The other day, as a joke, I told my students I was turning 40 today.
(The little smart things that they are came back immediately with, "Really? We thought you were older." Zing.)
But it got me thinking . . . the stereotype is to lie and say you're much younger than you are, which has always seemed perfectly silly to me, especially once I realized that if people believe you, they're very likely going to think you look a little haggard for your age.
How much more intelligent to lie up instead of down? Then people think you look fantastic, and endow you with assumed wisdom and experience to boot.
I think I'm going to be turning 40 for at least the next five years.
Showing posts with label students. Show all posts
Showing posts with label students. Show all posts
12.08.2011
4.03.2011
goodness
The internet, I think, so often gets a bad reputation. People talk about porn and online gaming and stalkers and the lack of socialization so often that we forget sometimes that there are good things that happen, too.
One of my favorite "good things" about the internet is that it reminds me, often, how wonderful and truly generous people can be.
Recently, Michael of Forgotten Bookmarks decided to do a book care package giveaway, and asked his readers to nominate someone who was having a tough time. I nominated one of my students (whose story, even in the watered-down, anonymous version I emailed to Michael, is personal enough that I won't share it here). Suffice to say that "tough time" is an understatement, and I've been doing my best to help this student survive it.
Michael sent me an email back, saying that of all the stories he received, the one about my student stuck to him the most, so he would be sending the handmade journal and the care package. In his follow up post he talked about how hearing these stories had changed him, and how he planned on trying to get a package out to everyone who sent him a story.
The experience has changed me, a bit, too. It's a very generous thing he's doing; I can't even begin to comprehend how much such an endeavor will cost him in books and time and shipping (although other readers have offered to donate to help him with shipping costs, which speaks well of his community of followers, too). I forget, sometimes, in the midst of our budget cuts and wars and crime, that there are people out there like Michael; there are whole communities of strangers who are willing to help brighten someone's day, even for a moment.
I don't know that that level, that concentration, of generosity between strangers has ever had such an easy forum as the internet. This is one example, and perhaps the biggest I've experienced, but there are many more; and each time it happens, my faith in humanity is resuscitated just a little bit.
One of my favorite "good things" about the internet is that it reminds me, often, how wonderful and truly generous people can be.
Recently, Michael of Forgotten Bookmarks decided to do a book care package giveaway, and asked his readers to nominate someone who was having a tough time. I nominated one of my students (whose story, even in the watered-down, anonymous version I emailed to Michael, is personal enough that I won't share it here). Suffice to say that "tough time" is an understatement, and I've been doing my best to help this student survive it.
Michael sent me an email back, saying that of all the stories he received, the one about my student stuck to him the most, so he would be sending the handmade journal and the care package. In his follow up post he talked about how hearing these stories had changed him, and how he planned on trying to get a package out to everyone who sent him a story.
The experience has changed me, a bit, too. It's a very generous thing he's doing; I can't even begin to comprehend how much such an endeavor will cost him in books and time and shipping (although other readers have offered to donate to help him with shipping costs, which speaks well of his community of followers, too). I forget, sometimes, in the midst of our budget cuts and wars and crime, that there are people out there like Michael; there are whole communities of strangers who are willing to help brighten someone's day, even for a moment.
I don't know that that level, that concentration, of generosity between strangers has ever had such an easy forum as the internet. This is one example, and perhaps the biggest I've experienced, but there are many more; and each time it happens, my faith in humanity is resuscitated just a little bit.
3.23.2011
a world of made
pity this busy monster,manunkind,
not. Progress is a comfortable disease:
your victim(death and life safely beyond)
plays with the bigness of his littleness
--electrons deify one razorblade
into a mountainrange;lenses extend
unwish through curving wherewhen until unwish
returns on its unself.
A world of made
is not a world of born--pity poor flesh
and trees,poor stars and stones,but never this
fine specimen of hypermagical
ultraomnipotence. We doctors know
a hopeless case if--listen:there's a hell
of a good universe next door;let's go
e. e. cummings
(I taught this poem to my sophomores today. It was their favorite, I think, of what I showed them, which makes me happy.)
