My high school had our Open House on Thursday. Having gone to a much smaller school than the one where I currently teach, the idea of an Open House seems unusual to me. Apparently students and parents around here get to choose which high school they want to go to? I’ve always been under the impression that, if you lived in a certain area, then you went to a certain school. That was why rich parents would move to a certain neighborhood “for the schools.”
Yesterday, though, I spent an evening explaining (or “upselling”) aspects of the English department to prospective parents and students. Mostly, I did this by giving everyone really hard grammar and punctuation questions and giving them mini Snickers if they got a question right. Good salesmanship is about having snacks. (Prove me wrong.)
I didn’t try very hard, though. English would not be a selling point for nearly any high school — every student has to take four years of English, no matter what, so there isn’t much “selling” to be done. I can understand some students wanting to go to a certain school for the football program, or because they have a good music director, or their theater department was big, but nobody picks their high school based on the English classes.
Essentially, I was like a car salesman pointing out that the vehicle in question had four tires.“These babies sure do spin!” I said, aiming a kick at a tire, missing, and kicking the door frame instead, leaving a large dent.
So, it’s been a busy week. I have made some good progress with The Portable Dorothy Parker (I’m nearly finished), and am thinking about what I want to read next. I’d like to pick something fun, but I also want to keep working with the element of randomness. Maybe I’ll just pick a number and let the Gods of RNG hold my fate in their fat, fumbling fingers.
I mean, I can’t pick out the books that I know I’ll like first. If I do that, pretty soon the list will turn into one big chore. Like a bowl of Lucky Charms with all the marshmallows picked out; it’s milky disappointment. I feel like randomly picking is the only real way to go forward.
At the same time, who cares? This is my project and I can do it however the hell I want.
Maybe I could randomly select three books and choose the one that I like most? That’s an idea! It’s still random, but it’ll keep me from getting hit with The Bible when I don’t feel like reading something so ponderous.
Let’s try it!
Native Son by Richard Wright
In Xanadu by William Dalrymple
the lives and times of archy & mehitabel by Don Marquis
Oooooh what a range. I’ve heard of two of these, and I’m pretty sure I read Native Son in college. Still, if I’m picking between those three, then I suppose my next book is going to be In Xanadu by William Dalrymple, which I’m pretty sure is about a guy traveling down the Silk Road in the 1980s.
Let’s get ready for some lightly racist soul searching!
I’ve been trying to think of what, exactly, it is about Dorothy Parker’s writing that I like so much. I touched on it briefly yesterday when I wrote about a New Yorker style of writing, but I think there’s more to it. These things can often be indescribable, however, so you’ll have to take this with a grain of salt.
First of all, I think I read from the perspective of a writer. I’m not as interested in character and plot as I am in how the author presents those things. (This is largely why I never mind spoilers — knowing the end makes the journey more satisfying to me.)
One question I always ask myself when I’m reading is this: “If I were writing this same story, is this how I would approach it?” When the answer is “yes,” I feel a quirky sense of camaraderie with the author, as if we’re reaching across great gulfs of time and space to give each other a spectral high-five. “I see what you did there!” I say to them. “You and I are on the same wavelength!”
Dorothy Parker starts stories the way I start stories, she writes dialogue the way I try to, and all of her endings are satisfying. I feel like a baseball enthusiast watching a pitcher completing a perfect game. I know just enough to recognize how cool it is, even if I can’t accomplish the same feat myself.
While I appreciate authors whose sense of style jives with my own (like Parker, pictured above suddenly realizing the photographer was totally nude), it’s not that I can only enjoy authors who write the same way I write, or that I think those are the only good writers out there. Far from it.
To stick with the baseball metaphor, sometimes books can be more like, say, a hockey game. As a baseball enthusiast, I can appreciate the athleticism and the teamwork and the speed of a hockey match. I can even marvel at how violent everything is and how suddenly, as if by magic, teams seem to score. Hockey games can be wonderful to watch and I’m sure I’d have a great time if I went to more of them. But, no matter how good the game is, I’m still a baseball guy.
I enjoy reading Ralph Waldo Emerson, for example, but I would never write the way he does. The same thing goes for Thomas Pynchon and Gene Wolfe — they are fantastic authors that I always return to, but they have vastly different sensibilities than I have.
Dorothy Parker just plays my sport, and she does it awfully well.
(In that same metaphor, reading Salman Rushdie feels like watching a variation of Polo that was only popular in a specific region of Kashmir during the early 1970s, and I’m stuck watching the match while sitting next to a guy intent on elbowing my ribs and explaining why the whole sport is actually about religion.)
I had another observation at school today, which basically means I had an administrator sit in on my class with the sole purpose of giving me an assessment. (Huzzah!) That makes a total of … five times this year that I’ve had some sort of observation. It is unusual to have that many, and I’m not a huge fan, especially considering one of those observations was done by our district superintendent, but it’s not as if there’s a lot that I can do about it.
Some teachers point out that professional development meetings and classroom observations are the means by which administrators justify their jobs. Even though, quite frankly, I don’t know who is arguing that we should have fewer administrators. Schools need more people in nearly every position — you could double the number of admins and it wouldn’t hurt at all, as long as they were doing useful work.
More to the point of today’s evaluation: I don’t like how administrators evaluate teachers like college professors who say, “It’s impossible to get a 100% in this class.” It’s a stupid philosophy that is only ever brought up by people who are experts in their field, but not experts at teaching. (Hear that? It’s the sound of hundreds of engineering department heads mouthing, “Who, me?”)
We’re evaluated in a number of areas on a scale that goes from “Poor” to “Exemplary,” and from my understanding, nobody every gets an “exemplary” on any part of it. What I’ve been told is that “the wording of ‘exemplary’ on the rubric makes it nearly impossible to attain.”
Am I exemplary? I doubt it. But I am “proficient” enough to recognize that you shouldn’t build a rubric with unattainable levels of scoring. Because what is the point of that? It’s like not handing out a gold medal for the long jump because nobody at the Olympics can jump 50 meters.
Is it supposed to make me feel like I have room to improve? I always feel that way. Most teachers do; we don’t need a reminder. We constantly evaluate and improve our plans and strategies. That’s baked in.
Am I supposed to think that administrators are evaluating us based on faulty perceptions of what “good teaching” is because nincompoops at the department of education are forcing them to? Because that is what’s happening, and that doesn’t make anyone look good.
Anywho. I’ll probably have one more observation this year, and I’ve decided that it’s not worth worrying about. (I’ll still worry about it, of course, but I’ll feel silly for doing so. (Put something to that effect on my tombstone.))
The temperatures have gotten so low (around -12º F) that they’ve cancelled in-person school today. It feels like a bit of a … wimpy decision. Where I grew up, they would never cancel school for cold temperatures. Snow? Sure; cancel away! But, as far as my tiny alma mater was concerned, freezing to death in sub-zero temperatures was just fine. Some people would even say it was a right of passage.
Snowdays are a thing of the past, though, even in “big city” districts like mine. These days we’ve got to create asynchronous lessons that students can do from home and then have virtual professional development meetings.
So, my students are watching a video about Arthur Miller while I’m having Teams calls about S.M.A.R.T. goals.
(There’s an unspoken understanding that we have so many virtual meetings because teachers in my district got a raise recently. and any time teachers get a raise the “I WIsh I GoT sUmMErs OfF!” crowd demands that some free time be taken away. It’s stupid, but this is Nebraska, and the true litmus test of a piece of Nebraska legislation is “How much can it hurt public employees, minorities, and/or homeless people?”)
The meetings will only take up the morning, however, so I’m not too bent out of shape. It’s not like it hurts anything to set goals for the upcoming months.
I adore Dorothy Parker. I’m working through The Portable Dorothy Parker (it’s technically Penguin’s Dorothy Parker Collected Stories) and just enjoying the hell out of it.
Parker, who was instrumental in the growth of The New Yorker magazine in the 1920s, has become somewhat emblematic of a New Yorker style that I don’t know the actual name of but exists in my mind as its own category. Parker is in there, along with J.D. Salinger, John Updike, and David Sedaris. The relationship between those people may seem tenuous, but I would categorize their prose as tight-knit. An entire story or essay might hang on a single word or phrase, and it follows that every word and phrase needs to be elegant. In the end, what you get is a meticulously crafted insight into some subtle aspect of the human character.
On a sentence-by-sentence basis, their writing is an absolute treat. (As opposed to my recent foray into Salman Rushdie, whose sentences are bloated for the sake of bloating.) They approach their writing with thrift and a great concern for how things sound.
