DVK Students Visit Seattle

Nándor

It finally happened. Kata, my wonderful mentor from Dráva Völgye Középiskola, and two exceptional students, Detti and Nándor arrived at the beginning of the month for a two week visit funded by a Fulbright alumnus grant. It's been an intense and very full two weeks, involving four host families including our own, a large high school, two important religious holidays, a dozen tours, Hungarian apple pie served to perhaps 800 kids, and a debilitating influenza snaking through our ranks. I have so much I'd like to report here, and I'm hoping somehow I'll remember interesting parts -- like reactions to American routines and services (peanut butter, root beer, and classroom decorum) -- but if I start from the beginning and move through the parts I remember, maybe those will emerge in turn. Frankly, Stephanie experienced more of this visit than I, giving tours of things like the aquarium or Boeing factory or Experience Music Project, even when she was so out of it with disease to remember much of it; but the slices I present here are a picture worth portraying.

Kata

They arrived after a one-stop flight through Amsterdam. I had spent the preceding weeks in contact with our visitors and their host families and was very excited about the arrival, unsure how it would all play  out. Using a Google document, I tried to coordinate a schedule, but the balance of activities was so theoretical; and while I knew the host sisters and brother, and e-mails from their parents seemed so enthusiastic and warm, I didn't really know their families or how this would all turn out.

What a delight, then, when Kata, Nándi and Detti arrived, to see their excitement and feel my own; what a relief and unexpected joy to meet Nándor's host family, including my student -- Camas -- and Paige, Ross and the younger brother, Silas; and to meet both of Detti's families, and feel so at home with them as well: Ani and her parents, Lisa and Josh, and their two sons, Jeremy and Sam; and Charlotte's parents, Mary and Ralph. The energy was so full of welcome and love, and I felt so at home with them all. And I was happy to spend time with them, let alone entrust our young visitors to their homes. Ani's younger brothers, though, spent two hours silently on the couch while my own daughters hid in another room, falling down in their own responsibilities.

Ani and Detti

We ate fish and Kata's excellent paprikás csirke (paprika chicken); we toasted; and so suddenly I felt like my family was very big.

Kata's Stars and Stripes

Kata had come equipped with numerous gifts for us, like a bottle of Tokaji Aszú and a parchment of the national anthem, and for my principal too -- including a full size Hungarian flag and a softly lit framed portrait of the Holy Crown of Hungary. Additionally, she brought three European handballs, an entire set of laminated displays about Hungarian history and culture, folkdancing dresses and more. Her application for the journey included six pages of single-spaced proposals for things she might do while visiting Roosevelt, plans that both guaranteed her spot but also made me nervous because they were too much to ask for from students and the operations of a full-speed-ahead comprehensive high school the size of Roosevelt. But in the end, here's the part that amazes me still: she planned a handball tournament, a Hungarian dance house, a singing and drama demonstration, a film festival, Hungarian culinary samplers during lunch, and cultural and historical lessons, and she accomplished much more of this than I could have expected. The Hungarians left their mark on Roosevelt.

Detti and Nándor also prepared more than they were asked to deliver, including weeks of rehearsed folk dancing and several musical pieces involving a recorder and the piano. They had hand-transcribed notes onto paper, and as I stared at the scripted notes, I marveled again at the preciousness of paper in Hungary. They played the piece below in their first hours in Seattle.

Before the welcoming banquet, I drove with our girls to Snoqualmie Pass. Amelia's teacher was taking his kids tubing and it was time for Sophie to give up the skis she'd rented for the season. We'd invited Kata up to the mountains but she stayed home and made the chicken.

The next day was the first day of school. All of the visitors showed up in my sixth period class, Camas's class, which is three quarters boy, big energetic boy, and ultimately saw a debate from my students about the role of religion in politics. One of the boys came in late wearing a hat and a wire hanging out of one of his ears. I was totally ashamed. In the end, the class succeeded in demonstrating some of the best and the worst of American habits, including an overflowing exuberance and also organization of personal thoughts towards critical argument. Detti noted that the kind of thing that happened in the debate, students articulating so many of their own informed thoughts in a back-and-forth conversation, is the kind of thing that might occur to some extent in a foreign language class in Hungary, but it would not approach what she saw there. 

But these were recurring observations. American students show a shocking lack of respect, and also an impressive level of initiative and originality. American teachers are genuinely interested in their students' opinions, and in some degree, they actively teach students how to develop valid opinions.

Detti in my 9th grade class

Kata was in my room one Friday when the day began, and she was startled by how few students greeted me. It was the same morning that a small group of ninth graders crowded around me before class to share various things or experiences -- an event from the day before, a book someone was interested in reading, a rabbit pelt a student had tanned herself; but it was true: some students came in and sat down without looking up, or dropped off bags and left again without saying boo. I thought two things about this: One, I thought, that's true, I don't think much about that kind of acknowledgement; two, I think I encourage that kind of distance in the morning, because I'm usually typing furiously or doing something at my desk and I don't look up to give anyone the chance to interrupt one of the few moments during the day I can prepare and answer e-mails. In Hungary, teachers go to their students' classrooms. In America, students come to us, not only to our teaching spaces but our office spaces, and perhaps that is a difference.

