it's time, butch

round 2.

armed with almost no idea what i'm doing (an improvement over having absolutely no idea last year), it's time to lace the gloves back up and step back into the ring.

on the bill for this contest:

in the red corner: hailing from the sovereign nation of dismerica, weighing in at 200 lbs., mr. november.

in the blue corner: hailing from puerto rico, dominican republic, haiti, jamaica, honduras, trinidad, the bronx, harlem, and likely a few other places, weighing in at about 23,000 lbs., 150 high school students.

the stats are as follows:

2 classrooms (an improvement)
only teaching until 8th, rather than 10th, period (also a bonus)
2 classes of freshmen (one of which is a special ed. inclusion class)
2 classes of intermediate esl (this will be interesting)
1 class of regents prep for juniors (the only thing on the list i feel prepared for)

should be a hard fought bout.

--november

it was all a dream...

summer is over.

back to school.

in about ten minutes i'll be dragging my drowsy ass out the door, down the steps, around the corner, and on the train straight up to the boogie down, and year two of this teaching gig. were today the fourth and i'd be seeing students in my room(s), i'd be much less ambivalent about the prospect of rolling into the hallowed halls of blackhole high. as it stands, i've got two action-packed days of sitting in the auditorium and, maybe, some "team building" retreat upstate tomorrow. i don't know, i don't know if we'll have enough time.

all told, i am excited about getting back into it, just a bit melancholy looking back at the summer.

pens and pencils packed. shoe laces double knotted. lunch money in pocket.
...i'm off.

--november

OH SHIT, A STORM IN MAH BRAIN!

we were just handed a series of, well, handouts that are intended to aid us in vocabulary and broad content instruction.

my joy overflows.

anyway, one of them is titled, "A B C Brainstorm." this particular gem asks students to place a topic in a box at the top of the paper and then has all 26 letters of the alphabet organized in columns with a short line following. students are expected to come up with a statement for each letter of the alphabet for whatever topic they have been assigned, say...bitches and/or hos.

a sample:

A- all bitches are hos
B- but not all hos are bitches
C- cunts are often, but not necessarily hos and/or bitches
D- despite often being female, neither hos nor bitches must be. it is equally possible for a man to be a "bitch." although, the attendant misogyny of this construct, as it does require a concept of stereotypical and female "bitchiness," might render the argument that "bitch" can apply fully, and independent of that female referent, to a man laughable at best. this situation is, in essence, making the male female, bitch by proxy.

okay, you get the point. i might have taken it a bit further than necessary at the end there.

peace, bitches.

education: taste the flavor...

there is, without qualification, something soulcrushing and dead about education education. yeah, that's right, education education.

i'm sitting in a classroom with round about 30 highly educated, mostly motivated, and entirely bored teachers. being taught in the loosest definition of the word.

in theory, or at least according to the course catalog and class title, i'm supposed to be learning about how to teach english language learners right now. what is really happening looks more like this:

-eleven people sitting at their laptops banging the keys or playing minesweeper.
-six or seven dedicated doodlers.
-two or three thinking about how many ways they could kill themselves with a coffee cup.
-four or so shameless brown-nosers asking the sort of inane questions that thrill the sort of simp represented by the...
-one adjunct faculty member who is...
-flogging the room through a powerpoint slideshow for three hours.

oh my fucking pain.

at least it's air-conditioned and i can pick up an internet connection. small victories.

now back to contemplating the many ways i might violently employ my styrofoam coffee cup....

'round these parts...

back to summer-long ed. ma grad school shenanigans. happily, this will not be the week-long eight hour slugfest that was last summer's experience...but i'll still have to interrupt my drinking, reading, playing, passing out on my roof, to show up for this nonsense from 8:30am to 4pm twice a week.

almost feels like punishment for being bad.

at least i'm not grounded.

and ain't nobody taking my bike away for the summer.

to summer.

--november

distance: trying to get some.

with the school year over (yes, school is still technically in session, but rich people eat foie gras and that shit is technically bird liver...how's that for a nonsensical, non-sequitur dismissal?), i'm still too close to the thing to really get any cogent thought about it together.

i miss the kids.

shit, damn, do i miss the kids?

i don't like adults. seriously.

okay. yeah.

anyway, rest assured, i'll write some nonsense about this whole thing, if only to try and give shape to an amazingly unwieldy experience. for now, however, as i sit daily in the school library grading regents exams, i am struck by one, unquestionable truth.

set of truths.
series of truths?
battery of truth missiles?

phalanx of ten thousand armored truth-bears with very pointy swords coming to fuck my day right up?

yeah, that one.

big teeth, too.

i fucked up this year. oh shit, did i fuck up.

and those bears are pissed. hells yes, they are furious bears. FURIOUS.

looking back with, as of right now, beer-colored glasses, i have trouble figuring out how i taught anything between september and now. did i teach? was i a teacher? where have i been for the last nine months?

