After yoga, I take a walk through the park and nearby neighborhood, listening to Ann Patchett’s collection of essays, These Precious Days, apt title for my life right now, my morning, this moment. I pass a house with such a vibrant garden of colorful blooms it rivals beds at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in Austin. I don’t stop, don’t take a picture, but I stroll through the perfume of the blossoms.
A few houses down, a vine with purple cone-shaped flowers twines around a decorative lamppost in a front yard. As I go by, one long tendril of vine reaches out—literally lifts and reaches away from the post. I slow and peer. Is it the wind? I don’t feel a breeze. Is there a hummingbird or squirrel playing a trick? I don’t see one. I continue walking, leaving the mystery of the reaching vine unsolved.
I turn right and cross my favorite bridge overlooking a pond bordered by the picturesque backyards of big, beautiful houses. I pause to look over at the turtles—some of them impressively large—floating below, then keep going. Soon I cross paths with two boys carrying fishing poles.
On the next block, I hit my mile and turn around. When I return to the bridge, the boys are there, fishing lines draped over the concrete wall. Cottonwood pollen fills the air, drifting down on street and poles and creek and the blond heads of two boys on a summer adventure. I walk on the other side this time, looking over at the part past the dam where the water now trickles in a shallow creek. Two ducks sit side-by-side beneath me.
It is hot out even though it’s early. I must have cut a corner somewhere because I get back to my car just shy of my two miles. I consider circling the parking lot a time or two but opt for air conditioning instead. I am done walking.
I did not take a picture, did not stop to record notes. This precious day will have to rely on my memory and my words to keep it fresh.
Over the past ten months, I interviewed thirteen teachers about what it’s like working in education today. All of the participants work in public schools in Texas: three in elementary, six in middle school, and four in high school. Each teacher gave honest, thoughtful, often eye-opening, sometimes hilarious insights into the day-to-day life of a teacher. I am grateful to them, not just for taking the time to complete my survey and for sharing the truth of their job with the world, but also for doing this job in the first place, for being there for the kids and showing up despite the many difficulties.
As summer starts and schools shut down and pools reopen, teachers everywhere are heading out into the sunlight for a couple of months. Some will relax and go on exciting vacations and read stacks of books. Some will work a second job to save up some money or try to make ends meet. Some will switch out of teacher mode into parent mode, spending June and July chauffeuring kids to camps and sports or keeping their little ones at home to save money on daycare. Others will spend the summer attending workshops, creating lesson plans, and redesigning their classrooms, looking forward to the school doors opening in August again. Whatever the summer has in store for teachers, I hope it also brings time to breathe and rest and rejuvenate.
Before my thirteen interviewees closed their classroom doors for the year, I asked them one more question. Are you going to teach again next year? Why or why not? Some of their answers surprised me.
Of the thirteen teachers interviewed, eleven will be returning to the classroom next year, although some are headed to different classrooms or different schools. Their reasons for staying vary, but there are a couple of common themes: the love for the kids and a sense of duty. Here are some of their answers about why they will still teach.
Mr. W: “I love teaching and I look forward to leading my floor in the same way that it was led during the best years. I believe it can be done.”
Ms. B: “Someone’s gotta do it, and I’d rather it be someone with genuine love for the kids.”
Mr. L: “This year was awful, but I have to find out if every year in education will be comparable to my first year. If they will be, I have to leave teaching, but the only way to find out if this year was the norm is to hang around for another year!”
Ms. S: “Because I enjoy it. (And someone has to.)”
Ms. C: “Because no one else will and I just can’t not.”
Ms. L: “I enjoy introducing new information to students, watching them learn and grow both academically and socially.”
S.S: “When I think about leaving teaching I feel a little sad. There are many things about teaching I enjoy, especially the students. It’s still a stressful, fast-pased job. More than money, I wish I had more planning time during the day and a teacher aide to help with grades and lab set-up and take-down. I also wish we had more effective ways to help struggling students and those with discipline problems. “
The two teachers who will not be returning to the classroom next year are “Math Teacher” and Ms. A.
Math Teacher‘s main reason for leaving teaching is the STAAR test, Texas’s standardized state assessment. “If I had to just be with my kids and help them fall back in love with LEARNING and actually knowing why, not how, I would stay forever. But the academic demands were already proven to be above grade level material, and on top of that… just trying to help these kids heal. It was too much and I didn’t want to spend the rest of my career boiled down to test results.”
Ms. A‘s reason for leaving is more personal. She and her partner are moving to an area that doesn’t offer her subject in schools, and she wants to be able to travel more, not just in the weeks when school is out.
