Seriously, guys.

Seriously, guys:

In the summer of 2004, I worked with a guy named Will. One of Will’s favorite things to say at staff meeting before or after he would give us information about music was, “Seriously, guys…” so we all started saying, “You guys, Will is serious this time” and he would get irate (I’m talking seeing red)…so naturally we continued doing it… all the time. For the rest of the entire summer. Like it was our only job.

Will and the golf cart:

The thing about Will was he was soooooo easy to read and you could push his buttons so easily; it just became cheap entertainment while living at a summer camp. The second thing that burned him up (after commenting on his seriousness) was messing with the golf cart. Will loved the golf cart almost as much as he loved his guitar. If you messed with the golf cart, or if you took the golf cart… or if you hid the golf cart from him (ahem), he usually stormed around in his flip flops muttering things under his breath until you gave him hints about where to find it… but only after he’d say, “I’m serious, Jackie.”

Did I mention that our summer camp was completely walk-able and no one needs a golf cart?

Neat freak:

Maybe you didn’t know this about my friend Will, but he was a neat freak. I’m talking about making his bed with hospital corners, color coordinating his closet, and lining up all of his shoes, neat freak.

One of my favorite memories of the neat freak coming out was in college. Will was having a party and it lasted late into the night. At about two o’clock in the morning, I realized I hadn’t seen him in about an hour, so I went looking around. I found Will in his garage bleaching the floor. “What? It was messy.”

This was the same party where I discovered a Crayola pillow that Will stashed under all of his pillows that no one was allowed to see because he had it since childhood. But if you moved the crayon or if you found the crayon, he would get bright red and snag it from you as fast as he could.

“Jackie, stop moving the crayon…Seriously.”

But these are the funny things about Will. And the best part was that he never tried to be funny. What I loved about Will was that he knew that when we teased him, he was never the butt of the joke; he knew that we loved him.

The helper:

You never know when you are going to need an Eagle Scout. Will would recite the pledge (or whatever you call it) if I begged, but usually he refused.

When I moved to College Station, I would see Will from time to time. We’d run into each other at Northgate or outside a football game. One day I was going to leave campus and I realized I had a flat tire. I had no idea who to call at first, but eventually I just broke down and called Will. I think I might have even been crying because it was during finals.

Will didn’t really react well to my waterworks over the phone, but when he showed up, he gave me a hug and fixed my tire. He called the next day to make sure it was working fine and went with me to the shop to make sure that no one messed with me. And that was it. I don’t even know how long I went before we talked again, but that was just the friendship we had. I could call Will for anything and he would help me. It was in Will’s nature to do for others and never ask for anything in return.

I remember that Will and our friend Nathan built a dock the summer we were at camp together. They gave up rest periods to go down to the river, they worked on their breaks, and they never complained. Will killed every bug I asked him to, he would help me clean the arts and crafts cabin until early into the morning, and he would play the guitar until his fingers bled if we begged him to keep playing.

Remembering Will:

I didn’t keep in close touch with Will after college. The last time I talked to him I had just met his dad in the valley. He called Will in front of me and said, “There’s this blonde in front of me that says she knows you. I told her that she better know you.” He and I had a good laugh about that. 

I guess the point is that regardless of how often I saw Will, he was a constant, as so many old, real friends are. I could rely on Will and many of us felt the same way. He had a way of making you feel like things were going to be OK, even if you were stressed or tired, his motto was “Well, we’re just going to do it. Don’t worry.”

And seriously, guys, I never do. 

The Weight of Reading

I was talking to a coworker the other day who came into the break room and slammed down his copy of Go Down Moses by Faulkner. “I cannot get these kids to care. How can I engage them in the text when they don’t even know what they are reading?”

I picked up the book. Never a huge fan of Faulkner myself (except for his essays and his Pulitzer acceptance speech), I began to flip through it. “This book isn’t marked”, I said. In fact, it looked as though it hadn’t even been skimmed through. The spine was in pristine condition; the pages were crisp; the price tag was still on the cover.

