Blog-Sothoth

2012-01-22T13:32:00.003-05:00

I want to take a moment to talk up a great Xmas gift. I just used it for about an hour and a half--and without moving I was able to read a chapter of Thubron's The Silk Road, a few chapters of Notes from the Underground; I was able to check FB several times and play Scrabble, I looked at the news, watched a substantial part of a film called Ip Man, watched part of Persona on Netflix streaming, and downloaded for free or pennies a copy of The Secret History by Procopious and a history called The Fall of the Roman Empire. Then I downloaded in seconds novels by Ian McEwan and William Styron.

Pretty cool!

Of course it's not an iPad; you won't create a lot on the Fire. But you can easily highlight text in your books and look up words and make marginal notes. And yes, Amazon is a competition-killing behemoth. We should watch it carefully.

But, pretty cool!

Book #2

2012-01-15T17:27:00.002-05:00

I'm not ashamed to name-drop: I hung out with Russell Banks a few times back in '93, I believe. I was in the MA in English program at Temple University. The MA had a focus in fiction writing and Banks was a visiting writer one semester. Hanging out with Russell Banks and Toby Olson several times when when I was an aspiring writer was a special opportunity, and though I never actually pursued being a writer after grad school I still think fondly on those days. At that time Banks was working simultaneously on Cloudsplitter and Rule of the Bone. "Rule of the Bone is my leisure time, my fun," he said. "Cloudsplitter is my work."

Rule of the Bone is leisure writing? Have you ever read Rule of the Bone?

But here's Banks with a new novel, Lost Memory of Skin. It reminds me of Rule of the Bone because of the voice of its narrator, but the book ranks with Banks's most complex moral fictions as well. As befits the author of books like The Sweet Hereafter and Affliction, his latest is rather discomforting.

The novel's narrator is called The Kid. Usually if a book's narrator is called The Kid I'm in for a good read. Sam Delany's astonishing dystopian novel Dhalgren had a narrator named Kid. Toby Olson's magical (sur)realist novel The Bitter Half had a controlling consciousness called The Kid (although sometimes the dog's consciousness took over). My high expectations for The Kid-narrated novels were met and perhaps exceeded by Lost Memory of Skin.

I'd have to be in top blogging form to review this book fairly, and I'm not in top blogging form. I did 400 pushups today and drank a half bottle of Lirac watching the Ravens game. Not top blogging form. But here goes!

All the characters in this book are archetypes. The Kid, The Professor, The Wife/The Widow, The Writer. The last archetype's physical description is quite obviously a reference to the real writer's author photo on the book jacket. The Kid is guilty of a grotesque crime, a sexual crime against a minor, and he is wearing a tracking bracelet for the first of 10 years. The Professor muses about weighty matters such as the causes of homelesses and the plight of sexual predators after conviction and their near-inevitable eventual homelessness. The Wife/The Widow I'll not discuss, and The Writer is a kind of deus-ex-machina who drops in to help make manifest the various threads of moral ambiguity at play in the narrative.

So Banks, fearless in the face of deep ethical questions, uses pornography and pedophilia and questions of freedom and responsibility to create a probing exploration of what America's promise has become. We've gone from shining city on the hill to I dunno what, but Banks could tell you. Everyone's trying to get back to Eden but they're distracted by porn and cell phones.

I'm sorry--I owe this book more than this treatment. Too much vino! It's really good, however. I also recommend The Relation of My Imprisonment.

Haint That a Shame Part XIV

2012-01-13T17:42:00.007-05:00

I didn't even want to write about this one. I waited a few days. This one felt different. It happened when both of us were completely awake and in the same place. It happened early in the evening on a school night. The lights were on. The TV was on, some insipid fare like "Man vs. Food," I believe. I don't know for sure, because I was seated on the left end of the couch, absorbed in a novel (Russell Banks's The Lost Memory of Skin). The arm of my halogen floor lamp was swung at eye level over the book on my lap. A couple feet to my left, at a 90 degree angle to the couch and along the other wall, sits a love seat. My wife was standing in front of the love seat and facing it, folding laundry into piles and stacking them on its cushions.

Between the couch and love seat sat a folding wooden TV table. It's not a luxurious item by any means but it's sturdy and pretty well-made--Crate and Barrel perhaps? At any rate it's solid wood. Upon this table sat a pint glass filled nearly to capacity with seltzer water. Just next to the pint glass was a tumbler with limeade in it. I'd glanced at the table several times, my eye just able under the glaring lamp of the halogen arm to look at the cold tumbler and consider taking a sip of the limeade. It's not worth the reach quite yet, I'd thought. I'll finish this chapter first.

