:: p-dog ::

I gauge my mood by how appalled I am at the idea of teaching next year. Today, for instance, was a lousy day, and I'm set on doing basically any other job in the world next year rather than this. On Monday, on the other hand, I was in a festival haze of teacher-joy as I discovered I have a budget for books in my class. An orgy of Scholastic book orders commenced, and I was a teacher-for-life.

I'm afraid that being surrounded by 12-14 year olds is affecting my emotional stability. So many hormones teeming that some are forced to go airborne, where they infect me. Contagious mood swings...

:: Leslie H - 4:13 PM - ::

Texas in three weeks! Time, I think, is accelerating. September was the longest month in human history; the fall was a slow, desperate crawl towards Christmas, when it seemed the world would end; now: January is practically over. It's practically March. School's practically finished. My career as a teacher is expiring. I'm halfway to middle-aged. (A recent complaint by a fellow TFAer: "I'll never be more attractive than this. These are the cutest years of my life, and I'm giving them to 6th graders.")

Things continue to go moderately better. I can tell because I have the energy to do things like read or write, and my teacher energy is spent more on lessons than on discipline. I laugh at my kids more often than yell.

No, I don't yell very much. And by "yell" I mostly just mean raise my voice and turn red. I have, as a teacher, discovered rage. Though no stranger to punch-the-pillow-and-cry frustration, I have very rarely been truly angry in my life. Teaching middle school, however, lays bare this whole new emotion. Every week or so I find myself stalking toward a table full of 12-year-olds, my vision contracting, almost light-headed. "You. need. to be. quiet. or I. will. kill. you."

Okay, I threaten detention, not death. But the rage is the same.

:: Leslie H - 4:31 PM - ::

I didn't take enough pictures this weekend to merit an album on gallery, so I'm just posting a couple from my fabulous long ski weekend. That's right: I celebrated the life of Martin Luther King Jr. by paying hundreds of dollars to participate in the whitest, yuppiest recreation ever. Word up.

Teaching may suck, but the perk of living in northern cali can't be beat. Here's:
Me on the mountain.



Lake Tahoe at sunset.

:: Leslie H - 8:29 AM - ::

Guess who's coming to Texas? [see below for correct answer]

Once school started again, our February break just snuck up on me. As a California-area trip never materialized--Bryan has to work, my TFA friends are all going separate ways, I decided to reprise my Christmas week and spend a few days each in Austin and Dallas. I'll be in Texas from the 14th until the morning of the 18th, cities TBA. I'd love to see as many people as possible, so let me know if you're available.

Now I'm heading to Tahoe for a long ski weekend. Rough.

[correct answer: me]

:: Leslie H - 4:20 PM - ::

My 8th grade reading class read today a personal account of a woman in a Japanese internment camp during World War II (this was after an entirely-too-long unit on Anne Frank and the Holocaust). Post-reading, we looked at some discussion questions like, "Do you think it was right of the U.S. to lock people up just because they were Japanese." I got an alarming number of "yes" answers.

"Well, they were Japanese, and there was a war."

"Okay, well, you all have studied the Mexican-American war, right?" (yes) "What if the U.S. and Mexico went to war again. Would it be okay for the government to lock up everyone whose family came from Mexico?" (the third of the class who wasn't listening perks up)

"...well, they couldn't.
There are too many of us.
We'd break down the walls!"
(cheers)

"So would it be right to do it?"

"No."

"So why was it okay to lock up Japanese people?"

"They're Japanese."

At least they can't be accused of just giving me the answers I want to hear...
It's these issues that I have the most trouble with. Kids who call people gay. Kids who call the Sikh teacher at our school Mr. Terrorist. Kids who accuse teachers of being racist against Mexicans every time they get in trouble, but don't apply any of that outrage to real instances of intolerance. I don't know how to tackle these issues responsibly, in any way other than lectures that wash over them and leave no impression. I realize that it's part of the nature of middle school--90% of energy is focused on yourself and what other people think of you. But I want to give my students some sense of a world outside themselves, and I'm totally stumped at how.

Admittedly, it's a monumental step that I'm even able to think about this question and not how I get Gilberto to stop throwing staples. My great relief in these first weeks back from break is that I finally have the time and energy to focus on teaching strategies and not just management issues. No question, my management is still far from ideal. I still have to repeat instructions 7-8 times and scatter detentions generously. But last semester I hardly had the energy to lesson plan, let alone ponder how to help my students be better human beings. Now I glimpse, at least, the real challenges and rewards of this masochistic profession.

:: Leslie H - 8:39 PM - ::

Bad Subaru!

http://nytimes.com/2004/01/13/automobiles/13SUBA.html?hp

:: Leslie H - 9:26 PM - ::

This may well be the first time ever that I've thoroughly exploited wireless internet (as I've never actually had a laptop or a wireless card at the same time). But I'm sitting in my Monday night credential class on the San Jose State U campus, with my borrowed-from-Bryan ibook, and I'm enjoying the sweet, sweet taste of checking email and blogs instead of taking notes.

