My 1000 Kids

In the early, pre-dawn hours of this morning, one of my kids died. I say "my" kids because when you teach, you have the special privilege of seeing a young person every day for 180 days grow up in front of your eyes.  This is especially true in middle school when the span of time from September to June can mean a six inch growth spurt, head gear and braces to radiant smile, facial hair and an octave drop in a boy's voice, say nothing of the relationship transitions, ah-ha moments when their reasoning fully shifts from concrete-ish to abstract, that first real conversation where the glimmer of the adult they will become shines through the bathroom humor or self-conscious mumblings. 

I have had the honor of seeing somewhere in the neighborhood of 1000 young people through these years, spanning 7th grade through seniors in high school, from about 12 to 19 years. Many I have watched grow from awkward middle schoolers all the way through self possessed, talented seniors, a decided perk of a 7-12 school. My oldest are now in their mid 30's and the youngest barely teenagers. I feel fortunate that I don't have much more grey hair than I do. 

After they graduate, I will accept their Friend requests, and I encourage them to call me by my first name.  A decade and a half out and some still just can't do it.  I love seeing their parents, or better yet, the kids themselves, in the grocery store and hearing about their first year of college, or how they landed this amazing internship or job, or that they are still playing soccer. I love the pictures of engagement rings and weddings, first homes and new jobs. Yet even when I get to hold their babies, I can still see that baby faced teenager who wreaked havoc on my third period class or cried in my office after school or wrote a brilliant essay about their favorite activity being a totally fictional underwater sport.

But not all news comes from benevolent social media posts. Yes, I read the police reports, searching for the names of "my kids." It crushes me every time I see one splashed across the news. I want to take them by the shoulders and shake them or hug them and show them a picture of that adorable (or sullen or purple haired) kid they were when they sat in my class wondering why I insisted they learn how to use a comma when really what I wanted was for them to pause and be good people. I want to ask them if there was an opportunity I missed or something that I could have done to prevent such unwanted notoriety. When I see them later in the aisles, head down and averting my glance, I try to catch their eye, smile, and search their face for the answer. I ask them how they are doing and I really want to know. I still want to know.

And then there are the headlines I could have done nothing about, even if I had made them read one more book about a better world or had given them an extra dollar for lunch money. These beautiful young people do not deserve to be fighting for their lives, or worse, have no fight left to give. I cannot save them from cancer or car accidents, and this incenses me even more than a trip to court or even jail.

I understand better than most that our time is finite. Tonight I look at my own son, snuggled in his bed, and I want to put him in a bubble and never let him out from under my protective watch. I have wished these past six months that I would live to see his graduation from high school, to dance at his wedding, to hold a grandchild. But it's on nights like this, as I watch my feed fill with the tears of my past students, when I fervently wish that I could protect all of those kids who have come under my care, that I simply, selfishly ask that he outlive me. Because anything else is unthinkable. 

Freight Train (A Permutation of the TEDx Talk)

I was honored to be able to give a TEDx talk at the first ever Littleton area event this past Sunday.  I drafted and re-drafted that speech a number of times, all with the same theme but decidedly different tones.  I like this one, but I figured it was better on the page than on the stage:

Freight Train

On May 8, recognition of my own mortality came barreling at me like a freight train with the word “Malignant” emblazoned on the side in angry letters. The name of my actual disease, synovial sarcoma, was a subtext, difficult to read and understand, overshadowed by phrases like “poor prognosis with metastases” and “1 in a million.”

In those first weeks, that train thundered incessantly along the dark, curving tracks of my mind, a clicking, clacking, constant reminder of this thing inside of me that was trying very hard to make my time finite.

It bore heavy cars filled with responsibility, regret, and the weight of lost moments: these cars were my son, my partner, my family, my school. Each one was painful to look into, but there was one, especially, that confounded me, and it was the one filled with Expectations.

.

This car shined ominously with All The Things You Were Supposed To Do. All of the Dreams Others Have Entrusted To You. The World You Were Supposed to Change.

That car, with all of those Expectations, started filling up when I was quite young. When I would jump on my adolescent soap box and preach for gay rights and gender equality, animal welfare or the arts in schools, opportunities for kids to stay drug free, there was always someone- my parents, a teacher, an administrator, saying, “Go ahead. Give it a try! You can do it!”  Never once in my young life did an adult tell me that I couldn’t change the world. You see, if you are told something often enough, you begin to believe it.

