Wild and Whirling Words

A gift

2010-09-21T20:43:00.002-04:00

Last year, one of my students got a concussion midway through the term. He was supposed to memorize and recite some poetry, but he was having an awful lot of trouble with his memory. So I told him that as long as he had it done before the end of the term, I'd accept it for full credit, and I emailed his parents to let them know that was what I was doing.

He did his recitation the last day of the term and did fine. I'd forgotten the incident entirely, to be perfectly honest.

Then last week, I was at my small group meeting, and one of the other women told me that she'd taken her child to the pediatrician's office to see the nurse practitioner. She and the NP were chatting, and the NP mentioned her son went to my school. My friend said, "Oh, one of my friends teaches there," and mentioned my name.

It turns out the NP was that student's mother. She told my friend about how much it had meant to her that I'd given her son extra time and been so understanding.

My friend told me that story, and I felt humbled. What hadn't seemed like a big deal to me at the time had made a difference for that kid and his family.

Overheard in class today...

2010-09-15T10:20:00.002-04:00

Student 1: Did Beowulf have a father?*

Student 2: No, he was spawned out of awesome.

Student 3: If Hardcore and Awesome spawned a child, it would be Beowulf.

Beowulf as Chuck Norris?

*He does, in fact, have a father: Ecgtheow, who has died.

The Brilliance of Students

2010-04-16T20:52:00.002-04:00

Today, as the beginning-of-class writing prompt, I asked my students what one thing they would change about our school if they could and why. It's not the first time I've ever asked this question, and it's usually good for some lively discussion about the value of uniforms, the brevity of the lunch periods, the quality of the cafeteria food, and things along those lines.

Today was different. One student raised her hand and said "I'd change the way we do our service hours." (Each student is required to complete a minimum number of community service hours per term s/he is enrolled in a religious studies course; it works out to ten hours every twelve weeks or thereabouts.) I thought she was gearing up to talk about how busy our students are and how it's just another demand on their time and why we shouldn't require it.

I was wrong.

"Okay, why would you change it and how would you do it?" I asked.

She replied, "The way it is now, most people wait till the last weekend before it's due and cram it all in somewhere, and that's not how service should be. It would be much better if kids went to the same place the whole time they were here and really built a relationship with the people and communities we're serving. Now we can say we have a whole lot of hours, but it doesn't mean very much if we don't have those relationships."

Her classmates were nodding in agreement. She went on to say, "What if we got together with our homerooms freshman year and chose a site, then we all went and did our service hours there for all four years?"

Other kids chimed in with their concurrence and why they thought it would be a great idea. I pointed out that doing service with their homeroom group would also be a way of keeping each other accountable.

I left class feeling so energized. In my senior class this term, we discussed the concept of servant leadership and how important it is to listen to others, especially your subordinates. Often they have wisdom or insight or perspective that you don't. I told this young lady that I want to help her pursue and present this idea to the group in charge of service hours, because not only is it an awesome idea on its own merits, it's also an idea that came from a student -- and in a school that's like many other schools and tends to be governed top-down, any time a student's idea becomes a reality is a victory for the kids.

Back in the sub pool

2010-04-09T10:51:00.002-04:00

Watching seventh graders do worksheets. On "rise/rose" and "lie/lay."

One of the reasons I don't teach junior high is my detestation of worksheets.

On other fronts, the teaching of Hamlet went well and I'm pleased with how it turned out. I wish I could spend a whole term on Shakespeare, and maybe one of these years I will do it. I'll blow through Beowulf and Chaucer and Sir Gawain in four weeks and then spend eight wallowing in Bardishness.

Fantasy Lit is coming back next year for another two-year cycle. I did two things differently than I did in previous years: I made potential students fill out an application and I strictly limited the class size to twenty. I think it's cut down on the number of goobers in the class pretty significantly. The students who've signed up are all die-hards, so they may be teaching me quite a bit!

I don't get to teach seniors next year, which is a disappointment; I've enjoyed world lit way more than I thought I would. I hope there will be a need for me to take a section in 2011-2012.

And since I'm not having a baby this summer, I'm exploring my options for more school. In all that free time I have.

Two weeks left till school starts!

2009-08-03T20:31:00.002-04:00

When I was a student, I dreaded the beginning of August, because it was The Beginning of the End of Vacation. Like many teachers, I think, I did not love being in school. (Maybe that's why I got into teaching, in part: to rectify everything I thought was wrong/bad/unpleasant/pointless/mediocre about how I was taught.) As a teacher, I look forward to it. As a mother of two under two, I look forward to it even more since being in school means I get a whole five minutes between classes to go to the bathroom BY MYSELF as well as twenty-five minutes to eat my lunch in peace. Perspective is everything.

I have a ton of reading to do, and probably won't get all of it done before school starts. I have great plans and expectations for this year, some of which will go spectacularly well, some of which will go spectacularly badly, and some of which won't happen at all. It happens every year. One of the greatest lessons I've learned from teaching is that you're endlessly tweaking and perfecting and shifting and changing what you do, no matter how experienced you are.

I do get to teach Hamlet this year, which thrills me no end. If I can swing it, I'm going to cram all the early and middle English literature into the first few weeks and spend the entire second half of the term on Shakespeare. The great perquisite of being the teacher is that I can spend more time on what I like best. I've enjoyed teaching Midsummer Night's Dream or Henry V for the past few years, but getting to teach Hamlet is total English Nerd Crack.

I really haven't disappeared (again)

2009-06-14T22:26:00.002-04:00

Well. In news of my world, I went back to teaching and found out how little time a full-time teaching job and a full-time mothering job leave one. :-)

Especially when one is pregnant with Numero Due.

So. The first child (the girlchild) will be one in a month. The second child (a boychild this time) will be here in the next few weeks. The teaching career picks back up in August with a new course; I'm picking up a section of world literature for seniors in addition to three sections of British literature for juniors. I'm thrilled about the change, especially since I truly enjoyed the students I taught this year who will be seniors next year!

My fellow teachers and I have a few new tricks up our sleeves for next year. The nicest thing about teaching is that it's never the same thing from year to year, or at least it doesn't have to be. One thing we're implementing is a mandatory grammar test for juniors because we're all tired of correcting the same errors multiple times throughout the year. Another great change we're making is moving the junior research paper from term 3 to term 2.

I'll reserve judgment on these changes for now, but my feeling is that these changes will be positive ones for both the teachers and the students.

Motherhood

2008-09-06T23:32:00.002-04:00

I'm not teaching this term. Instead, I'm being taught...by my daughter.

It's strange to see those words in print, especially since this time last year, I never thought I'd write the word "daughter" or "son" preceded by the first person possessive pronoun.

Motherhood has turned my entire world upside down and inside out. Like the vocation of teaching, it's many things I expected, many things I didn't, and both better and more difficult than I imagined it would be. I look at mothers of more than one child with awe now. They went through all of this and still had the courage to go back and do it a second, third, fifth, or eighth time.

I do understand it, though. Despite the sleep deprivation and the physical strain and the emotional toll that a new baby puts on his or her parents, I still find myself returning to the words of the psalmist: "The Lord has done great things for us, and we are filled with joy."

Nine months pregnant =

2008-06-28T00:24:00.001-04:00

The overwhelming sense that there are many, many chores that you should be doing now. Or should have done before you couldn't bend at the waist.

Updates, or "I'm not dead yet!"

2008-02-05T20:23:00.000-05:00

Just busy gestating.

2007 wasn't the easiest year of my life, either personally or professionally. It had its high points, indeed, but most of my emotional energy got expended on dealing with infertility or dealing with some of the most challenging students I have ever had.

On the infertility front, after seven months of fertility issues prior to an official diagnosis in July, The Greatest Man in the World and I found out in November that we are expecting our first child this July. I'm in the second trimester, feeling better, and ready for some cautious optimism. The first trimester was rough between constant nausea and chronic exhaustion, but I had great support from TGMitW, our families, and the select few people at work with whom I chose to share our news.

I plan to return to teaching next winter. I've been very blessed to have not one, but two experienced-at-our-school long-term subs who are willing to come out of retirement and teach so that I can stay home with the baby till after Thanksgiving. One of the possible subs is the teacher whose retirement opened the position for which I was hired, so I'm very confident that she knows the course extremely well and that the students will be excellently taught (perhaps better than I would have taught them!) I'm sad that I won't get to teach Shakespeare next year, but it's worth it to be able to stay at home with baby.

Professionally, I think that a nearly six month break from teaching after this year might be a good thing. This year's junior class is challenging. Actually, a small cadre of no more than a dozen boys makes it challenging. They have caused problems with their behavior since they were in the seventh grade, and although people hoped that they would improve with age, it hasn't happened yet. Their behavior has, if anything, become more outrageous: rudeness to teachers, inappropriate comments, rowdiness, attention-seeking behavior...you name it, they're doing it. For whatever reason, they aren't being disciplined as much as they should be.

To maintain order in my classroom, I have to be much stricter in my management than I usually am, and it's frustrating for me. I prefer to have students talking to me and to each other and engaging with the texts we read, and I can't allow my classes to have casual discussions like that this year. I know that many of the non-problem-causing students get frustrated too; sometimes they'll even call the troublemakers out and tell them to knock it off. I've had to hand out detentions like they're candy and generally be a much less relaxed person than I usually am. In years past, I've been able to tell my students what the boundaries are, let them know I'm serious, and then we've been able to play within the boundaries. This year, there's no room for play. There have been moments when I've had to pull students out of class for reprimands or tell them flat-out that they have crossed the line into outright rudeness or inappropriateness. On a couple of occasions, I've felt uncomfortable to the point of being threatened. And I'm not the only teacher who's experiencing this.

We all report them, we all complain...and nothing is done.

This too shall pass.

Scottish dancing season

2007-09-29T22:41:00.001-04:00

No, you can't shoot the dancers. Although as poorly as I've been dancing lately, it might be considered merciful to shoot me in the foot!

Today was just a show. The best thing you can say about my performance is that I fully embraced the old maxim about being confident in my mistakes. My sweet husband told me, "Unless somebody knew what the right way to do those dances was, they wouldn't have noticed any mistakes." Unfortunately, he does know how those dances are supposed to look when they're done correctly.

Must practice more. In spare time not taken up with 1) obsessing over my not-quite-spotless house but not actually doing anything to clean it, 2) grading student work that's backlogged, or 3) catching up on much-needed sleep...

LotR-fest 2.0

2007-09-16T20:05:00.000-04:00

At seven in the morning, the faithful began to arrive, armed with cushions, blankets, coffee, and lots of junk food (which, they inform me, does constitute an essential food group when one is under eighteen).

8:02 a.m.: After some frantic running around on my part in search of a grand master key to open the conference center and not a few "one key to rule them all" jokes, we began watching the extended edition of Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.

Twelve hours and thirteen minutes, three pizzas, dozens of doughnuts, and one roll of toilet paper later, we finished the extended edition of Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.

I'm still fascinated by the fact that kids will show up at school on a Saturday for nothing more than watching these movies, especially when many of them were going to the Georgia Tech game that evening. They already wanted to talk about some of the discussion questions I gave them on Friday, but we had to press on with the movie-watching.

As many times as I've seen those films, I still find something new every time I see them. Over the Labor Day weekend, I watched the original Star Wars trilogy with my nephew. It was his first time to see it, and he was glued to the screen. I can't wait till he's old enough to see Lord of the Rings.

Maybe by then I'll be ready to do another movie marathon.

Back to school, back to routine

2007-09-04T20:41:00.000-04:00

Well...sort of back to routine. I figured out that between August 9th and September 9th, I'll have spent 13 nights sleeping away from my own bed. (And there's a ginormous tree branch poked into the roof like a toothpick into a cupcake above my bed. I'm thankful that I was not in that bed when the tree branch met the roof.)

So. Year 2 of Fantasy as a Genre. Still full of students that could kindly be called "behavior problems." They keep it fun, and they seem to listen better than last year's class did. Lord-of-the-Rings-a-pa-looza is in ten days; it promises to be thrilling.

Ninth grade class retreat is this week. I actually got my sub plans in early -- that will never happen again! I'm looking forward to the two days up at camp, especially because I think my homeroom is actually going to have a decent skit this year.

