I sent out three poems yesterday to a literary journal.
I haven’t done that in probably two years, after I got a string of rejections and decided to put in some serious time refining my craft. So I’m still continuing to do that, but I have also grown in leaps and bounds as a poet, I think.
It’s incredibly nerve-wracking. But necessary.
So I sent them out.
Wish me luck?
The day after my presentation to the board of trustees, more than one person came up to me or emailed me to tell me they had heard how well it went. “Fabulous, fantastic, compelling,” were only some of the many words kicked around to describe my co-presenter and I. And every time, I did a variation of the “Aw, shucks,” shuffle and tried to deflect further discussion. Truth be told, I even feel weird writing that down, for other people to see. What if you all think I’m conceited, a show-off, a bragger, a know-it-all?
Why do I think that? Is it a leftover relic from Catholic school–a second-generation Catholic school student, even? Could it be connected to class, that privileged people are more likely to see their accomplishments as tributes to themselves, not strokes of luck bestowed by fickle fortune? A recent rant from Clay Shirky blames it on the female trouble “behav[ing] like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks.” He ends the article with this piece of advice: “it would be good if more women see interesting opportunities that they might not be qualified for, opportunities which they might in fact f*ck up if they try to take them on, and then try to take them on.” Laura at 11d was brought up to think self-promotion was tacky and says one of her biggest career regrets is that she assumed her excellence would stand for itself. She blames it on Catholics too, and also on the Midwest, which I can vouch for after my time in Ohio, where one of my professors, who greatly influenced the teacher I am today, spent years quietly toiling in unassuming excellence while others got the accolades and attention.
Self-promotion is something I’ve never been good at, which for a writer in the brave new digital age is a certain Achilles’ heel. These days, most writers (especially nonfiction) need to be as conversant with buzzwords like “platform” as much as with agent listings and query formats. If I had made a nonfiction writing career my top priority, I would certainly have had to work hard to overcome that tendency within myself to minimize my hard work and my accomplishments. But even a wonderful writer like Amy Corbett Storch, who’s multiplatformed all over the place, feels lingering awkwardness about announcing herself when given the perfect chance to toot her own horn.
As a teacher, however, and especially this year, I have been tackling more and more opportunities that could potentially end in effing things up monumentally. I’ve asked for things lately and taken on projects that may be well over my head. But every time, I’ve been sickeningly anxious beforehand, and every time, I’ve been deferential and flexible in every approach. Would a male colleague have acted differently? Perhaps. But I know this is an area where I don’t excel, and that excelling in, if appropriately done, would greatly aid my career and help me achieve a lot of the goals I have.
Thinking about my own learning is often a good way to think about my students’ learning. Sometimes, like with vocabulary, it doesn’t help me much, but then other times, my teacher brain kicks in and a connection lights up for me that helps me translate it for my students.
We are a laptop school, as I have mentioned before, and specifically, we are also a tablet school. When I first started here, I was thrilled at all the different ways the 1:1 laptop program enhanced and aided my teaching, but I was completely unfamiliar with tablets and styluses, and so basically for my first year, I never extracted the stylus tool, much less used it. But then this fall, when I was helping our seniors with college essays, it was incredibly helpful for me to be able to mark up drafts and send them back to students, or mark them up before a face-to-face meeting with them, and so I ended up using my stylus frequently.
Using my stylus felt so uncomfortable and artificial until I used it in such intensity and such abundance this fall, and I felt so good about all the suggestions and revisions I gave, that now I do feel a really positive association with using my stylus, and it feels like a trusted useful tool in my hand.
One of my major stumbling blocks as a poet has been revision, how to see my work with a clear eye so that I can improve it, so that I can push it past a string of pretty words and make sure there is a rigid spinal meaning underneath. Now I am keeping poem drafts in a OneNote notebook, and the muscle memory from all those college essays is kicking and carrying me. I’m jotting down comments and eliminating words and feeling more free to evaluate these poems like I would student work, or like I would a poem I am thinking of teaching. I think when I looked at them before, I would sometimes panic, lose all connection with my instincts and have no idea what to do. Or maybe I was choking, second-guessing every choice I had made before. But now, that muscle memory is kicking in, and carrying me in this other arena.
Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.
Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, 1967.
I’m doing NaBloPoMo this month, and so I’ve had to implement some different strategies to keep up the pace. First, like I blogged about before, I have had to rethink my standards and preferences for posting, which I think will give me some freedom and breathe some new inspiration into my blogging here also. This very entry is a “process-y” one I might not have written before!
