Over the years she often sewed her children’s clothes, a practical and financially sensible decision despite amounting to abject torture in middle school hallways. But it’s the tie that has become immortal in my mind. The tie was a simple ask, a requirement for speech team meets, plain and easy enough to pick up second hand, but Anita would not be paying for something she could easily make herself. She had no patience for things that she felt were unnecessarily fancy or complicated, and to her mind, the interfacing between the tie and the liner was pointless. Actually, giving it some thought, the lining itself seemed unnecessary too. And thus was born, the most flaccid, shapeless, and wrinkly tie ever to grace the neck of a member of the Prague High School Competitive Speech Team.

I deeply wish I had a photograph of this tie to share with you, but I do not. Instead, I trust you to imagine a sharply intelligent, slightly round adolescent, painstakingly applying his tie-tying skills, only to result in a knot so formless and tight it more closely resembled an abandoned friendship bracelet than a standard half-Windsor.

I think about the absent lining and interfacing often. How, despite the obvious function of these components, Anita so boldly scrapped them from the design. To me, it always seemed reckless and shortsighted. But here I am, hanging by a thread because I haven’t been to physical therapy in months and it’s been even longer since I’ve published an essay.

This spring, my parents moved and my husband got sick. I’ll spare the details of his illness because it is impossible not to google it and even more impossible to unsee the search results. He’s on the mend now, though. He’s doing everything right, taking impeccable care of himself, and checking in with his docs often. And my folks are also just about over the finish line with all of the negotiations, packing, and closings that come with downsizing. But for my little family, it took a life-threatening illness for my husband and me to pause and take stock of the little things we had let slide because they seemed superfluous.

When my world collapses, I look for some part of it that I can control, usually work, and go all in. When Blake came home from the hospital, I had a lot of catching up to do at work and threw myself into it. On the surface, I was back. Papers were getting graded, emails answered, lessons planned. But I was staying at work until six in the evening. Blake was left to manage household responsibilities and parenting solo for hours in the afternoons. I’m lucky to be in a marriage that can weather this sort of thing -we’ve seen one another through professional opportunities, the loss of both of his parents, my master’s degree, a decade of IVF, and parenting a middle schooler. We are resilient. Except, without a purpose beyond the struggle, our family was descending into a shapelessness much more tragic than Anita’s tie.

The thing about families -and ties- is that we must invest in the sustaining structure, even if it seems no one will ever see it. To that end, I’ve been writing a little. Journaling daily, participating in workshops, writing little poems, composing letters of recommendation. I’ve pushed myself to make art, silly things, tiny linocut stamps and graffiti art birthday cards. But slowly, these practices are bringing me back to life. The small moments of human expression give me the stability I lost this spring and that I had been seeking in long days at work. The opportunity to work through frustration and disappointment creatively, to examine my problems with the goal of expression, and not resolution feels like a long exhale before tackling the next hard thing.

We are living in a time and place when every day seems like it will end up in a social studies textbook fifteen years hence, and despite how isolating that may feel, we are not alone in this critical moment. We find one another through expression and engagement, not retreat. I’m drawn to Anita’s approach to labor and care because of its radical morality: skeptical of excess and appearance, she unsentimentally created pieces that were consistently practical, durable, and frugal. What appeared to be “eyeballed” was, in actuality, cut with precision born of experience.

I can make the argument that Anita’s tie was simply a comical oversight, but that would be to paint an incomplete picture. Toward the end of her life, she had a little sewing business called Seams Right -a tongue-in-cheek nod to her propensity for eyeballing and winging it, and (usually) arriving at a garment that would come together in the end. But to know Anita is to know that there was nothing truly haphazard about the pieces that mattered to her. She understood textiles in a deeply personal and totally unique way. Without a lot of money to throw at important projects, Anita would dumpster dive at the Carhart factory for fabric offcuts and zippers. The men in her family were never “tie” people, so she didn’t care about the tie. But clothing that made sense to her, pieces that were deeply useful, that kept children warm and workers safe on the job site, those pieces were indestructible.

I used to think I was indestructible too. I believed that what mattered was getting the job done, not how I held together while doing it. I’ve learned the hard way that I need the interfacing. I need the lining. I need the daily struggle for expression because it keeps me human. The lining isn’t about indulgence. It’s about form. About being able to carry weight with some grace. About recognizing that care, especially invisible care, is not the enemy of strength but the condition of it.

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All my thanks to the man who, even in his dreams, where physics and reality don’t matter, still lost a quick draw to Anita. She raised you in the way only a woman like her could …and the world’s a better place as a result. If she was here, I’d thank her too.

This is how it’s supposed to work. And it’s how it did work.

As parents, my partner and I are responsible for picking up at the point where the school leaves off. We instill values and guide our child through difficult decisions. Our child knew that using inappropriate language on his school Chromebook might result in consequences. He also knew that it is wrong to not call out racism and homophobia when he sees it. He made a choice and accepted the outcome. And to be fair, he also knew he could call out the bigotry without cussing, but he’s a middle schooler and pushing boundaries is kinda par for the course at that age. As parents we opted to overlook the boundary pushing in favor of celebrating the courage it takes to speak up to friends who are making mistakes. So we spent the evening on Mars with Matt Damon eating ice cream -and I really only regret one choice.

Because I’m proud of my community, our schools, and above all, my son, I shared the moment as a note here on Substack.

The outpouring of love and support has been endearing and more than a little surprising. As I draft this essay, my little social justice warrior is reading your comments and “liking” those that suggest he should get more ice cream. Still, even the positive reaction feels extreme. Is this top tier parenting? Eh… I dunno. Parenting has a way of immediately humbling you the moment you deign to celebrate a win. Tomorrow I’ll be late to pick him up for band and I’ll have to surrender my mother of the year crown.

But the part of this story that worries me is the anger directed at the school administrators and desire to see the other children punished. In over two decades in the classroom, what I’ve learned is that adolescents often feel like they’re being singled out. It’s the most common complaint I hear when addressing problematic behaviors -from students and from their families. But I’ve learned to take this complaint as a powerful compliment because it tells me that I’ve been discreet enough in my discipline of others that the complaining child is completely oblivious to my interventions with their peers. I call this a win for privacy, especially among adolescents who are forever making silly mistakes and putting their proverbial feet in their mouths. They deserve the opportunity to learn and adjust course.

I probably should have anticipated the outcry I observed from supportive strangers eager for reassurance that the school is taking appropriate action against the real problem: whoever was spouting the bigoted content to begin with.

Here’s the thing though, it’s none of my business. Legally, I’m not entitled to know how someone else’s child is being punished. Ethically, my job as a parent is to focus on my own child. Personally, I trust the principals to do their job without my inexpert oversight. Public education is a tough gig right now, and more than ever before, we need to remember that we’re all on the same side. We all want to get through the school day safely and help our kids navigate the complicated world we’ve created for them.

So what about the kids spouting off hateful rhetoric? They’re kids. I don’t know where they picked up the language or ideology driving their contributions to the email thread -it’s possible they’ve picked it up at home, or from one another, or from listening to sound bites from elected officials. But the science is clear, adolescence is a time of pushing away from parents and other authority figures in favor of building relationships with peers. At this stage of development, to be called in by a friend is often a much more impactful consequence than anything the school has to offer. That the children have been able to learn from one another and move on -mine has already abandoned the comment section in favor of Minecraft with some of the other email writers- tells me that nature is plodding along as always. The kids are, as the saying goes, alright.

I know I’m completely biased -I love public education, I’ve got a rad son, and as a teacher I think teens and preteens are awesome. But for all those same reasons, I am acutely attentive to how the next few years are shaping up for all of us with a stake in public education. Our teachers and administrators need us to show up in big ways: contacting our elected representatives to voice concern about detrimental policy proposals, attending board meetings, and reading banned books to name a few. But our kids need us to show up in small, ordinary ways, in particular, pausing our own outrage long enough to get the whole story and remember that we really are all on the same side.

My son would like everyone to know that he didn’t even really, technically swear. Big thanks to JMT and his pops. And all the love to our incredible public school principals, social workers, teachers, and everyone in between.

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When it’s time to begin a new class text, I neatly print my students’ names their books’ top edges and place a homemade bookmark inside each one before I hand over the book that will be our home for the next few weeks. My tattered copy stands in stark contrast to the tidy stacks of brand new books waiting to meet their reader. I suppose I romanticize the moment of text distribution, recalling only the earnest bookish girls who crack the spine immediately and bury their noses, inhaling the pages, or the stoic tough guys who ask “Hey Miss, do we get to keep these? Like, are they ours?”

“Get to.” “Ours.” I hold those words like a new mother, already forgetting the pain of childbirth -and the agony of kids who greet their book with a deep sigh asking if they “have to read the whole thing?” I’ve been teaching literature too long to be surprised by their show of negativity. I know it’s not the story or discussions they’re dreading. They dread being made to prove their presence on the page with annotations. Often, they approach their brand new paperback feeling already defeated, uncertain about what each chapter will hold, but knowing that whatever it holds will need to be highlighted and reflected upon in the margin for someone else’s approval.

Students’ frustration has a way of spreading, so when my friend and colleague, Jamie, Kramered into my classroom demanding “annotations: skill or tool?!” I was undeniably startled, though hardly surprised. She had chosen the right door to burst through; like her, I too felt stuck. For at least as long as I’ve been at this school, the curriculum has required students to annotate their texts and required the teachers to then evaluate and score those annotations. For over two decades, students’ annotations have been a summative assessment common among all English classes at my school. But now, in the context of an impatient world loudly insisting that adolescents no longer read, and a student body that is vastly different from the note-passing young millennials who filled my rosters back in 2004, I cannot understand why annotations remain the sacrosanct practice that has so stubbornly persisted.

Truly, annotations can be useful in writing and discussion, but what about the kids who don’t need them or whose train of thought is derailed by the distraction? What about the myriad of other ways a person can show that they’ve got their head in the reading game? Is our obsession with annotating teaching our students to engage with texts in a way that will be useful in the long run or are we just training them to fill a page with proof that they read it? My frustration is that annotation is often taught as the only tool (when it is even taught at all) and yet it is consistently evaluated as a skill unto itself.

Despite her grand entrance, Jamie initially seemed to be weighing the same simple question of whether annotations were a means or end unto themselves. In truth, though, she was taking aim at our entire pedagogical framework for literacy instruction -a fight I am only too happy to square up for at her side. Why are we so set on making kids prove their engagement with texts in one, oddly specific way? It is especially strange given that we don’t often teach them why annotating is beneficial nor how to do it in a practical way. Instead we continue reinforcing unsustainable, grueling reading habits that build resentment over time and leave bright young scholars daunted by the mere thought of honors track courses.

So, if not annotations, what does engagement with a text look like? How can I tell that a text is “book that has been loved”? And, since we’re talking about American public schools, how do I measure that engagement and use the data I collect? Regardless of the skills and abilities of the reader, to be engaged with a text is to comprehend an author’s overall narrative or argument, actively using repair strategies when necessary. To explore multiple layers of meaning -consciously or subconsciously. To be able to discuss the work thoughtfully; questions being more important than answers. To critically reflect and write about both the text itself and the contextualized experience of reading it. And to approach new ideas, themes, techniques, and language with curiosity.

