Soul's Typography

It’s been about four-five weeks (depending on when you actually call the end of the school year, based on the fact that seniors were supposed to be released a week before the underclassmen) since the school year ended. I’ve NOT missed the early wake-up time, the smell of the hall bathrooms, the drama of the annoying people I have to work with. You know what I have missed? Handwriting.

I teach English, so there’s obviously more writing there than say, chemistry, but I’d say that teachers could probably be really great at one of those FBI/Forensics jobs where the nerd with the thick glasses and bright light in a dark steel room analyzes handwriting and what it says about the bearer’s personality. Teachers start to notice things about the ways people write-- silly things such as drawing circles instead of dots over i’s, some people’s penchant for writing in print or cursive, and even the way some people have the propensity for killing a whole lot of paper by skipping lines or writing unusually large. 

I assign journals—in fact, I think it’s one of the hallmarks of why my classroom “works” so well. Students have a regular channel of communication with me—regardless of how much time we get together—if we have any quiet moments for any tete-a-tetes-- if it’s a testing week or a teaching week. This channel is sculpted so that kids can have a free-choice topic and they have the open option of writing down song lyrics (rap/r&b) and essentially explicating them, as one would do poetry. Now, when they’re writing a detailed explanation of why they like certain lines of the song and how the meaning is subtle/broad/nuanced, etc. they don’t realize they are doing higher-order thinking. I’m tricking them into academic discourse. Plus, I love music. I may not enjoy angry rap, but I get its place in a teen’s world.

Another aspect about journaling is that kids, although they are so completely plugged in—texting, calling, facebook, twitter, etc., they feel like so many of us may have felt as teens—that no one understands them and that they have no voice. Or that if you have a voice—there’s either no one to hear it or it’s not worth being heard. Having a journal in which a trusted adult (eh-hem, that’s me) responds and can write back or even open up a personal conversation about in response to the entry? That’s communication gold. It’s private, safe, and available. They know that it’s not getting ignored or, heaven-forbid, not “liked” or “followed” on social media. This leads to some powerful writing and teenaged catharses.

So it’s summer time. And I realized I miss handwriting. A student sent me a graduation “thank you” note today—thanking me for teaching him and helping him have a great senior year enclosing  a prom and senior portrait. He was a sweet kid-- polite, played sports, had a plan for college and career success. The kids generally have my home address because I send cards—handwritten ones—throughout the year. I kept a spreadsheet of how many cards I sent this year. It was a lot. Postage jumped during the year, thanks recession. It took a lot of time, but the payoff was good—for the same reason that reading 6 stacks of journals—close to 200 a week—is a good payoff. Having human connection—something tangible and real—that’s powerful. Seeing this kid’s handwriting brought back those moments in August when I’m reading through intro index cards and thinking, “How will I ever learn all these names?” even though generally I have all of them by the end of the week. His handwriting was uncharacteristically neat and tidy, for a teenaged boy.

I’m not sure what the rebellion within handwriting expression lies with teen boys is, because often, when I taught 4^th and 5^th grade kids, the boys had very neat handwriting. They’d spend time making sure it was perfect. The girls were often so busy flying through their ideas in the forms of paragraphs and poetry that their handwriting didn’t have time to be perfect. Somehow it switches back by high school—the girls are writing neatly, and encapsulating good ideas within the syntax of those pronounced paragraphs, but the boys are dawdling, wasting time writing with sloppy yet fluid, messy lines, and having less and less to say. 

I’m over-generalizing of course, but it has been an observation. By high school, general-level boys are writing less and less and think they have less to say or be good at. There are a few poets, lyricists, and scientists in the bunch, but there’s less than with the girls. The advanced girls write neatly, are organized, and turn in multiple drafts, and on time. The gifted girls are hit and miss. Sometimes they write as neatly as a Word document and other times it’s complete gobbledeegook. 

