Matching Tracksuits

Month: January 2011

R&J

Sunday 30 January 2011

It’s that time of the year, the highlight of my teaching year in many ways: I go over Romeo and Juliet with my English I class. I know I’ve mentioned this before, even at roughly the same time of the year. (The start of the second semester is just such a perfect time to begin the most challenging read of the year.) I suspect I’ll be writing about it every January, because I get such a thrill out of introducing a new group of kids to arguably the greatest writer in English.

It’s such a time of uncertainty for the students. Shakespeare has held such a vaunted place in their imaginations for so long that they’re certain it will be the most stilted, boring bunch of aristocratic nonsense they’ve ever encountered.

And then they hear the nurse making one sexual innuendo after innuendo: “I am the drudge and toil in your delight, / But you shall bear the burden soon at night.” They notice that Juliet is prone to making them, too:

‘Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What’s Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man.

They see Mercutio being a positively provocative smartaleck: “And but one word with one of us? couple it with / something; make it a word and a blow.” They find themselves not liking characters: “Mr. Scott, Romeo is kind of creepy in a way.” And out of the seeming blue, they find themselves able to follow three scenes (2.4-2.6) in a recorded performance without the aid of the text before them.

Every day, I ask the same question: “On a scale of one to five, how difficult are you finding Shakespeare now?” I ask students to hold up the number of fingers to express their difficulty with the text. After the first reading of the prologue, it was all fives. Now, after two acts, it’s a mixture of fours, threes, and twos.

I have the privilege of watching 100+ eighth graders grow and develop over the course of nine months. I see them developing self-control, self-confidence, and occasionally even calm humility, but these are part of the natural course of growing up. Seeing them gradually make their peace with an author they feared only months before (and I can claim all 100 for this, for everyone in my classroom comes to terms with the Bard at some point and some level) is something I can claim at least partial credit for, and it’s one of the many thousands of reasons I can’t imagine doing anything else.

Photo by -JvL-

Slip Sliding Away

Saturday 29 January 2011

Stepping onto the ice for the first time in probably twenty-five years can be a bit of a stressful experience. My mind turns back to the last time I ice skated: I recall being fairly confident; I remember the importance of having tightly-laced boots; I think about how I was finally able to skate backwards the last time I ever went as a kid. Or was I? I did go only a handful of times, after all, and most of those times my attention was not on the ice but on those on the ice around me — usually on specific person.

Maybe I only imagined I could skate, because the instant I step onto the ice, I’m fairly certain this is the first time I’ve ever ice skated.

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Yet I watch the Girl, who truly is on the ice for the first time, and I realize that perhaps I haven’t forgotten everything. I push off and begin to glide — I realize I have.

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Perhaps because I have more experience and a more developed sense of balance, I’m not as bad as the Girl: her feet are slipping this way and that, forward, backwards, left right. She looks like she could have been the model for some cartoon about a character’s first time on ice.

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By the end of the hour, though, she’s able to skate glide by herself from me to K and back again. A few more times and she’ll be asking when she can try her first jump.

One Semester in One Month

Friday 28 January 2011

I just finished up a course on diagnosing and correcting reading deficiencies in middle and high school students. One of the most useful courses I’ve ever taken — especially the book: Kylene Beers’ When Kids Can’t Read: What Teachers Can Do. It’s my new classroom Bible.

The course was a one-semester course crammed into one month, what my school calls, appropriately enough, “January term.”

Which is finally over. And which explains how we could take the Girl ice skating for the first time and it receive nary a mention here…

Maybe over the weekend…

Letters, Part One

Wednesday 19 January 2011

Teachers have a dream letter. It’s the letter that says simply, “Thanks. You helped me.” Sure, it’s an ego boost, but more than that, it’s confirmation that a teacher is doing his job effectively from the only source that matters: the student.

I received one such letter after my student teaching. A young lady in the honors course I was teaching was frustrated with the amount of reading I’d assigned. She came to me after class and explained that she has great difficulty comprehending what she’s read. “I have to have my mother help me. She reads it and explains it,” she said quietly, wiping her tears and glancing about to see if any other students were in the room.

The next day, I gave her a list of techniques I’d created the night before while pouring over all my notes and books from college. I explained how each technique worked, modeling a couple. She used them at home and said they were helpful.

