Phlox & Zinnia

I’ve been thinking about this, and partially because no one uses Facebook anymore and partially because I’m beyond caring, I’m not protecting the links to this blog anymore.

When I started this blog about a year and a half ago, I didn’t really know if I would stick with it or keep up with it. I didn’t know what it would turn into and where it would go. I didn’t know if people actually wanted to read my thoughts, so I did the gradual release method: wrote for myself for about a month, opened the link to close friends and family, and slowly added people to the list as they mention hearing about my blog.

And the safety of a protected list is nice. I often don’t edit these pieces as I edit my the post calvin essays—the last one probably taking me about 4 to 5 hours from start to finish. I was able to be fully myself and say whatever I wanted. I guess now I’m confident enough to do it without a safety net.

Will I actually promote this blog more? Probably not. Will I write more on it? Also probably not. But this year I am trying to write more as I find it helps me work through my feelings. We’ll see what 2020 brings.

(If you’re new here, here are some posts that capture what this blog is about: The Start, Who Tells Your Story, Living in the Hyphen, Hallmarked Homecomings)


*****


I asked Abby, the post calvin content curator, for feedback on my posts. As I’ve mentioned before, I feel a little unworthy to be on such a high-caliber blog such as the post calvin and I don’t do my best writing under imposter syndrome. She mentioned that I’ve written a lot about teaching and that I should make a rule to not write about teaching until, say, April.

A part of me immediately balked at this idea. Me, a first-year teacher at a difficult school, not write about teaching for four months? What else am I supposed to write about? It’s what consumes most of my waking hours; if I’m not at school, I’m either lesson planning, thinking about my day and how to do better, at church, hanging out with friends, eating, reading, or sleeping. That list pretty much sums up my life.

“My life is teaching, my house, my church, and reading,” I glibly remarked to most of my parent’s friends at our annual New Year’s Day open house. I got kind of sick of explaining my job and having to be like, “No, it sucks and it’s really hard and I am kind of dreading it but it’s fine!” so I defaulted back to my joke-y line that reminds me of something Mom said in September 2018: “First-year teaching isn’t a job; it’s a lifestyle.”

That statement or advice has become unhealthy to me, I think.

(and even a piece of me right now is saying, “No it isn’t. Teaching takes a lot of time, and you are investing a lot and that’s good. Don’t try to weasel your way out of doing a good job just because you are tired. That’s really what this is.”)

I spend so much of my time thinking about teaching that it is becoming who I am. It’s taken me four months of conversations that have danced around this topic for me to finally let my guard down enough to even engage with that idea: that perhaps I am more than my job.

I’ve been so focused on being a good teacher that it has come at the cost of me being a whole person. Sure, being a part of a church and a PN house has mostly counterbalanced it, but I’m afraid if I keep hurdling down this route I will become the person who only talks about her job because she does nothing outside of that.

Here’s what I’m going to try: when I feel anxious and want to avoid my work, rather than browsing the Internet and find random memes or essays about pop culture, I’m going to turn back to things that I know fulfill me—reading, writing, prayer, and meditation. I will give myself evenings off. I will be a full person so I have the energy to love my students, even when they so clearly do not love me back.

But first, I have some lesson planning to do. Thanks for letting me process with you all.


Recommendations:

• The Good Place Season 1. Don’t say that I didn’t warn you that it is addictive. It’s on Netflix.
• The Way You Make Me Feel — a sweet YA contemporary summer novel that was light and yet had substance. I enjoyed it a lot more than most of the books I’ve been reading.
• Mad Max: Fury Road and Into the Spider-Verse are movies that I revisited due to the decade ending. Surprise! They are as amazing as they were when I first watched them.
• Little Women. I’m totally sold on everything Greta Gerwig produces now.

“She didn’t give up on me, ever.” — a former student of my mom’s


When I was at LCA two days after she passed, I remember walking the halls and seeing all the memorials and thinking, “What will be left of her when all these students are gone? When all of these teachers who remember her are gone?”

It’s the nature of schools to be in transition: students are flowing in and out due to family moves, better opportunities, social dynamics, and graduation. Mom was always the one who handled the biggest transition—the baby 6th graders. They were all new, all coming from different schools, and all had no idea who the others were. Mom was the one who became their go-to person for everything, no matter what it was.

I couldn’t imagine the six-grade class who entered LCA’s halls in 2019 not knowing my mother’s face and the way she smiled at them in the morning and how her laughter sounds when it floats down the hallway. It hurt too much to picture LCA in 2025 when there would be no student who saw how she drew her terrible whale and used the Annika button during a quiz (which is wailing “WAIIIIIIIIT!”). I turned to some other teacher and said something along these lines. They said, “We will make sure she lives on.”

But will she really? When we went as a family to honor the first recipients of the scholarship founded in my mom’s name, I found myself looking through the program with all of these names—names that had friends and family and students whose hearts probably hurt when they passed away but names that meant nothing to me. Who’s to say that wouldn’t happen to Mom’s name? And how could that happen to someone who dedicated 20+ years of her life to a school?


