Schoolmarm

I don't think I can express to you, dear Reader, how grateful I am to have a job teaching and how much I love my students and the place where I work. I teach at a school that uses a one-to-one model, and we went virtual back in March after a week or so of Windexing our rooms and wiping down surfaces to ward off the beginnings of the plague. Sigh.


That seems like forever ago. It was forever ago. The transition to virtual was virtually seamless, to tell you the truth, and while I miss seeing my students and colleagues in person, and Zoom can be exhausting in a weird way,  teaching English literature is doable. I had only a few students all summer long, but the fall term is picking up, and next week I have a nearly full schedule with about 12 students. They range from a darling sixth grade Language Arts guy who bounced up and down all through our fifty minutes together, to a young woman and young man in their last semesters of 12th grade English. I'm also what we call a Tutor/Mentor to a couple of students who struggle with reading. Each student is like a miracle, to tell you the truth. They show up on this weird platform and we work together to learn about literature and writing and life. I am encouraged by their and my own sons' general resilience to #weird world. The term ahead has Catcher in the Rye, Macbeth, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Anne Sexton, Little Women, The Laramie Project, Anne of Green Gables, Out of the Dust, Roald Dahl, Flannery O'Connor and so forth. There's really nothing better than back-to-school for geeks like myself.

In other news, I've been doing a little bit of art these days. I've taken a couple of Zoom classes and dabbled a bit in a handmade book with collage, via an old blogger friend of mine, Suzy Banks Baum. I also ordered an embroidery kit.

This morning, I spent an hour doing paper cut-outs, Matisse style, via Zoom and the London School of Drawing. The instructor even had a jazz playlist on Spotify for us to listen to, and damn if it wasn't the best hour of quarantine that I might have spent.

I feel somewhat at peace of late due to meditation, I guess, and turning things over to a higher power. Just kidding on the higher power. Sort of. Things had gotten so bad that I sort of broke into my higher absurd dark-humored self. Or she came around again after taking a hiatus. Praise Jesus. Even today, for instance. I've been feeling covidy lately, so this afternoon I made an appointment and went for a test. I paid big bucks to stand under a tent with a guy in full PPE who handed me a swab and told me to first cough hard a few times into my mask and then wipe the swab on the inside of both cheeks and on both tonsils. You'll know you've gotten the tonsils when you gag, he said. I then dropped the swab into a test tube and went on my less than merry way. I'll find out by midnight tonight. I don't mean to be glib. It's hot as shit here and northern California is burning. There are people in Terrible America who believe the virus is a hoax, and there are people I love who still support Dear Leader. There are, quite obviously, two Americas and who knows what will happen? I'm struck by the ease with which I got a Covid test, by how much it cost and by how quick the results come in when you have the money to pay. This is not right. This is totally fucked up. But like I said, I'm feeling more at peace these days having surrendered in a small way to all the fuckery in my own world and the outer world. We can only live in the now, as they say.

We Can Do Hard Things, Friday 4/3/20

From off the wide world webs

I don't know about you, Reader, but I find myself cycling through a whole lot of emotions each day beginning at about 5 am and continuing throughout the day, often capped off with a kind of easy dissociation and ending when I go to sleep (always untroubled, this is a gift I know). I woke this morning in a financial panic with apocalyptic scenarios that would make envious any thriller screenwriter, and I realized only after breathing through all of it that the panic comes from privilege -- the privilege of having everything that I need right now. Plus, the sun came up. So there's the FEAR ZONE, THE LEARNING ZONE and THE GROWTH ZONE.

Do you see how much one can grow, even in the darkest hours before dawn?

Today is a beautiful one in southern California. I've taught my students and am now ready for what we used to call "Spring Break." I have no idea what I'll be "doing" next week but somewhere in my tiny little mother mind™ I might sit down and pull out the GDB and get writing.

Oliver told me that during a zoom conference with his boss at the U of A (he works in the bookstore), they learned that the university is operating soon at a massive deficit and that many, many people will be laid off, including faculty. Cue a FEAR response (anger at why would they say these things in a meeting?), but instead I'm going to LEARN, and I'm going to take Oliver along. I recognize that the university, like all businesses and people, is trying to do its best. I ask him whether this was rumor that the boss was spreading or whether there's validity to it. I acknowledge that this whole thing is scary as shit but we can't control this part of it. 

