Are You Better Off Than You Were a Year Ago

"Are you better off than you were a year ago?"

It's a question that always comes up around election time, posed by politicians and media outlets and other special interests, but lately it's a question I've been asking myself. A year ago I was writing about and reeling from the shock of going home for the first time since moving to Mississippi. Things that had always felt familiar felt so different and strange. The world had shifted around me and I needed time to make sense of how odd the world felt, in it's new colors and hues.

This year I find myself looking inward instead. I know now that the world had not changed last year at all; I had. As time has passed since then, I have become more cognizant of this. When I think back to college and high school, I wonder at how far I've come from who that girl was. I sometimes find it hard to believe that she was once me, so care free and yet so convinced that she carried the weight of the world on her shoulders.

Surely to some extent this is what happens with time and age. People around you change and you do, too, but it feels as if this experience has accelerated that change for me. I don't remember feeling this much distance between the girl I was when I graduated high school and the girl I was my sophomore year in college, but the difference between the girl who walked off Ohio State's campus in spring of 2015 and the woman who walks the halls of a Delta high school is a profound one, though, not necessarily a bad one. Sometimes different is not better or worse; sometimes it is just different.

In recent weeks, I have found myself pondering the same question frequently: Would you do it all over if you could? If you knew then what you knew now, would you still do this thing? Or if you had the chance to start fresh, would you push rewind and tape over this place and this job and this experience?

I cannot say whether I am better off than I was a year ago, but I do know this: I am more compassionate than I was a year ago. I am also more confused than I was a year ago. I am more disheartened at the world than I was a year ago, but somehow I am also more hopeful. I know this, too: I would not press rewind.

What Happens Now?

Last night I watched the election results come in with my roommates. Some time after North Carolina and Florida started to look bad I started to do what I also do when I begin to panic: I imagined the worst case scenario. At first, I ticked off the big ones. The population my mother serves, her friends, might get deported. The economy might crash and people might lose jobs. The country might go to war and my students who are in the armed forces might get deployed. 

Then, it sunk in that these were the far off things to worry about, the things I have no control over. Something larger loomed: What do I tell my students? What do I say, what can I say tomorrow morning to my beautiful, intelligent, terrified, Black students? Can I tell them not to be afraid when I am so scared myself? Can I tell them it will be okay when I am not sure I believe it? How can I look them in the eye and say anything comforting when I am so desperately in need of comfort myself?

These were the questions that kept me tossing and turning long into the night. In the sleepless hours of the early morning, I began to figure out what I needed to say.

This morning, as anticipated, my students asked me what I thought, how I was feeling and I told them the truth. I told them that I did not know what to say to make it better. I told them that I love them, that I loved them yesterday, that I love them today, that I will love them tomorrow. I told them I will be here for them, as long as they need me. I told them that today will be a hard day for all of us, but we must begin to look to tomorrow. Today, we are sad and scared and defeated, but tomorrow we must begin again the work of American democracy or, in the words of Barack Obama, "We must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America." Tomorrow, we must model in our own lives the very qualities we did not see this election cycle. We must show kindness, demonstrate community, listen and speak with respect, and live our lives with love for one another. Together is the only way we will move past this and move forward.

What Teaching Feels Like

If I had to sum up my first year of teaching in a single cliche, then that single cliche would easily be "Fake til you make it." And, oh, did I fake it. I faked knowledge where I had little, authority where it felt like I had none. Always, I faked confidence; sometimes I faked preparation. I imitated poise and calm when I had none; I pretended to be okay when I most certainly was not. And then one day I got so good at faking it that I didn't have to fake it at all. It probably took until January to have a "no-faking" day and then until March to have another. By the end of the year, I might have been able to string enough together to make almost a full week of not faking it.

I still feel like I'm faking it most of the time, but if you asked me the difference between my first and second year of teaching I would tell you that this year I actually feel like a teacher. What, then, does teaching feel like? I am just beginning to fully find out.

Pride. It feels like the rush when a student who failed geometry last year gets a B on her segments proofs quiz, when she tells you that it's not as good as she wanted but "it's better than last week and isn't that the point?"

Defeat. Doubt. Hope. It feels like trying every possible test taking method for a student who can verbalize his answers perfectly out loud but can't manage to get them on paper, like defeat when he fails the fourth quiz in a row, like doubt when you tell him that together we'll figure this out, like hope when he promises that together we will.

