In the beginning was the word—The dangers of grading...in the hot tub

I love to read. But even better, I love to read in the bathtub. There is something…call it amniotic…about soaking in warm water absorbing words. Now I just can’t imagine I am alone in this pursuit. I can’t help but feel that there are other literature lovers who, like me, love to turn the faucet on as hot as human physiology will permit— just short of shutting down from shock or coma—and then soak like human stew until the water cools to gazpacho.

But I am queen of tub reading. I have been since before my Judy Blume years, even before Beverly Cleary and Beezus and Ramona. Why, I have a wavy copy of Stuart Little that proudly shares a box in the garage with a sister paperback of Wuthering Heights that both look like they came through the CSU Library Spring Creek flood catastrophe.

I have read in the tub with Phineas when he jumped with Gene from the tree and I have wept over Little Ann and Big Dan with tears that were warmer than my bath water. It is a private affair—dim lighted and reclusive, and I have found I can get sometimes nearly three hours out of a good full tub of steaming hot water—enough to induce a complete mindless euphoria I like to call fictionoblivia.

But because of this word-n-water habit, good or bad, I have developed another habit—a bad one. GRADING in the bathtub. And it is this bad habit, I’m pretty sure, that led my husband to finally install a hot tub in our back yard. NO students in the world wants to know their teacher read their their essay on Raisin in the Sun while Lazin’ in the Tub. (I could go on with Grapes of Bath and more, but I’ll spare you).

So now the hot tub solves some issues. First of all…it solves that dilemma of reading essays in my bathroom, and the even better…the water NEVER goes cold.

But there is, as I have indicated earlier, one horrible side effect of grading term papers in the hot tub…a little something I like to call it the “distressed essay” look. This is the term paper that takes on the fluted paper muffin-cup-liner look—like the wavy edges of a 1950’s prom dress. I mean, no matter how hard you work to hold them up out of the water, one or two always seem to suffer the side effects of excess humidity. And short of ironing every paper before I return it, I have handed back one or two…or three…or six…papers with inky comments that bleed a little on the page or crinkle a little louder than the others when they’re handed back.

But last week beats all—BEATS ALL.

Last Saturday as I set up my stool and briefcase (filled with 120 American Lit. and AP Comp. research essays) beside the hot tub at 6:30 a.m., I did not foresee the future quite as clearly as I now wish I would have. I flipped back the cover, breathed in the steam, set down my portable mug o’ coffee and slipped carefully into the soup. It never occurred to me that my man had generously—per my directions—refilled the tub while he was hosing off the back porch the previous weekend, and that the level of the water had risen considerably.

I know what you’re thinking. But it’s not true. I DIDN’T overflow the tub. No, I leaned back and sipped my java, listening for the meadowlarks to wake up,  watching the sparrows dip and chirp above the pond, following the clouds as they meandered across the sky.

And then a voice in swim trunks came through the steam…”Mind if I join you?”

Yes, my best friend and husband had risen to soak in the hot tub with me, in quiet reverence of the morning and my silent quest to grade. And without another word, he sent a wave of water--just shy of the Tsunami that wiped out the coast of Japan the previous week—over the side of the hot tub right into my briefcase.

One-hundred and twenty papers…and average of seven pages …approximately 400 words per double-spaced page…I think it works out—if my math is close, which is always a variable in the equation—to approximately 335,000 words…UNDER……..WATER.

I spent the morning arranging them, and re-arranging them before the fireplace, praying for them to stop curling like milk in lemon juice and that the words would remain legible enough to read. And just as I reached the point of ultimate despair………..and for those of you who teach, you know what I mean………….the point where you realize you will have to admit to your students just how really stupid you really are……………..I heard the voice of Norman Mclean.

You know it. It’s from a River Runs Through it. And for those of you who haven’t read it, perhaps you’ve seen it, as narrated by Robert Redford (who has the voice of an archangel, I’m pretty sure). It’s the voice of my father, the fisherman, and his father and grandfather who fished before him. It’s the voice that pulls me home to my White River every summer, and the voice that makes me take my shoes and socks off by a stream. It’s the voice hovering over the face of the waters from the beginning of time. It’s the voice from the womb that draws me to water and words.

No wonder I grade papers in the hot tub. No wonder I read in the bath. It’s what I was created to do. Words and water simply go together. They just WERE…from the beginning. Mclean said it like poetry. It’s water and the words.

(Link) View more Robert Redford Sound Clips

"Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters."

P.S. Myriah, I’m so deeply sorry about your essay. I apologize from the bottom of my toppled pedestal. I’m just SO not perfect. 

My First Pat-down: Where's the teacher when you need her?

This...this...thing I remember.

I just flew in from our nation’s capital. You know, the place with the Pentagon and foreign embassies galore, and I have to say…the fellas in D.C. are serious about their airport security—very serious. Like serious, uniformed, guards at every check point barking, “Have your boarding pass in hand!” And TSA people shining ultraviolet flashlights into your luggage muttering, “It’s not your name I’m looking at.” Creepy, really.

So by the time I made it to the metal-detection area, I was completely taken aback, for it as it turns out this little thing called a “full body scan” is for reals. Maybe you knew that, but I didn’t. Truth be told, I’ve flown from a very large, very central US Aiport (whose initials start with DIA) to another very moderate mid-western Airport (whose name always followed, as I recall from childhood, Mutal of…) several times in the last couple of years and I’ve never seen these controversial virtual nudity machines. 

I just thought it was a bunch of hype—rumors about naked bodies through clothes—the kind of stuff that fourth grade boys used to play with their drug store “x-ray glasses.” They’d say,  “I can tell you have on white underwear,” which really required nothing short of rocket science seeing as how back in 1974 I think eight out of every eight fourth-grade girls wore white underwear. Still, it was scary. We girls knew this was some nasty stuff these boys were up to, and we usually told a teacher who confiscated the specs and told us there was no such thing as x-ray vision.

But no…turns out Mrs. O’Quinn, who was stuck on playground duty that week, was wrong. Now, thanks to technological advancement of the best kind, every fourth grade boy can get on his knees tonight and thank God because science has just made dreams come true for pre-pubescent boys. X-ray vision does exist. It’s alive and well in Dulles International Airport.

