I love my teacher summer and I never want it to end.
There is still plenty of summer left, but the return half of the journey always feels shorter than the way out, innit?
Last night I had an absurdly blatant anxiety dream in which I reported back for work at the end of August to find that the department head had “remodeled” my classroom while I was away. The remodeling involved building a wall that reduced the room’s size by half, as well as turning it from a room with a nice window into a windowless room. Then she announced that the courses I would be teaching were different from the ones I’d been expecting. I spent the second act of the dream trying to let her know how upsetting this all was, but tactfully, so as not to ruin our working relationship.
Right before bed I’d finished rereading “Bartleby, the Scrivener”—not the input you want if wholesome work dreams are what you desire. But also, this is the week of summer when I told myself I’d put school stuff back into the mix.
The halftime report: summer is great, and I’m doing all the things I said I would. Naturally they don’t all feel as intense and definitive as I hoped/imagined: at 45, I can recognize that particular lacuna as part and parcel of being me. But they’re all there, they really are.
I am exercising, I am reading. I am home improvement-ing, but not to an obsessive degree. I am getting back to writing. I am parenting—summer parenting is THE BEST. The kids are happier, the pressure is off for all of us. We’re having our yearly monthlong love affair with a family that lives nearby; we’ve been friends since the kids were in daycare but they go to different schools now and so it’s only June/July when our schedules align. We walk to camp together on camp mornings, we meet up at the pool for swim practice, the girls ask to have a sleepover or beg me to make pizza for everyone, and sometimes I say yes.
I’m officially divorced, with the janky piece of Baltimore City stationery to prove it, and though it feels nihilistic to claim an act of negation as a positive achievement, it’s something I worked toward for a long time. (And I mean that literally. We didn’t have a lawyer. We didn’t even have a mediator. I wanted one, but my ex didn’t. So I was the one who navigated “the system.” Becoming legally divorced isn’t rocket science, but it’s not exactly a “go to a website, click a button” kind of thing either. I hope that I will always remember standing in front of the window in the family law room at the courthouse with my stack of forms last winter, and having the clerk at that window ask me, “Are you one of the parties? Or are you a lawyer?” One of the parties, I said. “Oh, just checking,” she said. “You present like a lawyer.” I felt so weirdly proud of myself in that moment.)
At the beginning of June, I threw a birthday party for my daughter—eight!—and later in the month, I threw one for myself. I spend a lot of time at our local “community” pool. Private swim clubs in Baltimore have a whole ugly history behind them, and the article linked here actually fingers my local pool by name.
While it cannot be a source of pride, this would be an unfaithful chronicle if I didn’t admit that the pool is a tremendous source of pleasure. It is a twelve-minute walk from my home—far enough that I drive when it’s me and the kids and all our gear, but close enough that I walk when I’m solo. The facility is small and the non-pool areas grassy: it all resembles someone else’s deluxe suburban lawn. The staff are mostly teenagers, and the whole place is run with a balance between casualness and order that seems to resonate in some deeply right way with me. The same people are always there, more or less. You meet your kids’ friends’ parents. Families bring picnic dinners. Your kids run around freely but, now that they can swim, there isn’t much for you to worry about. So you relax. You melt into the spandex herd.
Yesterday evening I went to the pool and I sat on a lounger and read a book. My kids are at their dad’s—in fact, this is my last kidfree stretch until the end of the month. I suppose it’s not just single parents who can relate to the feeling of missing your children and exulting in your solitude simultaneously. I do miss them, and it is comforting if a little uncanny to look up at the end of a page and find myself surrounded by other people’s children. For a moment, it’s nice to have the ability to just observe kids (because they don’t need my tending right now). They’re adorable. The way they wear their swimsuits. Their sweetly defective senses of time.
The book I was reading (180 Days, by Penny Kittle and Kelly Gallagher) is about teaching ninth grade English, written by some teachers who have a particular way of going about it. I am thinking about the first lessons I’ll teach this year to the ninth grade, though I’m trying not to be too swayed by radical ideas, or at least not till I fully digest them. There’s nothing worse than committing to some gimmick and then realizing it’s not your gimmick.
I haven’t done that much school work yet, though I am determined to set myself up a bit better for the year, and especially the first month of the year, than I did last time. I looked at my AP class and it’s mostly solid. Ninth grade, as always, there are more question marks; I swear it’s the most rigorous discipline of them all. I like that AP Lit has the exam to prepare for, and they have to get the flavor of a college English class; I find that I can provide both of those things.
The question of what a ninth grader needs feels much more wide open and uncertain. I’m glad I’m not a high school freshman in 2024, but whether that nugget provides any guidance on how to teach a class to them, I’m not too sure. I’ll be honest: I feel a greater burden of responsibility toward the ninth graders. With the students in AP (all seniors), I feel like, OK, you came here for a taste of this specialized thing, and I can give it to you, and you can see how you like it. With the ninth graders, it is more . . . it is more like very much wanting to get a butterfly to land on your outstretched hand.
At home, I recently cleaned out my shed—a big task two years in the making—and I discovered a couple boxes of papers of mine from high school. These were journals and notebooks, letters, ephemera, zines I wrote, and also a fair amount of schoolwork. I was happy to see the schoolwork, and I would like to get it out later this summer for an even closer look. I have a newfound interest of what kids in the olden days were asked to produce, what length and quality they turned out, etc.
For now I’ll just say that it was incredibly nostalgic to be transported back to H-B Woodlawn. This is no place for an overview of my magical 6th-12th grade experience, though that’s something I have been meaning to write now for a while. But it was a potent blast from the past to find pages marked up with Elly Kluge’s and Judy Mayeux’s handwriting. I took history from Elly for three years—yes, we called our teachers by their first names—and creative writing from Judy probably as many times, and both of them had distinct handwritings that are etched into my brain.
It’s time to be wrapping this up, so let me conclude that as I digested 180 Days, which is very much about grooviness, juiciness, choice, joy in the reading and writing processes, etc., it did strike me that what its authors are preaching is very much like what Judy supplied in her creative writing class, which was so formative for me.
In that elective course she wasn’t bound by any need to be “academic,” as traditional English classes are. And she did all the moves. We kept notebooks. We “read like writers”; she would give us short readings (usually poems) and then have us imitate the craft in them. She gave us interesting prompts, and we wrote what we felt like, and thereby we developed our voices. I say “we”: I have no idea what lasting effect this class had on anyone else who took it. But I feel that it put something in me, for better or worse, that has persisted all my life.
It’s not that I disliked the analytical writing assignments in other classes. But it was in Judy’s class that writing came to fascinate me in itself, and came to feel like something I could potentially consider mine. Judy, as the authors of 180 Days recommend, offered extensive feedback and “assessment” without grades as such. She was so good and so generous with the feedback! She made us these comb-bound notebooks filled with provocative questions and statements, and we would write things—in response or not—and she would read and return them with brief comments on sticky notes, and then the process would repeat; she placed us into conversation, via written words, in a way that transcended the one-direction, “you write, I grade” formula of traditional coursework. She took the time to make us feel as if she cared about what we had to say.
The exclusively creative method isn’t one I can employ in ninth grade English, where I have other mandates. But I can attest that it was powerful, at least for this girl, and it does make me think.
In closing, while I wallow in the John Cheeveresque pleasures of neighborhood pool life, the climate emergency deepens and the wheels are falling off of politics. It is hard to know what to say or do about that, beyond continuing to make modest tax-deductible donations to some organizations that I believe in. I acknowledge that I live a pretty nice life and will likely continue to do so “no matter what happens,” at least until the climate apocalypse arrives. Still, it’s hard not to view, at times, my every thought and activity through the lens of some future person who will find it all suicidally trivial in light of the harsh realities of the sixth AI Trump administration, or whatever. Why weren’t you doing something to prevent all this?, Future Person hisses at me.
At our last PD event at the end of the year, the faculty of my school were visited by a thoughtful presenter who talked about engaging civilly across political divides. Among the faculty and administrators, I’ve observed that we take an old-fashioned, “don’t talk about religion or politics” type of approach with each other. This has its merits, but it trickles down to classroom culture and can have the effect of making teaching and learning feel irrelevant, cut off from the issues of the day. In a school of all girls, for example, I’m not sure I’ve said the word “feminism” aloud in my classroom even once. That must be an exaggeration, but it points to a functional reality. A reality that grows more dissatisfying in proportion to how high and pressing the stakes of public life become.
It is not my job, or my place, to tell my students what to believe. But in the spirit of Judy, I would like to commit—this year!—to finding ways to create space for them to pause and consider what it is they see in their world, and how it makes them feel.
That sounds so nice, right? But I predict that getting it done in fall 2024 will be a wild ride. I also doubt it would wholly satisfy the demands of Future Person, so that’s another conundrum we’ll have to save for another day.
“I would prefer not” became a valuable part of my vocabulary while I figured out a balance between that and what MUST be done, preferences be damned. A good read as always. There’s plenty of summer left, and kids/swimming is a great way to do it. Though we’re sticking to McCarren and not swimming our way from one neighbor’s pool to another as in that Cheever story. What was it called? “A&P”?
I know others who would love to read what you wrote about Judy Mayeux. What is the best way to share?