Teacher Corner - Growing Up in Santa Cruz

Teacher’s Desk

growingupsc — Mon, 28 Feb 2022 17:41:27 +0000

Roots and Wings By Lisa Catterall Children make your life important. — Erma Bombeck I’m staring at a dresser covered with dirty glasses. They have rings of dried and yellowed milk, encrusted smoothie droplets, and they are sitting on top of a stack of plates, some with pizza crusts hanging out. All that goes through my mind this time is a meme my best friend sent me. It said “If you don’t like their messy room, wait until their room is empty…” My best friend has always been one academic year ahead of me in the parenting game, from the time our kids met at age nine months (mine) and 18 months (hers). Now mine is a senior who just got into college and hers is away at his first year of college. I feel so many different emotions right now. It’s like I’m baking banana bread and I’ve thrown all the ingredients in, and the mixer is just starting to churn different things to the surface. My feelings are in the bowl of my stomach, and sometimes what surfaces is sugar, sometimes it’s salt, and sometimes it’s rotten bananas. I used to teach seniors. About this time of year, I’d start to get really miffed about how unfocused they were on my awesome curriculum. Here they were, as capable as they would ever be in my hands, and they just didn’t seem to be doing anything. Now I have a view from the other side, and I know that they are doing so very much. Everything they have known and depended on seems to be quickly approaching a cliff. There is an end date to their friendships which are the most important thing in the world for them. They are trying to detach, yet trying to fully inhabit all the days they have left with those friends. They want every ritual and rite of passage to its utmost, they need to know that they are experiencing the best of every event they’ve been expecting, but sometimes they are too scared about their world changing to be present when those rituals are happening. At the same time, they are wondering if they will get into college, or into their favorite college, and they often think this is the balancing point of their entire future. This year in particular, they are scared about succeeding because they feel a learning gap from the pandemic, and they wonder if everyone else does too. Meanwhile, their parents are grieving. It is not named as such in our society, so parents don’t know to approach it that way. We are expecting to feel triumphant and proud to have shepherded this human from birth through all of these accomplishments that occur this year, and most certainly, that is how we will appear on social media:. so proud and happy about my newly minted grown-up! Hello world, behold the beauty and accomplishment! Inside, though, grief makes us do funny things. We cling too tight to our seniors or we brush them off too quickly. In my case, I suddenly freeze and become utterly incapable of doing anything simple like packing a lunch, then alternately move into constant unnecessary motion and find myself doing way too much, as if to make up for everything I wish I’d done. As my senior was taking a bow in his very last high school play, I had a Hollywood-style flashback of so many moments in his life, the most memorable of which was holding him one minute after he was born. I want him to stay my baby forever, but I also want him to seize his future. In the 940 Saturdays that happen between birth and leaving for college, did I take every chance to lean into the privilege of being part of his life? There are 25 left now. How will I make sure those are all perfect? These are the ridiculous questions that go through my mind. The truth is it’s all been perfect, and it will all continue to be perfect. My child has roots that grew into wings this year. It’s humbling, shocking, frightening, gratifying and beautiful, all at the same time. Lisa Catterall teaches STEAM, math, science, and art at Mount Madonna School and is a senior associate of the Centers for Research on Creativity. She lectures and trains teachers and administrators on innovation in education in Beijing, China. Lisa has five children and lives in Santa Cruz County. Read More Parenting Articles

