How does the universe know when you are in a hurry? I’m going to assume it’s one of Newton’s rarely studied postulates called the Stress-Based Law of Increased Atmospheric Friction.

Or you could just blame it on a design flaw. That’s what I’m thinking after my alarm goes off this morning.  I’m reaching to turn it off when I knock my ipad over on the nightstand. Through the predictable physics of the ricochet (is that a thing?) my glasses fly across the dark room, and of course, since we are talking about my glasses and because it’s dark, I can’t find them. Good morning, design flaw.

I’m in a hurry because I have completely unrealistic expectations for the first sixty minutes of my day today. In order for the  thousand piece jigsaw puzzle that is my life this week to work, I need to start complete this essay and a second piece of writing that is close to being finished, but keeps refusing to give up its truth. Right now that other essay is a beautiful pile of words in search of what it’s trying to say.

Not this essay, though! This essay is going to grow like a freeze-dried seahorse from a tiny capsule into a complex, living creature in mere minutes. All I need to do is add water coffee. (Which is ready now–excuse me for a second while I go get a cup.)

This IS NOT an essay about seahorses. In fact it’s another essay about how wonderful teenagers are, but I know that you can’t tell that yet.

While we all wait for me to get to my point, here is the thing about seahorses. When I wrote that simile about my essay growing like a freeze-dried seahorse, I was thinking about Dudley Do-Right and those crazy things you’d want to order as a kid watching Saturday morning cartoons or reading the backs of cereal boxes.

Help me out, siblings or age-group friends. Does anyone else remember ordering freeze-dried seahorses by mail in the late sixties or early seventies? Pop them in water, and voila, instant seahorse?

It seems unlikely that I could be making this memory up, but when I asked Professor Google just now (and really, I’m in a hurry! Why am I googling seahorses?!) I didn’t find a link to a site for goofy seventies novelties, I found real information.

Did you know that there are twenty-five different species of seahorses? That fact is from some website I already clicked away from, and I’m in a hurry, so I can’t go back to figure out if I should trust it. I’m sorry if that information isn’t true. But really, this isn’t an essay about seahorses, so let it go, ok?

Get this. According to National Geographic, seahorses “are monogamous and mate for life.” And I know what you are thinking now. You are thinking, what can this possibly have to do with teenagers making five circle Venn diagrams?”

At least, that’s what you would be thinking if I had started writing the essay I was planning on writing this morning. That essay is about serious things like fiscal policy and Venn diagrams and compromise. I think you’ll like it.

I know we’re in a hurry; I’ll get to the Venn diagrams in a minute. But did you know that, according to Nat Geo, seahorses,  those amazing creatures that I think I remember buying freeze-dried through the mail “are among the only animal species on Earth in which the male bears the unborn young”?

“Oh, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here!”

It reminds me of the day I learned about asparagus plates.

Before I start talking about teenagers and  fiscal policy, I’d like to point out that it’s not even six a.m. (but it’s close–way too close! I’m in a huge hurry this morning!) and I’ve already written about physics, marine biology, and economics. Well, I haven’t really written about economics yet, but that’s the subtext. I’m sure a careful reader will be able to tease it out, just as they picked up on that little Shakespeare quote I just slipped in.

I thought someone should notice. A little applause maybe. (Note to self: When I’m in a hurry, I forget to edit out my arrogance.)

Since googling seahorses led me to information about a real species, I decided to google “freeze dried seahorses” instead. That search didn’t go so well. In fact, it made me sad. I learned that seahorses are ground into powder for use in Chinese medicine. I learned about an illegal shipment of seahorses that was “seized at the Beijing airport.” I skimmed through the comments at seahorse.com  and read this note from a seahorse breeder who said “It is a LOT harder to raise seahorses than to kill them.”

And damn if I haven’t googled myself into a perfect segway for talking about teenagers.

This fall I fumbled my way into my now-all-time favorite lesson plan. It started about six hundred crises ago when the government was on the brink of shutting down. At this point, I can’t remember why. Passing a spending bill, maybe?

