonging in the Jewish community as a woman. He told me that I may feel like that, but the community feels that I belong in it. We’re braided together as intricately as the scrumptiously browned challah that Sara bakes every Shabbat, and I leave this part of my Charlotte community secure in the knowledge that I will see all of them again. I am, after all, moving to our home. Moving to Israel.

This morning, a friend and I ran our second half-marathon this year. We both got bitten by the running bug at Disney, and nothing seemed like a more fitting end to two years of insanity than finishing the second half of a marathon. We made our goal, and I finished in 2 hours and 28 minutes, running full out for the last part. As I pounded across the finish line, muscles aching, heart pounding, but oh so proud, it felt like a physical manifestation of the past two years—the pain, the pride, the triumph. Running these past two years has been my catharsis, my coping mechanism, and ultimately, a way to challenge myself in an arena in which I feel I have complete control.

 

As I slowed to a walk past the finish line, I felt my throbbing calves and considered the feat of finishing my second half. It was different from the first. Harder. For the first, my goal was simply to finish, and because I knew that I would never give up, it was merely an exercise in ignoring agony and humorously pulling up from stumbles as best I could. For the second, I wanted to push myself. To do the best I could. To summon all of my strength, my will, my humor, to aid me, and help others along with me. We were sent off with a Sunday-morning prayer and the Star Spangled Banner to spur us forward at dawn. Looking back at the end, with Southern accents congratulating me and my muscles knotting in aching soreness, surrounded by a strangeness of culture that I will soon be trading for my own familiar one, I feel the deepest gratitude for God and country, and the strangers-become-friends who cheered along the way.

Moral Development

The last question on my students’ final exams was this: what have you learned in psychology class that you can use to control your own behavior? What have you learned that you can use to influence others?

Many students talked about compliance techniques and conformity. Others mentioned being there for others who have psychological disorders, and using developmental psychology to understand their children. But I was amazed at how many students referred way back in the year, to when we talked about Kohlberg’s stages of moral development. Students wrote about identifying their motivations and operating based on that knowledge.

Psychology is an elective. There’s no pressureful standardized test, or “value added” nonsense connected to my evaluation. And so, if I can inspire my students’ intellectual curiosity, enhance their reading and writing skills, and teach them the basics about how their minds and bodies work together, I’m pretty happy. But, as I told a class earlier this year, there’s no point in learning psychology if you don’t use it to make yourself a better person.

And my students have. They wrote about knowing the difference between fear of punishment and accepting the social contract of the law. They mentioned moments when they buckled to their need to belong with their peers, and moments when they stood up for a higher moral imperative. In a world which will constantly pressure them to compromise, they have one more defense in their moral bulwark.

Lately, moral understanding has seemed more important than ever. In end-of-semester grading, it’s key. Today, three of my favorite students sat in my room, heckling me gently. One was there to make up his absence from Monday, without which he couldn’t pass the class. The other two were desperately trying to finish their makeup work for the semester and bring their grades up to a D. All three of them are pure delight—the kind of hilarious-on-the-surface, compassionate-underneath shovavim that make a classroom so fun.

“It was review time after an exam, I didn’t even know it counted,” my senior wheedled.

“If I do this project, it’s big, so can you count it as two assignments?” another asked.

The third said nothing, just eloquently slid the corner of a dollar bill out of his pocket so that it was clearly visible.

“I’m a senior… you could just erase the absence. Why not?” the senior tried again.

For a second, I considered it. He got a high A on his exam, and making him stay just to make up “seat time” per the CMS rule seemed ridiculous. But the other two had to put in the work. And if I let this go, what would be next?

“I can’t,” I looked up at them with a grin that kept coming back despite my best efforts, but deeply serious tones. “It wouldn’t be right, or fair to all the other students who worked so hard, and whom I marked absent also. Those grades mean something. You have to earn them.”

“Oh. It’s, what’s that word,” offered the senior. “That word we talked about the time you really wanted to go home early but didn’t. Integrity.”

“Exactly.” (I really wanted to go home, and I’m not sure that integrity was the answer to why I didn’t—it was probably more of Kohlberg’s preconventional level—but it was a good opportunity to teach him the word ‘integrity’).

They set to work, and by the end of the day, all three had achieved their goal—they’re all passing psychology this year. But more importantly, I pondered over how they help keep me straight. It’s so tempting sometimes to fudge the numbers, especially with students who you know are trying like the dickens, but just can’t make it to school because they’re homeless and the bus doesn’t keep up with all their address changes, or who fall asleep in class after working the night shift so they can help their parents pay the bills, or whose absences are inevitable—if I was having a baby, I’d miss some school, too. And yet, the knowledge that these students would know, that precisely the children I am trying to help, would be the ones learning the wrong lesson, keeps me straight.

Other teachers also help keep me straight. When my colleague called me back to get the copy paper I’d left in the copier drawer (a commodity more precious than gold, as anyone who works in a Title I school knows) and my next-door neighbor discoursed on the ethics of plagiarism and my fellow TFAer reminded me that I really shouldn’t leave early regardless of it being my planning period, they were also reminding me of the standards that I try to live by. And yet, there’s something so much bigger that they do.

The teachers in my school win an incredible moral victory every time they go into a classroom faced with forty kids who don’t care, and manage to walk out still caring themselves. The rockstar Spanish teacher who is always dancing around in the mailroom with weird new ideas to get her level-one speakers engaged no matter how many times she’s cursed out, the world history teacher who dresses up like historic characters despite his freshmen’s apathy, the ESL teacher who firmly yet kindly corrals students into class from their hallway hangouts when it would be much easier to leave the recalcitrant children there for security to pick up, the fellow TFAer who looked at us in serious refusal when he heard someone suggest just giving up on a difficult class… these teachers present a moral victory of the quiet, uncounted kind. They are the reason that I am so proud to teach at my school.

In many other schools, students come in, put their backpacks down, and wait out their state-mandated six hours of education without anything more strenuous than their regulatory morning argument with their parents. In my school, students and teachers together make difficult decisions to never give up, never compromise. Their daily grind shows a moral determination that is astounding. They have climbed to the apex of moral integrity in pursuit of an equal education and the potential to effect good, and camped out there. As I look up at them from my arduous hike, my moral muscles straining and complaining, they remind me of the goal towards which I am climbing.  

Stafford, The Way It Is

There's a thread you follow. It goes among
Things that change. But it doesn't change. 
People wonder about what you are pursuing. 
You have to explain about the thread. 
But it is hard for others to see. 
While you hold it you can't get lost. 
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
Or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing can stop time's unfolding. 
You don't ever let go of the thread. 

All Up In My Feelings

Today was my second-to-last day of teaching at my school in Charlotte. I cried three times. I laughed more than that. The tears were surreptitious and never made it past my eyelashes. The laughter spilled over to fill the crevices of the day with elation.

I cried at this private confession:

“It was a tough year. It will be my mother’s fourth surgery for this week tomorrow. I’m scared. I’m worried.” And then, in a small voice, “I’m sorry I was disrespectful yesterday. I know you noticed even if you pretended you didn’t.”

And this off-the-hand remark:

“And after I graduate, I’m going to visit my father. He was deported ten years ago.”

“Have you seen him since?”

“No.”

And at the sight of a student resolutely taking out a novel to hide her face as the tears dripped down, who told me about her worries from home during lunch.

But I also laughed. I laughed in pure merriment, and appreciation, and pride…

When J played a game of keep-away from me with the stapler.

When A turned in the packet of work I’d given her to complete while on maternity leave.

When C delivered a stellar presentation on his final project after resolutely refusing to speak all semester.

When N told me she’s identified the parenting style in The Lion King as authoritarian rather than authoritative.

When M read me the charming opening paragraph he wrote for his college application essay.

When two students who came to my planning for English tutoring lay on the desks muddling over Shakespeare’s sonnets together.

When an old student of mine from last year told me that I made him realize he wanted to go to college, and could even without documentation. He’d have got there anyway, on his own, I think.

While giving a student an empty cardboard roll from the laminating machine, and using the other to challenge him to a fencing match. I laughed when I won, too.

