My negativity blanket.

When I was little I used to carry around a plastic baby doll bottle, the kind where it looks like the milk is emptying when you tip it over. I don't remember this, but family lore shares that I was quite attached to this bottle- once having broken it my mother had to immediately go to the store to purchase a new one, for fear I would never stop my dismal tantrum. I guess it was a security object for me, like my little brother's "Bunny" or my cousin's "Old Yellow" (a blanket affectionately named for it's well-loved and tattered appearance).

As it is basic human nature to want to belong to a group, to feel that we are never alone, that we are part of something, that we are protected and safe, it is a natural occurrence that children create their own soothing forms of security.

Many people do not realize that adults never really grow out of having a security object, though it may change over time and become an idea rather than a tangible object. Some adults are glued to their email- the security of constant communication. Others find security in their sexuality and youth through infidelity. Some adults chew their hair or repeatedly get tattoos as a way of self-soothing. For me, my over-analyzing negativity is my security blanket. A blanket, that lately, many people are trying to tear away from my grip.

Sometimes I want to embrace negativity, to dwell in the delicious comfort of skepticism and doubt, allowing potential melancholy to shroud around me like the comfort of swaddling a newborn. Thinking about the worse thing that could happen is not a way I self prophetize, nor is it meant to drag my soul into a pit of depression, rather, for me, it is a comfort, a way my soul and heart communicate to know that whatever happens in a given situation I'll be okay, broken hearts will mend and tears will dry up. In short, to get my plan B...C...D...and E... in order- should I need to use them.

Perhaps if I did not have a strong sense of spiritual comfort, I would be like so many others who let negativity and depression eat away at their life energy, never to recover. I do see the glass half empty, but I still appreciate the half that is there. I still strive to fill up the glass, and try not to take even a single drop for granted. If in the process of filling up my cup I take comfort in a quiet reflection and oppugn wrap, is it really a problem?

My negativity blanket is the jumping off point to my positive meditation, my first step. If we only feel positive emotions then we are not truly whole; like the yin and the yang we must encircle all affection to really be.

For without our deepest sadness, grief, and negative thought, we equally would not know the sweetest happiness, love, and joy.

Too bad, so sad, no techie for you.

My school is limited in the available technology hardware we have available, though not from lack of wanting. Our two computer labs are booked for the entire year on the first day of school; teachers race to be the first one to block off their dates on the calendar, knocking down anyone or anything that gets in their way, like the running of the bulls. To combat this problem most teachers have given up on having students use computers individually; they kindly let the runners pass them by, then turn and leave.

I am a runner.

However, as this is my first year teaching in this building I did not catch on to the game until the calendar was already full. That did not deter me though; I simply decided I would have to find other ways of using what little technology my students and I can access.

The truth of the matter, is that kids these days need to know about technology, whether it is all around them or whether it hidden by a brick wall; they need to know various applications if they are going to succeed in this world. I believe that as an educator I have the responsibility to help them with this goal.

As a New Year resolution, I decided I would do more with technology in my classroom by not being afraid to have students do their technology work in the evenings on their home computer. Eighty percent of my students have a computer with internet access available in the evening. But, what about those that do not? This is a problem that prevents many teachers from assigning technology projects. They fear they will come across as un-empathetic to students who are not as advantaged, and who do not have computers at home.

I look at it this way (prepare for harshness!): Deal with it. You may not have a computer at home, but you need to figure out how to access one sometime during the week. I am sorry your family is not wealthy, neither was mine, but you can sit back and let the truck of technology run you down, or you can run after it and catch the bumper. The world is not going to wait for students to get their own computer; the world is not that patient. When my washing machine breaks (and I am expecting it to any day now!) and I cannot afford a new one, I do not wear dirty clothes, I go to a laundry mat.

Armed with this new philosophy I did however decide to do something to make accessing computers easier for these students. With the support of our school librarian I blocked off one of the computer labs every Tuesday for an hour after school; reserved for my 8th grade team only (I stay to supervise). In the three weeks since open lab started, I am amazed and pleased at how many students take advantage of it! They are free to do anything on the computer in that hour that is for a school subject and is within the appropriate policies. In addition to this, our students do have the option of going to the media center to use a computer during their free period. These strategies combined, I feel assured that I can defend myself if someone approaches me about students who do not have their own technology (no one has yet.)

There is nothing more satisfying (and rare) than an untenured teacher feeling confident in breaking the mold of educational norms. Leave it to my students to put a kink in the plan.

I received an email just yesterday that two of my more iniquitous students had breeched library code-of-conduct and decided to locate gang signs, inappropriate song lyrics, and YouTube videos while in the library during free period. Their user accounts are henceforth terminated for the remainder of the school year. In simple terms, this means they cannot use a computer in our building for the rest of their junior high career. Hmm...so much for getting them to post their poetry assignment to our Moodle site....

