my weekend checklist:
a five-mile foothill hike,
four tickets to Spain
“This is an FBQ conversation,” she begins. And her artistry, backed by data, emphasizes the urgency.
The urgency. It is mid-October, and I’ve seen my principal cry too many times in the course of twelve months.
The urgency of children who have escaped a war zone, who have traveled on three city buses to escape their neighborhood school, who have escaped poverty with our food bank, to be on the tips of our tongues as we sit in the come-down-to-Jesus choir room, AKA, staff meeting with bad news.
This isn’t the day after the election when our hijab-wearing girls were too fearful to take a bus to school, when our students of color were threatened by now-openly-racist citizens, when we were lost souls in a city school surrounded by bigotry.
This isn’t the almost-there rating of last year when we met in our usual fourth floor, everything’s-going-to-be-fine lunchroom location.
This is a Friday-the-thirteenth, tell-it-like-it-is, FBQ meeting. The urgent meeting.
We face ourselves and then each other. Is it you? Is it me? Is it them? Is it us?
We argue in the hallway after, fuck the contract hours on a Friday afternoon when we’re supposed to be at FAC. “You know those charter schools eliminate kids left and right. One infraction, gone. SPED? Gone. Detention for forgetting a pencil and you don’t show up? Gone. Charter schools in the poor neighborhoods? Don’t even try to argue, I looked at all the scores last night. RED.”
We are ourselves, wholly ourselves, and we promise to honor her FBQ request.
But this room will be on our minds for the weekend, for the week, for the rest of the year. This conversation, this seeking of solutions. This, what-did-we-do-wrong-this-time question that sits at the back of our minds every damn day when kids don’t show up, when kids say, “Fuck this class,” when kids come crying about their dying mothers, their far-from-home brothers, when kids wish nothing more than one percentage point higher than what they have earned.
“Can we turn the qualitative values of this school–I mean, look how many of you are wearing purple today–into something quantitative?”
FBQ: Family, Be Quiet.
I want to stand up and shout: You can’t measure this. You can’t quantitatively, statistically, mathematically, measure the amount of emotion that drips down her cheeks, that causes me to clench my fists and hold back my own tears, that makes us question the very effort and belief system we put in place with every moment of every lesson we work so hard to place before them.
You cannot measure, quantitatively, LOVE.
Family, Begin Questioning.
Start with:
1) Why do we vilify teachers?
2) Why do we blame students?
3) Why do we quantify humans?
I want to change her acronym. I want to change them all. To mesh the SLO with the CLO, to move LEAP into SIOP, to blend FAC with FBQ. I want to change colors from yellow to green to the beautiful blue sky that hovers over my beautiful school, with its red-yellow leaves just making that blue pop like a world you’ve yet to see.
It’s Friday.
Be Qualitative.
Because you can’t quantify love. And isn’t that what matters?
at least fall colors
pretty my blue-sky city
(there’s no place like home)
The weight of it burdens me before dark: the students who struggle, the teachers who I’m asked to support when I can barely support myself, the spinning cycle of meeting after meeting that leads to nowhere. Fast.
Coming home to kids crying over homework, kids spending their lives addicted to screens, to screens that fill my world with the darkness that will always be The Trump Era.
If only I had the guts of Eminem and could shout to the world, “I’m drawing in the sand a line, you’re either for or against.”
If only I had the guts to face the days I face with that same passion, that same tenacity.
Today I pulled out a trick that I learned from an old teacher during my first year of teaching. A kid who wouldn’t sit down, who wouldn’t stay on task, whose house I’ve called too many times, whose hallway conversations have led to nowhere. A kid throwing papers and pestering his friend across the room.
“M, how fast do you think you can run to the end of that hallway and back?”
His incredulous stare went from my eyes to my watch.
“I’m timing you.”
And so he ran. A couple of other boys standing in the hall whispered, “You’re allowing him to do that?” A teacher came out of her room to investigate. But he ran. Fast.
And when he came back to class? He wrote me the first full paragraph of the school year. Therefore, that one small action, that one small accomplishment, made my fifth period a relative success today for the first time, eight weeks in.
Yet the failures stack up all around me. Student test scores. Apathetic teachers. Overburdened teachers. Unfilled forms and lost money. My oldest trapped in a class she can’t succeed in. My youngest trapped in a cycle of doubt over math skills. My house trapped in a temperature of sixty-four degrees and no furnace repairman available till the end of the month.
And it’s getting cold. Fast.