There’s also an element of psychology to their writing that I’ve always enjoyed. The way a character speaks is a little glimpse into what’s going on inside them, what’s “wrong” with them, how they are damaged. There’s a belief in this New Yorker style that we are all a damned mess and only vaguely pretending to be well adjusted for the sake of appearances. Our voices, however, give us away.
It’s all great fun, and it’s honestly hard to believe that some of Dorothy Parker’s stories are 100 years old.
The sun is as high as its going to get, I’m afraid, and it is a balmy 8º F.
Once upon a time, there was a guy in a covered wagon rolling across the great plains with his family, an ox, and a big bag of corn. He stopped (here! of all places), looked around, and thought, “This’ll do.”
Yesterday was an odd one. Sarah was still in bed recovering from the effects of a bad egg, while I was at work, getting ready for a whole bunch of classroom observations that’ll start next week.
Every teacher in my district has yearly classroom observations during their first 3 years, and then another observation every couple of years after. It basically amounts to an administrator sitting in your classroom and watching how you teach, which is…unsettling. While they are largely a formality, you will always always always be told “how you can improve.”
I don’t think I’m a perfect teacher. I’m competent, and I think I’m doing a not-bad job during my first few years at a new district. But, while there is always room for improvement, I never have a meeting with an administrator that doesn’t result in my having more work to do. I could be the best goddamned teacher this side of the Missouri River, full of charisma, teaching a room full of literal angels, and an observing administrator would still tell me, “Are your students’ wings obstructing their view of the whiteboard?”
My school is a good pubic school and my administrators are good administrators, but it definitely does seem like administrators are a solution in search of a problem.
Anywho. It’s fine that I’m going to be critiqued and I’m sure I’ll get some practical advice on how to improve my teaching, but I think there are better things admin could be doing. Our internet connection has been broken for 3 out of the last 5 days, I have been struggling to get students access to the online version of our textbook, my classes are so full that I don’t have a single desk to spare, and administrators are tackling all these problems by telling teachers they’re using too much paper.
I honestly didn’t read much of Midnight’s Children yesterday, but I did start doing some background research on Indian Independence. After over a century of British occupation, India achieved independence in 1947. As they approached this freedom from colonial rule, there were varying opinions on how the subcontinent should practically govern itself. In the end, different cultures and ethnic groups decided if they wanted to be their own country or join together with others. The biggest “split” was the separation of India and Pakistan, two countries that have gone on to rival North and South Korea for the coveted ‘Best Neighbors” award.
I found some footage on YouTube of Indian Independence Day. While it is silent (save a few mysterious hisses and pops), it is interesting to see a few glimpses into the lives of everyday Indian people, along with massive crowd sizes during the celebration:
The main character of the book, Saleem Sinai, is born at the exact moment of India’s Independence. (Which, I assume, is why the book is called Midnight’s Children.) His trajectory will match the trajectory of India, so I’m going to do a bit more reading up on major events in India from 1947 – 1980 (?). I don’t know if that’ll help me enjoy the book more, but it wouldn’t hurt to know more about the country, considering I’ve never formally studied Indian history.
It is cold and dark outside. Jolene is asleep in front of the little space heater we have in the office. Last night I dreamed of refrigerators.
For weeks now, I’ve been struggling to figure out a way to write about Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” #462 on the list of 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die. It’s gotten to the point that I’ve started reading books on literary theory to get inspiration. Most books on the subject are awfully dry and filled with the sort of academic jargon English departments are notorious for. 10-dollar words like “philology” and “hermeneutics.”
The issue isn’t that the book is hard to understand. Sure, the dialogue is written in dialect, but it’s not difficult for the average reader to comprehend. And the issue isn’t that the subject matter is inherently depressing, even though you do feel somewhat drained as you flip through the pages. A lot of bad things happen, and it can be difficult to read such a novel when we live in a world with so many bad things happening.
That isn’t the problem with my blogging about the book, though.
The problem is something usual, something that I experience with a lot of the books I read that are on this list: This book absolutely isn’t written for me. As a straight, white, American male, I am about as far from the “target audience” for “Their Eyes Were Watching God” as you can possibly get.
Zora Neale Hurston, “Their Eyes Were Watching God”
I feel like I’m bogged down by thinking of this blog as a “book review” blog, which is not what I want it to be.
