Hey first years! What to do this summer (besides sh*t your pants)

Just kidding about your pants. Relax! Be cool. There is plenty of time for worries later! Seriously, it is impossible to prepare completely for your first year teaching, and the best thing you can do is approach with a clear and refreshed frame of mind. You just graduated college, most of you. Give yourself a break! And don’t let Ben scare you too much. Yeah, teaching your first year is really tough, especially where you are going, but it’s going to suck no matter what you do this summer. So relax a little! Honestly, you don't even know enough about who you are as a teacher to plan good lessons yet. And that’s okay. Enjoy your summer while you can. Do what you need to do for Teacher Corps but try to enjoy your time with classmates and us second years. Remember, you take them for granted now, but you will not be seeing most of these wonderful people too much once the regular school year begins.

My other advice, aside from everything you will hear 1000 times this summer about planning lessons and preparing your classroom discipline, is to get into your classroom as early as you possibly can. Chances are, you may inherit a room that has had a lot of turnover in the past. Teachers come and go, and they leave all kinds of useless and forgotten crap behind. You may have 15-year old computers or a random assortment of yellowed workbooks no one has looked at in 20 years, plus 12 popcorn poppers stacked in your cupboard. You really never know until you look in your room. It may take some work to get it halfway organized and uncluttered, that’s all I’m saying. Most schools will not give you enough time to deal with this, because veteran teachers already have their rooms set up they way they want, from the year before. And if you plan to make posters or anything else to put in your room, try to get that ready in July, before you move to your site, so when you do get there, you have time to clean up and throw away and organize.

Further musings on the topic of organization: One of the mundane struggles of the teaching life is the enormous amount of paper you have to shuffle through on a daily basis. Frankly, if you are anything like me, you probably have no idea how to organize all this until at least halfway through your first year—and by that time, you are too busy and burned out to care about a little clutter. My desk was an absolute, primordial mass of papers piled on top of each other that grew bigger and messier throughout the year. I would actually tell students not to leave homework papers on my desk because I might not find them! Aside from homework, quizzes, and other assignments you take up, which of course piles up alarmingly quickly if you let it, you will receive endless announcements, lists of students absent for various and sundry reasons, memoranda about many useless topics, lunch menus, calendars, and well, you get the picture. Personally, I recommend an accordion-style file folder for carrying student work back and forth between home and school and the local McDonald’s—wherever the inspiration to grade papers strikes you. For all the other crap, you’re on you own. If you are the type for it, you might try asking a mentor teacher at your school (if you can find one!) what papers are important to keep and how to organize them.

observation heartache

hold me against the sweetness
of your breast and whisper your
forgiveness promise me honey
moons in tropical locales and
take me to Houston when you leave

love me with the secrets and broken
lives of schoolgirls caught writing
****************He does not care about me
1000 times on the notebooks of God our

bodies tuned to the impulse of pregnancy
and backstreet impromptu posturing the
candor of life like What should I do? from
parents and babies without daddies

cholesterol yes

future portrait perfect self or the mega-collapse
of sky-scrapers, the wretched lawnmowers and
guns in every direction, some one-word messages
for all those in search of easy answers, like old cars

or God, that noisy ceiling fan or this silent bedroom,
regret, the heavy sound of doors closing, that dear,
you forgot something even if you wanted to, to
those about to leap with and without parachutes

just say something, anything, bring solidarity to this
thin retreat and explain to posterity our reasons
in a sympathetic light, for everything worth anything
was summed up on a Wendy’s wrapper today

the future is sentences without words, a friend who
never writes back and a self-implosion waiting to
happen anyway, so just “Do What Tastes Right” and
toss it away: there are 256 ways to order this hamburger.

On the Topic of Mental Health (Namely My Own)

It’s not been too good lately. Frankly, I’ve been pretty depressed for the past month or so. You know this is true when self-destructive images begin to enter your fantasy life. My sleep has become extremely irregular. And to say my self-motivational powers have wavered would be something of an understatement. How can this be so?

Pattern recognition: I notice in myself a tendency to become depressed in anticipation of significant transitions. As one phase of my life (such as my first year as a teacher in the U.S.) draws to a close, I begin to look back on it with regret, as I realize I have not been or done half of what I once imagined in my most idealistic fantasies. It’s like you dreamed as a child that you would one day do something special, and then the time of action comes and goes before you realize you never did it. What a sad thought.