For two months leading up to the visit, I had been trying to correspond with the student government at Roosevelt and getting increasingly nervous as responses were few. But what I discovered is that, while I wasn't hearing anything, the government was organizing around the e-mails I was sending anyway, and in the end, they really helped make things happen. This included daily announcements and signs reminding all Roosevelt students about dancing with our visitors, a day of handball, and also a notice on the readerboard outside school welcoming our visitors. Kata also joined with the culinary arts instructor, teaching the class how to make Hungarian apple pie and then single-handedly serving over a dozen giant trays of it to students, teachers and administrators during both lunches. I watched some of the distribution, students holding still, skeptical, because who gives out free food in a school?, and then delightedly taking part.

As for the folkdancing, my history partner and I brought our 57 ninth graders to learn some of the dances from Somogy county, really looking forward to doing something active with a class that is quiet with each other in the best of times. The boys, outnumbered by the girls in this group, huddled together, only to find that they had to hold hands with each other in a giant ring and rhythmically step to each other's moving feet. I stood next to a student who was able to maintain his masculine sense of self by countering every left with a right and nearly taking my arm out at every measure. Below is a video of the circle dancing.

But I'll treasure the next moment even more for its awkwardness. At a certain moment, Detti and Nándor  demonstrated a little partner dancing together, and then suddenly split off to join the ninth graders, in their horror, in pairs. While I danced with Kristi, my history partner, and Lauren, my girls' music teacher, who had come to get in the rhythm before performing Kodály and Brahms' Hungarian Dances the next weekend -- and not daring to dance with students, as I comfortably would in Hungary -- we adults enjoyed watching the boys squirm with a choice of humiliations: dancing with another boy, or dancing with a girl. Video below.

The next day after school was the open-school folkdancing event, advertised in announcements and flyers. That morning I started receiving frantic e-mails from a couple local Hungarian societies offended that they hadn't heard earlier because now they could send only one member and did we have microphones and soundsystems. The first Wednesday, our visitors got together with Maria and her husband, two members of the Seattle-Pécs Sister City Association, and had first a very fun time with the Ducks tour -- in which an outrageous and obnoxious tour guide drives an amphibious vehicle on land and sea -- and then had an intellectually full discussion with Maria and her husband, both Hungarian ex-pats who'd left in 1956. Kata ultimately decided the ones who stayed in Hungary were the brave ones, but Maria's story is one of terror and courage. In any event,  a professional dancer showed up and led instruction in a somber, near-whispering voice to which we'd become accustomed the year before on Hungarian news stations and classrooms. My own family came and joined in the dancing. Paige was there and watched as well. By this time, she was crashing with the disease that had taken out Stephanie, Kata and Amelia the week before.

Kata was back in it two days later, teaching handball for five straight periods. There were at least two classes showing up in the big gym every period, which we accommodated by lowering the curtain through the middle, then integrating classes and separating the sexes. Kata did a great job of explaining the rules to all; usually, she'd stay with the girls while the boys ended up playing a version of basketball that ended with lobbing a ball as hard as they could at a mat that stood in for a goal while a keeper tried not to get creamed. The girls' side, meanwhile, was organized by multiple rules and whistle shrieks as Kata instructed them in the finer points of offense and handball defense. In either case, any students brought to the gym had a great time and wanted to be able to play again.

In addition to visiting classes and touring with Stephanie to various places, and getting out with host brothers and sisters (Nándor was able to visit the Seattle Art Museum and Jazz Alley with Camas; Detti went to a party with Ani and the Tulalip reservation with Charlotte), and all of them trying frozen yogurt for the first time -- and other things I don't know too much about -- they spent a day or two with Roosevelt's Hand for a Bridge, an organization devoted to crossing cultures. HFB was hosting over a dozen students and teachers from Northern Ireland, and our visitors joined theirs in a visit to Seattle's International District and the Wing Luke Museum, debriefing the event the next day. Nándor and Kata and I also joined this group for their farewell dinner. Irish bravado is very different from Hungarian.

 

I'd like to be able to say more about the many things they all did together without me, which included several visits downtown and a visit to tidal pools and also an outing to Everett for the Boeing tour. The only reason I emphasize this more than other interesting experiences they had without me is because I have a picture, which I display here too because of the contrast of expressions in this given moment, which I also think is very funny. Nándor, what are you doing? Maybe this is also the time to say that Kata says that root beer tastes like toothpaste and Nándor finds peanut-butter and jelly as well as turkey and cranberry very odd combinations for a sandwich. Kata also notes that we must have hated the service in Hungary, marvelling in restaurants at the number of people catering a table and checking up on our welfare and pouring fresh water.

Camas, Charlotte, Detti, Nándor and Kata

Kata leaving her mark at the Pike Place Market gum wall.

I do want to say one last thing about the visits to school, which is about Nándor and Detti's gathering on the last Friday with my ninth grade block. We gathered all 57 in the one classroom; and after I conducted some regular business with them, we gathered and asked questions of our visitors, in turn getting questions back, and finally warming up the group. Students wanted to know what Detti and Nándor thought of our food, our schools, our people. Fat cowboys? Detti has never seen so many people outside running. Classrooms? Don't teachers think it's rude when you eat there? Favorite English expressions? "Elusive" and "clumsy." Drink and weed in Hungary? Yes. Government? Conservative. After going back and forth with each other for well over an hour, we pulled out board games and played for the final twenty minutes. Because we finally took the time to appreciate the exchange with thoughtful and slow questions, and because our students lived up to the opportunity so fully and because Detti and Nándor represented Hungarian teens so well, it felt like the classroom event I most wanted to have with our visitors, and I was very happy.

