Apr 3, 2013 Teaching and Learning

All you bloggers out there!

I just wanted to let you know that I’m starting to feel as if I’m a part of this strange, wonderful, anonymous, underground community, who reach out across the vast ocean of cyberspace to each other, from our deserted islands.

It’s really rather nice.  Sometimes, I think it would be nice to see the ones I don’t already know face to face.  Then, I think, I’m glad I don’t actually do so. 

Makes everyone that much more mysterious and interesting.  I can imagine what your faces look like (if you haven’t posted images), and imagine your setting and all the people who fill your days.  More than that, I love the characters, art, photographs, notions, poems, thoughts, images, concepts and dreams which you share so freely with the rest of the world.

That’s a kind of trust.

Looking forward to seeing more of your work in the fullness of time.

Warmly,

Dreamer of Dreams

Tags: blog, Bloggers, blogging community, Message in a Bottle, Shoutout

Mar 29, 2013 Teaching and Learning

Maelstrom – A Poem

©By Vijaya Sundaram

Written long ago, on Sunday, June 20, 2010

And thus, we send out our frail leaves of self

Floating on a tide of indeterminate purpose,

While all around us the seagulls call loudly to one another.

Eddies whirl our bits of memories about

And then, we vanish, leaf by leaf

Into a maelstrom,

Where, far below,

The monsters of the deep await.

******************************************************

And then, with our flaming magic swords

We vanquish them, swish, swish, swish!

And turn them into pretty fish that swim up

And pop into the air, turning into butterflies

Which then arise through the mist into the clouds

And return as rain, which then descend

Into the depths of a maelstrom,

Where, far below …

The monsters of the deep await.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~The End~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Mar 28, 2013 Essays on Music and Musicians, Parenting/ Home-schooling / Family Music and other Notes, Teaching and Learning

What Does it Mean to Be a Teacher?
©By Vijaya Sundaram
March 28th, 2013

It means that you:

Give unstintingly of your attention to your student or students who are there to learn from you.

Not allow dislike, prejudice or frustration to mar your interactions, even if a student makes it VERY hard.

Don’t give in to despair when confronted with failure, either on the part of your students to understand, acknowledge, absorb or appreciate the beauty of what you’re offering, or what they’re learning, or on your own part for not always having been all of the things you wanted to be, from time to time — because we’re all exhausted, all human, all prone to retire from time to time, to lick our wounds and self-heal.

Find that which is pure, child-like (with a capacity for wonder, questioning and curiosity) in your student, and teach THAT person within the student.

Listen to, and learn from, your students.

Always remember you’re a conduit (through whom all of the knowledge, learning and understanding flow)  not the repository of all of those things.

Love, always love your student, love your own teacher, and love the subject you’re teaching deeply and completely.

****************************************************************

I was thinking of these things after I had a long talk with my husband, teacher extraordinaire. 

He had been feeling low, because a student had omitted mentioning him as his music teacher on his website (and had shamelessly mentioned more famous and well-known names in the field).  My husband wasn’t expecting gratitude, just acknowledgement, because in this field, as in any great field of artistic and soulful endeavor, one MUST acknowledge  one’s teachers, especially those with whom one has spent a significant amount of time.

My husband is primarily a teacher of Indian classical music (among other types of music).  He had taught this student thoughtfully, devotedly and completely, over a relatively long period of time, and didn’t expect much back from him.  The student was talented, but arrogant, puffed up with a spurious sense of self-importance.  We had already seen signs of that while he used to come to our place nine years or so ago, but we dismissed that as the cockiness of youth.

There is no way to get around this, no matter how much one might try and dismiss it as a passing wind which we “respect not.”  To find that one is consciously omitted rankles.  One would have to be a sage to brush it off. 

That student’s rank ingratitude and puffed-up self-importance will cause him grief one day. Every person has to face his or her Karmic duty. 

What was my husband’s response to feeling low about all this, plus other worries? 

This: 

I have taught many people; I have always tried to give appropriately to the individual student rather than use prefabricated lessons or curricula.

No two people want or need the same thing. But everyone needs music.

The world’s parlous condition increases our need for song. I sometimes become discouraged…but singing fortifies me and reminds me that I’m just one link in a chain that reaches farther back in time than any of us can imagine.

I have had so many great teachers in my life; I’m remembering them….while thinking of my students. If I cannot give what I know to my students, my teachers’ love and labor was in vain. My teachers loved me. I love my students. That’s how it works.

Tags: #Journal Entry, #Learning, #Teaching, Students, teachers

Mar 23, 2013 Awake in Real Time: Coffee-induced Meditations and Journal Entries, Reading, Writing, Thinking, Teaching and Learning

A Thirst for Human Knowledge

©By Vijaya Sundaram

March 23rd, 2013

When I was very young, it was very hard to imagine a past without me in it.

As I grew a little older, I got it, and loved reading history books. The past was an amazing panorama of stories blending into each other, misted with mythology and moistened with tears for some of the great ones.  All around me, growing up, were the ghosts of India’s past, swirling up through the books and prowling around my consciousness.