I found a nifty little game online called the Fiscal Ship. I’m in a hurry, so I’ll just give you a quick overview. You choose three governing goals–things like “protect the elderly” or “fight climate change” or “rein in entitlements” from ten or eleven choices the game gives you.

Then, you play the game by implementing realistic policies to meet your goal while you simultaneously work to “reduce future debt to today’s levels.” The policies are sorted into seventeen major categories, like education, defense, social security–you get the picture. I’d give you more examples if I wasn’t in a hurry.

Each time you choose a policy, you can see the impact on the debt level. It’s a nifty game, and it worked great for teaching kids about the sort of choices that politicians make.

John Dewey said:

“…give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; …learning naturally results.”

(I’d just like to pause in my rush for a moment to point out that I’ve now added pedagogy to the list of things I’ve written about before six a.m.)

I was having so much fun seeing the students struggle with hard choices that I decided to ask them to present their results to the class. Surreptitiously, I took notes on their governing goals as they spoke.

Then, because one of the students said, “This would be so much harder if we had to get other people to agree with us,” and I had already been thinking along those lines, I matched them up with other people whose goals were radically different from their own and had them play again.

First, though, I wanted them to reach a thorough understanding of their differences. On a whim, I told them to make a Venn diagram showing the overlap between their ideas. For the record, making a five-circle Venn diagram is no small feat. None of us were even sure it was possible.

Here’s what they looked like while they were trying to figure it out (and for the record, they told me I could use these pictures).

Making a five circle Venn diagram was just hard enough that it took them a really long time to figure out how to do it. By the time they had worked it out, they had a rich understanding of the differences between their goals. (If you didn’t know me, you might think I had planned it that way.)

I’m in a hurry, so I’ll jump to the punchline. Once the students had clearly identified their differences, they were able to reach agreement on shared goals easily. I was shocked; kids who had chosen “rein in entitlements” quickly found common ground with kids who had chosen “shore up social security” or “decrease inequality.”

They played the game, and I listened to them negotiate their differences. I walked around the room hearing them say things like, “We all agree on the carbon tax, so that will give us enough money to pay for pre-K education for all. Can everyone live with that?”

The point is, they made it look easy. If you want to believe there is hope for the world, ask a teenager to solve a problem.

Finally, because one of the skills we’ve been working on is developing  models, and because I was so impressed with their work, I asked them to develop a model for how to reach a compromise. Again, piece of cake for these kids.

One group based their model on a recipe. They combined five tablespoons of ideas with a “pinch of open ears and hearts.” Another group drew a flower. That model included taking the areas you agreed on and applying them back to your shared goals. Others created simple, step-by-step flow charts.

None of them failed. Every group was able to agree on policy choices that met their shared goals and kept the deficit in check. Not only that, they kept their friendships intact, too. No one called each other names or stormed off or took their crayons and went home.

The other thing none of them did was to decide that the problem was insoluble. A good Venn diagram  “shows all possible logical relations between a finite collection of different sets.” When the students played the game individually, they chose as many as thirty policies each. Showing all of the possible logical relationships between their sets was a massive undertaking.

That fact didn’t stop them. Even when they weren’t certain they could solve the entire problem, they kept doing what they could.

I’m in a hurry this morning, so I’ll leave it to you to wrap things up. There are some things we can all learn from teenagers like the ones I’m lucky enough to spend my days with.

Maybe someday they’ll even save the seahorses.

When you teach teenagers, you often come home tired. I’ve mentioned this before. Some days it’s because you’ve got more work than hours. Some days it’s because too many students are crying or because your cheeks hurt from laughing all day. Some days, you get a full cardio workout  as your heart swings back and forth through sadness and silliness.

February 7th was one of those days.

It started with the tampons.

At my school, students lead service learning groups that emerge out of their own interests. Faculty act as sponsors, but the students are where the action is. My group is called “WEL,” which stands for Women’s Empowerment League.

