The End Is So Close I Can Taste It

And it tastes like gingerbread. Mmmmm gingerbread.

I just submitted my HAT for Adolescent Readers on LiveText and now just have to complete my unit for Special Methods (I'd say I'm 60% there), make it through class on Thursday, and endure having that whole class watch video of me teaching. I'm boring. Sorry, methods folks. Once that's done, I can put my feet up and focus on the stress of being broke for the holidays and having no reliabe source of income for the next 5 months or so.

I'd like to sat this has been a great semester. I expected to be able to say it was the best yet--then I started it. Now, it could be that I've been so preoccupied with having to find work from day to day, trying to get settled in a new house with my girlfriend who lived 750 miles away for the past year, and just trying to juggle school, work, homework, and my personal life that I won't realize how much I learned until I take some time off and decompress. I really hope that's what it is, in fact. There's definitely been a lot to learn from--a lot of people, places, fun, and frustration.

If there's anything that I know I've learned, one thing I can point to, it's that I'm happy being in school every day. That seems like it's important for a teacher. I don't like the unpredictability of subbing, and I don't like having to introduce myself to between 25 and 150 kids every day and answer questions about my height, beard, (lack of) hair... I don't like getting stuck in rooms with teachers who yell at first graders for crying because they yelled at them and then answer their cellphones in class, or teachers who yell at little girls for sneezing too loudly. I don't like 17 year-old football players trying to physically intimidate me because I'm the stranger in their classroom. I don't like getting called a leprechaun.

But, all that aside, subbing is still the best job I've ever had because it's teaching, at least sorta. Yeah, I'm tired and ready for vacation (and I could really do without having to bust my butt to try and work all next week), but I am pumped about student teaching next semester. I learned from my days as an audio engineer that any idiot can fake it through the classes and get a degree, but the real test, and the real learning, is in the field. I've been in the field all semester, every day, and all I want is more (after a vacation).

Too Cool for School?

I have recently discovered that I am cool. This is not a first for me; I was cool in the sixth grade when I had the good fortune of being--among the seven boys in my grade--neither that crazy sociopath kid who talked to trees nor the fat kid (who was, you know, fat). In seventh grade, there was an influx of students, and I became very instantly uncool. By high school, I was pretty tight with the fat kid, that Marilyn Manson kid that everyone else was almost too scared of to pick on (except not really at all), and all the other dorks and misfits who picked theater over sports for after-school activities.

I mean, I've always been cool, from my fourth grade school picture in my Harley Davidson t-shirt to my years in New York City playing rock star to empty venues on Friday nights. I'm, like, a totally rock 'n' roll, non-comformist, anti-establishment, heavy-metal-punk-rock-Bruce-Springsteen-and-Black-Sabbath dude, y'know? It's just that I'm SO cool that for most of my life I've been the only person cool enough to see how cool I am, see? Lightyears ahead of the curve and such.

Anyway, I've been observing/student teaching once a week at JHS all semester, where my host teacher leads a journalism class. I do not know what I have done or said in that class, aside from having a giant beard, but those kids have decided that Mr. Beard is THE COOLEST! Sounds awesome, right? Don't all teachers want to be the cool teacher, like that suave motherf**ker in that crappy Rose McGowan horror flick that was on TV the other day--that dude was helping young damsels-in-distress with their lockers, beating flunkies in half-court for the wager of an A in his class ("I believe you owe me an A."), making out with his smokin' hot girlfriend in front of students, and then--and THEN--he was like, "Call me Pete." Now that is cool. Who doesn't want to be that teacher?

I don't. That guy was a douche, every aspect of his behavior was inappropriate and should have been grounds for firing, and by trying to be a peer instead of an elder he completely undermined his own authority. Good thing he was a good basketball player, I guess, or he might have had some classroom management issues.

Well, I'm 5'3" in my teacher shoes, and I don't shoot hoops. I'm glad kids like me and think they can relate to me (they seem to value my opinion, and that's certainly a plus), but it's like they're so convinced I'm cool that they forget I'm a teacher. One of them actually started to say something really crass about my host teacher right in front of me! Look, if a kid is dissatisfied with the way he's being taught, I do want to hear about that. I can learn from that. But how did I let that interest get mistaken for, "Hey, I'm the cooool teacher. You can talk crap about your other teachers in front of me. Don't worry, I'm coooool."

You know what happens when you forget your place because you're too busy trying to be cool? You become Michael Scott from The Office. I don't want to be the Michael Scott of teachers. Sure, I want the kids to like me, but not because they think I'm like a kid or I'm on their level; because I give them the chance to come up to my level and behave like and be treated like adults.

Reading Response: Looking For Alaska

This blog contains spoilers. You have been warned.

