Rainy Day Teacher #1

Days like these days--intermittent bouts of rain, sky the color of steel--make it hard to get excited about anything beyond sweatpants, coffee, and Lifetime movies. Adding to this malaise, I've just finalized the grades for my first quarter at ITT Technical Institute and am struggling with the strange mixture of relief and disappointment that often follows final grade submission. Did I do enough to help my students? Did they do enough to help themselves? Did I make class interesting? Did activities trump learning?

Teaching is a strange profession. Perhaps there are wonderful teachers out there who can tame the lion when thrown into the den, but I have found in my (admittedly somewhat limited) experience, that the effectiveness of my classes are in large part determined by the make-up of the class, the commitment of the students (both in regards to attendance and to how they conduct themselves while in class), and the spoken or unspoken expectations communicated by the school at which I'm teaching. In short, I've held the opinion that a lot of a class's effectiveness is determined by factors outside of a teacher's power. Sure, a good teacher can motivate the apathetic and can set a standard of expectation separate from the school, but I've always thought that good teachers needed students who had, on some level, the will to learn. Perhaps that's why a recent article in The New York Times caught my attention. (You can find the article in its entirety here.) It's subject: teaching teachers to teach. Its thesis: good teachers can be made.

We hear this debate all the time, especially with writers: are good poets born with some innate talent or do they develop it through intense study? Putting that issue aside so that we can move past an endless nature vs. nurture debate, the article brings up some great, concrete ways to turn your sluggish classroom into an industrious factory of learning (perhaps a poor metaphor, but check out the videos linked to the article for the proof). The biggest observation brought up in the article is that in many education programs, very little time is devoted to teaching teachers effective teaching methods. (How's that for repetition?) I flash back to my teacher training and think about how helpful it would have been to learn classroom management techniques, such as Cold Call. I'm not disparaging my training nor saying that I should have expected to be trained this way. (From what I hear, many TAs are tossed into the classroom without the two-week training and sustained support over the course of the first semester that I received.) It's just articles like these and the work that these teachers are doing infuses me again with excitement to get back into the classroom, even on dreary days. Teaching, for those who feel at home in the classroom and are looking for more than a pay check, is a constant process of development, of introducing new techniques, of cutting exercises that flop. These kinds of articles give me a new set of tools to try out. Like an angler with a new fly rod, I'm eager to see what I'll hook.

Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!

Last fall, I faced the unfortunate let-down of having my bicycle stolen, a dose of frustration mixed with a large amount of embarrassment due that fact that I had played a significant role in the series of events: I hadn't locked it up. Instead, my bike lock hung like a heavy necklace around the frame as whoever had stolen it, (presumably) wandered out of the bar around the corner from our apartment, stumbled down the sidewalk and happened to glance into the alleyway between our house, spotting a quicker way to get wherever he was going. The lock clanking against the metal frame as he lugged himself onto the seat, the squeaky pedal that I hadn't yet had the chance to oil screaming out with every rotation as he turned onto the street and pedaled away, all of the noise from the ruckus tugging at the pant leg of my sleep but failing to wake me, to get my attention.

The next few months had me eyeing every bike rack, every cyclist zooming by for signs of my blue Schwinn road bike wrapped in reflective tape. I imagined spotting my bicycle down the street, the rider stopped at a street light, and off I'd be running to catch him, to throw him off my bike, to kick dirt in his face. But it never got to that point. I never found my bike. And then when the thaw came and bikes started emerging from the banks of snow like prizes from a cereal box, I thought of rusted chains, flat tires, rims warped by baseball bats wielded by drunken, bored college students. In one harrowing vision, I imagined my bike at the bottom of Lake Mendota, the chain woven with seaweed, the seat gnawed by fish and bleeding foam.

Now, my bike has returned to me.

