Why Are You So Happy?

Teaching feels like this! Including those moments you don't
get off the ground or fall and sprain your ankle. But when
you're soaring, it's the best! 

Fourth week of school. Yet more new students, who come in and ask, “why are you so happy?” By now the old students respond in chorus: "Because she likes to teach!" They know.

While talking to one of the other world history teachers one lunch, he asked if our students think we’re weird. He’d leaped onto his desk to recite the Declaration of Independence intro, and has the sneaking suspicion they all think he’s nuts. Good nuts, I told him—Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society nuts. But it’s totally true—all our students probably think we’re rather crazy.

Went to my first football game in my whole life! I’d already sat an hour in the sweltering hot gym watching one of my second block students’ volleyball games—I’d bumped into her on the way to my trailer and she had her uniform on, so I came by to cheer her on. Well, mostly I gave her a wave and nod when she looked at me while surreptitiously grading papers in the back of the bleachers.  Anyhow, after another hour of grading I headed with two other TFA teachers over to the football field. It was INTENSE! The band is really impressive. They played at Obama’s inauguration, and if anything, are even better than the football team. One of my students is the baton twirler out front, and I kept grinning proudly as I watched her perform. The whole gorgeous force of her personality came out as she led the band. Then the football players came on, and I laughed as hulking huge young men turned around anxiously to check the bleachers for parents and teachers.

 

One of my fellow-teachers explained everything to me as the game proceeded. At first I was shocked by the violence. One gets over it quickly, though, and pretty soon I was cheering, “get him!” along with everyone else.

There are some kinds of violence one never gets used to, though. I was walking past the administration building this morning, ahead of me one of the security officers, and noticed a young man grabbing at a young woman. I waited for the security guard to say something, but he walked straight past. By now the man had the young lady in a headlock, her neck against his elbow, and she was trying to smile while he laughed. “Let go of her now,” I told him as I passed, and he loosened his grip. The security guard looked back and said, “chill out,” to him. Then he held the door open for me. As I went into the office, I saw out of the corner of my eye that the man had the girl up against the wall by the throat and was laughing. I glanced up at the security guard waiting for me to enter, opened my mouth, and closed it. So I didn’t say anything. Now I’m chewing over my words. It seemed to me at the time that the security guard knows better—that he knew it wouldn’t help to say anything. But now I wonder if he’s just desensitized—if the sight of a young man playing around by pretending to physically harm his girlfriend doesn’t even faze him anymore. Because it still brings the bile into my throat when I think of it. Next time, I’m sticking around until the brutish horseplay stops.

I survived Yom Kippur— what to others is a religious experience is for me always simply a 25 hour period concentrating on not fainting. But I’ve gotten really good at it over the years, and know exactly which books to read and when to give up on davening and lie prone. After Yom Kippur, the Rabbi’s house developed an impromptu kumzitz. It was a perfectly lovely start to the year to sit there listening to the Israeli chazzan play piano while his son trebled high and all the guys brought in for the weekend sang.

All that I am, I will not deny! Yes, sometimes I
shout that to the skies when I'm walking alone.

Today I spent entirely in lesson planning and grading. I literally did have a stack as high as my knee that I have waded through in one day. I have cool stuff for this week—we’re putting Joan of Arc on trial, using historical documents to figure out what motivated the Crusaders, and comparing the Black Plague to AIDS. As I zoomed through the video on the Black Death I want to show, I began to get nauseous. Realizing that I’m going to have to sit through it three more times has me slightly queasy. Can’t wait until we move on to the Renaissance!  

P.S. You’ll have noticed I succumbed to the Eurocentric viewpoint. I’m too baby to shake things up—just getting my lesson plans out on time and all my stuff graded is keeping me highly occupied! Most of the paradigm-shaking I do happens impromptu. But I do always seek out the minorities perspective within the European oh that sounds too much like a whinging excuse. Anyhow, I’m slowly figuring out this teaching gig, and once I’m on firmer ground and gone through the curriculum once, I’ll be able to maneuver it better into the kind of political learning I want to engage in. This week’s literacy practice: an article on feminism in high schools.