Hard People and Easy People

I’m not easy to live with

I know that it’s true

You’re no picnic either, baby

It’s one of the things I loved about you

                        From “All the Love in the World” by Don Henley

A few weeks ago, I heard someone say that her friend has “hard” kids, meaning that they were difficult to deal with on an emotional level.  That made sense to me:  some kids—and grownups—are high maintenance and some are low maintenance.

When I think about the easy and hard people in my life, I see them on a continuum.   Some are easy most of the time, and it is just certain contexts or situations that make them hard to deal with or be around.  Fewer are easy all the time.  And some are just plain hard. 

What makes a person hard?  Looking at my students, it is mostly about anxiety.  The ones who need constant attention and reassurance, and no matter how much I give, it is not enough.  They are perennially disappointed in me as their teacher, no matter how long the emails and nurturing the dialogue.  It has been a journey for me to figure out that it is their problem, not mine.  I will never fill the gap in their lives.

There’s also the unpredictability factor.  I have been in situations where I thought there was mutual understanding and respect, just to find out that no, the other person does not have the same view of the relationship.  A lot of this is about blindness based on a particular view of the self and of the world. 

Then there are those of us who project their fears onto others.  They interpret any dissonance as a personal slight.  Long ago, I had a colleague, whom I will call Amanda, who was hurt if she thought she was not invited to lunch.  I remained friends with her even when I moved a thousand miles away.  Amanda said she valued our friendship, but I always felt as if I was not living up to her expectations.  It was work to be her friend.   And when I told her I could not fly back to attend her daughter’s wedding, which was during the first weeks of school, she refused to talk to me afterward.  I did not live up to her idea of what friends do.  It was her projection, not any misdeed on my part.  It still feels bad, though.    

My principal used to say that all students brought baggage with them to our alternative school.  My colleagues and I brought our own baggage as well.  In secret, I named our school “the Island of Misfit Toys” because teachers and students were just a bit too weird to be in the mainstream.  It is disingenuous to think that we, as grownups, have left our baggage at some proverbial train station, and thus are easy, leaving our hard parts hidden in the dark recesses of our minds, or the privacy of our families and writing journals. 

Unfortunately, though, we take our baggage with us wherever we go, and it is visible to others who know how and where to look. While I did not have the language at the time, I knew Amanda was hard from the first weeks of working with her.  She felt her colleagues were conspiring against her, and her voicing of those perceptions made her anxiety and fears obvious to the rest of us.   

As for myself, I thought I hid things pretty well until I started taking yoga.   I was horrified to realize my baggage had a physical presence that was visible to my yoga instructors who gently and insistently instructed the class to drop our shoulders, soften our expressions, and unclench our jaws.  It felt like one of my dirty secrets was revealed.  Anybody who knew how to look could see the real me:  I sure ain’t easy. 

So what about you?  Where are you on the continuum of easy and hard?

Life's not Fair.

Life’s not fair.

The answer is:  It depends.

These phrases used to frustrate me, and now frustrate my candidates as they ready themselves for student teaching.  They want things to be smooth and clean.  Predictable.  The textbook/lesson plan/mentor/principal/internet has the magical answer. Given that belief, they feel confident in their ability to teach.  They feel ready to leave the nest and head into the wilds.  And yet, and yet.  They are about to be hit hard with the knowledge of how much work it takes to be a good teacher.  How you plan the best lesson ever, and it will bomb.  How some students will not buy what you are selling, and it has nothing to do with you.  How one reading strategy will not transfer from one text to another, one management tactic will not transfer from one class to another, how your relationships with individuals and classes evolve and devolve in seemingly random ways. 

My cooperating teacher, who became my friend, principal, and first mentor, said it simply: Life’s not fair.  There are many promises based on the same premise as the American Dream:  if you work hard, you will achieve your goals.  If you are fair, respectful, and know your stuff, students won’t smoke pot in the neighbor’s yard, or fight on a school trip, or come to school drunk.  Uh-huh.

But then you will have an oppositional student who later becomes an English teacher, she says, because of you.  Or you will have a candidate who did not get along with either of her cooperating teachers and who is now applying for National Board certification.  These balance the kids you had to kick out of school and the candidates you had to kick out of the program and blame you. 

