Vietnam
My husband Thomas and I flew out of Los Angeles on 09/11, a short layover in Tokyo, then touched down in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) some twenty hours later.
I’m deeply grateful for two things that made this trip possible. The first was an invitation to speak at NZAMT in Whangārei in northern New Zealand. This honor meant an opportunity to visit Vietnam on the same trip, especially to tour all the regions north of Nha Trang for the first time. I hadn’t returned to Vietnam since 2005. The second is my employment at Amplify which means it’s the first time my vacation days are not tied to the school calendar and peak airfare prices.
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Organized Chaos. That’s how Thomas describes the traffic in HCMC. People pay no mind to the few traffic signals. Our driver claims 13 million people live in the city, and I believe him because half a million are currently on motorbikes at this one intersection. And people honk as a way to alert you of their approach, instead of it being a middle finger to your driving.
Grab, self labeled as “Southeast Asia’s Superapp,” is incredible. You just need to remember that your ride is likely to arrive in less than 30 seconds, so be ready.
Ăn ốc — snails eating — is my new wish for what Heaven might offer. One particular street stall [pictured] on Hang Buom Street in Hanoi is exceptional. In addition to an assortment of snails, she also has clams that she cooks with fresh pineapples, chillies, and lemongrass. Perfection.
If all Vietnam could offer were its beautiful landscapes, I seriously would not care to return. I’ll just watch a documentary. It’s all about the food in Vietnam that I can’t get enough of, especially due to where I live in the States. (I have to drive nearly 3 hours one-way to Little Saigon to get a sampling of Vietnamese cuisines.) Cơm bình dân means “commoner’s rice,” a meal consisting of rice and several side dishes, including soup. Turns out this is the type of meal I miss most. I invite our tour guide and driver [blue shirt, top left] to eat with us at every meal, but I understand if they just want to be alone. After all, our driver speaks no English, while Thomas speaks no Vietnamese.
We spent 12 days with these two gentlemen, and I pray our paths will cross again.
I envy easy access to the abundant and affordable fresh produce in Vietnam. It makes me sad and angry that the stuff that’s good for us costs so much more here in the States. Common herbs — mint, basil, rosemary, thyme — are packaged in little plastic pouches as if they were limited and exotic.
That was the basket! At the break of dawn, a small boat takes us to the fishing village of Duy Hai, Hoi An. The men fish, deferring to their wives the all-important job of haggling over prices with customers. I see it before anything else. I point at it and call out to Thomas, “That was the basket! The basket that my brother threw me in from the cliff! Looks just like it.” [top right]
On the last full day, we went to Vung Tau, a lovely seaside town where I was born.
Foreign Things
A young father tells me that his 7-year-old daughter is a very picky eater. And there is evidence. He offers her several possible choices on New Year’s Eve, including macaroni salad, and she hollers a resounding no! to all of them from her bedroom. Tugboat, our cat, is a picky eater too. It can be the exact flavor from the same company, but he won’t eat it if it’s in paté form, the prince wants it as shreds.
I’ve seen parents needing to trim away the outer edges of bread slices. (When I make a sandwich for this kid, he gets to remove the crusts himself.) They can’t pour spaghetti sauce over the pasta. Hide pulverized broccoli and peas inside meatballs.
It’s still a foreign thing when I hear parents asking their kids what they want to eat. My mother never asked us, nor did I to my three kids prior to preparing their meals. I don’t recall getting explicit instruction on family dinner decorum, but I knew not to ask my mother for a second bowl of rice if we had guests over for dinner. I knew not to take the last piece of food because I believed it belonged to my mother who would decide using her chopsticks to place it into one of our bowls. A luxe treat was getting to toss my rice into the frying pan to soak up the pan juices from a small steak that she had cooked solely for her husband. The bits of fried garlic in the steak drippings coated the white rice and made it taste like heaven — sufficient proof that I could tell my friends the next day that I indeed had steak for dinner.
Another foreign thing is a potluck. People really just bring over a dish to share. Essentially I’m invited to a meal where the probability is high that no two foods complement each other. Beef chili and tuna casserole — with watermelon salad. My goodness, where did you find watermelon in late December? I walk along the table half trying to be polite and half trying to decipher this mess of a smorgasbord. Ah yes, of course, deviled eggs. It’s not just the food not getting along and that most of them are not at the temperature they need to be, it’s the fact that I have to work before going to a party. Why would you invite people to a celebratory occasion and make them suffer at the same time?
Even when it’s a themed potluck and I have to examine the taco bar sign-up sheet posted in the teachers’ lounge, the whole thing is inefficient and wasteful. Potentially we’re asking 40 different staff members to get into their car, drive to the store, find a parking space, search the isles for the item that they’d signed for. Soft corn or flour? Hard shells? Ooh, I haven’t seen these shells that stand up! Then do mental math to know how much to buy, get in line to pay, drive home but leave the stuff in the car or else they’ll forget all about it. Finally, we all witness what happens after the gathering — there are leftovers. A lot of food leftovers that people had touched, poked, held up to the light. Did you want to take these cool stand-up shells home? I’m thinking what the fuck for, so I replied, “Yes, of course. Thank you.”
Happy New Year, everyone.
I made the most cumbersome thing to date, bánh bèo. (I’d have to drive over a hundred miles one-way to order these at a restaurant in Santa Ana.) They are steamed rice cakes topped with pulverized dried shrimp, mung bean, and scallion oil. It really was delicious, one of my favorite Vietnamese appetizers.
Becoming Vietnamese [Again]
I hurried to become an American like it was my destiny.
The first weeks and months in the United States unfolded in surreal fashion. People appeared to have jumped off the pages of the Sears catalog that once occupied my daydreams. They talked too fast, but I noticed they could also slow down a bit, enunciating each syllable as if that would help me. I liked car rides, so goddamn fast and smooth. There was a machine that washed your clothes. Shampoo for your hair, plus conditioner! Buttered toast sprinkled with sugar. Television was in color and it was on all hours of the day. I watched The Price is Right because I understood the numbers, and I pretended to understand Happy Days because I laughed when the live(?) audience laughed. Each house came with a room for the cars too.
To be more American meant being less Vietnamese — the only way to fill up this cup was to dump out stuff already in it.
I formally changed my name to Fawn when I got my citizenship. It never occurred to me and my then Vietnamese husband to give our three children Vietnamese names. His real name was changed to John, for God’s sake. His mother enrolled our kids in Sunday school to learn Vietnamese because she knew it’d be the only way they could pick up the language. I felt bad for our kids as I knew from childhood experience that the meanest teachers on the planet were Vietnamese Catholic nuns. The class lasted no more than three sessions.
