A Newsletter
the impartial morning,
dark like yesterday,
erects the set around me.
I whirl and gimble
in my furious path,
spinning and spinning
while the walls stand still.
if I could fix this one thing,
would it trigger the sun
to rise, would it set
me free from the walls,
grant me the peace
to imagine a door outside
and the power to stand still.
I have a stash of folders in my classroom. In my school, in which supplies provided for teachers and student’s own supplies don’t really exist, my stash is like gold. I’ve hoarded my folders, dolling them out for the truly needy student and lesson objective. A couple weeks ago, I used some of my precious trove for one class’s essays. As students picked a folder out of the bin, we discovered some had names on them, and some still had work in them. Attained by hook and crook, not all the folders came from students I had taught. I leafed through names I didn’t recognize, and I flipped through some of the work, always curious what assignments other teachers give their students. And then I found it. A piece of evidence for something I’d been thinking about for some time. It feels good to be validated, but often validation about educational issues usually means you’re right about something that harms the students. This is the text of an unlabeled assignment from a middle school student, dated 9/8/08:
“Last Year I was Proficienct. Now I will try to be advanced. (In Reading.) I will try to be advanced because I promised my mom I will try my hardest. If I am advanced in Reading, My mom will be proud of me. If I get advanced in Reading I’ll be advance in both Math and Reading.
That’s why I want to be advanced in Reading.”
The student received a check plus and a 50/50 on this assignment.
Some background before we get to why this paragraph breaks my heart.
I started teaching in October, 2003, almost two years after the No Child Left Behind law was signed by George W. Bush. NCLB brought with it a new atmosphere in teaching. I didn’t realize it then because I didn’t know anything else as a rookie teacher. But now as I’ve gained experience in education and have seen the previous generation retire almost completely and heard their stories, it’s clear how much NCLB was its own era. The basic idea is that schools needed to have a certain percentage of their students score “Advanced” or “Proficient” on a state-determined standardized test (the PSSA in Pennsylvania). If a school scored “Basic” or “Below Basic” in math or reading, penalties kicked in. The penalties ranged from requiring a school to create an Improvement Plan to the school being taken over by the state with administrators first and then teachers fired. This draconian law turned schools into compliance-checkers instead of educators. There’s much that can be said about this law and the devastating effects it had. But I’ll stick to what pertains to this student’s assignment.
I took issue with the way students were scored because of its deleterious effect on them. Students received a score of Advanced, Proficient, Basic, and Below Basic. We were directed to inform the students of their score, to post the scores in the classroom, and encourage those scoring Below Basic or Basic to improve their scores to at least Proficient. The first problem I had was the scoring labels. Unlike the traditional A, B, C, D, F scale, Advanced, Proficient, Basic, and Below Basic label a student’s abilities. While a hierarchy exists with the traditional scale, and students are labeled as a “B student” or a “D student,” there doesn’t exist in the wording itself a means of labeling a student’s ability and inevitably the student himself. If I as a student score Basic, then I am Basic. What a horrible word to describe a child! Yet our government mandated it with a threat of penalty, and educators acquiesced and became complicit.
The second problem I had was the Advanced – Below Basic shaming system gave no clear and direct path towards improvement. If a student has a D or F in my class, I can give them specific steps to improve their grade. I can talk to the student about turning work in, putting in more effort, or how and what to study better. I can give them a path to success. With a state test given once a year (one that brought with it a carnival atmosphere complete with pep rallies, useless incentives, and in fact a carnival), what direct steps can a teacher give a student to improve? The answer is to pay attention and do the work in the tested subjects throughout the year, but that’s useless advice. It lacks in concrete terms, something a child needs from adults. So we as adults said to the students of our country, “You are Basic, and there’s nothing you can do about it except cross your fingers you do better next year.”
The true sadness of this paragraph is that the student bought into it. She accepted the terms by which our country’s educational system has labeled her. Her hopes and her need for her mother to be proud of her are tied up in these labels. What happens when she doesn’t score Proficient? I hope to God students weren’t punished liked they would be for a traditional grade.
One aspect of teaching that’s more difficult to handle than most is the unintended effects the system has on students. NCLB swept the land, and while there were small pockets of resistance as some parents opted their kids out of these tests, if you went to an American elementary or secondary school between 2002 and 2015, NCLB dictated your education. It can be argued you received a subpar education because NCLB took the focus away from learning and placed it squarely on doing well on a test. Art, music, and other vital subjects were cut. Though no fault of their own, American students were educated in inadequate schools. As a teacher, it was tough to comply while witnessing my students buy into something that helped only the adults running things.
