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What a Weekend!

Dusty 1 Comment

WOW! That was… amazing.

This last weekend was the Tucson Festival of Books. And for the fourth year, I had a booth, and I offered my pirate books, the three volumes of The Adventures of Damnation Kane, for sale to anyone who: 1) Saw my tri-corner hat and pirate-themed shirt; 2) Noticed the name of the booth, or 3) Paused to look at the INCREDIBLE art that my wife Toni DeBiasi created for all three Volumes of the series.

And that was a LOT of people.

I went there with, I think, about 65 books.

The first day, Saturday, I sold 42 of them. (The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything!) I sold every copy of Volume I I had with me. I went home, got the four other copies of Volume I at my house, also grabbed my VERY FIRST copy, the first printed copy of any book I have ever written, and brought that on Sunday. I used the very first copy (which was NOT for sale) as a display copy.

I sold the other four. And six more copies of Volume II and Volume III. And I unfortunately had to turn away a few other people because I didn’t have a copy of Volume I to sell them, at the end of the day, or else I would have had at least two or three more sales.

I now have 13 copies left of the 69 copies I brought with me to the Festival.

I have never done that well. The Festival has always been pretty good to me: I have a good book (Three of them, I think), I have a good hook — “Can I tell you about my time-traveling Irish pirate?” — and the aforementioned three attention-grabbers (sign, cover art, and stylish chapeau) brings people close enough to get drawn in by my elevator pitch. But my previous record was, if I remember right, 29 books sold. So I almost doubled that.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, to everyone who came and bought my books. I am honored beyond belief. And now I am anxious as hell that you all won’t like the books, or that you won’t like the third book, or — I dunno, something. So if you could see your way clear to tell me if you do like the books: go to the Contact link at the top of the page (Under the three lines, on mobile), or click on the Feedback link that should be floating in the bottom left corner of the page, and send me a message. Send me a Facebook message or Instagram message — @TheodenHumphrey, in both cases. (Also the same handle on X, if you are a glutton for punishment — or Threads, if you’re a glutton for social media.) Or if you’re really feeling good about my work, post a review somewhere — Amazon, or Goodreads, or Lulu.com where the books are produced — and then let me know that you did so. Thank you.

Thank you, as well, to my fantastic booth partner Amanda Cetas, who stood with me on a patch of sole-stabbing gravel for eighteen hours over two days, who covered me when I wanted to take a break (And made sales for me, too), who directed people to my side of the booth when they seemed more interested in fantasy than in historical fiction, and who stayed positive and energetic all the way through. Thank you, also, to all the people who bought Amanda’s books — she said she did better this year than she has before, too, so it wasn’t just the Pirate who made out like a bandit.

Amanda also shared my confusion over our nearest neighbors, who were… intactivists. Anti-circumcision activists. With whole books. About… circumcision. Now, I actually know the arguments against circumcision, and — how do you fill an entire book with them? Let alone TWO?!?

Needless to say, they did not send many customers over our way, and we didn’t send any their way, either. I didn’t have any people come to my booth and say, “Pirates, huh? You wouldn’t have anything about foreskins, by any chance?”

(I would have sent them over if they did. But they didn’t. The people over there still had people at their booth all weekend, so I think they did fine, too.)

If you didn’t get the book or books you wanted, or you now want more books, then please use the links on this page to Contact me or to order yourself a copy from Lulu.com. (If you Contact me, I will sign the book for you before I ship it.) If you didn’t make it to the Festival this year, then come to next year’s — Amanda and I will be there (Hopefully with our partner, the Poet, Lisa Watson, who wasn’t well enough to attend this year), and I will have all of the Adventures and at least one new book, as well. Amanda will probably have nine new projects, all of them as wonderful as the ones she has right now.

And if you bought books, two things: thank you for reading. You, along with the rest of the literate people, are the bulwark holding back the tide of Fahrenheit 451. You are giving my world meaning. You are joining me in this weird sort of slow-motion conversation that is a novel.

And also: get off the internet and go read. Like I’m about to do.

(If you’re wondering, I only bought two books this year. But that’s because this is my TBR pile.

No, I’m not kidding.)

Here are the two books, anyway.

Happy Reading, all.

This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

This morning I am still thinking about being positive, but I actually mean to do it.

As soon as I posted yesterday and then  went back to read it a little later, I realized that despite saying at the outset that I was going to be positive, most of yesterday’s post was negative. Either it was things we need to stop; or it was, once again, simple criticism. But as Ned Flanders said to Homer, “It’s easy to criticize, Homer,” (to which Homer replied, “Fun, too!”), and I should stop taking the easy way. Well, not stop, necessarily, but make an effort to do the right thing instead of the easy, fun thing. At least some of the time.

So what positive things can we do to make boys less suckish?  We can expand their options, starting when they are very young, and try to steer them in directions according to their interests and abilities, rather than their gender or with an eye to their future. For instance, when buying boys presents, get them an Easy Bake Oven along with the football. Buy them Legos, and also buy them stuffed animals. (I’m aware that these present examples are archaic, and I couldn’t care less. Substitute in whatever you want from the world of Pokemon or whatever.) Enroll them in dance class, and in music lessons with non-manly instruments: flute and violin and the French horn (Somewhere there’s a buff, tattooed flautist slowly twisting her flute into a knot and dreaming of doing the same to my neck. [Just out of curiosity: did you read that pronoun as I wrote it, or did you substitute a male one in there?] But I am speaking of traditional gender stereotypes in order to encourage defiance of them; I think that “manly” instruments according to the prejudice are the rock band instruments, drums and guitar and bass, maybe saxophone and trumpet. Orchestrals are welcome to tell me I’m wrong.) Get them into knitting and quilting and gardening, grow their hair long, let them help Mom on the weekends instead of Dad.

That’s a big one, I think. Encourage boys to spend more time with girls. One of the things that has made me a better man is that my best friend and strongest influence is my wife, whom I’ve known since I was 20; also, my profession is populated  predominantly by women, and so most of my work friends are female. I think it helped also that I was a Mama’s boy, my mother’s favorite son, and that my very best friend as a lad was a girl, with whom I used to play imagination games with our stuffed animals and her little woodland creature figurines. Man, those things were cute.

