You’ve got a tower of rows of wooden blocks, and the game is played by sliding out the bricks from the middle and placing them on the top. The tower gets higher, yes, but it also gets more structurally unsound. There’s less support to hold things up. And the higher you build, the more you take away from your foundation.

That’s what my school feels like. Jenga.

“Build higher!”, we’re told. And we are. We’re climbing. Slowly but surely, we’re inching up.

But we’re also watching the bricks slide out from the middle. We’re watching our supports vanish out from underneath us. It seems like every advance we make comes at the expense of something else we need. Small classes disappear so we can have more money. Work time disappears so we can have training. Art and music disappear so we can raise math and English scores.

We’re building and we’re building and we’re building, but it’s getting dangerously unstable. We’re at that point in the game where the tower is going to topple any minute now and there’s a constant and pervasive anxiety about knowing that it’s coming but not when. We’re at that point in the game where we’re supposed to keep building, but we’re having trouble finding any bricks in the middle left to pull.

And what’s scary is when I look at other schools. I’ll go to a meeting and chat with another teacher I just met, and I’ll realize that their school isn’t playing Jenga — they’re building with Legos. They’ve got a big stable mat and a big bin of bountiful interlocking bricks. Different shapes, sizes, colors. And they’re building without cannibalizing. And they’re building something that is structurally intact. And they’re building something that serves a purpose.

They’re building something beautiful — the school-equivalents of cathedrals. Meanwhile, we’re just building up. And we’re doing that because we’re told that’s the only direction we have to go.

Now, it’s not easy for them, and occasionally a spire gets knocked down or some pieces don’t fit together like they envisioned, but there’s a purpose and an outcome to what they’re doing. There’s a vision. There’s celebration of success. There’s admiration for hard work completed. We’re just building. That’s all we’re doing. Just building. Building for building’s sake.

And doing it in about the worst way possible. Jenga.

When I talk to the Lego teachers, or they hear about my school, some of them are really compassionate. “Here,” they say, “our structures sound like they’re about the same height, and you sound like you could use some help. Try out these pieces in these configurations. See if you can get a hold of these other ones. They’ve all really worked for us.”

It’s heartwarming and heartbreaking at the same time. They’re reaching out, but they’re telling us to use things that we can’t. Those pieces don’t work for our tower. And we can’t even get access to most of them in the first place. Of course, we can (and do) toss whatever Legos we do come across on the top, but that doesn’t help anything — it just gives the illusion of added height. It doesn’t actually give any support where we really need it. In the middle. Where the bricks are disappearing.

Others look at our tower with contempt. They think we’re the ones who chose Jenga in the first place. They think the holes are our fault. They don’t realize that most of us got into the tower without quite realizing what the game was. And that once we’re in, and we’ve stayed in for a bit, we’re faced with two terrible options: leave, and hope someone else can fill our gap without toppling the tower, or stay, and watch plenty of others we’ve relied on for support opt for the first choice.

I don’t want to help topple the tower, but I don’t want to stay in teetering anxiety either. I instead wish we could get a bin of Legos. Build with those.

But for now, we’re stuck with Jenga.

And we’re almost out of bricks.

It was a simple quiz: 24 questions over four functions (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division) with positive and negative single-digit integers. No twists, no curveballs — just stuff like -3 + 2 and -5 x -7.

For a pre-algebra class, this is review, as it’s what they’ve been doing in the many grades leading up to mine. Furthermore, it’s what we spent the entire week on. I retaught them all the rules they needed to know and we practiced all of them extensively. In fact, every single question on the quiz was one that I’d given them in classwork earlier that week.

And, as you can see, scores are pretty abysmal. 72 kids missed ten or more problems. Only 21 students, less than a full class, missed two or less. And there were only 24 problems.

It’s hard to articulate how low-skilled my kids are sometimes. I mean, people know it in an abstract sense. My school is a failing, low-income public middle school. 97% free and reduced lunch. 100% students of color. 70% English language learners. Single-digit test scores. We’re what people mean when they talk about the achievement gap, we’re what people use for political expediency when they want to talk about educational “reform”, and we’re practically expected to fail, even by the people who don’t want that to happen.