I don’t want to give books five-star ratings. I don’t want to sell you on a story. I don’t even really want to give plot synopses, to be honest, although it’s hard to think of a way around it. What I want to do is have a chronicle of my journey (if you want to call it that) toward reading these 1,000 books. Something I can look back on in seven years’ time and think, “Oh, that was right around when the election happened and the whole world went to shit. My how time flies.“
The whole thing is steeped in nostalgia. Nostalgia for a time when blogs were popular, when the internet wasn’t an ad-riddled, subscription-based nightmare of trackers and trolls and propaganda. Nostalgia for when we didn’t refer to this sort of thing as “content.” Nostalgia for when the internet was populated by people and you had a sense of community.
It seems as if we’re intent on killing that version of the internet. More’s the pity.
Zora Neale Hurston, “Their Eyes Were Watching God”
Anywho.
Zora Neale Hurston died in poverty after being nearly forgotten by the literary community. She had become popular during the Harlem Renaissance, but many people thought her work focused on the wrong topics — she tried to capture the everyday lives of black Americans rather than writing about social justice and the struggle for equality, which, naturally, were prominent topics in African American literature.
This is a simplification, of course, but sometimes books go against what are considered “modern trends” and fall out of public consciousness. This was the case for Hurston and many other “Harlem Renaissance” artists.
After Hurston died, scholars like Alice Walker “rediscovered” her writing and realized its uniqueness and importance. Suddenly, Hurston’s work was like a diamond that had been found in the garden, and Hurston has since become somewhat of an American staple — she is still taught in many U.S. classrooms, including my own.
Zora Neale Hurston, “Their Eyes Were Watching God”
I often think about what it’d be like to be forgotten in that way. It isn’t quite the same, but recently I’ve been wishing I could experience it. I’m not saying I’d like to disappear, but I’ve been having this desire to…hibernate, if that makes any sense. I’d like to experience what it’s like to crawl into a cave, cover myself with leaves, and sleep for three to six months.
In fact, I have been sleeping a lot more than I usually do. When I get home from school, the first thing I do is crawl under the covers for a quick nap. After dinner, I also go to bed relatively early, often sleeping for 9-10 hours.
Is it seasonal depression? Maybe. Nights are getting longer, and the weather has finally turned into the bitter cold that’ll be tapping at our windows around until March. Ultimately, though, I think I’m just craving the feeling of sanctuary you get when you crawl into a warm bed in winter. The coziness, the safety. Much like I imagine a hibernating bear feels when her nature tells her it’s time to go into her cave. No expectations, no responsibilities, just me and my earthen hovel and my leafy blanket.
Zora Neale Hurston, “Their Eyes Were Watching God”
It’s interesting to consider the impact of a book upon someone who isn’t the book’s target demographic. I said earlier that “Their Eyes Were Watching God” wasn’t “for me,” but that thought is slightly more complicated than it seems on the surface. Whatever literary theory you subscribe to (which may be no theory at all, and God bless you),it’s difficult to read a book if you can’t put yourself into it. There have to be characters, themes, settings, plot points, whatever that resonate with you. Or, at least, that’s the way our modern education system has trained us to approach literature. Right or wrong, we read books and ask ourselves, “How does this make you feel?”
In the case of Zora Neale Hurston, I can recognize that there are elements in the novel that readers might identify with, but they just don’t hit me the way I think they’re supposed to. I don’t know any people who are like these characters, I’ve never had these sorts of marital issues, and I’ve never been to Florida.
I would probably say that it’s a “difficult” book for these reasons, but there are others. There’s a lot of dialect in Their Eyes. It’s enough that you often get the impression that you’re reading two separate books.
“Two things everybody’s got tuh do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin’ fuh theyselves.”
The prose itself is not written in this voice, but whenever we hear a character talk, that’s what it looks like. It made the novel an interesting and…er, novel experience, constantly switching between standard prose and prose in dialect, and there are many people in American society who use a variety of voices when they speak. Depending on the context, people can often have what you might call “dual personalities.”
Some of my students are prime examples. To hear them speak in the hallways is one thing, but the way they talk inside the classroom makes them come off as entirely different people. Are teenagers everywhere like this? Probably, to some extent. Teenagers all over the world act one way with their peers and another way around adults.
That, I suppose, is something we all can identify with. While all of us don’t have modes of speaking with such dramatic and noticeable differences, there are times when all of us feel like we are someone we’re not.
