Emergency Room Holiday

I spent my first vacation day in the Emergency Room at Maimonedes Hospital. My stomach felt as if someone had stuck a balloon inside it and was blowing it up at will, and nothing was working (not water, not pepto, no food going down), so I found myself moaning in a bed next to a man who couldn't breathe, at about 12:30pm. The doctors were pretty swift with me and decided pretty early that I had one of the many viruses going around, and once my bloodwork proved mostly normal (my white count was up, of course), I was handed an elixir of phenobarbytol and maalox which knocked out the pain and sent me a-slumbering for about an hour. When I awoke, the guy next to me sounded like he was breathing under-water, and the amazing nurse who was working on him noticed quickly that there was no suction device near his bed. She called for one and a chaotic group of nurses and doctors surrounded her while the device was set up (no more than an ordinary suction bag and a plastic jar). She had to ask the guy questions and get him to move while she did some of this -- and I heard her call out, "Not yet!" Then a voice behind her said, "He's got a DNR." The nurse said crisply, "I don't think we're at that point," and proceeded to suction out fluid from the guy's lungs. Fifteen minutes later, he was talking to his teenage son.

When I was preparing to leave, about 45 minutes later, the doctors -- most of the respiratory team available on a Saturday -- were deciding how to replace the man's trachial tube -- what size to use, what to do about a blood clot which seemed to be at the bottom of the one he was currently using, and questions were repeated over and over by each group that was added to the case. "Did we put this in? Has he been x-rayed?" In a lot of the questions, you could hear the underlying wonder of how much should be done. I wanted the people with questions to go away and simply let the smart-mouthed, but excellent respiratory doctor who was at the center of the circle and now testing a smaller sized tube, do his work. He was explaining everything non-chalantly and then deciding what size to go with. "I understand," he said to the man as he worked on him, "It feels like the tumor is bumping up against the tube." The doctor didn't say if it was or wasn't -- I don't think he knew. He was certain about the clot. He continued to work. I couldn't see him, but I felt as if I could picture what he was doing. "You see, I just put this [smaller tube] down and he says he feels better so we must've moved the clot or whatever was at the base of the other one." "This is a size..." His words became muffled by the movement -- he was getting ready to replace the tube and he swiftly left the circle to get what he needed.

My nurse took my blood pressure just before I signed my paperwork, and it was 139/90 -- higher than it had ever been in my life, but we took this to be from my involvement in the drama next to me. I was telling her about how frustrating it was to hear the same questions repeated while this guy is getting uncomfortable and that I wished people would let the respiratory doctor work. She said, "You're going home today. This is a good day." Then she left. I grabbed my prescription for pain medicine from the cheerful doctor who had worked on me seemingly obliviously to the pain of the man next to me (She wasn't on his team, at all. No one who worked with me was.)
And I went home.

There is JUSTICE in our courts and our UFT.

http://www.uft.org/news/judge_voids_city_school_closings/

It's a beginning and I think one of a long road of victories to come.

An old essay topic

For years, I used to give my students the question, "Does punishment work?" as an essay topic. Usually, I got about a 50/50 response, with it coming down to, "it depends on the kid." Most often, they gave examples of how punishments worked on their younger siblings. Whether they were being honest or not, my students usually felt that punishments had stopped working on them -- not because they didn't feel the pain they caused, but because their actions were decisions based on what they thought were rational ideas. Since I've spent the majority of my career working with the overage and under-credited, I'm biased in favor of the latter set of arguments. I've met students who didn't succeed in school because they were busy trying to survive on a much more fundamental level. Yes, I know, there have been homeless kids who get perfect SAT scores. I'd argue that those kids are very talented to begin with. Having gone to Stuyvesant High School, I can also tell you that a lot of very talented kids have trouble succeeding academically when their basic needs are not being met. Exceptions never prove rules.

I think the same formula can be used for adults.

Call me a child of the 70's, but I believe the only way people learn is through forgiveness. Yes, I think wrong behavior should be addressed. But, no teacher or student wants to do harm or to fail. People make mistakes out of frustration, whether they are very young or not so young.

I put this note out there for everyone to consider. You don't need to write five paragraphs in response. Just let me know what you think.

Teacher Isolation

At the end of the day, for about five minutes, I sat with a colleague while he played Pink Floyd's The Wall on his personal laptop. We talked about it -- the themes, where we were when it came out -- I was graduating from 8th grade, he saw the movie with a group of friends. The movie had gotten to me later, in high school, along with Tommy. I always want to go right home after school, which is a new feeling for me. I used to sit with kids for hours or just work with a colleague. But now I wondered why I wasn't right out the door. I needed those five minutes. And then I pushed myself out the door.

