Untangling the Mess

Welcome new teachers! We hope you are able to enjoy the items in your red totes! They were packaged with love and appreciation. We know you often feel overwhelmed, underpaid, and under appreciated. But what you do matters so much! You are the silent heroes of our community, and unfortunately you hear most of the complaints! From parents, students, administrators, state boards of education... But you are the ones in the trenches, and we are eternally grateful for all you do for the students of our community. We wish we could give you more than a red tote, but it's a start! This blog is a place where teachers in Michiana can come and share of few "Me too" moments and strategize how we can help each other in the trenches!

We know what it's like! We're teachers too! There are certain parts of our job that we love ... namely, the students. We want our actions, our words, our promises, our lives to scream to them "You matter! You are not an accident! You are not someone's second thought. Someone's punching bag. Someone's scapegoat for their own lost dreams. You have a reason for existing and a part to play in the good and beautiful side of this world. The sky's the limit . . . "

But our voice competes with the cold square bricks of concrete, the upcoming state tests, data team meetings, funding issues, students' homes where basic needs aren't met, our own homes that vie for our attention as well, and evaluations that remind us to to "stick to the standards." But are we ok with the standard that our students often feel like another filled desk, another word on a faceless roster, another bad kid waiting to get caught, another ID bar code to scan in the lunch line, another test score waiting to land on a graph? Of course not. But we often feel overwhelmed by what seems to be a system that is a tangled mess!

Good news, in the middle of this tangled mess is one simple fact. You love your students. One by one you are brightening their world, their minds, and their futures. Can we single-handedly untangle the tangled mass of issues facing public education today? No, but what we can do is take the few strands we have and weave them together to make something beautiful and strong, so we can hold on to each other in the middle of the mess. One strand, one day, one lesson, one class, one student at a time.



"If we are to achieve the quantum leaps the future seems to be demanding of us, we must risk to leave our containers-turned cages and find grace to dance without stepping on toes. . . Many of us choose security over freedom to such an extreme that we confine ourselves and profoundly limit our experience of life. Maximum safety, minimum existence."
Gordon MacKenzie, Orbiting the Giant Hairball

"I want you to be smart in the same way—but for what is right—using every adversity to stimulate you to creative survival, to concentrate your attention on the bare essentials, so you'll live, really live, and not complacently just get by on good behavior."
Jesus (Luke 16:8b (Msg))

Getting to the Root of Things

It happens every day. Kids are cruel to each other, snapping insults back and forth. We correct. We make them apologize, and then it starts all over again. Then we find our own voices and bad attitudes added to the mix. Our nerves have been frayed, emotions are raw, and our patience levels are falling like snow in these winter months. We're left longing for spring break which seems too far away. But sometimes it's ok to stop the lesson and dig down deeper to get to the root of things. Maybe that's where the real lesson begins.

That kid that is shoving, fighting, sleeping his way through the day. What's going on at home? What's really going on in his head? This rotten apple you're afraid might spoil the whole bunch. Sometimes it's easy to fall into thinking that the instigator in your classroom is the villain to your hero story. But he's really just a kid confused about right and wrong, and most of all, who really cares. Maybe we take him aside without the ears of his peers or outside the classroom for a few minutes to find out. Many times we'll find there's a deeper issue. Every student deeply longs for friendship, connection, trust, peace, even when it looks like they do their best to run from it. This "me first!" demand might actually be a question "Do I matter?" If we start to love them, root for them, and correct them like we would our own children, it's amazing what fruit they begin to produce. We just have to dig deep to find out what's really happening at the roots. Roots before fruits, and then have fun watching them grow up to surprise you.


“Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.” Leo Buscaglia

"In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day's work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years." ~Jacques Barzun

A Day Off to Dream

As we celebrate Martin Luther King Day, I can't help but remember the beauty of the diversity in my classroom..his dream come true. We're closer, but we teachers still have to break up fights in the hallways and help them unclench those fists of anger and I took time a moment to reflect so I could connect...

I am from blonde pigtails and Mr. Rogers
and old hymns that sang me to sleep
but You didn't just live in my cookie cutter world
as I read, listen, and dive into
the stories of my students
I learn so much from the colors of their world
where Nikki Giovanni's phrase rings true
"Black Love is Black wealth"
where Carmen Tofolla's abuelo
passes down his wisdom like tools in his rusty toolbox
that she wasn't allowed to touch in "Mi Familia"
Langston Hughes speaks of rivers
and dreams of dancing in the sun
"to whirl and to dance
Till the white day is done."
hands raise that never would before
angry stories of getting followed in the mall
or women clutching purses and the
thunk, thunk of door locks as they walk down the street
Brent Staples says "Black men trade tales like this all the time"
we are studying multi-cultural America
but the room is the real textbook
each with their own unique story to tell
quilted patchwork squares of bold patterns
until they finally came together
"red and yellow, black and white
they are precious in Your sight"
ALL of them.

"An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity."
Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Day by day our lives are woven into a giant narrative, and every moment we become more and more the story of who we are. We are stories. And we only connect with other people when we know their stories. The more intimate we are, the more our stories intertwine . . . and each one of those stories, each one of those people, mattered so much to the Author of Life that he left heaven and began the dreadful trek to the cross . . . The storyteller entered the tale. The author stepped onto the page. The poet whose very words had written the cosmos became part of the text of this world." Steven James, Story

A New Year, A New Question

Let's get real. As teachers, we get drilled daily on the "hows" and "whats" of all we're expected to accomplishing a class period, a day, a grading period, a semester, a school year. Staff meetings, evaluations, strategy meetings and red tape drain us and leave us feeling overwhelmed and exhausted. We get home to our families a leftover version of ourselves when they are asking for our best. We have only so many pieces in our pie and we unintentionally dished them all out between 8am and 3pm and it leaves us feeling pretty crumby at the end of the day. In the fog of fatigue, we start to lose sight of the joy of what made us choose this crazy calling in the first place--the why.

Good news: We are your cheerleaders! We want you to come home to your families with a bounce in your step. We want teaching to feel more like playing for you! You've come to the right place!

Buried underneath the data, test scores, piles of papers to grade, totes stuffed with clutter like their minds, is the why behind all the "what" that weighs us down. The reasons we started teaching in the first place. That look in our students' eyes when they realize "I didn't think I could do that! Look what I did!" The lightbulbs, the joy, the fact that no matter what their age, each one of our students is someone's baby.

But these faces gets buried each day in the stress of the piles in the day to day details of the how and what. We are forming a group of teachers that is determined to keep the "why" at the tops of our piles, the fronts of our minds, and the center of our hearts. Join us and rediscover the why!

"The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his information and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing.To him he's always doing both." James Michener

"What's your red rubber ball? What's your source of joy? What topics do you love to discuss and ponder? What dreams to do you chase? ... After all, where do dreams start? They start when we're playing, when we're free to run and romp around. That's when we imagine we're something bigger than we are. The red rubber ball represents play to me. It's any activity,topic or purpose that makes you excited about the day..." Kevin Carroll, Rules of the Red Rubber Ball