I used to have a recurring nightmare that I was still in college, and I was trying to right my ways academically. Then in the dream I would realize in a terrible panic that there was some class I had forgotten to attend all semester. I guess the nightmare has stopped by now, only to be replaced by this recurring depression.

From my present perspective, it seems I have gotten another year older without getting any closer to anything important. I am not entirely convinced that I am better teacher now than I was 12 months ago. Yes, I have jumped through a few hoops and improved my on-paper credentials, but who is to say my actual classroom work has improved? Not me.

There is probably a social element to most episodes of situational depression, and yes, I have allowed myself to become increasingly isolated in the last month or two. Because I tend to be a loner somewhat anyway, it is very easy for me to fall into this. I am shy to initiate social contact, and I generally enjoy my time alone, so outside of some situation or special relationship propelling me into regular, meaningful social contact, it is easy for me, when surrounded by relative strangers, to become quite isolated. Next year will most likely only be worse, as my roommate and MTC classmate are both leaving town, and there will be no replacements from within the program.

Things seem bleak indeed—probably irrationally so. From where I stand now, it is hard to see anything getting much better—socially or otherwise—within the foreseeable future. Nothing but another year of unhappiness to look forward to. What’s wrong with me?

This past weekend was a brief reprieve. On a hint of suggestion, I had gone to the trouble to catch a ride up to Oxford to attend graduation (of my roommate and other second-years). It was surprisingly well worth it. The social aspect of the occasion was affirming and improved my mental state considerably. I was the only first-year not attached to a significant other, and a couple second-years just sort of showed up for the free food afterwards, so when it came time for introductions at the reception, I got introduced as somebody’s friend four times in a row! I guess that made my day, stupid as it sounds. And it was fun to meet Moda’s Columbian grandmother afterward; she’s quite a character!

The job is grinding to a sad, chaotic close. Last Friday was probably the worst day of the year so far. Tons of teachers were absent, and students were wandering the halls almost at will. I had to cover a “science reasoning” class (the holding class so these students don’t f**k up our state biology test is what that really means) during my planning block for one of the absent teachers. The children were zoo animals, and one of them ended up throwing a pen at me before I finally called the vice principal, and he dealt with them by sending them out to work on the football field (in preparation for Saturday’s pre-prom football jamboree) as a supposed punishment. Lately, my third block Algebra II class has become my true bane. I hate teaching that class even more than I hate teaching Transition to Algebra (the holding class so those students don’t f**k up our state Algebra I test)—and that’s saying something. I have maybe three people in the entire class passing. They have really terrible attitudes. They do nothing but complain, even the relatively good students among them. A couple weeks ago, they went through a phase where, to the person, they absolutely refused to participate in class at all or answer even the simplest question. Last Thursday, they all tried to skip class by going to another teacher’s class to supposedly help with the prom decorations, even though she explicitly said they could only come there if they had nothing better to do. I had to round them up, and they resented me for it. Imagine that, the novel concept that you should be in your class during the designated time!

And that’s all I got to complain about—for now!

What Makes a Hero

Spider-Man is my favorite super hero. Superman is too perfect, too powerful, too everything. Batman is too aristocratic, and his villains are just goofy. Of all the well-known comic book series to generate major spin-off movies and television series over the years, Spider-Man is by far the best, for one simple reason: The characters actually have some dramatic depth. Spider-Man is the most human. All his powers are limited. He always seems to be the underdog in every major fight he gets into, but his primary asset is just his resilience. He has pluck and determination. He constantly gets smashed against a brick wall a few times before he finally seems to pick himself up, as if to say, “Hey, I’m Spider-Man, gosh darn it! I’m better than this!” Spider-Man has regrets. He makes mistakes. He is in love. He is a good person torn to pieces by a secret identity, an awesome responsibility too big for his shoulders. We love him for all of these reasons.