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Unusual Bliss

growingupsc — Sun, 01 Mar 2020 08:00:00 +0000

Unusual Bliss BY LISA CATTERAL If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. -Joseph Campbell This month I am about to experience my first math competition with a student. This one student will become our school’s inaugural competitive math team. I’m very excited about this. In college, I took a two-week seminar on photography. Suddenly, all I could think about was spending time in the darkroom. It wasn’t even a class; it was just something I found on a flyer at the bookstore. But it carried me away to something akin to bliss. I remember the teacher saying, “You seem to spend all your time here in the darkroom. Maybe this is something you should do for a career.” I’d never considered it, and I was afraid of the idea. I thought the teacher should be saying something more like, “You have a gift for this.” Or, “You have the top grade in this class.” Therefore, it should be my career. Not simply, “I can see that you really love this.” I hope my students today, and their parents, are not afraid of bliss. This fall, our math department met to discuss the latest research on teaching math. I learned that rather than assigning high numbers of repetitive problems for homework, I should assign just a few problems that allow my kids to really think and stretch themselves. This sounded risky; those are not the types of problems kids can usually get help from their parents on, and I was afraid of really stressing them out. But it turned out to be the best possible practice; now we have a math team! Early on, I assigned a problem so challenging I wasn’t entirely sure how to complete it when I first read it. I told the students to simply come up with ideas at home for possible approaches, and we’d solve it as a team. One student became so intrigued that he spent lunch, study hall, and apparently the whole weekend trying to crack it. He got the entire math staff involved. I felt like we were all in a math movie. Then he solved it. That’s when we discovered the Stanford Math Tournament. It seemed like a way for the student to have a goal besides a grade. Watching a student find something they love is a joy. I’m fortunate to see that happen often during my school year, although kids who actually love math are rare. I’ve had many students who are good at math and like it, and many who are high achievers in the interest of another goal. But real love, the kind that draws kids away from video games and other distractions, the kind that keeps them working through lunch, is rare. Math seems to get a poor reputation in our culture. I can’t wait to see this student in a room of 250 students who share his enjoyment of math! At least I hope they do. In the last few weeks I read that expensive academies exist to train students not only for the competition, but to earn a spot on their schools’ team for the competition. So, I wonder if the other competitors have found bliss or whether they have other reasons to be there. And I wonder, if math as a subject was freed from its reputation of being difficult and nerdy, would the competition be 10 times larger?

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When They Melt Your Heart: Teacher’s Desk September 2019

