it's good enough for now

trying to affect a nice shade of relaxed, listening to the new wilco record due out on the 15th of may.

you can stream it here.

pissing in the sink, i think...

none of my students did, but they were treated as if they had.

some background:

i had taken a monday off to deal with some diabetic nonsense (calibrating the outboard pancreas), and was enjoying, in my own way, the day of fasting and close bodily attentiveness. around 3pm i was called by one of the assistant principals at the school:

"november, what do you think about opera?"

"well, i'm about as interested in it as i can be interested in a dying art form. opera could be interesting."

"okay, well there's this project centered on getting our kids to go see an opera, and your ap [the man on the phone was the assistant principal of the social studies department] said that you were into music and didn't get out of the building enough, so i thought i'd see if you were interested."

"yeah, definitely. could be cool. what's the score?"

"well, there is a professional development meeting tomorrow at lincoln center and you need to be there at 8am."

"okay. yeah. i'm in."

black hole high was tagged to be a part of a pet project of the metropolitan opera that involved teaching opera to the students, the kids going on two field trips (one to see the opera, another to see what goes on backstage), and then producing some sort of performative artifact related to the whole process.

initially, this seems like it could be cool. these students are not generally in a position to consume opera as a medium, don't spend a lot of time in manhattan, and have never been in a place of opulent grandeur on par with the metropolitan opera house in lincoln center.

i was kind of psyched.

the professional development meeting was, entirely and without reservation, fucked. the program had no direction, the people running it were blind enthusiasts of the art form, and most of the "teaching artists" we were to be saddled with were hopelessly disconnected, lame, and corny. happily, the guy assigned to black hole high was a solid cat who was fully aware of how broken this whole project was from the word "go."

so, i sat, with the music teacher from my school, marveling at how completely unrealistic and poorly planned the whole scenario was. they expected us to set aside our curricula (which at this point in the year, at least for core subject teachers, is focused on prep for the ever-looming regents exam) so that we could teach our kids to not just sit through and take, but love opera. on top of this, they expected us to cobble together an opera of our own for the kids to perform in front of their parents and schoolmates at an assembly we were supposed to organize and run.

their idea of "teaching" opera was to sit kids down with the libretto and walk them through the standout pieces from the work they would see, citing the musical intricacies and the convergence between melody, rhythm, tone, texture, voice type, character, plot and theme. we were walked through this process by a man in his early 60s, poorly hammering out the melodies of the music on a shitty keyboard.

were i to try any of the things suggested at this meeting my students would erupt in homophobic overtures and incite the beginning of a thirty person riot.

all of this aside, i was willing to soldier on. i could turn this into an extended writing prompt, having my students translate the opera into a prose text in their own speech and register and set in the present.

this could work. i could shoehorn this into my classroom and make it somehow fruitful for my students as they march to the gallows of the english regents exam.

yeah.

nope.

the truly hateful woman who is the liaison between black hole high and the program informed me that just having their reinterpretation present and presented at the "culminating event" would not be good enough, and that i would have to guarantee full attendance and participation of my students at said event, along with a promise of their parents showing up.

unfuckinglikely. but, willing as ever to roll with the punches, i worked with her and tried to find a way to make it work.

all of this bad blood continued up until our trip to the opera on this past tuesday.

i had prepared my students with the plots, character names, and major musical themes for the opera we would be seeing: puccini's il trittico. i had conned the kids into thinking that this was going to be a day of art full of high passion, violence, and comedy...which the plots of the three acts do offer.

at 38 students, we managed a reasonable group, and arrived at the opera house.

i was immediately chastised for not having brought between 60 and 70 students.

i took my licks, not wanting to incite the territorial nature of my kids with the perception that we were being "told," and hoping that none of the kids would respond with "stop sucking me!"

thing is, my kids kicked ass.

they were quiet (mostly), paid as much attention as they could, and after spending 4 and 3/4 hours in the met opera house did not start burning the place to the ground. in fact, it was other schools that had the most embarrassing incidents, while we were relatively tame.

problem: my students were treated by the staff of the opera house, the opera guild members, and the organizers of the program and other random patrons as if they were groundlings being let into the coveted balcony. it was as if the haughty pricks were allowing my students to enter this world through an act of unimaginable and christ-like charity. the false piety and disdain that these people held just beneath the surface was palpable and disgusting.

