Do people who study employment also keep track of not just job availability but also job, like, mobility? That is, from what I can tell, even when the job market stops being so intensely, well, stercoraceous, it's still going to take a lot more time for companies to be willing to take a chance on people coming to them out of similar, but not identical, fields. For example, eventually there'll be more jobs for journalists, but even then, if you're coming into the job market just out of college, you're still going to need a degree in journalism to get one - having one in English will simply not be enough, especially given how much of a buyer's market the working world is going to be for a long time.
Or maybe it's always been like that, or never been like that, and my impressions really are as ill-informed as one would expect based on the incredibly-small amount of research I'm basing this on.
2.28.2011
2.22.2011
Classroom Interactions: Kyle
Note: Obviously, that's not his real name. The satisfying thing about writing about students under other names is that you get to name them after what they look like their name should be, rather than what it is. This kid looks a little like he should be a Kyle. So Kyle he is.
In my class we've started a unit on description, and the first descriptive essay we're reading is Yiyun Li's short piece "Orange Crush," which you yourself can read here if you're curious. If not, basically Li describes being sixteen in China in the 1980s, when China was just starting to get products and commercials from America. She talks about Tang, which in China is renamed Fruit Treasure (I think probably because Tang is a Chinese surname), contrasting it with the bitter boiled-orange-peel water that her father makes to cure the family's colds. Fruit Treasure becomes a symbol of everything she wants life and especially love to be - rich, colorful, intense - but then she describes how she was disillusioned, ultimately deciding that "every dream ended with this bland, ordinary existence, where a prince would one day become a man who boiled orange peels for his family." It's something of an anticlimactic ending, but its descriptions are good, so I use it as one of the examples.
So.
Dear Kyle,
When you read "Orange Crush," you could take it, if you were in that kind of mood, as another indication of everything that's wrong with me. My guess is that, after today's conversation, you think that I'm glib rather than wise - that I'm unaware of how people work; that I give up too easily, make too many excuses for myself, and take defeatist philosophies as my standard.
But you know what? Teaching is a lot more like "Orange Crush" than it's like Dead Poets Society. And despite what you may think, I, for one, am not at all sure that I'm supposed to be here to be your John Keating.
*
When I was in seventh grade, I saw Dead Poets Society, and, like any bookworm middle-schooler, I was enchanted. I penned a rapt entry about it in my journal. The journal's since been thrown out, thank God, because it really was that insufferable, but I clearly remember writing, at some point in that DPS entry, the partly-underscored sentence, "I have to be a teacher."
Flash forward: I'm in class this morning, and Kyle, whom up to this point I've liked and thought liked me (not that that's supposed to be important, but in real life it certainly is), is raising lots of objections, both in class and afterward. He's frustrated (partly, though only partly, legitimately) about how long it's taken me to get the first essays back. He's frustrated (again, partly legitimately) about the fact that he didn't get his first essay back before the second one came due.
In class, he's pressing and pressing me, relentlessly, about the point at which narration turns into description. I've drawn a spectrum on the board, with narration at one end and description at the other, and tried to tell my students the difference so that when they go to write descriptive essays, I get descriptive essays with some narration, rather than narrative essays with a few adjectives thrown in, which last semester was mostly what I got. So I'm trying to explain the spectrum, and he's trying to nail me down about it. "But if you take narration and add description, doesn't it then become description?" Well, yes, but I'm asking about which one is primarily being shown. "But doesn't your example of a narrative paragraph have description in it?" Yes. I'd said that it did. But what I'm saying is that it has to do with what you're trying to do, the difference between focusing primarily on what happened and instead focusing primarily on what it was like. ...I'm trying to reassure him that I'm not going to be out to get everybody when I grade, and that as they read more examples, which they'll get next class (though I believe that I probably told them they'd get them this class), they'll get a better idea.
"English isn't just science. It's also art," I'm trying to tell them. Please, Kyle, just trust me. This is only 110. It doesn't have to be exact. Don't scare everybody into thinking I'm going to not tell you what to do and then punish you for not doing it.
