It is the end of August, and we shouldn’t be in school. The mill-levy funding for “air conditioning” was really, and literally, some Big Ass Fans put in some classrooms. Not mine. It is ninety degrees, 5280 feet, and we have the relentless Denver sun bearing down on every moment of every day.

So on the first school year Saturday of summer, I did not go into my classroom to subject myself to that torture for a sixth day. Instead I relished the fact that I am so. Lucky. My house has six recliners in the living room, all of them surrounded by vents, and more importantly, air conditioning.

I spent five hours grading ninety-three essays from three, yes, count ’em, three, classes.

My day is not about essays. It is not about me figuring out how to “track this data” on Schoology without these horrific baseline assessments affecting their grades (factor: 0.00, if anyone needs to know). It is not about my three girls going to the pool with the neighbors all afternoon, or the attempted long walk I cut short with the miniature dog we’re dogsitting, whose breath grew short in less than a mile and whose poor little chunky body had to rest in a freshly-watered lawn before she could go on.

My day is about tomorrow, when we will rise early, pack our lunches, and head to the mountains, five Girl Scouts and a world of heat, and papers, trailing behind us. We will eat s’mores and shop at the mini Girl Scout store and see what life was like a hundred years ago on the Girl Scouts of Colorado’s hundredth anniversary. We will have blue skies and peaks and rivers and cool mountain air.

We will not have Big Ass Fans. Only the accomplishments of this Saturday, turned to Sunday, and a higher altitude. A higher attitude for school starting in August.

And, perhaps, a bit of a mountain breeze.

mojito summer:
 mint from our garden of love
 Friday night Eden
 

Surrounded by darkness, we begin our day as teachers. We close the blinds to shield our classrooms from the blaring sun, open our windows with the strength in our forearms, and lay out our objectives for the students to gobble up after their free cinnamon-roll breakfast.

We read the morning headlines and the late-night emails that burden us with the responsibility of introducing these kids to a world we’re not sure we want to live in ourselves. We attend staff meetings bearing more bad news, and not a single soul leaves the brief update with a dry eye.

Surrounded by darkness, the school year begins. It isn’t enough that on the first day the moon literally blots out the sun. Its predecessor of racism, bigotry, anti-semitism, misogyny dressed up with tiki torches and accessorized with flippancy had already left us half blind.

We read letters from students who can’t find a place in their families who prefer siblings, a mistress, isolation over them. Letters that describe escaped wars, bullying, racial attacks, judgments about neighborhoods, gang violence, lost grandmothers. We read letters from students who have suffered more in sixteen years than we have in our entire lives.

Surrounded by darkness, their words filter into the sunlight of the late afternoon, the blinds reopened to let in a brief breeze, a small reprieve from the choking heat. They raise their eyes, their hearts, their voices to promise us they’re fully here, they’re fully listening, they’re fully aware of how safe this place is, of how much we love them.

We stand in hallways cheering them on as they run late to class. We exchange hope through shared lesson planning, whole-child strategies, ideas about how to reach the toughest, the sweetest, the lowest, kids. We reassure each other’s doubts, question the society we must send them to, and promise each other it will get better. We read each other’s words and commiserate, encourage, respond.

Surrounded by darkness, we wait for the sun. We go to bed too late and wake up too early, plagued with worry, with stress, with plates stacked too high and bad news piled too deeply.

And yet… there is beauty in shadows, in the small slivers of light from eclipses that dot the concrete sidewalks outside the school, where everyone has gathered together to be a part of history. In the cool morning before the sun hits the high sky, with impassioned pink cloud cover that draws in its softness a hope that we won’t swelter through unforgiving ultra-violet rays. In the truth of their words, of our words, where we trust each other with the world, with our raw emotions, with an honesty only found in youth.

Surrounded by darkness, we begin our day as teachers. We pull the blinds shut, open the windows, and wait for just the right moment to let in the light.

Surrounded by darkness, we wait. The breeze builds up, the moon blocks the sun, the heat seems inescapable.

But there is always just the right moment to lift the blinds. To hear our collective suffering fill the air, to see their eyes lifted to the sky, mesmerized for what may come, to be right here, only in this moment, letting our light surround our darkness.

first day of high school
 her first set of brand new Chucks
 and this sunrise view
 

cause pie is golden
 both as dinner and dessert
 her perfect matchup
 

eleven years old
 still my sweet baby daughter
 brave enough for ropes
 

eleven welcomes
 in students’ eleven tongues
 from my daughter’s hand
 
 she is raised with love
 (hate isn’t welcoming)
 yes. it’s that easy.
 
 

I have two jobs now, and they may as well both be full time. Tack these onto my other two previously-employed jobs: full-time mama and part-time college professor. I might as well pull my hair out now, even though the students haven’t yet walked through my door.

Job number one: teaching two classes with new curricula; one I have taught for many years but must constantly revamp because I have the same students year after year, and therefore cannot teach the same content. The other, an honors eleventh grade English, I have never taught, though The Crucible and The Great Gatsby may as well be the plague of my existence. Back to the drawing board, take five.

Job number two: five emails, four classroom visits, three classroom check-ins, two verbal requests, one mildly-sarcastic PD a day. I am a “leader,” a “coach,” a semi-organized mess of a bridge between the administration and the teachers.

I remember when I was in Spain and it rained so hard that people were afraid to drive and I put on shorts and Crocs and walked two miles with a raincoat, an umbrella, and an REI backpack through calf-deep puddles to ring their doorbell. “Karen, eres tu??” “Si, claro.” “Solamente una americana podria trabajar en este tiempo.”

Only an American would work in this weather.

On a holiday.

On a Saturday.

On. Any. Day.

I heard it so many times that it became a part of my blood. Only an American would be told, “You have to have top-notch lessons, no cell phones out for any student, everything must at all moments be tied to the Common Core State Standards… and also, make sure you then check in DAILY with all the defiant/needy/tardy/absent/distraught/crying children to make sure their home life is OK… and also, even if you’re calling home with positive news, make sure you fully document it in the computer system… and also, if students have phones out which teachers are not allowed to take, make sure that you rate them lower… and also, if students are intoxicated, FINE, send them to the dean.”

My former coach stopped by today. “How’s it going? What are you worried about?”

What could I even say?

“You’re not here to coach me this year, so what will I do?”

“I have two full-time jobs and no way to do either one well?”

“I don’t have enough time in the day to soothe the crying soul and alleviate colleagues’ complaints?”

“Everything.”

There was no answer. There is no answer. I am a teacher, the underpaid, thankless job that has ten more tasks piled up each year. The Americana, wishing I could be a Spaniard with wine served at faculty meetings at 11 am.

Only an American would endure this world. This hate-filled, hopeless world. This presidential evil, gotta-solve-this-with-our-solvency world. Only an American would sit through five faculty meetings in four hours and come out… just a little hopeful. Knowing that every minute of every day is so filled with business and thought and empathy that, walking down the hall at 13:56, looking at my watch and rolling my eyes on the way to copier trip number twenty-seven this week, my colleague says to me, “I know that look. I know exactly what you’re thinking. It’s almost 2, and there’s no way in the next ninety minutes you’re even going to come close to what you wanted to accomplish today.”

Only an American would endure this.

And so we must. We must teach to the Common Core. We must count how many cell phones students are using. We must think about our own identities and own up to our biases. We must check in with every kid every day and make sure they’re surviving this shit society we’ve placed before them. We must walk in calf-deep puddles to do our jobs.

I have a million jobs now. Being a wife, a mother, a teacher, a coach, a friend, a colleague, a mentor, an attendance-caller, an IC-updater, a cell-phone monitor, a daughter, a sister, an online blogger, a limitless writer.

Only an American would do this. So let’s do this. Let’s start a school year, and, for real, make America great.

For once.

baked good bribery
 to make the meetings run smooth
 on our souls ‘ training