Help for my students?

To culminate our Humanities unit on early Asian American and Chinese American history, a colleague and I would like to take our ninth graders to the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) in New York City at the end of April or early May. Given that our school is located in Boston’s Chinatown and that our student population is 50-60% Asian/Asian American, this visit will encourage ALL of our students to learn important lessons about identity and also about an integral–but often overlooked–part of American history. It will also be an exciting travel opportunity for our students, many of whom have never been outside Boston.

The problem, of course, is funding. If we go on a Thursday, the museum will be free, so all we’ll need is the cost of one big bus for the day (there are only 50 or so students in our ninth grade). Unfortunately, Donors Choose and Adopt-a-Classroom do not allow teachers to raise funds for field trips, and neither students nor parents in our school’s high-poverty population can be expected to pay the $30 per child we would need.

To the point: if you know of any sources of funding (other than the Target field trip grants, whose deadline for this year has passed) that might be of use to us, could you let me know?

THANK YOU.

High School Teachers’ Meetings

leader: “So to start off, I wanted to do a quick check-in. We’ll go around the room; can everyone just say one verb that illustrates your mindset as an educator these days?”

first teacher: “Busy.”

Just call me a slut already.

I’m tired of being told that it’s because I’m “too young and skinny and pretty” that I have been harassed and assaulted so much by students. The “too” is normative, and saying “you caused it but it’s not your fault” is less comforting than people think. At least if I were to blame I’d have some agency in the matter.

What Constitution?

I’m getting ready to teach a unit on the U.S. Constitution to my ninth graders. Meanwhile, this appears in our (public) school’s bulletin:

“Family Holiday Celebration. This event, sponsored by the Advisory Student Committee, is scheduled for Wednesday, Dec. 16, 5 – 7 pm, in the auditorium. We hope you will be there to join in the Christmas holiday and New Year celebration. For your information, Hanukkah (or Chanukah) will fall on the evening of Dec. 16 and the Islamic New Year on Dec. 18.”

I wrote to the guy who does the bulletin:

“I have to say that I’m pretty uncomfortable with the implications of this passage from today’s bulletin. Claiming that we as a public school celebrate Christmas but merely inform ourselves about other religions’ holidays seems neither accurate nor ethical. Not all of us are Christian or even religious, and the separation of church and state in this country should allow us to feel comfortable about our beliefs in state-affiliated institutions like this one.”

He wrote back a one-liner: “Your points are well taken.” Then the next day, he sent out a parent newsletter inviting families to come “break bread” at the aforementioned holiday celebration. Whee.

Kristeva on Depression, Part Two

“For such narcissistic depressed persons, sadness is really the sole object; more precisely it is a substitute object they become attached to, an object they tame and cherish for lack of another. In such a case, suicide is not a disguised act of war but a merging with sadness and, beyond it, with that impossible love, never reached, always elsewhere, such as the promises of nothingness, of death. . . Although atheistic, those in despair are mystics–adhering to the preobject, not believing in Thou, but mute and steadfast devotees of their own inexpressible container. It is to this fringe of strangeness that they devote their tears and jouissance.”

—–

“I shall accept Hanna Segal’s hypothesis, according to which, beginning with separation (let us note that a “lack” is necessary for the sign to emerge), the child produces or uses objects or vocalizations that are the symbolic equivalents of what is lacking. Later, and beginning with the so-called depressive position, it attempts to signify the sadness that overwhelms it by producding within its own self elements alien to the outer world, which it causes to correspond to such a lost or shifted outerness; we are then faced with symbols properly speaking, no longer with equivalencies.”

—–

“Let us keep in mind the speech of the depressed–repetitive and monotonous. Faced with the impossibility of concatenating, they utter sentences that are interrupted, exhausted, come to a standstill. Even phrases they cannot formulate. A repetitive rhythm, a monotonous melody emerge and dominate the broken logical sequences, changing them into recurring, obsessive litanies. Finally, when that frugal musicality becomes exhausted in its turn, or simply does not succeed in becoming established on account of the pressure of silence, the melancholy person appears to stop cognizing as well as uttering, sinking into the blankness of asymbolia or the excess of an unorderable cognitive chaos.”

What, if anything, is “ethnic literature”?

My class was discussing this question today. At some point I said, “So if I wanted to write ethnic literature, what would I have to write about?” A student immediately said “white bread and mayonnaise!” Then, horrified at what she’d said, she started apologizing, but I was laughing too hard to hear her. IMMD.

“Can the beautiful be sad?”

Really, Kristeva? I have trouble convincing myself it can be anything but sad.