I think that most of the traditional competitive activities are fine if the competition is dialed down about thirty-four notches. Football is a fun game when it’s pickup tag/flag football, the kind of game where every side scores a touchdown every play. Same with most team sports. The problem comes when there is a focus on winning and losing: when the point is fun, or even when the point is to compete with one’s self and try to do better than one did the day before, then I think sports can be a fun physical activity, even a valuable one. This generally means that team sports are less positive than individual sports, because in team sports, while there is the cooperation and camaraderie of the team, those teams always turn on the weakest link, the one kid who dropped the ball and cost them the game, just like Jack’s hunters turned on Simon, and then on Piggy. More importantly, the team sports focus on wins and losses: and that means that anything  that gets a win is good. When one focuses on improving, then the sport tends to promote good habits, rather than an anything-goes mentality.

Let’s see, what else? I think reading is a key. A large part of toxic masculinity is a focus on self and a lack of empathy for others, and reading builds empathy and tends to downplay the value of selfishness, especially if one reads tragedies or stories with a tragic hero, because at least half of the time, the protagonist’s tragic flaw is arrogance or egotism or both. Watching hero after hero go down in flames that he set himself has a sobering effect on the male ego, I think. Reading is also quiet and intellectual, and therefore antithetical to the activities approved under the Toxic Masculinity seal. And if we can also remove the gendering stereotypes of books, that would be great, too; some of my favorite books are romances, and books by female authors or about female characters or traditionally female roles and situations — or all of the above.

Okay, one controversial one, and then I’ll call it a day. I think that dating and romance should wait until after the first towering inferno of adolescence has passed. One of the things that makes teenaged boys awful, in my opinion, is the terrible tyranny of the penis. It may be an exaggeration to say that everything that teenaged boys do is intended to get them laid — but it may not. The old trope about boys thinking about sex every seven second is, if anything, an underestimate. This monomania leads to all kinds of terrible treatment of girls by boys — and also of boys by boys, especially in our world of suppressed homoeroticism. It also leads to competition between boys for the affections of those they desire; and boys quickly learn, if they don’t already know from sports or the kind of friendly bullying that boys do to each other, that the easiest way to get ahead of your rivals is not to be better than them, but rather to make them look worse. That’s one of the reasons why boys are so quick to embarrass and shame each other, and do things that make other boys look bad, especially in front of girls. I don’t know if it is possible to stop boys and girls from dating until they’re around 18 or so, but it would surely be helpful, especially if we could encourage them to be friends instead. Maybe if we put a focus on friendly activities instead of dating activities in high school: like maybe the prom? Shouldn’t be about bringing a date? Just a thought.

That does lead me to an interesting thought about changing porn, both how we view it and what the standards should be for pornographic content; maybe if it was more acceptable and had better intentions behind it, it wouldn’t be so very encouraging of violence and objectification.

But I think that topic is not one I want to get into.

I guess I’ll just leave it with this: we should encourage boys to hug. Handshakes are lame. High fives, especially intricate ones, are cool; but you know what’s a far, far better way to greet your friends and to show your affection for one another? A good, genuine hug.

Here’s one from me to you.

 

This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

This morning, I am going to read.

This morning, I am going to take care of myself.

This morning, I am not going to make excuses.

This morning, I wish you the same.

 

(Also, please note this is my 42nd This Morning post. Hallelujah.)

This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

This morning, I am thinking about books.

I have too many books. I have too many books and I don’t read enough. I have a hard and demanding and time-consuming job, one that is important to me to do well, and so that takes up a ton of time and energy; maybe the worst thing about it is that my most-free time is late at night before I go to bed — but I can’t read then because it puts me to sleep. Which sucks because I want to read! And it also makes me feel like a lame-o who doesn’t care enough about reading, I mean, if I loved reading enough, I wouldn’t fall asleep doing it. But that’s dumb, because reading relaxes me, and I’m tired, et voila. Nodding off mid-page and dropping the book, which I do all the time. Scares my dogs. Though fortunately I rarely hit myself in the face. Not never; but rarely.

I also have this second job where I’m trying to write books. That also is draining and difficult and time- and energy-consuming, and so the two things together leave very little time for reading. This one gives me a strange feedback loop, too, because while I want to read as much as possible, as it gives me inspiration and fodder for writing, that means that when I read, it makes me want to write, so if the reading is going well that’s generally when I stop reading to write. Conversely, if the writing is not going well, it makes me want to read more, but then I also feel bad for not getting my writing done, because as much as I want to read, that is still my avocation, my hobby, my peaceful relaxing thing; it’s not my job. I don’t have goals and ambitions as a reader, but I do as a writer, so when I’m reading with the intention of getting back to writing, I am more focused on the getting back to writing, which makes me not enjoy the reading as much.

But I love reading. I love getting lost in a book. I love finding a new hidden thing, or a lovely turn of phrase. I love arguing with the author, or questioning why they did a thing — and I adore when I realize later in the book exactly why they did that thing. I love getting to know and understand characters, and I love seeing how things unfold in their lives. I love seeing how authors begin a story, and how they end one. I love reading detailed descriptions, and perfect metaphors, and ideas that I’ve never thought of before but that resonate with me down to the iron strings inside that Emerson talked about in “On Self-Reliance.” I love doing that, too, thinking of things I’ve read while I’m out in the world, and realizing that the book has had an influence on me, that it matters outside of the time I spend between the covers, wandering across the pages.

I love long books and short books, fiction books and fact books, children’s books and adult books, fantasy and science fiction and horror and romance and everything in between. There is no genre I won’t read, and no subject I won’t at least read about, though of course I have my preferences. Bookstores are dangerous for me, because every time I stop and notice something, I want to buy it. Even knowing that I have too many books at home and I don’t know if or when I’ll ever get to read that new book, I still want to buy it. I want it to be mine. I want to have the opportunity to pick that one right off my shelf, and then dive in and start reading it. When I travel, I pack extra books, because I don’t know when I’m packing which book I will want to read next, and I want that first moment of opening a book to be exciting and welcome, not feel onerous or like it’s just the best I can do. I don’t mind too much having too many books, because I just read that Umberto Eco had a personal library of 30,000 volumes, which he never could have read, but that it’s good to have more books than you can read because then you have to choose, which makes you more invested in the book and gives you the chance to learn new things throughout your life. I like that. I want to die with books unread: but not as many as  books read. That’s my goal.

I don’t ever want to be without books.