Zora Neale Hurston, “Their Eyes Were Watching God”
In my case, I often feel like I’m pretending to be a “good teacher.” I’m not sure if I even want to be what I’d call a “good teacher.” I’m a competent teacher — don’t get me wrong — but the line between “competent” and “good” is one that, in my own mind, I’m not sure I can cross. “Competent” teachers have to do a lot, but “good” teachers take on extra. Often times, they take on more than is healthy.
There are teachers at my school who are there 11 or 12 hours a day, teaching regular classes and then doing sports or activities after. They work on weekends, organize field trips, do fundraisers, and generally throw everything they’ve got into the teaching profession. I do care about my students, and I do everything I can to make my classes engaging and useful, but when that final bell rings, I want to go home and do other things. I want to have a life outside the building.
When I first became a teacher, things were different. I wanted a career I could throw myself into with every element of my being. I wanted to be like one of the characters on The West Wing, a kind-of Sam Seaborn who sleeps, eats, and breathes his work. The problem with shows like that is the fallacy that there are intelligent and moral people in charge of things. In reality, there are no whiz-kid doctors who’ll stay up all night to diagnose your medical condition, there are no tough-as-nails police detectives working overtime to catch the guy who broke into your house, and there certainly are no brilliant political officers who are trying to make the world a better place.
I know it’s putting awfully high expectations on myself when I say that I need to work 60-hour weeks in order to be “good” at my job. One thing that you learn if you study mindfulness or Eastern philosophies is that a person should be okaywith being “okay.” You don’t need to be brilliant — it’s enough just to exist.
That’s just a tough pill to swallow when you live in a country filled with bozos who brag about how little sleep they’re getting or how much overtime they’re putting in. As if it’s some kind of badge of honor to work yourself to the bone for a system that couldn’t give less of a shit about you.
Zora Neale Hurston, “Their Eyes Were Watching God”
Last night, a freezing rain fell that covered the whole city in a layer of ice. Sarah and I went out to get some drive-thru chicken and quickly realized that we wouldn’t be able to get out of our neighborhood — there was no way to drive up even the slightest hill. We saw cars hopping curbs, cars that were stuck at intersections unable to move forward or backward, people who’d gone out for a walk and were slipping helplessly down the sidewalks.
Some nights you’re just stuck. Nature will always remind you of that fact.
Last week was an odd one. There was meeting on top of meeting at school, with one whole day given over to “Professional Development.” This is when everybody in the English department gets together to listen to presentations about textbooks and online resources.
Classes for teachers, basically.
I get the feeling that, because teachers are teaching classes all the time, they really want to believe that more classes is always a good thing. Sort of like if there were a meeting of gastroenterologists and they all went to get colonoscopies, thinking, “This is what regular people do!” It’s fine enough in theory, and everyone can do with a good flushing out, but sometimes all you want is a chance to sit down and do your goddamned work.
Plus, most of these “Professional Development” sessions are led by textbook salesmen. Shills, in other words.
After such a long week, I was really hoping to unwind. Sarah and I do this by just sort of existing at home. We don’t go out too much and aren’t all that adventurous. Sarah knits and reads. I read and write. The cat vacillates between her lap and mine and we make a real time of it.
We had to go places, though, on Friday. My dad asked us to drive to where he lives so we could visit a Brazilian steakhouse. It was only a 45-minute drive and we honestly haven’t been visiting…anybody as often a we should, so we hopped on down and made a night of it.
The pseudo-Brazilians kept coming around with meat on skewers and all of us had…too much. (The salted pork was particularly delicious.)
The next day, my older brother came to town for a sports thing and brought a whole bunch of beef for us to take home, so now our freezer is full. This is a thing that happens often in Nebraska — a friend or relative kills a whole cow and spreads the beef around. Like Jesus except with red meat instead of fish.
A part of me wishes we were the adventurous people we used to be — not all that long ago we were living in Indonesia, eating shakshuka on the beach, driving a scooter through rice paddies and forests where monkeys steal cell phones. I spend too much time these days wondering, “What changed?”
When did we become a couple of chumps who just sit at home in Nebraska of all places?
It happened, as many other things did, during the pandemic. I feel like we haven’t been able to “recover” since then, as if the world has been getting slowly and inexorably worse in every measurable way. Our health, both mental and physical, haven’t been great. Everything financial is pretty much f*cked. Everyone is divided, storms are destroying everything, and it turns out Joker 2 probably won’t be very good.
As often happens when I’m in this kind of mood (I’m sick today with some kind of flu and feeling blue about it), I tend to blame myself for things that are going on.
