Stress on the Penult

In my dream, I had a room like a grove, kids here and there stretched out in repose of creative activity its nymphs and friendly fauns. The phrase that meant so much was passionate moderation--either we were discussing this or listening to a recording of voices to that effect, and evoking images of the disaster that ensued from passions unconnected with the aim of a virtuous temperament, while for ourselves we had the reality of pastoral peace all around us. A girl lying full length like one of Cezanne’s bathers wrote in a journal, boys play-acted and squabbled like the fairies and mechanicals. But all these dreams are the surest way to make people stop listening, actively and with looks of affronted patience, or diss and dissect with psychoanalysis whatever they did hear.

Yesterday it came to pasting words into the Annotations from the talk on nouns, since at some point we’ll want to see what some of them are writing anyway, and I had nothing new written as we spent all day down in the yard picking, slicing, mashing and containing apples. Miserable rides in the car before daybreak and after sunset, with constant talk of the sisters or repetitive music assaulting all attempts at rest or thought, too dark to read or write or look out the window.

So this is the alternative to such havens of quiet, for most kids their only reality, a loud darkness hurtling fast along.

So this morning, trying to flush the aural parasites with Sufjan’s planetarium and make up for lost time with words, quiet, stillness, that moderation we must be passionate towards or it will go out like a light, a dreamed place. An easy week this time, the penult, and diligent nanowriming up until last night, when I was too full of sleep and depression to try to come up with more words for my convoluted immobile plot. The dream that followed was a combination of worrying I have lost touch with good friends, because Jess was there, and that I’ve missed my chance to enter into communities of intellect, art, and leadership I might have done, as the rest of the group was vaguely important, confident, the doers of meaningful work and enjoyers of life’s deeper pleasures. We were around a table awhile, or they were, while I was off to the side, serving or simply lurking there trying to catch a word, a reference dropped. This owed something to the poetry workshop they held at Spark yesterday, which I could overhear but not participate in, not having signed up and paid, only volunteering my time by chance at the same time as it on my new day. It sounded like they had lines borrowed from other books and their own unfinished work and were trying to connect the pieces into something. I caught the question about word-hoards, personal vocabularies, and couldn’t show off that I knew something about where that treasure was buried in the English language.

The place where we were was also like a hostel or a rented house, which connects it to my more immediate anxieties about teaching Spanish, or only training in how to behave in a classroom. It seems that this latter training has been pushed to its extreme and any further going down that road would be in absurdity at this point, when the respect for authority at the very highest levels is a betrayal of anything good or true. And so I can agree with Mr Farzana that my teaching methods are boring and ineffective, that I am failing and as a result smart kids are getting subpar grades, feeding them into that cycle little by little by which they’ll be spit out of the schools to do their learning elsewhere, on streets or cellblocks. It will be a time to tell them so without mincing words, but without undermining the curriculum or school as such, only rending away my own poor effort to stand in for them, and in their place to try a Michel Thomas lesson. There is nothing to lose at this point, and plenty that might be gained.

I had the transcript all written out in abbreviated form, and below it I mused, sitting in the sun, until kids in the cafeteria knocked on the windows at me, or was that a different time?: Not will this work, but how to present this? Watch the documentary first? Say something about my learning trajectory? About his life? With a couple of students at a time? And is the danger simply that it undermines the respect for school as a whole, or is it the more personal fear of having wasted so much time, fought so many unnecessary battles and caused so much needless antipathy, that you are too invested in the old ways to give them up without losing your identity? What would the corresponding method look like in other classes, of building more and more complex structures of logical connection? Or is it enough to know that it happens best when students learn face to face with a teacher, not as passive listeners to a slow disintegration of small ideas in the soft hands and mumbling mouths of small minds? Should they each just listen to the audio recording, or watch Khan academy videos, or read with the guidance of the computer station?

In passing, what else I’ve been doing in free time at Glover: besides transcribing Michel Thomas and agonizing about implementing it with the 7th and 8th graders: translating Old English poems laboriously with glossaries in the back of the book; watching lots of Signum Seminars and the webathon, though for some reason the part on Stranger Things is blocked by the restricted mode filter; reading Teach Like a Champion and gradually forgetting everything which would have been good to have done. While working on planning, grading, eating lunch or watching kids during detention I’ve listened over and over to Taverner’s Funeral Canticle, watched a video essay by Bernstein on teaching, some interesting Feldman chamber music, etc. Then I check in the intervention room every so often, or they call me to cover classes for which no subs have been contracted that day--or string of days. And I doubt it is legal to post any reproduction of the Michel Thomas Spanish CD, so I’ll not do that with my transcription. Particularly since my students have googled me and found my youtube videos and were apparently listening when I mentioned I write this blog, I had better be a good role model.