For Eliza
Sarah Lang
Remember listening to Into the Woods?
On car trips I cried when the witch, clinging to Rapunzel,
Warns with such piercing grief that the world is “dark and wild,”
And pleads, “Stay with me.”
And you were thrilled when Rapunzel’s prince came to carry her off
And turned out to be the same actor as the wolf.
The witch, of course, was right:
how sad you know that so soon.
The witch tries too hard, but the baker’s wife not hard enough:
She wants her moment in the woods.
Like her, I lost my focus, and then the giant moved in.
Too often, you’ve encountered him around the nearest tree,
enraged, frightened, despondent, insatiable.
The baker’s wife lost her life.
We’ve never found our way out of the woods.
At the end of the musical, everyone is sadder but wiser.
The married couples reunite.
The baker sings, “We are not alone. No one is alone.”
I am the witch and the baker’s wife
and so will you be
and in this way and in our journey together
you are not alone.
Illuminations
Sarah Lang
Jeff Borda lived three doors down from me on Linden St. in Bethlehem, PA, in a neighborhood of two- and three-story houses with space enough in between for two bikes to pass side-by-side. We measured all distances by our bikes, because in good weather we pretty much lived on them. Since the adults were happy to have the kids out of their hair, we were allowed to race wildly from backyard to backyard, unselfconsciously shouting and crashing and picking ourselves up, mildly bloodied but undaunted. Jeff and I, a year apart in age, formed a community of two who shielded and defended each other against the random assaults from the older kids in the neighborhood, including two of my older brothers. When we weren’t hiding or running away from the big boys, we practiced becoming them, giving each other Indian burns, exploring the sadistic possibilities of the doctor game, and holding our breath and squeezing each other around the stomach until we passed out. Occasionally we’d play more innocent games like desert, where we pretended to be stranded in the middle of the Sahara and had to reach into our snack bag filled with saltines and juice boxes for sustenance until a plane appeared on the horizon to rescue us.
It was a world of children. Our parents were the wallpaper in our lives, always there but barely noticeable and not that important except when they were mad at us. My father, a dentist, and my mother, a homemaker, were steady and reliable. The only time I questioned the solidity of our lives together was when I read a letter from my aunt, my mother’s sister, which referred to my mother’s previous marriages. I cried for two days until I confided in my cousin, who told my parents, who reassured me that my aunt was making a joke and told me my unhappiness was the price to be paid for reading other people’s mail. Jeff’s family was more interesting; his father, a military man, had spent time in France and Italy after the war “helping people clean up,” my father told me in a voice that suggested this wasn’t a reputable activity. I think he had a gun. He and my father had had some sort of falling out, so whenever my father spoke of Jeff’s father there was tension in his voice. Jeff’s mother was a wilted string bean of a woman who wore flowery house dresses and no bra, and we’d all try to get a peek at her long, narrow breasts when she leaned over to dump the garbage or weed the garden. She always seemed sad. Jeff’s brother Vence was weird; he stared off into space instead of looking at you, made comments that had nothing to do with the conversation, and never laughed at the right time. No one ever visited their house, and none of us saw Mr. Borda much.
On summer nights, eight or so of us younger kids on the block (I had a much older brother and sister) would play flashlight tag, a game I loved and dreaded. After our fathers came home from work and we’d had dinner, we’d hang around in my backyard, running through the sprinkler, punching each other when we saw the first stars come out, and catching the fireflies that appeared at dusk. When it was dark enough, one of my brothers would run into the house and get a flashlight. Whooping and flashing it on and off at us, he’d announce he was ‘it’ first, and the rest of us would quietly slide off into the night. Sometimes I’d grab Jeff’s hand and we’d search together for a hiding place, but more often I’d take off myself so as not to be accused of cowardice. I could never decide on the best spot – the bush in front of my father’s office, or behind the Tallarico shed – so I’d end of scrambling for whatever was closest by the time my brother reached “Twenty!” The moments of waiting to be caught were some of the longest in my life, then and now. I’d start out curled up in a ball with my hands over my eyes, and at first the fear roared up in my ears, the same sound as when I’d been caught and tumbled by a big wave at the shore. Then, I became hyperaware: the crickets chattered deafeningly and my own breathing seemed so loud I was sure it would give me aware to my pursuer. I could feel the insects moving beneath my bare feet, and the cobweb draped across my shoulder and neck threatened to strangle me. Worst of all was the consciousness of my own smallness in the night: there was so little separating me from the darkness. I was able to look at myself as an outsider might – small, trembling, and vulnerable. Too busy during the day for reflection, I was undone by this foray into self-awareness. “Gotcha!” When the light hit me, did it show how relieved I was to be rescued by my brother?
