Meltdowns, Moms and Magic Elixirs

(The first part of this blog was written a few weeks back, discarded and then found again)

Tonights are the easy nights. Baths are done (Milly did open a bottle of "bath paint" that soiled the bathtub something dark purple, but otherwise, uneventful), kids are eating more than screaming and their clothes are put away. This past weekend was anything but.

We took the kids to Indiana University. My eldest had a tourney/camp and after we realized the hotel we were staying in had a pool, we decided to make it a daycation. Of course, the second we get there, a sign in the lobby tells us the pool is closed for maintenance. Despite the bad news, I kept telling myself, "Don't freak out."

Of course, we sometimes end up doing the opposite of what we tell ourselves. We remind ourselves to not say something stupid, and it's the first thing out of our mouths. So, it's not five minutes into the room that I'm getting after kids for jumping on the bed or Cruz for screaming. Not an hour before I'm regretting the decision. Soon, it's a full blown meltdown.

Then after the meltdown, you remember your proclamations. This will be a good weekend. I will help out with the kids. I'm here to help you relax. Then it all crumbles in front of you like some spilled cup of ice (which, ironically, did happen a few times).

(The rest is fairly current.)

But the weeks after have been bittersweet (we introduced that word in vocabulary to the fourth graders concerning a slave owner who sold his slaves and who used the word in his narrative, pretty interesting to see their responses). We finally got to see some indoor softball games of Lisa's, I fell back into a solid routine with my reading groups and Del and I delved back into Bible studies and share groups.

Thanks to some great ideas discovered from Sunday school, I transformed some lessons and reworked them for my needs at school. Also in the mix was an idea from Lisa's campaigners evening where they prayed for one another. So last Monday we had them finish the sentence, "I am at my greatest when I..." And the kids wrote down their answer, passed their papers to the right and wrote down the same answer or new ones. By the end, each had 28 "greatness" examples. The next day, we shared our favorites. Some of them were pretty good, like showing their work in math or cooperating with others. Then we chose one we wanted to work on, one idea we aren't strong in but wanted to improve. We wrote that one goal inside a tracing of our hand. After taping our hand-goals on the cabinets, each student laid their hands on them and said, "I am going to help (name) with...(whatever their goal was). Empowering day for me and the kids got into it. So far, the kids have been using that language in the class with one another. It's good to have a family to come to work for!

Not that this school week hasn't had their down sides. Despite some productivity in Social Studies projects and compiling picture book materials for their k-1 read-alouds in a few weeks, I had a collision of wills with a parent, one that I haven't had since my second year of teaching.

Of course, I have a habit of rattling hornets' nests. I've often told my students, that if I have to make everyone at your house mad at me so that they can gain an education, then that's the price I'm willing to pay. I rarely use the power of office referrals to social workers to get the desired affect of getting a kid in class. Sometimes, it's the power of the comment box that gets them before it gets to that point. Needless to say, when you see a mom wearing a hoodie coming down the hall after you with her kid in tow, followed by a sub principal who had the assumption something was amiss, you know it's not your day.

Whether my comments in the hall that day amounted to frustration, disgust (her words, not mine), stress, soap box, tiredness or my subconscious need to uphold my reputation in front of the kids, but doors were closed, fifth graders were laughing behind then and my kids were probably pretty stunned. Amid all this, I wondered what her daughter was thinking when mom comes to the school to chew out her teacher?

There's a lot of questions and questioning between my colleagues and I this week. Do we ignore how the boys talk to the girls in class? Do we throw our hands up at the borderline learning disabled kid who is reading at a second grade level? Do we snicker at the mom who requests to move her kid to another class as if that's the magic elixir that will suddenly cure their child's' mischief?

More to come....

Lorenzo the Lion

Tomorrow is back to school! Excited, a bit tired and always stressed because my greatest fear is failing on stage miserably. Then school starts and it pretty much goes the opposite of what I may be thinking about my lesson plans.

My mother texted me the other night and told me my Tío Lorenzo died. He's my grandmother's last brother that lived in the "valley", a southern part of Texas near the border that is known to me as such a regional landscape as long as I can remember. We would take yearly trips to the valley to see my abuelita, our second cousins, weddings and the occasional funeral.

I haven't been down since my great-grandmother passed almost 15 years ago. I miss the Spanish conversations between my grandma and her sisters (they always seem like they are arguing, and only for their facial expressions and tone, for all I know they are talking about dress sizes). I miss the outpouring of love from my cousins and the general feel that I'm in some alternate universe where the still-standing house my grandma grew up in is somehow too short for words. I sat in that house smelling the smells of a Mexican kitchen and looking at pictures of my great-grandfather in his military uniform.

Back to my Tío. His name was always pronounced "Lee-un-zo" or "L'onzo". He made trips up here to Houston many times and you always knew he was in the room. He was a strong presence (I can't imagine him and my now deceased grandfather in the same room. I wonder who was loudest?). He owned his own business (a funeral home that he passed on to his daughter) at a time that I never quite grasped that Mexicano men could be more than just city workers and laborers. He was the kind of guy that was always in dress pants, dressed nice. He was corporate Dos Equis. And even though I'm marginalizing what he meant to his family, there is no doubt he was a loved figure. He would get after my mom and I for my lack of Spanish speaking skills and told us both about it. When he called to talk to his sister on the phone and I answered, I better knew what he was saying! He never compromised. And if I spelled his name the way I thought it sounded it would look as if he was born from the grandest of all animals--Lion-zo!

After calling my grandma about her plans for the funeral, I was watching "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World." As a kid, it was one of those movies that was close to me because it was one of my grandfather's favorites (along with Foghorn Leghorn cartoons) and my dad distilled this sense of movie wonderment as a kid and I knew a lot of the comedians in the movie. So, it went that all I could think about was my Houston family. My grandma's side in the valley, my grandfather's in Ohio. Me somewhere in between.

Now I watch it and wonder what my grandfather was probably laughing about all those many years ago. Was it Spencer Tracy's dreams of Mexico? Was it the foolishness of Sid Ceaser trying to blast through a locked door with a sledgehammer and getting nowhere? Was it the nagging mother-in-law that was attacking him with a purse? Or did he sometimes feel like Jonathan Winters when he destroyed the entire gas station, tearing through walls like they were paper mache? I vaguely knew the two men, my uncle and my grandfather. One from language barrier and the other from age. Death has them both, but they are released now, one in memory and one we mourn. We are much better in our life for having known them.