Purim is coming! Everybody be happy! Seriously!

Purim is coming. In a few weeks, right before Easter, we will celebrate Purim. When I say "we" I of course mean all Jews, but also my Old Testament class. We will learn of Esther's story and how her husband, the king of Persia, did not know she was Jewish, and was also convinced by an antisemitic official to exterminate all the Jews. So then Esther gets all brave and tells the king she's Jewish and in the end, everyone except the antisemitic official (who is executed) lives happily ever after.

The point being, Esther told her secret, one that was too big for her to carry around anymore, and it led to a positive conclusion to the story instead of the death of all her kinsmen.

I was reading about Purim today, thinking about how to make it a bigger deal for my kids than I have in the past.

There are several rabbis I follow on Facebook, which time and again show me how much joy Judaism contains. And today, one of them wrote about Purim.

The book of Esther is the only book of the bible that never mentions God's name.

And this is part of why it's so important.

Passover is a big awesome amazing traumatic deal. God brought down hellfire on the enemies of the ancient Jews, saving them from slavery and drawing them out into freedom. God did this. All of this, Jews believe. Everything from too many frogs clogging the streets up to and including the death of the first born sons of Egypt. God's hand, God's miracles. God.

The book of Esther is about our hands. It is about our work to bring about the kingdom of God. It's about turning on the light and getting down to what is really wrong. It is about being brave and doing it. Using our senses and intuition and hands and everything God gave us and getting it done.

We don't see God's name in the book of Esther because people are doing the work and God is underneath it all.

All our choices to do right. All our challenges and synchronistic moment and every time we say, "oh thank God it happened this way."

And this is why Purim is such a joyful celebration. It is one of the greatest miracles of God because "the ultimate revelation of G-d's power and ever-presence is when He does not have to interfere. This is the meaning of the Megillat Esther--the revelation of hidden-ness. Within the free choice of people, G-d's will and plan are being completely fulfilled, step by step." (Rabbi David Aaron).

Everyday heroes. Ordinary folks. People who speak truth to power. People who bring about change in small consistent powerful ways.

People who listen to their instincts and open themselves up to that small voice.

And then get up and do what needs to be done.

That's God's story for us.

That's why I'm going to celebrate Purim with my 6th graders.

Vulnerability, Feeling, Doubt, Pain, and Trying to Swim

Ok I'm going to say some things here.

I've been kind of drowning.

This current mess started in October and continues to grow.  I've talked about my invisible boy before. I worry and watch and try to see. But recently it's started to solidify for me that there is something wrong. I talk to trusted advisers who get quiet and say, "yes."

He has started staring at me.

And not like I turn around and he smiles and waves at me all goofy kind of staring. Like he's looking through me into my soul kind of staring. I look over at him, and he's looking straight at me and does not look away like normal folks would after a moment of eye contact. I always look away first. It has become unnerving.

Because in addition to staring at me, he gives me nothing. I don't mean "he gives me nothing" like I'm expecting some sort of tribute. I'm a bit of an empath, not in a psychic way, but in a "This is how I encounter the human species" way. I feel my way through and if that doesn't sound like a thing, then it's not a thing for you. It is a thing for me. I can feel you people.

I can tell when folks are bored or sad or angry or happy or excited or manic or flat or any number of things. I don't always act on it, but I often consume it. I bring your mood home to be my mood. This is a maladaptive trait sometimes, but in a classroom it makes me the teacher I am. I can tell, without having to ask, that you do not understand what I'm teaching, because I can feel it. I can tell that you like my lesson today. I know when you are hurting and I need to take it easy on you. I know when your frustration is about to boil over and I can try to alleviate it.

But it's like this one child is staring at me through a television monitor. He isn't actually in the room. Emotionally, I mean.

He is staring at me and he's not there and nobody knows who he is and he's in 6th grade and his former teachers confuse him for another boy with a similar name.

