The Love Letter to Myself in an Effort to Carry the Weight of a Precarious Soul (August 2006)

Dear Maya,

"I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive."

You teach because it makes you feel alive.  For most of your adolescence you were in love with the idea of being a teacher.  You worked with students that others had forsaken.  You watched as they went from F's to A's, as they began to believe in themselves and only needed you for company or an occasional high-five.  In exchange they taught you about a world which existed far beyond your own.  You were in love with teaching and teaching seemed to love you back.  But one day you had a bad fight with the school system; hurtful things were said, your faith was deeply wounded and you broke up.  You thought for good. While you mourned the end of this relationship you began to redefine yourself.  You were no longer the school system's girlfriend.  You stood on your own.  And little questions became big questions: If you could not get along with the schools system then how could you be a teacher? And if you were not a teacher than who were you? These questions bled into other questions: what if schooling and education were simply not the same thing? What if teachers and teaching could be mutually exclusive? What if a teacher did not need a classroom? Could a teacher be more a way of being? This last idea caught you right between the ribs.

You thought about teachers from your high school, teachers you worked with in Philadelphia, ad the teachers in training at your first graduate school.  They all worked as teachers and yet none of them seemed to live as one; to move through the world approaching each interaction as an opportunity to learn, grow and change.  To teach without first living as a teacher lacked luster you craved, so you walked the other way.  You made a commitment my dear, to be your own teacher and to view the world as your own classroom.  In that way you could live life as a teacher and every experience could hold that "rapture of being alive."  Years later, with that strength in foundation you returned to the school system.  You thought, "Maybe now that I know I am a teacher and the world is my classroom, I could work inside a classroom again."  You decided to reconcile because the love was still there.  And at the end of the day, that is all that really matters isn't it?

Upon further prying of how and why you recommitted yourself to education three categories emerged: the spiritual, focusing on my macro understanding of the external world; the personal, my micro or internal motivation; and he political, which exists in the space where the other two collide.  The rest of this letter to you, my dear, is an examination and exploration of each of these categories, elaborating on each grouping, its genesis, and its potential.  These values should be pervasively applicable--you should be able to treat your students with the same love, respect, reverence and rigor that you would address yourself, your family, your colleagues and your friends.  I intend for these values and formatting to evolve with you.  More importantly, I hope they act as a grounding and reminding force for those times when you will need both.  According to Joseph Campbell, "If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a  kind of track, which has been there all the while waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living."  I do not expect that because you found your 'bliss' you will never lost it, so you can also think of this letter as a 'just in case.'

The Spiritual: Understand the way that we move through the world, how we feel about ourselves, understand ourselves, make decisions, determine our values, affect ourselves and others, in an effort to nurture joyful, grounded, inspired, ethical and rational beings.

Honor Us: We are all living through the same awakening.  Some of us are more awake than others; some of us were more awake than we are now.  The process moves fluidly and constantly.  Remember to recognize this limitless possibility within each person.  We may be all things to ourselves and others in this life: beautiful and heinous, powerful and destructive, joyful and morose.  To know that we have agency provides us with the power of choice.  Remember to respect one's choice as an act of creation.  We can drastically change what we choose to create from moment to moment.

Study Us: For a person to discover that she is made of endless possibility she must learn how to see herself, to hear herself, to know herself.  Help us to know ourselves, how we learn and how we think.  Give us the space to study ourselves and to learn from our mistakes.  Allow us to feel safe enough to try new methods and explore both our internal and external worlds.

Enable Us: Each person walks their own way.  Therefore each person arrives at an education through innumerable ways.  Help us to determine our own educations.  Ask us to develop our own inquiries and follow the questions that burn for us.

"Do No Harm" to Us: We are naturally wired to learn, do not turn us off from learning.  Do not separate our questions, our thoughts, our interests, our lessons from us.

Expose Us to Riches: Diversify what diversity means--go beyond race, culture, gender, perspectives, opinions, methods, etc.  We live in an enormous world and throughout time people have found countless ways to solve the same problems.  Understand and respect the validity of these differences.  Help others to recognize that grandeur.

The Personal: Tend to yourself as if you were your favorite student. Remember how small a piece of knowledge you will ever know.  Everyone is your teacher, the world is your classroom; dream, work, be.

Learn from others: All learners must be both teachers and students.  Everyone has a perspective to offer and experiences to teach from--while you were off developing your own thoughts, others were off developing theirs.

