Category: Teacher Tales

Laugh and cry along with me as I spin true tales from room 8.

Dear Little One,

On By Alicia McCauleyIn Letters, Teacher Tales4 Comments

Dear Little One,

Today I sat down next to you to see how your writing was going.  You were writing a letter to a friend.  You winked at me and told me you’d put one in my mailbox, too.  Actually, you haven’t learned how to wink yet, but you blinked with purpose and I got your drift.

You stopped writing for a moment, cupped my face with both of your hands and said, “I just love you, Mrs. McCauley.”  And then you hugged my neck.  You smiled and I saw the window where you’d lost your first tooth.  I hugged you and left you to finish your letter.

After school I had to deal with an angry parent.  And then I had to deal with a student who is being untrustworthy.  I left school drained of all joy.

And then I thought of you.

I thought of your little smile, your little hands, and your big heart.  You are the reason I teach, little one.  Thank you for reminding me.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll teach you how to wink.

Love,

Mrs. McCauley

Shoulders

On By Alicia McCauleyIn Teacher Tales2 Comments

I have big, broad shoulders.  Manly shoulders.  Shoulders that don’t easily fit into women’s blouses.  I’ve always wished for petite shoulders, the dainty shoulders of a real lady.  I recognize that they would look ridiculous on my six foot frame.  I get it, I do, but my whole life I’ve pined for smaller shoulders.

Until now.

It started with a thank you note, a simple card I’d scrawled to say thanks for a mug of trial sized bath goodies.  I was woefully late in writing the note, as almost a full month had passed since Christmas.  I penned the name of my student on the envelope and added on “and family”.  I didn’t give it another thought until I passed the card to my student.

“Mrs. McCauley, I can’t read this.” he said, handing the card back to me.

“Of course you can.  You’re a great reader.”  I cocked my head to the side, puzzled by this freckle faced kid who devours library books.

“No, I can’t read it because it’s says ‘and family’.  My mom and dad separated and I don’t have a family anymore.”

My heart lurched.  I felt my whole body sink under the weight of his statement.

“Honey, just because your mom and dad don’t live in the same house, doesn’t mean they’re not part of your family.  You still have a family.  Your mom and your dad both love you very much.”

“But who do I open the card with?  I’m going to my dad’s today.” he asked, still holding the card out to me.

“You can open it with your dad and show it to your mom when you go to your other house if you like.”  I took the card and tucked it into his homework folder, sorry that I’d confronted him with such a jagged decision.

“So I can still open the card?”  He leaned into me, a boy hug, all body and no arms.

“Yes, you can still open the card.”  I tucked him into me, hugging him too long until he started to squirm.

The next day, one of my little girls sat at her desk writing in her notebook.  She wrote about her mommy and pushed back thick ropes of hair to reveal tears welling in her brown eyes.  She’d never cried in class before.

“What’s wrong, sweetie?” I said, rubbing circles on her back like my mom used to do when she tucked me in bed.

“My mommy doesn’t like to play with me anymore.”  The tears were streaming now, rivers down her cocoa cheeks.  The boy sitting next to her pulled some tissue from a box, handing them to her in a wad.

“Oh, honey, is it because she has to spend her time taking care of the baby?”

“I don’t know.  She just doesn’t like to play with me anymore.”  She hiccupped and gulped for air at the same time.

“Have you tried telling her how you feel?  Your mommy would want to know if she’s hurt your feelings.”

“She doesn’t have time to listen to me.”  I wanted so desperately to make this all better.  To make her better.

“I know she’s busy with the baby, but I think it’s important you talk to your mom about this.  She doesn’t want to make you sad.”

“But I am sad.”

I’m convinced a more true statement has never been said.  Her eyes harbored no anger.  Just hurt, so much hurt for a six-year-old.

“I know, and it’s okay to be sad, but you should talk to your mommy about this.”

“Okay, Mrs. McCauley.  But what if she still doesn’t want to play with me?”  I hugged her tight, her tears wetting the shoulder of my shirt.

“She will, honey, she will.”

“How do you know?”  She looked at me with hope.

“Because your mommy loves you very much.”  We hugged until she picked up her pencil again.

A handful of days later, one of my more rambunctious boys stayed a few minutes after class.  He fills my days with a constant stream of chatter as he voices every thought and fidgets every second of the day.  I was sitting on the carpet and he squatted down next to me, his brow furrowed.  I took a deep breath, hoping to breathe in a little more patience for him.

