Christopher's Windy City Weblog

Jogging Envy

2007-08-29T22:31:00.001-05:00

Now that the weather is back down into the low 80’s and high 70’s, and not quite as sweltering as in the past few weeks, I see more and more people out jogging on the streets of Chicago. And I’m jealous.

I never thought I would ever see the day when I regretted not being able to run. It’s been ten days since I last laced up my running shoes and pounded the pavement with my long, loping strides, but that “pounding” part seems to have been the problem. Until my plantar fasciitis clears up, which could take a few more weeks, I won’t be running again any time soon.

I ran track and cross country in high school, and hated almost every minute of it. I did it mainly because Dad said I needed to do something active with my free time. I knew he was right, but that didn’t mean I really wanted to run. We lived in a tiny town in the very rural southwest corner of Michigan. What else was I going to do? (I played basketball in the winter for two years, in 8^th and 9^th grades, before I staged my version of rebellion by deciding I needed my winters off). So I ran.

At the time, I took for granted the excellent physical shape I was in because of these pursuits. Not every high school kid can run a mile in five minutes, 30 seconds (which I only did once, which was quite enough), or run 3.1 miles in 19:30, but there were plenty of other runners who were faster and more resilient than I, and I tended to judge my accomplishments vis-à-vis theirs. I never felt like a very good runner, which was one reason I didn’t really enjoy it. The monotony was another reason.

Back in March or April, I finally decided to do something about the weight I had gained in the past few years. In college, I did a karate workout at least twice a week, and there were some years when I also lifted weights regularly. I wasn’t as trim as I had been in high school, but I stayed fit. My gut stayed behind my belt, where it belonged.

Then came two years of getting a teaching certificate, which included one very stressful year of student teaching. This was followed by a year and a half of ultra-stressful teaching on the South Side of Chicago. My gut wasn’t huge (I never looked pregnant or anything, a look I desperately never want to sport), but I had grown tired of it pushing against the buttons of my shirts. It was time to slim down.

I was too cheap to join a gym, but I had a decent pair of running shoes, so I bit the bullet and started running. As usual, I pushed myself way too hard my first time out. After only about half a mile, I felt like puking. I only made it a mile that day, one very sweaty, achy, gaspingly uninspiring mile. I quickly changed my tactics: a slower pace, permission to walk a half-mile for every mile I ran, less pressure on myself to make some kind of arbitrary time.

Soon I was up to a mile and a half, then two miles, then two and a half miles, then three miles. Every time I went out, I enjoyed myself a little more. The monotony was still there, but this time I taught myself to savor the runners’ high, that rush of endorphins right at the end of a run that makes the senses clearer, the mind sharper, the step light and brisk. Dinner always tasted better after a run.

The other good part came months later. I’m as vain as the next guy, so when friends, acquaintances, and people at work started asking if, and then outright saying, that I had lost weight, I felt another sense of accomplishment. I might never have a 34-inch waist again, but my gut wasn’t pushing quite as far over my belt, my face wasn’t quite so round, and to top it all off, I noticed other health benefits, too: I was sleeping better at night, even if I got fewer hours of sleep; I was more relaxed during the day, and had deeper reserves of energy.

Nine days ago, I ran 3.5 miles in about 33 minutes, without stopping, for the second day in a row. The next day, I limped from morning ‘til night because my right heel hurt badly, as if someone had sunk a nail deep into the muscle and bone, a nail I drove deeper with each hobbling step I took.

When I was seven or eight, and running a mile with my dad before he ran his daily six, I would have welcomed the excuse not to run. Back then, I only ran because I knew Dad wanted me to, and I felt guilty if I didn’t. So I’d have to “tie my shoe” every few hundred yards. Or I’d see “something interesting” on the side of the road that I’d have to stop and check out. I hated running. Didn’t want to do it.

I never thought I’d ever say this, but now, not running is driving me crazy.

First Day of Classes

2007-08-28T21:24:00.000-05:00

I started teaching my two online sections of English 101 yesterday. Some of my students have even started their work, or have at least emailed me with questions. Tonight was the first night of my one face-to-face section of English 101. I haven’t taught 101 at this college before, so I was a little nervous. I shouldn’t have been. When I get in front of a class, it feels like I never left, even if all of the students are new. This is what I need to be doing full-time. Gotta keep sending resumes out.

Harry Potter and the Re-reading Critic

2007-08-10T11:28:00.001-05:00

The best thing about Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone is knowing that there are six more books after it that more fully develop the story. On its own, Harry Potter 1 is a rather bland read. It is intriguing enough, however, that the promise of more depth and detail in the following six books makes it worth the few hours takes to read the first short novel. The story of Harry’s development from a child into a young adult is, of course, timeless and engaging, but just from a technical standpoint, anyone who enjoys arc-driven storytelling will find plenty to admire throughout the course of all seven books.

From the first, I was dead set against reading any of the Harry Potter novels. They were children’s books; I don’t read children’s books. Widespread hyperbolic comparisons to J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, a saga I absolutely adore and have read many times, didn’t help any. It sounded to me like blasphemy to state that anything could be as good as—or even worse, better than—LOTR. Such comparisons are ridiculous, of course, since HP and LOTR are very different literary animals. LOTR is a heroic saga in the mold of the ancient sagas of myth and legend (especially the Norse sagas); HP is a seven-volume coming-of-age tale. The two books share some themes and, of course, magic as a plot device and reality of their literary worlds, but otherwise, comparing the two is like comparing Star Wars with 2001: A Space Odyssey.

When I did eventually give HP #1 a chance several years ago, I wasn’t impressed. After re-reading it in the wake of finishing the seventh book, I am a little more impressed by Rowling’s skill, but the story of the first book, on it’s own, is still fails to move me significantly. In it, Harry is 11 years old, and the story is written to that level of reader: descriptions are suggestive rather than detailed, dialogue is sometimes stilted, and the plot is episodic in the extreme. Each book covers one year in Harry’s life at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry; the first book is only 309 pages long, and in it, Rowling has to plant many, many seeds that will enable the following six books to flower effectively. Every character (and there are dozens of supporting players) is new and therefore must be introduced quickly, but effectively enough so that when they show up in later books (and some don’t show up again until book 7) they will be remembered. The plot of HP #1 has to work on its own, yet leave enough unanswered questions to keep readers coming back at least for the second book, which then has to hook readers even more deeply so they’ll come back for #3, and so on. And perhaps most significantly, Rowling has to create an entirely new world and make it believable. On all of these counts, Rowling succeeds in an efficient, workmanlike fashion.

Harry, the Dursleys, Ron, Hermione, and various other “minor” Hogwarts characters like Neville Longbottom, Draco Malfoy, and Severus Snape are efficiently and colorfully brought to life—and although they have small roles in book #1, they will play important roles in the books to come. Even characters who only show up once in this book will play a significant role in the final book—but to tell who they are at this point would spoil the fun. The story these characters bring to life does work on its own—Is the powerful sorcerer’s stone being kept at Hogwarts, and is Snape out to steal it for his old master, Lord Voldemort?—but, since Harry is only 11 years old and just a novice at magic, he gets by on luck as much as he does skill. His bravery, a central characteristic of Harry’s, also get him through many tight spots, but most of his bravery is geared toward things an 11-year-old boy, magical or not, could reasonably accomplish on his own: breaking school rules, standing up to bullies, jumping on the back of a rampaging troll (well, OK, the last one isn’t typical 11-year-old behavior, but even in that scene, he survives mainly through luck).

Of course, Harry and his friends are triumphant at the end of the book (like there is ever any doubt in the reader’s mind they won’t be), but Rowling leaves plenty of unanswered questions: How will the evil Lord Voldemort threaten Harry again? How will the inevitable showdown between Draco and Harry happen? Who is going to be the next Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher? Why did Hagrid get expelled from Hogwarts? Some of these questions get answered in book #2, but even as the old mysteries get solved, new ones crop up. In this way, Harry Potter #1 reminds me of the first season of J. Michael Straczynski’s science fiction “novel for television” Babylon 5: lots of exposition and world-building crammed with new characters and plot points, some of which get resolved that season, some of which get resolved in the next season, and some of which carry through four more seasons to the end of the series. And the whole way, more plot points and characters get introduced, develop, and even die. Like the first season of Straczynski’s masterpiece, the first Harry Potter book often seems clunky, bland, and uninspired. But these kinds of problems are almost unavoidable. Stories have to start somewhere, and the effectiveness of the threads used at the beginning cannot be fully judged until the entire story has been laid out and the full tapestry can be appreciated in its entirety. In this sense, re-reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone is most enjoyable because of the seemingly insignificant details dropped in—a name here or device here, a plot point or setting there—that anyone who has finished the series will recognize as extremely important later on.

Much of what becomes important later on in the series is the wizarding world that Rowling has created: Hogwarts, of course, and Quidditch and Muggles and wands and potions and the Ministry of Magic and an entire history going back hundreds of years that is only hinted at in the first book, but no less real because of it. Harry’s non-wizarding life with the Dursleys is painfully real (they hate him and make him sleep in a cupboard under the stairs, for starters), his wonder at discovering the wizarding world of his birthright is just as believable because readers are introduced to it through the simple faith of an 11-year-old’s eyes. The prose, stilted and bland as it sometimes is, perfectly captures Harry’s point of view and acceptance of a magical world parallel to the regular, Muggle world we are all familiar with. Once Harry accepts it (which he does easily), we do, too. Still, the first book has to cram so much of the world into so few pages that we only get a quick glimpse of this intriguing place, and the best thing about this quick glimpse is that it whets out appetites for more.

In short, Rowling gets the job done, creates a mildly entertaining story, and leaves room for plenty of development. Were it not for the assurance that in six more books all of the characters, settings and plots would get more detailed and more complex (by at least one or two orders of magnitude), the first book would hardly be memorable at all. Every book is longer than the previous one, except for books 6 and 7, which are both a hair shorter than #5, but by that time, Rowling has planted almost all of the seeds she needs to plant to make Book 7 the immensely satisfying and mature conclusion of what started with a mildly entertaining and efficiently-written little children’s novel.

A Thoreau-ly Relaxing Weekend

2007-08-06T23:06:00.001-05:00

The trouble with having a secluded and difficult-to-find camping spot is that every time I myself try to find it, I have difficulty. I tramp around the dunes, looking for my little stand of pine and poplar rooted in sandy soil, sweat pouring off my forehead, soaking my shirt, and even soaking the padded straps and hip-belt of my 60-pound frame pack with all the gear I require for a weekend—or a week—but, eventually, I find it. And I am never so happy as when I have set up my camp there.

Everything I need I have carried in strapped to my back. I could set up “home” anywhere, and I usually choose this spot, about a mile further south along the Lake Michigan shoreline than most people camp, in a sparse copse of jack pine, the silvery, uprooted tree stump exactly where I left it from the last time I was there, about three feet from where I will build my fire. The ashes of my last fire are never visible. I drown and then bury them, hoping to leave the spot as pristine as when I found it. The only evidence that anyone uses the spot at all is difficult to find: a few scattered bits of deadwood, no thicker than my forearm, that I neatly sawed into nine-inch lengths and camouflaged in tufts of dune grass because I never got around to burning them. And, of you look carefully at the thinner end of the stump, you will see another sawed log, about twice as thick as the others, about six inches long, propping it up, making an almost level, single-person bench.

Soon, I have my tent pitched next to one of the few poplar trees in this wide and sandy grove, my pack hanging on one of the pine trees, my food suspended from a high branch to keep it away from hungry and mischievous animals, and, after a trip over the short barrier dune and into the lake, two collapsible buckets filled with water that I will later filter for drinking. The breeze, when it comes, makes a soft rattle in the poplar leaves, and carries the sweet, soft susurration of Lake Michigan surf to my ears.

Sometimes, during the day, if I climb the short barrier dune between my campsite and the lake, I can see others, in pairs or small groups, rarely more than ten people total, often fewer than five, swimming in the lake or playing on the beach. But toward sunset and after, when gray twilight and then star-pierced darkness drapes across the sky, I feel I am the only person for a hundred miles. It’s not true. There are others within a half-mile, usually; certainly within a mile. But it’s that feeling that counts: utterly alone, reliant only on myself, accountable only to myself, needing only myself and the Boy Scout motto for company: Be Prepared; and I am.

During the days, I hike all over the dunes, all through the forest further inland. I’ll hike to Big Sable Point Lighthouse and into Ludington State Park. I’ll converse with complete strangers about the weather, the trails, the park, the view from the top of one of the few lighthouses on Lake Michigan to reach 100 feet (although our shoes, as the helpful informational plaques say, are only 92 feet up). In other words, the weekend as a whole is hardly the exercise in complete solitude I always imagine it will be when I set off from Chicago, city of 3 million people.

But in my campsite, I’m alone, and that’s good enough for me.

Dune grass, waves, and sky

Still point of the turning earth

Thoreau solitude

Still Officially a Geek

2007-08-03T08:30:00.000-05:00

It’s always nice to wake up and read an email that reaffirms your place in the world. In this case, it was an email from my sister:

Hey Geek-Squad,

I am typing this from my own computer--I somehow got the thing to connect! I was up early, mad about the computer, so I decided to try it again. I went back to the beginning and installed the NetGear card. It took me through installation differently than it did last night, and then it found the wireless network. With your help last night I was able to figure some things out this morning, and voila! Internet access! Thanks for your help. Don't put away your pocket protector just yet. . . . You really did help me figure this out, and your idea for the NetGear card was brilliant!

If my younger sister says I’m brilliant, it must be true, and it makes me happy. Hell, I’d be happy even if she hadn’t said I’m brilliant—I was right about the NetGear card! My geek instincts have been vindicated!

Geek Squad Wannabe

2007-08-02T22:57:00.001-05:00

I’m the tech support for my family: something goes wrong with Mom and Dad’s computer, they call me. Tonight, the call came from my sister—who was calling from my parent’s house. She had taken her boys to Michigan for the week; she had packed her laptop, too, and it couldn’t connect to Mom and Dad’s wireless network. Something about the password needing to be either 40 or 104 ASCII characters, something that was never a problem on my computer or the folk’s computer. I had run into the issue with Anne’s computer before, and I knew this was trouble. My geek credentials were about to be sorely tested.

In the past, Anne’s computer has been able to connect to Mom and Dad’s network, but that was before the Geek Squad, the real Geek Squad, came out to set up their new Vista-running laptop, and set the wireless network password for them. Admittedly, setting that password is something I could have done for them ages ago. I just never did, because I knew from past experience that Anne’s laptop, for whatever reason, wouldn’t be able to connect, and I didn’t figure there were a whole lot of computer hackers living in a sleepy Kalamazoo condo subdivision. I had avoided this issue in the past, but with my sister on the other end of the phone anxious to have her computer work the way it had always worked before, it was time to face the mystery of the uncooperative encryption.

I did a quick Google search and came up with a possible reason for the problem—the hardware in her laptop wasn’t set to use the same encryption as the router—or even capable of doing so. Since neither one of us really wanted to mess with the settings of Mom and Dad’s network (at least not without me there to fix any problems that my tinkering might create), that meant we had to find a solution within Anne’s laptop. And then it hit me—Mom and Dad’s old computer used a removable wireless network card! We could insert that into Anne’s laptop, and viola! problem solved!

It wasn’t, of course, that easy.

The first glitch in the process was human error. After a little rummaging through computer disks and peripherals that he hasn’t touched in years—accompanied by, Anne relayed to me over the phone, a little under-the-breath swearing—Dad found the CD with the device drivers, and Anne slipped it into her laptop—but the New Hardware Wizard couldn’t find the drivers. This struck me as odd. The wizard always finds the drivers when (then it hit me) when the right CD is installed.

“Hey Anne, eject the disk and tell me what it says.”

“Um . . . ‘Netgear Wireless Router—’”

I cut her off. “Nope. Wrong disk. We need the disk that came with the adapter.”

“Dad, we need the disk that came with the adapter.” Pause. “He’s swearing some more.”

The swearing must have helped, because Dad quickly found the right disk, which made installing the drivers much easier.

As it turned out, that was to be the only easy part of the whole process, and also the only successful part.

With the new drivers installed, we then disabled the built-in adapter and restarted the computer. So far, so good. But then we couldn’t figure out how to get the damn thing to connect to the internet. Anne was still getting the same error message, something about the password needing to be 40 or 104 ASCII characters long. By this time, we’d been on the phone for almost an hour. Anne kept saying “I know you have better things to do with your time,” but the OCD in me didn’t want to give up. I know we were on the right track. We had disabled the built-in wireless network card. We had restarted he computer. But all to no avail, and I was fast running out of geeky ideas.

After about an hour of fiddling with various control panels and still no internet connection, Anne decided to call it quits. My OCD tendencies would have kept me at the problem for at least another hour, but it was an hour later in Michigan, Anne had had a long drive earlier in the evening, and she finally just resigned herself to not getting her computer to work.

I felt like turning in my pocket protector. Christopher’s Friendly Family Telephone Tech Support had been thwarted by 40 (or maybe 104) ASCII characters.

It’s not that Anne can’t check her email without her computer. She can always use Mom and Dad’s. But as a stay-at-home Mom, she’s gotten used to having the internet just a few steps away while she watches her sons, ages 6 and 3. When they all visit Mom and Dad, the boys play in the finished basement, where the only internet access is wireless. Anne herself said the lack of connectivity wasn’t a big deal, it was just a convenience she had gotten used to, and she could get used to going “old fashioned” for a week. Technology is not the be-all and end-all of our existence.

My sister is right. A break from technology is a good thing. When I’m camping this weekend, there won’t be a computer (or indoor plumbing, for that matter) anywhere nearby. Just me, my gear, and miles of pristine Lake Michigan shoreline. And I don’t need 40 or 104 ASCII characters to enjoy that.

Nostalgia Camping

2007-07-31T21:04:00.000-05:00

Without my father’s encouragement, I never would have joined Cub Scouts as a child, and then never been a Boy Scout, and thus probably never grown to love camping as much as I do. So it is entirely appropriate, even necessary, that I head out for a roughing-it weekend at least once a year with Dad.

It’s been four years since our last camping trip, and before that it must have been at least two years. As we’ve both gotten older and our lives have changed (he’s retired, I live in Chicago), we’ve had less and less opportunity to pitch a tent, hike all day, eat hobo pies, and toast marshmallows over the pulsing coals of a campfire. But this year, despite our busy schedules (in his retirement, he works part-time for a former retail giant; after quitting a steady high school teaching job, I now work two jobs that keep me busy 24/7), we made the time for a weekend at Yankee Springs State Park in Middleville, Michigan.

My first hike in the woods was probably at Yankee Springs. I grew up in Hastings, which isn’t far from Middleville, and Dad still has, somewhere, a picture he took of me and my sister sitting on a carpet of brown pine needles near smooth trunk of a pine tree; an army-surplus backpack lies open at our feet and I’m holding a half-full bag of potato chips. Anne’s holding a half-full two-liter of Pepsi. In those days, I guess that was Dad’s idea of a good trail snack. I’m not sure exactly where in Yankee Springs Dad took that picture, but I’m sure it was at Yankee Springs, somewhere near Hall Lake, on the Hall Lake Trail, a hiking route Dad and I have trekked many times since, including this past Saturday.

We’ve upgraded our trail food in the years since then. I’ve always got at least two bottles of water and a couple of granola bars with me; Dad carried the trail mix this time. But one thing hasn’t changed: Dad still loves to take pictures. Years ago, he had a Minolta Maxxum 5000 SLR camera with a wide-angle and a telephoto lens. He took that thing everywhere, took pictures of everything: the scenery, his children, other people, his students (he was a sixth-grade teacher and then a principal), and he’d even set the self-timer and get into the frame once or twice himself. But as he got older, the camera got heavier, and I “borrowed” it for a photojournalism class or two in college. He stopped taking so many pictures. In some ways it was a nice break. In others, Dad just wasn’t Dad unless he was snapping pictures of everything that caught his eye.

A few Christmases ago, Anne and I went in on a Kodak digital camera for him: smaller, lighter, and with an almost unlimited capacity for pictures (sure, there’s a limit, but not even Dad takes 200 pictures on one trip). This thing fits in the palm of his hand, and has almost as many settings as his old Minolta (which is now sitting in my closet somewhere). He loves it, and puts it to use at every family function: his grandsons’ birthdays, holidays, when we built a retaining wall around the deck a few years ago, and, of course, whenever we go camping.

During this outing, not only did Dad take pictures of our campsite, our tent, our backpacks as they hung from two trees, various odd-looking trees around our campsite, a family we don’t even know as they fished from a skiff on the lake, but Dad took pictures of me, and of us, in the same spots, in almost the exact same poses, as he did four years ago. For some reason I have yet to figure out, Dad has a special affinity for old, large, many-branched trees that look like something out of The Wizard of Oz. As we passed one such tree, which I recognized as soon as I saw it, our conversation went something like this:

Dad: Let’s get a picture of us near this tree.

Me: You mean just like we did four years ago?

My smile as I said those words started out sardonic, but soon turned cheerful as the shared memory passed between us on the quick and good-natured you-smart-aleck-type-glance that Dad shot me as soon as the words left my mouth. Yes, we had taken pictures near this same tree four years ago. And yes, we’d do it again, because this was a new camping trip, and because taking pictures is what we do on camping trips, and camping is what Dad and I do together.

And when I camp solo, to wilder and rougher places than Yankee Springs, places too far out of the way for Dad these days, I take pictures of my campsite, and my tent, and my pack as it hangs from a tree, and strange-looking trees and vegetation, and every so often, I set the self-timer and get into the frame myself, because I know if Dad were there, that’s the kind of picture he’d take.

Galumphing Through the Week

2007-07-24T22:50:00.000-05:00

Final grades are due Wednesday night, so I’m spending each night doing something related to finishing up the semester. Yesterday I graded final exams. Today I graded the final discussion board forums. Tomorrow I’ll do one last check over the grades before I submit them--and I’ll cram too much gear into my external frame pack in preparation for the father-son weekend camping trip, an old summer tradition we’re starting up again after an unfortunate hiatus of a few years.

And in among all of this, the following poem keeps bubbling through my brain. Maybe it’s the Harry Potter influence. Maybe it’s because of my ongoing attempt to memorize it (it shouldn’t be difficult, and yet . . .). Trying to recall the exact order of the stanzas gave me something to do while I was locked out of my apartment last week. In any event, it’s a fun poem, and one I’m certain J.K. Rowling is familiar with. Enjoy.

JABBERWOCKY

Lewis Carroll

(from Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, 1872)

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought --
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

"And, has thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!'
He chortled in his joy.

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

No Spoilers Here

2007-07-22T16:32:00.000-05:00

I just finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows about 15 minutes ago. I’ve neglected washing, work, and food (but not sleep, though I also tried to neglect that, too) in order to read it, to inhale it, to drink it in with large, satisfied gulps. Reading a book hasn’t been this much fun since I was a kid sitting in front of a box fan on long, hot summer days working my way through a stack of books Mom had brought home from the library for me.

To discuss the book in any great detail would probably give away plot details that I absolutely refuse to divulge, but it should come as no surprise to anyone who has read the previous six Harry Potter novels that Rowling’s foremost strength as a storyteller lies in her ability to construct and maintain an enormously detailed plot that stretches over generations. Every major event in this book, the last of the series, is somehow foreshadowed or touched upon in one of the previous six books. She has created, not just a world and characters that live and breathe and fully come to life in millions of readers’ minds, she has created an intricate and immensely satisfying seven-book storytelling arc.

Anyone who enjoys the kind of arc-driven storytelling that infused works like Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Babylon 5 will relish the way Rowling’s vast scheme unfolds over the course of all seven books. She said in an interview with NPR back in 1998 that she had already written the final chapter of the series, i.e. she had the entire arc planned, at least in outline form. Now the proof is here, and it doesn’t disappoint. That must have been one hell of an outline.

Powerful Addiction

2007-07-21T19:39:00.000-05:00

I now own a copy of the seventh and final book in the Harry Potter series, and I’m more excited to read it than I thought I would be, because a good story is like heroin—immediately pleasurable and addictive.

I was never interested in reading any of the Harry Potter books. Boy wizard? Didn’t interest me. Give me Gandalf, the gold standard by which all other wizards should be measured. An orphaned boy with silly glasses and a lightning-bolt-shaped scar on his forehead sounded too cheesy for me to want to read about.

And then, as in so many stories, I met a girl. She didn’t change my mind right away (in fact, I almost dumped her when I saw her collection of every Harry Potter book printed up to that time—in hardcover). But then I discovered a used, beaten-up copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in a box of books given to me for use in my high school classroom, and thought “Hell, since I didn’t have to pay for it, I’ll give it a chance.”

I didn’t like it much. Too juvenile. But seeds had been planted, so I thought I should at least give the second book a chance. I didn’t care much for that one, either, but water had been poured on those seeds, so I gave the third one a try. And that hooked me.

So when I got the “Reserve Your Copy of Harry Potter 7 Now!” email from Amazon a few months ago, I promptly typed in my credit card number and forked over some digital cash. And I never buy hardcover books. I prefer the way a paperback fits in my hands. Also, I’m cheap. But I had to find out what happens to Harry before some inconsiderate asshole spoils the ending for me.

But the copy of what I have so far only read the first chapter of in is not the copy I ordered from Amazon. That copy is still waiting for me in my UPS Store mailbox.

I had to proctor a two-hour final exam for my online students today. At 11 a.m., the time UPS estimated my book would be delivered. And at 2 p.m., I was going to see Mirror of the Invisible World at the Goodman Theater with a friend from work who had free tickets. That didn’t leave me a lot of time to collect my tests, hop on a train, get back to my neighborhood to pick up the book, and get back downtown to the Goodman. Especially after I was a nice guy and let a student who had shown up 45 minutes late stay an extra 45 minutes to finish his test. By the time he was done, I had about 35 minutes to get my book. The UPS Store closes at 5 on Saturdays, and the play was supposed to be two-and-a-half hours long. With my luck, it would run over, and I’d miss my chance to get HP 7 today, fall behind on my scheduled reading, and thus increase the chances of some idiot spoiling the ending for me.

So at 1:30 I stood at the Brown Line platform at State and Lake, waiting for a train. After six minutes, I knew the train was late. I knew my chances of getting my book and getting back to Goodman before 2 were slim to none. I though about bailing on the play, but I love theater, and I had already made plans. But if the play ran as scheduled, I’d probably still have time to get back to the UPS Store before 5. Except with my luck, the show would run late and the Brown Line would break down.

