teaching – Teacher Truth

Annus Horribilis

It has been almost a year since I’ve posted anything online. I feel badly about that. I was surprised to learn I actually had subscribers, and I feel I have let them down. I have a good excuse, several in fact, but still, I don’t like to leave readers hanging.

To borrow the words of Queen Elizabeth II, it has been an annus horribilis, a horrible year. It began in January 2024 when I developed diverticulitis for the first time. I was in quite a bit of pain but still trying to teach through it while I was visiting various medical professionals attempting to figure out what in the world was wrong with me. That was followed by days and days of trying to teach with pain while sticking to a purely clear liquid diet (in other words, no energy). I lost five pounds the first week and another five the second, which was great because goodness knows I need to lose far more weight than that, but as a weight-loss program, I don’t recommend it.

Then about the same time, my husband began to have a lot of swelling and pain in his right leg. It became so bad that it was too painful to walk. I’ll spare you the description of not one, but three, nightmarish trips to the emergency room and the series of mishaps and misdiagnoses on the part of our local hospital (another story in itself). It all finally boiled down to the identification of a huge blood clot high in his right leg and a hospital stay of several days after the doctors performed a surgical procedure to try to break it down as much as possible, because by this point, the clot was too large to wait for blood thinners to take care of it.

The unspoken question between my husband and me then became, “Is the cancer back?” You see, the only other time he has had blood clots was when he was first identified with colon cancer five years before. He had gone to have a CT scan for the cancer when the doctors found blood clots and called him to immediately go to the hospital emergency room. Fortunately, the cancer was in its earliest stages, and they were able to remove it with surgery. Since then, he had kept every appointment, taken every test, and had come back clean. He was coming up on the five-year anniversary of his original diagnosis and was expecting to be dismissed by his oncologist and released from his more frequent visits and tests.

The agonizingly slow-arriving answer to the cancer question was, “yes.” It was now stage four. It required chemotherapy.

As if that weren’t bad enough, the week after he received his diagnosis, my husband was laid off from his job. In the blink of an eye, we went from doing better-than-alright to not-alright-at-all. The loss of his paycheck meant a reduction in our household income by 75% and all of our health insurance, because men in the corporate world are compensated far better than women in the public education system. No amount of savings could make up for that drastic loss, the first of many this past year.

Reality and a very frightening picture of our future came crashing in on us. My husband and I had always planned to downsize as soon as all of our children were out of the house, but we hadn’t thought it would be anytime soon. However, with his age and now the cancer to deal with, his prospects of quickly landing another job were very doubtful. We could not afford our home on my salary alone, especially not with the rapidly mounting medical bills. We decided to take advantage of the current housing prices and sell our home so that we could buy something much smaller, a lot cheaper, and a home that (hopefully) couldn’t be taken away from us as easily. I needed that security. I needed to believe that I wasn’t going to end up homeless.

A real estate agent friend of ours took the lead, almost before we were ready. In the blink of an eye, our house was turned upside down with painters and handymen trying to get everything in the best shape possible for putting the house on the market. He and his wife came into our home one day and decluttered every room while I was at work teaching. I came home to discover my house turned completely upside down, topsy-turvy from top to bottom. I couldn’t find anything. It had all been put in boxes and taken to the basement.

We had an offer on the house before we had even put it up for sale, but we held out for a better offer. We had that better offer within about 24 hours of putting the house on the market. We accepted. My head was spinning. I was very grateful, but everything was moving so fast.

Now all of a sudden we were faced with having to get out of our house and find someplace else to go. We started looking, but there wasn’t much to choose from in our price range and ended up in a small town duplex with no basement and five fewer rooms than the metropolitan suburban home we were leaving. It wasn’t in great shape and needed quite a bit of work, but it was what we could afford and put me a lot closer to the school where I’d been teaching. My commute was cut by more than half, which was nice.

The next challenge was lining up all of the work that needed to be done on the new house before we could move in, all with an eye on the imminent deadline imposed by the closing date on our old house. Along with that challenge was the even more overwhelming need to get rid of five rooms of furniture and a lot of the stuff that was being stored in our basement.

We tried Facebook Marketplace, offering items near and dear to my heart (read: inestimable) for a tiny fraction of their actual value. What we discovered is that there are a lot of people on Facebook Marketplace who aren’t actually interested in your stuff, only in trying to cheat you and steal your identity. Thankfully, I don’t believe they were successful, but needless to say, we turned to other avenues to get rid of our things.

