Extra Nerdy
Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play by Jennifer DeVere Brody
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The first bit is mostly cute jargony wordplay for its own sake, but the later chapters on “Hyphen-nation” and “Queer Quotation Marks” are more interesting. Basically I liked it better the further I got in it.
Vacation is over, and so is my reading binge.
The Enormous Room by E.E. Cummings
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
If I had the power to describe e.e. cummings’s prose, I’d be even more of a genius than he was. I can’t understand why he spent so much time writing poetry instead. Who else speaks of “a spic, not to say span, gentleman”? Observes a man “buckle his personality” and “bang forward with bigger and bigger feet”? Explains that he “hoisted my suspicious utterances upon my shoulder, which recognized the renewal of hostilities with a neuralgic throb”? Says that “rain did, from time to time, not fall: from time to time a sort of unhealthy almost-light leaked from the large uncrisp corpse of the sky”? And introduces a character thus: “By some mistake he had three mustaches, two of them being eyebrows. In speaking to you his kind face is reduced to triangles. And his tie buttons on every morning with a Bang! And off he goes; led about by his celluloid collar, gently worried about himself, delicately worried about the world” . . . ?
Vacationing is Hard
This fall was one of the busiest semesters of my life, and I could not have gotten through it without thoughts of the upcoming winter break. The last day of school before vacation was lovely: I woke up energized, got done everything on my to-do list, and even bought my students chocolate to make up for the fact that I was being that Grinch of a teacher who doesn’t throw parties in class and assigns essays over break.
Then the final bell tolled, everyone left the building, and suddenly I was miserable. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t do anything. I went home and sat on the couch blankly until my husband got there. And as soon as he walked in, he knew: “Uh oh. Vacation syndrome again?” Because–guess what? This happens EVERY time.
In college every Friday afternoon was a nightmare. A couple summers ago I spent the first two weeks of my time off in tears. The severity and the details vary, but the pattern is clear: when the work lets up, I lose it.
Since that first miserable afternoon last week, this vacation has been wonderful. I’ve slept, run errands, spent time with family, hung out with my husband, had long talks with friends, caught up on housework, gotten ahead on schoolwork, and read book after book after book. All this, too, happens every time. After the initial shock, I’m fine.
But still. I’m pretty sure I’m doing something wrong.
I discovered Dostoevsky’s soulmate, guys.
Hunger by Knut Hamsun
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
It’s like Raskolnikov and the Underground Man had a baby (and forgot to teach it about tenses). “A dray rolls slowly by, and I notice there are potatoes in it; but out of sheer fury and stubbornness, I take it into my head to assert that they are not potatoes, but cabbages, and I swore frightful oaths that they were cabbages. I heard quite well what I was saying, and I swore this lie wittingly; repeating time after time, just to have the vicious satisfaction of perjuring myself. I got intoxicated with the thought of this matchless sin of mine.” Et cetera.
Too busy for real posts
A Personal Matter by Kenzaburō Ōe
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I’m going to need a few days (or decades) to process this before I can write about it…
“A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings”
“Besides, the few miracles attributed to the angel showed a certain mental disorder, like the blind man who didn’t recover his sight but grew three new teeth, or the paralytic who didn’t get to walk but almost won the lottery, and the leper whose sores sprouted sunflowers.” – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
More Kierkegaard (i.e., Repetition?)
“Hope is a charming maiden but slips through the fingers, recollection is a beautiful old woman but of no use at the instant, repetition is a beloved wife of whom one never tires. For it is only of the new one grows tired. Of the old one never tires. When one possesses that, one is happy, and only he is thoroughly happy who does not delude himself with the vain notion that repetition ought to be something new, for then one becomes tired of it. . . . When one has circumnavigated existence, it will appear whether one has courage to understand that life is a repetition and is inclined to delight in it. He who has not circumnavigated life before beginning to live will never come to the point of living; he who circumnavigated it but grew tired had a poor constitution; he who chose repetition really lives. . . . Indeed, if there were no repetition, what then would life be? Who would wish to be a tablet upon which time writes every instant a new inscription? Or to be a mere memorial of the past?” – Constantine Constantius, Repetition
INFJ
The more gregarious I become, the more I realize how intensely introverted I am.