One night my brothers were off by themselves; without them as ringleaders, the other kids went home. I was bored and missed Jeff, who hadn’t shown up, so I walked towards his house. I could see that the whole upstairs was dark, as if there was no one home, but light was coming from the basement windows. Knowing I was being rude, I knelt down and looked in the first window I came to. What I saw in the stark light of the basement’s single unshaded bulb made no sense to me: Jeff’s mother and father were at opposite sides of the empty basement, and they were shoving Jeff back and forth between them. Mr. Borda was yelling, and Jeff was crying. When Jeff stumbled, he just picked himself up and went over to his father for the next shove, as if this had happened many times before. His father whacked him on the arm before sending him flying back to his mother. The whole scene froze me and, despite some faraway concern that I might be discovered, I watched for a few moments longer. At the time I wasn’t familiar with the concept of child abuse, and though our mother slapped us when she became impatient and irritated, the idea of adults setting out to punish their child in this deliberate and protracted way just left me terribly confused. I wanted to cry out, to run away, to get my parents, to save Jeff. Instead, I stood up, walked back to my house, through the dining room where my mother sat drinking a cup of coffee and smoking a cigarette, and went upstairs to bed, where I buried the incident in my mind.
A few years later, Jeff and I went steady for a week until I decided he was too boring. Allowed to ride and walk further from the house, I spent more time with my girlfriends and tried in every way possible to distance myself from my block and its overabundance of boys. Jeff and I went to different high schools and lost touch completely during college. I’d hear things from my mother about how he was doing, about Mr. Borda’s death and Mrs. Borda’s struggles, how Vence lived with her and did odd gardening jobs. But in the funny way that we are able to lose people while keeping them close to us, Jeff the little boy in the basement has always stayed with me. His plight is linked for me to the terrors of flashlight tag and other blinding realizations that seem to occur in the dark.
Confessions of a First-Year Literacy Coach
Sarah Lang
When talking about our school district, the former Superintendent of Schools loves to quote Jonathan Kozol, who apparently told her at a conference that it is one of the few truly diverse school systems left in the United States. We are proud of that, even though it means we face more daunting challenges than the average school system in our upscale county, including, at the high school, a ninth grade failure rate of 50% in one or more subjects. In 2003, our administration, noting that low-performing 9th graders in a school of 3,300 students tend to get lost, tried to tackle the failure/disappearing problems by creating Small Learning Communities, and later by training all the teachers in differentiated instruction. While SLCs have been great for keeping track of students and fostering a real feeling of community, neither they nor the differentiated instruction have boosted the motivation or mastery of skills and content among these students. So, in Spring, 2006, Stan, our principal, with the help of an educational consulting company gets us off to a textbook start on a literacy initiative designed to improve the literacy skills not only of the failing students but of all our students. They form a Literacy Leadership Team, which makes decisions about the initiative and creates a 3-year action plan; conduct a faculty-wide literacy audit to find out about teachers’ knowledge and use of literacy strategies; and sponsor summer training in several strategies for the department trainers who will be educating their peers in the upcoming school year. The action plan includes hiring a full-time literacy coach to keep the initiative on track and work with teachers to implement the strategies in their classrooms. The school is ready to take this step just as I am about to move out of my role as English classroom teacher: serendipity? I hope so.
