Different Story, Different Day

Story #58: Working It

2009-08-15T12:53:00.000-07:00

It is really starting to look like I am actually going to have a job for the new school year. I have been waiting all summer to find out, but I think it might really happen.

Here's what's been going on: When I signed my contract last January, it was to work only for the rest of the school year as the opening I was filling was for all intents and purposes a leave position. But then I got to my school and liked it...and even loved some things (and people) there and so that got confusing, because I wanted to stay. But the person who had left was coming back and wanted her job and so there was just not the possibility for me to come back.

Then the option became available for me to work in the middle school division of our school, because the person doing that job became the Assistant Principal. That person, over the course of the spring semester, had also become someone with whom I was--shall we say--spending time socially? And so going to work at the middle school seemed complicated and potentially challenging too. Also, the MS position was only half-time and so to make up the other part of my contract I would have had to teach. middle. school. Like whoa. Some people are great at it but I am not one of them. Actually I've never done it, so I'm not sure how great I might actually be. But I do not want to try it, and so the point was kind of moot anyway.

All this meant that while I am eligible to fill a position in the district, doing the same job as last year, for 2009-2010 I did not have a school at which to work. There was no school with an opening to which I could go. So I could:

a. apply for other positions within the district, which I didn't because I thought it might actually jeopardize the possibility of getting the job I really wanted

b. apply to other schools and districts, which I did

c. be anxious and frustrated and even cry sometimes which I certainly did too.

Finally it seemed like the waiting might be over, and I went last Monday and had a great interview at a well-located school with a convenient schedule that offers a whole range of community-based services. Seemed great. I liked the (new) principal and the new principal liked me. Afterwards I left and went directly to the district office to tell my director's secretary that I wanted to work there for the fall. And then, I didn't...hear...back. Again. For three days.

Until Thursday when the secretary emailed apologetically, saying they've been so busy and she hadn't been able to speak with the director but now she had and the placement looked good and if I still wanted it (still wanted it?!?!?!?) she'd put through the paperwork.

My email back to her read simply: DO! IT!!! :) and I realized with great relief I was about to have my very own job again, one that I get to keep if I want to, for the first time since October 2008. There was some chocolate-eating and a few joyous phone calls and text messages and then we even went out for drinks that night at Orson (sidepoint: It was such the lesbian scene. The Lex or El Rio or Wild Side West or Cockblock or anywhere else of that genre was never part of my club circuit...so I had never been out like this WHOA) to celebrate. Yaaaaay all my patience and suit-wearing and smart responses to questions about school reform and instructional equity had paid off. Done :)

Until...yesterday morning, when my director emailed me herself (a completely rarity) asking if I would consider a placement at another school. For whatever reason there is a total eleventh-hour opening at a high-profile school that participates in a district-wide professional learning community with other schools and an educational non-profit. They too are getting a new principal and need a strong person with my professional profile to fill their opening. So on Monday I am going to meet with their old principal, now an Assistant Superintendent in the district, and my director to see if this site might be a match for me instead.

I was really starting to get into the idea of going to the school I visited last Monday, though. They have never had someone who does my job placed at their school, so it seemed like a cool opportunity to kind of write my own story about the work I'd do there. Plus it is right. downtown. which I love. And downstairs from the school is Naan N Curry, and Peet's is across the street. And it is by transit and starts at 8:40, not 7:55 like the school I'm going to visit on Monday. Sigh.

I just want to know what is going to happen. I have been advised again and again to trust, to rest in uncertainty, to avoid attachment to or anxiety about things I can't control. Easier said than done...I will keep you posted.

Story #57: Time Off

2009-07-16T08:56:00.000-07:00

It has been almost six weeks since I've posted anything here on Different Story, Different Day. That's a lot of days without stories. Of course, countless stories have been unfolding during that time--I just have not been sharing them here.

Time off can feel nice but one thing that I realize, time and time again, when I take a break from writing is that ultimately it is harder for me to understand my world when I do not write about what I see and learn. Plus, telling stories is fun to me and from what I've been able to tell people enjoy reading what I have to say. So, hello again everyone :)

Story #56: Diet Coke Cake

2009-06-07T11:51:00.000-07:00

Henry and me hard at work on the batter

Kelli shows off her frosting, ready to spread

Last weekend we were all in Chicago for my mom's surgery. It also happened to be my dad's birthday. "Can I be in charge of the cake?!" my sister in law Kelli wanted to know. "I have a GREAT recipe I want to try--it's called Diet Coke cake and it's incredible!" Diet Coke cake? I mean, I remember food in the midwest being different than what I eat now in California but this was more than unusual. Sure, I thought--as much as I love my dad and love cake, the last thing I was in the mood to do was create some special birthday confection. Plus with a name like that, who wouldn't be curious?

We went to the Jewel on our way home from the hospital Saturday night. I was worried about getting home because my brother had sounded pretty frustrated on the phone when I called to tell him we were leaving the hospital. Spending all afternoon with Henry and Samuel, while fun, can do that to a person. Kelli reassured me that the trip to the grocery store would be quick. "The recipe only has four ingredients," she explained, "even including the frosting. So there's not much to buy."

Diet Coke Cake

ingredients:
one box chocolate cake mix
one 12-ounce can Diet Coke
one tub frozen Cool Whip
one package Jell-o gelatin mix (we chose raspberry)

directions:
1. Empty the cake mix into a large bowl.
2. Add the Diet Coke.
3. Mix until batter is uniform and free of lumps.
4. Bake according to directions.
5. Cool.
6. Thaw Cool Whip until stir-able.
7. Empty the packet of Jell-o mix into the Cool Whip.
8. Fold until blended.
9. Frost.
10. Eat.

Henry and I were in charge of the batter while Kelli and Samuel made the frosting. The cake itself was light, fluffy, moist, and (on a California note) vegan. The frosting--shocking pink in color--was a little overwhelming to me, mostly because the crystals do not dissolve completely and the texture is crunchy as a result. Overall, though, innovative and enjoyable. Most importantly the birthday man seemed to enjoy being celebrated, which is the most important thing of all.

Dad eating Diet Coke cake!

Story #55: Jessica!

2009-06-07T11:25:00.000-07:00

Over Memorial Day weekend I went to Tawonga to work as an educator for family camp. The long drive into the mountains gave me plenty of time to think, worry, plan (ha!) and daydream about the future. The scenery outside the car was gorgeous, as ever, but inside my mind it was a mix of beautiful and exciting possibilities about what could be next in my life and disappointing, terrifying fears about loss.

And then, of course, there is the charge to just live in the present, to show up and unpack your stuff and live amongst the tall, tall trees if only for a long weekend. Breathing clear Yosemite air and watching the millions of stars come out helped remind me of the peacefulness that can come from appreciating every moment. Plus camp, for all its dirt and bugs and lack of Internet access is simply very fun. Just when I get tangled up in my own life and upset about what might or might not be, I find myself on stage with my friend Avner and a bunch of other camp staff, not to mention a dozen kids under the age of six, dancing to the Israeli club favorite Jessica. Like the Macarena or All the Single Ladies by Beyonce, the song Jessica has a signature dance and it is super fun...even better when being coached through and cheered along by Avner: "Okay, now be the train, choo choo! Excellent!" So fun. The next time I need to remind myself about the freedom of being in the present, the next time I need a break from the busy-ness of my mind I think I will dance Jessica just on my own, wherever I am. As a matter of fact, now is as good a time as any. Dance it with me, everyone...

Ech besof hashavu'a
hi be'ofen kavu'a, lo levad
im ein gever bashetach
(az) hi potachat bedietat shokolad
k'mo kol echad.

Vehachiyuch shelah ratuv
ani chozer k'shehi tashuv
nas'ah lah lemakom acher.

Tamid chashvah sheha'elohim
ahav lir'ot otanu menagnim
ki zeh harosh shel Jessica
Jessie, Jessie, Jessie Jessica ooh oh ooh oh
ah ooh oh ooh oh
achshav hi rechokah.

(read the lyrics in Hebrew and English here)

Story #54: At The Beach

2009-06-07T11:10:00.000-07:00

me up to my ankles in the cold swirling surf of Ocean Beach, staying right where I am even when the shifting sands and chilly toes make it very tempting to want to go

On Wednesday I went to Ocean Beach with Sarah. She is leaving in just a few days to move back to Seattle for the summer. In the fall, she will move to Los Angeles to begin rabbinical school.

Two years ago we had met on the same beach except then it was me leaving for my sabbatical and her staying here in San Francisco. Now it is the other way around. I was going to camp and then Jerusalem, she is going to Zeigler and then to...well, of course...Israel eventually. Unsurprising.

We talked about the ideas of staying and going, about which is easier, about which is more brave. We talked about how going is usually a choice while staying is sometimes not, is sometimes just status quo. I had always thought that going requires greater courage but recently I am beginning to learn that staying is much harder than it seems.

Story #53: Hiatus

2009-05-31T20:10:00.000-07:00

I have not written for awhile. On Wednesday I left for Chicago and have spent the past five days with my family. My mother, recently diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer, is in the ICU at Loyola University Medical Center. It is hard to think of other things much less write about them right now. I have so appreciated hearing news from friends in the outside world while I've been away. It is a powerful and important reminder that there is more to life than what is happening in our family right now. Thank you to everyone.

My trip home was not only distressing, it was at times very entertaining too thanks to my nephews Henry and Samuel. Many, many pictures to follow--most of them taken by Henry. Below is a preview to whet your appetite. I will post the rest of them soon but for now, I am back in San Francisco and ready for dinner and a good night's sleep. I am sure it will not be long before I post another, more upbeat story...so, stay tuned.

Nathan & I hanging out on the futon, photo by Henry Kotleba age 2

Story #52: Going to Camp

2009-05-21T02:59:00.000-07:00

What a surprise, it is 3 a.m. and I am packing to go to camp. I am having flashbacks to last year. Tonight's production is much less extreme than that, though, because when that post was written I was moving out of my whole entire house and going away for almost twelve weeks...unlike now when I am just trying to write a four-day-weekend worth of curriculum and pack up for a school day, a work night, a city sleepover, and a family camp's worth of time away from home.

Somehow it's still hard and it's still the middle of the night and I'm still awake.

I had gotten really good at packing and unpacking, those sixteen months that I was away. Thinking back on that time I cannot help but remember packing for camp, since that was where I went first when I left behind my fancy and well-appointed but underwhelming life in San Francisco. The day that the movers came to take my things out of 1000 Judah and put them into storage, the morning I dropped off my soon-to-be un-partner at the airport and drove someone else's Subaru up into the mountains for the very first time was the beginning of my life at camp and of my year-and-a-half-long sabbatical. I had no idea what was ahead of me and my only refuge from the craziness of living in the woods with hundreds of other people was my little camp house behind the office beside the trail on the way down to Pipeline. That first summer I learned a lot about how to live in nature and in community, how to be flexible and accepting when it comes to dirt, and how to be honest and patient with myself. Now it is two years later and the lessons are different but the need to always learn them, and about who I am, is the same. Packing, while it had gotten very easy during all those months, is hard again.

Back then all I had was three bags and five pairs of pants and my stuffed sheep Pierre. My home was wherever I was, I had no place else to go. Now I have a couch and a Kitchen Aid Mix Master, I have recycling to take out and plants to water before I leave town. Which is easier? Both are complicated. Which teaches me more? In the process of first going away and later coming home, I have discovered how to learn no matter where I go. Camp will always be a home to me, and packing has gotten easier since the first time I went because now I know exactly what ratio of days away to clean socks I should use when calculating my wardrobe needs. What hasn't gotten easier is being up all hours of the night trying to get ready to go. לילה טוב, lailah tov as we say at Camp Tawonga...good night.

Story #51: Meet My Nephew, Gloria

2009-05-11T23:22:00.000-07:00

The other night I was on the phone with my brother Nathan, who lives in Iowa. Nathan has two sons: Henry is two and a half, and Samuel is two months old. Samuel is not old enough to talk on the telephone, but Henry is, and partway through our conversation Nathan asked me if I'd like to speak with Henry. Well, of course!

First came the predictable scuffling noise that is Henry trying to lift the phone up to his ear--it is heavy and takes both hands for him to hold it, you see. Then began the adventure that is any conversation with Henry: trying to figure out what he is talking about. You see, Henry is not savvy enough to know that when he begins speaking with someone new he should use social conventions for entering a conversation, such as a greeting such as "Hello!" or a pleasantry along the lines of "How are you?" No no, Henry just continues to speak out loud into the phone about whatever happened to be going on in his mind at the time. This, along with the fact that there is a LOT of conversational filler in Henry's speech along the lines of "ah, ah, ah, ah...." makes it very challenging to know what he is talking about sometimes. The absence of visual cues makes it even harder to understand what is going on.

But, it is always an adventure and so this time--like every other chance we've had to chat by phone--I just dove in.

"Hi, Henry, how are you?" I asked.

"That that that ah, ah, ah, that is not my name," came Henry's tiny high-pitched voice across the miles between us.

"Henry, you have to tell Aunt Sarah your new name, she doesn't know it yet," came Nathan's voice in the background as he coached Henry on what to say.

"Do not call me Henry, my name is ah, ah, ah, Gloria!" Henry said emphatically.

"Gloria?" I asked, confused.

"Yes!" he replied firmly.

"Let me talk to your dad," I said.

It turns out that Henry has decided he wants to be called Gloria, because that is the name of his favorite character in the movie Madagascar. So now we call him that and he loves it. Remember back when it was so easy to try new things, to shift your identity, to imagine yourself as any one of a number of different people with different strengths and talents and dreams?

Story #50: Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are

2009-05-10T11:57:00.001-07:00

This is my friend Sage. She is super-pregnant with her and her wife Emily's first baby. This baby was conceived during the summer Olympics when there was lots of swimming being done by a very famous American. And, babies swim. And, they didn't want their kid's prenatal name to be Peanut or Ishy-Squishy or Cletus the Fetus (they actually have friends who used that moniker for their baby before the baby was born). So Sage and Emily's baby is called Phelps.

Phelps was scheduled to arrive on May 5. Cinco de Mayo! What a fun day to have a baby. We all could have worn sombreros in the delivery room instead of our Team Phelps shirts (pictures to follow). But no, Phelps did not arrive on that day. Five days later, Phelps is still not here. We are all waiting (not so) patiently. Last night sitting on the deck watching the sunset and enjoying a dinner of grilled lamb with vegetables, green salad, orange-basil corn on the cob, and red wine Sage tried to explain to Phelps that it is nice out here and we are looking forward to meeting her/him. No luck. No Phelps.

As you can see from the photograph, this womb's expiration date was May 5. Come on Phelps! Pack it up, let's go.

Story #49: Full

2009-05-10T11:44:00.001-07:00

My schedule this past week was very full. Standardized testing rages on in the public schools of California and as our site's test coordinator, my days are kept quite busy managing 28 teachers as they administer a total of 72 different exams. The principal's office is a sea of Trader Joe's bags that get checked in and out each day, one per teacher, with booklets and pencils and schedules and huge ziploc bags filled with pretzels and Goldfish.

I also had a chance this past week to meet up with an OLD friend from high school, a woman who I hadn't seen since more than half my life ago. We went to Sugar in Hayes Valley and played hipsters for a night--well, she lives in New York City so I think she is probably a hipster most of the time if not always. So fun to see her again and compare stories and lives over overpriced cocktail lounge drinks :)

Then there was the third round interview for something I'm trying to pull together this summer.

