on the subject of listening to the mind-numbing atrocity that is paris hilton's new song:

"Show me real love, baby, and I'll show you mine"?

Hasn't she already shown all of us hers, far too many times to count?

sinking under the watermark

So, I've been doing this for a week and a day. I'm still struggling with how much to say about my actual pupils, but I have a lot to say about teaching and my head-first dive into it, so here goes nothing.

Thing the first: I am insane. Does anyone else know anyone who, with absolutely no prior experience teaching actual children, decides to take a job teaching actual children? First graders? Here's the thing. I've spent an enormous amount of time care-taking for children. Two solid years, in fact, of part- to full-time childcare. And I'm damned good at it. Because the way I always approached working with children is to show them interest, respect, and a sense of fun off the bat, and win them over with sugar and a firm sense of consistency.

Imagine me, then, in a raft in the middle of the ocean, and that firm sense of consistency is all I've got left. I can't get these kids under my rule with respect and a sense of fun. I've got to be tough as nails. Has anyone noticed that I'm not actually tough as nails?

Thing the Second: I remember being a child. I remember the seemingly arbitrary judgements thrown on us by teachers, the "No!"s and the "Not now!"s and all those things. I REMEMBER thinking they were unfair and thoughtless.

Guess what? One week and one day and I'm throwing out "Only if you sit DOWN first!"s and "Did I tell you to do that?"s with the BEST of them. And do you know what it feels like? It feels like there's a middle line of ineffective, ineffectual teaching that straddles the divide between Good Teaching and Bad Teaching (that is to say, NOT Teaching). It feels like I'm constantly being tugged down onto the level of Ineffectuality by these pronouncements and judgments that classroom management forces me to make.

I want to be a good teacher. That is to say, I genuinely care about these kids and I KNOW I have something to offer them and more than that, I know they deserve it, possibly twice as much as their more well-endowed counterparts across the East River. And I know they can do it. And I know I can help them. But everytime I have to sink back down to the level of snapping my fingers for attention, or raising my voice (even if I'm raising my voice in a controlled way), I feel like I'm veering from teaching into corralling.

And you veterans out there, I know you will tell me that corralling is necessary for classroom management. And I know you will probably tell me that a stern hand and follow-through on consequences is vital, and in this neighborhood, chances are that school might be the only place they're getting structure.

But I want to actually teach them. I don't want to just herd them into lines all the time. I want to share with them.

Thing the Third: Forget everything I've just said. I know I'm getting through to them, but it's little tiny battles all the time and it's harder and more challenging than every single thing I've ever done, including writing and the learning curve is impossibly steep. I've made some stupid mistakes - not giving full weight to the incomprehensible heirarchy of a child's understanding of fairness is one. Saying yes simply because I was being badgered by a child is another.

But I'm learning, and learning requires setting up all these almost nonsensical rules and processes for the classroom that really seem to get in the damned WAY of teaching. So I'm trying new things all the time, which is inconsistent.

Didn't I start that section by saying I know I'm doing well? I'm trying to trust that I'm doing well. It's hard.

Oh, Thing the Forth: Kids? They're cunning little things. And sometimes, I need to remember that it's not that I'm not getting through to them - it's that they're not letting me. But they will.

Relatedly, I read some Shel Silverstein poems to them today and they loved it. Baby steps.

elsewhere

At gothamist, reviewing A Spot of Bother by Mark Haddon:

Another success of Haddon’s is the totality of your immersion in the Hall family. Other writers, when putting forth an entire complex family in a few hundred pages, will be tempted to lay the stories down as if the reader was a guest at Christmas dinner – with background and explanations and interruptions. But the Halls know everything about one another, intimately and without footnotes.

...It’s subtle, and brilliant, and should be studied as a prerequisite for ever following in Tolstoy’s footprints and writing the great Unhappy Family novel.

At flickr, taking funny pictures of silly things:

And here at home, where I've been reading a lot, landing kisses on Stuart when he's least expecting it, enjoying the sounds of rain outside, celebrating Rosh Hashana with good friends, drinking full-bodied reds, and not thinking about teaching.

Which, incidentally, went really well this week. It's occurred to me, blissfully in time, that blogging about my students and their behavior or my colleaques is a complete no-no. But I feel (rightly? wrongly?) that I can blog about what I'm learning about myself and teaching and how it's affecting my new life, so I will be endeavoring to do that and just that. Teachers out there, your opinions?

What I haven't been doing lately, much to Shana's and my chagrin: writing. I know, I know. But between the short-term but intense copy-editing (only one more week) and the teaching, it has been necessarily simmering on the back burner. Will I ever learn to balance all these plates?

But for now, there is dinner and there's a movie and there's that full-bodied red I mentioned.

madness

Every morning for the past week I've been slogging through dozens of listings that I'm copy-editing. This is sort of mentally exhausting but it pays well.

Yesterday was my first day of classes. I was very lucky to come home to the kind of guy that brought flowers and cooked dinner and let me vent, because people, I was a wreck. An utter, and complete, wreck. Teachers out there, please tell me that the first day which felt like a two-hour drug trip is normal. Tell me first days are always exhausting and draining and terrifying.

Or is it just terrifying for teachers with absolutely no experience, thrown into an adorably chaotic den of 6 year olds?

So if you've called me recently, or just miss my blogging, this is why.

Today will be better because today, I am reading Where The Wild Things Are to my class and goddamnit, everyone loves Where The Wild Things Are, even if the Wild Things are actually in my first-grade classroom.

Send reinforcements and cupcakes.

getting ready for the onslaught of apples

Between training for my teaching job (!!) in the afternoons and copy-editing in the mornings, I have suddenly found myself short on time.

Time being something I learned to use and waste to MAXIMUM awesomeness this summer.

The training is going well - the steepest learning curve I've ever faced, but every day that I hear practical tips from experienced teachers and look over sensible and motivating lesson plans, the less terrified I am about the entire prospect. Twenty-two kids! In my care! Oh! My! God!

I'm excited, though. Which is a niiiiiiice feeling.

This weekend I'm: going to Rhode Island. Being Stuart's co-pilot while he practices driving on the mean streets of Providence with his shiny new learner's permit. Learning how to make rice pudding. And reading a lot of material about kids, literacy, and teaching.

Holy cow, people! Four days to Go Time.

kerchunked

I went into my polling place today, signed in all the right places, and then stepped into the booth as my 156-year-old polling instructor fiddled with the settings on the side. The settings that, purportedly, go from D to R depending on whether you're registered to vote as a Democrat or Republican in the primaries.

Once in the booth, I kerchunked the red lever to the right to begin voting. Only my little black markers wouldn't budge next to my chosen candidate. Wouldn't - freaking - lemme just - maybe if I - ARGH. But the Republican levers worked fine, so it wasn't that I was nudging them wrong. So I opened the curtain.

Me: "I can't flip the levers for my candidates, but I can flip the Republican ones."

156-year-old I'm going to call Rose: "You have to push them down."

Me: "I know."

Totally uninvolved but pushy matriarch in line who thinks I'm a dumb youngster unaware of the voting process, who I'll dub MABEL: "You can only vote for ONE, sweetie, ONE party."

Me: ignores her.

Rose: "Gotta vote your party."

Me: "I get that. I'm trying to say that the Rep levers work, but the Dem ones don't."

Mabel: "Are you registered Republican?"

Me: "NO, I'm aware of how it works, I'm a registered Democrat and I'm trying to vote that way."

Rose: "Then don't push the Republican ones."

Me: "I understand. Could you please check?"

What ensued then was four different "instructors" looking at the machine and realizing that Rose had set the machine to record a Republican vote.

Vaguely Irish middle-aged man who I will name Malachy: "Well, you've already moved the red lever, see, so now you've lost the vote."

Me: "I didn't lose the vote. She incorrectly deployed the machine. You're saying, what, I can't vote today?"

Malachy: "Have to vote on a paper ballot."

It took them another ten minutes to locate an envelope that I was meant to fill out. They gave it to me and seemed surprised when I pointed out, after filling in my information, that there was no ACTUAL BALLOT IN IT.

Malachy: "Well, that's what we have."

Finally, another official brought me a ballot and I inked in my votes and gave it back to them. Only when I left did I realize that Rose hadn't even signed the AFFIDAVIT on the ballot that says an official received my envelope.

So I may not have voted at all today because my voting officials were inept. And no one even took a moment to apologize to me - they simply kept saying that I'd "lost" the vote because I'd taken for granted that when I stepped in and pushed the lever to the voting position, my party affiliation had been correctly noted. So I'm going to the Election Board website and look to see if they need workers or volunteers for the November elections, because that shit was just bananas.

Somewhere, my dad is laughing into his breakfast that I was practically being coerced to vote Republican.

sweet autumn

Good lord, it's fifty-seven degrees outside. HURRAH!

I'm going for a walk.

"liquid, sane, unruly, musical, self-sufficient..."

Mannahatta

I was asking for something specific and perfect for my city,
Whereupon lo! upsprang the aboriginal name.

...

Rich, hemm'd thick all around with sailships and
steamships, an island sixteen miles long, solid-founded,

Numberless crowded streets, high growths of iron, slender,
strong, light, splendidly uprising toward clear skies.

