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?
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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
Want to know what women fantasize about? Being safe.
There’s this new policy at my school: at every Wednesday meeting we each get a summary of all the incident reports that have been filed since the last meeting. This helps us get a sense of how our students are doing in other classes and share strategies for those who give more than one of us trouble. This is good! But it means that this Wednesday everyone gets to read about a recent occurrence of sexual harassment that I reported. I keep having this fantasy: first I’m really embarrassed, as I expect to be, and then it somehow comes out that this stuff happened almost every day last year too, and then someone asks me why I never reported it before, and then I tell them how the first time another staff member overheard inappropriate comments about me she scolded me instead of the kids, and how when two of my students were sexually assaulted (one rape, one attempted rape) by another student another staff member said that they were just looking for attention and too young to be messing in the (18-year-old) assaulter’s business, and how that made me conclude that this was not a safe space for women to report such things, and how I’m only now getting up the courage to try to change that. Then of course everyone heaps imprecations on those staff members’ heads and proclaims me a heroine and the whole environment of the school changes and it’s safe forever and ever amen.
Equality FAIL, Part Two
Last Thursday was the first day of school. We teachers had been told beforehand (a) to devote our first advisory period to dealing with emergency forms and such, and (b) to enter our attendance electronically this year and use the physical folders only as backup in cases of computer or network failure.
When Thursday came, (a) none of the forms were ready for my advisees, and (b) halfway through the day an administrator came to my room looking for the hard copy of my attendance, wondering why I hadn’t turned it in to the office yet.
On Friday, I signed up (a) to use the school’s one working digital projector first period on Monday [even that projector's color is broken, and I've ordered a new one with my own money, but it hasn't shipped yet], and (b) to use the computer lab during my advisory on Monday.
Today (Monday), I came in to find that (a) the projector wasn’t ready and the person responsible for it wouldn’t be in until the end of first period, and (b) the computer lab still lacks internet access and saving and printing capabilities.
[My boyfriend's emailed response: "BABY THAT'S NOT THE COMPUTER LAB IT'S PROBABLY A PET STORE OR SOMETHING. DOES IT SMELL LIKE POOP?"]
Also today, I got to school at 7 in order to make a bunch of copies and found (a) the second floor copier and printers out of paper, (b) the fourth floor copier and printers out of paper, (c) the first floor copier out of paper, (d) the office printers out of paper, and (e) the custodian with access to the locked storage room nowhere to be found.
It’s “school,” urban style!
