Changes

On Thursday, I broke a tooth during a Google Meet on what seemed like an otherwise harmless yellow jellybean. I rushed in to an empty dentist's office, where a hygienist had to unlock the door for me, then patched the open gap with temporary cement herself to last until my dentist could take me for an emergency appointment on Monday. When I woke up this morning, the temporary fix was gone. I probably swallowed it while grinding my teeth during the night. So today, I'm stuck with an uncomfortable broken tooth that my tongue hits anytime I attempt to speak or eat. I keep thinking about a writing prompt that my students responded to a week before our last day of school before self-quarantine for National Dentist's Day, and the horrors that so many of us associate with dental work. 

The dentists's office is just another area of life that has been impacted by COVID-19. I'm also four days away from having a new daughter, which will look very different now than it did when I had my son four years ago. I'm anxious and scared, but still excited to meet this tiny new person and enter another stage of my life.

It's hard to say goodbye to my students without really having the chance to say goodbye. The last time I met with my classes on March 13th, I had a good awareness of what was coming based on what I'd been reading and following in the news for the past two months, but that whole day still felt so surreal as it was actually happening. I remember walking back from the lunchroom with my tray and passing a student who said, "See you in May!" and laughing a little, because I still thought we'd probably be back after spring break if everything went as we hoped. I don't remember if I erased the whiteboard before I left the building that evening, but I do remember thinking this could be the last time I see them for a long time and then immediately quelling the thought. I miss my students. I miss my classroom. I miss our community. I miss watching those stupid cat videos with captions with my Warhawk Time. No matter what happens, I will still miss the next month and a half of school where so much fun happens. But I'm so grateful for the six and a half months that we got to spend together this year.

Calendar Time with Hank (Day 15)

We start each morning with the calendar I put up in my son Hank's bedroom when he cried about missing morning circle time at preschool. He repositions a Velcro-backed arrow onto weather squares according to his view of the sky when we pull the curtains back from the window. Why is it always cloudy, Mama? He pulls out the next square from a little orange pouch to place in the next slot, then takes his pointer and counts all of the days we've lived in March. I always know the month and date. Time does not ebb and flow at Christmas-break speed during quarantine for me. The hours go quickly and I am never bored. Somehow, I have less time than usual. Now that Hank's birthday is over, the countdown begins to the birth of his sister. On Sunday, there will be 11 days left. Appointments are canceled, rescheduled. All plans change but life continues, regardless.
Hank's understanding of the virus is limited to what a four-year-old can grasp, which is more than what I expect sometimes. When he plays, his dinosaur villain is Coronavirus, who lives at his daycare, the grocery store and now: the hospital.
But it's spring break so I try to make fun out of what we have now. His interest has deepened in the backyard bird feeder after it was visited by a fat pheasant for a few hours last Sunday, a sign of good luck, according to my parents. We watch for favorite birds at certain times of day: mourning doves, goldfinches, cardinals, and chickadees. I watch too much news. I read too much news. I make Paw Patrol Macaroni & Cheese three days in a row. On his fourth birthday, he misses out on the crown he'd wear at preschool, the treats he'd bring to class, and the games he'd play outside with friends. But we video chat with our family and friends as he blows out the candles on the cake that the two of us make out of a box and top with canned frosting. His dad assembles the big kid bike that we ordered for Hank's birthday present weeks before we confined ourselves to the house on the evening of March 13th. The pedals make it trickier than his old balance bike, but Hank doesn't give up, even though he's clearly frustrated. I watch from the sliver of our front porch, standing in the puddle of light that leaks outside from the entry window. He practices pedaling with his dad jogging next to him for balance, back and forth across the uneven asphalt until you can no longer see the sidewalk clearly in the dark. 

Why now?

I started my first online journal a few weeks before 9/11 as a freshman in college. Every few years, I revisit what I wrote then and remember the uncertainty of the months that followed, remember visiting the ATM with new friends from the dorm and withdrawing the meager savings I'd managed to set aside for that first year at Beloit. It was an overreaction then, but none of us knew it at the time as we walked together beneath that eerily empty, beautifully blue sky. Rumors were flying and everyone seemed to know someone who supposedly knew what was going on. In truth, the people who claimed to have inside knowledge or seemed confident about what was going on in the world were dealing with just as much uncertainty as the rest of us.


In some ways, it was reassuring to revisit my old journal today. It's hard to really know what's going on right now, and COVID-19 is definitely making a lot of us nervous. My hope is that our country takes self-quarantining seriously and manages to "flatten the curve" in order to give everyone a fighting chance when they experience the virus. There's a lot of uncertainty right now so I'm trying to focus on the things that I can control: figuring out how to make a Buzz Lightyear birthday cake for my soon-to-be-four-year-old son Hank from the ingredients in my pantry, training my cat Gerri to stay off my desk while I'm working, keeping in touch with my brother and soon-to-be-sister-in-law who are self-quarantining after returning from a cruise in late January. My newest niece Zara will be born in the next couple of hours, and although I'm disappointed that I'll have to make do with pictures and video chats since I won't be able to visit her for a while, I'm looking forward to when I’ll able to meet her for the first time. I know that Zara will grow up in the new normal that comes after today's uncertainty.


