Sarah is writing a novel this month! Check back in December.

Kim Davis essay posted on Curve Mag blog!

To read the whole article on the Curve Magazine blog, click HERE.

Ms. Sisyphus

She perches on the edge of the desk, dressed in black leather, one well-manicured hand on her sexy black-rimmed glasses.  The class, a diverse crowd of teenagers whose earrings and tattoos and mannerisms would intimidate most people, watches her every move, riveted.  She’s saved them.  They’re convinced.  Because of her, they will learn now, and watch every door open to them as they move forward in their lives.

It’s the teacher’s daydream, made Hollywood real in the 1995 movie Dangerous Minds, starring Michelle Pfeiffer.  Would the audience have found Pfeiffer as sexy if she’d spent 60% of the movie attending district-required trainings, updating her grade book, emailing parents, and attempting to hold her urine for eight hours?  Of course not.  What’s sexy is the engagement with students.  See Mr. Holland’s Opus.  See Dead Poet’s Society.  The movie teachers know what actually matters in a school day:  the students.  That’s why they change lives.

I, on the other hand, am a real teacher.  I teach English at a vast city high school with as many challenges as the one in Dangerous Minds.  In the desks in my classroom are:  disengaged freshmen trapped in poverty, senior football players angry that graduation requires English, immigrants from tens of cultures who carry their parents’ hard-won expectations on their shoulders, kids of all backgrounds who lack confidence in their reading and writing and do not believe they’ll succeed.  If I were a movie teacher, I’d connect with each of these kids, find out what each of them needs, take them on field trips (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest style), expose them to the world, build their confidence.  Each one of them would realize that they want to and need to learn, and they’d all embrace learning (even the kid who seemed resistant to it all -- a requirement of the movie genre), and it would be because of me.

Instead, I spend all day running and failing.  6:45, out the door, traffic on I-25, the right turn into the sea of the parking lot at South High.  6:55, wrench the tall classroom windows open with one hip and the strength of my lower back.  7:00, write the lesson plans on the board, write the “content/language objective” on the board for each class in case an administrator walks through to check for that district requirement.  7:10, run to the copy room to make the photocopies I forgot to make because I rushed out the day before to pick up my daughter from school.  7:20, give up on the jammed copy machine and change lesson plans.  7:25, listen to a student who needs me to hear a long story about her weekend.  7:32, set up the projector for the daily announcements.  7:35, update the digital gradebook so parents and students who check it during the day will view an accurate number.  7:40, welcome the freshmen trickling into the room.  7:45, bell.  7:49, remind them that after the announcements, they need to look ready for class: notebook and pen/pencil out, Samsung Galaxy tablet signed in to our class page.  7:50, remind them again.  And again.  “Ah, Miss, do we really have to read today?”  

The day blurs.  1st period, 2nd (seniors in a college-prep class), 3rd (more seniors), 4th (freshmen again).  In each five-minute passing period, I’m recording late work, or cajoling someone to come in after school for tutoring, or I’m checking in with the girl who slammed into class and laid her head down on her desk.  I drink water because my first year of teaching, I became dangerously dehydrated and nearly passed out, but there is no time to pee.  The trick is to drink enough water so I don’t pass out, but not so much that my bladder recognizes it’s full.  

Each class, I’m scrambling, no matter how airtight my lesson plan.  I love to plan lessons, each day crafted to meet a clearly defined objective with opening activities, models, guided practice, independent practice, closure.  But plans never take humans into account.  Jordan doesn’t have his book.  Mariella has just burst into tears because her boyfriend broke up with her.  Two of the boys in that small group neglected to do their homework.  Stacey claims she has no ideas and can’t get started.  So:  I have to start cutting from the plan, adjusting, shifting.  I give them time to talk to a partner so I can take attendance on the computer, but an email pops up on my screen from a counselor (she needs to see Teshe immediately), and the laughter in the far corner of the room tells me that group is not discussing the serious essay we just read.  

I never sit down.  In my memories of high school, the teachers taught from their desk chairs.  My AP English teacher leaned back in his, propping his feet up on the desk at times.  I circulate, reading over kids’ shoulders, participating sometimes in small group conversation, prodding kids who are stuck.  I ask Mario, a 9th grader, to write a little more, and he pounds his fist on his desk.  “Why’re you on my case, Miss?”  Because that’s what I’ve been trained to do.  It’s my job.  

Lunch is not lunch.  It’s a social worker popping in to talk to me about a student’s new homelessness status; it’s the psychologist seating himself seriously across from me and warning me that IEPs and 504s are legally binding but no, he doesn’t have the paperwork on each kid for me yet; it’s a colleague wanting to know how I’d handle a situation; it’s a student pleading for more time on an assignment; it’s a series of emails from parents and the district saying “Why can’t you fix it Why can’t you fix it Why can’t you fix it?”  Sometimes, I grab my tupperware and hide in the break room with the other English teachers who are hiding.  We deserve a forty-minute lunch.  Don’t we?  We’re not sure.  We eat quickly, our eyes on the clock.  If we worked non-stop -- planned, graded, created, planned and graded some more -- we’d never be finished.  Someone tells a funny story.  It feels good to laugh.  We are human.  That’s right.  We’d forgotten for awhile.

Now 5th period (team meeting), and then:  6th. My planning period.  The only fifty-minute time in the day that is mine.  In Dead Poet’s Society, Robin Williams never closed the door behind a class and then collapsed into his chair out of pure, happy relief to have some time to himself (possible deleted scene from Dead Poet’s Society:  Robin Williams performs some yoga stretches and heads to the bathroom to pee.  Cut to an artistic shot of him standing on a toilet, yelling “Oh Captain, my Captain!”).  We never saw Michelle Pfeiffer gorge herself on M&Ms and then burst into tears at the long to-do list scribbled on a purple sticky note on her desk.  Richard Dreyfuss never settled into his chair prepared to create a new inspiring lesson plan, only to open his email to new directives from the school district that would consume forty-five of his precious free moments.  It shouldn’t be called “planning time,” but “breathing time.”  Barely.