Somewhere we have managed to skip over the almighty and authoritative quality of loving the weight of a book. That immeasurable success and pride that comes with traveling to the last point of pagination that screams “A job well done” cannot be replicated. As a teacher, one of the first things I do when I give a new book to a child (as hippie as it sounds) is to bend it. Break it in. Smell it. Flip through it. Look at the names of the chapters. Read the last page. Make the book your property.

This sense of ownership is what we value with every piece of property we purchase, and more so when something is given as a gift to us. This... perfection of weighted importance, a commitment to the page, is something that has to be taught. No love of information or knowledge comes until you accept ownership of the information you receive.

I read everything. I read directions. I read emails. I read papers. I read blogs, book reviews, trashy magazines, and novels. I read mostly on the train. I read when I am waiting for my name to be called for some insane amount of red tape I have to sift through to get to whatever the next step is. I read when I wait for friends to meet me places. I read when I am bored. I read when I am sad, happy, lonely, confused, anxious, and overwhelmed.

By the time I get on the train, I have stared at technology most of the day. I have sent texts, waited for texts, emailed, returned phone calls, and sat through countless presentations. By the time I finally get to venture home, I have had someone or something else doing most of the thinking for me. When I read, I have the opportunity to escape from noise and actually use my brain (although it’s usually tired from working all day)… and it doesn’t feel like work at all.

For me, reading works my imagination. It forces me to think about what I enjoy or believe and why. Most importantly though, reading gives me something to give back to the universe. When I think about  all of the opinions and absolutes that I have stored in my mind over the years and had turned upside down by something I have read, I realize that I have yet to formulate an original idea. But the conversation of ideas, now that is true scholarship. To have a verbal exchange of ideas and findings with others is one of the greatest joys in this life… and it costs virtually nothing.

I think that one of the greatest compliments we can ever pay another human is to give them a book. It communicates to someone that you not only know them well enough to purchase something that they might enjoy, but it tells them that you think they have drive and intelligence. You see them as someone who will finish a task, who doesn’t give up when presented with other options that might provide more immediate gratification, and as someone who needs to learn on a regular basis. In my mind and in a perfect world it also says, "Someday I want to talk to you about this." and just like that, there is a dangling conversation to be had between you and this other person whom you value. That is what I want my students to understand when I hand them a new book. This is the begining of a conversation I want to have with you about something important, because you are important to me.         

Our students may never love Go Down Moses (I don’t), and we’re going to have to be okay with that. There isn’t any reason why they should or why we should try and make them. My bigger concern and my biggest hope for my students is that they love any book. I am convinced that if they can manage to own a book and commit to knowing the information and characters inside, starting with the shape and weight and pages of a book, we might make lifelong learners out of them after all.

My Summer Camp

I’m not a nostalgic person. In fact, I tend to think that nostalgia can be a pretty dangerous thing. Nostalgia is usually the past as we choose to remember it, as opposed to how something actually occurred. We often create memories in places where we cannot fill in the gaps, a prosthetic memory, if you will. Whenever I am with a collective group of friends, I am always referenced as “the goldfish”, since I cannot seem to recall some of “the best times we ever had”.  This usually makes me sad (that I cannot recall specifics of major formative points in my childhood), but there is a time and place that I can remember rather well.

I had a pretty average childhood, and like many kids, I grew up going to a summer camp. My summer camp was this sweet collection of cabins in the Texas Hill Country.  In the summers you could sleep with the windows open and wake up freezing. In the winters you could smell campfire on your clothes for a week after you came back from a midwinter retreat. The summers were the best, though.

When people ask about my summer camp, they usually ask if we had horses, bike trails, mountain climbing, water tubes, and Camp Olympics. In a word, no.

We went to a camp that encouraged us to eat food bathed in butter. We went to a camp that had a softball field that had not actually had a softball game played on it since the 1980s, but what we used for countless fictitious games that activities directors before us had made up involving dodge balls, Nerf bats, and deflated soccer balls. We wore blocks of wood around our neck with our names on them, which would later become a method of precious currency exchanged between best friends, campers and counselors, and your camp romance. One summer, I actually got the brilliant idea to create a mosaic nametag out of tile and grout and give it to my best friend… who wore it until a rather unfortunate incident on said softball field. (I mean, it did weigh about six pounds, so I can understand why she had to remove it from nametag rotation.)

