I'm Not Feeling Very Magical...

Sometimes the mountain

is hidden from me in veils

of cloud, sometimes

I am hidden from the mountain

in veils of inattention, apathy, fatigue,

when I forget or refuse to go

down to the shore or a few yards

up the road, on a clear day,

to reconfirm

that witnessing presence.

--Denise Levertov.

Disney World, one would imagine, is the last place to reconfirm that witnessing presence. Busy, fake, and a madhouse of materialism and un-ironic media representations of what’s wrong with America, it seems like the last place one would go for catharsis. But this weekend I took off two days of school to head down to Florida with some friends. As we walked through the airport in Orlando, one of our party stuck behind on a later flight due to airline blunders, one of our group remarked, “I’m not feeling very magical” in a singsong voice that became the mantra of the trip. And yet, by the end, it was all magical.

I went with the right people. At Harry Potter Land (which I think is also called Universal Studios by some muggles), we freaked out over Hogwarts, shrieked our way through rides that probably little children could do without fuss, and kicked back for drinks and people-watching at suitable intervals throughout the day. On Shabbat, they were nonplussed by the dinner invite I received in our resort lobby (“Wait, you somehow found out that that guy is your high school friend’s husband’s family’s close friends from New York, and they invited you to dinner at their room? And you’re going??? We’ll come after you if you get taken”) but accepting. I taught them the term “bageled” and one inadvertently mixed it up with biscuited, so we have a neologism to share:

‘Biscuited’: identified as a Southerner by another Southerner for the sole purpose of rejoicing in their mutual Southernism.

And, of course, Sunday morning, three of us woke up at 2:30 am to run our first half-marathon. Dressed as Disney princesses. May have been the most fun ever. I’m hooked. It was fantastic. The adrenaline surge was incredible. Our goal was that we all finish together, and we did. The goal for next time: find out how fast can I run a half-marathon. Because this one was pure magic.

Picking up our race bibs. Disney does this right. Every marathon should have footmen.

OHMYGAWD it's Hogwarts!!!

About to ride the Hogwarts ride and freak out the random guy in our carriage by shrieking the whole way through.

Refreshments in the Boar's Head Inn.

Welcome aboard the Hogwarts Express. Ladies, set your drinks down behind you. If you forget them, don't worry, I'll take care of them. 

About to ride the Hogwarts Express. Kind of excited. Okay, thrilled.

=

My friends on their quest to eat or drink in every country in Epcot: "Do you think they would serve sake inside the temple?" "Hm, probably not." It was only three countries later that we remembered sake is Japanese, not Chinese. At least we made insightful comments about how there are no African countries represented, only a little thatched hut with some drums (??? )and Morocco, which is Arabic in culture. That makes up for not realizing that all Asian countries are not the same.

Found the land of sake. Picture to celebrate.

By this point, we had been up for fifteen hours, ran/walked a combination of thirty miles, and were dead. But we had to ride the teacups. It was magical!

Here we're actually asleep. That castle was a figment of our dreams. 

6 am and raring to go!

Counting the miles as we go by.

Running backwards so that we can get a picture of us with the castle. 

Finished! A rose for each princess, a quick soak in the pool, and back to Disney World. Because, let's face it, we're feeling magical...

Rejuvenated and ready to go back to school to teach the next four months. Goal: Share the magic with my kids.

Walkabout

I’d like to congratulate a portion of the school body that recently went walkabout. The students of whom I’m speaking were all suspended during final exams, but showed up to school anyhow to cause as much disruption as possible. When scooped into a police van and taken to a bus stop several miles from the school, given bus passes and the instructions to go home, they took only a couple of hours to return to school. Walkabout was a success.

Ceremony of induction by fire happened later that week, in the first floor bathroom of the freshman building, where they cleverly substituted burning toilet paper for a bonfire. Word of their geste has been uploaded to worldstarhiphop, among other traditional methods of record-keeping. Attempts to chant their prayers in classes have been circumvented by the priestly order of the teachers, who persecute these neophytes by demanding that their melodic performances take place elsewhere. The practice of subduing the senses into a higher state and achieving a nirvana of the soul is equally oppressed, and in fact downright policed by a hegemonic leadership that outlaws any substance on campus that has not been produced in the sweatshops of the school cafeteria.

Declaration of successful transformation into adulthood is being debated by school officials, who are considering the process of removing these new adults from the school arena, in which, having completed coming-of-age rituals, it is inappropriate that they remain. Their still immature friends who linger in the hopes of a diploma most probably are considering with longing the idea of going walkabout themselves and thus becoming full members of the adult community.