After class he doesn't let up. I'm trying to explain it to him. I'm trying to explain to him why I can't explain it better. I don't write descriptive essays for a living. "I guess I'm just going to have to go back to the dictionary and look it up for myself," he says. "I'm not just here to get a degree. I was homeschooled. I graduated at fourteen. I started college at seventeen...that's why I'm asking questions that the students don't ask."
We're edging near the door. The room's been empty, save for us, for some minutes now. "I can tell," I eventually say, trying to be diplomatic, and also trying to be honest because I feel like my students deserve honesty, "that you're familiar with genre, and you may be coming up against the limits of my own knowledge." At this point I think I've already said, "Like I said, English is partly art, and it's partly science."
"I want exact definitions," he said.
"You're gonna get very few of those in the world of English," I tell him.
"I know. Or anywhere else..."
Anyway, by the end of the conversation I've tried to explain to him that I'm trying to make a working definition - I explain last semester's confusion, how I got a lot of narrative essays that threw in a few details here and there and thought it was description, and tried to explain to him that my definition's not going to be an exact one.
"But isn't it a teacher's job," he asks, "to get as close to the exact definition as possible?"
"Yes," I said. "I agree with you. I think it is."
Lest you wonder why I've let him get so far at all, it's because, first, I think he deserves it, because he works hard to try to learn, and he asks me the deepest questions of any student I've ever had except for Leah. But secondly, because earlier in the semester he's been much more playful about it - staying after with a classmate, Drew (also not his real name), who also likes to be philosophical. They ask me big-picture, at times faintly deconstructionist questions, and I try to answer. But it hasn't gotten like this before. Today he sounds disappointed in, frustrated with me.
I think it's as we go, but maybe it's already happened: he also asks me why I let Drew sleep in class today. It's really a combination of things, though I don't say so: for one, because it's uncharacteristic of Drew to sleep. For another, because I made the mistake earlier of getting a little snippy with him when I felt like he hadn't been listening (in other words, I told him, "If you'd been listening, you would know"), and because he felt like he had been listening but I just hadn't been articulate enough, that's the point at which he shut down and fell asleep. So I didn't feel like picking another fight.
Which is really another way of saying that, at heart, I didn't wake Drew because I'm scared of most of my male students, except for the ones who go out of their way to be friendly. This is stupid, but it's true. I am not one for gender stereotypes, and I am impatient with the possibility of someone implying that all my problems in education are caused by patriarchy, but the plain fact is that most of my female students are just plain nicer to me than most of my male ones, even when they see that I'm flawed as an educator. In just seven semesters of teaching, I have been questioned, patronized, ignored, sucked up to, and/or criticized by a lot of boys and men, a considerably greater number than the number of girls and women who've done so. And you'd think I'd be used to it, but I had kind male friends both in high school and college, and I'm really not over the shock yet of how no-win a situation it usually is when they decide to be difficult: be weak, or else be resented. I'm never sure which to choose, so I add the additional flaw of being inconsistent about the one I choose.
But that's not what I tell Kyle. Basically, I try to tell him, it's because people have to take charge of their own education, and some days it's not worth it for me to wake every sleeper. (In other words, I find that often it's not much use. Typically, when I try, they get vocally snotty. Almost invariably they deny that they were sleeping. Sometimes, after this, they fall back asleep.)
And - I can't remember his phrasing - but he told me, in response, that good teachers do more than just the minimum needed to get paid. That the ones who are memorable are the ones who do more.
Well, thank you. Thank you for your combination of assuming that I don't know that and, by extension, accusing me of mediocrity.
"I don't think it's going to make me memorable just to wake every sleeper," I said, or something like it.
"You'd be surprised," he said.
You'd think that after all this we'd be done. But no. We were only climbing the stairs toward the main entrance.
"I'd also like to thank you for being on time these past two classes," he said. "Before that, the whole first month, you were late enough to cost us a whole class all together."
"Probably about that," I laughed, thinking he was exaggerating.
"Exactly that," he said, correctively.
Which, again, is not literally true. Not that he doesn't have a point. It's true that some days I've come in late to their class, and two or three times it was by wide margins - a couple of times because getting to and through the copy center took more time than I'd planned, once because my parking pass had fallen between my seat and door and it took me a long time to find it. And I apologized to them for those, since they were egregious (nine minutes, once) and my fault. And smaller latenesses - on the order of two or three minutes - other times. But I had plenty of classes like that in college, with teachers who were perfectly fine. And we've also had two snow days, so given the times I have been on time, we simply haven't had enough classes for me to have lost them a full seventy-five minutes.
