September 24: It was so hot that no classroom turned on their lights today so they wouldn’t add any extra degrees. At recess, I had the spray bottle and they surrounded me. I felt like I was fending off a hoard of zombies with nothing but a sawed off shotgun. It got a little easier when I told them they had to compliment me in order to get sprayed. “You’re pretty!” Nancy yelled. “You’re the best teacher in the school!” Allisson added. “I know where you live!” L’madja yelled.
September 25: It was hotter than yesterday and Ana turned the hose on the children. They loved it, and when they were soaked, they surrounded me and group hugged me until I was just as drenched as they were. The more I shouted at how slimy they all felt, the tighter they hugged me.
September 26: Allisson came to visit me in the bungalow during snack again. She brought in some artwork to show to me. She drew Trump’s wall, a mass of bricks with curled barbed wire stretched across the top. Above it all, she drew a dozen of butterflied flying free, so high that the sharp edges couldn’t touch them.
September 27: Jai’von has been drawing portraits of people in his class. When we were waiting for his mom, he showed me his illustrations of Luna, Umali, and Milo. I jokingly asked him when he was goin to draw me. He answered that he hadn’t done that yet because he doesn’t know how to draw pimples.
September 28: Every time I think about the holiday season coming up, I fill with dread knowing that it means I will need to interact with his family. That’s how bad this situation has gotten. I’m literally scared of holidays.
September 29: I’m only a few months into 30 and I’m already having back problems. I think I have a pinched nerve. It feels fine when I’m not doing much, but if I turn, a wave of pain shoots through my entire spine. It woke me up multiple times last night and has succeeded in convincing me that I might actually have a spinal injury and that in the morning, I might wake up and find my body paralyzed from the neck down.
September 30: Edwin dropped our program and I have another new student. Her name is Cynthia and she moved here this week. Her teacher assured me she will be a great addition to my program, which I’m sure she is, but I’m having trouble keeping up with how much my class roster keeps changing.
much love,
hedgie
Monday, September 30, 2019
Monday, September 23, 2019
a toilet that poops butts
September 17: When Kiara is my last kid, we play a game while waiting for her mom to show up. All she has to do is not laugh. She hasn’t been able to go over ten seconds without erupting into giggles. I don’t even have to do anything, she just can’t contain her laughter. I suspect she even giggles in her sleep.
September 18: We are entirely out of bouncy balls except for the one that is roughly the same size as a kinder student. We started out the school year with one for each class. But each week, one kid gets angry during recess and purposefully kicks it over the fence to get back at the people annoying them. It isn’t until the next recess the day after that they realize that means they have nothing to play with now either.
September 19: My kids are obsessed with the weirdest things about people. They don’t care to know what I do when I go home or what I majored in when I was in college. But they do insist on knowing what tea I have in my thermos every day.
September 20: Turns out my fourth graders will gladly sit down to do their homework if there is a timer set for ten minutes and they try to challenge themselves to finish before the alarm goes off. Not sure why they seem to think it’s fun, but they are weirdly their best behaved when I’m forcing them to do their math sheets.
September 21: Nick told our Google Home to play fall music. It found a playlist made on YouTube. Half an hour in, it played a song about how effortlessly beautiful a woman was. It described the stars in her eyes and the thrill of touching her. It started making me cry, knowing that songs like that are never written about girls like me.
September 22: I don’t know if it’s because of the personal therapy and getting confirmation that I am not crazy, but I can feel all my sadness making a transition into anger. Anger that people thought it was okay to treat me this way for so long and anger that I had accepted it too.
September 23: To introduce the “Our Stories: Circles of Me” unit, I had them play Three-headed story teller. It’s a game where groups of people have to work together to tell a story. Each person can only say one and they take turns as if they were a three-headed monster in a King Arthur story. Their story ended up going: A poop cat named Turdface Butt lived in a doghouse with a toilet that pooped butts. I’m not sure what else I expected.
much love,
hedgie
September 18: We are entirely out of bouncy balls except for the one that is roughly the same size as a kinder student. We started out the school year with one for each class. But each week, one kid gets angry during recess and purposefully kicks it over the fence to get back at the people annoying them. It isn’t until the next recess the day after that they realize that means they have nothing to play with now either.
