O Brave New World...

Almost forgot. Man, five more posts after this one.

James Lincoln Collier has been writing historical YAF since the 1960s, and the book he's probably best known for -- which he cowrote with his brother, Christopher Collier, as he did several others -- is My Brother Sam is Dead, written in 1975. I used to see it on the shelf at the Evanston Public Library, as I would run my finger along the bottom looking for titles I hadn't read that sounded interesting. It's about the American Revolution, and the quandary of Tory families. That's an interesting topic. But I chose to read Esther Forbes' 1944 Newbery Award winning Johnny Tremain, instead. Now that's an excellent book, with plenty of historical detail of silversmithing, Paul Revere, Boston, the lead up to the American Revolution, and a great struggle to overcome adversity. My Brother Sam is Dead is just not that good. Better than that is Collier's trilogy, also about the early American Republic, but taking on the issue of slavery.

Jump Ship to Freedom is a YAF novel about a young man, Daniel, whose father won his freedom by fighting for the Continental Army, but who died while out fishing, after the war, before he could buy his son's and wife's freedom. He had saved his pay, in Continental army scrip, and much of the plot of the book revolves around whether Daniel will be able to convert that worthless paper into actual money. Daniel escapes to pursue that dream, and ends up in New York City, where he interacts with members of the Constitutional Convention. Essentially, Christopher Collier was a historian who fed his writer brother facts to make accessible to preteens, so what I can say about this book is that it's a pretty good explanation of the three-fifths clause as the linch pin of passing the Constitution. Which doesn't augur particularly well for the brilliance of plot, characterization, or dialogue. Still, it's pretty good. I've used it as a teaching tool a few times, in fact, and own, somewhere, a class set, in paperback. The books which complete the trilogy are War Comes to Willy Freeman and Who is Carrie?.

Strangely, though, his best book is (okay, actually this is not that strange; it makes perfect sense, as I will explain in a minute): The Jazz Kid, which is about a white kid in Chicago in the 1920s who falls in love with black music -- with jazz. This subject is obviously close to Collier's heart, as according to Wikipedia he is, himself, a jazz musician. And the protagonist is white, as he is himself. I don't think he writes black characters particularly successfully, which isn't a huge shock. I can only think of one or two white authors who manage it at all. Maybe just one; I'll have to think about it. I mean, as a main character. Still, The Jazz Kid, of all of these, is well worth reading. It's far more culturally convincing and nuanced than all of his other books combined (though I have not read the one about the beatnik guitar teacher, called The Teddy Bear Hero.)

I'm trying to get this post done long before midnight. That would be good.

I said I would write about one of my favorite subgenres -- historical YAF -- and I am going to start doing that. Oddly, though I love it very much, right now I do not see as many authors' names as I would have expected. Possibly they will keep coming back to me. As I said earlier, I refuse to write much about the didactic and annoying Ann Rinaldi. And I've already written about Laurence Yep. But there are more!

For this entry:

Scott O'Dell

Rosemary Sutcliff

Eloise Jarvis McGraw

Well, that's about three for each entry, I am guessing. Though as I say, I may think of others. Note that I am starting with a man. Mostly that's because I want to get him out of the way. I do not enjoy the writing style of Scott O'Dell, though I grant that his extremely famous novel Island of the Blue Dolphins deserves its fame and its inclusion in plenty of reading curricula. Not that there is time, any more, to teach entire novels in middle school Language Arts classes -- oh, NO, we must spend the time teaching writing in various formats, grammar (well, sort of), and analysis of 'literature' through short fiction in textbooks. Which mostly don't have any canonical short stories anymore, anyway. Sometimes, if I am lucky, they have EXCERPTS from good YAF novels, such as, e.g. Karen Cushman.

Anyway. Scott O'Dell. He covers a lot of historical ground and eras, but specializes in indigenous cultures of the Americas, which is worth while. Not many people do that well, though as I said in an earlier entry, I think that Clare Bell did it better with regard to tribes subject to the Mayan empire. He's good at different cultures. He has that flat male affect I do not enjoy in fiction. Should reads for Scott O'Dell: Island of the Blue Dolphin, published in 1960... I'm thinking his 1969 Journey to Jericho sounds pretty good, too, though that may be because it sounds a great deal like the historical novels I prefer by Patricia Beatty. It's about an Appalachian miner's son following his father to California. Hm. Some of the reviews call it "a long short story" and praise the simplicity of its writing. That's exactly why I don't much like O'Dell.

Rosemary Sutcliff, on the other hand... you know, her tone is semi-affectless, too. By which I guess I mean it is emotionally detached. Hers, I suspect, though, is that way because she was writing historical YA fiction in the 1950s, jostling with male writers, and dedicated to scholarship. She reminds me a bit of Mary Renault, though of course, I don't know whether (and doubt) she was a dyke. Anyway, her very excellent books are most often about various aspects of pre-Roman and Roman Britain, including an excellently unromanticized (or at least, romanticized in a very different way) take on King Arthur. She's sort of a poet of the 'dying of the light' which she clearly believes happens when Rome gives up on controlling Britain and then, to boot, its empire is overrun by Germanic barbarians. I own a lot of her books. She was writing largely in the 1950s, but continued on into the 60s, 70s, and at least had some reprinting going on in the 1980s. Her stuff is all very male-centric (much as Renault's is) and stoic. I sort of think of it as the kind of thinking a pre-feminist does: screw what girls are supposed to like, I'm going to be like a BOY... with some unacknowledged dislike of inferior female characters. Anyway, I forgive her this, because I like her historical detail.

