December 2023
December 1 Friday
Zahra is from Afghanistan but has made close friends with her Central American classmates. In the process of complimenting my maroon puffer vest today she confirms herself a budding Spanglish speaker by saying “tu” instead of “you.” She points to me and says, “Tu! The jacket! Is beautiful!”
December 4 Monday
Something drawn on the back of Felix’s hand peeks out from under his sleeve as he reaches for a highlighter on another desk. I’m across the room but I can see the bent arms of a swastika. What?!?!?! Felix fits the following descriptors: teenager, chatterbox, disorganized, Venezuelan, new. Absent from this list is Nazi. He’s not brandishing the symbol or sneakily showing it around, so I can’t figure out his motivation. I walk him down to see Jeremy, who’s on discipline duty today. “Am I going to get suspended?” Felix asks. He sees me staring at his hand and starts scrubbing at the swastika with his sleeve. It comes off easily because it was drawn with one of the dry-erase markers we use on the whiteboards. Meaning he did it at school. But why???? “Maybe,” I tell him. He needs to sweat. My instinct tells me he doesn’t know what this symbol really means, just that it’s provocative. I perhaps will add “influenceable” to the descriptor list. Jeremy shows Felix the discipline book and tells him we could suspend him for five days. Felix is upset that we will call his mom, which is the first good news in all of this. He tells us he saw the symbol in the comments of some video he watched, but didn’t know what it meant. “Do you draw everything you see online on your body?” I ask. There has to be something more, but Felix won’t tell us what. In the end he gets in-school suspension and I explain the punishment and reasoning over the phone to his mom. I ask whether she knows what I’m talking about when I say he had a Nazi symbol on his hand called a swastika. She doesn’t. But she tells Jeremy and me over the speaker phone that she’s so sorry and glad he’s learning a lesson. One lesson learned, perhaps, but far more tragically unlearned.
December 5 Tuesday
How do I know I’m stressed? Because writing things down is no longer working. Usually when something’s on my mind, I write it down, and my brain allows it to stay there on the page instead. My brain trusts that I’ll get to whatever it is, which I always do. That works for school stuff, but for personal stuff, like questions I want to ask mom’s doctor, it doesn’t. I’ll open my notebook only to find I’ve already written down whatever it is three times. I need a new strategy.
December 6 Wednesday
Lisa asks whether I have a good relationship with Edgar. Not just having taught him, which we both have, but whether I’m on a special wavelength to have a heart to heart. He’s about to fail his math class and needs to take drastic action. I don’t have that relationship with Edgar, but maybe if Lisa and I combine our powers like a CareBear stare we can bust through and turn him around. When Lisa brings Edgar down to my room I’m surprised to see him already crying. This emotion can’t be from a math conversation. There must be something else. I brace myself to hear he’s suffered abuse or he’s being deported, but it’s not that. He’s been dumped by his American girlfriend! I want to clap and cheer because his problem is so… Normal! But I hold in my smile because Edgar’s recalling the heady days a month ago when this wonderful girl told him she didn’t care about their language differences. But on Monday she changed her mind. “Communication is important,” she told him, and she needed more. Now he’s cut off completely and doesn’t know what to do with himself. I ask whether his friends have noticed he’s not spending time with her anymore. They have, but Edgar has told them she’s just busy. I recommend he tell them the truth and let them support him. I acknowledge that this can be harder for guys, and that’s unfair, but when you keep something in your head, it seems bigger than it is. It weighs more. Edgar agrees to give it a try. Maybe with his newfound free time he’ll study some math.
December 7 Thursday
Gail asks students to use the word “surly” in a sentence to tell us what makes them feel that way. Zahra can’t do it. “I’m never surly,” she writes. “I’m always happy.” I can think of a few things that a young woman refugee from Afghanistan might feel rightly surly about, but Zahra’s either too resilient to be affected by that or she’s not ready to talk about it. Later she comes over to Gail’s desk to ask to use the bathroom. Gail smiles and says, “No!” I lean over the desk and ask, “Are you surly now?” Zahra mirrors my posture, tilts her face up to mine and says, “No!” We all laugh. “Well, we tried,” says Gail.
December 8 Friday
Ok bilingual detectives: What translation fail do you think happened here? –
After reading a paragraph about how Tim never washes his clothes, and how Fernando makes his bed every day, students had to answer the question: Who is a good roommate for you? Why?
Eduardo’s answer: I think the best roommate is Fernando because he is more Asian than Tim.
So which word is the translation fail culprit? It’s “aseado” meaning neat/tidy. That’s what Eduardo meant to type instead of “asiano”.
December 11 Monday
I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: There’s no such thing as too much routine. It creates stability for children who have survived trauma, and it makes it easy for me to write sub plans for today while I’m with my parents. The kids already know basically what we’ll do, the order it’ll happen, and where to find it on my webpage.
