Here are all the things that are unclear:

1. I do not know where I will be teaching next year.
2. I do not know what I will be teaching next year.
3. I do not know how I will be teaching next year (because I do not know what I will be teaching).
4. I do not know how to pack up my classroom (because I do not know where I will be teaching next year).
5. I do not know how to reflect on a year of pandemic teaching…and I don’t know how to not reflect on my teaching.
6. I do not know how to revisit successful lessons and make them better, when I don’t know where or what or how I will be teaching.
7. I do not know how to reimagine failed lessons, when I don’t know where or what or how I will be teaching.
8. I do not know what to do with my books.
9. I do not know what to do with my books.
10. I do not know how to envision my twentieth year of teaching.

Here are the things that are clear:

1. My school is changing our English Language Arts program.
2. The important details are unclear, but it is clear that they are changing and shifting and redefining.
3. They are primarily focused on roles and schedules, not curricula and pedagogy.
4. My school is changing our master schedule, which likely drove the change to our ELA program.
5. The important details are unclear, but it is clear that they are changing and shifting and redefining.
6. They are primarily focused on big picture issues, not pesky details that have the potential to derail the entire endeavor.
7. My school is undergoing a major capital project, demolishing three-quarters of our building over the next two years.
8. The important details are unclear, but it is clear that they are changing and shifting and redefining.
9. They are primarily focused on moving forward in a time when maybe it would be better to pause.
10. They are administrators, not teachers and definitely not students.

What to do with uncertainty:

1. Breathe.
2. Let go.
3. Focus on what is in my control.
4. Consider possibilities.
5. Find moments of positivity.
6. Laugh at the absurdity.
7. Allow for sadness.
8. Keep an open mind.
9. Let go.
10. Breathe.

Depending on when you met me…

you might find me sitting quietly on my mat

eyes closed

legs crossed

power flowing through my chakras

Depending on when you met me…

you might hear my voice

booming across the room

not drowned out by the sounds

but enhanced by the energy

Depending on if you saw me–really saw me…

you might see the either or both of me that phoebe sings about

or gloria’s survivor or the woman demanding aretha’s respect

you might see what the music has found

Depending on when you met me…

you could be a customer, an investor, a homeless mother of three

you could be five years old and filling out your Boys & Girls Club card for the first time

you could be finding your voice in the poem you never thought you’d write

Depending on if you know me…

you would understand that my world can start and stop with the right song

or that the perfect symphony can be found in the early morning woods

or that words pushed together “just so” find a permanent place inside of me

Depending on when you met me…

i am utterly forgettable

fading into the background with no voice

or

i have gathered you up

brought you along on my journey

His hand is up. I feel like his hand is always up. Even though I have told him that he can just talk, that there is no need to do the hand-raising-so-I-can-talk thing, his hand inevitably goes up.

“Here’s a question,” he begins, oblivious to the other people around him, “what am I supposed to do at night when I can’t sleep?”

Oh boy, we have been down this road before…

“I bet that is hard,” I answer, trying to strike the balance between hearing his question (and the ones lurking underneath) and getting him back on track.

“You have no idea,” he says, the words tumbling out of him with the exhale that has likely been stifled all morning. “In fact, I haven’t slept in days! Usually, I am up all night and fall asleep around 4 am but then my mom tells me that it’s time to get up and so I don’t even really go to sleep because then I have to get up and come here and I don’t have any coffee even though I’m really tired but my ADD medicine makes me too jumpy and then I forget to eat…” He talks without waiting for a response, without making eye contact, without even breathing, it seems.

“Well, I am really glad you are here,” I interject, noting that the patience of his peers is starting to wane and their sympathy is shifting across the line into mockery, responding as typical teenagers who are uncomfortable with his unfiltered honesty. “Let’s figure out how to get moving into our workshop.”

“But seriously, did you sleep? I know that when I don’t sleep I seem to have more energy than when I do sleep which I never really do except when I was little and I would just like literally pass out from being awake and then I would sleep…” I wait for the pause to come, allowing me to try again to get this train back on its rails. “And I can’t write about any of this because it brings up too much for me from my dad…”

No, no, no…please don’t go there.

