here and now

Some good things happened today!!! So, I mean, I’m going to tell you about them.

-Acting on a suggestion from my marvelous fifth-grade-teacher housemate M, I used construction paper “foldables” to reteach figurative language today — and it was one of our most fun AND successful lessons ever.

-My test prep students fiiinally recognized that the sentence “the sky is blue,” or any other “noun = adjective” combination, is not a metaphor…and WHY. (Next step: retention.) Also, for some reason they really enjoyed my “her nose is a beak” metaphor today, except for this one girl who seemed to think at first that I was making fun of her. Apparently her mom tells her she looks like a bird. Awkwarrrd…moving on.

-Marcus had a MAJOR breakthrough with context clues and was grinning for the rest of the class period.

-My students actually seemed to buy into my enthusiastic/emphatic “a new nine weeks is a fresh start” speech.

-I only had one student who refused to answer the open response questions on today’s vocabulary quiz. This may sound ridiculous, but it’s a giant leap for many of these kids.

-After a heinous Homecoming week, my students behaved beautifully today.

-Thanks to a quick Google search for my iTunes “fatal error” code, I was able to find a relevant post on a Microsoft message forum and REINSTALL ITUNES on my computer! And, in case you ever experience this horrifying problem yourself, you can pursue one of two very different, yet apparently similarly effective, solutions: 1. Completely wipe your hard drive and reinstall Windows Vista. 2. Simply rename your junky iTunes folder (or whatever application — this also happened to my Adobe Acrobat) so that the installer won’t recognize it when it tries to reinstall the program. Guess which option I chose. HA! HAHAHAHAHAHA! That’s right, Vista, fooled you rrrreeealllll good. Bam. P.S. The error code is 0×80070091.

Anyway, I spent the majority of last week feeling like a terrible teacher/human, so I feel like I can say this without feeling too guilty or obnoxious:

Yay yay yay yay yay yay yay YAAAYYYY!!!

And so I found myself: alone in my car in the middle of a field, suddenly engulfed by a practice formation of the high school marching band. I was accompanied only by a Jeepful of freshly inflated balloons in school colors. An absurd flashback to the swanky consulting interviews of one year ago left me wondering, vaguely, how many of the iridescent sort-of-spheres my boxy vehicle held. “How many tennis balls would fit in a 747? How many airplanes do you think are in the sky at this moment? If every airplane is full of tennis balls instead of people, how many tennis balls are in the sky?”

I had lost the will to calculate. I looked at my wristwatch. The Homecoming parade was about to begin.

Clad in a sweatshirt in misguided anticipation of fall weather, I shielded my eyes from the scorching sun and searched in vain for the sophomore class float. When would our truck and trailer come around the bend? Why weren’t they here yet? Why hadn’t I programmed these kids’ numbers into my phone? I was failing in my first real act as sophomore class sponsor.

We had decided to wait until we were downtown to attach the balloons to the float. With this ingenious plan, we wouldn’t have to worry about decorations flying off the trailer as it gunned down the highway on the way to the parade site. Unfortunately, however, the float and I had gotten separated as we’d left the school; the Homecoming parade is easily one of the biggest annual events in our town, and it had drawn traffic to match. I had dutifully parked in front of Foodland at 3:15, as promised, but soon 3:15 had turned to 3:50 and our still-nearly-naked trailer was nowhere to be seen. The parade was supposed to start in ten minutes.

I wondered, foolishly, why so many of my students had suddenly realized around 2:30 that afternoon that they didn’t have rides to or from the parade. I couldn’t drive any of them there myself because the aforementioned balloons had conquered my car — not to mention the lack of parental consent. About 20 students had signed up to ride on the float. Where were they? Had any of them made it?

I smiled at various people and blasted Rihanna and T.I. from my speakers in an effort to appear unconcerned. I called my friend T to vent. My patience for logistical problems was at an all-time low.