I actually sort of enjoy this class. It's pretty theoretical, about the flaws in most literature/social studies books, giving our students a one-sided, rah-rah U.S.A point of view on most of history. We're reading Zinn and co. and talking about how we can supplement our text books to give our children a reasonable idea of history that fosters critical thinking rather than blind patriotism. Nothing I haven't really heard before, but interesting nonetheless. However, since I've had all these conversations before, I can remorselessly check email, catch up on news, post to puddledog, catch up with other favorites (shout out to showcat, mrwright, headfake).

My day today went pretty well. My totally anal new procedures in the classroom seem to be paying off. I am absurdly organized and structured. The first seven minutes and final four of every class are totally scripted, and every other day reflects a weekly schedule of reading, writing, spelling, and grammar. And the students seem to respond well to that. I'm not sure if it's because they crave routine or they're just scared of me because I seem (key word, seem) so on top of my shit. So combined with an increased willingness to strip rewards and dole out detentions, and classroom management is a much different creature. I think something changes in the kids' heads, too, when they come back from Christmas break to find a teacher still there. There's a lot of turn-over at my school (with which I totally sympathize), and driving a teacher crazy and away is definitely a status symbol for classes. Once they figure out they can't do that, they seem to resign themselves to actually doing some work. At least a little.

I also had a couple of students tell me I just cut my hair so I'd look tough. Which is kind of true. And it works. Wearing glasses, too.

I've got this week-long vacation in February, which seems very close. I'm trying to decide what to do (go somewhere? solicit visitors?), and I'm totally open to suggestions.

:: Leslie H - 8:34 PM - ::

I posted many new pictures on gallery, and commented on some that hadn't been. New: more pictures of my students from the day before break (in album "The Kids"), comments on the pictures from Cameron's visit, many more from our week in Texas, and a new album called "Clare Comes to Visit."

:: Leslie H - 9:51 AM - ::

The girl who drew this is leaving my class and moving to Dallas. If you see her, you should compliment her on her artistic abilities and unwitting cleverness. (A precious little seventh grader, completing an assignment to illustrate one vocabulary word, with no clue of her drawing's, hem, interpretation.)



Kids. I'm beginning to sort of love them.

:: Leslie H - 8:23 PM - ::

Five hours to go, and I'll be free for the weekend. Freeeeeeee. It's been a long, but not too awful week. Mostly I've been readjusting to the absurd schedule again: teacher from 7:30 - 3, grad student from 4 -10. I have a feeling I'll look back at this year with incredulity and wonder.
I think most of my students are getting used to the fact that I'm not going anywhere. They're stuck with me, so they might as well stop fucking around and do some work.
I'll do my best to post pictures from winter break. Hopefully this weekend.

:: Leslie H - 9:37 AM - ::

Ah, remiss again. I should have written a week ago about my visit to Texas and winter break, before the sensations had drowned again in fretting over school. It was a wonderful break, and felt so long. I was delighted if surprised to discover that Texas exists, more or less as I left it. There's a mirage-like new building in downtown Austin, and of course everyone was gone, visiting their own families. But Dallas was just the same, and I saw enough old friends in both cities to make me feel quite at home. (Thanks again for lunch, Amanda.) Bryan and I did a driving tour of old Austin haunts, and it felt disturbingly familiar, as though I'd just dreamed California and Teach for America.

It already feels so long ago. We've been back in Santa Clara since Tuesday, though I've seen even more of Austin people here than there. Allison was in San Francisco for the new year, and we got to spend basically a whole day together, which was smashing. And Clare has been staying with us since Wednesday. Also much fun, and she's been very understanding of my alternate needs to work frantically and to do nothing at all. We've seen some cool things--spent the better part of an afternoon in Golden Gate park and SF, toured the Berkeley campus and town, hiked through the requisite redwoods, driven along the Pacific, dined on "California cuisine" and cooked some old favorites.

School restarts tomorrow, and I'm planning a new beginning. I feel much more like tomorrow is the first day of school than that it's any old Monday. Benefiting from experience, I'm making the return from winter break into a whole new Day One, complete with teaching rules and procedures, getting-to-know-you activities, and making an example out of a few kids to scare the rest into submission. We're sitting in groups for the first time. I'm excited to get this sort of second chance start, and also nervous. The stakes are high. If I blow this, my January-June might be as miserable as my September-December. While I anticipated the fall being hell, I also expected the spring to be better. My fingers are crossed. My mean teacher face is on. My hair, by the way, is short again. I decided to have Clare cut it as sort of a new year thing. I'm happy with short hair again. Makes me feel tougher.



I'll do my best to keep posting updates and let you know how 2004 goes. But not tomorrow. I'm booked again from 6 in the morning till 10:30 at night. :) Farewell, sweet vacation.

:: Leslie H - 7:56 PM - ::