But it’s really hard to get people to really understand what that failure means. The failure on the outside looks like a pre-algebra class having a strong majority of its students lack the pre-requisite skills to be successful. But really, the failure is what it feels like for me and for these kids to work, for an entire week, on skills they’ve already seen and should already know, and still not be able to do them.

And I mean that not in an accusatory sense. I’m not saying that my students’ performance is their fault. It’s actually not about blame at all, as blame doesn’t get anyone anywhere but frustrated. It’s about the idea that there’s some disconnect — a big, powerful, and damning disconnect — between what my students experience and what they learn. And it’s about what that disconnect does to them over time. Nobody likes not understanding something. Nobody likes trying the same thing over and over again and failing at it. Nobody likes feeling stupid or ineffective or powerless.

It’s one of the huge things that makes this job so difficult. The students try and fail and try and fail and try and fail, and, by my grade, so many of them are so sick of failing that many of them often stop trying altogether. It’s hard to watch kids feel like they’re terrible and dumb and worthless. It’s hard to motivate them when they’ve already internalized the idea that the only thing they’re good at is not being good at anything.

And it’s absolutely crushing when all the work you did to break through the barriers and get them excited about learning is for naught when you hand them a quiz with a low grade and their name on it. You watch them retreat back to the safety of denial, or acting out, or shutting down, or checking out, or saying “fuck school, I don’t need this shit” as they angrily walk out the door and rail against the structure that, from their perspective, has fought them and won, time and time and again. That quiz is just another defeat. Another misstep. Another failure. It validates everything, and affirms nothing.

72 kids felt that today. Many will feel it tomorrow. Or the next day. Or the day after that. It’s the kind of thing that tends to hang around and build up over time. It’s the kind of thing that gets the opportunity to present itself in six different periods a day, five days a week. It’s the kind of thing that drives our students to give up on school and, even worse, on themselves.

And I wish I knew how to reverse it — to send the tide back out instead of just dreading how much of the shoreline it’s eating away. I wish I could make my kids feel better. I wish I could teach them in a way that they would understand better. Reformers point to schools like mine and say that clearly the issue is bad instruction, and that might be the case, but nobody has shown me or any of the other people at my school what “good” instruction looks like for our kids. What gets them to bridge that disconnect? What gets them to really get it? What helps them build from behind their walls? We see success happen in limited contexts in our classrooms, with individual kids, but we can’t scale that up systemically. My school and my district and the hundreds just like ours in America have this struggle that nobody seems to be able to solve and, like our kids, we’re feeling the failure. Trying and failing and trying and failing and trying and failing isn’t fun for us either, and it’s no coincidence that the rate of teachers leaving the these schools is often comparable to the rate of students dropping out from them.

Failure is what we feel and what we know. The teachers know it. The kids know it. It tempers our time together and guides our beliefs. There’s not a community in it — a shared bonding that we’re all failing together — but an isolation. We feel singularly inadequate and individually incapable. It’s disheartening, it’s heartbreaking, and it’s tough.

It’s really fucking tough.

And I don’t know what to do about it.

Two weeks ago: “Wow… Just, wow… I just didn’t expect how much they weren’t ready to be students. I can’t believe how not ready or willing they are. So many of them don’t even want to try to learn.”

One week ago: [silence] [tears] “I just… I’ve never been disrespected like this… I’ve never… They’re mean and… They’re malicious… It’s…” [tears] [silence]

I fully realize that it’s not your fault, but as soon as I start writing something I really want to say, I stop after I reconsider how you’ll post it to be theoretically available to everyone on the internet and actually available to a much smaller group of people who are sick of hearing me whine. Your ability to do that is actually the main reason why you’re awesome, but right now it’s bumming me out because it’s making me feel like I can’t really be honest. Or, moreover, not that I can’t be honest, but that, in being honest, I’m letting down the people who care about what I have to say because they’re growing tired of an honesty that’s centered in negativity.

The honest truth is that this job is fucking bumming me out.

And that scares me. Because I really like it. Or liked it. I’m not really sure right now. It’s hard to compare things to last year when the comparison’s so apples to space shuttles.

Last year I had a spacious portable with effective climate control. This year I have an oven that’s half that size. Last year I had classes in the 20s. This year I have 32 kids in every single one. In a space that’s half the size of my last room. With no fucking air conditioning.