I have a confession to make: yesterday, I was that bad substitute that mostly ignores the kids while he sits and reads because of this book. I had started reading it a tiny bit at a time during the week, but during a planning period yesterday (which combined with lunch to form a 90-minute block of freedom in the middle of my day) I had my first chance to start reading in earnest, and when the kids came back to class I couldn't quite pull myself away.

At first, it was the humor in John Green's narrator, Miles "Pudge" Halter, that hooked me. Pudge and his friends are quintessential teenagers with the intelligence to make their teenage-ness really hilarious. My private high school in Jersey certainly didn't have everything in common with Pudge's Alabama boarding school, but I felt a lot more connection to that experience than to the ECE class I was charged with for the day--populated by kids who mostly seemed smart enough for comprehensive classes but too resigned to failure and too determined to hate everything about school to prove it to anyone. I do love the way that teenagers see the world and interpret it; that's one of the bigger reasons I'm going into high school. What I love more is teenagers who can back up their attitude with brains, who aren't all backtalk and self-absorption. These are the characters John Green creates in Looking For Alaska, and that got me.

Then the book stopped being funny, and it hit really close to home. I had a friend in high school who was a mystery like Alaska. She was that dark, sad, beautiful girl who smoked to die but laughed and smiled in a way that made me want the first day I spent with her to last forever and made me act a fool that whole day just to keep her laughing. She only used payphones and usually hung out with a group of people I didn't want to be around, and so we mostly lost touch when she left my school and went to live with her father. A week before her 18th birthday, she took a train into New York City with some friends for a night on the town. Late that night, she overdosed and died at the hospital. I hadn't seen or talked to her in seven months, but the day she died I was thinking about calling her--I couldn't remember her number.

After Jill died, my friends and I were left with a lot of the same questions and feelings as Pudge and his friends. Like Pudge, I had had an infatuation with Jill that never had a chance to blossom. Even as distanced as I had become from her before she died, I had guilt to deal with; maybe if I hadn't let her slip away things would have been different, maybe if I'd been a better friend to her she wouldn't have spent so much time with those friends I never liked. More than anything, I had to deal with the fact that I'd been clumsy with our relationship and would never know if she died knowing how much I'd loved her--and with never knowing how she really felt about me.

Another confession (or two): While six ECE students alternately slept at their desks, toyed with the idea of actually doing their assignments, and watched rap videos on YouTube, I teared up behind the teacher's desk reading this book. After dismissal, I cleaned up the room a bit and sat down to read for a few more minutes before writing a note to the teacher about my day. So yeah, I liked the book. A lot. One of the quotes on the back cover says, "The spirit of Holden Caulfield lives on," but Holden Caulfield was not this reflective, not this purposeful. Looking For Alaska asks the questions teenagers have to start thinking about for the first time and admits to them that they will probably never have any more answers than what they choose to believe. It is literature as much as it is adolescent, if not more, and I wish I had had this book eight years ago, when I was dreaming of my lost friend's uncatchable ghost and kicking myself in the ass for never pulling her as close or holding her as tight as I always wanted.

Reading Response: The Lightning Thief

Of the "teen lit." or "adolescent lit." books that I've read so far this semester, this has probably been my favorite. Rick Riordan's The Lightning Thief is the first in a series about a boy from New York who finds out around the end of his sixth-grade year that the gods and monsters of Greek myth are real, and he's one of them--a demigod, in fact, half human and half god. Among the mysteries Percy (short for Perseus) Jackson must solve is the question of which god is his father, so I won't spill the beans here.

As the story unfolds, Percy sets out on a quest to find and recover Zeus's stolen lightning bolt, a personally important task for him because he is the primary suspect on Mount Olympus (which, by the way, has moved from Greece to the 600th floor of the Empire State Building). Along the way, he has dealings with more mythical creatures than I knew existed, even in myth, and discovers how the Olympians, their monsters and friends, and their offspring continue to be the driving force behind "Western culture."

Riordan writes from Percy's perspective, with a convincingly naive yet adaptable voice, and the action and mythical references never let up. I've read a couple of series books this semester, and this is the first one that's made me want to continue the series. It's definitely adolescent, perhaps moreso than it is literature, but it's informed and fun--adventure with an education--and I kind of like the idea of seeing ancient gods in the modern world.

Reading Response: Wilhelm Ch. 6

In the section titled, "Toward A Critical Literacy," Wilhelm brings up a couple issues that I find worth reflection. First, he asks, "Why do we teach the language arts? What do we hope to achieve for our students and for ourselves through this enterprise?" (151) For me, these questions also tie back into a question he posed earlier in the chapter, regarding "what our purposes are as teachers: to teach texts, or to develop readers who can and will want to engage with and know texts in personally powerful ways throughout their lives?" (145) In my special methods class this semester, I reacted to the idea of teachers having a responsibility to the text. At the pre-college level, I don't believe that teachers are responsible to anyone or anything but their students. Their success, in and beyond our classrooms, is our job (success being measured by actual learning and performance, not grades). The text is a tool to be used in whatever way it is most effective towards getting the job done.