Now, I’ve stayed out of the great debates about civil rights and invasion of privacy that was THE hot topic back in November when these machines first surfaced. I guess I simply didn’t believe such a thing was possible, and even more naively I believed that if such technology did exist no self-respecting government, let alone a democracy, would allow it to be publicly installed. 

I mean, I believe in terrorists. I’m still as traumatized as any other American over nine-eleven. I believe, just as much as Virgil and Wyatt Earp ever did, that weapons shouldn’t be allowed in public where nine-year-old little girls go to shopping malls—and that no magazines other than the latest Marie Claire should be allowed onto campus in some college student’s backpack . 

And please don’t think for one minute I’m one of those guns don’t kill people people—I’ve been shooting .22’s and .32’s and 12-guages since before I was in training bras, and I KNOW guns can kill people. I appreciate a well-placed metal detector as much as any other patriot who stands and sings along with Lee Greenwood that “I’m proud to be an American” at the firework finale on the Fourth-of-July.

But the problem is that the SECOND line of that song goes “…where at least I know I’m free.” And today I’m hacked off because as big a platitude and as sappy as that song has become, I’m here to tell you that it simply is not true.

Yeah, I was free. Free to walk through a machine that scans my nude body onto a screen in an unseen observation room, or free to take a pat down. Admittedly you can’t expect too much from other world citizens—of which there are plenty at Dulles Airport—who have neither been educated in nor given  basic principle freedoms, who have never given lip service to human rights and who remain unaware of something called Civil Liberties. But were not some of us in line at x-ray this morning American citizens? Wasn’t there one other passenger flying with my this morning who has been raised in a country in which one has the right to determine and practice his or her own religion, the right to remain silent, the right to bear arms, the right to freedom of speech, of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances?

Well buddy...I'm about to ask for a REDRESS about UNDRESS. Today, as I stood lining up two...three...four...plastic bins to send down the rubber conveyor belt filled with all my personal belongings, I began to wonder what would happened if I forgot to stop:

What if— after pulling off my boots, my necklace, my bracelets, my belt, my coat and my sweater—I simply took three more steps and removed my dress, underpants and bra. It’s only another three steps—really. And then…let us not bandy words any longer… we could call it what it is—A STRIP SEARCH: a full-out, full-body, naked display of every man, woman and child that walks through security.

And as if this alone weren't enough to make a body gasp, could I just speak about the “posture” or position one must assume in order to have one’s naked image displayed for TSA to accurately assess on their flat-panel televisions—something akin to a pose most often struck for a:

A:  Photo shoot in a porn magazine

B:  Breast exam at the gynecologist’s office

C:  Death March for prisoners of war. 

Listen, Mr. TSA officer…Don’t  you stand with your arms crossed staring straight ahead like a junior Nazi officer at the door to Auschwitz barking out, “Remove your laptops! Remove your liquid items in plastic bags! Remove all shoes, belts, jewelry or other metallic devices…” and pretend that a VIRTUAL strip search is a legitimized technological option to an ACTUAL strip search—because you are wrong. The first time somebody asks one of my children to pose for the nudy-cam, I’m going to file a law suit. Last time I checked that was called child pornography—was it not?

How desensitized have we become? Has technology so overtaken our senses, so  allowed us to remove ourselves emotionally from a factual process that we no longer bat an eye at what is a legalized, systematic display of a person’s unclothed body and a grossly inappropriate invasion of privacy.

But nobody batted an eye.

I watched people squirm, laugh, and joke and then spread their legs and put their hands behind their heads like some sort of war criminal stripped naked in front of a firing squad and undergo this process simply because there was no other practical choice. There was nobody there to offer an alternative, nobody to give them an option. They were run through like cattle at a meat packing plant. And suddenly, in my eyes, it felt like a sick Twilight Zone reenactment of  the processing house at Treblinka or Auschwitz.

And nobody batted an eye.

In fact, check out the TSA page on body image scanners. No surprise, nearly 80% of flyers said they would be willing to undergo the full-body scan. But the fact is: there is no “willing” about it. It’s “Either line up for the virtual strip search or get a pat down.” There’s NOT a choice. Ask me. And the looks the guards and passengers give you as you dare to grind to a stop the giant cattle chute of technology is nearly enough to make you say, “Skip it, skip it…just joking, boys.” Except for me it wasn't.

Listen Madam Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano:

You want to see me nude? Then have the guts to ask to look at my bare body in the flesh. You want to see my naked body to see if I’m smuggling drugs or weapons? Then snap out of your euphemized, euthanized, desensitized un-world and ask me to strip.

I truly wonder…if my fellow citizens would have been asked to strip— to actually, not virtually, “remove all items of clothing” before entering the terminal area—I wonder if they would have risen up in protest. Or would they simply have endured one more stripping (no pun intended) of their individual rights in order to make a plane.

Am I alone with George Orwell and Margaret Atwood who force us to ask “HOW FAR, people?” How much personal integrity and privacy are we willing to surrender in the name of technology and worse yet in the name of terrorism? When are we going to realize that 97 percent of the nation is being asked to undergo a strip search to prevent 3 percent of the terrorists from sneaking a bomb on board.

Is there not something better? Somebody please tell me before I despair of purple mountains majesties,  sweet land of liberties, and home of the braves! Where are you Lee Greenwood, now?

How long is it before the fourth-grade boy on your daughter’s play ground isn’t fooling around any more? How long is it until you walk down the street and know that any pair of dime-store glasses is now the “real deal.” Will it be illegal to look through a person’s clothing at their naked body? Can perpetrators get actual (here’s an oxymoron) real-time virtual thrills from a neighborhood park bench?

C’mon, I’m not joking. Seriously,  just flip through a Sky Mall magazine and look at the micro video recorder glasses and bugging devices that are available now to the general public. Stuff that America gasped in shock over when Richard Nixon tried them out on George McGovern. Complete lack of integrity, complete stripping of civil liberties, complete lack of business and political ethics that WATERGATE WAS. 

And there’s another key word: WAS. Today, in this nation overflowing with virtual voyeurism, I’m afraid nobody would bat an eye at Tricky Dick's little spy games.