I wept over Asoka (Ashoka) the Great, Harsha Vardhana, Shivaji the Great, Akbar, Shah Jahan, Gautama, who became the Buddha, Mahavira.  I struggled over the names of the Chera, Chola and Pandya kings.  I wondered where the women of those times were, and how they endured all this.  I was pleased with the story of Rani of Jhansi, although I hated, absolutely hated the practice of Sati, which reduced the power of women to ashes.  I was put off by the great battles, the greed and small-mindedness of some of the Emperors and Kings, enshrined in their own mythologies.

And then, there was “world history.”  How I loved it all!  I pored over my history books, soaking up stories and facts about Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, China, and all of the ancient kingdoms.  The middle ages did nothing for me, and I found stories about the people’s dirt, dumb superstitions and squalor to be VERY upsetting, but not more so than the rank avarice and shameless exploitation of the masters who ruled the people.  Similar kinds of movements (feudalism, etc.) were cropping up everywhere in the world.  (One has to wonder about how all historical movements around the world paralleled each other — the rise of hunter-gatherers, agriculturists, kingdoms, tyrannies, feudalism, the rise of organized religion, the movements in art, literature, science, as well as the constant wars, dictatorships, democracy, all cycling each other.)

The Medieval period might have been stinking, superstitious and stuffy, but there were some bright spots.  As a forerunner of the Renaissance, Dante’s vision of the Inferno and Il Paradiso bloomed in people’s minds, forcing new metaphors into their conceptions of heaven and hell .  While I disliked Dante’s sadistic visions, he made hell sound much more interesting than dull old Heaven.   And I am forced to consider that, while Dante over-indulged in his descriptions of the horrors of the nine circles of Hell, and all of the different types of damnation, there was some sense of the metaphorical aspects of all this, and that people’s minds were evolving.

Hieronymus Bosch, medieval-surrealist supreme, the artistic forefather of Salvador Dali (in my mind), exemplified similar ideas in his paintings.  Carl Gustav Jung (one of my favorite psychologists, whose book, “Memories, Dreams and Recollections I would re-read with an unquenchable thirst during my teen years) called Bosch, “The Master of the Monstrous, the Discoverer of the Unconscious.”  So, the Medieval Period wasn’t a total loss.  There were artists dealing with the monsters thrown up by humanity’s unconscious mind.  There were writers and theologians, and scientists who tried to separate the strands, but they were all creatures of their time, as are we all.

Along came the Renaissance, and that thrilled me.  Dante gave way to Petrarch, and Boccaccio commented on everything.  Humanism seemed to be on the rise.  Over and over again, I read about the Italians, their art, architecture, science, and  religion. Leonardo Da Vinci fascinated me, as did Michelangelo.   The Renaissance must have seemed like a kaleidoscopic time after the stinking stuffiness of the previous age.

Then, the Age of Reason, of Enlightenment bloomed, but it was incomplete.  The earlier ideas of Ptolemy had given way to Copernicus, then to Galileo, then Newton (I’m sure I shall be corrected, but this is all just memory surfacing), then all of the great scientists of the modern age.

Now, we’re in the age of Doubt and Skepticism.  If there weren’t so much ignorance, superstition, blood and gore, we’d be in a good place.  Alas, there are those in power who seem not to have learned the lessons that history offers, or if they did, they learned the wrong things from those lessons.  And so, we have the terrible wars of the 20th and 21st Century.  Our rulers play by different rules than the ones they want other rulers to follow.  Such rank and absurdly frightening hypocrisy.  How can people NOT see this?  How do we tolerate this?  In order to seize enough power to influence the masses to one’s (correct!) way of thinking, one has to want power.  And the danger, as we know, is that, as Lord Acton said, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

All this, I guess,  is a separate set of ruminations about the ruination of us all.  I don’t feel like meditating on that yet.

Alas, the details of all that I’ve learned are fading away.  I shall have to start re-reading history, because, as we all know, “Those who do not study history are condemned to repeat it,” and I do not want to replay all those scenes of ignorance, superstition, blood and gore, even metaphorically, in my mind or my life.

The decades have rolled by, and I’m in my middle years, and comfortably ensconced in my life. Soon, perhaps, Enlightenment and the Age of Reason will come.  Then, the end will come. I sort of get it.

What I will miss is reading about it.

I see this thirst for history in my daughter as well.   When she was younger, she’d ask us about life before she began.  She still does, but with less urgency, just intense curiosity.  Now, she loves history, and wants to know more about it.  I hope that I shall do justice to her thirst for this knowledge.  I hope we can discuss those difficult matters without losing our way, or being heartbroken, or nauseated to such an extent that we stop studying.

Somehow, I think that we will continue to study, and can do so without losing our way.

Thanks for reading!

~ Vijaya Sundaram

(I will insert pictures soon, but don’t have time right now!)