Every one of those people had taken a wish, a sparkling, hopeful, beautiful thing, and handed it to me. So many of them expected “Big Things” of me, their wishes filled with grand expectations, fancy job titles, aspirations that were bigger than I thought this little town could hold. And there they sat, in the depths of that car, waiting to be fulfilled.  

For years, I felt guilty that I had chosen to become “just a teacher.” Deep inside it felt like I was letting down all of these people who had expected such Big Things of me. Teachers don’t become president of the Ford Foundation or win MacArthur Fellowships. But I had no desire to join committees just to step up the political ladder so I could be Secretary of Education, or to publish articles that are simply a restating of something someone else wrote 20 years before.

But I thought I had time, decades of time, to teach, to work with students, and then, maybe when my son had gone off to college, when I was ready to retire from the trenches, maybe then I would be able to do those nebulous “Big Things” that were expected of me. Maybe later I would be able to make their wishes for me and the the world come true.

But now, something else was driving that train, telling me that I might not have that kind of time.

And then, on May 26, 42 of my students changed the world with an act of kindness. It wasn’t about money, or about me, but about showing the world that there is good to be had in abundance. And literally millions of people heard them.

By June, a month after my diagnosis, and a week after our story went viral, the train finally started to slow down.  I looked back, and that car, so ominously filled with unmet Expectations, was replaced by the 42 students from Profile’s class of 2015. Behind them, I saw the nearly 1000 faces that I have known and taught in some capacity, including that very first group of World Changers from 15 years ago, and in all of them, I saw the most beautiful things:

I saw eyes opened up to the possibility of being the first person in their family to go to college.

I saw passion sparked by reading the first book ever, in their whole lives, as a freshman in high school.

I saw hearts and souls poured out onto countless pages, edited and reworked, published.

I saw young people who had been so lost, found.

I saw engineers, teachers, nurses, parents, artists, carpenters, loggers, clergy, non-conformists, activists, soldiers, athletes.

I saw people being elected to public office. Traveling the world to make peace. Solving the crises of developing nations.

I saw hundred of tears, but thousands of hugs.

Nowhere did I see a number, a test score, or a face without a story.

And saw THEIR wishes.

I saw World Changers. And I saw the world change.

And stretching back behind that car were all of the other teachers who had come before me and the ones that I’ve worked alongside.

I saw people from our communities, waiting to welcome those young people and share with them their wishes and dreams.

I saw the connections, handshakes between a brilliant student and a member of the community who was willing to take them under their wing.

And then farther back still, thousands upon thousands of strangers whose lives had been touched by the 42, and others by the rest of the one thousand.

What I hadn’t realized until that moment was that those Expectations had become my Wish, and that wish was made of all of the wishes that had come before me, stardust forming dreams, back and back, through time immemorial, through everyone who had come before me, taught me, and loved me.  And that to every one of those thousand young people, I had given them a piece of my wish, and thus the wishes of everyone before me. A legacy...

That they feel heard. That they feel they belong That they know they mean something.

That they know world holds amazing things for them, whether they choose to go away or stay right here.

That THEY could change the world.

And now, all of those people, 42, a thousand, millions, now hold a little piece of my wish.

They don’t need to know my name, but through my students, they hold a piece of my heart. And they hold a piece of all of those wishes that came first to help me make mine.

The train has slowed enough for me to see it clearly now, to jump back on and enjoy the ride. And that car filled with Expectations? All of those wishes and hopes for the world that were given to me? I have shared those hopes with a thousand young, eager minds. Minds that will astonish you with their capacity to take those hopes, make them their own, and run with them. To do good.

Because that’s what teachers do: They take a wish for the world and they wrap it up in punctuation marks and quadratic formulas, chemical equations and maps of the world, and they gently pass it, or they lob it and run, or they hide it for a student to find later, but they find a way to pass it on.

If I had been one person, on a quest for fame or power with a fancy titled job, those Expectations would have rested with me. But instead, I chose a passion, a vocation, that has blessed me with the chance to share them with countless capable hearts.

I have realized in this that I simply may not be meant for Big Things with fancy titles. That I may never have been meant to work for Bill Gates or be president of the NEA. No one is going to miss the book I didn’t write or the committee I didn’t chair. But the world would miss those 1000 students with their dreams. I know I would.

