Category: Rantings

Yapping, often with an indignant tone, often after reading or listening to the news.

Guard Dogs

August 14, 2014

cerberusThe two big news stories since I moved from Missouri have been: anti-Semitic lunatic shoots up the Jewish Community Center, and cops shoot teenager who is black and unarmed.  Is that where I am from?  Well, yes.  It is a place that struggles with fear in its own ways.

We will always have trouble with people in authority and how they scare themselves and other people.

Terrible things happen when people get scared.  I was scared of Kansas City’s east side, the black side of town, until I went there for work, until I knew and loved so many people who lived there.  I’m still scared when alone in unfamiliar neighborhoods that look uncared for, neighborhoods where kids aren’t out playing or there is no one to see what happens to you.

I am scared of being alone, although I like being alone.  I am scared of not having enough money.  I am scared of falling down steps.  I am scared of thinking I am being funny but people are offended or think I am weird.  I am scared of not having enough time to think.  I am afraid of looking back on my life and thinking I was a coward.

When I get scared, I watch a lot of television.  I make a plan that involves begin to list things that are wrong with other people in comparison to what is right with me.  Being a hard worker, or laid back, or smart, or ignorant, really, anything will work.  I used to work a lot with logic, having faith in the logic of the world, the logic of other people, or even in playing the odds, how likely is that to happen?  Also, I think about how to make myself so okay that I will never need anyone else and then no one can ever disappoint me again.

These strategies are actually rather effective and thus it is hard to stop.

When cops get scared, really bad things happen.  Either cops are scared, or they are stupid.  They know people hate them and want to kill them.  They have a lot of fear to manage.

When teenagers get scared, and they are scared almost all the time because you may not recall but their whole selves are construction zones where heavy shit can fall and they aren’t even the foremen, usually.  Teenagers who are black have particular and real reasons to be scared.  Especially the ones who live in neighborhoods that give them PTSD.  This is still gunshot season, until about the first frost.  Then things calm down until Christmas when people have to deal with their families, or realize they don’t have money for presents they want to give.  And then you know the people who are supposed to protect you are people who even if you want to, you have trouble trusting.

Really bad things can happen when teenagers get scared.  Not necessarily the things people think of, running away, withdrawing, but often counterphobic stuff like stealing a car or borrowing a gun or cussing out a teacher or throwing a book at her.  (Said book was nowhere near aerodynamic enough to be anything more than a gesture, don’t worry.)

I think scared people are helped by sitting in a quiet room with someone who is either not afraid, or pretending not to be.  I am very good at the latter, not to brag.  Posture is important, too, that is, sitting next to someone, side by side, is usually good.  Lots of quiet is good.

I have plenty of fear experience, both of the average type, like, I am too afraid to move to New York, which is something I still think regularly although it’s hard to have faith in now.  And the pathological type of the anxiety disorder, which is a different species.

For religious people, repetition helps.  Chanting and praying the hours and ritual helps.  Singing helps.  Letting yourself feel your feelings helps, but this is very hard.

For many fears between people, conversation about food and annoying parents or annoying children helps.  The weather is a place to begin.

I had no great interest in the movie “Big Fish,” but I remember a scene with a big black dog.  Someone had to confront this very scary dog, and when they did, the dog ran away.  This doesn’t always happen.  Sometimes bullies don’t back down.  Sometimes they beat the shit out of you.  Sometimes they kill you.   You may be better off, though, working on your happy medium of not running away, not becoming aggressive, something in between, whether it is jokes or silence or shifting your weight.

Take A Load Off Annie

June 9, 2011

Parents versus teachers: we’re sort of on the same team, and sort of not.  When we clash, it’s ugly.

I didn’t go into teaching to sabotage or attack students. In fact, it hurts like the dickens when you suggest I haven’t done a good job.  When left unsupervised, about 1/4 of my brain obsessively catalogues my shortcomings.  I know my imperfections well.