I wish Math Teacher and Ms. A the best in whatever they choose to do. I know they will be missed and will probably find themselves missing their kids and coworkers, but I’m proud of them for realizing when it was time to move on. And I’m still sending all the love and good vibes to the teachers returning this fall. Thank you again for all you do.
As for me, it’s been a year now since I left the classroom. There are definitely things I miss about the job. Mostly the people. I miss the people. But I know I made the right choice for me. I don’t feel a pull back to that career anymore. I’m enjoying my time writing books and learning how to do this whole self-employed author thing. That doesn’t mean I’m totally done with schools, though. I hope to spend some time this fall doing author visits and teaching writing workshops and talking to kids about ghost stories and poetry and the writing life. So if you know an elementary or middle school teacher or librarian who would like to hire me, let me know or send them a link to my Visits page.
May is a messy month. For teachers and students, it’s the time of year for cleaning out lockers and packing up classrooms. For college graduates, it’s often a season of change– moving in or moving out or moving back home or moving on. And for parents, May might mean the messiness of summer scheduling– camps and vacations and sleepovers and appointments and figuring out who’s going where and when and why.
For writers, the month of May may or may not mean anything major. It doesn’t necessarily mark a pivotal point in the year. But that doesn’t mean we can’t still choose to make a mess.
Up until mid-May, I was busy writing The Ghostly Tales of Delaware (coming this August!) while marketing The Ghostly Tales of Dallas. (Did you catch my interview with Jane McGarry on Good Morning Texas? If not, click on the image below to check out my segment of the show!) When I submitted the Delaware manuscript on May 15th, I suddenly had a little down time before my next deadline. That’s where things got messy. Deliciously, delightfully messy.
First, I spent some time drawing and coloring. Even though it makes my hand hurt, I love sitting and coloring a pattern for hours while listening to an audio book or favorite TV series. My almost-one-year-old kitten helped add to the messiness by stealing my pencil sharpener, then knocking over my jar of colored pencils and batting the jar around the floor. A couple of days later, I traded my colored pencils and paper for acrylic paints and a canvas. This time, I locked the cat out of the room, but I still made plenty of mess myself. When that project was done, I looked around and decided my books were much too tidy.
It had been a few years since I spent a night making book title poems. I’ve gotten a lot of new books since then and have said goodbye to many others. I could tell poems awaited in the new assortment. I started pulling books off shelves. Books and books and books. Piles and piles and piles. I started with the ones I’ve recently acquired, the ones who haven’t had the fun of playing the found poetry game before, books like The Broken Lands by Kate Milford and The Space Between You and Me by Ashley B. Davis and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. I wanted to use as many of the new ones as possible, but I had to pull some of my old standbys too. I mean, Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes and Billy Collins’s Sailing Alone Around the Room are just too perfect for making found poems. When I had a big enough mess, I started seeing what fit together. Here’s what I came up with…
S is for space, the space between you and me. This is not a drill, the worlds we leave behind marooned in realtime, the stars beneath our feet, voices in the air shout a wish in the dark– rebirth tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.
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The Broken Lands Bomb Shelter
The woman in white, the trespasser, the scapegoat, the searcher, the outsiders, the forbiddens, the new kid on the block, a common person… All thirteen inside/ out. The last generation tap dancing on the roof.
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Ancestor approved rules of civility amaze me. The dream stealer writing down the bones, horoscopes for the dead. Other words for home flutter and hum. Smallest leaf, extending the shade, the tree is older than you are.
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The tiny journalist becoming a writer. Interview with the vampire, call and response. The last interview… nighty-nightmare. Still writing the magazine that never dies.
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Little women from the dust returned transfer big magic to kill a mockingbird. Bird by bird, eleven wingbeats in a kingdom of birds, the golden feather sailing alone around the room.
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Poems that live forever fuel our bodies, ourselves like water for chocolate. Call us what we carry– every soul a star.
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Stories for the Dead of Night
The night the scarecrow walked through the woods along Greathouse Road, the house with chicken legs haunted Dallas, her own two feet growing pains, a rattle of bones, the clackity worser off the road.
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I’m not missing, Miss Nelson is missing! Myths and legends rattle the emotion thesaurus. My wicked, wicked ways eclipse the walls around us. Which witch? Something wicked this way comes, a lantern in her hand.
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A thousand mornings in the company of cats spark good poems, good omens, metamorphoses– the arrival the color of magic.
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The strange and beautiful sorrows of Ava Lavender ring the house of leaves. Speak of the devil breaking dawn. Shift the shadow of the wind, dust the picture of Dorian Gray. The lost track of time: faithful place after ever after.
Carie Juettner 