happy tuesday!

And a very happy one it was, as it was a short day. For on-track teachers this meant an hour and a half of PD; for me, the sub, it meant going home at 2pm. I tried the new bus-metro method I've worked out for getting to the new apartment; it is gloriously simple. A complete success.

In fact, I had a few successes today:

I walked into an alien classroom this morning and, before I could even take stock of my situation, students were calling out, "Hi, Ms. L!" and hastily putting their cell phones away.
(Technically that would be Miss L. They are not good on the whole Miss/Ms. thing, though they seem to understand it intellectually after our feminism mini-lesson. I am picking my battles, and this is not really one of them.)

Upon discovery that said classroom's regular teacher was out longer than expected and had not left enough work, one unfamiliar student asked, in a very familiar gleeful tone, if we would be having free time. Again, before I could say a word, one of my long-term students more or less shouted, "Yeah, right! You know we be doin' work in Ms. L's class."

This felt better than I can describe with all the words that I know or can reasonably expect anyone (apart from Amelie) to comprehend.

Also, when checking out this afternoon (at 2 pm - did I mention that part?), the principal's secretary told me that another teacher had requested me for Thursday morning. I am being requested! In addition to being formally asked by the SSLC to continue covering this long-term spot!

It's like being asked to a high-school dance. And then a party on the weekend. By separate boys.

It is not quite like being asked out by boys you like - more like those early dating years when you are not yet discerning enough to decide whether you like them or not, or to have realized that such things matter. It's definitely more about being liked than by whom.

Less fun things:

I have one of those pounding, splitting headaches that makes you lose your equilibrium and your head sway side-to-side. I am attributing it to a combination of dehydration, inadequate nutrition, sleep deprivation, stress, noise, eye strain, smog (which is drying out my eyes and all-around aggravating my allergies) and shifting rapidly and repeatedly from darkness to harsh brightness and back again - otherwise known as "my lifestyle." Does anyone else get these?

I have officially lost my taste for both soda and fast-food french fries. In addition to not tasting good, they both make me very, very sick to my stummy.

Root beer is still OK.

We are moving this weekend, which entails finishing painting the new apartment tomorrow (in the lurid brights I so adore), packing this apartment on Thursday, and driving up to the bay on Friday evening so the four of us (me, Aaron, Jody and Seb) can pick up all of our remaining possessions, jam them into a truck, and drive back down again. I do not anticipate having any free time to see anyone, which makes me really sad and lonely, but I'm telling myself (probably not incorrectly) that they're all so busy with classes right now that they wouldn't be free to see me anyhow. Also, the baby shower (Aaron's sister) is on Saturday, so I must finish the sweater before then. All the pieces are done now; I just have to stitch it together and do the design work. This will probably happen tonight, despite the whole splitting-pounding-balance-losing business.

Assigned the students the prologue to Kindred tonight and warned them that they would be quizzed tomorrow. As the prologue is two and a half pages long, I am steeling myself for the gut-blow of how many students fail the thing. Not to have low expectations or anything, but some of them wouldn't even carry the (264-page paperback) book home with them as it was "too heavy."

My job is awesome.

back on campus

After last week's "vacation" (ie 40 hours of professional development,) it is back to the sub's life for me. On my triumphant return, I discovered:

• My school is now approximately 85% less competent.
  I arrived this morning to see that Mr. B, 1/9 of our Assistant Principal force and the man in charge of assigning subs, coordinating and ordering resources and technology, and working with new teachers, among other things, was not at his ordinary post in front of the gates, greeting the students and turning away those in blatant dress code violation. Instead, it was Campus South's principal, Mr. B's boss, looking grim. In the front offices, no one knew what sub jobs were open or what the plan was for the day. Once in a classroom, I noted that the voice making the morning announcements over the loudspeaker was not, as it should be, Mr. B's. While Mr. B has been absent from time to time, this seemed different, unplanned - and nothing was going right. It took another few hours before someone confirmed my worst fears: Mr. B quit last week, apparently in frustration at the lack of support he had in running the school more or less single-handedly. I can't really blame him -he had to lie in bed every night and wonder, What do the other 8 APs do? Anyway, I'm sure he got a job at a better school which will hopefully realize his worth. As for us...well, God help us now.
  
