Feel free to vote, though Anonymous votes will be erased.
Should I:
Get a special ed license on the theory there's always a need, even if at private schools and the pay is bound to be better than data entry.
Just consider my teaching career dead and train as a paralegal so I have an immediate job I can work over 40 hours a week at and almost make ends meet. I will have completed the training roughly when our contract runs out in October. THEN--Dig in and go to Law School hopefully while I still have a teaching job to pay for part of it--Get myself a whopping good tutor and take the nine exams to become an Actuary on the theory that I did pass the Stuyvesant test once...This will also assume I'm making enough money to pay rent.
Sit tight and ride out this ATR business as the UFT swears they won't let us go. So far they haven't and they could have.
Abandon all hope. The undercurrent behind all of my choices is a feeling of "it wont work".
29 April, 2009
19 April, 2009
14 April, 2009
A WORTHY EVENT
TUESDAY, APRIL 28th @7:30pNYU Kimmel Center, KC 802 Shorin
60 Washington Sq South FREE
Gaza & Beyond: A Feminist PerspectiveA discussion with 2 Israeli women, one Jewish, one Palestinian. Nisreen Mazzawi & Dalia Sachs are members of the Coalition of Women for Peace, which mobilized a protest by more than 1,500 women and men within a few hours after the brutal attack on Gaza began.Join us for an exploration of the relationship between war, gender & security. Co-sponsored by: the Anatolian Club of NYU, CODEPINK Women for Peace, and Women in Black Union Square
60 Washington Sq South FREE
Gaza & Beyond: A Feminist PerspectiveA discussion with 2 Israeli women, one Jewish, one Palestinian. Nisreen Mazzawi & Dalia Sachs are members of the Coalition of Women for Peace, which mobilized a protest by more than 1,500 women and men within a few hours after the brutal attack on Gaza began.Join us for an exploration of the relationship between war, gender & security. Co-sponsored by: the Anatolian Club of NYU, CODEPINK Women for Peace, and Women in Black Union Square
09 April, 2009
08 April, 2009
To print or not to print
It's 3:26am, and the last thing I want to do is print material for a class I'm covering. I don't know why I now wait until the last two free hours of my morning. There's something about not wanting the intrusion, combined with a never-ending resentment over using my ink for school. Ink. It drives me crazy. I have to go to Staples to get it because I have a portable printer and it's also expensive.
I should bring the printer with me to school and I did once but I had nothing to print that day. I begged a colleague to let me print something she was handwriting just to feel like I hadn't carried the little toy in vain.
There isn't any hope of good faith anymore. Used to be, you did a job and you felt good about it and, at least, you'd earned your right to it under your union contract. Since my status is defined as indefinite, it's hard for me to want to do anything until I have to do so -- just in case I'm replaced in a few hours.
I should bring the printer with me to school and I did once but I had nothing to print that day. I begged a colleague to let me print something she was handwriting just to feel like I hadn't carried the little toy in vain.
There isn't any hope of good faith anymore. Used to be, you did a job and you felt good about it and, at least, you'd earned your right to it under your union contract. Since my status is defined as indefinite, it's hard for me to want to do anything until I have to do so -- just in case I'm replaced in a few hours.
06 April, 2009
When Magical Thinking is Difficult
Joan Didion's book, The Year of Magical Thinking, describes very accurately what mourning has been for me. I live in the world where objects hold not only memories, but possibilities. Clothing still waits to be worn. Emails wait to be sent. Like in the movie, Tell No One, I expect to get an email which shows a cryptic video of Karen shopping in Taiwan.
It is unfathomable to me that all of a miracle can be reduced to pulp -- I think this is what Shakespeare meant by "instant putrefaction" in Troilus and Cressida. When someone dies instantly by being crushed, if you must look, and I only have the coroner's report, the body is all bruise. So, plaintive and so mundane. She'd just been hit too hard. In these days of miracle medicine, it's so hard to reckon with the idea that death can't, at least, be forestalled. People talk about the blessing of things being quick and painless, which, of course, we have no idea is really true. The person has entered a world which is byzantine, and like some monestary run by an ancient order, untresspassable.
The stoic insanity of it has been my excuse for partially not believing in it. People disappear in my life, but they don't usually REALLY evaporate, flatten...go. I've found people on Facebook I haven't seen in twenty years. There are a million Karen Hunters, and one of them is even a gay priest who has written a book about being married. God loves to tease me.
I can less and less call out her name and expect an answer that doesn't come from inside me, however that may be. It's time to get all of the photographs developed to the sizes she wanted and to finish what I know needs to be done. All of this will take a while and each one will push me further behind the firmament--these are part of my gallery, like every work of literature or art worth reading, they depict the strongest yearnings of a beautiful soul.