No more about school.

The second weekend together was Passover and Easter. Easter had the advantage of being a holiday well-observed in Hungary, which is largely a Catholic nation; however, Kata, Detti and Nándor may well be pretty typical Hungarian Catholics, or maybe not, I don't actually know, in that they're not very observant. During one of the conversations about religion in my American Conversations class, I tried to suggest that the Soviet era let out a lot of the religious steam of the country, as it had done in other places. Kata insisted this was not so, and said levels of religiosity remained about the same throughout. Stephanie pointed out that in a book we'd both read recently, The Invisible Bridge, a compelling book about a couple of Hungarian Jewish families during WWII, a book, by the way, that mentions Barcs ("Horthy had decided to let Hitler invade Yugoslavia from Hungarian soil--Yugoslavia, with whom Hungary had signed an agreement of peace and friendship a year before. Nazi troops had gathered at Barcs and swarmed across the Dráva River while Luftwaffe bombers decimated Belgrade" (449)), Stephanie pointed out that the pre-Soviet Hungarians in the book weren't that religious. The Jews described were largely assimilated. Religion isn't intense in Hungary the way it is in much of the U.S.

Devout or not, religious events are great moments to swap cultural practices, and we were able to do so.

All our visitors were invited to my father's Passover seder at my sister's house. Not only were we able to introduce Lauren and Jeff's family to our visitors, but we were able to share one of the great Jewish traditions with people who'd never experienced them ever before. 

I was proud to read and sing in Hebrew, in part to dispel the monolingual reputation of Americans, but also because they'd all lived with me for a year and probably knew very little about a side of me that much of Hungary no longer knows much about. During the seder, I talked to Detti about the Barcs railroad station and how there was a Jewish encampment in 1944 there until officials were ready to put the Jews all on the trains and send them to Auschwitz. Detti didn't know this, or of the plaque on the railway station commemorating the event, despite the fact that her class had visited Auschwitz earlier in the year. I also told her the story of the Kremsier-kastély in Barcs, owned by a Jewish family, the patriarch of which killed himself rather than get taken by the Nazis in 1944, something I discuss more extensively in this old blog entry.

Lauren: First plague rocks out.

I'm also very proud of the story of liberation, and how seriously my father takes it, a tale he always makes very personal and relevant, in a world where poverty makes our dependencies to each other so much more important and so many of our desires and routines so much less. He speaks every year of the things that lead us into bondage, the things that bring us together and make us free.

Of course, he also uses an orthodox haggadah, whose brutality and thirst for blood and vengeance, from the Israelites but also God Himself, are prominent. Every year, Dad successfully contextualizes such brutality. But I'm starting to think maybe it's time to ditch the Orthodox book -- and I couldn't help but feel itchy as I thought about the fact that this was first contact with Judaism for our visitors. Even without our guests, I don't always want to have to remember why it's okay that we ritualize lines that translate into asking God to pour out His wrath upon other nations.

Spending time with family was enlivening, and I was so proud. And Maude lit up the room, as always.

Detti went to Ani's seder the next night, and we brought Kata to Louise's. There were many more little children there and the energy was less formal and more social because of it. Kata noted that once we ate dinner, we never returned to the seder, as we'd done the night before. But at Louise's, those last few rituals don't mean much. The celebration of family and the tradition of defiant activism is what stands at the fore.

Again, the room was packed. I don't know how Louise found room for us all, but I'm so glad she did, and glad too that Kata could experience times two the kind of welcome that comes from what is either or both a Jewish tradition or an American one.

Maisie squinches her eyes as the afikomen is hidden.

One of my favorite days this whole trip was going to meet with Charlotte's extended family at their compound on Hood Canal. Charlotte's grandparents live in a house with space for other branches to stay, and the place is a wonder. One side of their house is an estuary, a natural bird sanctuary, and it all opens up to the canal and its dramatic backdrop of the Olympic mountains. The day was calm and blue and the mountains cut sharp lines across the horizon. I was very full once again with this place in which we live.

Stephanie has noted the number of times I've pointed to the mountains in the last two weeks. Look at the mountains! I've said it repeatedly to Kata. Look at Mr. Rainier! No one ever seemed as excited as I was. That's why the picture on the left, taken right after I'd said, Look at Mt. Rainier! and stopped the car, captures a little of all that. Stop. Look. Stop. I don't think I was ever able to convey how special these mountains are to Seattlites, as rare as a sunny day, and as sparkling and soul-lifting.

But on this day, on Hood Canal, I think it all became clear.

The vistas were thrilling, but the company was good too. I have become very fond of Charlotte and her family. They were always warm and welcoming. At a certain point too, they sat me down to tell them about my year in Hungary; their questions were smart and engaging, and soon, most of us were sitting in a circle by the shucked oysters in the blinding falling light, juggling questions and answers between Kata, Detti, Stephanie and myself, taken in as warmly as Charlotte had taken in Detti.

