Several years ago, the company I worked for incentivized us wearing red during the month of February to commemorate National Heart Month. If we wore red on Fridays, we got a free blue jean day. Normally, we had to pay to wear jeans, and I am all about a discount, but red ain’t my color. I didn’t even own anything red and I didn’t want to spend any money on a red top because that would have put me upside down on the savings I was going to garner via a free blue jeans day. Like folks do, I took to Facebook to ask if anyone had a red shirt that I could borrow. A friend of mine commented, “Your neck is red.” I vehemently denied being a redneck, so he reminded me that I grew up in a singlewide trailer that was situated (precariously when it rained hard) on a creek bank. His comment unlocked a long-forgotten childhood memory.

It was late 1984 or early 1985. Miami Vice was the hot new show on TV. It was wintertime, and we were experiencing a particularly brutal cold spell. That always meant that outside critters would go to great lengths to come inside.

It started with the common tell-tale signs. Shredded toilet paper in the bathroom cabinets and little droppings underneath the dish rags in the kitchen drawer. We had a mouse. A mouse in the house is common, especially when your house is on wheels and there is a field on the other side of the creek.

Mom baited and set traps. Pro tip: Peanut butter is the trap bait of choice because a crafty rodent can snatch a nibble of cheese off of the trigger before the trap can spring into action. Some nights, the traps would snap and some nights the traps would be relieved of their ooey gooey Peter Pan, but come morning, the traps were always rodent-less, the Charmin was still getting shredded, and there were still tiny turds in the drawers. This mouse wasn’t dumb enough to fall victim to a simple trap, so my folks moved on to Plan B.

Plan B was a heavy-hitter. Mom and Dad brought out the D-Con, aka rat poison. Anyone who has ever dealt with rodents knows this is a risky move. Sure, the poison might kill your pest, but the pest could also die within your walls or underneath your floor. Then you’d be left with the aroma of a rotting carcass until the varmint decomposed enough to not actually smell gross anymore. Days went by and the cereal boxes were still being gnawed through and there wasn’t a hint of decomposing flesh in the air. The mouse was getting the best of us.

One night after Jean and Larry had gone to bed, they were awoken by a rattling sound. Their sleep-clouded eyes focused just in time to see the four-legged asshole that had been terrorizing our home scurry down the hallway. And that’s when they realized it wasn’t a mouse. We had a creek rat living in our midst. My parents went scorched earth to evict the rat from our home – rat traps AND D-Con. Still, the rat escaped death. It continued to crawl underneath my mother’s beloved handmade oak trash can at night and shake, rattle, and roll us all awake.

Like any good country-dwelling, card-carrying member of the NRA, Larry’s next plan was to shoot the sonofabitch. Inside the trailer. Shooting indoors wasn’t strictly prohibited, since Dad used to teach me how to sight a gun by letting me target shoot a BB gun at the bathrobe hanging in my mom’s bedroom closet. But ammo that contained gunpowder was a different beast altogether. Jean wasn’t about to let Larry shoot a rat in the house because blood and guts would flat rurn the wallpaper. Besides, putting another hole in the wall or floor was just asking for another visitor to come inside and take up with us. So Larry devised yet another plan of attack. Our family would work as a team to get rid of our unwelcome houseguest. I was fully on board because the new plan meant I would get to stay up after my bedtime and watch Miami Vice.

With the overhead lights turned off and and the living room illuminated by the ambient glow of the floor model Zenith, Jean leaned close to my ear and whispered, “Now if you see anything or if I tell you to, you just jump on top of the coffee table.” That wasn’t going to happen. I was obstinate, even at such a young age. And I was armed with the same type of weapon the adults were carrying.

I, a tiny, blonde-haired, angelic child, clad in long handles adorned with tiny pink flowers, sat on the couch between my parents. The three of us were locked, loaded, and ready to face our enemy. My father’s weapon of choice for us that night could be found hanging on the deer hoof gun holders of many a wall back in those days.

We were taking on the rat with frog gigs. My father’s plan was to catch a glimpse of the massive rat and collectively sling sticks adorned with a very sharp pitchfork-like stabbing implement on one end until one of us speared the massive creek rat. Or maybe he planned on us stalking the rat until we cornered it and were able to pin it down with our stabby sticks. I don’t think he was ever too clear about that part.

Unfortunately, nobody got the opportunity to spear a rat to death in our living room that night. Eventually, Larry had to find (borrow) a steel trap to catch the hateful bastard, and the rat exited our home stage dead. No guns were fired (indoors), and a plug of steel wool prevented ay more unwanted vermin from taking advantage of the entry point the creek rat had cleared.

But it is my first memory of Larry trusting me enough to let me hold a weapon. And it draws a direct line to my being a redneck, no matter how hard I try to not be. The roots of our childhoods run deep. And trying to erase those roots is every bit hard as cleaning a rat’s blood and guts off of wallpaper.

Gomez and I have always had our most meaningful discussions in the car during road trips. Yesterday, we were talking about how much Elroy enjoys living here and how great it is to see him mesh with a group of friends. It warms my heart to see him come into his own. I’m not sure how, or even if, that would have played out for him in our old hometown. Gomez said he feels like he’s flourishing, too, and I agreed. He’s always been a great teacher, but it’s much easier to see the results of all of his hard work and expertise in a public school.

Then Gomez said I’m the only one who isn’t flourishing. I agreed with that, also.

I told him that I feel like my succulents. When they were on the porch, they were happy and growing and green. Once the weather turned cold and I moved them inside, they blanched and started stretching for light. They’re pitiful.
Gomez said he was thinking I was more like the hens and chicks in the flower box on the front of our house.

