Here and There

I was delighted by a friend's list of unrelated items. It did what good blogs do for me. It made me think "Me, too! I can do that!"

1. With the help of a wise new friend, I figured out where the time in my day is going: to people. I feel like I used to be able to accomplish more in a day than I do now (which may be inaccurate). It's not that I have less to do, necessarily, I just do less. I blame three of my life's recent additions for this: driving and traffic, an inconsistent work schedule, and living with people. Two were obvious to me, but the third was surprising. I have lived alone for a long time, so I didn't realize the time consumed by the daily minutiae of maintaining relationships.

2. A Marin native illuminated some of this county's peculiarities for me--things I'd noticed but didn't know how to name. People here are "slightly apathetic", "casually sophisticated" and "quirky" to the point of making an art of it.

3. I have become more obsessive about my paper-crafting. It's sort of a cut-and-paste self-medication driven by a hunger to share my experience and creative inspiration around every corner. In other news, I found a store near my coffee shop interesting in carrying my notebooks.

4. I am so disturbed by men over thirty who use "Booyah" and "It's go time." Even as a punchline.

5. I went to Coffee School in the City for my new job. Unfortunately, the curriculum content ran a distant second to a research paper I wrote in sixth grade, titled "Where in the World is Juan Valdez."

6. A customer in my coffee shop talked today about growing up in North Beach where real Italians make coffee for other real Italians. He overheard a customer order a drink with specifications nearing 50 words, and shook his head. "What happened to the days where a drink was a drink? Everything was a cappuccino and it was perfect. Coffee? Yes or no. Let the barista make the damn drink." His small capp was on the house.

7. I miss teaching, my classroom, and my students every day. I feel like the Autumn started without me. One of my regulars at the coffee shop is a teacher who retired after 35 years. She misses it, too. After describing my move to Marin, she smiled knowingly and said, "My dear, you are plant who has been re-potted. You've just left behind a few roots." Here's to hoping they'll regrow.

Highschool on TV

I've found I really enjoy movies about high schools, not in the John Hughes sense, but movies whose main character relationships are between teachers and students. Okay, maybe not main ones, but secondary ones at least. I'll concede that the movies are usually about student-student relationships.

I might be the only one I know who really loved the new Harry Potter movie. I like the Harry Potter franchise, but true fans complained that it wasn't what it was supposed to be. I don't know whether it was accurate enough to the book, but I do know that when Harry and his classmates moved from middle school to high school, the books and characters were much more endearing. I found their classroom foibles, romantic blunders, and detentions delightful. I thought: I teach those kids. Not wizards, but I teach teenagers and there's something so universal about who they are 15-18. Even if they are wizards, they still get scolded, boy-girl troubles are the end of the world, and there is nothing like the burden of an impossible teacher.There is a collectivism among the Hogwarts faculty about the well-being and potential of its students to which I can deeply relate. I am blessed to teach at a similar school, where (on a good day) the students are cared for and taught by a community of committed, concerned adults.

I also watched the movie FAME! this afternoon with my sister, where rockstar kids with performing arts superpowers are loosely coached by famous former FAME stars like Debbie Allen. The teachers in this movie had a strong presence with a tough-love approach, resulting in adoration from their students. These kids, too: romantic blunders, distant parents, struggling to achieve in impossible classes, arbitrary stratification into "cool" kids and gifted "outsiders". I found myself rooting for the kids who come from behind to shine at the end.

Then we watched the season finale for the show Glee from the DVR. If you haven't seen this show, it's about a teacher in a Midwest, ordinary high school who tried to revive the school's glee club. It has the deadpan, unapologetic, absurd humor of the office without the mockumentary style. The teacher gets in his glee club the most ridiculous, rejected kids on campus who at least know they can sing. To the ordinary viewer of this show, those kids look like mutants. To me, they look like the inhabitants of Room 5 at the end of the day and so I love them. At the end, the students sang a song to their teacher "To Sir with Love," and it made everyone cry. People may doubt that students are that grateful for their teacher, or that the teacher was that moved by his students--but this is my world! This is why I approach graduation with a breaking heart.

Channel 13 News every week, it seems, has some horror story about a teacher abusing his or her students--the kind of story that makes the holy task of relational teaching very difficult. These non-fiction accounts of the modern high school setting get it so wrong according to my experience. Teaching isn't about power and abuse - or worst, sex - that might be the "real world", but it isn't teaching. Real teaching, I've found, is cultivating the mind and spirit of extraordinary people through life-changing relationships.

I instruct my students to disregard Hollywood's approach to most things because of the glamorization and romanticizing inherent to film. But in the case of students and teaching and those relationships, there seems to be much more truth in the fiction than anything I've heard about in the "real world".

Poetry Jam

Today I'm reading for the MVA Poetry Club's Poetry Jam that is part of Fine Arts Week. (I wish I had something of my own to read, but I can't afford to dwell there today.)

I am reading these three poems I found on the Underground in London:

'I saw a man pursuing the horizon'

I saw a man pursuing the horizon
Round and round they sped.
I was disturbed at this;
I accosted the man.
"It is futile," I said,
"You can never--"


"You lie," he cried,
And ran on.

--Stephen Crane (1871-1900)

The London Eye

Through my gold-tinted Gucci glasses,
the sightseers. Big Ben's quarter chime
strikes the convoy of number 12 buses
that bleeds int the city's monochrome.

Through somebody's zoom lens, me shouting
to you, "hello...on...bridge...'minster!"
The aerial view postcard, the man writing
squat words like black cabs in rush hour.

The South Bank buzzes with a rising treble.
You kiss my cheek, formal as a blind date.
We enter Cupid's Capsule, a thought bubble
where I think, "Space age!", you think "She was late."

Big Ben strikes six, my SKIN. Beat blinks, replies
18.02. We're moving anti-clockwise.

