Week 20: Slings and Arrows

I don’t know whether to post about this. Or what to post, exactly. Or who would want to read it.

These are the usual concerns, though, and I rarely let them stand in my way. So, here goes.

On April 30, I turned in my two final papers for the year. I was looking forward to six weeks of being out of classes, while everyone else in the house was still in school, to work on my First Year Exam (FYE – you’re going to hear a lot about it, so I may as well give you the acronym) and do some projects around the house that I’ve been too busy to get around to. That content and hopeful feeling was obviously an invitation for the Universe to fuck with me. I see that now.

On May 1st, I got a call from the school at 9:10 saying that my son had been “displaying a knife” at school, and that I needed to come and escort him to the police station for questioning. By the time I got to the school (I walked.), the principle had upgraded “displaying” to “brandishing,” and at the police station, it was clear that they thought he had threatened somebody. I rode in the back of the police car with my twelve year old and sat through a couple of threats of felony charges and juvenile detention which Gavin clearly didn’t understand. The officer explained that he was going to be read his Miranda rights “just like you’ve seen on TV,” but I can’t think of a single show that we watch where Gavin would have seen such a thing.  The officer’s presumption that Gavin knew what was going on was way off, but I had no idea how to course correct him.

During the questioning, it became clear that Gavin had picked up an exacto knife (with a protective cover on it) from the end of our driveway (Maybe it fell out of my scrapbooking box when I cleaned out the trunk of the car? I really don’t know.) and took it to school thinking that it might be his art teacher’s. He showed it to his best friend who said, “Hey, I have one of those,” and pulled out his pocket knife for comparison.

You can see how this looks.

They put the knives back into their pockets, but by then another kid had reported that there were kids with knives in front of the school. They got hauled into the principal’s office, separated, and questioned about the “altercation.” For an hour. Then the police arrived, and the school called me.

The boys’ first statements (which I got to see – eventually) make it clear that they have no idea what they are supposed to be describing. Gavin thinks he’s supposed to be saying how he found the knife, and writes that he “subconsciously collects shiny things.” The other child thinks he’s supposed to explain why he routinely carries a pocket knife and mentions “anonymous death threats” that have nothing to do with Gavin. The boys were interrogated by admin until they revised their statements to include the idea of a fight. Neither of them does a good job of it since they have no idea what they were supposed to be fighting about. Gavin says that he “got mad for some reason,” and that “he knew that [he and the other boy] would never hurt each other because we are friends.” The other child fares no better since he doesn’t know what the “altercation” was supposed to be about. The newspaper article about the event (slow news day+police at a middle school=this made the news) states that what took place “cannot be characterized as a fight.”

The eight “witness” statements range from kids who plainly state that they didn’t see anything, to kids who ramble on about other times when they were annoyed by one of the two boys. There is one statement by an adult – who did not see anything even though he was standing only a few feet from the boys while he was on before-school duty – who reports that a child reported to him that there were “blades exposed.”

It was important for admin to question the two boys extensively before notifying their parents because what Gavin was carrying could not be classified as a weapon without establishing that he intended to use it to hurt somebody. They worked hard to establish it, and I don’t think they did a very good job, but the school board upheld the charges because the principle pleaded at the hearing: how would it look if Gavin were allowed back at school after bringing a knife?

So, apparently, it is the look of the thing, not the truth that was his primary concern.

I get it. It’s fine. Of course, I was NEVER going to let Gavin go back to that school after the way they handled this. So he really didn’t need to concern himself with how it would look. Gavin was stupid to take the thing to school and deserved to be suspended for that. He did not deserve to be pressured into admitting to something he didn’t do for the convenience of appearance. The principal had all the power in this situation, and he used it to coerce children and then hid behind a defense of protecting the innocent.

So Gavin is suspended for the rest of the year, and he’s supposed to complete his school work at home and send it in for grading, but since the school’s curriculum is the absolute worst we have seen in all our contact with schools, we went ahead and withdrew him. At the hearing the principal indicated that Gavin could return to the school next year, but I don’t think we will go that route.