Ask Big Questions: The ones that probably don't have answers, or at least not clean ones.  The right question frames the entire exploration, provoking discovery of all kinds.  Discovery holds more weight than answers.  Learn to question the fundamentally accepted truths.  Learn to question the fundamentally accepted truths, break down barriers and progress to new understandings.

Make Connections: Once we understand the effect we have on people, places, ourselves, we can make informed choices based on how we want to affect people, places and ourselves.

Avoid Manipulation: Do not ask them to learn for you, but rather for themselves. Everyone must find their own entry points, the ones which inspire them, the ones that make them feel alive.  Beware of your intentions and the role you play so you do not allow someone to believe you will love them less or hate them more based on the choices they make for themselves.  

The Political:  Develop activism within education, both on the microcosmic level of how the system functions in your classroom, or school, and on the macro-cosmic level of the school system.  How are issues such as power, authority, equity, autonomy and agency being dealt with and in some cases distributed.  Work towards equity and justice both in the classroom and outside of it.

Shout for Those Who Can Only Whisper: Provide them a voice when and where they do not have one.  If possible, help them to speak for themselves.  If not, than consult with those you are speaking for.  Be careful you are relaying their wishes and thoughts, not just the voice you think serves them best.

  Facilitate: Help to negotiate the relationships between students, their parents, the community, and whoever else may be involved.  Foster respectful and constructive dialogues.

Share Power: Actively examine the role of power and authority.  Who has it? Who does not? How are these forces being used? How can they be better used? Commit yourself to sharing power and authority.  Everyone should be allowed to determine their own lives (as long as they are not hurting others).

Examine Your 'isms: Seek new ways to organize against bias.  Reflect on your own behavior and do not scare from confronting others as regards theirs.  These experiences are inevitably uncomfortable and easy enough to avoid because you are white, straight, upper middle class, educated, and physically-abled.  Remember the ways in which you are privileged and the ways in which you are not.  Consciously and continuously examine and develop your perspective on issues of bias.

Develop Citizenship: Recognize your responsibilities to teach each other, own your part in creating problems and solving them.

Collaborate: Work with others to seek varying perspectives and teamness.  Share your ideas and ask others for theirs.  Model a collective mentality; without it a collective can never form. 

You carry the weight of a precarious soul: a spirit unwilling to accept anything but its desire, spoiled with the experiences of meaning, love, and joy.  This weight may seem heavy, latent with responsibilities and commitments to yourself and others.  But you must carry it as your compass, honor it and it will be your best ally, it will keep you from going astray.

Good luck my dear and have faith that if you do your part the world will grow healthier than if you don't do your part.  So, at least there's that.  But of course you know there is so much more. You can feel it on your shoulders and in that place between your ribs.

Stay strong, stay true, stay open, and keep loving--this is a love letter after all.

Maya

 

I am a bad teacher.

Two years ago one of my first assignments in graduate school for education was to write a paper detailing my educational values, my teaching philosophy so to speak.  My professor, who to this day I still treasure as one of the classier, smarter and more caring women in the world, explained that it was this question which her professor asked her so many years back that stood as a pivotal moment in her professional thinking.  So she asked us in the hopes that it would begin us on our own roads, and if not begin than at least clarify.  I was not interested in either beginning or clarifying my road.  I climbed aboard the teaching ship when I was fifteen years old and 11 years later I was just as passionate, just as committed, just as thoughtful and just as clear as when I began.  Of course, both literature and experiences had informed my philosophy over the years, but the basic tenets, the philosophy was the same.  

I sat down at my computer a couple of times to tell my teacher what those values were, what the philosophy was, but it seemed wrong, as in useless and trite.  It didn't really matter if she knew what my philosophy was--a philosophy only really matters to the person attempting to live by it.  More than that, the whole enterprise felt trite.  Love and respect as values are powerful, but as words terribly overused and rendered void of meaning.  I decided to focus more on the point of the assignment.  It seemed to me that a written statement of one's values is not necessary while one is living according to them, when one is walking along her path, but rather terribly important when she has strayed.  There are enough seasoned and haggard teachers out there who claim their transformative intentions when they set out to terrify me of the possibility that I could one day join their ranks.   So, instead of writing an essay on my educational values to clarify my present, I wrote a love letter to my future.  Assuming that one day I risked becoming a burnt out, frustrated and confused version of myself, I wrote a letter to remind me of my beginnings, to help me find my path once more.  I never thought I would need to read it within the first month of becoming a classroom teacher.  I never thought that future would come so soon.