This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

This morning, honestly, I’m thinking about how much I have to teach my students still, and how little time I have to do it. I’m thinking about whether or not literature can be parceled  into discrete packets called “reading assignments,” and whether there is any point to assigning reading homework to people who don’t read. I’m thinking about whether it’s better to comment extensively on essay drafts, or to hand them right back and just say, “Make it better.” Independence or guidance?

On the one hand I have the pedagogical establishment in this country, which wants me to differentiate and scaffold and make all learning student-centered, preferably student-generated project-based collaborative group multimedia discovery projects. I honestly have no idea how to do this, but I suspect it is both transient and unsustainable: that too much effort would go into planning and organizing the perfect project units, and in pre-teaching protocols for students to follow in generating their own discovery learning projects, and in trying to make the groups work fairly, particularly with low-interest students; and within five years, pedagogists will have discovered a new element that should be added — though nothing will ever be taken away. The new element will not make this more practical.

And on the other hand I have Eugen Herrigel’s Zen and the Art of Archery Herrigel was a German philosophy professor who studied traditional Japanese archery in Japan, and his book is credited with helping to popularize Zen in the west. His archery master has the perfect system: he shows the students how to do the thing — how to draw the bow, aim, and fire at a target (Also, most importantly, how to breathe) — and then he has the students do it, and he points  out their mistakes. Then he does it again. And again. That’s it: modeling and expert critique. There is no explicit  instruction at all.

There is precisely one reason why I have to rush, why I have to assign reading packets rather than whole novels, or better yet, just read whole novels with my students and discuss them as we go, and it is time. The determination that one class lasts for fifty minutes, that one week is five classes, that one semester is eighteen weeks, that one year is two semesters, that an education is thirteen years. We are in a hurry, all the time, forever, particularly with our children. That’s what ruins everything.

If I could teach anything, I would teach this world to take its time.

But You Get Summers Off!

Dusty 2 Comments

[Read Part One: Money Talks]

[Read Part Three: Walking Out]

The day begins at 8:15. That’s when class starts.

But of course that’s not when the day begins. Students come inside at 8:05, and as soon as they do, I am teaching. That’s when the day begins.

Unless I have morning duty: then it starts at 7:45, when I have to show up, unlock the two gates, and then stand in the parking lot and make sure nobody gets run over while all the parents are dropping their kids off at school, and the high schoolers are whipping into the parking lot, trying to make sure that no one took THEIR SPACE. That’s work. 7:45 is when it starts, some days.

Although it might be fair to say that my day begins at 5:20, when my alarm goes off and I get up and take a shower; because in that shower, I am thinking about school. Always. Planning what I will teach, thinking about what I have to grade, trying to remember what meetings I have this week – is this Wednesday a faculty meeting, or grade-level teams? Do I have an IEP meeting today, or is that next week?

But if we begin with the thinking, then the day begins around 2:30 am. Because that’s when my insomnia kicks in, and I start thinking about school. Trying to go back to sleep, of course, but that isn’t always possible; it depends on whether I’ve done anything wrong. Did I lose my temper and snap at a student who asked for the fifth time if we could watch a movie? Did I have to explain a grade to a student who thinks they are a brilliant writer, but really they’re not, and I had to find a way to let them down easily while still encouraging them – but also making it crystal clear that they aren’t as good as they think they are, because otherwise they will get their parents to file an official complaint about the grade, and I’ll have to have three meetings, at least, to iron it out? Do I have a class that’s misbehaving, and I need to explain to them all, again, why they shouldn’t act that way? Because if I do, I will start working on my script at 2:30, and I won’t be done until 3:30 at the earliest. 4:30 is more common, on the days when I have a controlled-anger lecture to give.

That’s when my day begins.

Then, 5:20, alarm, and I have my morning; I have sometimes taken advantage of my early rising to get some correcting done, because I’m fresher first thing in the morning with that first coffee jolt, and I can get through eight or ten vocabulary assignments in under an hour. My vocab assignments are tougher than some, because I make them define the word and then use it in an original sentence, so I have to make sure that the definition is correct, that the sentence uses the word correctly, and that the sentence is grammatically acceptable; that’s also why I can’t let TAs grade the vocab, because they don’t know enough grammar and can’t always pick out which of several similar definitions of the word is the best one. I also give them credit for the sentence even if they got the definition wrong, but the sentence can make sense anyway; and I don’t trust teenagers to do that. So I do it. There are between ten and twenty words per assignment, so it takes me between five and ten minutes for each student to check the whole thing over – longer if I want to give feedback on why the sentence is incorrect, maybe offer a correct alternative so they can see what it looks like to use an adjective properly. 97 times, every two weeks. (I know, only 97 students? I have such small classes! At my last school I hit 180 students, some years! I’m lucky, now. Oh – and I do have more students than that, but two of my classes don’t do vocabulary assignments.) Then it’s breakfast, walking the dog, getting lunch ready, making sure I have all the papers and materials I need for the day. Then it’s off to work.

Morning duty. Usually I’m just a presence; the parents who drive badly (A good 30-40% of them) assiduously avoid eye contact. If it’s a student who speeds through the parking lot or swerves too close to a 6th grader crossing their path, I can yell at them to watch where they’re going and they’ll at least give me an apologetic shrug, but mostly my job is to scowl at the drivers and wave at the students. And watch the clock: because at 8:05 I have to unlock the school door and let the students in; and then I’m supposed to stay out there until 8:15 – but my class starts at 8:15. Do I open the classroom door while I’m outside, let my students hang out in my room until I get in there? If I leave them unsupervised they may get in a fight, or steal something, or break something valuable; I better leave the door locked. Which means they will stand in a loud, obnoxious clump outside my door, and block the hall for everyone else. Oh, well, can’t be helped.

I fudge the end of morning duty, go in about 8:13; usually my boss is coming down the hall to make sure the door is locked, so he sees me. Damn. I’ll be getting an email later about how important duty is, how we need to make sure our students are safe. Well, anyway: into the classroom, 21 freshmen for Honors English, and here we go. I need to:

*Log onto my computer, start Chrome, open the email program and make sure I don’t have any emails with subjects like “EMERGENCY: BOMB THREAT HAS BEEN RECEIVED,”

*Start the attendance program, log in, take attendance (If I don’t do this in the first three minutes, the front office will call to remind me.), mark the tardy students absent (We don’t mark them tardy during first period; if they come in late, they have to go to the front office for a note, and then we mark them Present; the front office changes their attendance to Tardy for us.), change the Absent students to Present as they walk in late with notes

*Start Internet Explorer (Because that’s where I have the Bookmark) and open the morning announcements.

