2001-11-30
It's been a good week, posted at 8:03 a.m.
Epiphany in Baltimore has moved to epiphanyinbaltimore.blogspot.com It's Friday. Woo-hoo.When all is said and done, it hasn't been a bad week. It's actually gone pretty quickly, considering it's the week after a holiday. I had to leave right after the bell rang at 3:15 on Wednesday after school to make it to the basketball game. Then, yesterday my department head asked me to go to a department head meeting for her on the other side of town at 3:30 - she had me leave at 3pm and someone else watched my freshmen for the last fifteen minutes of class. I finally went running again last night, and while it wasn't the best run in the world (I kept cramping up), it was nice to get back out there. This morning, I had a good weights workout. And today's Friday, meaning I'm dressed in khakis and a t-shirt. All of this adds up to my really good mood right now.
Can I just say how much I love Their Eyes Were Watching God? It's definitely one of my favorite books of all time. I listened to it this summer during one of my Michigan/Maryland trips. That was great and all (Ruby Dee does a kick-ass job with it), but I think you notice all of Hurston's figurative language even more when you're reading it. I'm having my kids chart her use of figurative language, and it's amazing. Lines like, "She was a rut in the road. Plenty of life beneath the surface but it was kept beaten down by the wheels. Sometimes she stuck out in the future, imagining her life different from what it was. But mostly she lived between her hat and her heels, with her emotional disturbances like shade patterns in the woods - come and gone with the sun" and "his vanity bled like a flood" and "Rumor, the wingless bird, had shadowed over the town" and "The sun from ambush was threatening the world with red daggers..." just send shivers down my spine. She is a stone-cold beautiful writer. I want to read other stuff from her.
My freshmen were terrible yesterday, and I gave four kids detention. They're all good at playing the victim and blaming other people for their misbehavior, or saying it's not fair that they got detention and so-and-so didn't. I fought them hard yesterday. Teaching shouldn't be like this. They're so good, however, when listening to the book on tape. I want them to do reading at home, but it's tough to fight the urge to just play Ruby Dee reading the story for 90 minutes during class, as good as they are when she's doing it. Class discussions generally bring about good comments, but they're so damn rude to each other - interrupting, cutting each other off, degrading other's comments. Next semester, I've got to be a hard ass from the beginning. That's all there is to it.
I've also got some parents to call this morning. I called some parents earlier this week, and the results have been wonderful. They both sent in letters. One girl wrote a letter of apology to me for her outburst in class ("This ain't a quiz, this is a test. This is so stupid. I hate this crap." Tanita, if you say another word, you're going to get a zero. "I don't care if I get a f-ing zero. This ain't fair. Go ahead and take it. I'm not going to take it anyway"). It was a little backhanded, I thought (she wrote it to my first name and last name, and said she should not have responded to my comment because I am the adult, rather than saying her initial comment was wrong), but I still have some satisfaction from it. The parent of the kid who I've had problems with all year wrote me a long letter saying he will "jack him up" if does anything else. I'm not sure what that means, but it doesn't sound good. He's been the perfect angel since then. That's another one of my goals next semester - to call home more often.
I'm going to be a much more effective teacher next semester. I can't wait. I'm already working on my syllabi.
My next dilemma is trying to figure out what to do with Chaim Potok's The Chosen. It's the last novel on our freshmen curriculum - we also do August Wilson's The Piano Lesson (which we'll do in class over the course of four days or so). I'll be done with Their Eyes in a little more than a week. What I was planning on doing is introducing The Chosen and having students read it independently over break, completing a reading journal and then having a couple of days of discussion the first day of January and perhaps a test, and then being done with it. That's what another English teacher is doing. Another one, however, doesn't think The Chosen is very good, and says the kids hate it every year. He teaches excerpts from the novel, then is planning on having students do an independent project on an American author of their choice. It will consist of reading a novel, reading some biographical information, then giving a powerpoint presentation on their author. I like that idea. I'm not sure what I'm going to do. I think The Chosen is okay, but reading that text and To Kill a Mockingbird seems a bit redundant (same narrative style, themes of intolerance, etc) and it would be easier to just teach that than organize this other project. But I like the idea of kids reading authors of their choice. We'll see.
I'm hoping this weekend will be good. My movie wish list is as follows:
1. Harry Potter
2. In the Bedroom
3. From Hell
4. Joy Ride
5. Spy Game
6. Behind Enemy Lines
Maybe I'll even get to see a couple of them.
Last night, Jason, roommate Mike, and I went to a cool little Mexican place called Nacho Mama's. It was in a cool little neighborhood town square place in B-more called Canton. It's like a less-touristy version of Fell's Point - very cool. The fact that there is so much more of this city to discover is both exciting and frustrating. Frustrating, because it seems like it's going sooooo slow. A couple of teachers have decided to take me out on a tour of the city on Wednesday after school, so hopefully that'll be fun. Cool places I've heard about - Federal Hill, Charles Village - are places I haven't been yet at all.