I remember being shocked at the idea of nature being nondiscriminatory.  I somehow had the idea, perhaps because it was called “Mother Nature,” that nature was benevolent and kind, like some kind of divine goddess with flowers woven in her hair.  It’s taken me a long time to reconcile that nature is many opposite things—beautiful and ugly, calm and violent, loving and angry.  There are patterns, but these patterns are not regular and predictable, as was reiterated this year with its tornadoes, hurricanes, and snowstorms. 

Teaching is like that.  There are patterns, but they are not set in concrete.  No student is the same day after day; no lesson is the same from one year to the next; and no routine is eternally effective. 

While I am happy my candidates feel confident and ready in their pedagogical content knowledge, I also know that they are about to find out the secrets of teaching that keep some of us in the profession and drive others away.  Teaching is unpredictable, and the answer to most questions is…It depends.

Musings on Middle School Students

Middle school kids have a bad reputation.  Supposedly, they are ruled by their hormones, and in general, are a little crazy. 

Looking back at my own experience, that never made sense to me.  If I was ruled by my hormones, I sure didn’t know it.   This could have been because my mother explained sex by talking about eggs, at which point I was confused.  “Like a chicken?”  I asked.  The whole conversation was about fertilization, but I never quite got the connection to my body and a boy’s body until I heard the baseball metaphor.  You know the one:  first base is french, second base is feel…and I’ll stop there.  Listen to Meat Loaf if you need more information.   Boys definitely became more interesting, but looking back on it now, it wasn’t a physical thing, but more of an attention thing.  My first sloppy spin-the-bottle kiss at an eighth grade Halloween party did little to make this change. 

This week, as I observed teacher candidates teach in two different middle schools, I saw clear physical, attitudinal, and cognitive differences from 6^th-8^th grade, and even in the same classroom.   Some of the girls looked like they should be in high school, including the 8^th grader who sat down with a heavy sigh and said to her teacher, who was sitting next to me, “I’m ovulating.”  The boys sitting in her group didn’t blink an eye—not a blush or an eye roll.  Did they understand?  Had their fathers given them the same talk my mother gave to me, so they had no idea what that even meant? 

In contrast, I watched a 7^th grade girl in another class use a broken piece of plastic to search around in one nostril, observe what she found, and then stick it in her mouth. 

I worry about the girls.  Some of them are miles ahead in maturity, height and weight.  Being in middle school must feel like poor fitting jeans, when you move from “juniors” to “misses” and realize that your body has outgrown who you have been for so long.  Middle school, with its necessary structures and explicit rules meant to nurture and support children as they move from childhood to adolescence, must feel restrictive and a bad fit.

But boys can also be mature.  At an urban school, I saw that some of the boys had the name “Jose” etched into their haircuts.  I just assumed there were a lot of Joses in the class.  But when I discovered one of the boys’ names was Francisco, I realized that these kids were paying homage to their friend and classmate who had been killed by a gunman who had come to his front door looking for his brothers.  When Jose opened up the door, he was shot multiple times.  His friends paid tribute to him the only way they knew how.  It was beautiful, and it was heartbreaking.  Death is not unusual to these kids.

The most poignant moment came after class, when three of the boys came over to me and shook my hand.  I have observed teacher candidates for over six years now, and this has never happened.  I was touched by these students’ dignity and adult manners.  These were children, and they took the time to come over and talk to me, even as they were in the midst of being at school and grieving for their friend.  As my mother would say, bless their hearts. 

The Otsuka Effect

Sometimes I tell myself I am just too busy to attend the many events that take place on this campus, as appealing as they often are.  Luckily, I had to attend Julie Otsuka’s talk this week. 

Julie Otsuka wrote When the Emperor Was Divine, this year’s text for Open Books, Open Minds, a campus-wide endeavor to get all faculty and students to read a common book.  As a member of the OBOM Committee, I was skeptical of the book at first, thinking it too quiet for college students, especially the freshmen who are required to read it.  But that was before I read the whole thing and discovered that yes, while it was quiet, it was also powerful. 