Things aren’t even really that bad. We have food and a roof over our head. We’re getting older and maybe want to settle down a bit. I’ve got to practice gratitude. Even though I’m not all that good at it.
Still. I look around where I live, look at what’s going on in America, and I think, “Why in the hell is everyone working so hard to maintain….THIS?” We’re like people on the Titanic hanging up “ICEBERG 2024” signs and complaining about all the immigrants locked up below decks. Who would want to shovel coal in that scenario?
I don’t have an answer. But grading papers in which students write that Elon Musk INVENTED the goddamned ELECTRIC CAR to HELP HUMANITY makes me wonder what in the hell I’m losing sleep over.
Sigh. Food over my head. Roof in my belly. This is my mantra.
Every week is a “rough week” when you’re a new teacher. While I may not be “new” (I’ve been in classrooms for coming up on 15 years now), most of my years have in South Korean classrooms — this is only my 2nd year as a teacher in America. So, I still count myself amongst the ranks of people who are just figuring things out.
The biggest difference so far is that South Korean middle-schoolers are more “adult” than most of my American high-schoolers. By every measurable rubric. There’s more accountability, more empathy, more hard work. I try not to get too down on American high-schoolers because of it — I don’t think it’s their fault — but it makes my job a lot harder, and it just makes me…I don’t know. Sad.
One of my students this week got in trouble for standing up and walking out of the classroom. Where’d he go? I’m not 100%, but I suspect he went to do drugs. (Weed vapes are a big problem.) When he tried to come back into class, I sent him up to his administrator. “That’s unfair! I was just going to the bathroom!”
“Okay, but you went without asking, didn’t sign out, and you didn’t get a pass.”
“I had the pass!”
“No, you didn’t.”
“I had the pass, but [ANOTHER STUDENT] took it from me!”
“Alright, you can explain that to your administrator and we’ll sort it out.”
He left in a huff, throwing that day’s assignment on the ground — a gesture that somehow lost its meaning when you consider that he hadn’t yet done any work on the assignment. Matter of fact, this student hasn’t turned in a single assignment all year.
His administrator listened to the student and called me to confirm the story. “[STUDENT] says you sent him to me for going to the bathroom. Is that true?”
“He left class without permission and without a pass. I don’t know where he went.”
“So he’s lying when he says he had a pass?”
“Yes.”
I heard the student in the background practically crying about what a liar I was. A bold move considering our security cameras clearly showed him leaving class without a pass. Even when that was explained to him — even when he was shown the security footage — he still maintained that he’d left with a pass.
I should point out that, while I was talking to the student and his administrator, 34 other students were waiting for class to continue. Class sizes in most American schools are ridiculous and, frankly, untenable. There should be, at most, 20 students per teacher. Our school usually does 35. (One of my classes has 36, even though there are only 35 desks. It’s a trivial problem considering there hasn’t been a single day when every student has been in class, but still.)
And many people might say, “What’s the big deal? If the student had to go to the bathroom and went to the bathroom, he shouldn’t be punished for that. Stop micromanaging!” I can see why some people might think that — it’s because they are idiots whohaven’t spent any time at a school in the last 20 years.
The problem isn’t that he went to the bathroom, it’s that he left class and nobody knew where he went. Why is that such a big deal? Safety. For one, unsupervised students sometimes fight each other in hallways, brutally, and for two: In the event of a fire or, you know, an active shooter, you need to know where everyone is.
The fact that this student lies and behaves like a petulant child isn’t surprising; he is a petulant child, and likely a petulant child being raised by a petulant child — but what is surprising is that we’re expecting him to improve while stuffing him in a classroom filled with 30+ students who also have behavior issues, students who have learning disabilities, and students who lost out on years of socialization because of COVID.
I’ve spent several hours after school this week talking with counselors, administrators, and making phone calls to parents. Not just about this one student, but about him and dozens of others. When I get home, I haven’t been in a “reading” mood.
Mostly what I want to do is sleep.
I have made some progress on “I Capture the Castle,” which is light-hearted and just as sweet as box of lady fingers — by I’ve fallen awfully short of my reading goal. I’m almost finished, though!
This is turning into one of those “should I post this?” posts that I ultimately end up deleting because this is supposed to be a blog about books and I want it to be a positive one. Ultimately, though, my job drastically impacts my reading habits. And it’s probably cathartic to let all this stuff out.