We didn’t have time to put a garage sale together. I was trying to wrap up the school year by this time and get prepared for summer school, for which I had applied to teach in order to bring in a few extra bucks. My husband had started chemo treatments. Instead, we made many, many trips to Goodwill with the trunk and back seat of our car loaded to the gills. However, that didn’t help us get rid of the furniture pieces. For that, we called several charities, like Habitat for Humanity, that would come to your home and pick up items. Even they wouldn’t take a lot of it, though we had nice pieces of furniture worth thousands of dollars.

In the end, we were forced to call 1-800-JUNK. Yes, we actually had to PAY someone to haul away our beautiful things. It was sickening. We were simply out of time, cutting it right down to the wire, and had no other choice.

Next came the actual move. I could write pages about this nightmare alone, but I’ll just give you the highlights. My husband hired someone recommended by our agent, but we must have gotten the crew from hell. I left that morning for an 8:00 dentist appointment and returned to find my hardwood kitchen floor covered with water and absolutely no one in sight trying to avert the flood. The movers had tried to disconnect the refrigerator and had broken the valve on the water line. A very kind neighbor had taken my husband to the hardware store to try to find something to stop the water line from flowing. I ran around frantically trying to find anything absorbent, which wasn’t easy because by this time even the rags had been packed away. Just as soon as our wonderful neighbor had fixed the water line in the kitchen, we heard a shout from the moving crew in the basement.

My neighbor had just left to return to his own home across the street when we had to call him back, because when we got down in the basement, the sump pump, which had given us absolutely no problems in the six years we’d lived there, was spewing water all over the place. What our neighbor found was that a part inside the sump pump was turned the wrong way. All he had to do was turn it back in the right direction, but it was obvious that someone on the moving crew was messing around rather than working.

However, the day had just begun. The crew couldn’t get the basement refrigerator out through the basement door, and they wouldn’t take the doors off the refrigerator because they hadn’t been trained to do that. (That was the point at which we called in 1-800-JUNK.) There were crashes in the driveway followed by “oops!” There was our solid oak kitchen table that they didn’t bother to remove the legs before they loaded it and then, unbeknownst to us, loaded on the truck right side up, after which they loaded as many heavy boxes as they could fit on top of it. Needless to say, we no longer had a kitchen table at the destination end of our move, just a pile of splinters. That was only one of several major pieces that were broken.

The day ended around 10:00 that night with the movers trying to get our kitchen refrigerator through the kitchen door, which was about ¼” too small to accommodate it. Again, another lecture about how they couldn’t possibly remove any doors to help facilitate getting it through. I sat down on my broken couch, looking at the gouges they had put in my newly repaired and painted walls of what was now my home and fought to keep back the tears. This was not my first rodeo. I’ve moved thirteen other times. I know what to expect. But I’d never experienced anything like this.

As the year has progressed since then, there have been many other losses, like the death of my mother-in-law at the end of the summer. A lot of this is first-world problems, I know, but it has been a lot with which to deal. So. Much. Loss. To add to that, it has been an absolutely horrible year at school, as well, but that is another story for another time.

Parent-Teacher Conferences

When was the last time you attended a parent-teacher conference? I’ve just come through another round of conferences a couple of weeks ago, our third this year. I can remember when, as a child, my parents only had one conference with my teachers in the fall. That was all. The only reason anyone ever had a spring conference was if the child was struggling in some way, usually academically, because a behavioral problem would have already been addressed. (Correct me if my experience has been different than yours, but back then, the behavior issues were far less serious and numerous than they are today, and they would have been dealt with swiftly and decisively by both the parents and the teacher. The rule at my house was always: if you get in trouble at school, you’ll be in twice as much trouble when you get home.)

Then a few years back it became de rigueur to have two conferences every year, a fall and a spring. I thought that was a little unnecessary. As a teacher, if I need to meet with a parent, I just reach out and ask for a meeting, no matter the time of year. If I don’t need to meet with you, I won’t bother you. However, I complied, of course.

Then along came the pandemic. A third parent-teacher conference was added (via Zoom) to the school calendar before the new classes began in August. This one was to allow everyone to meet each other virtually and to allow the teacher, who had now also been given the task of acting as a kind of social worker, to check on the well-being, not only of his/her students, but of their families as well. Additionally, it allowed the teacher to explain how distance-learning would be handled, a process new to both educators and parent-guardians alike. It was not only understandable, it was absolutely necessary and quite helpful.

