when she is the student

Note: I know I said before no faces in my posts, but in this case, the student I am working with is my daughter. I also think this last photograph captures the essence of our sunny afternoon on the back porch, and I feel as if this may have been one of those turning-point moments for my daughter, a memory she'll point back to as she's in the thick of her career and say, There was this one strange evening when my mother took me out back and we dissected a squid on newspaper and I knew, at that moment, that I wanted to be this.

Maybe. I might be over-privileging this moment too because I want, so much, to be able to provide for her, and for my son, and for my students, the opportunities to engage with the world around them to discover where their passions really lie. This sums up exactly why I want to teach, right here: my own privilege to be a part of that happening for them.

We are at the end of week two of summer two of training, and I'm walking around as if I knew exactly how I slot into things, but I don't. My longings confuse me, and I nearly cried, as I am wont to do, when the guest instructor came in and talked about the cosmic task of teaching and how, as elementary teachers, we are generalists. That word resonated with me, with what I wrote about in my last post, my flitting and flirting with so much overwhelming else.

I feel a little like this sad squid here. Blobby, out of water. Admiring of the beauty of it all, but somehow I'm in this very peaceful but a bit mournfully quiet places inside of myself, and I'm OK with that. I am an observer (who still has to frantically write up albums and color charts). My mode is not in making but in processing just now. The need to continue to move forward is ever-present, but internally, I feel a bit wispy, as if I were a mote, a bit of fluff from a cotton tree. All I want to do is oh-so-quietly watch. And think. I've been thinking about so much.

Instead, we do. And when we are done, we bring home a spare to do again, with one's daughter, and one's son, who filtered in and out, his nose pinched.

For me, my daughter was the ideal student to practice the presentation. While she deferred to me while I made the movements, she was ready to touch herself, to get her hands slick with the juices, to puncture the ink sac and see how the gritty black plopped out. She moved from tentative wonder to get-your-hands dirty wonder. She was amazed at the pen as I wrote her name on the wet paper, and she identified the gills, the iridescent copper eyes, marveled at the beak as it opened and closed.

My son even requested that we open the ovaries and see what came out.

To her, everything was beautiful. She said it in that marveling voice too: Mama, it's so beau-tiful! Be-you.

Afterwards, we watched a video of a Humboldt squid dissection, which was just absolutely daunting in comparison, and as we began to tunnel, watching, then, living squids jetting through water and then baby sea turtles make that Olympian journey to sea, we saw an advertisement for Jane Goodall's Master Class. I've always thought of Goodall as a kind of kindred spirit of Maya's--of Maya as a spirit animal or Goodall as her future self or some sort of strange, thin cord connecting these two lives--but despite the picture books I've read to my girl about Goodall, she never latched on. Until she watched Goodall in her living, breathing self, and Maya said to me, "I love her. She's amazing." She paused, leaned into my arm, then said, "I wonder what good I'm going to do in this world."

Oh Maya. I wonder too. What amazing faith to have, though: that this small person, this absolute rocket of potential, is already changing so much within me, causing me to bring home squid in Ziplock bags, to build a coop and fill it with birds, to think about the words that come from my mouth (Mama, that's not nice, she'll remind me, and then she'll say, You need a hug, don't you? and she'll ground me, right then and there, by holding me, not judging, also saying, It's OK--we all get upset sometimes).

What good, what miracles. What luck, what privilege to watch it as it all happens, the transformation, the movement from who she was to who she is to who she's going to be.