Teaching on the South Side: Four Alarm . . . Fire?

There were four fire alarms pulled at school today. Three of them in rapid succession: as soon as everyone was almost completely back in the building after the first alarm, someone pulled the next one.

It was an interesting way to spend my planning period.

The final prank alarm was pulled twenty minutes before classes were over. Other teachers and I tried to keep the kids moving out, not letting them stop at their lockers, not letting them loiter or act like school was out. Then the announcement came over the PA: get your stuff and vacate the building. If you have an after-school activity, report there now.

It's not what I would have done, were I in charge, but I understand there were some other circumstances besides possibly undercutting teacher authority to consider.

Every time the fire alarm gets pulled, police and fire trucks are automatically dispatched to the building, of course. I wonder how much that costs? I know that money could be better spent on education, but as long as there are jackasses who would rather pull fire alarms than get an education, these kinds of things will always happen.

Life in the Windy City: Cheese-by-mail

Mahaffey put in a good showing with that link to Adrian "Chief" Roman's martial-arts distance-learning site the he emailed me and the rest of the guys from Lansing today (http://www.adrianroman.com/M_menue.htm--you gotta see this to believe it), but Tom Wing is still the undisputed Master of Cheese.

Lemme 'splain.

After a particularly long and frustrating day at work, I come home to my sanctum sanctorum in Lincoln Park and, while checking my mail, find a small package for me on the floor of the lobby (this is, apparently, where all such packages end up--better that than having to go to the P.O. to get it). It was one of those mid-sized bubble-wrap-cushioned mailers--just the right size for the DVD box that was inside. The return address: Tom Wing, Lansing, MI.

Tom is the only friend I know who has both a TiVo and a DVD burner that works pretty much like a VCR works for the rest of us, and he has burned me some stuff before. I entertained the thought that this particular DVD might be more episodes of the animated Clone Wars series from Cartoon Network, or perhaps another particularly funny episode of "Angel," but I always kind of knew, in the back of my mind, that this DVD contained the Tom Wing Special: bad karate movies.

And I was not disappointed. Now I can thrill to the exploits of the "Master of the Flying Guillotine" or learn the secrets of "The Five Deadly Venoms." These are cheesy classics that no BKM-loving geek should be without.

But Tom added a little bit of sharp cheddar to this offering of creamy, flavorful havarti: "Joe's Apartment" (which he named "Christopher's Apartment" on the DVD menu). Then there was the last offering, a steamy hunk of feta: Perfect 10 Boxing. Think "America's Next Top Model" meets "The Contender." Yeah, my skin crawled, too, when I realized what I was watching.

Tom Wing, Undisputed Master of Cheese, you made my day. Thanks.

Life in the Windy City: Finally Reading Harry Potter

I have been resisting reading any of the Harry Potter books since I first became aware of the phenomenon. At first, my resistance was only on principle (some would say unfounded bias): this was a children's book that was being compared to the masterwork of one of my literary heroes: Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. There was no possible way a children’s book could compare to the complexity and depth and texture of a modern-day heroic epic. There have been countless fads among children over the years: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Power Rangers, Pokemon, etc. I wasn’t going to bother with some Scottish boy wizard.

I was open-minded enough, however, to read an excerpt of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire when Newsweek published one in 1999, a few months before the book was to be released. This only solidified my distaste for all things Harry Potter: the characters were two-dimensional, the plot seemed overly melodramatic, and the syntax and diction were definitely aimed at a child’s reading level. Let me use a food metaphor: Harry Potter was a slice of ham on white bread with mayo, and my appetite in my adult years leans more toward piles of smoked turkey with sautéed mushrooms and havarti cheese on dark rye bread. I like more substance and flavor in my reading these days, and my taste of Harry Potter didn’t provide it.

Plenty of my friends read the books and loved them. Mary dressed up as Dumbledore for Halloween. Sara spent something like an entire weekend reading the first five books. Bill made a big deal about taking his sons to see the first movie. Mike joked about the possible, and inevitable, porn rip-off titles. I didn’t even want to make fun of Harry Potter. I just wanted him to go away.

As the years went by and I started working on getting my high school teaching certificate, it began to dawn on me that, eventually, merely as a professional necessity, I would have to read Harry Potter. Just about every freshman in the classes I student-taught at Okemos High School had read Harry Potter. It was a common currency among them. If I wanted any credibility at all as a reader and teacher, before I could attempt to bring my students beyond Harry Potter, I was going to have to read him.

But even professional necessity wasn’t enough to get me to go to a book store and buy the first of the series: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. There were other things I wanted to read: a biography of Frank Lloyd Wright, a collection of short stories by Dan Simmons, the newest Spenser novel, a collection of essays by George Orwell. I usually have about five different books going at any one time, and Harry Potter was not among them. When I gave any thought to Harry Potter, which wasn’t often, I just told myself I would read him when I absolutely had to—when I was finally teaching students who had read him. I’d blast through the book in a day, and be done with it.

But I was also privately worried that reading Harry Potter would go the same way that re-reading Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time had. This past summer, I thought I should get re-acquainted with some of the books I had enjoyed as a child. I saw A Wrinkle in Time at the local used book shop and snatched it up. I started reading it eagerly. Then eagerness turned to boredom, and them frustration, and I finally just gave up. The book deals with some pretty heady metaphysical stuff, but in such a childlike way that I found myself far too distracted by the questions the book raised for me to enjoy the plot or the characters. I wanted more—more in-depth characterization, a more labyrinth plot, more detailed descriptions, more metaphor and symbolism and other kinds of figurative language. All of these things are present in A Wrinkle in Time—a book I loved so much as a kid that I read its two sequels—but compared to something like The Lord of the Rings (which I also read for the first time as a child of 9 or 10) or Dan Simmons’ sprawling space epic Hyperion (not to mention the other three books in that cycle), A Wrinkle in Time was nothing but fluff. Kid’s fluff. And I didn’t have the patience for it. I had graduated, moved on, found more challenging reading, and I wanted to continue to play in that arena.

At the end of the summer I moved to Chicago and started a job teaching troubled ninth graders. The job was part of a year-old program at Chicago Public Schools that used a curriculum model formulated by researchers at Johns Hopkins University. As part of this program, teachers were given hundreds of dollars worth of materials: lesson plans, transparencies, computers, overhead projectors, and books, books, books. Part of the structure for the kids in this program would be 20 minutes of independent, self-selected reading each day. And in one of the bins of books I was given was a beaten-up paperback copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. This was not part of the standard “set” of materials reading teachers were given. It must have been left in there by the previous teacher to use these books, a teacher at another school that dropped the program after its first year. Now I had no excuse not to read Harry Potter.

I need to jump back in time a little bit, here. Chances are when I opened that bin and saw that copy of Harry Potter #1 staring me in the face, I would have taken it home and read it anyway. But what made this chance discovery all the more interesting were the events of the past two weeks, when the first glitch in a budding relationship turned out to be hardcover copies of the first five Harry Potter books.

I haven’t mentioned Lisa in any of my posts yet for a number of reasons, not the least of which is a desire not to get too far ahead of myself: we’ve only been dating for a little over two months, after all. But she figures prominently in this Harry Potter odyssey, so she deserves a mention here.

The short version of the Lisa tale is this: when I first moved to Chicago back in August, I was so bored that I did something I swore I would never do—try internet dating. I wasn’t looking for anything other than conversation and maybe a cup of coffee, but I found a bit more than that. The basics are just another example of the tired online dating cliché: we started chatting on line, kept chatting for hours, then for a few days (although not continuously), then we met for dinner at The Twisted Spoke on Clark, a wannabe biker bar. She was cute, the conversation continued to be good, and we kept seeing each other. Enough of the clichéd stuff. I’ve got plenty more Lisa stories to tell, but for now, I want to start getting back to Harry Potter.

