Sleep — that most elusive of creatures … as newborns we crave and successfully find it for almost 20 hours of every day! But it’s not long until the fight begins…

​As toddlers, we are never tired, and especially not when we are overtired! We will fight, fight, fight to the bitter end to avoid our naps and bedtimes, and when we wake up from said naps, we are often very cranky.

Soon come the teenage years, and we continue to fight our bedtimes, as our rewired adolescent brains convince us that staying up past midnight is the best way for survival…. And indeed, this approach works well — until the 7:00 A.M. alarm clock rings, signaling the evolution of our lives beyond neanderthal times, much to the chagrin of our not-yet-evolved brains, which now find themselves very tired. Relief comes only on the weekends, when our teenage brains can rest and rest and rest… Sometimes until two or three or even four P.M.!

​And then the cycle begins again. 

Another change arrives with adulthood, and our slow desire to move our bedtime a little earlier, especially when we work and jobs that require an early morning wake up. Yet we continue to fight sleep, sometimes because night is the only time we truly have to ourselves, to rest, to relax, to pursue our own interests from behind the screens of our phones and laptops… as we travel through adulthood, many of us find that our struggles with stress and anxiety travel along with us, like oversized luggage that the airline won’t allow you to check! These painfully large packages join us in bed, even if we go to bed “early enough” and “at a reasonable hour”. Now it is the baggage that is fighting asleep on our behalf; all we need to do is lie there with our eyes or closed, ruminating, waiting for night to end so that we can splash cold water on our faces, put on our appropriate attire, and paste on a smile to Face the world after yet another sleepless night. 

As we continue to age, we may consolidate some of our baggage into smaller, more manageable sleep packages that take up less room on the bed with us; unfortunately, that usually doesn’t happen until a special kind of later adulthood kicks in, at least for women. Perimenopause. This new and unwelcome visitor often brings with it night sweats and other sleep disturbances. Once again, sleep eludes us, even if we no longer have to wake up early for work or other commitments. Sigh. 

​In our quest for sleep, some begin experimenting with “remedies“ — herbal options, including naturopathic suggestions or cannabis related products. Or, if we’ve had it and are ready to fight big, something a little stronger, requiring a prescription from a licensed doctor. (Of course, we’ve exhausted all other options first: plenty of exercise, good bedtime routines and sleep hygiene generally, blah blah blah.)

If we are lucky as we proceed through our lifelong quest for sleep, we find elusive pockets of this treasure in unusual places: 20 minutes  on a beach chair while on vacation at all-inclusive resort, before someone comes up and offers you a drink, a necklace, a sun hat or some other tchotchkes being sold by one of the many beach vendors who are also not sleeping.  Of 15 minutes glorious, drifting, deepening sleep on an airplane when you were lucky enough to get a row to yourself, before turbulence hits, and the flight attendant gently but firmly wakes you up to insist you buckle your seatbelt “and then you can go back to sleep“ (which of course you, now safely buckled in and wide awake, never do!!) Sometimes, you might — like me — even have sleep “stations” opportunistic places set up strategically around your home: a cozy couch in the living room room, for example, with a throw, or a reclining chair, or a hammock strung across the porch. Here you can occasionally find up to an hour of uninterrupted, deep and glorious sleep!

Eventually, there comes a time when we close our eyes for the last time, and — without interruptions from flight attendants, spouses, alarm clocks, children, or mental trials and tribulations jerking us awake at the most inopportune times – then we will finally sleep. It will be a most glorious, deeply nourishing sleep. One from which we will never awake. 

​I was conceived on a summer camping trip, after my parents – who had been dating quite seriously for some time – had already broken up. I deduced this after my mother died, while reading one of the many, many love letters that my father had written her. 
 
 Xavier Pasteger, a Belgian immigrant, was a lover and a writer! He wrote my mother hundreds of letters, in florid handwriting, over the course of their courtship, and began many of them with “ma chère grenouille”, my dear frog. My mother kept them all, and along with a blurry black and white head shot she obtained for me from his former employer at Atomic Energy Canada for my 16th birthday, they are the only artifacts I have of my late father.
 
I never met Xavier. My grandmother tells a story of how, when she was wheeling me down the street in a stroller as a baby to take me to a nearby park, she saw my father walking towards us about a block or so away. When he recognized my grandmother from a distance, he crossed over to the other side of the street and continued walking, without making eye contact.

Before my third birthday, he had died from cancer.
 
