a fit of jealousy

Yesterday, my sister called me with some amazing news.  After more than a year of searching and what seems like 50 interviews, she has been offered a job in her field!

I’m losing a babysitter on Thursdays, but I’m happy for her.

At least I was until she told me how much she would earn in her salary.

After she told me, I made some lame excuse and got off the phone.  I did some quick math. Her salary is way higherthan mine.  It made me feel horrible, and I burst into tears, angry tears.  I was jealous.

And then I was ashamed.

I was, however, still very upset, so I called my dad.  He’s often the person I call, especially about money-related problems.  He always offers sound advice.

I tearfully confessed that I was jealous of Rachel.  I said, “I know that I shouldn’t be, but I AM!”

He got quiet–the kind of quiet when you know something wise is going to follow.

I’m going to paraphrase what he told me, after he said that I deserved a smack in the head:

I am incredibly lucky and blessed.  I may not make as much money as my little sister, but I have an adorable husband and two amazing children.  I also get to spend time with them thanks to my flexible work schedule and summers off.  My dad told me that the summers he spent with me and my sisters were memories that he would never exchange for any sum of money.  That is something I can look forward to.  I have already treasured two summers with Juniper, and this coming summer with Oren will be even more amazing.

I’m lucky that I don’t have t to choose between work and parenting, which would ultimately result in a lot of guilt.  I can work during the school year and look forward to the summer with my children.

Now, I’m definitely still ashamed that I had such a jealous fit.  I’m over it (mostly).  I wish that I had more disposable income, but I would have to sacrifice time with my family to get it, and I’m not willing to give up time with my children.

But now that things have been put into perspective, I can feel genuinely ecstatic for my sister.  And I do.  I am so proud of her for sticking it out and not giving up when it would have been so easy to do so.

And I’ve been humbled.  I am not immune to jealousy, and I hope that it never takes hold of me again.  That was a really stressful 20 minutes.  I guess I can be thankful that it was only 20 minutes!

Thanks, Dad.

And CONGRATULATIONS, RACHEL!

I don’t know much about politics, but I do know this.

Dear friends,

I’m not going to pretend to know a lot about politics.  I don’t.  A large part of that reason is that I generally try to avoid confrontation, and a good many confrontations start because of politics.

I’m also not going to pretend to know a lot about budgeting.  I can barely manage my own budget (although I am getting much better at it!), so I’m not going to pretend that managing the budget of an entity as large as a state is an easy task.  It’s not, and I don’t envy the people who have to do it.

I fully acknowledge that balancing a state budget when there is not enough money for everything is going to create anger, frustration, and enemies.

 

Since so far you know that I don’t know a lot, here is what I do know:

 

I am a teacher at an alternative school in which the teachers do not truly belong to a union.  Our pension plans are managed by some sort of union, but I have to admit that I know less about that than I really should.  As a small group of teachers, though, we do not collectively bargain for salaries and health care benefits.

I know that if I worked at a Chicago public school instead of an alternative school, I would be paid a lot more (we’re talking almost $10,000 more).  I would also belong to a union, and my health care would be better than I have now.  The union would take care of my concerns relating to my pension plan and health care, and I would be grateful for that.

I work where I work for a variety of reasons, which I will not discuss right now.  What I do want to discuss is the possibility of a state making sweeping cuts that affect people like me.  Thankfully Illinois has not had to deal with this particular issue (yet).

In Wisconsin, there are many more Republicans in the state legislature than Democrats.  The governor, Scott Walker, wants to balance his state’s budget, and in order to do that, cuts must be made.  Several of the proposed cuts will directly affect not only teachers but all state workers.  Pensions will be cut, health care will be cut, and the right to collectively bargain will be cut.

My very basic understanding of the situation is this: if the proposed cuts are passed, state workers will still have to work.  Teachers will still have to teach.  Social workers will still have to meet the needs of their clientele.  Sanitation workers will still have to cart away the trash.  The biggest change will be in the ways they are compensated.

My dad is a pretty staunch republican.  For years, I have listened to him talk about teachers and how much they make in their salaries PLUS their stellar health care and pension plans.  I have understood and even agreed that teachers can get some pretty sweet deals.

Then I started teaching, albeit in the state of Illinois.  And I disagree with my dad.  On the surface, we get some pretty sweet deals.  Summers off?  Yes, please!  Work on the clock: 6.5-7 hours?  Yes, please!

