To Write Love on Her Arms

Today is facebook's 2nd annual "To Write Love on Her Arms" Day. Read it. Share it. Live it.



http://www.twloha.com

Ask My Kids IV: The Holocaust

Once again, my kids amaze me with their awesome grasp of history, culture, and the human experience. Today's feature: Hitler.

(This is the real deal, in all its raw and unedited glory.)

Hitler was a very cruel person who killed a whole lot of people which were Jewish, he also made them slaves it didn't matter how old you were he would make them work in open land and he would have his soldiers wip them if they did not work fast or if they said anything back to them. The reason he chose to pick the Jews instead of any other culture was because he did not like Jesus, and Jesus was Jewish, he also didn't like God because he herd from many people that God owned the world and that was what he was trying to do.

Fair enough.

Ask My Kids II: Relationship Counseling

A conversation between two of my 17 year old students about the nature of love:

"You ever cheat on your girl, man?"

"Naw, man. I love my girl. I am a man in love."

"Yeah, I hear you, man. I love my girl too. But you know what I'm sayin', sometimes even if you in love, you still be tempted, you know?"

"Naw, not if you really in love. I mean, everybody tempted, but if you in love, you don't do nothin'. You don't act on that temptation."

"How you stop yourself? You know, like, some ho gettin' up on you, and your girl ain't there, whatchou do?"

"I tell you whatchou do: you get on your phone and you call the woman you love. Soon as you hear her voice, you ain't gonna be tempted."

"Well, what if she don't answer her phone? My girl be busy, ya know what I'm sayin'?"

"If she don't answer her phone, you go to her. Wherever she at, you go."

"See, but I don't gotta car."

"Then you walk, man. Whatever you gotta do, you get to where your girl at."

"But she live on the south side. I can't be walkin' that far. I got asthma."

(At this point, a third party chimes interjects: "You got an inhaler, dumbass!" She is promptly told to C her way out of this A/B conversation.)

"Look, it's like this, man. When you really in love, you need your girl, like you can't breathe without 'er. So, you don't care if you gotta be a little uncomfortable on the way over there, 'cuz you know as soon as you next to your girl, you gonna be able to breathe easy."

"You full of it, man."

"You not really in love."

:-)

The Daily Grind

Every job has its perks and its quirks. In college, I managed a little coffee bar and had the delightful privilege -- nay, the duty -- of starting my day with a free 20 oz. latte. Every day. This was important because as I sat at the register drinking my cup of joe, I demonstrated to the passing populous that I believed in the quality of our product. It also served as the "test run" to insure that the machine was working properly and that the grind was up to a Goldie Lockean standard of excellence.

On the other hand, my coworkers insisted on watching Dawson's Creek from 10 to 12 every morning. The only thing about that show that I ever enjoyed was the time that Jen's dying wish was for Joey to make up her frickin' mind!!!



*ahem*

You don't often see those moments of raw honesty in teen dramas.

Speaking of teen drama...

(Wasn't that a good segue? I knew you'd like it.)



Teaching high school is a bit like being in a very bad spin-off series of Dawson, but with fewer moments of inane personal reflection and more hip-hop. Regardless of the official curriculum, every group of students is an entirely fresh experience, so while I should have only two preps (that's teacher talk for two different courses), I actually have four. This year, I am inadvertently teaching the following courses:

Writing in the Hood -- In Writing in the Hood, we explore what it means to string two or more sentences together coherently in an attempt to convince the tax-payers that American public education is not an utter charade. Please do not be offended when I tell you that "You be trippin'" is not grammatically correct. I do respect your culture; it's just that you're about to graduate, and I want you to be able to get a job that doesn't involve a funny little hat.

Just Trying to Make it to May -- The students in the Just Trying to Make it to May course skim dutifully over the surface of many interesting pieces of literature. We can't be expected to remember to do work outside of class, but in class we will not protest to doing copious amounts of reading and grammar exercises. Occasionally a fiery discussion of some kind will spring up, reassuring the instructor that all pulses are still pumping. We're not really here to learn, but we don't mind if it happens accidentally.

