Monthly Archives: June 2009

School’s Out for Summer

Posted by Jackie in education, teaching

My girls are happily settled in their morning summer learning program, so here I am at my own school, posting this blog entry before I settle into working. The building’s pretty quiet without the students, but like many schools, we offer our space to a wide array of summer camps, so I’m not the only person in the building by a long shot.

But what do teachers do during the summer? There’s no grading, which is often, I think, all that people think of when they think of the work of teaching. For me, grading is the most onerous, least interesting part of this job, so during the summer, I feel like it’s the perfect time to do all the things I often don’t have for during the year– revamping assessments, choosing and designing new assignments, revamping old lesson plans that didn’t fly so well the first time, designing new lesson plans for a new concept, text or perspective I want to include in the next year.

Some teachers like to go in and wing it, but one of the many things I’ve learned about myself since starting this job is that I’m a planner. I can certainly branch off if the students seem willing or if I get inspired, but even if I don’t use it, I like to go in each day with a plan. It helps me stay focused on what I want to impart and what my goals are for that class period, so that I don’t get to the end of a unit and realize that I never talked about the motif of birds throughout Jane Eyre (to use one example). Right now, I’ve got lists and pages of ideas from the workshop I just attended, and so my goal this week is to think productively about how to best integrate those ideas into next year’s curriculum. I’m determined to get some of it done this week because next week, I’ll be in New York at another workshop for a week, and am hoping to come home just as inspired and bursting with ideas.

I started to regret signing up for this next workshop a bit when I realized I’d have to be away from my girls again, but now that I’m here, I realize how excited I am to learn more from other teachers. In addition to being a planner, I’m also a big fan of collaboration– I’ve learned so much from listening to other teachers, whether it’s chats in the faculty room, trading assignments over email, or reading blogs. Part of our evaluation process here involves a degree of peer review, and it’s been incredibly helpful for me. Even if the reviewer only has positive feedback to give, I find I am even more thoughtful about my planning when I know someone might be popping to observe it, and that helps me think more about planning each of my classes. Next year I get evaluated again (once a year for the first three years you’re here), and I’m also serving as a peer evaluator for a fellow teacher. I’m looking forward to learning from both of those experiences as well.

I don’t mean to imply that I’m incredibly eager at all times to tackle these experiences– I get tired and fatigued, sometimes depressed when it feels like I’ve got more flops than successes, and I think every teacher has that moment(s) where we think, Good Lord, did I teach them anything at all this year?!

Don’t worry about me, though– I’m going to mix in a lot of porch-sitting, pool-going, and baking this summer too. But in the mornings, at least in July, I’ll be here, typing away, printing out rough drafts to revise, sorting through old documents and shuffling them into new folders. The air-conditioning is pumping, I’ve got water and snacks, and Pandora is keeping me musically fed, so here’s hoping I can make some headway in the ever-expanding job of trying to become a better teacher.

Bits and Bobs

Posted by Jackie in all about me, blogging

If you’re looking for commentary on Michael Jackson’s death or Farrah Fawcett’s death, you’re out of luck. I was too young for Farrah, and I don’t have many memories of Michael Jackson before he had started to become Wacko Jacko.

My workshop is winding down and I’m simultaneously bursting with ideas for next year and completely weary from so much mental heavy-lifting. I’ll probably blog more about that stuff later– I’m planning to do a lot of prepwork in July and I also have another workshop, a week-long one on grammar that I have to travel for too.

So what do I have, then? I’ve been reading some new blogs:

* Joy the Baker is a bright, cheerful blog with a engaging tone, lovely photographs and most importantly some truly mouth-watering recipes for peanut-butter fudge treats, pumpkin pie bars and more. It’s hard to think about baking when the weather is as hot as it’s been this week, but I’m hoping for summer potlucks and cookouts that would benefit from a dessert or two, and it’s never too early to stock up on rainy-day cooking projects or lunchboxes.

* Remember when I told you to check out The Happiness Project? Well, now Gretchen has developed The Happiness Project Toolbox, which I have spent some time experimenting with and really like so far. It helps you think about how exactly you can live a happier life, including resolutions, happiness hacks, personal commandments, lists, inspiration boards and more. Your profile can be entirely customizable, and you can make most everything private or public or a mix of both, depending on much privacy and/or community you want.