some specific examples of outright bullshit:

-one of my students was accused of taking pills during one of the operas. a horribly uptight, waspy house attendee took him aside and, without giving a moment's consideration to alternative possibilities, accused him of taking drugs during the performance. truth was, he was playing with and, this is kind of gross, eating little pieces of a tissue that had come from:

-a situation during an intermission (which ran far over the time we had been told, leading the already antsy kids to near disastrous frustration) when, in conversation, this same student laughed and clapped his hands. important to note, the rest of the balcony was as loud as his minor explosion of mirth. the moment he made his slight noise, an older woman came over and began to chastise him for his unacceptable behavior. she said that he needed to leave that kind of thing "outside of the house" and that this place "required him to realign his behavior."

now, davon is not generally what you might call a "good" kid. but in this position he knew to defer, and he did. he nodded appropriately and attempted to let it go.

old lady was not satisfied.

he returned to a now muted conversation with his friends while old lady pulled a tissue out of her pocket and unfolded it. she carefully tore off half of it and held it in front of his face.

davon looked at her, understandably confused. she was quiet for a moment, just widening her already frighteningly large eyes, and then just said "gum."

she held the fucking thing in front of him, demanding that his spit it into the tissue, and then handed it back to him once he had. then, she had the gall to turn to the row behind, where i was sitting, and say, "these children need to learn to behave because they obviously don't get it elsewhere."

these two specific examples that i was involved with were compounded by the same pompous prick who had poorly played the shitty keyboard at the professional development screaming at a teacher from another school in the following exchange:

"you need to handle your students! they are snapping their gum!" [this was also during an intermission]

"sir, i haven't seen any students blowing bubbles, but i will address any that i see."

"they do it when your back is turned! they're mocking me!"

"i don't think that's the intention, but i will pay closer attention and speak to all of my students."

"that's not good enough, i'm going to speak to your supervisor!"

this set the tone for my students. they told me later that they felt, and were, unwelcome there.

what cemented this sense for them was the last moments of our stay in the opera house. at the end of the dress rehearsal the orchestra does corrections, where they play 5 to 50 second chunks of music that were not quite up to par. i had warned my students about this, but was aware that this was going to be a rough time for them after having sit through 3 hour-long acts of the opera in silence. they behaved admirably, and i kept reminding them that every school had to sit through this and that we needed to behave appropriately.

until the accompanying teacher from the wealthy, white private school that was sitting in the row in front of us got up and moved to the back of the balcony. about 45 seconds later, he came back and guided his students to the back and out of the auditorium.

my students were ready to pop.

i had to keep explaining, in a strained whisper, that we needed to wait because everyone leaving at once would disturb the orchestra.

happily, about five minutes later, we were instructed by the staff that we could also file out, silently, and leave the auditorium.

i'm not convinced, entirely, that if i had asked before the prep-school teacher i would have been denied...although it seems highly likely. for my students, however, the message was clear: they belong here and we will do what we can to make it more comfortable for them.

i am not making claims at overt or systemic racism in this specific instance, but under the already difficult circumstance my students saw it as such and told me so.

these are savvy people, my students. maybe not in the ways that most people value, but they have a pretty intense bullshit detector and it was going off all fucking day. they felt like slaves getting to eat at the master's house, and there were five kids who told me so the next morning in school.

if the goal of this thing was to interest the next generation in your preferred art, then you failed. if your goal was to give students a positive experience with what is clearly a part of the culture of power, you failed miserably.

if your goal was to show these kids that they are as valuable as every other person in that auditorium on any given day...well fuck you.

i will take my kids over you on any day.

i wouldn't cross the street to piss on your head if your hair was on fire.


