A homophone is a word that sounds the same as another word but differs in meaning. Homophones may or may not differ in spelling (right/write, tire/tire). The above photograph is of a letter, sent to me by the Chicago Board of Education, confirming my resignation, and misspelling a homophone.

It’s hard for me to write these words: I am not a teacher anymore. I resigned from the Board and am now a coach of new teachers at turnaround schools. A turnaround is defined by Mass Insight as “a dramatic and comprehensive intervention in a low-performing school that: a) produces significant gains in achievement within two years; and b) readies the school for the longer process of transformation into a high-performance organization.” The stakes are high, and the teachers I coach are under a lot of scrutiny and pressure.

Transitioning from teacher to coach is like going from being a superhero to being the person who massages the superhero before she changes into her world-saving cape and leaps into the air. My bosses don’t see me as a masseuse; they believe that coaching is the lever to raise teacher and student performance. A lever amplifies an input force to provide a greater output force. So yes a lever can uplift you, but there’s force involved. Read on

It’s been a little gloomy here, what with blood diamonds fueling civil wars, Chicago youth murdered by the hundreds, and bacteria holding my counter tops hostage. How about a few cookies to cheer us up?

Of course, these can’t be conflict-free cookies. Their very batter stirs up psychological disturbances from my past. Behavior was modified and inner children were hugged in the baking of these cookies. Thankfully my friend Tim of Lottie + Doof was there to help me through it.

It all started in 1979 on the first day I met my stepmother. I was three, but just as neurotic as I am at thirty-five. I don’t remember this day at all, but I am told that on the first day we met, we baked cookies. What a classic lure! Just as Hansel and Gretel were lured into the witch’s oven by a gingerbread house, I was lured by chocolate chips. And just as the cannibalistic witch of the fairy tale fattens up children in an iron cage, I was fattened up with cookies!

Actually, knowing three year old me, I probably licked the spoon briefly with a paranoid tongue and ate a single cookie with hesitant bird bites. Life is pretty Disney for my stepmother and me today, but many of our years together were quite Grimm. And so the cookie-lure of my primary years lurks in my psyche.

Flash forward six years to the fourth grade. I was drafted into the Brownies. Yesssss. Finally, I had an in to that exclusive group, that secret society, no doubt shrouded in secret handshakes and hard to crack codes. We would surely meet in a cave somewhere, don our brown sashes, and ceremoniously pin our sisters as we chant in strange tongues.

Really we met in the Kindergarten classroom at my school, and glued a Polaroid photo of ourselves onto a construction paper flower. How lame. There was no secret handshake, nothing secret at all. The overhead fluorescent classroom lights gave off their ordinary glare. Ah but…. on the calendar… a meeting at Lisa Bard’s house! It must be off school grounds where the secret society flourishes. And what happened there? Kids yawned, and moms delivered instructions on how to sell Girl Scout cookies. I dropped out of Brownies immediately. Read on

One reason that I avoid cleaning, besides being lazy and having better things to do, is that deep down I feel that I am perpetuating filth, not annihilating it. Sometimes the act of cleaning feels so dirty. One reason for this is the sponge. I do not understand the sponge at all. It is counter-intuitive to me. You have this object that absorbs, which makes me feel that germs (and everything bad you’ve wiped the sponge over) are festering inside of the sponge. Keep it a month or more, they say? That’s a month or more of festering! Heat it in the microwave, a trick they prescribe? It smells like sautéed microbes. And now that it’s absorbed a month’s worth of everything you wanted to get rid of, then sweated half of that out into your cooking apparatus, spread it around on other things you want to clean, and make them dirtier.

I have an innate sense of mistrust. I remember being a young child as my mother ran a hot bath for me. I thought about how she could, if she wanted to, drown me in the scalding water. I had no reason to think this; my mother is very nice. Trust nobody, not your mother, not a sponge. Because of this, I can’t seek help in conducting this research on the sponge. I’ll have to do it myself. And then with some curmudgeonly scientist’s method, I’ll have to test it, and prove the good or evil of the sponge once and for all. Read on

Photograph by Carlos Javier Ortiz

I have been teaching on the South Side of Chicago for ten years, and yet I have not been an authentic part of the communities in which I work. I have lamented low attendance at family nights, and yet aside from a first communion, a basketball playoff game, and a few home visits, I have not reached out to spend time with families outside of a school setting.

