Quilting, as told by the pieces.

Adoption is like making a quilt, if you view the quilt making from the point of view of the fabric:

There were once these various whole, uniquely designed pieces of fabric. Different colors, different textures, different grains, different fibers, different weaves, different vibes, but they were each part of their own bolt. Bundled with their own cloth, then some thing happened, and they were separated from the bolt, cut, ripped, torn. 

Something happened, and they were all now pieces.  All the pieces were then gathered up and arranged and rearranged, pressed, and bound together with thread. This seems like a good idea,  because as scraps and pieces, we are all lost, but as quilts, we hope to be beautiful. 

 

 People like to skip to admiring a beautiful product, but they forget the point of view of the fabric. 

That binding fabric together with thread requires extra support, pressing with heat, and continual piercing with needles as they try to fill the holes, close the gaps, create a unity that had not previously been imagined by the fabrics on the bolts, and may not feel instantly natural to the pieces. Quilts have to be reinforced because blankets with that many seams are more susceptible to tears.  They have to be handled with care, because something with that much intricate work put into it is more easily damaged by a careless visitor. 

Quilts can be exquisitely beautiful because of the careful arrangement of fabrics from a variety of sources, because of the delicate skill required to create balance, and the time and work needed to turn small, seemingly random pieces into a big, cohesive, intentional blanket. In that beauty, it is easy for observers to forget the feelings of the fabrics that were first turned into pieces and then arranged, rearranged, ironed, pinned, pierced, bound, and trimmed to create a blanket that hopefully turns out beautifully.

The fabric endures so much more to become a quilt than it generally does to become a comforter.  

Adoption can be a beautiful thing. However, because it is dealing with small pieces being patched together, it can also be an arduous, tedious, fragile, and sensitive task for families that become quilts. 

Even if they eventually become strikingly beautiful quilts someday, all of the pieces, experience -and often silently recall- the overwhelming task of going from fabric, to pieces, to quilt. 

Adoption is never a simple project. 

(All images taken from Google's Free to Share image collection.)

Lessons Learned So Far: Teaching, Year 3, Entry 1

Since I have had many visitors lately, it only seems fair that I write the blog I should have written months ago.

Year 3 has a bit of a twist, because I changed schools, which means relearning many of the things I had already learned at the last school!

1. The teacher and the classroom are symbiotic creatures. We're lichen. This is something I had begun to understand a little at my last school, because my classroom and I were getting along so well. In my work, that classroom was my right arm. I knew how it worked, I knew the trouble spots, and I knew it better than my students. Changing schools to a new classroom has got me missing my right arm a little. We're starting to grow on each other, though. (I think I just heard some science nerds giggle...but maybe it was just me.)

2. Culture matters. I know we all say it, and we all recite it in our BTSA and credentialing essays, but it's still kind of jarring to actually come across the evidence. I moved from one low income school to another low income school, both with similar social issues, and similar household statistics. They are extremely different students. The school itself is extremely different. Even the culture of colleagues has its own beat to learn(There: Teachers used more last names of colleagues when discussing things amongst other teachers, here: First names, almost always. I'm still playing the matching game of which first name goes to the last name I learned from listening to students discuss their teachers!) Often it's the little things that baffle you in the change, such as at the old school the borrow pencils couldn't have erasers on them, the students would destroy them, at the new school the students can handle the erasers on the pencils, but will thrash the large spare erasers left on the table. Why the difference? I. Seriously. Don't. Know.!!! What is the psychology here?!

3. BTSA still sucks. But it's not as scary as it used to be. I think perhaps that lowers my efficiency in it. All I know is that any small dregs of fascination I once had with it are gone now. If it was a toy, it'd be in the Goodwill box already!

4. The "Are you a sub?" question returns upon changing schools. Dang, I had just finally put that question to bed with the students at the last school!

5. Old technology. New technology. They'll both steamroll your day someday. Whether it's the computer that fondly recalls the debut of Oregon Trail as the good ol' days, or the shiny new projector that experiences epileptic fits when it sees light on the screen, it's always best to be ready to teach that lesson in a more creative fashion if necessary!

6. Students like control.  Gasp! What?! I know, "Thanks for that, Señora Obvioso!" But rather than just complain about the obvious, sometimes it's good to establish that this fact regularly causes problems, and try to work it into a few solutions. I have tried the whole, "You will stay in this classroom as long as it takes until you tell me what was wrong about your behavior." (Oh goody, a show down) And believe me, some of those students would have spent their summer vacation in my classroom if I didn't find a way out of that corner I painted myself in.