And I fully admit I am not trusting my gut on this one (even though it has been pointed out that I am never wrong--sometimes I don't get a bullseye but I'm always hitting the target). But I'm terrified of making a mistake and one single mistake feels like it will ruin this whole house of cards and he's reaching out to me but WHAT IF I'M TOO EXTRA FOR HIM? WHAT IF HE'S WAITING FOR ME TO DO SOMETHING AND I DO IT WRONG? WHAT IF I AM WRONG AND I SOUND LIKE A FREAK?

WHAT IF I'M RIGHT?

WHAT. IF. I'M. RIGHT.

So this week I've been feeling it build up, the stress of knowing that I don't know, the choking feeling of wanting to do something and being afraid, the soul-killing fear of being right, the pain of all the past everything coming to bear, crushing me into paralysis.

I went and got a tattoo on Thursday. I walked out and felt better for the first time in months.

But I ruined it again on Friday in my religion class, when I talked about a former student of mine who committed suicide. Because we're studying Jeremiah and we read chapter 20 and we talked about feeling betrayed by God. Being tricked. Being angry. I wrote out and then read to them, out loud in the semi-darkness of my classroom, about my student and about his death and about his funeral.

They got the picture. I had them write for 15 minutes about a time they were either angry with God, or if that didn't ring true for them, with a person who had power over them. They wrote. They shared. Most were about when grandma or grandpa died, which was a relief. Some were not. I have work to do this weekend to respond in the best way possible.

And then I went out with a friend Friday night and talked, pretty much non-stop, for 7 hours. The night ended with me in her car leaning on her dashboard sobbing through similar words that I say above. I'm angry that nobody has seen him. I'm afraid he's not going to make it. I'm terrified of what I should do. I'm paralyzed by doubt. It's too much.

She told me to stop asking permission to do what I knew was best. That I was the expert right now. Talk to him. Just. Do. It.

I went home and, once I was able to get to sleep, all my dreams were preludes to a conversation. They were rehearsals.

Except for one. I stood across the street from his house and watched construction work going on. Work that took off the front of his house and put it on a hinge so you could pull it open like an oven door. I could see into all the rooms.

I woke to two feelings:

1. I really needed to go out with her on Friday and be vulnerable and share my pain. I've been walking around, for years, with friends I didn't feel I could do that with. Not and still walk away with any of their respect. I am so relieved and happy that being me was ok? It sounds ridiculous because I am often way more me on my blogs than I am in real life. But I was me last night and I needed to be.

2. I am not drowning anymore. I'm swimming as fast as I fucking can.

In the end, the message probably won't be for me, like I said a couple of days ago. This invisible boy will slip through my fingers and remain invisible, which will kind of permanently etch me as much as Andy permanently etches me every time I walk into that tattoo parlor to have him hurt me on purpose.

But I'm not going to stand in another classroom, ever, for the rest of my life, and think to myself, "what more could I have done? My God, I could have done a lot more."

The one with Sally talking in too many metaphors

Synchronicity. You know what I mean, right? The Jungian idea that there is meaning in unrelated events. Sort of. Like you are thinking intently of a geographically distant friend one morning and you find out that evening that her mother died around the time you were thinking of her. Maybe it's a thing. Maybe it's not a thing.

Maybe we can go ahead and say it is a thing because what's stopping us? I don't mean magical thinking or superstition that keeps us from making decisions. I'm not talking about "I must paint my living room blue so the fairies will visit" or "It is God's will that I give up my rational thinking for my husband to make all the decisions". I'm not talking about crazy or deluded or giving up free will. I'm just talking about happy, or unhappy, coincidences that make you turn your head and say, "Ok, so that happened. Ok then."

Maybe it's confirmation bias. Sometimes it probably is. I am focused on, say, logarithmic spirals, and suddenly they are everywhere. I'm ruminating on my higher purpose and the bumper sticker on the car in front of me reminds me that God is not mad at me.

