All Hallow's Eve

On my thirty-second Halloween, I thought a couple of weeks ago after reading this, I’ll finally have an appropriate response.

Growing up, many of the families in my conservative Evangelical circle did not celebrate Halloween at all.  They had “harvest parties” that, ironically, were probably more firmly rooted in paganism than the idea of a night when the demons gain a measure of independence from the power of the saints’ prayers.

Others, like mine, allowed trick-or-treating but shunned costumes that seemed to glorify death — no bloody-fanged vampires; hippies, cowboys, or even dice.  (This was my sister’s brainstorm: her head, with a black stocking cap, was the single dot.  As costumes go, it was pretty straightforward.)

Neither response seems exactly right, though.  How can you be a light to the world without marginalizing the traditions of our society (which, on the surface, have merit — on what other night will you spontaneously interact with so many neighborhood children?)

I like Steve’s idea because it allows people to participate in a lovely tradition without too much explanation or judgment.  I meant to borrow some supplies from the church yesterday, but amid the post-Liturgy chaos it slipped my mind.  So this afternoon I was a little grumpy until I remembered the jar of candles I keep in the icon corner, leftovers from special services like Pascha and memorials.  I liked the idea of these unknown children picking up where my prayers left off; what better way to connect with the people of my community?

I rustled around in the basement for a candle box, but after a little brainstorming, decided there really was no acceptable substitute for sand. (Topsoil? Pea gravel? Rock salt? All fall short for different reasons.)  So I headed over to Lowe’s to buy some — and lo and behold, found a half-empty bag that I could actually carry out.

It was a nice night, so I opened the windows and turned on The Rudder, a streaming radio station run by some friends in California.  It’s a wonderful variety of meditative and joyful Orthodox hymns from all different traditions, and I found that I enjoyed listening to it even in place of the silence I so treasure after a hectic day at school.  It was a little too cold to sit outside, so I settled for just inside the door, with my book and a slightly-alarmed cat (music and open windows are not standard operating procedure, and she knows this.)

Just after nightfall, they started to knock.  Following Steve’s lead, I offered each one a piece of candy and then asked, “Would you like to light a candle?”  Out of dozens of children, I only had one refusal all night — a shy adolescent who was alone.  The others were gleeful and full of questions.

“What is it?” some asked. “It’s like a prayer,” I responded, as simply as I could.  They understand prayer, I know.  In this mostly blue-collar neighborhood, black families are AME or Baptist; Latino means Catholic. The vast majority attend church; it’s the white families who don’t, and very few of those have children of trick-or-treating age.

Mostly, they were probably amazed that an adult was asking them to light something on fire.  Well, I’ll take what I can get.  Bigfoot removed her furry claws to grasp a beeswax taper, and Mario singed one of his white-gloved fingers.  A tiny bumblebee accepted my guiding hand over hers, and her mother was grateful: “That’s really nice,” she said.  “What a good idea.  That’s really something different.”  

They all said that, the adults: from the street, the steps, or — as is disturbingly more common — the car, which I suppose must be more efficient than searching for the next friendly house on foot.  “That’s different.”  That’s why it worked so well.

“Happy Halloween,” I said, over and over again, and behind me, a Russian deacon intoned his assent: “A-MIIIIIINNNNN!”

The One Who Kept Me Going

Still cursing myself for stopping my New York Times subscription a month before the special Food & Drink and Education issues arrived (Full price? Me?!), I am also still working my way through the treasure trove of articles within — cobbled together as best I can from Twitter links and the Times Mobile app.

This piece, one of a growing sort of tapas-style journalism, was incredibly moving: in it, fifteen New Yorkers share brief meditations on their most influential teacher.  Here’s Wes Anderson, of Rushmore and Darjeeling fame:

He was nothing like our other teachers. For one thing, he was a man. The only man in the school who did not teach P.E. Also, he had a computer. I think he built it himself. His handwriting was neat but somehow exotic. He spoke briskly and seriously, and he pointed his finger at us a lot. It was immediately apparent that the range of his knowledge went far beyond anything we were ever going to touch on in class. He invented games for us. In the fall, we were each assigned countries that we represented in an international trade market. Wars were declared. Mineral deposits were discovered. Fortunes were made and lost. In the spring, he put up a poster on which he had pasted a hundred faces cut out of newspapers and magazines. All semester we searched for clues and slowly learned who they were, but he had to finally give us Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. (This was in pre-algebra, by the way.)

The Visionary Professor may be a cliche, but it’s still an inspiring one.  I wish I were Mr. Burris — or, failing that, that he would come and teach me.

Going to Extremes

Next time you’re looking to kill half an hour, read this fascinating trilogy of pieces about an American family who placed their three children in a Russian-language school in Moscow.  They first floundered, but finally found their footing and flourished.  (Accidental alliteration?  Never.)