Who I Was and Who I Am

Four years ago I was strong. I was working in a school that I absolutely adored, with a phenomenal team of people, designing and implementing programs that I believed in whole-heartedly. Even when I was putting out fires, which was often, I felt like I was making a very real difference in people's lives. I had decided the summer before that, if my body wasn't going to allow me to have children, I was going to find joy in other ways. I was seizing the chance to work a bit on me, to be the best version of myself. Two days a week, I woke up at the not-even-crack of dawn to work out with a group fun and inspirational women. I learned I could push my body and keep up with people I considered "fit." In the evenings, weary and bleary from a ten hour day at school, I would truck off to rehearsal for My Fair Lady, which allowed me to sing, dance, and play, to transform on stage. I was excited, joyful, bold. 

I met my wife four years ago this week, while she was visiting my school as part of our ten year re-accreditation visit. We had no fireworks moment then, just a shake of hands and smiles at the welcome reception. For the next four days she toured the school, learned about its programs, interviewed people, and apparently, watched me- not in a creepy stalker kind of way, but the way someone watches the second in command of the school they are assessing. And apparently, she liked what she saw. "You were such a powerhouse of a personality," she has said to me. "You radiated confidence. And you were beautiful." 

Four years and one week ago, I found out I was pregnant, and I was absolutely elated. Maybe it was the working on me bit that allowed my body to take on the task of creating a new person. Everything about me felt capable, powerful, and in control.  I believe then I truly was the woman she saw, a woman in charge of her own life and making another. My year continued on an upward trajectory: good things at school, a best actress nomination for the state theater awards, a healthy pregnancy supported by a husband and friends who told me I had never looked more beautiful, that I handled pregnancy and work like a trooper. I was exhausted but ecstatic. The next time I saw my now wife, I was six months pregnant. I sat to her left as we interviewed her for a position at our school. She had fallen in love with it, a school I had helped to create, during her visit, and we were anxious to bring her energy aboard. "You were such a cute pregnant lady," she tells me. "You and your basketball belly. I knew you were someone I wanted to get to know." 

We saw each other once again that spring, when she visited to see how we created the schedule, but not again until after my son was born. By that time, in the end of July three years ago, I had taken on the pallor of a new mom: dark circles masked by big smiles. My body was depleted from breastfeeding and lack of sleep, but I had this new little life that was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me. However, behind the scenes, his father had started to disappear. He spent countless hours away from home, rarely touching me or talking to me. He told me at to do so was "off-putting." I had no idea how to be a new parent (no one does), and I certainly didn't know how to do it alone. That powerhouse of a woman? She started to fray around the edges. My migraines came back with a vengeance when my son was six months old. I tried very hard to keep myself pulled together at school, but as my physical self began to wither away to nothing, it became outwardly clear something was amiss. 

When a dear friend questioned me about having an eating disorder, I had no choice but to tell my administrative team that no, I wasn't starving myself, but instead, my world was collapsing, and my body was responding in kind. My husband was having an affair, which had been going on for months, with a woman-child twelve years younger than me. I had tens of thousands of dollars of debt from helping him start his business, a six month old infant that I would now be raising essentially alone, and a sense of self that had been shaken to the core. All of that confidence, that physical glow and inner light? Gone. My colleague then friend cried in her office for me and wondered what she could do to help.

A month later, my friend and trusted mentor announced that he was retiring from the superintendency, and he asked me to apply for his job. He knew what life had dealt me recently, but he still thought I was up to the task. It was wonderful to feel like someone believed in me, still saw me as strong and worthy, but the prospect of taking on that responsibility was daunting. I polished up my suit of armor, bought some new big girl clothes to fit my fragile frame, and tried to muster that glow my friend had seen in me. I was honored to be named one of two finalists, but I wasn't sad to see the job to go to someone else. But then my second trusted friend and mentor, the principal of my beloved school, also announced that he was going to be leaving. It felt like I was getting jilted for a second time in less than six months. 

