The Truth about Teaching

After 45 minutes of agony with my 8th graders, I walk next door into Peter's classroom to return the English-Hungarian dictionary that I borrowed.

"Was everything okay?" he asks.

Usually I lie, or downplay, but today I don't even smile.  "No."

"I thought so."

......

It is my first day back to school after a week of sick leave.

Maybe this is why I have less patience than usual.

Or maybe, it was Norbi, who hoisted his chair, ready to throw it at Tamás.

It's a good thing I am paid to run intervention.

Some days, I teach.

Other days, I swear under my breath and fantasize about throwing them out the window.

I could lasso them, I think, bundle them all together.

But that would take the pleasure out of tossing them one by one...

......

My voice is hoarse, and not just from yelling at children.  I am recovering from a throat infection, from days of being so sick I didn't leave my bed.  After doctor visits in broken English and hungry hours (2 of them, while I was fasting for my labwork) of waiting to give my blood and urine, I was diagnosed with a UTI.

Have you ever had one?

Don't do it.

It feels like (and pardon the imagery, but there is really no other way to put this) a dagger shoved up there.

If you have to do it, keep a couple of things in mind.  Don't schedule it at the same time as your menstrual cycle.  And do yourself a favor -- get up early enough to take the bus to work.  Or walk.  Yeah, do that.  Whatever you do, don't ride your bike.

It feels like a lot of things, none of them good.

......

Earlier in the day, I saw Peter in the teacher's lounge.  "Have you given the students grades?" he asked me.

At most of my schools, I give the students monthly grades and this factors into their overall grades for English.  At this school, on my first day, Peter told me that I could give them grades if I wanted to, but that I didn't need to.  I didn't give them grades.  I have never given them grades.

Today, however, four weeks before school is out for the summer, I am asked to give them grades.

Can this be reason #3149 that my job is really hard?

That, and I was never given an official class roster for any of my classes.  Which means I don't know my student's full names.  Do you know how many Balazs' go to this school, only a couple of whom I teach?  Lots.  So how exactly am I supposed to give them grades?  Beats me, but apparently Peter is confident I'll figure it out.

Oh!  And can reason #3150 be that I teach a total of 198 (one-hundred and ninety-eight!!!!) students split between 4 (four!!!!) schools?

Thanks.

......


Quick!  I need summer!  And quite possibly shock therapy.

Eötvös Graduation: If You Want To Sing Out

Kathryn and I were invited to perform at the "School Leaving Ceremony" (Graduation) at Eötvös last Saturday.  Pisti, my Hungarian friend/co-worker/tutor, asked if I would sing for the graduation ceremony.  Their first choice was Without You (that poppy gem by David Guetta and Usher), but shock of shocks, I declined that offer.  It's not really in my range...

After much debate, Kathryn and I decided to play a cover of Cat Steven's "If You Want to Sing Out, Sing Out."  

Wanna see the video?

There you go.

And here are some photos.

Congratulations, graduates.


My brother is graduating this weekend.  I wish I could be there, balloon phobia and all.  Stings like a bee.  Love you Steven.

Open Now: A New Song (with video!)

I wrote this song in the wintertime.  It is called (at the moment) Open Now.

This is a really rough recording, imperfect and raw.

Lyrics:

Open Now

Will you look how it's all opened up since you stopped squeezin'

And grace moves through you on the path where sorrow's been heavy breathing

You say my eyes and heart were closed when I washed up here, when I washed up here

Well I'm all out of bravery, fresh out of strength

And what was once so strong and hard is cardboard in the rain

Labor pains I'm about to give birth to something

Call the doctor, call up to god, c'mon people get ready

Cause I am open now

Come out wherever you are

I am open now, now, now

Come out wherever you are

And grief it is a heavy thing

Don't know if I can hold it

And pain's been knocking persistently

but I've ignored it

And now it's called for back-up and it's knocking down my door

I'm un-hinged, wide open, feeling insecure

Cause I am open now,

come in whoever you are.