My thoughts about their experience were very strong, but also very conflicted:

1. Good for them!  Not enough kids get to have an experience like that.
2. Would the kids have wanted that experience, though, if they had asked them?
3. Of course not.  Left to their own devices, most kids won’t even brush their teeth.
4. Is education supposed to be stressful to the point at which kids don’t have enough energy to have fun on the weekends — only to recover?
5. That kind of attitude has landed our country at the bottom of the test-score pile.
6. Who cares about test scores?  Are they really learning?
7. They’re learning a foreign language, and fluently!  You know you would have loved to do that as a kid.
8. Yes, but I would have wanted it to be my decision, and I would have wanted it to be in a less insular and pampered environment.  For $10,000 in yearly tuition, they should be flying to the moon by now.
9. Your own school costs more than that.  So does the school where you teach.
10. My school’s not in Moscow.
11. Moscow has the fourth-highest cost of living in the world.  Baltimore isn’t even ranked.
12. Are you actually doing Internet research to support your argument against yourself?
13.  … 

It disintegrated further from there, but I’m not settled, even if the odds seem to have won the day.  Anyway, it’s a pretty interesting story.

The Longest Day

It’s the longest day of the year, I remember suddenly, and boy, does it feel like it.

I am driving home from class; Stevie Nicks is wailing away on the stereo.  I am bawling, though I am not quite sure why.

For some aggravatingly unknown reason, I work much better under pressure than without it.  Thus the lazy shopping trip this morning, the e-mail exchange with my faraway sister, the heartwarming chat with the school principal when I dropped by with an early dinner for the staff… and then the frenzied consumption of 67 pages of textbook reading in hurried snatches between lessons for the remainder of the afternoon.  Sigh.

I’d read the chapter on ADHD (the shortest of the three, and it took me the longest – just reading about distractibility is enough to distract me!) and so launched into the one about emotional and behavioral disorders.  These are some of the most challenging students to teach, and they have some of the lowest rates of success in school, work and life.  They tend to run into trouble with law enforcement, teen pregnancy and substance abuse.  Absorb.  Absorb.  Highlight. Memorize.  Prepare for the quiz.

It wasn’t too hard, and afterward the instructor presented a [well-organized, thorough and informative] PowerPoint lecture about the chapter we’d just read. Then she started telling stories.  Like:

• A child tattles on his friend: “So-and-so just pimp-slapped me!” The teacher responds: “That’s not appropriate; we don’t say ‘pimp’ at school.” Child is puzzled. “Pimp’s not a bad man; pimp’s a rich man!”
• Teacher gives an assignment: write a letter to your parents. In it, try to persuade them to do something: anything you want. The child asks his family to please clean the house.
• Child is showing signs of emotional disturbance; in a conference, teacher finds out parents have been taking child to a strip bar.
• Staff remove a child who is throwing a tantrum from the classroom and place him in the “quiet room,” where he can calm down without hurting himself. He proceeds to run around the room yelling “gangbang!” and then demonstrate precisely what he means by that term.
• When physically restrained by her teacher, a child does what she has learned to do to escape such situations: urinate on both of them.

Somehow, I remained clinically detached from these harrowing stories. I asked questions, took notes, commented when appropriate.

I didn’t even feel sad, really, until my friend Rebecca exploded with: “Can’t we just start a boarding school somewhere and take these children there and give them what their parents can’t?  Feed them, clothe them, discipline them, show them affection, help them succeed?  They can have their kids back on the weekends.  I think it’s important for them to be with their parents.  But… someone has to do something!”

“Do it.  I’ll work for you,” I said.  I meant it more than anything I’d said in at least a month.

And then, after watching this extremely disturbing promo for a documentary on eating disorders (an internalized form of emotional disability,) another friend mused: “It seems so sad, so extreme, and yet we are so much closer to those girls than we realize.  Life is hard, and people have to deal with it somehow; we all have different coping mechanisms.  Mine might not be as unhealthy as starving myself to death, but just a little change in the way my brain was wired, and –” she couldn’t finish her sentence.

We finish our wrap-up activity, walk to the parking lot, smelling the rain and chattering about the next day.  I start the car, turn on the radio for some reason. Then Stevie.  Then the tears.  I think, over and over: it’s not fair.

None of it is fair.  Nor has it ever been.

A Dose of Reality

So I'm sloooowly working my way through twenty-five ten-page research papers, alternately commenting, disagreeing, cheering and shaking my head.  The proliferation of misplaced commas and plagiarized passages is depressing.  The occasional smooth transition or original idea is encouraging.  Mostly, I'm just hoping I'll finish soon.

This article*, then, helped remind me of how lucky I am to be teaching these students, and how lucky we all are to have such a stable existence:

Twenty percent of Fern Creek’s students are homeless, and school is the best part of the day for many of them. All eight members of the Collins family — Brianna is the oldest of six children, including three who are too young for school — live in a 13-foot-by-15-foot windowless room and share three bunk beds. It is a great relief getting out in the morning and off to school.

“They love Fern Creek,” said their father, who lost his job hanging drywall after the economy collapsed. “I can’t say nothing bad about Fern Creek.”

The children’s mother, Felica Blue, who lost her job working the 11 p.m.-to-4 a.m. shift cleaning the arena after the Orlando Magic’s basketball games, said: “They love Fern Creek. Brianna’s always talking about kids from her class.”

Ms. Schreffler is struck by how happy Sydney is despite her circumstances. “She’s so grateful. It seems like everything is, ‘Thank you, Ms. Schreffler,’ ” she said.

So sad.  So inspiring.  And now, back to work.

*By the way, I've finally found a use for Twitter: a loophole toward unlimited access to the New York Times! Just search for what you want (I tried "NYT education") and read away.  My theoretical support for their new capitalist venture does not translate into financial support -- remember, I'm Armenian -- so I was glad to find a free source with which to indulge my news habit.