To all my seniors...

To all my seniors:

To all of you beautiful weirdos, I hope that you had a fantastic first day of your senior year. I hope that you helped someone who needed it, rekindled friendships with people you hadn’t seen all summer, and got a little geeky over school supplies (yes, I know that last one probably did not happen, but I can dream.).

I hope you all know how special it was to teach all of you your freshman year. You were my first class of freshman, and you are all so dear to me. You came into my class scared to death (a record I hold no small amount of pride for being able to accomplish), and stepped out of my class (never too far away from stopping in to say hello) a little more knowledgeable and polished than you came before. This was a team effort. I watched some of you really struggle, but you made it… and now you’re seniors. If I were still your teacher, I’d try to teach you small lessons as we went through your last year, but since that is not the case, I wanted to make sure you knew a few things that will help you make it through your last year in secondary education:

1.)  You absolutely do not know everything; stop strutting already. I know you. I know EXACTLY how you walked around those halls today, and you need to just cut it out. Be on time, be respectful of other people’s time… because you will absolutely never be able to predict when you are going to need someone’s help, and you want to make sure you’ve given a little help to others in the process.

2.)  Work together. I said “work” not “cheat”; you know how I feel about cheating. Help each other out. The same kids I saw working together to make sure their friends passed their AP classes late into the night at Whataburger are the same people you are now. Except you can drive… and that terrifies me.

3.)  Be nicer than you have to be. I’m telling you, and hear me now and believe me later, repairing things later is hard work. It’s much easier to do it right the first time. Be nicer than you should be, and people will ever so grateful.

4.)  Avoid being lazy. I know it’s tough, and you’re going to want to coast, but you will have full on panic attacks (I see it every year) because you assume someone is going to figure it out for you. No. No one is going to figure out for you whether you signed up for your SAT, applied to college, sent in the check for graduation fees, or remembered to take health so that you can graduate. (You still need health to graduate, right? I don’t even want to think about your concept of public health and hygiene.)

5.)  I said stop strutting, but you should absolutely be a leader. Humility is a hard lesson, and most of us learn it MANY times over. Be a humble leader by helping those who do not ask for it when they need it most and (here’s the hard part), TAKE NO CREDIT FOR IT. That’s tough, because we all want people to know our goodness, but that’s not the point of doing good. Remember that.

6.)  Read a book of your own choice. Let me just say that you will not have to know the 200 literary terms I taught you to make it in life. That’s just, like, a fact. You will however, find that there are a lot of people your age reading all over the country for pleasure. You won’t feel the backlash of it five years after college, but you will the NEXT five years after college. If you travel to New York, be careful; everyone on the east coast is a book snob because they all read on trains…even the teenagers.

So pick up a book and learn something and remember that there are so, so many kids (in this country, no less) that would kill or die for a library. I know some of them. You have a beautiful library and Mrs. Vyoral is just waiting for you to ask for her help. So take advantage of that resource and make yourself a little smarter than you have to be. You’ll be so glad you did.

7.)  Remember the little people. At the end of this year, you get to honor some educators who changed your life for the better. You did not teach yourself to read. You did not learn Algebra II on your own. Your handwriting is questionable, so that might be the only thing I’d believe that you taught yourself.

Say thank you and say it often. You don’t get to honor every teacher, but you can say thank you to most of them. Go visit your kindergarten teacher this year when you get out for early dismissal. Walk over to the middle school and say hi to a coach that taught you integrity and commitment. Stop in to say hello to your freshman World Geography teacher. Most importantly, remember that it isn’t just your teachers you have to thank for who you became at school; you have a plethora of people who work hard to make school run for you (as much as you might hate it from time to time). They are your custodians, your cafeteria workers, your campus police, and your administrators. They get very little thanks, and they absolutely deserve it.

8.) Be interesting. I know that it’s cool to shop at all the same places, and listen to all the same stuff… but please, please do not be afraid to be interesting. That does not mean you have to throw out your new clothes or “only download indie bands”. (Gross. Newsflash: that isn’t interesting; it’s predictable. It makes you just as boring as everyone else who is a slave to their wardrobe and money.) Interesting means thinking outside the box. Ask questions. Read MULTIPLE articles on something you find interesting and ask yourself why you believe/agree with something. Watch a TED talks or listen to a great podcast every now and then. Try new food that sounds questionable. Ask people their opinions about real things and then really listen. Digest ideas and then create some of your own. Those are the interesting people, the ones who aren’t afraid to be different.

Above all, show integrity, and remember: Those who make excuses are rarely excused.

I love you, I love you, I love you. Have a fantastic year and make me so proud. J

Movies my parents let me watch and other ridiculous things I think about that cause me to miss train stops...

Look, I know that parenting is a tough job and that I know nothing on the subject, but the other day I was talking with my friend Justin on the roof of our apartment and our conversation got me thinking about some movies I got away with watching as a kid. The conversation went something like this:

Justin: What’s it like inside the bikers’ club?

Me: Meh. Kind of cramped. I don’t know. I only stepped inside for a second.