I’m interested in studying what these values can look like in practice. But while we forge ahead, inviting young readers back to books, and rekindling curiosity on one side of the classroom door, we face demands for accountability, assessment, and commonality on the other. Politicians, academics, edtech giants, and other stakeholders (whose influence often exceeds their investment) may have the time and bandwidth to debate the delicate balance being sought in schools like mine. But I am in the classroom, where the calendar and clock are as unrelenting as the scrutiny from folks on the other side of the door.

This is the machine Jamie was raging against the day she stormed my classroom. Yet, day in and day out, I witness her facilitating authentic engagement by designing opportunities for students to learn and practice a variety of strategies within an age-appropriate curriculum that she has carefully aligned to the needs and interests of the community of readers on her roster. This is a high bar, but with a grounding set of values and a plan in place, it is not outside the reach of committed educators. This is where I am beginning -the call to adventure if we want to be literary, and an open invitation to join me in articulating a new vision for authentic engagement in the literacy classroom.

I’ve grown as a professional in the years since I met Ishmael Beah that night in Evanston. I was wrong to assume that it was my annotations that impressed him. The worn out book itself was only one piece of the puzzle. I was an hour from home on a school night, having survived parking in downtown Evanston, stealing moments here and there to grade quizzes, swapping babysitter woes with other moms, and greeting a cluster of my students who turned up at the event too. In unique and telling ways, all of these facts point to a strong love for the book in my hands and to my commitment to this text as an engaged reader.

Six years later, in 2020, our paths crossed again. Beah was redefining the author-press-circuit to promote his novel, Little Family, in the midst of a global pandemic and invited me to join him on Instagram Live to talk about the power of storytelling, especially for teens, especially in times of crisis. His invitation came, not from his memory of my aggressively annotated text, but from having tagged him in Instagram posts where I share lessons, strategically cropped photos of my students reading Bra Spider stories together, playlists for listening to the songs mentioned in his memoir, and pictures of readers deeply exploring nature imagery in chapter eight from the wilds of a suburban Midwest school courtyard. In short, it came from evidence of students engaging authentically with a text in the day to day bustle of classroom life.

When the afternoon of our Instagram Live arrived, my students flooded the chat. They wanted to know if Ishmael ever reconnected with the nurse who took care of him in the second half of the memoir. They wanted to know why his writing style was so different in his later books than it was in his memoir. They were curious what music he was listening to these days. The frenetic pace and urgency of the comment section had no space for annotations. Their relationship with the text was never a question; rather, it was, as it always has been, the answer.

As educators we are often reminded to build relationships. Stand at your door, greet your students, de-escalate conflict, use restorative practices and repair conferences. We can poke fun, but we also know that it’s true: our professional success or failure lives and dies by relationships. As literacy educators, the relationship between reader and text is at the foundation of all of the content we teach and it deserves our attention and nurturing.

Now is the time to overhaul our approach so as to center the reader-text relationship, impart practical skills for navigating story, and equip our scholars with a wide array of tools to bridge their individual needs with the demands of diverse types of texts in a variety of environments. Looking ahead, I’ll dive deeper into specific engagement strategies, share concrete examples from classrooms, and explore how we can practically balance accountability and curiosity to build a new vision for literacy education.

Big thanks to Jamie, Jen, and my Dear Sweet Wesley.

Professionalism in the Service of Social Justice
         -Loyola University Chicago School of Education motto (ca. 2004)

“Carolyn,” the sweet middle-aged nun who taught my section of “Jesus Christ” had said, “there is no exclamation point in the name of this course. To include one, is to diminish our reverence for the lord.” She tapped the heading at the top of my paper and handed it back to me. As a studious but irreverent goth attending Loyola as a transfer student at the very start of the millennium, I was still adjusting to my new environment: small school, big city, and I hadn’t quite figured out how to adapt my sense of humor to meet the moment. 

I can’t remember her name, but twenty years ago, when I transferred to Loyola and needed a theology credit, I found myself divinely placed in Sister Something’s section of “Jesus Christ.” I had taken a chance with the exclamation point on the first assignment and I was wrong. But she didn’t shame or punish me; instead, she took an interest in me, and I’m a stronger scholar, writer, and human being as a result.

Typically the course consisted of a close reading of the four gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Her section, which met Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 8:00am, was different. On the first day, as she reviewed the densely packed syllabus, Sister Something informed us that we would be reading far more than the standard four. “If you love Jesus Christ like I do, then you’ll want to read everything anyone ever wrote about him, don’t you think?” Sister Something affirmed this truism with a puckish wink and half grin that put my rebellious heart immediately at ease -maybe that's what gave me such punctuational bravado on the first assignment. 

Now look, I do not think anyone -my mom, the pope, even the virgin Mary herself- could love Jesus as much as this sweet little nun, but her point stood. In a purely pedagogical light, the buy-in that resulted from her absolute dominance of logic was impressive even before considering that it was said in the context of doubling the readings for a 100-level required course. And while my affection for JC was luke-warm at best (pun absolutely intended), I did love God, so why wouldn’t I want to read what everyone had to say about his favorite kid?

Sister Something wanted us to appreciate the rhetorical genius of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and she did that by contextualizing the language and politics of their authors. More critically, she wanted us to discover the underpinnings of faith woven through not just the canonical four, but through the words of Mary Magdalene, Thomas, and others. She showed us that we could arrive at truth through critical thinking, relentless research, linguistic competency, and dedicated comparative analysis. I don’t know how she got away with such a significant variation from the typical curriculum, but I also can’t visualize anyone telling her that she couldn’t do something. 

It was that fearlessness that I appreciated most about Sister Something. That her faith was unwavering was a foregone conclusion evinced by her beige orthopedic oxfords and habit, but her faith in us, her faith in our faith?  That was really something. She trusted curiosity to see us through the increased workload. She trusted that the words of these often excluded gospels could reach us in new and personal ways, strengthening our relationship with Christ and building our critical thinking skills. And on more than one morning after a late Thursday night out, she trusted me to stay awake and hold down my corn flakes -at least until the end of class. 

I had done nothing to instill or earn her trust. It was still relatively early in the semester and we had just finished reading John -separate from Matthew, Mark, and Luke. I procrastinated on the essay so I could meet some friends to see The Dropkick Murphys at The Vic. But working through the wee hours, I managed to get the essay done, and miraculously, done quite well. I also managed to get to class on time to turn it in and take notes on the day’s lecture, albeit in sunglasses and absolutely inhaling a large black coffee, but I was there. 

Sister Something believed in grace. She gave even though I had shown that I was unworthy of the gift because, nun or teacher, that’s what we do. And I, in turn, kept showing up. Eight am, three times a week, front row, center seat, because I wanted to. 

When she handed out copies of the Gospel of Thomas, she tapped my desk “you’re going to like this one.” She was not wrong. I loved it. Initially I thought she had found out I dropped “The New Testament” the previous semester and that she was singling me out to keep me from dropping this class too. But no, as in Thomas verse 9, Sister Something was simply scattering seeds trusting that some would bear fruit. 

She won me over with the Gospel of Thomas. It was unlike anything I’d ever read, bridging the gap between traditional Christian truths that my mom eagerly pressed and a universally practical, eminently believable philosophy I could get behind. And while I know that the whole point of faith is to take a leap beyond what is believable, I just wasn’t ready. Fortunately, Sister Something wasn’t in a rush. 

As spring break approached with Easter on its heels, I celebrated my twenty-first birthday on a Sunday. All night. The next morning, as Sister Something dropped a freshly xeroxed copy of the Gospel of Mary Magdalene on my desk, I remembered her first day proclamation: “if you love Jesus, you’ll want to read this.” I don’t know how or when it happened, but somewhere along the line she convinced me that I loved Jesus and dammit I would be reading Mary. On the L, on the way to the Fireside Bowl -I don’t recall what band I was there to see but I didn’t really pay much attention to the show anyway. 

I’ve been thinking about Sister Something a lot this week as I’ve been navigating the onslaught of feedback about my last essay, “The Atlantic Did Me Dirty.” Specifically, I’ve thought about her strategic command of the long game. It was never a matter of either/ or for Sister Something; she had patience and time for everything. Instead she invested in if/ then. If she could open a door into the words of Christ, then perhaps the mess of a girl in the front row will walk through it. If her students see their own values reflected in the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, then maybe their hearts will open to the Holy Mother next. It’s impossible to know for certain if any of this is true, but she seemed comfortable with if/ then, even if “then” never came. I think it was because either way, she had given something. She didn’t try to break my rebellion; instead, she handed over every tool in her toolbox, one by one, so that I could kindle the fire of my own curiosity and values. 

Sometimes I feel like I’ve let Sister Something down. That my inability to love Jesus in the way she envisioned was a personal failure. But then I hit play on some Flogging Molly and get back to work, because the reality of the classroom, whether university or preschool, is far more complex than any magazine article, blog post, or comment section can represent. Our kids come to us with unimaginable burdens and untamable creativity; the only constant is that we have to start where they are at and help light a path forward. When a self-avowed non-reader in the fall is furiously cursing Friar Lawrence by springtime, it’s an obviously satisfying win. But I find it equally fulfilling if that same non-reader asks for a copy of “that elevator book by Jason Reynolds” to borrow. I take my students as far as I can, but I don’t panic if the sparks don’t catch. Eventually they will be ready -or they won’t. I suppose this is the closest I’ve been able to get to taking a leap of faith: trusting that my students will find the stories they need when they need them and in the meantime preparing them to be ready for the opportunity. My objective has never been to protect or destroy the canon, the canon exists because it stands on its own strength. My job is, as it has been since I first transferred to Loyola, to “go forth and set the world on fire.”

Though I will never be on Sister Something’s elite level of compassion and empathy, that won’t stop me from consciously choosing to extend grace to my students whenever I have the opportunity. Not because I’m duty bound to ecumenical vows, but because it’s the human thing to do. Because it’s right. Because Sister Something showed me that it’s what I wanted to do all along. 

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Notes, because this week has taught me that people will decontextualize the smallest detail or turn of phrase:

-I spent a few hours this weekend in my basement digging up my old essays from Sister Something’s class. I know her name now, but I’m keeping that detail for myself (and hoping I forget soon) because I like her existing as “Sister Something” if for no other reason than her privacy.

-I don’t actually know if her classroom management approach was as intentional as I give her credit for, but this essay is about how I recall those experiences in hindsight. I know there are things I’ve misremembered. I’m not trying to be perfect, but memories exist how they exist and, accurate or not, they shape our reality. 

-To that end, I don’t know for a fact that it was a Dropkick Murphys show that night. Coulda been Flogging Molly or maybe Let Me Introduce You To The End. And it mighta been the Aragon or the Metro. I’m not a ticket-saver and the actual band is not as important to me as the overall feel and there was a lot of Irish folk punk going on for me at that time.

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All my love to BWT and the many talented, compassionate educators I’ve priviledged to work with -in school and in professional organizations. Thank you for your support this week. And to RS for your advice for existing online.