growingupsc — Sun, 01 Sep 2019 12:20:13 +0000

When They Melt Your Heart Teacher’s Desk: September 2019 By Lisa Catterall We were scared, but our fear was not as strong as our courage. – Malala Yousafzai Surely we digress. We were working very hard, painstakingly going over every single detail of a test the entire class failed. When this happens, it’s time to try again. We had spent a class and a half going through every problem asking every possible question, with me explaining it every possible way. It turns out, this is a really good way to build trust. No one had anything in the gradebook for this test, basically, it was heading for the garbage and it was time for a do-over. Students understand, when you take the time to loop back around and re-do something, that you actually care that they learn it. With 10 minutes left in the class, they suddenly got distracted and seemed to need an attitude break. They started talking about who was coming back next year to teach and learn at our school. I took a deep breath and went ahead and shared my feelings with them about the things they were talking about. I shared my deep passion for our school and for the opportunities they were being offered, about ways I could see the institution growing, and about how important it all was for me. I may have shed a tear, I’m not sure. Usually digressions like this are to be avoided; part of a teachers’ job is to simply rein in the conversations and keep the class on track. Every single day teachers come to work, trying to find new ways to have kids understand the problems they will face. But more than anything else, we try to empower kids to solve those problems. Photo Credit: Kevin Painchaud At that time, the exhaustion and frustration about spending so much time learning things that are really difficult, and the passion the kids seemed to need to release, moved me. Later in the day, I saw the students again for a class on another topic. It was almost time to go home, and I didn’t realize it, but they started to test me a little bit. A swear word slipped out. I calmly reminded the student not to use that language in a classroom. We had just finished a documentary and they asked if they could share a video with me in the last five minutes. They started it. There was a swear word, so I stopped it. Then they let the truth spill out. There was a music video “going viral,” and they were so passionate about it, and it meant so much to them, but they really, really wanted to share it with me. They were not sure they could because there were some “inappropriate” things in it. Suddenly it dawned on me that without knowing it, these high school students were asking for adult guidance. Adults are always shutting down teenagers who raise taboo subjects. I thought about what the consequences might be if I allowed something in a classroom that might not be appropriate, and weighed the insight that the kids really needed a grown-up opinion and might not have anyone else they trusted to share this with. “OK, but I might have to turn it off if it’s too far out there.” Seven minutes later, just after school ended, we were still in the room and I was definitely crying. The video was all about saving the planet. A rapper had gathered 20 of the most beloved singers and celebrities of this generation, some wonderful animation artists, and created a video about loving the earth and reversing climate change. There were several taboo moments with split-second flights into topics I would not delve into without parents’ knowledge, and there were a few swear words. But what the kids were holding so dear was the fun and lighthearted spirit of it, the gathering of so many powerful artists, and truly, the message. Kids are scared of climate change, and terrified of their leaders doing nothing. I remember having nightmares about nuclear war growing up in the eighties; it was a terrifying and real threat then. We should never forget that our young people and children are just as scared as we were. Educators have really emphasized climate change and it is part of the Next Generation Science Standards. Whenever I teach a lesson on climate change that sinks in, the horrifying end of the lesson is always, “but will it stop?” and the awful answer is “I don’t know.” This rap video ended on the same note, but really emphasized the potential to make a change and to make the world a better place. And it was fun, and cute, and full of little ways to rebel against the adult world, which to young people, seems to be utterly failing them. “This finally says all this stuff in a fun way,” explained one student. “Yeah, and it’s hopeful. It’s totally going viral. EVERYONE is watching it.” “Yeah but I saw someone watching it while they were using a disposable straw. HYPOCRITE!” Everyone laughed. For as long as schools have existed, educators have been planting seeds, hoping to make a difference. When the world takes a turn for the worse in some way, we question what we might have done to teach people better, or what the system might have done to serve our country better. Every single day teachers come to work, trying to find new ways to have kids understand the problems they will face. But more than anything else, we try to empower kids to solve those problems. When the kids showed me that video, it was like the teaching of science and involvement and empowerment was finally coming back around to face me. They cared so much they took a risk and shared it with me. Thirteen years of planting seeds had grown into a tree that was bearing fruit. It was personal to me, and powerful. And, like everything worthwhile that is produced from the life of a teacher, it all began with trust, and the freedom to teach. Some material and subjects, taken completely out of context, can be risky. Thank goodness most teachers feel that the risks of the profession are worth the reward of developing meaningful conversations and guiding students to become thoughtful and engaged citizens. Lisa Catterall teaches STEAM, math, science, and art at Mount Madonna School. She has authored curriculum frameworks for California and Kentucky on arts education as a senior associate of the Centers for Research on Creativity. She is a former Middle School Director and the founder of a STEAM engineering program. After spending 14 years in biotechnology, she began her teaching career as a middle school math teacher in her mid-thirties. Lisa has five children and has lived in Santa Cruz County for most of her life.

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Potential and the Value of Sitting on the Bench