I'd just glanced at it, in fact, and returned to my novel when the table moved a bit more than half a foot in my direction. There was a substantial noise, the table moved, and I glanced up at Cha, thinking she'd bumped it with her hip while folding clothes. She was staring at me a bit oddly, but I thought that was because she'd almost knocked over a couple glasses, the contents of which were currently sloshing back and forth. I went back to my book.

"Geoff," she said. "That table just moved."

"You bumped it with your hip," I replied. "You were bending over to stack T-shirts and you bumped it with your hip."

She made an incredulous sound with sudden air in the back of her throat. "Look where I'm standing. There is no way I bumped that table."

I did look over; I pushed the arm of the halogen lamp aside and looked over. Cha was a good two feet away from where the table had until recently been positioned. Even her marvelous and substantial badonka-donk could not have bumped the table. She began probing with her foot along floorboards to see if a loose one might have rocked the table. "It didn't rock, it scraped along the floor," I said.

"I know."

We both saw and heard it. We both witnessed it at the same time and in the same way. We were completely awake--involved in tasks, yes, but totally cognizant of surroundings, half-watching TV, etc. etc.

This is the first incident inside the new house.

Day #74

2012-01-11T17:21:00.003-05:00

It's really a struggle to get back in the swing this year! I'm not physically tired right now; I spent the entire winter break focusing on unclenching the clenched fist my body had become. I hung upside-down a lot, took a dozen super hot baths, and even went to my massage therapist twice. I read and actually absorbed what I read for the first time in months. So physically I feel really good right now, and spiritually too.

But something's amiss. I don't have the creative spark. I'm struggling to come up with lessons which are coherent and engaging and meaningful. I'm at a loss. I have to teach ancient China and the Silk Road and I'm just not able to pull together a sequence of lessons to get it done. Instead, I'm rushing around in the morning before work throwing something together at the last minute. So far, that's actually worked pretty well, but I need the lesson plan faerie to drop by and give me a boost ASAP. Hopefully she'll be wearing boots.

My boss asked me the first day back how I was doing. "Rested, but not refueled," I told her. She sent me a long email that night checking in and asking for a meeting because she felt the same way. My boss is awesome. It's great to have a boss who can also be a confidant and friend when you need it.

The kids have been squirrelly too. Today I had chaos 2nd period, and they disregarded my repeated requests for quiet until I smashed the bottom of my fist into the board at the front of the room. Papers hanging from magnets jumped to the floor and the LCD projector screen flapped up dramatically. Kids jumped out of their chairs. Hale and Hardy said "why y'all got to make that man so mad!"

"I'm not mad," I said very quietly. "I'm play-acting right now. Hopefully you'll never actually see me mad." I had no further trouble from them. Wish I could say the same for the 6th graders last period!

Day #70

2012-01-05T19:33:00.003-05:00

Had fun teaching today for the first time in a while. I gave a small test on Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery," which we read this week. We talked a bit about tradition and ritual and human sacrifice, and it was hard to get the kids to go as deep into the story as I would have liked because they're in middle school and they've not lived enough to really get its theme; actually, that's bullshit. I wouldn't have spent three days on it if I truly thought that. Some kids made potent connections to The Hunger Games, some thought of our work with the Holocaust last fall. Some asked serious questions about what motivates people, because the idea of a village doing something like The Lottery isn't really that shocking--and that's what makes the story shocking.

Before I gave the test I showed a fun 1969 film done by the Britannica folks. I'd been thinking the kids didn't give a shit about the story, that they hadn't "got" it, and yet they knew each character as they showed up, and often yelled out the dialogue in advance. Old Man Warner was a hit on screen, just as he was in print: "Crazy damn fools!"

After the vid I put a desk in the center of the front of the room and I put a big black box on the desk. I called each kid up by their last name and gave out the test from inside the box. The kids were somber at first and then started shouting dialogue or calling each other "Tessie" or "Mr. Summers" or "Davy."

