My Personal Ten Commandments

I've been reading a lot of Gretchen Rubin lately. She combines self-help with personal narrative in a really engaging voice, and I greatly admire her drive and discipline (two things I have never had in spades). I loved her classifications for people in Better Than Before. For example, I am an Obliger, Lark, Sprinter, Abstainer, Overbuyer, Finisher, and Simplicity Lover.

I also love the four Foundation Habits she outlines in the book: sleep, movement, eating healthy, and housekeeping. My big resolution for 2016 is SELF-CARE so these are like duh! As a wife and mother, I have to work hard to make myself a priority. It isn't easy to think of my needs and definitely doesn't come naturally. Focusing on the big four Foundation Habits - especially sleep - has made a big difference for me so far this year.

One exercise from The Happiness Project that I just undertook was to make my own Personal Commandments.

1. Be Becca.
2. There is only love.
3. Trust in abundance.
4. Act the way I want to feel.
5. Be a spiritual being.
6. Do only things that will make me feel better in the long run.
7. Radiate kindness.
8. Offer myself grace.
9. It is all input.
10. Bloom where I am planted.

The Teenage Whisperer

I love teenagers. People think I’m crazy, but it’s true. For many years, loving teenagers was actually an unspoken job requirement of mine. I taught middle and high school in an academic recovery program for at-risk teens. In North Long Beach. I saw it all. 

Pregnant teens, homeless teens, teens whose parents had abandoned them for drugs, for prostitution. Scared and lonely teens just trying to find somewhere they belong. I saw a baby brought to school in a stolen shopping cart because her young mother, who had just fled the foster care system on her 18th birthday, had no stroller. Another girl proudly posted videos of her fights in YouTube with such engaging titles as “Me beatin her ass.” Two students were arrested for manslaughter after one fired a gun into a crowd and killed a girl. I confiscated drugs, a necklace made from a bullet casing, called Child Protective Services when I heard about suicide attempts and beatings. I was on a first-name basis with probation officers who would stop by the school. They knew the families and the histories of my students. They shared family trees that spread out like a map in my mind, and suddenly everything made so much sense. Hearing about the uncle who was like a father, who just got sent to jail for “gang activity” filled in the puzzle-piece gaps until I could better understand the whole picture. 

I was from another world. They might have thought me an alien at first. An alien wearing a cardigan and pearls. I got many comparisons to Erin Gruwell, the Long Beach teacher who, a few years earlier, had gotten major publicity for the Freedom Writers. Not because I did the amazing things she did, not even close, but because I was white and fresh in way that was hard for them to put their finger on. I’d grown up in suburbia in a faraway place and gone to a private high school. To say I experienced culture shock at first is putting it lightly.

Yet something about the nurturing world I came from let me know what my students needed. They needed to be seen. They needed an adult in their lives who wouldn’t yell at them or make them feel like a fuck-up. They needed someone to gently show them that I knew they had other shit going on in their lives that WAS more important than school, but school is how you break out of the cycle. All they needed was to have someone who believed in them. You can’t fake that. They can see it in your eyes.

One of the things I love about teenagers is how fragile they are, even though they are trying to act so tough. They are still innocent in their world view. They were children when their neighborhoods were set on fire during the Rodney King riots. That shapes you in a fundamental way. You grow up accepting that kind of violence and brutality as normal. Yet I never knew when I was giving a student a pep talk if they were going to cry. Under that tough exterior, they were all still afraid little children, acting out because they craved love and understanding. 

There are really two main types of teenagers. The ones who strut around like peacocks, demanding everyone notice the feathers they have puffed out, and the ones who are trying so hard not to be noticed. As a teacher, it can be easy to focus on the ones who are crying out for attention because they tend to be the source of classroom disruptions. You have to train your gaze to notice the other students, too. But soon you see that the students who are crying out to be noticed are no different than the ones who are praying not to be: they are both afraid to show their true selves. They both feel shame and want to hide. One does it by hiding in their body, and the other does it by creating a persona so know one can see their who they really are. 

Another thing about teens that is equal parts adorable and heartbreaking is their relationship with reality. One of the things I love about teenagers is that the sky is the limit. They think they are going to change the world as soon as they get a taste of freedom. They have no clue about any limits society will place on them. Yet soon they will realize they are not going to get into USC on a basketball scholarship… because they are a recovered drop out with a 1.6 GPA who now attends a school without a basketball program. 

I taught a Personal and Career Goals class and one of the final assignments was to write a paper about your dream. What is your dream for your life, your future? Many students wrote about joining the NBA or about being rich. There were some future movie stars and famous rappers in my midst, too. Some went the other way— they wanted to break the cycle of poverty, they wrote about how they didn’t want to work at McDonalds like their mom. Many of the practical ones wanted to be longshoreman. The famous Port of LA is in Long Beach, and most Asian imports enter the US through there. Working at the port is a union job, and by retirement you could be making a good salary. That would be a fortune to these kids. It would mean so much. Being a longshoreman to them is the equivalent of being a doctor or lawyer to my peers.