As for the Brit Lit classes, two have an unusual number of girls in the section. I've never had a section where the girls outnumbered the boys, but it's been interesting. I've maintained for the past couple of years that by the time they're juniors, the girls at school get reticent in classes with the boys, particularly when the boys are obstreperous. (There are quite a few obstreperous boys in this junior class, but none of them are in my sections yet.) As a result, it's often more difficult to get the girls to speak out and take leadership roles in the course. It could just be the blend of personalities in my sections this term; so far, however, the girls are being slightly dominant in class discussion. My holds-degrees-from-two-women's-colleges self is loving it. :)

There's a lot that's positive right now, although I feel like my life for the past eight months was taken over with infertility issues. Finally, finally, finally, we're moving forward with treatment, and there may be a light at the end of this tunnel. Even if there's not a light, there's at least forward motion, and that's better than standing still.

Saying goodbye

2007-07-21T16:20:00.000-04:00

Summer, 1998. While we were visiting my godmother in Chicago, she pulled out a copy of "this great book about a little boy who finds out he's a wizard and he goes off to wizarding school." It came highly endorsed by her fifth-grade class.

I, as a soon-to-be-freshman in college, wasn't all that interested, but my youngest sister (a.k.a. the non-reader) took it and read it. When I came home for fall break, she followed me around the house to explain Quidditch and Hogwarts. She'd never gotten excited about a book like that before, and I read it because she was so enthusiastic.

And I was hooked. This Harry Potter kid was a new King Arthur or Luke Skywalker. I recognized this story and I loved this new storyteller's way of framing it with imagination and wit and humor.

Now, almost ten years, four midnight release parties, five movies, seven books, and one elective course later, it's time to close the books. The story's over. No more speculation about the characters' ultimate fates or unanswered questions. A new generation of readers, one that knows the ending and likely will have seen the movies first, will enjoy the books in a completely different way.

For most of us who've loved Harry and his pals, the end is bittersweet. Sure, I wanted to know how it all turned out, but seeing the series end is like closing any chapter in one's life: you might return for a visit, but you can't go back and live it over again.

What made it so great? I don't think it's the vividly imagined and richly detailed world Rowling invented for her characters to inhabit (although it's certainly a draw), or the fun of seeing adolescents with magical powers. I believe it's the epic struggle between good and evil that only, ultimately, can be won by love and self-sacrifice. That's why Harry, Charlotte, Aslan, Frodo, and other heroes and heroines involve our emotions so deeply -- their stories, no matter how seemingly fanciful, are powerfully true.

As I closed Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows at a quarter past four this morning, I wiped away a few tears. I'm looking forward to the fall term to see what my newest crop of fantasy lit students thinks about how Rowling chose to end the series.

And I wrote a small note of thanks to my godmother, who gave my sister the book, and my sister, who gave the book to me.

What's in the water?!

2007-04-09T14:22:00.000-04:00

Is everyone around me having babies or what?

Two of the girls in my small group are expecting. My sister-in-law had a baby girl two and a half weeks ago. Two of the girls at work are expecting, too. And I just got an email from one of my high school buddies announcing the birth of his daughter last Thursday.

Maybe it's just that I'm at the age now when all my friends are starting to have families of their own, but it sure seems to be epidemic right now. Instead of talking about books and movies and going out to eat, now conversation revolves around little people and the things they do (and parents really are uninhibited when they're talking about kids...there is nothing they won't say) and we go over to people's houses. Life is just...different...now. Not in a bad way, though.

And all those babies are cute, especially since nobody's asked me to change a diaper yet. :)

Lions and tigers and...parents, oh my

2007-04-01T22:15:00.000-04:00

My mom and dad are in town this weekend for a brief visit, so we've been spending Quality Parental Time.

Things for Which I Am Profoundly Grateful:
1. My parents and my in-laws get along well with each other. We all had lunch together today, and it was really fun.

2. My parents respect our space. Seriously, they're good guests, and I gather from some of my friends that parents don't always make good company in their children's homes.

3. That the older I get, the more I truly enjoy spending time with my parents. I don't feel obligated to spend time with them; I look for ways we can get to spend time together, and so do they.

4. My husband is a gracious and generous host. Just the way that things are, his family is all in town, and my family is all out-of-town. Way out of town. So when they do come to visit, they stay with us, which can be pretty intense -- people you don't see very often and then when you do see them, it's a 24-7 sort of visit. And bless his heart, he just rolls with everything and has a good time. He tells me that he enjoys my family. That's true love for you right there.

Shaggs and shoes

2007-02-03T23:53:00.000-05:00

The Greatest Man in the World is upstairs listening to My Pal Foot Foot.

If you've never heard of My Pal Foot Foot, then you are missing out on what's possibly the worst band ever to have existed: The Shaggs. Really. They're so bad that it's almost good.

I'm down here searching for shoes...both shoes for my sister's wedding in August (yay!) and for my Highland dance competition at the end of the month.

I like these for Sister's wedding (pending her approval, natch) dyed light gold. As for the dance shoes, no clue. I'm hoping my current pair of ghillies will last through the competition, but it's probably a good idea to have a Plan B in case they don't.

Oh, and Foot Foot don't live here no more.

The only sane person in the room looks crazy

2007-02-03T22:30:00.000-05:00

A few years ago, my sister and I had a conversation wherein she repeated to me this little gem of pithiness: "When you're the only sane person in a sea of insanity, it's hard to convince yourself that you aren't the crazy one."

True.

I just finished reading The Overachievers by Alexandra Robbins and I want every single administrator, teacher, parent, and student at my school to read it as well. As I read the book, I thought to myself, My gosh, I know all of these kids. And that thought really frightened me.

I think sometimes, as someone who graduated high school nine years ago, that I'm more likely to fall into the trap of thinking that school now is the same or quite similar to school when I was a student than someone who graduated twenty or thirty years ago...and I'm wrong. I knew kids when I was in school who definitely were overachiever poster children (aforementioned sister and best friend among them), but there wasn't a culture, at least not as far as I could tell, of overachievement. Maybe it's because I was a militant underachiever for the first eighteen years of my life, or maybe it's because the kids at my high school were applying to Auburn and Alabama, not the Ivy League.

But now, where I teach, the culture of superstardom is endemic and it's heavy. I remember the student I taught my first year who seemed to be killing herself with extracurricular activities and advanced classes as a junior. When she came to me and asked that I sign off on her application to run for student council co-president, I told her that I was doing so with serious reservations because of her other commitments; I felt strongly that she wouldn't be able to juggle everything successfully.

She ran and she won, and she did a terrible job as co-president because she didn't have the time to keep up with her coursework (got a bad grade in a math class that kept her out of her first-choice college), take large roles in every single school play, be a managing editor for the paper, and devote energy to student council.

I asked at the time, and I'm still asking three years later, why didn't we as responsible adults tell her to stop? Why don't we have some sort of policy in place about extracurriculars and leadership positions like we do with AP courses? If we don't let our students take more than three APs in a year, why in the world do we let them play two varsity sports AND have officer positions in five clubs AND the lead in the musical AND be retreat leaders?

Because, the Older and Wiser Heads told me, that's how things are here. Handle the pressure or quit. We like our superstars. We make them our poster children every year. That's our standard of excellence.

Graduates tell me overwhelmingly that the most important thing they learned in their years at this school was time management -- how to schedule their lives at a breakneck pace for four years. And to me, that's sad.

The head of the guidance department said once that parents want to put the bumper sticker on their car that says "University of Georgia Parent -- but the Kid Turned Down Harvard, Stanford, and MIT." Not that it's fair to blame parents or teachers for the whole thing, though, because it isn't. The kids put lots of pressure on themselves. They have to be the best at everything all the time, or it isn't worth doing.

Reading this book sharpened my resolve to homeschool our (eventual) children -- I really don't want my family to believe that this lifestyle is normal or desirable.

But it's probably not good enough for me just to advocate for my own family. I've been unsettled by seeing this trend for the past several years, and my desire to be an agent of change for my own community has now crystallized. I might just be the person who everyone else thinks is crazy, but I'm betting there are enough other sane people floating in the crazy ocean who will agree and sign on.

Partying like rock stars

2007-01-27T18:37:00.000-05:00

So, the SMC Alumnae Club of Georgia (The Few! The Proud! The REAL (Southern) Belles!) hosted a Real Live Alumnae Author Saturday afternoon at Coffee Buy the Book here in beautiful historic Roswell.

We don't have all THAT many events. The only problems with graduating from a women's college in Indiana and having an alumnae club in Georgia are 1. Not many women from Georgia go to colleges in northern Indiana and 2. What with its being a women's college and the graduates being 100% female, a great many of the alumnae are full-time mothers and as such are really, really busy. Usually, if we get fifteen people at an event, it's a big success.

One of the ongoing club events is a bimonthly book club that's been going for about two years. Back in the fall, Mary Beth Ellis '99 contacted us to see if we'd be interested in having her come speak to the club about her new book, Drink to the Lasses, which is a humorous account of her years at Saint Mary's. Of course we accepted enthusiastically and scheduled her appearance for this weekend. We invited the entire alumnae club, not just the book club members, and promised free refreshments and wine.

Since I'm the board member who lives the closest, I was in charge of said refreshments. (I think I might take on a side job as a party planner -- I seem to find myself doing this sort of thing with alarming frequency!) I hit Trader Joe's on Friday afternoon for a case of Two Buck Chuck. There is something so darn satisfying about being able to buy twelve bottles of perfectly good wine for under thirty dollars. I got the nibbles from Edible Expressions, and added to the list of Things I've Learned is that a caterer's opinion of what constitutes "serves 10-12" and my opinion of the same thing are wildly at odds. Serves 10-12 what? Football linebackers? Sumo wrestlers?

Oh well...better to have too much than too little.

Out of the thirty women who RSVPed yes, twenty-eight showed up. We drank a little wine, had a lot of really delicious food, and thoroughly enjoyed Mary Beth's readings and presentation. Although the book's probably got a certain meaning for women who are SMC grads, it's really about college and self-discovery and making the transition from childhood to adulthood, told with unflinching candor and wry humor. (I've written one too many blurbs for annotated bibliographies.)

Anyhow, very cool event, very cool author, and very cool book. Pick one up off of her website or from Amazon and have fun!

That's just how we roll around here

2006-11-25T20:00:00.000-05:00

Two days after Thanksgiving, and the Christmas season has officially started.

Or it's open season on Christmas. Pick your favorite.

Today I added one more item to the list of Horrifying Evidence that I Am Indeed Becoming Just Like My Mother: I baked Christmas cookies.

I love baking, actually. The only problem with baking is that it produces baked goods. And the problem with baked goods is that if they're around the house, I'll eat them in quantities larger than what is good for me.

But these cookies are not for me -- they are for Other People. Family and friends. Being the kind and considerate person I am, I even baked light cookies.

The cookie tally currently stands at 4 dozen peppermint double-chocolate chews, 4 dozen almond biscotti, 2 dozen ginger shortbread wedges, and 2 dozen plain shortbread wedges. Still coming: 4 dozen mini chocolate chip pumpkin muffins, 5 dozen chocolate chip cookies, and 5 dozen chocolate chip/mini peanut butter cup cookies.

I'll post the highlights of the ALAN conference later...off to roll more cookies!

Reflections on Term 1, 2006

2006-11-17T13:34:00.000-05:00

Because, as I've learned in my (few but full) years in the classroom, good teaching comes from reflection.

The only problem is finding the time in which to reflect.

So, in a blast of stream-of-consciousness, Reflections on the Past Twelve Weeks:

1. Never, ever again will I have thirty students in an elective. Especially not when 26 are seniors. And certainly not when 19 of the 26 are young men. Trying to manage that class was absolutely exhausting. Of course, it had its benefits...I gained a newfound level of respect for grade-school teachers!

2. Order the Henry V texts way earlier in the term. The Shakespeare unit snuck up on me this year, and I ended up kind-of sort-of wasting a week waiting for the books to arrive. Shakespeare got short shrift this year, and that's irritating to me, since it's my favorite part of the term.

3. But on the silver-lining side, not having the texts forced some quick revision on my part, and I liked the way things came out -- the performance aspect took precedence over the textual analysis aspect, and I felt that the students' understanding of and ability to dissect the nuances of the play was much improved from years when I tried to do the heavy textual analysis first and performances second. They really got the idea that you don't have to understand every single little word in order to get what's going on and enjoy it.

4. Plus, watching clips of the Branagh Henry V is really fun when the students are calling out to see "their" scenes -- and even more fun when they're righteously indignant that lines are cut out of the film version!

5. Even if they did spend a lot of time saying "There's Christian Bale!" "There's Bilbo!" "There's Gilderoy Lockhart!" instead of paying attention to the words of the play. (Ian Holm plays Fluellen in Henry V and Bilbo Baggins in Lord of the Rings; Kenneth Branagh plays Henry and also Gilderoy Lockhart in Harry Potter. They didn't, however, recognize Emma Thompson, who plays Princess Katherine in HV and Professor Sybil Trelawney in HP. Must have been the lack of glasses and fluffy shawls.)

6. Numbering the in-class writing assignments on the board is a good idea.

7. Encourage the Vocabulary Game more. Keep the daily class participation log handy.

8. Resolution for next term: grade all papers within the week. Procrastination makes it harder to do the longer it's put off.

9. Having three ASO performances in six weeks, plus a dance competition in the middle of it, was way more stressful than I thought it would be.

10. I will start planning next year's fantasy lit elective over Christmas break. Hold me to it.

11. Maybe hiring a cleaning service to come in once a month to do the heavier housework would not be a bad idea, or an advertisement to the world that I am an incompetent housekeeper, or a lazy spoiled person.

November Rain

2006-11-13T20:00:00.000-05:00

Or snot, as the case may be...

It's November, it's the week before exams, and like every other pre-exam week on record in practically my entire life, I've got a sinus infection. And unlike the days when I was a student and could stay home with chicken soup and orange juice, I have to be there.

So I'm teaching with a big bottle of water and a big box of Kleenex by my side.

Things that make you go "blech"

2006-11-02T11:26:00.000-05:00

It's not a big secret or a big revelation to say that school Masses here are less than beautiful, reverent, worship-filled liturgies. In fact, Mass is probably the thing we do worst here, and yesterday's All Saints' Day Mass was no exception.

Part of the frustration inherent in trying to hold a Mass for a thousand students and two hundred faculty/staff/guests is that the only location that will accomodate the crowd is the large gymnasium, and the youngest half of the student body sits in folding chairs on the floor. Since the altar and lectern are also placed on the floor, it means that the only thing that most of the younger (and most easily distracted) segment of the community can see is the backs of each other's heads. Also, in an attempt to create a more reverent atmosphere, the lights are dimmed. Not the most aesthetically engaging environment for liturgy. Plus, the dim lighting makes it hard for teachers to see what kids in the middle of the crowds are doing (and half the teachers don't sit where they're supposed to sit or even show up to Mass, but that's another whole issue.) At the last school Mass, I collected three textbooks and four notes and pencils before the homily. Don't get me started on the gum-chewing.

Another part of the frustration is the "well, God loves any effort we put forth on His behalf, so anything and everything is perfectly acceptable and laudable" attitude. I will simply say this: if we had the same results and attitude about our academics, athletics, and fine arts that we have about our liturgies, nobody in their right minds would pay five figures to send their children to school here. The readers mumble and fidget, there is a positive herd of EMoHCs (who, in defiance of the removal of the indult, assisted with the purification of the Eucharistic vessels), and the music...well. Let's just say when people ask for a return to Latin in the liturgy, I don't think they're looking for "Gloria! (clap clap) Gloria! (clap clap)". There is a real feeling, too, that anything done in the liturgies is completely above reproach...because it's for God and all. So we applaud everyone under the sun at the end of Mass and "thank" them for "all their hard work" in putting the liturgy together.

I want, sometimes, to stand up and scream, "No! No, I will not thank anyone for his or her hard work or effort! It is a privilege to serve the Body of Christ. Applause for this work should be an embarrassment to those who do it!"

Beyond that, the Mass conflated the celebration of All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day. The homily was a rubbishy "we're all saints and all the dead are in Heaven with God." Reminded me of The Incredibles: if everyone is special, then nobody is. If everyone is a saint, then what's the point of this feast? Look at us, we're so great and awesome?! And if All Saints honors all the dead, what's the point of All Souls?

Anyone hear an inspiring homily, besides the Pope's?

Your child is not special...

2006-10-23T13:44:00.000-04:00

And neither are you. Get over it!

I'm so tired of all the bumper stickers I see all over the place: "My child is an honor student at Fill-in-the-Blank Elementary!" "My child is Student of the Month at Such-and-so Middle School!" "My child is a STAR! at the Twinkletoes Dance Academy!" "My child is an Accelerated Reader!" "My child goes poop in the potty on a consistent basis!"

Except for the last one, I've seen all of the above (names changed to protect the not-so-innocent) in the past week. Plus all of the huge magnetic thingies that are shaped like cheerleader megaphones and football helmets and whatnot that announce the child's name and jersey number and what team s/he is on. I'm beginning to think the proliferation of Monstrous Behemoth SUVs is an outgrowth of the desire to turn the back of one's automobile into the personal billboard advertising the greatness of one's children.

My school is feeding the ego-frenzy, too. Instead of generic stickers that advertise the school, we now have stickers for football, stickers for cheerleading, stickers for the Arts Guild, stickers for the swim and dive team, et cetera. We do have generic school stickers, but we also now have stickers to go under the generic school sticker for Every Single Activity/Club/Sport in which your kid is involved. Bonus points if your sticker collection has to make two rows. (And I'm not talking just a "Band" sticker. We have "Marching Band," "Jazz Band," and "Concert Band." "Swimming" and "Diving" are two separate stickers.)

At one time, I think, putting stickers on your car advertised support for a school or organization with which one was involved, not one's individual achievements or accomplishments. Now it's all about the individual -- like the organization exists to showcase Your Specialness!

I'm having a hard time this year dealing with parents and children who believe that they are Special. It's not that I don't want children to believe that they are precious in the eyes of God and worthwhile individuals who have much to offer their world -- I do -- but it seems like more and more, I'm just seeing children who think they're the only persons who count in the world. Everybody Else has to meet certain standards, but I'm Special, and I need to be treated differently! And then I meet the parents, and I get where it's coming from.

Instill a sense of individual worth in your children -- that's great. But when it's not accompanied by the lesson that other people are just as worthy, then you've created Selfish Monstrous Bratty Beasts.

Three years and counting...

2006-10-11T16:21:00.000-04:00

Today The Greatest Man in the World and I are celebrating three years of wedded bliss. (It's also parent/teacher/student conference night tonight, so our celebrations won't really begin till after 7 p.m. But who wants an early dinner anyway, right?)

I don't pretend to be an expert on All Things Marriage, but I can say that after three years, it isn't what I expected -- it transcends expectations. It's also hard but rewarding work, this vocation.

The Holy Father's Angelus address from Sunday 8 October is addressed to married couples, and he puts it better than I can:

"My thought is directed to all Christian spouses: With them I thank the Lord for the gift of the sacrament of marriage, and exhort them to remain faithful to their vocation in each stage of life, "in joy and in sorrow, in health and in sickness," as they promised in the sacramental rite.

"May Christian spouses, aware of the grace received, build a family open to life and capable of facing together the numerous and complicated challenges of our time. Their testimony is particularly necessary today. Families are needed that do not let themselves be drawn by modern cultural currents inspired by hedonism and relativism, and that are willing to realize their mission in the Church and in society with generous dedication.

"In the apostolic exhortation "Familiaris Consortio," the Servant of God John Paul II wrote that the sacrament of marriage "makes Christian married couples and parents witnesses of Christ 'to the end of the earth,' as authentic 'missionaries' of love and life" (cf. No. 54). This mission is oriented both to the internal life of the family -- especially in mutual service and in the education of children -- as well as the external: the domestic community, in fact, is called to be the sign of God's love to all. The family can only fulfill this mission if it is supported by divine grace. For this reason, it is necessary to pray tirelessly and to persevere in the daily effort to keep the commitments assumed on the wedding day."

The biggest assumption I made about marriage three years ago was that it was mostly about my husband and me, and what wasn't about us was about our families and friends. That assumption's been turned on its head many times since; in fact, what our marriage is has less to do with us as individuals and more to do with what God is calling us to be in this mystery.

The priest who celebrated our wedding (God rest his soul) began the ceremony with the words "We interrupt this wedding to bring you...a miracle." And in the years since, I've realized he was right -- that this holy mystery is miraculous and a high calling, and through it, we are transformed and transforming, changed into something more than we were as individuals by His Divine Grace. I don't understand it -- I just try to live it.

Teaching...English?

2006-09-26T14:50:00.000-04:00

So. (I think I'll borrow that little opener from the lovely Seamus Heaney translation of Beowulf -- it's simple yet profound. /digression)

My job description, if I had one, would probably include language about the teaching of English language and literature, helping students develop writing skills and critical analysis skills, and shepherding my youthful charges through various Extracurricular Activities that appropriately engage their interests and talents. Thank God it doesn't include coaching athletic teams, or I'd be sunk. Hand-eye coordination seems to be a prerequisite to most organized sports, and I am sorely lacking in that capacity. I don't know if it would include catechesis.

When I attended the National Catholic Educational Association annual convention last spring, I went to a session about the new publication from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops: the National Directory for Catechesis. It's been out for maybe two years...so perhaps new isn't quite the term anymore. Recent, perhaps. Anyhow, the session was unfortunately only an hour long, so the presenter was forced to give some items a lick and a promise. I've since gone back and read further in the directory for myself.

The most striking assertion the directory makes is that every teacher in a Catholic school is a catechist...not just those in the theology/religious studies/whatever the term is nowadays department. Which, on reflection, shouldn't be all that striking, but still is.

I think back to my own seventeen years in Catholic schools (kindergarten through undergrad), and I can certainly think of great catechists who were and were not specifically engaged in religious instruction.

But what does it really mean? Yes, I begin each class with a prayer...but certainly that isn't the be-all and end-all? The best I've come up with so far is leading by example when possible: reverence during school Masses and morning prayer, annual assistance in preparing musicians for the Latin Mass in February, speaking to the faith and gender course for girls, and the like.

This week, though, I got two opportunities to be a bit more direct in the presentation of the Catholic faith: once in a class discussion and once because of a slightly flippant remark I made. (I know...first rule of teaching is don't make jokes. I break it constantly.)

A class discussion on The Lord of the Rings (in fantasy literature, so it was on topic) brought up the question of the moral licitness of using evil means to achieve a good end. I posited and believe Tolkien's work posits the teaching that one can never use evil means (i.e., The One Ring) to achieve a good end and that Saruman is an example of what happens to those who believe otherwise -- evil is a strong force and not to be trifled with. A student asked the question, "What about the dropping of the atomic bomb to end WWII?" And we were off on the issue of that which is evil in itself (malum in se) versus that which is morally neutral but can be put to evil ends. Without expounding too much on just war theory and Catholic teaching on war, the class and I concluded that nobody would say that dropping the A-bomb was a moral good but rather that it was an evil perpetrated to prevent the possible greater evil of an invasion of mainland Japan and the probable carnage and destruction on both sides. I was pleasantly surprised to hear how articulate the students were in their moral thinking and only had to insert the "Well, the Church teaches X" comment in a couple of places.

The second situation arose during a casual exchange with a student after class -- he'd gotten a detention for being out-of-uniform and wanted to get demerits instead of going to detention. I remarked that while he might prefer that option, I was fairly certain his mother and father wouldn't feel the same way. He expressed his feeling that parents have too much control in their children's lives as it is, and I said that as long as one is on one's parents' payroll, that's just how it is. I added "And when you're off the parental payroll, there's always that whole 'honor thy father and thy mother' thing as well."