7. Give them better ultimatums. Let's face it, if you're being held late individually by the teacher, odds are, you're already in a lose-lose situation, and one "lose" option allows you to brag about your resilience to your friends when the teacher finally has to let you go to the next class. However, give a student the option in the form of "Lose&Win or Lose&Lose", and you'll find the student in a more reasonable mood. Example: "You're staying 10 seconds late if you can tell me what was wrong with your choice earlier, or a full minute if you can't." No coercing, no pleading, just the facts. (I have a timer. I use it obsessively. They know it will be an exact minute.) Either way, you're staying, one way lets you shorten the stay and get on with your life. I tried this one week. Kids who would have gladly waited 15-45 minutes to stick it to me with my previous approach will fess up with full details in 10 seconds.

8. Make it their problem. You may remember from previous LLSF entries, I have borrow pencils. Big, fat finishing pencils, this year from Lowes (I like these especially because they have the motto "Never stop improving" printed on all of them. Good statement for a classroom). I have magnets strapped to them. They get 5 new ones stuck to the board every quarter (The old ones are removed). If someone forgets to bring one back, then they only have 4 spares until the end of the quarter. If someone bites them until they're nasty, then they have bitten pencils until the end of the quarter. If someone saws a hole midway through the pencil (I have no idea how that was done), it is what it is. The regular borrowers learn, if they want a pencil available, they better put it back; if they want a nice pencil tomorrow, they better not destroy it today. It's their problem. If something goes awry, it is not my job to fix it, and thus, there is no point in messing with the pencils to mess with me when you're cranky. The next part is the part I'm really getting better at this year: when something does go amiss, gently remind them that it would be great for the class if the pencil found its way back. I'm not going to yell at you if you took it accidentally, because it's not my problem. Everybody knows it went missing in 5th period yesterday. If you don't want to look like "the class that made it so we only have 4 pencils", it might be a good idea to bring it back. For the first time ever, we got a perfect score (all 5 pencils made it to the end of the quarter) by the 2nd quarter this year. It took until the 4th quarter last year.

9. The kids you really want to scream at are the kids who really want you to scream at them. This one goes back to #6. Control. If they can get you to lose your cool, then you are in no more control than they are. They have proven that you are just as unstable as they feel. They knew they couldn't lean on you for support all along, because you're irrational. There are some specific students who really feel the need to test this every stinking day. If you give in, and raise your voice, you're finally entering a battle that they can win. They know all the tricks. They have all the perfect button pushing lines on speed dial (and they know they work, they've tested them out on their parents ahead of time). Let's face it, they're kids. They're just flat out better at irrational shouting matches. At some point, your reason will kick in and remind you this is idiotic, and force you to back down. The odds of the student's reason debilitating them in such a battle is extremely low. Don't go there. Send them out instead!

10. Children forget that they are good at learning. Children are the best learners in the world. They pick things up with an alacrity that is the envy of everyone who misses that ability, and yet we have several generation of children that are scared to learn, because successful learning has been defined as something completely unattainable. People have a lot of negative things to say about Common Core. And to be honest, there are a lot of negative things about Common Core (although, often the actual negative things and the spoken negative things are not in the same neighborhood), but before everybody gets up in arms and starts defending the "good ol' days" let's recall that the good ol' days as they stand now are pretty sucky. The last system of education had become a place solely of telling kids to sit down, shut up, you don't know anything, here's what you need to memorize to be considered smart. There are actual official directions (IN POSTERS AND BOOKS) that warn teachers not to let students play with ideas, don't let them share ideas without teacher approval first, or take guesses and try them out, experiment, or come to their own answers through logic, because- much like Thomas Edison- they might not get the answer right the first time. Don't let them think it out; it's dangerous! This is the classroom the students have learned how to learn in, and so as science does its little tap dance of glee over being told by the Common Core that the students need to learn to "figure something out through experimentation" the students' eyes grow wide with panic. You give them a situation, tell them to make a prediction about the outcome and their mouths go dry. How are they supposed to know? You never told them the outcome. This is terrifying to them. However, give them lots of chances to play with things, to work things out, to be the ones who hit upon the answer before their peers, and you'll see them start to realize something: Thinking is fun. It's just a very slow awakening process, and I have to remember to be patient, and give gentle nudges as I wait for them to be brave enough to try something (cotton, coal, wire...anything!) until a light bulb comes on.