Finally, the pandemic subsided enough that in-person learning could resume, much to the relief of almost everyone. For most students, distance learning left much to be desired and did not produce the same level of achievement as in-person, which should not have been a surprise to anyone. We did our best, but it was not an ideal situation. Strangely enough, however, the third parent-teacher conference did not go away, and to be honest, most of the teachers I know, including myself, while we wish we had that time to work unencumbered in our classrooms, appreciate the value of getting to meet our students and their families and allowing those families to begin to get to know us. Everyone seems to feel more relaxed and prepared knowing a little better what they or their child are walking into on the first day of school.

But still…three parent-teacher conferences a year? Couldn’t we get rid of the spring one unless we need it?

Now, come to find out, our state doesn’t even recognize the legitimacy of those before-school conferences! We had quite a few inclement weather days in January this year, much more than the make-up days we had built into our district calendar, so we were trying to work with the state auditor to see how we could make up the missing required hours. The auditor informed the school district that those conferences held before school starts in August don’t count because they don’t contribute directly to the students’ future success. Like heck, they don’t!

The other issue I have with parent-teacher conferences lately is that it has become standard practice to bring the child to the conference. Back in the day (yes, I sound like an old codger), the children were left at home with a babysitter. That’s why they’re called parent-teacher conferences, not parent-child-teacher conferences.

I really needed to meet with a parent by herself last fall because her very clever daughter was trying to manipulate the both of us, and I felt it would be better if she and I could share information and strategize without her daughter taking in everything that was being said and trying to outsmart us. I asked the parent if it would be possible for her to come sans child and unintentionally completely freaked her out.

Now before you jump all over me, let me just say that I recognize that paying for babysitters can be prohibitive. If that is the case for any of my parents, I don’t want them to miss their conference because of the cost of childcare. I teach in a Title I school, and I know firsthand that can be an issue.

I am also aware that there are such things as student-led conferences, and they have their benefits, as well. I’m not devaluing them. It’s just that sometimes, as the old saying goes, “little pitchers have big ears,” and the grown-ups need the opportunity to speak freely without the child around to hear it. Sometimes children misunderstand, sometimes their feelings are hurt, sometimes they’re given too much of a voice in the conference (in other words, more than the parents themselves).

I’m also tired of having to hurriedly clean up my classroom before the next parent arrives because some student’s younger sibling has destroyed it while the parent sits through our conversation ignoring the behavior, never correcting it, and leaves without making the child pick up the mess. Does that sound familiar to anyone else?

Blue Moon

There was a blue moon last night, or so my weather app tells me. A blue moon, by definition, is the second full moon in a single calendar month. They don’t happen very often, hence the old saying “once in a blue moon.” In fact, this particular blue moon is the last one we’ll see for two years, according to the same knowledgeable app.

It’s also about how often I’m happy in my job anymore, once in every couple of years.

This past week, though, was one of those blue moons. I didn’t get to experience it last year, because we were all still teaching remotely and many of our students didn’t come back in person at all last year, even after the school doors reopened. I didn’t get to experience it for the previous two years, because I was the new teacher in the school and didn’t know anyone.

The phenomenon I’m talking about is the return of former students. It started a couple of days before the first day of school, when my sweet Caroline stopped by with her mother on their way out of the building after meeting with her new teacher. I had her in my class two years ago, and she’s a little taller, but other than that hasn’t changed a bit. They went out of their way to come say “hello” to me in my Harry-Potter-like classroom under the stairs. I gave her a distance hug, because I’m still not supposed to squeeze the stuffing out of her as I would like, as we’re, once again, donning our masks so we can be together.

Then, there was a “Hi, Mrs. Baker!” that floated in from the stairs as a boy paused in his ascent to his third-grade classroom. I wouldn’t have recognized the boy because he was much taller, he’d lost his Anakin Skywalker padawan braid, and his grin was hidden behind his mask, not to mention that I hadn’t seen him at all in a year and a half. But I would have recognized that voice anywhere. “Oh, Sean!” I almost cried. “It’s been so long since I’ve seen you! How have you been? How’s your family?” I could see his eyes crinkle with a grin above his mask as he patiently answered all of my questions. “It’s so good to see you!” we called to each other, and he went on his way with a waive.

