Classroom Systems of Support

              Most of this year, teaching has been vastly improved from the last: Students have now had a year back in school, which blunts their hair-trigger anxieties and sensitivities and provides some nuance back to their social-media narrowed points-of-view; and the ninth graders now have had an actual year of middle school and so have already learned to stay in the room and mostly not climb on each other; and I’ve started the year without a mask, which allows me back my laughter and delight in social relations as well as my vocal and facial expressiveness, all of which turn out to be helpful in teaching; plus I’ve quit chairing the English department, all of which allow me to focus squarely on my professional goal for 2022-2023—to enjoy teaching again.

              But this last Wednesday called everything back.

              The week before Christmas break is always bananas, and my History partner and I had split our block in half, guiding 32 ninth graders to choose reading NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names in fourth period and 32 in fifth to choose Angie’s Thomas’s The Hate U Give. All students seemed happy with the resulting groups—fourth period more scholarly (post-colonial novel with nightly content warnings) and fifth period more fun (YA novel, please). Students this week had started literary analysis essay work, and by Wednesday, were gathering textual support for chosen questions and developed claims.

              But my point isn’t about these students or what happened fifth period, because the damage I’m trying to describe happens later, when, in a faculty meeting, our principal asserts the importance of restorative justice over models of disciplinary punishment, and I agree with her, but my heart has fallen so low that when Stephanie gets home I can’t bring myself to look at her and in a few hours we go to sleep, and I hold on to the feeling panting inside me.

              Fifth period started with a teacher chasing a student into the classroom because the kid was flying through the hallways and “could have hurt someone.” My ninth grader sat regally in his assigned seat and said, I don’t care. This had me jumping up and calling out, “That’s not how you talk to another human being,” and the child again said, I don’t care: he’s old. Thus began a class that would involve a two hour shelter-in-place because an Airsoft gun had been spotted on campus.

              What occurred during those two hours recalled 2021’s October 13^th testing day, for which I was asked along with the Social Studies department chair to come up with a plan to occupy all ninth and tenth graders for three and a half hours while upperclassmen took tests, and all ninth graders were placed in windowless test-noncompliant science rooms: for three of those hours, my charges were tolerably engaged; but at the 200^th minute mark, admin was looking for me because the Juniors needed more time with the PSAT and can we hold the ninth graders now until one o’clock; but the five hours on stools in an airless room without lunch turned out to be too much for the 14 year-olds, and rotating classes through the gym, which was the ad hoc solution involving two to three hundred crazed hungry kids in a single room until only ten minutes were left of the school day, turned out to be too much for the teachers as well, who helplessly watched the mad, thunderous chaos with both horror and absolute lethargy.

              This year, though, as I said, has been much improved. Still, fifth period last Wednesday reminded me of that very worst day of my very worst year. Many in the YA group treated our evidence search-time lightly. A few students needed help to refine their argument claims, but during the shelter-in-place, the number of others bugging or blurting or on a phone or in the wrong place or even on the floor meant I wasn’t much help with intellectual refinement. And then a student had an allergic reaction to something from lunch, and I had to coordinate care from my locked classroom. Then the phone rang because the principal was calling and I couldn’t get to the phone and a student I was calling to grab the line didn’t know I was talking to him. Then security came to my room for a kid whose name he didn’t have, and because the nurse told me to expect security, I sent him off with the allergic girl who was then returned a few minutes later as the wrong person.

              There were a few more rounds of this—the phone ringing, security knocking, emails misleading, the allergy girl not dying—as minutes ticked past the end of class and towards the end of day, and students finally started to understand that I wouldn’t let them leave even then, not until we received the all-clear. When we were told just before the bell that students could indeed leave—don’t linger, leave campus immediately—kids piled across snack wrappers and cockeyed desks and a few overturned chairs. The one moment of quiet during those hours was after a knock on our door when two grim, fully armed policemen entered and called for my running kid and, sternly, for his backpack. The gun, we thought as he grabbed his pack: the gun was here in the room all along. But then the kid was returned fifteen minutes later and told the class staring at him to fuck off.

              Fifth period, what turned out to be my last class of the day, was a long, enervating and discouraging experience. But it was recoverable. The final two days of the week were fine.

              What ultimately poisoned the week was not the anarchic shelter-in-place but the bimonthly faculty meeting, wherein our principal answered concerns about students roaming the halls and hanging out undisturbed every period in the lunchroom with a message I do approve: It’s not right nor is it practical to respond to students traumatized by school with punishment. We need to respond instead with respect, love, and support. And right now, she said, we’re working on our systems of support, which include reaching out to the community, reaching out to parents, reaching out to partners, and building our bridges so that we can respond person-to-person and react with care rather than anger and exclusion: Students will not be disciplined, therefore, unless students are committing crime.

              It wasn’t until the next day that I realized why I was so burnt not just by the day but her words, why I was so emptied out I couldn’t look at Stephanie when she asked me about my day.

              I agreed with our principal.

              But on Wednesday, students and one in particular needed more from me than I was giving, and my calls for help have remained, unsurprisingly and as ever, unanswered and unacknowledged. I didn’t need the running kid disciplined; but the promise of the described person-to-person exploratory dialogue, or at least an email to me in response to my own, would have been useful.

