Slices of Stacy

An Open Letter to my Algebra Professor

Dear Professor Stinson:

Now that the semester is over (HOLLA!) and I can breathe, I want to thank you for a terrific class.  I didn't have a chance to talk to you after we handed in the final and frankly, I think that this discussion would have sounded terribly ass-kissy at that point, so here it is -- after final grades are calculated.

(Note:  Plus, I'm way behind on blog postings and what some people call laziness I call multitasking! HA!)

First, I appreciate what you said about the way Mathematics needs to be taught as opposed to the way it used to be taught.  I'm terribly afraid to have to be the one to tell you this, but 'used to be' is 'still.'  I was partnered with a Math teacher for a while this semester and not only does she still teach by skill-and-drill, she refuses to teach more than one method for any mathematical procedure.  She is afraid that a) the parents wouldn't know how to help and b) the kids would just get confused.

Unfortunately, she may be partially correct.

I taught several small group lessons on multiplying by powers of ten.  (Incidental shout-out to Poor Statue at Convince Me for leading me in the direction of the Beyonce lyric:  "To the left, to the left, when you multiply a factor by a fraction move it LEFT, to the left, to the left,"  I love it when you get to see the little light bulbs go off above their heads.)  What I discovered was disheartening: the students have no real number sense.  I wanted to go get the manipulatives and re-teach the basic principles of a base-ten system.

However, I will disagree with that teacher in a couple of important areas.  When I made suggestions about things I might teach or how I might teach them, she blanched at anything that would have involved higher-level math thinking, swearing the students couldn't do it.  Maybe she was right, but if you don't try, how will you know?  How are we ever to prepare these students for classes like yours in this manner?

Gah.  Cannot wait until I have my own classroom.

Another thing you brought up that I really appreciated is the fact that we have to captivate our students where they are and bring them to where we need for them to be.  You are so right.  One of my biggest frustrations as an intern is listening to teacher after teacher bemoan the fact that "Kids these days don't want to work, they just show up, they're not motivated, blah blah blah."  Well, they're right: kids should show up motivated, ready to capture the pearls of wisdom about to fall from our lips, yada, etc. 

But that's not the way it is.  Welcome to the real world.

In my student population, kids show up at school having had no breakfast, some in the same clothes they were wearing the day before.  Their mothers may or may not have come home the previous night.  My fifth graders were probably responsible for getting themselves and at least one younger sibling up and ready to go.  A couple are even homeless.  They have had adults in their lives break promises, lie, hit, cheat, steal and go to prison.  And they're going to walk into school bright-eyed and yearning for higher knowledge?  Yeah RIGHT.

It's all about choices.  Teachers can spend their time focusing on the way things USED to be or the way things SHOULD be or they can use their energy to captivate this generation and motivate them.  I've managed to build relationships with the students that encourage participation and excitement and I'm only there two days a week!

Yes, it's going to require more effort.

No, we're not going to get paid more for it.

Yes, it is reality.  Deal with it or go home.   This isn't a job in a cubicle somewhere, where your disinterest will show up in a less-than-snazzy Powerpoint presentation.  These are children's lives.  We're preparing them for a world we can't even conceive of and, as you said, Professor, we are doing them a disservice if we think for even one minute, "I hate my job."

So there you have it.  Thank you again for reminding me how it feels to struggle cognitively and how rewarding it is to find the answer on my own after that struggle.  Thank you for refusing to answer most questions but knowing when to help, after all.  Thank you for teaching us the way we should be teaching our students.  Have a great summer.

Sincerely,

Stacy

Because I'm just not interested in albino porn...

...I've had to install a verifier for comments.  Sorry.  The spam was getting unmanageable.

And the hits just keep on coming...

First, our dysfunctional school board illegally hired an interim superintendent, who state official has said is unqualified.

Then the people the governor appointed to assist the county go on record saying that accreditation cannot be saved.

God help this county.  This is unbelievable.  The hubris of the school board is amazing.

We'll never starve, I guess...

About a year ago I got really sick for a couple of days and then found out that about half of our peanut butter had the accursed stamp which meant they may have been contaminated.  We actually had about 12 jars of peanut butter at the time.  DJ was positively obsessed with buying more peanut butter.  He got help and I thought it was fixed.  Then I opened the pantry door this weekend and realized that the cure was decidedly temporary.

Do you SEE that?  That's SIX containers of peanut butter.  For a family of three.  My God.  And the soup... I count THIRTEEN cans of soup and that's without moving anything.  God only knows how many more are back there.  If civilization as we know it comes to a crashing halt, we are in great shape because we will be able to eat for a week on what is in our immediate visual field.  What the hell is going on in my husband's mind?

I have a hard time going grocery shopping.  I hate it with a passion and, upon seeing a full cart, have been known to have a panic attack.  DJ is usually happy to assume the grocery shopping duties.  However, I may have to review all grocery lists in the future to make sure they do not contain SOUP or PEANUT BUTTER because the rest of the world needs these items, too. 

