Dear Fellow Teachers,
 
This week, I’m heading to NCTE, the annual convention of the National Council of Teachers of English. (#NCTE19 is in Baltimore, this year, so send your local eating and touristing recommendations.)
 
One of my presentations at NCTE will share some research on what happens when teachers write. I plan on discussing the top two or three themes that came out of my research. I thought I’d use my blog to post the full top ten I worked with, for anyone who’s interested. I’m hoping it will spark some discussion, so please comment at the bottom of this post.

Best,
Eve

​I’d like to tell you that the number one topic was writing. But there were actually two top themes. One was, in fact, the importance of low-stakes writing--low pressure assignments, writing for fun and experimentation, writing without the pressure of a grade or what William Zinsser, in On Writing Well, calls “The Tyranny of the Final Product.” 
 
Here are a few typical comments. (I’ve changed people’s names):
 
Suzanne, high school Social Studies teacher at a boarding school: "I think the biggest thing I realized was that I can write without necessarily having a purpose at the outset. I think I often don’t write because I’m like, well, who’s gonna to see this? Or what is this for? Or as we talked about genre the other night, like what is this even gonna be? What am I making? And this weekend, for the first time in a really long time, I just started writing things, and some of them took form and became pieces."
 
Lucia, middle school English teacher: “I want to build more time for just, ‘You’re going to sit down and you’re just going to write creatively for ten minutes… once a week, and it’s not graded. They can share if they want.”
 
Ocean, high school English: “When I first started teaching, I was always doing a free write Friday… and if we didn’t do it, the kids would notice, and they would want it. … And I just sort of stopped doing it because you have this book that you have to teach, and we only have, oh my God, spring break is just around the corner… But it’s definitely inspired me to just really push to include that again.”
 
Ayana, Ocean's department chair: “And it’s not even to say we have to abandon everything else. It could be a creative quick write, or a creative free write about the texts, even.” (I love how the department chair responds with a way to keep teaching all the planned curriculum--but get a little more open with it.)
 
Siobhan, early childhood teacher: “There was a freeing aspect to not feeling your writing has to be something that’s epic… it does free you up to writing in different ways.”

What the heck. If I'm going to move my blog over here, I may as well include the feather in my cap. When I was notified (by email!) that I'd won a Pushcart, I thought one of my students was playing a trick on me. I hadn't even known I'd been nominated.

Published in The Gettysburg Review, Autumn 2010
Reprinted in 2012 Pushcart Prize XXXVI: Best of the Small Presses

My father sits at the edge of his bed, insisting on his shiny concert shoes. Their lack of traction on a polished floor is treacherous for a man who can no longer stand up on his own, a man who has seized and used every moment of living left to him. But the shoes are not negotiable, nor are the button-down shirt or the pants that need to be safety pinned to secure them to his wasted frame. In an hour or so, my father will find the weight of his clothes unbearable. In a few hours, my father will be dead. But first there is a final concert to play, and there is the proper attire in which to play it. I watch as my mother helps my father get into his clothing for the last time.

Earlier in the day, I held my father’s mottled hand, the baggy skin flaking away, but the grip still sturdy from a lifetime of scaling the strings of his viola. For much of his career, my father was the assistant principal violist of the New York Philharmonic. “You have to know when he’s going to start,” my father whispered from his pillow. He took a noisy, shallow breath in, and released a long, rattling exhale. “You have to know when he wants you to play the beats.”

Well, of course! I thought. Not a black-hooded hooded figure with a scythe, but a conductor with a baton. “You know when to play the beats, Dad-ling,” I said gently, though I hadn’t been a gentle daughter.

“But you don’t!” he said, with more strength than I thought he had left. He hadn’t been a gentle father.

“Well, I’m not the musician,” I said evenly.

He took several percussive but unhurried breaths. “It’s deceptive. It begins with a rest.”

“Oh. A rest.” I pronounced the word lingeringly, softly. “That sounds like a good idea.” My father hadn’t slept for several days. His body was strung tight, and he couldn’t stay still; he had plowed an agitated path between his bed and the reclining chair in the living room, going back and forth like the needle on a metronome, assisted by my mother or my sister or me. And when he no longer had the strength to get from one room to the other, he had relied on us to help him sit up in bed, lie down, sit up. All day. All night. “Do you want to rest?”

