it's an honor to be apart of delicious words again i've been here before as a writer and here i am today as an artist and i look so happy to be benefit in cots celebrating our community and sharing the size of me i want to dedicate today to three people who are here dave and joey and then it were so incredibly kind to my mother and to all of us when when when alice lived with us and then of course my husband peter who definitely gets the saint of the year to have his mother in law live with him for several years says so this is an interesting project i want to tell you about it because what it did for me is integrated all the facets of my life it brought together being a daughter being a writer being an artist a being an anthropologist and it came to be like this i was sitting in my office and you v m where i was  professor who was in charge of bringing culture diversity and humanities into the medical school her medical school curriculum scatting ready to give a lecture on culture and medical decision making and the phone rang and was the lawyer for my mother's new york co op apartment and he was calling me to say that on account of the apartment fire she couldn't live there anymore without full time outside help well that was the first site heard of the fire but it made perfect sense a few weeks earlier peter and i had driven down there and found the apartment stifling and dirty the air conditioner unit sat on the floor in front of windows shut tight but my mother could remember nothing about the fire  she didn't remember them removing the unit she couldn't tell us anything about it but we followed orders we set up around the clock care she hated it she said they follow me around like the gestapo she was a proud hard working career woman and she had done all the cooking and cleaning for her family of five without any outside help for her our whole lives so we try to one bedroom community in a nearby one bedroom apartment in a nearby senior living community but then she kept on trying to walk home so they said that her only option with them with the lockdown alzheimer's unit they urged us to find another solution because she was still too well that's how she came to live with us alice was disappearing she lost her own home now often the internal gov of people with alzheimer's disease also disappears they say exactly what's on their mind and this disappearance ended up being a blessing it left out let alice find parts of herself that she had kept hidden from her children anyway and she wished out loud that she had gone to medical school instead of becoming a biology teacher and so at last all those years of her pushing me in that direction and away from creative work made perfect sense but then the internal governor led her to stand in my kitchen and look around at all the things i had hand painted the cabinet knobs and pictures and she said to me you should quit your job and make art full time so her loss was my gain that's alice homers after several months of trying to ballast balance full time work outside the house and the home care agency i followed her advice i took a leave of absence from the college of medicine  i'm here so that's my story we remember through story we think through story we connect through story when i started recording alice's story just as i had in my own development i was an artist first then i got practical and became an anthropologist and in that process i discovered my writing voice but when i wanted to tell her story i turned to graphic storytelling for a few reasons one of them was that i had made a promise with an artist friend in beijing that she and i in the fall of two thousand and ten that we would send drawing a drawing today to each other by email we had just had to transition alice out of our home and so i was just drawing pictures of alice they were to process my own grief but also i wanted remember all the magic and laughter of the time that we had together i found this voice for this story when i made that picture i had been using a lot of collage of my work collage and pencil drawings but that day i realized i'd already done a series of drawings of her and her bathrobe but i suddenly realized you know what i'll cut up alice in wonderland to make her clothes and this was a book that we had read together my father read to us when we were kids and my mother always took us to the library but there it was i made that picture and then when i finished the whole thing i suddenly looked at it and i saw that as i had drawn that picture these halos appeared around alice's head and i realized oh my gosh this is reminiscent of armenian miniatures armenians my mother's first language there were days when she couldn't speak english and she would wake up from a nap and she would need to speak to me an armenian unfortunately i had studied it in college and and it also was reminiscent of her reverting to childhood sort of they're cutting up a book from the  our shared time together when i was a child and she was she was my my mother and there we had sort of reversed roles that is actually the aides are so picture in this story book because i've gotten advice willems that if you're making a visual story never start on page one you need a little bit of time to find your voice the minute i need that picture so found a voice i went right back to page one and just  drew it all the way through and you're seeing part of a series of drawings i've had to leave some out on account of space but if you go from the beginning and read all the captions you can tell that this part of it's essentially a love story my father dave alice would see him in trees whenever we went outside she looked up and said there's a deck of the new tree or she would say to me that time one dave used to he was hiding in the tree and he wouldn't  tell us where he was we were all saying where's the worst dave and then finally when we just were about to give up he'd come out so she was i obviously they're seeing things that we couldn't see and in the process of this  instead of kind of reacting all of these pictures then became part of the brooklyn art library sketchbook project which is this kind of funky public art project where it reverses the relationship between books and art usually arts on the walls don't touch the art don't do any of those things books you can check out and page through these sketch books are meant to be handled so all of these original drawings have been handled and i think they're probably disintegrated by now because they've been handled now they travelled across around the country and they've been checked in and out and touched and fortunately we've got digital scans and these are now printed on to canvas and as soon as i printed them on to canvas started thinking about what else about my mother and our relationship and our time together did i want to bring into them well we had a lot of fun and the fun was already present i mean you can see this isn't your usual doom and gloom i mean happy colors teapots stars this was something i learned directly from her this could be a fun time it could be a time together and she taught me this very early in the disease that when she still kind of knew what was going on and she would walk around the house periodic lee singing this song from the rodgers and hart musical babes in arms some of you might know it seems we stood and talked like this before we leave you look at each other in the same way then but i can't remember where or where the clothes you are wearing are the clothes you wore the smile you were smiling you were smiling then but i can't remember where so right away she gave us permission to laugh but there are other layers and there are layers that emerge when these became printed i said she would walk around the house always wanting to contribute so she'd come into the room got  heard we were the best mended we never even got to the point we were like penelope thank