flaneuse.org

The last post is not my way of saying I am quitting my job, or anything else, but a link to a comic I thought was funny. The comic is from the great Toothpaste for Dinner and what I thought was funny about it was not that the person was quitting, but that he handwrote a note to make it look like it was word processed. So no one need worry (Mom, or anyone else : ). I love my job and while I have been working a lot lately, I am a far cry from quitting.

Chris and I are on a short weekend in DC in the moment and having a lovely time. Central air makes loads of sense in the dog days of summer and the Smithsonian was and is a trust in the potential of Americans to reflect on and care about the many things we have contributed to the world. Will be back online Monday or so. Be good, all. Love lots.

i-am-quitting

Sometimes life just plain throws you. I got home from teaching last night and settled in to read blogs, sitting on the rug in front of the futon, where sweet Ed was sleeping when he went into a seizure. An hour later, it was all over and 16-year-old Edgar the-one-eyed dog, whom I christened “Edgar Lou” and sang to when I first met him, is gone. Asleep and no more sweet smiling face, even though we had to carry him up the stairs and always gave him a Beggin Strip when he remembered to pee outside. He was Chris’ best friend for 16 years, “a gift” as the vet last night so truthfully put it. I don’t know what is harder — not seeing Ed on the futon waiting for me to watch crap tv with him, or the hollow in Chris’ eyes.

Ed was selfless and good and all the things a dog is that we never manage to be. Even in pain, he watched everyone and everything at the vet, getting and giving petting and love and still smiling in his wide open grin. I can’t post a picture right now — it’s honestly too much, but I will soon. The cats miss him; Naima doesn’t know who to bully and Spenser misses his happy grandfatherly Edgar couch buddy. They both wander around the house looking for the center, the soul. Something as simple as a dog who keeps us all together. He was like you would light a candle and find our way, leading us to a place where we could be better than ourselves.

Good night, sweet Edgar. May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

You know, I don’t often blog politics because — I don’t know, this could easily become a political blog and I could blog nothing but and more and more I think about that. I’ve been reading Howard Zinn’s You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train (he wrote A People’s History of the United States, which changed how I and many others thought about American History), as well as many other things online and off and thinking about the times and world I live in. I’m redesigning one of my classes around the notion of “big ideas” — the important ideas we need to wrestle with today: we’ll be talking and learning and reading about sustainable agriculture and American nutrition (Fast Food Nation), war and American intervention as well as what courage means (The Kite Runner), global warming and government coverup (An Inconvenient Truth), Western dependence on oil (Syriana).

And then I get to this morning’s NYTimes, my first stop (along with a cup of coffee and morning play with Spense and Ed and Naima) and find two things waiting for me. The first you have to pay for but is well worth it — Paul Krugman’s column on why African-Americans distrust the Bush administration and the second is this:

“The American Bar Association said Sunday that President Bush was flouting the Constitution and undermining the rule of law by claiming the power to disregard selected provisions of bills that he signed.”

This is not a new story, but even the ABA is paying attention now. The President has put himself above the rule of law, the very Constitution of this great land of ours. As Zinn wrote, “I love this country, but I don’t pledge allegiance to governments.” Yeah. Wonder why. With Bush’s reliance on signing statements amended to nearly every bill passed under his watch, he has exempted himself from more than 100 laws in a move amounting to a line item veto with one important exemption — Congress can’t act back as they could with a Presidential veto. Check and mate. In language so broad that Mr. Bush has left himself plenty of maneuvering room:

“When Congress requires outreach or affirmative action for women or members of certain racial or ethnic groups, the president demurs, saying such provisions must be carried out “in a manner consistent with the requirements of equal protection under the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.”

Game over? No way. This is not only unethical, it is completely contrary to the ideals on which this country was founded — namely the checks and balances system of government that are supposed to prevent one branch, let alone one person, from gathering too much power. The time has come and gone and come again. This is well past sensical. Speak now or forever lose your right to do so.  Stay informed and exercise your right to vote.

Jon Stewart in ‘08. It’s the only way. [grin]

Took a couple of days off — no computer, no work, just some reading and time with Chris and quiet. Nothing really to report other than thinking and talking — and Clerks II was funny as hell — and am feeling a bit better. Sometimes a small vacation is the only kind you can take and so you do it, and it works because it has to. I mean, what else are you going to do, when no matter what, you just keep getting up in the morning ’cause there’s still and always going to be good reasons to do so.

