The 21st century: Was-bands

I was not-really-on-purpose eavesdropping on a woman at Red E this morning, and I had to ask her: "Excuse me, but did you just say you're taking your wasband to the airport?"

She laughed. "Yeah. As in, was my husband. But not my ex-husband, he's not exed out of my life. He's my was-band."

She told me about how he's still so important in her life, they've been separated for about two years and are getting divorced, but they still have a joint checking account, they talk every day--and yeah, she's the one taking him to the airport. People who know her have warned her to be careful, he's her ex, she shouldn't talk to him, should just break it all off, he'll hurt her, she'll get hurt--but she said how it just isn't like that between them, it never has been and it's not going to be like that now. She said she loves him and he's a part of her, part of her life, and she wouldn't want it to be otherwise.

I said how I'd been curious because divorce is just such a part of our world now, it seems like we have to figure out other ways of relating to exes, especially when there are children involved. I know so many divorced or divorcing people with kids--friends, friends of friends, parents of students--and they're co-parenting, but the ground rules of their own relationship have changed, which affects everything. But I know at least one person with a sort of a was-band, a friend who recently went on vacation with her ex-husband and their son, plus my friend's girlfriend and the wasband's girlfriend. The woman with the was-band--whose name I never got--liked that story a lot.

She said, "Thank you for saying something, thank you for asking."

I told her I was glad I did.

After Tupac

I just finished Jacqueline Woodson's After Tupac and D Foster, and I loved it so much. I was too cool (or at least too "alternative") for 2Pac when he was alive, when I was in high school and then college. I don't remember hearing anything at all about his death--but he died less than two months after my father committed suicide, so it makes sense that it wouldn't have registered. Very little registered at that point.

As my music taste evolved, I did buy a Tupac compilation bootleg CD in downtown Brooklyn, and I've worn that thing out. But it's only got eighteen of his 393 songs (that's according to iTunes, and includes remixes and all that stuff--but he had a lot of songs) so after reading After Tupac and D Foster I especially had to go track down "Brenda's Got a Baby."



I didn't realize how intense a song this was while I was reading the book--I was assuming it was just coming across as so intense because the main characters in the book are twelve years old, and I thought "Father Figure" was intense when I was twelve. But--damn.

The main character talks a lot about how beautiful Tupac's eyes are: "He had the prettiest eyes of any rapper--they were all big and sad-looking and he had dark eyebrows that were so thick, they made you think about soft things." I can see what she means. She describes him singing in "Brenda's Got a Baby": "His eyes looked sad like he was really singing about the truth and somebody he knew real good."

"Dear Mama" is also really important in After Tupac and D Foster, and if I'd listened to it at twelve I would've probably loved it too--but coming to it in my 30's it feels sorta power ballad mushy. (This one was on my bootleg CD, so I knew it, but--yeah.) Of course, the video still made me cry watching it just now, right after reading After Tupac and D Foster. I knew it would.



I do love how much respect he shows to women in his music. This is probably my favorite Tupac song from my bootleg CD:



There's also a lot of talk about his trial in the book. The main character's mama says, "They say the judge didn't like the tattoo--didn't think it was something a person should have written on themselves. That's that boy's own body. ... It's not the judge's business. ... First Amendment says people got a right to freedom of expression without government interfering--everybody knows that. Judge doesn't like the way he looks, didn't like the way he was in the world, what he talks about, what's on his stomach...that's the crime here." The narrator says, "Mama wasn't a big Tupac fan, but she was a big fan of justice." ("The tattoo" was THUG LIFE--click on the image to see it bigger.)




Another girl in the book, D, says, "It's like he sees stuff, you know? And he knows stuff. And he be thinking stuff that only somebody who knows that kinda living deep and true could know and think."

Tupac was 25 when he died. That's eight years younger than I am right now.