Then there was the Tuesday evening therapy appointment and the Thursday evening book group. Did I mention the Friday afternoon haircut? What about the early morning carpools into the city? Oy vey....my days and nights have been very full.

I would expect myself to be paralyzingly tired, what with all this and more going on. But it is as Kelly said: "When you are doing things you love, that make you feel good about yourself, you find more energy. Not even that--the energy just comes! Suddenly late-night phone calls and midnight text messages are racy and delicious, not exhausting."

Um, she's right :)

Story #48: Talking School, Speaking Kid

2009-05-10T11:44:00.000-07:00

This afternoon I was sitting in the Starbucks conference room (who knew there was such a thing) at Mariposa and Bryant, taking part in my professional book group. We are reading the book How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey. It is a book about communication, about different "languages" or models of discourse that can be found in everyday interactions between people. Sounds boring, maybe, but the content is very key to success in my line of work and also the people in the group are awesome, so it's super fun.

Partway through we were sharing quotes from the book with one another. The person whose turn it was to share a quote would tell us all the page number and approximate location on the page (i.e., "second full paragraph, last few sentences, start where it is 'And in this way...' or whatever). Then we would all find it, and read along in our minds as that person read aloud. Once, though, the woman sitting next to me was lost and could not find the quote on the page that had been announced. "Wait, what? Where is it?" she asked as the person began to read aloud their selection from the text. I leaned over and pointed in her book to the spot where the person had begun to read. "Great, thanks!" she murmured, relieved, as she began to follow along on her page.

As the discussion unfolded I was only half paying attention because the act of showing her where we were reading had taken me back in time to my last classroom, that huge room with a wall of windows tucked upstairs in the ark-inspired building on Brotherhood Way. I taught there for five years, in my little home-away-from-home, and in our class we spent far more time on building community and reinforcing positive social behavior than on parts of speech or memorizing math facts. Just like Kegan and Lahey describe there being languages of interactions between adults, there are certainly languages of interactions between kids too and one joyful thing for me was to help every kid who came into our class become a fluent speaker of the language that helps us get along with one another.

This idea of discourse with children is one of the reasons I first started blogging, almost six years ago now. It was really all Matt's idea in the beginning, he was the one who was most insistent that the stories I told around the big redwood brunch table in his kitchen actually had a far wider audience. Like me, Matt is a bit of a whore for languages and through conversations with him I came to understand that not all adults speak Kid in the way that I do. "How did you know what to say to them, how could you tell what they were talking about?" he would marvel. A bit of natural affinity, perhaps, but a WHOLE lot of practice.

One thing that was always part of the language of my own classroom was the way that you help your neighbor when they get lost during read-aloud time. If we are all looking on our own copies of a shared text (like Friday afternoon during Social Studies, for example, when we would read our weekly newsmagazine Time for Kids) and someone gets lost, you should help them find their place. However, you should not do what comes naturally--pointing at your own page--because then they have to look at your page, find the word you're pointing at, look back at their own page, find the word there, and by then we're on to the next sentence and things have gotten worse instead of better. Instead, when someone is lost during read-aloud you should point on their own page since that is where they are reading anyway. Then they can easily get back on track and you can return to reading your personal text. Don't get me wrong, this took a lot of practice. Kids are developmentally very self-centered. So it was not easy to get them in the habit of leaving their inner world to point at someone else's page. But with time they got it and soon it was second nature.

So simple, right? But such a revolutionary idea: helping each other the way the other person needs help, not the way WE think they need help. As I sat in the Starbucks conference room, pointing to the spot in Jen's book where she should start reading, I smiled to myself and thought back to all the kids out there in the world who point to other people's books and help them get back on track. It is nice to know that the long hours and underwhelming pay and emotional fatigue that come with this job are balanced by the good karma of hundreds of kids becoming adults who have learned the value of helping someone else the way that person needs to be helped.

Story #47: Weird Meat...Blogging From School

2009-05-01T12:17:00.001-07:00

Just now I was in the office, in between meetings and curriculum correlations and student paperwork and test coordination. I was, I am not embarrassed to say, actually sitting down and having my lunch like a proper grown-up...something that was truly much easier to do when I was a classroom teacher. I had barely pulled my magnificent leftovers from last night out of the microwave when I heard the secretary's summons. "Sarah!" she called, "Come here, I need you!"

Rushing out with my tupperware and fork in hand, first bite halfway to my mouth, I found two small and somewhat damp kindergarteners sitting sheepishly on "the chairs", a line of brown-upholstered high-backed seats lined up against the wall facing the massive main desk nerve center where the magic of our school site really happens. "Yes?" I asked the secretary. "What's wrong?"

She waved her hand dismissively, on the phone in that way I think she fake-talks when she doesn't want to deal with the world on the other side of her desk. Turning to the two students, I took a deep breath. "Yes?" I repeated. "Why are you here?"

They looked at each other, then at the floor, at me, at each other...time for a different question, obviously, since I was not getting anywhere just yet. "Are you hurt or in trouble?"

"Hurt," the taller one murmured, pointing at his behind. "I fell on my butt and I hurt it."

"You fell on your butt?" I asked, bite number one of my lunch passing my lips as I realized this was not an urgent enough situation to prevent me from eating. "How did that happen?"

"I was running in the bathroom and I slipped on the floor and fell on my butt," he replied, eyes still on the ground.

"You were running in the bathroom?" I asked, for clarification. "Why?"

"We were playing tag!" the shorter student answered, enthusiastically.

I turned to him. "In the bathroom?" He nodded. "Why?" He shrugged. "Is the bathroom the place we usually play tag?" He shook his head vehemently. "Where do we usually play tag?"

"On the playground!" they chorused with practiced certainty. I could tell they'd had to answer questions like this before. Sigh...another bite. "Did you fall on your butt too?" I asked the shorter student.

"Oh, no, I just brought my friend to the office so he could get an icepack for his butt," was the earnest reply.

"Do you need an icepack?" I asked the taller student as I continued to eat my lunch. "Would that help you feel better?"

"I actually feel fine now," he said, twisting his hands in a mix of embarrassment and desire to return to recess.

"I feel fine too but you know what?" his friend asked me, standing up from his brown chair and tying his shoe in preparation for heading back out to recess.

"What?" I asked him.

"Your lunch smells funny. What are you eating? It smells like weird meat." The secretary, finished with the imaginary phone call she'd been on to avoid having to talk with these kids about their sore butts, was now trying to hide her laughter by covering her face with an attendance folder.

"It is weird meat," I replied, nonplussed, fork to lips.

"Can I see?" he asked, shoe tied, on his tiptoes craning his neck to look into my bowl.

"No," I said definitively. "Go back to recess."

"Aren't you vegetarian?" the secretary asked as the boys ran back outside, sure to slip and land on their butts again as they raced across the rain-slick pavement towards the playground.

"I am," I answered around another mouthful of the magnificent Mac-And-Cheese-Chicken-Apple-Sausage combination Sage whipped up for me as comfort food when I went to her house last night.

"Vegetarians don't eat weird meat," the secretary pointed out.

"Spending this much time in an elementary school causes people to make all kinds of weird choices," I answered as I walked back to the principal's office.

Story #46: Houses

2009-04-25T13:45:00.001-07:00

I was working on Sunday and while looking for something in a stack of papers on someone else's desk, I accidentally dislodged a set of flashcards that fell from the pile and fluttered to the ground like so many three-by-five-inch snowflakes. This card was the first I grabbed as I began to collect them from the floor and return them to the desk, rubber-banded this time. "Ah, batim," I thought to myself absent-mindedly as I plucked the word from the ground and reached for another. Surprised by myself, I paused for a moment. Holding the card in my hand I thought back to the time that I wasn't able to read it at all, before the symbols had any meaning or the letters made any sounds in my mind. Now בתים is a sight word, I don't even have to use the vowels included on the flashcard to sound it out but instead I recognize it instantly.

A small reminder of the way things change with time, I suppose. Years ago when I first taught with Jason in our fancy new building on fog-shrouded Brotherhood Way a flashcard like this would not have helped me learn anything because the only alphabets I'd had any practice with moved from left to right. Then there was my first Hebrew teacher: Mrs. Solomon, who let me learn along with the second graders in my class and even gave me my own workbook, and there was summer school at Hebrew University the July that the war raged around us and we took our final in a bomb shelter. There was ulpan at HUC in Jerusalem last year during my sabbatical, and there was the need to make myself understood teaching English at an elementary school in HaGivat HaTzarfatit. And now I know this word, along with countless others.

I spent seven years in a learning community where flashcards and posters like this were on display everyplace you looked, where sounds like ch and ts were on everyone's lips. But I do not choose to live in only that world, unlike many other people, and now there are new letters to learn and sounds to practice and words to read. Coming to a school where cultures different from my own are all around me, where I sat recently in a meeting and learned about Flores de Mayo all the while thinking about the fact that the night before had been Yom HaShoah, just made me so happy that as an educator I really do believe the world is my own classroom and that I can learn something from everyone I meet. Will there come a day when I can read Spanish and Tagalog as effortlessly as I could read this flashcard that says "houses"? Yes there will, and for that I am very glad. I love being a teacher but I love learning even more.

Story #45: Running Away from School

2009-04-25T13:16:00.000-07:00

On Friday Carley and I ran away from school and went to Costco...I had never been there before like whoa. It was apparently sample day? Here is Carley eating a pierogi. "It's potato and cheese, even you can have it, do you want some?" she yelled across the masses of people swarming the sample lady. "Mm, never go to Costco on sample day with an Italian," she said, "we'll just eat the whole time." "Speaking of cultural groups and eating, what about an Italian and a Jew?" I said. "Good point!" she replied. "Want another pierogi?"

We were there to buy snacks for students to have as a special brain boost during the standardized testing that's happening at school the next...yeah...three weeks. So, almost 600 kids times twelve days of testing times how many boxes of cheddar Goldfish do we need?! equals SO MANY snacks. $310.25 later we loaded it all into her 2 door Accord (would have been a perfect opportunity to take advantage of all the cargo space in the Subaru, but alas it was in Oakland) and, while tempted to play hooky and get iced coffee at Java Beach, we went back to school. Wow did we feel like we were getting away with something while we were out in the real world though.

Story #44: Thunder

2009-04-25T10:30:00.001-07:00

There are twelve apartments in my building, four on each floor, separated by a hallway in one direction and the central staircase in the other direction. This means that when I go out my front door (oh yes, I have a back door to you see, that is how fancy I am now) I see directly in front of me my neighbors' front door. Our apartments are the mirror image of each other. Then there is an apartment above me and also below me, exact same floor plan. The people who live in these three apartments are the ones that feel most like my neighbors, because I interact with them the most. I see the people on the other side of the staircase too, sometimes, but only up in the laundry room or taking their bikes outside. I don't really know what's going on with them on a day-to-day basis.

With my upstairs, downstairs, and across-the-hall neighbors it is different though. I can smell the tantalizing dinners they cook, listen as their children practice for school plays, see the light slicing out from underneath their door at night. It feels more connected, somehow, and that connection of course generates more stories.

The man who lives upstairs, given to playing folk music and sea chanties throughout the day, has recently taken on a new audio campaign. I presume it is to help him sleep, but I have not asked and so I cannot be sure. I first noticed this new soundtrack to his life on Sunday night of last week, just having gotten home from lying about in the park at the end of my block (but, not lying about in that park the way Kelly has been recently) and ready to cool down a bit after the first truly hot spring day in the East Bay. The sun was sinking behind the city skyline as I sat down on my couch with a glass of lemonade, ready for a rest after working hard all day pre-park. Just as I was getting settled I heard the most unexpected sound. Thunder?!

I looked out the window up at the darkening sky with a mixture of surprise and delight. One of the two things I miss most about Midwestern life is the warm-weather thunderstorms, the sky filling with clouds and lightning, the thick heavy air filling with rain. Could it be that a springtime deluge was about to unleash itself just outside my picture window? Um, no...not at all. The sky was inky but clear and the sprinkling of stars shining stronger than the city lights below began to gleam across the sky. What WAS that noise?

By now you have guessed, perhaps, that it was my upstairs neighbor. Beginning on Sunday and continuing every night this week, it thunders upstairs. All night long. It starts at about 11 p.m. and this morning when I woke up at 9 it was still going strong. I must say it is very tranquil, just kind of incongruous when you're getting dressed and ready for the Grand Lake Farmers' Market on a sunny Saturday morning and it's thundering upstairs.

Story #43: Kindly Hold, Please

2009-04-20T20:37:00.000-07:00

The three most recent schools at which I've taught have been multilingual in all kinds of ways. First there was the English Hebrew Russian milieu on Brotherhood Way, and then the Hebrew Arabic English remix in East Jerusalem. Now there is the English Spanish Tagalog mash-up in SOMA and what can I say? I know how to say "hello" a million different ways. Have I mentioned I am also a very skilled French speaker? Different story...

All of this is actually fascinating to me because I love to learn, and learn about, languages. I taught myself Japanese and Italian growing up, I built my skills in French from early childhood all through college, and then of course things flip-flopped from right to left and I learned Hebrew. I love alphabets, I love the sounds letters make alone and combined, and almost more than anything I love idioms. Recently I wrote an entire article about the ways in which English, as adopted by speakers of other languages, is being mis-learned and then these tangled-up linguistic accidents are becoming part of actual mainstream native-speaker language. I did it just the other day: "Oh! Look at that fabulous necklace," Sage exclaimed, looping her fingers through the silver chain and well-worn charms. "Where did you get it?" "From the (insert name of turn-of-the-millenium dot-com boyfriend here)," I replied. What? We don't say "the" before people's names in this language. Or as Jody wrote on my facebook page recently, in response to a Friday afternoon indulgence I'd bragged about in my status update: "I love me some popsicle..." Huh? What?! An indefinite article before a noun that names a definite item? Sigh...

Then there are all the funny things that just can't be translated. They're everywhere you listen, really. When I asked her if I could borrow one today, our school librarian was describing how never has a staple remover because she does not use them, she uses her fingernails instead. But, she promised, she would keep her eyes out for a staple remover "from now on" and pass it along to me the next time she came across one. "From now on?" the native Spanish speaker with me asked, quizzically. "Like from now, going forward, until the time that she finds one..." I tried explaining, my efforts met with a blank stare.

Perhaps the most humorous of these was recently in the office of my principal where we found ourselves actually separated by our common language, English: We were talking when the phone rang and, recognizing the number, he answered it. "Ah, yes, yes....I see, okay....certainly. Kindly hold. Kindly hold...kindly...hold...?" He looked at me with confusion, his finger poised over the transfer button but the person on the other end of the line unable to understand that they should wait. "What should I say?" he asked me in a stage whisper, covering the mouthpiece so the person on the other end couldn't hear. "They won't wait, they keep talking!"

"Hold, please," I responded.

"Hold, please?" he repeated, hand over mouthpiece, confused.

"Hold, PLEASE, that is what you say to them to make them stop talking," I instructed.

"OH! Hold, PLEASE," he said with new confidence into the telephone. And just like that, he pressed the transfer button and replaced the handset into the cradle. "How did you know to say that?" he asked, mystified.

"I'm not sure, I think that's just what you say. I'm not sure people are so very familiar with the expression 'kindly hold'," I told him.

