All We Need is Janet Leigh

It's like a Hitchcock movie. Try to walk across campus in the middle of the school day, and they're there: the birds.

Seagulls. Even though we're ten miles from the ocean, every day hundreds of seagulls descend on the campus at a pre-determined time, ready to scavenge through hundreds upon hundreds of food wrappers, looking for the half-eaten pizza crusts, untouched fruit, and scattered french fries that are to be found in abundance; the flotsam and jetsam left in the wake of uncaring, under-socialized, irresponsible, self-centered students. I've never seen a seagull dig into one of the many, many trash cans placed about every twenty paces around the campus; they don't need to. They can remain fat and happy on what has been thrown away (dropped is a better word) in enough abundance that even flying ten miles one way to get here every day is well worth the smorgasbord that awaits them. There is enough half-eaten, untouched and undiscarded food lying around campus to force our custodial staff to have to come and clean up behind them twice a day to prevent the school from looking like Woodstock the morning after. If the custiodians were to skip just one day, there would certainly be a outcry from the students, who expect to walk through a pristine campus, but who feel no obligation to lift a finger to help create one.

Ironically, the very same students who throw their french fries at each other will shriek and run under the flapping cloud of seagulls over their heads, hoping not to be shat upon with yesterday's french fries. Poetic justice.

The recent edition of the school newspaper had an article noting the rearrangment of the custodial schedule in order to provide more cleaning of the restrooms, an action that was the result of student complaints about their condition. Most students consider this a grass-roots political victory: the populace applying pressure to their leaders to improve living conditions. If students would only throw away their own garbage out on the quad, the bathrooms may have had adequate attention all along, and the host of seagulls that the students have trained to fly in and crap on their heads every day wouldn't exist.

So what lesson have we learned? Be self-centered and blind, and refuse to make a connection between your actions and the results you have created. Be irresponsible, complain, and let the government wipe you.

And they'll be voting in a couple of years.

A Drop of Water in the Desert

It's a typical afternoon. I'm teaching John Steinbeck to my juniors, helping them to see the Christian symbolism that is being used early on in Of Mice and Men to set up Lennie as a Christ-figure, an innocent that goes off to be slain. This class is just small enough that we ca all sitting in a big circle, seminar-style.

What I'm doing this day is nothing unusual for my class: Steinbeck employs the same Christian archetypes in most of his writing, and why shouldn't he? He's writing in Western Civilization to readers in Western Civilization. Christianity is almost a sine qua non. That's what makes his writing so powerful: he taps into the symbols in our cultural subconscious, and uses them masterfully.

Well, after I show them Lennie's baptism and immediate approval by the God-figure, Slim, I asked them why they think Steinbeck did that, and what they think will happen next. Some students thought that Lennie would then go on to do great things, and someone brought up the main character in The Green Mile, who is a Lennie type if there ever were one, complete with dead mouse. Others saw a more ominous future for Lennie: no doubt they were more familiar with the Gospel story. I moderated, but didn't let the cat out of the bag.

After a few minutes of this, I told them they'd just had a college-level lesson, and admitted that I never had a teacher in high school who showed any of this stuff to me; I had to wait until I was at the university before we entered this deeply into the text. And then we went on with the rest of the chapter; hopefully, with eyes opened up a bit wider.

Here's the point of my post. After class a student stayed behind, came up to me, thanked me for showing him how to look beyoned the surface, and shook my hand as a sign of gratitude.

Teachers rarely get this kind of feedback from students, so when it happens, it's notable. Student X, you appreciate me? Not as much as I appreciate you. Thank you.

Happy New Year

Hmm… so far it doesn't feel any different than 2007. We'll just see about this.