It is a perfectly reasonable assumption, but it’s wrong. This is not to say that there aren’t external factors affecting students’ reading stamina, but to line up such a simple series of dominoes to topple oversimplifies a complex challenge and places undue blame on the shoulders of discerning young readers and the public school teachers who work tirelessly to support them.

My primary concern throughout the summer of interviews, emails, and fact-checking, was that we were slipping into a familiar panic in the face of progress: how will this next technological or social development bring about the downfall of society?  It’s an old story; in the fall of 1978, The MATCY Journal published a handful of “probable” quotes from history including the infamous lament over the proliferation of paper: “Students today depend on paper too much. They don’t know how to write on a slate without getting chalk dust all over themselves. They can’t clean a slate properly. What will they do when they run out of paper?” This, and the other quotes in the article, aren’t actually real. However, they reveal a genuine pattern in panicked thinking that, rather than unveiling flaws in social and technological change, instead lays bare the atrophied mindset of the people doing the panicking.  

From a similarly stodgy perspective, Horowitch’s article reflects a frighteningly narrow definition of what constitutes worthwhile literature. Passing references to Moby Dick, Crime and Punishment, and even my unit about The Odyssey, confine literary merit to a very small, very old, very white, and very male box. As a staunch advocate for diverse and representative literature, I was immediately curious about the actual texts at the center of this “crisis” so I asked Horowitch directly what types of books were the sticking points in her professor friends’ curricula. Unsurprisingly, it was canonical classics. As Horowitch points out, I am just “one public-high school teacher in Illinois,” but while professors at elite universities sound the alarm over Gen Z undergrads not finishing Les Miserables because they are uninterested in reading a pompous French man drone on for chapters about the Paris sewer system, my colleagues and I have developed professional toolboxes with endless other ways to inspire our students to read about justice, compassion, and redemption.  

And that’s a good thing, since Gen Z and Gen Alpha don’t cow to authority for authority’s sake. They simply won’t do things they don’t want to do, and I actually kinda love that. The rising young generations want texts that matter to them, that reflect their lives and experiences. So when we force-feed yet another vanilla canonical dust collector, and then complain that they aren’t playing along, it’s just not a good look for us.

Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone, Ibi Zoboi’s American Street, and David Bowles’s The Prince and the Coyote, are all complex, challenging, and substantial texts that speak to the interests and experiences of my students, so it’s not a fight to get them reading. Frustratingly, despite the numerous examples I provided of students reading books cover-to-cover in my class, Horowitch opted to include only the unit that, like the original rhapsodes of the bronze age, I excerpt and abridge. Equally frustrating is that her article implies that I was forced into that decision in order to pacify floundering students or submit to the demands of standardized testing. 

Rather, my experience is that young readers are eminently capable of critically engaging in long form content, but they’re rightfully demanding a seat at the table where decisions about texts are being made. Luckily, we are living through a literary renaissance. Publishers are flourishing amid a profusion of stories, books that give voice to the experiences of people who look and live like the young readers in my classroom. There is no shortage of engaging texts that students can and will read cover-to-cover. But if we insist that quality literature must come from old dead white men, we are consigning ourselves to irrelevance before we even begin. 

One often overlooked hurdle that I brought up with Horowitch was the impact of language evolution on reading comprehension and comfort. Linguistically, the dialect of English spoken by contemporary adolescents is rapidly moving further away from the vernacular of the canonical works we ask them to read. While this has always been true to some degree, social media and technology have sped up language evolution and widened the gap between English dialects. My students code switch into my spoken dialect to engage with me -something that I never had to do to communicate with my teachers in high school. So when I ask them to shift further into the recesses of linguistic history to read Shakespeare, the struggle is real. The additional layer of linguistic distance between them and Shakespeare remind me of my own struggles through Chaucer in the original Middle English -difficult and worthwhile, but truly a challenge.  As a society, we have become more accepting of vernacular differences and demand less code switching -all good and important changes that validate students’ identities.  But it does inevitably become harder to successfully navigate long form texts in dialects of English that are fading ever further into history. My observations about the way my students navigate written language come from experience and observation, something I emphasized with Horowitch as I urged her to talk to a linguist or linguistic anthropologist to get their perspective on possible language-related obstacles affecting students’ reading. Regardless, as a responsible educator, decisions about text selection are not haphazard or routine. I am careful to select texts that offer diverse content and language. Simply put, I require more justification than merely longstanding tradition as I set a course for my precious minutes in the classroom. 

One of the reasons I have found so much success with The Odyssey, aside from the monsters and murder, is that the emerging generation of translators, including Dr. Emily Wilson and Maria Dahvana Headley have been transparent about their processes of bringing new life to canonical treasures like The Odyssey and Beowulf.  In one lecture, Wilson explains that historically, translators would often intentionally foreignize their language to establish gravity and reverence for these works as products of “alien cultures,” a tradition the new generation of translators are choosing to break from because of the exclusionary effect it has on readers. Contemporary translators have shifted their mindset from one of preserving tradition, to one of illuminating narrative and purpose.  Homer wanted his audiences to be both entertained and shepherded into the culture. Wilson seems to want that too, and so she gives us a deeply relatable, heartbreakingly honest, and eminently readable translation of The Odyssey. In allowing her understanding of the story to expand with time, she remains true to the story’s original purpose and relevant to a new generation of readers. 

These are all points I made in speaking to and emailing with Horowitch and her fact checkers throughout the summer. I have to think, I was not the source she was hoping for. I was a problem.  Perhaps the most disappointing defeat I observed in the final article was that although I shared my observations of the tireless work of colleagues at the state and national level advocating for intellectual freedom, Horowitch does not acknowledge that culturally, we do not value reading. We ban books, scrutinize classroom libraries, demonize librarians, and demoralize teachers. We pay lip service to the importance of literacy, requiring four years of English and regularly testing literacy skills, but when push comes to shove, we don’t make space for the curiosity and joy that are the foundations of lifelong literacy habits. In truth, we seem to be doggedly fighting against the best interest of a literate populace. While aggressive censorship is an agony I’ve been spared in my current position, it is a formidable obstacle I see my colleagues and heroes across the state and across the country struggling with.

Instead, Horowitch places heavy blame on standardized testing and the Common Core.  I argue that this blame is misplaced and irrelevant. While there is absolutely a push for analytical skills to be developed (see AP curriculum and testing), truth be told, Common Core or College Readiness, they’re more similar than different. The pressure to switch from one set of standards to another isn’t much more than a nuisance in the grand scheme of teaching.  In practice, teachers have always balanced various standards and testing with a familiar degree of disruption to the important work of building practical literacy skills. The never-ending cycle of new initiatives and projects outlasted by tough-as-nails veteran teachers is the oldest trope in the faculty lounge and certainly not newsworthy enough to merit The Atlantic’s hefty subscription fee. 

In a move as cliché as blaming standardized testing, Horowitch takes aim at smartphones and social media, a constant classroom annoyance to be sure, but old news, at least among high school educators, who have already read The Anxious Generation, adapted our routines, and moved on. It seems too easy of a target to take seriously in the context of a major American journal like The Atlantic, but here we are.  It should go without saying that there is a medium between TikTok and Tolstoy. If we position ourselves as fighting against social media and short-form entertainment, we’ve already lost. The dopamine hit from the ding of a push notification is far more neurologically satiating than anything I have to offer in a classroom. So even as I continue to develop more engaging curricula, I ask my students and their caregivers to reframe their expectations, to reconsider the type of “entertainment” that they expect from my class. When my students shift their mindset to enter my classroom expecting nerdery, thought-provoking conversation, and midwest dad jokes, they find that the forty-five minutes passes enjoyably. I trust the literature because I am confident in my skill as an educator. 

Creating space for the joy and curiosity of reading is important work that high school teachers step up to every day, designing lessons to teach what once came naturally. Previous generations turned to reading as a leisure activity, so they had an innate sense for how to read in school and how to read sneakily under the covers way past bedtime. To some degree, all of the things I’ve mentioned in this essay have stripped reading of its human value and made it into a chore. Teachers are thus charged with retraining kids to love books. It’s hard, but it’s working. Again, the current proliferation of complex and substantial young adult texts is a goldmine -if we don’t cut off access. But we have to be intentional about teaching young people how to read for fun versus how to read for academic purposes, and it’s not something that all professors have been trained to do. At the secondary level, we differentiate between the short works that must be read closely and copiously annotated versus the more substantial works that must be comprehended and revisited, pondered and discussed in a social-academic collaboration.  Are the panicked professors expecting -or implying- that their students should be giving everything the close-reading treatment? Are the professors clearly communicating appropriate expectations? In my sophomore honors class, I invest time in teaching my students how to build their understanding over several readings of a scene, chapter, or poem at various degrees of scrutiny and analysis, and that is an investment I consistently see returns on.

The golden rule of maintaining a presence on social media is to stay clear of the comment section, but realistically, its siren song is impossible to resist.  In this case, I truly wish I had tied myself to the mast. The Atlantic’s promotional tweet for this article quickly ignited a barrage of ill-informed comments about the “dumbing down of the American education system” and gratitude for yet another reason to homeschool or unschool or outschool. It’s a familiar cadence for those of us who have devoted our professional lives to education, and still try to maintain an online existence.  While this essay is evidence enough of my frustration, I’m first and foremost an educator.  I accept The Atlantic’s journalistic tantrum with a grain of salt, understanding that its articles are unbearably long and perhaps this topic cut the author a little close to the bone. I can extend my compassion and pity, but then I have to get back to work -we’re starting The Odyssey tomorrow and I have some eyeball puns to sharpen before we hit chapter nine.

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Gratitude to my forever editor, Blake “The Hammer” Thomas.

My family is a Star Trek family, which is a fundamentally different kind of family than a Star Wars family. While we do love General Leia Organa and the other perfectly Campbellian heroes she is surrounded by, when push comes to shove, the opening credits to The Next Generation just hit the perfect combination of nostalgia and adventure. 

Its roots, The Original Series, was a meticulously choreographed dance between the series’s creators and the viewing audience.  At the time, the mid-nineteen hundreds as my son says, it was Lucille Ball who backed the show and ushered it into production. And, fun fact, it was the only television show that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. allowed his children to watch.

When I think about the way this program has, over the decades, walked a line between important social and cultural commentary and abject silliness, I picture an actual dance between Lucy and Dr. King.  I imagine them gliding around the Tropicana, grinning with delight to have found one another amidst the chaos of twentieth century revolutions. To find one’s audience seems to me a bit like finding the perfect dance partner or a soul mate: a longshot, but possible, certainly worth the effort, but not worth losing sleep over.  Still, as a human, if I’m going to the trouble to cut down a tree in the forest, I just really want to know that there will be someone around to hear its sound.  

This spring a friend of mine encouraged me to start a substack.  I was afraid that no one would read it, but she assured me that a) people will read it and b) that’s not the point. I want to get this out of the way right now, I don’t know what the point is, that’s not what this essay is about, so please, abandon  that particular goal as we begin. But it’s a question worth asking, how important is an audience?