Earlier in the year, when the teenagers watched a video showing how hard it is for homeless women to get basic hygiene products, they decided to hold a drive.

On the morning of the seventh, two brave young women got up in front of the whole high school and explained the problem. They talked about the cost of tampons and pads and showed a clip from the video. In less than fifteen minutes, two teenagers disrupted the secrecy surrounding women’s periods.

The young women explained to the group that half the students were boys, so they called on their male peers to participate in the drive. At that point, the man who heads the high school jumped up with a box of tampons and made the first donation to cheers and applause from the student body. I stood up and let the boys know I’d have a box of pads in my classroom if they wanted to come in to practice carrying them.

Joy, pride, laughter, goofiness. It wasn’t even 8:15.

The teenager with the sad eyes stopped by later. It’s a teacher thing: sometimes a student says “Can I use your three-hole punch?” and you hear “I’m falling apart.”  When you respond to what you heard instead of what they said, the tears come. It’s 10:15.

It’s lunch-time and I’m meeting with four young women and another teacher. We are revising the harassment policy from the student handbook and writing a sexual misconduct policy. The teenagers’ insights are clear and nuanced. They balance justice and compassion.

It’s overwhelming, really, to witness their focused commitment to changing the world. It’s 12:45.

Midafternoon, the film crew arrives at my desk. Four teenagers from film class are making a movie about coffee. A few weeks ago they asked if they could interview me for their movie because they had noticed that I drink a lot of coffee.

(Years ago I read a good book about teaching called The Students Are Watching. Note to self: it’s true.)

The teenagers, ever prepared, have brought coffee cups along for props. We all laugh when they count six different cups on my desk and realize they could have skipped that step.

“When we ask if you are addicted to coffee,” the student who seems to be the director prompts me, “would you mind just zoning out and staring at the camera?”  I flub the first take, but nail it on the second. It’s 3:15 and I can’t stop laughing.

It’s Wednesday, which means my next stop is a faculty meeting. At 5:15 I’m heading toward my car in the west lot when I hear a violent commotion. It takes my brain a minute to sort out what I’m hearing. I haven’t processed the squealing tires before I hear the explosion of the crash.

My school sits just off one of the busiest roads in the city. I drive home worked up, worried that someone I love could have been in that car.

That’s the essay I started writing last week. One good day in the life of a person who teaches teenagers. All the feels.

In the nineteen days since February 7, my school has been flooded with tampons and pads. Our donation bins are overflowing and my desk is piled high. I’ve probably said the word tampon out loud more times in these few weeks than I have in the rest of my life. The teenagers taught me (and each other) that it’s ok to talk about these things.

We finished the policy drafts and delivered them to the faculty for their review. Then we took them to our student judicial committee to get their input. Not surprisingly, they said smart things.

Some other stuff happened since then, too. Some other teenagers rose above our expectations and got busy trying to change the world. These aren’t your parents’ teenagers.

Today was another teeter-totter day. At 8:15 I sat in a roomful of teenagers listening to a young woman play a bold Prokofiev violin solo. At 5:00 I met with a group of students and adults to put the final touches on our plans for next week’s HPV awareness event.

In between, we had a lockdown drill. The teenagers and I sat on the floor in a darkened class room for twenty silent minutes waiting for the all clear. When it ended, we raised the blinds and turned the lights on and blinked at each other. We tried to shake it off, but I’ll be honest, we didn’t really accomplish a lot for the rest of the period.

Life is bold and beautiful in a high school. Every day you live full out, your heart wide open. Teachers and teenagers alike: we bring what we have and we hope it will be enough.

In The Writing Life, a book Annie Dillard calls (inexplicably) “an embarrassing nonfiction narrative,” Dillard writes, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

If you spend your days teaching teenagers, you can count on getting your money’s worth.

This just in from my email:

We must learn to regard people less in light of what they do or omit to do, and more in the light of what they suffer. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I’ll get to that in a few minutes. Meanwhile, the post I’ve been struggling to finish all week is about how everything is different this year.  I keep saying these words to my students as old books hit this year’s raw nerves in new ways.