It is through one of these letters that my mother saved that I realized how late in their relationship I came to be. In my youth, I had often asked my mother what happened to my dad, why they never married. (I knew he had died, but it wasn’t until I was a young teenager that I came to understand that I was truly a bastard, born out of wedlock, and that that choice had been almost exclusively my mother’s.)
 
My mother, Carola Teschow, was a German immigrant and the first feminist I ever knew. Her story is not for this blog post, but suffice it to say that by the time she became pregnant with me, she had an established career in a male-dominated field, owned a share in a decent house in a nice neighborhood, and had built a life in her adopted country of Canada. By her accounts, my father asked her many times to marry him. But his conditions were a life of tradition: he wanted my mother to stop working, and take care of the household and any children they might have together; this was the appropriate thing to do as a woman, he told her. She declined, and so the relationship ended.

From what I can gather through letters, the camping trip was supposed to be a friendly, pressure-free bit of fun weeks or possibly months after the initial break up. The steamy night in a shared tent that ultimately produced me was not the intended outcome of that adventure… at least not for my mother. His florid written apology post-camping quest must have fallen on deaf ears, as they did not reunite thereafter. Even once he found out that she was with child and asked her – again – to marry him. (Only after I was born to my single mother did she – probably at the suggestion of Child Services – reach out to my father one final time, to request some sort of financial support; he did not argue, and until my 21st birthday, a handsome monthly sum was deposited into my school savings account, first directly through his employer and after his death, an orphan's benefit payment via superannuation program through the government.)

Growing up with my mother and grandmother, I looked to them as my influencers, at least genetically. And yet, my mother’s genes are only part of the fabric of who I am. I know little of my father, and yet I recognize his crooked smile from the one faded photo in my son, and there are patterns in my own appearance and behaviour that very clearly do NOT come from my mother’s side of the family. As I grow older, I think occasionally about the bigger picture of who I am, outside of upbringing and environment.

 Xavier didn’t get the girl back, even after he put a baby in her! And it occurred to that baby this morning to examine why, beyond the simple “if we get married you have to stay home“ disqualifier. 

From his letters and the fact that they stayed together for more than a few months, I can infer that my mother loved the Belgian’s passion, was fascinated by the way his personality lit up a room, and was drawn to the way he love-bombed her. I recognize these traits within myself. And yet, she ultimately left him.

What was their communication style like as a couple in the early 70s? From her few stories and the tone of his letters, he was clearly thoughtful, but it seems he was also reckless. How did he show his respect (or lack thereof) for her female leadership skills, and how did she navigate their considerable height difference? (She was a good 11 inches taller than him – without heels!) How did they fight, and how did they recover from said arguments? Did he push her too hard, violate her boundaries? Did she withdraw when he pushed, and did he sulk when she did so? Why did she agree to an overnight trip with him after they had already broken up – and clearly didn’t want a continued physical relationship with him (as evidenced by several lines in his later apology letter… was he apologizing for essentially raping her that night?!) 

My mother is long dead and unable to tell her side of the story, and of course I never got his, other than what’s left of him in his writing.

As I navigate difficulties in my own personal relationship and reflect on previous associations, I’m left wondering how much of my father I inherited in my personality: I, too, am a lover and a writer. I’m also a boundary pusher – did I get that from him? Perhaps unlike my father, I am recognizing the problem with such a quality, and learning (albeit slowly and late) not to violate those I love the most. Like him too, I am thoughtful yet careless.
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Unlike my father, though, I’m not dead yet, and I am educating myself. I am a very serious and committed student. Unlike Xavier, I hope to succeed in my quest to get the girl back.

A friend sent some photos tonight, from the bridge that ties PEI to the rest of Canada. The Mikmaq there are standing with their Indigenous sisters and brothers in BC, as are so many indigenous groups and their Canadian allies, across Turtle island these days.

It’s hard to know where to begin this blog post.  On the one hand, what can I possibly contribute to this story?  On the other hand, it’s important to me that others do not mistake my silence as playing accomplice to a system I have benefitted from in many ways, despite the parts of my identity that are subject to oppression within it.  Some people are saying „it’s not our business“, and yet, as a white, settler Canadian, I believe what’s happening right now is very much our business, and we have a unique opportunity to decide which side of history we will stand on. I feel empathy for those who are severely inconvenienced by the trains being canceled, but rage for white, able-bodied, cis-gender male politicians who demand that it is the protesters who should „check their privilege“, while they themselves continue to support a system that does not provide adequate living conditions for citizens from certain cultural groups, and are selective about which laws to enforce and who to shield from both laws and crimes.

