Phlox & Zinnia

I don’t know what happened last night at Rhylee’s house,
nor does Rhylee know what happened at mine.
My head is full of plans and misfires and adjustments, but
it looks opaque and serene and ineffable to students.
When I get up to speak, I expect the heavens to open
and am instead satiated with glazed eyeballs that aren’t rolling
to communicate with their fellow soldiers in the war against
me.
I ignore the head-bumping in the hallway
and take deep breaths in the lounge
and try to make my copies before the bell.

But God, I want to be better.

Help me smile at Jacklyn when she talked her way through
my class. Fight back my fears of inadequacy.
Give me the courage to walk up to Jamon

You all know I’m a nervous and doubting soul. Whenever I do a new thing—the most recent of which was pulling up to a high school and attending a professional development day—thoughts of “Am I in the right place? What door do I enter? Did I have to wear nice clothes, because I’m wearing jeans today and my only change of clothes is gym shorts” cycle through my brain. I thought something similar would happen the first time I got in front of a class full of students who were confused to why their real teacher wasn’t in front, but instead my mind was full of student names and questions I had mapped out the night before.

My student teaching is going well, and I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. I admire my mentor teacher, the other teachers he works closely with, the students in my homeroom, the students in other classes, and other teachers who I briefly see in the teacher’s lounge. One of those teachers came up to me during the professional development day while I was sifting through emails on my phone and asked, “So how’s student teaching going?” unprompted. I saw two of my students outside of class this weekend, and each time I waved to them and whispered to my housemates, “That’s my student!” The school’s environment feels familiar to me, and being in front of a class feels like a nature outgrowing of all the theory and practical knowledge I’ve ingested explicitly from the last three years of college and implicitly from the other thirteen years of school. I only get nervous when I have to tell other teachers what I’m planning on doing because I know they are going to give me advice and improve on it while I just want them to say, “Bravo! Magnificent! Take my job!”

All my fears about student teaching seemed to come to a head on Wednesday, where I felt prepared enough to take over two whole classes by myself but then spent 3 hours micromanaging and souring relationships with students rather than actually teaching them. After barely keeping it together in front of my mentor while we hashed out the events of the day, I sobbed in the bathroom. A younger student called after me in the hall and asked where some teacher was, oblivious to the tears running down my cheeks. I was able to pull myself together and get something completed, but to some extent my confidence was shaken. My mentor made a comment that I must have felt lonely, and I did—lonely and frustrated and powerless and unprepared. But then I did what I do best: reflect, make a plan, and try again. School went better on Thursday, and I got my sea legs again.

It’s definitely been an adjustment going from the college life of being unable to get out of bed by 6:30 am and only falling asleep after 11:30 pm to the teacher grind of being out the door by 5:50 am and telling my friends at 10:30 pm that my brain has stopped functioning. Sometimes I feel like I have to justify my exhaustion to my housemates when I fail to communicate that being at school from 7 am to 5 pm means working from 7:30 am to 4:30 pm, even if I’m only teaching for 3 to 4 of those hours. I’ve never related more to Mom, who at 6:30 pm would head upstairs to watch TV and fall asleep by 8:30 on weekdays, even though I have yet to watch Monday’s episode of The Bachelor despite it being Saturday. There’s something draining about continually prepping every move you make but also having enough flexibility to strike up conversations with students, which you can never ever really prepare for. There’s also something incredibly rewarding about students knowing my name and seeing me as a teacher and treating me as such (most of the time).

Since I declared education as my major of choice, I’ve wondered if I really want to be a teacher, and I always said to myself, “I’ll know by student teaching.” I’m under no illusions: I understand that the school I’m in is one that is extremely safe and comfortable for me due to my background. That being said, if being a teacher is what I’m doing now, I’m excited for the next couple years at least. Seeing glimpses of the complicated lives of adolescents, grappling with issues of how to best inspire students to learn content and how to be a better person, getting free food, laughing over strange student interactions, bouncing lesson ideas around, calling on raised hands, being surprised by angles that I had never seen before, watching the copier spit out sheet after sheet which will be crumpled in some student’s locker by the end of the day, writing learning targets that make me excited to delve into persuasive writing, and even redirecting students time and time again have all shown me how teaching does consume every part of your life, but it also transforms life into a mission: to pour my professional expertise, my well-intentioned (but not always well-enacting) actions, and my poor poor reflection of God’s love into one person’s life a little more every day. To find is to lose; to lose is to find. How could I ask for anything more?

