Q & A
Question on a reader-response-theory-oriented homework assignment: “What does the book remind you of in your life?”
Student’s written answer: “It reminds me of my potential of not giving up until I reach my goal. Like when my mother hid my GameBoy charger, I searched for 15 minutes around where she was until I found it, but afterwards, I forgot where I put my gameboy.”
Ah
“To know you can do better next time, unrecognizably better, and that there is no next time, and that it is a blessing there is not, there is a thought to be going on with.” – “Malone Dies” in The Beckett Trilogy
[Edit] Also: “…and like a sweat of things the moments streamed away in a great chaotic conflux of oozings and torrents, and the trapped huddled things changed and died each one according to its solitude.” – ibid.
I am angry.
It was pouring this afternoon. Walking home from work, I passed a doorstep in which two guys were standing. The step was a foot off the ground and they were taller than me anyway, so they couldn’t really see me under my umbrella. I thought that meant they wouldn’t bother me, but no: one of them leans down and sticks his head under my umbrella so he can pucker up and make smooching noises right in my face.
I’m sorry, but the last time I checked I wasn’t part of a zoo exhibit, and that’s not just because I can be viewed for free. And at least zoo animals are protected by a fence. Maybe a woman’s situation is more like that on a hunting range. I feel like every time I go outside people put guns to my head and then just happen to decide not to fire. It does not add to your charm, sir, nor does it count as my fantasizing about you, if I have to wonder when you talk to me whether you’re planning to follow me home and rape me or you’ll decide it’s not worth the effort.
And this is one day after a neighbor comes over asking for a tutoring session and ends up groping my legs and making inappropriate comments the whole time I’m trying to talk about decimals. Meanwhile, Sarah Palin charges rape victims for their own medical examinations. Never mind angry–I feel humiliated and terrified.
On Laundromats
So after we take care of the stock market, the wars, the economy, the public education system, the prison system, the campaign finance system, racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, ageism, social security, the immigration policy, media monopolies, CEO salaries, welfare, health care, native American rights, lobbyists, alternative energy sources, Russia, Georgia, Darfur, Palestine, Israel, the affirmative action debate, the stigma of mental illness, the whiteboard markers that don’t work in my classroom, a few other minor problems, and meanness and stupidity everywhere, I think we should turn our attention to the nation’s laundromats. My fellow Americans, the laundromat system is in dire need of reform. These places are some of the saddest in the country. Thank goodness I have no need to visit them often, but I did last week, and I can tell you that no atmosphere is more conducive than that of a laundromat to pondering the utter frivolity of washing dirt out of one’s clothes and the unbearable lightness of being. Surely the places would make more money if they didn’t inspire in their customers the sort of existential despair that throws into cuttingly sharp relief the utter meaninglessness of washers and dryers. I very nearly turned around and walked back out of my local laundromat as soon as I entered, convinced that it would be more pleasant to buy a scrubbing board and wash my linens at the nearest well than to sit in that hellhole for two hours. Come to think of it, my situation was probably not unlike that of students who drop out of school today, convinced that it will be more pleasant either to live without formal education or to study at home for the GED than to walk through the doors of the hellholes that are their (mostly urban) public school classrooms. Hm.
BTW
I want a bailout too. I speculated wildly with my money, unreasonably assuming that, having been hired in July and begun work as a unionized city employee in August, I might have a paycheck and health insurance sometime before October. I now see the error of my ways. I promised to pay $700 a month in rent on the flimsy assurance of a signed contract of employment from the government–what could I have been thinking? We public school teachers are such a bunch of damned market capitalists.
Brief Onions
Palin Unveils 9/11 Firefighter Cousin, Reformed Lesbian Neice, Naturalized Mexican Half Brother. “Palin has a campaign stop scheduled next week in Texas, where she is expected to introduce her stepsister Linda, a $35 barrel of offshore-drilled crude oil wrapped in an American flag.”
Kissinger Instructs Palin on Finer Points of Clandestine Carpet Bombing. “The governor now feels completely confident that, if she is ever required to step in for Sen. McCain to mastermind the toppling of a democratically elected but left-leaning South American government without congressional consent, she will be fully prepared.”
Cash-Strapped NPR Launches A Couple Things Considered. “A Couple Things Considered is just one of many new shows brought about by budget constraints, along with NPR’s recently launched Bicycle Talk and Public Radio International’s This Tri-State Area Life.”
Word “Presumptive” Prepares for Another 4-Year Hibernation. “Plucked from the recesses of the English language to serve for the brief but heady interval between the first presidential primaries and the party nominating conventions, the elegant adjective has toiled earnestly these past nine months, scurrying through the lips and pens of journalists the world over, and shall now retire for a spell, far from the public eye.”
