education

Coronatine, Day Twenty-eight (10 x2)

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Day 2 of Quarantine Gratitude. It’s been a pretty rough day, and I’m disappointed by online learning for Newcomers, so this is going to be hard, but I am trying here!

  1. Gas prices. I know Trump’s an asshole, and these countries are having a bidding war right now, and I should have an electric car, but these prices are eleven years old, this is the first time I’ve filled my car in a month, and it’s a relief.
  2. Speaking of cars… it’s nice to run an errand with just a little traffic. Denver has horrible traffic, and it’s been nonexistent lately.
  3. People listening to the governor. Went to the grocery store today, and they had it all set up for social distancing with one-way aisles, a line around the store, and most people were wearing masks! It was good to not be the only one.             
  4. Speaking of food: our school’s food bank, and in particular, Jaclyn Yelich. She called me two days ago because she just knew some students weren’t getting food. In the midst of a crisis, when she had to move her entire food bank to another location, she knew that some of my ELLs were getting desperate. We made a plan. She formed her delivery team, she asked me to help, and we brought food to six of my Newcomer families. She had a whole warehouse of boxes and bags ready to go for each family. This woman has worked all her life, raised her daughter, and now has given up her entire retirement to feed the families at our school, which takes more time than a full-time job. She gives hope when there is no hope.
  5. The moon. I have always loved the moon, and in high school even won an award for a story titled, “Catch Me a Moon.” In all its clichéd symbolism, its constancy is calming right now. Knowing that it’s up there, shining bright, so far from all of our problems, connecting us all with our own special glimpses of it wherever we might be in the world, is a comfort.
  6. Gardening friends. I am certainly not a master gardener, though I bought a house from one! What a joy today to receive the generous gift of an entire tray of spices and vegetables for my garden. Their petite green stems bring life to this sunny window, waiting, just like us, for the frost to stop and the world to be ready for a permanent move to a better life that is waiting on the other side of the glass.
  7. Audiobooks. In a house of six, it’s difficult to sit down and read. So many distractions and background noise. I love audiobooks because I can take them anywhere with me–in the car, walking the dog, gardening, or cross-stitching.
  8. Cross-stitching. I will never be a seamstress, but this I learned to do when I cross-stitched baby blankets for my three girls. It is relaxing and methodical, and fulfills my need to always be doing something with my hands. And when this is all over, I’ll have a pretty picture to hang! 
  9. Work flexibility. My district and school have handled these crazy circumstances very well, and they’ve offered us so much flexibility with office hours, grading expectations, and the amount of assignments. It has been so refreshing to work within a schedule that I create, which as a teacher, just never happens. It’s so nice to have time on weekdays to run errands, to fit in an appointment, and to make my own schedule.
  10. To go with the theme of weekdays and flexibility, it’s refreshing to be able to clean my house whenever I want and not try to cram the chores in between a harried workday, harried dinner prep, and a harried life. Cheers to vacuuming on a Friday morning and a non-harried life!

 

Coronatine, Day Twenty-seven (10×1)

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I’ve been bitching a lot (and crying a lot), so here goes: ten good things about quarantine for ten days straight.

No promises. But I will try.