"So I want to thank you for being on time. And for giving me time after class," he said. But - maybe I'm imagining it, looking back - almost with a note of challenge, almost sarcasm, almost resignation. As though he'd thought I'd only condescended to do it.
"You're welcome," I said. And, more out of a sense that I should than a sense that I meant it, I added, "And thanks for your help." Since I'm the teacher, and already I wish he'd remember that, maybe I should have said "suggestions," but I think "help" is all that came to mind.
And we parted ways. And, not to be melodramatic, but I worked not to cry.
*
I'm used to my students not wanting to be in my class - to the bored looks, or the defiant ones during freewriting. Go ahead. Tell me to keep writing. You can tell me that every class if you want. But if you don't tell me that every class, I'll stop writing when I want to stop writing. After a while, it's not worth it to nag. After a while, it's not worth it to settle into full-blown power struggle. They may grow more compliant, but they won't know more at semester's end. They have to want it, too.
I know what to say to students who are already curious about my subject. I know how to answer questions. I know how to admit contradictions. But I don't know how to inspire people who don't want to be there. The question is, though, is that my job? My seventh-grade self would say that it is. Maybe my college self, too. Maybe I'm mediocre because my love for them doesn't burn, because I don't put unnecessary hours into my job.
It's no use, I know, to try to tell Kyle how much I have working against me. I'd say how little I'm paid, but I know as well as he does, from a lifetime of believing it, that the pay shouldn't matter, that anything that feeds/clothes/shelters me should be enough in the service of education.
It's no use to tell him how little education I really got, the canyon of a gap between what English majors learn and what they need to know in order to teach. Professors taught us to read and to write, sort of. But they didn't teach us to teach. And they don't watch us while we're learning. I get observed once a semester. But Kyle, as many former homeschoolers are, is self-motivated enough to know that that's not an excuse. I could learn how to do it better; therefore, in his eyes, maybe also in mine, I should.
It's no use to tell him what's in my life - my housemate, my friendships, my efforts at getting a second job, my church, the mission group, helping Ife with youth group, the mornings I've lost sleep because I've woken in the middle of the night short of breath, the amount of time it takes to grocery-shop and cook meals and get exercise once a week, the time it takes to keep close relationships close. You're on shaky ground with a community-college student anytime you try that, crossing your fingers that they're not one of the students who works full time in addition to going to school full time. Kyle, I know, walks half an hour every school day to get to the nearest bus stop. He dropped hundreds of dollars - money I don't have - for a specialized pen and notebook that record the lecture as it's happening, such that he can tap any part of his notes and get the recording of what I was saying as he was writing it. If he's got a list of things to do, if he has to work himself to the bone to do everything, I'm sure he does it.
The real answer is that my heart isn't in this - or, at least, not primarily in this. Teaching's okay, except when it's not, but I have a church I love, friends I love, a life I love, and teaching doesn't light me up the way those things do. The real answer is that life isn't like Dead Poets Society. Maybe he thinks that no one should be in education who doesn't burn to teach. Dorothy Sayers did, if I recall, and I certainly have plenty of respect for her.
And surely, under the best of circumstances, they're right. When NPR talks about education systems that would base compensation on merit, that would "remove incompetent teachers," it hurts to know that they might well be talking about me. When people talk about teacher incompetence, they don't think they're looking at an incompetent teacher.
It's not that I don't know that I should organize better, lesson-plan better, get to class on time more consistently (though certainly my current boss doesn't consider punctuality a high priority, if what he's said offhand is to be believed), grade faster and better, wake the sleepers, shush the talkers. I know those things, and frankly, I resent being patted on the head about them as if I didn't know. The problem is that I'm so scared. I'm so scared of my students. I'm so scared of my responsibility level. It makes me want to do almost anything else, when I have to plan lessons or grade papers, almost anything else but confront the huge gap between what's being asked of me and what I can easily - maybe even possibly - do.
To be John Keating, I'd have to breathe teaching, spend all my waking hours in pursuit of it. And people do that with their graduate majors. They spend hours reading, researching, writing, submitting. Because they love it.