I should point out that I have a few exchange students from South Korea in my homeroom. We spent part of yesterday looking at where we used to live in Seoul on Google Maps while lamenting how much we miss things like Isaac Toast. It was a fun, if not bittersweet trip down memory lane.
I’ve been dreaming about South Korea a lot recently. It’d be an understatement to say I miss it there, but it’s true. I miss the students, the food, the people I used to work with. It’s not a perfect place, but they care about education in a way that most Americans can’t fathom.
And I frankly can’t imagine what it’s like for a South Korean student to transfer here to America. I mean, I’m sure they have a lot more free time without after-school academies, and the workload is probably trivial for them, but the culture shock must be huge.
It’s been a rough week for reading. Both forms of school (the classes I teach and the classes I’m taking online) are taking up my time, Virginia Woolf isn’t the easiest read in the world, and there have been some … occurrences that have put everyone on edge and have me feeling on the verge of panic a lot more often than usual.
Earlier this week a victim of bullying brought a gun to a school in my district and, when confronted by his bully, shot the other student in the torso. The student had a history of being bullied — it’s likely why he brought the gun in the first place; he wanted to protect himself.
I am sorry for nearly everyone involved. The student who thought he had no other choice than to resort to bringing a gun to school; the student who didn’t wake up that morning thinking he’d end up in intensive care; all the other students who had to deal with the terror and uncertainty of a lockdown; and all the parents and families who joined the ranks of thousands of Americans who have faced similar horrors, who have gotten in their car and rushed to school to pick up a child they hope, hope, hope is okay.
And the crowd goes WILD!
Not Feeling So “Peppy”
My high school has been blessedly free of gun violence, but it’s easy to see that everyone is thinking about it. We get reminders to keep our doors locked and never, never, never open them for people we don’t know. There’s been an increased presence of school resource officers as a just-in-case measure, but seeing three guys in body armor outside a pep rally doesn’t make anybody feel better.
At the football game last Friday, a rumor spread through the crowd that someone had come with a weapon, which caused people to run away in fear. No one was hurt and the rumors turned out to be baseless, but it goes to show how worried people are.
“The Desire to Flee.”
I always try to tell students that it is gun violence in schools is a tragedy, but it is a relatively rare tragedy and that they shouldn’t dwell on it. But, well. When the guy you’re standing next to gets struck by lightning, it’s hard not to keep your eyes on the clouds.
The Man, the Mythulu
In an attempt not to focus on all the horrible things that are happening: Sarah and I went out to get “sushi” on Friday — put in “quotes” because we had California Rolls and a bunch of other deep fried cream cheese cylinders that Americans call “sushi” — and had a few bottles of hot sake for good measure. (I’m not knocking this cuisine. It’s delicious, but only very charitably referred to as “sushi.”)
When we got home, we played some Mythulu.
Starter Pack A and Starter Pack B
If you aren’t familiar, Mythulu is a card game that helps you generate ideas for stories. You have a deck of cards that are split into six categories — Traits, Elements, Habitats, Characters, Textures, and Relationships — that represent tropes in storytelling, which you can draw in certain combinations to create new ideas.
For example, you might draw “Sky,” “Ash,” and “Memory.” You put those three together to get a roving cloud of ash, perhaps spread from a crematorium smokestack, that implants memories of the dead into anyone who is overtaken by the cloud.
There are no wrong ideas. You just draw the cards and let your imagination run wild. These cards are FANTASTIC for developing story ideas or parts of a story. Sarah and I often play it when we’ve had a few drinks; not because we’re actively working on a writing project together, rather just because it’s fun to talk about.
We decided we’d draw cards to create a monster that we could use in a fantasy story.
“Don’t dwell, children. It won’t do to dwell.”
As we were drawing, we brainstormed what we thought the cards meant.
“It’s a creature, right? And it lives in the ground. It grows really slowly and … and here’s the thing … when people see it, they want to take care of it. Like, like it release a chemical or something that triggers maternal instinct.“
“People want to take it home and look after it.”
“Right! They want to take it home and feed it and love it and they’ll often times just sit and look at it. That’s how magical it is. People put this monster in their house and just look at it and adore it and want to keep it alive.”
“It tricks them. It bamboozles them.”
“Yeah! It plays the long con. It’s completely helpless unless it can find someone to take it home and give it everything it needs. But … but the people who are being conned, they don’t even mind it.”