I am open now, now, now

come in whoever you are.

A Visit to Visegrad

So I took off for Visegrad yesterday.  The Danube, like many things in life, is strikingly beautiful when the sun hits it, and muddy upon further inspection.

I took a ferry across the river and into Visegrad, which is a charming town that winds with the river.

There is a castle at the top of the hill, but I only had ballet flats, thanks to rule # 2361 when travelling: don't be too prepared.  Normally, I am not much for rules, but I follow this one to a T.  No way were those puppies making it up the hill.

Look at this rusty green-capped building!

Pisti, whose qualifications include film afficianado, Hungarian literature teacher at the gimnazium, and my Hungarian tutor, took the same train as I did to Budapest.  Thank goodness (or really, just thank Pisti), because I didn't really know where I was going.  No big surprise there -- this is my usual state.

Dragon cloud about to chomp down on the moon!

I am tree, hear me roar!  Or at least, look at my scowl. 

Now that you've seen dragon cloud and grumpy tree, let's move onto the main event in my Visegrad stay: the jazz festival.

I saw a local flyer for a jazz festival, with a free show in the park, and I was stoked.  My usual self/universe-congratulatory dialogue started: "Wow, my life is so great!  This kind of thing is always happening to me!  A jazz festival on the day I am in Visegrad?  Shucks!"



I walked the path along the river, strolling past families splashing in the water and 2,000 too many couples sating their appetites for love (a.k.a sucking face; PDA is pandemic in Hungary) on picnic blankets, and that's when I heard it.

I would know it anywhere, and you would too.

.

.

.

.

.

You Can Leave Your Hat On


It totally makes sense that they played this song, this jazz classic, because hello! we're at a jazz festival.

Oh my god, Hungary, you make no sense!!

!!!!!!!!!


Let me set the scene for you.  I was too entranced (or maybe dumbfounded) to take pictures.

We are in a "park" which is really just a patch of green grass.  About 20 white plastic lawn chairs sit in front of the stage, and around 10 vendors are selling clothes, pottery, and sausages.

On stage, a guy who can only be described as "beefy" wears a black Harley Davidson t-shirt that hugs his mound of a belly, and a rock-star grimace.  He thrusts his white handkerchief in the air before using it to wipe his forehead just above his glasses.  He is trying to be Eddie Vedder, and it is not a success.  To back him up, we have Bandanna-Man, a guy with long sandy brown hair covered with a black bandanna.  He wears camouflage cargo shorts and his head rocks up and down as he stands in the power stance.  He could be 14 years old, playing air guitar in his living room, and I kind of wish he was.  Apparently, so does everyone else, because the applause is pitiful.

The drummer and bassist complete the band both musically and aesthetically.  The drummer has impressive 70s-style-hair: long sun-blonde curls (I smell a perm) and the bassist is clearly the most bad-ass of them all.  A shaved head, AC/DC shirt, and tattooed sleeves.  They cover classic rock songs with gusto.

Where am I again?  In Hungary, right?  At a jazz festival?

Suddenly I am not too sure.

But either way, I'm amused.

I was positively charmed by these hillside houses. 

I walked through the town to a local cemetery.  Two women tend gravestone flowers.  Teal plastic watering cans hang by their elbows, next to a hose.  Jo napot kivanok, a woman smiles to me.  I do the same.  I am looking at all of the names and the dates, overgrown flowers pushing their way to the sun.

What I am really thinking about is the Holocaust, about all of the names and dates we don't know.  I have been reading Auschwitz: A New History by Laurence Rees, and I am queasy as I walk through the cemetery.

I wonder whose flowers she is tending.



I heard a story on NPR about a woman in Maine who goes to the cemetery to scrub grave stones, the shock green and black of lichen disguising the names.  She spends hours each day scrubbing.  At the time of the interview, she had cleaned over 1,000 gravestones.  I wonder who will kneel in front of her grave, scrubbing.