I'm glad that I can revisit my own thoughts, decisions, and fears from almost twenty years ago because it does give me some reassurance today that the world may change, and that's definitely scary, but life continues and situations stabilize. I will never regret keeping a journal of that time in my life and that time in this country. It helped me to deal with my anxiety then, and it helps me to cope today.

Can't See the Forest For the Trees

I've always noticed that the last maple in my front yard branches into opposite directions, that it has a perfect tree hole above its fork, the kind that squirrels love in real life, not only in children's stories.  One of the elements that drew me to this house four years ago was the front yard shade, the dense leaves that let in just enough sunlight to allow a downy film of grass that only needs mowing for the sake of weed control, and of course, the two parallel branches that arc in the perfect curve with the strength to support the swing we hung for the first time this summer.

Until a month ago, I didn't notice that this last remaining mature tree in our front yard was crumbling from its core. From the vantage of our neighbor's yard, it was clear that it this tree was close to collapsing over our office or her garage in the next heavy windstorm.

There were certainly signs of maturity, from its mossy lichen patches to its slowly shedding bark, but I didn't see the forest for the trees when I missed the pockets of decay in the branch over the swing, the split trunk that signaled a new danger over storybook charm. Last week, a tree service removed the limbs extending over the roof while my son and his cousins gaped out the living room window as they "crushed the tree," as my son enthusiastically recounted to me when I arrived home in the aftermath. For now, the rest of the tree isn't a pressing danger. We plan to let it stand until next summer on the distant hope that it will have some time to recover. In reality, we're just giving ourselves another year to face the inevitability of its loss. 

Steps Before Story

"THE LAND OF NOWHERE"
I'm in the land of dragons, / I'm in the land of books, / I'm in the land of games,/ But... / I'm in the land of NOWHERE  !

As a five-year old newly obsessed with an electric typewriter, I appeared to marveling at what happened when I "entered the land of nowhere" in the story above, which I'm interpreting as an adult to mean imagination and play. I remember the ideas I had when I was writing on that incredible machine "coming out of nowhere" like magic, and although my sense of story was clearly still developing, I remember thinking my ending was perfect:

"THE LITTLE WHITE HOUSE"
One [morning] on a hot hot day a little white house was made. Not only it was little but it was pretty. [Because] it had pink window [panes] and a blue roof. But the most [prettiest] of the little white house was the INSIDE. Inside the little white house was a girl her name was Sany. She lived with Her mom and dad.
AND...
[they] were...
worms.

I had a strange interest in worms at the time and found them especially fascinating because they mysteriously appeared on the sidewalk after a good rain, only to vanish as the concrete dried. Yes, worms lived in the ground, but what did a worm's house look like?

As a story, this doesn't quite fly, but it does show how I was starting to conceptualize the concept of surprise in the ending, and although my thought process didn't make it onto the page, it's seems clear to me as an adult, decades later.

Now, I have a two-year-old son who went through a language explosion over the summer. Lately, I've been thinking a lot about language usage and the steps that come before story. I always laugh when my son makes an observation about something that he thinks is really cool ("Crushing cans!") and then exclaims, "Whaaat!" until my sister observed that I often used the same exclamation in the same affectation when he was an infant. I like to think, as someone with a deep love and appreciation for words, that I'm conscious of my vocabulary, speech patterns, and meaning, but I was unaware that this was a phrase I'd included in my everyday interactions with my child until the obvious was pointed out to me. I'm learning to be intentional with my language. As he masters one word, I talk about the object in different ways and at different times, and sometimes I intentionally try to introduce synonyms for mastered words so he can learn new ways of thinking about the idea. When he encounters a new words in a book, I try to point it out in everyday life when we encounter it.

I give credit to the videos on his curated playlist for some of the vocabulary and concepts that he has mastered.  We recently read The Digger and the Flower by Joseph Kuefler, which I love for its rich verbs and cute story line involving large machinery, one of Hanks' many interests. We've read several books that have included heavy machinery or involved personified construction equipment, however, my knowledge and interest in the topic leaves something to be desired. 

Enter Blippi.

It's easy to dismiss Blippi as a YouTube clown, but his videos on excavators, skid steers, and fork lifts are fascinating to my son. As a parent, I appreciate that he doesn't dumb down the language of a topic just because a word might have multiple syllables. 

Blippi has also given my son a strategy for managing his anger as he learns to share with other children. Although I model appropriate behavior over and over, at this point, his frustration just always seemed to overtake everything and result in an inevitable tantrum.This weekend, we noticed that he was walking away from a fight over a toy with his cousin, and engaging in what appeared to be breathing exercises on his own. When I asked him what was going on, he expressed that he was mad.

