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

©By Vijaya Sundaram

March 7th, 2013

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 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