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[queernonbinaryteachinglife]

I’m tired y’all

So this week my districts been remote due to rising cases like almost 100 positive cases a day.

I got sick last week (pretty sure COVID, but atypical symptoms) and got tested last Friday at the district site that they direct students and staff to use.

I have yet to get results. So I’m getting tested again tomorrow but I’m supposed to isolate and act like I have COVID.

Anyways today they announced we are going back to school next week because positive cases are going down (there’s a 500 test back log sooooooooooooooooooooooooo I’m not sure about that). And our isolation/quarks getting cut in half and starts with the onset of symptoms.

So according to the district I’m fine to go back to work.

According to the school nurse I should assume I have COVID and isolate.

[queernonbinaryteachinglife]

[queernonbinaryteachinglife]

I grew up with active shooter drills. I remember sitting in front of lockers in my sixth grade class looking at the windows wondering if we’d actually be safe there.

I remember a drill happening after lunch during passing period while I was in high school and panicking. I didn’t know it was a drill and I had just left my last class and now where near my next. One of the foreign language teachers saw me and gesture for me to get into her classroom.

Once a bomb threat was called in to the middle school next door so we had to go on lockdown too. We all knew something was different. The announcement was different. We sat in almost silence for a whole period wondering what would happen next.

I went to college to become an elementary teacher. Junior year I had my first placement in a classroom. On my first day the classroom teacher walked me through what the policy was during shooter drills and told me that as near as she figured if your time was up your time was up. She went through how the drills have changed. Whether blinds should be up or down. Having students throw anything at the attacker (this was a 3rd grade class mind you so 8-9 year olds).

I graduated in the Spring of 2019 and got a job for the next school year. In the fall I had my first active shooter drill as a teacher. I had all my books from college and deliberately left one of the heavier books by the door easily accessible. Once I got the students organized and quiet and windows covered, I sat by the door with the book in my hands even though I knew it was a drill. When the assistant principal unlocked the door (and undid the lock that holds the door to the ground) I immediately went over to apologize saying I was sure I had done it right. I think I almost tried to hit her with the book too. She must have seen how terrified I was because she reassured me that I had done everything right and showed me the tool she used.

On of the best things about this year is not having to do those. And yes. I’ve had active shooter dreams. Only now I’m a teacher who has 20 kids to protect and realizing I would die if I thought that would keep them alive.

Do any other american high schoolers have intense survivor’s guilt and trauma with school shootings even though they weren’t at your school?

[queernonbinaryteachinglife]

So. 10th grade English class. We all come in one morning to find a balloon and a perfectly sharpened pencil on each of our desks. No instructions, no explanation, which is strange, because our teacher is meticulous about that sort of thing. A couple of people try to ask her and she says we’ll get to it. She takes role and then announces that she needs to go to the copy room and she’ll be back in a couple of minutes

Kinda unorthodox, but no one is complaining because this is advanced English and the teacher usually goes kinda hard. So, y’know. Brief respite. We all sit and chat; one of the boys teasingly steals a girl’s balloon, but gives it back to her easily enough; it’s quiet and kind of a nice break. Then the teacher comes back, stops in the doorway, and just stares at us

After a long moment, she says, confused, “You didn’t pop the balloons.”

To which one of the guys about two rows over exclaims, “We’re allowed to pop them?” and immediately turns around and stabs his friend’s balloon with the pencil

There is a vicious revenge balloon-stabbing, and a few more people pop seatmates’ balloons or their own, and the whole time the teacher is just shaking her head. “I can’t believe you didn’t pop your balloons.”

Apparently we were starting Lord of the Flies that day and she wanted to demonstrate the basic concept of kids turning on each other when there are no authority figures present and it was basically my favorite failed social experiment ever

[queernonbinaryteachinglife]

“Among us” is a wonderful way to show the fallibility of eyewitness accounts.

[queernonbinaryteachinglife]

sometimes I tweet about the funny/cute/utterly bizarre shit my 3rd graders do and say

[queernonbinaryteachinglife]

American Girl stories were the best tbh

[queernonbinaryteachinglife]

Kids are just amazing. Think about it, they come into the world knowing absolutely nothing, and everyday they’re looking wide-eyed at the world, so curious about even the slightest detail of it. Why, just the other day, my little Lilah came up to me and said: “Daddy, why is the sky blue?”