The student then stated his belief that parents wrote that and furthermore that the Bible was man-made rather than divinely inspired. Luckily, we were going into the lunch period, and I could stop and chat with him about faith, reason, and the Bible. It's rare in the modern world that one is actually afforded an opportunity to share one's faith openly and unreservedly, and in truth, it's a little intimidating. I don't think I really made a life-changing major impression on this young man, but he was open and receptive to what I had to say and I think maybe a bit impressed that I could answer his assertions and questions logically and not with "Well, that's just what I believe." (Hat tip to my husband, a.k.a. The Greatest Man in the World, for introducing Bible study and apologetics into my faith formation -- although he can still whip my backside when it comes to knowing Scripture by heart. The Protestants have us Catholics beat soundly there.) We parted with his summation: "I accept faith because I can't see another acceptable alternative -- sort of why/why not. You're more why/because -- you actually believe it because you thought about it." I suggested that he read Mere Christianity.

I came home today feeling like I accomplished something. Maybe only a small seed planted, but something nonetheless. And it was a good, good day.

Heart of an Empire

2006-09-05T18:44:00.000-04:00

So. Notre Dame won, Florida State won, my sister is engaged :-) and Dragon*Con was great. It's always fun to see all the wild and fabulous costumes, and since they added the YA lit track, I actually feel like I'm doing work! Well...maybe. Work disguised as fun, perhaps.

The Greatest Man in the World and I busted our backsides to get down to the con on Monday morning at 10 so that I could go to a panel with some of the actors from the Harry Potter films. On the schedule, the panel was listed as being in one room, but when I got to that room, I was told it was in a different room, so I hiked over to the other end of the hotel and found...no Harry Potter actors.

What I found was a large poster advertising a film called Heart of an Empire. If you're a Star Wars nerd like me, you might have heard of the Fighting 501st, a group of people around the world who dress up like stormtroopers and clone troopers and various other Imperial folks. They aren't affiliated with Lucasfilm in any way and they aren't a LARP; they just like to dress up like the characters and do various events.

I didn't have anything else I was doing till 11:30, so when one of the filmmakers told me that the Harry Potter thing was cancelled but I was welcome to stay for the screening, I said "Sure."

I'd always thought that grown people dressing like movie characters was a little weird and a little cool at the same time. What I didn't know -- and what most people won't know -- is the impact that someone dressed like a stormtrooper can have on someone else. I won't spoil the movie for anyone, but suffice it to say...I laughed, I cried, it was better than Cats. And I left with a new respect for the power of imagination and of that inventive mythology of George Lucas'.

Only one week?!

2006-09-01T16:40:00.000-04:00

Yes. So far, it's only been One Week since school started. Already I'm needing a three-day weekend (although that might be due to the head cold that reared its head yesterday and is in its full nose-honking glory today).

But this weekend is Dragon*Con, to which we've had tickets since...March. And friends who we seldom see are going to come over from Birmingham for the events.

(Dragon*Con, for the uninitiated, is a four-day-long Nerd Fest of all things cult, sci-fi, fantasy, and strange. I'm going for the young adult literature track and a few things on the Tolkien track; the Star Wars fans at this thing make me look like a dilettante. And for those of you who know my 20+ year enjoyment of Star Wars...that takes some doing.)

It's also the Georgia Tech/Notre Dame game, which is being played at Georgia Tech for the second time since the Great Fish Debacle in 1978. (Tech hosted ND in 1980 for the only tie in the series, for you sports trivia junkies. The score was 3-3.) My parents, along with hordes of other Irish fans, are descending on Atlanta this weekend.

Plus, it's Labor Day weekend, and my in-laws are having a Big Family Cookout on Sunday night.

Somehow, I don't think that rest and recuperation are on the schedule this weekend. *honks nose loudly*

Onward and upward!

Long time, no post, part deux...

2006-08-27T22:04:00.000-04:00

So...it's been a while. I've been in Italy, England, and home in Georgia. But I've been taking a break from the blogging thing for a while with summer and all.

Pics to come later...

School's out...well...almost.

2006-05-25T22:38:00.000-04:00

The end of another school year is nearly upon us, for which we are all truly thankful -- amen!

Actually, when I was in high school, I don't know if I ever thought that my teachers were probably as tired and drained as we were towards the end of the year. Since becoming a teacher myself, I've learned that teachers look forward to the summer vacation as much as their students do!

But between me and those blessed weeks of respite lie the following:

-- Four classes' worth of performance projects to grade
-- Four classes' worth of in-class essays to grade
-- Four classes' worth of final papers to grade.

The final papers have me quite worried right now. The papers are due in my hands in eleven hours, and I'm still getting emails from students of the "is this thesis okay" variety.

Note to students: the "Pressure produces diamonds" theory may work for carbon, but I don't think it's well-applied to scholastic endeavors.

I'm off to sweet dreamland while the Little Darlings slave away, fueled by massive amounts of caffeine, sugar, and Instant Messages about their cruel English teacher.

Reposting "Contemporary* music and the liturgy"

2006-04-26T20:20:00.000-04:00

I've been thinking much lately on the current cultural trend toward so-called "contemporary" music in liturgy, and the more that I think on it, the more discomfited I become.

A frequent argument cited by proponents of "contemporary" music is relevancy. "We need to be more relevant if we're going to reach people effectively" is the philosophy which translates in practice to the adoption of Top Forty-esque music in liturgy. This argument is frequently cited in discussions involving youth and liturgy.The premise seems flawed to me on two levels: one, a misunderstanding of the proper function of liturgical music; and two, a reversal of the attitude with which liturgy should be approached.

As for the first, the function of music in the liturgy is to be an organic part of the celebration of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Raucous instrumentation, whooping and hollering, hand-clapping and motions are all at odds with the formal, elegant, highly structured rituals of Mass in the Catholic church. Not that there is not a time and a place where all of those things are not inappropriate, and not that those things are intrinsically bad; they're just the liturgical equivalent of redecorating the entire White House with Pucci prints and Ikea furniture. Whenever something jars the worshipper's focus away from the celebration of the Mass, it becomes liturgically problematic. If the congregation feels unsure whether or not it should applaud after a piece of music, it is liturgically problematic. The focus has shifted from the communal celebration of Mass to a performance, which reduces the congregation to the role of audience.

"But the people can't sing Gregorian chant!" is another frequent complaint, to which I reply "Nonsense!" I've taught a group of teenagers who can't read music how to sing the chant "Ave Maria" in under fifteen minutes. I find that the structure and tessitura of chant is easy to understand even for non-musicians -- people who can't read music can still see on the page whether a line rises or falls and feel naturally where a line resolves. Chant is simpler to sing than 95% of "contemporary" music, which generally has irregular rhythms, uses odd harmonic structure, and has a broad or uneven tessitura. Much of it is sung in a range that's very uncomfortable for women's voices, as it's too low to be sung comfortably in the range where it's written but high enough that singing it up the octave isn't pleasant, either. The lower male voice suffers, too, as the music as written is too high but down the octave is too low. In the services I've attended where I have not had a hymnal in front of me, I've found it easier and faster to catch on in a chanted service than I have in "contemporary" services where the words to the songs are flashed up on a large screen.

To the second, the idea of relevancy, when explored by its proponents, seems to entail an injection of God into the modern culture. I believe this raises two questions: one, is God not already present in our culture, at least liturgically speaking; and two, since God is timeless, why the necessity to make His worship "timely"? I submit that the driving force in the relevancy argument is actually the reverse: an attempt to inject secular culture into sacred liturgy.

As Paul instructed us, we are not to be conformed to this world. Using the musical language of secular culture conforms our worship immutably to worldly standards. Liturgy should be sacred -- set apart -- in all its components so that we understand just what it is that we do.

One of the theological concepts I so love in the Eastern Catholic Church is the knowledge that the liturgy is where Heaven and Earth meet, and the liturgical space and music and prayers all acknowledge that reality. The Western rite could certainly use a dose of that uniformity of purpose and intention. The Divine Liturgy in the Byzantine church I now attend feeds my soul in its embrace of the mystery and sanctity of God in a way that pop-culture Masses are simply incapable of doing.

*I chose to put the word contemporary in quotation marks because as it is a term of art as applied to liturgical music. Contemporary comes from the Latin con tempore, meaning with the time. Arguably, the work of living composers is contemporary by definition, but I have yet to hear someone calling for Arvo Part's "O Antiphons" in the name of contemporary music! Contemporary, in the current discussions of liturgy, is applied solely to music which shares the lyrical style, structure, and setting of pop/rock/Top Twenty hits.

The new apologetic

2006-04-18T20:21:00.000-04:00

To quote one of my students -- "I just want to throw this out there."

Back from the NCEA convention and it was a whirlwind day; I was once again reminded how small this world of Catholic education really is in some ways when I ran into my grade-school principal along with two of my grade-school teachers within five minutes of arriving onsite. Plus, the new president of the NCEA was working at my college when I was a student there.

I'll post a bit later about the two sessions I attended -- they were both substantive and reaffirming of the ministerial nature of Catholic educators. While it's still fresh in my memory, though, I'd like to say a bit about Bishop Braxton's keynote address this morning, titled "The New Apologetic."

It's my hope that the full text of his remarks will be made available online sometime in the near future, but he issued a call and a challenge for a new apologetic in the twenty-first century. Acknowledging the reality that our young people are more willing to ask their questions in the chat room than in the classroom and more apt to do their research on the Web than in the library, he challenged those who are committed to the strong formation of young Catholics to have a bold and compelling presence in cyberspace (Catholic bloggers, unite!)

The four points that this new apologetic needs to address are the new atheism, the lack of substantive instruction in Scripture and Tradition, the rise of Islam and what it means to Christians, and...argh. Drawing a blank on the fourth point, and I know it was a good one.

In a world that is so often hostile to the message and messengers of Christ, the only thing that will effectively arm us to defend our faith and our hope is reason coupled with deep knowledge, which means that we who teach in Catholic schools need to communicate the Gospel and to catechize our students at all times. We teachers also need to be aware of what's out there in the world around our students so that we can effectively address their questions.

The day reminded me yet again why I'm proud to teach in a Catholic school.

(Lest you think, though, that all was sunshine and roses, the session on liturgical music was run by none other than David Haas. Grrr. I did not attend.)

Christos Voskrese!

2006-04-17T21:28:00.000-04:00

Voistinu voskrese!

And that is my entire Church Slavonic vocabulary.

Your resurrection, O Christ our Savior, is praised with songs by the Angels in heaven, make us worthy to praise You also here on earth and to glorify You with a pure heart.
-- Resurrectional Stichera

A blessed Pascha to all!

Going East, part I

2006-04-12T18:16:00.000-04:00

I know this isn't really anything to do with teaching, but all of the rumors currently swirling about the possibility of a general indult for the 1962 missal have got me thinking a bit...

About six months ago, I started attending a Byzantine Catholic church full-time. One of the primary differences between the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom and the Novus Ordo Liturgy is that the priest faces the altar during the Consecration in the Eastern rite.

Having been brought up in the post-Vatican II Roman rite, I'd always heard that to have the priest facing away from the congregation was a bad thing (or if not precisely bad, then certainly undesirable). Now, it's one of the things I cherish in the liturgy.

In the back of my mind, I had a sense that the priest facing the people turned the liturgy into a bit of theater, with the community focusing on him and his gestures instead of on the Eucharist. When I went to a Roman rite Mass after having spent six months away from it, that sense intensified sharply, and I found the priest facing the congregation most distracting.

When the priest faces the altar, it creates a sense of community -- he is leading us, but the focus is on the Holy Mystery taking place in the room and the words of the prayers, reducing the "spectator sport" aspect.

Holy Week...

2006-04-12T18:00:00.000-04:00

Or as we like to call it around my school, "Spring Break Redux."

It's really rather depressing when the principal at a Catholic school feels he must give multiple reminders via the public address system and through newsletter notes home that we are asked to keep this week holy, which at a minimum requires that we attend church on Easter Sunday, and a student in my class scoffs openly as though this is the most ridiculous thing he has ever heard. (Other students just sighed or got Expressions of Supreme Teenage Boredom at Adult Inanity on their faces.)

Holy Week? You mean the point of Holy Week is not to go to Florida and lie around on the beach?

Generally, I like and respect the majority of the parents who send their children to this school, but I believe that this attitude begins at home. Parents need to be told that they're derelict in the duties to which they swore when they baptized their babies when they don't act like the spiritual heads of their households, leading by action and example.