I keep wondering what I could have done differently to avoid all this. If I had kept up the routine of walking him to school, if I had not made a nuisance of myself about the bullying and curriculum issues at school, if I had talked with him about knives… but I don’t think that line of thinking is all that productive. I feel like I failed to equip him in some way – for the way he might be misinterpreted, for the way people might try to make him into something he’s not, for the recognition that tools might be seen as weapons under the right circumstances. I don’t know how I could have had these conversations with him in a way that would have helped him put all of these pieces together, though. I have (as a result of this) advised both of my children never to answer an administrator’s questions without asking to have a parent present. I don’t think this principal would have gotten away with such behavior in the presence of an adult. I’m sure that’s part of why I wasn’t called until an hour and ten minutes after the boys were hauled into the office.

I feel a lot of (probably unnecessary) worry about how people will think of him if they don’t know the whole story – or of how they will think of him if they hear my story and think that I am just making excuses for horrible behavior. Also, not productive. For the first week, I didn’t feel like I could talk about it with anybody. Now that it’s all wrapped up, and the world hasn’t stopped spinning or anything, I’m more able to talk about it. And I keep trying to come up with things for him to fill his time now that he is completely isolated from his peers. It’s stressful. School has always been challenging for Gavin, though, and he seems to be doing 100% better now that he doesn’t have to try to fit into a system that has never really offered much in the way of support. I want to believe in public schools, but right now my faith is being seriously tested.

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Week 18: “The Wheel is always turning…”

“That only matters to the people on the rim.”

We’ve been living on the rim for a while, and it’s definitely making us nauseous.

The last two weeks have been almost entirely terrible, with the minor light of finishing my first year of coursework being the only ray of hope.

I’m not ready to write about any of it yet. We’ll see how this week goes.

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Week ?? (15, I think):Pennyfoolish, Poundfoolish, and Perspectivewise

I’ve been working on projects and delaying posting in hopes of confirmed good news, and now with this week that we’re having… yeah, I’m just going to post.

The weather can’t quite decide what it’s doing here. The rain has been useful for my reading/writing mental space, but not for my getting-myself-to-classes process. I heard a horrific suggestion on the radio last night that we might expect “rain mixed with SNOW.” It’s nearly freakin’ MAY! Not okay, Michigan.

William got his letter of Intent to Hire this week, and they assured him that his teacher pay will begin from April 15. He hasn’t seen/signed the contract yet, but he did get an email apology from the superintendent (We’re going to take it to the bank! No, not really.) Today he found out that his first paycheck should be May 6. We’ll be able to plan our summer once we see it. So excited!

The semester is… not so much winding down as tilting full speed at a brick wall that is going to end it. I’ve been taking a lot of pictures of my cat to distract myself. I’m trying to learn simple html in Dreamweaver, create two presentations, and write two papers. I’ve done a ridiculous amount of work/annotating, but I feel like I still don’t have the shape of the things locked in. I’ve realized that the topic for one of my papers should be completely different, but it’s too late to change it, so I just need to suck it up and write the thing. I’m waiting to hear whether a prof will agree to be a first-year-exam reader and waiting to hear about a pseudo-academic blog post that I submitted.

Remember when I was so happy because I thought I had a research interest? Yeah, it’s changed. For the first-year-exam, anyway. I’m pretty happy about the change, but it’s funny to think about milestones that maybe turn out not to be milestones.

I’m feeling much better about being here. Maybe it’s just getting through the first year of coursework (almost), maybe it’s that the kids seem to be settling in, maybe it’s the holy grail of (almost) having Will’s contract in hand. I still don’t quite know how this work is actually going to help me contribute to schools/society. I guess I’ll just keep thinking.

I’m feeling better about the end of the semester. I’m having some of the same difficulties – elusive topics, not enough done in advance to revise, etc., but I’m not gearing up to take Merlin for a radiosurgery that may or may not be fully covered by insurance. And I’m looking forward to a summer of study, research, visitors, camping, and warm weather, with a trip to Texas thrown in at the end. I might even have enough money to fund it!