Today, I called my dad on the phone on my drive into work. A couple people in my life have recommended that I start to practice some silence, which I took to mean that I don’t always have to be consuming some form of media every second of the day and therefore shouldn’t always listen to podcasts on the way to work. Some days I do drive in silence, but today I wanted to connect with my favorite Massachusetts man. He mentioned not sleeping super well because of a card that he got from LCA with student messages in it.

When I saw the blue envelope in my mailbox later, I knew I was in for it.

Her colleagues talked about still feeling her presence at LCA and expressed well wishes of prayers. Some talked about how proud she would be of me. Students gave wishes of strength and shared personal memories. But the one that really got me was written by a student whose name I recognized.

After I graduated from LCA, I knew less and less of the sixth graders; however, on our family skypes my mom still told stories about her sixth-graders—who came to her constantly for help, who were becoming friends, who said something funny in class, and who was driving her up the wall. The note was from a student who my mom talked about (although I can’t remember if it was because he was amusing or because he needed a lot of help).

It cut through the performance of grief and delivered the simple truth—that Lori VanderKlay Johnson did not give up on her students, ever. She didn’t give up on any of her students, no matter how much of a hard time they were giving her. She sought out new strategies, talked to her colleagues, vented at home, and holed up in her bedroom at night all in order to come back the next morning and support that child the best she could.

In the position I’m in, there are a lot of students I want to give up on. Students who say things like, “Wow, can’t wait until we can choose our own elective and no one will want to pick art” or “I knew from the moment that I was in this class that we weren’t going to get along” or “You need to stop talking” or “Your breath stinks.” It’s easier to write them off and focus on the students who are actually giving me the time of day. But my mother knew that every student deserved someone in their corner who was fighting for them every step of the way.

Maybe none of the middle schoolers in two years will know my mom’s name. Maybe they’ll be in love with the new mama bear and their current English teacher—I hope they are. Maybe it’s okay that in six years no students will have had her as a teacher; she already made the impact she needed to make. Her memory will slowly seep out of LCA, but it will live in the hearts of students like the one above. Maybe it’ll even tuck itself into my own students.

On my twitter feed a few weeks ago, this article I had read last year, “Hey, New Teachers, It’s OK to Cry in Your Car” popped up. It focuses on this experienced teacher who sends motivational emails to teachers in order to “get new teachers to Thanksgiving Break.”

Getting to Thanksgiving Break has been the line that has gotten me through these last couple weeks.

One of the other new teachers at my school decided to leave at the beginning of November. After his decision was announced to the students, one of my middle school art students said to me, “Ms. Johnson, are you going to leave? Like Mr. __________ ?” It broke my heart as much as hearing another student tell me in the first week of middle school art that they “bully the new teachers.” I told them that no, I was not going to leave. Even after the class where I spent the entire time telling them to be quiet and ended with the school social worker stepping in and taking control of the class because they couldn’t get it together.

There have been decent days, for sure. Days where students have unexpectedly stepped up and helped me out, days where a student who has been flat-out ignoring every word I say actually does their work, and days where other teachers lift me up and tell me I’m getting there. Then there are the other days where students almost fight each other in my room because they don’t know how to process their feelings, days where there are crayons completely strewn over my floor, and days where I can’t even teach because I spend the whole class period waiting for students to stop talking and giving out warnings and calling parents.

While this job, being the long-term substitute art teacher with an advisory of 16 sixth graders who all currently hate me, has been tough due to its insubstantial nature, it’s also been a good area for growth. I’ve been telling people that it’s a nice way to learn classroom management because if we don’t get to the art, my heart isn’t super broken over it. It’s not like we missed out on reading a beautiful poem by Jacqueline Woodson or discussing the intricacies of the pantoum poetic structure exemplified by Sarah Gambito’s “Charlottesville Curriculum.” At the same time, I’m not motivated to get up in the morning by the subject material; often I have to tell myself that today is the day that my children will be the hardworking and thoughtful angels that I know they can be.

The biggest thing that I’m learning is that structure can be a powerful force for good. I’ve heard so much and learned so much about the broken structures in our society that perpetuate racism and inequalities—and I’m certain that I’m contributing to that broken structure in some way in the job I’m currently in—that I forgot that they could be leveraged for good. Last Friday, I sat down and made a schedule for my Saturday, detailing all the tasks I wanted to accomplish and the time I allotted for each. My seating charts actually took me two and a half hours rather than 45 minutes and I didn’t actually get around to planning my Sunday School lesson until Sunday morning, but just the act of committing myself to a plan motivated me enough to get a good amount done. Today I had the freedom to spend an extra two hours in the kitchen to make sourdough popovers just for the heck of it and to sit down and write this blog post that I’ve been meaning to write for the past two weeks. In conclusion, yay structure!

