Phlox & Zinnia

 I don’t spend nearly as much time on Teacher Twitter than I used to, but the general sentiment seems to be, “Online teaching is rough, I don’t like it, and I feel like I’m a first-year teacher.”

While I am exhausted at the end of the day, despite needing to set a timer that reminds me hourly to get out of my chair and move, I genuinely enjoy my online experience. Yes, everything takes me twice as long. No, I don’t know what 3/4s of my students sound or look like. But nothing beats when you are explaining GUIs to 12-year-olds and you reveal that everyone used to have to use a command-line interface. “CRAZY,” they say in the chat. Or when you greet your high schoolers as they roll into Game Design and every one of them says hi back to you in the chat.

When I interviewed at my school, I asked my principal if there was anyone I could talk to about the teacher experience. She told me it was unlikely, as all teachers were on summer break, but she’d try. She called me about 10 minutes later and gave me the phone number of a math teacher. Turns out said math teacher loves Nintendo and is very friendly, so we’ve been chatting ever since. The other day, he messaged me, “So, did I oversell, undersell, or accurately display life at HVAM?”

I immediately messaged back, “Definitely accurate.”

I honestly don’t mind that my students aren’t required to come to my classes. Yes, sometimes it feels like I’m talking to a brick wall, especially when certain students don’t respond. Yes, online teaching has the fisheye effect x100. Yes, answering the same email is exhausting. But I love how engagement looks in my brand of online teaching. I enjoy the control I have without feeling like I’m erasing student voices or disproportionately focusing on certain students. I like the fact that students seem to enjoy coming to my class. I enjoy not being told that my breath stinks and not telling students to get to a voice level zero.

Without the pandemic and a complete paradigm shift in the American workforce, I’m not sure I would have ever considered this career move. Most if not all of my colleagues have children at home—most under 5, some in school as well—and cite the flexibility of online teaching as a priority for them. Me, a young adult with 4 housemates whose idea of a good Friday night is watching a Korean movie about the trials of hell or part four of the Pride and Prejudice 1995 miniseries, is a little out of place.

And yet, I feel myself flourishing. I am seeking out feedback, I look forward to class, I don’t mind sinking hours into spreadsheets or calling parents or developing an assignment, and I get off of work at 5 (we’re not going to talk about the work I push off to Saturday). I genuinely enjoy my colleagues, even though I don’t feel like I know a lot of them, and when they told me that everyone at HVAM is willing to answer questions and help out, they were really right.

On Thursday afternoon, I had a series of panicked emails from a student in my Game Design class. We eventually got on a call, and she set up a time to work with me on Friday. On Friday, after we had worked through the basics of the assignment, we were shooting the breeze a little bit and she was talking about the amount of work she has to do. “I help new students, I help teachers—but I haven’t had to help you too much! You’ve learned pretty fast!” I smile and then think of the many mistakes I’ve made over the last two weeks.

“Thanks. I appreciate it.” I grinned as I clicked out of the window and took off my headset.

I don’t mind being a first-year teacher again if this is what it feels like: the paradoxical exhaustion and thrill that runs through me every day I wake up and remember, every time I see “Ms. Johnson,” every time I glance at my growing to-do list, every time I click the “x” on a classroom.

 I’ve begun to reexamine my taste in music after an icebreaker.

Over the pandemic, I’ve attended my fair share of webinars and Zoom meetings, but this was the NCTE Sandbox: I had to apply and be accepted into this webinar, and I was supposed to share with other English educators my ideas rather than sit passively through a lecture. I had already found the cleanest area in my house, arranged the lighting and the camera, and rethought my decision about 10 times before clicking on the link.

Ernest Morrell, one of the presenters, gave a sort of “get-to-know-you” activity that propels students into thinking about their own media consumption. He invited us to open up iTunes (or Spotify or Netflix), pick a song, and reflect on it. What do you like about this song? What would you change about this song? What are the values that the song holds? And, most interesting to me: what does this song (and the fact that you enjoy it) show about you?

Kacey Musgraves’s “Space Cowboy” (which, no, isn’t about Cowboy Bebop or cowboy aliens or alien cowboys) immediately popped into my head. Besides the clever writing and laid-back vibes, I hadn’t considered the song very closely until this activity. The song complicates the idea of freedom, noting the costs it demands and drawing distinctions between the speaker’s quiet bounded freedom with the lover’s wild dreams of freedom. It’s a breakup song, but the speaker’s stance is very passive (“I ain’t going to fence you in”) and yet firm (“I know my place / it ain’t with you”).

It also is very country and very nostalgic, which complicates my love for the song as I grew up on Country 102.5 and have since realized how it intertwines with misogyny and racism.

