Category: Writing

Since I’ve dedicated this summer to being a full-time artist, my main creative outlet has been writing since I work my second novel daily and nearly everything I read somehow flavors that manuscript. Additionally, I finally found the time to reflect on my first two years of teaching at an Austin public school, which has been the most challenging teaching situation I’ve ever faced.

I wrote an essay, called “Monochromatic Butterfly: How Teaching to High-Stakes Testing Leads to Teacher Mediocrity.” Although I started working on this essay a few days after school was out in early June, I did not finish the first round of editing until The Fourth of July.  I thought that was an appropriate time to email what was essentially a two-page protest about my current teaching situation to about 30 friends, the majority of whom were educators or had been. I requested that they email me their reaction to the essay. I made a special request to friends who happened to be English teachers and/or writers to edit the essay.

My goal was to send my polished essay with the AISD superintendent and Lloyd Doggett, but a few friends suggested that I send it to a few major newspapers as an op-ed piece.  One friend, a journalist, recommended that I interview other teachers and throw in some stats.  I laughed at the latter suggestion since I know that people lie with statistics all the time.  I don’t want to adulterate myessay with that deviltry!

In the meantime, I was amazed at some of my friends’ passionate response to “Monochromatic Butterfly.” I emailed them back, asking permission to add their unedited reaction to my essay in its entirety.  This would at least give other educators’ voices, chorusing in harmony with my main point: high-stakes testing leads to mediocrity, both among students and teachers.

With so much emphasis on the test, students mainly prepare through rote memorization and the “new strategy” that my school tried this past school year was to standardized the lesson plans as well.

I was horrified that things had worsened.  My love for teaching had only lasted this long due to my freedom to be creative in the classroom while teaching the curriculum. Take away creative freedom and I might as well do some other less stressful job that pays more. (I know a few passionless accountants who make more money and have less stress than I do!)

Whatever happens as a result of “Monochromatic Butterfly” at least it has provided me a creative outlet to vent and share my opinon. Sometimes, just getting things off my chest is just the thing I need to continue pursuing happiness.

I love the part of summer vacation where I start to lose track of the days.  Thank God, I have a smart phone where I can input all the things that I’m going to do on a calendar! I made up my mind not to work, study nor change apartments over the summer; so now I have a wonderful routine of daily writing, and going to either yoga, capoeira or swimming–along with going out dancing when there’s a good venue to do so.

Everyone who knows that I’m on summer break always makes some jealous comment about hating teachers’ summer break, but I gently remind them that they don’t envy us the other 9 1/2 months! After teaching for 15 years, I finally understand how to use these weeks of unstructured time wisely.  There’s always this tease of studying, working and or moving during the summer because “I have the time,” but this is the first time in a long time that I’m using my summer vacation for something that I normally leave town and go on vacation for: reading.

I know I sound like the typical nerdy teacher, but I’ve got lists of books that I’m determined to plow through and the maddening thing is that the more I read, the more books I put on the list.  Even when I try to curb myself, I still think that now’s the time to do so since “I have the time.” One interesting thing that I’ve noticed in my concentration of reading is how many times I run across the word “struggle.”

That may not seem significant, but one of the characters in my latest novel is named Struggle.  I never outline the chapters of my story or even the overall outline of the book, which would be a wonderful and logical thing to do, but it’s just not ever worked for me.  What has worked very well is writing every single day.  That way, no matter how little or much I write, I’m advancing the story.  I like to humor myself that I’m coming up with the advancing chapters “organically,” but now that I have a serious reduction of stress in my life, I can make even more connections between the various things that I’m reading, which spans a wide range of interests from the Bible, theoretical physics and sexuality, especially women’s sexuality.  In all of those topics, there’s a mention of “struggling.” I never pondered how struggle was such a universal theme in life.  I guess it’s pretty ironic that Struggle is the most laid-back character in the book so far.

I’ve not organically come up with an ending to the story yet.  That’s sort of the gift of my approach to writing fiction.  When I finally reconcile with my subconscious about some new insight, it’s the most amazing feeling.  It’s not often I get to surprise myself in everyday life, but I do increase the frequency through writing.  Occasionally, when I have something stressful weighing on my mind, I go swimming and intuit a solution. Yet, when I write, I never know where the story’s going to take me.

This is truly a vacation.

Fire drill pranks…food fights…final exams. Yes, this school year’s coming to an end.  I was so anxious to be over and done with this school year, that I took it upon myself to write the final exams for both the science subjects that I teach–much to the surprise of the other teachers since we were supposed to divide up the work and all write a part of the final.  At times like these, I remind myself that if Moses was a committee, then the slaves would still be in Egypt.