My train pulled up to the station. I had made my decision, but I wasn’t entirely happy: I’d risk missing the play (or being late, which in my mind is even worse) in order to guarantee getting my hands on HP 7 today. I bent over to pick up my backpack, and as I swung it over my left shoulder, I turned right to face the train—and found myself looking at Ana-Luz, my friend with the tickets, who had just gotten off the train I was about to board. Not two feet away from me. Between me and the train that would take me to Harry Potter. I grimaced. I didn’t have time to explain that I’d be late. I’d probably miss the play, but I had to have HP 7. I’d feel guilty and petty, and I hate feeling that way. So I’d be a nice guy and forego my HP gratification. I’d feel anxious and uptight until I had my hands on HP 7, but I didn’t want to look like a dick in front of a friend (although, by my grimace, I probably already did).

Then Ana-Luz pulled the mostly-orange brick of my obsession from her bag. “Here. I didn’t want to feel guilty that you might miss it today,” she said.

I’m an atheist and a pragmatist. I never attribute anything to luck, or fate, or destiny, or God. The world is what it is, and it is shaped by our actions. Nothing else.

But here was, without a doubt, a lucky break.

I was so confounded by this series of coincidences (remember, I was mainly running late because a student of mine had been running late earlier) that, for a moment, I must have seemed angry, because Ana-Luz asked if I was upset. Not upset, I managed to stammer. Just discombobulated. The core of my philosophy of life could not have been more shaken than if God had suddenly appeared before me to say “Hi. You’re wrong.”

I explained all of this to Ana-Luz during the one-block walk to Goodman. She explained that the book had been given to her by another friend who was trying to convert her to Harry-Potterism (“So why start with the last book?” I asked. “Oh, he got me the first one, too,” she answered. “Still strange,” I said. “Yeah,” she answered.) I successfully managed not to read the book during the play. I waited until several hours later, back on the L, headed for home.

When I pulled Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows out of my backpack, I felt like Indiana Jones unearthing the Ark of the Covenant. It seemed to glow. I felt the mass of it in my hands, and I don’t just mean its physical weight. I had known for weeks what the cover would look like. I had seen two people reading the book at the Brown Line stop while I struggled with my earlier ethical decision about ditching a friend. I had even felt it in my hands hours earlier, when Ana-Luz had given me this copy. But now, as I pulled the book from my bag, knowing that this time I was going to actually open and read it, it seemed as though I could not only feel the cardboard and paper that the book was made of, but feel the heft of the story within, pulsing between the covers like a living thing.

Because that’s what story is—life.

The power of story is a recurring theme in the works of Neil Gaiman and Dan Simmons and just about every other author I admire. It was the theme of the play I had just seen. Story is the beauty that never fades , the treasure that never loses value. It is the only thing humans can create that even has a chance of being eternal. And for atheists like me, it is the only eternal thing. Story. Narrative. Tales that tell of fanciful exploits and daring loves, horrors beyond imagining and beauty that rends the heart. Harry Potter may not be the most finely-crafted literature in the English language. It will never be placed in the canon beside such monumental works as King Lear or Anna Karenina or The Old Man and the Sea or Madame Bovary. It has no such pretensions. J.K. Rowling just wanted to tell a tale that meant something to her and that might mean something to others. In that, she was successful. The books hit all the major clichés of a successful story: the characters come to life, the plot is both twisting and cohesive, the world comes to life. These elements of the story stay with the reader, with me, long after the last page is read and we move on to another book. A good story is as addictive as heroin, and (I’m guessing here) pleasurable for many of the same reasons. We read and are transported, taken out of ourselves, and yet a good story grounds us in ourselves as nothing else can.

A long-time fantasy fan (I read The Lord of the Rings when I was something like 10 years old and haven’t been the same since), I have recently started struggling with wanting to feel less frivolous in my reading, and so I read more non-fiction, like Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, Henry David Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience, Huston Smith’s The World’s Religions, Thich Nhat Hanh’s The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching, Reza Aslan’s No God But God. Serious books about serious things, college-reading-list types of books, books that address real concerns in the real world, political philosophies and spiritual truths.

But just often, although in a different way, a good story can teach me—affect me—just as much. So now I’m going to finish reading Harry Potter.

It's Live! Live, I Tell You!

2007-07-19T22:22:00.000-05:00

It probably goes without saying that a world-class city like Chicago always has something to offer. It has two major-league baseball teams, one major-league football team, several highly-regarded museums, more than a handful of historic sites, numerous fantastic attractions, and a wide assortment of restaurants and nightclubs.

I’m probably most fond of the local public radio station, especially the locally-produced and nationally-recognized shows, like This American Life and Wait, Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me! Once I finally got around to discovering podcasts, I’ve been downloading and time-shifting these shows every week. I’ve even been fortunate enough to catch a live taping of TAL (episode #328: What I Learned from TV) and several tapings of Wait, Wait—like the free show in Millennium Park I attended tonight.

The free-and-in-Millennium-Park part was only one (OK, two) reasons this show was special. The third reason was the guest for the “Not My Job” segment—United States Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois Patrick Fitzgerald. You know, the special prosecutor in the Valerie Plame identity leak case; the guy who got I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby convicted of lying to prosecutors during that investigation (and then, of course, President Bush swooped in and bailed out his loyal henchman, but more on that later).

Fitzgerald rarely gives interviews, so his appearance on the show was something of a coup for the Wait, Wait crew, something host Peter Sagal made a point of mentioning, albeit in is usual humorously self-deprecating manner. Before the show started, he told this (paraphrased) anecdote about talking with Fitzgerald back stage:

I was talking with Mr. Fitzgerald back stage, and told him that his public appearance was so rare that a reporter called me up to ask me about it. I explained [to the reporter] what Fitzgerald would be doing on the show, and the reporter asked me what I was going to ask him. I explained that we like to keep the “Not My Job” questions a secret, since we like to surprise the guest with them, but the reporter explained, “It’s OK, I’m writing a story that won’t come out until after the show is broadcast.” So I told him. At which point Mr. Fitzgerald looked at me rather archly and said “So you leaked.”

And then I had to change my pants.

The best joke of this entirely excellent show, however, came about halfway through the taping, once Fitzgerald was actually on the stage. After quickly getting the obvious question out of the way (“Who leaked Valerie Plame’s identity?” at which Fitzgerald only chuckled), Sagal continued with some relaxing banter, inquiring into Fitzgerald’s past jobs (he once worked as a doorman and a janitor, and said it was easier being a janitor), past prosecutorial successes, and the fact that he now lives in Chicago.

Peter Sagal: We hear you live on the north side.

Patrick Fitzgerald: Yes.

Peter Sagal: But you work downtown.

Patrick Fitzgerald: Yes.

Peter Sagal: So, how do you feel about . . . commuting?

I am ashamed to confess it took me about ten seconds longer to get that joke than it should have (I blame Sagal’s completely deadpan delivery), but once I got it, I was howling along with the rest of the crowd.

And yes, the scooter jokes flew fast and thick every moment Fitzgerald was on stage. And if you want to hear them all, I suggest listening to the broadcast of Wait, Wait on your local public radio station, or you can go to iTunes and sign up for the weekly podcast (which you should do anyway—you’ll laugh and learn a thing or two about the state of the world. Nothing that’s really useful, but still).

The last reason you should listen to this show is because I was there. And if you listen carefully, you might even pick out my cackling all the way from the back row of the Jay Pritzker Pavillion in Millennium Park in downtown Chicago (Richard M. Daley, Mayor).

Getting to Know the Neighbors

2007-07-18T21:42:00.001-05:00

For a few years when I lived in Lansing, I would sometimes work for my friend Mark, a journeyman contractor. He’d get a job to, for example, re-do someone’s basement bathroom, and he and I would show up, armed with drill drivers and nail guns, and proceed to tear everything out of the old bathroom, re-route the plumbing, re-wire the fixtures, frame and drywall the room, then sand, paint, and viola! new bathroom.

Since he was a pro and I was merely a professional helper, Mark always handled the actual plumbing and electrical work. I got to run the nail gun sometimes, but that was about as advanced as I got. I’m certain that at some point, Mark pointed out to me that these days, most major electrical appliances, refrigerator, air conditioner, water heater, etc, get their own circuit in the breaker box.

Not, apparently, in my apartment.

The building I live in was originally built sometime around the beginning of the 20^th century. The interior has been updated throughout the years, but it still leaves a little be desired. Floors that cant to the middle of the room are the most obvious drawback of my domicile. Blowing a fuse almost every time I use my air conditioner is another. The A/C itself can run OK, but if I want to use a fan or two to help circulate the colder air, the A/C and everything in my kitchen—the fridge, the microwave—will eventually draw too much power and flip the breaker.

Oh, and did I mention that the breaker boxes for all four apartments that have been carved out of this house are in a tiny, closet-like room accessible only from outside the building? Consider it mentioned. This means every time I blow a fuse, I have to put on shoes, walk about forty feet along the outside of the building, unlatch the wooden door to the breaker closet (imagine the latch on an old screen door; you know, the kind with a hook that fits into an eyebolt?), and find the breaker that’s been flipped.

This isn’t usually such a big deal. Sure, the last time it happened, I was pretty sure I spooked a rat or something that had made a home in amongst the many autumns’ worth of dead leaves that have piled up around the roofing paper, old broom, and other miscellaneous junk that’s kept in there (the door doesn’t come all the way to the ground, making access incredibly easy for small animals), and the first time I blew a fuse, I had to flip switches in each of the four breaker boxes because none of them are labeled. So re-setting my breakers has gotten kind of routine. So routine that I walked out of my apartment rather exasperated—and forgot to grab my keys.

Yep. I locked myself out of my apartment, something I haven’t done since college. And heavy gray storm clouds were moving slowly across the sky, like a hungry bear stalking its dinner. Me.

Those of you who know me will not be surprised that as soon as I realized what I had done, the first word out of my mouth was one that begins with an “f.” Those of you who know me will also be surprised that the very next thing I did was laugh. Loudly. I kept laughing for a good five minutes. What else was I gonna do?

After my short burst of absurdist mirth, I took stock. Did I have a spare key? Yes I did. In my apartment. Could I get in through a window? No, I had been running my air conditioner and all of my windows were closed and locked. Were any of my neighbors home? Elizabeth who lives above me? Nope. Rachelle who lives behind and above me? Nope. Lupe or her husband, who live directly behind me? Bingo!

I only knew Lupe and Juan through their gas bill. It had been delivered to me by mistake shortly after they moved in, so I hand-delivered it to Juan. “Hi, here’s your gas bill, it was in my mailbox.” “Thanks.” That was about the extent of my conversation with Juan.

But Lupe was very helpful. She had the maintenance guy’s number in her cell phone, dialed him for me, gave me a glass of water while I waited for him to show up. We chatted about the gas bill (which unfortunately in the winter tends to be rather large for an apartment in a house that is about 100 years old—I suspect from lack of insulation), and the hassles of parking in the street.

Half an hour later, about an hour after I had locked myself out of my apartment, Brian showed up and let me in.

“Don’t feel bad,” he said. “Elizabeth’s had to call me at least three times.”

I Killed My Television

2007-07-17T21:07:00.000-05:00

I haven’t watched television regularly since December of last year. When I moved into my new apartment that month, I thought I’d save a little cash by not hooking up cable TV. Since I can get the only two TV shows I watched regularly through iTunes, anyway, it wasn’t much of a sacrifice. And I haven’t missed it since.

It would have been easy to get cable TV hooked up. After all, I needed cable internet to be able to effectively teach my online composition courses. That costs me $60 a month, and TV only would have been an extra $40. It was tempting. I have never not been without TV. I don’t think many of us have. That damned cyclopean glass eye is in almost every living room, family room, kitchen, and bedroom in the country.

A number of things held be back, however. First, there was the money. I was only saving $40 a month, but $40 is $40, especially when I knew I would almost never be home to watch the TV I would be paying for. I might have spent the $40 if I’d had a TiVo (and not one of the vastly inferior DVRs that Comcast could provide), but the TiVo I used to have belonged to the ex, so no time-shifting for me. Third, I could actually time-shift the only two shows on television I care about these days, now that anything and everything created by Joss Whedon and/or Tim Minear is off the air; The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are both available through iTunes, for about $20 a month combined, and I can take them on my iPod and watch them during my train ride to work every morning. In the end, it was easy to kill my TV.

The television set itself is still in one piece, actually. It even still works. I needed it for a while to watch movies on. I killed cable, but not my Netflix queue (although I did dial that down to one movie at a time, limit two a month). And after I got a new wide-screen laptop with an absolutely gorgeous screen resolution, I watch movies on that. But I most emphatically do not watch regular television anymore. No slanted cable news, no stupid sitcoms, no shows I love canceled because network execs didn’t get it. I get my news from NPR and the Associated Press (via Yahoo). I get my laughs from The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. I have my favorite movies and TV shows on DVD. I read books. Non-fiction, even. I don’t need television, and I don’t miss it at all.

Summer Job

2007-07-16T20:36:00.000-05:00

I spent the summers of my teen years mowing lawns: $5 a pop for the small ones, $10 a pop for the larger ones. I was the Official Peach Street Lawnmower Man, or I would have been, had Peach been more of a street and less of a packed-dirt rut that connected Harbert Road and Red Arrow Highway. Back then, having a summer job meant independence (I got to drive Dad’s Ford Escort station wagon all by myself once I turned 16—I could fit the push lawnmower in the back) and, of course, money. I mowed a lawn, I got cash, half of which Dad insisted I put in savings. I hated it at the time, but when I finally went to college and had enough for a Macintosh LC, it all seemed worth it. But the feeling of independence the summer job gave me was paramount.

I haven’t felt the same about a summer job since.

In college I had a motley assortment of summer jobs: doing morning delivery for a bakery, working as an office peon for the Central Michigan University Health Sciences Department, stocking shelves and helping customers as a sporting goods associate at Meijer, helping maintain one of the safety systems at a nuclear power plant (it wasn’t nearly as glamorous as it might sound, or as dangerous). Some of the jobs were cool (the nuclear plant), some were hellish (I had to be to the bakery by 4 a.m. every day), but they were all means to an end—getting out of college and getting a real job.

The problem was, I didn’t really want a real job. I would have been perfectly happy as a professional student, and I prolonged college as long as I could by sticking around an extra there years to get my MA in English Language and Literature (had I been serious at all about finding a real job, I would have gotten some other kind of degree).

Random Person: “So, what’s your degree in?”

Me: “English.”

Random Person: “Oh. So you gonna teach in high school?”

Me: “Hell no. I hated high school the first time through. Why would I want to go back?’

But, the job market being what it is for someone with a degree in English, I eventually did get my high school teaching certification. The number one reason I decided setting foot in high school again wouldn’t be so bad: I’d get my summers off.

Granted, that’s one of the worst reasons to become a teacher. Teaching is about so much more than getting two or three months of free time in the summer. But I’m a die-hard outdoorsman, and the prospect of spending weeks out in the wilderness without having to coordinate with some corporate vacation schedule (or spending years accumulating enough vacation time to take the kinds of long trips I had in mind) was vastly appealing.

If you’ve been reading this blog, you know the rest of the story. I enjoyed my one summer off while it lasted, but since I didn’t know at the time that it would be my last summer off, I hardly made the most of it. After the hell that had been my first year of teaching, I figured I had earned the right to slack off for a few months.

And now I work a full-time (although temporary) job for a corporation, and while I have managed to finesse my summer hours so I work more in June in July in order to get every Friday in August off, I know it won’t be the same as having my entire summer to myself.

I do sometimes regret walking out on my students and fellow teachers halfway through my second school year. I let a lot of people down. On the upside, I saved my sanity. I’m much calmer and more relaxed these days. I don’t come home from a day of proofreading, for example, and immediately drink two glasses of strong red wine.

But on summer days when the air is warm and dry, when the sky is brilliant blue and smudged here and there with the white cotton of cumulus congestus, when the trees are replete with leaves and lawns are vibrantly verdant—on days like that, I wish I still had my summers off.

All the same, however, I’d rather have my sanity.

Re-crossing a Metaphorical Styx

2007-07-15T21:30:00.000-05:00

I’m alive.

I thought it necessary to begin that way because, as I have discovered after these many, many, months of not posting to this blog, I have a fan base. A tiny fan base made up mostly of my immediate family and a few close friends, but it’s a start. And, like fans everywhere, these people want to know when I’m going to start writing again, specifically, when I’m going to start writing in this blog again. Apparently, some of them need one more thing to distract them at work.

Therefore: I’m alive. And since I have realized that I am, indeed, alive, and have spent the past several months getting used to that idea, I now find that every so often I have something to say, or, more to the point, write. However, since I am a world-class procrastinator (having been given the rank of “Expert” by the World Procrastinator’s Society; or, at least, I will be given that rank when they finally get around to forming said society), I can always find a reason and/ or a way to put off writing. But if I can motivate myself to wake up at 5 a.m. every morning to do yoga and tai chi before going to work, if I can motivate myself to stay awake while proofreading what seems to be the same math textbook over and over and over again for up to eight hours a day, and if—most amazingly—I can motivate myself to run a little over three miles when I get home from work, if I can find the motivation to do all of these things, surely I can find the motivation to write.

And now, having used up my writerly motivation for the day, I will close this post, pick up my copy of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, and read for about 30 minutes before falling asleep. I wrote much more than this, but it’s in terribly rough shape, and I don’t have time to clean it up and make it presentable, as I have a 5 a.m. date with the Yang style short tai chi form, but rest assured, fans: more is coming.

Fun with nucleation sites

2006-06-06T10:12:00.000-05:00

Diet Coke + Mentos = soda fountain. Literally. Just watch the video.

Oh, the things I learn watching Rocketboom.

Summer job

2006-06-05T21:11:00.000-05:00

As of today, I am officially done with my pre-summer-term planning and prep for the two classes I will teach in June and July for that community college down the road from me. I always like this part of the semester: plans always look so shiny before they collide with reality and get a little disheveled. Of course, plans for college courses never get nearly as derailed as plans for high school courses, so I don't think I will have too much to worry about. If the preliminary class lists I saw today were any indication, I will only have eight students in my reading class, and only two students in my writing class. That could, of course, change during drop and add, but I don't think it will get anywhere near a full 25 students per class. Of course, I've been wrong before.

Classy Rejection

2006-05-12T19:21:00.000-05:00

You're the fantastic writer, but I'm the one who must now do some tricky but heartfelt communicating.

First off, you have our deepest thanks for the time you invested in our Reading Comprehension audition. Our projects can be complex and unusual, so they often call for an audition that is likewise. But you were quite up to the task. We knew your material would be strong and you didn't disappoint. You are a writer we like.

The bad news is that we didn't have room on this project for everyone we like, and we’re unable to offer you a position with us at this time.

The good news (at least, I hope you'll think so) is that you'll very likely hear from us again. Now we've had the pleasure of meeting you, and seeing how well you do with our specific kind of writing. That makes it much easier for us to call you for future projects. We hope we can find a better match for you soon, and we’re currently in the contract stage for a lot more work that you’ll hopefully see as right up your alley.

Thanks again for coming in to meet me and creating such a great audition. I wish you the best of luck, and hope we'll be talking again soon.

As rejection letters go, I don't think I've ever received a classier one.

To read my audition, click here.

Audition Submitted

2006-05-10T19:59:00.000-05:00

Now I sit back and wait to see how they liked it.

Nailed the Interview

2006-05-08T15:58:00.000-05:00

Now I just have to nail the audition/ writing test, and I'll have a full-time job through the end of July, maybe longer.

The Christopher Cadre

2006-05-08T09:59:00.000-05:00

As a huge Joss Whedon fan, I keep up with the fan blog Whedonesque, on which other Joss, um, enthusiasts like me keep up with all things Joss, like the new Wonder Woman Trailer.

It was probably Joss's creation and development of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that eventually led to his being tapped by Paramount to script the new Wonder Woman movie, and his success and both writer and director of Serenity that led to him being given the director's reins of WW, as well.

So Joss, and Wonder Woman, is a hot property in Hollywood right now, and it seems that She of the Golden Lasso is the role to get for young actresses these days. The script hasn't even been turned in to the studio yet, but that hasn't stopped casting rumors from running wild (for my money, I'd like to see former Firefly regular Morena Baccarin in the role).

Some sources conjecture that Whedon will opt for a young unknown to play the coveted role, and that has prompted one Atlanta actress to put together her own "cast me! cast me!" Wonder Woman Promotional Trailer.

Kudos to Clarke Wolfe for her enthusiasm and verve. Who knows, maybe she'll start a trend. But by far the BEST thing about this trailer is the crazy guy in the "newscast" at the end, none other than my old college buddy and fellow Star Wars geek Chris Burns!

After watching this trailer, I still want Morena Baccarin to play Wonder Woman, but I just as certainly think Joss should give Burns a role. Something evil. He'd like that.

Couldn't Help Myself

2006-05-07T23:22:00.000-05:00

SJ Writing is now up and running.

I thought I'd wait, but then I figured, "why?"

I have an interview with a small software company tomorrow. It's just a contract job, full-time, but not long-term, but if they called me for an interview after reading my quite audacious cover letter, then I have high hopes for this interview. They need a "great writer" (so said the Craigslist posting) to write interactive dialogue for a new computer game that teaches reading comprehension. I'm jazzed about this.

Finding a Focus

2006-05-06T17:51:00.000-05:00

I've applied to over 45 different jobs since I quit my teaching gig in March. That's a lot of resumes, a lot of cover letters, a lot of self-examination. Some of those jobs were teaching positions, but most of them were either writing or editing positions, because, the more I thought about what I really wanted to do with my time, my energy, my life, I realized that I wanted to WRITE. I got into teaching because I love to write. It has recently occured to me that that's like becoming a mechanic because you want to be a racecar driver.

So, while I'm not completely dismissing the idea of teaching at a high school again (I spent two years and several thousand dollars on a teaching certificate, after all) I have been focusing more these days on writing--and reading--than anything else.

To that end, I've decided to focus my blogging efforts, too, with at least one new blog: SJ Reading, in which I write about the things I've read or am reading--a poor blogger's literature review. I expect SJ Writing will soon follow, once I start having more things to report about my own writing efforts. If you're a fan of this blog, don't worry: it has served me well, and I don't plan on retiring it any time soon.

New E-Mail Updates Available

2006-05-06T01:32:00.000-05:00

If you want to keep up with my postings, but haven't yet figured out RSS, it is now possible to sign up for email updates. In the right-hand sidebar, just above the radio button labeled "Subscribe," there is a box. Enter your email address, click that subscribe button, verify that you do indeed want to get email updates, and soon you will be getting email each day I post something new here.

Thanks to Chris Thilk, my brother-in-law and the insane genius behind Movie Marketing Madness, for mentioning this cool FeedBurner service on his blog.

Blog Envy

2006-04-28T15:28:00.000-05:00

Apparently, rumors and speculation are still flying fast and furious around my old school that I am the author of “Fast Times at [my old school’s name spelled backwards] High,” the blog in which a teacher vented his (or her) frustrations about teaching in a soul-sucking, hope-destroying environment.

Let me make this clear: I WISH that other blog were mine; it’s not. That kind of publicity is a book or movie deal waiting to happen. I always figured I’d turn my blog into a book sooner or later, and I suppose I still could (I could title it: “Driven Crazy: Why I Quit Teaching in an Urban School After a Year and a Half”) but whomever this other blog author is has got a leg up on me: his (or her) blog has stirred up amazing amounts of conflict, and, as I used to teach my students, conflict is what makes stories interesting. In fact, it was THAT conflict which generated news, NOT the blog itself. The blog only became news when it infuriated students and teachers alike (although for different reasons, as I pointed out before). To my understanding, the other blog author only leaked his (or her) involvement in the blog to other teachers at the school, NOT to the media.

If I’m wrong about this, someone please correct me.

And for anyone who would like my old school to continue making the news: PLEASE give this blog address to the media. I would love an increased readership.

Also, anyone reading my blog has to admit that, despite my frustrations with my old school and the educational system in general, I have always taken pains to be as fair in my comments as possible. I mean, my blog never stirred up the kind of resentment “Fast Times at X High” did (in fact, as far as I know, it never upset anyone at all), and I’m sure part of that has to do with my writing style. Maybe the Trib could do a story comparing my blog to the other one, and maybe then the Trib (or some other media outlet) could do some kind of investigation into how many CPS teachers blog. And why stop with just CPS teachers? There are plenty of other teachers who blog from the trenches. Just google “teacher blog” and you get about 51,400,000 hits.

We’re not alone, we just work that way

2006-04-26T18:10:00.000-05:00

I love getting comments on my writing, especially like this one from my March 20 post (“I quit”).

You very well may be my new hero! I've been teaching in an urban school in Kansas City, Missouri, a notoriously dysfunctional school district. I left a good job as a computer programmer to "save the urban students" but have had the same experience as you -- babysitting apathetic students in a hostile environment, where every problem and low test score is blamed on the teachers. As I've tried to make it through to this June, reading your weblog has encouraged me, if for no other reason than I have seen I'm not alone.

This just suggests to me that more teachers—if not every teacher—should blog. Teacher are the only professionals who really know what is going on in the nation’s schools. Most parents don’t. Politicians certainly don’t (No Child Left Behind has its heart in the right place, but fails to address the real social issues that are the real cause of failing students). Students know, too, but by and large they are too apathetic to do anything about it—I know when I was in high school, I vowed that when my four years were up, I was NEVER going to return (a vow I, of course, broke when I started teaching in high school).

So that leaves teachers.

Teachers need to let the public know what goes on in public schools. Part of the faculty and staff reaction to that frustrated teacher’s blog (see the previous post) was a feeling that this teacher had violated some kind of code by airing his grievances in a public forum. No one is disputing that the things he says happen, happen at that school. They’re just upset that it’s now public fodder.

But why shouldn’t it be? This is a public school, after all. Maybe if people started hearing about what public schools are really like, on a daily basis, politicians would realize that No Child Left Behind isn’t the solution it’s supposed to be. What we really need is total systemic change.

Take, for example, Teacher Man.