Yet the sun still shines, as it always will in Colorado, so often mocking my mood. The stars come up over our street where six of our kids run up and down the block making merriment with the neighbors, where Isabella is asked to babysit, where our kitties keep us warm and this is the first day this week I’ve had to make dinner thanks to the blessing of another family who shares our home and a mother who knows how to cook better than me.
And my principal, the realist, the perfectionist that she is, has praised me once again.
So the burden of early-morning doubt may still wake me in the morning. I will tear myself up over scoring teachers and wish I could be a better teacher myself. I will go to meetings where I will likely feel inadequate, where I will feel like we’re getting nowhere. I will coax Riona through subtracting fractions and give in to Mythili’s Halloween costume extravagance. I will run Girl Scout meetings and hope that these young minds capture, for a moment, the power of feminine collectivity.
I might even ask M to run up and down the hallway again. Fast.
Because sometimes we just need to draw the line in the sand and run. For or against the hope that tomorrow will be better than today.
no pictures today
just the melancholic doubt
that plagues all teachers
snow burst October
in a broken-furnace house
(they don’t seem to mind)
even with stolen poems
lost from early morning tears
(and no sign of lattes in sight)
i’ve found my daughter
waiting behind the burgeoning dawn
with her gumption in her palm
ready to take over the world
i carry them in the back of my mind
as green grasses give way to fall
in a burst of golden red peaks
that hide the city skyline
from a cloudless day
my girls, shared beds, shared worldview
nearly-perfect grades but better yet…
nearly-perfect playmates
to everyone they meet
they make my steps easier
on these long days into night
when all we want to find
is the poem we lost before dawn
when the flu hits home
at least Kiko can be nice
purring for a day
I’m thinking about Spain tonight. Not just because I’m already planning our summer road trip across the Iberian Peninsula. Not because Castellano is on the tip of my tongue–because it’s not.
I’m thinking about the garage full of trash bags that I gave to the Goodwill before we went to Spain. Old toys, books, clothes, unwanted small appliances, furniture, shoes, pillows… JUNK. About fitting our lives in five giant suitcases, five backpacks, and an airplane across the sea. About coming back to all of our items left in our house… that was no longer ours.
The piano. The maple nightstands that stood on either side of my parents’ bedroom in that custom-built two-story in upstate New York. The dining set we picked out soon after our wedding, its oak pedestal and matching chairs a testament to the solidity of our marriage. The most comfortable recliners a body could rest in.
Our beds. Our patio set. Our entertainment center. Every last comfort, joy… empty from our rental house upon our return.
How we begged and borrowed items to make a home once we returned from Spain. How we spent the “advance” of my first salary to buy double-over-double bunk beds so that our girls might share a room.
How, when we went there, with everything packed in luggage, we had to adapt to uncomfortable furniture, to a mattress on the floor for a bed, to no closets, no bath, no extra bathroom, no dryer, no dishwasher, no place to fit our lives into.
And how our girls… adapted. How they made friends, made paper cutouts to decorate the walls, painted ceramic eggs from the “Chino” to hang on the tiny plastic Christmas tree we found in the wardrobe, sat next to one of the space heaters during rainy winter months when the wind whipped through the frail windows, learned how to wash dishes and wait hours for clothes to dry and speak Castellano more fluently than me by year’s end.
And the aftereffects of Spain, of moving out… and moving back. Of trying to pick up the pieces of the life we’d left, trying to reposition ourselves amongst our friends, our family, our view of the world, trying new careers and new colleagues and a new house that was ours… and wasn’t ours.
That is why. Spain is why, five years later, we can make space in our two-bathroom, five-bedroom home for six other people. Why when I drove a couple miles today to pay a neighbor $80 for an extra refrigerator, her jaw dropped when I said what it was for, her “For Sale” sign in the yard of a house just like mine because she, her husband and two boys “just need more space.” Why, after sharing one bedroom for a year and one bathroom and one suitcase full of clothes, my girls could move things over, purge, split their beds, their time, their Americanness, to make room for a whole other family in our home.
I may not have learned Castellano. I may not have r’s rolling off of my tongue. My girls may not remember more than what a croqueta is.
But they know what it means to make a sacrifice. To give up a piece of themselves. To move. To transition. To lose and gain friends. To try new foods and new schools and new sleeping arrangements.
That is why this revised chore chart, designed by Mythili and with input from six other voices, is my picture for today.
There is beauty in those three Expo colors. Compromise. Adjustment. Initiative.
Adaptability. With a little bit of gumption and Castellano on the side, just for good measure.
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