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Stephen King~et. al.~ is valid reading for high school. Better that students read and enjoy King than pretend to read Dickens and hate ~fear?~ it.
Those who read King, Rowling, Koontz, Sparks, Grishom, Zane, and whatever else they damn well feel like reading will cultivate a love for reading and may someday decide to read Dickens.
Those who have developed the habit of running in horror from libraries and bookstores never will.
Oh, and when those King readers do decide to read Dickens, they’ll still know how.
I get to talk about Pink Floyd ~and other cool stuff~ with people who are still enthusiastic about it. Every year at least one student asks me if I’ve seen Dark Side of the Rainbow, or heard “See Emily Play.”
I LOVE THAT about young adults. They’re excited about things.
~it’s not the best pink floyd picture on the web, but it’s the only one i’ve taken myself with a cheap camera live from the superdome~
Ken tells of a student who drew vaginas on his standardized test booklet:
…one of the students used his test book to draw an extremely large image of female genitalia.
Then, he was all work, all business; like he needed to draw a really big vagina before he could settle down to the task of testing.
I’m impressed. Vaginas are more difficult to draw than penises. I get those on my tardy book about once a month.
Odd, really, because if The Scribbler doesn’t like my tardy policy ~where can he stick his attitude concerning my tardy policy?~ he could talk to me about it. But what is going on in The Scribbler’s head, thinking that drawing a penis is an effective, or even interesting, protest? ~i am assuming it’s a guy. 80% of my late comers are guys, and why would a girl draw a penis?~
I once had a student draw me with my hair on fire, clutching a book, wearing a T-shirt saying “Read or Die.” I had a gun in the other hand. He signed his name.
The penis scribble isn’t worth my attention.
So, class, the lesson today is that nobody is impressed with the drawings of genitals. We teachers already knew that boys have a penis, and ~perhaps more shockingly~ we also knew that lots and lots of boys like vaginas. Lots and lots.
In the irreverent comedy, a failed actor-turned-worse-high-school-drama teacher (Coogan) rallies his Tucson, AZ students as he conceives and stages a politically incorrect musical sequel to Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.”
SOME writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.
Thomas Paine, Common Sense ~which you should read immediately, even if you’ve read it before. when we’re studying a text, we don’t pass over it with our eyes once & call that reading~
Big religious debate on twitter yesterday, and I managed to keep my big mouth shut. Although I believe in God, I’m tired of the conversation. I’m especially tired of believers and non-believers alike confusing institutions with the ideals ~or truths, if you will~ that started them.
I wouldn’t have brought it up at all, but the same thing is happening in lots of areas of our thinking.
The behavior of the church is no more an argument against the existence of God than the behavior of the schools is an argument against the existence of science. Same is true for government and democracy.
Nor is the unearned authority ~tradition~ of the church, government, or schools to be taken as evidence of God, democracy, or education. ~or anything at all for that matter~
Government, people, is BAD. So is religion. So is schooling. Society, God, and education, however, ROCK. The enemy is orthodoxy.
But that means MY orthodoxy as well as the other guy’s. Institutions are the enemy. We need to take my good friend Elton’s advice: stop arguing about angels in trees and burn down the mission.
No comment on the fact that the guy gets taken away at the end….
NOTE: Apparently it’s Elton John Week here at Taylor the Teacher. I don’t do things like this on purpose. I’m sure it’s a sign of my UNPROFESSIONALISM as a blogger that I don’t PLAN better & keep these things from happening. ~at least I’ve started using the toilet~
About a month ago, someone uttered solemn reproaches on me for the better part of an afternoon for cussing on my blog. It’s UNPROFESSIONAL, and makes other teacher blogger dolls look bad, she says. ~i’m not picking on her, since she’s far from the first to tell me that~
Best I can break it down, their argument is this:
“People” are judging teachers and the future of teacher blogging based on what teachers do right now, so I should shut up.
Nobody has actually told me to “shut up,” or “shut down.” ~yet~ But, people have asked me to tone down my language for the good of “teacher bloggers” everywhere. You know, in the name of “professionalism.”
If you use words like “professionalism” ~part of the lexicon of intellectual rape~ you must be doing some GOOD for society, right? Your argument must make sense because you used a six syllable word.
But the above argument, both their eloquence and my paraphrase, is… how shall I put this? Crap.
Some assumptions to this argument, presumably unexamined, are these:
The true content of my blog is irrelevant. Some words are too evil to utter. So evil, in fact, that a doll’s entire message should be disregarded if she uses one of them. ~ridiculous, but common~
Context, artistic license, intellectual freedom, the First Amendment, and even meaning are to be subordinated to the need for the collective to maintain control. ~fascist fucks~
Teachers have something to prove. It’s assumed we’re morons, and how teacher bloggers behave is supposed to change that. ~wake up! teachers take the heat for the whole system because we’re the lowest on the totem pole, the easy targets. not because somebody said ass butter online~
It’s acceptable for the professional futures of ALL teachers to rest on how well I ~and others~ show out for the team. Making it, by extension, acceptable for THEM to silence the speech of educated grown ups.
It seems some think we should all just comply with the current system and do as we’re told. As though that’s working for us. How many teachers have been forced to take down blogs? How many are afraid to start one? People that try to control language ~and therefore thoughts~ need to be told about themselves.
Censorship on any level is an attempt to silence something.
UPDATE: Just found this video within minutes of publishing this post, via JJ on Twitter, and thought it fit perfectly. It’s called “The Annotated FUCK.”
When I was writing To a Little Boy, my original title ~handwritten in my spiral notebook~ was To a Little Black Boy. I debated whether or not to mention his race in that post. Does it matter that the boy is black? He was a sad, tiny boy. He was a sad, tiny, black boy.
