Affirmation Bear Gets Silly and Other News

It's been just over two months since my mother passed, and it seems my family has stacked up a neat little pile of changes in reaction to that. Some of these are subtle, like a part-time student deciding to go full-time starting January. And some are not so subtle, like major shifts in philosophy of life. It's a little dizzying, really. But, when a matriarch dies, it seems the whole family are thrown into a bit of an identity crisis. Each one is forced by the event to ask "Who am I and what do I really want from my life?"




[The following has been edited to remove the insinuation that I stare at the navy, which is patently false!]

Despite my disastrous first foray into the habits of the hopelessly bourgeois navel-gazer, I have decided to try therapy again. I have specified that this therapy is to navigate the grief process, with the hope that we'll just leave all my fun quirks alone and deal with the huge hole that my mother's death just blew into my life. This news has been met with:
- surprise by a few who thought that my freak-out at having been instructed to read Eckhart Tolle while possessing a fully functional prefrontal cortex was the end of all psychological self-improvement effort on my part,
- confusion by some of my acquiantance who also grew up ethnically German and Irish and socially working class and who consider that the punishment at the deepist pits of hell would be comprised in large part of talking about one's feelings in front of people,
- and great relief by a few of my more pansy-assed delicate and refined cohort.

Now, while I am a little irritated to please the Northern Californians, who seriously need to toughen the hell up, I am willing to make that sacrifice if it means I can get through these next few months without requiring physical or chemical restraints. Also, since the children at the school I work at have seen not one but two of the staff crack up and be driven off to the hospital this year, I decided that it is part of my responsibility as an adult to keep my any crack-ups I might have lined up at bay at least until summer break. The kids are starting to think that they can break adults entirely by collectively refusing to do homework, chew with their mouths closed, or sit still. While that is a fair assessment of the situation, it isn't good to let on and ruin all the mystical adult gravitas.

And so off to therapy I went. From the first day, I dubbed my therapist "Affirmation Bear" for reasons which should be somewhat obvious. And we chugged along happily, if more weepily than is my custom, for a few weeks. Then Affirmation Bear asked a question that struck fear into the heart of the delicate and refined: "Don't you ever get tired of being nice to people all the time?" Hilarious! As was her advice that followed: "Be more open about your feelings with people."

That is as beautifully ironic a piece of advice as the time I went to the MD for a physical, fully expected to be bitched out about gaining weight and cholesterol and told never to eat anything good again, but was instead informed that I am anemic and must take iron pills and consider reintroducing red meat to my diet.

I mean, really! I have been known to walk into a room, raise my fists into the air and declare my(sometimes violent) feelings to the assembled company. Sort of a verbal terror-alert system. Today is bewilderment, it is safe to continue as planned. Thursday was anger; commiserate or avoid. As with the anemia-required burgers, I joyfully went about my day having emotions left-right-and center because, hell, I was acting on doctor's orders. It's not my fault that my doctors tell me to eat burgers and be a bitchy pain in the ass, and yours are all "have some tofu and yoga and be kind." Want my doctors' numbers?

Still, last week, Affirmation Bear went too far. She asked, "Why do you feel like you have to be Suzie Sunshine all the time?" And, you know what? There is no way she got Suzie Sunshine out of anything I told her or anything in my demeanor. So, perhaps AB is asking stupid questions just to watch the faces I make while I try to figure out where she got the ridiculous thing she just said to me. Either that or she's phoning it in.





My severely commitment-phobic sister, and her more severely commitment-phobic paramour of several decades got married in a beautiful if quickly assembled ceremony recently! One of my sister's bffs burst into tears during the ceremony, but the rest of us were too stunned to have emotional reactions like that.




Stay-at-home mom sister has started working again! She has always been an out-of-home worker in her heart, really, but stayed at home for the kids and because her husband had an image of a family in which mom was home making pie while the kids were at school and dad was at work. I blame 50's television. But now that my nephew is in college and my niece's illness has been in remission for quite some time, sister is free to do something that is hers alone. And that's wonderful!



Niece 3.0/earliest replicator of her generation is on this coast visiting with first great-niece whom I haven't seen in a dog's age and first great-nephew whom I haven't met. I look forward to meeting the littlest sprouts on the family tree when I go home for Christmas.

