18 February, 2010
Don't just stand there, listen!
It was a pleasant lunch of rubbery spaghetti and lightly bruised steamed vegetables. "I can't believe the educational system has gone down so much. I see kids coming to school and they don't look like they want to go." I chewed steadily. "Where is the money going?" I nodded. "And how can you be paying for materials?" "What do you mean you have no books?" My eyes widen. "I know you're telling the truth. What do the other teachers do?" I make a rolling motion with my hands. "You all do this?" I cough. "I thought you were going to the doctor." I cross my eyebrows. "I know it's been a busy week." "Did you take a cab here, by the way?" My face doesn't move. "Why can't you walk?" My eyebrows lower and my skin feels yellow. "I know you're in pain. I know you're out of shape. You're letting yourself fall apart." "For what? I mean you collect a salary, but you spend most of it on the job." I drink my water. "It never changes. But, it's got to change if you're going to go on with your life. Can't you just explain your situation: it's too far, they need too much..." I press my hand down lightly on the table. "You're telling me they don't care. Doesn't the UFT care?" I shrug my shoulders and put my palms up. "It's not their decision, I know." (Pause)
"Let's get the check."
I thanked him for lunch.
"Let's get the check."
I thanked him for lunch.
13 February, 2010
Larry Wondering
In the middle of his birthday catnip feast, Larry takes a moment to wonder. What's he thinking about?
07 February, 2010
Larry turns seven tomorrow.
Here he is dreaming of all the catnip...a lot of which he got tonight....
The only comfort I take in more school closings
There really is no comfort to be taken in school closings. All I can think, however, is that will leave so many, many more ATR's that it will be impossible for them to be fired -- the sheer number of people and the tactic would make the union busting of the Bloomberg administration obvious. Why they think they will get away with displacing all these people and then trying to fire them is beyond me. It's not good politics. It would show off too obviously how bad off the middle class of the city is. I don't think he can even open new schools fast enough to absorb all the kids who are going to need them -- at some point this ponzi scheme has to fall in on him. There will be no place for the kids to go. He doesn't get that this isn't like a re-org in business. The fall-out is much greater per school and per person. Eventually, there have to be whole sectors in which kids are not being served at all. I'm sure it's happening already. Someone has to find a good hard luck story -- a family with no place to send their kids in the fall which can service their kids properly. When Tilden closes, for example, there probably won't be enough high schools in the area to absorb the ELL population. This has to be happening in more places across the city.
06 February, 2010
Time
Time is a funny thing. She was. But it IS still her birthday. My love for her is still very much alive. He IS. It will soon be his birthday. My love for him is dead because it can never be realized. Yet, I dream about him constantly of late. And her, too.
31 January, 2010
This is only a test. If this were a real emergency, we'd never be taking all of this lying down.
A student's face popped up on Facebook. "I don't say 'Hey' to you enough," appeared next to the picture. It was sweet, and immediately jarring; either I'd forgotten that people did live on after Brooklyn Comprehensive died or I'd temporarily forgotten that I no longer worked there.
The student is graduating from SUNY Purchase. For him, the time which had gone by was very sweet and untarnished by the closing of schools. I'm so glad it is, and find it heartening to imagine that there are people out there for whom the last four years have not been shattering. This is not a complaint against where I am teaching now. It's just a recognition of the fact that a world I miss is entirely gone. So is the world in which we once laughed at the Regents Exams as jokes -- when they were much harder, and I was in high school. Now we pretend they are something serious and grandiose that set "Standards." But, I digress. The point has been made by the many community colleges who find themselves filled with students who have passed Regents exams and are not functional in the subjects in which they were tested. I don't really care about the quality of the exams students face except that they've supplanted our ideas of what a real education is or could be. We've also truncated our belief in the possibilities of our children. We have done a lot of shifting around.
Three schools in which I have worked have been closed down. One major influence, dead. Two colleagues retired. The others scattered among schools living inside schools -- let's just say they all work at some "Formerly-Known-As-Academy-Campus High School." Many of them are working with overage and under-credited students who will age out with no place to go to next. And there are people who think that's okay. Last year, I encountered many teachers who felt students were being given too many chances. I understand. They wanted the failing grade they gave the kids to stand for something. It does. It stands for the fact that students are arriving at high school unprepared, ovewhelmed and desensitized to the possibilities that an education might offer them. I don't care whose fault it is, honestly. It doesn't matter. What matters is that, under better circumstances, some of these students could go on to graduate from competitive colleges.
Smaller budgets, fewer offerings and less and less compassion are not those circumstances.