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It's super scary and unnerving, I share with Oliver, but right now, we're fine. We're making sandwiches, and I've got a job. You have an internship lined up for the summer that is still going to happen. We're all going to get through this but not unchanged.

Reader, tell me how you're experiencing fear, learning and growth.

We Can Do Hard Things, Friday 3/20/20

I guess I'll start dating these posts in the title, since I imagine there are going to be a whole lot more we can do hard things-themed posts. It's weird to be coming here again daily, reaching out, knowing you're out there you and you and you.

How's it going?

I finished up a week of virtual teaching -- 17 classes. I am so damn grateful for this job, for these students, for the routine, for the subject matter, and I'm winging my caregiving on the side. Sure, it's only day five and here in Los Angeles we're in a kind of lock-down but Sophie is ever my teacher.

That being said, after dinner I felt like I was going to implode so I went for a walk in the neighborhood, the air was clear and crisp, the clouds blue puffs the streets silent. I passed a solitary man on the sidewalk who stepped to his right and me to my right and thus we passed in a weird lock-step dance of avoided intimacy.

I'm obsessed with this article: Is This American Resilience? and would love to discuss with anyone. Thoughts?

What else is there to say? I feel so heavy, so filled with dread. Cleaning helps.

After My Sabbatical: Tiny Tidbits About My Last Job

I have not actually been on a sabbatical, although I wish that I had and I wish that I could return to somewhere, anywhere back to reading and writing and otherwise not taking part being part of this period in the world's general history, the triumph and toppling of materialism and stupidity the emperor with no clothes the professional sports world the cult of celebrity the impossibility of publishing the tyranny of the politically correct and most of all the rise of Bernie. I just do not feel the bern the burn the whatever it is you who do do. My younger sister worked as an intern for Bernie back in the last century or should I say millennium and every time I see the Bern or Bernie I think of what she heard every day for the duration of her internship and that was Jennifah! Get me a tuna on rye!

I was, am a Warren lover, and I don't understand why an energetic intelligent woman with many plans, a woman who's fought successfully against The Man the bankers the corrupt the plutocracy and has a history of sensitivity for the disabled for children for special education is losing has lost to two elderly men one who's nearly doddering who sat and railed against Anita Hill back in the day, his day when he should have done better and the other who screams more than talks who has visions and no realistic plans who had a heart attack quite recently and whose followers are legion but include easily IMHO as the kids say the same sort of dense folks who back the naked emperor in chief just from the other side of the proverbial coin. And if they're not those followers, the bros or whatever they're called, I suspect they're following him because it's cool to like someone so uncool.

I will very much support the Bern the Burn if he is the person who runs against the Piece of Shit.

I've thought about things to write in this space, ways to communicate and what to tell you, dear Reader and I come up short. I bought a green bra and panties the other day, the most lovely color green. I flew to Atlanta to visit my mother and my father, had a wonderful time hanging with them, realizing that I am so incredibly blessed to have parents who are truly parents. We don't see eye to eye on politics (they're best left unsaid) and their views are such that I've felt near despair over the last four years, especially, but somehow it didn't feel that way this visit and I'm not going to wonder why.

Buried deep within this post is a tidbit. A tiny tidbit. On one of my last days at the ultra-Orthodox Jewish girls' school where I worked (see previous post), there was some talk in the teachers' lounge about Trump, and Mitt Romney had just voted "Yes" to impeach the PieceofShitPresidentoftheDisunitedStates and I never, never, never talked about my politics in this place because there's no good in talking politics when Israel is part of the equation but I said I just didn't understand how anyone could support That Man and someone else said, "He loves Israel," and so I stood up and said, "I can't be involved in any conversation that supports That Man," and I walked out and into the office and sat down to do a little grading while I steamed. The thing is, Reader, at this school I was prevented from teaching anything that had anything that was suggestive of romance. I mean things like longing gazes in a Willa Cather's Song of the Lark. I mean suicide in Marilyn Robinson's transcendent Housekeeping. I mean the word hell in an article from The New York Times. I mean Nathaniel Hawthorne's rich allegorical short story Rappaccini's Daughter because it mentions The Garden of Evil. When I referenced the great Spanish architect Gaudi in a poem we were studying by a contemporary deaf poet named Raymond Antrobus and asked the students if they'd ever been to Barcelona and they said yes and I asked whether they'd seen the amazing cathedral and one girl said, What's a cathedral? and because I'd been teaching there for a year and a half, I knew there was a distinct possibility that a seventeen year old girl might not even know what a cathedral was, I told her. Then I was told We are not allowed to go into cathedrals, and I said, Oh. And this was later confirmed by one of the Powers That Be and still I said Oh when what I was thinking was that we are all screwed here in this world. Back to the office where I sat sweating and biting my sharp, sharp tongue that so desperately wanted, was trying with all its half-century honed might to scream:

You protect your daughters from reading Nathaniel Hawthorne and Willa Cather but support the Pussy-Grabber-In-Chief?

Reader, it's a good thing that I am no longer working at this school. I learned a lot there -- about intolerance, to tell you the truth, and about its masks. Given these girls' behavior in general -- which was, frankly, closer developmentally to those who've just entered adolescence than those leaving it for marriage and babies -- I can only surmise that their rituals, their blind belief system and oppressive rules and regulations regarding every single thing they wear, eat and do make them uniquely unable to live in the world, much less listen to their silly, old lefty progressive English teacher, Elizabeth Aquino.

Did I mention how stressful it was dealing with this school and these girls and the idea that there are legions of people out there preventing 17 and 18 year old females from reading Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own because it would just open the floodgates (one of the teachers actually said this to me) yet supporting a serial sexual assaulter and vile racist misogynist because he's been so good to Israel? Did I tell you about the Cup-o-Noodles girl last year? The sad thing is that I was so into my job last year.

Jennifah, get me a tuna on rye!



#VoteBlueNoMatterWho

Stay Tuned

I've quit my job at the Ultra-Orthodox Jewish girls' school. (Bless their hearts.)

I will be writing about my experiences there, and I will be wearing that exact ensemble you see above, freed at last from the "modest" clothing covering every inch of my offensive female skin.

Stay tuned.

Warning: Profanity Ahead, Plus Poetry

Pity the Nation (After Khalil Gibran)

Pity the nation whose people are sheep
And whose shepherds mislead them
Pity the nation whose leaders are liars
Whose sages are silenced
And whose bigots haunt the airwaves
Pity the nation that raises not its voice
Except to praise conquerors
And acclaim the bully as a hero
And aims to rule the world
By force and by torture
Pity the nation that knows
No other language but its own
And no other culture but its own
Pity the nation whose breath is money
And sleeps the sleep of the too well fed
Pity the nation oh pity the people
who allow their rights to erode
and their freedoms be washed away
My country, tears of thee
Sweet land of liberty!

Lawrence Ferlinghetti
2007


P.S. I listened to a group of teachers in the teachers' lounge at my school today make excuses for that POSPOTUS. I didn't know what to do so I left the room. What are we supposed to do? How are we supposed to live in love with these people?

P.P.S

kubeiko

n. a state of exhaustion inspired by an act of senseless violence, which forces you to revise your image of what can happen in this world—mending the fences of your expectations, weeding out invasive truths, cultivating the perennial good that’s buried under the surface—before propping yourself up in the middle of it like an old scarecrow, who’s bursting at the seams but powerless to do anything but stand there and watch.

via The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

What the Creature Read

I haven't really looked at myself in a long time, but I think this is what I look like to my students, especially today when I sort of lit into them about rudeness and respect and the difficulty of teaching when they're walking around making cup o'noodles and chatting to one another and blurting out questions completely unrelated to the subject I'm talking about. I'm not kidding about the cup o'noodles. I think they got the message, though, because they got really, really quiet and apologized and then sang me some kind of song which was kind of embarrassing, but, damn, they're sweet and I just love my new job. I had them do this presentation in small groups about What the Creature Read, and each presentation was so original and interesting and funny and intelligent, that all my frustration melted away. If you're interested, we are finishing up a unit on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and since the theme I chose to dwell upon was empathy in the novel, and I found a really good curriculum on the world wide webs, the project was for each group to review a famous novel or work of literature that the Creature read when he found a bunch of books in a bag outside the home where he was staying. They had to answer a series of questions about why Shelley had chosen for the Creature to read those books and think critically about all of it. (Lord the whole phrase critical thinking!) The books Mary Shelley had him read included Milton's Paradise Lost, Goethe's Young Werther and Plutarch's Lives, and in lieu of my students reading all of those, I printed out some summaries and they went from there. If you're interested, The Creature basically learned from these books how to feel and how to live, so my students worked in groups and placed themselves into the Creature's shoes. They were incredibly creative, down to re-titling the books themselves, which was part of the assignment. For Paradise Lost, they changed it to Garden Gone Wrong. The Sorrows of Young Werther became The Book of Sad Love. One group did a silly play that was quite funny and each group made astounding drawings.

