Breaking Radio Silence

Yeah, yeah, yeah...long time no write.

The school year has started but it's all jarring and interrupted by holidays, trips to the Hulbert Outdoor Center for teambuilding, emergency faculty meetings called to deal with snafus...next week will actually be my first full week of classes, and it's about time.

I am currently on Lake Morey in beautiful Fairlee, VT, and the rain. It is incessant. We come to Hulbert each year in order to bring our small middle school together and foster leadership in the 8th grade. So far, so good. We spent yesterday on teambuilding exercises in the pouring rain, and I heard not one complaint, not one peep of discontent. Well, until two sixth graders went for the same football and collided. One kid is fine, one kid has a lump the size of said football on his little addled head.

I am in charge of the 8th grade girls' cabin. It's wet, it's smelly, it's loud with the hot whispers of pre-teen angst and gossip. Despite all that, we fell asleep last night to the call of two owls, and that makes up for a  lot.

Today, more team building and the high ropes course. One year ago, I wrote an article about what this experience means to our school, and as I head out for breakfast, I will post it again, for good times' sake. The full piece, with photos, is here.

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.[1]

In the common day of my Crossroads Academy classroom, I encourage my students to wander into their own regions of supernatural wonder. I teach my students to understand the journey of the hero – Aeneas, Moses, Arthur, Huck Finn – in order to prepare them for their own quests, their own battles, their own victories. The journey of these heroes – and of my students – inevitably leads into the wilderness, where the true exploration of heart and soul takes place.

In order to allow our students to embark upon their own heroic journeys, we take them into to the wilderness of the Hulbert Outdoor Center for three days each fall. Under the firm but gentle tutelage of the Hulbert instructors, and with the encouragement of their classmates, Crossroads students challenge themselves to go into the dark places they must visit in order to make the big discoveries about themselves.

Crossroads Academy is a small, independent school with a very large mission. We educate children in kindergarten through eighth grade according to the Core Knowledge Curriculum set out by E.D. Hirsch, and the Core Virtues Curriculum outlined by Mary Beth Klee, our the school’s founder. Our academic curriculum is interwoven with an education in the core virtues of justice, temperance, fortitude, and prudence, and, through the study of these virtues, our students are continually challenged to assess who they are in and what sort of people they want to become. We explore the meaning of character as it is expressed through history and literature, but there is no better place to explore one’s individual interpretation of justice, temperance, fortitude, and prudence than at Hulbert Outdoor Center.

Hulbert allows us to build a strong and trusting community in a matter of days rather than the months it would take in a normal classroom environment. We assign cross-grade teams for the three days, teams that get together for lunch over the course of the school year in order to re-connect and reflect on their Hulbert experience. Older students partner and mentor their younger schoolmates on the ropes course while the younger students are encouraged to establish their place within the larger community.

In our surveys of their experiences at Hulbert, students reflect on the things they learned there:

“One of the most important things I learned at Hulbert that I can use at school is the ability to believe in myself.” Seventh grade student.

“By the end of these three days, I feel I have learned so much about each and every person in my group. I also feel that I have made bonds with the people in my group, which cannot be broken. Also, I feel that during these three days I have learned how to be the best team member I think I can be.” Eighth grade student.

“I learned that you shouldn’t ever underestimate anyone, including yourself.” Sixth grade student.

“I learned that I can be a strong leader, but that there are also times when I need to hold back and let other have a chance to lead. It took empathy to understand that others besides myself wanted to lead as well.” Eighth grade student.

It’s not just the students that learn about themselves. Students are able to get acquainted with their teachers informally, outside the rigors of the classroom. Often, students are nervous about being away from home, and the support of their teachers in the cabins at night fosters a special trust that cannot be created in the classroom. Teachers take part in the ropes course and teambuilding exercises, and it never fails to thrill the students when their French or math teacher comes barreling down the long zip line. I have learned so much about my students – their fears, hopes, and dreams – through my participation in our annual trip to Hulbert.

After their successes in the physical and emotional challenges presented to them at Hulbert, my students are well equipped for the academic rigors ahead. The bond of trust formed in teambuilding exercises at Hulbert extends into the classroom, and holds our school together as a community. Our students arrive at Hulbert individuals and emerge as part of a larger community. When we return to the common day of our classroom, my students are ready to learn. They trust me, they trust their classmates, and they are more able to take the intellectual leaps of faith I ask of them.

Each year, in our budget meetings, the Crossroads Academy staff looks at the expense of Hulbert, the luxury of three whole days in the woods when the budget is tight. Ultimately, we all agree. The trip pays for itself daily in returns of diligence, fortitude, perseverance, and a spirit of intellectual bravery. I am a better teacher and my students are better learners because of the foundation laid by Hulbert staff in the opening days of our school year.