*Edit–Her next question: “Can disenchantment be beautiful?” A better question.

Poisonous

This year I’m doing a better job of reporting to authorities the more serious forms of sexual harassment I get from male students. (Last year I just tried to deal with it all myself, which backfired spectacularly.) But that means there is now more than one kid who has been (a) been suspended for an incident related to me and (b) been ordered by the administration never to talk to me, come near me, or look at me again if he wants to avoid expulsion.

Ours is a very small school, and this is awkward. I used to walk the halls wary of words and hands; now I’m all shifty-eyed because I’m afraid of bumping into silence or fear or anger.

Kristeva’s Linguistics of Depression

“Listen again for a few moments to depressive speech, repetitive, monotonous, or empty of meaning, inaudible even for the speaker before he or she sinks into mutism. You will note that, with melancholy persons, meaning appears to be arbitrary, or else it is elaborated with the help of much knowledge and will to mastery, but seems secondary, frozen, somewhat removed from the head and body of the person who is speaking. Or else it is from the very beginning evasive, uncertain, deficient, quasi mutistic: ‘one’ speaks to you already convinced that the words are wrong and therefore ‘one’ speaks carelessly, ‘one’ speaks without believing in it.

“Meaning, however, is arbitrary; linguistics asserts it for all verbal signs and for all discourse . . . Now every ‘normal’ speaker learns to take that artifice seriously, to cathex it or forget it.

“Signs are arbitrary because language starts with a negation (Verneinung) of loss . . . ‘I have lost an essential object . . . but no, I have found [it] again in signs, or rather since I consent to lose [it] I have not lost [it] (that is the negation), I can recover [it] in language.

“Depressed persons, on the contrary, disavow the negation: they cancel it out, suspend it, and nostalgically fall back on the real object (the Thing) of their loss, which is just what they do not manage to lose, to which they remain painfully riveted. The denial (Verleugnung) of negation would thus be the exercise of an impossible mourning, the setting up of a fundamental sadness and an artificial, unbelievable language, cut out of the painful background that is not accessible to any signifier and that intonation alone, intermittently, succeeds in inflecting.”

“Persons in despair become hyperlucid by nullifying negation. A signifying sequence, necessarily an arbitrary one, will appear to them as heavily, violently arbitrary; they will think it absurd, it will have no meaning . . . The arbitrary sequence perceived by depressive persons as absurd is coextensive with a loss of reference. The depressed speak of nothing, they have nothing to speak of: glued to the Thing (Res) they are without objects.”

This reminds me of the time I kept staring at a chair wondering why it was ever made, named, used–anything. I was so confused–and even more confused when I tried to explain the episode to my friend afterward.

[All excerpts are from Black Sun.]

Reading Kristeva

It’s maddening. She’ll be rolling along with a brilliant argument, and then suddenly, out of nowhere, she’ll attribute everything she just said to the fact that women want penises, that melancholia involves the absorption of one’s mother through one’s anus, that we all want to kill our fathers–whatever. I don’t get it.

Field Trips

School excursions for my students inevitably involve their being surrounded by a sea of very, very wide-eyed white people. They are used to this, and we are all used to my whiteness being seized upon with relief by fearful tour guides and ushers. We can joke about it now. But there’s always something new that pisses me off. Today it was a cashier. We owed $214 for a tour. I paid with my credit card. After she recovered from the shock of my not having a check from the school, she said she would get me a receipt so I could get reimbursed. I said that it was okay, that I wasn’t going to be reimbursed, that the other teacher and I would just split the amount. She said “Oh, of course you’ll be reimbursed!” as if I were crazy and got me the receipt anyway. Well no, actually I won’t. We fought hard just to get the transportation covered by the school, then made students pay more than they should have (and we paid for the ones who couldn’t afford the $10), and we still needed to chip in to make the balance. Teachers do this all the time. We’re not unusual. I wanted to tell her this. Of course I didn’t. But really. How clueless can you get? No wonder people don’t rally around education reform. They don’t even know it’s needed.

Descriptions of Depression, Part Two

When I wrote this post I had not yet read what should have been its centerpiece:

“For those who are racked by melancholia, writing about it would have meaning only if writing sprang out of that very melancholia. I am trying to address an abyss of sorrow, a noncommunicable grief that at times, and often on a long-term basis, lays claims upon us to the extent of having us lose all interest in words, actions, and even life itself. Such despair is not a revulsion that would imply my being capable of desire and creativity, negative indeed but present. Within depression, if my existence is on the verge of collapsing, its lack of meaning is not tragic–it appears obvious to me, glaring and inescapable.” – Julia Kristeva, Black Sun

I have struggling for years to express what Kristeva does so perfectly with those last two sentences.