you for taking the fishes out so she could really soak so she could always have that feeling of contributing and being part of us so the minute i had these on and thread and i started and bella showing these original drawings with with stitching that emphasize the halos and her slippers then as i'm doing this and my son said my my pointer are getting sorrel i put on the symbol it's still hard to sew into canvas i got it all and i started poking into the canvas to make that work a little easier and then all of a sudden i realized my gosh my mother's father was a shoemaker he probably handled alzheimer's disease and i wrote essays that go with with each one of these and i wanted to do this story as a combination of pictures and words because my mother a lifelong reader the entire time she lived with us she read every single day and i was always just baffled and impressed by the fact that she would read even if she couldn't remember what was at the beginning of the paragraph but pictures books with pictures were the things that she responded to the most strongly and remember her reading a book that's about her third or fourth graders called robot dreams a great wordless graphic narrative really very sophisticated and fun and my mom was sitting on the couch this is a fantastic book because she couldn't remember it somehow better with the images so when i made started making this i wanted it in a medium that somebody with alzheimer's could access and that meant making sure that there were pictures there to reinforce force the words knowing that it was all fun and if laughter that that was permissive than allowed in this project is also part of why i chose a graphic medium because we associate graphics comics with humor they get right into our subconscious and sort of give us that permission we remember reading peanuts we know we're allowed to laugh so the classic al timers question you know does she still recognize you my mother didn't recognize me all the time when she lived with us let alone now that she's in an alzheimer this was a typical conversation they know why are you so good to me because you're my mother i'm your brother who's your daddy and you know it was it it's much better to laugh than to have a broken hearted battered and to know that even though she didn't know that i was her daughter she had this absolute perfect trust for me anything i was doing was was was safe in her mind the i also brought in through this whole process a lot of what i did back at the college of medicine i was able to tackle lots of issues that biomedicine leaves out i'm a medical anthropologist i'm used to come studying medical systems of other cultures where things are done very differently in lots of other systems you've got a healer who's with you and then you die and that healer stays with the family and with the corpse and they're all together where is he here we have a medical system in which the doctors are technical experts death is treatment failure and then the family is handed off to some other kind of expert we separate out the spiritual side or the secular side the funeral home director or the pastoral person comes in at the time of death whereas we've got to practice death all the time we got to talk about death my mother this one here the story that goes with this one the lobster quadrille which you won't you won't you won't you join the dance you might remember that from alice in wonderland this story is about when my mother would practice death for many days at around sunset and she said dana dana get it get a shower curtain this is it this is the end i don't want to make a mess and she was asking me just to sit with her in practice and we would have these conversations about death that are usually left of medicine because medicine usually is working at preventing death so we got to do all sorts of things like that lots of times when i'm sitting down now to write a story in response to the sub conscious driving i go back to the male clinics website and i think about say it's a story about hallucinations well how do they handle hallucinations they stop them we use superhero approach and i think i they have to write about wandering say and how you've got to prevent wandering i don't have the responsibility of being a medical doctor so i can talk about how we let my mother wonder with the dog because it preserved her dignity and because we live in the country we could trust that the neighbors would notice and she would get back home instead of having to have the kind of of a vigilance that people might need to have  an urban setting i also learned that so often the things that are interpreted as just wacky behavior are often real desires made manifest were real feelings made manifest my mother recall me over to say dana can you check have i grow horns and who have said when she was worried she was feeling bad about something so she literally experience the sensation of that and that was an opportunity to say oh what's going on not defects crazy you don't have horns instead it was the opportunity did to just talk about what's bothering you what's the we could understand dave in the tree is being desire i want to close by just telling you one of these stories because i truly believe that stories are what heal us and stories that go back and forth between visual and verbal and the sub conscious and the conscious are the best sorts of stories if you read the story that goes along with this when they're under like that i first met my hands on the image i first met alice in one thousand nine hundred three i don't remember the details neither does she so i was never close to my mother not counting those first nine months and the six months that followed when she breastfed me unlike most mothers in the scientific one nine hundred sixty s were mammals of course i breastfed you she had said when my first son was born and then those fine meals and a clean enticing home filled with unusual things to large striking oil paintings by her friend gaylord florrie i hand out of bed from libya a carved wooden chest from brazil and a backyard with a vegetable garden surrounded by fruit trees but no we were never close until alzheimer's it wasn't  collins is worn truth that you can never repay your mother that led me to have her move in with us when the lockdown alzheimer's unit was her only other option that we read his poem the lanyard together many times it was our unfinished business of finding the good clothes when i was a little frugal alice would let me noodle off the remaining bits of red from around the excise stem of the tomato if she was cutting one up for a bit first salad for her i always kept a bowl full of red ripe tomatoes on the counter for the taking competitive you told me can i have a tomato alice used to my fair lady voice and held your pinky out when she asked for one help yourself behind mother wouldn't let us do that i didn't either or that's hard alice gives the best empathy i kept a salt shaker hidden in my tree for i would sneak tomatoes from the garden and eat them up in my ford very clever i wish i had thought of that thanks but you didn't have a tree ford or a vegetable garden when you were little know that's right alice took another bite where did i live you lived in a walk up railroad apartment on fifty sixth street back when there was still a bad neighborhood two thirty three east fifty six street six stories multiple apartments on each floor with a shared toilet in the hall her building is long gone respect the placed with nondescript offices and there is a slaughter house an processing plant down where the united nations is now i told her i learned this fact when i was doing research for a novel the smell was horrible i can imagine but the best facts i learned straight from her sometimes my mother stood a lamb's head for supper i wouldn't touch it i go to bed hungry but my sister she loved it alice reached for another