income

Coronatine, Day Thirty-six (10×10)

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I’ve made it to the final day of gratitude! The ten last bits of gratitude for the Coronatine.

  1. Always love a bike ride. We wore the new masks my friend made, even though I’ll admit they weren’t wholly necessary because I planned a route that did not involve crowds (I have avoided the Cherry Creek path like the plague, pun intended).
  2. We stopped at a local cafe. Of course, it wasn’t the same. We couldn’t sit down, we couldn’t have a nice brunch, but we could still get some lattes and support a local business and tip the server with a 50% tip.
  3. While we were riding, we saw the Thunderbirds fly right over us on 12th Avenue!
  4. I spent a lot of time this morning reviewing our budget. I rarely do, and in fact don’t really deal with our money because Bruce is a money master. But I think it might be possible, if we are very careful, to live on my salary (which they’re already threatening might be frozen soon) and our savings for a year, so hopefully, that will give the economy enough time to recover and Bruce to be able to find work.
  5. Speaking of that salary, I am SO GRATEFUL that I just got a raise on March 1 because of my National Board Certification. What a difference that will make!
  6. I reorganized the garage, the hall closet, and the basement storage room to make more space for stocking up on supplies while we still have two paychecks. It really is nice to have time to do this without the craziness of working so many hours, especially since Bruce was going to be laid off anyway before the quarantine was put in place.
  7. I really do work at an amazing place with extremely dedicated teachers and students. Our school’s weekly news show has continued during this crazy time, and this week included an in-depth interview with an NFL player who graduated from South in 2004. He couldn’t stop talking about how influential his teachers were and how his experiences traveling to New York on a student trip and participating in the musical made high school so special. It’s so nice to hear that and to know how important schools are in the lives of students.
  8. My counselor colleague helped me (through a Facebook post) avoid paying the AP exam fees for the four AP exams for Izzy and Mythili! I really hope that this virus will help everyone realize what a scam standardized tests are. I’m so over the College Board and AP. It’s a bait and switch, most colleges won’t give you credit, and most students can’t get the score they need anyway. So I’m hopeful that all of these tests will become less important in the future.
  9. In cleaning out the garage, I found the tent stakes I’ve been meaning to put in the tent bag, and since a neighbor girl needed to earn a Girl Scout badge by setting up a tent and didn’t have her own, the tent was already out! I have been trying to get those stakes into that stake bag for three years, and it took coronavirus to make it happen!
  10. Let’s hope we can camp this summer, or at least go on hikes. Let’s just keep hoping that something is gonna give, soon. Testing, isolation, whatever it takes. Because we gotta make this work for our world. We just gotta.

Coronatine, Day Fourteen

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My elderly uncle with the ‘No Solicitors’ sign on his door happily steps right out onto the covered porch to collect the three Costco-oversized boxes of tissues that I have brought to him.

“Are you going to come in?” he asks as I creep backward, down the three concrete steps.

“You better wash your hands now that you’ve touched those boxes,” I immediately reply. “I could have it, and it lives on cardboard for 24 hours.”

He brushes me off and acts, quite nonchalantly, as if he’s been expecting me. “Thanks, I was waiting for something like this. I use five or six tissues every time I have to clean my catheter.”

What a lucky find, I think. “Well, Floyd, you’re the master of social distancing. How have you handled the Coronavirus?”

It’s true. He’s been reclusive, the middle child and only boy wrenched between six sisters, for his entire adult life. He lives in the same house he bought as a young man, the 1950s Mayfair ranch decorated exactly the same as the original owner, and “Why should I change what’s already there?” He worked as a TV repairman for as long as there were TVs to repair, and happily retired twenty years ago to a lifestyle of only visiting the grocery store and denying most social invitations from his six sisters.

But now there are no tissues in his grocery store. No toilet paper. No frozen vegetables. No eggs. No sense of security for the five square miles he drives within any given week.

He talks my ear off in the fifteen minutes I stand in his front yard, keeping my six feet of social distancing requirement.

This isn’t like yesterday when I drove to all corners of the city to deliver my students their much-needed headsets, folders, notebooks, and supplies, when their parents seemed grateful for my latex gloves and, more importantly, my brevity. “Check Schoology!” I found myself shouting too many times, “It has everything you’ll need for your life right there!”

This is Coronatine, Day Thirteen: my elderly uncle, my not-so-elderly parents (who also need tissues), who I can only stand on the porch with, and not really visit.

“You’re really not going to come inside?” they inquire, and I mention Italy. We’ve all heard about Italy. My father’s mother was from Italy, still has living relatives there. “Over sixty, Dad,” is all I really have to say (my parents are 66).