Oh well...it reiterates to me the importance of our young people's seeing good and faithful examples of Catholicism and Christian living in their daily lives. And when they asked what I was doing for Easter recess, I was happy to tell them that The Greatest Man in the World and I were staying home and going to church. Lots of church. Two services at his church and three at mine over the course of four days. If nothing else, it maybe plants a seed...

Long time, no post

2006-04-07T22:57:00.000-04:00

Every spring, I feel like I don't accomplish very much. The kids don't want to be there; I don't want to be there, and we generally end up antagonizing each other past the limits of reasonable human endurance.

But. There are moments of greatness along the way. One class had a great discussion today about sexual morality (only tangentially related to Byron's poetry, but so substantive that I hated to bring it to any premature ending). The weather is gorgeous, bar the insanely high pollen counts. The research papers I'm grading are better, mostly, than last year's batch of papers. My dog still thinks I'm the greatest thing since sliced bread. I got the funding to do summer study in Oxford. Life is pretty darn good.

Why can't you just do what I told you?

2006-02-02T22:16:00.000-05:00

Grrr...

I went downtown today with several students to attend a Mass in memory of the late Coretta Scott King celebrated by our local archbishop. The setup was all very last-minute, and the need for chaperones was dire, so I volunteered my services and left three of my classes to the able hands of my colleagues.

The Mass was quite lovely; one of the intown parishes sent their exquisite gospel choir to augment the liturgy. Normally I disapprove very strongly of "Communion meditations," which strike me as a means of introducing performance into a prayer that should be focused on the community, but I'm very willing to make an exception for such glorious music as this group made. They sang "Straight and Narrow Way" with a soprano soloist who sounded like Leontyne Price. It absolutely sent chills down my spine.

When I returned to school in time to substitute for another teacher's last-period class, I discovered that some of my students in one class had made the executive decision that the in-class writing assignment I had left for them was a suggestion and not a command. They had opted not to write the essay, and they turned in Free Rides in lieu of their essays.

A Free Ride is a pass I issue each student at the beginning of the term. My class rules are strict (no bathroom trips unless it's a medical emergency, no locker trips, no gum-chewing, no sleeping, etc.) and my reading assignments can be long. I like to give the students a bit of personal responsibility and freedom of choice -- hence the Free Ride. It's good for one bathroom/locker trip, one reading quiz, one minor homework assignment, one extra night to work on a paper...but once it's gone, it's gone. And the catch is that the Free Ride, if stapled to one's final exam, is worth 5 bonus points on the raw score of the exam. (Since my exams are usually out of 200 points, and the exam is worth 20% of the final grade, the Free Ride can only mathematically make a difference of 0.5% in the actual grade (if my math is correct). But the kids think it's a big deal and they treat those Free Rides like they're gold-plated.) Basically, the Free Ride is worth about 5 points any way you slice it.

The assignment I left today was a 50 point assignment. And they blithely decided that it would be okay for them not to do it, despite clear and specific instructions that the assignment was to be completed and turned in at the end of the class. One student out of the seven or eight who didn't do the assignment came to me after school to question whether or not it was all right for him to have ignored my instructions. When informed that it most certainly was not all right and that he owed me a paper, he asked for an additional copy of the instructions so that he could write a paper and turn it in tomorrow. Fine.

My knee-jerk reaction was to give the miscreants zeros on the assignment and to keep the Free Rides. But then the voice of reason and the voice of mercy piped up in my mind. (Inconvenient conscience and compassion!) I'm going to give the students who did what I asked a study day tomorrow and give the students who didn't do it the chance to write the essay for full credit. The Free Rides that they turned in will excuse the lateness of the assignment, as under most circumstances our departmental policy is that late papers may receive a grade no higher than C.

*sigh* Well, they wouldn't be teenagers if they didn't do wild and wacky stuff that confounded adults, would they?

Happy birthday, Rabbie...

2006-01-28T00:37:00.000-05:00

The auld lad's still sounding wonderful a mere 210 years after his untimely demise.

I need a break between finishing Paradise Lost and starting Frankenstein, and I usually try to schedule that break to coincide with Robert Burns' birthday on 25 January. It's a good excuse to have a party that also has some cultural and educational merit: a Burns Supper.

Burns Suppers (or Burns Nights) vary in tone from quite elegant evenings with scholarly speeches and silver spoons to raucous events down the pub. The first year, I described the Burns Supper and had the students read "To a Mouse" and "Red, Red Rose." Last year, I brought in cakes and asked each student to read a Burns poem of his or her choice aloud.

This year, I decided that it would be good to have as fully-developed a "supper" as possible. No John Barleycorn and no haggis, but plenty of food and everything as student-driven as possible. So my students and I spent the last week planning the parties (one in each of the four sections of the course I teach), inviting other teachers and friends to join us, choosing and rehearsing poetry, and writing speeches and toasts.

I'm always slightly amazed by how much students can accomplish when they're given some clear directions and some flexibility in choices. Not only did they lay out some very impressive spreads (including two very authentic and delicious trifles!), they all did very well with their poetry readings -- even the students who read in Scots. (Although they did complain quite a bit that "this isn't English," to which I replied, "No, it isn't. The dictionary link is on your handout.") We had outside guests in all but one of the classes, and the students seemed to have a good time. Particularly in the class that discovered the poem entitled "Cock Up Your Beaver, Johnny," which is a completely innocuous poem about putting a feather in one's hat, but has the opportunity for all sorts of vulgar jokes in modern parlance.

As much fun as it all was, I think that next year I'm just going to do one big supper as an on-campus field trip. I'll pull all my classes out for the middle of the day, serve an authentic Scottish lunch, and augment the poetry by some Scottish dancers and pipers. Doing three parties in three periods on an accelerated schedule day was just too much running around.

On sportsmanship and high expectations

2006-01-19T21:08:00.000-05:00

On Tuesday night, I ventured out in the torrential rain to attend the girls' and boys' basketball games that my students were playing against the archrival diocesan Catholic high school. Most sporting events between our school and this school are more or less cordial and generally well-attended.

I arrived midway through the girls' game due to traffic difficulties, and when I got there, we were leading by 22 points. As the game progressed, the lead shrank to 10 at times, then widened back to 14-16 points for most of the second half. The outcome was never really in any doubt.

Engrossed as I was in the game, I had hardly noticed the cheerleaders on the sidelines till an opposing player went to the line to take some free throw shots. The entire time that she was shooting, the cheerleaders were performing a "Miss It!" cheer. The first time they did it, I was nonplussed. But after the ninth, tenth, and nineteenth times they did it, repeating it with increased vigor every time an opposing player took foul shots in both the girls' and boys' games, I was dismayed. Even more disheartening was the fact that the opposing school's cheerleaders did not do such a cheer when our players went up for free throws.

As a school, we profess to value sportsmanlike conduct. There's a large banner in the gym that says "Sportsmanship is an expectation." I know that the cheerleaders were, at heart, just cheering on their friends and classmates, but I also know that there are many ways to cheer on one's team without tearing down the opponents. I also feel that we ought not have been shown up by our archrivals on our home court.

Even though we won both games by the scoreboard, we didn't walk away with the class and sportsmanship trophies.

Best one-liner of the day...

2006-01-11T17:12:00.000-05:00

When discussing blood sugar levels and the necessity of a balanced diet:

"Yeah, I tasted my blood the other day...it tasted like Hawaiian Punch."

Buon Natale e Felice Anno Nuovo!

2005-12-24T11:32:00.000-05:00

Hodie Christus natus est;
hodie salvator apparuit;
hodie in terra canunt angeli;
laetantur arcangeli;
hodie, exultant justici, dicentes:
Gloria in excelsis Deo!
Alleluia!
--Text from the Latin Christmas Mass

Today Christ is born;
today the savior appears;
today the angels sing on earth;
the archangels rejoice;
today, the just exult, saying:
Glory to God in the highest!
Alleluia!

Have a blessed Christmas season!

O magnum mysterium

2005-12-12T14:01:00.000-05:00

This past weekend was busy to the point of madness; in addition to my singing in four concerts in three days, my husband and I hosted my parents and one sister for the weekend and had a Gaudete Sunday brunch for our visitors and my husband's parents, sister, brother-in-law, and nephew. I'm tired today, but it was truly wonderful to spend time with family and to participate in such beautiful concerts.

Years ago, Robert Shaw started the tradition of Christmas concerts with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Choruses. When Shaw passed, the baton went to another local conductor who was less sensitive to the very religious nature of the programs Shaw had always selected and chose instead to do a more secular concert. It was nice enough, but attendance waned and the concerts lost their luster.

The baton passed again this year to Norman Mackenzie, the ASO Director of Choruses. I could go on for a really long time about how wonderful Norman is as a conductor and as a person, but that's another post. Suffice it to say that I count myself very privileged to sing under his direction.

It's always been fascinating to me how the same group of singers and instrumentalists can behave and react so differently to different conductors. There was a spirit present in this year's concerts that wasn't there in the three previous years I sang in this concert series. I can't explain it, but it was there nonetheless. People understood that this was something special and holy -- much of the music had the aching Advent sense of longing for Christ and/or marveling at God's incredible love and humility.

The two best pieces on the concert were, to me, Morten Lauridsen's "O Magnum Mysterium," sung a cappella by the ASO Chorus, and Olatunji's "Betelehemu," sung and accompanied by the Morehouse Glee Club. Two more completely different pieces of music it's hard to find, yet both of them were so beautiful that I found myself choking up at the same point in each song during each performance. (If you know the pieces, it was the soprano descant alleluia in the Lauridsen and the final refrain after the solo verse in "Betelehemu.") The Lauridsen was just piercingly exquisite, and "Betelehemu" was so full of joy.

As a member of the ASO chorus, I've had multiple opportunities to sing beautiful music with a chorus that sings beautifully well. I love and enjoy many of the works we've performed over the past several years, but there's very little that touches me in the same way that this concert of predominantly sacred music touches me. The only thing that saddens me is that for most people, the only time they'll hear music of this caliber is in a concert hall, not in a church.

Pranks and cruelty

2005-12-01T22:32:00.000-05:00

Fair warning -- this isn't going to be a happy post.

A student's home has been vandalized three times in the past two months. Not that vandalism isn't bad enough, but these particular miscreants have spray-painted homophobic epithets in several places on the house (including the garage door), causing thousands of dollars worth of damage to the house and untold emotional damage to this young man and his mother.

Right now, there's no reason to believe that it is another student who is committing these crimes. But there's also no reason to believe that it isn't, and that's what has me feeling heartsick.

I looked at the pictures of the words "GAY (Student's Name)" spray-painted in eight-foot high red letters on the garage door that our principal showed the senior class this morning in an assembly discussing the problem and wanted to vomit. I still can't wrap my head around why somebody would do something like this. I don't know if the kid is gay or not, and frankly, I don't really care. It's none of my business. He's a successful kid with an amazing athletic talent -- he could conceivably go to the Olympics someday -- who makes good grades, isn't a troublemaker or a clown, and is just generally a nice, serious, decent young man. Not that it would somehow be okay if he were a total jerk, but his being a good guy just adds insult to injury.

What is so wrong with someone that he or she feels the need to tear another human being down? To be so incredibly cowardly and hateful? To rob someone of the right to feel safe in his own home? Why should this young man's memory of his senior year of high school include this?

I don't know what to say or what to think. How can people be so hateful?

Another gem from the pen of a student...

2005-11-10T15:56:00.000-05:00

Seen on a final exam today:

"'The Wife of Bath's Tale' teaches the reader how to be truly gentile."

N.B. The noun form of "gentility" is "genteel."

"Contemporary"* music and divine liturgy

2005-11-09T10:34:00.000-05:00

I've been thinking much lately on the current cultural trend toward so-called "contemporary" music in liturgy, and the more that I think on it, the more discomfited I become.

A frequent argument cited by proponents of "contemporary" music is relevancy. "We need to be more relevant if we're going to reach people effectively" is the philosophy which translates in practice to the adoption of Top Forty-esque music in liturgy. This argument is frequently cited in discussions involving youth and liturgy.

