The Mao

I could not have scripted a better weekend in Chicago with the pals. (Okay, that's not true. If I had scripted it, I would have left out my total insecurity about reentering the world of academia and that annoying travel constipation.) All that aside, I'd like to spend more weekends viewing fabulous art and exploring restaurants in a fine city like Chicago with KC and Lee. But even if we can't hang out in cool places, we'll have as much fun in our jammies with Sudoku, free internet, and pay per view movies even when we are too tired to solve the puzzles, locate lost e-mail messages, or watch a flick. I really heart those two.

If Only For a Moment

I'm not in the business of teaching to tell kids how to live their lives. I figure my job is to give them the right tools to muddle through, to help them learn enough about themselves and the world to understand what the best choices might be. But every now and then, I get up on my high horse and offer a lecture sure to make them rethink every move they'll ever make . . . or so it feels. Today, I delivered a doosy.

The troops spent the day yesterday on a field trip where the discussions and activities focused on the topic of courage. By the end of the day, the leaders had worn the kids down to their emotional cores, and when they take it seriously, it's a journey that can change the course of the school year for many. Not the case so much this year.

Last hour today, Student A pulled a chair out from under Student B. Sadly, a normal occurrence with the sevens. But Student B was M. A. D. and carrying baggage from similar incidents. He stood up, hit Student A, and began to yell, "You're stupid! You are all stupid!" at every laughing kid in the room. This merely made the populace taunt and tease with greater zeal. Meanwhile, my heart was breaking and my anger rising.

This is when the movie theme music kicked in. Something from Dead Poets Society or Stand and Deliver. "That's enough!" I shouted. As I don't yell much, the laughter ceased immediately.

"What are you doing?" I went on. "Just stop and think about what you are doing. This is tearing me apart. I don't know what you believe you learned about courage yesterday, but today, I am sad to say I see NONE of it in this classroom."

(This is where the violins get really loud.)

"I am looking at twenty smart and good people right now, and once, just once, I would like for you to have the courage to do what you KNOW is right instead of doing what everyone else is doing. Be that strong. If you do indeed have the courage."

I'd like to say that tears fell and sincere apologies were made, but really, we just went on with the lesson.

Later, a kind and savvy girl, one with her own brand of courage, pulled me aside. "Ms. D," she whispered. "I counted twenty-two students in here. Not twenty. So, which two are the really dumb and mean ones?"

She had saved me from my serious self and I thought she had earned this response: "I'm not really allowed to say, but you should know that there are more like five of them." Then we had a good laugh and the credits rolled.

Sicko, Part II

After ten days of coughing and blowing, I finally took a sick day. What should have been a day for sleeping and recuperating became a day of grading to get ready for conferences. And I'm feeling, even, like I didn't get quite enough done. This inability to relax, I realize, is my true illness, one for which I desperately need a cure.

Namaste

When my yoga instructor isn't making jokes about stealing the blocks to do ab exercises at home or telling us about her latest favorite movie -- "The penguins, people, you've got to see the penguins!" -- she talks with intensity about finding intention and following the breath. It took me a few years to take her seriously on this pursuit. Now, through the first five Surya Namaskar A's, I follow the breath to find my intention for each yoga session. The intentions vary from week to week: to lift my top foot during side plank, to kick my feet back after balancing my weight on my forearms, to hold my headstand without the support of the wall, to straighten my legs during that bastard V balance pose. Each week, I make it something different. Each week, I successfully match my intention while messing up every other pose. And I'm pretty proud of that.

I've known for a long time that Jonna, my yoga master, wants us to think about intention for more than the hour and fifteen that we are with her, and to think of breath as more than the energy we need to finish a class. This is the part of yoga that is most difficult for me. It is where my challenge begins. It's just so damned easy to let someone else determine your intentions, to live day-to-day meeting the deadlines that someone else has created. I want to pay more attention than that. So my first life intention is to pause. To think. To breathe. To live with intention. Maybe I'll mess up every other thing that I don't intend, but it's not the success or failure that matters so much as the intending. And that, after years of yoga, I finally get.

The Squeamish Beware

Although few admit it, I know that I am not the only one who thinks it's kind of cool to find a yellow glob of mucus in the tissue after coughing or blowing your nose. Something very satisfying about such productivity. But it's not nearly as cool as the time that a greenish and bloody ball of disease came out of my nose at the end of a battle with tonsillitis. Through that entire sickness, I kept checking on the size of the white globule in the back of my throat and wondering, where the heck will that growth go when I'm better? Turns out, a sneeze can loosen a globule's grip, and when you blow your nose . . . voila! Proof that you are on the road to better health! I admit, I thought about keeping the evidence in a jar, but that's just weird. Instead, I just told everyone I knew about it. Nothing as fascinating as that happening in my body as I near the end of this cold, but it does bring back fond memories.

Happy Sister's Day

Bdoc still doesn't have her own blog, but as long as she writes nice things about me, we've agreed she can post guest entries on my blog now and again. Before reading her entry, please note that as much as we have in common, my older sister and I differ in significant ways as well. Case in point: Not only will she purchase edible underwear, but she will also write about it in a text that she KNOWS her parents will read. Nope. We are not the same. Still, there's no one I love more (except for maybe cdoc -- who, if you are wondering, would never make said purchases or write about them either). Enjoy.