Eloise Jarvis McGraw is a welcome rebuttal to that kind of writing, though she didn't get much published. Still, her two main books are perennial favorites, and give GREAT daily life details for Ancient Egypt. Her Mara, Daughter of the Nile is a romance, a spy adventure, a historical imagining of the past (with a certain analysis of Hatshepsut which more recent revisionists would scorn)... it's great. Aimed at teenage girls. I have managed to interest some of my students in this book. One of my favorite girls this past year -- half of a pair of twins... and I had both of them, though luckily not in the same period -- she liked the book so much that she drew me her version of the cover, which I promptly fake-laminated and stuck on my wall. Needless to say, I've kept it with the best of my student work and took it home when I emptied my classroom, this past June. McGraw also has a book aimed at younger kids, called The Golden Goblet. It's a good mystery and adventure, and gives great detail about the lives of Ancient Egypt's craftsmen. Really, you learn so much from these books... which is part of my fascination with them. Such a painless way to pick up information. She's written on American history, too (one of the many 'white captive' novels, if I recall correctly, Moccasin Trail) and according to Wikipedia, won three Newbery medals in three different decades, which is pretty awesome. Her last novel (she was born in 1915 and died in 2000, making her my grandmother's almost exact contemporary, which is interesting) was The Moorchild, which, again if I recall correctly, dabbled in fantasy -- the notion of changelings. Seriously, though, read Mara, Daughter of the Nile. It's excellent.

I'll continue with the other authors tomorrow.

I don't know exactly why I haven't updated for shit, recently. It's summer; I've got the time. I'm doing pretty well at not falling into my general summer habit of staying up ridiculously late and then sleeping during the day. Partly, my summer is starting off with classes and trainings that don't really permit that.

Anyway, I thought I would use this entry to kill two birds with one stone: continue writing about some of the YAF authors on my long, long, long-assed list, and make what I write one of the assignments I turn in for the final class I need to take to clear my multiple subject teaching credential. I hope it is the final class. I may need to take CPR again (so annoying) and I have to prove to the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing that I DID take the stupid Health Ed requirement. Which I did. I don't know where proof of that lies, sadly, since I took it through Oakland Unified. But I did take it.

So. The class I am taking, the possible LAST class, is through Cal Berkeley Extension, and it's on Mainstreaming Students with Disabilities. I think it is fantastic. SO much better than the version I attempted last Fall, which was online and dreadful. I really, really like this instructor, who is a counselor specializing in adolescents and adults with ADHD as well as a graduate professor of education. She's awesome. And herewith, annotated reviews of several YAF books that focus on or include as major characters young people with disabilities. And possibly one film -- we'll see.

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As a middle school teacher of Language Arts, I try to have a wide knowledge of contemporary and more classic (or just less current) young adult fiction. I also try to maintain a large library with what I consider are the best examples of these. That doesn't mean I exclude R. L. Stine and K. A. Applegate, both factories churning out series titles -- horror and science-fiction, respectively -- which are very popular and very easy to read. I just don't read them myself, or care whether they get dogeared or are stolen. I admit that I cater to my own tastes, too -- I have a vast collection of historical fiction written for children and teenagers, some excellent, some merely covering a place and time I consider useful. I also choose books that offer students (potential) opportunities to identify with characters like themselves. Working in West Oakland, I made it a priority to find YAF that centered around African-American characters, and was written by African-American authors, or at the very least extremely good non-Black authors -- some of the historical fiction had white authors who managed not to be terrible in that regard. In the district I work in now, I look for novels in Spanish, in translation, but also for books which reflect the Latino/a immigrant experience, Mexicans in the United States, turmoil in Central America and so on. I also have gathered, over the years, a number of books whose main character or major supporting characters live with a disability of some kind. My reasons for having these books -- well, if I'd thought about it, my reasons would have been to -- again -- offer models and opportunities for identification for my students, and to offer vicarious opportunities for students without disabilities to "step into someone else's shoes", or take perspective. In fact, however, I didn't think about it, exactly. The following titles are books which meet those goals, but which I collected more because they are very good fiction -- well-written, interesting, mind-stretching, emotion-evoking fiction. I offer this annotated list as a resource for teachers of students aged 11 through 15 or so.

Blindness/Deafness

Okay, this first one isn't a book. But it's a classic movie which is still amazingly effective even with jaded students who play fast action video games in color every afternoon. I refer to the movie The Miracle Worker with Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke playing Annie Sullivan and the famous Helen Keller. The Miracle Worker not only gives what seems to be a pretty accurate portrayal of the world a deaf-blind child could create for herself in the absence of any more complex means of communication than miming, but makes it very, very clear to any watcher that the facts of a disability mean nothing whatsoever about the quality of the mind in that body. Helen Keller was brilliant, stubborn, brave, and resourceful, and that is clear in the movie as well as in any biographical material about the socialist speaker.

