100407 These are my goals. What are your goals? How can we synthesize them? (How to have this conversation/exercise without immediate chaos...) Start out not just shrugging and saying yes to everything. Start out with restrictions in place, then gradually let up on them WHEN YOU ARE READY, not when they say they want it. Because they will always and quickly say they want it, and it may even seem reasonable. You don’t have to be reasonable all the time. Why do you yell at the boys, but not at the girls? Be civilized, please. Somehow.... 021508 “Without the Constitution” buttons Lose
the careful nonchalance.
It’s fake, easy, utterly ineffective.
Try
instead
to “describe the most important thing
 in the world.” hair — clothes — glasses? Should I be doing more than just babysitting? Should I ask them if they understand the question, or if they need any clarification? Am I supposed to “teach” anything? Is it possible that I would actually prefer to work in Milwaukee? I’m having a hard time imagining feeling needed, here. Maybe that’s unfair, but.... (Or maybe it’s incredibly arrogant and presumptuous.) Nobody’s going to take you by the hand and tell you how to do it. You’re supposed to be a professional, and professionals make their own decisions based on informed principles. make all notes etc into “books” or “decks” based on—whatever. Like this one, today, would totally be one. Programming language/math—equip them with a versatile, modifiable tool. Stage presence — How? “Is it supposed to be serious, or what?” If you write with conviction, passion, dedication, no-one will know whether you’re “serious” or not. Therefore you will be able to say whatever you have to say. That’s power. Can writing really be that hard? How important are grammar, mechanics, etc, and how do you (if you do) rationalize asserting what’s correct? This is probably about the worst profession I could have gotten into, I mean, in terms of natural ability or tendency. I simply HATE putting myself out there, being an authority. Their text (McDougal/Littel: Language Network) uses the term “nonstandard” and “standard” to correct grammar. (Why) is that better than just saying “right” and “wrong?” What is your answer to the outrageous triviality of all these arbitrary texts and assignments? Do you even understand the question? Or does your reluctance to be irreverent, irresponsible, or just plain wrong, prevent you from even asking it? The protective stance is deceptively slack—gazing pointedly into the focal point/field of the device—into the singularity, in fact!—brow slightly creased, body slightly inert/vacant—it’s a dipole disguised as a monopole, which is really a deeper disguise for a network node. That network is juxtaposed with the one we so-called grown-ups mostly inhabit—how are the two related? Tabloid trash is made potent by people who don’t even realize that they feel invincible/immune. «being» engaged alert loose ready excited «awake» What leads to those? When do they naturally occur? mornings An equitable mediation between your own tendencies/traits/proclivities/preferences/comfort and what is needed that you’re not supplying—or—a revolutionary work-around? Or—a redefinition of what is needed? Stop Apologizing.
Fuck it. 022508 At some point, you have to decide whether or not you care about cheating. Hell, at some point, or points, you have to decide whether you care about anything. Relax. Remember what you told [that one girl—was it Maya?] at MHSA—I’m not in high school any more! I don’t have to worry about being a dork! 022608 So far, I haven’t seen a “me,” though. Why? Blind to self? Or was I invisible? Of course, you are going to make an ass of yourself sometimes, so go ahead and do it. You’ll learn from it, whether you wanted to or not. You don’t have to be Mr. Smart English Man. You’ll make as much of an ass of yourself with kids as you will with adults, the internet—anyone—if you spout off too soon. Have the humility to continue the legacy of Doug Hunt, and resist the urge to fudge. to read: Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn. Everybody—students, employers, society, yourself—expects you to take charge, to be authoritative; I’m not knocking that skill. I just don’t think it’s the whole story, is all. Dude, you can’t just ask them what they should be doing. Can you? They did eventually figure out their own way to make groups. They got the work done. And the leadership skills of one student really shone. This could be an example of “to hell with what the crowd says”—whether the crowd be literal, or a vague, institutional threat. I guess I am a teacher, after all. The assertion, “I don’t like to read” is still shocking, alien, heartbreaking. The trouble with subbing is, there’s no feedback. You don’t know if you’re doing it right, or even what’s expected. It’s hard to be hard on girls; hard not to be hard on boys—boys of a certain demeanor, that is. You have to remember the withered neurons. No point getting all emotional about people whose capabilities (defined in part by the existing structure of their brains) may be completely not analogous (is there a word for that?) with yours. Or, they may just be fucking with you—malandragem! It is funny, as Delany pointed out, how someone you find so unique can, you later find out, fit so thoroughly into a wider social group displaying similar characteristics. There’s a couple of “Joe” (the basketball kid from MHSA) guys in here—the whole hair, lank, the “wigger” thing, all of it. Of course, everyone is unique, in some way, but we sure do learn how to hide it! CYNICISM: one of the most important elements of this society’s core curriculum. Taught by ironic dissonance. We act as if it’s the natural decayed state of embittered adulthood; we pretend we’re reluctant inhabitants of its domain; all the while we eagerly, comfortably model it for our kids. The “clique” is a substitute for the “lover.” The members come to look alike, in the same way couples come to resemble each other. They—some of them—the virile, smart-ass, too-loud ones who think they’re so fucking clever—mock their own adolescence. Are they adults, or aren’t they? No one really knows, neither we nor they, and that uncertain identity space creates a shifting, discomfitting energy. Embrace it? The main question of subbing is, are you going to try to teach anything, even if you have not been specifically instructed to do so? And if so, how? I think the techniques (if you want to identify them as such) must be different from those used in your own, full-time class. 031108 I have seen, more than once, boys massaging each other’s shoulders in this school. Cool! The problem is, there’s a dissonance between two branches of the same perspective here, I think. Here you are, an actual grown-up, certified by undeniable, inevitable, self-evident facts resulting from having survived, reproduced, etcetera. Now here you are, a grown-up in high school, and of course it doesn’t take any special kind of grown-up to see that high school kids are still, most of them, as most but not all of them were the first time around, assholes. Here’s the problem: part of you wants to win the battle from which in youth you shied away, when you were overwhelmed by the omnipresence of socially sanctioned boorism. Part of you demands it of yourself; you’re a grown-up; you’re powerful now (aren’t you?); shouldn’t you be doing something to avenge your juvenile humiliation? Don’t you owe it to yourself, to all the quiet ones, to anyone who knows better, who is not, in short, nor never wanted to be, an asshole; to prove, definitively and sure-footedly, that the assholes aren’t the superior beings their continual, facile braying insists that they are? But the other part of you pretty much accepts that there’s nothing you can, or even should, really, do; assholes will be with us always, and if you really care what they think or say, then you really haven’t changed at all, have you; you’re really not—dare not whisper it—a grown-up at all! Part of the problem with so-called “discipline” is that, as adults, we’re rather afraid of energetic movement. Says Quiller-Couch, Sir Arthur: “To know the why of things—the ‘inquisitive instinct.’ This, being the one which gives most trouble to parents, parsons, governesses, conventional schoolmasters—to all grown-up persons who pretend to know what they don’t and are ashamed to tell what they do—is of course the most ruthlessly repressed.” 031308 Subbing may be spoiling me a little bit... when I get a real job, I’ll have to be on my feet quite a bit, actually working; not just sitting around being a lifeguard, browsing the freaking web.