Thinking back over this year, three of my most creative writer-girls—they were all three musicians (band instruments and one singer), all poets, and all, Bertha, Lumeria, and Miranda,  had some sort of rough aspect to their home life. A terminally sick dad, a custody fight between parents, a child who was the first generation American who mom relied on heavily for translating-- these three 18-year-old girls had atrocious handwriting! It was bubbly and flowing and messy and squished up at the end of each line and completely annoying to read. Sometimes it would be giant and take up two lines when one would have sufficed and other times it was so crunched up, I needed a magnifying glass to read it. What is the commonality? The creativity. The songs within their hearts. Seeing the beauty around them for all the pain within them. So that handwriting? Annoying to grade—powerful to know the voice which was creating it.

Some other kids had type-writer perfect handwriting. Neatly made, whether it was print or cursive. Every assignment was neatly outlined and carefully spelled. These types of handwriting make life simpler! It’s a little bit of a chicken-or-egg dilemma though—am I grading more subjectively in their favor because they have good handwriting? Or is their good handwriting a product of more carefully thought-out answers and better foresight? Who knows. Several of the kids who I can think of who had delightful handwriting—Sarah and Corean in particular—were sitting on scholarships to the colleges of their choice by year’s end. Was it the handwriting on their admission packet? Doubtful—most of that is word processed.

Which brings me to my point—I MISS handwriting! All this word-processing and Web 2.0 stuff is great—the fact that everything is in real time, can be time-stamped, retrieved at a later date, can’t get lost, etc. can be a salvation for disorganized teachers. But when it comes down to it, the pop-quizzes are generally hand-written, and Georgia is still woefully behind the rest of the nation when it comes to open-response (essay) format tests, so they are still administered with bubble scantrons and number 2 pencils. Honestly, you could hand me nearly any piece of paper with writing on it and I could tell you which of my students did it—or that it wasn’t my student at all. 

Handwriting is beautiful—typography representing the subjectivity of the writer’s inner voice. It’s summer time and I miss having stacks of handwriting to wade through. I do!

Nervous Nellie on Exam Day...and I'm the Teacher!

I meant to post this last week, but things have been pretty hectic in high school teaching land. The week and days leading up to the AP exam were pretty intense. There were a lot of senior activities that split the kids’ attention—and made it hard for them to focus on (what I think is important…) their AP Literature exam. 

Realistically, is my class the only one they have? Nope, they have 6 others…presumably 3 other core classes and 3 electives—which take varying degrees of time. 

Is my class *that* important? Nope. Family, extracurriculars, volunteering, working, music, sports, social life…I find these things imperatives to a healthy, well-rounded upbringing.

But wait, they signed up to take AP and I signed on to teach AP so that they could have a shot at getting a 3, 4, or 5 on the AP exam (and subsequently exempt a college class) and to be challenged in an academically rigorous and collegiate environment for the year. The exam is the culmination of their efforts.

All the books. (I assigned one a month since December. That was painful.) All the essays. All the Socratic Seminars. All the debates. All the Literature Circles. All the movie tie-ins. All the vocabulary quizzes. All the crazy rants I went off on about critical theory. All the technological assignments that had strict deadlines.  Tons of this was new to them. High school hasn’t been hard for a lot of the kids because they’re smart or the classes are easy. My class has been a big change for them. I’m okay with the fact that I challenged them.

 *      *      *      *

The Friday before the exam, a huge amount of the kids were on the senior trip to Disney. [I was more or less assigned to babysit a couple other classes due to  the lack of substitutes in the building. No big deal—I sent the extra kids into my classroom with a Disney movie on (well, it was Pirates of the Caribbean) and made a round-table arrangement of desks in the hallway. (Sort of the hallway—I have a little mini-entrance that I call the Vocabulary Vestibule because I hang up their comic versions of SAT words out here.)] Any of my AP students were to check in with their electives and then come back to work on AP. We worked on poetry, multiple choice, and applying literary vocabulary. It was groups of 2 to a dozen kids plus me—on a lot of coffee. (I talked re-heeaaaalllllly fast.)

