Tagged

Yeah, I know, I don't come here often, so I missed the fact that my Comments have been spammed. So sorry you have to scroll through Viagra ads to see the pathetic few comments (not that your comments are pathetic: the fact that there're are so few such golden nuggets there is the pathetic part). And I can't seem to figure out how to delete old comments…

While I'm here:

Have you noticed that everything in our Therapeutic Society today is some kind of pathology to be treated? Things that used to be considered just part of the Human Condition are now diagnosed, then prescribed. The afore-mentioned Viagra is an example: almost completely a product targeted at male insecurity. And that insecurity has been given a name: "Erectile dysfunction. What would you say, ninety percent?

And this generation has been taught that what's wrong with them isn't a lack of character, but that they have oppositional defiance disorder (that one brings the biggest chuckle, because my father had a cure for that. He wore it around his waist), or whatever other bona fide borderline personality disorder has been added to the DSM.

I'm not saying there aren't actual problems out there. There have been times when I've been grateful for a kid going back on his ADD meds. But some of this other stuff is suspect. There are an awful lot of pills being pushed out there, and many of them seem to take the place of us having to engage the unpleasant realities around us. I don't need a bottle of Xanax: I need to to through the grieving process of a major loss, get through it, grow through it, an move forward with an emotional strength and maturity that I didn't have before, and maybe a drop of wisdom as well. The pill lets me circumvent that growth. Not good for me.

I'm not a pharmacological Luddite. Most of these drugs have legitimate uses, but when we over-prescribe them just to make life easy, it makes us weak.

Beat Down

I'm sitting at my desk, sneaking in a few peaceful moments & morsels of nourishment, when the air begins to tingle with excitement, and students are being pulled, as if by some magnetic force, out into the quad. That can mean only one thing.

Fight.

By the time I make it out to the quad, the assistant principal and security, out on lunch duty, have already separated the perps/combatants/adversaries, and are cleaning up w/ crowd control. Nothing for me to do here.

I used to break up fights when I taught in the middle school. Because I was younger, and because the kids were smaller, and I could pull them apart without much fear of injury to myself. Looking at fifty next year, I'm not likely to do that with the bigger high school boys, unless they are tiny, or it's still at the trash-talk stage.

I never intervene in girl fights: the emotions are so intense that getting seriously scratched up while one girl is trying to get through me and back to the object of her wrath is a very real possibility. That, and the idea of me touching a teenage girl in any manner, even to break up a fight, is problematic for a male teacher on its face. Better to wait for security unless someone is receiving an ugly beat-down and can't even fend off blows. Still, a judgment call, because it'd be difficult to see a woman, young or old, taking a decisive beating, whether from a man or another woman.

This path of non-intervention goes against my sensibilities and upbringing, but the legal realities trump ethics here, sadly. The fear of being sued by a student who is even slightly injured, or just uses the claim of injury as a pretext for a suit, while being pulled off another student he is committing aggravated battery against ( oh, the irony), is very real, and could be a career-ender. Her tooth vs. my career. Sorry, Sheila, but they can do marvelous things with dental implants these days.

Stay Cool, Boy

Wrote my first referral (sends your little butt to the vice-principal form) yesterday.

I hate writing referrals. I work very hard to avoid it, for several reasons:

1. If I write a referral quickly, it may be passing my problem off to the administration too early, instead of taking the correct steps to deal with it myself.
2. It may send a message to the student that he is being "flushed" away, instead of at least listened to, however crazy, disrespectful, wrong-headed he is. And we all know what you are if you get flushed.
3. Referrals written by teachers who jump to writing unsupported referrals (for small offenses they should be handling though intermediate steps) carry less weight on the desk of the administrator, who may even develop sympathy for the referred student ("I know, Grover, she's crazy: I'm just going to write 'Counseled student' on this, and you can spent the rest of the period in in-house suspension. Just try not to set her off anymore, okay?").

The third reason is very important. I seldom write a referral before the second semester begins and that is a fact known by everyone. So when I do write a kid up, and provide justification (give the administrator specific information to use, written on the referral), that kid damn well better get a punishment.

More referrals during second semester because the teenage angst thaws with the daffodils in the spring.

Don't get me wrong: there are certain behaviors, notably continued disrespect, that jump right from a detention to a referral, and they're merited. If the kid is unmanageable, he's unmanageable, so here's you ticket to see the Old Man in the Office.

It's the same way with my affect in the classroom. I'm very patient with kids' behavior, and I provide a little margin room for them to be goofy kids. But when they see my expression change, and my voice firm up, and all the other small signals, they read it clearly, and I usually get immediate results. If I ever have to raise my voice, or keep a class after the bell to mini-lecture about their behavior, it means something to them, because it stands out so distinctly from my everyday smiling, glad-you're-here-kid affect. Teachers who raise their voices a lot, or are dramatic, or cuttingly sarcastic, who use these methods as the normal fare of their classroom interaction, quickly lose effectiveness, because kids tune them out (or down). The teacher (and I might suggest, the parent) who cries wolf is soon ignored and discounted.
Not I: when I raise an eyebrow, I usually get results, because the eyebrow isn't lost in the background noise of other emotions/demonstrations.

