Wednesday, Mar. 24, 2004
Remember it's only a game, posted at 9:28 p.m.
Epiphany in Baltimore has moved to epiphanyinbaltimore.blogspot.com We lost our first game. Beaten pretty badly. I'm bummed out and pissed off, like a little kid. I made some mistakes. The players certainly did as well. I've got to figure out how to run practice tomorrow. I'm hoping the night sleeping on it will make it all seem a little better.I started a yahoo baseball fantasy league. Anybody want to join?
***
Interesting, sort of cool moment happened today. Actually, a couple of them. I used Dr. Riddle's Scale of Multicultural Competetence (with 9th graders!) as a discussion starter for a text-to-world discussion about To Kill a Mockingbird. Serious stuff. Homophobia. Racism. Shit like that. I teach in a good school with good kids, but many are very underexposed to different cultures. They don't know that the word "chink" is derogatory. Anyway, I have the kids write about their prejudices, and, invariably, someone will always write about gay people. Today, I had a perfect example of a revulsion response. A kid read about how he thought gay people smelled funny and he didn't like them because they wore tight shirts like girls and they look at him weird. This other kid jumped in and said, "Well, I think they looking at you funny cuz you're going around smelling them!". It was so funny. But we had a pretty good discussion, an honest one, and that's what I wanted. A kid raised his hand and shared that his mom was a lesbian and had a girlfriend and they wanted to get married, and he's a quiet kid and I could tell it took guts for him to say it and that was cool. I tell them that one of the philosophies of my life is this poem, how I believe that injustice against anyone is injustice against all, and all that stuff. If I can open up just a few kids' eyes about how TKAM can be related to today's world, then I'm successful.
Anyhow, I ended up sending one boy out in the hallway for being a little jerk, and talked with him after the bell rang. I happen to teach while the rest of my colleagues are eating lunch in the break room right across the hall, so, unbeknowst to me, they were all listening to me talk with the kid. And it was probably a bit of laying into - this is a kid who needs that, he needs strong male figures in his life, I can recognize that and have worked with him all year. When I sent him off after listening to his side of the story and telling him he has to do better, I walked into the break room, and got a round of applause. Later, a veteran teacher pulled me aside and said she heard every word of the conversation, and then she said the most interesting thing. She said, "You really are so happy right now, aren't you?". When she saw my puzzled look, she said, "I mean, doing what you do. Teaching. You really love it, don't you? I saw you listening to that kid and holding that conversation, and I could just tell that there was nothing else in the world that you would want to be doing at that moment." She's a wet-eyed type of lady to begin with, and her eyes were shining. It gave me goose bumps.
I thought it was nice of her to say so. I could be snide and say that there are probably a hundred things I would have rather have been doing than putting a kid out in the hallway and having to talk with him about his behavior, but her sentiment was both nice and correct. It's the sort of moment that, looking back on this day of March 24, 2004, makes the less-than-auspicious beginning of my high school coaching career a little easier to swallow.