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.

Oh, Yeah: Blog Some

A month since my last post? Egads, where has the time flown?!

So very busy. Hundreds of papers to mark, but there is always something pulling me into other orbits: car to the garage, grocery shopping, planning lessons for tomorrow, blah, blah; and now, Christmas shopping. The five-week progress report grades are due Monday, so I'll be cloistered in my apartment this weekend, making the InPile shrink and the GradeBook entries add, subtract, multiply and divide. Hurry, hurry, I'm late, I'm late, for a very important date.

On the UpSide, the school's system is available through the internet now, instead of only through the campus' intranet, so I can upload grades from home, as long as I meet the deadline, which is convenient.

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My car has no heat. Well, that's not technically true, but I can't coax it to divert any into the cabin, where I sit during my morning commute to work. Instead of the levers on my dashboard connected to cables that open and close the flaps directly, Volkswagen engineers, for very good reasons that only they know, built a control box in front of (toward the front of the car) the dashboard. Sliding a lever on the dashboard opens up channels or something in the control box, which taps into the engine's vacuum; the vacuum then travels down other tubes to open a valve in a hose that sends hot water into the heater unit. But the control box is dead, Jim, and no amount of lever-sliding gets my windshield defrosted. If it were connected directly with a cable, I could fix it myself, but I'm not going to take out the vacuum box and try to figure out what's wrong with it. A new unit is $400. A cable could have cost what, a dollar?

I'll tell my mechanic to advise me, and if it's the control box, I'll hie me down to the junk yard ecology center to pick up a used one on my own, and deliver it to the mechanic. Gotta be under a hundred, and worth my time.

Oblivious

Kid asks for the question worksheet because he was absent yesterday. Fine, I give him one, and he returns to his seat near the front of the room.

After a couple of minutes I notice from my perch at my podium that I had given him the wrong sheet, one for a comletely different class. So I wait for him to raise his hand to tell me.

Well, genius spends the entire period staring off into space, and never notices he has the wrong paper on his desk. Never lifts a pencil to write down the answers we're all recording; never even glances down in mild curiosity at the paper lying untouched and half-covered by a limp hand. He's just waiting for the bell to ring.

The bell. He robotically jams the paper into his bag, and heads for the door, pulling his pants down under his arse as he passes out of the room.

Sigh . . .

With Apologies to Carol King

You came in late this morning with a pass to class,
There's something fishy here, your writing's smooth as glass,
And I don't think you know just what those big words mean.

Well it's too late, Baby, now it's too late,
Though I really did try to grade it;
When you brought me this late work you lied, and I tried,
But I can tell it's not yours: you faked it.

I can tell by your margins and the odd font size
This isn't your effort, you've plagiarized;
And I don't want to do it,
But a Referral is what you need.

Well it's too late, Baby, now it's too late,
the quarter term ends today,
You can't sleep in your seat three months
Then turn your sorry D to an A.

Is This Going to Be On the Test?

Yes, Robert: that's why I'm talking about it now.

Maybe you ought to write this down.

The Crack in the Dyke

I found a paper airplane in the teachers' lounge this morning.

Bad sign.

Little cracks of instability like this, early in the year, can turn into giant fissures in our sanity well before Christmas Break.

I'm keeping my eyes open.

I Got the Four-Wheel Blues

Okay, so my car is fifteen years old, and is approaching 150,000 miles.

It's given great service since day one, so I really have nothing to complain about. That Farfergnugen company makes a good product.

But the writing is on the wall. It didn't want to start this morning: cranked happily on a year-old battery, but no firing.

When I turned the key off, there would be a little firing, just enough to shake the engine a bit, so I began just releasing the key from the Start position to let it snap back to the On position, hoping it would catch.

After the fourth try, running the starter fifteen seconds or so without a hint of firing, I let the key snap back to the On position, and she fired up.

Odd, that.

I stopped at the store on the way to work, and when I got back in the car, she started immediately: I couldn't even hear the starter because the engine fired up so quickly.

Funny thing, but maybe she's getting to the place where I shouldn't be letting it sit the weekend without starting the engine. Usually she gets only an occasional Saturday off, but yesterday I slept in and didn't make it to church. That two days was just too long, I guess.

Yup, she's getting old, and I have to adjust. I think I'll drop by AAA, and see how much it is to join, to get the towing. It'd be nice to just pull the card and my cell phone out of my pocket if the car decides to take a nap in the street. I can't imagine how much it would cost to hire a tow truck to drag that worthless carcass my pride and joy across town to my mechanic.

I'm seeing the signs, and now I'm worried. I'll still drive my little wreck, but in the meantime, I'm going to be considering what I want my next car to be.

Please Leave a Message

"Why is my daughter not turning in her work?"

This is the question a parent asked a colleague in a phone conversation I overheard in the teachers' lounge/workroom/copyroom (lounge? Not a sofa in sight).

There's something odd about that question. Not in the question per se, but in who the questioner was and who the hearer was. I think they're reversed.

In a perfect world (or just in the world of a generation ago) it would be the teacher asking the parent "Why is your daughter not turning in her work?" But now the onus for making the kid perform is laid on the shoulders of the teacher. Parents send their kids to school in the morning and the kids are then our problems.

Of course, in that previous generation most kids grew up in two-parent households, and many of those were one-paycheck households, so moms had time to supervise more of their kids' school careers. Now, one-parent households are so commonplace as not to raise an eyebrow, and it's almost unheard of for a woman to devote her energies to being solely a wife and mother.

Some of this is a result of a changed economy, some a result of the femminist movement ushering women into the workforce, some of a higher divorce rate, some is a result of a higher expected standard of living, e.g., a larger home, (the square footage of typical home to house four people has gone up), two expensive, financed-to-the-gills cars, the big-screen TV, ad infinitum.

So we live in a way that might make our gradparents blush at our consumerism and lavishness, and the kid's homework isn't being done because no one is making sure it's being done, because parents are all working and rightfully tired when they cross over the threshold in the evening. We don't even use the term "latchkey kid" anymore, because it's not unusual for kids to be completely unsupervised from the time school lets out to the time Mom comes home from work at six.

Ideas have consequences. Human resources are finite: time and energy given to serve one value means fewer resources are available to devote to another. As I survey the landscape of the American family, I conclude that there has been no other time when it has been more important for families to take inventory of where their values are: a $40,000 SUV, or a few more hours to spend with the kids? A mother seeking fulfillment in the workforce, or in shaping the character of her children? Of course, many don't have the luxury of choice, but even some of those situations are the results of earlier choices that put kids on the losing side of the equation.

Incrementalism, the series of slight changes over time, can have a large cumulative effect. One drop of water on a rock is insignificant: but monoliths are eroded by nothing strong stronger than individual drops of water. And we don't notice, because the change is so slow, we adapt the the slightly different viewpoint, way of living, way of thinking, of accepting what is normal.

I'm not a cultural alarmist in the full-blown sense, and I know we tend to romanticize the past, but I see a distinct difference between this generation and the one I grew up in, and the results.