Nonsense, Drivel, and Balderdash

Our baby girl has finally arrived and her name has come with her. When we began the long process of looking for the perfect name, we had a couple of things we wanted: Bilingual: Her name had work in English and in Spanish.  Personal:  We wanted a name that was personally meaningful, one that reminded us of people we love.  Finally, we decided on Martha/Marta . Martha in the red sweater and green crown Martha, the English version, is my maternal grandmother's name. I hope that my baby girl grows up to be as steadfast and as loving as her namesake. My grandma is humble and not self-seeking. She is a strong and resilient woman in a way that makes you say "they don't make em like that anymore." But I can only hope that we have made at least one more.  Marta, the Spanish version, is the name of one of our best friends from Spain. Few people are as loyal as Marta, she would move heaven and hell to help a someone she loves. From her we hope our baby ...

A few days ago, the governor announced that Boston would be in a state of emergency this week. I found this amusing because, in my mind, he Jacob household had already planned to be in a state of emergency on January 26 long before any satellites had begun promising signs snow. My amusement was short-lived however as the reality of the situation began to sink in and I began to picture my wife giving birth in the back of a hospital bound Toyota Matrix that has gotten stuck in the snow. Fortunately, before full panic set in, my aunt called me and offered to put us up in hotel just half a mile from the hospital. That is where we are now. Right now, Jessica is sleeping, sprawled out, stretched in ways that are only possible when you aren't sharing a bed. I count six different pillows, each positioned strategically to alleviate her burdens.  Pregnancy has not been gentle on her, and different discomforts have disturbed her slumber for the past three or four months now. Seeing he...

Waiting. That is what it is has come down to. At any given moment, a cocktail of emotions mixed around inside me, varying the ratio of apprehension and expectation, of dread and delight. It is a weird thing to know that your days are numbered, that life will forever change in the matter of a week. On one hand, I feel like I should take advantage of this last week and go crazy, but on the other hand Jessica's pregnancy has been so miserable that we have already been introduced to long sleepless nights.  The feeling of waiting didn't really start until recently for me. This past year has been so crazy that I have mostly just been caught up in a current of change and uncertainty and spent most of my time trying to stay afloat. Instead of waiting for the baby to come I was scrabbling away from the inevitable, hoping to delay things as much as possible until I could find a job and some stability. But recently, as things have settled down, I have started looking at the calendar mo...

It is weird that the most common way of expanding your family is by growing another member. "I want a child." "OK, why don't you plant one? Wait some months till it's ripe."  Like a zucchini. My wife's belly is a single-fruit garden. It is bizarre when you think about it. But maybe everyone thinks this way. All the pregnancy blogs always refer to the size of the embryo/fetus/baby in relationship to fruit. No one seems to be fazed by this idea. The same girls that cringed and squealed when hearing campfire stories about seeds getting stuck and growing in ears or noses somehow say "aww" when the internet tells them: "Congratulations. Your child is the size of a cumquat." You would think that we would want comparisons to things that are actually cute, fuzzy things, but for some reason that just seems worse. "Congratulations! Your child is now the size of a young badger" just seems terrifying. Fortunately, the chil...

The potential for rapid change is always amazing to me. A winning lottery ticket or a car careening into oncoming traffic can forever change the course of someone’s life. While this past year didn’t hold anything nearly that drastic, it was a year of upheaval. It began with despondency, was filled with uncertainty, but fortunately ended in hopeful resolution. Last January, I was in the doldrums of my professional career. I was stuck in a teaching job I abhorred, but was still struggling to admit that I needed out. Now, 2015 dawns with a new career outside of the classroom, in an administrative position at Harvard. Between then and now: finishing up my last year of middle school; trying to balance my teaching job with a new job search; making ends meet with menial temp work for 5 months; spending my free time applying to -and getting rejected from- hundreds of jobs… and finally, after 9 months of searching, landing the full time gig where I am now. Of course, my professional life ...

Reading over some old journal entries, I was reminded of the importance of record keeping. The journal that I read was from a summer camp I worked at five or six years ago. I had kept a pretty detailed record of people’s names and events and as I read them, I found memories coming back that I had long thought forgotten. The memories were jolted back: faces, places, stories and feelings. Reading an old journal is like getting a whiff of a particular soap or kind of wood and experiencing a rush of remembrance. Journaling is something that I do sometimes, but with so little time to write, I usually forgo record keeping in favor of other writing projects. It is something I should really take time to do, especially in this time before I leave my school. I will begin to forget a lot of things about my job, much of it purposely. I take comfort that many of my most traumatic students will be but a blur in 5 years. After all, I can only remember a single name from my time as a camp teacher,...

I didn’t expect my wife, a person who lives in a perpetual state of cold, to be the one excited about spending the night in a hotel made entirely of frozen materials, but she was positively gleeful at the prospect. With all the job uncertainty in the air, and not knowing what will be going on during my summer vacation, Jess and I decided to take our holidays during my February break. To me, this sounded like heaven. This winter has been brutal, and I could picture myself lying somewhere warm, water lapping at my feet and the sun on my skin; the only ice I would see would be the one filling the bucket of beer by my cabana. All set to buy our cruise tickets, we had to admit to ourselves that it was not wise to spend money on an elaborate vacation right when I was planning on leaving my job. So we began to look elsewhere for something to do with our winter break. One Groupon and one 9 hour drive later, we were pulling into our ice hotel outside of Quebec City. Staying at an ice ho...