I was generally annoyed with all things Vietnamese. Except the food. And except the beauty salons because they were cheap and knew how to cut Asian hair. However, I had to endure hours of Paris by Night playing on the TV screen — how could anyone listen to these insufferable singers and watch their gaudy display? Worst is having to listen to whiny cai luong, a type of “modern folk opera.”
My mother is apparently too old to assimilate to American society. I can’t tell you how many times her children had to tell her, Mom, this is not Vietnam. Stop doing that! My sister called me to say, “Guess what your mother did at Costco today? She poked a hole in the salmon package to smell it!” I also couldn’t understand why she’d continue to squat whenever she was in the kitchen when we had perfectly good countertops.
I nearly died at sea to be here, so I could not be bothered with my mother’s failure to get along.
Then it happened, and I allowed a hint of pride when I first heard someone say to me, “You don’t have an accent at all… thought you were born here.” The cup was full — I had become a full-grown American.
What also happened along the way was my three Vietnamese children were unable to communicate with my mother or with any other Vietnamese who didn’t speak English. This remains one of the saddest failures on my part. Other Vietnamese parents my age have children who are fluent in both and have beautiful Vietnamese names. Outside of a handful of Vietnamese dishes, my kids don’t know much about the Vietnamese culture because it had become foreign to me. I’ve tried to explain it away that I myself was only 11 years old when I immigrated. But that’s entirely dishonest because I’d actively distanced myself from where I came from. Would this have happened if my parents came over at the same time though? I don’t know. They didn’t get to leave Vietnam until 15 years later, so I grew up pretty much without my parents.
Undoubtedly I was stupid and arrogant. Too dumb to not realize that I can embrace both cultures. Too arrogant (and stupid) to believe that the Sears catalog lifestyle was better. I deprived my own children of their roots, all in one swift generation.
I like listening to Vietnamese music now; my favorite is still Khanh Ly, but I’m finding other wonderful artists too. What I once dreaded — the folk genre of cai luong — has suddenly become heartbreakingly beautiful because it’s all about story telling, stories about family and love, war and famine, honor and sacrifice. I now call my mother when it’s not even her birthday or Mother’s Day. She laughed when I told her that I learned the benefits of squatting from a CrossFit routine.
Sabrina, my youngest kid, and her husband plan to spend a month in Vietnam later this year. I hope she’ll get to learn and celebrate this most beautiful country where her parents were born. We are truly a rich nation when we celebrate and honor all the cultures.
Saigon, 1997
I was 11 when I left in 1976. So, I was 32 when I returned and visited my old elementary school. The name changed, so did all the street names.
Her Tattoos
I make a habit of asking people about their tattoos.
I’ll call her Tiffany. She’s predictably friendly and bright — the genetic markers needed to work as a server at a family diner in God’s Country, aka Tennessee. I ask if she could recommend a citrusy IPA, she tells me there is no IPA, citrusy or not, so I end up with a Yuengling. I forget how not-good this beer is.
Tiffany has many tattoos, but they are more scattered, distinct. Her skin a canvas more like an anthology than a novel. As our meal winds down, I ask her permission to ask about one of her tattoos, whichever one she cares to share.
The many small birds on her right leg are for her sister E who passed away too soon. The single large flower on her left leg is for another sister M who died 18 months later. Her mother has since pleaded often to her, “Don’t you die on me too! Don’t you dare!”
Tiffany then pulls down her open-collar shirt to reveal a long vertical scar, about six inches, “My heart doesn’t beat on its own.” She exposes her upper left chest to reveal the outline of a mango-shaped pacemaker. She squeezes the area the same way I last clutched my heart when I thought it hurt. Tiffany adds, “I had this thing put in right after I had a C-section to get my daughter out.”
She might be in her mid 40s. Certainly younger than I am. Everyone goes through tough things that we may know nothing about, yet some of them are the kindest and most positive. Tiffany juts out her chin, “I get up every morning and do it all over again!” She then repeats the exact same sentence — not sure if meant for us or for her.
That evening, out on a “sunset cruise” courtesy of a Vietnam veteran and his wife, I keep thinking about Tiffany. I’ve often said that if anything happened to one of my kids, my heart would stop. I wonder if that’s what happened to Tiffany.
Don’t you die on me too! Don’t you dare!
Gardening and Teaching
To change a community, you have to change the composition of the soil…We are the soil.
Ron Finley, The Gangsta Gardener
With nothing more than a hand trowel — and hours of stabbing and digging at the hard earth — my mother turned her front yard into a garden. She planted vegetables and flowers, herbs and climbers. Her neighbor, a tall burly man, liked to tell me, "Your mother, she's something else. If you gave me a shovel, I still couldn't do what she does with her own hands." She's gangsta alright. Mom negotiated just the right ratio of determination and desperation for mint and squash.
When a form asks what my hobbies are, I write down "cooking, gardening, and traveling." Cooking requires other people though, I need someone else to enjoy the food with me. By myself, dinner means a bowl of popcorn and a glass of wine. Traveling is a lie — I lack the necessary funds, and I lack even more patience for airports and long flights. But I can garden all day every day. Working the soil with my bare hands is quite luxurious, like kneading dough, only better because you get snow peas and Walla Walla onions. Gardening is so much more than a hobby though. It's the most generous act — for oneself, others, the planet.
Teaching is not quite a hobby, unless you get to train a dragon, but I believe it's also the most generous act — for oneself, others, the planet.
We're all teachers, by the way, because my definition of teaching simply means to share something. There's value placed on what we share and how we share. I see young children as the most wonderful teachers. They are more direct, more creative, more willing to give you another chance. What's wondrous about children is while they may not be able to do something, they can tell you how it should be done. A child will squarely critique your cooking of a cheese omelet or your attempt at tying shoelaces, "No, not like that. Like this!" When I'm confronted with such harsh criticism, children are the only species that can transform my thinking, Do it yourself then you little shit, into my saying, I'm so sorry, let me try again. You're soooo cute!
Reading to someone is teaching. While the content might belong to another author, but how you read — your intonation, inflection, breath — conveys the nuanced ways that content can be delivered. Playing a game with someone is teaching. It's a symbiotic dance of what next-moves to make and not to make.
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I got this far on the post, then the next day, watching the video of George Floyd's horrific suffering that resulted in his senseless death leaves me limp. This "Gardening and Teaching" post becomes stupid, my blog pointless. Zoom is unbearable, even with mic and camera off. A bowl of oatmeal in the morning is all I can manage to make and swallow until I repeat 24 hours later. I was afraid I couldn't hold it together with the students yesterday because I've been weeping steadily like a garden hose left on slow trickle.
