Optimism

My new school year’s resolution was to actively set aside time to reflect, something I didn’t do very often last year. Well, we’re three weeks in right now and this is my first entry, so I’m off to a rocky start. But, a start is a start.

One thing I’ve been trying to do (to varying degrees of success) is really establish a community within the walls of my classroom. In some classes, like my Lit of America class with 27 (!) kids, it’s worked to astonishing degree. In others, like Basic Writing, it hasn’t worked one bit (more on that later). There are still a billion things I need to figure out, but I can safely say that this year is going so, so much smoother than my first year.

The second thing I’m trying is a complete re-imagining of the way I approach my classes.

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Lone at night, when I was twelve years old, I looked at the planet Mars and I said, ‘Take me home!’ And the planet Mars took me home, and I never came back. So I’ve written every day in the last 75 years. I’ve never stopped writing.

[…]

If you know how to read, you have a complete education about life, then you know how to vote within a democracy. But if you don’t know how to read, you don’t know how to decide. That’s the great thing about our country — we’re a democracy of readers, and we should keep it that way.

Ray Bradbury on doing what you love and reading as a prerequisite for democracy.

If You’re Bored Surfing the Internet…

I highly recommend you check out this program: World Book Night.

The premise is very simple: You input your information and why you want to help out, they send you 20 free paperbacks for you to hand out anywhere you want, to anyone you want (so long as they are people that wouldn’t normally pick up a book, “light readers” is the term WBN uses).

I signed up, hoping to hand some books out to my students or at the Red Cross come April. The idea is that having a stranger fork over a book with a personal recommendation (I’ve requested The Book Thief) can be a powerful motivator for reading. Even if one person reads the book they’ve received and nothing else, they’ll be able to recommend it to others, and hopefully begin a small wave of literacy.

Anyway, it’s worth signing up, and even if you don’t get chosen, it’s a worthy project to follow and invest some time/money in.

“You’re making a generalization.”

When I’d initially decided to become a teacher, I was fully aware of the workload I’d be willingly taking on. I’d done practicum in the midst of writing my twenty page senior thesis, and even though I wasn’t fully in charge of the classroom at any one point, I knew that life after graduation would be roughly the same: so much work and the absence of time. Life would cease to exist outside of academics.

Turns out I had no idea.

To be creative, energetic, caring, and responsible for 8+ hours a day is the singular most exhausting task I’ve ever set for myself. A colleague told me that, one night, after his alarm clock went off, he immediately hopped out of bed without checking the time and went through his morning routine, making and thinking about which students needed to make up which assignment, when he was going to find the time to copy handouts in-between staff meetings, and how he was going to act energetic on virtually no sleep at all. These processes had become automatic, he said; so automatic, in fact, that he was halfway through both his mental run-down of the school day/brushing his teeth at 2:11 A.M. when his wife stumbled into the bathroom bleary-eyed and told him to go back to sleep. Something was wrong with the alarm clock, it had gone off four hours early. How does a person actively involve themselves in one hundred and twenty-five separate lives for eight hours a day, five days a week and still find time to decompress?

This is probably just because it’s the first few weeks of my first year of teaching, and I understand that. There’s one other new teacher in my department, Erica, and we ask each other nearly every day, “Are you completely overwhelmed?” It’s reassuring to hear that the answer is always “yes,” probably always will be “yes,” and probably is “yes” for the majority of our colleagues, many of whom are well into the double digits as far as “Years on the Force” go. “Those who can’t do,” it’s said, “teach.” I would posit that those who teach simply can’t spare the ridiculous amount of time it would take to “do” and still prepare a meal at the end of the day. There’s an hour or two of free time between the end of the school day and the start of planning for the next few days of school.

That’s not to say I dislike my job, though. Let’s not confuse exhaustion for disgust.

I’ve had one cheater so far. Well, two, it takes two to cheat. Spelled the word “hatred” as “haterd”, both in the exact same spot. That’s what tipped me off, anyway. The next few pages of identical answers threw up the red card. So I brought the hammer down in my own passive-aggressive way:

“So, I’m going through your packets, and I see that you spelled the same words wrong in the exact same spot. Why is that?”

“I let him copy my answers.”

“… Well, that’s, um, cheating. And that’s a zero. For both of… both of you.”