“Mrs. McCauley, can you help me solve a problem?”

“What’s the problem?”  I readied myself to answer a question about double-digit addition or the Power Rangers book he’d been writing.

“My mom has a boyfriend and my dad has a girlfriend and I can’t figure out how to get them back together so I can have a family again.  Can you help me?”  He waited in earnest for my solution.

“Oh, honey, that’s not a problem you and I can solve.  Mommy and Daddy have to solve or not solve that one.”

“But what if they don’t?”  He moved closer until his lunchtime milk mustache was mere inches from my face.

“Your mommy and daddy still love you, even if they aren’t together.  You still have a family, even if they live in two houses.”  He hugged my neck.

For the first time this year, he was still, his dirty playground hands on my collar and my arm around his waist.  A minute or two later he wiggled free and packed up his things, pushing a container of markers into his backpack so he could finish illustrating his Power Rangers book at home.

It’s no wonder that this group of kids started the year stabbing, kicking, punching and biting each other.  This year is harder than any of my previous years of teaching.  Strike that, it’s harder than all of them combined.

Divorce, new babies, unemployment, dying family members.  So many problems on such small shoulders.

At night when the hum of the fridge is the only sound in the house, I lie awake thinking of my students.  I roll my shoulders in circles, trying to ease the ache in my muscles, to release the burdens of the day.

In the sheath of night I whisper prayers for the freckle faced boy and the girl with cocoa cheeks and for the boy who drives me crazy with his constant chatter.  I whisper a prayer for past students who were little more than shadows in their own homes.

And then I say prayer of thanks.  I thank God for my big, broad shoulders.

LOVE, Part 3

On By Alicia McCauleyIn Teacher Tales, Writing ProjectLeave a comment

When I was a kid we lived near the Rogue River and on sticky summer days my family would head to the river.  My big brother would walk the riverbank filling his pockets with skipping stones.  He’d tromp along picking out the flattest, smoothest rocks and then he’d fling them with a flick of his wrist and they’d dance across the water.  I tried in vain to make my own rocks tiptoe across the water, but I always chose rocks that were too lumpy, too big.  I’d heave them into the water and after a satisfying splash, my rocks would sink to the bottom, the river rippling great rings in their wake.

Enough time has passed since sharing about the LOVE statue with my colleagues that I can look back on it and see beyond my quivering hands holding the paper, beyond stumbling over my own words in a room so quiet that my nervous vibrato seemed to echo off the walls.  When talking with my colleagues, the heart of our conversation was my desire not to miss opportunities to act in love because I was too wrapped up in my own life to notice opportunities that are sometimes quite literally right in front of me.  I talked about how it’s easy, especially this time of year, for me to be caught up in the inertia of my own life.

I mentioned previously that some of my dear colleagues shared what they wrote about what it means to love and that their writing moved me.  Two things that they wrote stand out in particular.

The first is this: love means loving even when that affection is not reciprocated.  The enormity of that statement is something I’ve thought about daily since our time together.  It’s something I struggle to put into practice and by the nods in the room, I’m guessing I wasn’t the only one acknowledging that unsavory part of myself.

The second thing that has stuck with me is what a teacher wrote about compassion.  This teacher lost her husband to cancer last year.  Currently another teacher’s husband is in the same fierce battle.  Through tears in her eyes and over the muffled crying of just about everyone in the room, the first teacher shared about how love means acting with a depth of compassion only birthed by her own loss.  This teacher gets a gold star for bravery.  To write about her loss and how it has changed her and then to share about it in a staff meeting amazed me, amazes me still.

Each day since our staff meeting, teachers have sought me out telling me their stories, telling me about ways they’d acted in love in light of our meeting.  Teachers began doing things like collecting money to help pay for cancer treatments and writing notes of encouragement to their students.  I was delighted by their actions, but the thing that surprised me most and tickled me to my core, was that teachers took additional time outside of the staff meeting to finish the quick write we’d done.  Oh, that our students would experience that compulsion to write!

My experience at the staff meeting harkens back to my memories of throwing rocks into the river.  I threw my rock into the water and my little LOVE story rippled out in beautiful rings.

I’m left thinking then, what if writing in the classroom was like this?  What if more teachers mustered the courage to share their own writing, to talk about big ideas, to use writing as a vehicle for growth, both academic and personal?  I have a feeling that if we looked at the heart of writing as closely as we look at its structure, then profound change would occur.