This year I have seventh graders. Last year I had eighth graders. I’m getting kicked in the ass right now by how little I knew about how much of a difference there is between the two age groups. They’re so much more childish, so much more emotional, and so much more jittery. Of course, I might be attributing that to the wrong cause, as it’s hard to tell if it’s because they’re seventh graders or if it’s because there’s 32 of them. Packed like sardines. In a fucking oven.

I have to dance and slide my way between table groups and over backpacks just to get anywhere. The kids hate being crunched in uncomfortable desks in a stuffy classroom within inches of people in every direction with whom they don’t get along. And I not only hate dealing with them when they’re like that, but I really hate being the one who actually has to enforce the structures that make them like that.

The fantasies of a desk job have started creeping up again. At desk jobs you can go to the bathroom whenever you like! At desk jobs you don’t have eleven-year-olds calling you offensive names using offensive words they don’t know the meanings to just because you didn’t sit them with their friends! At desk jobs you won’t be totally fucked for the day if the copier isn’t working! At desk jobs the copier is probably usually actually working! At desk jobs you may be crammed into a cubicle, but at least you’re only crammed in there with pictures of your kids and not the actual kids themselves!

I realize that’s just an idealization, and I realize that, like any dream, it has a small likelihood of coming true and an even smaller likelihood of coming true like I’ve planned it, so I, as always, push the thoughts from my mind and try not to dwell on the fact that at a desk job I could come home at 5 o’clock and not have to keep working late into the evening on stuff that always goes over-criticized and under-appreciated.

The truth, WordPress, is that I’m fucking terrified that this year is going to metaphorically (if not literally — the room is 10 degrees hotter above the overhead) burn me out, and I’m going to, like so many other teachers, walk away feeling wronged and embittered by the very establishment I care so much about. And yeah, WordPress, I know I just need to grow up or man up but doing that has always made me feel even more like a fuck up because I just shut up and things bottle up until they boil over once it’s game over because I’m so fucking over letting myself be fucked over.

And game over scares me. Because I really like the game. Or liked it.

I’m not really sure right now.

And by “my classroom”, I mean the one that I was moved to with the unfixed hole in the ceiling and the hundreds, possibly thousands (not an exaggeration) of staples inexplicably and erratically teething into my walls. I spent over an hour today just standing on desks and chomping at them with the vicious bite of a staple remover — covering myself, in the process, with the fine dust of drywall and probably some asbestos. It’s not an ideal learning space, but it’ll have to do.

Spending a full 90 minutes grappling with staples seems fatuous when I consider the amount and magnitude of the rest of the work that I have to get done before Monday, but getting the classroom looking good is something that greatly benefits me, as I like my workspace to look nice. Being in a space that is orderly, colorful, and clean helps me feel collected and calm. When my classroom is cluttered or messy, I get a little bit antsy and a little bit on-edge.

My students like it too. Last year I had multiple compliments from my kids on how clean my room looked and how good it felt to be in there. Of course, part of that was simply that I had a working air conditioner, but a lot of it was that they appreciated that I kept things tidy and inviting. Sweeping my classroom at the end of every day is tedious, but it’s worth it to me because of how it makes me and the students feel. And when they’re happy, I’m happy. And vice versa.

Which is a funny concept, because it’s something that’s becoming increasingly sparse in educational discourse. Not the specific concept of the importance of the “feel” of a classroom space, but the idea that teacher needs and student needs are in alignment. The idea that something that’s good for teachers is good for students as well.

You can look at opinion articles about education and see the common refrain that people, usually teachers and teachers’ unions, are “putting adults’ needs ahead of students’” or not making decisions “for the students”. The controversial Michelle Rhee has named and centered an entire advocacy group (StudentsFirst) around this rhetoric. And it’s easy to understand why: it’s a gripping piece of argumentation. The idea that someone — anyone — is meeting their needs at the expense of the needs of children seems downright unjust and a little bit sinister.

Unfortunately, for everyone, it’s a piece of argumentation that is also deliberately and debilitatingly misleading.