There is something evil-feeling in being the one left with the artist's estate. The danger is to become too much a curator. I'm not sure what I mean, but I don't want to become one of those people who sees the weaknesses of works....stop. I've spent my life being that kind of person. To indulge in an artistic act I believe to be beautiful and to commit to it without reservation is beyond me or has been except for when I was with Karen. Flying is that kind of an act. Listening and selecting music is another. Being with someone in the music, another. Fact is, I've never done anything beautiful alone, and usually I am the "voice of reason," who wonders if the metaphors are enough.
Perhaps I can think explain it best by saying I start to feel further away from the sky.
It is unfathomable to me that all of a miracle can be reduced to pulp -- I think this is what Shakespeare meant by "instant putrefaction" in Troilus and Cressida. When someone dies instantly by being crushed, if you must look, and I only have the coroner's report, the body is all bruise. So, plaintive and so mundane. She'd just been hit too hard. In these days of miracle medicine, it's so hard to reckon with the idea that death can't, at least, be forestalled. People talk about the blessing of things being quick and painless, which, of course, we have no idea is really true. The person has entered a world which is byzantine, and like some monestary run by an ancient order, untresspassable.
The stoic insanity of it has been my excuse for partially not believing in it. People disappear in my life, but they don't usually REALLY evaporate, flatten...go. I've found people on Facebook I haven't seen in twenty years. There are a million Karen Hunters, and one of them is even a gay priest who has written a book about being married. God loves to tease me.
I can less and less call out her name and expect an answer that doesn't come from inside me, however that may be. It's time to get all of the photographs developed to the sizes she wanted and to finish what I know needs to be done. All of this will take a while and each one will push me further behind the firmament--these are part of my gallery, like every work of literature or art worth reading, they depict the strongest yearnings of a beautiful soul.
There is something evil-feeling in being the one left with the artist's estate. The danger is to become too much a curator. I'm not sure what I mean, but I don't want to become one of those people who sees the weaknesses of works....stop. I've spent my life being that kind of person. To indulge in an artistic act I believe to be beautiful and to commit to it without reservation is beyond me or has been except for when I was with Karen. Flying is that kind of an act. Listening and selecting music is another. Being with someone in the music, another. Fact is, I've never done anything beautiful alone, and usually I am the "voice of reason," who wonders if the metaphors are enough.
Perhaps I can think explain it best by saying I start to feel further away from the sky.
04 April, 2009
High Anxiety
I think I heard that Gary Sheffield is on the disabled list because of anxiety.
As an ATR unable to navigate a new place with no real roots or space of my own, I believe I understand how debilitating anxiety can be. Every night, before I go to bed, I plot out a "plan of attack" on the school building. I'll spend the morning in the programming office between classes and the afternoon in the students' cafeteria when I'm not "pushing in" to someone else's class. As for those teachers who don't seem to enjoy my presence, simple: I won't go. There are other teachers who would like me instead. None of the haters will report me as they don't want me back and none of the lovers will squeal as they want me to be able to come back unobtrusively.
No way any AP who happens to be watching members of either group (because there are objecters to the hideous curriculum we employ on both sides) is going to catch me (perhaps one of the most outspoken critics of said lessons.)
Needless to say, it's an exhausting enough prospect that after two sleeping pills, plus melatonin, I doze off for about four hours before waking up in the complete realization that THIS WILL NEVER WORK. The prospect of going back into the teachers' lounge and sit and be ignored, "whatever-ed," "dismissed," or accorded so much fear that my colleague's mouth dries and she legitimately reaches for sound along the vein-color pallor of her lips, makes me want to feel my worst symptoms of my most difficult ailments, just a little more intensely.
And simply put, I can't sleep until I over-sleep.
As an ATR unable to navigate a new place with no real roots or space of my own, I believe I understand how debilitating anxiety can be. Every night, before I go to bed, I plot out a "plan of attack" on the school building. I'll spend the morning in the programming office between classes and the afternoon in the students' cafeteria when I'm not "pushing in" to someone else's class. As for those teachers who don't seem to enjoy my presence, simple: I won't go. There are other teachers who would like me instead. None of the haters will report me as they don't want me back and none of the lovers will squeal as they want me to be able to come back unobtrusively.
No way any AP who happens to be watching members of either group (because there are objecters to the hideous curriculum we employ on both sides) is going to catch me (perhaps one of the most outspoken critics of said lessons.)