  1. I actually love being alone. The older I get, the more introverted I feel. I have very few actual friends anyway (the blessing and curse of being overly opinionated), and see them infrequently, which is fine with me. So the social distancing aspect is not challenging for me at all.
  2. Dinner. Isn’t it every working mom’s nightmare to be running between work and children’s activities and trying to do laundry and trying to grade papers and trying to keep a clean house… and trying to come up with a dinner idea every night? Well, now that I’m home all the time, I can set out meat early in the day (see yesterday’s post, haha) and pull up recipes well before noon. I can easily fit in a meal plan without feeling pressured or rushed.
  3. My garden. You are about to be overloaded with images of flowers and vegetables. Raised beds. Compost piles. Green grass growing. Perfect pink crabapple and redbuds blooming. Weed-pulling. The two hundred plants that fill my yard and take hundreds of hours of work to truly care for… hundreds of hours that I now actually have at a time of the school year that is normally jam-packed with so many activities that I can barely breathe. Well, now I can breathe.
  4. My dog. Sleeps on my legs and keeps me up half the night, cuddles right up against wherever I’m sitting and takes naps throughout the day. Jumps into my lap for extra cuddles and when he fears I might be considering going back to work. Never says no to me when I want to take him on walk number eighty-six. Trots happily beside me, leash or no leash. Has no idea why none of us ever leave anymore, but couldn’t be happier. There is no purer love than a puppy’s love.
  5. Not having to pack a lunch. Just feeling hungry at whatever random time, combining various leftovers from the fridge and never having to lug the Tupperware, the lunch bag, the silverware, the cloth napkin back and forth and forth and back.
  6. The mute and no camera features during virtual meetings which occur 90% less frequently than the endlessly wasteful meetings I normally sit through. I just want my thoughts, not my face, on the screen. It’s quite magical to have that sense of privacy, to be able to listen without being watched to see what my reaction might be.
  7. Casual Friday every. Fucking. Day. I think my comfy clothes alone could make this time actually magical.
  8. Never having to deal with silencing and unsilencing my phone. So simple, so redeeming.
  9. Seeing my children blossom in different ways (when they’re not driving me crazy). Riona building up her YouTube Channel, taking on art challenges, endlessly chatting with friends on FaceTime, getting all her schoolwork done with zero nagging and her handy checklist when I can’t ever get her to do homework on a normal day, giving me hugs, helping me when I ask for help, and being her ever-sweet self. Mythili taking walks or bike rides with me, never commenting on the length or the speed, working on her digital and painted artwork for hours or days, piecing together puzzles, easily managing her homework. Izzy creating coffee drinks to share with everyone, garnering followers with her quick TikTok videos, working on her badminton skills and perfecting how to curl her hair (often letting me braid it just like when she was a little girl). Fabian never once complaining, helping around the house before ever being asked, pulling a too-heavy compost bin off me with the strength of an ox, building a weight with a bar and some chopped old logs, getting his schoolwork done before the rest of the class meets on Google Meets each day at 1pm.
  10. I am so damn lucky to live in Denver. In a city with a thousand days of sun. With easygoing neighborhoods and walking-distance parks. With snow today, gone tomorrow. With a liberal governor and mayor who offer support for all people, broken-not-broken, immigrant or citizen, homeless or homed. With a network of streets that you could spend your life meandering through and never get lost. With my beautiful school across the street from the greatest park ever known. With bike lanes and bike paths everywhere. With everything I need to feel safe in this nightmare of unsafety.

Coronatine, Day Twenty-six

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The day begins with this chicken lining the bottom layer of an IKEA/Costco bag beneath the bagels I’d actually been searching for, beneath its canned chicken counterparts, beneath a giant double box of mini-wheats.

This $22 worth of chicken, sitting at the bottom of a bag for five days and not put away into the freezer. This double-grocery trip, gloves and mask on, this bucket of Pinesol and hot water ready on the porch, me carefully removing the packaging, carefully scrubbing down every last item with the cloth rag and my made-up formula, carefully trying not to bring this virus into my house.

This chicken that I asked my oldest daughter to put away.

In my mind is everything: her loss of prom. Of not being in the first and only musical of her life. Of her not lettering in dance (her only chance of a letter). Of her high school days abruptly ending on March 13 because she’s already signed up to take all her classes next year at the community college. Of her missing AP Physics with the same pain she’d miss a boyfriend.

In my mind is everything: her words to me last week, completely out of the blue: “I’m moving in with my friend and her parents the second I turn 18.” Her friend since kindergarten running off with a boy in the middle of the night, her mother’s frantic phone calls at 3:30am, and my daughter’s candid retort the next night over dinner, after the friend had been found: “I’ve thought about running away so many times. So many times.”

