They Have Their Own Thoughts

two worlds

2006-10-11T11:13:00.000-06:00

This week we are giving our 9 week exams.
I don't know where to start so I'm just going to start. I've been here for 9 weeks now. I'm teaching the polar opposite of what I was teaching a year and a half ago. I'm teaching the gifted now. My heart is pulled. Douglass has reopened in its building. Every day it seems there's a story in the newspaper about the problems the schools that are opening are facing. Kids at John Mac are protesting the poor conditions and being interviewed on television. No toilet paper. No doors on toilet stalls. No books. No teachers. That's the one that gets me and that's why my heart is pulled. I'm a teacher and I was their teacher. Yesterday in the paper there was an article about how many teachers have quit and how many they still need, about how someone said that there are actually classes of 100 students and the authority says no, that's not true, that they're running about 40 in a class. 40. Our governor spent some time in an elementary school which is one of the model schools. Someone interviewed her and asked her why she wasn't touring the schools with problems and she said she's meeting with people who know what those conditions are like, but I know, and there's no doubt about it, just like really seeing what Katrina did to New Orleans, you have to see it with your own eyes. Second hand accounts, pictures, like that, cannot possibly express the devastation. I was so angry when I saw her on television all I could do was cry.
At least there's a little noise.

TinSoldier

2006-09-12T13:22:00.000-05:00

I just don't know where to start.
TinSoldier. Thank you for finding this blog and for writing. Thank you for being in my room. Thank you for respecting it. Thank you and the people who left the stuffed animals in that science classroom, and for the note you wrote on the board about leaving the animals because the children had already evacuated.
Some of them are back. Douglass has reopened as the afternoon platoon shift at Clark or Cohen or one of those comparable schools. Their hours are 1:30 to 7:30. Next week the school itself is supposed to re-open. What can I say? I wonder if Whitney and Monique and Jaquonda (the girl who saved Maya Angelou's book of poetry from the "fire") will be looking for me?
I wonder who will erase Williams Stafford's poem, "For my young friends who are afraid," from the board in 219?

a matter of perspective

2006-06-14T10:09:00.000-05:00

School is over and I've been to Paris and now I am finally really going to settle in on writing again. I've been stymied with the writing of the story of Douglass and I haven't known why until yesterday. Yesterday my friend asked me if I had any trouble last year writing, and I didn't, not really. What she said to that made me gain perspective. She said that last summer, Douglass was still a viable (relatively speaking) school, and ongoing. At that time I was writing the blog and the book to address the plight of the children of New Orleans, and the sad state of the school system. Now there is no Douglass anymore, no 9th ward/lower 9th ward to speak of, almost no New Orleans, so now I see that the job isn't about addressing conditions so that maybe they'll change. Now the job is to be an advocate and tell the story of those children I knew, to say what I learned about them, about what they were given in the name of education, so, I don't know, maybe so the outside world can know a little more of what they were up against. Anyway, now what I'm doing is telling a story about something that happened and is over. It's an entirely different point of view.

the road

2006-05-29T12:12:00.000-05:00

The school year is over and tomorrow I'm going to Paris for 10 days. I haven't been able to write here in so long. I miss it. The last month has been overwhelming. I had to have an angiogram. But when I get back I intend to reflect on the end of the year and report in then. Meantime, bon voyage, Melanie.

last writing with first

2006-05-11T08:03:00.000-05:00

This blog today is the last writing I did with that marvelous first period class. I read it aloud to them. Later I'll read what they wrote and include some of that.

What I wanted was for us to reflect on the semester, to think about all the poems we read, all the writing we did, all the discussions we had. I loved when we wrote about living in the isthmus after reading Pope's "Essay on Man." And the deeper yes after reading some of the new German Pope's first encyclical on love. How did it happen that such a beautiful group of young men and women would convene at this one place, this one point in time, especially when I was here, and let the world open up a little? Some people believe in dumb luck but I don't. I can't. I don't know why I can't. When beautiful things happen I feel like they're gifts we're being given (not that I know what the giver is) as rewards or as opportunities for lessons or as boosts for us or as times to prepare us for times. This semester with this class has changed me somehow. It reminded me, for one thing, that real education is possible in school. It reminded me that there will be adults out there in the world in the future who think for themselves. It makes me feel safer and somehow like the world is richer knowing that they're out there and I'm richer because they were here for me. It's significant that this would be the first group of students I'd work with after Katrina. Theirs were the first faces I saw who looked toward me to be their teacher. They were the first students since the storm with whom I'd had an opportunity for intellectual inquiry, real serious inquiry, inquiring to the point where we all had to throw up our hands and acknowledge that we didn't know, that we'd gone to the edge of the known and, standing on its narrow ledge, looked into the vast gray whatever. It's circular in that grayness and I know that what happened in here is going to circle through the parts of life we don't know and return to our consciousness having been sparkled with cosmic dust. We'll one day go to a zoo and see a polar bear or a swan or a flamingo or a platypus or a giraffe or a walrus and we'll understand it a little bit differently than we did before and these children will carry on with their lives and experience things that try to crush them but they'll rise and remember and they'll carry all that with them. I hope that it's people like these who will become lawyers and judges and law makers and that they will remember about this Earth and its awesome beauty and power and I hope they'll remember how Pope in his Essay on Man said how things aren't simple when you're a being who wishes to live consciously. And I hope they'll remember about surviving and thriving and that there are people living in their very cities and neighborhoods who only seem to thrive, who just barely survive, and I hope they'll remember that life is hard but can be beautiful and when they go out in the world I hope they'll remember that it's very hard to pull oneself up by the bootstraps and that sometimes people don't have boots. I hope that when they pass judgment they will remember the deeper yes, and about love, and I hope they will look upon the kids, for example, at Douglass High School with compassion and heart.
Anything else? Oh yes. I certainly want to say a huge thank you to the powers that be for giving these people to me these some months (and forever). Amen.

what it was all for

2006-04-18T08:59:00.001-06:00

So Friday was the day we'd set in first period to stand together in the middle of the room and place our animals in the zoo. I honestly had no more plan than that, and I told the students so. Someone suggested we make a circle with our desks, which we did. Then someone said maybe we should start with climate. Two people had ice-requiring creatures, the polar bear and the penguin, so we began with that. Sarah, the student with the polar bear, told us that polar bears and lions are the two most discontented zoo animals and we know this because they're the animals that pace the most. We ended up talking about quality of life and the difference between surviving and thriving and whether or not animals' freedom should be sacrificed for the entertainment and education of humans and whether or not animals recognize that they're free or not free. In the end, we pretty much talked ourselves out of creating a zoo. Sarah said she doesn't like zoos anymore.
Here are the three of the many wonderful lines I heard during the discussion that I managed to write down: "Platypus's don't care." "In the UK every swan is owned by the queen." "All that evolution is for nothing."
I don't care anymore if we make a zoo or write a paper or get our bibliography pages right. All that research had its fruition in that one 50 minute discussion as we sat like educated people, sharing not only what we learned but, more importantly, what our minds came to understand. The students taught each other, and they taught me. I was stunned, and elated by it. They were too.

some people eat Flamingoes

2006-04-12T16:18:00.001-06:00

I wrote a long blog yesterday and it disappeared when I attempted to publish it. It tore me up to lose it. I forget how important this blog is to me. So I’m going to try to reconstruct what I wrote.
I began by saying it has been too long since my last writing, that I have been distracted, that I feel like I stepped into a school in motion from out of a world that is most definitely not in motion. It’s hard to reconcile the two worlds. When I make it back to the south shore I can hardly remember what it is like to be in a chaos-free place.
Anyway, what I wrote about yesterday was how the zoo research project is going. I think it’s a success. Learning about animals is pretty compelling. One of my students said the animals of Europe are boring. She said the only interesting one is an extinct one called the Irish Elk, that it went extinct because its antlers grew too large and its neck couldn’t support its head any longer. She printed out a picture of it and everything. Half the people in the room know now about the Irish Elk. Another student informed us that there are people who eat Flamingoes. Another student is researching the Cheetah and it gives us the chance to talk (informally) about what the fastest land animal on Earth would need in a zoo in order for it to thrive. My wish is that these brief interchanges will lead to a discussion of the differences between surviving and thriving, not just at a zoo, not just among animals, but among us. One time somebody who reads this blog pointed out the fact to me that these young people at Mandeville High School are the children who will be going to college and who will become lawyers and law makers and such, and that perhaps these are the children who may have the greater impact on our society. I’m thinking about that because maybe someone in this class will remember the talk of thriving and use it to help the children of my students at Douglass.
A dilemma led to a beautiful piece of luck, by the way. One of my students, a very strong and present young woman, was absent the first few days of the project, so missed the animal choosing. I gave her a book about the current thinking on zoos and made her the zookeeper and tomorrow, when the animal researchers gather in the middle of the room, armed with their information, she will be the expert and she will arrange the zoo according to what she learned in her reading. I envision her asking the animal experts questions so she can juxtapose. They’re all writing papers that contain information about the animals, a discussion of what each animal requires to survive, and a discussion of what each animal requires to thrive. Maybe when we get back from our break I’ll try to get them to make the leap and, in a formal discussion which will lead to an essay, apply their thinking to the human race.
The freshmen are still reading Great Expectations. I read the first 85 pages aloud and now I’m letting them read on their own. A student today told me she loves the book. I’m loving it too. I’m beginning to understand why it’s so revered. Pip is a plain old flawed and glorious human, just like me.

expectations

2006-03-23T15:46:00.000-06:00

This week was LEAP testing. I gave the iLEAP (whatever the hell place that holds in the universe) to four 9th graders in special ed and my job was to read the tests to them. It was nice to make a bond with these four children. They went at the tests with no whining, with gusto even. On the last day (yesterday) we had the reading comprehension section and I was not allowed to read the passages to them and I could see the fire fade in their eyes and the worry set in. I have a friend who says that politicians ought to take the Graduate Exit Exam that all high school students have to pass, even the students with society-tested, doctor-verified situations or conditions that render them officially incapable of passing the test, and publish the politicians' scores. I think so too. It's too easy to sit on the self-imposed and self-congratulatory "I'm an adult" throne and toss out edicts. Excuse me, but does anyone think our president could pass the high school GEE?
But to get off the soapbox...
Today I went to a wake for a student at our school who died Sunday in a car wreck. I didn't know the girl but I do teach her best friend who was in the car with her. They were both from Chalmette, now living on the northshore and going to Mandeville High School. Enough said.
Today I also started Great Expectations with my freshmen. It's a hard novel. I remember trying to read it in high school and hating it but reading it later in life and loving it. So I told them that. In one of the classes we talked about the difficulties and abuses so many children experience and I waxed romantic about how amazing the human spirit is, that it can endure such abuse and still rise, and students told stories, and I told mine, and one of my students said, "some of us do not rise." I think something important is going to happen in this class.

what is the sacred

2006-03-09T17:29:00.000-06:00

Here's the story of yesterday. We read the "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," (pasted in below). I tried to explain or rather to help the students understand something that I can only vaguely understand with my mind (though I sense what's true), that is, why the mariner was so grievously punished for taking the life of a bird. I only sense but cannot actually know that all things on Earth are connected and that what hurts you hurts me, and also that what feeds you feeds me (and what feeds me feeds you). But the mariner stepped into the flow and pulse and interrupted it, interfered in the forward movement. He was cocky maybe, or had the belief that he didn't need the mystery the bird represented. Maybe that's it, that our ability to understand rationally (which negates the possibility of faith and mystery) is an empty thing, that the mariner's spirit or heart or whatever got filled up by the experience of loss, that it perhaps made him feel that loneliness that I think is at the very very core of humans, made him feel that "...his soul hath been alone on a wide, wide sea: So lonely 'twas, that God himself Scarce seemed there to be." Maybe what he received was the opportunity to find God, to recognize his emptiness and loneliness and to seek out the mystery. But we have to sacrifice or face danger and death in order to reach inside to where the center of things is shrouded in the fog and the mist (9 fathoms down), the unknowable. The irony about all this is that during a discussion of the sanctity of life (we didn't name it that but that's what the discussion was) one student, Roy, who had come in late and missed the poem, said he likes to kill animals. Here was the man who must hear the mariner's tale and he came in late and missed it.
We wrote in response to Coeleridge's line, "What manner of man art thou," and I got some of the most real writing I've seen yet from students. Here's one by Adam:
"What manner of man art thou? Hidden, scalded. Raw. I hide from society. People are friend and foe. Living anxiously for something to happen. Waiting to see tomorrow. Enjoying the things that get me thru the day. Hoping to get over the fear of people. Hoping to live life anew. Though hoping to be ignored. Fear always there. As if over my shoulder. As if fear was a person. Fear/Pain, Love/Pleasure, Fear/Hatred, Love/Desire, Fear/Society, Love/Acceptance, Fear/Life, Love/Tomorrow, Fear/Love.
But always fearing fear itself."
It's 8:15 a.m., the room is filled with intensity. Racquel, who playfully fights me about all these poems we read, has been writing for 25 minutes non-stop. Her hand is on her forehead. Occasionally she stops and lifts her face and looks to the floor beside her, into the depths below the floor, for a word to flesh out some vague thought, some fleeting glimpse of understanding, because she wants to name the thing inside. I feel profoundly grateful to be the one this time who was able to give her the space to find a little more of herself. And this time it came about because we read a poem that she fought about a man who had an experience that deepened him and forced him into the world to be a teacher. And here I am, a teacher, passing another teacher along. But Racquel is a teacher too. She's listening to the muse and writing her song out and will pass it along sometime, somehow, because now she has words for it because she has a pen in her hand, and someone sometime somehow will hear her words and what she knows about herself and will see what we recognize to be true of ourselves too, that we are of the one human community, cut from the same cloth, one wide and lovely entity that is indeed affected by the death of a bird.
Here's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner":

ARGUMENTHow a Ship having passed the Line was driven by storms to the cold Country towards the South Pole ; and how from thence she made her course to the tropical Latitude of the Great Pacific Ocean ; and of the strange things that befell ; and in what manner the Ancyent Marinere came back to his own Country.
PART IAn ancient Mariner meeteth three Gallants bidden to a wedding-feast, and detaineth one.
It is an ancient Mariner,And he stoppeth one of three.`By thy long beard and glittering eye,Now wherefore stopp'st thou me ?
The Bridegroom's doors are opened wide,And I am next of kin ;The guests are met, the feast is set :May'st hear the merry din.'
He holds him with his skinny hand,`There was a ship,' quoth he.`Hold off ! unhand me, grey-beard loon !'Eftsoons his hand dropt he.The Wedding-Guest is spell-bound by the eye of the old seafaring man, and constrained to hear his tale.
He holds him with his glittering eye--The Wedding-Guest stood still,And listens like a three years' child :The Mariner hath his will.
The Wedding-Guest sat on a stone :He cannot choose but hear ;And thus spake on that ancient man,The bright-eyed Mariner.
`The ship was cheered, the harbour cleared,Merrily did we dropBelow the kirk, below the hill,Below the lighthouse top.The Mariner tells how the ship sailed southward with a good wind and fair weather, till it reached the Line.
The Sun came up upon the left,Out of the sea came he !And he shone bright, and on the rightWent down into the sea.
Higher and higher every day,Till over the mast at noon--'The Wedding-Guest here beat his breast,For he heard the loud bassoon.The Wedding-Guest heareth the bridal music ; but the Mariner continueth his tale.
The bride hath paced into the hall,Red as a rose is she ;Nodding their heads before her goes The merry minstrelsy.
The Wedding-Guest he beat his breast,Yet he cannot choose but hear ;And thus spake on that ancient man,The bright-eyed Mariner.The ship driven by a storm toward the south pole.
`And now the STORM-BLAST came, and heWas tyrannous and strong :He struck with his o'ertaking wings,And chased us south along.
With sloping masts and dipping prow,As who pursued with yell and blowStill treads the shadow of his foe,And forward bends his head,The ship drove fast, loud roared the blast,The southward aye we fled.
And now there came both mist and snow,And it grew wondrous cold :And ice, mast-high, came floating by,As green as emerald.The land of ice, and of fearful sounds where no living thing was to be seen.
And through the drifts the snowy cliftsDid send a dismal sheen :Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken--The ice was all between.
The ice was here, the ice was there,The ice was all around :It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,Like noises in a swound !Till a great sea-bird, called the Albatross, came through the snow-fog, and was received with great joy and hospitality.
At length did cross an Albatross,Thorough the fog it came ;As if it had been a Christian soul,We hailed it in God's name.
It ate the food it ne'er had eat,And round and round it flew.The ice did split with a thunder-fit ;The helmsman steered us through !And lo ! the Albatross proveth a bird of good omen, and followeth the ship as it returned northward through fog and floating ice.
And a good south wind sprung up behind ;The Albatross did follow,And every day, for food or play,Came to the mariner's hollo !
In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud,It perched for vespers nine ;Whiles all the night, through fog-smoke white,Glimmered the white Moon-shine.'The ancient Mariner inhospitably killeth the pious bird of good omen.
`God save thee, ancient Mariner !From the fiends, that plague thee thus !--Why look'st thou so ?'--With my cross-bowI shot the ALBATROSS.
PART II
The Sun now rose upon the right :Out of the sea came he,Still hid in mist, and on the leftWent down into the sea.
And the good south wind still blew behind,But no sweet bird did follow,Nor any day for food or playCame to the mariners' hollo !His shipmates cry out against the ancient Mariner, for killing the bird of good luck.
And I had done an hellish thing,And it would work 'em woe :For all averred, I had killed the birdThat made the breeze to blow.Ah wretch ! said they, the bird to slay,That made the breeze to blow !But when the fog cleared off, they justify the same, and thus make themselves accomplices in the crime.
Nor dim nor red, like God's own head,The glorious Sun uprist :Then all averred, I had killed the birdThat brought the fog and mist.'Twas right, said they, such birds to slay,That bring the fog and mist.The fair breeze continues ; the ship enters the Pacific Ocean, and sails northward, even till it reaches the Line.
The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,The furrow followed free ;We were the first that ever burstInto that silent sea.The ship hath been suddenly becalmed.
Down dropt the breeze, the sails dropt down,'Twas sad as sad could be ;And we did speak only to breakThe silence of the sea !
All in a hot and copper sky,The bloody Sun, at noon,Right up above the mast did stand,No bigger than the Moon.
Day after day, day after day,We stuck, nor breath nor motion ;As idle as a painted shipUpon a painted ocean.And the Albatross begins to be avenged.
Water, water, every where,And all the boards did shrink ;Water, water, every where,Nor any drop to drink.
The very deep did rot : O Christ !That ever this should be !Yea, slimy things did crawl with legsUpon the slimy sea.
About, about, in reel and routThe death-fires danced at night ;The water, like a witch's oils,Burnt green, and blue and white.A Spirit had followed them ; one of the invisible inhabitants of this planet, neither departed souls nor angels ; concerning whom the learned Jew, Josephus, and the Platonic Constantinopolitan, Michael Psellus, may be consulted. They are very numerous, and there is no climate or element without one or more.
And some in dreams assuréd wereOf the Spirit that plagued us so ;Nine fathom deep he had followed usFrom the land of mist and snow.
And every tongue, through utter drought,Was withered at the root ;We could not speak, no more than ifWe had been choked with soot.The shipmates, in their sore distress, would fain throw the whole guilt on the ancient Mariner : in sign whereof they hang the dead sea-bird round his neck.
Ah ! well a-day ! what evil looksHad I from old and young !Instead of the cross, the AlbatrossAbout my neck was hung.
PART III
There passed a weary time. Each throatWas parched, and glazed each eye.A weary time ! a weary time !How glazed each weary eye,When looking westward, I beheldA something in the sky.The ancient Mariner beholdeth a sign in the element afar off.
At first it seemed a little speck,And then it seemed a mist ;It moved and moved, and took at lastA certain shape, I wist.
A speck, a mist, a shape, I wist !And still it neared and neared :As if it dodged a water-sprite,It plunged and tacked and veered.At its nearer approach, it seemeth him to be a ship ; and at a dear ransom he freeth his speech from the bonds of thirst.
With throats unslaked, with black lips baked,We could nor laugh nor wail ;Through utter drought all dumb we stood !I bit my arm, I sucked the blood,And cried, A sail ! a sail !A flash of joy ;
With throats unslaked, with black lips baked,Agape they heard me call :Gramercy ! they for joy did grin,And all at once their breath drew in,As they were drinking all.And horror follows. For can it be a ship that comes onward without wind or tide ?
See ! see ! (I cried) she tacks no more !Hither to work us weal ;Without a breeze, without a tide,She steadies with upright keel !
The western wave was all a-flame.The day was well nigh done !Almost upon the western waveRested the broad bright Sun ;When that strange shape drove suddenlyBetwixt us and the Sun.It seemeth him but the skeleton of a ship.
And straight the Sun was flecked with bars,(Heaven's Mother send us grace !)As if through a dungeon-grate he peeredWith broad and burning face.And its ribs are seen as bars on the face of the setting Sun.
Alas ! (thought I, and my heart beat loud)How fast she nears and nears !Are those her sails that glance in the Sun,Like restless gossameres ?The Spectre-Woman and her Death-mate, and no other on board the skeleton ship.
And those her ribs through which the SunDid peer, as through a grate ?And is that Woman all her crew ?Is that a DEATH ? and are there two ?Is DEATH that woman's mate ?[first version of this stanza through the end of Part III]
Like vessel, like crew !
Her lips were red, her looks were free,Her locks were yellow as gold :Her skin was as white as leprosy,The Night-mare LIFE-IN-DEATH was she,Who thicks man's blood with cold.Death and Life-in-Death have diced for the ship's crew, and she (the latter) winneth the ancient Mariner.
The naked hulk alongside came,And the twain were casting dice ;`The game is done ! I've won ! I've won !'Quoth she, and whistles thrice.No twilight within the courts of the Sun.
The Sun's rim dips ; the stars rush out :At one stride comes the dark ;With far-heard whisper, o'er the sea,Off shot the spectre-bark.At the rising of the Moon,
We listened and looked sideways up !Fear at my heart, as at a cup,My life-blood seemed to sip !The stars were dim, and thick the night,The steerman's face by his lamp gleamed white ;From the sails the dew did drip--Till clomb above the eastern barThe hornéd Moon, with one bright starWithin the nether tip.One after another,
One after one, by the star-dogged Moon,Too quick for groan or sigh,Each turned his face with a ghastly pang,And cursed me with his eye.His shipmates drop down dead.
Four times fifty living men,(And I heard nor sigh nor groan)With heavy thump, a lifeless lump,They dropped down one by one.But Life-in-Death begins her work on the ancient Mariner.
The souls did from their bodies fly,--They fled to bliss or woe !And every soul, it passed me by,Like the whizz of my cross-bow !
PART IVThe Wedding-Guest feareth that a Spirit is talking to him ;
`I fear thee, ancient Mariner !I fear thy skinny hand !And thou art long, and lank, and brown,As is the ribbed sea-sand.(Coleridge's note on above stanza)
I fear thee and thy glittering eye,And thy skinny hand, so brown.'--Fear not, fear not, thou Wedding-Guest !This body dropt not down.But the ancient Mariner assureth him of his bodily life, and proceedeth to relate his horrible penance.
Alone, alone, all, all alone,Alone on a wide wide sea !And never a saint took pity onMy soul in agony.He despiseth the creatures of the calm,
The many men, so beautiful !And they all dead did lie :And a thousand thousand slimy thingsLived on ; and so did I.And envieth that they should live, and so many lie dead.
I looked upon the rotting sea,And drew my eyes away ;I looked upon the rotting deck,And there the dead men lay.
I looked to heaven, and tried to pray ;But or ever a prayer had gusht,A wicked whisper came, and madeMy heart as dry as dust.
I closed my lids, and kept them close,And the balls like pulses beat ;For the sky and the sea, and the sea and the skyLay like a load on my weary eye,And the dead were at my feet.But the curse liveth for him in the eye of the dead men.
The cold sweat melted from their limbs,Nor rot nor reek did they :The look with which they looked on meHad never passed away.
An orphan's curse would drag to hellA spirit from on high ;But oh ! more horrible than thatIs the curse in a dead man's eye !Seven days, seven nights, I saw that curse,And yet I could not die.In his loneliness and fixedness he yearneth towards the journeying Moon, and the stars that still sojourn, yet still move onward ; and every where the blue sky belongs to them, and is their appointed rest, and their native country and their own natural homes, which they enter unannounced, as lords that are certainly expected and yet there is a silent joy at their arrival.
The moving Moon went up the sky,And no where did abide :Softly she was going up,And a star or two beside--
Her beams bemocked the sultry main,Like April hoar-frost spread ;But where the ship's huge shadow lay,The charméd water burnt alwayA still and awful red.By the light of the Moon he beholdeth God's creatures of the great calm.
Beyond the shadow of the ship,I watched the water-snakes :They moved in tracks of shining white,And when they reared, the elfish lightFell off in hoary flakes.
Within the shadow of the shipI watched their rich attire :Blue, glossy green, and velvet black,They coiled and swam ; and every trackWas a flash of golden fire.Their beauty and their happiness.
He blesseth them in his heart.
O happy living things ! no tongueTheir beauty might declare :A spring of love gushed from my heart,And I blessed them unaware :Sure my kind saint took pity on me,And I blessed them unaware.The spell begins to break.
The self-same moment I could pray ;And from my neck so freeThe Albatross fell off, and sankLike lead into the sea.
PART V
Oh sleep ! it is a gentle thing,Beloved from pole to pole !To Mary Queen the praise be given !She sent the gentle sleep from Heaven,That slid into my soul.By grace of the holy Mother, the ancient Mariner is refreshed with rain.
The silly buckets on the deck,That had so long remained,I dreamt that they were filled with dew ;And when I awoke, it rained.
My lips were wet, my throat was cold,My garments all were dank ;Sure I had drunken in my dreams,And still my body drank.
I moved, and could not feel my limbs :I was so light--almostI thought that I had died in sleep,And was a blesséd ghost.He heareth sounds and seeth strange sights and commotions in the sky and the element.
And soon I heard a roaring wind :It did not come anear ;But with its sound it shook the sails,That were so thin and sere.
The upper air burst into life !And a hundred fire-flags sheen,To and fro they were hurried about !And to and fro, and in and out,The wan stars danced between.
And the coming wind did roar more loud,And the sails did sigh like sedge ;And the rain poured down from one black cloud ;The Moon was at its edge.
The thick black cloud was cleft, and stillThe Moon was at its side :Like waters shot from some high crag,The lightning fell with never a jag,A river steep and wide.The bodies of the ship's crew are inspired, and the ship moves on ;
The loud wind never reached the ship,Yet now the ship moved on !Beneath the lightning and the MoonThe dead men gave a groan.
They groaned, they stirred, they all uprose,Nor spake, nor moved their eyes ;It had been strange, even in a dream,To have seen those dead men rise.
The helmsman steered, the ship moved on ;Yet never a breeze up-blew ;The mariners all 'gan work the ropes,Where they were wont to do ;They raised their limbs like lifeless tools--We were a ghastly crew.
The body of my brother's sonStood by me, knee to knee :The body and I pulled at one rope,But he said nought to me.But not by the souls of the men, nor by dæmons of earth or middle air, but by a blessed troop of angelic spirits, sent down by the invocation of the guardian saint.
`I fear thee, ancient Mariner !'Be calm, thou Wedding-Guest !'Twas not those souls that fled in pain,Which to their corses came again,But a troop of spirits blest :
For when it dawned--they dropped their arms,And clustered round the mast ;Sweet sounds rose slowly through their mouths,And from their bodies passed.
Around, around, flew each sweet sound,Then darted to the Sun ;Slowly the sounds came back again,Now mixed, now one by one.
Sometimes a-dropping from the skyI heard the sky-lark sing ;Sometimes all little birds that are,How they seemed to fill the sea and airWith their sweet jargoning !
And now 'twas like all instruments,Now like a lonely flute ;And now it is an angel's song,That makes the heavens be mute.
It ceased ; yet still the sails made onA pleasant noise till noon,A noise like of a hidden brookIn the leafy month of June,That to the sleeping woods all nightSingeth a quiet tune.[Additional stanzas, dropped after the first edition.]
Till noon we quietly sailed on,Yet never a breeze did breathe :Slowly and smoothly went the ship,Moved onward from beneath.The lonesome Spirit from the south-pole carries on the ship as far as the Line, in obedience to the angelic troop, but still requireth vengeance.
Under the keel nine fathom deep,From the land of mist and snow,The spirit slid : and it was heThat made the ship to go.The sails at noon left off their tune,And the ship stood still also.
The Sun, right up above the mast,Had fixed her to the ocean :But in a minute she 'gan stir,With a short uneasy motion--Backwards and forwards half her lengthWith a short uneasy motion.
Then like a pawing horse let go,She made a sudden bound :It flung the blood into my head,And I fell down in a swound.The Polar Spirit's fellow-dæmons, the invisible inhabitants of the element, take part in his wrong ; and two of them relate, one to the other, that penance long and heavy for the ancient Mariner hath been accorded to the Polar Spirit, who returneth southward.
How long in that same fit I lay,I have not to declare ;But ere my living life returned,I heard and in my soul discernedTwo voices in the air.
`Is it he ?' quoth one, `Is this the man ?By him who died on cross,With his cruel bow he laid full lowThe harmless Albatross.
The spirit who bideth by himselfIn the land of mist and snow,He loved the bird that loved the manWho shot him with his bow.'
The other was a softer voice,As soft as honey-dew :Quoth he, `The man hath penance done,And penance more will do.'
PART VI
FIRST VOICE
`But tell me, tell me ! speak again,Thy soft response renewing--What makes that ship drive on so fast ?What is the ocean doing ?'
SECOND VOICE
`Still as a slave before his lord,The ocean hath no blast ;His great bright eye most silentlyUp to the Moon is cast--
If he may know which way to go ;For she guides him smooth or grim.See, brother, see ! how graciouslyShe looketh down on him.'The Mariner hath been cast into a trance ; for the angelic power causeth the vessel to drive northward faster than human life could endure.
FIRST VOICE
`But why drives on that ship so fast,Without or wave or wind ?'
SECOND VOICE
`The air is cut away before,And closes from behind.
Fly, brother, fly ! more high, more high !Or we shall be belated :For slow and slow that ship will go,When the Mariner's trance is abated.'The supernatural motion is retarded ; the Mariner awakes, and his penance begins anew.
I woke, and we were sailing onAs in a gentle weather :'Twas night, calm night, the moon was high ;The dead men stood together.
All stood together on the deck,For a charnel-dungeon fitter :All fixed on me their stony eyes,That in the Moon did glitter.
The pang, the curse, with which they died,Had never passed away :I could not draw my eyes from theirs,Nor turn them up to pray.The curse is finally expiated.
And now this spell was snapt : once moreI viewed the ocean green,And looked far forth, yet little sawOf what had else been seen--
Like one, that on a lonesome roadDoth walk in fear and dread,And having once turned round walks on,And turns no more his head ;Because he knows, a frightful fiendDoth close behind him tread.
But soon there breathed a wind on me,Nor sound nor motion made :Its path was not upon the sea,In ripple or in shade.
It raised my hair, it fanned my cheekLike a meadow-gale of spring--It mingled strangely with my fears,Yet it felt like a welcoming.
Swiftly, swiftly flew the ship,Yet she sailed softly too :Sweetly, sweetly blew the breeze--On me alone it blew.And the ancient Mariner beholdeth his native country.
Oh ! dream of joy ! is this indeedThe light-house top I see ?Is this the hill ? is this the kirk ?Is this mine own countree ?
We drifted o'er the harbour-bar,And I with sobs did pray--O let me be awake, my God !Or let me sleep alway.
The harbour-bay was clear as glass,So smoothly it was strewn !And on the bay the moonlight lay,And the shadow of the Moon.[Additional stanzas, dropped after the first edition.]
The rock shone bright, the kirk no less,That stands above the rock :The moonlight steeped in silentnessThe steady weathercock.The angelic spirits leave the dead bodies,
And the bay was white with silent light,Till rising from the same,Full many shapes, that shadows were,In crimson colours came.And appear in their own forms of light.
A little distance from the prowThose crimson shadows were :I turned my eyes upon the deck--Oh, Christ ! what saw I there !
Each corse lay flat, lifeless and flat,And, by the holy rood !A man all light, a seraph-man,On every corse there stood.
This seraph-band, each waved his hand :It was a heavenly sight !They stood as signals to the land,Each one a lovely light ;
This seraph-band, each waved his hand,No voice did they impart--No voice ; but oh ! the silence sankLike music on my heart.
But soon I heard the dash of oars,I heard the Pilot's cheer ;My head was turned perforce awayAnd I saw a boat appear.[Additional stanza, dropped after the first edition.]
The Pilot and the Pilot's boy,I heard them coming fast :Dear Lord in Heaven ! it was a joyThe dead men could not blast.
I saw a third--I heard his voice :It is the Hermit good !He singeth loud his godly hymnsThat he makes in the wood.He'll shrieve my soul, he'll wash awayThe Albatross's blood.
PART VIIThe Hermit of the Wood,
This Hermit good lives in that woodWhich slopes down to the sea.How loudly his sweet voice he rears !He loves to talk with marineresThat come from a far countree.
He kneels at morn, and noon, and eve--He hath a cushion plump :It is the moss that wholly hidesThe rotted old oak-stump.
The skiff-boat neared : I heard them talk,`Why, this is strange, I trow !Where are those lights so many and fair,That signal made but now ?'Approacheth the ship with wonder.
`Strange, by my faith !' the Hermit said--`And they answered not our cheer !The planks looked warped ! and see those sails,How thin they are and sere !I never saw aught like to them,Unless perchance it were
Brown skeletons of leaves that lagMy forest-brook along ;When the ivy-tod is heavy with snow,And the owlet whoops to the wolf below,That eats the she-wolf's young.'
`Dear Lord ! it hath a fiendish look--(The Pilot made reply)I am a-feared'--`Push on, push on !'Said the Hermit cheerily.
The boat came closer to the ship,But I nor spake nor stirred ;The boat came close beneath the ship,And straight a sound was heard.The ship suddenly sinketh.
Under the water it rumbled on,Still louder and more dread :It reached the ship, it split the bay ;The ship went down like lead.The ancient Mariner is saved in the Pilot's boat.
Stunned by that loud and dreadful sound,Which sky and ocean smote,Like one that hath been seven days drownedMy body lay afloat ;But swift as dreams, myself I foundWithin the Pilot's boat.
Upon the whirl, where sank the ship,The boat spun round and round ;And all was still, save that the hillWas telling of the sound.
I moved my lips--the Pilot shriekedAnd fell down in a fit ;The holy Hermit raised his eyes,And prayed where he did sit.
I took the oars : the Pilot's boy,Who now doth crazy go,Laughed loud and long, and all the whileHis eyes went to and fro.`Ha ! ha !' quoth he, `full plain I see,The Devil knows how to row.'
And now, all in my own countree,I stood on the firm land !The Hermit stepped forth from the boat,And scarcely he could stand.The ancient Mariner earnestly entreateth the Hermit to shrieve him ; and the penance of life falls on him.
`O shrieve me, shrieve me, holy man !'The Hermit crossed his brow.`Say quick,' quoth he, `I bid thee say--What manner of man art thou ?'
Forthwith this frame of mine was wrenchedWith a woful agony,Which forced me to begin my tale ;And then it left me free.And ever and anon through out his future life an agony constraineth him to travel from land to land ;
Since then, at an uncertain hour,That agony returns :And till my ghastly tale is told,This heart within me burns.
I pass, like night, from land to land ;I have strange power of speech ;That moment that his face I see,I know the man that must hear me :To him my tale I teach.
What loud uproar bursts from that door !The wedding-guests are there :But in the garden-bower the brideAnd bride-maids singing are :And hark the little vesper bell,Which biddeth me to prayer !
O Wedding-Guest ! this soul hath beenAlone on a wide wide sea :So lonely 'twas, that God himselfScarce seeméd there to be.
O sweeter than the marriage-feast,'Tis sweeter far to me,To walk together to the kirkWith a goodly company !--
To walk together to the kirk,And all together pray,While each to his great Father bends,Old men, and babes, and loving friendsAnd youths and maidens gay !And to teach, by his own example, love and reverence to all things that God made and loveth.
Farewell, farewell ! but this I tellTo thee, thou Wedding-Guest !He prayeth well, who loveth wellBoth man and bird and beast.
He prayeth best, who loveth bestAll things both great and small ;For the dear God who loveth us,He made and loveth all.
The Mariner, whose eye is bright,Whose beard with age is hoar,Is gone : and now the Wedding-GuestTurned from the bridegroom's door.
He went like one that hath been stunned,And is of sense forlorn :A sadder and a wiser man,He rose the morrow morn.