Our youth, and slowly by association our elders, have grown so very accustomed to seeing their images reproduced in a dozen different mediums, through a hundred virtual networks, and hearing their voices played on a thousand different recordable devices, that they no longer see the marvel of it, gasp at the wonder of it, or flinch at the invasion of it.  I’m fearful, if we don’t regain our senses soon,  that one fine day, not long from now, our senses will simply go completely numb. 

And maybe, right before they do, some of us older ones will remember that there was a time when we “just knew” something was wrong. We may not have known what it was called—we were too young for words like civil liberties and invasion of privacy--and we didn’t have the power to stop it on our own…but at least in fourth grade, way back long ago, we had the sense to tell the teacher. And she could always do something about it. 

But I was on my own this morning at Dulles. The playground monitor was nowhere to be found, and not one other soul seemed to even care. 

Cue Lee Greenwood on five, four, three... 

Harry Potter nothing;my first-grade teacher was a witch--a tribute to my mother

Is it just me or is there something concerning about that one?

Hermione step aside: meet Mrs. Eolne (and I didn’t spell that backward in case she has some loved ones…somewhere). And it is because of Mrs. E. that I have no problem, whatsoever, believing in witches. But when I was five years old, I had not, as of my first grade year, met one. (And for those of you who just want to get to the point about my mom and skip the witch part due to severe religious beliefs of severe scarring from flying monkeys..or both I guess.. then just go to the *)

Starry-eyed, and nearly literate, I began first grade able to read and write. Mine was the first generation after “See Dick Run.” We were the guinea pig 1970’s protégés of a little something called The Programmed Reader.

My brother and sister, however, were raised on Dick and Jane, the crazy wagon-pulling white kids with their dog named Spot. And my siblings made certain I knew how to decipher the secret “See Dick. See Dick run” code before starting first grade. In fact, come to think about it, considering the nearly library-sized collection of school books we have rubber stamped with “property of,” I’m pretty certain my brother probably stole the book from which I learned to read.

But first grade at Cantril Elementary held something much better than the

Image via Wikipedia

old brown and blue cloth-covered primers of the 1960’s. Oh yeah…we received shiny purple magazine-like readers with happy cartoon characters named Sam and Pam and their dog named Zip and a cat named Nip. And everything in those readers rhymed, and no word was longer than three letters.

I  guess the creators of Sam and Pam thought the “ck” blend of Dick and the silent “e” conundrum in Jane were problematic for young reader—not mention that the sentence “See Dick Run” actually contains two verbs, or the implied “you” subject creates two subjects, or that “Dick Run” is probably an implied clause reading more accurately “(you) see (that) Dick runs.”  Honestly! How did they ever expect kids to learn to speak English?

Well, these must have been the same geniuses who decided to print the answers to each fill-in-the-blank on the inside margins and then trust six-year-olds to cover their answers with a wide bookmark which could be slid, one answer at a time, to check the answers.

Ah yes! The programmed reader was born. The thought, I’m sure, was to give immediate feed back to the student and eliminate grading for teachers. The inventors probably thought it would create a generation of geniuses. What it created, however, was a generation of cheaters.

When I finished my programmed reader in a week, Mrs. E—who was so nearly ready to retire she probably drove an RV with a red Good Sam sticker in the back window to school—saw in me the fulfillment of every prophesy she had probably uttered during the first staff meeting after the district proposed the death of Dick and Jane. There is an old Asian proverb that says something about when the lawn mower was missing the neighbor’s son looked like a thief, and I think it probably fits here. But regardless, I was labeled a cheater and sent to the…get this…cloak room.

Now, as I’ve said before, I was well educated at home, and I’d had enough Grimm’s Fairy Tales to know that the only people who ever wear cloaks are witches.

Yeah …that’s right…try being five and going to the cloak room with the Wizard of Oz and those creepy little flying monkeys in your head. Not to mention that the witch masquerades as a normal neighbor riding a bike. I immediately saw through Mrs. E’s thin disguise as a gray-haired, pinch-faced, child hater.

She was much more than that, and I shudder to think of what might have happened if I had brought my dog to school. Wait!...I did bring my new puppy to school one time and he peed on the floor right in front of Mrs. E. (If that’s not proof positive, well then, what is?)

Suffice to say I became intimately acquainted with the cloak room, a small hallway-slash-closet between the classroom and the outside door that smelled of wet mittens and rubber overboots. (Remember overshoes? It was the day when you wore your regular shoes to school and you had cool little white, red or…god forbid…black rubber boots that had a little button and an elastic band to hold them snug around your ankle. And if you ever forgot those overboots, your mom made you wear Roman Meal bread sacks—those ugly orange ones because she was convinced that Wonder Bread was too overly processed to be good for you—over your shoes held up with rubber bands!)

I found myself in the cloak room the day Mrs. E said she had discovered a “long-necked giraffe” in the classroom. I couldn’t have been more thrilled, but when I asked her how it got into the classroom and where was she hiding it, I quickly discerned that this was secret teacher code for “cheater” meaning somebody was copying answers.

Another time I was knuckle-headed enough to suggest that apples, like the ones appearing on our daily phonics worksheets, did not necessarily all come in red. I tried to explain the value of a Golden Delicious and the tartness of the bright green Grannie Smiths—the preferable variety for apply pies. This information, however, was not greeted at all with the enthusiasm I was expecting, and then—when she called me “smart”—I was stupid enough to think she really meant it. So I was sent to the cloak room to “think about being smart.”
The worst and funniest time I was sent to the dreaded cloak room was the time Mrs. E had the lack of common sense to sing the ABC's to us and end with "Now I know my ABC's, tell me what you think of me." C'mon! It's asking too much! She asked!

(*There’s that asterisk) I know by now you are asking “how in the world is this a tribute to your mom?” So I’m going to tell you. My mom just turned 75 last week, and she is the most remarkable woman I have ever met. This Christmas she went snowshoeing with the family and kept right up with her 20-year-old grandsons. She drives off to Texas, she flies to California, she runs women’s groups, she sings in the choir. She is sharp, and funny, and smart, and perhaps the most loving and compassionate woman I have ever met.

Which is why I adore her.

But the thing that sealed her in my heart forever was that day in 1970 when I decide to quit school for the rest of my life. That February day I had come home for lunch (we lived right across the street from the school,and in those days kids actually had moms who were at home and made lunches—go figure) and I had had enough.

