Windfall

I'm really disappointed that the Borders in Lawrence is closing soon - I love going to bookstores whether they're corporate establishments or holes in the wall with dusty bookshelves, so I mourn the demise of any book seller. I'm also sad to lose the location of some great college memories - the free wi-fi lent itself to many hours in the cafe slaving over midterms, final portfolios, and a few poems when the required work wouldn't come. I even met up with A. there for our first date out on the town - I found him drooling over cookbooks when I arrived. Typical. If nothing else, downtown nightlife will be in big trouble if anything happens to restrict access to that parking lot! (For the record, I always made it a point to at least walk through Borders and consider future purchases before heading to the bars. But I also always buy a soda or candy bar if I use a gas station for their bathroom.)

The one good thing about a bookstore closing, though, is liquidation pricing. A big thank you to the federal government for the safety bubble created by my tax refund, and a thank you to Borders for giving me the opportunity to work on that "read more, dammit" goal I made for this year. (Still working on the "write more, dammit" goal... one thing at a time.) So, here's the list of new acquisitions - I've only read two of them before, so feel free to pester me about any one of these to make sure I'm progressing. :)

Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
Alice's Adventure in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass - Lewis Carroll
The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Sound and the Fury (audiobook) - William Faulkner
100 Selected Poems - e.e. cummings
Bright Star: Love Letters and Poems of John Keats to Fanny Brawne
Poet's Choice - Edward Hirsch
Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides
The Reader - Bernhard Schlink
Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

All for well under $100!!! But before I can start any of these, I have to finish the books I've already started or borrowed from students and friends. Currently reading: We, Yvgeny Zamyatin; The Amber Spyglass, Philip Pullman. On deck: Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut; Catching Fire, Suzanne Collins.

Time to clean off my glasses and settle into some spring break reading... but first, there's a new Lego set that needs building with my sister. :)

Following Dr.'s Orders

I don't like the way this turned out at all, but this is the first list of things I thought of, and I'm not one to ignore directions. 50 miles is starting to feel a lot longer than it used to, especially with these reminders all around.


Traces

Driver’s seat still pushed back too far in the morning
Headlights expose flat tires on a men's bicycle
A borrowed pen travels atop half-graded papers
(1) waits patiently in Gmail inbox
Grows to (11) throughout the day
Smiling eyes and stifled giggles
Curious looks on little faces

Radio man complains for 33 miles
A different smart-ass voice echoes silently
Neglected houseplants beg for water
2 bottlecaps rest where arms belong
Dinner for one, amateurly made
A single ceramic plate hides amongst the plastic
TV squawks to fill the silence

Forgotten overnight bag lies full of Sunday
Poorly-aimed Kleenex loiters near its destination
Glasses rest on shared books under a darkened lamp
Old Spice drifts faintly across suddenly spacious blankets
Another day spent alone ends, but
A promise still lingers in my ear for tomorrow –
See you soon.

January 18th, 2011

Test day leaves time for thinking

I am frustrated.

I want to write. I want the feeling of creativity and inspiration that comes when I write. I feel like a hypocrite every day when I ask my students to write while I do not.

But I’ve got nothing.

It’s a goal of mine (call it a Resolution if you must) to both read and write more this year. I’ve been reading (We, The Golden Compass – both are excellent so far), which is a start, but I can’t write.

I feel like my brain is constantly on overdrive, and every time I think of something vaguely creative or meaningful, it immediately gets shoved out of the way by the never-ending deluge of more pressing, practical problems and tasks. Have I filled out that form yet? Did I ever make it to the printer this morning? I’m running out of clean clothes. And gas. What am I going to do about my student who is tardy every single day? When’s the last time I went to the grocery store? Oh crap, my phone is dying again. What am I going to do in class tomorrow? Should I take K-10 or I-70 to KC today? Hey, that would be a cool idea for a poem… wait, where did I leave my to-do list?

And so on.