He didn’t answer. His mind had drifted elsewhere. His hand was cold; I let go of it, and pulled back. The smell of death already permeated his body, and though I wanted to kiss his brow, as I had done the day before, the stench drove me away. He held the hand out in front of him and examined it. The skin under his fingernails looked bruised. His green eyes had a pale, opaque glaze to them, as he slowly rotated the hand from side-to-side, and then brought it back toward his gut. Was he already leaving his body behind like an old coat, wondering to whom this hand belonged?

I sat with him, trying to hold onto just being in his presence. As I had become more than a guest in my parents' home, my father and I had shared a comfortable closeness that had been pointedly absent from our adult relationship. My sense of the minutes floated away with him.

But then he was back. “What time is it?” He could barely get the words out, but there was a sense of urgency. “When… when do I play?”

“In a couple of hours, maybe,” I told him.

“No!” His voice held a faint trace of power and rage that lingered like the smell of sulfur after a gun is fired. “When is it? When am I playing?” Rage was our family’s stunt double for passion, for deep feeling… for life. To rage was to live.

“It’s your concert, Dad-ling.” I made my voice soothing and slow. “It can be whenever you want.”

“No, it can’t. I don’t trust them. Who are the other players?”

“It’s your concert,” I repeated. “Who do you want to play with?” And then, “You’re going to play beautifully. It’s going to be beautiful.”

He seemed to consider this. “Eve, go away,” he said, not unkindly, followed by a characteristic, “I’m very busy.” I left him to gather the last bit of himself, to concentrate his focus.

Out in the living room, I was alone. My mother, dodging despair, was in her study, asleep. My sister had briefly relinquished the role she’d carved at my father’s elbow during his long illness, and was off at yoga. I sat down on the couch, next to the empty leather recliner my father had favored as he had grown weaker, and across from the piano, where a few weeks ago, my son had played for his grandfather one last time. My father had lectured Leo on the art of taking a bow. “The audience claps; they’re saying ‘thank you.’ You acknowledge this by bowing. Never leave the stage without a gracious bow.”

This was the room where we had hovered over my father all these months, while death hovered over us—unspoken, unspeakable, because to speak of it violated my father’s force of will. It was maybe five or six months ago that he decided he wanted to ski again. He could barely walk. What he told me was, “I want to stand on top of the mountain.”

I drove. It was the sole time he was in the passenger seat and I was behind the wheel. While he didn’t get to the top of the mountain, he did stand on the peak of the bunny hill and skied down it. Once.

And he and my mother had gotten to the Cape only a month ago. Cape Cod, where he had taught me to ride waves, where he had showed Leo how to scour the bay at low tide, and fill a wire basket with oysters, where the day started with a swim in the pond and ended with a sunset dinner. When they arrived, my father didn’t have the strength to leave his bed. But the bed had a view of the bay. He declared he’d be back—and better—when summer rolled around.

His students were still calling on his work line to schedule their next lessons.

But there was no more time left for him. I swung my legs around and stretched out on the couch. The sun glinted off the remaining sliver of the Hudson still visible between the new steel-and-glass high-rises that had gone up as my father became sicker. The diffuse, afternoon light bathed the apartment. It was silent, except for the flow of traffic so far down that it was easy to imagine it as a distant brook moving over rocks and stones to the river. I felt guiltily peaceful.

No more bearing witness to my father’s dogged decision to take his meals via IV needle in his arm when his appetite died before the rest of him. No more sharing close quarters with the grief my mother and sister had claimed as an identity. I was near release from their insistent ardor that burned my oxygen. Near release from my father’s orbit, with the flare of violence it had left on my adolescence. In the waning day, all that remained were the tender, complicated feelings, threatening to push up through the surface of my momentary calm.

My father is almost ready. Back in the bedroom now, I ache at his tenacity, his engagement, as he asks my mother for his white shirt. He rubs the fabric gently, weakly between his fingers. He manages a shake of his head. “No. The black shirt.”

I fight my tears. Of course the black shirt. He requests his tails, a fixture in the back of his closet since the Philharmonic had gone from tux to the less formal suit and tie. I had little-girl memories of him wrapping his satiny cummerbund around the waistband of his trousers, fastening his bow tie, and shrugging into the jacket with the penguin tails hanging behind him like a bride’s train.

