Matching Tracksuits

Month: March 2020

Virus

Thursday 12 March 2020

And like that, everyone is living with the effects of a pandemic. The Girl’s tournament this week will almost certainly be canceled, and we aren’t going even if it isn’t: our club owner made an executive decision that no Excell teams will be playing there. USA volleyball recommended the cancellation of all tournaments, but the tournament organizers didn’t cancel. “I put the girls’ safety above everything else,” he said in a team meeting this evening after practice. “The NBA has stopped playing; universities have virtually closed down; schools are closing. It’s just not responsible to go.” And we all shook our heads in agreement.

It also puts into question our summer trip to Poland. It’s still three months away, but who knows how this will play out.

It’s gotten me to thinking macabre thoughts, though, about a potential pandemic a few years in the future that seems inevitable. A pandemic that, if it comes to pass, will have been completely preventable. The permafrost is melting due to rising temperatures, which in turn are due to our shortsightedness, past and present. Trapped within that permafrost are microbes that have been locked away from immunological history for millennia. When they get out, what will happen? In my mind, the worst-case scenario would make the present fears about coronavirus seem like the naive good old days.

Always the pessimist…

Still Shooting

Tuesday 10 March 2020

The kids have grown positively obsessed with shooting in the backyard — the Boy, his bb gun; the Girl, her bow and arrow. They really have no interest in trading.

Today’s adventure: find the arrow that ricocheted off the fence post and soared into the wild. (Slight exaggeration: it didn’t go more than thirty feet away, and was never in danger of landing in a dangerous way.)

The Girl fired it; the Girl found it. I would have half-expected her to give up sooner than she did. She’s dealing with frustration better than she was a few years ago. But she loves jumping as much as she always has:

The discovery of the day: the bbs bounce right off the archery target.

We could pick them up and reuse them, just like the arrows…

A View into a Mind

Monday 9 March 2020

It was a difficult poem, to be sure. But I’d adjusted accordingly.

First, I’d given students plenty of footnoted definitions. Words like “smouldered” and “pungence” (the poem used British English) would have left them flummoxed otherwise.

Additionally, I’d asked a fairly simple series of questions as part of our weekly inference practice: “What can we tell about this lady? What does she look like? Is she old or young?” As always, I expect the students to back up their answer with the text, and I’ve given them a simple formula to follow.

  • Make a claim: “The lady is x.”
  • Back it up from the text: “I know this because the text says…”
  • Explain your thinking with one or two sentences: “This shows she’s x because…”

I really don’t feel like it’s all that challenging. Besides, it’s something we do every Friday — inference work.

“It’s like shooting free throws,” I tell them. “It’s the most basic skill we do when we read, inferring.” It’s why we do it every Friday, week after week.

Thirdly, I’d cut the text: we were only working on the first stanza. The rest of the poem, I felt, might confuse them more.

Finally, I am always walking about the room as students work, offering help and answering questions, helping redirect or clarify thinking or ask questions that help them see the text in a new way, and there is a co-teacher in the room as well.

The text itself was a poem by Amy Lowell, “The Lady.”

You are beautiful and faded
Like an old opera tune
Played upon a harpsichord;
Or like the sun-flooded silks
Of an eighteenth-century boudoir.
In your eyes
Smoulder the fallen roses of outlived minutes,
And the perfume of your soul
Is vague and suffusing,
With the pungence of sealed spice-jars.
Your half-tones delight me,
And I grow mad with gazing
At your blent colors.

So given the questions — “What can we tell about this lady? What does she look like? Is she old or young?” — and the formula we’ve been using all year, something like this was my objective for student achievement:

The lady in the poem is beautiful. I know this because the poem starts with the words, “You are beautiful.” The poem wouldn’t say “You are beautiful” unless the lady was beautiful. The writer might be joking, but I don’t think so.

Also, the lady in the poem is old. I know this because the poem says, “You are beautiful and faded.” I know from my own experience with clothes that usually it’s old things that fade. So if the writer says the lady is faded, she must be old.

Of course there would be varying degrees of writing proficiency with that (I don’t teach writing — I’m the literature/reading teacher), and I would have to help some students reach that second realization. Also, that final sentence of the first paragraph requires some evidence as it makes a claim. What in the poem suggests the writer Still, most of them saw these things and wrote something similar.

Many, but not all.

There are several students who receive special ed services in that class — it’s an inclusion class, and there’s a co-teacher in there for that very reason. Many of the inclusion students have behavior issues that accompany their learning disabilities, but some just quietly do the best the can.