Tags: Carl Gustav Jung, Dante, European History, Hieronymus Bosch, History, Indian History, Love of History, the Renaissance

Mar 21, 2013 Teaching and Learning

Despair — A Poem
©By Vijaya Sundaram
March 21, 2013

All this writing is a flailing
All this talking is a failing
All these songs are a wailing
All these stories are a hailing
Of ice onto a desert, frozen
By sun and burned by snow.

You know that, don’t you?

A flailing and a failing
Because the silence waits.
Brooding and unrelenting
Endless and frightful,
The dark and angry silence

Waits.

Jealous of those who speak,
Greedy to suck our sounds,
Enraged by us,
Ready for us,
Eternal and malign,
Silence awaits our sound.

For it will all be swallowed
By the gaping chasm
Yawning like a grin
In the skull of Death,
A chasm that widens
And lies at the very end of
The trail of my words,
And the wail of yours.

Our out-pouring of the chatter
Which approximates thought,
Words, words, words:
Weak reflectors of the
Unfathomable,
Beaming into the blackness
Between our minds,
Create false comfort,
For in our waking sleep,
Creeps in the beast.

All words lead to …
All roads lead to …
All songs lead to …
All action leads to …

So, I know this, don’t I?
And you know this, don’t you?

And yet, I struggle and flail
Throw my songs, my words out,
Hoping some of them will flutter
Onto a Waiting Cliff, bleached
By a starving sun,
Weak but pulsing still.

And you struggle and flail,
Toss out cry after cry,
Song after song,
Story after story,
Hoping they will be
Miraculously delivered
To a faraway shore.

Perhaps a Someone will see
And hear, listen and watch.
See mine struggling,
Loosen their terrified hold,
And set them free.

Perhaps another Someone will see
Your castaways on the faraway shore
Revive them, give them succor.
And they too will be free,
Eternals, all.

And perhaps, mine will flutter
Into a sky that promises
Something unknown,
Unknowable, but bright.

And perhaps, they will call
Into the widening sphere
Hoping to find their mates,
And roost somewhere,

Forever.

And perhaps yours will traipse
Into another sphere and bask
In the light of Imagination,
Ready to be reborn
In another form.

I can only dream of this,
I can only give shape to this
In those very words
Which might tumble,
Echoing eerily
Into that yawning chasm.

For, to think otherwise,
Is to die, not by degrees,
As we all do, and must,
But right here, right

Now.

– And that would never do!

And thus, the false dawn brightens
Our gasping, choking day.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~The End~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

(Feeling very, very dark today.)

Tags: #Communication, #Death, #Hope, Despair, Eternity, Falling, False Dawn, Flailing, Silence, Words

Mar 19, 2013 Teaching and Learning

After Steubenville — A Poem

©By Vijaya Sundaram

March 19th, 2013

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A sickness has stolen into our worlds.

The souls of our young men,

Swollen with self-love

(Or could it be self-hatred?),

Fatten themselves upon the spirits

Of our young women, who,

Powerless, longing for recognition,

No matter whence it arrives,

Find themselves caught unawares

In the buffeting waves

Of the contempt and hate

That pulses in the swollen, unfettered

Power-crazed glands of young men.

After such crimes, what punishment?

And  who shall speak for our girls?

Filled with confusion, eager for love,

Looking for direction, they follow

False trails, lose sight of themselves,

And, trapped in a mirror world,

Desperate, surrounded, they cry out,

Lose their way, flounder, flail, fall

Out of consciousness.

And the talking heads on idiot boxes

Blame them subtly, making mouth-noises.

Do they not see the horrors they condone,

Waggle-tongued hypocrites of our time

And of our shame?  Worshippers of clay gods,

They babble and preen, loose-jawed

Purveyors of muck, shaking their heads,

While our girls lose consciousness.

After such crimes, what punishment?

And who shall speak for the boys?

Lust for power and narcissism,

Hero-worship and sports-worship

Create a crazy, mirror-world with distorted

Images, reality suspended, decency snuffed out,

Morality crushed underfoot, shame splintered!

Self-knowledge drowned in manic laughter,

They cavort like Pan’s satyrs.

A sickness afflicts our children.

And our girls shall not see freedom

And our young men shall know prison.

Each imprisoned in a hell that we,

The makers of our world, need to break down.

Break down, rebuild, rename, re-teach.

And we need to teach our children well

Or we shall all go to hell.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~The End~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Teach Our Children — Crosby, Stills and Nash YouTube Video

Tags: #Original Poetry, #Punishment, Crime, Media, Ohio, sick society, Steubenville, Teach Our Children

Mar 7, 2013 Essays: On Books, Art, Literary Appreciation and so on, Reading, Writing, Thinking, Teaching and Learning

 OR: A Day in the Life of this Eighth Grade English Teacher

Today was a day of non-academic messiness.

