Month: July 2022

The Summer of Nothing In Particular

“Summer. It turns me upside down.” I’ll never not picture myself and my girlfriend and one of her friends tearing down the Borman at 80 or so, windows down, music up, last day of school as juniors, heading to the beach with a cooler of beer and sandwiches. This song on the radio and we sang it at the top of our lungs.

If it’s July, it’s definitely summer.

(Source) Eugenio Hansen, OFS, CC BY-SA 4.0

Just not an endless one. In fact if this summer got a name it’d be: “The Summer Of Nothing In Particular.”

I decided before the school year was done to skip everything for the nine-ish weeks of break. No conferences, no video summits, no professional reading, none of it. Just rest. And recover.

But if this is the Summer Of Nothing In Particular, I’m gonna need a Something tho:

  • Sleep. Lots of sleep. (No shame in a daily afternoon, or even mid-morning, nap)
  • Personal reading (Goodreads page here)
  • Back on my bike (it’s good to have people for inspiration)
  • Music (just because)
  • Some better nutritional choices (my doctor was pretty happy with my numbers last time, but I’m aware of my areas of weakness)

I legit haven’t even opened my school chromebook since summer school ended. It’s been in my bag for two weeks straight.

At some point I’ll start looking at school stuff, Algebra II in particular. Jump Start (we call it “suspended curriculum” in my district, where we front-load a lot of the procedural stuff, expectations, and SEL content we want in place to start the year) means I have a minute on that. But I need to touch up my slides (Quzizz lessons baby) and make MathXLs and Kuta for the Algebra II lessons I last taught during remote learning.

I was selected for a policy fellowship in my state this year and I’ve got a bunch of background reading to do for that as well. 

I’m hopeful for a “normal” year, if such a thing exists. It will be an opportunity to keep building culture in room 247. Amongst my summer reads is Happy at Any Cost, tracking the rise and untimely death of Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh. You may be familiar with his memoir Delivering Happiness. Although famously Brene Brown is gaining a lot of traction with her “core values” exercise, especially amongst education folks, I first encountered the concept in Hsieh’s book. Here are the 10 values Zappos employees generated.

It wasn’t intentional (even though we’ve been benchmarking Shieh in this house since our Vegas days) but I think that list describes my classroom pretty well. All of it feels like what we already do, which is good I think. And I feel like it was an important reminder to me with Back-To-School on the (not so distant) horizon.

But I’ve got another set of guidelines to ponder as well, speaking of culture. It seemed like the entirety of Chicago’s WXRT family was glued to a radio or streaming device on Friday. Beloved host Lin Brehmer had announced earlier in the week that he would need to take a leave from his airshift for a round of chemotherapy for prostate cancer. Gut punch. He and news host Mary Dixon were the soundtrack to 13 years of commutes to Hammond, and The Cubs Opening Day broadcast was the highlight of the radio year, every year. I can’t tell you how many times I sat in my car in the Gavit parking lot before school started to hear the end of an episode of Lin’s Bin.

I’ve said for years the best eulogy is one that’s delivered while the person being honored is still alive, and ‘XRT listeners responded with an outpouring of support. One of the most touching came from a long-time producer on Brehmer’s morning show. It ended with the producer’s suggestions for how listeners could celebrate Their Best Friend In The Whole World:

“Lin’s only request: kindness.

Perfect.

Well, almost perfect.

I’m going to add one more request.

The greatest thing you can do to honor Lin is to … try.

Just try.

Do your best.

Don’t give up until you find the exact right song.

Be relentlessly creative.

Engage in your neighborhood, your community.

Don’t just live life, CONSUME it.

Wear your eatin’ pants.

Invite chaos into your life.

Be late.

See a concert on a school night.

Bring your glove to the ballpark.

Dance.

Cry when you hear a bagpipe.

Smile when you hear a banjo.

Call your wife your best friend … and mean it with your whole heart.”