If I may wrap up this post to say that to garden is to cultivate: to nurture and to tend. How we sow and cultivate a plant matters in the kind of fruits it bears. How we teach children matters, and it really should be the only thing on this planet that matters.Teach well. Teach like you're so very afraid of what will bear if you didn't.
What's in a name?
I'm one of four daughters, and we have such ordinary names: Loan, Nga, Phuong, Chau. By ordinary, I liken them to Bob, Alan, Laura, Ann. I asked my mother about this -- knowing that my father didn't have a say -- begging for an explanation of why in sweet Jesus's name that she'd neglected to give us prettier names. She said it would be vain to do so, and God would punish such vanity by giving you an ugly daughter. She cited several girls in our neighborhood who had pretty names but had faces that were "bored to death" to look at.
Phương vs. Phượng
Phuong means "direction." At least Kanye West and Kim Kardashian named their daughter North to specify a particular direction. And Phuong without the dot under the name is more of a boy's name. If I just got that extra dot, my name would mean phoenix, a pretty big deal bird. So, I grew up wishing I had a real girl's name. I wanted one of my girlfriends' names which were of exotic flowers and birds and of cardinal virtues.
Then I arrived in America, and it got a lot worse.
I had to tell people how to say my name. Most folks put emphasis on the "o" sound, and upon hearing me say it, they would overcorrect and emphasize the "u" sound. I was always flattered that they even bothered to try. (I also had my last name Nguyen to contend with: Newan, Negyan, Wen, Noogen, Noowen, Um-no.)
Phuong was usually misspelled as Phoung. I get it, most English words have -ou instead of -uo, like pound, ground, loud. And mousse -- not the chocolate kind that you eat, but the copious amounts that went into my perpetual perms.
Whenever I ordered food at a counter and was asked for a name so they could call me when my order was ready, I would give some random name, like Julie or Amy. That only worked if I remembered what random name I'd used. One time I forgot what name I'd used -- because it was a long wait, okay? -- so when no one came up to the counter to get the brown to-go bag when the server beckoned, Julie, your order is ready, I walked up and asked, "What exactly did... Julie... order?" This charade went on for longer than necessary.
Then, freshman year at Centennial High School in Gresham, Oregon, my classmate Tim -- tall, brilliant, handsome -- scribbled something next to my name on a piece of paper. I had to look at it closely. He added -us at the end of Phuong. Tim smiled as if he'd invented recess, "Fungus!" Phuong-us. Of course.
That marked the end of Phuong for me. I don't remember exactly how I came up with Fawn. I knew I wanted to replace the Ph- with F- because why use two letters when one suffices. I wanted to drop the "u" because I never wanted to be referred to as a yeast or mold again, and it was probably wise that the letters f and u shouldn't be together in a name.
I made the official name change when I became a U.S. citizen. I didn't have the campaign My Name, My Identity to dissuade me some thirty years ago. My mother is one of the few people who still call me Phuong. It is a pretty name now that I hear it.
Serenity Prayer (and Teaching)
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.
Some things teachers cannot change or have little say in:
The adults who work at our school
The students who show up for class
Their parents and home life
The curriculum (we may have input, but unless we get to make the final decision, we go with what comes in the box)
The physical space we call "classroom"
That impossible faucet
Things we can change
How we react and respond to the adults in our building.
I don't think I said two words about anything during my first 900 days as a teacher, and I was a science teacher at a middle school. I did what I was supposed to do: show up, teach, return the classroom key to the office before I go home, rinse, repeat. I was the quiet type anyway, so quiet that when I announced my decision to become a teacher, this person laughed, "How can you be a teacher? Ha!! You can't be a teacher, you're so quiet!" I was offended and said, "Shut up, bitch!" Actually, no, I didn't say anything, I just smiled, a quiet smile that betrayed my suspicion that she might be right.
I found my voice on Day 901, on staff dress-up day, maybe it was Halloween. I walked down the hallway in scrubs borrowed from my husband at the time. A male teacher who also donned scrubs said pleasantly, "You can be my nurse." Equally pleasant, I said, "I'm dressed as a doctor today."
Maybe that was a trivial story, but the likes of it happened a lot. I was a young Asian (am still Asian) female (still this too) -- and somehow this permitted certain people to say whatever to me.
How we treat our students.
I failed and failed at this. The same way I'd failed at times as a parent to my own three children. I yelled, sent the kid out, made sure I got the last word because I needed everyone to know I was in charge. The side effects of my behavior always included shame, regret, guilt. Mostly shame. To give myself some grace, most of these incidents involved my believing the child had lied or demeaned another person.
Then I got better. I learned to hit the pause button and quiet my indignation. I learned to listen -- like listen to their eyes and hand fidgets, their breaths and moments of silence. I learned to get the full story, at least find more truths than the half-truths I was getting. I learned to see the child in front of me as if I were his mother. Mostly, I listened to the better version of both of us.
I read what a student had written about another teacher, fresh from a recent incident. He didn't want to give me the paper, and I only asked for it because he was supposed to be writing an assignment on that paper. As I was reading, he said, "I didn't mean to... I was mad..." I finished reading and looked up, "Do you feel better now that you'd written this?" Tears brimmed his big brown eyes, he nodded, "Yes." I crumbled up the paper and tossed it into the garbage can, "I'm glad. No one else needs to see that note. I love you. [The teacher whom he'd written about] loves you too. We care about you." He straightened up, wiped his eyes, and thanked me, and off he went to lunch. Not until he was out the door that I thought, Ah, shit, he still owes me the assignment. But then I thought that no one else needed to know that he wrote on a different topic instead. Full credit.
Most days it was about giving my students the best math tasks and challenging them. But on all days, it was about kindness and making the most of our time together. I did always laugh with my students though. Sometimes we laughed so hard we were in tears.
Know that parents are sending us their best.
That's it. End of story. Just like the customer is always right, the parent is always right. They may have funny ways of showing it -- like being belligerent and crazy -- but they do care about their babies. Also, no matter what color skin the parent has, he/she cares about his/her child as much I do about mine.
Make the curriculum come alive.
There are a lot of good resources and people out there to help us with this. Teach in a way that no software or Khan can replace or replicate what we do. To make math come alive, we need to come alive. Students are the best bullshit detectors, so let's not even try. Make up for our shortcomings with all that we are passionate about, and hopefully topping that list is building a relationship with our kids. Even if math is not their favorite subject or dividing fractions is a big zit, they still enjoy coming to your class and think you're badass for coming to their games and wearing that stupid costume, for the third year in a row.
Attend to your physical space.
Bring in real plants, they make everything better and don't demand much more than some water and light. And they don't talk back. Hang shit up. Anything. Some teachers have perfected this, I'm the least of them. Maybe this is the only reason to get on Pinterest. Please don't post Classroom Rules though. I mean, do you post Home Rules in your home? Mr. Vaudrey says music is good for your class too.