ADHD

This is a more recent focus of attention in schools -- was that a pun? Not sure. Anyway, when I was in school, there was no such diagnosis, and a student with the range of symptoms which might produce that description now would probably have been called "a handful." But we have named it, now, and now students with this label are well aware of it. Some of them, in my experience, are able to use their self-knowledge to get accommodations for themselves. Some of them, not yet. One series of books which I think is wonderful both in giving students a sympathetic mirror to look into, and to offer deep recognition, is about a boy named Joey Pigza, a fifth grader (I think -- maybe he starts out as a fourth grader?) and is by Jack Gantos. In my longer treatment of YAF, these books would also go under a category I want to write about -- novels with working class culture and roots. There are far fewer of these than I would like to see -- most novels for teens are firmly rooted in the middle or upper-middle class, and if their class identification shifts for one or two titles, the attempt is often awkward and unconvincing. An example in this regard is an author I like very much, but who can't really write anything that isn't middle to upper-middle class, or anything that isn't white. That would be Andrew Clements, an otherwise great author of school stories.

Anyway. Jack Gantos' protagonist Joey Pigza, is a handful. His mother is divorced from his father (who seems also to be a handful) and in the first novel, Joey lives with his paternal grandmother, who is eccentric to say the least. Throughout the first novel, called Joey Pigza Swallows the Key (2000), Joey is confused and sometimes tormented by his inability to fit in with the norms of classroom behavior. The depiction of what it feels like to have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder is very powerful, and very specific. Gantos evokes the physical sensations as well as what seems almost like a manic emotional high. He is on medications, but they do not work well. By the end of the novel, he is transferred from a mainstream environment to what seems to be SDC while a more competent and concerned teacher helps him both with meds and with coping techniques. This novel obviously deals with very controversial ideas -- whether and how to mainstream, for instance, and the place and utility of medication -- but it does not state anything monolithically. In the course of the four books, in fact, Joey's education seems to run the gamut from mainstreaming to segregated Special Education to being withdrawn from public education and home-schooled by a Christian acquaintance of Joey's mother. It is as though the author wants to explore several different avenues of how Joey can deal with his life, his education, and his interactions with others.

There are four books in the series, so far, and it may end there. I haven't read the fourth one yet, but the titles are, in order: Joey Pigza Swallows the Key, Joey Pigza Loses Control, What Would Joey Do?, and I am not Joey Pigza. I really wish I had these books on tape.

Amputation/prosthetic limbs

Cynthia Voigt is an amazing author of young adult fiction. She is prolific and she is especially good at complex characterizations which are often ambivalent. None of her characters are flat. In Izzy, Willy Nilly, she tells the story of a young middle class high school student, moderately popular, moderately pretty, moderately good in school, whose life is disrupted when she allows her older date to drive her home drunk from a party. In the crash, the driver walks away, but Izzy loses a leg, or more accurately, her right leg below the knee joint. The novel is a journey for Izzy through dealing with this change. She denies it, revolts against it, is deeply depressed for much of the story, and slowly comes to terms with it. Her life changes as a result of losing a leg, but in some ways, Voigt seems to argue that she comes away a better person for having to struggle. She is dropped by her own popular clique and slowly becomes friends with a much smarter, more awkward and honest misfit. She sees herself and her old friends through a more thoughtful, if painful, prism. I don't think that the book is didactic or preachy -- Voigt never is -- but she handles emotions and nuance very, very well.

Learning Disabilities

Cynthia Voigt is also the only author of YAF I can think of right this minute who has a major character who would have an IEP (Individualized Education Plan, for students who qualify for Resource Specialist Programs), at any school I've taught in. In her series on the fictional Tillerman family, the younger daughter, Maybeth, is "slow" -- she does not have mental retardation, but is frequently identified as "retarded" by children and teachers alike. She has been held back in school once already, and in the first book is about to be held back again, so that she would be in the second grade for a third time, this time with her younger brother. Throughout the series, Voigt develops Maybeth's abilities and explores her processing issues. She has trouble both with language processing when using the whole language teaching methodology and the memorization of lists of sight words, and with mathematic concepts like fractions. Yet she can learn to read using phonics, and she has perfect pitch and the ability to read music and recall songs and melodies very quickly and accurately. The second novel in the series, Dicey's Song, even has her older brother James, a gifted student, research teaching methods that might help Maybeth once she is allowed to proceed into third grade instead of being retained. The book is useful not only for is portrait of Maybeth as a multidimensional character, with many graces and talents, but for its exploration of how families can look for resources to help members with processing issues, and how they can understand difference.