There was a lot of fumbling of words and objects after that. And I feel really badly about the zero. It’s hard to bounce back from a grade like that, almost discouraging, but the Humanities department has a more or less uniform cheating policy: it doesn’t happen, and if it does it’s punished with a swift fierceness that’s borderline cruel, at least to me. Nobody goes in to teaching to punish, but maybe I’m too nice to be teaching. Anyway, I did the damn thing, and I’m not happy about it.

The discipline is the worst part. I yelled at my fifth hour for talking while some people were finishing a quiz over our Native American unit, the one where we discussed stereotypes and mutual respect and generalizations. They were making noise just to make noise, anything from sloshing ice around in a cup and giggling across the room to literally banging their heads against the wall because “it shakes.” I told them my wife has kindergartners that are more well-behaved. It literally turned into a struggle of life and death when I announced a new seating chart was on it’s way.

“You’re telling me they never act up?” asked a girl who, three minutes prior, was flipping off her friend sitting across the room while I watched the whole thing.

“No, they do,” I replied, “But they’re also not expected to be adults in two years. If you can’t act like adults, you don’t get the same freedoms as adults. I choose the next seating chart.”

I’m actually a little proud of that one.

And here’s the point: They know it’s my first year. They know I’m weak, but they don’t know how weak I actually am. I don’t confront, and I don’t punish: I clean up the mistakes of others. But I feel like if I don’t stop these things immediately, they’re lost for the rest of the year. Something like 40% of a classroom teacher’s time is spent managing the classroom. That’s stupid, especially for a room full of almost-adults. This is my chance to save an entire generation from the same useless, selfish struggles that have plunged society back into the dark ages ethics-wise and show them the true value of compassion and empathy, the most endangered natural resources of them all!

Immediately after my brilliantly biting response, she cocked her head slightly, and hissed in a lilting, charming Valley Girl, “You’re making a generalization. And that’s stereotyping.”

And maybe she’s right. Maybe I was just tired. Frustrated. Nervous. Sweaty, worried, horrified, insecure, caffeinated and irritable. Maybe I’m just a first year teacher. But at least she learned something.

Revival

Since the beginning of my foray into teaching, every teacher I’ve ever had has discussed the importance of keeping a journal, and how they wish in vain that they’d kept a journal or some sort of personal record in their first year of teaching. Being a product of the digital age, I decided that a blog would do very nicely, and that, instead of starting a new one from scratch (which is beyond difficult, as you well know), I would resurrect a music blog that never really went anywhere. The two previous posts will stay, but they will look wildly out of place. I hope you understand.

Anyway, stay tuned for the next few months. I’m in for a bumpy ride.

The Best of 2009

Where to begin. Well, the bad, maybe, since we naturally end with “The Best” in a list like this. First: “Indie” culture, whatever that means now, has been continually raped by all kinds of people in all walks of life. What was once a signifier for an actual subculture, i.e. Independent Musicians recording on a label operating outside of the standard Big Record Label-dominated marketplace, now stands for a “sound,” or, at worst, an actual lifestyle. Urban Outfitters and American Apparel continue to cater to the “Indie” lifestyle and impossibly attractive human beings have come out of the woodwork with half-shaved heads and Day-Glo RayBans and perfectly coiffed beards (beards!) to make me feel even more “un-hip,” which doesn’t really bother me except that it does. It’s akin to finding out that your favorite band has suddenly been adopted by the rest of the world as their favorite band, which, in itself is kind of a self-centered way to view the world, because an entire generation liked Pavement way before I did, but it still sort of hurts in a way typically reserved for rude service at a restaurant and farting (loudly) in class, something that shouldn’t bother me, but, very clearly, does. The marketplace is now flooded, and what was once a smart alternative to the very bigdumbloud AltRock and Pop-Rap has suddenly become another contributor to that “fridge buzz” of modern life. Suddenly, we have nowhere to take refuge. Suddenly, our favorite bands are shilling for Miller Lite and Nissan and Cadillac. And, of course, this is nothing new, this commodification of a subculture. Ask the Hip-Hop kids, or the Punk kids, or basically everyone who’s challenged the definition of “art,” only to watch in horror as six-thousand inferior imitators turn their vision into Scrooge McDuck-piles of wealth (Muse, I’m looking at you). Good or bad doesn’t matter, and there are certainly good and bad aspects about this adoption. Modest Mouse, for example, but in a good ten years before allowing their songs to be used in commercials, and, to further muck up the argument, they’ve been on a major label since 2000. This alienation has been a decade in the making, if not longer. For every Nirvana, there is a Silverchair; for every Beatles, a Monkees. As before, this can be simultaneously good and very, very bad.