Lisa loves Harry Potter. She has all of the books in hardcover. She owns the movies on DVD. She’s not as much of an HP geek as I am a Star Wars geek (I, after all, have framed posters of Yoda on my walls) but she does unabashedly like this Scottish boy wizard. I did not know this when we started dating. I knew she had a bachelors in both drama and psychology. I knew she was a company member at a non-profit theater in Oak Park. I knew she designed and maintained that theater’s web site. I knew she was from Wisconsin. I knew she liked mystery novels—including Robert B. Parker’s Spenser series. I knew she had naturally curly hair. I knew she was Jewish by culture but agnostic by belief. I knew she liked sushi. I even knew she had an allergy to black tattoo ink. I did not know she liked Harry Potter.

I discovered this the first time I visited her apartment in Oak Park. There, prominently displayed on her bookshelf, along with Play Directing, Great Jews of Stage and Screen, The Riverside Shakespeare, The Joys of Yiddish, and books filled with the sheet music to dozens of Broadway musicals, were Harry Potter #1-5.

I admit it: I cringed.

Harry Potter? This fantastic woman, this witty and clever and intelligent and articulate and thirty-two-year old woman liked Harry Potter?

It is a measure of how much I already liked Lisa that I did not run screaming from her apartment (and I exaggerate only a little, here).

I managed what I thought was a fairly neutral “So, you like Harry Potter, I see.”

“And you don’t.” It was a statement. We had already covered that fact that I was a literary snob, even if we hadn’t specifically discussed Harry Potter.

So I told her about the Newsweek excerpt. I had given Harry Potter a chance, and he had disappointed me. I felt no guilt or shame or prejudice—I had actually read some of J.K. Rowling’s writing and not been impressed. I shrugged it off. Lisa liked Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I could overlook the Harry Potter thing.

My snobbish attitude became a joke between us. I could tease her about not listening to popular music (NPR and showtunes are pretty much all she listens to) and she could tease me about being a book snob. We were even.

But she still hinted that I should give the boy wizard a chance.

And then I opened that bin of books and saw Harry Potter staring back at me. When I told Lisa via text message over my cell phone what book I had just started reading, she was incredulous, then happy. “I was planning on picking up a copy for you on the way home,” she texted. “Now I don’t have to :-)”

I figured I’d whip through the book in a couple of days. That was about four weeks ago. A number of things slowed down my usually prodigious reading rate (something like 1200-1400 words per minute): teaching (with all of its planning, grading, and stressing), boredom, and teasing.

The fact that work got in the way of pleasure should come as no surprise. The fact that I, the book snob, often found the opening chapters of Harry Potter boring should also come as no surprise. The teasing, however, probably needs some explanation.

As with A Wrinkle in Time, I found Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone difficult to read because of its simplicity. Luckily, I hadn’t read this book as a child, so I my sense of disappointment as I read wasn’t nearly as great as with A Wrinkle in Time. This made the reading bearable. But I still found the diction and syntax annoyingly uncomplex, the plot rather drab, and the characters quite shallow. Hagrid’s entrance in chapter four finally brought a little bit of excitement to the book, but Hagrid himself was mostly just an annoying “gentle giant” cliché.

I found reading this book almost painful, and certainly frustrating, at times. This was obviously a rich world that J.K. Rowling had created, and the lack of deep psychological and world-building exploration was frustrating. Yes, I could identify with Harry—what child has never felt alone and picked on and unsure of him- or herself? What child has never suddenly been overjoyed to find that there is at least one skill at which he or she is good? What child doesn’t desperately want to be accepted by his or her peers? But I am not a child anymore. I am an adult. I can sympathize and empathize with this child’s feelings, I can even remember feeling that way myself, but the intervening years have added knowledge and emotional baggage and wisdom. The world isn’t as simple as winning a quidditch match or foiling the plans of the Dark Lord. Whatever I felt when I was Harry’s age has accumulated the weight of years, and I want to read things that address those accumulated feelings, too.

So I took to entertaining myself while reading by pointing out to Lisa all of the “pornographic” and “homoerotic” subtext of the book. I’d take lines like “A magic wand . . . this is what Harry had been really looking forward to” or “Your father, on the other hand, favored a mahogany wand. Eleven inches. Pliable. A little more power and excellent for transfiguration” and read them to Lisa in the most insinuating way possible. She’d grimace, then smile, then point out how easy it is to find a subtext that isn’t even there, and I’d make a crack about finally having a use for my MA in English. I knew I was being an ass, but it was a fun way to get through a book I otherwise would have set aside and never come back to.