2.03.2011
giving trees
It started rather slowly. I shared Ender's Game, and then Ender's Shadow, with a small, quiet student who sketched while I lectured and learned better when he did. I could tell by the way he drew the illustrations of the books for his presentation that they'd stuck with him. His Ender, blond with head bowed while they took the monitor off his neck, looked like him.
And then I loaned Pride and Prejudice to one of my seniors so that she would understand the allusion when I said a mutual acquaintance reminded me of Mr. Collins.
It began to build. When one of my juniors was going through a rough time at home, I lent her my copy of Matilda (a testament to how much I trust her). And I handed her Hunger Games and Catching Fire yesterday, promised that I'd give her the third before she was ready for it. She started reading Slaughterhouse on her own, on Google books, because of my tattoo, and was complaining about it cutting off after the first fifty pages. Once she pays off her library fines, she's checking it out from the school library.
I realized yesterday too that my Chinese student, still not proficient in the written form of English, might benefit from reading fun things at a slightly lower difficulty level. I tried to pawn off my extra copy of Diary of a Part-time Indian on him, but he vetoed it; I was able to get him to check out Ender's Game instead. This feels like a success, or will be if he likes it.
I already know the next student, a sophomore, that I'm handing the Hunger Games series to. I'm planning out without meaning to the next few titles I'm going to loan my junior, the one who reminds me so strongly of my far-away sister.
And it occurred to me: I don't have to only share with them the literature that they often get bored of and quit reading simply because it's homework. I have to do that too, but I can share with them my private shelves as well, sneak them the books that impacted me and wound their way into my psyche long before some of them were even born.
And then I loaned Pride and Prejudice to one of my seniors so that she would understand the allusion when I said a mutual acquaintance reminded me of Mr. Collins.
It began to build. When one of my juniors was going through a rough time at home, I lent her my copy of Matilda (a testament to how much I trust her). And I handed her Hunger Games and Catching Fire yesterday, promised that I'd give her the third before she was ready for it. She started reading Slaughterhouse on her own, on Google books, because of my tattoo, and was complaining about it cutting off after the first fifty pages. Once she pays off her library fines, she's checking it out from the school library.
I realized yesterday too that my Chinese student, still not proficient in the written form of English, might benefit from reading fun things at a slightly lower difficulty level. I tried to pawn off my extra copy of Diary of a Part-time Indian on him, but he vetoed it; I was able to get him to check out Ender's Game instead. This feels like a success, or will be if he likes it.
I already know the next student, a sophomore, that I'm handing the Hunger Games series to. I'm planning out without meaning to the next few titles I'm going to loan my junior, the one who reminds me so strongly of my far-away sister.
And it occurred to me: I don't have to only share with them the literature that they often get bored of and quit reading simply because it's homework. I have to do that too, but I can share with them my private shelves as well, sneak them the books that impacted me and wound their way into my psyche long before some of them were even born.
1.19.2011
the worst part of growing up
It's not taxes, or responsibility, or the mortgage I will someday have (mortgages are the final step in journey to adulthood, you know). It's not even realizing that ten years have passed without you accomplishing anything of note.
It's discovering that, unlike what you were told, it's not the crème de la crème that rises to the top. The intelligent, rational, logical, respectable people are not the ones who are actually in charge.
It's the incompetent people who slide by on a wink and a smile who somehow blunder their way into high places and "run" things.
This is a terrifying, horrifying, demoralizing realization.
There's some part of me that wants to warn my students: I am teaching you to think. You are becoming smarter. You are becoming rational, logical, critical. And this will, almost inevitably, make you miserable: you will not be able to help being frustrated with people who refuse to think. Sheep are blissful in their ignorance; you will not be ignorant, but neither can you achieve that sort of opiating bliss.
The Tree of Knowledge is perilous, indeed.
It's discovering that, unlike what you were told, it's not the crème de la crème that rises to the top. The intelligent, rational, logical, respectable people are not the ones who are actually in charge.
It's the incompetent people who slide by on a wink and a smile who somehow blunder their way into high places and "run" things.
This is a terrifying, horrifying, demoralizing realization.
