Sunday
Miś
"I have a film you must see." We were sitting in a restaurant, waiting for the next bus back to Lipnica, when Janusz told me this. "It's a perfect film."
"What's it about?" I probed.
"Poland. It's about -- you just have to see it," came the response.
For the next few weeks, whenever we met up, Janusz brought up the film.
"When are you going to come see it?" he would ask. "You have to see it. It's a perfect film."
Little did I know: classic and perfect.
The first time I saw the Polish cult comedy Miś ("Teddy Bear"), I knew I'd have to see it again. I'd laughed so hard at some scenes that it was difficult to catch my breath, but I knew I'd only caught part of it. This was partially because of language -- my Polish, after all, isn't perfect -- and partially because of the layers of the film.
In the years since I first watched the film, I've seen it countless times. Those layers are still revealing themselves with each viewing: little touches like signs in the background and repeating musical themes, things you'll never get from one viewing. Indeed, I've watched it so many times now I can quote whole sections of it, and no matter one's situation, there's almost always a quote from Miś that is perfectly applicable.
The first shot is of a helicopter, clearly working as a flying crane. We see the wire, but it takes a moment before we see what is hanging from it.
On the ground, it becomes immediately obvious: it is a fake building with police officers milling around, part of a suprise speed trap.
As the credits roll, other officers put up two-dimensional fake buildings to create a small "village" near the road. The reasoning is simple: Polish traffic law requires drivers to slow in a teren zabudowany.
Both words have as close a thing as a cognate as just about any words in Polish: "teren" means "terrain" and "zabudowany" derives from "budowac," which means "build." So teren zabudowany literally means "terrain built."
The trap, though, is incomplete without people. Other officers soon appear with variously dressed mannequins in hand. An off-screen ranking officer's voice instructs, "Put them in a line," and after a pause, we hear an explanation: "There must be some sign of life."
The opening scene concludes with a soon-to-be-critical officer announcing over the radio that they are ready and that "moze zaczynac!"
"We can begin!"
What is amazing about the film, made in the very early 1980's, is how much it mocks the Polish Communist reality and the effects of a state monopoly on everything from goods to ideas. That it made it past the censors is a minor miracle: I've really no idea how it could happen other than the notion that perhaps the Polish Communist party was more forgiving than Big Brother to the east. All the same, such blatant mockery?
The story, though, is simple: Ryszard Ochódzki, the director of a sports club, is trying to beat his ex-wife to London, where they have money under a joint account. Each knows the other will drain the account, and so it's a mad race to see who can get there first. When Ochódzki's wife, Irena, tears some pages out of his passport making it impossible for him to travel abroad, he devises one of the most complicated and convoluted schemes to get to the bank despite this seemingly insurmountable obstacle.
It's a miraculous film, and many of the scenes resonate with my own experiences in Poland in the mid-1990's.
Damage
Four Thursday Vignettes
Practice
Every morning I have hall duty in the arts wing. On one side is the band; on the other, strings. I walk back and forth between the two, listening to a beautiful cacophony of kids learning music.
A young lady is practicing her violin part. I recognize the melody.
"Do you know what that is? Who wrote it? What it's called?" I ask with a smile. The boy standing with her is one of my favorite students, but I don't teach him. He's on a team down the hall, but he's a sweet young man who smiles a lot and is friendly with everyone, so we've chat a little almost every morning. He glances at the sheet music at the same time she does. I beat them to it, though.
"Edvard Grieg. It's called In the Hall of the Mountain King." One of those pieces we all recognize from this or that film or advertisement, but few can identify by name. "Bet you didn't expect an English teacher to know that, did you?" I laugh. They both agree it was unexpected, then go back to practicing.
Texting
We received a text this morning about some visitors to our school: we would be having district personnel touring, and they are not paying attention to us teachers; they're looking for what students are doing. In other words, no need to talk to them or anything. I got admittedly a bit snarky and replied,
Usually, when someone on the group text makes a comment everyone likes, hearts and thumbs-up start bouncing all over the place. For this -- nothing. Several teachers later said they appreciated my text, but no one felt comfortable expressing it in a way that everyone could see it. I think that speaks to the overall feeling that seems to be sitting like a low, heavy fog, and if I were to guess, I'd say it's not just our school.
The Visit
Of course, the district personnel come to my classroom. The first one comes accompanied by our principal. Did he guide her here? As soon as they leave, another administrator brings another district person to our classroom.
It was a good day to visit, truth be told. The kids are having a Socratic Seminar -- one of their favorite activities. After we'd watched a bit of Harvest of Shame yesterday in preparation for our unit on immigration stories, we transitioned to Harvest of Shame Revisited -- a 2010 return to the topic of conditions migrant farm workers face. The common question on the viewing guide was the same: "Why do these folks earn so little money?" So this morning, I decided to change plans. We discussed that. In a limited way. In a South Carolina way.
All the kids discussed how we could do this or do that, but the bottom line was that all their ideas cost money. "Who's going to pay?" I pointed out there are a couple of sources, but one is we, the people. "They get paid so little because we want cheap food." That's true enough, and it led to the discussion I was intending about the necessity sometimes to sacrifice for the good of others.
Left out of the discussion -- the elephant in the room for some perhaps -- was the exorbitant salaries of CEOs. Where does that money come from? It can come from the consumers, but it can (many say should) also come from reduced CEO salaries or increased taxes on those earning at that level.
