Doing Better, Part 2

Last year I wrote about the inspiration I get from my kids to be better and try harder.  Lately I have been unusually overwhelmed by the amount of self-improvement I want to accomplish, and I've been really exhausted by the questions that won't stop asking themselves over and over again in my head.  Perhaps this is part of growing up, this constant nagging of oneself.  Perhaps this is one of the markers of adulthood - like having your own washer and dryer or hosting a big holiday at your house.

In the recent insomnia and chaos that wants to take over me, I've been thinking a lot more about improvements I want to make in my personal life.  Here are the top five things that I'm desperately interested in getting better at: {help!}

1. Letting go.  When things go wrong I grin and bear it and say things like "That's ok," or "No worries," or "I'm over it." Spoiler alert: I'm not over it.  I try to fool people that I am in order to decrease friction, maintain good relationships, and keep things moving along.  I even try to fool myself but it doesn't often work.  When some idiot driver nearly slams into me or a pedestrian walks right in front of my car in the middle of the street, for example, I get extremely angry.  I may not always scream and holler, and I may keep driving as if nothing's wrong, but I am fuming.  These commuter annoyances, like many of the things I struggle to let go of, are a daily occurrence.  So shouldn't I be able to just honk and move on with my life like every other New Yorker? (Ha!) My blood boils for several minutes as I fake being cool.  The "fake it till you make it" thing is not working, or at the very least the "make it" part is taking forever.  How do I learn how to chill out and let go for real? 
2. Organization.  At times my stuff seems to be everywhere.  Doesn't everyone need to be better at this?  
3. Sleeping.  I've always been a bad sleeper, but lately it's gotten progressively worse.  It seems to take me eons to fall asleep and/or go back to sleep.  How the heck do you get better Zs without medicating?  
4. Running.  I am the worst runner, possibly ever.  You know those ads and pictures you see of girls running?  Their hair is bouncing in a pretty ponytail, they look tall, determined,  and strong of mind and body?  Yeah, I don't look like that.  {I look like this.} What I do outside on the pavement cannot actually be considered running, so I don't know why I call it that.  Also, I hate running so I don't even know why I want to be better at it, but I do, and I think that relates directly to....
5. Being bad.  I don't mean coloring outside the lines or breaking the rules once in a while.  I mean genuinely sucking at something and doing it anyway.  For most of my life I have had an intuitively good sense of where my talents lie and where I am essentially useless.  Like most people (?), I don't generally relish doing something I'm awful at.  I don't mind trying, but if it's not going my way I'd rather move on and try something else.  Being a teacher has helped.  I tell my kids to persevere, to strive for growth instead of perfection, and that there is value in the struggle, value in old-fashioned elbow grease and hard work.  I have no choice but to model these philosophies in my professional life.  My kids have to learn, and if I'm no good at what they need me to do, I have to try to get better, and keep trying. But just doing it in my teacher life is no longer enough; I want to be the kind of person who is ok with failing every once in a while.  How do you aim for better while being ok with the fact that sometimes you're bad? 

Our school recently had a class competition where the grand prize was a fun field trip to do an indoor sports arena.  Earlier this week the kids from one of my classes were gathered around looking at the tally sheet for their class, pointing and smiling at their score.

"Look, Ms. Haskell, we're doing better!"
Another child shrugged and added, "We're not going to win, but we've gone up a lot lately." 

They were right - they didn't win.  Not even close.  But they were happy with improvement. They were happy to try.  So that afternoon when I got home, I begrudgingly laced up my sneakers and went outside for a "run."  Maybe this self-improvement game is part of growing up.  But people, it comes with some serious growing pains.  {And some minor shin splints.}  

Sweet

Yesterday colleagues and I took the kids to Lake Compounce, an amusement park sponsored by Pepsi where you can get free, unlimited soda all day with your admission.  Before letting them jump into the wave pool and scream on the roller coasters, I gathered my group and essentially begged them to please stay hydrated by limiting the soda intake and drinking water.  As I laid out my plea, the kids jokingly rolled their eyes at me and started finishing my sentences in chorus.  They have spent the year listening to my occasional tirades on the diabetes inducing "drinks" they sometimes insist on buying and bringing to school, namely those 99 cent Arizona "juices" and "iced teas."  (The quotes are truly necessary because few edible liquids on earth could be father from juice than the crap inside of those brown bottles and tall tin cans.) In some city neighborhoods, you can find even more horrifying substances bottled for kids to consume, called quarter juices. The labels lists no ingredients but water, food coloring, high-fructose corn syrup, and the occasional chemical.  GROSS.  Oh, and they only cost 25 cents, hence the nickname quarter juice.  Thankfully my kids don't drink those nasty things, but they're out there nonetheless, fostering sugar addiction in really young children.