This novel tells the tale of a Japanese family sent to the internment camps during World War II.  We hear from each of the family members: the mother, the daughter, the son, and finally, the father.  Julie (after seeing her speak, I can’t bear to call her Otsuka, or even Ms. Otsuka—it feels too formal) said that she did not write the novel to make a political statement, although her grandparents, including her mother, who was 11 at the time, were sent to the camps from 1942-1945.  Instead, she said the novel was a way to get to know her mother.  In fact, Julie hesitated to tell this story at all, as she was not sure she had the right to do so, not having personally experienced the camps herself. 

I appreciated the care and humility with which Julie approached her subject.  For example, she chose not to name the characters not only to represent their loss of identity—the family was assigned a number at the camp—but also to preserve their dignity. As she put it, the characters got to keep their names to themselves.  It was an act of privacy she could offer.  The same thing has happened to me when I have attempted fiction.  My characters rebel against the parameters I have given them and start behaving in unexpected and sometimes disturbing ways.

As a writer who struggled with a 40 page article on-and-off for three years, I felt validated when she said it took her five years to write the book, and two years to finish the long chapter in the middle.  Julie described her writing process, which involved hours in a coffee shop writing longhand, typing up her notes later that night at home, and then going back to the coffee shop to edit.  One paragraph might take a week, and then she might throw it away anyway. 

After her talk, I told a friend that I wanted to be Julie Otsuka when I grew up.  It is not just because my dream has always been to be a professional writer, but because of how she talked about writing.  How she talked about her family.  How she talked about her characters. 

Julie has motivated me to revisit the characters I abandoned months ago and see what surprises they have in store.  I don’t care if the story ever ends, whether it has enough dialogue, scenes, or a believable plot, much less get published.  I just want to see where these characters take me.  Thank you, Julie Otsuka, for your inspiration.  And congratulations on your National Book Award nomination for The Buddha in the Attic.  I look forward to reading it.      

The Legacy of Women

This year’s Nobel Peace Prize winners are all women, which I believe is a first.  The Nobel Committee is to be commended, because this award is well-deserved:  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/08/world/nobel-peace-prize-johnson-sirleaf-gbowee-karman.html?_r=2&hp

Reading these women’s stories got me thinking about my colleagues.   The women in Educational Studies are fierce, smart, ethical, and strong.  In considering the amazing work they do, I am reminded of my own family members.

My mom, Helen, will be turning 77 this week.  She was born and raised in Decatur, Georgia, and spent her girlhood summers in south Georgia. She came up North to Indiana University to get her graduate degree in piano and met an Indiana farm boy in the dorm cafeteria who was working on his MBA.   He bought her first legal drink, along with a bunch of illegal ones before that.  They got married, despite the fact that he was a Yankee.   

What you may not know about southern women of a certain age is that while they may have been bred to be nice, helpful, and all those other traditional feminine qualities, you don’t want to mess with them.  The movie Steel Magnolias didn’t quite capture it, according to Mom, but at least it had the right idea.      

The best example of my mother’s iron will (forget steel—that’s not strong enough) happened before the fall of the Berlin Wall.  She was a church choir director, and also directed a city-wide choir made up of members from many different churches who would sing at special corporate and nonprofit events.  Her church connected with a church in East Germany, and when Mom found out they didn’t have a set of hand bells, she found this upsetting.  EVERY church should have a set of hand bells, as music is an essential part of any church service, and bells were a beautiful and necessary addition.    

Mom spearheaded a monumental fundraising and organizational process, which included booking travel and lodging for 40 people to travel across Germany singing and sightseeing.  Despite all of her preparations, which included plenty of contact with Senator Birch Bayh’s office, they were stopped at Checkpoint Charlie.  The choir spent several scary hours stuck on the bus as the soldiers searched their luggage and rummaged through the velvet-lined cases holding the bells.  I do not know why they finally allowed the Choraliers through the barbed wire and concrete, but I am pretty sure a small gray-haired lady from the South charmed or shamed them into it.  The church congregants were grateful, and the bells continue to ring there, even today.  