Well of course I knew the answer right off the bat. “You remember how rainbows work?” I asked her, lifting her up on my knee. She nodded. I’d taught her about rainbows and prisms, with a hands-on demonstration, just a couple of months before. I gave her the whole spiel about light breaking up in the atmosphere, about how red light traveled further but blue scattered wider, and so that was why the sky was painted blue in the middle of the day but red at sunset, when the sun was far away enough that all the blues got scattered behind and only the reds traveled far enough to reach us. “You got all that?” I said. “Don’t be afraid to ask questions if you don’t understand.”

She got that little pouty frown on her face that told me she was processing it, and then she said “uh-huh” again dubiously, and then asked, “Why isn’t the sun blue?”

That caught me off guard. “What?”

“When the sun -” She waved her arm in a clumsy arc that didn’t really demonstrate everything. “When the sun’s—there, it’s all red, cuz the sun’s far away, and the - the red light goes really really far, so when the blue’s all spilled everywhere, why isn’t the sun blue, too?”

I set her down off my lap. This was an unexpected wrinkle. It’s funny how you can just know something nearly all your life, and never have questions like that occur to you. Why wasn’t the sun blue? Still, I believe it doesn’t hurt kids to let them know that sometimes their parents have to look things up, so I took out my phone. “Let me just find out, and then daddy will have an answer for you,” I said.

As a first exploratory impulse, I googled ‘why isn’t the sun blue’. The first few hits were asking why the sun, if it was so incredibly hot, didn’t burn with a blue flame instead of a yellow one. I didn’t offhand know the answer to that one, either, but it wasn’t relevant to Lilah’s question so I quickly skipped over them. The Stanford website, which I skimmed over, didn’t tell me anything that I hadn’t already said, aside from the added factoid that the sun’s visible light peaked in the green part of the spectrum, so technically it was slightly greener than anything else.

That didn’t help me either.

Finally, it was the NASA website that gave the answer. “It’s because the light is straight from the sun,” I told her. “When you’re looking up at the sun, it’s still pure white, but all around it at the sides, that’s where the blue’s scattering off in all directions.” The NASA website had an awfully condescending graphic, I thought, with a cartoon sun shining white light straight down on a cartoon dog, and the blue light going off at an angle. The dog wasn’t even looking up. You’d think NASA, of all things, would be able to come up with something slicker. 

“But … doesn’t all light come straight from the sun?” Lilah said, interrupting my train of thought.

“Well, no—” I surreptitiously checked the diagram with the cartoon dog again. “’Cause if you’re looking at the sun, that’s the light, straight from the sun, and everything else—”

“But…” Lilah screwed up her forehead in thought. “Cuz when it’s daytime, that’s when the—half the Earth is facing the sun …”

“That’s right, and on the other half it’s night, because they’re not facing the sun,” I provided, reciting an old lesson.

“So isn’t all daytime light from the sun?”

I tried, in my head, to picture a lamp shining on half a globe. Yes, every illuminated part of the globe was lit directly by the light bulb, so if a tiny person on the surface of the globe was looking up, wouldn’t the entirety of the bright daytime sky be the sun’s light? But then again, the sun was definitely only in one specific spot in the sky, so that couldn’t possibly make sense either … I was beginning to suspect that I didn’t actually know how light worked.

“No,” I said definitively, trusting in the cartoon sun and dog, who were clipart images staring blankly at random angles. The sun’s eyes moved between images, I  noticed, as I scrolled up and down. The dog’s didn’t. “That’s not how light works, sweetie. When you turn on a light in the room—” I pointed up. “Everything’s lit up, right? But you can only see the light—the light-light—when you’re looking straight at it.”

She considered that while I held my breath, and I only let myself breath again once I saw her nod, a series of ponderous calculations still going on inside that cute little head of hers. Kids, I’m telling you, they’re really something. She wandered off to consider it on her own for a while, and I was trying to think up a sequence of words to google that explained the difference between light directly from the sun, and light that presumably was also directly from the sun, but you weren’t looking straight at it (my first stab of ‘ambient vs direct light’ of course only brought up a bunch of hits about home decor and 3D modeling) when I felt Lilah tug on my shirt sleeve once again. “Daddy?” she said.

I looked up, forcing a grin. “Yes, sweetheart?”

“If it’s all a rainbow, and red’s the one that goes the farthest, then why’s blue the one that scatters around the most? Shouldn’t it be…” She paused to mouth the words “Roy G. Biv” to herself. “Violet?”

