BrooklynGirl

The Cracks

When I was student teaching, a student handed in the most disturbing story I had ever read. It included male rape, graphic violence, and two brutal (and detailed) murders. It was gruesome.

The author of the story was in 7th grade at the time. He was my best student--smart and popular (a rarity in middle school), outgoing, from an involved and stable family. His mother was a social worker, and I knew her independently from activities in the neighborhood.

The story spooked me. I showed it to my cooperating teacher, then several other teachers, then the guidance counselor, and finally the principal. "If it was any other kid, I'd be worried," was the response I heard from everyone. And I wanted to agree. But still.

Eventually I spoke to the student and his mother--separately and together. He very comfortably explained the story was made up, inspired by novels and video games that he described. His mother was embarrassed, but not particularly concerned.

And so I let it go.

The student is in high school now. I see him in the neighborhood sometimes--he hangs out in a pizza place I pass on my way home from school. He looks well, and for all I know he is well, but I've always wondered if I should have done more. Especially now.

One Week

...is exactly how long the detente with my boss lasted before he asked if there was "really no possible way" I could come in another day per week.

Since he asked me this after observing my teaching, I suppose I should be flattered that  he actually wants me around more, but mostly I'm just annoyed.

Is It Really November?

I made a student cry this week.  She is the overwrought, straight-A type (the same type I was back in the seventh grade), and I had given her a 78 on a quiz.

I still think she deserved the grade, but it was at the bottom of a very large stack, and I was feeling uncharitable by the time I got to it.  In response to her hysteria, I reviewed her work and found enough extra points to give her a B.

The truth was it didn't really affect her grade for the marking period either way, but now I feel like she got away with something.  I hate that.

*****

A student in a different class asked me if I was a student teacher.

"No, I'm a real teacher," I responded.  If you have to explain it like that, though, I'm not sure you are.

*****

I still have a job.  The principal agreed to let me work  one fewer day per week.  It was an unexpected compromise.

He essentially reserved the right to fire me if I should ever need to take a day off for, well, anything, but I'll cross that bridge when I cough on it.

Kids Today

Growing up, I was the kid on my street who conned her mother into buying Forever as just another Judy Blume book when all the other mothers knew that this book was different.  I hid the book in my neighbor's treehouse with the corners of the really good pages folded down so everyone in the neighborhood could read them.

In other words, I appreciate teen smut--really, I do--but even I have my limits.  Or I'm just getting old.  To wit:

In many middle schools today, English classes aren't like the classes I took when I was growing up.  Instead of having the whole class study one book together--usually something like The Catcher in the Rye or Animal Farm or To Kill a Mockingbird--these kids have independent reading, in which they choose books that appeal to them (and teachers give reading process lessons about how to find symbols/themes/characters in whatever books students are reading).  The most popular books at my school are The Gossip Girl series. 

Not to put too fine a point on it, these are loathsome books.  Book  #1 opens with the high school aged main character drowning her sorrows in several glasses of scotch.  The second chapter of the same book is called "an hour of sex burns 360 calories."  You get the idea.

I am not a  prude, and if I was in7th grade, I would probably have loved the books and hidden them in a treehouse and talked about them with all my friends.  But I would not have brought them to school because if an adult saw me with these books, that adult  might want  to talk to me about sex and other things I would not want to talk about with adults.  Ick.

 

Tired. So Tired.

Starting a new job is exhausting.   Starting a new job the week your husband goes out of town is even more exhausting.  Starting a new job the week your 13 month old decides to stop sleeping past 5 am is just plain stupid.

But hey, I don't teach Fridays so my week is over, and I seem to have survived.

Worst moment: Agreeing to help field English questions at study hall only to arrive and find that I was the only "adult" in the room.  Attempting to corral 35+ rowdy middle school students who neither know nor respect you and just want to leave to go watch the Yankees game is just plain miserable.

Best moment:  Having a severely learning disabled kid thank me for helping him with an assignment and asking me when I would come back and help him again.

Most mortifying moment: Leaving a folder filled with all sorts of confidential teacher-y stuff in a public place and not being able to find it for 15 very long minutes.

Most completely predictable moment: Realizing I needed to pee at the beginning of a 90 minute class and not having a key to the teachers' bathroom, knowing where the bathroom was, or having an opportunity to ask these questions of the other adult in the room.