We still have a couple of weeks to navigate between now and then. I was counting on a small paycheck for some research work to patch us through, and then my bank hit me with two overdraft fees that obliterated it! It was one of those situations where something appeared to have cleared, but was then put back into the account, so it looked like I had money when I probably didn’t. I went $4 over somewhere. Gavin has a boy scout campout this weekend, so I called in emergency funds from the in-laws, and it looks like we might make it. We’re also waiting for reimbursement for Will’s Chicago trip with students and for a state income tax return. Any day now, I’m sure…

I got an insurance statement from BlueCare network explaining that the $89,000 procedure in San Francisco was fully covered, which is a huge relief. It isn’t the total for all her care, but we’ve had several notices of full coverage, and every time I get one of those statements, my chest feels a little lighter.

So, we’re still scraping the barrel for every month and leaning heavily on Will’s parents; we cashed in every bit of financial security we had to go to and come back from India; we charged up all our credit cards to move to Michigan, and I keep my phone on silent to avoid the customer service calls – which this morning caused me to miss a frantic call from Merlin’s school notifying me that she was having a seizure. They called Will, and Will called Aubrey, and Aubrey came over to get me. Then we collected Merlin, and Aubrey bought us all breakfast.

Still, our insurance has covered almost all of the (close to) half a million dollars in medical care that Merlin has needed over the last year, William got a teaching job in a state where it’s a minor miracle to do so, and in light of the Real Problems going on in the world, my papers and presentations don’t seem like such a big deal.

I’m worried for the world, but right now, I’m pretty fucking happy.

 

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Week 12.5: A Stubborn Patch of Snow

It’s not quite Spring here yet. In spite of blue skies and valiant first flowers and my morning ritual of walking out the door and shouting “It’s Spring!” My breath comes out in a cloud, and there are still frozen clumps of ice, huddling together for the sustaining chill.

Skies are blue, though, and flowers are pushing through, and I’m wearing my light coat, and we are all insisting that this winter is done.

I’ve almost done with all the reading for my courses. I’ve almost settled on what my final projects will be. I’ve almost thawed enough to begin writing. Feeling just a little icy. I hope once I get started (tomorrow? tomorrow.), the melt will roll through like a flood of ideas, a flood of words, all the molecules independent but connected, fluid and unlocked.

Sometimes all it takes is a good controlling metaphor.

And relatedly, I’ve run into four people around town that I know. In shopping markets, at school, at social gatherings. A couple of them knew me or William by some means outside of my small program.  A run-in with a parent at Sparrow Market resulted in a sleepover for Gavin. Merlin made a contact at a Sunday pot luck that turned into babysitting this week. Just like that. In spite of our dragging him from India to Texas to Michigan, the cat hasn’t chosen a new family. He comes home every day.

It’s almost like we live here.

William has been in pretty much continual pain from a tooth problem that he’s been putting off treating because he was waiting for his contract and the dental insurance with it. He finally decided he couldn’t wait and went to the University dental school, and they are doing an emergency root canal tomorrow. For free. Because it’s research. He’s supposed to chaperone a bunch of students to Chicago on Friday, but the school district is balking because he isn’t an employee. Of course, he isn’t an employee because they are either exploitative or incompetent. The job posted, he interviewed, and the principal offered him the position back in December. All the paperwork on his side is done, so there aren’t any other explanations left. It’s frustrating, but maybe it means they will push his contract through by Friday? It doesn’t seem likely, but hope springs eternal.

If we can just get William’s contract in hand, I think we will really be settled. The last patch will melt. We’ll stop feeling so stuck, so provisional, so hindered. We’re ready for this last stubborn patch to give way.

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Week 11: Unpacking my Baggage

This last weekend was “Recruitment Weekend,” which is significant for me because I came here a year ago. In one way or another, my mind has been in Michigan for a year now. I’m going to make a collage of it, but not tonight. I’ll keep you posted.

Anyway, that’s not really what I want to talk about.

It’s been a difficult year, and no mistake. This weekend I was called on to recruit people to come into this experience. Now it’s a given that not many people are as crazy as I am, and my experiences are not like others’. Theirs aren’t like mine. However you want to look at it. I don’t imagine for a moment that I’m special, but I also don’t believe for a second that I am the same. Having had a difficult semester teaching and a mediocre experience in classes and a heartbreaking role as witness to the experiences of my children and husband, I am in a very strange position to recruit people.