the human condition

2006-02-22T16:50:00.000-06:00

I went to Douglass again Saturday, looking for my boxes of essays and poems and had no luck. I have a few essays I'd made copies of so I've been using those these last some days. It has been wonderful. I give them each a copy of the essay and I read it aloud and they highlight words, sentences, paragraphs, etc., that they find good and compelling, for whatever reason, aspects of the essay we respect, aspects of the essays that make us want to keep reading. Then we're talking about what makes the essays good and also about their content. And then, when they're all stirred up with ideas, we do freewriting first drafts on something that came into our minds during the discussion. They're loving it and so am I. Yesterday we read one essay about the boorishness of our society and one girl, Shelley from Chalmette, said, "they got a lot of boorish customers at Burger King," and I told the class about Ronnie, a Mandeville High student I had two years ago, who was pregnant and working at Burger King and how some woman customer got in her face and that Ronnie climbed over the counter and punched the woman in the face and knocked her down. Yes, there is much boorish behavior in the world.
Another one we read was an essay from Time Magazine called The PG-Rated War, about how government does not want the media to show photographs of war dead. We had a fantastic discussion about whether war casualties and executions should be made public. Arguments were wonderful on both sides. Ammy made it personal by asking how we'd feel if it was our own childrens' deaths photographed. Someone said that if the mother's child died in war we should respect his/her right to die for her country and that we should be proud for her. We talked about capital punishment and about the controversy sometime back over whether Timothy McVey's execution should be televised. And I told them about a revelation I'd had some years ago about hunting, about how my ex-husband was a hunter and I hated it until one day when I was at the grocery buying a nice rump roast, a piece of flesh wrapped neat with no big brown eyes, I realized I was a hypocrite.
Another one we read was by Leonard Pitts, about a video game called JFK Reloaded, a game in which the player is in the shoes of Lee Harvey Oswald and must assassinate the president. Again, the discussion went all over the place. Arguments for and against the game came up that had never occurred to me. Danny said it's telling that the game was made out of the country. Mandy said she thinks the impulse that causes humans to create such things like JFK Reloaded stems from that same something in us that causes us to look at a car wreck, that everyone has the instinct or curiousity to view death. Fran said she thinks we want to be scared.
In the end the question was, what does this say about the human condition? The human race? Us? Me? That's the point after all.
I'm two and a half weeks behind on my reading of the Times-Picayune. That's good because now my purpose in catching up is to gather more essays. Chris Rose has become a fabulous writer since the storm. For example.
On the Romeo and Juliet front, I saw today what I always end up seeing when I read Shakespeare with students, that they balk and they balk and they balk and then, by Act V, they're almost suddenly not balking any longer and they're getting it and LIKING it and I'm able to point out the more subtle aspects of the text. And they're asking a lot of great questions, some I don't know the answers to. It thrills me. I'm having them make note of certain passages, significant for different reasons, and tomorrow we're going to go back and study the passages. I think the only way to "teach" Shakespeare (hahaha, here I go again, realizing I'm not giving them anything except an open door) is to hold their hands while they muddle through until we realize they don't need my hand so much anymore. I would now like to read another play with them. It would blow their minds to realize how much they know already that they don't know they know. I'm thinking Hamlet. Or maybe a comedy? I imagine it would be fun to read a comedy and make note of where the comedy could have turned tragic and then where Romeo and Juliet could have turned comic (in the classical sense of tragedy and comedy).

numbers

2006-02-15T15:56:00.000-06:00

Yesterday was Valentine's Day. I had my little plan in the back of my mind about what I wanted to do with my classes but when I got to school there was a red rose on my keyboard and all thoughts of essaying flew my head. It didn't help that I'd listened to Annie Lennox, LOUD, all the way across the Causeway and I was in an altered state. So I got to school and there was the rose and I flipped through the few little folders of poems I have and found William Stafford's poem, "You Reading This, Be Ready," and I decided we'd read the poem and pay attention to the moment and ready ourselves for its place in our lives. Here's the poem:

You Reading This, Be Ready

Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?
Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?
When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life -
What can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?
-- William Stafford

They dug it and the discussion was wonderful. No one in the room, including me, fears trying out ideas aloud. They've (we've) embraced the notion that there are layers and layers of the truth. We kept flittering around into subjects seemingly unrelated (like Waffle House) and one girl in the room, SS, gently returned us to sanity by saying, "and now, back to the poem." Also, I used the word "magnanimous" and someone in the class asked me to give them a cool word every day. Today I gave them "disenfranchised," and I told them about Douglass High School.
Second period I was still unwilling to return to my plan so I dug around again and found a piece, I have no idea what to call it, wherein a page-length paragraph contains nothing but numbers of things: Number of times I've been kissed: 23,300. Like that. One of the kids just started reading it aloud and then people were interjecting their own numbers of things, like "number of times I've seen my drunk uncle get into a boat without a paddle:" So I got the idea of writing down the things they were saying and I typed it, copied it for all of them, and today we had THE most relevant and true lesson on revision that I have ever known. And in the midst of it I asked them to write a reflection of the process they were going through in the revision. Tomorrow we're rewriting the things, each in our own way. I will let you know how it turns out.

breaking down the walls

2006-02-08T16:25:00.000-06:00

We are now in our 4th week. It's interim time already. As usual in every beginning quarter, my grades are crazy. People have either 100's or 40's. It's too soon to grade things, in my humble opinion.
I have a new student from the 7th ward and it soothes me to be around her. I feel like an alien in my classes except around people like her. I guess it's obvious that I'm still in the throes of intensely being a New Orleanian and that we have that shared experience makes me feel at home with them.
The trash is still on the ground here. Houses are still unlit and melting. Nature is taking back what was originally hers. The impulse that I had since the storm to come back, just so my house could be lived in, that by sheer force of will and also my heat and heartbeat I could keep the walls up, is the thing that's missing in the rest of the city that is languoring. There's little life. I am fast losing my optimism. And I'm disheartened. I had a dream yesterday that I was in a place where the walls were weakened and I leaned against one and it came down and wild animals teemed in. The first animal was a horse.
Today two classes complained that we haven't been writing enough. So I let them. In one class, freshmen, when the 10 minutes was up, I announced it and a boy said, "crap." I told him to keep on writing, and he did, as did over half the class (I looked) for another two minutes. It was beautiful. I wonder if the thing I do for them in the end is simply this, that I help them over their fear of the pen and the blank page, and over the fear that they have nothing to say.
Now I have a TEST to write. Hahaha! No, but really...

wherefore art thou?

2006-02-01T20:35:00.000-06:00

The sun was hard this morning. I mean hard bright yellow. Stunning in its intensity. It occurs on the right side of my consciousness, rising up from the lake as I travel north. It blinds me as it illuminates me.
I made it to school before the first bell of the day. This is the first day in the twelve days so far this has happened. Usually I straggle in a moment after the students have arrived, during the principal's morning announcements. I am not proud of this. It is just a fact so far. A year ago I was riding my bicycle to school, leaving the house at 8, locking my bike up to the fence between Douglass and Charmaine Neville's house at 8:15.
Today my senior students wrote a second first draft and tomorrow I will pass back to them everything they've written so far in these twelve days. They will then choose one of their writings that has heat and revise it. I'm shocked at how able they are, and willing, and interested, and all so immediately. There has been little need for me to woo them, though I continue to express my energy toward that. I think they're hungry to be invited to think. In first period I, off the cuff, gave the guy who played Blackbird for us an opportunity to get credit for a 25 point first draft, without having to write it, if he would only play his guitar one whole hour for us, for our inspiration. The inspiration for this idea came because he came in twenty minutes before our period ended this morning, and he took his guitar out and played, and he's so good. I would require silence in the class and we could use him to direct us. Unwittingly.
I brought boxes of kleenex to all the classes I float into today and was surprised to note that all the classes already had tissue. At Douglass almost no teachers had tissue. And neither did the bathrooms. No toilet tissue. So at Douglass I kept a big stock of tissue for the children. I also kept a big bottle of lotion for when they were ashy, and hand cleaner for when they felt dirty. Kids I didn't even know came to my class for the stuff all day long.
I intervened in a semi-fight yesterday. The only part I saw was a big blond older boy crossing the gym and punching a brunette freshman from behind. I held the blond by the elbow then ran out for an administrator, who arrived immediately, and the situation was contained.
We had super salad/baked potatoes on the hot lunch side and hot dogs on the other side. I chose the hot dog but got a little chili from the hot lunch line to add to it, even though it was outside the rules. Afterwards, I served my duty, which is to keep un-officially sanctioned students out of a certain hall. I'm not very good at it. I tend to believe everybody who walks through with an explanation. And the truth be told, they're usually telling the truth. I can usually feel it.
We're watching the Zefferelli rendering of Romeo and Juliet in my freshman classes right now. This perhaps explains my romantic attitude.

sofa memories

2006-01-31T16:53:00.000-06:00

Today at school we had tacos for lunch. They were fantastic, better than I remember them being. Maybe I'm just so grateful for a good cafeteria again. There were many things I loved about Douglass, but the cafeteria food was not one of them. It kept everyone lean and mean. At lunch time at Douglass, the kids congregated in the hall outside the cafeteria, not eating (though almost all were on free/reduced lunch), intimidating and playing everybody who pushed through the crowd. It was a prime time for 8th ward 9th ward fights. It was an ordeal every day, which is one reason, besides the quality of the food, that I didn't eat in the cafeteria very often. I don't know if the kids didn't eat because the food was dreck or if the food was dreck because they didn't eat and so the cafeteria ladies didn't care, or if it was another subtle way the system dissed the poor.
Teachers got double helpings of it. The dreck, I mean.
But Mandeville High has a great cafeteria, and I'm glad. I'm a little infamous in the teacher's lounge for loving the lunch. This afternoon after school I washed the dishes in my kitchen and see it's almost only cups and glasses and cat dishes. No pots. No measuring cups. Once again, I'm taking my main meal at school. (But I'm definitely keeping up with my high blood pressure medicine.)
The two senior classes are writing essays now, and it's fun. I was trying to help them come up with ideas for subjects today and I said "sofas" is a good subject to essay. They laughed of course. I reminded them about the memories associated with the living room sofas, etc., and then, in the middle of me saying these things, I remembered that there's a girl in one of the classes (more than one kid, but this one sticks out in my mind because she wrote something to me about the state of her psyche and emotions these days, which isn't calm) who lived in Chalmette and I realized that the sofa she grew up on was gone and I wanted to stop myself. In fact, I did, sort of, by telling them to imagine their sofas gone, but I didn't go too far with it because I feared it was too much for the one girl. After, I took her out in the hall and we had a cry together and I told her what had occurred to me while I was suggesting the essay subject, and she told me that she's going to write her story (we're going to probably write two essays a week until school is over), and she was smiling about it. So it was good. But it humbled me, and it, she, keeps me conscious and real.
One more thing is that every time I see African-American students in the hall I just want to hug them, even if they're not from New Orleans. I miss the African-American community. It would be a travesty (though that suggests blame but, really, who's to blame?) if New Orleans lost that community. I miss them so much. Before when I was at Mandeville I didn't understand about the community. They were all just Mandeville kids. But at Douglass I learned about their separate soul. Assimilation is not complete. And it makes me think about everybody else, and how assimilation is probably not complete for any of us. We just try to make it be. In the end, we all have our separate connections to our cultures. Mine was a father whose family was (and spoke) Croatian and how can that not have informed my life? Or my mother whose mother was from Scotland. How can her culture not have informed my life? I wonder, if everyone had the same skin color, would everyone appear to assimilate more completely (even though it could only be on the surface)?
I love this world.

take these broken wings

2006-01-27T15:45:00.000-06:00

Random things from the past three days:
Wednesday a red-shouldered Hawk landed on a light standard next to my truck. The number 10 was printed on the light.
We're reading Romeo and Juliet in my three freshmen classes. Yesterday we came to Benvolio's description of the sunrise, the "golden window of the east" from which Romeo fled in his depression.
This morning, driving down the still trash-strewn Elysian Fields Avenue, I saw a dump truck with stuffed animals strapped to its side and it occurred to me that the driver was saving stuffed animals he found in the storm detritus. Then ten minutes later, crossing the Causeway, I saw "...the worshipped sun peer forth the golden window of the East." During first period, a student who used to live in Chalmette, who had his guitar with him, played "Blackbird Singing in the Dead of Night" by the Beatles. A little while later, during fourth period, I saw two bluebirds. This afternoon I saw a FEMA trailer being pulled by a red truck on the interstate as it passed the neighborhood of a friend of mine's house that flooded. He raised exotic birds, kept them in room-sized cages, and loved them. Yesterday I found out that all his birds drowned.
There's a little bitty part in the play in which a servant, who cannot read, bumps into Romeo on the street and asks him to read something for him. The something Romeo reads for the servant is the invitation list to the party Juliet's father is throwing that night, the party, as we know, where the star crossed Romeo and Juliet are fated to meet. One of my students said, "I think the servant's the cause of all the trouble that's going to come because he's the one who let Romeo know about the party." It made me think that perhaps I could make a list of if onlys, and have the students fill in the rest: If only Juliet had not..., If only the nurse had..., If only Lord Capulet were not..., If only Romeo were..., if only, if only, if only. So we could find out that nothing's that easy.
A lot of things struck me today.

living in the isthmus

2006-01-23T16:36:00.000-06:00

Today was my fifth day at Mandeville High School. There was a bad case of fog on the Causeway (looked like we were streaking through milk) so drivers were forced to use only the right lane and to drive at 45 MPH, so I was five minutes late for school. A teacher was looking for me a minute before I got to school and came to my room and the kids told her I was "out making copies."
First period. Friday we read an excerpt from Alexander Pope's piece about the nature of man, about the dichotomous, paradoxical nature of man, and they loved it. Here's the piece:

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of Mankind is Man.
Plac'd on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise, and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the Stoic's pride,
He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest,
In doubt to deem himself a God, or Beast;
In doubt his Mind or Body to prefer,
Born but to die, and reas'ning but to err;
Alike in ignorance, his reason such,
Whether he thinks too little, or too much:
Chaos of Thought and Passion, all confus'd;
Still by himself abus'd, or disabus'd;
Created half to rise, and half to fall;
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
Sole judge of Truth, in endless Error hurl'd:
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!

I haven't gotten myself together yet, though the first moment I was face to face with the students, on my first day back, I felt the groove, and I was happy again. But I haven't put together any lesson plans or even know what I'm doing from one day to the next. I keep finding poems to discuss with them and we're then writing, and they're so willing. It's glorious. However, I need a bigger picture, and I need to find my stapler and such things in the stuff I brought from Douglass. I had a box full of twenty years worth of essays I'd clipped out of various publications, which I use to show students what a good essay looks like (rather than attempt to "teach" them how to write) and that has been lost somewhere at Douglass. That's the only thing I'm sad to have lost.
I've been thinking non-stop about being there at MHS again, about having been at Douglass, about kids, about society, but haven't yet had the moment to stop and pull my thoughts together. But I will. And when I do, I'll be rolling more consistently on the blog again. But I can say this: I did not make the wrong decision.

Melanie

preparing to paint

2006-01-14T08:50:00.000-06:00

Things have been coming to a head. I’ve more than lost my mirth. I turned off the lights and lit a candle and stared into it. It has been a very long time since I’ve done such a thing. The storm has dulled me, caused me to seek out whatever can numb me, and I spend hours every day engaging in numbing activities. I have to change. I am tired of quieting myself. I am tired of relenting. I am tired of the easier path of sadness. I am tired of being mindless. I want to live again.
I decided to paint. I’ve never painted. I went to David Art Supply on Veterans Highway in the dreaded Metairie and bought $60 worth of stuff – eight tubes of acrylic paint (including "hooker green"), two long-handled paint brushes with fat bushes of white bristles, a pack of disposable palettes, and a piece of un-stretched canvas, three by six feet, and I nailed it to the wall. I went through my photographs, which in and of itself was an event and revelatory, and picked several to consider – two of Penny, one of my old dog, Maggie, one of a spider. Is it best to work my way up or down a canvas? Will the painting develop best from the top down or from the bottom up? I think I’m a one who works from the top down, though that seems too obvious to me. An artist would probably tell me to pin the damned canvas up and see where it feels right to start. And isn’t that part of why I’m doing this? To try something I don’t understand at all?
It’s this or math. Math is next.
It’s not that I wish to accomplish some kind of reward. It’s that I wish to delve into what I don’t understand. That’s where the life is. It’s the mystery I love, the unknown. It’s what I love about being human, that we just fucking keep on striving toward the black unknown. I live for that. It is perhaps why I have not the proclivity toward settling in with another human. I love being always on the edge, going toward someone, something, somewhere. It’s perhaps why I cannot ever align myself with a group. I’m not as interested in the solution as I am in the question. I love looking. I don’t love finding. That’s I guess relative to why I write.
I picked the photo of me and Penny galloping on the levee. Painting is different from drawing. I think painting involves a sense of the subject, not a picture or an idea. This photo is all about movement and Penny’s distended nostrils. She’s on a left lead and my body is leaning into her lead. I look wide-eyed ecstatic and she looks solidly alive and thriving. It’s like we’re riding through a magic door and entering into something. We look like we’re completely in the moment and headed straight into the next one, which is really this one. Like we’re the center of energy.
And now I realize something about myself: I love writing about processes. The book I wrote about traveling in Europe is about the process of one person figuring herself out as she’s figuring the world out. The book about Douglass is the same thing. Everything I write is about discovery. Now I want to paint and I’m writing, attempting to discover the meaning of what I’m about to paint. So I wonder if painting will be the same experience, of attempting to discover meaning? It seems not to be. It seems that a painting is the being there, even if the "there" is just a moment in the process. It’s like taking a word and illuminating it. Catching a moment and depicting it and it seems that a good painting will make the moment be representative of something larger. Like that photo of me and Penny. The lake is on our right. The barn is on our left. It feels like we’re riding forward into the future. And we’re both joyful, each in our own way. I am exuberant. She is resolute and moving. I am happy. She is not "happy" exactly. She is alive and doing what her nature tells her to do. My nature doesn’t tell me to do anything. My brain, my feelings, they direct me. And I guess me and Penny connected. Her nature told her I was hers. Maybe my nature did direct me because I know she was mine, that we were complete together. It was not my mind or my heart. My mind and my heart responded to what was in front of me: her.
Again I say it; I have yet to put that relationship between me and Penny into perspective. I can’t quite place her. She’s more than a mother to me. She’s my life force. She made me able to live. She brought the forces of the universe together into a form for me. She was a gift, a perfect collection, a manifestation, a creature with breath and blood who also held somehow the mystery and who also was a higher form the chaos made. She became a port, a point of light, the place where I felt my heart beat. She was the center, the focus, the collector of energy. It was to Penny I went for recognition. She affirmed my existence. She reflected me and made me know I was real. Even in the flat brown of winter her eyes shone and I could literally see my face in her eyes. But under the sheen of me was the darkest deepest depth of life to its origin, and she was there and I was there because she brought me there. I think maybe she was the manifestation of God for me.
And so here it is, the beginning of the new year, after a hurricane that almost killed my home, after a life’s worth of work and questions and joys and toils, and the one who points me toward home is a short brown horse with the world in her eyes. She’s not a Buddha or a saint or a child or any kind of human love. She’s a horse.
And all of this started because I was watching Orange washing his face and I thought about how that is a way the cat retrieves himself from chaos. And I’d been thinking about how the candle flame erupts into too much air where it breaks up but then falls back into itself and flames on, still and bright and quiet and fat, a drop of fat fire. And all that because I haven’t looked at a candle in a long time.

back to the future

2006-01-13T09:22:00.000-06:00

I believe fear is at the bottom of sadness, and I and pretty much everyone around here feels it. But Wednesday morning I woke up with a pointed, specific fear, for the first time since the storm. I woke up realizing that the likelihood of me getting a teaching job before August is practically nil, and I have no insurance. My teeth were hurting, and my throat, and I’m almost out of blood pressure medicine, and I was conscious of how I’ve been living as though in a state of emergency and that five months of it has affected my face and my clothes and my diet and my eyes and my smile. I woke up thinking I had to do something and that working part time at Central Grocery and receiving unemployment would only keep me where I am. An hour later the telephone rang and it was Mandeville High School calling, offering me a job.
It’s not the first time they’ve offered, but it’s the first time I’ve said yes.
My gut told me immediately that it’s the right thing to do. On the surface it seems so strange, so incongruous with the path I’ve been on. Here came Katrina, the cleanser, the changer, the instrument of awakening, and now I’m going back to the physical place of my life pre-Katrina and pre-Douglass, as if nothing ever happened.
So I’ve been thinking about what, besides the fact that it’s a chance for me to rise again, this could really mean. I was thinking how it’s an incredible opportunity for me to go back and study a school I knew, but this time with new eyes. It will also be an opportunity to study my new eyes. One of the biggest issues I’ve attempted to grapple with after the experience at Douglass is what have I learned? I ask myself that a lot. Now I’ll be able to address the question. I have also developed a new appreciation for the fact that, rich or poor, white or black, privileged or poverty-stricken, every human being has a mind full of potential ideas – native genius, I’m more inclined to say – and that my job is to help them find themselves out.
I committed myself to stay through this semester, even if another school here at home calls. But in August I expect to again be in a Room 219 somewhere in this city, ready to welcome New Orleans back.
And so here I go. And so the blog lives again.
Melanie

closing the door

2006-01-02T13:04:00.000-06:00

On the 19th Douglass teachers were "allowed" into the school to retrieve our things. I'd been to school in October, when I found the door busted open. A week after that visit I went back and found the door was boarded up. On the 19th the door was busted open again and the school was trashed. When I arrived there was only one other person there, the school nurse. No police, no administrators, no other teachers. No electricity. It was eerie. The nurse and I agreed to check on each other periodically because besides being eerie, it was scary. And it was sad.
I didn't handle it very well. My resolve went by the wayside. I had to call a friend to help me. The last two times I'd been to Douglass the fate of the teachers and the schools was still in the air so there was, you know, foolish as it might have been, a little hope. But by the 19th we'd been told that on 31 January the teachers were all to be officially fired, so this was really it, and time to empty myself out of Room 219 and out of Frederick Douglass High School.
I took my encyclopedias, my poetry books, my few little supplies, my 16 years worth of files on writing and teaching. Some books. All the journals and notebooks my students had left before the storm. Some journals and writings that students had left last year. I don't know what I'm going to do with all those journals, but I knew I couldn't leave them there. I couldn't find my box I'd collected with stuff for teaching Shakespeare's plays, or the box of essays that I'd been cutting out of newspapers for twenty years, or my box of poems and recordings of students reading poems. The room was still neat and "For My Young Friends Who Are Afraid" was still on the board. Eventually a few other teachers arrived and one of them, who had been there before today also, told me he thinks the school got trashed on purpose to make the possibility of Douglass re-opening even more unlikely. If so, somebody's despicable, because that beautiful old school was desecrated. Not overwhelmingly so. Not axed or torched or anything like that. Just trashed. Things strewn around. Doors busted out. Classrooms looted. Maps and wall hangings torn down. Windows broken. Feces on the floor. Mold crawling up the walls. The green terrazzo stairs chipped and layered with some kind of filthy dust. Stink. Cough-inducing air. I should have worn a face mask.
While I was putting things in my truck a police officer arrived to monitor who went in and out of the building and we had to sign our names on a sheet.
I don't feel finished with Douglass.

