• Categories

  • Blog Thoughts
  • poetry
  • Teaching
  • Uncategorized

• Recent Comments

  • skpatterson on Drop Out
  • Philadelphia on Blog Lines Joy
  • yuraj10 on Drop Out
  • anniexbananie on Public (I)dentity
  • joonplee on News Hound

• Meta

  • Login
  • Entries RSS
  • Comments RSS
  • WordPress.org

• Pages

  • About

• Connections

  • 

• KIS BLOGS and LINKS

  • 12eng08 Blog Website for Class

My senior students are reading The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath; at the same time the juniors are reading The Great Gatsby.  Unfortunately, The Bell Jar is speaking to me and speaking to me deeply. I try not to live my literature.  I have a friend who does and I seriously began to dread Hamlet-time-of-year.  She would be anyone from Gertrude to Hamlet, of course, and one entertaining few weeks identified most with Polonius.

Well, I “feel” Esther.  When she describes sitting in a chair unable to pack or move because she has too many clothes and she can’t conceive bringing the urban life back to the dreadful suburban existence, I understand.  Her friend whirls in and sweeps the mess under the bed for a night on the town.  It is the night Esther almost lets herself be raped through indecision and the need to cede control.  Ultimately, in a crazy, gorgeous move Esther throws the clothes into the dark New York night.  I wanted to be her.

She tries suicide time after time, but it really is too hard for the depressive state she is in.  Finally, she crawls into a wood stove, pulls the rotting wood around her, and takes 50 sleeping pills.  Then she wakes up in the hospital.

This entry is not some self-confessional suicide notice.  I never went that route, but only because when depressed it seemed too much effort and my mother might never recover.  This is an acknowledgement of how close the book connects and in a way it keeps sucking me back in.

So I find it a difficult piece to teach. The brilliancy lies in its power and its accuracy. But many could say this is true of so much literature.  Today I am loving the womb imagery.  It took me until almost the end of the novel to realize that the constant references to water and tears and eddies relates to the womb as well as other motifs.  So the hope is that as Esther is reborn, so will I be.

My seniors are bored, difficult, and ready to graduate; therefore, this piece is not it for them. One led discussion today and she was brilliant with some really fun insights.  For the most part though, those who don’t want to be there are taking the oxygen and life of those who do have an interest.  Two more weeks.  They are on the brink of their rebirth. It is an exciting time.  And now I remember that I love seniors.

Where is this going?  I don’t know. Except if I am Esther, I hope she escapes the B(h)ell.

I dropped out worse than any of my students.  They know they have to maintain at least one post a week for a grade.  I know that this is a life style consideration.  And I become lazy just like other bloggers I see in the world, so I dropped out.

Now, I feel the need to be back though with even less purpose than before.  The same could be said of all my writing.  Let me co-opt an excuse e-mail sent to friends and family:

Over the past few weeks I’ve received many a missive, and if you sent one, you probably did not receive a reply.  As Mom asked in her recent e-mail, has something happened or am I just lazy.

Yep, the answer is lazy.
I dropped off the planet.  One, Jon and I had a fantasitic time in Vietnam.  I’ve never traveled with someone who would prefer to sit on a street corner with a drink and watch the locals or talk to stranger-backpacker #4.  The closet would be Catherine who loves restaurants and the food becomes the event itself.  Jon and I had fresh squeezed lemonade or whatever other fruit juice you might prefer, ate an an amazing vegetarian restaurant with stuff eggplant, and talked about life, about nothing, and about censorship versus rights.

My friend Rhonda started me on the habit of the top ten from a trip.  I’ve stuck with it since– until this trip.  Jon mentioned that one of his top ten was probably the first breakfast he and I had.  We sat at a sidewalk cafe with omelets and bacon (my first Western breakfast since Christmas), and Jon had a tiny espresso cup that was refilled.  We watched cyclos and motorcycles, and hawkers and businesses opening.  He said it was that moment that he felt worldly.  I know what he means.

