Read time: approximately 10 minutes

This week

• Sunday, 07 December ran a half-marathon! Traveled to Fredrikstad, where I would be staying for Roving this week. 
• Monday, 08 December — Wednesday, 10 December was at Hvaler Ungdomsskole, a school on an island! Taught every 8th—10th grader at the school.
• Saturday, 13 December Rover latke party at a fellow Rover’s house in Oslo.
• Sunday, 14 December church in English! And the Norsk Folk Museum Christmas Market!

Last week was really hard. I am glad I had work on Thursday and Friday to give me something to do. On Friday (Dec 05) we had our December Rover check-in in Oslo. At the end of it, a Rover friend turned to me and said, take care of yourself. I knew I would have to take his words seriously to get through this week. 

It was easier when I had things to do. On Sunday I completed my first half-marathon with a personal best! It felt really good to have trained for something for 14 weeks and to have achieved my goal. On Saturday evening I made myself spaghetti and meatballs to carb up. I went to bed early. On Sunday after the run I filled myself with fuel and fluids. I showered. I napped. I was taking care of myself.

Sunday evening I headed to Fredrikstad. I needed to stay out there because it was the closest town to where I was teaching at Hvaler Ungdomsskole, a remote school on an island. I would be working with the 10th graders on Monday, the 9th graders on Tuesday, and the 8th graders on Wednesday and was really looking forward to the three days. And I was taking care of myself so that I could teach: sleeping, eating, resting, thinking about ways I could improve my teaching.

Because I was lowkey exhausted and sad from the week before, I was actually glad to be giving the same workshop 6 times over 3 days (2 sessions for each grade level). In the States, even when I was a high school English teacher I didn’t teach the same lesson 6 times. Instead of thinking about how tedious it might be, though, I wondered how in each iteration I could improve the lesson. 

When I taught 12th grade World Lit & Comp, my colleagues and I learned about and attempted a Japanese pedagogical method called lesson study. The idea is that a group of teachers works together to study, plan, teach, and revise a lesson. First, the teachers select a problem of practice: what is it that is troubling them in the classroom that they could do better to support student learning? For example, how might they encourage students to listen to each other in class discussion? The teachers would read research on this topic, discuss the underlying theoretical framework of the problem, review the pedagogical practices, and then plan a lesson where they could leverage their new learning about teaching while engaging with students. 

While one teacher teaches the lesson, the other teachers in the learning community observe the teacher and the students. They write down questions, jot notes, mark spots in the lesson that are particularly evocative of learning. Then, they debrief the lesson, discussing what happened, what went well, and what could be improved. Then they plan the next lesson they want to do an observation for. 

Another teacher teaches it while the learning community observes. And on it goes for the year. The teachers continue to study the problem of practice, discuss their teaching, teach, and make note of their address of the problem of practice. These steps help teachers develop specific teaching ideas and knowledge about what works in teaching and how and why it works for their specific problem of practice they started with.

Because I was teaching the same lesson over and over again this week, albeit to a different group of students each day, I wondered if I could attempt to lesson study my own teaching to make continual small improvements to craft a banging lesson by the end of the day on Wednesday.

In this workshop, I am trying to help students understand how a visual artist (Kent Monkman, Cree) can clap back to systems of privilege, power, and oppression through remixing an artwork and creating something new that offers a social commentary. The anchor painting we worked with is Sunday in the Park (2010), which is a mash up of American Romantic Painters of the Hudson Valley School like this and Georges Seurat’s (1884) A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. After spending some time with each painting where I ask students what do they see (great vocabulary builder, btw), I ask a series of questions to help them understand Monkman’s commentary. 

But I’ve found that in order to get to the point where I can help students make the requisite connections, I need to do some teaching about Indigenous people on Turtle Island and their encounters with white settler colonialism, especially in regards to the importance of and taking of Native people’s land. I’ve had a hard time figuring out how to simplify these ideas for English Language Learners without oversimplifying the concepts and/or losing the students completely. So that became my problem of practice this week: what sequence of questions and ideas could help students understand Monkman’s social commentary? Teaching this lesson 6 consecutive times across 3 different grade levels helped me to pay attention to my sequence of questions and notes and how students responded and took up the ideas. I didn’t have observers, and I had forgotten at my house my mike that I use to record and listen back to lessons, but I did what I could. I think each day and class the lesson got better. There’s still ways to improve, but I’m happy with how the three days went.