Teaching: Ranting, Raving, Cute Pictures, and a Video guaranteed to make you smile

Yesterday, if you had asked me about teaching (or even if you hadn't -- sorry Kathryn), I would have been ranting.  I was sweaty and seething after a day at the high school, just wrecked.  I taught five classes in a row, and it was just one of those days.  The whining was incessant.  The kids couldn't even be quiet during a movie.  In one class, instead of watching the movie, kids played mah jong and some kind of shoot-em-up game on the computers.  The violent tapping of keys and idiotic teenage chuckling was really getting to me, not to mention the talking.  Okay, if we are having a lesson and kids are bored, they start talking, I get it.  But this was a movie.  A movie.  Can't they at least sit quietly through a movie?  Shouldn't they be grateful I am showing them a movie?  

I went up to one of my kids, putting a hand on his shoulder: "A.  This is the only time I am going to ask you to do nothing the whole class.  Can't you do that?"  He couldn't.

...

After my tenth grade class, a student stayed in with me to show me a short video clip.  A 12th-grader in the hallway saw me in the classroom.  We often chat in the hall.  He has been known to say cute things such as "If I had your shoes, I would do the same."  [referring to my living and teaching in Hungary.]  Okay, so that is the only cute thing he has said, but it was pretty damned cute.

So, I saw him in the hallway and he called out to me: "She's crazy!" meaning the girl in the class with me.  The girl who could hear him.

I walked outside of the door.  He was grinning like an idiot.  Okay, that sounds mean to write, but it's an expression so you can picture this grin plastered on his face, right?  Anyway.  "Don't be a dick," I said to him, and shut the door.

...

On the bright side, I saw one of my tenth graders in the hallway and asked how his day was going.  "Sucky," he said.  He's one of the few students I talk to honestly about my hard days, and I told him my students were being buttheads.  He thought I meant that I anticipated that his class was going to be difficult.  "I will bring the energy," he told me.

True to his words, he walked in and said, "Hi Jess!  What's crackalackin?"

Oh I was so grateful.

But on a whole, my day was tough, and it got to me, as it does 75% of the time (and that might be a generous figure).  I was so frustrated with my students, with the Hungarian education system, with how out of the loop I feel, with the lack of communicated, the lack of motivation, the "joke" that my job sometimes feels like.

...

Today, on the other hand, after five classes in a row at the primary school, I love teaching.  

I am consistently, amidst my moments where I am saying to myself "Jump ship! Jump ship!" or muttering not-so-kind words under my breath, having small moments where I do silent fist-pumps and say to myself, "Yessss!  You kick ass!  You are a real teacher!"

Like this one:

7th grade class: B is working with D.  D is going to dictate sentences, from memory, to B.  B says: "This will be terrible.  D has a slow brain. He can not do it.  He will not know the words and he will have problem."  He has a smile on his face; he knows he is being a jerk.  "B," I say to him kindly and firmly, "if he has trouble, you will help him, because you are a helping kind of guy," and I walk away.  

I know he is helpful, and I know he is not cruel.  He has the potential to be kind and helpful.  It feels good to remind him of this.  To expect this from him.

Here are some peeks of the lessons this week.  One of the many perks of living with Kathryn is that we can share lesson plans.  She had the ingenious idea to do a lesson on taste, and this has been very popular with my 5th, 6th, and 7th graders.

First, we learn taste words in English and Hungarian.  

 Then, I introduce a food (we tasted dark chocolate, gummy bears, granola bars, wasabi peas, sour candy, pretzels, and cranberries) and the kids guess what it will taste like.

Next, we close our eyes and taste the food.  This is Milan's thinking pose.

 About to taste yummy gummy bears.

Laura is not sleeping.  She is in dark chocolate heaven.

