I just got a present from a student.
Here is the note, with the present below:
In 9th grade you had this quote posted on the side of your white board. You said that this quote by Mark Antony was the most intense battle cry that could in no way be surpassed by any other attempt in any movie… SO I immediately thought, WHY NOT CROSS STITCH IT ON A PILLOW? Well, since a pillow is too difficult for me (a beginner) I hope you treasure this frame instead!
Thanks for everything!
While discussing Pilar Ternera from 100 Years of Solitude, my class had the following exchange.
Student: There should be a limit on how old you can be and still have sex!
Me: Why would you say that? She’s just trying to help people.
Student: This is just wrong! She should stop. Old people should not be doing this. They should be cut off!
Me: (uncomfortable with where the rest of the class may take his imagery) I think we should drop this topic. You should be grateful your parents don’t agree with you on this.
Student: No, that’s my point. I don’t want to think about them doing it. They should be cut off!
Me: I think you should drop this before I bring something up that you’re going to like even less.
Student: Worse than my parents? … what are you…NOOOOOOOOO!!!
While writing an in-class essay on 100 Years of Solitude, the entire class works in near perfect silence. Then…
Student #1, looking up quickly and raising his hand: Is it acceptable if I refer to Colonel Aureliano Buendia as a “man-whore”?
Student #2, responding across the classroom: Can you support it with the text?
Last week, the Teacher L_______ did his role-play of the French Revolution with the students. These are things overheard or witnessed during that event. Continue reading
In his essay “Exactitude,” Italo Calvino makes the argument that pleasure in writing comes from the contrast between the specific moment and the infinity of possible moments that might occur. He says this exists formally in the specific details which, when numerous enough, cannot be seen as individual things, but join together to produce a vague sense of beauty. To demonstrate, he uses Giacomo Leopardi’s Zibaldone di pensieri, where the poet discusses the different beauties inherent in different kinds of light.
One of my 10th graders, the narrator from last year’s Island Experiment, told me she had to sneak G.K. Chesterton’s Everlasting Man into her “Young Adult Literature” class. We had been reading Orthodoxy for class and she liked it so much that she had bought another of the author’s books. Last week she had been told it was, “Not appropriate for the class,” so she was smuggling it in, buried in a hollowed-out copy of Twilight.
I was delighted by her moxie and intellectual verve, but disappointed to think that we’re telling kids to spend time on vapid and maudlin children’s stories, instead of teaching them to delight in and learn from the heady savor of Chesterton’s writing. At least she’s learning, in spite of her education.
The first week of school, my entire honors 9th grade class showed up late for class on the third day of school. All twenty-seven of them. One student being late or going to another class is one thing. Even if half of them had gone, I might have thought they were just confused. But an entire honors class getting the schedule wrong? Impossible.
So I went down to the office to find where they could have gone. I spoke to the principal, the academic dean, and the dean’s secretary, who makes the schedule. As it turns out the only reason an entire honors freshmen class goes to the wrong place is if the student schedule is incorrect. The had all correctly followed an incorrect schedule.
Cute, but, well, finished. Not anything to worry about.
However, the following day, we had a whole school assembly, and the principal, in a bid to win the hearts of the upper class-men, told a joke about how everyone did really well the first day except one class that didn’t show up at all. “They were freshmen” she grinned. Mass hooting and laughing from the sophomores, juniors, and seniors.
This week, as we were finishing up Beowulf and moving on to To Kill a Mockingbird, I staged a little Viking raid, using some of my former students. The current freshmen were non-plussed, but I held some hopes that they would at least remember what it was like to have screaming savages burst into your life and leave, and yesterday I got my proof.
The principal came in to observe my teaching. She sat in the back of the room and was mostly silent. When she left, I suddenly realized that the students, all new to high school, didn’t really know who this person was.
One student asked, “Why was she here?”
Another one, rather observantly, and a bit annoyed said, “Isn’t she the woman who made fun of us in assembly?”
I nodded.
Then he asked, “Can we Viking Attack her?”
Laughing at the thought of twenty-seven bony little freshmen storming into the office of a woman who used to teach in a maximum security prison, waving their books at her and demanding an apology, I said, “That’s probably not a good idea,” but I was secretly glad that they even considered it.
So, I find this kind of ironic, but yesterday, a sophomore came into my class a bit frantic and said, “I think I left my planner back in the choir room. Can I go back and get it?”
The trip from the room where I was teaching to the choir room involves a sprint down a hundred-foot hallway, two double doors, a left turn and another hundred feet to two more sets of double doors. Then there’s a right hand turn, an obstacle course of a cafeteria/lobby, a two hundred foot hallway/gallery littered with sculptures and abandoned books, another set of double doors, a u-turn, and another set of doors opening into the choir room. The chairs in that room are about fifty feet from the entrance. Then do that all over backwards to return.
Knowing the answer, but wanting to give her a chance to show her confidence, I asked, “I don’t know… are you fast?”
She grinned with the joy of an athlete encountering a challenge, and said, “Yes.”
I grinned back and said, “Go,” and she was gone.
She reappeared in class 34 seconds later. Maybe she knows something I don’t.
One of the classes I teach combines English and history into one double-period frenzy of cross-curricular intellectual delights. The teacher who handles the history section believes above all things in organization and clarity. Every day the Teacher L______ begins class by carefully reviewing the schedule and events for the coming weeks. He details meetings, sports dismissals, and assembly speakers, adding careful explanations for the reasoning behind each administrative decision and irregularity. Today he spent fifteen minutes explaining the ASVAB test to the students, just because one of them said she thought it was a waste of time. He had diagrams and statistics and charts.
The man loves order. His chairs are precisely spaced. He keeps the daily schedule, reading assignments, homework reminders, trivia facts, fire drill procedures, payment reminders, and famous inspirational quotations, all in their own places on the white board. His markers are lined up, on end to preserve ink, on the board tray, arranged according to the colors of the rainbow.
But every once in a while, this teacher uses the stability the students expect of him to create something truly special. Continue reading
My 10th graders read the second episode of Oedipus the King this weekend. They were of course fascinated by the horror of the characters’ lives, but they also like to make fun of how clueless Oedipus is, especially during his debates with Creon and Tiresias.
At first Tiresias refuses to answer Oedipus’ questions, but when the king accuses him of murdering the former ruler, Tiresias declares that Oedipus is the real killer. Oedipus denies it and makes fun of Tiresias for being blind, insinuating that he’s a terrible prophet as well, unconcerned with either piety or citizenship. That breaks Tiresias, who finally gives in and spills all the truth,
[Oedipus] passes for an alien in the land
But soon shall prove a Theban, native born.
And yet his fortune brings him little joy;
For blind of seeing, clad in beggar’s weeds,
For purple robes, and leaning on his staff,
To a strange land he soon shall grope his way.
And of the children, inmates of his home,
He shall be proved the brother and the sire,
Of her who bare him son and husband both,
Co-partner, and assassin of his sire.
Go in and ponder this, and if thou find
That I have missed the mark, henceforth declare
I have no wit nor skill in prophecy.
After reading this passage together in class, the one of the students summarized the passage. “So he calls Tiresias a bad prophet, and then Tiresias says, ‘Oh yeah, well you’re having sex with your mom!’ That’s the best Your Mama ever!”
Sophocles: playwright, philosopher, master of the Your Mama cut-down. I was grinning for the rest of the day.
The Needle's Eye 