Mental Overdrive

Posted by Jackie in education, teaching

Posting will probably be light this week– my girls are in California on a long-awaited trip with my MIL, but I’m at a week-long professional development workshop as well, so my blogging time will be brief, but also a lot of my mental energy is engaged elsewhere.

This is my first intensive workshop like this since I started teaching at Single Sex School, and while I expected to feel a bit funny about being a student again, I am actually really enjoying it. Sure, I feel a bit overloaded– we did a lot today, and today was only the first day, and I lugged home an enormous binder and left a comparable spiral-bound book there, plus a smaller book I brought home, and I have homework, a reading assignment. And yeah, getting up early enough to be at school by 8 was not too pleasant after sleeping in all weekend.

But it also reminded me how great it feels to be in a room full of people who are earnestly engaged in trying to understand new ideas, and more importantly, to be one of those people, instead of the sap in front trying to keep it all running. I didn’t have to manage the situation, or be “on stage,” or attempt to meet everyone’s needs at once. I got to read, write, and talk about new ideas and old with people I respect and admire and like working with more and more. And I know I wasn’t the only one– at each break and during lunch, I could hear people saying, “Hey, don’t you think this would really help a kid like Ninth Grade Girl? And wouldn’t this really help with those quizzes students kept failing?” There were people there from grades from K-12 and several different branches of administrative departments.

Professional development, or “professional days,” often get a bad rap for being pointless, redundant, or ineffectual. I’m too new at this kind of teaching to really say, but after my experience today, and after reading about thirty-three Baltimore-area teachers going to Space Camp, it seems pretty clear that professional development can be truly amazing, when done well.

Get Leave to Work

Posted by Jackie in all about me, conversations, poetry, writing

Today a friend of mine and I spent the afternoon talking about work, careers, families, spouses, money and why we make the choices we make, something I had been thinking a lot about for my own reasons (more specifically, stuff I’m not ready to blog about yet) but also for more philosophical reasons (which I think I am ready to blog about).

I listened to a podcast yesterday on leaving academia, in which a friend of mine was interviewed about her choice to leave a tenured position and in fact leave behind academia forever (you know who you are). The interview subject finds herself still leading a life about education, writing, and editing, but not nearly in the way she imagined, or in the more predictable path she had been following. I found myself nodding along, but also reminded of what I’ve come to believe more and more strongly as the years roll on: once we discover what is important to us and move those things into the center of our lives, fulfillment often follows, though it comes under names and guises we might not have recognized before. Sometimes I’m reminded of it in major ways, like career choices, and sometimes I’m reminded of it when the stereo breaks in my car and I spend my driving time singing all the songs I know, because music is that necessary to me. But the older I get, the more I see what is important to me, what I’m willing to fight for, what I’m not willing to live without.

I went to a poetry lecture Monday night given by Sue Ellen Thompson, a poet I was unfamiliar with before, and her words really resonated with me. She talked about poetry as autobiography, lyric poetry and emotional truth, and a lot of other subjects, but what struck me most was how she spoke about her work as a pursuit she follows because of what it gives back to her: “poetry as a survival mechanism for adversity, but also as consolation for adversity itself,” and how to make her poems useful both for her and her readers. I don’t know how to survive in the world without writing my way through it, but I also want it to be consolatory for anyone reading it, because language has always given me my greatest consolation. And this is my work, just as much as teaching is, because it fulfills me and is essential to who I am and who I want to be, even though it doesn’t fit into a lucrative or well-defined box.

I guess this is where I fall in line with the Etsy entrepreneurs and shop class or even parenting as soulcraft folks, and all those who yearn to be of use. Do the dirty work, the hands-on work, the crafty or girly work, the work that greases up your hands or mucks up your clothes with baby vomit: just do the work that engages and envelopes you, that absorbs each of your capacities, the work you can’t imagine going without, and the rest will fall into place.

Greener Grass

Posted by Jackie in all about me, conversations

As I begin this post, typing on my couch, my girls are out in the backyard, digging in the dirt, observing worms, and playing an elaborate Harry Potter game on and around our swingset. We’re about halfway through the first book, but a lot of their friends have read them all, so they know all about Luna, Ginny, Lupin, and lots of characters we haven’t met yet. So far today, they’ve played with play-doh, listened to one of their parents read three chapters of HP aloud to them, watched a few episodes of their favorite shows, made themselves mini-pizzas for lunch, and now are playing outside. Many of their friends, however, are spending the day at summer camps or shuttled back and forth between summer activities.