I don’t often think deeply about my music. When people have asked me what I look for in songs, I often shrug. A kicking drum beat, solid songwriting, a hook that gets stuck in my head: it seems to differ from song to song and from month to month.

Phoebe Bridgers released her album Punisher on June 18th. By June 20th, I had already fawned over it to all my housemates and my friends with whom I share similar music tastes. It’s one of those albums that I would happily listen to any song; however, “Chinese Satellite” quickly established itself as one of my favorites. Again, the writing is immaculate, the soft indie pop creates a somber and dreamy atmosphere, and I’ve definitely belted the chorus to my ever-patient housemates.

What really draws me is how Bridgers tugs at faith: how the speaker “wants to believe” but instead looks “at the sky and feels nothing.” As someone who grew up in Christianity and has had multiple conversations with my fellow members in the dead parents club, I find it difficult to believe that some people just can’t make the leap of faith, even if they want to. At the same time, the lyrics really capture the feeling of having some idea, some dream, just out of reach and deluding yourself that if you just tried a bit harder, maybe you’d be able to catch it.

I’d like to believe as a pretentious English major I’d only love songs with really clever lyrics. But you can’t really call “Over My Head” or “Roman Holiday” lyrical masterpieces: sometimes I just want a bop.

Obviously, you know about Taylor Swift’s surprise quarantine album folklore. I feel like a poser saying this, but cardigan, the lead single (if you can even have a lead single for an album whose advertisement time totals less than 24 hours), captured me. The ambient clicks and the repetitive piano theme underlying Swift’s soft vocals bring me to a new place where I’m scorning and yearning for some lover that I can’t seem to let go of. It, as all good love songs, glamorizes the mortifying ordeal of being known and brings back the hope that young love will, against all odds, come back. You all can psychoanalyze me for this one.

After diving into these current obsessions, I emerged recognizing how white my music is. I listen to no artists of color beyond an occasional Beyonce. LGBT+ artists are barely represented. I am not excused by my choices of genre: with minimal searching, I’ve found awesome folk artists like Joy Oladokun and top-notch country in Our Native Daughters.

It’s been a few months since that Zoom call. I have not overhauled my music library, but I’m striving to be more aware. It is not all I am called to do, but it is enough for now.

I realized in my latest post calvin post that I was being angsty, which meant I was being a little down and out. It’s a little bit of my writer brand, and I’ve mused on here before that I wonder if I’ve relegated that part of my personality to only come out in my writing. Or I somehow believe that my optimism isn’t interesting enough, isn’t cool enough, isn’t enough.

I’ve always felt a little selfish, openly processing my grief. It’s so often a private journey, one that I haven’t even really seen in my own family. There are always hints, but it’s never out in the open.

Chanel Miller laid it all out in her book Know My Name: all the words, all the feelings, all the darkness. And it was dark, yes, but those weren’t the times when I cried. It was when survivors swelled up around her and supported her. It was when she realized that she needed to speak out for herself, to unpack her own history. That survivors do not need platitudes or toxic positivity. They need the “I was in the dark place too. For a long time. But I’m making my way out of it.”

As I shared in my post calvin piece, I’m still in grief. Most of the time, now, I’ve forgotten it. Lori peaks out at me from my wallpaper, a picture on my fridge, a facebook memory, but I can smile at her for the most part. I don’t think “What if she was here? What would she be thinking?” constantly as I did throughout my first year of teaching. I’m not angry that she’s gone, most of the time. But sometimes it chokes me by the throat, like when people have a full conversation about heaven and maybe that we are in nothingness until Jesus comes, and while that’s a fun thought experiment for some people it means for me that my mom is gone until Jesus comes back. During my CPR and AED training, I couldn’t stop thinking if Mom got CPR in time. Was Lars trained? Was Dad trained? When did the paramedics start? Did she recognize her symptoms after doing school trainings for forever?

Someone reposted on facebook this description of grief like a ball in a box. The box has a big red button on the side labeled “pain,” and at the beginning the ball nearly fills the box, pushing into the button all the time. Every passing day reminds you of how many days it’s been since your person was alive. Every new thing you do you mark as “the first _____ since.” You are keenly aware of the before-after divide in your life.

But as time goes on, the ball shrinks. I find myself not marking the 7th of each month. I forget how much of my life my mom saw: was I living in Nizhoni? Had I started teaching? Was I friends with _________? Did I know _________? There are still triggers, still moments, but they are less often. The ball hits the other sides of the box more often than it hits the button. I’ve grown accustomed to the chain mail of grief; I’ve gotten strong enough to not notice its added weight as often. 

When I mention her death, and my students express condolences, I can just smile and say, “Thank you.” The days where her photo arrests rather than comforts me are few, and for that I am grateful.