He is not perfect, but Peter Parker is a good-hearted person. He is humble and loyal. This is my biggest grip with the new Spider-Man 3 movie: The dark side of Peter Parker / Spider-Man is anger and revenge, perhaps a touch of envy—not vanity. See, he can fight crime all day and still never bring his uncle back. He is misunderstood, and that hurts. His relationship with Mary Jane constantly suffers, not because he is too self-absorbed to pay attention to her, but really for the opposite reason. He is simply too busy with the responsibility of his double life as a crime fighter to pay attention to his own love life. The dark Spidey in this new movie is too dumb. The alien suit is supposed to be powerful, not petty. The scene where Peter Parker dances in the jazz bar to get revenge on Mary Jane is not just painfully over-the-top, it totally misses the point. Peter Parker would never act that way, dark side or not. He is just not vain. The suit was supposed to make him more aggressive, not a laughable jackass.

Thankfully, the movie begins to redeem itself shortly after its most painfully stupid sequence. A more believable dark side comes out when Peter unleashes his anger at the bouncer, and in a berserk fit of ‘roid rage, indiscriminately knocks Mary Jane to the floor before finally coming back to his senses and realizing the horror of what he has become. The real Spider-Man steps forth. Some may rightly criticize that the movie had too much going on to do any of it well. The first half of the movie was plodding and unconvincing. But the final battle, with good Spider-Man and good-turned-bad-turned-good-again Harry Osborne teamed up against the evil twin of Spider-Man and the misunderstood criminal-cum-flying pile of sand, made it all seem worth it. It was a satisfying conclusion to a movie that fell well short of what it might have been. And I love how the re-found Peter Parker finally forgives the man who shot his father. This is what Spider-Man is really about: character in the face of adversity—not some cheesy American flag waving in the background as Spider-Man comes flying to the rescue.

Success and Failures

Last Friday, I got a ride home from school with the veteran calculus / pre-calculus / trigonometry teacher from my school. Her classroom is always immaculate-looking, but people say she has no classroom management. She seems competent in the subject; one time she told me she had taken every math and science course offered at Delta State. A middle-aged white Mississippian, she is the longest-tenured math teacher at my school. Because our district buses students between the two high schools for certain classes, her AP Calculus class is a pocket of whiteness in our otherwise black high school. Due to our 4x4 block schedule, she has some of my former students this semester. On the drive home, she told me how my former students really knew how to solve quadratic equations, factor, etc. She said she was reviewing to see what they knew, and they were answering questions left and right, telling her “Mr. A taught us that!” Of course, the students she has are the ones who did reasonably well in my class, but still it feels like a success story. Because I do not teach state-tested subjects, I receive no objective outside evaluation on how I am doing, as a teacher. So the best compliment I can receive, I suppose, is when another teacher tells me how well-prepared my students are for the next level.

The bad news is that I have a ridiculous number of students failing. Probably around 2/3 are failing. Most are just not trying at all. They tune out. My third-block Algebra II class was in revolt a during state test week; the entire class refused to answer questions or participate at all, so I had to call Mr. Bic to come and have a word to them. They want to have free time and say my class is too hard. Well, I plan to forgive a few assignments, as I have done in the past, which will help those who are on the threshold between passing or failing, but I plan to stick to my guns on those who have truly earned their F’s. (I’ve already signed my contract for next year. What are they going to do, fire me?) Almost all the students who are failing have many assignments missing. A few of them will pay attention and do something well every once in a while, but their efforts are so inconsistent that they fail the tests. It is so frustrating when you teach your heart out, and every day when you ask a question or give them a problem to look at, the majority of your students will take one look at it and say, “I don’t know how to do this!” But they never study. The ones who are failing are the ones who do not take notes.

So my principal is on my case. He says I need to contact parents. Which is true, I suppose. I have not contacted parents much at all this year. Afterward my little conference with the principal, I ended up talking with the art teacher. You would think art is an easy subject to pass, right? Well apparently she has a lot of students fail, too. So I was talking with this teacher, and she told me she has even had the superintendent on her case, telling her she needs to call parents. But she said exactly what I was feeling: These children are adults—or very nearly so. To the parents, “I have 100 students, you have one. Can you call me?” And if the parents really cared, why do they wait until the end, when the report cards and progress reports have been issued on designated days, noted on the school calendar, every four and half weeks?

Then I had a conversation with my roommate about this. Apparently he has done a lot of home visits. He talked about breaking down the barrier between home and school, and he described the priceless look on a students, faces when he showed up on their doorsteps. He claims it has made a difference. It puts me to shame.