juggling for work

2005-12-09T08:05:00.000-06:00

I got called back for an interview, one of the "chosen 200." It was a debacle. They told me to arrive between 10 and 12, so I got there at 11. I got interviewed at 2. The room (at Holy Cross College) had three groups: elementary, administration, and secondary. I chose a seat in the secondary section and a woman next to me told me I had to sit at the end of the line. For three hours we sat in the seats and each time the first in line got called forward for an interview (in plain sight of the whole crowd) we all moved forward a seat. A little rotation. It was bizarre. I did two New York Times crossword puzzles (only completely got one), went outside twice for a smoke, paced, drank water, had several lengthy conversations with strangers, one of whom turned out to be my neighbor just one block down Marigny. That was pretty cool. Anyway, by the time I had my turn my clothes were rumpled, my shirt untucked, my resume bent at the corners and a little dirty on the bottom from being on the floor, and my mind dull. The hard-faced interviewers were the two secondary principals and their assistant principals. One was the man who screened me last week. The first question they asked was this: principals and assistant principals in the new charter system will have additional duties besides administrative. What leadership role will you play in the school to help pick up the slack? Actually, the question wasn't even that clear. I paraphrase. So there I sat, dumb, unable to remember what administrators actually do, and you're not going to believe this (I tell you, my mind was dull) I said aloud, I can't remember what administrators actually do. That did not go over well at all. Before I could even stumble around with an inane answer to the question I sat there, silent. I really could not remember what administrators do. I said something stupid, like help by holding after school detentions. One of the interviewers asked me if I'd be willing to commit to that and I said I'd have to think about it. They were not impressed. And then the second question was, how do I handle discipline in my classroom? And I reminded them that my last school was Douglass. They weren't really listening actually. So I said that when I have a problem with a student that the next day, before I allow the student in the room, I have a talk with him in the hall and require that he promise to do as I say, sit where I say, or he cannot come in the room. The interviewers said, what if he won't promise? And I said I won't let him in. And they said, then where would he go? And I said I don't know and I don't care. They were dumbfounded, even laughed at me. In retrospect I wish I'd asked the question, would YOU let someone in your room who has no intention of behaving? I mean, duh. But I also told them that no one has ever refused me before, which is true, and it always works for me, which is also true. But they were still laughing. And I reminded them once again, I TAUGHT AT FREDERICK DOUGLASS HIGH SCHOOL. And then I said, that answer about me attempting to exact a promise from the student wasn't the right answer was it? And they laughed again and shook their heads no.
I'm too old to lie or to make myself be what they want.
I left there not interested in teaching for the ACSA. And I decided that if they called me for a job (haha!) I'd refuse it. They didn't call.
Which is a very good thing for another reason. The day after the "interview," Lusher School called me in for an interview. They're a magnet/charter school focused on the arts. And that interview went great. I think that if they do indeed find that they have a position available they'll hire me.
Today Douglass teachers are allowed into school to get our things. That sad experience will be my next blog.
Melanie

light and dark

2005-12-01T08:43:00.000-06:00

The electricity comes and goes, two or three times a week for 12 hours or more each time. But I'm still so grateful to have electricity. The other night I had to drive to Metairie so I tried to take the least painful route there. I chose Canal Street to Metairie Road, but it was not a painless route. There's a long section of Canal Street without power and it choked me up. I almost turned around and went home. It was a little party I was going to, which seems so incongruous right now. As it turned out, almost everyone at the party had lost their houses altogether (lived in Lakeview and off Canal Street and by City Park). As happens lately every time a few New Orleanians get together, we talked about how much crying is going on. And drinking. I went home the same way but when I got to the dark part I sped, even through stop signs. There were no cars to stop for anyway. I don't like going outside my neighborhood at night. There is no route out that does not put me in darkness's way. From the interstate at night you can see how dark the city really is. Oh, and there's still a boat at the Elysian Fields exit ramp.
I don't see too many National Guardsmen around anymore. A few weeks ago someone got murdered in the next block on my street. Last night someone stole the new tire off my bicycle, which was locked at the corner. The Red Cross comes by most days around noon, honking a horn and over a bullhorn offering hot meals and water. I ate one once. It was a chicken patty sandwich. It was pretty good, too.
Last Saturday there was a second line from Sweet Loraine's on St. Claude Avenue, through several neighborhoods, and which ended at the river for a concert. Spike Lee took the walk with us. We stopped at the usual places -- a few bars (including Ernie K-Does Mother-In-Law Lounge), Blandin's, Preservation Hall -- but we also stopped to serenade some OPP inmates. The sheriff in charge of watching them took pictures of us. We did the dirge and we did the dance. The thing I detected among us was an innocence, a hope that New Orleans would be okay and that this would lead toward that. But as I think on it, the great thing about the second line was that it was New Orleans itself, and that it didn't have anything to do with how New Orleans would BE, but that New Orleans IS. The concert lasted 'til sunset. We had, I'd say, a hunger to be together. Even after Kermit had packed up his trumpet and the dark settled in, people lingered, loathe I think to be alone again.
I've been having strange nights filled with something like a dream, but not exactly a dream, and in this something like a dream there are two things in my mind trying to reconcile with each other. Then the other night, a third thing came into it. The middle thing, like a screen, showed life as normal. One of the side screens depicted destruction and the other depicted plants growing wrong, like they'd been contaminated with radiation.
And last but not least, there's the school system. I was hearing nothing, nothing was on any of the web sites, nothing was on the news, about how teachers should proceed. I kept hearing about schools trying to open but no one knew how to get in to get interviewed. So I found an email address for the big cheese with the takeover firm hired last year to fix us, and he very kindly emailed me back with an address for his employee in charge of the Algiers Charter Schools. Anyway, the process has been that we fill out an application and deliver it and our resume to their office in Algiers. Then Tuesday and Wednesday we suited up and went for a "screening." This involved answering a few questions in writing, writing a little essay about teaching, and answering five math questions. I could not remember how many ounces are in a gallon, so I probably got that wrong. Then someone picked up the thing we wrote and we got assigned to a principal (they were just hired last week) who asked some generic questions. The feeling I got was that the manning of the schools has already been done and this was just a way to appease us, to make us think they were interested in us. My screener asked me questions and then, I could feel it, didn't listen to my answers. He didn't take any notes, didn't read what I'd written, didn't have my application or resume with him. Didn't know anything at all about me. And didn't listen to me. It was insulting. The deal is that of the many many teachers who came for the screening (I heard there were 2500), 200 will be called in for a second interview, and then on Sunday the 60 chosen teachers will be notified, and school will start Tuesday. Yesterday's screening gave me a bad vibe and now I don't want to teach with that organization.
And then yesterday, on the New Orleans Public Schools website, a press release was posted, announcing that as of 1/31/06 all school personnel will be officially fired. Each school is given a date for teachers to come "pack up your shit and go. You're fired!" (that's what one of the clowns last year did to me, came into my room, looked at some papers, and told me that the office had sent him up to give me that message.)
I can't believe I won't be returning to Room 219.
Melanie

room 219 revisited

2005-11-23T08:40:00.000-06:00

Douglass's St. Claude Avenue door was bent from being pried open and the glass was out of it so I went in. I forgot my camera and my flashlight, but remembered the Louisville Slugger I keep by my bed for "protection." These are lawless times. (I remember once Peanut asking me what I'd do if some thugs busted open my door and I said I'd repel them with my baseball bat and he laughed so hard he had to put his head down on the desk. He said Ms. Plesh, you'd be killed. I guess those were lawless times too.) Anyway, that's what I brought with me. Tim's wooden little league Louisville Slugger.
The first thing inside, in the foyer, I saw garbage cans and push brooms and cleaning supplies and for a minute I believed it was the powers that be finally taking care of things, cleaning my school, but then reallized it was from the military men who had stayed there right after the storm, the Oregon National Guard. They'd left it. The glass-enclosed office area seemed unscathed and none of the glass was broken. I thought for sure that if the reports were correct, that the "bad" ones stayed at Douglass like someone who had been there told me, that the first thing they'd have done would have been to bust up the place where those in authority worked. But no.
The green terrazo steps to the second floor (my route every morning after checking in, the staircase that ended in my hall where once some kid caught a poster on fire that the French teacher ripped down and stomped out, the third fire that day) were dusty but not broken, which is what I'd feared. I don't know why I assumed they'd be broken. On the second floor, nothing seemed out of place, except that all the classroom doors were wide open, even the math teacher's. Except, strangely, mine were closed. I had my key so went to the primary door, turned the key, and when I went to open it discovered that the knob was still gone! And I laughed out loud, thinking about how it had gone missing a few weeks before school let out last May, and how I'd written in this blog the continuing saga of the door. So I went to the other door, the secondary door, now the primary door, with the translucent blue paper still on it. The bottom half had holes kicked in it.
But inside, to my wonder and relief, the room was fine. There were about ten desks in the room, in rows (that made me laugh too), and most of them were good new plastic desks taken from another classroom, not the funky wooden ones I loved so much. My teacher desk, such as it was, was not there. (I found it later in the hall, stacked with other teachers' desks. All that was in it was a part of my manuscript about Auschwitz that I'd brought to school, thinking one day I'd share it with the students; half a bag of potato chips I'd left; and a new, still unwrapped roll of the necessary duct tape.) The room was swept. A giant collage of my students' photographs that a girl from Mandeville High School had made for me several years ago was face down on the floor, but I think that was an accident. My Brittanica Encyclopedia set was stacked on the file cabinet. All the books and magazines I'd had on the windowsill were gone, but I found them in the cabinets. The boxes I had on top of the cabinet -- my 16 years of Shakespeare information and paraphenalia, the box of essays I'd been collecting forever, my box of loose poems and cd's of poets reading -- were missing. But given the respectfully kept state of the classroom, I presume the boxes are stashed in a bookroom somewhere. The bookrooms were all wide open.
Here's the thing that blew my mind though. All the chalkboards (three huge walls of chalkboards) were clean except for two things: the Stafford poem I'd left on the board before the end ("For My Young Friends Who Are Afraid"), the one that shows in the Times-Picayune photograph, was still up there, and there was a three line address for the 1/162nd Division of the Oregon National Guard. A funny thing is that the silly "word wall" the program administrator had put up on the chalkboard (she had to put it up because I wouldn't. It was too silly and I refused.) was torn down and crumpled in the corner. In fact, the room seemed sober and somewhat stark, just the way I like it. There was no sign of 9th grade in that room. It felt once again like a studio for writers and a space for intellectual pursuits. I know that was inadvertent on the part of the National Guard, but it felt to me like my room was restored to me.
Elsewhere in the school things were mainly the same. The walls still needed painting and plastering. The doors still needed fixing. One of the stepped lecture rooms had apparently been used for meetings because there was a big map of New Orleans, consisting of six or eight quadrant maps taped together, attached to the back wall. St. Bernard Parish was outlined in black marker. In another room, a science classroom, there were stuffed animals in each of the desks and I thought, God, what kind of macabre prankery is this, and I was a little afraid to go into the room. But on the chalkboard was a note from the Guardsmen. It said they'd brought these stuffed animals for the children, knowing that they'd be staying in a school, but that all the children had already evacuated and so they were leaving them for someone to pass along to the children, wherever they were.
I went back about a week later and the door was boarded up.

Melanie

relativity

2005-11-06T09:42:00.000-06:00

The hurricane aged us fast. It ended people's ways prematurely. Families didn't get a chance to come and go naturally. Habits, ongoing ways of being, plans set into motion, the hurricane pushed regular time aside, regular progression, and made its own time. What would Einstein call this?
I wish I could remember being light-hearted and happy, feeling attractive, being fun and flirtatious. I've gotten so old-hearted lately. I've lost my mirth. And I don't know how to retrieve it. Is innocence and joy ruined? It cannot be, especially given the fact that not only did I survive but everything I own is safe and sound and dry. I'm one of the relatively few people still intact and I think it's my job to give my intact backbone to those who lost the material things that held them up. It's selfish of me to stay in the sadness. I have to help. Wallowing in sadness is not helping anyone. It's short-sighted of me. I have to rise out of this. I have to get my power back. I have to because I'm wasting myself. I'm not meant to languish. So how do I do that? How do I pull my power together? One way is to not complain another single time about not having gas service. No more complaining. No more feeling sorry for myself. I have to give my power. However, before I do this I have to try to say what I saw on Friday when Tim and I drove around. The houses in the 9th ward. The water and wind, how the wind tore the trees out, how the water rose and floated boats and cars and anything else that could temporarily be lighter than the water and then moved it, dropping things, discarding things. Then the water with its black film on top stayed for weeks, soaking everything, melting the wood, melting the floors, letting the poison grow up the walls that had remained dry. At the levee break the water roiled and tore the ground up like jets had dropped bombs. It gutted the earth where it flowed.
I met a guy this morning named Wayne who lived on Canal Street and had to leave his house in a boat. He told me that after the hurricane, when he was on the street, he could hear his footsteps and he could hear himself breathing. The silent city. That's what the rest of New Orleans has become, a silent, gray, overwhelmed, dead city. I feel its anguish. It is incongruous to be light and happy in the quarter.
The front door of Douglass, which was made of glass, was broken in and I want to, if I dare, go inside. Maybe that's exactly the thing I ought to do, and go to my room and see the reality and maybe then I can accept the complete truth, which is that Douglass is dead. I need to tie this up, put an end to it, get closure, so I can get on with my life. Because that's exactly what I'm not doing, getting on with things. I'm stuck. I'm physically okay, strapping even, and it's time to roll out of my depression and get my life back. I just heard a guy behind me say, "I lost everything," and now I realize what that means, with those miles and miles and miles of houses ruined and their doors opening and closing in the breeze, people's homes opened to anything or anyone who would enter. But there's nothing to get, nothing to see, just flood-soaked, melted nothing that used to be something.
There are no schools open in New Orleans. I've been counting on there being schools in January but will there be any students? It seems less and less likely that New Orleans will return. My head is scrambled and full. I have to slow down and sink into my heart and pay attention. But it seems like I've beaten to death the point that my students are all gone, that Douglass High School is no more, that 80% of the city flooded and most of that will not come back out of the muck, that the levees are still leaking. That at the end of November my health insurance will be $5000 deductible. My feelings burst out occasionally, and I usually have tears just under the surface, but I haven't felt and understood at the same time yet. I haven't put anything together. The feelings I'm having are not spurred by realizations but from gut-level things, like empathy and compassion. I feel but I can't connect it to anything except the vague and obvious. I need poetry now perhaps. Or something. I need to connect with the reality of what is occurring in the spirit. New Orleans is where I was born. I love New Orleans. It is my home. I guess that seems foolishly obvious but it's a big deal to be able to name one's home and to feel at home there. And when I came to teach at Douglass I felt like I was really finally doing something to keep my city alive and viable. And then Katrina came and took out what I came here to help do. I absolutely must go to Douglass and see for myself. See what's real. And then I can proceed in that new light.

sea change

2005-11-05T11:46:00.000-06:00

From my journal, eight weeks after the storm.

Sunday. I had two dreams in which I was naked and not embarrassed.
A NY Times article today (10/23) said 30,000-50,000 houses may have to be demolished.
Several of the neighbors are outside cleaning up the curbs. It's nice. Chava and David are home and there's jazz coming from their house. It's a beautiful, cool morning. Gail is chuckling with an old man walking by. The old man is talking about the house he built himself in Gentilly that got destroyed. It's hard enough for me, who lost nothing but a job and a school. But to imagine everything gone? My writings, my cello my piano? My city?
A guy just emerged from a car wearing a styrofoam pith helmet, a Hawaiian print shirt, flip flops, and shorts, and his legs are tanned. He went to the car in front of him and reached in and hugged the driver and said, Haaay Honey. And they've been talking ever since, right in the middle of the street. And we've got a new guy in the neighborhood temporarily.
I feel something like hope this morning.
Everyone outside is friendly and working, walking to the newspaper box, sweeping. Life here is going on. The #5 bus just rolled down Royal. Empty, but rolling. I just cleaned my truck on the inside. Someone stole George's hose so I can't wash the outside.
I feel good, actually good, practically normal, like I've had a pleasant Sunday and life is proceeding and all is as it should be. And all that is exactly true. I did have a pleasant Sunday and life is proceeding and all is as it should be. This might be the first day I've recognized that this is my life, just as it is, since Katrina. I am grateful. And Tim is home which makes me feel more connected and real. The anchor. Like Penny. I let myself stay still and love him rather than run around as was more my wont.
I'm thinking about that Sunday morning we left and how very different the house is now. The place was a mess with clothes strewn across the bed (including the periwinkle princess dress) and some cut lemons, an empty wine box, and half a pot of coffee and the grinds. Stuff like that. Newspapers. The first time I came back I just gawked and watered my plants. I'd brought clorox and gloves and bags and vinegar to clean the refrigerator and I left all that piled, along with all my other damned crap, on the table. All I really did that day was say hello again to my house and connect myself back to New Orleans. One of the other times I came in I cleaned. I threw away a bunch of things, including my whole damned coffee maker, and I cleaned the counter. The chaos of that Sunday morning we left is not discernible in this house anymore. That hurricane really changed me. I am disgusted by meat. I cannot bear to leave any food on the counter. I wash the dishes all the time. Or rather, every day, which is all the time to me. I've collected a pickup truck load of stuff for the Bridge House. I bought a new broom. I feel the strong need to only have that which I have a need or desire to be conscious of and then to be conscious of it. I don't want any forgotten obscure niches of treasures that mean so little to me I don't even remember their existence. I want to put all my rocks and sticks and bones out on a shelf so I can look at them. I don't want things that don't matter to me taking up my space. Space, physical reminiscences, these are precious now. A lot of people lost everything, everything, everything they owned. Every single thing. Knowing about the state of their houses makes me crazy to keep my stuff clean and together, and I don't want meaningless stuff around me. The world has changed. I have changed. I have had a sea change.

It's almost nine weeks since the storm and I'm writing the last few pages of this notebook that I've been keeping since 28 August. It's Thursday and I still have not gotten "cleaned up' and gone out to find a job. But it's hard to get cleaned up when it's so cold and there's no hot water. And it's strange because on the surface things seem to be moving along in new Orleans, but I sense that things are not really moving along.
Dammit. Two gas company guys were just here (they were driving down the street and I flagged them down) and they said I have a LOCK on my meter. Other people in the neighborhood have gas because they turned it on themselves but I have A LOCK on mine so I cannot do that, and now the gas men have noted that so I don't think it's a good idea to apply the bolt cutters to it. They said we have to wait until the water is pumped out of the gas lines then someone would come unlock the meter and turn me on. Meanwhile, I think I should just sit here on the stoop and wait for the gas men to come by again.

Friday. Yesterday was a pretty lost day. Today the FEMA guy came to "inspect" me. And Tim and I took a ride so I could see, for the first time, the 9th ward where all my students lived. And we saw Lakeview. Where the levee broke in Lakeview the ground is torn up like it had been bombed or like something came and dug new roads. Houses are in the street, whole houses. Windows and doors of all the houses are open and rags of curtains are fluttering in the breeze going through the houses. Oily water lines range from halfway up the piers to to roof eaves. There is unbelievable destruction. I'm stricken. I cannot articulate what I've seen.
It's time to begin anew, and starting a new notebook is a good way to start, especially now that I've seen New Orleans. 80% flooded and I now understand what that means. It's not an inconvenience or a bump in the road. 80% of the city was catastrophically affected. I cannot imagine much of that or actually any of that rising again. Still, I cannot make words. Things like what I saw happen in other places, not in New Orleans. They happen in Pakistan and Indonesia, but not here.

Saturday. My knees hurt and my teeth hurt and I'm achey. I feel funny. I think I'm ill. I'm going to have to get busy on this getting a job business. A few schools are opening in November. It's going to be hard going back, in a way, but on the other hand everything has changed and I will not again have the experience of Frederick Douglass High School. I was there at its end. It's amazing to me to see how things happen. I never knew when I was thinking about leaving Mandeville High that this would be the story. I thought I'd go in and participate in the change, not sing its swan song. But I don't think change (not much change) was in the cards for Douglass, even had there not been Katrina. This might be the best thing that could have befallen those children, even though their lives and families are scattered and lost. But their lives were going nowhere, and I say that not forgetting that they loved their lives. But it's all they knew and most of them would never have gathered the wherewithal to change, much less get out. Yesterday showed me the darkness of Katrina, so I'm glad I had the chance to see the light of Katrina first, so that could settle in my head.
The Times-Picayune's obituary page has no more pictures of young black men who died of gunshot wounds.

refrigerator city

2005-11-05T09:22:00.000-06:00

From my journal, seven weeks after the storm:

I feel lost and I'm so sad. I can't shake it. Every time I go out in my truck and see the city, the people, feel the city, I cry. Hard crying. I'm stuck in some sorrow that I can't free myself from. And I know I'm not alone. I see it in a lot of faces around me, that same spooked sad look in the eyes. The only laughter I hear is drunken and hysterical. What are we going to do? I picked George up from the airport yesterday and now he's next door cleaning his refrigerator. When I took him to Sav A Center earlier he smelled like refrigerator. What a crazy phenomenon that is, for a person to reek of refrigerator. That refrigerator smell on his skin made me nauseous and until just now, when I fixed a gin and tonic, I felt sick.
I also feel very intense and, strangely, closer to being real than usual. Maybe because my feelings aren't in my control right now. I'm not "fine." In New Orleans I've been able somehow to feel like I belonged to something. It's my home. I was born at Baptist Hospital. It has always felt to me that I was okay here, that it didn't judge me. And now the city is filled with out-of-towners who are touristing but that's not their purpose for being here. They're workers. They're putting the city back together. They're getting paid to be here. They don't have that awe going on. They are more in awe of their own work. They're not here because they love New Orleans, they're here because they work and they undoubtedly have pride in their work and so they take some credit for the continuing living of this city and they walk around New Orleans like New Orleans is in a coma. And they don't bother whispering.

Friday. George called first thing this morning to say he couldn't get the smell out of his refrigerator so he paid Tony at the corner twenty bucks to take it out and put it on the street and we went to Sears and bought new refrigerators. Mine cost $449. We had to take a number at the Sears refrigerator department to get waited on, there were that many people buying refrigerators.There was a guy I'd met at Molly's the other day who gave me his number and said he'd help us retrieve our refrigerators, so after we made our purchases we called him, but we couldn't reach him, so the Sears men put both of our new Kenmores in the back of my little Nissan pickup truck, tied a little pink twine around them, and I DROVE them home myself. I had to move slowly and not make any sharp movements so I took Causeway to Airline Highway -- was very nervous going up and down overpasses and that traffic circle -- then continued down Tulane Avenue. It was the worst damage from the storm I'd seen. Every building on the entire avenue was flooded and busted up. Tulane Avenue is dead. I took an illegal left on Claiborne and cruised onto Marigny Street and parked in front of our house. A stranger driving the wrong way on Marigny stopped and asked if we needed help getting the refrigerators out, and so we paid him and Tony $30 each to bring our machines in, and it is now up and humming. Oh, and Robert's Grocery parking lot is now being used as a staging area for dump trucks. Robert's got almost completely destroyed by looters. Ravished by viciousness.

Saturday. Bonnie and I began a list of Katrina-related images and terms: mountains of trees, duct-taped refrigerators, superdome, convention center, grocery carts on overpasses, boats, national guardsmen, garbage, FEMA, MRE's, face masks, ghosts, blue roofs, boarded windows, spray-painted warnings to looters, commandeering, mosquitoes, flies, animal rescue and crow bars, torn open 25 pound bags of dog and cat food on the sidewalks, the x sign, the Saints. Someone wrote in to a nola.com discussion forum that she was looking for MRE wrappers. I smell a costume coming on.
George boiled a big pot of water on his barbecue grill for me so I took a good bath, and did the whole grooming thing. I feel like a woman again. It's the first hot bath I've had in a week. Bonnie says she thinks the reality of the hurricane is coming on us, like maybe we're getting over the shock and it's settling in. Maybe that's what the heaviness is. Too much has happened. It's impossible to process things that happen so fast. But maybe the processing is occurring finally. I've been like in a daze. I spoke with Linda, my student from last year who was so influential to me as a teacher, and she gave me the skinny on everyone. Most of the people we had in common are in either Houston, Dallas, or Atlanta. She's in California. She wants to come home.
Tim is coming home tonight!!!!! His presence will give me perspective. I really wonder what has changed in me. How has New Orleans changed? How has life changed?

home to stay

2005-11-04T10:44:00.000-06:00

From my journal, 6 weeks after the storm:

Saturday. I'm sittong on the stoop. The new sights and sounds of New Orleans is of front loaders, backhoes, bobcats, 18 wheel dump trucks. The bobcat scrapes the street and dumps the load into the front loader, and when its bucket is full it raises the load (like it's emphatically praying to the heavens) and drops it into the dump truck which sits, idling, at the corner of Royal and Marigny. There are today four dump trucks lined up, idling and waiting. The front loader is beautiful in the graceful way the arm raises and lowers. Machines are beautiful. These machines are from Florida. The men are all wearing white nylon or plastic suits over their clothes and heavy work boots and orange reflective vests and white hardhats and white cups over their mouths and noses. There's the constant roar of diesel engines and the beeping the machines make when they back up, and the sound of the metal buckets banging against the dump trucks, and the bobcat's bucket scraping the concrete street. A neighbor just came by with a flea-bitten dog on a leash and he took the defunct bike off the curb that I'd put out there, and told me he stood in a free food line on Canal Street that was for the workers, not the locals, and he said they were cooking steaks as big as dogs and he pointed to his dog. Then he told me he was using his FEMA money for weed.
Now the trucks are gone and it's strangely silent. Since they left I think I've heard two sounds -- a car passing on Royal and a woman around the corner greeting a long lost somebody. I'm in a cleaning frenzy. I took four bags of trash out of the back plus several large things, like a lawn mower and that bike and some other things I can definitely live without. I de-potted my plants. Almost all of them are dead but I created a plant hospital anyway, just in case. It's sad about my cedar tree especially. That has been my Christmas tree since I've lived here. Next door a man is on the roof, hammering, and a woman is standing on the ground giving him instructions. The flocks of pigeons are beautiful today. I love the way they move. They fly like girls, breast first.
Sunset, on the stoop again, mosquitoes. I think it's my job now to be outsidde, to show people that our city is habitable. Just like it was at Douglass, just to exist and show up and be myself. But it's a vacant city. A ghost town. I don't understsnd why people didn't flock home. It was a really lonely day. It's like the Twilight Zone. And I feel achey and my sinuses hurt. I raked and swept the whole street and sidewalk on my block this morning and I guess the dust got me. I guess there's a reason those people wear those masks.

Tuesday. The refrigerator is OUT. I've been terrified that I would go crazy in the night and open it. I've been adding more duct tape every day, just in case. But now it's gone. I have three ice chests, one of which is leaking. I bought some pork chops to barbecue but really don't know if I can stomach meat anymore, considering what Mark the butcher said about how there were things living in my refrigerator so big I could put them on a hook and go fishing with them. The idea that the seeds of those creatures are IN THE MEAT AT ALL TIMES. God. And we eat that. Are the creatures in us?

Thursday. I have the cats back home with me now so the house is almost comlete. Orange is behind the stove. My turntable is going crazy and ruining my Gordon Lightfoot album. That will not do. I couldn't park in my usual place because of the workers across the street. Which makes me SO HAPPY! People. Glad to have people. I keep looking around, drinking my life outside back into me. Everything looks brand new to me. But I also feel sick. Nauseous. Every little exertion shows my limbs to be sore. And I'm having a hard time breathing. It's mental. Leaving Dave's was hard to do. Besides the fact that we became like a family, leaving there with the cats also marks the end of a very safe period. As long as my stuff and my cats were there I felt like I had that safe haven and someone to take care of me to which I could retreat. But now I'm really altogether back, and alone. And it's scary being alone around here right now.

the last week in Hammond

2005-10-28T10:50:00.000-06:00

Saturday. Yesterday Dave and I were talking about going to New Orleans and we got to talking about why it's important. And I said it's not to view the destruction. It's not. And I said it is perhaps to view what is not destroyed. But that isn't it really either. I can't really yet put my finger on why it was important to go though. Maybe it's just important to be home, to feel the physical of New Orleans. I keep saying to myself it's not destroyed but there's a part of me that doubts that. I think the only way it's going to be okay is if people go back. New Orleans is fragile now, and badly damaged, and it's like the aging (beautifully aging but aging) body of an extraordinary woman, and she got knocked around by something brutal, though it's not a malevolent something, just a natural brutal something, and she's hurt and bruised and broken a little, no, a lot, and sore and she needs to be nursed. And that's what is so hard about all the people being gone. Not only is there no one there to tend to her broken bones and gashes and to keep the poison at bay, there's no one there to calm her and commisserate with her and nurture her and nurse her. She's falling into lethargy because she's abandoned in her time of need. Injury, even brutality and abuse upon a person, can be healed with love. The problem victims face, the thing that hurts them, us, so much, is having to face it alone. Love is what can heal pain. Compassion. Tender soft-handedness, warmth, big wide strong healthy arms to hold the injured, unconditional love. That's what New Orleans needs right now. Maybe now that several areas of the city are officially opened and people go back, if only to rummage around, that will help. To let New Orleans have people again, the warm beating hearts and the emotions and energy of the people. That will begin to make New Orleans okay again. We were also talking about how when people are in proximity with each other they exchange not just energy but other physical things too, like sharing the air, taking something of each other into the self. So the answer to Dave and to anyone else who doesn't really know the point of going into New Orleans, it's not for us, it's for New Orleans. Breathe her and give her our breath. She has loved us and given us our lives, and now it's time for us to return the favor.

Monday. I've been having a hard time sleeping. I can even hear myself talking in my sleep. And I'm dreaming constantly, dreamed that the neutral ground was full of furniture and there were hundreds of blond puppies that all looked alike, dreamed a student begged me to help her, dreamed I was surrounded by Douglass students in uniforms and I wanted to help but didn't know how and I was searching their faces for those I knew and then some kid climbed on my car roof and I got out of the car and reprimanded him. Then boys and men with guns appeared and we were definitely in danger but I still told the boy to get off the car. I expected to be shot.
One of the things that has me anxious is a conversation I had with a woman who had to be evacuated out of the 9th ward. She told me about the water rising and rising and that she and her brother-in-law went into the attic and busted a hole in the wall or roof and stood on attic beams for two days with the water up to her waist, and that her brother-in-law died during that time and she could feel his body bumping against her sometimes and when the water receded some she could see him. She told me about having to move his stiff body away from her when the water receded so that she wouldn't be pinned by him. She told me she swallowed water three times. She said that someone took her to the St. Claude bridge over the Industrial Canal and she walked to the elementary school across the street from Douglass. She said all the "bad ones" went to Douglass. And then someone found an RTA bus and they drove it to Houston and that people kept getting on, wanting to go to Wal-Mart and such, and she told them no and she had had a dream the night of the storm that told her the route to Houston and during the drive on Wednesday or Thursday she kept insisting that the driver follow the directions she'd dreamed and he did and they got there.
After the woman told me the story of her ordeal she told me about some things that she was victim of in her past and I'm thinking, how can this woman still be on her feet? And she kept saying, "I don't know why I'm telling a total stranger this."

Tuesday. Bonnie called to tell me I HAVE LIGHTS! Now I can go home! Which raises new issues: how do I say goodbye? And how do I thank Dave? My God. I guess I didn't really ever believe this day would come. There's so much I want to say, so much packed up raw, undressed, inside me. Things frozen whole. Two months of unprocessed experience.

Saturday. Today I'm going home. I've been so anxious lately. I haven't been sleeping but I know that everyone in New Orleans suffers the same thing. Six weeks of huge and small changes, one after another, and not enough time between them to absorb them or even identify them or even fucking name them. Or even recognize them. Maybe my tendency is to live circularly (except when I'm done with a thing and then I march away in a straight line and don't look back). But about the circularity, it's like I go out and sweep through and come back to my solitude and reflect on what I saw, learned, etc. This has been a big wide sweep and now, today, I'm finally going to have the chance to go home and sit down and feel it, see it, name it, get some percpective on it. And in addition to that I have also to tie this part of it up, this six weeks in Hammond, that I'll never as long as I live be able to repay Dave for. And to say goodbye. He saved me. He took me and my also straggling boys in and didn't just give us shelter but lit candles in the shelter and had flowers in it. He has made this for me a life and not just a shelter in the storm. As much as it was possible he made this home for me. Always in the back of my mind (and most of the time right in the front middle of my mind) was the thought of my house that might have been damaged, might have been destroyed, might have been flooded or looted or lost a roof, and me this far away unable even to close its door or patch it so it could weather the time without me. Then to know it was okay, that was such a relief. But to remember it vacant of me and my life, and with that horrible refrigerator in it...and to sit here, tended to graciously and generously in Hammond, while my city rots. Not dead, not alive, but traumatized and badly badly damaged. Today I'm going home to help nurse it back to life.

home for the first time week

2005-10-27T16:41:00.000-06:00

After the second week, a few days after David and I brought Leonard Earl to Lafayette, my friend, Bonnie, came to Hammond from Cincinnati. She spent one night, then the next morning I followed her into New Orleans. However, the city had been closed again because of Hurricane Rita. So we had to get creative. We tried every regular passage and were turned around by national guardsmen. So we went through old Metairie, where I grew up, and actually down Aris Avenue, where I lived, and I stopped her and pointed out my house. We got onto Metairie Road and going toward the Palmetto Street overpass had to go the wrong way on a one way street for a while, but we made it to Carrollton and we were in. The overpass, like every other bridge I was to see in the city, was strewn with clothing and debris. That was my first glimpse of the city.
We wound our way through uptown toward her house. There were no working signal lights. St. Charles Avenue looked like a path through the woods. There was no electricity anywhere. Trees and signs and signal posts were strewn everywhere. Wires dangled in the street. There were few people. At her house we found the door wide open, but everything was okay inside, except for the fleas (now that her dog was gone).
Then I went to my house. I was the only person in the entire area, which was scary. The house, it was fine. It was fine. I turned the water on. It was brown. I watered my plants, which were also brown. I tried the toilet. I wandered around touching things, looking at things. I was amazed by my house because I always think of myself as such a slob and what I found when I opened the door was not the home of a slob but the home of someone who lived in a house, really lived in it. It was a revelation. And it didn't stink like I expect I and it stink. Except of course for the refrigerator. I stayed a few hours, locked the door, went to Molly's on Decatur Street (which was empty of cars) and had two of the coldest beers known to man, and got back to Hammond before dark. I was relieved and heartened by what I saw, and even though later, on my next several trips in, I became disheartened, I will never forget that I could finally exhale again.
At Molly's I saw a school board member with whom I'm acquainted and I told him about the photograph of the Oregon National Guardsmen in my classroom at Douglass and he told me Douglass is slated to be torn down.