As an English teacher, I am greedily accustomed to taking on the role of “audience.”  Each essay my students write is tailored to meet my specific tastes, avoiding my personal pet peeves.  At its best, the result is a very focused, clearly-written, creatively-argued essay devoid of comma splice errors, and (when my luck is exceptionally good) at least one correctly used semi-colon. I teach them to write well, and they go on to adapt those lessons for their next teacher, whose tastes and turn-offs add to their repertoire of skills.  We believe that this revolving door of one-woman audiences of high school English teachers offering new tools to refine style and voice prepares each student to write for the wider world.  But a handful of English teachers is hardly a representative demographic.

I am, however, a devoted audience of one.  Each forty five minute class portioned out among twenty-six busy minds, five times a week (minus the Wednesday late start and all of the little tasks that eagerly devour minutes), leaves very little room for connection. But I can linger on the page.  Before I’m fully able to tie a name to a face or the tenor of a voice, I know each student’s penmanship, the way they spell “definately,” their affection for em dashes or ampersands. 

My audienceship, though, comes with a sort of tyranny of the red pen.  The double spacing and margins exist to accommodate my needs, my notes, my commentary.  My suggestions foreshadow more revision work if there is time, grades when there is not. I see their eagerness to please me in their use of the thesaurus, choosing “whilst” and “whereas,” awkwardly code switching into an unnatural dialect they imagine I prefer.  They wear these words like their father’s oversized suit jacket and flop around like a little girl in her mother’s high heeled shoes.  It’s precious, admirable even, and effective as they begin to gain control over their words and ideas. 

But even as I reflect with warmth and kindness, I wince at the patronizing tone of the previous paragraph. We socialize young writers to cater to a single, specific audience, and one that is so quick to not just perceive, but to judge. How can this arrangement possibly give rise to a healthy, functional relationship between speaker and audience?  

It can’t.

In the context of an overarching study of rhetoric, I teach my students about the rhetorical triangle, the relationships among speaker, message, and audience. We pay lip service to the power of a speaker or writer to adapt their message to the audience, asking students to analyze essays and speeches, identifying the ways in which the message is tailored to circumstances.  But, it is something impossible to put into practice, as the teacher is ultimately always the audience. The feeling of “audience” as the one variable we cannot control is disempowering; it conjures to mind old fears that no one will show up for the band concert or birthday party. Or worse, perhaps, to the adolescent mind, that all eyes are forever upon us, critical and judging. 

As an adult, I’m overwhelmed at the thought of the agent to publisher rat race.  I see my friends and colleagues struggling through it as well, being cursed, seemingly randomly, with terrible luck or, blessed, finally, with long-awaited recognition -completely divorced from their capacity for creative work or skill.  Finding an audience, like falling in love, feels random.  

But it’s not entirely fair. As writers, we cultivate our audience by finding ourselves. I argue, that our job as writers and educators is to focus on the speaker and the message.  Our students, like ourselves, need opportunities to choose their medium, try on different voices and genres, to fail miserably, and to get back up again. There is a satisfaction that comes with stepping into one’s voice that is deeper and longer lasting than the ephemeral approval of an audience, and that, Dear Writer, is what I hope you will seek.  

It seems wrong to me that the best we can offer our young people is a devoted but critical audience. It seems wrong that the opportunity to cultivate their voice and build a genuine audience is a privilege that comes only after completing the prerequisite essays and projects. Young writers deserve the opportunity to build a voice and style that can be a foundation for authentic community, an engaged and supportive audience of peers at a time when they most need it. But I fear that what I am proposing is impossible in the daily grind of shuffling adolescents through texts and grammar and multi draft essays. And yet, to ignore the need for speaker-audience relationship building is nothing short of academic neglect. So where do we meet?

In 2021, when we returned to the classroom, I started a creative writing club. I had envisioned a space where, with some guided prompts and fun activities, students would express themselves authentically and create work they were proud of.  Noble aspirations, but the kids were already writing, already proud.  They simply needed an audience. I still provide activities and lessons, but those take a back seat to the students’ works in progress -epic fantasies spanning hundreds of pages illustrated by their friend in Anime Club, or a half-filled notebook of lyrics that will never, and I mean never, see the light of day, much less the dazzle of spotlight.

When students approach me and ask me to read their work, I ask “Is this a gift for me to read so I can bask in your creativity for a moment, or would you like feedback?”  If they request feedback, I ask “Would you like me to tell you what I notice and enjoy or do you have a specific goal for my review?”  Most of the time, it’s a momentary gift, and when I finish, I ask “Can I show you my favorite line?” 

For me, it is refreshing to set down the red pen, and read their words with no duty aside from enjoyment.  It is a return to storytelling, or rather, story-listening, in its truest form.  And in relinquishing my desire to find or control an audience, it is a chance for me to remember what it means to be one. 

Last year, the kids started a ‘zine.  A quarter-sheet, photocopied booklet called Penguins + War that comes out three times a school year, stuffed with their ramblings, drawings, angsty poems, and heartrending fantasy.  The school already has a literary magazine, we are not trying to compete, the ‘zine is not the prestigious publication that the literary magazine is.  It is, however, a non judgemental audience -how critical can you be while reading a xeroxed booklet you found on the bathroom windowsill? 

Week after week, our meetings make a huge school feel cozy and safe.  It is an environment where young people have complete creative freedom in their expression.  Dear Writer, this is what I wish for you: the freedom to find your voice and to build a community around you full of the people and ideas that will inspire you to continue writing -for yourself and for the joy of it. And if you are very, very lucky, you will find your audience, too.

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Dear Writer is a Story Exploratory virtual event coordinated by Jen Vincent.  Learn more about Story Exploratory’s monthly workshops and coaching opportunities at storyexploratory.com.  And follow Jen on subtack here.

At its simplest, memento mori, Latin for “remember, you must die,” proposes a basic formula as its core philosophy: life + time = death. Memento Mori is the only unbreakable promise, that life ends. A premise that, in theory, turns us inward away from worldly concerns to attend to our spiritual selves, to prepare for the only inevitability.

The St. Xavier Mission church invited me to reflect on this concept while I was on vacation with my mom and son, exploring with the usual distracted-but-respectful interest of tourists wrangling a six year old who missed his nap. But when we entered the chapel, it scared my son. The dogmatic maximalism in that small space felt overwhelming.  In contrast, the local non-denominational churches where he attended family weddings or pre-school fundraisers had a decidedly more subtle approach to decor and the iconography of Christ’s passion. This was his first time to be so deeply immersed in the trappings and symbology of Catholicism. And lo, he was afraid.

My son’s wide eyes swept the room swiftly, unwilling to pause too long on any one object. Instead he ducked behind me dodging the sight of what amounted to some pretty violent scenes. My mother, torn between her two lifelong devotions: early childhood behavioral science and Jesus Christ, calmly accepted that her beloved grandson was terrified of his lord and savior, and somehow restrained herself from plopping him whole-hog into the basin of holy water on the spot.  

In Life of Pi, the Hindu protagonist, also on vacation, pauses upon entering a Catholic church.  Overwhelmed by the imagery around him, he asks “which one was the god?” (Martel 52). When I read this scene, I see my son in the chapel of St. Xavier, confused and betrayed by violence that the adults around him seemed oblivious to. His fear stays with me when I reflect on that experience. In particular, it struck me then just how ineffective a motivator fear is, because it is so easily and inevitably defeated by experience. 

In its earliest applications, memento mori asked its audience to reject worldly temptations and focus instead on enrichment of the soul -because, it cautions, you must die and in that sleep of death, what dreams may come? The sentiment is familiar, from Robin Williams’s hushed murmur of “carpe diem, boys” to the millennial cry of YOLO (because you really do only live once). I know I am meant to die, but I’m unwilling to live a life in fear of that inevitability. What I, like others of my species, seem to struggle with is how to meaningfully fill the time until the end. 

The question is one of god and of science, and I approach it thusly: we will all eventually die and something will be true. Either the worms will get us and that’s that, or there will be an afterlife of some kind. But until then, I’ve got maybe forty or fifty years left, and I am solely responsible for how that time is spent. 

So what are my big plans? I want to sing and write and run and cry. I want to listen to good music, have sex, travel to places I’ve never been, eat chocolate, see art, get drunk, smell the rain and dirt, sit on my friend’s patio and watch a storm roll in. I want it all. But of all of the things this life on earth, this body, and its free will afford me, I want to believe. I want to believe in something I cannot prove, because that is a distinctly human luxury. When I die, if the worms don’t get me and instead I find myself knocking at the pearly gates, it will be too late to believe. My experience of St. Peter with his clipboard and room assignments will then be a matter of science and perception, not of faith.  As a terminally human person, this is a invitation into duality, an invitation to embrace constantly abutting pairs in opposition and conflict because that is what it means to be human. So let me believe, now.

It is not lost on me that the St. Xavier Mission, which was established to convert the Tohono O’odham people in the late 1600s, is where I learned about I’itoi -the man in the maze.  This image represents the earliest creation stories of the Tohono O’odham people.  I’itoi emerged as the creator among a variety of his fellow creatures, and the labyrinth shown at his feet represents the human journey through life. It is a theology firmly anchored in the beauty of mundane existence, and as such, it resonated with me deeply. I’itoi is a figure existing within the worldly concerns of his people, and seeing his likeness emblazoned on altar pieces in such a setting was, in itself, an acknowledgement of the inherent duality of existence, a tenuous balance between safeguarding one’s soul and really living. Ironically, it was the image of I’itoi that sparked my son’s curiosity, drawing him out of his apprehension, and inviting him to ask questions and observe the art around him. 

Spaces like this fascinate me because I believe it is in confronting duality that the magic of humanity thrives. Classrooms, train stations, tattoo shops, hair salons, restaurants. It’s in these spaces that the enduring and ephemeral coexist. I mentioned my musings on memento mori to my friend, Hare, a tattooer who at the time was living in Tucson, and he told me “it’s art that has an expiration date.  It reminds us that [the body] is an empty vessel.” On that particular trip, he sent me home with a massive thigh piece honoring Shri Durga Maa, the mother goddess, protective and violent atop her tiger, the full spectrum of what I was learning to embrace in my new role as mother and my evolving role as daughter.  The goddess, whose name comes from a Sanskrit word that means impenetrable or fortress, sunk into my skin, one strike at a time. Hare was right -he usually is- that tattoo is profoundly impermanent. As surely as its Canvas, the tattoo itself must change and die. 

My mom is not so easily sold. No, she argues, always baffled at my love for tattoo, there is nothing more permanent. Whenever she notices I’ve acquired a new one, the moment calls forth from her an exasperated sigh as she searches for her reading glasses and prods at my skin, exasperated but politely inquiring about Hare and his wife and children. While she has learned to tolerate my affection for color in this form, it is an uneasy peace that is tempered by her gratitude and love for my friends. 

Where I get hung up is that if a tattoo is permanent, it would require one’s notion of existence to end with the life of the tattooed person. To acknowledge a world wherein my tattoo doesn’t exist, requires acknowledging a world wherein I do not exist. To me, this seems small and selfish, given the grand timeline of humanity and of existence writ large. However, when I think about my own child, I understand. I refuse to consider a world without him. 

Last year, on his birthday, he was running across the lawn -joyously, stupidly, in the way ten-year-olds do- when he tripped on some landscape edging that tore through the flesh of his left knee requiring dozens of stitches. As I held him throughout the evening in the emergency room, we talked about the scar he would have on his knee forever and the story it would tell. 