*Get the students’ attention: impossible because they are too busy chatting and visiting and teasing each other.

*Stand for the Pledge of Allegiance when it comes over the PA

*Go over the morning announcements: a witty quote that is either over the students’ heads, or strange and offputting, or both; the same five announcements that have been on there for a week; a new video from the Character Education class about Inclusion, this week; God forbid a new episode from the journalism class with this week’s school news (They do a fine job, but my students love nothing more than criticizing, and so every week when the new episode is posted, I’m in for several minutes of snark and sass, and then indifference and distraction when I stop them from being crappy.); and then sports scores that none of them want to know about unless they were on the team that won, and then they want to make sure that the scores are seen and they get congratulated.

*Start class.

What am I teaching again?

Oh, right, To Kill a Mockingbird. Well, at least these students get their own books off the shelf – though I have to remember to tell them to stop throwing the books across the room to their friends, because somebody’s going to get hurt, most likely the book; I’ve been able to pick up a few used copies to replace the worst ones, but I already can’t tell the difference between the ones I bought and the ones I got from the English teacher next door when I took over this class: covers are falling off, spines are snapped, chunks of the book are falling out. Okay, so now I’ve got them on the right page (Mostly: there are four different editions, all with different page numbers, so someone is always lost), and it’s time to start reading. They’re still chatting, and I shush them. I start reading.

They’re still talking. I shush them again, louder, and add “Quiet, please!” I start reading again.

Still talking. Now the students have gotten annoyed with their peers, and one of them cries out, “SHUT UP!” I should tell her to be more respectful, but I’m on her side. Plus, it worked. So now I read. It’s a good class, the Honors class, so they pay attention, mostly; there are only three or four who are still scrolling through their phones behind their books or under their desks while I’m reading aloud; when I stop to ask a question, I get several kids willing to answer. Actually, they might be too involved: the one kid who loves to talk has his hand in the air every five minutes, often starting his comments with, “This is a little off-topic, but…” And the one precocious girl always wants to share when she has had some insight, when she has spotted a thematic connection; it’s great, but her classmates are tired of her being a know-it-all, as they see it, so as soon as she starts talking, they start making noises, having small side conversations; and the girl speaks too quietly and I can’t hear her.

But I read, enjoying every minute of it, because it’s Harper Lee and every page is brilliant. The kids like it too, and everything is going great – except now it’s 9:09, and the class is almost over (First period is longer to allow for the morning announcements.) and DAMMIT, I forgot to give them their reading project assignment, again. I’ll have to remember to change the due date on the assignment sheet and make a new set of copies. I stop reading with a minute left, they put the books back on the shelf; the precocious girl and the talkative boy both come up to my desk to talk to me, at the same time, and I try to listen to both as the bell rings and the room empties. By the time I have laughed at the boy’s joke and heard the girl’s last insight, my next class has started coming in: they are juniors, so they drop their bags on their desks and then go back out in the hallway, to the bathrooms and the water fountains. I check the email, make sure there aren’t any bomb threats; I have an email from a parent and one from the Special Ed teacher, both of which I have to open immediately. (I also have eight assignments from students, two communiques from the principal, and seven pieces of spam.) The parent email is asking about a student’s grade in their class, so I mark it Unread and try to remember to read and respond later; the special ed teacher is reminding me that we have an IEP meeting this afternoon. Crap.

The bell rings and it’s time for 2nd period: College Readiness. A required elective which the juniors all resent; it’s intended to help them succeed on SATs and ACTs and college applications; they split the week between math, college counseling, and me for English. It’s annoying to them because most of them are already in more advanced math classes than what is on the tests, and they already have me for English some other time during the day, but they still have to take this class. They are all late, either because they took too long coming from first period or because they’re in the bathroom, expecting their bags to count as attendance placeholders; sometimes I mark them absent and then change it as they trickle in, sometimes I mark them all here and forget about it. But when I do that, I always remember my college professor telling us that the attendance record is a legal document, and if I mark a student here when they’re absent, it could be used as evidence in court, say if that student is actually off robbing a Kwik-E-Mart while I said they were in my 3rd period class. And if I mark them absent while they are present, that makes the automated system call their parents and say the kid is absent from this class; then the parent texts the student to ask where the hell they are, and I get an email. And if I don’t get the attendance taken in the first three minutes of class, the front office will call and remind me.

So what were we doing in here? Oh, right, they are practicing their college application essays. So I want them to make their rough drafts twice as long, and then they will cut them down to 650 words max, the recommended max length from the Common App. So I could use one of the samples that I wrote, and show the students where I would add more details, more information, more words just to hit the target length (Even though I hate writing for length, as all that should matter is purpose and audience; this is the only class where I assign minimum and maximum lengths for essays, because college applications expect that), but I think it would be better to get one of them to tell me a story, and I’ll type it up on the projected screen while they all watch. I’m lucky; the class clown is in this group, and he always has a story, and the one today actually isn’t that bad – though it is about running off campus to buy snacks from the Circle K in between classes, which isn’t allowed and I should say something about it. But I get the story down, which takes about half of the class time; and then I start talking about where the essay thus created could be added to.

Nope: they’ve stopped listening. Well, after all, it’s not a real class; the assignment isn’t due today; the story on the board isn’t theirs, and though it was entertaining, they already heard it when the clown told it to me the first time. So they have no reason to pay attention. I give up, and let them do nothing; I sit at my computer and start answering that parent email –

Fire drill. The loudest damn siren in the world, makes me jump every time. Fortunately the students know what to do, so they head outside; if it was a lockdown drill, they’d be anxious and awkward and unsure, and I’d have to guide them where to go and what to do. I grab my attendance folder off the wall, shut off the lights, go back for my sunglasses because the sunlight makes me sneeze, and then lock the door and go out. I have to hold my hands over my ears as we pass the outside siren, because the noise is actually painful. Then we’re outside, and I have to direct the students to the right place after all, because we’ve changed protocol this year (They used to go through the locked gate, which meant they all piled up until I got there to open the lock; now they go through the parking lot to the far side), and tell them not to mess with the parked cars, and no, they can’t run down to Circle K for some snacks. Not even if they bring me some. Take attendance again outside, hold up the green card because they’re all there, and then wait for the signal to take them back inside. Still waiting. Still waiting. “Hey Student X, put Student Y down, please. Student Z, stop spitting sunflower seeds on people.” Still waiting. Okay, there we go: back inside. They file back in just in time to get their things, and then the bell rings to end the period. My third period students already left their second period, so they’re coming in even before second period ends, asking, “What are we going to do today?”