Two days later. Hurricane Rita is about to hit the Galveston area. NPR said every person in Galveston has evacuated. I'm more stressed being away from New Orleans than I would be if I were there, even with another hurricane and even with the emptiness and scariness. It's raining there now and the city is so compromised that the levees could fail again and the city flood again. Of course, there are no people in the flooded areas, almost no one at all in the entire city actually, so that's a good thing. It's just that we've just begun to come out of the water and the chaos and I fear this could deal a psychological blow to us.
From here in Hammond I see a blustery sky and the cars outside sprinkled with some raindrops. It's gray and ominous. It's going to be a weird day, a weird two days. It's scary out there. Across the street the gardeners are cleaning up the park. Every so often the wind goes into the middle of the Pear trees and lifts leaves up and ruffles them. There's a woman and a dog across the street and the dog reminds me of Maggie in her looks and her movements. I think I'd like to get a dog again. I keep saying that and in the next thought I think I want to get rid of my belongings and run. Home. The issue crops up again and again. As long as I had Penny I had a home and she kept me stable. Then when she died I had Tim and he kept me stable. When he left I was so used to being stable that I just stayed where I was. Then I uprooted myself and moved home to New Orleans and stabilized myself there. And then Katrina strikes and I leave home and all behind and come to Hammond and that was almost four weeks ago. And now another hurricane comes around.

The 9th ward is flooded again. People are going to lose heart about New Orleans.
I'm feeling weepy again, and I feel dull, apathetic, weak, beat, even a little hopeless. I've been petty and stupid and whiny. Trying to make things be fine, worrying about how I look, feeling duller and duller and more stupid all the time. I have been coming apart and I didn't realize it. I've been trying to have a life here when my life, I don't know, it's only a shell of me here. I'm trying to make the most out of what's going on, being a survivor, instead of acknowledging what's real. Look at Bonnie. Look at Bruce. Look at Dave. What have I done? Buy skirts, drink, weep, whine, worry, argue. Nothing productive. I feel shallow. Four weeks I've been lost at sea. Four weeks I've been trying to make things smoothe, but inside me I've been anxious and stressed. I haven't been myself. I haven't been real. I've lost my connection. Wayne died, then the eight hour evacuation, the traffic, the brakes, the rain, Leonard, the cats, the lack of clothes, the imposition on David, all the little things to tend to like prescriptions and unemployment and FEMA, the fact that my job is over, that I won't have an income, the question of where all my students are, the horror stories about New Orleans trickling in, trickling in, the sadness in everyone, the kindnesses, the generosity, the warmth, then hearing that my friend Arne died, and then Jason's father who died at a shelter, worrying about Bonnie, the relief of talking to lost friends, then the new storm and the re-flooding, the thousand dead, the story in the paper about Bruce, the picture in the paper of my classroom, and the question of what are we going to do. It's amazing.

the next two weeks

2005-10-27T10:09:00.000-06:00

I'm a person who has to drop out of the action of living every so often and reflect on it, to get perspective. I do that by writing in my journal. But in mid August, with the beginning of the 2005 school year, everything started moving too fast, boom boom boom, and I didn't get to write much and I didn't get perspective and suddenly I found myself, two weeks after the hurricane, trying to get a grip and feel my life. During the first two weeks there was FEMA to think about, and emails that I couldn't access except every so often, at PJ's, with the rest of the refugees. My brakes got ruined during the drive from New Orleans that Sunday so I had to have a brake job done (the man at the Texaco, Darryl, reattached my rearview mirror without even charging me for it). There were the neighbors, Patsy and her refugees and Ryan and his, and Kathy downstairs and the dog Greta who disappeared for a while after the hurricane, and all the drinking and partying on the stairs, and the Crescent Bar opening, even without electricity, so people could get booze, and waiting for the Mexican restaurant, La Carreta's, to open, like it was some kind of magic event, like when that happened somehow everything would be okay. And about how meanwhile, during this day to day attempt at normalcy and the human unfolding, New Orleans was desperate. The Superdome, the Convention Center, filled with people who'd not gotten out, and the desperation, the lack of food and water, lack of toilets, for days, and the talk of looting in the city and the burning of SAKS Fifth Avenue, and the talk of thugs with guns attempting to take the city over, commandeering vehicles. And the news was just trickling in and it was all dark, every day darker, and hearing about the city flooding and none of us knowing what was happening to our homes. And the low grade crying all the time. And having no clothes and driving to Dillards and telling the ladies what I needed and where I was from, and the sadness and compassion in their eyes, and the woman in the lingerie department fitting me for a brassiere (I hadn't brought one), which was the first time that had ever happened for me in my 52 years (and learning the little trick about leaning forward and holding the brassiere by the top edge and shaking to get the, um, flesh, in there right). And me trying to be a girl in the midst of all this, trying to live somehow normal in that sweet little town, knowing that the city was in chaos. It's like I was in two places at one time, the most tender and serious part of me in New Orleans, the survivor me in Hammond, trying to be fine.

This is from my journal:
It's the day after Labor Day. I signed up for unemployment insurance and must now look into food stamps and social security. But the main thing is I SPOKE TO TIM AND BONNIE! Tim said, "What are you going to do?" And finally, nine days after leaving New Orleans, I hear the question. And it blows my mind. What am I going to do? What am I going to do? What am I going to do? Tim made this great point that if ever there was a time for my book about Douglass High School it's now. He made the point that all those people at the Superdome and Convention Center were from the 9th ward. And that I taught in the 9th ward at Douglass in what will probably turn out to be its last year. And I wrote a book about the experience. I wish I could find a way to get on the blog site so I can update it. I know there will be people who are concerned. Another thing is that people are talking about racism, that those people on the roofs, waiting for days to be rescued, were black, from the 9th ward, from poverty, probably almost all of them, and that they were left for days on roofs. Why were they left behind? I think maybe there's something in the story of Douglass that may help explain that, the disregard these children are treated with.
It's stunning how the hurricane called everything to a halt. Where's Tanya and Ms. Simmons and Julie and Monique and Whitney? Where's Raymond? Did he get out? Did Katrina disable him? Is he trying to take care of his mother? Where's Ms. Holliday? Where is Douglass? It's like this is a cleansing for New Orleans. The murder, the crime, the poverty, the ignorance, the destitution, the way the city let the black population slip. The disregard it had for protocol, much less propriety. Plain human protocol, just following a few of the rules that keep us decent, we did not do that in New Orleans. Our laissez faire attitude, our celebration of the playful and the outlandish and the extreme, our acceptance of, hell, everything.
I have to start smiling more. I think in the recent past I'd gotten way too serious and heavy. It's probably because of that job. Which I do not have anymore. I half jokingly said, aloud even, that I halfway hoped I'd get fired in the massive layoff frenzy that was occurring before the hurricane. And now I have been, but by a hurricane. And I don't want to jump into a teaching job outside of New Orleans.
I feel like a big drop of mercury that hits the surface and scatters. Or more, like a big drop of water that hits a hot sidewalk and sizzles. I feel like the world has popped open, like a shell, and I'm an emerging bird. Oh, and I heard that there are 45,000 national guard troops in New Orleans and that a new hurricane is in the gulf. Ophelia. I hope some of my students from last year will remember who Ophelia was in the Shakespeare we read.

There's a train, open car after open car, fifty maybe, more maybe, hauling nothing but chunks of concrete, heading east toward New Orleans, the sound of it over the gaps in the track like old men harumphing, a high explosive expression of a tone, a clearing of the throat as it were, landing an octave down in a kind of resolution, a being finished with the moment. It's that sound all the way down the tracks, yard after block after mile of the journey.

Listening to the radio. On Monday it looks like some people, uptown and in the quarter, will be allowed home. I guess we can't stay, but we can at least see. I fell asleep reading The Odyssey, which David brought me yesterday. I know there's a big perspective to gain. In the near distance I hear a church playing a fake bell rendition of Rock of Ages. There's of course nothing intrinsically wrong with the music but I don't like the fact that churches try to act like those are bells, like from the old world. The woman who sold me my cellphone today was angry and adamant about the New Orleans people here, talking about how they are different, crankier, more impatient, and that a lot of them "hang around doorways." I'd been thinking of how New Orleans people would change Hammond because of our differentness but wasn't thinking about the negative things. I guess that'll happen, yes. The influx of us. Things will be different everywhere New Orleanians have settled.

Looking at the fish in the bottle on Dave's table. The Tetra. It’s a gorgeous dark red billowy thing with big fins and a spectacular tail, but it sits or floats or lies or whatever it is fish do all day alone in a clear glass bottle about the shape and size of a vase that could hold a dozen roses, with a plant growing out of it and blue glass disks layered in the bottom. It has for its companions the blue glass at the bottom, the roots from the plant, the rope around the bottle, and its little surface of air which it sips sporadically. I think it’s the height of arrogance for humans to keep fish and birds in such cages, to keep such creatures in check like that. Why does it even occur to us to keep animals bound for our pleasure? Why is it a pleasure at all? I’m sure it could be said that, at least as far as the fish go, we bred them for it. I mean, does the Siamese Fighting Fish occur in the wild? The terrible idea of lovebirds kept caged for us. Why? Why do we need to witness the spectacle of love caged? Why does anyone find that attractive? It’s some perversity in us. I’m sitting here watching the creature react to various stimulants I touch onto the glass and I think he’s full of fear and bravado. But then I remember he’s a fish and I don’t think fish have either. The thing is, it’s not a cruelty toward the fish or the bird so much as it’s a cruelty in us towards ourselves, that we could derive pleasure or satisfaction from the manipulation of an animal. That’s the terrible thing. It’s how it harms us. It’s how we show ourselves feeding a mean streak in us, perhaps us trying to reconcile ourselves with how caged we are. If we were not in this society as we are, with rules and cages of our own, would we be able to derive any kind of pleasure from seeing others in that position? Maybe that’s it, it’s a way we can come to terms with being tamed as we are by taming other creatures. Maybe it’s a way we rationalize our own lives. This makes me question whether we were ever wild. Have we ever been the sort that succumbed to allowing ourselves to be tamed? Or were we born to be tamed? Organized? Forward thinking? Rational? It seems to me more like a curse than a gift. Wouldn’t it be lovely to be thoughtless and blind, so to speak, and to follow instincts through the world, follow the messages from a designer, follow the design without question? But it seems we weren’t made like that. It seems we were made to strive, to think, to reach, to attempt to rise. It seems we could never, can never, will never really rest, that we’re born to move toward understanding, that we have to question everything, that it’s only in the rising that we’re really alive. That’s probably one of the serious issues for the kids I used to teach. They’re as filled with the human need for movement as anyone else is, but the portals out and up are closed to them. How did that happen? Do we not all share in the same human need and desire, and therefore feel compassion for our brethren? It seems we don’t. Otherwise, why would we let the things happen that we let happen? Why would we allow the kids at Douglass, for example, to remain exempt from the wider world? Is the world not big enough? Is that what we fear?
When I get back into my world I'm going to understand something I didn't understand before. I don't know what. Which adds to the wonder of it all.

type the word

2005-10-26T22:25:00.000-06:00

I activated the feature that causes posters to "type the word you see" in order to respond to a blog. That's because the spam factory machines that respond to blogs ("Great blog. I've got it bookmarked! Keep up the good work! I also have a great site in case you want to double the size of your penis.") cannot type the word. And I really don't need any more woodworking tools.

first week after

2005-10-26T13:18:00.000-06:00

Then there's how we lived, all four of us loners who lived alone before this hurricane, on pads and cushions and a futon on the floor, and David's incredible generosity and kindness, and Orange in the cat carrier the first night and behind the washing machine for a week, and how worried I was because I didn't believe he was eating or drinking, and he'd panted, red-gummed tongue-curled panting, all the eight hours to Hammond, and I kept getting my fingers wet from the bottle of water and trying to get him to drink and he wouldn't. And then that magic day when I was in the bathroom with him, calling him, trying to coax him out, and he came on out, he just came on out.
LEJ awoke earliest every day and went out onto the porch with his little transistor radio, (because the electricity was out for four days), trying to get news, and then reporting the sketchy details of the worsening situation in New Orleans. On Tuesday, the day after the hurricane, we heard that the water was rising, but we didn't know where. They told us it would take a month to get electricity back in the city. We heard that one could not enter St. Tammany Parish. We heard that the CBD "blew up." We heard that the water would remain for three weeks in the city. And on Wednesday morning, we heard that Mayor Nagin said he woke up that morning saying he'd had a few hours sleep and was seeing more clearly and was ready to address the city. I wished I'd heard that address. I wished I were in the city. And I really believed I'd be back in a day or two.
By thursday the news was telling us that perhaps many thousands of people in new Orleans may be dead, that 80% of the city flooded. That there was lawlessness.
We could really only imagine.
I wrote in my journal that week:
I'm sitting on Dave's front porch. A guy just rode by for the second time on a bike with foil blue and red triangular flags on a mast behind his seat and a pile of Mardi Gras beads on his handlebars and baskets on the back full of found treasures. A New Orleans kind of nut. God, what happened to the homeless guy with the crazy eyes who sweeps our neighborhood? I saw him Sunday morning, walking down Marigny toward the river. And what has happened to my students? When will I see Valerie again, or Sharon or Rene or any of those friends at the Friendly? Maybe never. That's impossible. Usually it is me who decides what will be but this time what will be has been determined by a swirl of wind and rain as big as the Gulf of Mexico that has taken the something (I don't yet know what) out of New Orleans. I won't say the power is gone. I'll say it's this kind of thing that gives people power. And so we will rise. When? What will become of us? I can't know. I can't control it. It's way beyond anybody now. What will matter is that we exhibit what we're made of. It will require that we dig into ourselves and call upon the most real aspects of ourselves.
For now I'm not going after anything. I'm just going to try to live. That's been the hard thing, just living lately. This might be the biggest change in my life. I chose the others. I didn't choose this. This is the Universe wiping the slate clean and saying here you go Mel, here you go, what do you want and where do you want it? New Orleans and that life again? Hammond and this one? Lafayette? Paris? Mmmm, Paris. How could I make that work? Take a thousand dollars and go there. Apply for social security and unemployment and FEMA and take off until January when maybe school will start again and spend it writing in Paris? Four months. I could pay Tim's rent for him and stay there. Let the house go? Burn my bridges? Sell the piano and the cello, the furniture, stash the bikes somewhere, stash the writing and the pictures and my grandfather's letters somewhere, find something to do with the cats, and when I come back from Paris, if I come back, start over.
Saturday was the worry. Sunday morning was the decision. Sunday afternoon was the drive. Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday was the juxtaposing of people and cats and a dog and neighbors and need for gas and who has money and going to the grocery, the line at Winn-Dixie, the air conditioning there, me, George, the tears, the stories, the revelations, the love, the mess, the news, the radio, Leonard and George, David, the sweetnesses, the conflicts, the personalities, the loners. Then George left yesterday and things changed. It got obvious and serious. It's not a party.

unspoken goodbye/evacuation

2005-10-24T17:08:00.000-06:00

This here, and the next few blogs, will be about what I've been doing these past eight weeks instead of teaching at Frederick Douglass High School.
I have to start, though, with the Wednesday before the storm. That was my last day at Douglass. This is what I wrote with my second period class:
Wednesday, 24 August 2005. Just read Stafford's poem with them, the line, "Fear will not go away: it will take you into yourself and bless you and keep you." Fear. That's our subject. I step into things I'm afraid of all the time. But it makes me wonder if I'm stepping into the easy scary things or the things that I'm really afraid of. Like committment to another. I'm really afraid of that. I think every time I've stepped into it I've found it wanting, but maybe...agh.
I need to plan my class better. I need to write. I feel all scattered. Figure out class for tomorrow. I'll read chapter three from the Douglass narrative to them. And we will write. And talk.
I'm outa here.
I'd just found out a few days before that my brother-in-law had died and the funeral was going to be on Friday, out of town. On Wednesday after class I decided to go to the funeral a day early so I was absent from school Thursday and Friday. Katrina wasn't even an issue at that point so I didn't say goodbye or good luck or anything to anybody at school. And the storm hit Monday. And the 9th ward flooded and all my students evacuated, a lot of them through the Superdome.
So Wednesday was my last day at Douglass. And I don't know whether I went out with a bang or a whimper. You never know when you'll walk out a door for the last time, corny as that sounds.

On the Saturday after the funeral and before the storm, a good friend of mine and I had a parting of the ways, which was sad. That night I met two friends at a bar on Frenchmen Street and we had crazy conversation about dying in the hurricane and this could be the last time we see each other and such. The atmosphere was foreboding. Then I went to another place I frequent and danced and at midnight we all said see ya tomorrow, with hope and doubt. But I was still planning on staying at that point. A lot of people were. But at 7 Sunday morning Tim called to see what I was going to do. I told him I was staying, which is what he'd expected to hear. And he said what the heck mom, you could just go somewhere for a few days. It'll be an adventure no matter where you are. And I said I'd think on it. Then Leslie called from the road, on her way to Tampa, to see what I was intending. I think she was trying to plant the seed to get me to leave. Then I heard on the television that the mayor had called for a mandatory evacuation and it got me scared. The thing that decided me though was the fact that Tim was worried. So I called my friend David and accepted his gracious offer of refuge, and I called two older men in my neighborhood who didn't have anywhere to go and said let's go to Hammond. I packed a few things, for a few days -- about five items of clothing, the gin, the brandy, a box of wine, a pillow, all the non-perishable food I had, cat food, litter pan -- and we put all our stuff in the back of my little pickup truck, and I put my feral cat, Orange, in a plastic cat carrier (and he was hysterical and clawing and I told both of the old men with me that if I couldn't get the cats out I wasn't leaving) but he calmed down, and I put my other cat, Princess, in a pillow case, and LEJ and I and the two cats packed ourselves into the cab of the truck, George and his dog Panda in his car behind us, and we headed east to go west to Hammond. LEJ sat with Orange in the cat carrier on his lap and Princess in the bag, howling, between us, and George in my side view mirror. Princess ripped her way out of the pillow case about twenty minutes after we started and so was loose in the truck, panting and howling, trying to get under my feet, for the eight hours it took us to get to Hammond, five of which were in rain and one in a blinding storm that fogged my glass beyond the capability of my defroster to correct, so I had to drive and wipe the windshield constantly with the only dry thing in the truck, toilet paper. Poor Orange was terrified and overheated and curled up in the corner of the plastic box for eight hours. My air conditioner wasn't working so the windows were halfway down and it was hot and noisy and I kept cupping water in my hand and opening the cat carrier to try to give it to him (while I was also driving) but he wouldn't have any of it.
I don't remember the rest of the night except that we got to Dave's about 7 PM in a moderate condition of shock. The clothes I tried to put on (the ones I was wearing were soaked) were also wet from being in the back of the truck.
Eventually, George went to Boca Raton and LEJ went to Lafayette. Princess and Orange and I stayed with David for six weeks.

paraders

2005-10-22T17:43:00.000-06:00

A year and a month ago I wrote in this blog that my son, Tim, was moving to Paris. I haven't seen him since then. He's coming home tonight, to stay for two weeks.
But besides that, there are other things to think about. I've been wanting to write in this blog but because I haven't been teaching, I didn't know what to write. Cassandra telephoned me today and we talked about that and she made the point that the reason I'm not teaching right now is very significant and that perhaps I could write about that. And so I shall. Thank you, Cassandra.
Katrina struck eight weeks ago this coming Monday. All the students that Frederick Douglass High School served scattered. There is no more 9th ward or lower 9th ward, and there's only a partial 8th ward. I wonder what happens when the 9th ward students meet the 8th ward students in Dallas, for example? In New Orleans we'd call that a ward fight. I'm wondering if they're still fighting?
Today I spoke with Linda G, a student I wrote a lot about in last year's blog. She called and left a message for me yesterday from California. She gave me the skinny on a lot of my students. That's why she was calling. And also to check on me. She said she was worried about me. I found out that most of the kids she and I had in common with each other are in Texas. One of them had her baby, a girl. Several of them Linda saw on the news right after the storm, at the Superdome. One of those was a girl who gave me a hard time last year, about whom I wrote quite a bit. I can just imagine her being at the Superdome and some National Guardsman with an M16 and steel-toed boots telling her what to do. Wow! I KNOW those Oregonians never heard a girl speak like I do not doubt she spoke to them. I believe Linda said this girl was in the Superdome for five days, tending to her mother. This girl, EN, is the girl who cursed me out, threw her writings on the floor, and left my classroom, and I chased her down the hall. It was so explosive and out of control that I knew something else was going on with her and I tried to get her to come back and talk to me, or at least let me help her to someone else she could talk to. But I got another fuck you for that. Anyway, one of her friends told me there was a big problem with EN's mother, but that's all I ever knew. The other kids made remarks to EN about her mother's crack habit, so maybe it was that. Anyway, she was on the national news outside the Superdome.
A lot of people say they're never coming back to New Orleans, but I don't think that's possible. The world out there is not like New Orleans, which is good and bad. It's good for the people who needed to get unstuck and out of here, but it's bad for the people who love the city. Like Linda. She said there's no city like this on the planet.
I'm extremely scattered. For eight weeks now it has been one emergency after another, in a city that is much worse off than the news is able to show. Life here is nothing but emergency. And everyone is in shock. And most people are deeply sad. Personally, my life (I'm home, have been for two weeks. Before returning to stay I snuck in five times, just to be here.) my life is easy, but lonely. I haven't been able to make words of my feelings or of anything. Yesterday I bought a new refrigerator (the old one is down the block, duct-taped, full of food that has been in it for eight weeks without coolness...
nine people, two of them drumming, just paraded down Royal Street past my house, right past all the refrigerators...
Where was I? About to get maudlin. And then comes a parade.
We are going to have the most unbelievable Mardi Gras this year. Pass the word.

Melanie

Room 219

2005-09-22T14:55:00.000-06:00

It is Thursday, the first day of the shorter light. A lot has been happening this week for me. The most astonishing thing is that on Tuesday there was a half page photograph in the Times-Picayune (c-5 in the sports/living section) of two soldiers in a second floor classroom at Douglass High School and IT IS MY CLASSROOM. Yes indeed. Two people besides me recognized it from the newspaper. Ellen said she just recognized my "touch." Richard figured it out because of the poem on the chalkboard, William Stafford's, "For My Young Friends Who Are Afraid." I'd copied that poem on the board Wednesday and talked with my students about it, and they understood, and then on Thursday and Friday I was in Bogalusa for the funeral of my brother in law, and then Sunday I came to Hammond, so it was the last thing we did in my classes. That poem. This poem:

For My Young Friends Who Are Afraid (William Stafford)

There is a country to cross you will
find in the corner of your eye, in
the quick slip of your foot -- air far
down, a snap that might have caught.
And maybe for you, for me, a high, passing
voice that finds its way by being
afraid. That country is there, for us,
carried as it is crossed. What you fear
will not go away; it will take you into
yourself and bless you and keep you.
That's the world and we all live there.

Then yesterday I snuck into New Orleans with my friend, Bonnie. Police were at every usual road into the city turning everyone back because of Hurricane Rita, so we snuck in by going the wrong way on a one way street (there was absolutely no one around) and onto the Palmetto Street overpass to Carrollton. The city, as everyone knows, is deserted. Bonnie's neighborhood is fine and so is mine. It was hard to leave, even without electricity. However, there are no people around and it's scary. I can imagine what it must be like at night, alone, black, soundless. The bar, Molly's on the Market (on Decatur Street), was open and I had a couple of beers in there. It was well-populated. An Orleans Parish school board member with whom I'm acquainted was in there and I told him about the picture in the paper and he told me that Douglass as we know it has probably had its last year of life. How amazing would that be if I were to end up being the one to sing Douglass's swan song? He told me there's talk of tearing it down and I argued its beauty and soul and he said soul is not in a building but in its people and I argued back that architecture is art and it has soul. I'm usually not the victor in debates like that, and I guess he'd say otherwise, that I was not the victor (not that there has to be a victor or loser, but in debates like that, that's usually the case). Anyway, he did concede that perhaps it would make a good condominium building. He said the thinking is that half the population of Douglass will return.
Then last night at a restaurant I saw a former student from Mandeville, from many years ago, and he wanted my email address so I could help him with a paper he has to work on and I thought, hmm, I wonder where my services are most useful?
Meanwhile, I gathered some names of literary agents and publishers and in the next few days intend to get a letter and some samples of the blog book out. I wonder if there are people to whom I should send the book that I hadn't thought about? It's definitely related to Katrina now.
I want to say that I cannot reply to comments posted on this blog and I don't have my computer address book here. Like for example, Clay, I wanted to respond to you about Tara, but don't have your address. Could you send it to me? And Julie, I don't have yours either.
Thank you.

Melanie,

hard to focus

2005-09-12T17:18:00.000-06:00

I do not have my address book. And, Julie, I couldn't get to your web site.
I'm in PJ's at a wireless whatever, working on Dave's laptop. But I cannot think here. I guess the only thing to do is compose in the journal at home and type it in here.
Melanie

bootstraps

2005-09-09T14:00:00.000-06:00

I'm sitting on the second floor balcony of my friend Dave's apartment, writing and smoking and rueing the invention of the leaf blower which is being wielded below me on the last few little sticks of Katrina trash that is left here. I haven't been watching the TV or even listening to the radio, just reading the NY Times and the skinny little Times-Picayune, which is skinny because it's lacking most of its sections, most notably, the Living Section. I say this to say that really the only first hand knowledge I have of the results of the hurricane is what I see here, and here, in downtown Hammond, life is back to normal. It is so strange because I know about downtown 9th ward New Orleans where Douglass High School is located, specificaqlly Douglass because there was an article in one of the papers about the musician Charmaine Neville, whose house was deeply flooded. She lives across the street from Douglass. And the lower 9th ward, where a large number of our students lived, fared worse. God, where are they now? Where's Raymond and Monique and Whitney? Where's K who is theleldest child in her family and is raising the siblings? Where is R who has two babies, whose parents live in a crack house, whose father stole her rent money to buy crack, the young woman I wrote about some months ago for whom our beautiful school found the money to pay that rent?
Yesterday, or a week ago, time has so lost relevance, some woman in some line I was standing in, said she doesn't feel sympathy for those people who ended up in the Superdome because there were buses evacuating people and they chose not to go and so they caused their own problem. That's another one of those "if those people would just pull themselves up by the bootstraps" sentiments. At the moment I was too numb to react but as I think on it, I get sicker and sicker about it. I know she's just ignorant. I know she doesn't understand that these are not people who could be leading middle class lives if only they'd do a little something for themselves. Like it's easy or something. Like maybe my student, RM, the writer I loved so much, whom I cited and quoted so often, the one who wrote about keeping things real. His mother is a crack addict. Could he have just said, come on mother, let's leave this place, and gotten his addicted mother on the bus and out of New Orleans? Leave the ONLY thing they knew? That's been the issue all along. The people who live like that, who live in those poverty stricken areas, have not only no knowledge of the rest of the world, they can't even imagine it. I was getting around to really understanding that at the end of last school year.
The story of Douglass High School that I experienced last year and the first five days of this year has taken on a new relevance. Who they were and what they were, these people I knew in the 9th ward New Orleans, these peole who ended up on roofs and in sewage, walking to the Superdome. These people I knew before Katrina. The story is no longer simply about looking at the school system (though the connection between their school lives and how they ended up is obvious), it's about looking at them. I'm astonished, overwhelmed with gratitude, and in awe, that I had the chance last year to learn what I learned.
And what I know even more clearly than ever is that they, especially my children, need to have someone speak up for them.

Love, Melanie

thursday, 8 september

2005-09-08T19:18:00.000-06:00

Somehow I stumbled upon my password, but now my time is up at the machine so I must be brief. Next time I can get online I'll write a lot more. In fact, I'll write in my journal and just type that in here.
I thank you so much for your concern. I'm okay, as you heard, living in Hammond, unsure how to proceed.
I'm so happy to be able to be here again.
Tomorrow.
Love, Melanie

five days in

2005-08-24T16:20:00.000-06:00

Today was the fifth day. I've already covered one class and they asked me to cover another one yesterday but I had a meeting to go to. One teacher broke her collarbone the day before school started and another had some kind of diabetic attack that mimicked a stroke the first day the kids came to school. I'm just saying that to say the absences are legitimate and there's no tomfoolery.
The first couple of days it looked like it was going to be a different year, but things have pretty much gone back to normal, with rivers of students circling the floor, a few students who don't respond to me when I say hello in the hall (they look at me and walk past me), bellowing during classes, etc. I haven't had a problem with people walking into my room because I put up blue paper on the panes before school even started and I'm locking my door. I tried leaving it unlocked the first day but a kid came in and did his little dance, so I'm locking it again.
The strategic reading program comes with a facilitator who is there full time, working with the three of us strategic reading teachers. She put up a "word wall" with colorful borders in my room and I now, for the first time, have POSTERS in my room. I prefer the walls stark so that the children will look inside themselves for the colors and such. But I'm following the program. Trying to. Today I had a tiny argument with the facilitator about the length of time children are given to read in the group setting. I'm going to try. And dammit but the poem I used for the reading showcase (included below) was too hard (my fault) and it didn't really work with the kids, which is not a problem for me because I have no problem saying my bad when I choose something that doesn't work. But the facilitator was in there, watching me. Now I'm thinking out loud here. I think the powers that be believe it's the teachers that need help teaching, not that other things have to change. I feel like I'm being scrutinized, and by a very young woman with I think five years of teaching under her belt. I think she has assumed that I'm not a good teacher and that that's why she's there and that that's why I'm at Douglass. It's a weird feeling. I guess I'll just have to see what's up.
Monday a student of mine from last year, Shonda, told me she had a nightmare Saturday night in which she was riding in a car with two boys and someone shot the boys and she went running out of the car and into Douglass screaming, "Ms Plesh! Help me!" over and over. She screamed it out loud and her mother came into her room and asked her who Ms Plesh is.
A lot of my students from last year have been coming to see me. It doesn't hurt my street cred or my reputation for the children in my classes to see this.

Here's William Stafford's poem, "For All My Young Friends Who Are Afraid":

There is a country to cross you will
find in the corner of your eye, in
the quick slip of your foot--air far
down, a snap that might have caught.
And maybe for you, for me, a high, passing
voice that finds its way by being
afraid. That country is there, for us,
carried as it is crossed. What you fear
will not go away: it will take you into
yourself and bless you and keep you.
That's the world, and we all live there.