I once heard introverts defined as people who derive their energy from themselves rather than from others. That seems pretty accurate. I don’t particularly dislike socializing anymore, now that I’m no longer painfully shy and no longer busy being suicidal in my bedroom all the time–but now that nothing prevents me from talking to others, I’m discovering just how much it takes out of me.
I have what they call “engagements” every night for the rest of this week. I am sincerely looking forward to all of them, but I also feel like I need to carbo-load or something if I’m going to make it to Sunday without losing my shit. That would not be true, by the way, if I simply knew I’d have to stay really late at work for several days in a row. And often when I’m inexplicably cranky, I realize that it’s because I’ve had too much company for too long–no matter how good the company happens to be.
Of course I’ve got my share of misanthropy too. Perhaps more than my share. But most of the time I don’t hate people. It’s just that they’re so damn tiring.
Lazy Post
Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance by Noam Chomsky
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Incredibly convoluted syntax and argumentation, but still fascinating. My dad would tell me to take it with a grain of salt, but salt is tasty, so it’s all good.
Victor Hugo on Hipsters
“What did they do in Madame de T.’s salon? They were ultra. To be ultra: this word, although what it represents may not have disappeared, has no longer any meaning at the present day. Let us explain it. To be ultra is to go beyond. It is to attack the sceptre in the name of the throne, and the mitre in the name of the altar; it is to ill-treat the thing which one is dragging, it is to kick over the traces; it is to cavil at the fagot on the score of the amount of cooking received by heretics; it is to reproach the idol with its small amount of idolatry; it is to insult through excess of respect; it is to discover that the Pope is not sufficiently papish, that the King is not sufficiently royal, and that the night has too much light; it is to be discontented with alabaster, with snow, with the swan and the lily in the name of whiteness; it is to be a partisan of things to the point of becoming their enemy; it is to be so strongly for, as to be against.” – Les Miserables
Decisions
I was talking to a friend–another Ivy Leaguer in the education field–the other night. This is what I was able to articulate:
I have a job that…
- challenges me intellectually and emotionally and even physically.
- makes me excited to wake up in the morning and do my best every day.
- provides me with endless opportunities for renewal and improvement.
- makes me euphorically happy on a regular basis.
- pays me more than enough.
- provides me with a balance of people-time and alone-time.
- promotes social justice and other causes dear to me.
But I’m considering leaving that job. Why? It is:
- physically, intellectually, and emotionally degrading.
- one of this country’s least prestigious white-collar professions.
That’s it. Honor and prestige.
See, I’m recognized for excellence at my workplace. But only because I show up on time.
And I’m paid well for my work. But so are those whose work I have to do for them.
And I’m admired for what I do. But only because I’m deigning to do it.
In my more idealistic moments, I know that if I leave my classroom it will be in order to improve other classrooms–that if I leave teaching, it will be in order to widen my impact on education as a whole.
At other times, I know that I just want to work someplace safe and clean and proud.
Via Goodreads
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Hugo is a much more stylish writer than I expected him to be. Even in the midst of absolutely shameless melodrama he can be sarcastic and abrupt. I like that.
The Boston Debate League should pay me for this.
My student teacher sought my advice after a frustrating class period the other day. She felt that she was “too much of a presence” in her classroom, that as a result her students were apathetic and resentful.
We debriefed. Her lesson had focused on how to conclude a personal essay effectively. She had typed up a list of criteria for judging conclusions, distributed sample essays to her students, had them work in groups to determine which essays met which criteria, and then required each group to share its results with the class.
On its surface, the lesson seemed fine: it combined direct instruction, group work, and presentations in front of the whole class, and it gave students a voice in the class. What was missing?