When my cooperating teacher had the students write letter to me before I completed the assignment (one thing you liked, one thing you didn’t, and advice for the future), she wrote a sentence that, though I have long since lost the letter, I remember clearly: “You’ve helped me more than you realize.”

Fifteen years later, I receive another letter.

To be continued

A Toast to Refined Consumerism

Monday 17 January 2011

We are a consumer culture. The fact that the manufacturing industry is diminishing while the service sector continues to grow (relatively speaking). When all one’s basic needs are met, consuming can flourish. In such a state, we can begin to invent perfectly useless products and services that add nothing quantitative to one’s life and only barely had a qualitative measure for some brief moment until the novelty wears off.

Standing in line to return a product at Best Buy today, I noticed such a product: the ProToast Toaster.

For less than forty dollars, you can buy a toaster that not only produces tasty toast but also affirms your choice for Favorite Football Team.â„¢

If only it could help you with your Fantasy Football standings…

Looking Back, Looking Forward

Sunday 16 January 2011

Herbert W. Armstrong

Twenty-five years ago today there was a death that only a few thousand true believers and former true believers even remember, let alone know anything about. There are of course a few specialists — historians of religion and theologians — that would remember this man or know anything about it.

Herbert Armstrong died on January 19, 1986. He was the founder and leader of the church I grew up in, and his death came both as a shock and an expected consequence of age: he was 93 years old.

I remember his death; I remember his life; I find myself compelled to mention it. In that regard, I am hardly alone: there are dozens of bloggers writing about the same thing today. They’re rehearsing for the millionth time how he made false predictions (Armageddon was scheduled to begin during World War II, in 1972, and by 2005), how he lived in a palatial mansion and wore hand-tailored while his followers gave ridiculous amounts of their income (minimum of 10% of one’s gross salary plus offerings) to his church, how he was accused of some fairly awful things (which are certainly unprovable but highly suspect given the amount of circumstantial evidence).

Yet what strikes me about today — yet again — is how quickly time has passed since then, how insignificantly short twenty-five years can be.

This is most noticeable when thinking about music. I think of the music I grew up on, the music that was freshly released while I was in junior high and high school:

  • Boston’s Third Stage
  • U2’s Joshua Tree
  • REM’s Green
  • Pink Floyd’s Momentary Lapse of Reason

This is music that today’s teens consider “old music.” I think of how little time seems to have passed between the release of those albums and the present moment. It doesn’t feel like two and a half decades; the music doesn’t sound that old. And yet.

During high school, I was much more interested in “old” music myself:

  • Genesis’s albums when Peter Gabriel was still fronting the band.
  • The Grateful Dead
  • Pink Floyd
  • The Beatles

Now I stand in the same relationship to the music I grew up with as my teachers stood to Pink Floyd and the Beatles: twenty-plus years in the past (“It was twenty years ago today…”) yet feeling like yesterday (fill in the Beatles allusion for yourself).

And so I look back at the death of Herbert Armstrong realizing that it was an insignificant blink of time ago. Less than the flit of an eyelash in the grand scale of time. And not such a big chunk of time as twenty-five years seemed when I was thirteen and Armstrong died.

38

Thursday 13 January 2011

27+11

WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg recently wrote of turning twenty-seven on the eleventh of January. Twenty-seven and the creator of software that has literally changed the world. Must be a good birthday.

Two days later, it’s my turn. Twenty-seven. Plus eleven.

Twenty-seven seems so very distant. It was 2000, and I lived in Boston. I was about to give up on my minimal religious studies work at Boston University and had just begun working for a start-up. My return to Poland was still a year off, and I was in a self-imposed limbo.

Eleven years later, I’m back in the classroom, and still spending too much time on the computer. Yet I’m infinitely more content, and how could I not be? I’m married, and we have a beautiful daughter.

As I approach forty, I find myself smiling at Mullenweg’s comment about twenty-seven:

27 is a really awkward age – I’m not young anymore but still before the looming 30. It’s inbetween.

Thirty looms for him; forty for me. So many I should give both of us some advice: starting a new decade is easier if you do it in style. I suggest a glance at my own thirtieth birthday.

My closest friends were there.

