Random Bits of Friday

In class this week I read “Indian Education” (Sherman Alexie) with the two language arts classes I teach a little in.  The prompt I gave one class after we discussed it was to write for 10 minutes on the most important memory from Elementary, Middle School, and High School.

“my favorite memory of elementary was when I threw a chicken nugget at a car.”  Was one of the first responses I read later that day, and I realized there is just something inherently funny about the word “chicken nugget.” 

I am constantly amazed at the importance that a single event can pack in our lives, and the power a few lines can hold.  And because I didn’t get a chance to write during their writing time, and because my pedagogy professor recommended never doing something we wouldn’t ask our students to do, here is my ten minute response:

Langell Valley Kid Education

Elementary School
In kindergarten we had plastic cows, bright black and white, that I came in from recess early to get.  I had a best friend that the other kids teased me about being in love with.  We kept being best friends for the year anyway. 
In third grade we followed the cows to California.  I stole a turkey egg from the turkeys’ nest next door and snuck it into my room to hatch, and then I felt so guilty I threw it away.  I told mom that story recently and she gasped, told me that those turkeys were totally feral and crazy and didn’t live “next door.” 
In fourth grade I went through the self esteem crash they say happens as an adolescent and came home crying every day, sure that everyone hated me.  That summer my brother died and I stopped crying for 500 years. 

Middle School
I met writing, I went back to softball, I was obsessed with otters, I took high school classes, I was called brave for the first time ever; all three years kind of mush together.  I was happy and full of self discovery.

High School
In hindsight, I was in a protected bubble.  After Matt died, many people stepped in to watch me.  I didn’t notice, but now I know my big cousins were there, watching my back in math and science, protecting me in the hallway.  All I thought about was being totally, totally perfect.  



Why is it that we always write about the sad or melancholy bits?  Are they somehow more potent and universal? 

Anyway, here's some more class updates, mainly that.....they loved zentangles!!  See below :)


The teaser I put on the board for class today


Doing a step by step on the board


A couple students' work!  One was left on the board for us, and one I snagged before the student could throw it away (his inner perfectionist rioted at any error - even though he took on the hardest part of the tangle on his own....) and now its celebrating on the wall!


This is another journal prompt product - the question was their prompt and the responses are compiled from journal entries and class discussion.



besos y abrazos
Emma

Campesino Ghosts

When I got home for Thanksgiving Break, Mom had a copy of Translation Nation (by Héctor Tobar) waiting for me.  As soon as I read the subtitle, “Defining a New American Identity in the Spanish-Speaking United States,” I was thinking of the potential there for my future teaching or sharing with students.  So far, I haven’t been let down, and just the references Tobar drops have had me thinking; rummaging Google images for Skid Row in Hollywood, Diego Rivera’s murals in Mexico City, and Che’s signature dashing beret and beard combo.

What really got me thinking though, was the theme of the campesino (person of the country) as he exists in the life of the immigrant.  “Los Angeles is filled with people like us,” Tobar writes, “people who have Latin American Villages and peasants hovering around their lives.”  The section goes on to say:

“There are campesinos in our dreams, on our lawns cutting the grass, in the pickup trucks next to us on the freeway, in the picture frames on the walls of our living rooms.  The peasants in the pictures might come from the age of the Mexican Revolution, or they might be twenty-first-century campesinos in villages connected to California by bus lines and extended family relationships.   We can go down below María’s family home and hear roosters crowing at sunrise from backyard chicken coops.  In the newer Mexican Suburbs of Watts and Compton, we can find stalks of corn growing in the front yards, a crop from the old country seemingly about to burst from its cage of wire fencing to populate all the other lawns, and a reminder to all that the gardener or the mechanic inside was once a campesino, and perhaps still longs to be one” (pgs 11- 12, 2005 edition). 

Now what really got me thinking here was that as I read the part about María’s family roosters, my brain immediately jumped to my time in Puerto Rico (walking along streets with the local chickens), and to my own family’s chickens roosting in the front yard.  Maybe, I thought, it is not so much the campesino that we long for, but what he represents.  Maybe it is not the campesino, but the campo.  With the exception of the immigrant who comes to work in agriculture, it seems that most end up looking for work in cities.  The homesickness that moves in then might express itself as stalks of corn in a front yard, or as simple longing for the views and sounds of a place left behind.  We miss where we came from and we are haunted by ghosts of its image.

And I say “we” because it is not just an ailment of immigration across national borders, but one of simple moves across states as well.  You see, the further I get away from home, the more I find my identity revolves around that place in the valley where I grew up.  Spanish seems to grasp this concept better than English in the way it says “I am from __” as “soy de __,” or literally, “I am of __,” because to be from a place is to be a product of it and to be a piece of it.  We have not truly left that place and we are not “from” it, we are of it and we carry it with us.  

