This week

Okay, let's see. Well, besides school, not that much is going on. It's almost our 3 month anniversary, as well as our honeymoon (next weekend). I've still been so busy I haven't been to the gym, which makes me feel kind of sucky, but I have been really active in teaching that dance class. In fact, Wednesday at ballet I was SUPER sore and the ballet teacher caught me kind of cheating at grand plies and made me do another really slow one.

I also found out (speaking of ballet) the answer to the mystery of the one high boob. And knowing, now I feel kind of bad for having been so curious. You may remember ages ago I mentioned a woman at ballet who had a breast that seemed way higher than the other one? It turns out that she had a radical mastectomy years ago and had the reconstructive surgery and a silicone implant put in. But since so much of her tissue was destroyed, there was really nothing to hold the implant in place, and it worked its way up. She's going to have another surgery, but was hesitant at the recovery time and the process they'd need to do (it includes taking muscle from your abdomen!). So she has heard of another type of surgery and may go with that one instead. Anyway, mystery solved.

School was neat this week. We finished Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, and on Thursday I just put the following on the board as they came in: "Creatively express your controlling impression of the chapter 'Night Life.' You have 25 minutes to prepare." After a few points of clarification, they were off and running, and 25 minutes later I found myself watching dueling MCs rapping about the chapter, the "Rat Kiley going nuts" part being acted out (complete with lighting and minimal props) with three students playing the bugs that obsessed him, crawling across the floor after him. We had a puppet show. There was a musical group singing lines from the chapter (my favorite, "I saw his liver!" with the backup singers going "His actual fucking liver!" -- and yes, I let them use profanity, because they were quoting the book). It was cool. The best part is that the next day we really did finish the book and I asked them to write about their reactions to it. I read their papers, and they overwhelmingly liked it and thought they'd remember it for years to come. I was worried about halfway through, because they were really frustrated with the book's narrative (i.e., in one chapter some story will get told, and in the next the narrator will completely negate what was said and tell the story in a completely different way).

Then in my 2nd period class, there was some bad news this week -- a student had been harassing another, and assaulted him, bloodying his nose. I didn't hear the whole story, but apparently he was so afraid he was going to get in trouble that he took off, not even going home. No one has heard from him. So with that kind of tense, emotional background (it didn't happen in my class, but the group kind of travels in a pack all day), we entered Thursday, where a young lady in the class presented her oral autobiographical narrative (as everyone was required to do), but was so emotionally overpowering that about 75% of the class was in tears. The story was about her grandfather who had passed away, and the combination of her storytelling skills, her obvious emotional state (she was weeping openly through most of her own story), and the story itself (basically, she was very close to her grandfather, but because of her Tongan culture, she wasn't allowed to do much of what she wanted at the funeral, like help carry the casket). We had to just take a long moment of silence to recover after she was done. I'm not exaggerating -- we ran out of Kleenex. It was hard to know what to do as a teacher -- it seems like most people, when overcome like that, would stop talking and sit down, or would take a moment and recover, but she just kept crying and telling her story. It was a long one, too, filled with rich detail and her thoughts and feelings at the time. At one point she started to really sob, so I stopped her and gave her a hug. I said "It was really brave of you to come up here and share your story. Are you okay?" She nodded, then said "Can I finish?" I said yes, and got the hell out of her way. Afterwards, I took that as an opportunity to address (however obliquely) the other incident, saying that I knew it had been a rough, emotional week, but that I hoped it would help bring that group closer, because to make it all the way through the diploma program, they were going to need each other's support. It was interesting.

I was also talking to a first year teacher this week (I saw her in the hall looking frazzled and invited her to eat lunch in my room), and I felt for the first time that I really had some experience and wisdom to offer, and a place from which to speak. I mean, I've talked to younger teachers before, but I finally really feel like a veteran. Maybe it's the fact that some enormous percentage of teachers quit in the first five years, and this is year six for me. Congratulations to me.