Where I come from...

We had no students at Princeton on Friday.  Instead we spent the day involved in professional development workshops focused primarily on differentiated instruction.

The first 'workshop', however, had nothing at all to do with differentiated instruction.  From seven until eight-thirty, we were asked to do something that a number of our students choose to do: write a poem based on the starter of "Where I come from..." and then share that poem with the staffers around us.  Each group was then asked to nominate one poem to be read before the entire group, the readers ringing the whole group and reading their way around.

Some of the staff members took the assignment very seriously, writing of their childhood and bringing themselves to tears as they shared their poems.  Others wrote humorous poems or challenged themselves by limiting themselves to the haiku structure [cough]Calen[/cough].

I wrote nothing.  I spent the ten minutes considering some educational ideas that had been running through my brain that morning.  Then, when it came to be my turn to share, I simply told the five other teachers that I'd written nothing, that I had no interest in the activity.

And I didn't, kinda don't.  There's something off-putting to me about sharing intimate details with coworkers.  With you folks, on the other hand...

I come from contradictions.

My home state is a land of summer swelter and winter storms, of driving backroads through rolling hills in a state known for being flat as a board, of Indiana homes receiving media broadcast from Kentucky, of city folks growing up a scant few miles from corn fields.

Mine is a family that values education but doesn't have a history of being educated.  Mine is only the second generation of college attendees on both sides, but mine was likely the first for which college was fully assumed and expected.

My parents have one and zero siblings, but the next generation back saw more than a dozen siblings. The nuclear families were close - one set of grandparents within walking distance, the other a short hop across the river - but the rest of the family was hugely distant - in Arizona, Florida, California, Missouri, or the far west side of my hometown.

My father teaches at the high school that he attended, lives not five miles from the home he grew up in. His parents moved once in his life - a move that required them to carry furniture across a single driveway to their new home. My mother lived in a half dozen states before she was in high school. I have inherited both their desperate wanderlust and strong desire never to leave home.

One loves music to the point of near obsession, loves to go see movies, has almost no interest in sports, reads constantly. The other couldn't name a popular song from the past thirty years, prefers sitting on the couch, has coached tennis and football and swimming, and still hasn't opened the books that I got him for his birthday a dozen years ago.

They taught me to achieve - national merit, National Honor Society, Phi Beta Kappa, top student teacher, chemistry leadership award, leader of a nationally recognized campaign - but to always pass off the praise that comes with those achievements.

They trained me to mock everyone, to never take anything too seriously, to question authority, but to be supportive of people, to consider every possibility before acting, and to hold our authority figures in hugely high regard. To salute the flag but not be jingoistic.

I grew up loving my hometown, cheering for the home teams - the New Albany Bulldogs and Indiana Hoosiers - but I couldn't get a job in my one try to work at the former and passed up a chance at a scholarship to attend the latter, instead heading two hours up river to a state that I had barely ever even visited.

I find myself unwilling to speak about my background to people with whom I have worked for nearly a decade, but I am able to tell these very same things to the black void of the internet, opening those same secrets up for the entire world to see.