growingupsc — Sun, 02 Jun 2019 00:00:48 +0000

Potential and the Value of Sitting on the Bench By Lisa Catterall I would never have thought I was capable of sitting on the bench as the number two man. And it showed me that you can really achieve everything in life, even the unthinkable, as long as you’re willing to work on yourself a little bit. – Oliver Kahn Some of my students were particularly distraught today because a friend of theirs quit a varsity sports team after one of the biggest games of the season. There was a speculative consensus that this students’ reaction was because they felt slighted by the coach for being on the bench too much during that important game. I asked my students why they were upset about this. They said they lost a friend for their practices, and they lost momentum, and they were not sure if they should take sides, and they were fuzzy on what happened and whether there were even sides to take. They loved this team-mate and wanted them to stay for all of high school; they needed this person as a player and friend. The conversation took a deeper turn as they pondered what would have driven their friend to do something that seemed so drastic to them, after all, this student had been playing this sport throughout their life. We talked about happiness, and one student wondered, “Is being the star of the team really what makes you happy?” Too often our culture drives people to make decisions that create the opposite of happiness. Sometimes, from a teachers’ perspective, we watch our students and their families pour so much energy into pursuits that appear to lead directly away from happiness. When we watch parents pushing their students in directions that don’t seem to fit or to allow the student to follow their bliss, we see lost potential. Back in our classroom discussion, which occurred as we worked on an architecture project for my geometry class, I had a rare moment of allowing myself to dole out my personal perspective. I prefer asking questions and listening until students make a realization they need to make in the moment. “Happiness doesn’t come from anything you achieve by yourself, it comes from being absorbed completely into something bigger than yourself.” The happiest day of my life was my thirty-fifth birthday. I was at our sister school in Nigeria, working hard in the heat, installing computers and having dialogues and conversations with teachers about how to handle discipline by counseling not corporal punishment (it was later the first school in West Africa to ban corporal punishment). It was hot and dusty, there was no plumbing, and it was very hard work, but I was very passionate about it. I got a message at about four o’clock from my father, wishing me a happy birthday, and I realized I was so involved in the work that I had no idea whatsoever that it was my birthday. I was truly, deeply, happy and satisfied all day. I was lost in something greater than myself. I learned, then, what really makes me happy. I told the students this story, and they surprised me by enthusiastically agreeing. Yes, being involved in something that is not just you is what makes you feel really happy. They brought up theatre and some of the volunteer work they had done as some of their happiest times. So, is school in its current state an inherently unhappy pursuit? Is working through academics in a system designed to foster competition between individuals for every test, every project, and every score unhappy? It seems isolating whether you succeed, fail, or can’t seem to find your place in the middle, because wherever you fit it tends to be about the race to stand out as an individual. I’ve noticed, though, that the one standing out is just as unhappy as everyone else. Creativity and learning are human nature, both of them should produce happiness, as should being involved in a classroom community. One of my mentors, who also was the mother of a son who found a very traditional version of success at Stanford and beyond, told me she spent all of high school traveling around watching him sit on the bench at sports games. “Best money I ever spent, best time I ever spent. That kid learned how to have a good attitude. He learned how to be humble and support a team effort. Everything you need to impress people.” I remembered a soccer tournament with my own son. A coach for another team was yelling angrily at his players, who were eight. We all spewed vitriol at the man from our seats, and I said, “Yeah, I mean, it’s not like they’re heading for the Olympics later in life.” You could have heard a pin drop. I swear I had ESP for a moment, or maybe just read the expressions of the parents around me too accurately. The thought bubbles floated over their heads. “But my kid is.” “What? Why am I paying for this? Of course junior can go to the Olympics.” “Mine will at least get a scholarship later in life, right?” As teachers, we have the privilege of understanding the value of activities that develop kids in multiple ways. I kept my mouth shut after that. When I look back on thirteen years of kids flowing through my classes, the kids who were on the bench were certainly the most successful. I can easily remember all of the big stars of the teams, and to say it went to their heads a little and made them less likely to tow the line in math class would be an understatement. What did they need with math class? They were stars. Did they play in college? Almost never. Did they need math in college? Absolutely. So parents, don’t worry about your bench warmer. A very wise ex-principal came to talk to us one day. She said to us, “The truth is, most children are average; that is the nature of average. Very few parents believe their children are average.” We all laughed. But really we secretly did not agree with her. In honesty, we teach because we believe that every single student has a gift the world needs, and in the course of our lives, the best moments are when we have the honor of discovering that gift. Most teachers, and all of the coaches I know, are looking, and watching, and hoping, and waiting to find those gifts. When you find one, it’s a great day. When you have to let people know there isn’t one where they thought there was, by having a kid sit on the bench or sharing a bad grade on a math test, it’s not such a good day. Whatever happens, we always hope they don’t quit. Lisa Catterall teaches STEAM, math, science, and art at Mount Madonna School. She has authored curriculum frameworks for California and Kentucky on arts education as a senior associate of the Centers for Research on Creativity. She is a former Middle School Director and the founder of a STEAM engineering program. She lectures and trains teachers and administrators on innovation in education in Chaoyang District’s foreign experts program in Beijing, China. After spending 14 years in biotechnology, she began her teaching career as a middle school math teacher in her mid-thirties. Lisa has five children and has lived in Santa Cruz County for most of her life.