When we were finally old enough to become camp counselors, we began to follow in former counselors’ footsteps. We doled out canteen (a privilege for counselors only), distributed ear drops, led swim tests, sat in the back row for movie and bonfire night… and sneaked off a few times ourselves. We pranked one another and snuck into opposite genders’ spaces after hours. The best prank I ever personally participated in involved making Jello in a toilet using dry ice.

We traded cabins for the day and shared our care packages. We got dressed up for dances and danced with campers all night long until the last song came on. We went out for staff lunches after a session was over and vowed to work there for an entire summer once we were old enough.

And it was great.

No, it wasn’t real life. It didn’t last. My memories are lacking the sensation of being hot and tired and sweaty. My memories lack frustration, fatigue, and a general disdain for Frito Pie when it’s 116 degrees inside of the dining hall. But for a short time we all lived in a space that we truly loved. And we were great there together.

I have never really desired to go back to this summer camp. When I worked my last summer, I drove out of those gates at warp speed. After an entire summer, you find that you have in fact, “gone native”, and highway with your windows down never looked so good. My summer camp is very different than it was when I was there. That’s OK. It should change and grow and be something wonderful to kids. Our collective, prosthetic memories do not make our experience any less valuable because they came in older cabins or on handwritten canteen cards. Our memories are not less beautiful because they were paved on a baby blue Activities Building floor instead of a golden street.

I haven’t seen most of the people I went to summer camp with in years. If we saw one another, I have no doubt that our meeting would be filled with a lot of laughter, and maybe even a little sadness for people who can’t be with us. It would definitely be filled with plenty of grace and love.  

I may never go to a camp reunion. I will never make another nametag. I’ll never spend another night in a cabin (thank God). I’ll never eat chicken fingers and chocolate milk in the dining hall after hours, visit the chapel, or work with the same people ever again.

 I will never make friends like the ones I had when I was twelve years old.

Jesus. Does anyone?

The GFG

Can we just take a moment of silence for the George Foreman Grill?

Can we just appreciate that the GFG (as I refer to it on a regular basis) revolutionized our view on cooking (I’m speaking to my fellow Generation Yers), only to be abandoned by us ten years later? By “revolutionized” I mean that for about three years in the first decade of the new millennium I actually thought I could cook because I owned not one, but two GFG!

How many of us received this gem on our way to college? Red, blue, white, black- George Foreman said no to grill-color boundaries. We can make them pink! Pink, I say!

I remember fondly Monday hamburgers with my neighbors in college where everyone brought over their GFG to create a very smoky kitchen and fatless hamburger every week.  Which brings me to my next very crucial point, which is that the GFG could really only make three things: grilled chicken, hamburgers, and grilled cheese sandwiches. You know what else can do this? A skillet.

But that didn’t stop us. Somehow the GFG was better. I mean, why we needed fatless grilled chicken is beyond me. I don’t know that grilled chicken needs to lose any fat. Hamburgers: a no-brainer, but I maintain to this day that the actual preparation of a hamburger takes place long before it touches heat, and the only seasonings that could be found in my house was salt and pepper… and some very questionable cumin which probably came with my apartment. My hamburgers were always lacking in the taste department, since they had no fat AND no seasoning. No one ever wanted any of the hamburgers made on my GFG.

The grilled cheese had me fooled for about 18 months until I finally saw someone make it in a skillet. That was the end of my love affair with George.  

The breaking point probably wasn’t the grilled-cheese revelation. The cleanup was also rather cumbersome. Here is an appliance with an electric cord that by all logic should stay away from water. However, cleaning this contraption became laughable. You could try to clean it on the counter with a sponge, but you had to wait for it to cool completely (some of us bent this rule) and you could not reuse this sponge (some of us broke this rule). So, you would get this thing soapy and brown (brown and soapy), and then, because of the SUPER!, AMAZING!, UNPARALLELED FAT DRAINER! (also known as gravity), your brown and soapy concoction would begin to sliiiiiidde down. So, you had to have cat-like reflexes to then lift this Grill to the sink where it would flap and spit back hot grease while you tried to wash it under the sink, keeping the cord free from water.