What students should learn in school is a hotly debated topic. Though it always has been, today’s difference is that technology is the great disrupter. What will the technology look like when our current students graduate? What do they need to know in that world? So much is in flux that we as a society haven’t yet defined what’s important going forward. We simply don’t know yet. Whatever comes, I hope we never see a paragraph from a student like the one above. As a teacher, I need to start seeing empowered students rather than pawns for disconnected adults’ untested and theoretical ideas.
For the past couple years, I’ve noticed something about every single book I read: the first 100 pages sucked. Some books made the miraculous transformation from shitty to good around page 85. Some took their time and didn’t morph until p. 112 or so. I thought at first I was on to some discovery about my reading or literature at large. Are today’s authors such navel-gazers that they take their sweet time getting to the gripping action while they meander through their self-indulgence before getting down to the real job of keeping my attention? Or was there…something else?
I’ve read a lot of books in my life. But I can’t remember a lot of them. I remember reading them, and I remember the feeling I had reading them – a mixture of shading, raw emotion, and intuition – but I often forget the basic plot, the character’s names, or even the major themes of the work. I sometimes read like a vampire, sucking what I need out of a book and tossing it aside for the next one. Those things that I should latch on to and that should latch on to me slip by in my frenzy to consume. I’m addicted to words, and I’m addicted to story, and when I read I want the uncut stuff right in my veins. Addicts don’t have time to sit back and reflect; they just want more. I want more. But I also want to carry more of what I read with me. I want to remember so I can articulate the beauty I see as it passes me by.
I’ve been told I have high expectations. I’ve always had a problem seeing that in the way others see it. I give credence to the fact that it’s difficult for us to see how we are to others; my reality is so much inside my head that the outside is like the outside wall of a prison, something I never see. I think what others see as high expectations is my fixation on one thing. I get obsessed with one idea, and though I see the rest of the world during my obsession, it’s background. So when I read a work of fiction and I’m bored for the first 100 pages, and I read another work of fiction and become bored around the same area, and when this repeats over and over again…I’ve come to realize I haven’t discovered something about the world. I’ve discovered something about myself.
How skewed is that? That my opinion of something is so individualized that I fail to see any reality other than it. The first 100 pages of the last dozen or two books that I’ve read are not all crap. A novel needs time to establish itself, to build to something so that an epiphany can exist. It’s unreasonable, and silly, to expect a novel to be non-stop adrenaline. What boundary am I not respecting? I expect the lines of reality to blur to the contours in which I perceive them. I expect reality to bend to me. I’ve stepped into the realm of demanding my wants be met in every area of my life, regardless of the reality of the situation. I want life without death; happiness without suffering; drunkenness without the hangover; gluttony without the weight gain. This is the dark side of dreaming, when one looks at the world, hopes and imagines it different, but instead of birthing something uplifting or something genius, it’s more of the old twisted ways, the self-serving, the blind.
I carry every book I’ve ever read with me. But not in titles and author names and plot lines. I carry them in feelings, emotions, and the nameless things that animate my world. I am an addict and I enjoy my addiction. Yet I still feel I must answer for it, to have something to say to someone else. To be able to articulate my experiences.
It’s funny. I like to write. I have some skill with it. But I struggle mightily with articulating the swirls and shifts of my perceptions. You know what I mean?
I don’t fit in,
But I don’t feel bad.
You can’t miss a feeling that you never had.
“Normal People”
Fucked Up
I love the last line for the hope it gives. But I don’t think it’s true. You might not be able to miss something you never had, but you can see other people using what you don’t have, and you can want it. Missing and wanting sometimes feel like the same thing; emotions can’t tell time. Past, future; it’s all the same.
I see her laugh and I want that. I want something carefree. I want something so light. But I can’t read her heart. I can’t see the shadows and the dread. I can’t see how the laugh is a fist in the air, a rebellion that will soon die. It will resurrect again, but it lives and dies and lives and dies, and that’s just how it is.
Another thing I want: to ride the hope that’s in the lyric. To not run it through my logic machine. To not think, to not clamp my thoughts around a feeling like a rubber tube so they can bounce harmlessly off all the rocky surfaces. To raise my fist and make a decision, to not ride helplessly the swift tide of conformity and comparison-competition.
I don’t fit in.
I do feel bad.
I want that feeling that I never had.
I like Fucked Up’s version better…
I’ve dabbled with writing since I was a junior in high school. In college, writing took a backseat to reading since I showed up as an English major with major deficiencies in my literature experience. After college, writing took a backseat to partying and shaking off the shackles of my youth. As I entered my third decade on the planet, I began to see the end of the endless good times. Something substantial would have to replace the carefree since the carefree doesn’t stay so innocent for long.