After that, there were a half-dozen or so different false starts, with children looking like they were about to bolt forward for a hug and then remembering we’re not supposed to do that anymore. One girl finally broke through her self-restraint and actually followed through, grabbing me around my waist, her head now reaching my shoulders. I even had some “I wish I was still in your class!” shouts in the hallways and outside on the playground.

When I asked my new, current students what they liked best about first grade at the end of the day on Friday, amidst the “recess” and “P.E.” answers I was shocked when one student said “being here with you.” Several others followed suit after that, whether genuine or from the herd mentality that frequently happens in a first-grade classroom, I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.

This is what I need to remember to get me through the coming school year. This is what is important. It’s not whether my lessons go according to plan. It’s not whether I’ve completed my asynchronous PD. It’s not about complying with all the time-wasting demands from upper administration who have forgotten what it’s like to be on the front lines in the classroom, or maybe never knew.

It’s about this, the relationships I have with my students, both past and present. It’s about letting them know I care and that they are loved. That’s what makes me happy in my job.

Hot Dog

One day, my class was working on a Social Studies unit about economics. We had been studying about needs vs. wants and the difference between consumers and producers. That brought us to our current assignment: to pretend that we were entrepreneurs opening our own business, a pet boarding business. We were discussing why the community might need such a business. Someone might be going in the hospital and unable to care for their pet for a little while. Someone might be traveling and couldn’t take their pet with them.

That led to a rather morbid tangent when a child brought up the point that you should never leave your dog alone in the car, especially on a summer day. Another child graphically added, “Yeah, you would cook your dog.” That prompted a third child, who has a particularly well-developed sense of humor for a six-year-old, to hold his index finger up in the air as he had a “Eureka” moment and announced to the class “And that, my friends, is how you get a hot dog!” (“Get it, Mrs. Baker? A hot dog? You cook it, and it’s a dog, and it’s hot?”)

Yes, my friend, I got it even without the explanation, because I was practically rolling on the floor with laughter. First graders rarely tell jokes that make sense, so when they do, it’s completely unexpected and all the more hilarious for it. It’s moments like this that keep me going. Hot diggity dog, indeed!

What a Waste!

Looking back at some of my most recent posts, it sounds like saner heads were prevailing, but alas, the sanity was short-lived. From the moment we headed back to school this fall, the push to send us back into the classrooms turned up the pressure exponentially. What surprised me was the direction from which the push came: administration.

I had hopes, at first, when the COVID-19 numbers began to rise last August and our board members voted to delay the start of school and then start remotely when we did begin. Whoever was in charge of the district calendar did an excellent job in reworking it so that all of our PD (professional development) days were moved to the three weeks during which school was postponed. It gave the teachers days to “prepare” (if only they would actually leave us alone and let us do exactly that instead of tying up our time in meetings) and kept our school year from having to be lengthened. It was brilliant.

The only problem with this seemingly good plan was the quality of the PD. It didn’t really help us with the problems the teachers were facing, and in the end, turned out to be a huge waste of time. For example, we were told if we were going to begin the year remotely, our school needed to have a website presence on Google sites, and each teacher was supposed to develop his/her own page for students to use remotely. Almost none of us had experience with the Google sites program and how it worked, and we were given no instruction in its use. None. No joke. Instead, we were told to “go play with it.” The theory being that we would learn much more through our own exploration than by being shown. (I wonder what kind of evaluations WE would get if we just simply told our students “go play with it” and expect them to learn on their own.)

Having spent a few hours in frustration and not having those hours to spare, my grade level cohort and I went to our instructional specialist, who is our technology guru, and begged for some pointers to get us started. With just a few minutes of demonstration, I was actually excited and felt equipped now to tackle the assignment set out for us. I spent days, yes, entire days, as in a spare hour or two during the day that I wasn’t scheduled in some worthless meeting, plus evening hours and all weekend, designing and building my website. I made buttons that served as links to my Webex meeting room within a clearly-laid out schedule for my students to follow every day.

(Oh, yes, I don’t believe I’ve told you yet.) You know how there was this huge push to get the teachers to learn Zoom last spring? Not only did we have to learn how to be a participant, we had to know how to run the meetings, control our students’ behavior on it and teach them to properly use Zoom’s tools, as well as help our parents trouble-shoot. Well, just as everyone gets fairly proficient with Zoom, our school district decides to dump it and change to Webex. All of that learning was thrown out the window, and we’re all having to learn Webex, which doesn’t work like Zoom, as well as Google sites, on top of everything else.