Fear. It feels like the pit in your stomach when you think of your seniors who have worked so hard for the last twelve years, but who cannot seem to pass their graduation tests. Like a shiver down your spine when you let yourself wonder what will happen to them.

Joy. It feels like the smile you cannot hide when one of your students informs another that "mistakes are okay because that's how we learn," a line you spent all of last year repeating to them, like happiness uncontainable when the other students nod and clap in agreement. It feels like maybe they learned something last year after all.

Exhaustion. It feels like forcing your eyes to stay open through the fourth after school meeting of the week in a room full of colleagues who look just as tired as you feel. It feels like dragging yourself to school sometimes with too much to do and not enough time or energy to do it.

Love. It feels like the warmth that your students exude when you put their names on the board and they cannot contain their excitement. "You know how to spell all of our names!? Even the apostrophes!" It feels like an overwhelming dose of affection when your students from last year tell you how glad they are to have you again.

Faith. It feels like assurance that you'll be back tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that. The knowledge that some way, some how you'll get through this roller coaster because your kids deserve better. And at the end of the day that's all that matters.

Ready, Set, Go

"Are you ready for Monday?" they keep asking me.

"Ready" isn't really the word for it, I think. I don't have a roster. I know the subjects I'm teaching, but not the class periods I'm teaching them. I have three preps including the new-to-me algebra III and, to be honest, I'm not really all that sure what, exactly, algebra III is. My shelving units won't show up until Tuesday so everything in my classroom is shoved under a table and behind my desk. Yet, despite all of that, I feel oddly prepared.

Maybe it's just a false sense of confidence from surviving the storied First Year Teaching that will come crashing down at 7:30 on Monday morning, but I think it might be just a little bit real. I may not have all of the details figured out yet, but I do have way more figured out than I did at this time last year. I have unit plans for two of my classes and I know exactly what my students will be doing on the first day I get to see all of my classes. My long-term calendars have been constructed (except for algebra III) and I'm relatively confident that we'll get to cover all of the required topics despite the outlandish amount of testing.

It's more than just the details, though. In some bigger sense, I feel more prepared which I suppose I'm supposed to feel. I've learned a lot in the past year and most of what I learned will help me be a much better teacher this year than I was last year, but there's one lesson that stands out in particular. In fact, if I sat down and picked the single most important thing I learned during my inaugural classroom year, it would be this one: I love my students so much and at the end of the day that is enough. I want to be clear it is not enough to love your students and not teach them the content, but for me when it came down to it loving them was powerful enough to get me through everything else that happened.

There were so many times last year when I thought I couldn't go on and at each of those junctures I was surprised to learn that, when I remembered why and for whom I'm here, I could. At each of those points, I had to remind myself that whatever I found so bad in that moment had been keeping my students down for years. Yes, administrative changes suck when you're a teacher. They suck more when they define your education as a student. Yes, the amount of state testing is oppressive to teachers. It's more oppressive to students who have known nothing else. As a veteran teacher put it, I can pack up and leave at the end of the day. I can drive home at the end of the school day and drive back to Ohio at the end of the year, if I so choose. My students cannot. Leaving is a luxury and it is one my students so often do not have. Going to school every day is my job; for my students, it is their lives.

My students cannot leave and they deserve so much better than this and I love them enough to want to stay here for as long as I can to make it happen. It's this love that keeps me going on the hard days and even on the easy days. I was pretty overwhelmed yesterday with the amount of things that had to be done for the coming year and it left me feeling pretty zapped of energy. And then in walked my students. Some of the football players came by whom I taught last year and whom I will have the singular pleasure of teaching again this year. They were there to help teachers move classrooms and they were actually excited to see me! One of them walked in my room and said with his trademark grin, "Did you miss me?" Of course, I did. I missed all of them. And suddenly, the energy was back. I really have missed them and as physically and mentally unprepared as I may be for Monday, I am so, so ready to be back.

There's Something About This Place

When I first stepped foot in the Delta, it was February and the fields and trees were bare. Without a leaf in sight, it was hard not to notice the emptiness caused by the pristinely flat landscape. All around was nothing and amidst that nothing it was hard not to feel obvious, like a stranger in a strange land. I've always worn my heart on my sleeve and surely in this flat landscape the magnitude of my fears and my insecurities about myself and about this job and about this place could be seen for miles.