  
• My long-term position was dissolved...and undissolved.
  Apparently they got rid of all but two English classes, then had a balancing meeting and decided they could keep the class after all. A teacher has been hired, but she is at another school right now and needed to give them notice. I will be the sub for the next two weeks, until she gets here. The drama classes are gone (praise Jebus) and some new English classes are being brought in. Additionally, the head of the SLC, who has been laying the smack down on these kids the last few days, has come up with a list of assignments which need to be done in the next two weeks and which will be part of the students' permanent grades. So, that takes away the planning element, leaving me free to ward off student advances, confiscate cell phones, encourage/cajole/beg students to work...
  
  
• The drug problem is that serious.
  I haven't witnessed much of it myself, though friends and colleagues have busted kids for smoking pot and sniffing glue on campus, and in one very special episode, actually doing meth in class. Today, though, we had to drag our kids back into first period because we had paramedics in the main building, and no one had bothered to make the Please stay in your classrooms announcement until after students had already begun flooding out into the hallways. (This would not have been the case had Mr. B been there.) Once we got the all-clear, a distinctly not-Mr. B voice announced that we'd had four students ill and that the paramedics had needed the hallways clear to tend to them. Four? One is a seizure. 75 is food poisoning. But four can only be drugs.
  
  
• Vacation makes everything easier to deal with.
  Even if it is professional development.
  
  

out of the classroom!

I'm in professional development this week, getting trained to use my program. Exciting! It's a five-day training with three days of follow-up over the rest of the school year, and if today was any indication, there will be enough material to comfortably fill about 1/3 of that time. The worst thing about it, apart from the length (for which my years of schooling have more than adequately prepared me), is the veteran teachers. Some of them are wonderful. Others are bitter, angry, prone to derailing the conversation, incapable of turning off their snarky running commentary, and generally much worse-behaved than I would tolerate from a classroom of teenagers. Additionally, one gentleman who has been in the profession for "30 or 40 years" is given to asking things like, between English Language Learners and monolingual English speakers with extreme difficulty reading, "which ones are dumber."

It's horrible to say, but I am glad not to be at school, the reason being that my long-term position will not be there when I get back. Long story short: A-track, being closest to the traditional calendar, is very popular and thus generally overpopulated. My school attempted to correct for this, and in fact corrected for it so well that there are now "too many classes" and "not enough students," necessitating the speedy removal of seven or eight teaching positions. My sub spot, as an unfilled position, is an obvious target, as it involves no actual firing. So it is back to day-to-day for me. Sigh.

Problems with this scenario:

• "Dehired" teachers likely to leave for other schools in frustration rather than shifting to still-unfilled B and C track positions
• Not sure how a track with "not enough students" still has classes where students must sit on the floor
• School is still aggressively trying to OT students who were late on the first day of school, regardless of their attendance, behavior, and work habits in the meantime
• Day-to-day blows

Clarification: "OT" means "Opportunity Transfer" which means "we are sick of yo' shit and are shipping yo' ass to another school." An opportunity, theoretically, to start fresh, as though you're not blacklisted from the minute staff realizes you're there (which is the second you set foot on campus.) I have heard of students being OT'd at least six times.

It's not like these kids are all hard cases with one too many strikes against them. Two case studies in the educational burlesque that is the OT:

Shaun, a junior, member of the varsity basketball team. Sits by himself when his teammates do groupwork so he will not be distracted; asks for comprehension strategies and reads with silent, ferocious determination. Says, unprompted, that his biggest goal is to be the first in his family to go to college. Takes extra time to explain the assignment to Jamaal. Is in his seat, on time and prepared, every day.
Jamaal, another junior, also on the team. A SpEd student who loves to make people laugh and who has trouble with comprehension of verbal instructions but who checks himself when he gets too distracted and will not let you leave until he understands what to do. Also in his seat, on time, prepared, each and every day.