I pointed out that the share-out had seemed more like a performance than an act of communication. She said she felt like she had been “playing a guessing game” with the students, one in which she had all the “answers” but wanted them to read her mind in order to articulate those answers themselves. I proposed that she had attempted a sort of lecture in disguise–that her lesson was student-centered only superficially. She suggested that her students understood all of this, that these were the reasons for their disengaged attitudes. I asked if she wanted to give her students a more authentic voice in the classroom. She asked how she could do so. I said to have a debate, and I said I’d show her what I meant tomorrow.
The next day, in my own classes, I taught an alternate version of her lesson. I split my students into groups, assigned each group one of the same sample essays my student teacher had used, and told them they had ten minutes to prepare for a debate in which each group would argue that its assigned essay had the best conclusion.
On their own, the students came up with all the characteristics of an effective conclusion that my student teacher had wanted them to know. I merely took notes on the board as they spoke. At the end of the activity, two of the groups continued to argue, as I tried to move on, over whether ending abruptly with a fragment was a better idea than ending with a long flourish of a sentence. They weren’t just engaged; they were ignited. They taught themselves, challenged themselves, questioned themselves; taught one another, challenged one another, questioned one another. They had a voice–and I had a break.
This is why I believe every teacher can and should use debate in her classroom.
Ouch
“It is in our thirties that we want friends. In our forties we know they won’t save us any more than love did.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up
My Greatest Fear
“They were both very happy so, and both unconscious of it. These times, that meant so much, and which were real living, they almost ignored. [...] Sometimes life takes hold of one, carries the body along, accomplishes one’s history, and yet is not real, but leaves oneself as it were slurred over.” – D.H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers
How to Pretend You’re Not as Bourgeois as You Really Are
I recently discovered what being on the receiving end of charity feels like.
I work at an inner-city public school. Its facilities are the least severe but most obvious of its problems: instead of working toilets and potable water it has rats, trash, holes, wires, and blatant fire code violations.
A nearby law firm that had lost an employee on 9/11/01 decided to make our school its tenth-anniversary service project. Accordingly, a team of lawyers in matching inspirational t-shirts showed up at our building one morning, ready to paint, sweep, and scrub us into respectability. All eleventh and twelfth graders and their teachers were pulled out of their morning classes, assigned to teams (each led by a lawyer or two), and put to work.
It was touching. I was resentful.
I resented the fact that these corporate folk showed up with their catered breakfast at 9 instead of at 7 like the rest of us, so that students had to eat their usual disgusting breakfasts at 7:30, miss class to force-feed themselves again at 9:30, work through their lunch “hour” (really a 20-minute break that falls at 10:30 or 11:30 depending on the grade), and then miss an afternoon class so that they could eat lunch at the lawyers’ convenience. I resented the fact that our box of materials held three pieces of sandpaper for a team of 20 people, that these lawyers thought they were doing good no matter how incompetently they did it. I resented every joke the lawyers made about the stifling heat (“Hey, when does the central air come on?”) when I knew they’d be back at their air-conditioned offices that very afternoon while my students would be trying to concentrate in my third-floor classroom, a good ten degrees hotter than the first-floor foyer the lawyers were helping us “improve.” I resented the very nice lawyer who kept complaining about how swollen her hands were in the heat. I resented my students’ gratitude toward these people. I resented the fact that we were were sanding away century-old paint and breathing in dust full of lead and asbestos in an airless, 90-degree chamber. And I resented the idea that this farce was supposed to be helping my students more than the teaching I do every day.
Good God, I was angry. When a student later complained that her team’s lawyers “didn’t do anything–just ordered us around” I felt shamefully gratified. When, later in the day, yet another one of my classes was derailed because an administrator discovered what a mess the morning’s activities had made and requested that I send my students down to help clean it up, I was furious (and not at said administrator).