*I want to be clear: the GFG was not the contraption that made the turnovers/grilled cheese sandwiches/ waffles. That was some other contraption… although I did enjoy debating this with friends at brunch this weekend.*

George Foreman, who has five or six children all named George. George Foreman, who was given the chance to endorse the grill after Hulk Hogan turned it down (information provided to me this past Sunday over many Bloody Marys by my friend Sarah) and became a billionaire (with a B). So, kudos, George Foreman. You convinced both my parents and I that I would eat well in college (which I did) and become a decent cook with the help of your alleged “versatile” contraption (which I did not), and I feel confident that I am not alone in this boat.

Every time I pass by a garage sale and see a GFG being sold, it makes me a bit sad. The Grill did not get it’s proper place in history for all it accomplished, and that is tragic. I think George Foreman was famous for something else before the GFG, but there is no debating that my generation will always remember him as the man who toughened our chicken and gave the skillet a run for its money for about a decade. Bravo, George.

Thanks, Ryan Adams

“Hell, I still love you, New York.” – Ryan Adams

“Do you love New York?”

“Do you love New York more than Texas?”

“Are you ever coming back?”

First thing is first. New York and I have a strange, and perhaps lasting relationship. Unlike most lasting relationships I’ve had with people, my connection to NY wasn’t instantaneous. New York was always a place I liked visiting, but I think it bears mentioning that I love Texas. I was never the type of person who hated where they were from; in fact, I love where I am from and let me tell you why:

New York takes away your specialness.

Slow your roll, people. Let me make my point before I get hate messages about how wrong I am. My students always tell me that I can’t tell everyone that they are special, because if everyone is special, then no one is. In the City that Never Sleeps, everyone is special, and therefore no one is. It’s simple supply and demand. You have a higher degree? So do all your friends, and your waitress. Oh, you can play an instrument? My friend so-and-so can play three. You think it’s impressive that you can speak four languages? So can your cab driver.

My point is this: in this particular Petri dish, the competition is fierce. And I cannot figure out for the life of me how people manage to grow huge egos in this city. I trip eight times a day on the street which keeps me sufficiently humble. I have gotten lost above ground more times than I can count. I have gone the wrong way on the subway only to end up in Queens. Yes, these are the things that keep you human.

But the more important other side of this coin is that everyone is special. Everyone is interesting, funny, clever, intelligent, progressive, determined, seeking, tenacious, poetic, artistic, and hungry. The thing to remember is that if you made it this far, someone and some other place helped you get there.

You are special because of where you come from.

Someone put you in piano lessons. Someone bought you a drum set. Someone told you that you were clever enough to make it in comedy, let you buy fashion magazines so that you could one day make it to Parsons, gave you an A on a paper so that you could have the confidence to try your hand at being a writer, or put Legos under the tree so that you could build mini versions of the buildings you would one day derive from pure imagination.

Do I love New York more than Texas? It’s not a qualifying question. It’s not even a legitimate question. You may find yourself divided. But the thing I am figuring out is that you don’t have to be. I love both places because one raised me and one raised me up.

I don’t know if I’ll ever move back to Texas. I try not to speak in absolutes, because I am only absolutely sure that I am a horrible fortune teller. I live in a pretty small corner of the universe (contrary to most New Yorkers’ belief) and most of the day to day stuff that I worry about doesn’t matter that much. Most of the stuff that does always has. And whether you’re an hour ahead or an hour behind, that’s probably true for you, as well.

Teacher-y Things

Every former colleague always ask me, “What are the kids like where you teach?”

Well, they are:

Messy

Self-absorbed

Goofy

Hormonal

Stressed

Care takers

Thoughtful

Thoughtless

Hot

Cold

Steady

Temperamental

Self-conscious

Loving

Hard on each other

Hard on their teachers

Hard on the world

Hard because of the world

Oblivious to the rest of the world

Seeking the end of the world on December 21^st so that they don’t have to take my final.

