Story time!

My freshman Honors English teacher and speech team coach, Mr. John Hires, sat us all down on the last day of school my freshman year and just looked at us.  He sighed a deep sigh and put his hands on the table, arms outstretched.  He said: “I wish there was more time.  I wish I had more time with you all.  You were such a great class.  I want to discuss the meaning of life.  What is the meaning of life?”  We all laughed and the bell rang, ending our time together as a class.

Little did I know, this would be more or less my last memory of Mr. Hires.  He passed away my sophomore year, and this was one of the most heartbreaking events during my time at my high school.  He was an amazing teacher – inspirational, encouraging.  Treating us like adults instead of like kids.  Talking to us like we knew what we were talking about.  Always wishing for more time instead of counting down the days until summer vacation. 

I wanted to be a teacher like that.  I still want to be a teacher like that.

He taught us his favorite play, Our Town by Thornton Wilder.  I love that play.  It was the first play I directed as drama director at my previous school.  Every time I think of this memory of Mr. Hires, I think of Emily’s monologue at the end of the play.  She’s died in childbirth, and the Stage Manager – the narrator of the story – allows her to come back to see a day in her life, one last time.  As she is getting ready to leave her worldly life, she says:

Emily: Oh, Mama, look at me one minute as though you really saw me. Mama, fourteen years have gone by. I’m dead. You’re a grandmother, Mama! Wally’s dead, too. His appendix burst on a camping trip to North Conway. We felt just terrible about it – don’t you remember? But, just for a moment now we’re all together. Mama, just for a moment we’re happy. Let’s really look at one another!…I can’t. I can’t go on. It goes so fast. We don’t have time to look at one another. I didn’t realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed. Take me back — up the hill — to my grave. But first: Wait! One more look. Good-bye , Good-bye world. Good-bye, Grover’s Corners….Mama and Papa. Good-bye to clocks ticking….and Mama’s sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new ironed dresses and hot baths….and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth,you are too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it–every,every minute?

Stage Manager: No. (pause) The saints and poets, maybe they do some.

Emily: I’m ready to go back.

It is a beautiful moment in the play, and totally reflective of what I think is the right attitude – for education and for life.  Thanks, Mr. Hires, for teaching me that.

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Roundtable discussions are my absolute, most favorite thing to do with students in my English class, and the last roundtable of the year always makes me a little sad.

I’m sure most of you can figure out what a roundtable discussion is, but for those of you who don’t know, it’s an activity during which I ask all of my students (sometimes 30 in a class) to move their desks into a large circle around the perimeter of the room, and then for the remainder of the hour, we talk to each other about whatever we are reading at the time.  I sit in the circle with the students, too (which is always funny when someone walks into the room with a pass, because they look around the circle and say, “Where’s your teacher?” every time!), and my purpose is to gently direct the conversation, but more often, I find myself just listening and participating with the students, adding a few insights here and there.

Roundtables are amazing, because the students can all see each other, and we are really on the same level.  I start the first roundtable of every year by telling them about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table (it’s also amazing how many of them don’t know that story), and how King Arthur decided to have a round table instead of a rectangular one because, with a circle, there’s no head of the table.  All participants are equal, including myself.  Of course, that’s not really true.  They still look to me for the “right” answer frequently, although that happens less and less every time they do a roundtable. 

As you can imagine, the first roundtable of the year is somewhat a battle.  They look at me; they don’t talk to each other; when they do talk to each other, it’s never about the literature; sometimes, they’re so shy about sharing their ideas that they won’t say anything at all.  But as the year goes on, students who have never said a word in class before become the star players in the roundtable.  Students who might never care about literature are excited to share their ideas.  Some of the most critical thinking I’ve ever seen comes out of these roundtables, and so the last one of the year always makes me a little sad.  But also happy and incredibly proud that my students have come so far.

Yesterday, we were discussing the book (and video), The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch – which is a great way to end the year, and a really easy book to discuss because the students can relate to it and they really like it – and the students were coming up with ideas I’ve never thought about left and right.  They were saying things like, “I liked it, but all he talked about was work.  Even though he talked about his childhood, it was all stuff that related to his work.  I know he said he didn’t want to talk about his family in the video, but he could have talked about life outside of his job, right?  I  mean, there is life outside of a job, right?” 

And there was more where that came from. 