"Well good, it worked," he said with finality as he turned away from the phone and rose from his desk. "Now I know."

Story #42: Tomorrow is Forecast to be Cooler Than Today

2009-04-20T18:59:00.000-07:00

Oh my goodness, I most certainly hope so. It was hot today at school and I will confess: I was complaining. When I saw the weather report this morning, I didn't even think it would be that bad. I've lived hot places before, like Jerusalem in July and Yosemite in August. Triple digits? HA, I scoff. But something about 90 degrees in April in SAN FRANCISCO was just too much.

I tried to prepare when I got dressed this morning, bringing down from the shelf in the closet the large plastic storage box stuffed full of the wardrobe for Israel and camp. Interesting, isn't it, how those two places require much the same clothing? Just more modest in Jerusalem and more, well, I don't quite know what the wardrobe is more of at camp--not modest, to be sure, but something. I chose the longest biggest most cottony skirt I could find, I picked out a tank top for a little modesty and the light gauzy short sleeve shirt to layer on top. Strappy Danskos and a sweater to ward off the early morning chill completed the outfit and I was on my way.

Except that there was no early morning chill, and by the time I got to casual carpool at 7:30 I was sweating. My strappy shoes gave me blisters before recess and I resorted to the flip flops I'd shoved as an afterthought into my lunch bag to wear on the BART ride home. Flip flops at school? Clearly my common sense was impaired by the heat. Open-toed shoes around that many children, any of whom might stomp or bleed or drop hot lunch on your feet? Terrible choice.

By the time I walked three loooong SOMA blocks to my 3:00 meeting I was beyond wilted and had a hard time recovering. The fact that I had to get up and speak in front of everyone did not help. The fact that not only the person whose job I took midyear, but also the person who is taking my current job for next year, AND the person whose job could potentially be mine next year if the stars align and the creek don't rise were all there during the presentation REALLY did not help. No no no it did not.

I came home and laid down and drank lemonade and talked to Mara forever and now I feel better so I am going to make dinner. Except nothing hot. Maybe a salad. And a popsicle. Then a cool shower and lots of writing and picking out another warm weather outfit for tomorrow. I already know what I will wear--it is for super-hot temperatures, this particular combination. It wraps around and is drawstring-y and tunic-like. If the woman from School Health Programs did not think I was pregnant already on Friday (different story for a different day) she will for sure tomorrow morning when she sees my linen-y voluminousness. Ahhh....cooler. I'm ready for it.

Story #41: Which Sister Are You?

2009-04-12T21:23:00.000-07:00

Here is a picture of me and my brother, Nathan, at our parents' house one Christmas. Can you guess how many years ago it was? Hint: it was not the same year that this post's story took place. Don't let my present-day youthful radiance throw you off!

Three or four years ago now I was in Iowa over winter break visiting my brother and his family. One evening we had dinner at the home of my sister-in-law's grandparents and I found myself seated between two of her cousins, a pair of brothers who are two of--wait for it--ten siblings. One of them I'd met before many times (see the "Oh! You must be Nathan's sister, I can tell because..." comment referenced in an earlier post) and the other of whom I'd attended mutual events with but never met face-to-face.

"So," the one I'd just truly met said, "Which one of Nathan's sisters are you?"

I blinked, politely. I was already a little thrown off in general as a vegetarian in Iowa at a Christmastime ham dinner, not to mention disoriented by the subzero temperatures that made my California blood freeze up every time I went outside. This, though, was really more Twilight Zone-ish than I could handle. I tried to think of what to say that might not be openly rude, but could only come up with repeating the question as a strategy to stall while I either thought of something else to say or hoped someone nearby might rescue me. "Um, which of Nathan's sisters?" I answered his question with a question.

"Yeah, you know," he said around a mouthful of scalloped potatoes chased with creamed corn, "He has that sister who's a teacher in California, and then the other sister who lives in Israel, and then the one sister who just learned how to swim a few years back, plus that sister who won the hog-calling contest at the state fair, and well there's also the sister who dated that one guy for years and years but, um, doesn't anymore, and well, you know--which one are you?"

By now Nathan had his hand over his face, horrified at how embarrassed I might feel by all of this, and Kelli was unabashedly laughing into her napkin. Ah, I see what's going on here...

Nonplussed, I put my forkful of macaroni salad down and look him right in the eye. The kid has nine brothers and sisters, and has lived in Burlington, Iowa, his whole life. Based on his own prior knowledge, no wonder he is confused. "I'm all of them," I answer. "Nathan only has one sister."

"OH," he gulps while his brother on my other side rolls his eyes and my own brother gets up from the table for more food. "Really?! I just, you know, somehow thought that you must have a bunch of girls in your family, well, because, each of those things on its own seemed kinda unusual to me, so I just never imagined, well, anyway...does anybody else want some more ham?"

Later on the way back to their house Kelli apologized to me. "You know he wasn't trying to make fun of you, right? It's just that in his family, everyone's life is always the same, beginning to end. You have to know that Nathan adores you, and talks about you all the time. Over the years he's told all different stories about the places you've been and everything you've done, and he just never thought to explain that the sister in every story was always the same person. I hope you weren't too offended by my family."

Not offended, just entertained. I think the conversation was probably way more awkward for the cousin than it was for me. My life is just my life, you know? I guess to the casual observer I can see how it would appear to have many lifetimes inside it. I'm just lucky, I guess, or that's how it feels to me anyway.

Love you, funk soul brotha...xoxoxyouronetruesister

Story #40: Forgive This

2009-04-10T11:05:00.000-07:00

I am not ashamed to tell you that I owe a lot of money. Horrified, yes, but ashamed, no. You see, I--like many people--went to college, and the summer before my senior year my parents' employment situation changed, and so to finance my fourth and final undergrad year of out-of-state tuition I took out a loan. Then, two years later, I went to graduate school. I was an in-state student that time, but still I was working as a teacher and going to night school, and teaching salaries in the state of Iowa at that time were $100 a day. So, I took out another loan and added it to the first.

Fast forward four years. By now I had moved to California and gotten a handful of years in the classroom under my belt, and so I went back to grad school for good this time. Not the dabbling, inquiry-based approach I took the first time but a rigorous, three-year, full-time, thesis-requiring, dual-credential-awarding program. Again, on a teacher's salary and by this time I was also paying dot-com-era rent on a studio in San Francisco. So I filed another FAFSA and took out my third loan and when I saw the numbers on the page, knew I could not even conceive of ever being able to pay off that much money but also knew that saving up for graduate school tuition would never happen either. So signed my promissory note and dove in.

Seven years have now passed since I walked across the stage that foggy, chilly May day at San Francisco State and received my Masters degree. I have very diligently paid my student loan every month since then. The balance goes down but the hole in my budget where the monthly payment comes from remains. So, as part of my Spring Break to-do list I decided to contact my lender and ask about loan forgiveness programs for teachers.

You hear about them all the time in our line of work: teach in an urban public school system and your loans can be forgiven, work with high-risk populations and your debts will melt away before you know it. So I called today and spoke with Michelle, my representative, only to be told that my loans do not qualify. You see, only loans taken out since October, 1998, are eligible for the federal loan forgiveness program. But, she suggested helpfully, maybe my state offers programs like this for teachers?

I hung up, discouraged. My state's budget is such a mess that there isn't even enough money for me to have a job next year at this point. Pay back my student loans for me? Please. And, further Internet research shows that not even the lion's share of my loan, taken out since the eligibility date, qualifies for forgiveness because I consolidated my loans in 2004 and now it is just one big amount that I will never pay off.

Much is reported in the media about teachers leaving the profession. In California, the attrition rate for new teachers is greater than 50% in the first five years. But, I am not the teacher who spends a few years in the classroom and then goes to work in retail or sales or marketing or or or. Education is the only professional practice I have ever had and will ever have. Both my parents were teachers, my brother is a teacher, and I am a teacher too. I do not plan to leave teaching for a higher-paying position, even though--as I posted last year in the blog I wrote during my sabbatical--I was offered a job last spring as the night desk clerk of a super-sketchy motor lodge out by Ocean Beach for $10,000 more a year than I make now as a veteran teacher with a Masters degree, seven credentials, and more than a dozen years experience. I am tired of always having a second and third job, of not being able to go anywhere on the Spring Break I worked so hard to earn, of budgeting constantly and never being able to, as Kelly so wisely said so long ago when we were all living at The House of Flowers, buy avocados. Is it too much to ask Uncle Sam to free me from the tens of thousands of dollars in loans that I spent learning how to do my job well, especially when it is a job no on else seems to want?

Forgive me for complaining. It looks like the only thing I qualify to be forgiven for at this point, so I am going to take full advantage.

Story #39: Stories

2009-04-09T13:21:00.001-07:00

Yesterday morning I went for a walk to Lake Merritt for Birkat HaChamah (post with that story=coming soon). Afterward I went to--where else?--Trader Joe's and on the way home stopped at Arizmendi on Lakeshore. Sitting at the metal cafe table, enjoying my brioche knot and glad I was bundled up against the damp chilly breeze, my mind wandered back in time to another Pesach morning, another day before not the first but the second night of Passover, at another Arizmendi.

Spring Break, 2007, and we were sitting outside the co-op bakery's home in the Inner Sunset. Unlike yesterday in Oakland it was hot and sunny that day in San Francisco and we sat not in North Face down jackets and wool socks but in tank tops and flip flops, the sweet smell of shea butter sunblock mixing with the delicious aromas pouring through the shop's open windows. That morning we'd woken up and decided to, you know, host a seder (the marathon-style multi-hour dinner and community observation of Passover): the way you do at 10 a.m. on the morning of second night. We found ourselves with post-its and pens and highlighters and scissors and tape and scratch paper and about half a dozen different haggadot (books used as guides for participating in the seder), me doubtful we'd get it done but her convinced that in eight hours we could prepare a text, cook a meal, pull together two dozen people, set a table, provide art materials, and facilitate the individual and group experiences and reflections on liberation that are hallmarks of the holiday. Really?!

In the end we completely pulled it off: highlights included pulling huge chunks of mortar-bound brick out of the sea at Baker Beach, driving them home, dripping, in the back of the Subaru, then soaking them in bleach water and actually using them for the seder plate...boiling a half-dozen huge beets in the world's largest pot and then laughing as the blood-colored water poured out into the kibbutz-style kitchen and made everyone shriek...buying paper and clay and oil pastels at the art-supply store on Van Ness, then encouraging everyone to draw sculpt sketch share their insights as the meal went on...bundling up in borrowed button-fly jeans and cozy wool socks as the sun went down over the East Bay hills and we closed the big picture windows against the nighttime Marina fog, keeping everyone warm as we stayed until late in the night talking and singing.

The text we created, cut and pasted old school-style with scissors and glue stick, came from many sources but primarily from a book called A Night to Remember: The Haggadah of Contemporary Voices. On my way to Arizmendi yesterday I had tucked it into my bag, just to flip through while enjoying one last pre-Passover pastry, and among the post-its and matzah ball soup stains I found again one of my favorite quotes, not just in this book but about the holiday:

When a day passes, it is no longer there. What remains of it? Nothing more than a story. If stories weren't told or books weren't written, humans would live like the beasts, only for the day.

Reb Zebulun said, "Today we live, but by tomorrow today will be a story. The whole world, all human life, is one long story." Children are as puzzled by passing time as grownups. What happens to a day once it is gone? Where are all our yesterdays with their joys and sorrows? Literature helps us remember the past, with its many moods. To the storyteller yesterday is still here as are the years and the decades gone by.

In stories time does not vanish. Neither do people and animals. For the writer and his readers, all creatures go on living forever. What happened long ago is still present.

--Isaac Bashevis Singer, Nobel laureate, from Zlateh the Goat

I have found no better explanation than this one of why I tell stories. We used to ask each other impossible questions, like "What job would you have had if you lived a hundred years ago?" Had I been born one century earlier, I know I would still have been a teacher just like I am in the modern day. But as our rhetorical meanderings continued and we wondered what our lives would have been like not a century but a millenium ago, my answer changed. Teaching and learning looked different then, but community looked the same and so did shared experience, so did collective wisdom. A thousand years ago I would have been the one people came to with secrets and stories, the one with the agonizingly accurate memory, the one who shares the lessons from generation to generation.

Singer was right--time does not vanish. It is the telling of stories that allows time travel, that creates the possibility of living on forever. As you tell your stories, of Passover or Easter or the equinox or last year's Spring Break or whatever it may be, I wish for you the chance to feel yourself as part of not just the stories told before you but the stories your loved ones will continue to tell as time goes on.

Chag Sameach--a wonderful holiday to you :)

Story #38: How Much Would You Pay?

2009-04-08T01:06:00.000-07:00

There's a game we used to play called "How Much Would You Pay?" I am not really sure how it got started or who played it first but it is now a part of the vocabulary. How Much Would You Pay? is ironic in that it is an inherently fake game, played to try and put a price on impossible things. Perhaps the most telling example of How Much Would You Pay? took place on my first trip to Israel in the summer of 2004, with Rebecca. She had been to Israel, many times, and had lived there for the year not long before but I had never been there and did not know quite what to expect. Some things were exactly as I'd imagined, and some things were completely different.

One thing that there had been no way to predict is the fact that in Israel, there is no Mexican food. None. Not like, kind of here and there but it's hard to find and definitely not kosher....not like, you have to take the bus to Tel Aviv and get it there on Sheinkin Street where the hipsterim hang out. None, like, yeah. None at all.

Living as I was in San Francisco, where the burrito is an inexpensive and readily-available staple food, I was floored. I do love Mexican food, but suddenly my love had turned to obsession. Eating a burrito was all I could possibly think about. I am an adventurous traveler, and that includes trying new foods as well, but in moments of 115-degree-Fahrenheit weakness when we had been on the bus all day and the drama of my trans-Atlantic personal life became too much to bear I was not in the mood to try yet another Middle Eastern combination of dates, lentils, skinny cucumbers, and fermented cheese. I wanted the rice-and-beans predictability of the goodness that comes wrapped, bolster-shaped, in foil with chips on the side for $6.49.

So we began to play. At the beginning of the three-week trip I declared I'd pay, you know, the standard price: seven bucks, or whatever, for a vegetarian burrito. By the time we were queued up to board the El Al flight back to JFK my price had gone up to 450 shekels (US$75) and Rebecca was SICK of hearing about it. You can easily guess what I had for my first dinner back in the States upon my arrival at SFO 24 hours later. El Balazo, aw yeah...

What does any of this have to do with the present day? Perhaps you recall my post from a few days ago about things I refuse to wear over vacation. I have stuck by the promise I made myself not to wear my watch, and mostly it is very good for me. It is not the logistical matter of elapsed time that I seek to avoid, because clocks of course are everywhere. Rather, it is the sense of being physically cuffed with a constant reminder of the truth that time is passing and the related response that I personally experience, which is an overwhelming sense of never being able to get everything finished. So yes, can I walk into the other room to view the clock on the wall or can I look on my cell phone and see the time? Yes, but that is not important. Being free of constantly checking my watch in an attempt to faux-determine how behind I've fallen is my goal.