As Riff advises in West Side Story:

Boy, boy, crazy boy,
Get cool, boy!
Got a rocket in your pocket,
Keep coolly cool, boy!
Don't get hot,
'Cause man, you got
Some high times ahead.
Take it slow and Daddy-O,
You can live it up and die in bed!

Boy, boy, crazy boy!
Stay loose, boy!
Breeze it, buzz it, easy does it.
Turn off the juice, boy!
Go man, go,
But not like a yo-yo schoolboy.
Just play it cool, boy,
Real cool!

I'm the adult: he's the yo-yo schoolboy. It's my job to model maturity. I can't indulge my anger, my frustration, my indignity, except in measured doses designed to let students see the results of their mistreatment of others. Even then, I need to be in control, and meter it out. And when I do it right, that may be the most valuable lesson presented to them that day.

As Mark Twain Said…

Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.

Haven't posted for months, and had to retrieve forgotten passwords and such just to get here. Pity: now I have no time to post, and Brother, have I got a lot to say.

Soon, mis amis, soon.

Coming Up for Some Air

Ah, it's been so long, I bet you thought you'd lost me. Truth to tell, I did take a couple of weeks off, distracted by other projects, but I'm back now, and actually in Ch. LXXIII.

Man, this guy is a great storyteller. By that I mean that he sure knows how to stuff a goose. Multiple chapters go by in which Melville abandons the plot to discuss rope, or water, or boots, or something, but I can perceive how it is all intregal to his purpose. Here are some of the chapter titles: Chowder, The Albatross, Squid, and The Line (all about rope). Sometimes these chapters are back-to-back, leaving the story idling while I learn all about hemp fibers, or harpoons, or sails. All very fascinating, but the Story, Man! I vacillate between thoroughly enjoying all the arcana, and wanting the story to go on.

Jack London gives details about ships, weather, sailors, all gleaned from his personal experience on the water himself. Did Melville ever put to sea? He sure knows a lot, and it's almost as if he's compelled to tell me about the all-encompassing world of whaling, down to the last tack. Not in a feverish way, like the narrator in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, but he's not going to let me go until he's unburdened himself.

---

Okay, so after almost four hundred pages, they're still looking for MD. They have hauled in two whales, and the second one was just to set up a superstition: that a ship that hangs a sperm whale's head from one side, and a right whale's head from the other will never capsize. They've met a couple of other ships, and Ahab is always seeking information on the whereabouts of the white whale. There was a prophet character, an insane man, from another ship that warned Ahab would sink to the bottom of the sea, so we have that classic Illiad element. But it's slow, slow, slow, like the ponderous, deliberate movement of the whale himself.

Oh: them sailors are some superstitious guys, taken as a lot. Reminds me again of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Melville has been working hard to make MD a completely mythical character: larger than life, almost not part of this world, in a sense godlike, or as if MD were a metaphysical or psychological reality instead of a physical one. Building, building, bigger and bigger he becomes. By the time Ahab catches up to him, he'll be as big as a mountain in the reader's mind. He's thrown in the yeast, and now is letting the lump grow in our minds. Some sailors believe MD has magical powers, or that he's in more than one place at a time; the insane man, a self-proclaimed prophet, declared Moby-Dick to be his god. Oh, it'll be a Titanic struggle, it will, when at last we hear the cry, "There she blows!"

A Little Coffee with Your Milk?

How much foreshadowing can a writer indulge in? It's all over the place, but he doesn't seem to be embarrassed one bit. It ain't subtle, that's for sure. Maybe because I know the outcome I'm conscious of more than I would be otherwise, but tone it down, Man!

The Early Chapters

Okay, this is really good. I'm already two hundred pages in, and there's a lot going on. I should have stopped to blog before this, but I'm enjoying it more than I thought I would. I thought the blogging would be a kind of chronicle/journal to help me wade through, but so far I haven't needed much in the way of self-help.

All right, the thing that is the greatest surprise is his humor. My impression of him was that he was going to be unrelentingly morose and heavy, but that's not true at all. He's actually kind of funny, esp. when using Queequeg the barbarian to expose the hypocrises of 19th C. western civilization. Queequeg is the epitome of the direct, open, loving voyager through life, his pagan religious ideas aside for the moment. Melville is having some fun using him to poke at the mores of the "civilized" people around him. I never expected such humor. So points for you, Mr. Melville.

Not that Melville is ant-religion per se: Ishmael speaks of his own deep Presbyterian roots, and one takes that as rather auto-biographical and dearly-held; the character of Father Mapple is as humble and pious as Melville can make him without him becoming caricature, deeply conscious of his own sin and shortcoming, both as a man, and as Man, quaking in recognition of an Almighty God in the heavens. I think Father Mapple's life verse would be "What is Man, that You are mindful of him?" (Ps. 8:4). What seems to matter to Melville is one's earnestness rather than propositional truth. At least, he suggests that even Queegueg is a member of a Universal congregation of Man to which we all belong, when Capt. Bildad challenges Queequeg before allowing him to sign ship's articles.

