flaneuse.org

We moved this weekend, consolidating two apartments into one. Sort of. I don’t remember it being this hard before. Of course, we chose the first weekend to break 90 degrees to do it, and our apartment has not one, but two sets of narrow, twisting stairs. There were bumps and bruises on me, the walls, the banister (which Chris deftly disassembled after we firmly wedged the boxspring into the stairwell. And I mean firmly. I almost received a double mastectomy). For three days I have worked until collapse and then kept going. It’s so hot I haven’t yet cooled off and I am sitting in my air conditioned office at the university in the least amount of clothing decency will allow. I am also on the verge of complete collapse. So far this morning I have poured coffee into the keyboard of the laptop, forgotten my wallet at home and realized this only after placing an order at Starbucks (God bless those kind baristas), tripped several times in my heels and re-injured my knee (moving injury), mailed a letter without postage (I think), and cried. I think a  nervous breakdown from sheer exhaustion, stress, the pressure of the past year is on the horizon. MMMM, fun. At least I can sense it coming.

I am happy as a pig in shit preparing for this adol lit class, at least until I get to the part of my colleague’s syllabus (which I am using as a model, since she usually teaches this class) about Columbine. Then I am stopped.

It’s been seven years. I was a mile away that day, teaching in the closest middle school, but worlds different — where suburban became urban and poor. We heard the initial reports of “firecrackers” on the news and all of a sudden we were on lockdown for the next several hours and that whole Spring became about two boys and their desire to wipe their school off the face of the earth and be anti-heroes. Columbines were no longer my favorite flower but short-hand for the gut-wrenching fear of that day when all I knew was that my principal’s daughter usually ate lunch in the Columbine cafeteria — where was she? How many dead? Who was doing the shooting and were we next?

I only taught two years before going back in to do my doctorate and, if I am really honest with myself, Columbine had a lot to do with it. I haven’t dealt with a lot of those issues — I don’t like to talk about it and I walked out of a graduation at Vandy because the keynote speaker was saying stupid things about school violence and waving Columbine around like his own personal flag. Teaching changed for me on 4/20/99 and I go between understanding what it was like to be an outcast in school (I was even spit on once by a popular girl, my school was so jock and moneypopular-centric) and wanting to dig up their graves I am so angry with those two idiots.

Am I ready to teach about this? The thing is that Columbine has become shorthand for the extremes of social hierarchies and the pain of harassment in schools. Some schools are worse than others — the suicide rate at mine was pretty high, as were transfers (no, I am not going to mention what school I went to). Kids all over the country are still holding up Harris and Klebold as icons and heroes even though those two never even went after the kids who were targeting them in the first place — I’m not even sure anymore that was their focus — and school shootings still happen. As do teasing, taunting, and harassment by popular kids and jocks where the school administration just looks the other way.

I think I need to teach about this if only because it is part of the landscape of American adolescence. When I think back in my mind to those rainy days, one of the only times it ever rained five days in a row — God cried for us in Colorado because we just couldn’t, the shock ran much too deep — I see a deep scar where sunny suburbia used to be. The earth just opened to show what lies beneath.

What I can’t do is pretend those scars aren’t there.

The Notebook Girls

This is why adolescent literature is so interesting to me. The genre is getting more and more ballsy, as publishers put out books that seem to accurately depict the world of teenagers, without censoring language or experience. This book is taken directly from the notebook passed between four girls at NYC’s Stuyvesant High School  and looks just like that. The pages have been printed in their handwriting (I think you can see an example at the website above) and include the doodles and obscenities just like most of us wrote in our high school notebooks. This one just happened to be printed and comes with its own accompanying website.

That’s the interesting thing, really — that this was published as a *book* and not a LiveJournal or myspace page. I mean, these girls took this all the way to the point of getting it published as a paper text, which still carries much more cachet than a webpage, no matter how many Facebook pages are out there. In publishing a paper version, they were able to capture the look and almost the exact feel of the original, thereby giving the reader something of the sense of reading a private diary shared between four girls, a more individual, traditional reading experience than that of reading a LiveJournal or myspace page littered with links and blasting music. On the other hand, this book wasn’t cheap and isn’t nearly as easily available to as many people.

It’s so interesting to me the kinds of media decisions that have to be made by teens today about how they want to communicate a message — and the kinds of media available to them. Perhaps those decisions aren’t the best ones; certainly teens are playing with the boundaries of public and private in ways that can be both exhilarating and dangerous, but the metacognitive implications shouldn’t be ignored. Teens have the ability to think through the decisions they make and the range of options open to them in complex, savvy ways — if we push them to do so.

My apartment looks like something exploded in it. I am moving, again, for something like the 30th time in my life (no, I am not kidding). I am an old hand at this and, unlike the last few moves, no state lines have to be crossed so I am being much too lax about the whole thing. We just have to go down the street after all, although I should be much more packed than this. What can I say, I’ve been busy. I started putting together a calendar yesterday and the mere fact of writing things down in different colors made very clear what teaching three classes and writing a book, along with consulting might look like. It looks like a three-year old colored outside the lines. In case you wanted to know. Perhaps being faced with this knowledge triggered my first migraine in weeks. As God is my witness, I swear I am going to learn to budget next year so I don’t have to work like this all summer.

where i have not paid bills in many many days. but no worries, there is this

I managed to finally “walk” the ceremony of graduation — after six long years: five fine years of study, one year as a professor, one divorce, two cross-country moves, many new friends and some lost ones, and other cataclysmic changes in my life. I’m not the girl I was in August, 2000 when I started this degree, when I came home from my first class and cried, elated and terrified with what I had signed on to do. I truly had no idea. How could I? How could anyone?