But there's this other thing going on in my life of late, not really synchronicity or confirmation bias, but more like the rod cells in my eyes are noticing things the cone cells in my eyes are distracted from by pretty colors all around me. I'm noticing things out of the corner of my eye these days. I'm starting to collect bits and pieces of information that seem, all alone and out of context, just odd bits of flotsam, but when put into a large bucket with all the other bits, are starting to add up to something.

Yes, I'm talking about my classroom.

And yes, that's all I'm going to say about it here.

It's just, it's like I'm tuning into to a radio station. To a numbers station. From Russia. In 1989. Odeen. Dvah. Tri. Chteri. Pyat. Null. 

I'm catching the message midway though.

On an analog radio in a basement.

I don't have a one-time pad to help me decode.

And all I can do is listen, record, watch, and be my best damned version of my best self for the next...rest of my life.

She sat in her classroom. They were all writing. Tell me about a time you felt God in your life, she had prompted them. She was teaching them about Isaiah. The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light. Tell me about the light you see. She'd told them stories of her life. They wrote, and she wrote, too, thinking about the question. Things that have come to pass. Things that might. The words scribbled onto the page in her purple ink and suddenly she was at peace with some things. She looked up into the semi-darkness. They were all still writing.

Friday they will write about Jeremiah.

Eventually the words will work out.

Or they won't.

But I'm ripples in a still pond, baby. I'm a middle school teacher.

I know where my influence ends, and it is related to my field: we are infinite.

I may never crack the code but I'm going to stay tuned in.

Just in case the message is for me.

ICE

ICE. In Case of Emergency. Its a thing on the cell phone, red font in my contacts. Bixby is my ICE, of course, but so is my father and my sister Bevin. In case of emergency, please call this person. If I'm incapacitated or you don't think I'm going to make it through the night, call them.

I'm Bix's ICE. I'm Brooklyn's ICE. My name and house phone number was for a long time written in permanent marker inside someone's hard hat. I was his ICE. For a while.

In the world of middle school, there is a step down from ICE that we call "trusted adult." When we have class meetings or even sometimes in the middle of class, we will mention things like, "If you're worried about something, talk to a trusted adult." I never assume I am the trusted adult because I'm sure I am for some folks but not for others. I never tell students, "Come talk to ME about it," but instead refer to a trusted adult, to seek out a trusted adult.

Many of my kids last year had the fifth grade teachers as trusted adults. Some of last year's 8th grade boys had me in that place. Many girls in middle school trust, deeply, the Spanish teacher. 

Right now in my homeroom there are a couple of ongoing conflicts. I have some of the details sorted but not all of them. We had a class meeting today and I had four animal archetypes on the walls--sharks, bears, turtles, and owls. We talked about different responses to conflict. 6th graders, remember, still play along sometimes, and I had them split into groups and talk about the archetypes, positives and negatives. Then I had them stand by the animal that best represented them (I'm a bear; most of my class stood by the shark).

After the activity, I had a reflection sheet. Why did you choose your animal? How is your animal good at conflict? How might it make things worse?

On the back of the sheet, I had them reflect on a recent conflict in their lives. This is where I was looking for information on the current problems. All the forms were anonymous.

My last question was "Is there anything you need me to know?"

That question produced mostly "no" but a couple of students had some things to say that it is clear I need to follow up with (even though the form was anonymous, a few wrote their names). There are some problems in my class.

The second last question was "Do you have an adult mediator to go to if you cannot resolve a conflict with a peer? Do you have a trusted adult?"

Everyone answered that question with either "yes" or with an example--parents, coaches, teachers, older siblings. Every child has a connection somewhere, some adult he or she thinks will listen and believe them. Or at the very least, every child knows how to play the game--tell the teacher what she wants to hear.

Except one.

He'd written his name at the top but had erased it. I could still read it. His answers were thoughtful on the front side about the animal activity. On the back side, nothing out of the ordinary, and then that question caught me. Do you have an adult mediator to go to? Do you have a trusted adult?

