Royalty in our Midst

Today, on my traffic-ridden drive home from work, grumpy and tired and feeling sorry for myself. I think, I must have the hardest job in the world.

I see a woman standing on the street corner holding a sign with scrawling writing, "Anything Helps". Sitting on the curb next to her is a very young child.

I pull over two blocks later and walk back towards them, Not knowing what to say. I don't have any cash, or a credit card on me. I don't even have a granola bar to offer.

Feeling awkward, I introduce myself and asked their names.

The woman, Tasha, is completely lovely. Absolutely, stunningly beautiful. Gorgeous, chestnut skin, with a colorful scarf wrapped around her head, two strands of dreadlocks poking through the bottom, and wide-rimmed glasses framing her gorgeous, bright eyes. Her 6-year-old daughter's name is Zion.

What a lovely name. 

"No way! I just moved from Zion's national Park area." I smile, and direct my question to the little girl, " Do you know where that is?"

"Do you know, Zion? It's in Utah" says Tasha.
"Oh ya." Zion says dismissively, "Of course I know"
Tasha chuckles. A melodic laugh that makes me want to sing along. Her voice is grounded and rich, colorful and smooth, she could been on the radio. Or a queen.

I want to ask her a hundred questions. Where are you from? How did you land here, at this traffic corner with a cardboard sign? What do you need? What can I do to help you?

But I don't know how to say any of that. I ask Zion, "Would you like a cookie?"

Zion barely looked up from the addition worksheet she was filling out with the help of a calculator and said, "Sure."

Tasha asks in a loving reminder, "What do you say?"

Zion waves a bright, toothy grin at me, "Thank you."

What a lovely child.

I go back the two blocks to my car to get a credit card. Then buy a gift card to Rubio's fish grill, and a cookie, since that's what I'd offered.

I calligraph their names on the gift card sleeve with a BIC pen. Hoping I spelled them right. Maybe they'll think it's nice to see their names written beautifully?

This is stupid. They probably don't care if their names are on the card at all. Let alone written sort of fancy.

I pause after writing their names, and on the other side add my phone number.

When I hand it to Tasha, she flashes a stunning smile, and in a low, smooth, rich voice she thanks me, and like a gracious host, relieves my awkwardness by adding, "Rubio's is Zion's favorite place."

What a lovely woman.  

"Where does Zion go to school?" I ask, not wanting to leave them yet.
"She's homeschooled."
"I'm a teacher." I offer, kind of muttering, "It's impressive that you're doing that. Teaching her yourself. It's hard."

Ugh. That was so dumb

I then mumble, ineloquently, "I...uh...left you my phone number. I'm not really sure why..."

I am afraid she'll feel condescended to. Some snobby, white lady who feels guilt over her own privilege, here to swoop in and save us.


It isn't like that at all. I want to be her best friend. To hear all about the bucket of hardships she has. I want to cry into her shoulders, and have this grounded, soul tell me that we are stronger than we seem. I want to tell her how much I admire her--this beacon of grace, and poise and strength--to stand, even so elegantly, on a traffic corner for her daughter. I want them both to be ok.

to apologize for the sterile, safe, privileged life I lead.

But I can't say any of that.

"I'd...uh... I'd love it if you ever wanted to call. Maybe I could help. With school or whatever. I don't know...Whatever."

She, gracious again, controls the moment like royalty, relieving my awkwardness, and treats the gesture like a cherished gift.

"Thank you so much, Averill. I'll call."

What a lovely thought.

I don't know if she will. I probably wouldn't if I were her.

But I hope she does.

I'd love to help Zion learn addition.

Jodie and the Spy Talk

Dynamics are important in music class.

So I have a big poster showing a voice levels chart, (for my visual learners). The chart has been there since the beginning of the year for classroom management purposes. In a burst of cleverness, I cover the level numbers with dynamic markings. I had to make a few other changes. Like covering up the words, "whisper" because that's bad for your vocal chords, and "out of control"... for obvious reasons. 

Isn't is cute?!

A few weeks later, we take a quiz on music dynamics. There's a chart that they fill in. 

"Symbol" on the left, "Music Term" in the middle, and "Meaning" on the right. ie:

f                               forte                               loud

and they fill in the spots that are blank. 

One student, we'll call her Jodie, writes under the meaning of pp (pianissimo, or really quiet) --"Sex talk."

I chuckle. Then I pause (you're not supposed to chuckle when 6th graders make sex jokes); unsure of how to grade it. Do I give her full credit for understanding the definition and applying it in a separate, but arguably accurate context? Or do I knock off points for being inappropriate in a school?  Does she even really know what she wrote? Kids these days are exposed to a lot more than I was at that age...She doesn't seem like the type of kid to press boundaries like this...

Later, I looked at the writing again and realized she wrote, "Spy talk." As in the example from my chart! (Handwriting is not this generation's strength.)

