technology

This is All I Have For Now

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Hope for today: a new student came to my advisory. A Syrian refugee who has been here for 20 days. He could not communicate very well in English, but another newcomer from El Salvador who’s been here for a few months was able to help him with signs and support. He also took pictures on his tablet of everything I handed out and was able to run the words through an app that translated the words to Arabic. And, through the tablet translation, proudly told me at the end of class that he speaks three languages: Arabic, Turkish, and Kurdish.

I wonder what else he has stored behind those questioning eyes? I can’t wait to find out. And I’m so glad he made it through the Trumpocracy.

#standwithrefugees #standwithimmigrants

Return of the Jedi

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Star Wars costume show
followed by our nation’s truth:
the stench of failure

it seeps through the stacks
into our souls’ library:
let’s check ourselves out

depression so rank
we can’t even choose a book
from our city’s shelves

soon we will rise up
upon realization
of Trumpocracy

but it will take faith
beyond what fits in a poem
to fight the Dark Side

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Honesty. Squared.

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It’s a Friday in January and my mouth is running rampant. She came, she asked, and I don’t lie.

I know that people hate the truth, and the truth hurts (me the most–sometimes I think this), but she wanted the truth, and had twenty different ways for us to share it with her, most of them anonymous.

But I said what I thought. What we all think. What needs changing. What already works. I had evidence and examples, just like I always tell my students to write in their ACEITCEIT paragraphs. And I splayed my soul in front of God and everyone–I got a 3 (7 is the best), and Nick was as honest as could be when he spoke to me, and said, ‘I sat in my garage for three hours last night in turmoil over this’–and that humanization of the score meant more to me than anything else. That humanization–that’s what teachers want. 

And do you know what they said (of course)? You let him give you a 3?

As if they hadn’t heard the whole conversation. As if it weren’t enough, the admittance, the heart on sleeve, the truth.

The, Why can’t you be a little more honest?

On with my day. Two more classes in the afternoon. Coming in a bit tired and a bit disgruntled about the first standardized test of the semester they took yesterday, but still willing to work for me. To discuss and argue about the validity of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and try to decide which one they thought was most important, and write a paragraph about it (ACEIT today, just ACEIT).

If I’d known sophomore year was going to be all about paragraphs… one begins, unable to finish as she shakes her hands between sentences. But look at the progress you have made! I begin, but am interrupted by knock at the door number four for period five, with a para and a stack of papers three feet thick. Oh my God, what have I done? I start to ask, but cut myself off when I realize it’s the first four chapters of I Am Malala, copied times 160, because we still don’t have the books on our tablets.

You just saved my life, I whisper, and pile the pile on the desks.

Then, just after I thought my day was done after my sixth period valiantly pointed out a grammatical error on my sentence stem (Have you ever had an HONORS ELD course?? You should try it some time. Come by any day at 1:11), I remembered my ultimate task: covering the severe needs special education class. Seventh period. On Friday.

There is no amount of money in the world that could be a fair salary for what these women do every day. With needs that range from nonverbal to highly functioning, students who are obsessed with either Play-Doh or making sure my watch is exposed from under my long-sleeved shirt, to vacuuming relentlessly and walking around only on knees, to the computer dying mid-class and the wheelchair-bound girls moaning in distress, to the speech-language-pathologist teaching the alphabet to one girl for fifty minute straight, there. Is. No. Fair. Salary.

Before I left, I saw a man who I visited last summer during one of our home visits. He was chain smoking and playing violent video games in the projects, his tiny apartment nothing but white windowless walls. He was kind and adept, and described his rather difficult job of trying to keep severely autistic teenage boys from harming others. I suggested he apply at our school since his daughter would be attending there. You have a severe needs program there? I didn’t even know! Today I saw him for the first time, and we fist-bumped. You’re the reason I even have this job, he told me.

Best moment of my day.

Or, the walk. Yes, I got in a walk after all that honesty and writing and chaos. Around the park with the little dog we’re watching. And the winter light sparkled just so on those geese, perfect silhouettes against the season.


These moments allowed to me before Izzy entered the car and spilled the entire sex ed story, provided by none other than Planned Parenthood and a literal wooden penis named Woody. Yes, they demonstrated how to put the condom on Woody. Yes, “Becca” taught them how to insert a female condom using only her fingers. Yes, they passed around an IUD and pressed it against their skin so everyone in the class could see what it felt like. Yes, the main way to prevent pregnancy is abstinence.

Yes, we live in Denver now, where it’s as liberal as it gets, apparently.

No, this is not the sex ed you remember.

