-: Hi, everyone, my name is Marcella Pixley,
and I am the author of Trowbridge Road.
And what I wanted to do today
is I wanted to share with you a letter
that I wrote for my students
at the beginning of the school year,
that I feel like introduces myself as a teacher to them,
and makes some wishes
about what our year together should be.
And so I thought that I would share the letter with you.
And so here it is.
"It is the weekend before school starts,
I guess you can say it's still technically the summer,
but I'm beginning to get that fluttery anxious feeling
that means school is about to begin.
I can feel a shift in the air already,
a kind of spiciness that reminds me of apple picking,
and autumn leaves, and cinnamon,
and the special excitement
that comes only at the beginning of each school year.
The strangest part of teaching for me
is the last day of school, and the first.
On move up day, you all pile into my room,
still seventh graders,
ready to burst out the door, and dive into summer.
On the first day of school,
you come in as new eighth graders,
you come into my classroom still buzzing from the summer,
and look around at the posters and wooden animals,
trying to imagine yourself in here,
trying to figure out if you are going to like it.
I look out at you without knowing you yet.
And I close my eyes.
Deep down, I make a wish, a little girl wish really,
from the days when wishes had power,
that it will be a magical year for us.
What can I tell you about myself?
I was a strange kid.
I played cello.
I had a ferret named Jessica.
I wore my hair in three ponytails, one on the top,
like a unicorn's horn, and one on either side.
In the 80s, purple eyeshadow was in style,
and so were black spandex leggings.
I had a curly perm,
and I used to wear black silk shirts,
and green suede elf boots.
I read science fiction and fantasy obsessively,
and I believed deeply in magic.
My best friend, Erica, and I
used to play this make-believe game,
where we had psychic powers.
We would stare into candle flames
trying to make the fire flicker with our minds.
Sometimes we would practice
with bubbles, or milkweed, or clouds.
Things changed in sixth grade.
It seemed like people had transformed overnight,
but I had stayed the same.
At our middle school dance,
while the other kids slow danced to Stairway to Heaven,
I pretended to be a wolf.
I piled a bunch of folding chairs together,
and crawled underneath, howling faintly.
I always wanted to be a writer.
I used to travel from class to class with a black notebook,
where I kept all my strange ideas.
Sometimes I would write down
what the people around me were saying.
Sometimes I would make up fantasy worlds,
where I was always the heroine,
and draw maps of the kingdoms I imagined.
I scribbled in my notebooks during all my classes,
and rarely paid attention
to anything the teachers were saying.
One time when Mr. Hancock left the room to have a smoke,
teachers smoked in the faculty room back then,
their tweed jackets always smelled like cigarettes
and strong coffee.
One girl who hated my guts, came up to my desk,
and started tearing pages out of my notebook,
just ripping and ripping.
When I asked her to stop,
she grabbed my black silk shirt,
and pushed me into the wall.
Then I smashed her in the head with a nearby grammar book,
an action that felt really good,
but did not help me reclaim any of my lost pages.
What else can I tell you?
I'm not the kind of teacher
who enjoys silence in the classroom.
I love it when students call on each other,
and I can move out of the circle
to listen and admire your minds at work.
When the conversation is really clicking,
it will hum in this room,
I love the kind of discussion
that gets people rising out of their seats,
slapping their desks with open palms, frothing at the mouth.
I fell in love with passionate talk
when I was a little girl,
sitting at my father's Passover Seders.
Grandpa Sidney would be there,
and great aunt Ida, and grandma Anne's second husband, Sam,
and all these older people
would talk about politics and religion,
and how people should live their lives.
They would speak with their mouths full
of my mother's brisket or matzah ball soup.
And the kids would sit and listen.
Sometimes I would fall asleep at the table,
listening to them argue, listening to them debate,
wishing that one day I would be old enough to join in.
Maybe that's why I became a teacher.
I want to create a classroom
where everyone feels like they are welcome to speak,
no matter who they are.
I invite you to argue with me this year.
I invite you to disagree, I can't wait to hear your ideas.
I promise I will push you as hard as I can this year.
I promise that our work together won't be easy.
Nothing important should ever be easy.
I promise to ask you hard questions
that will make your minds stretch.
Did you know that thinking deeply
really does change the structure of your brain?
All I ask is that you do your best in here.
I ask that you come to class
ready to share your own ideas and opinions.
I ask you to find your voice, and choose to use it.
I can't wait to get to know you,
and hear your ideas at our table.
Hurry up and get here so we can begin,
sincerely Mrs. Pixley."
So thank you for hearing the letter
that I start off my school year with.
And then I invite my students to write a letter to me.
And their very first assignment
is the very difficult assignment
of trying to explain in their own voices
who they are to a teacher that does not yet know them.
But this assignment,
and starting this way with letter writing,
I find is a really nice way
of making that first connection be a deep one.
So thank you so much,
and enjoy your school years, and your writing.