The problem with it is that it sets the needs of students and teachers in opposition. What’s “good” for the adults is “bad” for the kids, and vice versa. There’s nothing fundamentally true about that at all — the needs of both groups are numerous, diverse, and, given both groups’ statuses in the same establishment, often overlapping — but the rhetoric of needs narrows the two groups to one-dimensional characters in oppositional conflict. It’s easy to judge, malign, and want to reform the entirety of an establishment when you view it through such a narrow lens, especially when that lens tells you that one side is children and the other side is the people who are selfishly hurting them.

That’s a pretty warped view to have. When teacher advocacy is dismissed as putting the needs of adults ahead of children, it automatically assumes that the teachers have no interest in the needs of students because it doesn’t allow for the idea that what is good for teachers can, concurrently, be good for students. It’s a backhanded way of telling the educators of America that they’re in this for themselves and only themselves.

Except for those “good” teachers. They’re the trump card. Just like the idea of hurting children is viscerally unjust, the idea of a talented educator who effects monumental success in their students is unquestionably celebrated. The “good” teachers are the ones whose names, habits, and test scores get dropped whenever someone wants to remind us that they’re not trying to impugn all teachers. They’re the rhetorical safety that allows people to cast aspersions on an entire profession without it seeming like they’re using us as a punching bag.

It’s compelling, but it’s pretty weak. In celebrating a small subset of a group based on a loose criteria of quality, you’re implicitly asserting that the others’ corresponding lack of quality is a product of their own ability. Which would be fine — if teachers existed in a vacuum. If we were given full agency, ability, support, and resources to do whatever we wanted with our classes, then, yes, such judgments of quality and condemnations of failure would have some merit. Currently, however, teachers are merely one part of a frighteningly large and staggeringly complicated system. Schools encompass laws, parents, cultural values, violence, communities, pedagogy, food, families, drugs, adolescence, politics, puberty, and, most significantly, the education of students all the way from learning phonetics to solving integrals and the development of kids from the time they’re waddling to the time they’re walking the stage.

To claim that teachers are solely responsible for the success of the institution implies that all other individuals with any agency in the educational process are doing their part and doing it well. “Bad” teachers can come to be classified as such for a number of reasons that lie outside of their control, but, when it comes to educational reform rhetoric, they’re the ones that take the fall. They’re the ones that are hurting the kids.

It gets worse. The one-two punch of asserting that teachers’ needs are contrary to those of students and then blaming them for systemic failure creates the idea that most educators, save the small handful of “good” ones, are selfishly and singlehandedly facilitating the underperformance of a national institution.

Heavy stuff.

What’s damning about that, aside from the obvious, is that it actually ends up devaluing the advocacy of the community that has the largest connection to, impact on, and interest in student success. When teachers stand up for themselves and it’s viewed not as the testimony of professionals who have legitimate insights into students’ needs but as the outcry of out-of-touch adults who are clamoring to hold onto things they don’t deserve, we’ve lost our agency. We’ve lost our voice.

And it scares me that when I lose the ability to advocate for myself, I lose the ability to do the same for my students.

Heavy stuff…

It’s a habit that I started back when I was younger. My afternoons and weekends were spent hanging with digital friends instead of real ones, as my games required isolation just as much as my isolation required games. But, of course, the habit fell off as I got older and put away childish things. Movies were so much more important and artistic than games, and I edified myself with Hotel Rwanda and Amores Perros instead of Crash Bandicoot and Gran Turismo. Expanding my worldview and connecting with the human experience outside my own seemed so much more important than collecting wampa fruit and racing in circles.

Now, even my movie phase was short-lived, as soon I was a college student, bootin’ and scootin’ through dorm life where I was surrounded by a surplus of real friends that more than made up for my lack of them during the duration of my public schooling. We would stay up late talking, go grab coffee at 3 AM, vulnerably discuss anything and everything that we wanted to, and then crash onto our uncomfortable mattresses at 8 AM — the exact time we were supposed to be sitting in class with open notebooks soaking up our professors’ wisdoms. Videogames were, of course, mentioned, talked about, and even played intermittently, but it wasn’t to the point where it was identity-forming and we would call ourselves “gamers”. It was just a small hobby that we entertained alongside our other college focuses of procrastination, pontificating, and pizza.