I have never liked Valentine’s Day. In my opinion, it’s the day where the lame ass boyfriends and husbands of the world can redeem themselves for being such by buying cheap gifts that only die or make us fat anyway. This year, I’m trying my best to stop being such a bah-humbug (BH) about every holiday (I detest Christmas too) since my boyfriend with whom I now live, loves every holiday and St. Valentine’s Day is no exception. So, I bought AJ some edible underwear and 1000 Sex Games. He will love them. And I will laugh when he thinks I’ll actually wear them or play the game. But we’ll have fun. AND I wore pink and red to work. No one will detect the BH in me by outward appearances even though the attitude still lingers deep inside and will color my every thought and smirk throughout the day.

But when I got to work, I was challenged in my BH attitude too. I received a forward from jdoc. She appropriately labeled it cheesy but forwarded it nevertheless. It was one of those tear-jerkers; about how we can never forget our sisters. About how they will be the mainstay in our lives through loves lost and friends that pass through our lives. And about how we should make efforts to be with them and cherish them as much as possible and foster that relationship throughout our lives.

So today, in honor of that dastardly and hideous “holiday” called St. Valentine’s Day, I will celebrate my sisters without that BH attitude. We have something special; the three of us; that others envy. I will foster that connection throughout my life. I’ll continue to dream of the three of us living at the ranch where the Three Sisters will reign and no boys are allowed unless they are the canine variety. And I’ll cherish that I have them in my life.

So, here’s to my sisters. I love you.

Sicko

Despite the coughing fits and snot drips, I managed to teach a full day of school today. Hopped up on Valentine's sugar, the kids didn't cut me much slack. I threatened to breathe on a few of them who wouldn't settle down. That held them at bay for a little while. If they hadn't tortured my sub last week, I'd consider calling in sick tomorrow. Instead, I'll just go to bed early this eve and hope that they'll all be on the post-candy crash tomorrow.

The Unexpected Adventure

The whole point of our trip to the environmental learning center is to challenge the kids to challenge themselves. To push themselves further than they think they can go. We do that by making them walk on wires thirty feet above the ground, cling to a wall for dear life and then fall, and trudge through snow four feet high to reach an unknown destination. Each time I chaperone this trip I am moved quite nearly to tears by the successes they achieve while never believing they can. It's a Hallmark movie with a Chariots of Fire theme song. It really is.

For some, the challenge is physical, pushing yourself up onto the single high wire after falling. For some, it's mental, solving the puzzle of where to place your fingers on the rock wall. But for most, the emotional weight of their social interactions is the greatest challenge of all. The one that no one expects, not the teachers, not the kids. Their greatest fear is not belonging. It's the reason one won't climb the rock wall and why another won't sit with the group at dinner. It's the reason one crawls into bed instead of joining the campfire and why another trips everyone instead of telling them their words hurt. They are afraid. And it's the reason that I spend a good chunk of my week cushioning the blows that they serve one another. Eating with a lone boy in the dining hall. Sitting on the edge of a bed as a girl cries. Walking with a boy in the back of the pack as he talks . . . and talks and talks. . . his whole life story laid bare.

As I look back, then, over the three days, I'm not sure what we learned about the environment, but I can say that we each learned a little something about fears. So when they said to me, whether on the high ropes or the climbing wall, "Ms. D. I'm scared." They didn't know that I was thinking about ALL of their battles when I replied, "Of course you are. That's why what you do next matters."

The Lining

Two days later, the laptop is back. It wasn't cheap, but the invisible crack they accidentally put in the case of the computer saved me a significant amount. This is how my luck works: It'll only take us a couple of days to fix your problem -- HURRAY!-- but you'll lose all of your files -- ohh. We did damage the case of the computer -- ohh -- but we'll take a pretty sum off of the cost AND you can't even see the crack -- HURRAY! With Jupiter, the planet of good luck in my sector of the zodiac, I keep thinking that laptops shouldn't crash and relationships shouldn't end, but what I've learned from that great, guardian planet is to stand by for the yin to find the yang. So. The blog is back after only a short break -- HURRAY! -- but tomorrow I head up north for three days with forty 7th graders to a place where electronics are not allowed-- ohh.

One Laptop Down. . . One Blog Site Missing

Last night in the middle of writing what was sure to be the most brilliant blog entry ever (one about how painting my kitchen is a metaphor my romantic life), my computer crashed. Not the same logic board problem that has haunted my laptop. This was clearly something different -- and a metaphor for something else, I'm sure. The computer is now out of my own care receiving a new hard drive, motherboard or other gadget that is sure to erase whatever files, photos, and music therein. What this means, my friends, is that the blog will suffer for a few days and I'll be out of touch. Godspeed, computer geeks, godspeed.

P.S. Ukemochi is experiencing her own blog problems (as anyone who has attempted to read her site has noticed). Don't worry. She has her own set of geeks working on it.

The Day

Today was ski day for the sevens. I stayed back at the compound with the derelicts that had racked up referrals, detentions, or suspensions and the other lingerers who did not turn in permission slips to go. About ten of them total. Staying back with ten kiddos sounds pretty easy, but planning six hours of activities for ten angry and left-behind children was a daunting task. Missing work was determined, copies gathered, a schedule prepared, lunch duties swapped, and passes written to break up the group now and then. I was, admittedly, worried about how the day would go. In the end, it was smooth sailing. Even the girl who had told off three teachers that morning before arriving at my room settled in to read a book before too long. There was no magic formula, just a little attention given to ten kids by one teacher. And I realized, if this could be the size of every one of my classes, we could really get some stuff done. I mean, we could really learn some shit. I could feel like a teacher five out of five days of the week and no child would be left behind. Not a single one.