December 12 Tuesday
Gail and I confront Felipe about cheating on his vocabulary test last Friday and get a very unexpected response. He basically doesn’t care. This is a very bright kid, a good student, the guy whose middle school teacher gifted him a book he loved and which he in turn loaned to me. Felipe likes to learn and is capable, so why doesn’t he care about his academics? Because he’s only planning to stay in school until he’s 16. He figures he’ll learn what English he can, then get a job and save money so he can buy some land and a house back in Guatemala. I want him to think about studying and living his life here in the US, but that would be a precarious existence. He could invest in an education and still get deported or not find a job. I find it hard to argue against his plan, except to ask, “Can you make enough money in two years to live on for the rest of your life?” He seems to think if he can just get the property, he could make enough money back home to manage the rest. That’s the pattern of immigration and return he has observed growing up, so that’s the goal he’s set for himself. Sometimes you have to see something different in order to dream it. I think about the guest speaker presentation in Spanish the students heard yesterday in Lydia’s class — A scientist from Ecuador who studies life in the Galapagos Islands. That man was literally speaking Estuardo’s language and modeling an academic life path, and I’m disappointed that the very next day Felipe’s own ideas for his future remain so bleak. I guess one guest speaker isn’t what it takes to change a firmly established cycle. I remember hearing an interview with a woman who said she didn’t think about being a chemist until she saw a poster showing a female chemist. So that kind of inspiration happens, but it’s hard for us to control when and for whom. We have to just keep providing opportunities.
December 13 Wednesday
The bell rings to end lunch. I’ve just started eating and I see Kaitlin from Student Services come in. Is she here to find a student? No! She’s here to give the standard 10th grade presentation about graduation and GPA and all that good academic stuff. The counselors sent a schedule of visits for all 10th grade classes, and this is my day. I completely forgot! She had been thoughtful enough to share her slides ahead of time and even added additional information specific to my students. I had requested to have it early so that I could translate it and print copies for the students. That was a modification I knew they’d need so that they could get the most out of her talk and participate in the review game at the end covering all the material. Only one problem: Class is about to start and I haven’t made my photocopies. In normal times when I’m less frazzled, a slip like this wouldn’t happen. I decide immediately to forgive myself and tell Kaitlin I’ll be just a minute late. It’ll be a sloppy start to class, but it won’t be the end of the world. I run to the library where the photocopier jams just a few copies shy of finishing. No time to unjam it. I swoop in late to my own class stapling packets and mentally picking out which kids I think can handle sharing with a partner rather than having their own packet. Internally I grumble that if I had my usual handful of absences, then no one would have to share. Finally the presentation gets going. The kids are attentive and ask very good questions. I fix my attitude about having too few copies and decide to be glad that everyone’s here for this information. Maybe this will be the day of inspiration someone needed to imagine themself going to college.
December 14 Thursday
Matilda and Dayner are Googling the titles on my bookshelf to see which ones are banned. Nearly everything has been banned somewhere! Dayner holds up Hey Kiddo. “This is a prohibit book!” he tells me. “Yes, that’s how I choose my books,” I say.
December 15 Friday
Shorter Maksym has a question but he gets his words confused and suddenly we’re playing Jeopardy! “Excuse me Miss! I have a answer!” I’m so pleased because I’m a fan of the show and because he’s finally speaking for himself rather than through Andrei. I will question any answer he has.
December 18 Monday
Don’t tell anyone but I might be a failure at teaching symbolism in literature. The students are to identify, draw, and explain two symbols as part of their book project. Nasir draws the little image that appears in his book at the start of each chapter and writes that it means A new part of the book. I need to sit down.
December 19 Tuesday
The “wheel of names” is my favorite feature of my new Promethean board. Students love to hate it, and I never have to decide whom to pick on when no one volunteers. Oh, no one wants to act out writing with a marker so the class can practice using the present progressive verb tense? Fine, I’ll spin the wheel. Everyone plays along, but when it comes to Francis, he just sits there because he’s spaced out and not paying attention. The class doesn’t miss a beat. “He is sitting!” they say. Everyone claps. “Good job!” I tell him. “Way to plant, Fran!” Each time the wheel chooses someone who’s absent today, the students say, “She’s / He’s working!”
December 20 Wednesday
Today my students see Scrooge get haunted three times by Christmas Spirits. They do not see me cry three times at work. Mom’s having an epidural this morning, and I’m stressed about whether it’ll provide any pain relief from the tumors pressing against her spinal cord. It’s kind of a last option as other treatments have not been effective. Yesterday Mom said she’d be less likely to want to try palliative chemotherapy if this epidural didn’t work, because why try to extend a life that’s so painful? So you could say a lot is riding on this procedure.
At the end of my morning planning Matt asks me how I’m doing and gets a lot more words and snot than he bargained for. It’s all been too fast! Too much emotional up and down! I go to peel my orange over the trash can and clumsily drop the whole thing in there. Now I need another hug. Matt abandons whatever he was going to get done to spend his entire planning period comforting me and later cheering me with other topics so that I can, finally, get on with my day. Not sure what I’d do without the coworkers I have.
December 24 Sunday
Dear Santa,
Don’t need to ask for much this year. Mom has gotten pain relief from the epidural, which has been a gift for her. I’ve gotten to watch my role model navigate one of life’s hardest challenges in terminal cancer, which has been a gift for me. I could do with more good-feeling days for Mom, and more 100% attendance days for my students. I had only 4 days this semester where everyone in class had been there the day before and knew what was going on, and no one needed catching up. Those were nice days.
I have no photo for this month because I was too busy with grading and lunch duty and making peace with mortality. I dropped the previous sentence into an AI art generator and this is what it gave me:
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