After the test I called them up again and made them draw a slip of paper from the box. Jon got the black dot first period, and he tried to hide under a table as we all pelted him with paper ball rocks. It was a birthday present for him. 2nd period Gasbag got it. He sprawled face down on the center table in my room as the kids beaned him with paper wads. At one point my principal came in to check out the reason for the cacophony, but when she realized it was sanctioned somehow she let it go.

Book #1

2012-01-02T21:18:00.002-05:00

If memory serves, I read a short story collection by Denis Johnson back in the mid-90s--I think there were stories set in an ER? One perhaps about a guy with a screwdriver in his head?

Now he's won a National Book Award for a novel I put in my Amazon cart years ago and forgot about, and he's written Train Dreams, which perfectly inhabits the desolate prairie between Flannery O'Connor and Cormac McCarthy. A fantastic little read to start off the New Year.

Now: back to work, and I'm not ready at all.

Book #46

2012-01-01T10:08:00.003-05:00

I close out 2011 with Joan Didion, her subject the lamentably short life of Quintana Roo. Like its predecessor The Year of Magical Thinking, Blue Nights is a deeply sad book, but it is never dreary. Didion at one point writes about her inability to get into the old rhythms of writing, and yet her paragraphs still drift by, the occasional sentence repeating again for rhetorical affect,her pain palpable. Her prose reminds me of Duras with its asequential chronology and impressionist effect. There are quite lovely passages about Quintana which had me turning the book over often to look at her photo, thinking about what I'd read.

I must choose books to read carefully next year, given how Nigh is the End. What books does one read in 2012 when we find out how it all ends? I'll begin the year finishing the books I've substantially started but not completed--that's the hope.

Book #45

2011-12-29T01:08:00.001-05:00

I tried to write this blurb last night on my new Kindle Fire, but while I could figure out how to cut the HTML code for the graphic above, the ability to paste it into Blogger is as of yet beyond me. So, back to the laptop!

I believe The Dispossessed is the first novel I've read by Ursula K. LeGuin. I've been reading her fine short fiction in the Best American Short Stories for years, and I recall reading with wonder the novella The Word for World is Forest about 30 years ago in Again, Dangerous Visions. But an early abandonment of sci-fi left her books in the lurch until recently, when Zadie Smith wrote an ecstatic appreciation of Le Guin during her too-brief tenure as book reviewer at Harper's and I ordered a few from Amazon.

The Dispossessed is a philosophical meditation on TIME and POLITICS and individual FREEDOM and the cycles of all three and how they intertwine. Shevek lives on a moon which was colonized by anarchist rebels from the planet it circles. Almost 200 years after the settlement he is a physicist isolated by his genius on this small world, and he opens channels of communication with the home planet in the hopes that he can contact its brightest minds and bring the ideals of his world to theirs. Of course the home world is a capitalist "propertarian" place, with the 1% controlling most things and the 99% living in various degrees of comfort and misery on what trickles down, while Shevek's moon is a "paradise" of mutual aid upon which everyone is obligated to work by fear of shame and nothing of beauty is really produced and your true labor is often disregarded as you sludge along in some necessary function for the benefit of all.

When Shevek gets to the home world he is incapable of completing his unifying theory of time and space. He is sickened and distracted by the lavish and sheltered life prepared for him by his hosts, and slowly realizes he is being used by them to produce a theory which will give them a technological, military, and profit advantage over others. Back home he was manipulated by bureaucrats and his ideas watered down to fit political orthodoxy; here he might unleash his theory with catastrophic consequences for the Universe.

What will Shevek do? You'll have to read to find out. Le Guin's worlds are rich and her presentation of these convoluted ideas are not at all dry. It's kind of endearing to imagine that thousands of years into the future and light-years away our descendants will still have debates across the same political spectrum.

Baltimore's Best Back Yard

2011-12-26T14:48:00.003-05:00

Took advantage today of global warming's gift to Baltimore--60 degrees and sunny leading up to and following Xmas. I walked up to Druid Hill Park, as I often do, and though the Park is more regularly occupied now than it was when we moved to Reservoir Hill almost 5 years ago, I still often have acres to myself.

I passed by familiar statues: pockmarked marble George Washington, defiant granite and bronze William Wallace, deteriorating Colombus, and found a tiny unpaved footpath into a corner of the Park I rarely visit on foot or bike. The path meandered through a small wooded area littered with Magnum and Lifestyles wrappers--obviously a pleasant spot to bust a nut or two. I emerged somewhere southeast of the zoo, back by the fenced pond. There, on a sloping hill, was an impressive bronze bust of Wagner I'd not noticed before. An inscription announced that a Baltimore choir won first place at a singing competition in Brooklyn, and this statue was awarded to the city on their behalf.