Modern Women for a Matriarchal Utopia -- Extra credit assignments in this course consist of such lofty aspirations as "Create World Peace in Seven Steps or Fewer" and "Become the Supreme Ruler of the Earth Using only the Internet and Four AA Batteries". The name is not deceiving -- this group of students is, by some fluke of scheduling, 100% female. I estimate that the probability of one of these young women actually becoming a world leader is about 7:1 for. Not only does this course cover the required federal, state, and College Board material for both eleventh grade English and AP Language & Comp, but discussions very often branch into the realms of philosophy, international politics, religion, and art, as well as the finer points of linguistics. For example, the other day a student quite astutely observed that the word "of" sounds like "uv". I responded with a somewhat brief explanation of the concept of voiced and unvoiced sounds (in this case, fricatives). This blossomed resplendently into an intricate exploration of the evolution of language in general and English in specific, including -- but by no means limited to -- Indo-European roots, the Battle of Hastings, and why we shouldn't be so quick to judge those who say "aks" instead of "ask". In a normal classroom of 16/17 year olds, I'd have lost them at "fricative" (Hu hu! She said "frick!"), but my Modern Women were on the edges of their seats, all attention riveted on the discussion, every voice chiming in to confirm that they really did a) understand and b) care.

and

I Think I'm Smart & My Mom Says I'm Special -- The title of this fourth and final course really says it all. This course was originally supposed to have the same material as the Modern Women course, but as I said, no two groups of students are the same. The major flaw in the I Think I'm Smart & My Mom Says I'm Special class is that sometimes there just isn't enough Smart and Special to go around. When Student X receives some Smart in the form of the instructor saying "Yes, X, that's correct," Students A-W universally resent Student X, feel it necessary to defame and slander Student X behind his/her back, and may eventually make Student X feel so uncomfortable that he/she refuses to speak up in class again. It's important to note that Student X is not one particular student -- simply whichever student has answered the question correctly. The equal distribution of Special is also cause for malice and unrest, but this is aimed particularly at students who have long-standing relationships with me, the instructor and Highly-Qualified Distributor of Smart and Special. These unwitting victims include students who had me last year, students who participate in a club that I advise, students whose brothers or sisters are friends of mine, and my second-cousin-once-removed who simply can't help coming from a long line of literary geniuses.

With a day as colorful as this, who would want any other job?




Okay, I do kind of miss the free coffee...

The Big P/T C

so... let's talk about parent/teacher conferences.


the first time i ever went to a parent/teacher conference was when i was student teaching. my mentor teacher, yvonne, thought it would be a good experience for me to come along and listen in, though i didn't really have much to contribute, since i was just a stupid college kid. (my words, not hers.) we sat in her classroom all evening as the parents filtered through and asked about how their little susie or billy or whoever was doing in english class.

three years later, i don't remember much of that evening. i do remember one parent. she came in, quite flustered, sat down, pulled out her daughter's progress report, and burst into tears. TEARS.

for a moment, i thought maybe it was because her child was failing the class.... o no. she had a B. probably even a B+. how unstable of a mother do you have to be to weep in frustration and disappointment over a B? how screwed up will your child be by the time she graduates from college? even the wisest cannot tell.

somehow yvonne talked her down and we all survived the horrifically embarrassing encounter, but i've got to admit: it's sort of tainted my idea of conferences. every time a parent walks up to me, i always think "i wonder if she'll cry. what will i say if she does?"



the building where i work now is absolutely huge, so we don't do conferences in our classrooms. parents just have too much trouble navigating the corridors and hoofing it up and down the four stories worth of stairs. instead we all sit at tables in the gym in alphabetical order and the parents wander around to find us. (incidentally, you'd be surprised how difficult the concept of "alphabetical order" is to a lot of parents.) i was on the lookout for a weeper again this week, but luckily she didn't come.