I don't have one, he wrote out in a full sentence.

He's twelve.

He's twelve years old and he's alone.

Charles Bukowski must've taught middle school in his spare time

"....and I had a father come into my classroom with his belt in his hand," said a teacher friend this evening to me. A teacher friend who is leaving the classroom behind, which is a damned dirty shame because she might be the best teacher I know, with real gifts in hard places and stamina that I cannot muster. But she's also right to leave. I nodded at her and repeated words I've said before:

"That was the day--the day when Lorin's father showed up and asked me how he was in the classroom, and I told him, and he took Lorin out of my room while I stood there watching him leave with his son, beat him in the hallway, and Lorin came back in with a cut on his face, that was the day I became a liar." No matter what happens in my classroom, it's something I handle with that kid at that time.

The kids I teach now? Nobody's going to walk into my classroom with a cut face after a beating in the hallway.

But I still play my cards close with their parents. I'm still a liar.

------

She's mad but she's magic. There's no lie in her fire.

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"Did you think that if we just loved him enough, it would turn out ok?"

Yes, of course I did.

Why else on the earth would anyone ever try?

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You begin saving the world by saving one person at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.

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A teacher was on a field trip, which means classes get shifted around. If you were supposed to have her class, then you take the class that she would have had. It is never hard to sub in your own building. You know the kids. And you don't actually have to do any work. My homeroom was supposed to be in her class, but were assigned to another teacher for the hour.

I went over to that room to tease them a little bit before I took my break. To tell them to be sure to be good for her. Of course they would be. They're a good group. I walked in and my kids--these are my kids--are sitting down at the desks and chatting, eating a snack before the quiz they've been assigned by the absent teacher. I scan the room and then see my invisible boy, standing the back facing the wall with his books on a counter.

"What's that?" I ask the teacher.

Shrug. "I don't have enough chairs."

I walk over to him. He's studying for the quiz. "Can I, please let me get you a chair?"

"Thank you," is all he says. All he usually ever says. Thank you for helping me. Thank you.

I go across the hall and get a chair from my room, take it back and put it at a little computer table. He nods at it, picks up his books, and thanks me again. Fleeting eye contact. No expression.

He was going to just stand through that class.

Everyone in that room was going to just let him stand through that class.

That teacher was going to let him stand through that class.

I am sure I offend people 100 times a day. I blunder around and talk sharp sometimes and hell, I teach middle school and that's enough said about that. But my classroom is my domain. And I am going to make sure everyone has a place in it.

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We must. We must bring our own light to the darkness. 

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I flip through records. I look at pictures, I look for hints. I look at those little kindergarten photos and then the progression through to middle school. Stability does not equal happiness, that's the lesson there. I wouldn't have had more than one or two photos in a permanent record like that. These kids, almost all of them have a full set of K-6 by the time I have their names sorted in my homeroom and it's picture day.

Stability can be smothering, even toxic. Or maybe it's unrelated directly to the outcome. Correlation, not causality. Some kids are resilient. Some are happy. Some are talked about in meetings. Some are never talked about at all.

------

back off. If there is light, it will find you.

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Sitting across from her, a girl who has closed herself to me in her anger and shame, there was nothing I could do.

Except teach her the math.

So that's what we did. Math. The reunion of broken things.

And she, too, thanked me on her way out after her test retake. A different sort of thank you, one said out of perhaps sheepish realization that I wasn't actually out to get her, out to fail her. It felt real, not parroted.

"You're welcome," I answered her. "We'll go over the answers tomorrow. We'll get it sorted."

We parted in the hallway. She was already on her phone, looking for her mom to pick her up. I was headed out the back door to my car--I drive a Ford Escape--to take off the teacher hat and blare the music so loud that my brain cleared.

But my heart really never does.

------

What matters most is how well you walk through the fire.

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"How did you know you wanted to be a teacher?" one of my favorite 8th graders asks me as the snow falls outside the window and the ipads only sort of work how I want them to.