The Park is full of such surprises: disused old fountains half-buried in the woods, abandoned and decrepit cemeteries, formerly segregated swimming pools now filled with dirt, paths and antediluvian light posts hidden away. I love it. It's the best back yard in Baltimore, and I don't have to mow or rake a goddamn thing.

Unfortunately I had no camera today; it's quite lovely despite the absence of leaves. The reservoir was an astonishing blue, like something mixed by Vermeer.

Catching Up

2011-12-23T08:35:00.002-05:00

My first day off for holiday break and I woke early to catch up on some reading. The current issue of Cabinet has an interview with Sianne Ngai in which she says "Cuteness is a way of aestheticizing powerlessness."

I wonder what she makes of Angry Birds?

Day #66

2011-12-15T18:29:00.002-05:00

It's been two weeks since I blogged about school. I've blogged, in fact, exactly twice this entire month so far. That's because I've been at school 11 or 12 hours a day, and working my tail off on weekends, since Thanksgiving break. I'ma shoot myself soon if this keeps up!

Not really. I'm writing report cards, and at the lovey-dovey charter school it's done different. There's no grade book with an average score that I type into the BCPSS system at the end of the semester; I have to look at growth for each skill and decide on current levels of understanding, and have proof with which I can justify my grades, and I have to keep in mind learning styles and IEPs and all that other jazz. It's philosophically the way I want to do grades if I have to, but it takes a beastly long time. Humanities teachers have it particularly rough because we report on two subject areas: Social Studies and Language Arts, and we have to come up with a trimester grade for five or six different learning targets for each, and narrative comments, and a section on reading and language assessment data, and behavior comments: it takes between 30 and 45 minutes to write most of these report cards. Multiply that times 65 kids, and add in the usual planning and assessment and teaching time, and you're talking brutal long ass days.

But because I worked my tail off I have only 7 cards left to write tomorrow, and then I won't have anything to do this weekend. Next week the kids present their learning at student-led conferences, so they only have classes on Monday, and SLC prep means no planning. Tuesday I have my homeroom kifd all day to get them ready to present and then I just chill and watch the shows Wed and Thursday, with a couple planning meetings for next trimester here and there.

Writing report cards has been exhausting but also rewarding. Many of my 7th graders made vast improvements from last year to this; the hard work we did last year to teach them class routines, to work on their characters, to build intrinsic motivation, is starting to bear fruit. I wrote some rock star report cards for kids who were C students last year. I'm loving that.

Books #43 and #44

2011-12-12T19:21:00.004-05:00

I managed in between agonizingly long bouts of at-home work and staff parties to find a few moments to polish off Mockingjay, book 3 of the Hunger Games trilogy. I finished book 2, Catching Fire, some time ago but never got around to announcing it on the web.

I like Katniss Everdeen. She's sometimes a bit thick-skulled, a bit aloof and distant, and doesn't really respond well to love. She's also dutiful and determined and independent, which offsets her flaws and makes her real. I think the fantasy hero she most resembles from my own teen reading is Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, and I can see why tweens find her appealing.

Katniss morphs over time from a desparado to a militant radical to (briefly) a sort of Ghandi, then she becomes Machiavelli and finally General Curtis Lemay. I got a bit distracted during the finish of the 3rd novel, which felt abrupt and a bit of a let-down after all the build-up, but I can see what the fuss is all about. Collins has written a book for kids which demonstrates the future of America if Grover Norquist gets his way. The next time I teach Hitler to middle grades kids I'd like them to do a novel study for connections. These might suffice!

Haint that a shame Part XIII

2011-12-06T17:09:00.002-05:00

Things go missing in the classroom. It happens. People borrow your stuff and forget to return it. People come in your room after school when the cleaning crew has all the doors open and they rummage and occasionally take stuff. We've had a couple break-ins this year, and a couple times kids have been jacked up for crimes of opportunity. We've even had some dudes pretending to be parents roaming the school and taking cell phones out of teachers' desks.

So when I come in at 6:30 am and stuff isn't where it's supposed to be, I don't freak out. I look around, I wait a couple days, I ask questions. Usually someone borrowed the stapler I left on my desk, or my tape dispenser--it might take a while for me to get it back.