It doesn’t help that our culture has put more and more of the responsibility on teachers, less and less on students and parents.  I kind of get off on everyone thinking I’m so powerful, but let’s face it: I can’t make a parent pay attention to a kid’s grades.  I can’t make a kid work.  I’m a stubborn, insistent motherfucker of a teacher, but I have my limits.

Ninety-five percent of the parents I’ve dealt with are supportive and respectful.  Five percent ignore their child’s schoolwork and academic progress, and then, at some point, abruptly demand to know why I didn’t alert them to it.  It takes every ounce of my self-control to not say, “I have a hundred kids.  How many do you have?”

Infuriated, I start mentally listing my responsibilities (just skip to the end of this when you get bored): supervise 100 kids, monitor their academic and emotional and physical health, plan three sets of activities for the three classes I teach, five days a week, constantly revising them to fit the particular group of students, time of year, day of the week, their other courses, current events, and mood in the building, check on student work while they’re working, keep everyone engaged all hour in productive work, vary social and individual and visual and kinesthetic and oral activities, balance writing and reading, create and grade homework assignments that are meaningful practice, choose literature samples that are compelling and both connect and challenge students, choose grammar exercises and explanations that are accessible and clear, and most helpful to the particular writing problems of that group, tutor students after school, offer extra help to the weak and extra challenges to the strong, clean my classroom, monitor the halls, sign demerit cards for uniform infractions, language, and lateness, meet with the disciplinarian about serious discipline issues, tweak assignments and tests for students with IEPs, meet with my team of teachers to discuss discipline, curriculum, scheduling, and education theory, make sure everyone gets lunch and snacks, refer the suicidal, pregnant, and self-destructive to the social worker, alert student to changes in the schedule or upcoming events, encourage them to monitor their own progress and reflect on their work, encourage age-appropriate developments toward abstract thinking and reasoning, give mints to the sleepy, comfort the sick, encourage the English department and protect them as much as possible so they can do meaningful work, read widely to stay abreast of educational research and current events and literature, and write frequently and seriously so that I can be an authentic writing teacher, offering advice that reflects how people, in all their various approaches, actually write.  Also I occasionally hold poetry readings.

Here’s what I want our parents to be responsible for: know what your kid’s grade is, and let someone at school know if you want to talk to us about that grade.  Here’s what I want the students responsible for: asking for help when they need it, pointing out my mistakes, and accepting a grade based on what their work (or lack of it).

Through the wonders of the internet, parents can look at student grades any old time they want to.  Before we had that system set up, I sent paper copies of grades home every week. Still, in meetings, parents would complain that they were in the dark.  (My students are older– as I like to remind them, old enough to drive a car.  I think if you’re old enough to drive a car, you must old enough to take some responsibility for yourself.  At least the state of Missouri thinks so.)

Often, they ask me to call them when their student has grade problems.  I do not have time to consider all 100 grades every day or every week or every month, and I don’t have time to ponder if you think the grade is appropriate and need a phone call.  (Parents also, of course, receive grades mailed home eight times a year, as long as we have an up-to-date address.)

Let me say again: 95% of our parents come in for meetings and tell the kid, “You better listen to your teachers and straighten up.”  I love that.  I especially love the ones who are frustrated or depressed or anxious, which is most of them.

The problem with putting more responsibility on teachers is that it cripples students.  If you work with students in poverty, encouraging a sense of helplessness and a lack of personal responsibility is the best way to keep them poor.  It’s hard for a school that serves such a population to make any demands on parents or students.  We know how much they are struggling with the basics.  But responsibility, even a little bit, is empowering.  We flatter ourselves when we say they have to rely on us, that schools have to bear the burden alone.  We don’t, and we shouldn’t.  It’s not helpful.

Giving and Having

May 2, 2011

I woke up this morning to death.  I didn’t cheer it like those kids in DC.  My cat had killed a mouse.  I screamed, and then I laid a towel over the corpse.  My great-grandfather used to say, “It’s not the dead people you need to worry about– it’s the living.”  He was a mortician.

