Garfield Thunder - 2nd place winners

Why I'm a Teacher: Part 4

The street hockey playoffs were today.

My team, the Garfield Thunder, came in as the second seed with an 8-1 record. After losing our very first game of the season to the Fair Oaks Sharks, the champions for the last five years, we won the next eight in a row. Our first win was a beauty. We went down 0-2 early in the first period. Rather than hang their heads and give up, my team stepped up, holding them scoreless for the next 35 minutes and eventually scoring three goals for the win.

That's a special thing for a team of fourth and fifth graders. It's hard enough for me as an adult to keep my head up when I'm down. But when you're 9, 10, or 11 years old, you don't have much of a sense of perspective. You don't have a history of experiences to draw from. When you get a group of kids to stick together, to not give up, to just come back and win on pure guts, that's special.

For the next seven games we rolled through our competition. We scored somewhere around 50 goals and gave up only 7. We came into the playoffs riding high, but a big challenge loomed. Our semi-final opponent was the third-seeded Sharks. In six years of coaching hockey, I had never beaten the Sharks. I had faced them twice in the playoffs before, both in championship games that we lost, and here they were, in the way again. I was worried that my kids would be nervous to the point of being scared, especially since this was the only team we had lost to and everyone knew that the Sharks hadn't lost a single game in the playoffs for five years.

Before the game began, I gave my pep talk.

What do you say to a group of kids that you've been spending eight hours a week with after school for the last two and a half months? What do you say to them before the biggest game of the season? You've got 13 pairs of young eyes on you, and what you say is either going to pump them up to go out there and do their best or it's going to scare them so much that they're going to play not to lose instead of playing to win. What you say is going to live in their memories, consciously or otherwise, for the rest of their lives. It will become a part of how they deal with stress, with competition, with opportunities, and with life.

I thought a lot about it the past several days, what to say. What came out probably wasn't so profound. I told them that win or lose, I was proud of them for what they had done this season, that no matter what, I would still love them, that we had put a lot of blood and sweat into making this opportunity and now was our chance to take it a step further.

I also gave them a gift - I had received a donation of a hundred or so fossilized shark teeth a few years back. They were donated to interested Redwood City teachers by an old, long time resident. He had found them in Florida and, based on where they were found, the teeth were estimated to be over a million years old. I told them it was our good luck charm.

The semi-final game began, and it was a battle. We led 2-1 for over half the game, only to have them tie it with about a minute left. On we went to sudden death overtime. The puck went back and forth, we had our chances, they had theirs. I could tell everyone was on the brink of physical and emotional exhaustion as sudden death dragged on for 3, 4, 5, 6 minutes. But when Christopher somehow found the back of the net on a beautiful breakaway, everyone just went nuts. Everybody ran onto the court, jumping up and down. Our huge crowd of parents and student supporters was screaming, everyone was hugging each other, half the team started crying, and we were on our way to the championship game.

None of my fondest memories of teaching at Garfield come from teaching math or reading. Many of them come from coaching. I will always remember that moment, the moment we were all hugging each other in a big screaming, jumping circle. I probably won't remember so well that once we got to the championship game, we lost 4-2. But I will remember Sonia getting hit full force in the head with a puck and seeing the look in her eyes as she willed herself not to cry and to keep playing. I will remember Juan saying afterwards that he appreciated all the life lessons he had learned this season about never giving up and the importance of always trying your best. And I will remember José, still playing his heart out in those final minutes of what was a losing cause, getting knocked to the ground as he hustled after the puck, his stick flying from his hands, and seeing him quickly get up, pick something else off the ground, and realizing he had been holding the shark tooth in his hands the entire time.

the lesson of the moth

The previous post reminded me also of a poem I first read in sixth grade. My teacher, Mrs. Archer, told us about a series of poems written by Archy, a cockroach who lived in the office of Don Marquis, a columnist for a New York newspaper. Archy was a reincarnated poet, and so every night he would climb up on top of Don's typewriter and jump off, hitting one key at a time, writing poetry that Marquis would find in the morning. Because he was a cockroach, he couldn't hit a letter and the shift key at the same time, so he wrote everything in lower case. And because it was such tedious work, and perhaps painful, too, he didn't use any punctuation.

