#the urge to fill out a fifth grader ‘all about me’ is calling

[fruitmouse]

kind of want to make a fun cute carrd just bc they’re FUN and CUTE but literally where would i put that thang LMAO

[galoots]

Surprise, surprise. A wrote a little piece about Scrooge taking care of his nephew during a depressive episode. As always, leave me a comment and enjoy!

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Donald flicked the switch of his SAD therapy lamp on, filling the air with a quiet electric buzz. For a half an hour every day, he was to sit in front of this lamp, blasting 10,000 lux directly into his face. This came at the recommendation of his therapist—a new addition to his life since he’d quit college to work on his mental health. The lamp was one of the many therapeutic aids he’d been advised to add to his life. Antidepressants, melatonin, weekly therapy sessions, daily meditation, light exercise, journaling, quality family time; it felt like the laundry list of remedies was endless. He has set up a spot in the living room for all this garbage: a desk with his journal, his medications, and his stupid, stupid lamp. He affectionately called it his depression corner—a name his uncle objected to for it’s dispiriting connotations, but it was his corner and he’d call it what he’d like.

           Donald sighed as he settled into his chair, cracking open the novel he was currently halfway through. It was a remnant from one of the classes he’d been previously attending. There was no real reason to continue it, he had failed that class and slumped home in utter defeat, but pressed on with it any way. Not only was the novel unbelievably boring and tedious, but it reminded Donald of his own failure: his inability to take care of himself once he left home and the pathetic spiral of depression he’d soon found himself in. Reading this book made him miserable, but he slogged through it anyway as if finishing it would prove that he was at least capable of something. Besides, he had nothing but free time, so why not spend a portion of that time reading?

           He threw himself back into the grueling task of reading the same page over and over again—the words barely registering in his head, floating through the thick fog of his mind, before they were ejected back out on to the page. Slightly damp yet unprocessed. Ready to go throw the charade one more. He was on his fourth read-through of this particularly dense passage when he heard a familiar voice sound from over his shoulder.

           “You’re sitting awfully close to that lamp, nephew. Has your eyesight degraded to the point you need that much light to illuminate your reading?”

           Donald glanced over his shoulder at his uncle and shook his head. “Not that kind of lamp, Uncle Scrooge.”

           Scrooge slid his arms over Donald’s shoulders, resting his chin in the crook of Donald’s neck. “What kind is it then?”

           “The doctor recommended, alleviate your depression kind of lamp.” Donald sneered. “The sad kind all the cool depressed college drop-out’s use. The kind that comes highly recommended from all the other basement-dwelling losers online.”

           His uncle frowned, furrowing his brow with concern as he stared into the bright white light. “You sure seem to have quite the… antipathy for what sounds like such a helpful little lamp. Is it not working?”

           “It’s… not not working… I just…” Donald let out a little huff of aggravation as he fiddled with the switch on the base of the device. Aggravation with himself, aggravation with his sorry circumstance, aggravation with the chemical failings of his own brain. “I just don’t like that I need it.”

           Scrooge made a thoughtful noise, noncommittal but inquisitive, urging him to explain further.

           “It’s just, like, another stupid thing in a long regimen of things I have to do now. I hate that I need all this stuff simply to function. I’m sick of it. Why can’t my brain work like it’s supposed to?”

           Scrooge lifted himself off of Donald’s shoulders and gave his nephew a reassuring pat. “Functioning is good. We like functioning. Nothing wrong with that.”              “I guess…”

           “I need glasses to see properly, hearing aids to hear properly, and a cane to walk properly, don’t I?”

           “Yeah…” Donald said.

           “Are those bad?”

           “No…” Donald sighed in response. His uncle was right of course, but it didn’t make it less annoying.

           Scrooge planted a kiss on top of his head. “Keep at it, boyo. I know its not fun, but doctor’s orders.”

           Donald shrugged in response, reopening his book to reread the text there for the fifth time.

           His uncle rubbed his shoulders in support. “I’m going to make some tea. Want a cup? I can sit with you for a while.”