And that was another thing. Watching the blossoming friendship between Detti and Charlotte. I didn't have occasion to see what took place with Ani, but I saw Detti with Charlotte several mornings in my class, dancing second period and later after school, playing handball together, all day this Easter Sunday, and later at a Mariners game, and the chemistry was terrific. They called themselves twins, and there was much to this label. They are both very outgoing, throwing themselves into events with reckless joy; they're both very engaging and ready to talk and ask questions and appreciate the opportunities presented in the company of others; and they love to laugh, and seemed to make each other do so every other second. The picture at left gets it: the mirroring, the air from each melding into a giant bubble between them.

Below are pictures from the afternoon on Hood Canal, including walks across the oyster beds and preparations for a 200 egg Easter egg hunt, before which, Mary removed all of Ralph's lame layings to make the search more of a challenge, and during which, kids ages 4-18 flooded the area with Easter hoots.

As we neared the very end of the time together, we brought our visitors to their first baseball game, a new experience for them all. It was the Mariners' home opener, and so it was in some respects a first for me too. It included the first time I'd been to a sold-out game (46,000), and the first time I'd experienced the panic of a crowd crush. I had become separated from Stephanie and was stuck between three young women, which might have been thrilling but instead was terrifying. I wanted them off me. It turns out we were all stuck because several yards away someone was handing out free t-shirts.

The game itself featured a stolen base, a home-run, some good pitching, walks, and other things I was happy to explain to our Nándor on my right. But nine innings, nine losing innings, is a lot of innings. Hungarians typically have a much longer attention span than Americans, but I don't know how much fun it was for them. 

Charlotte and Detti painted their faces beforehand and talked the whole time, about Epiladies and hair removal, I believe, and so they were happy enough.

Nándor's biggest entertainment was the crowd itself. One tier above us, two men dressed in full-on Star Wars regalia were launching a strange, repetitive war cry over and over, throughout the whole game.

Nándor was also befuddled by some of the crowd's enthusiasms. Behold the puzzlement slash contempt in the picture below, taken after three animated hydroplanes raced for first place on the Jumbotron while masses of fans yelled their predictions and then triumph or disgust in the conclusion. After I took Nándor's picture, we all laughed at what we saw there. Here's to you, Nándor.

There's so much still to say about this visit, in the small details and in the larger fulfillments. I know I'm not up to the task. But I will say this. Bringing a little Barcs to Seattle hurt. It made me remember and miss so much, and to long for people and feelings. And yet it was such a gift to share our world back, after Hungary had given us so much, and to bring so concretely the gifts of our experience last year to students and teachers here at Roosevelt. And to do all this with such good people, the Hungarians as well as the host families I feel so fortunate to have come to know better: it was as good as ever I hoped. When every sharing was an act of generosity and affection and curiosity, the world became for those moments a kind and enthralling place, and for that, I am thankful again.

Thank you, Fulbright. Thank you, Kata, and you, Detti, and you, Nándor. And thank you Camas, Ani and Charlotte, and your wonderful families. This is a gift that will last far longer than the two weeks in which we spent it.

Yesterday morning we said our goodbyes in front of our house. Then Charlotte came with us to the airport. 

I miss you all.

Snow Days

During a week already shortened by the Martin Luther King holiday, snow sent us to school two hours late on Tuesday and then home two hours after that, not to return at all until the next week.

This last Wednesday night, meanwhile, Sophie soloed the first movement of Vivaldi's A minor violin concerto. She played with the Oak Lake Strings Chamber Orchestra, an amateur group of adults, and Sophie delighted us all. Some poor video of the event is below.

Dear Parents: A semester reflection

January 27, 2012

Dear students but mostly parents,

After one semester past a life-nudging year in Hungary, I feel a need to reflect on my performance as your teacher and to articulate the victories and limits and therefore the needs and unanswered questions that result.

I have worked hard this semester, harder than is healthy, and still, far too many of my students have arrived at the end of term with a failing mark. There are several possible reasons for this. One is that I have not made the most efficient use of my working time. Another is that many students are stubbornly resistant to my expectations and overtures of support. A third is that my expectations are off-course or too high. A fourth is that the job is simply too large and the structures supporting it too few. Based on a national conversation on schooling and teachers— within which the dominant theme is that teachers lack accountability on one side and on the other that teachers are overworked and unfairly targeted—you might expect me, as a teacher, to lean towards the last possibility, that the job itself contains prohibitive barriers to success.

In large part, I do. And it’s probably the most important truth I’d want to convey to a voting public. I’m a well-qualified English Language Arts teacher—an English degree from Oberlin College with Phi Beta Kappa, Masters in teaching and curriculum from Harvard University, 16 years of experience and countless hours of professional development, and National Board certification—yet my roles as a teacher have often of late left me overwhelmed. Meanwhile, the learning outcomes I assess are based on common standards, and, in my ninth grade and Philosophy classes, grading is heavily weighted towards achievement therein: in ninth grade, students need only to pass two standards-based, thoroughly scaffolded and supported assignments to pass the class, and in Philosophy, students encounter only a very few important skills in the same writing assignment over and over. Despite a narrow focus, many don’t make it. Finally, my students are smart, respectful, well-intentioned kids who help each other and who almost always want to learn, and yet, as we stand here on the last day of the semester, 18 out of 147 them (12%) are failing. If the problem isn’t one of training, course assessments, or students, then there is a problem in the supports or expectations for the job itself. Indeed, I am confident that with fewer students and more institutional supports, such as tutoring or course readers or school week time set aside for conferencing or even one fewer teaching period a day for writing teachers and fewer initiatives and demands coming from Stanford Center, I could reach more kids and maintain high standards.