But in the first few weeks of teaching English to two classes of Turkish five year olds, I am remorse to say that I have become that which I hated.  I have yelled at children, I have become angry at them and with them.  I have partook in singling children out to punish them in front of their classmates.  I have demanded that they LISTEN TO ME.  SIT DOWN. SIT PROPERLY. FOLD YOUR LEGS. LOOK AT ME. HANDS IN YOUR LAP. HANDS UNDER THE TABLE.  I have demanded that they accept my version of their worlds, not because they respect me but because they are afraid of me.  I have insisted that what I deem important is important, that sitting and cutting and pasting pictures onto paper is more important than what they deem important.    I have denied them agency over their lives in "our" classroom in almost every encounter they have throughout our school days.  And as much as its hurting them, which I believe it is, it is killing me.

Fortunes

When my mother was younger she went to see a fortune teller on a whim.  At that point in her life, slightly younger than I am now, she bore a striking resemblance to me.  Not in physical features, because to her dismay I look exactly like my father, but in life choices.  My mother was a hard working, dedicated and loving elementary school teacher for the Head Start program in the South Bronx of New York City.  She was also planning to get married.  She was also whimsical, as per the visit with the fortune teller and her upcoming travels to Israel. Needless to say my mother thought the psychic was a crap-ic because he told her both that she was about to meet her future life partner, implying it was not the man she was already with, and that she would make a life for herself in sales, not education.  Putting the night aside as some silly play she went on with her life and journeyed to Israel for some fun in the sun.  But on a fatefully windy day on the beaches of Tel Aviv, my dear mother could not light her cigarette.  My father received his cue from the universe, offered her a light and some shelter from the wind.  Minus the risk of cancer, and betrayal of her man back home, I do not think there could be a more poetic beginning.  She moved in with him that week, married him a few months later, lived in Israel for half a decade and through better and worse continued their partnership over these past thirty some odd years.  God bless the wind. Oh, and when she did finally return to the United States she did stumble into a life-long career in real estate sales through another series of surprising and amusing events.  The crap-ic's crap proved not so crap-full after all.

I am sure my mother would have met my father with or without a fortune teller to predict the occurrence, but because I owe my life to this occurrence I do feel a stronger sense of camaraderie with a psychic's telling than maybe the average bear.  So, even though I was beyond exhausted last night when I got off of work, I could not resist my colleagues when they invited me to come have my Turkish coffee grinds 'read.' 

Traveling in Istanbul during rush hour is an animal of its own genus.  We took one taxi till we hit traffic, got out to walk past the jam, caught another taxi and rode till we hit the next maelstrom of cars burning oil rather than gas.  We got out, ran across a freeway (perhaps one of the most dangerous things I have ever done, and yet fairly acceptable here), and arrived at yet another hilarious play of 7 drivers who decided that their desire to go forwards, backwards and sideways into the same spot at the same time was more important than the aggravating knot they were about to incur, as well as the countless laws they were simultaneously breaking.  I could only stand there for a minute trying to extrapolate how much of a country's culture one could understand from observing their traffic patterns, before we caught one more taxi.  After two hours of traveling a laughably small distance we finally arrived at a small cafe, where a man with piercing green eyes and matching green running pants sat ready to tell us about our pasts, presents and futures. 

We drank our coffee, placed the plate on top of the cup, made three small counter clockwise circles while holding the cup and plate tight.  We then flipped it towards ourselves asking the universe, or whatever force it is who tells a man in running pants things that no stranger should know, our question.  Finding it difficult to settle on one, I tried to keep my thoughts towards professional queries, but of course my relationship with Tarkan snuck in, and so I mostly asked for direction regarding my loves...hoping the universe wouldn't feel snubbed by my greedy attempt at a twofer.

