Underway...

The madness has begun. I've promised myself to stay ahead of it this time around. But how could even the best of them--the teachers who have learned to rise above the fray--breathe dead hippo, so to speak, and come away unaffected. Does September fool every teacher into thinking that this time everything will be under control? Are all of these conveniences I've accrued an attempt to appear in control when in reality there's no stopping the madness from taking hold? I suppose smothering oneself in the crusty, organize mess that is human interaction is what it's all about, but the armchair psychotherapist in me wonders if the role of teacher becomes misappropriated by the system, by the students in need of more than an education, by the teachers in need of more than fulfillment, for a desire for purpose in life, and society's need for control. Bell to bell, Foucault's Panopticon is in full effect.

Let the optimism reign for at least a little while. Let there be smiles on every face on campus. September: the honeymoon is meant to end.

image source: I could just scream!

"What would you say to yourself? Write an imaginary scene between you at your current age and you at a younger age. If you don't want to use dialogue, you don't have to."

"Hey, Erich, the twelve-year-old: give those day dreams some legs and point them in the right direct. Speak more German to Omi and Opi. Avoid taking vegetarians girls to Tony Roma's, no matter how shy you are. You're a good kid--remember that."

Arrows of Chance

"When did you feel the most free? Write about it."

San Sebastian. A night train into the city left me with a traveler's hangover. You go through the motions after a while, just like everything else, except when you're backpacking a stranger in more than one strange land, you must remember how vulnerable you really are once you step off that train. This is not what the travel guides described. This is not what I thought I'd write home about. I suppose this is where I shed the romantic hue to it all. The beginning of the end. There are always fellow backpackers to befriend along the way, but it was somewhere along the transfer of trains on course to San Sebastian that the feeling of solitary existence hit me. Everyone had their separate destination, taking another train to another site. I tried best to avoid the worn backpacker's trails through these destinations, which often led me to the mundane. Definitely not what my family expected to hear about. 'Not all who are wandering are lost' was the axiom that repeated through my head as I scraped the most out of those traveler's mistakes I frequently made. That's what you get when you opt for the road not taken. There's no romanticism to latch onto when you're out of money and still feeling unsatisfied.

But San Sebastian lay there. I tumbled out of the train like a drunkard looking for the next den of indemnity. There was nothing that this morning in this sleepy port town could offer a weary traveler. I sought refuge much the same way I had always done as a runner: look for high ground and conquer it. I found the highest point, Urgull, and cut through every small alley to reach it. A stranger wandering through Basque neighborhoods at 6:30 in the morning hardly seemed the image I wanted to send the locals. Still, the doors remained closed as I passed through, climbing higher.

I finally reached the peak as the sun began its mark on the day. It was then that I had that Whitman-esque connection with it all. The quiet of the earth, the vastness of the sea, the arch of the rainbow--all left me feeling that it was all worth it. My sense of freedom was born from initial feelings of loneliness and despair. No matter how hard I tried to break away from the beaten backpacker's path, there were always fellow travelers with me headed in the same direction. Not on this day. Not a traveler's soul in sight. I was the only creature awake up on that mountain as I looked over the bay of San Sebastian. This was freedom, even for a moment until the world around me awoke, until the others caught up with me, until I decided to return to the mortal minutia below.

Ten old tricks I can't touch

"When did you realize you couldn't still do it? List ten things you could do when you were younger but can't do anymore. Put one, some, or all of them together in one piece of writing."

I've yet to find a legitimate gray hair on my head. They must be there, hidden between all of the sandy blonds, laughing at me with every abrupt step and awkward bow I take. It must all be so amusing to them, watching this shell of a thirty-two year old attempt that which is more fit for someone ten years his junior. I've never wanted to be "that guy" who doesn't catch on to the fact that he looks about as out of place as an Eskimo luau.

Yet with age shame has less of a tinge. I know my limitations, perhaps to the extent that it may stifle any great experiences I may consider venturing on, but I still recognize what qualifies as folly. However, it's more than stuff of mere embarrassment. There are some on the list that cannot be done, or at least done as well, because of physical or mental limitations. Ten sounds nice, but here's my list of five.

1. 16 x 400-meter sessions
Really, I'm not the monster on the track I once was. Sixteen miles, mostly at breakneck speed, was once something I could do without even blinking. All of my grueling ventures as a runner are now unfathomable. It's not that I necessarily think my body is incapable (though, I'm sure that I can't recover like I used to) it's just that other responsibilities in life have left little time to regain my physical prowess.

2. Bilking The Man
I suppose there was justification for this when I was a starving college student. I certainly found enough reason to rationalize my choices that involved paying as little or nothing at all. It certainly depends on who you ask when defining stealing. However, I would never consider thievery in the classic sense. Just the typical slacker behavior. You know, theater hopping, lounging at Soup Plantation for hours, pirating software, DVDs, and/or music. Softcore Abbie Hoffman. I could never really steal this book. Hell, I bought the thing from Barnes and Noble for crying out loud. I'm a little more understanding of the fact that others are trying to survive too. I just choose my businesses more carefully rather than patronizing the big corps (No more McDonald's, never Walmart).

3. Lateness
I don't know how my first boss put up with me habitually arriving five minutes late to work. Hell, I would fire me. I guess I had other redeemable qualities. Still, it's not that I don't still arrive late now and again, but I've learned to be considerate of other people's time as well as my own. It is the commodity worth more than money. A lucrative salary can never compensate for lost youth (i.e., physical prowess lost is never gained in retirement).