But there have been damned peculiar things going on of late. Like my floor wasn't swept because the cleaning staff said my chairs were down, when I know for a fact I had the kids put them all up during detention the previous day, and the chairs were all up when I arrived in the morning. Or my cabinets will be open but not rummaged, with perhaps a rubber ball or two out on the floor. I've spoken to the custodial staff a couple times about things like this. I've asked if kids have been in my room late at night. Sometimes the maps are pulled down and the screen put back up, or vice-versa; little things which aren't harmful, but stupid and time-consuming.

The trip to the Holocaust Museum a month back was exhausting. I got back to school at 6:30pm. I went up to my room, which I'd left at 8:30am. Everything was as I'd left it. The cleaning crew was actually in there when I dropped off some stuff. I said hey to Greg and D as they vacuumed and swept. They said hey back.

There were no students in the school. The only present adults were custodians and Mrs. P and I.

When I arrived at 6:30 the next morning, my chairs were down, my rubber balls were out of the closet and all around the room, a couple bulletin board displays had been torn down, several hallway displays had been removed and strewn along the floor, and my stapler and tape dispenser were missing again. My file cabinets were open and the classwork files were in reverse alpha order.

I went to see Sheryl, the chief custodian. I told her about being in the room the night before and then early the next morning. I said Greg or D wouldn't mess things up. I explained there were no kids in the building, and asked if one of the staff had their own children around. She said no. She scrunched up her face and kind of thought about what she was about to say. Then she just said it.

"I think there's something weird in your room," she said. "The staff don't like it in there at night. They hear things."

Great.

Day #54

2011-11-30T16:43:00.002-05:00

I've had the luxury this week to watch two awesome MICA interns run the show in my classroom. I need do nothing--they have a signal if they're in over their heads, but they haven't used it yet. So I've been able to observe the room and see things I typically miss from up front.

Yesterday I snatched 6 notes being passed second period. Each time I told the kids "If you are PERFECT for the remainder of class, I won't read this, and I'll return it to you. If you screw up once, I'll read it and recycle it. If you screw up twice, I'll read it and give it to the Big Cheese."

One of the notes I ended up reading because the kids passing it goofed off again. It was a chart listing boob sizes in the class: None, Small, Average, Large. Two of the categories had been filled in with names by two different boys. I took the boys out in the hall and walked them down to the copier machine. I photocopied their boob chart and said "these copies go in your folders. I dare you to screw up in my class again this year. If you do I'ma show them to your parents and the Big Cheese." I took the original and shredded it. Then we had a talk about disrespect and emotional safety.

Today I played counselor second period. We're working on collages of a situation from our lives in which we played the role of oppressor, victim, bystander, or rescuer. All of this is to help synthesize what we learned studying Hitler and the Holocaust. Many of the kids have awful things to share: a father shot and killed this summer, a sister who leapt to her death from a high-rise in September, a drive-by at the front stoop, etc. I spent an hour taking kids out one by one as they broke down in class. When the MICA kids planned their lessons I never thought to say "we might get some really raw stuff--be prepared for that!"

Last period today was a zoo. The sixth graders just can't handle the freedom of "here's several piles of collage materials and a hot glue gun--help yourself!" I thought about reining things in a few times, but let it ride, intervening only on a small scale. The interns never flashed the emergency sign, so I hung fire. I did, however, step in at the end. There were kids running rampant with clothespins, pinching each other. I jacked them up. I thought the interns should get a taste of what can happen when things go off the rails. They did! Tomorrow we'll debrief what went right and what went wrong.

Book #42

2011-11-27T07:44:00.002-05:00

A remarkable memoir by an amazingly tenacious survivor. Any one of the close shaves, beatings, or miraculous escapes in this book would have done in a lesser spirit; Bretholz managed to sustain his will to live over seven of the darkest and most difficult years in Europe's history. I was on the edge of my seat for much of the text, and I won't say another word because you should read Leap into Darkness tomorrow and I fear to spoil it for you.

netflixed

2011-11-22T17:53:00.005-05:00

My job takes so much of my time and energy that I rarely get to interact with film in a serious way anymore. That's a huge regret, because one of the things that made this blog somewhat successful back when it used to be somewhat successful was the time I spent watching serious flicks and commenting on them.* Now I'm likely to fritter away any free flick time on TV shows via Netflix or fluffy entertainments like horror flicks. I simply don't have the requisite intellectual space to devote to one of my main passions anymore. Even over the summers I prefer to veg in front of light fare, and I can't recall the last film I saw in a theater. I'd had this disc at home for about six weeks before I got to it at all.