most of my conferences go well, as i have a lot of high level kids who basically do their work and behave themselves. i was a bit nervous about this year, since i've been out sick -- nervousness spurred primarily by a dire warning i received from a coworker -- but none of the parents took issue with that, and many of them were genuinely concerned about my health. (i've got to remind myself to stop listening to warnings from people who don't have the same charisma points i have. parents friggin' love me.)


at any rate, i did have a couple awkward encounters i want to share with you.

the first was a darling little mexican woman whose son is in one of my writing classes. she sat down and we exchanged pleasantries for a moment. i told her that her son is delightful to have in class -- great sense of humor, really neat kid. then i pulled out his grade report and gave her the bad news. he's not failing. he has a "0%". that's right. he has NO grade in my class because he has turned in absolutely, positively, not one blessed piece of work all year. i know he does his work. i sit there and watch him do it. then i go grade the stack of papers and he never, ever, even accidentally turns anything in. *shrug* i dunno what you want from me, lady.

only a few minutes later, another mom sits down and asks how her daughter is doing in my class. well, i say, i had her last year, so i know her pretty well, and i'm sure she'd be doing fine in the class if she was ever IN the class, but she's not. ever. i haven't seen her in two weeks. at least. she's been marked absent every day and you should be getting phone calls from the attendance office every day. mom looks puzzled. "she leaves the house every morning..." well, yeah, they all leave the house every morning. they don't all come to school.



but the true delight of parent/teacher conferences comes the next day. the "0%" kid hands me a folder with every assignment for the entire year in it, all beautifully done. the truant kid shows up at last, grumbling about how i "hoed" her out to her momma.

:-) i love my job.

Down with the Sickness -- The Mono Chrons Cont.

o yes, i'm still down with the sickness. i was very well-behaved and took three whole weeks off work, but i can't stand it anymore. one can only spend so much time cooped up, you know.

this week, i'm attempting to be back at work half-time. this should actually be less stressful than staying home, where i'm constantly behind on paperwork and trying to chase down substitute teachers who don't return phone calls. sometimes i wish i was a substitute teacher -- then i could get paid $80 a day to show up late, lose things, and ignore all the work and energy the actual teacher has put into lesson plans a chimpanzee could carry out. if anyone had a problem with it, i could just say "well, i didn't know" and that would make everything all right.



okay, enough bitter ranting.

i'm back with my kids in the afternoons, and that's the important part. luckily for me, my afternoon kids are actually my really good kids -- one honors american lit class and two senior writing classes. as every teacher knows, students fall into two basic categories: those who invigorate you and those who suck the life out of you. these kids are the former, so even in my somewhat delicate condition, i actually felt better after spending time with them than i do just loafing about at home.


* * * * * * * * *


in other news, i got a very exciting phone call from one of my brothers yesterday. he called under the guise of asking how i was feeling and then said he wanted to cheer me up. naturally, i supposed he meant he was going to do a little song and dance number for me or recite a little poem or maybe send me a gift of some kind... after all, that's what i do to cheer people up. but no! he had a much better plan.

he called me "aunt g."


then he said, "o hang on, *other brother* is on the other line. just a second," and put me on hold!


seriously.


i sat there for a second musing. when he came back, i felt it necessary to clarify. "we aren't talking about your stupid cat, are we? 'cuz i'm not that cat's aunt. and we're not talking about *other brother's* new dog? i mean, we're talking about your wife being pregnant, right?"

we were, indeed, talking about his wife being pregnant.


so sometime in mid-april i'm going to be an aunt. i come from a sizable family, but currently, the youngest "baby" in my family (both sides included) is my cousin, who is twenty and engaged, so it'll be quite a change for us to have a little one around.

that is pretty damn cool.

Pretending to Be Well

Today I went in to work. This is one of the curses of teaching -- I actually care (a great deal) about my kids and what they're doing/thinking/learning. Therefore, even when my head is pounding and my lymph nodes are swollen, I can't spend too many days sitting at home not knowing what's happening at school.

I just wanted to check in with them, make sure they had gotten everything they needed out of last week, make sure they were ready for what's coming next, etc.


