Inspired Teaching

Sometimes I just have to stop myself when I get caught up in a moment of inspiration about something work related, that is in my case, school related. I love to daydream about school, brainstorming solutions to problems ranging from lost jackets littering the stage like the floor in a Ross store, to getting all of my special education students to pass the state TAKS test. I go through phases of thinking that these things are actually possible.

Lately though, I've been trying to step back and gain some perspective about what it is that I actually want to accomplish as a teacher. Yesterday I came up with a plan to revive two struggling third grade classrooms full of students that we teachers keep saying "just don't care." As I daydreamed I had visions of 100% passing rates, teacher of the year awards, an "Exemplary" rating for my school, and plenty of incentive pay to fund next year's vacation. In my dreaming I also saw hours of noble sacrifice meeting with students, filling in some massive gaps in their learning, and doing large amounts of research into what would motivate the students to "get with it and do their best." I was sure I could do it if I could get the other two teachers to buy in and make some sacrifices of their own to do whatever it takes to meet these kids where they are and find a way to get them where we need them to be. Sounds great? Or does it?

One thing that I love about myself is my ability to dream. When I was still in elementary school myself, I remember thinking that if I died right then I would still be happy because I would have so much to think about in heaven. Even as a child, I felt I'd learned and experienced enough to create an infinite number of daydreams.

Fortunately, as wonderful as this teaching daydream seemed, I came to a point where I woke up and realized that it was not what I wanted at all. Not at all. I had somehow forgotten who I am. Like any teacher, I want ALL of my students to be truly successful, but I had forgotten my definition of success. If I could do anything, I would set a goal to inspire ALL of my students to love learning. I honestly don't care what it is that they want to learn. It doesn't matter. If they love learning they will be receptive to my teaching because there will be a point to it. They will learn to read because they have something they want to learn about. They will learn to write because they have something to say. If they learn to read and write for these reasons I will truly feel like I have reached far past mastery of the TAKS test. It would be nice if the students fill in the correct bubbles on the way, but it wouldn't be the measure of their success, or mine. Believe me, people wouldn't have to look at anything but the child to see results. No bubble sheet in the state can give testimony of learning like an enthusiastic and inquisitive child can.

I'm on vacation right now and still have two days left. I'm looking forward to having time to daydream a bit differently. I'm glad I had the victorious state testing dream. It jarred me into a clearer understanding of my role as a teacher. I will go back after vacation and work hard to inspire curiosity, enthusiasm and purpose in my students. There probably won't be any awards or merit pay for achieving those things, but it's what I want. It's what matters to me. It's my contribution to my students' true success in life.

I'm diabetic today.

I have been trying to write this post for 3 weeks. It just wouldn't happen. The first time I tried I got so depressed doing an image search for diabetes that I had myself a little mini-crisis that took up the rest of the weekend. The next weekend I was so busy enjoying life that I didn't want to begin to think about diabetes. And last weekend I got so busy trying to create a skinny avatar and trying to find a diet to go on, I never got around to writing.

So tonight I'm finally writing about it. And honestly, it's still difficult. Some days I feel like I participate in being diabetic and some days I don't. A couple of people who know me well sometimes ask me if I "am diabetic today." Strangely enough, some days I feel like it's not true.

Maybe it's because I got confused with how "being diabetic" unfolded. At first I was so incredibly sick, taking two kinds of insulin and being afraid to eat anything with carbohydrates. Then when I was experiencing what felt like too many lows, I would eat something sweet to raise my sugar level quickly. The food made me feel better. The bad thing is, when my A1C went down to 5.1 and I got off of insulin, I continued eating carbohydrates every time I needed "to feel better." For the longest time I had myself convinced that low blood sugar for me was anything below 100. I did everything I could to make sure it didn't go below that number.

Now that I understand that a reading below 100 does not constitute low blood sugar, even for me, I have a lot more freedom. I don't feel like I constantly have to monitor and have food with me for emergencies. Unfortunately though, I don't understand exactly where I am in the world of diabetes. Since it's "not so bad" anymore, sometimes I feel like I don't have it. It was a mistake . . . an 867 blood sugar number mistake. It seems like a serious illness that passed.

I have figured out that while I am taking metformin I can eat sweets and still get away with a 6.1 A1C. Even that number is confusing though. As I understand it, that number is high for a normal person. But for diabetics, I have seen many references to setting goals to be somewhere under 7.0. My doctor is satisfied with the 6.1. It seems like I must be doing ok.

I have an extensive library of books related to diabetes. In everything I have read, I can't find myself. I don't know if it is because my symptoms and circumstances aren't there, or if they are there and I don't see them because I don't want to see them.