I wasn’t going back. I wasn’t going to spend another day in the cloak room. I wasn’t going to read another sentence about Nip and Zip. I still didn’t know how to color inside the lines and-–worst yet—I just couldn’t figure out how to not be me.

My dad, unfortunately, didn’t see the situation quite as tragically as I did. He told me to dry up, buckle up my overshoes and get myself back over to the school, “pronto.”

Well, I didn't.
As the tardy bell rang, I stood on the front step of the school crying my eyes out, completely unable to understand or communicate what had gone so horribly wrong with something that I had been waiting my entire life to begin.

My entire school career could have ended right there. I was ready to face my own misfortune—whatever punishment or retribution it contained—because anything at this point would have seemed better than, or could not have been as horrible as, going back to first grade.

And then I saw her across the street.

My mom appeared in the doorway of our house slipping on her heavy winter coat. Even writing the words now brings a rush of emotion over me. My eyes get as hot as they felt when I first saw her swimming her way toward me through my five-year-old tears. Somehow I knew in that moment that she had not only defied my father, but she was also risking her very life to face the witch of first grade. And she was coming to rescue me.

As she took my hand to walk me down the long tiled hallway to the first-grade classroom, I tried to secretly communicate the fear and terror awaiting her. But there wasn’t enough time.

And that’s when I knew for CERTAIN that my teacher was a witch because she had pulled a transformation spell. When my mom walked into the classroom, Mrs. E had disguised herself as a caring mothering-type, bringing me a “tissue” and asking “what’s wrong, honey?” It was nearly convincing—shape-changer that she was—she nearly appeared to be a real person. And I was afraid, more than ever, because I was scared my mother would fall under her spell. I was terrified my mother would believe and then leave me to suffer the repercussions after the spell had worn off.

But here’s why I love my mom: She didn’t buy the magic act.

My mom knows a witch when she sees one, and she always has ever since.

My mom was fearless, and she still is.

My mom faced the most disingenuous person woman in the world and never even broke a sweat; and she still doesn’t.

My mom made Mrs. E, without a single hateful word, back off, and quit making my life hell. And that’s what she still does.

My mom with the calm confidence of a woman of highest valor, saved my life; and she’s still doing it every day.

I love my mom. I just want to say it here for the entire world! Because for over 30 years, she has been saving my backside and loving me beyond my greatest fears.

She turned 75 a couple days ago, and it makes me wonder, at times, what I will ever do 30 years from now. I wish more than anything in the world, that I can someday be half as a good a mother to my daughters as she has been to me. I learned what a witch was when I was five years old, But I also learned that there is something a lot stronger than any witch on earth.

And that, my friends is woman of God’s dearest heart.

Step Aside HG Wells: Tis the season for...The Time Machine

You can’t argue with math and science—ask any teacher this time of year. Because…yes, (oh, I so want to say “Virginia,” here, but I’m afraid I’m the only one who is old enough to know what that refers to) …it IS THAT time of year! No, I’m not talking about artificial snow and elves. And, no, I’m not referring to that other messy business, worrying about accidentally uttering “Merry Him-whose-name-may-not-be-spoken- in public-education-mas!”

No, I’m talking about THAT time of year all teachers dread……..that week before the end of the semester.  That week when all the slackers finally log on to their online grade accounts and figure out that the little “m” stands for missing, and that a zero averaged in with three 90 percents equals the letter D. (That’s the math part.)

It’s that week in the year when the wire basket on the corner of your desk fills up with old grammar sheets and reading quizzes that were handed back without somehow getting recorded.

Well, okay, if I’m gonna bag on the kids, then it's only fair I bag on myself a little, too. Yeah, I know you parents don’t want to hear it, but sometimes….rarely…once in a while…I “fat finger” it (as my esteemed colleague Dough puts it)  and miss an entry as badly as the next guy.

And it’s true that when you’re a high school English teacher and you carry work back and forth from home to school every night, it’s not shocking to learn that sometimes….rarely…..okay…once in a while…a paper falls into that little crack between the console and the passenger seat and rides around town for a week...or two. And usually it’s that make-up compare/contrast paragraph on Owen’s Dulce Et Decorum Est and Joyce Kilmer’s Memorial Day, that some kid handed you on his way to after-school tutoring when you were just returning from the teacher’s lounge carrying that pile of junk mail about workshops on “Behavioral Intervention Differentiating for Multiple Intelligence Reluctant Learners in Your Classroom through Motivational Strategies!”, and a full-color, glossy, brochure for “Teachers travel free with thirty-seven paying students!”  Thank God my old dog-eared copy of The Great Gatsby was on top, or the whole kit and caboodle would have gone in the trash! That’s all I can say. And yes, White-4, I already apologized for your Huckleberry Finn tests in the back of my daughter’s Pontiac, but I found them, didn’t I? All I can say to that is My bad, dog! (That makes it all okay in the teen world, I’m told.)

And it’s that time of year when, like Christmas carols playing on department store loudspeaker systems, you can hear one of my old familiar favorites called, “What can I do to bring my grade up?”

And it’s that time of year when I adapt a little lesson in cynicism I learned from another esteemed colleague who plays the Ukulele. (feel free to steal it as I did….along with all the other excellent teaching strategies that teachers give away online and interdepartmentally for free on a daily basis because they are just that kind of cool people who give away excellent stuff for free all the time. It’s part of the nature of choosing the profession. People silly enough to spend 60K on an undergraduate degree and another 32K for a master’s when they only get paid 40K a year are NOT sassy enough to charge for their intellectual property…………….c’mon, get real!)

Anyway, here’s what it looks like step-by-step when a student asks, “What can I do to bring up my grade?” (At least this is what it sometimes….rarely…okay, once in a while…looks like in my head.)

 1.  Don your most Madonna-esque smile, with gently parted lips like Curly’s wife dead in John Steinbeck’s barn after letting Lenny touch her hair—please add the beam of 3:30 p.m. sunshine streaming in from the setting sun behind the teacher’s head for the halo effect—and murmur back softly, like Daisy Buchanan, “What can you do?”

2. Pause, for a brief look at the ceiling like Jim Casey trying to piece together a prayer for Grandpa’s funeral.
 

3. Curl lips together in deep thought. Tap upper lip with index finger, shift mouth to bite upper lip corner like Scout Finch trying to figure out what Atticus’s brother is talking about when he tries to explain what a Whorelady is.

