The best laid plans of mice and men…

I spent all that time on Saturday and Sunday creating my first lesson plan with all its graphics and worksheets, only to have to redo much of it tonight after today’s talk with my mentor. That sucks because I had hoped to have tonight to prepare Wednesday’s lesson. This means that instead of being a day ahead on every lesson, I am now down to having only the night before to get everything created and executed for the following day. I’ve already used up my buffer day. Grrr.

One of these days, when and if I’m ever a real teacher, I am going to do as I see the other real teachers doing and grab a lot of stuff already prepared out of books. But for the practicum, we aren’t really supposed to cut corners like that. We are supposed to create our own materials. This is one time when I wish I could lock my inner perfectionist in the closet and get on with things. SIGH.

Well, the good news is that I am done with tomorrow’s prep, though it took me from 3:30 till now, and can go to sleep at a reasonable hour. Tomorrow night I probably won’t be able to say the same. But hey, it’s only one week of my life and one of the five days is already behind me.

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This morning something so bizarre happened, I can’t even put it into words.

I had hoped to be showered so very early that I could be in and out of the kitchen for my oatmeal before host mom even arrived on the scene. I failed by ten minutes, though, and paid for it dearly.  I don’t want to say right now what the exchange was exactly, but I can tell you that it left me feeling violated. It also caused me to boot up my laptop a) to check Snopes.com to see if this person was just spreading a grotesque urban legend and b) to search for someone to whom I could vent and unload some of the toxic nastiness that had just been unloaded on me.  The first email in my inbox was from my mom, who is also one of my best friends. So she was the lucky recipient of my brief rant.

I might blog in detail about this exchange later, just to get advice from you on how I should have handled it. But tonight I must make this brief and get to sleep.

Blessedly, the second email was from my new friend and former classmate R, whose words you can see in the comments on my post Impermanence (Anicca).

Can you imagine how those words lifted me from the toxic cloud I had moments before been trying to claw my way out of? They did. They made me beam and remember who I am. To remember who I am was something I desperately needed at that moment.

Then I thought about what another friend wrote to me not too long ago:

I experience “light” when I am with you. It is a lightness of spirit and,
when you smile, a brilliance. It’s a most welcome thing, Grace.
Thank you for blessing the world, me, with your light.

Light or The Light is one of the central theme of Quakerism. Instead of saying, “I’ll pray for him,” many Friends would say, “I’ll hold him in the Light.” We are asked to see that of God in everyone. One of my favourite Quaker songs is this one.

I pulled myself together and stepped into the image my two friends had painted for me of myself.

As the subway train nears the end of my commute, it surfaces from underground for about a mile. As the train and I came up out of the dark, cool earth, a blinding sun–low over the horizon–assaulted my eyes like a million angels with blaring trumpets, refusing to be ignored. I let the rays bathe my face as the train carried me to my destination.

* = GiST 209

• Ear plugs.
• Five more sleeps in Toronto!
• Taking good care of myself and preparing for the non-stop intensity of the practicum by stocking up on snacks for energy. Clementines, almonds, green tea, dark chocolate will go with me everywhere I go this week.
• Thanks to pacing myself and getting a lot done yesterday and today, I can go to sleep by ten tonight. I want to start the week fresh and awake.
• The sunshine, the green velvet couch, the woman whose hands shake, the tea cups, the bulletin board, the black squirrel, the silence, the ministry, the tears that coursed down my cheeks, and everything else that Quaker Meeting gave me today.

Today I rose with purpose. I did not want to miss my third and last visit to the Toronto Quaker Meeting after noticing last week how much it lifted my spirits to go there, how it fed me enough energy to stave off my regular homestay funk for the rest of the day–and into the next day, as well.

The concentric circles of chairs are set up in a room that is all glass from floor to ceiling on one whole side. It’s almost like worshiping out of doors.

Before dropping in on this Meeting, I had experienced two other monthly meetings. I was a regular attender in Little Rock for about three years and for a little while in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario. I have also visited the Fayetteville, Arkansas Monthly Meeting, and have been on weekend retreats or Quarterly Meetings where members of monthly meetings from surrounding states come together for three days, sleeping in cabins in a state park. The normal practice for involving children in Meeting–at least in each of these meetings that I have experienced–is for a First Day School to be offered at least one First Day (Sunday) per month. Before the parent or First Day School teacher takes the little ones off to another room, however, the children are encouraged to sit in silence with the group for as long as they want. In other words, until they start to squirm. In this way, children are allowed to start with perhaps 5 minutes of Meeting for Worship, which gradually lengthens as they grow older. By the time the child is twelve or thirteen, she may be joining Meeting for the full hour.