We milked every practice discussion question for what it was worth and we debated the best ways to approach the essays. Kids who had felt nervous about their abilities got praise from their peers (and me) and hopefully took some of the weight of their self-doubt off of their shoulders. We argued about the reasoning for studying old, ancient, dusty poems and the relevance-slash-confusion of modern, new ones. We brainstormed the books we’ve read (mostly from this school year)—Invisible Man, 1984, The Handmaid’s Tale, Jekyll and Hyde, Frankenstein, The Bean Trees, Robinson Crusoe, The Bluest Eye, Great Gatsby, Night, Julius Caesar, A Doll’s House, The Awakening, Their Eyes Were Watching God, The Joy Luck Club…They realized that they have more stuffed in their brains than they think. 

I wished I had a small, laser-like focused AP group every dang day. It was very awesome.

Leading up, every day after school, I worked with kids on whatever they wanted help on. We had a movie afternoon and compared “Children of Men” to 1984. We watched parts of 1984 and scoffed at the movie-making techniques of only a handful of years ago. We watched parts of Wall-E and discussed how this had shades of Bradbury and Orwell. 

College Liberal-arts background: you’ve served me well. 

So, May 9^th was the exam and I went and met the kids in the library before they headed off. It was “Decade Day,” so many of them were in ridiculous outfits and costumes—notably many 1950-60’s Doris-Day looking fancy dresses and heels that, according to the kids, were inspired by The Help. I was in a hippie skirt, along with many of my Flower-Children! They weren’t to take anything with them, so I offered to hold onto cell phones—

I think a picture is worth more than a description here. 

Here’s the strange part to me—I had a large number of kids taking the exam—between 70 and 80. I’ve had plenty of kids taking high-stakes exams—Graduation tests, EOCT’s, 3^rd, 5^th, and 11^th grade Writing Test. I’ve never *felt* anything like this.

I was nervous. 

The whole morning (3+ hours!) I was pacing and just a wreck! I had the butterflies in my stomach and a dry throat—I was just so dang nervous for my babies. I can’t imagine having children and watching them perform on a stage. That must be torture. 

When they started trickling in to collect their (eh-hem) expensive electronic devices, I felt the weight lifting off of my shoulders. For better or for worse, they’d taken their exam. Most of them felt confident about the multiple choice (“You gave us way harder questions than ones that were on there, Miss G.!”), the poetry essay (“I just annotated it, TPCASTT’d it, and wrote everything I could think of!”) and the Free-response essay (“Is it okay that it seemed JUST like the essay I wrote for you about ---- book? The prompt seemed familiar!”). The prose essay was something modern and they didn’t enjoy it, but oh well. Some of them didn’t space their time well and ran out. Oh well. Some of them came in beaming and pleased with themselves…and that’s what makes me happy.

So I made it through a year of teaching AP Literature. Check one more curriculum off the list for me. The kids learned a bunch of stuff. Their writing improved vastly and I greatly desensitized them to their allergy to reading. I’d say it’s been a good year.

Putting the attitude in gratitude

I jotted down some notes about this—which should be a great way of starting the pre-writing process, except for me, I’m a bit of a (as my friend Christy would say) one-draft-wonder. I write to have catharsis—I write to release—I write to share—I write to maybe enlighten, and very possibly entertain. If I write it down in my journal or notebook, I basically have released it. It’s a different sort of release than typing and/or blogging, but it’s been set free from the dizzying confines of my mind and is therefore somehow laid to rest. When I draft an outline, that’s usually as far as it goes.

I think I was kicking around ideas for this as a pro-con list. I like to make my pro-con lists when I’m in a euphoric mood—that way, when I look back over them later, if I should happen to be in a bad mood, it still makes me happy that I have so many darn pros in my life! Who can argue with that?

Lemme start with the bad…but I didn’t write it in this order. It was hard to think of the bad stuff.

The cons:

HOME: My home is a shitty townhome. I have a roommate and I’m almost 30. That is stupid. Then again, when you have a roommate, it’s kind of like having a sister who’s always there—we talk, cook, walk, and hang out a good amount of time. Eh, move it to the pro side.

WORK: I have a crappy job that I 80% loathe. Despite the colleagues I like, there are a couple of MCB (see my teaching blog for more explanation), disappointing administrators, a colleague who should have been fired outright for all her actions (in other words, someone who leads by negative example), and piles of kids who seriously need some rules in their lives. It sucks to be demoralized, treated misogynistically, and overworked on a daily basis; working for this paycheck has some serious drawbacks.