4. Three days on nothing but Coke and red vines
Man, I was a machine in my youth. Six years of never missing a day of school and never even missing a day of practice. My body could withstand most anything. I never really had my first major illness until coming down with Mono while surviving in Japan (I say "surviving" because I believe it was in Japan that my body first was thrown for a loop). Now, I can no longer consider ventures such as "Three Day", the nebulous agreement in college to go without sleep for three days straight in order to see the psychological effects. Less a tank, more a trembling temple, my body cannot withstand another typhoon.

5. Subverting the dominant paradigm
The daydreams of revolutionary upheaval of the system have even greater relevance now that I've become a working stiff, but I also recognize the repercussions of such ventures. This is not to say that questioning authority is not out of the question. But now I am the authority. To adhere to such a philosophy would lead to things falling apart, the center being unable hold, et. al. Perhaps I took a page from Tyler Durden's destructive approach. Now I must work with the broken shards, the mangled pieces to build something worth keeping. Less about me, more about those who come after me. Still, there are the little battles of subversion worth fighting. I can work incognito. Project Cage Rattle. Cue the Madagascar penguins: "You didn't see anything."

Books on my teacher shelf

Although I've reserved the waning moments of the night for fiction (please, let it be more than a sleep inducer), I've put a number of texts on teaching on my shelf hopefully to fight the madness of periods and bells and of grade-driven students. It is so easy to follow the traditional routine in lock-step and continue the vicious cycle that keeps public education irrelevant in the minds of many students. What's this worth if students find no meaning in it? I hear the challenges in the back of my mind as I write this. Yes, there is the horse-to-water analogy trotting in. I understand. I have been on the losing end of the classroom battle for resistant minds many times before. Yes, I have no control of the student's will. Yes, a teacher can only go so far before s/he has reached the realm bordering on co-dependency. But I am always learning what it means to be a better teacher. This means questioning my own practices regularly. Routines may be comfortable and may help me through a schedule that is impossible to handle for any teacher. Survival is one thing, recalcitrance is another.

So, here is the short list:

Understanding by Design (Grant Wiggins & Jay McTighe)
Going With the Flow (Michael Smith & Jeffrey Wilhelm)
The Elements of Language Curriculum (James Dean Brown)

The list will surely expand throughout the year. To be continued.

The keys to the car

I can't help but compare today's experience to one I experienced the day I passed my driving test at the DMV. It's that one test that offers very tangible rewards upon receiving a passing score. I felt like screaming with elation on the drive home. It was my first ride as a legal driver, one I could have managed solo if I were inclined to do so (if I really, really needed to!). Today I finally received the keys to my first classroom. I have been teaching in some fashion for nearly seven years--the elementary and junior high schools in Japan, the ESL adult classes for HBAS, and, of course, the many subbing jobs around Southern California. Always a temporary location, though, the teaching felt all-too-permanent. Now I have been granted the freedom to create my own learning environment as I see fit. I've always believed that where one learns has as much an effect on the process as how one learns. If I cannot control the world outside and all of the distractions that come with it (but should a teacher really strive to do so?), then this corner of the world can be reserved for creation, expression, work, work, work.

With the keys comes obligation to manage the space, not necessarily for my own comfort as it is so often used, but to create an engaging environment for learners. More than stimuli--this can often be random firings which evoke random results. What covers the walls needs to be relevant to what we are learning in class, and, by chance that it all may bleed into the backdrop of white noise, needs to be renewed regularly. A scenery change for each unit? Is this a lofty goal? Will I be overwhelmed with the curriculum itself, the phone calls home, the IEP meetings, the assignments to grade? Perhaps.

Mishapen Muse

The second coming of reform may be due. While Bruce Pirie's text, Reshaping High School English is little outdated by research standards, his call for change does not fall on deaf ears. This book came to me on a whim. So desperately wanting to hang with the big kids in the credential program back when I was a mere undergrad two years from left before the great walk of pomp and circumstance. This was during the time of great educational reform, well before NCLB. Teaching jobs were practically being handed out to college graduates and the upper division courses were filled with enthralling discussions on pedagogy and praxis.

Finally, I took the time to dig into to Pirie's ideas. It falls on the heels of my own thoughts after reading Blogs, Wikis and Poscasts. I've accepted the idea of integrating blogs into my instruction, but given the lack of computers readily available to my own students--the waiting list for the one computer lab set up for both the middle school and high school with only a few spots available at least two months in advance--my only recourse for this to be a regular routine is have students complete the weblog assignments on their own. Those who don't have the luxury to a computer at home would be asked to utilize the computers available in my classroom or the library at lunch or after school. This will cover a portion of the writing activity for the class. But it's the in-class activities that concern me.

Of course, I am planning on assigning in-class writing, be it journaling, in-class essays and short-answer-quizzes, but I cannot deny that there are times when I do worry whether I will have a creative approach to the literature we will cover in class. I can't just have them write the a response after every reading. Not only will such a plan be misconstrued as punishment by students, but it will also kill the literature we are covering. Pirie stresses the use of dramatic work as a means of engaging students with text. Not just plays as the texts selected to read in class, but dramatizing literature that sits flat for many students: "If we're trying to see how verbal language is embedded in nonverbal contexts, then we need to make a deliberate effort to experiment with other ways of knowing and communicating--visceral, physical, large-as-life complements to the 'talk and text' of traditional English" (54). Pirie is suggesting that we don't necessarily use drama as purely a source of entertainment in the classroom when all life seems to have been sucked out by some textual ghost, but find those episodes in a text that demand drama to explicate a text. The use of drama in such cases needs to be continually questioned for its purpose and value to assist the students. Otherwise, it may be equivalent to showing the movie in lieu of the literature itself--a choice so often made by teachers and more often preferred by students. But to what end? Clearly, not to explore the text more deeply.