thanksgiving poem

My dept chair sent this poem around today. It seemed appropriate for a day of thanks:

A Testimonial

I have lived in this city
25 years
and all that time
I have dropped things.
I've dropped tissues,
letters from women
in Santa Fe, N.M.,
money,
the keys to my house,
books by
Jacques Prevert.
And all this time,
you,
the people of this
city, have pointed
to me, and said,
"Hey!" "Sir!" "You!"
You dropped something!"
and then I have picked it up.
You have watched
over me, all these
years,
and I've waited till
now to thank you.

--Michael Gorelick

gobble gobble.
J

what are we doing

Students got their grades today for the first quarter. One came to me to ask about her B- in my class. She thought it would be higher. We took a look at her grades for the quarter, talked for a few minutes, and then she burst into tears. She felt so much pressure, and she wasn't sure where it was coming from. Her parents weren't on her back, her teachers (me included) weren't riding her, but she felt so much pressure. It made me very sad. She's a good kid, an ok student, and she seems pretty sure of herself most of the time. But she has some indescribable sense that she is not doing enough, that she is falling behind. And she doesn't even know where she is trying to get; she just senses that she's not doing enough. What are we doing to these teenagers?

J.

if you just reach one student

Friday I had a twenty minute conversation with a student. She wanted to talk about sexism, about how she was tired of guys telling her she was "pretty funny, for a girl," about how even though she is thrilled about Obama's presidency, she thinks H. Clinton (and even S. Palin) got rough-handled because of their gender. She talked about how great it was to go to an all girl camp, where girls were the athletic ones, the funny ones, the smart ones, not the boys. It was a good talk, a rollicking, laughing, thoughtful conversation. And at the end, I asked her if she had any all women schools on her list of colleges she was considering. She said, "no?" and we laughed about that, too.

Today, I smiled at her as she turned in her test and asked her if she had any more thoughts about colleges. She smiled and said that she looked hard at Bryn Mawr over the weekend and asked her guidance counselor if she could add it to her list. If you just reach one student . . .

Facebook

I'm enjoying Facebook. I signed on a few months ago, and I found that many of my friends from college and High School were signing up too. Someone flipped a switch, and the 40-year-olds jumped in. Minutes ago, I exchanged messages with a guy in Scotland I had met 20 years ago. It is wonderful to reconnect.

HOWEVER, what do I do with Friend requests from people I never really liked? How do I tune out the noise of postings from friends I was happy to grow past? There is a cadre of folks I went to high school with who keep inviting me to "pillowfights" and "kidnappings." Yikes. I don't want either, thank you very much.

Honesty

Class Friday was Dreadfully Dull. I asked my students to read excerpts from papers they were turning in that day on Their Eyes Were Watching God. One student after another regurgitated points we had made all week about Janie's quest for independence and love, about how her hair represented her freedom, or about the porch's important role in the African American community. But no one had anything to say, positive or negative, about the other students' writings. We were going through the motions of a class, a group of isolated individuals sitting together but not really connecting.

Then C. volunteered to read from his paper. He launched into a description of his early childhood as an Asian student in a predominately white community in the mid west. He talked about the favoritism he received from some teachers because he was the only minority in the class; he described the rock thrown through his family's window because they were "other." And he compared himself to the least likable character in the novel we had read, a black woman who hates her race and wishes she were white. C. described how he sometimes wishes he weren't Asian, and how he sometimes hates a white majority that leads him into that moment of self-denial.

He put it all out there, his anger, his confusion, his desire to be different, and his darkest feelings about himself society and God. But it was all in the context of a novel we read in class, from a student who seldom contributes and who is not the strongest academic student in the room.

When he stopped speaking, there was nervous laughter followed by authentic applause. The previously disengaged students were riveted. They had been shocked out of their reveries by C's honesty. And while C. read, we were all tied together by his scathing, brutally honest connection to a troubling character in a novel. What a powerful moment, one of those electric days in a classroom.

R + J

Tonight I stayed late at school to see a production of R+J, a version of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. It's pretty much the regular play, but it has a frame story around it. A group of students at a prep school are going to perform Romeo and Juliet on the school playground one night, but they can't get any of the girls to play Juliet. A boy volunteers to be Juliet, says he knows all the lines. The boy playing Romeo thinks it over, shrugs and says, "why not?" The rest is the regular play, with the added frisson that Juliet is a guy. It gives the play a new tension.

So there I sat, in my school's auditorium with 200 other parents, teachers and students watching two boys kiss on stage (not for nothing, that's what the Elizabethan audience would have seen, but that's another story for another time). It was exhilarating, taboo and beautiful all at once. I had spent enough years in high school drama productions wanting to kiss the Romeo, looking around the cast for the others like me, that to see male desire, love, and passion displayed on the stage was intense and cathartic. We've come a long way, Virginia Slim, if teen boys can kiss on a stage in front of their mother, Homeroom teacher, and the football team.

I was also struck by the beauty of the language, expressed so naturally by these young actors.:

"Juliet: Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss.

Romeo: Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?

Juliet: Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.

Romeo: O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do;
They pray, grant thou, lest faith turn to despair." (Act I, Scene V)

sigh. or this one-

"But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.
Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,
Who is already sick and pale with grief
That thou, her maid, art far more fair than she."

That William knew what he was up to, and these kids got it. They played the puns, the playfulness of street insults and bitten thumbs for all they were worth. Sure, they got a little melodramatic in a few death scenes. But isn't that what adolescence is all about?

Two days after CA banned gay marriage, it was a relief to see there are still corners of the country where a boy romeo and boy juliet can meet, fall in love, and marry. Oh, yeah, they die in the end too, but what a way to go.

J