Oh Happy Day

Thanks to everyone who has provided advice about baby stuff.  Keep those cards and letters coming by posting here.   I will compile the comments and put a more accessible link somewhere on the blog ASAP.

**********

The rumors started at around 11:00 am yesterday.  I was in the English department office calculating final grades when one of the teachers came in and reported, "The kids say it's cold outside."

We all laughed, locked in the windowless dungeon as we were, feverishly punching calculator keys or (for the nerdier, such as myself) adjusting Excel formulas.  I didn't actually get outside--or to a classroom with a window--until 3:15, and the kids were right!  It was cool (if not actually cold).  The heat wave is over!

My student teaching experience is also over.  My grades have been turned in.  All the kids passed, and all my seniors will graduate--even the one who wrote her final paper about how Adrienne Rich's poem "Planetarium" is a celebration of the first female astronaut's trip to the moon (except for that rather significant error,  it was a pretty insightful paper). 

So, now I have no excuse not to focus on The Project.  There are cribs to be examined.  Paint colors to be chosen.  Furniture to be rearranged.  For some people, I know this is the fun part.  For me, though, it reminds me of planning my wedding, where I was forced to realize that I'm just not that kind of girl.  I didn't have fantasies about dresses or place settings or bouquets so when I set about choosing those things, I spent a lot of time wondering if I was doing it right: Are ivory tablecloths tacky if my dress is white?  Can hydrangeas be part of a fall bouquet?  How is the bustle supposed to work?

I feel the same about baby stuff.  I'm not going to see a crib and swoon that that's the crib I've always dreamed of--I don't think that's the infertility taking; it's just me.  So mostly I'm just worried about picking the wrong thing: "Oh, my God, I can't believe you got the crib with 2 mattress positions instead of 3--don't you know that babies who sleep in 2 mattress position cribs average IQs that are 20 points lower than those who sleep in 3 mattress position cribs?"

It's a sickness, I know.

Short Story Palooza

Thanks to everyone who chimed in with recommendations regarding my last post.  I haven't actually chosen a story yet because I'm indecisive like that. 

Plus, there are some factors at play that the non-teachers may not have considered: I teach in a public school which means that I cannot require students to buy their own books; I must provide them with copies of all materials to be read.  If we don't already have the books in our tiny, under-resourced book room, then I need to provide photocopies (scooting around paying strict attention to all applicable copyright laws), and the copier coughs, sputters, and then stops working if it is asked to make too many copies at once.  So long stories and/or book length works are out of the running.  Such are the realities of public school teaching in the big city.

That said, I am leaning towards "The Yellow Wallpaper."

Gatsby and the Green Light

So, the last book we're going to do at school this year is The Great Gatsby.  I love this book, I really do, probably because I hated it so much when I read it for the first time back when I was in high school.  It wasn't until I read it again, long after my college graduation, that I got it--or got something anyway. 

That green light at the end of the dock? That "orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us.  It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.  And one fine morning--So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."  That, my friends, is desire, that's yearning, that's 3 years of infertility in 3(ish) sentences.   It speaks to me.

Wonderful as Gatsby is, however, it is short, really short, and I'd like to round out the class with some short stories so I'm looking for recommendations.  Ideally, I'd like stories (appropriate for high school seniors) about yearning, about wanting something badly enough that you'd stake your whole future on it.  Ideally, I'd like pre-1950s stories, but if you've got something from the present day that fits the bill, don't be shy.   

Anyone?

Why I Believe in Public Schools

There's a really interesting discussion going on over at Cecily's place about education, and since I've already weighed in once over there, I thought I would continue to weigh in over here on my own dime, as it were.

Since I'm not a parent, my perspective on public schools is that of a teacher and a student.  As a teacher, I've only taught (and student taught at that) in public schools in Brooklyn: one middle school that was part of the small school movement (total enrollment of about 400 for grades 6-8) and one high school that's hugantic (total enrollment of 4,300 for grades 9-12).  The average class size in both schools is 34, the legal limit.   As a student, I attended public schools in wealthy, suburban neighborhoods from grades K-5, and then moved to Florida (a state that had really crappy public schools in the 1980s) where I switched to private schools until I graduated from high school.

