Back to full classes, full schedules

                I am so full, being back in the room with live students again—building upon the energy of conversations, refining ideas in the back-and-forth of group dialogues, humming with the frenetic goof and teenage verve that had, for the last year and a half, been flattened and muted on isolated black Zoom cells. I know none of us is as safe as we’d been when spread out across the city; I know some struggle to mask their beaks and noses seem suddenly indecent; and I know that no students in my crowded room have the short yard of distance the CDC hopes they’ll keep for safety. But for the first time in a while, there is a buzz of teenage nervousness and joy.

               I’ve loved that. And yet, my colleagues and I are exhausted. It’s hard to quantify all that’s involved in this, because some things are small, like trying to hear and be heard and understood through a mask and over the drone of our filtered fans and street noises of open windows, straining to communicate emotion, excitement, and interest when faces are hidden: we must work harder to amplify our sound, our clarity, our energy, and fall hard at the end of the end of it.

               Some things are not small at all:

               Student trauma and isolation over the quarantine reverberate back now in anxiety, tremendous sensitivity in feeling, difficulty sustaining attention, and most of all, a huge hunger for connection, so when a teacher is on, with our own strained emotionality and sense of precarious safety, that’s a lot to absorb, feed, or fend off.

               Students’ acute outrage and demand for equity and justice, and the language and routines that reflect them, guided by a year and a half of all discourse mediated through Tik Tok and Instagram, I embrace gently through careful discussions about how we hold discussions. It’s meaningful, tender work, and in student sincerity and hunger, I give my own vulnerability and heart.

               That’s not nothing. But the day is long.

Back to School

                Last Friday, the governor commanded all teachers back to buildings by April 19^th, ordering all schools to make 30% of learning available in-person. I am so ready.

               When I visited my sister on Saturday, she told me her daughter had become lazy and wasn’t putting in the work or previous concentration; I told her as a teacher, I’ve seen so many students--both those with resource issues and those resource-rich and reliably prompt--fall through a motivation and spirit hole: what looks like laziness to a parent is not laziness.

               Maisie’s unexpected response to the return was distress. Her first joy in school has always been gathering with friends and the energy of interactions; but now she says there are people to whom she just does not want to return, online presences and tensions she does not want to see made live. It deflated me.

               And then I read an opinion piece written by a 12^th grader in Virginia, who described students split alphabetically and sent in shifts and divided still smaller because many stayed home, and he described how his teacher made all his eye-contact with a laptop rather than the live students behind the screen, and he portrayed lunchtime as students separated on green dots and scolded for their aerosol vectors when they tried to talk. This led to a third, more tentative response in me.

               My students, meanwhile, are largely apprehensive about going back. They don’t trust their peers or teachers and they don’t trust our school to keep their families safe. A student gymnast described football players huddled together, talking loudly and poorly masked, and one of our staff stepping into the gymnastics gym and pulling down his mask to yell.

               I can’t blame students for their reticence. But it’s still true that something needs to be different. Yesterday, I checked in with my classes--How are you feeling about the return-to-school order; how are you doing; how are you feeling about the workload in this class? One of my brilliant and normally energetic students has been down for a while. She admitted as much again. And when I sang “Older” in celebration of her birthday occurring later this week, she looked away. After class, she stayed behind for a logistics question, after which, I tried to condole with her, and said something about Wednesday being “your birthday, damn it!” She started weeping. After school, I wrote a birthday card all appreciations and celebrations, biked to the store for chocolate bars, rode them six miles to her house, and knocked on the door to her mother who disappeared very fast to get her daughter, who then stood in front of me awkwardly, crying again, as I said, I just wanted to wish you a happy birthday, and I needed to see your face, and she thanked me, eyes wet, waiting for me to leave.

               Something needs to be different.

Duwamish River visit

                Stephanie and I drove down 1^st and parked near Spokane and took our bikes over the currently restricted lower West Seattle bridge and commenced on the Duwamish River trail. It’s been years since I’ve done it, and remembered thinking then that, for a trail by a river, it was a wasteland of a ride all the way to South Park. But now I’ve learned enough since then to appreciate the magnitude of the industry here, and the winding majesty it replaced.

               What is that five mile industrial channel between recycling pits and container yards? It’s what remains of the Duwamish River. The River that Made Seattle suggests that had Se’alth rebelled with others in the Indian Wars that followed the scornful 1855 treaties with Isaac Stevenson, he might have won claim to lands for the Duwamish people, as did others like the Nisqually under Leschi, whose meager reservations set aside by government were expanded to better lands and waters. But Se'alth did not follow Leschi into battle and sided instead with white trading partners; and now the Duwamish remain refugees on their own ancestral lands, a solitary longhouse on the side of East Marginal Way.

