Feeling effective (finally)

It’s been a rocky start to the year, and the two projects that I’ve posted about have felt like rare moments of classroom work where we have connected as people and as learners together. I looked at that energy and tried to find a way to touch that each day. It’s been hard for some reason. But my batting average is improving:

• An advisee who has been struggling is beginning to feel as though she is a agent in her own destiny. Every day I see it and my heart wants to explode with joy.
• The Cubs were swept by the Dodgers. It was a dark day. But that same day an old college classmate, a winning Big 10 coach with an amazing story to tell, agreed to let my journalism students interview him. In the words of a former student (and sportswriter) “That is a great get.” The dark cloud lifted that day.
• My American Lit class came to a 2:00 PM Friday class abuzz with their project – the modern Scarlet Letter assignment – the Shame Shirts – This is a whole post when the video is done, but they sent me off into my weekend happy to have helped them connect to a timeless nineteenth century text.
• Yesterday, six girls (some of whom had never baked anything before ) joined me and two other women ( a mother of a junior and Theresa, my colleague) in the school kitchen and made 600 (that’s 50 dozen) cream scones to sell at our fall weekend County Fair. Their joy in creating something delicious and beautiful made me realize that it is the process, the getting your hands dirty, that makes the beautiful, delicious thing possible. They all feel accomplished and proud of, as Emerson would say, the work of their own hands. And I think about the lure and lore of the kitchen (and my own family food blog).

So – that’s the path that I want to find for all of my students, that sense of agency in the world – as small as a scone, as large as speaking up.

 

Itchy Friday…

It’s Friday and I see my American Lit kids at 2:00 – for most of them it’s their last class of the week, and they admitted to thinking the day was already over (much to their chagrin “but it’s not that I don’t like your class Mrs. Tabor, it’s just been a really long week”).  Today I promised to only talk about chapter 8 in the Scarlet Letter – and true to my word we talked only about Pearl, Hester, Dimmesdale, that moment when all the people you wish weren’t together are together and talking about you, and the way that the old men in Boston want to see the supernatural in the child (and how Hawthorne just imagines the governor’s head on a platter a la Salome and John the Baptist).  So, to end class early,  each student had to give me a list of words that were top of mind at this point when they think about the Scarlet Letter – and here is the word cloud that their 150+ words created:

 

“All that is not my soul…”

Clear and sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not
my soul. — Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, section 3

End of day two of the 2008-2009 academic year. Yesterday almost proved too much for me. The Thursday schedule is brutal in the morning, and there was the added layer of stress getting out the first issue of the school paper. We were having problems with page exports, and it did turn out that there was a problem with a linked jpg file that was crashing Acrobat and InDesign. But I did my very best Lady Macbeth imitations, getting crazier as the day went on.

A sample of my email to techhelp:

at 10:22 We are having export difficulties with the Weekly – We are currently logged in in my class, but I’m teaching until 11:15. Help me, Obi Wan Kenobe…

At 11:16 Adobe Error

Can you read my mind??

At 1:19 Arrgh!! Now as I have waited (im)patiently for the log in to scan in my room I have the finder problem that we were having with my log in so I can’t get to the group shared folder (or any finder window).

at 1:42 – Export failed on my log in: I have to go eat something before I eat the computer – but it failed on my log in. I’m stumped!

I did not eat the computer, and I did finally figure out what the problem was (this morning) after a good night’s sleep and thinking aloud to my favorite Mac man.

Clear and sweet was the arrival this afternoon of the school paper. A back to school issue out the first week of class for the first time in years. We are posting to moodle now as well, and it is so satisfying to see it in color on-line (we print black & white on newsprint.)**

Clear and sweet were also my students. We started with Chapter 1 of The Scarlet Letter today (all page and a half of it), and looked at Hawthorne’s naked themes that he tosses out without any apology (nature, decay, artifice, edifice, death and punishment, youth, age, weeds and flowers). Fifteen students – three girls and a dozen boys thinking about shame and sex and ratting out your friends. For all that is clear and sweet as well.

Time for the weekend.

**I have to shout out to my printer, the able folks at the Law Bulletin who take our pdf by 9:00 AM and deliver printed folded newspapers by 1:00 PM. Astounding, and they make me look good!