We are still awaiting the vows of celibacy, nonviolence, and fasting that we know will accompany the other rituals we have witnessed.

The Performance Of Race

The annual Black History Month Performance at our school was a poignant mixture of squirms and deep feels. The white girl who needed to monologue about being stifled because white women victimized black men in the past through merely a word and now therefore are victims of their own guilt also needed to do it in the privacy of her own bedroom, not facing an auditorium of happy African-American families there to see her kids who couldn’t give two cares about her identity struggles as a privileged person. The slam poet probably didn’t need to hang a noose around his neck while he talked. And three deep-voiced, talented girls certainly didn’t need to sing on three different keys for ten minutes while repeating the same lyrics over and over.

But other parts were arresting, nay, breathtaking, in their excellence. The poetry club astounded with their well-placed anger and the vibes of their vocabulary. What caught me was that, over and over, as children spoke about race, I peered into their faces trying to place them. Is that a child of mixed race, saying “Still I rise”? Is that student speaking with such conviction of Black struggles, Latino? Or no? Is the rest of the audience playing this awful game of guess who, or am I the only one? Whenever anyone was too distraught about their skin color I felt uncomfortable, wanted to tell them to snap out of it—hate the oppression, but don’t hate your own skin, white-black-brown-tan children. Love your faces, and your bright-eyed proud reflections in the mirror.

One performance topped all the others. Two students did a comedic take on a policeman stopping a boy for a DWB. They were hilarious, and had the audience roaring in their seats, as the policeman pushed the teen down to his knees and promptly blamed him for it:

“See, now you’re in the road, you got to scoot back.” Shoves him back.

“Sir.”

“You being wise?”

“I been wise.”

“Get down! On your face!” Shoves the kid down onto the stage floor. “See, now you’re in the road again. Scoot back.” Cue audience laughter. It was funny right up until, for no particular reason that we could see, the policeman called in:

“I need an ambulance, man shot three times in the back, he was tussling with me, so I pulled my gun, self-defense, I need an ambulance.”

That was our clue that he’d shot him. And beside me, someone muttered, “that’s probably exactly how it happened.”

Well, I Smoke a Lot

Today I decided to teach my IB students a lesson. In both classes, there’s an element that has been reacting really negatively to an old standard-program student of mine who quietly comes into my class during his lunch break and waits for a moment to catch up with me. He’s never intrusive, but they’re upset regardless that he’s in their class, and I do understand the resentment. Still, I thought it was the perfect teaching moment.

Today, I taped an envelope to my door with his name on it. He followed the directions inside perfectly. This is what they said:

Instructions: Walk in today and ignore us all. Copy this onto the whiteboard:

Experiment: Replication of Sherif’s Robbers Cave Aim: See if IB students exhibit in-group behavior. Procedure: 1.    Student enters class during lunch repeatedly. 2.    Record reactions. Findings: IB students behave like twelve-year-old boys. Evaluation: Valid. Reliable. Slightly unethical: no informed consent.

Heh. Heh. Heh. The IB kids are familiar with Sherif's experiment, and the smarter students caught on when they read the procedure. The rest were still asking me, “are you just going to let him write on your board like that?” Slowly, they realized that this meant I had asked him to come in during lunches and run an experiment on them (Well, I hadn’t, but they need never know). Those who had been chill were amused. Those who had been mean to him were less amused. I pointed out that there’s no point in learning psychology unless it makes us better people, and they returned to their work, chastened (I hope).

A few minutes afterwards, I noticed a student was crying. Tears rolled slowly down her face, and then sped up, until she was awash with sobs. She buried her head in her arms as everyone asked what was wrong—they’d thought it was crocodile tears for fun at first. Slowly, it came out: IB! It was too hard. This essay was too hard. She just couldn’t, anymore. A chorus of agreement followed. Everyone understood. Everyone, especially the seniors, began unloading their mountains of stress. They piled worry after worry onto our collective list.

I had to figure out how to stop them, or everyone would walk out of here in tears, and worse, with a strong sense of futility. I thought about something someone sent me just last week, and decided to copy it. I held up my water bottle for their inspection.

“Glass half full!” rang out my smartest student.

“Aha, that’s what you think I’m going to ask you, but I’m not,” I replied. “How heavy is this water bottle?”

“You could carry that forever,” answered a student.

“Well, not forever,” another qualified.

Slowly we began to zoom in on the amount of time I could carry the water bottle without my arm falling off. Then it was time for my inspirational speech.