               Stephanie and I spent most of our time in the park across the street from the longhouse—Herring’s House Park, on the grounds of the former village of basketry hat from 500 A.D. The lone, remaining curve of the Duwamish River is there, bending the park, with Kellogg Island, the dredged piece of land between the curve and the machine straight channel, on the other side. Since 1970, people have worked to restore habitat, and a sign there made me realize the grass and marsh trees aren’t reserved principally for people; it serves osprey and beaver and salmon even more urgently. Nature has been so effectively thieved and repurposed that parks I thought were recreational are desperate habitat instead.

               To get to the park, Herring House Park in one name, T-107 in another, one must circumnavigate trains, tractor trailer yards, alleys of fenced-off homes, buckled sidewalks, and then cross a roaring five-lane arterial. This is the first two tenths of a mile of the Duwamish River trail. Here is the park. Across the street, the longhouse. And the remaining bend of the river, here. Everything else is steel and slurry, concrete silos and razor wire. To imagine this place ever habitable to people up and down the tide flats or to envision these waters navigated by cedar canoes among barges acres long is just too much for the mind. Of the ancestral paths and trading posts, even in this hard-won oasis of cormorants and clam shells, only industrial pathways remain.

               In the park, there are plaques that unwind a story: A salmon wants to swim up the river, but an older, wiser salmon warns that the river is bad. There is an otter, and it will eat you. There is a bear, and it will grab you. There is a man with a spear, and he will spear you. The river is bad! But the salmon wants to swim. The fish jumps over the otter, under the bear, and through the man with a spear. The river is good! So many obstacles the salmon must overcome. But what if the river itself is yanked straight and dredged deep and barrels of chemicals invisibly leech through sediment and there are fish with bellies of iron the very size of rivers themselves?

Asking my class, What is it like to be you?

                In my Hands for a Bridge class, we’ve discussed the traumas and perpetuations of racism and colonialism; we’ve read and investigated poetry, autobiographies, stories, and essays, and we’ve thought about disruptions in our own local and national communities. Today, I interrupted conversation on Anu Taranath’s book, Beyond Guilt Trips, within which we’ve been thinking about the kinds of discomfort we face as we travel, and how we need to be open about these with fellow travelers, mindful and curious about what such discomfort is asking. Anu’s book is a lot about how to have difficult conversations about and across difference.

               The interruption today was therefore deliberate and personal. We wrote and then one by one we shared: What's it like to be you?

We carry different burdens and hurt out into the public: So what do you carry, in public or in conversation? What is it like to be you?

                The sharing was full of heart and pain. Students told of anxieties, relationship to bodies, spirals of thoughts, masks they wear, bullying, pressures to succeed, illness endured, protective walls they’ve built, all the while throwing supportive comments to each other, silently, in the chat.

               It was such ponderous and lonely weight they were sharing, so much private toil and sorrow.

               In response, there was a distinctive slowness, an alert quiet. Everyone nodded and held still, radiating presence and care.

               I’ve never done this in a class. Only a few times in my career I might have tried. In a physical class, we would have tossed desks aside and sat in a close circle on the floor, just to see reflections in each others’ shining wet eyes. Today, we were squares on a screen, throwing compassion to tiny faces in random spots on a computer, and still it moved.

               Afterwards, we wrote of our pride and gratitude to each other, and the testimonials still scroll there, like footprints in a sidewalk that show we’ve walked together.

               We were raw and open and loving to the end.

Being deliberate about joy

                It’s important to be deliberate about joy when holiday contact has been flattened and we’re all locked in with few and sometimes wounded relations.

               On Tuesday night, I ran an all-staff, no-talent talent show for Roosevelt High School. I know students have been isolated and sad, but educators have been too: for the same reason I share with students a Zen at Ten half hour for happiness on Wednesdays, I organized a talent show with health and community in mind.

               And it was so good—a joyous affair that included singing and guitar and poetry, cookie deliveries and virtual eating, cat tricks, juggling, crochet and art shares, a Boomwhacker arrangement of Rolling in the Deep, a dramatic reading of a children’s book, and a stage-stealing pursed lip trumpeting of The Star Spangled Banner, all in one neat hour.

               Today, the day between semesters, an hour and a half away from home, I slipped into a forest at an unmarked pullout and followed the roaring sound to a perch over water churning white, blue, and green. The ground was the soft overlayer of forest—needles and moss and soft rot of wood and earth—until I came out on the slick rocks over a dramatic river. At Eagle Falls, the river had kettled out round bowls in rock while a boulder-layered wall lifted cedars on the other side.

               By the time I got back on the road, I was buoyant and happy in ways I haven’t felt much since the lockdown and the car drove like a teenager’s.

Democracy Terrorized

                Yesterday, white terrorists stormed and vandalized the capitol. Images of a man smugly propping up his feet on House Speaker Pelosi’s abandoned desk unsettled me as much as pictures of Pramila Jayapal huddled on the floor of the balcony, hordes breaking down barriers, smashing windows, marauding through halls of Congress, pipe bombs found at Democratic and Republican headquarters, a corpse of a young woman carried down the Capitol steps.