This morning one worshiper was accompanied by his two children. The younger of the two was delighted to recently have become very mobile in an upright way and was exercising this new ability in a state of sheer glee. Father sat in silence, older sibling sat in silence. Toddler ran full tilt toward the plate glass window separating us from the back garden, giggled as she slammed palms first against the window, then turned and ran back to her dad.

Dad allowed her to do this. When she put her arms up to be held, he held her on his lap. She was able to “do” the silent sitting for about 10 seconds at a time. Then she would squirm back down and repeat her rush at the glass doors, occasionally punctuating her voyage with “gah” or “daaaah!”  She seemed quite pleased with herself and not the least bit bothered by the fact that she was the only moving being in the room, the only being in the room emitting any noise whatsoever.

I wondered what she thought of this strange room full of people who all sat perfectly still and quiet. Mustn’t that have struck her as odd, since the world was normally full of people smiling at her, cooing at her, clapping and laughing at her antics and achievements?

After about seven minutes of this, dad decided it was time for her and older sibling to go to the children’s room. This inspired the first spoken ministry of the hour. A silver-haired woman to my left stood to say, “before the little one goes…” and expressed how wonderful it had been to watch her. It brings us all back to the basics, to where we all started, she said. Thank you for that, she added, sitting back down.

The silence was pierced three or four more times during the hour, each bit of spontaneous spoken ministry sandwiched between stretches of silence.

After Meeting, we all congregated in the sitting room with its beautiful, recently recovered old sofas and armchairs with tea and cookies. One woman about my mother’s age said to the toddler’s dad what I wish I’d been able to articulate as well: she expressed thanks for the child’s ministry.

Ministry.

That is exactly what it had been. Not a distraction. Not something to be squelched or reigned in. Not a reason to chastise the child or hush her.

Ministry.

I will miss my Sunday morning outings to be among people who think like that.

Well, this is it…the home stretch.

Today I got up not too early, but early enough to finish up a lesson plan so I could carry it with me on my flash drive when I went to Quaker Meeting, then stop off at Kinko’s on the way back to print out big colour flash cards for Tuesday’s lesson.

The class in which I am doing my second practicum is more challenging than had anticipated. I knew I was biting off a lot when I chose to teach a level one. I also knew I was making things more difficult for myself than they needed to be when I chose the Scarborough site with its hour-long commute over the North York site, where I did my first practicum. But I wanted to get a taste of each of my school’s three locations.

This class is going to test my mettle in a couple of other ways. One of the bane’s of an ESL teacher’s existence is the dreaded multi-level class. Even though this class has only been going for a couple of months, there is a vast gulf between the level of the strongest student and that of the weakest. The weakest student is new AND cannot be present in the afternoons. My mentor tells me that many classes end with her in tears. As far as I can tell, she doesn’t understand a single thing going on around her. Fortunately, her first language is one of the ones that I speak, and I’ve got the mentor’s permission to whisper a few helpful things in that language when it might help her along.

I wonder why LINC coordinators allow students to join mid-session like that, especially if they have absolutely no English yet. Why do that to the student or the teacher?

The strongest student is someone who has been here many years, including some years spent working in a factory here. I’m not sure how she qualified for the class, unless through a relative. In any case, her accuracy is very low (she doesn’t use the correct forms), but she is quite chatty and can make herself well understood. Example: “Sri Lanka me work cow chicken cow.” ME: “You had a farm?” Student: “Yes, farm.” ME: “What happened to the farm when you moved here?” Student: “Sister.” ME: “Your sister took over the farm?”  Student: “Yes, yes.”

Anyway, it’s showtime, folks.  I feel about as ready as I ever will.

• Getting up early to work on the lesson plans for my practicum. I got lots done.
• Going to give blood and…drum roll, please…being allowed to donate. Yay!  No more anemia, thanks to the little green iron tablets my doc prescribed six weeks ago.
• A mild if overcast day. I brought a wool toque with me to Toronto but haven’t had to wear it at all yet.
• Six more sleeps till hugs and kisses…and being able to sleep in my own bed again.
• Receiving a hand-written note from a beloved friend. Snail mail rocks.

• Rising early, walking to the bus stop through streets still wet with rain.
• The orange flowers still blooming in one of the yards I pass on my way to the bus stop.
• Hearing some Persian words come out of one student’s mouth when she was on the phone with a family member. Hey, wait a second, I thought. There are no Iranians in this class. I got her to show me on the world map where she is from: Tajikistan. She told me that she does speak a version of Persian, but doesn’t write it in Arabic script! She picked up a piece of chalk (it was break time) and wrote her name for me in her script. I took the chalk and wrote her name again as it would be written in Iran.  You learn something new every day.
• Sitting in a cozy cafe for an hour with one of my dearest friends. Email, letters, phones are okay…but there is no substitute for being able to look into a friend’s eyes.
• Long, tight hugs.

Since it takes an hour for me to get to my practicum site (bus + loooooooooooong suuuuuuubway ride + bus), I was out the door by seven this morning. It is now after eight p.m. and I am plum tuckered out.

Looking back on my day, what is most salient is the flow and flux of energy. Some activities drained me a little, some a lot. Other events and exchanges pumped me up, some way up. It went like this:

• Up before anyone else in the house for a peppermint shower = energy in.
• Being trapped in the kitchen with host mom while I ate my oatmeal, listening to her whinge and gripe about the latest thing one of the students has done to cost her money (broke a light switch) =  energy OUT. Way out.  Toxic, toxic person. And toxic behaviour pattern of mine–to sit and allow the toxicity in. I need better boundary skills.
• Observing the class I’m going to be teaching next week = energy out. Yeah, I know. It surprised me, too. It was the opposite during my first practicum. But this class holds the energy of stagnation, frustration and blockage. Watching it drag on was taxing.
• Meeting my dear friend K from Waterloo = ENERGY IN! Big time. Being with someone I love, with whom I can be 100% myself, to whom I can say anything… yeah. Energy in. We hug spontaneously, reach out to touch one another, share secrets, cry. Anything goes.
• Talking to my classmate R on the phone = energy IN. She is one of those rare souls who recognizes (and cares about) a rare soul. It feels good to be recognized, and I think it feels good for her, too.
• Checking email and finding that the teacher has finished marking another one of my assignments. Reading her comments = energy IN. I became absolutely bouyant, as light as a dandelion seed after reading her words. She is a prof who does not dole out words of approbation liberally, so even the tiniest praise from her puts me on cloud nine. She used the adjective “lucid” to describe one of my arguments. I think I’ll get that on a tee shirt.
• Skyping with my sweetie and talking about our respective days = energy in.

So that was interesting…watching myself fading and wilting at one point in the day, then watching how another type of interaction or surrounding brought me right back to life.

I recognize that being in this bedroom is heavily oppressive and saps almost all my creativity and energy for school work. Since a lot hinges on how much preparing I can accomplish this weekend, I am going to experiment with taking my laptop into the kitchen and/or to the nearby library branch.

I am reminded of the time my good friend, who was struggling to write a dissertation, asked me if I thought place mattered. She had proposed to her therapist that she might have more success and progress more quickly on the thesis if she moved out of her small apartment and found an airier, sunnier place to live and write. I told her that I most certainly did think that writer’s block could be linked in part to the space in which she was attempting to write.

What drains away your energy? What recharges you?

• All your comments and the love that I felt pouring forth from them. Thank you!!! :)
• These two young people. They paced themselves well and saved up for a burst of energy at the end. Aren’t they lovely?
• Green tea to wake up my brain so I can work on another assignment.
• The nice comment I got from the admin assistant yesterday about my marks when she pulled my file for me.
• The zingy, refreshing peppermint castile soap I got at Grass*Roots yesterday to refill my pump bottle. Wow, it’s very minty…and it doubles as a very nice shampoo!
• Spending time after supper last night helping G with English. He had talked a kind librarian out of an old copy of Utne Reader and was going through it with a highlighter to learn new words. Now that’s my kind of English lesson. We started with how to pronounce Utne. It rhymes with chutney. Ok, for those of you who mispronounce chutney, that’s an /ʌ/ as in BUT, not an /uw/ as in lute.
• Getting hugs last night, and not being the only one who was on the verge of tears.
• Hearing very briefly from my darling today that his consult in London went well and he’s feeling confident.
• Getting excited about tomorrow, which is when I meet my (second) practicum mentor for the first time. I will sit in on her class just to get a feel for where she’s at with the students.
• The possibility of a visit with a dear friend tomorrow evening, too!

This morning I sat at the big desk in my room (which was once a dining table) and worked on one of the final assignments, stopping frequently to look out the window at the sparrows that flit to and from the feeder next door. I could hear host mom puttering around in the kitchen. Laundry was flapping wildly on the clothesline. Over a period of three hours I did manage to finish writing my half-page to one-page essay answers to each of six opinion questions. Without printing it out for a final proofreading, I emailed it to E, the administrative assistant who date stamps all assignments before printing them off for the teacher to mark.  At this point I’m less concerned with perfection and more interested in getting one more assignment off my plate. With that one finished, I’ve just three to go.

Today I had a date to meet my classmate R an hour and a half before our last night class so we could go over her poem together. It’s about Toronto and it’s in Farsi. I’ve spent hours over the past weeks penciling in the English translation of as many words as I could find on Farsidic.com in wee tiny writing between the lines.

We agreed on 4:15 at the Green Beanery since the night module starts at six.  I wanted to drop by the school before the administrative assistant went home for the day so I could take a look at my marked grammar test–see what I got wrong so I’d know what to bone up on. I also needed to get my soft soap pump container refilled at GrassRoots, so I left the homestay house a couple of hours before I was to meet R.