           “No thanks, unkie.” Donald replied with glum monotone. He was feeling mired in his bad mood today, regardless of any avuncular pep talks or brightly simulated sunlight trying to cheer him up.

           The next day he sat down in his chair. Same as always. Flipped on his lamp. Same as always. Opened his book. Same as always. Another series of monotonous tasks in a day full of them. In a life full of them. But today something was different. His plain white lamp had been tampered with. Now a wreath of yellow petals cut from construction paper decorated its frame, meeting with green paper leaves at the bottom. It looked like a rogue pack of first-grader’s had unloaded their arts and crafts skill on his lamp overnight, giving the whole thing the appearance of a sunflower. A crooked, amused smile snuck onto his face as he observed the changes his lamp had undergone. On his desk, next to the lamp, sat a bundle of neatly wrapped presents. Clearly the careful administrations of his Puppa. Uncle Scrooge couldn’t wrap a present for the life of him and always had his husband take care of any wrapping jobs for him. He unwrapped them, tearing away the paper to reveal a stack of books—one of sudoku, the other of crosswords, and the third of logic problems. A new pencil, sharpened to a point, accompanied the books along with a cozy dark blue knit sweater. Inspecting the stitches, Donald didn’t see the orderly rows his knew Duckworth to be capable of, but the sloppy, inexperienced work of an amateur. There was no note to identify his mystery gift-giver, but Donald didn’t need one to know who was responsible for all of this. He slipped on his new sweater, one sleeve slightly longer than the other, but still comfy. He picked up one of the books of puzzles and the pencil, ready to pass the time.

           As if on cue, like he’d been waiting for just this moment to occur, Scrooge rounded the corner, making headway towards the nook Donald occupied.

           “Well, well, well!” Scrooge exclaimed. His poorly feigned surprise doing little to dissuade Donald of the obvious fact of his involvement. “Aren’t you the lucky one! It seems you’ve been visited by a helpful little elf overnight.”

           “Seems so.” Donald covered his beak to stifle a chuckle. “Although this elf didn’t realize that it doesn’t make much sense to turn a lamp into a sunflower.”

           “Uh, er…” Scrooge stammered, his eyes opening as he started from Donald’s playful dig. “Well now the lamp needs you to be its light source, you see!” His uncle clapped his hands down on Donald’s shoulder, pleased with the answer he’d supplied on the spot. “You’ll have to sit here for the allotted time each day so it can get the proper amount of sunshine and grow up healthy and strong.”

           Donald smiled, leaning his head back on his uncle. “How sweet. Did the elf tell you that?”

           “Yes.” Scrooge smiled benignly. “Yes, he did.”

           Donald chuckled again, not bothering to mask it this time. He wasn’t fooled by his uncle’s utterly lacking acting skills, but he was happy to play along. “Well tell your elf friend thank you. I appreciate it very much.”

           Scrooge rubbed his nephew shoulder’s warmly, gazing fondly down at him and soaking in the first genuine smile Donald had worn since he first came home. Although the circumstance by which Donald had returned home could have certainly been happier ones, Scrooge was relieved to see his little boy back in the nest again. The old duck felt like he’d been withering away ever since Donald left, but now he was here, back in his arms, back in their home, and finally smiling once again.

           “I’ll go make us a pot of tea.” Scrooge whispered. He padded softly out of the room, doing his best not to disturb Donald, who had absorbed himself in solving the puzzle in front of him. His novel lay off to the side—forgotten. There was simply no need to finish it anymore.

           Eventually it would be shelved along with his other books where it would sit and grow dusty without use. Donald would never finish, but that was for the best. Not all books need to be read to the end. Some are better left unfinished, waiting silently upon the shelf like a lonely sentinel, ready to be rediscovered during happier days

[pythonpie]

Sam the Bully (story)