I dropped off the planet. One reason is that currently I love my students and teaching.  At one point I had the thought that life is just that horrible waiting before the students walk into the classroom the next day.  I love the energy and life that is the classroom.  I’m amazed at what some of my students can produce, I worry that I’m not teaching them to stretch to the fullest extent.  In the meantime, grading is still avoided.

Partially the blue skies and green earth disappeared in life again just because it does periodically.  It becomes the time when I have no energy and I go through the motions waiting until the light reappears but despairing that months may go by before I care about anything again.  That’s dark, but it happens as most friends know.  So, I watched television and became familiar with the Disney Channel.  Packing for Vietnam was a nightmare because it was so difficult to move beyond the fuzz.

Partially the earth dropped because of age.  I’m unlikely to have kids and for the first time ever I felt that as a personal tragedy. I always said that if it happens I would be happy, if not okay.  Well, the clock definitely ticked.  I wanted to experience pregnacy.  I wanted a chance to hold the soft body knowing the fleeting moments.  I love two year olds and wanted to control my own temper.  I wanted to listen to my child babble and babble at age nine.  I didn’t want my favorite sweater to be ruined or the oil pan to drop out of the borrowed car.

I just found out today that a teacher who has gorgeous curly hair, is tall, talented, and married 3? years ago is in her third month of pregnancy.  She and her husband have been trying for two years.   She’s 40.  They met when she was 37.  So okay, if it is something desired, I could put this on my goal list.  I’ve achieved almost the entire goal list that Dad had me create at age 18.  I missing two countries and I no longer care about beating the Mario Ninetendo Game.  However, of the 20 plus goals, I’ve achieved almost all.

I am a little busy.  That does account for the rest of not communicating with Mom.  Friday, went to a stupid movie (Street Fighter with Keanu Reeves.)  Don’t see it.  However, it must be mentioned that Keanu was excellent.  He had very few lines and I think that as long as he doesn’t speak he is an excellent actor.  Saturday, three of us took our bikes on the subway (a bit of a no-no), visited the large river by Seoul, went to an arboreteum and a park kind of like Central Park and then rode the two hours back to our neighborhood.  That was my true introduction to spring. The lilacs have finished blooming, the green is no longer new, but that green that is right before summer green sets in, the cherry blossoms were gorgeous, and my cat Rain is antsy.

Today was CPR training, tomorrow is Korean lessons, Thursday dinner with Keith who is leaving at the end of May (friendships are very much hello, goodbye here), Friday is the school play, Saturday helping with the Swim Meet, Sat night is our principal’s 40th with poker, and Sunday I will probably grade.  Whew!  So, friends, even though I’m turtling, no one really knows.  Though Clay did take me to task for not updating my blog.

Well, I’ve got to grade . . . or watch TV.

My goal is to be back.  Watch for new posts that maybe are a  little more analytical, a little less woe is me.

  

Cooking is a glorious creative or mathematical art depending on the cook.  I personally can devise excellent meals, yet I am not a proficient chef.

An example, today is my day for salad. My collegue across the hall makes salad on Tuesdays and I have Thursdays.  This is perfect.  At least two days a week, I eat salad.  Plus, and I love this part, she and I sometimes get creative, find new recipes, and discover the offerings of vegetable Korea.

I’ve learned from her salads.  Did you know that beets don’t just come from a can? You need the top and bottom to make them turn purple when boiled, and this information seems magical.

I have learned to make a cranberry and walnut salad that is fantastic.  But tomorrow’s creation is new.  I’ll see how it turns out.  It calls for water chesnuts (or water chestnuts however it is spelled).  I know what water chesnuts look like in the can: it has a picture of sliced white things layered on each other.  Just a reminder: I’m in Korea. I am absolutely positive they have this item.  I am absolutely positive I cannot communicate my needed item to the grocery store staff.

So I look and look. I find chestnuts in syrup.  Is this the same? I decide no.

