August 2013 – Mysteries and Manners

First Days of School!

August 28, 2013

english-teacher — Source: scaryforkids.com
… not sure why this picture is from this website

I do not have much time to write, but I wanted to give you a quick update on my first few days of school.

First of all, I’m loving it. This is such a wonderful school. The students are so polite and kind, and everyone has been so welcoming to me. Plus, not having FOUR preps and SIX classes a day (with an “off” period usually reserved for substituting) is amazing. I have two “off” or “prep” periods! And I get to use them! And I am especially blessed because I only have 1 prep (or 1 and a 1/2 if you count my Honors class separately), and thus I have a lot more time to preparing lessons and giving more frequent feedback on assignments. It’s still a lot of work, and I am still very exhausted after most days, but it makes me wonder how I ever got through my first two years of teaching.

Second of all, I feel like this:

Okay, my kids are a bit bigger. And I wasn’t this sweet the first day of school – in fact, I hear I was kind of scary. But that’s how I felt on the INSIDE.

Third of all, I devoted my first week of class to procedures and what Carol Dweck class “Growth Mindset.” Basically, her idea is HOW we view our own intelligence AFFECTS how we are able (or not able) to use our intelligence.

For example, if you believe that intelligence is static, that you were born smart or born not-so-smart, that belief has certain behavior consequences. On the other hand, if you believe intelligence is dynamic, that it can grow and be shaped over time, that belief also has consequences.

Another example: saying things like “I am an A student” or “I am a C student” means you probably have a fixed mindset. You believe intelligence is innate and remains basically the same throughout your life. This can have serious consequences for both the “A students” and the “C students.”

So, my first bell work assignment was a survey that students took that helped them analyze their own views of intelligence. Throughout the week, we talked about the results and what they mean.

Here’s a great visual chart I gave my kids to look at:

dweck_mindset — Source: qedfoundation.org

They got pretty excited about this topic, because even though they (and all of us) have heard the “work harder” mantra and the “practice makes perfect” cliche, they had not heard these ideas presented in such a new and well-researched way. And honestly, Dweck shows us how just “working harder” is not enough. If you’re interested in these ideas too, check out this awesome website on Mindset. Read it with an open mind (pun intended). Honestly, when I first started reading about Carol Dweck’s studies in my educational psychology class, I was rather skeptical because I thought it was going to be more bland “self-esteem” stuff… but actually, learned a lot about myself and my own approaches to success and failure.

Fourth of all, this is what my Labor Day Weekend Forecast looks like:

ManInMiddleOfPaperStacks — Source: caitlintucker.com

Very busy, with a 100% chance of a grading downpour, a 95% chance of exhaustion, and a small but rather alarming 10% chance of drowning in papers.

“Something we can Hold in our Hands and Love”

August 17, 2013

It’s been in-service all week, and I’ve loved it.

My new school seems so well-organized to me. I love the young faculty. I love the supportive administration.

The theology teacher was giving the new faculty a talk on the history of our school. It was beautiful. He talked a lot about Joseph P. Machebeuf, the first bishop of Denver and our school’s patron.

Bishop Joseph P. Machebeuf. Source: machebeuf.org

“So these two young priests from France wanted to be missionaries. Without their parents’ knowledge, they crossed the Atlantic and came to Ohio. From there, Lamy was sent to be the new bishop of Sante Fe, and his friend Joseph Machebeuf went with him.”

As I listened, I realized that this story sounded very familiar.

“Lamy struggled with the church already in the area. Many of the priests had taken wives and felt very disconnected from the universal Church’s teaching. Machebeuf, years later, would encounter similar struggles in the Colorado territory. While crossing the Rocky Mountains he was thrown from his carriage and suffered an injury that made him lame for the rest of his life.

“He became the first bishop of Denver, and built the first churches and schools here. He also built St. Joseph’s hospital.”

I couldn’t believe it, I thought. I already know this story.

It’s Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop.

This is the very the novel I spent my last semester of college studying for my senior thesis in English. I spent hours and hours pouring over this novel, writing about this novel, thinking about this novel.

Simple, sparse, and beautiful, I remember wondering at first if I should have chosen a more challenging work… but by the end of the semester had so fallen in love with it that it’s simplicity was one of the very things I addressed in my thesis.

My thesis, actually, was about storytelling and miracles in the novel. Latour (based on the historical Lamy) and Vaillant (based on the historical Machebeuf) are close friends who have two very different ideas about miracles. The intellectual Latour describes them this way:

Where there is great love, there are always miracles…. [They] seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always. (Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop 50)

So beautiful.

And yet, his friend Joseph Vaillant sees miracles very differently:

The miracle is something we can hold in our hands and love. (Ibid)

He has a much simpler faith. Notice that Father Joseph Vaillant doesn’t locate miracles in our perspective, in our ability to see “what is there about us always,” but rather in the specific interventions of God into our world. Miracles, for him, are so real that we can actually hold them in our hands.

This is Willa Cather’s description of Joseph P. Machebeuf, the patron of my new school.