I double over laughing when I realized my mistake.

Jodie, "You wanted to talk to me, Mrs. Corkin?"

Me: "No. Yes. Just wanted to say you're doing great. Have a great day, kiddo."

Sex talk. Most of the time is pianissimo. Depends on what you're into. 

Bryson, Nora, and the Audition

These kids fight me on almost everything. 

Mrs. Corkin, your song choices are lame. Xylophones are lame. Singing is lame. 

I whine back at them, 'You're lives are lame if you're not willing to try new things!'

Towards the end of the year, I finally pick a song that they like.  I can tell. Despite their best efforts to come across as disinterested, I know they are into this song. You'll Be Back from Hamilton. Also for the first time this year, this particular class is stoked about a solo! (The first verse will be performed by "King George") 

And they immediately quiet down. They are respectful of one another's auditions. They encourage and applaud for their classmates. This is a strange experience for me: they're never this good. 

Bryson and the Audition

Think of your middle school class clown. Now surge the power up about 30%, and you have my 6th grade class clown, Bryson. 

He cannot even make it through our warm up exercises without making a strange noise/gesture/dance move to get everyone's attention. But he's a good kid. In spite of his annoying attempts for attention, I like him.

When the solo auditions roll around, Bryson is uncharacteristically bashful. He turns away when I ask him if he'd like to audition. He says, "nah" and waves away the idea. 

I push just a little, "Are you sure? I mean, dramatic loud moments where you're the center of attention... Isn't that kind of your thing?" I tease,  "You should audition if you want." 

He pauses for a moment, really pondering what I said. He says, completely straight, not even a glint of humor in his voice, "I'll only audition if everyone chants my name, loudly."

I laugh out loud. And the whole class chants his name, "BRY-SON, BRY-SON!" Eventually, he stands up, "Alright, alright, if you insist." 

How do you bottle that kind of confidence?!

Nora and the Audition

One shy girl pauses after class. "Mrs. Corkin?" She squeaks out. This is the first time I've heard her make any noise. 

"Yes, Nora?" 

"I want to audition for the solo, but I didn't want to to do it in front of everyone." 

With a huge smile, I say, "Can you do it right now? In between classes?" She nods her head and I play the music. 

She is so off key, and so off tempo, and I'm so proud. 

I tell her that she did awesome. And that I'm so glad she auditioned.  She runs out the door so suddenly that I think I said the wrong thing. 

But she reemerges from a bustling passing period hallway, with her friend from class--another shy girl. "Mrs. Corkin, Jacqueline wants to audition too." Jacqueline does not look like she wants to do anything but leave immediately. She looks terrified, and physically tries to swat the whole thing away with her hands.

"I don't want to audition"

"No, it's fine, she's cool," says her brave friend, Nora. (The 'she' in that sentence is referring to me. Which makes me feel swell-- One never gets over teenager approval of coolness.)

I ask if she would sing with Nora. She looks away, embarrassed, but nods. Then they sing it together, and it's terrible. But I'll never forget watching that one painfully shy girl helping another shy girl out of her comfort zone.  I hope they want to speak up more during class. 

They don't utter another peep for the rest of the year... But at the end of the year reflection, under the question "What is one thing you will remember and take forward from choir this year?" scrawled in barely-legible writing is Jacqueline's response: That I tried out for a solo. 

I'm delighted she will remember her bravery. I will too.

Victor and the Prank War

I thought my classroom was haunted.

I would come to work, and my chairs had been rearranged. Nothing drastic, but I always put them in order before leaving, and I always arrive the next morning with one section slightly scrambled. 

I confide with a class that I think I have a ghost. "Something's been moving my chairs!"

One particularly-trouble-producing boy, we'll call him Victor, starts chuckling. 

"It's YOU!" I deduce from his reaction, that he is the chair-shuffling culprit. He couldn't contain his giggles. 

"Maybe" ... laughing like he's the cleverest little prankster to ever exist.

"I'm going to get you back for this, you little punk" I said with a wink and a sparkle in my eye.  

He hates my class, as far as I can tell. He is a cool kid  on campus, and this class is not very cool. 

After that little encounter, where I catch him for his crimes, his relationship to the class doesn't really change. He certainly doesn't try to sing or anything crazy like that.

But he will hang back, try to be the last one to leave the room so he can have his moment with me to throw down: "I'm waiting, Mrs. Corkin" in a taunting tone that says, I  don't think you're really going to do anything.  

To which I reply, "It's coming... Just wait." He smiles and leaves. 

The second-to-last day of the semester, I enlist some help from the adults. Our school resource officer (aka policeman) pulls Victor out of class, walks him down to the front office, and makes him sweat, thinking he's in trouble. Then, the front desk secretary asks his name, nods disapprovingly, clicks her tongue, and hands him a note. 