Lately I’ve been finding myself going back to some bad habits of using the internet to avoid thinking about my problems and/or doing my work (sorry Mrs. Elliott—I know you are rolling in your grave over that slash usage). I’ve been using sites like “What Color is It?”, “Liquid Particles, ” and “Do Nothing for 2 Minutes” to break me out of that self-destructive cycle, and it’s actually been pretty effective. I give myself a moment to breathe, reset, and figure out what I’m going to do. I’d highly recommend this: find a site that you can visit when you need to signal to yourself to take a break and bookmark it so you can find it easily.

Overall, I’m making it. Sure, I’m not actually teaching a lot, and there are a lot of kids who strongly dislike me at my school, and I feel like I’m still learning the practices that I should have gotten the hang of by the first week, but I’m going to make it to Thanksgiving Break. And maybe when I’m actually able to get the students to listen to me, I’ll be able to take a critical look at my school’s philosophy of discipline and my own method of teaching. Until then, I’m hanging on by the skin of my teeth and the little victories that pepper my days.

Recommendations:
I recently discovered that Shane Claiborne, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, and Enuma Okoro’s Common Prayer book that I try to read as a daily devotion is online, meaning I can worship without leaving the comfort of my bed. This probably isn’t as good for me as I think it will be, but it also means that you all can experience the wonder that is daily common prayer.

I’ve been cooking a heck of a lot and trying out new recipes, but the best by far was the house dinner that Shira and I made with Malai Kofta Potato Dumplings and vegan Palak ‘Paneer’. We probably used 75% of our kitchen’s dishes and spent two hours making it and a vegan carrot cake, but it was so worth it.

The Toll, The Starless Sea, and The Queen of Nothing are all coming out this month! And I have all of them on hold in the library and with my luck they’ll come in when I’m on Christmas break! But that’s okay because I’m so dang excited to read all of them!!!

Did I recommend you read Oculus by Sally Wen Mao? Because you should.

Buzzfeed had this amazing article about how social media algorithms and backlogs of TV shows has messed with our sense of time—just be prepared to hold up your hand to a really annoying gif on the side of the first third of the article.

I saw Lucy Dacus in concert—please listen to Fool’s Gold and Pillar of Truth—and Liza Ann, an artist who was in my huge playlist that I deposit people who I eventually want to listen to, played this great song “I Love You but I Need Another Year” that I cannot stop listening to.

As I walked up the Science Building stairs to the 3rd-floor computer science lab, where I spent many-a-hour fighting with tricky lines of code, I was struck by the familiarity yet unfamiliarity of the situation. Here I was, dropping off the car keys to my junior year sister (because yes, we are still sharing a car surprisingly) and not looking or feeling too out of place. Whenever I passed someone on the path, I felt the sense of superiority you feel when you see someone whose surprise birthday party you are attending later in the week—an inward smile when you know something they don’t. I know I’m not a college student, but they are none the wiser. At the same time, I felt this overall sense of not-belonging; knowing that this campus was once my place but is not anymore, even if I’m the only one who knows that.

I guess that’s a part of the deal when you graduate college and you still live in the same town: when you do some of the things you did in college, nothing has really changed and yet everything feels different. If I want to go to a concert at Calvin, I can’t buy the $5 student price anymore. My schedule conflicts about when to go grocery shopping are more consistent than “I have to meet with these people to work on a group project this Saturday” or “I have three exams coming up this week so I need time to study this weekend.” As a now non-student member of the Oratorio Society, the choir I’ve sung in for the last 4 years, I actually have to buy a robe (and now $25 doesn’t sound like such a steep price anymore). I get to have a chat with my roommates before I go to bed because staying up past 10:30pm just isn’t an option for me anymore.

These changes aren’t always bad. In a sense, it’s kind of comforting to me that my setting at home hasn’t changed because I can concentrate on my ever-changing situation at work. Since my position is a push-in position, I still kind of feel like a student teacher who is learning from the masters. I’ve been called fake teacher more than once, and whenever I step into a class for the teacher to step out for a moment, one student inevitably goes, “Where’s Mr./Ms. So-and-So?” At the same time, I am teaching by myself for one hour a day every day, and that’s teaching me a lot about student motivation at this particular school and what it means to be consistent in discipline. It’s not easy, and I feel like there’s not a lot of learning getting done in the classroom, but I’m doing the best I can and feel like I’m at least learning a lot.

I’m still trying to “find myself” as a teacher, and perhaps using “still” there is rushing myself too much (since I’ve been teaching for maybe 2–3 months tops), and it’s a little strange doing it in the limbo space that I’m in—not a full teacher, still connected with my college (now university). But I kind of love it too. It’s really nice not having the full pressure of being a teacher, and honestly I’m not killing myself over making lesson plans. When I’m ready, I will shift into the other part of my job, which is being a building sub (including in the elementary school). I don’t know exactly how that will go, but I’m counting on it to continue building my skills and preparing me for whatever will come in the future. As for now, I’m just going to keep giving myself space to learn and fail and also love my life outside of school too.


