Finding David

Since I’ve been in leadership positions, I’ve learned that there are four ways you can get lucky when it comes to staffing your school.

One is connections:

• You hear from colleagues about good teachers.
• You wait (timing is everything – you learned this working in personnel).
• You phone your staffing consultant, tell him you need a teacher and ask if you can interview so and so.
• Five minutes into the interview you know you want the person and you are antsy as hell waiting for your assistant principal to finish asking his questions so you can offer K the job.

Another is seeing in action:

• You have watched the person when they have been supply teaching in your school.
• You wait (timing is everything – you learned this working in personnel).
• You call your staffing consultant as ask if you can please have M for the maternity leave position that must be filled now.

Yet another is interviewing:

• You call your staffing consultant and ask for candidates.
• You interview the individual and after a few minutes you send him packing when he tells you he doesn’t think he would want to teach at your school because he couldn’t further his career doing so with the kind of kids you have (yes, this is a poor part of the city, but we love our students and know how wonderful they are).
• You call your staffing consultant again, give him a report on the interview, and ask for another applicant.
• You interview and are more than pleased to offer G the job.

And then there is the “given” category:

• You get a call from the superintendent’s office telling you that you can’t advertise the position because they have someone for you.
• You stifle a massive groan and hold your head in your hands as an instant migraine develops and wonder what you could possibly have done to upset the superintendent (You worked in personnel—you  know how these “givens” work).
• You get a call from the giving principal telling you about the individual.
• You know better than to trust this particular giver so you make some calls of your own.

Within a few minutes of meeting the individual and a few days of working with him, you know that someone up there loves you because you now have David, who will prove to be an absolute gem as your new assistant principal.

Wise words from the Indian helped me be a better teacher

They troop into the office, the injured student and his or her gaggle of friends who cluster around the hurt one chattering away. I chase the mother hens out and deal with the injury, be it physical or emotional.

Then I meet the Indian.

Unfortunately, I can’t remember his name or even what he looked like, but what he said is vivid in my mind all these years later.

He was from South Dakota. In Canada we use the terms aboriginal or first nations, but he eschewed those saying, “I don’t understand you, here in Canada. I don’t need fancy words. I’m an Indian.”

And the words that I remember all these years later? They spoke about his philosophy for raising children.

He said that his system was to take the best from Dakota culture, from Jewish culture, from American culture, or any other he came across, and meld them into a way of thinking and acting that benefits children. And what benefits children is what benefits all humans.

Two of his examples loom large in my mind.

The father who got a call from the police saying his son was in jail the very first time he soloed in his father’s car. The father went to the police station and his first words to his son were, “I love you.”

The woman who lay in the hospital bed dying, the members of her family silently watchful in the crowded room—science can measure the medical benefits of the presence of others—don’t isolate the ill.

I went home that night thinking about my own actions and knew I was guilty of missing the boat in some critical instances. When an injured or upset student came to the office accompanied by a gaggle of friends, the first thing I did was chase the friends out and isolate the student. Now, I knew better and I soon found that letting the gaggle stay invariably reduced the stress for the injured student and calmed the situation for everyone, myself included.  

I wish I could remember this wonderful wise man’s name, and the name of his organization. I wish I could write to him to thank him. I can’t do those things, but I can honor him by writing about him as I have done here.

Teacher as Heroine

I have theories about the much maligned teachers and the public’s attitude toward them. Everyone’s been to school. Everyone knows the education system from personal experience—some of those positive, some negative. It’s easy then, to think you know what really goes on, to think you have every right to criticize, to tell teachers what they are doing wrong, and sometimes even what they’re doing right.

As a life-long educator, I’ve experienced the exhilaration of working with teens and the thanks and appreciation of many students and parents. Yes, there were negative moments, some of them brutal, but for the most part my career was a joyous one.

My instinct has always been to promote respect for teachers and the importance of a well-educated population. What better way than to make the heroine of my novels a school principal? Let the teacher meet the alien, have the fun, the adventure, the love affair. Yes, that was definitely the way to go.

And if writing about what you know is the way to go, then you can be assured that the school scenes are authentic. In fact readers who know me say they see me in various parts of my books. Not surprising I guess.

Here’s a school scene from EMBRACED

“Miss D?” Curtis frowned. “You all right?”

Abby nodded. Another lie. She wasn’t all right. One minute enchanted and dreamy, the next trembling in terror. One minute loving the romance and impossibility of it, the next hysterical with the stark fear of tumbling into an insanity from which she would never recover. Curtis handed the pages to Tim and Lyle. She watched the boys hunched over the pages. And now I’m dragging you along with me. Oh Lord, I’ll rot in hell for this. Fortunately the enchantment overrode all else—most of the time. Or would fear be better, give her a way to break out of this black hole she was sinking into? Curtis was still frowning at her.  

“Any luck decoding?” she asked to be polite. That Curtis and his friends might find something was a ludicrous expectation. She wished she’d never involved them. No. That wasn’t true. She was glad she wasn’t alone with the pages.

“Well …” Curtis looked from Lyle to Tim.

Lyle shrugged. Tim tapped the page of code he held in his hand and nodded. “It’s on every page.”

Curtis sighed. “We didn’t want to say anything too soon, but we’re pretty sure the code is a message.”