I showed him my scar from falling on my roller skates while distracted trying to flip the cassette in my Walkman. I pointed out the scar from the cesarean section that brought him into our lives. We toured my tattoos and swiped through old photos telling stories and matching them up to the physical marks they left on us, because our bodies are the record of our humanity. Perfectly, permanently vulnerable. 

Back in the tattoo shop, Hare threw my question back to me. What were my thoughts on tattoo as memento mori? I told him how I had boiled it down to a formula: life + time = death, and that for me, tattoo has been a measure of time. The time spent in the strange intimacy of a tattoo shop -stripped to skin and on display. The snap of gloves, first tentative taps on the pedal as the machine buzzes to life, his big, loud joy-filled laugh, and the hot surface pain of the process -it all brings me peace. A place to hold discomfort and appreciate its beauty. 

My view of memento mori doesn’t erase the fear, the skull still grins and chatters off to the side, but the fear is replaced with a desire to fill my time with beauty and meaning. 

I like being tattooed -a claim I make with the intentional ambiguity of the claim memento mori itself. Both meanings bring me closer to a fully lived life: the experience of receiving a tattoo and the experience of living with visible tattoos. Perhaps it’s the mental taxonomy of the phrase itself that pushes memento mori into the dark, obscuring its true purpose and muddying its message. Now more than ever, we are looking for permission to live. Yes yes, I know, I will die, but that’s not really any of my business. My job is to sort out the next few decades, and I plan to live. Surrounded by friends and drinking in experience. I want to feel this life so much deeper than the surface of my skin.

Explore Harry’s portfolio here (with lovely little glimpses of his life and family, and the oversized joy in his laugher that they bring out).

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Thanks as always to my number one cheerleader, BT, and love to JV & JT.

Once upon a time, I was sixteen or eighteen, my best friend loaned me a copy of Neil Gaiman’s Smoke and Mirrors, a collection of short stories -all fantasy and magic. I loved it.  I drank in every story, and to this day, find excuses to read and share my favorites with classes. The copy he loaned me was a signed first edition, a prized possession.  And I dropped it in the lake.  

But I’m a midwesterner, and lakes are special.  Plus, this was the lake at the summer camp where we worked, the place both of seemed to fit in most easily. It could have been traumatic, but he said I “baptized” it, that it was blessed with lakewater and fishpee and algae, and suddenly, the lake, an ordinary and often irritating part of my life, became holy. The stories -both the published ones in the book and the personal ones that emerged from my mishandling of the book- became a common haven, a room with an open door my friend had prepared for me in his home, even though our notion of what made those stories “home” was very different.  

It’s something that crystalized last year when I read Anna Marie McLemore’s Lake Lore. I picked it up because, well, lakes.  Also, the cover was beautiful and honestly I’d read a grocery list if Anna Marie McLemore wrote it.  Lake Lore is the story of Bastian and Lore, both non-binary, neither neurotypical.  They seem to be inexplicably pulled together -the first time many years prior to the story’s exposition.  The two find themselves reconciling their worlds, above and below the surface of the town’s lake, rife with mysteries.  

The depiction of ADHD was so painfully, perfectly accurate that I was giving it to everyone to read in the hopes that maybe, maybe they could understand.  I was forty-two years old, teaching for twenty years, past president of the Illinois Affiliate, an NCTE member, and on the Build Your Stack Committee, and this was the first time I felt in my bones what it meant for a story to be a mirror and the first time I realized how much I needed it. And when I tell you this experience lit me on fire, I am not kidding.  

This essay was originally a book talk that I presented in November of 2023 at the NCTE convention. I was among my people, fellow educators for whom the quote I offer as an epigraph above has been a pedagogical guidepost for ages. And yet, they shared my joy and delight when I realized how earnestly I was needing a story to mirror my experience.  Once I was able to process my “mirror” experience, I was able to look through windows too.  I suspected that the Latine and trans stories in this book were handled equally well, a hypothesis confirmed by friends and students.  

Reading Lake Lore gave me back something I didn’t realize I was missing.  It had been ages since I picked up fantasy for fun -J.K. Rowling did the genre no favors and I hold grudges. As an adult, I had maintained a love for mythology, comfortably situated in the context of history and anthropology. I often returned to David Bowles’s Feathered Serpent, Dark Heart of Sky and Neil Gaiman’s Norse Myths, collections of stories that felt familiar and magical, but also important and scholarly.  So in 2021 when Dr. Bowles described a project he was working on with a friend, The Secret of the Moon Conch, my curiosity got the better of me. I hounded this poor man for an advanced copy and eagerly read it the moment it arrived.  

The story is a dual-perspective romance across a five-hundred year gap.  Calizto is a Mexica warrior, watching Spanish invaders bring about what will ultimately be the end of the Aztec Empire.  Sitlali is a young refugee fleeing to America to avoid the unwanted affection of a local gang leader.  Of course, the time gap makes an ordinary meet-cute impossible.  Instead the two communicate through a magical conch shell trumpet that is mysteriously in sync with the waxing and waning moon.  The story is the perfect balance of action, romance, and history.  

I started reading it because I trusted the author, but I stuck with it because it articulated a rage that had been building within me for a long time.  A rage at political and social injustice and a frustration with a lack of options.  My friend, Luz, deepened my contextual understanding of the story, giving me Meso-American history lessons during our common second hour planning period. She would stand in the doorway between our offices and fill in the gaps in my knowledge, softening the story’s edges and enabling me to appreciate the quietness that existed amidst the chaos. Still, as I steadily approached the end of this book, I felt my rage building again because I knew how the story had to end; Luz had already laid out the timeline; history was written. Luckily, I was wrong; the story has a perfectly beautiful and satisfying ending, one that I will elaborate on shortly. But I had found a strange comfort in the anger that it gave me permission to feel, and it was an emotion I hadn’t finished exploring. 

The need to sit with my more difficult emotions is the reason I picked up The Prince and the Coyote, also by David Bowles.  Again, I trusted the author, but I also craved the comfort of a place to sit with a feeling of rage. Unlike the other titles I’ve mentioned, this book is not fantasy; however, it does have some fantastical elements that I greatly enjoyed.  I was fascinated to learn that this book is a fictionalized story of a real historical figure.  Prince Acolmitzli, Nezahuacoyotl (Neza to his friends, and we’re friends now), was one of the most significant individuals to live on this continent.  He was a poet, inventor, strategist, soldier, and politician. A father and grandfather of kings. And I had never heard of him. The Prince and the Coyote tells the story of his early adulthood, fleeing into hiding after tragedy, until ultimately taking his proper place as a leader of what would come to be the Aztec Empire.  There are appropriately steamy romances that exist contentedly outside of heteronormative monogamy.  The action and adventure is some of the best I’ve ever read. Amanda Mijangos’s illustrations are breathtaking.  The audiobook is delicious. The story is riveting.  

Still, I found this book difficult to read -no fault of the book or author.  Rather, I was trying to balance too much in my life and at times, reading felt like one more thing that demanded my focus.  But unlike the other demands I was struggling to meet, The Prince and the Coyote created space for itself the more I read.  I found that as Nezahuacoyotl cooled and found peace, so did I.  This time, I gave Luz a copy of the book, so we could read together. She gave me more history lessons during second hour, this time with stories about her family living near the volcano, Popocatépetl. Luz and I met in these stories, in the community they offered. Experiencing, as so many of our students do, the way Luz weaves together history, folktale, and family, I understood that her success in the classroom was the natural outcome of the pride and depth she returns to students with each lesson. As we read the opening chapters of The Prince and the Coyote, the words on the page comforted us in different ways, and we coexisted in the sanctuary they offered. 

By the time I started planning the first version of this presentation for the NCTE convention, I had finished both books and it had been months since I thought about the ending of The Secret of the Moon Conch.  So when, in a breakout session, Guadalupe Garcia McCall spoke about the ending and how some people didn’t get it or didn’t like it, I was a little surprised.  She was talking about me. Although I genuinely loved the story, and appreciated its end, I definitely didn’t get it until she explained: “It’s love.  It’s about love.  The only way forward, the only way through, is love.” When I began each of these books, I was feeling isolated and angry, but they brought me through that and into community and love, and to ending that I deeply understood and desperately craved.

The summer that I read Lake Lore, my niece was also on an important journey of self-discovery too.  That summer, she thought she might be a witch.  She was curious about magic and knew she was on the cusp of figuring out something huge about herself or the universe, (but really, what’s the difference?). She had been writing a brilliant story with her besties, full of magic and animals and girly romance. And because I’m that auntie, I gave her books. I had a copy of The Girl from the Sea by Molly Knox Ostertag, and it seemed like exactly the right story. In it, Morgan, who is outgrowing her little town and is eager to start living, and also maybe have her first kiss, very nearly drowns in the opening pages of this sweet little middle grade romance wrapped up in Ostertag’s usual charming illustration style. She’s saved by Keltie, a Selkie. Selkies are mythical creatures that exist as seals until they choose to shed their seal-skins and take on human form.  I love that the theme of finding oneself torn between two worlds, two realities, is repeated and resolved, in various ways literally and metaphorically throughout the story. 

I had forgotten that the love interest was a selkie until my niece reminded me: “Nana tells us stories about Selkies!”  It’s true, the branch of the family tree she and I share comes from Welsh coal miners who emigrated to the upper peninsula of Michigan, and we tell stories about Selkies. 

She read a lot of Molly Knox Ostertag that summer. Looking back, I can see that she needed a mirror, too. A story that would reflect her family but also show her a world of possibilities beyond what any of us could offer her from our suburban midwest experience. 

I’ve borne witness to the power of books to build bridges and foster community, and even so, it’s always felt more academic and pedagogical than personal.  But in returning to fantasy, a genre that I felt had abandoned me, I found a surprising intersection of mirrors and windows. And so much like Dorothy, I was delighted to discover that intersection had brought me home, and home, as it always has, brought me love. 

I can’t imagine a story quite so powerful as The Prince and the Coyote to remind my Mexican students of their deep cultural roots on this continent. Nor have I found a book as on the nose as Lake Lore to to validate my own. But in experiencing Dr. Bishop’s mirrors and doors so personally, my understanding expanded and it’s in this homemade alchemy that the extraordinary becomes ordinary and the ordinary becomes magical. 

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Shoutout to my editor and partner in crime, btho.

Resources
Bishop, Dr. Rudine Sims. “Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors.” Perspectives: Choosing and Using Books for the Classroom. vo. 6, no. 3, Summer 1990.

At the end-of-year picnic, I met many of the moms and aunties, one of whom recommended Written in the Stars by Aisha Saeed.  Beautiful book, I added two copies to my library.  Amazon recommended Amal Unbound, so I added two copies of it as well.  

Over the next few years, the club’s president graduated and her sister took on a leadership role.  My family began building a relationship with their family -one I cherish to this day. Early on, I struggled at social events where my young son and I were quickly peeled off of my emotional-support extrovert husband, and ushered to the women’s space -a common arrangement at Muslim events.  In retrospect, I appreciate the opportunity to be a complete cultural outsider.  The taming of my midwestern instinct to hug everyone -which my students’ dads politely dodged- quickly humbled me.  My clumsy efforts to make a good impression were a self-centered shadow of the careful assimilation to western culture I saw from my students and their families. But I was never made to feel bad or silly. Always a friendly glance met my eyes and steered me where I needed to be. 