“They’re excited! They’re excited to have it. They tell all their friends about it and go on the internet to do research about how to best take care of this little monster. They take pictures of it and share them.”
“And it never stops! For their whole life, these poor suckers are dedicated to caring for this monster that’s latched onto their lives. Some people even have more than one. They fill their whole house up with them, and taking care of these damned things becomes their entire existence!“
The horror!
We’d been drinking, so it took us a little longer than it should have to realize that we were describing houseplants. In our attempt to create a new, fantastical monster, we created ferns.
The midwest summer is finally starting to show signs of abating as cooler temperatures begin to meekly eek their way into existence. Thursday was the first day I felt the need to wear a sweater when the sun went down, even though there was a high of around 80 in the afternoon.
I’m getting strength and resilience built up in my legs and feet. I’ve felt the start-of-the-year aches and pains more acutely than I have in the past, probably because I’m getting older and probably because I hadn’t been exercising as much as I should have during the summer. Shoes are the important thing. One of the best bits of advice I’ve ever heard is this: “Don’t buy the cheap version of anything that comes between you and the ground.” Beds, tires, sleeping bags, tents, rugs. Anything that’s meant to be between you and mother earth ought to be of some quality.
This goes double for shoes. I made the mistake at the start of the year of buying some cheap Nikes to serve as my “school shoes.” I thought, like a dummy, that Nike made a quality product that couldn’t possibly let me down. (Or, more accurately, I thought, “Nike is surely good enough.”)I couldn’t have been more wrong. Not only do my new shoes make a nonsensical clicking sound when you walk, the insoles are woefully under-padded.
I’ve switched back to last year’s pair — Sketchers with Memory Foam insoles. Even though they’re a little run down and starting to show wear and tear, at least I’m not limping slightly at the end of each day.
“Well why can’t they make them COMFORTABLE!?”
“Middle-Age Man Gripes About Shoes.” More at 11.
My reading has been going well. I’ve hit my goal of at least 100 pages each day, even though a lot of those were pages of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” some of which only had a total of 30 words on them. (Plays read quickly.) The real challenge this week has been anxiety.
I’ve made a point of talking a bit more with the teacher who sits next to me at the plan center. He’s fresh out of college and this is his first year teaching. After he missed a day due to illness, I noticed that he seemed to be as stressed out as one could possibly get, grumbling over papers and second-guessing things he was doing. I’ve been there. The signs are easy to recognize.
If you’ve never been a teacher or worked with kids in any way, this might be difficult to understand, but teaching wears you down. As a professional, you want to do well — not only for yourself but because children are depending on you to do so. You are working without a net and largely without support and you’ll just come to feel like you’re carrying around a terrible weight that you just can’t put down.
I made a point of talking to my plan center neighbor a bit more to let him know that this stress is normal. “I feel like I’m having a panic attack nearly every day,” I said. “Right when I wake up, BAM, my heart is racing and my thoughts are circling the drain.”
He nodded vigorously. “Yeah,” he said.
“What, me anxious?”
I told him that I suspected almost every teacher in the building was going through it in one way or another, that we’re all overworked, and that I’ve been told (and believe) it takes around 5 years of teaching a new subject to be “comfortable” with it.
He seemed relieved to hear it. “It’s good to know I’m not the only one.”
Mourning in the Morning
I don’t know what’s causing me to feel so anxious in the morning. I don’t drink very much, my eating habits aren’t terrible, and I have been getting between 12,500 and 15,000 steps each day (that’s just how much I walk while I’m teaching), so a lack of exercise isn’t the problem. I also try to get around 8 hours of sleep each night, which is only ever interrupted when I come awake at 3:30 AM feeling like I’m about to die.
The racing heart and sense of impending doom aren’t the worst part of it, though — the worst part is climbing into bed each night knowing that it’s going to happen. It’s like Sisyphus at the bottom of the hill pondering that goddamned rock.
“I’m gonna do it this time … “
It’s one of life’s cruel ironies that people with depression are often sad about being depressed and people with anxiety are often nervous of their anxiety symptoms. The only thing you can do about it, though, is just start doing stuff.
“The opposite of anxiety is action.”
So, I get up, I read, I type stuff. I put prompts into Stable Diffusion and marvel at how wildly inaccurate they are.
This is supposed to be “A man looking at a large, round boulder.” #spoton
The sun is rising and my cat has the zoomies and it feels like Fall is almost here.