September 19: My kids are obsessed with the weirdest things about people. They don’t care to know what I do when I go home or what I majored in when I was in college. But they do insist on knowing what tea I have in my thermos every day.
September 20: Turns out my fourth graders will gladly sit down to do their homework if there is a timer set for ten minutes and they try to challenge themselves to finish before the alarm goes off. Not sure why they seem to think it’s fun, but they are weirdly their best behaved when I’m forcing them to do their math sheets.
September 21: Nick told our Google Home to play fall music. It found a playlist made on YouTube. Half an hour in, it played a song about how effortlessly beautiful a woman was. It described the stars in her eyes and the thrill of touching her. It started making me cry, knowing that songs like that are never written about girls like me.
September 22: I don’t know if it’s because of the personal therapy and getting confirmation that I am not crazy, but I can feel all my sadness making a transition into anger. Anger that people thought it was okay to treat me this way for so long and anger that I had accepted it too.
September 23: To introduce the “Our Stories: Circles of Me” unit, I had them play Three-headed story teller. It’s a game where groups of people have to work together to tell a story. Each person can only say one and they take turns as if they were a three-headed monster in a King Arthur story. Their story ended up going: A poop cat named Turdface Butt lived in a doghouse with a toilet that pooped butts. I’m not sure what else I expected.
much love,
hedgie
Monday, September 16, 2019
too much power
September 9: Mr. Diego has been sent around the different classrooms to watch how all of us teach and keep order in our rooms. My kids scare him the most so far. Apparently, without any prompting, Luna turned to him and told him that ruining lives was kid of her thing.
September 10: At the end of recess, our students separated to go to their electives. All the girls in my Girl Power swarmed towards me, screaming. Vivi thought it was hilarious that I was momentarily worried about my safety. She told me next time to hold up my hands and yell, “Too much power! Too much power!”
September 11: My kids begged me to show them videos of the 9/11 Twin Tower attacks. I told them I didn’t really feel comfortable doing that because watching that kind of thing is very different for the people who lived through that time. I didn’t want to relive how I watched footage of the towers falling when I was pouring a bowl of cereal for breakfast, how so many of my friends were kept home from school that day, how none of my teachers seemed to know what to do and we spent most of the class periods that day watching the news on the TVs that hung in the corner of the room. Miss Connie told us how she was actually talking on the phone with a friend in New York when it happened. The line suddenly went dead and then she turned to a TV and saw what was happening. Miss Jen was at her house when a friend came running in, screaming “We’re under attack! We’re under attack!” My kids seemed disappointed by my response, but by the time it was snack, they had forgotten they wanted to see it at all.
September 12: Today, I was upstaged by a worm. Ms. Mesa needed the classroom during electives, so I had to teach Girl Power in Precita Park. The lesson was quickly ignored when we sat in the grass and a girl found a worm in a patch of dirt. They all swarmed around it and ignored me. It got to the point where I picked it up and moved it to a new dirt patch, which made them all scream with disgust that I was touching it. For the rest of the lesson, when they thought I wasn’t looking, pairs of them would try to sneak off to the new dirt patch to get another peek at it.
September 13: Orlando was not invited to be a Jr. Coach again this year, but a lot of kids in his class were. He’s been talking about it all week, wondering why this was happening to him. I felt bad and invented a new job for him during program. He will help Mr. Diego get the play equipment before recess starts, help distribute them, and be in charge of collecting it all and putting it back in the shed. When I asked him if this was something he would be interested in, he got so excited. He gave me the biggest smile and hugged me. I need to hold onto the smile for awhile because I have a feeling before the end of the week I am going to want to throw his phone out the window while he watches.
September 14:
September 16: I put “Heads Up” as one of my play centers when homework is done. There’s about a hundred cards for them to choose from and act out, but they choose the same dozen nouns over and over again. One of them is the song “Single Ladies” by Beyonce. They sang it so much that they asked me to play the music video for them. While watching it, I remembered all the stupid drama about it that happened between Kanye West and Taylor Swift during the MTV Music Video Awards. One of my kids noticed the post date of this video was in 2008. “Wow,” she said. “That’s the year I was born.” I have never felt older.
much love,
hedgie
September 10: At the end of recess, our students separated to go to their electives. All the girls in my Girl Power swarmed towards me, screaming. Vivi thought it was hilarious that I was momentarily worried about my safety. She told me next time to hold up my hands and yell, “Too much power! Too much power!”