But, this is only a test, right? We wouldn't really let over 100,000 kids drop out, unable to contribute to our economy and at the mercy of others to defend their rights? That would be boorish. Like the fact that we don't have national healthcare -- even China has national healthcare.
Oh.
The student is graduating from SUNY Purchase. For him, the time which had gone by was very sweet and untarnished by the closing of schools. I'm so glad it is, and find it heartening to imagine that there are people out there for whom the last four years have not been shattering. This is not a complaint against where I am teaching now. It's just a recognition of the fact that a world I miss is entirely gone. So is the world in which we once laughed at the Regents Exams as jokes -- when they were much harder, and I was in high school. Now we pretend they are something serious and grandiose that set "Standards." But, I digress. The point has been made by the many community colleges who find themselves filled with students who have passed Regents exams and are not functional in the subjects in which they were tested. I don't really care about the quality of the exams students face except that they've supplanted our ideas of what a real education is or could be. We've also truncated our belief in the possibilities of our children. We have done a lot of shifting around.
Three schools in which I have worked have been closed down. One major influence, dead. Two colleagues retired. The others scattered among schools living inside schools -- let's just say they all work at some "Formerly-Known-As-Academy-Campus High School." Many of them are working with overage and under-credited students who will age out with no place to go to next. And there are people who think that's okay. Last year, I encountered many teachers who felt students were being given too many chances. I understand. They wanted the failing grade they gave the kids to stand for something. It does. It stands for the fact that students are arriving at high school unprepared, ovewhelmed and desensitized to the possibilities that an education might offer them. I don't care whose fault it is, honestly. It doesn't matter. What matters is that, under better circumstances, some of these students could go on to graduate from competitive colleges.
Smaller budgets, fewer offerings and less and less compassion are not those circumstances.
But, this is only a test, right? We wouldn't really let over 100,000 kids drop out, unable to contribute to our economy and at the mercy of others to defend their rights? That would be boorish. Like the fact that we don't have national healthcare -- even China has national healthcare.
Oh.
13 January, 2010
Please, if you have students with Aspergers Syndrome, read this.
NOTE THE SCHOOL DISCOURAGING THIS STUDENT FROM GOING TO A SCHOOL THAT CAN PROVIDE SERVICES HE NEEDS.
Runaway Spent 11 Days in the Subways
By KIRK SEMPLE
Published: November 23, 2009 The New York Times
Day after day, night after night, Francisco Hernandez Jr. rode the subway. He had a MetroCard, $10 in his pocket and a book bag on his lap. As the human tide flowed and ebbed around him, he sat impassively, a gangly 13-year-old boy in glasses and a red hoodie, speaking to no one.
After getting in trouble in class in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, and fearing another scolding at home, he had sought refuge in the subway system. He removed the battery from his cellphone. “I didn’t want anyone to scream at me,” he said.
All told, Francisco disappeared for 11 days last month — a stretch he spent entirely in subway stations and on trains, he says, hurtling through four boroughs. And somehow he went undetected, despite a round-the-clock search by his panicked parents, relatives and family friends, the police and the Mexican Consulate.
Since Oct. 26, when a transit police officer found him in a Coney Island subway station, no one has been able to fully explain how a boy could vanish for so long in a busy train system dotted with surveillance cameras and fliers bearing his photograph.
But this was not a typical missing-person search. Francisco has Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism that often causes difficulty with social interaction, and can lead to seemingly eccentric behavior and isolation. His parents are Mexican immigrants, who say they felt the police were slow to make the case a priority.
“Maybe because you might not understand how to manage the situation, because you don’t speak English very well, because of your legal status, they don’t pay you a lot of attention,” said Francisco’s mother, Marisela García, 38, a housecleaner who immigrated in 1994 and has struggled to find ways to help her son.
The police, however, say they took the case seriously from the start, interviewing school officials and classmates, canvassing neighborhoods and leafleting all over the city.
Francisco says his odyssey wound through three subway lines: the D, F and No. 1. He would ride a train until its last stop, then wait for the next one, wherever it was headed. He says he subsisted on the little he could afford at subway newsstands: potato chips, croissants, jelly rolls, neatly folding the wrappers and saving them in the backpack. He drank bottled water. He used the bathroom in the Stillwell Avenue station in Coney Island.
Otherwise, he says, he slipped into a kind of stupor, sleeping much of the time, his head on his book bag. “At some point I just stopped feeling anything,” he recalled.
Though the boy’s recollections are incomplete, and neither the police nor his family can retrace his movements in detail, the authorities say that he was clearly missing for 11 days and that they have no evidence he was anywhere but the subway.