Mental Illness

The book I selected for this category was surprising to me, because its author is more well-known for her own vast factory-like production of The Babysitters Club series novels. Ann M. Martin has been trying her hand, lately, at more complicated, 1960s-based, class-located first person novels, and two of these are very good indeed. These novels are Here Today, and A Corner of the Universe. It is the latter which tackles the subject of mental illness in the secondary major character. Hattie, a girl living in a small town in 1960, meets her uncle Adam, of whose existence she had been utterly ignorant, when his specialized private boarding school closes down. It is not exactly clear what her uncle's diagnosis is -- some level of autism, it seems, signaled by an encyclopedic knowledge of the I Love Lucy show, and the use of lines from that show to mediate most social situations. But Hattie's relationship to her newfound uncle -- by far the closest forged by anyone in her family -- makes Adam a real person, whose differences stop being frightening and begin to be understandable. The novel is aimed at 9 to 14 year olds, but I agree with the Amazon.com reviewer who felt that age bracket skewed too young: the ending of this novel is tragic, and its darkness would be very hard for most children under 12 or 13.

Cerebral Palsy

Finally (I could probably keep going for quite a while, but I am going to stop, I think) there is the novel Libby on Wednesdays by Zilpha Keatley Snyder. The main character of the book has no disability except a social awkwardness caused by being homeschooled by an unworldly poet father. But when she is forced to go to middle school for socialization purposes, the Gifted And Talented Education program places her in an after school writing club which meets on Wednesdays. There, she meets an ungainly assortment of other students whose writing is fascinating and creatively compelling, one way or another. She does not expect to like any of them, but slowly comes to respect and enjoy them all. The first student she gets to know is a boy named Alex, who is called a spaz by other students because he has cerebral palsy and cannot control his limbs well, at all. He writes his stories on computer and composes parodies of almost any genre, lickety split. The depiction of a boy with cerebral palsy, again, underscores the fact that mental ability is not the limiting factor -- if there is a limiting factor -- in a disability.

Working as a middle school teacher, teen (and preteen) pregnancy is something I've encountered both in the classroom -- though the seventh grade girl in question managed to snow ALL the teachers at my school for her entire pregnancy, by wearing a puffy down jacket all year -- and heard about after the fact. It has rarely seemed as benign and sweet as Juno, though I liked the movie a lot. However. A friend recently wrote me asking for book recommendations on teen pregnancy and self esteem, more or less. I found myself with a weird juxtaposition of books. Here is what came to mind:

From the 1960s (books I read, over and over, as a teenager) (um, in the early 1980s)

Mr. and Mrs. Bo Jo Jones is about class divisions and teen pregnancy in the South in the 1960s. The author is Ann Head, and the book was published in 1968, though the counterculture touches only very lightly on this novel. An upper-middle class white girl from an old, genteel Southern family is rebelliously going out with a working class jock -- the aforenamed Bo Jo Jones -- from very much the wrong side of the tracks. She gets pregnant. They drive across state lines to Alabama, I think, and get married, and then try to be married as teenagers. It's actually a complicated book about class and gender expectations of the time. It wouldn't be at all useful for the purpose my friend wanted.

There is also a trilogy by one of my preferred British young adult fiction authors -- K. M. Peyton, better known for her horse-and-girl books, and her Flambards books -- which deals with the same sort of middle class girl, working class boy, unintended pregnancy, then marriage scenario. The first book is called (depending on whether it is the British or American imprint) Pennington's Last Term, or Pennington's Seventeenth Summer. The sequel is Pennington's Heir, and the last is The Beethoven Medal. Pennington is the scruffy working class lout with horrible parents who, nonetheless, in the form of a horrible mother, push him to take private piano lessons because he is a prodigy. One of the jewels of early scenes is him, in school, forced to play for school assembly, and knowing that "O Tannenbaum" drives the master wild because it is also the tune for "The Workers' Flag is Deepest Red", or one of the tunes for it, and thus a Communist song which he plays over and over. Ruth is a horsy girl (I think she has another book of her own, prior to her fate as a pregnant teenager) who falls for Pennington and gets knocked up just after he's released from Borstal. These books are very good about repressed and also dark and unsure emotions. The tone is very, very well done. Their trials and frustrations and temptations and problems are realistic and compelling. Again, however, not really suited to 2008 and West Oakland.

Imani All Mine, by Connie Porter (bizarrely, she is also the author of the American Girl "Addy" books) is closer to the mark, although I thought the ending kind of spiralled out of drama into melodrama. The teenage mother in this book is black, fifteen, and living in Buffalo, New York. The setting is the mid 1990s. She has a daughter she has named Imani, which means Faith. And she covered up her pregnancy much the way my student did. The story deals with the very difficult theme of rape, and, as I say, spins out, at the end. I am also unclear about how the entrance of storefront evangelical Christianity worked with the plot, although obviously the daughter's name makes that link, too. The book is written in urban black English, and is fairly consistent and not patronizing in that. I've read much, much worse, usually when attempted by whitey -- Marilyn Levy comes forcibly to mind. Connie Porter, according to Wikipedia, grew up in public housing in Lackawanna, New York, thus knowing of what she writes.

But the book that I think is the best of these is one by Rita Garcia Williams called Like Sisters on the Homefront, which is also written in urban black English. Williams wrote two related books about teenage friends in Queens, NY. One is part of another sort of African-American YAF girls' subgenre, as it involves dance -- I can think of at least four such books off hand. That one is called Blue Tights.