Vocabulary

I am grading my students' projects that they completed after reading their independent reading books (of their own choice). One of their options was a vocabulary project: "Keep a list of words you don't know while you're reading your book. When you finish, pick 15 of these words. You must define them and use each in a sentence with context cues. Then create some kind of vocabulary activity that would help fellow students learn your words (a crossword puzzle, word find, fill in the blank using your sentences, etc.). Include an answer key."

I don't know how to grade these fairly, especially when the student's first language is not English, so that their only exposure to these words is probably through books.

GRIM: Harsh, forbidding.
"I'm so harsh with my brother, im grim all the time"

SACRILEGE: An act of disrespect or violence.
"Stop acting sacrilege to your brothe, so violent"

RIBALD: vulgar lewd humor.
"Your so funny, so ribald."

LITHE: easily bent or flexed.
"Metal can be very lithe while heated."

MANGY: affected with or resulting from mange. Example, chicken pox the holes from chicken pox.
"I have mangy skin due to the sun's rays."

I do know that I obviously need to point out that if they don't know the words in the definition for their vocabulary word, they have to look those up, or they aren't going to know what the word means! Also that they need to be careful about the spelling and punctuation of all the words they use, not just the vocabulary words. But beyond that, I'm at a bit of a loss. Suggestions?

I do really like this one, in spite of the "from" which I think is just a typo:
USURP (no definition given)
"I usurp my neighbor's land, to get back at him from using my lawn for a garage sale."

Loss, Grief, Growing Up

I have a pain-in-the-butt kid in my pain-in-the-butt advisory. Advisory is just generally a pain in the butt--it's not a "real" class and there's no curriculum for two of the three days in the week. The day that does have curriculum consists of lessons discussing our academic goals, important qualities for being a good student, and really stupid videos on these and related topics. The kids make fun of the videos and talk through them, and I am reminded of how lucky I am that for the most part I am in control of my own curriculum and don't have to teach stuff that I can't get behind. Anyway, of the other two days, we're supposed to use one as a study hall, and the other day is a pep rally once in a while, and the rest of the time it's just a pointless half hour almost at the end of a Friday afternoon. I tried to play games with them once on a Friday early on, but they were way too cool--I might try again now that they know me better and we're a little more united. But mostly we just do a little homework and then hang out on Fridays.

Anyway this one pain-in-the-butt kid, D., might be my favorite kid in advisory, though I have several I like in there--they've been growing on me. D. wasn't in advisory on Tuesday or Thursday, though, and I was vaguely annoyed because I assumed he was skipping. I make my kids work during advisory study hall--I'll give them an assignment of my own if they don't have anything to work on. They fought me at first but apparently I'm a hardass teacher and now they know to at least just pretend to be working. They also know that if they are quiet and work for a while, I'll give them free time at the end. Even the Caitlins don't skip as much as they had been, and when they're there they don't give me quite so much attitude as before (there are three Caitlins total in my advisory of twelve students, but two of them are a united force of rebel, and the other one is mellow and separate).

But D. He's failing a bunch of his classes but is way too cool to work on anything during study hall, so I pulled him aside and worked one-on-one with him some, got in touch with Mrs. Matz, the teacher who works with kids with behavioral problems and specific academic needs and who knows D. very well, emailed a couple of his teachers, and got him actually finishing and turning some stuff in. Apparently he told Mrs. Matz that nobody ever tried to help him with anything in advisory, but Ms. Nelson actually cares about him. This was good to hear, since what he was saying to me in advisory was "They're not working! How come you're not saying anything to them? You're picking on me. I'm the only Mexican kid in here. How come you're not talking to them? They don't do work in here." My response, over and over, was some variation on "You're not passing. You could be passing. You're totally smart enough to do this, I know sometimes you just need some help getting focused. We don't have anything better to do in here, why not get your work done?" Plus I would point out when the other kids were doing work, and make a point of calling them out and reminding D. that he wasn't the only one who had to work. So he'd come sometimes and fight me, refuse to work and just talk to everybody; come sometimes and actually get some stuff done; and skip sometimes.

Yesterday he came in just as the late bell rang and he said, "Look, I can't be in here today. I can't be in here right now. I have to leave. I just have to go."