But now I realize that I don’t know what chesnuts are.  Are they cooked chestnuts? Are they something else?  So yes, the internet is my friend and I looked it up.  If you want to know, they actually grow on small, bush like trees.  They are different.  Ninety percent of the water chestnuts found in the stores are imported from China.

Now I need a substitution because frankly this angst was too much and I’ve given up on water chestnuts.  This is where I can cook fine, but not good.  What is the purpose of the water chestnuts in the recipe?  Probably the crunch.  Would broccoli work just as well?  Broccoli replaces mushrooms fine.  Maybe the taste, but I can’t remember the taste, besides does this substitution matter when I’ve already discarded brown sugar and coconut from the recipe?  And the macadamia nuts?  Will it be okay if I use walnuts instead?  And the iceberg lettuce . . . will romaine work fine?

The salad should be interesting and hopefully edible.

In the last couple of months, I’ve started paying attention to the news again. Current event discovery has been rather random for me since being in Asia. First of all in my “other life,” I listened to NPR as I drove to and from work and that obviously doesn’t happen. I watched the news at the fitness center and that doesn’t happen. Mom told me about recent reports she had watched and then I paid attention . . . and this no longer happens with the same frequency. I read our local paper because I knew people. I read the headlines in the checkout stand. I read the state paper about once a week.

News just seemed to happen.

At first being here, I relished the release from the constancy of the information world. No longer in shops do I even hear advertisements because I don’t understand anyway. Now if I see an advertisement in the subway, usually I notice it for its interesting visual composition, not for message. I’m sure there are radio stations here in English, but I haven’t found them. Finally, tv news was never my medium.

Except . . . I had the gift of BBC. Twenty-four hours of BBC with minimum commercials. BBC news with world news, reports with a bias that I don’t entirely recognize, news that had a fresh take on the elections in the U.S., news that led with the East Timor shooting rather than sports or weather. Just news that was more global, probably more liberal, but also quicker and more serious.

A tragedy has struck my life. Our cable carrier has decided to let BBC go. I jokingly told one of our Business Office staff that I might have to reconsider my contract. Before I could explain the joke, Sweet Business Office David said he would call the company today and see what they could do. Okay. I’m selfish. I’me going to let him.

You may or may not have heard that Korea has suffered a tragedy in the last day. Namedaemun, the South Gate to the city of Seoul, 640 years old has burned (to the ground?) and arson is suspected.

It was in the city center and kind of a defining landmark. Truly it was impressive. Almost everyone seems to be going through the stages of grief concerning this: at first denial, anger, and so on.

The students had to tell the staff. The English press is usually half a day to a day behind as one would expect.

I watched CNN briefly tonight. The had a 5 minute segment on the yearly killing of the dolphins in the village in Japan. I could tell I have been living here in Asia just long enough because I found the piece sentimentalized toward the dolphins, very propagandistic and with no attempt at understanding the complexities of the issue. Once upon a time I was all about Saving the Whales.

Anyway, BBC on the net has a part of the main page called “The Day in Pictures,” with photos from around the globe showing the events. Absolutely gorgeous, one that is horrific, and they truly did give a snapshot of the world that the headlines neglect.

So what’s happening in your part of the world that’s caught your attention?

Tae-An Oil Spill Clean Up

Saturday, I accompanied 18 fantastic students and their chosen chaperone to help clean up at the oil spill on the coast of Korea. We were told before going to bring gloves, rubber gloves, rubber boots, and a raincoat. Lucky for most of us when we arrived they provided the materials.

The area is beautiful with a soft sounding surf, short pine trees, and an interesting rocky coast. We marched to a rocky area, the group was told (in Korean so part of my information is second hand) that we were to wash the rocks of the oil.

We arrive with the gorgeous coast to ourselves. The smell isn’t entirely unpleasant as apparently the oil either isn’t bad or much has already been cleaned. We can see that some obvious work has already been done here as the sand and rocks are greatly disturbed.

