Letters from Lisa

It’s 12:03 am and I can’t sleep. This is a relatively common occurrence, but generally my tossing and turning can be traced back to an identifiable cause. For once it isn’t residual over-caffeination or jitters about a big event coming up. I’m not quite sure why I’m up, other than the fact that I went into bed at 8:00 last night and apparently I do not need that much sleep. It could be as basic as that. Or, it could have something to do with the fact that I am getting old.

It’s not that I feel old. I don’t. I feel energized and upbeat and ready to take on big things. But I keep getting subtle and not-so-subtle reminders in my daily life that time is passing. Whenever I try to have a conversation with kids about technology, for example, and I end up sounding like my grandparents. “Why, when I was your age, cell phones hadn’t even been invented yet!” (Of course, the speed of advancement in technology has bypassed us all. I’m sure the children of today will sound like old codgers when they attempt to explain to THEIR kids how they recorded music into those quaint little colored boxes with the little white headphones. Headphones! The next generation will be plugging themselves directly into iTunes and downloading music straight into the brain. Or something.)

Today what brought it home was watching the 8th graders graduate. I was in the audience as the graduation proceeded, and the little pipsqueaks I knew as 4th and 5th graders strode confidently across the stage as brand new high schoolers, complete with corsages and diplomas. Each of them gave a short speech about their middle school years, thanking their family and friends and teachers for supporting them and enabling them to succeed. A few even made passing references to how hard school was for them as elementary students, even to the point of saying, “When I first got to this school, I didn’t like it very much.” Thankfully, none of them had been in MY classes… that would have been awkward. Though the fact is, I am one of the few remaining staff people in my division who even worked at the school when these kids were elementary students.

Sometimes I feel like the school historian, when I find myself saying things like, “You should have seen him when he was in elementary school… he’s come a long way.” People nod, but it’s like we’re talking CD players and iPods again. It’s hard to imagine what it was like “back then”. And this is the group that feels “back then” for me, because this is the group that welcomed me to the school when I started out as a student teacher.

They were my first students in every academic subject except science.

They were the founding castmembers of my very first musical theater production.

They slept overnight on the floor with me at the Central Park Zoo.

They beat me mercilessly at checkers, Connect 4, Battleship and UNO, and only stopped reminding me about it when we passed in the hallway fairly recently.

These were kids who challenged me with Star Wars and Lord of the Rings trivia until they finally realized that I had so many more years of viewings under my belt that my trivia supremacy was assured.

These were kids whose voices still ring out in my language samples and case studies from graduate school. Though they were reduced to pseudonyms and made-up circumstances, they were always perfectly real to me. Sometimes, even now, I find myself telling stories about them to my graduate classes as though I worked with them just last week, when in fact what I am describing happened 5 years ago. 

These were kids who found out what it was like to face me in an all out, no-holding-back, supercharged powerhouse dizziness-inducing Tag smackdown. (And for the record, I caught every single one of them. So what if I was out of breath for the next 20 minutes?)

These were kids who, on my last day as a student teacher, clung to me and threatened to lock me in the closet so that I couldn’t leave. Realizing that was probably unworkable, they then sat together at dismissal plotting how to shuttle me in between their various houses, as if the reason I was leaving was that I didn’t live nearby. They just didn’t believe that I would leave them because I actually wanted to. And they were right. I never did leave. I told myself that I was going to see each of them graduate from high school, and in just a few more years, I will. Some of them eventually moved away or left to go to other schools - and I wonder about them all the time - but I feel a loyalty to this group that I don’t think I’ll ever lose, and that I might not ever quite feel again.

As a teacher, I know I’m going to be faced with this year after year. It’s partly why I do this job. Sometimes, in the moment, one can start to despair. It seems that if a child doesn’t “get” something within your 45 minute period, all hope is lost and they’ll “always” be stuck where they are. Well, on that stage today were kids who, when I knew them, seemed very stuck. And somewhere along the line, they got unstuck and started to move forward. Maybe I had a little part in that, I don’t know. They taught me a lot more than I taught them. And one thing that they have taught me, just today, is that sometimes you don’t get to see exactly how your work with kids gets them toward the end result - but it does.