In my mind is everything: soon to be without a second income, soon to be without decent health insurance, I’ve been stocking up on every last thing so that my storage room looks more like a second Costco and my freezer is (should be) filled with this goddamned chicken, and why can’t my ever-so-smart daughter do the simplest thing, show me some semblance of respect?

Everything spills out over tears that I can’t control before it’s even 7:30. Everything, everything: the wish to run away, the wish to move out, the haven’t-I-tried-to-be-good-to-you, the you-know-I-love-you-so-why-do-you-hate-me?

She is a lump in the bed, unresponsive to my words. All I can do is return to my room, flush out the tears, and record my daily video lesson for my Newcomers, which takes an hour longer because I have learned how to add subtitles for a deaf girl in my class, a refugee who cannot hear a word in any language but can draw Anime art like no one you’ve ever met.

Then Bernie drops out, the stock market immediately takes a leap of faith because this country will always be profits over people, and it seems there is no hope in the world on day twenty-six of this cursed Coronatine.

I pound my frustration into chopping vegetables for the pot roast, its scent soon spreading through the house like a virus worth scintillating.

I decide to finally make the summer trip cancellations, hoping for some semblance of refunds, but the travel industry is one of the most unforgiving on the planet, and I am left with a few small rewards and thirty hours of research and hopeful anticipation lost to sickness, layoffs, and disappointment that brings on wave after wave of new tears.

She doesn’t come downstairs for hours, and when she does, she is all made up, beautiful and young and representing the promise that everyone would want for our future. She avoids me further for another forty-five minutes, then offers to help me with the second sourdough I’ve attempted within a week, setting the timer to fold and re-fold the dough. She agrees, later, to watch Dirty Dancing with me because it’s the only thing I can think of that will cheer me up, and laughs at my pathetic attempt to chainsaw the juniper.

She makes her special sweet coffee drink for everyone, including Fabian who never in his life had heard of iced coffee, but gulps it down happily within seconds.

And I know that she is more than this stupid $22 worth of chicken. That seventeen-year-old girls say mean things to their moms just fucking because. That every problem I have listed here is a first-world problem.

And I know that small things are beginning to blossom in my yard. And I have to stop thinking about “What if” and “Why can’t we?” and start thinking about these small shoots and sprouts and flowers that pop up when I need them the most.

And my girls are still in spring even as I approach winter. They need sunlight, soil, refreshment.

And forgiveness.

And I have made it through another day of this. Just. Like. That.

 

 

Coronatine, Day Twenty-two

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dough starts the morning

(impossible sourdough)

kneading, needing, rest.

victory garden

burns through this false spring sunshine

as we drill, hammer

my boy is fearless

removing every last leaf

from our high-pitched roof

my girls love salad

work the seeds into the ground

ready, row by row

we plant potatoes

in our newly-built raised bed

(plants will save us, right?)

it angles others

in defiance of the times

(ready to win this)

my baby makes art

a YouTube challenge (with hearts)

and we win this day

just in time for bread

that rises as the sun sets

we are safe. and well.

Coronatine, Day Twenty-one

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The email comes through in the midst of an online staff meeting, and a couple of teachers immediately burst into tears and soon have to log off.

That is the world we live in right now. Every bit of news is a bit of sadness, tears waiting just behind the corners of our eyes, ready for action.

I cannot cry in front of people and refuse to even fully place myself in the video meeting, posting a picture instead. Because I am always ready for action, and I have a list for this day: Home Depot to buy wood and sand, the garden center for my seed potatoes, two grocery stores to spend another huge percentage of our salaries to stock up on food before Bruce’s money is no more.

And while I am at the store, I stock up on all the things my Newcomers certainly don’t have: lollipops, candy bars, chips, pens, pencils, tootsie rolls, card stock, and colored paper.

In less than a year, they moved, with or without their families, across the world. They barely speak English. They barely know anyone. We’ve barely begun making progress towards everything from basic phonics to common expressions such as, “How do you get around your city?”