My father, himself a 32-year veteran of public schools (first as a 6th-grade teacher, then as an elementary school principal) recently lent me his copy of Teacher Man, Frank McCourt’s memoir of his 30 years teaching in some of New York City’s toughest schools. I’m stalled on page 59. It’s just too depressing. McCourt dealt with the same problems and issues teachers are still grappling with today. Reading Teacher Man is like being back in those situations again, something I fervently never want to do again. Granted, McCourt fought through his tough beginnings to become a highly esteemed and successful teacher, so I’m hopeful the book eventually gets more upbeat. But for now, it’s just too much of a reminder of what I went through.

It’s wonderful that McCourt is being frank about his experiences teaching in New York city. But I think most people will read his stories and think “Well, that was 30 years ago.”

People need to see how little things are changing in the world of education. Sure, there are some success stories, but the cons of our antiquated educational system far outweigh the pros. And in case you don’t believe that our current system is antiquated, consider this:

The original reason schools don’t meet in the summer months is that parents would keep their children home then, anyway, to help bring in the harvest. I don’t know exact statistics for the rest of the country, but I do know that the total percent of the population that works on farms in this country is quite low-probably less than 10 percent. And I know that of all of the students in Chicago Public Schools, that percentage has got to be either zero or awfully damn close.

I loved my summer off, but that structure is archaic, as is so much of American education.

So teachers, start blogging. Start showing America what is wrong with its schools, and start suggesting ways this broken system can be fixed. If enough teachers speak up, someone’s bound to listen eventually.

Bloggers, Bloggers Everywhere

2006-04-26T17:56:00.000-05:00

It seems I wasn’t the only teacher at my school who knew how to blog.

During a conversation with a former co-worker about computer stuff (I’m still the school’s back-up tech guy, it seems) she asked me if I had seen the article in the Chicago Tribune about the teacher who had been airing the school’s dirty laundry on a blog much like mine.

I can’t believe I missed this, but thanks to the Internet and the Tribune’s searchable database of old stories, I was reading the story in minutes. Here is an excerpt:

He labeled his students "criminals," saying they stole from teachers, dealt drugs in the hallways, had sex in the stairwells, flaunted their pregnant bellies and tossed books out windows. He dismissed their parents as unemployed "project" dwellers who subsist on food stamps, refuse to support their "baby mommas" and bad-mouth teachers because their no-show teens are flunking.

He took swipes at his colleagues, too—"union-minimum" teachers, literacy specialists who "decorate their office door with pro-black propaganda," and security officers whose "loyalty is to the hood, not the school."

The author never identified himself or the school, but he apparently told some colleagues about the blog in hopes that word would get around. It did.

According to both the Tribune article and my former colleague, no one has openly admitted to authoring the blog, but most teachers and students have been quick to point fingers (my friend said that my name was brought up, until someone pointed out that there had been posts that occurred after I quit). The teacher those fingers pointed to has taken several days off school because he “fears for his safety.”

Whoever the author is, he or she took down the site this past week because of the fiercely quick and vitriolic response from students, faculty, and staff. Apparently, the one or two hard copies floating around are about 30 pages long.

That’s a lot of job dissatisfaction.

An excerpt from the blog, and some teacher reaction, courtesy of the Tribune story:

"Do you not realize that many people go home and CRY to their loved ones about what they experience here? Do you have any idea the psychological and emotional trauma that is inflicted on those who suffer because of the daily injustices and wrongdoings here? To fear for your own safety? To know that you will likely be unemployed, hated, spit on, punched, and have property destroyed? This is not a one person blog. This is a building speaking for the suffering it sees every day."

One . . . teacher publicly challenged this view, both in a signed posting and in numerous conversations with her English classes.

"Although many of our students adopt tough facades and insist they are grown, they are still children: sensitive children who still crave guidance, encouraging words and positive reinforcement. . . .Was the author present when students, having read the blog, dejectedly hung their heads with pained, angry tears stinging their eyes?"

Wow. I almost wished I still worked there. Then again, I hear that the teachers are forming into camps, taking sides on the issue of this blog. And I know hostile glances would be directed my way: about three months ago, someone put hard copies of my blog in everyone’s mailbox. At the time, I got nothing but positive comments about it (although only three fellow teachers came forward to say anything). I learned later that my authorship was pretty much common knowledge around the school.

But back to this other blog. I gotta agree with this last excerpt I’ve posted here. And even the students, faculty, and staff all agreed that the incidents described in the blog do, unfortunately, happen at this school. But what really set people off was the perception that the blogger was making racist comments when he described his students as “project-dwelling welfare cases” or something to that effect.

And here’s where I make my own incendiary remarks:

I would be among the first and loudest to proclaim that not every student at this school is on welfare on living in a housing project. In fact, I’m sure most of my (former) students don’t fit this stereotype at all. But their behavior certainly doesn’t allow much room for anyone not familiar with them to have any other ideas about them.

Guess what, kids, the world is a harsh place. This teacher wrote what he wrote out of frustration born of an immediate familiarity with the terrible social and educational conditions at the school. His comments were spurred by emotion. I’ve said similar things in the privacy of my own home many times, and for the same reasons—pure, unadulterated frustration with the situation of that school, and with urban education in particular.

But there are plenty of people out there who make those kinds of observations casually, not based on experiences like the ones the teacher described, but based on habit. And until those upset students start voicing their objections and exceptions in rational, coherent, correctly-spelled, profanity-free, well-reasoned, standardized English, nothing is going to change that.

This is where I almost wish I still taught there. I’d do a whole unit: “Being Black in America.” I’d have the students document their lives with their own blogs, by taking pictures with the school-owned digital cameras, by making short videos (as soon as we got a video camera). I’d have them bring in their music, tape TV shows with black characters, magazine and newspaper articles by and about blacks, and I’d make lessons around the messages these things are sending, the stereotypes they either break down or reinforce. I’d encourage them to show the world what they wanted the world to see about their lives. Of course, this is all easy enough to say now that I’m not teaching anymore. But I’m still enough of a teacher to see the perfect opportunity to get them writing about these issues, to get them seriously thinking about their place in the world.

But still, that’s not enough to make me want to go back to the kind of environment this blogger describes. When I remember how bad it was, I’m glad I’m out, because until the system undergoes major changes, no amount of testing or money is going to make schools like this better.

Financial Incentives vs. Good Work Environment: Which Would You Pick?

2006-04-02T11:33:00.000-05:00

Recent data compiled by the Center on Education Policy in Washington shows that many schools defined as “failing” by No Child Left Behind have been doubling the amount of time students spend in reading and math classes. This makes sense: if the students don’t have the reading and math skills, they could use more time practicing them.

There has been an outcry among some educators over this, however: if schools are doubling up on math and reading, they must be getting rid of other programs, other classes. This is the attitude today's NYT editorial takes issue with.

The editorial points out that the data from the Center on Education Policy doesn’t support the idea that music or art classes are getting cut by the score, or that science instruction is somehow falling behind. If the students don’t have the basic skills they need to succeed in other classes, the editorial says, then those skills should be given more time in school. “The real crime is that millions of them are still being passed along without mastering basic language skills.” Amen.

The editorial next puts forth the idea that No Child Left Behind will dramatically change education if it forces schools to stop hiring sub-par, under-qualified teachers and to start finding ways of attracting expert teachers—something that isn’t happening all that rapidly. “In this school year only about a fifth of districts say they have intensified efforts to find expert teachers for high-needs schools and only about 5 percent are offering financial incentives to attract good teachers to those schools. That will need to change if children in poor neighborhoods are to be given the chance to succeed.”

Great idea: pay teachers more money to work in high-needs schools. Financial incentives will undoubtedly work to attract teachers, and NCLB mandates that schools only hire “highly-qualified” teachers. But here’s the reality: teachers who want to work in high-needs schools with high-needs children will work there anyway, financial incentives or no. Many of these people are excellent, highly-motivated and highly-qualified teachers.

Here’s more reality: the more excellent the teacher, the more job prospects that teacher has. For many teachers—heck, for many employees, period—the work environment is as important as, sometimes more important than, the money to be made. Teachers who can get jobs in better schools will get jobs in better schools, even if those schools pay less.

NCLB is a well-intentioned law. It will undoubtedly improve some things about education, if only that teacher-education colleges will have no choice but to start churning out “highly-qualified” teachers. In a few years, every teacher who gets certified from an accredited institution will meet those requirements. But what NCLB fails to take into account is that poorly-qualified teachers are only part of the problem. As long as guns and knives and violence and gangs and all of the other stereotypically bad things are present in poor schools, good teachers will continue to seek jobs elsewhere, financial incentives be damned.

Looking at Culture

2006-03-27T19:39:00.000-06:00

Orlando Patterson wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times on March 26 called " A Poverty of the Mind."

In it, he ponders the taboo against looking at culture as the reason for the alienation of young black males from the American mainstream. Such social issues, he says, are commonly looked at only through the lens of socioeconomic factors, which fail to adequately explain the problem, or suggest any ways of effectively dealing with it.

Socioeconomics cannot explain why poor schools pump out so many illiterate black males; they cannot explain why poverty often leads to drugs and crime, since not everyone who lives in poverty turns to those things--but black males do so in overwhelmingly large numbers.

Patterson cites a number of reputable studies and a few compelling anecdotes before coming to his conclusion: in order to explain and then solve these problems, we have to look critically at culture, especially the subculture of young black men, to explain these things. Such an examination will not inherently "blame the victim" as opponents of this approach fear. The issues are too complex for such a simple outcome. This approach will, however, shed much light on what matters to these young black men who feel that the only rewards they can hope to reap from life are those that they find through their own subculture.

Culture is a sensitive topic, especially as it relates to the black-white, rich-poor divide in this country. But Patterson makes a compelling case that to ignore it is to ignore the root of the problem.

Support

2006-03-20T18:57:00.000-06:00

The support I’ve been getting from friends, family, and (former) co-workers has been phenomenal. When I tell them I’ve quit, the most common thing they say is “congratulations.” The second most common response is “wow.”

In fact, one of those former co-workers just called to say I will be missed. I miss them, too, I even miss a few of the kids, but I’m better off taking Ralph Waldo Emerson’s advice: “Whoso would be a man must be a non-conformist . . . What I must do is what concerns me, not what the people think.”

The more I kept repeating those quotes to my students (which was everything we read of “Self-Reliance”—and even that seemed to be too much) the more Emerson seemed to be speaking to me. On March 16, I finally listened.

When I was packing up my things during 8th period, one of my good students, D, said to me “You know you’re just teaching me to run away.” I wish I’d been quick enough to quote Emerson to him. Or perhaps Thoreau: “The only obligation I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think is right.” I was really looking forward to teaching “Civil Disobedience,” but I probably would have been more frustrated than elevated. I still got my fix, though: “Civil Disobedience” was my “comfort reading” this weekend.

I quit

2006-03-20T12:31:00.000-06:00

I finally did it. I quit. I no longer work for Chicago Public Schools. And I feel great.

Quitting my job has given me an enormous positive rush: the dammed stress of a year and a half finally burst forth, and the release was cathartic.

Actually saying the words “I quit” out loud was a huge rush—it was like a tidal wave of frustration had finally reached the shore, and carried away all of the detritus of inertia that kept me at CPS; it carried me right out the door.

Sure, I’m a little worried about the eventual effects of my decision on my bank account, but money is less important to me than sanity. My fiancée and I moved in together in December so that I could quit then, if I wanted to (she and my counselor have been suggesting I leave this “toxic environment” since October). I thought I could tough it out until the end of the year. In the end, I refused to accept the compromises I would have to make, personally and professionally, to survive CPS until June.

It wasn’t that Thursday was any worse than any other day: it was actually about the same as every other day, and that was the problem; the students weren’t getting my lesson, they weren’t paying any attention at all, except to yell profanity or other negative language across the room at each other. Nothing I did—continuing to teach, asking them to stop, writing up the continuous offenders—had any effect. It never has any effect, and I realized it never would have any effect. Sure, the nightmare would end in June, but until then, I’d have to endure 57 more days of this. And that was 57 days too many.

I could have just taken Friday off. I could have taken every Friday off from then until the end of the school year. I was planning on taking another “sick day vacation” toward the end of May. A lot of people do it. It’s how they cope. It’s how they manage to endure this job long enough to get paid, and maybe reach one or two students in the meantime.

There were a few students I was making a difference with, but the personal cost got to be too high: you go into a burning building enough times to save others stranded in the conflagration, and eventually the flames will get you, too.

I’ve inhaled enough smoke. It’s time to save myself. I gave it my best shot. I did good work while I was there. I would rather quit now than fake my way through the rest of the year. I got out before I burned out.

Aphoristic Wisdom

2006-02-05T10:48:00.000-06:00

This semester I'm teaching American Literature. While I'm not going through the canon chronologically because I opted for a thematic approach, I nevertheless threw Benjamin Franklin in the first week, because the excerpt from his autobiography in our textbook fits nicely with the theme of this unit: Identity (the other two themes will be Rebellion and Survival).

We also read some aphorisms from "Poor Richard's Almanac," and before I had students write their own, more modern bits of "Street Wisdom" and "School Wisdom," I asked them to pick three aphorisms from "Poor Richard's" and translate them into something more modern-sounding.

One girl chose to work with "He that lies down with dogs, shall rise up with fleas."

Her translation: "Practice safe sex."

She got an A.

Dan Ryan Dread

2006-02-02T22:23:00.000-06:00

Massive lane reductions for construction on the Dan Ryan Expressway (I-94) start in March. I take the DR to and from work every day. Half hour in the morning, 45 minutes to an hour coming back.

Halving the lanes (from six to three in each direction) suggests a doubling of travel time. I could avoid the expressway altogether and take Halsted all the way from my place to school, but the times I've done that in the past, the trip took an hour or more.

I'm gonna hate March. And April. And May. And half of June.

Teaching Interest

2006-02-01T07:00:00.000-06:00

I have often said--vehemently, in private and in public--that I'm basically teaching grade-school skills, and that I don't WANT to teach grade school, that I am not TRAINED to teach grade school. Add to that the toxic environment I teach in every day, and I end up making myself sick with stress and discontent.

But then I think about the maybe half-dozen kids I have really been able to reach, the ones who want to learn so badly that they will fight (sometimes literally) to learn what I have to teach them.

When I think of these students, I realize that I do love TEACHING. It's the baby-sitting I can't stand. And that I'd teach underwater basket-weaving if a student wanted to learn it badly enough.

In college, most students quickly learn that the subject is less important than the professor. In other words, if the professor is good, you'll love the class, regardless of the subject.

In high school, the kids don't have a choice in what teachers they get, and the teachers don't have a choice in the students they get.

I'm not really teaching English. I'm teaching--or trying to teach--the ability to get interested in learning. Maybe my professors at Michigan State University said a thing or two about that. I'd have to check my notes, because I was most interested in learning how to teach English. The majority of my classes were structured around teaching English, anyway. I know for damn sure I never took a class called "How to teach enthusiasm for learning." There was that ONE classroom management class, which didn't really prepare me for Chicago AT ALL. (Most of my own personal enthusiasm for learning came from my parents and my loving and caring home environment, and I certainly can't directly affect that for any of my students).

And anyway, if the profs at MSU did say anything about that, I probably let it go right by me, because (in my "I've taught English for five years at the college level already what do I need this for?" hubris) I was focused on English. And I learned a lot of great strategies and techniques for teaching English, strategies that work wonderfully when the students are even half-attentive and half-interested. And I've got some students who want to learn so badly they will risk starting a fight in telling some loud-mouthed jackass to shut up and be quiet. So for them, my stuff works.

The real hat trick, of course, is teaching kids how to want to learn. And I'll be damned if anyone has ever come up with a consistent and reliable way to do that. I used to think it had to do with the way I present my subject. Now, I'm not sure at all anymore.

But that doesn't mean I don't still want to . . .

2006-01-22T21:17:00.000-06:00

The countdown has begun: only 21 more weeks of school left this year.

Although each school day does have its bright spots, I spend the majority of my time at school standing at the front of the classroom, providing instruction while most of my students talk about the big fight last week, who is going to beat up whom today, doing each other’s hair, or staring off into space.

The bright spots are caused by simple acts, like when Sammy asks me if I’m feeling OK because I’ve got that “I hate my job” scowl on my face, and I can tell he’s really concerned about me. Or when Tina asks me for help on an assignment because she’s really trying to write the paragraphs I’ve asked her to write, but she just doesn’t have the skills. Or when Jimmy, who has spent most of the year sleeping at his desk, stays alert and awake for the entire 90-minute period and contributes interesting and thoughtful comments to our discussion. Or when Zander stays after school to ask my advice about girls. These are pleasant interactions, even if some of them occur during a class period in which most of the students are cursing at each other.

I’m happy, then, that a local community college (LCC) offered me a position as adjunct faculty for spring semester. I was offered the job last Friday, and classes began the following Tuesday, but the short notice has not made teaching willing, enthusiastic adults any less enjoyable. The department chair told me I wouldn’t make great money doing this. I told him I was more interested in this being a foot in the door. When things get really frustrating at my high school, I just cling to the hope that next year the LCC will offer me a full-time job.

Of course, if I stop teaching on the South Side, I won’t have nearly as many sad/funny stories to tell anymore, which is one of the best parts of teaching here.

For example: the other day, some students were talking about drinking and getting drunk, and Sammy, one of the students I have really managed to connect with, said something like “You know those white motherfuckers are always getting drunk.” I looked at him, but he apparently didn’t realize I had overheard him, because he asked me “Mr. Richardson, do you ever get drunk?” To which I replied “I don’t know, Sammy. Am I a white motherfucker?”

Everyone had a good laugh at that.

Then there was the day when I played the last third of Martin Luther King, Jr’s “I have a dream speech.” During our discussion, I asked the students if they knew what Stone Mountain in Georgia was, since MLK references it in his speech. No one knew, so I explained that it is a mountain in Georgia that has the images of Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis carved into it. No reaction. I asked the class if they knew who those people were. They didn’t.

Only 21 more weeks to go . . .

Can't Quit Now

2005-12-20T21:53:00.000-06:00

The rollercoaster is never-ending. Today I was frustrated by students who came to class halfway through and then expected me cater to their needs, to basically start the lesson over because they had missed half of it.

In short, for a few minutes there, it was another “I want to quit before next semester” day. I’m just getting sick and tired of this crap and other crap like it, and the attendant bad attitudes, day after day after day after day.

Then, at the end of the day, “Xander,” who is getting one of the two solid A’s in my class, who is always polite, who never talks in class, who tries to stump me with Star Wars trivia, gave me a Christmas card envelope.

“Thanks, Xander.”

“You’re welcome Mr. Richardson. I’m not going to be here the next three days, and I didn’t want to forget your present.”

“Present?”

“Yeah, there’s a gift certificate inside. I know you like to read, so . . .”

“Xander . . . you didn’t have to . . .”

“I know. See ya Mr. Richardson. Have a good break”

I still get a little choked up, thinking about this. At the time, I had to go back into my classroom because, um . . . I had something in my eye.

Inside the envelope: a Christmas card, and a $25 gift Borders gift card. “Thank you from the Jackson family.”

How can I possibly walk out in the middle of the year now?

If the shoe fits . . .

2005-12-13T20:25:00.000-06:00

This story in today’s Chicago Tribune discusses a report that “analyzed arrest numbers from 1999 to 2003 [in Chicago Public Schools], which showed that 75 percent of all children arrested over the five-year period were African-American though they make up 50 percent of the district's enrollment. The district is 38 percent Latinos, who account for 20 percent of arrests.”

Of course, the students think the cops and school employees are just way too strict, and the raw statistics would seem to point to some kind of basic inequality inherent in the system.

The only inherent inequality or disparity I see, from my perspective as a teacher in an on-probation CPS school, is, as F. Scott Fitzgerald put it in The Great Gatsby, “a sense of the fundamental decencies is parceled out unequally at birth.”

When Nick Carraway repeats this snobbish suggestion of his snobbish father, he readily admits that he, like his father before him, is being rather snobbish.

But the fact remains that there are serious social inequalities perpetuated in this country, but these do not start at school. They start in the home. If the student even has a steady, reliable, safe home, which many do not. Without a solid support structure, how are these students supposed to learn how to be decent to each other and to other people?

Every day, I see example after example of young people who either don’t know basic human decency or just don’t care.

Yes, most of the students I see every day are black, but anyone who takes even a simple anecdotal look at just about any other urban school can obviously see that the conditions that lead to these students getting arrested at school are not unique to one ethnic group.

My friend Nathan teaches at a mostly Hispanic (by way of the Dominican Republic) high school in New York City (Harlem, to be exact). He recently sent out a mass email to let all of his friends know how he’s doing. Here is an excerpt:

“One of the most important things I've learned is that girls don't get into physical fights as often as boys, but when they do, there is no limit to their fury. Having had to break up fights of both kinds in the last two weeks, I would choose to separate two boys instead of two girls any day. (it is disturbing to see footlong fistfulls of hair, and torn clothes and scattered bead necklaces as the wreckage of an altercation).”

THIS is why schools like CPS have a zero-tolerance policy. These kids can go from zero to ass-kicking literally in the time it takes to blink. Just yesterday, I had one student slap another full across the face because he had taken a book off of her desk—a classroom book she wasn’t even using at the time.

Oh, one other thing: most of the cops and administrators (that I know of, anyway) in CPS are black, just like the kids who are complaining that the cops and administrators are too handcuff-happy.

This is not a racial thing. This is a socioeconomic thing.

And while we’re on the subject of crime, this link is just too good not to include, even though I know my mother will probably get one or two more gray hairs when she checks out www.Chicagocrime.org.

It’s a Googlemaps hack that maps out crimes reported to the Chicago Police Department. The database is searchable by crime type, street, date, police district, ZIP code, ward, and specific location. I subscribe to the RSS feed of the block my school is on. In the unlikely event that my boss reads this, I don’t want to antagonize anyone by posting the link to my school. But those of you who know where I work can find the address online easily enough.

Shoved

2005-12-07T21:01:00.000-06:00

Today was actually a good day. Classes were running more or less smoothly, some learning was actually occurring. Not a lot, but some.

And then came 7th period.

Mitchell walks in with his CD player. I ask him to put it away. He sits down, keeps listening to it. It’s sitting on his desk, in plain view, so I grab it. He clutches at it. I say “You want to fight about this until it breaks or give it to me?” He lets go, puts his left hand on my chest, and shoves. It was like a mosquito shoving a boulder, but still, Mitchell put his hand on my chest and shoved me in anger.

I spent most of the next 90 minutes in the police room on the first floor, filing a police report and talking with Mitchell’s mother.

He’s not a bad kid, really, he just . . . but still, I can’t have students shoving me with impunity, so I filed a police report.

Interestingly enough, however, he wasn’t led away in handcuffs, which I fully expected. I think someone dropped the ball on this one, but I’ll find out more tomorrow. At the very least Mitchell needs a few days suspension.

Calm Evenings

2005-12-06T23:49:00.000-06:00

The secret, I think, is learning how not to care.

A psychologist or social worker or counselor would describe it as being responsible TO my students as opposed to being responsible FOR them, but I like the nihilism of the not caring. Call it my punk rock attitude toward my job.

Telling myself that I don’t care (which isn’t entirely true, of course, but there are reasons for my self-deception: read on) helps me keep a psychological distance from my job that lets me feel human in the hours I’m not at school.

So these last two nights, I’ve definitely felt free, unshackled by worries about work. The school will still be there tomorrow. My students will still be there tomorrow (well, the ones who show up, anyway). I’ve done a reasonable amount of planning and preparing. I could do more, of course. I could plan for every contingency and freak accident; I could go to Kinko’s and run off dozens of “just-in-case” worksheets; I could grade a few more papers or read a few more articles about the culture of poverty and how it affects students.

I could do all of this, but I’d rather spend 30 minutes on my ski machine. I’d rather spend 20 minutes doing tai chi or yoga, or both. I’d rather take time to enjoy a hot cup of green tea while I chat on line with my fiancé about how, in a few weeks, we won’t have to chat on line in the evenings anymore because we’ll be living together. I’d rather mail a friend a couple of books I think he’ll like.

I’d rather do all of these things, so that when I get frustrated with my students tomorrow, as I’m sure I will, I can think “I have something to look forward to when the day is over.” I can’t entirely escape days like the one last week where I wanted to walk out on the spot (I had at least a dozen of those last year, and probably half a dozen so far this year), but I can embrace the things, like exercise and meditation and writing in this blog, that provide me with a sense of peace.

And I’m working on carrying that peace with me.

Today, for example, I had an exchange with my students that went something like this:

ME: There are two parts to this standardized test. One is 20 minutes long, and the other is 35 minutes long. We’ll take both parts today. Don’t worry about how well you do. The test is designed to measure how successful I have been in teaching you, so—

STUDENT (shouted): Are we taking both tests today?

At this point, after having dealt with this kind of rudeness all day long, I got mad. I could feel the angry retort swell up in my throat like hot bile. And then I could see it, a red wave crashing from my head down my torso, swirling around in my gut for half a shallow breath, then cresting again over my head before I . . . watched it go with the deep breath I had reflexively taken the moment that student interrupted me.

I shouldn’t describe it as not caring, but it sounds so much more dramatic than simply “letting go,” the phrase the Buddhists and Taoists and psychologists and counselors and such like to use. Then again, I don’t know why I need any more drama in my life, unless it’s the kind that comes on DVD.

Dealing with this kind of aggravation minute-to-minute—sometimes second-to-second—has never been my strong suit. My mother thought I was going to have a heart attack before I was 20. My father . . . well, we had lots of talks when I was a kid about controlling my temper.

Over Thanksgiving, Lisa, my mother, and I went to see “Good Night, and Good Luck,” George Clooney’s movie about Edward R. Murrow’s 1954 stand against Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Communist witch hunts. As director, Clooney chose to use music not to underscore the emotions of the characters (and in this taught film, the emotions, while rarely discussed, are always clearly running as high as the stakes) but very sparingly, and only during important scenic transitions. For example, when Edward R. Murrow is defending his journalistic choices to the man who signs his checks and stands a very real chance of getting fired or at least censured, there is no ominous bass rumbling under the words—there are only the words and the actor’s faces to convey the emotion and meaning of the scene. Clooney wanted to make the audience listen and watch carefully, because he wants you to think carefully about the idea of journalistic integrity and bravery and all of those high ideals that Murrow embodied and fought for. So the people sitting behind us in the movie theater who kept up with a steady stream of loud whispers to each other were obviously missing the point.

I noticed them, sure (how could I not?). I was annoyed, certainly (I take movie-watching very seriously, especially when the movie is serious). But it was Lisa who turned around and shushed them. Would I have eventually done the same? Maybe. But compared to what I deal with on a daily basis, it’s easy to let that stuff go.

And another thing . . .

2005-12-01T22:21:00.000-06:00

My boss told me the engineer's response to the faculty restroom lock problem was "these doors are built for honest people."

In other words, there isn't a new and improved door lock in the works for the second-floor men's restroom.

It's not just my students that drive me crazy around here.

The best-laid plans . . .

2005-12-01T22:19:00.000-06:00

Today I got so frustrated with my second class that I actually packed up my bag, turned off my computer, and readied myself to walk out the door and go home. I hadn’t worked out if I was ever going to come back, but I knew for damn sure I wasn’t coming in tomorrow.

It’s not that there was a fight in my class today, or three false fire alarms, or that anyone suggested they would hit me if I didn’t let them leave my classroom. It’s just that I’m getting tired of teaching 3rd-graders who inhabit 10th-grader bodies. Most of them come to class late, and then try to argue that they are on time—even though the bell rang maybe 20 minutes ago. They break into song—loud song—in the middle of my instruction. They talk amongst themselves while I explain the assignment, and then ask me later what they are supposed to be doing. They come to class without a pen, and then ask to go to their locker to get one. They walk to the door and stand there, chatting with people in the hallway who should be in class. I could go on and on, but just the memory of their rude and inconsiderate behavior makes my blood pressure rise.

To be fair, not all of my students are like this. In fact, individually, most of them are quite pleasant. But get them into a group, and it becomes apparent that they thrive on chaos. When they are at their worst, it’s like I’m being worried at by a pack of rabid dogs, who will take turns nipping and biting and tearing away my flesh until I collapse in a dizzy, bloody, exhausted heap, just waiting to get my throat ripped out.

My second class today was like this. I can’t even remember details, just the emotions: the frustration, the anger, the sadness, the depression, the almost overwhelming urge to slap them around until they will sit still and listen. The fourth time someone asked me to explain the assignment to them in a tone that accused me of never having explained it in the first place, I clammed up, sat at my desk, and got out my dog-eared copy of Dan Simmon’s Ilium. It’s a comfort book. I read it in something like two days over the summer—all 725 trade paper back pages of it. I bored into the book like a badger into its den. I was pissed, and I wasn’t coming out.

At first, nobody noticed. And then students started asking me questions. When I didn’t respond—didn’t look up, didn’t answer, didn’t move except to turn the page—then they noticed. And the classroom got kind of quiet, although not dead silent. To hell with ‘em, I thought.

But I couldn’t curb the teacher impulse in me. I wanted to make these kids understand . . . anything. I tried to explain that I was frustrated because I love to read and I want to share that with them and—well, then another late student knocked on the door and screwed my litany all to hell. I should have just given up and gone back to reading. Instead, I started exchanging emails with Lisa about the wisdom of quitting before we were living together, before I found a new job. Yeah, it wouldn’t be wise, but dammit I just wanted out of this madness.

That’s when I turned off my computer and put Ilium and my water bottles in my pack. I was ready to leave.

Of course, I chickened out. I stayed, and stayed furious. Furious at these kids for acting like kindergarteners. Furious at their parents for raising them that way. Furious at a society that would allow the kind of poverty that shapes parents to raise their kids that way. Just furious, a cold, focused fury that kept repeating, over and over in my mind I need to leave, I need to leave, I need to leave.

Class finally ended; I got to take my lunch. It went by too quickly: when the bell for my next class rang, I was immediately filled with dread and loathing. Damn it all, I’d just have to stand up and teach, barrel my way through 90 minutes and screw anyone who didn’t want to follow along.

Class began. Then the students showed up. I gave some instruction, they talked amongst themselves. I gave an assignment, they kept talking. I tried to review the assignment after 10 minutes, they kept talking. At this point, I was so frustrated, so disappointed that I hadn’t at least gone home during lunch, that I whipped off a quick email to my boss: “I’m not coming in tomorrow, CR.” At least now I had a day of job-hunting to look forward to.

I handed out another assignment. They kept talking. I explained the assignment. They kept talking. One or two of them asked questions about the first assignment. Then others asked for their make-up work from two days ago. I ignored them and moved on to The Giver. My lesson plans stated that we’d be on chapter 9 by Friday. Some students are still on page 1. I explained that I was going to read to them for a little while, to make sure they all got the same start, to make sure they were all on the same page. Then I started reading.

Most of them just kept talking, but “Daryl,” at least, was following along word for word in his copy of The Giver. I read for him, to him, directing my voice directly at him from the front of the room. I would periodically stop to ask a clarifying question, to make sure they were keeping up with me. Daryl would answer, and I’d keep reading. Then I noticed that J’rell was also following along. I moved to the back of the room so they could hear me better as I read page after page. After about 20 minutes of my reading, answering Daryl’s questions, discussing my answers with Daryl and J’rell (who had read the book in 7th grade, like most students around here do) Erin moved from her desk near the loud talking group of girls to a desk near Daryl, J’rell, and me. She was actively following along. She was asking questions, making comments.

I kept reading. I read for 30 minutes. I stopped, looked at the clock. Standard operating procedure is to move on to a different part of the lesson during the final 20 minutes of class, but I was on a roll, so I asked Daryl and J’rell and Erin if they wanted to keep going. They said yes immediately.

So I kept reading. And by then, most of the rest of the sometime-almost-overpowering chatter had died down, and a few other students were following along. Of course, at least three were sleeping, and three had walked out, but all I really cared about at that point was reading.

With five minutes to go, I stopped, asked someone to put the books away, and then Erin looked up at me and said “Mr. Richardson, can we do this again tomorrow?”

Dammit, I thought, now I have to come in tomorrow.

And that good feeling lasted until 15 minutes after class was over, when Shantice stopped by to get her grade report and do some of her missing work.

On the one hand, I was glad to see that she wanted to take some responsibility for her grade and work to change the F it had fallen to. On the other hand, her grade would never have fallen so far and she wouldn’t have had to stay after school if she had just paid a little attention when we did these assignments in class. This garish juxtaposition of wisdom and idiocy drives me crazy. I think it’s called “being a teenager,” but having a name for it doesn’t make it any easier for me to deal with.

While Shantice did her work, I went downstairs to punch out and ran into my boss. We started chatting, she opened the email I had sent, and worked her way around to convincing me to come in tomorrow. I don’t really want to. I could use the day off. But, well, like my boss said, it’s only one more day . . .

Besides, I forgot my 40-gig external hard drive on my desk at school, and I don’t trust my students to leave it there until Monday.

Facutly restroom update

2005-11-19T11:45:00.000-06:00

I got an email from the principal in charge of the building last night (as opposed to the principal who is just in charge of the Achievement Academy)--he says the building engineer will fix the lock on the restroom within the week.

Facutly restroom = teachers only. Not around here.

2005-11-18T12:45:00.000-06:00

While I was using the men's faculty restroom on the 2nd floor today, at the beginning of 3rd period, a group of four or five male students jimmied the lock and entered the restroom. I know they jimmied it, because I made sure the door locked behind me. However, I have also noticed that, with about half a dozen turns of the doorknob, it is still possible to open the door, locked or not. And even if the knob and lock worked properly, it is still possible to open that door with a credit card or an ID.

When I left the bathroom stall, I said "This is a faculty restroom, get out." The boys argued in a smug way before they eventually left, but I had to tell them three more times to leave.

I don't want to think about what would have happened had this group of boys decided to argue with me in a threatening manner. They were, after all, standing between me and the only door. Most teachers would just ignore the students and walk out, sending the implicit message that they can do whatever they want to around here. I put up with enough crap in my classroom--I'd like to at least be able to pee in peace around here.

And this is to say nothing of the sanitation issues that arise when students have access to the men's facutly restroom. There isn't a day I go in there I don't have to clean the toilet seat before I use it. Yesterday, I saw yellow liquid in the sink (it sat there because that sink is plugged and drains very slowly). My guess was that students are now urinating in the sink.

Obviously, the door on the men's faculty restroom on the second floor needs to be fitted with a lock that is more tamper-proof than the one currently installed.

Most of this post is also an email I sent to my boss. The second such one in two weeks. I trust my boss to fix this, but it's not all up to her. This is, after all, a very large bureacracy, and when the wheels turn at all, they turn very slowly.

"Virgil" update

2005-11-13T22:55:00.000-06:00

Remember that student who refused to give me his cell phone, the one I called "Virgil"? Well, my worries that his refusal would undermine my authority seem to have been largely unfounded. The students who refuse to heed my authority would do so (and do) even if they didn't witness Virgil's defiance. The students who would respect my authority anyway still respect it.

Also, Virgil is in jail. Or the juvenile school where they handcuff students to the desks. If there is even a difference. He's been there for almost two months. I can't say the lack of Virgil in my class has made my class a paradise, but his absence has meant I have one less defiant and/or apathetic student to clash wills with on a daily basis.

I hear he's coming back when he gets out. That should be fun.

Clueless

2005-11-08T22:39:00.000-06:00

CPS doesn’t call them “Parent-teacher conferences.” CPS calls it “Report Card Pick-Up Day.” The parents have to come into the school between 1 p.m. and 6 p.m. to get the report card and talk with the student’s teachers. There are no classes this day, which happens twice a year, right after report cards come out.

It’s a day when, first and foremost, I can sleep in. I don’t have to struggle to manage a class. I get to talk with parents face-to-face, which is something I am exceedingly good at. I’m not being immodest. Well, maybe immodest, but I’m not exaggerating. My mentor teacher during my student-teaching days complimented me on how well I handled some of the most demanding parents in the state (this was in rich district, where many parents would punish their children for getting an A instead of a full A). My fiancée overheard me on the phone one day telling a parent about a time I referred to her son’s actions in class in a slightly less than professional way (I said he was acting like a dick, which he was). When I explained what her son had been doing, she completely agreed with me. Lisa was floored that I could finesse such a situation and come out smelling like roses.

So report-card pickup is usually a good day. I’ve been trying to figure out why this one was such a downer, and I think I have it boiled down to one phrase I kept saying over and over all night long: “if your child would just come to class . . .”

While this is the first time I have spoken with some parents, there are some that I have seen before. One such parent was the mother of “Kirk,” who was astounded when I called her last month to tell her Kirk had missed an entire week’s worth of my class. “I don’t know how that can be, I drop him off at 7:45 every morning.”

Well, the student advocates did some sniffing around, and caught Kirk coming into school just before 8 a.m., MAYBE sticking around for his first class (mine) or, more likely, sneaking out another door. But Kirk is clever. Since his mother comes back to school at 3 p.m. to pick him up (she’s worried about his safety), he makes sure to be outside the school waiting for her at 2:55.

And it’s not like Kirk is having trouble in my class. When he shows up, he’s quiet, he does his work, he gets good grades. But since he rarely shows up, he can’t do the work, and he ends up failing.

There are many students who make my day with their absence. Kirk isn’t one of them. He seems intelligent and well-socialized. I have absolutely no idea why he chooses to miss so much school.

Kirk’s mother has known about his sly school-skipping for weeks, but whatever she does at home to discourage him obviously isn’t working. When I was talking with her this evening, I could tell she kept waiting for me to give her some kind of magic solution to her son’s behavior. Believe me, I wanted to delve into her parenting practices, find out what she was doing and not doing to influence her son’s life, to point out to her that she is expecting her son to act like an adult when he clearly is not capable of doing so (I want to say this to a LOT of parents).

But I don’t want to attack my best ally in the fight to save this kid’s future. Besides, I’m not the school counselor or social worker. I am neither credentialed, qualified, nor paid to assist parents with their child-rearing skills. So I make my phone calls, document my conversations, and feel more like a truant officer or secretary than a teacher. When Kirk fails, when he misses so many days of school that his mother is taken to court, my butt, at least, is covered. It’s cynical and sad and unfortunate, but that’s the way it is.

Fire?

2005-11-07T15:21:00.000-06:00

Two fire alarms today. Both false, as far as I know. This makes three in the past week.

Oh, and while the students and teachers were outside, waiting to come back in, there were at least two fights, one during each false alarm.

OK, to be fair, the second one wasn't really a fight: it was one young man who REALLY wanted to fight another young man. His ire did not fade, even with three security guards trying to restrain him/ calm him down.

Never a dull moment here.

Attrition

2005-11-07T12:26:00.000-06:00

The Achievement Academy has been short three math teachers--two for the freshmen, one for the sophomores--since September 6, when school started. We got by on subs for a while, and then, three weeks ago, a new sophomore math teacher was finally hired.

He quit last week.

Apparently, he left a voicemail in the main office at 5:30 a.m. last Thursday: I'm not coming in today, and I'm not coming back, period.

On the one hand, I feel like some kind of Iron Man: I've mangaed to last here for over a year.

On the other hand, I'm envious of what must be a more peaceful time in his life. This Iron Man is getting rusty, and his frequent attempts at polish are getting harder and harder to maintain.

Payday

2005-11-07T00:00:00.000-06:00

After a day like Thursday, I was all set to call in sick on Friday. Luckily, Friday was professional development day, which meant teachers got time to finish calculating their 10-week grades and enter them into the official computer record. There were also meetings.

After the Achievement Academy’s meeting, our new principal gave us all an orange 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper on which appeared in 24-point font: "You have worked so hard this week that you deserve an extra pay day. Please check your mailbox." And in 14-point font below that: "There is nothing that is done in the open or in secret that is not seen or known about . . . ." And below that, in 12 point: "Please know that all of your hard work does not go unnoticed."

Of course, I zeroed in on the pay day part right away. An extra payday? Since there was no way we were getting any kind of a bonus, maybe we were getting a free day off? Maybe in our mailboxes was a note saying “You’ve been working hard, so take a day off. Let me know what day you want to de-stress, and I won’t count it as a sick day.”

I’ve been having a lot of bad days lately, so I was thinking big.

My initial reaction to the Payday candy bar in my mailbox was one of disappointment. I felt like I had been teased and let down. But when I stripped all of the ambiguities of the message away, and looked at this gesture for what it was, a show of support and appreciation from our new principal, I was happy.

After all, we never got anything like this last year. And it’s the thought that counts.

A fight + an act of kindness = my emotional breakdown

2005-11-03T22:45:00.000-06:00

“Errol” came back from a ten-day suspension two days ago. He got suspended because he pushed his way through me to get out of my classroom. Because I wrote him up, he took his suspension personally. Whenever I say “hi” to him as he enters my classroom, which I do with all of my students, he says “don’t talk to me.”

Since coming back from his suspension, Errol has refused to do any work. I give him a handout, he throws it on the floor. I ask him to stop talking so he doesn’t distract any other students, he tells me not to talk to him, sometimes adding “I ain’t doin’ this shit,” or “I don’t have to do this shit,” or “I can say whatever the fuck I want, you can’t stop me,” or, if I happen to be standing near him “Get the fuck outta my face.”

Errol is a tense and unhappy young man who has serious anger management issues.

So when “Tyrone” walked into class late, and Errol made a comment, and Tyrone decided not to back down, I knew it was only a matter of time before both of them were standing chest-to-chest, each daring the other to throw the first punch, the act that would legitimize fighting back.

I knew Errol was spoiling for a fight, and I knew Tyrone was getting baited, so I walked over to Tyrone to try to get him to back down long enough for me to tell Errol to back off. I knew Errol would probably walk out if I reprimanded him, but I wanted to get Tyrone calmed down first. I might was well have been invisible, though, because while I stood right next to Tyrone saying his name over and over again in a firm but friendly tone, he just kept trading variations on “I ain’t afraid of you, you ain’t shit, you ain’t gonna do anything” with Errol.

Not wanting another fight to break out in my classroom (I’ve have enough of those this year, thank you very much) and realizing that I wasn’t going to be able to stop it, I poked my head out of the door and called for Mr. Henry, our security guard. No fight had broken out, but I wanted to be ready when one did. I was hoping Mr. Henry would take Errol out of the class, since he had instigated the shouting match, but since Tyrone was standing, Mr. Henry ushered him out of the classroom. Tyrone didn’t want to back down, and resisted Mr. Henry a little at first, but eventually went out with him. I walked the two of them to the door. I wanted to let Tyrone know I knew he hadn’t started it. Maybe that would calm him down. But when I turned back around to go into my classroom, there is Errol, blazing mad and trying to get past me and at Tyrone.

I put my arms out to the sides, trying to block Errol. I told him to go back into the classroom and sit down. He pushed his way past me, but I kept backing up and yelling at him to go back into the classroom. Now about half my class was following. They smelled blood, and wanted to see the fight.

Errol kept trying to push me out of the way, screaming at me to get the fuck out of his way, and then Mr. Hooker, another security guard, showed up. He thought Errol was attacking me, so he grabbed Errol by the arms and tried to subdue him. Errol started pushing and swinging. Mr. Hooker had to shove Errol back into the wall to try and restrain him, but Errol was fighting back like a madman. Students from my classroom and from other classrooms were gathering around, like lemmings or sheep. I yelled at them to get back into class. They ignored me. Some shouted back. Errol was still fighting Mr. Hooker. Mr. Henry was on his radio, calling for backup. Errol only stopped flailing when more security arrived.

No one was hurt. Tyrone had been quickly ushered into a nearby office when Errol had come out into the hall. Errol was taken to the discipline office, where Mr. Hooker was going to press charges against Errol for attacking him.

I went back to my classroom and found most of the class’s textbooks and all of my lesson plans and transparencies scattered across the floor. Someone had obviously decided to take the papers on my overhead projector cart and toss them on the floor. I was upset, and screamed at my class in a fit of incredulous rage. At least Reeza, who is always helpful, and often reminds me of a puppy in her eagerness to please her teachers, was cleaning up the mess I knew she hadn’t had any part in creating.

I stood in the doorway, fuming at the chain reaction of chaos that had started when one student walked into my classroom late and another had made a comment about him. Some of my co-workers came up to me and asked me if I was OK. I was touched by their concern, but it didn’t abate my anger and disgust.

Mr. Hooker came back, asked me to write up a description of the incident. I was happy to be able to focus my anger on something constructive. While my fingers flew across my keyboard, most of my students stayed relatively quiet. A few even kept reading their books.

I finished, gave the write-up to Mr. Hooker. He left. Mr. Henry came by, told me I was wanted in the discipline office. I went, gave my input, and walked back to class. As I went up the stairs, I saw the building police officers leading Errol out in handcuffs.

I got back to my room with two minutes left in class. I stood and watched my students. When the bell rang, I excused them, and they handed me their folders on their way out the door. Jorry decided to turn the lights off as she left. She thinks it’s funny. It was just one more thing to add to my list.

My students were gone. My classroom finally quiet. I turned on the lights. I went over to my overhead cart. Reeza had put my plans and handouts and transparencies back. They were in a disorganized pile, but she had helped me out, and I was grateful, if still angry.

And then I saw the folded piece of notebook paper sitting on my cart. I picked it up, unfolded it, and read:

“Mr. Richardson Jorry dropped all your paper and book about 2-3 times while Shauna and Reeza try to help.
From Ariel Martin”

And this is where I finally lost it. I wept like an infant.

All day, I had been frustrated with my classes. Students not paying attention. Students being disrespectful. Students being jerks to each other. Then Errol getting into a fight with Mr. Hooker. I was furious and pissed off and disgusted. I wanted to quit. I wanted to walk out and never come back. I wanted to write everyone in this Godforsaken school off completely.

And then Ariel had to go and do something that showed she and Reeza and Shauna, at least, cared.

It was more of a roller-coaster than I could take, and I lost it.

I eventually got myself pulled together. I cheered myself up by surfing the web and listening to Def Leppard and “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” on my ubiquitous iPod. I should have left school earlier than I did, but inertia kept me there. I left about 5, and hit average-slow traffic. By the time I got to Lisa’s place an hour later, I was again too frustrated to do anything but collapse on her couch. She didn’t try to help my by doing anything other than just being there, which was just what I needed, even though I was too emotionally drained to tell her that in a coherent way. I drove home before I got too tired to drive.

I ate some dinner. Watched an episode of “Firefly.” Wrote these blog entries. I can’t say I’m back at 100 percent, but at least tomorrow is a professional development day, which means I don’t have to deal with any students and ride the roller coaster they put me on. I prefer my rollercoasters to be literal, not metaphoric.

Some ups, many downs

2005-11-03T21:28:00.000-06:00

As my sister pointed out in a mock-miffed tone (or maybe not so mock) last weekend, every time she’s checked on my blog lately, she keeps seeing the same old posting. I know. I dropped the ball. As my fiancé pointed out, if I’m going to promote my blog, I need to keep feeding it (and the curiosity of my readers).

There are, of course, many reasons I’ve slacked off lately. For one, I’ve been trying to have a life. If I get a chance, I’d rather spend the evening with Lisa than grading papers or calling parents. On the other hand, I routinely spend anywhere from nine to 11 hours each day at school, so I really only get to see Lisa on the weekends.

But the main reason I haven’t been writing much lately is that it’s all just been too depressing. Or not depressing enough. Dramatic anecdotes make for the best blog fodder, of course, and there haven’t been much of those lately (but wait for my next entry—it’s a doozy).

I made a note to write about some of my positive experiences, like “Tavis,” a student who failed last year, who did almost nothing but screw around in class last year, and who, this year, has one of the only A grades in my first class. I even asked him once: “Where is the old Tavis, and what have you done with him?” Then I said “Don’t answer that—I like this new Tavis better.”

I’d like to say I did something wonderful to affect his turnaround, but unless you count failing him last year, I didn’t really do much. When I asked Tavis what motivated him to come to school on time every day and do all of his work this year, he just said it was failing last year that finally kicked him in the butt. This was a kid I had all but given up on at the end of last year. When I gave him his summer school application, he returned it at the end of class with these words on it: “Not going sorry.”

And now he’s not only passing, but getting an A.

The bitter part of this story is that, because Tavis was so uncooperative last year, the staff had him evaluated for special education services. And he got them: 900 minutes a week, the max anyone can get. Since the academy hasn’t been able to find and hire a special education teacher, however, there is no way Tavis can get his special education services while he is enrolled in the academy. So next semester, he gets transferred out to the regular high school. He doesn’t want to go, and I don’t want to lose someone who is now practically a model student, but rules are rules, I suppose.

Then there is “Jaxon.” I couldn’t stand Jaxon last year. He was rude, disruptive, disrespectful. He never did any work. He intimidated all of the other students. The best thing about him was that he was always getting suspended, and so was rarely in school. He failed my class, and every other class he had, except, maybe, math.

I knew I’d have him again this year, so I made a conscious effort to mentally wipe the slate clean. He came back to school with his customary swagger, but he didn’t give me too much trouble. He must have given someone trouble, however, because within the first two weeks of school, he had been transferred to the school at the juvenile jail. I didn’t find this out until Jaxon had been absent for over a week, and I called his mother to ask where he had been (to be honest, I didn’t really care, but it’s my job to try and keep attendance numbers up in my classes, so I call). She told me was in juvenile jail, and told me the date he’d be back in my class.

I steeled myself for the worst when Jaxon came back. He’d been in the prison system, and I wanted to be ready for whatever changes his experience had made in him.

Jaxon came back—and actually came to every class on time. He did all of his work. He asked me questions. He even took out his earrings when I asked him to. Not right away, and sometimes he’d put them back when I wasn’t looking, but Jaxon was a much improved student after his stay in the slammer. I found myself actually looking forward to seeing him every day, to teaching him. By the end of the first quarter, he was earning a C in my class.

And then his schedule got changed.

I don’t know why, but Jaxon’s schedule was changed, and that meant that instead of having me for the first two periods of the day, I would have him for the 4th and 5th periods of the day. Since the change a little over two weeks ago, I’ve seen him maybe twice. One of those days was yesterday, when he had a note from his mother saying he had been sick for two weeks. Maybe he was, but I just don’t think I’ll be seeing Jaxson in class much anymore, because 4th period is right after Division.

Attendance is all-important in the CPS system. Our target is 90 percent attendance for the kids who are enrolled. The school’s budget is based on our attendance figures. Official attendance, then, is taken from about 10:20 to10:30 every morning. This time is called Division. Attendance isn’t taken first thing in the morning because attendance at 8 a.m. is so spotty. When my 8 a.m. class starts, I routinely have anywhere from four to six students in my room. This is out of a roster of 27. By 9 a.m., maybe another dozen or so will show up.

Everyone knows that the only attendance number that really matters is the division attendance number. If you start missing Division 10 or more times, the attendance office can and will start trying to get you dropped from the official rolls, because those absences directly affect the amount of money the school receives from the city and state. But students can miss an actual class dozens of times, and they won’t get kicked out of school—as long as they go to Division. So by Division time, 99 percent of my students show up. And some of them disappear immediately afterwards, even when all they have to do to come to my class is stay in the room.

I’ve called one mother once each week to let her know her son comes to division, but rarely, if ever, comes to my class. If he isn’t in my class, he can’t do his work, and if he doesn’t do his work, he will fail (and did fail the first quarter). She is obviously concerned. She has come up to the school numerous times to meet with me and the other teachers. She brings her husband. They both lecture their son. They both say they will stay on him, and I believe they do. But he still doesn’t come to my class.

They’re not just there to stop fights, you know.

2005-10-05T21:50:00.000-05:00

I’ve had students walk out of my class before, but today I noticed a twist on the old formula of “let’s get up and walk out because he can’t physically stop us.”

It’s nothing new for Jorry to get up, walk to the door—in the middle of class—look out, and then sit back down, all without apparently hearing me ask her where she is going or hearing me tell her to sit back down.

The first time she walked to the door, she looked out, and, seeing a red-shirted security guard, she sat back down.

The second time she walked to the door, her friend and partner in the walking-out-of-class game, Carmelyta, asked her “Is TJ out there?” TJ being, of course, that red-shirted security guard.

When Jorry said no, Carmelyta got up and they both walked out, completely ignoring my calls for them to get back in their seats. There wasn’t a security guard anywhere that I could see on the third floor, and there were several small groups of students just hanging out in the hallway.

It’s not that I was sorry to see Jorry and Carmelyta go. They are usually pretty disruptive. But it ticks me off that they bothered to come to class anyway, when they were just planning on leaving as soon as they could. Their antics stole several valuable instructional minutes from everyone else.

And, of course, once they flaunted not only my authority but the entire school’s authority by walking out of my room with impunity, they were soon followed by Errol. Two other students almost got in a fight, so I had to send them out into the hall—even without security there to intercept them. I can’t have that kind of hostile environment in my classroom.

By then, of course, the 90-minute period was completely shot, as were my nerves. I did what I could with the few students who actually care, but the whole time I just wanted the day to end.

And instead of coming home and relaxing, de-stressing before going back into the trenches tomorrow, I’m supposed to be planning something for the students to blow off, I mean learn, tomorrow. But when I know most of my efforts will be in vain, I can’t help but think, “What’s the point?”

Rampant Racism

2005-09-24T23:59:00.000-05:00

Just like last year, my final class of the day is the most difficult to manage. Students are hyper because they have either just had lunch or really want to go home, or both. They want to talk, to touch each other, to hit each other, to wander aimlessly around the classroom until I throw them out (which I will only do if I think they are posing a safety hazard, as was one girl who kept telling me to “shut the hell up” as I kept telling her to sit in her assigned seat).

And since yesterday was Friday, the level of student restlessness was about 10 to the 100th power worse than usual.

So there was that girl who kept wandering the classroom and telling me to shut the hell up. There was the other girl who kept arguing with me about the rules: “There aren’t any cell phones allowed in school, so take yours off,” she said. Sure it’s a double standard, but I’m the teacher, and I use that cell phone to sometimes call parents on the spot. Then there were the two guys who actually wanted to learn, who kept yelling at everyone else to “shut the fuck up.” And did I mention the other guy who was probably sexually harassing another girl in the back of the classroom? I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but whatever it was, it was getting her upset. I can tell him to stop, but I can’t duct tape his mouth shut.

As should be clear by now, there wasn’t much learning going on in the classroom. Shouting at them never helps, so I have adopted a policy this year of simply waiting, or saying student names individually and firmly to get their attention (although this is admittedly less effective when I have to say 15 names in a row: by the time I’ve said the name of #15, #1-10 are talking again).

I was getting frustrated, but I was also managing to keep just enough emotional distance to not feel completely dragged down by it all. And then D’Gray said something that really concerned me:

“You know how black kids are . . .”

I rounded on him immediately. “D’Gray, please don’t ever say anything so racist in this class again. I find that highly offensive”

“It’s not racist.”

“Yes, it is. Any time you reduce a person to a color, to one aspect of who they are, that’s racism.”

“But I’m not racist. My grandfather was white.”

“I didn’t say you were racist. I don’t think you are racist, but you said a very racist thing.”

“But I’m not racist.”

And so on.

At one point I mentioned classism, and Demane, one of the frustrated “I want to learn but these other asses are screwing that up” students, said “What does that mean? Please, I’d like to learn at least one thing in class today.”

So I explained it. And he learned something.

And then I went back to telling Jorry to sit down, and she told me once again to “shut the hell up and leave me alone.” This is the same student who, after I called her grandmother to inform her that Jorry had walked out of my class twice without my permission, said to me “Why do you bother? I never get in trouble.”

Of course there are differences between black culture and white culture. One has only to look as far as conventions for naming children, a trend which Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer has studied as part of his examination of “where blacks went wrong,” as he puts it (and which Steven Levitt outlines in his fascinating book Freakonomics). But many, perhaps most, of these students have internalized the idea that D’Gray made explicit yesterday: black kids are unruly and don’t care much about school.

Here is a thesis that bears some research: where do these attitudes in back culture come from? It certainly doesn’t help that President George W. Bush’s slow response to Hurricane Katrina makes him look like a racist bastard (although I’m sure the oversight was more an issue of socioeconomic blindness than racism), and makes many blacks in this country feel marginalized, even if they’ve never been within 500 miles of New Orleans (all of my students are convinced that George W. Bush is unrepentantly racist).

But here is the thing that scares me the most, the thing that bears the most research (or maybe Fryer or others like him have already done it and I’m just not aware of it): to what extent are these attitudes being disseminated within black culture by other blacks? Research—and even casual observation—has shown that black audiences statistically prefer black music, black television shows, black movies, and anything else that somehow becomes associated with “black culture” (Levitt notes on page 182 of Freakonomics that Newport cigarettes enjoy a 75 percent market share among black teenagers, for example, while the same cigarettes have only 12 percent of the market share among white teens, who statistically prefer Marlboros).

Although it is illegal to create any kind of forced segregation in this country, de facto segregation does exist, the kind imposed from outside (group A moves out of the neighborhood as group B moves in, for example) and the kind imposed from within (group A flocks to see the opening of a new movie starring a member of their ethnicity, while group B statistically ignores it). This being the case, my very unscientific but extremely gut reaction is that blacks get most of their negative stereotypes about blacks from other blacks.

Something I learned when I started teaching here, for example, is that skin shade carries with it all kinds of social value: light-skinned blacks are often more high-status than dark-skinned blacks. Maybe I was just sheltered and naïve, but I found that truth rather shocking. Maybe I had just seen too many documentaries about the civil rights movement, films like Eyes on the Prize that made the “black cause” seem monolithic in its unity.

But again, the real issue isn’t race, it’s socioeconomics. Statistically speaking, poor kids go to poor schools and do poorly in school. The poor, regardless of their ethnicity, often have narrow views on things like ethnicity and politics and sexual orientation. The poor and disadvantaged usually see the world in stark black and white; they haven’t learned to recognize, appreciate, and savor the shades of gray that make up life. Only education will broaden their minds and their horizons, but the drop-out rate among blacks and Hispanics in this country is astronomically high.

I’d like to end this post with a suggestion for improving this mess, but frankly, all I can think to do right now is finish grading papers and plan for Monday’s class.

-----------------------------------

Two related stories about teaching from the New York Times:

"As Test Scores Jump, Raleigh Credits Integration by Income"

and

"Tenure, Turnover and the Quality of Teaching"

Thanks to Barbara S. for pointing these out to me.

The First Chink in My Armor?

2005-09-21T22:36:00.000-05:00

I have a story about a student, and, like every time I mention a student here, I’ll make up a name for him. I’ll call him Virgil. The Roman poet Virgil was Dante’s guide into Hell.

Virgil, my student, not the Roman poet, is a student with many problems. All of my students have some kind of problem, or they wouldn’t be in this program, but Virgil . . . if I ever successfully imagined what Virgil’s life has been like up to this point, I’d probably collapse into a gibbering heap on the floor (or maybe that would just be the result of getting four hours of sleep a night these days).

Virgil is completely lacking in empathy. He is more self-centered than most of my students. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume his rude and abrasive personality is a mechanism that protects him from whatever is the trauma that make up his life of being bounced around between a mother who can’t control him and a social welfare system that, for all of its good intentions, simply cannot care for him the way a good parent could or should.

Virgil had his cell phone out today. He was only checking the time, but rules are rules. I told him if I saw the cell phone again, I was going to have to take it. “Oh, OK,” he says, and I get the distinct impression, as I often get when talking to most of my students, that I might as well not even be there.

Thirty minutes later, Virgil has the phone out again. I don’t know what he’s doing with it, but it doesn’t matter. He obviously has the phone out, and if I let it slide, I’ll be fighting this from him and other students all year. So I walk over to Virgil and tell him I need his phone. I’m polite. I’m firm. I keep my voice even. And he flat-out refuses.

This does not surprise me. Very few students will simply hand over contraband the first time I ask for it. But after about five minutes of me standing there repeating variations of “These are the rules, I need your phone,” I can tell I’m not getting anywhere. And the rest of the class is getting restless. Loreese, who is actually one of my better students, keeps trying to get my attention, as if I’m not already involved in a serious issue with Virgil. “Mr. Richardson, what do we have to do? Mr. Richardson, what do we have to do?” she keeps asking over and over and over. All of my students are like this. When they want my attention, dammit, I better respond to them. When I want theirs, I practically need to shoot off fireworks in class to get their attention.

So Virgil is stonewalling me, arguing with me, not responding to me, and I have a class to teach. I know there isn’t a shred of empathy in his being that I will eventually be able to get through to, so I make a decision to tell Virgil he can keep his phone, but I’ll have to take this to the next level. According to the rules and consequences list the other teachers and I came up with in the days before school, that means I need to have a conference with his parent or guardian.

The only problem is, no one has a working home number for Virgil’s mother. And even if we did, we all know from experiences last year that a conference with Virgil’s mother is going to be less than effective. It’ll probably just make his behavior worse.

So now I have a student in my classroom who successfully refused to heed my authority, and the next step in my consequences chain isn’t going to be effective at all. I’m dreading the next time I have to take a cell phone or CD player away from a student in that class. Will they also stonewall me, braced by Virgil’s example of defiance? Or will I have enough social capital left with the other students that those kinds of distractions won’t be a problem?

The one thing I do know is that when Virgil is absent, we get a heck of a lot more accomplished in that class. There are some students who are so detrimental to the education of others that they should not be allowed in school, or at least not allowed around students who actually want to learn. The law says we have to keep him until he’s 17. And any student who gets special education services we have to keep until age 21 (I’m not sure about Virgil’s status in that regard).

I’ve been called a saint at least twice in the past two weeks by people who hear these stories I tell about teaching. I don’t want to be a saint. I just want to be a guy who does his job well and gets to go home and relax at the end of the day. I hear that special education teachers often burn out in five years or less. I’m not a special education teacher, but I deal with a lot of students who should have been classified as special ed years ago (severe deficiencies in reading and writing, which these kids have, are enough to get the paperwork moving, but since there is a limit on how many students can be referred each year, these kids have fallen through the cracks, and now they are in this program). I can see why special ed teachers can burn out so fast. When I deal with students like Virgil on only four hours of sleep a night, I’m heading for a burnout fast—or at least a day off.

And I have another worry: I ran into a gym teacher the other day I used to work with last year. His position was cut because of funding issues. He’s back teaching drivers’ ed at the school, but he can’t find a job actually teaching because, with almost 30 years of experience, he costs too much. I already cost too much for many districts because I have a masters. Will it just get more difficult for me to find jobs the more years of experience I get, thus placing me higher on the pay scale? I shudder at the thought.

Book Junkie

2005-09-19T21:59:00.000-05:00

My name is Christopher, and I’m addicted to books.

That’s the first step, right? Admitting you have a problem? When I was 12, or 10, or however old I was when Mom used to bring stacks of books home for me to read from the Hastings Public Library, where she worked, reading to the exclusion of almost everything else wasn’t so much of a problem. Well, Mom and Dad did think it rather rude when I would bring a book to the dinner table and read instead of conversing over chicken in wine sauce, but, for the most part, reading books never really got in the way of anything.

And now I have a real job, a teaching gig that requires that I plan a new lesson every night, and I’m sitting here, not crafting an assignment or a list of discussion questions. No, I’m reading Trino’s Choice.

In my defense, it’s the young-adult book I’m going to start with my students on Friday (or perhaps Monday), so this reading is kind of like my homework; I’m getting a leg up so I won’t have to stay just one chapter ahead of the students (I’ve done that before, and it’s never fun). Also, the book is actually good.

It didn’t start off that way. When I wasn’t grading papers this weekend, I was reading Blink, Malcolm Gladwell’s examination of research into the mind’s ability to make split-second decisions. I’m also stuck halfway through The Scold’s Bridle, a tepid mystery by British author Minette Walters. I’m also about 100 pages into Gabriel Garcia-Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. I started Dante’s Inferno a few weeks ago (I stalled, but I’ll pick it up again, I’m sure). I read Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby for about the hundredth time three weeks ago. I have Gladwell’s first bestseller, The Tipping Point, waiting for me on my nightstand, along with the next Sano Ichiro mystery by Laura Joh Rowland: The Way of the Traitor. In the past three weeks, I’ve also read the first three volumes of Lone Wolf and Cub, a Japanese graphic novel about a samurai assassin and his infant son and their adventures in Tokugawa-era Japan.

In short, I don’t read young-adult books, so Trino’s Choice was something I had to read, rather that something I really wanted to read.

And then author Diane Gonzales Bertrand had to go and make Trino start to discover poetry. Trino’s street-tough attitude would have prevented him from allowing himself even the slightest interest in words for their own sake, but through serendipitous encounter with an ex-con poet who gives Trino a copy of his book, the boy’s mind starts to open. As a logo- and bibliophile, I’m a sucker for stories like that.

So I had to keep reading.

I’m not done yet. It won’t take me but another hour or so (this is a short book), but I can’t afford to stay up for another hour. I can’t even afford to be up right now. I should have my head hit the pillow so I can get more than four hours of sleep tonight. I don’t teach well when I’m exhausted. But I can’t turn in until this lesson plan is done. And that’s going to take me at least another hour.

But I couldn’t resist the logographic lure of this tale of a budding bibliophile caught between the life of a street thug and something richer and more wonderful between the pages of a book.

My name is Christopher, and I’m a book junkie. Now, if I could only get my students addicted . . .

The First Fight of the Year

2005-09-13T21:30:00.000-05:00

I managed to keep two students from fighting in my first class. I wasn’t so lucky in my last class.

In the first class, Roman and Jeremy had been “gunning” each other for at least an hour, despite my firm reminder that respect is rule #1 in my class. When Roman started getting visibly agitated and telling the whole class “I’ll beat his ass,” in reference to Jeremy, I ushered Roman out into the hall. Not to yell at him, just to get him away from a hostile situation. He went and talked to the two student advocates, and no fists were thrown.

Fists were thrown in my last class.

Because that last class had wasted so much instructional time with side-chatter, I ended up holding them for three minutes after the final bell rang. There was some complaining—loud and childish complaining—but most of the students sat down. Some were trying to push past me out the door, but I just kept telling them to sit down, and I think I would have succeeded in getting them sitting down, had I not then heard “You wanna go?!”

I looked past the students trying to push past me, and saw Errol and Gus in very bad boxing stances: fists up but not protecting the face, weight so far back on the rear leg that moving forward—much less actually reaching your opponent with a punch—is almost impossible. It took me half a second to realize these two were serious, so I opened the door and called for security.

The security guard was on his walkie-talkie as soon as I called out “Hurry!” I looked back in the room. Errol and Gus were now clinched, and Errol was getting the worst of it: Gus’s from-the-shoulder punches were weak and ineffectual, but they must have stung a little as they peppered Errol’s face. But Errol wasn’t just standing still. The two were locked in that street-tough “as long as we both hold on to each other this will look impressive but not hurt much” embrace, and they were careening around my room like a blaster bolt in the Death Star trash compactor. They knocked one of my box fans out of the window (into the room, thankfully, and not out into the street), they knocked one of my white boards down. I was afraid they’d knock my computer off of my desk.

Then one security guard was there, pulling the two fighters apart. Gus calmed down right away, but Errol was enraged, the way I always used to get when I was seven and the victim of some merciless teasing from my classmates. Errol wanted a piece of Gus, and one security guard wasn’t going to stop him.

Two more security guards showed up. The head of security showed up. The attendance coordinator showed up. The assistant principal showed up. I was stuck in the doorway/atrium between all of them, so when I let Gus out of the room, presumably to be taken away by security so we could get Errol out of there, Errol tried to charge his way through all of us in the doorway. He was flailing around so much as security tried to subdue him that I took a slap on the face. It didn’t hurt. I’ve been dropped by better punchers than this wild kid. But still, that’s not what I expected when I went into work this morning.

It hurts me more to watch some of these kids tease and insult and belittle each other pretty much constantly, despite my efforts to teach them a better way. So much anger and insecurity. I come home and I can still taste it, like the rancid tang of rotten meat coating my tongue, even though I have only smelled it and not eaten any. I get home and get on my ski machine and bask in the baptism of pouring-off-my-body-sweat that 30 low-impact minutes can give me. And I still feel awful. The only thing I can do is go back and keep trying. These kids are hard-headed, but mine’s harder. I’ve had more experience banging it into things. It’s a wonder I don’t have a concussion. Or an acute subdural hematoma.

Eventually security restrained and calmed down a howling Errol, even though Gus had slipped away in the confusion. It won’t matter, though: both boys have been suspended for 10 days, as per the Uniform Discipline Code of Chicago Public Schools. We can’t help them if they’re not in school, but we can’t let them solve their disputes with fisticuffs, either.

Battle of Wills

2005-09-12T21:52:00.000-05:00

At some points during my summer vacation, I would think to myself in a very tiny voice, “I should be doing something about classes next year . . .planning, reading, something.” And then I would just as quickly reply to myself with “dammit, it’s my vacation. I’m not doing anything until August.”

As it turns out, a summer spent doing nothing related to teaching was probably the best thing I could have done.

Many times in just the past five days I have found myself thinking “Why didn’t I do this last year?” or “Why couldn’t I see my students from this perspective last year?” I don’t think I could have until I spent a summer just letting go and letting my mind process what was unprocessable last year in a kind of subconscious Zen meditation.

I feel like a whole new teacher.

For example, today in my final class I spent 40 minutes in a battle of wills with a handful of students who did not want to move from their old assigned seats to their new assigned seats. I warned them on Friday that I would shuffle the seating chart. Some of them didn’t believe me. Some of them just wanted to complain about the heat (I have mentioned how hot it gets in my classroom, even with two box fans going, haven’t I?). Some of them wanted to test me.

The class went something like this: I would ask a student to move to a new seat, and he or she would either move or complain. I would ask again. And again. And again. I kept asking until the student moved. Some took 15 minutes to move. I watched the time drift away. I deflected complaints that I was unfairly punishing everyone. I held my ground, and kept asking, sometimes firmly, sometimes in a flat, matter-of-fact tone. But I didn’t back down. I didn’t explain why they had to move. They just had to move. (Thank you, Rick Smith, for that chapter about “Inner Authority”).

Amazingly enough, to me, is the fact that it wasn’t the chronic screw-ups, the kids way below grade level, who were giving me the most problems. It was the A and B students.

Actually, the final student to move wasn’t going to move. Ever. He kept writing, kept pretending that he couldn’t hear me. That was worse, for me, than going up against a student who would talk back. I knew this student had exploded in other classes last year. I didn’t want him to explode in mine. So I whipped out my cell phone, called his home, explained the situation, and put him on with his mother. “Earnest” moved after that. He walked right out of my classroom.

He didn’t sit where he was supposed to, but my point about the seating chart remained firm. To the students, my seating chart, and the fact that I insist on assigning one, seems completely arbitrary. To me, it’s a way to establish and reinforce my authority in the classroom. They don’t have to understand that logically. I think if I tried to explain it to them, they’d just rebel more. So I just insist. Stuff like this you can’t learn in teacher education classes. Experience is the only way to really understand how much this can work.

Once everyone was either sitting in their assigned seats or out of the classroom, I started putting notes on the board. We had five minutes to cover what I had taken 20 to cover in my other classes. Then we moved on to the partner assignment (30 minutes) then journaling for the last 20.

Last year, losing so much instructional time would have caused me great anxiety. I always resisted the idea that teachers teach children first, their subject second. As someone who went into teaching because of his love for English and in spite of his distaste for youngsters in general, the idea was abhorrent to me. I wanted to teach reading and writing, period.

I have moved on. My primary focus this year isn’t teaching English. It’s teaching behavior, and patience, and how to work with others. It’s teaching responsibility and accountability and organization. They can’t learn anything about language until they learn those skills. So this year, I can retain my equanimity when students resist my authority and want to waste class time, because I know that what I’m teaching them by being a firm educator is, in the long run, more valuable than the plot of Romeo and Juliet.

The Best Teaching Tactic Ever

2005-09-11T01:00:00.000-05:00

It’s been an interesting week. Despite the many “business-as-usual” difficulties we faced before the school year had even started, or perhaps because of them, the first week of school actually went rather smoothly. For me, at least, feeling like the bureaucracy of the system was against me caused me to focus on my classroom, dig deep, and become more self-reliant. Reading Rick Smith’s Conscious Classroom Management, especially Chapter 3, “Inner Authority,” didn’t hurt, either. It’s the best thing I’ve ever gotten from CPS, actually. I’ve started this year off confident in my ability to say “No,” or its variant, “I understand, and the answer is no,” and although my classroom does not yet run like a well-oiled machine, it’s already running more smoothly than it ever did last year.

Add to this newfound confidence that I am the law, fair and just, in my classroom, with the amazing tool of insisting that I dismiss the class, not the bell, and I think I might actually be on my way to something approaching a well-oiled machine. Sure, some students complain when I insist that they put their butts in their seats before I will let them go, but—and this is what amazes me—they actually do it.

On the second day, when I was enforcing this new rule in my classroom, “Rodney,” a student who would rather be anywhere else than school, fumed in his seat. “If we all leave, he can’t stop us all,” he said. “And if he does, I’ll pound him like that,” and he slapped his right fist into his left hand. But he didn’t make a move to get up. There was some laughter, but no one else tried to bum rush me, either.

The next day, “Jimbo Jones,” actually attended class. Jimbo loves to challenge my authority. He and Rodney sometimes skip class together. When class was over, the bell rang, and some students, including Jimbo, got out of their desks. “Wait.” I said. “Sit down. Sit down and I will dismiss you.” There was some grumbling, and no one grumbled louder or more profanely than Jimbo. Everyone else—including Rodney—sat back down. But Jimbo wanted to fight me. So he stood there, cussing just loud enough for everyone to hear.

“Jimbo,” I said, “Sit down in the desk, please.”

“Naw, man.”

“Jimbo, please sit down. No one is going anywhere until you do.”

“I want to hold everybody up.” He leaned against the desk part of the desk with the attitude that he had all day and not a care in the world. Except I knew he wanted out of my class.

Me again: “Jimbo, sit down.”

Then Rodney spoke up: “C’mon, Jimbo, sit down.”

And there were some other similar mutterings. And then Jimbo sat down. And I dismissed the class.

The sense of victory and power this new rule/ procedure gives me would almost be intoxicating if I didn’t know just how slender a thread it can be. This week, application of this tactic was easy. Next week or next month it might be harder. Or easier. These students can be a moody bunch. So I find solace in another bit of advice from Rick Smith, which I call “Zen mind, teacher’s mind”: “we are generally best served not ‘riding’ on the good experiences or making too much over the bad ones” (79).

I record my good experience here for posterity, so I can remember that it actually happened, and Monday starts with a blank slate.

In this vein, I should also record that Thursday did not end particularly well. My middle class was awesome—kids were learning all over the place—but my last class was awful. Not as awful as some from last year, but hardly stellar. About a quarter of the class kept sleeping, and I have yet to find a good tactic to keep students from putting their heads down. My gut reaction is always “sure, they’re sleeping, but at least they’re quiet.” I’m not proud of this, but it’s true. So I came home Thursday night hating my job, lamenting that I would once again get only about four hours of sleep that night because I had to stay up and plan for Friday, frustrated that I have students who cannot write a simple sentence, and terrified that I would fall asleep from exhaustion and not get anything prepared for the next day.

I did fall asleep. I made the mistake of lying down in my oh-so-comfy bed, next to my oh-so-cuddly girlfriend, and woke with a start two hours later—10:00. After lurching around my apartment like a drunken chimpanzee on Quaaludes for about a half an hour, I finally forced myself awake enough to write up a lesson plan. I was done in an hour (which must be a new speed record for me) and back to a peaceful, although too short, sleep (damn my 4:30 a.m. alarm). The anxiety in such moments sometimes makes my heart race, my head pound, and my body start like a cat licking an electric wire. It is the worst part of teaching.

I record my bad experience here for posterity, so I can remember that I did actually survive it, and Monday starts with a blank slate.

And hopefully more than four hours of sleep.

One down—170 or so to go . . .

2005-09-06T21:09:00.000-05:00

The first day of school has come and gone for another year. I got there earlier than anyone else on my team (6:36 a.m.), and stayed later (4:30 p.m.).

In between, I made copies of adjusted class period schedules for all of our teachers, worked with everyone else to coordinate getting our students to the right classes, checked in on everyone during my planning period to make sure everything was running smoothly (relatively speaking, of course), took away two cell phones after making clear that I did not even want to SEE them in my classroom, called the parents of those students on those cell phones (with the students’ permission—they wanted those damn things back) to make it clear that next time the parent would have to come up to the school to retrieve said cell phone, and took away one Mp3 player from a student who was too busy listening to music to hear my warning about not using personal electronic devices during class time. The ironic part? He wasn’t even supposed to be in my class at that time. Had he simply read his schedule better, he might have avoided losing his Mp3 player. I was willing to call his home to explain the rules to his sister (who he said looks after him) but he didn’t want that, so his Mp3 player is locked away in my file cabinet, and will remain there until his caretaker comes and gets it.

I sweated so much my brand-new tie was soaked through where it was touching the shirt that was touching the back of my neck. Needless to say, the shirt was soaked, too. And the wicking T-shirt underneath. It’s why I switched to more expensive wicking undergarments (even my socks) from cheaper but more creep-uppy-when-sweaty cotton. It gets hot on the third floor in an old building with no air conditioning (because the wiring can’t handle the power requirements without extensive capital improvements, apparently).

Thankfully, traffic was light on the way home (relatively speaking, of course), with the only major slowdown being to rubberneck at a nasty-looking accident in the southbound lanes of the Day Ryan. That traffic didn’t look like it was going to go anywhere anytime soon.

I got home, did 10 minutes of tai chi, did 30 minutes on my ski machine (a hand-me-down from Lisa, who told me I could have it if I just took the thing out of her apartment), ate a stylish dinner of PB&J sandwiches and chicken tenders, washed down with a can of Vernors, that ambrosial ginger ale of the Midwest, and sat down to blog.

It’s already past my bedtime (the alarm is set for 4:30 a.m.), and I still have to make up some seating charts and plan some kind of class for tomorrow. I held off from any actual teaching today because about half of my students just didn’t show up. It’s hard to get a regular classroom flow going when students pop in like fireflies and fade away just as quickly.

I got through the first day of school. Now I just have to get through about 170 more.

Kinesthetics + Moral Support = Happier Me

2005-09-04T00:22:00.000-05:00

After spending over half of my Saturday in my classroom, cleaning out old materials, putting up colorful decorations, and organizing my desk and other supplies, I feel much more ready to take on the first day of school.

As I was moving around my room, getting the sense of it, imagining myself teaching in there this upcoming year, I realized that it was this concrete imagining—actually being able to SEE myself teaching in THIS specific space—that was making all the difference in my anxiety level (it’s lower than it was last week, but still above baseline). Then it occurred to me: I have never been a particularly kinesthetic learner. Even when training in karate, I always found it more helpful to define the movements and concepts linguistically, as opposed to just observing my instructor and then imitating him or her. But when it comes to teaching, I find myself to be VERY kinesthetic. If I can’t move around, manipulate things, get a sense of my physical space and the things in the room I can touch and interact with, I have a much harder time visualizing teaching at all, much less teaching a specific lesson. And if I can’t visualize it ahead of time, the lesson suffers.

Educators these days either preach about Robert Gardner’s theory of “multiple intelligences” (linguistic, bodily-kinesthetic, logical-mathematical, musical, spatial, interpersonal, and intrapersonal) or spend many professional development hours listening to such preaching. “Make sure your lesson plans address the different modalities of learning!” is not only a popular catchphrase, it’s a requirement—implicit or explicit—in some districts.

But I never hear anyone preaching about the other side of the coin, how a teacher can best teach. The assumption is that most teachers, if left to their own devices, will simply talk too much, and lecture the students into boredom. I know that I have been guilty of this current cardinal sin of teaching enough times in the past to make me rather sheepish when the subject is brought up. But I am rarely, if ever, completely still in the classroom. I like to move around. I move back and forth in front of the blackboard, trying to infuse whatever I write on it with the same enthusiasm I feel about my subject. Even if I’m more or less stuck next to an overhead, I still move around as much as possible. I don’t particularly like overhead projectors because I have to keep my writing on the transparencies small—i.e. normal and unexciting—and I can’t move around as much. I like to walk around the classroom, getting closer to students to help them feel and share my interest in the story we are reading (and it’s a good classroom management tactic, too).

Current educational theory is much invested in Gardner’s theories. But only as they apply to students. I wonder how much better I could make that all-important first day of school if I had known, from the last day of school last year, or even from the beginning of August, or with only a week before school started, what room I’d be teaching in, and what resources I would have access to; if I had been able to spend more time getting the FEEL of my classroom, that kinesthetic connection that I find essential to my teaching. I wonder if other teachers feel the same way. This is a subject that NEVER once came up for discussion in any of my teacher education classes. Certainly, we need to focus on our students, to meet them where they are so we can see to their educational needs. But if teachers’ own needs aren’t being met, how can we meet our students’ needs?

It’s a question I have only recently begun asking myself, spurred not only by my experiences here, but also by reading Teachers Have It Easy: The Big Sacrifices and Small Salaries of America’s Teachers (Moulthrop, Calegari, and Eggers, 2005). I’d settle first for better working conditions, but these authors think the biggest and most important change should be a drastic increase in teacher’s compensation (which, just for the record, I’m not at all opposed to). Either way, this statement has particular resonance for me:

“The mood of a school starts with its teachers. If teachers are content and can be proud of their work and compensation, their self-respect trickles down and is felt by every student.”

Now, I’ve never been a firm believer in any kind of “trickle-down” theory, but this one makes a lot of sense to me.

For now, in lieu of that salary commensurate with the amount of responsibility and stress of the job, I’ll take the kind of interpersonal support I’ve been getting from a few key people.

Although the Achievement Academy is currently without a principal, the regular high school principal has been fantastically supportive of not only the Achievement Academy as a whole, but also of me personally. He mentioned the other day that he noticed I was showing leadership initiative in trying to get things done for the Academy. That was a nice pat on the ego, good fuel for the effort I’ve been expending these past few days.

My parents, of course, have been their usual unconditionally supportive (and parentally concerned) selves, especially my father, who has 32 years of teaching experience to share with me. He, more than anyone else I’m close to, I think can acutely share my disbelief and disappointment at some of the circumstances I have had to navigate.

My girlfriend’s parents have even gotten in on the act, offering moral and other kinds of support; they read this blog. If nothing else, knowing that I’m being heard and appreciated is a wonderful comfort.

Speaking of my girlfriend, she’s been an absolute dream. Not only does she provide unwavering, unconditional, and unselfish support in all ways, shapes, and forms of which she is capable (she, more than anyone else, has seen exactly what the stress of this job can do to me), in addition to all of this, she came with me at 8 a.m. this morning to help me clean and arrange my classroom. And she actually enjoyed herself! If dating me doesn’t prove that she’s crazy, this most definitely should. When given the chance to arrange things, whether they be desks or computer settings or bulletin boards, the OCD in both of us has a chance to swell, shine, and pulse in a simpatico beat that makes normal people stare incredulously, then shrug and shake their heads. She’s definitely the right woman for me.

And perhaps the most unexpected, but no less appreciated, support has come from some of my former students. On Thursday, when we Academy teachers were realizing just how many desks and computers and books and such we needed to move between rooms before Tuesday (everyone was moved to a different room) someone had the idea of calling up some of last year’s freshmen. I whipped out my laptop, upon which was my call log from last year, and proceeded to call about ten different students and ask their parents for their help. Every student I got in touch with agreed, and most of them even showed up the next day. Legal reasons prevent me from mentioning them by name, but they know who they are. And they got lunch out of the deal. One of those students even came back for a second morning of work. There wasn’t as much heavy lifting to do, but he still helped out tremendously.

So now I have a physical sense of how I will teach, and I have a supportive net to fall into when I need to duck and cover from the strain of teaching.

Now all I need are some finished lesson plans and the inner authority to keep my classroom running smoothly. I’d love about another month to prepare—hell, I’d take one more day than the two I currently have to work with (and I’m taking tomorrow completely off—I’ve earned it this past week), so I’m looking at having all of my remaining prep done—syllabus, letter to parents, lesson plans about the rules, signs and attendance sheets for the first day, and a host of other things that will just keep growing until next June—on Monday.

I guess that’s why they call it Labor Day, right?

Making Sacrifices, Getting Sacrificed

2005-09-02T23:05:00.000-05:00

I worked for a large company years ago. I was part of the telephone customer service team for a large bank. But the department was relatively small, and the business was well-run, for the most part, so I never got the feeling of what it is like to work in and for a bloated bureaucracy.

Now I do.

I got my room today, but while I am now more or less happy, the decision has caused hard feelings in the rest of the team. Not feelings toward me, but feelings of betrayal in the teacher I displaced, feelings directed at the general unfairness of a situation in which faceless bureaucrats we have never met make decisions that affect the immediate comfort and workability of our employment situation.

Here’s how it works:

Students need teachers. Teachers cost money. Therefore, it makes wise business sense to hire only as many teachers as the amount of students warrants.

So the number-crunchers look at last years’ year-end enrollment data to project how many students will be at Y High School this year, and allot budgetary resources accordingly.

In a perfect world, last year’s numbers would always be pretty close to this year’s numbers, so life at Y High School could remain fairly smooth.

But, as my experience lately has shown me, and as I have heard from others who have been in this system longer than I, life at the beginning of the school year is never smooth. I didn’t have a room. One of my colleagues was shifted to another position at the last minute. Actually, this happened to at least three people I know, and in one case, a pay cut was the result. This when he had been told at the end of last year that he would have the same position.

And today we find out that instead of X number of students, we will have X + 300. All to fit into eight not-overly-large classrooms. And we’re not getting more space, that’s for sure. If teachers cost money, capital improvements/ expansions cost MONEY.

OK, this sounds bad. And it will be—for at least two weeks. Maybe more, but after two weeks, the sad truth is that many of our students will stop coming for a variety of reasons. Some will be chronic truancies. Some will move and not tell anyone in the system. Some will transfer to another school. Some will run away from home. So, eventually, conventional wisdom is that no matter how many students a teacher starts the year off with, societal attrition will reduce that number by anywhere from 25 to 50 percent.

So, although our principal is doing all he can to get us more desks, on the first day of school, we will have rooms with about 20 desks, and each class will have at least 30 students.

Assuming, of course, all of the students who are on the rolls actually show up to school. It’s always a crapshoot, but I’d feel better if we were looking at more desks than students. Then again, if that were the case, I’d probably be out of a job as soon as the number-crunchers figured out a more cost-effective student-to-teacher ratio.

I’ve been complaining about the bureaucracy that I find myself mired in, but, really, the higher-ups in the bureaucracy aren’t faced with any really attractive choices.

Ugly Choice #1: They could hire as many teachers as they think they will need to service every student effectively. And then when attendance numbers drop and stabilize in October, the system will be paying for more teachers than the system needs, and the taxpayers will point an accusatory finger at the district for overspending. To avoid this, all of the “extra” teachers will be pink slipped. No “wasted” tax dollars, at the cost of seriously undermining recruitment and retention in the district.

Ugly Choice #2: The number-crunchers could hire as few teachers as possible, which they know will mean over 40 students in some classrooms, depending on the school, but which will keep the budget in line, at the cost of teachers’ sanity and a classroom climate conducive to education. But this situation probably won’t last long, so what’s a week of quality instructional time lost against thousands of dollars of budgetary savings?

Since money is the most important thing in our society, it’s obvious which choice the number-crunchers make year after year. Education is seriously under-funded, so to make every penny work, fewer teachers are asked to.

Those who are asked to, however, face a monumental challenge in the first few days or weeks of school. How can a student be comfortable enough to learn when he or she doesn’t even have a desk to sit in? With not even a desk, students will feel angry and/ or neglected. Some will start to act out. In a room of 30 or more students, one angry student can cause a nasty behavioral chain reaction. Maybe some expert veteran teachers can get some learning happening in a situation like that. As a second-year teacher, I’m not sure what kind of success I will have.

And teachers don’t have much choice other than to play with the hands we are dealt. Because, the bottom line is, the kids are coming on Tuesday, whether we’re ready or not. We must rise to the challenge, like teachers do every year, to be ready.

While I am proud of myself and my team for working together, despite hot rooms, rising tempers, and personality conflicts, to get ready for our students, I can’t help but feel a little used. The students have to come first. Teachers don’t just make sacrifices, teachers are sacrificed. Large bureaucracies—and, more importantly, the public that spawns them—know that good teachers will always break their backs doing whatever it takes to be ready to teach their students, and so, intentionally or not, take advantage of them.

Bureaucracies make their unpalatable decisions because of money, and money is dependent on wildly fluctuating enrollment numbers. And whether a student comes to school or not is ultimately the responsibility of the parent. Too many times, the answer is “not.”

Of course, the only way that’s going to change is through education.

I guess teachers are screwed any way I look at it, caught in a catch-22 that only wide-spread and monumental school & societal reform can ever hope to fix. Maybe I should look more carefully at Chicago’s Renaissance 2010 program. Critics say it doesn’t go far enough, but at least it’s a step in the right intention.

Teaching: TARFU*

2005-08-31T17:02:00.000-05:00

I was prepared for students with attitude. I was prepared to share a classroom. I was prepared to move from classroom to classroom. But I was not prepared to have no classroom whatsoever. Not when classes start next Tuesday.

When I received my schedule/room assignment, I saw that I would be in room 328. But when I got to the third floor, I couldn’t find room 328. Room 332, 331, 330, 329, 326 . . . but no room 328. I wasn’t yet worried. This is Chicago Public Schools I’m dealing with, after all.

So I went and asked the programmer. She pulled out her map of the building and showed me room 328. It immediately became clear to me that this building map was way out of date, because it showed room 330 as half the size I knew it to be—and it was right next door to room 328. At some point, the two rooms had been joined.

Now I had a problem.

Well, I thought, someone will have to share room 330 and team teach two classes at once. I’m down for teaching the sophomores, however, and Jan, who was assigned room 330, is teaching freshmen. Either I’d have to switch with Ms. Harris (the other freshman English teacher) or she and Jan would have to share room 330. Or some other pairing of teachers could share room 330, but someone would have to share. According to the programmer, there isn’t any more room available in the building: sharing is our best option.

I took this plan to the team, the other Achievement Academy teachers. Nobody liked it. “Administration screwed up, administration should give us another room,” was the general consensus. OK, I agreed, let’s ask for the ideal solution. Might as well, what have we got to lose?

We got the principal and the assistant principal upstairs and told them the situation. They were sympathetic, but obviously couldn’t just build another room. This had to be looked into, all possibilities explored.

I should mention that the assistant principal who approved these TARFUed room assignments over the summer found another job and is no longer working here. Either way, we’d have a problem, I still wouldn’t have a classroom, but still, the timing of her departure is just the icing on the cake. I feel strongly that people should always clean up their own messes. That's obviously not going to happen in this case.

This is such a logistical nightmare that the principal won’t be able to fully address the problem, and offer a solution, until tomorrow. Other administrators, people responsible for supporting the Johns Hopkins Achievement Academy model in CPS, have been called and will be present tomorrow to help us resolve my classroom issue.

But since this issue isn’t resolved, despite the hard work and good intentions of the administrators involved (the ones who still work here, anyway) I was unable to spend any time this afternoon putting my classroom together. Since there is a chance I might switch to teaching freshmen, so I can team teach with Jan, who I get along with really well, I’m kind of at a loss as to what to do right now, how to most effectively utilize my time between now and tomorrow. One day of lost planning can’t possibly screw me up any more than this room TARFU has. This isn’t the end of the world. I will eventually figure out what and where I am teaching.

But this is not an isolated occurrence. This kind of crap happens ALL THE TIME in CPS. If it’s not a problem with a missing classroom, it’s missing student rosters, and if the rosters aren’t missing, then they’re late, or out of date, or incomplete or incorrect or all of the above. Supplies are hard to come by. Teachers get shuffled around all the time, with little or no warning. Ella, a young woman who spent six days in training to teach in the Achievement Academy, just found out TODAY that she’s actually teaching in the regular high school, even though The Powers That Be made the change on Monday.

THIS kind of bureaucratic nightmare is the reason public schools are in such bad shape. This kind of slipshod planning creates a tense and chaotic climate during the first days of school, days that are crucial to getting kids on the bandwagon, to getting them focused and on track and caring about school. They can sense when things aren’t right, when the teachers are upset and distracted and stressed out. And all of this could be avoided if someone could just invent a bureaucracy that actually ran smoothly.

* A military acronym related to SNAFU. Stands for Totally And Really Fucked Up. The only condition worse is FUBAR: Fucked Up Beyond All Repair. So you see, I’m being generous by describing my current situation as a TARFU: I know it will get fixed eventually, somehow, even though the solution is likely to be inconvenient for all involved, and not fully serve to undo the damage to the school climate the students will feel the moment they walk in the door.

Vacation’s Over: A Summer of ’05 Retrospective

2005-08-29T00:58:00.000-05:00

Although the first day of school is still one week away, I am forced to admit that not only is my summer vacation over, I should have laid these halcyon days to rest at least two weeks ago: I have much planning to do. Still, I’m glad I sucked all of the marrow out of summer that I could.

The first batch of summertime professional development came the second week of August. The following week I spent four days in New York, visiting a friend who is working on his master’s in education at Teacher’s College at Columbia University through a program for returned Peace Corps Volunteers. We hiked all over Manhattan, did some tai chi, put on our sparring gear and went a few rounds, even got cheap seats to a Broadway show. I should have been writing lesson plans, but I wanted to squeeze as much out of my summer as possible.

Not that I haven’t been doing just that through most of June and July. This was my first summer off as a teacher, and I intended to enjoy it. I thought about teaching summer school for about 30 seconds, then embraced the wide-open stretch of free time that lay before me by heading out for Nordhouse Dunes in my home state of Michigan the first chance I got. I spent two days and three days alone in the wilderness on the west coast of Lake Michigan. That trip alone was almost enough to make nine months of first-year-teacher hell worth it.

Almost.

But I had plenty of time to fill with other activities, and fill that time I did. My only firm plan for the summer was to not do any work, and that included maintaining this blog. Over the past year, writing these entries has been wed in my mind mostly with a way to unwind from school, to vent some of the pressures that teaching in a massively inefficient bureaucracy to disadvantaged students can create. So I took a break from blogging, as well.

And now, with my second year of teaching looming before me, ripe with both trepidation and promise, I decided to pick up the blogging banner again and have at it.

It’s also a great way to put off writing those damn lesson plans.

I spent some time during the fourth week of August trying to get my mind back into teacher mode and my emotions ready for the onslaught of stress that is the school year. It was time well spent, but, as is typical of me, I spend so much time just overcoming inertia that my net output is rather small.

My mind keeps wandering back to the two days following my return from Michigan solitude. After that 48-hour video game binge early on, I put the Neverwinter Nights disk away and settled in to some serious lounging around. My first order of relaxed living? Celebrate my eldest nephew’s fourth birthday party.

That was followed in short order by a visit to the Taste of Chicago, a Fourth of July weekend spent in Michigan with my family (including that now four-year-old nephew, Nolan, who loves “marshing marshmallows” to make s’mores), a barbeque with some friends where most of the conversation was in Polish (which I don’t speak), a trip to Lansing, Michigan, to show my girlfriend off to my best friends in the whole world, and also to get shot in the head with paintballs by one particularly bloodthirsty paintballing friend (I was on your team, Cam!).

The Lansing trip was also my only summer opportunity to get my Dungeons & Dragons fix. The withdrawal symptoms involved telling my patiently amused girlfriend many stories of past gaming glories. That she still loves me is a testament to her wry sense of humor. She says she really enjoys my stories, but can anyone be that super-humanly patient?

Lisa, the aforementioned girlfriend, also dragged me to not one, not two, but three live tapings of “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me!” the NPR weekly news quiz cum laugh riot. If I laughed any harder, I swear I would have needed surgery. Lisa, those tapings are dangerous. That much hilarity is going to kill someone some day.

Late July saw my youngest nephew finally get the kidney transplant he’s needed since before he was born. I gotta admit, I had always kind of hoped that my kidney would end up being the best match. Give up an organ, be a hero. But hearing my sister’s dry comments about her husband’s kidney—which ended up being the match Evan needed—was much more satisfying. “Do whatever you want to him, just don’t hurt the kidney!” was a phrase we heard often in the days leading up to the transplant. Chris bore the price of his hero-dom well.

It was that wry, dry, and sometimes long-suffering sense of humor, I’m sure, that helped my sister through the transplant and the constant doctor visits that have followed. If I ever have to endure what my sister is going through with her 22-month-old son, I hope I can do it with as much grace as my little sister.

After the kidney transplant, the rest of the summer seems mildly anticlimactic. I went camping once more, this time meeting friends from Michigan at Nordhouse. I took my first trip to Madison, Wisconsin to spend a weekend with Lisa’s mother. I didn’t hear nearly enough embarrassing stories about Lisa that weekend, but I’m sure we’ll go back at some point, and I’ll be able to hear more.

Then there was my trip to New York, some professional development that most other teachers skipped, and, most recently, a weekend spent hiking around Chicago with my father; I’ve wanted to show my parents around what I’ve come to think of as My Town almost since I moved here on August 15, 2004. Mom is staying with Anne in Aurora while Evan recovers from his transplant, however, so this weekend’s sightseeing was a guys-only affair.

So I’ve had a pretty full summer, even if I never did make it to a Cubs game. I did, however, get to see the Bean (covered and uncovered) and Millennium Park, once by myself and once with Dad (I think people like the Bean mainly because they can see themselves in it—I know that’s one reason I liked it); Lisa and I went to the top of the Sears Tower (a merely shrugworthy experience, I’m sorry to say); I walked among the graves of some of Chicago’s brightest historical figures at Graceland Cemetery (the closest I’ll ever get to the likes of Daniel Burnham, Phillip Armour, or George Pullman); I got to take Nolan to Shedd Aquarium (it was a much faster trip than I had anticipated—I had forgotten that four-year-olds are not famous for their attention spans); and I toured Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House with my father (the restoration isn’t complete, but what a house!).

It’s been a full, fun summer—everything I had hoped a summer off would be like. I know it might sound really mercenary—perhaps even cynical—to say that the best part of teaching is getting my summers off. It was, truthfully, one of the top five reasons I went into secondary education (another being that teaching in college on a contract basis was not providing me with a stable income).

What about the kids, you ask? Isn’t seeing the light of understanding brighten a young person’s eyes supposed to be reward enough? Isn’t teaching supposed to fill teachers with joy at the lives they touch? Honestly, teaching mostly fills me with anxiety—there is always so much to do and rarely enough time or resources to do it. For an OCD perfectionist like myself, that is not a formula for happiness. I do get pleasure from teaching, but it comes later, when I can look back and reflect on the good and the bad and realize, when everything is added up, that I have actually done some good.

This summer off has provided me with the chronological and psychological and emotional distance that I need to appreciate last year, with all of its bright spots and dark hours. Because I’ve had a chance to relax, to take care of me, I can go back to school next week feeling ready for the nine challenging months ahead.

Theoretically, that would mean I’d be writing lesson plans now instead of blogging, but I gotta work on one thing at a time, here . . .

Teaching on the South Side: Finally!

2005-06-17T10:30:00.000-05:00

It's the last day of school. I survived an entire year teaching on the South Side of Chicago. All I have to do is get through today and I have two and a half months of summer bliss laid out before me.

Apparently, the kids here always start rumors that huge fights will occur on the last day, or that they are going to "get" the facutly and staff (whatever that means). This is probably why all CPS expects out of students today is that they show up, get their report cards, and leave.

The sooner that happens, the sooner I can go camping.

Teaching on the South Side: When Can I Leave?

2005-06-17T10:20:00.000-05:00

As you might expect, the students who might actually have raised hell on this last day of the school year never showed up. In fact, only about ten of my students did. I guess final grades aren't that important around here.

The halls are empty. All of my paperwork has been turned in. I only have one more question: when can I leave and start my summer vacation?

Life in the Windy City: Objects in Motion . . .

2005-06-01T21:49:00.000-05:00

The walking/biking/rollerblading path that parallels Lake Shore Drive for roughly twenty miles along the Lake Michigan shoreline links all of Chicago’s major eastern parks, like Lincoln Park, Jackson Park, and Hyde Park, as well as other notable places like North Avenue Beach and the Museum Campus, home of The Field Museum, the Adler Planetarium, and Shedd Aquarium. It’s a place to exercise, to sight-see, to spend a lazy afternoon walking hand-in-hand with a loved one. It can also provide optimal conditions for testing Newton’s First Law of Motion: Objects in motion tend to say in motion . . . It is because of the wonders of physics that I now need a new cell phone.

I need a replacement for my trusty Treo 600 because I took a dive off my bike after trying to make a sharp left turn while going about 19 miles an hour down by Shedd Aquarium tonight. I had a choice of paths, and I chose poorly in my haste. My front wheel locked up, I went flying (that first law is right, apparently), did a forward roll (years of karate training do occasionally come in handy) and stood up unscathed. My cell phone, however, was in the waist pack at the small of my back, which made momentary contact with the ground as I rolled. It was enough to crack the screen of my $400 Treo. I knew paying the $5 a month for the phone insurance would come in handy some day. By Friday, I’ll have a brand new Treo.

And, as luck would have it, I had an audience for all of this. Two women and an entourage of about half a dozen small children were relaxing on the lawn by the aquarium right where I took my spill. The first thing one woman said: “Are you OK!?!?” The next thing she said: “My son said that’s the coolest thing he’s ever seen.”

That’s me: Hollywood Stunt Man, entertaining the masses with feats of derring-do. Heck, it’s gotta be easier than teaching.

(And, for all of the mothers reading this: yes, I was wearing my helmet.)

Life in the Windy City: An Evening of Evil

2005-05-21T01:11:00.000-05:00

OK, so I saw Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith at 3:00 p.m. today, which hardly qualifies as evening, but I did also see Wicked, the musical about the witches of Oz, based on the book of the same name by Gregory Maguire, at 8:00 tonight, and “Evening of Evil” has a more alliterative ring than “Day of Evil.” Seeing both examinations of evil in the same day was pretty trippy. I’ll start with Sith.

It was a movie I fully expected to dislike, and as far as the writing and acting are concerned, my fears were well-founded. “Clunky” and “wooden” don’t even begin to describe the lines the actors tried to deliver or the way in which they tried to deliver them. Only Ian McDiarmid and Ewan McGregor gave anything resembling a competent performance. McDiarmid simply oozes serpentine evil as Supreme Chancellor Palpatine, who finally, with the help of Anakin Skywalker, achieves almost absolute power as the Emperor. McGregor not only provides the stalwart good heart of the movie, he seamlessly matches his performance as Obi-Wan Kenobi to that of Sir Alec Guinness, who originated the role. McGregor’s voice, expressions, and body language all perfectly evoke the Obi-Wan Guinness immortalized.

Amateurish dialogue couldn’t keep these two from calculating finely nuanced performances. The rest of the cast, however, especially Hayden Christensen, just couldn’t breathe believable life into lines like this exchange between Anakin and Padme:

Anakin: You're so beautiful.
Padme: It's only because I'm so in love.
Anakin: No, it's because I'm so in love with you.

Or this petulant line delivered by Anakin:

But I’m on the Council now! They should make me a master! This is an outrage!

Or something equally silly. At least now we can see that Luke’s whining was hereditary.

The first three movies, the classic three, were filled with cheesy dialogue, but nothing this rancid. Listening to this movie was, at times, painful.

And boring. I sat through the first 20 minutes thinking “The Clone Wars animated series on Cartoon Network was more exciting than this.” And I’m not exaggerating. Hands down, the stuff on Cartoon Network was better. And it wasn’t even digitally animated. The lightsaber battles were cool, but they could have benefited from some judicious cutting (no pun intended). They just ran on too long.

But still . . . for all of these flaws, I still found myself drawn into this tragic tale. Although the acting was wooden, I still got dragged into Anakin’s internal struggle. I still felt discomfort, even pain, watching as his good intentions destroyed everything he was trying to save. Anakin was manipulated by everyone around him, even the Jedi Council. No wonder he latched on to the one person who seemed to provide the guidance he so desperately needed. Too bad that person was an egomaniacal, psychopathic Sith lord who knew just how to prey on Anakin’s messianic complex.

Sith happens, I guess. Evil springs from good. In the end, painting with broad brush-strokes in mythological primary colors is the only thing that saved Lucas. That, and state-of-the-art CGI.

There were no computer-generated images gracing the stage of the Oriental Theater that night, but the general thematic questions were the same for the Wicked Witch of the West as they were for Anakin Skywalker: Where does evil come from? What makes someone evil? Is evil really just a matter of perspective? The themes were the same, but there was singing, and music, and a happy ending.

