Saturday, September 29, 2007

before i dash off...

It's 11 on a Saturday night and I'm two glasses of wine in..so what's new? The small fact of my field trip tomorrow, is all. Five other teachers (two of my closest friends, my co-chair, and two others) and I are taking 60 students on a three-day trip to UC Santa Barbara, UC Santa Cruz, and some other place you've probably never heard of called UC Berkeley. Hells yeah.

I should probs pack.

Anyway, a few things before I go:

1. We got a new car. I've been meaning to take a photo but it's delayed the post so much already. Anyway, we ended up with a hybrid Civic in "magnetic pearl." Is it blue? Is it purple? Is it grey? I don't know. All I know is it is already dented from a woman in a BMW who decided to move into A's lane regardless of A's extremely-parallel presence in said lane. In other news: move to LA!

2. Cats! We have 300 of them and they are getting big. Big enough to fill the sink, even!


Major has moved back into the loft.


3. I started my grad program on Wednesday. So far so good, except in a logistical sense. UCLA's ed program is extremely competitive and well-respected and worthwhile, but that doesn't prevent them from doing things like emailing you on a Friday that your classes will start Monday, or in my case, emailing on a Wednesday that tuition is due in full by Friday or you'll be dropped. ....thanks. No paper mail or anything. No due dates mentioned, ever. I know that the logical thing would be to check UCLA's website for such things, but a) the website sucks, and b) my credentialing program (also through the ed school) had totally different payment dates from the campus as a whole, and informed us about them separetely, and also tardily, though not quite this tardily, and without threats of revoked admission. UC Regents, how I've missed you and your bedside manner!

4. Mila, this one's for you.

Monday, September 10, 2007

standin' around in pretty dresses

A couple of things:

Thing the first: We got a new car. It's pretty. I will put up a picture soon, if I can get it together to take one. Also, we managed to scavenge a whole bunch of stuff out of the old one, including A's textbooks, more or less a whole case of wine and another of beer that had been protected from the shattering glass, my new shades which I had been moping about losing, two binders' worth of CDs, and the Bose deck, which was, incredibly, completely unharmed if noticeably stickier than it was at purchasing-time.

Thing the second: Photos are up! Send me an email if you didn't get the link. Be sure and tell Dmitry how awesome he is.

Some of my favorites (though there are many more):






















That last one might be the most complete group shot we have. Prove me wrong, people!

Thursday, August 30, 2007

How to dispose of leftover wedding alcohols

...in 5 days or less.

OPTION ONE: Five-day mimosa binge

OPTION TWO: Drinking game in which every time someone asks you if you feel "different" and then looks at you expectantly, you take a drink

OPTION THREE:

Bonus: This option will also take care of your new ipod deck which you have been looking for a way to destroy.

On the for-real plus side, Aaron (who says to tell you that he totally had all his hubcaps when he went to bed last night, and that one must have flown off and landed somewhere out-of-sight or rolled into the gutter or something) took my wedding dress out of the trunk when he got home last night. Not that I know what I'm going to do with it, but it's nice not to have the decision made for me in such an abrupt fashion. He also got to stick his head in the backseat and screech,"It smells like a brewery in here!" a la Nathan Scott Phillips. And, though it sounds funny, when a policeman shines his flashlight in through your screen door at 4 in the morning, there are much, much worse reasons than this.

RIP, ipod deck.

Mourn ya til I go to BestBuy and convince them that the 2-year warranty covers acts of drunk.

Saturday, August 04, 2007

the nuclear family

We sort of accidentally got a third cat. Not that she's staying here permanently, mind...just that she wandered in the door a week and a half ago and kind of refused to leave. She's the sweetest thing in the world, silky and docile with a sort of bemused Luna Lovegood-ish gaze. But then I've been seeing Luna in everything since viewing the otherwise painfully mediocre Order of the Phoenix.



The Tiny (aka Nathan Scott Phillips, aka Bounce-Bounce) has gotten decidedly less tiny. This week I'm calling him Brown Bread, for his incredible weight and density.



For the most part the Major tries to stay out of their way, but the two of them together are a hoot. You can get a sense of their general dynamic here:




That kid I was talking about last time finally got transferred. Did he stab someone, you ask? Commit armed robbery? No, his final offense, the one egregious enough to warrant explusion, was walking out of his IEP meeting.

There's a lot to get upset about there, but whatever. He's gone.

I'm going to [gritted teeth] Stanford next weekend for a school retreat. As a non-improving PI school we're required to have an outside provider come in and magically solve the problems we're too stupid to solve ourselves - you may remember how much I hated our last Outside Provider. I wasn't alone, and collectively we chased them out, only to have them replaced by Stanford. Now, the Stanford ed school is the home of outspoken Program-hater Linda Darling-Hammond, so they can't be all bad, but so far their whole plan for the school involves spatial redesign, and since our school is already so cramped with additional buildings and "bungalows" (what we would have called "portables" back home) and there's no time or money to rebuild, their entire plan consists of "signage." You know - banners and umbrellas and such. Mostly banners. They were paid $2 million by The District for this plan. Not for banners and umbrellas, even - just for the mere notion of banners and umbrellas.