We had finished John Steinbeck’s book The Pearl almost two weeks ago, but were working rather late on the projects, because the materials I’d ordered would take that long to arrive.  So, after their essay on the book, we moved on to our Holocaust unit, but revisited The Pearl in an oblique manner, in order to work on our “Personal Pearl” project.

In the book by Steinbeck (a terribly, terribly sad book, with almost no joy in it, except at the start), the protagonist, Kino, an indigenous pearl fisherman near the Sea of Cortez on the Pacific side of Mexico, finds a pearl, which they call “the Pearl of the World.”  The pearl seems, to Kino, to be a sort of crystal ball in which he can see his future — he’s very poor, and his idea of wealth consists of seeing himself, his wife, Juana, and their son Coyotito, all clad in beautiful new clothes.  He envisions himself getting properly married in a church, and getting their son baptised.  He sees his son getting an education, and reading from “a great book.”  He imagines a harpoon to replace the one he’d lost, and finally, he visualizes a rifle.  He shares his dreams with his neighbors, and this last one makes all of them hold their breath in amazement.  Ultimately, through some terrible events (which I cannot divulge), all that he finds himself with at the end of the book is the rifle.  All his other dreams vanish, and when he looks into the pearl, all he sees is the recent dead past, along with the scenes of suffering he’s had to undergo in his need to keep his pearl in order to sell it in the big city (as opposed to the greedy and underhanded pearl dealers in town, who had offered him a pittance for it).  Thus, the pearl becomes an extension of Kino’s past, present and future, an outward screen onto which all his dreams and hopes get projected.  It has always been and will always be only a pearl, but to Kino, it’s a symbol of all the misfortune and calamities he’s suffered.  The only recourse he has, at the end, is to part with it, and the way he does it, is as inevitable as the ending of a book of this nature can be.

It’s far from pleasant in parts, but the rhythm of Steinbeck’s prose is akin to hearing poetry spoken aloud by a singer.  The cadence of his language, the choice of words, the sentence structures, the metaphors — these make my imagination swoon.

But because the book is so sad, and our essay on it is so serious in tone, I try to offset that by having students work on personal pearls of their own (which is accompanied by a lighter, more personal essay).  These, however, are pearls which they create, and which reflect some aspect of  themselves (unlike Kino, who found his pearl, and it became his soul).  These pearls symbolize the work they do.  I ask them to imagine that we humans are all busily creating pearls out of the travails or struggles of our lives, much like an oyster would create a pearl to deal with the irritation caused by sand in its bivalves.

Thus, today, my students were going to make a “personal pearl” with small spheres I’d bought for the purpose.  On this “pearl” they were supposed to glue colorful pieces of tissue paper, and add details about some of their past achievements, or things they were proud to have accomplished — as public as winning a trophy, learning to sky-dive, learning to do several back-flips, or land an A in Spanish or French, and also as private as conquering fears or bad habits, becoming better at staying focused, speaking up in public, or gaining new confidence in themselves.

So, you can imagine the scene:

~A total of one hundred and seven students working on this project, arriving in groups of twenty or twenty-two, every forty-seven minutes (I teach five class periods), full of energy, full of the potential for deep mischief, full of enthusiasm at doing something different in an English class (Really?  We get to glue things, and mess around?), and ready to tackle anything.

~Controlled chaos erupting in the back of the classroom, with PILES of beautiful tissue paper,  shiny mylar paper, plus big containers of the smelliest, nastiest, stickiest but really fast-drying, and easily washable glue that leaves glued-on surfaces shiny and smooth: The charmingly named Mod-Podge.

~Chatter and cooperation, some occasional foolishness, which was quickly quelled by someone’s coevals and group pressure to do a nice job.

~And LOTS of paper strewn about everywhere — on desks, falling in slow-motion to the floor, lying in rainbow heaps on computer counters, decorating an occasional crazy student, or an object that’s not meant to be decorated.

This was our day, and it was good.

I like chaos, actually.  I don’t mind it at all.  People, when they know they’re going to make a nice, happy mess, change in behavior around each other.  They feel and act freer, somehow.  There’s lots of kidding, plenty of good-natured teasing, lobbed back-and-forth sallies between teacher and students, and license for me to say things like, “What on earth is THAT?!  Surely, you’re not thinking of handing that in!  It’s terrible!  It’s so awful I’m going to faint.  Save me!”

I can be terribly sexist (against boys — sorry!).  “Look at the girls, boys!  Check out how nicely they’re doing it.  Learn from them.  How come boys have NO clue how to be neat?  Huh?”  At this point, some boy will then hold up his beautifully worked-on “pearl” and I’ll pretend to reel my words back in, and eat them.  Sorry!  Sometimes, we can be wrong, you know!

So, the day unfolded.  I collected late homework assignments, had parent conferences during our mid-day Team Meeting time (saw FOUR parents within forty-five minutes, and all of the meetings were positive ones — yay!).