But the sacrifices we have to make are much greater than many people realize.  Many of us have had to take out large student loans in order to become certified to teach other peoples’ children.  Many of us live paycheck to paycheck.  Many of us purchase our students’ school supplies and classroom supplies because no one else will pay for them.  Many of us stay up past our bedtimes to finish assessing our students’ progress and planning meaningful activities for our students.  Many of us have to creatively balance our own budgets in order to pay for childcare OR rearrange our schedules to work around caring for our own children because we do not qualify for state-sponsored childcare programs.  Many of us have to unfairly balance time between work and family time (hence staying up past bedtime to finish grading, etc.).  Many of us wake in the freakishly wee hours of the morning in order to finish our work and prepare for the day ahead.  Many of us are physically and emotionally exhausted by the end of the day.  And then we have to get up and do it again.

Some of us who work with students who have failed out of “regular” schools also deal with the following: being emotionally abused and shattered (have you ever listened to a teenager tell you how she has to prostitute herself to feed her children?), being verbally assaulted, crying with and for our students, feeding our students with food paid for out of our own pockets, and much, much more.

I’m not going to make the money argument, because I’m bad at math.  I get paid what I get paid, and between my husband and myself, we make it work.  What I can say is that my salary was frozen this year and will likely be frozen again next year.  I will be lucky if it isn’t cut.  I will be lucky if my health care stays the same.  And I work for a non-unionized school.

My friends in Wisconsin who do work where unions are present should have it better than me.  Instead, they have taken pay cuts, furlough days, health care cuts, and pension cuts.  They are being asked to give even more–no, they are being mandated to give more.  If this bill that Governor Walker sponsors is passed, my friends will be forced to give up more AND not be able to collectively bargain for themselves in the future.

I don’t know how to fix the budget problems, but this doesn’t seem like the best way to do it.

A complicated issue requires a complicated solution, doesn’t it?  And the commercials demonizing state union workers just makes everyone angry: the people it targets and the people it preaches to.

At the very least, I ask you to educate yourself about the situation in Wisconsin, because whether you live there or not, if this bill is passed, it will likely affect you sooner or later.  Illinois is in even worse financial condition than Wisconsin, so this will likely be knocking on our doors next.

Again, the disclaimer: I did the best I could.  I’m really sorry if I misconstrued the facts; I will be happy to discuss them with you.  And while I think it is crass to proclaim that “Madison is the next Cairo,” I do think that we should seriously think about the implications of taking rights away in this democratic society.

And I should care about this old white guy who wrote 400 years ago because…?

Greetings, friends.

In an effort to keep myself accountable to my students and myself, I am going to share with you my response to several questions asked of me after an observation of one of my classes.  I’m not going to give you a play-by-play of the class period; rather, all you need to know is this: I love Shakespeare, and I want to teach it better.  It’s hard stuff, trying to be creative and engaging all the time in front of people who wish they could just turn me down.  Anyway, take a read-through, even if you don’t get it all.

Thanks, friends.

1.  How do you think that the end of class went?  What went well and what would you change for next time?

2.  What is rationale or larger context of the Shakespeare information?  Do the students use the information again?  Does it help them better understand the plays?

I believe that the end of class went as well as it could have.  I was lucky and unlucky in a couple of ways.  Unluckily, my class was behind on the research, which meant that presentations would be ready in the middle of class.  Also unluckily, I felt the pressure of having to decide whether to push on to the next thing in my plans or to whip up something else which wouldn’t have made it onto the lesson plan.  Luckily, most of my students were present (!) and amazingly ready and willing to work.

Obviously I wanted you to see some actual teaching rather than end-of-the-period wrap-up stuff.  When it came to the sonnet characteristics, I obviously designed that worksheet and activity for a longer slice of time.  I think that I need to reorganize some things on the sheet itself, because I changed the order of things on the spot, realizing that it would make more sense to count syllables and talk about rhythm before discussing meter.  (It’s also an old worksheet that I’ve been needing to update.)  I do believe that having students come to realizations about the patterns (having them count out the syllables, later on having them discover rhyme scheme by matching and categorizing words) is much, much better than just giving them a lecture and notes.

I guess I feel similarly about the research and presentations.  Previously, the WebQuest was the same for everyone, and it was a stand-alone activity that we never revisited and completed only because I, as the teacher of a Shakespeare class, thought it was the proper thing to do.  I have been trying to make things more interesting, applicable, connected, and real-life in all of my classes, which is why I revisited the WebQuest in the first place.  Yes, I think they need to know about Shakespeare.  No, I don’t want to give them a lecture.  No, I don’t think this is the best way for them to learn about Shakespeare, but it is a step in the right direction from where I started several years ago.

I also wanted my students to take some ownership of the information, which spawned the idea of them presenting to each other about some select information.  This was my first time with this approach (for Shakespeare).  Changes I would make: I would obviously PLAN for them to have more time to complete the research.  I would also consider having them put together a whole-class PowerPoint presentation with images and information IN THEIR WORDS that we could view, print out, and keep as a reference when things do come up in the plays.