It was 9 PM and only then was I heading home from work. It was the Thursday on the first week back from Christmas. I had done this for three days in a row, getting home with about half an hour to spend with my wife before finally collapsing into bed and falling asleep. I had arrived at work at 6:45 AM and left for home at 9 PM. A 14 hour work day for three days in a row. There are sweatshops that work their people less.  Being an English teacher is especially challenging because of how long it takes to grade English assignments. It isn't grading multiple choice. There is a lot of reading and writing required on the part of the teacher; even our short answer questions have a higher level of subjectivity in comparison with similar questions in, say, science. What this adds up to is time. Let me break it down for you: Right before break, each of my students had written a page long essay. In terms of grading, this means: 120 students + 10 minutes per essay (yes, it takes that...

S ince writing the last post, and since Christmas, I've had to come to terms with something about my current situation: it is untenable. For me, my current job feels like quicksand; the harder I struggle, the deeper down I go. I can see myself hanging on, but it would be at the expense of my mental health and general wellbeing. And so, without further ado... I have decided that this will be my last year at my job. It simply isn't a good fit for me: English: Officially, my class is called "English Language Arts," though why they bother including the word "arts" is beyond me. I am really responsible and held accountable for teaching the kids how to think critically. This is a good thing in its own right, but it bores me. I work with people who find it fascinating to break down particular thinking skills and attempt to teach them, but I was never an Education major. I was an English major. My masters degree was also in English Lit. I became intereste...

A funny thing happened just a few days into my Christmas vacation. It started as a flutter. A deep, increasingly constant feeling inside me, like a desperate, flightless bird trying to take to the air, wings pumping feathers and dust, noise and pressure, without ever taking off. My day was greeted by this feeling and I tried to push it down, ignore it, and distract myself with holiday affairs and the levity of family. But it was always there, lurking in the depths and recesses. I would lie down at night and feel that bird flap its wings once or twice in warning. “I’m not gone.” As the days went by, and the end to my vacation edged implacably closer, the feeling only got stronger, anxiety knotting up inside me, taking up more air, constricting my diaphragm. As much as I tried to unravel it, it wouldn’t go away. Towards the end of my time in Seattle, I finally figured out where this feeling was coming from. My cousin and I had several talks about teaching (she is also an educator...

Today my hard drive in my laptop died. Out of the blue. No warning or courtesy call. It just up and died after the battery ran low. It was as if it lost its will to live as the computer ran out of juice. Maybe it was in love with the battery and it didn't understand that it could be recharged. And so, like Romeo, it took its own life as its love went into a deep sleep. Needless to say, the battery was quite taken aback by this once she awoke, sending the whole system into flashing folder icons on my screen, which I can only assume are my computer's way of expressing deep grief. I took the computer to the manufacturer's store today and they said it would be ready to pick up in 5 days, once they have ordered and received the right components needed to repair the machine. Unfortunately, all the data on the old machine will be lost. For the most part, this isn't a great tragedy. My computer was relatively new and, as such, most of the information on it was brought over f...

Growing up, it was always strange to see one of your teachers outside of school. There was something pathetic about seeing a teacher on the bus or subway. A high and mighty teacher, at the mercy of the transit system just like you. I took perverse pleasure at seeing them "humiliated" by normalcy. And yet at the same time, I hoped and prayed that they wouldn't spot me, because I knew that if they decided to approach me that I had to be polite or I would regret it the next day in class. Of course, now that I am a teacher, I am on the other end of this experience. I am the teacher that giggling kids are bumping into with their fake smiles. If I thought it was awkward was back then, it is way worse now. You would think that now that I am an adult, I would have the emotional and social tools to handle these sort of situations with more grace and poise than when I was 13, but I don't. The fact is, I go out of my way to avoid places where I might bump into my students. Wh...

There are potted plants on the roof of the house we are staying in. Some of the pots are actual containers made of baked clay, while others are not much more than canvas bags filled with dirt from which flowers have bloomed: big yellow ones hanging lazily from a vine, small white ones sticking out tongues of red, pink roses, succulents and cacti… there are dozens of little plants growing, hidden above the muddy Nepali streets below. They are subtle, not junglelike enough to overwhelm or surprise a curious rooftop visitor, but as I sat among them earlier today in the morning breeze, I was struck by their presence up there. Someone must have taken the time to haul these potted plants up five flights of stairs and onto the roof, to sacrifice some of their restricted water and time to keep them alive, though no one can see them from the street below. A secret touch of color five flights above the dust and soot. There are countries where squalor creates monochrome, a washed out despair...