Often, I think all of this is one of the reasons it can be so hard for some to leave a place, and yet why others do.  For me, the decision to move started in early Middle School when my parents told me they wanted me to go to college, but if I wanted it too, then it was going to have to be something that I did for myself.  And they gave me a cow.  After that, the sale of Rosie’s yearly calf went into my savings account for college and I began to think about funding myself. 

By the time I was a senior, my life pointed towards college.  I was being encouraged to go to school and get a degree for something I could always have a job in.  Looking back now, I never realized that the hidden implication of the decree would be that if I pursued that job and that life then I would be leaving.  In an indirect sense, a successful job meant going away from the life I grew up with.  And, wrapped up in sports and school, I didn’t notice for three years what it meant.  When I did, it felt like a decision I had never made and I noticed my own campesino ghosts for the first time. 

Now, I say all this merely to discuss a challenging part about growing up, one that my classmates who chose to stay in our hometown made much sooner than I did; what do we do with our home when we move away and into our own lives?  To me, this seems to be at the heart of many immigration struggles our nation faces today as cultures struggle to find a way to simultaneously assimilate to a new country, and to keep a grip on where they are from.  The product is the first and second generation “American,” still not yet totally sunk into that identity, but far enough in to be unrecognizable to grandparents.  In schools this manifests as the cafeteria tables that end up divided racially, the tables that the staff stare at wondering about the cliques, or the segregation, or why those ____ kids always only sit with each other.  These groups are a totally new creation (which, tada!, is the point of Tobar’s whole book) and no one totally understands what to do with them.  How much to adopt?  How much to move away to?  How much to move back?  How much to keep?

As a future English as a Second Language teacher, I see the struggles as ones that all immigrants and first and second generation students, and school systems are having.  I will have students that I need to get producing English successfully enough to be a productive and satisfied part of society, but at the same time I need to support the students’ first language and culture.  Just like students from rural areas struggle with identity in deciding whether to stay or go, ESOL students struggle with identity in deciding how much of their new country to adopt.  All of us are haunted by some kind of campesino ghost.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a good answer to any of this, just a lot of questions about the way we long for our ghosts.  I tried to ask Sherman how he felt, and what generation removed he is from his southern Chihuahua roots, but he only woke up long enough to give me a disapproving look… probably for writing blog posts and not lesson plans for my work sample next week.  Yep, the work sample I’m so nervous for that I’m avoiding lesson plans by writing two page blog posts.  However, I refuse to be made to feel guilty by someone who eats enough stuffing from his toys that I often feel as though I am gathering brown teddies bears on our walks.  Not a chance.    

Goodnight all!

Y, para que sepas; soy del valle lleno de ovejas, al lado de un rio perdido. 

Emma

Teaching and Writing

So here I am, only on my second blog post and catching up on lost time…and not going to write anything about Sherman!  That’s alright; just imagine him here, sleeping away on the couch while I clack away at the table, wide awake after a post Thanksgiving dinner nap and thinking back on earlier this term. 

What I’m thinking about is being a practitioner.  This is the way a classmate describes his dedication to continuing to actually do what he is going on to teach.  It seems so simple, but there I was a few months ago, about to be eligible to teach English Language Arts and I realizing that I haven’t done much with writing in so long!  I was thinking this as I drove into town to watch Sandra Cisneros speak at Powell’s.

Now Sandra Cisneros, she is one of my all time favorites, and of all my all time favorites, she is the one I wish I could write like the most.  Her most well known book is probably The House on Mango Street, but I’m a big fan of Woman Hollering Creek and her poetry that I’ve read so far (Loose Woman, and a few from My Wicked, Wicked Ways).  She’s spicy womanhood, creative non-fiction, narrative vignettes, and Spanglish play all in one package, so of course when I heard she was going to be in Portland I got my first ever case of star fever.  Bad enough that when I finally got to get an autograph from her I was practically incoherent….and a friend told me I might as well have asked for a lock of hair.  So much for seeming calm and cool I guess, when the only thing I managed to squeak out is that I can’t wait to teach her stuff in my future classroom, and then hand her a book with someone else’s name in it's second hand cover. 

 

(Here I am getting books signed by Sandra Cisneros!)  

 

Anyway, the point of all this is the feeling that I walked away from that book reading and into the classroom the next day with.  What a change!  After weeks (er, months rather) of slogging my way through homework and class time, my own literary life was pretty dry.  I was able to read some Tony Hillerman to escape, and maybe some subtitles lazily thrown on the TV, but I hadn’t wanted to think and talk about writing the way I did leaving that bookstore in a long time. 

 And who wants that teacher?  The one that sloths around the classroom, tired and distracted by standards and surviving… who would want to learn from her?  It’s so easy to forget that one of the best things I can bring with me is a wild passion for what I want to teach, or rather, it’s so easy to forget what that passion feels like.