The character instilled in those three days at Hulbert is a boon to our school, and even deep into our school year, those three warm days and cool nights they spent in the wilderness together continue to bind our community. Crossroads Academy students go into the woods in Fairlee in order to find themselves, but emerge having found their place in a community of heroes.

---

[1] Joseph Campbell. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968.

Rather an Extraordinary Girl

Pip has been gone for ten days, and it's been hard for all of us to face the possibility that he will never come home. The kids listen for the jingle of his bell, and the neighbors are on high alert. We spent two days walking the woods in pursuit of a false lead and have reluctantly begun to mourn his loss.

Pip charmed his way into our home. He followed me around Robie Farms, rolled over on his back and looked over his shoulder with a come-hither invitation to fall for him. He bestowed his affection on me and I was grateful, so when he withdrew his love, I felt jilted. Dumped.

In the meantime, our dependable house cat, Clementine, remains constant. We adopted her five years ago from the Upper Valley Humane Society despite her overbite, toothlessness, and bow legs. Her appreciation is tangible. Every night, she meows plaintively at the top of the stairs with impatience, then moves to the end of the bed nearest the door as I conduct my evening routine, and finally takes up her position on my pillow when I slide into bed. She's restless at first, frustrated with my book for monopolizing the prime real estate in front of my face, but when I finally get rid of the extra reading pillow, she settles in. She stalks purposefully up on to the pillow, then lies down in the shape of a comma, her back against my ear. I fall asleep to her soft down and the soothing purr of her contentment. Like a puppy soothed by the tick tock of a blanket-wrapped clock, she has become my white noise machine.

In the thrall of Pip's sexy and alluring newness, we stopped seeing Clem. I have grown so accustomed and dependent on her presence that she became part of the set dressing of my life. The irony is that without Clem, I would be lost. In order to sleep, I need my bed, my husband, and Clem. If she left...well, the wounds would be deep.

Which brings me back around to the novel Great Expectations. It's the first text I teach in the fall, so it's been on my mind a lot as I plan the coming academic year. I have stuck with this book year after year because my students love it. They connect to the characters, and as most teachers know, that's half the battle in teaching literature. The boys tend to see themselves in Pip, a the main character, who falls in love with Estella, an untouchable, beautiful and cruel first love. The girls, however, are divided. Some girls, the ones who have discovered the social power of emotional manipulation, see themselves in Estella. Others, the girls who have been manipulated, taken for granted, overlooked, see themselves in Biddy, Pip's childhood friend. Estella and Biddy act as foils in the novel - Estella is all regal, refined beauty, while Biddy is plain, understated comfort.

Pip's journey from poor orphan to educated gentleman is punctuated by his love for these two women. Biddy was there at the beginning, a fixture in the life he abandons for a brighter future. Along the way, he's blinded by his yearning for Estella's affections, and wrecked by her cruel disdain. But in the end, Biddy is the constant, the home he returns to when he realizes he's strayed from his true path. His realization comes too late, however, for Biddy has moved on and married a man who appreciates her for her understated yet and comforting embrace. Pip realized a little late that the thrall of a cruel woman may be heady and exciting, but happiness more often lies in the comfort of a reliable, uncomplicated love.

This morning, I received an call from a neighbor who was sure he'd trapped Pip in his house. I raced out the door, jumped in the car and sped up Pout Pond Lane, almost out of my head with excitement. I closed my eyes as I reached the second floor landing, too anxious to look.

The moment I opened my eyes, I knew. This was not Pip. It looked a lot like him, but this cat had five pounds on Pip and a birthmark on the tip of his nose. There was no recognition in his eyes, no bald patch on the back of his neck, no come hither glance over his shoulder as he rolls over for a belly rub.

I couldn't contain my disappointment as I made small talk with my neighbor. He was disappointed, too, and as we watched the cat head out into his territory in the general direction of his house and family, I teared up a little.

But when I got home, Clementine was sitting on the dining room table, watching the door for my return. Her bowed front legs splayed out at odd angles, and there was a drop of drool on her chin, but she was waiting for me to come home. And tonight, when it's time for bed, I will fall asleep to her comforting softness, grateful for her constancy.

Addendum: I took the photo of Clem (below) and realized she was not acting like herself. She was grumpy (see photo) and making frequent, yet unproductive, trips to the litter box. I watched her for a while and when it became clear that she was insanely uncomfortable, I took her down the road to the vet. Our town vet diagnosed a UTI, and sent her home with antibiotics. She'll probably be fine in a couple of days. Tim thinks there are darker forces at work, however. His theory is that our newly neutered Pip, who still had plenty of testosterone roiling in his blood, took advantage of our poor Clem, gave her a UTI and the took off, in true tomcat style.