This past week, our Mayor announced that he wants to ban all sugary drinks over 16 ounces within the city limits.  Arms are up.  (I love the way The Young Turks debate the issue here.) A few years ago, New York tried to put a tax on soda and other sugary drinks to create revenue and hopefully discourage the purchasing of such horrifying substances.  No dice, the legislation failed, but it revealed some scary, scary things about people in this country.  There was one commercial that was no doubt sponsored by coke or pepsi or some other drug-dealer posing as food-supplier.  It had a mom who was complaining about how "juice would be taxed too, not just soda."  There was another ad that declared "the pennies add up when you're trying to feed a family." It's clear: we Americans have no idea what we are putting into our bodies.  We don't bother to read labels, we accept advertisements as gospel, and we eat and drink thoughtlessly, with utter disregard to what our bodies need to function and thrive.  Anyone thinking big bottles of soda and other high-sugar drinks should be part of "feeding a family" need a serious and immediate wake-up call.  As a society, we are obsessively seeking convenience.  Our priorities are warped and illogical.  We choose a fancy car and a designer bag over a nice neighborhood and a complete meal.  For most of us, these stupid decisions to focus on material goods over quality of life are not made consciously, but they are made nonetheless and they affect the health of our bodies, minds, children, and economy.  Many people don't consider why things like soda and junk food are so cheap.  It boils down to a simple cliche: you get what you pay for.  If you are more concerned with the cost than the quality of food, you ought to expect to look and feel like crap for most of the hours of most of your days.  Unfortunately, we are so diluted by the pill-popping, convenience paradigm that we don't even realize how truly sick our society is.

When tobacco advertising was phased out we saw a similar uproar that was (unsurprisingly) spurred by and stirred by the tobacco companies themselves.  So is anyone shocked that people are reacting badly to Bloomberg's so-called soda ban?  Any critically thinking human can infer that these responses are fully pressed by the drug-dealers (food producers/providers).  If you're consciously making the straight-up dumb choice to drink soda all day, go forth and be sugared up.  However, as adults we have more to consider than just ourselves and our current state.  We are supposed to be caring for the future as well.  Do we want our children to be part of a productive, competitive, and healthy workforce or do we want them to be riddled with sickness for the rest of their lives?

If you are an adult I really don't care how you abuse your body - smoke, drink in excess, use drugs, eat crap, poison yourself in any way you see fit.  You are sapping our economy, wasting our oxygen, and contributing to raising healthcare costs, but I can let all that go.  What I cannot and will not get down with is exposing kids to any of this abusive behavior.  Our government protects kids from tobacco by disallowing the ads that clearly targeted them; we have a drinking and a smoking age to discourage young people from making stupid choices and discourage companies from turning kids into hosts for their parasitic profits.  Few such regulations exist for protecting our kids from food companies whose moral compass points to the same false North as that of Phillip Morris.

Throughout the day yesterday between asking me to hold their money, glasses, and towels, many of my kiddos ran up to me with big smiles on their faces and clear liquid in their cups. In a tone and inflection clearly designed to gently mock me, they giggled and shouted "look what I have," and "it's water, Ms. Haskell!"  Children should be exposed to information about what they're putting in their bodies and encouraged to make good decisions about eating and drinking.  Since they often are not exposed to such knowledge, someone has to take on the responsibility of keeping them from going into a diabetic coma before they turn eighteen. If that someone turns out to be Bloomberg or "bigger government," then fine, because I could really use the help.

Doing Better

Yesterday my kids took a quiz on integer operations, a topic I have never taught in-depth with sixth graders (it's a seventh grade topic).  The quiz wasn't easy, but the vast majority of the kids in both classes performed to the best of their ability, and many of them did 100% of the work correctly and completely.  When I handed back the quizzes today, the responses I got on both ends of the spectrum were exactly what I love to hear.

Can I come up at lunch and get extra problems? -G scored 70%
I can't believe I missed that negative sign! -T scored 90%
I'm getting better at this. -K scored 65%
Do you need help in after school this week? -B scored 100%

I met my goal.  I want to get an 80 next time. -C scored 75%

But there was one reaction that really got to me, more than all the others.  A student who throughout the year has been a challenge for me behaviorally and academically scoffed and shook his head at the thumbs up sign I gave him when I returned his 80% paper.  I gave him a look of confusion to which he replied, "I can do better."  Not so long ago, this student would be thrilled with a D, and sometimes perfectly content with an F on quizzes, tests, classwork, and homework assignments.  No more.  He examined his quiz meticulously and called me back over.

HERE!  This is mistake I shouldn't have made.  I forgot the rule that a negative divided by a negative is a positive.  I must have rushed through that question.

It's easy to blame everything wrong in our lives on external factors.  It's easy to avoid holding ourselves responsible and just blame something - or someone - else.  Does that mean it's hard to own up and step up?  I told him that since he used the same rule correctly on two other questions, he probably did rush through it, but now he'll remember to take his time, even when the question seems basic. He agreed and went back to work on designing story problems for multiplying a positive by a negative.  

Forty minutes later upon giving back the corrected quiz he repeated, "I can do better, Ms. Haskell.  I'm going to do better."  

Is it harder to solve a problem than it is to complain about it? Is it more difficult to maintain faith and resolve than it is to give up and despair?  My experience tells me that the good and bad options require the same amount of emotional energy, but one side of the coin leaves you inspired and hopeful while the other simply sucks the life out of you.  So is it hard to own up and step up?  No.  My kids can do it, and so will I.  I will be better too. 

The Reframe

Everyone has bad days at work, and lately I have had what I consider to be a disproportionate number of them.  The honeymoon period of the first months of school is over and I am unspririsingly entering the super-self-critical stage of the year.  It's freaking crunch time and there is too much to be done for me to waste my emotional energy on anything but the kids.

I have come to realize that the recent bad days have been merely a matter of maladjusted perspective.  My kids are awesome.  I should not care about anything else.  Yesterday I let a bad afternoon ruin my entire day, but nothing should have been able to discount the fact that earlier in the day my kids got their highest class averages yet on an exam, and that I had a significant number of kids master every standard I tested them on, including one girl who told me during advisory that this year so far has made her "love math so much."  I've reworked my mindset and I'm ready to let go of the nonsense.  I do love my job 99% of the time, and the 1% can pretty much just go to hell.

Teachers

There are way too many teachers out there who need to find a new line of work.  Not because they are still developing their skills or still learning how to be good instructional leaders, but because their desire for a paycheck, an airtight union contract, and a 3pm end of day outweighs their concern for the individuals sitting in front of them day in and day out.  These teachers (you know, the ones who care more about themselves than the future of our country) are a great departure from the ones that I remember growing up.  In the hopes that more of the good ones would join the profession, I'm going to throw out into the blogosphere/universe the names of some of MY most amazing teachers.  


Dodge, Gale, Solan, Reynolds, Levy.  If you've had them, you likely remember them and are grateful for their brief presence in your childhood.  Someone get more of them to come teach.  Now.  


A note to clarify: these individuals did not impact my life because they were excellent pedagogues.  They were excellent pedagogues, of course, but that's not why I remember them 5, 10, and 15 years later.  I don't remember how Mrs. Dodge taught me to be a better reader, but I remember listening to her read The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe while sitting on the carpet, enthralled, and how Dodge city (our class token economy) was like the coolest thing ever.  I can't recall the structure of Ms. Solan's lessons, or the notes she gave us, but I definitely remember enjoying math more than I ever had before, and I remember getting a 98 on the regents after getting a 72 the year before (no secret that the teacher is the key).  There probably wasn't anything terribly remarkable about the textbook we used in Ms. Levy's class, or the way she assigned our homework, but the short time out of class that she sometimes took to do trivia or incite my impersonations of other, less admired staff members (SHAPIRO) - those were the remarkable things about school; the moments we laughed together as a class and sat on the edge of our seats and believed we could be really really smart.  These moments may not fall under the act of teaching, but they are a big part of what it means to be a good teacher.  It's a hard thing to remember in the current climate of high-stakes standardized testing, tenure debates, and drastic budget cuts that threaten our livelihood, but that's what it comes down to.  


And so, the bottom line comes from a David Brooks early January New Yorker article: "We’ve spent a generation trying to reorganize schools to make them better, but the truth is that people learn from the people they love."


End. of. story.