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.

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.

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.

Keep Writing

Photo by Richard H. Hahn, Jan. 15, 2015

Ever since I stopped steeping myself in grief all the time, I've lost some of my direction as a writer.  What is there to say, when there is everything to say, suddenly?  When my eyes are open to all of life again?  My smile isn't forced anymore; I walk into my apartment at the end of a day and feel only happy gratitude for the orange tulips M. has left on my table to greet me.  When I sit down at my computer each night, the world seems so open to endless possibility that I feel stumped.  What should I write?  Do I have anything to write, other than grief?

Doubt whispers in my ear.  Were you ever any good, or were you just writing about topics so extreme that people wanted to read them?  If you're happy, how can you possibly have anything to say?

Then tonight, I attended the annual Boulder Writers' Workshop Member Showcase and Recognition event, and remembered that I am not just a writer alone in a dark apartment at midnight, but a member of a community of writers.  The keynote speaker, Gail Storey, reminded us all that our work as writers is to "bear witness" to others, to create an offering of love to the world.  Storey warned us that it is fear that stops us, preventing us from mustering up the courage to transform with our art.

I listened, and remembered:  I was a writer long before grief.  Maybe, for a time, I needed to pour all of my art into sadness, but now I'm ready to write about parenting, teaching, hiking, Colorado, marriage, being gay, adoption, travel, technology, violence, aging, writing, love.  I'm ready to create characters in fiction again.  I'm ready to explore the world's problems through science fiction, to suggest happy endings in romances, to experiment in literary fiction.  I'm ready, like I've been in a white-hot fire and emerged pure.  I'm edgier, wiser, a little more anxious, but ready.

At the showcase tonight, I read my Long's Peak essay, which the BWW was kind enough to award the annual "Editors' Choice" award for essays published in the Flatirons Literary Review.  It was strange, to read an essay that did not flay open sadness, or only consider death.  "A Woman on Long's Peak" is ultimately about the joy of being alive in a majestic, wild, and dangerous place.  It's also about being part of a community of women who summited the mountain once, too.  I'm not alone.  As a hiker, as a writer, as a person: I'm not alone.

Some morose Germanic part of me wants to insist that great literature can't arise from joy.  But maybe it should.  I think I'll silence Doubt, whose other name is Fear, and just write.  Charley Parkhurst needs me to write him a lesbian version of his story, and I've got a scared girl character trapped in a future in which everyone texts and no one talks face-to-face.  I need to reveal some truths about education, and I need to record the experience of parenting Mitike right now.  I need to espouse my opinions about the death penalty and about gay marriage, and I need to write some good essays about love and relationships.  Ah, it feels good to make such a list!  Every night, I write, but every night lately, I've begun with Doubt.  No more.  I'll read and re-read this blog post instead, as my opening ritual.

Lately, in the midst of quite a bit of happiness blooming in my life, I've caught myself playing the saboteur, searching for reasons to worry or to be a little sad.  I start worrying about finding a college job (which I'd love), or about whether I should move to Denver, or about what I'll do for my parents when they become elderly (they're all in their 60s and are currently fine), or about whether I'm parenting my child well enough that I'll prevent her from becoming a dysfunctional adult (she's currently 8).  It's all fear.  It's that I'm afraid the happiness won't stay.  But tonight, I'm considering this:  I was so intent on detailing every aspect of my experience of sadness; I was so certain my journey required me to hold grief up and examine it closely from all angles.  Why should I not do the same with happiness?  Maybe a good writer's responsibility is to seek to witness the entire range of human experience.

I love to look at this photograph I've posted with this text, a photograph my dad, a professional photographer, took a couple of weeks ago.  The immensity of the universe -- all those stars! -- reminds me I haven't even begun.

Time to keep writing.