What are we – oh, crap! I need the Chromebooks. They’re doing research for their argument essays this period. Race to the computer (Unlock it because it timed out while I was outside), bring up the Staff Forms page, open the Chromebook Cart Reservation page, check the three carts – Cart #3, okay. Dammit, it’s all the way down at the other end of the school. Pick out two students and send them to get the cart. Then it’s time for attendance, and I have a minute or so to remind them of their tasks before the computer cart arrives, at which point they stop listening to me because they now get a computer to play with, and they all swarm the cart and grab Chromebooks.

Except there aren’t enough. The last teacher didn’t manage to collect them all, because of the fire drill. So I send some students down to fetch them. They do, but there still aren’t enough, because this is my big class, 26 sophomores (Well, 25 sophomores and one senior taking Sophomore English for the third time, bless her heart. She won’t pass this time, either.) and the cart only carries 24 Chromebooks. So I send two more students on a quest for random Chromebooks, which they track down in only 20 minutes of roaming the halls. But no great loss, because that same time has been spent in the classroom watching YouTube videos and finding ways to play free online video games, or else bringing up Google and then looking at a phone. The rest of the class period goes the same, and at the end, they ask if they will also have tomorrow to do research. I shake my head, unable to muster any better answer, and send them away when the bell rings. Then I have to collect all the Chromebooks they left on their desks, return them to the cart, make sure all of them are plugged in –

No, wait, that has to wait for a minute: I haven’t been to the bathroom in three hours. I race down to the teacher’s lounge, because the boy’s room across the hall is filthy and usually occupied, and I have bashful kidneys. By the time I get back to my classroom, the Chromebook cart is gone; hopefully to the right place. I don’t know: this is my prep period, the best time of the day. No students for fifty – no, forty-one glorious minutes.

I have to:

*Actually read all of the emails that came in today, and any I didn’t get to yesterday.

*Respond to all emails that need a response, in the following order of importance (most to least): parents, special ed, other teachers, administration, students.

*Check that I have the right handouts for the three classes after lunch, that I know what I’m teaching, that I know what assignments I have to collect and what due dates I have to remind them of

*Make any copies I may need this afternoon or tomorrow morning, as I won’t have time to make copies in the morning (Xerox machine is always tied up before first period) and I have an IEP meeting after school

*Make more coffee before I collapse into a stupor

*Use the bathroom at least one more time

*Do as much grading as possible. Usually not very much. Today, none: because one of my colleagues stops in to ask me if I’ve heard the latest absurdity the admin’s gotten up to, and I haven’t, so we need to discuss it. We do. It’s infuriating.

 

Now I have eight minutes left. Didn’t get any grading done.

But that’s okay, because the next class is lunch; not quite as satisfying as prep, because there are students in here, mostly hanging out (with their terribly smelly food) but some looking for help or to check on due dates or to ask if I’ve graded that essay they turned in late. The students who are hanging out want to talk to me, because they want to tell me what they did yesterday, or show me that meme or the video they found that was hilarious and I’ll like it because there are dogs in it, or they want to ask my advice, or for me to settle an argument (Is cheesecake a pie or a cake? Have I seen the trailer for the new Fahrenheit 451 adaptation, and what do I think of it? Should they move into the dorm for college next year, or live with their parents to save money? Should they even go to college? Don’t I think the new math teacher is an asshole?) [Answers: I say cake, because of the name, but really it’s a tart; yes, and I think it will be a good movie but not the wonder that the book is; they should move out if they can afford it; yes unless they have a different plan that is as useful as a college education would be; and no, because I like the teachers more than the students, even though I agree that math is evil. Yes, these are all things I have said to students.].

I eat my lunch, finally make my coffee while also finishing up the copies I need for class after lunch, and spend a few minutes talking to my wife. (On the phone for the first sixteen years of my career, in the next classroom for the last two years, as she has been teaching at the school where I work. It’s lovely to have her there. It makes my blood absolutely boil to see the way they treat her, the goddamned admin and the obnoxious students and the entitled parents. Drives me nuts.) Then it’s time for 6th period: Advanced Placement Literature and Composition. Today I am teaching Julius Caesar by Shakespeare, which is nice, because I’ve taught it for years and I know everything about it; I also worry that I’m not seeing it with fresh eyes for the same reason, and so there are things that I’m missing. I need to help them see through the text, because this class is struggling with the AP expectations for analysis; they write well, for the most part, but they don’t always get what they’re reading. Because with one or two exceptions in this class of twelve seniors, they don’t ever read outside of what is assigned for school. They never have. They tell me, half ashamed and half proud, how few books they’ve read this year, or the last four years, or their entire lives.

People wonder why I read books out loud to my high school students. It’s because it is literally the only way I can be sure they will read at least one book in my class.

This is one of the factors that makes English an impossible subject to teach: the students don’t read. I have to find a way to keep them interested in books, which they believe, with all of their hearts, are boring and obsolete; I have to find a way to make them want to put thought into the books, because that’s the only way they’ll see the value of literature. I have to both know everything about the books I’m teaching, so I can answer their questions and ask them good ones in return, and also improvise constantly, and use whatever I can to relate the literature to this class, these students, this point in time and place; because of that, I generally can’t re-use old lesson plans, and I have to constantly learn everything there is to know about new literature. Teaching writing is even more difficult, because it has all of the same inherent feel of being boring and obsolete to students who are never disconnected from the internet; and also because it makes the students feel inadequate, because they know they don’t write well, and they don’t want to be embarrassed, and they don’t want a bad grade – and so they try not to write, which means they don’t practice and they don’t get better. When I do ask them to write, they often put as little effort into it as possible, and then they confirm for themselves that they don’t write well.

18 years teaching, and I don’t know how to fix that. I try something new every year. Sometimes it works. With some of them. I think.