I opened my mouth, and then looked down at my phone and quickly typed in ‘why isn’t the sky violet’. 

“Hrmm….”

“Daddy?”

“Okay,” I said slowly, still keeping one eye on the article. “It turns out that the sky actually is violet, but because of the way our eyes work …” I quickly glanced up at Lilah. She was still with me, listening placidly as if I hadn’t just contradicted my previous explanations, completely willing to listen to her dear old dad explain the world to her.

“We have—we have cells in our eyes,” I began, “that are how we see color—they’re called cones—and there are three kinds. One is sensitive to—One sees red things, one sees green things, and one sees blue things. And so the—” I squinted at my screen. “Blue light makes the blue cones light up, right? But, it also, uh, tickles the green and red cones, just a little bit. So if when we looked up into the sky it was really all blue light, then to us it would look … uh, slightly …. slightly greenish. Blue-greenish. Because the green cones are also getting tickled, so it would look kind of green!”

I ran one hand over my head, reading out the penultimate paragraph. “But because the sky is actually violet, that means our blue cones can’t see it all that well. But our red cones can kinda see violet, so if it … if it was violet we’d actually see it as reddish …” I trailed off.  “But since the sky is actually part blue and part violet,” I finished up, all in a rush, “the red and green cancel each other out, and all we end up seeing is blue!”

I made a sort of ‘ta-da!’ pose, a smile frozen on my face, and miraculously Lilah was nodding along as if my botched rendition of the science had made perfect sense. Maybe … it did? Maybe according to the free-floating haphazard logic of a child who has no idea how the world works and has no choice other than to accept all explanations given, it was completely sensible that red and green should cancel each other out just like lights on a traffic signal, and that blue-plus-violet should equal blue, just as a fundamental property of math. I was almost congratulating myself on having provided a successful answer, when Lilah once again spoke up.

“So if the blue sky is really violet,” she said thoughtfully, fixing her big brown eyes on me, “at the end of the rainbow, what’s violet, then?”

I’ve done a lot of research since then, squinting at my tiny screen, and some of the information I’ve pieced together includes: that some of the colors displayed on my phone don’t actually exist, since different combinations of wavelengths of light stimulate different combinations of cones and make you hallucinate colors in your head; that violet is actually just dark blue and not purplish at all; and that yellow is just red and green light without any blue—but as to what they actually mean when they say “yellow” and “red” and “green” and “blue”—that part, I’m still trying to figure out.

It took me a while to even get this far. Lilah’s long since forgotten about the question and is now absorbed with watching Minecraft let’s plays on YouTube. They’re just incredible, kids. They’re born into this world, not understanding a damn thing about it, just having to trust what people tell them, and somehow they grow up into fully-formed individuals. I’m her dad, and I’m hardly responsible for a fraction of that. What else is it but a miracle?

And if anyone ever figures out what violet is, let me know.

[queernonbinaryteachinglife]

[queernonbinaryteachinglife]

Things my school is doing that are very frustrating

1. Spelling bee: why??????????????????????? Like why are we doing this???????? Stop trying to make this year “normal”

2. Science fair: technically optional according to a district person. Our school is doing it because “we always have”. But it’s optional for students. I’m kinda regretting giving my students an option.

3. Do intervention plans...

Okay I can kinda get it. But 1/2 my students aren’t taking the monthly test we’re supposed to use for data. And I’m not doing intervention groups for math because every student needs help with the math concepts.

4. This is technically from my mentor: every student needs to come to small group time. (15 min). If they are 1 minute late you need to email and message parents.

Me:?????? Okay so now my small group time is 10 min and I’ve added another hassle to parents. Cool.

Like I’m exhausted every afternoon. And I bet my students are in a worse shape.

Anyways teaching virtually sucks.

[queernonbinaryteachinglife]

So my students (upper elementary school. Most are around 10 years old) play Among Us. I gave them some tips on how to stay safe. Now they want to play as a class for a reward.

I think they would be very motivated. But I’m worried about it being inappropriate (not sure why. I just am).

Anyways. I’m posting this here to get other teachers input.

[queernonbinaryteachinglife]

So over the weekend I scheduled an email to go to my principal this morning asking to meet (so I could come out, but that wasn’t in the email).