):)
Make no small depressions, for they have no power to move (wo)men’s souls. If it has to feel less than wonderful, why can’t it always be epic despair? (I don’t really mean that, of course.)
Yes but No
A friend told me that I am a good person because I see beauty everywhere. I said yes but I see pain in all beauty, so what does that make me?
Isaiah Berlin, School Reformer
One of my vague but lingering intellectual memories of freshman year in college is the distinction, as articulated I believe by Isaiah Berlin, between positive and negative liberty (or freedom). I cannot possibly do justice to poor Berlin now, partly because I have not read him in five years and partly because this is not a dissertation on political philosophy. For my present purposes, however, I will venture to oversimplify the matter thus: negative liberty is the ability to do whatever you want to do without external constraint, while positive liberty consists of being able to realize your true or full potential without self-imposed or unremarked constraint. The problem with negative liberty is that it leaves people free to make stupid and self-destructive decisions; the problem with positive liberty is that, taken to its extreme, it justifies taking total control of others in the name of their best interests. Positive liberty acknowledges the difficulty of knowing oneself and the too-often-invisible menace of the unconscious; unfortunately, it can also justify brave new dystopias of Orwellian proportions, as Berlin well understood.
A discussion I had in a class last year might have interested Isaiah Berlin. We analyzed a certain high school split into five different learning communities with distinct educational purposes (vocational, college prep, artistic development, etc.). The school claimed that it provided “equal opportunity” to each of its students because its lottery system gave every student a chance to express a preference about learning community placement and a chance, however small, of being admitted to her top-choice community. At the time I was troubled by the suggestion that an unrealized possibility—which, after all, is always possible to posit after the fact—could be “opportunity” enough to validate claims of “equal opportunity.” That may be a problem in itself.
Now that I have Berlin on the brain, though, I find myself fixated on a different (though related) aspect of the discussion. It turned out that the technical/vocational learning community in the aforementioned school always had room for everyone who listed it as her top choice; therefore this particular community, at least, provided exactly what students wanted to as many students as wanted it. My gut reaction was to protest, “But the students who choose this non-college-prep route should be told to aspire to more. After all, whether they knew it or not, their choice was probably largely determined by social expectations based on their race, class, and parentage.” I was arguing for positive freedom.
After reading Patricia Graham’s description of education policy based on children’s “probable destinies”—to say nothing of Jean Anyon’s damning account of one manifestation of such policy—I find myself even more preoccupied by these intertwined ideas of possibility, probability, choice, self-limitation, and whatever else I have been trying to describe and pull together here. I want every student to realize his full potential. If I set out aggressively to “reeducate” (a sinister word) marginalized and self-doubting students about their self-worth and academic potential, though, am I not limiting their negative liberty?
How are we to balance negative liberty—the right to choose—with positive liberty—the right to realize one’s full potential—in the quest to reform schools? (Put in terms of the purpose of education: which type of liberty should education prioritize—or can it protect and cultivate both?)
I am scared.
I never thought I would post a Maureen Dowd column, but in this one she doesn’t even need to bust out the meaningless vitriol; the people she interviews do it for her.
Then there’s the McCain(-Palin) health care “plan,”
the McCain(-Palin) economic “plan,”
and the fact that I’m getting an exposé overload merely by reading The New York TImes. I don’t even know if I have the courage to find out what all this sounds like on the leftist blogs.
The Public Education “System”
I have been teaching full-time for a month now. I have not yet been assigned an employee ID number, which means I have no email address that anyone I work with can discover other than by asking me for my personal one, no access to my colleagues’ contact information by means other than wandering the halls in search of them, and no access to the intranet and therefore no way of inputting any grades and therefore no way of giving my students prompt quantitative feedback on their progress or determining how their behavior and tardies and whatnot are actually affecting their grade. I also have no working health insurance at the moment, which is illegal in this state, so I am (or rather, my parents are) paying out of pocket for the psychiatric drugs without which I don’t function at all, not to mention birth control. I have no computer at work–I have been promised one, but the first two I was given did not work, so I’m still waiting. In fact I have no technology in my classroom more advanced than a whiteboard (not even the windows stay open on their own, which is a problem because we don’t have air conditioning and propping them up with textbooks decreases our textbook-to-student ratio even below the usual 1-to-20). I wasn’t paid two weeks ago as I should have been, so I’m broke, and of course there is no way of obtaining or being reimbursed for classroom supplies through the “system,” which means my parents are also paying for my students’ pencils, stapler, hole puncher, paltry library, etc. I just found out yesterday which of my students have IEPs (individualized education plans–documentation of special needs), and last year teachers never found out this information at all, so I should consider myself fortunate, though I can’t help wishing, perhaps unreasonably, that I could see the specifics of the IEPs in addition to simply knowing they exist.
None of this bothers me terribly on a daily basis. I’m lucky enough to have stable and generous financial support, and my students distract me from everything else. But when I think about the national budget and priorities, I want to scream. I know it’s an old complaint; it just needs to be made again and again and again.
This one’s not political.
My most well-worn childhood memory is also my earliest memory of depression. It is of a day in what I think was sixth grade–certainly it was no later, because the setting is my elementary school–when I felt a bleakness so unprecedented and overwhelming that my only ambition–it seemed lofty enough then and still does now–was to bear witness to the enormity of the thing. I knew that adults could never attribute such existential despair to an eleven-year-old no matter how much they tried to sympathize, and so I did not try to explain myself to any of them–except one: my future self. I promised myself then that when I was older, even if I couldn’t remember how terrible I felt back then, I would believe the testimony of my sixth-grade self and grant that she had experienced something real and horrible that day. Sure enough, I haven’t the slightest memory of the feeling itself, but I do have my mental time-capsule of a promise, and I have no choice but to keep it.
The strange thing is the comfort I derive from that memory. It’s a comfort of the sort one should find in recalling the joys of relative innocence, not the one major blemish on that innocence. I know I take comfort in my depression and I know its destabilizing force is one of my life’s most stable elements, but really, allowing it to be one of my most cherished memories seems a little much. By ninth grade the illness was seriously affecting all aspects of my life, and by tenth grade it was ready to end that life, but in sixth grade its appearances were still rare enough. It’s nice that I kept my promise to myself to remember it even in its rarity, but I do wish I could remember what else I was thinking in those days.
Don’t Gimme Fiction?
“We’re teaching books that don’t stack up,” says Nancy Schnog. Her argument is a familiar one: we high school English teachers are responsible, often enough, for murdering rather than engendering or even nurturing a love of reading in our students. Coincidentally, though, my father sent me the article the very same day that I gave my class of juniors their first writing assignment of the year: a formal paragraph arguing why a certain book (of their choice) is or is not a good book to assign in English classes. I told them that this would serve, not only as a diagnostic assessment of their writing skills so that I would know what to work on with them, but also as an important source of guidance as I finalize the syllabus for the year. Some (unedited) excerpts from what they gave me:
“Books I don’t like and don’t wanna read would be basically fictional, old books, and books that the school system provide.”
“The books that we should read should be books that are a little imaginary but it still has meaning and can be true at the same time. Last year when I had english we read some good book such as The Bluest Eye and A Lesson Before Dying. These two books were not all that fake and [not] all that true either. But they both had meaning and they both had a lesson to come out of it. So in conclusion we should read books that are funny (imagenary) but can be very true and meaniful.”
“We should not read any books that you don’t like. If you don’t like it, you wouldn’t really feel like reading it and it would waste our time.”
“I don’t think we should read books with more than 210 pages. It’s kind of boring reading long books.”
“I’m done with reading about social injustice in other countries when we have the same problem at home. No other books that the school thinks we should read. It’s all biography and social injustice, they want us to think, but we sometimes want to take a break form thinking.”
“I don’t really like books that relate to life.”
“The type of books I like to read are urban books. It talks about reality, violence, drugs, and etc. It catches my attention because I can relate to what they say.”
“We should read books that are not about racism/violence because we know what it is already. Some book I would like to read would be like myth/fiction.”
“I don’t want to read any books. Books are not interesting to me at all.”
“I don’t really read so it doesn’t matter what book. Reading isn’t my thing. Here’s a little tip about me. I’ve never really finished a book in my whole life. Maybe like in 5th grade I read Magic Tree House. But its now. I read Graphic novels and Gossip Mags. Just to sum it up anybook is fine, and I doubt I’ll finish it but ill try.”
“I like to read urban books or books that talk about abuse.”
“I do not want to read about racism. I want to read mystery & fantasy books. Books about murder mystery or myths and legends. I also like to read books about regular teenagers not the one who has to deal with racism because they were born in another country. I really liked Harry Potter. I thought it was interesting and fun to read of things that don’t really normally ever or could happen.” [no, the author isn't white]
“I don’t want to read anything fictional especially anything that has to do with make believe things. I just think we are old enough to handle real life situations.”