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On the Best Day a Teacher Can Have…Behind the Desk May 2019

growingupsc — Wed, 01 May 2019 18:19:35 +0000

On the Best Day a Teacher Can Have… Behind the Desk May 2019 By Lisa Catterall True teachers are those who use themselves as bridges over which they invite their students to cross; then, having facilitated their crossing, joyfully collapse, encouraging them to create their own. – Nikos Kazantzakis I have a funny tradition in my science class. Each year, when we get to organic chemistry, I introduce the topic in a half-hour long discussion. For the last five minutes of class, I give the kids exactly sixty seconds to come up with a structure for the chemical C6H6. If a student can do it, they do not have to take the final. In 11 years, I’ve had two students succeed at this ridiculous challenge. One was eight years ago, and the second was this week. I figure, if a student can comprehend that much organic chemistry in one lesson, they probably don’t need my final exam to cement their learning. Luckily, success is so rare that the word has not gotten out; so far I’ve never had kids arrive at my doorstep secretly prepared. I suppose I will have to stop the tradition after this blog… The funny thing about the lesson this week was that the class is ninth graders who skipped chemistry entirely in middle school in favor of an environmental contest. They did not know what an electron was until that moment, in any scientific way. The lesson began much farther back conceptually than it normally does. Despite this, not only did one student rise to the “impossible” challenge I posed, but most of the class also scared me by coming dangerously close. Floored, I spent some time reflecting on what makes a lesson really work for kids. What was different about whatever was happening in the room that day, and how can it happen more often? Weeks before, I began the semester with these kids as I always do. I try to answer the two biggest questions every student has when they meet a teacher: Do you care about me? And… What do I need to do in this class? I think, when learning is humming at the highest possible pitch, it’s because those two questions have been answered. They’ve been answered thoroughly, resoundingly well. More importantly, the students know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the answer to the first question is “yes.” My first principal and teaching mentor died last night after a short battle with cancer. The most brilliant aspect of her mentorship was her support for teachers building relationships with their students. She mentioned the importance of relationship quite often, but better yet, she extended her influence like a concrete tunnel surrounding the airspace of “relationship time.” She was a solid and uncompromising barrier between critics and a teachers’ freedom to use school time to bond with their students. This might seem like an obvious use of time for elementary school teachers, but it can be dicey in high school when too much content is required in too little time. Back to my humming organic chemistry lesson. This class is a small group of twelve students, and I’ve known more than half of them since kindergarten. My son happens to be in the class, which means I’ve known them as a mother. Many individual students have cried on my shoulder over the years. The level of trust in the room is very unusual between teachers and students. What does that mean for replicating the environment that gave them the freedom to learn so much so fast? I can’t have my own child in every class I teach, after all. When I look at what was going on in the room, I remember the students who did not understand the concept popping off question after question, using all kinds of strange language and references, but because I knew them, I just rode the funny twists of their thinking with complete trust, even feeding the ideas back in their own metaphors. “OK, so, Hydrogen only wants two electrons and Carbon wants eight, so Carbon is like the super extroverted party friend and hydrogen is a weirdo with no friends and just hangs around by itself at the coffee shop.” Actually the student used some terms I don’t care to repeat when she made this analogy. With a class of teenagers I don’t know, or with a class being taught in front of an adult observer, it would have been time to pause and talk about appropriate language. Because these were my kids, we rolled with it and even expanded on it. “I still don’t get it.” This statement was popped off without a raised hand, 10 or 11 times. They were quickly challenging me to find completely new ways to explain the lesson. In any other class, would that student have trusted me enough to admit over and over that they just couldn’t get it? One reason my first principal was steadfast in her support of the teacherstudent bond was that she was drawn to education by the possibility that loving and understanding your students was the most important ingredient in successful teaching. I think this week, my students managed to prove it to me. Lisa Catterall teaches STEAM, math, science, and art at Mount Madonna School. She has authored curriculum frameworks for California and Kentucky on arts education as a senior associate of the Centers for Research on Creativity. She is a former Middle School Director and the founder of a STEAM engineering program. She lectures and trains teachers and administrators on innovation in education in Chaoyang District’s foreign experts program in Beijing, China. After spending 14 years in biotechnology, she began her teaching career as a middle school math teacher in her mid-thirties. Lisa has five children and has lived in Santa Cruz County for most of her life.