Sitting in the grass at a graduation party, my toddler in my lap, surrounded by other moms, I began to understand that I continued to make an effort because the group welcomed me with grace. 

My students were barely toddlers themselves in the wake of 9/11, when their parents were made to regularly denounce terrorism, to prove themselves in a way that other cultural groups weren’t. My students’ polite deferential demeanor was a practiced response to a world that demanded perfection at best and silence at worst. 

At MSA meetings, students deserved to feel ownership over the space and time. The notion that this was a student led club took on a different meaning at that point. Yes, the kids would still plan the meetings and lead the activities, but their lived experience would be reflected in the space and schedule. I was there to learn from them, but they were not there to teach me. They were there to be kids. 

At that point, I was still early in my journey to reimagine my classroom library, but I realized I had an opportunity to let my shelves speak. The idea of curating a perfectly representative and diverse collection was daunting, so I chose to focus on the kids who were already there; I would expand my representation of Muslim voices.  Of course, I already had Malala, The Kite Runner, and Three Cups of Tea. But that’s akin to saying I’ve got Lorca, House on Mango Street, and Hundred Years of Solitude, so I’m all set for my Latine students. My Muslim students deserved all sorts of mirrors.  

I was on a mission to provide more than representation; I wanted to provide variety, joy, and intersectional advocacy.  I started with Love, Hate, and Other Filters by Samira Ahmed, Saints and Misfits by S.K. Ali, A Girl Like That by Tanaz Bhathena.  It was a start and since my readers were mostly girls, a pretty good start. These titles were instantly popular, but my two copies of Love from A to Z by S. K. Ali, never rested. Books passed from sister to sister without a moment to pause on the shelf.  

I added Here to Stay by Sara Farizan, Ms. Marvel, Yes, No, Maybe So by Aisha Saeed and Becky Albertalli, The Henna Wars by Adiba Jaigirdar, and dozens more.  I found that kids arrived early to MSA meetings to browse the shelves and ask for recommendations. Girls popped in during lunch to pray Dhuhr and ask, “Did Ayesha return that Nafiza Azad book yet?” Maintenance helped me staple a Quibla to the ceiling next to the overhead projector, and an unclaimed prayer rug found a new home, carefully folded in a bin next to a handful of wear-and-wash loaner hijabs -scarves I no longer wore. 

I intentionally created a space Muslim students wanted to occupy, whether or not they were members of MSA. To this day, kids still arrive early for MSA meetings and browse the shelves, but they also mess around on their phones, tease one another mercilessly, and leave their shoes off.  They are less perfect and more human, something I take as the highest compliment. I will always be a cultural outsider, the white lady at the end-of-the-year picnic, but if my classroom can feel like home, a place where they are not pressured to represent anything to anyone, where they are able to just be obnoxious teenagers, then I’m happy. 

I’m not saying it was the books that did it, but I’m not saying it wasn’t.  We play roles in this profession, and I’m the book lady. I express my love and humor through stories -finding compassion and humanity in a stack of books.  This year, First Chapter Friday has been a place for me to hold space for my MSA kids, who now more than ever are looking for mirrors.  I give them Power Born of Dreams by Mohammad Sabaaneh, As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow by Zouldfa Katouh, Rifka by Mohammed el Kurd, A Woman is No Man by Etaf Rum, Footnotes in Gaza by Joe Sacco, Among the Almond Trees by Hussein Barghouthi, The Beauty of Your Face by Sahar Mustafah. 

Like many educators, I’m limited in what I can say politically, but luckily, our kids understand that, and frankly, they don’t need more politics; they need to see their stories reflected in the unique portrait of their world that a teacher’s bookshelf paints. 

Individually, to curate a perfectly diverse, representative classroom collection is to be forever tilting at windmills.  Yet, to carve out a focused niche is not only possible, but goes far to make a huge school feel smaller and more personal.  If my colleague down the hall has a similar basic collection, she can fill in by intentionally seeking out stories that center athletes and sports.  Perhaps then the football players who gather in her room after weightlifting will notice something that sparks their interest. If my neighbor can make sure he has plenty of queer voices represented with joy and complexity, his shelves welcome the young ones who need those titles. 

I didn’t accept the role of MSA advisor expecting much of a challenge. And yet, as a white woman, in a profession where my demographic outnumbers all others, this early lesson in allyship was a welcome challenge. In learning to quietly step out of the way so that the children can lead, or play, or read, I found a niche. School and public libraries are magical spaces with unlimited possibilities and endless representation. But as teachers, our classroom libraries must necessarily tell a nuanced story. If we approach our collections as opportunities to affirm the readers who are already in the space, we build far more than a library, we build a little home within a big school. 

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Michelangelo Buonarroti is my Roman Empire, the odd fixation that I find myself frequently pondering, in much the same way, apparently, as the red-blooded American male ruminates on Marcus Aurelius. The version of Michelangelo’s story that I return to is not historically accurate; it’s an awkward mutt of a thing, part Irving Stone, part Giorgio Vasari, and part sentimental airbrushing by time and my affection for Ninja Turtles. But over the years, I’ve fallen in love with my version of the story, distorted though it is, because I feel a sort of camaraderie with Mike that has broken my heart and healed my spirit. 

Pope Julius II hired Michelangelo to carve his tomb. The plan was magnificent, a massive and imposing Moses, flanked by statues of captive slaves. I think it is the most beautiful thing he ever created, despite the cost.  These days, the unfinished slaves are scattered throughout Europe in various museums, hidden treasures waiting to be appreciated by his truest fans. I made a point to seek them out at the Louvre on my first solo trip abroad. I was fresh out of a Modern Lit class with “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” newly committed to memory, at a time when I was more in love with Michelangelo than ever. These unfinished sculptures were the first thing I’d ever seen that was carved by the man himself -they were the reason I was at the Louvre that day, their deep gouges proof that artist really existed and the things I learned in art history were true. Despite their rough hewn state, they stood in front of me as evidence of the extraordinary plans he once had for the project, the tomb that should have been his magnum opus -until Raphael screwed it all up.

Raphael was a painter, skilled in fresco.  He was gregarious and fun; everyone, including the pope himself, enjoyed his company.  But he was jealous of Michelangelo’s talent, so Raphael brought an idea to Pope Julius: what if he took over for Michelangelo on the tomb, freeing Mike up to paint the ceilings of his uncle’s chapel? The proposal was nonsense; Michelangelo was riding high on the critical success of his “David,” an irrefutable masterpiece and testament to his genius with stone. Besides, other than  a little four-foot portrait of the holy family, Michelangelo didn’t have much experience with fresco. The swap made no sense; Raphael was uninterested in sculpture and anyway, he was busy with other commissions, including a series of his own frescoes in the Vatican. The whole scheme could only end in embarrassment for the both of them, but that was the point. Raphael’s own failure would be quiet -the pope had recently been convinced that building an extravagant tomb while he was still alive was bad form, and so a simpler design would not be disappointing.  Michelangelo, however, would fail at fresco dangling sixty feet in the air, trowel and paintbrush in hand. 

The provenance of this story has a lot in common with a throwaway line in the song “A Winter’s Ball,” from Hamilton. In it, Burr says of Hamilton, “Martha Washington named her feral tomcat after him!” In the original cast recording of the performance, Lin Manuel Miranda, as the title character, pipes in, “it’s true!” But it’s not.  In fact, in Hamilton: A Revolution, Miranda concedes that it’s “most likely a tale spread by John Adams later in life. But I like Hamilton owning it” (70). Although, that’s not true either, strictly speaking.  The cat and its name are affirmed in an 1780 letter written by a Captain Smythe (Moore 250).  The cat existed, but Miranda took liberties with tone and intent, chiseling and polishing facts to fit his vision.  It’s not lying; it’s world-building -the divine right of the storyteller.   

The pope kept Michelangelo on the tomb project, and assigned him the ceiling frescoes. Immediately, plans for the tomb had to be revised, pared down to allow time for the ceiling, and construction of the scaffolding that the Sisyphian task would necessitate. It was solitary work that left his vision and posture awkwardly off balance for months, even when he was on solid ground. He hated it. I have to imagine Raphael chuckling at the slapstick agony of it all. 

I’ve seen the ceiling twice.  My favorite panel is “Expulsion From Paradise” because, like all great storytellers, Michelangelo’s world-building tells a story that is more interesting than true.  In this panel, Eve leans back leisurely reaching behind her; Adam has agency.  He stands towering above her, grasping the fig tree with both hands, aggressively gesturing at the serpent, whose head and torso are undeniably feminine.  He takes the historical prominence from Eve -she’s no longer the agent of change; that role is given to Adam, but in casting the serpent as a woman, her gender is absolved of nothing.  I’ve always found this statement to be perplexingly powerful, but ultimately dismissed it as another blow from the patriarchy.  However, as time goes by, I am better able to see Michelangelo’s pain and frustration.  He had no place in high society Rome at that time.  Women were of no interest to him and he lacked the ability to navigate a complex social world.  He had to have felt like an outsider, exiled from a society that eagerly devoured his work, but couldn’t make space for the man himself.  

Raphael could not have been more different, and perhaps, in Michelangelo’s mind, that difference devolved into animosity. Once, Raphael persuaded Bramante, then working as the papal architect, to sneak him into the chapel to get a look at things.  Whether he was there to get a laugh at Michelangelo’s monstrosity of scaffolding and plaster or to sincerely admire the work is irrelevant; he was inspired.  

There is no sneaking in slyly to admire the chapel anymore.  The line of eager tourists begins forming before dawn, and snakes around the building’s exterior, winding through the once private stanze of Pope Julius. Raphael’s “School of Athens” is a favorite waypoint along the path to the chapel.  In it, Raphael thrusts the gloomy likeness of Michelangelo front and almost center. 

Some of us recognize that it is Mike, slumped with his head in his hands.  Some even know what's got him so down, though I doubt Raphael is among us in that knowledge. Raphael died at thirty-seven when his heart gave out -rumors say he was too enthusiastic in his “socializing” with paid female companions. Whether or not that’s true, he would leave behind a career almost as illustrious as Michelangelo’s. Nor would he have any knowledge of the real cost of the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling: as the project ballooned, expanding onto the back wall and bookending biblical existence with an epic depiction of the last judgment, the tomb languished, dwindling until it was barely a shadow of the original plan. 

Taken as a whole, none of it makes sense. All of this subterfuge amounted to nothing. While it is possible to substantiate facts and dates, the scandal itself is difficult to verify in history books.  The murmuring docents at St. Peter’s are silent on  this piece of centuries old gossip, so tourists wend their way through the labyrinthine Vatican stanze none the wiser -because it didn’t happen.  At least not the way I’m telling it.  

