I thought therapy was about analysis, but apparently I’m supposed to leave that to the professional. Every time I say something, my therapist says I’m over-intellectualizing and bypassing the question of how I feel. I really don’t mean to do this; she says it seems to be my primary defense mechanism in life, probably because my intellect has never failed me but my emotions sure have. That helps explain why I’ve been so resistant to therapy for so long and why I’m more drawn to the idea of being a therapist than seeing one. Ah well–an anti-intellectual challenge!

To culminate our Humanities unit on early Asian American and Chinese American history, a colleague and I would like to take our ninth graders to the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) in New York City at the end of April or early May. Given that our school is located in Boston’s Chinatown and that our student population is 50-60% Asian/Asian American, this visit will encourage ALL of our students to learn important lessons about identity and also about an integral–but often overlooked–part of American history. It will also be an exciting travel opportunity for our students, many of whom have never been outside Boston.

The problem, of course, is funding. If we go on a Thursday, the museum will be free, so all we’ll need is the cost of one big bus for the day (there are only 50 or so students in our ninth grade). Unfortunately, Donors Choose and Adopt-a-Classroom do not allow teachers to raise funds for field trips, and neither students nor parents in our school’s high-poverty population can be expected to pay the $30 per child we would need.

To the point: if you know of any sources of funding (other than the Target field trip grants, whose deadline for this year has passed) that might be of use to us, could you let me know?

THANK YOU.

leader: “So to start off, I wanted to do a quick check-in. We’ll go around the room; can everyone just say one verb that illustrates your mindset as an educator these days?”

first teacher: “Busy.”

I’m tired of being told that it’s because I’m “too young and skinny and pretty” that I have been harassed and assaulted so much by students. The “too” is normative, and saying “you caused it but it’s not your fault” is less comforting than people think. At least if I were to blame I’d have some agency in the matter.

I’m getting ready to teach a unit on the U.S. Constitution to my ninth graders. Meanwhile, this appears in our (public) school’s bulletin:

“Family Holiday Celebration. This event, sponsored by the Advisory Student Committee, is scheduled for Wednesday, Dec. 16, 5 – 7 pm, in the auditorium. We hope you will be there to join in the Christmas holiday and New Year celebration. For your information, Hanukkah (or Chanukah) will fall on the evening of Dec. 16 and the Islamic New Year on Dec. 18.”

I wrote to the guy who does the bulletin:

“I have to say that I’m pretty uncomfortable with the implications of this passage from today’s bulletin. Claiming that we as a public school celebrate Christmas but merely inform ourselves about other religions’ holidays seems neither accurate nor ethical. Not all of us are Christian or even religious, and the separation of church and state in this country should allow us to feel comfortable about our beliefs in state-affiliated institutions like this one.”

He wrote back a one-liner: “Your points are well taken.” Then the next day, he sent out a parent newsletter inviting families to come “break bread” at the aforementioned holiday celebration. Whee.

My class was discussing this question today. At some point I said, “So if I wanted to write ethnic literature, what would I have to write about?” A student immediately said “white bread and mayonnaise!” Then, horrified at what she’d said, she started apologizing, but I was laughing too hard to hear her. IMMD.

Really, Kristeva? I have trouble convincing myself it can be anything but sad.

*Edit–Her next question: “Can disenchantment be beautiful?” A better question.

This year I’m doing a better job of reporting to authorities the more serious forms of sexual harassment I get from male students. (Last year I just tried to deal with it all myself, which backfired spectacularly.) But that means there is now more than one kid who has been (a) been suspended for an incident related to me and (b) been ordered by the administration never to talk to me, come near me, or look at me again if he wants to avoid expulsion.

Ours is a very small school, and this is awkward. I used to walk the halls wary of words and hands; now I’m all shifty-eyed because I’m afraid of bumping into silence or fear or anger.

“Listen again for a few moments to depressive speech, repetitive, monotonous, or empty of meaning, inaudible even for the speaker before he or she sinks into mutism. You will note that, with melancholy persons, meaning appears to be arbitrary, or else it is elaborated with the help of much knowledge and will to mastery, but seems secondary, frozen, somewhat removed from the head and body of the person who is speaking. Or else it is from the very beginning evasive, uncertain, deficient, quasi mutistic: ‘one’ speaks to you already convinced that the words are wrong and therefore ‘one’ speaks carelessly, ‘one’ speaks without believing in it.

“Meaning, however, is arbitrary; linguistics asserts it for all verbal signs and for all discourse . . . Now every ‘normal’ speaker learns to take that artifice seriously, to cathex it or forget it.

“Signs are arbitrary because language starts with a negation (Verneinung) of loss . . . ‘I have lost an essential object . . . but no, I have found [it] again in signs, or rather since I consent to lose [it] I have not lost [it] (that is the negation), I can recover [it] in language.

“Depressed persons, on the contrary, disavow the negation: they cancel it out, suspend it, and nostalgically fall back on the real object (the Thing) of their loss, which is just what they do not manage to lose, to which they remain painfully riveted. The denial (Verleugnung) of negation would thus be the exercise of an impossible mourning, the setting up of a fundamental sadness and an artificial, unbelievable language, cut out of the painful background that is not accessible to any signifier and that intonation alone, intermittently, succeeds in inflecting.”

“Persons in despair become hyperlucid by nullifying negation. A signifying sequence, necessarily an arbitrary one, will appear to them as heavily, violently arbitrary; they will think it absurd, it will have no meaning . . . The arbitrary sequence perceived by depressive persons as absurd is coextensive with a loss of reference. The depressed speak of nothing, they have nothing to speak of: glued to the Thing (Res) they are without objects.”

This reminds me of the time I kept staring at a chair wondering why it was ever made, named, used–anything. I was so confused–and even more confused when I tried to explain the episode to my friend afterward.

[All excerpts are from Black Sun.]