1984 Response

Cute?

I was a little bit flabbergasted, a little bit disappointed,  and a big bit amused when a student described Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" as "cute."  To be fair, she was probably just trying to humor me and let me know that she didn't hate it, or at least she didn't want me to feel bad about my reading of the poem to the class.  She was being respectful and kind, and I appreciate that.  However, to hear and read a poem written in an opium haze about the exotic and epic palace of a cruel and powerful ruler, a place where women wail for their demon lovers and there are mystical rivers and caverns measureless to man, this palace's destruction in fire and ice, and the power of myth and poetry to replicate such things, and then to respond with, "eh, it's cute" shows a misunderstanding of the poem in general.  The entire class seemed to be bored with the poem, and any teacher knows that boredom happens sometimes, and good teachers push on and find a way to instill sparks of interest with the next text, or the next, or sometimes good teachers must be satisfied with the hope that they have prepared a garden where interest will grow at a later date, sometimes years down the road.  I know these kids, and they are brilliant kids.  I know these texts, and I know that they are brilliant texts. I don't need my students to love every text that we read, but I need them to understand most of them on a basic level.

I would be happy if one of my students had said that they didn't enjoy the text, but that they understood what Coleridge was doing, that they understood that he was exploiting the exotic ideals of The East in a romantic and mystical poem that intended to create a yearning and an awe of the unknown depths of human history, even if they felt that he failed or that he utilized racist stereotypes to achieve this end; that would be good AP level criticism; however, though it may be annoying and problematic in many ways, "Kubla Khan" is not cute.

We are beginning to read one of my favorite novels of all time, Frankenstein.  Perhaps with Mary Shelley's help, my students and I can bring the Romantic ideal out of the realm of "cute."

The Melancholy Dane

I love teaching Hamlet.  I teach it three times per year, and I look forward to every line.  I have had discussions with friends who aren't Shakespeare fans, and I think I understand why they are intimidated or bored by what they perceive as antiquated language and a melodramatic, tired plot, but Hamlet is insidiously compelling, and I have seen more than one of these Shakespeare naysayers change their minds after revisiting the play.  The juxtaposition of limitless human potential and the inevitability of failure has profoundly affected me in distinctly evolving ways as I have grown older, and I think that Shakespeare understood the many levels upon which his play functions.  I never miss an opportunity to see the play, and even a mediocre performance inspires me to consider human mortality, loyalty, and love.  Here we go again.

Knock knock...

Bernardo- Who's there?

Biographical Statement for The Reno Ramblers Bike Club

My first bicycle related memory is of my father’s bright orange Raleigh leaning against wall in the living room.  Ever since then, I’ve been convinced that orange bikes are faster than their lesser colored brethren, and that the living room is a good place to keep a bike.  Unfortunately, not one of the 7 bikes in my stable is orange, and my living room is too small to house bikes for more than an hour or two without a stubbed toe or a snide comment from my wife. I intend to rectify both of these situations soon.

I spend my mornings and afternoons in the spring, fall, and winter commuting by bike to and from my job teaching Reno’s adolescents about Shakespeare, irony, and the proper use of commas. 

In the summer, I like to ride my bike as far as time and money will allow.  My first extended tour was across the state of Nevada with fellow Reno Rambler, Addison Wilhite.  The state of Nevada has a lot of mountains, and I think I crossed them all, but I loved every minute of it.  I like being out in the world with only that which will fit in my panniers. 

I help to run Dan’s Night, a weekly free bicycle maintenance workshop at the Reno Bike Project; this workshop is named Dan’s Night after fellow Reno Rambler, Dan Ruby, even though I have spent more time as a facilitator than he has.  I am not bitter about this slight, albeit grave injustice.

I ride bikes as often as I can.  When I’m not riding, I like to build and maintain bikes.  When I’m not doing either of those things, I’m either fly fishing or wishing that I was on or near a bike.  I am proud to be a Reno Rambler!

March.