So, believe or not, I am rather a skeptical person. And being what Flannery O’Connor calls a “big intellectual,” I struggle a lot with trusting in God’s particular intervention and interest in my own life… rather like Latour does in the novel.

But as that theology teacher went on to describe the real Bishop Joseph Machebeuf, I had the strange sensation that perhaps grace had led me here to Denver more intentionally than I had at first thought.

I told this to my best friend Teresa, who also went to UD and understands the gravity of one’s “Senior Novel” experience. She is very confident that I’m not just making up this connection, that it is real, that Providence is at work. She’s usually right about these things.

Well, school starts on Monday. I’m really excited, and really nervous. I miss my kids in Louisiana a lot. I hope I can love my new students just as much. Hopefully Joseph Machebeuf will be looking out for me.

By the way, if you haven’t yet, you should go read Death Comes for the Archbishop.

Saint Clare

August 11, 2013

Today is her feast day, and she is my confirmation saint. I love her.

For a really beautiful post about here, please see Amy Welborn’s blog:

Amy Welborn – St. Clare

As noted in her post, Pope Benedict as this to say:

The story of Clare, with that of Francis, is an invitation to reflect on the meaning of life and to seek the secret of true joy in God. It is a concrete proof that those who do the Lord’s will and trust in him alone lose nothing; on the contrary they find the true treasure that can give meaning to all things.

My Mouth is Dry

August 9, 2013

I have moved to Denver!

I am sitting in my new classroom, imagining the faces that will occupy the empty desks, the colors I will use to mitigate the overwhelming whiteness of the walls, the procedures I intend to begin practicing with them on day one…

…and my mouth is dry.

It will probably feel a whole lot dryer on the first day when I have to speak to my new students (whom, I hear, have been informed that I am a very hard-core scary teacher by my ACE predecessor).

Or the first time a student doesn’t follow directions, and I have to administer a consequence.

Or that first parent phone-call I make… even though I plan on the first one being very positive–a reaching out and introducing myself to all the parents before they know what hit ’em .

Or that first summer reading assignment I hand back… their first taste of my high expectations.

But right now, sitting here, typing and imagining and predicting, my mouth is dry.

They tell you when you move to Denver, you should drink a lot of water. Something about the high altitude and the climate makes dehydration pretty common, especially for newcomers. So I’ve been carrying a water bottle everywhere I go.

And my mouth is still dry.

When I was in Louisiana, sometimes I felt like I couldn’t breathe because of all the moisture in the air. Every time it rained, the water flooded the streets because it had nowhere to go — I guess the ground was saturated already.

Richard Wilbur’s beautiful poem, “Grasse: The Olive Trees,” was floating in my waterlogged thoughts all the time these past two years:

Here luxury’s the common lot. The light

Lies on the rain-pocked rocks like yellow wool

And around the rocks the soil is rusty bright

From too much wealth of water, so that the grass

Mashes under the foot, and all is full

Of heat and juice and a heavy jammed excess.

If that ain’t Louisiana, I don’t know what is.

Funny, because Wilbur is from Massachusetts like me, and lives a couple of hours away from where I grew up. Apparently the South made a big impression on him though (as it has with me). Look at how beautifully he describes the stillness, brought about by the thick heat. I was warned that people in the South walk more slowly, and talk more slowly. Sometimes, during my first year teaching, my kids would ask me to slow down. And it makes perfect sense that they think we rush around so quickly:

Whatever moves moves with the slow complete
Gestures of statuary. Flower smells
Are set in the golden day, and shelled in heat,
Pine and columnar cypress stand. The palm
Sinks its combs in the sky. The whole South swells
To a soft rigor, a rich and crowded calm.

And then, to my Northern delight, Wilbur notices something that protests the South, and all it’s sticky hot sweetness. And, to my even greater delight, it’s an olive tree — evoking images of that golden time I spent in Italy during college, biblical images, this whole idea of thirst….

Only the olive contradicts. My eye,
Traveling slopes of rust and green, arrests
And rests from plenitude where olives lie
Like clouds of doubt against the earth’s array.
Their faint disheveled foliage divests
The sunlight of its color and its sway.

Take a look at this olive tree, and then reread that stanza again:

Yup. It “contradicts” the landscape, the richness, the “excess.” The olive tree is still thirsty, for all of that water and warm sunshine.

But then this, as well:

Not that the olive spurns the sun; its leaves
Scatter and point to every part of the sky,
Like famished fingers waving. Brilliance weaves
And sombers down among them, and among
The anxious silver branches, down to the dry
And tsisted tgrunk, by rooted hunger wrung.

And then he ends his poem, in this incomparably beautiful way, gently evoking images that make you thirsty too, but perhaps for something else:

Even when seen from near, the olive shows
A hue of far away. Perhaps for this
The dove brought olive back, a tree which grows
Unearthly pale, which ever dims and dries,
And whose great thirst, exceeding all excess,
Teaches the South it is not paradise.