...

The summer air, the bright sun shining, and the sailing
clouds aloft,

The winter snows, the sleigh-bells, the broken ice in the river,
passing along up or down with the flood-tide or ebb-tide,

The mechanics of the city, the masters, well-form'd,
beautiful-faced, looking you straight in the eyes.

...

A million people - manners free and superb - open
voices, hospitality, the most courageous and friendly
young men,

City of hurried and sparkling waters! city of spires
and masts!
City nested in bays! my city!

poem from walt whitman, photo from stuart

tender is the touch

A few months ago, Stuart and I were driving back from Rhode Island and listening to Alanis Morissette. Shut up, I'm going somewhere with this. There's this one song - seriously, it really doesn't matter which one - where there's this strange little tink in the middle of an otherwise rough and raucous chorus. Almost like the string on a string instrument was accidentally but forcefully plucked in the recording studio.

"It's like, a balalaika or something."

"It's exactly like that, like someone just wandered through the recording studio, plucking a balalaika."

"You know, Alanis probably had some boyfriend at the time, some guy who played the balalaika."

"Totally - 'please, Alanis, let me play balalaika for you, like this: PLINKY PLINKY PLINKY, come on, Alanis '."

And at the same time, we said:

"And she'd be all, SERGEI..."

I nearly lost control of the car. We must have laughed all the way through New Haven. What are the odds, that in the same crazy imagining about Alanis Morissette and her troublesome Eastern European boyfriend with his goddamned PLINKY-PLINKY, we'd both land on Sergei, at the same time?

A few months ago, Barrie asked me something about marriage, what I thought makes Stuart and me tick. I told her that some couples are good for each other because they complement one another, like the perfect little black dress and the perfect slingback heels. Those couples find harmony in the ways they fill in each other's gaps, even each other out.

Stuart and I, by contrast, are more like the two shoes. I think we're basically the same person on a lot of very fundamental planes. This isn't better, we don't win some couple-similarity trophy, but it's just the best way I can describe how twinned our ideas and emotions and reactions are, after knowing each other for such a comparably little amount of time. The reason that we did what we did, in that crazy way that we did it, was because neither of us really needed the sensible amount of time necessary to discover that you've found your complementary mate. Something essential in me saw exactly its twin in him.

The odds that we'd find each other are pretty much close to the odds that we'd both yell Sergei. When I think about that, my heart gets tight in my chest and I thank a God I don't really believe in for the privelege of being where I am, every night. I don't know how better to thank him for seven hundred nights together and nearly two years of marriage than to say life, in itself, is a marvelous thing - but the colors are brighter with him around.

with half-sincere apologies to anyone who doesn't like the sappy stuff.

birthdaze

Beth and I started with French Martinis at the apartment before going downstairs with a massive cake in hand and failing utterly to get the black car company to actually send us a car. We improvised and arrived at La Vuelta nearly on time, and handed off the cake to the kitchen before joining Heather and Shiv and wine on the patio. People trickled in with hugs and birthday wishes and when we had a good quorum, we took over the banquet of tables inside spread out for 26 people.

Dinner was glasses of sangria and steak and plaintain chips and I think everyone had a wonderful time and I know I did. I bothered everyone with my flash and my shiny new 1GB card that Stuart tucked into my birthday purse of goodies, along with earrings and funny books and music and flowers and things. I wore my purse to birthday dinner, complementing my birthday-gift-to-myself shirt from Banana Republic and mom's pearls.

Really, it couldn't have been a more perfect way to usher in 26. So I spent yesterday detoxing from all the fun and sangria, wandering around downtown and cozying up at Border's with a stack of books on teaching and literacy and young children in classrooms.

I also sat in City Hall Park and watched a couple with very disparate families celebrate their marriage at the clerk's office - they stood in front of the fountain with an endless rotation of family portraits and rose petals thrown at them. The groom's family were European and tall and thin and fashionable, the bride's was American and the opposite. It was strange, seeing the sister-of-the-groom surrounded by the male contingent of her new in-laws, simply because she was that caliber of stunning that just naturally attracts male attention.

I also saw what I gleaned was a well-to-do Lebanese family being interviewed by a young Spanish docu-journalist. When I told Stuart all these stories over lunch, he told me that I've got write more because my observational story-telling is like a pressure valve that just sprouts a little leak along the seam when I'm not putting the habit to paper. I'd never noticed this about myself, but he swears it to be true.

The first day of September ended by going out with Stuart's coworkers after a big deadline and having a drink at Ulysses, and getting an incredibly early night's sleep. Hurrah for the final days of summer. Bring on the fall.