Even though I’m bringing the 15th school year of my teaching career to a close, I still become giddy with anticipation of nearly 3 months of unstructured time.  I have big plans of finishing my second novel’s rough draft, exercising more, promoting my first novel through readings and business-card dropping and reading even more than I already do.

Beside my nightstand, I have a pile of books and magazines that I read through every day.  I no longer have the patience to simply have a pile of books that I’m going to get to. Actually, I still have THAT pile on my desk, but I’m referring to the pile of reading material that I’m actually reading through on a daily rotation. I’m sure there’s some neurosis that describes people who do that, but I like to humor myself as an eclectic reader who enjoys reading a wide variety of stuff on a daily basis.  At least I always have something interesting to talk about. Even if it’s the fact that for the past 6 weeks or so, my pile of reading material consists of the Bible at the bottom and another enlightening book called Cunt on the top. My ritual is to transfer the intact pile from my nightstand to my bed and as I read a little from each, I then place them back onto the nightstand.  I always start with the Bible, which is never taken out of rotation no matter how many times I read it.

Two things that are being temporarily taken out of rotation are my Spanish conversational and tango classes.  I love those classes, but the flip side of taking classes is that that time is always obligated to those activities.  So part of my stay-cation is doing some different things that I couldn’t do before since I was in those classes.  I’m so glad that I have a good Spanish grammar book, which is going in the reading pile (as if you couldn’t see that one coming!) and I’m at the point in my tango dancing abilities that I can dance competently at a milonga, which I plan to attend on a regular basis so my skills won’t languish.  One insightful thing I learned in my over-a-year studying of tango is the alternative interpretation of “it takes two to tango.” 

At first blush, one thinks of two people, the leader and the follower. Recently, I went to tango class after drinking a margarita and a glass of wine and danced very well.  So, I now think: it takes two (drinks) to tango.

Another useful piece of tango advice I heard while doing a grueling 3-day, 5-hour tango workshop was:  “The man will be the king when the woman becomes the queen.” Again, at first glance, tango appears to be the most chauvinistic social dance, but as all men, whether beginner or advanced, realize, he cannot accomplish anything without the woman’s cooperation.  And as in life, women are much more cooperative to the point of bending over backwards in sexy clothing and stylish shoes if she’s happy.  When’s the last time you heard a group of men talking about how easy it is to make a woman happy?  Such is life and so is tango. When it’s all the man’s responsibility to do something, then he gets all the blame when anything goes wrong.

The two classes I’m continuing are bikram yoga and capoeira.  As a matter of fact, now that I’m going to have 3 months of mostly unstructured time, I’ll have the chance to do yoga at least twice a week rather than just once as my busy, school’s-in-session schedule would allow. I marvel at people who are my age and older who don’t do yoga.  I don’t know how they manage to walk upright without constant back pain.

Now it may seem contadictory to practice capoeira if I’m concerned with back pain, but I love how capoeira keeps me in shape, especially my legs and butt although other women tend to notice my arms. I’ve heard from male friends that they notice too, but they claim they are not generally free to compliment a woman on her body since they run the risk of being slapped.  I think something’s definitely wrong with the world since we have so many bad words to refer to a woman, but hardly ever receive a compliment since a man is afraid of bodily harm.  Why isn’t the opposite the norm?

Fortunately, I’ll have plenty of time to contemplate that along with a host of many other questions I’ve not even thought of yet after Thursday!  I officially kick off my vacation with a reading.  Afterwards, who knows?

Last Saturday, I called my mother.  As soon as she answered, I enthusiastically said, “Happy Mother’s Day!”  She hesitated a moment before saying, “Today’s not Mother’s Day.”  I happily responded, “I know.  I just wanted to practice!” She laughed for a solid minute, which was a far more valuable gift than the one that showed up a week later in the mail.

I usually call my mother at least once a week, but I knew the competition would be fierce on the actual day among my two older sisters and me.  As I correctly guessed, Mom had a full day planned and truthfully, this weekend was quite busy for me as well.  Mom always assumes that when she calls and has to leave a message that I’m out dancing.  And I love the way she says it: You must be out DAN-cing–with much emphasis on the first syllable, full of joy and wishful thinking.  For this weekend, she was correct.

I literally kicked off my weekend on Friday evening by doing a capoeira performance at a heritage program sponsored by my school.  I had worn my capoeira uniform to school and showed all my classes a few videos from my group during the last ten minutes of class.  Many of my students had never heard of capoeira; so I took advantage of the teachable moment.

Before my performance, I had the pleasure of meeting Lloyd Doggett, who came to make opening remarks at the start of the program.  I walked right up to him, introduced myself  as a science teacher and asked if he’d take a picture with me.  I have no idea if he hung around to watch my group play capoeira or not, but one of his people took a picture of us as well. I hope they use the picture to show how diverse teachers’ hobbies are.