The ending first: having read the book at the urging of my significant other, who had read it herself about five years ago, I was extremely disappointed in the Broadway Happy Ending. I should have expected it, but the happy ending completely undermined Maguire’s central theme of the book: good and evil, like success and failure, is largely a matter of perspective and spin. There is no happy ending in Wicked, the book, which helps the book pack a much more satisfying philosophical punch.

That being said, however, the point of a Broadway musical is rarely sophistic inquiry. The point of a Broadway musical is to have fun, and Wicked, the musical, delivers on all counts. Green-skinned Elphaba (EL-fa-ba, as in L.F.B., or L. Frank Baum) is a social outcast at her boarding school, Shiz. Through accident, she ends up sharing a room with Galinda, who will later become Glinda the Good Witch of the North, even as Elphaba, the animal rights activist, is later saddled with the moniker Wicked Witch of the West.

The dour Elphaba and the annoyingly perky Galinda eventually (OK, within 20 minutes of the opening curtain, if that) become the best of friends, and it is only after a confrontation with the Wizard of Oz over the treatment of talking animals in Oz that Elphaba discovers her true powers, breaks ties with her friends, and leaves to start her crusade against the Wizard.

There is a love triangle, of course, a really impressive puppet dragon mounted on the proscenium (the significance of which is only clear if you have read the book), and a fantastic levitation trick at the end of Act I during Elphaba’s signature “Defying Gravity” number. Hydraulics, while not nearly as sexy as CGI, can still produce impressive special effects. Especially when the actress they hoist 40 feet into the air is backlit, caped in a massive black cloak (to hide the hydraulics), wreathed in stage smoke, and belting out lines like:

I’m through accepting limits because someone says they’re so
Some things I cannot change, but til I try I’ll never know . . .
So if you care to find me, look to the western sky
As someone told me lately: everyone deserves a chance to fly
And if I’m flying solo, at least I’m flying free
To those who’d ground me, take a message back from me
Tell them how I am defying gravity
I’m flying high defying gravity
And soon I’ll match them in renown
And nobody in all of Oz, no Wizard that there is or was
Is ever going to bring me down.

It’s not Shakespeare, and it is unabashedly sentimental (what Broadway number isn’t?) but it is rather catchy, and quotable. Which is more than I can say for the dialogue in Sith.

For an evening of evil, today wasn’t half bad.

Life in the Windy City: It’s Starting Already

2005-04-08T17:52:00.000-05:00

I found this article on Yahoo News today:

"Star Wars" fans queue for tickets seven weeks before film premiere

If Star Wars is a religion, then I have lost my faith. I want to go to these people, shake them, and tell them “It’s not going to be that good! Didn’t you see Episodes 1 and 2? George Lucas can’t write!”

But it wouldn’t do any good. These people are crazy. The worst part? I used to be one of them.

As nostalgic as I can get about the original Star Wars trilogy, I refuse to wait in line for any length of time for a movie that will probably disappoint me.

I'm trying to keep an open mind, but Lucas' recent track record does not instill me with confidence. After all, this man had only written and directed three movies (THX 1138, American Graffiti, and Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope) prior to 1999's Phantom Menace debacle. By contrast, truly great directors, like Steven Spielberg or Martin Scorsese each have over a dozen movies to their credit (and this is a low estimate). These men know how to direct an actor, how to write and compose a scene. Lucas got lucky with a movie/ mythology that tapped into some kind of Jungian-based zeitgeist, and hasn't had to prove his directing chops since.

No, I'm not optimistic about Revenge of the Sith at all. I want to like it, I want it to be good, but I'm not getting my hopes up.

Teaching on the South Side: Even the Good Students Fight

2005-02-23T21:18:00.000-06:00

Today, while I was helping a student at her desk, I heard “Say that again and I’ll kick your ass!” shouted to my right. I turned to look, and saw one student, we’ll call him Jake, standing in front of another student, we’ll call him Dorian, who was seated at his desk.

Before I could say anything, Jake had hit Dorian hard across the face with a sloppy left hook.

Dorian, of course, jumped out of his desk and tackled Jake. Had I not interfered with their impetus by trying to break up the fight, they would have topped my computer from my desk.

I called for security even as Jake continued to wail on any part of Dorian that was available. Of course, when your opponent has his face and shoulders pressed into your midsection and has his arms tight around your torso, it’s hard to land an effective blow. Still, Jake was trying. His screams of “I’ll fuckin’ kill you” were almost as loud as my calls for security.

Oh, and I should mention that Jake was the recipient of the Leadership Award at our celebratory assembly yesterday, and he is one of the few students actually interested in the Odyssey.

Now he’s going to be suspended for three days. He’ll miss O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Dorian got in-school suspension for one day. He’s also a decent student. At least he sometimes does his work.

Security came and broke up the fight. My principal just happened to be out in the hall when this happened, too.

I have never wondered why 39 percent of first-year teachers in Chicago Public Schools do not come back for a second year. When even the good students are likely to start pounding on each other at the drop of a hat, it’s hard to find the drive to go to school for just one more day, let alone find the energy for another year.

Teaching on the South Side: Who Decides These Things?

2005-02-22T23:24:00.000-06:00

I used to have a student in one of my English classes, we’ll call him Kirk (rhymes with jerk), who was constantly disruptive. He would ask to go to the bathroom every five minutes, and complain loudly when I explained that I was not going write him a pass. Whenever I would let Kirk go to the bathroom, he would stay gone for at least ten minutes, wandering the halls, disturbing other teachers. Every day he would ask, and every day I would explain why I wasn’t writing him a pass today, or ever, for that matter, and every day he would complain about my class, about me, about school, in loud and offensive language. Sometimes I would write him up. Sometimes I would plow on with my lesson.

Eventually, he got so bad, and complained so much to the counselor, that she switched him with another student in Julie's English class. I felt bad that Jules now had to deal with this horse’s ass, but he was out of my hair—and hey, maybe he would do better with a female teacher.

No such luck.

After being in Julie's class for one week, during which she once spent 20 minutes of class time just working with him (after which he again refused to do any work, repeating the same pattern he had set in my class), Kirk threatened Julie's safety. Apparently, he had been mouthing off loudly, and when Julie told him to stop, he said something like “Don’t worry, I’ll catch up with you on the street.” It was a blatant threat, and he admitted that it was a blatant threat. Julie called security, security called police, Kirk was hauled away in a police cruiser, and Jules went to the police station to press assault charges.

We thought Kirk was out of our hair for good.

We were so naïve.

After a few days of suspension, Kirk is back in school, mouthing off and refusing to do any work, as usual.

Teaching on the South Side: So, You Wanna Quit Too?

2005-02-21T13:54:00.000-06:00

So, You Wanna Quit Too?

I went to dinner with Lisa, Anne and her boyfriend, Brendan, last night. Anne teaches at a high school on the East Side. The moment we sat down, she looked at me and said: “So do you want to quit, too?” I smiled. Then I told her how I had submitted a resume to Chicago Public Radio for the position of assistant editor of the arts desk, and if they offered me a job (something I’ll admit I’m not all that optimistic about, as I have no experience in radio) I would probably take it.

Basically, Anne and I are hitting the wall of frustration common to all first-year teachers, which is exacerbated by conditions in the inner city. You know what they conditions are. You listen to the radio. You read the news. You watch movies like Dangerous Minds.

Anne and I will probably make it through this first year, if for no other reason than we have to. Who’s going to hire anyone with a degree in English?

But it’s comforting to know we are not alone. According to a study done by the Chicago activist group Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, 39 percent of first-year teachers in Chicago Public Schools never come back for a second year. And teachers will less than five years experience have a 35 percent attrition rate. To read more about this study, click here: http://www.acorn.org/index.php?id=322

Teaching on the South Side: Language

2005-02-21T11:50:00.000-06:00

My kids know a million different ways to use the f-word, and they like to make up their own street slang. For example: a "bust-down" (pronounced "busdown", and sometimes abbreviated as "bussy" or "busser") is a woman of loose morals (although my students would define it by using graphic examples of what such a woman does). Such women (and men) are sometimes also said to be "runnin'" or to be "runners."

My students also use "musty" to describe the smell of someone who has poor personal hygiene, usually when "gunnin'" each other (trading insults a la that classic urban game of verbal combat, the Dozens).

They stretch the meaning of the verb "trifle" (which can mean 1a : to talk in a jesting or mocking manner or with intent to delude or mislead b : to treat someone or something as unimportant or 2: to handle something idly) to mean playing around in irresponsible or just plain foolish ways.

They also use the word "drowning" in some sort of derogatory fashion, probably also related to personal hygiene, in a manner I have not yet deciphered.

And, of course, they all use the n-word to refer to each other. Some students have even used it to refer to me (as in, "this n---er is bogus, man, he tryin’ to make us read.")

Life in the Windy City: That’s WU-shu, not MU-shu

2005-02-06T22:17:00.000-06:00

My freshman year of college I wanted to stay physically active (and thus avoid the dreaded “freshman fifteen” weight gain) but I did not want to run. I had run cross country and track in high school, and I had been in great shape, but I had always been rather bored while doing it: there just isn’t much variety to putting one foot in front of the other as fast as possible.

In college, though, I could live out my swashbuckling childhood swordplay fantasies by joining the fencing club.

My roommate, Darren, and I made a deal: if he’d go to fencing with me, I’d go to karate with him. We never made it to fencing, and Darren worked too much to stick with karate, but I’ve been doing martial arts of one kind or another since the fall of 1991.

I was not a particularly talented karateka. I had never been particularly coordinated (which is why I eventually dropped out of high school basketball), but what I lacked in natural grace I made up for in persistence. It took me seven years to earn the rank of black belt. One of my favorite instructors once told me that the ones who stick with karate are never the ones he expects will stick with it. I guess I was a pleasant surprise, and to no one more than myself.

At some point during those first few years of learning Moo Duk Kwan Tang Soo Do (“Institute of Martial Virtue, Way of the China Hand,” the Korean style of karate practiced by the Central Michigan Karate Club) I realized that I was addicted. I was taught karate not just as an art, or a sport, or a means of physical fitness, or self defense, or mental discipline, but as an inseparable amalgam of all five. I had never approached running or basketball this way (and these activities are rarely taught this way) but there is a long history of this kind of holistic approach in the martial arts. It satisfied a wide variety of my needs: I was regularly physically active, I was learning how to control my body and mind, I was learning how to appreciate kinesthetic art, I was becoming more confident that I could handle myself in a violent situation if I could not first avoid or extricate myself from it. And I was learning something that was just plain cool.

I have gotten older, but these needs haven’t changed except to grow more pronounced. If I go without a karate workout for too long, I start to feel something definitely like withdrawal. I get tense, anxious, fidgety, bored.

When I moved from Mount Pleasant, Michigan, to Lansing, one of the first things I did was look for a place to satisfy my martial arts addiction, and I found a great one in the Michigan State University Karate Club. I studied under new instructors, learned new things, refined old skills, met new (and long-lasting) friends.

They also practiced a Korean style at MSU, Pu Kung Tang Soo Do (“Northern Diamond (Mountain) Chinese Fist Way”), which was similar enough to Moo Duk Kwan that I fit right in, and was eventually called on to help teach, including the twice-weekly kickboxing classes that were an offshoot of the regular club.

The similarity of what I was learning to what I had learned, in addition to regular, insightful, and persistent instruction at MSU made a tremendous difference in my training. A year after I moved to Lansing, and two years after I had earned my first degree black belt at CMU, I tested for and earned my second degree black belt at MSU.

A word here about belts and ranks for those of you who have learned all you know about martial arts from the movies: being a “black belt” does not make one a master at anything, except maybe persistence. Most martial arts styles and schools assign a high number to their lower ranks, such as 10 for a beginner, a white belt, and as the student passes various physical and mental tests, those rank numbers decrease until one moves from the “negative” ranks of the colored belts to the “positive” ranks of the black belt. All a black belt means is that the student finally has enough of the basics down to truly begin his or her training.

Because there are so many different styles of martial arts and so many different schools and testing systems, there is no single common skill set for any rank, least of all black belt. Sure, most schools would expect that a black belt have a certain amount of focus and control, but even these can vary. Because of this, and because so many people have the wrong idea about what a black belt means, I rarely, if ever, mention the fact that, according to the MSU Karate Club, I have earned a 2nd dan. I will answer truthfully if someone asks me point-blank “Are you a black belt?” but I am far more comfortable simply stating the number of years I have been training. Consistent training is a far better indicator of skill and aptitude than the color of someone’s belt.

But, paradoxically, I make it a point to mention my belt color here to take advantage of exactly those misconceptions I deprecated earlier: a black belt doesn’t mean I’m an expert, but it should indicate that I have at least some skill.

And as my skills improved, I tested three years later for my 3rd dan. I practiced consistently and hard. I trained with a good friend, Nathan Blom, the same friend I had tested for 2nd dan with. We were good—but ultimately lacking. We tested for 3rd dan, but did not pass.

This didn’t bother me overly much. Sure, I was disappointed, but this was hardly the first time I had failed a test. In the years leading up to my black belt test, I failed at least twice. Those were harder to take, but I got over them and continued to train, because, whatever my rank, the important thing to me was always simply to train.

So when I moved to Chicago, I knew I would eventually need to find a place to practice martial arts. I needed to train, or I would get fidgety, anxious, bored. I was starting a new job and moving to a new city: I would need massive amounts of stress relief.

I moved to Chicago in August but did not start with a new martial arts school until November. I’d like to say I conducted an exhaustive search, looking for just the right place and teacher with whom to train and learn and hone my rusty skills (student teaching had left little time for working out—I had committed the sin of letting my training lapse) but, while I did do a few online searches and flipped through the local yellow pages, my choice was eventually decided by one purely practical consideration: distance from my apartment. Daytime traffic in Chicago is, at best, congested and slow. I wanted to be able to walk to my new dojo, or at least find a place with convenient parking.

Championship Martial Arts Academy is about a half-mile west of my apartment, on the very same street on which I live. The only way training there would be more convenient is if I lived there.

Training with CMAA meant a number of changes for me. For one, I would have to start paying for training. I hadn’t paid for martial arts instruction since 1993, when I was appointed president of the CMU Karate Club. At MSU, black belts earned their keep by teaching. The $95 a month I pay at CMAA, however, is really quite reasonable, especially since it entitles me to work out any time the place is open. The expense chafes a little, but I need the activity, so I happily write a check each month.

The second and more profound change, however, was that I would become a beginner again. After seven years of being a black belt instructor, I was going to be a white belt student. CMAA is a school of Chinese martial arts, or wushu (which literally translates as “martial arts,” or “stopping violence” and is not to be confused with “mu shu,” the Chinese pork dish traditionally served in Peking pancakes brushed with hoisin sauce).

While all Asian martial arts share many common characteristics (descending, as most did, from Chinese martial arts), different arts have different ways of achieving the same result. My 13 years of experience in Korean karate would help in some ways (I am much more coordinated these days than I was 13 years ago, for example) but they did not prepare me for the many jumps and spins and deep, low, stances of wushu. If nothing else, wushu gives me one hell of a workout.

It also helped me throw out my back just before Christmas this year. I was doing a jump-spin warm-up I had done dozens of times before, but this time I twisted before I pushed off with my legs, and something in my lower back snapped or twisted or ground together the wrong way. I walked like an old man, hobbling around, half bent over, for the better part of two weeks. My zeal to get into something new caused me to overextend myself. I’ve been more careful since.

And I’ve enjoyed being a white belt again (although in wushu they wear wide silky-looking sashes instead of narrow, thick cotton belts). As a white belt, all I have to do is learn. I’m not responsible for teaching anyone else, or for the club treasury, or for planning demonstrations to attract new students. I can just show up and train. The frustration I sometimes feel at the new skills I am trying to learn (like butterfly kicks, in which the desired effect is to jump and spin while keeping both legs straight and your body more or less parallel to the ground) is more than balanced out by the wonder I feel at being new again, at being reminded of what it is like to come to something with wide eyes and a slight palpitation of the heart.

One of my favorite Zen sayings is “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few.” I like having many possibilities before me.

Life in the Windy City: “What Are You Doin’ New Year’s Eve?”

2005-01-01T19:50:00.000-06:00

I’m sure I had heard that Frank Loesser song at some point before this past New Year’s Eve, but I had never heard it sung live, and certainly never from such a captivating vocalist as Susan Werner.

That’s what I did, with Lisa, on New Year’s Eve.

Werner was playing at a Davenport’s, a piano bar on Milwaukee between North and Division, and after Lisa had gotten me hooked on her “40’s songbook” album I Can’t Be New, my mechayeh* girlfriend got us tickets to see this superlative singer-songwriter in person.

Davenport’s is a charming little storefront bar with a kind of subdued art deco interior, a grand piano in the front room, and a back room with a tiny stage and room for about sixty people, tops. It was in this back room where we got to see Werner’s second intimate show of the evening (she did one at 8, and one at 10).

Werner is a singer-songwriter who, previous to I Can’t Be New, wrote and sang mostly folk-type songs, although to pigeonhole her as an artist is a grave disservice. It is true that she performs mostly on the folk festival circuit, and at cozy little venues like Davenport’s, although I’m sure part of the appeal of the Davenport’s gig for her was the fact that she’s a native Chicagoan and currently lives here.

I Can’t Be New was the source for most the evening’s music. Werner likes to sing her own songs, not from any sense of ego, but because “I should be able to remember those lyrics better.” That self-deprecating humor is also part of what makes watching her perform so much fun. When she stood to sing “What Are You Doin’ New Year’s Eve,” she said she felt a little uncomfortable because singer-songwriters always like to have something in front of them, even just “a tambourine—-anything.” At this show, she settled for her long, silk scarf, then proceeded to knock us out with that Loesser song.

She is immensely talented: her mezzo-soprano vocals flit somewhere between smoky and husky most of the time, a kind of rich, smooth, aural silk; her nimble fingers pluck tunes out on a piano, keyboard, or guitar with equal flair and grace, and she plays them all in the course of a show; her own lyrics are often witty and clever, but she also has facility with somber and moving. On this festive night, however, she kept those songs to a minimum.

In addition to her 40’s-style jazz and Frank Loesser, she pounded out a jaunty piano duet with her local producer (I forget his name and I wasn’t taking notes) of “If I Only Had a Brain” by Harold Arlen, because “he was born in 1905, and you’ll be hearing a lot of Harold Arlen next year, and we wanted you to hear it from us first.”

She rounded out the show by taking a couple of requests for her older stuff, and obliged by accompanying herself on the guitar with “All of the Above,” a song inspired by a friend who was certain she had finally hit upon the secret to success with placing personal ads: she was going to be very specific. The song proceeds to list everything this woman wants (the “All of the Above” of the title) and what she doesn’t want (“none of the below”). It is a funny paean to the travails of finding that perfect mate.

She also treated the audience to her new (as in “I just finished this four hours ago”) Christmas song (“because you haven’t really made it as a singer-songwriter until you write a Christmas song”). She didn’t share the exact title, but the chorus went something like “I’ll still love you the day after Christmas.”

Her tribute to the Windy City (and a sly gibe to The Big Apple) “I’ll Take Chicago Any Day” finished up the regular set, and, as you might imagine given the venue, a huge hit with the audience. Even I, a very recent immigrant to Chicago, felt more than a little civic pride while listening to that song.

After the show, Werner mingled with the audience/ revelers, chatting easily and with the same charm she presents on stage. She and Lisa talked briefly about singing (Lisa has been taking voice lessons for something like 20 years) and when I mentioned I had recently moved from Michigan, she held up her hand, palm out, pointed to it, and said, “So where are you from?” as if she were a Michigan native. She certainly picked up some local color on her last gig in Ann Arbor, it seems.

There was a champagne toast at midnight, some smooching (with Lisa, not with Werner), and then the quick cab ride home. It was , quite simply, one of the best New Year’s Eves I have had in years.

Now I gotta see where Susan Werner is playing next . . .

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* a Yiddish word meaning “a pleasure, a delight.” I have used it here to mean “delightful” but that’s probably stretching the proper use a bit. Dating a Jewess is good for working Yiddish into one’s vocabulary. It also helps that she got me the parody book Yiddish with Dick and Jane, by Ellis Werner (no relation to Susan, I’m sure) and Barbara Davilman. The book (and its helpful glossary) are so funny you’ll plotz.

Teaching on the South Side: Cultural Capital

2004-12-30T13:40:00.000-06:00

I’ve been keeping a journal regularly since 1988, but it is filled with stream-of-conscious ramblings that I would never show anyone else. It’s too personal, too disorganized, too raw. It’s been good for keeping me in touch with myself and with the act of writing, but it hasn’t gotten me any closer to my childhood goal of writing best-selling novels.

So I started this blog, this record of my move to Chicago and my experiences teaching on the South Side, not just as a record, but also as a way to force me to keep an audience in mind as I write, and audience that I can hopefully connect with, an audience I can manipulate into feeling something when they read my writings, an audience I can convince to keep coming back for more, an audience I can turn into a nascent fan base.

My father is probably my biggest fan. I emailed him last night to let him know about my latest updates. He called me this morning to let me know I had let a typo slip through (don’t bother hunting for it, I fixed it right away). He also said, in that paternally-impressed kind of way, “You’ve become quite a theater-goer.” Understandable, since most of my last post detailed the many theatrical amusements Lisa has treated me to since I moved here. I also thought I detected a hint of surprise in Dad’s voice, so my reply was: “I always have been.”

Then I got to thinking: how would Dad have known that? I haven’t lived at home since the summer of 1992. I’ve been home on vacations and holidays (and to help Mom and Dad move from Sawyer to Paw Paw on the day Star Wars: Special Edition opened in theaters). I’ve changed in those years away. I’m not the same kid they sent to Central Michigan University in the fall of 1991.

And yet.

My earliest memory is of seeing Star Wars with my father when I was four (Mom didn’t want to go, so he took me). When I was a kid, Mom and I would spend Sunday afternoons watching old movies on TV.

My first exposure to live theater (at lest the first I remember) was seeing a high school production of South Pacific. Mom (and maybe Dad, I’m not sure) took my sister and I because one of our babysitters, the daughter of a friend of Mom’s, was in the chorus. The next year, Mom took us to see Guys and Dolls. The friend’s daughter had the lead that year.

When I was 12 or 13, Mom and Dad dragged Anne and me to see the traveling company of Cats in South Bend, Indiana. I hated it. It was bad enough that I had to get all dressed up, but then I spent and hour and a half trying to puzzle out the plot before I realized there wasn’t any. Anne, on the other hand, loved it. She loved it so much that, well, if I wanted to embarrass her on line with a more vivid description of her enthusiasm for the show, I could.

The next year, it was Big River, the musical version of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. At that point in my life, I hadn’t yet read the book, so I wasn’t as appreciative as I could have been, but at least this musical had a plot. It was better than Cats.

I could go on cataloging the various shows I’ve seen over the years, both because Mom and Dad took me and later, when I would go to shows in college, or when I did a little acting and stage hand work myself during my graduate school summers, but my point isn’t that I’ve always enjoyed theater.

My point is that I haven’t. I had to be taught to enjoy live theater. And the people who taught me were my parents.

And this brings me to the reason I have logged this entry under the heading of “Teaching on the South Side” and why I have titled it “Cultural Capital.” But before that explanation, I need to show off some of that fancy learnin’ I got from my teacher education classes.

Cultural capital is “the general cultural background, knowledge, disposition, and skills that are passed on from one generation to the next” (MacLeod, 13). It is a theory very heavily entrenched on the nurture side of the “nature or nurture” debate: human beings become who they are not mainly because of genetic predisposition, but because of the environment(s) in which they grow up and continue to live in. Genetics are certainly a factor, as studies of alcoholism and other such phenomena have shown, but environment, parenting, social exposure and the like have a tremendous impact on how a child will develop. This is part of the reason I like theater. It’s the reason my father shouldn’t be surprised to read the list of shows I’ve been to since moving to Chicago. It’s why I shouldn’t think he would be surprised.

It’s also what makes teaching on the South Side so difficult, frustrating, and exhausting for me. My students literally come from a different world. They speak a different dialect of English than I do (which means their speech patterns and pronunciations of “standard” words are often just as confusing to me as their slang-heavy vocabulary), they have different standards of value, they have backgrounds and experiences that I can’t begin to fathom.

I haven’t compared notes with my friend Nate, who recently returned from teaching English in Nepal for the Peace Corps, but I would think that teaching English to a completely different population would be easier than teaching it to a population that has some elements in common with yours, elements that are mostly superficial.

It is my job to teach these students of mine, to give them the tools with which they can choose their own paths in life, make their own destinies.

But then I remember another term I learned in teacher education: social reproduction.

“Several decades of quantitative sociological research have demonstrated that the social class into which one is born has a massive influence on where one will end up. Although mobility between classes does take place, the overall structure for class relations from one generation to the next remains largely unchanged” (MacLeod 4).

I was taken to live theater shows as a child; therefore I still enjoy them as an adult. Some of my students talk with a certain pride about owning a bootlegged copy of the latest theatrical movie release. To say we have different values is a bit of an understatement.

As a teacher on the South Side of Chicago, I am fighting against massive social forces that conspire to keep my students in exactly the same social place their parents occupy and which they currently occupy themselves. And perhaps the most disheartening thing about this is that my students aren’t aware of the forces arrayed against them, and resist the notion that they can do anything to change their circumstances, e.g. get an education. Part of this is typical teenaged fatalism, egocentrism, and naïveté. The other part is social, monolithically, oppressively so. I’d like to think that one person (i.e. me) could make a difference, but it’s hard to maintain that optimism when the societal wheel is crushing you beneath it on a daily basis.

Thank goodness for the escape of live theater.

NOTE: the references to MacLeod refer to Jay MacLeod’s fascinating and insightful study of social forces at work on two different groups of students, growing up in the same disadvantaged urban neighborhood, Ain’t No Makin’ It: Aspirations and Attainment in a Low-Income Neighborhood (Westview Press, 1995). It was required reading in one of my teacher education classes. It challenged and changed my perception of the idea that anything is possible for he or she who works hard enough (what sociologists call the achievement ideology). MacLeod’s findings surprised me, as I think they would surprise most people.