Still I suspect I could be prioritizing and making use of my work time better. But I know that I can’t plow more minutes of the day than I do now, because, as I’ve said in a blog post, my work week so often seems longer than my week week. So how do I maximize time to meet the weekly demands with the tools provided? That’s the difference, perhaps, between a teacher like me and a master teacher.

It comes to this: I am doing a pretty good job teaching your kids, though not a spectacular one. I feel my standards and expectations are demanding, worthwhile, and fair. I also believe I’m providing clear instruction, useful scaffolding of skills and challenging projects that engage high order reading, writing and thinking skills. I turn around work quickly, usually publishing scores the day I receive work. And I fully stock my Source page with information and tools, including detailed daily agendas and all scaffolding and rubrics for major assignments. But here’s what’s lost in my teaching this semester: I’m not tracking often enough who’s succeeding and who’s failing, and this means I’m also not conferencing with students and contacting homes the way I should. I’m not reflecting much during the week, and I’m not having many spontaneous moments of intellectual connection with your kids. I’m not providing the level of oral or written feedback I think students need, instead providing what guidance I can through maybe an essay a month and criteria-based scores for the rest, hoping that specifically channeled reflection and revision work can make up for the loss in feedback. I know how to be a better teacher to your children. It’s been maddening to fall short.

The job is not so different than the one I left for Hungary. There are slightly more students, slightly more directives from downtown, a new course to create in Advanced Placement Composition, and slightly more pressure to improve outcomes in slightly more ways. It adds up.

So how can I improve what I’m doing for your kids while restoring some balance to my life? And what can Roosevelt, or Seattle Public Schools, do to make its best goals manageable? I have many thoughts about the latter, and many feelings about the former.

I’ll leave these large questions for right now and get to one more immediately relevant to you: What does it mean for your child? Mostly, it means I’d like you to take advantage of how much information I put on the Source. If your child is missing an assignment, go to your kid and make a plan for how to fill the hole. Chances are the assignment is either attached or described on daily agendas on my Source page. If you have questions about an assignment that your kid can’t answer, your child (not you, please) should communicate with me. In other words, while I’m having trouble finding time to chase down students, I need your help monitoring and nagging.

And then, maybe, you can join me in addressing the largest questions of schooling.

David Grosskopf

Hungarians are coming!

I have had more activity through Fulbright this year than I had expected. I thought I'd take my year and that would be it. But within the five months of my return, I was flown to Denver to help guide incoming Fulbright exchange teachers from Europe (described here), I chaired an interview process for teachers wanting to exchange next year, and I received a grant, just over $4000, to bring three Hungarians from last year's school to Seattle.

Below you can see pictures of three fourths of our interview committee for teachers seeking a Fulbright. We're in my livingroom. The computer on the chair represents the person interviewing, who we either saw through Skype or phoned through the computer because, I don't know what you'll think of this, but Stephanie and I haven't bothered hooking up long distance service since we're returned to the U.S., and neither do we have a cell phone.

One of my greatest reasons to accept the responsibilities of the committee was the possibility of being able to fly up a friend in Arizona, Emily, who perhaps you've seen in many other pictures in this blog, because she was living in Budapest last year. Below are pictures of Arizona Emily and Seattle Emily, who was also on a Fulbright last year, in the Czech Republic.

As for the latest Fulbright activity, it started out as a request for a grant from Fulbright so that I could, as I'd done with Emily, bring back a missed friend for a visit. The simple idea was for two weeks: one teacher and one student from Dráva Völgye Középiskola would come to Roosevelt. The teacher would stay at my house (the friend: several people I excitedly imagined coming!) and the student would stay with a Roosevelt kid. The U.S. State department accepted my proposal but said I should adjust my participants and budget upwards, which I gladly did. 

Once I started telling Roosevelt students about the possibility, however, and once I started getting applications from DVK students and teachers, this became much bigger than me.

Candidates put a tremendous amount of care and heart into their applications. Because costs are prohibitive, many students don't travel; and for this reason, the European Union has several programs that have helped fund various kinds of class trips around Europe. Even then, some of the students applying wrote that the only big city they've ever seen is Budapest. Students wrote of the cooking, dancing, singing and cultural and historical lessons they could bring, and much more. Above all, their eagerness was palpable. 

Roosevelt students, meanwhile, infused their own excitement into the process. They loved reading the applications, and over and over again, they said, I think this one should come, listen to this. Many Roosevelt gladly volunteered to host for two weeks also, and now that I have started telling parents that their kids have volunteered that they would house and feed and entertain a strange Hungarian for half a month, I have discovered that the parents are excited as well.

