MindSpinner

She’s a vibrant, smart young woman, a natural leader. When we teachers sat around a table in November and brainstormed about how to help some of our struggling students (beyond what we teachers can manage), I suggested that we recruit a handful of especially capable seniors as peer tutors. She was one of three we named, and she was glad to help out. She’s thinking of teaching someday.

She did an especially creative yearbook page for our middle school cheerleaders. She learned how to use Photoshop to turn portions of photos to black and white, while her cheerleaders popped with color. I’ll doublecheck her proof changes on Monday and see how far she got with pages for our next deadline.

She won’t be finishing them.

I learned yesterday that she hydroplaned on Christmas afternoon on rainy roads. Her car wrapped around a tree. She’s still unconscious, and the prognosis is not good. I lay awake late into the night last night, praying. Sometime in the night I dreamed that she had died. I hope my dream means nothing at all. But brain damage is suspected, and her other injuries are extensive. If she recovers, that recovery will take the better part of a year, doctors say.

“Fight,” I whisper into the air. “Fight. If anybody’s got the stuff to be a miracle girl, you have.”

I teach in a very small school with a strong sense of community. The senior class, which I co-sponsor, has fewer than three dozen students. For the most part, they’ve grown up together. This is going to be tough.

We teachers, we go with the flow. We are ready for anything, almost, because we’ve very nearly seen it all. So when we open our classroom door come Monday morning only to note that the ceiling, if not the sky, has fallen, what do we do but collect a few materials, park our first period students in a room with a teacher on her planning period, go in search of available classroom space for the rest of the day, notify maintenance, and convince the superintendent, who probably needs no convincing, that we need to check the rest of the ceilings over fall break.

Amazingly, maintenance, not to be outdown by the whims of gravity, installs a new ceiling by the end of the day, properly anchored to studs above.

Fortunately, though Monday was Monday only moreso, tomorrow is Friday come what may.

I opened my classroom door yesterday to behold a prodigious desk, the likes of which I’ve never seen in a classroom - the same wood tone as the other, the same handles, all drawer fronts intact, not just a desk but an “L” stretching six feet in one direction and a few inches more than that in the other. I’m nicknaming it “The Fortress.”

And then I noticed the chair. The Jolly Green Giant could sit comfortably in that big black executive-style chair.  The last sizable office chair I ran across in a classroom was broken so that it pitched me backward whenever I forgot and leaned back.  I ditched it for fear I’d end up on my back with my feet sticking up in the air.  But this chair you could practically live in. 

Talk about wish fulfillment and then some!

Anybody who cares about teaching, schools, and our what government really ought to be doing shouldn’t miss Michael Winerip’s NY Times piece today, “Teachers, and a Law That Distrusts Them.”  The sad part is that this piece concludes Winerip’s four-year stint writing about education for the Times. I wish he’d open out this piece into a book showcasing what education should be and debunking nonsense that passes for attempts at progress.

But don’t stop there.  Also read, at Creek Running North, Chris Clarke’s account of his wife Becky’s teaching experience in a school district obsessed with implementing “progress” from above. Somewhere buried down in the comments I put in my two cents worth, from which I’ve excerpted the last paragraph:

There’s something truly insidious about the kind of education Becky was being required to implement, especially if it’s stretched over twelve years.  It’s mind-numbing, and it rewards compliance.  It’s a torment and a deterrent to creativity and curiousity.  Who wants that?  I’ve begun to think that there are those who do indeed want to produce a skilled population of workers trained to comply and long discouraged from asking big essential questions like “Why are we doing it this way?” or “What are the larger consequences of this course of action?” These graduates are likely to depend on others to think for them without deeply analyzing and are thus fairly easily manipulated by those who know how to orchestrate their prejudices, fears, and desires to net votes at the ballot box.  One can fleece their futures and simultaneously make them grateful for crumbs, lead them off to war waving flags, keep them stirred about minor moralities instead of issues of global consequence.  The result can look like a democracy when really it’s a ruling class managing its sheep.

School starts two weeks from today for teachers at our semi-year-round school, with a week of teacher training funded by a Federal Striving Readers Grant. My daughter and I will be off to see my mother next week, so this is school prep week. There’s a day of planning for each course and a day of filing to do. Moreover, I need to make the room look welcoming in time for our Open House on July 26. I’ll print out quotes again for the walls, repaint the wood table with better, less peelable paint, and work on the bulletin board.

It feels good to work in my big sunny classroom while I listen to NPR on an old radio from college or to an audiobook. Today’s audiobook title was American Theocracy. I can’t work and follow as closely as I could if I were reading, but the disturbing gist of the book is unfolding nonetheless while I file or clean or map out unit plans. Without the pressure of too much to do in too little time, school is a pleasant place to be. Work on leisurely summer days is usually interrupted by one or two lengthy conversations with colleagues or staff who happen to be at school (or must be), and I enjoy these, too.

Out in the hallway by the office, as I come in, a big desk has been sitting for weeks. It must be six feet long; it’s all of warm-colored wood or a convincing reproduction thereof, with distinctive drawer handles. In short, it’s the sort of desk teachers never see unless businesses donate them or the school system buys them somewhere used on the cheap. I’m not sure how this one came to be in the front hallway. The fact that the front panel of the middle drawer is missing is trivial indeed. It could be replaced and stained to match. Since my desk upstairs is not a desk at all, but a wobbly semi-circular table under which I’ve stacked plastic drawers from Wal-Mart, it is natural that I should succumb to desk lust. I’ve offered to adopt it if it happened to be homeless, but I learned today that it’s going to one of the new teachers, likely the literacy coach we hired thanks to the grant.

I’m all for this - really. New teachers deserve a good start, a perk or two, to show them that they are valued and supported. My perk is my big sunny classroom, though I practically had to excavate when I came last year. My plastic drawers work well enough - drawers are drawers, after all - and the table probably has as much surface area as the desk. But I have to wish that the maintenance staff would hurry up and move the object of my desire into that new teacher’s room and out of my sight so that I can stop thinking about it when I pass by. Now that the head of maintenance knows I want a real desk, he’ll probably generously try to find one for me. He gets things done and quickly, too. (This is a rare and wonderful thing.) But, sigh, I can see this desk now: metal with chipped paint and much smaller. I’ve had it before, over and over, for years. Once it came to me with a bum leg and the word “Dildo” emblazoned on it in permanent marker that just wouldn’t come off. I managed to doctor it a bit and made the word “Bilbo” instead, as if a Tolkien fan with a marker in his hand had not been able to contain himself.