I opened a window, and the wind blew in promptly making little eddies of colored paper swirl up in the air, before I wrestled them into submission, while flakes of snow whirled around outside in the little courtyard below.  I wiped down the tables three times today, and swept my floor with my nifty little broom three times as well.  Otherwise, the scene that would have met the custodian’s eyes this evening would have made him faint right away.  And if he didn’t revive, it would have been on my head.

And I wouldn’t like that.

Besides, no one would like to walk into my classroom tomorrow morning, and find a passed-out, or worse, deceased custodian on the floor.  That’s a no-no!  (I mean, how would we concentrate on our studies?)

Such are the kinds of things we teachers have to worry about in order to keep our jobs!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~The End~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Tags: #Learning, #Teaching, A Day in the Life of an English Teacher, John Steinbeck, mild attempts at humor, Personal Pearl, Silliness, Snark, The Pearl

Mar 6, 2013 Teaching and Learning

Teaching, not Categorizing
©By Vijaya Sundaram
March 5, 2013

Today, having filled them out carefully over the weekend, the teachers in the Eighth Grade passed out the “High School Course Selection / Recommendation Forms” to our students.

This is always a big deal.

There are sighs of relief, fanning the air around the faces of some students: 

I made it, after all!

Oh, thank goodness. I won’t have to face my (WASP, or Irish-American, or Italian-American, or Russian, or Chinese, or Japanese, or Indian, or Pakistani, or Bagladesi, or Iranian, or French, or German) mother / father / grandmother / grandfather!

Thank goodness I won’t have to tell my [Harvard-educated, MIT-mentored, Stanford-schooled, Yale-feted, Berkeley-breathed (not the cartoonist!), Columbia-crested, Wellesley-weaned, Brown-begotten, Princeton-pampered] parents that I didn’t make it.

Thank goodness, I won’t have to tell my (Boston-Brahmin establishment-upholding, endowment-elevating, charity-donating, old-money-possessing) family members that I am in a middle or lower-level class.

Then, there are doubts in the form of winged question marks fluttering like moths around the heads of other students:

Am I no good then? Does she hate me, after all the time I spent, nodding and smiling, answering and participating, working hard, stressing out, sleeping less? Does she? What was the point of all this?

Am I no good then? Do I lack the brains? Do I not read and write well enough for her? Does she think I can only do this much, and no more?

Am I no good then? Does she think I cannot read John Steinbeck, because I didn’t understand the language in The Pearl? (That book is so hard! How can she expect me to understand it? And it was a book I didn’t like anyway!)

Then, there are always tears held in check in the case of some students. Sometimes, the dam breaks. The floodgates are opened. One could drown in their sadness.  (This hasn’t happened this year, but it could!):

I knew it. I’m no good, really. She’s just confirmed it for me. I am a dunce. I always was. I wonder what my I.Q. is! It must be in the low 80s. I’m sure of it!

I knew it. My mother / father / sister / brother / other teachers all told me that I didn’t really have it in me to do this, and I don’t. I’m never going to be good at anything. I might as well give up.

I knew it! I should just stick to skateboarding or hanging out downtown with my friends. It’s much easier. Doesn’t really demand work. I’m not good at thinking, anyway. When I’m sixteen, I’ll quit school!

There are the jubilant ones.
There are the doubtful ones.
There are the resigned and defeated ones.
There are the belligerent ones (Not any so far, this year).
There are the indifferent ones.
There are the realistic ones.

And through all of this, I feel terrible.

I never believed in levels for my subject– not at this grade, anyway! They’re only children, I say to myself. Give them the work, yes, but give them a break! Their brains are growing. Their tastes are changing. Their maturity is slowly unfurling its wings.

They’re only just beginning to understand that critical thinking isn’t about criticism.

In their book, up until now, or at least for several of them, inferring was the same as implying.

In their book, up until now (and probably still), to talk things over between themselves is the same as talking things over among themselves, because after all, all teenagers know that two is the same as more than two. Right?

In their book, to be beside themselves because they are roundly defeated in an argument is the same as the fact that an irrelevant factoid might be besides the point in a rational discussion, which fact pointed out by someone might make them cry. What’s the difference?  they might argue. They lost! That’s the point!  (This is the juncture where the chance to down a couple of aspirin is not to be passed up).

To be teenagers of thirteen and fourteen is to love a person, a subject, a teacher, a friend, a movie, a book, a celebrity, a cupcake, a dress, a hairstyle, a pet, a T.V. show, pasta, pizza, burgers, soccer, dance, music, musicians, actors, actresses, passionately, devotedly, equally … until they hate some of those same things equally.

They can indulge in rational thought, sure, just as they can call upon logic to prove points and impress grownups. They can don sensible behavior, like a school uniform, only to quickly lapse into absolute irrationality, stripping their minds of any sense, and donning foolishness, like those skimpy clothes that girls keep in their lockers (away from the eyes of parents) in order to change into them in the Girls’ Bathroom, and walk down the hallways in scandalous attire, only to be caught and made to change back into sensible clothes by the Assistant Principals or the School Nurse. 

