Hard Work

I'm attempting to write everyday in March.Today is 4/31.

From my parents I learned the value of hard work. They lead by example, showing me a work ethic that is unparalleled to anyone else I've known in my lifetime. Both my husband and I have attempted to teach this to our boys. While, like most kids, they frustrate me on a daily basis, I do see them following in our footsteps and that gives me hope. And while there are many examples of their effort, they are both good students and have drive to achieve their goals, this weekend saw clear examples of how they can set their mind to a goal and work to achieve it.

Liam is our youngest. He has had to follow in his brother's footsteps, which is difficult. Luke has had a lot of success in sports. Liam has had to work for it. For the past three years, Liam has not made the basketball teams he tried out for. In fifth and sixth grade, that was a travel team. This year it was the school's team. While he has a good shot, he is not aggressive. He also needed to improve his speed. This year he came home after finding out he didn't make the middle school team and I knew he would be crushed. I was surprised when he walked in, tears being held back, and requested immediately to do an acceleration camp this winter along with the Y's basketball team. After failing to meet his goal three years in a row, I had kind-of expected him to be ready to move on. He has taught me more than anyone else about determination and not giving up simply because something is hard. I have a feeling that this will take him far in life as a result.

Luke has a drive that I cannot put words to describe. While he's always worked hard in sports, it was in middle school that we saw a switch. He began to make goals at the end of every season and actually achieved them. In seventh grade he began running and found a success and two sports - Track and Cross Country - where he loved the team dynamic. He's gone to state numerous times, found success there. Even so, I'll forget just how good he is. This year he came home and said he wanted to run varsity as a freshman. I had my doubts, but he did it. On track he told me he wanted to run a sub five minute mile. Considering my mile is closer to 15 minutes, I just raised my eyebrows at him. Yesterday he ran it and his time was 4:41. I've learned not to doubt him. Now his goal is below 4:30 by the end of the season, below 4:00 by the end of high school. I firmly believe he can do anything he sets his mind to, so I bet those goals will be met.

They say your kids are always watching, learning from their parents and the adults around them. I believe that is true, but the reverse is as well. Every day my boys teach me something and so do my students. Every. Single. Day. I constantly say that children are the best of us, and I believe that deep into my bones. So while my parents taught me something about work ethic, and that has permeated down to our sons, my boys have taught me something about perseverance and determination too. Through them I continue to grow and learn.

Words

I'm attempting to write everyday in March.Today is 3/31.

Words. I tend to surround myself with them. In my classroom they can be found in quotes that hang all around as reminders to me. There's a quote from Penny Kittle...

I believe you've got to do what's right, every single day of your life, even if the rest of the crowd isn't. Teaching is about honor and goodness and mercy. It really is. And no one will be watching you most of the time. You either live up to the calling of this profession or you don't, and most likely no one will ever know but you.

There's a quote I wrote down after reading a teacher named Paul's blog one day...

Inside them are birds
Our classroom can be a cage
Or a field, a sky.

So many words, we are surrounded by them.

This morning as I made coffee to fortify Chris and myself as we drive three hours each way to watch Luke run, I glanced around our kitchen. Words. This is my favorite room in our house and I've surrounded myself with words. Even our bedroom, second favorite room, has quotes. Heck, the t-shirt I'm wearing today has one on it. How about you? Is there a quote you live by? Words you surround yourself with? 

Words around our house...

Finding Joy

I'm attempting to write everyday in March. Today is 2/31.

Lately, I've been in a bit of a funk. Sometimes it seems that the negativity of the world is wearing me down. When that happens, I look for the joy. In the past few weeks I've been jotting down moments where my students exemplified everything I love about middle school students. I'm sharing those snippets of middle school awesomeness and just general happy memories here maybe to brighten your day as they did mine. Sometimes what we hear reported is the worst of human nature. I'm fortunate to see the best of it on a daily basis.

During the ALA Youth Media Awards announcements...

• Lauren standing and cheering when The Hate You Give won its first award.
• Alyssa asking me how the books would get their stickers on them.
• Kassidy lamenting when Long Way Down won its first award, "Will my name ever get to the top of the waiting list? I want to read that." (Side note, she is now doing just that.)
• Huge applause during the Printz for Long Way Down (along with a cry of, "It didn't win?"), The Hate You Give, and Vincent & Theo (with a cry of "YES!")
• When I explain to Taylor, a trombone player, that Trombone Shorty is based on a real person she grins and says, "Yep, I know all about him."

Book Love

• Tera dances at her table telling a classmate about Red Queen and how much she loves it.
• My fourth hour gasps as I shared the below message that Lynda Mullay Hunt posted on Facebook.

