Take me to the river, and let me see again.

"Fifth grade! Let's get one thing straight before we start our day together. Yes, Miss Davis has a giant sunburn across her forehead. Yes, you can see a clear outline of her headband she wore yesterday in white in the middle of her forehead. It's funny. It's okay to laugh a little bit. She should probably be a little more responsible next time. That being said, we can't talk about it all day. We have way too much to do."

I walked down the rows of experimental corn with a mesh bag hooked to my belt, work sunglasses strapped to my head and dirt softly pelting my face as the wind groaned every few minutes. I thought early in the day about the sun, about what its effects would probably be, but I quickly forgot.

The fifth through eighth graders picked corn all day on Wednesday as a fundraiser for the year. It was fun. It was a lot more work than I expected it to be. And when a fellow teacher showed up to give rides back to school, I could tell by the look in her eyes when she saw me that my prediction about the sun had been right.

Thank God parent-teacher conferences aren't this week. Thank. God.

If there were a prize for looking the most insane at a job, I think I would have won for the remainder of last week. You can even see the faint, white silhouette of where the feather my student stuck in my headband rested against my hair line.

Don't worry though. I've been aloe-ing like a champ. It was worth it. Standing in that field with miles of indigo sky unfolding around me like Muddy Water's guitar seemed like the only thing we should be doing on that warm and windswept day.

I addressed all of my classes like that on Thursday. Immediately after that a student walked into my classroom late.

"Miss Davis, you are so sunburn. Your forehead looks hilarious."

Sigh... "You're right."

The dog days are over...

I could see the eyes of the seventh and eighth graders glaze over somewhere between Alcott's mother, Abigail, and her sister Elizabeth.

"Listen. I'm not going to try to fool you into thinking appositives are the most exciting thing you'll ever learn about, but it's not an open invitation to sleep."

No, I'll save fooling them into excitement with superlative adjectives. They'll be the excitedest... er... the most excited.

In a recent news article I was quoted as saying, "We're thrown in the water and asked to sink or swim."

I've always been a good swimmer. I can swim for miles. I can tread water for hours. I learned the butterfly when I was eight and the other strokes much earlier. Sinking has never been an option.

So when it seemed like the option was sink or swim, I have to say, I was relieved. But you see, I haven't done too much swimming in the last few years. In fact, I'm a little out of practice. And this is the part where my metaphors get confused with reality and what I'm actually talking about.

This teaching thing is just as hard as I though it would be. Granted, I made myself think it would be much harder than I actually hoped it would be... so I would be pleasantly surprised. Nope. Just as hard. But it's hard in a way that I've seldom experienced, where I feel challenged to do better every day, where even a good day is a day that could use a lot of improvement. That's a type of pressure that seems foreign and uncomfortable and, in a way, perfect.

"We were not made for comfort. We were made for greatness." - Father Hudgins

So here I am, with my teacher floaties, just beyond the shallow, simply remembering to breathe.

Heaven Bound and Glory Be

Three times a week I walk over wood chips, pine needles and asphalt as wind whips fiercely past me and several dozen students.

Recess.

I love recess. I find everything about it wonderful. Being outside. Being in the gym. Observing... mostly the observing. Everything.

Usually ball tag takes the jungle gym, kickball the pavement, football the grass. Some students stand on the teeter totter until I notice and remind them that seats aren't for feet(s). The seventh and eighth graders usually play tether ball.

But not the fifth grade girls. No. They farm.

Every day six or seven on them gather under the pine trees with two rakes and a hoe. And they farm the dirt. They move pine needles from side to side. They rake the sand. They dig surreptitiously. Surreptitious, because no one seems to notice or think it strange that a handful of 11-year-old girls choose their fleeting seconds of freedom to be used in thankless and baffling labor. Surreptitious, because I'm starting to find it normal as well. 

Sometimes I wonder how much we could accomplish if their steady, earnest farming were translated into reading or writing or thinking or learning. But such raw dedication can't be manufactured or stolen or simply created. It has to grow, like the fifth grade girls' dirt garden.

I guess what I'm saying is: I'm working on growing a dirt garden.