tomato you know you must've been the cute little kid i wish i had known you that anyway it's a treat to hear you and it's very inspiring and i'm going to play off your idea of stories because the way i'm what i'm going to talk about is my lifelong passion for teaching and i'm going to do it re of stories at the power of storytelling these happen to be true stories of students that i've worked with all my life i've been a lifelong teacher and to play off the words of robert frost two roads diverged in the yellow wood and the path that you take can make all the difference in your life and the path i took my entire working career has been teaching and is again as far says it has made all the difference so my talk today is going to be about my lifelong passion for teaching and a thanks to the students who probably taught me as much as i hope i taught them teaching has been a long tradition in my mother's family back to the earliest settlers in the massachusetts bay colony the people in my mother's family were teachers i was raised to think that that was something proud of and go to the plymouth colony and talk about your ancestors and when i was a young woman i remember a remark made by a rather arrogant supercilious quite wealthy guy who said to me how your people got here first you had all that chance and all you ever did was become ministers or teachers puff somehow that remark stayed with me when he scoffed about it and i hope today that i will show you that there is many other forms of remuneration other than than financial so it is true that need a choice is a high paying profession but it's been a wonderful profession for me my grandfather taught his whole life at the boston latin school my mother's brother was chairman of the spanish department at the choate school and my mother was a career teacher when i came of age the choice careers for females in the early one nine hundred sixty s weren't a lot different than what was offered to my mother in a previous generation the same proverbial choices do you want to be a secretary a nurse or a teacher and that was it the first two for lots of reasons were out for me so i think i am lucky that it turns out i think i was a born teacher my first teaching job i'm going to take you back to georgia in its one nine hundred sixty four i was in georgia because my husband was an army officer we were newly married and he was posted there i was age twenty years old in columbus georgia just newly graduated from penn state i had nothing to do i was lots of energy nothing to do so i phoned the superintendent i was looking for a teaching job and made an appointment and i went in with my you know my transcript my recommendations my bob law i remember this interview because the superintendent only asked me one question he said did you go to college when i answered in the affirmative he said great you start tomorrow i wasn't a very long time in georgia maybe five months but i learned so many experiences and had such lessons that i still remember today and as a teacher that's what it's about you given your take you learn each day in this exchange so again it's nine hundred sixty four georgia the confederate flag flew over the school that i went to teach in the american flag flew underneath the confederate flag i had thought in mind i even take that since the supreme court case brown versus board of education that there was no more segregation in american public school systems not true the first day i drove the it through the black section of columbus and got to the white school and all my students were white it was a poor white school and i remember i could imagine the will of these other facilities we have here can you imagine the conditions in the city black schools out of my paltry salary i purchased most of the materials that we used i was teaching sixth grade i actually wasn't accredited to teach sixth grade but the superintendent had named bothered to ask that i was accredited for seven through twelfth anyway short time period in germany in georgia but seminal experience in my life here's what i took away from that first there was the boy who sometimes slept in my class so one day i sat down with him and i said why do you sometimes now in  school i felt i put time into these lessons and why was he now having and he said to me turned out that he lived with his mother in his baby sister and his baby sister had an open heart defect and they had no money for surgery in this baby had to be kept up right at night could not lay flat and he told me that his mother was out every night all night i was not sure whether she worked in the night shift or the peanut factory over the she was a street walker but anyway this child would sit up all night holding his baby sister and i was wondering why he napped you know during the day i remember the twins who said they were never hungry at lunch a boy and a girl and this was before the error which we have now we have free federal lunches subsidized lunches reduced price lunch is depending on parental income so obviously during my time in georgia they had a free lunch and didn't know where it came from but the most powerful lesson i want to share with you i called the stedding lesson i had a friendship with a janitor an old man an old black man he would arrange to sweep my room after score and we would talk and he and i would talk politics i've liked talking politics my whole life and he and i would do that and he it was the year that barry goldwater was running for president and he was afraid that barry goldwater what would happen if goldwater won and the spitting lesson ties in with the other major character of the story he is a fifteen year old boy in the sixth grade he is at my class he has a juvenile delinquents and he's almost six feet tall every single day here asked me about the same time i want to talk in the afternoon if you could use the bathroom and he did this for many weeks and one day even naive as i was i thought what is he doing so i followed him out of the classroom and here's what was happening was one of those old buildings with you know the staircases and we were on the top floor so you could look all the way down to the basement what this boy was doing was every day going to the fountain filling his mouth with water then he was leaning over and he was trying to spit on the head of my friend of the janitor when he walked on me i was so angry and that afternoon i said to my friend why didn't you tell me why don't you tell me what's happening i will stop it and it's been a lifelong lesson i remember he looked at me and he said you don't understand you just don't understand and it was true i certainly did not understand the situation in georgia in one thousand nine hundred sixty four in one thousand nine hundred sixty four i was driving home from school the day when i heard the news on the radio that martin luther king had been assassinated i remember i had to pull off the highway because i was crying so hard because it was a public radio station public airwaves not a public radio and i couldn't imagine that people were allowed to speak and say the things that they were saying on the radio station i also remember how little experiences my students had in the world i remember asking them what country they lived in and they said georgia and i pull down you know every school had those old maps and i pointed out here's the united states and here is georgia but not up until by the time i left it they if you had said where do you live what state what country ga ga after a few months my husband was transferred to outscore germany and i still have somewhere in my files the letter of recommendation from the principal he wrote as follows we don't like yankees but you are welcome to come back and teach at my school any time germany i taught at the department of defense army day school year the d o d s school then my husband was sent from germany to vietnam we