Everything comes in fits and starts, like an engine that won’t turn over. I feel like my days are choppy, and my thoughts reflect that. When inspiration does hit, it stops short of completion, and I suddenly lack the time and patience to work and follow through. My notebook is full of half-ideas and clipped phrases, and that’s when I bother to grab it at all.

Try as I might, I can’t push down the nagging fear that I might not be challenging myself intellectually right now; that the unavoidable boredom of constructing basic sentences and simple paragraphs 5 times a day every day could be a contributing factor to the increasingly basic nature of my thoughts. It's not the only distraction or the only possible cause, but it’s always been in my nature – get bored, get comfortable being bored, settle in. Don’t rock the boat. Change is scary. Change takes work. Sigh.

Like everything else I’ve tried to write lately, I don’t know where I’m going with this, how it ends, or what I want out of it. I think I just needed to… write.

I've made it!

Last year, at the end of my first student teaching, one of my precious kiddos made me a goodbye card that read: "You will be a great techer." I immediately took it home and hung it on my fridge, where it still hangs today as a daily reminder that I will one day make a difference for a child, if only to teach them the proper spelling of "teacher."

Today, I received a Christmas card from one of my current students. On the inside, it simply says: "You are a great teacher."

Such a simple change of tense, but it means the world to me. Especially since it's all spelled right.

Perspective

The kids have been working on a fun project today, and I've been doing a lot of thinking (partly to avoid end-of-term grading... ugh). One of my co-workers has been talking this week about a situation going on at her husband's school. He is a teacher at one of the worst of the KCMO schools, where the gang activity has begun to affect the safety of the teachers as well as the students. Gang members have been stealing teachers' coats so that they can use the car keys to steal their cars. A female teacher was cornered and sexually assaulted by a group of gang members until another teacher came along in the nick of time. In an effort to "take back" the school, some of the staff have actually chosen to arm themselves at work today, and after a shooting at the funeral of a former student, they fully expect retribution to occur at the school this afternoon.

I've been emailing with A. about this all day, getting his point of view and comparing to the situations at his school. He tells me stories every day about the wacky things that happen at KCK's alternative high school, and we generally have a good laugh about it. His students get suspended for maliciously throwing cookies at each other, smoking pot in his classroom's bathroom, and other relatively entertaining offenses, but I still worry if I think too much about the metal detectors he walks through each morning. Thankfully, his school chooses to remove potentially violent students before violence can occur - if they didn't, I would be a nervous wreck all day every day. But it wasn't too long ago that the KCMO problems were in KCK as well. Those students (and those teachers) are blessed to have an intelligent principal who cares.

Then there's me, teaching "JoCo brats" to write. I've been feeling stressed lately, ready for break, and the last couple mornings have been particularly difficult where getting out of bed and making myself drive for 40 minutes has been concerned... but as I write all of this, my innocent little kiddos are dancing around my room to the Numa Numa song, decorating my fake (deciduous) tree for Christmas, and "cleaning" the room after a long day of puppet making. Despite the times I have to tell them not to wrap crepe paper around their heads, and ask them thirty times to stop talking and read a book, and constantly remind them to keep their hands to themselves... I am extraordinarily blessed.

Each bad morning this week has been turned into a good day by kids gluing fake Santa beards to their faces and asking me what I want for Christmas, re-creating Amelia Earhart's plane out of Legos, making up goofy songs about llamas, and shamelessly rocking out to Queen. There are no guns here, my students wish me no harm, and they wouldn't know what to do with my car keys if they found them. They don't know what pot even smells like yet, and if they're throwing cookies at each other, they're laughing about it (even if I'm not). I wish I could keep them like this forever.

Idiot-savant poetry

It has been FOREVER since I've posted here. I won't be so immodest as to think anyone has been disappointed by that, but I offer my apologies anyhow. I think my New Year's resolution this year might be to update/write more. The spring should be a little easier on me as I've finally settled into a routine and without any grad school work, there will also be less on my plate. The plate will still look like the kind you get at a Chinese buffet, with a million different things piled together and flowing over the sides so that you get soy sauce on your shoes and rice down your sleeve, but I think the spring plate will have a little more sesame chicken and fewer of those powdered sugar fried things that look like a really good idea but just make you sick.