While finalizing my divorce and celebrating my son's first birthday, I was also named interim principal of my little school. This should have been cause for celebration, but it wasn't a job I was expecting, or even one I really wanted. I loved what I was doing before. I missed the people who had helped me do it. Instead, I was thrust into the role of new principal on top of new mom, with little to no guidance for either and a new superintendent who found fault with just about everything I did. Somehow, in less than a year, I had gone from the top of every aspect of my game to second-guessing my every move, every decision, every aspect of myself. 

There is nothing like being lied to and abandoned, told you are essentially revolting, balancing on a financial abyss, and being constantly berated, all while trying to figure out how the hell to operate a school and this thing called a child, while your staff stand back and watch you go down in flames, to make you feel completely and utterly inept. I was a shell of that person my friend had first met, although she repeatedly told me she believed in me, that that woman of before was in there. I cried all of the time. I was angry at the world. My migraines were so severe that I was sick nearly fifty percent of every month. I vacillated between trying to protect myself and protect my staff, and I did neither well. I existed in a perpetual fog of guilt at not being able to be the mother my son nor the leader my school deserved. I gave up on thinking I could change the situation at work and began to look elsewhere for jobs, for a place where I could start fresh, where no one would know that woman who had stood so strong, so capable, and so proud. A place where they would know only me in this present incarnation, and would hire her anyway. A place where maybe I could shuffle my way back to competent and confident. My friend had become my partner, and she supported me in this effort at recreation, at finding myself again.

And then I was diagnosed with cancer. 

My body, seemingly healthy and back from the brink of emaciation, was in revolt. A bunch of cells flipped a switch and somehow decided that if the stress of the last couple of years hadn't killed me, they were going to try. You think job stress is tough? Parenting? Let's try the prospect of dying. But before that, let's see how much trauma and physical pain your body can withstand.  How many times can a needle pierce your skin? How many hours can you spend in a tube? How much radiation and burning before your skin splits and oozes? How many inches of hair can we cut off, or flesh can we cut open and out? How significantly can we rearrange and disfigure your body before you snap?

People see the adversity I have faced and they tell me that I am strong. And yet sometimes I feel like the frame supporting this troubled body and anxious mind is made of glass. I am told that woman of four years ago really did exist. I have a vague sense of her voice and poise, the command of her limbs, the shadow of her mind and will, all the shimmer of a distant memory. My partner saw her then and tells me stories about her, and believes in her essence today, enough that she signed on to be my wife. I know I will never again be the person I was four years ago. But I would like my present self to have a chance to know her strength, her confidence, her inner and outer beauty, to allow the now me to be shaped by her. How desperately I want the me of today and the four years ago me to take all of the days in between and smooth them out and balance them, pain resolved to humility, rejection to resilience, guilt to acknowledgement, chaos to calm. I want my wife to have a chance to be married to the brilliance she first met and for my son to be raised by a mother who can embrace the weight and wonder of the world without being crushed by it. I believe there is a capable, beautiful, powerful woman out there searching for this wounded soul to claim and inhabit. And only by accepting that I have work to do can I hope to find her. Maybe then I will get to see her with my own eyes and not simply through someone else's. And perhaps, if I am lucky, she will be even better than before. 

At least I'm still considered a "Young Adult"

It's the day before the first day of school.  Typically, this day is spent somewhere on the spectrum of frantic last minute preparation and resignation that nothing will ever be truly complete/done/ready to my idealized perfection for the moment when students first walk through the door.  For the first time since 1981, I will not have a "first day of school." For reasons that are not entirely clear to me, per order of the Board and Superintendent, I am not allowed to discuss school matters with Profile staff, students, or the community.  I cannot welcome my students, meeting new faces and assuring them that Profile will be a good, safe home for them.  I will not see how much my veterans have grown and matured over the summer. I won't get to hear about internships and summer jobs, see gleaming smiles set off by tan faces.  Instead of laying awake thinking about what I will say at the opening assembly, I will lay awake in bed for the umpteenth night, debating on whether or not I should give in and take an Ativan, my brain gnashing frantically but without resolution at what it means to be forced into this "medical leave" of mine that feels an awful lot like banishment from not just a job, but my vocation.