I finished the book this morning, and, despite my earlier misgivings, despite the fact that I found the characters shallow and the syntax unsophisticated, I have to give J.K. Rowling credit where credit is due. This was a fantastically plotted book. The twist in chapter seventeen caught me completely by surprise (that’ll teach me to underestimate children’s books) and I was pleased to see that even the smallest plot details, like the toilet seat prank mentioned in chapter six, or the wooden flute Hagrid gave Harry for Christmas, found their way into a useful spot at the end of the book. Some of the plot devices, like Hagrid’s baby dragon or Harry’s inherent broomstick skills, were extremely transparent, but overall, although I had a difficult time getting into the childlike sentence structures and the simple premise, I have to admire the skill with which Rowling put it all together.

I’ll never be a Harry Potter fan, but I can certainly see why these books are so popular.

Teaching on the South Side: Finally Feeling a Little in Control

For the first few weeks of school, I was feeling pretty overwhelmed. There was one day when I actually came home and started looking for a new job. The students had been exceedingly difficult to manage that day, and I wasn’t feeling particularly cut out to be a teacher. There were so few openings for someone with a degree in English, however, that looking only made me more depressed.

I’m not sure what got me out of my funk and back on track, but I managed to scrape together a lesson plan and finish out the week. Maybe it was knowing there was only one day more in the week I had to work through, and then I could relax on the weekend that did it. Maybe it was talking to my dad, himself a 32-year veteran of public schools, that gave me some perspective. Whatever it was, I stopped looking for another job and kept plugging away at this one.

Then, this week, I started my students on their first writing assignment, and I got my world back again. I’ve been teaching writing since I started my master’s degree in 1996—this was old hat. I could teach the writing process in my sleep. Talking about pre-writing and drafting and revision and editing and freewriting and mind-mapping felt as cozy and comfortable as those really ugly sweatpants I ought to throw away, but I can’t help but keep wearing around the house. The instructor side of my brain could run on auto-pilot, which allowed the manager part of my brain to be more active in dealing with the usual student problems: constant interruptions for off-topic questions like “do you have kids?” or “how old are you?”; students who just can’t stay seated; students who want to sing for the whole class; students who need paper and/or a pen, and who wait until I’m right in the middle of my lesson to ask me for some. The list of these petty annoyances goes on and on, and when I’m teaching something I’ve never taught before, like the vocabulary words for Wanda Coleman’s “Eyes and Teeth” or Spiro Athanas’ “A Bag of Oranges,” it’s easy to slip, to lose track of my train of thought, to get progressively more annoyed at my students.

But when I’m teaching writing, I feel so much more in control. Oliver’s Law says that experience is something you don’t get until just after you need it, and while that cynical assessment might often be true, I’m finding that my almost eight years of experience (eight years? Has it really been that long?) teaching writing is paying off exactly when I need it to.

And so, tonight, as it nears 11 p.m. Central Daylight Time—far past my preferred bedtime on a school night—I finish up my lesson plan on revision for tomorrow and am reminded how much I enjoy stringing words and sentences and paragraphs together, and I find I have to scratch this itch I’ve had since I first read The Hobbit, this itch to write, and to have people read it.

Thanks for indulging me.

Teaching on the South Side: Breaking Up My First In-Class Fight

NOTE: All student names have been changed.

You might think, given the dearth of entries in here as of late, that nothing much has been going on in my little corner of Chicago’s South Side. I wish that were true. Some days I leave my apartment at 7 a.m. and don’t get back until 8 that night. I’m a first-year teacher: I always have a mountain of prep work to do. My mantra: next year this will be so much easier.