Now, I have absolutely no basis for class angst. Both my parents and my husband have advanced degrees. I have two Ivy League degrees. I’ve never been rich, but I’ve never been poor either, and I’ve always had more social capital than almost everyone I knew. And though I make “only” $62,000 a year, I know I could make much more if I wanted to–probably even more than those fancy lawyers who were so kindly helping my “cause.”
But that sure didn’t stop me. I have never felt such class-based resentment. I have never been so wary of “charity.” And I’m still not sure whether that’s a good thing.
I just rediscovered my college application essay…
I remember writing a research paper in sixth grade.
I remember sitting cross-legged on the carpeted classroom floor, dozens of 3×5 index cards scattered around me, each one featuring its own distinct fact relating to my chosen topic. I remember the classmates around me, some mirroring me as they tried to sort their unruly mass of facts into well-organized piles and potential paragraphs, some with their noses in reference books sniffing out new facts to add to their index card collection, perhaps one with the earliest scribblings of an outline taking shape—all of us brimming with the excitement of independent research and discovery. Most clearly of all, I remember the presence of Mrs. Haia, the teacher I had at my Montessori elementary school for grades four through six.
As we worked, she glided around the spacious classroom, taking on the multiple roles of teacher, friend, and even student as she checked on our progress. “This is a good point, but it looks like you could split it into two paragraphs…And how about you? Do you need any help finding reference material?…So why don’t you tell me a bit about the religion of the ancient Egyptians? I don’t know much, but it looks like you’ve got some interesting books there…” The phrases seemed common enough, but they worked like magic. Subtly, skillfully, she showed us how to think about our topics, how to distill them down to three or four clear-cut paragraphs, and most importantly, how to be absolutely fascinated by them and eager to share that fascination in our papers. Only toward the end of the several weeks that our class dedicated to this project did she mention that the papers would be graded on the A-F scale—an unusual procedure in the comments-based world of Montessori evaluation. By then, we were all too engrossed in our work to worry about the grade it got; the only thing we thought about was completing something that we would be proud of, that our classmates would learn from, and that our teacher would admire.
I remember writing a research paper in ninth grade.
I recall it as a hectic affair, begun in a weekend of research and consummated in a single late night of typing feverishly and answering telephone calls from friends who “just knew” they were going to “fail” and hoped that a half hour of incoherent conversation with me (with most of the incoherence on my end) would guarantee them a decent paper and so an “A” for the semester. The meaninglessness of the whole exercise was all too meaningful, and it frustrated me as much then as it does now.
It is at times like this that I tend to think of Mrs. Haia, and it is difficult to overstate the value of even the most fleeting memory of her class. I picture the sixth grade scene I have described above, and I am freed from the paralysis of grade-consciousness just enough to take a healthy step backward from the general panic of many of my high school classmates. My memories of Mrs. Haia’s philosophy, embodied by her teaching style, summon me back to a time that has become my image of the purest kind of learning. In sixth grade, we learned how to learn and how to love learning, and to accomplish those goals was to go far beyond the accumulation of knowledge. That does not mean that I can ignore my high school grades; in fact, anyone who knows me will testify that I am not one to blow off a major assignment or be unprepared for a test without becoming pretty dissatisfied with myself. I work hard, but I like to think that, much of the time—though it would be vain and untrue to say always—I am doing so for the right reasons.
Mrs. Haia’s influence on my style of thought and learning seems to grow by the semester, and lately I have realized that it affects not only my present but my future as well. Although I know college will be a great leap forward from high school, I also hope that it will be in some ways a return to the ways of fourth, fifth, and sixth grade, a return to a place where I can afford to be absorbed in and saturated by a topic of interest to me, so that college and the years beyond will be a continual process of research, revision, and fascination. I am optimistic, and the main reasons for it are my memories of Mrs. Haia and the knowledge that I will always have them with me.
Anecdote
It is related of Kierkegaard that once, having promised his betrothed a lovely ride in the country, he drove her to the city limits and then turned back toward home, explaining that she had experienced the joy of anticipation, and that that had been enough.
