The Days of Day

After further consideration, I would like to now inform me that I do indeed have courage (see art and home below), and also wisdom and patience and humor and color and glitter and a real bad weakness for perfect hot chocolate.   Today I did the kind of teaching I love, taking on the voices of Lennie and George in Of Mice and Men ( and if you didn't know THAT takes courage, you've never been Lennie in front of 14 year olds), watching kids give speeches (about things like how to avoid senioritis), and reading to prepare for the next few lessons of Ender's Game.  My home is cluttered, but cheerful, glittery, and glow-y.  My kids are bold and curious and creative and super proud of their ideas. Those things are not created by the faint of heart... or the feint of heart for that matter.   This life is created, in part, by a woman whose center is variety.  My center is like a giant toolbox filled with thousands of different tools and I can use each one mo...

Somewhere along the way I grew up.  I didn't see her leaving, that little girl with the uncontrollable, tangly, light-filled curls... the one with the dancing-in-public, hiding-in-the-clothes-racks glint in her eyes.  I didn't watch closely enough, or maybe I watched too closely, and she somehow packed her red cowboy hat and orange overalls and stored them away with the blue eye-shadow and Dippety-Do hair gel. I regret to inform me that she herself climbed into that box, too, and sent out of that closet, instead, a poised, competent woman with really erect posture and a good reputation. Some trade that was. The wild-child could fight, damn-it.  She could shout and tangle with monsters of disproportionate size.  She could point her finger and raise the roof, all at the same time.  She could scatter scraps of paper without one time imagining how long it would take to clean it up.  Man, she could just FLY. The model of appropriateness, though, just s...

There are days in teaching, where I come home feeling high with the euphoria of success.  I have found just the right way to communicate what I want students to be able to do... and... they... have... done... it.  I collect a bundle of poems from proud creator-hands and... the poem... are... transparent... and... whole. And then there are days like today when I come home holding my heart in shattered pieces, so tinny and broken I'm sure the shards will cut my hands.  If I shared this story with my colleagues, and maybe I will, they would all have similar stories to tell, similar episodes of setting aside the huge stack of papers that need grading to listen to a child who doesn't possess a fraction of the words he needs to communicate just how much he's suffering. There are too many stories like mine today, too many tales of the adults giving up or going away, too many stony faces of children swearing that nothing is wrong when really their world seems to be held togethe...