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Observing a Digital Day: Behind the Desk

growingupsc — Mon, 01 Apr 2019 13:10:41 +0000

Observing a Digital Day: Behind the Desk By Lisa Catterall I never teach my pupils, I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn. Albert Einstein Recently my family was snowed in at a lodge in Tahoe. The roads were closed, and the news declared that students in their district would not take a snow day, they would observe a “Digital Day.” Any time I use something with an electronic screen in my classroom, the students practically wriggle with joy. It’s like they have been wrapped in a warm blanket, plopped on the couch with a cup of hot chocolate, and given a foot rub. It’s an audible sigh of psychic relief; Finally, We Are Comfortable! In fact, this year, I’ve discovered so many new features on the web that I believe I could probably carry off a “digital day” in my classes. The kids might learn more of the curriculum from the syllabus than they can when they are in a room full of their friends. Isn’t that supposed to be my goal, delivery of the content on the syllabus, as approved by the school and the district and the state? Our school was conceived of by a woman who wrote her Ph.D. on some- thing she called the “implicit curriculum.” That’s the framework schools provide so that students can learn to operate in a community together. It includes the golden rule, honoring differences, self-discipline, reaching goals, picking up after yourself, and, hopefully, personal growth. One day in the summer, I visited campus, and a group offering personal growth retreats had rented out our assembly room. There was a large sign at the turnaround in front of the school which read “Speaking from the Heart. Room A3.” Why isn’t THAT on our kids’ schedules? If a typical eleventh grader, one year from graduating to adulthood, is taking “Calculus, AP Literature, Spanish 3, American History, Physics, and Theatre,” could they not take “Logical Thinking, Looking Deeply, Honoring Differences, Knowing your Place in the Span of Humanity, Getting Comfortable with Complexity, and Expressing Yourself in Your Community” instead? Wait. THEY ARE! I just renamed the classes. I’m not certain, however, that the second list of course titles could accurately name classes taught mostly through digital days. This morning, two students burst into my classroom early, having a high pitch conversation about being just “SO DONE” with high school. That turned into a conversation with me about what it feels like to face a big life transition. Earlier, as we were learning about how cancer drugs are made, students shared their personal stories about cancer with one another. Conversations, and human faces with nothing but air between them, take us places beyond the curriculum, all the time, every day. Even teaching something from the content, something totally dry, is difficult for me to picture without seeing a student’s face. I completed a masters’ degree entirely online, and I learned an enormous amount about myself, my fellow students, and the world. But I still cannot imagine what it might be like to teach an eighth grader how to do algebra without watching their face comprehend each little idea, or seeing the order in which they write numbers down on a page. Can I Skype teach then? I’d see the face, see the work going on… No. Eleven years ago I went to see a mentor teacher of mine, and found her standing in the middle of a playground with an intense look of focus on her face. I started to ask her a practical question and she immediately silenced me. “Sssshhh. We are learning the everyday pitch and tone of the kids’ voices so we will know right away when something goes wrong.” I looked around and all the teachers were doing the same thing. Listening. Sensing. Using intuition. Feeling the vibe. Yes, I went there. The VIBE. Me, a quantitative and methodical math teacher. I can’t say there is not learning magic in technology. To be able to bring TED Talks into my classroom in the blink of an eye, or use an online discussion board to elicit deeper critical thinking, is a gift from the pixel universe. I’m glad that those billions of bits of information are floating in the air around us, ready to be summoned at the touch of a key- stroke. I think my single favorite use of tech in the classroom is the giant panda cam, streaming pandas going about their day at the San Diego Zoo in real time. Their charisma draws out many an interesting conversation and story and piques curiosity about biology, geography, environmental science, and other topics. But “digital days?” Only during winter storms, please. Lisa Catterall teaches STEAM, math, science, and art at Mount Madonna School. She has authored curriculum frameworks for California and Kentucky on arts education as a senior associate of the Centers for Research on Creativity. She is a former Middle School Director and the founder of a STEAM engineering program. She lectures and trains teachers and administrators on innovation in education in Chaoyang District’s foreign experts program in Beijing, China. After spending 14 years in biotechnology, she began her teaching career as a middle school math teacher in her mid-thirties. Lisa has five children and has lived in Santa Cruz County for most of her life.