The premise seems flawed to me on two levels: one, a misunderstanding of the proper function of liturgical music; and two, a reversal of the attitude with which liturgy should be approached.

As for the first, the function of music in the liturgy is to be an organic part of the celebration of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Raucous instrumentation, whooping and hollering, hand-clapping and motions are all at odds with the formal, elegant, highly structured rituals of Mass in the Catholic church. Not that there is not a time and a place where all of those things are not inappropriate, and not that those things are intrinsically bad; they're just the liturgical equivalent of redecorating the entire White House with Pucci prints and Ikea furniture. Whenever something jars my focus away from the celebration of the Mass, it becomes liturgically problematic. If the congregation feels unsure whether or not it should applaud after a piece of music, it is liturgically problematic. The focus has shifted from the communal celebration of Mass to a performance, which reduces the congregation to the role of audience.

"But the people can't sing Gregorian chant!" is another frequent complaint, to which I reply "Nonsense!" I've taught a group of teenagers who can't read music how to sing the chant "Ave Maria" in under fifteen minutes. I find that the structure and tessitura of chant is easy to understand even for non-musicians -- people who can't read music can still see on the page whether a line rises or falls and feel naturally where a line resolves. Chant is simpler to sing than 95% of "contemporary" music, which generally has irregular rhythms, uses odd harmonic structure, and has a broad or uneven tessitura. Much of it is sung in a range that's very uncomfortable for women's voices, as it's too low to be sung comfortably in the range where it's written but high enough that singing it up the octave isn't pleasant, either. The lower male voice suffers, too, as the music as written is too high but down the octave is too low. In the services I've attended where I have not had a hymnal in front of me, I've found it easier and faster to catch on in a chanted service than I have in "contemporary" services where the words to the songs are flashed up on a large screen.

To the second, the idea of relevancy, when explored by its proponents, seems to entail an injection of God into the modern culture. I believe this raises two questions: one, is God not already present in our culture, at least liturgically speaking; and two, since God is timeless, why the necessity to make His worship "timely"? I submit that the driving force in the relevancy argument is actually the reverse: an attempt to inject secular culture into sacred liturgy.

As Paul instructed us, we are not to be conformed to this world. Using the musical language of secular culture conforms our worship immutably to worldly standards. Liturgy should be sacred -- set apart -- in all its components so that we understand just what it is that we do.

One of the theological concepts I so love in the Eastern Catholic Church is the knowledge that the liturgy is where Heaven and Earth meet, and the liturgical space and music and prayers all acknowledge that reality. The Western rite could certainly use a dose of that uniformity of purpose and intention. The Divine Liturgy in the Melkite church I regularly attend feeds my soul in its embrace of the mystery and sanctity of God in a way that pop-culture Masses are simply incapable of doing.

*I chose to put the word contemporary in quotation marks because as it is a term of art as applied to liturgical music. Contemporary comes from the Latin con tempore, meaning with the time. Arguably, the work of living composers is contemporary by definition, but I have yet to hear someone calling for Arvo Part's "O Antiphons" in the name of contemporary music! Contemporary, in the current discussions of liturgy, is applied solely to music which shares the lyrical style, structure, and setting of pop/rock/Top Twenty hits.

Update from last week...

2005-11-08T15:05:00.000-05:00

The student who chose not to do her Shakespeare project (very uncharacteristic of this young lady!) came back on Monday, apologized for her abrupt behavior, and asked if she could have another opportunity, which I was pleased to give her. She recited perfectly; it must have been une attaque des nerfs on Friday that got to her.

It makes me feel better that she did come and get her "do-over" of her own volition. I think it's important for me as a teacher to respect the decisions of my students -- there is great learning to be had from unwise choices and none from insulating students from the consequences of their poor decisions -- but it's very difficult to step back and let these precious people suffer the effects of their own choices.

Ora et labora

2005-11-08T09:33:00.000-05:00

Yesterday was an absolutely gorgeous and unseasonably warm (78 degrees in November!) day. When I got home from work, I noticed that the yard, deck, and driveway were covered with leaves, so I changed clothes, brought the dog outside with me, and grabbed a rake.

As I raked, I was mindful of the gift that work is. My husband and I are currently involved in a Bible study that focuses on financial stewardship, and the past week's study was about work. One of the verses in the study was Genesis 2:15 -- "The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it." The principle in the lesson was that God created work before sin entered into the world. Work is made difficult by sin, but work itself is not a punishment for sin.

In the spirit of that verse, and in the spirit of stewardship (all that we have belongs to God and we are temporary caretakers of His gifts), I began to be thankful for the gift of strength and ability to do manual labor. I was thankful for the ability to care for the home that my husband and I share. I was thankful for the amusement of watching our silly dog bound ecstatically through the leaf piles.

I worked and thought on a Benedictine motto: "Ora et labora" (pray and work). Both essential elements of the Christian life, they felt to me artificially separated by the "and". A twist on the motto sprang to mind: "Labora est ora" (work is prayer). If our work is for God, as Paul states in the Epistles, then it is, indeed, prayer and not punishment.

All things counter, original, spare, strange...

2005-11-04T22:55:00.000-05:00

Today was the last real day of classes for the term. Tomorrow is the day that I'll be spending at school grading papers and preparing the final exam.

The term went by, as is usually the case, far too quickly. This term seems to have been sped on its merry way by a marked abundance of special schedules, accelerated days, and approximately twelve hundred assemblies and Masses and whatnot. I know that my original syllabus had far more time spent on Shakespeare than what actually occurred. Next year I will plan for four weeks of Shakespeare and perhaps get the three that I want.

The students presented their live performances of scenes from Henry V in class yesterday and today. Some were better than others. Some were amazing. Some were heartbreakingly rough. One chose not to do hers at all. I haven't decided whether or how to respect that choice, since it will mean a failing test grade and possibly a failing grade in the course.

I'm always surprised by what this assignment reveals about the students. It's not that complicated: memorize and perform 30-60 lines of Shakespeare. There's a written component that consists of turning in a copy of the script with the blocking written on it, a few sentences about their costume/production concept, and a rewriting of their lines into their own words. Not, to me, a massive assignment.

Some students embrace it wholeheartedly. Others fear it worse than they'll fear anything else in their whole high school experience. Students who like to "play the game," as it were (figure out the Magic Combination to the Teacher's Brain and Make an A!) go all to pieces over this assignment. Students who don't find much redeeming value in test-taking and paper-writing suddenly produce amazing results.

Every year, a few kids get stage fright so badly that they just freeze and forget their lines; I let them come and get some points back by reciting for me alone. Usually, if the student knows the lines, he or she will be able to do it for the audience of one with no stress.

I had something different this year, though. A student had a real mental block with the assignment. I've had him in class for twelve weeks, and he's always been a very quiet, reserved young man. He came in this afternoon after school to try to finish his speech for me, and he just couldn't do it. After a few abortive attempts, he suddenly started talking about how he was having trouble with the memorization and how it was confusing and frustrating for him, not like math which comes easily to him. He kept talking about how he "sees" what he has to do in a math problem, and he couldn't see anything in the lines he had been desperately trying to memorize for the past week.

We had a great conversation about math and English, different learning styles, what was happening in the lines he had to read, and what's interesting or important in Shakespeare for a modern audience. He finally read his lines (not entirely correctly, but with a smile on his face) and left.

I'm still not sure why I decided to go back to my classroom this afternoon instead of racing to beat the Friday afternoon rush hour, but I'm glad that I was there for him when he stopped by.

Dogs are strange.

2005-10-19T14:45:00.000-04:00

Mine is right now lying on the floor on his back, waving his hind feet in front of his face, and trying to bite them.

It's sort of like watching a baby attempt to eat its own foot and is strangely entertaining.

Random thoughts on high school dances and "financial decadence"

2005-10-19T14:39:00.000-04:00

In the abstract, I don't have a problem with high school dances or social events. God knows that teenagers need all the chances they can get to develop social skills (including but not limited to the ability to say five words without interjecting "like", but I digress).

However, it's been my experience that over the past ten years, high school dances have devolved from social events where kids dress nicely and play grown-ups for an evening into debauched orgies of excess. Prom isn't treated like a nice opportunity to wear lovely clothes and enjoy an evening with friends and classmates; it's become an Event that's second only in scope to a wedding and is beginning to assume much of the conspicuously consumptivist trappings of a wedding.

Much of the behavior at the dances is objectionable for an educational setting. I know what people do at clubs and at private parties and on MTV, and while I personally find people humping in public squicky, I won't quibble with their right to do as they please in those places. At schools -- where students are supposed to be held to a certain standard of behavior conforming to public decency -- and particularly at religious schools, most of which have mission statements that use moral language and speak about forming the character of the student -- erotic dancing has no place. Social intercourse doesn't mean sexual intercourse!

I also find it deeply problematic (as a teacher at a religious school) that lack of rules or lack of enforcement prohibiting such dancing paints the faculty, staff, and administration in a hypocritical light in the eyes of the students. We tell them in class that they're supposed to be chaste and respect their sexuality, but then we sponsor events and let them grind to their hearts' content? It's a very mixed message! As for financial decadence, the expenditure of staggering amounts of money for proms and after-prom parties is a sanctioned replacement for the decadence of going out and getting wasted in a hotel room. Worse, people think they're doing something praiseworthy -- "I don't want Little Johnny to drink and drive, so I'll rent a limo with a fully stocked bar for him and his buddies!"

I'm all for having a good time, but spending hundreds and thousands of dollars for a dance is positively disgusting. When people spend thousands on weddings, at least there's something to show for it at the end -- a married couple. What's to show for all the money spent on proms? A crushed corsage and an expensive dress that'll never be worn again?

Today's Deep Thought

2005-09-26T21:30:00.000-04:00

(Note: my students have a daily journal-writing assignment where they write for five minutes on a question/quote/topic that's on the board when they come in. Some days we discuss them; some days we don't. Today, we discussed.)

Me: "So, what makes a lady or a gentleman?"

Student: "Well, good manners and stuff."

Me: "What constitutes 'good manners'?"

Student: "Helping little old ladies and making sure your fly is always zipped."

Me: "Setting that bar really high, aren't you?"

Get your freak on, junior high style

2005-09-25T21:56:00.000-04:00

Yeesh. I chaperoned the seventh and eighth grade "social" last night. (The term "dance" is seen as too intimidating and too encouraging to the "come with a date" phenomenon. Ergo, social. But it's the same thing...D.J., chips and Coke, boys on one side and girls on the other for the first hour.)

The kids generally had a blast, and the peer leaders (juniors and seniors who act as mentors to groups of 6-8 7th or 8th grade girls or boys) came and helped get the dancing rolling. Several peer leaders hosted sleepover parties for their peer kids after the social, which I thought was fabulous, although I'll admit that the thought of spending a Saturday night with 17-20 thirteen-year-olds seems like the seventh circle of Hell to me!

Even though the dress code was casual, the kids were all told what was and was not appropriate attire for the dance. We went over it with them in homeroom. Still, we had girls show up in WAY short (read: barely covering everything that needed covering!) skirts and uber-tight tops. The tight, low-cut, belly-baring tops look completely obscene on girls who still have baby pudge and no breasts. Thirteen-year-olds who look like they're going clubbing just scare me.

The kids who showed up in inappropriate attire got a verbal reprimand, but nothing else. I think it sends a mixed message, but we don't have a protocol for what we do with inappropriately dressed kids. (Note to self: bring this up at next faculty meeting.)

And then there was the freak dancing.

I'm used to breaking up freaking, because I've done it for two years at the high school dances. What they do in their own homes with their parents' full knowledge and blessing is one thing, but at a Catholic high school dance, it's just not right. I did not expect to have to do it at the junior high dance.

The little boys weren't interested in dancing with the little girls. So the little girls just went and freaked with each other. That's a whole new level of icky.

I love dancing, and I do think it should be about as much fun as you can have with your clothes on, but I don't think it needs to look like what you do with your clothes off!