Something on his face, something in his voice, made me say simply, "Okay. If that's what you need. Okay." But he got halfway to the door and I said, "But wait, hang on, D.--" I went over to him--"Where are you going?"

"I'm just gonna sit on a chair in the hall. I'm just going to take a chair out. I just, I just can't be in here."

I was kind of surprised. He just wanted to sit in the hall? "That's fine. You go ahead."

A counselor came in to pull out another student and I chatted with him a little... I graded some of the eighteen thousand projects that students are turning in this week and next week, before the end of the quarter... and then I remembered D., sitting out in the hall. I grabbed a book off the classroom bookshelf--D.'s not a reader, he's told me a bunch of times how much he hates reading, but he was sitting out there with nothing at all. I brought out Yes Yes Y'all; Oral History of Hip Hop's First Decade, which has been popular with many a non-reader since I bought it. It's one of those books I bought for myself but realized would be worth more in the classroom library than on my shelf at home, though it would stay in much better shape at home and would be much less likely to disappear forever. I think about the books I stole from school libraries as a kid and how I still have many of them: Steinbeck's Travels With Charlie, Vonnegut's Welcome to the Monkey House, Charlotte Sometimes by Penelope Farmer (which I stole from the library long before I ever heard of the Cure or the song by the same name)--those are three that come immediately to mind without even consulting my bookshelves. I'm not checking any more big expensive graffiti art books out of the public library and loaning them to students, but my own books and books bought for my classroom will probably keep disappearing. I just imagine that they're disappearing because someone wants to have it, wants it near them at all times, which is why I stole books--not just because they're lost under someone's bed, or thrown out a school bus window. Plus sometimes they don't disappear, they get read and returned and then the same kid will ask me for another book because I actually gave them a book they liked for once.

Anyway. The book was also just an excuse to go out there.

"Hey," I said. "Brought you a book, something to look at--you're just sitting out here." He had his phone out, maybe he had been texting or playing some game, but even so, he really was just sitting, mostly. D.'s an active, loud, gregarious kid too. And he looked so sad. He had way more of his feelings on his face than I'd ever seen. Way more than you usually see on a high school kid, especially a boy.

"What's going on?" I asked him. I put a hand on his shoulder, but he didn't respond to the touch, and I took my hand away. He was too tight inside himself for that.

He told me the whole story. His aunt died. She'd been sick, then she was feeling better, then all of a sudden she was really sick and then she was dead. His mom's only sister, forty-four years old, and D. spent every weekend at her house, all weekend, just hanging out with her and her son, D.'s cousin, who is like his brother. "She was like my other mom," he said. He told me that's why he hadn't been in school all week.

I said some stuff. Maybe it helped. He reminded me so much of me and my sister and how wrecked we were after my dad died. Too awful, too sudden, but totally real and there's nothing you can do, it's done.

I don't remember what I said, except I remember saying, "Try to have some fun this weekend. But you won't." I got half a grin, not amused but recognizing the truth of it, and a nod. I said something about how I lost my dad and I know how hard that can be, how much it can hurt. I wish I would have told him to do something that makes him feel good about who he is, something that means something to him. I don't know if I would have lived through losing my dad (yeah, I would've, you do, you just do, but you know what I mean) if I hadn't had my journal. Writing is that out for me. I wish I would've told him just to play video games, go shoot hoops, to watch his favorite movie and call out his favorite lines along with the characters, listen to his favorite music really loud. Let his brain and his heart have something else to hold onto a little bit and stop working full speed at being overwhelmed and horrified and heart-broken, let the grief step back for a moment and something that feels good move forward, even just for a second. But I didn't think of it then. I thought of it after school, on my drive home. I did think to talk to the counselor at the end of the day before I left and I asked him to meet with D. on Monday. If I see D. Monday maybe I'll try to tell him something about trying to do things you love so you don't totally sink into the loss so that it's all you are for a while, even though it will probably be all you are for a while even if you try not to sink. Even just the effort of trying not to sink can help a little bit, maybe. (I hope I can figure out a way to say it that might make some sense to him.)

