Have You Been To The Woods Recently?

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear, nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

Ralph "Where is Waldo" Emerson, Walden

Temporary Time Temp

temping is awesome!
i love filing stuff!
i love heavy paper folders and paper cuts!
i love time cards!
i love people with horrible breath, who talk softly!
i love getting up early!
i love getting home tired!
i love bending over a file cabinet!
i love listening to i-pod headphones so much that my inner ear hurts!
i love pretending to not be online!
i love writing emails to everyone i can think of!
i love checking my email obsessively!
i love looking at the clock!
i love looking at the clock fifteen minutes later!
i love going to use the men's room and keeping my ipod headphones on!
i love living vicariously through the lyrics that i hear!
i love waiting for 530pm!
i love work!
i love having such an amazing work ethic!
i love meaningless tasks!
i love the fact that someday i'll be a teacher!

and all of the tasks that i complete will be
oh so meaningful!

just bursting with meaning!

i love all of it!
i can't get enough of it!
it smacks me in the face!
and i beg for more!
more!
more!


a little more!



ah, friday!

Cutting Your Own Hair

Is a dangerous proposition...but has the potential to be very rewarding.
Every morning, after the shower, I rub my head with a lovely towel and attempt to shove my hair into some semblance of order. It's not that my hair is wildly uncontrollable. But it has been quite a while since it was cut...outside of my home. For a while, Natasha was cutting my hair...and did a damn fine job, I might add. The problem was me. I couldn't sit in our IKEA kitchen chair for more than about forty minutes at a time. And Natasha did a good job, which took some time. So, after enough of my itchiness, she decided it was time for me to deal with my hair. So I would get out of the shower, and take out the scissors, and chop off whatever seemed to stick out in a bad way. I haven't had many problems with the beard or the sideburns, or around the ears. I can keep those neat without any severe accidents. The occasional notch above the ear. I have been able to trim the sides of my head without any huge problem. At times, the sides can bounce up a little bit, making my haircut resemble a middle-school-style bowl-cut, but for the most part, I've been happy with my work on the sides. The front is interesting. My hair is longish, so I've got some curl to the bangs-portion of my hair. I've had some mild success with that. Here is the problem: I can't see behind myself. I have no idea what's going on back there. Sometimes, I just snip randomnly, when a bunch of hair sticks crazily out after the shower, but I have no idea what kind of progress I'm making over there. The bottom of the back is also a challenge. I think things are pretty uneven back there, but I'll never know. In any event, I got a complement from a mustached-man recently. When informed that I was cutting my own hair he went so far as to tell me I was doing quite a good job. No, he really meant that. Hooray.

All's Well That Ends.

Done.

Music to Launch You.

Something happened. I had chosen the music carefully. Prefuse 73. Fridge. Broken Social Scene. No words. Only waves of sound. Backbeats. Blips. Slow-motion melodies. Music to launch you, to drift you off into your own mental space. Music to write to. And they were actually writing. There was freedom. They could sit wherever they wanted to, well almost wherever they wanted to. The G-Master wanted to sit outside on the steps. It was a gorgeous day. I told him he needed to be in the classroom. If I'd taken them all outside, there would have been issues. No music. Too much freedom, no writing. Sneezing. Dog poop. Issues. So, the door is open. The breeze blows in. The music is taking them. And they are actually writing.

The day before, their homework was to observe. On their way home from school, as soon as the final bell rang, they were to take detailed notes on the process. No speaking. Just observing. The five senses. Imagine you are writing to a blind person. What do you see? To a deaf person, what do you hear? ("But Mr. Hill, if you're blind, you don't know what anything looks like. If you're deaf, you don't know what anything sounds like!") Right. Just recently blinded. A freak accident. Just lost their hearing. Just last year. Unfortunate. Use your senses. No talking. If you're speaking, you can't be observing in the true sense. Alright, go forth. Observe!

And they came back with 10-15 observations. Most of them. Some barely did anything. ("Mr. Hill! Mr. Hill!! I forgot to write it down as I was going home, so I wrote it after I got home, OK?? Is that OK???)

They were given three choices on a handout. You can write from the perspective that yesterday was your last day going home from this high school. That you moved two hours away and never saw the ocean and the beach again. That this trip home was a piece of your personal history, and that now you are 19 and looking back at that trip home with nostalgia.

Or

You are writing to a future you. This future you was born in 2070, and rarely walks. Buses don't exist for the future you. Neither do cars. All the future you knows is the autopod, which holds only them and takes them where they want to go at ridiculous speeds, so observation of the trip is impossible. You are writing to this future you to describe what walking was like, or riding in a car, or bus.

Or

A letter to your imaginary silly old grandpa who has recently become blind--accident at work--and you haven't seen him in a while. You are writing to get him to understand your daily routine, to get to know you a little better, because he's getting sick, and might not be around too much longer.

---

More than half chose the letter to grandpa. And they got into it. The music helped. At first, the G-Master wanted to bop his head and tap his feet more than write, but he settled down after a bit. They all settled down. They were all in their own mental space. It was awesome. I went around the room and quietly checked in with students who seemed stuck. Offered some encouragement. Made sure they used their observations from yesterday.

73 minute class because of STAR testing. Went by in 5 minutes. A few students asked, "How long have we been writing?" at the end of the period. They were amazed that class was over. 40 minutes and some music. One of those rare days.

Journal writing to instrumental music

The 9th graders started class today with a quote by Anais Nin, whose name rang a faint bell in my memory, but whose writing I'm sure I've never read. After class today, I discovered she was a French-born, American author, who was born in 1903 and died in 1977, and is most famous for her journals, which detail her life from age 11 to shortly before her death, as well as her erotica. Apparently, Nin, who married one man in the early 20s, married another man in 1955, and her journals chronicle this double life.

In any event, the quote I'd found was: "We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection." Apparently Nin really did 'taste life twice.' The students have been responding to quotes as well as questions I have posed over the entire semester, but until now, I hadn't incorporated music into the journal writing time. I thought this might help students who normally might try to carry on quiet conversations focus more on the writing if instrumental music was a part of the process. So this morning I decided that I would bring in Mice Parade's "All Roads Lead to Salzburg," which is an album of experimental electronica. The first track, which is about 9 minutes long (just about right for journal time) is hypnotic and seemed to me like it might lead the students to write wherever their thoughts might take them. I haven't read the journals yet, but I think I'll keep using music to help them get into their own writing.

The quote confused many of them. We defined "retrospection" as a class, which hopefully helped. The brief discussion afterward makes me think that many of them are at least becoming vaguely aware that writing and memory are deeply interconnected.

One More Month

Four and a half weeks left. And then the program ends. What will we do with ourselves when we have completed this educational boot camp? Will we march headlong into the abyss that is the teaching profession? Will we recover our sanity? Will we be prepared for that first time a classroom belongs to us, and not our master teachers? Will we be prepared for five classes and 150 students? Will we fall prey to the statistical probability of burnout? How long will we remain idealistic? Will we learn how to support ourselves as well as our students?

A week off and now a month on. A month of wading through, of furious weeks and precious weekends. Of plowing on and surviving. Here we go.