A few quick examples:

Tom, in the opening pages of The Great Gatsby, quotes white supremacists and warns about the downfall of the white race. “Oh,” I find myself saying this year, “this sounds just like our president.”

George Murchison, sometime boyfriend of Beneatha in A Raisin in the Sun, tells her to stop thinking. He’s sick of hearing her talk, he says; all she should worry about is looking pretty. Then he bombs in for a kiss she doesn’t want and has to push away. (American Lit refresher–he’s the rich boyfriend. They let you do anything when you’re rich.)

Finally, earlier this week, I pulled out the Ta Nahisi Coates Atlantic essay from a few years back, “The Case for Reparations.” I have my students read excerpts from it to get a sense of how government sanctioned red-lining has kept neighborhoods segregated and prevented African American families from accumulating wealth through home-ownership. It helps them understand that the Younger family isn’t heading into an uncomplicated  “happily ever after” when they move into an all-white neighborhood in Chicago.

Of course, that was different this year, too. Usually when I read that essay, I praise the Congressman who has brought HR40 to Congress every year since the mid-80s. You’ll recognize his name. It’s John Conyers.

Teaching English for seventeen years in a row makes you tired creates an interesting anthropological window into our culture. Ten or fifteen years ago teaching Gatsby, students often didn’t notice Tom’s racism. They would read the first few chapters and come in complaining about how much they couldn’t stand Daisy. After the chapter where Tom hits his mistress and breaks her nose, they would come in talking about how much they didn’t like Myrtle. They somehow didn’t see the big abusive white man hiding in plain site. (OH–I just re-read this and realized what I wrote. None of us saw them, did we? )

Five or so years ago teaching Raisin in the Sun, I would have encountered an earnest young student who argued that Mr. Lindner, the man from the home owner’s association who tries to buy out the Youngers to keep his neighborhood white, was actually being reasonable. After all, Lindner himself assures us, “that race prejudice simply doesn’t enter into it.”

This year, we encountered this scene the day after David Duke, former head of the Ku Klux Klan, praised Donald Trump’s reckless promotion of racist videos. In other words, a man who left the KKK to start his own white supremacist organization is praising POTUS. That’s new.

My students, though, bombed into class calling out Lindner’s hypocrisy before they even sat down. “Hurry up and graduate,” I told them. “You’ve got work to do.”

So, I was trying to figure out what to do with all these  random thoughts about how teaching literature is different this year.  Nobody needs another litany of the past week’s (or weeks’, either works here) horrors, and my trusty old optimism tic seems to be on sabbatical.

I thought I might write a cutesy “Five Things to Do…” essay like all the cool blogs do, but how would I end that sentence? Five things to do while…waiting for a new president? …wondering about nuclear war? …waiting for the next Evangelical pastor to endorse Roy Moore?

And even if I could end that sentence, how could I come up with five things? Who could possibly have five pieces of advice for how to live or love in these times? I’ve been having trouble coming up with one.

And then that Bonhoeffer quote showed up in my in-box.

Forget the cutesy, self-care suggestions. Don’t go for walks in nature. Don’t stop reading the news. Don’t pet a dog or drink tea or make time to relax with friends.

Bonhoeffer gives us advice that just might be hard enough for these hard times.  “Learn to regard people…” he tells us, “in the light of what they suffer.”

My first thought was to end this essay there and let that quote just resonate. Fred wasn’t impressed. “That’s it?” he said, when I stopped reading. “You’re just going to stop there?”

If I had stopped, I would have gotten this essay out into the world before the latest school shooting happened last Thursday, a few hours up the road in Aztec, New Mexico.

I wouldn’t have had to wrestle with the line I keep hearing the students say on tv. I wouldn’t have had to spend even five minutes thinking about just whose suffering Bonhoeffer wants me to attend to.

When I first started teaching, I felt what I think most new teachers or new parents feel–an overwhelming sense that I somehow had to be better than I am. After about ten years in the business world, I knew how to be a professional–I knew how to leave my real, messy self at home and take a shiny, polished version of my life into the office.

