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.