For anyone who loves college basketball (like me), you're aware that March is the month where tournaments of elimination take place getting us to the final four best teams of the season. During March there are games taking place all day every day. It's a true high for those playing and viewing--what we could call the rising action or even climax of this event. It's absolute madness (in a good way)! For any educator, March is also considered madness. Particularly, middle school teachers. It is a long month with no breaks or holidays. Spring is on the brinks and the kids' hormones are ripe and ready to explode. We're so close to the end, yet not so close that we can shut down...Rather, the reality is there is TONS left in the curriculum to be taught and you're trying to overcome the burnout. And, Spring Break couldn't come soon enough.
My reality comes in seeing an eighth grade girl who is raising herself and is addicted to any drug that will make her forget the problems of life. I am faced with another eighth grader who has just come to our school, is African American, and is freaked out by the cultural differences. Her comfort is in going bad rather than seeing the fresh new start her parents desired to provide her. Now, I am working with a teacher who wants to press charges on her for reasons I can't fully support. A seventh grader that I mentor chooses to hang out late at night and get involved in drama to avoid her home where her mom doesn't exist for always working and her step father stays drunk. I stare at another one of my mentees who hasn't been to a Saturday session in three weeks because he was suspended yet again and still doesn't get where he went wrong. I am battling parents that can't handle their children, but I can't keep the seventh grader in school who is selling cigarettes to his peers at a slightly high rate than what it would be in the stores. I can't encourage the student who is a black male statistic--a whole 3 grade levels behind--refusing to do the work given to him. Not because he doesn't want to do it, but because he doesn't know how and there is no one at home to help him...With every fight that occurs, parents want to defend their children arguing it was in self defense and demand justice. Students are sent to the office for gum chewing, back talking, or skipping; somehow the teachers who sent them don't understand they've now given the children what they want: time out of the classroom. Meanwhile, the teachers of these students are frustrated and feel no support. They battle with the bad blueberries that are tainting the good fruit, making everything go bad.
So, today, March 9, 2008, my March Madness is put into perspective and all is restored even if an hour was lost due to Daylight Savings! What I understand to be true is putting my hands in it will not force the situations mentioned above to get resolved or better. What I know to be true is every situation I have handed over to God has had its own resolution in due season. What I understand to be true is I affect my environment; it doesn't affect me...My supervisor sent me a powerful, encouraging message this morning that gave the analogy of ice cream. Whatever you add to it, your focus is on the cream, not the nuts, sprinkles, fruit, etc. Those added things are just that: added. The truth of the matter is, I am the cream and need to act like it. I work in an environment that truly does have a top down method despite its efforts to work horizontally in team/collaborative methodologies. We set the tone or flavor for all the added "stuff" people like to throw in the mix--good and bad. I remember why I am there and what my purpose happens to be, and I get excited about all the possibilities of what could and should be.
On Friday of this past week, I had the opportunity to meet two awesome Black women in education. Kay Toliver is a retired math teacher from the Harlem, New York Public Schools. She now goes around giving inspirational presentations to educators on having positive learning encounters. She reminded us to get back to the basics, have some humor and fun in the classroom, and live by the C's: caring, connecting, communicating, courage, compassion, conviction, and commitment. Dr. Donna Ford came with the force, pounding us with the hard data of our nation and schools. Her passion and love for advocating the need to become culturally awake to minority students was inspiring and timely. One day I will be her!
Even bigger, though, is putting life into perspective. As I traveled home from church and rounded the ramp to get onto the interstate I saw a goose that was just standing isolated and lost. I wondered to myself, How did you get there? When I got closer, I then saw the dead goose that just lay there next to this goose. Oddly, I felt pain and sadness. The goose would not fly away; it was likley waiting for a flock to come that it could join. Every day of our lives is a day closer to our end, but we complain and focus on the work rather than enjoying the energy, gifts, and time we've been blessed and purposed with to get the work done. I don't ever want to be accused of not waking up and living for the day...Today I am embracing March Madness, not just the basketball tournament but this game called life.
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