So I am thinking about that tough kid and how much he's hurting. Grateful that he could tell me what was going on. Wishing I could do something to fix it but of course I can't, nothing can fix it. Time, sort of. But even that only sort of. A book about hip hop and graffiti maybe a little bit for a little while. A few things for a little while, and the whiles will get a little longer, eventually, and the rough spots will get further apart. I was proud of him for letting himself hurt, at least. That more than anything might get him through it the best.

Student Wisdom some more

Told my fourth period class that my sub on Monday, Kathleen, left me a note that said, “These guys are Rockstars! They worked so hard you could hear a pin drop in this class!”

Alan said, “Actually, that’s not how rock stars would act.”

Standardized tests, editing inappropriate materials...

At parent/teacher conferences last night, the parents of one of my Junior English students mentioned that they felt an article I had read in class with my students was inappropriate. The article was a New York Times editorial about how standardized tests are graded, and who is grading them, written by a former test grader, Todd Farley. I thought the article made a lot of good points about the subjectivity of these tests, and I gave it to my students for several reasons: I think it's a great example of an editorial, it's extremely relevant to them and their experiences, and I thought it would make for good discussion. We read mostly fiction in my classes, so I try to bring in current non-fiction whenever possible to vary things and to help those students who don't like to read fiction connect with my curriculum. (I am also really sick of students deciding they are "bad writers" or "can't write" or just generally are stupid on the basis of their standardized test scores.)

The parents' primary problem with the editorial was that one of the examples the author gives of a subjective decision test-graders are forced to make is that of how to grade the movie review of a ninth-grade student who chooses to review Debbie Does Dallas. The parents told me it just wasn't appropriate, that it would give a teenage boy ideas, that maybe if the article didn't name a movie specifically it would be okay, but to say Debbie Does Dallas! Maybe if it just said "an inappropriate movie," they suggested--I said, "or a pornographic movie?" and they nodded as if maybe that would be okay, and told me that I should have changed it. The dad said, "Because it was printed in an adult newspaper, the New York Times is for adult readers, and they're teenagers, so not everything is going to be appropriate for them."

He also told me that since these tests are so important, maybe it wasn't appropriate for them to read something so critical of the tests, and at the very least, if I was going to have students reading something like this, they should read something giving the other side too. I said that we discussed the article at length in class, and students came up with those points on their own--I didn't want to give them both sides because I wanted them to think it through, and they did. I told the parents that we had a very good discussion of the article, talking about the tests, and testing, and who should grade them, and how these problems could be fixed. We talked about what was good about the author's opinions, and what wasn't.

I was proud of myself for how I handled this. I didn't argue, I nodded a lot, I addressed their concerns, and when they left I said, "Thank you for sharing your opinion, I can see where you're coming from on this, and I appreciate you letting me know. I'm sorry you felt it was inappropriate." They smiled and nodded and walked away.

Babies

I wrote my students a letter at the beginning of the school year, and their first assignment was to write me a letter in response. I asked them to tell me a few specific things about themselves--what was easiest for them in English class, what was hardest, that kind of thing--and to tell me anything else they wanted me to know. One of my junior girls wrote that she wanted me to know that she had a beautiful two-year-old baby boy, and she was "ready to have another one." I referred her to counseling, not sure whether this meant she was pregnant or trying to get pregnant.

She's visibly showing now.

I was talking with another teacher about this today. I said, "I just want to put a bowl of condoms on my desk. Some of the kids would blow them up and bounce them around the room, or shoot them at each other, but I don't know if I even care."

I said, "Obviously abstinence-based sex education is not working. They should be able to get the pill from the school nurse if they want it."

We talked about how nobody's addressing the fact that some of these girls are getting pregnant because they want a baby. The student mentioned above? Her two-year-old isn't a baby anymore. Condoms on my desk wouldn't make a difference for her, if she wants that baby.

So much more to say about this and nothing more to say.