Nervous Nellie on Exam Day...and I'm the Teacher!

I meant to post this last week, but things have been pretty hectic in high school teaching land. The week and days leading up to the AP exam were pretty intense. There were a lot of senior activities that split the kids’ attention—and made it hard for them to focus on (what I think is important…) their AP Literature exam. 

Realistically, is my class the only one they have? Nope, they have 6 others…presumably 3 other core classes and 3 electives—which take varying degrees of time. 

Is my class *that* important? Nope. Family, extracurriculars, volunteering, working, music, sports, social life…I find these things imperatives to a healthy, well-rounded upbringing.

But wait, they signed up to take AP and I signed on to teach AP so that they could have a shot at getting a 3, 4, or 5 on the AP exam (and subsequently exempt a college class) and to be challenged in an academically rigorous and collegiate environment for the year. The exam is the culmination of their efforts.

All the books. (I assigned one a month since December. That was painful.) All the essays. All the Socratic Seminars. All the debates. All the Literature Circles. All the movie tie-ins. All the vocabulary quizzes. All the crazy rants I went off on about critical theory. All the technological assignments that had strict deadlines.  Tons of this was new to them. High school hasn’t been hard for a lot of the kids because they’re smart or the classes are easy. My class has been a big change for them. I’m okay with the fact that I challenged them.

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The Friday before the exam, a huge amount of the kids were on the senior trip to Disney. [I was more or less assigned to babysit a couple other classes due to  the lack of substitutes in the building. No big deal—I sent the extra kids into my classroom with a Disney movie on (well, it was Pirates of the Caribbean) and made a round-table arrangement of desks in the hallway. (Sort of the hallway—I have a little mini-entrance that I call the Vocabulary Vestibule because I hang up their comic versions of SAT words out here.)] Any of my AP students were to check in with their electives and then come back to work on AP. We worked on poetry, multiple choice, and applying literary vocabulary. It was groups of 2 to a dozen kids plus me—on a lot of coffee. (I talked re-heeaaaalllllly fast.)

We milked every practice discussion question for what it was worth and we debated the best ways to approach the essays. Kids who had felt nervous about their abilities got praise from their peers (and me) and hopefully took some of the weight of their self-doubt off of their shoulders. We argued about the reasoning for studying old, ancient, dusty poems and the relevance-slash-confusion of modern, new ones. We brainstormed the books we’ve read (mostly from this school year)—Invisible Man, 1984, The Handmaid’s Tale, Jekyll and Hyde, Frankenstein, The Bean Trees, Robinson Crusoe, The Bluest Eye, Great Gatsby, Night, Julius Caesar, A Doll’s House, The Awakening, Their Eyes Were Watching God, The Joy Luck Club…They realized that they have more stuffed in their brains than they think. 

I wished I had a small, laser-like focused AP group every dang day. It was very awesome.

Leading up, every day after school, I worked with kids on whatever they wanted help on. We had a movie afternoon and compared “Children of Men” to 1984. We watched parts of 1984 and scoffed at the movie-making techniques of only a handful of years ago. We watched parts of Wall-E and discussed how this had shades of Bradbury and Orwell. 

College Liberal-arts background: you’ve served me well. 

So, May 9^th was the exam and I went and met the kids in the library before they headed off. It was “Decade Day,” so many of them were in ridiculous outfits and costumes—notably many 1950-60’s Doris-Day looking fancy dresses and heels that, according to the kids, were inspired by The Help. I was in a hippie skirt, along with many of my Flower-Children! They weren’t to take anything with them, so I offered to hold onto cell phones—

I think a picture is worth more than a description here. 

Here’s the strange part to me—I had a large number of kids taking the exam—between 70 and 80. I’ve had plenty of kids taking high-stakes exams—Graduation tests, EOCT’s, 3^rd, 5^th, and 11^th grade Writing Test. I’ve never *felt* anything like this.

I was nervous. 

The whole morning (3+ hours!) I was pacing and just a wreck! I had the butterflies in my stomach and a dry throat—I was just so dang nervous for my babies. I can’t imagine having children and watching them perform on a stage. That must be torture. 

When they started trickling in to collect their (eh-hem) expensive electronic devices, I felt the weight lifting off of my shoulders. For better or for worse, they’d taken their exam. Most of them felt confident about the multiple choice (“You gave us way harder questions than ones that were on there, Miss G.!”), the poetry essay (“I just annotated it, TPCASTT’d it, and wrote everything I could think of!”) and the Free-response essay (“Is it okay that it seemed JUST like the essay I wrote for you about ---- book? The prompt seemed familiar!”). The prose essay was something modern and they didn’t enjoy it, but oh well. Some of them didn’t space their time well and ran out. Oh well. Some of them came in beaming and pleased with themselves…and that’s what makes me happy.