My dad is used to strong women.  His mother, Marie, became a schoolteacher in a country school in southern Indiana.  At that time, she did not need a degree to teach (bizarre, I know), but she wanted to be a better teacher and spent her summers at Indiana University and teaching during the school year.  This was in the 1920’s, when very few women earned college degrees.  When she met my grandfather, they had to elope to Kentucky because schoolteachers could not be married.  They came back and she continued to teach for awhile.  Later on, after raising three boys, she retired and wrote columns for local papers on women’s issues. 

While the women in my family would never name themselves as activists, they are strong in their beliefs, their work ethic, and that they have something valuable to contribute to the world.  A worthy legacy indeed.

I want my own laundry basket. Or not.

My cat Juno likes to sleep in a laundry basket on our kitchen table.  If you are not an animal person, or you are a meticulous housekeeper, this probably alarms you on multiple levels.  However, black tumbleweeds of fur rolling across the placemats aside, it is clear that this laundry basket, with just a couple of layers of Nels’ jeans in the bottom, serves as a refuge for Juno.  It is here that she feels safe from any threat, the chief one being her adopted brother, Mr. Spock. 

Mr. Spock is twice her size, and can’t seem to figure out that Juno is neither prey nor predator.  A year of separate feeding stations, litterboxes on two different floors, copious amounts of Feliway (designed to calm cats), and small dosages of Prozac have not alleviated his anxiety and aggression toward her. 

Regardless of whether Spock is around or not, Juno spends most of the daytime hours in her basket.  Sometimes Spock lies on the table outside the basket, all stretched out, but that doesn’t seem to bother Juno.  She’ll open her green eyes, yawn hugely, and then snuggle even deeper into the jeans.  The basket is a safety zone.

When my friend Jenn came over to work on an accreditation report on a recent Saturday, we decided that we wanted our own laundry baskets.   A place where there are no demands made, no emails to answer, no list of tasks to be checked off.  A place to curl up and observe the world outside, or maybe just relax.

But a recent conversation with one of my favorite teachers got me to quit looking at Juno with envy when I leave the house for work.  This teacher said that she just recently went to Iggy’s Doughboys in Warwick, and in spite of living in Rhode Island for 25 years, that was her first time at that venerable institution.  She said, “I just keep going around and around on my donkey path on the East Side.”

Those words resonated with me.  I have my own donkey path up and down the I-195 corridor.  Home-RIC, RIC-Home, visit some schools as needed, occasionally go out with friends, usually in Providence.  When I have to go over to South County, I get nervous because the way is unfamiliar.  Part of my anxiety stems from the fact that Rhode Island is chintzy with street signs and I have no sense of direction.   I often feel uncertain or lost, even with my GPS. 

My donkey path, though, is not just literal.  It’s metaphorical too.  I used to have a friend who would say “I’m a slave to my body” when I would tell her about some crazy diet I was on.  Her point was that she was going to eat what her body wanted, while I was trying to force mine to eat more cabbage and less chocolate.  I’m still not a slave to my body (it gets all the chocolate it wants, though), but I’m a slave to my routine.  I wonder why I can’t think of anything to do on Saturday or Sunday afternoon but work, and then I blame work.  As the saying goes, though, “It’s not you, work, it’s me.”     

Yup, it IS me.  As emotionally demanding and time-sucking as this job can be, I can still choose to have a rich and productive life, and  say no to things that I don’t really need to do.  Nobody is keeping score but me.    

Somehow, I have to break my weekend pattern of resisting going anywhere that requires makeup or extroversion.  I want to go to the beach.  I want to go to the zoo, King Richard’s Faire, and the Factory of Horrors.  I want to go to plays, movies, museums, drinks and dinner.  I want to go to Boston, Mystic, and Concord, MA, to visit my old friends the Transcendentalists, or maybe just Iggy’s.  So let me know if you are interested, and we can go together.

The Quick Giving Heart of a Kid

 I have a crush on someone.  Don’t worry, Nels knows. 

This is not my first. That was back in the mid-90’s, when we went to see a then-unknown blues musician named Keb’ Mo’.  Keb was onstage at Second Story, a somewhat small, somewhat dirty, and seemingly unheated venue above the only gay bar in southern Indiana.  He was by himself, on a stool with a battered acoustic guitar, jaunty hat, and smile as wide as the Atlantic Ocean.  Not an ounce of pretension, just telling stories and singing the blues as if they were actually happy songs.  I may have had a couple of beers when I turned to Nels and said, “Honey, I’m leaving you for Keb’ Mo’.”  And he said back to me, “No, hon, I’m leaving YOU for Keb’ Mo’.”   