For his parents, the memories of those 11 frantic days — the dubious sightings, the dashed hopes and no sleep — remain vivid. “It’s the most terrible thing,” his mother said in Spanish.
Just what propelled Francisco to take flight on Oct. 15 is unclear. Administrators at his school, Intermediate School 281, would not comment. But Francisco said he had failed to complete an assignment for an eighth-grade class, and was scolded for not concentrating.
After school, he phoned his mother to say he was heading home. She told him the school had called and she wanted a serious talk with him.
His first impulse was to flee. He walked eight blocks to the Bay Parkway station and boarded a D train. It seemed a safe place to hide, he said.
When he did not arrive home, his mother started to panic. In January, after another problem at school, Francisco had left home and ridden the subway, but returned after five hours. “We thought this time it would be the same,” Ms. García said. “But unfortunately it wasn’t.”
Her husband, also named Francisco Hernandez, went to the nearest subway station and waited for several hours while she stayed at home on Bay 25th Street with their 9-year-old daughter, Jessica. After midnight, the couple called the police, and two officers from the 62nd Precinct visited their apartment.
The next morning, Mr. Hernandez, 32, a construction laborer, borrowed a bicycle and scoured Bensonhurst. He and his wife separately explored the subway from Coney Island to Midtown Manhattan.
They had been trying to help their son for years. Born in Brooklyn, Francisco grew up a normal child in many ways, his mother said, earning mostly passing grades and enjoying drawing and video games. But he had no friends outside school, and found it difficult to express emotions. A gentle, polite boy, he spoke — when he did speak — in a soft monotone.
Francisco lived out of his bookbag.
In 2006, his parents had him evaluated at a developmental disabilities research clinic on Staten Island, where his Asperger’s was diagnosed. The clinic’s chief neuropsychologist concluded that Francisco struggled in situations that demanded a “verbal or social response.”
“His anxiety level can elevate, and he freezes in confusion because he does not know what to do or say,” the doctor wrote.
After he disappeared, his parents printed more than 2,000 color leaflets with a photo of Francisco wearing the same red hoodie; friends and relatives helped post them in shops, on the street and throughout the subway in Brooklyn. The family hand-lettered fluorescent-colored signs.
“Franky come home,” one pleaded in Spanish. “I’m your mother I beg you I love you my little boy.”
Francisco said he never saw the signs. He lost sense of time. He was prepared, he said, to remain in the subway system forever.
No one spoke to him. Asked if he saw any larger meaning in that, he said, “Nobody really cares about the world and about people.”
Sightings were reported. An image of a boy resembling Francisco had been captured by a video game store’s security camera, but he turned out to be someone else, the police said. A stranger called Mr. Hernandez to say he had spotted Francisco with some boys at a movie theater in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. A search turned up nothing.
Ms. García said one detective told her the boy was probably hiding out with a friend. She replied that her son had no friends to hide out with. Frustrated, the parents sought help from the Mexican Consulate. Officials there contacted the Spanish-language news media, which ran brief newspaper and television reports about Francisco, and called the police — “to use the weight that we have to encourage them, to tell them that we have an emergency,” a consular spokesman said.
Six days after Francisco’s disappearance, on Oct. 21, the case shifted from the police precinct to the Missing Persons Squad, and the search intensified. A police spokeswoman explained that a precinct must complete its preliminary investigation before the squad takes over.
The squad’s lead investigator on the case, Detective Michael Bonanno, said he turned the focus to the subway. He and his colleagues blanketed the system with their own signs, rode trains and briefed station attendants.
About 6 a.m. on Oct. 26, the police said, a transit officer stood on the D train platform at the Stillwell Avenue station studying a sign with Francisco’s photo. He turned and spotted a dirty, emaciated boy sitting in a stopped train. “He asked me if I was Francisco,” the boy recalled. “I said yes.”
Asked later how it felt to hear about the work that had gone into finding him, Francisco said he was not sure. “Sometimes I don’t know how I feel,” he said. “I don’t know how I express myself sometimes.”
Apart from leg cramps, he was all right physically, and returned to school a week later. But Ms. García said she was still trying to learn how to manage her son’s condition. Though doctors had recommended that Francisco be placed in a small school for children with learning disorders, she said, officials at his school told her he was testing fine and did not need to be transferred.
“I tell him: ‘Talk to me. Tell me what you need. If I ever make a mistake, tell me,’ ” she said. “I don’t know, as a mother, how to get to his heart, to find out what hurts.”
One of the fluorescent signs hangs on the living room wall. The others are stacked discreetly in a corner, and Ms. García said she was not ready to discard them.