And so, as a Canadian by birth, I want to blog, and I hope you will join me in my discomfort as I bumble my way through what can only be described as a difficult state of affairs in our country right now.

Over the past several weeks, I have been immersing myself in (un)learning.

Now that protests have shut down the railroads across Canada, mainstream media is finally reporting on a story that I‘d become aware of some months ago already, largely because of a promise I’d made to myself to diversify who I follow on social media.  As a result of this promise, I began to follow a white „settler“ who speaks out fiercely and courageously in favour of indigenous folks.  Through her Instagram acct, I happened upon more and more accts that were telling the story of what was unfolding in BC, on land that — as it turns out — is unceded and in fact by Canadian Law itself was never traded to Canada, and therefore technically still under Indigenous law: 22 000 square km of Wet‘suwet‘en territory is not covered by any treaty with the Canadian State, and therefore not really subject to colonial rule (or, as Trudeau likes to call it, rule of law).

Well, depending on who you ask.

To be honest, it‘s a big, complicated mess, one made more complicated by the fact that many Canadians my age are wrestling with the realization that we were taught a history growing up that not only included huge gaps, but also potentially downright untruths.  Incorrect facts.  Corporate lies designed to keep up the myth of the colonialist state of Canada, along with its system of oppression for anyone who might interfere with the machine‘s path forward. So for some of us, it‘s a long, messy road to understanding the various salient details and diverse perspectives that contribute to (or in some cases actively hide) „The Truth“!

As those of us who avail ourselves of the opportunity to unlearn those lies re-educate ourselves through the images and text freely available through an increasing variety of social media and other outlets, we are shocked and appalled at what is unfolding here in our diverse and „inclusive“ country.

We shouldn‘t be shocked, however.  Oppression, as I am learning, is not new in Canada.

While I have known bits and pieces of our „not like in the US“ sham of a history, as 2020 unfolds, I am learning more.  And the details are disturbing.

White people and other „settler“ Canadians: If you haven‘t already done so, I urge you to pick up a copy of Desmond Cole‘s „The Skin We’re In“.  It‘s a must read for any Canadian.  Affirming for Black and Indigenous Canadians, and an important wake up call for those of us who are not.

The challenge is what to do once you know.  Because see, if you do nothing, then you‘re implicated. 

So I‘ve been reaching out to the few indigenous folks I know.  (The photos above are from a passage about people of colour generally, and black people in particular.  But Cole draws lots of connections to the plight of Indigenous people in Canada, and spends a full chapter specifically on that topic.)

Dinner last night with a student pilot friend who is studying at a school located on reserve here in Ontario yielded a reminder that even today, post-secondary institutions of knowledge - if they are geared toward First Nations - may not enjoy the clean water that most of us take for granted when we turn on the tap at home.  Yes, in this day and age in a „first world country“, her school has to provide bottled drinking water, and the poor woman has to shower in toxic stew while she studies here for four years!!!

My general message of support to a friend on PEI, my beloved east coast island, yielded in return a text with photos of the blockade she‘s supporting at the bridge. Confederation Bridge.  Named for something that most Canadians would think of as a unifying symbol.  And yet, we spend millions on bridges and pipelines while indigenous women are disproportionally sexually assaulted, kidnapped and murdered, while many of Canada‘s indigenous population continue to be relegated to insufficient, out of the way reserves with no access to clean drinking water, with crumbling or no schools past elementary, while indigenous people continue to be disproportionately represented in data on unemployment, illiteracy and incarceration. How can we then consider ourselves a „unified“ nation?!

We righteously shake our fists at the injustices we read about around the world, and write cheques to support poor children across the globe, while turning a blind eye to the systemic injustice and careful brainwashing and bias-building our own tax dollars support right here at home!

While the mainstream media is beginning to report on the uprising that has been building now for some months, they are careful to include nice, clean photos of protests, rather than the blood on the snow and heavily armed RCMP with guns in peaceful protester‘s faces that are captured in the photos from people actually on the front lines.

While articles like this one offer a good primer for those still new to the topic, they - like my history classes in elementary school - include lots of gaps! I therefore urge my fellow settler Canadians to check out websites like  Unist‘ot‘en  and It’s Going Down, and follow accts like @gidimten_checkpoint, @decolonizemyself and @settle_in_settlers in Instagram to get a more fulsome picture of what’s actually happening.