Fast forward 15 years later to my new crush, Taylor Goldsmith.  I first heard him in the band Middle Brother, which is made up of three guys from different bands:  Taylor is in Dawes, Matt Vasquez is in Delta Spirit, and the local connection is John McCauley of Deer Tick, which is based in Providence.  I fell in love with their CD, and then fell a little more in love when we saw them on a sticky-hot day at the Newport Folk Festival in August.  Seeing these three guys having a blast on stage, with the crowd singing along, gave me goose bumps in the 90 degree heat.  Their sense of fun, musicianship, and songwriting made me want to invite them over to drink beers all night on the deck. 

Seeing Middle Brother live was the impetus for ordering the Dawes CD, which I’ve been listening to ever since.  It’s my album of the year, with Middle Brother a close second.  Some songs sound like Fleetwood Mac, some bring to mind Jackson Browne, and still others remind me of Warren Zevon.  This guy, this KID, Taylor, writes exceptional lyrics full of melancholy, longing, and the tension between helplessness and anger.  I’m a sucker for a good line, and every single song is chock full of ‘em.  He articulates emotions of loss, pain, and loneliness in concrete and visual ways.  Here’s one example from “If I Wanted Someone”:

If I wanted someone to clean me up I’d

Find myself a maid

If I wanted someone to spend my money

I wouldn’t need to get paid

If I wanted someone to understand me

I’d have so much more to say

I want you to make the days move easy

http://youtu.be/qZJWeFU9gA4

Now that’s a love song that isn’t treacle-y or overdone.  He doesn’t want someone to fix him, he wants somebody to just be there. 

He has other words of wisdom that really resonate as I struggle between what I have to do and what I want to do. These are from “Coming Back to a Man”:

You’re still caught somewhere between

The plans and the dreams

So that neither end up turning out right

http://youtu.be/mKgTBId6pF0

   But the very best song is the last one, “A Little Bit of Everything.” Here, he weaves two disparate stories together:  one is a guy who is about to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge, and the second is about a young woman planning her wedding.  Taylor brings their experiences together with this final verse:

All these psychics and these doctors

They’re all right and they’re all wrong

It’s like trying to make out every word

When they should simply hum along

It’s not some message written in the dark

Or some truth that no one’s ever seen

It’s a little bit of everything

http://youtu.be/pcaJsUNA_ww

As Nels said, “I’m not a poetry dude, but that dude writes poetry.”  

Yes, indeed. 

The Lousy Competitor

Competition brings out the worst in me.  One of my earliest memories is screaming and crying after my dad beat me at Candyland.  I may have thrown the board across the room in a thwarted four year old rage.  It was MY game, and therefore I should win, was my reasoning.

 Later, I learned craftiness.  After my dad and my brother would beat me in Connect Four, I would steal their methods and use them on my unsuspecting friends.  This carried over to the badminton court, when my brother would send the birdie flying at my face at what seemed 100 mph, and my only  choice was to get hit or duck.  I tried that on my friends too, and it was no wonder they chose not to play with me anymore. 

Due to lack of athletic ability and a preference for books over people, I never played on any teams growing up.   Thus, I never learned that it was possible to win graciously, lose gracefully, and remain friends with your competitors.  Now when I watch elite athletes lose track and field events by hundredths of a second and then hug the winner, I’m in awe on two levels.  First, if I lost anything by less than a second, I would be very upset with myself.   Second, I would not be hugging the sweaty winner.  I’d be saying, “Give me that gold medal, sister, or I’ll rip it off your neck.”

That’s an exaggeration of course.  My mother would never allow that kind of behavior.  And my running career is not exactly about winning anything, much less by seconds.  No, instead my husband, who is a terrific cheerleader, urges me on with “You’ll finish in the top half of the race!” and “You’ll be in the top third of your age group!” 