July: Panic
I’ve got the job; now I’ve got to figure out what it is, which is why I am spending several beautiful summer afternoons poring over a sixty-page document that I’ve found on the NCTE website entitled ‘Standards for Middle and High School Literacy Coaches.” Sixty pages? Does Bill Gates have a job description that long? The person described in this summary must be at least 105 years old to have accumulated the knowledge and skills required of a literacy coach! I must know the entire high school curriculum, be a master teacher, have at my command the perfect strategy for every occasion, get along well with others… etc. But wait! I have math anxiety, only taught for three years, just learned about some of the strategies, and tend to be introverted. I have to quit before I’ve even started! I visit dozens of other websites that talk about literacy and literacy coaching and find a few that reassure me I won’t be the only literacy coach in the U.S. who’s not a composite of Nancie Atwell and Albert Einstein.
Early September: Insecurity
The one literacy issue no teacher disputes is that kids don’t know enough words. Probably a third of lunchtime discussions among teachers revolve in some way around the wordlessness of their students. The previous year, Stan addressed this problem by instituting Word of the Day, using suggestions from an online dictionary. Each morning, to the great hilarity of 3,300 kids and their teachers (or at least the 50% who listen to morning announcements), a good-natured senior plowed her way through the pronunciations, definitions and clunky sentences related to words such as widdershins, swot, fascicle… words that no one, not even the most erudite among us, cared about. I win many friends when, the first week of school, I shift the plan to using one Latin or Greek root a week with five words in its family (e,g., spec/spic: retrospective, conspicuous, etc.) Many teachers find a way to work the roots or words into the day. I confiscate some centrally-located bulletin board space, post a couple of big trees cutout of felt (thanks to the art department), and pin up the words of the week. Jim, business teacher going on his 40th year, greets me in the morning with “Here’s the Word Lady!” The Word Lady? The Word Lady is to a Literacy Coach as Danielle Steele is to Cynthia Ozik .
Late September: Angst
My to-do list:
√ Schedule training.
√ Work with trainers to make sure everyone is on track and prepared.
√ Attempt to explain my job to anyone who asks.
√ Meet with department chairs to sell my services.
√ Meet with the librarian to brainstorm ideas for getting more interesting books into circulation
√ Hang around the teachers’ lounge pretending to use the computer in the hopes of learning who the 200 teachers in this school are and strike up a conversation about literacy with at least 10% of them.
√ Hang around the copy room for the same purpose.
√ Beg the English department chair for a class to teach. I need the work, practice with the strategies, credibility with my peers, interaction with the students, and probably most of all a sense of groundedness.
October: Hostility
Setting: At the sinks in the ladies room
Margo (former English department colleague): I don’t have to go to this training tomorrow, do I?
Me: Yeah, every teacher in the school is attending so we’re all speaking the same language in the classroom.
Margo: You know it’s wasted on me, right? I mean, when we started doing Small Learning Communities five years ago, Sam and I and the rest of the teachers on our team went to Brown University one summer and spent a week being trained by them in the strategies. We’re all about literacy. I don’t know why no one talked to us when they started this whole literacy thing.
Me: Actually I didn’t know that. (Pause to think about the infinite possibilities for things I don’t know and that I am destined to discover in the ladies room.) But that’s great, you can be a resource to other people in the department and talk about your own experiences.
Margo: I can sit there and do my real work.
Early November: Glee
Donna, Victoria and Julia, the three volunteer trainers from the Social Studies department (each department has at least two), have engaged their initially skeptical colleagues in an exploration of the literacy challenges of their students and of several pre-reading strategies. Most of the 27 smart, quick-witted and rowdily argumentative men and women have been won over to the idea of trying the strategies, or calling them by a common name if they’re already using them. I circulate with the three trainers, discussing how the strategies might apply in specific lessons. As a final activity, the trainers break the group into four subgroups, assign each a stage in the process of gradual release, and have them role play the gradual release process. The topic: how to make a paper airplane. Soon teachers are arguing about whose airplane is best, and paper airplanes are flying all over the room. As an independent application, the last group enacts the fire bombing of Dresden, complete with German-accented commentary. Now why didn’t I think of that?