That faucet.
Quit your job. Change building. Investigate this most important feature the next time you interview for a job.
And wisdom to know the difference.
This wisdom should help us talk more about thriving in teaching rather than mere surviving in teaching.
An Update
The young nurse asks how my day is going as she wraps the blood pressure cuff around my arm. I pretend to be relaxing on a yacht to yield low numbers, and the machine beeps 124/74. Dammit, I’ve never been above 120 — the yacht is sinking and death is near. She tells me that the procedure I’m about to undergo is quick. Math practice number six beckons and I ask, “What is quick?… Like five-seconds-kinda-quick or…?” She smiles, “About fifteen minutes.”
I want to choke her. I hate pain, any kind of pain, especially the needle-poking kind of pain. You know the 0-10 pain scale they post in the exam room? Getting a flu shot registers at least a 7 for me.
The doctor, who also looks very young, explains the procedure that she’ll be performing. Her voice is remarkably well-modulated and soothing, but not enough to drown out words like a long needle, grade two, some pain, numbing, cauterize, burn, death. Maybe I imagined that last one. I want to ask her where she’d obtained her training and how many times she’d performed this exact procedure. But I’m afraid that sounds like profiling which will trigger her dulcet voice to morph into a shriek, You are the worst patient! I should just let you bleed to death!
I want to hold someone’s hand. I need to hold someone’s hand. I’m so tempted to ask the nurse if I may hold hers, but she’s busy getting all sorts of scalpels, chisels, and cleavers for the doctor. I should have brought me a fake hand to hold. I settle on holding my own, my right holding my left. I want to pass out. Instead, a few minutes in, I can’t hold back the tears. I’m quietly sobbing. I ask for some tissue paper. The doctor’s soft voice, “Are you okay? We got you, here you go, you can have the whole box.”
She asks about my pain level. I tell her, honestly, that I’m okay, pain wise. “I’m just stressed.” My brother Vinh passed away two weeks ago. My cat Charlie has been missing since the evening before. Now, this.
I drive straight to work afterward. A few hours later, my son Gabriel texts me a picture of Charlie safe and sound. (Charlie is at the forefront, the other monster is Tugboat.)
My math coaching job is great. It’s new yet familiar, structured yet flexible. No one has to remind me how tough teaching is. But I did forget. I forgot about stuff that became second nature to me, like classroom management, building a rapport with students, speaking up for them, and planning a lesson.
I now have the privilege of observing different classrooms, modeling a number talk or task, designing a lesson and co-teaching, working with younger students, facilitating PD, creating slide decks and docs that might be helpful. There are three of us TOSAs in the district: English, ELD, and Math. I don’t get to see much of these two smart, strong, caring women outside of meetings, but they make me laugh and have my full admiration. There’s something special here with personnel. I liken it to the DNA that Oregon Ducks’ head coach Cristobal often speaks about, the DNA of each player that collectively makes up the team’s DNA. The culture is good here. My bosses are passionate and grounded, their roots are strong within the community because they are part of the community; their history is their present. It’s a cool place to be, and I feel very fortunate to be a part of an incredibly hard-working and caring network.
On the pain scale, work has not exceeded level 1, so I’m grateful. Wouldn’t it be great if somehow our pain level could be visible to others and our charge as humans is to lower each other’s numbers? And the more people’s numbers we can lower, the lower our own number gets. I think kindness is a potent pain reducer and can be self-administered too.
A New Position
I just accepted a math TOSA position (grades 5-8) with the Rio School District.I’d spent the last 30 years in the classroom – my school as my second home, my colleagues as my family, my work as my life and identity, but most of all, my students as my children, my babies, my heart.Then, I thought about not having to grade papers and not having to write sub plans when I’m deathly ill. Hell, yeah, I wanna be a TOSA.Other stuff that I will not miss about teaching:
Having that patent nightmare, always the week before school starts
Finding my lunch in the microwave at 3:00 PM because I’d forgotten about it
Ignoring and hanging up on any and all nature calls
Feeling guilty on the weekend for not preparing for Monday’s lesson, and feeling guilty on all weeknights when I haven't worked on the next day's lesson
Hearing students coming back from an absence and asking, “Did you do anything? Did I miss anything?”
Hearing students ask the day before the grading period ends, even though it’s a widely-known forbidden question, “Is there any extra credit?”
Pretending to laugh at their stale jokes
Lying to them that I’d missed them during winter break
Dreading to open that one parent’s email
Having to choose between sleep or exercise because God gave teachers fewer hours
I’m excited to embark on this ambitious assignment. I hope to support the teachers by meeting them where they are, and if they’re always at happy hour, I’m willing to work with that. I’m in this to listen to their concerns and ideas and will try my best to refrain from uttering nobody cares. It’s imperative that we build our relationships on trust and respect, and plus one on the respect if they cheer for my #GoDucks too. I look forward to a co-teaching model that honors the students’ contributions and their rights to the best versions of us, if not the best education. I will remind us about self-care.
Many thanks already to Jeff Linder and Andrew Stadel for answering more questions about math coaching than I knew to ask.Let’s have a fantastic year of learning and supporting each other, all while cheering on one team – STUDENTS.
2019 Is an Odd Number
The arrival of 2019 means I have to scroll down even farther to find my age year when I fill out an online form. Ugh... 1985... 1975... 1970... 1967... Here it is... 1965!
I just came back from a short trip -- via long-ass flights -- to Melbourne for my niece's wedding. I did a lot of walking and eating (not unlike what I do elsewhere), but the highlight was seeing my all-time favorite, koalas.
Around this time, two years ago, I wrote These Twenty Things -- the nerve I had to suggest we should do this and that. But, I do wish I had more time to write because recording in this space helps me reflect on what I enjoy most about teaching, which is mainly about what my students take away from a lesson, and perhaps more importantly, what they put into it.
There are a variety of things in education that I still don't have a good grasp on, like differentiation and Problem-Based Learning (PBL). I get what they are, I just don't think they play out in the classroom [of 35 students] nearly as efficiently and effectively as intended. They are hard to do, most teachers have not had the training, or the training they get is from people who have never consistently implemented them.
But here are a few things I trust I have a good handle on.
Begin with a challenging task so everyone has access to it. Fully invite students to work on the problem, individually at first, then in small groups, then with the whole class. When sufficient time has been devoted to this (this can mean 30 minutes or two days, depending on the task and your students), then go do your regular routine, but invite students who finish the regular stuff to continue with the challenging task. I normally see this gets flipped around a lot, that teachers ask students to do the challenging task after they finish their regular work. The problem with this is 1) at least half of the students don't get to it, and 2) those who get to it don't care about it simply because the teacher didn't care enough about it to fully introduce it. It's not lip service when I introduce each PS with, This is definitely my favorite one!