The bell for 7th period rings, and I’ve only crossed off “plan tomorrow” from my formidable to-do list.  The seniors who lounge into the classroom for 7th resent that they’re still in high school.  If they pass my class, they earn college credit, but they’re not as motivated by their own goals as my other two senior classes.  Read?  Many of them groan.  Write?  Most of them claim to hate it, “suck at it,” or both. This is my chance to slide into the movie teacher role, to inspire so deeply that, for reasons they won’t fully grasp until they’re much older, all they’ll want to do is read and read and write who they are to the world.  

Instead, the intercom buzzes.  Please release all softball players at 2:15.  Please release all tennis players at 2:15.  Football scrimmagers should be released at 2:30.  A fourth of my class rises, some apologetically.  Some hand me the homework that was due, but all of them leave.  

Take attendance.  Collect homework.  Input grades.  Organize the students into groups.  Circulate.  Guide them back onto task.  Circulate.  Lead a class discussion.  Assign tomorrow’s homework.  As we’re clarifying the homework, LaShonda asks me, “You have an English major in college, Ms. Brooks?”  I nod.  The others are listening.  LaShonda clicks her tongue and punches the boy in front of her.  “See?  My mama says people who get English majors in college can only become teachers.  She says major in something else.”  The bell rings.

Within a minute:  silence.

Outside the tall second-floor windows, students shout to each other across the grass, laughing.  Truck engines rev.  Inside this classroom, a shaft of soft sunlight across my desk, I have exactly 27 minutes to assess as many papers as I can, input grades, write tomorrow’s plans on the board, photocopy tomorrow’s handouts, and respond to the five emails that have popped up in my inbox (all marked urgent).  A male voice below my window:  “What a jack-ass!”  I click my purple pen open and begin to read a student’s essay on Malcolm X’s thoughts about education.  “I’m not so different from Malcolm X.  Like him, I have had to learn in the walls of a prison.  School has trapped me here, and I’ve had no choice.”  A female high-pitched giggle.  A male teacher:  “Hey!”

3:25.  I switch off the fans, yank the ancient windows down, grab a manilla folder of papers to grade at night, pull my bag out of the closet, pull the door closed.  The pennants of my educational institutions decorate the doorway’s edge:  the BA from Luther College, the MAT from University of Alaska Southeast, the MFA from Naropa University.  Every afternoon before I rush to drive slowly in afternoon traffic, I pause to consider these pennants.  I could be a movie teacher, couldn’t I?  I could inspire.  Maybe tomorrow everything will slow down a little.  Maybe tomorrow I’ll be able to just focus on the students, the other details be damned.

3:41.  I’m late to Mitike’s elementary school, but Meredith is there, smiling, ready with a warm hug.  3:52, I make Mitike a snack, settle her at the kitchen table.  Meredith asks, “How was your day?”  Without thinking, I say, “Defeating.”  Mitike asks me a question about math, and I start chopping an onion for dinner.

“Really?  Defeating?”  

What is this profession?  Meredith has had her own long day.  I tell myself:  Be calm. Give your best to your family.  Leave the stress at school.  But all my filters are skewed.  I can’t be the movie teacher, and so I feel inadequate at every role.  Parent.  Wife.  Cook.  I can’t be the movie anything.  I want to sit down on the kitchen tile and cry, or wrap myself in an afghan and read for two hours while other people make me dinner, or venture out into the foothills for a long restorative hike.  Meredith would say, “Then do one of those things!”  But I have to keep running.  I won’t survive otherwise.

8:45, read a little more of Harry Potter to Mitike.  9:00, turn off her light and kiss her on the forehead one more time.  9:10, check in with Meredith.  Connect, connect.  (I want to connect.  I think Robin Williams and Michelle Pfeiffer were both single and alone.  Was Richard Dreyfuess? Implication:  great teachers don’t need love or partnership?).  Meredith and I cuddle next to each other to talk about the Kentucky county clerk who refuses to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.  On my desk in my classroom is a framed photograph of my family.  The first week of school, a 9th grader interrupted me to ask, “Miss, is that your sister?”  I told him no, she’s my partner.  He furrowed his brow and quieted, but spent the rest of the class time glancing at the photo.  Another kind of education.  Kim Davis, Kentucky county clerk, would disapprove.

9:35, down to my orange office where I want to write books.  Instead, I grade papers for an hour, then write lesson plans for another hour.

When I finally climb upstairs to bed, Meredith has already crawled into bed.  Please forgive me, I tell her.  It’s only for the next ten years or so.  Just until Mitike graduates from high school.

“But does it have to be this way?” she asks.

I’m not sure.

I wake in the night, at 3:21 a.m., disturbed by a nightmare in which I tried to pull all of my students forward in viscous, deep mud, but some of them sank beneath the surface.  I couldn’t save them, though I pulled with all my weight on the thick ropes wound around their waists.  IN the darkness, I couldn’t see if I was pulling them toward any kind of safety at all.  

6 a.m., alarm.  6:15 a.m., coffee and breakfast, The New Yorker:  my civilized moment of the day, though I-25 roars already a few blocks away.  

6:45, out the door, traffic on I-25, the right turn into the sea of the parking lot at South High.  6:55, wrench the tall classroom windows open with one hip and the strength of my lower back. 7:00, write the lesson plans on the board. . .

I am not a movie teacher.  I have stood on desks and yelled out poetry, but I’m not Robin Williams.  I’m just a flawed human being with an English major attempting to complete an impossible job every day, Sisyphus trudging up the mountain again, rolling that round enormous stone ahead of her.  Yes, I’d love to wake up each morning and write books, with maybe a college class or two to teach in the afternoon.  But for thirteen years, I’ve been rolling this stone up the mountain.  Along the way, a student or two learns a few things.  Several of them wave at me, smiling, as I lumber past.  

Strangely, that makes the entire task worthwhile.

I love camping (and also hate it)

Last July, when Meredith and I had known each other only a month, I asked her on the spur of the moment to go camping in Rocky Mountain National Park with me and Mitike.  I didn’t ask, “Do you camp?” or “Do you like camping?”, as I assumed everyone my age loved to crawl into a nylon tent and sleep in the wilderness.  This assumption had been formed by: 1) my sometime blindness to experiences outside my own; 2) the unusually high percentage of time I have spent in a tent in the past 20 years; and 3) the fact that I love camping.

Meredith, on the other hand, had not been camping for ten years.  Meredith doesn’t love camping.  She loves five-star hotels and white sheets, long hot showers, soft supportive mattresses, innovative restaurant food. 

But she was falling in love with me.  “Do you want to camp with us tonight?” I asked, and she said, “Sure!” as if she camped all the time.  She had to drive five hours round-trip to retrieve her dusty camping gear from her parents’ garage, then meet us at the Moraine Park Campground site, working hard to appear nonchalant.  I did wonder why she struggled a little to set up her tent, but otherwise, she fooled me completely. 

A year later, securely in love and engaged, Meredith confessed to me that she really doesn’t love camping that much.  This was just before we were to depart for a four-day camping trip in the Sawtooth National Recreation Area in Idaho. 

I responded gently:  It will be fun!  I’ll make it easy.  There are actually showers (true), flush toilets (true), the food will be great (sort of true) and the air mattress is incredibly comfortable (not really true, though it’s better than hard ground).

But I wanted to say:  HOW CAN YOU NOT LOVE CAMPING?

I didn’t grow up camping.  When I was a little girl, we headed west from Iowa to Colorado, where we spent a week in the Rockies in a cozy cabin with electricity and indoor plumbing, then drove back across Nebraska.  Once or twice, my family did camp in the sticky Iowa humidity in a nearby county park, and when I was in 9^th grade, my brave (and young, and also foolish) biology teacher Mr. French took our entire class camping for a night at Wildcat Den State Park.  But I didn’t actually begin to love camping until I was nineteen, working as a camp counselor in the Sangre de Cristos in Colorado.  It was then that I had a revelation:  for free, I could carry my house in a backpack, and live happily in the most pristine wilderness for days and days.  At age 24, I hiked the Colorado Trail from Durango to Copper Mountain, happily living in a tent for four weeks. 

For some reason, this was one of the first pieces of biographical information I chose to share with Meredith’s parents the first time I had dinner at their house.  Her dad’s eyes widened:  “So you didn’t shower for weeks?”  I quickly assured him that I shower regularly now.

But what is it about camping that still enamors me, all these years later?  It’s not easy.  It requires hours of organization and packing and set-up (and unpacking and re-organization).  It’s not always fun, especially when it’s raining, hailing, sleeting, or all of the above.  Even the most gourmet meals get cold, or get bits of dirt or pine needles in them.  Campground camping is a strange mix of solitude and too much company from RV owners, children on bikes, and your own tentmates.  Just one night of a lovely campfire perfumes your hair, skin and clothes for the rest of the camping trip.  After a circuit or two of the campground and a few hours reading a book in the hammock, it’s time to walk around the campground again.  The air mattress is not comfortable, and each morning, your back and neck ache, and your tongue sticks to the roof of your mouth and you get those little yellow crusties in the corners of your eyes.  At most camping sites, you either have to poop into an outhouse pit toilet filled with other people’s excrement or you have to dig a hole and poop like the black bears.  In the morning, making coffee requires warming up your fingers enough to flick on the lighter, which may or may not start the camping stove that may or not have enough fuel.  Add to all this a relatively new understanding of mine about camping:  family camping means no adult privacy ever, since an excited little girl in a purple sleeping bag is rolled up right beside you, with her brown eyes wide open.

Why do I still want to go camping?

Because I love staying up late under the brilliant stars, warming my hands at the campfire.  Because I love cooking on my little propane stove, and I love watching the light fade from the sky through the silhouettes of the pine trees.  Because I love having nothing at all to do in a day but hike and lounge in my hammock with a book.  Because I love being woken by birds and the light filtering through the nylon tent.  Because I love that I have everything I need right there in the wilderness:  kitchen and bedroom and living room.  Because I love making tinfoil dinners and tasting hot coffee on cold mornings and roasting marshmallows late at night.  Because I love the moment my feet get warm in my sleeping bag.  Because I love my daughter’s sense of freedom when we’re camping:  the way she plays in the woods, and feels important that it’s her job to fill the water bottles at the pump.  Because I love the simplicity of camping:  that our devices go dead after a day, that no one can call or text or email us, that we have to mull over a question together instead of look it up quickly on Google, that to-do lists and expectations and obligations cease to matter.  Because I love the quality of conversation that happens between people camping together, when there is time and space to reflect and discuss.  Because, even though a little girl and a dog are sleeping nearby, cuddling with my fiancé in a tent beneath layers of blankets and sleeping bags is sweet, and cold nights are a lovely excuse to cuddle closer.

As I set up our tent in the beautiful woods in the Sawtooths, and Meredith laid out the lunch food on the picnic table, I called over to her, “Isn’t this great?”  I so dearly wanted her to love camping the way I love it that I had hidden my long list of reasons I don’t like it.  She smiled at me across the campsite, a Wheat Thin layered with peppered salami and fresh mozzarella cheese in one hand.  “Yes,” she said, gazing up at our canopy of pine trees, and then over at our tent, “this is a beautiful place.”

One of the many reasons I love Meredith is that she’s open to adventure, even if it’s not what she would have chosen to do on her own.  We finished setting up the camp and then walked down the hill to the white-sand shore of Redfish Lake, where the Sawtooth Mountains rose in an impressive backdrop to the glittering blue water.  Mitike and our dog splashed around, and we lounged on the beach, our backs against an enormous fallen tree.  Later, after a dinner of hot dogs and steamed French green beans, we built a roaring fire and watched the stars emerge.  And still later, we crawled into our bed in the tent, cuddling close.  I closed my eyes and thought about the Milky Way above us, and I thought about how much I love camping.

And then, in the middle of the night, when the temperature had dropped to 35 degrees and my feet and nose were freezing, when my lower back hurt and Mitike was whimpering, “I’m cold, Mommy!” and the dog had curled himself into the smallest ball possible, I whispered into Meredith’s ear, “I actually hate camping, you know.” She burst out laughing, which sounded odd through her chattering teeth.  “You do?”  “Yes.  Let’s get a hotel room, with white sheets and a hot shower and room service.”  Instead, we pulled the blankets and sleeping bags closer around us, draped a sweater over the dog, and cinched TK’s sleeping bag around her head.    