Naturally, I want to get faster, and I have over the years.  I have cut 20 minutes off my half-marathon time and 8 minutes off my 5K pace (another nugget from my partner, “Your top speed is very close to your bottom speed”).  Now, though, as I rack up the miles in anticipation of our second marathon in October, I’m faced with only two choices to get faster:  I can run more miles or I can eat less.  In theory, I would like to run more miles, but I already run between 40-50 a week, and that takes up a significant amount of time.  The losing weight part is even less attractive.  While the experts say that for every pound lost, a runner gains two seconds per mile, it just doesn’t seem worth it.  I like to eat with frequency and gusto, which is partly why I started running in the first place. 

So, on the eve of my fifth half-marathon, let us hope that I PR (set a personal record).  If not, it’s possible that I might cry and throw things. 

I Ain't No Musician

I’m not a musician, but I’ve lived with them all my life.   My mother, a church choir director and piano teacher, exposed me to hymns, spirituals, and various kinds of classical music.  My sister, an opera singer who teaches singing at Indiana-Purdue Fort Wayne, taught me to appreciate musical theatre (sorry, sis, never got the opera).  My brother, a drummer, exposed me to the Doobie Brothers and Jackson Browne.  Various boyfriends led me to a diverse range of music ranging from Motley Crue to Led Zeppelin.  No wonder those relationships didn’t work out.  My husband, a trombonist and singer, introduced me to the Grateful Dead, Jimmy Buffett, and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, along with countless others in the singer-songwriter category. 

Aside from a one-year experiment with the viola in middle school (can you imagine middle school orchestra concerts?), I have never been a musician.  But I was a deejay in clubs when I was 18.  Back in the 80’s, you had to be 21 to get into bars in Indiana, but if you were a performer, you could be 18.  Being a deejay taught me to find themes and patterns in music and put them together.  Keeping people on the dance floor was the sign of success.  On a personal level, I always reached beyond the dance hits to the songs that told stories or had some wisdom to offer.  I’m a sucker for a good line.

Music has the power to help us name experiences, speak back to injustice, and unite. On the tenth anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001, I look back on some of the music that offered—and still provides-- connection, understanding, and healing.

Jackson Browne’s rendition of Little Steven’s “I Am a Patriot” is an anthem about refusing to be categorized (I ain’t no Democrat/I sure ain’t no Republican) and yet feel a sense of pride and belonging to the United States.   http://youtu.be/saYvWAVmT_s

There is no doubt that New York suffered the largest loss—not just on a human scale, but on an identity scale.  Those two iconic, seemingly permanent buildings represented so much of the swagger of that city.  To have them vanish in the space of an hour created a gap that will never be filled.

Bruce Springsteen’s “The Rising” is a triumphant homage to the American spirit, writ large. It’s a perfect adrenalin rush that addresses the need to do something:  http://youtu.be/eNnB4dkVRJI

On the other end of the spectrum, you have Loudon Wainwright III’s quiet song, “No Sure Way.”  He was on the subway when the attacks began, and tells the story of that eerie experience.  As the train went under the WTC, he writes: The lights were on/it somehow seemed obscene. http://youtu.be/q3EIVKnyLCQ

And then you have those who use their songwriting and harmonies to describe what it felt like afterward:  a fear that things will never get better, and a profound hope and sincere belief that yes, they indeed will.  The Eagles’ “Hole in the World” asks us to not let the hole get bigger and deeper, but to heal the wound by understanding the bigger picture: Anger/is just love disappointed. http://youtu.be/haNpuHZam40

And then you have Girlyman’s “Amaze Me” which asks us to appreciate all the beautiful parts of where we have the privilege to live: http://youtu.be/UdXAXJ21AIY

When I think about how these songs still have the power to enrich my understanding of what happened on Sept. 11, 2001, I wonder if music can also heal us in this extended dark period when people are losing what they own, not to mention a sense of identity and belonging—that they have an important place in this world.  There is no giant catastrophe, no one event where we can all share the same sorrow and subsequent unity.  But the songs above demonstrate that we know how to heal, we know how to connect, and we know how to make sense of experience.  You do not have to be a musician to appreciate all the different ways music serves us. 