In Like Sisters on the Homefront, the main character, Gayle, is a fourteen or fifteen year old girl who has a one year old son, and, in the opening paragraphs of the book, is caught by her mother in the bathroom, throwing up from morning sickness. Where this book departs from the usual after school specials (as Imani All Mine also differs from them) is that Gayle is treated as an agent and the functioning mother of her son. Unlike Imani All Mine or any other YAF book on this subject that I've seen, in the next paragraph of the book, Gayle's mother has hauled her down to the local clinic and scheduled an abortion. I have read this book aloud at least three times in middle school classes. Once I was reading this section, on the abortion, aloud in front of an Oakland district administrator. She walked in while I was already reading, on a surprise visit. That was fun. She was dubious, but admitted to being impressed by how students reacted.

Anyway, Like Sisters on the Homefront is also an unusual book because it treats one of the common themes in black communities -- at least in Oakland -- of parents sending their children back to their Southern relatives once they've been exposed to trauma or trouble. Gayle's enforced exile to Georgia and her preacher Uncle Luther and very churchfolk aunt and cousin Cookie, and especially her dying Great-grandmother, Great, is wonderful and incredibly touching. Difficult. Full of ambivalence and resistance. But deeply emotional. I am usually in tears, in class, by the end, and not manipulated ones. I highly recommend this book; it's one of my very favorites.

PS: after writing this, I thought of another 60s classic: Lynne Reid Banks' The L-Shaped Room, which is unwed late teenage pregnancy in London. It's very good, though again, not anything my friend could use.

So. In my classes, during the 7th grade World History portion (which I am not really even supposed to be teaching the beginners in my afternoon class, but whatever), we are exploring The Rise of Islam. We look at the life of Muhammad, the Five Pillars, the Sunnis and Shi'ites, and the first four caliphs. We also look at the role of literacy in the spread of Islam, and at cultural forms. So right now in class we're doing a mini art project where students design repeating patterns after looking at examples of Islamic art, and as part of it, they incorporate their names, spelled phonetically in Arabic. Which means they have to get familiar with the Arabic alphabet. Therefore, I made a simplified version, and here it is. People with expertise can feel free to correct me severely, but I'll tell you that I already know I haven't included all the letters or ALL the forms of all the letters, or the other non-alphabetic marks. Believe me, it's an advance that I got two forms of the letters. I'm actually slowly starting to recognize and be able to sound out SOME of the letters, and write them without consulting this chart. I'm good at A, R, M, N, S, L, Ayn, Sh, Wow, Yay, one of the Ts, (the one that looks like a lowercase italic B, sort of), and K.



I like this. I want to learn Arabic. I also want to learn Farsi and Hindi, but for starters, Arabic.

Oh, god, I love my job. I mean, administering an endless stream of CELDT tests is daunting and horrid, but... but the teaching is fucking so FUN. These were the kids I wanted to teach when I moved to Oakland, even though my seven year sojourn in West Oakland, teaching the grandchildren of Panthers was wonderful in lots of ways. Painful and awful in lots of other ways, though not many of those had to do with the students.

But... but... we're looking at and making poetry right now, as I sort out what their reading levels are and all, and journalling. They journal first thing when they come into class, and I learn all sorts of fascinating things from what they write. I've always liked that as an assignment, for that reason. Some students find it a new way of handling their emotions and what's preoccupying them. Some just write to get it over with, and it still has good effects in that case.

This morning and afternoon, though, I had promised them I would bring in some music. I've already sung various songs for them, because I'll basically do anything in a class if I think it relates. Anything. So. I played them the Coup's Wear Clean Draws just because I like it. There's no real poetic lesson in The Coup, or at least in that song. But I wanted them to hear it.

And then I played Leon Gieco's Solo le pido a Dios. The morning class was underwhelmed. They have higher English fluency and many of them were born here. It didn't speak to them, and they weren't aware that it might have, to their parents. In the afternoon class, at least four kids were singing along (with me). Two others asked who sang it* and were clearly affected by it. It's a beautiful song. I wish I could link to it. It also illustrates repetition of both phrases and ideas, so it's good for talking about poetic forms. Here are some of the words:

Solo le pido a Dios
Que el dolor no me sea indiferente
Que la reseca muerte no me encuentre
vacia y solo sin haber hecho lo suficiente

Solo le pido a Dios
Que el injusto no me sea indiferente
Que no me ofrecer la otra mejilla
despues de que una garra me arana esta suerte

Solo le pido a Dios
Que la guerra no me sea indiferente
Es un monstruo grande y pisa fuerte
Toda la pobre inocencia de la gente

Es un monstruo grande y pisa fuerte
Toda la pobre inocencia de la gente

*Leon Gieco is an Argentine pop folk artist who wrote and sang against the dictatorship. He has links to the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, the mothers' activist organization around the disappeared.

A friend pointed out that she hadn't even known that I'd started teaching. I guess it's time to update.