A year later, I ran into two students at the school gate after school and one of them offered to walk with me out to the baseball field where he had practice and I needed to talk to the coach. That February day a feeling so different from the discomfort of a year ago hit me: Belonging. It was not belonging in the sense that this is the place I am "meant to be", though increasingly I wonder if this place is exactly that. It was belonging in the more simple sense that I was a part of something, a part of this place. Yet in all it's simplicity, it was profound and it swept me right off my feet. It is a feeling I have been privileged to feel a few other times since and each time it captures another tiny piece of my heart and sews it indelibly into this landscape.

A week ago, I drove back into the Delta after more than a month away and the same flatness that had so frightened me early on, now enveloped me in a sense of comfort. Yes, I am still a stranger in a strange land, but that strange land has become my home and the often strange people I surround myself with have become my family, not the one I was born into and the one I so often miss, but my family nonetheless.

In three short weeks, school starts and as the time ticks by I find myself feeling stressed out about all of the change this year will bring. Though my courses, my students, my administrators, and my colleagues may all be different in the coming year, I know I am surrounded both here and afar by people who love me and support me and want me to succeed so when fear creeps back in I remind myself that here in the Delta I have found a place, where in every sense of the word, I belong.

5 Ways to Celebrate National Teachers' Day

As the lovely Google doodle may have informed you, it is National Teachers' Day, a day that falls amid Teacher Appreciation Week, so to all of the wonderful teachers I know let me say "Thank you!" Most people that I know have had more than a handful of awesome teachers who influenced the person they've become. If you're one of those people and you're looking to appreciate a teacher in your life, then allow me to make some suggestions:


1. Just Say Thanks

As simple as it sounds, saying "thank you" is a powerful act. Though most people appreciate teachers and all they do, that gratitude often goes unexpressed. Think about it. When was the last time you thanked a teacher? If the answer is anything other than "today", consider taking a few minutes to give a shout out to a favorite teacher. Make a phone call, send an email, or even stop by in person. I promise you from first-hand experience that it will warm your teacher's heart and they just might keep your thank you note in their desk for the rest of the school year.

2. Volunteer

If you have the time, think about spending a little bit of time in a local classroom. From pre-K to high school, almost all teachers could use a helping hand in their classroom. Whether you want to help throw an end of year party for the little ones in kindergarten or just spend an hour after school helping a teacher get organized, there's probably a place for you. Teachers have a lot on their plates and having an extra set of hands in the classroom every once in awhile can be tremendously helpful.

3. Make a Donation

It's no secret that teachers pour time, energy, and love into their classrooms, but in most cases they're also pouring their own money into their classes. A recent survey showed that teachers spent an average of $485 on supplying their classrooms last academic year. That comes to a whopping total of $1.6 billion nationally.  Fortunately, organizations like DonorsChoose are trying to ease the burden. DonorsChoose allows teachers to post projects asking for donations which donors can then fund. It's host to a variety of projects so whether you want to donate to a classroom at the school you grew up at or to fund a specific subject like early literacy or even help out a math teacher who desperately needs shelving in her classroom, there's something for you.

4. Write to a Government Official

In public schools, teachers often operate at the whim of government organizations they have little to no control over. If you really want to help a teacher, make your voice heard on the variety of issues that affect education. This might mean reaching out to a state representative about fully funding education or writing to your US senator about the rate at which students are tested. There are a number of political issues affecting the classroom so talk to a teacher you respect and see what issues touch their life everyday. You might learn something new and feel inspired to lift your voice on the behalf of teachers and students everywhere.

5. Consider Becoming a Teacher

If you're at a point in your life where you don't know what's next, take some time to seriously consider the classroom. For the 2015-2016 school year, all but one state reported at least some teacher shortage. Whether you're a soon-to-be college student or grad or someone looking for a career change, look into offering your talents to the nation's students. One of the best ways you can thank a teacher is by paying it forward.


No matter how you decide to celebrate National Teachers' Day, a teacher near you will appreciate it so take a few minutes and raise your voice to say "Thank you, teachers!"

Hard to Love

Sometimes I have to admit that my students are a little bit hard to love. Sometimes they are obnoxious and whiny and pesky and a million other things that teenagers often are. They regularly make me exhausted, frustrated, fed up. I wonder occasionally why I am putting in so much effort for a group of people who can be so cruel and so ungrateful, but even on those days when they leave me wondering why I even like them, I try to do as Mother Teresa said and love them anyway.