He cautiously unfolds the paper. The note reads, "Dear Victor, Gotcha! :)  -Mrs. Corkin"

He tells the whole class about our little prank war--like it is the coolest game ever. This little skirmish against each other means we are actually on the same team.

It is so funny. Not in a HaHa kind of way but in a 13-year-olds-are-strange-and-unpredictable-creatures kind of way. I shouldn't be mad they're not what I expected. Sometimes, you need to meet them where they are. 

Long after he is no longer my student, he still waves at me. He'll throw up the "I'm watching you" signal, with a smile, before almost running into someone in the hallways.  Up until the very last day of school, a semester later, I see him sneak in and out of my room, and he waits until I catch him, so he can flash me his big grin.

Alex and the Song

Surprising Spaces. 

We'll call him Alex. He was kind of a bugger. A kid who made it clear that he didn't really like my homeroom class (which, to be fair, I didn't either). He was the kid who rearranged all my push pins, and stole rubber bands so he could launch them across the room in a finger gun. He was the kid who groaned at my choice in background instrumental music. He was the kid who right after I instructed, "you can do origami, but no paper airplanes, please" made a paper airplane and threw it at my forehead.  He and his friends would say things in Spanish, testing whether or not they could get away with their own secret language under the teacher's nose. 

 (I luckily squelched that pretty early when one kid said to Alex, "Tienes alguna comida? Tengo hambre" to which I replied, "You guys know you can't eat in here" they both gasped, looked at each other wide-eyed, and never tried anything like that again. I didn't tell them the only other phrase I could've caught them on is Donde esta la biblioteca"). 

One day he nods his head in the direction of the piano. "Yo, Mrs. Corkin....You know how to play that thing?" I smile. He's not in one of my music classes. 

"Ya, Alex, I can play that thing."

 A challenge in his tone, "For real? Show me. What can you play??"

"How about happy birthday?"

"ok, ok, cool." 

I play the familiar ditty on the piano and he clicks his teeth and scoffs on his way out the door--unimpressed. He's made fun of me for my taste in music before, nothing new. 

Over the next few days, he starts to kind of wander into my class during passing periods. Just stopping by. Sometimes just sitting in the back while I teach another class for a few minutes until I notice him, "Alex, are you supposed to be somewhere else?" Then he bounces out the door. Undeterred, he keeps coming back. I think he kind of likes hanging out in my classroom. Which is weird, because I thought he hated my classroom.

One day, he pokes his head in and sheepishly says, "Hey, yo, Mrs. Corkin. You think you could teach me how to play happy birthday?"

I grin. 

"I think I probably could."

For four days straight, he wanders in, en route to somewhere else, sits down at the piano, and learns two or three notes of the sequence at a time. 

He then proudly walks into the middle of my other classes, sits down at the piano, shows off his skills playing Happy Birthday with the confidence of Billy Joel. 

Before I usher him out, because he is actually supposed to be in another class.

 

Like most experiences with 6 and 7th graders, I'm not entirely sure what the moral of the story is. 

Children's opinion of you is not reflected in their behavior. Shooting hand sanitizer across the counter, or reading books upside-down, to get out of reading, is not necessarily a middle finger. 

I assumed Alex thought I was lame, but somewhere along the line, I created the space he felt comfortable wandering into, escaping to, learning from, growing in. 

The songs I think are basic, are still awesome. He was so proud of himself for learning that song. 

 I realized he's probably never played any piano except for mine. 

I hope he caught the music bug and wants to be a pianist. I hope he remembers the first song he ever learned was happy birthday. And that he learned it from his frazzled 6th grade homeroom teacher, Mrs. Corkin. 

Josue and the Martian

Because of Covid (and some Emmy-award-level drama through the administration), there was no longer a position for me at the high school where I taught last year. 

So I moved to another school in town--an intermediate school: 6 and 7th grade. This was a very different demographic than high school performers. Low-income school, lots of English Language Learners. Lots of tough kids. My bleeding liberal heart loved the idea of really changing a kids' life through music. But the day-to-day was not that romantic. 

The next few blog posts are about my time teaching 6-7th grade goobers. 

Josue and the Martian

Three weeks into school. This is very different than teaching high schoolers. 

6th and 7th grade. 11-13 year-olds.

Remember what you were like then?

 Now multiply that by 40. That's what I have to teach three times a day. These creatures are like aliens to me. They might as well be a different species. They can't really sing. They don't sit still. They don't really listen, even when they are quiet--which is not often.

This was the recipe for my year: 

Take 42 barely-pubescent children

Gently fold them in the same small classroom

Beat until submissive -Kidding-

Remember they've just came out of quarantine (played video games endlessly for months). 

Now cover their mouths so you can't tell who's talking. And you have to learn all 120 of their names using just their eyes and hair cuts as distinguishing features. 

