The Sweet Spot

Today, I watched both the sunrise and the sunset over the ocean, which is not as implausible as it sounds. It is November, after all, and all fall the sunset has been creeping slowly to the south, although until this evening I honestly hadn’t noticed. This morning, the sun rose like an iridescent tennis ball above a blue-gray court of water; this evening it hid behind the high rises but turned the sky a cotton-candy pink. Sea gulls stood on the beach in puddles of pink water, pink clouds billowing out above them. I passed a woman walking a German Shephard who was barking and pawing at a horseshoe crab. On the seat of her gray sweatpants were the words “Love Pink.” At that moment, it was hard not to. The whole beach was pink, and everyone was happy. Two teenagers in bikinis splashed each other in the waves, pretending the water wasn’t freezing, while the rest of us pulled up our hoodies and smiled at each other. Kids trotted down the beach with their beaming parents; no one was tired or grumpy or had just lost their temper. Everywhere I looked couples were holding hands or kissing. I hadn’t even left yet and already I was trying to figure out when I-- no, we-- could come back.

The last two summers, Don has suggested a beach vacation, but both times I have dragged my feet. I just couldn’t bear the thought of sun-burned, mosquito-bitten kids with sand in their diapers trying to sleep in a sweltering tent. And I know Clayton. He goes in the water once and immediately wants to change into dry clothes. Then he’ll play in the sand for twenty minutes and announce, “I’m all done playing.” He doesn’t seem to understand that it’s supposed to be a day at the beach, not an hour.

All in all, a beach vacation just seemed like more trouble than it was worth. Why not just go to a lake? There was sand, there was water. Wasn’t it practically the same, only without the salt and the inflated prices and the five-hour drive? No, Don insisted, it was not, although he did not push the matter. “There’s just something about the beach...”

Today, I got it. There is just something about the beach. Even Myrtle Beach, with its ugly building and neon lights, has that something. All afternoon I couldn’t pull myself away. A thousand thoughts were buzzing in my head, but there was something in the steady roar of the waves that hushed them.

I’m in Myrtle Beach for a TESOL Conference. I came to earn credits towards the renewal of my license, and to escape, for a few days, the tedious requirements of my children. I’m leaving with an energy and a vision I haven’t felt in some time. This morning, after the sunrise, I rode my bike the five miles from the cheap hotel I’d booked on priceline back to the Marriot and settled into the front row of the big conference hall for the final plenary speaker. Over the next hour and a half, my shrunken little educator’s heart grew two sizes. Kelly Gallagher is one of the most inspirational speakers that I have ever heard. I wanted to be him, with his badass powerpoint slides and his books he tried so modestly not to plug. I could imagine every one of the ninth grade students he teaches being in love with him. I was a little bit in love with him.

After all the hate and disrespect thrown at us in North Carolina recently, Kelly Gallagher’s talk was a cool breeze off the ocean. Sure, he’s an educator, not a legislator, but still it was deeply reassuring that there are people out there who, one, have a clue about what makes a difference in education, two, are making noise about it, and three, are still in the classroom themselves, doing their best to make that difference.

And he wasn’t the only one. Yesterday’s plenary speaker basically shouted from the proverbial rooftops that we should do away with the dreaded five paragraph essay and teach real writing instead. She made me want to finally stand up to the sour-faced teacher at my old school who is still using the exact same moldy lesson plans she taught from twenty years ago and say, “See!” Of course, not all the sessions blew my socks off in quite that way. Still, my rusty teacher toolkit is practically bursting with new strategies that I can’t wait to try out once I get back to teaching.

This fullness I’m feeling... I know it’s not just the professional inspiration and the vibrant colors in the sky. My brain feels swollen with ideas, my heart stuffed with a sense of possibility. I know at this stage in the game, I’m probably not going to go after that Ph.D in Applied Linguistics that part of me hankers for. Probably it’s too late to be an English Fellow with the State Department. (Or is it? The flyer I picked up said there’s an allowance for dependents, so I might as well check the website.) Still, I feel something shifting. All those teachers, they’re fighting the good fight. Maybe I’m just getting ready to join up.

At last year’s conference, I felt like hiding my name tag; I was ashamed of the empty spot under my name where my school affiliation should have been. “I’m not in the classroom right now,” I kept apologizing. This year, it’s different. That empty spot-- I know what goes there, even if it’s not printed: “Mom.” I actually feel proud of that. It’s taken the better part of the three years that I have been out of the paid workforce, but it seems I’m finally feeling good about the identity piece of the path I've chosen.

At the end of the conference, I ran into a woman who had done her student teaching in my district. She’s clearly an awesome teacher; I’d gone to her presentation last year and been awed by the work she’s doing. Where was I now, she wanted to know. “Still with my kids,” I said. She got this look in her eye and told me she was pregnant. She was trying to figure out what to do about work once the baby came.

Probably she’ll stay in the classroom. Most teacher moms do, which is probably why it can feel so lonely on this side of the fence. But talking to her about the challenges ahead-- how will she manage to pump at work, how much time can she off take without losing her job-- I felt at peace. Being a full-time mom has been the hardest job I’ve ever done. It’s not the same kind of got-to-keep-all-the-balls-in-the-air hard that I know working moms face, but it’s its own hard. And I’m finally starting to feel proud of the work I do.

This afternoon, I walked down the beach, searching for shells to take home to the kids. It felt good to miss them, to imagine their happy little faces as they sorted through the treasures I’d brought for them: the hotel pens and pads of paper, the hard candies-- meant to lure you to buy books-- that I’d swiped from the publishers’ tables. I had that post-conference glow, and I smiled to myself as I realized that I might be able to hold onto it for a while, since it won’t have to endure, on Tuesday, all the buzz-killing minutia of an ordinary day of school.

When I get home, I’ll store this year’s conference binder next to last year’s. The glow will, inevitably, fade. Still, I’ll type up my notes and read Gallagher’s books and a thousand more that Dee Dee and Clayton and Sylvia will hold out to me. Gallagher talks about the “sweet spot” of teaching, that elusive place somewhere between making kids hate reading by shoving text analysis down their throats and leaving them alone to flounder in incomprehension. I look forward to trying my hand at that again. For the moment, with ten years of my career behind me and surely decades more to come, I’m glad to be enjoying this sweet spot, with my children.