And how did I manage in the Costco line today? The rain hadn’t started yet, nor the snow. It was cold, and I had my latex gloves on, plus my ski mask (I didn’t think far enough in advance to buy medical masks, so when I put it on in the parking lot, Fabian said he’d prefer to wait in the car. I didn’t care. I’m not fucking with this shit). I waited a good thirty minutes to socially distance myself, six feet back from the guy in front of me, to get in the store.

And they still didn’t have toilet paper.

This was after we visited the Mexican Envios, always open, line out the door, everyone ready to send money home to their poorer-than-any-of-us-here families back home. My boy was in and out in fifteen minutes, but his poverty-stricken father had to wait in line for three hours to get that money we sent him because this was the first day out of seven that the banks were open, and the seventh day out of infinity that he is unable to work and support those two baby girls.

Never mind that he lives in the most dangerous city on Earth with a corrupt government and police on every corner making sure you don’t go where you’re not supposed to.

Never mind that he doesn’t even have a mortgage because his house is a shack on his boss’s property constructed entirely of corrugated sheets of metal.

Never mind that however bad you think this is for us, standing in the cold in the Costco line, cleaning your catheter with the last bits of tissue, wishing you could hug your parents…

We still live here. Where capitalism, evil as it may be, allows me to trump the system and send an extra hundred dollars home to Honduras because, God, why the fuck not?

This is Coronatine, Day Thirteen: six boxes of tissues delivered. Check. Three hundred dollars sent to Honduras to buy food. Check. Wondering who has it among us, and which ones will die. Check.

What else is there to say?

I planted spinach just in time for the snow to water it. Please let it grow. Please, God, let it grow.

 

 

The Mountains Have Called

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we’re winning this day

even if it feels like loss

once we leave this slope

Genuinely Trustworthy

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only in his eyes

can i pretend it’s ok

because it’s just not

Dread

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i have no energy to write tonight

’cause i’m trapped in  the battle of fight or flight

(i know i’m not and i can’t rhyme for shit

but this crushing feeling is def legit)

what an insult, this new paygrade i got

why should i bother with this cursed rot?

because it is the weight i must carry

since he is the one i chose to marry

of course i love him more than anything

but that will never take away the sting

of knowing that i must pay all the bills

with a paycheck that allows zero frills

 

and the frills are what makes life worth living

after hours and months and years of giving

yet this is my lot on this Tuesday night:

not quite fight or flight–rather fright, fright, fright.

 

Down the Drain

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we’re trapped in sewers

that choke on the wasted love

of life-sucking roots

 

Two-Sided

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The Eritrean immigrants asked me, and then apologized profusely when I told them I turned 41 yesterday, for my ID at the liquor store today.

“Just because I am wearing a high school T-shirt does not mean I am in high school,” I attempted to joke. “I am a teacher at a high school, not a student.”

I tried to reassure them. “You’re just doing your job. Don’t apologize.” I hadn’t pulled in an ounce or a sip of wine yet. I carried my Riesling and 12-pack of Blue Moon the six blocks back home, gathering all my steps and burning all my calories before settling into a flurry of Friday tears.

My puppy and my daughters awaited me, pestering me for kisses (puppy) and dinner (teens). Mythili, as always, took charge, grilling pepper jack and cheddar-with-jam sandwiches, heating up our Friday-cop-out tomato soup while her mother paced the living room with her Riesling and screamed and cried, transcript search coming up empty, Facebook chat verifying that sixteen years into teaching, a master’s degree, thirty-six credits beyond a master’s degree, and a three-day teacher strike, had led her all to a salary less than what she’s making now.

The form to verify my “lost” credentials requires a two-sided copy of a transcript that I hand-carried six years ago and placed in a human resources officer’s hands.

The waiting period for the said transcript, if ordered today (done) from the university is fifteen business days.

The time I have to post a double-sided grievance to my school district is thirty actual days.

On the backside of a transcript is a watermarked imprint of how any given university determines eligibility. A description of credits. A copyright. A promise of authenticity.

But no. Actual. Credits.

Words.

Truths.

My school district, my world, our America, is two-sided.

Get your education… so you can pay loans for the rest of your life. 

Advertise (through movies and media) to the world how attainable the American Dream is… until anyone with a skin tone darker than Northern European comes and realizes that slavery is real, present, and unforgiving. 

Jump through every damn hoop to save a section of your soul with 150 kids every day… just so that bureaucracy can take it away.  

Upload your life into a system so unforgiving that you will wonder why you teach… Until, two sides later, you remember why you teach:

Your daughter dancing with the rainbow of humanity at this high school.

Immigrants’ voices sharing their poetic souls all day long so that even the most disengaged students put their phones away. 

Students celebrating art with as much gusto as cheering on the soccer team.

How two-sided the soul becomes when asked, Why do I teach? 

Why do I put myself through this constant criticism?

Why do I accept such a pathetic salary?

The answer is two-sided.

Because I love them more than money.

Because I spent the money to be here with them.

It’s not really a coin or a toss. It’s just the other side of the story.

Fly Us Home

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Wanting a better life for her family, my mother uprooted us to move to Denver when I was 11. Contrarily, her own parents had ripped her from Park Hill Elementary at the same age 33 years prior in the 1960s “white flight” migration. Always burdened by this blatant racism, my mother told us, “We’re moving straight to Denver, and you girls will learn the value of diversity.”

I attended Merrill and Cole middle schools and Manual High School, the latter two hosting the burgeoning Denver School of the Arts.

Unlike my tiny town in upstate New York, DPS offered me a side of society I’d never seen: racial violence in forced-integration hallways, a Chicano Mathletics coach, and a set of friends from multiple races, language backgrounds, and family dynamics. DSA offered me a spotlight into the world of LGBTQ acceptance and the privilege of the most inspirational teacher anyone could ever imagine–Mrs. Jana Clark.

Mrs. Clark and DPS are the reasons I became a teacher and the reason I came back to this district after teaching stints elsewhere.

Because Denver is my microcosm of what the world could be. What my mother wanted and what I was lucky enough to proclaim: I am a DPS graduate. I am a DPS parent. I am a DPS teacher.

DPS represents our world. Its teachers represent DPS.

Listen to the teachers. Their right to strike is your right to make this city the one we want to fly to, not fly from.

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My Livelihood is ‘Political Theater’

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I have twenty-eight students with one to two essays due EACH WEEK in my new University of Phoenix class, my second job that pays $225/week on the occasional basis that I am granted a class.

I haven’t taught this particular class in over two years, so of course, they’ve changed the entire syllabus, I have to read two different textbooks, and I need to update all my rubrics. Also, all of the online discussion questions have changed, so I will need to respond to thirty different questions with a new set of thirty 200-300-word responses.

Part of the reason I keep this job is that it’s online, and I can squeeze it into (every possible free moment of) my day.

Another reason I have kept it, at the moment, is to fund the $2000+ I’m paying, in addition to doing hundreds of hours of work, to try to obtain my National Board Certification, which is the only possible way to get a raise at this point in my career without investing thousands of dollars and hours in another degree (I am MA+30).

The disheartening reality of what every teacher I know does to survive, every teacher who isn’t lucky enough to marry rich, or at the very least marry someone with guaranteed job opportunities and a forever-steady income, is that we must jump through every hoop imaginable to make ends meet.

We teach summer school. We do home visits. We spend our own money on advanced degrees and credits with the hope of improving our instruction and earning mediocre raises.

This is on top of the fifty or more hours a week we spend planning lessons, grading papers, counseling students in trauma at lunch and after school, attending meetings, sports events, professional development, and student recruitment events (because we have to sell our schools now).

So when my state, my “blue” but really purple (perhaps leaning red) state, calls us actors on a “political theater” stage, I am at my wit’s end:

“Criticizing the most recent teacher pay bargaining session as ‘political theater,’ the head of the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment urged the Denver school district and its teachers union Monday to work harder to find common ground — even as he expressed skepticism that the two sides would reach a deal” (Chalkbeat).

Was it theatrical that we gave up the tenth evening in as many weeknights to wait for our district to come to the table with an actual proposal rather than a cost-of-living increase already in the budget?

Was it theatrical that young children stood behind the fraudulent superintendent with signs begging her not to deport our teachers after the HR department more or less threatened their right to work?

Was it theatrical that we have negotiated for fifteen months, yes over “philosophy disagreements” because the PHILOSOPHY OF OUR DISTRICT IS TO SHUT DOWN PUBLIC SCHOOLS, TAKE OPPORTUNITIES AWAY FROM STUDENTS OF COLOR, AND GENTRIFY EVERYTHING FROM NEIGHBORHOODS TO CURRICULUM?

And. Just. Like. That.

All the hours. All the years. All the goddamn blood, sweat, and tears have been put on stage for the world to see, chart-paper and all, chants in the background, livelihoods on the line.

For political theater of the worst show you will ever wish you didn’t buy a ticket to see.

Frostbitten

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snow swirled around
in exchange for a strike
(we’ll save our signs though)

only a few came
to fill the seats of our schools
(because weather bites)

even in winter
no teacher will miss a day
(we’re there for our kids)

someday they’ll see that
(through blizzards of ignorance)
until they see us