______________________________________



“Okay Alex, so you have a job and you think about it a lot, I get it.”


Yeah. I do other things outside of school too, kind of.

Lately I’ve been watching Bachelor in Paradise remotely with my dear father. We started just texting during it, and now we’ve evolved to full-on speakerphone chats about the people we want to go home, the predictions for how relationships will turn out, and in my commercial breaks our daily lives. After spending the summer at home and hanging out with him a lot, it’s been really grounding to connect again, even if it is over 20-somethings manufacturing their own drama because our society believes you need to have a partner always to be complete.

On one of these conversations, I also got to talk to one of my other sets of parents, the Bulgers. I found myself talking about how I’m thinking about trying to pursue teaching computer science at the secondary level, which I hadn’t really spoken to anyone seriously about until now. In August, I searched computer science teacher positions just to see what was out there. It’s scary because I was never taught computer science and honestly I don’t know how much I retained in college and I didn’t really get any pedagogical training for computer science specifically; however, my heart is still yearning towards it for some reason. Maybe it’s because it feels easier to explain the importance of computer science than English; maybe it’s because I want to stretch myself beyond just the bonds of Mrs. Lori Johnson’s path.

I’ve been kind of reading my Bible more consistently, and after reading The Power of Habit I am trying to create new “cues” and “routines,” the most successful one being doing yoga for 10 minutes right after getting out of bed. I’m trying to do that with prayer too. Elizabeth and I have been talking a lot about what it means to love God and what that looks like, and that’s something I want to think more about as I start to work towards becoming a member of Creston CRC and continue to work with students who traditionally have been underserved.

I walked to the downtown library last Sunday and got out a bunch of poetry books, and now I’m very excited to read them all. So many books, so little time.



Recs

Consider volunteering with a youth organization, maybe specifically in mentorship. Mentors are so important to young adults, and it just requires having time and building relationships.


Don’t waste an hour of your life on YouTube (like the author did last night), but if you really want to you should be watching Brian David Gilbert or Lil Nas X’s new song “Panini” (which was way more catchy than it has any right to be).

There's been 4 days of school, I've taught 4 classes of creative writing, and only one of them has gone well. I know the learning curve is step but whew, I'm just trying to stay positive.

The Sunday before the first day I was hit with a wave of anxiety before I even got out of bed. I went to church and read more of my book and tried to keep my mind off of things, but this feeling of unprepared-ness lingered. Just who were these kids, and what did I think I could really teach them? Who did I think I was?

I mispronounced name after name on my attendance and only got through one activity that I had planned. The second day I went too far too fast, careening straight over my kids' heads. By talking about mentor texts academically, I lost them, and I lost a part of their trust. Wednesday was the worst—I got completely off track and my students just dissolved. I subbed for another teacher later in the day, and the students got so out of control that the behavior specialist had to stay in the room. When my boss asked if I wanted to debrief, I was feeling defeated.

But we talked through everything, and I got some actionable steps. I rewrote yet another lesson and finally got my students engaged in what I was presenting. I successfully pushed into other classrooms and helped to manage behavior. I was able to put my foot down, and students took me seriously.

Instead of getting down on myself about feeling exhausted after only teaching one class or beating myself up about not knowing where the heck to go after this (because I haven't done that at all...), I'm trying to see my role like a gift. I've already been able to see students in multiple classes throughout the day and get the one-on-one interactions to get to know them. In observing other teachers, I get to see the kind of tactics that work and the kind of tactics that do not and what I want to put in a classroom.

More importantly, I'm learning that I can relate to students who come from vastly different backgrounds from me and how they can teach me. They've already surprised me with their determination, their ability to stand up for themselves, and their genuine heart. They want to believe education can help them, but that has been proven to be a lie for them time and time again since they are African American. I just want to make sure I'm not getting in the way of that education, to let them learn in the ways that connect with them the most powerfully.

If you asked me how my first week of school was, I'd tell you it was exhausting and a bit demoralizing and made me question if I really know anything. But it was also a recognition that I love students and I would to better center my class on building strong overall community and strong one-on-one connections. We'll see how week 2 goes.

Tonight, I attended a choir concert to see some of my students in action. Even though I was in the nose bleeds (who knew so many people came out to watch middle schoolers?!), I spotted most of my students and grinned as they awkwardly sang and swayed to the music. I said hi to a number of them afterward, and you know I’m going to bring it up tomorrow.

I also attended a baseball game on Saturday, just for the heck of it. While I was only able to watch an hour, I was reminded of the lives of students that I now miss due to me being a teacher, stuck in a room. It was fun to see how they cheer each other one and where their passions lie.