There's some part of me that wants to warn my students: I am teaching you to think. You are becoming smarter. You are becoming rational, logical, critical. And this will, almost inevitably, make you miserable: you will not be able to help being frustrated with people who refuse to think. Sheep are blissful in their ignorance; you will not be ignorant, but neither can you achieve that sort of opiating bliss.
The Tree of Knowledge is perilous, indeed.
1.13.2011
the heavier the burden
I experienced an intense moment of weight, today.
One of my juniors, a quiet, swimmer's-shouldered, sensitive gem of a girl, waited after class to talk to me. Yesterday she had come to me at lunch to ask how to apologize to her sister, who didn't want an apology. When my student started crying in the middle of class, perhaps a half hour later, I thought it might have something to do with that. She was still listening to me talk about the book we were analyzing, nodding at me as she does, but her eyes were pale red and filled with tears that never seemed to fall. Filled is a common figure of speech, but I mean it literally.
She told me today what I had already partially heard from a co-worker: this student's friend, a boy at another high school, is very suddenly dying of bone cancer. She got a text in my class yesterday, from her mother, saying that he was in his last hours.
My student told me this, her eyes again awash with tears, and I told her I'd heard and that she could have left my class if she'd needed to cry, that she should let me know if I can do anything. She approached me without a word and hugged me, just briefly, and left.
The weight hit me, then. I remembered that my aunt, my favorite aunt, went in for a lumpectomy this morning, and I had no idea how it had gone. And I realized that I have been talking of nothing but death for the last four days: death in the form of the little boy, kissing the pomegranates when the bomb dropped, in my juniors' novel Black Rain; Macbeth killing Duncan with my sophomores; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern dying, not dying, perhaps dying, with my seniors; Christina Green, the nine-year-old shot this weekend, whose funeral was today, and whom I tied to the boy in the book when it came time to discuss why the death of children hits us so hard; the relative of another student, one who came to me on Monday and said that because of it, she couldn't handle discussing the play. My boyfriend's mother lost her job this week in a lay-off, which is another kind of death. Everything is suddenly so very, very heavy.
And with the weight is the inescapable realization: this is it. This is all we have. We are balanced, precariously, on a knife edge, and any moment we plunge into the abyss that waits on either side. (I know I am stealing this metaphor from somewhere, but you'll forgive me, because it is a good one.)
The inescapable realization is, for me, followed by acceptance, or at least a desire for acceptance. This is how it happens: people die. So it goes. It just means that, before that happens, you have to live the best you can, reveling in the balance.
Please don't think I think I'm being original. I don't feel that I am. People have been saying this, in one form or another, for a very long time. But the realization, and the acceptance of it, is the closest thing to truth I've found, and I needed to share. There's been so much of heaviness, of late.
Milan Kundera says in The Unbearable Lightness of Being:
One of my juniors, a quiet, swimmer's-shouldered, sensitive gem of a girl, waited after class to talk to me. Yesterday she had come to me at lunch to ask how to apologize to her sister, who didn't want an apology. When my student started crying in the middle of class, perhaps a half hour later, I thought it might have something to do with that. She was still listening to me talk about the book we were analyzing, nodding at me as she does, but her eyes were pale red and filled with tears that never seemed to fall. Filled is a common figure of speech, but I mean it literally.
She told me today what I had already partially heard from a co-worker: this student's friend, a boy at another high school, is very suddenly dying of bone cancer. She got a text in my class yesterday, from her mother, saying that he was in his last hours.
My student told me this, her eyes again awash with tears, and I told her I'd heard and that she could have left my class if she'd needed to cry, that she should let me know if I can do anything. She approached me without a word and hugged me, just briefly, and left.
The weight hit me, then. I remembered that my aunt, my favorite aunt, went in for a lumpectomy this morning, and I had no idea how it had gone. And I realized that I have been talking of nothing but death for the last four days: death in the form of the little boy, kissing the pomegranates when the bomb dropped, in my juniors' novel Black Rain; Macbeth killing Duncan with my sophomores; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern dying, not dying, perhaps dying, with my seniors; Christina Green, the nine-year-old shot this weekend, whose funeral was today, and whom I tied to the boy in the book when it came time to discuss why the death of children hits us so hard; the relative of another student, one who came to me on Monday and said that because of it, she couldn't handle discussing the play. My boyfriend's mother lost her job this week in a lay-off, which is another kind of death. Everything is suddenly so very, very heavy.
