after the feast

coming back from the holiday, trying to get my mind back in track, and naturally, procrastinating - er, blogging.

quite the past four days. first thanksgiving, which was lovely and more low-key this year. and then friday - goodwill hunting w/ rosepag, wonderful nap and 5-year high school reunion. the reunion was a lot more friendly than i thought it would be and i was really glad i went (but perhaps even more glad to have pete to look to and say "wanna get out of here?" whenever i needed to.) i was only slightly blown away that we are all Groan Ups, and it was cool to come back into that milieu with five years of being ourselves. some people seem to have grown up out of that pressure and some seem to have settled or compressed inwards... i'll be optimistically subjective (for what else, really, can i be?) and count myself amongst the former. mostly. honestly, though, it was kind of a triumph to be around them and be at ease, to realize that the demons that i fought back then didn't get the best of me.

saturday was goodbyes and a little correcting, then visiting bill en route to the rosen-baiers. we had pizza & beer and jon told horrible, horrible jokes and i read to benny and told leo about zombies. dropped rosie off w/ her boyfriend in lee and then went to the dreamaway. drama as usual, but it was great to see the old crew (or the new-old crew, i guess.) i begin to wonder how much of the bullshit is essential and sort of the engine of the magic and how much is perhaps the premonitions of the ship going down. and then i stop entertaining those thoughts and am just thankful that such a place exists. it's that kind of alternative reality, even if it's only one weird little restaurant, that makes me wonder if i'll always be coming back to the berkshires - if i'll end up there eventually.

and now here i am, preparing for what is actually my FIFTH week of teaching. it feels like yesterday that i started and at the same time feels like i've been there for a million years. and even though it's the hardest thing i've ever done, and won't stop being difficult ever, really, i found myself telling a lot of my old classmates that i love my life. and i do - seeing all of the options that have become people's lives for the past five years, and seeing mine, it becomes clear that dreams do come true (and then usually grow to astonish us with how mundane they are.) i mean, here i am, planning how to teach a bunch of brooklyn kids about the stories coming from the navel, as it were, of the collective unconscious (persephone myth tomorrow). here i am, guided on every side by men and women and places that are as beautiful as they are crazy, and i get to be the conduit of that beauty and insanity. i guess we all do, though; it's just the amounts we receive and give away that vary.

lists

god. i've had three damn days to get shit in order and to miraculously become the best english teacher i can be and you know what? i'm not. i didn't use my time well. i got some work done but there's a million other things i should have done, too.

i'm beginning to get it now - there is a certain under-controlness that experienced teachers exude that gets the kids in line - i don't have that yet. the under-controlness apparently comes from lots and lots of lists. lists of grades. lists of points earned for good behavior (pretty much the only way i can get them to sit down and start learning - the high school equivalent of a gold star. yes, i have to give them meaningless points to make them do anything... although the way they react it's clear that they are anything but meaningless). lists of things that were supposed to get done veteran's day weekend that actually got done.

i guess this is part of the magical process of figuring it out... but i can't help but wish i was there already, for my students' sakes and, of course, for my own.

light and dark imagery

so, last post was perhaps a bit too much of an overstatement. i made it through the first week, am mostly alive, and have learned a couple things.

• number one: no expectations, just knowing what they're capable of. no miracles are going to happen - or rather, the ones that are, i'll hardly see coming anyway.
• number two: don't take it personally.
• number three: just because they don't give a shit (or seem not to, anyway, at least after lunch) doesn't mean i don't give a shit

and things are really pretty good with my first three sections. my schedule works out so that the earlier in the morning, the better they are, and then we have 6th period lunch, and it's a like a swarm of demons overcomes them. and it happens every day, too. it's pretty sorely compounded by the fact that they haven't had a teacher for three weeks, have a brand-new teacher with very little experience, and are a CTT class (which, by the by, is a code for class comprised mainly of students with behavioral and/or developmental issues) so by eighth period i vacillate between deep breathing and suppressing the urge to duct-tape their asses to the chairs and gag them with the homework assignments they didn't do last night. the most shocking thing is that all the adults are really too busy with their own shit to even care - which is to say that the people i'm most accountable to (my students, right?) apparently want nothing more than for me to disappear completely. and people have told me that it's some "they're-rejecting-you-before-you-can-reject-them" stuff, but as far as i'm concerned, it makes my job a living hell. apparently it gets better. i guess i'll spend however long that takes learning how not to throttle them and hopefully also how to make them understand that studying literature can actually make their lives better.

because it totally fucking can. or at least it makes my life better - being an english teacher, and getting to expose people to patterns of humanity and human thought is a really cool thing to be bound to at the end of the day. we're doing a myth unit with the freshmen (two classes of whom are my last two periods, making it even more painful to be denied the opportunity to teach a fascinating topic ... but aren't i supposed to be asking myself how i can make that fascination accessible? or is that a really naive, second-week-in teacher question to ask?), and so i'm reading joseph campbell's "myths to live by" and a whole bunch of global myths from the big compilation i make copies out of. how striking the patterns are! and so much around me has been speaking lately to the end of days theme... this is either because i'm losing my mind or because it really seems to be happening. at any rate, i leave you with a campbell quote:

And of all these warnings and pronouncements, that of Spengler [in The Decline of the West] was the most disquieting. For it was based on the concept of an organic pattern in the life course of a civilization, a morphology of history; the idea that every culture has its period of youth, its period of culmination, its years then of beginning to totter with age and of trying to hold itself together by means of rational planning, projects and organization, only finally to terminate in decrepitude, petrifaction, what Spengler called 'fellaheenism'. Moreover, in this view of Spengler's, we were at present on the point [in the early twentieth century] of passing from what he called the period of Culture to Civilization, which is to say, from our periods of youthful, spontaneous and wonderful creativity to those of uncertainty and anxiety, contrived programs, and the beginning of the end.

(love that about the "morphology of history" - i get an image of the sinuous, three-dimensional beast of it.) well, it certainly seems that we're passing from a time of creativity to a time of "anxiety, contrived programs, and the beginning of the end" to me. and so what if it is? so what if we are careening from order to chaos, from light to dark, as all the old stories have it? seen in another way, a lot of those students who didn't pass this marking period aren't going to pass this marking period, either. this is not my fault. but my job - and, yes, my joy - takes me back there every day. this is, for now, at least, my own adventure. so the terror and the joy, the shadow and the illumination, are both they as they will always be, and i follow as best i can to where i feel them. because, that, i think, is my greatest duty - to manifest these polarities in my own life, to use them to my benefit.

as the post-act-of-titling coup de grace, i have to briefly also thank all of my previous english teachers - all of my teachers, in fact - for the examples, whether good or bad, they set for me. of particular note is mr. pickard, who with the help of nathaniel hawthorne, drove the nail of light and dark imagery deep in my head, and whom, being a brand-new 23-year-old when i first met him, i think of with renewed sympathy all the time.