Patience Agbabi (b.1965)



from Ode: Intimations of Immortality

THERE was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparell'd in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;—
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

The rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the rose;
The moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare;
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where'er I go,
That there hath pass'd away a glory from the earth.

--William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

AND IF WE HAVE TIME...

One Perfect Rose

A single flow'r he sent me, since we met.
All tenderly his messenger he chose;
Deep-hearted, pure, with scented dew still wet -
One perfect rose.

I knew the language of the floweret;
'My fragile leaves,' it said, 'his heart enclose.'
Love long has taken for his amulet
One perfect rose.

Why is it no one ever sent me yet
One perfect limousine, do you suppose?
Ah no, it's always just my luck to get
One perfect rose.

--Dorothy Parker (1893-1967)

Teaching and Drinking

Top-five Things I Love About Being a Teacher that Have Nothing To Do with Instructing:

1. The process of getting coffee on campus: having to wash my mug in the bathroom, going to get the coffee in a colleague's room, then having to go get milk from the workroom fridge becomes less about obtaining the beverage and more about all of the detours on the way.
   
   
2. Summers off.
   
   
3. The excuse to buy school supplies every year, only being able to get more sophisticated ones like fountain pens, ink bottles and paperclips. Don't think I don't still grab that 24-cent box of crayons and a bottle of Elmer's glue, though.
   
   
4. Dressing up on Wednesdays--I'm a sucker for ceremony, and here we have pomp and circumstance and ceremony weekly.
   
   
5. Birthday celebrations. I always felt bad in school for kids who did not get to celebrate their birthday with the class because it fell over a school holiday. Mine is right at the time of the term when we need a celebration, and I get to celebrate birthday week in 5 classes!

Top-five Historical Figures with whom I'd Really Like to Have a Drink: (in no order, and subject to change)

1. Benjamin Franklin
   
2. James Madison
   
3. Dietrich Bonhoeffer
   
4. William Wilberforce
5. William Gladstone
   

History in Art Nouveau

We just finished the Gilded Age in my AP class, my trip with students to the Morse Museum in Winter Park was particularly meaningful. In class, we talked about the American triumphalism as displayed at the Chicago World's Fair, and the museum has that Louis Comfort Tiffany chapel reconstructed from its first display there. Tiffany is such a great example for this period because, as one historian explains, he "combines decorative genius with scientific experimentation and commercial acumen."

Another reason I call attention to Tiffany is that I really enjoy the rare moments when America gets to participate in the grand tradition of Western art. Even rarer still are times when America's artistic contribution surpasses any European one. And thanks to Sargent, Whistler (my favorite) and Homer, we get that at the turn of the century.

I have been having a discussion regarding classroom content and patriotism with an erudite stranger. I had asked him whether patriotism and personal ideology had any place in the classroom. He replied that teaching patriotism was "better left to Joseph Goebbels and Hugo Chavez." Blind patriotism is no friend of truth and accuracy. But patriotism is only one kind of these ideas with the power to poison. Plenty of 19th century art was wrecked with an over paint of Victorian morality.

In reading about Tiffany, I came across a description of his contemporary, Homer, which really resonated with me. He "was not interested in painting morals, merely recording nature truthfully, though his viewpoint was always personal and could be tendentious." Homer himself said, "When I have selected a thing carefully, I painted it exactly as it appears.*" Here, Homer's naturalistic integrity speaks to more than the painter; it also serves the historian and the history teacher. We need to put aside our bias, employing careful selection and an exacting approach to verisimilitude. And while the product may be marked by a strong, implicit point of view, it is more likely free from the dangerous artificiality begotten by ideological imposition.

I recall my drawing instructor in college requiring us to practice a technique called "contour drawing." We had to draw the outline of our subject without looking at the paper or really picking up our pencil. It was partly to train our hand-eye coordination, but most important, it was to force us to closely examine our subject for what it was and divorce us from our pre-conceived notions of how it is supposed to look. In doing this, it surprised me with how often my suppositions were wrong, which in turn, wrecks the whole artistic attempt. A line can betray a commitment to the supposition instead of the thing itself.

For history to be worth anything, one has to be like Homer and hold versimilitude as the highest ideal. If we don't, any other emergent ideal is rendered defective because of its faulty basis.



*Paul Johnson, Art: A New History

Life Lessons #2

This weekend, a few more life lessons came to light:

9. If ever offered the chance to meet "his friend Bobo," always DECLINE--more than once, if you have to.

10. Tatoos are no substitute for clothing.

11. When it comes to 1000 Places to See Before You Die, it is important to remember that BIKETOBERFEST is NOT on the list.

12. Driving is a lot like Mariokart Racing: Only after a collision, you don't just spin around and get dizzy; you wind up in the hospital and have to pay thousands of dollars.

13. If you consistently fail quizzes and you feel newly inspired to cheat, start small. Teachers find perfect scores suspect when a series of "F"s ends in a sudden "A". They will find you out.

Our Students

And while we are generating top-five lists:
Here are the top-five most annoying student questions (in no order):

1. Do we have to write this down?
2. Do we have a quiz today?
3. Can I go to the bathroom?
4. Is this going to be on the test?
5. Did we have homework last night?

And in the running...
6. Oh, am I late?

classroom aphorisms

I am accidentally in correspondence with an erudite stranger. I sent him queries on the dilemma of content selection for my course, and this was his response:

"The best history, and the best learning, I believe, comes with the negation of the students and the teacher. Only the ideas should exist in the classroom--we leave ourselves outside.

American education has been doomed to mediocrity at best because we think ourselves too important. No. We are nothing. Ideas are everything...

Lazyness and apathy are the real enemy, not interpretive schema. It is against these that the teacher must fight..." --J.R., Kansas City.