Happy Birthday to me

My kids would say I'm blessed. In the past, I would have said I'm lucky. Now, I'm no longer sure what sort of word to use, but whether I attribute it to blind chance and luck or to a higher power, I was born and grew up with a wonderful group of friends.
Just today, I got a birthday card. Granted, my birthday was a month and a week ago, but the best cards have no need to be on time. Their lateness just confirms that someone has been thinking about me all that time, waiting for the right inspiration to write a note. In fact, the card came from one of my neighbors, Jenny, and her daughter, Ashley. When my house was a duplex, they inhabited the other half. Ashley was a freshman when I was a senior, which means I was in third grade when she first got on the bus to kindergarten, a moment I remember well. We played all sorts of games, one that I'm sure Jenny recalls with dread was the "game" when my sister (it may have been me, but I might as well have blame her) decided to unzip the pink beanbag that was a current feature in Ashley's room. That room was the mirror image of mine at the time, and later became the room I called home during high school and on to today, after my dad took on the ambitious project of converting the old mill house into a single-family dwelling. And yet, as terbulent as my room was over the ensuing years, the floor covered with soccer or ski clothes or whatever sort of clothing happened to be in season, papers, books - I never was and still and not what you would call a neat man - yet no matter how much I abused my mother's sense of order, the room was never as joyfully chaotic as it was on that day when Rachael, who could only have been four or five at the time, unleashed an avalanche of miniature styrofoam snowballs from the bright pink bean bag.
They poured out, swamping our version of the peter rabbit board game, and began to run to all corners of the room. As the senior child in the group, older than the rest by four years, I ought to have done sometime. Although I may have organized some sort of half-hearted cleaning attempt, what I remember was how tiny the bits of styrofoam were, so light that they fell in slow motion when you tossed handfuls of them up in the air, and so small that they fit not only between the edge of the hardwood floor and the wall (the molding was not something my dad had gotten to by that point) but into some of the larger cracks between the floorboards as well. Later, with the trusty shop-vac, I realized that they were some of the more difficult cases to dislodge.

To be continued.

everywhere is war

So last night, DD and I went to the fair in town. Just like the fairs set up in parking lots of all the other small cities in the country, it was a sea of asphalt filled with a few rides operated by the drug addicts and the mentally ill and hoardes of rigged games where you trade two dollars for a very slim chance to win a stuffed animal you could probably buy for three bucks. DD spent nearly 20 bucks trying to shoot basketballs into no-regulation rings, but I managed to resist the urge until right before we left, when I dropped two bucks on the game that involves throwing softball-sized balls into a what resembles a laundry basket, tilted at an angle.

When I was a kid, I won that at a carnival somewhere, but the carnie told me I had cheated, because I leaned in, and he didn't give me my four foot stuffed creature. So I figured I'd try it again. Three shots for two dollars. DD suggested the first one be a practice shot, and the carnie said "sure, first one's a practice shot, unless you make it, then I'll count it. just because you're white" I wasn't sure I had heard him right, and I really didn't want to believe that I had. I made the first shot, and even figured out the trick. Anyone can make the first shot because they leave the balls in the basket to dampen it, but they clear them out afterwards, to make the second two shots almost impossible. This way they get your confidence up, so you come back to try again and again. Anyway, as I took my second two shots, the guy sort of strck up a conversation with us, asking us where we were from, and so on, and as we left, he offered us a couple of small stuffed snakes, saying very clearing this time "just because you're white." I mumbled something, no, that's alright, no thanks, but he thrust them into our hands and i just turned a walked away, too stunned to really know what to say. We were leaving anyway, and gave the snakes to a seven or eight year old kid with big eyes, who smiled at the prospect of claiming them as his own prizes for winning a game.

The fair was really the first place where I saw blacks and whites socializing together in large numbers. My school has 4 white kids. DD and I stopped in at the bar on the way home, and it was all-white. When I've been to the bourbon mall, another restaurant / bar (try the fried pickles), it's also been all-white. Wal-mart and kroger were really the only places I had seen large numbers of white and black people together, and those, by nature, are not places that foster social interactions. Unfortunately, what I heard from that carnie last night was not the only sign of the latent racism that is still so strong here - DD heard a young white couple make the comment "these niggers are so fucked up." This world is so fucked up, when there are people thinking things like that.

The group of guys I play pickup soccer with is surprisingly mixed. There are whites, from the private school, blacks from the public school, whites and a few blacks from the catholic school (both alums and current students from all three). There are mexicans from the mexican restaurant, and there are a few guys from baghdad, doing who knows what here. Yet still, race is the defining characteristic, and generalizations based on race are still a little shocking to me "the damn mexicans just kick you too much" or even things like "where are all the mexicans today?. Usually, we play mexico vs usa, which is a convenient way to break up the teams. Sometimes the arabic guys go with the mexicans, sometimes with us, to even out the numbers. Most of the guys out there are really nice guys, and I wouldn't say they are racist. Yet race just looms larger on the radar here.