had a daughter then and i enrolled in graduate school my husband with considerable good luck returned from vietnam his commission and we moved and settled in new hampshire i spent many years at home raising four children i had three exchange students and a houseful of most other people's children all the time but of all the different things that i did in that time period i'm only going to pick one thing to mention to you because i want to spend the majority of my time telling about you about personal vignettes of the students to stay in my mind and what i learned so what i picked to tell you about was i developed with a physician friend a teaching program on the dangers of the nuclear arms race remember this was the height of the cold war between the soviet union in united states the idea came about when i was at a soccer game and talking to my good friend and family physician and he and i were concerned about the been the medical consequences of a possible nuclear exchange and he said i wish we could do something and i said i know what we can do i'm a teacher i'll white the curriculum and you present with me because the truth is in small communities doctors were sort of elevated to a god like status and i knew we'd made a good make a good team the teacher and the physician so we had a partnership and we presented it basically to anybody who would listen to us needed a speaker rotary clubs libraries community centers but our main target was high schools and colleges and we did that for when two or three years i think and my doctor partner and i were awarded the annual peace prize given fi the physicians for social responsibility and he went to collect the prize because by that time i was back in the public school and i didn't have any time off to go get the war the rest of the time personal vignette of students that i remember i'm going to focus on the nearly ten years i worked in a public school in new hampshire in the second poorest town in new hampshire to put that into perspective new hampshire  mississippi for the lowest amount of financial aid given to schools so you can imagine that this was an extremely disadvantaged or all public school it was a post industrial town whose only industry had shut down and  s ten most disastrous places that needed to be cleaned up i worked with a charismatic principal whose career i had been following to a newspaper and magazine articles i sought a job with him and i got it and with this charismatic principal and a handful of dedicated teachers this small school became the national flag ship school for the national school reform movement which was called the coalition of essential schools and we had quite a ride we were on t v they made a made for t v movie about him there was a book about him i got to go around the united states giving talks to teachers during the summer and vacation but the most important thing i remember from all of those years in that school was the students and i've divided them for you into categories the first category i'm going to call the students that we lost our case study or category the first one alex alexandra i had her in both the eighth grade for language arts and the eleventh grade she had an abusive stepfather and i reported it to the principal and the police arrived i told alex that she could live with my daughter lindsay and me if she wanted to the principal dennis overheard me and he said jean could i see you in my office please and when i went in there he put his hands on my shoulders and he said jeez listen you can't save them all you can't save them all and then he stepped back and he said not to mention what you just did is illegal well years later alex followed a really bad man to new york city he sold drugs and he was a pimp and alex died of a drug overdose i know that my offer to her may not have been legal or smart but alex might have had a very different life had she lived with my daughter and me my second case study is brandon brandon was the smartest young man in the eleventh grade he and i had some powerful conversations in front of the class he had so much talent and ability and he made such bad choices he got mixed up selling drugs and one day we had a major confrontation front of the english class we had just finished reading f scott fitzgerald's the great gatsby he actually stood up and he wasn't shy and he said miss k i make more money than you ever dreamed of making and he had a goal to think he had lost necklaces and i said yes you do and i said you and i and everyone sitting in this room we know where that money comes from you best be careful what if you end up like gatsby shot dead floating face down in his paw and nobody even comes to his funeral he's a drug dealer well i'd like to say that he changed but he didn't and he didn't stop and he got beaten up with a baseball bat with a drug deal gone bad and i went to visit him in the hospital i said brandon this might be your last chance you could go either one way or the other you have so much talent or you could throw your life away and do something really stupid well the end of this of brandon story is he is now serving a very long sentence in the massachusetts maximum security prison outside boston a few years ago somebody sent me an editorial that brandon had submitted to the boston sunday globe and they printed it and this editorial when wrote he was warning kids not to do what he had done and he said that there had been people who tried to help him and he wrote of a teacher who tried to save him and someone sent me tauriel the third in the last one and then we'll get to more positive stuff takes thirty examples colleen no father alcoholic mother intelligent bright sweet i noticed that she didn't have a winter coat once and my daughter lindsay gave her a coat for for calling to wear and i remember the scarf or who said what a fool you are she's just going to use it for drug money and she didn't she wore that coat every year for a couple of years she had so much potential and so little guidance and so she made some bad choices she had a child she dropped out of school then i got a christmas card from her a couple years later she had turned her life around she was working during the day going to school at night taking care of her child but old habits and old environments they're hard to change in the was a party and alcohol and she had a tree on the way home and somewhere in that small town i've been there twice is a little painted wooden cross where her car hit the tree so those were my three examples of students that we that we lost but there were lots of success stories too helping kids who were the first generation in their family to ever go to college it's just a wonderful thing to do one of  students she lived with her mother and her grandmother and both the mother and the grandmother got pregnant in the tenth grade and she paraphrased to me that sort of what was expected of her well she was we all worked hard to get interviews did kinds of things for her and she went on to college another student with a great success story is sierra sierra beat all the odds she became pregnant in ninth grade and the father was an eleventh grader i had both of them in the air in both classes my fellow teacher and friend barbara and i was sat in the teacher's room crying because sierra was so promising one of those rare students that comes down the road well she and her single mother raise that baby she went to college and she's now teaching in the same small town that i'm talking about so sierra made it to the last one is someone who taught me a great lesson and his name was stanley stanley was an eleventh grade student he was mainstreamed into my language arts classes and he probably had a reading ability of about third grade and once we had a visit from the director of the coalition of essential schools he was brought along with my principal denis into the classroom to see the final presentations