Second, I am now maintaining a OneNote personal writing notebook, and one section of it is marked for blog post drafts. I have trouble posting to WordPress during the school day, but I do have time to quickly jot down thoughts between classes, which slowly but surely will percolate into posts.
Third, I’m trying to keep a backlog of stored drafts, so that if I don’t have a chance to write a fresh entry during the day– like this Saturday, when I’ll be camping out with the Brownies–I can publish a saved draft. I also enabled the post by email function WordPress offers, so that I’ll be able to post that way. I’m going to test that future soon to make sure I did it right.
Finally, I’m going to try the Press This bookmarklet WordPress also offers, so that I can manage quick photo or video posts from my browser. Again, this is a feature I’ll be trying for the first time, so don’t be surprised if you see some renegade test posts around here that don’t seem to be well-executed!
“Mrs. Regales!” she said, throwing open the front door of the school as I came up the walk. “I’ve been waiting for you, I need to show you something!”
Another girl spoke to me about class, one asked me about a fundraiser, but Mary (not her real name) was insistent, and so I followed her down the hallway , past the groups of girls giggling and chatting, through the clump of ninth-graders standing aimlessly at the intersection of two hallways.
“I just hope it’s still there,” she said, with worry in her voice. Is it something bad? I wondered? A word scrawled on a locker, a name scribbled on a flyer–was she going to show me something I would have to rise up and deal with? Athletic, sometimes blunt and forthright, Mary is the kind of girl who plays her heart on the lacrosse field and fiercely loves her friends but may not stand out in a crowd. She would be more likely to report something than commit something negative.
“There,” she said, pointing down the hallway, “Look out the window,” and I saw a blaze of sunrise, gold and purple and dark pink against a violet-blue sky.
“Oh Mary, it’s so beautiful,” I said. She was showing me beauty, the kind of beauty that she loved, with a hustling foreground of girls too intent on grades and gossip to look up and see the sun, unfurling behind them. Last summer, she had emailed me a similar photograph she had taken, of a prosaic streetscape with a gorgeous sunrise overhead.
“I’m so glad you came before it was gone,” she said. “I saw it this morning coming up the stairs, and I was so anxious for you to get here so you could see it. Just seeing it made my day,” she said.
“And now you’ve made mine,” I said in return, and she grinned and ran away.
I emailed her later and thanked her again, and she replied, “Every single morning I wake up and I can’t wait to get in the car and drive to school and see what’s different about the morning sunrise sky. Its always different—and always beautiful”
These are the days when I feel so lucky to have my job, so lucky to play a part in the lives of so many amazing girls.
From the “Cliché for a reason department”: throwing a stone into the water, you never know what it will reach.
This week, another teacher and I gave a presentation to our head of school and board of trustees about our “Facebooking Gatsby” project, which we also presented at our regional professional association this past fall. The project started as a small seed that ended up blossoming, but I had no idea how much it would unfurl.
Laura, our tech coordinator, is a classic “Yes” person, who while also being a dear friend of mine, has become an amazing sounding board and collaborator for me this year. Last winter, she really nudged me to make this a presentation, which I never would have thought of on my own– I have little to no self-promoting skills, and still a little tentativeness about my place in this independent school world. It helped me feel more like I was on solid footing here, which encouraged me to start thinking of other new projects and ideas, and now I have a bulging OneNote notebook full of links and PDF files and jottings.
Our presentation at the regional association was attended by several administrators at my school, which then led to presenting at the trustees meeting as a part of a regular feature about academics at the school, and also opened up discussions in our faculty about other projects that might be possible.
This week, I was also contacted by a teacher at a school in Annapolis, who asked Gatsby questions but then also wanted to offer me his experience with Voicethread, which is rapidly becoming the backbone of my short fiction unit. He and I are thinking of collaborating on a project where both our groups of students are working on this type of project simultaneously, both on books to do with Africa (Cry, the Beloved Country for his classes, One World: A Global Anthology for mine), and could comment on each other’s projects. We both agree that this could turn into another presentation or even article or both, and certainly he would now be part of my personal learning network. This is the kind of collaboration I read about on the Ning, but didn’t know how to spark for myself
None of it would never have happened if I hadn’t had such an enthusiastic and awesome colleague or hadn’t taken the brave step of extending myself into this new arena, and now, I’m so thrilled that I did.
It started with a sweet pair of chestnut-colored cowboy boots I found online. I ordered them for myself as a not-so-subtle boost for my spirits after a rough spring about four years ago. We had been on a string of uneven luck, and then I was in a car accident that shattered my right forearm (yes, I’m right-handed) and left me with a terrible fear of driving that took me months to overcome. So I took a jump and bought some cowgirl boots to stride forward into my future.