Most of them are there because there's not enough room in art or PE class, and they have no hesitation telling you how much they hate your subject matter. 

This one kid--we'll call Mav--is literally bouncing in his seat. When we do our introductions, he is "Mav the Martian" and wiggled his entire body for a whole minute before we could move on to the next child. He cannot stand still. He cannot sit still. He cannot stop talking. 

I finally threaten that I might his move him to another chair across the room, and he immediately freezes and goes silent.  I am surprised: This tactic is not usually that effective. I made a mental note that Mav really doesn't want to move seats. 

After class he comes up to me, "Uh... teacher?" 

I reply with a snarky, "Yes... pupil?" I can learn 120 names without noses, and you can't remember one teacher name?

I can see he is confused by my response--my awesome sarcasm does not land. I then recognize that he doesn't know what pupil means in this context, and sigh. They'll never appreciate my humor. 

I try again, "Ya, Mav, what's up?"

"Um...You said you might move my seat, which is fine and all, but can I please sit next to Josue? He doesn't speak English, so he gets lost and scared in class if I don't help translate." 

*cue heart melt. 

The next few days, I observe the way Mav watches out for his English-learning friend. 

This Mav kid immediately changes from being one of my least favorite, to one of my most. He is certainly not a model student. I can't even call him a good one. And he hates singing--and he makes that clear to me often. 

But I love his spirit. I love watching him be protective of a fellow student, Josue, who could easily feel lost,  isolated, and overwhelmed in a classroom where you don't speak the language.

For our Christmas (virtual) concert, we sing a song in Spanish. As we're learning it, I put Josue in charge of his own group to help with the pronunciation, and he beams with satisfaction that he can contribute.  

Though Mav doesn't like choir, Josue does. He likes choir a lot. And without Mav annoying my class, and watching over his friend, Josue might never have known it. 

Fairy Vampire Queen or Bad Birthday Cake? The Purple Hair Saga

We all go through hair events. Mine aren't usually spectacularly interesting. Like the time I went red (and I looked like I'd fallen in a bucket of dirt) or the time I got a perm (and looked like a wet dog). But when it happens, it genuinely feels like the most important thing in your life at the time. So I'm writing a whole blog about my current hair event: Purple. 

A fundraiser at school was called "Teacher Torture," where if the kids raised X amount of money, teachers would do something unpleasant.  Like the social-studies teacher would wax his legs, our media instructor would get eggs thrown at him, our principal would engage in a rap battle, and I would dye my hair purple. The others were more like actual torture (like the math teacher having to come out in full drag) but mine was like throwing me in the briar patch. "Oh...Please! Not PURPLE HAIR!"Secretly very excited. At one point I was nervous they wouldn't raise the money, and I'd have to donate myself to reach the goal because I'd already bought the hair dye.

I really loved it.

Went to prom as a chaperone, sporting my own prom dress from 10 years ago. The floor-length, pleated black and-blue silk never going out of fashion. And I felt like a Fairy Vampire Queen.

The picture doesn't do it justice--but with the hair, and the gown, and the face, it was fierce. I felt like the feisty, mystical heroine of a teen fantasy novel.

Then I decided the purple was too quirky to have the same boring haircut. I needed a change. And like the random, spontaneous being I sometimes am, I decided to cut it myself.


No, I have never cut my own hair. No, I have not cut anyone's else's (besides buzzing a kid's afro at a basketball game in high school, and a boyfriends' in college who thereafter banned me from ever cutting hair again). But I've watched someone cut my hair at least 50 times... How hard could it be?

It was a bizarre impulse I can't quite describe. Strangely empowering.  I felt like a 6-year-old who was searching for control and finding it in destruction... Just slicing through a chunk of hair. 4 inches, gone. A totally, completely irreversible act. Chop chop slice chop slice chop chop chop.

I even layered it--like I'd seen the pros do every time.

Then I blow dried it, and styled it, and felt pretty darn good about myself.
Bam! Haircut! Layers! I just saved myself $50. Shear Brilliance (see what I did there??)

Not bad for a 1st time hair-cut, right? 

My brother's dog was staying with me. And he looked up at me with pleading eyes that unmistakably said, "I wish I could change up my style that way. I want something fresh, and a little funky. But subtle." How could anyone not respond to such a reasonable and specific request? So I dyed his ears purple. and then we matched.

He clearly is thrilled about his new 'do.

Fast forward a few days-- I washed my hair, and let it dry normally, and discovered one side pretty drastically longer than the other. Also, the awesome layers I was so proud of, looked more like a 3-tiered, Dr. Seuss cake. So it wasn't quite as victorious a venture as I'd thought. 

But you know what? Unlike other hair fiascos, it does not feel like the most important thing in my life right now.
Which is liberating.