But I can’t really say that English is harder to teach than other subjects: we all have individual difficulties, and mine aren’t worse. At least I have stories, with sex and violence and beautiful language; math teachers need to constantly think of ways to keep students interested in abstractions, thinking in ways they don’t normally think; history and science teachers have to present an enormous amount of information, and somehow make it digestible; arts and technical teachers have to constantly circle the classroom, never sitting down for a second all day, looking over students’ shoulders and trying to figure out what they’re doing wrong and help them do it right, all while the students are incessantly calling out the teacher’s name – if you’ve never been in a high school arts or tech classroom, just imagine 20-30 hungry baby birds in different nests, with one bird trying to feed them all while also keep them from falling out of the tree or pecking each other to death, while they just keep crying out, crying out for attention. It’s quite the dance.

Elementary school teachers have to do all of this at once. Though with a lot fewer students, admittedly. Still: it’s not a job I’d want; the one day I subbed in an elementary school was one of my worst as a teacher. I prefer high school, and Language Arts. At least I think I do. A lot of the time, I’d rather just be a janitor.

6th period goes well; they’re great kids. Almost graduated now. I worry about some of them. Especially the one student who recently had a death in the family. I worry a lot about that one, because the death hit hard, and all plans have changed, and I don’t know if that’s a warning sign or just the normal healthy grieving process. I’ve been a teacher for eighteen years, and I’ve had three of my students commit suicide: I don’t want to have a fourth. I’ve also had to make reports to social services twice, once for an abusive parent and once for a girl who had a “boyfriend” who was twenty years older than her. Neither report led to a good outcome. I don’t need to report this one: everyone knows the whole situation, which means everyone treats this student like they’re kryptonite. I try to be normal with the student. I try to talk to them every day, to be present for anything that needs to be said, to be as honest and open as I can be, always, no matter what. I don’t know how well I do. I don’t know if it will make any difference. But it’s all I can do. So I do it.

When I have time.

We don’t get through much Julius Caesar, because they constantly distract me and the class with their jokes and their stories and their questions; I encourage that, because I think it helps make the class more meaningful and more useful, and also because there are pedagogical theories that encourage students to associate knowledge with their own lives, their own experiences, and so letting them voice all of their thoughts encourages that sort of association. Or maybe it just wastes time; I don’t really know. I know they like my class. I know we don’t cover half as much material as most other teachers. I don’t know any other way to teach.

Speaking of teaching: now it’s time for 7th period. AP Language and Composition.

What the hell was I doing in this class?

Oh right: they’re halfway through “Shooting an Elephant” by George Orwell. We’re talking about imagery. I find my copy under the pile of papers by my podium, and I tell them to get out theirs; I remember to take attendance then, and go to my computer to do it – and realize I forgot to take attendance for the senior class last period. Dammit. Huh, well, at least the front office didn’t call. I mark attendance for both classes, then hand out replacement copies to the two students who lost their packets since yesterday and one to the kid who has it but doesn’t want to dig through his backpack and find it, and then we’re off: to Burma, in the 1920’s, when a young George Orwell is about to slaughter an elephant because he doesn’t know how to let the elephant live and still be a white police officer in a British colony. He hates everything, especially himself. I can kinda relate.

I get into it, reading the piece; Orwell was such a damn good writer. I wish I could write like that. I know it’s because he was able to live his writing, almost all of it: when he wrote Homage to Catalonia, about the Spanish Civil War, it was after he went to Spain and joined the anti-fascist militias, and actually fought on the front lines. I wish I could do that. Not fight in a war, but go to where I am needed, and do what I believe needs to be done, and then write beautiful, crystal-perfect books about what I had done. Though I’d rather not die at age 48 of tuberculosis: I’m 43 now, so that’s not much time left. Still haven’t published a book. Not that much time in my day to write; certainly no time to do anything worth writing about.

I can’t get too into it, though, because this is my annoying class. This is the class with the one student who likes to irritate everyone, and so says intentionally sexist or racist things, and then says, “I’m just kidding.” He knows I’m a vegetarian, so he likes to bring up how he slaughters his own meat. He likes to make the stories as disgusting as possible, and then smile at me. And there’s that other student who can’t sit still: she will stand up and dance right in the middle of class, while I’m reading. Or she will make hand gestures and funny faces at other students in the class, laughing loudly while we’re trying to have discussion. She’s the smartest one in the room, so if I call her on it, she’ll apologize, share some insight to mollify me – and then go right back to disrupting the class, while also making some passive-aggressive statement about how limiting and controlling school is, how that’s unhealthy for a growing mind. Then she’ll stare at her phone for half an hour, turning it around to show funny memes to students across the room. And the rest of the students in here would rather be studying for their math class which they have next period, or grumbling about the history class they had last period. The class often feels like a complete waste of time.

Speaking of not much time left: class is almost over now. I cut the article off with one paragraph left; we’ll finish it tomorrow, but the mood will be ruined, because they won’t remember tomorrow what we read today, other than the bare facts: Orwell shot the elephant. Now it’s time for 8th period: the second AP Lang class, the big one – twice as many students as 7th period. Fortunately, this is the one time when I don’t have to remember what we were doing, the one time when I have the same class twice in a row; unfortunately, the two classes don’t go at the same pace, so I don’t remember where we were in the Orwell article with this class. When I remember, I mark the paper where each class stops. When I remember.

Unfortunately, fighting through 7th period has put me into a bad mood, and worn me out entirely. Well, at least I have four minutes to recover. I take deep breaths, try to shake it off, try to treat the new class fairly, not take out the last class’s misbehavior on these kids. It’s tough. Especially at the end of the day.

The class goes by in a blur, but also, because it is the end of the day and I am exhausted, it crawls by. The clock doesn’t move and doesn’t move and doesn’t move, and then suddenly there are only 20 minutes left and we haven’t finished the reading. We get through it, the whole thing (so now they’re ahead of 7th period), and I’m about to lead them into the analysis: when the bell rings. 3:30. Day’s over. They swarm out, and silence descends.

Then my classroom phone rings: I forgot the attendance again. I apologize, and take it now. I fall into my desk chair, open my email. Oh right: I have an IEP meeting. Down I go to the special ed room to talk about how well that student is doing in my class (or how poorly) despite learning disabilities or physical disabilities or autism spectrum challenges. Or all three.

An hour later, and it’s all I can do to gather my things and leave. Home, to dinner, and dog walking, and family time, and some relaxation; then, around 8:00, after dinner is done, I remember: I haven’t actually graded anything all day. I grab up the laptop, sit on the living room couch, open my email, and start grading vocab assignments that students sent to me online. If I’m lucky, I can get a whole class done before I have to go to sleep, sometime between 10:00 and 11:00.