For all the heavy emotions and grief on this blog, I also want to let you know that there are so many lights throughout my day. Sometimes I gripe about students, but other times I just have to laugh at their antics. Here’s a sampling:

One morning, I decided to ask students as they trickled in if they liked the weather. It was overcast, sprinkling a little bit like it had been for the last week or so, and I was expecting everyone to complain about it. One by one, they went, “Oh, I kind of like the rain.” They talked about the sound of it on roofs and going outside to run around in it. Suddenly, it clicked for me: they love the cloudy skies because it reflects their mood, driven by those little angsty hormones.

In the last class of the day, I was sitting at my table, prepping for whatever I was going to do while my mentor teacher taught. I looked up, and one student was just perched on the table, balancing on the balls of his feet. “****,” I said, “What are you doing?” He looked surprised and said, “Oh yeah, I just kind of do this.” For the next few days, he intentionally perched on the table and grinned at me.

Two students without fail will always talk to me when they pass me in the hallways. I know logically that it is because these two students will talk anyone’s ear off, but it still delights me when one of them says, “Hi Ms. Johnson!” and then launches into whatever they are thinking about that day.

There was one day where they were working on their spoken word poems, my major project, when a student asked, “What can you do in 10 seconds,” as she wanted to show the frequencies of the occurrence of her topic. I bounced it out to the rest of the class, “Hey guys, what can you do in 10 seconds?” “Hold your breath,” someone calls out. “Hold your breath!” I cry, delighted by the answer. Three of the boys in front of me gulp air and look at me puzzled, and then they said, “Oh, we thought you telling us to hold our breath!” I had to stop I was laughing so hard.

A few days ago, a student came up to me and said, “Can we start a spoken word club?” I said, “If you want to organize it and get people together, I’ll supervise.” fully expecting that there would be no way she would want to do that. “Okay,” she agreed and then motored off to collect attendees. When three other girls showed up in my room the next day, I was surprised to say the least. They didn’t really get anything done, but they did some writing and the “founder” shared a strong poem with me. They were laughing and being silly and fooling around, and I felt so privileged to be in the room with them.

One student who I don’t know super well was God in the Easter chapel. One of the homerooms always does this chapel with a skit and a song, and all the homeroom kids act in it. This particular student is laid back, doesn’t really go out of his way to do much, but a generally nice guy. He came out in a referee costume, lip-synced words, and honestly acted his heart out. A few days ago, I had some students help me out by making a video to send to a job application. Afterwards during class, this student looked at me and said, “Did you get the job?”

We just finished reading Romeo and Juliet, and my mentor and I had restructured the assessment a bit. I pulled up a chair next to a student so I could be ready to jump in. This student before class had asked me why there were so many old people in the parking lot outside our window (they were picking up flowers for a fundraiser). At some point during the class, he turns to me and whispers, “See? Old people.” as if I’m not a teacher and not going to call him out for not paying attention.

Early on in the year, I brought an android toy to school, and I used it as a talking piece in a restorative justice circle for homeroom. I came to the first class of the day and saw that some students had broken off one of its arms (I learned a valuable lesson—never bring anything you care about to school). A student in my homeroom saw the robot on my desk and said, “Oh, I can fix that for you. I’ll bring in some glue.” He did, but the glue didn’t hold. It’s the thought that counts.


There’s also the innumerable little things: other staff members who intentionally include me in conversation (because apparently I’m really bad at lunch table small talk), students who ask me if I’m teaching that day and seem excited when I say yes, the different quirks of middle schoolers, a couple pictures that students have drawn of me, students who stay after a particularly awful class just to say that they still think I’m great, and the list goes on.

Overall, I love that I can walk through school and have a semblance of a connection with each student. I’ve graded (for all except one) some work of theirs, so I know them through that, but I see them from day to day and hear about all the things they talk about: face timing and movies and Instagram, but also who likes who and sports and classmates. It’s so fun to know these students and for them to at least be comfortable around me. That idea, that I get to do this relationship building and talking about literature and writing, for a job seems like I won the lottery. Other days I remember the drags of grading and logistics and the energy it takes to reframe student situations so you can see a fuller picture and consistently delivering engaging content, but for right now I’m seeing the love.

Am I sad to leave? Not really, because no matter how connected I feel, I’m still a visitor in this school. I knew the day was coming. I’m kind of excited because I know that this ending brings me closer to a terrifyingly new beginning where I’m the one planting the seeds for communities and relationships. Other student teachers have said this to me, and I think I’m ready to echo it too: I’m ready to have my own classroom and start to implement these visions that have been rattling in my head.

We’re having confession time here, because it’s always confession time on this blog: I’ve been avoiding this space.

The month of April has been a difficult one for me. Work-wise, it hasn’t been too bad. I’ve been working through the poems I collected from my eighth graders (now I have collected them a month ago and still haven’t finished them… whoops) and mostly chilling in the back while my mentor teaches Romeo and Juliet. I had another awful class where 4 students didn’t listen, disrupting learning for the other 22 in the room, and that was frustrating and brought on some self-doubts. I haven’t had a ton of extra evening or weekend commitments.

