New Years Rulin’s

I re-read Woodie Guthrie’s New Year’s Resolutions–“New Years Rulin’s” he calls them–as a brief reminder to myself that these exist and can be salubrious. I have spent a lot of time in 2018 mired in some dirty mud, as if addicted to it and as if it helps me. Advancing upon middle age, I wonder to myself if I will ever feel the sting of incipient mortality upon me. Will I start worrying that time will run out, and thus I should actually do the things I keep intending to do? Or will I spend the next forty or so years still holding off on doing those things because I need another hit of . . . the mud?

Woody Guthrie Resolutions
Woody Guthrie’s “New Years Rulin’s”

Guthrie’s “27. Help win war – beat fascism” holds new significance to me now. As does “33. Wake up and fight.” Suddenly the urgency of those Rulin’s make sense. His personal care ones, such as “6. Eat good” and “7. Drink very scant if any” and “12. Change bed clothes often” also hit home for me.

Every year. . . every day damnitall . . . I make the same goals and have the same intentions. I realize what a cliché I am too. I also realize that the things holding me back are the same ones that hold everyone back: internet scandals to check in on, personal nemeses to check up on, endless scrolling through pictures to confirm and/or undermine self-loathing, and so forth. I also use social media for good, I think: much of my intellectual life now is a result of things I learned from people on Twitter.

I spent an hour uploading all my book purchases from Amazon onto my Goodreads account. I looked through all my book purchases on Amazon, beginning with those I bought at the end of college. Apparently I was really stanning my religious studies professor, because I bought all of his books as well as those written by his best friend. I also bought some Aquinas and Plato and other books I had and have literally no interest in reading. Then there is a spate of education and literacy texts from my high school teaching and master’s degree days. Snore! I can see the person who I was trying to be through all those phases of book-buying. How few I read! Some of those books no longer live on my shelves! Look at grad school go by! SO much Said. All the Buddhism that I now renounce.

A couple of years ago I came up with a mantra to govern my year’s efforts: Function over form (I spend too much time futzing with form – I mean even deciding on a font for a syllabus occupies hours a semester). There were a few other bits to this mantra that I can’t remember (shows how little I followed it). This year, I want to Read More than I Scroll. And I want to Write More than I Binge-Watch. To that end, I’m going to use Goodreads to track my reading and am going to keep the blog as part of my writing routine. I also will write about teaching on my official website. This site will function more as a journal than anything else.

Day 1 – Over

I have to walk out the door in 15 minutes. I have been precisely calculating my commute over the past few days and learned the hard way (by having to sit in the hot train station for 20 min) that the first train does not come until 6:37am.

First student of the year: H—- something. He had body odor. Immediately wanted to know if two specific enemies were in the class. He also was happy to be helpful in the classroom and I put him and the other 5 kids to work around the room setting things up.

I had prepared very intricate lesson plans for myself and did literally 5% of what was on them. All the “rules setting” activities? Forget it. When I did have all 34 kids show up, they were so excited to see each other, show off their new outfits, goof around, reestablish old dynamics that we were not going to get anywhere. Also I was too excited. Also the periods were shorter and there were so many interruptions.

I did notice that kids seemed more . . . used to the rules. They easily signed the late logs. There were no hitches with stuff like that. It seems like that aspect of the culture of the school just was finally . . . working. Definitely lower percentage of Jamaicans and more South Asians than before. I think I even have a Chinese student.

Some of my initial impressions include that some of my honors kids should be in not-honors (they didn’t even know they were in honors), and some of my not-honors kids should be in honors. Fortunately for all, I will be teaching them the exact same stuff. I can’t do 3 preps. That ship has SAILED.

The AP class was even shorter than the others. The students already wanted to talk about patriarchy. There are three boys. I already love them all. One girl had a pen shaped like a gavel because she wants to be a lawyer then a judge. Two said they want PhDs and two want to be doctors.

Many more girls wearing hijab in the school. Probably more Muslims in general. People don’t get it: these schools are so diverse. There’s no way around having to be inclusive in your language and approach to culture because there’s no default in here.

I thought I’d have grown out of this, but the students were still interested in my age, if I have kids, etc. My sixth period class applauded when I told them I had just finished my PhD. I almost cried. Most of the students seemed excited to have to call me “Dr.”

I guess I forgot about the chatter and the low din of noise. But when I was reading their extremely personal surveys, I was reminded of the fact that there were still very interesting things going on. The sorts of humor, personal information they revealed, and the sophistication in some of their turns of phrase made me eager to know more about all of them. Some of their responses (“do you read newspapers?” “I’m in high school . . . I don’t read newspapers.”) were calculated to make me laugh. I appreciated that. A lot of them said of themselves that they are funny and people love them. Good to remember that they think that of themselves.

Back to the board.

I’m returning to the high school classroom after being away since 2007. In the intervening years, I earned a PhD in English and taught all levels of college English at a major public university. I have decided to teach high school again primarily because I wanted to return to my home city and the professorial path does not offer you the chance to determine where you want to live. No less a consideration important to me in making this decision has been my desire to work again with younger adolescents. Even ten years later, my relationships with former students have buoyed me and convinced me that a meaningful life for me would be one in which I help kids learn to write, read, and engage critically with texts.

That sounds pretentious. I’m returning to work in a large high school in one of the poorest counties in our country. I went there last week to help proctor summer school statewide exams and for four hours sat in the extended-time special ed testing room with about ten kids. It was a dark reminder of how ill-matched our institutional requirements are with the students who are forced to sit and take these tests. One of the students turned in his exam and I said, “Have a good summer.” He turned around, walked back to me, and slowly asked what I meant. “I mean, have a good rest of your summer until school starts.” (It starts after Labor Day.) He was confused: “I thought today was the last day of summer.” I looked at the other kids confused and one offered, “it’s the last day of summer school?” I mean, this kid was so thoroughly confused by my throwaway salutation about enjoying summer. That is what I’m talking about. Literally, that is how hard life is for some of these kids.

I will be teaching the AP English class and will have extraordinarily smart students. I’ll also have tenth grade and tenth honors. In addition to being from ethnically oppressed groups, a lot of these kids are recent immigrants. One girl taking the test the other day had moved here from Pakistan like a month ago. I am not sure that most white middle-class white Americans get to have the experience–really an honor–of encountering this level of diversity. For so many years of graduate school, I spent a lot of time mouthing theories and ideologies of anti-racism, anti-oppression, etc. It’s a rarefied, precious environment with relative intellectual freedom, but little chance to put espoused beliefs into action. I did all this before. I taught at this same school years ago when it was actually much “worse” in terms of crime and lack of institutional support. Now I return with age, a title, and more at stake. Then, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with my life, but now I feel eager to do a good job on a daily basis without burning myself out.