One such student produced the following in reply to the above prompt:

we know about this woman that she is beautiful and she likes an old opera tune and the perfume of her soul and she is young and her appearance is a grow mad with gazing and eighteenth-century boudior and her personality is blent colors

The lack of punctuation and capitalization is fairly typical of average eighth-grade students these days, at least in my school. That’s not my concern with this excerpt. What initially fascinates (and saddens) me is the content: it simply makes little to no sense at all past the first two clause-like elements: “we know about this woman that she is beautiful and she likes an old opera tune.” Beyond that, it seems like just a random collection of elements from the original text.

There is, however, a pattern. She clearly referred back to the questions: she explains about “her appearance” and then “her personality.” So this was not an apathetic student just randomly grabbing some words and throwing them together. This was not a vindictive act of “I’ll just put complete nonsense there because…” It’s a genuine effort at answering what was for her an incredibly difficult question.

Yet there’s more than just that. Look closely: she links “appearance” with “gazing,” a verb connected to seeing. She links “personality” to “blent colors” because the poem says “your blent colors,” so she clearly recognized that possessive pronoun and made a stab that that might be related to “her personality.” It’s not a bad interpretation, to be honest.

It’s really a valiant effort, truth be told.

But I didn’t see that at first. Grading so many such assignments, week in, week out, I get to where I’m only scanning, truth be told. Which is to say, I read it, but I read it so very fast that I’m not really reading it in the truest sense of the word. I’m not reading it like I read a book that I’m really enjoying, or even an email from a colleague. I’m looking for specific things very quickly.

I’m doing what I tell my students not to do.

Review: Flights

Friday 6 March 2020

Do I have to actually finish a book in order to review it? Doesn’t the fact that I couldn’t bring myself to slog through another page constitute a review in and of itself?

I wanted to like this book. I went into it with such high hopes. After all, Tokarczuk just won the Nobel, and this is her most-recommended book.

I found it to be a collection of random, vapid, and shallow “observations” — thoughts that anyone who has traveled at all has had a million and one times — strung together in a random mess of I-don’t-know-what.

A more eloquent Goodreads review put it thusly:

Gosh. What a load of disjointed tripe.

Not a novel. Not a book. More like the author collected all kinds of things: personal notes, FB statuses, random thoughts, more random scramblings and mixed it all together into some sort of text.

Extremely dull, disjointed ramblings on all sorts of things.

It could be read but personally I don’t find it very interesting or illuminating.

Overhyped graphomania, nothing more, nothing less.

If this is her best, I’d hate to see her worst.

It really reminds me of modern visual art. Take a jar, urinate in it, toss in a crucifix, take a picture — voila! Piss Christ. Paint a picture of the Madonna. Add some elephant dung. Voila! Art! Chris Ofili’s The Holy Virgin Mary. I get it — it’s postmodernism and post-postmodernism.

It’s still just nonsense to me.

Speech

Thursday 5 March 2020

Since I’ve managed to hoodwink and bamboozle all my fellow teachers into thinking I know a thing or two about teaching, they chose me as the teacher of the year this year, for which I politely thanked them and promptly forgot about it. The head of the school’s Beta Club chapter didn’t forget, though, and started asking me in December if I would be the keynote speaker for the induction ceremony.

I said no thank you. She asked again a week later. I said no thank you. She asked again a few days later. I said no thank you. She asked again the next day. I said no thank you. She asked again the next day again. I said no thank you. She asked again later that same day.

I started thinking the only way to get her to leave me alone was to agree to do it.

“Five to ten minutes,” she said. “Something about community service.” Here’s what I came up with:

Chapel was at nine in the morning Tuesdays and Thursdays. During my freshman of college year I didn’t have class until 11 on Thursdays. Since I didn’t live on campus, getting up and driving to the college two hours before I had to be there for a class was less than inviting to an 18-year-old. (You might have noticed I only made an excuse for Thursdays; I have no excuse for the Tuesdays I missed other than to say I was 18 and not terribly bright.) As a result, I failed to fulfill the Chapel requirements that my small Presbyterian college placed on all students. To make up for the missing chapel attendance, the college required community service. I chose a soup kitchen downtown where I went to spend an entire Saturday to make up for my missing chapel requirements.

I had heroic visions of what this would be like. I saw myself serving homeless veterans, giving them hope and soup and a smile. I saw myself giving joy to those who had no joy of their own simply by showing I cared. I saw myself bravely facing the cruelties and injustices of the world and making a difference. I saw myself battling back the apathy of society and showing these poor souls that someone cared. I saw myself changing a life or three just by handing out some beans. In short, I saw myself.

By the time that Saturday rolled around, I was more than ready. I was excited. I was optimistic. I was going to change the world through my heroic self-sacrifice!

So I was a little surprised when, on my arrival, the director of the homeless shelter led me to a small pantry illuminated by one dim dingy light bulb hanging from the ceiling.

“Our pantry needs reorganization,” he said. “That’s what we’d like you to do.”

It was true: the pantry shelves had cans of fruit next to cans hot dog chili and squeezed in between them were cans of condensed milk and packets of tuna. Mysteriously there was canned cat food hidden here and there. It was chaotic. And dark. And dirty.

“We also need you to check to see which cans have expired. Set them aside so we can throw them out,” the director said over his shoulder as he left.

I stood looking at the chaotic mess and wondered how anyone could find anything. There was no denying it: the pantry shelves needed reorganization.

Still, this was not how I was going to become a hero.

The first thing I discovered was that many of the cans were not just dusty but filthy: something had leaked on these; those were so ancient that they had a cake of dust on them; some were sticky; some were missing labels. Being somewhat OCD about such things, I couldn’t just re-stack them and leave them a mess, so I requested some water and rags and wiped off most of the cans as I worked.

All told I spent almost six hours in that pantry, not talking to a soul, not giving out soup to anyone, not listening with patience to anyone’s stories, not sharing a bit of comfort or joy with anyone.

It was the antithesis of what I’d anticipated.

And that’s probably why, nearly thirty years later, I still vividly remember that Saturday. I did more community service while I was in college, though for less-than-altruistic reasons: once I discovered how relatively easy it was to knock out a third or half of the chapel requirements on a single Saturday, I started skipping chapel with abandon. But I don’t remember much about those other occasions. Just that first one, when everything seemed to be the opposite of what I was expecting but just what was needed.

Today, you are becoming members of the Beta Club, which most people see as recognition for your academic effort and perseverance. And it is that. You have shown great resolve and fortitude in maintaining the grades you have maintained. It is a laudable achievement and a reflection of the character of both you and your parents. But this prestige is not the greatest benefit of being in the Beta club.

The greatest gift to you is the opportunity the Beta club provides to do community service regularly.

Throughout the school year, the club will provide you with many opportunities for service within the school community, and many of these projects will bring a smile to your face. You’ll go to Build a Bear to create teddy bears for Ronald McDonald House and Children’s Hospital. You’ll conduct the SouperBowl food drive in the school for the Samaritan House. You’ll participate in the Acts of Kindness week for the Department of Juvenile Justice. All of these activities will, in their own way, be fun.

But I would argue that you need to fulfill some of your community service hours by doing something that’s not fun, that is in no way Romantic (capital r — you’ll learn about Romanticism in American lit), that is in no sense enjoyable. Something hard. Something that gets you dirty and makes you sweat. Something practical. Something you most decidedly wouldn’t want to put on Instagram.

This is not because I think you should punish yourself, because such work is not punishment. Such work, especially when done surreptitiously, is the stuff of character because it is often not recognized and seldom lauded. Rearranging that pantry was in a sense miserably boring. But I know that I helped other people help other people. In organizing that pantry I made the job of the cooks easier, and they were the ones doing the real work, day in and day out, not some little college freshman hanging around on a Saturday because he’d been too lazy to go to chapel. It was a little thing, but that’s why I remember it. That’s why, in a sense, it was big, because it taught me that often it’s the little things that make the difference.

So go out and find the bigness that’s in those little moments of self-sacrifice accomplished by completing less-than-glamorous community service. Go seek out jobs that bring no glory, the little things that you don’t think anyone notices. Before you know it, that type of service will become a reward in and of itself. You’ll do these things not for the Beta club service hour credits you earn but for the sense of accomplishment and character they bring. And then you’ll stop doing it for those reasons as well: it will just be a habit. It will be something you do without thinking, something you do because that’s who you are. And when you reach that level of serving others, of helping those in need, you’ll be someone who really makes a difference, someone who changes the world, one grimy soup can at a time.

In the end, I cut some of it on the fly. (I indicated what I remembered cutting above.) An odd experience overall: my brain was calculating several different trajectories at the same time:

  • Am I speaking too quickly?
  • Do I know the speech well enough to make eye contact at this moment?
  • I need my notes! I need my notes! I have to break eye contact and gracefully let my eyes fall on the spot where I should be next — without panic.
  • Who does she look like? She looks like someone I’ve seen before.
  • Am I speaking too slowly?
  • Didn’t I teach his brother? He looks a lot like Z from two years ago…
  • Is this making sense?
  • Can I cut this part short? As I say it aloud, it doesn’t sound as good as I thought it would.
  • If I skip this next part, will I have transition problems?
  • Why the hell don’t they have a mic stand? I hate standing here holding this mic.