• The crowd that gathered around my window when I posted the March Book Madness brackets with shouts of, "Hey Mrs. S - are we voting in this like we did in 5th grade?" And the cheers of "YES" when I say we will be.

By Tuesday of this week, even though I had been on a mission to find my joy, I was a bit discouraged. I believe that I am an optimist at heart. I look for the good in others. I try really hard to be a good person, though I know I often come up short. Tuesday was my birthday. I began the day in a bit of a funk. I felt sad that I couldn't depend on a few people I had thought I could. That I had apparently offended some folks and they chose to talk to others about it instead of just asking me. I worried about a world where the truth doesn't always win the day. And then, I rallied. I received birthday greetings from friends old and new. My husband sent me flowers. My students sang to me. And I received messages from students - current and former - like this one:

I had this student five years ago. She completely made my day. Then I headed over to Facebook and read this article (HERE). Tears of laughter streaming down my face. 

I went to bed on Tuesday rejuvenated. I can't please everyone. I can't even make everyone in my town, or the country, see other perspectives. I can't control what others say, how they act. But I can control myself. I can continue to live in a way that my actions match my words. That I treat others the way that I would want to be treated. And my student reminded me that the kids are watching. In that simple message, that took her only seconds to send, she restored my faith in humanity and I found my joy once again.

Wishing you all a joy filled weekend. Happy Friday! 

Knowing When to Say No

It's March 1st and one of my favorite writing times of the year - the Slice of Life Challenge run over at the Two Writing Teachers blog. Last year I rejoined the challenge after taking a year or two off. This year, March 1st completely snuck up on me. It wasn't until a friend asked if I was joining in again this year that it dawned on me that the time was drawing near. I was hesitant.

See, I love the Slice of Life challenge. I love the push to write every day for thirty-one days. I love the accountability in the group. I love the comments from other slicers. I love reading their slices, being inspired, learning about people I don't know. It is amazing.

And yet, I'm not joining in this year. I simply can't. The thought of writing daily is exhilirating. However, I know I do not have the time in me right now to give myself to the community in the way I should. I cannot be certain that I can read other slicers' blogs, commenting on at least three a day, and that's not ok. I don't want to ask more from a group than I have to give, so I've decided not to join. 

What I am going to do is blog myself. I'm challenging myself to write everyday in March on my own. Looking at my blog, I've written five times since January 2nd. Now that's for a variety of reasons. I am truly trying to live my word of 2018, present, and I have been. But a great deal of that has to do with being hit with Influenza A on January 31st. Even with the gift of Tamiflu, that knocked me for a loop. 

Then, the cough began. My students would count how many cough drops it took me to get through one class. (I have a bad habit of crunching them up once the cough has let up.) Kids brought me some as gifts. One class began researching the most effective cough drops, even sending me links when they were at home. Today is day thirty of my flu and cough, and while it has improved (the flu part anyway), I still have this darn cough.

So, blogging took a backseat in February, even more than the sporadic at best blogging that happened before. But ideas have been percolating. I've felt the writing itch again several times over the past few weeks, and that has been dormant for some time. It is precisely that itch that made me decide I was tackling this blog for the month of March, but I was doing it for me.

So to my fellow Slicers, WOO HOO. You've totally got this. I'm cheering you on, but know that I need to blaze my own path this year. March is yawning ahead of me and feels full of possibility, and hopefully one of those possibilities is a day free from coughs and cough drops. That is sounding good to me. 

Write on! 

Privilege and Raising Our Voices

Monday my students and I will enjoy a day off from school. While they do celebrate their time without me, I took the time to remind them today why we were off. To them Martin Luther King Jr. is akin to a president from the past, someone that was famous for doing something important. If pressed they can murmur phrases like Civil Rights Movement or that 'I Have a Dream' speech. They haven't given much thought beyond that.

This quarter my class has a nonfiction genre requirement. While my seventh graders read multiple books a quarter, there is one book required in a certain genre each marking period. This allows them to explore genres they might be unfamiliar with, but still allow for choice reading the majority of the time. For the first two weeks in the quarter I book talk books from that genre daily. Today I shared these two books with the holiday approaching on Monday in mind:

I've lost track of how many times I've recommended the March graphic novel series to people since I first read it. It should be required reading. I've book talked it before to my students, but shared it again today. 