Well, we got into a discussion about Native American cultures. The basic idea I wanted them to get out of the reading was the image of time as a cycle -- everything repeats, everything decays and is renewed.

In an attempt to juxtapose that with our Western Civ concept that time is linear -- a constant parade towards *insert your personal philosophy here* -- I asked them how Europeans thought about time.

A girl in the third row raised her hand:

"Don't they have, like, really long lunch breaks?"

.
.
.

What?!?!


It kind of reminded me of this infamous youtube video.



(On a side note, I just realized I'm using capital letters. I don't know why. Hmm...)

The Clinger Jr.

I thought that one of the big advantages of my new job would be the consistency. I would know which students I was going to be dealing with at any given time on any given day. Better yet, there would be no clingers. Even the most obnoxious of adolescents would only be in my room for fifty-five minutes a day.

Theoretically.

You should really never make sweeping generalizations about teenagers.

I had a problem child in my sixth hour. To sum up, he watched too much South Park and thought that it was so funny, he should model his own behavior after it. This essentially meant that he spouted obnoxious, and generally racist, remarks almost constantly. Throw in a dash of potty humor and a "your mom" quip here and there, and you'll have a pretty complete picture of him.

Just as Japanese Mr. T's rambling tales of erectile dysfunction made his classmates squirm and look at him sideways, this student's crass remarks made his classmates squirm. The building tension finally came to a head one day when he turned to a girl in the back row and, for all the class to hear, referred to her Pakistani boyfriend as a (and remember, these are his words, not mine) "sand n*gger." I was completely dumb-founded. She was in the social worker's office in tears. Parents were on the phone in a rage. All signs pointed to Little Mr. T on the fast-track toward expulsion.

What happened next is a bit hard to explain. After a few days of exchanging emails with the social worker and speaking to both sets of moms and dads (which, in Little T's case is actually dad and truly Disney-style evil stepmom), I pulled him out of class. I asked him if he wanted to be expelled. He insisted fervently that he did not. Then, I explained, the only person who could save him was that little girl in the back row, so he had better fall down at her feet and beg for mercy.

This he did, though I don't know exactly how he managed it. What I do know is that it involved apologizing to both her and her boyfriend and that when he was done, she dropped all the charges against him and after that they got on like a house on fire. What's more, all my problems with his outrageously inappropriate sense of humor vanished into oblivion like a politically incorrect ninja.

Truly miraculous.

So all was well, you assume? O no. Never make assumptions about teenagers.

Very shortly after the dust settled on this one, Little T started developing another peculiar quirk. He started coming to my room on his lunch hour when I was teaching another class. He insisted that this would keep him out of trouble, as lunch hour is normally fraught with mischief-making and shenanigans of all shapes and sizes. We struck a deal -- as long as he behaved in sixth hour, he could stow away in my room during lunch hour.

The arrangement worked well for a while... 'til he came in my room one day during fourth hour. When I inquired as to where he was supposed to be, he explained that his math teacher told him to get out and never come back. Ever. She didn't account for the fact that there are no refugee camps for geometry exiles, so the child had nowhere to go. "You can send me to the principal's office," he suggested, "but I won't go -- I'll just go out to the parking lot and smoke pot with *insert names of two other miscreants here* 'cuz she threw them out too and I know that's where they are."

*sigh* So I told him to sit down and be quieter than a deaf, blind, and mute mouse. In fact, quieter than a mouse that was actually dead.

By the end of the year, Little T was attending my class for three and a half hours a day. Three and a half hours! He was a Miss G junkie! He truly must have been Mr. T's much younger and much whiter twin. The other option is that some time before Mr. T's current erectile problems, he fathered a son...

Ew.

A Note of Discouragement

I just received this email from one of my students here... one of my honors students here:

Ms G -

wahd up doe, a man, whatz crackin' lackin' but fo reel doe how u been? r u enjoyin' yo summer vacation? most of my friends r leavin' over the summer. We might move to Georgia.

- E

*sigh* An English teacher's work is never done.