In a video about emotions, Blippi trips and falls, then expresses that he is mad that he fell and hurt his knee. He gives advice to his viewers that feeling mad is when you get that feeling like smoke is coming out of your ears, and that when you get mad, you need to take deep breaths. Then Blippi models a basic deep breathing exercise before saying "bye bye" to mad. 

I was impressed that my tantrum-throwing two-year old was actually transferring his understanding of a problem and its solution from a video to a real-life situation. 

I am definitely overthinking this, I know. Regardless of what I do, he will still acquire language through interaction, play, imitation, repetition, books, music, and video, like so many other children living in this century. Although obviously back-and-forth exchange plays a critical role in language development, YouTube has helped my child to explore his interests in yet another way. This can only help him as he continues to build his understanding of the world.  

3.) This is how I'm feeling right now.

Two and a half weeks before I enter my eleventh official year of teaching in Wisconsin, I'm still dealing with the background worry that has plagued me every August for the last ten: that I will have forgotten how to teach. It's irrational, like the half-fear that my teeth will spontaneously fall out while I sleep or a colony of fire ants will silently invade my backyard and swarm me while I'm mowing the lawn. It's my adult version of back-to-school anxiety that usually quells around Open House as I meet new students and catch up with those who have moved on, only to make a brief but violent resurgence on the night before the First Day. 

What does it even mean to "forget" how to teach? It's a natural impulse, something that many people do to varying degrees every day, albeit with less focus and pressure. It's essential to our survival/thrival as a species, an innate skill that can be exercised, cultivated, or ignored. I essentially rediscover myself during the summer outside of the classroom. I'm not circulating a group of students or conducting a mini-lesson from June to August, but that doesn't mean I'm ignoring my impulse to teach and learn, even if the formal act of putting my teacher persona on and entering the school building "to teach" has a different feel to it. Rationally, I know I haven't forgotten who this September to May version of me operates on a daily basis, but I do know that I've emerged from summer a little bit differently each new school year. The teacher I am today is five cycles removed from the teacher I was in 2013, ten cycles removed from the teacher I was when I had my first official classroom of sixth graders back in 2007. . For all the growth I've witnessed in my own practice from year to year, there are still plenty of things that first-year-teacher me did that aren't cringe-worthy to me now.

As a recovering hoarder of teaching documents, I've spent some spare time over the last few years scanning and purging old files, which is why I still have a copy of the handwritten questions I used as icebreakers with my students on the first day of school. 

At the time, Room Raiders was in early reruns on MTV and the formula still felt fresh, somehow. (Disclosure: I watched every episode.) I remember that this was a variation of an exercise I first tested during student teaching. I talked about how much the items in a room, the artifacts of a life, can tell you about a person. Then, the show felt like it was pushing into exciting boundaries of public vs. private life, now, I think back on the concept and laugh at how forward-thinking it felt at the time, how normal it would seem to my students now. 

I remember these questions definitely "broke the ice" and sparked great first-day-of-school conversations. They also gave me a vehicle to convey a few of my deep beliefs about writing to my students, starting with my very first day of school as a teacher with my own classroom. I'm tempted to see how these questions fly now, eleven years later. 

 

Good Dentist: Found

"This too shall pass."

Few things are more uncomfortable than the absolute blind trust I must put in my dentist when that chair begins to recline, those smudgy glasses settle against my eye sockets, and several hands in blue gloves start their probe of my mouth's insides. I've been blessed with large, weak teeth, the kind that crumble on McFlurrys, cuddle with the mandibular nerve, and split in half with the force of a toddler's headbutt, so I've spent a lot of uncomfortable time with people who solve these kinds of problems for a living. For the longest time, I'd drive six hours to the dentist in the town where my parents live until I eventually admitted that this was impractical. A five-year chain of horrible experiences closer to home that eventually led me to dentist I see today. He's a good dentist, an opinion I've formed primarily based on the fact that I've never once felt his drilling through the Novocaine and he doesn't strike me as a moron.

My dentist talks in stream-of-consciousness monologues while he's working on teeth, which I appreciate. He doesn't ask questions that I can't answer. He unintentionally gives me ideas to focus on while he works. Yesterday, while prepping my crown, he told the hygienist, "I'm awesome," and when she didn't respond, he said, "...although that sounds like mawesome, which sounds like I'm covered in moss." I imagined teeth sprouting spores and the entire office colonized in green before my brain caught onto another idea.

"It was a literally a tsunami out there," he said about a rainstorm that had just ended before I arrived, so while he was throwing out words like bur and lingual, I was attempting to develop a disaster plan in the event that a tornado were to strike before the rest of my tooth could be built and restored. I've gotten used to discomfort as long as I can expect it first. Cliches that I always thought of as hollow start to speak to me over time. It's strangely comforting to know that tomorrow, at this time, it will be over, because it always is.