“It’s not easy to say it’s over and it won’t happen again,” she said.
Runaway Spent 11 Days in the Subways
By KIRK SEMPLE
Published: November 23, 2009 The New York Times
Day after day, night after night, Francisco Hernandez Jr. rode the subway. He had a MetroCard, $10 in his pocket and a book bag on his lap. As the human tide flowed and ebbed around him, he sat impassively, a gangly 13-year-old boy in glasses and a red hoodie, speaking to no one.
After getting in trouble in class in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, and fearing another scolding at home, he had sought refuge in the subway system. He removed the battery from his cellphone. “I didn’t want anyone to scream at me,” he said.
All told, Francisco disappeared for 11 days last month — a stretch he spent entirely in subway stations and on trains, he says, hurtling through four boroughs. And somehow he went undetected, despite a round-the-clock search by his panicked parents, relatives and family friends, the police and the Mexican Consulate.
Since Oct. 26, when a transit police officer found him in a Coney Island subway station, no one has been able to fully explain how a boy could vanish for so long in a busy train system dotted with surveillance cameras and fliers bearing his photograph.
But this was not a typical missing-person search. Francisco has Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism that often causes difficulty with social interaction, and can lead to seemingly eccentric behavior and isolation. His parents are Mexican immigrants, who say they felt the police were slow to make the case a priority.
“Maybe because you might not understand how to manage the situation, because you don’t speak English very well, because of your legal status, they don’t pay you a lot of attention,” said Francisco’s mother, Marisela García, 38, a housecleaner who immigrated in 1994 and has struggled to find ways to help her son.
The police, however, say they took the case seriously from the start, interviewing school officials and classmates, canvassing neighborhoods and leafleting all over the city.
Francisco says his odyssey wound through three subway lines: the D, F and No. 1. He would ride a train until its last stop, then wait for the next one, wherever it was headed. He says he subsisted on the little he could afford at subway newsstands: potato chips, croissants, jelly rolls, neatly folding the wrappers and saving them in the backpack. He drank bottled water. He used the bathroom in the Stillwell Avenue station in Coney Island.
Otherwise, he says, he slipped into a kind of stupor, sleeping much of the time, his head on his book bag. “At some point I just stopped feeling anything,” he recalled.
Though the boy’s recollections are incomplete, and neither the police nor his family can retrace his movements in detail, the authorities say that he was clearly missing for 11 days and that they have no evidence he was anywhere but the subway.
For his parents, the memories of those 11 frantic days — the dubious sightings, the dashed hopes and no sleep — remain vivid. “It’s the most terrible thing,” his mother said in Spanish.
Just what propelled Francisco to take flight on Oct. 15 is unclear. Administrators at his school, Intermediate School 281, would not comment. But Francisco said he had failed to complete an assignment for an eighth-grade class, and was scolded for not concentrating.
After school, he phoned his mother to say he was heading home. She told him the school had called and she wanted a serious talk with him.
His first impulse was to flee. He walked eight blocks to the Bay Parkway station and boarded a D train. It seemed a safe place to hide, he said.
When he did not arrive home, his mother started to panic. In January, after another problem at school, Francisco had left home and ridden the subway, but returned after five hours. “We thought this time it would be the same,” Ms. García said. “But unfortunately it wasn’t.”
Her husband, also named Francisco Hernandez, went to the nearest subway station and waited for several hours while she stayed at home on Bay 25th Street with their 9-year-old daughter, Jessica. After midnight, the couple called the police, and two officers from the 62nd Precinct visited their apartment.
The next morning, Mr. Hernandez, 32, a construction laborer, borrowed a bicycle and scoured Bensonhurst. He and his wife separately explored the subway from Coney Island to Midtown Manhattan.
They had been trying to help their son for years. Born in Brooklyn, Francisco grew up a normal child in many ways, his mother said, earning mostly passing grades and enjoying drawing and video games. But he had no friends outside school, and found it difficult to express emotions. A gentle, polite boy, he spoke — when he did speak — in a soft monotone.
Francisco lived out of his bookbag.
In 2006, his parents had him evaluated at a developmental disabilities research clinic on Staten Island, where his Asperger’s was diagnosed. The clinic’s chief neuropsychologist concluded that Francisco struggled in situations that demanded a “verbal or social response.”
“His anxiety level can elevate, and he freezes in confusion because he does not know what to do or say,” the doctor wrote.
After he disappeared, his parents printed more than 2,000 color leaflets with a photo of Francisco wearing the same red hoodie; friends and relatives helped post them in shops, on the street and throughout the subway in Brooklyn. The family hand-lettered fluorescent-colored signs.