April should have been pretty good. But in the first week of April, I decided to reconsider a job in Massachusetts that I had previously passed up on. By the last week of April, I decided against that job again. Between those two times, I bounced back and forth between the uncertainty in Grand Rapids and the security in Massachusetts. I prayed, I talked to my housemates, I asked for prayer requests, and I tried to join Creston CRC, which was ultimately the thing that made my housemates and I say, “If I’m trying to join a church, shouldn’t I be trying to stay here?”

I should be secure and content, knowing that God will provide for me a job in Grand Rapids somewhere. But let me just tell you, I spent the last four minutes searching charter school jobs in Grand Rapids because that’s one of the only fields that I haven’t tapped into yet. There have been two times when I’ve been driving home from my Tuesday night seminars—tired after a full day of school, three hours of class, heading to another hour or so of devotions, and frustrated with my situation—and God has shown me that he’s got me through a beautiful sunset or a song that spoke to me. Yet whenever I’m around my fellow student teachers who are getting jobs and becoming more secure in what they are doing next year, my self-doubts start to creep in. What if I’m just good at school and I can’t translate that into being a teacher? How am I going about the job search wrong? I thought I was doing decently at this, but no one is giving me a call back. What do I do?

I’d like to give a neat and tidy answer to those questions, but I’m still in the weeds you all. I’m still struggling to let God take control of this part of my life that I want to control so badly and that I feel like I am controlling somewhat—I do have to send in the applications, right? This job search is showing me a lot about how I value myself, which I thought was dictated by my own standards but turns out is dictated by others’ affirmation of me, and how I deal with uncertainty and fear. Maybe God’s been preparing me for this through studying Jesus & Peter walking on water through John Ortberg’s book If You Want to Walk on Water, You Have to Get Out of the Boat; maybe he’s been preparing me through conversations that I’ve had with my housemates about the spiritual disciplines; maybe he’s been preparing me for this through Mom’s death. All I know is it feels unfair to have worked this hard and have felt so passionate about the work I’m doing in education only to be roadblocked by my lack of experience and job searching skills.


I know it’ll all work out. I just want to tell that to the Alex who is hanging off the cliff, feeling her fingers getting slick, unable to look down and see the outcropping ten feet below.

I’ve been teaching full time-ish since March 5th, teaching the persuasive spoken word unit that I created and refined with my mentor’s help. And honestly? I’m so tired. I don't know how I’m going to do this day in day out next year.

I haven’t taught my whole unit completely on my own. My mentor taught the first lesson because I was away on a required Calvin conference, and then a week later I left again to go to the Cs. But it’s my baby which I’ve been nursing since early February when a student off-handedly said, “Do you do spoken word?” and I laid in bed later that night and thought, “No, but you all could.” My baby who has grown and morphed from a perfect planned square garden to a community patch that has grown over all the seed markers and turned into a beautiful and frightening jungle, and I the frazzled and harried coordinator who wishes she could schedule the sunshine and the rain.*


There have been so many positives. Students who haven’t liked me taking over have kept mostly to themselves about it, and I’ve gotten a few comments from students asking if I’ll teach at the school next year. I talked with a student at lunch about Marissa Meyer’s Renegades series (which I have a lot of thoughts about), and then the next day she picked up the conversation again as if a day hadn’t passed. I got to hear a couple student poems as they presented (voluntarily!) in front of their classmates, putting their words and their thoughts out there for all to see. The staff has been really inclusive with me, and my mentor teacher has been supportive when wanted and hands-off when needed. My observations with Calvin professors have been nothing but constructively positive. I’ve really started to feel like I can see myself as a teacher.

But the other half of my title, the “student” part, is giving me some trouble. Every week I feel like I’m situating myself more and more in the classroom, and then something will happen that makes everything seem to fall down around me. Missing three days and jumping back in with little idea of where the students are. Days where students blatantly decide that the work time I’m giving them is their own time to waste. Lessons that I can’t seem to go right. Students who are shut off from me and refuse my questions. Uncertainty in my status in the eyes of a parent or administrator. Classes where I feel simultaneously frustrated at being treated like a student and others acting like students and then not being able to answer the questions or ask the questions I want to ask.


Being a student is being self-centered, especially in college. I’ve been in that mindset and culture for the last three years, and I would argue I had that self-centeredness as far back as middle school. There is something to be said about a community of learners (which I did participate in and as a professional would like to strive towards), but in the capitalist ranking culture of the United States being a student means making choices that benefit your own learning first and foremost. But being a teacher? It requires a lot of selflessness to give every ounce of your energy and time (and I mean every ounce.) to students when in school and when at home too. I’ve realized that I’m constantly on to make decisions and look out for the interests of my students and the school culture rather than my own. If a teacher is selfish, that means they aren’t doing what’s best for the students because what’s best for the students requires a heck of a lot of work.