Although fortune telling is typically a personal experience between one's self and the teller, my teller spoke Turkish and unless my fortune concerned the locations of bathrooms, or the lyrics of Michael Jackson songs, I didn't think my language skills would do the trick.  So, my friend Tomris joined as my fortune translator, a title I would love to hold.   Here is what they said: in the past year and a half I have made some changes, some big changes, and they are working, or rather I am working them and beginning to see the difference.  But a dark man, dark in character but also dark in complexion, who lived far away from me hurt me a year ago, he damaged me, betrayed me.  My first piece of psychic advice, "stay away." He told me I have a strong personality and have been able to recover from most of this hardship but again, I should "stay away."  To me, it was an obvious and seemingly unnecessary warning--and yet still portentous, as if there may be a time when I wont be able to keep my distance, like a run-in at a restaurant.  Or an unknown mutual friend.  The psychic found Tarkan in my little coffee cup, he found our meeting and our love and our worries and our future daughter, who we will meet in around two years.  All hiding in shades of muddy brown.  He saw our engagement and our wedding which he predicts will happen around April or May.  And he saw my careers, because he saw two: teaching and writing.  Moreover, he saw that my writing will be about my life, but because my life is also about teaching my writing will also be about learning.

He asked me to pick a number between one and five, and make a wish.  I wished for the security and confidence in my decisions, for the ability to have faith in my directions.  He looked a bit confused for a moment and then asked me if I had made more than one wish, perhaps two or three.  Busted again by my greedy ways I confessed, explaining that they all seemed terribly connected in my mind.  He asked if I had guessed the number three, which I had, and told me all three of my wishes would come true.  So, I guess the universe is more understanding after all.  Understanding, all knowing, disturbing and delightful.  

Flushed by the accuracy of his detailing of my past, and excited about the prospect of my future I returned to the cafe table to absorb.  There were no shockers, there was no future partner I was about to meet, or profession in sales I would leave teaching for.  Only some warnings to heed and inspiration to pursue.  I came home and decided to write.  I've been writing all day.  Perhaps I would've written without the encouragement of a fortune teller telling me to, but perhaps my mother would not have been open to the idea of meeting her future partner if her psychic hadn't told her she would.  Fate's such a funny little friend...sometimes.

T.I.T. (This is Turkey)

Tonight, after leaving my friends house in Tunel, a part of Istanbul with a view that makes you wonder why anybody would ever live anywhere else, Tarkan and I walked up a hill to catch the tram that runs down the busiest/liveliest street in this excessively busy/lively town.  A charming ride for people watching and convenience, slowly careening down a convuluted street the Turkish tram is probably the best way to get from point A to point B.  That is until your tram runs over a dog--or god-willing a dog's tail.  Cause the way I figure it, to hear a dog scream that loudly and for that long and with that much suffering (a cry that I think will haunt me for years to come) meant both that the dog had been run over, but also that the dog was in sufficient enough condition to continue to scream.  So I'm thinking a tail.  I'm also thinking "T.I.T.--This Is Turkey."  The tram stopped a couple feet past for some pedestrians to scream at the tram driver, tourists to smile awkwardly, for me to cry a little and Tarkan to make his trademark response: "its not real, its not real." And because this is turkey, within a few minutes all was forgotten and the journey continued.  

Working hard to put the incident behind me and return to our lovely evening together I was elated to learn that I know enough Turkish to translate some of Michael Jackson's foremost love ballads into lumpy Turkish songs.  Naturally, I began serenading Tarkan on the underground metro with "Saat Hatirla misin? Ne zaman ask olduk? Saat Hatirla zaman? Ne zaman ilk tanisdik, yeah!" (Do you remember the time when we fell in love, do you remember the time when we first met, yeah) And yes I do remember the time both when Tarkan and I fell in love (because it was not so long ago) and when Magic Johnson dressed up like a pharoah, because for over a decade now that disturbing and brilliant image has run like a seamless backdrop through my demented little head.  

The night was beginning to pick up again, unphased by the smell of body odor on the train, Tarkan and I decided to buy some chocolate pudding from the new bakery near our house and mix it up with some milk to make the closest thing to a milkshake we could find in Turkiye. Still giggling from my latest rendition of "I'm bad, I'm bad, bunu biliyorson" the baker made some sick comment about me and sweets and sex...because this is turkey.   Needless to say Tarkan who does not look Turkish, but definitely is Turkish, understood.  Which is also why I am sitting here writing you this little vignette about our lovely night out while he goes back to the bakery to tell them off and teach them a lesson and other strange sayings about potentially scary, slightly manly, but mostly bizarre experiences.  My only hope is that no body loses a tail...and I can start a Turkish MJ cover band...and that the milkpudding tastes good...and for world peace.

night night,

love maya  (do it)