I laughed hard, and tried to hide it, when one of my funniest students ran for president of the NHS today, starting his speech with, “Hello. If Barack Obama were here today, he would ask you what he can do to serve you. Since he isn’t, I’m going to ask you what I can do to serve you. That will be my goal as president.”

I laughed while knighting him with the cardboard roll after the elections, and when hugging the old members goodbye.

I spent today all up in my feelings. Tomorrow is the last day before exams. I will dig my heels into it and drink up every second.

Here's What We're NOT Going To Do

I have a student whose favorite saying is, “here’s what we’re not going to do...” She says it when projectiles fly through the room, when another student insults someone in her vicinity, or when people make dumb mistakes in following the directions. She says it in a grown-up tone that makes me laugh as she mimics some teacher who must have once had occasion to finish the line with, “we’re not going to cut each others’ hair with the safety scissors.”

Here’s what we’re not going to do. It could be TFA’s mantra of superiority. In their hands, it becomes a snobby injunction that leaves hearers wondering exactly what positive goal we’re reaching towards (certainly not continuity in the classroom—my students deserve more than two years of commitment, and I am torn in two right now that I’m not giving it to them).

Today I sat in a coffee shop with my TFA coach from this year, a tranquil man whose keen yet modest presence has mellowed my teaching, trying to articulate exactly what feedback to send to TFA after two years of solid discomfort in the organization.

“Well, my school was amazing, I learned so much there, and I loved my students, and my amazing TFA teacher peers…” I paused. He sat with the expectant air that practiced teachers use to draw forth thoughts from their children.

“I hated TFA.” I confessed evenly. “I’m so grateful for the opportunities it gave me to teach, but I hated the time-wasting, anecdotal, self-congratulatory manner of our professional developments, and the pretend humility that led to saying words like ‘thought-bucket’ instead of ‘genre’ or ‘subconscious’, and the quid pro quo use of vulnerability by telling us about family deaths or personal failings, used to drag forth our own confessions.” I paused, thanked him for his marvelous, kind, focused coaching this year, and left. But as I drove home, the litany continued in my head.

I was uncomfortable with how TFA tried to build an unnatural community of people with different values by extracting our values from us as though they were teeth at the dentist’s office. And I felt uncomfortable as a frum Jew for the first time in my life, not because of having to skip the Saturday programming and Friday night story slams and awkwardly unpacking my sandwich at workshop dinners, but because people apologized about those things as though they were some negative part of me instead of a joyous facet of my existence. We spent so much time unpacking our feelings when TFA should have been a professional setting of shared goals instead, leading to a community of equals instead of an odd hierarchy of zealots. It never felt like a professional community, and I never felt like anything other than an unruly rebel.

I think this is what the transformation was supposed to be like.
I was supposed to reach in and slide the butterflies out.
But, you know, that doesn't end well for the butterflies.

I was uncomfortable with the word “transformational,” and how TFA thrust me into a classroom armed with little more than Anne of Windy Poplars, and the sense that I ought to be transforming children. TFA doesn’t tell you what you’re supposed to be transforming them into. And once you get to know them, the children defy transformation. They are awesome and awe-inspiring, silly, cheerful, angry, curious, and could do with some pushing and guidance and high expectations. But they don’t need to be transformed into anything.

But most of all, I was uncomfortable with the ‘here’s what we’re not going to do’ attitude.

Every TFA event begins the same way. Here’s what we’re not going to do. Be boring, like those other teachers. Be reserved about our feelings and experiences. Be traditional, or overly capitalist. Be racist, sexist, ageist, elitist, nationalist, weightist. Oh wait, nationalist is okay. After all, America is the eponymous hero of our organization. If someone didn’t declaim “Muricaaaa” with an intensity that belied their ironic stance at least once before the pizza arrived, it wasn’t a TFA session. We’re Murica, but we’re not homophobic, classist, xenophobic, chauvinist, or even speciesist.