Four days later, when we were actually enjoying hot showers and clean white sheets in a Provo, Utah, La Quinta Hotel, I admitted it again:  “I really don’t know if I love camping.”  Meredith grinned at me.  She’d just listed everything she’d loved about our trip to Idaho:  a hike on a dramatic ridge above the lake, kayaking, campfires, star-gazing, dinner on the beach, a lazy morning with scrambled eggs and coffee, our tree silhouette canopy, the ease of our togetherness and of being unplugged for awhile.  She pulled me into a full hug.  “I love you, you know.  And next time we go to Redfish Lake, we could stay in one of those cute cabins.”

We could, of course.  Almost everything I love about camping could be achieved through the kind of cabin experience I had in my childhood, and everything I dislike would be fixed by a comfortable bed, a flush toilet, a hot shower, and a little heat within four walls.  But.

What if the point of camping is to more fully appreciate a hot shower?  What if the point is to understand how lucky we are to have soft beds and clean sheets, restaurant food, and sweet-smelling hair?  (Meredith says she already appreciated these things). 

What if the point is to be a little uncomfortable, to shake ourselves out of the expected comfort of daily modern life?

Several days after our camping adventure in Idaho, Meredith showed me a little YouTube video advertisement for the Australian-made “Teardrop” camper.  I watched the video three times on my own.  In that dear little tow-along camper, one has a comfortable king-sized bed and a full kitchen. 

“If I had that, I’d never sleep in a tent again,” I said, in awe, and then clapped my hands over my mouth.  I had just betrayed tent-camping!  But maybe – just maybe – I’ve put in enough time on the ground.  Maybe it’s time to transition to something a little more comfortable in the wilderness. 

Maybe. 

Ask me next summer, when enough time has elapsed, and I’ll tell you I can’t wait to unroll the tent and shake out the sleeping bags.  I love camping, I’ll tell you.  It’s one of my favorite things to do.

We are the change we've been waiting for.

A little "art" I created in a Naropa class last week:  Anna
Dickinson, the 19th century Quaker abolitionist and
orator (and lesbian) observing 9-year-old (lesbian) me.

While Facebook friends and my classmates and professors at Naropa's Summer Writing Program celebrated the SCOTUS marriage-equality decision last Friday, I struggled with anger.  What were we celebrating, really?  The Supreme Court's decision that my fiancé and I deserve basic human rights?  I thought about the 1954 Brown versus Board of Education decision, and wondered if African American families felt celebratory or exhausted and angry when it was announced.  Of course my child should get to attend school with your child.  It's about time.  Or the 1919 passing of the 19th Amendment, which enfranchised women in the United States 143 years after Abigail Adams pleaded with her husband John to "remember the ladies" as he helped write the text of the U.S. Constitution.  I've seen the photographs of women celebrating the amendment, victoriously holding their placards aloft.  But surely they felt anger, too.  One hundred and forty-three years?   The fight was painful, vitriolic.  Opponents hurled insults at the suffragettes:  she's really a man, she neglects her children, she's a Sapphist. Many suffragettes did not live to see their dream of the vote realized.  When justice takes so long, how can we forgive the time frame and just celebrate?

I carried these brooding thoughts with me to a table at the Naropa Café, where my poet-friend Val was gesturing for me to join her.  Val is much older than I am:  short gray hair, life-worn, a poet shaman who wears bright scarves, believes her dreams, and talks openly of a difficult past she barely survived.  We're connected because we're both writers and we're both lesbians.

"I can't shake this anger I'm feeling today," I told her.  My bones felt heavy.  I told Val what I'd been thinking about Brown and Abigail and celebrations, and she nodded, agreeing, but I caught the glint of loving amusement in her eyes.  And suddenly, I heard how young I sounded.  I came out as a lesbian at age 28, in 2005, after famous people like Ellen had begun to come out (1997), after the last sodomy law was overturned in Texas (2003), after Massachusetts legalized same-sex marriage (2004).  I was born eight years after the Stonewall Riots (1969).  And I didn't feel like celebrating?  In the middle of my own sentence, I burst out laughing.

Val grinned.  "The world is changing," she said.  "It's our work to be midwives to all this change.  We've got to celebrate.  It's our work."

It's our work.  I celebrated the rest of the day without hesitation, cheering with all the rest when Anne Waldeman introduced our Friday colloquium with a joyful fist in the air and a "How about that Supreme Court decision?" I checked Facebook more often than usual, and felt only glad to see all the rainbows.  Meredith texted from the World Series of Poker in Vegas:  "Because of the Supreme Court decision today, I've already won!"  Determined to be a midwife for all this change, whenever it arrives, a friend and I toasted Justices Kennedy, Ginsburg, Sotomayor, Kagan and Breyer at dinner that night.  What does anger accomplish?  The change is happening.  People who struggled with police at Stonewall never thought they'd see this day.

This morning, I sit outside on the front porch with my coffee, the sprinklers nourishing the new plants in our garden, and contemplate change in my own life.  In four years, Mitike and I have moved three times:  Juneau to Fort Collins, Fort Collins to Boulder, and now to Denver. Four years ago, Ali died.  Only two years ago, I emerged from living all the time inside grief.  And now, in this past year and a half, as if something in me was finally prepared to midwife good, life-giving change:  I met Meredith, I got a few pieces published, I earned an MFA, I found a good high school English job, and I got engaged.  When the assistant principal at South High asked me why I was moving to Denver, I told her I was moving in with my fiancé, and that she lives just a few miles from the school.  It wasn't long ago that it was dangerous for a teacher to come out to an administrator.  The assistant principal just smiled and said, "Congratulations!  Will the kids have to get used to you having a new last name next year, then?"

This morning, I feel only joy.  Yes, these changes that seem obvious take too long.  Yes, we have a long way to go in this country to craft a safe and equal world for people of all races, backgrounds, sexual orientation, etc.  But this morning, I'm watching the sun glint off the droplets of water on my new yarrow and coneflower plants.  In a year, I'm hoping these plants fill this garden, but they're still new.  They're waiting for the soil to be right for their roots, for the sun and rain to nourish them just enough.  Then they'll grow tall and full.  For now, I'll stand nearby and write, a midwife for all this good change.