I asked them to let the dark chocolate melt on their tongue.  After a moment, I told them they could chew the chocolate.  "No!" Laura cried out, her eyes still closed, savoring it.

After they guessed, and tasted the food, they wrote down what the food actually tasted like.

...

In one of my favorite seventh grade classes, we did a lesson about the post office today.  Here is a video of a post office role-play.  But before the video, I have to share this with you:

We were brainstorming about the post office, and I asked them: "Who works at the post office?"

"Post officers!"

...

transcript:

B: Hello.

R: I want some postcards.

B: Here is some. Choose one.

R: It's all ugly. Please give me some more nice.

B: Here that's all our postcards.

R: I want this one.

B: Okay, that's 1 pound.

B: Are you serious?

R: Yes.

B: 1 pound??

R: 1 pound.

B: I don't give it to you until you don't pay it.

R: Give it, please.  I will pay it.  I promise.

B: You promise?

R: I promise.

B: Are you serious?

R: I, I serious.

[Jess - call he police!]

B- Hi police.  He steal postcard from me.  ... Oh!  No, he is back.  He is going to pay.  

R: Here it is.  My invisible money.

B: Oh thank you.  It's a new technology.

Füvészkert Szeged - an afternoon at the botanical garden

I have been itching to be in nature, so I decided to find somewhere green to go this weekend.  Szeged, though a beautiful city, is still a city.  Perhaps I am spoiled.  I did grow up in a forest, the creek chattering by our house, the river across the street, and the ocean only four miles down the road.  Then I lived on an avocado ranch, mountains tan and covered in rich green trees.  Okay, not perhaps -- I am definitely spoiled.

I asked Sándor, a co-worker at the high school, for recommendations about somewhere close I could go.  He recommended a field, or Szeged's botanical garden.  Well, I didn't have much desire to see the field, so I decided to go to the garden.

In perfect synchronicity, a friend of mine from yoga, Róbi, invited me to the botanical garden this weekend.  The weather forecast says rain, he wrote to me, but I will go anyway.  I like shiny things!

This made me smile.  It was a damp and earthy morning, the ground slicked with last night's rain.  Shiny things awaited us.

Light rain fell in a hush as we biked through town; over the bridge and out of the city.  I was so excited to see trees and fields and a pond and sheep and spring flowers blooming in front of cute houses.  I nearly crashed several times.  

But I made it to the garden alive, and it was just what I needed.  I could breathe again.

                            

When I saw this woman, naked in her joy, I knew we needed to walk along this pond.  I saw a turtle paddling slowly with his (or her) small turtley feet.  Plop!s in the water were frogs jumping from the reeds into the pond.  I didn't see any, but Róbi saw one.  "What was it like?" I asked him.  "Like a frog," he said.

Wind sighed on the water's surface and the trees shimmered.  I was entranced.  

"Look!" I told Róbi, after I took this picture.  "The water looks like sky!"  

... "It is the sky.  You took a picture of the water."

Maybe I was getting too much oxygen.

While I was busy taking a picture of these blossoms, Róbi said to me, "Use your other sense!"

It took me a second, but I realized he meant for me to smell the flowers.

In the greenhouse tour, we saw a vanilla plant.  I sniffed the leaves.  "No smell," I whispered to him.  He smiled, whispering back, "Bite it!"

This is a fence to keep you from crossing the stream.  I wonder what's on the other side.

We took a tour of the greenhouses, which smelled warm and old, like home.

The whole visit was like being home.  When we saw deer in the meadow, when I walked on dewy grass, when I looked into the pond and saw trees -- I was in Oregon.  The greenhouse, warm and tropical, was California, the avocado ranch.  It ached in the best possible way.  

We left the path to wander through the meadow.  We saw deer, we sat on a bench made from a tree trunk (thank you, tree), and we used more senses.  I found seed pods on the ground, and opened one.  Orange mush slimed my fingers, but the seed was brown and smooth.  "It smells like something!"  I told Róbi definitively.  Nothing had ever been truer.  ;)  "Don't taste it," he told me.  "I won't!"  and then . . . "It smells like papaya."