Wait time and asking for a classmate's help. Y'all know about the wait time. I usually wait, then I say to the student, "Would you like to call on a classmate to help you?" If the called-on student is not able to help, then I ask the same of this student. This should keep more students paying attention, and it's one more way for me to stay out of it.
Deal with "bad" behaviors in a different (unexpected?) way. I have two recent examples. I was on detention duty, and instead of copying down a selected passage we gave, the student had written a very angry note to another teacher. He had hoped to hide it from me. When I finally got him to produce the note and read it, he started to tear up. I said, "Do you feel better now that you'd written all this down?" He said he was mad and didn't mean anything by it. I said, "You wrote it, and I read it, and now it'll go into this garbage can. Done. Sometimes it helps to get it on paper." Another one was when a student brought a pencil to me and said, "It has bad writing on it." Along its skinny spine was the inscription: fuck you bitch. I thought of one particular child who may have written it. The next day, at the start of each class, I projected the pencil under my doc camera. I said, "The spelling is all correct, that's always good, but punctuation needs work. Anyway, if this is your writing, I hope it was a good stress release. Next time though, please write it on a piece of paper instead, this was our classroom pencil, and now I have to throw it out. Waste not!"
Go ahead and give your students lots of advice because you can't do this with adults without risking getting punched in the face. My usuals:
That soda is not good for you. Eat a doughnut instead. (Hey, the sugar ratio of soda to a doughnut is 3.5 to 1.)
If you want to cheat off of your friend's paper, I offer a free how-to clinic at lunch. I mean you do a horrible job at this, I can TELL for chrissake.
It's not all about you. Learn that early and learn that fast. Your parents may love you unconditionally, but have you ever tried to wake them up early for no good reason?
Always brush your tongue too.
Don't trust places that claim "We're like family," and yet they don't let you eat for free.
Your real friends are not the ones who attend your party. They are the ones who show up when no one else does.
Oh, and there's a book that you or your school should get. It's Necessary Conditions by Geoff Krall. I know it says "secondary math," but that's some marketing talk, it's really for any teacher, you!
And finally, I'm incredibly honored and grateful to be at the following meetings this year:
February 20: Washington ESD, Vancouver, WA, full-day workshop
April 5: NCTM Annual, San Diego, IGNITE
April 25: Ross Taylor Symposium, Duluth, MN, full-day workshop
April 26: MCTM Spring Conference, Duluth, MN, keynote + session
May 3: Wisconsin Math Conference, keynote
June 19: HIVE, Open Up, Atlanta, talk + panel
July 11: CAMT, San Antonio, keynote + sessions
August 7: Ohio Annual Meeting, keynote + session
August 15: NYS Master Teacher Program, full-day workshop
May 8, [2020]: OAME, Ontario, featured speaker
I sincerely hope I get to connect with you at one of these places!
Mrs. Quiggle
I didn’t know they made teachers so old, but Mrs. Quiggle was that old when she was my 8th grade Home Economics teacher. She perched on a high stool in the corner of the classroom, leaning over a wooden podium that she used as her desk. Home Ec was my favorite class, along with math — two classes that didn’t require a whole lot of talking in front of your peers, you just gotta follow the instructions. There was one instruction that I tried my best not to follow, and that was pressing the seam open after sewing a set of stitches. Oh good Lord, ain’t nobody got time for this laborious step, and I hated ironing more than sin.
Mrs. Quiggle could always tell though when I skipped the ironing nonsense, “Now, here, young lady, you didn’t press the seams open again! See how it’s puckered here and not lying flat as it should here? I’m going to need you to remove these stitches and start over again.” All I wanted to say in reply was, And I’m going to need you to retire, Mrs. Quiggle, before your body gets cold.
I sewed pretty sundresses with gathered ruffles and biased trimmed shorts. I made baked Alaska and chocolate fondue. I appreciated Mrs. Quiggle’s teaching and all, but I wished she’d stop bothering me about the pressing-of-the-seams. Why couldn’t she be like other normal old people who took breaks often and drank tea and ate Honey Maid graham crackers?
It was now springtime. I went to check the mail and found a letter addressed to my parents from Mrs. Quiggle. Well, hell, Mrs. Quiggle, you know my parents are still back in Vietnam, and it’d be a hundred years before they could come over! By the way, they don’t know English anyway. What is the point of writing this, Mrs. Quiggle, what could you possibly want to tell them — how I failed to press the seams between stitchings?!
I opened the letter, read the full-page of Mrs. Quiggle’s perfectly slanted handwriting to my parents, beginning with, Dear Parents of Phuong Nguyen.
I sobbed. I read it again and sobbed. Mrs. Quiggle wanted my parents to know that in all her years of teaching, I had surpassed the number of points earned by any student by a wide margin. I got well over 200 points, beating the last highest score of 70 something. (I should have this letter saved in a box somewhere — the same box where I keep my three children’s ultrasound images.)
She never had to remind me to press the seam again. I continued to sew through high school, through college, through mommyhood. The secret to a beautifully sewn article is in the pressing of the seams. This sets the stitches and removes tiny wrinkles. It’s like origami where each fold needs to be creased precisely and sharply before the next fold. It’s like doing the right thing the first time when we already knew what the right thing was. It’s like telling the truth the first time when we already knew what the truth was.
Upcoming Grassroots Workshop in December
I’m super excited to announce my upcoming Grassroots Workshops event being held on Friday, December 8 and Saturday, December 9. It’s the first time that I get to spend TWO FULL DAYS sharing math teaching, math learning, and math awesomeness with teachers.
So, if you teach mathematics (grades 6-12), please-please consider signing up! Registration does not open until October 16, but I know requests for funds can take time, and you’d want to ask before your school’s budget goes to curriculum X and supplies Y that may end up collecting dust in storage land!
Even if you live in Brussels or Shanghai, you should still try to make it because Disneyland is less than 3 miles away from the hotel. Yup! So, bring your whole family and make a vacation out of it. :)
I’m still in the classroom full-time, and this year I’m teaching Math 7, Math 8, and Coding. I feel your pain. Yes, we work too hard for too many long hours. Yes, we grade papers while we scoop dinner onto our face. We have the most neglected bladders of all humankind. We lie sleepless at night because we want to find a better way to explain concept A to Johnny and build math confidence in Mary. And I share your joy. If teaching mathematics is not a joyful profession for you, then maybe we can talk about that. We need to talk about that. Our failure is not here to shame us, it’s there to remind us to seek smarter and kinder ways to operate.