My mentor last year, who was so generous and hard-working and kind, is coming in the beginning of April. She is accompanying Nándor -- a student I had in last year's 11th grade English class and one of the brightest kids in the school -- and Detti -- whom I substitute taught once but knew in part through her mother, in my adult English class.

Detti has started a blog about the upcoming trip. 

It includes this video:

Christmas, 2011

By the time I reached the end of Christmas holiday break, I felt any problem I had faced juggling duties at school was solvable; I was fat and rested and full of love, and though I did a great deal of work during the holiday too, I was on a track of remembering that said maybe the pressure I'd felt in the months before was just a phase I could get over. As such, my New Year's Resolution -- not surprisingly, to regain balance -- was something I was already achieving.

Perhaps because of the verb tense in this last paragraph, you are expecting a But Now. (And I'm writing this a week after a return to school, and maybe there is one.) But I'm not going to give it in this entry.

Stephanie's parents, Mickie and Bruce came and filled our house for two weeks, easy and loving house guests. We drove to Vancouver for a night and made gingerbread houses and played floor hockey in twelve feet of space with our good friends Rachel, Isabelle, and their kids Ben, Gabi and Thomas, then returned to have lunch with Marsha, my mother's one remaining cousin. We experienced two Hanukah parties, one tree decorating party, a great Christmas morning at our house with Karen, Dan, and our niece and nephew Nate and Anna, and New Years, with Vancouver friends and my good friend Aaron and my family too. There was music and food all the time, games and hopes and walks.



Lauren and Jeff hosted a Hanukah party at their house. Some of Maude's early steps are captured here on her way to Mickie.

In Vancouver, above, Rachel and Isabelle squeeze a lot of energy from our bodies in their small den. Below, Lauren and I met with our cousin Marsha who was in town for a sixtieth wedding anniversary. See Maude wiggle.

Amelia was a delightful, confidently fearful Mr. Tumnus in a winter break Narnia production. 

And at another Hanukah party, we see that what started as a friendship between mothers in the maternity ward between my mother and Louise (foreground) has led to a giant harvest of babies in the my generation.

Christmas at our house was not lacking for music. Below see Anna with our girls, Stephanie, Karen, Dad and Wendy, and below that a picture that turns into a moving picture of an impromptu holiday concert in our living room.

Finally, the turn of the year, with more music, more games, and dancing. Aaron demonstrates grace in a failing attempt to bite the bag (no handed, one-legged jaw-grabbing bag lift), and below this, Lauren demonstrates what it means to play Trivial Pursuit without a trivia knowledge base. 

It's a great moment so I take a picture with one hand while a guitar is in the other: Aaron, Dad, Isabelle, Rachel and Jeff singing.

When midnight breaks, we are gathered around a candle-lit table with our written resolutions. Amelia wrote 26 this year, including "Stretch my imagination" and "Learn at least 1,000 new things." Maisie resolved, among other things, "To eat more things I don't like" and "To wear an actual coat more often." Aaron said he would get his cat to walk on a leash. Tommy, far left, shared some too, like "I'll play with my truck." 

And there was a dance party. The kids decorated the basement and organized the whole thing, making and posting a proliferating number of signs the longer the adults conversed without coming down.

Want to trade teaching jobs for a week?

            Surely this isn’t the way all teaching jobs are—the unrelenting, unforgiving manic pace of it, the number of students I’m leaving to fail when I have a moment to look over my shoulder and check, the well-intentioned but practicably ridiculous broad and deep lists of ways we should be interacting, challenging, intervening, assessing, diversifying, universalizing, coaching, re-directing and reaching every child, most of which I wholeheartedly agree with and am reminded thereby of the failures and sacrifices of my own instructional practice; surely some schools have similar hopes and expectations for the classroom but throw fewer competing demands at their teachers, fewer students, more resources; or there must, alternatively, be effective schools out there that focus on fewer deep-bore goals at once.

            When I went to Hungary, my interest was not in a comparison of educational policy or pedagogy, but I couldn’t help but be affected by the different orientation teachers and students had with the material and scheduling of their days. It’s how I know that not all teaching jobs are like mine. But I wouldn’t trade on our American push for creativity, collaboration, critical-thinking and choice, nor on the core American belief, backed up by tremendous national investment however flawed, that every child should have resources and opportunities to succeed.

            Still, even here, even locally, surely this isn’t the way all teaching jobs are. This morning I began to fantasize about more local exchange possibilities. What if I could trade into other teaching experiences without jeapordizing programs and relationships—and, to be absolutely aboveboard, financial standing—and could learn and weigh approaches to teaching and lifestyle within the same systems (and commuting locale)?

            What if I could, for example, spend one week at The Nova Project, learning about an alternative high school in Seattle that vastly rejects the many premises that undergird a day in which intellectual behaviors (and, for thirty minutes, socializing behaviors) are fragmented by bells?

            What if I could spend a week living on Vashon Island, home to people who’ve chosen isolation and community over the overwhelming cultural and social bustle of city life? What’s it like to teach at the Vashon High School, or to bike home through the trees?

            Surely there’s some job out there that makes sense.