Preparation Metaphors

Preparing for a new year of teaching reminds me of painting.  There is a ton of prep work before you get to dip your roller into the paint and smooth it onto the wall, watching the character of the place change, knowing that this is something you will make your own.  Teaching and painting can be divided into three parts:  pre-preparation, which is all about the gathering of resources and wits; preparation, which involves concrete moves to get ready, and then the act itself: when everything comes together.  Or not.

Pre-preparation for teaching

-In the spring, I observe student teachers’ strengths, weaknesses, and levels of preparation, and take mental notes about what needs to be added to practicum.  It all seems so obvious with the clarity of hindsight.

-I submit a list of teachers to the OPP for practicum.  I email the department heads, they talk to their faculty, and then I submit a list of high school and middle school teachers, knowing that this will change in the fall.   

-I start to keep notes about what books I want to keep or discard, read other possible articles to include, attempt to learn new technologies (this year I have been exposed to Prezi, TRWorkbench, Capzles, and wikibooks, to name a few), and add ideas based on conversations with colleagues, teachers, and students as well as from attending conferences and visiting professional websites.  I order books and cringe at how much I’m asking my candidates to spend.

Pre-preparation for painting

-First I talk to anybody who will listen (friends, neighbors, the mailman) about how much I hate the existing color in the master bedroom (lavender paint with flowered wallpaper, if you must ask).  I obsess about color, considering the light (not much), the bathroom color (apple-green), and the shape of the room (slanted ceiling on one side).  I buy a comforter and decided to match the color to that, but the comforter is mainly green and I’m pretty sure it violates all kinds of laws to have a green bathroom and a green bedroom in close proximity. 

-I finally decide on colors (dark yellow and lighter yellow with white trim for the chair rail) and then choose carpet to match.  I thought it would be simple.  Give me a Berber whose color will conceal cat hairball stains.  However, it is far more complicated. There are many colors and qualities to Berber, and then I found out it’s the pad that matters, not the carpet.  So I went with a brownish shag in honor of my 70’s childhood.   

Preparation for Teaching

-I write the syllabus and make agonizing decisions about what to keep and what to cut.  I move the fieldwork schedule around testing.  Then I realize I don’t have a classroom.  So I exchange emails with Dennis McGovern, who is none too happy about this. 

-I create a survey in Survey Monkey (http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/D8QCMYB) and also provide an optional personality test (http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/JTypes2.asp).  This will help me make suitable placements, not turn into Godzilla when someone is absent (perhaps she has a health or family issue), and maybe, just maybe, someone will take the personality test and realize they are not cut out for teaching English before April (this happened last year. Not kidding). 

-Then Irene visits.  Not only do I lose two days of teaching, I also realize, after I sent the syllabus to my candidates, that I had us going to school on Labor Day.  I condense three days of teaching into two.

Preparation for Painting

-In my house, I am the Wallpaper Remover.  I attempt to take down the wallpaper by rubbing some fabric softener on it and scraping away.  However, someone must have used Gorilla Glue to apply this paper, and thus I make little headway.  Luckily, I am able to borrow a wallpaper steamer, which makes the work slightly faster, but also very sweaty.  I track wallpaper strips all over the house.  I do love the satisfying feeling of big sheets of paper coming off, kind of like peeling your own sunburned skin. 

-And then it becomes clear why people put up wallpaper in the first place.  There are holes, nicks, and bumps in the walls.  At least the walls were finished, which was not the case with the bathrooms.  And that is why there is still one bathroom with wallpaper in this house.  I have yet to summon the courage to take down wallpaper again.

Teaching

-Once class begins, I relax.  I realize the students are just as anxious as I am, and on the first day we enjoy muffins from LaSalle Bakery (something I do every year to lull them into thinking that maybe this year won’t be so hard after all—insert evil laugh here).  We start building our community, and I realize that oh yeah, I really do know and like my job. 

Painting

-I watch the large swoops of the roller, as well as the painstaking edging process along corners, chair rails, and doors.  Just like in teaching, there are places of expansion and sloppy joy, and also places of precision and detail.  And then, after awhile, I grow comfortable in this new place, just like I grow comfortable with my new students.  The choices have been made.  There is no going back.  This is where we are.