There’s a note in my phone that reads like utter gibberish.
That isn’t exactly a surprise; I have many folders in the notes app that contain incoherent partial thoughts. My list of potential newsletter topics includes rambling snippets of thoughts like “Pie song waitress” and “Tuna fish” among the first ten, but also massive stream-of-consciousness paragraphs that read like the product of an emotionally-charged random word generator. Dozens of notes contain individual quotes—“All I know is she smelled like hand sanitizer”—or character actions—“Alani won’t sing”—for my novel projects, and even more speak to ideas for problems and tasks that ended up falling by the wayside or haven’t just yet met their moments.
This note, though, is one that I return to regularly throughout the school year. The gibberish it contains grows every month. As I write this now, it has already been refined and reorganized, but not four days earlier, it was packed with lines like “Bagged Milk”, “Sus Sussy Amonguss”, and “Panther’s Choice” instead.
By describing the contents of this note as gibberish, I suggest that its meaning can only be deciphered by me. That isn’t precisely true, though. This note is nonsensical when it begins, yes, but every silly phrase and random allusion will eventually make sense to a specific group of people. The meaning of each one is a puzzle, but decoding them will be one of the most amusing and endearing things I do each year.
That gibberish will inspire grins. That gibberish will spill a few tears.
That gibberish will be printed onto cheap award certificates.
*****
Just as Garfield hates Mondays, so too do I hate meetings.
Meetings are inert, even when they are informative. Meetings are stagnant impediments to productivity. Instead of actually working, they pause the work and talk about the work. Meetings are meta-work: a part of working that addresses the logistics of working. I’d rather just be working.
I express this antipathy despite working at a school where actual effort is made to imbue meetings with meaning. For years, administrators toyed with their structure, dividing the staff, rotating the presenters, and cycling activities to keep things fresh. Lighthearted games and warm-hearted recognitions have opened our staff meetings in recent years, and both establish an optimistic tone of unity. Email gets used as a tool to share information, leaving meetings to coalesce around more dynamic tasks and experiences, and our host this year is endearing and entertaining. All of this is appreciated.
I still loathe meetings.
At my most cynical moments, the good parts of a meeting feel forced, and the rest feel cursory. I make it my goal to focus entirely on the presentation at hand—I know the discomfort of addressing an apathetic audience—but so many around me do the opposite. Many grade papers; others text with such blatant disregard for the task that I become embarrassed to add announced events into my phone.
But I get their reluctance to engage. Those minutes spent in a meeting could be productively used toward something else. Something that isn’t so static. I understand that my contract compels my attendance, making meetings a part of my job, but when a position is performance-based and people-facing, nothing feels more removed from that work than sitting in a back-wrenching folding chair and neither performing for people nor facing them. Even when the presenters care—and I’m convinced ours do—I can’t silence that voice reminding me of everything else I could be doing that more directly informs the part of my job that matters: what I put in front of students.
This is all to say: meetings have a high bar to clear to win me over. Even the best-intentioned, most-polished sessions stand as mild inconveniences.
It should, therefore, carry some weight when I say this: one of the most influential events from my time as a teacher was a meeting.
*****
It’s May 2014. I am sitting in the classroom of Lito, our then co-department chair. I am pretzeled into a student desk, blissfully unaware of the damage the ergonomic-only-in-hell seat wreaks on my spine. I am thinking about AVID.
My class is graduating soon. After four years together, I am focused on crafting activities and moments that will sew up four years together in as ideal a way as possible. AVID Senior Night is already behind us, so the most significant activities have already ended.
The school year as a whole is wrapping up, in fact. That’s the focus of our meeting. Lito is hosting our final contractual gathering of the year, aiming to achieve some closure of his own.
He shares some information at the beginning of the meeting that doesn’t make an impression. There likely isn’t much to say; we are a few weeks from summer break, too late for any major new policies to be enacted, but too early to begin preparations for August in earnest. Rare is the meeting when that portion of the agenda sticks with me anyhow.
Preoccupied though I am, I am present enough in the meeting to be caught off-guard when Lito suddenly says my name out loud.
“The Mike Steele Award goes to the person whose car you’re most likely to find in the parking lot at 7 pm…next to Mike Steele’s! I present this award to…Michelle!”
I watch Michelle stand up to receive her award. Printed on cheap certificate paper—$5.99 for 100 sheets at Kinko’s, I will learn very soon—the paper in her hands doesn’t grab my attention; her smile does. Michelle is grinning, the room is laughing and clapping, and even I am chuckling in that automatic way when my brain hasn’t yet caught up, but every signal to it orders up a laugh. The atmosphere, stoic and restless moments before, has become charged with utter mirth.
Lito continues from there. Each award he presents is jovial and generous, but he doesn’t shy away from gentle ribbing either. The names he anoints the awards with are silly, but he follows up each one with a nugget of kindness and words of sincere gratitude. Some awards lean into jokes or reference situations I don’t recognize—our department uses two separate buildings; one is hard-pressed to be inside of every gag—but I find myself energized by even those, riding a wave of joy deriving from the way the faces of those who know light up.
My award is the Most Likely to Get a Million Hits on YouTube Award. I haven’t been as active with video making lately, but I have posted enough things—and with minimal fanfare—that it means something for him to acknowledge and celebrate it. Reaching out to receive my certificate, I see Lito’s same smile but with a new gleam. Always eminently likable, I realize just how attentive of a leader he is. A person can’t do what he is doing in this meeting without paying attention to his colleagues. These aren’t broad awards—“Hardest Working” or “Best Smile”—like my AVID class chose for their superlatives; these are awards that show Lito notices not just the little things we all do but the ways in which we do them as well. Growing up with a workaholic dad, being noticed by people always elates me. And, receiving that frivolous award on cheap paper, I nonetheless feel seen, a phrase that I have never really understood or felt prior to Lito’s award show.