I need to get a few hours of sleep before I wake up at 2:30. I’m worried about that kid in my 6th period class. Seemed … off today. I hope there’s nothing going on. I hope nothing happens. I hope I didn’t say or do the wrong thing. I hope.

This is no exaggeration. This is what I do, what I have done for 18 years. I don’t always have fire drills, or adventures with the Chromebook carts; sometimes it’s a lockdown drill. More than once in my career it has been a bomb threat, and an evacuation. Oftentimes I realize I don’t have the copies I need to teach the lesson I wanted to teach, and I have to do something I make up on the spot. More than once I have gone to the computer lab and found another class using the computers. Schedules change, students are out for field trips or athletic events. I don’t always grade at night; sometimes I get more done at school, and then I let myself do something else in the evening. I pretty much always grade on weekends, and during vacations; I’m an English teacher. I have essays to read. A single essay takes between 20 and 30 minutes to grade and comment on, and I have 100 students, and I assign multiple drafts.

Ask me to communicate regularly with parents. Or to stay until 7:00 or 8:00, three or four times a year, for parent conferences.

Ask me to have extra meetings with troubled students.

Ask me to plan and organize curriculum, or to discuss pedagogy with other teachers, or interventions for students who aren’t successful.

Ask me to plan, organize, and run extracurricular events, on evenings or on weekends. To coach teams, to run clubs, to offer extra tutoring to students who need it. Ask me to be the department chair, and the community liaison, and the head of the recycling program.

God forbid you ask me to raise my own children on top of all of this. I don’t know how teacher-parents do it.

Now ask me how much I get paid for the job I do. Ask me how much I should get paid.

Then ask me why teachers are going to be walking out across Arizona tomorrow.

You can ask. But I think you already know the answer.

Tell me about the rabbits again, George.

Dusty Leave a comment

I’ve decided I want to be stupid.

If I were stupid, I couldn’t be a teacher. No, that’s not true: I couldn’t be a good teacher, but we all know there are plenty of bad teachers out there. So I wouldn’t be a good teacher any more, which is sad; but I wouldn’t know it, so there wouldn’t be any problem. What’s more, I wouldn’t ever worry about being a good teacher. I’d never have to worry about whether my students were really understanding the point I was trying to make, because I’d never have a point. I wouldn’t have to read their essays any more, and write comments on them trying to make them better, and feel the frustration when they don’t pay any attention to those comments but go right on making the same mistakes; I could start grading essays according to how many words they are and whether they follow MLA format perfectly and how many words over three syllables they use. I wouldn’t realize the damage that standardized testing does to students, and to education, because I wouldn’t understand the purpose or the power of education, and I wouldn’t know what an opportunity is lost when students are beaten down with tests; I’d just do what I was told, and teach to the test, and threaten my students with bad grades if they don’t pass. So I’d never have to worry about lesson plans ever again. I would swallow all of the snake oil that gets sold to teachers, and I’d believe everything the salesmen said about it, so I could change entirely my policies and lesson plans and teaching methods every three or four years; so I wouldn’t even get bored. Every day would be a PowerPoint presentation and a jigsaw lesson, followed by a standardized test. And you know what? I bet my students would love me. Because they’d never have to think, either.

If I were stupid, I couldn’t be a writer. But wait: that isn’t true, either. It just means I couldn’t write well. But – assuming I still wanted to be a writer, which I probably wouldn’t because I wouldn’t be able to see the world the way I do now and I wouldn’t care about what I couldn’t see; I wouldn’t believe that art could help make the world a better place, as well as making me a better person; I wouldn’t even believe that writing was an art, because I’d think that art was only painting pictures. So if I were a stupid writer, that would work out great: because my books wouldn’t take so long to complete, and I wouldn’t have to work so hard to write them well. I could just vomit out whatever drivel I wished about super-powered vampire werewolves who drive around at night in Lamborghinis (which I’d always call a “Lambo” because I couldn’t spell the full name) –

Dear God, I wouldn’t have to worry about spelling any more.

– fighting demons with their super-powered vampire werewolf kung fu and having sex with hot chicks at the same time. Then I could self-publish my e-books on the internet.

I bet they would sell a million goddamn copies.

I could stop reading challenging books: right now I am reading Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things because I will be teaching it to my AP class, and I am also reading Bertrand Russell’s Wisdom of the West (a condensed version of his three-volume A History of Western Thought) because I admire the hell out of Bertrand Russell and I am thirsty for more understanding of philosophy. But fuck that – sorry, screw that (if I were stupid, I’d believe that cursing is bad, especially the F-word): if I were stupid, I wouldn’t be teaching that strange and wonderful and ethereal and challenging novel; it’s got weird sexy stuff in it, and I’d know that was wrong to show to little kids like the high school juniors in my AP class. Plus I wouldn’t understand it because the story jumps around a lot and the plot is hard to follow. Plus I wouldn’t like it because it isn’t set in America and there aren’t any super vampire werewolves in it. Plus my class wouldn’t teach any full novels, because that takes too long and isn’t necessary to pass a standardized test that only asks you to read short passages and excerpts. And there’s no way I’d read philosophy, especially not a survey of philosophy starting in ancient Greece; I’d think the Greeks were homos and philosophy is gay. I’d get rid of every book like that and just read James Patterson. And books about sports. Though I’d prefer the audio books, because it’s easier and faster and not as boring.

Speaking of sports, I could watch football instead of spending my Sundays doing school work or reading or writing, and go to bars at night with my buddies and drink beer (and I’d just drink cheap American beer, instead of having to take the time to peruse the menu looking for good beer) and watch more sports and yell real loud when my favorite sports-squadron scored a goal-unit-basket. And I could wish that I had been good enough at sports to go pro, but known deep inside that it would never have happened, because I’m white and black people are better at sports. Which is why I would like baseball and hockey and NASCAR so much, because lots of white people are good at those sports. Though not hockey as much because they’re all Canucks and Russkies. Though watching the fights would be fun. And I could watch MMA and laugh when Kimbo Slice (That’d be a great name for one of my super vampire werewolves! Maybe I could change it to Jimbo, and then he wouldn’t sue me. Then I could make him white, too.) challenges his opponent to actually compare testicle size during a pre-fight interview.