PET: My Sweetie Petey-Bella Boo is quite the leash aggressor. She pulls really hard when there’s another dog around and I haven’t tried a dog park in years with her. That’s tough, because I’d like her to be more social, but then again, she started life in a really rough way, so I’m more than happy with how awesome she is.

LOVE LIFE: Hah. No such thing.

Pros:

HOME: I live in a home surrounded by my comfy bed, cute clothes, fancy-smelling candles, interesting books, pretty art, fancy cooking appliances and dishes, and my clutter. Yes, the clutter is still a pro. It’s my clutter and I like it. It's in a good neighborhood that I enjoy being near places.

WORK: I go to a job that is honestly AWFUL, but I have made many, many shiny spots in the blackened and dreary kettle over the proverbial fire I work in. I have a really good work buddy (I’m ALWAYS friends with the art teacher!), a funny neighbor down the hall whom I admire, a curmudgeonly-young colleague, a grandfatherly-department chair, sister vegans, a sassy librarian, etc. My attitude about my shit-ass job has made it more than survivable for the past 7 months. Go me. The point is, I have a job, where others in the world do not. I’m grateful. 

I also do teach a ton of amazing, creative, kind, deep, unique, and intellectual kids who I feel incredibly blessed to see on a daily basis. What a weird society we live in—we send our children off to hang out with strangers for 8 hours a day. I feel fortunate to be that stranger to drop some knowledge on some of these kids. 

The art chick and I have a rather elaborate note-passing game going on.

PETEY-BELLA: I have a rescue American bulldog. She's 8 and had a tumor removed this summer, and she seems to be doing just fine. She’s my child with 4 legs and man, she is the bomb-diggity. She sleeps most of the time, she follows me around when I’m home, she never gets sick, she is insanely happy to eat her dog food and boring treats,  she barks at noisy bad things, and she snores when she’s doing all that sleeping. Honestly, she’s a cuddler. When I’m in bed working on things, she stays at the foot, but not underfoot (You catch what I did there?), but when it’s time for the human to do the sleeping, she repositions herself accordingly. How cool is that? She’s also learned (I could say I’ve taught her, but it’s more like conditioning) to pee and poop on command. I tell her “Go potty Petey,” and she squats where she is. It’s great. “Go poopy, Petey,” and “Go baffroom, Bella,” take a little more time, but generally the result is there. I’ve been jogging/running lately and she’s totally been game. She has about a mile to 1.5 in her before she’s totally a Petey puddle of pup on the ground and I have to drag her home, but still, that’s pretty good for a really lazy dog.

It's a rather difficult life sleeping on mounds of pillows and a duvet.

EXERCISE: Speaking of the 1.5 miles, I’ve been walk-jog-running nearly every day since Christmas break. It has been awesome for me. My stamina grows each day and my emotional well-being is, well- being awesome! I know doctors recommend exercise and stuff, but it’s hard to make happen with a busy schedule. I’m turning over a leaf towards daily movement and it feels good…like there are little fizzy muscle cheerleaders in my cells being like, “you’re awesome, work us out some more!” I enjoy seeing my neighborhood from the perspective of a walker and knowing which houses have which gardens, pets, and recycling. I'm mainly just nosy. Hah.

FOOD: I’ve also been doing pretty well about prepping food for going to work and cooking at night. I follow some food blogs and I’ve been applying what I’ve picked up from those venues. Don’t get me wrong, if I could afford to eat out every night of the week, I most certainly would. I like my dishes and all, but I like it better if someone else washes. I’ve started adding flax or sesame seeds to salad…sneaking in bits of protein and fiber where I can. I was doing a calorie counter app on my phone, and I haven’t kept up with it that much, but the idea of it keeps portion sizes in my head. It feels good to eat well.