But I don't. I have many other things that I love. Not that that excuses my many failures of duty: I have a responsibility to my students, and I should put much more time into them. They really get too little effort even for me to be a pretty-good teacher, rather than a fully good one. But even if I fixed that, I will not immediately be a capital-T teacher. I just don't love it enough for that. I need more time. A lot more time. And a little more education wouldn't hurt.
I ended up at home, in the driveway and then in the kitchen, berating Kyle, who wasn't there, berating an empty house. This is NOT Dead Poets Society, and I am NOT here to be your freaking John Keating! I am going to disappoint you daily! And you are just going to have to find a way to deal!
And then, the worst: Sit there, get your A's, and get out of my class!
I complain about my students not caring. But maybe, at heart, I don't want them to care, because I don't have the energy to satisfy people who do. Maybe, if the alternative is humility, which I don't seem to be willing to give; if it's being nothing but a teacher, maybe all I want are his nineteen peers. Maybe what I want is compliance.
In my class we've started a unit on description, and the first descriptive essay we're reading is Yiyun Li's short piece "Orange Crush," which you yourself can read here if you're curious. If not, basically Li describes being sixteen in China in the 1980s, when China was just starting to get products and commercials from America. She talks about Tang, which in China is renamed Fruit Treasure (I think probably because Tang is a Chinese surname), contrasting it with the bitter boiled-orange-peel water that her father makes to cure the family's colds. Fruit Treasure becomes a symbol of everything she wants life and especially love to be - rich, colorful, intense - but then she describes how she was disillusioned, ultimately deciding that "every dream ended with this bland, ordinary existence, where a prince would one day become a man who boiled orange peels for his family." It's something of an anticlimactic ending, but its descriptions are good, so I use it as one of the examples.
So.
Dear Kyle,
When you read "Orange Crush," you could take it, if you were in that kind of mood, as another indication of everything that's wrong with me. My guess is that, after today's conversation, you think that I'm glib rather than wise - that I'm unaware of how people work; that I give up too easily, make too many excuses for myself, and take defeatist philosophies as my standard.
But you know what? Teaching is a lot more like "Orange Crush" than it's like Dead Poets Society. And despite what you may think, I, for one, am not at all sure that I'm supposed to be here to be your John Keating.
*
When I was in seventh grade, I saw Dead Poets Society, and, like any bookworm middle-schooler, I was enchanted. I penned a rapt entry about it in my journal. The journal's since been thrown out, thank God, because it really was that insufferable, but I clearly remember writing, at some point in that DPS entry, the partly-underscored sentence, "I have to be a teacher."
Flash forward: I'm in class this morning, and Kyle, whom up to this point I've liked and thought liked me (not that that's supposed to be important, but in real life it certainly is), is raising lots of objections, both in class and afterward. He's frustrated (partly, though only partly, legitimately) about how long it's taken me to get the first essays back. He's frustrated (again, partly legitimately) about the fact that he didn't get his first essay back before the second one came due.
In class, he's pressing and pressing me, relentlessly, about the point at which narration turns into description. I've drawn a spectrum on the board, with narration at one end and description at the other, and tried to tell my students the difference so that when they go to write descriptive essays, I get descriptive essays with some narration, rather than narrative essays with a few adjectives thrown in, which last semester was mostly what I got. So I'm trying to explain the spectrum, and he's trying to nail me down about it. "But if you take narration and add description, doesn't it then become description?" Well, yes, but I'm asking about which one is primarily being shown. "But doesn't your example of a narrative paragraph have description in it?" Yes. I'd said that it did. But what I'm saying is that it has to do with what you're trying to do, the difference between focusing primarily on what happened and instead focusing primarily on what it was like. ...I'm trying to reassure him that I'm not going to be out to get everybody when I grade, and that as they read more examples, which they'll get next class (though I believe that I probably told them they'd get them this class), they'll get a better idea.
"English isn't just science. It's also art," I'm trying to tell them. Please, Kyle, just trust me. This is only 110. It doesn't have to be exact. Don't scare everybody into thinking I'm going to not tell you what to do and then punish you for not doing it.