To my knowledge, both of these students fall into that group of tweens who do not have computers at home. My theory? Too bad, so sad, guess you will have to figure out a way to go to the public library or else get an F. Yes, I know I may sound insensitive, but I also believe that these students should not have the privilege of having an alternative assignment because they made bad choices. If they were sophomoric and made the bad decision to misuse the school computers, then I truly believe they should have to face the consequences.

In writing this- heart and logic stand behind my convictions, though whether or not administration or parents will agree with me is yet to be seen. I hope to remain strong, knowing truly that it is far better for students to be held responsible for their actions, then to be flittered along into adulthood, unprepared for the world of technology and the world of consequences.

Don't look a gift potato in the mouth.

In 1999 a vision of the Virgin Mary was reportedly seen in the window of a building in Clearwater, Florida. This wasn't the first "sign" America would see, nor the last.

Plagued by indecision, it was the only immediate solution we could come up with- going to Buffalo Wild Wings for twenty-five cent Tuesdays. L and I sat there, sipping soda and mulling over our options, none of which seemed to lift my spirit nor steer us in a clear direction.

Vandals once threw corrosive liquid over the image on the glass, but the representation returned.

Most people are indifferent towards unexplainable signs, though there are a few pertinacious individuals who cling to the belief that any sign, whether found in a mirrored window or a gum wrapper, is a divine message from God, sent to ease their suffering and provide hope. Ironically, it was not the indignation of vandals leading them to destroy it; they believed in the phenomenon the most, enough for it to scare them into attempting to get rid of it.

I had long stopped asking God to give me a sign for my issues. Either she never complied or I am too oblivious to notice. I can see the outline of a Mary-esque figure, but I'm not sure I believe it.

As the waitress dropped off twenty-four wings and an order of cheesy potato circles I could feel myself finally coming to an answer. I thought it over before saying anything, letting the hot spices, married with drippy grease, weakly attempt to make me feel better.

Just as I was starting to feel nauseous from indecision (or possibly the grease was eating away at my insides) I picked a solution from my virtual hat and laid it on the table. THIS is what we're going to, I proclaimed to L. He agreed.

With sticky fingers I reached in to grab another cheesy disc, beginning to feel a small weight release from my shoulders. The dimly lit room caused me to squint my eyes and immediately pause....my potato was smiling at me.

No, I do not usually see faces staring at me from my victuals, nor am I like Aunt Glady (Marge Simpson's aunt) who cherished her collection of potato chips that resembled famous people. My potato actually had two distinct eyes and a smile (as you can see.)

I told L it was a sign. What else could it be? At that exact moment I had just made a decision on something that had bedeviled my mind for well over six months, and there appeared before me a salty sign from above.

Skeptics claim the "Virgin of Clearwater" was "...the result of ground-water being sprayed up onto the windows from the sprinkler system, depositing a layer of metallic oxides there, and by thin-film reflection effects showing a fuzzy rainbow-like pattern on the glass." Maybe so, but it still formed that exact pattern at that exact time.

My potato friend is likely a natural cause of the intricate gourmet preparation of cheesy potato discs, but it was no less an auspicious gift, much needed at that exact moment.

I have no doubt that signs will continue to reveal themselves in unique ways until the end of time. Some of us will claim divination in an arbitrary picture; others will stare blankly with bemusement. Regardless, if my eyes do happen to be open at the time, I won't look a gift potato in the mouth.

Oprah, can you come to school?

We were watching a video, an excellent documentary, on the Holocaust. The idea was to give students a visual look at survivor's stories, to co-inside with the reading of The Diary of Anne Frank in Reading class. What follows is a quoted conversation from one of my students.

Him: "This is boring."

Me: no comment

Him: "It would be better if it were live and we were in a stadium."

Me: "What?!"

Him: seeing the look on my face "You don't understand."

Me: "No, I really don't. Please explain what you mean."

Him: "You know, like when Oprah has people sit in the stands, like it's live, like people sit in the stands and watch."

(silence)

I just walked away...

Suiting up.

Though I've never been a huge football fan, I tried to give an honest attempt at watching Sunday night's playoff competition (okay...in between grading papers, reading, and taking a nap). The 3rd coldest game in NFL history seemed to do little to sway the spirit of these fierce athletes. Each team played against the odds, against the cold; forging ahead with an unrivaled determination I watched with awestruck admiration.

This week I'm getting ready to play my own kind of game, though I have to skip the playoffs and head straight to the Superbowl. Physical preparation in not necessary for my match, instead mental rehearsal with insider interviews and advice, research and repetitive questions and answers are my pre-game strategies. In the end I hope my playbook will be full of profound and analytical responses, clever quips and a repertoire of solutions to our most quantitative educational dilemmas.