I‘ve recently started reposting accts mentioned above to my IG stories, and I worry a little that my friends, family and colleagues might be a little annoyed by the abundance of activism and protest posts. Or perhaps at best, just swipe through.  But I am pleasantly surprised by the refreshing and authentic messages I‘ve been receiving over the past few days, like the one below:

The amount of resistance that even the most activist social justice minded folks among us feel is not to be underestimated. Apart from the usual general apathy and unwillingness to give up our unearned privilege and inconvenience ourselves (and yes, I include myself in this!), there is the more altruistic grief, in a sense, of possibly losing the concept of Canada as this inclusive, diversity minded, hopeful social experiment, for those of us who consider ourselves pretty patriotic (again, me too - I sometimes cry when I hear a particularly moving rendition of our national anthem!)

When matriarchs burned the Canadian flag and declared reconciliation to be dead earlier this week, a piece of me died inside.  While many settler Canadians had not yet heard about it (it happened a day or two before the mainstream media picked up this story), those of us who had been following from afar already knew that we were entering a new reality, one which could not be navigated by simply rattling off the obligatory land recognition at the beginning of big, important meetings.

There is no going back.

Reconciliation as an official political policy may be dead, but I am hopeful that in this new age of instantaneous information sharing informed by an openness of some Canadians to a new (old!) way of being together, we can forge a new path forward.

Capital R Reconciliation may be dead, but reconciliation as a concept isn‘t. It‘s going to take a shit tonne of work and patience on all sides, especially as we bring along new supporters and gently but firmly leave behind those who refuse to be re-educated. But I am cautiously optimistic that if the Indigenous who continue to protect the important things on this land will also continue to teach those of us who want to be allies, and if we are willing to do the hard work, then there CAN be a beautiful new way ahead, together.

Who‘s in?

With all the commentary on toxic masculinity and patriarchal resentment in the media these days, I thought I’d weigh in it with my own perspective on the topic, from an aviation standpoint.

I recently read a comment on an Instagram photo posted by a male pilot, which applauded his misogynistic stance, and ridiculed the hashtag “girlpilots” that women in aviation sometimes use when posting aviation related photos to Instagram or other social media. What surprised me about the support of comment was that it had been written by another female pilot!

It reminded me of a story I heard not too long ago, from the leader of a women’s support group at a regional airline, about how some female pilots were quite resistant to joining said support group. It seemed as though they didn’t want to be treated any differently from their male peers, she noted, and they resented the spotlight being shone on them as women in a non-traditional Aviation role. They had fought so hard to get where they had gotten, they were afraid, almost, to discuss this reality with their female peers, and just wanted to be seen as “one of the boys”.

But we #GirlPilots are NOT like the boys we often have to fly with!

It’s not uncommon, even in 2018, for female pilots to be harassed either directly (think derogatory comments or inappropriate touching by male captains to female first officers) and indirectly (where “the boys“ make sexually inappropriate, jocular comments about the women they share the cockpit with, not knowing that those comments may be overheard by their female colleagues or males not comfortable with this sort of toxic masculinity.)

As I heard first-hand at a dinner celebrating the accomplishments of women in aviation the other night, this sort of nonsense still happens frequently. But rarely if ever the other way around. (Seriously, aviation friends, when was the last time you heard a female captain discussing with her peers the size of her first officer’s cock, and how that must’ve played a role in his getting hired?! Actually, let’s just leave it at the first part, when was the last time you heard a female captain? Case in point!)

The aviation and aerospace industry is still stacked strongly against women. 50% of the human population is represented in only 6% of most airline cockpits, and this imbalanced percentage is often reflected in other non-traditional aviation roles as well: aviation engineers, mechanics, flight instructors, rampies, etc.... Not surprisingly, it’s even lower for women of colour or other intersecting identities.

Having being a student pilot in a flight school overrun by disrespectful ground school peers and male instructors who were clueless at best and in some cases downright misogynistic, I know I’m not the only one who chose not to plow through that minefield and continue on to a career in the field of aviation once I finally earned my coveted PPL. There are only so many sexist “jokes” and comments you can take with a smile and and apparently nonchalant come back before wanting to poke your eyeballs out with hot skewers rather than go back voluntarily for more, just so that you can fly an airplane!