Overwhelmed

After my sister Katie and her book club read and studied Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time, by Brigid Schulte, the group of women attended Schulte's April 23 talk in Fort Collins. In the Q&A session after the talk, Katie raised her hand and asked where an overwhelmed working mother of two small children could even begin.  Schulte's response:  "Throw away your to-do lists."

On Katie's recommendation, I've bought this book, and. . . I've stacked it on the top of a pile of other books on my desk that I plan to read soon, when I have time.  When I'm not so overwhelmed.  One stack is my stack of esoteric "to-read" books; another is inspirational "to-read" books; the final one is "I've read this recently but haven't bothered to put it away yet" books.  On my bedside table in my room, I have the stack of "fiction I've started but haven't gotten around to continuing" books, the stack of "poetry I'd like to say I've read but it never holds my attention at midnight when I go to bed" books, the stack of "biographies I mean to read but stop reading because people's lives aren't as interesting as they could be at midnight when I've finished writing and grading papers and planning lessons" books, and the stack of "bad lesbian romances I buy because I want to support other lesbian writers but just can't bear to read them" books.

Schulte's book, Overwhelmed perches on the prestigious stack, the first stack I see when I come in the door after a long day of teaching, the stack I see when I grab my laptop to write my 1500 words for the night, no matter how tired I am.

To-Do:
*Read all those books.
*Stay as well-read as possible.
*Do everything on my to-do list, every night.

If I didn't have a to-do list, I'd never get anything done.  Throw it away?  I'm too overwhelmed to think about doing that.

Tonight, for example, I decided I would not let myself start anything else until I'd crossed off two important items from the long to-do list on my desk:  buy a dress for the San Francisco wedding in June, and buy shoes for that wedding.  Simple enough, except that I detest shopping, even online.  Styles, colors, reviews, comparisons.  I tried to shop in person earlier tonight, but one walk through Macy's made me shudder.  I'll take my chances online.  Two hours later, I clicked "purchase" on Amazon, then immediately regretted I'd chosen a lavender dress instead of something safer, like brown.  Already 11:30 pm.  Instead of picking up one of those books, I played three games of Words With Friends on my phone, then felt frustrated that I'd frittered away the time when I could have been enriching my brain.

To-Do:
*Get a dress for San Fran
*Stop frittering away the hours.
*Quote Thoreau more often.
*Read Thoreau more often.
*Do more yoga?
*Stay off Facebook!
*Check in with friends and family (Facebook for five minutes.)
*Stay up later, to do more things from my To-Do list

I know these are first-world problems.  White, privileged problems.  The anxiety that rises in me when I think about the full laundry hamper, the empty refrigerator (when TK needs food for her lunch tomorrow), and my current job search is the anxiety of someone who lives in a safe and secure house and neighborhood, who has a stable and well-paying job, who is relatively healthy and is surrounded by supportive, loving family and friends.  I don't need to worry.

To-Do:
*WORRY.

My chest aches, my arms go numb, my breath is too shallow.  My lower back hurts.  I sit on my couch and try to distract myself with The New Yorker, and end up reading about forest elephants which poachers are evidently killing at a rate of one every fifteen minutes.  American researcher Andrea Turkalo has camped out in the Dzanga-Ndoki National Park in the Central African Republic for twenty years.  She spends her time observing the elephants and reading voraciously.  She told The New Yorker:  "That's why I like being here.  You have time to focus on things."  Her life is in danger because the Sudanese poachers carry automatic weapons, and her work is in danger because the elephants are disappearing and the Chinese are blazing roads so they can log the forest.  I shouldn't feel jealous of Andrea Turkalo.

To-Do:
*Start a campaign against the buying of ivory.
*Discover a way to make my Boulder apartment feel like a tent in the Dzanga-Ndoki

I'm not overwhelmed the way I was when I lived in the middle of grief.  The smallest tasks overwhelmed me then.  I'd run out of milk and lean against the counter to cry about it.  I'd lie in bed in the morning and dread the complicated task of getting dressed and then brushing my teeth.  The dentist bill made me panic, and so did the price of ground beef, and of soccer lessons for TK.  Now I'm mostly overwhelmed by happiness:  moving, job searches, future plans.  And I'm a mother of a small child, which makes me overwhelmed anyway.  I don't get to come home from work and just lounge on the couch with my peanut butter tortilla in one hand and a book in the other.  I have to cook a healthy dinner and then encourage TK to pack her lunch and then push her to put her pajamas on and brush her teeth, and somewhere in there we practice math (tonight, we practiced fractions), and somewhere in there we read another chapter of Harry Potter, and then I tuck her into bed.  I could flop onto the couch after that, and read, or watch TV.  But I make myself write.

To-Do:
*Sleep more.
*Write three more novels before August 30.
*Find out why I'm so compelled to write.
*Find something bigger and more important to write about.
*Ask myself:  if I never relax and only write, about what will I write?
*Ask myself:  what will happen if I order out for dinner more often?

My middle school students are all researching nonviolent action in the world right now.  That's the best gift I can offer a privileged, predominately white population of students, to show them that 1) violence is not an answer to the world's problems and 2) they have some power to enact change.  But as I circulate in my classroom, helping with sentence construction and image layout, advising about the credibility of online sources, I only feel overwhelmed.  Yes, people are marching in Myanmar against the jailing of journalists, and holding up signs in Russia against homophobia, and projecting holographic images of themselves illegally protesting in Spain.  But North Korea continues to abuse its people, and Uganda's corrupt regime is still in power, and Guantanamo Bay is still open.  Is it working? I ask each group of students about the nonviolent actions they're researching.  They shrug.  It's still not fixed, if that's what you mean.  No.  It won't be.  All we can do is keep marching.

To-Do:
*Overcome the Powers That Be.
*Keep marching.
*Don't give up!

I'm tired.  I think I'll grab this Overwhelmed book and crawl into bed, open it, read a few pages before I fall asleep.  Tomorrow, I'm taking the day off so I can hike all morning in Chautauqua State Park, where I plan to think about nothing except what I see.  I won't bring any to-do lists.  I won't even make any in my mind.  I'll just walk, and breathe.  Maybe that's the most important action I can take in the world right now, before I can accomplish anything else.

