Mayoss 2024
My mentee Anne Marie tells me she and her class combined the words “May” and “chaos” to get Mayoss, a term that aptly describes the end of the school year. So I’m calling this installment of assorted events Mayoss 2024!
Mayoss 1 Monday
Note to self: Don’t do grammar demonstrations with heavy objects. That’s a young teacher’s game. I’m giving a lesson on using “too” to imply a negative outcome. Ex: “The chair is too heavy. I can’t lift it.” vs. “The chair is heavy, but I can lift it.” Yeah, that second one got me. Popping some ibuprofen now after ill-advisedly lifting my desk chair.
Mayoss 2 Tuesday
Today I’m gone for a full day of doctor appointments with Mom but somehow I’d only selected a half-day sub request in our online system. My colleagues see I have a class uncovered, and admin handles it. No one says a word to me about the error when I get back the next day. But of course the kids let me know!
Mayoss 3 Wednesday
I hope you’re sitting down because I’m about to describe a shocking sight: Four students meeting up at the back table to socially interact… without any phones!
Take a moment to process.
They play a word game that’s similar to Scattergories. Each kid writes out the categories (like “Name”, “Place”, “Animal”) at the top of a sheet of notebook paper. Then Cesar begins writing out letters of the alphabet until Luisa says, “BASTA!” (That’s the name of the game). They all crowd forward to see which letter Cesar stopped on, then groan or celebrate accordingly. I could give them a letter die that they could just roll to get the letter, but I have a feeling it would take away much of the fun.
Mayoss 4 Thursday
Zahra’s moving to a neighboring school district. I tell her that she can continue at Cary if she can find transportation, hoping she won’t have to change schools. Truthfully, I know she’ll be fine at any school, even if she has to make new friends. We’re the ones who will miss her because she’s… well, she’s easy. She’s internally motivated and so grateful for everything we teach her. It’s nice to have a couple like her in the mix of other students who (through no fault of their own) require a bit more maintenance. I’m sad when she says her dad doesn’t drive.
Mayoss 5 Friday
Yenson drives. He has a license and everything, but he doesn’t have a parking space on campus. Matt and I make this discovery by accident after school when we find Yenson waiting for his sister, who’s also his guardian. They’ve moved to Raleigh (Is a pattern emerging here?) and transportation has become very difficult. So that’s why he’s been missing so much school his grades are in serious jeopardy. Matt runs to find the principal and ask about a special allowance for this kid to park until the end of the year. Yenson’s sister is here. Soon I get a text from Matt: Yenson can park in a visitor spot on Monday until an official spot is sorted out. I run out to give the message to Yenson before he gets in his sister’s car and show him where to park next week. And THAT’S a great way to end a Friday!
Mayoss 8 Monday
Francis is here for the first day in forever and the celebration is on. I print out grades, talk to him, say I can’t wait to see him fourth period… But he doesn’t make it to fourth period. And that’s a crap way to end a Monday.
Mayoss 9 Tuesday
Today’s photo of the day is of a solar eclipse, and as soon as I project it I pretend to turn and cover my eyes. This is so cheesy but so necessary to inject a little laughter. Later Norberto catches me looking at the photo and says, “Miss! Do NOT!”
Mayoss 10 Wednesday
I’ve heard of gender dysphoria, but I never heard the term “gender euphoria” until today. Emma is sharing her coming-out story. She leads us through the confusion of her early years to the moment when she, as an 8-year-old, laid eyes on the most beautiful dress in the world. It was in a Target and her parents let her try it on. The result: gender euphoria. Before I know it, she’s pulled out the tiny dress to show us. It’s covered in seafoam tulle rosettes, like a frosted cupcake. It doesn’t look big enough to contain all these emotions, but it was. It’s magic.
Mayoss 11 Thursday
Zahra’s riding the city bus! She gets to first period a little late some days but I don’t care. Today she greets a newly arrived girl not in English but Spanish! She’s picked up an incredible amount of the language most kids around her are speaking. “How are you? What’s your name? My name is Zahra. Za — Ra. Very good!” Seriously this girl.
Mayoss 12 Friday
Note to self: Have a little cultural awareness before you instruct students to give advice to people they don’t know. My goal was to have them write advice to someone who was being too self critical. Several students write that they cannot tell an adult what to do. Next time I’ll specify that the advice is for a close friend or a younger person.
Mayoss 15 Monday
Danny misses his mother’s cooking. His uncle’s isn’t the same. I’ll try to remember this nugget the next time he finds my very last nerve.
Mayoss 16 Tuesday
Cesar is talking in Spanish with his table group about getting in a fight with his aunt. She slapped him. The diverging path my day is about to take flashes before me: Holding him back at the end of class, walking him down to Student Services, spending my planning period interpreting because the other Spanish speaking front office staff are busy elsewhere, the horrifying possibility that his home is abusive. This is not how I want my day to go, but I have no choice but to ask questions because there’s nothing more important than the physical safety of students. Turns out this incident happened many years ago when he lived with his aunt in Mexico. Now he lives with his mom, he feels safe at home, there’s no emergency. He’s just trying draw on personal experience to compose a good sentence with the vocabulary word “rancor”. Objective met.