No, I stuck with my nice, safe, gender-appropriate profession (I’m a public educator with more than 20 years of teaching experience, surrounded largely by women)!

I can’t believe that all men are naturally misogynistic pigs, though. In fact, among the many examples of jerks I had to put up with while earning my PPL, were some shining examples of decent human beings. Young men who were doing their best to just teach flying and earn some hours so that they could go fly bigger planes. And I’ve seen enough very young boys to know that – – no matter how early the dangerous socialization begins – – humanity grows up with the potential to be nurturing, caring, fair and equitable, regardless of their sex.

Gender socialization, and the promotion of “strong men“/boys who don’t cry, and who discard femininity as worthless, is taught. It’s taught by the adults – – men and women – – that surround a young child. And its effects are so powerful, that many women themselves believe, albeit sometime subconsciously, that they are the inferior sex.

Personally, when I post an aviation related photo of myself, I often use #GirlPilot, not to show off, but rather to find my sisterhood. As a student pilot, I endured plenty of horse shit from the boys I had to deal with along the way, and although I did not make flying a career, I can imagine that with the industry average standing at just 6%, most fellow #GirlPilots who also happen to be #CommercialPilots are not likely to find that sisterhood among their immediate collegial circle!! So when I click the hashtag after I post, I’m immediately virtually surrounded by other girls who – – like me – – swam through the sea of toxic masculinity and patriarchal resentment, and earned their stripes!

It’s exciting and encouraging.

I saw another post on Instagram recently, too. It was a photograph of a young boy holding a sign. The second “boys“ in “boys will be boys“ had been crossed out and replaced with “good humans”.

Imagine a world where the approximately 50% of the population that identifies as male is not feared, despised and/or disrespected by the other 50%, but rather revered and respected, because they are decent humans who in turn revere and respect as valuable and necessary their female fellow humans, rather than seeing the as worthless pawns provided by some great deity for their personal sexual enjoyment, whether in aviation, or in any field. Imagine if a man‘s power came from his choice to be decent, kind and respectful, rather than to oppress.

In such a world, perhaps some of us would no longer feel the need to hashtag our aviation posts with #GirlPilot because we could just be #Pilots.

I am appalled at the mediocrity of my writing.  Once inspired, and at times even funny, my blog posts have become average at best, mundane in actuality.

Even the quagmire of mediocrity through which they wade is a sham, the tired if apt phrase stolen from other writers, me being too uninspired to craft my own unique insult with which to describe my miserable work of late!

Why, tho?

It used to be the case, when I was swamped with students and the endless marking, lesson planning and social problem solving that accompanied them, that I felt constantly inspired.  Exhausted, yet excited about my work, I was frequently eager and somehow found the time and energy to share my various classroom experiments. 

The world before and after school also seemed more blog-worthy, somehow, and the words found themselves more readily in my mind, and worked their way more effortlessly onto the keyboard where they danced together to form ideas reasonably worth crafting so that others, too, could be inspired while reading.

Whereas I used to easily spin out a blog post several times a week, I am hard pressed now to find the time or inclination to write and post something more than once a month at best.

Is it because I am no longer a classroom teacher, then, that I feel a loss of material worth writing about?  How so?  The world has not changed so much as my place in it... surely even if I feel my contributions are less directly valuable than they once were, there is still inspiration to be found in the world outside of work...?

Or has the world changed, and is that the cause of my inertia? 

One thing I have noticed is the sheer abundance that colleagues and strangers produce: Before the age of twitter, instagram and facebook, before snapchat was ubiquitous, before in order for something to count, it had to have three hashtags and at least 250 likes, before followers were virtual and strangers were "friends", back at the dawn of the internet, when I was one of the few teachers in this country who had a blog, and by the very virtue of its existence, I was considered tech savvy (ha, ha, ha!) and my colleagues and students thought I was famous (tee hee), it was easy to get motivated to write.  Without competition, I felt the urge to get out there and self-publish!  Teachers needed me!  My dashboard showed they were searching critically important key words on my blog, and I had so much more to tell them about those themes and ideas!

But now, now there are a hundred thousand plus people who can say it better, with greater clarity, and with more awesome photos than I can. 