A man with a long, blue hose starts to gush water from the top of the beach, creating rivulets of water heading to the beach’s edge. We haunch and start running our rags over the rocks (kind of like washing clothes). But do I just have dirt on my rag or is it oil? I don’t know. Then we hear a rumor that one of the officials said to start rubbing oil off the only the dry rocks, so we move to the dry and pick up one rock at a time. One student comments that the task is impossible to wash every rock on a beach. Another rumor was to rub the dirt (again the washing clothes on a washboard motion) and then sift down and keep doing so.

More people arrive. The beach is no longer ours. A back hoe starts digging and the implication is that they are bringing lower strata up so we can washboard the oil from there. Then about 700 people are present and some stand at the end of the beach and capture the oil in the water with cheesecloth. I notice a line of cheesecloth is run along the entire enterprise. We hear a rumor that the rushes of water are to take the oil to the water at the beach because the oil is actually easier to capture in water. About nine of our students start sifting sand and rock into one of the streams a little like gold prospecting.

Everything seems to be rumor.

And I don’t get it.

Are we really helping? The implication seems to be yes or otherwise oil spills would not call for so much volunteer help throughout the world.

What would happen if we just leave it? No one seemed to know the answer to this. The answer from every student and the science teacher accompanying us and the two people I talked to on the telephone afterwards was that “it would be bad,” that they supposed it would spread to unintended areas. None of us really knew.

At what point do the environmental damages of clean-up begin to outweigh the help. The pile of rags from the clean-up was as large as my bedroom and living room combined. What are they going to do with that pile? As one student said, isn’t that its own pollution? What about the back hoe, the 1000 tramping bodies in this area, the tent city created?

And my personal question . . .was I really helping? What actions was I supposed to be taking? Was I supposed to be washing rocks one by one, sending water down to the ocean?

Of course, I can’t just let the questions rest. How lazy. John Whitfield wrote an article titled “How to Clean a Beach” for Nature Magazine and put the issue in an easy to understand manner.

Are we really helping. Well yes. Except when volunteers aren’t. Apparently, one oil spill the volunteers just pushed the oil deeper and deeper into the strata. Wow was I pleased to discover this.

What would happen if we just left it? One oil spill was just left due to the remoteness of the location. The description is that 40 years later it looks like a tarred driveway; however, it apparently isn’t still affecting nearby regions.

Environmental Damage of Clean-up? The article didn’t really comment on my specific concerns, but it did say that some areas are much better off with less clean up and some with more, but the judgment needs to be careful. They’ve invented a bacteria-eating method that could help over a few months, but it doesn’t get the deeper oil. A back hoe does, however.

My last question WAS answered. Apparently, it is easier to clean oil from the water than the beaches. There is technology that can help, so the goal is to IMMEDIATELY report the issue before the oil begins to wash up in new locations. Nice to know.

The article is an interesting, quick read and highly recommended for any who need more than Save the Beach rhetoric.

Generalist — one who has an interest in, knowledge of many areas.

I tend to think of myself as a generalist in my specialization.  I read books, many books, but by virtue of teaching literature and having more than one prep, and belonging to book clubs, and friends who read . . . I generalize.

Renaissance men (and women) have always amazed me.  Leonardo da Vinci drawing, inventing, jumping; Ben Franklin with his moral code, making deals with France, and examining electricity; Bruce Wayne developing a bat cave, dating, saving the world.

Though I admire the individuals who can do all, I am definitely not a renaissance individual, except with books.  Its a secret pride for which I will go to non-library hell at some point, but almost always when a student chooses a book, I have read it whether Ender’s Game or Freakonomics.

But I want to specialize too.  What deeper knowledge is to be had if I finish Moby Dick, in fact reread Billy Budd, read all of Hawthorne with his connections of hidden sin, cross the ocean to Dumas?  Of course, there are classes in this, but the realizations seem to be mine.

However, due to work, I also read the 75 essays turned in this week, examine student blogs, finished Tom Perotta’s new novel, reread Othello, watch Zefferilli’s opera, and consider wish for the time to specialize.

This flitting from topic to topic is what we bemoan we do to our students, yet so rarely does this seem to be solved.