4. Let out an audible gasp—like Abigail Williams in the town meeting hall before Judge Hathorne—who yes, is the great-grandfather of Nathaniel, who changed his name from sheer denial about those horrible witch trials—when John Proctor calls her a harlot.

5. Ask again like Daisy, “Do you know quantum physics?”

6. Pause for this to absorb. (And, by the way, for you doubters, the answer is always “no.”)

7. Adopt a nearly Tom-Sawyer-like frankness and kick right into, “Because, (fill in name), you see…at this point, my friend, (I like to add the “my friend,” but it’s absolutely optional—whatever you’re comfortable with) you’re going to need a time machine to go back into the past and turn in all the work you failed to do for the first 17 weeks of school.

Viola! And it’s just as simple as Arthur Miller’s brother-Ben walking into the jungle when he was 18 and walking out a millionaire!

Rejoice, teachers around America! A semester has flown and the large majority of your students have passed! Sure, you’re going to get called into the administrator’s office to explain what happened to that other marginal percent, whose scores are scraping pavement under the chassis of the great piece of machinery called the American Educational System, dangling somewhere between  25-37 percent, whose grades you couldn’t hope to save, because you never received a single sheet of paper from them, let alone saw them in your classroom, whose home and personal lives are so riddled with pain and confusion, and perhaps chemical addictions, that for them to even show up to school in the morning upright is sometimes an applaudable task in and of itself. Rejoice! For your seniors are going to move on to college or other higher education, or jobs, or real life. Rejoice! They, for at least six days, knew the definitions for supercilious, anon, jocularity, inferential, and reciprocal; they could draw a little hill-like plot line and pronounce denouement;  they knew that Huck Finn was up to more than a simple trip down a river, and they understood that Gatsby’s life was as empty in the end as  Pa Joad’s Wallet.

Merry Christmas, American teachers everywhere who will be grading essays over “holiday" break.  And rejoice, rejoice, rejoice that there really isn’t a time machine anywhere for any of us. Because I’m not sure which of us would cheerfully go back and repeat high school again. One time around was challenging enough, wasn’t it?

And this fact, perhaps above all others, is the one that restores us and makes us return again for another semester, hoping that maybe we can make it just a little less hard and just a little more enjoyable for some kids who could really use it. And that, my friends, doesn't take a scientist to figure out.

Trusting One's Own Voice--no thugs need apply

I think you heard the lady!

 Listen! I went to the ENT last week because I realized that when I was reading The Raven out loud to my juniors, I actually sounded like The RAVEN--it was disconcerting. I reminded myself of the old lady named Mrs. Smoke that used to live behind the church on our block. She used to holler at us kids for simple things (like throwing corn cobs into her yard--yeah, Kath, you know who I'm talkin' about), and I could do a pretty swell imitation of her. 

The trouble is....I don't want to sound like Mrs. Smoke. I want to sound like Grace Kelly... well, that's beside the point...no that really is the point I think....so I went to Dr. Gupta to find out what in the world is making my voice break like Katherine Hepburn calling to Henry Fonda about the loons in On Golden Pond. 
 Now Sanjay Gupta is more than a simple ENT. Sanjay is an Otorolaryngologist, which if my bill is anything as imposing as his official title I'll end up owing something just short of the National Deficit after my insurance company pays.

So anyway, after sitting with a string of ether-filled cotton ball up my nose for 45 minutes, Dr. Gupta hoves it out again, and then while crooning, "Just relax, just breathe through your mouth,"  shoves a laser camera through the little rubber flapper in the roof of my mouth to "get a peak" at my vocal chords. Then 7.3 minutes later, Sanjay Gupta whips that flexible tubing out of my nose faster than a garter snake running from an 8-year-old boy and tells me something I didn't want to hear (that is..other than my own gag reflex). He says, all calm and smiling, "Sure enough, you have two nodules on

your vocal chords."

"What?" says I. "What does that mean?"

And then Dr. Gupta points to his computer screen, showing me how my larynx is  engaging every other member in the area to help vocalize.

You're not trusting your own voice," he says. "You're overcompensating by using other muscles to back you up."

It is at this point in the blog that I would like to stop, and for the sake of my own self preservation, simply cease to expose my lifelong shortcomings. But the metaphor is just too good to pass up, don't you think? I mean, I don't want to sound all supernatural or anything, but when your very own body gives you something this ripe, it's hard to let it simply rot on the vine.

Now I'm no Owen Meany, but I can't imagine a life of quiet. A life of channeling Julie Andrews,  speaking into classroom microphone headsets, tipping my head slightly to the left with an ever-so-gentle smile and and saying things like, "Young ladies and gentlemen, would you honor me with your silence, please?" Nope--can't see it. I'm a yeller, a screamer, a bellower. Why....by the age of three my family had nicknamed me "leather lungs" because my mom never had to wonder in which part of the house, the yard or the neighborhood I was; she simply followed the sound.

But I'm avoiding the obvious. Or maybe if you aren't a lover of metaphor, it's the unobvious I'm avoiding--but either way--I simply can't ignore it any longer. Look. Here's the deal. When we have hangups in life.....our bodies find a way, ultimately, of letting us know. There it is. I've said it.

For instance, when I was in my early 20's, I developed a severe eye infection after my divorce that made my eye swell up so badly I couldn't wear contacts. Even after the virus had cleared up, my lid drooped so badly I walked around looking like Rocky Balboa after the 9th round with Apollo Creed. Finally, after nearly half a year, I looked at myself in the mirror and said "eye left" and then began to sob as if I was still sitting in the pew after my father's funeral. It was only at that moment that I started dealing with the severe abandonment issues that I had developed after a horrific divorce that followed hard on the heels of my father's death.