I’m in the hyphen of student-teacher—I’m bouncing between these poles of selfishness and selflessness. I spent all day serving students and talking to them and planning around them, but when I’m alone, I’m consumed with thoughts of how I can do better, can be better, can plan better, can communicate better. It’s been pointed out to me that even though I’m focusing on me, that focus is for the good of the students, but that doesn’t make me feel any less selfish when all I can think to talk about is “This lesson went really well! This student won’t stop talking. I have to grade 5 papers today or I’m going to be behind. I’ve got to go to bed or I won’t get my 8 hours in.” Maybe I’m being hard on myself or dramatic, but I’m struggling in owning my identity as a teacher when I’m just not one yet, no matter how desperately I want to be.

I know these decisions that exhaust me now will become easier. I’ll find the grooves for lesson planning and thinking on my feet and then will be able to focus more on tailoring ideas more specifically to students. I know I will learn how to teach; I just wish I wouldn’t have to dissect my heart before I can confidently give its pieces to someone else.

I have one recommendation for you (maybe I’ve learned how to conclude my thoughts and I don’t need this section anymore—huh): Zooniverse. It’s a website where you can do some simple(-ish) tasks and help real researchers complete their research. For me, it’s possibly the most dangerous thing on the Internet I’ve found because it allows me to complete tasks quickly, which makes me feel good, and I know it is actually helped someone get something done. I’m a fan of the “Decoding Punch Cards” (all about WWI YCMA volunteers—who knew??) and the “Etch a Cell” projects, but you should check out some more.

*My proofreading brain is screaming that this is a fragment, but I can’t bring myself to care.

I’m currently living in my nerdiest of fantasies where I’m a Ph.D. wielding professor at a small university who teaches composition, current education theory, and high schoolers on the side and who is unabashedly and unequivocally adored by my students. This small university is grateful enough for me to send me to the greatest of rhetorical composition conferences—the famed Conference on College Composition and Communication, or the 4Cs. I meet up with my professor friends, watching each other give presentations on research and theories that we are backing and oohing and ahhing over the celebrities in the field that we spot in the 15 minute passing periods. In my dream vision, the secondary education pedagogy dovetails with the rhetorical composition research to burst into a beautiful theory bird that threads its music throughout the sessions I attend.


In an attempt to normalize my life, late November last year I wrote up a proposal to present my research at a poster session at some conference I didn't know anything about. Now I’m at the 4 Cs with my blue lanyard, talking to other people who care about writing, introducing myself to scholars who I cited in my thesis, and walking around Pittsburgh like I own the place.

It’s probably the most explicitly social-justice-committed place I’ve ever been to, from signs on the bathrooms saying that everyone is welcome to beginning each session with a land acknowledgment (which means naming the indigenous people who live on the land where the conference is) and a no-punches-pulled keynote about how well-meaning white people perpetuate white supremacy even when they think they are giving students the right to their own language. My liberal heart is bursting, and the more mainstream part is a little taken aback by it all. It feels like a lot of performative gestures (Kristine, that one was for you) but as they say, ya gotta fake it til you make it.

———

After being in a Christian school and going to a Christian college, I was actually surprised when I didn’t hear, “Let’s open in a word of prayer” from the first speaker. I had forgotten that people usually just start going into their speeches and don’t offer that kind of acknowledgment. Obviously I’ve been to other places where not everyone is Christian, and I don’t expect everyone to pray before everything, but it jumped out to me a lot more than it hard before. I realized I missed it—that routine, that nod towards God—and started to see that I actually do find some value in opening prayers.

As my roommate (another undergrad poster presenter) and I walked past the Catholic church next to our hotel, she asked, “Are you super religious?” While I should have expected the question after telling her about giving social media up for Lent and going to a Christian college, I stammered around the question. I had a moment the day before where I walked outside of the convention center and looked over the river that it bordered, and all I could think was “I miss you God.” I couldn't really make sense of that. So am I super religious because I think about God and give things up for Lent? “I mean, maybe? I think I want to be, but I'm just not there yet,” I said, unsure if that hedging answer was enough to edge me out of the “religious fanatic” category in her mind.

I had an amazing time, weird religious interludes aside. I bonded with my thesis advisor Kristine on our drives between Grand Rapids and Pittsburgh, ate a lot of all-American (read: all-greasy) food, visited some classrooms themed after different nations in University of Pittsburgh’s Cathedral of Learning, took public transit in Pittsburgh (I swear I saw a bus on every street every time I was walking because the buses are so dang frequent), and reevaluated my stance on Andy Warhol so now I just think he’s a (pack rat) little overrated rather than completely overrated.

I loved being at 4 Cs because it prompted me to come up with all these new ideas of how I can leverage writing theory in the classroom (writing fellows! Incoming surveys about genre experiences! Making the purpose of the assignment clear!*), but more importantly, it furthered my growing sense of professionalism. Being surrounded by people who were teaching and relatively situated in their field and the little tendrils of student teaching that followed me to Pittsburgh—mostly in the form of frantic student emails and digital check-ins via Google Classroom—both make me feel like I’m being propelled closer and closer to a new era of life. Maybe that era will continue in more 4 Cs conferences; maybe not.