Light

Today feels heavy.  Dark clouds hang in the eastern sky, and the prediction is for rain and snow in Boulder over the next two days.  My students have been restless, edgy.  Spring break gave them a taste of freedom, and now they're back in these plastic chairs, trapped for hours in these square rooms, told to open their notebooks, get out their pencils, pay attention, engage now.  I stand in front of them and conduct a fun economics game that most of them seem to enjoy, but I keep drifting to the hours M. and TK and I spent driving through the red dust of the southwest, all that open space in my mind.

Today is heavy because eleven educators were convicted of racketeering in Atlanta and sent to prison.  They look familiar to me:  the stooped shoulders of people who work for too many hours for too little pay.  They've stood in classrooms in front of too many students.  What they did was wrong, of course.  But I recognize them as my colleagues.  And as victims of an enormous system that coerced at least 178 people into cheating.  The science fiction I'm writing doesn't seem too distant, if the testing culture is pushing entire school districts to these extremes.  Educators as criminals.  What's next?  Educators as superfluous?  I thought to look up a piece of satire I published as a 28-year-old grad student ten years ago -- "A Modest Proposal for Our Schools" -- and was shocked to find it's even more relevant today.

Today is heavy because Arkansas wants to pass similar "religious freedom" laws to the ones recently passed in Indiana.  In how many states will I -- and my family -- be declared unwelcome?

Today is heavy because I got the fifth rejection letter I've received in two days.  Yesterday, Room magazine wrote that they "regret to inform me" that they did not want my fiction or my creative non-fiction pieces.  And today, The Orlando Prize emailed that there was too much greatness in the submissions for spring; my essay and my flash fiction were "just not for them".  Fence thanked me for patiently waiting a year for their decision about their 2014 book prize, but I had not been chosen.

Sigh.  M. teases me when I write out "sigh", or when I say the word aloud to accompany the sound.  Thinking about that, and the way her eyes crinkle at the corners when she teases me, makes me smile.  And TK's excitement today about April Fool's made me smile.  And a few future possibilities I'm leaning toward.  And the way it felt to write all day yesterday at a coffee shop, acoustic guitar music in my ears.  And the plain M&Ms my friend Dede thinks to send me every single holiday because she knows they make me happy.  And the memory of Arches, that red-brown rock, the secret silences.  And the fact that it's Thursday tomorrow, and I know my students will love comparing Russian and American Cold War propaganda.  And the fact that I just beat M. at Scrabble.  And my niece and her round cheeks and the way she says "I don' know!", and my baby nephew with his voluminous wild hair and his fascination with his fingers. And my sister's laugh.  And the way TK murmurs in her sleep sometimes, like she did just now.  And my dad's happiness to be out on the trails again, stopping on a bridge to search for an American Dipper.  And the letters my mom and I write each other on Sundays now, like she and Gram used to do. And June, which I've always loved for its possibilities.

Days aren't heavy like they used to be.  I spent almost two years in the darkness, and now it's Easter, all deep plant roots and first crocus blooms and light breaking in, all the pagan fertility and whispered joy.  A light shines in the darkness.  NPR is playing the news about Israel and Palestine, and TK says, "Could you turn that off so we can be happy together?" and I do, because she's right.  I want to be responsible and learn as much as I can about the Iran nuclear negotiations and the ongoing search for fairness in Ferguson, but I also I want to make sure I keep a view of the light.

I'm here.  In Gram's green chair, with a view of the bright yellow happy wooden star that used to hang in a doorway at Gram's house.  My apartment is quiet; I've spent the evening reading The New Yorker; I'm about to write another chapter of my novel.  A sweet, smart, beautiful little girl is sleeping just down the hall.  Tomorrow, M. says, she'll be here after school, and she'll take care of dinner and hug me when I come home.  It might rain all day tomorrow, but we can have warm brownies and ice cream and watch Bette Midler's Hocus Pocus, and Fable the dog will stretch out beside us and close his eyes because his pack is all accounted for.

The message emerging in the science fiction novel I'm writing is this:  connect to humans. Turn off the devices; hold someone's hand; watch the clouds change in the sky. It won't fix everything, but it will make everything a little easier.  A little lighter.

Twenty Ways of Looking at the PARRC Tests

inspired, of course, by "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," by Wallace Stevens

1.  As I'm passing out pencils and scratch paper to the ten eighth graders who are taking the PARRC test in my classroom, I listen to them talk about why they're there (three-fourths of our school's eighth graders' parents opted them out of the test):
-- F. says her mother, who grew up in Mexico, wants her to obey whatever the school says.
-- S. says he wants to know how well he can do.
-- J. kicks the desk and says his dad wouldn't let him out of it: "He says I can always learn something."
-- C. shrugs.
-- L. points out that their peers who have refused to take the test are required to sit silently in the next room.  "I might as well take the test."

*

2.  I read the directions from a thick book, and the students open Chromebooks, type in codes, click "sign in".  I'm not allowed to say anything but what is printed in the "SAY" boxes.

*

3.  Begin.

*

4.  The test administrator book contains a special section for "extreme weather situations".  If there's a tornado, I am supposed to ensure the kids' safety and then return to secure the tests on each of the Chromebooks.

*

5.  The daffodils blooming in the tall slim glass vase on my table this morning made me happy.  M. left me and TK a note:  "This is how I feel now that I've met you both." That makes me happy, too.  I walk around and around the testing room, thinking about M.

*

6.  J. must be clicking random answers.  Only nine minutes into the 90-minute testing period, he raises his hand and tells me he's finished.  He eyes the football in his cubby, and leans back in his chair as far as he can.  "Did you do your best?" "Sure."

*

7.  In Georgia, twelve teachers are currently on trial for participating in systematic cheating on state tests in 2009.  They are being charged with racketeering, and if convicted, could serve twenty years in prison.  They erased student answers and filled in the correct ones.  Maybe they did it because administrators threatened their job security, or maybe they did it because demonstrated school progress would translate into raises for teachers.  Or maybe they did it because they were just scared.

*

8.  Twenty years in prison.  In how many ways would that change a life?

*

9.  Outside the window, there is no tornado.  Inside, the students tapping on keyboards, J. tilting back in his chair again, me walking and walking in circles.

*

10.  If education meant reading all of the thousand books in this classroom, we would live in a radically different world.