I hope it's okay that I put this up on the old blog. I am filled with delight over these girls when I'm not wildly distracted by their chattiness and unruliness and devotion to cup o'noodles. I'm looking for book selections for the 3rd term for the 12th grade -- thinking of Virginia Woolf perhaps, but which one? For the 11th grade, I'm thinking of Song of the Lark by Willa Cather. It's so profoundly American and has lots of music in it to break up the dryness. What do you think? Any ideas? Remember that I have massive restrictions on what I can teach -- no sex or romance or extreme violence or teenage pregnancy or suicide or mutilation or abuse or or or or or or.


The Bird-Catcher

When fighting time is on, I go
With clap-net and decoy
A-fowling after goldfinches
And other birds of joy;

I lurk among the thickets of
The Heart where they are bred,
And catch the twittering beauties as
They fly into my Head

Ralph Hodgson, b. 1879, Northumberland 







Thank you, dear Andrea, for sending me this poem.

Head Swimming with Wants

We're getting rain here in Los Angeles -- buckets and buckets of rain -- and the most beautiful winter sunsets. That picture above was taken on Saturday in Santa Monica. Carl and I were on the beach, and that's facing east, away from the ocean.

Turn around.

Today marked the first day of the second week of my new job teaching English to a group of eleventh and twelfth grade girls. I have three classes, two groups of eleventh graders and one group of twelfth. Each class is unique and one is particularly challenging. Anger and resistance make the air crackle in that room. Heads swim with wants. Take notes, I think. Keep taking notes. I have a mind and a memory like a steel trap, and these girls will join all the other hostages that wander the labyrinthine paths.

I get this newsletter every day from The New York Times newspaper cooking section. It's called What to Cook Right Now. I love it so much -- the recipes, the commentary, the links. Today I learned that it's the writer John Dos Passos' birthday (1896). I read nearly everything he wrote back in the last century, in my early twenties. I probably read him lying on a bed somewhere, maybe in the apartment where I lived with my first love, out in the country in Chapel Hill, a mattress on the floor at the top of the stairs, sandwiched between two walls and a window at the foot, a bookcase stuffed with used paperbacks. I might have been chewing on some Twizzlers when I read Dos Passos, red plastic mingling with brown must. Dos Passos was a hostage, though, wandering around my mind, lost down some dark corridor, until I read about him today.

Teaching these girls, doing the research for lesson plans, revisiting stories and poetry -- it's all packed in there, in my mind, and it seems that there's no end to what one can stuff into it. So, yeah. Take notes, I think. Keep taking notes.

Here's a passage from The 42nd Parallel that Sam Sifton, the guy from the NY Times newsletter thinks describes the writer's life. I agree.


The young man walks by himself, fast but not fast enough, far but not far enough (faces slide out of sight, talk trails into tattered scraps, footsteps tap fainter in alleys); he must catch the last subway, the streetcar, the bus, run up the gangplanks of all the steamboats, register at all the hotels, work in the cities, answer the want ads, learn the trades, take up the jobs, live in all the boarding houses, sleep in all the beds. One bed is not enough, one job is not enough, one life is not enough. At night, head swimming with wants, he walks by himself alone.

Recalcitrance

Blackboard by Winslow Homer, 1877

I've completed my first week of teaching three English classes of eleventh and twelfth grade young women. Here are some observations and notes:

• a bit of Emily Dickinson -- hope and the thing with feathers -- inspired a group of let's say recalcitrant girls to write their own three stanza poems using extended metaphor and dang if they didn't do a beautiful job

• have argued over whether or not to read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (only the 12th grade girls are reading it, now). It's old. It's hard. Cry me a river.

•  read aloud Christina Rossetti's The Goblin's Market and are now doing a fine analysis of it (thank you, LP, for turning me on to this strange and wonderful poem). I felt a tad uncomfortable reading the provocative parts of the poem, given the sensual imagery of juices running out of mouths, etc., but this poem! the language!