As I have recently learned, I belong to the "Young Adult" category of cancer patient, those of us supposedly in our working, reproductive, familial, and physical primes, for whom cancer poses a series of complicated challenges aside from the disease itself. Many of us are juggling young children and careers, struggling to maintain health insurance and salaries, perhaps pensions and life insurance, if we are lucky, while also spending and inordinate amount of energy fighting this demon called cancer. We are far too young to consider retirement, but given the uncertainty of treatment schedules, prognosis, and the simple cost of insuring us, we are not the first to be called for an interview, either.  It is illegal to discriminate against someone who is sick, but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen.  It seems it is surprisingly easy for us to be pushed out of the way.

I can handle being sick. As I have learned, burns heal.  Scars fade. I don't like being poked and jabbed and scanned ad nauseum, but I understand it.  Fatigue. Well, that's new and less than exciting, but I will survive it. What I can't abide is feeling inert, like I don't have a purpose. Yes, I know.  My job is to heal.  My purpose is to get better. And yet, I can't stand the anxiety that bubbles up in me when I hear about something happening at school or with one of "my kids" that I am not allowed to do anything about. I spend as much time worrying about the family I have created over the last seven years as I do wondering if I am going to live seven more.  Neither is a healthy pastime, and yet many inky hours have been spent at this rather than correcting papers or planning faculty in-service.

For every problem I have or pose, I typically have at least one solution. But for this one, I'm not so sure. I can't change the fact that I have cancer.  I also cannot change the minds of the powers that be to believe I or people in my position are still capable of being productive members of their work societies. But when I am healed? I may have just found a new cause to fight for.

The Power of Youth

Nearly 15 years ago, sometime in the late winter of my very first year teaching, I stood behind a woman in our local grocery store while she loudly lamented the state of today's youth.  It was an unfortunately typical, "Kids today are good for nothing, selfish hellions," conversation.  The middle aged clerk grimly nodded as she scanned her groceries, affirming the older woman's heated condemnations. At the ripe old age of 23, I was not far removed from the age bracket being roasted, but as a gainfully employed "adult professional," I felt I could weigh in on this diatribe.  "Have you ever given one of them a chance?" I asked her, as politely as I could without seeming like I was itching for a fight (which, admittedly, I sort of was).  She gave me a down the nose sneer, huffed, paid for her groceries, and righteously marched through the automatic doors.

"Really, kids aren't that bad," I said to the check out lady. "I know.  I work with them every day.  I teach at the high school."   She gave me that rather sad smile and shake of the head you give to someone who clearly has no idea what they are talking about and said, "God bless you."  I left feeling like I owed it to my students to do something to help them show the world that they were not to be cast aside as a generation, as mine had been.

When I was a senior in high school, in 1995, one of the major news magazine ran an article about Generation X, which I am on the cusp of, branding us as do nothing, care for nothing, apathetic slackers.  They painted a picture of morose, plaid-wearing misanthropes who would earn less, care less, and be less than every generation before them.  I was outraged. I hated labels and stereotypes then in the passionate way only a purple haired adolescent can, and I vowed that I would NOT, under any circumstances, allow society to see ME in that way.  You see, I had been blessed with amazing adults in my world who never once told me I couldn't change the world.  I had phenomenal parents, mentors, teachers, and administrators who supported me while I argued for gender equality, gay rights, drug and alcohol free choices for students, condoms and the arts in schools.  I did advocacy work, sat on youth panels,  attended and worked at a camp called New Hampshire Teen Institute that stressed education, outreach, and the development of leadership skills and self esteem in teens to help them stay healthy and drug free.  People believed I could do good things.  They didn't have to be big things, but to me, they made a difference.

I attended college at the University of New Hampshire, where I quickly saw that kids like myself from poor, rural towns were at a great disadvantage in comparison to those who had grown up in well connected, affluent area.  I had never heard of AP classes.  I didn't have the money to travel.  So I used my passion for advocacy and my sociology major to start researching disparity in educational funding, proving that separate is not equal, not simply in the matter of race, but socioeconomics, as well.  And again, I was blessed to find people who supported me and believed in me.  I had two amazing professors who helped me do funded research for four years on various aspects of education. I took graduate classes as an undergrad, I managed to worm my way into classes in the education department by taking on a second major in English Teaching and a minor in Education all with the goal in my mind of going to law school and becoming a lobbyist or activist on the national stage.  I agreed to do my M.Ed. at UNH because they let me into the program early and it would only take me a year.  Everyone told me they expected grand things, BIG things, from me, that I would be Secretary of Education or president of the NEA or head of some major think tank. And then I started student teaching.