Requiescat In Pace

Heomodor passed last Saturday, October 3rd, at 4:40 am. Just to be ornery, she died of a Pulmonary Embollism rather than the illness she has been fighting for the past few months. She is now buried next to my brother, as she wished.

On Being a Black Hole of Emotional Need

The best news I have to share with friends these days is this: my fear that enrolling myself in educational programs was somehow causing my loved ones to develop life-threatening or life-ending illnesses is now demonstrably untrue. For the first time, a loved one has been diagnosed with one of the "oh shit" illnesses while I am not anyone's student.

So, there's that.

I tend to hole up somewhere when I am in this sort of emotional state, and wait for six months or so until I can call people and chat about my life without getting sloppy about it. It seems tacky to emote all over people who just want to be happy and tell you about how their 2 year-old draws perfect replicas of Monet's greatest hits. But that wouldn't really be fair this time, because the person who is now mortally ill is Heomodor, and, truth be told, EVERYONE likes her. My friends like her more than they like me. By a lot. My ex-friends lament the loss of my mom in their lives. They do not miss me.

I'm a grouch. I scare people. I stand outside libraries in my leather jacket and discuss battle poetry. I ask uncomfortable questions. Since working as a CNA for years, I have very little sympathy for people with bruises and papercuts. Hard to get worked up about a papercut when you've seen a gangrenous leg almost fall off a guy. Since studying medieval literature, I have very little decorum left. Things that other people think is the most filthy thing imaginable I would say in church, because I got it from 12th century nuns anyway. I have been called tough countless times, and people were astounded and amused when I attempted to object.

My mom is not like me. She was raised to be ladylike, to be stoic when necessary, to be taken care of when possible, to listen. Strangers tell her their life stories because they feel like she will understand. People confess crimes to her, because they "know" she won't judge them harshly. Repairmen charge her less than they charge others, because she's so gentle a soul they can't take advantage of her. Once, when I was in undergrad and my income did not allow us to live in a great neighborhood (OK, but not great), I was reprimanded by a plumber for making my mother live in a working class town, when she clearly belonged "by the water." This was code for on the North Shore of Long Island, where the wealthy to obscenely wealthy live. Richard Nixon once pronounced my mom adorable and gave her a little booklet full of newly minted five dollar bills as a souvenir of meeting him. Luciano Pavarotti once hugged her when she "gently corrected" his phrasing. I'm not kidding.

Due to a fear of being alone, and some financial and health issues, gentle Heomodor has followed surly old me around for quite some time now, from undergrad to grad school cities, and now resides with me several states away from home in Virginia. So, I am the party responsible for disseminating some very bad news to lots of people with whom I don't always communicate as much as I should. Again, I hole up when stressed, and being responsible for my mom has often stressed me out. So, I have to call these folks and say "Mom is dying." And I really, really want to have a nervous breakdown, and get very uncharacteristically sloppy about it all. But I can't really request that level of support from people with whom I have not put in my time in some time. And they will be suffering themselves. Plus, I am so very bad at being emotional. I do it all wrong and upset people.

I really, really hate being weak and needy.

Teaching to the Middle

I’ve heard teaching to the middle shouted as a condemnation of teaching as a profession by frustrated parents, and by those who have never been responsible for the intellectual development of any creature more complicated than a schnauzer. I’ve also heard it whispered in resignation by teachers who have recently let their dreams of what classrooms with them at the helm would be like. As a student teacher, during my mostly off-campus senior victory lap at alma mater, I even disdainfully dripped that very phrase all over my ‘reflective journal’ as the type of teaching I despised and would never allow myself to practice.

I had no teaching practice, and little theoretical understanding, but I knew enough to know that teaching to the middle was reviled as a failure of worse than epic proportions.
I mean, you can kind of admire a teacher who loses it and slaps an abusive parent in front of a roomful of gaping students, or informs a particularly recalcitrant bully that the marines sure do help a person learn how to kill a man quickly, and without leaving pesky telltale marks. We like failures like those; they have pizzazz. But this quiet, banal failure of teaching to the middle combines the double crime of being both bad and boring. This is almost as heinous an offense as the ridiculous amount of alliteration in that last sentence.