Reasonable accommodation

2005-09-21T20:49:00.000-04:00

At our department meeting this morning, the subject of reasonable accommodation for students with learning disabilities came up. One of the new things that we're doing, spearheaded by the assistant academic dean and the counseling department, is the creation of a notebook with a page for each student with a documented learning disability that details the student's strengths, weaknesses, and needs. Teachers are expected to look up those students who are in their classes and read the students' profiles, then make accommodations accordingly.

That opened up a whole can of worms. Some teachers were all in favor of accommodating students; others thought that students used the accommodations as crutches. Some felt the one-page reports were asking too much of the teachers. I pointed out that were we a public school, we'd be required by law to do IEPs (Individualized Education Plans) for all students with documented learning disabilities or disabilities that influenced their learning (like hearing impairment). An IEP can run to 10+ pages and involves an annual meeting with each student, the student's parents, the counselor, and the teachers. Comparatively, we're getting off easily.

Still, people brought up the following: Students may be uncomfortable asking for extended time in public. Students get diagnosed by family friends or others who may or may not have a stake in the students' academic success. Students who are from wealthier families may have greater access to testing since we don't do it in-house. Students who do not have documented learning disabilities don't get teacher continuity or requests for specific teachers honored. Parents try to work the system to give their children unfair advantages. Teachers aren't included in the process to the extent that perhaps they ought to be. And so on.

I know that people try to game the system. Heck, I've seen people do it. There isn't much to be done about that. However, should all the students suffer because a few take advantage?

I just don't know what's reasonable and what isn't.

Dein ist, dein, ja dein...

2005-09-18T14:41:00.000-04:00

The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra season is officially underway with this weekend's performances of the Mahler "Resurrection" Symphony #2.

I'm not a big Mahler fan (or actually a fan of German composers in general, probably because I don't have the correct voice type for singing great big loud Germanic music), but I enjoyed the "Resurrection" Symphony more than I thought I would. Like the Beethoven 9th, it's got a long period of chorus-sitting-onstage-and-waiting-to-sing that can be a bit uncomfortable on the ASOC's folding chairs. Between every movement, there were massive not-quite-surreptitious stretching and shifting position sessions in the chorus, including a completely spontaneous synchronized leg-cross in the back row between movements 2, 3, and 4.

Despite the discomfort, I found that the Mahler grew on me more and more each night. By the third performance of most concerts, I find it very hard to pay attention to the non-chorus parts and the concert usually seems longest that night. Last night's concert seemed to be over quickly, and the chorus part had improved since the previous two nights (which, again, is not always the case. Saturday nights can get fatigued and sloppy.) Robert Spano (ASO principal conductor) spoke to us during our warmup and said, "I'm in a mood tonight, so...as Donald [Runnicles, ASO principal guest conductor] says about Scottish foreplay, 'Brace yerself, lassie!'"

And we did. It was a great night, and the audience was as enthusiastically appreciative as they had been the two previous nights.

Now if I could only get the florid German poetry out of my head, I'd be a lot better off.

And another gem from the mouth of a student...

2005-09-13T21:57:00.000-04:00

Student: "So the moon is a place in the world, right?"
Me: "I'm going to hazard a guess and say, by definition, no."

More overheard today...

2005-09-12T21:01:00.000-04:00

Student: "So, like, Beowulf is, like, the, like, hero, because he, like, is, like, honorable..."
Me: "Whoa. I'm cutting you off of 'likes.' One 'like' per comment."
Brief pause.
Student: "That's, like, hard."
Me: "My point exactly. And that was your one 'like.'"

Overheard today

2005-09-12T17:08:00.000-04:00

Student: "Hephaestus? Isn't that some product they used to use in schools that's dangerous?"

I think he meant asbestos.

Student: "Hey, look at Nick's monkey!"
Me: "Hey, let's not!"

I'm so glad that nobody walked into the room at that moment.

More later...

Fun and games, but no busses

2005-09-10T15:59:00.000-04:00

For some reason, probably because I'm my mother's child, I volunteered to go on the ninth grade class retreat as a chaperone.

No, I don't teach ninth grade. I don't moderate the ninth grade class. I don't even have a ninth grade homeroom anymore. But getting faculty to chaperone overnight trips is something of an onerous task at my school, so I raised my hand and hopped on the bus to camp Thursday morning, little knowing what lay in store.

My school admits students primarily at two grades: seventh and ninth. There's always been an issue with class unity in ninth grade between the new students and the kids who've been there since seventh grade. In previous years, the ninth graders have had an all-day retreat at a local church to try and encourage togetherness. Last year's retreat was, by all accounts, an unmitigated disaster, so the counseling department decided to try an overnight retreat this year to see if increased length of time and increased distance from school helped the kids to break out of their cliques a little more. An unforeseen benefit in the timing of this retreat was that there were several brand-new ninth graders who came this week as hurricane evacuees, so it was a nice opportunity for them to spend time with their new classmates.

Thursday morning, we put the luggage on the busses, went to Mass, then grabbed box lunches and headed up to the North Georgia mountains. The kids seemed excited; I'm not sure whether they were more excited about going to camp or missing class for two days, but they were sure loud!

We got up to camp later than we'd planned, so the staff got the kids going on their planned team-building activities right away. The staff assumed that the kids already knew each other's names, so they cut the icebreaker activity for the sake of time. Because many of them have only been at the school for two and a half weeks, they really don't know each other's names yet. The kids did have nametags, but they were pretty much destroyed by the time they got to camp. (How it's possible to destroy a stick-on nametag when all you're doing is sitting on a bus for two hours is beyond me, but it's obviously not beyond them!)

They ran around and did team-builders all afternoon, then ate dinner and had a little bit of free time before the evening concert. The guy who came out and performed was great -- the kids were all into the songs and the games and they were wound up by the end!

The chaperones were all on sleeping porches on the back of the cabins, which may not have been the best plan ever; I was nervous that we'd fall asleep and the girls would head out the front door. They didn't, but they were hopping in and out of bed so much and "whispering" (actually muted yelling) at each other so loudly that I didn't get a lot of sleep. I finally told them to get in their beds and close their eyes around 1 a.m. And 1:45 a.m. And at 2:15 a.m., I went all Wicked Witch of the West on them and said that anybody who couldn't control her mouth was going to come sleep out on the porch with me and Ms. N., the other chaperone. (She was knocked out on cold medicine at that point.) They settled down after that.

We had two more activity rotations on Friday morning, with a brief period of free time between breakfast and activities. Some of the boys used that free time to shoot off a fire extinguisher in one of their cabins, which the adults discovered before lunch. The counselors were really upset, not just that it had happened, but also that it could prejudice the administration against repeating the retreat next year.

The boys from the cabin where the incident had occurred had clean-up duty after lunch, and they were all worried that they'd be punished collectively for what had happened. They all said that they weren't involved, and then one kid came forward and said, "I did it." I was really proud of him -- it took guts to confess in front of his friends.

He wasn't the instigator; two boys from another cabin came in and were spraying the fire extinguisher and he walked in on them. They coerced him into spraying the extinguisher himself, probably so he wouldn't turn them in, although that sort of thinking may be too subtle for this age group. Anyhow, it put a blot on the end of what was otherwise a good trip.

We got the kids and their stuff up to the staging area for the busses around noon. By this point, we were down to eight faculty members because some had driven their own cars up and had already started back and some had gotten on the school's minibus with the JV volleyball players who had had to get back a little early so they could go play in an out-of-state tournament.

No busses.

They started calling the bus company and the school, and the bus company had messed up. They had scheduled busses for Saturday instead of Friday. So here we were, two hours from Atlanta, with two hundred kids and no transportation.

We needed four busses, but we could only get two each from two different companies and they had two different arrival times. I stayed with the kids in the last half of the alphabet, who were going out on the second set of busses.

The first group left around 4. We didn't leave till after six. The kids were real troopers; they sat around and talked and joked and played and generally had a good time. It may have been serendipitous...after all, nothing builds unity like adversity!

So will I be going on the Second Annual Ninth Grade Retreat next September? You bet!

But I'll take my own car. :-)

Why I'm proud to teach where I do

2005-09-01T16:37:00.000-04:00

Today we had a hastily convened faculty meeting after school to discuss our response to the people who have been displaced by Katrina who've called to see if we'll take their children at our school for the time being.

I'm so proud to say that we're not only taking up to 60 students, we're not charging for tuition, books, or uniforms. The other diocesan schools are going to do the same.

It isn't much, but anything we can do to lend some sense of stability to those shattered lives is worth doing.

Reading histories...

2005-08-26T10:34:00.000-04:00

One of my favorite assignments to give at the beginning of the year is a 1-2 page essay on the students' personal reading histories. How did you learn to read? What do you like to read? It serves a couple of purposes. One, I learn more about the students themselves so I get to know them better, and two, I can see where they are in their writing mechanics. (The second part tends to be somewhat depressing. Next to nobody can properly punctuate titles!)

They run the gamut from "I love to read and I read every single chance I get" to "Reading is really hard for me and I don't like it very much" to "I got made fun of by my classmates or my teachers because of my reading" to "I don't get a chance to read anymore because I'm too busy."

Some of them are hysterically funny; others make me want to cry, like the student who locked himself in the bathroom and cried for an hour on the first day of kindergarten because he didn't know the alphabet. His classmates teased him and his teacher thought he was defiant. It's a marvel to me that kids like that don't end up just hating school and giving up.

It reminds me every year of how strong the human element is in teaching. Every person in the room brings something different to the class.

The other beginning-of-the-year assignment is an essay on a summer reading book of the student's choice. I had one student bring hers by during tutorial yesterday so that she could get feedback on it before turning it in on Monday. Mechanically, it was well-written. Content-wise, the student had obviously written what she thought I wanted to hear. I told her that she needed to give herself permission to take a risk and write what she wanted to write, not what she thought I wanted. She squirmed a bit, then said, "I played around for my first couple of years here until I learned how to play the game -- tell the teachers exactly what they want to hear and make the grade."

I told her she had my permission not to do that in my class, but it still disturbed me. How many of the students who graduate from here look at their educational experience as "playing the game" for grades instead of investing in themselves and cultivating curiosity about the world?

And a Deep Thought from a meeting this morning...

2005-08-24T16:41:00.000-04:00

"Because we teachers pour so much energy into caring for our students, we frequently neglect to put similar energy into caring for each other."

I love the smell of coffee in the morning...

2005-08-24T16:23:00.000-04:00

Coffee. Mmm. Schools are fueled by coffee, I believe. The coffeemaker runs constantly in the faculty lounge, and nobody's drinking decaf except for the people who've already had heart surgery.

There's this great energy in the building that doesn't come from caffeine or sugar. I can't quite define what it is, but it flows from the interaction of teachers and students. I'm participating in a pilot program for teachers this year called peer coaching, where teachers go into other teachers' classrooms and observe all or part of the class. We fill out evaluation sheets with two compliments and two suggestions, then put one copy in the evaluee's mailbox and keep the carbon in our files.

I went and observed my first class today during my planning period: A.P. Biology with a 25-year veteran teacher (actually, the person who suggested the whole peer coaching program in the first place). At first, it felt weird to be commenting on someone else's teaching...almost as weird as it felt to be in a classroom that wasn't mine!

How quickly people get stuck in their little habits. I've been at my school for two years (starting my third), and I've never been in another teacher's room while teaching was going on. I probably know more about what's going on in Europe than I do about what's going on in another classroom down the hall.

I found that I was able, after a few minutes, to observe the instruction objectively. It's so great to see a master teacher at work, especially when you're a younger teacher. It gives one hope that there will come a day when everything starts to flow and you don't feel terrified that somebody's going to ask a question for which you have no answer. I also saw a few things that maybe weren't working so well. One was possibly a function of the classroom setup: students sit at lab tables with large computer screens under hoods at the center of the tables, which makes it possible/easy for students to have side conversations without being noticed by the teacher. The other made me realize how important it is to get information from another perspective: I had trouble hearing from where I was sitting in the back of the classroom because of the level of ambient noise in the room from the computers and projectors, especially when the teacher turned and faced another direction from me.

Maybe I'm deeply sensitive to hearing issues, since both my husband and my dad are hearing-impaired, but as a teacher, that's something I'd want to know that probably only another teacher would notice. I left the class excited to think of the possibilities for the program.