It's the other days, though, that they are hardest to love. My students are hardest to love when they fill my days with joy and laughter, when they fill my heart with pride and warmth. It is on the days when my students are easiest to love that I have the hardest time loving them. On these days, it is sometimes difficult to forget the world that spins madly around them. On these day, I sometimes cannot let go of the fear I feel for my students.

Maybe this is the hard part about loving teenagers, of giving a piece of your heart to these young people who are so rife with a sense of independence, recklessness, invincibility. You hear them whisper about their plans for prom night. You hold your breath in the bleachers on Friday night as you wonder whether your student will get up uninjured from the hit they just took on the football field. You listen as they recount the first time they heard gunshots outside their window. You kneel by your bed and pray for the second time this year that a student will make it out of the hospital alive.

And here is where the oxymoron comes in: The more you love them, the more you fear what could happen to them and yet the more you find yourself fearing what could happen to them, the more you know just how much you love them.

I think perhaps this is on my mind because the end of the year is ever so close and with it looms the reality that soon my students will no longer be mine. I've known all year that there is much in their lives that is out of my control, but at least in that time I could watch out for them if only for one hour of the day. For that hour I could do my best to make sure they were safe and they were learning and they felt loved, but when May 24th passes, that ends. When May 24th passes, all I can hope is that they leave me a little bit smarter, a little bit kinder, a little bit more prepared for what's ahead of them. And more than that I hope that they know they matter to someone and, in the immortal words of Dr. Seuss, that "When you get mixed up or hung up or blue, remember there's someone who's pulling for you."

The End of the Starfish Story

Before I began this journey and at many points along it, I have taken comfort in the "starfish story:. The fable goes something like this:

A man was walking along a beach the morning after a big storm that had washed thousands of starfish onto the beach, where they remained in danger of drying out in the sun. As the man walked, he came across a little girl who was, one by one, picking up starfish and throwing them back into the ocean. Puzzled, he said to the girl, "Young lady, what are you doing? There are are thousands of starfish and miles of beach. Don't you realize you'll never make a difference?" The girl thought for a moment before leaning over the pick up another starfish. Looking at the starfish, then at the man, she said "It makes a difference to this one," and threw the starfish out to sea.

Many times this year the starfish story has helped me in my weakest moments. When my students do poorly on a test, when a political change hinders progress, when a national tragedy or crisis resonates within the walls of my classroom, I take heart in the idea that even if I'm not making much of a dent in systemic poverty and racism, maybe I'm making a difference to a handful of students, maybe just to one. For a long time that was enough, the loosely moored hope that my presence here has a small but tangible net-positive effect.

But as time has gone on the starfish story has changed for me. Maybe the analogy was good at first, but it's grown more distant the longer I've spent teaching. In August, I was just like that girl. I pounded away relentlessly at my mission and believed whole-heartedly that I was making a difference. By November, outside forces made me question whether my actions really mattered, but I looked at the man on the beach and threw back another starfish, chugging along down the beach. In January an unexpected gust knocked me over, but I got back up and made my best effort to throw back the next starfish, perhaps a little bruised but no less determined.

Now it is March, three quarters of the year has gone and time is running out for my starfish. I look at the starfish in my hands and am struck by the weight of it. This starfish is no longer just another sea creature. This starfish, it has a name. It has a story. It has hopes and dreams and plans. And this starfish, it has shared all of them with me. I love this starfish, and all of my other starfishes, too. I look at the starfish, heavy in my hands with the weight of the storm it has been through and I notice for the first time how tired my arm is and just how far away the ocean looks. I throw the starfish and, like many of the starfish I have already thrown, it lands just short of the safety of the waves. I walk out and pick up the starfish, remind it that I love it, and toss it again towards the sea. 

I am tired and my throws keep coming up short, but I have to keep trying, because so many things have changed in the last year, but one has not: These starfish, these kids, deserve better.

The Monster in the Room

I wasn't tired when I drove home from work today. I wasn't exhausted, my feet didn't ache, my back didn't hurt, my voice wasn't hoarse. For the first time ever, I wasn't tired after work today and it was the worst I've felt all year.

On all those evenings in the past that I drove home angry, sad, frustrated, or just beat, I felt something else, too. Accomplishment. Meaning. Purpose. Even in the moments that I felt the weakest during the rough fall months and on the days where I felt that I was trying to do the impossible, I drew strength from the knowledge that somehow despite all the obstacles I was doing what I came here to do. I was teaching and making a difference, however small it might be. Yes, the victories were small at first, and usually very far between, but they were victories nonetheless and my students were learning.