Anyways she responded super quick and so yeah. I came out to her this morning. It was good. She’s clueless but very accepting which is like best case in my opinion. And yeah I’m going to reach out to a district staff member for more resources (they might already have like what if plans in place) and then the three of us can meet and talk.

She was like we can go as fast or as slow as you want. And I’m sitting there like I’m about to go from 0-60 like T and top surgery here I come.

It’s amazing. It really is. Three years ago I figured I have seven years of being closeted before I could even dream of transitioning and now like this next summer I’ll be on T hopefully and the next top surgery. I might actually cry from happiness.

I’m going to be Mx. Phoenix y’all. It’s amazing!!!

[queernonbinaryteachinglife]

Another post on this blog????

That I wrote?????

Now I know the world is ending.

Anyways. I have planned for this week (okay I only really have small groups for Monday planned but that’s okay. I want to keep them kinda flexible right now) and have my lesson plans.

I go to submit the lesson plans and...

No assignment has been made for them.

We have a principal, a vice principal, and someone who made the assignments last year. And yet none of them have made any assignments except for last week and the first “week”.

I really don’t want to hear from any of them about me not being planned/ready for the week.

Also the superintendent is like “we’re ready to do hybrid for Quarter 2. Even though 50% of parents want remote only. And you will need to both teach students in your class and those remote at the same time.”

_sigh_ I just really want this pandemic to be over. Hybrid is literally going to destroy my mental health.

[queernonbinaryteachinglife]

when a deadline is looming but the stress still isn’t enough to motivate you into doing something:

[queernonbinaryteachinglife]

Tattoos on teachers. It is a touchy subject. Some schools allow it, others do not allow it. So, the only time anyone brings up my tattoos is when they are exposed at work, whether it be students, teachers, or administration. My teacher rule: do not show unless you are ready to tell.

You see, the other day our school’s secretary decided to ask me what most potential (tattooed) teachers want to know: Do I show my Tattoos at school?

Frankly, if one has to ask that question then I say “No” because if you do not already know the answer, chances are that you are not ready to show and tell your ink to students, parents, teachers, admin, and staff. This is probably the best thing to do if you want to be respected in your profession.

“But I want to show my students that you can still be different, artsy, and still be professional…” Truuuuue, BUT do you want them to remember you as Mr./Mrs./Miss/Ms. Tattooed Teacher or Mr. Mr./Mrs./Miss/Ms. Teacher who had tattoos. Do you see the difference There?

“I want them to see me as their teacher.” As they should. So, if a question about whether your tattooed should be exposed is a concern, I say cover up, let them see who you are as a teacher, before exposing the badass ink that makes them go, “Whoa.” Because I hate when I point to the board and then ask the students whether they have questions and it gets interrupted with: “How long did it take to get your tattooes?”

My reality: As a Substitute Teacher I kept my ink covered, my classroom management skills strong, my professionalism on peak, and their students accountable. I built my reputation as Ms. ClassroomChaos. I did the same when a school decided to hire me. It was not until the California sun decided to heat up the coast that I decided to expose my tattoos and by that time I knew how to answer questions, redirect students distracted by my tattoos, and spoke honestly and sincerely of the stereotypes, discrimination, and challenges because of them.

See, everyone has ink stories. How we tell it, depending on our audience, makes all the difference.

[queernonbinaryteachinglife]

if you’re an adult that works with kids of any age do me two quick favors:

learn the symptoms of adhd and autism and their presentation in all genders. you dont have to be an expert, just know a bit about it beyond popular knowledge.

learn to recognize signs a kid is being abused in any way. beyond bruises and black eyes. learn to recognize the fearful apologies and hesitation. do some research.

do me these two favors and save tens of lives.

that’s no exageration either. after teaching my mom basics about mental disorders, she started spotting neurodivergent kids in her classrooms and helped them get help. almost every child she’s helped has been diagnosed with the disorder she predicted and none of them would have been diagnosed at a young age without her help. knowing this stuff matters.

learn. save lives. don’t make kids grow up in fear of their symptoms and family.

[queernonbinaryteachinglife]

Hey what are people planning for first day activities? Especially in regards to science/social studies like activities.

For reference, I teach 5th grade and we’re going to be fully remote to start. Also school starts on Thursday (why???? Idk) and science is in the afternoon.

Or like if you’re a student/have kids in this age range you can ask what they would like to do!! I love getting student input/kids input