Believe it or not, I’d do it all again with the same results and repercussions, if I could just end up here in the same place with the same people. How lucky am I to love what I do, and to have learned what I have in order to get here? I’ve been to London and the Netherlands (not to mention Berkeley, Ohio, Athens GA and many other places in between). I’ve learned to program and edit video online. I wrote a dissertation in six weeks (yeah, and it’s about six weeks good, let me tell you) and it finally dawned on me that I earned this degree for all the things I did in those five years *including* the dissertation — all the papers and presentations, being the first student named to an award committee in a national organization I belong to, winning a student research grant. I also f&cked up plenty along the way — I yelled at a professor once in front of a class because I thought she was wrong (yeah, that one is DEFINITELY coming back to haunt me); I got a D on one stats exam and spent the rest of that semester hyperventilating; oh yeah, and my marriage ended. But even things that seem bad, like a divorce, can be the best things overall when you get enough distance to look back at them and see what they really mean.

Just before the dean hooded each of us, formally proclaiming us doctors, we lined up in an alcove of the cathedral. Where before we had been giggling and complaining about the heat under our heavy academic robes and the length of the ceremony, in the stone stairway we all fell silent, waiting those last few moments before hearing our names called and walking out to the nave in front of the thousands gathered — our colleagues, families, and faculty. The silence was comforting, a last chance to reflect on what these years had been for each of us and I wondered what scenes played back in each of our minds — what others saw. I saw myself, going from naive to somewhat wiser and, in a funny reversal, from too much the cynic to softer and more hopeful. Then I heard my name, and went forth into the group of my peers — now the doctor and the professor.
A few of my thoughts on this Sunday morning. Peace be with you all.

Was talking with one of my freshmen this afternoon about how her other classes were going and she mentioned that she was worried about her upcoming computer science final. I asked why, only to find out that the material tested was neither in the book nor covered in the lecture, mostly because the final was written by the department. So this poor girl read a textbook and sat through lectures only to be tested on something completely new to her — of course then to fail, as she had no way to prepare for the exams. I expressed both concern and disbelief, but she just shrugged her shoulders — her professor chose not to teach anything tested on the scantron multiple choice exams and while he gave a healthy curve, she saw his out-of-left field exams as just par for the course. Literally. What the hell?

Later on I ran into another student who informed me he was on his way to class and would also be going next week, despite the fact that both classes and finals were over. I asked how his professor could still require attendance and he responded that “He just does.” Any other teacher can’t do this, but get to this level and faculty can and often do go way beyond what you might expect — attendance beyond the end of the semester, exams and papers students don’t understand, impossible reading loads. I’ve heard of, or had them all in my time. I also know that many students need and/or deserve the things asked of them — and that students push the envelope regularly. But how come students and others allow this? Is it thanks to the Dr designation that we can get away with more now than we ever could? (Then again, I had a student’s mother calling and emailing me all last week). What are the differences in the ways I am perceived and treated now, compared to when I taught seventh graders? I can tell you that when I divulge what I do for a living, the response is worlds apart. Professor has much more cachet than middle school teacher EVER did.

Yet both are teachers, and sometimes have much in common even as they diverge. Most people don’t know the differences off the top of their heads, and those perceived differences aren’t the ones worthy of respect — except perhaps having survived the extra years of schooling and completing a doctorate. Interesting to think about — that I am both a teacher and a scholar of teaching, and this idea of scholarship is the part I think that is least understood and most mysterious to others as well as maybe the part I love the most (and, lately, the part I have the least time for as the practicalities of teaching take up so much time…)

Damn ramblings of a wound-up mind. I think I set down to blog something about literature and adolescents. I am hoping to get a summer section of that class to teach (I have not ever taught it but it is a passion of mine) and waiting for the email to hear details and see if I can make it work, see if the person wants me to do it. Would be a special ed tech section of the course, which lets me get ubergeeky all over the place, even to the point of working Buffy into the syllabus.

Oh. The door creaks. Another freshman, freshperson awaits my deep wisdom and reading help!

Was just reading over at 43F, and came across his idea (taken from Sedaris’ article in the New Yorker, which is on my living room floor) of keeping a list of the things that are begging me to buy them. If, after spending some purgatory time on the list I still absolutely have to have the thing, then I buy it. Only then. This would absolutely help my budget woes and keep me much more sane than my current capitalist sprees have (BOOKS, more books, and then moving expenses). It also makes sense given the fact that almost all of us need much less than we have, if you think about it.

On other fronts, finishing up with grading and rewarding myself with episodes of Buffy (check out the Buffyverse over at Wikipedia) in between mileposts. This is a big month — graduation, Mom and Dad out, moving in with Chris, finishing up that all important first year, working on the book. Moving on, moving out, moving up in the world?

I’ve been grading like it’s going out of style, since the deadline of final grades is hanging over my head.

Graduation is next week and so I am sure I will have some sort of musings on that, perhaps drunken — who knows. I did get my outrageously expensive (think nearly $1000 bones) getup in the post. I look like a silly monkey in the thing. I really wish I could wear the cutoff cords and Converse sneakers that such a befrocked costume deserves but I will, instead, be wearing the silk dress and peep-toe heels of a relatively well-behaved assistant professor.

It’s a silent Friday in the office. Everyone is off writing and I am grade-grade-grading. Surely it is five-o’clock somewhere, tenure be damned. The pigeons on my office ledge are having relations but I am too smart to think there will be babies; I have yet to witness a baby pigeon despite three years living in NYC.

The one-eyed dog scratches his eye that is no longer there. The pollen coats my car in a thick dust of yellow foam. It is May once more.

Discuss.