How wonderful that I remember this poem and the story behind it, a full 18 years later. Here it is:

the lesson of the moth

i was talking to a moth
the other evening
he was trying to break into
an electric light bulb
and fry himself on the wires

why do you fellows
pull this stunt i asked him
because it is the conventional
thing for moths or why
if that had been an uncovered
candle instead of an electric
light bulb you would
now be a small unsightly cinder
have you no sense

plenty of it he answered
but at times we get tired
of using it
we get bored with the routine
and crave beauty
and excitement
fire is beautiful
and we know that if we get
too close it will kill us
but what does that matter
it is better to be happy
for a moment
and be burned up with beauty
than to live a long time
and be bored all the while
so we wad all our life up
into one little roll
and then we shoot the roll
that is what life is for
it is better to be a part of beauty
for one instant and then cease to
exist than to exist forever
and never be a part of beauty
our attitude toward life
is come easy go easy
we are like human beings
used to be before they became
too civilized to enjoy themselves

and before i could argue him
out of his philosophy
he went and immolated himself
on a patent cigar lighter
i do not agree with him
myself i would rather have
half the happiness and twice
the longevity

but at the same time i wish
there was something i wanted
as badly as he wanted to fry himself

archy

Of Goals Worth Fighting For

This is one of the most inspiring, thought provoking, and sad things I've ever seen, all at the same time.

And reminds me of this quote, which I've been using as my signature file the last several weeks:

"Sometimes, you have to ask for something that you know you may not get. And still you have to ask for it. It's still worth fighting for and, even if you don't believe that you will see it in your lifetime, you have got to hold it up so that the generation that comes next will take it from your hands and, in their own time, see it as a goal worth fighting for again." - Congressman John Lewis

It's official - I'm smart

You may recall my attempt(s) to join Mensa, the self-proclaimed "High IQ Society."

I received an envelope in the mail sometime last week (I just now got to it today; you know how I am about paper mail). Upon looking at it and seeing the Mensa return address, I had a brief flashback to my high school days when I was anxiously awaiting word from the universities I had applied to. A thick envelope, I recalled, was good news, because it would likely contain a letter of acceptance and the proper papers needed for accepting admission. A thin envelope, however, did not bode well, as it likely contained a terse rejection letter and nothing else.

This envelope was a little poofy, but not outrageously so. I opened it, fully expecting to see the words "You dumb!" in the letter's first line, but instead it said, "CONGRATULATIONS! Your Mensa Admissions testing has been scored and, based on your percentile rank, you qualify for admission to Mensa."

I guess I feel pretty good about it. It's interesting, something different. I'll likely join - it's not terribly expensive to be a member ($69 for one year, $157 for three years, $247 for five years, or $1,255 for a lifetime membership).

It reminds me of Who's Who Among American High School Students. Remember those? They'd send you a letter trying to make you feel all special, saying that you were selected to appear. But really, as I see it now, it was just a big money maker for them. You'd get your little tiny blurb in there and they'd get your proud mom's $70 for a bound leather copy with gold leafing. I got "nominated" for Who's Who Among America's Teachers this year, but I think it's all a big money making sham.

I hope Mensa is not the same way. More than 1,000 people nationwide took the admissions test on the same day I did - that's a lot of potential cash. The letter I received didn't even tell me what my scores were, only that they were good enough for membership - at a price.

All the News That Gave Me Fits to Print

The first edition of our school newspaper went out yesterday to the hungry masses and was--if I may so without a hint of conceit but, admittedly, a healthy dose of pride--a smashing success.

The process was long and arduous. Two other teachers (Mar and Michelle) and myself convened the Journalism Club about 5 weeks ago. We had a story brainstorming session, assigned the stories, met with the kids once or twice a week to get their drafts polished up as much as possible, and figured out our newspaper name (GarfieldSpace is a play on MySpace, a wildly popular online community; I tried to make the GarfieldSpace logo look as much like the MySpace logo as possible). Mar and Michelle typed everything up and I learned how to use Adobe InDesign for the layout which took a seemingly endless 12 hours to do. Thursday after school we gave out 100 teaser copies (the Journalism Club members in front of the school, yelling, "Extra! Extra! Read all about it!") and Thursday night I made 700 copies - that's 3,500 sheets (7 reams) of paper. I had to staple all 700 copies by hand because a few years ago when the budget cuts hit us hard, we stopped buying staples for the copy machines and we've never had staples since. 700 staples, by the way, requires emptying a full stapler, refilling, emptying it again, refilling, emptying it again, and refilling. And some people say schools don't need more money...

The aim of the paper is to promote student voice, to give students a forum to discuss issues they find to be important, and to foster community at our school.

I have never seen my kids read so intently and so void of distraction for such an extended period of time. They even read so carefully that they found a few mistakes (they took no small delight in saying, "Mr. Evans, you messed up!" since I'm always getting on their case about making fewer mistakes).

Wanna see/read it? You can try clicking here or, if your browser is lame and doesn't know what to do with it, you can download the file from the directory index by right clicking it if you're on a PC or control-clicking it if you're on a Mac and choosing the option to download the file directly to your hard drive. Your computer probably already has a PDF viewer, such as the free Adobe Acrobat Reader. If you can't figure out how to view it, let me know.