I can not yet be sure if I will prove victorious, though I can be fairly certain my game will run into overtime. The best we can do when we suit up for these competitions, is to keep the endurance alive within us, no matter how chilly the air gets, how bad our knuckles bleed, or how many opponents knock us over. Okay team... I'm ready. Let's win it.

The disservice of lax deadlines.

At the time I was drunk on admiration and paralyzed by the fear of her wrath, so I completely bought into her philosophies and beliefs about education, no matter how arbitrary or well researched they were. "Dr. Smith" as I will call her, was the first principal I would ever be employed under, the one who gave a starry-eyed intern her first real interview and first professional teaching job offer. From the first day I arrived in that Florida middle school is was the perfect symbiotic relationship. With the ink of my diploma barely dry, I needed to be on the leash of a strong leader who could guide me. She needed a young puppy to train, to sit at her heels, look up admirably and buy into her all her policies and beliefs. I was happy to oblige. I freely laced up my sneakers before she even said jump.

Dr. Smith was firm on her deadline policy, which I faithfully implemented in my classroom. Students were allowed to turn in assignments late at any time during the quarter, even on the last day (and in some cases after the quarter), regardless of when it was. The point, she reasoned, was for students to learn the material and complete the assignment. Wouldn't it be better for them to do it late than never at all? Absolutely, the little puppy would say, wagging her tail. Students were to learn, nay master, the objectives, and they should have as many chances as they needed.

It seemed like the right thing to do. It made parent conferences easier; we presented the idea that we really cared about student knowledge, no matter when that knowledge takes place. We were the educational heroes, putting the spirit of learning ahead of the convenience of timely grading.

During my second year, with a continuous lack of extended effort from my students, I began to feel something was amiss with this idea. I slowly chewed off my leash and began to ask other teachers what they thought about the policy, if they had done anything differently and what they reasoned was best for students in the present and future.

Before I had any time to process my findings however, I traded in my Florida i.d. tags for shiny new ones from Illinois.

I forgot about deadlines for awhile, trading them instead for the hugs and crayons of kindergarten students. Deadlines don't really exist in kindergarten. If Joey doesn't master his lower case letter sound identification the first quarter he just keeps practicing them the next. There is no great penalty on a check plus report card.

Re-entering middle school this year I naturally took the same policy of assignment deadline lenience I was obliged to use in Florida. I took off some employability points (points for skills relating to time-management, organization, participation, etc.) for turning in an assignment late, but otherwise told students they could turn in their assignments up until the last day of the quarter and they would still receive full credit. The result? The initial deadline for assignment after assignment lapsed as my list of zeros grew larger and larger for students who did not turn in their work, if they even bothered to do it at all. At the end of the quarter, when those few lucky students who had parents looming threats over their heads started to panic, I was quick to remind them they had the privilege of turning in missing assignments from the entire quarter up until the last day. Some dutiful students would quickly scribble out a few meager and grammatically disastrous sentences and try to turn it in as genuine prose. More others took the notion of "What? You mean WORK?" Nah, they implied, I'll take the F.

Is it any surprise that in all my classes totaling 107 pupils, that 16 students failed my class the first quarter and that 26 students failed English the second quarter? (It should be noted that there are many variables which caused or contribute to these F's, such as different genres of writing each quarter, students turning in work on time but producing poor quality, low employability scores and general laziness.) This is 8th grade English for crying out loud, not rocket science.

My team sat around at one of our daily meetings right before break and recounted our F list (most of these F students failed classes other than mine too). I couldn't see where I was going wrong, they could turn in their papers at any time, basically, why weren't they? Why did I deal with the inconvenience of having an additional stack of papers to grade at quarter's end because of the inability of my students to follow a deadline. Furthermore, why was I allowing myself to be manipulated in to feeling like I was a bad teacher because of these students, to allow my teaching self-esteem bank account to enter numerous withdrawals?

I took part of my winter break to reflect some more on this issue and came to the conclusion that perhaps it wasn't that my students didn't understand what a deadline was, it was that they didn't understand how not to follow a firm deadline.

Students are faced with deadlines all the time. "You can not play with your friends until you put on a coat." "You have to earn your allowance money before you can go shopping." They watch their heat being turned off in their apartment because mom or dad couldn't pay the gas bill by the 15th. Coach makes them run an extra lap because they were the last one to practice. Auntie burned the pie again because she didn't take it out when the timer beeped.

We are a culture of deadlines; when time lapses past the deadline and the task is not completed direct and indirect consequences happen. Middle school students understand this, perhaps what they have a harder time understanding is how to function without the deadline. If that pie doesn't have a burning point, then it doesn't need to be taken out of the oven until you are ready to eat it. If the gas company doesn't shut off the heat, then why bother paying? If we can turn that assignment in any time then we can just wait until later and do it. By giving kids essentially no deadline I was actually inhibiting them from doing their work. The cognition of a tween is not well suited to time manage long projects, ambiguous deadlines, and (as many middle school teachers can attest) is not going to work hard out of pure intrinsic motivation (bless the few that do!).