*

11.  On Sunday, M., TK and I shared breakfast on the front porch:  waffle sandwiches with bacon and scrambled eggs, a side of chopped cucumber and tomatoes.  The sun warmed us and Fable stretched out at our feet, his nose quivering in his sleep.  When I looked at M., I thought: I almost forgot the world was this lovely.

*

12.  C. is working harder on this test, which counts for nothing and means nothing, than he ever does in class.  His brow is furrowed.  Some days, it's difficult to get him to write more than a sentence or two on an assignment, but he is typing furiously.  I don't know what, since I signed my name to a contract promising I would not look at the test screen or discuss any part of the test with students.

*

13.  The 1st and 2nd graders have just been released to recess.  They run pell-mell from the door toward the playground.  I see TK isn't wearing her jacket, as usual, and she is grinning, racing her friends to the tire swing, where they will spin and spin.  J. catches me watching them, shakes his head sadly.  I hear his thoughts:  not fair.

*

14.  It is sacrilege to keep quotes from e.e. cummings ("be nobody but yourself") and Emerson ("I am a transparent eyeball") and Mary Oliver ("What will you do with your one wild and precious life?") on the walls when students are taking a computerized standardized test in a silent room.

*

15.  The British-based publishing giant Pearson has made millions of dollars from its contracts with states like Colorado.  S. asks me in the hallway:  "Is that taxpayer money?"  He's fourteen, asking the important questions.  I nod.  "And they're British?" I nod again.

*

16.  Next week at this time, I'll be in a car with M. and TK, driving across the red canyonlands of Utah.  For five laps around the room, I pretend I'm walking through a canyon at Arches, and that I'm entirely alone.  A red-tailed hawk calls, but otherwise the world is silent.  Abbey's world.  He'd tell me to hightail it out of this square room, these standards, these kids who would prefer to look at mindless games on their phones than engage, engage, engage.  Abbey, of the Monkeywrench Gang.  Where's the weak spot in this testing infrastructure?  What can I sabotage, and how?

*

17.  Two kids are still working.  The others sleep, or flip the pages of books.  Why are these two kids pouring so much time and effort into this test?  It won't count.  It can't.  They wouldn't judge our eighth graders' performance based on just one-fourth of our population.  Would they?

*

18.  We don't need no education.  We don't need no mind control.  Teachers!  Leave those kids alone!  R. and J. try to communicate with invented sign language across the room, and I shoot them a look.  Why?  R. would rather spend all his time playing video games.  J. just wants a ball in his hand.  In my social studies class, they want to play war games, and they stop paying attention when we debate freedoms and basic rights.

*

19.   I'm burned out.  Burned up.  Burning.  Not fired yet, but not firing from all cylinders.  Fired up.  I'm a good teacher, but it's the scores that matter.  The data.  Bill Gates announces tests must be standardized so we have a measurement for all Americans.  Pearson sets the cut line.  Cut.  Cut up.  Cut down.  Cutting edge.  Cut me and I'll bleed.

*

20.  All the kids have finished.  Now we are supposed to sit in silence until the administration tells us all the testing rooms are done.  Silence is the only gift these tests give us.  No phones, no music, no conversation. I sit down on a blue plastic chair, gaze at the far wall and let myself be silent.  I don't know where else to begin.

Notes From the Human Teacher

I'm working on a sci-fi novel right now that I started a few years ago, when I first moved to Colorado from Alaska.  I'd taught middle school in Alaska for ten years, and Colorado teenagers were fairly similar to the ones who had filled my classroom in Alaska:  eager, resistant, malleable, stubborn, rebellious, needy. Teenagers.  However, Colorado teenagers were far more absorbed by their cellphones.  Had I failed to notice this in Alaska?  Did the mountains and glaciers, the glittering ocean water, the sight of whales pull Alaskans' eyes up and out of their devices more?  Or did the "no cellphones" rule at the middle school where I'd taught in Alaska just shield me from the direction our society has been moving for quite awhile?  Everywhere I looked, in every common space, at every lunch hour, in the parking lot after school, in the Mexican restaurant down the street from our high school, kids were bent over their phones, checking, checking, checking, posting, checking.  It was a problem.

One day, the sentence came to me:  "No one has talked to me in eleven years."  I had this image of a world in which all teenagers have ceased to interact with each other face-to-face at all, where it would be possible to move through all of one's years of school without a human voice, where everyone has shifted to only needing their phones, and nothing else.  

It was an outlandish idea, and I discarded it for a couple of years.  How ridiculous to think that we will ever reach a time when people do not crave the basic human interactions of laughing together, kissing each other, looking each other in the eye, touching a hand or a shoulder.  Yes, teenagers are obsessed right now with Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, HeartChat.  That doesn't mean their phones will take over their lives completely.

Unless we help make it happen.  Last Friday, I sat through the annual proctor training for the state tests.  For the past several years, I've been administering state tests to my students each spring, dutifully reading the directions, keeping time, pacing around and around the room while my students sit in desks in straight rows and fill in bubbles on scan-tron forms.  Every principal for whom I've worked has emphasized the seriousness of the tests, the way our students' performance will affect the school's funding and status in the state.  Each year, the stakes have gotten higher.  Administrators stand at the entrance to the secure room that holds the boxes of tests and signs each box out to each teacher; we're instructed never to look at the tests students are taking; we're required to bring the tests back alphabetized on the penalty of a note in our files.  The ring of a student's cellphone will invalidate all the tests in that room; a test given in the incorrect order will also invalidate all the tests for that room and jeopardize the overall performance of the school.  This is unbelievably serious.

For the first time this year, the state of Colorado will administer computer-based tests, the PARRC tests created and sold by the Pearson Corporation.  Although twenty-four states originally signed up to administer these tests, parent lawsuits, financial constraints, and other considerations have dropped the number to ten plus Washington, D.C. Because Colorado is helping pilot the tests this year, our student scores will not count at all.  The idea is that states could all administer the same test across the country, to see if students are actually meeting Common Core standards, or if each state's standards are relative.  I've never believed in the worth of these standardized tests, as they rarely test what my students know or how they know it, and they take away weeks of academic content time.  However, the computer-based tests are taking all of this to a new low -- and they're compounding the problem of a society overly dependent on their devices.