After class he doesn't let up. I'm trying to explain it to him. I'm trying to explain to him why I can't explain it better. I don't write descriptive essays for a living. "I guess I'm just going to have to go back to the dictionary and look it up for myself," he says. "I'm not just here to get a degree. I was homeschooled. I graduated at fourteen. I started college at seventeen...that's why I'm asking questions that the students don't ask."
We're edging near the door. The room's been empty, save for us, for some minutes now. "I can tell," I eventually say, trying to be diplomatic, and also trying to be honest because I feel like my students deserve honesty, "that you're familiar with genre, and you may be coming up against the limits of my own knowledge." At this point I think I've already said, "Like I said, English is partly art, and it's partly science."
"I want exact definitions," he said.
"You're gonna get very few of those in the world of English," I tell him.
"I know. Or anywhere else..."
Anyway, by the end of the conversation I've tried to explain to him that I'm trying to make a working definition - I explain last semester's confusion, how I got a lot of narrative essays that threw in a few details here and there and thought it was description, and tried to explain to him that my definition's not going to be an exact one.
"But isn't it a teacher's job," he asks, "to get as close to the exact definition as possible?"
"Yes," I said. "I agree with you. I think it is."
Lest you wonder why I've let him get so far at all, it's because, first, I think he deserves it, because he works hard to try to learn, and he asks me the deepest questions of any student I've ever had except for Leah. But secondly, because earlier in the semester he's been much more playful about it - staying after with a classmate, Drew (also not his real name), who also likes to be philosophical. They ask me big-picture, at times faintly deconstructionist questions, and I try to answer. But it hasn't gotten like this before. Today he sounds disappointed in, frustrated with me.
I think it's as we go, but maybe it's already happened: he also asks me why I let Drew sleep in class today. It's really a combination of things, though I don't say so: for one, because it's uncharacteristic of Drew to sleep. For another, because I made the mistake earlier of getting a little snippy with him when I felt like he hadn't been listening (in other words, I told him, "If you'd been listening, you would know"), and because he felt like he had been listening but I just hadn't been articulate enough, that's the point at which he shut down and fell asleep. So I didn't feel like picking another fight.
Which is really another way of saying that, at heart, I didn't wake Drew because I'm scared of most of my male students, except for the ones who go out of their way to be friendly. This is stupid, but it's true. I am not one for gender stereotypes, and I am impatient with the possibility of someone implying that all my problems in education are caused by patriarchy, but the plain fact is that most of my female students are just plain nicer to me than most of my male ones, even when they see that I'm flawed as an educator. In just seven semesters of teaching, I have been questioned, patronized, ignored, sucked up to, and/or criticized by a lot of boys and men, a considerably greater number than the number of girls and women who've done so. And you'd think I'd be used to it, but I had kind male friends both in high school and college, and I'm really not over the shock yet of how no-win a situation it usually is when they decide to be difficult: be weak, or else be resented. I'm never sure which to choose, so I add the additional flaw of being inconsistent about the one I choose.
But that's not what I tell Kyle. Basically, I try to tell him, it's because people have to take charge of their own education, and some days it's not worth it for me to wake every sleeper. (In other words, I find that often it's not much use. Typically, when I try, they get vocally snotty. Almost invariably they deny that they were sleeping. Sometimes, after this, they fall back asleep.)
And - I can't remember his phrasing - but he told me, in response, that good teachers do more than just the minimum needed to get paid. That the ones who are memorable are the ones who do more.
Well, thank you. Thank you for your combination of assuming that I don't know that and, by extension, accusing me of mediocrity.
"I don't think it's going to make me memorable just to wake every sleeper," I said, or something like it.
"You'd be surprised," he said.
You'd think that after all this we'd be done. But no. We were only climbing the stairs toward the main entrance.
"I'd also like to thank you for being on time these past two classes," he said. "Before that, the whole first month, you were late enough to cost us a whole class all together."
"Probably about that," I laughed, thinking he was exaggerating.
"Exactly that," he said, correctively.