Indeed students are familiar with deadlines, and find comfort in the routine and familiar. Dr. Smith's philosophies on this issue, while perhaps so easily practiced for the "good of the child," are flawed, and I fear are doing a great disservice to our students. After all , the world ahead of them is not deadline free. Morons who forgot to vote in the last election are now stuck with a mockery of a political leader we call president because they failed to meet a deadline. High school teachers, and certainly college professors, will not be forgiving to students whose printers break, or who had to stay late at practice and couldn't get that paper done. Empathy and deadlines often do not embrace each other in the real world. Too bad so sad, as the saying goes.

Out of my winter break reflection came a new hypothesis that stricter deadlines may actually lead to more students turning in papers. I've decided to set my own classrooms into a small, informal experiment to test this theory. When we came to school this January, the classroom still chilly from lack of daily inhabitants, I shared the new stricter late work deadline policy with my soon-to-be-freshman. They would have 1 week and 1 week only from the original due date to turn in the assignment. Once the additional week ended that assignment would be closed, and they would be unable to make it up.

Though they could get full credit for the assignment (**see footnote below), they would face a 20 point deduction from their employability grade (20 points no matter if it was a minute late or 5 days late).

I can hear Dr. Smith's voice resonate in my mind, "Don't you want your students to complete ALL of your assignments, don't you want to give them that last chance to succeed?" Yes Dr. Smith I do, but every last one of those students who did manage to turn in work last last LAST minute, turned in poor quality that did not meet the objectives- so what were they learning there?

So far I have heard no grievances about this new policy. Our first assignment of the quarter was due last Thursday. And yes, though they had two weeks to work on it, as usual approximately 25 students did not turn it in. I anxiously wait to see if any of these individuals turn their narrative in before this Thursday's final deadline. (Giving students this one extra week allows for me to still look like I'm giving them additional chances, which the eyes of administration look for).

In this I hope to bring a better philosophy to my own classroom for the betterment of all my students- both current and future. Only time will tell if I prove successful. Should my hypothesis be discredited, at least I've contributed to the pool of introspective teachers, who actively work to make their classroom policies better.

So too I will have begun to toss aside my collar from Dr. Smith's world, no matter how as newbie teachers we so easily let them be tightened. My paws will be free to stretch and explore and test new theories in the pursuit of educational excellence!

(**Giving student the chance to keep full credit avoids bias in the gradebook entry. When parents look at the grade they know the A, C, D, etc. is based on their writing skill and mastery of the assignment objectives, not because they turned it in late. It keeps the grade record as standards-based grading as we can do at this point.)

Tales from the infertile.

Most people would be thrilled to have some time off work on a lazy Friday to take a mid-morning nap. A calm siesta, where one could drift off into a tranquil slumber, if only for a short while. Alas, that was not the case as I lay on the examining table for 40 minutes today waiting for my ob/gyn. “Just relax,” the nurse had said, but staring up at the bright florescent light while lying on a hard surface (the paper liner does little for back support) was not cozy.

Infertile women should not have to wait that long. We already have an unhealthy obsession with thinking about how we are infertile, but giving us extra time to think about this as we’re surrounded by baby magazines, pre-natal vitamin samples, and sonogram gel tubes is just asking for a flood of tears. Fortunately I held my composure today and chose to focus instead on how I could better please my husband with an appropriately elaborate, tasteful, and expensive Thanksgiving centerpiece (guilt compliments of the Martha Stewart magazine- the only non-baby publication in the room.)

After the nurse, adorned in her cute Halloween scrubs, removed the stitches from the aftermath of my laparoscopy, my doctor came in to talk about the “next steps.” Once again the road to getting baby "insert name here" will be a “wait and see.” The good news is that nothing is really majorly wrong yet. Dr. W is hopeful things will “take” this month and we’ll be in business. If not, he foretold of the great fertility drug SHOTS (ouch!) that will await me–complete with horrible side effects (bitchiness, mood swings, nausea….sorry sweetie!) If THAT doesn’t work it’s time for the IVF conversation.

I stopped off at Gloria Jeans on my way back to school from the appointment. 40 minutes of wait time deserves a pumpkin spice latte. A large, complete with whipped cream, sprinkles, and an extra long straw. Probably all the daily recommended calories I need, but us infertile gals’ deserve a little extra sometimes! Driving back I reflected on the trials we’ve been through the past two years and what lies ahead this next month of “waiting”. Despite it all, I lift up my latte and toast to the promise of a productive month, full of hope, faith, and well….production!