Get Out of Jail Free Card

Exhausted??? (photo by frumbert)

I’m a sucker for tired students.  So today, when the seniors dragged themselves into class I moved the assignment from Thursday before break to the Thursday after break.

And then I let them do homework in class – Mind and Brain projects, reading for my class, working on drafts, studying for the Chem IV test, the Qualitative or the Quantitative Stats class.

I’m a sucker, but I’d rather have them not exhausted, read their rested and thoughtful writing, and live happily ever after.

Powerful memories

Paul over at quoteflections posted today about Clementines.  He’s got me thinking and remembering.

In South Dakota in the 1960s foods were good and the measure of a cook was how well she (usually) could capture summer in the freezer bag, the canning jar, the jam pot, and the pickle pail.  Fresh fruits in the winter were apples, oranges, pucker inducing grapefruit, and grapes.

Except at Christmas.

At Christmas there were myriad delights, but chief among them was the tangerine in the heel of my hand-knit Christmas stocking.  Having little extra money, our family stockings were filled mostly with fruit, some pieces as big as your head, but the best was the little, deep orange package – the tangerine.  It was the smell of the tangerine peel that I remember most strongly.  It takes me  back to a living room with golden oak floors, and stockings tacked to the archway to the dining room.  It takes me to my grandmother’s house in Madison, where the smell of tangerine peel mixed with the smell of eucalyptus.

Never mind the seeds

It was a tangerine with seeds, but we didn’t mind.  They cracked open easily, and the oil from the peel flew into the air and clung to our fingers.  Their sweet flavor always had a tart bite.  When I eat clementines today they are both seedless and sweet, like the mandarin oranges that came in a small can.  But the smell of the peel is the same.

Proust

This is my Proust moment, stronger than almost every other scent, and as elusive for a while in my life as the eucalyptus that only came out at the holidays as a part of a non-specific ornament.  I was never able to pinpoint which piece of holiday decor carried the eucalyptus scent, and it was high school before I knew its origins, but although that is evocative, the tangerine is stronger.

But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.
- Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way. (You can find the entire text at Project Gutenberg)

There is so much to memory, but also so much captured in a Clementine. I must go get a box and eat my fill and remember.

An open letter to the NCAA Clearinghouse

How dare you?

How dare you say that Journalism is not a “real” English class?  How dare you say that my curriculum is not rigorous?  What do you know about the day to day challenges of the student journalist? What do you know about how hard they work to report and write stories?  What do you know about publishing a newspaper or a magazine?

I don’t tell you how to coach, to play, or to run your organization.  I don’t even begin to imagine the complexities of your work.  How can you imagine the complexities of ours?

I’m tired today because I was up until after midnight commenting on and editing student writing.  They are writing again tonight, draft two of the same story – crafting, thinking, writing.  I guess I shouldn’t put forth so much effort or ask my students to work as hard as I do because clearly the work we do is lightweight and should be easy, right?  So how come it’s so hard to do well?

Come teach my class.  I dare you.

Flowering from within

Well, thinking about poetry and teaching again, I looked at my class rosters and I realize that I have a couple of students who take a lot of my courses.  One girl that I taught in seventh grade and again last year in American Literature is taking both of my senior electives next year and is one of those anxious students who never feels her work is good or her ideas have merit.

Last year she wrote a really amazing essay and I emailed her tutor (a former colleague of mine) because it was so well developed.  I’m ashamed to say I thought she had help with the essay.  But no.  It was hers.  After her tutor explained to me what process they had used to work on the essay, she told me that the young writer remembered a time in seventh grade I had said that she was a good writer, so for me she was.  This is not to say that the essay was flawless, but it showed growth and depth and real connection to the book we were reading.

So as I approach the beginning of the year, I have to remind myself two things:

• The last students that I taught were at the end of their year.  This year’s juniors will be at the beginning of that hard but important year.  This year’s journalists will be new to this.  This year’s yearbook staff has FRESHMEN!  These seniors are worried.
• Dale Carnegie said, “Give a man a good name and he will live up to it.”  We all want others to like our work (even I am not immune), and it is our job as teachers to see the scholar and writer and nascent adult in our students.

So another poem comes back to me.   No, I don’t think of my students as pigs, but each one needs to flower from within as they are, not as I want them to be.  All are beautiful in their own awkwardness; each one will be their own person.  They just need to be reminded.

St Francis and the Sow
by Galway Kinnell

The bud
stands for all things,
even those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as St. Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of
the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking
and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

And this is the truth of it.