Debriefing: Kill Your Darlings and Absence of Pip

As I lay in bed last night, thinking about how on earth a deadline can come down to the last couple of hours, I calculated - estimated, actually - how many words, how many sentences I write for every one that ends up in the final draft. I actually think my ratio is high; I think I keep in more of my darlings than I kill, but lordy, there's a lot of time spent writing stuff that ends up on the cutting room floor.

Is this normal? I think it is. According to all those books I read, all those interviews, all those advice blogs, I have to write shitty first drafts and put in the hours, and write when it hurts, and write when it's crap. And I do that. I do - and I can't think of any other endeavor where there's so much time and attention put into stuff that ends up in the virtual trash can.

My favorite writing program, Scrivener, won't LET me throw stuff away permanently. Those people, they know writers. They know that we get pissed off and throw stuff away and regret it later. They know that sometimes I write with a purging hand, that sometimes I write with a 5-lucques olive martini by my side, that sometimes my cat accidentally deletes things...the Scrivener people, they are wise. I urge you to check them out.

In the meantime, it's actually really nice for my words to be in my agent's hands, to have time away from them while I prepare for the new school year. I am heading in today to make my classroom look great for the first day of school. I have an old, trashy copy of The Odyssey that I will take apart and use for the background of the main bulletin board, then put images from an old copy of a gorgeous mythology book over the top. I'm going all Martha Stewart on that converted-trailer classroom. There will be laminating. There will be decorative borders.

I also have some sad - no, not sad yet - news. Pip has been missing for about five days. I know he's probably fine, and I have not given up hope yet, but I think the neighbors are getting a little sick of my "Heeeeeere kitty kitty kitty" each morning and evening all up and down the street. I will go exploring in his territory today in case he's trapped somewhere. Keep the faith. He's wily and, as a barn cat, I remain hopeful that he's out there somewhere foraging and courting all the female cats in the area.

More news when I hear from said agent, or if - when - Pip shows up.

The Day After

Well, I made my deadline, but I think I have brain damage. Very early this morning, I scanned for errant red or green squiggly lines, checked the formatting one last time, and hit 'send.' I thought I'd feel relief when I hauled myself into bed, but for the next two hours, all of my grammatical, syntactical, and continuity errors showed themselves in my mind's eye.

All I have to do today is help set up for our town's library book sale and take a riding lesson with my son Ben, but I am hoping to do a coherent blog post later on today.

Time for coffee.

Did I mention I made pickles earlier this week? It was therapeutic and the sight of those jars all lined up in the cellar stirs a Little House in the Big Woods sort of contentment in me.

Pip's Expectations.

A place to nap, some mice, a bowl of water, and love. He's quite taken with my neighbors, as they are with him, so here's hoping he chooses us. Muses always have the choice to depart, you know.

He's settled in beautifully. Thank you, everyone, for asking. I'd love to have time for a blog post today, but my August 3 deadline is barreling down on me and it's all I can do to write fast enough for that project. News on how it's going will come soon, I promise.

So I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.

A couple of years ago, I was lost. I had written one book that my long-suffering former agent had shopped around to everyone who might be interested. Alas, it did not sell. But in the tradition of green writers and first books, all those publishers were right. That book did not deserve to be sold. It sucked. It had some really nice chapters, and some really wonderful passages, but overall, it was, well, a first book. But bless her heart, my agent had faith in my voice and no writer could hope for more than that.

Once I abandoned hope of publication for that book and pimped out its component parts to every magazine willing to fork over a few bucks, I did not know what to write about next. What would I say now that the schtick I had developed over two years was no longer relevant to me? I liked the narrator of Education of a Flatlander. She was funny. She was me, only more so. She is the voice I am supposed to be writing, but every time I tried to write something I felt might be marketable, I wrote in this weird, forced voice that just wasn't me.

The first piece I wrote in a voice that worked was an article for the Valley News on my life as a middle school teacher. It flowed and it worked, and I loved that piece. I wished I could write like that every day.

But when Tim suggested the obvious, that I write about teaching, I was skeptical. Who the hell wants to read about my teaching life? My life as a chainsaw-toting, mistake-making, homesteading wannabe seemed like something people might want to read about - something I certainly like to read about. But teaching? Huh.