I wonder why my almost-fourteen-year-old thinks nothing about telling me the whole sex ed story? Could it be that she’s my too-honest daughter?

No matter. We made it home and I made dinner. Or rather, I stuck some chicken and potatoes in the oven and called it dinner while I searched for ski condos in Crested Butte. (More than an hour later…) Dinner’s ready!!! Condo is booked!! Friday is done!!! 

It’s a Friday in January, and my mouth is running rampant. But at least I’m being honest about it.

 

To Laugh Until I Cry. To Live Until I Die.

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In the crook of early January, three weeks since seeing my students, on a cold wintry Saturday morning I shlep across town to make lesson plans with three other colleagues.

Later I will heat water for hot tea and curl in my recliner with a book, wishing I could write a novel as lyrically beautiful as Caramelo as my children wander in and out of rooms, in and out of our house and the neighbor’s, in and out of wanting to be near their dear old mom.

This after two attempts to jumpstart the old Hyundai whose lights I left on in our trek to the grandparents’ house last night.

This after listening to dating tales and math updates and wondering what it would really be like to be a single woman in modern America.

This after coloring intricate books with the girls in the brief time between our latest tech argument and the neighbor’s reemergence.

So is our Saturday, chicken defrosting in the sink, chores done and Echo playing my Pandora playlist to suit the color of my mood.

No dog to walk, no true purpose to the day other than making plans for a class no one really wants to teach.

What sits in the back of my mind is how easily I want to be able to relax. To have a deep and thought-provoking conversation that is justifiably, blood-burningly exciting. To laugh until I cry. To live until I die.

To take these lonely household moments and flip them over or back or somewhere else, when my children were small and my Chihuahua never left the warmth of my leg, when my marriage was young and everything we thought and did was about each other, not some game or book or phone or faraway friend.

In the crook of early January, holidays left out on the curb waiting for a second chance at life (mulch me till I can be reborn!), the cold of winter settles into my bones. The winter of this year, of my children’s childhood, of my marriage, nineteen years in the making.

Even with the beauty of the flakes that fall, their demise lies in slushy streets and icy black pavement, ready to trick any masterful driver, so used to winter but not its ugly, dry-grassed truth that lies beneath the surface.

In the crook of early January, I wait for the sun to rise high in the sky. For the snow to melt. For the tree to be taken. For the hollowness that hides inside this nook to break open in me a new way of looking at the world. For the bend of this season to straighten out into a road I can see, wide and clear and as questionless as a summer’s day.

But in the crook of January, there are no summer days. There are only questions.

Flushing

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self-preservation
 often looks introverted;
 whatever it takes
 
 i need my mountains
 to save me from self pity
 that swallows me up
 
 and yet, there is hope:
 a Girl Scout troop, a book club…
 new horizons wait
 
 
 

Technically a Winner

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Girl Scout turnaround
 after a friend-connect run:
 silver linings shine
 
 computer genius
 who should be making big bucks
 for knowing the most
 
 (at least i won him
 to save me from tech nightmares
 that plague my career)
 
 Saturday wins week
 (dipped in sorrow and regret)
 proving that hope wins
 
 

Bites and Pieces

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somewhere between the data crunch
 that swallows all planning time,
 the tech issues that chew up a third of every class,
 the common planning that gnaws into bitching about work,
 emailing counsellors about kids who’ve bitten off more than they can chew,
 grading grammar that nibbles away time with my own kids…
 
 there’s a teacher waiting,
 the entrée of this piecemeal,
 ready to share the most delectable taste
 of what this world asks and offers.
 
 
 

Lost and Found

/ lovizmytrio / Leave a comment

you couldn’t steal this:
 ancient homes, history learned,
 survivors by cliff
 

 or these sweet faces
 of my three girls, unafraid
 to face your world
 

 no, you can’t take that;
 my identity’s in words
 found here. not with you.
 

Weekend Kingdom

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Just before we left the mountains after the long weekend, the girls were asking their father to borrow his pocket knife so that they could carve their names into a tree trunk.

“We need to leave our mark!”

“We’re getting in the car in five minutes. You had all weekend to do that. Not now.”

They had all weekend to explore. To see where the nonexistent paths might take them. They found bottles that drunk former campers had left behind and found pleasure shattering them against boulders. They climbed over fallen tree trunks in an attempt to get to the next outlook or outhouse. They discovered several carcasses and took pieces in their hands to pretend to roast, brush the teeth of, or assign names to. They built and destroyed campfires, each claiming a stick and making rainbow sparklers dance across the sky. They set up their own tent and fought over who had the best pad, the warmest sleeping bag, the most comfortable spot. They made charcoal paint from ashen logs and drew on paper plates, clothes… themselves. They picked up giant pieces of bark and an abandoned rope, making an old-fashioned telephone “show” as they handed the “receiver” back and forth for hours on end, chatting about extended metaphors and checking current schedules for fire-fixing availability. They disappeared for hours on end, hiking several miles, discovering miniature ponds in large boulders, old cables that worked as trampolines, views of distant peeks… and … themselves.