These students just blew me away, and I told them as much.  When I did, and I told them how proud I was of how far they had obviously come this year, they all just looked at me and smiled.  This happened twice – two classes, same results.  And these were two of the best moments of my teaching career.

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Last night, the English department at my college treated the Masters students to dinner as a congratulations for finishing our thesis papers and the program.  It was a really wonderful evening, and it really didn’t set it until last night that I’ve finished my Master’s.  It feels good, but it’s also bittersweet.  I will miss my classmates, and believe it or not, I will miss the work – the writing, the discussions, the reading… all of it.

It was nice, however, to share an evening with professors and classmates that was more social than scholarly.  I was sitting next to Tim, of course, but also near my professors.  They were extremely complimentary of my work, which was nice to hear.  They were interested to hear about the conference at which I am presenting my thesis this July.  They were also curious about what I will be doing now that I have my Master’s.  I had expected this question; most teachers don’t get their Master’s in English unless they want to teach at a community college or go on to their Doctorate and teach at a university.  What I didn’t expect was that one of my professors would try to persuade me to “do better things” – his words, not mine.  He tried to persuade me so much, in fact, that the head of the department interrupted him and said, “Stop trying to persuade her to leave high school!  We need teachers like her!”  This topic wasn’t brought up again until the end of the night, as we were saying good bye.  My professor shook my hand and said, “Please consider going on to do better things.”

The fact of the matter is that I could not think of a single, more important thing I could be doing with my life right now.

You see, there are assumptions out there about teachers, and sometimes, those who we think are the most liberal thinkers are the ones who hold on to these assumptions the strongest.  We are mostly women who didn’t actually choose teaching.  We were pushed into it by a patriarchal society.  We were told our whole lives that we should choose a job where we work with people or nurture people, because that’s what women are supposed to do.  And, of course, those of us who teach English or other humanities courses are doing so because we were not encouraged enough to pursue careers in math or science.

Some people truly believe that we couldn’t possibly be teaching high school English because we love it or because we feel at home in front of a classroom or because we have a passion for teaching.  Or because we have a passion for English language and literature.

This isn’t a new concept.  I’ve been getting the same line from people at least several times a year.  “Do something important!”  “You were meant for better things!”  I’m here to tell you, right here, right now, that there is nothing better, nothing more important that I can do with my life.

Of all my choices – and I had many choices – I chose teaching.  And every day I choose teaching.

That said, I’m back to blogging with a more refined purpose.  My goal here is to work to end the assumptions that teachers are either not good enough to do something else or that they’re just waiting around for something “better” to come along.  I won’t write about teaching every time I write, and I’ll leave most of the educational theory and sharing of lessons for Equality 101, but I want to write here to give you all a little insight into my life and my work, and I want to show you all how feminism and human rights play out in my life and my work.

I’m excited to be back to the blogging community, and I’m excited about this new path for my writing.

It feels good to be back.

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Don’t forget!  There’s still time to donate to my Avon Walk for Breast Cancer AND to RSVP for the #chifems April Tweetup!

The Impact of Twitter on Feminism: Its Facilitations & Limitations by Emily Heroy

Feminism makes it way all across the internet–in universities all over the world, news articles posted online, in forums, on Facebook, and (as the title suggests), Twitter. I’ve talked about the impact of social media and feminism in a video interview I did awhile back. But for this post, I want to stress the impact of Twitter on feminism.

Teenagers and Reading by Justine Larbalestier

1. There seems to be an implicit assumption that all teenagers are the same.

2. There’s also an assumption in all these discussions about YA that it is primarily read by teenagers.

3. Another assumption is that a) only reading fiction counts and b) reading is better for you than any other pastime.

4. Then there’s the assumption that there is such a thing as good writing and bad writing and we all agree on what those are.

Smarts, books, teens and fairy dust by Chally

There’s a particular trend in the challenging of teenagers’ reading choices. Everything teenagers read – or everything teenagers are supposedly reading – is baaaaad. It’s immoral! Or it’s sapping their minds! Or they could be reading something better! say the older folk. We must question where such valuation of these books comes from. Is there something particularly wrong with Harry Potter or Twilight?