But this is South Carolina. And that is socialism. Not really, but it's going to be labeled Socialism (always with the capital letter) in many South Carolina homes. And that's at least part of the reason I didn't even bring that up.
Truth be told, the fact that it might raise some parents' dander is only part of the reason. To cover this well, I'd need to get a couple of articles for the kids to read about CEO wages compared to employee wages, and this was a spontaneous lesson. I'd decided to do it only this morning after reading yesterday's responses. But I do take that ugly s-word into consideration.
Such is teaching in South Carolina.
Teaching the Boy
I've been reticent to force my own teaching methods and ideas on our kids. L turned out to be a good writer without my help, but E has been struggling a bit. Still, offers of help but nothing more.
Today, he asked for help with his essay. I showed him how I have my students plan and organize their writing, and he found the technique simple and useful. He went upstairs and rewrote his entire essay using my method.
"The essay is so much better!" he gushed.
"That and the fact that you spent two hours in the evening working on it are things you can be really proud of," I replied.
"Thank you."
I've always oved that about the Boy: when you complement him, he quietly and modestly thanks you for the complement. It has always made me smile.
Last Practice of the Season
Tuesday
Tuesday has very little going for it. It doesn't have the unambiguous "you have to get through it" feeling of Monday. It's not hump day. It's not Thursday (a.k.a. almost Friday). And of course, it's not Friday. But Tuesdays this year are even more intolerable because of our Collaborative Team Meeting. A weekly mandatory meeting, it's as bad as it sounds. Occasionally, we get something useful from it, but like so many things these days in education, it just has the feeling of being a report mill for the higher-ups (who usually make two, three, four, or more times the average teacher's salary) so they can justify their job.
It's often a day for giving a test. I would have said "A day for testing," but "testing" now has connotations of standardized testing, and the increase in standardized testing is one reason so many of us are trying not to give tests of our own as much as possible. After all, how much can these kids be tested?
"Why not just use all the tests you have to administer for the district as grades?" Today, for example, we went over our benchmark scores. The benchmark, according to the powers that be, is supposed to be an accurate reflection of the degree to which the students have mastered the standards we are to teach in a given quarter. The only problem: they always include questions from other standards which we are to teach in other quarters!
"How is that a benchmark?" I asked one of our leadership team (another useful bit of jargon).
"Well, it's also predictive," came the response.
Predictive of what? I don't need a test to tell me how well the students are going to do on a standard I haven't even covered yet.
And the questions themselves -- so often a jumble of confusion. We went over one question today (they are allowing us to see isolated questions this year, but only when they were projected on a screen without us taking pictures or copying it in any way -- profits over the kids!), and I had trouble making sense of how they were even supposed to answer it, let alone which was the correct answer.
"If I am struggling to make sense of the question, what chance do my students have?" I asked.
"Let's focus on the things in our control," came the reply.
When you start your day of with that kind of a meeting, it's a challenge to regain a positive footing when the kids start coming into the classroom. And had it been last year's kids that came in after such a meeting, I would have stood by the door as the students entered and daydreamed about simply walking to the front office and saying, "Someone better get in my room -- there's no adult there, and I'm not coming back."
But this year, I have such wonderful kids. Sure, some are disruptive and a little argumentative. Many are immature. Several are chronically lazy. But there's not a kid about whom I could say, when he's absent, "Well, thank the heavens for small mercies." There's not a kid that I just dread working with because I know she's going to turn every single thing into a confrontation and make me thing it would be more productive to bang my head against the cinder block wall for the entirety of the period than to work with that kid. And trust me -- I've taught plenty of kids like that. But this year, not a one.
So it's easy to reign in the frustrations of a meeting and put on a positive face when such a great group of kids comes in. But it makes all the uselessness of all bureaucratic nonsense all the more acute.
Relief
What would you do if you suddenly realized that, due to some strange malfunction of a file management program, 15 years of online school materials disappeared? Thousands of carefully created questions for tests. Hundreds of online resources. Dozens of interactive lessons. All gone in a poof before you realized it?
What would you do if you then realized that your pet project of nearly 20 years disappeared along with it? Nearly seven thousand posts. Over 40,000 images. Almost three million words. All gone in a poof before you realized it?
Some discussion with a woman tech support with a lovely, lilting Indian accent, a bit of money (how much would have been too much), and some patience (it was supposed to take up to 72 hours), it's all back. That's why you're able to read this because everything was gone -- even the Word Press files themselves. Everything. All the URI produced was a 503 error. The relief was immense.
Sunday Baking
Volleyball and Soccer
Game Night
We only have so much time together as a family of four. L will graduate in a few short months, and then her time in our house will be limited to summers. I expect that soon enough, she won't be staying with us the entire summer. She'll be twenty, twenty-one years old. She'll have her own life. She'll have her own priorities. She'll have a job that she'll want to continue working over the summer. Or she'll have some internship or other. So these evenings are rare.
Some things have, of course, changed, but for poor K, nothing has changed. She always has the absolute worst luck in board games. When we play Monopoly, we call her (and she calls herself) the Slum Lord because she can never manage to get anything other than the very cheapest of properties, and the three of us end up bankrupting her in fairly short order. Tonight's game of Sorry was no exception. But one other thing stayed the same: we all laughed heartily about it.
Laughing as a family -- few things are more precious.