Anyhow, I was incredibly proud of my website. I was a little uneasy because I was wondering what’s to keep someone “off the street” from entering our website and crashing our meetings. However, I just followed orders, and I was told to post my personal Webex meeting room link clearly on my site for my parents to see and use. I secretly wondered if I’m the only one who sees the irony in the fact that we dumped Zoom because of “security problems,” which were actually our own fault by publishing the links and passwords to our meetings in a public place, and now we were even more publicly sharing our Webex links. Was I the only one to see a problem with this? Apparently so. I continued to build my site incorporating all the items my administration required: a contact page with my link big and bold, a weekly newsletter, a list of tasks to be completed, and the learning objectives for the week’s lessons. It was a beautiful sight to behold, if I do say so myself. I figured out a way to create separate links for my small reading and math groups so that they wouldn’t drop in on each other’s meetings, and I had them all hidden behind labeled buttons to make things as easy as possible for my students and parents. I was the very proud parent of my baby Google site, especially since the labor to give birth to it was hard and long.

We launched our sites, spent a few days in parent-teacher conferences demonstrating our sites to our parents, and it wasn’t until that moment the our school district administration decided “Oops! This wasn’t as secure as we thought it would be. In fact, you need to take it all down right now.” Days and days of work made completely worthless in an instant, and it all could have been avoided with just a little forethought and planning.

I knew before my principal did. I read the directive in the district’s daily bulletin that morning and pulled my Webex links off immediately in order to protect them. I later even taught myself how to go into Webex and change the actual link just to be sure no one could enter my personal meeting room using the previously published link. To add insult to injury, my principal chose that morning to do an unannounced “walk-through” observation of my site and my morning meeting with my students. The only thing she could find to criticize was the fact that my Webex link wasn’t published anywhere. I informed her that I had had it there minutes before she browsed my site, and I would be happy to put it up again if that’s what she wanted, but there was this article in the daily bulletin she needed to see that said to take it down. A few minutes later a memo was sent by her to the entire school to take the Webex references down, requiring interactive sites like mine to be dismantled.

This is just one of many instances I could cite that show the lack of planning, foresight, communication, and consideration of our district’s administration.

6 E-Mails Regarding Lunch

I achieved a new record this afternoon. Between 4:00 and 5:00 today, I received 6 e-mails from the mother of one of my students regarding the amount of food he was eating (or rather, NOT eating) at lunch. I don’t mean to belittle her concern, but 6…really? The child is not wasting away. He has at least 20 minutes to eat his lunch once he gets seated. (That’s 10 more minutes than I have to eat MY lunch by the time I get my students settled, go through the lunch line with the ones that are buying, and fulfill all the requests to help open containers that my students can’t or won’t, despite my plea to parents not to send food and drink items that their children are incapable of opening on their own.). Plus, he has a 15-minute snack break later in the afternoon. He’s not short on time to eat.

It is not my fault that this child is “out to lunch,” forgive the pun. He is constantly distracted and off in a world of his own. He’s not fooling around, playing with his food, or talking to his table mates when he shouldn’t. He’s just staring off into space. He does this in class, too. I know this, because I have spent the first four weeks of school having to sit with him and his classmates at lunch, enduring the decibel-skyrocketing din, constant vibration of banging little feet against the legs of the table, and unending demands for attention. I have only just been granted the freedom to have a short break, often the only break I get all day, to eat my lunch in peace in a location of my choice (lately, my relatively quiet, darkened, and abandoned classroom at my desk). I live for those precious 10 minutes. They restore my sanity. They make me a better teacher.

But this mother thinks I should spend this time by her son’s side, making sure he eats ALL of his lunch, not just half of it, in the time he’s allotted. She informed me that in India her son’s teacher provided this service, and she thinks I should, too. I wanted so badly to remind her she is not IN India anymore. The next thing I know, she’ll be coming up to school at lunch everyday and literally spoon-feeding her son, just like some of the mothers of other Indian students we have in the building. I know it’s a cultural thing, but 5-year-old children really are capable of feeding themselves, and in my experience, if a child is hungry, s/he will eat.