The NEW AND IMPROVED state test encouragement letter

I could just rewrite my letter from last year.
But I won't.

I shall practice here and then write in my own script.

Dear G,

You will soon take the KPREP as a 4th grader. Hopefully, since you took it as a 3rd grader, you kinda know what to expect and won't stress out about it. 

I know the schools make a big deal about the end-of-year tests, which might make you worry, but don't. Although I want you to do your best, this is one test. While it matters now, it won't matter in two years or five years. 

Taking this test gives me an opportunity to remind you of what is important:

*Giving your best effort at all times, whether it is test-time or not.
*Taking the time to be careful in your work and review it for mistakes.
*Taking care of your body by getting a good night's sleep and eating well.

But there are other VERY important things that this test will never measure:

*Your kindness towards others.
*Your ability to show compassion and helpfulness. 
*Your sense of humor (which I love).

No matter how you do on this test, I love you, and Daddy, N, and M love you. Don't ever forget that.

Love, 
Momma 

Being a feminist role model?

My daughter bought herself this book a few weeks ago.

When we got in the car to come home, she flipped through the text, reading me the names of the women in it. She then said, "I'll put you here."

This is what she showed me:

This made me feel a lot of things:
honored that my teenage daughter thinks so highly of me (because that is NOT how I thought of my own mother when I was that age.)
and
terrified because I think I am the last person on the planet someone should honor as a feminist.

I often worry if I have been a good role model to N of what a woman can be.

I imagine my own mother wondered the same thing.

For my mom, she didn't have a professional career. She worked, but she didn't love it. She wasn't a teacher or lawyer or chemist. From her own childhood, she knew if she had children, she would be at home with them. If she couldn't do that, she wouldn't have children. She went back to work part-time at my grade school after my brother started school but retired when she developed breast cancer at age 58.

My mother influenced me because she wanted me to have the choice of staying home if that was what I wanted. She wanted me to have options if at all possible, but she also made me very aware of limitations. I knew she was not going to raise my children, so I would either have to do it myself or put my trust in other people who were not family. I knew, long before I ever wanted children, that I could not easily do this.

Most of the time, I beat myself up because I am not what I consider a true professional. I am only a half-time anything. A half-time writer. A half-time teacher.

I do not give any one thing 100% of myself because I desire the flexibility of being available for my children if and when they need me. I have always been willing to sacrifice if needed to make that happen. I am fortunate that D has a good job, but when the kids were younger, if his job situation had changed, I would have moved into a smaller home and been a one-car family to make it work. (I would likely go back to teaching full-time if this would happen now since the kids are older, although if we were in dire straits, I'd still move and go to one-car.)

(I am very much aware that many women don't have that option, especially single moms. By the same token, I also think that some of the things we think we can't live without are more wants than needs. I feel like I need to write that so someone doesn't think I'm completely living in an upper middle-class bubble. I am, but I'm also very cognizant of that.)

I suppose, in some ways, what I am showing my daughter is that a woman can sometimes carve out a niche for herself that works for her. She can take graduate classes and be certified and teach part-time and write part-time and volunteer and read books and go to book club and have a mind that is engaged and growing.

This past week I worked at the magazine office to interview various women from different professions (marketing, image consultants, politicians, etc.) After speaking with them, it became very apparent to me how much of a woman being what she wants involves her knowing herself, being true to herself, knowing what she can and cannot live with or without.

For some women, they know that staying at home is not for them. I used to not understand this. Doesn't every woman want to be with their children every day?
Some women don't. They are okay with allowing others to care for their children (of course, wanting that care to be loving and responsible and responsive).
They know what they can live with.

For each woman, that is different.

While I certainly don't consider myself a feminist saint, I think I have shown my daughter that I am a blend of a "traditional" stay-at-home mom and a nontraditional "have a little bit of a lot of the things you like and are good at" mom.

State teachers, stupid things politicians say and do, and my own pension

Even though I am a teacher and in the pension system, my situation is very different from other teachers. This difference has me in a weird position.

When I left teaching to have N, I rolled all of my pension into an IRA because I didn't know what my future plans were. I had 3.5 years of service.

Now that I am back subbing in the district, I am once again in the pension system. However, because I don't substitute a ton, it will take me forever to accrue much money. In two years of subbing, I might have $1300 in my pension at this moment. It's not something I'd want to lose, but its also not something I can live on.

Even if I started teaching full-time today, I would never get a full pension because I don't expect I'll want to teach full-time after age 65, especially since I don't know that I have the energy to teach full-time in my mid-40s.

So I have a personal investment in the pension system, but at this moment, at least, it is not a strong investment.

As a sub, it has been lower-case frustrating to be in the midst of the politics because subs don't get paid if they don't work. I was supposed to sub the Friday before Spring Break, but that got canceled when the district couldn't find enough subs. As much as I support teachers and public education, I would be lying if I said it hasn't ramped up my anxiety to be wondering, "Should I take this job because it might be canceled if there is a sick-out?" or "Will I get dinged for not working enough days if these sick-outs continue?" And there is also the uncomfortable feeling of "I want to support teachers but I would also like to work." It is one of those times where the greater good feels at odds with my own personal good. I have to remember that while my pocketbook is thinking of the short-term, I have to think of the long-term game.