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Teacher’s Blog August 2018

growingupsc — Mon, 30 Jul 2018 22:32:29 +0000

Teacher’s Blog August 2018 By Tiffany K. Wayne High school History and Government teacher, Mount Madonna School, Watsonville I am anticipating the start of the new school year and missing my students. The last time I saw most of them was on Friday, May 18th, our last day of academic classes. Finals exams were over but I still had one more day of classes with my 10th grade U.S. History students before they left for a week-long science trip to Catalina Island to study Oceanography. We had started the film, Selma, a few days earlier as an end-of-year movie. “That made me cry,” a student shared, wiping her eyes with her shirt. “Why did they have to kill Jimmie Lee Jackson? For no reason!” We talked about the ugliness of racism and violence in our country. I told the class that I was born the same year Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated: 1968. They stared at me in awe, as if their teacher had just time traveled and appeared to them from out of the past. “None of this was that long ago,” I tried to tell them, but these are 21st century kids and 1968 is ancient history. One of the reasons I chose to show Selma to this class was that our current juniors and seniors (including my own daughter) were on a class trip to Washington D.C. at that very moment and had met Congressman John Lewis just that week. We pulled up the trip blog and projected their schoolmates’ words and photos on the whiteboard. One of the students – a senior who had previously sat in my history and government classes – reflected in his blog post on his emotional meeting with John Lewis: “When I asked John Lewis my question about how we could keep our moral principles in times of crises, he looked me in the eyes the entire time he gave his answer, the same eyes that “saw the face of death” on Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama….he wanted so desperately to pass on this message to the youth of the nation, the message of non-violence, love over hate, and importance of community. “ It wasn’t that long ago. It’s happening now. “I hope John Lewis is still in Congress when we go to D.C.,” one of my sophomores said, inspiring her classmates to excitedly start calling out names of other public officials they might want to meet in person: “Ruth Bader Ginsburg! Actually, I’d want to meet any Supreme Court Justice.” “Trump! I have some questions for him.” “I want to meet the Parkland kids.” The Parkland kids: the new generation of student activists. After the movie, the class is dismissed to lunch and I spend the afternoon grading and cleaning and organizing my classroom, before leaving it for the summer. Throughout the afternoon students wandered in and out as they finished up art or writing projects in other classes or have free time to play volleyball outside. While her classmates run about outside in the quad, one student sat quietly at a table across from me, flipping through her phone. “Don’t you want to go outside – or do something?” I said, in my accusatory kids-today-always-on-their- phones adult voice. She ignored my question. “Tiffany, did you hear the news? there was a school shooting in Texas this morning.” Yes, I had briefly seen the headline when I logged onto my email earlier that day but, honestly, I just did not want to think about it during the school day. Those of us who teach, work at, or attend high schools do not have the luxury of avoiding thinking about what has become a regular news onslaught of school shootings. Just two months earlier I had stood outside with these same students as we held a 17-minute silent vigil for the victims of the Parkland, Florida high school shooting. Was it selfish to want to get through this day – this last day of classes – without having to process another unfathomable event? “This is so scary!” the student cried out, holding her phone out for me to see. I had just talked kids through crying over the death of Jimmie Lee Jackson in 1965. I had been touched by their empathy for people in the past, but it turned out history and the distance of time were no comfort. This is the reality of the world they are growing up in now. “Yes,” I told her. “I saw that in the news, but we don’t have all the details yet.” I wanted to wait for details, but she was getting the details as they came in a live update. She was visibly shaken. “Hey,” I put my hand over her hand that was holding the phone. “Let’s wait until we know more and then we can talk about it. Want to help me file papers?” Just