I've been living in Maine a long time now and know well the annual return of the tourists flocking in like locust to feast on our lobster, rage on our roads, and tear up our lakes. I used to be one of the locust. I know the routine -- here they come, here they spend their money, there they go. I get it.
It typically doesn't bother me. I can move patiently and peacefully through the traffic with all the lane-changing shenanigans, beeping, and gesturing of the out-of-staters because it is not unlike navigating a middle school hallway. And the crowds in town do not usually bother me either because I spend the school year going around in the classroom between bodies that don't move when they see you struggling to get past them with a stack of a dozen textbooks that weight 15-pounds each.
But what on earth is going on this summer? It seems that there are just so many of them! And they are either zipping past you angrily or standing there dumbfounded. Maybe it's the lower gas prices. Or maybe nobody knows what's going to happen after the election in November, given the candidates, so it's all a last-ditch attempt to experience the way life should be. If you can't find it in Maine, what hope is left?
The cause of my rant was what should have been a simple trip to
Hannaford Supermarket in Windham this morning. The two mile drive from my house took a little longer as we all had to slog along behind a camper pulling a sedan, pulling a boat, pulling a trailer with five bicycles and a grandmother in a rocking chair. O.K. That is all to be expected. Family vacations require a lot of stuff.
When I finally did arrived, it was a slower crawl to even get into the parking lot. This was due to a funeral procession that was swinging past the front of the supermarket.
Or, so I thought. On second glance, it was a line of SUV's, all of them black, all of them with out-of-state license plates, running their AC with the passengers inside. They were lining up for their curbside pickup of groceries.
Well, this I understand too. If I had just driven hours through traffic with kids, dogs, and grandmother, I too would pull up and have someone fill my cars with groceries before I headed to the cabin on the lake. One less thing to worry about during a well-deserved vacation.
What I didn't expect was the mayhem inside the store. People, so many people! There was a swarm at the deli counter, waving their numbers like they were on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, babies crying, peaches rolling on the floor through the produce area. Peaches!
Carriage traffic was jammed up behind what looked like little Zamboni machines everywhere blocking aisles. But this was not an ice arena and the Zamboni's were actually large silver carts filled with grocery bags, driven very, very, VERY slowly by very stressed employees trying to fill the orders for the vacationing people lined up outside in their SUV's. It takes a long time because they are following a precise list sent through earlier online by the precise shoppers.
You know it's bad when the disabled people in the electric shopping carts start ramming their way through. After getting pegged in the back of the knees and my toes nearly run over by one eldery man making a run on sweet potatoes, I learned to listen for the ssszzzttt sound of the electric motor winding up prior to the bursts forward.
I don't know if there were more people using electric carts today or it seemed like there were more of them because I was on high alert for another affront to the back of my knees, but the electric carts seemed to be everywhere.
I have to give Hannaford credit. There were employees in all the right places helping people, all hands on deck, every register open. One voice called out to me, a bright-eyed young man stacking jars of pickles as fast as people were snatching them off the shelf. (I must have had a look of anguish on my face.)
"How are you today, ma'am? May I help you find something?"
And I found myself thinking a thought no teacher in her right mind, on summer break ever should: September. Just September.
My time has come. It was a very long ride of not ever thinking about my weight and there was even a spell of having to eat to keep my weight up. Then came "Oh, look! I have curves!" when I looked in the mirror, which was amusing at first. Now, not so much. My time has come to lose weight.
I tried to act surprised when I stepped on the scale at my recent medical appointment. "Well, what do you know! Look at that, will you!" But I knew it was coming. My doctor recommended the Whole30 plan with tremendous enthusiasm and first-hand experience, as she has been on it several years. (She looks fabulous, by the way.)
The Whole30: The 30-Day Guide to Total Health and Food Freedom by Melissa and Dallas Hartwig is a heavy book that Amazon Prime got here lickety split. With the exception of the many recipes that make up the later half of the book, I have read all the rules, regulations, advice, guidelines, explanations and plans and am ready to begin on Monday.
In a nut shell -- which is important, because you do keep it very simple and you do eat a lot of nuts -- you follow a very strict diet for 30 days and then reintroduce foods after that and see how they affect your body and your weight. The basics: no sugar, no alcohol, no dairy, no grain, no legumes, no exceptions. Losing excess weight is a side benefit, as the diet is really intended to target your gut bacteria and the inflammatory response, which my developing osteoarthritis and my skin issues will hopefully thank.