Now that I’m an adult, I’m interestingly falling back on my old habits. Hanging out with others requires planning, coordination, and travel. Walking down the hall to chill on the couch takes me to my living room, not a packed lounge. My time is so much more disconnected from others than it used to be, and, in response, I’ve sought connections of another kind. The couch companions I have now are controllers, and the friends I find in my room when returning home from class are my mouse and keyboard. With them, I spend my time solving puzzles, spelunking in caves, and romancing alien races.

And it’s beautiful.

I don’t mean that my games are adequate replacements for my socialization — I mean that they have an appeal and impact all their own. Playing games excites parts of my brain that feel like they’ve been dormant for a long time, and not just the puzzle-solving/narrative-following/hand-eye-coordinating parts that are expected. My interest in and awe for electronic design has been reignited as I find myself awed by just how far videogames have come since I last immersed myself in them. Braid is a beautiful, layered, and critically flawed piece of absolute brilliance. Machinarium is like a playable Graeme Base book with its puzzling beauty. Mass Effect is a sci-fi story couched in a sci-fi experience.

Even simple games like VVVVVV and Terraria demonstrate how you can take a simple concept and expand on it until you have a cohesive and satisfying whole that feels like it has done the idea justice. Playing these games — more than reading, more than movies — ignites a special something of creativity in me. It’s the something that wishes I had the skills to make my own, but it’s also the something that’s perfectly willing to find its agency in the work that others have done. Moreover, playing the games doesn’t make me want to be creative as much as it makes me appreciate and value the creativity of others. It’s a hands-on, experimental appreciation that delights as much in admiring a game as I willfully wander through it as it does in grappling with the game’s detrimental flaws.

It’s the type of appreciation that I wish I could get other people to see — the people for whom videogames are mere juvenile curiosities or the sad digital bastions of forever-alones. There is beauty and treasure in their design and execution, and there is a unique fulfillment in their play.

Funny how, now that I’m an adult, I’m starting to realize that young-me — with a controller in his hand and a smile on his face — was onto something.

“Just so you know, some of them might take the supportive thing a little overboard. They just want to make sure that you know they’re okay with you.”

He’s warning us about the following Saturday, where my boyfriend will be, for the first time, spending time with his extended family as an out gay man. I’ll be there too, meeting an extended family for the first time as someone’s out gay boyfriend. Heavy stuff.

Nevertheless, I find the admonishment funny, as it seems curious to be warned that people will be too accepting. It’s like warning someone that their meal might taste uncomfortably good or that their clothes might come out of the wash unusually clean. Warnings, I feel, should generally be reserved for bad things. Like my family.

So, as promised, a week later I got to meet his extended family. They were a boisterous, loving bunch — the kind who can come together at a moment’s notice to collectively screen the love interest of one of their own. I spent the evening answering questions and hiding behind food. It wasn’t until the night was almost done when one of his aunts came up and pulled my partner and me aside.

“I want to talk to you two — out on the porch.”

Instantly, I got a lump in my throat, and I automatically clicked into Diplomatic Mode, which is what happens whenever I perceive a threat. Usually, by speaking calmly and professionally, I can diffuse whatever strong emotion is coming at me enough for me to make it out alive. I do it all the time with my students’ parents, but my resolve to be composed was less comforting than usual because, at that moment, without a thirteen-year-old around to balance things out, I felt much more like a child than an adult.

We stepped out onto the porch, and I was already mentally rehearsing collected, diffusive answers when the aunt surprised me by putting her arms on both of us and simply saying, “I am so glad he found you”. What followed made the three of us, as well as another aunt who joined us mid-conversation, cry and smile and remember why love is such a powerful thing.

“I don’t speak English that well,” she continued, “but I want you to know, it makes me angry that people… that some people can’t accept who you love. I think that people, you know… that we’re all human. That’s all we are, and we should be here to make the people around us happy.”

She turned to my partner, “I’m so sorry you thought that people would never accept you. We love you! Everyone loves you! And it’s great to see how happy you are. I’m so glad you’re happy.

“I don’t know why some people like to draw so many lines and make so many groups. They’re always saying ‘oh, the Blacks this’ or ‘something else that’, and it… I don’t like it. I don’t think we need to have all these different groups because, you know, people just use them to judge. We’re all humans. We’re all humans.”

