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.

the mysterious disappearance of mr. cheeseburger

...and the overdue return of me.

First things first: Mr. Cheeseburger was my beloved piggie placemat, bought at the $3.99 store and named by my morning ESL class after I vetoed "Bacon" as too insensitive. Mr. Cheeseburger was taped to the door beneath a laminated speech bubble on which I wrote the day's most important announcements, which students faithfully read until the day the tape came loose and the maintenance staff saw fit to THROW HIM AWAY. I have done my mourning, and some day I hope to welcome Mr. Junior (Bacon?) Cheeseburger into my classroom. Until then, announcements the old-fashioned and oft-ignored way.

This is the logo of the restaurant where we had pretty decent Mexican food while I was visiting folk in New York a month or two ago:



Unfortunately, F13 is not just a brand of tasty Southern California Mexican cuisine, but also a brand of violent Southern Californian Mexican gang. I should be both broader and more specific: it's an extremely violent Latino gang in South Central Los Angeles, with ground zero being my high school. Two weeks ago, my SLC lost a former student - a close friend of many of my students - to eight shots to the chest, resulting from his involvement in Florencia. Since then, I've spent a lot of time and energy trying to ascertain how my students feel about it. At first they seemed callous, inured to violent death; they wore RIP gear (buttons, t-shirts) screened with the student's photos and told each other "if you get shot, I'll wear your t-shirt." Then they started showing me cell-phone footage of candlelight vigils and dropping off asleep in class, explaining that they'd washed cars all weekend to help the mother pay for the funeral. They felt something; I felt relief, knowing that at least we could start to have a conversation. Then, abruptly, I started finding tagging everywhere - out on the quad, in my pristine classroom - saying RIP "SHADOW" and, disturbingly, F13. The conversation is a gentle "maybe you should clean that off," with a rag and a bottle of mandarin orange spray cleaner extended, and while the wiping-down is happening, a suggestion that his name was not in fact "Shadow" but instead E., and that we should remember him for who he was, not where he was from, and that perhaps Sharpie on my tables was not the best way to memorialize him - perhaps this week's biography assignment would provide a better outlet? So far no takers on the biography, but a slowing in the F13 grafitti. If I prayed, it would be that none of my boys - my beloved softies who hang at the donut shop after school - will follow E.'s path in some kind of sick martyr fantasty. It happens all the time, but I hope that I never have to see it. I have been keeping my door open even when I usually close it, but I am resisiting the urge to run out and hug them whenever I see them. We get along because I humor their mistaken notion that they are tough, and I do not want to undermine this relationship.

The nines are starting literature circles, and they are also on my last nerve. They have done some really good writing lately, and they seem really interested in learning the hows and whys of writing, but reading is a whole other animal, one they eye with suspicion and fear. Picture, if you will, the classroom as a cave painting, with crude spears pointed at the object we call Book. It is going to be a long three months of identity and mythology.

My credential is finished tomorrow, HEY HEY HEY, provided I sign over $4000. I went shopping today so I might have a recent memory of what that feels like.

Attended - and presented at! - a Program conference in Las Vegas the other weekend, wearing handmade snarky anti-Program t-shirts, and was confronted about this on camera by The Program's Los Angeles Executive Director. Fortunately the snarkiness is of the direct-quote-that-is-so-insanely-stupid-it-needs-no-further-commentary variety, and I had little to explain. Executive Director Man pretended he thought this was "Great! Really.....just Great!" and that was that, and all of the t-shirt posse was semi-famous thereafter. Vegas sucks but we went to Cirque du Soleil, where you can enjoy a martini and a bucket of popcorn while watching the acrobatics. The only drawback of this is you have to go to Vegas to partake.