I walked into the reception after the ceremony today and immediately felt overwhelmed by the huge crowd, and was about to head out the door when one of the kids spotted me and yelled out my name. I slipped through the crowd to congratulate him and his family. “Remember the Star Wars trivia game from 4th grade?” he asked. “It seems like only yesterday.”

“It was yesterday,” I said.

And now it’s tomorrow. But maybe I can put it off for a few hours while I get some sleep.

Our entire school descended on the zoo yesterday, and despite it being 90 degrees and humid and sticky, a good time was had by all. You know it is too hot to be outside when kids throw away their soda and plead for sips of water! I personally have an ambivalent relationship with the zoo, since it’s usually stuffed full with school groups and is a large, spread out space, a prime combination for losing track of kids. I’ve never actually lost anyone, and with my obsessive head-counting it will probably never happen, but it’s always a fear. I also worry about kids who are super-sensitive to smells or who tire easily, or who are afraid of animals large or small. (I’ve known a few to have had a reaction with butterflies. Butterflies!)

But they were all troopers, simply happy to be there and looking at animals. There were excited shouts, “Lisa! There’s a turtle!” all through the reptile house. (Apparently another group did that as well, even though I wasn’t even with them!) They clapped as the sea lions gobbled up fish during training, and several kids told me that they liked the baby one the best because it kept wandering off and wasn’t listening to the trainer. One boy was concerned that a snake was “in the wrong habitat” since it was in hay and straw, rather than sand. And one little girl, who hates even walking anywhere, took off running when she caught sight of the zebras because she was so excited to look at them.

All of my experiences teaching science to kids, and just being with kids in pseudo-natural places like zoos, suggest that kids love nature. There’s sometimes a stereotype that today’s kids are so plugged in and zoned out that they can’t get excited about planting a seed or watching a baboon groom its friend. It isn’t so. Kids love nature, especially animals, from the squirrels outside our window to zebras to penguins.

Where have I been lately? I haven’t posted much here. The pages of my journal are largely neglected too. May and June have been an absolute frenzy of activities and special events and obligations. School is out on the 21st, so in the past couple of days my life has become noticeably slower and more relaxed, but I have been preoccupied with planning for next year and cleaning up and teaching graduate school 7 hours a week, so I haven’t had much time to reflect.

It all came to a head right around the end of May. We performed the musical for the elementary school as a dress rehearsal on May 30th. That night I taught my first 3 and a half hours of graduate class for the June semester. The next morning, May 31st, we did the show for invited guests. The timing was not the most ideal, but I can’t complain about the results - this is the best cast and crew of kids that I’ve ever worked with on a theater project, and also the show with the most creative input from students. We didn’t adapt a play or a book or a popular story this year, but basically wrote the entire show from the ground up, including most of the music. (Actually, most of the compliments I got about the show were about my piano playing.)

Once the show was over, it took a little while to fully recover my schedule. With that big project out of the way, it was time to pick up everything else that was on hold. Slowly, I’m getting around to it all.

This weekend’s project? Grade Round 2 of papers for the graduate course. The June semester is only 4 weeks, so all of the assignments and projects are crammed into a very tight space. It’s hard on the students AND their professor. I’m looking forward to the July semester, when I’ll have the same tight schedule but the benefit of running the class without also having to teach full time during the day. After this, those 2-hour sessions once a week during the regular school year will seem effortless!

Superintendent gives plaigarized speech at National Honor Society Induction

You know what is really irritating about this? As a high school student, I was a member of that honor society. If I had been found to have used a speech from the internet, I would have been kicked out. And rightly so. Plaigarism is plaigarism. Administrators should be held to the same standards as students.

This administrator’s job is up for review in a few weeks. I, for one, hope that her term is not renewed. I’d be embarrassed to have gone to school in this district if they continue to uphold this person as an “educational leader”.