Which, again, is not literally true. Not that he doesn't have a point. It's true that some days I've come in late to their class, and two or three times it was by wide margins - a couple of times because getting to and through the copy center took more time than I'd planned, once because my parking pass had fallen between my seat and door and it took me a long time to find it. And I apologized to them for those, since they were egregious (nine minutes, once) and my fault. And smaller latenesses - on the order of two or three minutes - other times. But I had plenty of classes like that in college, with teachers who were perfectly fine. And we've also had two snow days, so given the times I have been on time, we simply haven't had enough classes for me to have lost them a full seventy-five minutes.
"So I want to thank you for being on time. And for giving me time after class," he said. But - maybe I'm imagining it, looking back - almost with a note of challenge, almost sarcasm, almost resignation. As though he'd thought I'd only condescended to do it.
"You're welcome," I said. And, more out of a sense that I should than a sense that I meant it, I added, "And thanks for your help." Since I'm the teacher, and already I wish he'd remember that, maybe I should have said "suggestions," but I think "help" is all that came to mind.
And we parted ways. And, not to be melodramatic, but I worked not to cry.
*
I'm used to my students not wanting to be in my class - to the bored looks, or the defiant ones during freewriting. Go ahead. Tell me to keep writing. You can tell me that every class if you want. But if you don't tell me that every class, I'll stop writing when I want to stop writing. After a while, it's not worth it to nag. After a while, it's not worth it to settle into full-blown power struggle. They may grow more compliant, but they won't know more at semester's end. They have to want it, too.
I know what to say to students who are already curious about my subject. I know how to answer questions. I know how to admit contradictions. But I don't know how to inspire people who don't want to be there. The question is, though, is that my job? My seventh-grade self would say that it is. Maybe my college self, too. Maybe I'm mediocre because my love for them doesn't burn, because I don't put unnecessary hours into my job.
It's no use, I know, to try to tell Kyle how much I have working against me. I'd say how little I'm paid, but I know as well as he does, from a lifetime of believing it, that the pay shouldn't matter, that anything that feeds/clothes/shelters me should be enough in the service of education.
It's no use to tell him how little education I really got, the canyon of a gap between what English majors learn and what they need to know in order to teach. Professors taught us to read and to write, sort of. But they didn't teach us to teach. And they don't watch us while we're learning. I get observed once a semester. But Kyle, as many former homeschoolers are, is self-motivated enough to know that that's not an excuse. I could learn how to do it better; therefore, in his eyes, maybe also in mine, I should.
It's no use to tell him what's in my life - my housemate, my friendships, my efforts at getting a second job, my church, the mission group, helping Ife with youth group, the mornings I've lost sleep because I've woken in the middle of the night short of breath, the amount of time it takes to grocery-shop and cook meals and get exercise once a week, the time it takes to keep close relationships close. You're on shaky ground with a community-college student anytime you try that, crossing your fingers that they're not one of the students who works full time in addition to going to school full time. Kyle, I know, walks half an hour every school day to get to the nearest bus stop. He dropped hundreds of dollars - money I don't have - for a specialized pen and notebook that record the lecture as it's happening, such that he can tap any part of his notes and get the recording of what I was saying as he was writing it. If he's got a list of things to do, if he has to work himself to the bone to do everything, I'm sure he does it.
The real answer is that my heart isn't in this - or, at least, not primarily in this. Teaching's okay, except when it's not, but I have a church I love, friends I love, a life I love, and teaching doesn't light me up the way those things do. The real answer is that life isn't like Dead Poets Society. Maybe he thinks that no one should be in education who doesn't burn to teach. Dorothy Sayers did, if I recall, and I certainly have plenty of respect for her.
And surely, under the best of circumstances, they're right. When NPR talks about education systems that would base compensation on merit, that would "remove incompetent teachers," it hurts to know that they might well be talking about me. When people talk about teacher incompetence, they don't think they're looking at an incompetent teacher.
It's not that I don't know that I should organize better, lesson-plan better, get to class on time more consistently (though certainly my current boss doesn't consider punctuality a high priority, if what he's said offhand is to be believed), grade faster and better, wake the sleepers, shush the talkers. I know those things, and frankly, I resent being patted on the head about them as if I didn't know. The problem is that I'm so scared. I'm so scared of my students. I'm so scared of my responsibility level. It makes me want to do almost anything else, when I have to plan lessons or grade papers, almost anything else but confront the huge gap between what's being asked of me and what I can easily - maybe even possibly - do.