“The way he abused me was not okay and I won’t write about it and you can’t expect me to because then I just get angry and I don’t know how I’ll react.” He pauses, but I can’t fill the space fast enough. “People like that should be in jail and he is but then he might get out but he’s my dad and that whole side of my family is just not okay.”

“You don’t have to write about that,” I edge in, now breaching my six foot perimeter so that he knows I am not afraid of him and his story, “You can write about anything. What about revisiting the piece you started on climate change? Or the one about the roller coaster?”

Please, let me guide you back. Please, let my words penetrate so that you can come back into our classroom today. Please feel my presence and know that you are safe. Please be in our workshop.

“I can do that.”

And as quickly as it started, it ended and he went back to his computer with dozens of open tabs and multiple pathways to distraction. Today, like other days, I will have to decide if it is a day to direct him or to follow his lead. Neither has led to anything that even closely resembles the writing that I am trying to coax out, but I wonder if maybe today will be the day.

 I clicked from picture to picture, link to link, scrolling through text and images looking for a glimpse of my father. 

I read through obituaries (finally finding the one that I had written–poorly, I might add) and medical research…pages upon pages of research… his name attached to professional papers with titles about immunoglobin something or other and C3 proteins.  I even found a handwritten census from 1942. 

I kept going, a gnawing sense of familiarity in this search made me uncomfortable.     

Finally the Google search: “Howard University College of Medicine” brought me to the archived yearbooks.  I had been looking for traces of my father’s existence and finally, finally, there was an archive open to me, without a fee attached.  Howard University Yearbook, The Bison.  There it was.  My clicks were a little faster.  I searched “Roger Spitzer–Roger E Spitzer—Roger Earl Spitzer” and each time the message popped up instantly: no pages found.  I tried every date I could think of…maybe I had my dates mixed up? I searched the yearbooks 1960…61…59…63?  The date I knew was 1962, but with no trace of my father anywhere in this digitally archived yearbook, I was, quite suddenly and without warning, questioning everything.  Was this another one of his elaborate lies? Was this another story spun out of control, family lore that bore little resemblance to reality? My clicks were becoming frantic, no longer seeking out details, but now just needing confirmation.  In a moment of haste, I downloaded the entire 1962 Howard University Yearbook to my school issued computer.  All 302 unsecured pages.  Every last potentially virus-ladened bit of it.

I enlarged the text and started to look carefully, turning the pages electronically and watching the brown faces float across my screen.  I got to the end and stared, disbelievingly, at the back cover.  How was this possible?  I went back to the table of contents.  I went back to the college of medicine.  I looked again. Slower this time.  And there he was. Page 234.  In the upper right hand corner, just above Joseph Evans Sutton, Jr.  There he was, looking remarkably like my older brother.

In that instant, I was reassured that my father was who he said he was. He hadn’t embellished his medical school education.  His enrollment was not a fabrication.  This was something that was, in fact, true.

Typically hidden, now exposed; still essential.

Here’s what I know:

• I am healthy. Despite my best efforts during my adolescence and young adulthood, I have not done any permanent damage. I can walk at a respectable clip and still touch my toes. My bones are strong and I seem to have a solid immune system, likely from years teaching middle school and, alas, negligent hand-washing habits (that I have since corrected).
• I know how to manage my business. I know how to do the things I am expected to do. In school. At home. Driving my car. I know how to take care of all of that and all the details in between. I know how to take care of my shit (I wish there was a better word, but sometimes profanity wins).
• I have people. A select few people who see right through my walls and know my heart. A few of them even know what’s hiding before I can see it clearly myself. It has taken me a lifetime (well, half of a lifetime) to gather these folks and secure them to me.  There are a few I had to circle back around to my childhood and re-find, and a few that found me when I thought I was fully formed.  There aren’t a lot of them, but I have people.
• I am a teacher. I have been a lifeguard, a waitress, a secretary, a stock broker, a receptionist, a job coach and the director of our local Boys & Girls Club. I have loved and hated each of those jobs and only really considered one as a “career” path. But the hours were terrible and the benefits were non-existent. So, I finally became a teacher. I had always wanted to be a teacher, long before I ever stepped foot onto the other paths and even when I was failing at being a student. Teaching was always a part of how I moved through this world.
• Laughter is my most valued activity. Gut-busting laughter that leaves you gasping for air and holding your sides is better than any drug I have ever taken. I wish I could laugh like this every day, but I have done it enough to know that it is what I crave.  This kind of laughter, though, can only happen when I am totally vulnerable and at ease. It can only happen with my people.

My choices, the big Life Choices that seem to be lurking around every corner these days, are easier when I stop to remember what I know.

(with apologies to Wallace Stevens)

I 

---

II 

III 

---

IV 

---

V 

---

VI 

---

VII 

---

VIII 

---

IX 

---

X 

---

XI 

---

XII 

---

XIII 

My classroom is empty right now, when it should be bubbling.  It is mid-afternoon, mid-week, mid-March and my classroom is empty.  I didn’t even bother to turn on my lamps or my white string lights or even crack my window to allow for fresh air.  My classroom is empty and I see the ghosts of students sitting in every seat, even occupying the couches and soft chairs that have been relegated to the storage pods in our back field for this past year.  My classroom is empty and I am filling it with memories. 

I have had well over a thousand adolescents pass through my classroom.  Some have settled into a corner, emerging just a bit over the months spent in here, while others have transformed so drastically that they are barely recognizable to their September selves.  I have borne witness to life changing epiphanies and waited patiently for presumed crises to settle into manageable problems.  I have lost students to many things, not the least of which is the allure of shinier classes and activities that don’t require so much soul baring.  I have celebrated life moments with a few students long after they have moved on from middle school and I have endured long, quizzical looks from young adults who know they know me from somewhere, but just can’t quite put their finger on it.  I have gone to funerals.  

I don’t know what the next few years will bring…what it will all look like after we have put covid and hybrid learning and zoom instruction behind us.  I do know that there is a chance that I will be a part of a bigger reorganization in our district and I may find myself without a classroom.  I want to embrace the potential of moving into something new for the second act of my performance, but I worry.  I am, for the first time, feeling the inevitability of being forgotten.

An Interview With Myself.

What drives you in your work?

A lot of what drives me is not creating something new, but fixing something that seems to have gone off course.  I think that it stems from my father telling me (and my brothers) that our responsibility was to make the world a better place, which is an inherently Jewish concept:  Tikun Olam…repair the world.  So the impetus for what I do is seeing a problem or a deficit and trying to figure out how to correct it.

What is “good work”?

Work that requires hard work, problem solving, communication but work that is also achievable.   I am a helper, so good or worthwhile work would have to be work that nurtures and helps people.  Good or worthwhile work forges a path that helps others’ journeys.

Purpose, fulfillment, and growth are all critical…it’s what makes work not be empty.  Money is a value statement…it is an indication of worth and importance.  It is what shows an organization’s or a society’s priorities. But the measure of the work is seen in the outcome. Did I help to pave a path? Did I fix a mistake or improve upon work that came before me? Is the world a better place because of something that I did or facilitated?

What is your lifeview? How does it connect to your work?

I think that my lifeview is clearly linked to my workview!  Meaning and purpose of life is to make the world a better place, for myself, for the people that I love, and for others.  The relationships between myself and others is symbiotic; my worth is clearly linked to the happiness of those around me.  In all of this, the thing that makes life good is joy.  Pure joy.  Easy joy.  Laughter.  Ease.  Without joy, none of this is worth anything.  I guess the big question is where does Joy come from?  It comes from being seen & understood.  It comes from common understanding, so people are a big piece of this.  My communities make my joy…big and small communities.  It is really about the people who share my vision for the work. 

I am putting on my armor this morning

one cup at a time

Going into battle requires the proper weapons:

calm speech, soft touch, firm convictions, open mind

unwavering belief in the outcome.

Minefields dot the horizon–

skilled warriors know that the most dangerous are the ones we cannot see.

Looking to my left and right, I know I am not alone

my brothers & sisters in arms are camouflaged

fighting their own battles, united in our quest

I am guided by the north star, even when it is behind the clouds.