We checked that baggage at the door. Only, here’s the problem—it always left me secretly looking around, wondering whether I was being included in the good guys, or whether anyone would find out that sometimes I am boring, reserved, racist, elitist, speciesist. And only a skeptical nationalist (at least as far as ‘Murica is concerned). I live within those systems and can’t shuck them off at will. I’m not even sure I want to simply lose them, rather than come to control them. But I certainly can’t ignore them. And neither can TFA. By the end of a meeting, someone in the room had been offended. I liked to sit with the disgruntled set in the back of the room, trading doodles while half-listening to the self-righteous burble of the smug Kool-Aid.

I’d rather be aware of my prejudices than smug. Maybe I’m smug because I think I’m not smug. Or maybe I’m smug because I’m human. We’re all smug. But I don’t want to be TFA-smug. I don’t want to unite the virtues of vulnerable, data-driven transformation, or at least not under those names. I just want to teach, and I can’t do it well if I think I’m on a crusade and see my children as infidels to convert rather than knights galloping upon their own quests who sometimes need to read a letter from home reminding them that they can do it, that someone believes in them, and oh, yeah, to check the map.

Recently I’ve had the simple pleasures of skipping TFA alumni induction and deleting an email asking me to ferry hapless incoming corps members from the airport. Being able to forget TFA and focus, joyously, on my teaching, has brought me a sense of serenity. So I can say with tranquil certainty that when I receive my next TFA communication asking me to fill out a survey or watch an inspiring video, this will be my response:

Here’s what we’re not going to do.

Choosing Lives

 Last Thursday afternoon I walked around my apartment, playing hide-and-seek with a professional.

“There. And there. And what about that closet?” Dutifully, I opened it and found the backpacking gear that I’d almost forgotten about. Yes. Yes, I will backpack when I live in Israel. Choosing what to take is like deciding what kind of person I will be next year.

“Yep. That.” The reassuringly bespectacled man sought for a place to check off “tent and backpack” on his clipboard, and instead scribbled something in the margins. “What about the couch?”

“Nope, that I’m selling.”

Like every other person who has ever walked into my apartment for the first time, his unoriginal first comment had been, “you have a lot of books.”

“Yes. Most of my weight will be in books.” No decision to make there. Leaving them would be like walking out of my apartment without my ankles.

“Not so many English bookstores over there, is that it?” I smiled in acquiescence, though I know for a fact of at least three used bookstores better than Charlotte’s in the Jerusalem and Tel Aviv areas.

“So, I think that’s a wrap. We’ll get a quote to you next week.” I handshook him out of my apartment, and then stood in the center, surveying all my earthly possessions. Never before when I moved, from Maryland or Jerusalem or Norway or Toronto, have I had this number of things to move with me. If I don’t watch out, I’ll become the kind of packrat weighted down by physical junk and unable to shuck it off to roam the world with nothing but a backpack.

What kind of person will I be next year? A person with backpacking gear, ready to escape and explore. A person with a futon, ready for all the friends who have promised to visit. A person with a frog pitcher, some seashells, and a broken clock, who has a history in found objects. A person with books, who spends more time with her favorite authors’ minds than with most living human beings. A person who cannot part with her books.

But, I mused, I also want to be the kind of person who gives away books.

Time to make some choices

So I packed my first box, brutally tearing possibilities from my shelves, and brought them to school today. I split it open in front of my favorite class, wordlessly, watching with breath as bated as the Never Bird peeking between her feathers to see what Peter did with her eggs. I felt my throat close. Terror dilated my pupils. Am I really giving away books? Maybe there’s still time to snatch them back.

“Fullmetal Alchemist!” Ha, I could have guessed that fit.

“Ooooh, poetry!” Oh! That’s a surprise. ‘Ware Wordsworth, child.

“Was this signed by the author?” Oh. That was given me by the head of the Maryland English department, in recognition of something or other… I should probably keep it. But if all I want is the first page? Take it, child.

And what is the quiet wunderkind going to go for, as he restlessly turns the contents of the box thoroughly, methodically, onto the desk beside him?

“Can I have more than three?” Hm. Fascinating. I should make this an exercise on the first day of school, instead of the last, and see what my students clamp their paws upon. Nothing lends insight like seeing children choose books.

A gentle flow of elation pulses through me. My students are gamboling about the books like puppies. I have never had this joy from my books before—the exaltation of giving. In the future, I will be a reader, and a giver, of books.