"until the color of a man's skin, is no more significant, than the color of his eyes

there's a war"

...

Reasons my kids struggle to focus on school:

JF's house got robbed over spring break and he only has two pair of uniform pants.

ME, MD, SC, LK, OT, and CA are pregnant. (MT might be too).

HM, LK, and RM have babies.

EW got kicked out of his house - again.

WB has been in court trying to get his own custody sorted out after his mom passed this summer.

HM just found out she has cervical cancer.

DD's pregnant cousin just died of sickle cell.

Someone threw a brick at CM's car - then he fought them.

Two girls went after each other with scissors.

WD had surgery on her esophagus.

RM's mom is in the hospital.

Someone that all my kids seem to have known got shot last night.

The list goes on, and I continue to be amazed that they show up at all.

It's hard to look too far ahead.

It's never too late...

for new rules and consequences.

Yes, it's mid-march. Yes, we just got back from spring break. But that doesn't mean that it is too late to introduce a little more order into the classroom, which was getting quite ragged there before break. I have to admit that I was hanging on for dear life at the end there and the way I limped towards spring break was reminiscent of a stock car as it pulls into the pit stop after a wreck, sheet metal flapping loose, tailpipe sparking as it drags along the ground and something unkown just starting to catch fire under the hood.

But I made it to spring break, which was in fact terribly depressing, for two reasons. The first was that I realized how much I hate my job, and spent at least 5 of my nine days off in deadly terror of returning. The second was that I realized that without my job, I have absolutely no life or prospects of a life down here. That first Saturday, when return was sufficiently distant, was the best day of the break. I woke up early, got a hair cut, planted a garden (one thing you can't quite do up north yet), cooked a good dinner and watched a movie with my roomie. Even despite the fact that Babel was a big dissapointment, it was a wonderful day, and I felt very accomplished. But aside from that - nada. So I have a job I hate and fear, but if I don't fill my time with the job, I have even less purpose and feel worse.

That said, today was surprisingly un-bad. They listened, they accepted, grudgingly, the new rules and consequences, and tomorrow I'm set to start handing out writing assignments. Yet here I am, it's Monday night, still with a huge stack of grading and some planning left to do, and I have hardly done anything since I got home. It's just such an intimidating amount of work to get started on. I wanted to have a rule of no work after 9 PM, but that is looking less and less likely. Less blogging, more grading. That's what I need.

Math is amazing, I promise.

It depresses the hell out of me to think about how cool math is. Because I wish my students could see that. Because I can't do enough to make them see that. Because I make math boring. Because these kids will never see the beauty in that.

After school today I saw a senior, the brother of one of my algebra I students. I asked him why I was not seeing his name on the superintendent's list, and he proceded to tell me about his different classes, the trouble that he had been having in his calculus class before his new teacher arrived. I asked him what they were doing now, and he gave me a reasonable explanation of finding maximum area of boxes that had polynomials as their sides. Damn the boxes though, the mathematics itself is beautiful.

But in a five minute walk down the hall, I explained anti-derivatives to the kid. Just taking a derivative backwards. He told me the antiderivative of 2x was x^2. Good, but what is the derivative of x^2 + 1? 2x. So what is the anti-derivative of 2x? It could be two x squared plus any number.


Just that small leap of inference was beautiful. I would kill to teach that calculus class. But it also kills me to think of these kids trying to find the maxima and minima of functions. Even if you had just a cubic function, taking the derivative is easy. But setting the resulting quadratic to zero and solving it? In eight grade, I ate solving quadratics problems. Bam, boom, negativebplusorminusthesquarerootofbsquaredminusfouracallovertwoa. Give me another. I just feel terrible, like I am not preparoing my kids for this at all. KW could do it in three years, maybe even two. But the rest of them? If QR ever cared about anything. Maybe CH. And maybe MR. But almost all of them are smart enough to be able to do it. With the exception of, perhaps, 3 students, all of my students are at a level of intelligence equal to or above my high school calc class. If they were born in the berkshires, about half of my kids would take calculus.

Math has always seemed easy to me. This hsa been, certainly, an impediment to teaching it. When I get out of here, it might be really nice to have the opportunity to teach kids for whom math is easy. I know, at that point, that I wouldn't really be making a difference, but it would be fun. I'd love to take the top fifth and sixth graders, take them through a program that would get them from algebra I through calc in ninth grade. That is so possible for so many kids. Right now, I could take KW from algebra I through calc by the end of her junior year. But I hope she leaves. She needs to be at the math and science academy. Just like most of my kids, she needs to be anywhere but here.