Aiming for 10% Happier

The start of the school year is an energizing, renewing time of year.  Few moments are as full of promise as standing at the door greeting students on the first day; all that potential energy, all the cool kiddos to get to know, all the highs and lows of our time together still ahead of us.

To get to the excitement of the first school day, I have to move through the fog created by three days of professional development. At the close of the third day of professional development, I left the building nearly in tears, my mind swirling feverishly. How in the world was I going to teach English (which brings with it these days its own rearrangement of thinking and practice), AND be a career counselor, reading specialist, special educator, ELL teacher, and a mindfulness resource for my students?  How could I possibly stack up against my colleagues who know their content brilliantly, have the right strategies always at the ready, who practice the latest research, and who know their students on the first day?

Enter the book 10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing my Edge, and Found Self-Help that Actually Works -- a True Story by Dan Harris, a book recommended to me by my friend and extraordinary teacher, Ashlee Kuhry-Larsen.

Dan Harris, the author and narrator of the audiobook, is an ABC news correspondent and weekend anchor on Good Morning America.  Harris had a spectacular public panic attack on air in 2004, an event which sparked a journey of self-discovery.  As he searched for something to alleviate the anxiety, he tried illegal drugs, talk therapy, and eventually, meditation.  The meditation is what worked.

Harris is at times hilarious as he narrates his journey to become more meditative and mindful.  At one point he finds himself at a ten day meditation retreat, and he is struggling. He recites for the audience the thoughts in his head as he is supposed to be meditating, including thoughts about the pain in his feet, the noise of the birds, and, most randomly, the origin of the sneeze guard at buffet lines.  The honesty of his challenges is refreshing and makes the lessons of book even more applicable.

Throughout the book, Harris acknowledges that he continues to learn what it means to be mindful. He seeks and shares the words of experts -- pop culture guru Deepak Chopra, guided meditation expert Joseph Goldstein, and ancient Buddhist writings -- in his quest to better understand his own mind and heart. He recognizes and embraces the dichotomy of living serenely and with acceptance and yet with ambition and drive.

This book sparked in me in a desire to explore mindfulness more fully.  As a practice, it seems to have potential to quell the fears that caused me such anxiety at the end of the professional development, fears that I'm sure will reassert themselves regularly throughout the year.  I'm making it a goal this year to learn more about and attempt to practice mindfulness and meditation.

To start working on my goal, I picked up another book as a follow up, one that, based on the title, I assume will address mindfulness with a delightful amount of irreverence.  I've only just begun The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson and already I am on board with his philosophy which seems to be:  figure out what's important and spend your time and energy on that.  That is exactly what I intend to do as the school year starts.

What I'm going to focus on -- give a f*ck about, if you will -- is the relationships I will build with my students starting on day one.  It is those relationships that will allow us to work together to learn and grow, to celebrate and to struggle, and to maintain the energy generated on day one throughout the year.

Learning How To Teach, Year 25

I've spent the last week reveling in the magic of reading and writing. Not the teaching part, but the crafts themselves. 

Kelly Gallagher and Penny Kittle speak of the "volume problem" in high school English. Kids, they say, aren't reading and writing enough to build stamina with challenging texts and to write focused, supported pieces. As I look at my list of books read this summer (fourteen!), as well as the hours I've labored over blog posts, I realize I've spent a lot of previous summers, as well as school months, not actively engaged in the practices where I'm the so-called 'expert'. We speak a lot about motivating and engaging kids. Modeling my love of reading by enthusing over To Kill A Mockingbird year in and year out for twenty-five years probably isn't enough to sustain buy-in for my students over the long haul. Reading for pleasure as a literature teacher isn't a luxury; it's necessary if I'm going to pull from rich examples and book talk relevant texts every day. 

In selecting books for my classroom library, I turned to Goodreads, where my account's been pretty dormant for years. What a goldmine! Authentic readers effusing the 'academic discourse' of literature discussion, genuine models for talking and writing about books. It's also cool to peek into the windows of my friends' diverse reading lives. I've suggested Goodreads to my students many times as a way to find books or 'next' books, but jumping into the sandbox myself has me stepping up my game and planning to incorporate it into my classes regularly this year. The suggested book lists will help students locate 'next books', and I can show kids that real people, all kinds of real people and not just English teachers, discuss and critique books every day. And--lo and behold!--no one is doing so via a five-paragraph essay.