As I walked down the halls, I looked into windows to see classrooms full of students and teachers and learning happening, and it made me happy. I think that you know you've found your vocation when you can walk away at the end of the day with good energy in your heart.

Bikram Literature Classes

2005-08-24T16:19:00.000-04:00

On Monday, I got to school early and went to put some things in my classroom. I walked in and nearly fainted from the heat; it was cooler outside than it was inside by several degrees.

Turns out that a fuse blew in the A/C unit over the weekend and there was no air circulation in the building for 48 hours. I spent the whole first hour dripping with sweat, literally.

Other than that, the day went well. I spent time reviewing the syllabus, which is a not-exciting but very necessary part of the term.

The best thing said during the first half-day of school...

2005-08-21T10:45:00.000-04:00

Class is dead silent and staring at me like a group of zombies.

Me: Are you tired, or is it something I said?

Student: It's not personal. I just don't want to be here right now.

Me: If we can do anything to help you want to be here, let me know.

Student: I'll make a list and get back to you.

And we're off...

2005-08-18T16:26:00.000-04:00

This week has been the Never-Ending Series of Meetings. The beginning of the school year ought to have some time built in for actual planning...but it doesn't. (Although the word on the street is that things will change next year. The frenetic pace of the schedule shocked the new academic dean!)

And now, after all the meetings, the kids are coming tomorrow. Thank God, it's only for half a day of chaos. I'm excited...I'm very ready for them to arrive so we can get this show on the road!

Faculty togetherness

2005-08-15T16:18:00.000-04:00

This weekend, the school hosted its second annual trip to the Nantahala Outdoor Center for a whitewater rafting excursion. I didn't get to go last year because I was on the Liturgy Team retreat, but as the Liturgy Team has now been disbanded, I got to hit the river with 25 other faculty and staff members.

The trip was great fun. We had a blast being out on the river, and we got to spend time in fun and fellowship in ways we would never otherwise do. Particularly when a storm knocked out all the power in the place at 6 p.m. It didn't come back on till after midnight, and let me tell you...it is DARK up in the North Carolina mountains when you're walking back to the cabins with only a candle to light your path.

Despite the power outage, a good time was had by all. I stayed up talking to my cabinmates till after two in the morning. I've worked with these people for two years and never had a conversation with them that lasted longer than ten minutes. It was so good to have the time and the lack of busyness to be able to meet my coworkers as people.

The comment I heard over and over again was "We need to do more of this." Unfortunately, once the school year starts it's hard to find the time and the atmosphere to spend time with each other that isn't school-oriented.

Today was the official faculty "retreat" at a local church. Part of the day involved breaking up into groups and brainstorming about activities that would promote some community value to be done over the upcoming school year. We did the same exercise a couple of years ago, which is where the whitewater rafting trip originated.

The ideas were great...a faculty talent show, family picnic out at Stone Mountain, doing painting for the Foundation for Hospital Art, beer tasting and movie night, and several others. One of the themes that came up in multiple suggestions was time that included families -- children and spouses both. Another was just getting away from our little school bubble and doing more interaction as people. Everything seemed well-received by the administration.

In teaching, we focus so much energy and attention on our students. That's appropriate and good, but we lose sight of the necessity to spend some of our energies and attentions on each other. Our new academic dean seems to have a good understanding of the need for that time spent being together without being focused on school, so I'm hopeful that this investment in faculty togetherness will continue into the future.

Come on and take a Free Ride...

2005-08-10T16:28:00.000-04:00

This morning, I realized that there was a vital piece of photocopying that I had, as yet, forgotten to do: the now-famous Free Rides.

In the tradition of "good writers borrow, great writers steal," the Free Ride concept is completely stolen from my ninth grade honors English teacher, then-Mr. now-Dr. Brooks. At some point in the future, I'll have to write a paean to how Mr. Brooks is more responsible for my teaching style than any other person, including all my college profs. For now, I'll just say that Mr. Brooks' take-no-prisoners, drill-sergeant strict approach to classroom discipline made such an impression on me that I decided to try some of it and see if it worked.

Mr. Brooks told all of his students not to be late (lateness defined as not being in one's desk and seated by the time the bell stopped ringing), not to ask to leave class to go to one's locker or to the bathroom, and to have one's homework every single day. However, he held out these little passes called Free Rides. Everybody got one. The Free Ride was good for a minor homework assignment like a reading quiz, to get out of class to go to lockers or on potty breaks, to excuse lateness or out-of-uniform-ness, et cetera.

There was a catch.

If you hung onto your Free Ride all the way till the end of the semester and turned it in with your final, you got bonus points on the final. Not very many, but it could mean the difference between a B and an A.

Well. Nobody ever had to run to the potty in Mr. Brooks' class.

And now, nobody ever has to run to the potty in my class. My students treat their Free Rides the way that my classmates and I treated ours: like solid gold.

Who knew that one little slip of paper could eliminate so many classroom management issues? Thanks, Mr. Brooks.

Making a bulletin board

2005-08-09T09:36:00.000-04:00

After two years teaching, I finally got it together and made a bulletin board. The other teacher who shares the classroom has had the same bulletin board up since I've been there, and it's pretty cool. She has a big poster of Shakespeare up that's had other things stapled to it: "spirit beads" (Mardi Gras beads in the school colors), a button with the school logo on it, a large floppy hat with attached yarn dreadlocks, and a "W: The President" sticker (W for Will Shakespeare, natch.)

The other bulletin board in the room is...well...sad. It had random stuff stapled up to it haphazardly: news articles about college kids dying from binge drinking, a five-year-old tornado exit plan, a card with pictures of Magnificent Mullets (the hairdo, not the fish), and other junk.

Since I'm actually going to be in this room for all four of my classes this term plus at least two classes the other two terms, I decided that I would spruce up the bulletin board.

I asked another teacher where I might find butcher paper appropriate for covering a bulletin board, and she looked at me rather blankly. "I haven't seen butcher paper around here for years."

I remembered the large racks with rolls of colored butcher paper that resided in the offices of my grade schools, high school, and residence life in college with nostalgia and went off in search of paper. I found some in the English department office behind the card table with the electric typewriter. Since it hadn't been touched in the entire time I'd been at the school, I figured it was fair game. I also found a bit of bulletin board edging. Both were bright flame red. Not my first color choice, but hey...it was free to the finder.

Bearing my found treasures, I headed upstairs and started creating my bulletin board. One of the reasons I wanted to be a resident advisor in college was the ability to make bulletin boards, and I made some really cool ones. I had a Breast Cancer Awareness board that had little pink ribbons made out of tiny strips of pink paper all over it, a Welcome to 2 Annex board that had calligraphed names of all the residents and lollipop bouquets, a Stop Conflict Diamonds board with big fake rhinestones everywhere...I had too much time on my hands, really.

This wasn't one of those cool boards. However, it does have smooth, neatly stapled bright red paper on it and red corrugated bulletin board edging on the top and bottom. It also has the words "British Literature" floating in Quill font in the upper left-hand corner.

Other than that, the only thing on it is a sign that reads "Friends don't let friends go to Barnes and Noble" followed by a list of local independent bookstores. It also has a small sign with the website for the Fair Tax (okay political action because it's nonpartisan).

But now I've got a problem...about six square feet of smooth shiny bright red paper that is absolutely blank!

SparkNotes = Tool of the Antichrist

2005-08-09T09:14:00.000-04:00

I'll admit it: I hate the very idea of SparkNotes. I'm not fond of anything that promises great results with minimal effort...weight-loss pills, most items sold on infomercials, and so-called "educational" products that are really flashy marketing tools. If you're going to spend the time it takes to read the SparkNotes, why not just read the actual text again and see if it makes more sense the second or third or fifth time you read it?

Because that takes effort. And school, evidently, is not supposed to require more effort than it takes to produce the desired grade, or so some of my students want to believe.

My biggest problem with SparkNotes, besides the fact that they encourage lazy academic habits, is their lack of quality. The writing style is atrocious, the content shoddy, and the analysis superficial at best. If they just provided summaries, that would be one thing, but their summaries include analytical (and I use the term very loosely) commentary.

Not that I can convince my students of this, by the way. They refuse to believe that scholars won't put their work out on the free internet. They refuse to believe that SparkNotes is a marketing tool (how they can ignore the multiple ads from companies like TMobile that take up half a page is beyond me) and think it's a happy little service provided by nice helpful people. Riiiiiiiiiight.

I went and checked out their offerings on Henry V today because I'm teaching the play in a few months. It was predictably crappy. I'm just waiting to see how much of SparkNotes' "analysis" shows up on the final exams in November.

I've written my own synopses of each act of the play that I'll put up on my website in handy-dandy .pdf files. I wonder how many of my students will pick me over Spark!

One week and counting...

2005-08-08T13:11:00.000-04:00

I feel so official...I got my class rosters and schedule yesterday. Yet again, I have a seventh-period study hall to proctor. Seventh-period study hall and I don't have a good relationship.

The first year I taught, I had a seventh-period study hall first term. At the time, there was no cap on the number of students that could be assigned to a given study hall period. I was new to this gig, so I didn't know that it was abnormal to have more than twenty students in a study hall. Twenty-five students is about the limit that the classroom will hold.

I walked into a room with sixty-two students.

The registrar altered some schedules so I ended up with only forty-four in the room. Of course, the forty-four included almost all of the sophomore football players, who begged and pleaded and whined to be let out of class early on Fridays so they could beat the traffic out of the parking lot to go eat their pre-game meal.

There was great rejoicing when that term ended!

This year, I've got twenty in the study hall. Study halls are now capped at twenty-five, and I have the dubious distinction of having the largest study hall in school history!

I'm pretty happy with the schedule overall. More than half of the students I taught in the one freshman English class I had my first year are now back for Round II, and since they were a fabulous group, I'm looking forward to seeing them again.

Off to school to create a bulletin board...for the first time EVER, I'll be in the same classroom for all four of my classes! Seniority rocks!

Inspiration after lunch

2005-08-03T21:49:00.000-04:00

I've been taking a technology class at school for the past couple of days. With all the money and effort the school puts into technology stuff, it seems a shame that generally teachers don't know what's available both in terms of software and hardware.

It isn't (in most cases) that people don't want to know about it but more a lack of time and initiative. Kudos to the tech department for putting these little courses together -- they've really been helpful!

Today we learned about a program called Inspiration. Basically, it's an electronic version of brainstorming -- users can create graphic organizers and outlines. Users can also take a graphic organizer and turn it into an outline, which is a great teaching tool for the younger students who don't really understand how one generates an outline. Although it wouldn't be a bad tool for my juniors, who tend to be less proficient at writing and its attendant tasks than they'd like to believe themselves to be.

I played around with creating a graphic organizer for my second term units of study, which made me realize two things. One, I haven't touched anything for that term yet, and two, there's far more that I want to present than I'll be able to accomplish. I think that's the beauty and the beast of teaching survey courses: one gets to pick and choose from a wide variety of material, but there are just too many good choices out there!

Beowulf and Scott Foresman's Handbook for Writers

2005-07-27T13:04:00.000-04:00

T-minus twenty-four days till school starts and I'm still working on my first unit of study -- Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf. Frankly, I'd never much cared for Beowulf till I read Heaney's translation. The poem reads as a poem, not a stilted translation. If you're in the mood to read some early English epic poetry, pick it up sometime.

This year, we've added a grammar/writing handbook to the curriculum. My vote was for two books -- the Warriner's handbook for grammar and the MLA Handbook for writing. I was also interested in adding Strunk and White's Elements of Style. All three are classic texts for writers/students/teachers.

Warriner's is out-of-print. (Shocking...or not, when one considers the current state of grammar instruction!) Nobody else agreed with me on the MLA. (Philistines.) And Strunk and White was dismissed as too advanced for the ninth and tenth grades. (I'll concede that point.)

The compromise position is the Scott Foresman Handbook for Writers. I was instantly turned off when I saw it -- the cover features a cutesy graphic of an apple sculpture being constructed. However, the adage that one cannot tell a book by its cover has held true, and thus far I'm satisfied with the content. I still think that my eleventh grade students will need the MLA when they write their research papers in the spring, but for now this book will serve them well.

Back to marking key passages in Beowulf...