2009, then, is an extension of everything that occurred to the “Indie” community over the course of the aughties (that, strangely enough, seems to be an actual term now). Imitation upon imitation in an endless succession. The real question, then, is this: Does it matter? The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, for example, a Brooklyn band that sounds so goddamn much like The Smiths and Pavement combined, released a pretty alright album. If there is nothing new under the sun, then what’s wrong with creating these interesting, if not entirely original, hybrids? In some cases, nothing. Most of the albums that caught my attention this year have either a) embraced their influences wholeheartedly and managed to fuse them, no matter how disparate they seem, into a fascinating and cohesive whole, b) forged new ground in stagnating musical genres, or c) just decided to play a goddamn song and do it well. Regardless of this loss-of-culture and lack-of-originality wah-wah, the only thing that really matters is the capital-A Album, a collection of songs unified in purpose and executed goddamn well.

If you’re still in this, it should be stated that lists like these are obviously to be taken with a grain of salt, especially considering there is no panel of critics combining lists and all that hooey, just one bored soul who should really be reading a book or something. We all find something different to connect with in art, which comes as sort of a surprise to precisely nobody. That said, if there’s one thing that Lady Gaga and the experimental classical music of Krzysztof Penderecki can tell us about the human condition, both in equal measure and in their own unique ways, it’s that humanity will either expire through the slaughter of innocent humans or ceaseless dancing, but probably both at once. Cheers, and Happy 2010.

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Sonic Youth - The Eternal

Pioneers. Uniquely American, the idea of the pioneer. Around the time of the birth of our (my) nation, with it’s violent, catastrophic beginnings, the pioneer was in charge of making the new world habitable, safe, European. Problems, yeah, etc etc, here we are. American authors look at the land as something to be conquered, literally without value until a big strong man comes along with a gun and turns it into usable space. The Pioneer: “You’re welcome.” But what happens when there’s nothing left to pioneer, nothing left to conquer?

Sonic Youth is 16 (!) albums into an impressive, spotty career. Pioneers (there it is) of the New York No-Wave movement, they have literally influenced and allowed themselves to be influenced by everyone. Neato, right? So what do you do after sixteen albums? Where do you go?

Nowhere, it turns out. Big Confession: I love this band. I love Pavement, and little Mark Ibold is now a full fledged SY member. But how are we expected to swallow this? Steve Shelley, God bless him, has been playing the same drum beat for literally twenty-five goddamn years, and if you know Sonic Youth then dear God you know what I’m talking about. If not, it sounds like this: solid 4/4 on the hi-hat, alternating bass and snare (without the snares), repeat ad nauseum.

Thurston is no better. Lyrically, he’s always been somewhere around “poetry I should’ve burned in high school,” which is essentially a harsher way of saying “I’ve never listened to Sonic Youth for the lyrics.” The guitarwork is what sets them apart, and though Moore and Ronaldo can still make inhuman noises emanate from their instruments, the question this far in is, “why?” To look at them as neo-classical composers (which is easy to do if you’re listening to Andre Sider af Sonic Youth, a brilliant live composition once you skip the first ten minutes), the question is irrelevant. They do it because it’s different, unexpected, and entertaining. But for all intents and purposes, Sonic Youth are a Rawk Band®, and younger artists would be chastised to no end for an album of this quality.

As it is, Eternal is somewhere between Sonic Nurse and NYC Ghosts, maybe with a sprinkling of Daydream Nation in there, just because we’re playing Rawk. This fits somewhere in between because it isn’t that the album is completely unlistenable, it just exists somewhere in the background. After starting strong with “Sacred Trickster,” the album slowly trickles off, each song getting progressively worse, a dirty Major Label trick that one would hope they would’ve left at Geffen (Eternal is on Matador, their first independent release since signing to Geffen, SYR releases excluded).

This is my problem with the Eternal, inherently my problem: Is it bad because it’s Sonic Youth, who have revolutionized (pioneered?) many things before? Or is it good because it’s Sonic Youth, 50+ year olds still trying their damndest to create outsider art once again from the outside? Don’t expect a resolution.