If you are a listener, you heard this list in Lin’s voice.

And probably wondered why it was suddenly so dusty in here.

Also: That sounds like marching orders for a school year. Especially because I think I already do a lot of those things personally and professionally as well. You probably do too. I don’t exactly know what the Xs and Os of the school year are gonna look like, I just know Hsieh and Brehmer are gonna be in my head daily.

I wrote future me a note back in April, so I’ll probably take a look at that when I start planning. Got to talk with my geometry and Algebra II teams as well. They’ve been off-grid too. The math group text has been pleasantly silent. There’s time for all of the thinking and talking and planning. And other impromptu things.

But for the next five weeks (and beyond) I’ll take nothing for granted, and I’ll remember (as Lin Brehmer would say) “it’s F-period Great To Be Alive.”

One-Man Book Club: Show Them You’re Good

Two of the Unmistakable Markers of Summer™ coincided this weekend:

  • The first day I woke up and had no idea what day it even was
  • The day that Target rolled out the Back-To-School displays way in the back of the store, pushing Summer Celebrations necessities to the clearance rack

No surprise on the school supplies, obviously. It is that time of year. Independence Day (the traditional midway point of summer) has come and gone. August is legit three weeks away.

But the “lost track of time” moment is a little late due to summer school. That plus a month of prep for my youngest’s graduation open house meant that this summer vacation was always gonna be compressed. So grab those fabulous days while you can.

Time is a funny thing for real. And the two years (and counting) of Covidtide haven’t helped.

But reading makes time slow down for me. Disconnecting from electronics, learning something new, seeing the world through someone else’s eyes, that’s a part of summer I value immensely.

I picked up “Show Them You’re Good” by Jeff Hobbs this week. It traces the senior year for a group of students at two Los Angeles high schools, Animó Pat Brown (which I first encountered in Relentless Pursuit by Donna Foote), and Beverly Hills High. The story was compelling right from jump, where we meet Tio and Carlos cutting up in their AP Calculus class. Then Jon and Owen who are facing their own set of challenges. In middle school Jon was asked by a friend if he had read Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. Jon snapped back, “I don’t have to read that book. I’m living it.”

As I get older I am definitely a more sympathetic person. Less judgemental. Which is good. And I think part of Hobbs’ purpose in juxtaposing the travails of the two groups of boys is to help the reader see that high school kids struggle with a lot of issues, regardless of neighborhood. Still, I had to bite my tongue so hard at some of the anecdotes. Beverly kids getting taunted by opposing crowds at sports events, the boys putting on a homecoming dance they know will flop because school spirit is just not a thing there, concerns over paying for the elite colleges they’ll attend, when their zip code all but rules out any kind of financial aid. Sorry kids, that’s the price of admission to life when you live in actual Beverly Hills. Suck it up.

The reality is, although one of the subjects comes from a highly accomplished show business family, not all the Beverly kids are to the manor born. Some families moved to the fringes of the district boundaries so their kids could attend a well-regarded public school in LA. The really well-off families in that neighborhood opt for private education at Harvard-Westlake or Marlborough. So even the Beverly kids have to deal with their so-called betters.

That said, it’s hard to tamp down the upset on each page as Tio, Carlos, Luis, and Byron work at a carnival ride run by a friend’s family for extra spending cash while their parents work multiple jobs to keep their tenuous housing situations somewhat stable. They have to carefully vet every application for scholarships lest they risk family members being deported. Fairness is not evenly distributed. Even the kids who participate in programs aiming to identify promising students from historically marginalized populations and help them access highly selective schools encounter racism when they get to campus, and spend their school breaks alone in their dorm rooms because they can’t afford the travel back home.

Carlos has multiple Ivy League acceptances from which to choose, and eventually selects Yale where his brother attends. Tio faces disappointment as he is rejected from all the UC and Cal State schools he applied to, except UC-Riverside which to him is worse than a consolation prize. And Byron, who stumbled his way through college interviews, is shut out completely.