It seems as though every educator has a blog, a TPT acct and a social media following that rivals the Kardashians.  What can I say that hasn't already been said, and with greater eloquence and more recency?  And not just about teaching -- so what if I went to Cuba and spent two days off-resort with my kids?  A gazillion other travelers have beat me to it, and described it with breathtaking verbal imagery and panache. My recently-begun Salsa class is also nothing to blog about -- unless people are interested in a blog post about two left feet.  (And even that has been done and overdone.) So what if I periodically fly airplanes? #girlswhofly has 12 656 posts on IG. Even #queerparenting has over 1000, and I can tell by the pics that those parents are better looking, healthier, cooler and happier, and that their kids are all way more well-adjusted than ours!!!

It feels like I have nothing to offer the world, and that everyone out there on the internetz has me beat in every category.

My kids are becoming teenagers, but I'm the one suffering the adolescent existential crisis!

The superfluous content with which the world seems virtually stuffed, and the speed with which the it produces said content, is overwhelming.  To be honest, the pace at which I feel called to keep moving makes me question my ability to discern quality and authenticity in any form of content -- mine or others!  And I find myself not only lacking the inspiration to write, but often also the mental and emotional energy to participate at all.

If I stop to think about it, I have to wonder whether my writing, once a hallmark of my skill and imagination, has been replaced with other forms of creativity. Perhaps my ability to orchestrate six people's summer plans harmoniously across two or three households, or to coordinate a group of educators and policy makers by leading from behind is less public and glamorous than a well written blog post once a week but equally impressive and important.

But I sure would like a way to continue to develop these new skills while simultaneously growing as a writer. 

Perhaps a mindfulness exercise I will endeavor to undertake will be to notice small things worth writing about, and then to capture them in a few words.  Longer than a tweet, but shorter than the diatribes I used to write. A focused lens, an appetizer rather than a meal, a verbal salad.

Stay tuned.

Not long ago, a colleague of mine came back from a workshop and shared with me an image she had seen.
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“I have something to show you!” she gasped, almost breathless with excitement.  “I know how much you love equity, and I think you’ll really like this.”

The image she showed me served as a stark reminder of the long road ahead of us.

While I have nothing against this image as a starting point for engaging the blissfully ignorant in a conversation about equity vs. equality, her excitement in thinking she had uncovered something new to share with me made me realize how naive I had been, in terms of people’s general exposure to many of the concepts I take for granted.

While my colleague was engaging with the fence image for the first time, I had moved on to reading articles like this one, that challenge its limitations.

A Literal Interpretation

For a long time, I’d been struggling with the fact that proponents of the fence image seemed to be implying that anyone should be able to see a professional sports game for free (yes, literally)... And while I myself am not much of a sports fanatic, I was wrestling with the concept of implying that we (or some) should not have to pay to watch a professional performance.

Yes, yes, I know that in general professional players in sports are HUGELY overpaid in the larger scheme of things -- but apply the analogy to a arts performance then, dance, or a group of local musicians… how are people supposed to make a living if everyone should just get to enjoy their talents for free?!

Making Space for Everyone

Around the same time as I was wrestling with this conundrum, I’d been reviewing a monograph on culturally responsive pedagogy, which included a quote by George Dei:

(It’s also quoted in Ontario’s Equity and Inclusive Education Strategy, btw.)

At the time, it seemed like a nicey-nice, lofty statement. Lately, though, I’ve been meditating on it a lot.

What does it mean, exactly, to make a new space?  I mean, why wouldn’t we want to bring people into our great space that already exists?  Don’t we want “them” to have access to “our” sporting (arts, etc.) events?

It’s what I’d been trying to do for most of my career, open access for the students I taught (“them”) who might not have typically had access to the variety of resources and opportunities that I do.

And yet, if I examine the way my own classrooms unfolded over the two decades I taught, I am beginning to realize that together with the students in my care, I did in fact increasingly create new structures, systems and spaces.  Any remaining barriers (class size, lack of thinking and planning time, access to reliable wifi or digital devices and other resources, etc.) were products of the larger system, over which I had only limited control. (More on that later.)

Relinquishing Power

Creating a new space together with the students meant that as the person in the classroom on whom power and privilege had been conferred, I the teacher had to make way for the kids to develop some power, some real power.

It meant that when a colleague and I began exploring the concept of centres as a way to teach math with my Grade 7 and 8 math classes a few years ago, we asked for feedback… and then listened to that (often brutally honest!) feedback the students provided, and modified our approach.

It also meant that the following year, when we started a social studies based, cross-curricular inquiry together in Grade 6, and some of the students wanted to move in a direction with their learning that I had not envisioned, I had to give them the freedom to follow that learning, and support THEIR learning from the side rather than demand from the front what I thought it should be all about.