11. Ask more questions. Whether it's in a disciplinary situation, helping with student understanding of a concept, or even when greeting a student in the morning, questions are important. Asking someone a question implies that they already have important information stored up, ready to access. Too often, as a teacher, I assume I probably already know the source of the confusion or problem. Too often, I end up wasting a lot of time trying to explain the molecular description of density, when a student really understood all that, she just wanted to know how to pronounce "molecular."  Too often, students assume that they are completely, and hopelessly lost, and when I ask questions to figure out what they already understand, they realize they did understand it, they just didn't think it could be that simple. Too often, I assume that a student is just in a meddling, cantankerous mood, when I finally find out that the student's parent got arrested last night, and the student is just overpoweringly concerned about the rumors flying about campus.

12. When you tell the students to stack their chairs on the table before they go, maybe make sure that everyone understands what that actually means. We have special chairs that allow you to rest the seat of the chair on top of the table, while the legs dangle underneath the table. It's great. Make sure, however, that you do not assume that because there are 35 students doing it correctly in the room, that the one new student will look around and do as they do. If you do, you will wind up with 35 chairs neatly tucked onto the table, and one chair literally sitting (feet and all) on the top of a table, looking out over its peers, wondering why all the other chairs in the room are so short...

Dead Fields

At first glance, it looks like death. Grayish brown, still, parched, rustling.
If stepped on, it might crunch, crumble, and blow away.   
It's 100 varieties of brown and 3 shades of brownish green lingering through.
Scarred. Mottled with marks of existence.

The display of desolation would present perfectly if not for the  stubborn spurts of life.
We originated from migration, dust, from poverty clashed with ingenuity - sparking hope.
We grew up with dust in our eyes, wind parching our lips.  Particles of studies settling in our pores, the statistics of failure. 
And yet we stay. We grow under a demanding sun. We hope against popular odds.
We know that in a dead field there is unseen life.  We know that where there is nothing vitality can hide beneath the surface.
Dig in and churn, there is abundance, just add water. Delve deeper and fortune courses under the ugliest crust.

 

The spirit of our home reaches back to our founders. Reaches back to the assurance that despite all appearances, encountering nothing is a catalyst for success.

So we stay with dust filled lungs and souls because endurance, hope, and effort were our founders.  Though it is brown, still and parched, we are the life that defies the first glance. 

Again.

Things happen too fast. I can already feel I've made a mistake. Try to recover. Move faster. I see the bar flying towards me. I latch on to it a split second too late. The loop is badly timed. Off rhythm, wrong momentum. The dismount is doomed, however there is nothing to do but follow through. Try to save it. Throw more power to my toes. I can't save it. THUD, slap! My entire body meets the floor in one solid contact. I can always hear the sound of my disastrous landing just slightly before the vibrations rattle through my teeth. In that split second, I wait as all of the air retreats from me.

Time always slows down and speeds up at the same time right after a mistake. The shouts of my coach start catching up from my ears to my brain, as if to make up for lost time, they swirl repeatedly, overlapping her current shouts, as I wait for my chest cavity to expand again. To allow air to return.

"....More power... ....faster.... ankles together... snap feet... ... straight legs!" She glances me over for obvious injury and then barks: "Again!"

For most of my childhood, I was in gymnastics. Looking back, I gained a great amount of life training through the years of gymnastics training.

Recently, what remains loudest in my mind is the constant memory of failing as I crashed against the mat, having to get up and do some sort of penitence in the form of conditioning, and then attempting the same task again. It may sound awful for this to be a vivid childhood memory, but it really isn't. It is actually an empowering memory.
 

The uneven bars terrified me. And thrilled me. I was afraid of heights even at the beginning. I remember crying in terror the first time my coach told me to jump from one bar to the other. I remember crying the second time, too. And then, I remember overcoming that insurmountable objective. Breaking past a mental barrier with physical achievement. Shortly after the first terrifying success, the uneven bars became my favorite event, even though it still often terrified me. The more terrifying the risk, the more satisfying the success. With the right skills, I could fly. The flying is not what resonates most with me right now, though.

