Surrender was the only option

Yet I am grieving

Over the holiday lull I’ve decided my guest room/office needs some attention. Living in a 950-sf townhouse doesn’t allow for lenience in Stuff Management, and I’ve used the closet in that bedroom as a repository for quite a bit of Stuff since I moved in three years ago (this very week!). The closet contains all my sewing gear, all my family documents, wrapping paper, materials related to my current job, and two boxes of teaching binders.

The teaching binders are the remnant of a previously much larger assortment. I began my teaching career in 1999 so we were barely into the Internet age, and I relied on large three-ring binders as collection, curation, and deployment centers for all my teaching materials. Mindful of organization, I labeled the spines conscientiously and kept the tabs inside tidy and descriptive. I remember the student teacher who gave me an industrial three-hole punch because my dime-store version couldn’t handle its assignments. Each binder represents not just a topic, but an era in my teaching. The Hurricane Katrina unit, for example, resulted from careful notation of clips in Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke documentary and went with the book Hurricane Song and I taught that unit for probably a decade after the hurricane.

The enormous binder labeled just “Pop” held the entirety of the curriculum I developed for a course I invented called “Popular Culture in 20th Century America.” In that class, students answered the questions “How did Americans respond to major events in 20th century America through literature, music, and art?” Man, I loved teaching that class. We listened to so much cool music, and students painted gigantic murals that stayed in my classroom until the day I left.

Buildings at the Ursulines in St Ignatius, MT

I developed teaching units on Erdrich’s The Round House, Earling’s Perma Red, Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and Reservation Blues, Welch’s Fools Crow, Dorris’ A Yellow Raft in Blue Water. Flipping through the binders for these novels reminded me of just how much work went into their creation. I found photos of the Ursulines boarding school in Mission, the full photos but also copies cut into pieces like a jigsaw and color-coded on the backs in some scheme to get kids to switch up their groups every so often. In other binders I found laminated images that I remember using for discussion prompts. In another, provocative thinking questions like “Agree or disagree: Treaties are beneficial” were taped to the fronts of manila envelopes. The idea was to hang the envelopes up around the room. Students would walk around and write their thoughts about the prompts on index cards and drop them in the envelopes. Each day I’d pull cards from the envelopes and read students’ comments out loud, anonymously of course, and use those to generate discussion.

Wind binder and some contents

In many ways the most impactful unit I ever created was on D’Arcy McNickle’s historical fiction novel Wind from an Enemy Sky, on the topics of allotment, assimilation, and the construction of Selíš Ksanka Qlispé Dam based in the experiences of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. It was not impactful for most of my students in terms of the literature — almost unilaterally they hated the book — but for the way place-based teaching profoundly affected them. And for me. Teaching this book forced me to learn about all those topics in much deeper ways than I ever could have conveyed to students. And it led to tribal historian and educator Julie Cajune selecting me as the subject of a documentary called Inside Anna’s Classroom which documented six weeks of my classroom as students grappled with this book. This probably contributed to my winning the Southern Poverty Law Center award for Culturally Responsive Teaching, which probably assisted in other recognition but most importantly led to so much learning for me and largely guided the rest of my teaching career. Arguably this book even opened the door to the work I do today, creating Indigenous language courses with the tribes of Montana, and my founding of Chickadee Community Services.

Inside Anna’s Classroom DVD cover

Tonight I threw the binders away.¹

What went through my mind as I first flipped through each binder, and then placed it in the trash box:

• Look at all this prep work I did.

• Look how carefully I thought through these groupings.

• Here are some really thoughtful discussion questions.

• Here’s something that never worked very well.

• Here’s where I asked that one question, and Elizabeth M made that astute comment.

• I am never going to use this again.

• Nobody is ever going to use this again.

These binders are the physical product of a career that meant something only to me. I don’t mean that my students didn’t appreciate (some of) my efforts, but in terms of what was actually produced? It just looks like stacks of paper.

Not a single person would have perused these binders postmortem (mine) and exclaimed over their genius or effect on students. My children would struggle to decipher the endless images and laminated cards and weekly planners. Merely my retention of the binders would befuddle them. They wouldn’t find any gems such as a hidden teaching certificate, like the one I found in my grandmother’s papers, a surprise since I didn’t know she’d taught school.

But it’s not just stacks of paper. The lessons, the curriculum, the memories constitute an entire professional life, these binders with their envelopes and photocopies. I was really good at it. I think students learned, and some appreciated what they learned. And the teaching memories stretch beyond the classroom walls, to me: to an era of my life when my children were small, when I possessed seemingly unlimited energy, when I worked incredibly hard all the time.

No good reason existed to keep any of that stuff, and I should probably toss the last binder too. But stacking each one in the trash box induced a new wash of panicky regret. I can’t help but wonder if by tipping them into the dumpster, I’ve snuffed out my legacy, and in a way, erased part of my own life.

I know that’s stupid.

Yet I am grieving.

1. I kept the binder on Wind from an Enemy Sky.