Another sign that Melville isn't taking himself too, too seriously is the chapter on cetology, where his taxonomy uses Folios, Octavos, and Duo-decimos (the three different sizes for manuscript pages) to categorize whales. But I'm not sure if his definition of a whale as "a spouting fish with a horizontal tail" is meant to be serious or evoke a smile in his contemporary readers. That's the problem reading 150yr-old tongue-in-cheek: we don't have a feel for the pulse of the audience, and much of this kind of humor relies on what is known to be true and what is known to be false in past eras. Methinks he teases, but I'm not sure. I do get the impression, at the very least, that he's poking fun at the naturalists and their contradictory, ever-changing classification schemes; and so it is today with the paleo-anthropologists: the purported "ascent of Man" by incremental links from bi-pedal ancestors is a shifting path, and yesterday's missing link today sits on the top of a trash heap of disproved previous links. Still, they toil. Still, they call every biped "hommo." Still, they create whole villages out of a jawbone or a single tooth, with the help of "artists' conceptions." If you strip away all but the actual evidence, there is very little to go on. But we dig, and arrange, and hypothesize.

Why I Went a-Whaling

"Call Me Ishmael."

Those three words resound down the corridors of American literature like the voice of the principal calling a student into his office to be confronted with an unpleasant truth. Like the whale itself, this tome is out there, under the surface, malignant, stealthy, and to be avoided if at all possible. After all, there's so much of the sea that is navigable: we don't have to go courting the behemoth, hurling our tiny intellectual harpoons at its leathery hide (unless you've bought paperback), all the while fearing in your heart that they will bounce off as so many toothpicks, and that it will swim on, primal, unassailable, indifferent to us.

Well, that's the way I've always felt. I wrote that I picked this up when I was twelve ("Quite a reader, that boy"), and I remember being interested the way a child is interested in an antique shop: curiosity keeps him going, the novelty of the experience sustains him for a while; but ultimately, there needs to be a car crash, er, pay-off somewhere, and this plot just doesn't do any paying off for about eight hundred pages: building suspense and developing character and grappling with our place in the Universe can't carry a kid's interest by themselves. So I bailed out on it, and returned to the comfort of Bradbury and Asimov: a different captain, a different ship, and a different whale.

I threw myself upon Moby-Dick, and he tore my leg off and spit me out. But I knew I'd be back someday to hunt him down.

That is how this book became one that I have always thought I should read, if I'm going to be a good disciple. It's on The List: in terms of American literature, arguably it heads The List, but there are so many other ShouldReads that can we can play with: Twain, and Poe, and Faulkner, and that's all 19th C., which is the ground we're treading here. I'm not even going back to Cooper and his ilk. It's so much easier to laconically float down Ole Miss on a raft wth Jim while someone on shore plays a banjo than it is to roam the Indian Ocean wth Queequeg, deck pitching, spray in your face: it's work, Man. Work, I tell you!

So that was my attitude when I cracked open the cover thrity-five years later. And I'm surprised.

Melville (oh! the dark clouds that appear on the horizon at the mere intoning of that name!) can be vague and oblique, but no more so than Poe, and I teach that to sixteen-year-olds. He's not impenetrable, just metaphysical at times, but that's the age he lives in, so I shan't fault him for that. And it's a sign of a high intellect, it is. I can't be afraid to stand in the penumbra of his radiance for fear of being blinded. I have to walk out into the full blaze of his Melville-ness, and if I am burned, I will have the comfort of knowing that the redness will soon suffuse into a smooth even tan.

You can praise all your Moderns and Post-Moderns, but how sturdy is the house built on a bad foundation? I'm down in the cellar, shoring up the foundaton.

Blogging Moby-Dick

Dived into this when I was 12, but only made it through 100 pages or so. It's been lurking out there since then, like the white whale himself, daring me to pursue. So call me Ishmael & here I go.

Apologies to Conrad

Teaching writing is hard. And I hate reading papers, esp. demand writing, because I always become frustrated at the low skill level of students. The flights of logic I can understand, the grappling with meaning I have sympathy for; but their refusal to absorb the correct usage of the English language is frustrating.

I go over and over this stuff, but their patterns are stuck in their heads, and they fall back on them time and time again. Lack of agreement, no attempts at subordination, and the ubiquitous "they" when speaking of individuals. I want to scream, so I come here.

Our language use is not like our math use. The one is personal and part of our self-identities, the other is not. Even if we don't get our sums right, we all agree that there is a right answer, that we've made a mistake somewhere, and that it will never do to just keep going on adding together one and two and getting five. But language is not the same: the patterns of usage, our own idiolect, is so deeply ingrained in us that it is difficult to wholly and completely accept that how we use English is wrong and needs to be corrected before it is right. We think we're not so bad.

I have to re-design my content and come back to basic writing skills more and more often; I have to emphasize that the way they use language is not merely a matter of style, but that there is a matter of correctness that has nothing to do with style. It can by a stylistic feature to depart from standard usage, but the writer/speaker must know he's doing it in order to control it. And they don't know. Their non-standard usage is so ingrained in them that they will try to correct my standard English with their bastardized version, that they think is right. The irony, the horror.

Job security, I guess. Sigh…