from the his presentation he lost track what was he what was he supposed to do but here's what happened it was so amazing instead of getting upset he blew four and he said to all of us just wait a minute wait a minute give me a chance this is the way my brain works if you give me a chance i'll get it just just wait a minute and there was total silence in there around all those tough kids totally silent everybody who all rooting for stanley no one spoke and no one made a sound i felt like we were all sort of collectively breathing together and moving forward well then honestly it seemed like his face turned into a shining star and he said i've got it i've got it and he did a and i looked over and here's this world famous educator with all these books to his credit and the tears running down his face it was a really really good lesson to me the other lesson in humility i got from stanley because his reading little level was so low i paired him with a really bright smart college brown jr to work with him and one day i said oh thank you so much for working with stanley and junior really put me in my place he said risque oh you've got it backwards thank you so much for letting me work with stanley there's nothing he can't do or fix i've learned so much thanks so thanks a lot and that was a good lesson for me the next category is humorous tales and i have to give you a warning this sexual content in these because you cannot deal with teenagers and not deal with sex so here's the first example eleventh grade male student asks to speak to me and he says i can't talk to anyone else promise you won't tell anyone now at very awkwardly i'm going to describe his problem to you and women need a sip of water for this so he what he said in essence his girlfriend wanted to have sexual relationships with him relations with him and it isn't that stanley didn't want to it's that he had a problem and he had thought about it a lot he had obviously you know studied his anatomy and measured things and stanley said to me here's this cruel haven't greater he said miss kay i have to be careful you know i have a lifetime supply of sperm here and i have to figure out how to spend it and it's got to last me my life what should i do where i was biting the inside of my mouse so hard because i thought i laugh i mean this would be the most terrible thing so awkward y as i'm explaining awkwardly to you i told him that he really didn't have to wary about that there were so many times when students would ask me if they could come and talk to me and then once they begin and i hear where they were going i'd say stop is this really something you want your english teacher to hear about one year we had a mock presidential primary and it was for the town and the whole school and the whole town hosted by the eleventh graders and brandon so talent was founded was the master of ceremonies jerry brown came from california senator bob kerrey came we had a this is really a very big deal and we had a question and answer period and one eleventh grader stood up and he asked senator kerry why he should be expected to give child support payment for die first the bewildered senator kerry said are you the father of this child and the student's response was one afternoon i had a private conversation with an eleventh grade girl she confided to me that she was pregnant i sed and she said i can't tell my parents what should i do or by now i'd learned and i said you must talk to your parents and you must talk to them tonight they love you they will help you they have a right to now she cried and she cried pester the kleenex and sent her home she didn't come to school the next day engine come for many days thereafter when she did come back we hugged and i didn't ask her any questions what had happened it became obvious as many months went by and she didn't change in any shape or form she looked exactly the same the situation was never mentioned between us until the night of her high school graduation and she was going to college she kissed me in the graduation line and she whispered in my ear they queue so much risqu for helping me with the you know what problem and by the way that guy is a real jerk and i just can't stand him so typical of denis he came up with the idea that we should have a senior friday afternoon therapy group that he should divide the senior girls up into two classes and pick two female teachers and we were supposed to prepare them for life after high school and so i was one of the tos teachers and he managed to always make this sound like this was a complement instead of a great amount of work he had a ph d in psychology and he was very adept at doing that anyway so i had to figure out what to do every week for an hour with these girls sitting in a circle and we did a lot of self esteem and lot of training things when we also talked about practical things like check books that i'm still not very good at hunting for apartments jobs etc well the point of this tale since we shared so much these girls and i every friday for an hour i understood realized that they were all sexually active so i had a concern obviously there's always a concern for pregnancy in this poor school now aids was a major concern and since they shared with me i understood that they thought that you got aids from if you french kissed someone from  brought in red cross people and to talk to them doctors red cross and i would step out of the room so that girls would feel free to ask questions so i did this for three weeks in a row and the last session i use now i said i was alone with the girls three weeks have speakers come in i said now that they knew all this information i was sure that they would be all using pretty protection if they had sex big silence they all looked at each other and they felt bad for me they were trying to make me feel better so one girl piped up and she said well we wouldn't really carry protection because then it would look like we were planning it next not a good thing to look and second of all miss kennedy you shouldn't wary about us this is what i really remember you shouldn't worry about us we've all known each other since about first grade it's a very small town so if we have sex we only do it with each other so you don't have to worry about us any more so than that tale illustrates why i like working with teenagers they look like adults they have adult bodies but inside they're still they're still kids who want answers so the next quick categories humorous moments that happen in a classroom they happen all the time how well the girl giving a current event reports and she stood up here's a picture in the paper last week of the titanic she said i've been reported that the captain of the titanic had just been found floating on an iceberg in his dress uniform on a chair and  and i said could i see you in the hall for a moment and i said that's preposterous why would you if that doesn't make any sense and she said risqu i read it in the newspaper and i said well you certainly did in the national enquirer and she said how did you know that in this town there were some very frightening experiences a quick one and the one that sticks in my mind the most one day i was making bulletin board alone in the front hall in those days you could go in and out freely of schools now you don't do that you sign in and you use a hand maybe even get photographed drawn out but anyway i was alone in the school in this very scary looking man came in and came up to me and he just walked up and he put his face up there and he said that he hated all teachers he said i hate teachers and he said i have a lot of guns and one of these days i'm going to walk into this school and i want to teach you teachers a lesson and went to the principal and of course the police were called and he said was true the police went out and he did he lived in this rundown shack way on in the woods and he had a huge arsenal