MUSIC: I auditioned for and began singing with Emory U Chorus again this semester for the Beethoven’s 9^th Symphony—the Ode to Joy. It’s so cool to be in a room with 215 people, all watching the same skinny dude wave his arms around, while we read dots and dashes on a page in German, and make simultaneous noise pop out of our mouths at the same time. When the orchestra’s there, it’s going to be straight musical magic. Hellz yeah.

FRIENDSHIPS: I also started up a lady book club—not one I run for my students. That has its own place, but I wanted a chance to fellowship (femme-ship?) with ladies I didn’t work with and have a reason to read and talk about books—or a reason to get together and drink wine and not just talk about banal stuff. We had our first meeting, and there were only a few of us…but I felt good about it anyway. The euphoria of being with a group of women—that kinship—is strong and beautiful.

Checking out the Beltline art installation near Memorial Drive.

I’ve been spending some good times with good friends—ones I can count on my friend list (an actual one, not a list populated on facebook) for 5-10 years. Wow. It was pointed out to me how marvelous it is to have people in your life for that length of time—I hadn’t thought about it until I started taking stock. Good chats, good laughter, good food…good people in my life: I'm grateful for you.

Myself and one of aforementioned friends (Dan) at the High. The Klein Blue painting is particularly scary. If that Klein guy can get a color named after him, what else is he capable of??

LOVE LIFE: I have no boyfriend, but damn, I have got a lot of love in my life. Lately I’ve been noticing a lot of validation about my friends and how loyal, fun, and kind they are. My friends and family people know me, support me, and believe in me, even when I don’t have the courage to believe in myself. The right love in my life will come along when it’s supposed to, right now, the love I have is all the love I need.

BANGIN’ ASS BOD: Did I mention the working out and the eating more healthy thing? It has resulted in my body being AWESOME!!!! I have a scale that I left at my mom’s house, so I don’t really have any idea how much poundage I’ve retained/lost, but it doesn’t really matter. I look soooooo good naked!! I mean, I’m only getting naked for me and the shower (see love life, above), but still. It’s good to prance around in front of the mirror and be like, whoa, I look HAWT!

CONCLUSION: Bottom line, my attitude towards my life and body is pretty fiercely awesome. All that good attitude makes me have some pretty serious gratitude to nature, the universe, God, and all the other things that make it possible to have happiness, love, health, joy, and music in my world. That's worth singin' about.

Happy! Now go have a gratitude-attitude yourself. :)

tears to start my day

So there's this little boy who doesn't stand out too much in my class for positive reasons. He's behind grade-level academically, but he's generally pretty sweet. I steer him away from the "bad" kids so he isn't too influenced, but he has to work really, really hard to generate ideas, so everything I ask of him is pretty taxing.

He pops into my class this morning and I say, "Oh hey, y'all come on in."

He responds with a grin, "Oh, it's just me."

"Oh, just you? Did you take the lunch count? Ms. Dean must really think you're being responsible to take the lunch count. She really trusts you. Good work, buddy!" I like to be motivational, no matter what's going on.

"Yep, it's my first time to take the lunch count."

"So, you want to help me get the room ready, since they're late and you're on time?"

So he is helping me pass journals out, etc. and he sparks up a bit of a conversation. This isn't unusual per se, for kids to reveal things to me, but for this kid, he's been pretty quiet because my class is a little over his head and he just kinda lays low. It was the most I've heard out of him, for sure.

He speaks up, "I won't be here on Thursday."
"Oh yeah, why not? Got a doctor's appointment?"
He kind of looks down and says, "I'm going to Detroit (but say it DEE-troit) Michigan."
"All that way? On a plane and everything? What for?"

His words just kind of spilled out at this point- I could tell he'd heard a lot from his mom about this and he was putting it all together in his head. "My uncle's had a stroke. The whole family's got to go take care of him."

"Well, who's taking care of him now?"

"The hospital. And my grandma."

I looked at this little boy, and truly saw the face of an angel sent to tell me what I needed to hear. I said to him, "You know what, I'm going through something similar. I have a relative who's had a stroke too and we're trying to help her and take care of her."

"But it's going to be okay, Miss G. God will take care of everything."

That part, I'm pretty sure he wasn't reinterpretting from his mom. It came from a much greater source of power and greatness.