Unfortunately this has had the negative side effect of making it a bit unusual to be around me, since my discomfort about not knowing what time it is definitely affects others. Example: last night we were waiting for the performance to start, and as cool as I'd been playing it I suddenly lost my marbles, consumed with an urgent and undeniable need to know what time it was. I leaned over and murmured into her ear: "I'll pay you five dollars if you tell me what time it is..." And just like that, How Much Would You Pay? was on. I hadn't planned to play it, but that impossible need to acquire something just beyond reach had struck without much warning and I reverted to the game I haven't played in years now.

Do you think she told me? Nope. "Seven?" I offered hopefully. "Do you really want to know?" she asked. I stopped to consider. "Not for seven dollars, I guess," I replied, sinking back into my own seat. Come on, you could buy a burrito with those seven bucks. A girl's got to be thrifty, these days.

Story #37: Small

2009-04-08T00:48:00.000-07:00

note: That is not me when I was small. It is someone else in my family. Can you tell who it is? There is a hint in the photo, and a lot of you have seen it before and already know the answer. If you do, don't say. If you don't, it might be fun to guess. Look how small that person is! They are not small any more :)

Recently we were out at Zeitgeist (another Story for another time) and the person sitting next to me on the bench in the backyard ended up squeezed kind of close to me, as can happen when you try to fit 36 people at one picnic table. "Hey," she said as she measured my thigh with her hand, "You're pretty small."

It's true in one way, I suppose, in that I am not the biggest adult. Actually for being an adult I am on the shrimpier end of the spectrum. On a tall day I stand 5'4" and am only slightly more than half the title of one of the best albums of all time: Sixteen Stone, by Bush. So really compared to many grown-ups I suppose that's not so big.

(sidepoint: Do you like the way I avoided telling you how much I weigh? Aren't girls weird? Isn't body image stuff messed up? What if some people thought that was too much? What if some people thought it was too little? Perhaps those of you who've been blog followers for awhile remember the OLD post about the social confusion I encountered around having my pants size outed? Yeah. Looking to avoid that kind of awkwardness again...)

But, it is hard to reconcile this objective information with what feels true to me about my size. I do not consider myself small in the least. Actually the opposite, I worry I am too big a lot of the time: big mouth, big ideas, big plans, big passions, big mistakes, the list goes on and on. And comparatively I am large in relationship to others in my life, considering that I spend six hours a day with hundreds of people mostly under the age of 12. So at school I am TALLLL. And wide. And big.

In the end it's all relative, I guess.

Story #36: Scheduling my Spring Break

2009-04-07T10:48:00.002-07:00

On Saturday night when I was leaving their house after an evening of Indian food and the Final Four, Emily said to me "Hey, Happy Spring Break tomorrow!" Oh--I got all kinds of upset. "Tomorrow is just Sunday, just the weekend," I insisted, "NOT Spring Break! Spring Break doesn't start until Monday." I turned to Sage, knowing that as a fellow teacher she would understand. "Tell her!" I insisted.

Every teacher knows that the weekends around a holiday do not count as part of the actual holiday itself. Right? Let's take Spring Break, for example. The first weekend is just the weekend you earned by working all week. THEN it is vacation for five days (sidepoint: I am currently in the first half of day two and so far have been camped out on what I was recently told is my uncomfortable couch reading, writing, and chilling out--should shower soon? Nah...overrated). THEN it is a bonus weekend! Then it is school once again.

Yesterday I finally had to sit down and make a schedule for Spring Break. I knew if I didn't that I would just wander around all week (one of my favorite things to do) and that suddenly it would be bonus weekend and I would not have done anything: not anything fun, not anything productive, not anything.

Not that not doing anything is bad. It is just not my natural disposition and would likely have made me, you know, anxious.

So now my schedule and to-do list are complete. Some things are still up in the air, like going to Chicago (kind of permanently up in the air right now, and expensive) and my newfound search for summer plans. But some things are scheduled and that is nice.

Yesterday I went on a hike in Joaquin Miller State Park up in the Oakland hills by Chabot (scheduled), did laundry and cleaned my house (scheduled), and had an outstanding evening full of picnic-ing and world-premiere theater and ice cream (scheduled, with a slight delay at the beginning but fine in the end). Today's list includes making boring but necessary doctor's appointments, calling my insurance agent, figuring out what to do this summer, reflecting deeply on Passover which starts tomorrow, paying bills online, and, oh--daydreaming, napping, pizza, and maybe last week's episode of Lie to Me on hulu.com.

Because you know...it is Spring Break, after all.

Story #35: Things I Insist on Wearing Over Spring Break

2009-04-05T16:49:00.000-07:00

1. flip flops
2. my favorite jeans
3. lots of sunblock while I'm playing outside
4. my swimsuit in the pool at Mills
5. my hair down since there's no fear of lice
6. all my springtime playclothes
7. of course: my red shoes :)

Story #34: Things I Refuse to Wear Over Spring Break

2009-04-05T16:45:00.001-07:00

1. my watch
2. itchy mascara
3. overly helpful undergarments
4. sweat-producing tights
5. pinchy shoes
6. school clothes

Story #33: Harvest of the Month

2009-04-04T16:05:00.000-07:00

Unfortunately this posting from the WAD does not include any instructional materials to help teach students about why, after eating asparagus, your pee smells so weird. Hmm. Guess I'll have to develop some kind of curriculum for that part of the conversation.

WHO: All Staff at Elementary, Middle and High Schools

WHAT: April’s Harvest Of The Month! – Asparagus!

Did You Know?

* White Asparagus is grown from the same crown as the green asparagus.
* Asparagus, per one-half cup serving, has the highest content of folate of any vegetable. Folate (folic acid) is helpful in replicating DNA and RNA, and researchers believe folic acid may be helpful in reducing the risk for certain cancers.

HOW:
• Distribute Harvest of the Month materials:
- Copy Educator’s Newsletter for every classroom teacher
- Copy Family Newsletter, send home in weekly envelope
• Make tasty recipes found in both newsletters
• Prepare and offer Marinated Salad with Asparagus Guacamole, from the newsletters, at your next staff meeting
• Teach a lesson from the Educator’s Newsletter

WHY:
The goal of Harvest of the Month is to increase fruit and vegetable awareness and to motivate children, families, and school staff to make healthier choices.

WHEN: April 2009

For more information about the Nutrition Education Project,
visit www.healthiersf.org and click on the icon

Story #32: The Sex in the City Moment

2009-04-04T15:09:00.000-07:00

I have a friend who just started dating again not long ago. So did I, for that matter, but that is not the story being told in this post. Because of this somewhat unusual coincidence, I want to make it overwhelmingly clear that when I say "I have a friend..." I mean exactly that: this story is about a real friend of mine. I am not using the phrase in the ABC Afterschool Special kind of way, like "I have a friend whose parents are getting divorced," or "I have a friend who makes herself throw up when she eats." No. This is a real story, about a real friend. Okay.

My friend called me the other day to share news of her recent adventures. All of them have been very safe, and very responsible, and very flirty, and very fun. Some of them have ended early and chastely, and others have ended differently from that. One was particularly remarkable:

"So," she confided over the phone, "I had a sleepover. BUT NOT that kind of sleepover! Nothing happened. So much of nothing happened that I didn't even get undressed. It was like something from Sex in the City."

Sigh. This is yet another situation in which not having had television since 1999 really hampers my ability to have social conversations. "What do you mean, like something from Sex in the City?" I asked.

"Well," she said, "I hadn't planned to sleep over and I didn't want to take my clothes off so I slept in my dress."

THAT'S awesome, I think. I am so proud of my friend for going out an having fun...even if she her adventures only get told in blogland and not on cable TV.

Story #31: Overheard at Dinner

2009-04-04T15:01:00.000-07:00

Last night at dinner we were taking a break between the meal and the chocolate cake when conversation turned to Trader Joe's. There was much excitement about a new addition to the Trader Joe's line-up: kosher brisket, in the freezer section. "Is it called Trader Shlomo's?" I wanted to know.

"I think that's kind of weird, when Trader Joe's turns their name into a different name on the labels of some of their foods," the fifth-grader seated next to me at the table mused.

"Like what?" I asked.

"Oh, you know," he explained, "something like Trader Jose's salsa or Trader Giotto's noodles."

"Got it," I said. "I remember I saw Trader Ming's Sweet and Sour Chicken one time."

"Exactly," he affirmed.

"What do you think about that?" I asked him. "Do you think Trader Joe's is doing it to try and be respectful of other people's cultures, or do you think it's like teasing?"

My conversation partner and seatmate pondered a moment. "Well," he replied, "I guess I'm not sure, I can't really say because I am not any of those cultures so I don't know what it feels like for them. I'm Irish. Now, let's say they had Trader O'Malley's something--THEN I'd have a point of view. I guess for now I just think it's interesting."

Now, there's a kid raised in Berkeley by two liberal educators for you. Yeah.

Story #30: Blogging From School

2009-04-01T14:52:00.001-07:00

I always feel like I am getting away with something when I blog from school. It is the grown-up equivalent of writing notes in class :) Not all computers at school have access to blogger, but mine does, so it feels double super extra mischievious of me.

Today generated many stories--as do most days at school--but the one story I want to tell right now is that there are only two! more! days! until Spring Break. Tomorrow, and Friday.

PHEW.....

(more later, including perhaps stories from today involving mice, teeth, Ebonics, burritos, and the overwhelming urge to make a break for it...to be continued)

Story #29: The Grand Express

2009-03-29T01:19:00.000-07:00

http://www.yelp.com/biz/grand-express-oakland

From August, 1999, to June, 2007 I lived in San Francisco. Then from June, 2007 to October, 2008, I kind of lived everywhere and also nowhere which is a much longer series of stories for another time (extra, extra, read all about it here). And six months ago when I got my own apartment again I moved to Oakland.

Choosing to live in the East Bay was a complicated decision and one that was exactly right for me at the time. It is warm and sunny and cheaper here, there are wide open spaces and big old trees and a lake at the end of my block and hills to ride my bike through. There is a stellar taco truck by Fruitvale BART and, when need be, there is IKEA. That does not mean I don't miss living in San Francisco every single day. Not long ago someone asked me the million-dollar question: "So, when are you moving back to the city?" I startled myself with my instant response: "Next year," I replied.

Those plans are up in the air because my work situation is so ridiculously uncertain. Maybe I will move back, and maybe I won't. For now I have a rockstar apartment next to Lake Merritt. It is big and old and funky and clean and safe and has three (yes! count them) closets. It has a huge kitchen which is perfect because there is little else I love to do more in this world than play with my food in the form of cooking. It has hardwood floors and a two-tone paint job and a retro telephone you use to buzz people up from the front door.

And...it has the Grand Express. Located directly across the street from my apartment, the Grand Express is the corner store to end all corner stores. It is open from 6 a.m. to 2 a.m. and it attracts ALL manner of patrons. Unlike corner stores in the city, the Grand Express has a parking lot which means that it is frequently the staging area for anything from 100-person bicycle protests headed down Grand towards Broadway to late-night dance parties with half a dozen low-riders circled up, stereos pumping Kanye West in unison.

The most notable feature of the Grand Express is its large, well-illuminated sign. Clearly visible from every room in my house, including the bathroom, the blazing letters in yellow, blue, and red advertising LIQUOR & GROCERIES is a hideous, ridiculous eyesore but is indeed an excellent landmark. Just last weekend I gave directions to a person who'd never been to my house before, and of course mentioned the sign as an indicator that she'd reached her destination. She found my house, no problem. So, it's good for something after all.

Story #28: A Bad Sleeper

2009-03-29T01:01:00.000-07:00

(This is one of my all-time favorite photos of myself because it is such a random, ironic commentary on the fact that I just can't get my act together to go to sleep in my actual bed. Here you see that I am asleep on a trampoline right in the middle of the living room floor at my friend Melissa's 28th birthday party. ZzzZZzz...)

My nephew Samuel is what Nathan calls "a bad sleeper". What this means is that Samuel wakes up a lot during the night, can't stay asleep for long periods of time, falls asleep in weird places outside of his bed and then wakes up all fussy and disoriented, and is generally not well-rested.

Some would say that babies, as they try to orient their schedules to the overall schedule of the world, are not great sleepers in general. I would say poor kid, he's a Kotleba. He's cursed. You see, we Kotlebas are not good sleepers. I remember growing up, and even now when I visit my parents, that my dad would consistently fall asleep in his chair watching the news. Attempts to wake him were met with resistance, to the point that we would all just get ready for bed and leave him there where he would remain, upright but unconscious, until a few hours later when he would get up and spend time cleaning the kitchen, locking up the house, taking a shower, and getting ready for bed. He sleeps in shifts, my father, and now so does Samuel. And, so do I.

My fractured nights have gotten worse since January when I actually got a couch, because now after dinner I sit in the living room and read or write or study or work until the time when I suddenly and seemingly with no warning fall asleep: fully dressed, lights blazing, for hours. I usually wake up on my own around midnight but then, Dad-style, have to do the dishes, get in the tub, iron my clothes for the morning...the whole nine yards. By the time I actually get into my bed about an hour has passed and I have somewhere between three and four hours before my alarm goes off in the morning. Let me tell you: seven hours slept in shifts is waaay less restful than slept one after the other.

Story #27: Lice

2009-03-29T00:09:00.000-07:00

Not long ago I was walking down the hallway at school with student I'm tutoring. He just arrived from Russia and is a complete newcomer, logistically speaking, so we are doing things like practicing number words by playing Bingo and sorting the foods in the kitchen pantry to learn the names of fruits and vegetables. This particular morning we were walking around the school introducing ourselves to people so we can practice greetings and conversation starters like "Good morning!" and "How are you?"

We had just finished up our lesson for the day, a game where we practiced color words and spatial orientation vocabulary by jumping in and out of a rainbow's worth of hula hoops, and were walking back to class when the assistant principal came racing by us down the hall. Her long blonde curls were pinned up haphazardly on her head and her hands, rubber-gloved, were held aloft. "LICE!" was her stage-whispered response to the quizzical look I gave her.

After dropping my student back off in class I returned to the office to find a full-scale infestation in effect. Kindergarteners were piled up everywhere waiting for someone to flip through their hair with the long thin wooden sticks that look eerily like the stirrers from Starbucks. In all I think we sent something like 18 kids home. Gaah.

Getting lice is every teacher's nightmare. As soon as the last student got picked up and sent home with the trilingual information packet about how to do their family's laundry (less pertinent for families who live in transitional housing and don't have ready access to a washer and dryer, but still) I sat myself down in a chair in the principal's office and made the student advisor check MY hair. Her verdict? "Mmm..." she said, rubber gloves rustling as she used the stick to section my hair and scratch at my scalp. "Very smooth, what conditioner do you use?" she wanted to know. All I wanted to know was whether or not I had lice. In fourteen years as a teacher I have had many cases of pinkeye but never this. Fortunately with a snap of the gloves coming off the student advisor pronounced me lice-free this time too. Sigh. All in a day's work.

Story #26: Samuel

2009-03-29T00:00:00.001-07:00

This is my nephew Samuel. He was born on February 28, and he lives in Burlington, Iowa, with his parents and his older brother Henry. Samuel's dad is my brother Nathan. I haven't met Samuel yet but Henry and I are pals, so I can imagine that Samuel and I will be buds too. I was really lucky when Henry was born, because I got to meet him when he was four days old. Unfortunately I haven't met Samuel yet but hopefully I'll get to meet him soon.

