sometimes heartbreak melds
into a silver-lined sun
to set a new day
Let it Pour
sometimes heartbreak melds
into a silver-lined sun
to set a new day
Author: lovizmytrio
An Educational Cocktail
You can enter any cafe in Spain and you will probably find the same two drinks: cheap Pilsner beer and local wine (OK, you can at least choose between red and white!). The Spanish palette for mixed drinks is limited to adding liqueur to coffee, it seems, and their availability of decent beer choices is abominable. But when it comes to education, Spaniards love a good cocktail.
Here are some instructions for making an educational cocktail, shaken, not stirred.
Ingredients:
1. Homogeneous groups of students segregated by ability who remain together all day long for years at a time, and are allowed to choose their own seats.
2. Heterogeneous teachers who range in age, management, and educational methodology.
3. A school building that does not provide resources such as technology, textbooks, government-funded lunch, or air conditioning.
Instructions:
1. Place all students in one classroom. Wait for intermittently ringing bells that will shake them up out of their seats while teachers dance through hallways crowded with other teachers and random students who have PE that period, to arrive and wrap the students up in a somewhat-chilled glass with a pinch of salt along the rim.
2. Spend three hours each week trying to settle the above shaking, using the cold stirrer of the teacher’s little authority to embed knowledge enough of one subject area to make a decent mixed drink, full of flavor and memorable enough to spill out onto the streets with jubilation.
3. Subdue them on four occasions per trimester with exams that make up the stark majority of their grades, consisting of arduous essay questions, but only about ten per exam. Their flavors will bleed through classes so that they will begin to taste more like eraser remnants than a decently mixed drink.
4. Shake up the cocktail a little just when the school year is getting cold by surprising only select groups of students in one grade of primary and one of secondary with the annual government test, whose topics, flavors, and question amounts you will never know or begin to be able to prepare for, similar to visiting the cafes in every city in Spain who may or may not have a menu, use local vocabulary non-translatable in any software to identify food items, and whose waiters never return after bringing you your order. (Surprise, surprise, we all like to guess what it is we’re bringing to our lips!)
5. If the cocktail spills, you may clean it up and refill it once, for free, but only once. After that, you will be run dry and stuck in the same situation as the rest of the third world: working shit jobs for little pay.
Alas, you can always look back at your educational experiences and say that you had the best mixed drink of all time: moving through the school system in Spain!
Therapurrtic
trapped in whirlwinds
sometimes i need my anchors
purring me to calm
Sunrise
When I bought that dress in Spain, my souvenir dress, it was not a souvenir. It was a reminder of what I had sacrificed, of what I was still willing to give.
I searched your name. Yours. Because I knew you were there. Because I knew your passion. Because if, 5000 miles from home, I was going to trust someone’s gut?
Yours.
I have bought the house. I have enrolled my oldest. I have two other daughters ready to be Rebels. I have built my life around this.
And you are why.
Life is defined by moments. This is one.
And I stand with you in this moment.
Family
a table for six
can actually fit ten
if you care enough
Needs…
to finish grading
to finish observations
to find fall colors
Second Home
a pink sunrise view
tinted by autumnal love
makes it all better
Dreams for Today and Tomorrow
my weekend checklist:
a five-mile foothill hike,
four tickets to Spain
FBQ: Friday. Be Qualitative.
“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?
Wash Perk
at least fall colors
pretty my blue-sky city
(there’s no place like home)