Melanie

Frederick Douglass, the man

2005-08-19T16:31:00.000-06:00

As my "reading showcase" for the strategic reading program, (20 minutes at the beginning of every class where I read something aloud and my students watch a good reader read and watch me think aloud through it) I'm reading the narrative of Douglass. That man is a hero. The first chapter deals with the beginning of his life. He didn't even know the date or year of his birth, though from anecdotal evidence he thinks it was probably around 1817. He was the son of his slave mother and his mother's white master, though even that is anecdotal. He was separated in infancy from his mother and she died when he was a little boy and never verified it.
I am going to type some of my school journal entries (that I read aloud to my students) into this blog sometimes. That's what yesterday's was. This is today's:
Douglass was about 27 when he wrote this book. My son's age. I think about the differences. Once again I realize that people really aren't very different. I look at this life at 26, with family and education and power, and I look at Douglass's. But then, Douglass has power. He made his own power. And at 27 he is writing and has risen out of, gotten himself out of, slavery. I guess all our experiences are relative. But to have seen, for example, people treated like oxen, people who were owned, people who were not considered to be people...that's the thing I cannot fathom. I wish I'd let the topic be "iron heart."
Trent said he didn't like what he was hearing, about the whipping of the slaves and all, and part of me doesn't want to read about that, but the better part of me knows that ignorance of that reality only keeps people in the dark. And it's dark enough in this town right now. Dark. It got terribly dark when that little girl was found strangled, probably raped, and darker still when the woman and her little girl got shot for someone else's beef. How iron a heart does it take to do that? And how iron a heart does it take to sell a human being? Are we born humane and learn otherwise? Do we lose it because inhumanity is perpetrated against us? But what about people who are treated inhumanely and become more compassionate? Free will.
Third period. They took a few minutes to get settled into writing. I've discovered that it's a good thing to let them have that couple of minutes to make their noise. Then when they settle down to write they're doing it of their own volition. But Eris just asked Corey if he could think his thoughts in his head because he was disturbing her. Anyway, this idea of being owned...AGH. Writing has almost ceased. I've got to telephone some mothers. Or grandmothers. I wish they could understand that their thoughts are worth their time and space, that their thoughts matter. That the world needs their thoughts. That they're smart and good. All I can think is that they don't respect their minds. All I can think is that it's just easier to clown than it is to think. Maybe they're afraid to try. Maybe they've bought into the lie that all they are is clowns and that they don't matter.

Melanie

the first day

2005-08-18T23:05:00.000-06:00

This morning I was so nervous and anxious I felt nauseous. I kept remembering October and February of last school year and felt like I was going to be walking straight into an attack. I forgot about Chantelle's warm smile and her kind hug. I forgot about big Vernon the bear and serious Jonathan and Yvonne full of life. I also forgot that I'm in a different position this year than I was last year. I now know what's up, at least to some extent. These children are just children. They want what everyone else wants, to be happy, to succeed, to be loved, to be safe. I know they want to be looked up to and admired and they want to be admirable people. I know that they want people in their lives they can admire. I didn't realize how much I'd learned and gained until they walked in the door this morning and I looked in their faces, even into a face that had a sharp dare in it. I felt right. And good. And not nervous anymore or afraid that I'd forgotten how to be a good teacher. I look at their wanting. It's going to be a great year. I also realize that I have the extra good luck to be dealing with the brand new. I don't have to deal with Malcolm, for example, who has the reputation of a mean clown to live up to. Even if he wanted to change he almost couldn't now, or so he believes. He's Chuckie (which I refuse to call him) and he's made his bed. But I don't have to deal with him. I don't have to deal with a kid who isn't being real and so takes it out on everyone around him. I get to deal with the unjaded, the unreputed, the fresh and the closer to the true. I get to give them a chance to be whatever and whoever they want to be. I get to open the door for them to intellectuality and to the posssiblilties in and of their minds. I am so grateful.
Third period. This is a rowdy class. Thank God it's small. It's the post-lunch class. It'll be a challenge. Corey is used to being a bad boy, I can see that, and has that to uphold, unfortunately. I wonder how old these boys are? I guess I should find out. Corey and George. They can't seem to stop talking. I guess I should mention to them that fear will create stupidity which will keep them silent and/or foolish where it counts. People are so afraid of the pen. It's crazy. I think it means they're afraid of themselves, of their thoughts, of their realities. They're afraid to start maybe because once they start they open something up that they may not want to open up.
I feel an unruly cantankerousness in here. If I can get this chaotic energy directed, held into something rather than into the ether... I feel that these people have power but it's not going toward what they want. I think they're out of control in their minds. And I also see that a lot of kids in this class already have a reputation.That's the hard thing to contend with. They think they have something to prove. They think they're supposed to be bad. They are locked into something. It's sad I think because they're trying to please and satisfy the world, not themselves. And it'll end up lasting a lifetime, this sense that what the world expects of them is more important than what they expect of themselves.

Melanie

the babies

2005-08-16T07:36:00.000-06:00

I am scheduled to teach 9th graders this coming year. Not three, but four English teachers quit, two of whom taught freshmen, and since I'm at the bottom in regard to seniority, well, there it is. At first I fought it in my mind, thinking I have the most to give to students closer to graduating, especially about writing. But a little something in me said trust it. Yesterday I went to a workshop to teach 9th grade teachers how to implement a program called Strategic Reading, developed by Johns-Hopkins University. I didn't hate it. The program teaches that each day is divided into four parts: 20 minutes of modeling reading by reading out loud to the students and showing them how one reader(me) thinks through a piece. I already do that all the time anyway. The next 20 minutes is a focus lesson which can be but doesn't have to be tied to the reading. Just a little 20 minute chunk of time where the teacher teaches one something. Like affixes I'm thinking. The next 30 minutes is a bit vague to me, but I think it's a time students read on their own, aloud in pairs, and do some kind of question answering using a booklet provided by the program. The last 20 minutes is supposed to be "centers," which is an opportunity for students to engage in one of four tasks: information gathering, writing, and two others I cannot remember just now. It's extremely structured, and I usually balk at that, but I have a feeling it must be good for freshmen to be so structured. Nothing in the program is the least bit abhorrent to me. And I'm thinking maybe I could be of more use to the students if I started earlier with them, like 9th grade. And I'm thinking, if I could possibly do it, that it might be wonderful to go through four years with a class and then retire with 20 years of service under my belt. And yesterday, at the workshop, I saw a former student of mine, the one I met again after 10 years at the teaching fellows meetings last summer, and that felt like a sign to me that I was where I'm supposed to be. My friend at school who has like 25 years of teaching and has the most seniority in the Douglass English department offered to even trade schedules with me, to give me her 10th 11th and 12th graders (because she likes the structure of the the grade plan). But the little voice in the back of my mind that says teach the 9th graders is getting louder and I told her thank you but no.
I can't figure out if I'm losing my mind or gaining my mind.
The Douglass faculty is warmer than ever and I'm glad to be back with them.

Melanie

less than a full complement

2005-08-12T07:22:00.000-06:00

We're back and I'm amazed to say the first day, yesterday, was way beyond my or anyone's expectations. We had a morning session presented by two women from California, I think they work for IRRE which I think is a company responsible for creating and implementing programs for failing schools. They didn't give us anything new, but showed us how to implement what we already had been introduced to last year: family advocacy groups. Last year we were given what I would call a cursory introduction to family advocacy groups and expected to carry it out and bring forth fruit from it. That's the program where every student in the school is assigned to a small group with a teacher to lead. Last year we met with our groups 45 minutes a week, but what ended up really happening was it gave the kids 45 extra minutes of circling. Nobody understood really what we were supposed to be doing. But yesterday's inservice not only caused us to understand, it gave us ideas to use with our groups, ways to make the 45 minutes meaningful for the children. It was a wonderful inservice. Then in the afternoon we had another inservice about how to make our small learning communities work, another reform idea tossed out to us last year perfunctorily. It too was excellent. What's happening?
I don't know what the next some days will bring, but if it keeps up like this I'm going to say it seems the powers that be are attempting to get things down to the simple, trying to make things work that are already in place. And things were well organized yesterday.
I know of six teachers who are gone, all of their own volition. Four of them were English teachers. Three of them told me they couldn't stand it anymore. Several of the teachers who left were excellent teachers, I mean WAY excellent. I don't know which are being replaced, etc., or if our classes are going to get huge. Oh, and we also got a new assistant principal whom I think I'm going to like. Oh, and the front desk secretaries weren't there, including the lady who was so mean to me last year. But they might just not have reported in yet.
It feels beautiful to be among the faculty again. I feel quite at home at Douglass. I'm so grateful to be back. And all in all, it feels like the same old place (which for some reason I love).

Melanie

the penultimate day, take two

2005-08-10T11:41:00.000-06:00

Tomorrow we begin. Yesterday I went to Douglass just to see for sure that I was still working there (this is not me being dramatic. Yesterday it was announced in the news that $48 million was mis-interpreted as being in the budget and it wasn't there and that there'd be something like 400 additional cuts and I'm hearing from people on my teaching fellows e-chat page that several do not have jobs yet.) Anyway, I walked in and went into the secretary's office and said, Hi Ms. Platenburg. Am I still working here? And she said yes.
I've been feeling terrible anxiety the last few weeks. Half of the anxiety has been that I wouldn't be working at Douglass anymore and the other half is that I would be. That's just the honest truth. I've been remembering last year and its trials and the way last year stung my heart in so many ways. And I was thinking about how innocent I was this time last year. But then yesterday, at Douglass, after hearing that my job was once again mine, I ran into two students from last year, and they were both glad to see me and hugged me and all the beauty of last year came flooding in and I am now happy like I want to be. One of the two was the girl who told me last year that I was the first white person she'd ever known. I also saw the assistant principal, the one who wanted me to put up a bulletin board, and he smiled genuinely when he saw me and we hugged too. It feels like home to me there now.
Interestingly, I also ran into a kid I didn't know and he treated me coldly, like a stranger, and I realized that that will still be an aspect of this year, but I also realize that it won't last long.
On the way to school yesterday I stopped at Flora's to get some cigarettes and there was a woman in there who overheard me talking with a friend about being a teacher and she insisted on explaining to me some great new program called eyeq, and that I should try it. I said lady, we can't even get them in the rooms. It reminded me of how little the world really knows about what's going on in the schools. And as I write here I'm thinking that little encounter with that woman at Flora's might be just the way to start the book, because it's people like her (not disparaging her, she just doesn't know) who need to realize what's really happening.
I'm back and I'm thrilled to say so. But the best thing is to say, I'm still innocent.

Melanie

This is going to be the year.

Douglass beckons

2005-07-21T13:30:00.000-06:00

I wrote an email to the principal at Douglass to see whether I had a job this coming year and she wrote me back this morning to say it looks good for me to come back there! One of the first thoughts I had was THE BLOG LIVES ON.
This time last year I was four days from starting the new teacher induction weeks. This time last year I had chosen Douglass in my mind but had no idea if I was going to get to work there or not. And now look. A whole year under my belt and another one on the way.
I have spent the summer turning the blog and my journals into a book. I've really struggled with what the nature of the book is. I think it's a strange combination of my public actions and thoughts and my private ones. And, the third voice is all the people who commented, and the dialogue that occurred. I think the thing I've most struggled with is why I did it? Why did I go to Douglass? Why did I quit Mandeville? Why did I make this book? And for whom? I think I made it for the children. I think I want people to know who they are, what they go through, and what they're capable of.
This has been a violent summer and every time I hear about a new murder I know that there's the very real possibility that I will know the victim or the perpetrator. So far this summer that has only happened once, and he was a murderer. And he wasn't a student of mine, but the boyfriend of one of my students (a girl in the Hamlet class who listened to Luther Vandross all the time and had a song picked out to be sung at her wedding). I think the hopelessness in that community is almost impossibly deep. Maybe it's simplistic of me, but I think that the only thing that's going to save those kids is if they become educated. I don't just mean educated so they can go to college and get good jobs. I mean educated to find out that the world exists for them too, and that they have the minds to rise and participate. I think for them to learn about poetry and Shakespeare and to read stories about people like them (like all of us is what I mean) and to find out that in the off season one can fly round trip to Paris from New Orleans for $400 and that a hostel bed costs $21 a night. I even think that the way they've grown up, learning to read situations around them for their survival, gives them an extra edge in a foreign country. When I was a teenager I did not even understand what Europe was. I couldn't imagine it. I did not have any clue that it was within the realm of possiblity to go there. I couldn't even fathom where it was, even looking at a map. I didn't understand my place in the world. I educated myself though, read foreign novels, got strong, and when I was 46, went there, and to Russia, for six months by myself. Even though I grew up Caucasian and somewhat middle class, I identify with these kids more than with any other groups of people. I know what they need because I know what I needed. It's so interesting to me how very meaningless skin is.
Speaking of foreign countries, my son, Tim, is still in France, but staying for the summer in a sea resort town in Normandy. He's hoping to be getting his teaching job back for next year. He's happy.
Three English teachers quit Douglass over the summer, all three of them Caucasian.
That's all for the moment. I'm glad to be back!

Melanie

Jonathan Kozol

2005-07-19T09:29:00.000-06:00

Yesterday I read a book called Savage Inequalities by Jonathan Kozol. It's about America's schools, particularly the inner-city schools. It was copyrighted in 1991. It shocked me to read that the conditions of the high schools he visited during his research for the book are STILL the conditions of the inner-city schools today. The one that struck me most was the lack of teachers and how some kids have substitutes all year. It's unconscionable. I cannot understand it. What is WRONG with the powers that be that children are allowed to be thrown away like this?
It did help me focus my thoughts as to what this book is about that I'm writing. It's not to expose the system, though it does do that, but it's to bring up the idea that schools (inner-city and suburban) are all doing the same things to our children: not letting them think for themselves.
I'm still struggling with the introduction. I've completely rewritten it since what I posted last time. I'm going to revise it and get it more right before I post it again.
Melanie

introduction, paragraphs one and two

2005-07-10T10:57:00.000-06:00

Here are the first two paragraphs of the introduction. This is still a first draft. I just had to get something down so I could know where I was going.
The book consists of the entire blog and all the comments, and the five journals I kept over the past year. I also included some emails. Everything is chronological. I TYPED the five journals in!
Here's the beginning of the introduction at the moment, though that changes almost hourly.
I welcome any suggestions you might have. Thank you.
Melanie

INTRODUCTION:
I asked myself some questions to try to get me going on this introduction. I’m not good at beginnings. The most pressing (but not most important) question is, what is it? What kind of book is this? What category does it fit? Who would be interested in reading a book like this? (A book like what?) Even though I’m a teacher and the premise of the book is me leaving a suburban school and going to an inner-city school, and though it ended up involving a lot of teachers expressing some very deep things about teaching, it is not a book about teaching. Also, while everything in this book is true and really happened, there is a lot of conjecture on my part and on the part of others, and I’ll be changing the names of every character in the school story, but it’s not fiction. And though I’m the one who wrote it, the one who had the experiences, the one who kept a journal all year, it is not about me and it is not a memoir. So I went into Borders book store and looked around for something similar, so I’d have something to call it, and the closest thing I could find was the sociology section, where I saw books about racism and the American dream (and loss of it) and poverty and being of service. Then the other day I had a conversation with my friend Mary. She had just finished Rick Bragg’s book, All Over But the Shoutin’, which is about his growing up years. And yes, it’s true that it is about HIS family, but his family is part of the bigger family of man wherein all human experiences matter, resonate, and touch each other. And that’s the closest thing I can say my book is about, an aspect of the human experience. There’s no section in Borders for that.
I also asked myself why I did what I did, which was to leave a very comfortable 12 year teaching position of respect in a respectable blue-ribbon suburban highschool which I loved in order to teach in a storied and infamous inner-city highschool in a bad neighborhood. Wonderful things were occurring at Mandeville. The faculty was like family. I was not bored or under-stimulated. However, every day on my way home downtown, from suburbia 24 miles over a lake away from home, I would see little kids in school uniforms holding hands, standing on the neutral ground curb waiting to cross Elysian Fields, which is a busy three lane avenue, crossing over into decrepit houses in dangerous neighborhoods and into dire circumstances. I knew that some of those children were getting themselves dressed and to school by themselves in the mornings. And it killed me to think that they were not being rewarded for their efforts, that I, for example, their neighbor, was giving my good work to a school 24 miles away across a lake, to kids who already got the best of everything in school. It hurt my heart that they were getting dressed for nothing. Or for not much. (I’d read the stories about Orleans Parish schools. For very understandable reasons, fine, experienced, respected teachers do not want to work in Orleans, as you will understand when you read what follows.) I thought the kids here needed me more. I felt they were being betrayed.

I cannot explain it

2005-07-10T00:50:00.000-06:00

I have no idea how this happened. For two weeks I have not been able to post a new blog, though I've been fiddling with trying, and tonight, after someone wrote on the blog and asked me what happened to me, I got forward and sent about 10 almost mean emails to the blog people, begging them to help me (I actually used the word "begging"), and then I decided to erase all the attempts and try again, like to start from scratch, and when I went back to the site (in blogpeople talk, the "dashboard"), after having done nothing but beg into cyberspace, I was able to get into the blog! I cannot understand it. There must be a God!
I've been reflecting on everything. I typed my journals from the past year (five of them) into a word document and pasted the blogs, including the comments, into it, and printed it. It's 400 single-spaced pages. The story just gets deeper and deeper. Now I'm editing it. In fact, yesterday was the day I realized there was something wonderful about it, that it's a fantastic story of people talking about teaching and society and good and bad and right and wrong and love and joy and pain and kids and other people and such. Yesterday it hit me what we'd done.
Maybe what I should include here is the introduction I'm writing. It's a very early draft, but it's something I'd love to have seen. I will work on it tomorrow and post it here.
And I will think further on this tonight, now that I can write in the blog again. School is over, but we're not. I have to think though about how to proceed. Is there something I'm not thinking about that is obvious or would be good to include? Should I include some of my journal writings? Should I reflect on the process I'm going through about making a story out of this? Should I write about how I lounge around the pool? haha. I'm consumed with this story. And I want to continue with this blog. I don't know what to do at the moment. Give me a thought if you will.
Thank you.
And I am SO happy to be back!

Melanie

the first 83 pages

2005-06-14T20:25:00.000-06:00

Today I read the first 83 pages of this story I've written about Douglass High School, and when I was reading I realized some things I didn't include the first time around. Like the fact that the first few weeks I was scared. I'm always scared in the beginning of every school year, scared I might not have what it takes anymore to make it happen, so there was that. But there was also the other fears, that I'd been fooling myself, that I didn't know what I was doing, that I was out of my league. I saw every day hundreds of kids who do not live in my world. My son used to say that the way I say hello to strangers is disarming (that is, causes people to put their weapons and defenses down), but I didn't see that manifesting in the halls of Douglass. Straight to the point, I was one of a handful of Caucasian people in the school of probably, at that time, including teachers, administrators, staff, various workers, 1000 souls. I know so deeply about how we're all humans with the same deep fears and joys, but the surface situation was daunting. I am white. Almost everyone at school is black. The photographs in the news of young men who were killed or killing, I saw faces like those kids' in the halls at Douglass all day long. And when I say I wasn't scared, I wasn't scared of them, I was only scared that I'd gotten into something way over my head. I was scared that I would never be effectual at Douglass. I did believe that if I could only get a group in my room and lock the door that something beautiful could happen, but every time the bell rang and I knew I had to face the halls, and the intruders, and the loudness and crudeness and hostility, it was hard. I wasn't scared of being hurt. I thought it could happen in fact, but I wasn't scared of it. I was scared that I would never be heard. I was scared that I would never be enough of a presence or a force to stand at the hallway door and turn kids back, that they'd just push through, push me aside. I was actually worse than a nobody at first. I was a white nobody.
I guess I couldn't write all this in the beginning because I was so intent on keeping up my courage, and so had to keep my fears to myself. But I see that it's a hole in the story, one that only I know, and it doesn't seem honest of me not to say.
I also read about the day the ceiling fan fell on the girl (one month into my school year). I'd written in my journal a lot that day. It was one of those days that ought to go down in my history as a teacher as a great day, one of the greatest, and then the ceiling fan fell and the great day got thrown out. It was good for me to remember that before that happened it had been beautiful.
There have been so many murders in the city lately. I'm afraid now that I'll see one of those faces I love in the paper one day. Something I recognize is that mug shots make people look more like criminals than they really look like in normal life. That's something I learned this year. I know many a beautiful child with dreadlocks whose picture in the paper would make him look like a monster. It's a very important thing for me to have learned. I wish everyone could learn it.

Melanie

perpetual motion

2005-06-08T11:31:00.000-06:00

10 days after school ended.
I've been forgetting to write down my dreams and I've had some good ones lately. But now I've forgotten them. I do remember one was that two students had committed suicide and I asked another student (a girl whose entire face was covered with stubble) who they were and she hesitated to tell me.
When I began this school year I thought the world I came from teaching in was the polar opposite of the world I came to. I looked at all the violence in these children's lives and thought there's nothing like this across the lake, that these kids knew way more about death than the kids over there. It was naive of me. They don't. I and the kids over there know as much about death and knew as many who had died as these kids over here do. The deaths were just different. In that world, young people die because of drugs and suicide. In this world, young people die because of guns. I have been guilty of pitying and romanticizing the lives of the children in this world and being angry with the children in that world, as though the children in this world have less choice than the children in that world. I was wrong. I can't get a handle on my thoughts yet except that the truth at the bottom of all of it is that the kids who die like this, over there and over here, do not love their lives. And they don't know that they can.
I wonder how many children would be saved if they could take a trip to Paris? Once they'd been to Paris and seen that the world has THAT in it, seen that everything is not simple and black and white as Mandeville or 9th ward New Orleans, and then seen that in the off-season one can fly round trip from New Orleans to Paris for $420. Once they could see that they have some control of their lives...$420 transportation, $21 a night in a hostel, maybe $200 to eat on, if they could grasp that. But they don't know there's such a thing as Paris. So to speak.
I think education is the answer. Real, serious education, showing our children that there's a world out there and in themselves, showing them that they have minds and power, letting them exercise their minds and their power, showing them that the limitations that stifle them are not made of steel, that their minds are of a substance that can break through anything. Anything.
Several years ago a boy I'd known all his life died of a drug overdose. When he was little he loved the woods and the swamp and he was excited about his life and the world. I always thought he was a brilliant person because of the things he was able to see, even so young, and understand. One day when he was about 10 he knocked on my door, excited to tears, with a stick in his hand that had been stripped by a beaver. The ends were pointed. You could see their teeth marks. It was the first time I'd ever held a stick that a beaver had carved. He gave it to me. I still have it. Michael loved the stick and the beaver and the idea that a beaver could have whatever it takes to DO that, and he wanted to understand. He wanted to understand everything. Around that time he got it into his head that he wanted to build a perpetual motion machine, and he believed he could do it. That's often all he talked about. However, at the same time he was having trouble in school. He wanted to build a perpetual motion machine. He didn't want to do homework. He didn't want to learn how to divide. He didn't want to write paragraphs for the sake of writing a paragraph. He knew exactly who he was and what he wanted to do. It hurt my heart for him back then because the world did not take him seriously. What should have happened is that some teacher should have said okay, that will be the context of your education. We will study the subject of perpetual motion and you will build a perpetual motion machine. And then of course he'd ASK to learn math and science and how to read and everything else school wants him to learn. But he'd have a reason for it. He'd learn everything so he could create perpetual motion. But school didn't do that. Instead he got suspended and in trouble all the time. He got labeled a bad boy. He started hanging out with the bad boys. And when he was 14, one of the bad boys gave him a handful of pills he'd stolen from his grandfather and Michael swallowed them all down and died.
He's a person who loved his life and then quit loving his life. And he loved the world but it didn't love him back. I think school has to get real.
If we could all just ask ourselves if the path we're on has heart, and if it does, follow it...if we could all just ask ourselves if we're being true to ourselves, and if we are, stay true...if we could believe in bliss...
This is a sad subject. But this is also why I'm a teacher.
Melanie

looking back

2005-06-05T15:27:00.000-06:00

Now that the school year is over and I've had my recuperation period, I want to tie this blog up, complete it, do something with it. I never actually thought about what I'd do with the blog when the school year was over, except that I'd like to turn it into a book. Lately I've been reading my personal journals from July 2004 and what I'm finding is a lot of experiences and thoughts that, in retrospect, I see I wish I'd put in the blog at the time. I guess at the time I thought they were too personal, but now of course I see that the whole experience of the year at Douglass has been as personal a thing as there is, and so now I see that they fit.
Three things make me think typing my journal into this blog is a good idea. First, about six years ago I went on a six month trip to Europe and Russia and filled five notebooks there and when I got back, culled from them and wrote a book about the experience. This time, again, I have five notebooks since 14 July. The second thing is that the first thing I wrote in my journal beginning 14 July was about a conversation I had with a young woman who graduated from a downtown Orleans Parish magnet school four or five years ago. We argued about what children in the city need. The third thing is that in that writing I said, "If they were having their own thoughts...," which, eventually, became the name of the blog (though I didn't decide on a name until August).
I'm taking these as signs and so this is what I'm thinking I'll do: I'm going to type directly from my journal into this blog, beginning with my journal of 14 July 2004. Not every little thing, but a lot of it. I'd appreciate feedback about what it looks like I ought to do about it. I really am typing into space right now. Thank you.

14 July 2004. I saw that girl from 35 today and we had a semi-argument about inner-city kids. Naturally, I had to slink out. But here's what I wish I'd had the wherewithal to say to her: You got out. You are somehow and for whatever reason able to stand up and be strong. But how many of your peers do? If they were having their own thoughts do you really think they'd be staying where they are, living as they do, giving themselves over to the simple life others have passed down? Do you not think that they're just buying somebody else's thoughts about what life might be about? You remind me of me. I got out too. Sometimes I think that's as far as I got though, just out of the life my family was leading me toward. Somehow I had my own idea about what I wanted out of life. I even told my mother that I was leaving because I had to survive and that I was dying there.
Just read an article about the experience of a man on a Buddhist retreat who had to leave it to go to his friend's dying. It was honest, quiet, and tender. But it surprises me that he has to address at all the point about being fully in the moment. Who's that psychologist who writes about being self-actualized? That's what this is about. I'm curious to think about what that kind of discipline could do for me? I can't not live in the moment. I'm completely distracted by the moment, by every leaf and stick of the moment. Should I not think more about the future? Actually, I have recently been doing that, thinking about the future. The MFA. And now I'm putting together a portfolio of my writing almost like I'm meaning to, like I'm intending something. But I don't have that overall sense. I don't have something I'm bringing little things toward. The bigger truth or the end result or the overall reason for it all, the little things lead me toward seeing that. It makes me wonder if there's a big thing waiting to be recognized, or if the little things, as they develop, create the big thing. It's the question. Are the little things the thing or is the big thing the thing? Is there something pre-ordained? Or is the thing developing every second? Does the moment create the future or does the future compel the moment? Or is that a which came first question?

15 July 2004. I am completely done with making the curtains. It all looks so good. I'm proud of myself. And the only other thing I wanted to do was type some stuff out of my last journal. So I can put it away for a while.
Midnight. I had a bath, washed the dishes, made a salad and ate some, clipped even the damned toenails. The curtains make everything different. Things are more framed, more complete. More lovely. I did everything I'd hoped to do except type out of my journal.

16 July 2004. Listening to songs, and, as always, "Everybody's Talking At Me." Yet another song about the disenfranchised. Those with whom I identify. I wonder why I bother with normal people? They and I don't live under the same umbrella. By normal I guess I mean people who aren't haunted. I often think of myself as haunted. Like both characters in Midnight Cowboy, my favorite movie. How is this true? Maybe it is that joy is a thing that occurs in between dark moments, that joy is just a respite. The joy is strong because the dark moments are so dark. Really, maybe that is exactly why I have such great joy in my life.
I often say I couldn't live without my notebook. I wonder what that means?

17 July 2004. Thinking about Tim's friend, T, and his diabetes. He is now too old to be on his parents' insurance. But who's going to insure him now? I think that not having nationalized health care is a way for our society to keep people dependent on having jobs that make enough money for insurance purposes. It's another blow against the individuals who don't want to participate in capitalism that much. What if T were a poet or something? just trying to keep alive so he can do his art? But he'd have to have a serious job (which makes doing art hard if not impossible) so he can make enough money to afford his health care costs. I hate that.

19 July 2004. I woke up thinking about writing. Something about distilling rather than producing raw words. Remembering that morning when that word "limbeck" popped into my mind out of nowhere, and I wrote it down in my truck notebook, and that in the afternoon when I read my emailed Shakespeare Sonnet-of-the-day it was the one about him being a limbeck. This morning I thought another good writing word is "sirens." And the sonnet includes mention of sirens. And then when I was reading the NY Times this morning there was a story about a Sirens Music Festival on Coney Island. What does it mean that limbecks and sirens occur together out of nowhere twice for me? Shakespeare was a limbeck for the sirens' tears he drank. Here's the sonnet:

#119
What potions have I drunk of Siren tears
Distilled from limbecks foul as hell within,
Applying fears to hopes and hopes to fears,
Still losing when I saw myself to win!
What wretched errors hath my heart committed
Whilst it had thought itself so blessed never!
How have mine eyes out of their spheres been fitted
In the distraction of this madding fever?
Oh benefit of ill: now I find true
That better is by evil still made better;
And ruined love, when it is built anew,
Grows fairer than at first, more strong, far greater,
So I return rebuked to my content,
And gain by ills thrice more than I have spent.

What does it mean this idea of the limbeck and the distilling occurring to me when I wake up? Does it simply mean to remind me that sometimes I have enough raw material and that it's time to find the gem in the ore? Or the statue in the stone? Those are two different ways of seeing.

20 July 2004. A lot has happened today. I'll start with walking to the river. I met a 38 year old black man named R. What a story he had to tell. I was writing and he walked past with a stiff right leg. I thought he couldn't bend his knee but he said no, that his ankle didn't work. Then he sat next to me and told me his story, about having come to New Orleans from Minnesota, got a job waiting tables, and that three days after he arrived he got hit by a car on Decatur by a drunk driver who had not insurance, and neither did R. So he ended up in Charity with two broken legs, a broken shoulder, and three injured disks in his back. He said his right leg was almost literally ripped off. He's had a bunch of operations but his right ankle never healed and now, Friday, he has an appointment with Charity clinic to discuss a decision with his doctor, which is whether or not to amputate his right leg. It's upto to him. And he thinks he has decided to do it. He says at least then he can get disability. He showed me his leg. It's unbelievable. Huge, swolen, deformed. Horrible. So of course he can't work, and he has applied for disability but can't get it until he shows that he was unable to work for a year. Before long he should be getting it, but in the meantime he's homeless. He keeps his clothes hidden in the rocks and weeds next to the river. There are two public bathrooms which aren't always open, and if they are it's only during the day. He can't walk in a place for even a cup of water. No one will give it to him. And even if he could work, he can't apply for a job because he doesn't have a telephone number or an address. Or a way to clean his clothes. The homesless shelters charge 5 or 6 dollars per night to sleep. He's utterly lost. And absolutely outside of society. And yet, he's not bitter. It blows my mind. He told me a couple of stories about men who were willing to help him, but for a price. Where's the humanity? Where's charity? He told me about watching a restaurant worker somewhere dropping a full bag of food into the dumpster. He asked (himself, me, the world) why these restaurant guys can't just put the food in plastic and bring it three little blocks away to the homeless? What is the answer to that? Why can't that be done? What's wrong with us? And I said he had the double problem, being an African American man. He told me about two cops who stopped him on Bourbon and Esplanade, his first day in New Orleans, asking him what he's doing in this neighborhood, said something about "we don't go in your neighborhoods. Why do you come in ours?" They made him put his hands on the car, searched him, then asked him when he was last arrested.
Neil Young is on the jukebox: "We got mother nature on the run in the nineteen seventies."