My mother buttons him into the shirt he has chosen. But she eschews the satin-sided trousers that would need to be dug out of some ancient suit bag, while my father waits, hunched over on the edge of his bed. No matter. My father sees himself in his most stately clothes, rather than in his old khaki pants, pinned up, that he has worn to his last two doctor’s appointments, and that my mother somehow manages to get on him for the last time. I hurt for what she will feel when she no longer needs to call up her courage and brisk efficiency. My persistent friction with her subsides in the poignancy of the moment.

Finally, she slips on the concert shoes. No socks. It’s too difficult.

His legs, no power left in them, dangle down, his feet in those slippery shoes resting on the floor, marionette-like. His face is in his hands. I can see his skull through the sparse, downy wisps of hair the chemo left behind.

My father is filled with anxiety. “It’s been seven months since I played,” I hear him rasp, through his hands. And then, “Can I do this?” He looks up. “How will I get where I’m going?” His question takes me like a sucker punch.

He waits.

I hear a key in the door. My sister drops her bag at the foot of my parents’ bed, and moves in to position herself close by my father’s side--nurse, disciple, look who’s daddy’s girl. I step back, not out of kindness or deference. But at this moment, I am able to let in her tenderness, her need to protect him.

We’re all here. Now he acts. Instantly. He strains to get off the bed.

“He’s got a concert to play,” my mother tells my sister.

“Carnegie Hall,” he says, resolutely. It’s where he first played when he joined the orchestra, a young man with his life ahead of him. We lift him, our arms under his arms, around his waist. He shuffles forward. We move instinctively. We know this route. He’s back on the metronome track that leads to the living-room recliner. In a few precarious steps, he is off the bedroom carpet, and out onto the parquet hallway floor. We can barely keep him up. And now we see how those shoes glissade against the polished wood tiles, like dull skate blades on smooth ice. We move him a few more steps down the hall, pausing at the front door of our apartment. We can’t possibly get him to the reclining chair, nor even back to the bedroom.

The previous night, my father tried to get out of bed alone, and fell face-first on the bathroom floor. He sports a Band-aid on the bridge of his bruised, swollen nose. Broken, I think, though my mother can’t bear to consider the possibility of one last indignity. We struggle to hold him from another fall.

My sister races to grab an armchair, which she positions where my mother and I stand, clutching my father. “Margot, go. Call for a taxi,” my father instructs her. It takes all three of us to turn him around and get him seated on the snow-white cushions. And now?

My father asks for his viola. “My fiddle,” he calls it. My mother retrieves it, positions it on the floor in front of him as if the instrument itself is onstage. “Is my music in there?” My sister pulls a score from the side pocket of his instrument case. She places it in his hands. My mother locates his glasses, and perches them on his bandaged nose.

He does what we have seen him do hundreds of times before. He leans back in his chair. He takes a breath. He licks his thumb and forefinger deliberately. His motions are weak, but so familiar. With his moistened fingers, he opens his music. He scans the two-page spread. Licks his two fingers again, turns the page and repeats the process. How often we have seen him do this, without ever thinking about it. With clear vision gone, what music is he reading? What notes is he seeing, so purposeful, that for a moment, it’s only him and the printed pages?

“Okay.” He closes the score. “I’m ready.” It’s the voice I know. So tired, but deep, gravelly and grave. In the final, brutal stages of his illness, I have fervently wished for it to be over. Now I can’t bear his letting go.

My mother moves to the stereo. Through the final weeks of his illness, my father didn’t listen to music. Nearly any sensory experience seemed to be too much. Sounds were too loud, lights too bright, the tangible world too saturated, perhaps too exquisite to bear. Music above all.

But my mother senses what is required now. She opens the jewel box on top of the stereo, pulls out the CD, and puts it on.

A violin sings out a gripping, declamatory phrase, supported by the bold chords of a piano, second violin, viola and cello. My parents’ home is suddenly filled with music, as it was nearly constantly before my father became ill. I feel the majestic first bars in my stomach, the clear, simple rhythm of the opening passage. My mother comes back to stand behind my father, her hands on his shoulders—holding him, bracing herself. My sister and I are on either side of his chair, sitting on the floor and clasping his hands. His viola is front and center. Schumann’s Piano Quintet, opus 44 is the last piece my father will ever hear.

As the cello hands off the melody to the viola, his foot manages a few weak taps. Here is his moment; he is the voice.

We ride the mellow, honied sound of the viola line, the four of us. The music connects us, holds us fast in this magnificent, agonizing moment. This is a gift my father gave me, this mindful delight, and its power to bring a work of art to life--a book, a painting, this piece of music. Each note vibrates with our collective focus.

