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Meet You Tomorrow

Monday 18 August 2014

Dear Terrence,

We haven’t met, but by the time twenty four hours pass, we will have met. I might not even realize it yet, for you sometimes manage to keep yourself hidden in the rank and file, just another face in a sea of first day jitters, but more than likely, I’ll have a pretty good idea who you are, and how many of you there are as well.

picPart of me wants to say something like this: It’s all up to you. Whether I meet you or not is a simple question of self control. You could simply blend in, follow the examples you see around you of successful students, and you could just disappear before you even make your entrance. I want to say that’s possible, but I’m not sure a thirteen-year-old has that kind of fortitude. At your age, you tend to make things more complicated than they really are, and combined with your fatalism, that makes it highly unlikely that I won’t meet you. You’ll feel unjustly accused, or you’ll suspect someone across the room is talking about you, or you’ll simply need some attention, or a thousand and one other motivations might click and then we’ll meet.

I could actually be on the lookout for you: all I have to do is take my roll sheets down the seventh-grade hall and ask for references. It seems unfair now, and I strenuously avoided any comments from anyone about any of my students, but truth be told, that’s what “real life” — whatever that might be — is like.

All that being said, I have no doubt I’ll figure out who you are fairly quickly. At risk kids wear their cracks on their sleeves even when they think they are being impenetrable, and your body language will likely give you away. So the real question is, what then? When I figure out who you are, when I tell you the jig’s up, what then? Hopefully, I’ll do better with you this year than I did last year, which was better than the year before that. But will it be enough? Can we make it?

We’ll start to see tomorrow.

Concerned as always,
Your Future Teacher

Updated

Friday 15 August 2014

It took me four years and two principals, but I finally succeeded in my brilliant plot to take control of and completely redesign the web site for my school. It went live today.

Update

The district decided a year later that WordPress had such significant security issues that they couldn’t continue using it. Funny, Washington Post, Time magazine, and the New York Times all seem to feel differently since they use it, but what do for-profit companies know about using secure software?

Ten Years

Thursday 14 August 2014

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K in 2004, shortly after our wedding

On Monday 22 July 2002, while spending the summer in Boston after having relocated to Poland, I wrote in my journal,

I’ve been thinking about K. I’ve been thinking that I should tell her my thoughts first thing when I see her in a little over a month. I’ve been thinking that there’s no way she can say anything but no. I’ve been thinking there’s no way she can say anything but yes. I’ve been thinking it’s the best thing I can do. I’ve been thinking it’s the dumbest thing I can do.

It had all begun several months earlier, when K and I were at a wedding together. One of my former students was marrying her next-door neighbor, and as we’d both volunteered to be photographers as our wedding present, we spent the whole evening more or less together. Some time in the early morning hours, K and I had stepped outside for a bit of fresh air and a break, and our conversation turned to love and perfect matches. “I’d like to meet someone who… someone who…”

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Exchanging vows

And then the words came out of my mouth, and I thought, “Did I just say that?” Later in my journal, addressing K, I turned to that wedding:

At B’s wedding, we went for a walk around the hotel, and as we talked, I said something that quite surprised even me. “I’d like to meet someone like you,” I said, and immediately you replied, “No, you wouldn’t.” You gave a reason why not – I’m ashamed to say I can’t remember exactly what it was. You tried to say something about some perceived fault – I think you said you were too indecisive or something like that. Honestly, I wasn’t listening to what you said. I was thinking over and over, “Did I just say that?”

“I’d like to meet someone like you”? But I’d already met her, why someone like her?

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First dance

I first met K when she was still in high school — a senior — and I was a teacher in a neighboring village. It was in a bar/disco, and she and two friends walked up to me, the new American in the area (one of three in a ten-mile radius, thanks to the Peace Corps), and said, “We want to practice our English!” We’d become friends quickly, and our conversations were relaxed and pleasant. When she’d moved to Krakow to go to university, I’d visited her a few times, and over the years, I’d come to take our friendship as a given, like she was a sister or something. Romantic attraction never really crossed my mind. The thought of saying, “I’d like to meet someone like you” to someone who could have been — well, it was just unthinkable. Yet I couldn’t think of anything else.

Since then, though, I’ve been thinking about it. Sometimes almost constantly. And the more I think about it, the more it seems to make sense. We both want the most basic things out of life: a family, a house in some quiet place, a secure relationship. “It just makes so much sense,” I say to myself.

Apparently it did make so much sense and continues to make so much sense, for ten years later, nothing has changed: I’m still as in love with her now as then. No, that’s wrong: more so.

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Newlyweds

Something has changed; indeed, everything has changed. We’ve brought two children into the world, who have become the source of all our mutual joys and worries. We’ve got a house that adds to those worries, though with a different type of urgency. We’ve moved to an entirely new continent since then. We have new friends, new cars, new everything. Yet only new from the perspective of the journal writer of ten years ago, fretting away about what he was to do about this newly discovered attraction. Now everything is comfortably worn, like slippers that just fit the foot and bend just right. Comfortable. As it should be.