I walk out of Lito’s classroom fifteen minutes later, drenched in two feelings.
One is positivity. I feel upbeat and optimistic. I feel close to my department in a way I rarely do. I feel cared about and valued. I feel like I matter. Lito’s eye for the small stuff one can’t just accidentally see convinces me that I must.
The other feeling is inspiration. Not the vague, amorphous “I wanna do something” kind, either; this is that electric inspiration when you know not only that the lightning is going to strike but precisely where and with how much force you shall unleash it.
Back in L-5, I open a new file in Excel and add a second sheet. The first I title AVID; the other I mark Mathletes.
And then I begin creating awards.
*****
One week from tomorrow, I will host the tenth annual Mathletes banquet.
At that banquet, several things will happen. One of them will be eating, although our “Mathletes Banquet Potluck” Google Sheet is a little sparse at the moment. I hope that there will be a big trophy (or two!) to fawn over as well.
Maybe half an hour in, though, I will kick off an awards ceremony. I will present almost 60 certificates bestowing honors, including the “Bagged Milk Award”, the “Projectile Motion Award”, and the “That’s Not an ATV Award”. Each will be preceded by its name being announced to a crowd murmuring with interest, a short anecdote explaining its origin, and then a mouse click will reveal the worthy recipient. That recipient will then saunter to the front to claim their certificate.
Yes, announcing the 2023 Hall of Fame class, the four grade-level winners, the rookie of the year, and the MVP will stand as big moments, even when there’s little suspense like this year. There’s a decisive finality to presenting those awards; they close one chapter and make room for another.
But the highlight won’t be those formal honors with expensive engraved medals. Nope: the highlight will be the awards printed on cheap certificate paper. The room will roar, recalling the silly moments of lost dodge balls and Among Us costumes; the room will cheer for individuals who went above and beyond and remember tiny fragments of a year that seemed too small to hold onto but yet somehow will surface all these months later. A slideshow will eventually follow, but the awards will be the truer recap of the long season that, all will be reminded, consisted of special moments engineered by extraordinary people.
Some awards will speak to the entire crowd; all will remember the push-up contest’s winner or the crew member fractals. Other prizes will reference situations that only a single group of students experienced; what once led to limited laughs will grow into a team-wide meme on the spot. One award in particular will cut through the humor and address something never acknowledged before that will radically recontextualize that person’s connection to me; I will cry, as I am right now thinking about what I will say about it, and, while only one will understand, all will share that moment of connection. Over and over again, certificates will be handed to individuals with shocked looks on their faces, their reactions betraying that they didn’t think their time with the team had mattered enough to receive even an award on a 20-cent sheet of paper. Yet here they are, getting applauded by a room of their peers.
They, too—all of them—will feel seen, even if it’s just for a few minutes. They will feel seen just like I did in 2014.
That is the power I took from Lito’s meeting-turned-ceremony. He gifted me a simple but powerful tool to tangibly ensure that people know I value them. By printing up that paper, I make literal what might otherwise be at best figurative and at worst unspoken. The scope of the award doesn’t matter; it’s the sincerity of the moment and the physicality of that thin leaf of faux-stained paper that gives them power. By crafting awards that acknowledge each person’s unique contributions, I validate them as being essential to that season. Yes, a small group carries us performance-wise every year, but everyone brings something unique to the table. A season is an accumulation of moments from an assemblage of people; this is a perfect encapsulation of that.
It doesn’t surprise me that Lito was and is a decorated coach because his ceremony proved his skill at engendering esprit de corps. When everyone from the superstars to the benchwarmers knows you are watching and you care, all buy into their roles. That’s the feeling that has carried our Mathletes team for the last decade. It didn’t surprise me when Viên credited sneaking into our banquet as inspiration when they joined the following season.
But Lito’s awards didn’t just become a camaraderie enhancement mechanism; they also changed me. That note full of gibberish and references to bizarre situations is my evidence: I don’t generate my list of awards in May. I don’t look back and manufacture special spaces or places. I add to my list regularly. Any time we’re at a meet and something interesting happens, I slide my phone from my pocket and type in its essence. Instead of looking back on the year and straining my mind’s eye chasing after fun moments I’ve lost sight of, I am on the prowl for them all the time. From the first Mathletes meeting in August through the Steeplechase, I am wholly present with this team, looking to discover those tiny, celebration-worthy scenes. I have to be on at all times; otherwise, I might miss that special moment that will change how some kid on the team remembers the season.
That awareness, that determination to find good and joy and notability around me—it bleeds into other places as well. I can’t turn it off; I am constantly noting the non-Mathletes moments too. It equips me for those years when I thank and praise every person in the BC classes; it informs what I say at the dinner events. I write about darkness a lot, but I also savor the gentle, joyous light emitted from the tiniest bulbs. It might be the healthiest emotional habit I have.
Nothing changes how I feel about meetings. I’d still rather just be working, especially in times like these where there is so damned much to do. But it only took Lito’s transcendent adaptation of one for me to transform both Mathletes and myself for good.
That’s quite the achievement right there.
Award-worthy even.
It’s amazing how readily I find ways to be stressed and anxious.
The Time Has Come by Will Leitch was a fantastic read that I devoured in chunks over the last four mornings. I highly recommend it. I’m toying with an idea around reviewing it that would be in addition to the normal newsletter. We’ll see—Mathletes banquet and Hall of Fame are my first priorities on Sunday.