My brother and his wife, my sister-in-teeth (yes) Kelli, are those kind of parents who take their kids EVERYwhere. This makes for very adaptable children, they have found. So at the ripe old age of 14 days, Samuel went to a Mary Kay convention last weekend. There were of course many jokes about various products that can make your (face elbows hands feet insert body part here) smooth like a baby's....well. I think you know what I mean.

Story #25: Long Time, No Write

2009-03-28T21:59:00.001-07:00

I have not written any stories here in a long time. What have I been doing? Working, looking for work, remembering lessons from last year's sabbatical, reflecting on what they have to do with life here at home, making decisions, and following through on them. Oh--and most of all, collecting other stories. Time to get caught up! Here we go...sit down please, keep your hands to yourself, and listen :)

Story #24: You Should Always Try, or--Chag Purim Sameach!

2009-03-10T19:11:00.000-07:00

On the way home, I was feeling badly for myself. Not even the normal, natural, "I kinda had a crummy day" feeling badly but real, full-on, "Whoa, if I don't show some serious self-control I'm about 30 seconds away from being That Girl who cries on BART" feeling badly.

It was a combination of lots of things: finding myself for the first time in eight years without a Purim costume and away from a raucous Jewish day school holiday carnival celebrating the triumph of Queen Esther, worrying about when my pink slip will come in the mail, second-guessing a relationship decision I made over the weekend, spending all day in chilly itchy school clothes when all I wanted was a pair of big jeans and my cozy Stanford sweatshirt, and...maybe more than anything else, in that moment at least, not having any hamentaschen.

Now this might not sound serious, and if that is the case all it means is that you have not had the privilege of experiencing this magnificent delicacy. To save space I will not wax educational about hamentaschen and their praises here, but do I invite you to learn about them on wikipedia.

Purim kind of snuck up on me this year and without having 20 families' worth of Jewish moms generously showering me with plastic bags full of homemade hat-shaped goodness in all flavors of the spectrum (note to anyone paying attention: I like apricot the best) I just didn't know how to get my fix. I realized about lunchtime that my cookie craving was not abating but rather growing stronger and so I called the Grand Bakery in Oakland.

"How late are you open?" I wanted to know.

"Six o'clock and not a minute later, I've got some business to conduct with my bottle of etrog vodka from last Sukkot," the man who answered the phone informed me.

"I'll be there in plenty of time," I promised earnestly. "How's the inventory holding up?" I was worried demand would outstrip supply.

"HA! Just wait 'til you see when you get here--we'll have, don't worry," the baker said in no uncertain terms before hanging up the phone.

But, it all went downhill from there. My 3:00-4:00 meeting after school went until 4:30. Afterward I hustled to Civic Center BART only to race down the stairs and see the Richmond train pulling away from the platform. I finally got on the Pittsburg train 12 minutes later and there was a switching problem between West Oakland and 12th Street which left us in a weird, precariously roller-coaster style position waiting on the tracks above Peralta in Oakland with nothing visible below in the form of tracks or a platform, only laundry flapping in the cold wind.

I raced up the escalator and out to the bus stop on Broadway across from the Paramount Theatre, just to see the #12 bus pulling away and the last warm square of sunlight fading from the sidewalk. Standing chilly and crabby against the Kaiser Permanente building there on the corner of 20th, I was faux-reading my book and trying to understand how I came to feel so upset about all of this when a man walked up to me, RIGHT up and wrapped his arms around me pulling me into a surprising hug-kiss combo. At first I thought my day was getting worse because I was being attacked, albeit with affection, right there in broad-yet-shrinking daylight but actually it was my friend Jordan headed to the Y a few blocks away. "Kotleba!" he said with a smile. "I thought that was you standing here!"

He doesn't know it but Jordan and I met at a very complicated time, about a year ago, when I was trying everything I could to pull off the second half of my sabbatical. We became acquainted through the professional Jewish community and he was part of a process I went through to try and make it possible to spend three months building a school in a refugee camp in Ghana. His organization was really my last ditch effort, he was my Obi Wan Kenobi but I just couldn't make it come together and after having tried what seemed to be everything I did not go to Africa after all. I stayed home, I began to make a new home for myself and that is perhaps how I learned what ended up being some of the most revolutionary lessons that came from those sixteen months.

It was a 45-second conversation today, between Jordan and I, and it might seem silly to ascribe so much power to that one chance meeting, but it reminded me of something I had forgotten on this chilly itchy worrisome day: I have way more power than I remember, a lot of the time. And if I just try, even if it seems like it's not working out in the moment, my powers will always come through for me.

Buoyed as I was by this reminder, I decided that I was going to turn my day around and make it to the Grand Bakery by 6 o'clock after all. I boarded the #12 bus at 5:45, got off at my house six minutes later, ran around the corner and jumped into the car I've found myself wondering lately if it's really worth having, and tore up Grand Avenue towards the movie theater. I drove past the bakery and took a big risk by not turning into that little tease of a municipal parking lot that always seems like it will have a spot but never does, and immediately past the crosswalk there was a spot on the street. I pulled in and jumped out, wallet in hand, racing up the street first the wrong direction in my haste and then the right one. I saw with the delight that the stacking plastic chairs, identical to the ones found at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, were still out on the sidewalk and I ran completely unapologetically into the bakery.

"You...have...no...idea...how...glad...I...am...you're...still...open..." I panted, leaning on the counter and unwinding my damp scarf from my sweaty neck.

"Oh, hey, did you call earlier? You said you'd be here by six, right? Nice work," the baker smiled, seated by the cash register, the earlier holiday rush long since over. "What can I get you?"

I ordered my long-awaited hamentaschen, half a dozen apricot and half a dozen cherry, which he pulled boxed and ready to go from the promised massive cookie trove in the window. They were $1.10 each or $12 for a dozen. How could I resist? I ordered one lone prune-flavored cookie, loose in a white wax paper bakery bag, to round out the assortment and as the young woman was ringing me up the baker made me an end-of-the day offer.

"Free cookie if you can name the artist and song," he said, jabbing his thumb at the radio perched above the door to the kitchen.

"Oh, I'm not much one for music," I replied, embarrassed since I could tell the singer was well-known and that I should be able to identify him. "I'm really just happy that I made it here in time, you have no idea how hard I tried to get here--I came from the city and rode the #12 bus from BART and then jumped in my car along the way because I was worried I wouldn't make it in time."

"Whoa, that's pretty impressive!" the baker nodded as the woman counted out my change. "You deserve some kind of special treat for that much effort. Come on--smaller free cookie if you can just tell me who the singer is."

I thought of my brother because I know Nathan does an imitation of this guy and his drowsy, wheezy tone but let's face it--I'd had quite an afternoon and now standing in the Grand Bakery at 6:02 p.m. on Purim, cookies finally in hand, was just not up for playing games. "I'm really sorry, I can tell he's famous but I just don't know his name."

The baker laughed. "His name is Bob Dylan," he said by way of explanation. "He only has the single most-imitated style in Western music."

As the woman who won the Oscar-predicting poll at Sage and Emily's last month but then couldn't identify Robert DeNiro when he came on stage, I had to laugh at myself. "Oh well," I said as I walked out the door, calling back over my shoulder to the baker. "Purim Sameach--I hope you had a happy holiday!" Walking back to the car, balancing my plastic bakery boxes, I smiled to myself with the realization that as confusing as the past days and weeks might have been it seems I still have my power to always pull something off after all.

And now here I sit on my couch, having had all kinds of plans for a dinner of soup and kale and baked potatoes. Instead it is almost one in the morning and I realize that as soon as I came home, put on my longed-for comfy clothes and ate my after-school snack of three types of hamentaschen I must have fallen asleep right in this very spot. I think at the end of a day like this one that might have been exactly what I needed.

Story #23: Hallelujah, It's Raining...

2009-03-10T19:06:00.000-07:00

(03-10) 17:55 PDT SAN FRANCISCO - -- With 362 pink slips for San Francisco teachers in the mail, Mayor Gavin Newsom vowed today to give schools $23 million from the city's Rainy Day fund, doubling the amount he previously promised.

The district sent the layoff notices Monday by certified mail. School officials said the money would help save nearly 300 jobs, if not more.

The Board of Supervisors is expected to also support the allocation.

Once the district gets that in writing, it can rescind most if not all those pink slips, said school Superintendent Carlos Garcia. "We're really concerned about the impact it has on morale."

The amount of the Rainy Day funds coming to city schools has been a source of contention since the end of February.

Proposition G, passed by voters in 2003, created a pot of money filled in good economic times to be drawn down when times are tough. The measure said the school district can qualify for up to 25 percent of the fund's total - which stands at $92 million.

The mayor, however, said the district might only qualify for 25 percent of what's left after the city takes its share - leaving only $11.5 million for the schools.

The mayor and controller said Tuesday the schools qualify for the full 25 percent - $23 million.

"Those tough times are here and I want to prevent teacher layoffs by using our rainy day fund to aid the school district," Newsom said in a statement.

Story #22: Harvest of the Month

2009-03-08T13:46:00.001-07:00

It's an interesting balance: because our school supports a primarily underserved student population, we end up having a lot of resources available. One of them is the Harvest of the Month program through the USDA. Each month a different produce item is featured as part of the program, and the SNC (School Nutrition Coordinator but we call her the SNACK--my officemate, Maria) teaches lessons, prepares recipes, does in-class tastings, and talks about this particular fruit or vegetable. In February the Harvest of the Month was cabbage and now in March it is peas. At the beginning of every new month we get a message in the WAD (which stands for Weekly Administrative Directive, a digest of news sent from the district office but I just like to say the acronym: WAD!) announcing the featured item and describing all kinds of information about it. Read on and learn more about this important vegetable. Maybe you'll even try some peas on your own this month. If you do, write a comment and let us all know!

WHO: All Staff at Elementary, Middle and High Schools

WHAT: March’s Harvest Of The Month! – Peas!

Did You Know?

*Green Peas are among the top ten most commonly eaten vegetables (fresh, frozen, or canned) by California children.
* The sugar snap pea is actually a hybrid of green and snow peas. It was developed in 1979 to make an edible-pod variety with sweeter, full-sized peas.

For more information about peas, click on the links below:
• Educator’s newsletter – Peas_Educator_Newsletter.pdf

• Family Newsletter (English) - Peas_Family_Newsletter_English.pdf

• Family Newsletter (Spanish) - Peas_Family_Newsletter_Spanish.pdf

• Family Newsletter (Chinese) - Peas_Family_Newsletter_Chinese.pdf

HOW:
• Distribute Harvest of the Month materials:
- Copy Educator’s Newsletter for every classroom teacher
- Copy Family Newsletter, send home in weekly envelope

• Make tasty recipes found in both newsletters

• Prepare and offer Pea Salad with Fresh Herbs or Mexican Rice, from the newsletters, at your next staff meeting

• Teach a lesson from the Educator’s Newsletter

WHY:
The goal of Harvest of the Month is to increase fruit and vegetable awareness and to motivate children, families, and school staff to make healthier choices.

WHEN: March 2009

Story #21: My Boys

2009-03-08T08:25:00.000-07:00

This story is the follow-up to Hanging With My Boys. It's been lingering in draft form, as has much of my life it feels like, and is now being published about two weeks later. So no, I did not just get over having strep. That was awhile ago. But this story is still worth sharing. Read on...

When I finally got back to school after being out most of the week, marooned on my couch with strep throat and hulu.com, I went right away at lunch to find my boys. They were...playing four-square.

Huh?

"Hey guys, I missed you!" I said, coming up to them on the yard. The four-square ball bounced away, forgotten, as all six of them (or is it eight? There's so many and they kind of swarm so it's hard to tell) ran over to hug me at once.

"Teacher!" one of them said accusingly, "Where you been? Why you not been at school? You know what you always tell us--we gots to come EVERY day if we want to learn! That means you too, Teacher. What up?"

"Oh," I said, "I know, you're right. It IS important to come to school every day so that you can learn. And I should come to school every day too, but I was really sick. I had an infection in my throat and a fever and I had to stay home for two whole days. It was really boring. What's been happening while I was gone? I see you're playing four-square today."

The boys all started squirming and looking at the ground. One of them started poking their unofficial spokesperson. "YOU tell her," the poke-er whispered.

"Okay, well, um, so, you see, it's like this," the spokesperson said, jamming his hands into the pockets of his hoodie and avoiding my gaze. "We were doing Kung-Fu fighting without you and, well, we got in trouble."

My heart sank. "You got in TROUBLE?" I asked, incredulously. "From who?" I felt awful that they would have gotten reprimanded for something I specifically arranged with them.

"From (insert name of an administrator here), she told us fake fighting is like real fighting and she made us sit on the bench for an entire recess and said we can't do it no more so now we play four-square and we ain't been in any trouble since then," he explained.

This is such bad news, I thought. I can't believe they got in trouble for something I not only told them they could do, but something for which I helped them create a set of guidelines. Oh, no.

"Well, did you tell her that I told you you could and I helped you make up rules to keep it safe?" I asked.

"NO, oh no," the spokesperson responded as they all shook their heads adamantly. "We would never do that to you, Teacher, cuz you would've got in trouble too for telling us we could. We would never get you in trouble because we know you care about us and because you look out for us."

Stunned into silence and totally humbled, I hugged them goodbye and sent them back to play four-square. So this is the street mentality, I realized--protect the one who protects you, always. They could have been spared losing their recess, they would not have had to spend an entire day on the bench if they just would have told the administrator who got them into trouble that this had all been my idea. She would have come talked to me, and I would have confessed that it was a stupid idea and that I should not have done it in the first place--encouraged a group of Fifth Grade boys to do Kung-Fu fighting at recess!--and everyone would have been fine and we would have moved on. But my boys stayed silent to keep me out of trouble and now they are playing four-square.

I really need to think about this.

Story #20: Dance Time!

2009-02-21T11:00:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I was in a Second Grade class doing some literacy work with a small group of students while the classroom teacher was meeting with kids one on one to conference about their writing. Halfway through the period, the teacher rang a chime and a cry went up from the class: "Dance Time! Dance Time!" I had never seen them move so quickly and with such a concerted effort. Everyone stood up, put their books and papers in their desks, tucked in their chairs, and struck a pose. But, really.

"Ready?" the teacher asked, finger on the portable CD player's PLAY button.

"YEAH!" the kids replied.

And what do you imagine came out of those little speakers? At HIGH volume? Nothing less than Jailhouse Rock, by none other than the King himself, Elvis Presley.

Even better was the fact that as soon as the music began to play, the students sprang into action. Because, you see, they have a choreographed routine that they dance through, as a class, to this song. And swim, two, three, four...and Twist! Two! Three! Four! What could I do but join in?

And so there we all were, stretched out across the carpet in front of the whiteboard, Chorus Line-style....Snake Eyes! And, Jump! At the end of the song they all struck the standard Elvis pose, one leg extended to the side and the other knee bent, finger pointed skyward. I could no longer control myself and burst out laughing at all of us, as King-ly as we were going to get without capes. "Okay! Back to work!" the teacher said, clicking off the CD player, and without talking they all went back to their desks and sat down, picking up right where they had left off.

On his way back to his seat one of the boys I've been doing literacy work with pulled on my sleeve and motioned for me to bend down so he could talk into my ear. From behind a cupped hand, he whispered. "Hey, Teacher--you can really shake it!" And giving me a wink and a thumbs-up, he headed back to finish his journal writing.