Since my practicum is in Scarborough, today was my last time to take the subway to Bathurst Station.

Everything felt a bit sad.

I know.  I know all that stuff about flowers dying. We suffer not because things are impermanent, but because we fall into the trap of attachment.

I did become attached.

These fourteen weeks, separated by a 7-week break, have comprised one of the sweetest periods of my life. It has been like being a school girl again. It has been like an escape from the real world, that world I had to enter after I graduated university over 20 years ago. Ever since getting my B.A., with the exception of a few months after moving to Canada and a few months after moving to Windsor, I’ve been gainfully employed. And those two periods of unemployment were no vacation; I was desperately looking for work.

For two decades I’ve either been working really hard (keeners don’t know any other way to work) or have been stressing out about not having a job.  Once in those 20 years I took a two-week vacation. All my other vacations were shorter than that.  And typical of the overly conscientious, I often gave my coworkers and supervisor a number where I could be reached while on holidays…just in case a problem arose that only I could solve.

Now this!

It’s been like being allowed to step off the merry-go-round for four whole months. If I tune out the sound of my savings account going “sluuuuurp,” there’s no stress to speak of.  I haven’t even had to go grocery shopping or do any cooking during this second half of the course.  All I’ve had to do is get up out of bed in the morning, pick out something to wear, gather my books and go learn from 10:30 to 4:45.  Learn and bond with my lovely classmates and see movies.

Heaven.

I stood in the lobby of the coffee shop waiting for R.  Miss Manners says that waiting for someone twenty minutes is good etiquette. You’re not obligated to wait any longer than that when someone is late.  I waited thirty minutes. Thirty five.  Had it been almost anyone else, I might have gotten irked and left, figuring I’d been stood up or forgotten about. But not R.  She was either sick at the last minute or something had happened beyond her control. I decided to take a table, order something and read the paper.

She arrived at a little before five looking mortified. The southbound yellow line had broken down and passengers were loaded onto shuttle buses. She had left home at 3:15 just to ensure she would not be late for our meeting, then that happend. I reassured her that I’d been fine and was just glad she wasn’t sick.

“Relax,” I said. “Take a minute to calm down. It’s okay.”

Once she’d gotten her 15 apologies out of her system, we read her poem. She had written it out for me very clearly since I can’t decipher quickly-written Persian script, only careful printing that resembles what I learned in my primer.  It took us the whole hour to go through the pronunciation and meaning of each of ten stanzas, but it was worth it.  The metaphors made me smile, playful lines made me laugh softly. In the end she was disappointed that we had no time left over for me to recite it for her. She loves my accent, she says!

The poem has a sad ending. It is about the wind here, about being in Toronto and far from ones homeland, far from ones mother.

The teacher got us involved in a fun activity, so class went quickly.

I was acutely aware of all the things I was doing for the last time.  I wanted to go around and bid every silly thing farewell.

Good-bye, old tea kettle that takes four minutes to boil.

Good-bye, musty old school building with cracks in the ceiling.

So long, narrow little bathroom where the people coming out of the stalls have to make sure nobody is standing at the sink before they open the door.

I’m going to miss you.

Yes, I got attached.

Attachment is the root of our suffering.

We don’t suffer because things are impermanent. We suffer because we fall under a spell of believing them to be permanent.

But you know what? Though my eyes were leaking tonight, I was not suffering. There was sweetness to my sadness. I was sad because I had allowed myself to love. To fall in love.

With the cracked ceilings. With the tea kettle.  With all those precious rituals that wove continuity through the days: tea break at 11:45, playing Take Two at the lunch table with P and E, tearing the crossword puzzle off the back page of the Metro newspaper for J at my table. Every day we did the same things in the same way, constructing for ourselves familiarity from routine.

I’m going to miss the way we helped each other. Fed each other.

I’m going to miss subway tokens.

And pigeons on the platform looking for crumbs in the cracks between the tiles. (How DO they get down there and how DO they get back outside again when they want to?)

Of course you know that there’s not anything especially lovable about THAT tea kettle, that fire escape, that orange extension cord. It’s the associations I have with these objects. They are the objects from the physical world with which I will always associate this time of my life… like a certain scent you associate with your third grade teacher, or with summers at the cottage, or with your grandfather.

Instead of smells, I have a kettle. A staircase. The particular linoleum pattern that I will never see anywhere else ever again.

Is this suffering? Or is this engaging in life? Tasting? Allowing myself to love?

• Receiving an email from the prof to say I got 97% on the last exam I handed in. See, I do more than just go to movies!
• Sparrows on the window ledge finding the pieces of nuts I spead out there for them.
• A day so fine that I was able to sit in the garden with just a sweater for a wrap.
• Eggplant for dinner. Delicious!
• This. What a great idea.