It’s not because I don’t want to, or don’t find it important. I read about Paolo Friere‘s work in Brazil, and about Paul Farmer‘s work in Haiti, and I recognize the importance of working in partnership with communities. I know that for true change to take place, initiatives must be grown organically in collaboration with community members, not generated by academics and imposed upon them. But I never found the right entry point.

One night a few years ago I left school late, probably grading fraction quizzes or setting up microscopes for a lab, when I saw a procession of adults and children, carrying points of candle light, singing. They were turning the corner of 71st and Christiana, a spot usually devoid of magic for me, the site of my daily grind. The procession was mysterious, haunting, and humbling. For what was this vigil? Remembrance of loved ones lost? A protest of urban ills? An appreciation of saints? Why didn’t I have a candle and a place in this line? Would I scold a student for not having homework the next morning, not knowing he had been processing the streets all night? Had I done that many a time? Would my time that evening have been better spent at this vigil, rather than inside the building inserting common denominators? I didn’t see an entry point. I drove away. Read on

That’s not a diamond ring!
No, it’s not. It’s an aquamarine. It’s my aquamarine engagement ring.
It reminds me of searching for seaglass by the Atlantic ocean, of my Italian grandmother’s blue crystal candy dish, of the coast of soon to be visited Santorini.

A week before Justin presented me with this beauty, he solicited some guidance on ring selection.
Simple, I said, but with something strange or different about it. Not a diamond.

Why did I ask for not a diamond?
For one thing, everyone else has them. And a lot of people have a lot of them. By that I mean that I see women of all economic stratas barely able to lift their hands to steer their cars or swipe their credit cards as rocks and rocks and dripping rocks anchor them down.And sometimes I don’t like to have the thing that everyone else has. Growing up within a half-time custody arrangement made me belong everywhere and nowhere, and vacillate between wanting to fit in and wanting to stick out. There are certain things that everyone has that I want too: an iPhone, a golden retriever, a honeycrisp apple. But there are certain trends I don’t want to perpetuate, like Uggs in the summer. And diamond engagement rings! Read on

I feel defensive. Putting g-spot on my list of things I don’t know about makes it look like I have sex problems. If I did, that would be normal. I could write about g-spot from that stance. That might help people, or help me work through the problems.

Is it okay if I am defensive? Can I just tell you that I don’t have sex problems? I don’t. No, seriously, I really don’t. But somehow, I just didn’t really understand g-spot. I didn’t know what it was, where it was, or why it was called a g-spot. When you reach a certain age, you think you should know your body pretty well, so you stop asking questions. You think: I graduated sex ed in more ways than one, I should know this. When I teach sex ed to my fifth graders, I encourage the girls to use a mirror to check out their equipment. I don’t want them graduating not knowing how many holes they have down there. They get embarrassed. I get embarrassed. Americans, descendants of puritans, get easily embarrassed about sex and the human body. But this blog is about confronting shame and getting the facts… of life!

My cousin Liz is an amazing filmmaker. In her investigative documentary, Orgasm Inc: The Strange Science of Female Pleasure, Liz confronts the medical industry and marketing campaigns that take advantage of women and endanger their health. Liz was initially creating a documentary about female pleasure, and has conducted research on this topic for years. I was visiting her in Vermont and after peeking through her bookshelf, I decided it was time for me to do a little confronting of my own.

I have admired Liz for so long, since birth! Wouldn’t it be easier to look through her books? To Liz I have to admit that I don’t know about the g-spot? On Liz I have to turn the camera, even though she is the supreme filmmaker?

Luckily, with her usual enthusiasm, she agreed to be interviewed. She even recommended this aerial shot which I got by making her lay down on a bed and standing with her in between my legs. Read on

I’ve always had trouble learning about history and politics.  Or, I should say, I have trouble retaining what I learn. The three things that have aided in this are narrativity, experience, and relationship.

