Your The Best: Martinflaps 2.0

  I’m at the beach for two weeks and I’m collecting shells. PURPLE shells. I have no idea what makes them purple, and I definitely don’t know what used to live in them. Honestly, I’m not entirely sure what used to live in me, but I can tell you it’s not there anymore. I certainly don’t feel like I have a purpose, and I really only started enjoying my time here when I decided to collect shells.  Tom’s dead? Shells. Trump got elected again? Shells. Pitt’s sick? Pitt died?? Shells. I lost my teaching job and no one will tell me why? And really, Karen, at this point, I don’t want to know. Leave me in my pieces and continue ignoring my (I think) well-phrased email requesting clarification. You have to know you’re leaving me ill-prepared for my next interview: “Why did you leave your last position?”  Shells. Does my buddy want them? Absolutely not. Am I absolutely, completely determined to mine this beach for anything that’s even touched with purple? Yes, I am. I need to be doi...

Say what you will about my teaching career, but leave this standing: I was the best. Adhering to standards? Running a classroom like my literacy coach wanted? Delivering lesson plans on time? Absolutely not. Ensuring that my students followed protocol when it came to anything and everything, like leaving for the bathroom? Please. Where I WAS the best, and where my success will always let me sleep at night - or during the day, since I’m working nights now - is that any child in my classroom felt safe with me. Did I do it like you* wanted? Clearly not. But did I do it RIGHT? For me, yes. In going through - painfully, slowly, the detritus from my classroom - I found so many notes. Letters. Cartoons. Drawings. Oddly shaped clay sculptures. Stuffed animals. But the notes; most of them proclaiming me the best teacher ever. Almost all of them using “your”, not “you’re”. Now that’s something that should have been taught years ago, of course, and god forbid we release a child into the wild wild...