Truth to tell, though, eight years teaching writing in college, not to mention an MA in English, gives me more than a little edge this year. Thirteen years in the martial arts doesn’t hurt, either. Mrs. Grossett, one of the instructional support specialists for the program I’m teaching in, paid me a very high compliment last week when she said that me and two of the other older teachers were, “the strongest teachers we have up here.” She went on to praise what she called my God-given talents for teaching and leadership. I just nodded and smiled, all the while thinking that it’s not God (whom I doubt exists, anyway) that I have to thank, but every Boy Scout leader I ever had, every karate instructor I ever had, and every teacher who ever challenged me to do better than I was. I’m 31—I have plenty of experience to help me through the trials and travails of teaching in this unique and challenging environment.

And today it got just a little more challenging when a fight, an actual “I want to physically kick you ass” kind of fight, broke out between two students in my classroom.

Actually, as I look back on it now, handling the fight was actually easier than getting my classes, as a whole, to stay on task. The former only requires a willingness to step between two students who want to kill each other and the thought to send another student out into the hall for security. The latter requires a myriad of much more subtle skills, not to mention a hell of a lot more energy.

Perhaps I set the tone for frustration early in the class when, out of frustration that some students kept asking me the same question over and over, when I had clearly explained today’s schedule change at least twice, I put on my “I’m extremely annoyed act” (OK, those of you who know me know it wasn’t an act) and gave the whole class my “I’m not putting up with this foolishness today” lecture. Shortly thereafter, I got into a disagreement with Danny over a dog tag he had been playing with, passing around to other students when he should have been listening to me, and basically sent him to talk to the student advocate (a cross between a counselor and a disciplinarian). I hate getting angry with my kids, but sometimes it’s the most effective and efficient way to get and hold their attention.

Until the fight broke out at the end of the class period, the middle part of the class went exceedingly well. I read them a short story while they followed along, I got them talking about the story in small groups, and then we had a mostly productive whole-class discussion for about 15 minutes.

Then Lora and Kara decided to start trading insults.

“Bitch,” I heard one of them say.

“You’re the bitch. I’m not afraid of you,” the other replied (or something very much like it).

“Listen to me, I’m not afraid of you, bring it on, bitch!”

I tried diplomacy: “You should both be listening to me!” I said with as much easygoing firmness as I could muster without shouting at them. But the rest of the room had disappeared for these girls. All that was real to them was each other, and the insults they were hurling back and forth.

When Lora stood up I did too, walking over to them, still trying to get their attention by saying “Ladies, ladies,” over and over again, more firmly each time. But they didn’t hear me.

As Lora moved around the desks that separated her from Kara, Kara decided to get up, and she kept hurling insults, variations on “Bring it on, bitch, I ain’t afraid of you.”

Luckily, Carl got there first and stepped between the two girls just long enough to stop them from taking swings at each other. Hoping to avoid getting Carl mixed up in this fight, I thanked him for his help and asked him to sit back down, even as I interposed myself between the two girls and told them to sit down and calm down.

But Kara made to move around me, and I moved to keep myself between her and Lora. The insults were still flying, and all these girls wanted was each other’s blood. Kara moved again, and so did I, this time moving to face Kara, arms spread wide, keenly aware, as only someone who has been kicked in the groin many times can be, of how vulnerable I was if either girl decided to take her frustrations out on me.

It was Lora, whom I had my back to, that decided the issue for me. She kicked past me at Kara, striking her in the hip. I’m proud to say that I stayed exactly where I was, stayed calm, and had the presence of mind to tell John to go get security. I’m less proud to say that in a tiny little corner of my mind, I heard a voice say “terrible round kick form, and it hit the hip—no point.” You can take the man out of the dojo . . .

When Lora landed a second kick I decided it was time to move Kara out of the room as quickly as possible. I ushered her out of the room, and she kept spouting insults the whole way. By that time, Ms. B, the counselor, had come into my class and was taking care of Lora. Both girls were escorted to different rooms to talk about the incident with either the counselor or the advocate. I went back to a room that was more than a little riled up.

Luckily, there were only five minutes left of class.

So there it is, the story of the first in-class fight I broke up between two students. It’s probably not as exciting as you were hoping for, but it certainly gives you a little taste of how interesting things can get down here from time to time.