Welcome to Hey, Teach! It's a little corner at the intersection of pedagogy (mostly), teaching and learning (not the same things enough of the time), spirituality, poetry, art, powerlifting, activism, my dog, knitting and random memes that make me laugh (in other words, all the other ways I spend my time, and the things that fill me back up when my cup has decidedly decided to stop overflowing). It's admittedly a lot of intersections.
I happen to really like intersections. Four-way stops, out of all the possible ways to keep traffic flowing in a not-murder-y way, are my absolute favorite. They always have been. (Plus, I am very given to having lots of favorite random things. Punctuation marks. Onomatopoeic words. Shades of red. Sections of poems or novels, but not usually the whole novel/ poem/ etc. Moments in history. Epidemics. (PS: Black Plague FTW, everytime.) What can I say? I'm not an uncomplicated woman.)
Anyhow: four-way stops, and the reasons why I like them:
1. I think it looks like a courtly country dance, like in them there Jane Austen novels, when all the cars take their turn at just the right time.
2. You can go in any direction*.
And that's kind of my point: teaching is the most dynamic, living thing I know how to do. It is the four-way stop at the very, very, VERY weird pause between childhood and adulting all over the place, and it goes in every direction but the one you thought it would. It's a symphony, with moonstruck players and no sense of time and a rhythm section completely bent on its own way--until it isn't, and it's magical instead. (Sometimes it's so crazy magical that I feel like I'm standing at some weird Sinai moment, where an entirely new and breathtaking revelation is happening RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME, except that it's happening to a freshman who stepped out to pick the zit on his chin and now has a little bloody scab he's trying really hard to hide.) It's divinely frustrating. It requires the most patience, the most goodwill, the most humility I've ever had to muster on the regular in my whole life. I love it with a passion, and when I think about giving it up and finding something that might involve less grading and more adults, I end up meeting up with other groups of teachers, and then I think: these people are my MOTHERTRUCKING* TRIBE. Teaching, working, learning with kids: it's my gift of love back to the Universe.
It's SO FARTING COMPLICATED, is also my point. (One of them.) (By the way, my favorite punctuation mark is the parentheses, followed closely by the semicolon.) And because it's complex, because it involves real dynamics of power, authority, oppression and all the accompanying psychology those states engender--I think we forget that it's ALSO a form of art, or at least can have this transcendent invitation to make it so.
Or, sometimes, we keep it smaller than it wants to be, keep it focused on grading and content and standards till we choke out all the sparkle that comes in softly through the weird little cracks of a 9th grade class room.
Or, sometimes we only see the crazy-making administrators, the shirty schedules that have you in the classroom from 7:15-1:30 with a 15-minute break to pee and eat. the wildly unhelpful meetings, the new protocols that replaced last year's protocols that replaced the ones we had from five years ago that no one remembers why we stopped using in the first place. For every forced comment, for every random bit of iron-clad pedagogy that promises to perfect and protect every second of classroom time from now till the Messiah rings the end-of-school bell but irons out all the wrinkles and folds that make up the kids in YOUR room---
Teaching is as intersectional, as inspired, as bold and juicy and dark and real as we allow ourselves to be. It's the crack and the light; it's the breach and the man brave enough to stand in it; it's the arena and the gladiator ALL AT THE SAME TIME.
And I want to revel in it, talk about it, moan about it, maybe light a quiet light in a weird little corner of the Internet to maybe get you to fall back in love with it. Or if not, then tell me why you can't love it anymore, and we'll talk about it. Or something entirely different that I can't even imagine yet but might be better than what I'm thinking: this is a four-way stop of a blog, after all.
*=I know, not every direction. Down with your fascist literalism!*a
*a=No, I know, you're not really a fascist.
**=I'm trying really hard not to cuss, because I think my mom might be the only one to ever read this blog.