I hadn't book talked Voice of Freedom: Fannie Lou Hamer before, but knew this picture book biography in poetry format would be appealing to many of my students. I shared with my fabulous kids that one of the poems stopped me in my tracks. I know history, it was my major in college. I love learning about our past. I truly believe that a knowledge of where we went wrong can help us to improve the future. Yet when I reached the poem Motherhood, I slammed the book shut. It seems that while Hamer was having a small tumor removed (in 1961), a doctor went ahead and performed a hysterectomy without her knowledge or consent. Mississippi law at the time allowed poor women to be sterilized without their knowledge. In reading this, my breath disappeared, my heart ached, and my mind spun. How was this was only thirteen years before I was born? Only fifty-six years ago? And we wonder why people are angry.

This afternoon while home for lunch I read, and shared, the following article on Facebook. (HERE) Immediately I had some friends who I love ask me why I had to keep reading these things that upset me so. They reminded me to ignore the news. That I don't need to pay attention to our government to the degree that I do, that I can just focus on all of the positive in my life. I thanked them for their concern as tears welled in my eyes.

Friends, they said that from a point of privilege. To be specific, white privilege.

I could ignore the news. My social media feeds could be filled with photos of my boys, my dogs, my husband, books, Starbucks, and sunsets. And it is, at times. 

But I am angry. I cannot be silent. I don't speak up all the time because, to be honest, it is exhausting. And I know that is me using a privilege that I have no right to use. Others don't have a choice, they can't remain silent. These actions are impacting them. Every. Single. Day. So I try. I truly do. I try each and every day to be kind. To be compassionate. To show my love for everyone I meet. 

And I raise my voice. When the President of my country uses the word 'shithole' to describe the countries that some of my students used to call home, I speak up. That is not ok. 

Politics will always be about debates. One side will never agree with the other and that's ok. But there should be a level of decency. When we fall below that level, it is my belief that both parties should rise up, should speak up, should shut that down. In my dreams we do. Lin-Manuel Miranda said it in one of my favorite songs from Hamilton, History Has Its Eyes On You. As a teacher, I'm reminded every single day that not only does history have its eye on us, but our children do too. And while I don't share my political leanings, or beliefs, in the classroom; my students know what kind of person I am. They know I would never allow name calling to happen in front of me. They know that I would never allow racist remarks to fly by unchecked. I won't for them, and I won't on social media. 

Remaining silent, ignoring the hate, is a form of privilege. I have friends that don't have that privilege available to them. I have students that don't either. And these horrible remarks in the news are directed at them. For them, for these kids I love, I will raise my voice. I can't do anything else. 

Shielding Our Students from Darkness

This past November at NCTE I stood in the exhibit hall with tears rolling down my face while standing at a publisher's booth. I had heard about Matt de la Peña's new book that Loren Long illustrated, but I hadn't seen it yet. Reading Love in that booth, that exhibit hall, was one of those moments that I won't soon forget. The noises of the exhibit hall melted away. I felt like I was in this quiet space, the words whispered in my ears, the illustrations all I could see. I knew it was a book to share, a book to find yourself in, a book to comfort, a book to know that you are not alone.

Only a few hours later I spoke to a friend who said that a major player in the world of children's books had decided against carrying Love because of an illustration in the book. Matt describes the illustration in his beautifully written article which appeared in Time yesterday:

"In the scene, a despondent young boy hides beneath a piano with his dog, while his parents argue across the living room. There is an empty Old Fashioned glass resting on top of the piano." (Click HERE to read the full article.)

This notion of protecting children from darkness isn't new. Kate Messner wrote about it in regard to her book The Seventh Wish last year on her blog (HERE) when she was uninvited to a school visit. I'm currently reading S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders with my seventh graders. In an interview I listened to with Hinton she talks about how people took issue with The Outsiders for being dark, violent, but that was what she was seeing in her own school. Was she supposed to change her own truth to make others comfortable? 

I've been in teaching awhile. I know there are times to shield our kids. I also know there are times to be there, with them, discussing the hard stuff. I remember September 11, 2001 like it happened yesterday. I absolutely shielded my students, my beautiful nine and ten year old kids, from the horror of that day while it was happening. But on the 12th? We talked about it. Some of my colleagues across the country didn't have that luxury. For some, the events unfolded outside of their windows. What I have learned is that kids are resilient, often more so than adults. 

As we began The Outsiders this week we looked at the background of Oklahoma in the 1960s. Looking at the economy of Oklahoma, students noticed that the oil they had profited from began drying up during that time. We talked about how the loss of jobs in the oil fields and how it would create problems for families. When one student suggested that a family could just move to find another job, another student pointed out that they were saying that from a point of privilege, that moving requires money that often times, families don't have. Another student pointed that the loss of jobs in the oil business reminded them of the loss of jobs in regard to factories, to coal we see today. My seventh graders and I discussed the problems with automation, but also the advantages. We looked at why companies decided to leave our country and build factories elsewhere. One student pointed out that they now understood why I kept saying education was important - it often gave more opportunities for you in terms of career. 

