The Line

Your teacher pay check stub ever make you weep? Mine did yesterday, but not for the reason you might think.

I’m deeply aware– some might say obsessively so– about the moral dimension of teaching. Far more than irregular verbs or how to construct an engaging summative paragraph, I work to teach my students how literature can help ask and answer the questions that make living meaningful. And then I kind of kill myself trying to model such living in my own behavior, with varying degrees of success.

Why? Middle school kids notice. In fact, they have an eagle eye for justice that many adults lose. They notice when I slough something off, break a promise, or unintentionally flout my own rules, and have no compunction about calling me out. Some teachers call this disrespect, but I encourage and treasure it. The kids keep me sane and honest, especially when I feel the habit of rigor that they inspire, spilling– necessarily, I believe– into extracurricular areas. Ultimately, I can never forget that my integrity may be the only promise of consistency that some of these kids see. (Thanks, Kant. Some days I wish I never met you.)

So in this spirit, I committed personally to a strict adherence to contract regarding my paid leave use. This depleted my bank of personal days, while leaving a substantial bank of sick days untouched– and unusable for family emergencies. Imagine, then, my reaction yesterday to the fallout from the fact that I had to take nearly four days of unpaid leave in order to be with my dying parent.

(For you rule-mongers out there, The National Family Leave Act only legislates unpaid leave; and in my district, sick time may not be used in its place.)

I don’t publicize this as some kind of “how great I am” moment, or a snotty revenge against my HR department. I hold no grudges there; they’re just doing their jobs. Nor do I mean to whine about the lost money, although this is undeniably part of the steep price I am paying now.

Rather I remain reeling– as usual– in the moral realm; stunned at the message of a system that punishes me– never mind the folks not as luckily endowed with benefits– so swiftly and concretely, for doing the right thing.

And the first thing I wonder is, “How am I going to prepare my students for this inevitable disappointment? How will I ever begin to help them understand?” Because for some of them, an experience like this has the potential to knock them clean out of principled living forever, and make no mistake.

Anyone have some suggestions for pre-teen fiction where the protagonist is left at the end with only the satisfaction of a clear conscience?

“What is honesty worth?” my students ask. They ask this, explicitly and implicitly, every day. My answer today is tangible, secret, and unsatisfactory. It is not the touching and uselessly ephemeral Mastercard sentiment: “It’s priceless.” Today, honesty is worth a tired teacher, some tears, and eight hundred and thirty-nine dollars.

S., who earned himself an earlier post, is paging through his binder for a paper he has lost about nine times. The binder reminds me of a molting adolescent songbird, stuffed to bursting and shedding. (The discovery of clear plastic sheaths to protect individual papers has saved this boy’s hide, and I would recommend that any teacher who has recurring problems with wrinkles, rips, food stains and footprints have an available stack of these in the classroom.)

As he riffles through the binder, without looking up, he asks, “Ms. S, what is that thing where you’re super organized? It’s like a, I don’t know, a disorder?”

I try to put myself into his synapses, and then grab it. “You mean, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder?”

“Yeah,” he says matter-of-factly, papers flying everywhere. “I ain’t got none of that.”

It’s JP, of course, who’s coming up to me during writing time at the end of class, and I’ve learned by now that it can be for only one of three reasons: a) to show me his incomplete work and beg for help; b) to tell me about his missing work and beg for time to complete it; c) to attempt to make one of those jokes that demonstrates, once again, that there is an unusually decimated circuit between his head and his mouth.

But every once in awhile something astonishingly beautiful opens up in him, like a flower in flash photography.

“In this chapter,” reads the writing prompt I have created, “Haven Peck says his ‘mission’ is the work of slaughtering pigs– something that must be done, no matter how hard it is. What do you think your mission in life is?”

He hands it to me, points to his one sentence, and sits down fast, not making eye contact. I glance at the lack of development and sigh inwardly. Then I actually see what he has put down.

“My mission is to find my mission,” he has written.

As I get further into A Day No Pigs Would Die I’m discovering, quite by accident (or maybe not), a wealth of nature-related wisdom packed into it. It does take place on a Shaker Vermont farm, after all. So despite my initial woes, not only is Pigs starting to work well as an example of a banned book, but it makes this unit a shoe-in for the one just before The Leopold Education Project next year. We could collect Pigs axioms (I’m already getting kid-generated questions like, “Is it really true that pigs and cows can’t be penned next to each other?”) and research them, while relating them to excerpts from Sand County Almanac. Perfect springtime stuff, perfect high quality literature, perfect dovetail between fiction and non-fiction. I can’t wait.