So I made it through a year of teaching AP Literature. Check one more curriculum off the list for me. The kids learned a bunch of stuff. Their writing improved vastly and I greatly desensitized them to their allergy to reading. I’d say it’s been a good year.

Mother's Day 2013

May '08, ASC: 3 generations of education graduate degrees

30 years ago on this Mother’s Day, my mom was only a few days away from giving birth to a second child, her first girl, and the first the granddaughters on both the Thomaston side and Gauthier side. It was the 80’s and they only did the ultrasounds if there were suspected problems, so she didn’t know if she was having a girl or a second son. The story of my birth includes my Grandma Jane coming to my parent’s house, at a rainy, drizzly midnight, where a feverish toddler brother was being read stories while my mom breathed through contractions. My grandmother, all 5 feet of her, admonished my mother and pointedly said to my father, “I can read to Neil for you. I CANNOT have this baby for you. Now go to the hospital.” (I was born at 2:52, and would have been born sooner had the obstetrician even been at the hospital. The nurses slowed my mother’s labor with drugs and instructed her to wait on the pushing bit. Apparently I was ready to head out into this world!)

If you’d asked me ten years ago, “What are your mother’s day plans?” for today, I’d have assumed I’d be celebrating this holiday with my family and own children. I do not have children, with the exception of the many hundreds of children who have passed through my classroom door over the course of the past five years. I often do quite a bit of counseling with my students (from the young ones up to the high schoolers) and I am grateful that I’ve been deemed worthy (by whatever powers that be) to give advice and help my kids see a different point-of-view on the world. Little ones (from teaching Elementary school classrooms) have called me “Mommy” instead of Miss G from time to time, and many hugs with heads buried in my side and arms wrapped around my waist included wistful, “I wish you were my mom”s. Many of my high school kids have fussed at me for not having a baby yet, saying that I’d be a “cool mom” and warning me that my “eggs were frying and I needed to have kids soon.” (Yikes!) 

Several of my high-schoolers have been mothers or mothers-to-be and I’ve had a special bond with those girls, encouraging and enabling them to get the education they deserve in order to be the mom to their babies that their children deserve. I’ve felt humbled when talking with teenagers (usually girls) and pointing out that their moms are scared to lose their little girls—and that this transition point of high school is a clear sign that they won’t have the same role to play with their daughters as when they were younger—and hopefully saying words to these girls that will help smooth out the oft-tangled relationships between teen girls and their moms. 

So am I glad I’m not celebrating Mother’s Day tomorrow with children who are “mine?” No, not really. I’m a little jealous of moms and that relationship that they have as a sustainer of life—it seems to me like a mystical, spiritual chance to be one with God…one that I haven’t had the opportunity to take. Am I happy for the moms out there? Of course. If not for moms out there, I’d not have had the chance to teach, converse with, sing with, make art with, and learn from their children. 

My mama came to my Beethoven concert in April

In another sense, I’ve been so fortunate, lucky, and blessed to have a wonderful mom. My mom has shown me with her dedication to anything she sets her mind to—that life is yours for the taking. She never showered me with gifts, but always experiences— Girl Scouts, church, theater, museums, concerts,  Social Studies fairs; trips around this country and Europe; piano, voice, and oboe lessons. She is thoroughly academic and musical and has always encouraged me through her words and actions that I should strive for excellence. She has been my toughest critic with singing, acting, and music…but she’s also been at every concert and performance humanly possible. One time, in grad school, I was singing with an acapella group and we were singing at a woman’s wedding. My mom crashed the wedding—in order to hear her baby (24-year-old) sing.

 My mom is a teacher—a product of the 1970’s era of Women’s Lib when she knew that she had the opportunity to go to college, but she felt that her only two career options were nurse or teacher. I worked really hard in college to NOT become a teacher, but to accidentally follow in her footsteps anyway. They’re definitely not bad footsteps to follow. She’s been a teacher who’s constantly reinvented herself: she taught Elementary school, then worked while she was pregnant to obtain a Master’s degree and Gifted certification; then after 17 years, she switched to teaching Middle School Language Arts and Science and earned her Specialist’s degree. After 13 years there, it was time for a change again, and she switched to Elementary gifted again—at schools with immigrant populations unlike the golf-course-homes one she’d left years before. 

She’s made her mark, earning Teacher of the Year for her county, helping countless kids earn Social Studies, Writing, and art awards and taken dozens of field trips around the southeast with kids. She started a monthly recognition luncheon for the best citizens in each class—and it’s caught on so that other teachers help bring in deserts to brag about the good kids. She lives her life as true to herself as she can—church-choir singer, sci-fi fan, family caregiver, rescue-dog-mommy, pianist, baker, reader, gardener, and Snoopy collector. 