Anyway... I wrote an honest-to-goodness poem yesterday, but it's not done, and it's also not postable. I have my reasons. It might be available upon request, but the whole world doesn't need to see it. It felt really good, though, both to write again and to process/exorcise that demon, so you may see more relatively soon.

Enough cryptic crap; I came back here today because I've got another addition to the collection of awesome accidental poems that appear on the magnetic surfaces in my classroom. I have no idea who put this tiny gem together on the side of my desk or if they knew at all what it could mean, but it's kind of perfect (punctuation added for effect):

Our pedagogue
Stalwart, day to-do'ed

- Discovered December 6th, 2010

If this job kills me, THIS is what I want on my tombstone.

Guess who wasn't paying attention in class...

…and not for the first time, either. Yes, the teacher can often be the worst student, and for this I am thankful because I wouldn’t be where I am now if A. and I had been ideal students throughout our teacher training. (Put two nerdy kids in front of computers, bore them to death with lessons about skills they already have, add ridiculous websites about cats, and you’ve got a recipe for LOLZ and disaster. Warning: byproducts may also include a temporarily broken heart, but that’s another story.)

That first computer class was a lot of fun (no thanks to the instructor), but my favorite memories of the “we’re just friends” phase come almost exclusively from the three classes we had in one particularly hellacious room last fall. Yes, every Thursday for 9 weeks, we were trapped in room 247 alongside our colleagues as a rotating panel of professors appeared before our bleary eyes over the course of 6 hours. If you looked at my bag on 247 Thursdays, you would think I was packing for a weekend camping trip. Computer, books, lunch AND dinner, multiple layers of clothing (the room was alternately sweltering and freezing, of course), and supplies for a bottomless cup of tea were diligently packed and hauled up the hill each week. At 2:00, everyone would stake out their spot (preferably near a power outlet), spread their stuff all about them, and stay put until 8. It wasn’t long before everyone had self-assigned seating, and thus, Team Awesome was born.

Team Awesome typically consisted of a hilarious engaged (now married, still hilarious) couple, Kylee, A., and myself. Team Awesome’s purpose was to get ourselves through those marathon classes with at least a shred of sanity intact, which meant there was a LOT of muttering, giggling, and general heckling throughout the evening. We played flash games, we shared ridiculous links and videos, we made fun of each other, ourselves, and everyone else.

As mind-numbing as those classes were, and as frustrating as those hours could be, I’m grateful for them and for room 247 (where I have another class by myself this semester). I sit in that room now and think back on those ridiculous memories (lowering the steaks, the hammer of justice… don’t ask) and I get an odd sense of nostalgia when I compare that time to what I have now. Because when circumstances changed, as circumstances are wont to do, it was those ridiculous and fun nights that gave me the courage to invite one particular (and newly-single) member of Team Awesome over to watch MST3K’s professional heckling one June evening. And when the news spread? Not a single member of Team Awesome was surprised.


JRP 247

Once again in this grey, hard-backed chair
with little give or support,
I rest with my baggage at my feet
and, as always, on my mind.

Back in this room, this place,
surrounded by beige walls and
carpet lined by squares,
sitting at tables a friendly vandal left her mark on –
the same tables that left a mark on me –
your living ghost hangs over my head
alongside teleconferencing equipment.

Discussion drones on
indifferent to my inattention -
unfocused out the window,
beyond the golden valley
to an invisible skyline.

In reality, I’m only wistfully wasting time
the way we used to
because now I only need to look
past the fireflies in the yard,
under a crisp linen sheet,
up to a crowded stage,
or through the space in my mind,
and there you are: smiling,
waiting for me.

Bells sound and I gather my things
as the prison doors unlock.
It’s not time for peacoats and scarves yet,
but the memory warms me anyhow
as I walk outside alone –
the campanile is no longer our cue for goodbye,
but rather my signal to dial and say hello
the way only a cold, dark alley knew I wanted to.

September 8th, 2010