As we dove into The Outsiders, reading both together and on our own, we talked about the different characters. How Darry had to step up and become an adult, putting his own dreams aside for the sake of his siblings. We looked at Dally's life, what leads someone to make the choices he made. Yesterday our hearts broke a bit when we learned what Johnny went through with the Socs, what his home life is like. One student spoke up quietly that this book made him rethink what life is like for some kids, what judgements we make about others without realizing it. Another student quoted Pony when he said, "Just don't forget that some of us watch the sunset too." Kids nodded as I looked at their serious faces.

Life is hard, harder for some than others. My favorite part of teaching Language Arts is that we get to examine our own lives while learning about the lives of others - fictional and not. Reading makes us more empathetic people, if we let it. After twenty-one years of teaching I am still convinced that the world would be different if we all read, if we all soaked up stories that are not our own. Just as important is that reading allows us to see our own stories inside of books too. Some of our stories are "dark". I wish I could change that, but I can't. 

What I believe is this... we don't need to shield our children from the darkness, but instead we need to walk into it with them, hand and hand, and ask them what they notice. Through that we can all grow and maybe find just a bit more love to share. One good way to do just that? Check out Matt and Loren's new book, the trailer is below.

 

Powerful Quick Writes

I started using quick writes in Language Arts class years ago thanks to Linda Rief. I purchased this book and the ideas started flowing. As I grew comfortable with the concept, anything became an opportunity for a quick write: images, videos, songs, poems, picture books, or bits of text. This week I had my students do a quick write off of an image from my camera roll:

Then my advisory class did a quick write for the New Year after watching two videos from Hank Green:

This gave my middle school group the chance to talk about what Hank meant when he said, "You make you..." or the notion that they were always changing, they didn't have to be who they were right now. Important and deep conversations.

Looking at Facebook this morning I saw this video shared by Kristen Ashley. I haven't seen The Greatest Showman yet, but this moves it to something I really need to do. Wow. What a powerful video. I plan on printing off the lyrics for the song (which I'm pasting at the end of this post) and handing them out to my students to paste in their writing notebooks. Then we will watch this video, I will try not to cry, and we'll fill out notebooks with our own words or sketches in reaction to this beauty. I can't wait to talk about it with them. 

[Verse 1]
I am not a stranger to the dark
Hide away, they say
'Cause we don't want your broken parts
I've learned to be ashamed of all my scars
Run away, they say
No one'll love you as you are

[Pre-Chorus]
But I won't let them break me down to dust
I know that there's a place for us
For we are glorious

[Chorus]
When the sharpest words wanna cut me down
I'm gonna send a flood, gonna drown them out
I am brave, I am bruised
I am who I'm meant to be, this is me
Look out 'cause here I come
And I'm marching on to the beat I drum
I'm not scared to be seen
I make no apologies, this is me

[Post-Chorus]
Oh-oh-oh-oh
Oh-oh-oh-oh
Oh-oh-oh-oh
Oh-oh-oh-oh
Oh-oh-oh, oh-oh-oh, oh-oh-oh, oh, oh

[Verse 2]
Another round of bullets hits my skin
Well, fire away 'cause today, I won't let the shame sink in
We are bursting through the barricades
And reaching for the sun (we are warriors)
Yeah, that's what we've become

[Pre-Chorus]
Won't let them break me down to dust
I know that there's a place for us
For we are glorious

[Chorus]
When the sharpest words wanna cut me down
Gonna send a flood, gonna drown them out
I am brave, I am bruised
I am who I'm meant to be, this is me
Look out 'cause here I come
And I'm marching on to the beat I drum
I'm not scared to be seen
I make no apologies, this is me

[Post-Chorus]
Oh-oh-oh-oh
Oh-oh-oh-oh
Oh-oh-oh-oh
Oh-oh-oh-oh
Oh-oh-oh, oh-oh-oh, oh-oh-oh, oh, oh
This is me

[Bridge]
And I know that I deserve your love
There's nothing I'm not worthy of
When the sharpest words wanna cut me down
I'm gonna send a flood, gonna drown them out
This is brave, this is bruised
This is who I'm meant to be, this is me

[Chorus]
Look out 'cause here I come (look out 'cause here I come)
And I'm marching on to the beat I drum (marching on, marching, marching on)
I'm not scared to be seen
I make no apologies, this is me

[Outro]
(Oh-oh-oh-oh, oh-oh-oh-oh, oh-oh-oh-oh)
I'm gonna send a flood
Gonna drown them out
(Oh-oh-oh, oh-oh-oh, oh-oh-oh, oh, oh, this is me)