Homecoming week (Tacky Day! Twin Day! Don’t Pay Attention to Your Teachers When You’re Out of Uniform Day!) had taken a nosedive around the same time that my music, usually my solace, had spontaneously disappeared from my computer. (iTunes had vanished from my hard drive on Thursday and then refused to reinstall due to “fatal errors.”) Additionally, fueled by a combination of sleep debt and low blood sugar, immediately before the parade my housemate F and I had dissolved into a ridiculous argument about tying the balloons to the float. I had attempted to storm off angrily in my Jeep afterward, but because the vehicle was so full of balloons I hadn’t been able to use my rear view mirror. The result — an awkward, stilted reverse that I had to repeat because I hadn’t cut the wheel far enough — would have been raucously funny if I hadn’t already been so miserable. After walking up and down the street a few times in search of the float, I had gotten back into my balloon car and resigned myself to failure, blinking to keep away tears.

The parade had already begun. I waited.

After a few painful minutes, I saw what existed of it inching slowly around the corner. There it was, our little “float.” Two enthusiastic students, tiny siblings in tow, stood in the back of the trailer dancing with their hand-painted signs. They had attached ten or fifteen balloons — the small number that had fit in the cab of the truck as they’d driven over — to the trailer. It was homely, to be sure, but the display was beautiful in its own symbolic way. There was joy there. The balloons in my car had had no purpose.

The most striking part was that one of the two students who was dedicated enough to appear on the float had been a student who, at the beginning of the year, had done everything she could to try to undermine me and make me feel unwelcome in my own classroom. For the first five or six weeks of school she had made loud noises while I was speaking and frequently talked back to me in front of her classmates. She was familiar with my anger, and with the principal’s office. Something changed in the past few weeks, though, and I’m still not sure what or why. But here she was, her little brother and sister dancing around with her, her mom driving the truck. She had made it. She had made the float happen.

I ran up to her and jogged alongside the float for a few moments. “Where were you, Ms. ____?” she asked, not combatively as she would have a month ago, but instead falteringly, confusedly.

“I tried to find you,” I said. “I tried to find you, but I couldn’t.”

The words caught in my throat, hung for a moment like so many spinning quarters. They fell just as flatly. Thunk.

A string of new words, urgent in my brain: Get out of here. Get out of here. Get out of here.

I left my Jeep downtown, still full of balloons, and walked home.

We drove up to Helena yesterday for the King Biscuit Blues Festival, the largest blues festival in the Delta. Kind of a big deal, and so fun. It was great to see some North Delta corps members again. I also ran into an ‘04 Delta corps member who is now a PD in Indianapolis…and it turned out that she went to my high school! Tiny world. I love coincidences like that.

We spent the night in Clarksdale and didn’t get back until around noon today, yet somehow I still feel ok about this trip. I’m pretty sure it’s because I got a significant amount of work done before leaving; F and I forced ourselves to stay after school until 6:15 on Friday to plan ahead.

Anyway, I’m glad we made the trip. I really like the other corps members here.

I’m not sure what’s been up lately, but these past couple of days I’ve had some major issues with students bickering during my morning blocks. In an attempt to get them to act less like kindergarteners, today I had them pass around sheets of paper and write compliments for each other on each sheet.

Wellllll…I failed miserably. No one would stop talking; some kids ended up hitting each other, some wrote insults to each other (”you fat,” “you sloppy and ugly,” etc.), some wrote gang code as compliments, some stole candy from me as I attempted to explain the game to a stray group, and others just didn’t seem to have a clue what the heck we were doing. One kid also spent a whole lot of time picking his ears with the pointed end of a pencil (his, I fervently pray).

In short, it was a disaster. When it came time for a different lesson with my honors class during fifth period, I couldn’t have been more relieved.

In seventh period, though, I decided to give the game another try after reworking the process and directions during my prep. Because of absences, I was working with an even-tinier-than-usual class of six girls and one boy, and (due in large part to the small number, I’m sure) this time around, the game worked flawlessly. I participated myself this time, which helped a lot, I think — plus it meant that I went home with a page full of compliments, which would make anybody’s day. In fact, I’m going to go ahead and share them because they make me happy…despite rampant grammatical errors that run counter to comments on supposed good-teacher-ism:

“You are my favorite teacher. You are super nice to me. Your awesome.” - J.

“You are a good teacher and is so nice you’re my favorite of them all.” - W.

“You is a good teacher.” - Tough Girl (…Sigh.)

“You are a smart and very nice teacher thanks for putting pressure on me during my work. Keep it up and you are a very nice teacher. Woo hoo Go Ms. ____!” - T.

“Ms. ____ is my favorite teacher. I also love English, so this is my favorite class. Ms. ____ is also smart, reliable, dependible, and independent.” - S.

“Ms. ____ is a very nice and willing teacher. She is willing to help you no matter what if we are willing to help ourselves. Luv Ya Girlfriend!!!” - J. (This girl merits a blog post all her own. I mean, I gave her an inspirational magnet and stuff. I’ll tell you about it later.)

“You are very pretty.” - C. (the lone boy today)

Note: All but one of these kids has received hallway reprimands, parent phone calls, and/or dispositions from me for things like poor behavior, back talk, and academic dishonesty. Either my students are very forgiving, or their compliments about my “niceness” are diabolical lies. Hmmm.

Anyway, maybe at some point I can try this activity again with my first two blocks — in the very, very distant future.

“Hope is the thing with feathers.”

They say that if no one is teaching, no one is learning. Well, thank goodness for my Honors/Pre-AP class, because those kids make me feel like I am teaching — somebody, something. Today we read “The Veldt,” by Ray Bradbury, and they enjoyed it and were shocked by it just like I’d hoped they would be. And they were tossing out literary terms (correctly!) all over the place! Oh, man! They made me feel good today.

To stuff my good feelings cornucopia to the bursting point, I’d like to add that I am composing this entry during eighth period test prep’s silent reading time…and “tough girl” (remember her?) is READING today! I REPEAT, TOUGH GIRL HAS NOT ATTEMPTED TO PUT HER HEAD DOWN! I gave her Find a Stranger, Say Goodbye, by Lois Lowry, and she is reading it. For the time being.

This post probably won’t be particularly interesting to non-teachers, but I just wanted to say –

The kids are starting to get used to reading and writing on command, and with stricter time constraints!

I just realized today how much less I have to twist students’ arms than I did at the beginning of the year. Something is clicking, if ever so slowly.

It also just occurred to me that even if I falter, and no matter how discouraged I sometimes become, I am really enjoying teaching and being around these kids. The quality of our rapport has improved dramatically since the year’s rocky beginning. I really like these kids, and I think they like me too (even though I expect a lot from them).

I still think my expectations should be even higher, though. But — one step at a time. I’ll keep the faith that we can ratchet it up after overcoming some initial inertia. Let’s not ruin the moment.

Oh my goodness, I am so happy.

It’s Sunday morning again.

I was wide awake by 8 a.m. The familiar anxious chant of “so much to do today – so much to do today” rushes upon me even in sleep.

Sometimes it seems my entire being is permeated by stress here. Worries bombard me: How can I improve my lesson plans? How can I create a better quiz or test? How can I use my resources better? How can I grade essays faster, but still effectively? What should my students read next, and how can I get them to enjoy it? How can I get more sleep?

Other anxieties are more sinister, cutting straight to a deep fear of failure. If I didn’t do my best in college, it reflected poorly on me; here, my failures impact the lives of dozens of kids. Why is it that so many of my students just don’t retain what I’ve tried to teach them? Why can’t I coax some kids to higher-than-basic levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy? And just for tomorrow, just once, how can I do a better job of managing students who don’t see school as a priority? Why can’t I get some of these kids to focus, even for twenty seconds at a time? What am I doing wrong?

Worst, though, is the fear that no matter how much others care about me and my success, when it comes down to it I am alone here.

I’ve experienced stress before, of course, but it’s never been quite the same as it is here. In college, I could turn to friends in many social circles for support; in the Delta I rely on a small group of TFA corps members, none of whom have known me for more than a couple of months. Ironically, these new friends are the only ones who can really understand what I’m going through right now. I feel disconnected from my old friends because they cannot understand the Me of Now, and disconnected from my new friends because they never knew the Me of Yesterday.

This situation reminds me a little bit of last summer, when  I was studying in London and would sometimes yearn for some undefined “more.” My favorite cure was to go for a run along the Thames and to stop at the Tate Modern along the way. At the time they had a Rothko exhibit there, dimly lit, where I could sit for quite a while in silence. The quality of the paint, the blurred edges of floating squares, the hues so carefully chosen — mesmerized me. I guess my equivalent here is the lake. And, thank goodness, I can sit on our front porch on Sundays with the lake at my side. But I still need to figure out a great many things.

Today I attempted to compare the idea of scapegoating in “The Lottery” to a historical example: the Holocaust.

For some reason I keep being surprised at my kids’ absence of historical knowledge.

Sometimes I just want to put my head in my hands and cry.

I would like to begin this post by stating that yesterday was the first “meatloaf day” of the year, yet it passed without incident. Meatloaf lives in infamy here. Supposedly fights break out whenever they serve it.

A clarification I needed: The fights do not break out over the meatloaf, but instead as a result of altered body chemistry due to meatloaf ingestion. Hahahahahaha.

In other news, I’m starting to have routines. Weekly quizzes and vocabulary lists (15 words a week — “But Ms. ____, last year we only had to learn five words a week!!!” — my response to such complaints is usually “Womp, wommmmppp”) are a godsend for my planning and sanity. I’m slowly realizing that I don’t need to reinvent the wheel every day. Just write a quiz and be sure to align the key points of your lessons to it. Duh.

I’ve also added silent reading time to my Test Prep classes each day. My students fought that decision mightily at first, but yesterday they literally begged me to lengthen their reading time (!). I did lengthen it, of course, because I am a sucker. I want so badly for them to want to read.

Anyway, it is 7:30 a.m. in my classroom, and I’m feeling pretty good at the moment. After spending weeks in complete exhaustion, I am celebrating the fact that even with a trip across the river yesterday for dinner, I finished lesson planning last night by 10:30. I didn’t go to sleep until an hour later because I felt like diving into Development As Freedom, a book I’d never finished reading in college — but even with some time to myself, still I got seven full hours of sleep. Right now that feels like a major accomplishment.

Oh, and I also bought a really nice cardigan on clearance for ten dollars yesterday. And a pair of classic Sperrys. I’m still glowing from satisfaction with my purchases.

It’s Oct. 2. Mark the date for posterity…

So I volunteered to help facilitate something called the United Female Empowerment Workshop (UFEW) in a neighboring town across the river this weekend. We’ll be holding these workshops on Saturdays throughout the school year; they provide a forum for adolescent girls to discuss and learn about health and fitness, relationships, and college and career planning. I’m in charge of the “Relationships [irony noted] and Future Planning” workshop.

Anyway, I couldn’t be more excited about it.

What a positive environment we had this Saturday. We were working exclusively with young women, all of whom were enthusiastic to be there. We were stationed in a dark, rickety, tiny, windowless room — and we had so much fun together. This workshop left me rejuvenated. Somehow it seemed that after just one day with these girls I was beginning to play a positive role in their lives. I felt free. I got to be the adult without having to be the disciplinarian. I got to be myself again.

I hope I can figure out how to do a better job of translating that “self” into my classroom management each day. In my personality as a teacher, I still need to find an optimal and stable balance between “fun” and “strict.” Many of my students clearly don’t understand that school doesn’t have to be just one or the other. Maybe, though, that’s only because I’ve done a poor job of demonstrating it myself.

One of my students was bitten by a brown recluse spider today. He was in F’s class when he noticed that the flesh of his arm had turned gangrenous, but he went home in the middle of mine. He nonchalantly asked if I wanted to look at the bite, and I naively said yes. It was very possibly the grossest thing I’ve ever seen.

Yes. Gangrene. Look at this if you dare. http://www.countyofkings.com/ag%20commissioner/Ag%20Services%20Pages/Ag%20Services%20Images/BrownRecluseBitelrg.jpg

Today my students and I encountered some obstacles in our discussion of setting in Alice Walker’s powerful short-short story “The Flowers.”

It soon became apparent that a major reason why students couldn’t place the era or geographical location of the piece was a lack of historical knowledge or vocabulary for context. The story’s reference to sharecropping did not resonate, for example, and students were unclear on the word “noose”: they alternately pronounced it “nose” and “news,” with zero takers when I asked, tickets in hand, “What does that word mean?”

After I did some digging and heard comments such as, “When Martin Luther King freed the slaves…” and “But they had slaves until about 1950!,” today’s English class turned into a history lesson. I remember back in the second week of school, when I mentioned to F my fear that my “I Have a Dream” lesson would come across as stale or trite, and he said, “I bet they know a lot less about the civil rights movement than you think they do.” At the time I didn’t understand he was right.

I think I should mention that today’s discoveries would have been even more shocking if the reference I’d made last week to “colonial times” had not been met with utter blankness.

So, with a grand total of five and a half weeks of classroom experience in the rear view mirror, I offer my synopsis of the “literacy problem” as I have observed it. For the most part, my kids don’t have too much difficulty decoding the words on the page. The big issue, though, is that the difference between simply seeing words and truly comprehending them lies in how wide the reader’s world is. How is a student supposed to make connections from literature to other content knowledge if…he or she has no content knowledge? Without such a foundation, new pieces of information glide into the abyss. The new information ricochets off nothing, so the action of reading fails to produce some “equal and opposite reaction” based on prior knowledge. And why read if you don’t understand it?

So. It seems many of my kids lack an anchor for their reading. Without background knowledge, they are hitting a tennis ball to an invisible opponent. They have a single side of a Velcro strip. New information doesn’t plant and bloom. I wonder how many metaphors I can produce here (and I wonder how many of them my students would understand).

Teachers often comment that their students’ low literacy levels impede the study of history, science or math, and such comments are absolutely correct. I am slowly realizing, though, that the opposite is also true: literacy requires some basic “world knowledge,” too. I want my students to pay attention in history class — or just to take one. I want them to know what the History Channel is, and what NPR is. I want them to use the Internet not just to play games, but also to educate themselves as citizens and consumers. I want them to read the newspaper; I want them to read a book, dammit. I want them to study abroad one day.

We have a long way to go.

So — I ended up spending ten hours grading essays today. Not five. Ten. I worked from 10:00 am until 10:00 pm, taking a total of two hours of break time. I spent those “break periods” straightening up my bedroom and eating lunch and dinner.

Sunday is definitely not a day of rest. I wish I’d understood the meaning of “I will grade your essays this weekend” back in the day when I was a young high school whippersnapper.

Why on earth did I spend so much time on this task? (Here I am, borrowing a writing technique from some of my students: Write down a question and then answer it.) Well, I wanted my students to have plenty of concrete, specific statements from me because, for the most part, they have not yet processed how to apply a couple of general comments to an entire body of work. (I suppose such a lack of processing is in part my own fault.) Perhaps ironically, many of my concrete, specific comments simply identified places where the students’ own writing would have benefited from greater concreteness and specificity. Sigh.

I figure that if I put in the time to write such detailed comments now, I won’t have to do so later in the year: you know, that whole “gradual release of responsibility” concept. I’m crossing my fingers.

Annnd I’m going to go to sleep now, once again putting off my formal planning for a unit that has already commenced. I am also putting off grading a quiz, creating a tracking poster for Accelerated Reader points, etc.

Oh! I created my writing tracker today and entered my first round of data in it. This task feels like a major accomplishment, thus compelling me to record its completion in Blogdom.

Yesterday evening, a trip to a blues festival (so, so fun — we spent much of it pretending to be cheesy backup dancers) took an unexpected downturn: around 11:00 pm, I was throwing up some unsavory cooking oil as my roommates battled a plague of mosquitoes that had swarmed into our house.

It was not a charming moment — but then we watched Superbad, which made everything seem ok again.

This event has sparked a realization that perhaps my stomach was not made for the South. I think I need to eliminate fried food, or just meat in general (I’ve broken down here and have been eating it fairly often after years of mostly pescatarianism), for a while. I still can’t bring myself to eat funnel cake, which I once threw up in middle school; maybe I’ll never be able to eat fried chicken again? Right now, that sounds just fine.

Seriously…gross. I need to take better care of myself here. Doing so is going to involve investment in the time and effort to cook for myself instead of so often relying on the Delta’s limited dining options. I need to run more often, too.

But I digress. All things considered, this weekend has been pretty great. I really enjoy spending time with the other corps members here.

Now, though, it’s time for me to grade essays. I just realized that with 60 students, even if I only spend five minutes on each essay, I will be working on this task for five hours. Why didn’t I think about this earlier?

Among the sentences my students turned in today:

Compound: “Ms. ____ is nice, but she is also strict.”

Complex: “Although Ms. ____ is very nice, she can also be very mean.”

Compound-complex: “Although Ms. ____ is my favorite teacher, Mr. M is too because he is cute.”

Another compound-complex example: “I hate Saturday School, but I have to go because I have so many dispositions.”

Hey, hey, hey! The sentences above were written CORRECTLY!

Oh, my darling students…

“Ms. ____, you work me so hard! But it’s ok; you my n—a.” (Comment from “tough girl” mentioned previously)

After school: “Ms. ____, I’m fittin’ to go make out with my boyfriend now.” 15 minutes later: “Ms. ____, he need to learn how to kiss!”

“Ms. ____, she just touched my buttocks.” (From the boyfriend of the girl above)

Annnd another student handed me a copy of a love poem she’d written for her boyfriend…while everyone else was busy working on an essay.

They also ask me on a daily basis if F and I “go together.” They are consistently shocked that the answer is no.

These kids are pretty ridiculous, and pretty great.

I love the river. I can’t allow my appreciation for it to slip away.

What would our history have been without the Mississippi? It was coveted by the Spanish, the English, the French, the Union, the Confederacy, and who knows who else. These waters have been fought over and bargained for; they have unleashed floods, brought industry and commerce, and served as a beacon of hope for those escaping north toward freedom. People have written of this river, sung about it and perished on it. I wish I knew how many river-related treaties I memorized in high school (and later forgot — the Treaty of Paris? Pinckney’s Treaty? The Louisiana Purchase?).

Yet here we are now, crossing its banks twice or more each week, sometimes only later realizing we’ve already driven past.

Yesterday in the computer lab, I found myself sternly rebuking a large, grown-man-looking student for talking back to another teacher. He looked at me in confused surprise, as if his dominance had never been questioned before. And then out of nowhere one of my students, a tough girl with whom I’d butted heads time and again during the first few weeks of school, bellowed at him from the other side of the room: “YOU LISTEN TO MY TEACHER!”

This show of defense came soon after she’d earned a 10 out of 10 on the first writing assignment she’d ever decided to turn in to me. When she’d received her graded paragraph, along with a shower of genuine and enthusiastic compliments, she’d beamed and said, “I’m gonna start doing my work for this class!” I swear her grin could have lit up a darkened room.

Yesterday, after what had been for me a long and trying week, our school held a pep rally before our first home football game. The program included a few songs by the pep band, a dance by the majorettes, and a couple of sequences by our six member cheerleading squad, in addition to a dramatic roll call of the football team. The pep rally was made complete by a dancing beaver (yes) mascot who freestyled and did a mean Stanky Leg: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgUfHCLQa0. A couple of students took it upon themselves to teach me how to do the Stanky Leg as well, and characterized me as a “reverse Oreo.” Ha.

The football players also danced soulfully to a slow, drum-dominated version of “If you’re all for the Beavers, clap your hands/stamp your feet/(etc.).” It was amazing.

These kids have reams of raw talent, but it’s becoming clear that in a poor rural area like ours, such talent doesn’t necessarily have much of a chance to be honed by formal training. The cheerleaders don’t tumble, for example. This lack of formal instruction, however, makes it all the more evident that at the end of the day, no matter what I’ve seen and heard them do, these students are still kids.

Despite a few differences in content, the spirit of this gathering was largely the same as that of pep rallies at my large suburban high school. Kids are kids, no matter where you go. They are goofy, whether or not the teacher is in the mood for it; they have plenty of natural ability just waiting to be focused; and they enjoy nothing more than moving and being creative. They are young and in need of encouragement. This was almost a shocking revelation for me yesterday. And even though a pang of sadness registered in the back of my mind — “what if high school football proves to be the peak of many of these students’ lifelong achievement?” — the afternoon reminded me of how much I appreciate kids, and people in general. It was the best way I could have ended the week.

At 1:30 a.m., I am attempting to think about topics other than a.) teaching or b.) the election. It’s like sooo totally working, o m g. I am definitely already planning for Thanksgiving, Christmas break, spring break, and summer 2K9: whoooo (SO MANY EXCITING OPTIONS!).

Clarification: Actually, I’ve only really thought about the week before Thanksgiving, rather than Thanksgiving itself. Explanation: I’d like to go to the annual convention held by the National Council of Teachers of English. Please allow me to adjust my spectacles. I want to pick up more innovative teaching techniques — plus, the gathering is slated to occur in San Antonio, whose historic missions I would enjoy seeing and exploring as an adult. I think my Pathwise funding would cover the professional development, which energizes me even more.

Later, if all goes according to current plan, Christmas will bring good tidings with friends and family in New Jersey and New York. Then, spring break — and the good fortune of having a marvelous marvelous marvelous friend in the cruise industry — may, it seems, find me quite inexpensively in the Caribbean! And then I think I’m going to try for something out of the ordinary for “summer 2K9: whoooo.” Maybe I will teach English on another continent; or perhaps I shall simply close my eyes and put my finger on a map of Europe and go into hard-earned travel debt. Last summer I wandered solo through the UK and fell in love (with the place, not with a person). Perhaps I could have similar adventures in the Mediterranean or in Eastern Europe.

Or what if I worked as a camp counselor somewhere? And got to interact with kids in a (gasp!) more relaxed, fun, non-academic setting? And learned how to, I don’t know, kayak and go camping and stuff? I mean, I could probably teach kids how to paint or draw or play basic tennis. I have some skills, sort of.

But I digress. Part of me just yearns to go home to my parents’ house, enjoy free housing, waitress at the old tea room where I used to work (what an easy job, in retrospect…), and read and run and swim all summer. Hmmm. Maybe I’ll do that.

Also, I think I’m going to try to take a couple of personal days in October to make the long drive up to my alma mater for Homecoming and a decent haircut. I could devour some great literature via audio books on the road; the gasoline and time would probably prove good investments. Wow, yes, that idea sounds incredibly appealing.

Meanwhile, I just realized I NEED TO PAY MY RENT.

Today in the hallway I had an extremely serious conversation with one of my smartest students regarding his chronic disrespect and absence of effort in my class. The student became very upset, and instead of choosing to send him to the office, I wrote him a disposition and gave it to his mother. When I saw him later in the day, he barely met my eye.

It intrigues me, yet does not altogether surprise me, to observe the perfection with which my level of disappointment — and consequent fury — tends to correlate with the magnitude of a student’s unfulfilled potential, or my perception thereof. I am unconvinced that I would have unleashed my words quite so heavily today on a student of lower natural talent. Part of me wishes I could summon just as much disappointment in every underachieving student, but I think that at this point in my career a full-on war against such tragedy would only leave me an exhausted casualty. Goodness, I was so angry. This student just has so much potential. The Ivy League would probably vie to pay his way if he would just do his work. I’ve been drained — of everything, it seems.

I just want my students to do well, and to want to do well.

I need to get more sleep.

Things I have failed to mention: Ever since hosting the jagged edges of Hurricane Gustav last week, we have had…

• A flooded basement (nearly two feet of water at its highest level, pre-sump pumps).
• No hot water (the pilot light of our water heater was submerged and extinguished, and unable to be re-lit due to saturation and its location on the opposite side of a flooded basement).
• No dishwasher (short circuit?).
• No downstairs air conditioner (same explanation?).
• Various leaks from ceilings and floors (bonus!) all over our home (it’s a game: Follow the dripping noises to find the latest leak! Warmer! Warmer! In the closet, all over your clothes? In the laundry room, seeping up from under the linoleum? Hot, hot, hot!).
• A dock whose entrance and lower levels are now completely submerged in lake (so, how large of a role does evaporation typically play in this sort of situation…?).

We also have not used our upstairs air conditioner since moving in and opening our first heinous electric bill. A single AC unit managed to devour $260 worth of electricity in an 11 day billing period. We still don’t understand why, but we’re getting it checked tomorrow, along with just about everything else.

Oh, you charming old house, you. What a card.

The funny thing is that I haven’t really minded the “living history museum” lifestyle these past few days. There is something almost purifying about it — plus, it’s significantly cheaper. That said, though, I can barely contain my anticipation for a hot shower tomorrow night.