My awkwardest moment so far:
I led homeroom, a 10 minute time for announcements and getting to be with each other, on my third day of teaching (which incidentally occurred on the start of what was meant to be my third week of teaching).  I, trying to be semi-relatable, asked the students what they did over the snow day. The ones who were paying attention to me, which was like 5 of them, stared at me blankly, and the other 20 or so kept carrying on their own conversations. A couple of students raised their hands and gave answers, but no one else was listening. I awkwardly sat there, racking my brain for an option to fill the 2 minutes until 8:10 and blessed freedom, until the room naturally quieted down and all students turned to look at me. Panicking, I turned to my mentor, seated at his desk 5 feet over, and said, “You all are looking at me but I don’t know what to do…?” “You’re supposed to pray,” he whispered. Mortified, I asked if anyone would be willing to pray. A student jumped into a long prayer request about her dog staying at the vet overnight, and another wanted to pray that her family gets power, and then I just prayed. I breathed a sigh of relief once they all had exited.

Best teaching moment:
I had the idea to make the students act out where the different parts of a submarine are in order to review the vocabulary we had been learning about boats (since the book we are reading is about a submarine). I called, “Port!” and they all shuffled to their left. “Starboard!” and they shuffled to their right. “Conning tower!” and some of them pointed up while some of them just muttered their confusion to their friends. I thought the activity went over great.

When I'm asking the question, “Am I a good enough Christian?” I'm really asking the question, “Am I going to be able to see my mom again?”

It's no secret (at least I hope it isn't a secret to you all) that I struggle with my spiritual life. I've always had this sense that I'm conning everyone, that this Good Christian Girl™ is just how I act as because it's my personality and how I was raised. I guess in that sense you could argue that Christianity seeped into my bones, but I think following God requires a little more intentionality than that. I try to create intentionality in my cyclical phases of pressuring myself to do through reading the Bible, going to church, praying throughout the day, going to chapel, memorizing Bible verses, plus a new idea here or there.

But tonight my house read Galatians 3:1-6 and 5:1-6 in devos tonight, and my frustrations about my perceived mixed signals in Christianity came to a head. I thought of the passage where Jesus says that some will say to him “Lord, Lord,” and he will say “I never knew you.” I thought of the implorations I've digested to live by faith, not by works. I thought of all my failed faith projects where I try to establish a habit and it just doesn't stick. Ever. It feels like I'm constantly being told that I just need to believe in Jesus and follow him, and then I'm being told that I also need to great commission everyone and continually be in the word and pray without ceasing.

I know these things aren't disconnected. I know being a child of God is about my heart turning towards Jesus, who has been chasing after me, and loving him. And then loving my neighbors. And then following in his footsteps, which include great commissioning and knowing the Bible and praying all the time. I know if my heart's in the right place, I should want that.

So what does it mean if I don't? Worse yet, what does it mean when I read Scripture and go, “Wow, that was really fulfilling. I should do this more often.” and then proceed to not read more Scripture? What does it mean that I pray when I remember and sleep when I don't? What does it mean that I'm more concerned about shaping who I am as a teacher than who I am as a Christian?

(Sure, my teaching philosophy is based on Christian theology—image of God in all students & teachers, seeking after God in all parts of creation, Bible/parables showing how stories are essential to how we relate as humans—but it feels like at this point I'm spending more time honing that than my own ideas and implementations of theology.)

So I've decided that I need to be in a relationship with God and seek after him. What does that mean? What do I do? Should I be concerned that my mind automatically goes to action rather than time or reflection? Should I just adjust my expectations of what I “get out” of these faith actions?


If I don't get this right, how can I even conceive of an afterlife without my mom?


