I've made it!

Last year, at the end of my first student teaching, one of my precious kiddos made me a goodbye card that read: "You will be a great techer." I immediately took it home and hung it on my fridge, where it still hangs today as a daily reminder that I will one day make a difference for a child, if only to teach them the proper spelling of "teacher."

Today, I received a Christmas card from one of my current students. On the inside, it simply says: "You are a great teacher."

Such a simple change of tense, but it means the world to me. Especially since it's all spelled right.

Perspective

The kids have been working on a fun project today, and I've been doing a lot of thinking (partly to avoid end-of-term grading... ugh). One of my co-workers has been talking this week about a situation going on at her husband's school. He is a teacher at one of the worst of the KCMO schools, where the gang activity has begun to affect the safety of the teachers as well as the students. Gang members have been stealing teachers' coats so that they can use the car keys to steal their cars. A female teacher was cornered and sexually assaulted by a group of gang members until another teacher came along in the nick of time. In an effort to "take back" the school, some of the staff have actually chosen to arm themselves at work today, and after a shooting at the funeral of a former student, they fully expect retribution to occur at the school this afternoon.

I've been emailing with A. about this all day, getting his point of view and comparing to the situations at his school. He tells me stories every day about the wacky things that happen at KCK's alternative high school, and we generally have a good laugh about it. His students get suspended for maliciously throwing cookies at each other, smoking pot in his classroom's bathroom, and other relatively entertaining offenses, but I still worry if I think too much about the metal detectors he walks through each morning. Thankfully, his school chooses to remove potentially violent students before violence can occur - if they didn't, I would be a nervous wreck all day every day. But it wasn't too long ago that the KCMO problems were in KCK as well. Those students (and those teachers) are blessed to have an intelligent principal who cares.

Then there's me, teaching "JoCo brats" to write. I've been feeling stressed lately, ready for break, and the last couple mornings have been particularly difficult where getting out of bed and making myself drive for 40 minutes has been concerned... but as I write all of this, my innocent little kiddos are dancing around my room to the Numa Numa song, decorating my fake (deciduous) tree for Christmas, and "cleaning" the room after a long day of puppet making. Despite the times I have to tell them not to wrap crepe paper around their heads, and ask them thirty times to stop talking and read a book, and constantly remind them to keep their hands to themselves... I am extraordinarily blessed.

Each bad morning this week has been turned into a good day by kids gluing fake Santa beards to their faces and asking me what I want for Christmas, re-creating Amelia Earhart's plane out of Legos, making up goofy songs about llamas, and shamelessly rocking out to Queen. There are no guns here, my students wish me no harm, and they wouldn't know what to do with my car keys if they found them. They don't know what pot even smells like yet, and if they're throwing cookies at each other, they're laughing about it (even if I'm not). I wish I could keep them like this forever.

Idiot-savant poetry

It has been FOREVER since I've posted here. I won't be so immodest as to think anyone has been disappointed by that, but I offer my apologies anyhow. I think my New Year's resolution this year might be to update/write more. The spring should be a little easier on me as I've finally settled into a routine and without any grad school work, there will also be less on my plate. The plate will still look like the kind you get at a Chinese buffet, with a million different things piled together and flowing over the sides so that you get soy sauce on your shoes and rice down your sleeve, but I think the spring plate will have a little more sesame chicken and fewer of those powdered sugar fried things that look like a really good idea but just make you sick.

Anyway... I wrote an honest-to-goodness poem yesterday, but it's not done, and it's also not postable. I have my reasons. It might be available upon request, but the whole world doesn't need to see it. It felt really good, though, both to write again and to process/exorcise that demon, so you may see more relatively soon.

Enough cryptic crap; I came back here today because I've got another addition to the collection of awesome accidental poems that appear on the magnetic surfaces in my classroom. I have no idea who put this tiny gem together on the side of my desk or if they knew at all what it could mean, but it's kind of perfect (punctuation added for effect):

Our pedagogue
Stalwart, day to-do'ed

- Discovered December 6th, 2010

If this job kills me, THIS is what I want on my tombstone.