I’m truly hoping that you’ll come away from the two days inspired and motivated to make your classroom the best that it can be for all the math learners in your care.
If you sign up using this link — http://www.grassrootsworkshops.com/flyer — then we’ll email you a pre-sale link to register before the general public and a discount code.
This is an incredible opportunity for me, and I’d be honored to share the learning with you.
St. Cloud, Minnesota
I don’t remember the landing. It’s been a very long flight. Nor do I remember walking through the airport. We have no luggage anyway, like none.
My first memory of America is sitting in the back seat of TuAnh’s uncle’s car — an Oldsmobile wagon with wood panel trim. I’m almost eleven and a half years old, and this is the second time I’m in an automobile, a car car, which is much smoother than a bus or a van, and you’re not squished between strangers. The Oldsmobile is taking us straight home, not having to make a million stops along the way like my last bus ride from Saigon to Mũi Né.
Home is in St. Cloud. I’m not yet aware of how far it is from Minneapolis. It’s dark outside, around midnight dark, but my eyes are fixed on the passing landscape. I’m tired but I want the ride to last; I feel like I belong to a rich family that can afford a car.
TuAnh is my oldest brother’s wife. She’s the prettiest lady. The uncle's family will share their home with us, and us being six people. The uncle and aunt have six kids of their own for a total of 14. (This is the first time I pause to realize this number. When you live in Vietnam, and there’s still floor space in the house to sleep on, then another kid will be born. My mother comes over to America and thinks it’s an utter shame to use garage space for cars. My goodness, a family of eight can live comfortably in this spacious 2-car garage.)
The aunt has chicken phở already made. It’s the first time I have the chicken version. She says the mint is from her garden. You’re supposed to eat phở with basil, but nobody cares, there’s mint in St. Cloud!
I will sit and watch the news with the uncle. I have no idea what they are saying, but I just like seeing white people's faces and listening to how fast they talk. The best part is there’s always something on TV, there’s no curfew. I have two favorite shows, The Price is Right and Happy Days. You don’t have to understand very much English to watch The Price because prices are numerical, and English numbers look the same as Vietnamese numbers, except Americans are weird to write $50 instead of 50$. They claim to read from left to right too. I like Happy Days because it’s a show with cute boys, Chachi and Fonzie. (My family calls me Fawnzie. My name morphed from Phương to Fawn to Fawnzie. More recently, my son Gabriel probably sensed that I was stressed in our conversation and said, “Mom, I need you to be Fawnzie right now.” And I knew what he meant.)
English class is the hardest. Each word has way too many letters. While sitting in the school office waiting for the uncle to enroll me, I learn the spelling of the word(s) you say when you want to thank someone: THANK YOU. I don’t get it. I don’t hear the YOU part at all when people say it; until then, I thought it was one word, you know, THENGKEW. I believe Vietnamese is a monosyllabic language. Vietnam is actually Việt Nam. Saigon is actually Sài Gòn. While Nguyen might be the longest Vietnamese word (I don’t know, is it?), it’s just one syllable, so it’s Nguyễn, not Noo-yen. I spend hours breaking up each word into parts, I can only remember the word BECAUSE by seeing it as BE-CAU-SE to write it down. I am a mute in all my classes. I only talk when I’m with my ESL teacher, Mrs. Schnettler. Then eventually — a long long time really — I wake up one morning and realize my thoughts are in English. Someone has flipped the switch in my brain. Except it’s one direction, I can’t flip it back.
I spend the first eleven years of my life seeing only brown eyes, so it’s pretty cool to see other colors, shades of green and blue. Weirder is when kids from the same parents have a mix of colors. Weirdest is when a blue-eyed person sees the same red color on an apple as a brown-eyed person. Speaking of eyes, or just eye, Graham Smith has only one good brown eye, and he’s the one who yells at me to go back to Vietnam. The uncle’s daughter translates his words for me. I want to punch him in the face, knocking his eyeball out of his head, but then he’d be blind.
My sister Kimzie is three years older, so we’re now 12 and 15. (Her name went from Nga to Kim to Kimzie, which is dumb, at least Phương and Fawn start with the same sound, she says she wants to go from three letters to three letters and no more.) We know two lines from a Peter McCann’s song, “Do You Wanna Make Love,” and we belt them out at all hours of the day. Just two lines over and over again: Do you want to make love… Or do you just want to fool around… Then one day, my brother’s friend asks him if we girls knew what the words “make love” meant. We shake our heads and continue singing.
The six of us have now moved out to our own house. It’s a big white house with a big yard, there’s a porch too. In the winter, the snow would pile up as high as the single detached garage in the backyard. I make Jell-O by just leaving it outside for 30 minutes. I remember the few days in the dead of winter when we run out of oil to heat the house. I learn to ride my bike around the block, in the summer that is. A friend was surprised to learn that I didn’t know how to ride a bike until I was 13. I told her it was kinda tough to learn to ride when I didn’t own a bike growing up. Obviously, I didn’t know how to swim either. What sad kid doesn't know how to swim in the “land of 10,000 lakes.”
I get to visit St. Cloud this August; it’ll be my first time back since I left in 1979. I’ll be facilitating a full-day workshop, and St. Cloud will just be 70 miles away. I’m flushed with nostalgia and gratitude — going back to my first home in America.
Another Round
Exhausted and hungry, I walk to the restaurant a hundred feet from the hotel's lobby. The hostess greets me and asks how my day has been. I tell her it's been a long day, that I just came in from LA on a 5-hour-plus flight. She asks about my reason for being in Philadelphia. I tell her I'm here for a math conference, and she volunteers, "Oh... I'm not a big math person.”
I follow her to my table and want to say:
What the fuck does that even mean that you're not a big math person??? Are you a small or minuscule math person then?!? I don't care if you say that you're not big on eating raw octopus or fried worms, but math??!!
Her nonchalant proclamation is the last thing I want to hear this evening. She doesn't know that her words form the straw that breaks my mathematical patience's back. I am hungry, how dare she! She doesn't know that I hear the likes of that statement each and every time people learn I'm a math teacher.
I think about my keynote at 8 AM tomorrow.
So many people don’t like math — they are just not big math people.
My annoyance at her words quickly turns into sadness and guilt. I know I have students who may utter the same words leaving my class. While I believe I have made great strides in improving math learning and math teaching in my classroom, I haven't done enough, there's still a lot of work to do.
I can do better and I will, I get another round of teaching mathematics starting on August 22.
Have a restful summer, everyone.
House Cleaning and Lesson Planning
I posted this on Facebook:
There is something else that I do way better than teaching mathematics, even though teaching has been a 25-year plus career. That something is house cleaning.