Keeping all this in mind, I can (knowing that it will probably not register) use logic, trusting to their put-on rationality, and they will nod miserably and agree with what I’m saying, and then go home, cry to their mothers and say, “I hate her!  She hates me! She put me in the __________ level!”  Their mothers will say, “She doesn’t hate you, but you can put on your best behavior and be sure to make all your work pretty.  I’ll hire you a tutor, and you can bring your grades up.  Then, we can appeal her recommendation!”

How can I explain to them that these recommendations aren’t personal? That I spent hours looking over their grades, their essays, their tests and their quizzes, and mentally reviewing their class participation and accuracy of responses to thought-provoking questions? That I worry that I may have not been fair to someone, and thus go over my recommendations even more carefully?  That I might be condemning someone to feel like she or he is a failure, because she or he hasn’t been recommended for the __________ level?

So, the day passes. However, so far, no tears this year. Tomorrow, the day after, and all of the next few weeks, there will be a flood of emails, requests, pleas to change my recommendation. In some cases, the recommendation will change, if they improve between now and May.

Until then, we labor on, mightily. We hope the children won’t hate us. We don’t hate them. We love them. We want them to feel successful. Unfortunately, hidden in all these recommendations is the underlying feeling of unworthiness for students.

If the levels didn’t carry with them a number (credits in the High School) and a social stigma (idle chatter at suburban cocktail parties, status-related boasting, worry about college admissions, you-name-it), it would be wonderful. It would simply mean that people go where they can grow.

We teachers do all this in good faith.

The system, however, is ranged against good faith. The system needs numbers. Numbers are helpful. They can be used to impress, justify, silence. They can be manipulated to show a slanted viewpoint. They can be used to frighten and convince. Sometimes they tell the truth.

And sometimes, they are the enemy.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~The End of My Rant~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Tags: #Learning, Being teenagers, Course Selections, Rant, Recommendation for High School, Regret, Social Status, teachers, Teaching teenagers

Mar 3, 2013 Awake in Real Time: Coffee-induced Meditations and Journal Entries, Teaching and Learning

Curiously, it didn’t hurt.  It didn’t do much of anything, except to create a sense of dull satisfaction: Yup.  I knew my poems didn’t suit their needs, but I sent them off anyway.

Realism, thy name is DreamersOfDreams.

It must be because I’m almost forty-nine — the almost part is crucial.

It must be because I know how long a struggle all this is for most writers.  That’s why, I guess, they send stuff off when they’re in their twenties.

I didn’t do that in my twenties.  I was too busy struggling to find a footing, instead.  Married to an American, and finding myself on American soil for the first time at age twenty-four, I looked for work and found it in an independent record label and distribution company in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Working between ten and fourteen hours a day at $4.25 an hour for the first year, standing  on concrete floors, pushing a shopping cart from aisle to aisle, picking LPs, cassettes and CDs, packing them, and shipping them via UPS, I got a taste for what it meant to be really low on the totem pole.  Forced to listen to strange LPs played by angry young men during work hours, who indulged in mindless vulgarity and obscene epithets strewn carelessly about, I winced in almost-physical pain and went home to practise jazz and Indian classical music with a loving and kind husband.

For that first year, despite the hours of badly recompensed, and mindless, labor during the day, we composed music, played together, saw movies on the weekends at the Capitol Theatre in Arlington, and ate out at an Indian restaurant once a week.   I wrote short stories, poems and songs.  He composed his music.  We performed together.  I had vivid dreams.  I felt newly born, innocent.

We owned hardly anything — just books, instruments, cassettes and LPs, and later, CDs.  I wore old clothes, dressed oddly, didn’t much care for the trappings of middle-class modes of dress and manner.  My husband and I were in love, we had music, we had a good, rich-in-music, if financially-impoverished life.  Music saturated our waking and sleeping hours, and it was beautiful.

I realized that all my ambitions of my early college years had taken a back seat to all this creative sweetness.  It was enough to do music, practise voice and guitar, get better at singing and song-writing and take long walks, after a rough day at the warehouse.  It was enough to be content.

I used to be ambitious.  It had all vanished.

This is not to say there weren’t troubles in our life.  Somehow, anything that smacked of trouble in my life simply rolled off my back.  People use the phrase, “water off a duck’s back.”  I prefer my mother’s beautiful image in Tamil — “water off the petals of a lotus.”  That was what she’s been like all her life.  Troubles, terrible troubles, financial and medical, happened to her and my father.  She withstood it all, and seems to grow every year into a more beautiful, complete person.

We had our troubles too.  I don’t remember them, not much, anyway.

Over the years, my husband and I grew in music.  We went back twice for a year at a time to study with our beloved Indian classical vocal teacher, Pandit S.G. Devasthali (now “late,” to use the classic phrase used by Indians as well as Batswana people, like the fictional Mma Ramotswe).  We performed Hindustani classical vocal together.  I wrote many songs, composed surreal music, arranged them for sax, ‘bone, bass, guitar and drums (my husband’s ensemble, Antigravity), and later for sitar, dilruba, flute, Indian violin (with our dear friends playing those instruments, in the Indian version of Antigravity).  I played my songs in coffeehouses and the streets of Harvard Square, as well as the subways and made grocery money. We slept on a futon bed and used milk-crates with cushions as chairs in the living room.  Drank a lot of black coffee.  Ate veggie-lentils and rice. One can do that in one’s twenties.