I didn't put any thought into being in a pension when I decided to become a teacher. A pension was not a draw. I had worked full-time and had a 401(k) and contributed to Social Security). My salary actually increased when I became a teacher (which is sad). I became a teacher because I wanted organized chaos and busyness. After I became a teacher, I realized that I really love working with kids.

Being a sub has reminded me of a lot of the work that I had forgotten when I left full-time instruction. I forgot the staff meetings, the team meetings, and the department meetings that teachers put their time and energy into. I forgot the parent/teacher conferences. I forgot the Open Houses for registered students and the Open Houses for prospective teachers. I forgot the sub plans and the recovery from what the subs do with your lessons. I forgot the time crunch of submitting grades. I forgot the SBARC meetings during planning periods. I forgot the modifications for students with IEPs. I forgot the grading that never ends. I forgot the field trip planning; collecting money, getting chaperones, coordinating buses, and everything else that is involved. I forgot about holding detention after school when I wasn't in a staff, team, or department meeting. I forgot the professional development on gold days and during summer before school begins. I forgot about being a staff moderator for an extracurricular activity. I forgot about calling and emailing parents. I forgot so much that full-time teachers do of which the general public isn't cognizant.

This isn't to say that teachers are saints. They are human and flawed. And some teachers should be tossed out on their butts because they undermine their teams or simply aren't good teachers to students. Although I support labor unions, there are some things about unions that aren't so great, and the inability to get rid of ineffective or downright detrimental teachers is one of those things.

And this isn't to say that monies to fund education are always spent in the wisest way. I remember getting money each year to buy supplies for the classroom. I didn't need extra paper or pencils or crayons, but I did need class sets of reading level books for the kids who weren't at grade-level. We couldn't "save up" the money over a couple years, so sometimes grade level teacher colleagues and I would pool our money to buy class sets and share them with each other.

In addition to teachers not being saints, politicians aren't either. They sometimes say and do stupid things.

Don't get me wrong: I say and do stupid things all.the.time.

But I am not a politician under intense media scrutiny. I just interviewed a local politician the other day for a magazine article, and this is one of the things we talked about: how as a political figure, you never get to relax. You are always potentially "on." That has to be difficult.

Still, what has been lost is a basic civility. Even if you don't agree, you can say that in ways that are not antagonizing and insulting. You can disagree while still supporting people's basic rights to peacefully organize. As a writer and a writing teacher, I think about this a lot. You have to have to think about how your audience will read or hear what you are writing or saying. Unfortunately, some of our politicians allow their frustrations to come out of their mouths, further alienating their constituents.

Perhaps those politicians need to come sit in on my class?

Perhaps these politicians need to think of better go-to analogies for what protesting teachers are, rather than thugs or high schoolers wanting a better car?

Reincarnation

I recently read The Forgetting Time by Sharon Guskin and loved it. It is a fictional story of reincarnation, but it is grounded in the work of Jim Tucker and Ian Stephenson. Because I found the novel so compelling, I decided to read Life Before Life: A Scientific Investigation of Children's Memories of Previous Lives.

While I wouldn't say I'm a firm believer in reincarnation, I am a firm believer in possibilities that I cannot understand nor explain. 

Whenever I think about what happens after death, I think about the first law of thermodynamics, that energy is neither created nor destroyed. But I am not a physicist, so my understanding of the laws of physics are preschool-level (and I'm being generous). If you actually look up the first law and reincarnation, you then get sucked into a great mind-numbing debate on discussion boards that makes me wish Neil deGrasse Tyson would apparate and explain it to me in dumb-person language that I can wrap my head around.

As much as I value science and evidence, I also value that there is much that we don't yet know or understand. This is to say that at some point, we may have definitive evidence, but right now we do not. 

I don't need proof, really, because I think it is pretty fun to just ask the questions and wonder.

What is consciousness? 

What is the soul?

Are they the same?

Is there an underlying consciousness that all of our disconnected consciousnesses feed into or come from? And does that mean that there is only one consciousness and we are all just little feeder shoots off of it?

Is that what we call God?

Is memory real and trustable? (I think not)

If reincarnation does happen, what does that mean that the "me" I think of as "me" actually is? 

What does it mean if my consciousness isn't really mine? (And is that "possession" a stupid way to think of it anyway?)

One of the reasons I wonder about reincarnation is because of M and his ear-twiddling, which he continues to do now and has done since he was an infant nursing at my breast.

Is there a gene for ear-twiddling? Is that an actual trait that gets passed along from parent to child?

Because my deceased father-in-law was an ear twiddler. He didn't do it to everyone, but I was one of those people.

And it may be entirely possible that ear-twiddling is actually encoded in DNA, so it makes perfect "logical" sense that M does it.

But if it isn't, then how and why does M do this, especially since his siblings do not and his father does not?

I don't think M is his reincarnated grandfather, but I do wonder if consciousness of some kind is a plane of existence we cannot sense except in weird ways. 

My father-in-law died unexpectedly, and M was an unexpected birth control pill-conception. 

I like to think that his ear-twiddling is my FIL's consciousness reaching out to us, but I have no proof that it is. And if I did have proof that it isn't, that is ok, too. 

I also have what I have always thought is a dream, but maybe it isn't a dream. In this dream or whatever it was, I am conciousness but not corporeal, and I'm not even entirely sure that I am Carrie-consciousness. I have consciousness of being in existence but there is nothing else. Everything is black. 

If it was a dream, I don't know what the point was. 

And if it wasn't a dream, I don't know what the point was.

But I'm ok with either one.