And you think of Noah in that sea of water, after that great excess of the great flood, searching the horizon for the little dove he had sent away. And eventually the dove comes back… bearing an olive branch, and the hope of dry land. (Genesis 8:11)

The South indeed “is not paradise,” but neither is Colorado, as beautiful as it is. I can’t really imagine two places more different from one another than Colorado and Louisiana, but here they are, juxtaposed, and here am I in the middle of them, missing the humidity but loving the clearer air.

And my mouth is dry, it seems no matter how much water I drink.

Or, I guess, no matter where I go.

Jesus answered and said to her, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again; but whoever drinks the water I shall give will never thirst; the water I shall give will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may not be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.” (John 4:13-15)

Teaching Dreams

August 1, 2013

I’ve been having a lot of teaching dreams lately. Or, perhaps more accurately, teaching nightmares.

For instance, last night I dreamed that I was at my new school on the first day, only this new school looked exactly like the high school I went to back in Massachusetts. And so I thought I knew my way around, (in fact I remember wanting to look into some of the old classrooms and talk to former teachers) but for the life of me I could not find my own classroom where I was supposed to be teaching! The bell rang, kids shuffled to classes everywhere, and I simply could not find where I was supposed to go.

Bewildered, I ran through the halls – upstairs, downstairs, peeking into classrooms as I went by and catching glimpses of my own former teachers.

Eventually I came to a deserted classroom, which was apparently where I was supposed to be introducing myself to my new class. Mr B. (my high school principal, not my future principal) came in and demanded to know where my students were. For some reason I knew the students he spoke of were my Louisiana kids, and so I mumbled something about being late and that possibly they had all gone to look for me in a different room.

“Well, find them!” he said.

Once again I returned hopelessly to the endless hallways. Suddenly I saw my old senior English teacher, Mr. Tallon, who died very suddenly last year.

“Mr. Tallon?” I gasped. “I thought you had died!”

“A lot of people thought that,” he said amicably.

“Could you please help me? I’m not sure where I’m supposed to go.”

“Of course!”

Nonchalantly, and at a very leisurely pace, he walked me through the hallways and we chatted about old times. I felt better since I was with him, but I still felt a gnawing sense of anxiety because I could not find my students.

“Have you ever been up to the fifth floor?” he asked me suddenly.

At my high school, there is no fifth floor. “Um, I didn’t think there was one…”

“This way!” he said. And he went up a tiny stairwell. I hesitated because I really don’t like cramped, small spaces, and because I felt we were getting a little off-track.

Then another teacher arrived and asked us in annoyance where we were going. I felt helpless and sure that my employment was coming to a swift and disastrous end.

And then I woke up.

The English teacher in me is tempted to analyze this dream, to speculate on the significance of me getting lost in my old school, and my quest for my missing Louisiana students, and my encounter with my deceased senior English teacher. And perhaps to observe my own anxiety about starting at a new school this year, which thus far I have (during waking hours) kept at arms-length.

The other part of me, which finds dreams in general to be annoying and rather stressful, wants to dismiss this and all other nightmares about teaching I have had this summer.

If you were hoping that this post was going to come to some revelatory and insightful conclusion about the purpose of dreams, I am afraid you will be disappointed. But here is what I do know, after thinking about my dream:

1) I really miss my students in Louisiana, and maybe I will be feeling a bit lost without them at my new school.

2) I miss Mr. Tallon and my other old teachers, and I wish I could ask for their advice. I wish I could remember what exactly they did every day that helped me learn so much.

3) I wonder why dreams had such significance in the Bible, in both the Old and New testaments. I am thinking particularly of the angel visiting St. Joseph in his dreams, encouraging him to take Mary as his wife, and later urging him to take his family away to Egypt. I mean, how do you know when you should pay attention to your dreams, and when you shouldn’t? How did St. Joseph know?

4) All of my nightmares about teaching have been about losing control of the situation – and yet this is what teaching is! Through painfully embarrassing experiences, my waking self has realized that one of the secrets of teaching is simply accepting the fact that there is so much out of your control. When you are in a room of twenty five adolescents, anything can happen. You just don’t know what happened between student A and her best friend this morning, or student B and his parents, or student C and his lack of sleep. And that’s okay. Somehow, you need to give them the sense that you are in control, but at the same time you should resist being under such illusions yourself. God is in control, and that has to be enough.

What do you think about dreams?

Richard Wilbur writes a lot about dreams in his poetry. Here is one of his very best poems from his newest collection, Anterooms, which I believe he wrote about his recently deceased wife.

“The House” by Richard Wilbur

Sometimes, on waking, she would close her eyes

For a last look at that white house she knew

In sleep alone, and held no title to,

And had not entered yet, for all her sighs.

What did she tell me of that house of hers?

White gatepost; terrace; fanlight of the door;

A widow’s walk above the bouldered shore;

Salt winds that ruffle the surrounding firs.

Is she now there, wherever there may be?

Only a foolish man would hope to find

That haven fashioned by her dreaming mind.

Night after night, my love, I put to sea.