The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. This is not the beginning of a funeral oration. In this case, the “Lord” I have in mind is also all-powerful, but her name is technology. I’ve been beside myself for the last couple of days because my computer monitor died, and my attempts to replace it kept failing.
I’ll tell the story of that failure in a minute, but first I need to explain why the tech failure has been so upsetting. My routine for almost five years now has been to post the week’s blog entry on Facebook every Monday morning. By then, it has been marinating among my Word documents since it was drafted earlier in the week. But the very technological tools which have enabled me to share my thoughts with a small, but reliable audience silenced me.
I had enough perspective to know that I would eventually solve the problem, allowing my modest words to flow into the ether, but the temporary roadblock underscored for me how much I’ve come to lean on the blog as my raison d’être. Without it, I am inert and invisible. Through my whole working life, I’ve been a practitioner of one sort or another. As a teacher, school director and teacher educator, my identity was linked to the need to show up every day and complete certain tasks needed to keep the machinery running. The weekly posting is now the stand-in for exercising all those qualities of reliability and consistency that were my professional trademark.
In any case, I’m back now and ready to talk about issues of greater import than my damned computer. It’s not surprising that at this stage in our lives, both Rosellen and I are spending a good deal of time looking back at how our personal and professional lives have unfolded. In Rosellen’s case, that involves flipping through piles of correspondence, reviews, drafts, manuscripts in preparation for seeking an archival home for them. The process wavers between tedious and uplifting. Her early to mid-career brought her great acclaim – frequent publication and terrific reviews; invitations to do readings, attend conferences, judge competitions; receiving prestigious awards.
Then followed a long quiet period, capped by a modest rally and return to the public eye. Fame is a cruel mistress. Unless she is fed regularly, she ghosts you, renders you invisible, causing irreparable damage to the ego. So, for Rosellen, revisiting that earlier period of her life has been therapeutic, offering vitalizing reminders of who she was and how she was viewed. That in itself justifies the tedium of wading through those piles of boxes which may or may not be of interest to some as yet unidentified archivist.
For me there’s no archive that awaits the flotsam of my long years as a teacher and teacher educator. The only exception is my work during the ‘60s in Mississippi – a unique confluence of my personal trajectory and a significant historical moment. The documents from that period already sit in the archives of the Wisconsin Historical Society, which, for reasons unknown to me, is the repository for a large collection of materials about the history of the Civil Rights movement in Mississippi.
Beyond that, there are few homes for the records of the slow slog of educational practitioners, so digging through my journals and correspondence serve as their own rewards in an area where external rewards that parallel those in Rosellen’s literary world are scarce. Let me give you a few examples from the most recent dive into my professional past.
Here’s a folder overflowing with thank you cards. Some are the kind of obligatory notes one receives when you move on from a job. But the others are reminders of small acts of kindness – someone whom you’ve connected to another person or a resource that has propelled them in a life-changing direction; someone to whom you’ve been thoughtful at a difficult moment in their lives; someone who is grateful for your acknowledgement of their good work which has gone unnoticed in the past.
Perhaps the most consequential artifact in my current dig is the journal of a teaching year in a Houston high school at the beginning of the ‘90s. This was my second try at maintaining such a journal. My first try became the manuscript documenting an earlier year at the same school which no publisher showed much interest in, though pieces of it became part of my book Chasing Hellhounds, so the effort was not for nought. This second journal, which I don’t believe I’ve ever revisited before, was purely for my own need to reflect on my work as a teacher in the absence of any professional community to support me.
A little context. Jones HS was a neighborhood school in a predominantly Black low-income neighborhood. It was unusual because in addition to the program that served the local students who were zoned to it, it also housed a “gifted” program that drew students, including the only white faces in the building, from across the city. I loved my so-called gifted students, many of whom were eager and open to what I had to offer, but I wanted all students to have access to this kind of stimulation. So, that year, I offered to do two things that were unprecedented – teach a class of “regular” students and invite some of those students to join the “gifted” students in my creative writing class.
Among the many paths these journal entries followed, it was the theme of how this experiment worked out that I found myself drawn to. Over the years, I’ve come to remember the effort with pride and with a measure of self-congratulation. Reading these entries reminded me of how difficult the work was and how infrequently it met with success. The neighborhood students didn’t show up regularly, so on many days, the attendance was only 60-70%. Of those, the majority didn’t complete homework assignments, which forced me to adapt my lesson plans to account for that reality. Still, by the end of the year, there were tiny glints of progress.
I’ve always railed against the popular narratives of superhero teachers, who willed their resistant students into being inspired and motivated readers and writers. Reading these journals reminded me of how hard and often unrewarding the work was. I take some pride in the fact that this class was always respectful and almost never presented disciplinary problems. That was its own kind of achievement, though not the one I most aspired to.
I’m not sure anyone else will ever read this journal, but it’s been its own reward for me. It comes at a moment when teachers are reaping the harvest of Tim Walz’s rare elevation of them in the public eye. Just as Rosellen is renewing her own sense of pride in her accomplishments as a writer, my current excursion into the past is doing the same for my long hours and years in the classroom.