Teaching in Bamako

Oh my Lord! What had I gotten myself into? I stood at the front of the room facing fifty-four grade nine girls. Three bodies crammed into each desk meant for two. They stared at me solemnly.

I took a deep breath. “Good morning.”

“Good morning, Miss.” The chorus of lilting voices encouraged me, but I was soon to discover that learning English was not high on their list of priorities. Most, sent to the school by some of the wealthier Malian families, were putting in time until husbands were found for them.

Some of the girls lived in Bamako and rode their bikes or walked to school. Out-of-towners boarded in the dorms on the second level of the building.

I rode my mobylette to school and parked it amidst the girls’ bikes under the huge mango trees. At the end of the first morning when I went to retrieve my motorized bike, I found the girls poking at their bicycle seats with sticks.

“Qu’est-ce que vous faites?” I asked.

“Serpents, madame. Il faut toujours faire sortir les serpents.”

I found a sturdy branch on the ground and poked under my bike seat. I wasn’t about to share a ride home with a snake.

The next morning, armed with a few English as a Second Language textbooks that I’d been able to scrounge from the store room, we began language learning in earnest.

Chapter One: Sounds of the City.

“So girls, what are some of the sounds you hear in Bamako?”

“Roosters.”

“Goats.”

“Bicycle bells.”

“Dogs barking.”

I glanced down at the textbook. The lesson referred to machinery, buses, sirens…. However could these young ladies relate to a North American city? I explained as best I could about my city and we did manage to complete the lesson over the next few days, but baffled looks told me I’d lost them.

I turned the page. Chapter Two: The Sahara. I sighed with relief.

The morning of day three of working through that chapter was cold. I had brought a light cotton jacket from Canada and actually had to wear it. The girls, wrapped in what looked like every pagne they owned, shivered and huddled together.

“Mademoiselle, does it get this cold in Canada?”

I checked the thermometer outside the office door. 82F. “Oh, much, much colder.” I drew a rough map on the board to show them where I lived and tried to explain the cold of Alberta winters and the Arctic. As I discussed the Great Canadian North and its inhabitants, I heard snickers and stifled laughter each time I said the word “kayak.”

Finally one of the girls put up her hand. “Miss, that word sounds just like a word in Bambara. A very, very bad word that a lady would never ever use.”

“So girls, let’s see what chapter three is about, shall we?”

Pagne = a rectangle of cloth worn as a skirt with a matching blouse or as a shawl.

Zen Garden

My sister gave me a Zen garden for my desk when I was first appointed principal. It came with a few stones and a rake.

Over the years I added pebbles from the Indian Ocean that I collected when I visited Bali, sand dollars my sister and I found on the beaches in Australia, lovely white rocks from Greece, and a “petrified” peanut—this last a contribution from my granddaughter.

At school, I kept the Zen garden on the corner of my desk next to a box of Kleenex. Both played large roles in my life as a principal—sometimes larger than I would have liked.

The Kleenex mopped up many tears, mostly from students, but sometimes from staff too, including myself. Students came in with runny noses and asked if they could “borrow” a Kleenex. I always said, “No, I don’t want it back when you’re done.” This was followed by a slight pause and then, “Ew, gross!”  

The Zen garden proved therapeutic as my sister had predicted. Students and teachers played with the rake and sand as they unburdened, explained, sought moral support, feedback for their ideas, or whatever else needed to be discussed.

Playing with the garden had a calming effect on children and adults alike, but I noticed a significant difference in how they used the garden.

Teachers picked up the rake and carefully raked around the stones, smoothing the sand and setting the rake back in its original position. Students removed the rake, the rocks, and the sand dollars placing them on the desk. They raked the sand, used both their fingers and the rake to smooth the sand, make patterns of squiggles or ripples, and then replaced everything they had taken out in new arrangements.

The differences in behavior raised serious questions in my mind. What do we lose over the years as we grow from child to adult? What comportment do we adhere to as adults and what dictates the behaviors we follow, behaviors that seem so restricting, if the Zen garden “play” is a valid indicator?

Think about what a child hears over the years. “Don’t do that.” “What will people think?” “Don’t be silly.” “Be good.” “Behave!” “Be good.” “Behave.”

When my son was very young, I asked him how he would add up the numbers one plus two plus three all the way to one hundred. He thought for a moment and then said, “Well one plus ninety-nine equals one hundred and 2 plus ninety-eight equals one hundred….” I don’t remember if he got the total or not, but he certainly had the concept.

Years later when he was in grade ten he came home and said. “Mom, remember when I was little and you asked me how to add one to one hundred? What did I answer?” I told him and asked him why he wanted to know. He said that the math teacher had posed the question and no one in the class could answer. “That’s what school does to us. It takes away our creative thinking.”

Was my son right? Do our education system and societal strictures change us irrevocably as we grow and mature? Assuming the answer is yes, what do we lose, both as individuals and as a society when creativity is crushed?

I watch my four-year-old granddaughter, wearing a blanket secured with a clip—superhero to the rescue. I listen to her retell, in her own inimitable way, the stories I’ve read to her.  I assist her building with Lego, and play customer to her shopkeeper. I dance with her, sing with her, splash water with her…. I admire her clever original thinking and ingenious activity. She’s uninhibited by society’s norms and I envy her.