I don't think I wrote about it in here (did I?) although I've talked to friends about it a fair amount. While I was in Chicago, my principal called -- it was early August, like, the third or fourth of August. She told me that she needed to change my teaching assignment. Now, this is absolutely fucking routine in Oakland proper, where one cannot count on one's teaching assignment remaining stable even once the school year has started. Mine was shifted as late as November one year, and fairly often in October. It's all nonsense, there. And chaos, and ill management, and just general instability in the school population, too: it's very hard to predict how many students who are projected to show up will actually arrive. But that's not true here in this new district.

Anyway, my new teaching assignment... I didn't feel like I could refuse to switch, because I'd used up all my outrage and fury and just... bald, balking refusal when she asked me to teach math/science, in the Spring. So I accepted. The new assignment is to teach English Language Learners, or English Language Development. With the population my school serves, this is really mostly Spanish speakers, although there is sometimes a Chinese speaker or a Punjabi speaker or the like.

That's what I knew then. What I found out last Friday is that it's not just being an ELL teacher, rather than a plain old 7th grade Language Arts/Social Studies Core teacher, but the ELL Coordinator for my site. I am not sure why I am not collapsing from being overwhelmed and stressed out by that. But I don't seem to be. So far, after two days, I feel like maybe I'll be able to do this and rise to the challenge and blah blah blah. I tend to feel very competent in questions of being organized about paperwork and tracking data and testing stuff. Doing that AND planning lessons... well, there is a curriculum and textbooks, at least, and it's even one I'm familiar with -- I taught it in Oakland for three years, where I was kind of ambivalent about the fact that I somewhat liked the program, even though it's scripted.

So, anyway, school started Monday, and I like my students very much. The composition of my classes will change a lot as the testing results start accumulating -- I'm supposed to have the students who have the least English. But they seem very, very nice. That's actually the part I'm least sure of: teaching English as a Second Language to kids who've just arrived. Especially if there are only a few and the rest of the class is orally fluent. I'm not sure how to balance it. But I also sort of feel like... like maybe I could become good at this.

PS. this icon has nothing to do with this entry, but I love it -- it's a Bollywood hero brandishing a hammer and sickle at his enemies, because, well, coolies/porters are the workers of the world, innit?

For March, as Women's History Month, I am telling students about various women in French history, in chronological order. The first woman the internet told me about (more than I already knew about her, which wasn't much) was Sainte Geneviève, the patron saint of Paris. She's actually much cooler than most martyred-by-violent-rape saints.

The semi-firm dates: 422 - 512 CE. Here's my mangled version of her story: she was apparently the daughter of an educated and well-off couple in Nanterre, only what, 200 years since the fall of the Roman empire? People in the Gallic regions spoke Langue d'Oc and Langue d'Oeil still, and had names that sound more Latin than anything else, though hers is derived from the Gaelic for "the white wave" -- genovefa, according to the internets. It was a site about Celtic saints, so who knows.

Anyway, she was a bright and brainy seven year old when Germanus, the Bishop of Auxerre, stopped in Nanterre, spoke with her parents at Mass, and tried to entice her into the only career open to women who didn't want to marry and have kids, the Church. Several years later, around age 15, she travelled the short-ish distance to Paris and took the veil.

She's famous not for miracles, per se, (a relief to me, atheist that I am, reciting this stuff to credulous thirteen year olds) but for rallying women to prayer (twice) in a war-threatened city. The first time, Attila the Hun was nearing Paris, and the men of Paris were fleeing, and she rallied women to the church to pray to god, and the men were so shamed that they stayed. At the last minute, the Magyars (or whatever -- the Huns?) swerved south to Orléans and were stopped before they got there.

The second time, Childeric of the Franks was beseiging Paris and supposedly she gathered some laymen and organized boats on the Seine, under cover of darkness, to get through the enemy lines to outlying villages, where they collected grain to bring back to the city the same way, thus breaking the siege, in part.

Childeric won anyway, but was impressed with her and lenient to the city. She tried to convert him to Christianity and failed, but is credited with converting his son Clovis, who was then the first Christian King of the Franks.

Apparently she was known from Ireland to Byzantium during her lifetime, and all of it without magical intervention.

Next week, I'll do Eleanor of Aquitaine and Jeanne d'Arc, and the week after that, I'll leave behind the church and royalty, and do Charlotte Corday and Manon Roland, and the week after that, Louise Michel (my absolute favorite) and Marie Curie.

If anyone has other suggestions, I'll be glad to hear them. I don't want to do Marie Antoinette except to curl my lip at her. I am considering George Sand, but I've never read any of her work. Camille Claudel is depressing as hell.

Despite my atheism, it's DAMN hard to celebrate true joyfulness with other exclamations:


I have a new JOB!

