March maybe came in as a lion? Sort of?
Mar. 2nd, 2024 01:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
maeve66There was (for California, for the Bay Area) a tremendous storm, last night. My phone weather app claimed it was a thunder storm, but I heard none and saw none. It WAS relatively torrential rain and a lot of loud wind that freaked Devlin out about as much as hearing a pack of coyotes howling freaks her out.
I love rain, the heavier the better. Living in England for a year, I did not mind one bit the fact that it was grey and rainy for weeks on end. Months on end? Lots of rain and mist and clouds, anyway...
I have my Celtic music list playing on shuffle. There are only 160 songs on it (which seems weird, my folk favorites list is maybe four times that (though it probably contains all of these songs too, and the Bollywood one is also maybe three times as big...). But two holidays are coming up that were big in my youth: International Women's Day, this coming Friday, March 8th, and St. Patrick's Day, which was also my mom's birthday. The Celtic music (Irish and Scots, mostly) is in honor of the latter, and also just because I love every song on this list. I haven't listened to enough music recently.
When I was a teenager, the trio of causes that were always yoked (can you yoke three things, or only two?) were South Africa-the North of Ireland-Palestine.* Still true. National struggles are so fucking difficult. Part of me yearns towards Marx's condemnation of the idea of nationalism as dividing the workers of the world. But atavistically, I am glad I am mostly Irish by descent, and I understand how people cling to their national and ethnic identities, especially in light of the only other cultural option that seems to be on offer for ypipo -- undifferentiated whiteness, especially of the Usian variety.**
Normally our weekly staff meeting discussions of race (yes, this is a weekly agenda point at my teaching work place) are guilt-fests that bug the shit out of me, because I've done every anti-racist training ever, multiple times, and did a lot of it as theory in grad school as well, and fucking BELIEVE it, and try to live that belief, okay? But this Friday, it was actually a good discussion prompt for which we were split into duos or in my case a trio -- what has gone into our own racial experience? The two women I was grouped with both had interesting stuff to say, and were clearly actually thinking very seriously about the prompt and their own lives and formative experiences around their own race. One (white) woman grew up in Palo Alto and because her non-bio grandfather was Jewish and there is a big Jewish community in Palo Alto (bigger than around here, anyway) she thought she was a Jew when she was little. The other woman is Filipina and had thought a great deal about the very disparate ways that Filipinos identify. My childhood was basically Race Traitordom, so this was an interesting topic for me, from age 3 to grad school and The Wages of Whiteness. And the general discussion after the small group ones was also interesting as people got into it. I salute Dr. Saheli (our boss, who is not exactly a principal, because he is head of equity, etc. for the District, as well as Student Services (trying to prevent expulsions, basically), as well as the head of the alternative program I now work for) for coming up with this idea for discussion.
Oooh, I love this Planxty song, "Sweet Thames Flow Softly".
I am reading three novels with my students -- the 8th graders are doing one of my favorite books, Dragonwings by Laurence Yep; the 7th graders are doing Freak the Mighty, by Rodman Philbrick; and the 6th graders are reading Homecoming by Cynthia Voigt. One of the very, very many things I love about the latter is that the mother who disappears right at the beginning of the novel had always sung to her four kids, and on their long slog to a new home and safety, they self-soothe by singing various folk songs. I am making a Google Slides show to illustrate this book (I always do this unless I am unenthused about the book [sorry, Freak the Mighty... I already read The Midwife's Apprentice with the 7th graders, and I DO love that one and have a very long Slides show for it...] -- anyway, for some bizarre reason I had not yet made one for Homecoming... I guess I haven't taught it as often as I would like. Though god knows I've read it probably more than 30 times.
In the Slides show, which I am nowhere near done with, some of the things I am putting in are a couple of videos -- so far three folk songs the mother is said to have sung, which the kids also sing together -- "Pretty Peggy-O", "The Riddle Song", "Who Will Sing for Me?" so far -- with "The Water is Wide," and a couple more to come. Also a YouTube video of how to dig clams, which the kids do at one point.
Man, I love making curriculum stuff.
Look at this, an actual entry.
* A random note on this... my older niece Ruby is two-fisting Palestine demos today, one in downtown Oakland and the other immediately afterwards in San Francisco. In some ways she is having a good 20s right now, in that last night's activity was a Nicki Minaj concert. In other ways, it fucking SUCKS, because she is so, so, so depressed by how little effect mass protests have on intransigent FUCKERS in the US, Britain, and Israel. I try to talk to her about historical periods and the impossibility of voluntarism and substitutionism, but that shit is hard to hear when you are in your 20s. She had a crap experience in YDSA, and now doesn't want to join DSA because she cannot imagine being in the same political group as her dad (she asks me in utter disbelief how **I** could do it... it never occurred to me that it was weird to be in the same political group as my mother, my father, my stepmother, and at one point my sister and brother-in-law.)
** Also... when I read Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time the first time, sometime in high school, I think... there were two things that I had real difficulty with (difficulty in the first place that was only resolved when I finally embraced feminism in college, with the reading of Comrade and Lover: the Letters of Rosa Luxemburg and Leo Jogiches edited by Elzbieta Ettinger) -- the idea of separating reproduction from biological sex, and the idea that anyone could choose their ethnicity/identity. I still have issues with the latter. How can you choose to "be" Black (Rachel Dolezal), or another oppressed nationality, without having generations of that lived oppression? I think it was Piercy's attempt to deconstruct nationalist liberation politics, but...
I love rain, the heavier the better. Living in England for a year, I did not mind one bit the fact that it was grey and rainy for weeks on end. Months on end? Lots of rain and mist and clouds, anyway...
I have my Celtic music list playing on shuffle. There are only 160 songs on it (which seems weird, my folk favorites list is maybe four times that (though it probably contains all of these songs too, and the Bollywood one is also maybe three times as big...). But two holidays are coming up that were big in my youth: International Women's Day, this coming Friday, March 8th, and St. Patrick's Day, which was also my mom's birthday. The Celtic music (Irish and Scots, mostly) is in honor of the latter, and also just because I love every song on this list. I haven't listened to enough music recently.
When I was a teenager, the trio of causes that were always yoked (can you yoke three things, or only two?) were South Africa-the North of Ireland-Palestine.* Still true. National struggles are so fucking difficult. Part of me yearns towards Marx's condemnation of the idea of nationalism as dividing the workers of the world. But atavistically, I am glad I am mostly Irish by descent, and I understand how people cling to their national and ethnic identities, especially in light of the only other cultural option that seems to be on offer for ypipo -- undifferentiated whiteness, especially of the Usian variety.**
Normally our weekly staff meeting discussions of race (yes, this is a weekly agenda point at my teaching work place) are guilt-fests that bug the shit out of me, because I've done every anti-racist training ever, multiple times, and did a lot of it as theory in grad school as well, and fucking BELIEVE it, and try to live that belief, okay? But this Friday, it was actually a good discussion prompt for which we were split into duos or in my case a trio -- what has gone into our own racial experience? The two women I was grouped with both had interesting stuff to say, and were clearly actually thinking very seriously about the prompt and their own lives and formative experiences around their own race. One (white) woman grew up in Palo Alto and because her non-bio grandfather was Jewish and there is a big Jewish community in Palo Alto (bigger than around here, anyway) she thought she was a Jew when she was little. The other woman is Filipina and had thought a great deal about the very disparate ways that Filipinos identify. My childhood was basically Race Traitordom, so this was an interesting topic for me, from age 3 to grad school and The Wages of Whiteness. And the general discussion after the small group ones was also interesting as people got into it. I salute Dr. Saheli (our boss, who is not exactly a principal, because he is head of equity, etc. for the District, as well as Student Services (trying to prevent expulsions, basically), as well as the head of the alternative program I now work for) for coming up with this idea for discussion.
Oooh, I love this Planxty song, "Sweet Thames Flow Softly".
I am reading three novels with my students -- the 8th graders are doing one of my favorite books, Dragonwings by Laurence Yep; the 7th graders are doing Freak the Mighty, by Rodman Philbrick; and the 6th graders are reading Homecoming by Cynthia Voigt. One of the very, very many things I love about the latter is that the mother who disappears right at the beginning of the novel had always sung to her four kids, and on their long slog to a new home and safety, they self-soothe by singing various folk songs. I am making a Google Slides show to illustrate this book (I always do this unless I am unenthused about the book [sorry, Freak the Mighty... I already read The Midwife's Apprentice with the 7th graders, and I DO love that one and have a very long Slides show for it...] -- anyway, for some bizarre reason I had not yet made one for Homecoming... I guess I haven't taught it as often as I would like. Though god knows I've read it probably more than 30 times.
In the Slides show, which I am nowhere near done with, some of the things I am putting in are a couple of videos -- so far three folk songs the mother is said to have sung, which the kids also sing together -- "Pretty Peggy-O", "The Riddle Song", "Who Will Sing for Me?" so far -- with "The Water is Wide," and a couple more to come. Also a YouTube video of how to dig clams, which the kids do at one point.
Man, I love making curriculum stuff.
Look at this, an actual entry.
* A random note on this... my older niece Ruby is two-fisting Palestine demos today, one in downtown Oakland and the other immediately afterwards in San Francisco. In some ways she is having a good 20s right now, in that last night's activity was a Nicki Minaj concert. In other ways, it fucking SUCKS, because she is so, so, so depressed by how little effect mass protests have on intransigent FUCKERS in the US, Britain, and Israel. I try to talk to her about historical periods and the impossibility of voluntarism and substitutionism, but that shit is hard to hear when you are in your 20s. She had a crap experience in YDSA, and now doesn't want to join DSA because she cannot imagine being in the same political group as her dad (she asks me in utter disbelief how **I** could do it... it never occurred to me that it was weird to be in the same political group as my mother, my father, my stepmother, and at one point my sister and brother-in-law.)
** Also... when I read Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time the first time, sometime in high school, I think... there were two things that I had real difficulty with (difficulty in the first place that was only resolved when I finally embraced feminism in college, with the reading of Comrade and Lover: the Letters of Rosa Luxemburg and Leo Jogiches edited by Elzbieta Ettinger) -- the idea of separating reproduction from biological sex, and the idea that anyone could choose their ethnicity/identity. I still have issues with the latter. How can you choose to "be" Black (Rachel Dolezal), or another oppressed nationality, without having generations of that lived oppression? I think it was Piercy's attempt to deconstruct nationalist liberation politics, but...
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Date: 2024-03-03 02:10 am (UTC)I love your teaching stories. God I miss having a responsive class.
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Date: 2024-03-06 04:53 am (UTC)Also a weekly forced discussion of race issues at work sounds like my worst nightmare. I'm glad the last discussion was productive and interesting, though.
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Date: 2024-03-07 12:50 am (UTC)"Find Your Phone" spyware on my phone, when I saw her on what is a typical Oakland demo loop around downtown, and then later in SF. She was just ON HER WAY to the demo, meeting friends downtown in Oakland to get on BART. But she's been to many, many Palestine demos -- from here, to LA, to D.C., to Mexico City. My Yemeni students are glad to see photos of her. They're having such a hard time with this. Even some of my non-Muslim students are doing Current Events pieces on news of the war and how unfair it is. Which gives me hope.