There is a sentiment widely attributed to Michelangelo, but impossible to authenticate.  Sometimes it is cited as coming from Giorgio Vasari: “anyone who sees one of Michelangelo's statues can understand … that the artist's aim was simply to release the figure imprisoned in the stone.” I’ve been unable to find it in his biography of Michelangelo. Other times it reads  “I saw the angel in the marble, and carved until I set him free” this version is attributed to Irving Stone’s The Agony and the Ecstasy, but again, I can’t locate that to properly cite either.  The thing is, it doesn’t actually matter.  The world has already been built. The story is written, silent and waiting to be chipped loose. In my experience as a lifelong procrastinator, this mindset subconsciously absolved me of the guilt that has always come with waiting until the last moment, and allowed me to dodge the spotlight when things turned out predictably brilliant. 

The incredible art of the human brain is its propensity to make sense of the world through storytelling. More to the point, we see our own reality reflected back at us over and over as we move through the world. I was twenty-one when I stepped foot in the Louvre. I had transferred to Loyola and moved into a small studio apartment on the north side of Chicago. Despite being absolutely in my element, living in the city, studying at my dream school, a year out from student teaching, I was starting over, lonely and frustrated. The awful stories, tragic explanations for why I, too, felt like an exile, wrote themselves in my head. Or, perhaps, they were already there, waiting to be released. 

Looking back on that time from the vantage point of age and formal diagnosis, I now know that I was struggling with debilitating rejection sensitive dysphoria. If a professor’s margin notes on a graded essay were illegible or a friend was late to meet for lunch, my brain filled in the gaps with the most outlandish and painful possibilities. I misconstrued quickly and was loath to concede my error. Reason was irrelevant, and so I did what I felt was my only option: I glamorized my suffering, romanticizing every perceived slight.  I’m no Michelangelo, but I think about him often, the way he banished himself unnecessarily from society, much as I had. Did he understand how incredible he was?

I want to tell him that I love the simplicity of his style and brave use of color. The anatomy of his nudes -in painting and stone- is perfectly exaggerated without sacrificing truth; silk draped bodies twist and reach in endlessly diverse postures laying bare the artist’s innate gift.  In contrast, the fussiness of Raphael’s work -wispy hair and delicate halos- was a distraction that fooled everyone but me and Mike. But Raphael was cool in a way Michelangelo just couldn’t be. And I can’t escape wondering if that’s what the real conflict was. If, despite his superior talent, he was desperate to feel Raphael’s ease around people. I wonder if he sat on those planks sixty feet up, alone, persuading himself that his misery was entirely Raphael’s fault so that he didn’t have to admit that he was the jealous one. 

When you go to Rome, I hope you will make time to visit the Vatican, and see the marvelous ceiling that, despite it all, is the master sculptor’s most well known work.  But, I humbly request that you also set aside a few hours to visit San Pietro in Vincoli, the permanent home of Pope Julius II’s tomb. The basilica itself is small and unassuming; the crowds are nonexistent and there is no fee to enter.  You can be alone with your truth and Michelangelo’s work.  I remember studying various drafts of the tomb in college, each one slightly less grand than the previous, but nevertheless bold and simple, heavy with meticulous attention to anatomy and textile. When I finally arrived at the little church near dusk, I found the entire structure shrouded in scaffolding, save for a small opening through which Moses was only just visible. I was disconsolate. The scaffolding got the better of me, too. Like it had been for Michelangelo, it was yet another obstacle to my joy and satisfaction thrown carelessly in my way by powers so much greater than me.

The basilica of St. Pietro in Vincoli houses the chains that held St. Peter captive in Jerusalem until he was freed by "an angel of the Lord" (Acts 12:7). The pope chose this location for his tomb carefully, just as he chose Moses as the featured subject, but there’s no historical record wherein anyone acknowledges the bitter irony of Michelangelo’s servitude and suffering as he carved a statue of the great liberating prophet to be housed in a basilica alongside the relics of St. Peter’s own deliverance from bondage. But, the human brain is a brilliant storyteller, and I have to think, Mike knew. This is the part of the story I choose to carry with me now: the Archangel Michael was his own Moses, freeing himself from the very chains he created to live a second life in the sewers, hanging out, eating pizza and skateboarding, the chillest of Ninja Turtles. These days, I don’t know any kids still young enough to idolize the heroes in a halfshell; everyone has moved on to newer, cooler things, but I think I’ll hang back just a little longer in the sewers.

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References

Miranda, Lin-Manuel, and Jeremy McCarter. Hamilton: The Revolution. Grand Central Publishing, 2016.

Moore, Frank. Diary of the American Revolution, 1860, Vol. 2: From Newspapers and Original Documents (Classic Reprint). FB&C Limited, 2015.

Big thanks to my gem polisher, B-Dub, LU.

For so many reasons, I no longer teach that book, and so it’s been a while since I’ve heard his story, but I think about it often. In my mind, it is sugar-dipped and glittering: Jeff climbed Mt. Everest and rescued a girl from trafficking on the way down, taking turns with other climbers, carrying her to freedom and safety.

But that’s not the truth. The truth, is that he joined a group with an American guide who took some experienced hikers and amateur mountaineers to a lower camp on Everest. I’ve found that the mere mention of “Everest” around my friend garners an immediate eye roll and a string of commentary that will begin with “well, you know, he didn’t actually climb Everest. And the real heroes are…” hashtag relationship goals, as the kids say. 

The real hero actually was the tour guide who had been made aware of the little girl’s plight and took advantage of the hike up to make arrangements, and the hike down to collect the girl and deliver her to school. The truth is, my friend’s partner has little to take credit for, aside from having a very cool hobby and sharing the story and photos with our students. But thinking back on those afternoons spent in the auditorium listening to Jeff’s presentation, he did have so much to be proud of. 

It reminds me of a passage from Art Spiegelman’s Maus that I think about strangely often. In it, Artie juxtaposes the accomplishments and challenges in his life against the those his father faced surviving Auschwitz. His psychiatrist stops him and reminds him, “you weren’t in Auschwitz… you were in Rego Park” (Spiegelman 2.44). Years ago, my own therapist encouraged me to reflect on this passage throughout the decade-plus my partner and I spent undergoing IVF treatments. I still often find myself on this page, squeezed in next to Artie on that distorted chair, “you’re in Rego Park” echoing in my head like a mantra. 

This passage gave me permission to feel. To be angry and sad and disappointed. I didn’t have to qualify my suffering just because someone else suffered more. It was ok to grieve the vision I had for my life. Living in the truth of my heartache was validating. Accepting that there was space for my pain in this world allowed me to navigate my life more fully. 

That this passage has burrowed into the strange, dark corners of my consciousness is only surprising if we ignore the way we are socialized to compare (Eat your dinner; there are children starving on the other side of the world who would love those brussel sprouts). Accepting that a person is allowed to feel their feelings in whatever magnitude seems right has been pivotal in the growth of my empathy as an educator. Internalizing this lesson eradicated phrases like “you know you’re lucky that…” and “you think this is hard, just wait until…” from my repertoire virtually overnight. 

More and more, I find myself reminding students that while their parents are correct in saying that, “in the 90s we didn’t even have cell phones or snapgram,” it doesn’t change their current lived experience -the FOMO or bullying, loneliness or jealousy. My students aren’t in the 90s; they’re right here and right now. It’s remarkable how much trust and rapport can be built just by validating the simple lived experiences of our fellow humans. 

So why was I finding it so hard to step fully into my success and joy? That panel from Maus wasn’t just permission to cry and scream. It was permission to be. It demanded to know why a hard-earned B- is any less deserving of ice cream than an easy A (spoiler, it’s not). What I had neglected in my hurry to validate was a deep and urgent need to celebrate. 

So it would seem that this is the part of the essay where I return to the original metaphor, congratulate Jeff on his little tourist hike in Nepal, pat myself on the back, and we all feel better. Or I can tell the truth. I have been thinking about confronting truth a lot this year ever since I began writing more about the work I do in the classroom, and, the truth is, my neurodivergence has allowed me to see my work, indeed my whole world, in a way that is fundamentally different from my colleagues. And as a result, I don’t actually know what to celebrate and what to grieve. 

Sometimes it’s impossible for me to read words on a page.  Grading essays takes months, during which I hate myself every minute for my inability to do my job. What right do I have to wallow in self pity or frustration? I tell myself to quit blaming task paralysis and just. Pick up. The pen. Other times, I’d get an idea or hear a song and find myself able to bang out a thirty page thematic unit with integrated research and embedded rubrics, homemade fonts, accompanying slide decks, and impeccable design all in a matter of four days. I’ll admit, it’s a little exhilarating when it happens, but it’s not hard, so it seems silly to accept accolades.  Plus, it’s not me, it’s my disability. Hyperfocus is real and I didn’t choose to get hit with inspiration in such an obsessive way. 

The truth is that I hate myself the whole time I make those units just as much as I hate myself when I look at a stack of papers I can’t read my way out of. Because regardless of how pathetic or admirable it may seem, both circumstances result from the same source, my disability. 

Expressing this loathing in words feels a little like trying to put on wet swimsuit, everything exposed, impossibly awkward, uncomfortably cold. Reading my own words, I see the same truth you see. I know that my struggles are forgivable and that my triumphs merit celebration, but that’s not what I need. Perhaps that’s what keeps me holding onto Rego Park so tightly, the finite black and white of it: “you’re not there… you’re here” feels secure and predictable. 

The impossible part is holding space for both-and. In Life of Pi,  there is a beautiful description of Krishna dancing with the milkmaids: “they dance and dance with their sweet lord, who has made himself so abundant as to be in the arms of each and every girl. But the moment the girls become possessive, the moment each one imagines that Krishna is her partner alone, he vanishes” (Martel 49). As I read it, the message is clear: there is space enough for all of it. 

There is heroism in bearing witness to a miraculous intervention that saved a little girl at the foot of Everest. If there wasn’t, my friend would never have pulled me aside to suggest I invite her husband in to speak to my class. This is how stories work. They shift, iridescent in the light, changing with circumstance and audience. And so it seems like this should be the part where I admit that it is possible to hold onto both-and. To give myself grace and applause. To accept my disability as a superpower and transmit that, in turn, to my students. 

But, for me, it has always felt just barely out of reach, a compassion I extend to everyone but myself. As if merely glancing at the other girls is sin enough, and in a flash, Krishna has vanished. It is profoundly unfair that even in this imagined paradise, I falter, stumbling over a lifetime spent in the purgatory between shame and pride.  

As I’ve gotten older, I find myself able to dance with Krishna more and more.  In truth, I like this midnight meadow and his flute melody. There really is more space here with the cows and Jeff’s heroic climb, years of infertility and my beautiful child, incompetence and aptitude.  There is space for all of it, but only if I never steal a glance at the other dancers. 

If you’d like to know more about the little Nepali girl from the start of this essay, and perhaps even donate to the transformative programs that have made all the difference, visit https://changinglivesnepal.org/

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References
Martel, Yann. Life of Pi. Harcourt, 2001.
Spiegelman, Art. Maus II: A Survivor's Tale: And Here My Troubles Began. Pantheon Books, 1992.
Zabaldo, Deana. “Changing Lives Nepal: Home.” Changing Lives Nepal, 2022, https://changinglivesnepal.org/. Accessed 2 May 2024.