I asked my students to (just for a week) specialize on a topic, whatever that might be.  Ack!! What’s the specialization?

   A BBC report caught my eye last week.  Apparently, some Greenpeace activists claim they were roughed up by Japanese whalers.  The Japanese whalers say they held the two men in the hold until the officials could claim the “terrorists.”  The two men say the whalers not only detained them illegally, but tied them to a radar mast “with a plastic cord” according to an article in The Guardian by Justin McCurry.  

  Tensions are high.  Australia and Japan are having conflicts over Japan whaling in what Australia claims is its territorial waters.  Japan states differently.  The U.S. and others state that Japan’s whaling for “scientific” purposes is patently a cover for commercial gain, and therefore, should be halted. Notice how the quotation marks around “scientific” call Japan’s motives into question.

 

I remember at some young age in some crowded place a T-shirt that said “Save the Whales.”  Who hasn’t seen or heard this logo in the States?  So ubiquitous is the statement that it becomes a satiric characterization for comedy.  I didn’t know the meaning.  I didn’t know what a whale was (being from a landlocked state), and I didn’t know why I should care once it was explained. 

Now years later I still wonder the answers to these questions.  What is the meaning of “Saving the Whales”? Why has this become such a call for environmentalists.  As of 1997 (slightly old data, I know) there were 790,000 minke whales recorded in the ocean.  Yes, is this less than the past?  Duh.  How many buffalo roam the plains compared to the past?  How many elk and antelope, yet these still are killed for meat and other by products.  So why are the whales a rallying cry? 
 

What is a whale?  Some claim its intelligence above other animals.  Maybe. I am definitely not an expert, but I also claim the intelligence of a woman in Somalia and they are still hunted for their “meat.” 

If I am told again and again that whales need saving, I can’t help but look to the opposite argument.  I have an acquaintance that stopped speaking to me last year as I argued for the value of Crichton’s book that states that much of the global warming debate is just fear mongering.  He said that the idea that such an uneducated individual teaching the young minds of today makes him shiver.  Sorry, I’m built this way, and I can’t help but look to the “other” side.

So I read an essay written by Kaori Nakai for her Anthropology class in 1997 which comes semi-close to being unbiased in the writing.  I do learn quite a bit about Japanese justifications.  I am now convinced that “Save the Whales” is a political issue (and yes, environmental) that has much more to do with culture and unvoiced assumptions than what most of the participants’ acknowledge. 

 

I wonder what Ishmael would say?

 

 

My fingers freeze over the keyboard. I place my hands in my lap. I remember grading that needs done, an e-mail that needs answered, that I want to play the piano proficiently in another five years.

I’m supposed to be starting my blog as that is what I will be demanding of the students. I definitely have writing terror considering a blog. The sad thing is that I would love to have my own blog, but as a wise co-worker said, I need to be modeling for students, future employers could google me and read the blog and Sally from Wallyhoo, Idaho could become a new blog buddy. This blog then becomes my public face. With that thought, it freaks me out to know the semi-importance of the voice and the musings.

Of course, I so casually ask my students to do the same task. Are they experiencing the same frozen sensation? Are they iced with a desire for the perfect communication? Or are they done, already, with the first post, waiting to post their cluster maps? Do they (and I) already have something posted that could haunt us for the next ten years.

Which leads me to ask the question about time. Should there be a moratorium on the length of blame? If Sally Idaho puts a nude picture on the net when she is 20, but now wants to run for county prosecutor, should she still be held accountable? So what if someone inhaled in youth? So what if someone has changed their position from 10 years ago to now? When does forgiveness happen? Or maybe I should just ask for my own forgiveness in two months when I have discovered what the blogging is about.

If I’m so “scared,” what is the point? I want to be a part of this new world. USA Today reports that 13% of the U.S. reports blogging and reading blogs regularly. Only 60% in the States report even reading a book, so that 13% becomes that much more significant. It’s a world I need to join.

I hope I achieve perfection and ask for forgiveness, and give you my first post.