First-year teachers in the Washoe County School District are bombarded with hundreds of trainings, meetings, and mentor relationships, ostensibly in order to prepare them for their newly chosen career.  When I began teaching, this barrage of time-wasters only served to add to my already abundantly stressful workload; one of the many little hoops through which I had to jump was a weekly meeting with a woman sent from the powers that be to help me.  Her job was grant funded; she had recently left the classroom, and she worked a caseload of new teachers and teachers that were in trouble and needed support. I am sure that she was once good in the classroom, and that she is now helpful to many teachers, but our teaching styles were so different that I always left our meetings with a new set of post-it notes, some highlighter pens, an idea that I would never use about writing kids names on popsicle sticks to call on them equitably, and a feeling that I had permanently lost an hour of my life.

She did share one of the most valuable insights of my career however, and I am very grateful to her for it.  It was March, and I was extremely stressed about the upcoming end of the semester, my students' lack of motivation, and my inability to prepare for class because I spent so much time meeting with her. She saw the look in my eyes and, perhaps because she realized that I was about to throw someone, maybe her, through the window, she opened a notebook and showed me a piece of paper containing a graph correlated to the months of a school year.  She proceeded to explain that much research had been done about teacher and student morale, and that March was always the lowest point for people in academia.  The line did drop, almost off the chart, in March.  She looked me in the eye and told me that every March that I taught would suck, but that April and May would always follow, and with them, hope, accomplishment, and career-contentment would return.  The realization that this feeling is part of a pattern, and that this too shall pass, has been a real comfort to me ever since.  I guess the long meetings about wait-time, teaching transitions, and word-walls were fair trade for that piece of wisdom.

Now I just need to make it to April and May.

Mr. Mojo Risin'

I'm ashamed to admit it, but the first time that I read Brave New World, it was because I wanted to be Jim Morrison;  I was into The Doors, and I knew that they took their name from The Doors of Perception, also by Huxley.  I don't know why I didn't just read that book, but I'm glad I found BNW first. I no longer love The Doors; as a matter of fact, I really can't stand them anymore, but I do love Brave New World.  I dig the little things that Huxley does, like the characters' use of the name Ford in sacred context and the matter of fact presentation of the Alpha, Beta, and Epsilon caste system.  I think The Feelies got their name from this book; I never noticed that before.  

The typical dystopian realization of eugenics and population control is scary and riveting; however, as I get older, dystopian literature makes me sad where it used to make me anxious and angry at the world.  I love the science fiction that novels like The Handmaid's Tale, 1984, and BNW lead to; there can be no Logan's Run or The Matrix without Brave New World.  I also love the over-the-top criticism of oppressive and controlling social control that has become a staple of dystopian fiction. However, even though I believe that horrible atrocities evolve from misguided moral stances combined with the hunger for power, like in these novels, I think that it is even more evil that these things exist after atrocites.  In the real world, atrocities like the holocaust lead teachers like me to make statements like, "we must study this so that it never happens again," when in reality, genocide is happening all the time, and the brutal hatred and racism that causes millions of small scale horrors is just as strong as ever.  The pretense that we are being vigilant and avoiding large scale dystopia and horror, allows humanity to continue to perpetrate individual atrocities on one another in isolation, and to point to these novels and to past evils knowingly and with a sense of superior morality is folly.  

I'm reading all three of these novels in the next few weeks.  I will certainly have my share of the New World Order.

 

My wife was extremely annoyed by Krakauer's Into the Wild and its higgledy-piggeldy narrative style, several of my colleagues have been unimpressed by the book and its subject, and a few of my better students are so far removed from the protagonist and his self-imposed asceticism that they are uninterested in the rest of the book.  

The more I teach this book, the more I love it, in part because it creates arguments and discussions.  It is a cheap shot to teach a book about a young man who defies logic and goes off on an adventure after graduation to high school seniors that are about to graduate, but I am not above shooting the fish in that barrel.  However, McCandless dies tragically on that adventure, and even though I think that he was a good kid with a noble streak, and he had many admirable qualities, there is no way that I can suggest to students that they emulate him with good conscience.  He was fatally reckless, stubborn, and selfish, even as he was courageous, determined, and loving.  That is why I love this book.  It is a story that generates paradoxes and contradictions.  It presents questions without easy answers.