The children at Eppler Elementary had always avoided Sam. Even as a kindergartener, he was over six feet tall, broad enough to fill a doorway, and so strong that he once crumpled a doorknob like a wad of paper! But when Marcus Sinclair befriended the large boy in the second grade, everyone began to truly fear him. If such a beastly looking person was friends with Marcus Sinclair, everyone knew better than to linger around him. Marcus was a grade A bully, a tyrant on the playground. Being a fifth grader, he was taller and stronger than most of his victims already, but he wanted real power over the entire playground. He had a few buddies that would manipulate and menace the younger kids, but he wanted to push his limits with other fifth graders, and even sixth graders! And if he played his cards right, perhaps the teachers… Sam was now eight years old and a staggering nine feet tall, reaching the height of the tall slide and swingset! He was a behemoth to behold amongst the other children. Upon befriending Sam, Marcus was hoping to find that such a brute would share in his urge to dominate and control. However, Sam was painfully shy, and preferred to be left alone. Through manipulation and deceit, Marcus and his friends convinced Sam that nobody would ever like him except them. They told him that the only way people would ever respect him is if he became their friend. Having never experienced friendship before, Sam soaked up every ounce of praise he could get from these boys and was happy to be a part of their group, despite the given harassment he endured from them. However, Sam was oblivious to the tasks Marcus was putting him up to. They twisted their words to sound like they were being victimized by other students. Geoffrey McConnell had a brand new action figure that Marcus really wanted, so Marcus went to Sam and told him that Geoffrey stole it and wouldn’t give it back. A stern expression and a good looming over him was enough for poor Geoff to give Marcus the toy for fear of being pummelled by a third grade gorilla. Similar episodes happened for a good year or so, with Marcus using Sam to threaten and menace others into giving into his will, all with Sam being innocent to what was actually happening. It wasn’t until Sam was used to exert physical violence that things felt wrong.

Sam was sitting by himself as usual, reading a book on pandas that his aunt has gotten him from her visit to the Philippines to visit other family. It was a cold, gray autumn day. Sam wore his favorite jacket and held the appearance of a giant pile of laundry with his clothing being so baggy and loose. He was contently reading under his tree when Marcus approached him, holding his arm in apparent pain.

“Sam! Ow…. Sam, some girl hit me!” he whined, putting on a convincing show for his giant lackey. Sam sat up in alarm and set his book aside, worried for his friend.

“Oh no! Here, I’ll go get someone-”

“No! No…you should go find that girl and have her apologize!” Marcus instructed. Sam nodded with a slight grunt. That sounded reasonable. Marcus continued his lie, leading Sam towards the monkey bars where a few third grade girls were making bracelets. They seemed too busy talking and making them to notice Marcus and Sam approaching.

“Who hit you?” Sam asked softly. Marcus hesitated. Who should he choose? He wanted to completely terrify whoever it was. Someone small and weak…

“That one! Yeah, she hit me!” Marcus exclaimed, pointing to the smallest girl. She was a grade older than Sam, but petite enough to look his age. Suddenly, all eyes were on her when Marcus made his bold accusation.

“I didn’t hit you! Go away, Marcus!” she yelled, standing up to face him defiantly. Emily may have been the smallest, but she was stubborn and refused to give Marcus any power over her. Marcus looked up at Sam, not feeling confident that he would believe him.

“She’s lying! Sam, it really hurts!” he pretended to whimper. It was then that Emily realized that Sam was acting as Marcus’s bodyguard and grew very scared. Her eyes grew wide as Sam furrowed his brow and lumbered forward. Her friends had fled backwards like startled birds, leaving Emily only a few feet from the enormous boy.

“Why did you hit my friend?” Sam asked sternly, not understanding how huge and scary he appeared to her.

“I…I didn’t… I didn’t h-hit him!” Emily stammered, attempting to slowly back away. Sam was extremely uncomfortable. He hated scaring people, but he had to defend Marcus! That’s what friends did for each other…

“Sam, it’ll be even if you hit her back!” Marcus suggested through fake winces of pain. Emily’s heart leapt to her throat and she found herself stricken with fear. She’s heard about how strong Sam was. How he could rip playground equipment up from the ground. How he could twist bicycles like pipe cleaners. One hit from this oaf could shatter her bones. Emily had never felt so powerless, watching Sam’s meaty fist coiling in on itself. Emily sank to the ground in tears, begging Sam not to hurt her. By now, a crowd of students had gathered and Sam could see the principal rushing out the doors with a couple of parents toward them. Inside his head, Sam was fighting himself. This wasn’t right. None of this was right. He should get a teacher. But the girl said she didn’t do it, and wouldn’t confess even when Sam loomed over her. No! He couldn’t do this! Without a word, Sam turned on his heels and ran away. He thundered to his spot under his tree, grabbed his book, and hurried away inside to go somewhere to be by himself, ashamed and disgusted with himself and his so called “friend”.