Story #19: Sick

2009-02-18T21:37:00.000-08:00

I have not written for a week and a half because I was sick. Oh, but so sick! It all started the night of Friday, February 6th, when my cousin was in town and we all went out to Foreign Cinema for dinner. The entire meal I was hot and cold at the same time, and couldn't hear anyone talking because the throbbing sound in my head was so loud. I think I drank an entire decanter by myself...and that was just before the salads came. Oh, my throat hurt so much.

The next morning, feverish and unslept but delighted with the fact that I finally HAD health insurance after three months without any, I called the Kaiser appointment line to request a visit to the Weekend Clinic only to be told there were no times available that day. I begged the representative to let me come in and was eventually transferred to an advice nurse on the unit who told me no one could actually see me but that if I came between 10:30 and 4:30 someone would swab my throat to test for strep. Awesome.

So, at 2 p.m. on a sunny Saturday I found myself where everyone wants to be at that time: sitting on a paper-covered exam table, a nurse coming at my fiery throat with that LOONG Q-Tip. Yowch. As she was packaging it for me to take to the lab, she said, "You know, I don't think you have strep. Adults come in all the time with sore throats, and they think they have strep, but really just they have a runny nose and it's irritating their throat or something like that. I think you should probably just take some ibuprofen and drink some tea, and the lab will call you tomorrow, but probably it's just a virus."

"Well," I said, "I know most adults don't actually have strep when they think they do, but I'm an elementary school teacher."

"OH!" she replied, "Why didn't you say that in the first place?! Here, let me write you a prescription for penicillin and you can just get it filled at the pharmacy on your way out. That way when the lab calls you with the positive report tomorrow you can just start taking it then. And I'll write you a work note, because you won't be able to go to school for two days at least. Teachers are the sickest people I know. I have no idea how you do it."

Um, yeah. Neither do we.

So that is the reason for the radio silence: lots of fever, many boxes of tissues, endless popsicles. Thanks to all my friends for deliveries of flowers and soup and new toothbrushes for once the contagious period ended and I had to throw my old ones away. Turns out two of my officemates had the same raging infection the same time I did. We are all back now but this type of illness, streptococcus group A, can linger in the system for up to 21 days so our little workroom is full of tissues with lotion to ease our sore noses, gallons of Purell to sanitize our hands, and boxes of baby wipes to sponge off every hard flat surface we touch.

But fear not, the stories have been saved up in draft form and the publishing will begin anew soon. You will read about the swift and dramatic end that came to the kung-fu fighting, as well as an unwelcome visitor in the lunchroom and the very surprising chance I had to go swimming at school. Oh, and a fire drill thrown in for good measure plus maybe even a story or two from life outside of school too. Just let me have one last popsicle, and I'll get write (ha!) down to it.

Story #18: Hanging with my Boys

2009-02-09T22:48:00.000-08:00

As part of my new job, I do recess duty. LOTS of recess duty. Every day, at lunch, from 11:20 a.m. to 12:50 p.m. That is five rounds of recess. Whoa.

It starts with the little kids, K and 1st, and involves a lot of coat-zipping and shoe-typing and suggestions to go into the restroom and wash the rest of your lunch off your face because I can see, you had PB&J today, didn't you? After the first two rounds it's 2nd and 3rd, along with the related reminders not to jump in the puddles and yes that is the rule every day it rains and no I know I am not the first teacher to tell you this. And, I know he's chasing you, did you tell him you don't like that? No? Why don't you try telling him. I think that might help.

Then is 4th and 5th, the biggest kids, and of course as teachers we never have "favorite" of anything, not related to school anyway, not favorite kids or favorite subjects or anything that would make us appear to be something besides 100% unbiased. That said, I really like the 4th and 5th grade recess a lot. There is gardening happening in the back corner of the yard, against the chain link fence, and something about kids gardening in this tiny scrappy little piece of ground with the freeway and the jail in the background does my heart good. There are always two simultaneous, side-by-side games of double dutch going on and I will stand there and cheer with the best of them, a smile on my face and hope in my heart for the kids who taught me to double dutch all those years ago in Fontana, those second graders who are in college now if they tricked poverty and fate and even made it as far as high school.

And, at the 4th and 5th grade recess there are my boys. They are in fifth grade, and it didn't take long for them and I to find one another. We met my third or fourth day at school, when the five or six or seven of them were screwing around in the back of the line at the end of lunch and I walked over to stand by them. Proximity, you see, is the most powerful of all student management tools :) They wanted to know who I was ("Hey! You a substitute or something?") and what I was doing there ("You getting us in trouble? We didn't do nothing!") but when I stuck my hand out and told them my name and made them tell me theirs and explained that I do Ms. L's job now (the former reform facilitator and current assistant principal) they had a new and more accurate sense of who I was. And when I used my famous line, honed from years of practice ("I'm not getting you in trouble, your choices are getting you in trouble, now line up please") they knew I was on their side.

Let's pause here for some background information: I am good with boys. This is part of my professional reputation. I never set out to build this skill, I think it is a combination of natural affinity and experience gained over time with many different students, but wherever it comes from it is very real. For better or for worse. I am like a Boy Whisperer. The kid who almost got kicked out of school for sticking pins through the top of his teacher's shoe and into her foot while they were sitting on the carpet for circle time? Yeah, he was in my class the next year and hugged me goodbye every day of the week. The kid climbed into his cubby and refused to come out every morning because he hated class so much, who banged his head on his desk as an outlet for his debilitating anxiety and who would run away and hide at recess? By winter break he was waking his parents up at 5 a.m. to make sure he would get to school on time. Somewhat given to extremes, that one. And I loved him so much. And I love them all.

More than once I've been told I'd be great at an all-boys school, but there aren't that many of them and it hasn't really ever come up as a professional option. And, I haven't sought it out. I figure there are plenty of boys wherever I go, and my new school is no different.

So back to my boys, these fifth grade boys: ever since that day I met them in the back of the line, we have been fast friends. They see me at morning assembly and in the hall and completely free of the self-consciousness that I know will come next year when they go to middle school, they shout my name and wave. They come up to me at lunch and look in my canvas Whole Foods bag to see what leftovers I've brought from home and brag that their school lunch is way better. They high-five me in the morning and hug me in the afternoon. And, at recess we fight.

Not real fighting, of course, because real fighting is Not Allowed At School. That is how this whole thing got started. A few days after we met, I was doing recess duty and they were fighting so I went over to talk to them. "But, we're not really fighting! We're just pretending!" And so we all sat down together by the fence and I had the talk with them about how pretend fighting looks like real fighting, in the same way pretend cheating looks like real cheating and pretend kissing looks like real kissing. We talked about how all of these things can start out being pretend and can easily become real, and also how it can be very confusing because one person can think something is pretend while the other person thinks it is real and then it can get out of hand.

They were very dejected and disappointed because let's face it, these are scrappy boys who are not going to grab a rake and go work in the garden or get in line for double dutch. So, seeing their disappointment, I made them a deal. They can fight at recess. Not pretend fight, not real fight, but STAGE fight. I will be their director and they will be the actors and for five minutes every day at lunch recess we will enact a dramatic martial arts performance. We will use what we've learned playing video games and watching The Matrix and we will do some vigorous kung-fu fighting. Okay? What does everyone think about that, do we agree? Good. Come on, let's fight.

"Teacher! Just one thing," one of them insisted, grabbing my wrist and pulling me back down to the blacktop. "We have to make a rule that if someone fake-kills someone while we're acting, that they bring the person they fake-killed back to life. Because that doesn't happen in real fighting. Like with my cousin. When he got killed he was dead for real and nothing could bring him back."

*deep breath*

Okay, I replied, of course. Good point. Can we all agree that if anyone gets fake-killed while we're acting that the person who fake-kills someone will bring them back to life?

"No! That's not good enough," another one of the boys said, shaking his head vigorously. "If someone gets fake-killed, we'll all stop acting and come over and bring him back to life, together. Let's say it takes everyone together to bring someone back to life. That way we'll all be really careful not to fake-kill anyone because if we do, everyone will have to stop playing and come over and it will be annoying to be interrupted."

Really? Are you sure? I wanted to know. This seemed like kind of weird logic to me, but they were all nodding yes. Group resurrection, group consensus. Who am I to say? If this is what they think will help them self-monitor and not fake-kill someone else then okay. Never mind the fact that fake-killing is indeed that, fake, and that in the end it is really up to the person supposedly fake-killed if they are going to fake-die or not. That's not what it's about. It's about group accountability and being responsible for your actions, fifth grade-style.

So now every day we fight at lunch recess. Hanging out with my boys is one of my favorite parts of my day. And you know what? We haven't had even one fake death, yet. Turns out it's a pretty good system after all.

Story #17: The Player to be Named Later

2009-02-05T22:38:00.000-08:00

Remember the photos of my famous, pregnant best friend Rebecca and her husband Mark? They are still very famous, of course, but they are not pregnant anymore. This is their daughter! She was born yesterday. When she is a week old, they will have a baby-naming ritual and unroll the Torah to the portion of the week from when she was born, and then wrap her up in it like a burrito, and then tell us her name. But not until then. So crazy, us Jews! But, I know what it is. Not because they've told me but because Rebecca and I used to talk about these things---like girls do, sometimes. So not only am I so, so excited to meet the new friend (who I was told I get to hold whenever I want because I wash my hands SOOO often that I am pre-qualified on the cleanliness front) but I also feel like I have a fun secret since I know what her name is :) How beautiful is she? So beautiful. Brucha haba'a, chaverah katanah...welcome, small friend!

Story #16: Arun Mixes it Up

2009-02-05T22:13:00.000-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XAkJ8hcG1s

My student teacher from last semester is one of the most incredible people I have ever met. I knew he and I would get along the day I met him. I was in the school office working on something and he arrived, ten minutes early for our initial meeting. Another teacher came to get me to let me know he'd arrived and that she'd let him into the classroom he and I would be sharing. "He's so sweet!" she stage-whispered as we walked back towards the classrooms. "And he's tall, and bald, and he said he'd just sit in the class library and read until you got back!"

During the time we spent together I learned he is not only tall and bald but also that he does yoga, cooks amazing gourmet meals with combinations of incredible things from Berkeley Bowl, volunteers as an educator at the Oakland Zoo, has lived and rescued crocodiles in India, is married to another teacher who happens to be one of the most beautiful people on the face of the entire earth, and oh yeah--when he's not saving the world by being an elementary school teacher who is also a man who is also a person of color, which is huge in a profession dominated by white women, he's a rap star.

Check it out, yo...as if I didn't have enough admiration for him already, he rhymed the phrase "scientific method". Respect.

Story #15: Casual Carpool

2009-02-02T18:52:00.001-08:00

I live in Oakland and work in San Francisco. I have a car, but it is against my religion to drive it to the city, both because that is not good for the Earth and also because that is not good for my blood pressure. I am already an excitable person. I do not need to add navigating the Bay Bridge to the mix.

Subaru aside, there are a number of options for getting to work:

•take the AC transit (East Bay bus system) #12 to 19th Street BART

•walk for twenty minutes to 19th Street BART, carrying all my school stuff

•ride the TransBay bus

•...or, drum roll please, Casual Carpool

Casual Carpool is a system that sounds incredibly unreliable and actually potentially dangerous in theory, but one that in practice runs like a well-oiled and completely unattended machine. When I first heard of it I was sure it was an urban legend, but it is completely true and without it I would not get to school in the morning. If Casual Carpool is not something with which you are familiar, I will now offer you an explanation.

The Bay Bridge connects Oakland to San Francisco. There is a toll to cross it headed westbound and there are also very long lines at certain times of the day. Morning commute traffic is known to be especially heavy and slow. If you have three or more people in your vehicle, however, you get two special privileges to reward you for not being one of those people in their car all by themselves: you are exempt from the bridge toll, and you fly past the maze that leads up to the toll plaza because you are in the carpool lane.

Throughout the East Bay (Berkeley, Oakland, Alameda, El Cerrito, Emeryville, Richmond, Fairfield, and the like) there are locations where people rendez-vous to get their Casual Carpool on every morning. Drivers pull up and wait in line, while riders queue on the sidewalk. When there's a driver, and two riders, the car leaves. The driver saves the price of a bridge toll, the riders save the price of a BART ticket to the city. Simple as that.

I get into Casual Carpool at Grand and Perkins, half a block from my house. I have never had to wait more than two, count them, minutes to get in a car and go. Rides have ranged from a scary Scooby Doo-style conversion van in which I was sure I was being kidnapped, to this morning's sage-green Prius. There are rules for Casual Carpool: no talking unless initiated by the driver, no cell phone conversations, no eating or drinking, and no radio unless it is NPR and even then the driver gets to pick whether you listen or not. Everyone drops off at the TransBay Terminal in the city, just at the bottom of the Fremont Street off-ramp, unless you are at the two Casual Carpool locations that also have a Civic Center option for the destination (um, I wish that was the case for my CC spot because that would shave about 20 minutes and one MUNI Metro ride per day off my commute).

I will now begin posting updates each day about which scary kidnapper van, or supah-fly sports car ride, I end up with for my Casual Carpool each day. Because, you might not care but the way my day begins is directly influenced by this luck of the draw. Think of me each morning at 7 a.m. PST, and keep your fingers crossed for no dog-hair-laden backseats. Ewww.

Story #14: Part-Time Jobs

2009-02-01T16:07:00.000-08:00

Almost every teacher I know has, or has had at some point in the past, an additional part-time job. This is of course ridiculous on many levels because teaching is WAAY more than a full-time job already, plus as the mentors of tomorrow's future promise of the leaders of the hope of the tomorrow, shouldn't we just get paid enough for the one job we all already have? There is a great book about just this very topic, and it is called Teachers Have It Easy: The Big Sacrifices and Small Salaries of America's Teachers. Soapbox aside, I highly recommend it. One of the things it describes is this very phenomenon, that of teachers and their hyper-employed lifestyles.

Here is a list of actual jobs that have been held while also teaching full-time, either by me, by one of my colleagues, or in some cases both:

tutor
test prep teacher
exam proctor
curriculum developer
lifeguard
umpire
aerobics instructor
waitress
bartender
babysitter
dog walker
camp director
day trader
Mary Kay consultant
international tour guide
dancer (yes, that kind)
t-shirt folder at Gap

...and, these are only the part-time jobs I know about.

Now that I have a full-time job once again, I have to concentrate on finding my next part-time job. So I was looking on craigslist, where all good part-time jobs are found, and I came across this post. I have done many, many things for money in my time but this is not one of them and I just can't forsee that it ever will be. But, hey--never say never, I suppose. Read on:

Captain
Reply to: xxxxxxxxxx@craigslist.org
Date: 2009-01-31, 9:14AM

Part time Captain. Near coastal license required. Must be on 2nd issue of license. 100 ton minimum. Radar endorsement preferred. Must be clean cut, well groomed.

* Location: Pier 39
* This is a part-time job.
* Principals only. Recruiters, please don't contact this job poster.
* Please, no phone calls about this job!
* Please do not contact job poster about other services, products or commercial interests.

There are a lot of very unique skill subsets that are part of classroom teaching, but none of them have to do with radar. Oh wait, do the eyes in the back of my head count? Maybe I do qualify for this job, after all! I should check into it.