Anyway, I'm there Thursday through Sunday evening. If you're slumming it in Stanford those days, hit me up.

Overheard at work:

One maintenance man to another, heatedly: And they want us to empty trash, and spot-mop, and de-gum, and clean the sodas off the floors, and work as a team!

A kid (next to the side gate, lately closed to students, forcing them to walk all the way to the front of the school to leave): Let my people go! Let my people go!

Saturday, July 21, 2007

of books and beatings

First, the books:

I have in my posession not one but FOUR copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - two mine and two McD's - and, as of about 11:40, I have finished reading one of them. Fear not, for I will not spoil, but I will say that I feel the book's emotional peak came about two-thirds through, and that you should skip the epilogue, and that I was half-amused, half-irritated by brazen lifts from Lord of the Rings, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe and - wait for it - Return of the Jedi. All in all I enjoyed the experience - there's nothing quite as nice as an uniterrupted read-through - and I think I enjoyed the book, though it's hard to say since I was clearly going to read it either way, lest I be consumed by the desire to know, before anyone else, How It Ends.

In other YA news I have recently read A Great And Terrible Beauty, Rebel Angels, and Tyrell, which were extremely enjoyable, and Rooftop, which wasn't. Then I got sucked into Shame of the Nation, which is going to be one of my students' choices for lit circles when we come back on track in November. It is going to kick their butts, but I'm on this whole Challenging Kick, which is to say that I don't think I've been pushing anyone nearly hard enough except my ESL classes with Romeo and Juliet last year, and it's about time I hold everyone to the same standard. I expect great things this year.

Which leads us to the business:

From an academic standpoint, the new year is going really well. To my great surprise and relief I love teaching American Lit, mostly because I am completely ignoring the suggested curriculum and instead doing a unit on immigration policy, reading op-eds and articles and interviews and working on discerning the authors' underlying philosophical beliefs and assumptions. This is harder than it sounds. I spend a lot of time talking about "Habits of Mind," and stressing the importance of reading not just for information but for those little tidbits of word choice and rhetoric that give away the author's position. It's difficult for many of the kids because of just how much they go through in pursuit of the literal meaning of something like an Economist article, let alone delving beneath its surface. We're leading up to a complex position paper integrating multiple sources and a variety of modes of writing, so I think next week I have to take a step back and make sure we're really clear on what's gone on so far. Last week was a little crazy, so some of what we've done has started to feel a little unravelled from the whole.

Per craziness: the vibe on campus is changing. We had a series of fights and a resulting lockdown a week ago Friday, and another fight and a lot of (well-deserved) administrative crackdown on Wednesday. The kids are doing this meerkat thing at lunch, standing up on the benches and craning their necks to see where the action is going to be. Rumors are swirling about some Latino kids, probably Florencia, beating an African-American kid pretty badly - maybe a Blood, maybe not - and revenge being forthcoming.

Meanwhile, in addition to this campus-wide tension, my SLC has its own saga unfolding, with one of my former students. While I never had a personal problem with this kid - he was always polite to me and everyone in my class, despite attempting a grand total of one (1) assignment all semester - I know that he's up to his ears in Florencia, on parole (the story behind this is like Russian dolls, one offense nestled inside the next), the owner of some very nasty and unexplained scars, and high more or less all the time.

Our story begins on Wednesday during break, when I happen to glance out the window and see an unfamiliar kid on my balcony whip off his shirt and disappear around the corner to a rapt audience of about 20 kids. I am running towards the door with one hand already dialing the phone when I hear a heavy thud against my wall.

(I was talking to a colleague the other day, and we agreed that while we generally feel dumber than we did before taking this job, it has done miracles for our reaction time.)

So I get outside just in time to see my former student along with three of his friends, clad in Brown Pride finery, take off down the hallway, leaving a kid curled against the wall next to my room and a Hansel-and-Gretel-esque trail of little blood drips behind them. I follow, I find security, I write my statement. I figure, he's on parole. He must be out of here.

But oh! Not so. No indeed; he is back in class the next day. This story continues, but it's getting long already. The quick-and-dirty version is that he brags to me that he had in fact jumped this kid, making a charming stomping motion on the ground and laughing, "This is what we did to him, Miss. Send me back to the deans. I'll still be here." He has discovered, as we teachers already know and dread, that students designated as Special Ed for any reason, not just behavioral problems, more or less cannot be expelled or OT'd. They have to be put on a "behavior plan," which translates pretty well to total immunity. I would like to think that "Do not beat the shit out of people" is a pretty basic behavior plan and that he has clearly violated said, but that's not how it works. Come to think of it, I'd like to assume that beating the shit out of people is a violation of his parole, but that doesn't seem to be a problem either.

Anyway, outside of my English classes and Leadership activities and taking care of my community's two new English teachers, finding a loophhole on this kid is priority one. He knows I'm actively watching him and reporting back to the deans, so while I have personally never felt threatened by him (he seems to feel that being on his case is my job, just as maiming is his), it is probably a good thing that I have no car to key or anything.

Sunday, June 24, 2007

changing it up

As you may recall, we adopted a second cat awhile back. She was really beautiful, but so mean. She chased the Major around mercilessly and bit everyone and he lost a lot of weight because she wouldn't let him eat. They were not the best of friends.



So, we packed her up and sent her back.



It took about 3 seconds for the buddy to get all neurotic and weird again, with no Great Enemy to take up all his time.


So today, we found him a new nemesis. He is very small.



He does not have a name yet, but we are thinking of Zim. I am ZIM!

Thursday, June 21, 2007

the best feeling in the world

An age ago, when I was still in school, I would walk across campus sometimes, and something about the way the breeze would rustle in the trees, or a bit of conversation I would overhear, would fill me with this almost inexpressable joy, a feeling that surprised me at first in how it really is a swelling in the chest, and I would think to myself, "I am really, really happy here." That feeling was gone for a long time when I left. And now, just as suddenly, it's back. It's seven p.m., and I'm sitting in my warm, colorful classroom, reading my ESL students' essays on Romeo and Juliet. This is going to sound like bragging, but I have to say, they are blowing me away. They have really, really learned something this year, and they are honest-to-god ready to move on to mainstream English. And as for me - I, for the very first time, know what it feels like to be successful at teaching. It is the swelling/bursting feeling again, the feeling like I am in the right place, at the right time, doing the right thing.

Reading Area #1:

Newly-created Reading Area #2:

I swear I have space in my classroom for doing actual work.

Sunday, June 17, 2007

teen books = fun

Because I'm sure you are all really interested in what I've been reading during SSR, and in the state of YA fiction in general, I here provide an update. You're welcome!

Exit Here - I have to recommend this one just because of how hysterically bad it is. Think American Psycho-style brand consiousness meets Valley of the Dolls, only with rich scenesters from Michigan. AWESOME. The death toll is amazing, a mix of murders, suicides, car crashes, etc, plus two in jail and one HIV-pos diagnoisis, all while really, really high.
Elsewhere- I read this one last night and really liked it. It's Lovely Bones for the YA set, which works out a lot better since that book was crazily overrated fluff anyhow. This one has super-charming characters and less pretension. Pay no attention to the Amazon.com editorial review which says it's written in the second person - it's third.
Dairy Queen - Charming, charming, charming. This author has a really strong voice and reads like a teenager, which rarely happens in YA writing. I am pushing this one on my kids like crazy.
Born to Rock - Gordon Korman is one of those rare BOY writers who doesn't write sports or violence, just straight-up fiction. This one is about a young republican who learns that his biological father is a Jello Biafra type, and ends up a roadie on his reunion tour. It's fun but slight.
Skin - An anorexia book where the anorexic actually dies. Unheard-of! The eating disorder plotline is really good, narrated by the little brother who feels betrayed and lost in the world, but about 20% of the novel is given over to the shrill screaming of the parents, which I could have done without.
Sold - A verse novel about a Nepali girl sold into prostituion in India. I'm pushing this one hard, too - my kids have very little idea what happens in the world outside the Americas, good and bad.
Scrambled Eggs at Midnight - Good but not great despite the Jesus/Fat Camp v. RenFaire backdrop. The current printing has a couple of typos in it which always yanks me right out of the narrative. I like this trend of male and female authors alternating boy/girl chapters, though Nick and Norah does it better.
How I Live Now - Dystopic near-future romance - think pastoral 1984 plus, I don't know, The Royal Tenenbaums. I dug it.
Endgame - This one's a school shooting novel that takes you up to the event with the shooter himself. It's pretty brutal. The problem is the audience, as the protagonist is this sensitive dorky picked-on kid, and the ones who want shooter books aren't down with that, and vice-versa. I dunno. Hopefully it will find its niche.
Grafitti Girl - Completely unremarkable except that it takes place in a thinly-disguised version of my hometown. The author must be a hometown girl, and her resentment of the very real class divide comes through in occasionally hilarious ways, like when the protagonist attends a graf party at a three-story home in the rich part of town. Three stories! No joke.
Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist - This books is all, FUCK FUCK FUCK! ORAL SEX! PUNK ROCK! so of course I loved it. Our rocker girls are really into it - every single copy of mine has gone mysteriously missing. Insant classic!
Rash - Pete Hautman is always great, but this one is a social satire, and I'm worried about my *very literal* students not getting it at all.
King Dork - This one is currently making the rounds with my friends. The last book I handed around this way was High Fidelity - what is it about music/misanthrope novels? Fantastic, fantastic, fantastic. Although, I think there's a reason I'm pushing it on my contemporaries rather than my kids - it's one of those "looking back at being a teen"-style books, more than it is a book for teens.
A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier - You've probably seen this one at Starbucks. I read it thinking I'd have my 10th graders do a unit on contemporary world memoir, and it turned out to be just about a perfect fit. The first half is harrowing enough as the boys try to flee the war; when they become a part of it, it's a whole other thing altogether.
They Poured Fire On Us From The Sky - Holy God, what a book this is. I'm including it in the same unit, and I'm really hoping the kids give it a chance at it's not a small book, but it packs a punch.
Slave - Also a part of this memoir unit. I had to put this one aside - I can't quite get myself to believe it. Not that people are still sold into slavery, but just this particular family, this particular situation - it's like A Child Called It: African Edition. I don't know what this says about me, but I'm pretty sure it's not good. There's just something off about the author's voice, though, and it pushes me away.

A partial list of things I'm in the middle of: The Book Thief, We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, and Mayflower. All of these have been put aside because they're too good and/or too involved to be read with one eye trained on those boys in the back who keep trying to play checkers during SSR. I mean...checkers? Really?

Friday, June 08, 2007

fire-extinguished!

The Universe, it seems, was unsatisfied with last week's minor respiratory disaster, my walking out of my classroom and into a cloud of mere pepper spray. This morning, the ante was succesfully upped when I was summonsed to sub during my conference for DR, my most ideological opposite in the English department and luckily, my SLC-mate and four-doors-down neighbor. I am sick once again today, with my throat swollen almost shut this morning and having spent all last night shaking with cold and fever, but much as I wanted to spend the period asleep on my couch, I signed the damn paper and headed over there fourth period, and was rewarded with a faceful of freshly-sprayed fire-extinguishing chemical dust.

Working here has made everything normal. I thought, "Hmm. Should probably document," reached into my bag, and pulled out my digi-cam. Then, covered face and opened windows, took kids waiting on balcony to my room where I supplied them with markers and a small stack of books on tagging, called the front office, and texted everyone I know to let them in on the story. DR is pretty universally loathed; I knew it would be the pick-me-up everyone needed on a dull, plodding Friday like today.

At this rate, I fully expect to be mustard-gassed by the end of the school year.


Thursday, May 31, 2007

headache > tummyache?

I just busted out the ole' day planner to schedule my last 3 weeks of English 9 - I am going to kick their asses with work, here - and realized that the next day I spend without some type of work-related, time-consuming obligation is June 17th, 2 weeks from Sunday. 20 straight days of work? New record, anyone?

Grades are due tomorrow, so of course I got 3,000 assignments today. It actually makes my stomach hurt to look at all of them, even though I am grading in the most minimal way possible. I think I'm starting to understand why people hire wedding planners. Or maybe I'm not, because selfishly I can't imagine people in other professions feeling as swamped as I do right now.

Wednesday, May 30, 2007

mmmm. peppery.

Highlights of my day:

I breathed pepper spray for the first time! And it wasn’t even a fight, just some kids goofing around in the hallway connecting my classroom to the rest of the school (naturally.) I stepped in to head to the restroom and got a lungful. It’s like the first time you’re in an earthquake; despite your lack of prior experience, you immediately know exactly what is going on. It really feels like pepper, if that makes sense, and then your eyes water, and you cough violently, and later you get a headache. Or maybe that’s from the graffiti remover I used this morning – who can really say.

One of the other SLC’s leads is attempting to take a room in our rotation. This is incredibly freaking unacceptable. I am hoping it is resolved before I have to scream and yell about it.

Highlights from ESL 4 translations of Romeo and Juliet:

SAMPSON: No, sir, I do not talk smack at you, sir, but I do talk smack, sir.

ROMEO: Is she a Capulet? Oh dear, my life is a mess.

Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Do you know the times?

Sometimes you catch yourself thinking thoughts, especially when they are the first ones of the day, that make you reconsider your career choice and/or life path thus far. Thoughts like,

Oh good! We have toilet paper today.

Other times your students write things that are so unintentionally charming and/or hilarious you write them on 3x5 cards and show them to everyone you see that day.

On Romeo’s mental state and motivations:

Romeo is feeling depressed because he is in love with a girl that he will never be able to date or marry because she is a noun.

On asking people if they believe in true love:

I guess that the answer was different depending on which or what age they were. Like little kids think that love is gross. And also that little kids are gross.

Then there are the times when they say things so completely idiotic that you just stare at them, aghast.

After a really rough week with my 9th grade class, during which almost no headway was made in Romeo and Juliet, I gave them a brief talk about why they needed to learn this play: It’s one of the most famous in Western literature; it’s full of evocative, poetic language that will help us with our own writing; it deals with huge themes that help us to examine humanity; and last of all, every ninth grader in the known universe reads this play, and when you go out into the world, you will want to know what other ninth graders assume is base knowledge. My Prettiest Girl, by which I mean the one who has most consciously made the decision to be a Pretty Girl, says in her snottiest, most dismissive tone,

Well, what if we’re already in the tenth grade?

Touché!

Then today, I busted my kids betting on poker after the state test. They were pissed when I took their cards, and I explained (calmly and quietly, I might add) that this was not just my rule, but the school’s, and the government’s, when not of age and in a casino. And this kid says, in his best Gotcha! voice,

But I’m not legal! I don't have papers; I don’t have to follow your rules!

Yeah, buddy. Good luck with that.

Monday, May 21, 2007

Master of Scheduling.

First off, I've decided I need to do something about how infrequently I post. I find that I tend to shy away from posting because it seems like it's going to eat up a whole bunch of time. And usually, it does. So, short and sweet and if not everything gets covered, who is going to be the wiser?

Bullet points!

-I've been back at work for about three weeks now, three weeks of rock n' roll Romeo and Juliet action. Tonight is the first in about 2 weeks that I left school without attending any other obligation from the three-thirty-to-five-thirty slot. I made the mistake of showing up for the master scheduling info session - the master being the schoolwide course schedule of what's being taught, when, and by whom - and ended up programming the whole damn thing for my small learning community, which necessitated a lot of out-of-classroom time and a reevaluation of the science chair, who is honestly a huge ass, but who did teach me to do the master and then check it for me to make sure I hadn't screwed it up too royally.

-Also, I've been doing hiring stuff. This goes hand-in-hand, really, since I'm the only one who knows how many new positions my SLC is opening (three) and who's leaving (three or four more) and all that sort of thing. We haven't hired anyone yet, but our need is dire and it looks like we may eventually have to go with the hated Program. Ugh. I have made it known that no one will be hired from The Program unless I am present at the interview and give my approval, but it's not like anyone has been going to the rest of the hiring things, so I am probably not in any danger there.

-Finally, FINALLY, I am able to really work. That sounds funny but I don't know how else to explain it. My incredibly draining 3rd period class leaves, and instead of curling up on the couch during 4th and reading a book or wishing it would all go away or eating mini Twix and pretending I'm not there, I can actually plan, or make handouts, or grade. And my plans make sense now. They're not just "Hey! Let's do this now, maybe!" Let the record show that I am not the shittiest teacher The Program has ever had, and it has taken me two years just to get here. To be fair, if I had always thought I would leave after two years I might have rushed things along, and put off my mental collapse for a later a-splosion. But the earthquake method - lots of little shakes to release the tension - seems to have worked well, and I am feeling really good right now, like I might someday get to be a really good teacher, if I do not murder my entire 3rd period and have to flee the country in the meantime.

-This week is state testing. YAY! or not. I'll go with not. I have my second period ALL DAY tomorrow - from 7:35 to a mercifully early 2:11. We are going to have loads of fun, us and our state-issued bubble sheets.

-Crazy upcoming weekend alert: Friday is prom and crazy teacher after-prom party (possibly at a hotel if assman science chair's new fiance's brother, who is a hotel manager, hooks us up), and then Saturday a couple of us drive up and spend a few days in the bay. Wooooooot.

-My ESL students are reading Romeo and Juliet! And they are getting it! Woooooooooot x 1000. Jackpot, I win the internets.

-Also, I got into my MA program, which starts in September. So I am about to be a Master of Education as well. Buahaha.

Friday, March 23, 2007

vacation check-in #1

Week 3 of my off-track time comes to an end today. Of fifteen "vacation" weekdays, I have spent ten at work or work-related activities (i.e. conferences), plus one Saturday and one Sunday. For once this is very little subbing (only one day of that, though at least five more are scheduled) and a whole lot of other stuff: planning my speech curriculum, attending to ESL duties, and co-authoring a grant. I'm not actually qualified to write a grant, but it paid better than my actual job and it's not like I'd had time to start any kind of projects at home. Besides, the amount of money going to the school, should we receive this thing, is staggering. Read all about it here, and laugh heartily at the line about "district support" for alternative applicants like ourselves, as you picture the grant-writing team subsisting on Gummy Bears and Orange Shasta for an entire week and shouting deleriously at each other about the trolls living under the 100 bungalows.

I learned a whole bunch of things while writing this grant, very few of them about grant writing (though ironically, there was a grant-writing workshop on campus every afternoon last week, and people kept interrupting us to ask where it was. Go away! We are faking our way through writing a grant!) You can learn a lot, it turns out, by interviewing people about their jobs and by digging through data sheets, but even more by simply sitting in the Assistant Principal's office for six days and looking busy. It's as though you're not even there. For example, I know everything there is to know about new schedule proposals for next year, including the much-discussed but never-defined Shadow and Twilight Classes. (Google these terms and see what you find. I was - and still am - convinced that we are making them up.) The idea is that instead of tutoring your struggling students after class, you pre-teach to them by creating a "shadow" period before their actual class, reviewing key concepts and letting them practice ahead of time. Then, when the bell rings for class to start, the other kids come in and join them. Frankly, I liked the idea of Shadow Classes better when we thought it meant a set of super-secret classes run deep under the earth by government ninjas. This is where the real learning happens.

As far as my original list is concerned, little progress has been made.

Finish knitting baby blanket for increasingly pregnant colleague: 1/5 complete and incredibly adorable. I also made a hat for my sister.
Plan curriculum for speech class: Generic plan done; one more all-SLC planning session scheduled for next month.
Plan wedding: Invitations worded and laid out but neither printed nor assembled. Dress bought. All other plans stalled.
Doctor, dentist, optometrist: No, no, no.
Attend friends’ wedding in Bay Area: Have yet to make hotel reservations.
Attend about 8 credentialing obligations: One attended, one ditched and accountability form falsified.
Clean apartment: Ongoing but trending positive
Break addictions: Successful when at home, unsuccessful when at work (ie 2/3 of the time.) Although a misplaced hoodie did force me to rush to work on Wednesday without stopping for a latte, and I did not die. It should be mentioned, however, that colleagues brought Starbucks brewed coffee and Krispy Kremes that day, which took the edge off somewhat.
Read non-Young Adult books: Well, you see... The problem is that this takes time. And mental energy. I have both of these things, but as you see, I am dividing them up in a whole lot of different directions right now. It helps that Heroes is off the air right now and that I've caught up to Aaron with regard to The Wire, but still, reading grown-up books takes a lot longer than kid books, even when they are delightful fluff. The other problem is that I (of course) bought a new stack of YA for the library that I have to read before going back to work. As it stands, I've only read about half of The Terror and the first third of American Gods. I'm so ashamed!

Thursday, March 01, 2007

who wants a latte?

I know I do.

Fawesome things I’ve read lately:

On the library door: The library is close!

In my student’s final essay, comparing belief systems across cultures:
Science believes that when you died thats it thats the end. When you die theres no walking around earth scaring people. When you die thats the end of the road for you.

Science is such a downer!

Then later:
Christian believes if your good and go to church you will go to heaven but if your not any of that you will go to hell. Which it is kind of scary if you think about it.

As far as I can tell, he means the religion, not a person named Christian.

From the minutes of the last School-Wide Design Team meeting:
What are the Principal’s and Professional Learning Communities roles in SLC?
• Focus on attitudes rather than behaviors
• Model behavior
• Promotes widespread participation by faculty indecision making

I have also read some decent books lately, though, disappointingly, none I would classify as “fawesome” - not even Scott Westerfeld’s Peeps, in which Westerfeld suspends his disbelief that people will not associate the name with, you know, PEEPS, and taps into a rich vein of hipness by having his characters constantly say things like "Dude!" and, in the preview of the sequel, "Fexcellent!" This is simply ludicrous; no one in their right mind would ever use anything like this formation. Anyway, Peeps, the instant-cool points it gains for being a non-genre novel about vampirism notwithstanding, is not even close to the quality of Westerfeld's sprawling-and-enthralling Uglies/Pretties/Specials trilogy. In case you were wondering.

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I had an hourlong conversation with one of my best, coolest students and one of my worst, most irritating students about video games and the intricacies of Harry Potter while entering final grades this morning. It turns out we all have quite a bit to talk about. Mester's end is always good for moments like these, when all the assignments are either in or not and the harrassment drops away on all sides. Even your most irritating students are surprisingly likeable when not trying to distract you, themselves, and/or the entire class from what you're trying to accomplish.

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Plans for off-track time:
• Finish knitting baby blanket for increasingly pregnant colleague (photos of knitting to come)
• Plan curriculum for speech class
• Plan wedding*
• Doctor, dentist, optometrist
• Attend friends’ wedding in Bay Area
• Attend about 8 credentialing obligations
• Clean apartment
• Break addictions**
• Read non-Young Adult books***

*Right, that.

**I resisted admirably for MONTHS before giving in to a combination of temptation and necessity and becoming, once again, a Corporate Coffee Whore. The alarm goes and my brain is like, day. stand. pants? lights. lights, pants. latte? latte! yes. tall soy latte blueberry muffin. muffin muffin muffin. Then it just continues on, stuck in that track, until the objective is achieved. I pretty much need the caffeine at this point, it’s true, but I am also addicted to the ritual. Even as I type this I am wondering if I should erase this addendum and amend the bullet point to “Get up early; spend mornings reading over latte.” Effing Starbucks mind control.

***The shortlist includes The Terror, No God But God, The Blank Slate, No Logo, Perfume, Fraud, In the Heart of the Sea, and American Gods (intended for classroom library use and hence YA-ish but at least not dealing with Older Boys Who Expect Too Much And Move Too Fast.)

Aren't vacations relaxing?

Thursday, February 22, 2007

chuggin' along

I’ve been much less prolific in my posting recently than in semesters past, and when I have posted, it’s largely been in reaction to my administration, not my students. The thing is, my students are still brilliant and hilarious and prone to non sequiturs of the best sort. I love them, but I’m used to them, in a way. They bring me a feeling of deep contentedness, which is great but rarely inspires me to post. Administration, on the other hand, makes the worst kind of non sequiturs a veritable lifestyle, usually resulting in damage to my room, paycheck, or general health and well-being. After awhile people won’t listen to you yell anymore, and you must turn to the web.

That being said, the kids are the only reason I show up to work in the morning, let alone look forward to it, so I don’t know why I think people will keep coming back to this blog if it’s all administration, no kid.

KID STORY #1: The other day, I don’t know, there was something in the water and not one but two of my boys in my morning class spilled the sad and sordid details of their personal lives to me, up to and including their crews joining up with dangerous gangs, their frequent meth use, their friends’ meth addiction, other friends dying in drive-bys, families moving back to their home countries without them, the hovering threat of OT, near-miss violent confrontations, arrest in front of girlfriends’ already skeptical parents, raising stepsiblings more or less alone, fear of their own mortality, and mothers who have never hugged them or said “I Love You.” This all from, I remind you, two boys.

It is so interesting teaching ESL, because I have known one of these kids since he barely spoke a word of English, when he was just a punk middle-school type, and now he’s this articulate person with a whole world of concerns he never wanted to have, and I’ve seen him grow and change and become this new person and I’ve helped him – though not nearly as much as I should have – to develop the skills to express himself. I like him a lot better now – he really was a punk at first – and I worry about him a lot. If even half of this stuff is true (which I believe it is, and if you can believe this, I’ve omitted a lot more that I think is questionable) he’s got a lot more to deal with than anyone I know who’s my age, and a lot less support and fewer resources to do it with. I really want to believe that things will turn out OK for him. In fact, I sort of have to.

In case you’re wondering, I’m not wishing ill on the other kid. I’m just a lot more certain he’ll come out of things OK – even if that does mean, for him, joining the Marines. Thanks, cult of RTOC!

KID STORY #2: I have three rules of listening to music while working independently in my class. 1) No blatant misogyny. 2) No excessive profanity. 3) No “Smack That.” They complained at first but now, when the song comes on, someone wordlessly gets up within the first few beats and turns the radio off for just about 3 minutes. It’s pretty cute, actually.

So of course you’ve got the kids who are sassy – and yes, sassy is the right word. They will come up behind you with their headphones in, playing this song just loud enough for you to hear. They will serenade you on their way into the classroom. And yes, when you are teaching literary devices, they will realize that “smack” is an onomatopoetic word and start singing it as they take notes. You will laugh heartily, and they will be amazed, and you will realize that despite what you have been told by administration, you do not smile enough.

KID STORY #3: This one made me smile: my 9th grade boys, tumbling through my door before class like someone had tipped out a bag of marbles, standing in front of the Greek gods and goddesses posters we’d been collaging all week, arguing at a shout (a volume they seem incapable of operating below) about which god or goddess was best represented.

F: Zeus is the best! The women? The thunder? “Make the ground rumble”?!?
R: What? Poseidon! Poseidon is the best! Look at that…eel thing!
E: How is that the best? Where is Poseidon? I don’t see any Poseidon!
R: That’s because he is THERE! (jabbing at the world OLYMPUS, cut from a camera ad)

Also, note the general spike in participation by my skater kids since Hades entered the educational arena.

GENERAL NEWS #1: Ms. McD and I started a game club on Wednesday afternoons, where we sit around eating pizza and deepening students’ symbolic thinking skills via cutthroat All-Play rounds of Pictionary. I whupped a bunch of McD’s honors kids at Quiddler last night, which probably should not have felt as good as it did.

GENERAL NEWS #2: My SLC is really getting it together for the next two years, creating culturally relevant curriculum and planning activities to foster student investment in the community, and I AM GETTING A SPEECH CLASS!!! A year ago I never would have considered this a possibility, but things are changing: we’re more organized, I’m gaining slightly more respect and seniority, and the fates have aligned favorably for once. It will be a combination speech/leadership class with hand-picked kids in the 10th grade and above – a nice counterbalance to my all-freshman, all the time-style ESL classes.

GENERAL NEWS #3: The kids are reading more and writing better, especially the ELLs. It is pathetic, really, how my heart swells when I see a page of writing containing the future perfect tense with the correct, participial form of an irregular verb.

ADMINISTRATION IN BRIEF:

Trust me, you’ll want to hear these.

-One of our APs confessed to a social studies teacher that she believes herself to be the reincarnation of a French soldier from World War I. She does not see anything remotely strange about either the past life or bringing it up during a post-observation evaluation.

-Another of our APs – the highly competent, almost-fortyish fellow in charge of student discipline, in fact – was arrested on campus during lunch the other day, guns a-wavin’, for pulling a gun on the stepfather of a student from his former school when said student, jealous that she had been left for another student, threatened to reveal that they had been in a relationship.

And finally, a partial list of the books I have read in-class since we instituted sustained silent reading four months ago:
Bone 1-9, A Series of Unfortunate Events 1-4 and 7-13, Sorcery and Cecelia -or- The Enchanted Chocolate Pot, The Grand Tour, The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass, Blankets, Good-Bye Chunky Rice, Dreamland, This Lullaby, Someone Like You, Tenderness, Lush, Stuck in Neutral, Running Loose, Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes, The Princess Academy, Bound, The Perks of Being A Wallflower, Speak, Running With Scissors, The Handmaid's Tale.

I can heartily reccommend most of these books, and I can most definitely reccommend setting aside an hour a day to read. I feel so much more balanced, I can't even tell you.

Friday, January 19, 2007

the furniture wars

First and foremost: I'm alive!

That much was probably obvious. Less obvious has been that I'm still teaching. In fact, I'm teaching the perfect tenses right now, and Greek mythology, and how to craft a strong thesis and write a timed essay in under 40 minutes. So I'm doing all types of real teaching, as opposed to the BS-y fake teaching I did last year. This is not to say that I'm doing any of it well, but they say that comes in the third year.

The big drama at work is furniture-centric right now. It's sparked hours of ranting and raving, so I'll try to pare down to the bare minimum here. What you need to know is: our desks suck, and they suck hard. So, the five of us in the farthest-back rooms have fought and wheedled and coerced and gotten tables for most of our rooms, which rule.

About a week before the winter mini-break, we get this memo saying we are getting BRAND NEW DESKS AND CHAIRS for students and teachers and every single room that coming Wednesday!

Pause right here and remember that my school holds about 3600 students at any given time. How many desks and chairs is that, to move in one day?

So they give us these little paper signs, about five flourescent orange reading REMOVE and five flourescent pink reading DO NOT REMOVE. They are only for student and teacher desks as - this will become important - nothing else is to be removed at this time. I take it upon myself to coordinate the five rooms and make sure everything is labeled how it needs to be; this takes about half a day with all the attendant copying, taping, and phoning of off-track people, as we rotate these rooms in "pods" of three teachers for any given pair of rooms. This makes sense in a track-school kind of way and someday, if you are very lucky, I will explain it.

All through break I can't sleep for these vivid and recurring nightmares that I will come back to my room and it will be empty, or that my huge beautiful library tables will have been traded in for cheapie uncomfortable desks. When we come back and I find my room untouched, I am hugely relieved. Riley's room, next door, is a little different. They've taken out her 40 student desks and replaced them with 30 new ones. They've left her teachers' desk, as requested, but they have also put in a new teacher's desk, upside down, next to it. She puts in a maintenance request, but nobody comes for it.

Cool.

A week later, Friday afternoon, and we're still in our rooms at 5:00 for some god-unknown reason. Good thing, because some dude in a coverall sticks his head in and is like, "I'm here about the new furniture?"

Whaaa?

So we are insistent. We DO NOT want new furniture. We watch as he writes DO NOT REMOVE EXISTING FURNITURE in caps all across the instructions on the door. As an added precaution, I leave Mr. Junior Bacon Cheeseburger with what I hope is the cheerful but stern message, "Thank you for NOT removing my tables!" We leave feeling fairly secure that our directions are clear.

Come Tuesday, we enter through my room, where everything is still aces. Riley's room, however, now contains 40 student desks, her old teacher desk, her new upside-down teacher desk, and still a third teacher desk, shoved into the back corner of the room, blocking the fridge, microwave, and door into my room. Mysteriously missing is this amazing wooden table that I swore on several holy books that I would protect as it belonged to our insane dean. This is another story, and a pretty good one at that, but just now the (table-shaped) hole in my heart is too fresh a wound. I have been in alternate stages of denial and rage about it all week. That was my perch, man. My perch.

Riley is more or less just livid. We spend half an hour before school moving seven student desks and one teacher desk outside. The other one is too deep in the room, and too heavy to turn right-side-up. We throw a tablecloth over it, and it slumbers there still. She makes another maintenance request. From this we learn:
-Maintenance is angry that the new desks are outside, regardless of the fact that her room was so crowded we physically could not move around.
-We had been scheduled, all along, to receive our new furniture in this second wave. This second wave that not one teacher in the entire school was informed of.
-Riley's first set of new desks, then, was not actually supposed to be hers. It was in her room as "storage," despite the fact that her room is clearly in use, and that we are literally next door to a completely empty, abandoned wood shop.
-When they came the second week, they did not just add 10 desks. They took out the 30 desks "stored" in her room and put in 40 brand-new ones.
-My perch has been taken to salvage.
-As we were told all furniture taken from those rooms went to salvage, we can only assume this includes the 30 week-old desks that were removed to make way for this fresh batch.

Mr. JBC says:

Thursday, January 04, 2007