Too corny? I think not. Take this one for instance. When I was in high school I was a ski freak. I went to the mountains every weekend from the time the rocks were barely covered until the last slush melted into the earth. After accidentally stepping on a toothpick the day after Thanksgiving, I refused to admit to being disabled in order to hit the slopes (which were opening uncharacteristically early). Although the toothpick had been driven nearly its full length into the ball of my foot, I simply had my mother yank it out--the quarter inch that did come out, that is--and convinced her it had gone in broken. 
   What I needed to do was tell tell her how much pain I was in--what I ended up doing was catching an edge on that injured foot and severing my ACL. But do you think I told anybody how badly my knee, which was blown up the size of a small child's head, hurt? No, that what I needed to do, but I did not.
  What I needed was an orthopedic specialist--what I did was to wrap it in an Ace bandage and ski the rest of the season. When I finally DID see a doctor the following summer he said, "If you had tended to your knee when it first happened, we could have simply reattached the ligament. But by denying your injury, it caused the ligament to atrophy away." Well, metaphor scoffers, I know this...a lifetime denying one's pain and not tending to one's knee(d)s will make one a liar and ascetic of the worst sort--it will cause the worst kind of atrophy possible......atrophy of VOICE. (See how I, like Owen Meany, feel the need to yell it here?)

So....back to Dr. Gupta. Here I am screeching like Mrs. Smoke, and what I'd really like to be is the kind of strong, assertive, woman who carries off a scene with beauty and grace (ah yes, back to my Grace Kelly allusion).

  When Gupta pulled out this most recent piece of medical advice, I decided to listen...not to the doctor, but to the metaphor my own body had provided. WHEN, I thought to myself, HAVE I ever trusted my own voice? (Dang it, there's Owen Meany again!) And what would it sound like if I DID? I've blistered my vocal chords from hours of "over-compensation," huge attempts to sound big, to command attention to "cover the room" as the jovial doctor put it. (Sounds like a comedy act to me? Anybody else?)

Well, sometimes a metaphor is just too powerful to ignore--and this, it appears, is one of those........sometimes we need to quit blabbing and listen to what our own physical bodies are telling us.

 I am a writer. I write books and stories, and songs, and they are good. I want to produce a play from a novella I wrote called The Friendly Beasts, and next week I'm going to talk to a composer to arrange the songs I've written to go with it. I've developed stories called Elderbooks that are picture books for the elderly who can no longer read. I am finishing a novel about a woman who gives birth to her own sister, and I have short stories I want to publish in magazines and journals around the world.

Oh, and I write this blog. In fact, I realize that I haven't spoken but six-and-a-half words since beginning this entry, and it doesn't take a PhD in literature to realize that when one writes one doesn't use one's vocal chords. 

 I've spent my life as a teacher trying to "cover the room," as Gupta put it--waiting for somebody to give me permission and authority (the muscle part of the metaphor, as it were for those of you who aren't getting it) to speak into this world as an artist and a writer. 
Well, this week, I'm going to make my first attempt at covering the world with my words--to trust my real voice. It's what I want. In fact, it's what I need, (okay....plus just a little bit of grace to do it).  Oh, and P.S. no thugs need apply--I'm doing this one on my own.

11/8/10--an addendum: I just have to add this little bit of life coincidence. Today I listened to a guest speaker who quoted Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple Computers. Here's what he has to say, and I think he said it better than I did: 

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Steve Jobs (1955 -)

Although it's still under construction, feel free to have a closer look at some of my projects, please go to:

Plainsong Publishing

  

Shorty got low, low low, and I've had enough, enough, enough.

Friend, either you are closing your eyes to a situation you do not wish to acknowledge, or you are unaware of the caliber of disaster indicated by the presence of ________ in your community.  And thus, with the simple filling in of the offending noun, the old Trouble in River City rap begins.

Okay, I know I run the risk of sounding like Professor Harold Hill, or John Lithgow in “Footloose,” but I think I’ve just witnessed my last high school dance…at  least my last high school dance at which I stand by and condone with my silence the mass sexual molestation of girls 14-18 years old.

There is a line in Their Eyes Were Watching God in which Nanny tells Janie , I can’t bear to stand by and let men make “a spit cup outa you.”  Well, mothers and fathers, we have a raised a generation of spit cups.  Before I continue, let me acknowledge and repent publically of my own culpability in this affair. Every year since I began teaching in 1995, my husband and I have sponsored the annual homecoming dance. I’ve always considered myself a fairly “hip” and understanding teacher, and I have done my share of shoulder tapping or long-distance eye-brow raising to let students know they needed to “cut it out” on the dance floor.  But this last weekend I couldn’t stop it. And I’m tired. And I’m sorry.

There’s a new “move” in town, dirtier than any dirty dancing I’ve ever had to break up, and it began raising its ugly head (not touching that one with a 10-foot pole) about five years ago. It’s a little dance piece known as “grinding” in which a young man grasps a girl by her pelvic bones and then backs her in against his crotch as she rubs her buttocks against his genitals in time to the music. Sorry, I know I’m pushing the obscenity meter with this one. I tried to soften it, but I thought it would be best to just call it straight.

I know Mrs. S____ that you sent your freshman daughter to the dance thinking that there would be adult supervision…but there wasn’t. I mean, there were adults there. Plenty of them—myself included—from principals to vice principals to school counselors. But we didn’t stop your daughter from rubbing herself against her date.

I’m sorry Mr. G____ I know you thought that your girl was going out to dinner in her see-through skin-tight spandex homecoming dress to attend an innocent dance in the gym similar to the ones you and Mrs. G____ went to in high school…But she wasn’t. I mean, she did go to dinner dressed like that, just as you thought. But somewhere in-between she had several drinks and when she arrived at the high school and began clutching her ankles on the dance floor, her judgment had apparently been impaired. Well…we did catch that one.

But the rest of you, Mr. and Mrs. K__ and Ms. H____, we did nothing. The only way I can describe it is………….well, it’s like swatting flies at a livestock sale barn. Which ones do you stop?

And so, on homecoming night, your girls backed their buttockses up against young men and ground (or do we say grinded?) to music………some even tried to do it to the beat. What it looks like to them, I cannot imagine, but to the outside witness it looked something akin to an entire room of young dogs humping a mail man’s leg.

Do I want to ban dancing? Heck, no. I know that in the20’s parents cried out over The Charleston and ragtime (libertine men and scarlet women and ragtime shameless music—Pro. Hill, again there.) In the 30’s it was swing dancing. Parents have cried out over jitterbug, and Elvis the Pelvis, Go Go boots, the Twist, the Monkey and the Pony. John Travolta gave us both lycra body suits and skin-tight Wranglers with Saturday Night Fever and The Urban Cowboy. Not long after, Baby and Patrick Swayze gave us a crotch-leg combo called Dirty Dancing.

