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maeve66I say pensive for my mood because I've had a swing from miserably low and wretched (all day yesterday) to relieved and happy, except that it's always hard to recover from wrong ill-news.
That is, yesterday, a teacher came to my room and told me that he'd seen in the paper that one of my students, from my first year of teaching -- a student I remembered well, saw several times over the past five years, and had just had (shitty) news about, a month earlier (that he was in jail) -- had been shot and killed on Wednesday. And I was distraught and unhappy all day, breaking into tears and snatching a kid I really like and care about (who reminds me forcibly of the one the papers reported as dead) out of class to tell him that this was NOT the news I wanted ever to hear about HIM and he needed to get straight and stop playing the fool, acting the thug, pretending that "street" cool is worth more than the supportive parents he has and the opportunities they provide him are worth. He said he was "touched" by my concern, that I would lecture him like that, passionately and in language I would not ordinarily utter on school grounds. Yeah, he used the word touched. He can code-switch with ease... that is part of my frustration with him.
This morning, another teacher called me after reading the paper to tell me that the papers had printed a retraction, that the police had misidentified the dead boy not as the 19 year old I'd known, but as a 15 year old student from Fremont High, who'd been acquainted with the young man I'd had as a student. So I don't know if my guy really is still in prison or what. But I prefer that to death, though it's hard and horrible to be relieved when SOMEONE's 15 year old child is dead. This fucking inner city trap is so god damned awful, this society that can casually arrange for kids to die for dumb decisions and a lack of alternatives or the internal, hyper-individualized, and almost always imaginary "internal strength" to reject the easy incline to those dumb decisions. I hate it. I hate a system impelled by profit which closes down all alternate avenues because they cost more money, more tax money, because they require more collective social decisions to value human lives. I hate a system based firmly on infrequently verbalized but always present racism. I hate a system that gleefully dismantles, bit by bit, the possibility of a worthwhile, free, equal public education for all.
Okay. And on top of this, I'm reading Foucault's The History of Sexuality Volume I, for the L+P Theory Roundtable meeting this afternoon.
Foucault. He's the least horrible to read of the French deconstructionists, which isn't saying much, as they're all so terribly horrible. And I think I buy the simply stated heart of his analysis of repression/naming/centralization of talk about sex during the supposed height of Victorian prudery. But there are lots of questions I have, that I will be interested to raise today.
A. can't be there, since he's on the East Coast again. But he gets all exercised about the core of deconstructionism as a denial of a unified and constant "human nature" -- well, wait, the "constant" thing isn't fair. He didn't say that, and as a champion of evolutionary theory, I imagine that he would not think of human nature as fixed and unchanging. But unitary and somewhat biological (genetic) in origin? Yes. I doubt that the discussion will center around that, though. He's sad, because he thinks there will be no measured opposition to deconstructionism at the table, only trendy acceptance. Probably so.
Well. There isn't much more school left this year (probably both in the sense I mean, which is that I have four work days left, most of which time will be devoted to practicing for promotion and the actual promotion, itself... and also in the sense that this school is coming apart at the seams and there doesn't seem to be much left to IT, either, after one more year...).
I hope people are having a good weekend -- it seems sunny and beautiful out here in Oakland.
Salut, maeve66
That is, yesterday, a teacher came to my room and told me that he'd seen in the paper that one of my students, from my first year of teaching -- a student I remembered well, saw several times over the past five years, and had just had (shitty) news about, a month earlier (that he was in jail) -- had been shot and killed on Wednesday. And I was distraught and unhappy all day, breaking into tears and snatching a kid I really like and care about (who reminds me forcibly of the one the papers reported as dead) out of class to tell him that this was NOT the news I wanted ever to hear about HIM and he needed to get straight and stop playing the fool, acting the thug, pretending that "street" cool is worth more than the supportive parents he has and the opportunities they provide him are worth. He said he was "touched" by my concern, that I would lecture him like that, passionately and in language I would not ordinarily utter on school grounds. Yeah, he used the word touched. He can code-switch with ease... that is part of my frustration with him.
This morning, another teacher called me after reading the paper to tell me that the papers had printed a retraction, that the police had misidentified the dead boy not as the 19 year old I'd known, but as a 15 year old student from Fremont High, who'd been acquainted with the young man I'd had as a student. So I don't know if my guy really is still in prison or what. But I prefer that to death, though it's hard and horrible to be relieved when SOMEONE's 15 year old child is dead. This fucking inner city trap is so god damned awful, this society that can casually arrange for kids to die for dumb decisions and a lack of alternatives or the internal, hyper-individualized, and almost always imaginary "internal strength" to reject the easy incline to those dumb decisions. I hate it. I hate a system impelled by profit which closes down all alternate avenues because they cost more money, more tax money, because they require more collective social decisions to value human lives. I hate a system based firmly on infrequently verbalized but always present racism. I hate a system that gleefully dismantles, bit by bit, the possibility of a worthwhile, free, equal public education for all.
Okay. And on top of this, I'm reading Foucault's The History of Sexuality Volume I, for the L+P Theory Roundtable meeting this afternoon.
Foucault. He's the least horrible to read of the French deconstructionists, which isn't saying much, as they're all so terribly horrible. And I think I buy the simply stated heart of his analysis of repression/naming/centralization of talk about sex during the supposed height of Victorian prudery. But there are lots of questions I have, that I will be interested to raise today.
A. can't be there, since he's on the East Coast again. But he gets all exercised about the core of deconstructionism as a denial of a unified and constant "human nature" -- well, wait, the "constant" thing isn't fair. He didn't say that, and as a champion of evolutionary theory, I imagine that he would not think of human nature as fixed and unchanging. But unitary and somewhat biological (genetic) in origin? Yes. I doubt that the discussion will center around that, though. He's sad, because he thinks there will be no measured opposition to deconstructionism at the table, only trendy acceptance. Probably so.
Well. There isn't much more school left this year (probably both in the sense I mean, which is that I have four work days left, most of which time will be devoted to practicing for promotion and the actual promotion, itself... and also in the sense that this school is coming apart at the seams and there doesn't seem to be much left to IT, either, after one more year...).
I hope people are having a good weekend -- it seems sunny and beautiful out here in Oakland.
Salut, maeve66