I watched The New World in half-hour increments over several days. That's not ideal. Malick's stuff deserves one's full attention, and I like to soak in his films like a hot bath in order to appreciate them. But I did the best I could with the resources allotted me.

I found my experience of Pocahontas totally overwhelming, almost painfully intimate. Malick's dreamy approach perfectly conveys her curiosity, her deep sorrow, her joy, her playfulness. Who else could direct this material? The Scorcese who made Age of Innocence, or Kundun? Perhaps he'd do something interesting--but his approach is too direct, too severe. Peter Weir? Jane Campion 15 years ago? I don't know. But Malick nails it. I want to spend another few half-hours in this new world. And Ms. Kilcher? Wow. Why hasn't she done anything at this level since?

A strange melange of The Fall of the House of Usher, The Premature Burial, and The Pit and the Pendulum. I skimmed some scenes, I admit it. I never really liked Vincent Price much. I don't find him particularly creepy.

*blogging, alas, is another passion I've had to give up--or at least I devote much less time to it than before

Book #41

2011-11-20T09:49:00.002-05:00

At a bleak, stress-filled moment in my life I re-discovered this small book of edifying translations by the brilliant Kenneth Rexroth. The narrators of these ancient poems often feel melancholic, stressed, bummed out, miserable, useless--just like I do. And yet they take the time to notice the moon sailing over pristine lakes, or the crane tending its young, or a plum blossom drooping lazily by the gate, and everything seems OK.

Worth keeping around and re-visiting again and again.

Day #45

2011-11-15T16:55:00.005-05:00

My two teaching interns from MICA have arrived. They're pretty confident and they jumped right in, working with kids on their kristallnacht assignments. Starting Tuesday next week I turn the class over to them for about a week or so; they'll be teaching a final art project which will display the students' learning about the Holocaust and Hitler's rise to power.

At the end of the day, which went pretty smoothly, Nichay and Talapia started arguing about who had tape on her glasses first. Nichay has worn a piece of white tape above the bridge of her nose for weeks. Talapia doesn't even wear her glasses most days, and when she does, there's no tape. But they argued about it nonetheless. And I'm not talking regular fussing, I'm talking full-on spitting and red-faced, ready to throw down fussing.

And these are two of the best students in the class. Nichay reads a couple years below grade level, but she is bright and has strong recall and comprehension skills and she works diligently on each assignment; Talapia reads on a 10th grade level and freaks out if she gets anything wrong, launching into crying jags and gnashing her teeth at anything less than a 100%. To see them arguing over something so peculiar--Nichay's glasses aren't even real, they're frames with no lenses--was hilarious. The MICA students were appalled at the sudden outburst, however.

They'll learn.

Books #39 and #40

2011-11-11T06:48:00.003-05:00

I found Evans' book particularly useful as I worked to create our fall Humanities expedition about Hitler's rise to power. Though dealing with an enormously complex time period, Evans' narrative is efficient and engaging. His description of the Nazi's uncanny ability to take advantage of circumstances and twist them to their own ends is startling even to someone who knows this history pretty well. His analysis of the professed "legality" of Hitler's rise is powerful and concise. I'll definitely read volumes I and II, though I'll likely take a break first.

I don't often read books of poetry. I devoured this one in about an hour. Charles Reznikoff took testimony from Nazi war crimes trials and trimmed a bit in order to present the Holocaust in the words of perpetrators and victims. It's an elegant, shocking, and unbearably brutal work. I might use it in class to help kids examine the roles of oppressor, victim, bystander, and rescuer during the Holocaust. The stories and events presented are of course unimaginable, and Reznikoff must have had amazing mental and spiritual endurance to complete this awful work. I suspect he knew it was necessary.

Day #41

2011-11-09T17:49:00.002-05:00

All day I'm thinking "Damn, did I forget how to manage a class? WTF?" The kids were squirrely, confrontational, distracted, unfocused, incapable of sitting still. It was awful.

After a nearly 12-hour day at SBCS I walked out and saw the cause of all my woes.

foe liege

2011-11-06T10:50:00.001-05:00

foe liege, originally uploaded by Blog-Sothoth.