I decided to become a writer. It took me a while to realize that this needed to be an overt decision. I already wrote (from time to time), I thought about writing all the time, and I read voraciously, paying attention to writers and their world. But it wasn’t my world. It was a hobby that I expected to be more than that.On its own. It’s taken me some time to learn that in order to become something, you have to be it; you have to do it. All the time. I’d never surrendered to anything; I’d never tried to become something. I had nebulous ideas about me being a writer that I believed to be concrete facts, even if they hadn’t had their time yet. I can write; I am good at it; therefore people will knock down the door to read and publish myself. How can that not be true?!?
Over the past seven years or so, I’ve been in training. I see it in the same way as a doctor’s path to opening a practice. A doctor-to-be goes to school, takes courses, and then rotates through different aspects of the medical field. Upon graduation, she then begins to practice medicine. I am at the point where I feel I’m ready to practice my craft. I have something to say and I now know how to say it.
This is what has been so difficult for me: in order to be a writer (really any artist), you have to put yourself out there. Art of any kind is a performance. You are placing yourself out in the world and presenting your creation. Actor, writer, painter; any artist is a performer. Even writers like me who’d rather hole up in their writing spot and never speak or hear or see another human being ever again. Maybe not at the heart of it, but some part of the reason I want to be a writer is to be read. I want to be seen.
When I see a performer I like – an actor or a musician – I think about what it takes to get up and do what they do. Imagine what it is like for a top-tier musician who sells out stadiums to get in front of that audience and sing and dance with thousands of eyes on their every move. Even if they’re a natural, even if they’ve been doing it for years, that person is opening themselves up in front of other people. Their success depends in large part on people accepting and liking the performance. That whole idea gives me the fantods.
I don’t want to perform because at the heart of any performance is expression, and I have a difficult time expressing myself. Sometimes it feels like people in the outside world have a better bead on who I am than I do myself. What kind of artist doesn’t want to express himself? This one. But maybe this gets into something deeper. Maybe it goes beyond wanting and gets more into needing. Maybe I balk at the idea of putting my true self out there, but there’s something inside that’s pushing it out, that’s demanding to be let out.
I can’t find it right now, but I remember reading a quote by Ray Bradbury in which he said that he didn’t know what he was doing when he wrote his books. He just did. I’ve always been amazed by that quote since it’s logical that someone who accomplished so much couldn’t have done it without some sort of future-seeing plan. But now I get what he was saying. When I decided to be a writer, I didn’t know what kind of writer I wanted to be. I had lofty ideas in my head, but me coming to the decision to become a writer was partly borne of frustration. I’m not Ray Bradbury. I’m not David Foster Wallace. I’m not Stephen King. I’m not any of the countless authors that have spoken to me, who have lit the way. So who am I? I still don’t know, but I did find the one thing missing that could answer that question: the work. Sure, I have tons and tons of things I’ve written. Pages upon pages, books upon books, files upon files. But I didn’t have anything complete, nothing that I could say to another person, even a friendly ear: Here, this is something I’ve written that you’ll enjoy.
So I put my head down and I worked. I carved out the time and I wrote and I wrote and soon the writing took over. Soon I was thinking about it more and more, which in turn pushed me to write, which in turn pushed me to write. I had invented a perpetual motion machine.
Three months ago today, I took the picture below. I was feeling the work I was doing was useless. I felt like I was churning and fighting and grinding and changing nothing. And then I compiled the notebooks. I’d had my head down, and when I looked up I realized I’d done something. I’ve filled these notebooks since I’ve started taking writing seriously.
There’s a lot of drivel in those notebooks, but their value can’t be seen in the picture. These notebooks represent a no rules/no consequences space for me. I can write whatever I want. I can write something that will never sell. I can write something that sucks. I can write something that might be good. I can write something that is the seed of a thing. I can express myself.
Some people are at home in front of people. I am not. But I can get myself to the point where what I’m doing, what I want to write about is more powerful than my desire to live apart from the outside world.
Last night, my local writers group gathered in one member-couple’s house for a Halloween party in which we read a 1000 word or so scary story we wrote for the occasion. What I didn’t know beforehand was there’d be a vote for a winner.
I didn’t win. Not winning a fun contest between non-rivals shouldn’t be a big deal. But like people who play fantasy football and have limited determination over what players they have and no determination over how those players perform each week, I was pissed I didn’t win. Why does our ego bruise when we lose, even when winning is an arbitrary by-product?
I think there might’ve been a conspiracy afoot. Seven people in attendance. C1 and C; married. C2 and R; married. Then attending alone: A, M, and me. The two husbands didn’t write a story but still voted. And you could vote for yourself. One single attendee received 2 votes. One wife received two votes. And the other three attendees, including me, received one vote. This is what I think went down:
C1 (wife 1): voted for A.
C (husband 1): voted for C, his wife.
C2 (wife 2): voted for me
R (husband 2): voted for C2, his wife
A: voted for C (this is only one that doesn’t make sense to me)
M: voted for A
me: voted for M, the only vote I know to be true.
There was malfeasance present! Two people not writing and voting according to their conflict of interest. I was robbed!!
Or so I have to tell myself. Because I’ve been writing seriously for about 7 years now. I need things to start happening. I need to start receiving some recognition. And this little party would’ve been minor validation that I’m on my way. And I lost.
I don’t like losing. Anything. Is that why I’m here baking up thin conspiracy theories?
But seriously, I’d like to know how people voted, and I’d like to discuss the winner’s stories to see what worked and to see what mine didn’t have. That’s what I’m having trouble with. I write a story that I’m happy with and it doesn’t resonate like I want it to. Am I basing too much on people’s fickle taste? I’m not losing faith in my art; but it’d be nice to get some atta boys once in a while.
Maybe my story wasn’t what I thought it was. I’m ok with that idea, but I don’t know why. I need to know why.
I think sore losers get a bad rap. Is it so bad to be so heavily invested in something?
I oscillate between powerful and powerless. I am king of my domain and transient slave in another’s. I am the universe and I am a blip in its furious course.
My life is my kingdom that at times I rule with skill and wisdom. At other times it is a depressed city that’s been taken over by the state.
As I alternate my crown and my dunce hat, I think of a new kingdom. This new kingdom isn’t based on pushing outward, but circumscribing and staying put. It’s a plot of land. It has a fence. And I’m the source of energy and the impetus behind what happens behind the fence.
I am a teacher in my 16th year. I have an easier schedule this year than any other: no homeroom, and a duty period in which I can get other work done for 1st period. My days start off comfortably. There’s no rush. I am free to accomplish without the mean hand on my back. I am not the author of this good fortune; my power and abilities did nothing to bring about the good.
But I still create my own rush. I discomfit myself, push my own self from behind, blindly, ever on, ever on. To never ever quit is a value that needs to be devalued like an overpriced stock. To do blindly is to do dumbly. To do without a plan is to work like a mule.
I have started writing something that’s on my mind in the morning. Something short, something “easy.” My easier schedule allows it. But what happens next school year? What happens when I’m back to the oppressive schedule, when every minute of the day is spoken for by others, when what my school lacks devours my time in its demands placed on me instead of placed on adequate funding, adequate materials, etc?
I define success by accomplishing everything. I’ve failed to achieve my own defined success. As a teacher, I want to reach every student, teach every angle of every lesson; I want to do it all and I want to do it all well. Anything less is failure. But after 15 years, I’ve learned about failure, real failure. I’ve become intimate with it.
Even in trying to conclude this, I find myself thinking of everything. But the small something, the little thing I can put in my pocket and carry with me and make a part of me is this: I’m writing this morning. I won. But what happens when my life isn’t as advantageous to winning. What then is success?
Raising a child is time travel. As my son grows older and experiences so many firsts, I remember my own experience in the same circumstances as I observe him going through his. It’s living in the past and in the present in the same space. I am a powerful time lord!
I never thought I’d have children, and I certainly never thought I’d be the parent waiting outside the school building with all the other adults who have procreated. In various childhood memories, I remember a list of characters. Obviously I am the main character in my story-memory. Then come the other important characters, those directly involved in interactions with me or in my direct line of observation. Then there are the bit players, the person standing off to the side or walking by when something happened. Now, as a parent waiting for his son outside the school building with all the other parents and their pre-school-age children and the other students in other grades besides my son’s, I am a bit player in so many other kids’ experience. This is where the power comes from, the power to shape memories and tell stories that go beyond a selfish point-of-view. Before my son’s birth, I saw through that only-person perspective. I cared only about the construction of my own memories. Everyone was a bit player to my story. Now I’m a bit player to others. Maybe I’m able to time travel, but I’m not powerful. I’m no lord. If anyone holds the power, it’s my son. He doesn’t know it, and maybe he can’t know it. It’s the kind of power that maybe the one who owns it can’t wield. But he has it. The power to create memories. The power to draw me along with him as he establishes himself in this world, as he builds his memories and his stories. Maybe I’m not a time lord after all, but a time lord’s companion.
Bellicose Blatherings 
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