September 11: My kids begged me to show them videos of the 9/11 Twin Tower attacks. I told them I didn’t really feel comfortable doing that because watching that kind of thing is very different for the people who lived through that time. I didn’t want to relive how I watched footage of the towers falling when I was pouring a bowl of cereal for breakfast, how so many of my friends were kept home from school that day, how none of my teachers seemed to know what to do and we spent most of the class periods that day watching the news on the TVs that hung in the corner of the room. Miss Connie told us how she was actually talking on the phone with a friend in New York when it happened. The line suddenly went dead and then she turned to a TV and saw what was happening. Miss Jen was at her house when a friend came running in, screaming “We’re under attack! We’re under attack!” My kids seemed disappointed by my response, but by the time it was snack, they had forgotten they wanted to see it at all.
September 12: Today, I was upstaged by a worm. Ms. Mesa needed the classroom during electives, so I had to teach Girl Power in Precita Park. The lesson was quickly ignored when we sat in the grass and a girl found a worm in a patch of dirt. They all swarmed around it and ignored me. It got to the point where I picked it up and moved it to a new dirt patch, which made them all scream with disgust that I was touching it. For the rest of the lesson, when they thought I wasn’t looking, pairs of them would try to sneak off to the new dirt patch to get another peek at it.
September 13: Orlando was not invited to be a Jr. Coach again this year, but a lot of kids in his class were. He’s been talking about it all week, wondering why this was happening to him. I felt bad and invented a new job for him during program. He will help Mr. Diego get the play equipment before recess starts, help distribute them, and be in charge of collecting it all and putting it back in the shed. When I asked him if this was something he would be interested in, he got so excited. He gave me the biggest smile and hugged me. I need to hold onto the smile for awhile because I have a feeling before the end of the week I am going to want to throw his phone out the window while he watches.
September 14:
Thinking back on my characters in Panning for Pyrite, they all seemed trapped between two worlds, not sure where they fit in. Olivia is caught in between countries, too dark to pass for American and too disconnected from her roots to be Filipino. Miles is caught in between where he is and where he wants to be, full of dreams of travel and love, but stuck in a dead-end job and taking care of his estranged father. Irving is caught between this world and the next, feeling guilty for surviving when others didn’t and feeling like he didn’t deserve this extra opportunity.
Songs: Olivia“Wish I could Forget” and “Not Dead Yet” by The Weepies
Miles, “In the Meantime” by The Ditty Bops
Irving, “Roscoe” by Midlake
September 15: It’s impossible to ignore when this much time has passed. How could it be possible for this number of people to dislike me for over a decade if there wasn’t something deeply unlovable about me? It feels like I am begging them to treat me with basic human kindness and they find that too much to ask for. I get all the pressure to do all the work to make things better. Then when I can’t fix a two-way relationship on my own, I get all the blame. I am automatically set up for failure and there is nothing I can do about it.Miles, “In the Meantime” by The Ditty Bops
Irving, “Roscoe” by Midlake
September 16: I put “Heads Up” as one of my play centers when homework is done. There’s about a hundred cards for them to choose from and act out, but they choose the same dozen nouns over and over again. One of them is the song “Single Ladies” by Beyonce. They sang it so much that they asked me to play the music video for them. While watching it, I remembered all the stupid drama about it that happened between Kanye West and Taylor Swift during the MTV Music Video Awards. One of my kids noticed the post date of this video was in 2008. “Wow,” she said. “That’s the year I was born.” I have never felt older.
much love,
hedgie
Sunday, September 8, 2019
there's literally nothing i can do about it
September 1: The couple in the apartment next door brought their newborn baby home from the hospital today. We saw the husband while we were walking Addie and he wondered if we had been hearing the baby through the walls. He seemed surprised that we hadn’t noticed anything different. “Well, let me know if it ever gets too loud for you guys,” he told us. “But there’s literally nothing I can do about it.”
September 2: George and I walked ahead of Nick and Addie. Nick told me later that while that happened, Addie was watching us the whole time. He said that a woman passed by us and she gave a soft growl. Because I have been in San Francisco so long, it took a few more seconds of conversation for me to realize that Nick meant that Addie had growled, not the woman who passed me.