Knowing the incarceration rate of black males & the achievement gap of black males in schools did increase my concern for him. So maybe it does matter? But I decided not to mention it because his race is irrelevant to the story I was telling on that day.
In that story, he was representative of me, and of the “little guy” in general. But now, he’s part of this one:
That same afternoon I realized that the only film we watched all year that didn’t have a character in it that could be ~and routinely was, by black and white students alike~ called “the black guy” was “Crooklyn.” ~except for the ones with all white characters~ This is because, of course, all the characters in “Crooklyn” are black.
I’m a white teacher of both black and white students in a state that is steeped in old Southern racism. I never thought of myself as a racist, and in my heart I know I’m not hateful of others because of their skin color, but I never knew until I went to grad school that there’s a difference between racism and bigotry. Peggy McIntosh’s article Unpacking White Privilege was one thing ~of several~ that opened my eyes.
I’m not a bigot, but racism is everywhere. Like the air we breathe.
It bothers me to refer to characters in movies as “the black guy.” I reject the notion that “the black guy” suffices as a description of anyone, much less someone like Courtney Vance or James Earl Jones. ~i mean, hell, this is a film class, and those are dudes you’re going to see again~ But, as a shortcut when discussing a scene in a film with only one black character it seems to work for all the students in the room, and my avoiding saying it seems ~at least to me~ to stick out like a sore thumb.
It also bothered me that the only students who liked “Crooklyn” were black students, and that some white students were very vocal about their distaste. One student said it was “stupid,” which ~according to my film class policy~ obligated him to write an essay critiquing the film, which he posted on his blog. ~the idea is that “stupid” does not constitute substantive analysis. they do not have to like any film, but they have to say why they don’t like it in a reasoned argument~ The blog post was racist. Great. Hardly the substantive analysis I was looking for.
That was several months ago, and I haven’t written about it for the same reason that nobody talks about race in the classroom. Where does this resistance come from?
White guilt?
I have wanted to discuss race on this blog forever, but have hesitated for fear of saying something wrong.
Screw that. Guilt is unproductive. White guilt is a mental trap. As a white teacher, there’s the fear that I’ll say something wrong, reveal my “hidden racism,” hurt someone’s feelings, or stir up some closeted klansman to say something really horrible. As a white blogger, I have the same concerns. So I try to avoid it. ~but have been brave in the classroom several occasions, which i would have written about but, you know…~
But I don’t believe the current white-people-can’t-discuss-racial-issues-with-black-people policy is working.
So I think we should talk about it.
I hope some other concerned folks will talk with me.
Elton is my old pal. ~who’d have thought i could overlook the name “elton”~ I used to make my mom set a place at the table for him when I was very young. ~mommieee, where’s elton john gonna sit? we weren’t on a first-name basis back then~ That’s because, as my most favored imaginary friend, he always ate dinner with us. I don’t remember this, but my mother told me the story and I believe her.
I scratched the shit out of those old LPs. I didn’t know at the time how fleeting they were, so I played them till they bled. I devoured the jackets. Madman Across the Water is my very favorite ~for reasons that would take a long, strange trip in my head to understand~ but Goodbye Yellow Brick Road was a close second. Funeral for a Friend is coupled with Love Lies Bleeding on that album.
When Kitty Cat sent me this email today, I took it as her LLL to my FFaF:
i’m going to have to face facts. there’s just no pretending any longer. for a while, i was able to convince myself that the situation was workable and no action was necessary. but it seems i was wrong. and now i’m going to have to do something about it.
it’s time to buy some dry erase markers.
my precious collection, accumulated over the years and displayed brightly in my painted tin, has dwindled to two overworked and exhausted options. i’ve tried to convince them that it’s not as dire as it seems - we still have each other, and with a little bit of TEAMWORK, BABY! - the three of us could make it until june. but magenta feels differently, and let me know in no uncertain terms today that THESE CONDITIONS ARE UNACCEPTABLE. i’m not sure where she gets her sense of entitlement - black is surely getting the worst of the abuse - but for reasons undisclosed she simply up and quit today. and now black and i are looking at each other with that kind of resignation i suppose parents feel when the last child has moved out . . . like, that was fun, but now what?
once i loved the smell of new markers, and before that, the fall of dust from fresh chalk. but now the process of purchasing school supplies seems pointless and even upsetting.
I saw you today on the playground at your pre-school. My view of the playground is so obstructed that I can only see a small part of it when I’m on my porch in the afternoons.
You were sitting on a swing, perfectly still. You had your head in your hands with your elbows wrapped around the chain. I wondered if you were sick, and wished someone would check on you. On the swing next to you, an older girl was sharing the swing with a smaller child, swinging high and having fun.
About six months went by. You didn’t move. You were just covering your face, looking sad and tiny. Then you started moving. You were wiggling like mad in an attempt to swing yourself because your feet didn’t touch the ground. At all.
No good.
So you got out of the swing to try a different approach to get moving, but you had to jump and jump to get back into it again. I thought about how hard it must be to be so small. Then, you left the swing and my view. When I looked again, you were playing with a truck in the dirt, alone.
I was sad for you. I wanted you to “not only survive, but prosper,” as Tuvok once said of a child. But I felt completely helpless. I can’t make anything okay in this world. So I asked God to take good care of you.
Instantly, there it was. Clarity. There are many things I’m too small to control, and I often feel I’m playing in the dirt alone. All I can do is trust and believe. ~a.k.a. chill out~
So I hope you’ll do the same. I just thought you’d like to know that you were on my mind today, and that your day mattered to me even if it was a hard one.