Beyond the Pale: Is white the new black? by Kelefa Sanneh via The New Yorker

In a marvellously splenetic essay, “On Being White . . . And Other Lies,” James Baldwin argued that America had, really, “no white community”—only a motley alliance of European immigrants and their descendants, who made a “moral choice” (even if they didn’t realize it) to join a synthetic racial élite. And, in the nineteen-nineties, a cohort of scholars took up Baldwin’s charge, popularizing a field of research that came to be known as whiteness studies. In 1994, the white labor historian David R. Roediger published an incendiary volume, “Towards the Abolition of Whiteness.” Paying special attention to unions and strikes, he traced the unsteady growth of American whiteness, a category that eventually included many previous identities that had once been considered marginal: Irish, Italian, Polish, Jewish. “It is not merely that whiteness is oppressive and false; it is that whiteness is nothing but oppressive and false,” he wrote. “Whiteness describes, from Little Big Horn to Simi Valley, not a culture but precisely the absence of culture. It is the empty and therefore terrifying attempt to build an identity based on what one isn’t and on whom one can hold back.”

What Makes a Great Teacher? by Amanda Ripley via The Atlantic

For years, the secrets to great teaching have seemed more like alchemy than science, a mix of motivational mumbo jumbo and misty-eyed tales of inspiration and dedication. But for more than a decade, one organization has been tracking hundreds of thousands of kids, and looking at why some teachers can move them three grade levels ahead in a year and others can’t. Now, as the Obama administration offers states more than $4 billion to identify and cultivate effective teachers, Teach for America is ready to release its data.

Five Years by Danine Spencer

Sunday was the anniversary of a really good day. A great day, in fact. It was the fifth anniversary of the day I was admitted to Froedtert Hospital in Milwaukee, Wis., where I where I stayed for the next two months. I’m sure most people wouldn’t commemorate the anniversary of the day they entered a hospital for two months, but April 11, 2005, was a day that changed my life.

Guest Post: Interview with Julie Zilinger, teenage editor of top feminist blog, the Fbomb from Veronica Arreola

We had the opportunity to talk to one of the busiest (and youngest) bloggers on the web, Julie Zeilinger, sole founder of the Fbomb, a feminist blog for teenagers. Let us rephrase: while the blog may be run by a teenager and posted from a teenage perspective, the content is relevant for any feminist young and old.  Zeilinger attracts an international array of young feminists while posting from Pepper Pike, Ohio. In this interview, she tells us how her feminist outlook was shaped,  juggling school, the blog and the way her peers and parents view her.

SAFER: Beyond the Campus by Amanda ReCupido

I recently volunteered with SAFER (Students Active for Ending Rape), where I’ll be writing a weekly blog post that collects news of sexual assault from “beyond the campus” (their mission is to improve college sexual assault policies). Below is my first post, cross-posted here.

Food and Moral Weight by s.e. smith

But the thing I really like about Michelle is that she talks about the structural systems behind the food we eat, and she specifically addresses and refutes the commonly held idea that individual eaters should be held morally culpable for the system they are trapped in. She does not, in other words, think it’s very productive to judge people who don’t have a lot of choice when it comes to what they get their stomachs around. In fact, she thinks, as I do, that it’s actually pretty counterproductive to be berating people for not eating “right” when “right” may not be an option for them.

Take Care of Your Eyes! by Danine Spencer

More women than men are diagnosed with eye diseases such as glaucoma, cataracts, macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy

Women may experience changes in vision in various stages of their lives including pregnancy and post-menopause.

More than 2.3 million women (out of 3.6 million people total) live with visual impairment, including blindness

6 million women (vs 3 million men) have dry eye syndrome, a condition where not enough natural tears are produced.

Day of Silence by s.e. smith

Bullying kills. This is not just about kids being kids. It is about unparalleled viciousness and horrific behaviour. It is about violence and rape and hatred. It is about school districts which stand by and do nothing while their students are literally bullied to death and people are begging for help; the ‘not my business’ attitude harms youths who are being bullied in particular because they are counting on the adults around them to do the right thing and when they don’t it is an act of betrayal. An act which can’t be made up later, when the victim is dead, I would like to point out.

Following up on the F Conference by Chally

But a problem with feminism is that those “other” issues get treated as pet issues that mainstream feminism can pick up once in a while for minority points and drop again. And the sad thing is, intersectionality isn’t that hard a tool to employ. There are so many conventional sites of feminist activism that could centre, for instance, disability along with gender, but just don’t.

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Remember that teacher I was talking about here? The latest I heard is that he is finishing up the year, but not recommended for tenure and not coming back next year.

Honestly, I don’t know enough about the situation from an administrative standpoint to make any intelligent comments about this decision, and I really don’t think that a Facebook page made by some former students helped make that decision, either.