Last week both of these boys had looks of real distress, and when I asked them what was wrong, they told me the same thing: They're OTing me. I was late on the first day.

I told them, call your mom. Go get your coach. Get all your teachers - anyone who will fight for you. Nothing - nothing - makes me angrier than an educational system that works to weed out students who are desperate to learn.

not a rant

Last week was Hell Week as far as subbing was concerned, with me running class-to-class baby-sitting more or less feral children, as they all become when they go weeks on end without a consistent teacher for more than two days in a row.

Then I got hooked up with these really cushy jobs. We have some new teachers who did their student teaching here and were hired, but are still finishing up their last credentialing classes or haven't done their mandatory training week with The District, so they require a credentialed presence in the classsroom at all times. That was my job. I was more or less an FA - chilling behind the desk, making notes, helping students with their work. My mentor was responsible for my getting these cushy jobs, as he thought it would be good for me and the other teachers to gain different perspectives. He also wanted to displace the sub who had been filling this position in one particular social studies classroom, as he has the unfortunate tendency to commandeer the lesson from the teacher and preach God's word to the students. So he got kicked out and I was moved in. He was not happy.

Then we found out he'd gotten moved next door to an open long-term English position. You know - the kind I have been asking for since before I went off-track. The kind no one was aware we had available. After a few days someone did the complicated math and moved me into the English class, displacing "Mr. Church," as my kids call him, once more. Now he is day-to-day again, meaning he's taken a cut from ZZ (long-term) pay. Boy, does he hate me. He will not even look at me when we run into each other at the sign-out counter.

The English position has three preps, meaning I must prepare for and teach three different subjects per day. They are: English 10, American Lit, and Drama. Drama?!? Out of two full classes, only two students wanted the class. The rest were just sort of put there. One of the drama classes is a delight; the other requires constant maintenance. In American Lit today we started reading The Things They Carried (the short story, not the larger collection.) It took all period to get started because none of them had any clue what Vietnam was all about. As in, I asked what would have been going on in the world when O'Brien got out of college in 1968 and they were like, World War 2! Me: No, that was in the early 40s. Them: Oh. Uh...Pearl Harbor! One period was really into it and listened intently to my shoddy explanations of geopolitical intrigue. The other period, my last of the day, kind of made me want to die inside. The one girl giving me the most grief was like "I wish I had never come to school today. I am never coming to this class again." I told her, "Well, that's your choice. But I'll be here, and I hope you come back."

Pants. On. Fire.

Again, though, most of my kids are insanely sweet and really just need structure.

They did get one of their previous subs fired, though. At least, one girl did, and then transferred out of the class. The rest of the class is up in arms about it and I notice she hasn't been around lately, which is probably wise. The story is that she asked the sub, who was "tight as hell" and "real," about how drugs get into the US, and then went to the office and told them he was telling the class about drugs, which got him into trouble. I don't know the specifics; the social studies teacher I was FAing for tells me that kids used to say he talked about "weird stuff" even before this, but never specified what said "stuff" was. All I know is, he's gone and my students feel terrible about it, especially since it brought Mr. Church down upon them. This is also an excellent reminder never to trust your students with anything of real importance to you. This sounds like low expectations but really it's just covering your own ass. Example: the first of many students to tell me this story reported that "We were supposed to go to the dean and tell him what happened. But...we forgot."

I started school last week. I have class every Monday night and all day Saturday a few times a month. It's not hard, just inconvenient, though located very close to the apartment.

That being said, we're moving! We have new apartmenty goodness all lined up; the lease is signed and we get the keys on Thursday. It's cute and very cat-friendly, just like me and Aaron, so we will soon be an even larger, furrier, happier family.

Rant #2: Documentation

Back at Berkeley, I remember the reactionaries at BAMN endlessly shrieking about boosting minority enrollment. At the time I thought them short-sighted for focusing on the last step of a systemic problem, effectively protesting the symptom rather than the disease. They should be looking, I thought, for a long-term solution, not a band-aid: ways to make sure more minority students are prepared to go to college, made competitive by any standards, so this perpetual fight about quotas, lowered standards, and the displacement of qualified white and Asian students can someday end organically.

I've only been in LA for a few months, but it's already clear that my stance was not broad or strong enough. I was (and am) deeply concerned with the institutionalized racism that prevents minority students from achieving at the same levels as their more affluent caucasian counterparts, but I had largely ignored another issue: that of the children of "undocumented workers" or "illegal immigrants" or whatever else you want to call them. Like it or not, a significant percentage of minority (ie Latino) students in Los Angeles are undocumented. Many of them are in my ESL classes or have gone through the ESL program in the past, and many of their families chose to relocate to this country because of the educational opportunities it affords. The irony is that while all students are all entitled to go to high school, their undocumented status prevents them, unless they have private funding, from going to college. Ever tried securing a federal loan without a social security number?

As a result, some incredibly bright and highly qualified students are prevented from going any further than community college. Of 500 students graduating from my school last year, 174 were undocumented, many of them at the top of their class. Lest you think that being "at the top of the class" in a low-performing urban high school means nothing, consider our '05 valedictorian, who in her senior year passed five AP exams across multiple disciplines - English literature, statistics, environmental science, biology, and Spanish language - and now attends prestigious Long Beach City College. This year, the top two contenders for valedictorian are in the same boat. My colleagues joke thinly about marrying them off to American citizens.

It's true that not all undocumented students far outperform the national average. For every student like our valedictorian, there are a handful more who simply shut down and stop trying at all. When you ask them why, they explain to you, quite simply, that since they cannot go to college in this country, they see no point in preparing for it. It's a tough point to debate.

We need to take a good, hard look at our national values. We claim to value hard work, education, and self-improvement above all else. But who works harder than those who come to our country and do the exhausting physical and "menial" labor that native-born, "established" Americans would never touch? Who works harder than their children, who often come here neither speaking nor reading a word of the language, who must become fluent despite home lives conducted primarily if not entirely in Spanish, who daily must prove themselves and their right to be here?

If people want to do something about the racial and ethnic makeup of our colleges and universities, instead of just screaming about it, they'd do well to divide their problems between these dual problems: Why are so few minority students adequately prepared for college? And why are some highly qualified minority students kept out?

------------------------------------------------------

An interesting sidenote: between previewing texts for my English class, I'm working on Reefer Madness, Eric Schlosser's follow-up to the bestselling Fast Food Nation. It's a collection of three long essays discussing America's black-market staples: marijuana, pornography, and unpaid labor. The labor section discusses the worst-off of California's immigrant farm workers, the strawberry pickers, and focuses on three geographic areas: San Diego, Santa Maria, and Watsonville/Salinas. So it seems that I'm from all the interesting places in terms of the study of misery.

Madness, incidentally, would be a great book to read while you're waiting for Shame of the Nation to come out.

Rant #1: Kozol

If you've done any kind of social justice study, you've probably heard of, if not read, Jonathan Kozol. Over the last 40-ish years he's written a number of excellent and important books on the underserved, overlooked and otherwise dispossessed of our society, including Amazing Grace, Ordinary Ressurections, Death at an Early Age, and Rachel and her Children. I first read his work two years ago, on a dreary break from school when I found myself cooped up in my barracks-style apartment with nothing much to do and nothing new to read. Wandering between the apartment's two rooms, I happened on a stack of my sister's sociology texts, and picked the one that looked least dry. It turned out to be Savage Inequalities, a searing indictment of the United States' segregated public school system. It was one of those books that didn't tell you anything new, per se, just forced you to look at an uncomfortable problem very long, and very hard. It is one thing to acknowledge that schools in poor, largely minority areas are "worse" than schools in affluent white areas. It is quite another to realize what that really means, every day, for the students of those schools. How can you read about schools with sewage leaks, schools without books or desks, schools located in abandoned, windowless rollerskating rinks, without anger and disgust welling up inside, without being angry with yourself for having nothing to give but hand-wringing and tears? It was while reading this book that I remember, for the first time, thinking, I shouldn't be teaching English in Africa or Asia. I am needed here.

The last Kozol I read was Amazing Grace. I carried it with me while I was going through the district hiring process, which, much like a DMV appointment, can involve hours of patiently waiting in flourescent-lit rooms full of the irate unemployed. A colleague glanced at my book and, spying its subtitle -The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation - told me it was an appropriate choice. This subtitle is dead-on for what we do in The Program: it's about education, yes, but moreover, it's about realizing that in our society as it is currently structured, education can determine the rest of your life - and about having the conscience to act on that realization. My colleague asked if it was worth reading. I told her yes, and also that I read Kozol when I have trouble getting mad. Because really, it's amazing how quickly we become inured to the injustices of society. Those of us from Berkeley are familiar with the cycle: at first you're shocked by the amount of homelessness you see, and you want to help, but you soon start to feel powerless. As time passes, that apathy changes to avoidance, and you shift your eyes away from their gaze; you tell yourself you need your change as much or more than they do. Eventually you become irritated with them - begging all the time, smelling so foul, sitting in your way when you're trying to get to class. You can fight these feelings, but if you don't, they can sneak up on you and catch you unawares.

I have been at my school for just two weeks, and already I am used to it: the lack of bathrooms, the shortage of teachers, the complete absence of keys, the library closed to the students, the "Tardy Sweep" that forces any student late to class to spend the entire period rotting in detention, the track system that robs them of 21 educational days per year - over the course of a K-12 education placing them one full year behind students on traditional calendars. I don't like these things - I outright despise them - but I am not surprised by them anymore. They have become the status quo.

And then, the other day, I looked in my box in the main office and found a copy of an excerpt from Kozol's new book, The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America. The book comes out in two weeks, but Harper's Magazine is running a long essay adapted from the text as its September Report. The book was researched over five years, with Kozol visiting 60 schools in 11 states. The Harper's excerpt focuses heavily on mine.

Is this what you call "coming full circle?" Or is it called "getting what you asked for"? I read Kozol and I wanted to teach in those schools, the ones he talked about. So here I am, suddenly free of any doubt that this is indeed the kind of place he was talking about. He came here, and he talked to our students. And this is what he has to say about our school:

We have fifteen fewer bathrooms than the number required by law.

Bathrooms are so rarely open and operational that students often must go the whole day without using them.

Many rooms lack air conditioners and become so hot that students become sick and cannot focus.

The only vocational classes we offer prepare students for low-paying jobs: cosmetology, sewing, hairdressing.

We in fact offer two levels of hairdressing: hairstyling and braiding.

We force students into these classes, even those who request high-level and AP courses, because academic classes are overcrowded and few.

We force students into classes like "Life Skills," which teach things like the names and locations of the continents.

Rats have been documented in 11 classrooms and the kitchen.

Attending my school teaches students that they are not wanted by society.

All of these things are true.

So here I sit, pissed off at myself, because it is somehow so much easier to get angry about these things when you see them on the page than when you see them every day. Moreover, it is easy to get angry in theory, but to take absolutely no action. I am realizing how many times, already, I have told my students, "I'm sorry, that's just how it is," or, "I don't like it either, but you'll have to bear with me." They come to class hungry as their breaks aren't long enough to purchase food and eat it, and I am instructed not to let them eat; they spend their brief passing periods in line for the bathroom but never make it in, and I can't send them out because they'll get caught in the infernal Tardy Sweep, regardless of whether I write them a pass. My school is a bit militaristic this way, and completely illogical; they believe that students should be in class learning at all times, a proposition I agree with wholeheartedly until the student I have sent out for three minutes, to return much happier and more able to focus in my class, is detained and denied the right to return to the classroom for the remainder of the hour.

I remember Program veterans telling me, early on, that you have to decide if your loyalty is to The Program or to your school. I'm realizing that this is something of a false choice. Everyone involved is ostensibly trying to help my students, and "choosing a side" doesn't necessarily do much for me or them one way or the other. In the end, I think, I need to remember (as I always try to) that my loyalty is to my students. Crucially, though, I must act on it. I have students in classes like fashion, cosmetology, and the ubiquitous "Life Skills" (which one of my Program colleagues, interestingly, has been assigned to teach.) I have students taking "soccer" as part of their academic day, and also "filmmaking," which might be great, although I'm not entirely certain we own any kind of filmmaking equipment, and I'm certain students wouldn't be able to take it off-campus. I don't know what I can do about these things, especially in my first year. I do know, though, that I can be the teacher who makes my kids read a few young adult novels in addition to their ESL program, and who pushes my seniors to read tough novels and write long essays no matter what I'm told about what they are and are not capable of. I can start investigating the AP situation, how many we have and what I would have to do to start one up in the coming year and on my track. Our school has some AP classes, but in a school of 5,000 with three separate tracks, there can really never be enough.

Anyhow. The question for me is mostly how to hang on to my anger, and then how to turn that anger into a better life for my students. It would help me, though, if other people would get angry, too, so they might scream at me when it seems like I'm accepting my situation. So, if you can, go to the newsstand or the library and read that Harper's piece. If you are out of country, it may take awhile for the expat bookstores to get this month's issue, if they stock Harper's at all, and I certainly don't expect you to buy the thing at import cost - but maybe you could keep an eye out, too, and read the thing on the sly. I could even mail photocopies, if people were interested. As for me, I'll be buying the book when it comes out. The reality is that sometimes it's easier for me to believe what's in black and white than what's all around me every day. No one wants to believe they're surrounded by misery.

Week Two: Still going strong(-ish)

This week I started my temporary career as a day-to-day sub. Anecdotes/observations from the past three days:

• 2: Number of classrooms I was sent to which contained no students
  2: Number of classrooms I was sent to which already contained another sub
  1: Number of classrooms I was sent to which contained the actual teacher
  0: Number of times I have held a room key - any room key - in my hand
  
  
• Covering four periods of geometry, I initially thought kids were having trouble with their algebra review worksheets because they had forgotten the order of operations. They had, but that wasn't the whole problem. They had also forgotten their times tables. They did not seem to realize that they could just do the (admittedly tedious) addition; instead, they sat staring at their papers until I came around to each one individually and helped them through their problems. They were intially suspicious of this seemingly foreign practice, but by the end a few expressed regret that I was not staying in their class. Little do they know: I have entirely forgotten any geometry I ever knew.
  
  
• Covering one peiod of special ed, I had some students who read more fluently than my seniors, and others who could neither read nor write at all. One boy labored over his name for several minutes, then told me that his classes mostly consist of teachers "helping [him] spell." I intellectually knew it when I declined to check the "Special Ed" box on my application to The Program, but I really, really know it now: teaching SpEd is a whole other job than "regular" and ESL teaching (already two very different jobs.) It requires a whole other set of skills an an arsenal of personalized tactics and support strategies. I have the hugest respect for the good special ed workers out there. There are many - though of course, nowhere near enough.
  
  
• High school sports directors should not be allowed in the classroom. Today I covered for the sports director, who was on campus all day setting up for tonight's football game but who pounced on me the minute he overheard me asking who needed a sub. His students did not know what class they were in (all levels of English, incidentally, though the room betrays no hint of it) and told me he intends to "start teaching on Tuesday" when there's no first-game-of-the-season to worry about. I spent much of the morning flashing back to my own high school biology class, the bulk of which was spent sans teacher as he made equipment- and scheduling-related phone calls from the storeroom.
  
  
• The administration at my school is a joke. We have two principals and nine assistant principals. No one seems to know all their names or what they all do; the two principals are engaged in a protracted battle of one-upmanship and active undermining of the other camp. The schools is being divided into two campuses, North and South, which communicate by radio when at all and may be on different schedules next year. As the student who led me around campus on my first observation day astutely remarked, "There should only be one king for every kingdom." Not wanting to undermine my administrators before my first day of work, I told him that was true, if we automatically assumed we were dealing with a monarchic system. But even then, I knew he was right.
  
  
• All those people, and still, no one knows what the hell is going on. Who needs subs? Where is the person in charge of subs? How do I get to the top of the day-to-day list? No one has been able to answer any of these questions, with the exception, today, of "Where is the person in charge." (The answer, incidentally, was "Not here.") I have just been showing up every morning and asking who needs coverage. There is almost always someone, though I usually have to ask about four different people, and yesterday I got stuck in the principal's office for one period, helping the secretaries out with data entry. I debated refusing to do it, as it's about ten thousand leagues outside my job description, but they really needed the help, and besides, I was getting paid for the time. I also learned a lot about my school, not so much from the data I was entering as from all the gossip and backbiting you overhear when you're sitting in a high-traffic area in the chair of someone who most people routinely ignore anyway. It was a good experience to have, but I won't do it again - it felt too weird, like being back in middle school when I used to help my mom and the secretaries at her school make up student packets and end-of-summer mailings.
  
  
• Overcrowding is a real problem, and no one quite knows how to fix it. However, we also have the equally severe and completely solveable problem of uneven student distribution. First period geometry, for instance, had thirteen students; fifth period of the same exact class had about 50. They covered every available surface, including desk- and tabletops. A few refused to sit on the floor to do their work, as the floors have not been cleaned in months. I could not in good conscience force them to.
  
  
• I was intitially fearful of subbing, but in my incredibly limited experiences so far, other peoples' kids have been great. They have nothing to prove with me, there's that permanent Day One taboo against stepping too far out of line, and there's no grading involved at all. Of course, the experience is a thousand times better when there is a lesson plan waiting, which is not always the case. My plan this labor-dabor weekend is to make up a small Emergency Sub Kit which I can use in unprepared classrooms and leave for my own sub if I ever have a sudden emergency that's so big I can't spare ten minutes to scrawl a rough outline of the next day's activities.
  
  
• I finally went to the textbook room. As I suspected, it took over an hour to inspect and preview all my options. The selection is wonderful - I was hoping to find "a modern play or two," but instead found Jean-Paul Sartre, August Wilson, Eugene O'Neill, Lorraine Hainsberry, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, George Bernard Shaw, and Tom Stoppard. I was crossing my fingers for several specific novels, including 1984, The Bell Jar, Things Fall Apart, and Snow Falling on Cedars. All were present. I was pleasantly surprised by books like The Stranger, The Sound and the Fury, Catch-22, Slaughterhouse-Five, Heart of Darkness - all rich and complex works whose presence seemed too much to hope for. Maya Angelou and Barbara Kingsolver were both there - but so were Toni Morrison, Isabel Allende, Octavia Butler, Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, and Alice Munro. And of course, let's not forget Sandra Cisneros.
  
  
• The textbook lady seems to like me a lot more now, presumably since I spent so much time poring over the stacks. I must say, I like her too - she does her job well and she's clearly there for the kids.
  
  
• I wrote a couple of big rants this week, one about undocumented students and one about Jonathan Kozol. Stay tuned.