Yesterday was the end of a something dear. Literally.  I bought it in 1977 or 1976 at a drugstore in my hometown downtown when I was in high school. For some reason keeping this twelve dollar Vidal Sassoon dryer going represented keeping me going. I, likewise, am in faulty repair. My wisdom teeth are gone after being beat from the bones the day after my third grade class was over. First  I transferred schools and packed and cleaned and did that job perfectly. Then my teeth. A quite attractive twenty day recovery followed that I thought about taking pictures of, but changed my mind.
My days of thinking about backing out of mother (and wife) hood with a dramatic injury selfie have lessened. So no hugely bruised face photography to "remember" this life event. Then came the July bad back, numb feet and the excruciating ten days of trying to save a tooth that was badly infected. (Found looking at the wisdom teeth.) Thousands of dollars in all. This experience certainly remains a highlight on my list of pain that floored me. Would you like to see the rest of the list? I'm sure if you are reading past sentence two you would:

My List Of Pain (not quite like a bucket list, more on the order of times I "lost it")

1. Birth of Sylvia
2. Death of my mother, and then by proxy my grandparents, cousins, friends, Jack's parents, aunt
3. When my back went out lifting the Thanks books necessitating surgery, when I could not walk for months
4. The peritonitis and gastro bleed in Temecula
5. The first kidney stone
6. The tooth I'm talking  about right up there
7. The first peritnitis and gastro bleed -the nearest to death yet
8. The second kidney stone
9. All the other kidney stones
10. All the other peritonitis episodes
11. When I fell as a child cracking my skull and forming, I think, the syrinx
 12. All the other back episodes and all other missing memories and one I can't talk about here-actually two

That's ten, Oh my gosh wait, a re-write.  Adding two more and stopping thinking over other things. It's enough. Pain I ask, what is it good for?
Absolutely nothing.

Well, maybe not.

And then again quite a few folks I read AND a few I talk to, my tribe,  tell me pain serves us. Certainly it has made me aware of eating, an issue I avoid to my peril. It has also made me deeply consider my mother. Her teeth were awful and because we were fairly poor I didn't pay for things she should have had done, simple things. Big things. My guilt engaged forever over this, all I can do now is know that I have felt her in my teeth. She's a compassionate soul, this was not her intention. But it has settled me this summer into a reverie of loss, delayed grieving her August 23rd, 2013 death because obviously I "had to go to work" teaching right after she died. I'm not sure why I had to do that but I did. For money I guess. And in doing so I could never quite feel the intense sadness and move the lessons onward. I was asked late in the year at a particularly designed meeting not only "what is wrong with you" but also "you never seem to do anything," one of those quotes by a person that does not like being quoted-apparently their words are not the stuff they stand upon. I can answer that the taking care of and loss of my mother, the pain of that as well as the suffering of daily physical illness mark a lot of my life in the last five or so years. So, what's the matta which you? Fair fellow.

And so I realize that human life is suffering.
Teachers do know a different flavor of that as they breathe in inequity, of feelings of the work, situations of the students and breathe out the daily work. So far I haven't seen a Common Core Standard befitting these processes that are ultimately life. We are here, we suffer, we search for the reason we are alive, we contribute positively- and negatively, we die. Though it all we feel we see, know, we have constructs of mind unique to us and often wrong, we invent meanings, we assign motives and meanings. We choose or default to how we look at it all.

I read an article, reread it. It says the reason teacher work is hard. Here is the link, but you need to "click" on the darkened word to actually "see" it. Teacher work is hard because, and spoiler alert-read article linked first, well....... I want to digress in a digression before I address that article. I've been thinking about two things in teaching, how hard it is over time, and meaness in the dynamics of teachers work and the "rest of it." I read a good book "Who Controls Teacher Work" by Richard Ingersoll and I'm rereading Robert Fulghrum among other resources I have on life. The work is hard. And why is that? Ingersoll points out that in the US teachers are not viewed with respect, among many other reasons, nor are they trans-formative, autonomous, or clear on their work. It's a mean world in teaching US, but go read his thorough research.

The article I linked thinks it's  fleeing "time" and never enough. And indeed a feeling of not enough time often pervades the western emphasis on the Race to either tops or bottoms depending on who you ask. Working under the gun, too few resources, so on, very difficult. My reading tells me these are illusions of mind.  But what to do with that? That the relationship built with the children in a year is worth a hundred seasons. I know this to be true-several relationships built in my short childhood guide me now, in the time of a life. Guide me well. Through the illusion of time in fact. Fulghrum -I'm reading. A book on life rituals. He suggests that we make the most of the time, he certainly has. You know his work surely if you read "All I Every Needed To Know I Learned In Kindergarten" -perhaps it's interesting to read a man sitting in a chair on top of his own grave. But it reminds him he's not in it yet. I would offer he addresses how we set our mind to help us in life. Something a school might one day do.

So I got to thinking about the painful aspects of teaching, my life this summer-so far. While I was in pain, defending my writing "not in a private journal" I got to thinking about what pain there is after some deaths. What grief requires. I read Ram Dass expressing the purpose and the legitimacy of pain in grief, but I think he'd allow me to extend that into living. We have pain as part of processes to be fully alive. For me certainly it awakens things I need to face. So I can move on. I don't wish pain on anyone, but you certainly will deal with it being a living being. I don't want to shock anyone but teaching is very hard work. At times. For a lot of reasons. But it has the other side of the coin, just as I know that I had 53 years of life with my mother. Not 54, or 75 or some other number, just what we had when we had it. With a wealth of love. And laughs.

My hairdryer was fantastic. It lasted almost 40 years. For an appliance, not too shabby. That I asked Jack if we could bury it and he suggested he'd like to try to take it into his OR and work on it some more is a testament to our regard for it. Jack is well beyond the save a twelve dollar  old beat up appliance stage. He's more into the " I don't have time for this Sarah stage." I celebrate having anything with me that long-I look at it and feel I'm in the 80's darn near every morning. (When I could dance disco or punk or do whatever I thought looked good, flip the bangs out, flip the hair under and even tolerate looking at myself in the mirror.) I could look at this loss with joy but I acknowledge a deep sadness as well. Two ends-burning rope-life in the now.

So that's how school is for me actually, teaching. Sometimes too little of everything, sometimes too much, balancing, evolving. It gives the thing a pulse. We are striving with our standards and our common coring over commons building,  and our grade levels to take this out. Force life into a routine, remove pain, resolve emotion, routinize, achieve maximum efficiency, dramatically and emphatically get this "right," but we do so against the river of life-our standards setting in stone on a mountain worn by erosion, weather, avalanche, forces from the earth, water, in a time our ice caps are melting and wars blow through the world. Something to stop time, eradicate pain. A set of stone cores.
Yes, this is what the Common Core will do.
If we teach this set of things, all else will be ok. Things will feel ok. We can standardize life.

And yet my hairdryer died, and I felt it, and my mother died and I'm grieving.

I will die.
My children will die.
My husband.
You will too fair friend.
And I hold sorrow around that to my peril I think.

I read this, this week too, posted helpfully by a facebook friend. I really enjoyed it in a new way. Given what my teeth are telling me.


They found in it a wisdom.




What makes us think of why teaching is hard? What makes teaching a pleasure?
Frames of mind, my friend are all we control.