i can see now how i made more mistakes than i had any business making. how i missed the point over and over again. how i taught the wrong things at the right time and the right things at the wrong time. and how, more often than i'd like to admit, what i did wasn't teaching them a goddamn thing.

now, i can anticipate the response of family and friend alike: yeah, but you recognize where you can get better, that's a good thing. recognizing it shows you give a shit, and you can do it right next time.

there are two problems there, both of which have the armored truth-bears a-callin'.

first, and the lesser of the two: there is no "right" way. this shit is as subjective and wily as any art. you have to have a feel for the thing and an intuition to make it work, along with some severely fucked-up focus and want for said thing to work. what is "right" is about as easy to grab as water out of a spigot.

second, and infinitely more important: these kids can't just be my lab. if i fucked up, it isn't like they get to do it over (yeah, some if them will do it over...i know). i get to do it over next year, they don't. they move on having missed stuff they should have learned. this will, i repeat, will be an issue for them.

i'm starting to see how i can be "not bad" at this job. note that i didn't say "good." good is still a while off.

that said, it still doesn't excuse me from being responsible for what i should have been all along. what they deserved.

being a yeoman is just not acceptable. hopefully, i'm getting better. i just hope that i can get better enough for the next crew to get what they need.

apologies that this was a bit down, just knocking the toys out of the attic, as it were.

perspective and distance.

admitting you have a problem is the first step to fixing it...or so my friends who don't drink so well tell me.

--november

haywire

sometimes, when needed the most, music can salvage your completely wrecked little soul.

i'll post more about the end of this year in the soon, but for now i'm busy finding some lost things.

yeah.

-november

6'20", fucking killing for fun...

it's about time that i put this up here.

i was alerted to this perfect nugget of awesome by my comrade at murder by baltimore, rob, and have been watching it no fewer than five times a week since then.

seriously.

if you aren't amazed by the awesome might of this song, you have no soul.

period.

behold (just click the "behold" if the embedded video won't load...the internet is a confusing place):

a spoonful weighs a ton

okay, so the soft bulletin by the flaming lips is, likely, near the very top of the list of records i'd take with me on the space station when this rock eventually gets too fucked for life.

that it is a game-show-theme inflected (listen to "race for the prize" to get the full effect) concept record about, wait for it, scientists trying to save the world, only makes it exponentially better.

that the magical answer is "love," and is so without it being cheesy or lame at all (from someone who can no longer stomach most of the hippie love-in that accompanies this sort of sentiment, this is high praise) is a testament to how incredible a record this is.

the line "putting all the vegetables away" will take on entirely new, heavy, emotional resonance after spending some time with the track "suddenly everything has changed." i wouldn't lie to you.

point is, as i see the last 14 days of school laid out before me, i kind of feel like the scientists on the record.

and though they were sad
they rescued everyone
they lifted up the sun
a spoonful weighs a ton

giving more than they had
the process had begun
a million came from one
the limits now were none
being drunk on their plan, they lifted up the sun

"a spoonful weighs a ton" ...talking about how dense the sun is and the mass of something like it is a pretty great lil' metaphor.

this last spoonful of school weighs a ton.

the amount of material i have to cover is, at best, daunting. i have 14 days to tie an entire year together into something coherent.

i did not plan well.

this is to say nothing of the emotional weirdness that is plaguing me.

i can already feel myself missing some of these kids.

granted, i'll see some of them in the halls, but there are many of them that i've taken as a consistent and necessary part of the day.

play fighting with daniel ending with the kid bear hugging me, looking up, and saying "i love you, november." i then respond with "you suck, daniel." or the other way around. all depends on the day, really.

junissa and maria tackling me at the beginning of sixth period every day, early for that class, but late for the eighth period class they are scheduled for.

walking down the hall to round up my ninth period class, all of whom are standing 40 feet away at the stairwell talking to their friends and waiting for me to come get them.

trading jabs with jason during fourth period until he, inevitably, draws a giant dick on the chalkboard.

watching robert, in the same class, express his approval with a thumbs up and an "ok mistah!" or shaking his head and saying "oh mah gahd...." some of the only english he knows. also among the coolest human beings on the planet.

having tyrell ask me, every day, "why's it gotta be black?" and responding "because i'm a racist." then both of us laughing and him clapping my back. this kid also writes really funny poems about how he hates the elderly. a future onion writer...seriously.

watching, and being completely annoyed by, justin and barbara breaking up or hooking up in my class, EVERY FUCKING DAY! but also knowing that they are two of the best kids in the building.

being greeted, daily, by george with a firm handshake and a "how are you today?" ...then me inevitably screwing up the eleven-part long-distance handshake he taught me in january as he gets to his seat.

these are just the first few things to come to mind.

they feel like family.

i never knew that it would end up feeling like this.

i had no idea.

yelling as hard as they can
the doubters all were stunned
heard louder than a gun
the sound they made was love

these kids have their own fucking gravity. a spoonful, most certainly, weighs a ton.