Reset

Wednesday 13 August 2014

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With me heading back to school for another year on the more difficult side of the desk, E has had to return to daycare. He’s not happy about it. These first two days have been tough on K as she takes him, for he cries when arrives, and today he began the tears even before we left. He’ll get over it, for sure: he’s sociable, and all the teachers say he’s been interacting with the kids well, playing, sharing.

There’s always a bit of guilt we as parents feel as we drop off our child to be cared for by strangers. Yes, E knows them; yes, E loves at least one of them silly. But they’re still strangers. We would not know these people were we not paying them to take care of E while we’re at work. The irony of the modern world: we have all these time saving devices, but we end up just working more. Were it not for our desire — no, our need — to head back to Poland on a regular basis, our desire to make sure our children stay connected to their roots, would K continue working? I know where her heart is.

And yet, doesn’t some good come from this? After all, the Boy is going to have to head to school at some point. This is good preparation for that. L went through the same program and entered kindergarten solidly prepared.

There must be a balance somewhere.

Back Again

Tuesday 12 August 2014

We’ll be starting school in a week, meeting (some) students in two days, but today, the faculty gathered to do two things: deal with the myriad administrative announcements and clarifications that make up the bureaucracy of public education, and get caught back up with colleagues.

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Last year we faced the stress of a new principal: what will change? What will stay the same? After a year with this man, who has done an excellent job at transforming some problems at our school as well as keeping everyone on their toes, we know that we’re in for more of the same this year. It’s good and bad. I have this lurking fear that changes we know are coming are going to make me let go of some of my most prized pedagogical possessions — lessons, units, techniques that might not work with the new approach (educational fad or not? too early to tell) well be taking as a faculty. Yet change is often good. Still, on this end of it, it’s a bit daunting.

Soup

Monday 11 August 2014

DSCF0039L is a picky eater — no doubt about it. Certainly she has some odd tastes, odd by the average American girl standards, I think. Still she can throw us a curve ball, protesting something that seems so logical for her to life. Soup is always a hit with her, but K’s tomato soup from yesterday wasn’t a hit. Not sure why: it used to be a big hit. But it wasn’t. And it wasn’t any better tonight when we finished up the leftovers. She basically ate next to nothing, leaving almost a whole bowl of soup. Granted, she got nothing else for the evening with the understanding that she would have to finish the soup before she could have anything else. Nothing.

Tonight, during prayers, we reached “Give us this day our daily bread,” and I pointed out to L that she would get that soup back at breakfast. “We’re not going to waste food, especially when it’s something that you used to like and eat willingly. She fussed, predictably, but then, thinking about reading the news and the horrors occurring in Syria and Iraq as ISIS sweeps through and imposes strict Islamic law, committing their own brand of ethnic cleansing, I decided to give the Girl a little perspective.

“L, there are children in a country called Iraq now who are literally dying because they don’t get food or water.”

“Why?”

Brief overview appropriate for a seven-year-old, includes terms like “bad people” and oversimplification.

“So these children are so hungry, L, that you could spill that soup on the floor, and they would willingly lap it up like they were animals.”

Silence. Wide eyes.

“You’re lucky: you fuss about being given something you don’t want to eat. These children, if they had the energy to fuss, would fuss about not having anything to eat. At all.”

We’ll see tomorrow what happens. I’m hopeful, but I know how stubborn L is. Besides, that “kids starving in [insert country]” argument seems rarely to work.

Pavement

Sunday 10 August 2014

Just down the street from our house is another street — typical of suburbia, I know. But this street is different. It’s freshly paved, smooth and inviting, and it has just enough of a slope that anyone can enjoy riding up and down it.

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And so of late, we’ve taken to doing just that: E on his four-wheel pusher, the Girl on her new bike or her scooter, I on my bike, and usually K on foot.

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Occasionally we meet neighbors there, either by arrangement or by accident. Some are more enthusiastic about the activity than others; some ride with more abandon than others; some leave me shaking my head in wonder. Up and down, up and down, races and gentle rides, laughing and literal screaming (“That’s not fair!”) — it becomes a little microcosm of childhood.

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I have my own memories like this — summers on bikes, hills that are a pleasure (as well as hills that are hellish), riding with friends.

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Seeing my own children follow those same paths brings a smile.

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I See It!

Saturday 9 August 2014

chocomilkThe Boy toddles toward the stairs down to our transforming basement, cup of chocolate milk in hand. He gets a little excited and the milk soon splashes all over the floor. As I’m cleaning it up, I mutter to myself that this was avoidable “because I foresaw it.”

“No, Daddy,” E corrects. “I saw it.”