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?
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Bigger OOPS?
This year at work, I’m trying really hard to report what needs to be reported, since I think not doing so was my biggest failing last year. So the first student who harassed and molested me this year got written up (my decision) and suspended for three days (not my decision). He doesn’t come near me anymore, unsurprisingly, and since then I’ve had much less trouble with sexual harassment than I did last year. So that was a good job.
This week, though, a kid ended up telling me that his father hits him and tells him he’s dumb all the time. I told him I would need to report the abuse, and he wasn’t thrilled but I thought he understood, but I guess he didn’t because the next day (after Child Services had called his house or something) he was very angry and wouldn’t speak to me anymore.
He had told me before that he doesn’t like talking to adults in general, and it was something of a breakthrough that he had talked to me about his home life, but now he’ll probably never want to tell anyone anything ever again. This same kid earlier in the week kept telling me he couldn’t complete my essay assignment, that I should just fail him, that he was going to drop out anyway, and so on. I had finally convinced him to come after school for help, that he could do it and fulfill his dream of becoming a nurse in California–and now that won’t happen (at least not the essay part).
After last year’s problems, I had resolved to explain the rules of mandatory reporting to all my students on the very first day of school this year. Then I got lazy, or I was distracted, or I didn’t think such things would happen again, or something–in any case, I said nothing. And look what happened.
NEXT year…
OOPS
“Perhaps, like them, I was a throwback, a small distant meteorite that died several hundred years ago and now lived only by virtue of the light that speeds through space at too great a pace to realize that its source has become a piece of lead…” – Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
Parable
“When the task is becoming oneself, to what shall we compare the individual who does not even recognize that he has, or is, a self?” It is related of a peasant who came barefooted to the Capital, and had made so much money that he could buy himself a pair of shoes and stockings and still had enough left over to get drunk on–it is related that as he was trying in his drunken state to find his way home he lay down in the middle of the highway and fell asleep. Then along came a wagon, and the driver shouted to him to move or he would run over his legs. Then the drunken peasant awoke, looked at his legs, and since by reason of the shoes and stockings he didn’t recognize them, he said to the driver, “Drive on, they are not my legs.” – Søren Kierkegaard
Does anyone rival Kierkegaard in the sheer number of literary genres he has mastered? No wonder he wrote under so many different pseudonyms.
Ambush
“Reason unites mankind while the irrational destroys unity.”
Camus throws that sentence in at the end of a footnote on Hegel in The Rebel. It’s one hell of a claim to make in a footnote, especially when it’s not even the main point of the note, don’t you think?
Um
Pretty much every time I take a walk by myself after dark, I seem to lose my anchor in time. When I pass a Starbucks, it will be the Starbucks of Frappuccino breaks with my mom in my high school years or the Starbucks of late-night scones and lattes in college–or it will be the Starbucks of my old age and I will wonder at how little it has changed since I was young. The fact that I am in Cambridge will seem astonishing; why am I already or still living here? Am I just passing through on my way to my home elsewhere? I prepare to be greeted familiarly by people I do not recognize, to be told that I live in a building I thought I had never entered before. When I get home I am surprised that the person who greets me is my boyfriend, that he recognizes me, that the books on the shelves are mine, that I am 24 years old and it is 2009.
Then everything slides back into place, of course. But while it lasts, it’s weird.
Once in a while, Proust doesn’t make me barf.
“I learned to distinguish between these states which reign alternately within me, during certain periods, going so far as to divide each day between them, the one returning to dispossess the other with the regularity of a fever: contiguous, and yet so foreign to one another, so devoid of means of communication, that I can no longer understand, or even picture to myself, in one state what I have desired or dreaded or accomplished in the other.” -Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way
I think the project of becoming less like Miriam will keep me occupied for most of my life.
“‘What do you tremble your soul before it for?’ he cried. ‘You don’t learn algebra with your blessed soul. Can’t you look at it with your clear simple wits?’”
“She was prepared for the big things and the deep things, like tragedy. It was the sufficiency of the small day-life she could not trust.”
- D.H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers
