by popular demand

you may, should you desire, make your donation to my half-marathoning here. Just scroll on down and search by my first and last name. I also have paper-type forms, or at least I will, just as soon as I undo the organizational damage we did by cleaning house this weekend. The place looks awesome, though.

and other quarter-life crises.

Let's see. You have graduated from college, gotten engaged, entered a field and taken a position for which you are woefully unqualified, and gotten a big gnarly tattoo. Two actually. So what's next?

All type of things, as it turns out. I went out to Old Town Pasadena (the O.T.) this weekend and bought myself some crazy expensive new toys, in the form of a new macbook (the extra a-spensive black one, no less) and a printer/scanner dealie and a nano, the latter two of which were more or less free after my educator discount and the "we're unveiling a new model soon"-style promo. Technically this wasn't all that frivolous as my work machine, always imperiled, is down at the moment, and the Major has ripped several keys off my iron-age Dell, which weighed about seven stone to begin with. But yes, I do feel cooler, thank you for asking. It even has a built-in camera that does all kinds of nonsensical effects. Observe:















Then last week I did a phenomenally stupid thing and allowed a colleague to peer-pressure me into signing up to run the Disneyland half-marathon. No, unfortunately, your eyes do not deceive you. She's just so efficient; she asks you if you're into it and then while you're still on the mild high of being a great person, before the reality kicks in, she's whipping out the registration form and offering to fax it in for you and that's that. Anyway, my first action upon realizing what I'd done was to turn around and peer-pressure a bunch of other friends an colleagues into joining us, so that between her peer pressure and mine, our posse is seven deep. May and I have already begun sort of pre-training in the form of edging around the Silverlake Reservoir and realizing just how very out of shape we are. I have budding shin splints today, but as of tomorrow evening, I'm back out there, hopefully up at Griffith Park, where the ground is more forgiving. Anyway, I have until the beginning of September to get myself into some kind of working order, and raise $1,900 for AIDS research to boot. You hate AIDS, right? Right. So sign up and send me some moneys. You will be giving to a really worthy cause, and contributing to my running a long, hot stretch of asphalt in the OC in the late summer, too. What more could you want?

We're in the home stretch of this school year, with the new one starting up July 5th. I'm alternately excited and....excited. I love, love, love my kids, but I'm such a different teacher now that I was at the start, with such higher expectations, that every day kind of hurts me now, since these kids are operating by my much older, much lower academic and behavioral expectations and there's not a hell of a lot I can do about it at this point. It's really frustrating. I'm trying to plan tightly and harness my inner badass and still get this current group of kids through final writing projects at the same time. Not to mention that grades are due, and my credential is in jeopardy until I get one elusive piece of paper, and on and on and on. I have to switch rooms at the break, too, but I'm going to the coveted 530s, right next door to my friend Riley, unless I have jinxed it by typing it down before my stuff is actually being dragged across the threshold. We'll see.

disheartened

While I was out of the classroom 2 weeks ago, one of my favorite seniors (with "favorite" here meaning not "one whom I like better than the others," but instead "one with whom I have better-than-average repoire") tagged the hell out of my room, beginning with chalk marker on the balcony outside and continuing inside with chalk marker on the board-runners and my flowerpots, Sharpie on the blackboard, the ESL texts and the bilingual dictionaries, and carving into the side blackboard and my own personal stapler, which sits right on my desk. I know it was him beyond the shadow of a doubt, but I can't really exactly prove it, so we had this "I hope you would be the one to remind the other students that this is a space we share" conversation, subtext "I know damn well it was you and you had better not set a toe out of line," though I really was sincere in that I would hope he would be the one to check himself, and until 2 weeks ago I would have trusted him with the world. I feel like he's actually pretty ashamed, and the whole class has been better since they came in and were treated to my seething narrative of the "scavenger hunt of rage" on which I had embarked that morning. It hurt, though, in a personal way that teaching, really, should not. I thought I could not be angrier at or more exhausted by a student I trusted.

Then, this morning, my intermediate ESL class engaged in a mass cheating campaign, resulting in their sharing the entirely wrong answers when I know very well from their previous work that individually, they could have gotten the right ones. The second-highest grade, in a class of 20 students, was a 71.

Then my borderline-failing seniors decided to take the day off for Senior Ditch Day, rather than workshopping their theses and developing support. They'll be gone Friday too, and the essay's firm due date is Monday. I will be at graduation in three weeks and I am beginning to fear they will not.

Then in sixth period my favorite advanced ESL kid, the one I am always defending to other teachers and working my ass off to pull up in terms of literacy, got into a fistfight with another of my students. In my classroom. On my watch. Ever seen two people you care about, who you are physically and intellectually responsible for, start punching each other in the face?

Then, once we'd gone outside and one of them had cried and I had tried not to, and after they had tried to blame me because one had stolen the other's pencil and I had not even done anything about it, I came back inside to the rest of my students laughing and reenacting. "That was tight, Miss."

Linda told me early on that sooner or later, they will break your heart, and only then will you find your toughness as a teacher. She said it happened to her during her first year when (get this) they stole her teddy bear. It is funny the things that set us off, the straws that break the camel's back. We will see who I am when I walk into the classroom tomorrow. And take pity upon the students who have me for the next school year, which begins in just under one month.

Mr. Jesus pays a visit

Between my PACT, professional development, and required portfolio maintenance, I've found myself out of the classroom four of the last ten days. Additionally, we had Memorial Day off, so I was already pretty disoriented when I found out that I'd have a formal observer in from The District to watch how my scripted ESL program was being implemented. It reflects on the program itself, not me, but it's still been a pain in the ass to have her there in the back of the classroom typing down everything that anyone says. So far she's been there for two straight days, and she's scheduled for one more, for a total of about 7 hours. Argh argh argh.

On one of those on-campus off days, I had the evil luck to get Mr. Jesus in my classroom. I hate Mr. Jesus for perhaps obvious reasons, and I have done since I met him last September (back then we called him Mr. Church.) Though other teachers request him because he will make sure the kids do not trash your room, I don't want my kids preached at, I don't trust anyone who has "met" me upwards of fifteen times and still does not recognize me, I don't particularly enjoy finding propaganda leaflets tucked into my library books and left on my desk, and I just plain hate the way he so expectantly calls out "Teacher!" when he's subbing next door and he needs me to drop everything and go deal with my neighbor-kids or something. So I'm running late for my PD and trying to get my kids to take out their books and study, and in walks Mr. Jesus. The agenda is up on the board, the other classes have photocopied letter/checklists stapled to their assignments, and this class knows they are supposed to be studying so I figure at least nothing can get effed up. I am politely laying out the way I want the day to run while I shove all my files into my stylish milk crate when he, sitting at one of the student desks right in front of my teacherly one, cranes around to look at the class.

"This class is amazing," he barks. "They are just looking at us. Shouldn't they be studying?"
Bear in mind, it is 7:40 in the morning on the first day back from a 3-day weekend. Yes, they are slow to start, but this is not unusual. I express this to Mr. Jesus.
"No, really!" he continues. "I have never seen anything like this! Are you all in Special Education?"
I just freeze at that one, and all eleventeen thousand responses roll through my head at once, but all I can get out is a slow "Excuse me?"
He turns around to address my kids again. "I said, are you all in Special Ed?"
My kids do not respond, as they are all frozen as well and just staring at me. I get out another Excuse Me, followed rapidly by a truly angry rush of words about the complete inappropriateness of that statement, and how I don't even know what that means, and that my students simply lack motivation as it is very early on a Mondayish morning, a feeling which I am sure he understands. He can tell I am pissed and starts backpedaling, talking about how he knows how they feel, and he is that way all the time himself, blah blah fucking blah. My kids, who have heard the term "lacking motivation" before, are sort of angrily chorusing "Yeah, yeah!" while I am telling him off. Later on that day, I hear them telling this story to their friends. It goes something like this:
(rapid Spanish)
Excuse me?
(more rapid Spanish)
Excuse me?!?

I dealt with the aftermath of the whole incident for the rest of the week. My kids were really upset by it, especially the five or so who really do have IEPs and deal with stigma all the time. What really surprised me was that the rest of my students were upset not at the implication that they were SpEd, but that SpEd was in this case synonymous with stupid. I think it's partly because they are all friends, and partly because they deal with the stigma of being language learners, but either way I was really impressed with them, and we talked about it, and it was a good Program Moment all around. Plus I got to yell at Mr. Jesus, so maybe he will remember who I am and stop introducing himself to me, the creep.

Speaking of creeps, our incompetent and creepy-as-all-get-out counselor has taken to coming to school obviously intoxicated and wearing shades in and out of doors. This is against dress code. They are Prada though, spawning lots of devil wearing Prada jokes, along with less sophisticated exchanges such as the following:
Me: What, so you've never worn dark shades indoors?
My co-chair: What, you've never shown up to work still drunk?
Me: What, you've never been hung over for eight straight days?

I am insanely proud of my seniors today. We've decided to spend the rest of the year on response to lit, as almost all of them are going to state or community college in the fall. When I asked them to brainstorm questions they had about essay writing and asked if they felt comfortable writing a thesis, they asked, "What's a thesis?" Ho boy. So that's where we've been living. Additionally, they had expressed that I was not challenging them enough, which was true, so our texts for this essay are short stories which I read in college, under the assumption that if they can master these texts and write coherent essays about them, there is not a lot they will not be able to do. (Although I will cop to letting them write on Esperanza, although it was optional reading which we did not discuss in class.) Anyway, today we finished prewriting and sat down to really "answer the question," and after many times handing back the paper with a "Yes, but WHY?" or "Yes, but HOW?" and one serious conversation beginning, "If I can write a good essay without a thesis, how come I have to have one?", we finally got some theses down. And they kick ass. My favorites, slightly paraphrased (in response to a prompt about how environment affects minorities living in mainstream American culture):

The narrator of Maxine Hong Kingston's "No Name Woman" is traumatized by the stories she is told by her family, making her unlikely to become a wife or a mother.

In Sandra Cisneros's "The House on Mango Street," Esperanza is never truly the girl she wants to be, because she is ashamed of the places and people she comes from.

I dance, dance, danced around after those.