Like many people, I am more likely to assimilate information if it is in narrative form. For example, Dave Eggers’ creative biography Zietoun taught me more about Hurricane Katrina than news coverage did. I am also more likely to learn something if I can experience it. That’s certainly not unique. There’s a slew of educational research backing the merits of experiential, hands-on learning. What helps me remember things most is a combination of these three: I have an experience in which someone I have a relationship with tells me a story. It is at the intersection of these three things that I learn something new and remember it.

To learn about Madeleine Albright, I employed the three factors. Why did I want to learn about Madeleine Albright? Because I didn’t know about her and I thought I should. When I was a teenager, I played Trivial Pursuit with my family. I drew a card about Margaret Thatcher and fumbled with the answer. My Dad (a Harvard graduate with a daughter ignorant about the stats of a prime minister!?) wore a look of shame. I felt shame for letting him down and for not knowing about Margaret Thatcher. Over fifteen years later I felt a brief burst of the same kind of shame about Madeleine Albright when her book Read My Pins was released. But in my thirties I refuse to feel shame, to fear asking. This project is in part about confronting fear and shame, about bravely asking others to teach me what I do not know. Read on

When someone feels passionately about something, so much so that she changes her everyday actions as a result, we often fail to ask her why. Perhaps we don’t want to seem like we are challenging her convictions. Perhaps its because we don’t wish to reveal our own ignorance about topics common in public discourse.

But we should ask why, especially when we care about the person, and especially when her everyday actions impact ours.

My meat-loving brother’s fiancé has been a vegetarian during the ten years that they’ve been together. Last year she decided to become a vegan. I’ve had vegan friends before, and never asked them about their motivations. I’d heard the land use reasoning, but didn’t fully understand it. I’d heard the health reasoning, but wanted to know more.

I interviewed Pete and Louisa about the choices they make when they consume, and asked them to explain why they make those choices. You might say I pitted my carnivorous brother against his vegan fiancé. To give him an edge, since blood is thicker than water, I let him use a keyboard during the interview. Louisa had no props, but she is very articulate, and held her own in the debate. Read on

When my fiancé was a young man, he found this book in a Salvation Army for $0.75. It had been recommended to him five years prior by his beloved high school English teacher. A Catholic school teacher recommends a book with sex, murder, and frequent, creative usage of the word fuck? Yes. Why? He didn’t think any of his kids would get their hands on it. Why not? It was hard to find. And in those days you could not order a book on the internet. But Justin found it and it eventually found its way to me.

Was this book critically acclaimed? A cult classic? A sleeper? I have no idea. I’ve resisted, day after day, the reflexive google twitch that accompanies curiosity these days. I want to look at MAGIC’s dusty, black, jacketless cover with its silver beveled title and wonder about it. That is what magic was back then; wondering about a book. I want to experience it for myself without being informed of its reception or background. That is what magic is to me.

The book is so, so good. I can’t get the mood of it out of my system, days after closing its crusty back cover. It’s about a man who wants to be loved, who wants public approval. As a child he seeks “everlasting health and strength” but fails at the football his father grooms him to play after his strong brother dies. Merlin the magician grooms him next, but his act bombs at an open mic magic show. He attempts suicide, but resurrects himself (or is resurrected, we wonder?) as a magician/ventriloquist, delivering a humorous routine with a dummy named Fats. The self-deprecating banter with Fats wins over audiences, yet Corky refuses to take the required health test to make it big with the help of an agent, The Postman. Is he hiding the fact that he’s insane, with Fats as his alter-ego? Or is Fats really alive?

I’ve created a triphopera of MAGIC in order to explore its characters and themes. Corky teaches me that it is impossible to win public love if that is our motivation for performance. Personal fulfillment, genuine self-confidence, and connection with those close to us give us a shot at happiness. Applause and accolades are elusive. The phrase within Merlin the magician’s advisory intro repeats throughout this piece: “If you do it right, they can’t love you enough.” This is a cautionary tale. “Love” of the faceless public is not fulfilling. That is helpful advice to me on the heels of being rejected from several jobs and a coveted teaching award.

Thanks to Justin Gumiran for bringing this book to my mind, and to Bob Leone for bringing this magical keyboard to my fingertips. Read on