My LP Play List (LP stands for “Lesson Planning”…obbbviously) includes a haunting song, discovered during my Grey’s Anatomy phase, with the lines, “I want to change the world / Instead, I sleep.”

I always identified with that statement when I was in college.

While I cherish my college experience and at times wish I were still there, throughout those four years I waged a constant mental battle against the very fact that I was in college. A friend of mine once remarked that she and I were “in college, but not of college.” What I believe she meant, and what I mean now, is that even though we understood the merit of this multifaceted thing called college, we were always impatient to begin our crusade to change the world (how? I remain joyfully unclear on this point). Frustrations festered; we barely had time to read the campus newspaper, let alone to effect some global paradigm shift.

Just behind my enthusiastic pursuit of standard “college goals” — my simultaneous attempts to maintain a high GPA, to make (in retrospect quite small) differences via Illustrious Leadership Positions, and to achieve some semblance of social ubiquity — constantly hovered the unsettling idea that…that was all I was doing. And this revelation, whenever I noticed it languishing on my shoulder, always left me queasy. I wanted to do something, something big if possible, yet instead I was sleeping. Usually not literally sleeping — I didn’t sleep much in college, in fact — but was I a metaphorical Rapunzel? In some ways, yes, and I didn’t like it.

College, as it drew to a close, seemed to me an interminable sentence of idyllic familiarity. Even though I had worked hard from start to finish, at some point I had reached a golden era in which I understood exactly what I had to do, and how to do it, in order to succeed. I knew whom to turn to for help or guidance, and at the same time I had also veered somewhat dangerously close to thinking I knew everything. In short, I had gotten very comfortable. I admit it was nice for a time.

The exhilarating news is that although I still have yet to change the world, I am no longer comfortable (news flash). Indeed, I hardly sleep at all these days. The title line of the song, however, remains: “All that I know is I’m breathing / All I can do is keep breathing / All we can do is keep breathing now.”

Today after school a student said to me, “Ms. ____, why do I feel so comfortable around you? I tell you everything!”

I didn’t have much of an answer, but — smiley face! Her comment made me feel like I might actually be planting the seeds of something good here (…at least in the non-academic realm).

Then I started to worry, though: how comfortable should students feel around their teachers, exactly?

The weekend road trip was healthy for me, I think, with its good college friends and dancing and plenty of all-is-well-with-the-world sentiment. F and I also read the first few chapters of Steinbeck’s East of Eden aloud to each other in the car, which allowed us to escape into another world of complex characters and inner conflicts — in some ways a bit like our own lives, in fact, but more dramatic and far more expertly described.

Now I have a sore throat, though, which is rather unpleasant. And I have about 12,000,000 papers to grade, aaaand I have to track my diagnostic assessment, which I accidentally created in the most grader-unfriendly format possible. Whyyyy. And it is 8:30 pm…what exactly am I teaching tomorrow?

Womp, wooommp (Debbie Downer noise). Solution: Listen to Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” on repeat.

By the end of seventh period yesterday, I had sent all but five students to the principal’s office; my claws were definitely out. And today they were my BEST BEHAVED CLASS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Fifth period acted up today. They were as ready for the weekend as I was — though their minds were full of high school football, not the prospect of grading papers on a 460 mile drive to a sorority sister’s wedding.

Thank God sixth period is my prep.

Almost time for seventh period.

Almost done with this week of chaos.

Almost time to leave for Indiana.

My paradise.

A student tried to cut her wrists with one of my shelving units today.

She was unsuccessful.

So I think I wrote about the impact of a teacher’s positive attitude a bit too soon. I went into seventh period with a great attitude today, and I emerged in tears.

That said, I feel like everything is going to be ok. The administration and the other teachers at my school are exceptionally helpful and encouraging, and my “old life” support network is like gossamer. I just spoke with one friend, the kind of person who retains faith in me despite knowing me well, immediately before he left to teach in China; another friend sent a letter and a beautiful gift in the mail today from her recent trip to India. AND: I’ll be back in Indiana this weekend for a sorority sister’s wedding! And I will get to see yet another old friend along the way in Memphis, right before she leaves for graduate studies at Oxford (!). So — life is good. Life is very good.

F is playing “Atlantic City” right now. And the days will continue coming, just because that’s what they do.