14 hours from now I'll be boarding a plane, leaving the possibility of a cold New England summer for the certainty of Nepal's hot monsoon season. That is the only thing that seems certain right now. All I know of my time in Nepal is that it will be hot and humid. In less than a day I will be trading a summer of guaranteed mundanity and uncertain weather for a season of guaranteed humid heat and uncertain activities. If I were to stay in Boston for the summer, my biggest worry would be whether or not it would be warm enough to wear shorts, but warm weather seems to be the only thing that  is  guaranteed in Nepal. Everything else seems uncertain. I have been told that Nepal demands "flexibility," of the difficulty in making plans in a place that is in constant flux. Being a person who loves musical improvisation, I am surprised that this lack of planning has made me so apprehensive as the trip nears. Don't get me wrong; I  am  looking forward to Nepal. Jess and I ha...

Today I passed one of the most important milestones of a teaching career: finished my first year. When I started in September, all the other teachers patted me sympathetically on the shoulder. Throughout the year, as if offering condolences, they would say, "the first year is the hardest." At certain points of the year, as I wandered the halls in a daze, other teachers would look at me with pity. But even with all of this, I was still surprised at how many people genuinely asked me if I was going to continue teaching this year. The first year really is a trial by fire at the end of which many people decide that education is "not for them." The third year is the next big milestone that also sees a lot of teachers quit the profession. So I am still expecting a couple of hard years ahead. Nevertheless, I am confident that next year will be easier. Clearer expectations and experience will make things much smoother. The final real milestone, from what I hear, is the fi...

George's test was using more red ink than I expected, but as I went over his answers, two things became abundantly clear: 1) George was going to fail the test; 2) I was perversely happy about it.   Maybe more experienced, mature, or just better teachers don't experience feelings like this, but I do. I never realized how many complicated emotional processes being a teacher carries with it.  You get emotionally invested after working all year long to teach your kids, to get them to care, and to turn their efforts into results. I mean, just minutes before grading George's test, I was barely able to stop myself from cheering in the middle of the coffee shop where I had set up shop when I saw that Tony had gotten an A on his final exam. Tony and George have been my most... challenging... students this year. My mentor teacher has told me that it will rarely get any worse than these two. They both demand an unreasonable amount of my energy and attention: talking, ...

There are always international students waiting at my bus stop. I find this to be odd, because Winthrop (my town) seems like an out-of-the-way place for a young Japanese person to come live in for a semester. It isn't near a university (which is already odd for Boston) and it is not on the subway line. Instead, one must get off the subway in East Boston and take a shuttle from there into our town. Nevertheless, every day when I get out of work and arrive at the bus stop, there are invariably several foreign students already waiting. Japanese kids are probably the most numerous, their concentration divided between their books and electronic translators. Arabic students also make up a decent contingent, though they usually congregate in small groups where they talk and laugh loudly in their native tongues. But on any given day, you might run into Italian, Frenchman, or Argentinian students waiting for the ride to town. Often, I can't help but watch these students are they sit,...

It's not even May and I can't help but count down the days until summertime. I am not really  counting them down yet, not literally. I have kept myself from doing that at least. But my big teacher's calendar is by my big steel teacher's desk and I can't help but notice that there isn't much more than a month and a bit left of school. We actually get out earlier this year because the extra week of "snow days" were never claimed. Winter was mild and the snow never came. The mildest winter in decades has only seemed to pull summer closer than ever. Part of me feels terrible for looking forward to vacation so openly. Like it somehow makes me a bad teacher to yearn for June. I know this is nonsense, but most of my chronic guilt is nonsense. But teaching is the most exhausting job I have ever had, and according to mental health polls, one of the most mentally taxing vocations out there. As a teacher, I have already heard snarky comments from other professi...

Everyone can think of a teacher that they had in middle school that still looms huge in your memory. Who is yours? I can think of several. Many of them are still vivid in my mind because they were so bad: Maribí, "la Champiñon," or "el Locuras" (Spaniards have a penchant for nicknames). Others are remembered fondly, like Miss Ohler or Miss Stenoien. But in some ways, the idiosyncratic teachers are the ones that stand in the forefront of my brain.  Those are the ones that I look back on and laugh about, sometimes with a smile and other times with a shake of the head. You guys know what kind of teachers I mean: the kind with catchphrases, quirks, outdated views and mannerisms, oblivious of reality, and often a love for their subject matter.As I think about my own teachers and my memories of school, I can't help but look across my teacher's desk and wonder what kinds of memories my students are making right now. Sometimes it's pretty obvious which teacher...

Diligence is the name of the game if you are to work on a ship. Shipping, like all transportation, relies on punctuality and hard work so I arrive at the dockyard early. I just got here, but I'm already wet with the constant drizzle that hangs in the air. There is no way to keep dry against the tiny droplets, which I seemed to simply walk into rather than be rained on by. My umbrella, useless, dangles limply from my wrist. The the sky has begun to lighten, but you would hardly know it through the mist. I nod to the harbormaster and he nods back who seems surprised to see me here, though evidently not surprised enough to come out of the dry booth that oversees the waterfront and serves as his office. He flips through his charts and schedules and then looks up at me, surprise changed to amusement and grins grotesquely. My attempt at a smile back looks more like an awkward grimace than grin. The dock is empty. I look at my watch. I'm early, but the ship must be cutting it close. ...