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Month: August 2010

Other Side of the Desk

Tuesday 31 August 2010

I sit quietly, looking at the long list of assignments upon which the professor will be basing our grade. Thinking of all my other obligations, I find myself wondering if I’ll survive the next few months.

And I am pleased with that.

Being a teacher without being a student on a regular basis is about like being a mechanic who never drives. It’s one thing to “dish it out.” It’s another to take it.

To see the classroom from both sides of the desk is to ensure reasonable expectations from one’s own students.

Beginnings

Sunday 29 August 2010

L has been dancing whenever she hears music from the time she could stand. At first, it was only rhythmic bouncing with her knees and upper body. As her motor control improved, so did her moves.

So great is her love of motion that she’ll gladly sit and watch others dance. One of her favorite videos to watch is a clip about one young English lady’s ballet instruction, and from the first time she watched, she declared, “I’m a ballerina!”

Now, at close to four years old, she’s finally of the age that we can actually begin to make that reality.

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A quick trip to the ballet supply store, a few phone calls, and we have a reluctant ballerina.

L is a cautious girl: she doesn’t just dive into this or that without concern. She is, in short, a worrier. And so on the first day of ballet, though she had been talking about it all week, she fretted that she might not like it after all.

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Fear set in, and before long, she was declaring, “I don’t want to go.” No amount of cajoling could convince her.

The Opportunities-We-Never-Had dilemma set in: we never want to force her to participate in anything creative — where’s the joy in that? Yet we knew that if we could just get her there, just let her see the other girls dancing, that all would be well.

Finally, K simply declared that in order to cancel the lessons, L herself had to go with Mama to  cancel the lessons.

She ended up staying.

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Saturday morning, before her second lesson, L was all smiles.

Why I?

Wednesday 25 August 2010

The New York Times building in New York, NY ac...
Image via Wikipedia

A student in class today asked why we capitalize the first person singular subjective-case personal pronoun, I, but none of the other personal pronouns. “Why don’t we capitalize ‘he’ or ‘she’?” the curious young lady asked.

Indeed.

“I’ll look into that,” I replied, scribbling in my little notebook.

The New York Times offers an answer:

England is where the capital “I” first reared its dotless head. In Old and Middle English, when “I” was still “ic,” “ich” or some variation thereof – before phonetic changes in the spoken language led to a stripped-down written form – the first-person pronoun was not majuscule in most cases. The generally accepted linguistic explanation for the capital “I” is that it could not stand alone, uncapitalized, as a single letter, which allows for the possibility that early manuscripts and typography played a major role in shaping the national character of English-speaking countries. (New York Times)

The whole article is quite interesting.

First Things

Monday 23 August 2010

The first week of school is behind us. A hectic week of bureaucracy and smiles. The former comes from all the forms and materials we distribute to students and then take back up almost immediately. “Bring this back before the end of the first week!” The latter comes from my yearly effort to be genuinely friendly.

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Image via Wikipedia

There’s an old saying — advice to new teachers, really — that a teacher should never smile before Christmas. By the end of every school year, I’m so frustrated with my failures in dealing with this or that disruptive or disrespectful (somewhat synonymous in many ways) student that I promise myself that next year I will be a rock until Christmas. I will lay down the law and accept no compromise. I will be a drill instructor. I will pound them into submission and then convince them I’m a decent and nice guy.

Yet summer wanes, my planning progresses, and I inevitably turn my thoughts to what I want to do during the first days of school. And it occurs to me that I would most definitely not like to be beaten into submission as an initial experience with anyone. It would be hard to overcome the negative feelings such a first impression would create.

So when the first day of school arrives, I begin again to walk the ever-wiggling line between being a kind authoritative and devolving into a kind permissive teacher. Students might find the first overbearing at times but have a general faith — now and in the future — that all was done for their best; students find the second to be a favorite teacher while in middle school, only to look back on the teacher as one who was “nice but didn’t teach us much.”

Last week — the first week back — was the honeymoon period. The real test now begins. The sad thing is, I already have my eye on one or two that I believe will be major problems before the end of the first quarter. If I can work effectively with students and keep it only to one or two, it will be a great success.

Six

Saturday 14 August 2010

The passage of time has always fascinated me. “X years ago today, this happened,” I would think, marveling at all the things that happened in the meantime. Often, it wasn’t an exact day, but instead, within a month or so of the actual anniversary, I would find myself thinking such nostalgic thoughts.

Many of those events later turned out to be insignificant, of little more importance than what one had for breakfast nine days ago.

Today’s is the most significant of my — and K’s — life.

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When I reflect on the patience necessary for us to get married (a non-Catholic American getting married in Poland requires only slightly less bureaucracy than starting a war or passing a stimulus bill) and the patience necessary to put up with my foolishness for six years, I realize how fortunate I am.

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Six years — an awfully short time. Wars and debates have lasted much longer — and marriages. But when I look to the next six years, and the six years after that, and the six years after that (ad infinitum),

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when I think of a time when my few remaining hairs have turned gray and migrated to my nose and ears, when my mind moves slowly and my body more so,

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I will still have the most intelligent, beautiful, and thoughtful (among countless other superlatives) woman at my side. Perhaps only then will I truly understand the significance of our love.

Or maybe it’s to remain our ultimate mystery.

Endings and Beginnings

Monday 9 August 2010

The summer’s end nears. Morning temperatures are back in the lower seventies, and we return to eating breakfast on the deck occasionally. Bagels for us all, but the Girl prefers to dip hers in maple syrup. In a sense, it’s hard to argue with that kind of logic.