weeks before the Parkland shooting we, like schools across the country, had one of our classroom lockdown drills. The sheriff’s department had met with faculty and told us that the lockdown procedure had changed: We were no longer to shelter in place, hoping the shooter skips our classroom. The new state protocol for an active shooter lockdown is Run, Hide, Fight. Realizing that it is not always possible or safe for a room full of 20-30 kids to just huddle and wait in a classroom, we are now told to evacuate to a safer location, away from the buildings. If we are unable to leave our room, we should then barricade in place and, if in imminent danger (i.e. the shooter has entered the room), actively resist. Disrupt his plan, throw things at him (books? sharp pencils?), fight back. At our faculty meeting, we tried not to imagine how a confrontation between children and an automatic weapon would play out in this scenario. Realizing we can’t actually practice fighting off an armed gunman, for our lockdown drills we just practice awareness and staying calm. Lock the door, close the blinds, silence or turn off cell phones. Resume quiet study activity until we get the signal or code from the staff outside the door. The drill is not stressful or panic-inducing, but it is also not particularly reassuring. The teenagers joke about who runs the fastest and about the heroics they will perform to save their friends. Others – buoyed by the self-esteem and nurturing environment of parents and teachers as much as by teenaged bravado – are sure they can outsmart or outwit the shooter. But I know there are too many possible scenarios and too many unknowns. I feel lucky that I don’t have to do this with kindergarteners. Run, Hide, Fight. Another student skipped into the classroom to tell me that they were making tamales and enchiladas and salsa for their last day of Spanish class. Many of this group of students travelled to Costa Rica with this trusted teacher over the summer. A student complained that a classmate put too much cinnamon in the mole sauce. “I still want to taste them,” I said, despite the warning, and headed to the school kitchen. The mole was fine – a little spicy from cinnamon, but also sweet and flavorful. I took a plate of enchiladas back to my classroom. The student who was watching her phone for updates on the Texas school shooting was still there, while another girl, her friend, was flipping through a paper magazine, one of several subscriptions I keep for the social studies classroom. The students can – and do – access many of the same subscriptions online. With a paper copy, however, they are more likely to land on something that interests them or catches their eye, not just read an article I assign. Today, this student is looking through UPFRONT, a New York Times-based current event news magazine for teens. “Look at this photo, Tiff. This is terrible.” She holds up an article about gun violence with an image of thousands of pairs of children’s shoes displayed by activists in D.C. The issue of the magazine was dated May 14th. Four days before the next school shooting. “Every one of these shoes represents a kid who has been killed by guns. You can’t even count them all.” “I guess that’s the point,” I say. Students moving about by their own choice and interests between volleyball, cooking, video production, watching films, reading magazines, or chatting with the teacher. Why can’t school be like this all the time? But these conversations and interests and relationships with the teachers have been built through days in the classroom, days of rigor and structure, of reading and analyzing and mastering information, days of following through on a difficult project, collaborating with people you might not normally collaborate with, putting things into context and seeking and finding connections. “There are eight students dead in Texas now,” reports the girl with the phone watching the news updates. Later we learn that two teachers were also among the victims. Friday, May 18, 2018: the last day of school before my students were off on other adventures for three months. I have missed them and I can’t wait to hear all about Catalina Island and Costa Rica and family vacations and surfing and summer jobs and summer flings. They will tell me all about science camp and art camp and their hopes and dreams and plans toward futures. They will reunite with friends and share stories about a summer that their peers in Parkland, Florida and Santa Fe, Texas did not get to have. Lucky kids.

The post Teacher’s Blog August 2018 first appeared on Growing Up in Santa Cruz.