Story #13: Picking Up the Fish

2009-01-31T18:23:00.001-08:00

On Wednesday I was at school, hanging out in the office at lunchtime as I often do in an attempt to offer triage to the wide variety of lunch- or recess-related problems that can find their way to the front desk between 11:20 and 12:50. It did not take long for something interesting to happen, of course.

Two very small boys, in Kindergarten, come running into the office. The first is pulling the second by the wrist, and the second is screaming. In Spanish.

"Teacher!" the first one said, screeching to a halt in front of me while at the same time taking his friend by the shoulders and firmly pushing the screaming child down into a sitting position in one of the brown chairs lined up against the wall. "My friend is hurt!"

"Yes," I said, coming around from behind the desk where I had been practicing my one useful office-related skill: peering into the tiny, black-and-white video monitor to see who is at the front gate when they ring the bell and then buzzing them in. "From how loudly he is screaming it sounds like he is very hurt."

The young chaperone wheeled around to his hurt friend who was still screaming at the top of his lungs while sitting in the brown chair, eyes squeezed shut, face red and streaked with tears as he cradled one hand in the other. "Silencio!" the chaperone demanded, poking the hurt student in the shoulder for emphasis. Immediately the screams subsided to hiccupy sniffles.

Handing the sniffling casualty a tissue, I knelt down in front of him as he continued to sit in the brown chair. "Hey," I said gently, "What happened, how did you get hurt?"

"Teacher, he don't speak no English," the chaperone said impatiently, hands on hips and tapping his foot. "That's WHY I came with him to the office."

Ahh, yes. At a school with English-only kids as well as two bilingual strands (Spanish and Filipino) communication can be more complex at times than one might expect. "Does he speak Spanish?" I asked the chaperone.

"Yep, we're in (name of Kindergarten Spanish bilingual teacher)'s class," the chaperone said by way of explanation.

"Okay, great, so this means you speak Spanish too then?" I continued.

"YES I speak Spanish!" the five-year-old's patience, both for his hurt screaming friend and this ridiculously clueless teacher, were very evident.

"Great," I said definitively, "Ask your friend how he got hurt."

The chaperone turned to the injured and a not so much a conversation but rather more an inquisition began, with the chaperone yelling at the injured and the injured bursting into tears once more before yelling back. This continued for a few rounds until finally the chaperone turned back to me, shrugging. "I don't know. What he's saying, it makes no sense."

I took a deep breath, all the while looking over the injured for open wounds, compound fractures, and freely-flowing blood yet finding none. "Okay," I said, trying not to lose patience. "Did you not understand his words, or did you not understand his idea?"

"I understand his words just fine, but it makes no sense what he's talking about!" the chaperone protested, so agitated now that he was jumping up and down and pumping his fists.

"Well, let's start with what we have. What words did he use to tell you what the problem was? What did he say about how he got hurt?" I asked, faux-patiently.

"He said he was playing and someone stepped on his hand when he was picking up the fish," the chaperone explained in an exasperated tone.

"When what? He was picking up the what?" I demanded, now completely impatient and as annoyed as the chaperone.

"Picking up the fish!" the chaperone yelled.

"Can you please ask him again? I just don't understand what that could mean," I said doubtfully.

"He'll only say the same thing! Just give us an ice pack so we can go back outside!" the chaperone pleaded, sensing his own frustration was not getting him anywhere with me and instead resorting to groveling. "I just want to go back to recess, please Teacher, come on!"

In complete confusion I turned back to the injured. "Picking up the fish?" I asked him, as if he would understand me.

"Si," the hiccupy tearstained Kindergartener nodded. "Fish."

I stood up and reached behind the desk to the mini-fridge, wrapping an ice pack in a paper towel. "Here you go, little man," I said to the injured. "You two have a good rest of your recess." And the chaperone grabbed the injured by the wrist again and dragged him back outside to play.

All in a day's work.

Story #12: Found

2009-01-27T23:56:00.000-08:00

Monday was my birthday, and when I walked out of my apartment building on the way to work this is what I found on the ground:

I am one of those people who finds things. It's pretty cool, actually. Usually I find pretty everyday stuff, but every now and then I find something really good. It's like it got left there somehow just for me. Yesterday morning's discovery seems like a great thing to find the morning you turn 35.

As Momi would ask: "What is the meaning of this?"

Sidepoint: Lots of you haven't even met Momi yet.
Oh, that's like four stories at least, right there.

I'm not sure what finding this special little birthday-morning thing means, yet, but I think it will be cool to find out.

Story #11: Catching Up

2009-01-27T23:52:00.000-08:00

I have to say, this is not the best blog I've ever had--and, I've had a few. The premise was to write a different story every day and that has not yet happened, as evidenced by the fact that today is January 27th and I am on Story #11. Yikes.

Not only that: the layout is bad, and my camera was lost for the first three weeks of the month so I haven't had any interesting pictures to put up except the ones other people have sent me or I have thiefed from the Internet. Hmm. This endeavor is not so great so far.

But, I still like telling stories and I have a feeling that some fresh new material is headed my way. Don't know why, just a prediction I have. So in the way that the month of January is a little bit like a trial run for the rest of the year, I think the first dozen or so posts will be a trial run for the rest of this blog...you know, give me a chance to hit my stride and iron out the kinks and all like that.

Yeah. I gotta get caught up! There are so many stories to tell, you know.

Story #10: Advance, Australia Fair!

2009-01-27T22:05:00.001-08:00

Growing up, I had a very important job in the my family. Every year when my dad would get a new planner, he would give it to me to fill in all the not-to-be-forgotten dates: birthdays, school vacations, and of course the most important holiday of the entire year--Groundhog Day, his favorite celebration of them all. I was always a little confused, though, when I got to the end of January and saw that the box for my own birthday on the 26th already had a holiday printed into it by the publisher. Australia Day?!

It wasn't until a few years ago when my T.A., herself a *very* proud (aren't they all, though?) Aussie, really impressed upon me what a "lucky Sheila" I am to have this fabulous holiday on my very own birthday. It seems the whole of Australia knocks off work on this day and--since it is midsummer Down Under--everyone heads to the beach or the football field (that's soccer to us Yanks) or the cricket pitch, everyone grills on the barbie and drinks Foster's and spends the entire day celebrating the national identity of a group of people whose country was founded on 26 January 1788 when the British shipped a bunch of prisoners to New South Wales and made it a penal colony.

So--yesterday was Australia Day. Which means it was of course also my birthday. And, birthdays are among the best when it comes to being events that generate stories. One of the things I did to celebrate was play a trivia game with my friends to see who knew the most stories from my life. It was funny to hear what people remembered. Even funnier, though, was hearing the fake stories people made up as part of the game in the moments when there was something in--or related to--my life they'd never heard about before.

You'll have a few of those stories, the real and also the fake, to look forward to in coming days. Want to hear about a funny, and yet very highly esteemed, award I won one summer while I was an undergrad? Want to read tales of my bedroom-hopping, not just for a night here and there but in some cases for weeks at a time? Want to know what my middle name is, and what *way cooler* middle name someone guessed I have? I'll tell you. Stay tuned...

Story #9: Censored

2009-01-27T22:01:00.001-08:00

Maybe you noticed that stories #7 and #8 are gone. They were the stories written by my guest author, Aaron, while he is in Africa doing work with refugees. His organization did not feel the pieces he wrote were in support of their preference around how to describe the work they do with clients, and so they asked him to take it down from his own site. By extension, he asked me to take it down from mine. That is really too bad, for a number of reasons: Aaron is an incredible writer and photographer, and he is in Africa having an incredible experience right now, and I think his insight gave new voice to the refugee experience...oh, wait, which is not what we want to do. Right.

Moving on.

Story #6: Bacon

2009-01-17T17:57:00.000-08:00

Let me start out by saying: I am vegetarian. Also: I keep kosher.

Today I went to brunch at the home of a friend of a friend. There were two signs taped to the door when we arrived:

1) Shoes off, please!

2) BSG spoilers strictly forbidden--THIS MEANS YOU

We made our way inside past those formidable messages and greeted everyone in the kitchen: a small crowd, since it was early, which gave me a chance to make a true confession to the host that yesterday he stepped off a curb in front of my car and I almost killed him. "Oh," he said, nonplussed and unsurprised when I told him this story, "Was I not looking? I forget to, sometimes. This actually happens kind of a lot, I think. Hope I didn't scare you, sorry!" Um, no problem...

The menu offerings were quickly dubbed "Carbtastic" by a fellow brunch-goer but I did not let this stop me: fresh-baked raisin bread still warm from the oven, pastries from Cheeseboard, homemade coffee cake with that amazing crumbly goodness on top AND homemade fresh whipped cream...the offerings went on and on, all very starchy, all marvelous in my opinion.

As the morning turned into afternoon, the spread diversified somewhat: a salad arrived, carrots and humus, a whole tray of sushi...but as the variety increased, so too did a murmuring among the guests.

mmm blah blah hmmm bacon? blah blah mmmm hmmm bacon! mmm blah hmmm blah bacon...

You see, this is a household with two things posted above the stove: a flowchart for meal item selection in which every box and arrow leads to bacon, and a new-in-the-box pair of action figures named Mr. Bacon and Mr. Tofu. So the presence of bacon in the brunch offerings is legendary, and yet was absent, and the assembled were getting restless.

"I saw the bacon on the counter, next to the refrigerator," a woman confided to me in conspiratorial tones, her hand cupped around my ear as she whispered breathlessly. "I just wish someone would fry it up already!"

Never one to not take initiative, I went into the kitchen and confirmed the bacon's presence, and then went to find the host. "There are questions about whether or not someone might cook the bacon at some point," I told him, to which he responded "Tell the people asking the questions that this is a do-it-yourself kind of brunch and that they can cook the bacon whenever they feel like it."

That was permission enough for me. Only moments later I was in action at the stove: cast-iron skillet, plate with paper towels, fork. I have not cooked bacon in decades nor eaten it in years (ahem) but really, it's a fairly straightforward food to make and soon enough the room was filled with the briny fried aroma of bacon-y goodness. People began to stream into the kitchen from other parts of the house. "Bacon? Is there bacon? Someone's finally frying that bacon? Thank God, we thought we'd have to wait all day!" So popular, I had suddenly become.

At one point a kid who was at the brunch, with whom I had been playing earlier building a Rube Goldberg-ian machines on the front of the fridge with those magnetic chutes and funnels you roll marbles through, pushed his way through the crowd up to where I was standing in front of the stove.

"What are you doing?" he asked, wide-eyed.

"I'm cooking bacon," I answered. "Do you want some when it's done?"

"What is bacon?" he asked, looking up at me skeptically.

"It's a kind of a meat, it comes from pigs," I explained.

He shook his head firmly. "I don't eat meat," he said with conviction.

"I know, neither do I," I replied.

"But why are you cooking the bacon if you don't eat meat?" he wanted to know.

"People were complaining because even though there was a package of bacon no one was cooking it, and a lot of people wanted to eat it, so instead of listening to people complain anymore I decided to cook the bacon so they could have some and be happy," I told him.

"OH," he said, nodding with deep understanding, "that kind of thing happens at my house sometimes, when it's just easier to do something you wouldn't usually do than to have a big conversation about it." And with that he walked away.

Um, right, exactly. This is why kids are awesome.

The bacon, of course, was delicious and gone as soon as we pulled it out of the very greasy skillet. Not that I would know personally if it was good, since I do not eat bacon myself.

Story #5: Lunch With the Grown-Ups

2009-01-15T21:46:00.000-08:00

Let me say this: Recent events aside, I have mostly only ever been a teacher. This means I've spent a LOT of time with children during the day, and very little time with adults. The adults with whom I do spend time are mostly other teachers, and in a similar situation as me, so even when I do get to see the adults during the day we mostly talk about the children. Or of course there are some days when the few adults that are around get so overstimulated by being with the children all day that we spend the limited time we do have available to be together, such as lunch, hiding in our classrooms with the lights off eating the PB&J we have brought from home since lunch is only 25 or 40 or however many minutes anyway and there's no time to go out anywhere and get food and p.s., we don't even make $60,000 a year generally speaking...so, take-out=less of an option for many reasons.

However on Wednesday my world was rocked because I got to have lunch with (bah dum duuuummmmm....) The! Grown-Ups!!!

Yes indeed, I was in San Francisco for an appointment in the morning--such an adult-oriented appointment that I was wearing a suit, if you must know--and when I was done I sent her text as we had planned to see if she still wanted to meet for lunch. She texted back and said Sure, Great and gave me directions to her office and I went downtown to find her.

Um, okay, so first of all I find her office and it is in a huge building with like a dozen elevators. Not all of the elevators go to all the floors though so I kind of dork out briefly and have to consult the note I have written to myself ON THE BACK OF MY HAND (so not a grown-up thing to do) describing which floor her office is on so I know which elevator to take. I get to the proper floor and it is FAN-CEE and there is a man at the desk and he asks me my name, and then he calls her and tells her I am there and she comes out to get me and WE GET TO INTO THE BACK PART AND SEE HER OFFICE and I am trying hard to not actually let my jaw hang open. There are grown-ups everywhere! They have on headsets and are talking on the phone, they are putting on their coats to go OUT of the office since they have more than 25 minutes for lunch and likely during that time no one will ask them for help opening a Go-gurt, they are going to the bathroom without having to find anyone to be legally responsible for supervising their students because THERE ARE NO STUDENTS ANYWHERE. I am astounded.

We go into her office and I get to sit down on the upholstered chair opposite her desk while she signs something that someone had put into her box (!) and then we go to get lunch. For lunch we walk to a hipster salad place where there is a HUGE list of ingredients and you can design your own combination and also there are pre-designed options with hottt names like the "Cowboy" and the "Disco". Uhh...? She tells me just to tell the saladista what I'd like when it is my turn. So, I do, and he writes it all down on a form, and gets it mostly right, and we go to pay. The cashier consults the little paper the saladista used to write down my order and this is how the cost of my salad gets determined, because different options have different prices, next thing I know my salad is quoted at the price of TWELVE dollars. For a salad! I am horrified but she said she's paying for lunch so I got a $4 lemonade or whatever else too.

Once we are outside and seated at a table I get a chance to look around a little and I see we are in one of those community open spaces so popular in SOMA--there is a fountain and a waterfall and perhaps even koi but I did not see any, there is a zen-like slowly moving sculpture that looks like really huge hoop earrings and yes: there is bamboo. SO much bamboo, growing against the side of the adjacent building to camouflage the concrete and make it look like we are really In Nature. The whole time we eat I check my watch obsessively because surely the bell will ring any moment, or someone will show up and need their coat zipped, or who knows. But, wait...we are with the Grown-Ups! And, here are the top five ways I could tell people around us were indeed adults and not children (or, people who spend all day working with children):

1) Many people wore clothes that appeared to be dry-clean only, since likely they would not have had to consider the possibility of being thrown up on anytime during the day when they made their wardrobe choices in the morning.

2) Almost all the women (and, one or two of the men--I decided they must work at design firms and not i-banking offices) were wearing RIDICULOUSLY high heels, again because the chance of them having to chase down someone who refused to come get into line after recess=probably pretty slim.

3) No one was wearing a backpack full of emergency supplies that they are required to have on their person when leaving their immediate work area, unlike teachers and their JanSports full of epi-pens and inhalers and wet wipes and emergency rations and sunblock and the like.