The story is actually even stranger than the one I told in the last entry, about teaching second grade bilingual. Literally as I was driving down the freeway to my pro-forma (apparently it was a mostly foregone conclusion that they wanted to hire me) interview in this new district, my cell phone rang. Like an idiot, I fumbled in my shoulder bag to answer it. It was the principal of the school where I'd actually interviewed -- the middle school that had wanted to hire me, except for the fucking credential issues. But she was very excited and tense on the phone, asking whether I'd signed anything yet with the elementary school. I said no. She said that it was "all fair", then, and that she'd talked with the district's credentialling person and they thought that this middle school could hire me into a new fulltime position teaching FRENCH. She said they wouldn't know until Wednesday evening, but in fact, after my interview with the elementary school, where it was clear they were desperate and ready to take a chance on someone who'd never taught those whom raptis calls "tiddlers" before, I had three different messages to call Personnel, where the woman I reached told me she would have a contract typed up by 8 AM this morning, as long as I had some proof that I am pursuing a French credential.

Oh, my fucking christ. I haven't talked about it much in this journal, because most of my seething frustration in this area dates back to being forced to stop getting a single subject French credential in 2001, because Oakland eviscerated the electives program for middle schools. I had taught French 1999-2000, and it was insanely fun. It wasn't much like work, really, as far as I could tell. I loved making curriculum, I loved speaking French all day, I loved getting students turned on to language and watching them fall for French, in particular.

Anyway, once Oakland scrapped electives (drama, art, music, language, and anything else that might once have been taught -- Lowell had rooms that had clearly been intended as home ec and cooking classes), I felt like there were so few job opportunities in foreign language that I might as well accede to the District's demand that I get a multiple subject credential, so I'd be qualified to teach Language Arts/Social Science Core -- HA! given recent events. Not that I didn't worry about that, even back then.

Now... I didn't even APPLY for this job, and it's the job above all others that I would have wanted, had I known it existed and was possible.

So I signed a contract this morning, filled out reams of paperwork, and went to the middle school to look at my classroom. Strangely, for me, this is one of the most important things -- I'll make any classroom I work in beautiful somehow, because I cannot bear to work in ugliness -- but THIS classroom is already gorgeous, even almost empty! The whole back wall is windows, with a long curtain that can be pulled across like an auditorium. The desks are the two-people-at-a-desk-with-undershelf affairs, and those are the ones that I would request if it were in my power to do so, which it never is. The dimensions are good. There are two filing cabinets. It's a blank palette on which I can now begin to work. I can't use most of what I used to have up, though I do have some stuff left from the last time I got to teach French. But I'll accumulate things this year, oh, yes, I will. The first thing I am going to do is get rid of that fucking American flag and put up a French one, a Quebecois one, and a Haitian one. If I can get them. I think I have the first two? I'll have to look. kola and celesteh and nana_b, expect pleading for French realia on a regular basis. Used Carte Oranges, bus tickets, museum entry tickets, advertising posters, ANYTHING!

God, I'm so glad to have a teaching job. I start -- with students -- Monday.

I was going to write this entry just as an exercise in writing to record more or less random minutia (which, arguably, most of my entries are, in any case) -- no Grand Emotions are gripping my breast, or wherever those Victorian notions are supposed to physically reside.

But I wanted a cup of tea to accompany my written ramblings. So I went into my kitchen, not without fear and trembling. Things have Gotten Out of Hand, in my kitchen, in the past several weeks. A friend told me last night, as we went out to dinner and then somewhat oddly exchanged Tips and Hints on organizing space and cleaning from women's magazines and friends' hard-won domestic wisdom, that "the secret to keeping your kitchen clean, the theory, that is, is that you must never let ANYTHING sully the kitchen sink." He explained that the sink is the metaphorical center of a kitchen, and certainly of its potential for disastrous mess and uncleanliness. So if you always do every individual dish or utensil, much less whole dinners' worth of plates and pans... well, magically, nothing ELSE will accumulate.

I believe this theory with the kind of simple faith that comes with a silver-bullet solution combined with plain common sense. I think I ought to try it. God knows letting dishes pile up in the sink demonstrably has the OPPOSITE effect.

Anyway, I went into my kitchen to make a cup of tea, and then quailed before the towering stacks of vilely filthy dishes and pans and pots and bowls, and OLD cups of tea with, literally, mold growing happily on top of the now rancid dregs of cold liquid. Truly revolting. I don't even know if this is wise, to reveal the phenomenally messy nature of my household, at moments. But I guess I am revealing it. It IS, I hasten to assure you (you, my imagined readers) a temporary phenomenon.

And that's what happened, in fact; the phenomenon of that filth became temporary, because I literally couldn't see how I was going to be able to make any tea without doing all the dishes, gathering up trash and groceries that need to be put away, and rationalizing the mess in there.

So I DO have an emotion flooding me, at the moment. Great relief and pleasure that I finally accomplished that nasty task. I wouldn't claim that my kitchen was CLEAN, mind you, because that would take scrubbing the floor on my hands and knees à la Cinderella, frankly. And that ain't gonna happen. Not right now, anyway.

But I can add it to other incremental accomplishments like digging my way out from under vast piles (the bottom layers of which were literally months old) of laundry; cleaning out my hall closet so it can actually be used for storage AND be walked into. Slowly, slowly I am taming this apartment again.

Strangely (or maybe not so strangely) I am better at living in order and calm cleanness when I share space with someone else; I guess as long as that person, too, is someone who prefers order and neatness. Probably if I lived with a slob, I would descend to that easily reached level.

