092418 I truly want to do almost anything but this (not including more grading; i love/hate grading; more on that later), but I’m going to anyway, because. Just because. Wouldn’t it be creepy if everything you picked up to read turned out to be about you? Well, I don’t actually know if it would necessarily be all that creepy. It could just mean that you’re a narcissist. Or maybe that you’re spending too much time reading through your own journals. But if it was really in the true science fiction sense, and you could have outside corroboration of that, then yes, I suppose it could be the genesis of more than a couple little creepin’ tingles up the spine, yo. I don’t know. We’ll see, I guess. I’m an example of why we need AVID. The ones who “get it” (language arts, standard English, classic rhetoric, command of syntax, etc) are easy to provide feedback for. It’s like we’re bonding over a shared interest. I can say abstract things (simultaneously kind of showing off and vaguely kind of getting off on getting to be professorial in an environment where I’m not likely to be challenged by someone who *really* knows what they’re talking about) and have a pretty confident sense that they’ll *get* it, you know? So I can be satisfied I’ve done my jobby. The ones who are super clueless, I at least some of the time am able to zero in on one or two basic things that they could do to at least get a “3” now and again. It’s those ones in between. The lower middle class or the upper lower class of students. The ones who sort of seem to be half-assing the writing prompts. They make all the predictable dumb sounding plebeian grammar mistakes. They don’t make their quotes flow right. They don’t see the bigger picture--or, they do see it, but they can’t explain it. They say “would be” all the time. They say “In conclusion....” I pretty much assume they don’t care, because of like, sports, or three wheelers, or fishing, or construction or something. They probably listen to metal and have another browser window open with a Youtube video going while we’re having eSessions, if they come to eSessions at all. They’re not all poetic and shit. Except, what if they are? Why do I skip over them? Why do I dread grading their assignments? Why is it so hard to figure out what to put in the little box? I’ll tell you why: it’s because I have to put something that makes it sound like I’m genuinely trying to help them have ideas on how to improve, but because of my assumptions about them, I don’t honestly believe they are either able or willing to really improve, so I’ve already given up on them, and I know they’re not going to change and they’re not going to learn anything, and their writing is going to be exactly the same at the end of the semester as it was in the beginning, and they’re not going to be any better at reading *The Crucible* and they’re still going to think Thoreau was just some wordy dried-up crank, and so I just have to find some phrase that sounds teachery and open minded enough to look good, but it really doesn’t matter what it is because they don’t care and it’s not going to help anyway. That attitude is why we need AVID. We need AVID (or the thing it ideally represents, at least in my interpretation and (haltingly, falteringly, occasionally passionately) attempted implementation) to give students the skillz and weaponz they can use to fight back against the ubiquitous attitudes of intellectually and morally lazy teachers like me. We’re everywhere aren’t we? What makes me think that? Oh, just the things I overhear (or overread) other teachers saying, at meetings, in chats, at the bar, in their comments to students. Look, real teaching is hard. It may not scale. We all have a lot of students. We have to do things that scale. So we compromise. But when compromise becomes bullshit, we have a real problem. The best we can probably hope for is to learn how to make the students help us teach the material to them and us and their classmates. I need you to help me teach this. That’s the only angle that really counts, I’m starting to think. #pdp Well, in other news, I’m still tired. I’m still worried about Megan. I have had two flashes of intuition that she may be doing some kind of drugs. Don’t know that for sure, but can’t rule it out. God I sound old. Whatever. Fuck that, I don’t care. Millie acts like a normal girl when Megan’s not in the room. But often when Megan’s not in the room, her ghost is still there (no, she’s not dead. I just mean), the ghost of her anger and volatility. everybody’s a little afraid of her. There’s always like this sense of a very thin veil between her and complete chaos. She could snap at any time. And so we walk on eggshells. I gotta stop doing that. It’s not fair to the Millies of the world.