Then, a friend asked for advice on this, adding, "Will desperately be awaiting your response." I responded with:
Thought no one would ever ask. :) Here comes the list, the order is important.
Throw everything out.
When done with step 1, repeat step 1 again bc we both know you really didn't throw everything out.
With remaining [ideally just 3] items, ask, "Is it really really pretty?" If so, it should be displayed in your home in a pretty spot. Ask, "Is it useful, like a wine-bottle-opener type of necessity?" If so, keep it in a drawer.
Unless it's a piece of furniture, a houseplant, or a 4-legged friend, forbid it from touching your floor.
Counter space is only for items that do not fit inside a drawer/cupboard and are used almost daily -- e.g., toaster, Nutribullet, knife block.
Swiffer products should be regarded as essentials like toothpaste and TP.
The person who did not put the TV remote control away in a designated spot shall be banished from the home (or get punched in the face).
Make your bed every morning.
Never go to bed unless the kitchen is clean. (If you dread this, then don't cook.)
If you find the above 9 steps difficult to implement, then try step 1 again.
About throwing things out
Friends and family have seen me in action and tossed out this comment, "You like to clean, don't you." I always want to respond with, "Hell, no. I'd like to be on the beach drinking a margarita right about now." I have to clean because I want to live in a clean place. Pretty sure it's not an OCD thing, my classroom and my home have harbored enough episodes of disarray and germful cultivation.It turns out that the above ten steps mirror -- in a stretchy kinda way -- how I do lesson planning. Something very cathartic about removing stuff.
If you're at all familiar with my teaching practice, it's what I try to do all the time, like here, here, here, and for the last two months now, I've been removing the visual pattern steps and leave kids with just one step to build on.
We remove the question when we do notice-and-wonder. We remove the correct answer when we do Which One Doesn't Belong, we remove anxiety when we do Estimation 180. We invite great discussions when we do #smudgedmath.
About making things pretty
I have a hard time letting students use class time to make things pretty.
Conjecture: The "prettier" your students' individual works are (posters and such), the more class time you've wasted. #makeitprettyathome
— Fawn Nguyen (@fawnpnguyen) November 22, 2016
What's beautiful to me is a paper full of mathematical thinking -- a big mess of it -- with scratch-outs and start-overs and AHAs! And I get what pretty is, like anything and everything created in Desmos is pretty. (My students use GeoGebra and Geometer's Sketchpad too.)
About furniture and space
Steps 4 and 5 make me think of the furniture in my classroom. I'm seriously connecting with some folks to get my walls covered with whiteboards. (Earlier this month, I finally got to hear Peter Liljedahl talk about Building Thinking Classrooms at #OAME2018. Alex Overwijk walks the talk.) I've already asked my superintendent/principal if I may get tables next year instead of the same clunky student desks that I've had for the last 15 years.
About essential items
Essentials, like equity and access. I've become weary of the true deployment of these two words. There are broad guidelines, but looking at my own practice and those around me, I'd be lying if I thought for a moment that we have access and equity all squared away and project nothing-to-see-here-move-along. I'm convinced that every teacher move speaks to how much we care about equity and access. So, the more intentional we can be in our lesson planning -- from the questions that we ask, to the groups that we form, to the wait time that we give, to our body language -- the more we can make strides in this endeavor.
About putting things back
This one is about respect. Literally, it's about putting things back where they belong. It reminds me to always give credit to the source, to share the lesson, to pay it forward. The teacher species Herohomo supersapien has been known to beg, borrow, and steal, and now, put it back.
About fresh starts
And do-overs. We all have bad-no-good-horrible-vomit lessons. We tell our students to pick themselves up and try again, and again. We need to practice forgiving our bad lessons with grace and gratitude. The #MTBoS community gets this. Jonathan's tweet was part of this thread.
remember that for every mind blowing idea, there 10 crap ones that aren’t necessarily said out loud
— Jonathan (@rawrdimus) May 24, 2018
Like house cleaning, lesson planning can also be an asshole, especially on the weekends. On that note, I'm gonna hit the beach in an hour, the laundry and the lesson planning will just have to wait.
Broken Straps
Robert Kaplinsky drops me off at the front of the district building. I make my way to the room where I'd be presenting. I set up. I go out to the hallway, walk around, long enough to get lost. I'm looking for something. I don't know where my backpack is. Where did I leave my phone? I don't have my wallet either. Maybe I left everything in Robert's car. I'd call him if I had my phone.
I take a few more steps and look down because I feel something is coming off. I'm wearing flip-flops. It's broken. No, both straps are broken.
I can't walk in these. I stare down at the broken straps. No, the straps didn't just get pulled through their intended holes, they are torn! I note the crude and cruel fate that my shoeless feet are in right now. More importantly, why am I wearing flip-flops to a presentation?
Only three or four people are walking about in the building. No one sees me. No one notices me standing idly in the middle of the hallway with non-functional sandals. I yell out to the woman. She comes over. I point to my feet, hoping she'd notice what had happened to the straps without my having to explain. My voice is full of deep self-pity, "I'm trying to get back to my room. Where I'll be presenting today. I don't know the room number, but it exists, I was there earlier. I don't have my stuff. Like nothing. I have no shoes."
I jolt awake.
As if the nightmares before the start of school are not enough. I have #PDNightmares now. I'm about to board my flight, excited to facilitate another full-day PD. I'm wearing my favorite Italian leather boots, thanks.
Maybe Less Tech in Math and School?
I’m sipping hot sake while waiting for my food. I scan the restaurant, about half full already for an early Friday evening. Two kids are on their smartphones at the table with their parents. They don’t even look up as the waiter arrives to take their orders; I guess the parents already know what to order for them. At the next table, I see a young child sitting in his high chair and watching a video on a propped up smartphone. Nearly every kid in the restaurant is doing something on his/her phone. Never mind the adults.
This scene is all too familiar, too common — so common that it would be “odd” if we didn’t see this. And we’ve been seeing it for some time now.
I embrace technology like it’s the softest fluffiest stuffed animal. I need my laptop and cell phone — every goddamn thing is on them. (I still need a real book to read from, however, like this one that just came in the mail because the Internet said I should read it.)
But the restaurant scene is particularly jarring to me because I’ve always valued meal times as sacred, a time to say grace and connect, a time for storytelling, a time for pause and reflection. Dinner time is a time to be social. Ironically, our children are silent at the dinner table because they are on social media with 600 of their best friends. I’ve seen kids with earbuds on too while dining out with the family.