Late November: Resistance
Our literacy consultant from CRM is here for a two-day visit, most of which will involve our walking around together doing literacy audits of teachers’ classrooms. (Quick, free associate to the word AUDIT. Come up with anything positive?) We spend some time together adapting a form she’s brought along and then set off on a path I’ve charted to 15 different classrooms – avoiding, of course, the teachers that I know are hostile. I do the cheery-hello-when-we-walk-in thing, and the not-taking-notes-while-observing thing, and the finding-only-the-positive thing, but underneath I’m thinking subversive thoughts: We’re walking in at random moments; how likely are we to find the teacher in the middle of a literacy strategy?. Just because a teacher hasn’t hung strategy posters on their walls, doesn’t mean they’re not using the strategies. I don’t want to be seen as the enemy; I’m just starting to build bridges. Afterwards, I write what are and I hope sound like heartfelt notes of thanks to each of the teachers whom we visited. Still, a teacher-friend asks me how the spying went, and I don’t blame him. In a school culture where the only classroom visits you get are from your department chair for your yearly observation(s), this aspect of the literacy coach position is likely to breed paranoia and resistance. Also, AUDIT? No matter how much positive spin you put on it, you’re bound to be linked with the IRS.
December: Exhaustion
200 teachers x 2 training sessions @ 3 hours of missed classroom time each + pressure to do things differently + holidays coming up = Postpone December’s training until January.
January: Isolation/Consolation
My office has no room number; it’s known as “Rusty Morton’s old office,” or “the one in the North Tower.” It’s a tiny space in the old, castle-like part of the high school and, like the office in Being John Malkvich, is located on a stairway landing between two floors. On the door is pasted a big red sign: NOT AN EXIT. (Someday I’m going to white out the T and the AN.) Because of its remoteness and lack of video surveillance, the stairway is used mostly by students who want to avoid detection: latecomers, lovers, cell-phone users, and those who need to bash or deface school property. My office has no heat and three windows, so on this windy, frigid day it is freezing, even with the space heater at full blast. Except for the occasional shouts of “F***,” and “N*****,” and “You F****** N*****” from the stairway, I feel that I could be a character in a gothic novel, my long hair turning white, my skin withering, forgotten, until one day I am found, totally mad. Sigh. Snapping out of it, I start frantically googling. A half hour later, I’ve found and emailed literacy coaches all over the eastern seaboard, and soon I will be receiving newsletters and emails from coaches in Florida, Maryland, and Massachusetts, offering advice and support that ultimately helps me get out of my office and into teachers’ classrooms.
February: Infestation
The training is complete: all two hundred teachers at the high school now have 12 literacy strategies in their teaching tool kit. Perhaps more important, they have a new level of awareness about what’s going on with literacy in their classrooms. Here’s how one teacher memorably puts it:
“It’s like going into the kitchen in the middle of the night. You turn on the light and see all the cockroaches running around. During the day they’re not so obvious. You turn off the light, hoping they’ll go away, turn it on again, and see more cockroaches. This literacy thing has turned the light on our students’ reading and writing and what we’re seeing isn’t pretty.”
That’s the most exciting thing I’ve heard all year!
March: Resolution
Mary Sawyer of the Hudson Valley Writing Project confirms our interview time on Wednesday, March 5, 5:30- 6:45 PM in Old Main Building, Conference Room 101 E. As soon as I get the email, the questions start: Do I really want to spend the month of July more than an hour away from home with a bunch of strangers, WORKING? Do these people have anything to say about teaching writing that I can’t get from a book? Then I recall the cold, lonely days of December and January when I searched the NWP and HVWP websites, completed the application, and thought longingly about sitting among passionate-about-writing colleagues and possibly putting pen to paper for the first time in too long. OK. If they’ll have me, I’ll go.