Kids will always dance. ALWAYS. It’s part of what we do as a culture. I don’t think anybody wants to take dancing away. It’s a courting ritual; it’s a right of passage; and teen dancing has always pushed the envelope.  In fact, statistics show that slow songs have generated enough dance partner heat and friction throughout the decades to power a city the size of Milwaukee for 17 months.

But there’s something blatantly wrong with a room full of grinding girls, whose short cocktail dresses (and there’s another one) come up as they go down to Shorty Got Low, Low, Low. And there’s something even more wrong with a group of adults who stands back and watches as it goes down (or up as the case may be).

I’ve read a dozen blogs on this topic: People crying for bans and people crying for freedom of expression. What we should be crying for is the loss of innocence. We, as a nation have overtly stripped our young women of any mystique, allure or femininity. And we have stripped our boys down to nothing more than mere gropers and ogglers.  We tell boys not to treat women as objects, and then we create girls who see themselves as nothing more.

We’ve created a generation of overtly sexualized children, whose parents chuckle as Charlie Sheen takes three women to his bed, whose mothers get up and perform their morning pole dance work-outs, who watch blithely by as Degrassi and company get all bent out of shape not over the premarital sex but over the lie about the pregnancy, and we stand back and watch like helpless victims, rather than the perpetrators we are.

It was cute when Kevin Bacon taught Chris Penn how to dance (Let’s hear it for the boy) and the whole town, including the preacher, was rescued from the close-minded prejudice against dancing. We all had to learn the “moves” in our day. But sadly enough the only moves these boys have  to learn is something they can perform with an old t-shirt out of the laundry basket in the privacy of their own closets.

I don’t want to sponsor any more dances.  I can’t bear to see your girls (my students) used as spit cups any more. I have enough five days a week just trying to explain that “Mrs. Jones my computer printer sucks balls” is not appropriate on any level of communication. I’m tired of being the teacher who gets up from my office desk to go in the hall and explain to a group of young men or women that “Fuck” is not an appropriate adjective, noun, or verb anywhere in school. I’m worn out of girls who walk up to the drink counter dressed in their Homecoming finest and cry, “Damn,” when they find the water all gone, then yank up their strapless gowns over their escaping bosoms as they flounce away.

On a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly basis, I monitor and am held accountable for state test scores, failing grades, lack of reading comprehension and lack of student motivation. I have classrooms full of kids with depression, eating disorders, and abusive parents. I have a life full of cutters, bingers, drug addicts, alcoholics and teenage pregnancies that walk through my door every day……I guess I just don’t have the energy to preserve their morality on the dance floor, too.  I know, I took that 400-level pedagogy class called Teachers and the Law, that I am officially in loco parentis. But where are the parents on this one? I’ve got nothing more left to give.

Mr. and Mrs. D----, Perhaps it’s time for you to come sponsor homecoming and see for yourselves what your senior son and freshman daughter are up to. Maybe it’s time for mass-control ski-slope management techniques:  two armbands—cut off the first as a warning; cut the second  and it becomes your choice to call home and leave the dance. Because, mom and dad, surprised as you might be to discover this…students aren’t managing themselves. Especially not when they have been given a full head-nod from administrators and teachers alike.

Even in a lucrative society like the United States, when you dress a girl in a scrap of see-through, low-cut, sequined material, put her in high heels, spread makeup on her face, send her out into the night and ask her to rub her body parts on a man……………uh…………..well.

And maybe that’s the darkness that has overcome my heart this Monday morning. I grieve over child pornography, and prostitution that exists throughout the world—especially in third world countries. But guess what, Mr. and Mrs. W___ Mr. and Mrs. A___, B_____  C____ and D____? Even though I’m certain you kissed them good-bye and said, “Act like a lady. No grinding tonight.”  It’s a little closer to home than you thought. At least those girls in those third-world nations, albeit very small amounts, are getting paid. Your girls are doing it for free and nobody cares, and nobody is stopping it.

Teaching English--Beginning with Vietnamese

Today one of my students asked me--as we were diagramming predicate adjectives and predicate nominatives (which, by the way, they now call predicate nouns)--"Mrs. Jones what in the world made you want to be a teacher?" 

And in less time than it took to crack my yardstick against the white board (no, it isn't corporal punishment...don't tell Henry David Thoreau..it's just such a great power trip, a yardstick and speed grammar in colored chalk on the black board, blazing dry erase markers up front, and 15 kids flying around the room diagramming Tim's uncle has been the town mayor for twelve years, and Your little brown dog is actually a Doberman or Professor Dumbledore seemed angry at Harry for the whole term..if you love this stuff like I do, you understand) I was back in Mr. Jacobson's pink and blue sixth grade classroom, at Wilcox Elementary.

None of us were sure why they painted his classroom pink and baby-blue over the summer, but now that I'm a teacher I'm pretty certain he must have done something to incur the wrath of the maintenance crew (teacher-the/ pissed off-staff,the, custodial). Anyway, I digress.

It was the year they separated me from all my friends, you know, three sixth grade teachers...let's keep that mouthy White kid (and when I say White, that was my name, not my race...although I guess technically it's my race, but I wasn't meaning it that way, and why do I feel like I have to explain that anyway...sheesh--definitely another blog, another day) away from her friends and maybe they'll stand a chance of learning something this year, or coming in from recess without having been verbally badgered for an hour, or making up their own minds about a topic (okay, I admit I may have been a little bit overbearing as a child...but thank God, I/ 've outgrown/ that! ).

Literally, and I mean literally, every morning I woke up hating the idea, the very thought of, getting out of bed to go to school. I detested everything about education and my life. My big brother had gone away to college and rather than living in a state of Nirvana, not having to wonder when he was going to crawl out the bathroom window only to crawl around the house in the dark and scratch on the screens of the TV room to crawl back through the bathroom window and come to our "rescue" after unlocking the door to our screams, I was completely and utterly depressed...because  believe it or not, I really adored him. 