There was one student paper I would never forget. His goal— his big dream for his life— was to own a late model Honda with rims. He couldn’t even dream about a new Honda.

A few years ago I woke up with what I could not tell was a dream or a memory in my head. I am twenty-three and my ex and I are walking along a path with houses on one side and the San Francisco Bay on the other side. It was night, and quiet except for small waves lapping against a seawall. Everything was fresh with possibility. The whole world was opening up in front of me. It was a poem. 

I have racked my brain to try to figure out if that memory is real, if that place exists. It gave me such a feeling of excitement and contentment being there that I became obsessed with finding it. I did a Google Earth search of Alameda to find a street like the one from my dream. There is a contender, on a sleepy corner of the island. But I just don’t know.

That is what being a teenager is like. You cannot tell if you are living in a dreamworld or in reality. Everything is beyond your control. That sense of promise you feel could be an illusion, or it could be real, you just have to lean in to that potential. 

There was one girl I failed desperately. It breaks my heart to think of her. I was told she likely had borderline personality disorder. She thought the world was out to get her. I should have been there for her, believing in her, but I could no longer tolerate her attacks on me in front of other students. Maybe it was ego that caused me to kick her out of my class, or maybe it was self-preservation. I will never be able to reconcile it.

One of my students was homeless before I knew her. She got pregnant, kept her baby, and graduated high school under my watch. She went to junior college and just got accepted in an internship to be an electrical contractor. She is in the process of getting out. She is the dream. 

Teacher Guide for Text Set for Fahrenheit 451

The following is a sample of my academic writing:

Teacher Guide, Fahrenheit 451

In this text set for Fahrenheit 451, students will explore themes of the power of the written word and how censorship impacts the disenfranchised. This text set provides cultural and historical perspectives on censorship and what the societal relationship towards learning says about how a society cares for its people.

The article on the 1933 Nazi book burnings, the event that inspired Bradbury to write Fahrenheit 451, gives students historical context on how a dystopian society like the one seen in the novel can arise. Students will learn that the disdain for intellectualism that brought about censorship and book burnings in both Bradbury's futuristic American society and Nazi Germany can have real and unimaginable consequences. 

"You Have Insulted Me: A Letter" by Kurt Vonnegut is another nonfiction piece that looks at how the act of censorship does more damage than the inflammatory book itself. 

This set contains two autobiographical narratives that highlight the empowerment that comes with reading: "Learning to Read and Write" by Frederick Douglass and "Learning to Read" by Malcolm X. Both narratives give historical perspective, but they offer differing cultural perspectives. "Learning to Read and Write" by Frederick Douglass shows how ignorance can be used as a social structure to keep a class system in check, similar to Fahrenheit 451. Much like Montag, the protagonist of Fahrenheit 451, Douglass reads in secret.

"Learning to Read" by Malcolm X offers a different perspective because Malcolm X's education is sanctioned and encouraged within the prison system. This text offers a viewpoint that contradicts the other texts by showing how disenfranchised people can be inspired by a framework that wants them to better themselves, and thereby enact positive change on society. 

There are three poems contained in this set. The poem "Dover Beach" by Matthew Arnold offers a stark contrast to the values of the dystopian society in Fahrenheit 451 and shows how important art and beauty are to human nature. The poem "Burning a Book" by William Stafford highlights the dangers of an ignorant society, while the poem "Unto my books so good to turn" by Emily Dickinson imparts the solace and comfort literature can bring.

The fictional short story "The Portable Phonograph" offers a view of what is left of society after a nuclear event, like at the close of Fahrenheit 451, and shows how books and music remain the most important vestiges of society.

As teachers read these texts with students, some important questions to consider posing would be:

- What is the relationship between censorship and people becoming disenfranchised?

- What does it say about a society if that society wants to keep its people ignorant, as opposed to a society that wants a learned population? 

- What value do art, literature, and an appreciation of beauty bring to our world?

A note on sequencing: "Book Burnings" can be read before students begin Fahrenheit 451, but after the general concept of the novel is introduced. "Dover Beach" should be read as the poem is read in the novel, towards the end of Part Two. "The Portable Phonograph" should be read at the close of Fahrenheit 451. "Learning to Read and Write" by Frederick Douglass can be read at any point in the novel, but it should be read before "Learning to Read" by Malcolm X. The poems "Burning a Book" and "Unto my books so good to turn," as well as "You Have Insulted Me: A Letter," can be read at any point.