“Franky come home,” one pleaded in Spanish. “I’m your mother I beg you I love you my little boy.”
Francisco said he never saw the signs. He lost sense of time. He was prepared, he said, to remain in the subway system forever.
No one spoke to him. Asked if he saw any larger meaning in that, he said, “Nobody really cares about the world and about people.”
Sightings were reported. An image of a boy resembling Francisco had been captured by a video game store’s security camera, but he turned out to be someone else, the police said. A stranger called Mr. Hernandez to say he had spotted Francisco with some boys at a movie theater in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. A search turned up nothing.
Ms. García said one detective told her the boy was probably hiding out with a friend. She replied that her son had no friends to hide out with. Frustrated, the parents sought help from the Mexican Consulate. Officials there contacted the Spanish-language news media, which ran brief newspaper and television reports about Francisco, and called the police — “to use the weight that we have to encourage them, to tell them that we have an emergency,” a consular spokesman said.
Six days after Francisco’s disappearance, on Oct. 21, the case shifted from the police precinct to the Missing Persons Squad, and the search intensified. A police spokeswoman explained that a precinct must complete its preliminary investigation before the squad takes over.
The squad’s lead investigator on the case, Detective Michael Bonanno, said he turned the focus to the subway. He and his colleagues blanketed the system with their own signs, rode trains and briefed station attendants.
About 6 a.m. on Oct. 26, the police said, a transit officer stood on the D train platform at the Stillwell Avenue station studying a sign with Francisco’s photo. He turned and spotted a dirty, emaciated boy sitting in a stopped train. “He asked me if I was Francisco,” the boy recalled. “I said yes.”
Asked later how it felt to hear about the work that had gone into finding him, Francisco said he was not sure. “Sometimes I don’t know how I feel,” he said. “I don’t know how I express myself sometimes.”
Apart from leg cramps, he was all right physically, and returned to school a week later. But Ms. García said she was still trying to learn how to manage her son’s condition. Though doctors had recommended that Francisco be placed in a small school for children with learning disorders, she said, officials at his school told her he was testing fine and did not need to be transferred.
“I tell him: ‘Talk to me. Tell me what you need. If I ever make a mistake, tell me,’ ” she said. “I don’t know, as a mother, how to get to his heart, to find out what hurts.”
One of the fluorescent signs hangs on the living room wall. The others are stacked discreetly in a corner, and Ms. García said she was not ready to discard them.
“It’s not easy to say it’s over and it won’t happen again,” she said.
30 December, 2009
28 December, 2009
What's a vacation?
A break in work for a teacher is like a break between two championship series for a baseball team. You know you should rest, you also know the next battle will be even harder. Except for the teacher there will be no rings and no world-astounding end. The books will close, students will pack up and go home. And then a longer or shorter break, etc. Do business people feel this way? The one friend I used to have in business used to truly enjoy her vacations. She stayed out of contact with her office and she shopped and hopped around the globe. I can't imagine having the concentration to do this. There are so many other things to think about and so many to avoid.
I turned on the radio in time to catch Leonard Lopate interviewing a Yale professor about a book called, It Can Happen Here. Lopate was doing his best to dismiss the possibility that the "it" could be terrorism or violence, but was less able to quash the possibility of total economic disaster, though he did argue the usual "we've been through this before...." It was right for him to play such a strong devil's advocate, both as a good host/journalist and someone who knows that an audience that literate and free at noon is either over-educated and underpaid or unemployed. As someone who now tries VERY HARD not to listen to rumor, not to predict what is going to happen next, but just focus on immediate tasks, I was especially grateful. I called a former colleague who proceded to give me the latest news of what was "on the table" for our upcoming contract. We all see those tables so vividly and we argue for our deaths better than our lives because we accept both that we are powerless and that we were smart enough to have been given more power. So what? I know that "It" of various kinds can happen here and am less dismissive of the possibility of total economic collapse. But, I can't think about that either. It won't profit me. Panicking has caused me enough trouble.
Still, what do I do with this bountiful time? I've bought a test prep book. Bookmarked some textbooks to buy when I have more money. I'm going to surf for some more test prep and lesson plan materials I need and look for reduced-priced middle school readers. That, clean the cat box, eat and maybe look at a movie on Netflix (which I keep largely as it might be useful to my classroom) seems about as much as I can handle. In between, I do bits of massive cleaning around the apartment. What I don't do is talk with anyone. I don't know if this has happened to anyone else, but my friends have all reduced themselves to texting or to the kinds of conversations which don't last beyond a minute. "What else is there to say?" No one is going out much. Even on the rare moments when I think, "I would like to see that," I never pursue the thought. First, I'm broke. Second, everything seems indulgent. Everything. Except what I need right in front of me. There is no reason to get away. It will be there when I get back and there will be less time, less energy and even more fear. More fear. I never knew how much fear I could feel.