September 3: Before he walked home, David made a point of coming into my classroom to hug me goodbye. I miss him in my class so much.
September 4: It was a dramatic time during day school. One of the teachers got ringworm and the police were called when the people on behavior duty couldn’t find two lost students who turned out to be in a classroom the entire time.
September 5: My class got a punishment of practicing lining up for two minutes during recess when they kept trying to shove each other off the benches attached to the lunch tables. When I announced that, one boy screamed “fuck!” right in my ear. I thought it was Dea’madja and he spent his recess with Miss Melissa, proclaiming his innocence. I found out I had accused the wrong kid when Mauricio was overheard bragging that Dea’madja was getting in trouble for something he had done. Vivi was right. That kid is sneaky.
September 6: Every Friday during snack, I pull out two raffle tickets from the prize box. Every Friday, my kids want to be the ones to pick the tickets, but I don’t let them. I tell them that this is because raffle drawings are one of the few things I do that doesn’t make them upset and I’m not giving that away. The truth is that I pre-plan which two students will win the drawing every week. There’s a secret pouch where I put the pre-selected winning tickets so that I can hold the box over my head to prove I’m not peeking. I’m surprised that none of them have picked up on the fact that everyone in the class wins once before anyone wins a second time.
September 7: When I meet people for the first time, after finding out their name, I try to get to know them a little. I ask them what their job is or how they know the person we are there to celebrate. The first thing people ask me is about what race I am, like that is the most important factor to figuring out who I am as a person. A lot of times, they way they word it is hurtful. They ask “What are you?” And every time, I just want to look at them confused and answer, “I’m a human. Why? What are you?”
September 8: My new therapist suggested that I send her some of my writing because it’s been helpful with some of her other writer patients. It was weird reading through the short stories I wrote in college. I wasn’t expecting them to seem so sad to me now. All of them were about people who didn’t fit in with the world around them and had trouble finding a safe place to call home. I wonder how I didn’t see that when I was writing them.
much love,
hedgie
September 2: George and I walked ahead of Nick and Addie. Nick told me later that while that happened, Addie was watching us the whole time. He said that a woman passed by us and she gave a soft growl. Because I have been in San Francisco so long, it took a few more seconds of conversation for me to realize that Nick meant that Addie had growled, not the woman who passed me.
September 3: Before he walked home, David made a point of coming into my classroom to hug me goodbye. I miss him in my class so much.
September 4: It was a dramatic time during day school. One of the teachers got ringworm and the police were called when the people on behavior duty couldn’t find two lost students who turned out to be in a classroom the entire time.
September 5: My class got a punishment of practicing lining up for two minutes during recess when they kept trying to shove each other off the benches attached to the lunch tables. When I announced that, one boy screamed “fuck!” right in my ear. I thought it was Dea’madja and he spent his recess with Miss Melissa, proclaiming his innocence. I found out I had accused the wrong kid when Mauricio was overheard bragging that Dea’madja was getting in trouble for something he had done. Vivi was right. That kid is sneaky.
September 6: Every Friday during snack, I pull out two raffle tickets from the prize box. Every Friday, my kids want to be the ones to pick the tickets, but I don’t let them. I tell them that this is because raffle drawings are one of the few things I do that doesn’t make them upset and I’m not giving that away. The truth is that I pre-plan which two students will win the drawing every week. There’s a secret pouch where I put the pre-selected winning tickets so that I can hold the box over my head to prove I’m not peeking. I’m surprised that none of them have picked up on the fact that everyone in the class wins once before anyone wins a second time.
September 7: When I meet people for the first time, after finding out their name, I try to get to know them a little. I ask them what their job is or how they know the person we are there to celebrate. The first thing people ask me is about what race I am, like that is the most important factor to figuring out who I am as a person. A lot of times, they way they word it is hurtful. They ask “What are you?” And every time, I just want to look at them confused and answer, “I’m a human. Why? What are you?”
September 8: My new therapist suggested that I send her some of my writing because it’s been helpful with some of her other writer patients. It was weird reading through the short stories I wrote in college. I wasn’t expecting them to seem so sad to me now. All of them were about people who didn’t fit in with the world around them and had trouble finding a safe place to call home. I wonder how I didn’t see that when I was writing them.
much love,
hedgie
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