Julie Platt (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} juliesstudyhall) wrote,@ 2006-10-09 00:09:00 |
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Week Seven: Girl in a Box
Curator's Notes
Whee! My Sunday-night blog bender continues with a free-form entry inspired by the box-logic article. I collect some thoughts and images on teaching, writing and technology--some old, some new--and make my own collection.
Curator's Notes
Whee! My Sunday-night blog bender continues with a free-form entry inspired by the box-logic article. I collect some thoughts and images on teaching, writing and technology--some old, some new--and make my own collection.
The Grand Exhibit
 | Discussion is my biggest problem as a teacher--I talk the way I think, which is a mess, and I can't stand silence so I ask question after muddled question, confusing my students. And I never can take the right notes on a passage. | ||||
| July, 2006 This means that, on the shortest of notices, I have to take over teaching the class myself for the rest of the session, without a real TA, without much preparation, and certainly without much confidence. During closing ceremonies, I have to conference with all of the parents by myself. I have to do all of the paper grading and lesson prep on my own. Thankfully, I don't have to write evaluations, but I'm being encouraged to add to them as they are sent to me. I thought he was going to go over the last week of lessons with me before he left, but he just told me to basically do whatever I want, and that the last week should be cruise control. He seemed to have an almost frighteningly casual faith in me. I didn't have the heart to tell him how scared I was and how much I wanted him to at least go over the days with me. How do I feel about all of this? I'm worried about my now-absent instructor. I'm dreading having to essentially to pick up and start over. I'm anxious about my ability to teach material I haven't chosen. I'm really, really fucking scared. |  | It's those moments when I connect to my students--when I remember a student who was so excited about an assignment, or a student telling me that our conference made her realize what she wanted to do with her life--that make all the mistakes worth it. | |||
| There was a poetry reading on a plane. Actually, on two planes that were connected together at the door, and you had to leap across a little patch of sky--just large enough to scare--to get from plane to plane. Megan and Wancz were there, and somehow were married. Megan was very agitated, and I kept following her around like I always do. After the plane landed, I got off at the bridge and followed a little girl with bound feet as she tried to scale a snowy embankment after her mother. The border guards chased me back into the high school, where the administration revealed to me that I had somehow forgotten about my senior year history class and therefore, had never graduated. I screamed that I had a master's degree (something I'm a little too proud of in life) and that they couldn't keep me there. And I wailed all day in the dessicated gifted office, scraping plaster from the walls underneath my nails. | Can you say that you really love something if your understanding of it is essentially retarded? I guess the primary question of my essay is this: does the quality of your love for something have any relationship to the quality your understanding of it? | I resolve to have a less destructive relationship with my writing. | |||
| I seem to have forgotten what sixteen-year-olds look like; when I was sixteen, the other sixteen-year-olds seemed much, much older and much cooler than me. These kids are kids. They are skinny and short and have creaky voices; they wear strange combinatons of clothing, use neon Sharpie markers to highlight their hair, and make wallets out of duct tape. They play hot hands and frisbee and goof around during breaks. Breathe: they're not intimidating. Knock on wood, so far they're cooperative, extremely articulate, and generally well-focused. I have barely had to correct them at all; during last night's study hall they were as quiet as the dead. I feel less exhausted than I did with the 12 and 13 year olds because I haven't had to shush and yell at them nearly as much. I feel that I might enjoy this summer more than previous ones for this reason alone. | I got rejected from Poetry today, after all that hoopla about me being considered, after sending more work via email, and all that waiting. On the bright side, I did get a very, very nice personal note from Christian Wiman today, praising my work, which he indicated made it to the final round of cuts. He also asked me to send again in a few months. I was rather childishly puffing my chest out on this for a while. They really had me going. Time to go back to nobody-land. | I was going through my old blogs and noticed that I had set a goal for myself: to have five poems published by the time I'm thirty. I guess I need a new goal now. Often times when I try to make myself fail, the universe seems to make it so I can't. It's like someone poking me furiously in the back, daring me try to fuck myself over again. Well, I will keep doing it. Sorry. | |||
| The kids are just amazing--their exercises are some of the best I've seen from CTY students. I ran a couple of activities with them this week that seemed to go over well enough. My biggest concern, always, is with my ability to lead discussion well, and interpret the material just enough to lead them to their own conclusions. | Tonight's tasks: Acquire godlike knowledge of the kids' assigned readings. Prepare innovative, challenging and fun lessons for tomorrow. Come up with 5 paper prompts on a central theme. Start grading the last round of essays. | ||||
| Oh the wheel is turning spinning round and round And the house is crubling but the stairways stand With no guilt and no shame, no sorrow or blame Whatever it is, we are all the same Making it up in our secret world --Peter Gabriel | The question is what, in fact, am I made of? Limp pasta? Brittle leaves that powder when the least pressure is applied? Or am I made, even in the smallest capacity, out of metal? |  | I was sitting in traffic the other day, looking at some sparrows on the roadside grass as they foraged happily for food. Doesn't what I do break down to the same thing? Then why I am so miserable, hateful and jealous? Why do I care about trying to be better than everyone else when there's no way to win the race? |