Everyone should take care of their health. Right? So my feeling that I need to understand the diabetes must be my own form of creative procrastination. Some people have a close call with a health crisis and change their behavior. I did too until I stopped remembering I am diabetic, whether I am on insulin or not.

Last weekend when I was searching for a way to create a healthy avatar for me, I read an article that said overweight people with skinny avatars would lose more weight than those with avatars truer to their actual body size. Maybe there is something to paying attention to how I see myself.

Wouldn't it be cool if I could visualize a healthy version of me? A healthy version that is not solely motivated by fear of diabetes? I do think I need to put some serious effort into understanding more about the diabetes and how it affects me, but more than that, I think I want to start asking myself, "Am I trying to be healthy today?" instead of, "am I acting diabetic today?"

I can't.

When I first started teaching I had this cool way of responding to a frustrating day. I waited until it got dark, put a leash on my dog Max, and headed outside. We would cut through some bushes and across a small ditch, to find ourselves in a big empty field on the schoolgrounds next door to my apartments. We started at one end of the field and ran as hard as we could to the other end. Then again. And maybe again. And then fell, out of breath, in the big middle of the damp grass, and stared at the stars. We went home caring much less about anything stressful.

It would be nice if I could still do that. These days, if I run my knees feel like they will shatter under all the weight of my body. And if my knees held, my lungs would probably collapse. I'm way overweight and spend no time exercising. I can't run.

I noticed myself saying it out loud the other day, "I can't run." Then I thought about that for a minute. And for that brief moment I thought, "Yes I can; maybe not this second, but I could if I wanted to." Hard as it would be, I could do the things that would enable me to run that field again.

Encouraged by that little spark of possibility, I started thinking about other things I "can't" do. I can't dance. I can't go to this church or that. I can't learn another language. Couldn't dare travel to another country. Date? Are you kidding? I mentally ran my finger down this list of things I cannot do, and down past a lot more things I can't do. When I got to the bottom I thought, "Why not?"

Now many of the things on that list are things I don't desire to do. Those don't count. I'm not up for doing things just to prove I can. But when I was able to ask myself, "Why not?" this big free space opened up in my life and I realized I am much less limited than I thought. I could challenge some of my beliefs about myself. I can allow myself the freedom to dream. And then the ultimate freedom to try.

I'm not into pretending, so I'm not going to say I've actually tried anything on my "I can't" list. But I bet in time I will. Right now I will settle for having fun adding to my list. It is fun because I am able to see possibilities I never allowed myself to see before. The world looks much bigger to me. I can't wait to decide what to try!

Spaghettios and other Important Stuff

Ever try mindfully eating spaghettios? It's one of the most important things I've done all weekend. When I drove home on Friday afternoon I had big plans for enjoying the 2 days off. I was going places, buying things, creating things and learning a bunch of new stuff. It's Sunday afternoon now, and I can tell you, the weekend didn't go like that.

My car didn't move after I parked it Friday night. I haven't learned anything or talked to anyone except my family. I blew off grocery shopping and decided to live dangerously with only one bag of kitty litter. I don't know why, but it seems like backup kitty litter is important.

I didn't make a thing, though I moved around some art supplies. I didn't make any lists other than the grocery list that didn't make it out of the house. I didn't go to the bookstore or the park.

Though nothing went as planned, I'm more at peace than I thought possible. When I finished my spaghettios I realized the importance of all I already have. Realized I don't have to have new things, new experiences or new knowledge to make the weekend worthwhile.

While I have been fascinated by the whole "getting things done" movement, it doesn't really seem to work for me. "Adding value" to myself and my life doesn't make much sense to me right now either. The things that are important to me this Sunday night as I look back over the weekend are the number of times I petted my dogs, the smell of laundry detergent on my clean clothes, the time I spent sitting in mom's back yard, the naps I took, and the realization that spaghettios are good in this moment, not simply because they remind me of comfort food from the past or because they have iron and vitamins in them that might benefit me in the future.

Life is good. Right now. Just as it is.

Connections

I earned three stars out of five for my first Spanish composition. Three stars is not so good, but I am excited anyway.

I was reading through the pile of three hundred and forty some articles that had accumulated in my reader, when I came across Livemocha. I have had it in the back of my mind that I need to learn Spanish for a long time. And I have also been too scared to study it for a long time. I tried twice. And failed. Miserably. It was not because the language is too difficult, but because I was too scared to make mistakes. I was afraid of sounding stupid. So I said nothing.

I signed up with Livemocha and began my lessons. I couldn't believe it when, in lesson one, they told me to write about six people. They didn't even give me any cheat notes. I had to rely on memory of the vocabulary I had just learned. Now I know what my students feel like when they don't know how to spell the words they are writing. I held my breath and wrote as fast as I could, trying not to judge myself too much. When I finished, I submitted the lesson and went about other business since I didn't have a microphone for the spoken part.