I’m reflecting on this while my kids and I are wildcrafting in the backyard this evening– this is the absolutely lovely word, I’ve learned, for harvesting uncultivated edible plants. Today we’re hurrying to get four packed cups of violet blossoms before we cut the lawn. We’ll boil them down with sugar into a deep-hued, fragrant syrup, great over pancakes and near heaven with vanilla ice cream. My daughter is tweezing the flowers with her little fingers out of the long grass, singing “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” at the top of her lungs.

We’re doing double-duty by also weeding the garlic mustard that’s spread into the yard. One of the worst spreading non-indigenous plants of New York State, it was originally brought over by European settlers as a fast-growing herb for flavor in stews. My daughter offers to help me pull up the shallow root stocks, which complain by letting loose their characteristic pungent smell.

“But why are we pulling these up? They have pretty white flowers on the top,” she comments.

“Well, we don’t really want them in the yard,” I say gently.

“Why?”

I’m suddenly faced with explaining the concept of invasive species to a five year old. This sort of thing happens a lot.

I hunker down to her level in the grass, try to put it in language she’ll understand. “See how it grows so fast, and goes all over the place? When it does that, it takes the light and the soil away from other plants. It doesn’t want to share.”

She processes this, then nods.

“Oh,” she says solemnly. “It’s like people.”

Dear Lupe,

Did you ever wish that you could save the world?

Awhile back a student of mine, in seventh grade English, turned in an assigned poem. I loved its simplicity, its rhythm, the way the lines broke on the page. What made my heart even more glad was that it was from a kid I’ve been trying to reach for several years now.

Anyway. I was so proud of him that I posted the poem on my teacher blog earlier this week. And that’s where I found out he hadn’t written it at all. He had plagiarized “Kick, Push,” and confirmed that he had done it deliberately when I asked him about it. And not knowing your rap until this week, I had no idea.

It’s been an interesting journey, these past few days. I’ve cried once or twice. I’ve rethought how I give and support assignments for second language kids. I’ve been surfing your sites, pulling up your stuff on Youtube. I’ve fallen in love with your work. And I’ve rejected completely the punitive coercion that could serve as the consequence for plagiarism in my school. That stuff won’t work. This kid is too smart.

The only thing that will work, I’ve come to realize, is if, somehow, he talks to you.

This might strike you as overkill. What is plagiarism, after all, next to cheese heroin addiction, or teenage pregnancy, or gang bangs? But I would argue that it’s just this kind of tiny, critical choice, and how it’s handled by the adults involved, that can tip the balance in a pre-adolescent kid. Towards a life that is ruled by a living sense of the dignity of human beings, or suffocated with the stale mediocrity of selfishness. Towards a life fortified against amorality, or one that invites it in—in small ways now, and perhaps much worse ones later.

So now is the time.

I don’t really know what I am asking you for. Five minutes on speakerphone would do it. Perhaps a letter. Something that makes you real to my kid. Something that it is not yet, or may never be, within my power to do– try as I might.

Because you see, it’s not enough that you’re like a god to him; it’s not enough that he listens to you constantly and can recite your raps with passion and accuracy from memory in the middle of class. None of it matters—not the poetry, the positive role model, or the message—unless he internalizes it enough to know that in the destructive habit of taking the short, easy way out, he cheats everyone. You. All of us. And most importantly, himself.

I can’t guarantee that this will save the world. Maybe not even this kid. But it might. Will you bank on hope, with me?

Please give me a call.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I’ll be sending this via snail and email to Lupe’s production company, 1st and 15th Entertainment. Anyone else got any bright ideas? Contacts I can use? How much does a full page ad in the Chicago Times cost?

So I’m out crazy sick yesterday– fever, aches, nausea, the whole nine yards. This, of course, occurs right at the key point of introduction in a unit I’m creating from scratch based on the First Amendment. Students bring in favorite “statement” T-shirts and analyze them in writing– first for their presuppositions, and then as protected (or not) free speech. It’s challenging for everyone involved, and weird, and genre-busting, and full of little steps and student-centered discussions and teacher as guide and I was very nervous about my ability to carry it off to begin with– never mind that the products are going to be displayed for parents next week.

I’m in at 6 AM before I retreat to my bed, plugging through the haze of my aching bones, writing out what I am sure are completely unintelligible sub plans for a person I’ve never met– probably certified in math 25 years ago. I’m positive I’m going to come in the next day and find shreds of t-shirts, note cards, half-finished background packets, and a charred overhead projector, with a one word message from the sub in red pen: WHY?

Instead I find this note.

“Hi! The kids were great. Most of them got a solid start on their drafts. We had some wonderful conversations. My undergraduate degree was in Constitutional Law, so I think I fielded most of their questions well.”

It was almost worth being absent.