30th Birthday Party II

I’d hired a DJ (who was also a student) to play music I’d supplied (it was, after all, my birthday), so the party itself was a blast.

30th Birthday Party XI

Great friends; great music; great time.

Turning thirty was a snap. I anticipate the same thing in two years. And if I’m lucky, I’ll get a few “Lordy! Lordy! Look who’s forty!” birthday cards.

For now, as a warm up to forty, there’s bigos for dinner:

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Cheese cake for dessert:

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And a wildly active — which means a wildly healthy — daughter.

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And then there’s this to look forward to:

Sun

Thursday 13 January 2011

The sun came out.

The ice glistened.

In the trees.

On the ground.

“Sledding”

Thursday 13 January 2011

We live in the South: two things we do not have but would have come in handy this week:

  1. Snow shovel
  2. Sled

The former is easily enough fixed. A good square-point shovel gets the job done, albeit very slowly. The latter took some thinking. Eventually, we settled on a design: enormous Zip-Lock bags encasing a few carefully folded blankets. It’s soft; it’s durable; it slides — almost.

It needs a little motivation to go the first few times — a little momentum from an old body that now cringes looking at this picture. Still, for the good of God, country, sledding, and all that.

K has a bit more success, but Baby, strapped to a paper plate, glides along the frozen snow like a pro.

L herself, though, is a little more reluctant. She needs a few more observational sessions to get comfortable with the idea of sliding down ice on a pile of blankets tucked in a bag. (Would a proper sled allay her fears any?)

In the end, the most fun for L is “cleaning” the streets: taking large chunks of frozen snow she finds and breaking them gleefully.

“I’m helping our neighbors,” she explains in utmost seriousness, dumping another load of snow back into the road as she talks. “It’s hard work.” And wet.

So is hauling a heavy chunk of growing girl up and down the icy streets on an improvised sleigh, but like L, K doesn’t complain.

Hard is sometimes a pleasure.

Dancing

Wednesday 12 January 2011

The Girl loves dancing. We’ve known that for some time, and made videos and photos several times.

It’s such an odd thing for me, a complete non-dancer. She can hear music that she likes, and she’ll jump up and start dancing — in the kitchen, in the living room, in her room.

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I imagine if any of her favorites came on the radio while we’re out shopping, she’d dance about there as well.

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She dances to anything. K puts on Polish folk music and within minutes, the Girl has burst into the living room and is dancing. Anything by Chopin gets her swaying almost majestically.

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Elvis Costello can get her feet moving so fast it looks likes she’s running in place.

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It is the ultimate sign of a love of music.

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Our hope is that it will last and deepen over the years.

Snow Day(s) 2011, Day 2

Tuesday 11 January 2011

A snow day was always an unexpected blessing when I was growing up. They were so rare that it was hard believe it when they actually occurred. As a teacher, I’ll admit that one snow day a year is just about the best thing that can happen. I know that we’ve lost a make-up day, but three are built into the school calendar — not a big price to pay. Having two snow days gets to be irritating. Having three is simply annoying. After that, we’re in the hole: we have to make them up some other way.

So while the first day is all fun and games — playing in the snow, taking walks, just enjoying the snow.

I went for a walk, watching how Southerners drive in the snow, wondering where such misplaced confidence comes when they have so little experience driving in such conditions. At least one individual seemed to think that because he had a SUV normal rules of physics didn’t apply to him.

Others thought that somehow the laws of physics increased their stringency in icy conditions, barely going much faster than I walked. The majority managed to meet some happy medium.

Others were enjoying what the drivers were avoiding. “A day with dry, powdery snow does not present the best condition for a sled with runners,” I wanted to tell them. They were figuring it out for themselves, though.

As I trudged through the snow, I thought of all the countless walks I took in the snow while living in Poland. I was enchanted every winter: snow on the ground for weeks, months at a time. In the South, we’re lucky if it stays for a couple of days (the present conditions excepted). My first year in Polska, there was snow on the ground from early December to March. I went for a walk almost every day, exploring just how deep the snow in the fields could be in mid-January, after several snow falls.

Tramping around with a camera brought about some wonderfully nostalgic moments. My whole story of my photographic hobby unfolded in my memory: I arrived in Poland with a point-and-shoot Canon and quickly bought my first SLR — a Russian Zenit (Зени́т‚ in Russian), a solid, heavy metal-bodied camera with a manual focus and manual metering. I learned more about photography wrestling with that beast than I’ve learned since.