“If I never put this water bottle down, no matter how light it is, I’m going to become exhausted at some point. Not to mention if I also carry this pencil box, and these folders, and those stacks of paper… sometimes life is a balancing act. Sometimes you have to put one thing down so you can pick something else up. Sometimes you have to throw your hands up empty and run through the quad shrieking. Because if you try to hold everything at once, you’re going to crash. You can’t do it. You have to look at all your stress and anxiety, and then put it aside and focus on what you can do at the moment. And at the moment, we’re not writing essays. We’re not even writing paragraphs. We’re just figuring out how the studies that we found yesterday, support the thesis statements that we chose from around the classroom walls. We can do that.” I checked my watch. “We only have five minutes left until lunch…”

Eek. Only five minutes. Could they even do anything in that time? But it would be anti-climactic to just sit and talk. I didn’t know how to wrap it up. I felt myself floundering. But then a kid jumped in:

“We know, we know, for the next five minutes we’ll focus--"

“Yes! Five minutes of absolute focus on what you can control—the application of studies to your thesis. Do it.”

I blessed the teacher gods for sending me a whiney student who kvetched about my plan before I had it. They always come right in time, preemptively complaining to let you know what you’re supposed to do next.

I sat down beside a lanky, silent student and waited for his thoughts.

“Ms. W, there’s a lot of feelings in this room right now.”

“Yes, there are. How are you coping?”

“Me? I’m fine! I have ways.”

“Oh, yeah, you’re on the team. So, like playing basketball? Does that help?”

“Well, yeah, Ms. W, but it’s really just, well, I smoke a lot.”

The bell rang, and with that laconic touch of truth, he left me in stitches in my seat.

Aliens from Outer Space

 My students from last semester have taken to dropping by between classes and during their lunch breaks to say hi. One of my favorites now brings his girlfriend by, too.

Last week he told me he got a ticket for parking without a decal in the school parking lot.

“You’re an idiot,” I told him, “just go to ROTC and get one. They’re in charge.”

“Nah,” he shrugged.

“Dude, whyever not?” I pressed.

He looked at his girlfriend, then back at me. She was the one who answered.

“Ms. W, we’re Mexicans!” She half-laughed.

I arched my brows quizzically. She was trying to say something. I had no idea what. I wasn't sure what my stereotype of Mexicans was supposed to be in this situation.

“Um, you’re Honduran. That has nothing to do with anything. Go get a parking decal.”

“Ms. W, you need a license to get a parking decal.”

Truly John Doe. Not in the system at all.

“Wait, what? You don't have a driver's license?”  This kid loves cars. We talk about driving all the time. He wants to know what kind of car I drive, show me pictures of his car, talk about what’s under the hood even though I understand not one word of it... this kid breathes cars.

“Why the hell not?”

They shrugged.

“No, really, I mean, is it too hard to take the classes? Or what?”

“No, I already took the classes.”

“So what’s the deal? You failed the test?” I couldn’t quite believe it.

“Ms. W, I’m a better driver than you, probably, especially after what Mr. S said about you driving to school over the speed limit.” Darn Mr. S and his big mouth.

“So what’s the deal? Go get a license.”

His girlfriend chimed in again. “Ms. W, we’re Mexicans.”

The penny dropped. I finally understood what she meant by Mexicans. But I didn’t understand what she meant by Mexicans. So I refuted what I thought she meant: “You’re citizens of America. Don’t even give me that. I know you were born here and have documentation. That’s not the reason you can’t get a driver’s license.” 

“We’re aliens… from outer space.” She giggled. I glared at her. Stop enjoying the derogatory things people call you, kiddo. 

“Yeah, Ms. W, we’re illegal, we can’t get driver’s licenses.” But you’re not! What?

Finally, he took pity on me and explained.

“You need your parent to sign. Our parents can’t sign. They have to have a driver’s license or some ID to sign.”

Oh.

“Does it have to be a parent? I don’t want you driving without a driver’s license.”

“Don’t worry, I turn 18 soon anyhow, then I just go get one on my own.”

The bell rang and he headed back to his class, leaving me pondering my thoughts. Now, this kid is not a criminal. He's not the kind of kid that thinks it's him against the world, and that if the world isn't going his way, he's going to use whatever force he can to make it. But he does need to get to school every day, and to work, and, yeah, he also needs to get to those driver's ed classes. So he breaks the law every time he gets behind the wheel. So many of my good students are put in situations where, to meet the basic needs of life, they end up breaking the law. Not because they don't respect the law, but out of pure necessity. But it does make me wonder how they see American law-- when it turns into a behemoth of obstruction rather than a safeguard of individual rights, just how much can you respect it?