But when I live alone (which I do), it is harder to motivate to do my own social reproduction of my own labor power. It's harder to take the time to do laundry, to clean, to straighten, to do dishes, and especially, to COOK. I infinitely prefer to cook for other people. Cooking for one is ungodly boring.

Oy. Enough of cleaning.

What else is going on, these days? There are now fifteen working days left of the school year. This thought gives me much pleasure. Whatever happens next year, at least it will be NEXT YEAR. A new year always has the potential to be a better year, in teaching. Even in a district as absolutely fucked up as Oakland. I will continue my efforts to get a job somewhere besides Lowell (which will likely be closing, in any case, within a few years -- unless, after two more years, or one more year, it begins to transform into a small high school, one of many options loosed on us unaware by the state administrator, aka, All Forward to the Grand Gentrification of West Oakland, Randolph Ward. The perfect unison of a capitalist restructuring of property in West Oakland (One BART Stop Away from San Francisco's Financial District!!) and the capitalist restructuring (er, elimination) of public education via the "No Child Left Untested" Act; I mean, No Child Left Behind Act.

This is the time of year that teachers wax sentimental, realizing that some of the kids who drove them MOST nuts are the ones they'll miss terribly next year. Especially eighth grade teachers, like me. Every day seems both a little easier -- kids are happier and even though they're a bit hyper with approaching freedom, they're also somewhat calmer since it's finally almost HERE, their cherished summer -- and a little frenetic, as we try to finish up last projects and cram some final pieces of information in their curious heads. I found myself giving a mini lecture on the Cold War and nuclear weapons today, for instance, because none of them knew anything, anything, anything about it.

It's funny. I often find myself sounding like a Stalinist of the first water when I tell kids about the Soviet Union; I'm bending the stick so far in the other direction from what I remember hearing, growing up in the final paroxysms of the Cold War. And they've never HEARD of any social system that doesn't revolve around capital and property and profit. I can't bear to give a nuanced, even-handed treatment of it, at least in the thumbnail that is almost always all I have time for. So I describe the Soviet Union as being against inequality between rich and poor; as having no unemployment; health care for all; housing for all; no homeless, no starving people; support for people fighting against others taking their countries away or trying to control them and rob them (though that would more properly be Cuba than the USSR, after the 30s, anyway)... etc. I allude to the lack of democracy and multiple possibilities of political (or religious) vision only briefly.

I have one student who is very political (though he's never really told me that until recently; but he's clearly taken in the fact that I am... I sometimes wonder how they figure that out: I'm not USUALLY lecturing or teaching about subversion or radical history... I guess I don't hide my anti-war positions, or my positions on gender politics or race, though...) and he was very excited about the discussion of the nuclear arms race and which nation it is that has ever used the atom bomb, and against civilians, at that. But then... then he asked, in the middle of that discussion, whether it was true that the only reason we were at war with Iraq was because of the Jews. Fuck. My face reflected blank astonishment, and then I had just about time before the bell to reject that, but not to explain why that was so utterly wrong an analysis.

Other stuff. The music I am listening to right now is a CD I got at last Friday evening's Freight & Salvage (a coffee house/ folk venue in Berkeley) show, with Mike Seeger (Pete Seeger's stepbrother) and Evo Bluestein. Bluestein plays tons of old timey folk instruments, particularly the autoharp, which I adore. It turned out, in fact, that that was autoharp week at the F&S or something, because Bryan Bowers had played the night before. I wish I'd known; I would have gone to considerable efforts to see Bowers. He's got some amazing songs. One is a lament about a relationship that is ending... it's kind of chauvinist, but the melody is so gorgeous that I forgive it. Another is his chronicle of his own time in prison (for weed possession or dealing or whatever), and it's incredibly poignant.

And still on the culture front... I am rereading Possession by A. S. Byatt. Probably for the sixth or seventh time, if that isn't underestimating. I do reread books I love a lot. I've read everything Byatt has written (something I also do with authors I like), but this is the least challenging in emotional tone; the least negative or bleak. I like everything she does, largely because of her use of language and emotional observations. But this one novel is particularly addictive because of the dual romance in it (her characters are, like good characters, multifaceted enough that you aren't completely sympathetic to them; they have flaws that are believable... these -- Roland and Maud; Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte -- much less so than other of her characters) and also because it's arguably part of a sub-genre of British novels that center around universities; the academic novel or something like that. Other authors include David Lodge, Kingsley Amis, and Evelyn Waugh. I have a weakness for these books either despite or because of their strange class politics. It IS a weakness; I can't stand the authors, most of them. Misogynists all.

One last bit of unrelated flotsom and jetsam (sp?): Friday is my birthday, and I am going to get to dress up and go out to dinner at a fancy restaurant. I'm looking forward to it. I think I will also have a brunch-y kind of thing on Sunday with a lot of friends, at my sister's house. This is much more of a fuss than I've made about my birthday for the last several years, really. Probably a large part of that is due to A., who is very good at celebratory rituals and recognition of Occasions.

Bye, y'all