of guns and i don't know but maybe some kind of a terrible school tragedy which we're all way too familiar was averted there were other experiences that were disquieting but not frightening  one night we we had night conferences oftentimes because then i said no report card unless a parent comes in for a conference and since it was a poor working town we had conferences at all strange hours and weekends whenever a parent would come so i was alone in this building one night dark and old again one thousand century red brick building waiting for the father an eleventh grader i never thought about being nervous until the dad walked in my he was very disruptive while looking but i remember what he had on his hat and this is ghent pardon my bad english language but this what he had on his that it said quote put some class in your ass drive a cow or saki and i thought that was really awful hat to wear to have a conference with your kid's teacher and then he turned to me and he said listen here if my kid causes you any problem just beat the out of them and i said lamely we don't do that here and i thought to myself no more and i conferences you know alone last one last little tale true story is what i call the forty thousand dollars swindle one of the eleventh grade girls walked out of school one morning and she borrowed the car keys of a friend and she took a joyride and she had a very minor accident her father had a bad reputation in town and he sort of made his living by disreputable lawsuits so now it was our turn he sued the school that we were negligent the girl walked out of school and did this and he was awarded forty thousand dollars that was a great deal of money for this small poor town so one friday afternoon i was depositing my paycheck in the bank and i heard her she came what i post the parking lot she's waving this check around and she's yelling miscarry risqu i'm rich i'm rich and her father pulled up in a pickup truck and he was again i disreputable looking fellow nasty looking guy and i looked at her and i looked at him and i was qualls but i said whew just got a lot of money for doing a very bad thing the father jumped out of the truck and he said who's th is this and she said oh dad this is the english teacher and he hauled her back in the truck and they took off on monday morning her ninth grade i had to call the principal soon as i got home of course and report what had happened in the society said oh no not again kind of thing on monday her ninth grade already in trouble with the law brother he ended up in reform school he was really on his way to our not a good life he came up with his little gang and i said brightly if you go to class you don't want to be late and he said my dad said i can do anything i want to you so i took him to the principal and had him repeat what he had just said and that was the end of that was the end of that the very last few years i taught in a vastly different community chesterfield new hampshire some of you probably know what chesterfield is it's a bedroom town of keene the opposite of the kind of school that i've been describing where i spent the first ten years but still the lessons go on last couple of small ones eighth grade girl who plagiarized her final for she denied it over and over again to me and finally i sat up beside the computer and i knew that if you typed in the first page of a paper on a certain website if it had been plagiarized the entire thing pops up so i said to her this is your last chance you plagiarized this no i didn't know i didn't i had to type in the first line of course the entire paper payments on the computer so she had to write it again or get an f but the most important thing to her was i said she couldn't go to the eighth grade graduation dance and the principal supported me her mother came in and yelled at me and said i had ruined her daughter's life that there was going to be a limousine and you know pedicure and dresses in the whole thing and just two years ago i was at a high school bellows falls from on doing a job and as i was leaving i heard a young woman calling this k was cage's way up wake up i turned around she said do you remember me and threw her arms around me and there she was the girl whose life i supposedly had ruined according to her mother she said she couldn't believe her luck that we got to meet again and she wanted me to know that she was doing really very well she introduced me to this puzzle young man she called up and she turned to him and said dramatically this is miss kay she was my eighth grade language arts teacher i knew exactly what he was thinking yeah yeah like sure who cares what what's the big deal in the last one that happened was just two months ago at shop is that the healthy living she has it was a lie the people she turns this line of people and she says this is my eighth grade language arts teacher people in burlington a polite you know they also while they also miles and those are the rewards you get from teaching and the real things that i remember the most important things are those kinds of experiences and i said i would pick just one thing from from that had nothing to do with the the actual classroom experiences and from those ten years and twenty years of teaching that the ten years that that poor school the most exciting thing that i remember the ford foundation offers every year ten one hundred thousand dollars grants for innovative ideas across the united states and our high school submitted a grant and the grant was based on the fact that we had an interactive t v show three or four of us teachers agreed to be taped throughout the month and then once a month this team would come from new york city they would take those tapes and turn it into a two hour interactive show that was broadcast to four hundred universities around the united states for teaching purposes and it was interactive so callers would say that if people could see the show and then call us up and ask us what we were doing so we submitted a grant our school based on the t v program and we were one of the twenty five finalists and my friend barbara and i asked to represent our school we had to write and then give  presentation at the j f k school of business at harvard before a very prestigious committee and to say that barbara and i were petrified is probably an understatement i think we would have held hands if we could if we could have in order to maximize fairness you had to make your presentation stand up of present for fifteen minutes no overhead you know giant floor to ceiling projection nothing like that and the presenter before me was the governor of arizona well barbara and i make a long story short we won one of the ten thousand dollars one of the we were one of the ten winners of the hundred thousand dollars grant and she and i got to go to washington d c we were put up at the hay adams which i didn't realize is where they put visiting heads of state and we the ten winners had a three hour private champagne or d'oeuvre at the at the national art museum the ten winners and we sipped champagne and ate or d'oeuvres and looked at the priceless art and then barb and i had a thirty minute appointment with al gore and he gave us one hundred thousand dollars check to bring back so those were wonderful times but the most important thing ever of course in teaching is them that the experiences you have them and so the path that i took to go back to the robert floss it took many different dimensions and led me in many different places from the scared twenty year old to the senior citizen who is still doing it and it really is what you get back i found this in my desk last sunday when playing this is a christmas card i got from a student i had from the poor town in new hampshire all those years ago and she writes high life saved future ever all is well here busy look at my fan for food kids my family i think of you often always loved