Then I started teaching at my current school and got a generous gift card during the holidays, which allowed me to purchase a lovely pair of brown leather knee-high boots with olive-green laces up the back during a post-holiday sale. I wore them with a long olive green skirt, got lots of compliments, and started feeling pretty sassy every time I wore them. One more year, and one more generous family later, and I bought a pair of black leather boots kind of like these in another post-holiday sale. Teaching at my current school requires a very different wardrobe, and making that upgrade has definitely been an undertaking. I didn’t always feel like I was getting it right, but in these boots, I felt adult and attractive and appropriate every time.
During the most recent post-holiday sale, I was reading a blog I like and came across a link to a sweet pair of wine-colored suede boots the blogger had ordered herself. I kept going back to that link, and building outfits in my head, and convincing myself that they were such a deal. So finally, I bought them! I wore them last Friday, and they are comfortable and stylish exactly what I had hoped they would be. Slowly but surely, all my favorite cold-weather outfits are featuring pencil skirts, tights and knee-high boots. I love the way they look, the feel of the leather under my fingers, the way they cradle my calves on a chilly day, the polish they add to an ordinary Tuesday.
Maybe it’s because I wore uniforms to elementary school, or maybe it’s because I never had the eye or the money to be fashionable in my younger years. Maybe it’s the increased confidence and comfort with my body that I’m feeling, or the feeling of moving beyond cuteness into definitely adult territory. I’m thinking about hand-stitched red or black cowboy boots, slouchy gray suede heels, smooth caramel stilettos.
Either way, this is one affair I don’t see ending any time soon.
Unintentionally, I’ve spent a fair amount of time over the past few months reading a lot about finance and the history of our capitalist economy. For someone who took remedial math in college and has trouble keeping her checkbook balanced, this has been a somewhat ponderous effort, but through a string of coincidences and influenced by the current climate, somehow, that’s what I’ve been thinking and reading.
It started sometime last summer, when I picked up a hardback discounted copy of a wonderful biography of Alexander Hamilton. My husband read it after I did, and we were both flabbergasted at how little we had known about Hamilton, one of the most influential non-President Founding Fathers, who often gets overlooked. It was especially interesting to read since we had both read a biography of John Adams, and later I ended up reading The Hemings of Monticello, all three of which conspired to give me a much different (negative) portrait of Thomas Jefferson than I had previously had.
Anyway, the other side effect was that I really enjoyed Chernow’s style in the Hamilton biography, and since I’ve read almost all of David McCullough’s books (and saw him speak last spring with my mom, even), I was thrilled to find a new popular-yet-substantial historical biographer. Turns out Chernow is more of a financial historian than anything else, so next I read his Rockefeller biography, which was also incredibly fascinating. For Christmas, I chose his House of Morgan, which is more history than biography and quite honestly, was a tougher slug for me. But it was still really interesting (frightening?) to see all the ways the Morgan banks here and in London had played a role in international and domestic policy and military engagements.
Now I’m working my way slowly through a great biography of Cornelius Vanderbilt which was another Christmas book, and by a funny twist of fate, my mom and I lucked into free tickets to go hear Robert Reich speak tonight, a former Cabinet secretary and current public intellectual, often speaking about financial issues. If I’m not tired of financial history/biography by then, I’ll tackle Chernow’s The Warburgs, which covers an intriguing family of Jewish European bankers that featured tangentially in The House of Morgan. After that, I might be interested in a good biography of Andrew Carnegie.
Like I’ve said before, my mother taught US History for decades and as a result, I have a passion for American history that could be chalked up to both nature and nurture. I’ve already promised my girls that I would take them to Mount Vernon soon, and I can’t wait to show them all the American history that is within (relatively) easy driving distance. The other aspect of American history I love is how many different lens you can look through, and how each time you do, another shining (or tarnished) facet is revealed.
Do I feel like I understand the current crisis better? I’m not entirely sure, but I do think I understand a lot more about capitalism and how it is entwined with American and global history, which could only be good, right? For example, when you look at American history through a financial lens, you see just how many times our country has gone through a financial panic, recession, crash or depression, and how many recovery and bailout efforts there have been, sometimes literally from a tycoon’s pocket. It happens at ludicrous speed, you could even say, which could really make you wonder about the long-term viability of the system.
So, long story short: I continue to find that I learn history best when told through a narrative following one person or family through a certain period(s) of time, and I continue to be simultaneously entranced and repulsed by America in all its terror and glory.