The next day was lonelier than usual for Sam. Marcus and crew where angry at him and refused to let him hang out with them, calling him stupid, a baby, and a traitor. Sam was very upset to lose his only friends, and sat quietly by himself when he went to recess. But while Marcus shunned him, Emily found herself to be curious about the giant. Why didn’t he hit her? Wasn’t he supposed to be a heartless bully like the kids he hung around? Emily spent the next week observing him from a distance, taking in every mannerism. He seemed content to be alone, and did nothing to suggest he was violent or mean. In fact, she watched him be very tender when a bird came to investigate him. Maybe he wasn’t a big bully like Marcus. Maybe he was nice? Emily was a very friendly and social person. This brutish boy had sparked her curiosity.

[zipgrowth]

One Teacher's Plan to Close Culture Gaps in Schools

For my most of my teaching career, I was the only teacher of color in my building. I once expressed to the principal my hope that she would be considering teachers of color as candidates for an opening in our English department. “They just don’t apply,” she told me resolutely. I didn’t bring it up again.

I had also been closeted for most of my teaching career. While other teachers in the staff room talked about their husbands’ dentist appointments and anniversary plans, I ate my lunches strategically avoiding conversation about my personal life. During my fifth year of teaching, when I fell in love with the woman I am engaged to now, I stopped going to the staff room altogether.

When I left the classroom in 2017 for a job as an events curator for a community arts organization, it was the middle of spring semester during my seventh year as a teacher. I was a Washington State Teacher Leader and I had just become a TED-Ed Innovative Educator, which gave me an opportunity to join a cohort of international educators who were determined to find creative ways to enrich their school communities.

I was sick over the decision to abandon my classes of sixth graders and to walk away from former students who continued to stop by my classroom to tell me about their romances, anxieties and college applications. Of all my identities, teacher had been at the top on the list for so long, and now I was quitting.

Even so, I knew I had to leave. I was burned out after long feeling separated from my administration and colleagues and was craving community. Most importantly, I wanted to be somewhere where I didn’t feel like the only “something” in the room all the time.

Once my family moved to the mainland from Honolulu when I was in third grade, I don’t remember ever having any Asian or biracial teachers through elementary, middle or high school, or even in college or graduate school. Until I went to college, I never had an out gay or lesbian teacher who was open about their partner the way my other teachers shared about their spouses. Moreover, as a K-12 student, I rarely had teachers who seemed to be the kind of adult I wanted to become.

As a middle school humanities teacher, I saw myself in my students and they saw themselves in me, and we talked about it openly. Topics of race, nationality, class, gender and sexual orientation were all folded into my syllabus. When the district’s prescribed curriculum included only novels written by white male authors featuring white male protagonists, I supplemented with short stories, advertising campaigns and podcasts by youth of color, women and LGBTQ folks. We analyzed Beyoncé’s Formation video. We held Socratic seminars rooted in essays by Amy Tan and Daniel José Older. We performed poetry inspired by Saul Williams and Staceyann Chin.

So many of my students—kids of color, white kids, queer kids, straight kids—regularly expressed their excitement and gratitude over the many ways identity influenced our work together. They were eager to explore race and sexual orientation in the context of our safe and thoughtful class community. They had so many questions and stories to share on these topics. In fact, they seemed relieved that someone was finally asking.

Kristin Leong Taking Photographs for ROLL CALL, Image Credit: Kristin Leong

Motivated by experiences from my own classroom, when TED-Ed invited me to design a yearlong innovation project to solve an issue in my school community, I knew exactly what I wanted to do: I wanted to hear from actual students and teachers in our schools experiencing culture gaps and heteronormativity, and I wanted to take their photographs. In addition to sharing their stories of living these culture gaps every day, I wanted people to show their faces to humanize the statistics and remind people that the diversity of our schools is rooted in the unique experiences of real individuals.

