Tag Archives: school

Fiction, Writing

1st week of summer school

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Knightly Virtues –

This week in my summer school class, students who do not have online credit recovery to complete are being treated to lessons on chivalry from the likes of King Arthur, the daughter of Robin Hood, Heath Ledger, and The Mighty (two boys in one.) The less-than-stellar films that we are pulling lessons from are quite the crowd pleasers for teens:

King Arthur – the 2004 version with Keira Knightley and Clive Owen that does not get anything right about the legends, but is quite the cinematic treat with a handful of memorable loyal knights. My favorite character is one of Arthur’s knights played by James Gandolfini. He steals every scene he is in.

Princess of Thieves – the 2001 Disney movie with Keira Knightley and Stephen Moyer. It is truly terrible, but the teen girls like the little bit of unrequited romance and the fact that a female is a hero.

A Knight’s Tale – 2001 Heath Ledger is good fun and beloved by teenagers. They do not agree with me that Rufus Sewell is the hottest bad guy ever. They think he is gross. It must be an age thing.

The Mighty – (by far the best film in the bunch) is a 1998 Kieran Culkin, Sharon Stone film about a boy who is disabled and his unlikely friendship with Max who he goes on knightly adventures with. Side note – James Gandolfini makes an appearance as Max’s murderous father. The girls literally sob (tissues passed all around) at the end of this film.

We are off to a great start and the kids doing real work are motivated to hurry up and pass their courses they failed or needed to catch up on so they can join us in our literary/film fun! It is a great tool for speeding up the credit recovery process.

Plus, we’re making coats of arms, skits about generosity, writing essays about nobility, coloring awesome pictures, doing puzzles and word searches, and decorating everything with foamy letters, glitter, and whatever else makes teenage girls happy.

Essays, Writing

Lay offs

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My company had lay offs.  Several people’s last day is this Friday.  I am sad and feel guilty for having my own job.  I have tried to help them as best I can with offering letters of reference, help with resume writing and cover letter writing.  (I’m an English teacher.)  I’ve offered tissues and emotional support as people have cried and talked about job options, fear, and stress.

I had some concern that I could lose my job, so felt immense relief when I did not get the call into the boss’s office on the day of lay offs.  Then I felt guilty for that relief.  Who am I to still have a job when perfectly hard-working other people now do not?  The whole thing just makes me so sad.

My prayers and positive thoughts go out to all those struggling with this problem right now.  I have been there and truly know how it feels…the fear, the concern, the doubt, the questions of self-worth…

A pay check does not define self-worth.  Another person’s opinion does not define our worth.  A good review, a bad review, a positive appraisal, a crappy appraisal…they are just snapshots – neither accurate nor truth, merely opinion.  I need this pep talk as much as the next person.  The opinion I value most is my own:  my own conscience, sense of ethics, peace of mind…no one can take those away from me.

Essays, Writing

This would get me fired…(Day 29)

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Today’s assignment is to write about something that would get me fired.

I teach in a psychiatric facility, so the types of things that would get me fired are telling detailed stories about my students, using their names, birth dates, and physical descriptions such that people would be able to figure out who they are.

Also, other fire-able topics to write about include:  having an inappropriate relationship with a student, dissing my immediate boss, revealing my true feelings about the biggest boss of my company, claiming to have abused children in any way, blogging about deep drug or alcohol addiction issues currently raging in my life, pornography, doing jail time, or admitting to murder.

It would be nice to have the freedom to write about absolutely anything I feel like, but it is also nice to get a paycheck and to be trusted with the private confidential information of others as I help them to heal.  When my kids were little they would try to get details out of me about my students because I told them I was like an FBI agent who couldn’t share anything, legally bound and all.