            And I have so much to offer an exchange partner who will share the possibilities with me. For one week, I could provide targetted lessons in someone else’s classroom, and someone could play to her own expertise in my classroom. I could jump over and, for a week, provide an intensive week on Shakespeare, for example, or close analytical reading of a poem, or sentence diagramming, or rhetorical analysis of text, or the transferable skills of creative writing, or critical thinking and socratic seminars, or a flashbang introduction to popular French and German philosophy, or sophisticated framing of narrative or argumentative essays, or anything I’m asked. And, alternatively, I could provide someone an opportunity to fill my room and not substitute teach but guest teach one week units to my 9^th, 11^th and 12^th grade groups towards instructor passions and student needs.

            An exchange—with all the adventure and fresh relationships and reflection that such an exchange implies!

            That was the fantasy this morning, anyway. If I could slip into someone else’s classroom and he into mine without any to-do from headquarters, and if we could serve each other’s looming deadlines and needs, maybe I’d pursue it.

            Push me, someone! 

Work week longer than my week week

It's Saturday night on Thanksgiving weekend. Stephanie had cooked all day and served two kinds of potatoes, two kinds of cranberry sauce, two kinds of apple pie (and a pecan and a pumpkin), stuffing, brussel sprouts, beets and greens, and a fat, glazed turkey. She brought out and polished her grandmother's vased candlesticks and frilled linen napkins and set forth a beautiful meal for our family, for Lauren, Jeff and Maude, for Wendy, and not for my father, who is in the middle of a six week road trip in honor of an award he is receiving at his high school in Miami, and in honor of his new car.

I have time tonight to write. I've fantasized about this writing, because for maybe a month, I've been arriving at -- if not clear then resonating -- thoughts about work. But of course, the time to actually slow down enough to do more than intuit in a glimpse what I might compose hasn't been handy. Which is what I wanted to write about.

I was listening to NPR a few weeks ago, and a professor was talking about the kinds of preparation students are receiving these days to head out into the work world. Middle class parents tell their children, and then teachers and professors tell their high-achieving students, that they should do what they love, or, "do what you love and you will never have to work a day in your life." Find and follow your passion. But even when the job market's good, this advice so often leads to disappointment and self doubt. The truth is that many jobs out there don't enrich the soul. In the radio essay, a professor says that what "he tries to tell his students is that a good job is good enough; they don't need to have the best job." And that seems like good advice. While we're reading Moby Dick with Arthur Schopenhauer in my Philosophy and Literature class, this point seems to repeated: Schopenhauer reiterates the Buddhist noble truth that life is suffering, and that, as soon as people give up on trying to make themselves happy, they can be in tune with the universe, not happy necessarily, but at peace. Ishmael too finds himself grooving on the masthead, forgetting his philosophizing for a moment and just feeling the vastness of the ocean, or he finds himself contented with the small pleasures in squeezing hands in buckets of oil with the other sailors; meanwhile, Ahab is driving himself to thinness and ruin, trying to exert his will on the universe. To let go.To give up on the desire to define and cage passion or happiness, or the career that will answer the internal rumblings, seems wise.

And yet.

I have loved my job for years. So many aspects to my job are joyful. I love the teenage energy, the pride students feel in original thought or carefully crafted words; I love the thoughtfulness adolescents are willing to put into what it means to be a decent human being, or to live a worthy life; I love unbaring the nuances and subtleties of literature, or the overtly reckless fun in Shakespeare; I love shaping the energy and delight of two and a half dozen people, of producing a sense of moment; I love students' discovery of civic potential, and personal strength; I love the pride they feel after numerous revisions that finally get my nod; and I love the intellectual dialogue suddenly in reach, the deliberate sparring I invite; and the students who linger after class or return in spare moments to add a relevant thought. I even love aspects of my job that get outside my classroom, as when I'm collaborating with other teachers with books we're all teaching together, or sparking off their ideas, or lining up ideas for a meaningful new event.

But these things that I love are getting crowded out. It's now been three times this year that I have come home saying I hate my job, something I hadn't ever said in fifteen years of teaching to this point.

Before I left for Hungary, I had often felt the strain of my work. The role of an English teacher is a big one. Universities rightly lay the blame for poor writing and critical reading skills on high school English teachers; nationally, reading and writing are two of the three things that consistently get tested and compared. Like all of my departmental colleagues, I already felt like Animal Farm's Boxer. I will work harder. I read papers like mad and turned them around in a day through clever staggering of assignments, brought in tutors and student teachers for counseling and extra rounds of revision and feedback, and I pushed students to read and annotate more, knowing that my students were working far harder than I ever did at their age. It was a lot of work, but I never came home and started browsing career possibilities as I've done three times this year. It was enough work, though, that I sought the working sabbatical of the Fulbright to buy me some perspective.

As I'd said in the previous blog entry, all of us returning Fulbright teachers have felt the jarring strain of our return. So, does my dissatisfaction stem from this cultural moment, or has the teaching job actually gotten worse? Of course, it's hard to separate the feelings. But I think the job is getting worse.