Obviously, I faked being shocked and mildly hurt by his comparison. The neighborhood cats regularly come and use that flower bed as a litter box. They relieve themselves and claw at the dirt, disrupting the hens and chicks and moving them around all willy-nilly.

Then Gomez said, “You’re one of the ones that’s still okay. I mean, it looks fine on the outside, but it’s probably just hanging on by one tiny root that’s still in the dirt somehow.” He certainly ain’t wrong about that. But I chose to put the hens and chicks where they are because hens and chicks are resilient. They withstand the erratic climate in our area, and they perk up, spread, and sometimes bloom during the warm months.

So, here’s my Christmas wish – I wish that the tiny root that’s keeping you okay in the cat shit-filled flower box of life is enough. I hope it provides you with all the sustenance you need to not only look okay, but that it takes hold and spreads to anchor you into actually being okay. I hope that the turds that get dumped into your garden fertilize you into something lush and indestructible.

I’m wishing for resilience for myself. I just need enough to last until it’s time to go back to the porch again.

One of my first assignments in the teacher prep program I attended was to write an essay sharing my opinions about standardized testing. As I was (and still am) wont to do, I answered honestly. Standardized testing is garbage. It encourages memorization instead of thinking. It forces every single student to fit into a perpetually too small/too large/misshapen box. I got a C on that essay. My grade was based on my opinion, not on my ability to write a convincing, fact-based argument. The feedback my professor left me was something like, “Well, how can we ensure that teachers are doing their jobs effectively if there aren’t standards to establish a minimum for what they should be doing?”

Gag me. Here are a few ways to ensure that teachers are doing their jobs effectively:

Trust teachers to be professionals. Teachers don’t choose a life in a lower-middle-class socioeconomic stratum because they want to kick up their feet and NOT do their jobs. Teachers don’t choose to teach because we enjoy having to work second and third jobs to pay off the student loan debt that we racked up in the process of becoming educators. Teachers teach because we are led to service. We teach because we feel like it is our responsibility to do our part to create a better world than the one we are currently living in. We teach because a teacher in our lives left such a positive impression on our hearts that we want to be that teacher for our students. Teachers teach because we love learning, and we are always expanding and adapting our knowledge bases to be better than we were the day before.

It seems like more and more often, I see news stories from different sources about the teacher shortage in our country due to the number of educators leaving the profession. Teachers are leaving the classroom in droves because of high stress, low pay, and no work-life balance. Teachers, administrators, and school districts across the country are constantly being told by legislators that they aren’t doing enough, that their standardized test scores are too low, and that their funding will be cut because we aren’t hitting specified “targets”.

I have an idea for how to fix that. Stop moving the targets, and stop reducing students to data points.

When teachers and districts consistently “prove” that they’re doing what the DOE says they need to do by reaching or surpassing a pre-set pass rate on a standardized test, the DOE revises the standards. Teachers then retool our curriculum, crunch data, differentiate our instruction, and students then hit the targets established by the new standards. Then, the DOE moves the target to include a school’s attendance rate as a basis for whether a district receives accreditation or not. Attendance – something that is ultimately the responsibility of parents – is now a piece of the puzzle that will determine whether a school gets accredited by the DOE. That accreditation, in turn, affects a district’s funding. So, why are we as teachers held accountable for and consequently drowning in a cesspool of stress and anxiety because of students’ attendance? To answer that question, think about who benefits from telling schools that they are failing.

If we don’t hit the arbitrary marks that the government sets for us, then the government can use that as justification to decrease or withhold our funding. That means that the school districts in the worst shape – the ones affected the most by poverty, the ones in areas with the most meager tax bases, the ones with the highest unemployment rates due to the lack of any sustainable local job market, the districts that need help the most – get LESS funding.

All this while the Virginia DOE continues to pay tens of millions of dollars annually to Pearson, the company responsible for creating and delivering SOL tests across the state. And what else does Pearson do? They publish textbooks and materials that are marketed to districts with the promise of improving test scores. They receive revenue not just on the products they sell, but also in the form of tax breaks extended to them by localities that allegedly need their help, according to Pearson. Over a six-year period, the companies that are in business to make a profit off of public education by constantly telling school districts that they’re falling behind paid more than $20 million to lobby state and national lawmakers. The standardized testing industry generates around TWO BILLION dollars in revenue each year. To break that down, there are approximately 15,000 school districts in the United States. Divide the $2 billion that districts are currently paying for standardized testing, and that would free up over $100,000 annually in each school district in the country. The math here is oversimplified, but the point is both salient and disheartening.

Twenty years of mandated, linked with school funding standardized testing have not improved the quality of education our children are getting. So what if funding were based solely on enrollment instead of test scores? What if the government took all of the money they spend on standardized testing and pushed it back into the school districts where districts could pay teachers more? What if teachers could spend their time teaching instead of crunching data for documentation purposes, attending meetings, and monitoring attendance? What if teachers had all of the class hours they currently spend on progress monitoring, charting, pre-benchmark test prep, benchmark testing, and post-benchmark test reviewing to teach our students life and social skills, digital citizenship skills, how to discern the validity of information they see online, and how to think for themselves?

What if lawmakers and the DOE saw students as human beings and teachers as trusted professionals instead of seeing both as vehicles for measuring out how much money they will or won’t have to spend to ensure that everyone gets the education that they are legally entitled to?

What if our communities were full of young people who were empowered and taught to think critically?

Keep on moving those targets. Teachers and students will continue to hit them because that’s what we do – we rise to the occasion, no matter how impossible the goal seems to be.