When I was a kid, they would show us pictures of the holocaust so we would be aware of how badly Jews had been and could be treated. That fear was nothing like this. This is not to minimize genocide. Thinking about its possibility and looking at miserable sites makes me bilious. Being in a position in which thinking ahead is frightening is living in a conscious slow motion. Stultifying.
I turned on the radio in time to catch Leonard Lopate interviewing a Yale professor about a book called, It Can Happen Here. Lopate was doing his best to dismiss the possibility that the "it" could be terrorism or violence, but was less able to quash the possibility of total economic disaster, though he did argue the usual "we've been through this before...." It was right for him to play such a strong devil's advocate, both as a good host/journalist and someone who knows that an audience that literate and free at noon is either over-educated and underpaid or unemployed. As someone who now tries VERY HARD not to listen to rumor, not to predict what is going to happen next, but just focus on immediate tasks, I was especially grateful. I called a former colleague who proceded to give me the latest news of what was "on the table" for our upcoming contract. We all see those tables so vividly and we argue for our deaths better than our lives because we accept both that we are powerless and that we were smart enough to have been given more power. So what? I know that "It" of various kinds can happen here and am less dismissive of the possibility of total economic collapse. But, I can't think about that either. It won't profit me. Panicking has caused me enough trouble.
Still, what do I do with this bountiful time? I've bought a test prep book. Bookmarked some textbooks to buy when I have more money. I'm going to surf for some more test prep and lesson plan materials I need and look for reduced-priced middle school readers. That, clean the cat box, eat and maybe look at a movie on Netflix (which I keep largely as it might be useful to my classroom) seems about as much as I can handle. In between, I do bits of massive cleaning around the apartment. What I don't do is talk with anyone. I don't know if this has happened to anyone else, but my friends have all reduced themselves to texting or to the kinds of conversations which don't last beyond a minute. "What else is there to say?" No one is going out much. Even on the rare moments when I think, "I would like to see that," I never pursue the thought. First, I'm broke. Second, everything seems indulgent. Everything. Except what I need right in front of me. There is no reason to get away. It will be there when I get back and there will be less time, less energy and even more fear. More fear. I never knew how much fear I could feel.
When I was a kid, they would show us pictures of the holocaust so we would be aware of how badly Jews had been and could be treated. That fear was nothing like this. This is not to minimize genocide. Thinking about its possibility and looking at miserable sites makes me bilious. Being in a position in which thinking ahead is frightening is living in a conscious slow motion. Stultifying.
27 December, 2009
How should schools handle the holiday season?
It's impossible, in your first year as a school, not to respond to the irrepressible enthusiasms of ten year olds for everything from secret Santas to decorating the classroom, etc. in honor of the two holidays which dominate the December shopping season, Christmas and Hannukah.
But, if you have a chance to think about this for the future, what is the right position for a school to take in this throng of powdered-sugar inspired sentiment?
Mine this year was to do as little as possible to acknowledge it. Both the popular mythology of Christmas and Hannukah figured into World History this term, so I got to talk about the connections between the two holidays and cultures in an academic sense. Since the fact that Jesus was a Jew was a brand-new shocking detail to one of my smartest students, the entire contextualization of the famous crucifixion among the murder of over 30,000 Jews during the Roman occupation of Judea may have fallen by the wayside. And that's okay. It isn't important to me that the religious stories attached to periods of history be the highlights of my units. It just seemed like a way to get studets to visualize the events in occupied Judea at the time. Overall, my students knew more about that event than they had before, so I was fairly satisfied at the end of the unit.
Still, it irked me that what followed was a thunderstorm of requests for parties and pleasantries attached to Christmas. Having thoroughly established that several students and myself didn't celebrate the holiday, you'd've thought there would have been more discussion of what, if anything, we should do as a class. Instead there was this onslaught of presumptions which caused the muscles in my back to tighten like hubcaps on a wheel. To keep my back attached to me, I insisted as firmly as possible that nothing was to be done. I reminded my studets of "Separation of Church and State." I told the story of a student of mine early in my career who came to school on a day before the holiday to find my class was watching partying and listening to poetry who said, "I walked here for an hour through the snow, to find you are doing nothing!" Still, no one was moved. A colleague begged me not to do force her to "do any work" 8th period and, by this time, my jaw was so tight, I wasn't opened to making things easy. As it turned out my lesson moved at the pace of molasses, but we got through most of it. We were obliged to clean the classroom to prepare for an upcoming move so we started on that when the pulse and the point had basically become leaden. As we did so, streams of children came down the halls with food to give away, which, at first I prohibited, then gave into as we were closer to the end of the day. Sadly, I saw a colleague feasting on the snacks being offered when I had asked her to check on why these students were outside. Of course, I was making a big deal of nothing -- in the last five minutes before we were to leave, these studets obviously wanted to get rid of extra food from their parties. It was no big deal. Everyone around me had taught real lessons but had perhaps allowed for a little more festivity around them.