3 blocks from my house

2011-11-06T10:49:00.001-05:00

3 blocks from my house, originally uploaded by Blog-Sothoth.

view southeast

2011-11-06T10:48:00.001-05:00

view southeast, originally uploaded by Blog-Sothoth.

Day #37

2011-11-02T17:19:00.003-04:00

I'm rushing here, rushing there, trying to maintain. Stacks of uncorrected papers accumulate on the windowsill, my desk, my tech station, my dining room table, the table in my bedroom which is now my home "office," and in my brief case. I'm writing progress reports for all my kids, IEP progress reports for my SPED kids, IEP reports for SPED kids whose IEP meetings are forthcoming, planning a DC field trip, writing differentiated social studies and literacy tests, editing first drafts of homework essays, running learning stations about kristallnacht in my classroom, breaking up fights, listening to the new math dude across the hall threaten to quit, trying to chair 8th grade crew leaders meetings and failing miserably, attending School Leadership Team meetings and working on the Community and Culture Committee and on the Habits of Work and Learning CCC sub-committee, planning a service project for my crew boys, attending Humanities team planning meetings, teaching a new daily 30-minute reading intensive class, running detention, holding coach class after school, drinking, eating food, doing the nasty, trying to find a few minutes to do push-ups, collapsing into bed and then having anxiety dreams about all the work I can't get done.

Tuesday is Election Day. I'm hoping that in a good 12-hour period I can get caught up to where I should have been last Monday. If I can get caught up to last Monday by next Tuesday i'll put myself in a good position to catch up to the Monday before Thanksgiving by the end of Thanksgiving weekend, and then by Xmas eve I might be able to have all the work done that should be done by then by January 1st. Or something.

"October is the worst month!" my boss yells at me as we pass in the hall. "Remember that." We have papers under our armpits and in each hand, and we know if we don't get them where they belong quickly that we'll end up putting them in the wrong place and losing them. Sure enough, a parent catches me and asks me for my email and I use a list I need for standardized testing to scrawl my address down and she runs off with it. Then in my panic to call the same parent and tell her I need that paper back I end up dropped four piles in the hallway. It's the scene in Brazil where paper devours Robert DeNiro.

"Fake it 'til you make it!" my boss yells after witnessing this. I get back to my room, sort out my piles of paper, and see that while I was out someone came in, rummaged my desk, stole my tape dispenser and box of Sharpies and several glue sticks. Then it's time to teach sixth grade.

Day #32

2011-10-26T18:43:00.005-04:00

My fourth full-time year as a public school teacher in Baltimore City. If you count my internship year at the Book it's my fifth. Most teachers quit before they get to five years. I think about that fact quite often. Of course this ain't like the old days when you could just quit a job and find another one...

Not that I'd quit--but I'd consider it. I always have this nagging feeling that I'm not cut out for this job. It's too damn taxing in too many ways. It's frustrating, aggravating, and overly challenging. I have insufficient leisure time during the school year, and can't keep up with my personal reading goals (or blogging), and I almost never watch TV or movies. Socializing? Ha. Team planning meetings, brief conversations in the hall between classes, and chats in the photocopier line are about the only interactions with other adults. Well, there are also parent conferences.

But you do get summers off. And the job has a lot of karmic debt reduction benefits.

I feel like I'm just getting my feet under me professionally, like I'm "OK" at what I do but getting better every week. My class was audited by some dude from the MD State Dept. of Ed and he apparently raved about my teaching. Word got back to me via my boss. That felt good. Some of my students showed pretty dramatic reading level gains this year over last, and that really felt good. And I have no fewer than 3 interns this trimester--one a Morgan State student getting certified to teach History (I'm mentoring a history teacher--how odd!), and the others MICA students who are keen to help me create arts-integrated content lessons. A few weeks ago I was thinking "how can you give me mentees!? I don't know what the fuck I'm doing!" Now I'm really excited to share ideas and show others the ropes.

When the State Dept. of Ed dude was in my room I was teaching propaganda to the kids by having them analyze Nazi posters and film clips without ever having seen a definition of the word. I made them puzzle out characteristics and similarities and determine the purpose of each piece of media, then had them write a definition of propaganda from the examples they'd studied. They came up with "a form of communication which persuades people to follow a cause or idea." Not bad! I only had to print the examples and queue The Triumph of the Will. Now I'll get them to see the deceptive, biased nature of propaganda more clearly and they'll be experts in how it works.