They couldn’t carve their names into the trunks of trees because they were already leaving a piece of themselves behind. In a world surrounded by screens and studying and neat city blocks with perfect yards and friendly neighbors, they released themselves into nature as all children should. They giggled with their friends and had free reign over their weekend kingdom.

As we made our way down the dusty dirt road onto the smooth pavement that curved its snakelike yellow line out of the canyon, I was thinking about the pieces of all of us that are scattered behind us wherever we go. In their own way, my girls left their imprint on that mountain, with eighteen sets of shoe prints, a forgotten wisp of paper towel, a broken branch. But more importantly, the mountain left a piece of itself in us. The panicked drive up with nauseous travelers and no sites in sight. The scratches and ripped pants from too many falls and rough rocks. The charcoaled face paint. The layers of dirt and pine needles and campfire stench unwashable by the best of the best machines.

The memory of a weekend free of chores, free of homework, free of nagging, free of screens, free of strict diets, free…

Free.

In the end, Daddy didn’t give them the knife. Instead they piled in the Pilot, all seven of them, taking their new “telephone” to carry on their stories for the drive home. They pointed to peeks they’d topped on their independently-led hikes. They commented on how strangely smooth the pavement felt once we finally arrived to it. They napped near the end, fully exhausted from running a kingdom all weekend.

Even without a pocketknife, they left their names on that mountain. They carved them into the curve of the road that wrapped itself around our site. Into the bits of clouds that only barely covered the sun. Into the memory of every mountain, of every happy childhood that begins and ends with a bit of royalty, a bit of owning all your choices if even for a day.

A bit of freedom. It’s the best way to run a kingdom.

Beginnings

/ lovizmytrio / 1 Comment

The day began before it began. With the kitty who looked so cute under the drawer of my bed, so I reluctantly allowed her to stay. For which she thanked me with an in-your-face purring bonanza at 1:29 a.m. And with scratching the door and releasing a desperate meow two hours later (after I’d thrown her out).
 
 Sleepy-eyed and somewhat grumpy, I headed to school for the third week of a testing schedule that permits zero plan time two days a week, nearly-two-hour classes, and not enough computers to go around. The library became the epicenter for all misfits in the school who had nowhere else to go during the tests, and where one measly cart of books was to serve all three of my classes as the upper library, with ALL nonfiction books, was closed for testing. Instead we had a stockpile of books about countries in Europe. My refugees, doing research on their homelands, were at a loss. They looked about as perplexed as me when I thought about the last time European refugees were flooding American schools; in neither of our lifetimes, for sure. Sigh.
 
 By some miracle, a computer cart opened up at lunch, but half the computers were dead by then, and none of them would print. My students were knee-deep in research and trying to figure out how to indent, space, or title a piece on Google Classroom, the tech guy came to try to literally unlock the printing queue of ONE COMPUTER AT A TIME, and then a girl showed me this:
 


It was about twenty minutes before the last bell. This could have made me angry. Or frustrated for the fiftieth time. But just like her smiling face, all I could do was laugh. And get my camera.
 
 The inequity began before it began. I worked in a rich school district before. With MacBooks. IPads. Books for every student. Now? Crappy Dells that won’t log in, hold a charge, or print to the singular printer available in the ENTIRE SCHOOL. Books all my classes have to share. That I have to request a grant to buy every year.
 
 It’s laughable. It’s laughable how we spend our days, fighting these uphill battles with kids and pets and society. We lose sleep over our children, their children, our children’s children (case in point: kitty). And yet we still get through. We have fuzzy screens and crazy cats and rushes out the door to ice skating and kids who argue about chores and brushing their teeth and tightening their laces and won’t go to bed and when they finally do?
 
 “Mama? Can you wake me up early, just me, so I can have time with just you tomorrow?”
 
 I don’t tell her I was planning to come in early to make up for my lack of planning time today. That I’m behind… That I’ll always be behind.
 
 Because behind every moment of being behind, there is a cat’s silhouette in the morning window. A curious face peeking out of laundry. A beautiful sunset waiting to be written about. A child’s voice asking for love.
 
 My love for them began before it began. Before they were mine. I was theirs. Every last waking minute. The good, the bad… The blurry.