And with the weight is the inescapable realization: this is it. This is all we have. We are balanced, precariously, on a knife edge, and any moment we plunge into the abyss that waits on either side. (I know I am stealing this metaphor from somewhere, but you'll forgive me, because it is a good one.)
The inescapable realization is, for me, followed by acceptance, or at least a desire for acceptance. This is how it happens: people die. So it goes. It just means that, before that happens, you have to live the best you can, reveling in the balance.
Please don't think I think I'm being original. I don't feel that I am. People have been saying this, in one form or another, for a very long time. But the realization, and the acceptance of it, is the closest thing to truth I've found, and I needed to share. There's been so much of heaviness, of late.
Milan Kundera says in The Unbearable Lightness of Being:
The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?Both, friends. Choose both.
12.01.2010
take that, naysayers OR a NaNoWriMo success story
My Pre-IB sophomores have spent the last month writing novels as a part of National Novel Writing Month. The adult challenge is to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. As students, they were asked to set a goal of at least 18,000 words. As a reference, that's about 60 pages of text in double-spaced, 12 pt font.
I am incredibly proud of the following statistics. Of my 31 students,
This is a huge, mind-boggling success. It is an incredibly tangible expression of my personal belief that my students--despite being heavily minority, taught by failing schools, and mostly on free and reduced lunch--are capable of anything, if only one asks it of them and believes that they can succeed.
I am incredibly proud of the following statistics. Of my 31 students,
- 18 met or exceeded their word count goal.
- 22 took a risk and set a goal that was over the minimum, even though they knew that this could affect their grade negatively.
- 23 wrote more than 18,000 words.
- The class average percent of the word count completed was 85%.
This is a huge, mind-boggling success. It is an incredibly tangible expression of my personal belief that my students--despite being heavily minority, taught by failing schools, and mostly on free and reduced lunch--are capable of anything, if only one asks it of them and believes that they can succeed.
11.21.2010
thought processes
Sometimes, it's so clear what my students were thinking when they write something.
One of my students, in answer to a quiz question, did the following:
Although html coding makes it impossible, on the paper you can see her increasing levels of frustration as she uses one line to cross out the first misspelling, two for the second, and several lines for the final "c". It's especially funny as she could have used the "c" for the "cart" she finally chose instead of chariot.
It's such a microcosm of of how we function in all areas of our lives, and it made me chuckle.
One of my students, in answer to a quiz question, did the following:
5. Medea escapes on acharriottcherroteccart pulled by dragons.
Although html coding makes it impossible, on the paper you can see her increasing levels of frustration as she uses one line to cross out the first misspelling, two for the second, and several lines for the final "c". It's especially funny as she could have used the "c" for the "cart" she finally chose instead of chariot.
It's such a microcosm of of how we function in all areas of our lives, and it made me chuckle.
10.15.2010
grading day
Annelies and I came back from getting lunch--sushi rolls--to find some of our seniors taking a break from their Group 4 project on the lawn in the front of the school.
Three of the girls were lying in the lush grass, heads on each others' stomachs. They were under the half shade of the tree, and when we passed they lifted themselves in unison to say "hi" to us, then settled gracefully back down again.
The boys were playing some game of catch, one throwing to three or four others, running lightly and easily over the emerald grass, with the compact muscles of late adolescence and their skin glowing.
They all looked so healthy and happy and natural, out there in the October midday, the breeze then just lightly blowing, and it made my heart sing to see them.
Three of the girls were lying in the lush grass, heads on each others' stomachs. They were under the half shade of the tree, and when we passed they lifted themselves in unison to say "hi" to us, then settled gracefully back down again.
The boys were playing some game of catch, one throwing to three or four others, running lightly and easily over the emerald grass, with the compact muscles of late adolescence and their skin glowing.
They all looked so healthy and happy and natural, out there in the October midday, the breeze then just lightly blowing, and it made my heart sing to see them.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)