I have heard that with any good diet should come advice on lifestyle changes and rethinking relationships with food consumption. The Whole30 book devotes a great deal to this and as I read, I came across something that made me think about my students and my growing aversion to snacking in the middle school classroom and had to write about it here
I have kept my classroom snacking disdain under wraps for a while now because I do not want to ever become that old persnickety teacher with the perpetual scowl. (If I do, put me out to pasture). But I have found allies in Melissa and Dallas Hartwig on the issue, so let's talk about it.
The current rational for having students snack sometime between when they arrive (at our school it is 7:30 am) and when they get to lunch (11:20 am for our 7th graders) is two-fold. First, many 13-year-olds say they don't eat breakfast. And second, even if they did eat breakfast, they need to eat again before lunch because their metabolisms are high, their blood sugar drops, or they are simply growing so fast that the food needs to keep going in.
All of these are true. Most of my students say they are STARVING all the time and so the crumply-bagged snacks and small plastic ware containers from home enter into the classroom. Kids eat and we go on learning without much incident most of the time.
If you walked into our classroom during the middle of the school year, you wouldn't really notice the issue. That's because it takes a lot of management from my end to get there.
There is the snack-begging to control. At some point, a student will stroll in with a Family-Sized box of Cheez-It crackers tucked under his arm or a Picnic Day Extravaganza-Sized bag of SmartFood balanced on top of her books, and it turns into a feeding frenzy.
"Can I have some?" The cries erupt. Hands are outstretched. Chairs go flying. And there's me in the center saying, as I so often do, "What's happening?"
It's all fun and games until someone calls out, "Where's the broom?"
So management has to step in. That's me. "Here. Napkins. Pour out what you will eat and what you want to share at your table, then put the rest in your locker." Sometimes that directive in itself turns into a tussle.
The detritus of snacking is a problem too. I have to remind students often to take care of their trash because once the snack has been eaten, the wrappers and the small plastic ware that once contained them, are no longer within the vision of the student. It's as if it no longer exists in their physical realm. Many simply don't see their own wrapper.
Others do see it but are sneaky. Rather than walk to the bin to dispose of the trash, they invent some impressive ways of hiding it. There's always origami. I've found cranes made out of Cool Ranch Dorito bags and endless other shapes and bags folded and jammed into unusual places around the room. One that gets me every year is the small, strategically-placed plastic container aligned on a book shelf in front of a book spine of the same color as the lid. It usually hides for quite a while until the residue on the inside of the translucent part begins to decompose and change color and then the gig is up.
Aside from the management part, I am more concerned about why kids are so hungry and the choices of food that are available to them for snacking and for meals. Most of the snack choices I see on a daily basis are not healthy and lunch portions and the quality of the food not so good. So are kids really STARVING all the time? Well, technically not starving but they certainly are hungry and in need of nutrition.
The authors of Whole30 are not fans of snacking and here's why. They believe snacking between meals can disrupt the normal hormonal functions which then increase the feeling of being hungry more often which forces you to eat more snacks and not enough at meal times. They advocate eating three or four full meals and increasing the quality and quantity of each meal, rather than snacking if you feel hungry. They emphasize eating in each meal more protein and more fats (yes, fats -- good fats) to help the hunger.
With all the growing and hormones flying around in middle school, and the obvious fact that a classroom should be a place of learning, shouldn't we be focusing more on the quality and quantity of meals and not encouraging snacking during class? Can we ever imagine a school where meals of high-quality protein and a fabulous variety of organic vegetables and grain dishes are served in a way that truly nourishes students so they do not feel so hungry?
I don't know what the solution is within the reality of what I see right now. I do know that students are rushed in the morning. I do know that young adolescents would mostly prefer to start school later (which would give them more time perhaps to eat a larger breakfast). I do know that some students do not have food in their homes or a parent who is watching over their nutrition. And I do know that time for lunch, as well as the school lunch program, are limited.
So they will continue to snack in the classroom for now; I won't. And when it comes to the larger issue of student nutrition, I'll follow Ghandi's advice: "Be the change you wish to see in the world." Over the summer I'll learn some more about this Whole30 idea and come back in September, ready to manage the student snacking in my classroom, a little more slim and a little less persnickety.
The day after the 4th of July, I am still seeing a lot of flag action as I scroll through my Facebook feed. I like the one of the red and white stripes superimposed over amber waves of grain, and also the historical painting of the founding fathers standing next to the flag, looking dapper in their tights and tri-corn hats as they sign their lives away on the Declaration of Independence.
A day after and flags still keep coming -- draped behind a bald eagle, swaddled around a newborn baby, flapping out of a rear window of a pickup truck. The quotes "Freedom Isn't Free!" and "Home of the Free, Because of the Brave!" are often paired with the pictures.
