This sounds random because I wrote it in response to an email I got (via a leftist education listserv) that’s too long to post here.

I am but a first-year teacher, but already I see a pattern among the youth with whom I work. No matter how racist or sexist or classist or whateverist their casual speech may be, they at least have been conditioned (yes, I mean that word to include both positive and negative connotations) to vouch for the rights of the poor, people of color, women, and the wretched of the earth in general when faced with a serious discussion on such topics. In contrast, their casual homophobia and related phobias correspond to a conscious ideological bias that they are not afraid to articulate even after the laughter fades away. Some of them cite religion, which I will not touch, but the others…

This pattern is enabled in part by the facts that all my students are people of color, that half are women, and that our school is visibly poor, whereas none of my students challenges traditional notions of gender and sexuality in any readily apparent manner. But of course, the latter is both symptom and cause of the problem.

The possibility of hiding one’s gender or sexual orientation certainly distinguishes this civil rights issue from that of race and ethnicity, because here the right to be oneself publicly is at stake along with the right to equal treatment. Whether that fact lightens or worsens the burden of the oppressed group is not what needs to be established; the uniqueness of this fight is important primarily because it must determine what strategies we employ to win it.

My Student on Graffiti

“Graffiti really is not as bad as America portrays it to be. To me it is a form of art in a way to express yourself. [...] We don’t do it just to deface property. Sometimes we just want people to know our names so we don’t feel alienated from the world.”

Buzzword Generator

http://www.1728.com/buzzword.htm

Spring

To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

-Edna St. Vincent Millay

Latin “speakers”: what’s the plural of “Alma Mater”?

David Brooks says, “If a foreign enemy attacks the United States during the Harvard-Yale game any time during the next four years, we’re screwed.”

It would make a nice pointless study to poll those of us who went to one of those schools for college and the other for grad school to find out which one we want to win The Game. Then we could do another study of how much money was wasted doing that first study. Then another and another, in infinite regress. Finally one of “us” could add up all the waste, calculate how many children in the monolithic homogeneous entity “Africa” could have been saved from starvation with that money, and thereby set himself (probably not herself) apart from all us other elitists with that demonstration of his superior consciousness and compassion, eliminating the necessity of his thinking of anything but The Game for the remainder of his natural life. I have a dysfunctional relationship with my Alma Maters. And I want Yale to win, by the way.

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Whenever I go on a field trip with my students and we end up in a place with a bunch of white people other than me, they start telling each other to shut up and stop “acting ghetto” in front of the white people. Today I asked why they care and one said “because our people have been discriminated against long enough” and I said that would have been part of my rationale for saying they didn’t need to care, but I don’t know. Of course I don’t.

The Onion announces

a new pain-inducing Advil “for people who just want to feel something, anything.”

I wish I could read German.

Below is the best English translation of the Dedication to Goethe’s Faust that I’ve ever read. Imagine reading it your first year in college, a continent and an ocean away from home, an emo teenager and a certified depressive temporarily off your medication, having just broken up with a long-distance boyfriend whom you’d left at home when you went to college. HAHA. I started sobbing after this one page and couldn’t read the rest of the play (or whatever the hell that book is) until hours later.

—

Uncertain shapes, visitors from the past
At whom I darkly gazed so long ago,
My heart’s mad fleeting visions—now at last
Shall I embrace you, must I let you go?
Again you haunt me: come then, hold me fast!
Out of the mist and murk you rise, who so
Besiege me, and with magic breath restore,
Stirring my soul, lost youth to me once more.

You bring back memories of happier days
And many a well-loved ghost again I greet;
As when some old half-faded legend plays
About our ears, lamenting strains repeat
My journey through life’s labyrinthine maze,
Old griefs revive, old friends, old loves I meet,
Those dear companions, by their fate’s unkind
Decree cut short, who left me here behind.

They cannot hear my present music, those
Few souls who listened to my early song;
They are far from me now who were so close,
And their first answering echo has so long
Been silent. Now my voice is heard, who knows
By whom? I shudder as the nameless throng
Applauds it. Are they living still, those friends
Whom once it moved, scattered to the world’s ends?

And I am seized by long unwonted yearning
For that still, solemn spirit-realm which then
Was mine; these hovering lisping tones returning
Sigh as from some Aeolian harp, as when
I sang them first; I tremble, and my burning
Tears flow, my stern heart melts to love again.
All that I now possess seems far away
And vanished worlds are real to me today.

-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust (Part I, Dedication, David Luke translation)

On whether the author “really meant all that”

“No human brain, working ‘in the cold,’ however stirred up it might be, could ever have succeeded in penetrating far enough, could ever have been in a position to satisfy all the exigencies of the play’s form. Therefore the reasons which I will give to clarify the values of the play must not be thought of as intentions that I conceived beforehand when I prepared myself for the job and which I now undertake to defend, but only as discoveries which I have been able to make afterwards in tranquility.” -Luigi Pirandello, Preface to “Six Characters in Search of an Author”

On Allegory

“I hate symbolic art in which the presentation loses all spontaneous movement in order to become a machine, an allegory–a vain and misconceived effort because the very fact of giving an allegorical sense to a presentation clearly shows that we have to do with a fable which by itself has no truth either fantastic or direct; it was made for the demonstration of some moral truth. The spiritual need I speak of [which philosophical rather than historical writers feel and satisfy] cannot be satisfied–or seldom, and that to the end of a superior irony, as for example in Ariosto–by such allegorical symbolism. This latter starts from a concept, and from a concept which creates or tries to create for itself an image. The former on the other hand seeks in the image–which must remain alive and free throughout–a meaning to give it value.” -Luigi Pirandello, Preface to “Six Characters in Search of an Author”

Weirdo

I definitely found myself half-awake after a nap yesterday contemplating the difference between and relative artistic merits of a perfect description of the imperfect and an imperfect description of the perfect. Then I woke up fully and remembered that my dreams had also involved a grocery store. Also, can “thus” always replace “therefore” at the beginning of sentences?

Make the struggle for meaning the meaning.

In the preface to Six Characters in Search of an Author, Luigi Pirandello describes how, well, six characters came to him in search of an author. He could not decide whether they held the right kind of meaning to become art, so he wrote a work of art about an author who couldn’t decide whether six characters in his imagination merited being written into art (except he calls it life…).

This works for teaching as well as writing. When I’m not sure what to do, I teach the students why I’m not sure what to do. Sometimes the easy way out (if that is the easy way out) is the best.

Thus is affirmed “the multiple personality of everyone corresponding to the possibilities of being to be found in each of us, and finally the inherent tragic conflict between life (which is always moving and changing) and form (which fixes it, immutable)” (ibid.).

SNAFU

A ninth-grader wrote in his essay that “The Crucible by Arthur Miller is a shakespeare book about witchcraft in the 1900s.” By “shakespeare book” he means play. By “witchcraft in the 1900s” it is remotely possible that he means McCarthyism, but sadly it is much more likely that he means witchcraft (or the perception thereof) in the 1600s. This boy plagiarized his previous essay in its entirety without even troubling to ensure that adjacent sentences related to one another, however, so this is an improvement. Yay for public education in the United States.

“Writing” Assignments

A major flaw in our education system is that most student writing (a) has no purpose other than to prove something to a teacher and (b) will never be read by anyone other than that teacher. This is a huge problem for several reasons.

First, it is not good practice for the “real world,” where people write things for a purpose and not only to show their bosses that they can spell.

Second, it robs writing of one of its main purposes: communication. In other words, the writing students do in school is rarely writing at all in any meaningful sense of the word; it is rather a waste of time.

Third, if students know that no one really needs to understand what they are saying on paper, they have no reason to make their writing comprehensible or even to do it at all. Without such motivation, they will never do their best work, which means their capabilities will never be recognized, challenged, or improved.

Fourth, it makes the task of grading torture to teachers, for reading form without content is no more fun than writing form without content (to borrow the admittedly problematic Aristotelian dichotomy).

(Gerald Graff makes all these points more effectively than I do, of course.)

:):):):):):

For a year or two when I was a kid I was obsessed with smiley faces. I want to say that the depression moved in for the kill not long thereafter, because the irony would be lovely if that were true, but I really can’t remember one way or the other.

Beckett is SO ABSURD.

I feel like I should either say nothing at all about the below or spend a lifetime deconstructing it. I’m going with the former.

“Of the great traveller I had been, on my hands and knees in the later stages, then crawling on my belly or rolling on the ground, only the trunk remains (in sorry trim), surmounted by the head with which we are already familiar, this is the part of myself the description of which I have best assimilated and retained. Stuck like a sheaf of flowers in a deep jar, its neck flush with my mouth, on the side of a quiet street near the shambles, I am at rest at last. If I turn, I shall not say my head, but my eyes, free to roll as they list, I can see the statue of the apostle of horse’s meat, a bust. His pupilless eyes of stone are fixed upon me. That makes four, with those of my creator, omnipresent, do not imagine I flatter myself I am privileged. Though not exactly in order I am tolerated by the police. They know I am speechless and consequently incapable of taking unfair advantage of my situation to stir up the population against its governors, by means of burning oratory during the rush hour or subversive slogans whispered, after nightfall, to belated pedestrians the worse for drink. And since I have lost all my members, with the exception of the one-time virile, they know also that I shall not be guilty of any gestures liable to be construed as inciting to alms, a prisonable offence. The fact is I trouble no one, except that category of hypersensitive persons for whom the least thing is an occasion for scandal and indignation. [...] Once a week I was taken out of my receptacle, so that it might be emptied. This duty fell to the proprietress of the chop-house across the street and she performed it punctually and without complaint, beyond an occasional good-natured reflection to the effect that I was a nasty old pig, for she had a kitchen-garden. Without perhaps having exactly won her heart it was clear I did not leave her indifferent. And before putting me back she took advantage of the circumstance that my mouth was accessible to stick into it a chunk of lights or a marrow-bone. And when snow fell she covered me with a tarpaulin still watertight in places. It was under its shelter, snug and dry, that I became acquainted with the boon of tears, while wondering to what I was indebted for it, not feeling moved. And this not merely once, but every time she covered me, that is to say twice or three times a year. Yes, it was fatal, no sooner had the tarpaulin settled over me, and the precipitate steps of my benefactress died away, than the tears began to flow. In this, was this to be interpreted as an effect of gratitude? But in that case should not I have felt grateful? Besides I realized darkly that if she took care of me thus, it was not solely out of goodness, or else I had not rightly understood the meaning of goodness, when it was explained to me. It must not be forgotten that I represented for this woman an undeniable asset. For quite apart from the services I rendered to her lettuce, I constituted for her establishment a kind of landmark, not to say an advertisement, far more effective than for example a chef in cardboard, pot-bellied in profile and full face wafer thin. That she was well aware of this is shown by the trouble she had taken to festoon my jar with Chinese lanterns, of a very pretty effect in the twilight, and a fortiori in the night. And the jar itself, so that the passer-by might consult with greater ease the menu attached to it, had been raised on a pedestal at her own expense. It is thus I learnt that her turnips in gravy are not so good as they used to be, but that on the other hand her carrots, equally in gravy, are even better than formerly. The gravy has not varied. [...] It is perhaps worth noting that snow alone, provided of course it is heavy, entitles me to the tarpaulin. I have tried to make her understand, dashing my head angrily against the neck of the jar, that I should like to be shrouded more often….” -”The Unnameable” from Beckett’s trilogy

From “The Unnameable” in Beckett’s Trilogy

“To tell the truth, let us be honest at least, it is some considerable time now since I last knew what I was talking about. It is because my thoughts are elsewhere. I am therefore forgiven. So long as one’s thoughts are somewhere everything is permitted.”

New Theories of Mental Disorders

This is fascinating, caveats and all (one of which is that I don’t like the gender implications).

Link

Sign this petition if you would like Linda Darling-Hammond to be appointed as Obama’s Secretary of Education.

I feel uncomfortable writing something so unreservedly positive, but:

I have felt absurdly lucky this election season. The right to vote is itself precious enough to a 23-year-old and a woman. The chance to do so with unabashed enthusiasm, to for once not feel naked without the armor of cynicism, was an unlooked-for privilege. And for that chance to coincide with my first year of teaching in a high school full of students hoping desperately for “change we need” was extraordinary.

After two days of heated discussion my eleventh grade English class decided to begin the year by reading Dreams from My Father. I had my reservations, not because I didn’t want to read the book but because I wanted to perhaps too much. A white teacher enthusing about such a book to students of color was an off-putting image, as was that of a teacher assigning a book written by a political candidate she supported. I dealt with this dilemma as I do with most such difficulties: by confessing all to my students and asking for their understanding in my time of confusion. It’s quite an effective strategy, by the way.

(For every sentence I write here there are several more to be written. It is good to have too much to say, though; that is one difficulty I am trying my best to create for my students.)

The result was not a fairy tale. These students had never before been required to read anything for homework, and my assigning a twenty-page chapter each night meant that many students came to class unprepared. Others read but did not understand. My five-minute lecture defining neocolonialism was not nearly enough to enable discussion on the topic. One girl kept insisting that Obama had grown up in inner-city housing projects just like she had, and I hardly knew whether I should disillusion her or not.

But previously apathetic students began to watch the presidential debates and follow the polls. A boy who was often bullied became the center of respectful attention one day when it became clear that he knew more about the electoral college than any of us. One student seriously doubted Obama’s readiness to be president, and between him and my determination to play devil’s advocate we managed to stage intelligent debates between inevitable lapses into what I call “disciple mode.” Another student wrote a letter to Obama in time for me to send it to Obama for America just a week before election day. Many began to dream of Barack visiting our school. November 5th was special everywhere, but my classroom was especially joyful. I felt glutted with meaning. I still do.