That was the fall of 1975...and if I recall correctly it was also the fall of Saigon.
So that fall we spent the days looking through microscopes at purpled onion skins in Ms. Yancil's class, working algebra problems and learning grammar in Mr. Jacobson's nursery-colored classroom, and then spent the evenings watching dingy green and gray footage of military airlifts, the double propellered army helicopters taking off straight into the sky with  hundreds of South Vietnamese crammed inside, dozens more hanging from the runners as they rose higher and higher into the sky, roters whirling, until the hangers-on finally dropped off or were pushed to the ground.(hangers on-the/ dropped---or were pushed-finally/ to ground-the.)
It was also the fall we learned to diagram sentences. It was like discovering the math of English. Suddenly, words--which  I/ had adored-always, violenty-quite, like-brother,my, big-- fell into comprehendable rank and file, slanting lines of prepositions and sloping adjectives inclining adverbs. I covered my college-lined notebook paper (it was time for the big hitters, we were in sixth-grade after all) with messy pen and graphite lines filled with words--beautiful words. No, they drew themselves, the harder the sentence, the more in love I fell.

But I/ hated-still/ school......

And then Dâm arrived.

The Methodist Church sponsored one of the refugee families--the ones we saw flooding into Laos every night as  the North Vietnamese army marched its way south--and the family they sponsored was Dâm’s.
Her family had escaped with their lives, but they had been separated from her father. I don’t remember much more than that, and I’m not sure I ever truly understood. Maybe they floated on inner tubes, or doors or pieces of rafts—I remember the anchor men called them “boat people,” but most of them never used a boat.  Dâm and her family had somehow gotten to Laos, where they stayed in a refugee camp and learned basic English phrases like “Thank you” and “Please.” And when Dâm came to Castle Rock that’s about all the English she knew. 

The Methodist church found Dâm’s family a little two-bedroom house, scrapped together enough clothing for seven children and their mother, a tiny scrap of a woman who was still nursing Dâm’s baby sister, Hieuh, and then sent them to American public schools.
And that’s the event that changed my life. 

When Holden asked me why I became a teacher, it’s hard to explain that it happened nearly forty years ago in 1975 when Mr. Jacobsen called me to the back of his classroom and asked me if I would like a special project. My job, he said, for the rest of the year, would be to teach Dâm English. No more sheets of diagrams and sitting, waiting for the others to finish, no more grammar for me at all. How, I asked, would I do it? He told me: Just be her friend (you)/ be-just/ friend-her.

She had five brothers: Co, Minh, Trinh, Quang, and little Trang, who was only three years old and looked like a tiny skeleton of a boy. I’m always afraid I’ve forgotten one, now, as I’ve forgotten so many things. Her full name was Nguuyen Thi Dâm, meaning she was the daughter of her father, Van Nguuyen. The boys went by Nguuyen Van Co and on down the line. 

Co was sent to junior high, where the first thing the boys did was to teach him every swear word they could think of. I can't imagine the weight or the anger Co must have carried around on his shoulders as the oldest son--his father lost in war. I was always a little frightened of him. But one day I remember seeing him smile.
I had a friend named Peter and one day Co tried to ask if we were siblings. I tried so hard to understand him (I/ took-seriously/ job-my), repeating, “Peanut butter? Peanut butter?” Finally in exasperation Co started laughing, and I suddenly realized he was asking if Peter was my brother. Dâm, Peter, Co and I laughed until our sides ached. It was one of the few times I saw him let down his guard.
I played at Dâm's house; she came over to mine. We met almost every day in the middle at the Elementary school and played on the swings and teeter totters, and we sat on the monkey bars and exchanged languages. I remember so little of what she taught me, and I wouldn’t know how to spell it if I tried. Dow Di ,Mat , Mui , and Mea…that was head, ears, eyes, nose and mouth. She taught me to make paper gum wrapper chains, and I still have it in a little box on my dresser. She taught me to scoop up one rock at a time as I threw another in the air, like a game of jacks without the rubber ball. Her mother made the best chicken I have ever tasted, and I never realized how very destitute they were. In fact I didn't realize at all until my parents scolded me for eating supper at her house. When they found out she had fed me They were appalled (parents-my/ must have felt\ sorry-for her). Dâm became my best friend. Her smile was as quick and as bright as fox-fire. Her skin was as rich as coffee, her hair as thick and dark as the fall had once felt. She laughed at all my jokes, and with her I never had to fight for my way. She trusted me in everything.
And because I was just a kid, I never thought ahead to what might come of my beautiful Vietnamese friend. 

But that summer I went on vacation with my parents, and when I came home………….. Dâm/ was\ gone. The Methodists moved them to a Vietnamese community in Denver where they could have support, friends--a network. I guess there weren’t too many people like them in Castle Rock, but like most 12 year olds. I guess I had never noticed. I don’t know if I’ve ever cried that hard over a friend since.

Dâm was the best friend a 12-year-old girl could have ever had. Dâm taught me to not be sad angry anymore, and she made me think I was good at something. Dâm saved my life and taught me one of the greatest lessons I’ve ever learned: When you’re absorbed in yourself and depressed beyond words, try helping out somebody else. When you get your eyes off your own sadness, and you focus on another’s, the sadness suddenly recedes. Dâm came across the ocean, and she washed away my loneliness. And for that, I will always, always love her.I-for, that/ will love-always, always / her
I don’t claim to be an expert on the Vietnam war. It wasn’t even considered history yet when I was in high school. I’ve never been to Vietnam, and I don’t know if I ever will go. 

But, oh, how I would love to see Dâm again. I’d probably chicken out if I ever found her…I doubt she even remembers who I am.
But I try to imagine what she’s like now. I’ll bet she’s married and has grown up kids, just like me. I’ll bet she still smiles like the sun and her hair is still jet black. I’ll bet she can still turn handsprings around me in math, and that her English is impeccable. I wonder if she taught her daughters to make gum wrapper chains and play the rock-tossing game, and I wonder if she still laughs about peanut butter.

I believe God heard me praying every night that fall when I was 11 years old: “God, please, please, please send me a friend.” And just like God, with his enormous sense of humor, he didn’t just send me any old friend….he went to Vietnam to find her. And who could have ever guessed that by the time my birthday came around that spring, and I turned 12, I would have already become the teacher I decided eventually to become.I / became \ teacher.