(To which my stuck-up faith voice [you know what I'm talking about] says “You shouldn't be stuck on the afterlife the real good part of Christianity is what we do on earth if you are just in it for heaven you aren't actually in it why think about the afterlife when you haven't even gotten through college?”)

Mom's death upped the ante for me. I know I have the rest of my life to work through this, and I know I can't get it right on my own, but it feels like I have to. It feels like I gotta explore some foundational things and seek more for a relationship. But will I spend time on it? Is it more pressing than planning a unit for 110 students? Is it possible that I can still do all the things that God put me here to do/affect/screw up/make better/prolong/quicken/change and seek him? I'm honestly not sure if I'll even end up taking the time to try.

I've tried to end this post three times, and if I learned anything from actually teaching half of a lesson in class today, it's that I find conclusions really hard. I don't have any recommendations to save my sorry bum, so here: grief permeates the cracks of your life that you would really prefer to ignore, and it seems so far that it either fuses and transforms that piece into something more sturdy or it slowly erodes the cracks, smoothing the edges so they start to look like separate pieces who were never a whole in the first place. I can't quite tell you yet what grief is doing to my faith.

I’m batting 2/10 in my ratio of teaching days to snow days.

After a retreat this weekend with my lovely housemates at a beautiful cottage on the edge of frozen Lake Michigan, I was setting my alarm for 5:10 am not to get up and read books but to grab my clothes, my lunch box, and my courage and catch the bus to my new middle school.

I was so on top of things that I was able to catch an earlier bus than I was expecting and ended up getting to school before 7 am when it opened. I also ended up with soaked shoes as all the snow was melting from the last week, and the route I take involves ten minutes of walking on both ends of the route. Once some person—I think it was the building guy—let me in, I waltzed over to my mentor’s room and picked out a space for my desk to live.

Even though I was only able to teach Monday and Tuesday, and teach is a strong word for stand-up-in-front-of-students-and-tell-them-fun-(and-not-so-fun)-facts-about-you, I’ve already felt more invested in this placement than my sophomore student aiding. I’m starting to memorize students’ names, recommending books with a 33% success rate (shoutout to M. T. Anderson’s Symphony for City of the Dead), and getting questions about my C++ use. After 3-hour teacher seminar on Tuesday, I was getting excited to see a real class happen rather than just going to the library to pick out nonfiction books. Then Grand Rapids turned the cold shoulder on me and glazed the roads.

I feel like my mentor teacher and I are getting along well. He’s tolerant of my sometimes fool-hardy decisions, like me walking 30 minutes to school (and then him picking me up) in 0-degree windchill to get the work I left there on Tuesday, and is willing to let me shake things up. He clearly cares about his students, and his colleagues respect him. He even played a random indie playlist when we were both chilling at school late. I think we’ll get along fabulously for the most part.

Maybe I feel so in my element because this school reminds me a lot of LCA—caring students, the general atmosphere of goodwill, willingness to step out of the box. Maybe it’s because it feels like one of the easier assignments: we are on a block schedule, so I’ll only be teaching a one hour religion class and two 80-minute English classes a day, which will have the same material on Monday & Tuesday and Wednesday & Thursday. Maybe it’s because I’ve finally owned who I am (a 3 on the Enneagram, surprising no one) and where I want to get going.

On Sunday, my housemate Jill and I went shopping for the week. We went to Aldi’s (the best grocery store) and Meijer and were struck by the number of people there. “Must be the after Sunday rush, huh?” Jill said to me as we navigated the treacherous produce aisle. “I really don’t know why all these people are here,” I murmured back as I snagged two loaves of bread. As we were checking out, I overheard someone talking about the storm. “Okay, sure,” I thought.

On Sunday, I planned out how I would make a video on Monday to submit to the #becauseofCalvin challenge, my first day of student teaching. I thought it would be poetic, and I could cheat the rules and mention a bunch of Calvin things that I love. I packed my “teacher tote” because apparently teachers don't do the backpack thing, and decided on an outfit for the first day. I found out around 9:30 pm that night that my school was canceled for Monday. I set my 5:10 am alarm regardless, as Tuesday and the rest of the week were coming.