Mayoss 16 Wednesday
Here I am zoning out reading news articles because I can’t focus on emails or planning or whatever I’m supposed to be doing. I’m not too hard on myself because my mom has cancer growing all over her body. Of course I’m easily distracted. But what if I stay like this forever? What if grief makes me a permanently worse teacher? On the other hand, could grief make me better? Give me a gentler touch with those around me? Grief will definitely fill me for a while, and it might expand me. Maybe it’ll open up spaces for new kinds of understanding and creativity.
Mayoss 17 Thursday
Milton likes a singer called The Weeknd and asks me what it means in Spanish. I tell him. He says, “It doesn’t make sense as a name in Spanish.” I tell him it doesn’t make sense in English either.
Mayoss 18 Friday
I’m grading a multiple choice test and see lots of repeated answer choices, even though they know each answer choice is only used once. Same format every week, guys! If this repetition is intentional, I respect the hedge. If it’s not, our problems are worse than I thought.
Mayoss 21 Monday
Sara and Cesar are engaged in their favorite pastime: a Google Maps tour of their hometown in Mexico. The street view captures were taken in September, so everything’s decked out for Independence Day. Near the river are freestanding rainbow letters spelling out Playa Vicente. It looks very instagrammable. Cesar proudly shows me the school he attended and the carniceria where Sara’s dad works. They laugh at the clothes hanging on a line across the street. Cesar is proud of his town. “I know every place!” he declares. “I’ve been everywhere here!” He pauses, troubled. He zooms in on a small food cart barely visible inside a cinder block garage. “I’ve actually never had tacos there.”
Mayoss 22 Tuesday
Mom tells me she wants “those little strings” that Kim’s students get. She’s referring to my wife’s “instrument karate” system that rewards students for mastering progressively harder songs in their music book. They earn pieces of yarn that represent karate belts from white to black (and sometimes beyond if the kids are overachievers). The students tie their “belts” on their instrument case handles to show the world their progress. Mom wants to earn belts by drinking her daily recommended amount of water. And so she does. Kim brings me a bag of string, and I start randomly checking the water container in her fridge to see if it’s being emptied. So far she’s made it up to light green belt.
Mayoss 23 Wednesday
Note to self: Don’t say “The first one” to an Arabic speaker when referring to a line of objects if you want them to choose the one on the left. They’re going to choose the one on the right.
Mayoss 24 Thursday
The name “Matt” comes up in our grammar packet, and the students need to know whether the name goes with “he” or “she”. I gesture toward Matt’s classroom next door and ask, “Does anyone know his first name?” The students answer me confidently: “Mister!”
Mayoss 25 Friday
Henry says my Spanish has gotten better, probably because it’s a lot easier for me to translate the simple sentences in the grammar book than the complicated discussions on race I was trying to facilitate in his class last year. I wish I could say his English has gotten better.
Mayoss 28 Monday
This is the best, and it happens not infrequently: I explain, the kid nods, and then as soon as I walk away the kid asks the group, “What did she say?” Grrrrr!
Mayoss 29 Tuesday
I love that Milton puts his phone voluntarily in my paper tray every day, even after I’ve gone lax about making kids put their devices away.
I hate that Milton’s sponsors are pressuring him to drop out. He wants to graduate. I hope the strategies we’ve tried this year, and the ones we’ll start next year, help these guys have a chance.
Mayoss 30 Wednesday
Matt and I meet Leila when we visit her middle school for a rising ESL freshman visit. “I know your principal,” she tells us. “He came to my house with the police looking for my sister.” She doesn’t say much else during the presentation but hangs back afterward to give us the unabridged scoop on her homelife. The social worker later refers to this as a trauma dump and tells us they happen from time to time. I’m glad multiple teams are supporting this girl, whose mother passed away last year. The rebalancing of family roles seems to have put a lot of responsibility on her. She is consistently late for school because she has to get her younger sister and cousins ready and walk them to Kindergarten each day. She did manage to make it on time one day, because there was a field trip she didn’t want to miss. Her story shows so much pain, but her resilience inspires me. She wanted to participate in a school trip, so she made it happen. The whole time she was tracking her little sister and cousins on an old phone she left with them, and she could tell they never went to school. “When I got home they were just sitting on the couch eating elote, and I was like, Where did you get the elote?, and they just shrugged.”
Mayoss 31
Lusvin is here in the conference room next to the principal’s office taking the final exams he missed while suspended. He wanted to drop out from the embarrassment of providing the edibles that made his friend Vanessa freak out in the hallway and go to the ER. But Raquel, Amberlee, Lisa, Matt, let me just say the whole campus convinced him to stay. He only needs one more semester.
Mayoss 32 (because why not)
Delvin — one of my make-up artist guys from last year — wants to re-enroll. He’d stopped coming to school and had been accepted at SCORE (the online alternative high school) but he never went. He wants to graduate with Vanessa. I hug him and he smells like hairspray. Oh how I’ve missed him. He’s a redhead now. Come on back, friend! Take that senior year mulligan and we’ll see what we can all do next year.
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