Here’s what we’ve scheduled for them this summer: not much. Sure, they’re going on a trip to California with my mother-in-law. In July, we’ve signed them up for a month-long free program run by the school district, which will last all month, five days a week, three hours each morning. They’ll go to school, do activities and projects with different teachers from their school, and then I’ll pick them up around lunch time. We’ve joined a private pool for the first time, and we belong to the local zoo and science center, and we’ll probably go to some drop-in project days at our favorite art museum. My sister and I have big camping and hiking plans too, which will include the girls– we’d like to see as many as we can of Maryland’s highest mountains and waterfalls. But full-on summer camps? Nope. Not even the week-long kind we tried last year.

We’re trying to stay more on the frugal side this summer, as I suspect many of us are, and summer camps just didn’t make the budget– we chose the pool membership, but there wasn’t enough left over for lessons or teams or much else. I’ve been feeling a bit guilty about it, and sometimes conspicuous in our social circles lately, because a lot of their friends are much more scheduled this summer. But I also had a little moment recently that helped clear things up. I was in a group of mothers at the girls’ school, chatting about summer plans, and feeling vaguely awkward that my girls weren’t doing nature camp or ceramics camp or sleepaway camp or local private-school camps. I am working hard to get over it, but every now and then, I still have “keeping up with the Jones” twinges about stuff like this. But then the conversation turned, and a lot of the moms started saying how hard it is to struggle for childcare in the summer, and how they have to arrange carpools and make sure the camps come as close to overlapping as possible, but then they worry that their kids don’t get enough unstructured free time or with their friends, and on and on.

And I stood there, listening, realizing how worried they were about their kids and their jobs and their families and work-life balance, the same as I often am, and how the only one judging my kids’ summer “schedules” was me. And one of the moms turned to me and said, “You must be so glad to be a teacher right now, to get the whole summer off to spend with your girls.”

And I said, “Yeah, I really am.”

Parenthood and Poetry

Posted by Jackie in all about me, authors, poetry

Back when I first had my girls, I read a great essay in Mamaphonic: Balancing Motherhood and Other Creative Acts on the honor roll of mother-artists that each of us keeps in our head, the inspirational ones we think of who juggled the crib, the pram in the hallway, the crying child and the shouting poem, or painting, or unwritten song. We need to repeat those names, to chant them to ourselves in the hours when it all seems impossible.

Now that I’m more sure of myself, as mother, writer and poet, I’m not as obsessive about the honor roll anymore. But today, I added Jorie Graham to the list. I’d admired her work before when I read Dream Of The Unified Field, but today I watched an amazing interview with her on parenthood and poetry. I’ve always been more of a Whitman lover than an Emily fan-girl, but the image of a heavily pregnant Graham at Dickinson’s doorstep, wanting to save both her child and her work, really struck me, like a rung bell.

If you have the same honor roll in your head, I think you’d really like it too.

One-Car Family

Posted by Jackie in all about me

Today, during the course of some routine minor repairs, our mechanic (my uncle) discovered that my husband’s car needs new brakes. And air conditioning. Which all told, would cost about twice what the car is currently worth– we drive our cars right into the ground.

I’m getting a significant raise in September (more on that later), so we had already started thinking about replacing a car (currently pondering the minivan question), and now it looks like it will be that one, which is a 1999 Ford Escort that has done our family well. But what about between now and then?

We thought about it for awhile, and decided that we will be a one-car family this summer. After all, since I’m not teaching this summer, I don’t need to go to work everyday, and my husband has had a flexible work schedule for awhile now. We had already decided that our pool membership would be our big summer investment, and one of our closest friend-families also belongs there, so rides should be no problem. The girls are doing a summer program at their school, but I think between flexible schedules and friends, we’ll be okay there too. In addition, between planned trips and workshops, there will be a few weeks when my husband (who needs a good blog-nickname, clearly) will have the car all to himself. It feels wasteful, and toxic, to spend money we don’t really have to save a car that shouldn’t really be saved.

We’ve done the one-car thing before, way back when I was pregnant and housebound most of the time anyway. If Baltimore had better public transportation, I’d feel even better about the prospect, but either way, I think we’ll be fine. Still, it will be an interesting experiment, and by September, I may be so happy to have my own keys again that I take off down the highway.