I will tell a brief hodge-podge of craziness that has occurred in my classroom in the last month with scrambled names, genders, and identities to protect privacy:

Sam had a laughing fit that lasted almost 20 minutes.  Uncontrollable, insane, maniacal laughter that ended in tears.  The mania was a result of stopping a certain medication that resulted in hysterics.  Lisa stood up, headed for the door, gave the peace sign, and took off running.  She is quite the track star, so no one could catch her, except the police a few hours later when she turned up at a gas station asking to borrow a phone.  Ben threw up all over the bathroom…literally…all over…in the sink, around the toilet, on the floor, in the trash can, on the door…everywhere except in the toilet.  Sofie is a psychpath and coordinated a plan to sneak into the bathroom with another girl to perform oral sex.  Josh fell asleep on the floor in the middle of the classroom and peed on himself.  Such is my life…

And somehow we still manage to learn about Shakespeare, write poetry, edit essays, debate political ideologies, learn vocabulary, have spelling bees, and share personal narratives to make your heart break.  Today we wrote about bullying after watching Shane Koyczan’s To This Day.  Then we discussed propaganda and watched samples of hilarious commercials to demonstrate rhetorical devices.  We ended the class with planning products they could invent and sell – they will create their own advertisements.  It was a good day.

Essays, Writing

Eavesdropping – (Day 16)

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Today’s assignment was to eavesdrop on a conversation and write it down.  This was during my 1st period class when kids were supposed to be talking only about ballet articles for an open-ended writing assignment.  They were obviously off topic.

Girl 1 – “I’ve been having strange dreams lately.”

Girl 2 – “Me, too.”

Girl 1 – “I keep ending up on the floor or all twisted up in my covers.”

Girl 2 – “You talk in your sleep, too.”

Girl 1 – “What do I say?  And you snore.”

Girl 2 – “I do not!”

Girl 1 – “Yes, you do.”

Girl 2 – “You yelled, ‘Mom!’” last night.

Girl 1 – “Really?  I think I dreamed I was swimming.”

Health, Writing

Win Some, Lose Some – (Day 8)

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Today’s exercise is to list some recent victories and some recent losses.

Victories:  Signed up for James Patterson’s Master Class that teaches writing; made my second to last payment on my college school loan – I graduated 20 years ago; found a fabulous candle that I love the smell of – Febreeze willow blossom; have lost 7 pounds on Weight Watchers so far; snagged a hottie husband four months ago; got my grades turned in on time (I’m a high school teacher); found an awesome favorite pen (thanks to my husband buying one for me); shared modern-day heroes for Black History Month with my high school students

Losses:  lost partial control of my high school girls’ neurologically impaired class…while being observed by my principal…kids suck sometimes…; let my ex-husband get my goat from afar; ate food just because I was craving it this week instead of making better choices; got a ticket for not stopping correctly at a stop sign

I think the Victories outweigh the Losses.

 

Fiction, Writing

Nineteen Eighty-Four

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Today’s assignment was to “steal a title from a book you’ve never read and invent your own story.”

Nineteen Eighty-Four

I was eleven, smart rather than fun – so smart that I was a year ahead in school.  My long black hair stayed perpetually in a braid because I couldn’t figure out what else to do with it.  My parents wouldn’t let me cut it short and get a perm like the rest of the cool girls in school.  Every day I watched them strut through the hallways bouncing their hair side to side, those curls tossing perfectly as they laughed and called each other names in that mean girl joking sort of way.  I pretended not to care, but I wanted more than anything to be pretty and funny and popular like them.

It probably didn’t help things any that I had the highest GPA.  The natural correlation to that ranking was naturally the lowest social status in school.  Every teacher knew me by name and liked me name – also a bad sign in pre-teen land.  My only real friend was a fellow loser named Grace whose super religious parents made her wear long skirts every day of her life.

“Angela,” a voice called from behind me.  I turned, shocked to hear my name, wondering if someone said it by accident.

Running to catch up was one of the bouncy-haired girls wearing hot pink lipstick and a fluorescent green shirt that hurt my eyes to look at directly.  I stood frozen, unsure what to do in this unusual circumstance.  She had a half-sheet of paper that she was waving in my general direction in her one gloved hand (a la Michael Jackson.)  The entire moment was unsettling, due to the being addressed by a cool girl part, being expected to respond to something other than a math equation or history fact, and the unknown cause of the incident.