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.

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.

I’ve been thinking about writing a good amount lately. I read James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, and other than knocking me upside the head every page, it reminded me of his quote about making each sentence as clean as a bone.

I read the sam sax poem that I recommended two blog posts ago and gosh, it just made me realize that poems don’t need to be as contrived as I make them. Whenever I write poetry, I try to pack all the mystery of Shakespeare into the lines with convoluted phrasing. Take this poem that I wrote a few weeks ago:

Brain wave

I’m lying in my bed, ready to go to bed. It’s 6:45 pm. I’ve been up for only almost 13 hours.


When I had my student teaching interview with my potential mentor teacher, I asked him if I could stop by the classroom a couple times during the semester. He seemed taken aback and then quickly agreed. This conversation happened on November 7th, a mere five hours before [insert euphemism for death here]. While I wasn’t able to visit his classroom as many times as I would have liked to and I didn’t have as much time this semester as I was expecting to, I decided to spend a whole day of my exam week hanging out with middle schoolers. My finals are pretty chill, and I wanted a dry run of what my life will be next semester.

I left my house at 6:50am and using the Grand Rapids public transit system (and my own two feet), I made to the school around 7:50. I was immediately enswirled in the chaos of middle school, a welcome relief from the rising panic that blossomed in my chest the moment I saw the middle school sign and wondered, “Can I really see students who are analogous to the ones Mom taught?” I surprised my teacher, who had forgotten I had planned on coming in, and got right into watching teacher–student interactions and tasting the school culture.


After he introduced me to homeroom and I spent the bible period listening from the back, I was talking nitty-gritty citation details and conferencing with students about the themes of dystopian novels. My mentor says he threw me into the class because I basically get paid to conference with college students (one student misunderstood what he said and exclaimed, “You get paid to go to college?!” My dude, I wish), but a part of me wonders if he would have done it anyway. It was definitely a learning curve going from college students who willingly come in for half an hour to eighth graders forced to care about a topic and talk to me, a stranger, for five minutes. I mostly realized this when I tried to help jumpstart a student thinking about her topic of control in The Hunger Games by saying, “Well, you can talk about how the control on Katniss makes her grow,” and she gave me a blank stare. I circled back around to her later, and it was clear that everything I had said went over her head. Looks like I still got a ways to go, even with the part of teaching that I am the most prepared to do.

I sat in on a team meeting, which was my first real time behind the teacher curtain fully. In teacher prep classes, it is all about you and what you want to do. In reality, you got a district, a principal, a grade-level team, and a specialty team plus you, all of whom have certain ideas about what is feasible with students and what isn’t. They came up with a plan to better support and push their students who aren’t getting their homework in on time and occasionally bantered with each other. It was clear they genuinely enjoyed each other’s company.


When I started down Burton at 3:35 pm, I was already exhausted. I had emails to reply to, people to message, rides to figure out, and a podcast to boot. The day felt so long, being in the same space for hours on end, but it also felt so packed. I had forgotten what it feels like to be a part of a whirling ecosystem—the slamming lockers and the blurred voices that all seem to ride on the same frequency. I also had forgotten what it means to see yourself acting in ways that clash with your own philosophies; at times, it felt like I was reliving my own middle school days where the jagged edges between who I acted like and who I felt I was inside screeched against each other all too often.

My dad has been unearthing some cards that she kept, and a couple were from me from middle and high school. In one written for my high school graduation, I said, “I think you may be the only person who truly knows who I am.” I don’t think that’s true anymore, but I do think she is the one who knows me the most (one day I’ll transition to past tense, but that doesn’t feel right currently. Maybe it never will.).


In some ways, I think I’ll be teaching in two shades this semester: my mentor’s and my mother’s. Obviously my mentor’s students respect the heck out of him and learn effectively from him, and I’m not about to (severely) rock the boat and disrupt routines. Despite my eighth grade year being eight or so years ago and the clear shift in what is emphasized in the classroom, I am sure I will find her teaching ideas undergirding and undercutting my own plans.



This next semester was already going to be far from easy, and life has only doubled down, but strangely I’m feeling more hopeful and grounded than ever before. It’s like I’m about to take that first step on a hike that I know is hilly and confusingly marked, but I’ve purposefully left my compass and map in the car. I know I’ll get lost in the plains of Deerfield, NH for a day or two or sixty, but I also know there are other maps in those plains, in the streets of Grand Rapids, in the skies of my dreams, just waiting to be charted. I can’t find my own path when I’m tethered to the footsteps of my mom, and maybe it’s time for me to accept that having my mom’s face and mannerisms and carrying her torch of hopes does not mean I have to match her career.