What I like about public schools I've student taught in is the democracy of them: we're all in it together.  Every student has the same opportunities.  Okay, stop laughing.  I'm not daft enough to think it actually works like this, and the reason it doesn't work like this is because  public education is monolithically unfair in terms of funding.  Although public schools have to follow nationally imposed standards, they still have to fund themselves locally, and big, ritzy suburbs have a lot more property tax dollars to spend on education than poor, inner cities.  And that sucks.*

But when it works, it's amazing.  The students in my classes are amazingly diverse (Indian, Pakistani, Israeli, Mexican, etc.), and they bring their range of experiences into the classroom when we're talking about literature.  Recently we talked about a scene in The Grapes of Wrath in which a mother pierces her daughter's ear as a rite of passage, and we had an incredible conversation about rites of passage in different cultures that, I think, made the scene much more resonant for the kids than it would have been otherwise.  That conversation would have been impossible in my private school of 100% Caucasian smart alecks whose shared rites of passage consisted of going to the mall and getting drunk on rum and coke between third and fourth period (meet ya at the Coke machine, 'k?).

Also, intervention happens in public schools: I have a student now who clearly has a pretty serious learning disability (he's a junior in high school).  His parents keep insisting that he's an "A" student and keep getting him to register for advanced classes that he keeps failing because he can't spell words like "were" and "evil" (and his anxiety about his writing issues makes him not want to turn in papers).  The parents are finally coming around to the fact that there is a problem.  [Is it appalling that this issue wasn't discovered until 11th grade?  You bet, but I think if the parents had their way it never would have been discovered.]

The problems in public schools, of course, are legion.  My parents still can't believe that I go to a New York City public school unarmed everyday, and I'm 35.  "Do you have to walk through a metal detector to get into the classroom?" they ask (and then get apoplectic when I tell them that, no, there are no metal detectors in my school).

Maybe this will all change when (ahem) I have kids, and I'll be singing a new tune: "Screw democracy!  Nothing but the best for Junior."  But maybe not.

 

*44% of all school funds are supplied by local property taxes, 49% are provided by the individual state, and 7% are provided by the federal government (Source: "Money, Schools, and Justice" by Stan Karp).

 

Cornered

Forewarned is forearmed: lots of pregnancy talk in this post.

We haven't decided when we're going public with The Project.  There was a small handful of people in whom we had confided: our parents, some close girlfriends who listened to my IVF whining, and--you know--the Internet.  But that was it.

Until Friday.

On Friday, the principal at my school flattered me enormously by offering me a job for the fall.  I would love this job, but as it happens I'm due at the end of August and assuming things go as scheduled (uh huh), there's no way I'll be ready to show up for work the Tuesday after Labor Day.  This job, though, is calendar-specific.  They need someone for that particular semester (though the position would continue thereafter).

Part of the job would start soon...as in next week soon.  So after she offered me the job, she grabbed my hand to pull me into the Director of Operations office so he could fill out some emergency paperwork that would get me my teaching license almost immediately.  I stuttered, I stammered, I blushed furiously, and because I could think of nothing else to do, I got up and closed her office door and said, "There's something I have to tell you."

And so she knows.  She was very sweet about it, wished me well, and told me not to be a stranger when I was ready to teach again (I will continue my current student teaching until June).  I told her that I wasn't planning to share this news with anyone else just yet, and she said she understood completely, and then I opened her office door and walked outside.

Where the entire English department was staring at me.  She had asked everyone's opinion of me for the job, you see, so they all knew what was supposed to have gone on, but clearly things hadn't gone as planned.  "Do you want to talk about it?" my cooperating teacher asked me, and because I still couldn't think of a creative way around it, I took her into the hallway and told her too.

"This is very new," I said.  "I've had some losses, and we're nervous and weren't planning to tell anyone yet."  She said she understood and would keep quiet, and then I said I needed to take a walk to collect myself and there--in a hallway that had filled with students and teachers changing classes--she called after me, "Congratulations!"

Motherfucker.  It feels certain that the whole deparment will know by Monday if they don't already.

I feel awfully superstitious about all this, and though it will now be a little easier to explain my need for schedule flexibility vis-a-vis doctors' appointments, I wish I still had my privacy.