Other than Tuesday (when I got the news at 5:45 am after I had showered, packed my lunch, and put on my shoes), I found out every day this week around noon that school for the next day was cancelled—due to snow, due to cold, due to winter weather warnings, whatever. I've still gotten up at 5, still gotten nervous about teaching, still felt bad about not doing enough (whatever that means), and still got my first-day outfit hanging in my closet.

Here are a few things I learned this week while sitting in the same chair all week:

1. 17 inches is a lot of snow. -10 or minus wind chill is pretty dang cold.
2. You can get a lot of reading done if you actually commit to getting up at 5 am and you don't have anything to do for the rest of the day.
3. If a book is good enough, you will make do with reading by the string of lights on the porch a room away because one of your housemates decided he wanted to sleep in the living room.
4. Reading is fun, but sometimes you can't keep burning through books. But if you want a book that you'll feel good about completing, pick up a work of poetry. Absorb what you can; let the rest wash over your eyes and stun you with its mysterious beauty.
5. On days off, I expect myself to take on all my lingering projects. If I actually make substantial progress on them, I can only usually focus on two of them.
6. Sometimes you gotta make a crappy research poster before you can make a pretty one.
7. Crafting a tight essay is hard. You live in a perpetual state of tweaking. Why do people do this writing thing?
8. Shoveling is a futile effort only made marginally better by podcasts and fellow sufferers. Also, it's very disheartening to wipe off 3 inches of snow off your car only to wake up to another 3 inches that fell overnight.
9. Baking is a good time. Bread machines are magical creations. Food takes a large amount of upfront investment that pays off in later days.
10. Pushing cars when it's snowy outside actually does work. It’s also kind of fun to be a part of a traveling band of well-doers, waiting on a hilly corner to jump behind anyone’s car at a moment’s notice.
11. Skating backwards is hard and you look like a goof trying to do it.
12. Calvin does give days off. Who knew.
13. 5 snow days sounds like heaven, but when you know you have things to do that you can't start on, all that free time starts to stress you out.
14. If I could live in a beanie and be taken as a serious professional, I would.
15. Call Me By Your Name and Mad Max: Fury Road are perfect movies to play in the background. Fight me.
16. It really sucks when you have a whole week off and the video game you've been waiting for comes out, but it’s in the wrong state. Relatedly, Skrillex is a Kingdom Hearts fan and helped write a great song for the theme.
17. Even if you love being at home, reading books, cooking food, playing board games, watching movies, and getting ahead on schoolwork, you'll get to the point where you are ready to have your life back, thanks.

On today, my last day of freedom, I’m going to hit up the library, watch If Beale Street Could Talk, stop by campus to pick up a few things, do a little homework, read more of Slayer by Kiersten White, and do a little babysitting. Come Monday, I’ll finally have some new things to say. Stay tuned.

Recs

Recipe: Minimalist Baker makes this killer lentil dish, which mixes walnut, pomegranate molasses, lentils, turmeric, cinnamon, and maple syrup into a delectable stew. Shout out to Anne Clay for sharing this recipe on her facebook page.

Recipe: This isn’t much of a recipe, per se, but Shira recommended that I put it on my blog. One day sophomore year, I was over Amber’s house when it snowed. Her family introduced us all to this wintery treat where you take freshly fallen snow (either collected in a bowl or scrapped off the top layer) and sprinkle powdered lemonade mix right on top of it. The result is that snow texture that you loved to eat as a kid (you did, admit it) blended perfectly with the sugary powder. It was one of my mom’s favorite snacks on snow days, and as far as I can tell no one else on the internet is talking about it.

Book: On one of my 5 am reading mornings, I picked up Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky with Exit Wounds, which I requested from the library a few weeks ago. I was introduced to Vuong through Kit Emslie’s poem “Someday I’ll Love the Gym as a Good Gay Boy Should” and through Jeff Zentner’s Instagram feed, oddly enough. Anyway, the poems in Vuong’s collection are all breathtaking. I’ll leave you with a line that I loved from “To My Father / To My Future Son”:

Use it to prove how the stars
were always what we knew
they were: exit wounds
of every
misfired word.