If children are plugged in at dinner time, then I’m going to assume that they are plugged in most of the time at home. This makes me wonder if schools should embrace less technology. I witness that we have over-digitalized everything, not because there was a critical consumer-ish need for it, but because we felt the weird need to do so. Recently, I tweeted this and meant every character.
At BTSA mentor training, 1 of the prompts was "How do u incorporate tech into a lesson?" My knee-jerk response, "You don't." It's back to that tech for tech’s sake that irks me. It's like asking, "How do u add aspirin into your diet?" #ButIDoNotHaveAHeadache @ddmeyer
— Fawn Nguyen (@fawnpnguyen) March 10, 2018
We have an incredible privilege to reach our students in the space and time that we have them. I want them talking and interacting more than anything! Learning mathematics is a social endeavor. Here’s my perennial classroom routine, “Turn and talk with your neighbor.” I want to bring back the arts of speaking and listening, reading and writing, debating and presenting. Last week, Jennifer Wilson (you’re missing out if you haven’t heard Jennifer speak in person) wrote about how time is needed to develop MP3 in our students, “It takes time to determine the conditions for truth.”
I’m happy and grateful that technology is here to stay. But I hope we seek opportunities to connect more humanly.
Send Doughnuts
I had a wonderful time working with a roomful of teachers over two days at my Grassroots Workshops last week. During a morning break, I talked with a teacher who was concerned about not being able to reach all her kids, that there was a handful of students who were failing the course, and that she’d tried everything. I said, “But you are reaching the other 25 or 30 kids in your class.” She said, “Please tell my principal that.”
So,
Dear Principal,
Your teachers are working really really hard at this thing called teaching. The role of a teacher is not unlike that of a parent. And if you’re not a parent, then think of being a neurosurgeon or an astrophysicist, being a parent is way harder than that.
It’s practically guaranteed that your teachers have not reached all their students today. But, there is tomorrow and the day after that. Please remember that Teacher A in room 23 may not have reached all her students in the academic sense, but she smiled and said hello to Melissa, gave Joey a granola bar and Jake a sharpened pencil, laughed at Amanda’s joke.
Your teachers need your implicit trust and continued support to thrive. Show them you have their back and give them feedback frequently, but wrap each feedback in kindness, empathy, and humor. This makes all the difference in whether or not they want to show up for work tomorrow.
Some years ago, I had a principal who asked me the same question more than once, like he forgot or didn’t hear my answer the first time. He asked, “Fawn, how do you motivate kids?” I replied, “I don’t know. If I knew the answer, I’d write a book and make millions and quit teaching.” Now that I think about this, clearly he thought I’d given him the wrong answer, therefore he had to ask me again in hoping that I’d learned something over the course of two weeks.
Before I became a parent, I judged all parents. You’re a horrible parent because your child is a brat and disrespectful. It’s your fault that your spoiled kid is ungrateful and entitled. What a loser of a parent you are that your kid fails half of her classes and makes all sorts of excuses while doing so. You must be a bigger asshole than the little asshole you’re raising.
Then, I gave birth to three kids. At one time or another, honestly, more like an extended period of where’s-the-goddamn-light-at-the-end-of-this-tunnel, my own flesh and blood were disrespectful, ungrateful, entitled, jerks, assholes, whiny, rude, arrogant, mean, neurotic.
But, if you had said any of these things about my kids to my face, I’d probably stab you with a fork. I’m equally defensive as I’m protective. Until you walk in my shoes, you have no right to judge me. I’ve been a teacher longer than I’ve been a parent. One role blended into the other.
When an administrator makes a statement or asks a question to imply that his teachers are not working hard enough, it unravels the trust like pulling on a loose thread of yarn. Sure, there’s ineffective hard work, but it’s hard work nonetheless. Teachers want pretty much anything and everything to help us do a better job, but this advice or suggestion cannot come at a cost of making us feel any smaller and more unappreciated.
So,
Dear Principal,
Please stop being evaluative, start being helpful and send doughnuts.
Between 2 Numbers
I created a new site, it’s called Between 2 Numbers.
From the About/Contact page:
The inspiration for this site came from John Allen Paulos’ book Innumeracy. I read the book back in 2008, but reading it again this past summer reignited the inspiration and turned it into fruition. In my lesson plan spreadsheet, I started a column of “tidbits” to share with my students; it’s filled with mathematical fun facts, latest news, and stuff you see on here. I teach middle school mathematics, and ratios and proportional reasoning make up large portions of the curriculum, so I’m always comparing stuff, like tossing my flipflop onto this big Danish clog while visiting Solvang, CA, and wondering how big or tall the person wearing such clogs would have to be.
My goal is to have at least 40 entries to match the number of school weeks.
I would love to hear how you would use the site with your students and any other feedback.
And I hope your school year is off to a great start. I get to teach 7th and 8th-grade math this year. We’re on a block schedule for the second year now, and I’m getting used to it. Be well and teach well, my friends!
Community Circle
We have Core time with our homeroom students — mine are 8th graders — for 3o minutes at the end of each day. Core is our SSR time, but ELD students are in ELD during this time.
Once a month, however, we use this Core time to do a Community Circle (CC). We’re in our first year of implementation, and because my kids have shown genuine engagement in CC time, we hold it almost every Friday.
I normally pick one or two questions/topics for us to go around and share our answers/thoughts. Questions such as, “If you could be any animal, what would it be, and why?” and “What is your favorite food?” are light-hearted and fun.
But, if the topic gets any deeper than that, then I’m pretty much a wreck.
I don’t know what the hell is wrong with me.
I cried when talking with my students about my father, about my son, Gabriel, about the time when I ran away from home.
I get all choked up at workshops when I speak about a specific student.
Just last week, our school invited Kaiser Permanente to put on a play called, Someone Like Me, for our junior high students. It’s about adolescent bullying awareness, and one of the characters had written in her diary that she wanted to kill herself.
The thought of one of my students ever contemplating suicide makes my heart ache, my chest heavy, my head throbs. After the assembly, we were instructed to hold a CC with our students back in our classroom, but I was too emotional to even talk. Luckily, my colleague was there, and I’d asked her to facilitate the discussion.
I don’t want to know what my kids tell their parents when they get home. I wouldn’t be surprised if it went like this, “Jesus, Dad, Ms. Win cried again in our community circle today. And we were just talking about Jell-O.”
Oh, my God, that reminds me. One time — in the evening of our school’s Continuation Ceremony some years ago — a student pulled her father toward me to introduce us, “Dad, this is Ms. Win, she cried just the other day because she was afraid we girls would get pregnant.”
Seriously, I’d signed up to teach math. What is all this crying bullshit? I want to be a badass teacher, and badass teachers don’t cry, for Pete’s sake!
But, there’s still hope for me because one of my student’s moms tweeted this:
