This is why I still read Victorian literature.
“My Protean easy-chair is a chair so all over bejointed, behinged, and bepadded, everyway so elastic, springy, and docile to the airiest touch, that in some one of its endlessly-changeable accommodations of back, seat, footboard, and arms, the most restless body, the body most racked, nay, I had almost added the most tormented conscience must, somehow and somewhere, find rest. Believing that I owed it to suffering humanity to make known such a chair to the utmost, I scraped together my little means and off to the World’s Fair with it.” – Melville, The Confidence-Man
I’m in the mood for…
…apologizing to ex-boyfriends. (And I haven’t even had anything to drink today.)
I’m not big on titles, you’ll notice.
You know how at the end of this, my first year of teaching, someone is going to ask me what I would say if I could give just one piece of advice to new teachers? I already have my answer. It is that your first lesson of the year should be on mandatory reporting laws. This is especially true if you are young and female and the type of person in whom people confide, but it can’t hurt even if you’re a curmudgeonly jackass. That way you won’t end up like me, knowing far more than I can handle knowing about my students’ lives and way over my head in legal and ethical dilemmas.
On a happier note, others say:
Student (male, in fact): What’s up with those annoying people ringing bells?
Me: They’re from the Salvation Army, asking for help.
Student: Well, they never should’ve went to the army!
Male student 1: Hey baby.
Me: Uh, hey STUDENT.
Male student 2: Yeah, hey TEACHER.
Me: Thank you.
Dear Certain Male Students,
Please stop sexually harassing me. Please stop saying “hey baby” when you pass me in the halls and telling me “we’ll talk about it when we get home” when I tell you do to your work. Please don’t kiss my hand or my forehead. Please don’t tell everyone I’m your wife. Please don’t continually remind me how long it will be before you’re eighteen and I “won’t have to worry about getting slapped with a lawsuit anymore.” Please stop suddenly commenting on my appearance when I’m trying to talk about other things. Please let me look you in the face without fear. Please stop saying audible and inappropriate things about me for everyone, including me, to hear. Please stop making me feel like a whore. Please don’t wait to back off until I get really upset and even then simply assume I’m just PMSing for a few days before resuming your usual behavior. Please don’t assume that my obvious mask of neutrality hides a blush of desire or pleasure rather than one of shame and anger.
Please understand that the reason I don’t say this to your face is that I know you’ll then call me a hypocrite and a slut and spread rumors to back up those claims, because I’ve seen you do exactly that to every other girl who had the guts to stand up to you, and I’m not as brave as they were.
Please tell me what to do.
This ninth grader is ready for academia.
“Bacon’s Rebellion was when Bacon rebelled. He didn’t rebelled alone. He did it with other people. He rebelled with others because he was mad. They did it in the past too. It wasn’t in our times because we wouldn’t be writing about it.”
[Edit] So is this one: “Bacon Rebellion is a poor whites of the large miserably.”
“Leverage”
What is up with that word? I hear it being used as a generic verb in place of “do,” “take care of,” “cause,” “be,” and pretty much anything else besides “eat” and “punch.” Let’s leverage this. This will leverage that. It’s not supposed to be a verb in the first place, is it–let alone one that means anything you want it to mean? Is this just edjargon or does it pop up in meetings everywhere?
Three cheers for urban public schooling.
Another teacher and I are both teaching Romeo and Juliet during the same period. Between us, we have 26 books (all of which are decades old and need serious tape jobs), one set of speakers (of which half the pair doesn’t work), and one audio CD of the play (which I was lucky enough to find at a faraway branch of the city’s public library). So every day, halfway through class, one of our students gets to lug all of the above from one classroom to the other. We thus have no flexibility in our lesson planning, no way of using the materials for a whole-period lesson, and no sense of owning our learning. Most importantly, the students grasp all too well the significance of their being denied even one full hour’s access to an out-of-date and falling-apart version of a book.