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Here in the south, the end of summer is about the only time we can go outside and play comfortably. In July, it’s still 90 degrees as the sun sets. We try to head out sometimes for a little outdoor time, but no one wants to melt.

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Still, there are options. And does it ever bring back memories: a few minutes of running through misted water on a hot summer afternoon was my idea of paradise when I was a kid. A few overlapping garbage bags fastened to the ground with whatever one could find would sometimes serve as a slide, though never for too long. Since we don’t have a sprinkler (they’ve all broken), L has somewhat limited options. It’s more fun for me, though.

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The last of the crape myrtle blossoms begin falling.

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And in this end is my beginning: a new school year both sparkles and looms.

Lost

Sunday 8 August 2010

In the first installment of the Toy Story series, Woody, thinking he’s been left behind, falls to the ground and decries his new, depressing status: “I’m a lost toy!”

Surely there can be many things more terrifying than being lost. One of our great childhood fears is getting lost, being separated from our parents and unable to find them. It’s the stuff of every child’s nightmares, and in a modified way, the plot of great books of the past.

Losing something dear to us is like losing a part of us.

Today, before Mass, somewhere between getting out of the car and walking out of the restroom, L lost her Madeline doll. “She may be teeny tiny, diminutive, petite.” L’s Madeline doll was all those things, and she even had a scar from having her appendectomy.

I walked back to the car, looking for the doll that I thought surely would be easy to find. No such luck. K and L went back to the restroom. No doll. After Mass, I talked to the ushers. Sadly, there’s no lost and found bin anymore, but they informed me that people often leave lost items on the tables outside the sanctuary. No Madeline. We checked the bathroom once more and looked carefully as we went back to the car.

No luck; no Madeline.

Fortunately, L was not terribly attached to the dolls, so a few tears and it was all fine.

But I’m genuinely curious about what happened to that doll. Did someone take it? If so, why? Isn’t it obviously a lost toy? If someone found it in the parking lot, isn’t it a reasonable assumption that the owner will return to look for it? In short, who would simply take a toy when it’s obvious where the owner is? Who would take a doll from a church parking lot?

Perhaps it will show up next week. There’s always that hope — the idealism that led me to be a teacher still says, “Someone will play with it for a week, then return it.”

Face Bóg

Thursday 5 August 2010

Facebook is truly becoming ubiquitous, to the point that it can be used in Polish religious advertising.

Below was a poster at the entrance to one of the many churches in Krakow.

“Bóg” (“God”) is pronounced much like the English “book,” but with an obvious “g” instead of “k.”

“Dodaj boga do twoich znajomych” literally means “Add God to your acquaintances,” but a more Fackbook-eque translation would obviously be, “Add as friend.”

Sing, Sing a Song…

Monday 2 August 2010

K grew up so close to Slovakia that it’s fairly easy to pick up Slovakian programming from her folks’ home. Indeed, that part of Poland used to be Slovakia: there’s still a weekly Mass said in Slovakian, and K’s father’s high school exit exam was in Slovakian.

The program itself has hints of the old communist form.

Zoo

Sunday 1 August 2010

Shortly after she woke up, L declared, “I’m ready! Let’s go to the zoo!” Never mind that she was still in her pajamas, still unbreakfasted, and still rubbing sleep out of her eyes. We’d promised a trip to the Atlanta zoo (K wanted to go to Ikea, see?), and she was ready.

Much larger than our quaint (but lovely) zoo in Greenville, the Atlanta zoo has many species that L had never seen before. The first new friends: warthogs.

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I’d never seen them myself except in The Lion King, which hardly counts.

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They were shockingly ugly, like the product of some kind of cross-breeding experiment gone horribly, horribly wrong. Yet like most things we deem “ugly,” they were oblivious to their decided lack of charm.

Then again, these creatures must certainly enchant someone.

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Just down the path, though, were animals whose grace and beauty were inversely proportional to the warthogs’. Black horses with white stripes or vice versa, the zebras were lovely in a stark and simple way. Supposedly they are very difficult to domesticate, but certainly many have tried: who could resist?

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For me, though, the highlight of any trip to a zoo is the great apes. It’s as if we’re watching ourselves, they’re so intelligent and anthropomorphic.

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They seem to stop and think. They fight. They play. They’re among the closest to humans biologically and behaviorally among the whole animal kingdom. I always get the feeling they’re the ones watching us.

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During today’s visit, we were privileged — if that’s the correct term — to watch two enormous males contend for the attention of a female. They chased each other about a bit, then fell into violence. One smack echoed, and I shuddered as I realized the certain impossibility of a human surviving such a blow.

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They calmed down a fairly quickly, and they even decided to pose for a few pictures.

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In between hygiene breaks, of course.

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At the serpentarium it was feeding time, and a small constrictor — some kind of boa, if memory serves — swallowed a bird whole. Those who’d arrived first assured those of us who arrived only to see the last few inches of the bird, “It was dead when the keeper put it in the cage.” What irony: some would have been appalled by what goes on everyday in nature. Animal cruelty.

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Giant pandas were having their dinner as well, but it was a considerably more benign process: after all, bamboo doesn’t register pain, does it?

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Despite all the new animals we saw, L’s response to the on-the-way-home question, “What was your favorite part?” was really quite predictable.

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Who could put silly warthogs, zebras, constrictors, or pandas above an elephant ride?

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Even though the heat was unbearable, the elephant ride was blissful.

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If she could, she would have ridden into the night, I’m sure.

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