However, I remain disappointed in those who participated in this. You think you can put up a page and have it for a while and then take it down and poof, it’s gone. Well, that isn’t the case, and the sooner this is learned, the better. All those pictures on your profile pages? All that stuff you write that you think no one reads? It doesn’t go away. And with the new privacy policy, Facebook retains the right to use that stuff, too. What was done has implications beyond your reach, and all I’m asking is that you realize that and think about it the next time you’re angry about something.

I know several of my students were upset by my post, and will be upset about this post, too. I’ve heard from a few of them. Some of them are angry that I would “choose the teacher’s side.” Let me be clear: when it comes to a person’s rights and life, I will always be on the side of the person. No matter the crime, every person has the right to feel safe and be granted a fair “trial” or whatever you want to call this, and, especially, not to have hateful things said about him or her on the Internet.

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A little while ago, I wrote a few posts about teaching everyday activism to my sophomores.  (here and here)  For that lesson, I used an article from Gender Across Borders about Miep Gies.  The second-to-last paragraph in this article reads:

I wonder how the world would respond to Gies’ actions today. Much has changed in the way social justice advocates promote their causes. Today, activism is loud and intentional. Often, activism is misguided and misses the point. And though there are countless activists engaging in critical social justice work — work that they truly care about — activism today isn’t necessarily challenging. One can organize marches, distribute petitions, facilitate dialogues, and even blog about justice and oppression — all of these things are valuable to activism. But all of these things can also be put away at the end of the day, or forgotten about during a week when other life stresses take priority. Hiding families in one’s attic can never be ignored. If Miep Gies had set aside her activist efforts for even a moment, the people she was protecting would have been placed in immediate danger. (emphasis mine)

I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately, and about how there have been times that I’ve taken a break from blogging or gone on a much-needed vacation or shifted my focus to something that needs to get done right away.  I sometimes think about myself and my needs before those of others (For example, I am not waiting to get married until everyone has the right, although I’m unconvinced that waiting to get married until everyone has the right would be activism; more on that later).  But does that mean I can just turn off my activism?

If there has been anything that I’ve learned from the participants in my feminist blogging interview, it has been that you cannot turn off the feminism.  It permeates everything you do and see, and even if your posts are not overtly feminist or political in nature, they are still a part of feminist activism because the lens does not go away.  And just writing using that lens as a way to critique the world is activism.

So, isn’t just living my life as a feminist and as a feminist role-model activism?  I can’t turn it off!  Being a feminist is in my being, in my soul.  I can’t even watch shows or listen to music anymore without thinking about the feminist implications of it, and I usually can’t even stop the comments about it from coming out of my mouth anymore.  Sure, it isn’t Miep Gies style activism, but it is still activism every day that is, it seems, impossible to walk away from.  Maybe I’m walking away from my blogging for a few days at a time, but I don’t walk away from the way I live my life.  I can’t.  And I bet you can’t either.  (Shoot.  I can’t even get my picture taken without analyzing the situation.)

I’m not trying to say that what we’re doing is as grand a gesture as Miep Gies.  It isn’t.  But how many of us have been called upon to do something that huge?  And who is to say we wouldn’t if we could?  The point is that, like Miep Gies, we are also not walking away from our activism, ever.  Just in a different way.

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This is a cross-post from Equality 101.

You know those days when everything just lines up perfectly and all your synapses start firing and things just connect? Yesterday was one of those days. It started with Adam’s thought-provoking post from yesterday and a conversation that keeps reoccurring with my students, continued during my grad class last night, and a conversation with Tim afterwards.

When I ask my students what they want to see from a teacher – and I do this often, whether because I sense the need that they need to talk, or because it fits in with a lesson we’re doing, or because they volunteer the information – they always start by saying that good teachers understand them.

I might be bold in including myself in the “good teacher” category, but I must ask a pressing question: Do we, as good teachers, really understand our students? I mean really understand them.

Most teachers were students that could stand – maybe even enjoyed – going to school. If we didn’t, there’s no way we would have moved on to get the college education required for a teaching certificate. We are the ones who could afford that college education in the first place, and if we couldn’t afford it, we had the means and resources to take out loans. We are the ones that want to instill our passion for learning into our students. We are the ones who had a passion for learning instilled in us in the first place.