I definitely think I’m hitting the wall. I’ve been teaching so much I can’t tell what I’ve covered in one class as opposed to the other, which would be fine if they were the same class but they aren’t –

Yesterday, instead of reading and commenting on the growing stacks of papers I laid on the living room floor and read Middlemarch, cause I have only read it once and I keep coming across references to it in different things I’ve been reading –

I keep thinking, “So what if I don’t get tenure. Isn’t there an organic food co-op in Taos that needs someone to help stock the shelves and we can live off the grid for a while?? –

omg, next month I am teaching *every night* for five hours –

Went to the allergist who injected many many things under my skin to find out that I am allergic to mold, most pollens, dust mites (?!?!), lettuce (wtf?), celery — ok whatever, and coffee (!!)!)!)!)!!)! –

I need a long vacation. A road trip in my beloved Stella Blue to someplace dusty and Big Sky, with low humidity and no cell phones…..

A recent study, the first of its kind, just found that at 10 research universities, roughly 53% of faculty receive tenure within seven years. The number for women is less — 48%. The number isn’t startling, it’s about what I expected and the range across the ten schools goes from 33% to 67%, less *of course* for women. Of course.

The question is what to do with this information. What does this mean for me? Do I ignore it? Do I work harder as a result? Do I try to figure out if that means I need to work harder or, as the saying goes, smarter. What would that be anyway? Right now I think that means I ruminate. I am moving into year two, teaching hard and sprinting into what is really a cross country race. I need to find my pace, set my step.

These are the days I think I hate the most, that feel like an unending Wednesday afternoon in the back of Algebra class with Mrs. Heming, the teacher I got along oh so well with that I got to take her twice (yes, there’s a story there and no, I’m not telling it).

We saw Strangers with Candy this weekend first because we’re fans and second because there was air conditioning. It was hilarious, but the ongoing focus with all things adolescent has given me really weird dreams lately. I keep dreaming I’m back in high school — and there ain’t nothing good about going back and trying again. Only Amy Sedaris can make that worth watching, let alone participating in. We also watched Donnie Darko for a very different take on high school. (That site is worth seeing, as is the movie if you have a dark turn of mind and a taste for Echo and the Bunnymen. You know who you are if you do.)

All of these things, plus my reading have made me realize that high school haunts us in oh so many ways. Even as adults, there are vestiges of our high school selves that still cling to us. You know what I mean — you can tell, or at least you think you can, who was the prom queen and who was the class nerd. Do we ever get over and past all those slights and deep wounds? That’s what made Strangers with Candy so funny, and why I watched at least part of it through my hands, cringing. The things that happen to us as we form who we are, try on who we want to be — it wasn’t a great time for me, or for anyone I knew really and somehow I keep finding my way back to working with teens.

There’s something about that time, that sense — I’m not trying to do over but to learn and see and understand. It can be better for other women, other girls. It will be as we talk to girls and understand this complex web of actions and fears and dreams better.

I gave the students in my adol lit class the blog post topic of writing about a tale, a story that was moral to them — however they might define that — and I wanted to write about that myself, as well as read their posts. I’ve been debating the story to write about, partly because a blog walks the line between public and private and as I use this more and more with my students I find myself more and more careful about what to reveal, and partly because through reading Robert Coles’ The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination,  I find myself thinking about teaching as a moral endeavor.

First, I would say that I think of moral as wrestling with the big questions, not being afraid to debate them when they come up in class. All teaching crosses big questions — questions of why and how — and I think good teaching doesn’t shirk away from them, nor preach static answers but allows all of us to wrestle with the implications of some of the answers. In this class, we’ve been talking about what it means to be a teenager right now, at this moment, in this America; how we define adolescence and how it is defined for us, as educators, and for kids. Those are big questions.

The story I want to talk about is To Kill a Mockingbird, which I first read when very young — maybe seven or eight — and much too young to really understand it. I’ve read it so many times I have parts of it memorized, and I know Atticus Finch to be one of the most moral characters I’ve ever come across. I was much more like Scout — curious, intense, outspoken and I loved Atticus’ manner of answering his children’s questions honestly, calmly, and with real words. He was not a man who pretended the world was something it wasn’t, or who lived one story and preached another. The neighbor Miss Maudie across the street tells Jem and Scout one day that their father is one of the truest men who ever lived and I think that’s right. He worked hard, he nearly won an unwinnable case, and he always knew that Boo Radley was in that house and meant no harm. He had patience more than a town full of most of us today. Atticus Finch and Harper Lee taught me an enormous amount about what it meant to be a man, and a woman — to do right and to keep doing it, over and over again. He let Scout run around in pants just so long as she understood that all men in their tiny Alabama town were created equal, in the eyes of God and man. That’s the kind of person I’d like to be someday.

I have been so impressed with the writing my students in the adolescent literature class have been doing on their blogs that I wanted to link to the page where you can find links to all of them — read if you have time. They’re thoughtful and irreverent, well written and well worth your time.