Gallagher laments the focus on task-oriented vs. generative writing at the high school level. I am sooo guilty of forsaking the latter. I've let standards, test prep, MAP, ASPIRE, ACT, etc. dictate what I've allowed kids to create. How often when a student has raised a hand to ask, "When will we do creative writing?" has my mind filled with C-E-A paragraphs and A-C-T introductions, followed by a shrug, wince, and a lame remark about being creative with word choice and sentence structure? Too many times. What bunk. No more.

Writing is hard. I've generated more writing this summer than I have in decades. Keeping my "butt in the chair," as Anne Lamott would say, lends validity to expecting my kids to do it. And more than giving me the credibility to ask them write, it means compassion and empathy will drive my feedback. (Did I really give Caleb a C on one of his first writing assignments four years ago because the rubric focused on sentence structure and conventions--even though his voice dominated the piece? Ay-yai-yai!!!) 

The summer of 2017 has transformed pretty much all aspects of my life. One of my chief areas of growth, prep and planning, started with a daily organizer where I'm mapping out and reviewing what I've got going on for the day/week/month etc. each morning. An amazing Target purchase, my daily planner includes a quote for each day. Today's is from Seneca: "As long is you live, keep learning how to live." As I enter my 11th year at South, my 19th in Waukesha, and my 25th as an educator, I'm rephrasing Seneca's words to fit my mindset for this year: "As long as you teach, keep learning how to teach."

Exploring Identity Through A Gay Lens

After reading Anne's compelling post on including books that address LGBTQ+ issues, I grabbed a few titles she noted from the Muk library this weekend. I've been reading up a lot this summer on ways to organize books for kids in the classroom library, so on my drive back home from the library, I weighed the pros and cons of designating a category as "LGBTQ+" versus by their primary focus, such as identity or social justice or family relationships, etc.

How fitting, then, that my first book in this sub-genre was Bill Konigsberg's Openly Straight. Rafe, our narrator, has been openly gay since coming out to his almost-too-accepting-to-be-believable parents in eighth grade. Wishing to escape the confines of being seen as 'gay' before anything else, Rafe moves from Colorado to an East Coast all-boys boarding school for his junior year of high school and intends to keep his gayness a secret so he can just fit in and be Rafe instead of Gay Rafe.

Rafe is a witty narrator, and I think my stronger Pre-AP readers will like him. Some of the nuance in language will go unnoticed by the average student, but that's true of many teen novels I've read of late. There's a little too much frank talk of sex for my comfort level, but nothing that surpasses scenes that have squicked me out in several other YA books I've read this summer.  Konigsberg includes a writing journal motif where Rafe's teacher comments on his entries, which I found utterly cringey because the teacher asks questions and critiques Rafe's word choice and style, which seems totally inappropriate for a "just write your thoughts and make something from nothing" journal. Were I not an English teacher, this would fly right over my head, I'm sure.

As Rafe justifies his reasoning for pretending to be straight, first to us the reader and later to his parents and his best friend back home, his conflict echoes my back-and-forth about where gender identity and sexual orientation books fit best in my library. Rafe wants to be recognized as himself first. Do we do kids a disservice by lumping all these books together? Do a few kids NOT select a book they want because of where it's been placed in the library? Definitely fodder for further discussion. No one way is best. Or permanent.

Rafe's attempt to shed the weight of one aspect of himself reflects a struggle so many of us face-- celebrating and taking pride in a critical piece of ourselves when it seems to overshadow the other facets of our identity. At several points in the text, I was reminded of other characters I've met through my summer reading, especially the black characters feeling both singled out and lumped together/stereotyped by their race as they come of age. I also thought of my Nick, who's "the kid in the wheelchair" first to most people outside our closest friends and family.

I'm excited to add to our libraries books that ensure every one of our kids finds characters, settings, and stories they identify with and relate to. Still not sure how I'll organize them all, but it will all sort out.