Tio is left to work through his disappointment, and receives guidance from a beloved teacher.

“That’s why I feel life is unfair. I worked my ass off. I’m not saying other people didn’t, but they didn’t try as hard as I did or do as well, and some of them got accepted to the schools I wanted. That’s all types of fucked up. I’m depressed on that.”

“I get it man,” Mr. Sandoval replied. “I’ve been there too.”

“But you got into UCLA. I could have gotten C’s, just straight C’s all four years – could have not busted my ass all four years – and I’d still be going to Riverside for fucking farming.”

Mr. Sandoval struggled to conceal his grimace with a smile as he shook his head. “No, Tio. That’s the thing. No you wouldn’t. I don’t know what you’d be doing, but you wouldn’t be going to a four-year, UC school. I don’t know what to tell you to make you understand that, but you need to understand that.”

Hobbs’ next couple of sentences as he probes the teacher’s thought process during this conversation are a gut punch. Then, moments later, as teacher and student ride a bus high up into the Santa Monica mountains to a retreat (Caballeros con Cultura) organized and fundraised by Tio, this:

A couple more things stood out to me as I read.

  • My knowledge of the college application process is limited to my own experience almost 40 years ago, and the little bit I pick up in conversations with my students. I know it’s a lot more cutthroat these days. I would bet that Tio’s reaction to his college option is pretty common as students slot in dream schools and safe schools to apply to. You can almost talk yourself into deserving a slot at a school where everyone has the same GPA and test scores as you, or better. I vividly remember the moment I found out not all schools are alike:

Finding out where you stack up against the best is a humbling experience. I’ve told them that my SAT scores were in the 95th percentile at Indiana University my graduation year. I tell them I also sent those same scores to the University of Michigan. Not sure why, it just seemed like a cool place to go to school. Anyway: that same SAT score was in the 67th percentile at U of M. In layman’s terms for my kids: fully a third of the kids that apply to Ann Arbor scored higher than virtually everyone who applied to IU.

Holy Crap! What kind of kid gets in to Michigan then?

  • The book hit a little different for me right now as our youngest just finished his senior year. His pathway to adulthood does not include college so he didn’t experience that part of the struggle we hear about from the two groups of boys in Show Them You’re Good. But the day-to-day of that last year that is chronicled in the book? Oh yeah. The too-soon ending of a football season, the sense that so much of what you are asked to do in school is performative rather than preparatory (from Beverly Hills senior Bennett: “I don’t go to school to learn. I go to school to turn stuff in.”), the benchmark events, the downtime with friends.

And the party.

(Also: I made a little playlist to commemorate my son’s last day of school. Mostly for myself, but I think he’d agree with the sentiment in at least a few of the selections.)

  • A thing about being a teacher (different from the finality of a parent having a last child graduate) is there is always a new group of seniors walking the pathway of Tio and Carlos and Luis and Byron. I usually teach underclassmen so I get to jump back in a year or two later to see the last chapter of high school end and watch as they stand on the precipice of adulthood.

Although the book was not released until 2020, Hobbs was recording the events of the 2016-17 school year. So much has changed since then. Everything in the book takes place pre-pandemic. It was almost a little strange to read accounts of events and think, “Oh, remember how we couldn’t do that for like two years?” I’d be super-interested in a follow-up. Five years later, have the boys finished college? What’s the next step? How are the families?

It would have been easy for Hobbs to lean too far into stereotypes in the book. He acknowledges it early on: “…four boys residing in two neighborhoods, Compton and Beverly Hills, so alternately celebrated and maligned and caricatured that their names had long since come to signal more of a sociological condition than a geographical place…”

But he presents us with real humans who do real human things, who face up to their adversities and their challenges, with an attitude that never really goes away no matter how old you are or where you call home. I’ll give Tio the last word:

“I get very tired of people who all they want to do is hate on you, who want to make you weak until you show them you’re good.”