In my experience, Middle school students who have been raised in fairly traditional classrooms have become very “comfortable” (complacent?) with their lot. While perhaps unfulfilled and possibly bored, they generally do what they are supposed to -- including acting out and “misbehaving” in ways that are expected -- perhaps because they don’t know any other way.  They’re like prisoners who have lost their scope for the imagination of any better reality!

So when you introduce a new way of doing business (“You can write about it or show me by taking a picture of your work and recording a verbal explanation”, or “will you choose to work on your own today, or with a partner?”, or “are you ready to come and talk with me about your assignment, or do you want to get some feedback from your group first?”) middle school students (and heck, even adults!) can get very antsy.

They’re not used to being treated like capable, competent people with potential!

​They’re not sure what to do with the freedom and the ability, nay, the provocation, to think!  This is hard work, they realize, this participating fully in my learning....  And at first, they rebel.

Using the structure of a classroom circle early and often as we got to know one another as co-learners helped… as did regular read-alouds (yes, middle school kids still love a good read-aloud, especially when Ms. Teschow cries at the sad parts, as she notoriously does!!) 
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Surfacing challenges, discussing and sharing people’s feelings and behaviours openly, honestly and matter-of-factly, and sharing ideas for next steps helped -- in my experience -- to validate all members of the class.  (As an added bonus, our regular community circles really built their learning skills and work habits, and helped me get to know kids more personally, which was a huge bonus come report card writing time!!)

Eventually, fear at this “new” way anxiety was replaced with pride and commitment.  Pride their classroom family, and commitment to working hard (both academically and socially) for the benefit of all.

Discomfort was replaced with safety, and students flourished, even the most “unlikely” learners!

Scalability

Now, after 18 years in the field, I’ve become part of that larger system I mentioned earlier, the one that sets up barriers that directly impact kids in classrooms… and I still only have limited control!  (I thought working at the ministry of magic would enable me to change the world in six months or less -- ha!)

But while the systemic work is different than I thought it would be, and the workplace MUCH larger than I had imagined, the need to co-create new space together exists here as anywhere. Systems and structures that worked at some point in history for some group(s) of people are being challenged as new technologies disrupt the status quo and allow (and indeed encourage) an increasing diversity of voices in the workplace.

I’m interested how those in power in this large system approach their leadership role.

I’ve observed that some try to include by bringing people into an existing culture.  Others actively seek out newcomers that will help to shape a new space, a space where everyone is welcome, even if it means that they (the leader) will need to rethink their pre-existing assumptions. Still others speak of making space, but are reluctant to relinquish the comforts afforded to them for so long by their positions of privilege and power.

​So, I went to plastic surgeon for the first time today… No, I'm not having a nose job or breast augmentation done. I wanted an educated opinion on the progress of my burn, which is three months and two days old today, and my GP thought this would be a better referral than the burn clinic at Sunnybrook.

I'm not particularly concerned about the cosmetics of my slow healing burn; it's more the incessant itching and ongoing redness in a few remaining patches that I've been feeling worried about these past months. 

I have to confess, I held some bias against plastic surgeons; I just assumed that all they dealt with was cosmetic surgery, or that at least mostly that was what their work encompassed. As it turns out, they actually know quite a lot about skin, and about burns in particular, go figure!

For the first time since the day I poured hot water all over myself like an idiot at the office, I actually felt like I was talking to someone who knew what they were talking about.  Instead of desperately searching the Internet for answers, I was able to have an informed conversation with someone in the know.

Granted, the surgeon himself was rather a handsome man (all natural?  I didn't ask!), but he really knew his stuff, as did his student doctor.  I was able to ask my million questions with confidence, and have my fears alleviated in under an hour, all courtesy of OHIP!

The itchiness, it turns out, is unfortunately quite common with deeper burns, and can last six months or more.  It's one of the biggest challenges for burn victims, after the emotional stuff. An antihistamine was recommended. 

The good news is that all my self-care and witch-doctoring in the early months seems to have paid off, and my wound was continuing to "heal well", according to both student and resident. The reason for the dryness, apparently, is that oil secretion glands were damaged.  These take some time to heal.  Use creme, they said.  Any kinds, they said.  Bio-oil is good, they said.  Massage helps too, they said.  press hard.

The best news?  I can go swimming in Cuba next week.  Ocean and pool!  Just keep it out of the sun, they told me.

​I already knew that.