• have begun reading Hawthorne's Rappaccini's Daughter. Remember that? I loved Hawthorne stories as a young reader and hope to pass along the weirdness (not of me but of him) to these students. 

• have worn black tights three times this week which is more times than in the previous twenty years. This is not hyperbole

• who knew I had so little modest clothing? I've had to purchase some things that make me feel strangely invisible which provokes thought -- interesting thoughts --we think the ways in which we adorn ourselves speak to identity but maybe they don't because I am still me however much I look like an Italian widow 

• (the question of being told what to wear and what constitutes modesty and the concomitant questions of male authority and hierarchy and what it means to be reverent, etc.) 

I am both exhausted and exhilarated, my voice hoarse at the end of the teaching period, warranting a Rules and Expectations hand-out that includes some communication pointers and a stern demand for respect for me and for one another which translates into Refrain from interrupting and talking over one another and me. 

Listen


Listen


Listen

Back to School

I've got so many books that I've started wearing them on my back. Marie Kondo, mondo and all that jazz. Are ya'll watching that show on Netflix? I plan on checking it out as I've resisted that whole cultural phenomenon that appears to cater primarily to the privileged with me, privileged but rather content in the organized clutter that I call home.  Right now I'm trying to get into Circe, a book that was recommended by a slew of people whose opinions I admire and trust, but it's sort of mythological and sort of fantasy and -- well -- I just can't get into it. I'm at the age where I don't continue reading books that haven't grabbed me by, say, page 50. Bye, bye Circe. Hello Elaine Pagel's Why Religion. I've read Pagel's writing, and it's difficult and fascinating and right up my alley. I guess some of you would argue that religion is fantasy and myth, so then given my aversion to both genres, why would I read it? I don't know what to tell you, other than at one point I looked into getting a Master's degree in Religious Studies/Comparative Religion.

In any case, I STARTED MY NEW JOB TODAY. Yes, Sirree Bob, as they say. I've got this new job teaching English to 11th and 12th grade girls in a very, very strict religious school. It's not a Catholic school by the way, so I'm not dressed as a Flying Nun, but I'm dressed in a way that is not customary for me, and while it's not uncomfortable, I do feel a bit like an embedded journalist in a country far, far away. Taking notes, with deep respect and curiosity and a tiny bit of ambivalence about the culture in which I am thrust, black clad and modest.

I love Los Angeles as it's a place where all these different cultures collide -- under the sun, of course, with a new governor and a whole lot of lefties and a smattering of conservatives (just enough to add some "diversity" but not enough to encroach upon our liberal ways). And what the hey is going on with the POSPOTUS and the government shutdown? I'm sorry if you're a furloughed worker and hope that this is all resolved, and we can quit thinking about walls and spikes and concrete and hordes of terrorists rabidly climbing over and into our lives.

The girls were wonderful today -- bright and sweet and outspoken and even a little outrageous. I had some exchanges, stared into some very warm brown eyes and knew immediately whom I was going to love because love is a serious word (she told me) even as I'll be driven crazy.

It's all good.

Tell me what you're reading. Tell me what you'd like to read if you were an 11th or 12th grade girl and have some strict reading guidelines (no sex, no violence, no molestation, etc.). I'm making up a list of book suggestions and need your help.

Working Stiff

Street graffiti, Los Angeles, 2019

I finally got a job that I'm excited about, and it begins next week. I've been applying for various positions from a site called Indeed for the last year, and I was beginning to believe that it might be a front for some kind of data gathering Russian bot/Facebook thingamajig because literally nothing came out of it. I'm perfectly aware that I have my limitations at the age of 55, and I didn't bother applying to the kind of grunt work that offered a salary that would quickly be swallowed up by Saint Mirtha, but damn, it was demoralizing and all death of a salesman around here until Christmas week when I was hired to teach English literature and writing part time in a small private school for girls. The school is very small and very religious, with strict dress codes for both the students and the teachers. That's all I'll say about that. I am very excited and a tiny bit nervous but extremely grateful to have found something that perfectly fits the erratic schedule and overwhelming duties of my other job as CEO of Sophie, Inc. I will be jumping right in on Monday with the girls already reading Frankenstein. 

I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other. 

from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein








The universe is abundant.