After holding it together to teach, I think my body just collapsed, though. I returned home on Wednesday and I spent Thursday sleeping in, reading, doing the puzzles in my new advent calendar I’d bought in Fredrikstad (cannot stress enough how excited I am about this Advent calendar and doing the puzzles daily). I made sure to eat. I debriefed the workshops and sent the teacher pictures of the exit tickets and Fulbright survey. I answered some emails. I think the reality hit me of what my parents and brother and I had talked about earlier that week: they were going to change their plans and stay stateside for the holidays. I didn’t think this would make me feel so sad, but I really think it did. Initially I was going to holiday with my mom’s cousin and his family, who drive up from Denmark to go skiing in Norway each year. I was so excited! But after talking with him I realized it was going to require approximately 4 transfers to get to them and there were indications that I might be imposing on their holiday. I went from very excited to stressed and sad and unsure about what to do.

Friday I had a bang trim appointment so I showered for that and knew I had to go to the grocery store, which is not far away, and it just felt so hard. Thursday and Friday were struggles. I was telling my book club Friday what was going on and they responded the same way my friend did last week: how are you even upright right now? I think when I teach or work it’s just easy to ignore my self, my body, my needs. I spend a lot of time thinking about teaching (hello did you read the part of this post about lesson studying my own lesson?) and I get so much energy and joy from students, and had a really great three days at Hvaler that it allowed me to ignore my feelings about everything else. Take care of yourself, what my friend had said last week, kept running through my mind.

I reached out to a couple of friends. I talked to Jeremy. I cried a lot. Jeremy told me to come home. So I made some plans. And right away felt an immense sort of relief. I don’t want to belabor the point and I don’t want to make it sound easy, but the times in which I wasn’t teaching or commuting were slightly disastrous in terms of keeping it together. Which is completely understandable, given last week. I guess I didn’t think about how much last week was affecting me. Was it only last week? I’m glad I was able to ascertain pretty quickly what the problem was and find a solution. I’m glad for my friends and family. I’m glad I sat with how sad I was. I’m glad for the time in which I could sit with myself. I’m glad I was trying to take care of myself. 

Bonus! I have to share this, but it doesn’t go anywhere else in the post, so here goes. To get to Hvaler Ungdomsskole, where I taught this week, I had to take a bus 45 minutes one-way to the school. On Monday, it was still pitch black night when I got off the bus at 8am and raining and I was trying to follow my map about how to get from the bus station to the school. There was a path that seemed right, so I took it. About 100 meters into the path, a group of three small girls joined it from an offshoot path. They had backpacks covered in rain gear and a flashlight and were walking the same direction I was going. I figured there’s no other place they could be going at this time than school so I just followed them. Pretty soon, though, they realized that someone was walking behind them and they kept shining their flashlight in my face. Then they stopped and waited for me. When I got there, they immediately wanted to know who I was and what I was doing there. I told them (in Norwegian) that I don’t speak Norwegian, and I realize now how that can be confusing to a six-year-old. We exchanged names, sorted out that we were all walking to the school, and continued walking. As we walked, the girls continued to talk to me in Norwegian and I kept insisting (in Norwegian) that I don’t speak Norwegian. They fell into giggles. When we got to the school they met up with friends and teachers and I could hear them saying, “she speaks English!” We said our good-byes after another failed attempt at more Norwegian communication. The interaction was so cute, though, and I still find myself smiling from the encounter. Turns out I got to see them Tuesday and Wednesday too on our walk to school. They recognized me both days, doing double takes when they saw me. On Wednesday one of the little girl’s moms was working in the office so she brought me to her so she could serve as our translator. I learned that the girls had been so excited that they met me and on Tuesday and Wednesday wondered if they were going to see me again. They were excited and proud to use their English with me (hi hi and bye-bye). I was able to tell them that Wednesday was my last day so we said our real bye-byes. This was an almost magical encounter. They were so sweet and so giggly and so precious. There were so many things they wanted to say to me. It was just what I needed this week.