In all my educator classes, I had forgotten to apply some basic skills that being an English major taught me. I never asked the begged questions: why NOT teach to the middle? What does teaching to the middle entail that makes it such a shameful practice? Where should we aim our teaching? Hell, I had forgotten even to define my terms. I, like many with whom I discussed teaching, had in my head a jumble of meanings that were all bad, but not specific. (Think “family values” in reverse.) Teaching to the middle conjures up images of struggling children in the D and E/F range being permitted to struggle on until their spirits break and they get unsightly tattoos and break into their parents’ liquor cabinets. A heartbreaking image to me, and one which has had much play in government-level conversations about ‘what’s wrong with the schools,’ but one which is rarely cited as a primary concern in the general discussions of issues in education in which I have participated. It is the other image I hear about most often, the image of the junior geniuses withering in the corner, desperately wishing for something meaningful to do with all their booored synapses, until their spirits break and they get ironic tattoos and break into their parents’ medicine cabinets.

Imagine my surprise three years in to teaching at the secondary school level (1 year between BA and MA, and two more since MA), in discovering that I really enjoy that very sort of teaching of which I once declared myself an avowed enemy. I teach directly to children “in the middle,” and I do so unapologetically. I sometimes even puff up my chest with pride about it, because I see myself doing some good for some kids who really need some attention. Since NCLB, so much focus is placed on the ‘needs’ and ‘gifts’ of students, and in making education as effective and meaningful for the exceptional students, that the students in the middle are often overlooked.

My students are almost every definition of “middle” that one can conjure up. I teach at a middle school, working with children who are neither children nor adolescent with any consistency, preferring perhaps to vacillate between the two until they find their own comfort zone. In most students, this occurs during the two weeks just prior to the ceremony in which we send them to high school.

My children have also been identified as “average achievers with promise,” and are grouped together in my classes in an effort to fulfill that promise. (Yes, there is still homogeneous grouping. There are just different weasel ways to do it.) Depending on which group of children, “promise” could mean “kids who are technically at academic risk, but close to the ‘not at risk’ line,” or “kids who are super-smart but have parents who don’t or can’t teach them the middle class skills that make the school setting easier to navigate,” or “kids who are achieving at about the expected level, but have real gumption and we think you can do something with them.” I really enjoy these students. Unfortunately, my group also occasionally includes “kids who are super-smart but lazy as all get out and have inherited ridiculous entitlement issues from their equally obnoxious parents.” (Meh, no job is perfect.)

Often my children are in the middle socioeconomically, as well. They are first generation Americans working on learning English so they can teach it to their parents. They are first generation suburbanites, displaced from their DC homes by gentrification, or displaced from their farming communities by exurban sprawl. They are first generation middle class who have watched as their parents worked their way up the chain in the armed services or at their corporate jobs, and are now expected to do what their parents never did: get a college education. Some of them are first generation upper-middle class, and look on in confusion as their parents and I talk about budgeting our babysitting/lawn care money to pay for school clothes, and maybe even the movies, too. Many of them want very badly to be “tough outta soufEAST,” but they aren’t even fooling me, and I grew up in a town specifically created as a safe little bubble in which to raise naïve children.

They are also the children who tend to get lost, forgotten about in all the initiatives to make school a fairer place for the exceptional. Principals, in the pressure to meet shifting data requirements or lose funding, lose staff and possibly get fired, learn quickly. One of the things they learn is that “achievers” (who can easily be made to achieve more) shift the data as much or more than an average kid who “gets it.” So, the advanced children can carry you if you let them. Special needs children who gain proficiency help you meet data requirements in two ways: you need them to “get it” to make AYP, and they tend to bring your average up quite a bit, too!

And, you know what? The exceptional absolutely need to have their needs met by public education. But we have become so enamored of the exceptional that we forget that most of our children are in some way or another average. Not mediocre, not sub-par, not unexceptional: average. And those children might be able to be coaxed into exceptional, or they may stay average, but they need to be educated fairly and well. The way that NCLB is currently structured, that’s not exactly happening. At least it isn’t happening everywhere. The punitive side of NCLB doesn’t allow the freedom to make the kinds of choices that would make education fair for the unexceptional in communities like the one I teach in. Right now, the schools are just trying to make the numbers work well enough to keep the feds off their backs, and that doesn’t serve our kids.

Stupid Boys and their Stupid Stupidity

If just one more of those furry bastards says this to me

Heo, I wish I could find a woman just like you: smart, funny, great to hang around with, except (list whatever physical changes said furry person thinks would make me hotter, or a better accessory.)

I shall not be responsible for my actions.



That is all.

Burgerification Continues Apace

I have evidence.

1) My kitten has health insurance. I didn't have health insurance until I was twenty. I didn't have good health insurance until last year.

2) I take Latin and advanced German classes for giggles. This knowledge will not help me financially. Even if I manage to pass the near-fluency German test, um, I think the Germans have all the Anglo-Saxonists they need. They certainly have all the English teachers they need.

3) As of this afternoon, I have been to a therapist. A therapist who advised me to: practice mindful breathing, keep a 'feelings journal,' and read Eckhart Tolle. I just paid a guy $150 to listen to me explain my childhood and give me advice I could have gotten at home watching a single Oprah show. And apparently, I have to be Buddhist.

4) I actually said, without irony, just the other day: "I wish I had time to get a facial."

2009: The Summer of the Word Nerd, and related topics

A local institute of higher learning has an embarrassment of riches offered in the way of language courses this summer. This is convenient, because I have an urgent desire to apply myself to the acquisition of more language skills. It is double convenient that the school in question does not have the deliberately gatekeeping schedule that so many schools pretend happens by accident.*
So, though the intensive Latin course starts early enough to get the students fresh from a short family break after final papers, they are late enough at night to make it possible for people to come home from work, throw a sandwich at their children, and spend the remainder of the night at Latin class. Hooray!

I really need the structure of a class for a language, I find. I have all the resources for Latin, but I keep having to start over because it's very easy to put the "my hobby" thing down when the teacher stuff needs doing. And the teacher stuff always needs doing. I hope that with an instructor holding my feet to the fire, I'll prioritize the Latin a little higher up on the scale.

One thing. Teacherling at work heard "summer of the word nerd" and wanted in. He's a smart kid. So smart I almost forget he's barely in big boy pants sometimes. He's also extremely competitive in the "I will twist this issue every possible way until you tell me I win" way that young men often are. I don't tend to tell people they win if they are arguing disingenuously, because I am like that. When I was his age, I would have probably told him he was right to shut him up, but I am currently old and mean. Hilarity is almost guaranteed to ensue.

Local church has a Latin Mass which it has had forever, which makes the rector a heretic. Latin practice for me, a chance to live a memory for Mama. Good stuff all around. Except, I have read the rector's website and, um, he's the suckiest heretic that ever was heretical. I mean, generally I enjoy all things transgressive, but this dude totally ruins it. His heresy is of the "We demand that the authority beats us more often and more vigorously" kind that might make for an interesting weekend if you're into that sort of thing**, but is just awful in a person setting himself up as a sort of authority. So, I'm not sure I want to understand his Masses, because ew.

I am also annoyed with myself and a few of my peers. I'm exhausted by all the effort involved in examining my privileges only to turn around and find some more. I'm really tired of people who think it's OK to say patently un-OK things to me because I'll take the time to explain why they aren't OK instead of ripping their heads off. Am I doing anyone a favor by not ripping heads off? Do I even have the right to ask that question considering all the boneheaded things I do on a regular basis? I'm tired of the nagging assertion that everything I say today will horrify me six months from now, and that the best I can hope for is that I am not being terribly naive all the time. Why is being just a reasonably self-aware and occasionally kind person such a project?

"What? You have to work a day job? Well, I'm sorry, but we just can't offer a graduate class in anything interesting to someone who is unable or unwilling to devote their whole selves to our course. I mean, if your life demands that you support yourself and others rather than depending on others to support you so that you can take a ridiculously underpaid, and extended "internship" at our institution, thereby allowing us to refrain from hiring people just like you hope one day to be, or at least allowing us to refuse to offer them work at a living wage, causing you to know fully goddamn well that you will be accruing massive debt and suffering opportunity cost in the hundreds of thousands of dollars for a life of almost guaranteed penury, making this not only the most selfish thing you could choose in that matricide-by-failure way, but also the most foolish thing you could possibly choose in the bag-lady by severely limited earning potential plus no kids kind of way, then how can you possibly study hard enough to learn well enough that you can one day write a paper about the damaging effects of classism?" ***

**I am so not into that sort of thing.

***Yeah, I know. There's always plenty of irony to go around.