4) People were actually sitting down and eating instead of carrying their food around and eating while walking and simultaneously making sure people remember the slide is for going DOWN, not UP.

5) No one blew a whistle to get other people's attention, not one single time! Incredible.

And, of course all good things must come to an end so after about an hour and fifteen minutes of relaxed, adult conversation that might have even included profanity at one point (shhh....don't tell!) we walked back to her office. I really wanted to ask if I could come upstairs and use the Grown-Up Bathroom one more time but I was too embarrassed so I just got on BART. The whole experience was so fun! And, so fascinating. I'd need to go to lunch with the grown-ups a few more times (and, have someone buy me more $12 salads or $15 burritos or whatever) so that I could tell for sure but you know, while she and I had a great time, I have to say overall I probably find it more comfortable to have lunch with the children. Most of the time. Not always. Because if I did not have lunch with the children, when would I get to use the entire repertoire of professional vocabulary that I've developed over the past dozen years?

"Sit DOWN, please!"

"You may not use your hands to do that while you are also using your hands to eat."

"Where is your napkin?"

"Before you go play you need to take as many more bites of food as whatever grade you are in."

And...my favorite: "Did you try to open this with your mouth before you handed it to me to open for you? Because I do not like that. Do not do that again, please."

Now, that's a nice lunch, right there.

Story #4: I Know Famous People!

2009-01-11T18:16:00.000-08:00

My best friend is Rebecca. She and I met in August, 2001 at the Teacher Inservice of the school where we had both just been hired. I knew she was cool because she had on Birkenstocks and a fabulous outfit and was carrying some kind of totebag from some kind of workshop, the "I Like To Read Books and I Support Gay People" conference or something, I don't remember, something about literacy and queer identity is all that comes to mind--anyway it was a cool totebag with a cool logo and Rebecca is cool and I love her and since then for the past seven and a half years we have been best friends.

Since we met there are some things about my life and Rebecca's life that have been the same, and some that have been different. We have both been to Israel a number of times since then and on two of those trips we've actually gone together. We have both moved a number of times and thanks to her my library and my kitchen at my old apartment in the city were both impeccably arranged. We have gone to farmers' markets together and celebrated each other's birthdays and a few times, last year, because she trusts me a lot Rebecca even let me teach her First Grade class while she was away getting married and on her honeymoon. I love love love Rebecca :)

There are, as I mentioned, also things that have been different about Rebecca and I during the past seven years as well. Rebecca is married to Mark, and they are expecting their first baby oh, sometime next month (!) so that is very different, because I have never been married and I do not have a February due date or really any plans to have a baby anytime soon at all. I was so, so fortunate to be with them when they got married--oh, it was really I think one of my very favorite days of my whole entire life--and while I don't expect that I will be with them when their baby actually arrives I hope they let me see her really soon after she comes and I have a daydream that maybe even they will let me hold her if I promise to wash my hands REALLY WELL beforehand.

Rebecca and Mark are so wonderful: they are generous and fun and thoughtful and creative and they will be such good parents. And, in addition to all these things, they are...FAMOUS. They just became famous today actually. Check them out:

http://superherodesigns.com/journal/

(There is no permalink so scroll down to the entry for January 11, 2009)

Look how famous my friends and their baby are!

Story #3: Prewriting

2009-01-08T23:50:00.000-08:00

As a teacher who loves to write, or maybe a writer who loves to teach, or both, I spend a lot of time listening to kids talk about their writing. I also spend time talking to kids about their writing. I don't usually talk to kids about MY writing, but sometimes. Modeling is a good instructional strategy.

One moment that I knew my hard work was paying off was about two years ago, almost exactly this time of year. I was teaching Third Grade at the time and we were sharing together in one of our favorite parts of the week: Author's Chair. Ahh...Author's Chair was every Friday afternoon, and you could sign up as the week went on if you had something you wanted to read to the class but you didn't have to, and we had a special chair from IKEA that we only got out at this time of week so it was very special to sit in the actual Author's CHAIR. We had feedback forms that the audience could complete with two distinct columns and items to check off in each as a way of giving admiration and encouragement (and, to build our vocabulary along the way---oh, it took a lot of practice but by about mid-October I'd trained them all to say "I admired it when you..." or "I encourage you to try..."). Author's Chair was so fabulous. Sometimes there were even snacks.

So one rainy Friday afternoon in December it was time for Author's Chair and I got out the sign-up sheet and people took turns bringing their work to the front and sharing it with the class. There was admiration and encouragement and I think someone had brought in one of those *massive* packages of like a gallon of Goldfish crackers, cheddar flavor of course because--um, OBVIOUSLY--kids like cheddar flavor best.

Soon enough everyone was done with their turn in the Authors Chair and we'd even already packed up our backpacks and everything. I looked at the clock on the wall: fifteen more minutes of school? Dreading the amount of transitional energy it would take to move everyone into a game of Heads Up, Seven Up (or as we played it, Heads Up Ten Up because Ms. Kotleba is a socialistic egalitarian maniac and with twenty kids in our class Ten Up meant everyone got to be either a picker, or picked) so I decided to read to the class from my own writer's notebook.

I got up from my desk and walked to the Author's Chair, notebook in hand. I read my piece, a story about life with my brother when we were both growing up. The story had boogers and biting and kids being sent to their room as some of the key elements, so I thought for sure my kids would be into it. But, hmm, no. I was wrong. The people I called on for the "admiration" part of the feedback said totally vanilla things, like "I admire the way you used different voices for different characters when you read your story." Okay, fair enough and thank you for the compliment but what do you ENCOURAGE me to improve upon? Finally one of my students raised his hand.

"YES! Go ahead! What is it? What kind of encouragement would you like to offer me that you think would help to improve my writing?!" I was desperate for someone to say something, not only for the indication that would provide that they have some form of literary aspirations themselves, but as proof of the fact that I had actually taught them a variety of text analysis skills. Or even really that they had been paying attention at all.

"Um, Ms. Kotleba, no offense--but, did you use the Prewriting step of the Writing Process when you wrote this piece? Because it's funny but kind of hard to keep up with since it has no REAL plot. It doesn't seem very organized. You could use a web or some other graphic organizer from the packet we have in our yellow writing folders to plan out your next story before you write it. That might go better. I could show you how if you want next time we have Writer's Workshop."

...

And so it is with the different stories I write here on this blog. In case you were not able to tell, I do not always Prewrite before posting. Things can get long or kind of hard to follow. If you want to sit down with me sometime and share with me your favorite graphic organizer, that would be awesome. I am sure I still have a lot to learn about being a writer. And that, perhaps more than anything, is the reason I like to "teach" kids how to write--so they can actually teach me.

Story #2.5: Chapters

2009-01-08T21:15:00.000-08:00

Hello, friends. I have started a number of different stories, since it is now officially one week into the New Year and I've only posted twice--or, 2.25 times but that doesn't really count. All the stories I've started are beginning to seem like they are very long, which is why I haven't published them here--because none of them are done yet. So instead of a different story on every different day, maybe sometimes if I start telling a story of great length there will be a different *chapter* of a story on every different day. Yes. I think so. That seems more like fun and less like work to me.

The thing is--I'm not naturally, how would you say? Brief.

Story #2.25: Working on It

2009-01-08T00:11:00.000-08:00

I realize this blog operates much less frequently than once a day and I want to change that. I am just a little tired, is all. I tried tonight to write two separate entries (#3, followed by #2.5) about writing and the process and my experiences with it and how they pertain to this blog and then I fell asleep on the couch. So for now I will publish this 3rd-but-not-really post. More to come.

I just don't want you to think that my storytelling has gone the way of so many other New Year's resolutions from the past. Not that you would know what I was talking about when I say that, anyway :)

Story #2: Party Trick

2009-01-02T23:00:00.000-08:00

I took BART into the city on the afternoon of New Year’s Day to chat, eat, see, and be seen at one of my favorite events of the entire year: the First Day party at a friend of mine’s house. I had a little bit of a bad taste in my mouth since the last time I went to this party, two years ago (hard to go for 01.01.2008 since I was in, you know, Jerusalem) I met a boy and it was fun and he was smart and we went out for sushi a few days later and I wore a cute outfit for our date and in the end it was a complete disaster. But I reminded myself that lightning never strikes in the same place twice and I went and it was, of course, fabulous.

I rang the bell downstairs and got buzzed in, letting myself into the apartment and ducking right away into the bathroom to wash the BART off my hands. Plus, I like to ease into situations like this slowly. I wasn’t quite ready to walk into the roiling, teeming kitchen or even the lounge-y living room so I took off my coat, put some stuff away in my bag, you know.

It didn’t take long for the hostess to find me, since she is one of the most fabulous hostesses I have ever known and her Sixth Sense that someone was in the house and had not yet been greeted or given a plate of food or flute of champagne had been activated the moment someone buzzed me into the building. She showed me where to put my things away in the bedroom and led me to the kitchen to pour me a glass of this party’s annual tradition: The Eggnog.

I was not even out of the hall when someone came to find me and say hello. “We’ve been talking about you, we’ve been waiting for you to get here because we have a question for you,” he said. Oh, my. Right away I knew what was coming...Sarah’s Party Trick.

Looking back, I am not even sure how this got started. I think it was one chilly, foggy weekend morning when the two of us were going to the Post Office out on Geary to check his mail. I remember parking the car and crossing the street, where we found the door to the building’s lobby inadvertently blocked by a woman with a small girl. The woman was kneeling on the ground, tying the girl’s shoe, and the girl was clutching a huge (well, for her) pile of mail. We stood there and waited while they got organized, because there wasn’t much else to do since we couldn’t go inside. Soon the woman stood up and, seeing us for the first time, apologized repeatedly: “OH, I am so sorry, I didn’t even see you there! We should have done that somewhere else, how inconsiderate of me—I hope you weren’t waiting long, oh, I apologize…”

Walking through the lobby, he said something about the kid needing to learn to tie her own shoes or else get ones with Velcro. “Aw, come on,” I said. “She’s only three, you can’t expect her to deal with her own feet yet because she can barely even bend down to reach them without losing her balance and falling over.”

“How old was she?” he wanted to know.

“She was three,” I replied, becoming mostly uninterested in the conversation and wanting to see if anything cool had come in the mail.

“But, are you sure? How do you know?” he persisted.

“Think about it,” I said. “I spend six hours a day, five days a week, with kids. I went to college and graduate school with the sole professional purpose of learning about children and how they develop…and, sometimes, how they don’t. I can watch any kid anywhere for one minute and tell you how old they are. It’s my own useless life skill, I guess.”

Since then my expertise in learning styles, developmental timelines, and age identification have become my badge of honor. Just last week I fielded a phone call from someone I know who’d gone home to celebrate the life of his childhood friend’s mother at her funeral. What did his friend’s 3-year-old son understand about what was happening, he wanted to know? When do children begin to comprehend ‘death’?

And such was the case at the party I’d just walked into, also. Armed with a stiff glass of egg nog-y goodness, whipped cream on top, in my hand I was led back to the living room where another friend was enjoying one of the few premium spots on the couch. “Oh! Good, you’re here,” he exclaimed as the woman next to him nodded definitively. “They’ve been talking and talking about you and this party trick of yours,” she said—kind of awkward since I had never met her before and had no idea who she was, whereas she was apparently a total expert on me and my supposed superpowers.

“So,” my friend asked eagerly as we all sat down to a coffee table spread with everything from nut mix to shortbread, glasses of egg nog and champagne in hand. “At what age do kids begin to recognize sarcasm?”

Obviously this party was about to get a lot more interesting now that the child development guru had arrived…

My First Story in a Long Time

2009-01-01T23:50:00.000-08:00

I remember a conversation we had once, years and years ago, when we were getting to know each other. You know--that fresh, tender part of every relationship when the urge to ask questions, the need to learn more about the other person is stronger than the urge to breathe.

“What would you be, what would you do, if you lived a hundred years ago?” he asked. I knew the answer without even having to think. “I’d be a teacher, just like now,” I replied. “How about a thousand years ago?” he wanted to know. That took a little more thought. Were there teachers a thousand years ago, I wondered? Not like there are today, I was pretty sure, the kinds of teachers who pitch kickball and tie shoes and open Go-gurt, who teach kids to read and add and play fair even when things aren’t going the way they want. What would I be?

“I would be a storyteller,” I blurted out, surprised by my own answer. That was the closest thing I could think of, the position whose responsibilities would be most like what I thought of teachers doing today. “I would be the person in a community who sees everything and remembers it all, who asks people about their lives and what they’ve learned and then turns it all into stories that everyone can hear and, most of all, learn from.”

“Hm,” he said, a thoughtful look on his face. “A storyteller. That seems like something you’d be really good at doing.”

And in the decade since that conversation, that is just what I became: as a teacher, as a writer, as a traveler; in letters, in professional publications, and in a series of blogs. My identity as a storyteller had become an almost-central element of my self-identity. That is until, for a variety of reasons--some surprising but others not--I gradually stopped writing in recent months. From April to August I barely wrote in my journal, from August to October I wrapped up my sixteen-month blog chronicle of my sabbatical and its round-the-world adventures, and finally in November I first slowed and eventually ceased the spiritual practice I first undertook on my 30th birthday in 2004 and had continued without fail since then: writing and mailing a real pen-and-ink letter every single day.

As you might guess, with almost no writing going on I haven’t been telling nearly as many stories. I guess I’ve felt tired, and like I wasn’t sure who wanted to listen anymore. I know I stopped looking around and listening as much to see everything and remember it all. But coincidentally (or, not?) I began to hear from people around Thanksgiving, friends and family and colleagues who had noticed my silence. “Why did you stop writing?” they asked, and “Are you going to start again soon?” I wasn’t sure, I didn’t want to. But I did begin to look around again, I was reminded that the world is full of stories and there are messages everywhere.

Last week I was on vacation in Hawai’i, on the north shore of Maui, and for the first time in a long time I began to try and write again. First a return to my daily letter-writing practice in the form of vacation postcards, then a slow segue into journal entries scribed by the shore of the sea, next the late-night drafting of a poem or two, and finally a short story about a man from Seattle standing on the beach in the pouring rain grilling hot dogs and drinking beer from a can. Not only did I write but I began to once again, after months and months of silence, slowly share my writing and my stories with others.

The trip back to the mainland was fraught with surprise and adventure: everything from power outages and lost reservations, last-minute gate changes and mechanical problems with the plane causing hours of delay, detention at the agricultural inspection checkpoint and airport Starbucks outposts rendered impotent by the lack of electricity. Sitting in the Honolulu airport waiting, endlessly, to board the flight back to California, I sent a summary of my day’s escapades to a friend and in return got the following text message:

“My name is Sarah Kotleba and every time I walk out the door a story happens to me.”

Hmm, I thought, he’s right…or, is he? Do more stories happen to me than to other people, or do I just see stories everywhere in places and times that others are blind to them? My thousand-year-old storyteller ancestor thinks there might not be a difference between those two questions, and knows that even if there is it doesn’t really matter one way or the other anyway. I like to tell stories, and I am ready to start writing again.

So I present to you my New Year’s project: a different story every day. Some will be long, some will be short, some will have pictures and to see the images of others you’ll just have to use your mind’s eye. I think everyone who says that in this life it’s just same story, different day probably had a different job a thousand years ago than I did.

Enjoy ☺