Sunday in June

Posted by Jackie in all about me

It’s the end of a long week at the end of a long year and your lungs are only now slowly filling up with air. It’s been raining for days. The kids are bickering, your spouse has that stir-crazy look in his eye, and suddenly the sun breaks free and the morning is ripe and golden.

So you go to the pool. You bare your winter flesh to the light in a motherly skirted suit and feel warm and delicious. Your husband stretches out in a puddle of sun like a contented cat and your children splash happily into the cerulean waters. You eat a plate of snack-bar french fries and let the kids swirl the ketchup around on the plate as long as they like, and promise that next time, they can have the girl-shaped popsicles with bubble-gum eyes. They find two friends and lay out in the sun on their towels and you see their teenage selves in the lines of their long brown legs. Later all four of you are in the water and he is catching them when they jump and swirling them around in the water afterward and their laughter floats like bubbles and you can’t stop smiling from behind your sunglasses. You think everyone around you must see how much you love them.

Then you all pile into the car, wet towels wrapped around you, the warmth of the sun still thrumming beneath your skin, the smell of chlorine strong and sharp around your heads. The family heads home for tuna melts and corn and applesauce, with cheesecake brownie cupcakes for dessert. The day fades into a soft summer night, and everyone is happy.

You think that you want to remember this day forever, capture somehow in your mind’s eye, trap it in a golden net, but you also know that even if you pin a butterfly down as carefully as you can, it will never be as lovely as it was, dancing in the summer sun.

At the End of the Tunnel

Posted by Jackie in all about me, blogging

I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel, and I’m finally convinced it’s not a train.

I finished up my grades today for Single Sex School,which is a huge weight off my mind, and am trying to wrap up all the loose ends for my own girls– sending off the Brownie registration checks, remembering to donate for gifts, scheduling playdates and half-day pick-ups. I’ve also spent a fair amount of time this week working on an end-of-year project for one of my girls’ classes. A few weeks ago, one of the mothers in Sophie’s class sent out an email saying that she was compiling a book through Blurb.com that would be a memory book available for anyone to order. All the first grade classes spent time recently writing self-profile poems, and in the book, each kid’s poem would be scanned in next to a picture of them, kind of like a yearbook. When I got that email, I had two thoughts almost simultaneously: What a cool project! and Man, Lucy’s going to be so disappointed when she sees Sophie getting such a neat book and she doesn’t.

So you probably know what I did next– I volunteered to put together a book for Lucy’s class too. The Blurb software has been really easy so far, and I think it’s going to be really awesome when it’s finished. We’re going to give one of the nicest, hardback editions to the teacher, and I’m making sure there are versions available at different price points. This is not a sponsored post, but if the finished project is as nice as it looks on the software, I’d heartily recommend Blurb for similar projects, especially if you’re not a big scrapbooker or even that good about baby books (the next project I’d like to tackle with Blurb).

So this week while I’ve been spending so much time in bed or resting, I’ve been putting together Lucy’s class book. And to be honest, I’ve really enjoyed it, but I felt funny blogging about it. Oh no, I thought, is this the kind of post people make snarky “mommyblogging” jokes about? Is this a “privileged PTA mom” post? Are people going to think I’m overparenting or smothering or helicoptering or whatever term is current?

Then I decided to let it go. Maybe it is one or all of those things, but it’s where I am, and who I am, and what I’m doing. One of the nicest parts of being where I am in my life these days is that I’m happy with who I am, where I am, and what I do, and what better venue for that than my narcissistic personal-mom-teacher-blog?

Roses and Shadows

Posted by Jackie in writing


Roses and Shadows, originally uploaded by SingMyself.

After two days mostly in bed and on meds, I think the ear infection is on the retreat, but the chest/respiration aspect is still hanging in there. I still get out of breath pretty quickly, but on the upside, I’m getting a lot of reading done.

So far, I’ve read two novels and one shortish nonfiction book, and am through a good chunk of a wonderful biography of Alexander Hamilton. Tomorrow I’ve got final exams to grade, and Thursday I’ll be spending most of the day at school, but this little hiatus has been peaceful while it lasted.

Is it a little sad that I almost said I’ve enjoyed these past few days, despite the headaches and breathing issues? I think it’s clear that I’m ready to wrap up all these loose ends and finally close the book on this school year. I’m so close I can taste it.

Anyway, I thought a shortish, boringish update should at least have a pretty picture to accompany it!.