I continued to work at the company.  Rose in wages, rose on the totem pole, not dramatically, just steadily.  Then, came the urge to get settled –that dreaded phrase, which smacks of middle-class ambition and morality.  The urge to become a teacher had become paramount.  I enrolled in an M.Ed. program at Lesley College, now Lesley University, got my degree, worked as Teaching Assistant in a Cambridge School, while doing my college courses in the evening, got my license, got a job at a nearby school (while finishing the last of my graduate courses and graduated), and have been at that suburban school ever since.

Then, came the house and the grinding work of rebuilding a wreck of a place, while living in it, dust and all.  Then, came our daughter.  Now, it’s all about teaching, being domestic and homeschooling.  I love it all.

And I also miss all that music and creative writing that I used to do.

Ambition is making a comeback, rather late in my life.  I’m not crazy-ambitious, just enough to want to publish my three plays, all those short stories I’ve written, all those poems I’ve poured out, and at least one novel before I die.

I want to write, just write.  I don’t want to do much else, sometimes.  However, I also love to teach.  I love singing and playing music.  I love bringing up my daughter.

So, I’ll try and fashion a life in which all these strands are inter-woven, and they’ll create a tapestry which will make sense for me.

And I won’t let any rejections get in my way.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~The End~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Tags: #Music, Antigravity, Cambridge, Harvard Square, looking back, Massachusetts, Rejection letters, Rounder Records, Writing

Mar 3, 2013 Essays on Music and Musicians, Parenting/ Home-schooling / Family Music and other Notes, Reading, Writing, Thinking, Teaching and Learning

Saturday is My Day of Rest

©By Vijaya Sundaram

March 2nd 2013

It’s Saturday, March 2nd, and I am in a foggy, unspecified place in my body and mind.

Having (as usual) slept only a few hours every day of this week, while beaming out energy and enthusiasm at school in a tightly focused way every single day of this past whole week, which had come hot on the heels of a semi-lazy, semi-busy vacation week, I am now a hollow shell.

I dealt with curriculum.

Gave a test.

Assigned a complicated and (I think) interesting project based on John Steinbeck’s book The Pearl, facilitated class discussion, finished up that book (begun well before vacation week), then taught verbs, participles and perfect verb tenses, and began to teach the Holocaust unit.  Assigned and began teaching Friedrich by Hans Peter Richter.

Teaching the Holocaust Unit is the hardest thing I do every year.  I use the Facing History and Ourselves curriculum and ideas as some of my resources.  I have read an enormous amount on this subject and immersed myself in it for over fifteen years.  Yet, I cannot bring myself to remember every single detail.  I have to re-read some of it.  It’s too much for me.  I know all the numbers, and have read the books of several of the famous writers.  I know all about the different concentration camps, the infamous Nazis who conducted their horrible experiments, the leaders of the Third Reich, the euphemisms adopted by the Nazis for their terrible practices.  I know all about the Nuremberg Trials, the huge disaster that was WWII and the burden of collective guilt, not only in Germany, but several other European nations.  And I know about the brave souls who individually (Schindler, Irena Sendler, the Bielski brothers, Miep Gies, others) and collectively saved several thousand Jews (the village of Le Chambon in France, and an entire country — Denmark).  It’s all too much to comprehend or internalize.  So, I map out the unit into perpetrators, bystanders, victims, resisters, rescuers and survivors.  Because we read about it, and discuss it all from this perspective, it helps me and my students deal with the enormity and mindless nature of a whole era as revealed in Friedrich and Night.  I show clips of interviews with survivors and rescuers/resisters.  I show non R-rated movies and several scenes from the less-horrifying but eye-opening parts from R-rated movies.  We read moving excerpts from Primo Levi’s books.  We read poems.  We discuss weighty matters of morality and philosophy as well.  We inquire into the nature of evil.  We look into Hannah Arendt’s statement about “the banality of evil.”

And each teenager in my class comes away from this experience a “sadder and wiser” person, arising the “morrow morn.”

But all that hasn’t happened for the classes yet.  The students are still at the beginning of the unit.

So, where was I?  Ah yes, I was still dwelling on this past week of work which assailed my senses and my soul.

I facilitated a meeting with Green Team members at my school on Monday, and with the Executive Director of a local organic farm, as well as with the Recycling Co-ordinator for the town in which I teach.  We discussed how we would begin composting wasted cafeteria food in our  school (and transport it to the local farm for the soil and chickens).  It was a good meeting, despite all the difficulties we were sure to experience when we did begin to follow through on this idea.