Osama bin Laden was not executed.  He was killed while resisting arrest.  I would have rather seen him in jail.  I wish Adolf Hitler were still in jail.  I wish he had softened up, learned the roots of his self-hatred, and started knitting yarmulkas in between painting his still lifes.

I’ve always worried more about the living than the dead.  I did take my great-grandfather’s advice to heart.  And the stories my senior English teacher told about her husband, a Vietnam vet.  She said he came back broken-hearted and mentally muddled, and I thought, maybe that’s worse than being killed.  The real reason I hate violence is because you can’t armor the mind, or the heart.  I protested the war in Iraq because of that husband.  I never met him.

I do have problems with the dead.  Since there’s a dead mouse next to my toilet, I’m going to have to start peeing in the side yard.  I don’t see any other option.  Well.  I could move.

In February, I met a woman, Mary Johnson, who used to work with Mother Teresa.  Mother Teresa, the opposite of bin Laden and Hitler, right?  Mother Teresa was not perfect.  I heard Ms Johnson read from her book, describing how she told her mentor, her hero, that she was requesting a release from her vows.  It wasn’t an easy conversation.  Mother Teresa, while inspirational in many ways, was not God.  She did not understand everything, and she did not have all the answers.  (You can preorder her book here and please do– she’s great: http://www.amazon.com/Unquenchable-Thirst-Following-Service-Authentic/dp/0385527470 )

It doesn’t help anyone to make some figures angels and some demons.  Mother Teresa herself said, “We cannot conquer evil outside if we have not conquered it inside.  We cannot give what we don’t have.”  And we can only give what we do have: revenge and gloating, or reverence and awe, regardless of who has died.

Crosshairs

January 10, 2011

Of course, nobody told this guy to shoot a Congressional representative.  Still, when I saw Palin’s graphic, I thought of every first-person shooter game with gory blood spurting graphics, and I thought of JFK.  And I know if I found crosshairs drawn over a map of my classroom, I’d consider that a violent threat, because students have actually threatened me.  It’s different to see an image like that when you know the “target” gets threatened on a regular basis.

This is part of the reason people noticed Palin’s imagery.  Then there’s the fact that she makes such a big damn deal of waving her guns around and talking about how awesome it is to shoot them.  Maybe we liberals are oversensitive, or maybe she set herself up.

Threats from students are one of the few infractions I really go to the mat for.  I’ve never been physically attacked by a student, or had my possessions messed with (that I know of).  But several times kids have threatened me.  “She’s going to be sorry.”  “Something’s gonna happen to her.”

I’ve dragged the threateners down to meetings with our disciplinarian.  I explain that some things you can’t joke about.  For example, having a bomb in your luggage at the airport.  Then, “I know you didn’t mean that you were going to do anything, but you can’t say things like that.”  True or not, now the kid has an out to make peace with me, without losing face.  We also talk about how threats mean you will be the first suspect, even if you don’t do anything wrong.  (Palin’s problem.)  Tomorrow I have a flat tire, and I immediately suspect this kid of puncturing it, rather than assuming I drove over a nail.  Wouldn’t that suck?  Kid agrees.  Apologizes to me.

I don’t think any of my students actually followed through on a threat.  I think they lost their tempers and wanted to show off.  I have taken every threat seriously, though.

Once I had  a student yell to another student, “You’re going to get a bullet in you!”  She had been picked at and picked at.  She was fun to tease because she would easily spaz out in a theatrical way.  I didn’t believe that violence was in her character– in fact, I guessed she was too distractable to follow through with any violent feelings.  She was slow to anger and quick to forget.  I told her to go to the bathroom and calm down, and I meant to have a longer talk with her later.  I never got around to it.  Maybe I shouldn’t have trusted my own judgment so much.  I’m still troubled by that incident.

People with mental illness can get violent, and they don’t necessarily need inspiration.  I’m not comfortable knowing I might have even a tiny, backhanded, accidental part in encouraging violence.  Avoiding the appearance of encouraging lunacy should not be a move to avoid responsibility.  It’s part of a mature commitment to clear and responsible speech.