This month, what resonates loudest with me is smacking down against that thick, blue gym mat. The endless hours of blistered hands, and exhausted breathing, tingling fingers, flying, flailing, falling, waiting for the air to enter the lungs again, and the shout, "Again!" Ripped blisters, limbs scuffed red, chalked hands, deep breaths, pensive stares at the blasted uneven bars, recitation of errors and corrections, repeat task, crash! Again!...and Again! And again.

True, in gymnastics, I learned how to fly, but what turned out to be more useful than learning a "long hang kip" was learning how to fail. What I learned was that I could withstand pain I had never previously imagined, I could overcome exhaustion that seemed overwhelming, I could eventually rise up from every painful landing.The best lesson I carried away with me was: Again. Even after I so badly wanted to quit and go home, I could not accept defeat.

There, as a 9 year old, I developed an intuitive understanding about grown-up life. Sometimes when you miss your grasp, move too slowly, lack the strength, sometimes even though you tremble with exhaustion, your blisters have ripped out, when things are continually crashing to the ground, and when feel you can no longer breathe, you have to listen to the insistent shout, "Again!"  You have to get up. You have to do it again and do it better. The only other alternative is to quit, exhausted, injured, frustrated, and sore with nothing to show for it all.

And so, during those times in adult life, while I sit with my head in my hands, sore, exhausted, feeling as if the air is being knocked out of me, my mind drifts back to sinking into that blue gym mat again and again, ripped up, waiting for the air to come back, because it will come back, mustering strength to get up and hearing the distant shout, "Again!" Except, now I'm the only one in the room.

The shout comes from within, "Again!"And so up I get, to try it again, and try it better, because defeat is not an option in life.

And once I've learned these acrobatics, I'll move onto harder ones, because, like gymnastics, that's kind of the point of life. It wouldn't be any fun without something challenging you to expand the brink of your ability.

And so with a huff and a limp, I draw a slow breath, pull myself up, eye the task that keeps knocking me down and mutter: Again.

Lessons Learned So Far: Teaching, Year 2, Entry 2

What a classroom looks like when you move classrooms entirely on a Thursday night. Blurry vision intentionally incorporated into photo.

39. Talk less. Designate the task, give the directions, assign the roles, and turn them loose. It works a lot better than lecture lessons.

40. Use fewer tones. Have a happy tone, have a directions tone, have a last warning tone, but leave the drama tones to the theater. Kids are easy panic triggers. If your tone becomes higher, faster and frustrated, you lose them to panic before the message is transferred. In discipline, keep the matter of fact tone, go lower, not higher, pace words evenly.

41. Blame the system. You don't have to do it because I say so, you need to do it because this is the way the classroom works, and I don't want to send you out, but if you break the classroom system, I have to... Suddenly, it's just the machine works of the classroom and school, no longer an evil teacher being mean and unreasonable. It never seems to phase them that the system you blame is the system you created...

42. Sometimes, clearly spelled out mercy works better than harsh punishments.

43. End the class every period by telling them to, "Get out... and have a good day!" and eventually, whenever they leave your classroom or presence, they'll make sure to wish you a good day before they leave every time. It's nice. Say it a minimum of 6 times a day, and get wished it a minimum of 100 times a day.

44. Students are entirely different people when in entirely different teachers' classrooms. 'Nuff sed.

45. Narrow in on one classroom management area at a time. If you feel you need to improve the class exit procedure, do that, but make that your baby. If you try to fix 7 different management issues, you'll be scattered and frustrated, and so will the students. If you focus harshly on training one item for a week, and then make a new focus next week, while maintaining last week, the students will learn what is expected better than trying to demand two new procedures at once.

46. The teacher needs as much classroom routine practice as the students do.  Making sure that the students push their chairs under the tables every time they get up takes as much out of you to remember to enforce regularly, as it does for them to remember to do it regularly. (Hence lesson #45)

47. Blame yourself. True, there are things that you cannot take credit for (Some kids will never study or do homework), however if the thing is, "This class just won't be quiet."or something of the like, blaming the students only gives you the excuse to quit trying, blaming the yourself makes you start looking for sources of the issue, and strategies that can curb the problem before is starts.

What happens when you listen to student ideas for the door decoration.

48. If a student in your class has good study habits, a strong understanding of how to behave appropriately in a classroom, how to talk to peers, how to treat teachers, or any sort of thing that would make a person want to say, "He's such a good student!" then you probably need to thank their teacher in the grade level before yours, because no person is naturally a good student, it's a vocation that must be taught. (Parents deserve a lot of credit too, but even "good parents" have kids who act out in a classroom because mommy's not looking right now)

49. Teach some of your students how to run your classroom technology! You never know when you're going to have sub whose highest technological skill is using a touch-tone phone, and will be completely incapable of running the slides you left for class, let alone be able to turn on a projector or unlock the computer when it falls asleep.