Hurston never got the “book birthday” so many authors celebrate these days on social media or during book launch tours.  And what a shame.  I can imagine her in the vendor hall at the NCTE convention with a line wrapping around the entire room, all of us eager for a signature and selfie.  What would those few starstruck moments feel like?  What little giveaway or trinket would I keep forever or give to a favorite student upon my return?  Perhaps a bookmark or sticker, something to pique curiosity before reading, and call back beloved lines after.

It took me about ten minutes to make a pretty graphic combining a favorite quote with an image recalling the book’s central symbol.  Students would have so much fun doing this, I thought to myself. But without any clear academic purpose, it just wasn’t a good use of class time.  Still though, it would be fun.  

I couldn’t get the idea out of my head, so I dropped it in the calendar for a Friday when they’d be wily anyway -the weekend of the Turnabout dance, or spring break, I don’t rightly recall.  I planned to chalk it up to a lost day anyway; we’d design some merch and talk with friends, and then I’d print up everyone’s stickers and we’d trade.

As the lesson’s date approached, I was running up against submission deadlines for articles I was authoring for the NCTE Blog, and California English Journal. A dear friend was begining to see their first book squarely on the path to publication.  On social media, I watched unboxings of the fun little press kits accompanying launches of various new YA titles. All around me, the promise of publication seemed to be opening up. In many ways, publishing is seen as the goal, the endpoint in the writing process.  And yet, within the  school setting, publishing is a relatively inconsequential milestone.  A handful of students will submit work to the school literary magazine, and some will write for the school paper, but the vast majority of students run a quick spellcheck and turn their work in without a thought to what it means to put their words in front of another person.  

Of course, strictly speaking, that’s not true.  Publishing is simply preparing one’s work and making it available to a wider audience. Like most teachers, I cover that with days dedicated to formatting and proofreading, with occasional presentations sprinkled in throughout the year.  But none of this really reflected the nuances of publishing, a complex gear of the literacy machine that makes or breaks authors and stories for years to come.  

I saw that there was space to explore the idea of publishing.  To ask questions about who decides which stories get told, which authors get exalted, which books are worthy of investment. Looking at press kits, and ARCs, I centered the lesson around the idea of the sales pitch -which images and quotes would make a reader curious or engaged?  What designs would I be willing to slap on my laptop?  Which sticker would I be willing to shell out two bucks for? How much information about the story could I pack into a graphic while maintaining good design? All of these questions transformed my fun little craft into a complex and thoughtful examination of Hurston’s biography as well as the current landscape of marketing and design.  

The lesson was solid.  Deeply relevant and standards-based, cross-curricular in asking students to use design skills and technological tools.  To say that this was my plan all along would be disingenuous; it simply wasn’t.  And yet, the ideas, from conception to fruition, were entirely mine and designed intentionally. Fortunately, it didn’t matter whether I was a curriculum savant or just a lucky fool.  The lesson worked.

Once the kids were hard at work designing their “merch,” I was able to circulate among them and dig deeper.  At the first table, I noticed that the quotes were painfully long.  We talked about citing only the bare minimum.  What do you actually need to cite in order to make your point?  How much can you pare this down without losing meaning?  I paused class and gave a general reminder quickly reteaching part of a recent conciseness lesson.

At the next table, the students were busily trimming their quotes, when I urged them to think about the relationship between image and words. One student wanted to use a powerful quote, but observed that it contained racist language that wouldn’t make for good merchandising.  Together we selected a different combination of quote and image to convey the same powerful idea, but without decontextualized language that would be likely to offend.  

Throughout the day that I delivered this lesson, I found myself able to work in small groups of three to five students on the specific aspects of writing, citing, and design that were most useful to them.  Occasionally, I would pause the rest of the class to share the advice or reasoning that emerged organically, but more often, it just became an item on my mental checklist as I visited with working students. 

What became clear as the day wore on was that this was not a throwaway Friday; my students were doing complex and thought-provoking work with immediate real-world application. What’s more, in the advice and support they sought from me, I could tell that they were taking the opportunity seriously and genuinely wanted to create a meaningful product. By the end of the day, in addition to my planned lesson on what it means to publish, I had delivered dozens of mini lessons covering a wide gamut of individualized topics, and I had a rough sense of how every single student was progressing in their reading and analysis. It had been a fruitful use of time after all. 

There’s this thing they tell pre-service teachers when they’re drowning under the weight of formal written lesson plans: “eventually, you’ll get so good you’ll be able to lesson plan on a post-it note.” But, that’s not really accurate. The truth is something more transcendent. Eventually, as we understand our students as whole people, struggling to carve out a place for themselves in this world, people worthy of our trust and our time, we come to trust ourselves, and it is the lesson plan that is inconsequential. 

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© 2024 CMSThomas

I know you’ve heard it a million times, promises of books that will capture the hearts and minds of the pickiest readers, but these three are different. I promise. Meet me over on the NCTE blog to learn more!

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LITERACY

I am a software engineer. I write software.

These two sentences have been offered in conjunction countless times to explain to a curious conversational partner what it is that I and my colleagues do during business hours. It is a curious thing that I have so often felt compelled to refine the first sentence by offering the second. Indeed as commonplace as this description is, I must conclude that the recent experiences that have pushed me to reconsider their meaning are nothing less than peculiar and fortuitous.

It is certainly fair to argue that the software that programmers write on a work-a-day basis bears more similarity to a car manual than Hansson’s example of poetry, but this is, itself, a red herring. Writing, regardless of topic or target audience, is an act of literary creation regardless of where the author falls on that continuum between artisan and artist. Software ultimately is literature written for two audiences: the computer that consumes the code as instruction and the software literate people who read, modify and improve the code over time.

Likewise, the language arts teacher is no stranger to the close relationship between the craft and the art of literacy skills.  Our daily struggle is to transform words on a page into stories, relationships, philosophy, and faith.  finding ways to help our students transcend rote task management lies in fostering the means to understand and appreciate complex relationships among ideas. Similarly, the best programmers maintain a clear vision of the stories they are telling and rely on their ingenuity to find simple, accurate, and expressive ways to tell them.  Both in the classroom and at the command line, the ability to accurately and  creatively describe relationships is paramount.

It’s difficult to imagine two audiences more different than humans and computers, and yet, the tasks we are asking our students to complete are uncannily similar to the tasks described by programming languages.   Literacy skills that account for the daily grind of instruction - sequencing, causality, and other relationships - are the logical backbone of programming syntax.  Using programming language to express the logical relationships we try to untangle in texts is a surprisingly natural, yet totally unexplored medium.

Farrah Bostic made this point well when she said that we should all, not just engineers, become what she called “conversational coders,” or “code literate.” Conversational coders are people who are able to follow the meaning and intent of written software and even suggest changes or offer our own compositions. For language arts teachers, a little can go a long way.  Becoming literate enough to express, simple relationships can open the door to a largely unexplored territory.

Comprehension of program source code, then, is clearly a type of new literacy, certainly different from natural and written language literacy. Truth be told, much data and many people support the idea that the next and best jobs will be programming jobs. If it’s this critical and visible, then why is it so hard for software companies to fill these positions?

It clearly isn’t because of a lack of a college education. A recent report commissioned by the city of New York to highlight the increasing importance of the tech sector to that city has shown that about half of their technology jobs are filled by people without college degrees (Mcgeehan). The gap in training isn't being picked up by secondary schools either. Computer Science is the only so-called STEM field that has decreased in terms of student exposure since 1980, from 25% to 19% (United States). The common consensus is that few high schools offer much in the way of computer science outside of word processing applications.

So, where are all of our IT professionals coming from?

PRIVILEGE

I’ve often struggled with the question of how I found my career. The simple truth is that my hobby turned out to be more profitable than my unrealized profession. This was only possible because I was exposed to computing at a fairly early age. Without access to a home computer at a young age, I struggle to imagine how I would have become a software writer.

This story is so common in my industry as to be a leitmotif of privilege. These days meetups and other programs abound, especially in metropolitan areas, such as where I work in Chicago’s loop, that serve as independent study and lab instruction in computer science. Resources to learn programming skills flourish online. However, these resources, opportunities, and chance exposures are endemic to those who experience some level of privilege and remain largely invisible otherwise.

If public school exists to open doors for the next generation and we truly aim to prepare young people for careers and higher education then we have a duty to introduce our students to the skills, indeed the fields, that are most promising and competitive. 

DIVERSITY

If there was an unstated theme to this year’s RailsConf, the conference where Hansson spoke the words at the opening of the article, it would have been inclusivity. Software engineering is a profession that is statistically dominated by young white men who are often blind to issues of diversity. However there has been, in recent years, a groundswell of support for a more inclusive culture. Organizations such as Women Who Code, Girl Develop It, and Black Girls Code are garnering greater attention and support. As an industry we’re doing better than we were a decade ago, but there’s so much more to do. 

Diversity, at its heart, is a question of exposure. I hope that in coming years I will see more schools expanding their computer science curriculum, but more than that I would hope that we can expose as many students as possible to writing in general, and software writing in particular, as a creative discipline. Any chance we have to emphasize core skills involving composition will result in children and students better prepared to engage their future.

While incorporating software writing into curriculum may seem difficult, a code literate language arts teacher can bridge the perceived chasm between literature and computer science, and in so doing augment literacy instruction.  What better way to express and assess student understanding of the complex disputes among the youngsters of Verona than with the following succinct description written in pseudo-code?

The passage above describes how the death of his friend shifts Romeo's motivation to revenge and it accounts for the spiraling escalation of violence through use of a loop, a repeating section of code that allows for changing variables across multiple passes. 

In addition to the descriptive potential of programming languages, they can also be a powerful vehicle for meaning and art unto themselves.  In recent years, languages with greater expressive qualities such as Ruby and Perl have come to dominate the industry. This shift is so pronounced that it has given rise to such interesting phenomena as code poetry, verifiably correct and executable code written with the same poetic intent as found in traditional verse. Commercially available sources are scarce, but Ishac Bertran curates a collection of poetry in code {poems} that is visually appealing, thematically moving, and always programmatically functional.  Study of these works offers a unique approach to exploring relationships among ideas and author's intention.  The poems can be appreciated with no understanding of the programming language, but even minimal code literacy adds layers of meaning and beautiful depth.

With some trepidation and vulnerability I will conclude with an original code poem of my own as a small reminder that inclusivity fosters literacy, which in turn drives diversity.

Co-Written with my partner, Blake Thomas and originally published in The English Bulletin, Spring 2014.

References

Bertran, Ishac, comp. code {poems}. Barcelona: Creative Commons, 2012. Print.

Bostic, Farrah. Keynote Address, RailsConf 2014. Sheraton Chicago Hotel and Towers, Chicago. 22 Apr. 2014. Address.

Heinmeier Hansson, David. Keynote Address, RailsConf 2014. Sheraton Chicago Hotel and Towers, Chicago. 22 Apr. 2014. Address.

Mcgeehan, Patrick. "Half of New York’s Tech Workers Lack College Degrees, Report Says." The New York Times. The New York Times, 01 Apr. 2014. Web. 06 May 2014.

United States. Department of Education. National Center for Education Statistics. The Nation’s Report Card: America’s High School Graduates. By C. Nord. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2011. Print.

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