 Maybe it’s not even passion totally either, maybe it’s just that teaching is so much like writing in the fact that the more you live, the better you are at it.  With that in mind, I vow to be a practitioner.  I vow that I will keep loving my content area through distractions.  I vow that I will keep letting it heal me and teach me.  I vow that I will give my passion the permission it needs to enter the classroom with me every day to heal and teach others. 

I believe in reading and writing.  I also believe in reading aloud…and Sherman believes he is tired of hearing me read Woman Hollering Creek chapters to him as I make mock lesson plans and practice for reading to a class.  Yep, cool and calm are definitely out the window. 

 

Besos y abrazos,

Emma

Introduction to the Blog

When I got Sherman, I had forgotten what dogs smell like. Not that he was a lot of dog to smell, that little ten pound package of black fur and tidy brown eyebrows, but the scent was there when the adoption people handed him to me officially outside of the pet store and his neck landed near my nose.  And I’m not thinking of the wet dog, or doghouse smell, but that earthy one, that deep, deep smell of childhood, from when we had puppies every year and I spent more time roaming grassy paths on all fours than walking.  I did however, spend a substantial amount of time hiding from my hairbrush wielding mother who wanted the bits of grass removed for some reason that I didn’t understand at the time. 

But this was going to be different, I could tell.  This time, there was no puppies-going-home day, and no pastures to play in.  This was my dog, my forever-for-fifteen-years dog.  And I was in shock that I had actually done this, that I had actually committed to take care of something living, me, the girl that could kill an aloe vera (yes, a cactus) and who struggled with the idea of committing to a pair of running shoes that might last longer than a year.  But there I was regardless; holding a dog officially labeled 12 months, and trying desperately to remember everything I needed to buy before I took him home. 

The shock must have stood out on my face as I stared at rows of dog harnesses, dog collars, dog leashes, dog hair clips, and dog collar bling, because one of the store employees came over and helped me fit a little blue harness on him.  Liberated from the daze a bit, I wandered the store several times, slowly accumulating food and snacks and a bed and then we went out to my truck, where he promptly sat down in the bed on the passenger seat and looked at me.  Maybe this wasn’t such an overwhelming thing after all? 

Back home, my room was immediately claimed with a glance and a settled little body on my bed.  As I set down pet things, a vivid memory came back of my first dog, now 16 and lurching around the backyard back home.  It seems that every house has a Wilma, a dog that has been there through “It All,” and as I worked myself up to adopting this new dog, it seemed that suddenly everyone was telling me stories of their old dog.  I heard more stories about why people got dogs and what they meant to them in those few weeks than I had in years.  But then, maybe for the first time I was listening.

You see, going through a Master’s program in Teaching is a lot.  My time this year has been spent in my classes or in high schools and middle schools or doing homework.  And there is something in that combination of stress and caring that has birthed primal need to LOVE SOMETHING.  I have seen it in all my classmates, who getting engaged and adopting cats, and caring for each other with deep determination.  I jokingly told my mom at one point that it was to be a dog or a relationship with the first guy I met when I walked out the door.  She, very seriously, said, “pick the dog.” 
Then, in the midst of that are the stories, the ones from the teacher I am working with, from one of my favorite professors, from my parents.  These stories of getting a dog that fill in the details on some bigger piece of life, like the last child going to college, or a puppy that comes to live in the hole filled by one of those old dogs who had been there through it all, or of a small white peekapoo that takes on caring for a family knocked from four to three.

Dogs, and the stories we tell about them, often are the bookmarks in our lives, the record keepers.  That was what finally pushed me over the edge on my adoption dilemma – the hope that even though this is my year of exciting decisions made just for my, by me, and about me, that I will still have a friend there with me surviving it and going on to the next step with me.  And that is the point of this blog, and why it’s called “Sharing With Sherman.”  This is my next step, I have made the big decision to share it with someone, and the friendships we carry with us (sometimes literally) are the pieces of our story most worth sharing.  Under that guise, this is also a blog about me becoming a teacher, and the terror and joy and exhaustion of going through this program, and onto my first big girl job soon. 

Besos y abrazos,
Emma

PS. it turns out Sherman could fit into a carry-on crate, and that Portugal and Chile don’t have mandatory quarantine on pets entering the country.  Whoever would have looked into that kind of thing before adopting a small Chihuahua mix, huh? ;)

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PHOTOS!

Growing up with the Border Collies my parents raised (and still raise) as sheep and cattle herding dogs.  I am around 8 in this picture.

Wilma, the dog who has been there through "It All." 

Me and Wilma, circa 5th grade when I adamantly declared her as my best friend.

And finally, meet Sherman, the igloo maker.  The dog with which I will be sharing the next set of adventures!