               A president of the United States effectively sparked violence against another branch of government. We’ve had an illiterate, racist, hyper-coddled man-baby running our country, and he never seemed to understand the difference between presidents and kings. Our democracy has always been partial and inequitable, but I never expected to see it so severely ignored and violently sabotaged.

               Yet democracy is our country’s most vital and originating claim.

               Do we know anymore what this means? Equal voice and power of citizens hang on mechanisms of consensus. That means a number of things.

               We have signed on to a loud, messy project, one that calls for a rarely-smooth caucusing of ideas and good communication of facts to inform decisions. It calls for a mechanism of settling debates. And it involves a social contract that citizens will abide by rules of debate and then peaceably tolerate outcomes.

               Such debate calls for protection of assembly and speech, as well as dependable information and therefore vigorous protections of the press and quality education. We then need careful and accessible means of voting. And the settled outcome of these decisions requires our trust and peaceful acquiescence to what’s been decided.

               Our democracy is in trouble.

               The Republican Party, for too long, has relied on compromises in democracy that advantage targeted minoritarian interests. To achieve this, an executive class seeking to avoid taxes and regulation sold grievance, xenophobia, patriotism and freedom to a white, rural working class seeking to preserve Christian values and access to jobs. Such compromise includes a Senate where Nebraska has power equal to California and an Electoral College where sparsely populated states punch above their weight. These compromises have served Republicans well.

               Add to these compromises other degradations of democracy that advantage Republicans: massive voter suppression, Gerry-rigged redistricting, poorly funded schools, a bullied press.

               With all these advantages, Republicans still lost the White House and Senate.

               They were then able to go to courts, packed with judges appointed by Trump and rushed through confirmation by McConnell, and still, they lost. No fewer than 60 times, judges and Justices listened patiently to claims of election fraud, and claimants lost over and over.

               The President told his supporters yesterday he would never concede. He told them to march up Pennsylvania Avenue and give Republicans “the kind of pride and boldness they need to take back our country.”

               That’s not democracy. That’s a bullied press, degraded schooling, arduous voting, and an absolute refusal after two months to accept the will of the people. The fact that it ended up in the breaching and vandalizing of the People’s House where state-certified votes were then being honored and received is only the most demonstrable statement of the fact.

               Democracy is fragile. We have kicked the shit out of it. And we need to attend to its needs, quickly and with care.

The use of professional mourning

               In the book I’m reading today, In the Language of Miracles by Raija Hassib, there’s mention of professional mourners. It’s a job I’ve heard of before, but I’ve only nodded towards the intrigues of other times and places. I understand how one might hire others to demonstrate high standing—behold such sorrow at this great loss! I also guess that even if funeral-goers knew the keening and gnashing of teeth was amplified by mercenary wailers, there’d be respect for the effort to broadcast pain.

               But I put the book down to feel it more. Last night, Amelia and I were watching the end of Won’t You Be My Neighbor, a documentary that tuned in deeply to Fred Rogers’ radical slowness and quiet and love, his intent stare and unblinking recognitions of hardship and anxieties of children. In one tender moment, Daniel Striped Tiger is talking to Lady Aberlin, and the tiger softly says, I’ve been wondering if I’m a mistake. Then he timidly sings that he's not like anyone else he knows. She sings back, forcefully: “You’re not a fake. You’re no mistake. You are my friend.” It becomes a duet, where the tiger continues in his anxieties, and Lady Aberlin continues in her reassurance.

               When they stop singing, Lady Aberlin says, “You are just fine, exactly the way you are.”

               The way I look? he asks.

               Yeah, she says.

               The way I talk?

               Yes!

               The way I love?

               And she says, “Especially the way you love.” And that’s when I know I’m crying.

               But I’m not weeping like I am at the end of the movie, when Amelia had joined me. It’s after Mr. Rogers’ funeral. One of the talking heads remembers a time Mr. Rogers had said, Think of someone who helped you along the way, for one minute; I’m gonna time you. And then we hear Mr. Rogers’ own, slow voice and deliberate timbre: “Let’s just take some time to think of those extra special people.” And we see former cast members, sons, sister, aunt, friends looking off, looking down, one at a time, as we hear the rest of Mr. Rogers’ statement—that wherever those people are, you know that deep down, they always want what’s best for you; they’ve always cared for you beyond measure, and encouraged you to be true to the best in you. One by one, we watch the seven or eight people think; we watch them feel. They cry, smile, nod, fill, and finally, they look at us in blessing through the magic of the camera, by which point, I was ugly crying, and embarrassed to be doing so, but Amelia was crying with me, and we were transported together.

               This morning, I was thinking about professional mourners. I was thinking about the onion cellar in Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum, where people go to cut onions and cry together. Maybe the role of professional mourners isn’t mostly to broadcast status, but to encourage our wary grief. A quote from the book of Jeremiah suggests this to be so: “Consider and call for the mourning women, that they may come; And send for the wailing women, that they may come! Let them make haste and take up a wailing for us, That our eyes may shed tears and our eyelids flow with water” (9: 17–18).

               Sometimes we need help to liberate the churning and bruised humanity within.