This is how it happened: Leslie and I, on the way to meet a caterer this past Thursday, happened to drive down a street not six blocks away--one we had driven down many times on our way to church--and there it was, sitting pristinely on the top of a snow bank, resting against a telephone pole, practically waving, "Hi!" I could say nothing more sensible in that split second of recognition than, "That's my fucking bike!" I knew it the way a mother knows the cry of her child. The best part, the bike still worked. Practically better, in fact, than before it had been stolen.

Which leads to my point about writing. In falling asleep, my brain used to come up with "brilliant" and "indispensable" lines for poems, lines that I feared I'd lose forever if I didn't pull myself out of bed, find a pen and notebook, and write down. I used to be so frightened of losing thoughts that I'd carry a notebook around in my pocket. What I realized slowly, after months of reading these "brilliant" lines the next morning, after years of filling reporter's notepads with scribbles, was that most of this "brilliance" was junk, stuff that seemed significant in the moment only to reveal itself as pointless on the page.

I rejected my notebooks and filled my pockets instead with keys, loose change, sales receipts, chapstick. I stopped worrying about losing lines, letting them come and go like old friends. What I found out was that most things worthy of keeping around come back. It's not the naive "If you love something, give it away" platitude. It's not my conclusion that fate plays a large role in life. It's something simpler--that things will come back when they're needed. Like my bike, who left me in the fall a few weeks before I would've been forced to place it in storage only to return with the thaw, straight-rimmed and only slightly rusted. Or an image I hadn't written down springing to mind as the cursor in my blank Word document blinks and blinks and blinks and the pressure of being brilliant (or at least interesting) threatens to grind me down to soot. Off I am running out loose iambic pentameter. Off I am riding my bicycle to work, trying to beat the punch-in clock, my pedal singing out it squeals as we pull ourselves up the hill to the Capital and to the library beyond.

Found Poem #1—Robert Pattinson

Robert Pattinson On Life Beyond Twilight

Text taken from this article, with a few embellishments

Rob and I discover we share a mutual fascination

with afflictions that maim and disfigure and disgust:

He brings up cancrum oris, in which bacteria gnaws at the side

of your face until you get kind of a window in your head

and the entire world sees your teeth, shining white like a row

of piano keys. I mention cyclic vomiting syndrome,

a condition in which you puke all the goddamn time, and he

delights in lymphatic filariasis, where parasitic worms

burrow into your lymph nodes and can make balls swell

to the size of watermelons, forcing you to tote them around

in a large wheelbarrow. All this could make one hell

of a blockbuster hit movie, we agree, with a load of extras

and a few elephants, elephant actors like him. He wonders

if on some cosmic level, he might be a bit like elephants.

Do you know how they die? He asks me, as he sips his beer.

The elephant trainer told me their molars get ground down

from eating all that wood but regenerate like six times.

And after that they slowly starve to death.

Which is poignant and also must be what gives them time

to wander empty-stomached to the elephant graveyard.

They're incredibly designed creatures, he says.

I mean, people hang on way too fucking long.

Bang! Bang!

How can you argue against this? A great 2 a.m. song for all you night owls out there. I can't believe this song hasn't yet been cherry-picked by a rap artist hungry for a good hook. Wait, Lil' Wayne... what do you have to say:

Then there's this. The Raconteurs redeeming Lil' Wayne with their own version (notice the subtle, but significant switch in lyrics in the opening verse):

12 Books, 12 Months, 10 Years

In searching out intelligent blogs on writing and poetics, I came across Nick Lantz's The Dabbler (which you can find here). If you're looking for well-designed, well-written content, look no further. But what really caught my eye was his "Twelve-Twelve-Ten Project," which is his attempt to "read and review one book of poetry every month for the next ten years." (For more of his stipulations and his book list, read on).