Then a few weeks into my teaching career, 9/11 happened. None of us had a shiny, polished version of ourselves ready for that morning.  I had to learn to stand with students in their fear while navigating my own. I had to accept my lack of answers and get busy working on me if I was going to have anything of value to offer my students.

Over the years, I’ve had to keep learning–teaching begs you to be more compassionate, more clear in your thinking, more solid in your knowledge of who you are. It’s never-ending: every year I have to scrub off more pretense, barrel through new fears, crank open my heart wider than I know it can go.

When you are a teacher, I’ve learned, you don’t have that luxury of having a “work” self and “another” self–ready or not, the work calls you into wholeness.

Maybe that’s why I can’t stop thinking about those teachers.  Thursday morning when the immediate danger had passed and the horror remained, they kept trying to protect their students. “Don’t look to the right,” they told them, as they ushered them out of their classroom-turned-bunker, past the body in the hall. I can’t stop thinking about how that walk, about how those words are going to resonate in their lives.

So it turns out, I still don’t know where I’m going with this. Thursday night after I watched the evening news I went to choir practice. It’s advent. We’re singing about waiting for light to be born into a suffering world. It occurs to me that things might not be so different this year.

It occurs to me that on Tuesday when the people of Alabama cast their votes for Senator, we won’t learn anything new about ourselves if Roy Moore wins.

If he loses though, I’ll be thinking about those teachers in Aztec. In that most awful moment, they were still trying to shape how their students see the world. They were betting, I think, on the next day, a day with algebra homework and band and cheerleading practice, a day where no one hears gunshots in the hall.

They were teaching us how to live and love in these times.

Waist deep in suffering, they were making a space for the light to come in.

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One morning in July, Rusty nudged me out of bed at 6:30, amazed as always to have woken into another wondrous day. There were squirrels to see, bunnies to yearn for, birds to bark at. His whole body was wagging. How could I still be in bed?

I pulled on shorts and a t-shirt, slid my flip-flops on, and out we went into what passes for Eden. The air was cool, a good twenty degrees below the nineties we’d reach later in the day, and everything was moving.

Cottonwood fluff landed on my eyelashes; finches and cowbirds danced and dipped and dove. Trees quivered, a dotted line of ants marched crumbs across the sidewalk, and neighbors on their way to work waved from their cars. Rusty, beside himself in the brand new world, could hardly keep his paws on the ground.

At the far end of the street, high up in the cottonwood by the mailboxes, the neighborhood hawks are raising another family. The eggs have hatched and the birds are staying close; this morning one watches from the wall at the top of the hill while the other flies low overhead, gripping a doomed lizard. Tiny bits of bone and feather and fur litter the ground under the nest.

I was starting to think that maybe I would write about motion when I started noticing things that were standing still. I looked at the mesa, the Sandias tugging the sun over the crest, the thick trunk of the cottonwood I leaned on while Rusty sniffed and pawed at the ancient earth.

That was a few months ago. These days Rusty is sleeping later. Summer’s bright promise slid into golden fall, and I keep sorting the world into two piles: things that move, things that stay still.

I’m in my seventeenth year of teaching high school. I started in 2001, just before the Twin Towers came down. I was driving to work when I started hearing the story on NPR. When I reached my classroom, students were already crying. I remember saying something stupid, something to suggest that when we learned all the facts, things would somehow be ok, less terrifying than they seemed in those early hours and days of not knowing. Of course, that wasn’t true.

That day provided some of my earliest lessons in how to be a teacher. Understand that you don’t have what they need. Hold a space where they can cry. Try to be just a little bit stronger than they are, unless it’s one of those moments when they need to know it’s ok to be weak. Be grateful for structure; in a chaotic day, it can help to head off to chemistry class just because it’s 9:35.

Because I started teaching at this precise historical moment, my life divides neatly into before and after, just as in so many ways, the story of this country does. Because I started teaching at this precise historical moment, my work as a teacher has always been tied to my hopes and fears for the world.