Blog Entry Copout #2

A photo taken the week after a tornado hit downtown Atlanta:

And guess what?  This is my 500th entry.  Huh.  You'd think I'd do something memorable...

Blog Entry Copout

What American accent do you have?

Your Result: The Inland North

You may think you speak "Standard English straight out of the dictionary" but when you step away from the Great Lakes you get asked annoying questions like "Are you from Wisconsin?" or "Are you from Chicago?" Chances are you call carbonated drinks "pop."

Now We Are Six

The End

When I was One,
I had just begun.

When I was Two,
I was nearly new.

When I was Three,
I was hardly Me.

When I was Four,
I was not much more.

When I was Five,
I was just alive.

But now I am Six, I'm as clever as clever.
So I think I'll be six now for ever and ever.
--A.A. Milne

">Sweet Pea

No title

**I really don't know what was going on with the font in the last post.  I'm having a hard time caring.**

There is a photo in our hallway, a family photo of the three of us.  I remember the day it was taken.  Our former church had some photo company come in and take the pictures for a photo directory and then the company tried to sell us these horribly expensive packages.  We declined.  I remember the photo shoot, though.  We were trying to get a couple of good pictures of Sweet Pea in the silk dress that Aunt Carolyn made, so we had her 9-month-old self alone in some of the shots.  She sat on a small white wicker chair.  At one point she leaned forward and, as though it were happening in slow motion, her body fell forward, heading directly to the floor from the 4' platform.  I was right there and I caught her before she landed, smoothly bringing her back up to me as she laughed at the roller coaster ride she'd just been on.  Disaster averted.  Mommy is there.

That's what we're supposed to do, as parents.  We're supposed to see the potholes ahead in the road, to intuit headaches and heartaches and prevent our children from either one.  We accept that at some point we won't be able to do this, but that's 'someday' when our children are teenagers, a far off future that may or may not involve robots and superflus and daily trips to the moon.

Last week Sweet Pea and Neighborgirl were playing in SweetPea's bedroom.  She came downstairs and whispered in my ear that Neighborgirl asked her if she wanted to have sex.  I asked her to repeat the question because, although Sweet Pea has heard many colorful phrases from me, like 'pomegranate martini' and 'stupid motherfucker' I am reasonably sure I've never used the word 'sex' in front of her.

After she repeated herself, I sent her upstairs and, heart pounding, turned to face Neighborgirl.

"Sweetie, did you ask Sweet Pea if she wanted to have sex?"

"No."

I took her hand, looked in her eyes, and gently said, "It's okay.  Nobody is mad.  I just need to know.  Did you say that?"

Her eyes filled with tears and she said, "Well, I did say that."

I hugged her and said, "Okay.  What did you do?"

"I laid on Sweet Pea's chest."

"I see.  Honey, who told you about sex," I asked her, thinking it was her middle school brother or high school sister.

"It's what my stepdad does to my Mom."

Cold dread in my stomach for what was coming next.  "I'm confused, honey.  Don't you sleep with your Mom?"

"Yes.  With him, too.  And he does sex to her."

"While you're there in bed?"

"Yes." 

Oh God.  Oh God oh god oh god ohgodohgodohgodohgod.

She was crying.  I asked her if there was anything else she wanted to tell me.  She shook her head 'no' but cried even harder.

When she was finished, DJ arrived.  I told Neighborgirl it was time for her to go home.  I told DJ what happened.  I called my sister-in-law, a first-grade teacher, for advice.  She told me to talk to the Mom, that it was just one of those awkward conversations that has to be had.  She pointed out that while it was definitely bad parenting, I could say, "I'm sure it's completely innocent or maybe she's misunderstood, but..." 

I wasn't so sure.

We had a family meeting.  That's when Sweet Pea told me everything that happened.

Apparently Neighborgirl persuaded Sweet Pea to get in bed.  They pulled the covers over them and then Neighborgirl pulled her pants down.  When I asked Sweet Pea what happened next, she said she wasn't sure; she'd put her hands over her face at that point.

Now we'd moved to a different arena.  A little bit of "You show me yours, I'll show  you mine" is completely normal for small children.  A demonstration of the act is something else entirely.

The next day I went to the guidance counselor at Sweet Pea and Neighborgirl's school.  I told her the whole story and was advised that they would be contacting DFCS.

I shook the whole time.  I'm an incest survivor.  I had just committed the ultimate sin: I Told.  I Told the Secret.  Even if this wasn't my Secret.  I felt guilty because I hadn't asked Neighborgirl more pressing questions.  All I could think about was Sweet Pea, the effect it had on her. 

Now I've moved into anger and guilt.  I'm angry at Neighborgirl.  I know she's 6 years old.  I know it's not her fault.  But she just visited this experience on my child.  My own precious daughter experienced something that was WAY beyond what she was prepared for, in the midst of her own grief process about her adoption.