Since only a few capoeiristas showed up, each of us had to play a lot.  Two things I learned from this: I need to practice playing more in our training rodas in order to build up stamina and I need to attend more capoeira music classes.   A few times, I had to drum in order to let another capoeirista play in the roda.  Let’s just say that not all Black people have natural rhythm!

Afterwards, I dashed off to the gym to do my usual Friday night lap swim.  Even though most Fridays I feel pretty drained, a good swim truly does wonders for my back and knees.

Saturday morning, I spent nearly two hours painting on my balcony while talking to my mother.  It was almost too much of a good thing since I had to make a mad dash to an all day salsa workshop.  I’d learned my lesson last fall about attending a dance workshop three days in a row. So, I figured five hours of salsa wouldn’t be too bad, right? 

The first class I attended was about musicality.  I enjoyed how the instructor dissected the music, isolating each rhythm found in most salsa songs. He gave us a different dance step to do with each and at the end of the class, we practiced the whole routine that we’d practiced to a real song.

The second class I attended was Dominican bachata, which I now know is my absolute favorite version of the dance.  When I first saw people doing bachata here in Austin, I looked around to see if anyone else was alarmed at the pornographic gyration going on.  Up until then, I thought I’d lost all the prudishness I’d adopted while living in Egypt, but apparently I had some reserves.  The Dominican bachata is the traditional style with a lot of footwork, yet looks far more sensual.

By the time I hit the third class in a row, I was just about at my absorption point, which meant that it was not an ideal time to take a shine class.  Shines are supposed to add flavor to your basic salsa.  By the end of the class, my salsa flavor was “lost-in thyme”. I knew the moves, but just couldn’t get my body to cooperate.  I was tired and hungry. The instuctors, who happened to be brothers, kept hyping us with yelps of encouragement as they drilled us through the routine, but as I glanced around at my fellow salsa zombies, I decided to put myself out of misery.

A friend and I beat the crowd to the bar to order food and just relax before another two hours of classes.  Somewhat refreshed after lunch, I attended my fourth class, pachanga.  I’d never heard of it before, which was my main motivation for taking the class.  Someone had told me that panchanga was a variation of chacha. That’s like saying a Ferrari is a variation of a car.   And you pretty much have to move that quickly to dance pachanga. I do better in a samba class when it comes to dancing at warp speed.

Finally, I ended the day with a bonafide chacha class with the distinction that this chacha class had the word “funk” in it.  Unlike the first time I took a cardiofunk aerobic class, I wasn’t the only Black person in the room and the other students didn’t consult me on how to do the steps. The “funk” was a wonderful assortment of dance moves that voluptuous women with capoeira-toned butts love doing: dramatically swaying the booty from right to left; spinning around quickly and stopping with one hip up; body wave; body wave to the cha-cha-cha beat; and my personal favorite, the side-to-side samba step that gets the booty undulating while rocking. 

Never has taking a shower, followed by a nap felt so good.  As a matter of fact, I consider taking a nap part of my getting ready to go out routine.  I put on my black belly dancing pants and a beautifully embroidered, sleeveless Indian top and returned to the hotel for the salsa show and dance party.  The show featured salsero groups from around the world, who did the most stunning moves.  One group in particular even did some quasi-cirque du soleil moves, tossing the women up in the air and stylishly catching the before they crashed to the floor. 

After the show, we all exited so the room could be prepared for the dance party.  Basically, most of the chairs and recording equipment had to be moved.  Instead of having one big dance floor, there were about four or five portable wooden dance floors, which naturally provided carpeted pathways throughout the ballroom. I met my dancing quota within two and a half hours–scarcely using a single move I’d learned in five hours of salsa classes.  I left around 1:30 since I wanted to have enough energy to make it to my 10 am yoga class on Sunday.

As I figured, I played phone tag with my mother and one of my sisters on Mother’s Day, but Mom’s message sounded happy as she detailed how she was enjoying her day.  After yoga, I normally clean my apartment, wash clothes and then chill…but not today.  To round out the weekend, I attended one more dance workshop: milonga. 

There are three distinct tango rhythms: tango, vals (waltz) and milonga.  Milonga is the peppier of the three and when done improperly, one  hops from one step to the next.  The guest instructor was from Buenos Aires just like my regular tango teachers.  He was charming, funny and had an eagle eye when it came to correcting our errors. 

It’s misleading to think that I can both salsa and tango well.  Truth is, I step too widely when I salsa and too narrowly when I tango, but I’m too stubborn to give up one or the other to become really good at either.  I know my destiny doesn’t lie in becoming a professional dancer. I dance to be sociable although it’s safe to say that I over-frolicked this weekend, especially if you consider capoeira a dance.

Thank goodness I have to go to work tomorrow.  I need the rest.