Just kidding about that last one… (sort of). They’re kids. They are no different than any kid I have ever taught, babysat, been a summer camp counselor to, sat on a front porch and listened talk about their prom, heartbreak, or graduation with, or bandaged up on a playground.

I am not a parent, so I hope I don’t oversimplify this particular statement, but school shootings (and shit, I hate that it’s even a term we can pluralize) paralyze me. I never get used to tragedy, and I guess that’s a good thing, but I cannot divorce myself from doing what most parents do, which is think: That could have been my kid. Except I think about my students.

I have this pattern that I can’t seem to break. The first six weeks of school, I am the least favorite teacher on the block. A notoriously hard grader, a champion of the phrase “do it again and don’t hand it to me until you’re proud of it,” a big fan of apologies to someone’s face and looking them in the eye, and a proponent of manners (i.e., do not suck your teeth, roll your eyes, talk under your breath, walk away angry), I don’t always rock kids world at the beginning. But boy do I give it a good rattle.

Then the 7^th Week hits. Suddenly it’s starting to make sense. I don’t hit hard with the “I told you so,” (although I think it) but kids start writing well, they start reading harder articles, they learn my mannerisms… I learn their names. It’s a win-win situation. 

Here in Brooklyn, we’ve got some tough nuts to crack. At this time of year some of my students get pretty depressed because they aren’t looking forward to Christmas Break. School is their safe space; it’s really their whole world (and not-so-surprisingly these aren’t the best students) because it’s where they have limited pressure. I work with some pretty tough teachers. These peeps are no joke. They bring it. You have to. Kids will catch you slipping, and game over. We bust our tails to make school a tender place… and they never want to leave. Well, they do want to leave class, but if they could stay there and just hang out, they would… all night.

*knock knock (4:05 pm) walking out the door

Kid: Ms. Son, which train do you take?

Me: I take the G. I walk down Jay Street to get there.

Kid: That’s mad far, Ms. Son; we’ll show you a faster way.

And just like that, I collected seven misfits that walk me to the train every day after school. It’s a good mix of kids. I ask about the highs and lows of their day, how physics is going (always a hit), or weekend plans. We play “We’re selling hot dogs for lunch”, a game that my friends Robert and Tom came up with to pass time, where you impersonate someone using only the phrase “We’re selling hot dogs for lunch” to guess the impression.

When I lived in Texas, I had good relationships with kids. I feel like I was exactly where I needed to be for as long as I was needed. I’m a big believer in moving on when the time is right. Sometimes I think about leaving education, but then I think about the 7^th Week. Some people work several years, or even a whole career, and they never hit that turn where you go from being adversary to advocate.

I asked my students the other day before I introduced a new and very difficult concept, “I know this writing is tough, but I need to know something. Do you trust me? Do you trust that I have your best interest at heart? Do you believe that I come here every day to make you a better person? Do you believe that I will never ask you do challenge yourself if it won’t make you better?” Essentially proving that this (teaching) only works if they trust me. Let’s just be real about that.

Schools are supposed to be safe (well-built, sturdy, durable) buildings, but the classroom is a cultivated safe space. We work really hard to create a space where kids can escape a bad home life, a place where kids can connect with at least one adult on campus, and a place where they can be honest.

Working in a time and space where school shootings exist, and subsequently working in a school doesn’t scare me (well, no more than living in a city that was attacked eleven years ago). What scares me is that people might stop equating schools as a safe place, and that message does permanent damage. I can’t do anything about the guns. Or the crazies. Or people that get super political, from either side. I’m not really on a side (and I don’t say that because I am a big person. I say that because I honestly don’t have any answers).

What I do have are your kids for eight hours a day. When they’re with me, I try to keep the bad stuff out and shine light on the good stuff. Safety is a pretty relative term. I would hope that if you are a parent, you can think of at least one teacher with whom you’ve left your child that you consider a champion and an advocate. I don’t mean against bullets, because I cannot protect against bullets. What I can do is listen to your kid when they have questions about the world they are about to participate in full time and try to soften the edges.

I’m pretty satisfied with that.