All of a sudden the "big" things I hoped to accomplish took a back seat to being in the classroom. I found I loved it.  I could touch lives and affect change in a very real, albeit microcosmic way through teaching literature, writing, sociology, psychology.  I connected with students.Their curiosity and questions inspired me.  I thought I might teach for a few years and then head off to law school.  But I didn't.  And for this I blame my students, my amazing, passionate, forward thinking students.

Not more than two weeks after my disheartening grocery shopping experience, I was approached by a handful of students at White Mountains Regional High School, my alma mater and where I was spending my first harrowing year as a teacher, to see if I would help them with an idea.  They wanted a class where they could work on real projects that would have meaningful impact on the school and local communities.  With my combination of youthful naivety and social science background, I somehow was their choice (or perhaps everyone else had turned them down!). This was exactly the antidote to the check out counter lament that I needed.  The students and I approached the principal about our idea, and not only did he support it, but he paid me over the summer to design the class and purchase books. You have to understand, this doesn't often happen in spring when the budget process begins the previous November.

This class, which was officially titled Community Activism, but students referred to as Revolution 101, has affected everything I have done in education since.  It showed me clearly, with tangible evidence, that students crave the ability to do good for the world around them.  They are acutely aware of social issues, injustices, problems that need solving, people who need help.  Sometimes they just need a place to convene and brainstorm, an adult who will help them access their resources, and the support of the community at large to allow them to spread their wings and try.  Not every initiative that the CA students undertook was successful, but many of them were.  The point was that they learned from every attempt.  The communities surrounding the school embraced them and sought them out for projects and research.  Students were empowered.

Unfortunately, the administration who supported the development and deployment of the class was not supported by the local school board, and they were all asked to leave or they resigned.  The replacements were not student-centered and seemed threatened by young people having a voice.  Rather than exist in a culture that was clearly not healthy, I chose to leave WMRHS after three years and take what I had learned to another school.  Over the next five years I worked in a small private high school, White Mountain School, where I learned about the power of truly knowing every student in your community, Lancaster Elementary, a K-8 school where I taught 8th grade English and worked on my Administration certification, and simultaneously, an Adult Diploma program I helped to develop for people who had dropped out of school but now wanted a new chance.  

When I made the incredibly difficult decision to leave the classroom after eight years and move into Administration (at the encouragement of that very first principal who believed in me), I brought with me the idea that young people will surprise you if you believe in them and treat them with respect.  If you treat a school like a police state, it will become one.  If you expect the worst, that is exactly what you will get. However, if you remember that everyone wants to be heard, everyone wants to be valued and treated with respect and humility, and everyone has their own baggage and needs, EVERY student can succeed.  When we were faced with issues of intolerance at Profile School, where I have made my home for the past seven years, I knew that the only way I could change the situation was to enlist the help of a diverse group of students.  Working together as a team, they helped educate the entire student body on the toxicity of hate, and as a school, they decided that we would not tolerate that culture.  It wasn't me preaching or hammering out discipline, it was them.  They made the change.  Profile's teachers embrace this philosophy, and it pays off.

This most recent act of kindness on behalf of the senior class is just one example (a fantastic, amazing, phenomenal example) of the power of youth to do beautiful things.  They saw a problem, cancer in someone in their community, and they knew they had to do something.  They had amazing mentors in their class advisors, Kristy Duris and Ann Eaton, who gave them the tools and support to do good.  The school secretaries, Lisa Peckett and Kim Antonucci, knew that this was special, and they wanted them to be recognized.  Never, in anyone's wildest dreams, did they anticipate that it would gather the attention it has.

And why has it gone viral?  Because the world so desperately needs to see good things.  People need to believe that there are people out there who are kind, selfless, and giving.  They don't want to demonize today's youth or believe that there is nothing but mayhem and destruction in the world.  They simply need to be freed from the paradigm that that is the only way it can be.  And it works with adults, too. People have been inspired to reach out to my seniors and support them, offering money, new trips, and simply their kind words.  People of ALL ages want to do good.  They simply need an outlet.  If we empower people to see the positive acts, to realize it doesn't have to be a cure for cancer, but simply the support of someone with it, a relatively small gesture in this grand world we live in, perhaps we will all start to believe again that we CAN, as Gandhi said, be the change we wish to see in the world.