He carried the seed in his long fingers as we walked.

These pictures can't bring you the sounds of the gardens.  Our feet -- on wooden walkways, sucking mud, wet in the grass.  The water, the sweet back-and-forth of it, the plop!s of creatures cherry-bombing, the slow wiggle of fish.  And the music, a song so full and tender I closed my eyes to hear it, of the many birds above.

Oh My Watery Heart, or Waiting for the Spring

The snow has melted, and the trees are tender bursts of blossoms now.  Spring is here, but for awhile my body and spirit hadn't caught up.  I was stuck in the dead and cold of winter.

I think I was trapped under the ice, drowning in my own waters, my rapid breath fogging the glass.

I couldn't see or swim my way out.

So I did a little experiment.

I just sat in it, in the water, alternately breathing and crying and holding my breath.

This is what I discovered: being depressed is like holding your breath -- nothing gets out or in.  Nothing gets released, everything sinks.

I was sinking for awhile there.  Honey-mud.  In some moments the light would come through, but mostly I kicked my feet around in the reeds and stirred up too much dirt to see anything.  I found out: I am perfectly capable of muddying my own water.  I found out: I am perfectly capable of sitting still.  For a second or two.

In real life I don't like opening my eyes underwater.

It turns out that, metaphorically, the same is true.

I don't want to see the cold and feel how dark it is, but the truth of it is right there, in the water, surrounding me, seeping in through all the holes, prickling my skin and bubbling into my ears.

This time I stayed in the water, in the icy ice.  My eyes filled up with it.  My heart, though submerged, was still thick with ice, making unnerving pop rocks kpow!s and crackles.  My heart, the arctic, threatened to give, to break, under the smallest of steps, the tiniest of touches.

Still I trusted the sun would do its work and that eventually light would coax the ice back into water, each drop bringing me closer to freedom.

Easter arrived and I switched metaphors.  I was cave-living.  Or, dead in a cave, more like it.  Me and Jesus.

I couldn't move, or breathe, or find any sliver of joy.

The moon swole up like it couldn't wait to give birth, and I took those labor pains on as my own.

Rumi says: Listen!  All the awakened ones, like trusted midwives, are saying, welcome this pain.  It opens the dark passage of grace.

I tried to listen.  I was still and heavy and weighted as I waited.

Lately the light has been getting in.

Maybe it's been there all along, like a switch I've been fumbling for, batting at plaster, feeling for it.

At yoga tonight I felt waves of love.  I was undulating.  I pulsed.  I also involuntarily arched my back and belly up towards the sky and opened my mouth for a big cat yowl but only breath and then small small sound came out.  I could feel the black from the depths of me, releasing.  I could feel the dark passage of grace.

I breathed into the grace, I breathed into the dark and deep of me.  My eyes were closed, but I could feel another pair of lids opening to the light, that sweet light that bathed me, that I could feel shining into me, illuminating the darkest of hiding spaces.

It was the sun, shocking the ice back into little drops.

It was me in the water, calm and not fighting, sunken and sitting lotus-flower in the mud.

I knew in my body, from this deep place, that the pulses of light and dark I was feeling could co-exist, co-arise.  It was perfect.  Whatever I was feeling was perfect.  The waters, finally, were moving.

I was alive.

I am alive.

This is what I told Viktor, who asked me how I was feeling after he held me like a baby, his arms cradling me, my head nestled on the thump of his heart.

"I am alive!"

"This is good," Viktor said.

It is.  But it is more than that.  It is everything.  To be alive, to be in the water, is everything.

I breathed and felt his heart, the gentle knock of it, and my heart, warmed from springtime, warmed from the heat of my breath, burst.  In one moment, bud to blossom.