Students presented me with presents which I politely refused. I had told one that I could not accept presents -- that would be like accepting a bribe. What I told them were my presents were the questions they asked during class and their good work. They didn't need to thank me in any other way.
The week left me tense and I felt scrooge-like. It wasn't that I hadn't been generous, but I'd been pushed into a corner I didn't like and my views only solidified my exclusion. But, it was all right.
Given that we left off in the middle of a discussion of urban sprawl, I should have done more to talk about organizations who discouraged consumerism and who encouraged helping the less fortunate during the season. I know my students would've liked to hear about this. So, somewhere, next year, I will do just that. And more.
World peace won't be solved by one more Wii machine and one less meal.
But, if you have a chance to think about this for the future, what is the right position for a school to take in this throng of powdered-sugar inspired sentiment?
Mine this year was to do as little as possible to acknowledge it. Both the popular mythology of Christmas and Hannukah figured into World History this term, so I got to talk about the connections between the two holidays and cultures in an academic sense. Since the fact that Jesus was a Jew was a brand-new shocking detail to one of my smartest students, the entire contextualization of the famous crucifixion among the murder of over 30,000 Jews during the Roman occupation of Judea may have fallen by the wayside. And that's okay. It isn't important to me that the religious stories attached to periods of history be the highlights of my units. It just seemed like a way to get studets to visualize the events in occupied Judea at the time. Overall, my students knew more about that event than they had before, so I was fairly satisfied at the end of the unit.
Still, it irked me that what followed was a thunderstorm of requests for parties and pleasantries attached to Christmas. Having thoroughly established that several students and myself didn't celebrate the holiday, you'd've thought there would have been more discussion of what, if anything, we should do as a class. Instead there was this onslaught of presumptions which caused the muscles in my back to tighten like hubcaps on a wheel. To keep my back attached to me, I insisted as firmly as possible that nothing was to be done. I reminded my studets of "Separation of Church and State." I told the story of a student of mine early in my career who came to school on a day before the holiday to find my class was watching partying and listening to poetry who said, "I walked here for an hour through the snow, to find you are doing nothing!" Still, no one was moved. A colleague begged me not to do force her to "do any work" 8th period and, by this time, my jaw was so tight, I wasn't opened to making things easy. As it turned out my lesson moved at the pace of molasses, but we got through most of it. We were obliged to clean the classroom to prepare for an upcoming move so we started on that when the pulse and the point had basically become leaden. As we did so, streams of children came down the halls with food to give away, which, at first I prohibited, then gave into as we were closer to the end of the day. Sadly, I saw a colleague feasting on the snacks being offered when I had asked her to check on why these students were outside. Of course, I was making a big deal of nothing -- in the last five minutes before we were to leave, these studets obviously wanted to get rid of extra food from their parties. It was no big deal. Everyone around me had taught real lessons but had perhaps allowed for a little more festivity around them.
Students presented me with presents which I politely refused. I had told one that I could not accept presents -- that would be like accepting a bribe. What I told them were my presents were the questions they asked during class and their good work. They didn't need to thank me in any other way.
The week left me tense and I felt scrooge-like. It wasn't that I hadn't been generous, but I'd been pushed into a corner I didn't like and my views only solidified my exclusion. But, it was all right.
Given that we left off in the middle of a discussion of urban sprawl, I should have done more to talk about organizations who discouraged consumerism and who encouraged helping the less fortunate during the season. I know my students would've liked to hear about this. So, somewhere, next year, I will do just that. And more.
World peace won't be solved by one more Wii machine and one less meal.
20 December, 2009
Shut up! I can't handle your pain. Take a tranquilizer!
The above quote came from my mother, five minutes into my describing my teaching life. It occurred to me that she has probably NEVER been able to to handle any of my pain -- why I learned to tranquilize myself with everything from ice cream to spaghetti as a child.
And I wonder how many of my students use other drugs, violence and just the extension of rage for the same reason.