Then I looked at my bookshelves. They are filled with memoirs about real experiences. Memoirs that are true, memoirs that tell a story, memoirs that have a real voice, and it turns out I don't care that much about the context. Farming, hiking, adoption, travel, goat herding, teaching, cheesemaking. I love all of it, as long as the person writing loves their story and can write in a true voice. E.B. White said it well, in a letter to his brother: "I discovered a long time ago that writing of the small things of the day, the trivial matters of the heart, the inconsequential but near things of this living, was the only kind of creative work which I could accomplish with any sincerity or grace." Whether it's the death of a pig or the birth of a new career, it's best to stick with a voice that works. Tim tends to be right about a lot (don't tell him I said so), so I reserved final judgment until I'd had time to think about it.

One of my favorite chapters from Flatlander was called "Tarry, Good Beatrice," about the day I drove up to Robie Farms for milk and cream, and found myself attending the birth of a heifer. Lee Robie let me name the calf, and because I had been re-reading and listening to lectures about about Much Ado About Nothing, I named her Beatrice. I had been torn between farming and teaching, but that day, I realized that I did not actually want to be a farmer, and really craved a return to the classroom. The Robies had taught me a lot about farming, and that day, watching Beatrice come into the world, they taught me that despite my love of the barn and dirt and farm implements, my true love is for language and my students.

And so I returned to the classroom, the place I am meant to be. I started writing about that life, and you know what? Tim was right. As long as my voice is honest, it does not matter if I am writing about my attempt to live the life of a homesteader or about teaching Shakespeare. I keep writing, mining my experiences and playing with ideas in an attempt to see what's there. Just as Tim predicted, those words are starting to come together into something that looks a hell of a lot like a book.

Fast forward three years, to a second phone call with my new agent. I posted a while back about my first phone call with her - all that excitement and anxiety culminated in a discussion that was encouraging, confusing, exciting, and, well, anticlimactic. Over the past couple of months and a new book proposal, she and I have had a chance to get to know each other. I think we might just be a good match. Actually, thanks to Friday's phone call, I know we will. The polite questions and restrained enthusiasm of our first phone call gave way to jokes, encouragement, brainstorming, and light swearing. I knew from talking to her former authors that she is hot shit, that she really knows her stuff, both as an editor and agent, but now I really get it. The reality writers read about over and over again in every blog and book on publishing (but would like to think doesn't apply to their book, to their writing) is that a book has to sell. It has to fit into a category, fulfill a need, be definable according to the other books on the market. I can write my ass off and churn out some of the best writing of my life, but if she can't sell it, it's not going to be a book in the tangible book-and-covers sense. It's a hobby. Which is fine; writing will always be a joy to me, but I want to be a writer. A professional writer. The sort of writer who makes some money from the act of arranging words on paper. A writer that eventually gets to hold her very own words in her hands in the form of pages and a cover.

I have not sold this book yet, but I do have the confidence of this agent who knows what it takes to publish a book. She has faith in my voice, but now she needs proof that my book is something she can sell. And so I have a deadline: three chapters in three weeks.

So it seems appropriate that I celebrated the birth of a new book and a new chapter in my life with another visit to Robie Farms. 

Beatrice the heifer birthed her very own calf this season, and I was eager to see it. New calves have incredibly soft coats, velvety and clean, like infants' peach-fuzz hair. They smell sweet, of milk and shavings. At least until they start laying down in their own poop, and then they just smell like the rest of the barn. Their long, prehensile tongues licked our hands and left trails of slime on our forearms as we moved from stanchion to stanchion. Every couple of feet, when we stopped to visit with a particularly friendly or pretty calf, a friendly, buff-colored cat rolled at our feet, begging for a scratch or two before we walked on. When we moved, he moved, trotting along behind us, mewing and batting lashes at us. When we left the barn, he followed us up the driveway to the car. As we were leaving, I mentioned to Lee Robie that he had quite the barn cat. Most barn cats are aloof. They understand that their job is to keep the mice in check and in return, someone might squirt some warm milk in their direction. This cat, though...he craved attention. Lee laughed. He said they call him the "Cow Kitty" because he follows behind the cows and herds them when they move from the pasture to the barn for milking. Cow Kitty needs a family, Lee said, and he instructed me to take him home. 

I don't need another cat. Tim's allergic to the cat we already have. He'd kill me. It's preposterous. I really couldn't. 

But I did. 

Cow Kitty, like Beatrice, needed a new name, and after hundreds of submissions (Bob, Percy, Ice Fang, Sugarball, Draco, Hairy...) Benjamin landed on the right one: Pip. 

The first chapter of my new book is about teaching Great Expectations, and its characters occupy my thoughts as I attempt to make this August third deadline. Now Pip - our Pip - occupies my home as well. And that seems just about perfect. 