These are actual words and phrases from our training last week: 
*"It is an option to have a human reader."
*"Scratch paper is not secure."
*"The test monitors must be state-sanctioned."
*"Teachers should be in a position to see students working, not students' work."
*"Teachers should use proximity to keep students on task."
*"Ensure a standardized testing environment."
*"Proctors should erase the seal code once the test is underway and only provide current seal code."
*"A misadministration of the test includes systematic unethical behavior."
*"Watch for a breach of secure test materials."

*"In these virtual groupings of students. . ."

*"The administrator will ensure the chain of custody of the tests. . ."

I'm frightened.  At the risk of sounding like an alarmist, a conspiracy-theorist, a science-fiction writer, I'll say this: if we continue to place our children (from third grade and up) into these secure, contained, completely computerized environments, and we allow an unchecked dependence on devices during their free time, we will see a dramatic shift in the ways our children think, imagine, feel, and interact.  No one other than the designated proctor (me) is allowed to be with them in the testing room, so I cannot invite you into my classroom to witness the way a testing session looks -- my twelve- and thirteen-year-olds dutifully sitting in straight rows with their Number 2 pencils poised, bubbling circles, silent for two hours when they are never silent, docile when they are never docile.  Now they'll be on computers, and we are not allowed to say anything but "Keep working," even if their computer is malfunctioning.  The human teacher becomes a mere monitor of a room of children interacting with a computerized tool the human teacher is prohibited from seeing because that violates the test's security.

We should all be frightened.  

People write science fiction as a warning.  This is what could happen if. . .  But the deeper and deeper I move into the future I'm imagining in my fiction, the more frightened I am of the present.  What are we doing?  People in the corporate world shrug at teachers' passionate vitriol about standardized testing and say the tests are a way to guarantee quality. Advocates for Common Core say it's a logical way to ensure high standards across states and communities.  I've made those arguments before, too.  Except I've lost faith in the tests as utilitarian tools for learning, and have begun to see them for what they are:  punitive tools attached to money that finances corporations, long bureaucratic hours that only increase students' alienation at school and add nothing to their learning.  

I'm moving forward on the science fiction manuscript again, but sometimes I have to pause -- blink -- tell myself we're not in that world yet.  It's still February, and I'm teaching my students about the Holocaust, exploring personal narratives, interviewing survivors, examining primary source photographs.  I want them to think for themselves, not as part of a machine.  Only that kind of creative, critical thinking will save us from repeating the history my student Forrest, a 7th grader, captured in this cartoon he doodled in his notebook last week.

I can still be a human teacher, encouraging our "no cell phones" policy in spite of the eye rolls, forcing them to look each other in the eye and talk about the human truths of history.

I will do this until I am notified that my methods are not state-sanctioned, not secure, a breach of the system.

Yikes.  Lately, it's been too easy to imagine a dystopian world in a which a child really could go years without hearing a human voice or making eye contact with another human's eyes. . .

Teaching: War is Not a Game

We're currently playing World War II as a game.  Two weeks ago, I asked each of my 7th and 8th graders to choose a country by sitting in the chair behind a placard, and they've been role-playing the Axis and Allied powers each day since, rolling dice for battles, shouting out the "secret powers" that give them extra points.  The kid playing Germany yells out, "Dictator who will stop at nothing, for two extra points!"  Canada grins.  "I've got 'millions who want to serve' for one extra point, and France has 'free French Vichy fighters in the south' for another point".  The strategies begin as the kids enter the classroom.  "I think it's 1941 today.  Pearl Harbor happens now, doesn't it?  That means the U.S. might enter the war."

Like everything about teaching, this may or may not be an effective approach to learning about World War II.  While we're not repeating my own dismal middle school experience of memorizing battle names and dates, victors and generals, I worry I'm making war feel like too much of a game.  It's fun, which isn't the message I want to convey about global conflict.

So we took a break from the game yesterday to read and view primary sources from the Library of Congress collection about Japanese Internment in the U.S.  Ansel Adams' and Dorothea Lange's photographs silenced the kids.  This happened here?  In the U.S.?  We read FDR's Executive Order 9066.  This was okay to do?  What about the Constitution?

I asked them, "Could this happen again?" and in every class someone said yes.  "To whom?"  Maybe Muslims.  Maybe people from the Arab world.  Maybe gay and lesbian people?  Maybe immigrants.  The list grew as the kids imagined the ways in which certain groups could become enemies of the state.  I allowed the conversation to continue not because I want them to become paranoid, but because I want them to think critically.  

We're protected from that happening again, though, right?

It's happening now, I wanted to say.  In Guantanamo Bay.  At the Mexican border.  In Palestine.  In Ferguson.  Behind prison bars, inside detention centers.  In Alabama's resistance to same-sex marriage.  

What I said:  Keep asking questions.  Question everything.  Keep your eyes open.  

Today, we returned to our World War II game, to the final year: 1945.  The dice battles were raucous again, and the score in every class between the Allies and the Axis was close.  It felt more like a basketball game than anything, with the Allies cheering when they forced a German retreat, and again when the Soviets encircled Berlin.  "I'll use my secret power of 'Location in the Pacific'!" Australia announced in a battle with Japan, and Japan shot back, "Then I'll use my power of 'Kamikaze pilots'!"  One point here, one point there.  

And then, in every class, the kid portraying the U.S. looked at his or her card and said, "I'm going to use my secret power that wasn't ready until now.  The atomic bomb, for fifty points."  And in every class, the kids reacted to this with stunned silence.  Well.  The war was over.  And?  The game had changed.

We ended by reading an excerpt from Dr. Michihiko Hachiya's firsthand account of the Hiroshima bombing.  I let Hachiya's words linger in the room.  "It was all a nightmare -- my wounds, the darkness, the road ahead."  

My students left class quietly, subdued.  

War is not a game.  But maybe two weeks of role-playing these countries and the events of WWII made the end seem more personal, more real.  Maybe that was the reason for the silence when the atomic bomb was finally played in our game.  Or maybe -- for a flash of a moment -- the kids understood that none of these events are fictional, that all of this really happened, inthis world, in the world they are in the process of inheriting.

Keep asking questions.  Question everything.  Keep your eyes open.