After the meeting, the kids, the other teacher and I did our usual, mad, panting, breathless, crazy-whirly recycling for the whole school — dragging the huge, blue recycle bins down the hallways of all five floors to the South Parking Lot, where the giant Casella recycling dumpster stood, and emptying out all those bins, for the Casella people to deal with on Wednesday.

Note:  We are all of us girls (well, two women teachers and the rest of them were girls.  Our one boy was absent)!

Where are the schoolboys in any worthwhile effort, like saving the planet?  The girls informed me that some of the boys laugh at the school’s recycling efforts (although our bins are full!).

Makes one despair.

Mothers and Fathers:  Please teach your sons (and daughters) that the planet is not for pillaging and plundering, despoiling and tossing away.  There’s only one planet.

I guess it’s time for me to give another rousing speech at lunchtime over the mike.  Every time I did that in the fall, I got a few more volunteers, some of them boys, but then they faded away.

What else?

Went to a Baby Shower for a friend/colleague at school on Thursday, and that was beautiful — such events are always moving, especially for those who are already mothers, but for everyone else too,  because one sees a different side of all these harassed and harried school-teachers, who take the time to be together.  Everyone brings something good to eat.  There are all these lovely platters of (mostly) healthy, nutritious food, veggie platters, the healthier variety of chips and yummy dips, fruit, and of course the obligatory dreadfully frosted carb-heavy cakes and cookies.  There are piled-up presents, streamers and pretty tassels.  We clear up a space in the school library, set out the food on pretty table-cloths, put up streamers, and shower the star of the afternoon, the new mother-to-be with love.  And she is always tender, radiant and full of hope and beauty.  I wrote a poem, after being urged to do so by some of the teachers there.  And I posted it on this blog-site on Thursday, which eased my sense of guilt with not writing something the previous day (at least, I think I didn’t write something.  Perhaps I did).

On Friday, after the regular, exhausting, unending round of classes which I taught (I teach one hundred and seven students a DAY, and that’s nothing!  It was one hundred and twenty-five a day last year, which nearly killed me and the other English teachers on the other two teams — math, science and history teachers don’t have it so bad, although everyone reported being exhausted last year!), I ran my Poetry Club, put out food for the kids, made hot chocolate for them, and we wrote.  Well, they wrote.  I usually do, but yesterday, I was busy facilitating.  I didn’t have time.  So, that was a wasted chance.

Then, dinner at The Punjab in Arlington with my family.  That’s always very nice, and we three are VERY goofy and silly together.  Then, there was music at night with daughter and husband, after which, I fell, exhausted, into a species of sleep.

All of today was spent in a strange, cocooned state.  Tired beyond imagining, feeling the weight of the ages press down upon my shoulder-blades, and with feet that alternately felt numb and tingling with tiredness, I did nothing at all, not even fun things.

I didn’t write anything yesterday, and nothing much today.  At least I wrote a poem on Thursday, I console myself.  Yes, it made me happy, but it doesn’t satisfy me.  I want the high that comes with writing stories every day, writing poems every day, having interesting and inspired thoughts.

I’ve been reading Alexander McCall Smith books.  When mindlessness strikes, I turn to mental comfort food, and McCall Smith’s books and P.G. Wodehouse’s books are for good vibes and good prose.  Dick Francis books, and occasionally the less grisly Robert Parker, Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky books are for a sense of life lived in danger (compared to my tame and happy existence).  Of course, there are the usual J.K. Rowling books, some grab-me sci-fi for sheer pleasure, or an Oliver Sacks book at hand for sheer pleasure or familiar, but in-depth, moving humanistic science .  Mind you, I’m not talking about my other literary loves.  This is the daily fare for someone who can read unfamiliar or weightier books only during school breaks, and during the summer.

Watched a TED video showcasing Amanda Fucking Palmer, which was very moving in a strange way, especially because I don’t actually like her music or her face, although it is extremely compelling.  I am able to separate my personal likes and dislikes from my respect for artists (musical artists or artists who do performance art) who do what they are compelled to do.  I like John Cage, for example, but am not moved in the least by his music (or lack thereof).  I LOVE Yoko Ono, but her actual art does nothing for me.  We need such artists.  They challenge our preconceived notions and push us to think beyond our “comfort zone.”

And of course, I love, love, love Neil Gaiman (and have done so well before his rise to fame and fortune, since the early 90s, when his Sandman books came out), so if he loves Amanda Palmer, I am prepared to love her too.

So, this was my past week.

Right now, while I type all this,  my husband is making fritters.  I hear my daughter singing upstairs, and I need to help her with her guitar practice.

On that note, I bid you all adieu.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~The End~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Tags: #Recycling, Alexander McCall Smith, Amanda Fucking Palmer, Baby Showers, Elie Wiesel, English Teachers, Facing History and Ourselves, Green initiatives in school, John Steinbeck, Neil Gaiman, P.G. Wodehouse, Poetry Club, Primo Levi, Teaching the Holocaust, Yoko Ono