My family moved away from the Rogue River and into the backyard of the Sacramento River, but I never did master the art of skipping stones.  And I’m okay with that because right now I’m filling my pockets with rocks.  Big, lumpy ones.  Come January, during the first session in a writing series, I’ll start tossing my stones into the water.  This time I hope they won’t skip across the water.  No, I hope they sink down deep and ripple wide.


Mrs. Mcmahoomei

On By Alicia McCauleyIn Teacher TalesLeave a comment

As I was sitting at my school computer today typing up some of the beautiful imagery my little ones had written in their winter poetry, I overheard the after school program tromp into the pod.  Usually I shut my door when they arrive so that I can work in a little bit of tranquility, but today I overheard a conversation between one of my kids and his friend.  It went something like this:

“I can spell Mrs. McCauley’s name.”

“You can?  It’s looong.”

I leaned in and heard my darling little guy list a string of letters.  I walked into the space where they were working and crouched down near him.  I once heard a student say that her eyes were brown like horses.  Well, this little guy has those kinds of eyes, deep brown in one light, golden brown in another.  Horse eyes for sure.  I told him I’d heard him spelling my name and I wondered if he could do it again.  He smiled the windowed smile that is the hallmark of first grade and started spelling.

“M-c-m-a-h-o-o-m-e-i.”  he pronounced.  “Did I get all of the letters?”  He looked up at me, his eyes beaming from all that effort.

“You got most of them.”  I patted his back

“Did I get enough?”

“Yes, honey, that’s definitely enough.”

Reading. Out Loud. To My Colleagues. Gulp.

On By Alicia McCauleyIn Teacher Tales, Writing Project5 Comments

A few days ago my principal asked me to speak to the staff at my school about the National Writing Project conference I attended in Philly.  I thought about what to share.  At first I thought I’d share the hilarious genius of the poet Billy Collins.  Then I thought I’d share about a workshop I attended on writing across subject areas.  Both of those sounded just fine to me, except that another idea kept poking at me, whispering into my ear, disrupting my dreams even.

I felt compelled to share about the LOVE Statue.

I wanted to talk about something bigger than the conventions of writing and instead address the purpose of writing.  To present writing as an expression of feeling, as a call to action, as a response to an experience that changed me.

Oh man, that is not even close to what many people consider in the box of “writing instruction”.  Thankfully my principal is an out of the box kind of guy and when I pitched him my idea, he gave me the okay.

I was honored.  I was excited.  I was terrified.  Talking to my colleagues about my experience would mean reading them something I wrote.  Like, out loud, at the front of the room and stuff.

Gulp.

After fighting back the urge to hurl, I summoned my bravery from the pit of my rolling stomach.  Being a writer means taking the risk to share.  At least that’s what I told myself.

The staff meeting was today and I sat listening to my principal talk about copy machines and new phone systems and all the nuts and bolts that make a school run smoothly.  I tried to listen attentively, but my stomach was aflutter and my heart was hammering.  Then it came time for me to share.  I begged for God to have mercy and take me to Heaven right now.

He did not.  So I stood up and took a deep breath.

I talked a teensy bit about an upcoming writing series I’m co-facilitating and I talked a smidge about the conference and then I read my piece.

My voice shook.  My eyes welled up when I came to the part about being ashamed.  I pushed to the finish and waited for an accordion of groans and a slew of pencils flung at my eyes.  Instead they clapped.  And smiled.  And wiped their eyes.

I talked about the discussion Terry and I had about what it means to act in love, to seek out opportunities to show empathy.  Then, we wrote about what it means to love, about big and small ways we can show love.

That’s right, we wrote as a staff at a staff meeting.  It was a quick write and then I asked for volunteers to share out.  And people actually volunteered.  What they shared was moving and brought a fresh run of tears pricking my eyelashes.

In a time of standards and testing and budget cuts, it was water to my soul hearing about the heart my colleagues have for each other and our students.

At the end of the meeting, seven colleagues signed up for the writing series I’m co-facilitating.  Seven teachers willing to give up time on a Saturday to better themselves as teachers of writing, to better themselves as writers.  I have a beautiful opportunity to discuss within my teaching community the importance and power of writing.

Between now and then, I’m going to dig out my brave face and quell my squeamish stomach in hope that come January we will all be reading our writing out loud to each other.  And I couldn’t be more excited, more honored or more terrified.