And so I tell the story of the smart girl who changed her mind. "I needed a piece of paper," I sum up, "Something I could hand to a future boss and say, this is what I know how to do."

"Like, a mechanic or something," he connects.

"Yes, like a mechanic. Except with kids. Maybe more like a welder."

They laugh. I watch the snow and think about so many broken things.

Against all reason, I teach math

I moved from Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, to St. Louis, Missouri, in the middle of my first grade year. My parents had me tested and, back in the day, the answer to "what should we do with our bored smart girl?" was "Let's skip her up a grade."

So I started in a second grade classroom in south county in January. I loved Mrs. Chott, but I don't recall a single friend's name from that half-year in her classroom. What I do remember is Mad Minutes, those timed math facts papers.

They were my first taste of failure.

After my half year in second grade, I switched schools to a small Catholic school that is no more (so many of my schools are no more, it isn't fair). St. Bernadette's. Math was easy there. In fact, too easy. We moved again after 5th grade ended and when I walked into the math classroom in Columbia, Missouri, I was two years behind.

Two years! How do you ever catch up from two years? The girls I became quick friends with, the girls in my (top) reading group, were a year ahead of the class in math. Which meant I was THREE YEARS BEHIND my best friends.

I was ashamed by this like I had never been ashamed of anything. Ever.

My math teacher made a raw deal with me--I could take books home over Christmas break and finish big chunks of them and catch up with the average group. That was my challenge and I did it. I spent that Christmas break doing math.

So many three digit by two digit multiplication problems. So much long division.

So much long division that I taught myself.

I remember the satisfaction of turning in the work, and the remedial textbooks, to Mrs. Kruse. Moving my desk away from Bethany and Tim and Kyle and back into the normal zone of her classroom. (Which is a shitty way to split up a classroom, by the way).

In 8th grade, friends were shocked that I was in the average math class instead of Algebra. By this point, math was such a sticking point in my self-image that I didn't even try to engage. I soared in my Literature classes and Art and so forth. Math was a necessary evil. Like vaccinations or dental exams.

Ninth grade Algebra was taught by a football coach who never got up from his desk. Tenth grade down in Georgia was a skillful Geometry teacher and I decided that maybe I was a geometry person. I heard that folks tended to be one or the other. My junior and senior year math classes, in Houston, were spent at the mercy of a bright woman who knew math but could not teach it. I was a chapter behind most of those two years, and jealous of my smart friends who took the advanced classes from the physics teacher.

I wasn't good at math. I was good at many other things but not math.

So when my parish priest turned to me after mass one Sunday and asked if I'd be interested in interviewing for our parish school, for a math position, I said yes. Because I say yes a lot. It was only an interview. I liked my current job ok, although I feared teaching wasn't for me in the grand scheme of things. But I said yes because who knows what a yes can lead to?

I got the job. And I stood in front of a rough house of 8th graders who had driven the last math teacher right out the door.

I don't know where it came from, but I turned out to be pretty good at it. I taught them, and myself, middle school math.

And I liked doing it.

Kids in my class ask me, "What's your favorite subject? Is it math?" I always answer no, that my favorite subjects are literature, writing, and art. They give me funny looks.

"That's why I teach math," I try to explain. If they're young, I usually stop there. But 8th graders want more reasoning.

If I taught literature and all of you guys didn't fall to your knees over Ray Bradbury or Harper Lee, Lois Lowry or Langston Hughes, I would cry myself to sleep every night. I don't understand why someone wouldn't want to read, or even how reading could be frustrating and boring. But I get why math is hard. I know how it makes you feel stupid. I can feel the frustration of a wrong answer erased for the 3rd time on rough looseleaf paper and the futility of all these little rote tasks. I get it. I've been there. Math has been an acquired taste for me. I appreciate it, but I don't think I would ever love it. The thing is, you don't have to love it either. It won't hurt my feelings. We can still be friends.