Seventeen years isn’t as long as some things. It’s shorter than the time my sister Meg has been dead. It’s shorter than the number of years I’ve been married. It’s shorter than the number of years my parents lived on Marvle Valley Drive.

It’s longer than the lives of the students I am teaching now. When I started my life as a teacher, most of my students weren’t born. The students I taught in those magical early years are married, have children, lament on Facebook that they feel old.

My current and recently past students are in motion. They grow, they graduate, they move away, they come back. “How are you?” they ask me when they stop by on winter break. “What’s new?” Fine, I tell them. Nothing much, I tell them. I am still here. Some of them, I know, find this comforting, this returning to your past and finding your old teachers still mucking around in it.

Last week  The Birds of Chicago spent the week in residence at my school, making music for and with us. These people who tour over two hundred days a year taught classes, made us laugh, and yanked our hearts right out of our chests. We laughed and cried together while our hearts flopped around on the outside like fish at play in this crazy new thing called air. On Thursday morning after they played with our jazz band, I found myself talking to a colleague. “I want to go back and make every decision differently,” I heard myself say. Then the day took off as the days in a school always do, and I didn’t give it much more thought.

Do you know how, when you pray or meditate every day, answers to questions you haven’t even figured out how to ask appear fully formed in your head? Well, I haven’t been meditating every day, but I have been trying to write most days and to take a few deep, intentional breaths now and then, and, wham, somewhere mid-afternoon the answer to a question I didn’t know I’d asked popped into my head. “Do nothing safe,” it shouted, as though it was afraid I wouldn’t hear.

What the hell, universe? I’m fifty-three and ten twelfths years old. I’m healthy-ish, but that’s because I’ve got good health insurance that pays for one of those expensive drugs that flowy-haired women on horseback advertise on tv. I live in a beautiful, paid-for home in a marriage that works pretty well most days. I can afford to take violin lessons with my granddaughter and pay for the gym membership that keeps my joints moving. Sure, it would be nice to have a bigger number in my 401K, but I can’t really think of a different number that would make me stop thinking that. My only real gripe is that, when I read that the average age of menopause was fifty-one, I took it as a promise. That hasn’t really panned out for me.

So what’s up with envying people who spend two hundred days a year on the road, and what does the universe mean when it tells me to “do nothing safe”?

The next day I’m talking with my friend Nina who tells me about her friend the successful entrepreneur. His motto is “Think short term and rely on good luck.” It sounds like a prophecy, so I write it on a notecard and tack it to the bulletin board in my classroom. It’s terrible advice for teenagers, but I can’t bring myself to take it down.

So. October is sweeping the floors, getting ready to close up shop. November is dusting off the shelves, hanging the grand opening signs. I hear the cranes have come back. I haven’t seen them yet, but I believe they are here. The sycamore in the back yard is gold and going bare. The plum in the front is still green and going red. Some things are moving. Some things are standing still.

The problem is that I can’t figure out which one I am doing. On any given day I love my work. I love standing like a ledge, or a rock, or a launchpad in my students’ lives. On any given day I’m background noise or a faint breeze. On any given day I support or chastise or applaud while my heart swims out beyond my body and back again, over and over.

Those early lessons about teaching still hold. Just this week I’ve had students who needed strong, and students who needed to know it was ok to be weak. Just this week, I’ve held a place for them to cry. Just this week, I’ve realized for the millionth time that I don’t have what they need.

The problem is, lately I can’t figure out whether I’m living out my calling or avoiding it. Something is moving in me, stretching at my seams.

Maybe it’s just my body’s stubborn refusal to quit producing eggs, or all this Halloween candy, or another chronic illness come to swell my joints. Whatever it is, when it reveals itself, I hope I’m paying attention. I hope I will remember to do nothing safe. I hope I will remember to think short-term and rely on good luck.

I’ll keep you posted. In the meantime, you might want to check out The Birds of Chicago.

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