I continued my walk to the main street of our hamlet and slipped into an open CVS. By the door, the Southern storm staple: bread.

“Did you put that out for the storm?” I ask as I pay for the lighters I bought.

“I don’t think so,” replied the attendant. “But I didn’t work this weekend. I can’t remember if we had it out last time I worked.”

As I headed back home, I saw a fitting message.

Everyone had taken it to heart: the streets were virtually empty.

“Who would get out in this mess when there’s no where to go?” I muttered to myself. The whole state shut down yesterday: schools, state offices, everything but the DMV and their salt/brine-spreading, snow plowing devices.

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In the meantime, we kept ourselves busy.

Snow Day 2011

Monday 10 January 2011

Sunday was clear — sunny, with a blue sky and the cool air typical of a Southern winter. The storm was coming, though, and everyone knew it.

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Officials canceled school Sunday night, around 9:45, before a single flake fell. Local news outlets carried stories of empty store shelves as residents bought milk, bread, coats, boots, shovels — the signs of a population generally unprepared for such snow.

We woke to white, something so rare here that it makes us simply awestruck.

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We’d grown used to seeing one snowfall a year, usually with two inches accumulation maximum, disappearing by the afternoon. To wake up to four inches, with more falling — almost unheard of in the South.

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Everything stops — no one’s going anywhere, and so unexpectedly, we have a family day.

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Morning in the snow, maybe a movie in the afternoon, more snow before the sun sets — a perfect day.

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Journals

Wednesday 5 January 2011

Frustration Bliss
Image via Wikipedia

Reading eighth-graders’ journals is like jumping in a time machine: all the angst, all the broken hearts, all the frustration with school. I see myself a thousand times over. Bored with this. Frustrated about that. Irritated with him. In love with her.

“Nothing new under the sun.”

They’ll find this out for themselves. But when I leave comments in their journal, how can I say this without being dismissive? It’s a fine line.

First Day Back

Monday 3 January 2011

Returning to school as a student was always something of a mix. There was a little relief because, let’s face it: free time can get a little boring when you’re a teen. At the same time, there was the return to dreaded classes and dreaded teachers. There were classes we didn’t feel were worth our time (sometimes rightly, often not), but this was not the real problem.

The true problem was in the personnel: the teachers.

Though they were few, there were teachers gifted at turning interesting subject matter into drudgery because of their inability to share their enthusiasm or (probably more likely) their complete lack of enthusiasm. Such teachers often complained about the end of break, relied heavily on sarcasm in their interactions with students, and generally made no effort to hide the fact that they really didn’t want to be there, that they really didn’t enjoy working with us, and that, given any other options, they would choose just about any job over being a teacher. (This is certainly not to say that any teacher who complains about the end of a break or uses sarcasm is such a teacher.)

Those were the classes we endured when going back to school after a break. Was it best to have such a teacher first period, fourth period, or seventh? That was the only question. First period meant getting the dreaded class over with from the beginning. Seventh period meant capping a potentially great day with a sure disaster. Fourth was always good for me: not early enough to put me in a sour mood for the rest of the day and not late enough to leave a bad taste in my mouth before heading home.

I know there are still teachers like that. I suspect that if I snooped around a bit, I’d find one or two in my own school. Most teachers would say the same of their schools, I’m sure.

For such teachers, being in class is just as much drudgery as it is for the students. Neither wants to be there; all are counting the minutes to the end of the class. Such teachers drag themselves out of bed every morning and breathe a sigh of relief when the day is done. And so the first day back for them is sheer torture. It’s a return to work.

Along the lines of the old adage, I’ve never worked a day in my life as long as I’ve been employed in education. Going back to school today was a pleasure. Indeed, I couldn’t get to sleep for the excitement last night of trying some new lessons in old units. I walked down the hall this morning with an enormous smile on my face, and I greeted everyone — students, teachers, administrators — with a genuinely goofy cheerfulness. I told students that I’d missed them, that I’d been looking forward to returning, that I was a little bored without working with them.

Perhaps this helps explain why I have no behavior issues in my classroom beyond the talkative nature of thirteen-year-olds.