Some people get a little over excited about it all and that's when the fun begins with the comments. There's one picture of a guy lighting the tip of a flag on fire that elicited cries of desecration: "Burn the guy!" and "He should be shot!"
While I like a good parade and feel deep gratitude for being born a U.S. Citizen, I do not get too worked up over the flag itself and all the rigmarole that goes along with it. The flag, after all, is a piece of cloth on a stick -- often made in China -- that symbolizes, for many people, the power, freedom, and unity of our country.
One of the posts featured what looked like a child of the 1950's standing in a classroom with his hand on his heart, his eyes earnestly looking up at Old Glory. There were words that suggested that all of what's wrong with America today will be solved if those darn schoolteachers would just go back to making children say the Pledge of Allegiance every morning. I've seen this one before and this one always gets me. Where are the classrooms that are not saying the Pledge? I have taught in four school districts in Maine and in each of them, we have always started the day with the whole school saying the Pledge of Allegiance. Over the years, I have had three students who did not say the Pledge due to religious reasons and a couple more who chose not to say it just because they felt like being rebels. The rebels never really did find their cause and eventually went back to reciting it along with their classmates. In either case, I did not make a big deal out of. My only rule is to be respectful of those who do choose to stand and say it.
This idea that the younger generation is somehow deficient in patriotism and slacking off on being good citizens seems to have taken hold among the older generation. A couple years ago, Newsweek Magazine did a survey that turned into a mockery of young Americans. The survey had two questions: 1. Who lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? and 2. Who lives in a pineapple under the sea? I don't remember the specifics of how the survey was conducted, but apparently most of those surveyed were avid viewers of Nickelodeon Television and consistently got question #2 correct. Question #1, not so much. (Leave a message on my blog if you seriously don't know the answer to either question.)
Beyond being amused, I was not all that concerned with the results of the survey. If the older generation is measuring whether or not a young person is a good citizen based on being able to regurgitate a fact or recite a pledge, they will be sorely disappointed. My seventh graders hold access to all of human knowledge in their pockets (on iPhones) and very little in the way of rote memorization. They are far more global-thinking than previous generations, care more deeply about the health of the earth, and seem to know intrinsically the meaning of "all men are created equal." In fact, they sometimes ask me why we don't say "all men and women" or "all humans are created equal" instead.
It is comforting to keep some of the old traditions and, for many people, the flag symbolizes all the good of being American. It's also important to recognize that we certainly have some good young Americans coming up through the grades. I cannot wait to see what new glory they will bring.
Sometimes the name comes first and it takes you a moment to recall the eyes, the face, the voice, the whole of the student. The name comes in the news or online, maybe a colleague tells you. You freeze as your mind searches, retrieves, then marries the name with the memory and finally you claim the student that the tragedy has taken: "He was mine." Your students are always yours.
Jon Kauffman was pure sunshine. Blond hair, clear smiling eyes and round face. He lit up the classroom with a positive, casual, friendly energy that never wavered. He was my student in seventh grade language arts class during the 2007-08 school year, Room107 at Lake Region Middle School.
The news article said Jon's motorcycle collided with a white sedan on Route 25 in Effingham, New Hampshire on Friday, July 1. The white sedan fled the scene and my student was taken to the hospital where he later died. He was 21. They're still looking for the woman in the white sedan.
It is hard to connect the vibrancy of the thirteen-year-old boy with death. The typical phrases rise up in my mind and form a chatter: So young. What a loss. Didn't I also have his younger sister? I think he had an older brother. So very sad. Then the anger: He didn't get a chance to live. His life had just begun. Where is the woman in the white sedan? Can't someone find her?
The mind chatter goes on for a day and then begins to quiet. A TV news station posts some photos. Pictures from his Facebook feed start to fill in the years after he left my classroom. There are the high school years, a girlfriend, a selfie in big sunglasses. There's the motorcycle by the lake. There he is with his brother. A truck. A group shot with friends. Same bright smile. I smile back.
I smile back at his picture because I realize he did have his own full life. Though it was shorter than I understand, shorter than I think was fair, it was his life. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. There is friendship, love, and adventure in his photos.
The 185 days that Jon was my student in seventh grade have now taken on a new proportion in the duration of his life. In the sadness of losing one student, I am grateful for the gift of spending a school year with him and with each of them. In June, when I say goodbye to my seventh graders, I am reminded to understand that it is also godspeed, a blessing for the journey, no matter how long their road ahead may be.