And, of course, I feel guilty.  I feel like I should have known.  I should have been able to protect Sweet Pea.  When it was happening I was sitting right below them, in the living room, creating a lecture outline for my lesson on the rise of the dictators before WWII.  Why didn't something set me off?  Why didn't I intuit that something was wrong?

I failed her.  When she needed me the most, I failed my daughter.  I cannot protect her, not really.  I knew that someday it would happen.

I had no idea it would be this soon. 

Words, eaten

I believe that the possibility exists for a primal wound in my daughter.  And if it does, as I said in my comment, it is my responsibility as her mother to create a safe place for her to experience it.  I learned from my own wound how to grieve losses, how to become stronger for them.  I can close my eyes and whistle all I want, but that's not going to fix anything for my child.  I have to put my own ego aside in order to be a good parent.  Allowing Sweet Pea to feel ALL her feelings about her adoption means that sometimes I'm going to hear things I don't want to hear.  Sometimes she may be angry, or hurt, or sad.  If I am open to hearing those things, to walking through them with her or standing close by if she needs to walk through them alone, I can only enhance the bond between us.  That's what unconditional love is all about.

I wrote that on July 19, 2005.  Wasn't I funny?  I mean, really... isn't that a laff-fucking-riot?

Big words.  Hubris.  Because I'm here to tell you that the first bad day, the first time I heard her cry for her brothers, the first time I watched those shoulders heave up and down with grief, I wanted to take it all back.

Last night Sweet Pea asked me to tell her the story of the night she was born.  She hears it a couple of times a month.  This time was different, though.  She turned away from me in bed when I finished.  Somehow I knew something wasn't right and I said, "You know that if you ever have questions about your adoption, you can always ask me."  In a tiny voice, she said, "I miss my brothers," and then the tears began.  Today at school I mentioned the incident to the parapro in her classroom who told me about a picture Sweet Pea had drawn.  Something about it was different, she said.  I asked Sweet Pea, who told me that it was a picture of her and her brothers. 

Tonight, after a family meeting (which we had to have after the girl next door was playing upstairs with Sweet Pea and Neighborgirl asked Sweet Pea IF SHE WANTED TO HAVE SEX AND PROCEEDED TO TAKE DOWN HER PANTS but that's a whole other entry, Internet -- this whole parenting thing?  yeah.) I asked her if ther was anything else she wanted to talk about.  She began to cry and said she was sad because her brothers lived so far away.

It's so complicated.  Adoption is so complicated.  Parenting is so complicated.  There are so many things to say and I can't even sort out my thoughts.  I have to have a talk with Neighborgirl's Mom.  I have to put aside my own fears and insecurities in order to be truly present for my daughter.

The most important thing I have to hang on to, right now, is that she can tell us how she feels.  She feels safe.

Skool Daze

While I usually go to great pains to maintain some cloak of privacy around this blog so that after I graduate I can, y'know, GET HIRED AND SHIT, I have to tell you that I can no longer hide my disgust at the shenanigans of our local school board.  I was in Athens this weekend and couldn't attend the march demanding the resignation of all nine school board members. 

It's such a long story.  Some school board members and some concerned citizens alerted SACS to possible ethics violations on the part of other school board members.  Irony: the person who reported the others doesn't live in his district, either.  He has an empty apartment in that distract.  His first-grade daughter told someone at school all about it.  After SACS did their investigation (the report for which can be found here) they found that the board was "fatally flawed."  Their recommendation?  that NACS pull their accreditation of the entire county school system on September 1.

What does this mean?  That my nephew, who has straight A's, will graduate in 2009 and his diploma will have "Non-accredited" stamped across it.  And he'll be ineligible for the HOPE scholarship, which is given to any Georgia graduate with a GPA of 3.0 or higher who is attending a Georgia public university.  There are 52,000 kids in this county's school system.  Pre-K funding would be lost.

The school board is guilty of micromanagement and poor ethical choices.  Six of them are clearly guilty and while I haven't heard anything negative about the other three, I'm afraid that at this point the only way to resolve this is to get rid of the entire board.  The Governor has already appointed several people to start overseeing the changes that SACS has recommended.  In the meantime, one of the most guilty on the board is still refusing to resign.  He was recently arrested for beating up his gay lover in their home.  In Dekalb County. 

The worst problem is the "negative influence" cited in the report that is affecting the entire system.  That person's name will not be mentioned on this blog but he is pretty much the Devil incarnate.  He managed to get some of his cronies elected on the last school board (when SACS investigated our county a few years ago).  Upon getting elected, the previous school board head (who is black) said they were going to recommend that no more white teachers get hired until the amount of black teachers was equal to the proportion of black students.  With the words, "It's our turn now, we're going to get ours," she turned race relations in my county back 40 years.  Even after that board got elected out, That Person managed to get more of his cronies elected.

It's a mess.  And I just wish I had an answer, you know?  If you're local, check out public access channels for tomorrow night's school board meeting.  They just moved it to the local performing arts center and installed metal detectors.  But I bet I could sneak in some rotten tomatoes.