Friday, Feb. 11, 2005
Chronicle, posted at 4:20 p.m.
Epiphany in Baltimore has moved to epiphanyinbaltimore.blogspot.com My period of restful silence away from my cell phone is over. I paid my delinquent bill over the phone just now, after continued efforts on the Internet proved fruitless.I didn't mind not having a phone. There's a certain freedom to it. But the vacation is now over, and it's probably time.
I head to work tonight, and am hoping for a busy night to offset that unexpectedly large bill I just paid. I guess I haven't paid it in a few months, so that's going to happen. Oh well.
Arthur Miller died today. I student taught Death of a Salesman and The Crucible in the same year, and that was my first exposure to him. I would guess that he and August Wilson are the two most important American playwrights of the 20th century. I recommend the film version of The Crucible - it captures the essence of the play and features some truly incredible acting from Joan Allen, Daniel Day Lewis, and Winona Ryder. I think it was Allen's first really great role, the role that put her on the map of great American actresses. Showing that movie in school is a lot of fun, because the kids are at first put off by the Puritan costumes and such, but eventually they get really into Ryder's villainous.
School was excellent today. I really enjoy my B day juniors; I can joke around with them like I imagined teaching older kids would be like. A bunch of my A day juniors are assholes, but my B day ones are good-natured and funny. I get away with saying such mean things in there because I'm so nice and deadpan about it. None of them would translate to the page (screen), but suffice to say we laugh a whole lot. There might even be some learning going on.
We dissected a non-fiction essay by a black woman comparing the use of the Bible to justify slavery in the 1840s with the current use of the Bible to justify the condemnation of homosexuality, then compared it to Miss Maudie's line that "The Bible in the hand of some men is worse than a bottle of whisky in the hand of - oh, your father." It was a good discussion and the kids were able to analyze the writer's thesis statement, how she constructed her argument with evidence, and compared it to Maudie's line in To Kill a Mockingbird. The book is all about hypocracy, and I don't think I've always let them arrive at that concept like it's feeling like they're doing now.
Teaching To Kill a Mockingbird is like putting on a warm pair of socks - so comfortable and reassuring. They're also really into it, and not just because it's right after we read The Odyssey. Maybe that's part of it, though.
Tomorrow, I've already made plans to consume mass amounts of beer and take a cab home from J. Patrick's.