Needless to say, it's an exhausting enough prospect that after two sleeping pills, plus melatonin, I doze off for about four hours before waking up in the complete realization that THIS WILL NEVER WORK. The prospect of going back into the teachers' lounge and sit and be ignored, "whatever-ed," "dismissed," or accorded so much fear that my colleague's mouth dries and she legitimately reaches for sound along the vein-color pallor of her lips, makes me want to feel my worst symptoms of my most difficult ailments, just a little more intensely.
And simply put, I can't sleep until I over-sleep.
01 April, 2009
The big sleep
Want to see some kids who can't read listening to a book being read to them which they don't understand....
Honesty
I was given the AP class in my school to teach while the teacher who normally teaches it is ill.
I feel guilty. Yes, I asked to cover the class -- the teacher's entire schedule about a week ago. I didn't do it with the idea in my head of whether I deserved it or not. I just did it because I wanted to do it. I didn't get the rest of the schedule, but I got the AP Class. I sort of get why -- I never got the Ramp-Up training so maybe I don't know enough to lead a class in it. I've taught AP English before, though not with a class as good as this one. I was mediocre at it. I'd've been better had my students done homework.
However, I feel like the senior teachers should be teaching AP English and I shouldn't be. I don't know why I care, or why it bothers me when I have a shopping cart full of books waiting to "Proceed to Checkout" which I want to buy to help me with the class and I'm up now to work on my lessons. It's not that I don't like teaching it. I do. Clearly, I do. I'm spouting off as much as I can remember ever learning and I'm thinking about reading Oedipus Rex aloud in my passable Greek.
It's wrong, though. Much as my outburst last week was wrong. I don't have the right to outrage or preferences. These people have been here for twenty years. I'm just part of the Occupation.
It's not just politically correct politics. It feels god-awful.
So, I'm going to send an email to my chair and the principal expressing the wish that a senior faculty member take the class and I'm going to talk to my union rep as well. My colleagues are all teaching this hideous Ramp-Up curriculum and it's killing them. Plus, they've earned this in this place and I haven't. I believe that.
I don't even mind if my colleagues feel schadenfreud if one of them takes the class away from me. They deserve to feel it. I am feeling self-conscious and miserable in too many ways. Plus, I know I can teach this class some other time in some other place. This isn't my school. It never will be. Even though I also have a Tilden baseball cap in one of my many "Wish Lists" on-line. For me that's fashion, whereas for the other folks at this school it's history.
The trouble is, I don't know if my saying anything will do anything positive, but I'll try. No one at my school reads this blog so they'll never know what I felt. That's okay, too. I write this as one of many ATR's and teachers-who-also-write-and-do-art-in-their-other-lives.
I feel guilty. Yes, I asked to cover the class -- the teacher's entire schedule about a week ago. I didn't do it with the idea in my head of whether I deserved it or not. I just did it because I wanted to do it. I didn't get the rest of the schedule, but I got the AP Class. I sort of get why -- I never got the Ramp-Up training so maybe I don't know enough to lead a class in it. I've taught AP English before, though not with a class as good as this one. I was mediocre at it. I'd've been better had my students done homework.
However, I feel like the senior teachers should be teaching AP English and I shouldn't be. I don't know why I care, or why it bothers me when I have a shopping cart full of books waiting to "Proceed to Checkout" which I want to buy to help me with the class and I'm up now to work on my lessons. It's not that I don't like teaching it. I do. Clearly, I do. I'm spouting off as much as I can remember ever learning and I'm thinking about reading Oedipus Rex aloud in my passable Greek.
It's wrong, though. Much as my outburst last week was wrong. I don't have the right to outrage or preferences. These people have been here for twenty years. I'm just part of the Occupation.
It's not just politically correct politics. It feels god-awful.
So, I'm going to send an email to my chair and the principal expressing the wish that a senior faculty member take the class and I'm going to talk to my union rep as well. My colleagues are all teaching this hideous Ramp-Up curriculum and it's killing them. Plus, they've earned this in this place and I haven't. I believe that.
I don't even mind if my colleagues feel schadenfreud if one of them takes the class away from me. They deserve to feel it. I am feeling self-conscious and miserable in too many ways. Plus, I know I can teach this class some other time in some other place. This isn't my school. It never will be. Even though I also have a Tilden baseball cap in one of my many "Wish Lists" on-line. For me that's fashion, whereas for the other folks at this school it's history.
The trouble is, I don't know if my saying anything will do anything positive, but I'll try. No one at my school reads this blog so they'll never know what I felt. That's okay, too. I write this as one of many ATR's and teachers-who-also-write-and-do-art-in-their-other-lives.
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