Melanie

the woods

2005-05-31T12:06:00.000-06:00

I'm reading a journal I've just finished filling, which I began 17 February. (and I'm also now thinking I could include in this blog some of the personal journal writings during this year I had with my students.) I don't know. I'll just start here and type in this one and see how that feels.

18 February 2005 I'm sitting on a rotted fallen tree, my feet on a rotted fallen branch. God but it's good to be in the woods again! And the mud and the bugs and the coming darkness. I haven't seen a black night in a long time. In fact, the nights in my neighborhood are orange. More than lit. Lit and noisy about it.
It's a young woods. I can see Walter Anderson and his symmetry here. That's the biggest thing about the woods for me, its symmetry and balance and completeness and its perfection. I would love to bring my students to the woods, try to help them understand a different kind of logic and order. There isn't a wrong or right. This isn't, either. But the fact that it grows on its own, out of our hands and control, makes me trust it more. I think they could understand that. Eventually. That there is an order, even when it's not due to our manipulation. That there need not be thought and worry and concern a hundred percent of the time, that it's honestly possible to relax and let the world rise and fall around us, that we don't have to work all the time. That's what they don't know. We don't need to work all the time. We aren't in charge of absolutely everything. It's possible to relax, to just let Nature carry on and relax. They don't know what it means to live in a way -- to live without the stress of being smart and good and strong and sharp. They don't know that it's possible to live without watching their backs. They do not know this. What a thing! They do not know what it means to be safe. I would love to bring them here.

Melanie

a done deal

2005-05-28T07:43:00.000-06:00

Yesterday was the last day. I slept 11 hours last night.
I packed up my room and brought a few boxes home. I decided to leave all my books there in room 219 so it will remain a home spot for me. I managed to go through some of the student files (I'll bring them to school next year for them to have back) and put the work in chronological order. I'm studying them, looking for what, if anything, changed. Just off the top of my head (and because I woke up this morning thinking about this) there was one student, NH, who sometime in the past learned the 3.5 essay (three points, five paragraphs) and that's all she would ever write in my class. She is also someone who skipped all the days we were reading Hamlet. Yesterday I studied and studied her work and found no change whatsoever. Every essay was the same. The reason I woke up thinking about it is because I realized that she is the victim of that damned format. She has learned it and she will forever be stuck in thinking that's actually an essay. She can't break free. She was taught an easy way out and why wouldn't she use it? This girl (and how many others in the country?) has found a way not to think which is not only sanctioned by teachers, it is in some cases insisted upon. I bring up Hamlet because reading that was not the easy way either. NH has learned how to get by and pass tests and semi-please teachers, but not that education is an end in itself.
I have a lot of folders to read, a lot of things to think about, a lot of writing to do. That's just one thing that came into my head and wouldn't go out.
Yesterday everything made me cry. I am full of pent up emotion. But the fact that I MADE IT!!! is the doozy. That's got me reeling. I can't wait to finally read this whole blog, from July to now.

Melanie

a request

2005-05-25T16:19:00.000-06:00

The school year is over Friday. I can't believe it, of course. It has been a strange end because the kids have gradually quit coming to school ever since LEAP. The year is ending not with a bang but with a whimper. It has been impossible to get closure. And because there's so little to do it feels like I should be home vegetating, recuperating, all that end of the year pathology, but I can't quite yet, yet there's no energy at school to keep me going.
The other day a student, MF, asked me for a list of books she should read, so I gathered a handful that I had and gave them to her yesterday, then wrote her a letter and started the list, but I haven't seen her since and don't know if I will. So the letter and the list are sitting on my desk (folded up inside a copy of The Great Gatsby).
I've had all the time in the world, of course, to pack my room up. Today a teacher came in and sighed. And another came in and said it's almost like I'd never been in the room! It made me sad because I have SO been in that room.
So today I looked at the LEAP scores again and made notes, and my plan is to type up the results (in layman's language) and write a letter and give both to my principal. I don't know how to interpret the results except in the obvious way (4 scores stayed the same, 3 scores dropped, 12 scores rose). And I'm going to just give her that, with names and my commentary, etc. Trying to insure my position for next year. Tomorrow I'm going to look at all the writings I have from the students from all year, and take notes as I look at their work and see what I come up with. Because, for example, the three students whose scores went down doesn't make sense to me at all. So I'm going to look at their writings. Fortunately, I have work from most of the students who are part of this.
I have a request. I think I should write the stories of some of my students, but I don't know whom I should profile or why or what a reader would want to know. Can you help me know? Thank you.
And one last thing before I go watch the third and final championship Jeopardy game. Ken Jennings is 0 for 2. The one last thing is that a teacher in special ed, who came into the teaching fellows program with me and came to Douglass with me, died Sunday. It was a complete surprise. The way we found out is that school hadn't seen or heard from him for three days and a policeman went to his apartment today and found him. It's not foul play, it seems, just natural causes. He was a lovely man and I enjoyed him so much.

Melanie

a soulful graduation

2005-05-20T20:03:00.000-06:00

Today was graduation. It was at 10 am at the Mahalia Jackson Theatre for the Performing Arts, which was a beautiful venue. The last few times I was there was to go to the opera. (I'm a classy broad. We don't know why I have to say that. Who doesn't know?)
Back to the children. It was a beautiful thing. About 55 seniors graduated. They were respectful and even reverent. If anybody understands how serious it is to graduate from high school, I'd say they do. It's such an accomplishment for them, for so many reasons, not the least of which is that 60 other seniors in their class didn't graduate. Fewer did than didn't.
We teachers wore graduation gowns, including the hats. (Mine fell off.) There were a couple of speakers who were on the program but didn't show, including someone from the school board. That was cold. And the children so know.
But everything else about the program was wonderful. While the people were filing in the seniors on the stage moved subtly to the rhythm of the band playing "Pomp and Circumstance," moving their weight from one foot to the other. That was my first indication of what a soulful event this would be.The valedictorian and salutatorian were twins, a boy and a girl, Christina and Christopher Burton. Christopher delivered the hello and Christina delivered the goodbye. In between and before and after the coming and going speeches, here's what we had: the presentation of colors by the JROTC; The Star Spangled Banner, played by our band; a prayer by a student, which included mention of the Father and of Jesus (I can't really imagine a gathering of a group like this without that. I didn't mind it.); a song which on the program was meant to be sung by choir and audience, but since there was no choir, the audience did the best it could; our speech/journalism/drama teacher, singing a gospel song, "For thou, oh Lord, you've been a shield," (she had a gorgeous voice and got a strong ovation. It was spectacular!); the superintendent's award, delivered by someone else because no one from the superintendent's office or from the school board was there, the cold-hearted bastards; another piece of music by the band; the SPEAKER, Dr Dwight Webster, Pastor of the Christian Unity Baptist Church, who was FANTASTIC and who got a long and well deserved standing ovation. The inspiration for his speech was a Tupac Shakur song, "Keep Ya' Head Up," the text of which he read in its entirety, and which is all about not letting the world or your history dictate your actions for the future. I quote him: "Everybody in here is an ex-something. The question is, are you going to be held down by your past? By your biography?; Your destiny awaits, though your dreams might be deferred; You decide there's something in life for you and go after it." I guess those don't sound earth-shatteringly original in this context, but what he said moved everyone, including the seniors onstage. They were all turned to look at him and they were listening. It was beautiful. These people are willing to listen when someone has something useful to say to them. I love these kids. They give the gift of real.
The conferring of the diplomas was precious. Every senior walked across the front of the stage after being called by name, one senior on the path at a time, and each one stood with our principal and had a professional photograph made with her. Some of them danced across the stage. Some of them strutted. Some tottered on pink stillettoes (I'm not joking). Some in yellow. At least Elijah didn't do a cartwheel!
It was a beautiful morning. After the graduation I went up to one of my students, a great person, one who should go to this very theatre for an opera, and asked to meet his mother. He was embarrassed, I could tell. His mother is an addict, and it was obvious. I hope I did the right thing. I hope it didn't hurt his heart.
After all that, seven of us teachers went to Deanie's in bucktown and had a fried seafood lunch which was delicious, and over which we had good chat. I like the faculty. When we got back the school was deserted. Empty of students, that is. All the teachers were there.
It was a great day. I love what I do. I love the people I work with. And I love those children.

Love, Melanie

catching up

2005-05-18T18:14:00.000-06:00

I have a lot of catching up to do. I've been writing in my journal at school so I'm just going to type here what I wrote there.

9 May, 8:55 A.M. EN is sitting in the room and I have to talk to her. This is the girl who cursed me out and who got suspended for it. She's been absent (partly from several suspensions) way too much to get credit for the two classes she has with me. The assistant principal told me to give her a chance to make up her work and to excuse the absences. So now she's sitting in my class and I'm nervous to talk to her. She's mean. She's loud. She's irrational.
10:00 A.M. I wrote up a list of my expectations, including four 3-draft essays and a revision of her research paper, and including that she will be in both classes every day until the end and also that she will not raise her voice to me or lose her cool with me. She got argumentative and angry and said she wasn't coming back next year so it didn't matter. She accused me of passing other people but not her, and she accused me of not caring about her. Then she got called to the office. When she came back she respectfully apologized for raising her voice to me. She's a troubled girl.

13 May. This might be the last time I write with students here this year. And at the moment it's just me and DC. There's no energy in the school. The power has gone out of it. So few people are coming to school these days, which leaves the rest of us who are here listless. It caught me by surprise. But next year I'm going to do things differently. I'm going to be more conscious from the beginning of school of student absences and deal with that problem early. I'm gong to get more serious about class participation grades. I'm going to be hard in the beginning and ease up later. Too many people got B's the first quarter and now are not doing anything in class because, in the end, 3 divided by 4 rounds off to a D for the course. I don't believe those kids should pass and I surely don't want my name associated with someone who passes that way but receives no education in English III, for example, or whose writing does not improve. It's a badly flawed system. KB in my writing course got an A in the first quarter, and she earned it, but her writing has not changed or improved one iota. And yet she's going to pass the class. Then my name gets associated with a poor writer passing my class. I have no idea how to handle it. Maybe I could rearrange my plan and put the literature early in the year, and the tests (which I'm not a big fan of, but may have to become), and homework, and if somebody gets an A or a B, well, she will have worked hard for it. And someone who works hard and tries hard isn't the type to blow off school the last three quarters. But still, I hate to see people fail the first quarter because of tests. But then again, perhaps I could start the year out with literature and make tests that resemble the LEAP. And if they fail those then they need to know they're weak in that area. But what about writing?
Hell, I'm acting like I'm going to have a job next year!
I just realized there are no administrators in the school today. And the only other teacher on my hall is a substitute. It's rowdy and I'm tired of it. I'm tired all the way around, in fact. Seriously tired.

16 May. I made a comment on MF's essay, in response to a weak opening, that a writer needs to woo the reader.

17 May. God but I love working in this school. I love the children so much. What is it about them? Where it really counts they are a hundred percent real. They understand what loyalty is. So many of them wear their difficult lives with grace. In the face of poverty and near poverty they're still so generous. I feel like I can be a true teacher here. I feel like my job is to figure out what my students need and teach them that. Like for example, I thought my students needed Hamlet, so I gave it to them. They need prefixes and suffixes. They need one on one writing conferencing with me. I feel like I can be what the essence of a teacher is, which is to fill in the holes in my students' education wherever, however, whenever I can.

Today I went in to the archives room which is really just a big room full of file cabinets. I've always wanted to go in there because it holds the stuff from Douglass/Nicholls since the 30's, when the school was built. So today the door was open and I walked in. I nosed around for a few minutes and, idly, picked up a yellowed section of the Times-Picayune. It's unbelievable, but it was the obituary page from 19 May 2004, the page with the obituary and photograph of Dustin, a student of mine, who died a year ago Sunday. And in fact, I keep that very picture of Dustin in my desk drawer.

Another issue on my mind today is that I have been this year the victim of racial prejudice, which gives me an understanding of racism that a white person cannot understand from merely living in the theoretical world. I have a lot to say about this, which I will say in a lot of detail eventually, but not this second. I'll just say this, it really hurts having these children making such rude racist comments, like about how when white people get wet they stink, or that all white people look alike, or that white people don't know how to love, or that white women don't have an ass. This morning a boy I don't know walked down the hall and said something disparaging about white paople and I've just had it, really had it, so I said, loudly, get out of here you son of a bitch. I asked three of my students in the room if they ever hear racist comments hurled against them by white people and they all said no. HOWEVER, I think the kind of racial prejudice hurled against them is much sicker. It's systemic and subtle. It's a society insulting them and keeping them down, with a smile on its face.

18 May. Today. I had a look at the LEAP scores. I have to figure out how to interpret what I'm reading. I've decided to discuss each student and how their education went this year. But that's for tomorrow.

Melanie

the prom

2005-05-09T19:48:00.000-06:00

Saturday night was the prom. It was on the Delta Queen, though somehow I got it into my head, wrongly, that it was to be on the Natchez. When we got to the Natchez's dock there was no boat and there were no girls in tiaras. Strangely, who do you think shows up, also looking for the Natchez, but the secretary of school, the woman who not only would not talk to me or acknowledge my presence for the first six months of my time at Douglass, but who wouldn't even say hello back to my hello. How flipping ironic was that? Fortunately, she had a cell phone and called someone on the boat and found out that the boat was docked FAR AWAY, behind the Hilton, at Canal Street, the other side of the ferry. We were walking and her feet were hurting so she took off her shoes, and I mean we forged ahead, including walking over a patch of rocks. She was awesome!
The prom was spectacular! (exclamation marks are called for when discussing excellent proms) Most of the girls were wearing tiaras, and damned if I didn't think about wearing mine but in the end decided not to. The usual prom dramas played out, with individuals sitting alone eschewing their friends and their friends' pleas to allow them to help her, girls and boys together that one wouldn't have conceived of before, and so on. The girls were gorgeous. So were the guys. I mean they were gorgeous. One girl had an aqua dress and over-the-elbow aqua gloves. She was like a queen. That's what it seemed like, that we were in a room full of queens, and the men were cleaned up and dressed up, trying to get themselves one.
The music was through a dj, which was good fun. A girl, someone who was in my class a few times, said, "do you know who I am?" and, due only to divine intervention, her right name came out of my mouth. Then she insisted that I dance with her, which I absolutely had decided before the prom that I would not do but which I did with very little coercion. Now I'm not going to say I've got THE moves, but I have SOME moves, and I moved and they didn't laugh at me. Well, just a little bit. But only because they're accustomed to laughing at me. One of the girls taught me yet another line dance. (this same girl asked me, as we were walking on Canal Street after the prom toward our next destinations, if she'd passed my class. I told her to come see me today. She had not passed my class, and she did not show up today.)
But here is the special thing about the night. My friend, Karen, who graduated from Douglass in 1963 (in her time the school was called Nicholl's) agreed to accompany me to the prom. She wore a coral chiffon dress (with a sateen-like underslip, all coral) which had dragonflies on it. As another friend of mine said of her, she looked like a character out of The Great Gatsby. She was beautiful, and like a wisp. A teacher at Douglass who'd arrived at our school in 1965, while it was still Nicholls, to whom I mentioned that I was bringing Karen, brought me to his archives of old school newspapers (The Rebel Yell, which was a fantastic school newspaper) and we found all the 1963 editions of the paper there were to be had, and I gave them to her before the prom. In one of the papers she was acknowledged for having delivered a speech at a Future Teachers of America convention, which she didn't even remember having done.
It was a magic night. As prom nights are supposed to be.

Melanie

the door

2005-05-03T19:23:00.000-06:00

A student took my doorknob, which brings me back to the earliest reflections I made about the day-to-day at Douglass. The door. Lock it or not? Leave it open or not? Paper it over or not? And with what? And how? Answer the knocks on the door or not? Blow out the door like a beast when I hear shit out there or ignore it? Push a kid out with my shoulder and risk his mother's ire or let him come in and fuck up my class?
Here's the current status of my doors: one of my students went to the office and got some translucent blue paper and papered over the glass with that. However, she used duct tape, so it fell two days later. I have discovered that simply stapling the paper up seems to be enough. So the doors are papered in blue. They look so cool from the hall. (Maybe that's why I have so damned many children hanging around in the hall outside my door. The blue is very soothing.) A kid who is not even my student but who came into my class a couple of times and read Hamlet with us taped a sign on each door, "Do not disturb. Reading Shakespeare. M Plesh" I think I already may have mentioned that here in this blog.
Excuse me. I'm TIRED.
The door that lost the doorknob is the main door, so the lesser door, the secondary door next to my desk, is now the primary door. On this door, the once secondary, now primary, I have a sign, "please use other door." Now I answer all knocks at the new secondary door (formerly the primary door, but no one seems to NOTICE that the doorknob is missing), and I bellow down the hall, "YES???" Once it was a security guard knocking. Once it was the assistant principal.
A lot of kids and other people come to my door. I have finally made one particular boy understand that we actually have class inside my door, because yesterday he came to my door, for approximately the millionth time. I answered his knock, and before he barged in he actually asked me if we were busy. I said yes, and he said okay and left. I of course later admired him loudly and profusely and publicly for that.
Teachers are so patient.
The seniors have finished their classes this week, so it's a melancholy time. I have more to say about that, a lot more, but my chicken is ready.
What I do realize is how much love there is in my classroom and among the students who hang around. And in my heart. The trial is over. Now it's just love and joy.
Two weeks before the school year ends.

Melanie

hamlet

2005-04-27T19:35:00.000-06:00

Today was a fine day. I copied the blog into my hard drive.
But that's not the fine part. Today we began Hamlet in my second period. I told the children that they weren't going to understand most of what they read at first, but that we'd talk about it and they'd get it. So the way it's unfolding is we read, I stop us to explain something, then next time we read instead of me stopping us to explain something, I stop us and ask them to figure it out. And they're figuring it out. They're figuring Shakespeare out. Already we have noted quite a few things, not the least of which is Hamlet's dilemma, and his emotional state. Shakespeare is so AWESOME. I haven't included having them write yet because it's a fragile time right now and I have to be careful and handle things right, and not be too businesslike. I have to get them engaged and my gut feeling is that the way to engage them is to back off from writing and even have them back off from reading too hard and just let Shakespeare woo them. I think it would be a fun thing to teach a Shakespeare course and write a year-long blog about that.
I began collecting LEAP scores related to my students today. The results of the spring testing come in in a few weeks. Then I'll have something to say. But I will say, a girl you've read about a lot in here, LG, went from 50 in the fall test on her writing to 75 in the spring test (for seniors) on her writing. That's the lowest possible to the highest possible. It's exciting to be embarking on this quest for empirical evidence.
Anyhoo, I fall more and more in love with this school all the time. Also, it's that time of year for teachers of seniors, when we feel melancholy and already lonely for the children who are about to leave. Every year we have to make goodbyes.
Douglass just cannot let me go.
I'm going to go panee me up some pork chops and heat up a can of Miss Sylvia's lima beans in the olive oil and pork chop debris left in the pan. And also, a couple of weeks ago I brought all those things I disposed of earlier in the year to the Bridge House. It filled the bed of my truck.

Melanie

before and after

2005-04-26T18:37:00.000-06:00

8 this morning:
I'm going to xerox the list of questions and approach the assignment with the children today. Interestingly, yesterday LG (who asked me to sign her folder so she could remember me) said, "Ms Plesh. This poetry shit isn't working." That's first period. No truer words were ever spoken. She said why can't we write about school and your class and what we think about shit. And I told her that's exactly what I was intending.
My plan is to keep it informal, that they attempt to address most of the questions in a big piece of writing, that they can if they want break the writing up into 5 categories, like I did with the questions. Then after they get this down as best they can that they look at the questions again and see if most of the points are addressed, and so revise the writing accordingly and give me a fresh rewrite, front only, loose leaf, not stapled, so I can copy everything and give them their papers back on Monday (exam day). That's the plan.
One thing that continues to become more and more clear to me is that time is a good thing to give to students with writing. Sometimes for sure they have to toe the line and produce a piece of writing in an hour or two days, but not usually. Time. Good.
This morning I was looking on the blog for Clay's questions that one of the unsung inspirations of this story told me she liked, and realized that the archives wasn't present. I had to go into the works and republish the whole blog! Which scares me because I write this blog at the machine and it is the only draft of the book I expect this is leading to and (you'll cry) the only place it's written. The ONLY place. So this evening my job is to copy the whole thing into a word document and burn it onto several cd's and bring a cd to school for safe-keeping.
Yesterday I stepped into Ms Holliday's office and told her I wanted to stay at Douglass, that I love it here and my work isn't done, etc., and she said she was "crucified" this year for keeping on so many English teachers, and she looked sad and fidgety, and I'm pretty afraid that she was trying to tell me something. I have to find a way to keep myself there. It would be a colossal waste if they were to put me in another school. Anyway, I don't know if I have what it takes to do a first year at an inner city school again. It almost did me in this year -- twice -- but I was able to make it through, mostly because I knew I was in the process of paying my dues and that next year things would be different because people would know what I'm about. Because I've been accepted.

6 this evening:
I was telling a fellow teacher at school (we were sitting on the tailgate of my truck, smoking) about my dread of having a first year again at a new inner-city school, and she said it's not like this at other schools. So that's a thought. And a little relief.
Except that I believe I belong at Douglass and I'm going to do whatever is necessary to stay. Still, the system has the power to stymie me. But surely, and I really do believe this (I'm 52), I'm bigger than the system. Karen reminded me about the idea, "ask and you shall receive," and I think she is right and that is undoubtedly the answer.
Today I caught Ms Hollilday in the hall and told her that not only do I want to stay at Douglass, I believe if she looked at the LEAP writing scores of my students she'd see quite a rise. Saying that to her made me think to myself that if that's not true, that they rose, then I have a lot of reconsidering to do. So she said I should look into that and I'm thinking, wow, this is a cool thing to do. Also I think she is trying to help me put together evidence that I should keep my job, no matter my tenure. I know she wants to keep me. So I'm going to do that. I'm going to look at my students' scores, pre- and post- me, and make notes. I know that one of my students had a 75 on her writing score this last time but, otherwise, she appears BY NUMBERS to be completely illiterate. At the beginning of the year her writing was gibberish. That's the truth. She was a write off. (what an ironic term)

I just re-read this blog and realize that Ms Holliday is the one telling me how to establish and retain my position in the system. And in doing this, she's causing me to look at the numbers and determine if I really am affecting my students. I have never never looked at the concrete in regard to my efficacy. It will be enlightening. I'm grateful for her.

Melanie

what are our questions, part two

2005-04-24T12:53:00.000-06:00

Several people have given me ideas about things they'd like to hear the students' responses to. I made a list of the ideas and then grouped them. I'm thinking that I could give my students the grouped questions and ask them to attempt, in writing (essayistically), to give me their thoughts about each group of questions, without answering each question per se. Here are the groupings and the questions:

Expectations:
what do you want and expect from your education?
what do you value about education?
why have you continued to go to school when so many others have dropped out?
what do you believe you should be learning about in school? do you believe in what society wants you to learn about or do you have a differrent idea? what could you learn in school that would make a more practical difference in your lives in the real world?
what do you wish for?
do you long to be educated?
do you believe you can be educated?

Past Education:
what were your educational highs and lows? (attempt to connect what was happening in your life at the time in an effort to perhaps understand how they affected each other)
what went wrong in your education?
what went right in your education?
is there an individual or more who were instrumental in encouraging you to persevere?
be honest about your reading skills, lack of, wheatever, and what went wrong? tell me about your experience with reading.
what are your feelings about your past education?

Education, General
what do you think it means to be educated?
how much value do you place on education?
who are/were your role models?
how do you define the term "education"? what does it mean to you to be educated? is this a good thing or a bad thing or what kind of thing is this?
do you think it is natural to want to learn about the world? do you remember when you loved learning? do you still? do you remember or know what happened?

Teachers:
what do you think teachers who teach in urban schools should know (about society, about the community, about education, about psychology, about life on the streets, about you?) before stepping into your classrooms?
what advice would you give to a teacher who wants to teach in your school?
what one thing do you believe you have taught teachers in the past? education isn't a one-way street and teachers are constantly learning. what do you believe you have taught me?

Writing:
what are your feelings about writing? do you want to write? do you like to? what frustrates you or stops you?

I have to get them to do this either this week or on the day of the exam, which is the Monday after this. Part of me wants to give them several days to work on it, maybe to even include some time to discuss the questions before they write.
Another thing is that I want to tell them that I'm working on a book and that I want their honest responses so I can represent them properly in the book. What do you think about that?

Thank you for your help --

Melanie

what do we want to know?

2005-04-18T16:21:00.000-06:00

Seniors have two more weeks of classes, then exams, and there's something I want to do before the majority leaves. I would like to ask my students to answer some questions for me that I could include in the blog. I'm also thinking of profiling some students. I need help knowing what a reader would like to know. I was thinking about the following (in completely random order, off the top of my head, that I wrote in my journal at school today):

the students' life stories, their feelings about writing, do they want to write? what frustrates or stops them? what do they like to write? tell the truth about their reading skills, lack of, whatever, and what went wrong, when did they learn to read, where, with whom? what do they wish for? do they long to be educated? do they believe they can be? are they angry, disappointed, with their education? where do they place the blame? do they think it is natural to want to learn about the world? do they remember when they loved learning? do they remember what happened?

I was thinking about being honest with them, telling them I want to include some of what they write in this blog (later into a book), and perhaps I could make a questionairre sort of thing out of it, though I want them to essay their thoughts, not answer a list of questions.
But what do people want to know about these children?
Thank you for your thoughts.

Melanie

perhaps I was harsh

2005-04-15T13:17:00.000-06:00

Okay, perhaps I was harsh. I'm sorry, Mr Amato. I know you were beseiged. I know that every idea you had became a battle, and that every battle was uphill. What I wrote the other day I wrote in the heat of the moment. I wasn't thinking. I was just frustrated. Worse than frustrated. There's probably a word for that. People have pretty much given up on the system, it looks like. Maybe that's the thing to do, let it go, start anew.
I just don't understand how our society can so insult children though. Business people would never for a second consider working in the conditions students are placed in. Everybody was quick to bust Martha Stewart and those other people, many other people, who steal from systems or break the rules. But the children have been languishing for a long time and nobody seems able or smart or willing or loving enough to do anything about it. I really thought Mr Amato would be the one. I'm so disappointed.
I don't want to rant. I just want the children to be loved.
On another note, I don't know how I'll be proceeding. Being one of the last ones hired I'll be one of the first ones fired. Hell, who knows if there will even be a Douglass next year?

Melanie

the superintendent quit

2005-04-12T20:00:00.000-06:00

There goes another pseudo-somebody. Even though I'd become disenchanted with Amato of late, I hoped he'd fight the good fight and show he cared for the children. I'm disheartened that he would abandon the job just a few months short of the completion of the year, leaving in the middle of a time even when teachers, who work harder than people conceive of, are on the lip of not being paid. The whole thing is like science fiction to me. It is a sinking ship and the weak-hearted captain has taken a lifeboat even before the children got off. How dare he. When is somebody going to stay for these children? A social studies teacher at my school whom I thought had heart and a social conscience quit on her students a few weeks ago because of the system's bullshit. It's true that the system is ridiculous, but all I can think about is, what must the children feel?
To hell with belief.
Quite a few times this year students have asked me if I'm going to come back next year. I have been lately rehearsing what I would say to the impotents in power if they were to tell me I would not be able to work at Douglass next year. I haven't been able yet to boil it down into words, I only know that I will go as far as necessary (not just as far as possible) to remain as a teacher at Douglass next year. No matter what happens, I will not jump in the lifeboat.
I hate it that Amato did. Yet another disappointing man.
I know there are good people in this damned world. When is somebody with heart going to step up? When is somebody going to give it over to the children? When, please, is somebody going to put them first?
I'm heartsick about it. And if you're reading this Mr Amato, to hell with you.

Melanie Plesh

truth?

2005-04-06T17:14:00.000-06:00

I'm watching the news. Mr Superintendent Anthony Amato just called the situation a "cash flow challenge."

the truth, 2

2005-04-06T17:11:00.000-06:00

So, how about that Orleans Parish? No money to pay the teachers next Friday. There it is, front page headline, enough to add that little (or not so little, depending on level of optimism and belief in the human race and that people will do the right thing) ANGST to our lives. To add a perspective to things, I heard that there was a shooting outside Lawless High School today.
I was one of those people who thought Orleans Parish teachers needed a little shaking up. I came to my school thinking I'd find a bunch of teachers in it for the money (which is very telling in itself, that teacher money would be considered something to sell one's soul over), not teaching, and all like that, and that I would give myself over to the students, blah blah blah, to give them something and do something beautiful for a change. I was very wrong, and I'm embarrassed, and I apologize for my elitist thoughts. There are plenty of excellent and dedicated and loyal teachers at my school, people trying hard, and, as far as love for the children goes, I've never seen anything like it. This school is full of love. This blog has been just one person telling a story, but, in the case of my school, multiply my story by 50 and you can see the story of a school, and multiply that by the number of schools, and you get my point. My story is everybody's story who teaches in Orleans Parish. I'm just the only one right now talking.
But the part of that story that I hope never gets overlooked or overwhelmed by the distractingly low stuff is how fine the children are, and how grateful they are to be educated.
This has been a monumental week. Breathtaking. Perhaps this seems hyperbolic. It is not. These children so much love it when they understand something, like how to put together a research paper. That's what's happening this week, the research paper. I'm not doing anything with them I didn't always do with students, and believe me, it's nothing spectacular that I'm doing. But these children are so serious about it. It's awesome.
One final note. Yesterday the BMOC, who is in my first period writing class and has really gotten into it, told me, "Ms Plesh, you my nigga." I told him I couldn't tell anybody about that because I just can't say that word, and he said, "Don't worry Ms Plesh. You can say it. I got your back."
I love them.

Okay. That's the truth for now.

Melanie

the truth, 1

2005-04-05T21:34:00.000-06:00

Okay, here is one true thing:
Last week we had an average of 17 teachers absent each day. I don't know all their stories. Legitimacy has gotten foggy. If a student punches you, how long do you stay out, even though the physical is healed?
And although I do understand that in a way, here's the bottom line: a kid I know, a junior, very good student, very good writer, good guy, loving, kind, respectful, willing, interested, capable of rising, he hasn't got one single teacher anymore, only substitutes. Why in hell should he come to school at all.
That is obviously not a question.