Russian class and lost cats

I took Russian in high school from an army intelligence officer who may or may not have been on the verge of losing his marbles at the time he was teaching me. He taught us out of the standard Russian textbook available at the time, Russian for Everybody.

We did 15 chapters that year and he told us that it would count for a semester of college Russian if we decided to continue.

During that year, I was a witness to a gang initiation and that Russian teacher encouraged me to testify and then me in my dorky Catholic high school uniform and bad Texas hair was in the newspaper. Oh and then there was the time he got mad at me and threw a chalk eraser at me. But he also gave me his captains bars when I graduated. It was a love hate thing. He was crazy.

So I got to college and didn't take Russian that first semester, needing to get some other pre-requisites down. I went to visit the head of the Russian department before I signed up for spring classes, bringing my Russian textbook.

"That's the one we use," he held up his teacher's edition. "What chapter are you on?"

"We finished chapter 15," I told him.

"Then you need to start in Russian IV," he decided. I took a test and he confirmed it. I did well, although he used to point out my accent problems to the class on occasion--never as something to humiliate me, but to show how the influence of a teacher's accent can change a student's. My shcha was never exactly right, and I did my unaccented /o/ differently--not wrong, just regionally affected.

I made it through Russian VI, which was simply sitting in the professor's office translating passages in an independent study. I wish I had focused more, but college is wasted on the young.

Time went by, and I became a teacher myself. I started teaching at my parish school and there was a young girl in my 7th grade math class. I knew her last name. I saw her father's name on her transcript. It was my Russian professor. This was confirmed at the first parent-teacher conference. It was good to see him. I fell in love with that student and her friends, telling Bixby that I hoped that if and when we had daughters, they would be like her and her geeky fun friendly friends.

Bixby's brothers, twins, went to the same university we did, and they became casual friends with that girl from my math class. We continued to go to church at our parish, where my Russian professor was a longtime member, an elder, perhaps, you could call him. I became friends with my math student's older sister, through knitting, and then through facebook. The math student friended me at some point and I've watched her grow up, get married, have a baby.

And then another one of her sisters lost her cat. I saw the posters on the phone poles first, fluffy orange cat missing. Then I saw the notifications on facebook--the sisters posting them, and then other people I know near our park.

Time went on and the posters faded. Then they were replaced, and the sister, Maire, started up a twitter account for her missing cat, "Matt the Cat". I drove through the neighborhood, eyes open for cats every time. Nothing. I was impressed with the hopefulness, but I didn't think it was going to work out for Maire and Matt the Cat.

The past few weeks, Maire posted as Matt the Cat, with great humor, keeping him on the minds of those living in the neighborhood. And then of course, amazingly, he was found one cold night in the next neighborhood over. I sat with the computer that evening with many other people in Tower Grove, waiting to see if his microchip scan was positive. It was, and he was celebrated all over the place.

The bar Bixby goes to on alternating Wednesdays named a drink for him. Matt the Cat got a day at a cat spa (?) and a photo shoot. The alderman passed a proclamation celebrating how this one lost cat brought together a neighborhood.

And then yesterday, Maire threw a party for Matt the Cat. But not just for the cat--for us, for the people around Tower Grove, for what neighbors are all about. I was reminded of the parable of the lost coin. She lost something that isn't that precious to anyone else--and when she found it, she invited all her neighbors in to celebrate it. It's actually all over the New Testament. Something is lost, and then it is found.

What does this have to do with a Russian class in high school and a Leningrad accent? Maybe just that life's path is never straight. When that army captain came to me and said, "I heard you wanted to learn Russian. If you can get 5 other students, I can justify it to the principal", I had no idea that saying, "I'm up for that" would mean I was going to wind up celebrating the return of a lost orange tabby 24 years later with my kids--who are turning out just like those 7th grade girls I so hoped they would.

I'm game for that.

I'm not too hard persuaded.

I'll say yes.

Who knows where that might lead?