I was checking my email when I saw one with very unfamiliar characters in the title. It was from a woman who is learning Hindi. She had graded my writing and highlighted my many mistakes. She is a native Spanish speaker.

I am excited. This time I am not afraid to try. Tonight I will go buy a microphone and see what people say about my oral Spanish. I can't believe that while I sat around waiting for the grocery store traffic to die down on a Sunday afternoon, I have communicated with two new people from two different countries.

This is way more fun than safely saying nothing! It is still a stretch for me, but I can't wait to try again. I bet this time will be different.

Doing Virtually Nothing

I made a dent in the chair! I got up a few minutes ago to get more diet dr. pepper and when I came back to sit down at the computer I could see where I have been sitting for 2 days, doing virtually nothing. Well, depending on how you look at it.

I've played with facebook, twitter, NCTE Ning. I joined a walking site & created a profile. I used a map to save walking routes with distances. I ordered new clothes, browsed books, spent hours reading blogs. I took surveys on educational materials, updated my profile for the State Board of Education, completed 6 required online trainings for my school district, and googled ideas for working as an inclusion teacher. I searched professional development offerings and registered for the NCTE national convention. I looked at maps and hotels for Philadelphia. Bought a plane ticket and saw where I would be sitting on it. I registered my mom for jury duty. Checked out the dating profile of the guy my friend was meeting for a first date. I cleared some of my work emails. I went to the Real Simple website to see if there was anything that needed simplifying in my life. I checked my bank statement and my financial profile. I looked up heart attack symptoms on the American Heart Association website when my mom got indigestion. I filled out a survey to estimate my own risk for having a heart attack in the next ten years. And last of all, I checked to make sure there are no hurricanes brewing anywhere in the world.

All that, and I made a dent in my chair! Now, it is a holiday weekend. At least I can say that. And I enjoyed all of it. But really, a dent?

Homesick

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I can't believe how this picture makes me feel. I'm surprised.

I have been so happy to live in Houston. No mountains, no small town culture for me. But for some reason I can't readily identify, this street view picture of my first childhood house makes me homesick. I had forgotten about it. I felt that it didn't exist any longer since it wasn't a part of my life. I figured it would be raggedy and falling down if it were even still standing. I was shocked the other night when I obviously had too much time on my hands and looked it up on Google maps.

It sounds silly but I experienced some resentment that it was looking so good without my family there to take care of it. How could anyone else be living there? It just didn't seem right. For the first time I can remember, I felt like claiming my history there.

To tell the truth, I never missed the house after we moved to Texas to a split floorplan house with "my own private room." Actually, the Virginia house had been kind of spooky for me. It presented so many challenges for a child as anxious as I was. The back yard literally dropped off a few feet past my swingset. Far "down the bank" was the city of Salem or Roanoke, I don't know which. Regardless, no place that a child would want to slip and fall into. The cold damp basement had one lightbulb in the front and one in the back, both requiring a blind sprint through darkness to the center of the room to feel for the worn twine to pull to turn it on. There were too many granddaddy long legs. And there was the man I swear I saw in the basement going through our things (probably a nosy landlord) and the devil that stood in his red cape out by the clothesline many nights when I looked out my window just before dark. I hated that window by the foot of my bed. And I thought the world must be full of trouble since we were located down the road from the fire station with all its sirens.

So for all these years, since I left at the age of seven, I haven't exactly had fond memories of the place. And I'm not saying that I suddenly have a whole host of them. But when I saw the dogwood tree in the front yard the homesick feeling slammed through me. It's still there. The shade is still there. I remembered BELONGING there. Me and all my dolls and my barbies and my baby sister. We ran through the thick grass with bare feet, often getting stung by a bee. I sat for hours in the clover patches looking for the "four leaf's." I looked up at the telephone poles and hoped there would be a problem so I could watch the men climb it again. I imagined what it would feel like to climb them myself. I watched with wonder that the birds sat still on their wires when the fire trucks flew by. We ate popsicles on the porch so the neighbor kids wouldn't see and wish that they had one if they weren't as lucky as us. All these little memories made me willing to reconnect, willing to say it was my home.

I don't think I will likely choose to go back there, but seeing how it looks now has been a sort of a gift. Instead of working to maintain a safe distance between now and the past, I have a reason to feel good about claiming it. It is so easy to remember the negative things about the past. I don't know why it is so difficult to remember the "dogwood trees." I am thankful that I could virtually go back and reframe my memories of 910 Red Lane.

I hope they take good care of that tree.