In the end, my final version felt like it lasted about eight minutes, but I really have no idea.

An interesting experience, but not one I’m keen on repeating, but it’s not because it terrified me or anything of the sort: I make little public speeches multiple times a day. I’m just used to winging the exact words and having only a general plan in mind.

Changes

Wednesday 4 March 2020

Our daughter now leaves the bathroom trailing a Monet scent of blossoms and linens, the mingling of surf and grass — the thousand and one scents of a young teenage girl. She started out smelling of “pinkness and warmth and contentedness,” a warm mix of comfortable and soft scents that came from her effortlessly, naturally. It was who she was; it was how old she was, or rather how young.

Now, too, her scents bloom from her age, though now from deliberate choice and purposeful will. They come from body washes and facial scrubs, hand creams and lip balms, shampoos and exfoliants. They are from her will and a representation of her will — a desire to be pleasant, to be sweet, to be pretty.

To what end? As far as I can tell, she’s not seeking the eye of anyone, not interested in any such things, and though the time is right for such interest to begin budding, we’ve not heard a word.

But realistically speaking, would we? Didn’t I try desperately to hide from my parents the fact that I no longer found girls foreign and frightful? Didn’t I try desperately to hide from my parents the fact that this girl or that had caught my eye? Didn’t I try desperately to save myself from that embarrassment, because how could they possibly understand?

Giggles

Tuesday 3 March 2020

When putting to bed a 7-year-old, the giggles are sometimes inevitable. Just about anything can set them off. A giggling 7-year-old is usually a joy, but it bedtime there’s a touch of gray to it as well: the kid needs to go to sleep, but it’s so much fun just to lie there giggling together.

Tonight the word “nipple” the boy giggling and he couldn’t stop. “Such a funny word!”

I put my index finger to my lips to shush him.

“Daddy,” he said, “you’re trying to shush me but you still laughing.”

“I know,” I laughed.

In the end, I had to leave. I knew he would never get and I would never stop laughing if I didn’t.

There was an added tenderness to that moment from a passage I had read earlier in the evening in a book by Paul Auster. One of the characters is a man named Peter Stillman who’s father had literally locked him up in a dark room from the age of three so he would forget English and revert to the natural language of God.

Needless to say, it didn’t work.

The only thing the father’s cruelty accomplished was to create a scarred man who could barely speak.

No father would behave way. Depravity is possible but not to that degree. At least we tell ourselves that. Insanity is the only explanation for such horror.

It seemed to me then that I was not only having a sweet moment with my son but also giving him an extra helping to make up for other children’s horror. As if that would help. 

Reading Paul Auster

Monday 2 March 2020

paul auster photo
Photo by david_shankbone

I’ve read two Paul Auster books in the last couple of weeks: The Brooklyn Follies and The Book of Illusions.

It’s been a while since I read Auster, and I’d forgotten what it’s like to read his works. It’s like playing cards with a known cheat. You know when you sit down with him that he’s going to be slipping cards from the deck and sliding them up his sleeve. You know that he’ll likely be talking about sliding or hiding or even cheating as he’s concealing the cards, all but announcing that he’s doing it, all but saying, “Hey, watch me slide this ace into secrecy that’s no secret at all.”

You know that as he continues playing that he’s got them up there, and when you think he’s going to pull one out, nothing happens. He makes it obvious when he’s hidden them and then slides them into play without a whisper and you only notice it a couple of hands later. And all the time he’s led you to believe you’re winning. He’s laughed off his frustrating losses, smiled at his occasional wins, but made it clear without making it clear that he knows he’s losing. Except he’s not. He’s got that one last card sure to when that one last hand when all the money’s on the table and there are twenty pages of the book left, he’ll pull that card out of your sleeve and play it himself. You look at your sleeve, look at his, and realize that all those cards he put up his sleeve were somehow a distraction for putting one ultimate winner up your sleeve.

It’s not that he creates surprise endings. The Sixth Sense is a surprise ending. No, he just gets you to look straight ahead for the entire book at some scene right in front of you and then makes you look over to your right to see what he’s been building the whole time. Subtle, deft endings that come out of nowhere and yet are no surprise at all.