One piece is just numerical. I have 148 students a day. I haven't had that many students for half a decade. The numbers are threatening to get higher. Despite the systemic pressure on English teachers to deliver on an enormous array of embedded skills under the standardized microscope, because we have the largest department and therefore the most amorphous numbers, we are easy to trim. The biggest departments outside of Music, Theater and PE -- English, Math, and Social Studies -- have the largest class sizes. If I collect one paper every two weeks from every student, and I devote ten minutes to each paper, if I'm doing nothing else, I am also grading papers for 25 hours. But I'm not doing nothing else. I've taught Philosophy before, but you don't just do Moby Dick or Schopenhauer off the cuff. I've never taught the Advanced Placement Language and Composition class, and that takes preparation too. Even after cutting shameful corners, I still take between one and a half to two and a half hours a day to prepare the next day's lessons. And those papers: ten minutes an essay, really? If no parents e-mailed, if no student needed tutoring, and if I had no meetings to attend, then I'm already overwhelmed; but I don't think I hate the job yet.

The last time I hated my job, it was a Monday, and I was collecting papers from one class, quarterly projects from two others, I was biking downtown after school for a department chair meeting that would get me home to my family (and prepping for school) at 7:00 pm, preparing for a two hour meeting I was running the next day, and a two hour meeting I was running the day after that, and two staffings over failing kids after that, and a conference with two parents after that. When a boy wanted to meet with me to discuss his essay, but I had to run to (another) meeting, I realized -- all the heat rising into my chest and head, heat that was to become hatred, as in, I hate my job -- I realized that I couldn't meet with him before school on Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday either, or during lunch or after school on Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday either. And why the fuck not.

The very next week, I did something I've never done in all my years of teaching: I took a personal day off. On that personal day, I graded papers for six hours straight; I wrote a letter of recommendation; I made revisions to the departmental course catalogue; I cashed two checks that'd been sitting on the piano for two months; I went running; I sent out an application for a grant; and I ate lunch with Stephanie. It was like a revelation. I could do this! If my work week wasn't fitting into my week-week, I could call in sick and put a day-day into my work day. I could be in control. I don't want to end this particular story by admitting how quickly I became overwhelmed again the next day.

Time is a problem, and not being able to give it to that kid, for example, contributed, but it was the meetings themselves that made my feelings towards the job especially poisonous. The meeting I had downtown that Monday evening was in part about the Common Core -- national standards most states including Washington have adopted as the future language of targeted skills. Before I left for Hungary, English department chairs spent one or two sub days every month and two or three meetings every month developing our own standards, that would be in line with the Common Core. I wondered at the time why we didn't just accept the new standards wholesale and save a vast amount of time and money, if indeed, our state was soon going to adopt them. But we didn't. Now we are juggling four sets of standards at the secondary level in our department alone: the existing grade level expectations, on their way out, but still the state law of the land; the reading, writing and oral language standards we sloppily created two years ago; the standards we were encouraged to emulate in the College Board Standards for College Success; and the Common Core. If it's confusing, good news: I have another sub day scheduled next week to sort it in a day called Leadership and the Common Core.

The day after that, I have a three hour training after school to look at something called the Danielson Framework. This, like every set of standards, has pages and pages of charts too, but it's not just about English standards: it's about teaching standards, and every teacher in the district is being trained to use such charts to improve our practice, as we must, because the Danielson Framework is going to be attached to the new evaluation system going into effect next year, the performance evaluation system. I can't remember if the performance evaluation is also going to take stock of students' MAP scores (Measures of Academic Progress), a set of charts and an adaptive test students have been taking on the computer now for three years to measure their RIT levels (Rasch Unit); but I did go to my third training last week to understand how RIT scores worked and how to work with them -- but, for the third time, learned only that when scores go up, that's good. In any event, it's possible that the Danielson Framework charts will be benign, although it's another chart in my head: I'll find out even before that three hour training, because, on top of my whole day downtown for Leadership and the Common Core, I also have a whole day downtown this coming Friday for the Danielson Framework, preceding the three hour session the following week.

That's a lot of sub days, and each one means my work week is going to fit even less into my week week; but even more importantly, it means my head and my planning and my interactions with students are going to be crowded with all sorts of things that don't have anything to do with aspects of the job I love. And these things, they don't just compete with such joyous qualities for time in the school day: they crush.

I am going to many meetings and trainings to look at new charts and rubrics and standards, hundreds of pages of them; every faculty meeting goes over some slice of chart; every district meeting goes over some hunk. Thinking about the future of teaching in our district, with its increasing rigor and chartedness and class sizes, reflected in its absolute dry heave of a motto -- "Every student achieving, everyone accountable" -- it's hateful; and it's not just that I had a fabulous, life-bearing time in Hungary last year; it's that my job now is overwhelming and threatens to be ridiculous.

The class sizes are not going to get better any time soon. We know that the district budget is in trouble, and that the state budget is in dire straits. And this is a great opportunity.

A way the district and the state can save money while retaining the strength of its schools? For the duration, stop meddling. Leave us alone. Poke your head in our rooms when there's trouble, but otherwise, state, and you especially, district, no more all day trainings. No more charts. No more high-stakes tests. You can't afford them. You really can't.

I like so well the advice I heard, that "a good job is good enough." I'm willing to settle for a job that has its bad days and its good, its stresses and its small rewards, its unimpressive salary and invisible hours; but I didn't give thanks for it this year. If my work week doesn't fit into my week week, then that's it.

Thankfully, I have time this weekend to write my thoughts and slow down, and more importantly, to spend time with people I love. They're why a good job can be good enough.