“Can you believe this?” my father says, his voice uncharacteristically subdued.

“I can’t. I can’t believe it,” my mother replies.

It was only yesterday that my father allowed himself to consider the inevitable. “You’re going to start hospice care on Monday,” his oncologist had said, the previous afternoon.

I think the last conversation I had with my father when he was fully cognizant went like this:

“Eve, how long are people on hospice care?”

I had been banging away at my computer for days, checking the signs of imminent death. The loss of appetite, the physical agitation, the purple fingernail and toenail beds, the cold extremities. “A year,” I said slowly, “or six months, or a few weeks, or a few days. It depends.”

He nodded. “I see.”

So now he knows he is dying, and he has made short work of it. Made sure to embrace it, get right to it, do it well. If life is over, then his work is to die. He is good at working. Always has been. He has been busy. He told me so himself.

The piano, in the lower registers, introduces a passionate, urgent dance of instruments. How lucky, how grateful I am that it ends this way.

My father doesn't die with the final chords, though how could we not have imagined he might? Somewhere in the middle of the joyous, vibrant third movement, my father says sadly, “The concert’s almost over.”

“It sure is,” my mother echoes. She met my father sixty-two years ago, when they were young teens.

“I have to go,” my father says. He strains to get out of his chair, and we help him move the few steps down the hall and back to bed.

He doesn’t take the final bow.

A few hours later, I say goodnight to him. “I’ll be back in the morning,” I tell him. I kiss his forehead, trying to experience only the tender gesture, rather than the waxy feel of his skin or its odor. “If you want to leave before I get back, it’s okay.” He doesn’t react. “It was a beautiful concert,” I add.
​
He smiles.

I leave the apartment for the river of traffic.

​Re: Brief Encounters with White Men ​by Claudia Rankine, NYT magazine, 7/21/19
 
Dear Ms. Rankine,

I don’t have enough fingers to count the diversity events I’ve participated in over the last decade where a White person, struggling to understand their privilege says, “But I grew up dirt poor,” or “But I’m a wheelchair-user,” or “But I’m gay.” The word “privilege” in White Privilege is so easy to conflate with social privilege, economic privilege and other forms of benefits and opportunities. The word “privilege” often puts one more hurdle in the way of White people understanding our White Privilege. I agree with you that the term “White Dominance” might have been a better choice than “White Privilege” for engaging White people in our critical examination--and self-examination--of systemic racism in this country.

In nearly every diversity event I’ve attended, facilitators anticipate the issue of White people who don’t feel privileged. They frequently use as an example Italians or sometimes Irish to address pushback from White Ethnics to acknowledging and understanding our White Privilege. “Your ancestors might have been impoverished, but you still…” or “They may have fled famine…” they begin. But in exactly zero diversity events I’ve attended has any facilitator ever used Jews as an example. Several articles I read recently, while attending a conference at Teachers College, Columbia University on equity, race and pedagogical practices, similarly used examples of Irish, Italians and Slavs, but skipped the Jews. And yet White Ethnic pushback at the events I’ve attended is nearly always from people who, like me, are Jewish. I’ve heard an Irish person cite their White Ethnicity once in a diversity session, while struggling to understand White Privilege. And I haven’t heard a word about it from an Italian.

Not so we Jews. As victims of White Supremacy and hate crimes ourselves, more newly White in this country than many other White Ethnics, Jews who are new to doing work on race and equity are sometimes the folks who have the hardest time understanding that we are both marginalized and reviled, and fully possessed of White Privilege. That they’re not mutually exclusive. And that they intertwine in complex ways.

Blacks and Jews in this country have a complicated history. No more so than now, when being an American Jew is dangerously and erroneously conflated with the Israeli government’s human rights abuses against Palestinians and Israeli PoCs (there, I said it), and when Trump and company use Jews as a battle tool for their reactionary positions without our participation. It feels like we are now as hated by some on the left as we’ve long been by the extremist right. Yet Black universities gave sanctuary and jobs to Jewish professors escaping the Holocaust. We founded the NAACP together. We marched together in Selma. Our allyship has deep roots. But that allyship deteriorates further, each time we leave the messy relationship in the closet.

Every time I hear facilitators talking about Italians, or read scholars on White Supremacy citing the same, I find myself thinking, “Oh, they’re talking about Jews again, but are afraid to name it.”