At first, it seemed like an ambitious project (something akin to Sufjan Stevens' goal to write a CD for each of the 50 states, which I hear he recently abandoned), but then I did the math. At 60 poems per book (for a rough average), he'd have to read two poems at night. Two poems? That seems like a pretty reasonable sacrifice of time to make for poetry just like Sunday morning church seems like a reasonable trade-off for everlasting life. As I glanced around my apartment, I spied my overloaded bookshelf, spilling over with this year's Christmas present (Vonnegut's Look at the Birdie), books to review (The Anarchist by John Smolens, The Last Predicta by Chad Davidson, Touched by Lightning by Ernest Loesser, and Beauty Breaks In by Mary Ann Samyn), and all the other books I've appropriated over the years and didn't get around to cracking open. I realize I needed this too. Heck, I even had my January book done. (On a whim, I read Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt).

The basic structure of Lantz's challenge would govern my reading as well--one book every month, no exceptions. However, I would follow a slightly different set of standards when composing my reading list and after finishing with each book. First, no writing (unless I feel like posting short reviews on my blog). Second, I would have to own a copy of the book. (I'm all for supporting writers and will certainly buy books at my normal clip over the next year, but my dream is to get to the point someday where I've read through my entire collection and can start giving books away... I'm working with a therapist to make this happen). Third, I would focus primarily on prose. While I find it helpful to read poetry collections cover-to-cover to really get a solid sense of what the author is attempting, I have far too many novels to whittle through. With all that in mind, here's my list for the next few months:

January: Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt--completed

February: Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

March: The Anarchist by John Smolens

April: Look at the Birdie by Kurt Vonnegut

These are just the openers, but I'd also like to get to The Liars' Club, Sound and the Fury, all of Toni Morrison, and a good deal of other "classics" of literature I've yet to encounter. Any suggestions of books I need to add to the list once I finish those I own? (Who knows, I might even own a copy of whatever you suggest). Anyone else willing to take up Lantz's challenge (as I think I will take to calling it)? As anyone who's anyone knows, all the cool kids hang out at the library. Lord knows, if I'm to follow this schedule, you'll be able to find me there.

The One In Which He Turns Sage...

Perhaps this is not the right way to open a new year of blogging, especially on the tail-end of a many-week hiatus from blogging and especially given my recent reading of a slew of articles talking about the erosion of privacy rights in the wake of Facebook and the proliferation of blogging. (Will this blog keep me from being president? Hopefully...) However, here I sit drinking cold Sierra Nevada after yet another mind-draining night of teaching.

You may ask, "Did hookers come up?"

Yes!

"What about crack-heads?"

You betcha!

"But what about herpes?"

Here I sit at 2:59 p.m., which sounds pathetic until you let me explain that I work nights and am usually halfway through a shift right now, and my thoughts have turned to comfort. To moments when the world seems like a very decent place to spend a few years kicking around in.

Specially, I was recalling a moment on my "road trip" out to Deadwood and the Black Hills two summers ago. (Was it two summers ago already?) It dawned as a day of disappointment: I checked out of my cabin that was nestled in the Badlands, fought through morning traffic on I-90, paid a ridiculous entry fee to walk around a plot of land with huge heads of former presidents, almost wore out the shocks on my car trying to drive down a washed out gravel road to a ghost town, had a little trouble finding my campground back in Deadwood.

However, the campground had internet, and I spent that late afternoon following the Brewers on ESPN as they lost to whomever they were playing that evening. Gamecast baseball on a spotty internet connection a heal-all? On that particular evening, yes. It was one of those nights that was cool enough for a light coat but warm enough to sit comfortably in shorts. I had just enough potatoes and carrots and stove-gas to make a modest dinner. I had a backpack full of books. And baseball. It was a small moment with a simple pleasure, and that's what sustains us in life. Not the major awards or prizes, the raises at work (if anyone out there is still working), the lottery win. It's those small moments that I'll be clinging to on nights when the Sierra Nevada is cold, my girl is sleeping in the next room over, and I'm frantically searching for excuses to keep from grading this next stack of papers. So here's to 2010 and all the small moments it will bring. Let them always outshine the big, and let us remember them.

Goodbye 2009

Ok, I'm not the biggest fan of pop music, but this is pretty great, and a nice nostalgic goodbye to 2009. Let's hope 2010 brings brighter days... and better music.