Let’s face it: we are probably much more privileged than most of our students. I, for one, grew up in an entirely different situation than most of the students in my classes. Growing up, I experienced all sorts of privilege: white privilege, thin privilege, socioeconomic privilege… heck, I even had both parents living with me through high school. The list can go on and on, but just by growing up in a different place during a different generation in a different situation, I experienced life in an entirely different way than my students. So when they come in wanting to talk about their problems and issues and lives, the truth is that I can’t even come close to understanding.

I can sympathize, but I don’t think they want my pity. I can listen, which might be all they need, but they might need more. I can care, which I do – probably more than they know. But, honestly, I can’t understand.

I’m not saying that Adam’s student’s disposition after the incident excuses him from talking back to a teacher unnecessarily; we still need to hold our students to the highest expectations regarding academics and behavior. But I am saying that we could go a long way to acknowledge the fact that most of us truly don’t know our students, although we do our best to try to reach them, inspire them, educate them, and care about them.

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Image via Wikipedia

I have written before about The Laramie Project.  Please take a few seconds to read that post – especially the comments – before reading this one.

This Valentine’s Day, I was fortunate enough to see a former student in a production of The Laramie Project.  It was, quite honestly, one of the most wonderful moments of my life.  As a teacher, you always know that you’re doing important and meaningful things, but it is not often that you get to see just how important and meaningful these events really were.

I was accompanied to this show by Tim, who had never seen the play even after as much as I talked about it, and another former student, Mike, who was also cast in our production of the play before it was canceled.  We were able to have a late lunch with Mike and Collin (the student who was in this production of the play) and we reminisced a bit about the show and about what it meant to them to hear that it was canceled.  I knew it upset them, but I don’t know if I ever knew the extent to which it upset them.  And I don’t think I let on to them how much it upset me.

When the show was canceled, that night and for about three days afterward, I had to sleep on my couch with the TV on so I would have something to concentrate on besides the thoughts running through my head.  I was so sad and felt so helpless.  Here I was, trying to make a difference in these students’ lives, and instead I had just opened them up to the heartbreak and rejection they must have felt.  I felt responsible for it, because I was the one that brought up the idea of this production, knowing full well it may be canceled at any time.

And the worst part about it?  I did nothing.  I didn’t fight the decision.  I tried to tell myself that I couldn’t fight it for a few reasons: 1) I promised those kids a play, and they had seen enough productions canceled during their high school years for one reason or another, so I had an obligation to put on the show.  I asked the students if they wanted to drop out after it was canceled, and none of them did, so we found a new play and moved forward.  2) Quite frankly, I needed the stipend I received for the drama program.  3) I knew I was leaving the school at the end of that year (although the kids did not know that until much later) and, as a second year, non-tenured teacher looking for a new job, I didn’t want to burn any bridges by causing a big stink about it.  But I feel guilty about that a lot.  Here I am, touting myself as an activist, and what did I do?  Nothing.  I pushed forward and did the best I could with my time left at the school, but said nothing about the show until much later.

It didn’t even make any sense that they canceled the play in the first place, and I could have fought it, and fought it well.  The play isn’t really about a gay man; that is simply the backdrop for the event of the murder.  Even Matthew Shepard’s murder is just a backdrop for the townspeople’s feelings.  To quote Mike from yesterday: “The play isn’t even about being gay!  It is about how it’s not OK to beat the [crap] out of someone and leave them alone to die.”  And it really is about that.  About how it’s not OK to hate, and how hate this severe is often ignored until it manifests itself in a violent way like this, and what that hate and its violent manifestation can do to an entire town, an entire nation.  An entire world.  The backdrop to this play could have just as easily been any violent tragedy spurred on by hate.

And, most importantly, the play ends with hope – something on which we must focus if we are going to see any changes made.  Just before the end of the play, Dennis Shepard gives a statement at the trial of Aaron McKinney, saying he will not seek the death penalty in this case, and describing to the audience that Matthew was not alone out there.  He had the beautiful Wyoming countryside and the stars and the moon and the beautiful night sky and the wind and God.

In the face of this terrible tragedy, we see hope.  And, as I saw Collin deliver the last lines of this play, I thought: Maybe in the face of what must have been a tragedy for these students is hope, too.  Maybe they will see changes in their lifetime, and maybe they will be agents of those changes because of their experiences.  And maybe this time, I can help them.

I certainly hope so.

From the program

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But what do I know? I'm just an English teacher.

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