And the email has officially announced that I will not see their faces in my classroom for the remainder of the school year.

I have been teaching for seventeen years, primarily English to immigrants, but I have never taught truly new immigrants, and it has changed me. It has opened my eyes to the injustices of the world, to the beauty of the world, in a way that no other class ever has.

Everything about online learning will be difficult: those students who left their Chromebooks at home. Those who have to care for little ones. Those who are working. Almost all of whose parents are working and potentially tracking in this virus every day.

Being isolated in a small apartment without any exposure to our culture that they sacrificed everything to be a part of for… who knows how long?

None of this–going to the grocery store without a mask and gloves,  going to teach those beautiful faces, going to travel the world like I’ve always traveled the world–will ever be the same.

None of us–the immigrants who still have hope for their futures, for their families, the teachers who are trying to figure out how to teach piano and ceramics to kids who don’t have pianos or clay, the essential workers who wish they could stay home and can’t, the healthcare workers who are making their wills–will ever be the same.

So this is all I can do, tears present now. Ask my girls to help fill bags. Type up letters and schedules to print in case my students haven’t checked the online updates. Put in colored paper and card stock so that they can make hearts and cards for all that they love and all that they hope for.

And hope that we all make it to the other side of what the world has become.

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.

 

 

Coronatine, Day Thirteen

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i broke free today

with packets for every kid

(delivered by me)

and to top it off

i made me a home office

for online learning

(but it still won’t work

we all know relationships

are all that will work)

Coronatine, Day Twelve

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let me rephrase this:

my students are scared to death

their families could die

they don’t need English

they don’t need online teaching

they need love from us

i wish they could see

the beauty of this sunset

and find hope in it

but like these cracked streets

they’ve lived nothing but cracked lives

(and now they’re trapped here)

here! land of the free!

opportunities waiting

for someone (not them)

yes, i’m a cynic

cause i know without faces

relationships die

Coronatine sucks

the life from all we’ve worked for

and how will it end?

Un Chiste

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and so it begins:

three weeks at home with these kids

who will kill who first?

Coronavirus Pie Recipe

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Ingredients:

Four months of news stories and 4,300 worldwide deaths.

Social media memes and accusations.

Schools filled with unimpacted children who put their hands everywhere.

Understaffed schools that can’t keep up with soap consumption.

Homeless and hungry children who find their only two meals a day here.

Immigrant children who come anyway because this is nothing like escaping extreme poverty and war.

Directions:

Preheat hope to 375 degrees. Maybe it will be hot enough to kill something.

Put every worry and frustration into the rolling out of dough. Tough and round, an imperfect circle, wide enough to cover the whole belly of the beloved dish.

Spin and skin the apples until they are nothing but spirals of juicy love, bittersweet and crunchy and soon-to-be-soft, soon-to-be-coalesced inside a cinnamony mix of something sweeter. More hopeful.

Slice slivers into the top crust. Each piece is a taste of our world, cutting out the healthcare most of us don’t have, carving lines into the economic burden, trying to cover up the death toll.

Place the pre-cooked apple concoction into the lower crust belly, its syrup soaking through the floury dough, waiting to be better.

One by one, lay the lattice. Say a prayer, ask for something better, hope to God this will come together perfectly in the end. One by one, lay the lattice. Take your time. Gather your patience. Think of your children. All of your children.

Press the two parts of the world together: the bottom crust which opens its arms to everything that will fit; the top lattice which opens its door for all the cursed steam to escape, to prevent overflowing, to make a perfect pie.

Bake your pie. Bake, bake, bake your pie. Know that, after the timer beeps, after you have scrubbed flour powder into the compost, after you have soaped the dishes, after your pie has rested on its stinging-hot shelf, everything will taste oh. So. Sweet.

Teach your students how to say “crust” before they bite in tomorrow, before you won’t see them for three weeks, before the actual Pi Day.

And hope for many more Pi Days with oh-so-many pies as perfect as this one.