              I agreed with our principal. And yet the words made me feel terribly, terribly alone.

Room 1211

              Everything smelled yellow. The cancer had spread to Mom’s liver, so that’s maybe what I sensed: her skin was sallow. But hovering above the sharpness of hospital bleach and bedsheets, there was also a softer smell, something heavy and warm and unpleasant that spread everywhere in the room.

              My sister was the one who found Mom seizing in her bedroom where Mom had spent much of the past couple months—and Lauren who called 911. Six days later, I drove Lauren, my father, and Wendy back to the hospital at two in the morning. We traveled in silence; I stayed to the speed limit on the empty streets over Capitol Hill—no reason left to rush—street lamps throwing a faded brown onto the trees and houses around them.

              There were times in the hospital when Mom was conscious and lucid, and many more when she slept; other times, she bucked in a frenzy of pain, and a few times Mom spoke to us a strange, twisted language that made us all laugh. The trick was to run enough morphine to ease the pain but drop it back to return her to us. We called this dial-a-Myrna. But like so much of the week, it felt like the choice between love and death.

              Mom wore a blue gown with little gold patterns. The oncology wing was on the top floor, and the window of 1211 gave an expansive view of the Seattle’s thicket of buildings against the gray arm of Puget Sound. Mom had so many visitors every day, so it was good the other bed in her room was empty and people could sit there. Otherwise, we just had a low-slung pleather chair sunk further under the weight of a thousand wretched bedside visitors, its two arms, hard and wooden.

              Mostly we would talk to each other in the room and leave Mom out of it, not worried about our laughter louder than anything else on the floor—the black humor of Mom’s body and likely death—laughing at Mom waking up and telling Lauren to go out and play with the bananas, laughing because good friends were sitting together and this is what they did, hands on each other’s backs.

              We saved serious talk for the waiting room and once, the conference room the floor below because Mom had written a living will that made no sense: Directives to physicians usually advise a team in the event of a stopped heart to please allow the signatory to pass quietly. But Mom’s demanded the violence of all measures, surely to burst her cancer-ridden organs in the process. Even success was an absurdity in such a body. But then Louise slammed the table with her open palm. You don't know, Louise had said. You don't know what it was like: You weren't there. You weren't there when Myrna and I sat in the dark theater and watched the movie Dad, where a son came to visit his father every day and told him stories and fed him ice cream and revived him from death; you weren't there when Myrna made me promise… PROMISE! she said. Promise that you will do that for me, that you will come every day. But Myrna... PROMISE! Promise, Louise: Promise me that you will visit every day and feed me ice cream and read me stories. But Myrna, it's different, you have cancer. PROMISE! she had said.

              And I was remembering Mom, her chin up and grinning, a white button blouse with green paisleys over breasts still there and her glasses dark from the sun pouring into our living room, chanting a camp song about backdoor trots: “Diarrhea. Unh! Why were you born. Unh! Death, destruction, and despair. People dying everywhere. Diarrhea. Unh! Why were you born. Unh!” I was remembering Mom folding Lauren into a hug, remembering the feel of the hug myself, like her whole body was a smile.

              In the hospital, I couldn’t do much for Mom, but I could feed her crushed ice. She ate very little and couldn’t really drink, and her throat was scratchy and dry like a cat’s. The ice machine down the hall would grind the ice with satisfying viciousness.

              I could smell decay from her pores.

              For the flake of ice on her lips, I took the cloth from the bedside table. Gently wiped her mouth. Watched her chest rise and fall with her breaths. Felt my own lungs empty and fill.

Prom 2022

May 22, 2022

Dear friends,

              I send this album as my way of delivering photos I promised. Feel free to download and add as whimsy moves you until next Sunday, when I’ll remove sharing.

              Last night was such a joy! You were lively and loving and beautiful, and it was an absolute triumph—more than just climbing the tower of a Senior year. I’ve known some of you your every year at Roosevelt (Francoise, Kyle, Rona, Seraphina, Sofia), and others of you I’ve come to know and admire and adore over these last two very hard and strange years; but on this side of the era, Ms. Plesha and I agreed that last night, last night made us feel truly better about what has been so hard a year: you were dancing right on the top of it and embracing this good, good community you have made, and we felt utterly fortunate to be there as witnesses and guides and whatever else comes of our time together.

              But last night also had such a bittersweet sting for me: A couple weeks ago, Maisie performed her last with an orchestra to which all three of our daughters devoted time and pride: our family has reached its end there. Here we are now in the fast march of these culminating rites, joyous, hard-won, which will include more concerts and the last day of school and graduation (of course) and finally the day Maisie leaves for the big life she owns beyond us. Prom was the second of these celebrations—Maisie poised and beautiful and surrounded by friends—and I was proud, happy, but so sad too, full of love for Maisie, and love for you all.

              So here is a congratulations to you, and a hug to go. We’re in it now, everyone, and I’m with you in this delirious tumult of transition—in the excitement, the trepidation, and the love that comes in the final appreciation and grasping tight to the friendship, knowledge, experience, community, and routines of daily kindnesses and small mutual joys you’ve intricately grown in this ending time, this ending place.

              It was a joy to be with you last night, and I write to you with

love,

David Grosskopf

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.