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.

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.

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.

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.”

“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.

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.

Quick! Name a field of study in which the terminal degree promises its pursuers an existence both ethically and intellectually stimulating.

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.”

“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

Which income range most clearly represents the total annual income of your household?