Some other moms in my life are my grandmothers: my mom’s mom, Grandma Shirley Jane Pepperd Thomaston, and my dad’s mom, Grandma Marilyn Faye Cerasoli Gauthier (see, French and Italian!). I was at my Grandpa Bill’s 80^th birthday celebration this weekend when his sister-in-law (a woman I’ve not seen since I was a toddler), looked at me from a table, sighed, and said, “I see Marilyn in your face.” It made me cry because my mom’s always said that she sees my beautiful Grandma Marilyn’s eyebrows on me—in addition to other features. My grandma Marilyn was stricken with a neuromuscular disease most of my life—so I always knew her to be in her home, surrounded by her books, beads, sewing, crocheting, music, television programs, and Bible. 

There were several summers as a child when we spent a lot of time at their house west of Atlanta, and although she didn’t have the strength to do much of the cooking, she perched on a stool and gave me directions of what to do—to make Italian stuffed shells, salads, desserts, and drinks. She had recipes, but she also cooked by smell and visual presentation. Her dishes, “tablescapes,” and foods were beautiful to look at and wonderful to taste.  I would often call her as I was driving some place and she would fuss for me multi-tasking, but she would listen and sop up every story about my life that I had to tell her. She was an incredible listener, philosopher, and activist. I remember saying to my sister, that I can’t call Grandma Marilyn any more, but at least I can still talk to her—I just have to wait a while for her answer. From the time we were little, we’d give eskimo kisses and say “Bee’s Knees!” and so whenever I hear that I think of her.  I miss her so much.

 '08 Baccalaureate-- mom and grandma Jane love stuff like that.

My grandma Jane was a force to be reckoned with. She grew up traveling across the U.S. by train because her parents divorced (it was unheard of!)…her father was a photographer and her mother a contortionist. She was more or less reared by an Aunt and Grandmother on a farm in Oklahoma. She received a scholarship to Birmingham Southern College and eventually met my Grandpa Matt there. My grandma was the mother of 5 children, a dutiful wife who cooked every night, and an avid reader. But I think more than anything, she was a talker. When people who I’ve met through teaching (she taught for over 30 years in the county where I currently teach) say that I remind them of her because of how I talk and care about people—there’s no higher compliment. She looked out for the teachers, parents, and children in her school and she was a wonderful Grandma.

She traveled with me singing to South Carolina, Chicago, and all over Europe. I lived with her for a time in both high school and college and I thank the stars every day for the opportunity to know her the way that I did—not just as a grandchild who cared for her grandmother, but in a more one-on-one nurturing way. Grandma Jane didn’t know a stranger and she loved to tell entertaining stories. She had one about during World War II about rationing and that it was time for her to get her allowance of shoes and the only mary janes available in her size were RED! The ten year old Janie couldn’t have been more delighted with her luck to be the only girl at her school to have red patent leather shoes. What luck, and what a perspective on the direness of the times. 

Luchsingers concert May 08. She was able to hear the Dec. concert from her new home.

I also learned things about cooking and sewing from my Grandma Jane. To this day, I’d throw away all my vegetarian ideals for her pot roast and cornbread. She grew up with little store-bought food, but since she was on a farm, she knew how to make something to eat out of most anything. She didn’t bake terribly well because she was in much too much of a hurry to read the directions carefully (all that chemistry and stuff). It didn’t stop her from making me a birthday cake a time or two, or calling my mother and asking HER to make the beautifully frosted confections that my mom was excellent at making. Grandma Jane and I had a funny song and dance at IHOP or Cracker Barrel in which I would order whatever food she wanted, and she would get the senior breakfast that I wanted (I always liked the portion better)—in order to save on the bill. We’d wait til the waiter was watching, eye each other’s food and say loudly, “Yours looks better than mine. Shall we trade?” I wonder who was fooled. 

I got my chocolate brown eyes from my Grandma Jane (okay, my dad has brown eyes too) and I’d like to think her fighting spirit and love of seeing places of history all over the world. She and I shared many a marvelous moment traipsing across Europe—and she never got tired of people asking if I was her daughter, and she proudly explaining that I was her granddaughter. A bus driver even commented (to our amusement), “Oh yes, I knew you were related. You have the same nice legs. Sexy.” I learned a phrase from my friend Amber’s mom when she said, “I ran into your grandma and she was telling me about your trip. You know she thinks you hung the moon!” I cherish the things my grandma Jane liked to say…”How often do you get to tour the Red Light District of Amesterdam in the morning and hear your granddaughter singing a Mozart Aria at a cathedral in Germany in the evening?” She lived for soundbites!

These women and others have shown me to live my truth and to stand for what is good, right, beautiful, and musical in the world. Maybe I have one’s eyebrows, one’s legs, one’s brown eyes…but their spirits and good energy are in my heart and soul. Happy Mother’s Day to those ones who I have been so lucky to have the love of in my life.

Mother's Day Lunch 2012- Aunt Janet, Neil, Adrienne, Emily, Mom. We are generally an amiable bunch.