I kept my mouth shut for the most part. I nodded agreeably. But I got pressed at an informal coffee about my experience of moving from teaching high school in Texas to teaching college here, and I might have said something along the lines of, “I’d rather teach 168 high school students on free lunch than 18 Michigan students.”

That’s not really a reflection on the students here.

The majority of my career as a teacher was spent working with minority and low-income students. In that population, I had the full range. I had students who were college-bound and students who only wanted to return to their families in Mexico. I had at least one student who eventually went to university in Mexico. Almost every student felt like public education had something to offer them, and if they didn’t, I felt it was my job to persuade them.

The students here are highly motivated. They don’t need persuading. They believe the education they get here will help them lead the lives they want. They’re probably right. And I feel like I just want to throw monkey-wrenches. What’s wrong with me?

I’m dealing with some interesting crises. I’ve come here partly because I think it is something that people with my intellectual aspirations do. I’m American. If you want to go to the top in America, you follow the resources, you continue getting credentialed, you prove your merit in this meritocracy by getting in, by being recognized. On the other hand, it all feels like a weird self-congratulatory house of cards. It’s taken me this long to apply to PhD programs partly because I couldn’t figure out how this extra schooling would be useful. Where is the connection between academia and real life?

I’m here, and I’m awed and grateful for the resources available to me. That makes me a pretty good recruiter. But I’m also still wondering: how on earth does this matter?

In my rhetoric course, I’ve been unwittingly providing what my professor called “the subtext of every set of questions we’ve had all semester,” and that is: how do you apprentice people into the “code of power” when you’re not sure you know it yourself and without reproducing hierarchies and structures that you believe to be unjust? I don’t know the answer to this question. I’ve done all the “this is just one code,” “it depends on your audience,” “it’s a rhetorical choice,” stuff. I’m not sure I always believe it. The code we are teaching relies on (or transfers?) a set of underlying beliefs that sometimes come into direct conflict with commitments to language, family, and place. We live in a culture that pays lip service to family and children but denies many people the right to build such structures and belittles people who give up educational advancement to maintain them. Professions that support the development of children are often low-status and low-paid.

I’m also wondering how you make high school an awesome, common, empowering experience for students, whatever their later life choices. If they want to get married and stay home, if they want to join the armed services, if they want to go to college, if they want to become an expert in a trade, if they want to go to community college – for the basics or after years of working, as a life-enrichment or as a stepping-stone to four year institutions – how do we honor all of these choices and support all of these students? How do we guarantee the opportunity to change your mind if the choice you make when you are 18 (or 25 or 35) doesn’t work out the way you hope?

There’s a quality of life issue here that schools are being held to account for while power structures go on distributing the wealth unequally to the top 2%. Those people at the top are fond of blaming schools all the way to the bank.

And though I see the structural problems, and I am not sure that schools can solve them, I do believe schools have a role in creating quality of life, in sharpening the mind to appreciate what is good, what is beautiful, what is true. I believe schools have a role in connecting people – to the past and to each other. I believe that poetry can save a person’s life, even if he wouldn’t have chosen to read it on his own, even if he never chooses to read it after high school.

I still have misgivings about being in the program – concerns that my interests are too pedestrian or too populist, that I won’t be able to narrow my research down productively, that for all my smarts, I just won’t cut it here. But I’m feeling more at home (even in the snow), and I’m going to just keep thinking and working. I’m sure there are ways that my experience and the resources here could combine to benefit the students I worry about. I just have to finish unpacking.

 

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Week 10: The Ides of March

It’s supposed to snow 3 inches tonight. I don’t have words in any of the 5 languages I’ve studied to convey how I feel about that.

I’ve been delaying this post in hopes of producing secure good news instead of continued speculation, but the ides are here (is here?), and I have to post. So, William is this very moment completing the pre-employment packet (W-4, drug test, physical and transcripts/certifications), and he should have a contract next week. I know the force of that statement is weak since we’ve been saying it since January, but there you are.

Merlin had a choir concert at the local high school last night that was awesome. It’s always fun to see students being great.

 

I spent a few feverish hours convinced that I was going to homeschool/unschool Gavin next year and wound myself up about how cool the curriculum would be, but when I talked it over with him, he decided he would stay at Slauson because he has plans to hang with some friends on the 8th grade Chicago trip. Ha!