To be John Keating, I'd have to breathe teaching, spend all my waking hours in pursuit of it. And people do that with their graduate majors. They spend hours reading, researching, writing, submitting. Because they love it.
But I don't. I have many other things that I love. Not that that excuses my many failures of duty: I have a responsibility to my students, and I should put much more time into them. They really get too little effort even for me to be a pretty-good teacher, rather than a fully good one. But even if I fixed that, I will not immediately be a capital-T teacher. I just don't love it enough for that. I need more time. A lot more time. And a little more education wouldn't hurt.
I ended up at home, in the driveway and then in the kitchen, berating Kyle, who wasn't there, berating an empty house. This is NOT Dead Poets Society, and I am NOT here to be your freaking John Keating! I am going to disappoint you daily! And you are just going to have to find a way to deal!
And then, the worst: Sit there, get your A's, and get out of my class!
I complain about my students not caring. But maybe, at heart, I don't want them to care, because I don't have the energy to satisfy people who do. Maybe, if the alternative is humility, which I don't seem to be willing to give; if it's being nothing but a teacher, maybe all I want are his nineteen peers. Maybe what I want is compliance.
2.18.2011
Seven Quick Takes Friday: Downtime Edition
One: It's "midsemester break" at BCC, despite the fact that classes only "started" (but not really, because of the January 18th snow day) a month ago. They gave us Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday off, which was convenient in the sense that it let me out of this week's office hours. Inconvenient, though, in the sense that it's just enough to let me slide into Vacation Mode, in which I throw myself into my non-school life and forget that, in fact, it's really only one day off compared to what I'd normally be teaching. I really ought to start grading some papers.
Two: I had a job interview this week - there's a coffee shop around here that sells delicious sandwiches (which is what I, the non-coffee-drinker, have long liked about it), and they may be about to make me the backup delivery driver for their catering division. Or, given last month's accident (which they would have found out about during the background check anyway, but they also asked me if my driving record was clean, so I explained why it isn't), maybe not. But maybe they'll hire me behind the counter. We'll see.
Three: My regular dentist (to whom I went this week to get a broken filling redone), upon discovering that I no longer had dental insurance, told me, in something of a low voice, that BCC's dentistry program will clean my teeth for cheap if I get a hold of them. I also already knew from a local Cost Cutters worker that BOCES's beauty school also takes appointments for low-rate haircuts (don't worry, the students are watched by their teachers all the time!). So, Binghamtonian low-incomers, fret not about the upkeep of thy appearance, and get thee to a student.
Four: It is a beautiful day out here - fifty-nine degrees and sunny. Carrie and I went out to the track and walked around.
Five: We also had a springy/summery lunch: inspired yet again by Mark Bittman, I made tuna salad with lemon (juice and zest), olive oil (pick one that tastes good if you decide to make something like this for yourself), and minced shallot, instead of the regular mayonnaisey kind that I think I probably still don't like. And Carrie peeled a ripe mango, and I poured myself some white grape juice and she herself some diet ginger ale. It was lovely. I may carry on the warm-weather theme and make this for dinner, assuming I can get my act together and thaw the chicken in time to marinate it.
Six: So it's one of those things that my parents knew would happen even though I thought I could avoid it: I took out Alan Jacobs's essay collection, Wayfaring (which I definitely liked), from Syracuse's library system because Binghamton's didn't have it, thinking that I'd be back up there soon. Then I got delayed for various reasons. No matter, I thought, and renewed it. ...Then I overshot the new due date by nine days, and now, though I've tried to renew it again online (since I was offered a second renewal back before it was overdue), it will neither let me do that nor tell me how much I now owe (though I suspect it's ninety cents). So now I'm going to have to find a proper-sized envelope and get enough postage to send it back, because surely the mail will get there sooner than I will.
Seven: Thanks to Albert's approaching visit, the house is increasingly clean. Carrie and I always clean better when there are people coming. Plus, I'm off of school and unwilling to do a lot of schoolwork. So basically, as I told her this morning, there was the Albert factor, the free-time factor, and the avoidance-of-work factor. Basically a cleaning trifecta. And there'll be more to come this evening...after I actually do some schoolwork.
For more takes, go see Jen.