dale and that's what you get back from teaching and that's the path of i've taught it certainly in my life made all the difference thank you hometown lies in a basin this means that no matter which direction you look in you see a mountain the apartment i grew up in was located on the sixth floor of a building was due over the roofs of the neighborhood so by going from window to window you could get the four panel ramma the first thing i do in the morning was to open the shutters and observe the very core range as it stands to the west the morning sun hits it first bending in the particular overtone of the light blinding white yellowish pinkish i could guess what the weather would be like in winter how high above the valley floor the snow would start would tell me how skiing the vegetation has reached home wow or sent on or sent he when he would reach so now the highest plateau visible from town it was school vacation i have to check in the back or i do go to the bathroom officially to wash and brush my teeth but really to look at that the to take a look at the bed done range to the east of us back to late before the sunrise the range is all dark and flat almost two dimensional against an already glorious sky the quest line seem to separate the day in the night so precisely that i always wondered why the bible didn't mention it it seems like it should read and god said let there is separation between the light in the darkness and he was so and god called a separation bill done and it was the second day the good old days inn in addition to offering a magnificent view of the mountains serves as a separation between the northern and southern alps this might seem like an obscure distinction to a nun alpine person but trust me they are two different world however surprisingly enough the line separating the two is so thin that you could stand was one foot on each side drive up a windy road through the pass and as you reach where the water divides between two slopes the change is so brutal that it registers as a punch in the stomach the line is even materialized in the sky above your head this is where the clouds stub that in their track south of the the land is slanted toward the military and they and you can feel it the sparse vegetation the white limestone the blue sky the houses with their flesh colored tired roofs the tastes of the people for conversation and for this offical debate everything is screaming roman north of the line is the land of the barbarians people rush back and forth conversation the limited to the  philosophy would be an expensive voice a time the flanks of the mountains are covered was dark pines the roof was black slate and life is to be endured another enjoy north and south remain two separate this is when the government in paris decided that french only would be htat and tolerated in schools each side kept its distinctive accent though nothing parents could do about that each side has its climate and therefore its own agriculture and therefore its own cuisine you raise cows and harvest the cream from the milk or you farm all the born alive trees therefore you cook with butter or you cook was until a century ago both sides of the line had one thing in common though poverty tough climate the north draft in the south had the same result people often when hungry maybe this is why both sides state separate throughout history there was no incentive for anyone to cross into the other side seen from the north the south would appear as a small triangle of blue sky between two peaks in the cloud cover it might sound attractive but you'd have to cross a mountain range to get to it and then start just the same the path each side of the line took out of its misery was would you have guessed it differen was one of the first areas of the country to experience the industrial revolution the mountains made waterfalls provided free power which gave the local industry and they had in the marketplace and then the equipment  the fall themselves provided business a petunia days and employment the pipes the turbines the electric generators cetera from all the mountains north of the line came the starving peasants from the  from the was own or even the met is in plateau where my father's mother was from she used to say that if you wanted to drink a glass a good one with a good man than met the scene you'd have to bring the good wine and bring the good man's wife was so hard that only the mean one survivor suppose but the vindictive survive true if you believe another story of herbes a man in town was holding a grudge against his neighbor he never said a word but every evening of the long cold winters he'd get out into the cover of darkness and poor a pot of water on the on the wall of he's  house after twenty years the wall collapsed so for the migrants who were to built industrial empires the first generation though would weep in the streets at the sight of the in the street of the town at the side of the mountain regions of origin the second were to build the empires sets of the line you might think that the matter what they say misery had to be easier in the sun than under the gas poor bread men were some bad harvest they too had to leave home and they went much further they emigrated to america mexico to be precise i still hold a collection of letters written by me and say sers to the folks back home kept intact in a box for over a century by some miracle in the approximate grammar syntax and spelling they describe the everyday life they you official name of the street the by illiterate but fabulously of reach peasants these mentions probably were the tackiest things back then but after one hundred years they have become national historical monuments and they are carefully preserved year without seeing where he was going nobody in those or became of him i will however and quiet about this matter i will write to all priests and missionaries if i receive a favorable answer i will let you know immediately i understand your war about the sinus your son has kept i hope that nothing bad happened to him and that you will soon hear from him please believe me them that i will do everything in my power to let you know his whereabouts i received a lot of similar requests to yours and i can say that i often succeeded in tracking down those who had known the change address since in eighty years joseph menu someone even further and as a sort of mine right from kean where he found a job as an officer with a french colonial customs on the border with china how desperate and hungry does one have to be to go all the way to talking to her to earn a living in eighteen ninety nine and how do you get then a first place i imagine him walking down the main street of the village his parents walk with him to the river and there give him one last kiss and watch him cross the bridge how old can he be seventeen eighteen this he have a goal the young marsay a few days later after a few nights spent in the ditches along the road  in the big city he has never seen one he may take some odd jobs on the harbor and then one day when loneliness hearts to the point he needs to scream when he was just about to give up hope he makes a friend the man buys him a drink and then a second and then the third when he wakes up he's on the deck of a ship already at sea if he has dreamt of one day sailing away in the sunset he's now in the hold shoveling coal the flames of the steam engine not the sun burn his face coal dust not sea breeze fill his lungs if he wanted to say to america he sitting east six months later the better than him in a chinese harbo through all these generations and sufferings the line dividing the two cultures kept the two sides of my family apart and then my grandparents moved to the base in my mother's family coming from the south my father's from the north in my generation we travelled cunts to constantly back and forth across the line we travel across