Any thoughts of diplomacy or its necessity were far gone at this point, as I was more concerned with wiping my eyes and trying not to sniffle too much. What I had thought was going to be an assault turned out to be a touching, heartfelt affirmation. Not like my family.

We talked some more on the porch — probably a good half-hour. His aunt said some more beautiful things, his other aunt interrupted with some equally beautiful and often legitimately hilarious things, and my boyfriend and I, for the first time in our relationship, smile-wept collectively in front of two middle-aged women. Less-heavy stuff.

When we finally started back inside — warmth on our faces, water in our eyes, and loads off our backs — I lingered at the door, pulling my boyfriend in close.

“You okay?”, I asked.

“Yeah. You?”

“I’m great,” I said, smiling.

“I love you.” Amazing words to hear.

“I love you too.” Amazing words to say.

And absolutely incredible words to feel. For all of us humans.

My boyfriend: he’s amazing. He bought me the Kindle before we both flew across the country to meet his parents, simply because he knew that would be difficult for me. I think it’s a good sign when you’re legitimately touched by the sentiment behind a gift when, from anyone else, it would be the gift itself that would mostly hold your interest. I also think it’s a good sign when someone wants to introduce you to their parents. We’ve been hanging out with his friends, and it’s been a nice dip into a nerd culture that I’ve felt separated from ever since I left college. Learning to play Dominion and hearing them talk about D&D makes me wish I had some authentically geeky friends back on the west coast.

My computer: so amazing. I took it upon myself, in the idle chaos of these carefree summer days, to build my own desktop. My laptop has been hurting (i.e. overheating) lately, as I’ve made it struggle to play games it was clearly not designed to play (i.e. Plants vs. Zombies), so I took it upon myself to over-research and over-think a new computer until I over-suffered through the process of trying to assemble it. Nevertheless, the outcome was spectacular, and being able to turn every graphical setting ALL they way up in Borderlands makes me fear for the amount of productivity that game (among others) is going to make me lose.

After five months of distance dating, we finally get to spend an anniversary together in person.

We’re kind of crazy like that. =)

I used to read all the time, juggling required reading for my classes with books I wanted to read for my own enjoyment or edification (which were usually the ones I assigned priority to). Now that I’m out of college, however, I’ve seemed to find a yo-yo rhythm for reading — crash dieting for literature. Months will go by, and I’ll not turn a single page. I’ll delude myself into thinking that it takes up too much time or focus, and I’ll actually convince myself to the point of belief that I don’t really enjoy reading that much and that it’s “something I’m growing out of”. “Fiction just doesn’t grip me like it used to,” I’ve found myself telling people.

And then months will hit where I can’t get enough of the written word. If these past couple of weeks have shown me anything, it’s that I can simply devour books if I need to. Even poorly written ones can still hold my attention better than videogames or movies, and really good ones grab me from the inside and won’t let me go.

I’m in the middle of Portia de Rossi’s Unbearable Lightness right now, and it’s scary how much her narration reminds me of myself. Deborah Rudacille’s The Riddle of Gender has forced me to completely recontexualize what I think about people and their experiences, and even The Pot Book is proving useful in a way that only a multi-authored 450+ page book on marijuana ever could. Dennis Cooper’s Ugly Man showed me that decent writing can be marred by terrible ideas, and Tina Fey’s Bossypants showed me that good writing doesn’t necessarily need great ideas.

And while it sounds all noble to talk about these books as if they’re simply edifying me in meaningful ways, I’d be lying if there weren’t an element of vanity in it all. “I can write better than this,” I’ll think to myself in the middle of a bad book, congratulating myself for deeming myself acceptable for publication by proxy. Well-known books give me a sense of inner smugness: Look at how cultured I am with A Confederacy of Dunces! I’m currently reading that book that you and everyone else knows is important — for, errr, some reason or another! Reading even part of a non-fiction book on a subject means I will then sell myself as an expert on that particular subject indefinitely and pedantically.

So when I’m in those periods where I book binge and go speedily and zealously from cover to cover to cover to cover, I wonder if it’s appealing to me because I genuinely like what I’m doing, or if it’s appealing to me simply because I can ultimately let myself get a sense of superiority out of it.

I’m guessing it’s more of the latter.