Justin: You didn’t, like, hang out with them?

Me: Uh, no. I’ve seen The Accused. I know how that ends.

*end scene*

No, I did not see The Accused as a small child (my parents aren’t monsters, guys). Most of the dramas I got to watch with intense scenes like that as a teenager were probably so that my parents could infuse fear into my sister and I to make sure we would never, oh, I don’t know, WALK INTO A BIKERS’ CLUB ALONE. But I digress…

Here is the list of movies I got to watch as a kid (7-13) that would never fly in 2013:

Dirty Dancing:

I missed so many things when I watched this movie the first 200 times (which is true for every movie on this list), but I have real issues with Baby and Johnny’s relationship.

1.)  She hooked up with 1986 Patrick Swayze, who wore a black t-shirt and mastered the art of beckoning her to the dance floor with the “come hither” motion. This is unfair and absurd. Mostly just unfair. I didn’t realize how unfair until adulthood.

2.)  They hook up all the time. They were like rabbits. She was supposed to be practicing her fox trot and NOBODY noticed her absence? How is this possible? My parents always knew where I was (especially since I feared breaking rules until early in my 20s) all the time. My father mastered the art of “finding me” well into the 2000s, and I paid my own taxes.

3.)  Patrick Swayze's character was basically a womanizer/gigolo… who slept with older women and then felt really victimized by it. That’s weird.

4.)  There’s an abortion. That happened? When? They were practicing the mambo.

5.)  Apparently the dancing is a metaphor for sex. Just kidding. I always knew that. I have eyes, people.

Willow:

There’s a two-headed dragon (that makes zero contribution to the plot); thanks a heap, Ron Howard. There are small people that use magic. Val Kilmner is a con artist. But all of these things could be overlooked, if it weren’t for that witch.

I watched Willow when I was in college with my roommates and guess what: that lady is still terrifying. The movie is campy as hell, but the witch is super batshit crazy.* There are also these crazy, horny little pixie people that confuse me…and at one point one falls in love with a cat. I dunno. The 80s were weird.

*To this day, if someone says the name “Wiiilloooowww” like the sorceress/goat, I die laughing. Uncontrollably.

Grease:

I had to break it to my friend Jenny one summer that “Greased Lightning” is like, chalk full of sexual references. When she didn’t believe me, I pulled up the lyrics.

I’m still not sure if she forgave me for that.

Grease is the movie that I first learned what a condom was… mainly because there’s a pregnancy scare in the movie. But generally speaking, I think that my overall understanding of the movie came way later. And really, thanks to Grease, I can do a kickass karaoke version of “Hopelessly Devoted to You” that will Bring. Down. The house. If we ever karaoke together, you will be so, so grateful.

Crybaby:

John Waters, you master of dark comedy. Between this and the original Hairspray, I gained an early exposure to drag and a strong propensity for bad boys.

Look, I made good grades and I was squeaky clean most of my childhood. The chances of me ending up on the back of a motorcycle were pretty slim. First, my dad made me wear a helmet when I rode my bike in the neighborhood until I finally convinced him that I was the master of my own destiny (or I threw it in a dumpster outside the Stop and Go at the front of our neighborhood), so he really laid it on thick about motorcycles. And secondly, bad boys didn’t drive motorcycles at my high school. They drove trucks or Honda Civics.

Something about being taken away from the sock hop in a Civic just didn’t seem as sexy to me. Also, people at my high school dances were usually smashed on Boones Farm, so the “bad boys” were probably on black tar heroin. Or bath salts. Or whatever. I don’t really know.

I miss Boones Farm. Whatever happened to it? Do they still make it?

Next movie.

Pretty Woman:

I wanted those boots.

I think I still could rock them without falling into a prostitution ring. I knew the ENTIRE soundtrack to this movie. My aunt had the tape (and a tape deck, because she was my cool, single aunt), and my sister (who is four years younger than me) and I would come home singing all about “wild women who don’t regret it”. Don’t regret what? I had no idea. I just knew all the words.

I actually learned some very positive things from this movie:

1.)  Don’t beat down hos at a store when they are mean to you. Even if they suck as badly as those chicks did.

2.)  You should always try and help people who are lost because SURPRISE! They could be a millionaire with salt and pepper hair who doesn’t have any judgment at all about your prostitute tendencies or body count and wants to give you an apartment and a never-ending shopping spree. So, yes, always help strangers.

3.)  Make friends with your concierge. They know all the best people in town and will help you find the fancy forks and a cocktail dress. But in my version, I never wear a choker, because that’s tacky.  

4.)  Look like a lady, but act like … well, you get it.

5.)  Still don’t beat the hos at the store, even after you get a new wardrobe and look fabulous.

So, this is what I learned from the movies I saw as a child. I know that most kids watched really wholesome television, or no television at all, and that’s cool. I still maintain that a clean arrest record, no harm to humanity, and a generally pleasant disposition prove that I’m probably no worse for the wear.

Also, it made me a badass kid.

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.