I still need to pay for Merlin’s trip. <stressed>

There’s only like a month left of class. I don’t know how all these projects are going to get done (or apparently, who is going to do them?).

Wish me luck.

 

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Week 9: “There’s only us; there’s only this…”

My problems are small.

I blog about them, and bitch about them, and obsess over them because they are mine, and I feel keenly the lack of aptitude in “resolving” them. I put “resolving” in quotes because there is a very old part of me that recognizes that death will resolve them and that, in that case, I prefer the continued struggle.

A friend of mine from high school recently posted a link to a woman’s reflection on losing her child to Tay-Sachs. The mother’s advice there: cherish what you have as you move through the joys and frustrations of parenthood. I completely agree. And lately, I’ve found my frustrations with my children’s experience with school – especially the obsession with testing, which one of my friends here has recently blogged about - more in conflict with my goals than usual.

My daughter was diagnosed with a life-threatening condition last year. There are no obvious signs of her affliction at present, and she could live a long, full life without ever suffering any difficulties. Yet, there is no easy cure for her condition, and the configuration of her brain means that she could have a sudden aneurism and be one of those teens you read about in the papers who dies in their sleep. Without warning.

Her only guarantee is her daily life right now.

That statement is true for all of us, but brought more to my attention in her case. It makes my patience with high-stakes testing, clique-ish social practices, and opaque teachers willing to let her ‘just figure it out next year’ … short.

Her life is right now. That’s all there is.

Insha’Allah she will live a long time and need all of these “skills” that her middle school teachers are adamant that she must have to participate in high school life. God willing, their insistence that she figure things out herself will serve her. It’s a sink-or-swim kind of mentality where we pretend that everyone learns to swim, eventually. Presuming they have time.

And I’d like to turn here to my old, and much maligned, friend John Dewey, who believed that education was not about preparing children for some imagined future, but about engaging students in practical and hands-on ways with what they are interested in right now and connecting those interests to long-standing human inquiry and connectedness.

So I’d like to say for the record that my children are complete people, right now. They are not adults-in-the-making. They contribute to society as they are, already. They have entered a school system that does little to value their compassion, humor, sensitivity, interests, and skills, and yet, they still share, online and in-person, with their family and friends. They make life better for the people they encounter.

So, money is impossible, health is complicated, school is trickier than I imagined and both of my kids stayed home “sick” today. We spent the day reading and writing and listening to NPR. It wasn’t what I had planned, but it was what happened, and it was…

OK.

 

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Week 8: It’s the same rain…

It’s been raining for just over an hour, but now it’s turning into snow. The salt trucks have been out all day, and they’re saying maybe 4-6 inches tonight.

Next week is my winter (spring?) break, and I am going to do a great deal of reading and planning, I hope. Perhaps I’ll catch up on my weekly book reading as well.

I have nothing else to report.

 

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Week 7: Just Happy to Be Here

Sideswiped this week by a surprise assignment, but I’m making it happen.  Fairly caught up on school reading. It’s snowing again.

The big story here is Will’s continued struggle to get a contract for the job they offered him in December. We’re starting to make contingency plans. Snow days, February break, and March break means that he’s getting paid about $800 a month to work as a full-time teacher. It’s depressing.

I’d like to talk about something else, but this frustration colors every waking moment. Our phones are continually ringing with bill collectors’ demands, and we are beginning to slide into a very deep financial pit.

We have welcome weekend coming up next month, and I’m excited to meet the new people, but wondering if I should withdraw from most of the activities since I can’t possibly say anything to recommend Ann Arbor if you have kids in school or a spouse who needs a job.

I’m pretty low, so I’m not linking these to Facebook. I hate to spend all my time here complaining.

Merlin and Gavin are well. Crowley is a little stir-crazy from being indoors so much. William joined the civic chorus, so I’m excited about that. I have Spring break coming up in a couple of weeks, and I need the time to read and think and write, so that’s good.

I’m trying to keep an eye on the positives, and considering the medical drama of last year, I have to say there are definitely positives. We’re holding on tight here. Keep us in your thoughts.

 

 

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