Melanie

activism

2005-04-03T23:05:00.000-06:00

Yesterday a damselfly landed in my hair. A man pinched it to get it out (I did not want him to do that) and broke its wings. I was sick about it, and angry, because who in the world would think of a damselfly as something that needed to be taken out? I thought of its landing on me as a blessing. But I didn't say anything because, because I don't know why. Because I'm weak and afraid of rocking the boat. Because I think I'm supposed to be a good girl, and quiet. I learned the be a damned quiet good girl lesson well, and as a result of that grew to distrust my understanding of the truth. In the face of logic, what would my little anger matter? What's a damselfly?
I went home and remembered why a damselfly matters and why I sometimes loathe the human race. But I went home alone. It's a conflict.
Today I went to a talk at the Tennessee Williams Festival about using writing as a form of activism. It caused me, among other things, to think about being a warrior and telling the truth. I have been telling the truth, but I've also been trying not to be disloyal, so I've kept some things to myself that should be said aloud. That's why I'm there, to say what I see. But also to be a teacher. I've erred on the side of being loyal to my school. I don't know whom that serves. Besides me.
I'm not an employee trying to make my check in Orleans Parish. I already had a check.
The point of this blog?
A man who is creating a film about public schools contacted me and wants to interview me because of my knowledge of the two sides. I keep putting him off because I think that by talking in public I would jeopardize my position as an actual teacher, and I think I have work yet to do at my school, and I don't want to let my students down for next year. But I also know that I have to tell the truth. Somebody has to tell the truth. There are things that can be done. It doesn't take a rocket scientist. That's one of the secrets I've been keeping. It can be done. Even I know it can be done, and how it can be done. It does not take a rocket scientist.
But I fear that my opportunity to serve the children at my school will be curtailed if I speak out loud. Would I serve them better by speaking aloud in one fell swoop and then being fired or would I serve better by staying there and giving what I have as a teacher?
I know it's not as black and white as all that.

Melanie

"Nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so"

2005-03-27T12:08:00.000-06:00

It's Easter and the fourth day of our five day spring break. That's a bummer. And now we have two solid months left of school without a single day's break. I'd better get a good rest now while I can. Though how can that be, considering it is spring and considering this is New Orleans? Today, for example, there are four Easter parades -- old uptown money, old downtown money, new downtown money, and the queens of Bourbon and St Ann. That last is where the best hats will be, I'm guessing. Tonight the great poet Yousef Komunyakaa is giving a reading at a bar in the quarter. He's from Bogalusa, and grew up when the Ku Klux Klan was spray-painting hate slogans on the highways there. I remember being scared of Bogalusa. Now he's a professor at Princeton and a famous poet. Talk about rising above.
On Wednesday, the day before the holiday, my first period writing class wrote two sonnets in one hour, in iambic pentameter. I just decided on the spur of the moment that they ought to know what a sonnet is. I wrote the numbers 1-14 in a vertical row on the board and told them, in the language I understand, what iambic pentameter is: da DUH da DUH da DUH da DUH da DUH. And that each line had to have that rhythm and I told them about the abab cdcd efef gg rhyme scheme as a possible way to do it and I told them that the last two lines, the couplet, had to convey some kind of big picture or understanding or something, something bigger to bring the first 12 lines home. Something profound.
That whole explanation took about one minute, because it was Greek to them. They didn't understand until we began writing.
I suggested we try a love sonnet. I read one of Shakespeare's to them (I tell them, every time I read something to them, that they do not have to understand every word, just that they should relax and get what they can from it). Then someone who is grappling with love issues (who's not?) came up with an idea, and another kid came up with a first line, and we took it from there. Five of us were involved directly, and the other three stayed aware peripherally. One girl, PB, who never talks (sometimes I've thought she was deaf because she didn't even look at people who were talking), loved what we were doing and so I asked her if she wanted to take the chalk and she did and she ran the show. Sometimes we'd come up with a good line and then think of words that would rhyme with the end word of the line and write it at the end of the line where it would go, and we'd fill in the line based on the rhyming word we'd picked. It was so cool. I've honestly never had much luck with group work, either for myself as a writer or myself as a teacher. But this one was so spontaneous, I guess that's why it worked. It was natural. In fact, I didn't give anyone any orders, they just scooted their chairs in a semi-circle in front of the chalkboard and wrote a poem together. And when a line didn't fit the rhythm, for example, it ceased having to be me reminding them; the other writers did that once they caught on.
We hammered one out and then went back and did a little revising, but only a little. I'd like to see us revise it again and again, like real writers do. But it was too soon for too much of that. They needed a chance to revel in themselves. They loved what they wrote and they deserved to be left alone for a while, just to love it. Here it is:

Love Sonnet

Love is a word that always comes and goes
People say that love's a powerful thing
Love is like a show, no one really knows
Love just makes you wanna laugh and sing
It also brings an awful lot of pain
Love sometimes makes your heart sadly cry
Sometimes love makes you go insane
Love just sometimes makes people ask why
If you find someone that really cares
A person who is constantly on your mind
Someone that you will never want to share
That person you thought you will never ever find
Love will completely take over your heart
It will bring your life to a whole new start.

It's a beautiful first draft (which I equate with "opportunity") and could lend itself to some great practice at revising, and could open the door for a lot of lessons. I did bring up that I thought the first two lines both sounded like first lines and we toyed with that, but by the time we got to the end of the sonnet, it wasn't so glaring an issue. But again, it was too soon for a lot of that. The looks on their faces told me they believed they'd done something fine. Most of the kids copied the poem into their notebooks. Several kids from other classes copied it down too. All day I could see people reading it.
So then I suggested we write another one, a life sonnet. Here's that one:

Life Sonnet

Life carries a box of ups and downs
One minute you feel like the world's made of gold
The next minute you feel like no one's around
Life sometimes feels like you're left out in the cold
Life brings you through a lot of changes
Sometimes life is like Spring, full of flowers
Life is like a memo book, full of arrangements
Or sometimes feels wet like a rain shower
Life will not go on forever
But while you're here you can make it last
If only people will pull together
Do not bring up old grudges from the past
Life is like a game you must play to win
But like every game it has to have an end.

And then the bell rang.

Shoot, it might be fun just to bring in all the poetic forms I can find out about and show the kids the parameters and let them choose topics and just write and write and write. And I could slip in little lessons (which they'd want because it's their writing to which they'll apply the lessons) like parallelilsm, metaphor, simile, rhythm, repitition, rhyme, word choices, etcetera to the nth degree. Damn, I think I'm figuring out a way to "teach" poetry here, and maybe even how to construct an entire year's lessons! And I'm using writing to figure out a way to teach poetry, and that way is through writing. There's something of a revelation in that, I think.
Speaking of revelations, I had one this week. The children come into our classes, I hate to say this because I don't want to dwell on the irremediable past, but with very little education. What I realized this week is that it's the best place in the world for a teacher who loves to teach. Because the children have so little education and need so much, I can choose whatever I think it would most behoove them to know.
With that in mind, I have decided to teach Hamlet to my American literature students. It doesn't matter that Shakespeare's not in our textbook. They don't know Hamlet and they want to know Hamlet, and I'm going to help them read it. I think they understand what I mean about relaxing and getting what they can from written texts. They'll need to be able to. Hamlet's going to be the hardest thing they've ever read. But the thing is, Hamlet is so important, as we all know, though we mostly don't exactly know why that's so or how to say what we intuitively know about its significance. (I won't carry on about Shakespeare just now, though, as usual, I have a lot to say about that too.) It's not fair that these kids aren't given the chance to read these difficult but hugely important texts. Not giving this to them is yet another little way in which the system is keeping them on the outside. Being naysayers, forever mindlessly repeating that they can't or they're woefully under-prepared or they won't read or they don't come to school or they're clowns or they just don't care is the way we excuse ourselves from getting down with their education.
I feel a rant coming on.
I just decided that if school cannot provide me with a set of Hamlet that I'll find them or buy them myself. Or maybe we could start a Shakespeare club and have a fund raiser and buy books with that!
You may laugh, but I know what I know: children love Shakespeare.
Excuse me, but there's a parade I have to attend. Happy Easter!

Melanie Plesh

LEAP week

2005-03-19T00:23:00.000-06:00

Today is Friday. We've been testing all week. I personally proctored three tests over five days -- the English, the Math, and the Science. Social Studies for my group (11th and 12th graders who have never passed the LEAP) is this coming Monday.
Days one and two were the English. In the section where students have to analyze a poem and answer questions about it I noticed (because I was dutifully monitoring) that one of the poems was Langston Hughes's, "What Happens to a Dream Deferred," from "Harlem." I had that poem on my board (it's not in our text, I just love it so I put it up) for at least a month last semester. The kids who came to class (that's the key, that they came to class) know what the word "defer" means, believe me, and they understand the poem. I guess we referred to it almost every day. We used the word "defer" often in regard to the American dream. It played a big part in the final exam, because Barack Obama, whose speech we read the second day of the semester and again at the end of the semester, spoke so eloquently about hope and that in America dreams and the unexpected could come true, and I asked my students to make a connection between Hughes's poem and Obama's idealism. I also asked my students to take lost and broken dreams from the other literature we read (like from a Zora Neale Hurston story called "John Redding Goes to Sea"), and say whether the deferred dreams shriveled or melted or became cloying or festered with pus or exploded, like Hughes describes what comes of the loss of a dream. Or did they manifest as something else.
Days three and four of the LEAP were math. That's about all I can say about that. Except that I do have an intellectual desire to study math because I consider myself stupid about it and I don't believe in stupidity. I believe I must be capable of learning it. In fact (talk about a tangent) perhaps it would be a great thing for me to attempt to study math to the point of calculus, just to prove to myself that people really can learn, even old dogs like me, even children who are not reared in situations where education is a priority.
Today was the science part. The children, the looks on their faces as they read the questions, they hurt my heart. They were lost. I didn't read the test (because I wasn't supposed to), but I could see in their expressions that it was hard. I reminded and reminded them that they know more than they realize they know, but even I know it wasn't enough.
The problem is not the test, and it isn't just one or two other things. It's a lot of things. The kids say the teachers don't show up, don't teach, don't know their subjects. The teachers say the kids don't show up, don't have an interest, don't do homework, don't study, can't read, that their homelives are prohibitive. It's all true. Everybody has to take responsibility. I think perhaps the thing that is called for is a take no prisoners administration. Everybody has to be held to the fire. Everybody has to get real. The kids have to go to class and when they're there not hinder the process in the classroom, and the teachers have to give what all kids deserve. And anyone not toeing the line has to be dealt with. Hard.
During this testing period today a boy came to the door behind me and hit it and it sounded like a gunshot. I jumped out of my skin. I happened at the moment to be reading the following passage in Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov:

"Man, do not exalt yourself above the animals; they are sinless, and you, you with your grandeur, fester the earth by your apprearance on it, and leave your festering trace behind you -- alas, almost every one of us does! Love children especially, for they, too, are sinless, like angels, and live to bring us to tenderness and the purification of our hearts and as a sort of example for us. Woe to him who offends a child...One may stand perplexed before some thought, especially seeing men's sin, asking oneself: "Shall I take it by force, or by humble love?" Always resolve to take it by humble love. If you so resolve once and for all, you will be able to overcome the whole world. A loving humility is a terrible power, the most powerful of all, nothing compares with it. Keep company with yourself and look to yourself every day and hour, every minute, that your image be ever gracious. See, here you have passed by a small child, passed by in anger, with a foul word, with a wrathful soul; you perhaps did not notice the child, but he saw you, and your unsightly and impious image has remained in his defenseless heart. You did not know it, but you may thereby have planted a bad seed in him, and it may grow, and all because you did not restrain yourself before the child, because you did not nurture in yourself a heedful, active love. Brothers, love is a teacher, but one must know how to acquire it, for it is difficult to acquire, it is dearly bought, by long work over a long time, for one ought to love not for a chance moment but for all time. Anyone, even a wicked man, can love by chance. My young brother asked forgiveness of the birds: it seems senseless, yet it is right, for all is like an ocean, all flows and connects; touch it in one place and it echoes at the other end of the world."

We were supposed to have afternoon classes all week, but that, for the most part, didn't materialize. It was a poor schedule, and not because of what our school dictated. It's something systemic. However, even though the afternoons as times for formal education were a waste, today was wonderful in my two afternoon classes. People who would have otherwise wandered in the halls came into my room because I brought my OutKast cd and they could hear it and it drew them. The girls started line dancing and they taught me and we danced for an hour and had a fabulous time. Mr Douglass, who also writes poetry (unbeknownst to everyone until recently), was in the room, talking with a few people who weren't dancing. The bell rang and last period came in. For some reason the few in our class drew a small crowd of rappers and we spent the hour taking turns. Someone asked me to try, which I'm ashamed to say I didn't do because I was too shy and embarrassed, but he said I should be good at it because I have a good vocabulary. I'm going to work on that. One of the girls from my LEAP group was in there, someone I'd seen in the halls all year but had never known until this week. I told her our group has become tight and without saying so, I could see that she agreed.
Today was so much fun.
And I now have two new unknowns to look into -- rapping and math. One, because I have a good vocabulary, and two, because I'm not stupid.

Melanie

conferencing with students about their essays

2005-03-13T08:48:00.000-06:00

I really love how this essay writing business in our classroom is going. These last two essays we've done have taken a week each. On the surface it seems like way too much time to spend on one little 400-500 word essay. It seems it could easily be done in two or three class periods. And that's how I usually forced it to be. But I really like the leisurliness of the whole week on one piece of writing. It gives the students time to get underneath their everyday surface concerns, maybe time to recognize that their experiences fit into a big picture. It gives them a chance to let ideas form in the sub-conscious (or wherever that occurs), sometimes while they're doing other things, like reading the paper or flipping through a magazine or, and I saw a lot of this, a few people sitting in a group flipping through the magazines talking about stuff they see. And it gives me time to help them. Later I can cut it down to three days, say, then two, and then try to do it in one, but for now, in my position as a teacher and writer, I don't think any of this is a waste of time. In my opinion, when I present an essay idea on Monday and they have space and time for a week to get it the way they want it, they're acting like real student writers and I'm like their private tutor/mentor. Sometimes the good questions they might have don't come up until the Thursday of the week. But it's so cool that the questions come up! Also, all of this time gives me a chance to confer with students as many times as we like. I'd say that in the case of most of the students, by the time Friday comes we've conferred about three times and they've written as many drafts as it takes to get their essays right, even though I'd only required two.
Eventually, they will not need me so much.
The conferencing itself: in the case of these particular students, all that time and conferencing gives me a chance to help them with standard English (which they really are not fighting, contrary to what I thought would happen). Upon first looking at some of their essays, I am sometimes shocked and feel that their cases are hopeless. The writing, literally, seems like complete nonsense. But I've learned that their writing is not nonsense and that they're not hopeless. There's just a disconnect or a vagueness between the words in their heads and how to make something visual out of them. When I confer with a student I read her work aloud and when I hit a word that is crazy wrong (like writing open for ocean) I stop, point at it, and ask her what the heck that means. At first she may not understand because in her mind she's thinking ocean and it takes her a moment to realize what she'd written. Sometimes I ask the student to look at my mouth while I speak the word and usually she'll get closer to the spelling. And then I spell it for her and write it on the draft. After one or two of these sessions with students they seem to become more careful. It also gives me a chance to point out a lot of little things, like incorrect spellings of their/there/they're (which usually includes a little lesson on the difference). It also gives me a chance to point out subtleties, like word choices, and to teach the smaller things, like that punctuation goes inside the quotation marks and when to underline titles and when to use "who" and when to use "that." It's like every time I sit with a student I am tutoring her privately on the particular problems she has rather than "teach" it to the whole class. Yes, there is some time that appears wasted. However, I'm thinking that it's better for a student to sit and chat with someone in the class for 10 minutes while waiting to talk with me about the paper, and then getting private tutoring, than it is to be "on task" for a run-on/fragment lesson that some of them don't even need. I think in the end, a lot more takes place toward bettering their writing and their literacy when we spend the time. I guess you'd call that quality time. And I know that if they sit with me and hear over and over again that "are" and "or" have different meanings, that they'll eventually remember without my help.
And here's the gravy: they like what we're doing. And I may be wrong, but I don't think that they'd say anymore that they hate writing.
This week I'll bring the folder with all their drafts and pick a few good examples of what happened in the process. I also have some questions.
That's about it. Last Friday we lost two teachers. Tomorrow (Monday) we begin LEAP. Oh, and I had a revelation about that, too. I think the test is a perfectly sound test. It's not hard, for sure, (objectively speaking), and, best of all, it asks them to think. But here's what I found out. I've been, for the last two weeks, giving private LEAP tutoring to all of my students who still need to take the English part (they come to class on time rather than circle the halls, and so I tutor them then). I gave them a sample of the research section. They all missed this one question which gave a particular source sheet (an index page from a travel advice book) and asked which chapter you'd go to if you were looking for an inexpensive way to travel. The answer was a chapter that included bargain fares and cheap accommodations. There was no other answer that was close. The thing is, the students didn't know what "inexpensive" means, though they could figure it out when I pushed them, and they didn't connect it to "cheap" or "bargain." What this tells me (for the thousandth time) is that teaching the test is stupid. If we spent our time teaching prefixes and suffixes, and forcing them (how does one do that?) to read, and if we encouraged them to think, they'd have no trouble with such a question. Or the test.
Anyhoo.
The weather is spectacular.

Melanie

it was a great day

2005-03-09T19:29:00.000-06:00

First period moved me today. I wish I could have recorded it in every way. There were eleven children strewn around the room, most of them using two desks, so intensely into their writing that when a popular clown came in they didn't even lift their heads. I even felt a little bit sorry for the clown. They were serious. It was a beautiful thing. We started this essay, that one based on some inspiration we got from National Geographic, on Monday. One of the students, MR, wasn't there on Monday. Then yesterday he didn't do a thing on the essay. He read the paper, talked his jive, played cd's. I said to him that he was two days behind and shouldn't he get on with the writing? He said, "You know I'm gonna do it Ms Plesh." And I did. And he did. Today he spent the first half of class reading the sports page and I totally left him alone. But when he got down with the essay the boy was absolutely inspired and engrossed. We all have our ways, our processes, child writers as much as adult writers. We respect adults' ways. Why can't we let children have their ways too? I would have been spoken to probably for letting MR read the paper and play cd's. But had I not done that, he would not have done what he did. I'm sure of that. He has his ways and they're valid. As valid as mine.
I wish I had words to say how profound the energy (it wasn't silent) was in that room today. It's like I always suspect, all children need is an invitation to be thinkers and they will think. And I'll just say straight up, I take those children seriously. I mean it when I say they have as much ability as I do to have a profound thought.
Oh yeah, that's why I named this blog what I did.
And then there was second period. That's English III. We've spent the last several weeks reading the literature of the people who lived in this country before the American Revolution, then the speeches during the Revolution, and today, the Declaration of Independence. We got halfway through the first page. The discussion was riveting and broad, and intelligent and interesting. I'm not kidding, when the bell rang kids said "damn!" and stayed. They loved it. They said it out loud. Kids who never talk talked. Somebody thanked me! What got me was how respectful they were of each other's ideas and of each other's right to have the floor. (I took notes on the board thinking about the essay tomorrow.)
There's a girl in that class, DC, who is a natural teacher, and I told her so today. I told her to educate herself and go to school and become a teacher because she has the gift. It makes tears come to my eyes just writing those words. She took over the handling of the discussion and people listened to her. She admonished people if they talked over someone and they apologized to her. She was amazing! She's what the world needs.
Tomorrow we're reading Martin Luther King, Jr's, speech from jail, and an excerpt from Frederick Douglass's story.
I feel so privileged to do what I do.
After school I went to a softball game. It was an exciting game. A lot of passion. It was played at a corner baseball field near Douglass. There were no stands. The audience just stood around the edges. I was ashamed of New Orleans for that. Men stood around drinking beer and smoking. Kids were vile with each other. The language was foul. I'm no prude, but I was really uncomfortable there, and I was embarrassed for the human race that there is so little respect for children, and so little respect for their teachers. I don't think I'll be going to another softball game.
But it didn't ruin my day. In fact, in honor of the day I'm going to order a pizza from Bywater Barbecue and have it delivered and give the deliverer, who is usually on a bicycle, an exorbitant tip. Bon Apetit! (and thank you to the Universe)

Melanie

fish have eyelids

2005-03-08T18:49:00.000-06:00

I remembered to bring home the essay topics but forgot to bring home some of my students' writings. I think that would be a good thing to do this weekend, when I have a handful of them.
Yesterday I started a new essay with the writing class. I gave them copies of National Geographic and asked them to flip through the magazines, read captions, read articles, etc., and leave their minds open to let some idea about the world come to them about which they could write. I get vaguer and vaguer it seems, but really, my desire is to give them a chance to be thinkers, to look at pictures of places and people and things they have no idea about and think about them and think about what things mean. Also, I asked them to try to bring their lives into the more global arena. I wrote down things I was hearing around the room while they looked at the magazines. One girl said, "I didn't know fish winked." I thought that would be a great beginning for an essay about the things we don't know. (I didn't know fish winked either. They do it to regulate the light that comes into their eyes.) Someone else saw photographs of starving people in Africa and is writing an essay about how ashamed she is when she throws away food. She tried including quotations from the article she read. They seemed just simply tacked in until we had a conference about it today and she explained what she had in mind. I gave her a few little pointers. Little pointers. I didn't give her much, though I wanted to. She revised the essay so far and absolutely nailed it. It also made me realize that she's asking me to teach her how to include quotations in a piece of writing. Which makes me realize I owe it to them to let them do a research project.

Here's the list I keep on my board. It began as a conversation about the things we humans, and all living things, are consumed with: procreation and survival. Then I started writing things into the list that came up in class. A couple of the topics came from people who said that something would be a good thing to write about, like what can we depend on? Now, students turn to the list for ideas which, ironically, were theirs in the first place. Life be good.

Topics for poems, stories, essays, plays, songs, raps, etc.: the street, one-eyed kittens, procreation, sex, mysteries, problems, change, the unknown, death, rhythm in the brain, the human condition, El Dorado, if I were king, fountain of youth, Utopia, religion (God, myth, etc.), beauty, goodness, love, family, how we are influenced, if it's true it's true for me, are we our brother's keeper?, chillin', trippin', what can we depend on?, after death we're remembered for a while and then what?

(I guess that depends on what our baby daddy momma sister baby baby remembers to pass along about us.)

Melanie

essaying

2005-03-07T18:38:00.000-06:00

I notice that in the syndicated comic strip "For Better or Worse," the little family of Michael and Deanna and their two little children shows mostly the negative. All it seems we ever see of them is their stress and distress. I fear that my blog too often follows that same theme of stress and distress. The stress and distress is a given that I don't have to write so much about anymore.
Instead, I want to focus on the joys. And there are joys. And there are successes. Big successes. And interestingly, the successes are many in first period, that rough class that has caused such grief, the class I used to dread. What I've found out is that what I have is a room full of stories and the thing is, I just have to treat them like people with stories, and writers who want to tell their stories, and not subjugate them. They have responded to this.
Maybe it would be nice to feature one class a week in the blog. I could write every day for the week about the progress they make.
Last week, for example, here's how it went. I began the week with a plan to have a finished polished essay by Friday. We started out Monday by adding to the running list of possible topics for writing that I keep on the board (I'll try to remember to copy the list and type it in tomorrow). I read a few things from the newspaper, short articles that depicted the variety in our interesting human race (I'll try to remember to bring them for tomorrow, too) and then I read a Debarry essay from the Times-Picayune aloud. That guy's good. The essay was about how he was standing in line at a drug store and saw a teenage girl buying a pregnancy test, and what that made him think of. I gave a little talk about how the essay is their chance to express their thoughts and that it can begin anywhere. I told them that I want them to take the experiences in their lives and put them in the bigger picture of the entire human race. I told them that their human experiences are mutual and global. Something like that.
It's always hard for them to get started, just like it is for the rest of the real writers in the world. They had to talk a little and walk around, play the radio, sharpen their pencils, talk a little more, etc., all those things we do while our sub-conscious is working on the problem. By the end of that first day most of them had an idea what they'd like to write about. For the rest of the week we just continued working on these essays. I required that the essay be at least 400 words, but that's about it for requirements, and I only do that because I think they really do need some idea about what's expected length-wise. Also, it helps them decide upon a subject and thesis because the subject and thesis have to be broad enough to write 400 words about, and not bs words.
As the week went on and they progressed with their essays they came to me for conferencing whenever they needed to. They use me a lot in this way. I believe the key to helping students with their progress as essayists is for me to read their essays as a reader and not as a teacher. And I tell them so. That way I can stop and respond as a reader, like to say something's interesting or I hope you're going to pursue that line of thinking, etc. Then I can be a teacher and help them figure out how they can remedy their problems.
By the end of the week, half the people had written three drafts, though I only required two. They wanted their work to be right, not because of me, not because of a grade, but because they want to be writers.
More tomorrow.

Melanie

gratitude

2005-03-06T19:09:00.000-06:00

I know I've been spotty about writing here these last couple of months. I'm curious about why that is, but I don't feel like thinking about that right now. Instead, I was writing in my journal yesterday and what I wrote is what I want to include here.
Saturday. A baby daddy momma sister baby is a cousin. Even though it's five words instead of one, we know exactly who we're talking about. "Cousin" is vague. Baby daddy momma sister baby cuts straight to how exactly the person in question is related. And there's such a comfortable rhythm to it. I love the way the stream of words swells and rises at "sister," then descends. I find it charming. I don't want to change it. I even told MR Thursday that his piece about the streets had grammatical inconsistencies, but that he should not change a word. It's such a fine piece of writing. Gripping. Real. Correcting the "grammar" (whatever that is) would wash it out and ruin it. I understand and agree with the argument for learning everybodyelsespeak, and I'm teaching it. But I don't want them to lose the power of this language they have.
I know I said this at the end of October, but this time I really feel like I have turned a corner and that everything is going to be alright. And I'm finding myself more and more charmed by these minds they have. I'm charmed by their manner of dress and the way they rough-house with each other and their hair styles and that WR stepped into the hall last week to fart rather than farting in class. I'm charmed by the way LG lets me know how much she values what she's learning about her writing by revising every single thing she writes until it is error free, and how she comes around me without seeming to. I love that MR has discovered that he can write and that he has the voice for a story only he can tell. I love his willingness to face up to what is going on around and in his world. I love that EL always wants to read to me privately the things she writes, and that she wants to read to me, not have me read it to myself. I love how generous these people are with their hearts, even when they're trying to push me away. I love that they keep coming to school, that they still have some kind of hope, that they maybe even believe that they're not the throw away in our society. The fact that they still have that semblance of hope, even if it's naive of them, gives me hope. Their spirits aren't dead.

Melanie

leaping out

2005-03-01T17:05:00.000-06:00

I just got home from our monthly half-day faculty meeting/inservice. Today it was about the LEAP test, which occurs not next week but the week after. Such hopes are hung on this test. Our school is one level away from being in trouble, which could mean being taken over by the state. I understand that this may involve teachers all having to reapply at the school. At Capdau, I think only one of the teachers who had been there before the takeover returned. I have mixed feelings. I don't know that the state is going to know better how to fix us. Maybe it would be good for the attention to be drawn toward us so some of the muckety mucks in high positions could come to our school and find out for real what we're about. Everybody has an opinion about how to fix the school but I don't think any of them get it. I think what we need is a chance for people who are working with the kids, working at the school, to sit together for a whole day or even two, a retreat, to talk about what's really going on. Programs aren't going to fix us. Security guards aren't going to fix us. We need to get together and talk seriously and like compassionate human beings about things.
Such as what? Our school serves the area inside the infamous seven square mile area in which an inordinate majority of the violent acts in the city occur. That's one thing. These children live with gunfire in their lives. For a long time I've believed, but couldn't explain why, our society allows there to be a poor class. Yesterday in the paper, someone said that she understands why. She believes that it's because for the rich to function there has to be a pool of people who are uneducated and willing to work for 5.50 an hour at the grunt jobs, and so our society allows them to stay down. That's not to say, of course, that there isn't the possibility for them to rise out of that. People do. But to say it's hard is a huge understatement. It's assumed that these kids are not smart enough. It's not true, but what on the surface looks like stupidity is rewarded. Also, these kids have been segregated and what they're surrounded with is the same old stuff that is perpetuated generation after generation.
Tomorrow I want to write about my writing classes.

Melanie

Dorian McLeod Taylor Plesh

2005-02-23T20:13:00.000-06:00

Every day lately I'm hearing about someone who has been killed. Every day. I don't know if something unusual is occurring in the Universe or what, but everyone lately has a story of someone close having died or been killed.
Today is the second anniversary of my mother's passing and, strange but beautiful, several people, without knowing what this day is for me, came to me and told me or read to me privately about anniversaries of their parents' passings. EL wrote and read to me about her father who passed two years ago in April, and how she looks just like him. DD, whose father died last week, has her 18th birthday tomorrow. She wrote about how the two of them loved to watch professional wrestling together. DW had to leave the class while we were writing (about someone on our minds). I wasn't surprised. This morning before class I told her my story about my mother. Something just told me to. And I know her story. I'm afraid of being corny but I want to be real and say that we cried together and that I said to her that we, and every other person who has lost a mother, understand each other, and that because of a mother's passing we gain the gift of compassion and the ability to give solace to other people, just because we understand the unique pain. I never understood emptiness and loneliness until my mother passed. And now I not only understand mine, but DW's too. I'm afraid that I'm crazy to call it a gift, but it seems so to me.)
When DW came back into the room (the other students were worried about her and wanted me to go after her. I put my head in the hall, but I knew I didn't need to, because we'd talked and I knew she was as okay as she could be and that she was doing what she had to do. And I knew that she knew I was completely aware of her. But I love it that the children were so worried about her.) When she returned she had a speck of glitter below her left eye which looked like a clown tear.
It's the writing that's opening all this up. It shows me that we're getting real. But it's like looking at the sun and hoping our eye protection is sufficient.
My mother, Dorian Mcleod Taylor Plesh, died two years ago today and was buried on the 25th, her 84th birthday. Her death was not a tragedy but her life was. She had some moments, but too few for a poetic woman. She died before she found her voice, though she knew she had one. That's the worst part. My friend Anne said that she hoped heaven was like Florence, because her mother loved Florence better than any place in the world, and I'd like to say I hope so too. But for my mother, I hope heaven is Scotland and that she is with her people.
She was a lonely woman. I wish I had been a better daughter.

Melanie

work

2005-02-21T17:43:00.000-06:00

This morning I awoke with dreams in my mind about some little things I can do with my students to help them become more literate. When I got to school someone asked me how I was doing. She said I didn't look too good. I feel like a soldier in combat. I guess I wasn't smiling.
I'm determined to do a good job at this school. I feel like I'm coming to understand better who the children are and what they need. I realize I've taken way too much for granted when it comes to, for example, words I'd assumed these children, along with all people, understand.
It was a hard day. There'd been a fight Friday which several boys attempted to rectify today by starting a new fight. I've not seen so much tumult in the halls as I saw today. A lot of cops, a lot of screaming angry words and little fights, including "play" fights, all day. Children swarmed in packs in the halls, including the tall mean girl, who is not mean to me anymore. And she's pregnant, about seven months.
There are several kids per class who still need to pass the English LEAP and so I'm replacing the "do now" time for them with individual remediation.They have the potential to pass this test. I was called down last week by our distinguished educator in residence because I was not doing exercises with the whole class on LEAP strategies. I do understand the strong desire on everyone's parts to help these children pass. I am absolutely one of them. But I think it's wrong to remediate 20 children when only 5 need it. So I'm doing it on the side. However, I might be harrassed for doing it my own way.
I have papers to read tonight and grades to tally. We're finished with the first quarter of the new school year.

Melanie

what matters?