Everything Is Illuminated

I just found out that the head custodian at the school where I teach is the brother of the guy who coordinates custodial work and contracts for the entire city.

Tone

Today I was trying to help my students understand the concept of tone. I gave them a list of adjectives, made sure they understood the words, and asked each to write five short narratives about a single event, each with a different tone. Then some asked if they could share what they had written and see if their classmates could guess what tone they had been going for, so I said sure. This ended up being rather amusing, especially since one kid wrote about pissing himself (calmly, excitedly, angrily, formally, and curiously). But the best moment was when someone raised his hand to share the following:

“I whacked the dog with a bat, cut off his skin, ripped him limb from limb, pulled out his organs, and threw him in a hot fiery pot; I was hungry. After I devoured his meat, I buried his bones and pissed on his grave.”

Exception

“But the sun seemed to him a colossal thousand-legged tarantula, flinging itself on the earth with insane passion.” – Andrei Bely, Petersburg

For a high school English teacher, I’m pretty intolerant of extraneous similes and metaphors (as opposed to the ones so deeply embedded in the language that they’re unavoidable–see “embedded” in this sentence). I’m appalled when students tell me they’ve heard from previous teachers that the way to make their writing more interesting is to add more words. If kids trying to write college application essays start throwing around moronic cliches about how some experience turned them from caterpillars into butterflies or whatever, I tell them to cut that shit and just say what they mean. But once in a while, some simile or metaphor strikes me as so glorious that it almost makes up for the caterpillars, the butterflies, the roads not taken, and the rays of light at the ends of tunnels. Here is one.

Fun with Urban Education

Our school building is literally falling apart: there are wires hanging from the ceiling and holes in the walls and windows that that have been punched out. Among other things, my classroom door had been broken for ages. (It was still sort of functional, but it didn’t latch shut, and because the top hinge was loose, it cut trenches into the floor and made a noise like a dying walrus every time it was swung to or fro.) Apparently someone decided at the last minute that we should appear somewhat respectable at tonight’s Open House. This was a good thought. A not-so-good thought was sending a workman to drill and hammer at my door ALL THROUGH ONE OF MY CLASS PERIODS.

Then after school, I went to the bathroom (which took a while because our staff bathroom has been broken for a week and a half and almost no one can get into the student bathrooms because the custodians lock them so that they don’t have to clean them and most teachers’ keys got stolen last year and the nurse has a bathroom but she’s only here a couple of hours a day) and came back to find my door closed–and locked! Since it never locked (or even closed) before, no one has a key to it, so I was locked out. Happily the fire door to the adjoining room happens to be one of the few in the school that actually opens, so I got in that way.

Does it still count as a WIN when all you’re doing is making up for an EPIC FAIL? I think that’s all my job is about.

Poll

Quick! Name a field of study in which the terminal degree promises its pursuers an existence both ethically and intellectually stimulating.

More fun with taking people’s words out of context

Foucault wrote this in his History of Sexuality, but I think it would go well in a book about the public education system too. Among other things, of course.

“Briefly, my aim is to examine the case of a society which has been loudly castigating itself for its hypocrisy for more than a century, which speaks verbosely of its own silence, takes great pains to relate in detail the things it does not say, denounces the powers it exercises, and promises to liberate itself from the very laws that have made it function.”

She wrote this about eating disorders. I would say the same about depression.

“I gave life a trial period, six months, and said that when the six months were up, I could get sick again if I really wanted to. In that six months, so many things happened that death seemed, primarily, inconvenient. The trial period was extended. I seem to keep extending it. There are many things to do. There are books to write and naps to take. There are movies to see and scrambled eggs to eat. Life is essentially trivial. You either decide you will take the trite business of life and give yourself the option of doing something really cool, or you decide you will opt for the Grand Epic of eating disorders and dedicate your life to being seriously trivial. I kind of go back and forth, a little Grand Epic here and a little cool trivial stuff there. As time goes by, I take greater and greater pleasure in the trivial stuff and find the Grand Epic more and more dreary. It’s a good sign. And still, every goddamn day I have to think up a reason to live.

“Obviously I’ve come up with something.”

- Marya Hornbacher, Wasted

Filling out a Harvard alumni survey

Which income range most clearly represents the total annual income of your household?

$0-$49,999 $50,000-$99,999 $100,000-$249,999 $250,000-$499,999 $500,000-$749,999 $750,000-$999,999 $1,000,000-$2,499,999 $2,500,000-$4,999,999 $5,000,000+