reality hits:
school supply shopping, grading.
at least there’s a pool.
Endless Truth
reality hits:
school supply shopping, grading.
at least there’s a pool.
teaching
Two-Sided
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.
I Remember Columbine
I remember newspapers for a week filled with grisly details,
journalists flooding our city like vampires in search of storied blood
I remember crying all day on my twenty-first birthday,
the tears permanent streaks of worry on my cheeks.
I remember thinking, How can I become a teacher now?
and, Nothing could be worse than this.
I remember that it was ten miles from my home,
with faces just like my own now plastered on screens across the world.
I remember thinking that it could never happen again,
that with this media spotlight on the atrocity, it wouldn’t.
I remember my first lockdown, two years later,
kids huddled alongside me under desks like rats in a sewer.
I remember the silent votes of every white man and woman
in charge of our devolving society that grips guns like lifeblood.
I remember clutching my six-year-old child for hours
after twenty of her American peers were murdered
for the love of the Second Amendment.
I remember living in Spain where the scariest sound
was an infantile firecracker celebrating El Día de San Juan
and every door was open for the world to walk into
what it might be like to Not. Be. Afraid.
I remember when I once believed that someone would shout,
Enough is enough! and Congress would listen
instead of filling their pockets with NRA dollars.
I remember my high school in the ‘bad neighborhood,’
before a police officer stood at the door,
before I’d ever heard the word lockdown,
before I even knew what we would become.
There’s Still Hope
a new world view:
a high school stage set with love
inclusive of all
My Livelihood is ‘Political Theater’
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.
This Is Why I Will Strike
I just want to think about how hard-won this moment is. This day. This five of us skiing down a mountain together. This money we didn’t have before that we have now.
This fresh powder.
This view. Could you beat that view if you went anywhere else in the world? Well, could you?
I don’t want to think about the five years we, a family of five, lived on a frozen, constituents-unwilling-to-vote-on-a-mill-levy teacher’s salary of $48,000. The $10,000 out-of-pocket expenses we paid to give birth to our third child. The penny-pinching. The laying-out-$400-every-three-months to earn those goddamn fifteen credits so I could get a raise if I … changed school districts.
I don’t want to think about how Spain screwed me out of a decent salary and we came home afterward with $19,000 in debt, more than any we’ve had as a married couple.
I don’t want to think about the TWO 1998 cars we have outside our house right now, car-payment free.
I don’t want to think about a teacher’s strike. I don’t want to think about my refugees trekking across town on two buses and being huddled into the auditorium to wait, without teachers, the long seven hours until they trek back, because if they don’t wait, they might not have a meal that day.
About the hundreds of hours I, and every teacher I know, has put into grading, planning, meeting, educating (ourselves and them), in the ten months between August and June. Hundreds of hours outside our contract day listening to students tell us their traumas that are greater than any soul could bear, listening to our admin and school district rate us as failures when we wake before dawn and go home after dusk to bring our best selves into that classroom every day, listening to our coworkers decide between renting a slumlord shithole or buying a house an hour away…
Listening.
I don’t want to think about the thousands of union workers who died for this day. For this choice. For a society where corporate greed is not the only answer.
I just want to see my husband and my three girls gliding down this Colorado slope, this Colorado hope.
I want to ski. To smile. To rejoice.
I don’t want to go on strike.
But I will.
Just like I walked in and out of Manual High School in 1994 when my teachers asked me to support them.
Just like I lived on pittance pay for the early part of my children’s lives.
Just like every other union member everywhere who’s looking to find empathy in the eyes of the corporate monsters that rule our society.
I will strike.
And I will ski.
And we will win ourselves a bluebird day.
I Cry for his Loss
i cry for the card, for his loss,
for his Iraqi-Syrian past,
for all the burning hours of summer school
where he committed himself
to finishing high school in three years.
i cry for his words, for his loss,
his inescapable self that has hidden
a kind face in a chaotic classroom,
his sly smile catching my every
snuck-in witty remark
(even when no one else could).
i cry for the system, for his loss,
shuffled by our government’s wars
between homelands that stole his home,
for his pride in Iraqi architecture
that he may never see again.
i cry for his future, for his loss,
for how unequivocally kind his soul remains
after all he has witnessed in twenty-one years,
for his brothers who wait under his watchful shadow,
for our country to give him a chance.
i cry for his words, for my loss,
to not have his presence in my classroom,
to have the nicest thing anyone’s
ever written to me
disappear with a graduation ceremony.
i cry for the world, for their loss,
for robbing refugees of their rights,
for keeping the beauty that is him,
that is within all of them,
from sharing their strength
with all of us, inshallah,
for a brighter tomorrow.
Behold this, Eyes:
diversity wins–
the key to unlock hatred–
where beauty beats all.
Bilingual Rainbow
that moment at school
when a domestic violence reference
does not register
as a violation of human rights.
that.
that is a teachable moment.
let them write their stories,
their poems,
their lives poured out on paper
in a language that sifts through their minds
like Lucky Charms marshmallows,
where finding the right words to describe the trees native to their homelands,
the pain of fleeing war,
the parents who missed even grade school,
is like finding that rainbow marshmallow,
the brightest and sweetest:
the words,
the art,
that will save them.
for today, at least.
Check the Box
testing month begins:
aka, hell season of
PowerPoint trainings
Step Write Up 