--mr. november.

third down back

my brother, who is in all ways the wiser and more together of the two of us, has a habit of coining truly exceptional metaphors for his experiences. i, inevitably, steal these and pawn them off as my own in an attempt to seem erudite and clever. sometimes it even works...i'm a great liar.

anyway, my brother is also a teacher. his circumstances are a bit different: teaches elementary school, lives in arizona, got there by way of teach for america. regardless, he and i enjoy slinging stories back and forth about our respective students and schools.

in one such conversation, he casually mentioned that what he is is a "third down back."

for those of you unfamiliar with football, the third down back is a running back whose job it is to gain whatever yardage necessary, by whatever means, so that the team does not have to punt the ball away on fourth down and lose possession of the ball.

this is a clutch job, often one in which the odds, yardage, size of the opposing team's defensive line, and a history of injuries can make covering those remaining yards seem nearly impossible. if the back does his job, he might make it. if he's great he might pull it off 6/10 times he tries. even then, it's not likely to be pretty.

this is what my brother was saying about what we do every day.

we are third down backs.

the odds and yards are long, the defensive lineup makes us look like leprechauns, and we are all playing injured...but we need to cross the first down marker, otherwise we have to punt.

punting is unacceptable.

the metaphor seems pretty clear, so i'll not waste your time with my indelicate explanation, but i really find the image powerful.

stakes are high, and just being "great" is not good enough.

time to start running suicide sprints and working on my speed off the line, there's a lot of yardage to gain before the end of june.

--mr. november

hi, how are you?

yes, i'm aware that it's been nearly a month since i've dropped any of my verbal refuse on this thing. thing is, i'm still pretty bad at this job. other thing is, even just being bad at this job takes an insane amount of my time...so all two of you who read will have to wait. i still like to drink, read a few books, and occasionally sleep.

okay.

my renewed writing is prompted by two things: 1.) i am now a few days into an eleven straight day stretch of schoollessness. not a word, but ya'll can go fuck yourselves...it is now. 2.) an email i received from a former student of mine.

neil (name changed for all of the obvious reasons).

neil is a gangly, thinly mustached, talkative and clever puerto rican kid who was (until he transferred this past january) in my junior english class.

neil was, if nothing else, precocious. he liked to talk, liked to challenge, and liked to get me off topic with talk of the national football league and my beloved steelers.

he was my kind of people.

in addition to this, he was an almost slavish devotee to the man we've all come to know as 50 cent. the kid wore a flak jacket (minus the protective plates), endorsed by said performer, on top of his usual garb, which consisted of an undersized wife-beater and a hoodie, daily. he took a day off of school (and informed me of this) so that he could be at a book signing for 50's book. he was proud in every way of his fandom.

i was largely disgusted.

of all of the people a kid could choose to idolize, and i am not even beginning to take exception to the lyrical content of the man's songs here, why would you choose someone whose music is as fucking boring as 50 cent?

all of this aside, neil was a great kid. enthusiastic, intuitive, and bright beyond the myriad ways he had been under-served by his circumstances.

neil was also a budding mc/dj.

he informed me of this in the essay i had each of my classes write about the one thing i wouldn't know about them when i first met them (a gross oversimplification, as i later learned i would know nothing about them from my first impressions...it was my first day teaching, i knew nothing). over the course of the next few months neil and i traded mix discs. he gave me discs full of him awkwardly matching beats on top of eminem, biggie, and 50 songs with a touch of his own rhymes, and me trading discs with mos def, talb kweli, blackalicious, jurassic 5, and common tracks.

he was nonplussed.

where i was, genuinely, impressed with what he was doing with outdated programs and a pc that couldn't even begin to handle the realtime editing he wanted to do, he found most of my offerings wanting in every way.

despite my tastes in hip-hop being less than adequate in his eyes, when he left black hole high after my first 3.5 months of teaching he asked for my email address so that we could keep in touch.

i gave him my personal email and my full name. i told him that he needed to send me every new track he banged out, as i wanted to pass on my critique (we had some really good conversations about where he needed to tighten up his sound in the time he was at my school). we traded a few early emails and he sent on a few tracks, all of which were showing growth in his ear and ability to find something beyond the hook in a song.

last night he sent me something that made me smile ear to ear.

yo november! this lupe fiasco cd is nice!!
it makes me think of that stuff you burnd me. i get why you like that shit now. commons pretty hot. hes pretty soft when he talkes about his kid so much but the beats is nice. yea ill keep you posted on on my work both school n music.

i love that kid.

he's wrong about common talking about his daughter, but it's unassailably cool to see him start to grow up in the space of a few months.

yeah.

my job is awesome, every day i get to meet the most interesting people on the planet...sometimes for the first time.