April: Inspiration
National Poetry Month gives me a way to reach teachers and students in a new way: poem of the day, read aloud over the PA and emailed the day before, along with lots of suggestions about how to use the poems in class. I try to capture what for me is a highlight, which occurs on the last day:
National Poetry Month
Bashir’s voice over the PA
reading his favorite poem
Khalil Gibran’s Song of the Flower –
is as low as the rumble of a subway,
as slow as a sleepwalker.
I am a star fallen from the
Blue tent upon the green carpet.
Kids he greets every morning at the door –
“You be cool now, you hear?”
stop in the midst of morning chatter
to ask: Bashir?
Six foot six, maybe 250,
Bashir’s someone you’ve got to look up to.
But poetry?
I drink dew for wine, and hearken to
The voices of the birds, and dance
To the rhythmic swaying of the grass.
Ms. Lang, he said,
Do you know Khalil Gibran?
I’d like to read one of his.
So now his voice, like thunder,
warns the kids
that something important is going on.
But I look up high to see only the light,
And never look down to see my shadow.
This is wisdom which man must learn.
For a second, there’s silence.
Then the day explodes
and in the rooms where
poetry had its moment
what’s called real work begins.
May: Evaluation
I despise spin and hype, so here’s how I summarize the results of the teacher and student surveys and focus groups conducted by our literacy consultant: not so bad for the first year.
June: Collaboration
My Inbox:
“Sarah, Am going to start next year with stations that introduce my students to the literacy strategies. Can you help?
“Sarah, Liked your idea about using Sherlock Holmes to work with kids on habits of mind. Can you stop by during 4th period so we can do some planning?”
“Slang, I’m thinking maybe we could work together one day a week next year. You come into class, like Friday for example, and we do some crazy things with this literacy stuff.”
“Sarah, is it OK if I keep those writing books you lent me? I want to use them for lesson planning.”
Yes, Yes, Yes, and Yes!
July Again: Gratitude
Halfway through the Summer Institute at the Hudson Valley Writing Project, I feel energized, renewed, and inspired (OK, tired too). I am accomplishing one of my primary goals, which is to gather enough meaty ideas to take back to the teachers in my school, many of whom have much more teaching experience than I. My binder is bulging with possible projects and lessons and my head is swirling with ways to apply them across the curriculum. That, along with the writing and reflection I’m doing, is giving me a sense of confidence and optimism about the road ahead, and about my ability to deepen our teachers’ and students’ literacy experiences next year.
This piece grew out of the prompt to write about our neighborhoods and was also indirectly influenced by the backyard/frontyard writing we did. The neighborhood freewrite led me right to Jeff Borda, but I had no idea where I was going after that first paragraph, or whether there was anywhere interesting to go. I just let my mind wander over our respective families and then I got pretty quickly to flashlight tag, which has always stayed with me as one of the key experiences of my childhood. Thinking about what’s revealed in the dark took me right to the windows of the Borda’s basement, but I wasn’t sure that relationship would be clear to the reader, which is when I thought of the title, illuminations, and knew I needed a final paragraph to bring it all togethe
I took the longest time writing the description of hiding in the dark. I really wanted it to be true to my experience, and I had to rewrite it several times to get it there. Of course I’m not satisfied — there’s always the possibility of making it better, which is why writing is so frustrating and exhilarating.
There’s an interesting relationship in memoir writing between narrating a tale and commenting on it – the ‘what’ and ’so what,’ if you will. Why is the story worth telling or listening to? I usually don’t find out until I write it. Connections get made that I didn’t know were there. Kids usually have a terrible time with this and end up writing moral cliches: “I learned that lying doesn’t pay.” My hope for this modest piece is that the meaning – how kids learn about the terrors of the adult world – has resonance and a little depth for the reader.