Though I would have to worry about the size of my genitalia. And whether the size of my hands and feet gave an accurate representation of that size.

Speaking of hand and genital size, if I were stupid, I wouldn’t have to argue and debate and worry about politics: I could just vote for Donald Trump to make America great again, and go back to watching football. And then I could watch Fox News and never have to worry about reading or thinking about what is going on in the world: I could just be sure that America is the best country, that we have to have a strong enough military to keep everyone from invading us, but that if they did invade us, I’d be ready with all of my guns to fight them back, just like in Red Dawn, which would be one of my favorite movies. And maybe I’d have to worry about that socialist Bernie Sanders getting voted in, but I’d be pretty sure, in my heart of hearts, that America would never let that happen: I’d probably secretly believe that the Statue of Liberty and the statue of Rocky Balboa would come to life and drag Sanders down into New York harbor. And I’d never worry about that broad Hillary getting elected over The Donald: no way would America pick a woman over a man. We all know you can’t trust a woman with power – what happens when she has her period? She’d fire the nukes if she didn’t get enough chocolate ice cream! (I would have written Haagen-Dazs, but I can’t spell that, either. And Ben and Jerry are socialist hippies.)

I would believe that a wall on the border could keep out Mexican illegal immigrants. I’d believe that immigrants are bad. I could ignore uncomfortable irony like the history of my own family’s immigration to this country. Because I’m white.

I could chant “USA! USA!” without irony. And tear up when a small child or a crippled person sings the Star-Spangled Banner at my ballgames. And secretly hate that Beyonce sings better than anyone in country and western.

I could listen to country and western music. I wouldn’t have to change radio stations any more, because there’s only one country station here and I’d love every song because they all sound the same. I wouldn’t have to listen to challenging or depressing lyrics, or admire musical talent or songwriting ability; I’d just like the ones who say America is great and talk about drinking American beer and driving around in trucks. Which is all of them.

I could stop taking criticism to heart. I would think I was great because I am American, and a white male, and therefore I am the best people in the world, and everyone else is just jealous of what I have. Except for that genital thing. But I’m sure I could convince myself that there was no problem there. My hands are pretty big, after all. And it wouldn’t matter to me if people thought my writing was bad, or my teaching, or that I was behaving in any way wrongly: because I’d think they were haters, and Taylor Swift (who I would totally listen to, and try not to think about how hot I’d think she is because she’d be too young for me, but I’d know in my heart of hearts that she would totally have sex with me if I ever met her in a bar, because I am an American white male with not-too-small hands.) would have told me that haters gonna hate, hate, hate, and I just needed to shake it off. Man, that song is just so catchy! And that Kanye West guy is a racist. Though his wife is hot. And of course she married a black guy, because she’s got a huge butt and black guys like big butts. Sir Mix-A-Lot told us that.

If I were stupid, I would think that “were” sounds weird: because I wouldn’t know about the subjunctive mood and statements that are contrary to reality requiring a different verb; so I’d just say “was.”

If I was stupid, I wouldn’t worry about my diet. I wouldn’t care if animals suffered in factory farms, because they’re just animals and they don’t feel pain, plus the Bible says they’re here to serve us. I’d love bacon more than anything except steak, and best of all would be steak wrapped in bacon and topped with lobster. Wrapped in bacon. Maybe with a bacon milkshake on the side. I wouldn’t care about my cholesterol, because I’d know that America has the greatest health care system in the world and I could have all the triple and quadruple bypasses I needed when my ticker started giving out. And I wouldn’t care about my weight, because I’d lift weights – that is to say, I’d do it differently than I do now, because I would do bench presses and curls and maybe five sit-ups a week and call it good – because as long as my pecs and arms were big, I’d think I was hot, because check out these guns! Plus women don’t think the same way about appearance. Men are visual, they need chicks to be hot; but women just need them to be manly, so they feel protected and safe. And I’ve got all the guns I need. Get it? Get it? Because I meant my biceps AND the Glock on my nightstand!

 

 

Yes. I want this. Last night I went to see Of Mice and Men on stage, and it was lovely and heart-wrenching; but if I was stupid, I never would have gone to see it, and it wouldn’t have made me sad. And then afterwards, I spent a fair while writing an irritated response to a comment on Facebook from a woman who didn’t understand everything I was saying in my argument, but she was pretty sure I was a socialist and wanted to take tax money away from hard-working Americans to give to the junkies on welfare. But then I had to delete my reply. Because reasoned discourse is no longer acceptable in this country: all we care about is if people agree with us, and if they don’t agree with us, there must be something wrong with them; and if they tell us we are wrong, then we get offended. I had to delete the comment because I am a teacher, and teachers are not allowed – ever – to be offensive, even if the only reason we are offensive is because other people don’t like our arguments.

I had to delete my comment because six years ago, an offended woman on Facebook nearly got me fired and banned from teaching in Oregon by complaining about a comment I made, which led my employer to my blog, where I had written things that were true, but not polite, and not acceptable coming from someone who was supposed to love and protect and coddle all of the children while preparing them for the tests and cheering for them at football games, which is, I think, how most political entities view ideal teachers. I was called “morally reprehensible” for what I said. And the worst thing is this: that I have had to think about that, and whether it is true, and decide that to some extent it is, and then I have had to feel both shame and doubt because of it.

And last night, I realized: as long as I am a teacher in America, I will never be able to say exactly what I think, and I will never be able to argue, especially not about controversial issues like politics and guns and war and racism and religion and education, because telling someone that they are wrong, especially when they are, is offensive, and particularly for me because of my history, offending anyone, anyplace, anytime, could very easily get me fired. This means not only that I will always have to worry about what I write and post online, but also that I cannot use my abilities, my greatest assets – my intellect and my words – to do what I think is right, to try to make the world a better place through critical thought and reasoned argument, because I will never be able to argue, not as long as I teach. And probably not after that, because I’d like to be either a professional writer or own a small business, but if I make people mad at me by taking their bad arguments apart online, they will give me bad publicity, which will hurt my career, whatever career it is. I will always have to worry about what someone else will do to me if I tell them they are wrong. Because reasoned discourse is dead. We prefer circuses.

And I decided that I don’t want to worry about anything any more. I just want to do what I’m told and work hard and do the things that make me feel good.

I’d rather be Lennie than George. All the way to the end.