And so, for the last two years, I have been photographing students and teachers from around the world and asking them two questions:

What do you have in common with your students/teachers?

Does it matter that students and teachers have things in common?

Portraits from ROLL CALL, Image Credit: Kristin Leong

The project, called ROLL CALL, is focused on humanizing the many gaps that separate students and teachers including race, gender and sexual orientation.

When I launched the project in 2016, I was baffled that the culture gaps in our schools weren’t inspiring protests in the streets. The gaps at this project’s launch are alive and well today: according to the U.S. Department of Education’s most recent survey, about 80 percent of all public school teachers are white. Meanwhile, a majority of public school students are kids of color according to government estimates.

In addition to this race gap, a familiar gender gap also persists in our schools: over 75% of American public school teachers are women, a statistic that doesn’t represent the student population. Statistics on sexual orientation among high school students are hard to come by, reflecting enduring (although waning) societal taboos surrounding queer identification. But a recent survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) showed that there are likely about 1.3 million high school students who identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual in the United States. Furthermore, several studies suggest that young people are more likely to identify as transgender than previously thought and are rejecting binaries of gender identification. However, LGBTQ teachers still consistently express discomfort and even fear over being publicly outed about their sexual orientation while working as educators.

I narrowed in on a few goals for this project: shrink the culture gaps, shine a light on the need to increase the number of teachers of color and male teachers in our schools and transform classrooms into inclusive—not just tolerant—spaces for LGBTQ students and teachers. This was an ambitious vision to be sure, but one I was desperate to believe in.

Even though I no longer have my own classroom, I bring ROLL CALL workshops into schools regularly. I still find that teachers are just as frustrated and challenged by the culture gaps in our schools as our students are. I’ve seen the same sense of relief fall over both students and teachers when they are finally invited to tell their stories, just as I’ve seen empathy fill classrooms full of both teachers and students after learning the stories of their peers.

Over the past two years, I have been deeply moved so many times by the stories that students and teachers have trusted ROLL CALL to share. However, there is one story that stands out, because it made ROLL CALL into what it is today. The transformative story is that of Washington State’s Regional Teacher of the Year Lynne Olmos, who was the first person featured in the project.

Like most teachers, Lynne is white, female and heterosexual. Many of Lynne’s students don’t share her race, gender or sexual orientation. However, in response to ROLL CALL’s first question: What do you have in common with your students?, Lynne shared:

“When I was the age that my students are now, I experienced abuse, neglect a broken family and extreme poverty. This helps me understand their motivations and behaviors.

Additionally, for a time as an adult, I was a homeless, unemployed, single parent on financial assistance. Generational poverty is something my students and I have in common.

My path to becoming an academic was unusual and later in life. I know what it is like to be an unmotivated student without future plan. I know that it is never too late to change your path.”

Lynne’s story not only reminded me of the extraordinary ways teachers bring love into their work, but it also showed me that ROLL CALL’s original mission was wrong.

I set out to fix a flawed system—to bridge cultural divides and urge our schools to be more welcoming for LGBTQ teachers and students. However, by focusing on this end goal, I was losing sight of the incredible work our students and teachers are doing to connect within our current system, despite its flaws. Now, thanks to Lynne and the hundreds of teachers and students who have shared their stories through the project, its mission has evolved into what it is today: not just to humanize data, but also to celebrate the profound connections happening in our schools despite these divides.

I look forward to the day when our population of teachers more closely reflects the identities of our students, but what I hope stays with people from the project is its undeniable evidence that our schools are filled with teachers and students determined to find empathy where it seems like it isn’t possible.

So if you’re looking for a way to connect across divides in your school community, you might consider starting your journey by asking the students and teachers in your life ROLL CALL’s two questions. You might be surprised where the answers take you.

One Teacher's Plan to Close Culture Gaps in Schools published first on https://medium.com/@GetNewDLBusiness