and physically by spending vacation time either at my mother's family or at my father's but also culturally just by having dinner at one set of grandparents or another and because i loved both both sets of grandparents and both sides of the line i sometimes felt the divide as a tear in my soul taking side was impossible for me and being a crossbreed not an option given the magnitude of the differences although a lawyer people who can be verbose my father's father in true know than are kept to himself at the noisy family reunion he could stay he who listens harvests he'd answer and fall back into his science it took me years to understand how right he was but my grandmother too was a person a few words remember she was from the these in plateau if she'd see me a little bit cautious about doing something or more literal leave my misprints of a sister would insist on wearing rubber gloves to do the dishes the glove caton they were caught the raw say if we talk about a woman who had married the not so attractive however richman nineties don't have pockets they live the couple my miles off the road from him the marriage was breaking up a divorce of course was out of the question even letting other people wander was out of the question so in order to keep the appearances she would  laundry in the water and get on the clothes line for river everyone to see and then he's mother would come they get home and washing for good as i say they didn't care much for sharing in the north first solo ascent of marriage by having arrived at the top by a m drank whatever water was left in his canteen dropped a note into it screwed the cab back on and left it there to prove he had done it the note read i am alone two words some would have written volumes to describe the fancy feat two words be my dad who did his fair share of climbing also had his stories and then there were all his contemporaries who had made who made the front page of the newspapers on their regular basis if they had done the first ascent of the south face of the the first ascent of something anything and finally get on the names in the newspaper we had located the virginal cliff in the foothills of air corps within range of our bicycles after having studied it from the bottom with binoculars one afternoon and then manufactured ourselves the pieces of equipment we thought we'd need we set off in great secrecy early one morning were good not quite make it to the top got very close of having on them in the newspaper anyway in the tragic accident page that very night all across the line into the talkative southern side of the line by joining my family for dinner at my mother's parents i kept pretty quiet about my day fact my mother went to her grave not knowing where that one scarred my body came from soothing the wounds in my ego and in my flesh the smell of garlic frying benefits she woke with a pill in his chest and sit on it etc etc none stop until we'd leave all with that southern accent of hers her french interspersed was provoked words and expressions parrots be damned the smell of all of or than the narrative from south of the line around the dinner table were a mere preview of the fool southern experience you would get once physically involved there the house is a tall and after supper when the heat of the day subsides and the cool so hot breeze slid down the hill everybody pulled up a chair in the street and made conversation with everybody else letters from the expect  political opinions racy jokes but a function in this functions marital issues nothing was off limits it goes without saying that if you share a secret with your best friend talking from across the street the whole town  cheers it was you that ship in valon always travel and then they speed of light but then with the windows staying open all night to let the so on cool the inside of the houses and the street being so narrow w try hiding anything in your way back to the north of the line i remember my first successful climb the hot tool until then i could only hope to become one the a man room one and i was tortured by doubt would i ever become the equal of my father and my grandfather and all the famous climbers i told you about but here i was standing on the top of my  mounting an ocean of peaks in front of me all the way to italy in switzerland and never seen nor imagined so many mountains on the way down the pack made lighter by the consumption of the food the lungs euphoric at finding the thick oxygen the legs going effortlessly down the slope i felt invincible my nose which for days had only smelled my own sweat was now enjoying the fragrance of the dirt and the pine needles heated by the sun my eyes exiled for so long in a word world of blinding ice and black rock were finding relief from the colorful roar that the entrance i was happy  free those mountain which until then i thought might have been attached not to the earth but to the sky and therefore only accessible to gods were in the within my reach in val so no farm blocks your way or your imagination it's a paradise for game big and small and for boys big and small i trucked rabbits partridges wild boars or even the poachers themselves with their trap lin i tried my hand at rock climbing so low no ropes no protection on the dry sand paper feeling i'm stone picture of these heels and then further the higher summits as warmer friendlier scale models of the northern arms now and then you step on the patch of time brush against a rosemary bush or happen the bun wide lavender and now and go off in the cloud of fragrances but don't get the idea though that one can get cozy with these mountains just because they do not have a code that lies granted here you won't need the heavy boots the  i trust you now understand why i said earlier that the line separating the north from the south was running through me like a blade pity me born on the divide and ever could make up my mind between one side or the other and my south not khemu ever were confronted was an existential issue this present but that was my youth and those were the days now in my old age now that people find the stories of my childhood accurately funny now that nothing is what he used to be anymore and be honest with you all these seen all remote good time was carving the lines of my forehead have your raised a line between my two worlds for starts is the north still the north and south elizabeth please examine the evidence people in last divorce like everywhere else and in violent they do not pull up the chair in the streets to debate the intimate issues from across the street any more they should they adore and watch t v at night the windows remain closed because of the ac and the gossip material material filters out let's  drag and cuts to meet at your request you walk in you see more room ask what you'd like and the survivor opens the walk in cooler pulls out a carcass and then after having sharpened he's long knife was one quick thomas and places on the bench in the back of the store all prime real estate more often than not locals wave the tourist past the a turn to still a longer and finish conversations picture  as a cross between a white mean opera and the david letterman was solid gold front teeth moderating the debates were using the thought provoking questions that for a while had left the audience holding its breath here's an example and daylight saving they the villain or struggle to address the naturally this becomes a topic of conversation the bench i was there last time some of the b usual smile and jokes and then asked from across the store say i met them when they we haven't seen you was tall raymore know why i told them all was her lover or good twenty years younger than her walking home the rock of lem tucked into my arm i could not help a grin in my face if they were loners still tell their most intimate secrets in public then after all things are still where they used to be the