Today was different, though. Today I did not teach. Today my students did not learn. Today my students took a test, a test I did not want to give, a test they did not want to take. Tomorrow they will take a test again. My school, like many others, is stuck in the midst of a cycle of testing, being pulled into the sticky web by higher-ups at the district who are in turn being pulled by the magnetic force of state-imposed accountability measures, all a side effect of a culture nationwide that emphasizes testing over teaching. It's a culture that is eating away at students and teachers alike, that tells us that "success" is standardized for students, for schools, for states.

Though our intentions may have been to leave no child behind during this race to the top, the train seems to have hopped the tracks. We have somehow confused learning with education. My students tell me that they come to school to get an education so they can get a diploma and go to college to get a job to be "successful." I want to ask them when they stopped coming to school to learn and discover and grow. Was it second grade? Seventh grade? Tenth grade? I wonder when school started feeling less like an adventure to them and more like a series of arbitrary hoops (read: tests) to jump through on the way to a shiny piece of paper. I wonder when it started feeling that way for me. Who exactly did I let convince me that the measure of my intelligence, of my value, was the number at the top of OGT, SAT, ACT, [insert acronym here] score report? Am I becoming that person to my students?

When I have nothing to do but walk up and down the rows of desks and look at their tired faces as they struggle through the fourth two-hour district test in a day, it's hard not to think about this bigger picture, about the state of education learning not just in my classroom, but in the country at large. While day to day I my mind may be occupied with the minutiae of sharpening pencils and grading exit tickets and calling parents, on days like today the big picture crystallizes a little bit and a harsh truth comes into focus. As I fuss at students about not talking during the test, about putting in their best effort, even about always guessing C when they don't know the answer, I am forced to confront a frightening reality and ask myself a hard question: In my fight to create a more equitable system for my students, have I somehow become just another cog within the very machine I sought to destroy?

Teach Them Math

My roommate and I have a saying we call "going down the rabbit hole." For the most part, it refers to obsessive Googling of an often random subject that occasionally leads to momentarily increased anxiety over something inane and usually entirely out of our control. For me, on Saturday night, it was chronic traumatic encephalopathy. That's right. On a Saturday night in my prime years, I was sitting at the kitchen table reading as much as I could about brain damage caused by repeated blows to the head, usually found in professional football players.

That morning I had gone to see the new Will Smith movie "Concussion" about the doctor who discovered chronic traumatic encephalopathy and the NFL's reaction to the news. But, to be honest, the subject had been weighing on my mind since long before the movies. You see, I teach high school and some of my students play football and some of those athletes get injured and some of those injuries are head injuries. The first time you go to your school's Friday night game and your students get excited to see you there, it's fun and exciting; the first time you see one of your students get knocked down and not get back up right away, it's not.

So on Saturday night the thoughts of "Concussion" and of my football players sent me down the rabbit hole. In the midst of my reading on Mike Webster and Bennet Omalu and Roger Goodell, I would sometimes stop to pop out from behind my computer screen and tell my roommate some horrifying story about an NFL player who had tragically died after a career full of hard hits to the head or to worry aloud about my students. Finally, I said "This stuff scares me and I don't even know what to do about it. I know it's only high school football, but I'm worried about my babies. What am I supposed to do?"

"Teach them math," my roommate replied. And that't just it, isn't it? It's one of the hardest and most important lessons for teachers to learn, especially teachers in high poverty areas like the one I teach in. My students are facing a lot and it's hard not to worry about them, but at the end of the day all I can really do is my job. Everything else is out of my control, but for the 58 minutes they're in my classroom every day there are three things I can do to help them: Love them, support them, and teach them math. If I do that, I've done my job and if I want to keep doing my job and doing it well for years to come I have to be able to do that and then come home and let go at the end of the day.

There are some things in life and in teaching that you can't control and as easy as it is to say that and believe that, it's another thing to live it. It's a skill I'm still learning and one I'll probably be learning for a long time, but it's a skill that I have to grasp. There really isn't much I can do to keep my students safe and happy and secure on the football field or at home or on the bus or wherever else they may go outside of school hours, but, this semester, when I worry about those hours that they aren't with me and what I can do about it, I'm going to commit more often to do just what I'm supposed to do and teach them math.