We must have more psychologists in schools. I got regular counseling in HS and College which is how I survived.
And I wonder how many of my students use other drugs, violence and just the extension of rage for the same reason.
We must have more psychologists in schools. I got regular counseling in HS and College which is how I survived.
05 December, 2009
One time only
Two days ago, a student who had not done one ounce of work in my class and who talks continuously regardless of all punishments, worked. I knew he might because we were playing a jeopardy-style game about early civilizations and he likes competition.
And then nothing. I had even called his mom to tell her he worked that day. I did tell her I would call her again if this seemed to have been a "one-time-deal."
Not looking forward to that call.
And then nothing. I had even called his mom to tell her he worked that day. I did tell her I would call her again if this seemed to have been a "one-time-deal."
Not looking forward to that call.
30 November, 2009
I don't go out much
Today, both my mother and my uncle suggested arts events I ought to see. This was especially amusing, as I had just finished telling my uncle how angry I was that my mother wouldn't just accept the fact that I don't make plans in advance and I don't go out much, weekday or weekend.
Given the choice of getting rest, planning ahead for school, relaxing or hauling myself across boroughs or neighborhoods for a momentary escape, the latter rarely wins. I read a lot. When not at work, I stay home. My days are long. It's nice to get in extra time at home, when I can.
Given the choice of getting rest, planning ahead for school, relaxing or hauling myself across boroughs or neighborhoods for a momentary escape, the latter rarely wins. I read a lot. When not at work, I stay home. My days are long. It's nice to get in extra time at home, when I can.
26 November, 2009
A Thanksgiving Story
Early this afternoon, I left my apartment to pick up some bread and litter, the two staples of my household. Just a few feet away from me, there stood a religious Jewish woman in her fifties, stylish blonde wig and dazzlingly multi-colored dress garneshing her heavyset frame. The door was open to her black sedan and diagnonally across from it was her husband, white shirt and foamy beard tinged by his nervous hand. "What did you want me to do?," he said. I looked around for a minute, and about ten feet away was a Chinese man in his thirties, his bangs fashionably gelled upward which now, coincidentally, matched his confused stare at the clamshell-like dent in his silver sedan. There wasn't really anger or humor. Just puzzlement, to quote The King and I. "Did you take the information?" said the husband. "No. When the police come, they'll take it." They stood about five feet away from each other, and you could see his heels beginning to lift in reverse. "I knew I shouldn't have called you," she said offhandedly. He walked backwards, stopped, then turned around and walked off. She and the Chinese man just held on to their car doors, staring outward, as if they knew something had happened, but had forgotten what.
.............
As anyone unfortunate enough to know me closely knows, this is my least favorite time of the year. All sorts of horrible things have happened to me on this holiday, though one year, Queequeg, my godson-cat, was re-born in the ER of the Animal Medical Center. That was supposed to have re-christened the holiday for me, but I can never shed the fears that come with this section of the calendar. I have much to be thankful for, not the least of whom I just scolded for trying to eat an old piece of hard food off of the floor. Being the faithful son that Larry is, he did not. Bernie hovers on the corner of the bed and I know Larry is hinting that he would like to be brought up here, so I will. It should be a quiet day for us, and hopefully one of inner peace, at least for them -- and all of you who might be reading this.
.............
As anyone unfortunate enough to know me closely knows, this is my least favorite time of the year. All sorts of horrible things have happened to me on this holiday, though one year, Queequeg, my godson-cat, was re-born in the ER of the Animal Medical Center. That was supposed to have re-christened the holiday for me, but I can never shed the fears that come with this section of the calendar. I have much to be thankful for, not the least of whom I just scolded for trying to eat an old piece of hard food off of the floor. Being the faithful son that Larry is, he did not. Bernie hovers on the corner of the bed and I know Larry is hinting that he would like to be brought up here, so I will. It should be a quiet day for us, and hopefully one of inner peace, at least for them -- and all of you who might be reading this.
21 November, 2009
07 November, 2009
Very bad.
I've got a lot of good people behind me, so maybe I shouldn't say bad. How about, "very different."
05 November, 2009
Not really much to say.
My students said that Cleopatra's biography was "hot." Since this week's essay is about her, I hope that means they'll enjoy it.
29 October, 2009
Bronchitis
It turns out I've got a bad case of Bronchitis which is probably what has been plaguing me for weeks. Even with albuterol, my lungs wouldn't open up much. Plus my fever was 102 yesterday. So, I have to rest, ingest massive amounts of antibiotics, drink fluids and get better. Makes sense I'd be spewing pleghm, be dizzy and run down if I'm not getting a heck of a lot of oxygen.
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