“Hey,” she said breathlessly when she reached me planted in front of the boys’ bathroom.  She stuck the paper in my face.  “I’m having a birthday party this Saturday and was hoping you could come.”

I was dumbfounded and just stood there staring at her like a dumb-ass.  It was like my brain short-circuited and I had no response available for retrieval.  She stared at me for a few seconds, then smiled and tilted her head like a cute puppy.

“You have really pretty hair,” she said, then stuffed the paper into my hand and headed on down the hall to chase someone else with another flier.

I stared at the crumpled paper, then smoothed it as best I could.  Not only was this the best day of my life to date, but I had an even better day to look forward to on Saturday.  One of the cool girls wanted me at her party.  Things were looking up.

 

Health, Writing

Summer Vacation!!!

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summer school exhaustion

This was how I felt by the last day of summer school — white knuckling it — and so left my room like this:

classroom mess

Ok, maybe not quite that bad, but I certainly did not leave it in any shape for the start of school.  I will deal with that when I return for the year.  I am on vacation!

peace out

A kid asked if I will miss her and I said, “Probably not.  I’ll only be gone a week.”  She looked a bit wounded, but, come on.  I couldn’t muster the energy to come up with a creative response and I don’t lie to my students.  I should have said something like, “Probably as much as you’ll miss me,” but my brain was sluggish…due to her and her cronies exhausting me.

My dream goal five years from now is to be able to summer in Colorado or somewhere else cool (literally not hot like Texas.)  I will rent a cottage in the mountains and write for three months straight.  It will be a true retreat and I will return refreshed, enlightened, and ready to teach because I have truly had a break.

cottage in mountains

This is a real goal, not a far-fetched pipe dream.  I became a teacher so I could read and tell stories all day and have the summers off.  I have not had the summer off for the last 14 years.  Not cool.  I do get to do the story part, though.

For this vacation, I am writing, beginning The Artist’s Way 12 Week Course by Julia Cameron, dancing, swimming, and taking naps every day.  So far, my vacation has been a blast and I am appreciating every single second that I am not at work.

Health, Writing

Romeo & Juliet

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r and j

Today in summer school I am teaching Romeo and Juliet to a group of teenage girls.  My presentation is not the romantic drivel most of them have heard before.  We examine the play through different lenses and it becomes a fabulous cautionary tale.  Each scene is analyzed for thinking errors on the part of the characters:  Romeo’s impulsivity, all-or-nothing thinking, keeping score, and catastrophising; Tybalt’s overgeneralizations, one-upmanship, and uniqueness (thinking he is better than everyone else); Friar Lawrence’s magical thinking, grandiosity, sneakiness; etc.

The girls open to a whole new perspective when looking at these characters’ flaws and seeing their own behaviors in comparison.  This is a school in a residential treatment center, so the young ladies I am working with have seen some stuff in their lifetimes.  Many of them have attempted suicide (often over a lost love), have run away from their parents or their problems, have had numerous sexual encounters in over their heads and unprepared for the emotional fall-out at such a young age, and have been betrayed or misled by the adults in their lives who should have been better role models.

My favorite discussions with them involve re-imagining the scenes using healthy thinking, coping skills, support from trusted people, accessing available resources, etc.  If just one person had done something different in this play, something productive, something thoughtful and helpful, it might not have ended in such tragedy.  There are always more options.  “To be or not to be” (to quote Hamlet) could be a much longer list.  To be healthy, to be at peace, to understand, to be open…not to be afraid, not to be alone, not to be abused, not to be so hard on yourself.

Juliet was 13 for goodness sake.  So much more happens in life after 13.  I’m in my 40’s, have been through a marriage, divorce, children, grandchildren, and have just now found my Romeo. Building a good life takes time, learning from experiences, and resilience.  I wish for each of my students today a new critical perspective that makes each of them a “master of her own fate.” *

*from Invictus by William Ernest Henley

juliet  #

#from Gnomeo & Juliet (Juliet kicking ass)