50. Hinging on #49, whenever possible, grab your squirreliest kid and throw him onto running the slides for the day, or queuing up the videos. He'll pay better attention, feel important and necessary, learn technology, and maybe actually remember what happened in class that day! (And, you'll know exactly when he's goofing off, because that's when the slides on the projector screen will start fritzing out... :-/ )

51. If you work on a subject for a really long time, so long that you as a teacher want to vomit if you have to hear or speak the word "inertia" again, and work on it in several different ways, making the students work the concept out in writing, lab practice, reasoning, discussions... you'll be relieved when the unit is over. The zinger is, you'll fall out of your seat in shock when 3 months later, you explain how satellites stay in orbit, and the students raise their hands and say, "Isn't that just using Newton's 1st law of motion?" Suddenly, hearing the word "inertia" will make you want to kiss someone.

52. Really, really, really invest in the classroom relationship. Own up to your mistakes when you make them, or they'll never stop holding them against you. Don't burn bridges by losing your cool. Don't insult the way a student is doing something, because then you have insulted the way their brains and hearts work, which is who they are.

53. Appeal to the ideal side of the student, even if you only see it every once in a while. Point out the good attributes that you catch sight of in them and tell them that's who they really are, because, at this stage in their life, they really have no clue who they are. Take advantage of their confusion and nudge them towards their best sides.

54. Let them cry. They do that. Especially during adolescent years. Acknowledge that they feel hurt. Expecting them to suck it up and soldier soullessly through their trials is unreasonable. Allowing them to take a moment to cry it out, and then jump back into life, lets them acknowledge the issue, and then acknowledge that there is life outside of that issue.

55. They know when you're just trying to pass the time. They sense when you're unprepared. They may never say anything (though often they will), but they know. Every time. You can see it in their eyes.

56. They can be really, really sweet and helpful. And that's nice. Even though, sometimes you'll spend an hour outside of class time trying to undo something they good spiritedly "helped" you with, the good spirit is still rewarding to see.

57. They break your heart. The thing that makes you reevaluate whether or not you can keep doing this vocation is not the piles of paperwork, hassles from coworkers, the long hours, the parents, the piles of homework, or the adolescent behavior... the thing that makes you really wonder if you can keep doing the job is the heartbreak. With over a hundred little souls, every day, laying claim to some small portion of your heart, the odds are high that a few of them will fall down so hard that they shatter that portion of heart that they were clinging to. Odds are at some point you will have to find some alone time to overcome the heartbreak.

The Letter: We.

I had a rough day today. I've had worse. But, my goodness, I have had so many better days, too.

This made picking up the mail and finding this envelope that much sweeter.

I have received correspondence from a combination of 5 Compassion students since 2008. That's a lot of letters! Off the top of my head, I can think of 3-4 letters that have truly threatened to make me cry for one reason or another. And it has been a while since those times.

So it surprised me, when I read through 9 year old Alex's brief letter-penned for him by his older brother-when my lower lip trembled a little at the end of it.

 

You see, Alex lives with his Grandmother and his 6 siblings in Haiti. He is the youngest, and every letter, one of his older siblings does the writing for him. 

So, for the first time in my Compassion experience, sponsorship has been an extremely strong family affair.

The rest of his letter is phrased, "He greets you"  "He thanks you" "He..."  He.

And then...

We love you so much.

We. 

All 8 of them.

 

That's a lot of love to feel rain down on a soul, especially at the end of a rough day.

 Especially from people I have never met. I don't even know what his family looks like.

I could tell you about all the good I can do for someone living in poverty, how easy and inexpensive  it is to help someone who needs it. I could tell you that you should consider reaching into someone else's life to help make it better.

But not today. 

Today, I am going to be selfish.

 Today, I am telling you about a little boy and his family, who wrote a letter to someone who needed it. About a little boy who reached into someone's else's life and helped make it better without even realizing it. A little boy whose Christmas money was spent on a pair of shoes, but could still afford to to improve my life.

Sponsorship shouldn't be about what I get out of it, 

but today I am going to share a little truth: 

sometimes they're the ones sponsoring me.

Today's smile was brought to you by "The Letter: We."