I will admit that I have not focused on the larger context of the plays when I have taught Shakespeare in the past.  I have focused on the content as literature and tried to make them as appealing and engaging to students as I can while still trying to jump the hurdles of helping them understand the language.  Like I said before, the WebQuest information was not revisited.  But I would like for it to be.  I would like to be able to discuss what it would have been like to view a particular scene on the Globe stage as opposed to a private stage as opposed to a stage today.  I would like to discuss how and why Shakespeare was able to write about SO MANY different themes and refer to so many other stories, myths, and texts.

But I forget about these things during the daily grind.  It’s hard to remember how passionate I am when I juggle so much.  It’s hard to remember the bigger picture when I’m trying to figure out how to get my students to all be on the same page, comprehension-wise and behavior-wise.

Teaching is hard, demanding work.  I have friends who reply to my occupation with comments like, “Well, once you’ve taught a class, you don’t have to worry about it any more, because you’ve already done it.”  But that’s not the way I work.  I do reflect and make things better, or at least I try to.

I am glad that I am going to school again.  It keeps my brain sharp.  I waffled for a long time before I chose to pursue a master’s degree in English instead of Education.  What tipped the scale for English was that I wanted to be more of an expert in WHAT I teach.  Already I feel better-versed in the history behind the literature that I teach (well, at least the English renaissance for now).  It has helped me make connections between pieces of literature and between authors and events.  It is also helping me to ask more questions.  Yes, Shakespeare was a great writer, and everyone and their moms thinks so.  But how did he get to be so well known?  How did he create such powerful female characters when women during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were so repressed?  Why should people of color care about what a white guy write four hundred years ago?

Someday, I want a former student to come to me and say, “You helped make Hamlet come alive.  I may be an engineer now, but I still think about Hamlet sometimes.”

I don’t think I’ve gotten there yet, but I think I’m headed in the right direction.  I just need an extra 5-6 hours in a day.

a not-so-modest proposal

Yes, I know that the Great Chicago Blizzard of 2011 is pretty much old news by now, but it presented an opportunity that public school teachers in Chicago have not had since 1999: a chance to stay at home and do nothing in the middle of the week.  TWICE.

I have joked with many people that I needed an extra day in my weekend or my vacation.  But I am (mostly) serious when I say that the United States should consider adjusting the work week from five days in a row to two days on, one day off, two days on.  In other words: Wednesdays off.

I know that, as an American, I am supposed to be a workaholic with a crazy schedule; however, I have to look at my own performance as someone in the workforce.  I work better when I am well-rested.  I work better when I have had adequate time to prepare for the days ahead AND spend time with my family.  I work better when I am given space from what can be a very absorbing and high-stress job.

And an unscheduled, unbelievable snow day got me thinking: Shouldn’t this be the way it is?  Shouldn’t we slow down without nature telling us to?  We are always planning, always running from one appointment to the next, always filling our pile of precariously balanced plates with more.  (Let’s face it: In today’s world, we fill our time up so much that we need more than one analogical plate.)

Just because we can be ridiculously efficient, does that mean we should be?

I realize that, as the mother of two young children, I am in a position where I will take whatever time is given to me and run home with it.  Seriously: I go home when I am given time for free.  I somehow managed to convince my boss and my immediate supervisor to let me leave work early two days out of the week.  I can’t even begin to relate how much an extra three hours at home per week means to me.  I work with some of the most flexible supervisors that there are, and I am grateful.  But I will still run with it.

Case in point?  This Friday is Lincoln’s birthday, which doesn’t mean anything for any students/teachers in any other state, but in Illinois, we get the day off.  Through some vague markings on the official calendar, everyone at my school thought there was going to be school on Friday.  We just got the official word from the upper crust that there is, indeed, NO SCHOOL ON FRIDAY.  But!  One or more of my coworkers will be going in to school to work on various projects, and I am welcome to come in… which I will so NOT be doing.  I will take that time and run home.  Or maybe to the Shedd Aquarium, but the kids are still coming with me.

But I digress.  Back to the No-Work Wednesday proposal.

I think that it would be valuable for government-run and private corporations to give more vacation time to their employees.  Happy employees will work better.  Perhaps one way that this can happen is changing the work week.  Can you imagine what the United States would be like if Wednesday felt like Saturday, or at least Sunday?  It would be divine.

(I understand that I already get more time off than most people.  As a teacher, I milk my summers for all that they are worth.  And my winter breaks.  Oh, and my spring breaks.  But I just want you to know that I work HARD at my job, and it eats up so much of my time at home… so if I kept track of all the actual hours I spent on my job, it might not be much different than a year-round, 9-5 gig.)

And maybe No-Work Wednesdays would partially make up for the laughable amount of time mothers are given for maternity leave.  That, however, is a topic for another time.  And you can bet that I will have much to say about that.