But I digress. Regarding the initial question, I wrote earlier this semester that my goal as an English teacher is to create "effective and fluent communicators." Wilhelm, like me, sees the skills nurtured in English classes as reaching beyond the classroom, and beyond reading and writing. He writes, "Literacy is both the willingness and the ability to evoke, conceive of, express, receive, reflect on, share, evaluate, and negotiate meanings, in the various forms that meanings may take." (151) All of those things, in my mind, fell under my umbrella of "communication." As I read this section, I actually thought again about Frankenstein (the book this time). When I first read Frankenstein in the seventh grade, I was struck at how eloquently the monster was able to describe the experiences of his life before he learned (or re-learned) to speak and write. I wondered if, without knowing the words for what he was seeing and feeling, he would really have been able to commit those experiences to his memory with such detail, to be recounted later when the proper words were there.

Whatever the answer to that query, I do still believe that our communication skills, our comfort with language and its use, can enrich our experiences and enhance our engagement with the world around us on many levels. Working with figurative language teaches us to think abstractly and make comparisons and connections, to think if not in metaphors then perhaps in analogies that help us make sense of the new and unfamiliar. English classes, ideally, teach students to ask questions and think critically to answer them, to consider motivations and character, to interpret what isn't said as well as what is. In this way, students learn not only to communicate their thoughts and feelings to others or to receive and interpret communication from others, but also to communicate to themselves the full significance of their experiences with richer detail and deeper meaning.

Why do we teach language arts? To allow our students access to the world around them, to help them break down the mysteries, build understanding, engage their environments, and improve themselves.

Reading Response: Wilhelm, Ch. 5: Reading is Seeing

Towards the end of the chapter, Wilhelm writes something that I found potentially more interesting than all of his experiments and findings throughout the chapter. "In an art class," he tells us, "divergent views are 'interesting' rather than incorrect," and "students are prodded to explore and express their visions and understanding, not to simply justify them." Wilhelm argues that the use of (visual) art in our reading classes can "open the doors to these same possibilities with literary response" (140).

I watched "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein" yesterday, and there's a professor in Victor Frankenstein's first medical school lecture who begins by warning students--and I'm paraphrasing here--not to fool themselves that they might ever have a new or original thought, or that there is any hope or virtue in creativity or imagination. I'm sure no teacher in schools today tells students such a thing that explicitly, but to what extent are students being taught that same lesson? Why should art class be the only place where divergent views are encouraged? For that matter, why should it take the addition of visual arts to our classrooms to make students welcome to "explore and express their visions and understanding?"

Watching "Frankenstein" in 2008, it's easy to see what a fool that professor is, acting as though everything had been done and discovered and there was not a single advancement to be made in the field of medicine, but would we not be just as foolish to act as though we have all the answers to any text we might be reading with our classes? Easy as it is for us to see that we would, many of our students come to class expecting us to act just that way, and they don't know what to do when we don't. I of course love the way Wilhelm used drawing to draw reluctant readers in and will borrow his methods, but if the only time we are "prodding" out students to "explore and express" their "divergent views" is when they're doing it through visual arts, we're falling short.

Feelin' a Funk

Today is the last day of my 5-day weekend. Friday was a pretty good day. Julie was working, I had a list of things to get done and errands to run, and since I had my momentum from the week behind me, I managed to have a good and productive day and then to relax a little. I even made my first gumbo! For a guy claiming to be a Cajun, it's pretty sad that it took me 26 years, but it came out awesome.

Saturday was another great day. Julie & I went pumpkin picking, and we drove out to Lexington to do it just to get out and see a bit more of Kentucky. On the way home, we strayed from highways for a while and drove through some really pretty country and cute small towns. We both love Louisville, but we came to Kentucky for something a little different than the way we're living now. It was good to get out and see it, to remind ourselves of the ultimate goal.

For the last three days, though, I've been totally in a funk. With as little free time as I usually get, a 5-day weekend seems like having an eternity stretched out in front of me. After 2 days, I completely failed to make or stick to plans to continue getting everything done that I wanted to. The attempts I did make to put up a gate in the backyard so we can finally let the dog out without a leash or get ahead on my homework were frustrating flops. I tried to have band practice Sunday and to make plans to hang out with friends last night, but nothing came of it.

In a normal week, I get about zero time to stretch out or relax. The only downside of having 3 days off should be missing 3 days' pay, but somehow--poor as I am--that feels like the least of my frustrations right now. If only I could pinpoint what the most of them are, instead of just floating around here like a potato in a funky stew.