2005-02-17T19:44:00.000-06:00

An artist in residence came to my room yesterday. Somehow I am involved and the fortunate recipient of such a cool opportunity. She came to my room to ask me what ideas I might have for an interaction between our textbook (so to speak) and a paid outside artist. That's my perception of the situation. She's an actress and performance artist.
Even as we were conversing I felt BORING, and that I didn't have a life other than teacher, and this has spurred a lot of self-doubt. I feel like I've been a dull teacher so far this year. I think I'm preoccupied by the fact that these kids have such huge needs and that I don't want to spend a single minute on anything that will not specifically enhance their ability to make it when they graduate. The wise part of my mind knows that it's not the lessons but the atmosphere that matters, and that often tangential things that appear frivolous are actually profound if they're allowed to complete their circle and flower. But there's also my fear of anything frivolous sans obvious profundity. So much time is wasted at our school.
I fear I'm boring to my students. I like to think they realize they're becoming educated, but I fear it, fear that they don't see. But why should I fear that? It doesn't really matter that I see that they see. It only matters that they see. And I may never know if they do. I do know that KH learned two words -- exacerbate and penultimate (penultimate because she had the second to last conversation with her grandfather before he died), and I know that she's blowing her own mind with her writing. MR is writing something huge about his experience on the street. He too is blowing his own mind (and mine). In fact, it's also happening with JC and ST and BG. Things are happening all over the place. It's suddenly occurring to me. Even WR has discovered that he loves writing about himself.
Almost all of the writing these people have produced so far seems to be leaning toward themes. (I'm thinking this is something I need to write up somewhere, this beautiful thing that has inadvertently developed). In these four and a half weeks they've discovered what and how they like to write. Suddenly I realize this. I'm thinking I could help them actually zero in on their themes and then show them how the different genres could intrinsically, due to their natures, be useful for expressing various aspects of what they have to say.
It's incredible to me that first period, which has caused me so much grief lately, is the one inspiring all this. I'd think, given my experience in this world, I'd have expected it.
How the hell ever, I'm still boring. I'm preoccupied. I have no personal life. I am merely a worker, a serious worker, and the children are more important to me than me. But how can that be right?
I know I'm happy and crazed and preoccupied and lonely and, to make matters worse, am clear that I do know what I'm doing. I'm on fire, but I sure wouldn't mind a simple Thursday.

Melanie

the snake helped

2005-02-14T17:46:00.000-06:00

I did what I intended. I stood at the door and caught the culprits and told them what time it is and they rolled their eyes, and I told them that was a disrespectful act too and they'd need to drop that action from their repertoire. The class went fine. The original perpetrator, EN, wasn't there, and neither was another one, but that's okay. I've got a grip.
I realized today that one of the problems with me is that I feel sorry for these children and so I let them get away with too much. It's hard to draw the line. It's not black and white, but it needs to be moreso. I'd told myself that if I had to err, I'd err on the side of kindness. But I think that's faulty thinking. I think there should be fewer iffy areas. That's hard for me. I deeply do not understand hard and fast rules.
We got a lot of work done in that class today, which right there is enough proof that order is better than kindness. Did I say that? Good grief!
I am worn out. Just standing at that door this morning, gathering my strength and wherewithal, exerting, and standing by it, wiped me out. But it's done. I made it.
The snake around my neck got a little bit of attention. It's a little intimidating I guess. Fine. Maybe not everyone can wear a snake necklace. Maybe that told them something about me.

Melanie

a brown horse

2005-02-12T12:37:00.000-06:00

I woke up at 4 this morning with a brain full of all the cruel things I'd like to say to the people in first period. And every so often all day I've found myself talking to myself, saying out loud, here, alone, those same mean things I wish I was mean enough to say there, to them. That's not really true. I don't wish I could say mean things. But it does give me a little comfort remembering that they are rookies when it comes to using words. F You is pretty much the best they can do.
The only thing to do is to figure out a plan.
One thing I am definitely planning is to stand at the door on Monday and not let anyone in until I have had a private conversation with each one wherein I'll get their agreement to be decent or leave. That has worked before for me. Also, I plan to add a 100 point grade to this class, and if a person gets written up she loses 20 or maybe 30 points right there. And I'm making the grade retroactive, beginning with Thursday. The rest of that grade will be subjective, decided upon by me. Also, I have a stack of discipline referral forms which I will have at the ready, and I'll warn them once, that anything like rudeness in the class will be something I'll write them up for. This should work with the disciplinarian, whom I will warn ahead of time, because I've already written three of them up, and, really, they're the serious three. Two others participate, but it's the three at the core who cause the problem. Also, perhaps I can talk to a security guard (but where have they been?) and see if I can get her or him to pass my room during first period a couple of times so if I need a student taken out she or he can do the job for me. Because here's something surprising, when you tell a kid to get out of class they refuse! Then what? If there's no one in the hall to take the kid out, the only alternative is to buzz the office, but the two times I've tried to buzz (not for a discipline problem) the office can't hear me. I think just about every teacher in the school has a cellphone for situations like this, and they call the front office by telephone. I don't have a cellphone.
Another thing that I'm going to do is adjust my attitude. I'm going to take things at face value. I have a tendency to think I know what's behind bad behavior (like EN, the girl Thursday, and my sure belief that she's a troubled girl) and because of that letting things go that shouldn't be let go, letting kids say and do more than is right. I'm going to make them be responsible for their actions. Compassion is good, but holding them to a standard of decent human behavior is good too.
Something I don't talk about enough here is the constant racist comments against me by some students and the ever-present racial overtones. This plays a part in the terribleness of first period. It affects me by chipping away at my self-esteem. I'm just thinking out loud here. And naturally I have to imagine, and can imagine a lot more now than before, what our society's racist attitudes against African Americans must do to their self-esteem, what it must have done for a long time, and how these kids are the current result of, what, maybe five or so generations of ancestors who have been singled out and harrassed because of their skin color.
What I have to do is go ahead and see the big picture, which includes what I wrote above, but also to remember that it's wrong to be racist. Even against me.
I believe everything is going to be alright. In any case, I'm showing up Monday. But I'm going to wear my snake necklace, my horse ring, and carry a picture of Penny in my pocket, for strength. By the way, this morning I read over my dreams of the last three months and the night this semester started (January 18) I dreamed that a brown horse and a palomino came running by me and I thanked the brown one for showing up and telling me that everything was going to be alright. The palomino sank in some deep mud but got out. Maybe that dream was a before-the-fact kindness. Penny was a brown horse.

Melanie

blog sans title

2005-02-11T18:55:00.000-06:00

It's amazing and infinitely interesting to me that the blog I just wrote disappeared. I didn't like what I'd written, and now it's gone, and I don't want to write it again.
In brief, it was me talking about how EN tried to come back in my class today with nary a how do you do or even a little bitty sorry. Just tried to walk in. It was about how that first period class picked up where EN left off and threw profanities and insults around. It was about how they're trying to take me down and about how I'm thinking about going down without a fight. It was about the fact that they've won the day. It was about the fact that I'll get big again on Monday, but what a ridiculous waste of time and energy, of my one and only precious life, and theirs. It was about how I'm talking to myself, and that I know it will interfere with my sleep.
Why did I do this? WHY did I do this?
It was a terrible day. But what's a teacher to do? I cannot say or do the things a regular wronged, insulted human being is allowed to say or do. So I wrote discipline reports. Big fucking deal.

Melanie

how many battles does it take before we call it a war?

2005-02-11T18:36:00.000-06:00

the human race

2005-02-10T18:02:00.000-06:00

About 30 minutes into first period, after I'd asked her several times to watch her language, a student, EN, a new one, got up, threw her writing on the floor, and said fuck you to me, twice, and then a third time in the hall in front of another teacher when I went out to try to get her to see reason. Haha. Then a boy came out into the hall to tell me I ought to leave her alone, let her come back in class, that she's just crazy and has a lot of problems at home. I asked him what he'd do if someone publicly insulted him by saying fuck you to him. He said something that included violence. Of course the class was watching my every damned move when I came back in. I picked up her folder and loose papers and threw them in the trash. Maybe it was small of me but it was so humiliating to have a girl say the things she said to me, in front of the whole class, and there was nothing I could do. I had to do something. Then I tried to continue with my class. I was shaken but also, mercifully, numb. I turned my back on it. Tried to.
At the end of class I asked the boy who tried to cover for her if she had any friends or any teachers at the school with whom she could talk and he said just NM, who is another girl in the same class who is always on the verge of being unspeakably rude. So I brought NM out in the hall and asked her what was up. She said EN has some serious problems and needs to talk to someone. However, all the time she seemed to be stifling laughter. But I decided to err on the side of kindness and told her to give EN a message for me, that I'm not angry and that I'd be glad to talk with her. No punishment. Here's the thing: I know without a doubt that it's true about EN's life and something is seriously wrong. I also know that these are some cruel kids. Yes, I know, cruel because they're only respectful of people who can say fuck you to the world and to anyone who crosses them. But this makes them players, too. They're shallow. Maybe one just has to become shallow to survive. But not me. I only hope that I'm doing the right thing by being myself, by not participating in the games or the language or the hostility or the stupidity or the shallowness. I hope I'm doing the right thing by holding on to what I think is right. I hope I'm doing the right thing by persisting quietly.
Here's the rest of it. In this class are the sports stars. They're rude. They make fun of the way I talk by repeating what I say in a foolish way, whisper insults about my appearance under their breath to each other, and generally disrespect me every chance they get. I hate the class. I hate being in this ridiculous position. I hate it that they are seniors and still so unbelievably stupid about the world.
I'm still numb but a little bit of the anger is rising. I'm human. How can those children not see that? And where the hell is their humanity? They're only 18 years old.

Melanie

parenthetical me

2005-02-05T07:36:00.000-06:00

Thursday I woke up with a headache. After going round and round with myself, I finally called in to school sick. While I was taking a bath I kept trying to imagine standing at my classroom door, feeling puny and less than a hundred percent, the bell for first period ringing, and me attempting to tame the surge of circling, Mardi Gras-crazed adolescents. In fact, I couldn't imagine it. I don't think it's possible to go in as a teacher at my school feeling less than a hundred percent. It seemed weak-willed of me until I had the revelation that at my school there is never a normal day or a day without some kind of drama. Teaching here calls for every shred of ability and strength musterable, and for us to be prepared for the unexpected at all times. And for us to be prepared to handle the unimaginable. (The realm of the unimaginable is getting smaller. Theoretically I think that's a good thing, because what can be wrong with facing what is real? On the other hand, realizing that there are those kinds of things in the world is disheartening because I sometimes now wonder if I'm wrong in thinking that all children are salvageable, that their few years on Earth cannot possibly have damaged them forever, that no matter who or what, they can rise. Someone recently brought up the possibility that children who are their family's third generation to be born in poverty, often to young mothers who don't fathom that what they do and ingest while they're pregnant will affect a life, children who are raised in dangerous neighborhoods mostly without fathers, that these children begin life with a deficit that they may perhaps never be able to overcome, that their development is stifled from their pre-natal time and that a certain weakness or inability or disability is almost written in stone. I don't want to believe that. I have to and I do believe these children begin life on less than equal footing with most of us Americans [how can there be such poverty in the midst of such affluence? MLK raised that question], but that they're capable of herculean efforts. And that's EXACTLY why I want to be a teacher here - to teach them about Hercules.)
That was a tangent that got me to a truth about who I am. Writing blows my mind!
Where was I? Oh yes, the headache. So I knew I couldn't be Hercules myself Thursday and I stayed home. Yesterday a kid came to see if I was okay because she was so shocked that I'd been absent. That's a damned shame that a kid should be shocked that a teacher is almost always in class. But that's another story (we recently had a spate of days where on the average, 17 teachers were absent in one day). But that's another story (which I have to muster up the courage to tell soon). Soon. Anyway, so I found out that what I missed on Thursday was that several girls, all my students, jumped another girl, a former student, and the jumpee sprayed them with Mace. All but the macer got expelled. They're all girls I've written about in this blog, every one of them. In fact, we got a list yesterday of all the expelled students in school and seven of the ones on the list are or were my students. Also on Thursday a boy and a girl came to blows in my second period class, but apparently got separated before the authorities had to be involved. See, imagine if I had been there? On a hundred percent day the altercation in my second period wouldn't have materialized because one of the things we teachers do is stay on top of things all the time, almost smelling out potential trouble. That's one of the things that people don't know about teachers, how much of ourselves has to stay engaged every second we're with our students. (That's why it makes me crazy when people make light of teachers and give us a hard time, even in jest, about all the holidays we get. I know I speak for every teacher I know when I say that we couldn't function without the times to turn off and catch up with ourselves. And now that I'm on this tangent, saying off the top of my head, there's probably no amount of money that could entice people who are not willing to give themselves over like that. That's probably why teachers make a, relatively speaking, low salary. Am I crazy for saying that money is kind of an afterthought?)
So I didn't go to school on Thursday. That's the second day this year I've taken off. I'd begun the year COMMITTED to not taking a single day off, but I've backed off a little, now that I understand this hundred percent thing. It's an intense school in an already intense profession. Every so often, I guess we need a headache which makes having a headache, ironically, a blessing.
Enough for now.

Melanie

ad nauseum

2005-02-01T20:33:00.000-06:00

The steps forward are short. I hope they're deep. Right now I'm going on hope. I think that's the natural progression anyway. First the lessons are yellow jackets in the summer, all over the place and fierce, and later, now, they're yellow jackets in the winter, slower but still themselves. I see them coming now but they sting me anyway, and the sting hurts worse. I now know to go lie down and let the poison have its moment and that it'll pass. It doesn't blindside me anymore. Now it just makes me sad. I feel almost sick with sadness that the halls have turned vile again. I'm back to locking my doors and reading our daily poem over the foulness of their din. They crash against my doors and windows like fighting fish looking at a mirror. The noise is sickening. Sometimes I think it's better to leave the doors wide open because then they can't bang on them, but then they walk in like the gig is theirs and they're impossible, just like in the beginning, to get out. I do find that my students inside the room are less tolerant of the fools out there in the hall and ignore them more, except that yesterday one of my students yelled to the thugs outside that I was coming to the door and told them to run. I lost my cool and then I told him to find a new 4th period. He wasn't in class today. I hope I never see him again.

Melanie

they're back

2005-01-31T18:18:00.000-06:00

It is a new semester and so the kids who were expelled earlier in the year are back. I don't know the politics behind that but I know that we again have kids banging on our doors and howling in the halls. Today when I finally couldn't take the noise anymore I stepped into the hall and a kid was hiding in a nook next to my door and he jumped out and screamed in my face and scared the hell out of me.
I'd gotten complacent. But I'm also not brand new anymore and I cannot just sit in my room ignoring the hallwalkers while my students are being assaulted by them. It's more than foolishness. They're trying to tear us apart again. And I can't sit silently by. But I have to be careful.

Melanie

rocks and boats and a river

2005-01-18T21:02:00.000-06:00

I got my new classes today, two writing classes and an English III class. I have a lot to say. I even brought some of today's writing home with me to include here in this blog. But I'm not ready this evening to talk about that. Another, more pointed story wrote itself today.
Today I finally unburied my box of rocks from under the untouched boxes of workbooks against my wall and I opened it. There are a lot of rocks, and shells, and sticks that got loose from beaver dams, with the tooth marks, things I've been collecting all my life, things that just jump into my path. Or maybe I jump into their's. I don't know. One of my former students, LB, the girl who is writing a book about her life, came to visit me in my classroom after classes were done and she looked in the box and loved a few things she saw. She told me a story about finding conchs somewhere on a beach and being amazed at how big the shells were and that animals were living inside them and that she pulled the animals out of the shell. I accidentally made a noise that she realized was me being sorry the animals died. I know she had no idea about the life inside those shells. I didn't mean to worry her or insult her. It was just a response. But she reacted to it.
Then she asked me if I wanted to go see some rocks by the river at a place where she goes a lot and I said yes and so I drove us, under her direction, to the levee where the Industrial Canal and the Mississippi River do their thing together, where the levee is a wide green expanse, where both bridges are in view (I even saw the St Claude bridge open for a boat. It's a beautiful bridge.) and we talked and walked and picked up rocks and driftwood and shells. I found a dog skeleton. She gave me a rock to remember her and the day by and I did the same. The one I gave her was a triangular quartzish pillow of a rock. Hers was an asymmetrical tan and rough rock, flattish, compact, and pocked. She threw oyster shells in the river and said she was expecting one to fly one day. I never noticed before that an oyster shell resembles a wing.
I discovered that she is a romantic, and I told her so, and so I got to teach her what that means, that people who sit on the levee and throw wing-like shells and who watch boats and birds and who notice the various skins the river wears are romantics, that people who write by rivers are romantics. Once during our conversation I heard her correct her pronunciation of a word. I realized something important, and that is, that just close proximity with another influence can have a serious effect. I suspect I affected her in this way too.
Then I brought her home. I don't want to describe the neighborhood. It's low and she doesn't belong there.

Melanie

dancing

2005-01-13T19:02:00.000-06:00

We gave out new schedules today (we begin following the new schedules Tuesday). It hadn't occurred to me what a day this would be. It was. The girl I've talked about several times, L the homecoming queen, the one who comes and goes, the one who refused to take my exam, the one with the father she just met, the last couple of weeks this girl has been cranky and mean and saying things like how glad she was going to be not to be in my class anymore, how sick she was of writing, etc. When she saw her new schedule she bellowed because what do you think? She's been scheduled into my writing elective (she didn't elect for it) course! I told her it was a cosmic joke. I really hope she doesn't get out of it (she said she was planning to when she was bellowing and carrying on). I don't think she will though. I think she wants the class. We'll see.
But the other stuff about the day. A few kids I don't know came by my room and held their schedules in front of me to show me that they were going to be in one of my classes. My friend across the hall told me that a kid told her he'd heard I don't fool around. A lot of kids are asking me if it's true how much writing we do. I am developing a reputation. I guess it's silly of me not to have realized it, but I hadn't realized it.
And then during my planning period, for my perspective, a boy came to the door by my desk, the door with the hole in it, and made a mildly off-color remark through the hole. He was easy to chase off. In fact, it appears that I'm finding a new necessary voice. Not a loud one, but one with eyebrows.
Some very nice news is that quite a few of my students have been taking their exams back from me and revising them again (third and fourth times for some). I decided I'd let them revise until I have to turn in grades. I've even let a few take them home. I so know their writing, and they know it. They know better than to get someone else to write it for them, and they know I know how to know. I figure I'll get some more interesting reading out of the extra time they spend revising anyway.
The girl I'd had such trouble with, who got suspended on my account, whom I offered to help get a B this quarter (I changed her F to a D last quarter to give her a chance), she didn't come through and she failed for the year. She showed her upset with awful, vile-languaged anger. And then she walked out. I let her go. I'm so sorry for her. I wanted to help her. After she left, her friend, who also failed, said the girl should take her F because she deserved it. Then this girl left to go find her upset friend. It was a bad few minutes. After they left (we all felt heavy) we turned on the television to a music video channel (I can't believe I'm admitting this in public) and, since we were all girls, we danced. LB showed us a couple of moves and we had the best time. Tomorrow we're getting pizza for our last day. By the way, this is the class with L (above) and with M who told me I'm the first white woman she's ever known, who cried in the hall that time about her writing, etc. What a class!
Oh, and LB brought me the first four chapters of the book she's writing about her life. She has a natural understanding of pacing. She's a writer. And she knows it.
It's a bittersweet time. It's good for the children to have been successful and to have learned so much and to have grown so much and to have put another credit under their belts toward graduation, and it's good to see them go on to the next thing. And it's good for me to get a new group with whom I can practice what I've learned. But I so enjoyed and loved and appreciated these children for what they taught me. Here's a for-instance (besides the obvious new dance steps). M (above), who laughs at me all the time, a girl who is full of joy, asked me today why the body laughs, why it physically reacts that way. Like I know. So I came home and found a web site with information about that (it's about nerves) and printed it and I'm bringing it to her tomorrow. Just a small example of the things my mind has become open to because of the minds at work all around me every day.
And I'm paid money for this.

Melanie

In Honor of Lynne Vance

2005-01-11T18:09:00.000-06:00

Lynne Vance is a good friend of mine who is a teacher, one of the best teachers I've ever heard of, at Sumner High in the Amite-ish (not to be confused with the Amish-ish) neighborhood. Loranger?
How unclear is that?
Lynne Vance is a perceptive, generous, intelligent, loving teacher, and a great friend of mine. She's one of the best teachers I've ever heard of. She has ideas come to her like most of us have breaths. She called me around the Thanksgiving holiday and suggested a collaboration. She wanted my students to answer questions about themselves in writing and for me to mail their writing to her students so that her students could respond to my students with a piece of art and a piece of writing, which she would, in turn, mail to me. I mentioned this once before in this blog. She also wanted my students to outline their hands. My first thought was that these children of mine are way too un-childlike to consider doing such a thing, and I thought I'd be laughed out of Dodge. But Lynne was so earnest I told her I'd try. So she sent me a list of questions and I brought that to my students and asked them to do this for me. Of course they rallied, and they even outlined their hands. I mailed the stuff off to Lynne the week after the Thanksgiving holiday. She was to have her students read what my students had written and have her students make an artistic and a written rendering of the character of my students based upon what they read about them.
Saturday I received this fabulously mysterious looking package of the art and the writing. It was packed in a box from an auto-glass company. It was huge and strange and when the mail delivery lady gave it to me she said, "somebody out there must love you."
Lynne and I talked and planned about it before the package arrived and I told her I'd open it at home and figure out how to proceed after I saw what her students had done. But when I saw that great package I couldn't open it by myself. I had to let the kids see it. So I brought it to school, with absolutely no plan at hand and no idea about what would happen, and we opened it together.
What we found in there was beautiful. Her students had cut and pasted out of magazines and drawn and colored and used all kinds of art techniques on a piece of poster board, each one an attempt at expressing in visuals what they'd learned about my children from their writing, and each poster was attached to a black construction paper frame, making it that much more special. My children looked through the pile with big eyes, and I heard them say things like, "this is so beautiful," and, "this is exactly me," and, "that's my favorite color. How did they know?" and such things. I guess I had tears in my eyes all day. My children LOVED it and they felt SEEN. It was one of the sweetest days in teaching that I've ever had, and it was the brainstorm and the effort of Lynne. She is unbelievable.
What I see this doing for my students is that it causes them to take what they write seriously. (I just figured that out as I wrote here.) Lynne's students were more than an authentic audience. They were children who read what my children wrote and inferred or extrapolated my students' characters from their writing. Next time Lynne and I do this, and we're going to do it again, I'm going to make sure my students understand just how serious a thing it is to write. To be real.
Lynne's project had a serious impact on my students' learning. She brought verisimilitude to the classroom. Her project caused my students to take their writing and to take themselves seriously. My students were not writing into some empty nowhere where teachers pretend to be, but were writing to their peers and were glad for the opportunity to be real and to show who they are.
The people who were not in class that day in November when we drew our hands were very disappointed. That's another thing the project did. It made my students see that sometimes just showing up is the thing, that the potential for beautiful things like this to happen is just waiting in the wings and all we have to do is wake up and arrive.
Thank you, Lynne.

Love, Melanie

real revisited

2005-01-11T17:17:00.000-06:00

Today is Tuesday. It surprised me to realize I hadn't written in a week. And I have a lot going on.
First, the exam. Last week I gave the children the exams to put their names on and read and think about and then I picked them up at the end of the period each day. I told them to make notes, highlight highlights of Obama's speech, make connections, outline, ask me questions, talk to each other, anything they wanted, and for the exam day I returned to each student her own marked up test. In other words, they could have gotten the whole thing together in their heads and even written it down. Four did. The rest didn't even look over the literature. I haven't read them all yet, but from what I've read so far there are a lot of low grades. But there are also four essays that Barack Obama needs to read. And I'm going to try to figure out how to get them to him. I'm also going to figure out how to include something from each of them in this blog so you can see what I mean.
THEN, today at the faculty meeting, the principal (in semi-jest) asked how many sentences are in a proper paragraph and the magic number 5 came up from someone in the English department. I actually stood up and said that's not true. It got my blood boiling. I am incensed that children's thinking is limited by such things. RM, one of the four students I mentioned above, wrote a four page essay (tiny writing too) that would take your breath away, making beautiful and original reflections and connections about America and our literature and about Obama's speech (he worked on it for four class periods and revised it extensively). I think I should make a xerox of it and take his name off of it and put it anonymously in five-sentence paragraph's mailbox and ask her to grade it. What's going to happen to him if next semester he gets this teacher for English and is told he must write five paragraph essays consisting of five sentence paragraphs? I have to warn him. But that teacher has been at our school for a long time. The students don't know that what I tell them is true. Also, I imagine that some of them could be suspicious about why I would leave a school like Mandeville High to come to a school like ours.
And now I have this very pressing issue. Our principal gave a beautiful talk about how much negative commentary there is out there and among our students and our faculty about what a bad school we have. She said the hallwalkers and fires and fights are infamous, but that no one knows about the good things that go on. I've been thinking the same thing, and I want to do something about it. Yesterday in the paper there was an article about Woodson Middle School, and I want to tell our story. I am toying with the idea of telling our principal about this blog. I've been afraid she'd think I was being negative, but I don't think I have been at all. I've been just telling it how it is. And I love this school. I love it. And I'm proud of our principal and I think she's a brave and generous woman. But I don't know what to do.
I wanted to say one more thing about RM. This guy comes into class late most days and needs to leave a few minutes early. He just has to have that control over his life, over his education. Whatever. For whatever reason, I just have to let him come and go. When he's in class he does things like writes these exquisite essays. He's the guy I've mentioned in here a couple of times. He's the guy who must keep things real.

Melanie

I love final exams

2005-01-03T18:00:00.000-06:00

So today I put all the 75 terms and words on the board. To these brave souls' credit, they did not shudder or whine. And we just started going through them and they took notes. When we got to "beacon," I stopped for us to think about what Mr Obama might have meant about America being a "beacon of opportunity." They jumped right to it. These children are unbelievable. They understand metaphor as though it's as natural a part of their language as A is for America. Then I asked them to try to connect Martin Luther King, Jr's letter from the jail in Birmingham to the term beacon of opportunity. It makes me tear up to report that they were able to say how they see King as their beacon of opportunity and hope.
Being a teacher is beyond profound.
The four page final exam (which I'm attaching below) consists of this: a revised excerpt from the blog entry of yesterday (I thought it would help them understand what I'm shooting for), a page of details about requirements and some suggestions for prompts, and the two pages of Obama's speech. I'm going to let them see it tomorrow or Wednesday, not to keep, just to read in class so they will know where I'm coming from, and I'll pick them up at the end of the period.
We did have some hallwalkers third period. Eventually their bs at my door got the better of me and I stepped outside and chased them off, the little chickens. Then, how's this for reversal, my strategy for countering further attacks was to keep my door wide open and address the class from the doorway. The hallwalkers walked by about six more times, but didn't bother me or my children anymore. However, at the very end of the period, when I'd relaxed my vigilance, two of them came in the open door. I asked them if they didn't have anywhere better to be and they didn't answer me and I said well, you see I'm not going to let you steal from my students, and one of them asked my whole class if he was stealing from them and my students said yes. What a day.
During my planning period I took a student whose fourth period teacher was absent into the computer lab to teach her how to use the internet. After school, when I was riding my bike past the gym and the coach, he said the office had been looking for me fourth period to cover a class. He told me I should clear it up in the office.
Ha!!!
I felt a lot of love today, going both ways.

Melanie

Here are pages one and two of the exam: (3 and 4 are the speech itself)

Page One: (Revised from the blog to speak directly to my students)

I just read Barack Obama’s keynote address again, and although it was his speech asking Americans to vote for John Kerry, that's not the reason we loved it four and a half months ago. His speech addresses the hope of America, the potential, the ideals America embodies. He reminds us of the values on which our country was created. And he believes in them. He believes in America. So I was thinking, what if, for the exam, I spend this week putting on the board about 75 words and terms that I found in the speech that you won't know, and ones that will lead us to thinking about what America is, and we spend some days talking about them and then for the exam, ask you to choose x number of pieces of other American literature we've read and look at what those authors say about values, and somehow have you address Mr Obama's speech. We spent a few weeks recently on that project which caused you to remember everything we've read, from which you took notes, so you've somewhat prepared yourselves, and you still have all those notes and that big researched essay you wrote. I love the idea that this time around you've read and thought a lot more about America than you had in August when we first read the speech. You will have some intelligent things to say based on things that you've read. You have no idea yet how significant it is to have read some of the philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson, for example, and Martin Luther King, Jr. You have certainly known about King, but you didn't understand how he achieved his greatness. You didn't understand about his quiet civil disobedience, and that Thoreau had done it before him, and in the same way. Now you do because you read King's letter from jail and Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience."
One day, one moment, it's going to hit you that education is power. Barack Obama says:"There's not a liberal America and a conservative America -- there's the United States of America. There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America. The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States, Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I've got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported it. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America."
and,
"If there's a child on the south side of Chicago who can't read, that matters to me, even if it's not my child. If there's a senior citizen somewhere who can't pay for her prescription and has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it's not my grandmother. If there's an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties. It's that fundamental belief -- I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper -- that makes this country work." In the well-known speech that Chief Seattle is supposed to have made, about the Earth and all the parts of it being all of our brothers and sisters, that if something happens to someone we don't know it still affects the web of life, the whole, and therefore each of us, he says the same thing. We read Chief Seattle's speech in class too. And there's the literature of the pilgrims and the slaves and the puritans that we read. There's so much, yet, it all is about us. I think literature, in this case, has gone beyond its aesthetic significance and has taken its place to show us something about who we are. And Obama brings it all together without making reference to a single writer who came before him. It's amazing. I want you, my students, to be amazed with yourselves. And I think you will be. I'll say it again: I feel so honored to be the one this time to help you see what you're capable of.
Melanie Anne Plesh

Page Two:

Final exam January 2005 English III (25% of your grade)
The ultimate goal is for you to write an essay (two drafts) in which you respond to Mr Obama using information you learned from the literature we’ve read all these four and a half months. As I explained in the previous letter, his speech deals with American values, hopes, opportunity, all like that. So does all the literature we’ve read in the past, but not in exactly the same way. Your job is to show a connection with Mr Obama or an understanding of Mr Obama about values, because you have been educated in the literature of America which deals with values. In our classes we have had countless discussions about the meaning of the things we read, and how what we read shows something about the American psyche. This is an exam. You are to show me that the literature and the discussions registered.
The first draft can be as rough and raw as you like. I suggest attempting a free write. Then turn the free write into a rough outline, then write it again, carefully, watching that you have used the "to be" verb correctly, that you used " ‘s" for possessives, that you make plurals end in "s" (usually), etc. I will grade your exam based on two things: the content, that is, that you show me that you understand the literature we read, and the form of the essay, that is, that you execute it well.
I have three ideas to help you. One, you might consider writing Mr Obama a letter instead of an essay (they’re almost the same) or you can write a speech (also the same as an essay). Number three is this: what if I were to find a way to get some of your essays to Mr Obama himself? Consider that as a possible audience.
Some prompts that come to me:
I Am An American Too
Americans Have Always Had the Values You Espouse, Mr Obama
The Americans Who Have Come Before Us Created A Great Society (you will make reference to his points about our American society and connect them with the other literature.)
You Are Too Optimistic, Mr Obama
You Are Too Pessimistic, Mr Obama
(Choose a line or phrase or paragraph from the speech to center your essay around or to agree with or to refute)
You Are Right On, Mr Obama. Your Speech Reminds Me Of...
I Wish You’d Known... (name a writer)
Good luck. I admire you and I have loved working with you. Thank you for bringing your minds and hearts forth.