Last week someone stole my cell phone and I lost all of my contacts -- it's easy to erase your identity when a person has your handset. There are so many people whom I will never see again, whose phone numbers kept me connected to them. It gave me the semblance of a community. Now, I'm a pushy person. There are colleagues I know who have probably never asked for the phone numbers of colleagues with whom they have worked for years. While people worked closely together, they were much more conscious of their privacy in the generations before me. There was no Facebook to casually sign up on, and they probably wouldn't have, anyway. Perhaps they might have shared their "Linked-In" pages. I doubt it. A recent study of new teachers found that many of them are leaving the profession because they feel isolated, too -- although mentoring programs have helped to reduce some attrition. (How Mentoring Programs Can Reduce Teacher Isolation http://cie.asu.edu/volume8/number14/) There's been a lot of writing on the plight of new teachers, on the need for teachers to collaborate, to communicate with the outside world -- but little on what is happening to the school community itself which makes these, and just connecting with long-time colleagues, near impossible.

With all the closings of schools and the shiftings of personnel, there must be scores of teachers who have lost their communities, and some of their only long-term friends. Working together means you talk to each other every day. But without that ritual, you don't have a way to continue the intimacy. Some people will call each other for a while, perhaps. Juxtaposing the feelings you have for the colleagues with whom you were close and trusting and that of terror which has come with this new era of instability makes it harder to talk to anyone, though. You don't know if your friends have changed. Are they still for real? Are you for real?

In the coming weeks I want to look at studies on teacher loneliness and see if anyone is looking at what is happening to the population of teachers in NYC who are being continually displaced. Are they socializing anywhere? Are they eating alone? Sure a lot of teachers have joined the blogosphere. What about those who haven't. What does it mean to all of us that we have lost direct human contact with so many, so instantly.

Anyone who wants to write in, please do.

Being Positive

I was on the phone with a former student, now a mother of two in her thirties. She kept telling me to "be positive." I explained that being positive scares me. To me, it implies that there's no concrete evidence of the possibility of success.

...When my mother was in college, her Intro to Psychology professor told his class to "Feel free to ask any questions." My mother raised her hand and said that she no longer felt free because his invitation had made her feel self-conscious. If she were really free, why would anyone need to mention it.

So often, palliative phrases reveal the problems beneath the surface.

Re-invention

Practically every night, before I finally make the climb up to my cave in Bensonhurst (in Brooklyn, caves have staircases), I stop at the local supermarket to pick up groceries. Once upon a time, I was organized and bought a month's worth of groceries on a Sunday and had everything delivered. Now, I plan my meals in a pay-as-you-go fashion.

My supermarket is staffed by a steady crew of male and female teenagers and middle-aged women, all of whom are thoughtful and smarter than their jobs. I wish I were better at easy conversation and that my life weren't constantly paper-clipped with explanations. It's too difficult to keep explaining, so I don't anymore. We still say, "Hello," but there's not much eye contact.

Tonight, I took a deep breath and mentioned I was tired. The very polite young woman who is one of the few left who still tries to tease a smile from my jowls, answered, rather darkly, "at least you're working."

This is technically my 18th year of teaching. And I'm very tired. I'm in a situation to which I am totally unaccustomed and which keeps adding new variables. Yesterday, during a faculty meeting, we watched the short video, "Shift Happens," which makes projections about computers who will be able to outsmart all humans by 2049 and my students needing to work 14 different jobs in their lifetimes. It also talks about the need for students to problem solve. Of late, I've found students unwilling to take on that challenge. Whereas they once seemed interested in being involved in their community, they've grown apathetic. Some of that has to do with being 10-12 and not really knowing how to begin. They still ask how they should begin their essays, sometimes.

When I was their age, I already took ownership of my writing and you COULDN'T tell me how to begin an essay. Yet, I can be as dumbfounded as they are when it comes to problem solving in my own life. At 42, our economy, American greed and Puritanism be damned, is asking me to re-think how to think about myself. I'm not the kind of person to respond well to books about the subject and I intuitively loathe the genre of self-help. I've always found it amusing that Tony Roberts discovered his calling as a guru in that field after failing in others. What I'd rather do is imagine bringing a case to the Supreme Court proving that we are denying our children equal protection of the law by not equalizing the funding of education throughout the country. Do I go to law school? My track record for winning battles is very poor. I can create the argument, but I can't speak it. More often than not, I can't speak, these days.

My own trepidation and my exhaustion necessitates a process of re-invention that is careful and which can be done with some solitude. Of course, my biggest enemy is time.