Life in the Windy City: My Kind of Town

2004-12-29T15:28:00.000-06:00

Student teaching was, to put it bluntly, hell. The program at Michigan State University, which is one of the top teacher education programs in the nation, by the way, lasts for a full school year. For most of that year, the student teacher is solely responsible for teaching almost an entire load of classes, responsible for taking a full load of classes through MSU related to the student teaching experience, and, although it is officially verboten by the program, many student teachers are also responsible for whatever evening or weekend job they have to pay for college.

And during all of this, the student teachers are often told that their first year of teaching will be worse. Worse because, as unprepared as we might feel as mere student teachers, at least there is a safety net of mentor teacher, field instructor, classroom instructors, and the collective weight of Michigan State University. As a first-year teacher, you’re flying solo. Performing without a net. Sure, at least you’re getting paid, something student teachers don’t get and often complain about, but that paycheck comes with more responsibility, more stress.

I wouldn’t say my first year of teaching has been worse, stress-wise, than my year of student teaching. In some ways, such as the aforementioned paycheck, it is much better. But, like any first-year teacher, I have often wanted to pull all of my hair out in frustration: with my students, with other teachers, with administrators, with the bureaucracy, with myself.

Thankfully, I live in Chicago. As stressful as teaching, especially the first year, often is, as often as I fantasize about quitting my job and living the Bohemian life of a writer (that’s what summer is for, I tell myself), I only stress about actually living in Chicago when I’m stuck in traffic. Other than the inevitable traffic jams, life in Chicago has treated me very well so far.

If I were a more disciplined writer, a more timely reporter, a less-stressed teacher, I would have written about the following things months ago:

Flanagan’s Wake

Lisa and I hadn’t been dating very long, but her best friend, Naomi, wanted to check me out, make sure I was OK and all that. Naomi also happened to be acting in Flanagan’s Wake, a mostly-improvised comedy playing at the Pheasant Run resort outside of Chicago. So we killed two birds with one stone: we spent an afternoon laughing ourselves senseless, and then went out to dinner with Naomi.

Since the audience is integral to the performance of the play—the idea is that the American cousins have come to the recently deceased Irish man’s funeral to pay their respects, and they often have to remind their forgetful (or simply drunk) Irish hosts about vital information concerning Flanagan’s life—my favorite part of the play was when I was asked to remind everyone what Flanagan thought the afterlife would be like. I knew the word “bidet” would come in handy sooner or later.

The Credeaux Canvas

One of the benefits of dating someone who is a company member of a theater group is the free tickets she can get to shows. This wasn’t the main reason I started dating Lisa, but it is a nice perk. The first such show she took me to was the Circle Theater (www.circle-theater.org) production of The Credeaux Canvas, by Keith Bunin. The play uses the plot of three twentysomethings who plan to forge a “lost masterpiece” and sell it to an unsuspecting collector to examine the rules we set for ourselves and the roles we choose to play for each other. It was, in short, fantastic: the intimate set (and setting—Circle’s small theater seats fewer than fifty people), the razor-sharp dialogue, the perceptive themes all added up to a top-notch theater experience.

And, as an added bonus, I got to watch an actor I hadn’t seen since my graduate days at Central Michigan University: Jason Powers. In fact, we’d been in the same summer theater group together. Now he’s doing a lot of acting in Chicago.

Pilobolus Dance Company:

Yes, “pilobolus” is a real word. No, it’s not dirty. Well, not metaphorically, anyway. “Pilobolus (crystallinus) is a phototropic zygomycete - a sun-loving fungus that grows in barnyards and pastures,” says the official website of the company, www.pilobolus.com. “Pilobolus, the arts organism, germinated in the fertile soil of a Dartmouth College dance class in 1971. What emerged was a collaborative choreographic process and a unique weight-sharing approach to partnering that gave the young company a non-traditional but powerful new set of skills with which to make dances,” which is the website’s fancy way of saying what you see at a pilobolus concert looks something like a cross between modern dance and partner yoga—and it’s mouth-agape-awesome.

This was the second formal “date” Lisa and I went on, if you can count Credeaux as the first. We’d been out to dinner many times between the end of August and the middle of October, which is when we saw Pilobolus at the historic Chicago Theater, but we’d never actually gone out together, couple-wise, until Pilobolus. (Yes, you’d think seeing a movie together would have been simple enough, but for us, it wasn’t. Trust me. To date, we’ve only seen one movie together: The Incredibles. And that was just before Christmas.)

Shakespeare Kung Fu

It sounded so promising, a surreal melding of two of my favorite things: the immortal poetry of Shakespearean dialogue and the cheesy camp of bad kung-fu movies. Shakespeare Kung Fu turned out to be a disappointment; its main redeeming feature, however, is that it gave both Lisa and I something to laugh about on the train back to my place.

When Lisa first told me about this new play by “award-winning Chicago playwright Will Kern, best known for his popular and critically acclaimed long-running play Hellcab” (so sayeth The Store Front Theater) my first thought was “Damn! Why didn’t I think of that?

After we suppressed our laughter for the hour that the show ran, my thoughts ran more toward debating with Lisa whether the show would have been better if the actors had played the Shakespearean stuff more seriously or if they had hammed it up more. As it was, everything—the language, the cheesy combat (and not martial-artist-skillful, I might add, only stage-combat-skillful)—was so over the top that it was hard to take the whole thing seriously. At least the costumes and the set were nice to look at.

Off the Page with Keith Bunin at Circle Theater

Another perk that comes with dating a member of a theater company is the inside track I get on events at the theater. Not only am I privy to whatever Lisa tells me about the inner political workings of Circle Theater, more importantly, she keeps me updated on other cool events, like this one, when playwright Keith Bunin came to Circle Theater for a moderated discussion about his play, and about the life of a playwright. As a theater junkie, as a teacher of English, as a wannabe writer myself, these two hours were mana from heaven.

Jane Eyre: The Musical

Nothing Emily or Charlotte Bronte published could ever be considered cheerful and sunny. The same goes for this musical adaptation of Charlotte’s Jane Eyre. In high school, I was seized by the desire to read Wuthering Heights. It had something to do with a girl. I later found out that the girl wasn’t worth the effort. Neither was Wuthering Heights. I had never read Jane Eyre, but all you really need to know about the story is wonderfully summed up in this doggerel parody published in Maurice Sagoff’s Shrinklits: Seventy of the world’s towering classics cut down to size.

My love behaved
A bit erratic:
Our nuptial day
Brought truth dramatic:
He HAD a wife,
Mad, in an attic.

I fled! I roamed
O'er moor and ditch.
When life had struck
Its lowest pitch,
And uncle died
And left me rich.

I sought my love
Again, to find
And awful fire
His home had mined,
Kippered his wife
And left him blind.

Reader, guess what?
I married him.
My cup is filled
Up to the brim:
Now we are one,
We play, we swim,

The power we share
Defies all pain;
We soar above
Life's tangled plain--
He Mr. Rochester,
Me Jane!

The poem, at least, is entertaining. The same can’t be said of the musical.

It’s not that the actors were bad or that the set was poorly designed or that everyone was off key. On the contrary, the actors did a wonderful job, the set was solidly put together and no one’s voice was terribly irritating. But none of that could overcome a blasé script, inane music and the inherent downfalls of the period: poor English people in the Victorian period dressed in drab colors. It was, at times, like watching a funeral.

About half an hour into the show, I leaned over to Lisa and whispered: “Shakespeare Kung Fu was better.” We both had a good (although silent) laugh.

* * *

Yes, there is certainly much to do in Chicago. I definitely like it here.

Teaching on the South Side: Winter Break at Last

2004-12-29T01:59:00.000-06:00

I have been remiss in my postings—even tardy, truant, and just plain lazy. As a reader, I would be shocked and dismayed that one of my favorite web loggers (and I'm sure one of yours, too) hasn't posted anything since—October 26?!?!?! I would want that author dragged into the street, beaten savagely, shot, drawn and quartered, and his remains posted high above the town gates as a warning to all who would dare keep a breathless audience waiting over two months for another scintillating symphony of sentences such as these.

Of course, such rash action would rather defeat the purpose of getting said author to produce any more coruscating compositions, so let’s just settle for metaphoric self-flagellation, shall we? I will consider myself chastened, and you can all enjoy the bevy of belated essays that, in my guilt (and/or desire to put off getting back to school work for as long as possible) I am going to crank out over the next few days—maybe even hours!

I will, however, keep in mind my originally-suggested punishment, as a warning to myself of what happens to writers who fail to produce for their ravenous audiences. (About the only worse punishment I can think of would consist of being forced to watch, Clockwork Orange-style, hour upon hour of reality television—the thought alone gives me goosebumps. I am penitent. It won’t happen again. Much).

As the title of this posting (not to mention the date, I’m sure) indicates, I have made it to the first major oasis of the school year—Winter Break! (Of course, everyone at school still calls it Christmas Break, but I’ll deal with that morass of political incorrectness in another post—maybe the very next one!)

No, the point if this post isn’t going to be how irksome I find the narrow holiday appellation of “Christmas Break” (not to mention the very non-inclusive holiday atmosphere around school). The point of this posting is simple—I survived! I survived the first three-and-a-half-months of the school year!

I survived.

Now for the rest of the school year.

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

2004-10-26T20:35:00.000-05:00

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

2004-10-19T19:19:00.000-05:00

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

2004-10-11T12:54:00.000-05:00

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

2004-10-06T23:00:00.000-05:00

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

2004-10-05T20:01:00.000-05:00

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.

Teaching on the South Side: Looking Ahead to the Third Week

2004-09-19T22:49:00.000-05:00

After my first day of school, I attempted to post a quick paragraph just to let everyone know I was still alive and doing well. There were problems with Blogger that day, and my first, optimistic, post never saw the light of your computer screens. Or at least, I didn’t think it did. The post only showed up when I tried to delete what I thought was a blank entry. If you are so inclined, you can view my first-day post by scrolling down.

Anyway, my first day went very well: the children were more or less well-behaved, the faculty and staff were friendly and helpful, and I was actually able to punch into the time clock, which reassured me that I was indeed in the system and would eventually receive a paycheck. Sure, none of the Achievement Academy students had schedules, none of the Achievement Academy teachers had rosters, and no one was sure when any of these things would materialize, but I heard that the situation was much the same in the rest of the school, and was that this kind of controlled chaos was nothing new for the first couple days of school. I made flexible and general lesson plans for the next few days, anticipating that there would be some student-shuffling in the next few days, and went home looking forward to day two.

Tomorrow will be the start of the third week of classes for Chicago Public Schools. So what the hell happened between day one and now, you ask? I have neither the time nor space to catalog all of the triumphs and frustrations of working with disadvantaged students in what sometimes seems to be an bloated and inefficient bureaucracy (I believe I have mentioned before that CPS is the nation’s third largest school district). Then again, bureaucracies, in general, are not known for being user-friendly. I, at least, received a paycheck last Friday. Some of my co-workers, including the administrator in charge of the Achievement Academy, did not get paid. Eventually, I will have access to a copy machine that is meant solely for Achievement Academy faculty and staff. My friend Anne, who teaches at another CPS school, told me that the photocopier in her building was out of commission indefinitely. She has made three trips to Kinko’s for every one trip I have had to make thus far. Last week, my classroom was outfitted with five new internet-connected Dell desktop computers, courtesy of the monies set aside for the Achievement Academy. Most teachers are lucky if they get one.

This is the mantra of the highlights of my position that I keep reciting to myself when the stress of implementing a new plan for a new school makes my blood boil and threatens to make my head explode. There are organizational difficulties, personality conflicts, communication gaps, and student problems that often seem to be conspiring to drive me crazy. The kids, despite the problems a few of them sometimes exhibit, are just kids. They might talk too much during class time, or have the extremely annoying habit of walking or looking away from me when I’m talking to them, but, overall, the kids cause me the least amount of stress. When I close my door and get some of these kids to actually read, I know I have chosen the right profession. The administrative details will work themselves out in time. And if they don’t, I’m sure learning a lot about cultivating Zen-like patience. Any other choice would lead to a coronary, and it would be silly to have a heart attack over things beyond my control.

Teaching on the South Side: The First Day of School

2004-09-07T22:44:00.000-05:00

The best thing I can say about the first day of school: it's over. Not that today was in any way hellish (although at times it was), but mostly because this day is a huge hurdle/ milestone for any new teacher, it's over, I'm still alive and I'm still sane. Point one for Christopher.

In a nutshell: I got to school early, I was as confused as any new student, I still managed to help my new students (and parents) find their way around, I stayed late to clean my room (long story for later), I spent more time tangled in traffic in my neighborhood in my quest to buy colored chalk than I did on the Dan Ryan, and now, after some yoga, some frozen pizza, and a little planning for tomorrow, I'm going to bed.

More about the snafus of the first day in a later post, when writing won't leave me too sleep-deprived.

But hey, I'm alive and sane: that counts for something.

Life in the Windy City: Moving Out, Moving In

2004-08-25T16:32:00.000-05:00

Although finally found an apartment and I’m now nicely settled, with a new address and phone number and high-speed internet access, I didn’t simply click my heels together three times and wake up in my bed in Chicago. I had much help in packing, moving, and then unpacking (twice—more on that later) my stuff. I want to thank—again—the friends in Lansing who showed up Saturday morning to help move boxes, chairs, a desk, a couch, and a massively-large entertainment center. Tom, Eric, George, Bill: what would have taken almost half a day by myself only took a few sweaty hours with your help. Thanks again.

I would also be remiss if I failed to mention that my father did about half of my packing for me. I had made a decent start on putting stuff in boxes, but time was running out, and I had made plans to visit my friend John (aka Janko—that’s YAN-ko) in Flint Friday evening before the big move on Saturday. Luckily, on my last pass through Paw Paw, I picked up Dad so he could come to Lansing and drive my car to Chicago. When I went to Flint, he stayed in Lansing to pack my kitchen, my living room, and anything else I hadn’t already stashed in a box. Thanks, Pops.

So we packed the 24-foot rental truck on Saturday morning, I took the guys out to lunch, and then Dad and I headed to Paw Paw. I planned on storing things like my couch and that massively-large entertainment center in my folks’ extra garage. There was no way all of the junk I had accumulated over the years was going to fit in my Chicago studio. The trip to Paw Paw was uneventful, if a little slow: I couldn’t get the truck to go any faster than 55 miles per hour. I figured the engine had a governor in it, for insurance reasons. It wasn’t until the next day, when Dad drove the truck on the first leg of the Paw Paw-to-Chicago journey, that I realized how essential overdrive was to getting the truck to go faster. What did I know? My Saturn is a stick. I’m used to shifting gears all the time. But when I get in an automatic, I expect that putting the damn thing in “drive” should pretty much take care of everything. Well, now I know. At least I was reasonably sure the Budget truck wasn’t going to break down on me like the last U-Haul truck I rented five years ago (the clutch burned out, stranding me in the left-turn lane of a busy Lansing street for over two hours while I waited for a tow).

Once in Paw Paw (which is about 20 miles west of Kalamazoo, in case you were wondering) Dad and I unloaded at least half—if not more—of the stuff the guys loaded on the truck in Lansing. I have always been a bit of a pack rat, and I knew I was moving into a small apartment: I took up a whole corner of the garage with my stuff.

“You see how I stacked your boxes and things so you can easily take stuff out?” Dad asked. “And not put anything else in?” he added with a grin. Don’t worry, Dad. I don’t have enough room in the new place to accumulate anything. It’s so small I feel kind of like a dog in a crate: I can’t make a mess, or I’ll have to live in it all the time.

We completed the move to Chicago on Sunday, August 15. I drove the second leg of the trip, from Indiana to Chicago. It’s a good thing I took note that the truck required a clearance of at least 13 feet 6 inches: I never realized how many low-hanging overpasses there are in Chicago. The L tracks near my place were just high enough—13 feet, 6 inches—to allow me and the truck through.

Unloading took about an hour. I had much less to unload than I had to load, and my brother-in-law drove out from Aurora (“The Land of Wayne & Garth”) to help. During the unloading, while I was commenting on the proximity of my new place to DePaul, the L, a Blockbuster, several movie theaters, and such, Chris casually said “Have I mentioned lately how much I hate you?” with that tell-tale dry tone and faux-exasperation that told me he was making the kind of joke based on the slightest shred of reality.

“Because I’m close to the L?” The elevated is cool, but hardly envy-worthy.

“That. And DePaul, and Blockbuster and two miles from Wrigley Field . . . just the whole ‘living in the city thing.’”

And then I remembered: when I had first told Chris that I was moving to Chicago, he had commented how everyone in his suburban high school had dreamed of moving into the city after graduation. Chris went to a suburban college, met my sister, got married, and had two kids. It’s a good life, but it’s not city life.

So: the coolest thing about moving to Chicago? Brother-in-law envy.

We were moving more boxes. “So, Chris, how far away is Wrigley Field, again?”

“Two words. Seven letters.”

Yes, living in the city is going to be fun.

Life in the Windy City: Finally Settled

2004-08-19T21:51:00.000-05:00

I have finally done it. In a city of almost 3 million people and 227 square miles, I have finally settled into my own 220 square feet. It’s a studio apartment in the trendy Lincoln Park neighborhood on the North Side of Chicago (if you didn’t get the email with my new address, please email me at cer7173@comcast.net and I will provide you with both that and my new phone number). It’s on the ground floor, which means my one window has a stunning view of the shrubbery and the ankles of people who walk by. My blinds stay mostly closed all of the time. Did I mention that it’s small? But it’s my own little corner of Chicago, and just having a place to stay—any place—is an incredible weight off my shoulders.

When I started this blog sixteen days ago, all I knew was that I (in theory) had a job and that I was definitely moving to Chicago. The past fifteen days have been busy ones, to say the least.

My first order of business was finding an apartment. I started looking on August 4. I’ve moved once or twice (or three or a dozen times or so) in my life, so I wasn’t too worried about the search. I’d go on line, check out the Chicago Reader website (which lists the most currently available rentals), decide on an upper limit I would be willing to pay for rent, and viola—I’d have a place to stay in the city. Well, I had never looked for an apartment in a city of almost 3 million people before—the third largest city in the United States. My first (and only, I might add) search in the Chicago Reader turned up 314 possibilities. And that was just in the 60614 ZIP code. Chicago has 28 different ZIP codes; over 50 different neighborhoods. I had given myself about four days to find a place and sign a lease. I had my work cut out for me.

Of course, I could instantly narrow my search in a couple of different ways. First, by neighborhood: there are certain places in Chicago I knew I would never want to live. Take Canaryville/Fuller Park. Not For Tourists Guide to Chicago 2004 (an absolute must for anyone visiting the city, resident or tourist) describes this pair of neighborhoods this way: “If Chicago ever hosts the Olympics, this will be the perfect neighborhood to host the shooting event.” Canaryville/Fuller was definitely out. Actually, the only neighborhood I ever really considered living in was Lincoln Park. My friend and fellow MSU teacher education grad, Anne W., lives there. I crashed on her futon many, many times during my apartment search. I sort of knew the area. I liked the tree-lined avenues, the wide variety of restaurants, bars, and little neighborhood shops. I would live within a few blocks of the L (actually within half a block, as it turned out, but more on that later). Second, I narrowed my choices based on cost. I wasn’t going to spend any more than a third of my monthly income on rent, and that was on the high end. Still, after all of this narrowing, I had dozens, if not hundreds, of choices left to me.

So I started making phone calls from Michigan. I had to re-interview for the job that Friday morning; I planned to base myself at Anne’s Lincoln Park flat Thursday night, go to my meeting Friday morning, and spend the rest of Friday hiking around the neighborhood, checking places out. Well, to make a long story short, I must have walked over ten miles in two days. I figured out early on that a combination of walking and taking the L was far more convenient than spending hours in traffic just to go a couple of miles, then spending another ghastly amount of time just trying to find a parking spot. Sure, there are some neighborhoods where street parking is easy to come by, but as a general rule of thumb, the closer you get to the lake, or the more commercial a street is, the harder it is to find a place to park without paying out the nose and/or going insane.

Between Friday and Saturday I looked at five places on my own, and about five more with the help of one of the many free apartment-finding services in the city. It didn’t feel like I had seen much of what was available until Saturday, when I finally looked at a couple of apartments that I knew instantly that I did not like. The multitudinous spider webs housing large, ugly-looking spiders (is there another kind?) in the atrium ceiling was a big turn-off for me at one place (and the “bedroom” was barely big enough for a queen-sized bed), and the gritty urban feel of the three places above a frozen yogurt shop at the corner of Sheffield, Wrightwood and Lincoln streets would have been cool in college, but I was looking for something . . . professional-looking, I guess. I had a new job. I was finally living a grown-up life. I wanted a grown-up-feeling apartment, but I didn’t want to live in the hotel-like atmosphere of a high-rise (stunning views of Lake Michigan be damned). And I didn’t want to live in a neighborhood where people pissed in the streets (witnessing said urination was the deciding factor against the 1200-square-foot apartment in Uptown, just north of the trendier, prettier parts of Chicago).

So, in the end, I eschewed square footage, lake views, and a deck, for my tidy little hole in the wall on Fullerton, across the street from DePaul University and half a block east of the Fullerton L stop. It’s tiny, but it’s close to the L and it comes with its own parking spot out back. Most importantly, it’s now home.

Big Move

2004-08-03T20:38:00.000-05:00

This is it: I’ll be a resident of the great city of Chicago by the end of August, hopefully sooner. I’ll be teaching 9th grade English at X High School on the South Side of Chicago. (It's practically in Indiana, it’s so far south).

Although I haven’t signed any kind of contract yet, which means, I suppose, that some freak paperwork accident could still mean I won’t have a job come September, that I have been offered a job and accepted that job is all but a done deal. I was reluctant to make a broad general announcement before now, since, my luck being what it is, I didn’t want to tell everyone I had a job and was moving and then have the job disappear on me. However, now that I have had several short phone conversations with folks at X, and I’ve actually started looking on line for available apartments in various North Side neighborhoods, the fact that I have a job and I am going to move to Chicago has finally started to sink in—and I’m pretty darn excited about it all.

No, I am not one of those crusader teachers who has dreamed of working in the inner city since I had one of those social-consciousness epiphanies while doing volunteer work during my second year of graduate school. To be honest, I never really wanted to teach in high school, period. I hated high school when I was there, a long, cliché-filled story that might one day find its way into print, but not today. I cannot stress in this short space how much high school filled me with dread and loathing. I hated it when I was a teen: why would I ever want to go back once I had won my diploma and my freedom? Short answer: I didn’t. No way in hell was I going back. I would sooner have plucked out my spleen with an oyster fork, cooked it in garlic and onions, and eaten it with a nice chianti.

And now I find myself, not only preparing to teach high school, but to do it on the South Side of Chicago. What the hell happened?

Short version: I got my master’s in English, I got married, I got divorced, I got laid off. Somewhere in there I started teaching English as a graduate assistant at Central Michigan University. I liked it. I imagined getting my Ph.D. in English and becoming the hippest young lit professor at some high-powered, big-named university. But when I finished my three years of grad school, I was tired, and I was worried: I kept hearing that two-thirds of all Ph.D. recipients last year were not working in their chosen fields. I didn’t want to spend all that time in school and not get a job. So I got married, moved to Lansing, Michigan, and worked as a telephone service representative for what was then Michigan National Bank. I really put that MA in English to good use, let me tell you.

Trish, the now ex-wife, was the reason for the move to Lansing. She had just finished her teaching certificate and had gotten a job teaching earth science in East Lansing. We moved. I worked. The marriage fell apart (another long story that will not be expanded upon here). But during that time, I had been able to teach night classes at a local business college, and had been able to meet some of Trish’s students by helping out with the school plays (Trish had stage-managed many plays in college, and I had helped construct sets for a few, as well). I discovered that teenagers weren’t as bad as I remembered them being. Some of them were actually kind of cool. And Trish was sick of my relative lack of vacation time, at least compared to the days she got off as a high school teacher. In summer, she wanted to travel, and I was stuck answering phones for the bank. Our solution: I would get my teaching certificate, so we could have the same schedule.

I took the Michigan Test for Teacher Certification in 2000. I started the paperwork to begin teacher ed classes at Michigan State University. Then we got the divorce. And the bank laid me off. Although my life was a trite shambles for about a year, I kept to the plan of getting my teaching credentials. I needed a steady job. Teaching at the community-college level was fun and engaging and rewarding, but the pay sucked. I could make more as a high school teacher. And get benefits! I was purely mercenary in my approach.

So I spent two years in the teacher ed program at MSU, and did pretty well, considering I managed to demonstrate a prodigious amount of tactlessness and insensitivity on my very first day of classes (another long story that will have to wait). My instructor has since written papers about my comments that day. The “axe” event is now immortal.

Poor social graces aside, however, the two years of classes, during which I also spent a year interning at a local high school, did something to me. I lost my hubris (what did I need teacher ed for, anyway? I had been teaching for five years already) and realized that, whatever else I did in life, I wanted to teach. I wanted to get that visceral thrill that anyone who has ever taught gets when you show someone how to do something, and then, after a little help, they can do it on their own. This is, perhaps, a gross oversimplification of the complex dance that occurs between a teacher and a learner, but the thrill is real. And I wanted to feel it, every day, if possible.

So I graduated, went to job fairs, searched the Web for a job—and discovered that Michigan has an overabundance of teachers. My sister, Anne, lives in Aurora with her husband and two young sons, so Chicago was always my backup plan. Now it is my only plan. And despite my worries about how on earth I am ever going to relate to a classroom filled with students who have had life experiences so very different from mine, I find myself getting more and more excited about the change in my life, and the challenges it will bring. At the very least, it will give me plenty of stuff to write about, and I’m going to write about it here.

Chicago isn’t nearly as exotic as Nepal (actually, I suppose that all depends on the perspective of the viewer), where my friend Nate is finishing up his two-year stint in the Peace Corps, but I’m going to follow his lead and record my experiences as a new teacher in an inner-city school on this webpage. I should also mention that my brother-in-law’s blogging efforts have also inspired me in this enterprise. This is likely to be the biggest adventure of my life so far, and I want to share it with anyone who is curious (like the friends who joke that, on the South Side, I’ll finally get to put my years of martial arts training to the test), anyone who is worried (like my parents, who, I’m sure, are worried about me getting shot), and anyone looking for the next great book about how teaching changed my life (interested publishers can contact me at the email address listed on my resume, which you can find here).

Thanks for reading.

P.S. To check out the bloggers who inspired me, go to Nate’s Nepal Page and/or Thilk's Random Thoughts.