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It was bullshit. I took for granted that it had been ten years since I had to take Math. And while I knew that bringing their interests into the classroom would invest my students in their work, I did not yet understand what it meant to be a good teacher. I did not know how to help them do well.

I had to take Math again first.

Let me explain my life. As well as an adjunct, I'm a writer, MFA grad, who returned to school for certification upon realizing I prefer the classroom to the writing desk. Pretty early in my first semester, I got the bad news - I needed three more credits in Math.

"Math?" said my mother. "But you're an English teacher!"

I just nodded, well trained in jumping the flaming hoops of academia.

The first day of Math class, I was late. I was late to the second class too. And the third. And the fourth. Back in the day - I wouldn't have dared be late to any class. But now, my life was too full. I had stacks of papers to grade. I had yoga. I couldn't go to Math class with my chakras out of whack and my third eye off center, now could I?

Every morning, I trudged in, head hanging, feeling like a jackass. The students - all ten years younger than me - looked at me like I was a jackass. I waited to hear my teacher, Prof. Nitica, reprimand me. But every morning, he said nothing.

Within a few weeks, I realized that was Prof. Nitica. He never gave anyone a hard time. Not the obnoxious music major rockstars-in-training that talked all during class. Not the dim-witted sports who gazed out the window instead of paying attention.

The material was not. It was all logic, truth tables, and these geometric anomalies called Euler paths - stuff I couldn't explain to you now if I tried. But I could do it. Because Prof. Nitica organized the material so efficiently that everyone did well.

We worked like dogs for the first few weeks. Then just before midterm, the homework and tests stopped. We completed small in-class assignments until midterm ended. One day in class, it dawned on me what he was doing. He was testing us when we were at our best.

In order to pass each test, I had to study for - at least - a full afternoon. That's really not asking too much of a student. That's a gift - compared to how things were when I was an undergrad. Thanks to those little in-class assignments and the practice tests, I knew exactly what was on each test.

This repetition helped me the most. In class, Prof. Nitica was like a broken record. He repeated himself so much, he sometimes dropped the tone of his voice, mimicking a robot. Nobody laughed. But I always shot him a grateful smile.

When it came to Math, I needed to hear the same lesson over and over again. It was as if I'd moved to Mexico and tried to learn Spanish by immersion. On the third try, I'd hear the roots of what I already knew and begin to make sense of the language.

By the end of the semester, I was skipping yoga to make it to Math on time. I had an A-plus in the class. On my desk at home sat a pile of scrap paper - notes I'd been taking on how to revise my English class.

Every teacher is taught the importance of empathy, structure and repetition in the classroom. However, it's hard to understand why these components work when you are a master of the subject. Most teachers are lucky enough to love what they teach. Most students don't love what they learn. That's a pretty big gap to fill in forty-five minutes.

Prof. Nitica taught me one way to bridge that gap. In his math class, he cared about what mattered most. What mattered most was that his students did well. Once I became one of those students, I saw how much it mattered to me too.

Saturday, September 19, 2009

Home is Wherever I'm with You

Around this time last year, I ran into an old high school acquaintance at the gym.

"Hi Anney," he said. "Are you home from Boston?"

"No, I moved back. For good."

He stepped back and scowled "Why?" he asked. Like the idea of moving from a hip city like Boston to bumf--- Phoenixville, Pennsylvania was absurd. Like I was really uncool. Like we were back in high school again.

"Because it's my home," I stammered. It was the best I could do at that moment. Flustered and embarrassed, I walked away.

That was a year ago.

I still remember exactly where I was when I decided to move home: a train station in Leeds, UK. Out the window, Leeds looked like a crap town to me. But people poured out of the train. I saw moms and grandmoms, businessmen, teenagers, recent college grads on their cellies, even sleek pretty ladies in power suits. Why, I wondered, are these people here? They could live anywhere! Why here?

A voice answered from the back of my head: Because it's their home. Their family and friends are here. So what if it's an ugly town? Buildings can be torn down. It's people that make a place.

Oh my God, I thought. I am so lonely. I need to move home.

If my life was a movie, the credits would've rolled as I planed back to the states. There would be a montage of scenes, showing me starting over. Packing liquor boxes with books and candles. Driving Yoshi onto the Mass Pike, headed south. Dragging my bags up my parents' driveway. Walking across Molly Maguire's to hug my friends hello. Driving to Phoenixville Hospital in the rain, and stepping into the room where my BFF of 22 years just gave birth to her daughter. "Home" by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros would play. "Home, yes I am home, Home is wherever I'm with you." There would be the prevailing "happily ever after" feeling, like everything would be fine now.

My life is no movie.

Shortly after I moved back, everything went to shit. Jobs disappeared. Next, money. I couldn't afford to move out of my parents' house. Try living in a house with five other adults. Scratch that. Make that five other adults that are part of your family. See how much you get done. Answer: Not much.

Our house is a four bedroom Colonial. For the past year, I've camped out on my sister's floor. The fiction book I've been writing has lay in scraps of paper, piled up under her bed. My clothes, balled and wrinkled, in a Tupperware bin behind the door. To be fair, my sister was incredibly welcoming. She treated the room like it was ours, instantly. She was way more gracious than I would've been. But still. It's hard to get your life together when there's nowhere to organize it, besides the floor.

All over the house, there were signs of it being overcapacity. The fridge door never closed right. Inside, there were four different kinds of milk. Mom's lunch chicken. Matthew's rice. Moira's yogurt. My tofu. Racks of clothes hung along the upstairs hallway. Almost every night, I'd get up to use the bathroom and stumble into one of the racks. All the clothes would fall to the floor. Every morning, we fought each other for the shower. Sunglasses and keys were lost. Nobody ever got their mail.

So, yeah. Be careful what you wish for. In four months, I became the polar opposite of lonely. I couldn't get a peace of mind.

From time to time, the question resurfaced. Anney -- Why did you move back home? With it, came this awful shadowy monstrous doubt. What if I made the wrong choice?

Last winter, I got proactive. I started taking classes to get certified to teach secondary ed. Classes rejuvenated me in a way that story publications never ever could. Yet I continued to stress out. It was impossible to cram all of my new interests into a single day. I started to wonder if happiness was impossible too.

Then, this one horrible day, it came to me.

It was late last January. I was rushing around in the morning, late for class. It was snowy out. I was racing back inside from scraping off my car, when my one leg flew out from under me. My right leg went one way, my left, the other - 'til I was breaking a split in the middle of our front hall. I got up and realized that I'd pulled muscles from the sole of my foot up through my calf and thigh, to my ass.

Did I email my professors, telling them of my injury? No way. I drove the snowy thirty minute drive with two feet. I hobbled around campus. I held up lines of people on the stairs.

Halfway through the day, I found out that I'd been denied financial aid. This meant that I had to pay for five classes straight outta my pocket. Then, I failed a test. Spilled food on my favorite shirt. Broke my ipod. You name it, it happened. Driving home that night, I got pulled over on route 113 and was given a ticket for speeding five miles over the limit.

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Saturday, September 19, 2009

Home is Wherever I'm with You