Why? Are we too much of hotbutton topic? Do we hijack the podium too often? (Talking is in our blood.) Is the subject too incendiary? Just too complicated? It certainly is that. Various politicians and public intellectuals of color have recently cited fear of reprisal from American Jews and their allies for their silence on Israeli foreign policy. But leaving Jews out of the discussion on White Ethnicity is—dare I coopt this term?—a kind of fragility.

I get it it, though. I used to speak up about the particular issues of my dual identity as a Jew and a White. These days, when doing work on race, I often, like you, don’t mention it at all. I’m afraid to. Afraid of being seen as the Jew. Afraid of muddying the waters in an acute discussion. And it makes me ashamed. And less of an ally. I’m remembering a professional development session at my school, where I listened to a White-Jewish colleague protest that he was not from a privileged group. And I listened to the facilitator respond by talking about Italians. And I said nothing.

Ms. Rankine, you are one of my literary luminaries. I’ve read work by you with students, and discussed work by you with friends and colleagues. You’re a stunning writer. And brilliant. And deeply important.

So it was with a certain element of disappointment that I read your essential piece. Published in a periodical read by some of the same White guys who skip you in the airport line. And some of the same White friends of mine, authentically trying to look within, who still speak of being “color blind.” And I got to the line asking, “How did Italians, Irish and Slavic peoples become white?” and then, quoting Matthew Frye Jacobson, “…Celts, Slavs, Hebrews and Mediterraneans.” Hebrew? I’m not Hebrew. And I thought, “Et tu, Claudia Rankine?”

I have a shameful confession to make. When Jews were murdered at The Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, I was grieved and outraged, like so many people across racial and ethnic and socio-political lines. I tabled my day’s lesson plan for my 7th grade ELA classes, and worked with the Social Studies teacher to quickly create an interactive, culturally responsive lesson on hate crimes. I was deeply grateful that I work in a field where I had a productive outlet for my anger and fear, and where I like to think I make a difference. But there was a little part of me—and I’ve never said this to anyone before—that thought, “Oh, good. Now the country will actually believe that we are victims of White Supremacists, too.”

Because of our White Privilege, we aren’t afraid, when we leave the house, of being stopped and frisked, stopped and shot. Unlike you, we can choose to reveal our identities or not. Step into the exhausting Work or step out. That’s why we had to wear yellow stars on our clothing. To identify ourselves. That’s why most of the hate crimes against us take the form of graffitied swastikas, instead of injury to our bodies. (The exception being observant Jews in religious dress.) But our role in The Work is informed by our hyphenated identities.

I’d like to end this letter by quoting the last lines of your article. Because you said it better than I possibly can. “I was pleased that he could carry the disturbance of my reality. And just like that, we broke open our conversation—random, ordinary, exhausting and full of a shared longing to exist in less segregated spaces.”

​When discussing White Ethnicity in Whiteness work, please let’s not erase the Jews.
 
Yours in Allyship,
Eve Becker

Painting: The Beggar of Prachatice by Conrad Felixmüller (1924)

P.S. Please read Greg Thrasher's comment, below. I don't know the guy, or how he found this post, but he calls me out for using Jew to mean White, American Jew. And he's right--that's exactly what I did. I stand corrected for normalizing whiteness. Most Jews are white, with the issues of hyphenated identity I discussed above. But we are, as he notes, a diaspora community and come in different shades and nationalities. I still have work to do and always will. 

Teacher Appreciation​

Teacher appreciation week
With donuts
Can’t thank you
Enough
A roost of confidence
A welcoming pheasance
In the early warning
When you put your chairs
In a circle
Everything you touch
You change.
 
You open the shades
Sunshine shimmies in
 
The child in the clock
Talks
For the burst time
Moved
By a book that you
Read out cloud.
My own mother, he says
Gave me away
In the dropsicle
And
 
And
 
You speck in
Half a screp
Because he can’t
Finish
 
But you can’t
Fuse the word
Abandoned
A slice of a knife
In a stace with
His peers
 
So you say
The sense
Of being left.
 
(You think bereft.)
 
There’s a hot of love in this kreese
But the writer
Feels
And you feel
Left.
 
Yes
He says.
 
His classmates
Nod. Hold
The moment
Before
Venturing and adventuring
Breaking and entering.
 
At the end of the day
The custodians
Put the desks
In rows
That never were
 
Pull the shades down.
As if overnight
Someone from a laboring building
Might sprook into your classroom
And speal some knowledge
Or your weft
Or donuts
 
On off hours.