Report Card Composting

I have mentioned in the past that a lot of work goes in to the narrative-rich, error-free report cards my school sends out three times a year. I try to do my part for the trees and hold off on printing the reports until I have proofed the hell out of them on my computer screen, but plenty of teachers still print in order to do their proofreading. As we can't dump those confidential reports in the recycling, we have to shred them, and they fly all over the place in the recycling dumpster, so we have been instructed to put them in bags and then dispose of them in the regular trash dumpster. All that perfectly recyclable paper in a landfill? That just kills me.

I have done my very best to come up with creative and environmentally beneficial uses for the bags and bags of shredded paper our school produces each year. My favorite use for the paper is as bedding for the chicken coop, and the students love the poetic justice of my chickens shitting on their grades, but sadly, my chickens were slaughtered by a marauding weasel last winter. I can't use it in the rabbit tractor, because the rabbits eat the bedding. The thought of all that bleach and ink in their sensitive rabbit tummies freaks me out. I plan to raise a new batch of chicks next year, but until then, I am going to have to get creative and find other ways to keep all that shredded paper out of the school dumpster.

Today, I shredded a huge pile of old reports, confidential student evaluations, secondary school recommendations, and other sensitive papers. This summer, we are re-carpeting the middle school building, and that means the teachers have to clean up and clear out the mountains of "stuff to be filed" that piles up on our desks, floors, bookcases, and file cabinets. By the time I finished shredding, I had emptied the machine five times and had four enormous bags full of tightly packed shredded paper and managed to give myself three paper cuts. I may have also sent one paperclip through the machine, but kudos to Staples - despite the warning on the lid, it actually handled the paperclip quite nicely. I stuffed the four bulging bags into my car and headed home with my loot.

Now, in order to understand the nest part of the story, you must know that I take my gardens fairly seriously. I have tilled up most of the yard around my house, and grow a lot of what we eat, vegetable-wise. It's what I used to blog about, and was the subject of my first (unpublished) book. I have been known to use tractors to till up huge tracts of my front yard in favor of garden space, and I can talk endlessly about the virtues of rabbit versus goat versus cow manure as a garden amendement. I once asked for a dump truck full of cow manure as a birthday present, and once received a wheelbarrow full of it as a Mother's Day gift. I have promised my family that I will preserve yard space in front of the house for bocce and in the back for a soccer pitch, but any other sunny patch of yard is fair game.

That said, I found a perfect use for those bags of shredded paper. I selfishly convinced my younger son that he's grown out of the sandbox so I could re-purpose it for use as a new cold frame system. I lifted the frame off of the sand and moved it close to the house for easy access, even when there's a couple of feet of snow on the ground. I then raided the Lyme Country Store's cardboard and newspaper recycling bins and placed a thick layer of paper over the grass, weighted down with a thin layer of leftover sand. I then took those four bags of paper and dumped them into the frame, like so:

No, that yellow in the middle is not pee, it's a shredded yellow slip. At my school, we have a green (good), yellow (warning), and pink (you are in trouble, buddy) slip system, and one of the slips must have been in my pile of shredding. But it sure does look like the dog took advantage of the nice, white bedding in this shot.

As the wind was picking up, I freaked out and watered the shredded paper in order to keep it from flying all over the back yard. Crisis averted, I rolled the big compost barrel over to the box. I have been aging some rabbit manure and bedding along with the accumulated kitchen scraps from last winter. It was a little smelly, but as I was desperate to weigh that paper down, I went ahead and dumped the entire barrel on top of it. There will be at least five inches of dirt and composted cow manure on top of that, so it will have time to break down if I plant only shallow-rooting veggies in the box. Phew. Rabbit urine is stinky stuff because of all the nitrogen, so don't try this at home unless you are willing to risk burning your plants' roots.

That done, I hauled five garden carts' worth of topsoil and composted cow manure from the lower garden plot and dumped that into the 80" x 80" plot, along with a liberal dose of North Country Organics Pro-Gro 5-3-4. Once the box was marked off in quadrants, I sprinkled my favorite lettuce seeds on one quarter, arugula in another quarter, and then transplanted some ill-placed basil plants and two runty pepper plants. Yeah, yeah, root burn...I know what I said about limiting this to shallow-rooting plants. Whatever.

And....voila!

Before winter, I will surround the frame with bales of straw and install additional boards across the middle of the frame in order to accommodate the dimensions of of the storm windows I use over the cold frames. I grow corn salad, spinach, kale and some lettuces in the frames, and we have greens all winter long, even when it's well below zero. And in September, I must remember to let my students know that their all those comments, grades, and effort scores are serving as fodder for my family's winter greens.