Lesson Plans, Book Bannings, Sinus Infections, Work, and Everything That Makes The Days Go Fast

I am a bad and negligent blogger but life ran ragged over me the last two months. Currently I am working nights, taking two graduate level classes, observing and developing a unit plan for the ninth grade classes that I am assigned to for my clinicals at the high school, and recovering from the worse sinus infection I have ever had. Some where in between I have also managed to acquire a relationship that I didn't see coming. Oh well, he's a sweet person and an interesting addition to life down here in Mayberry.
I am supposed to be working on another set of lesson plans for Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire that a group of English teachers are developing for our Methods class. I am jamming out to Earth, Wind and Fire trying to stay awake to get at least half way finished. Some days I give myself a hard figurative kick in the hinder region for deciding to go ahead with this whole teaching idea, however, I really believe that it is a big and positive change in my life and work direction. That doesn't make it an easy adjustment and it also doesn't also give me the confidence that I am up to the job.
This is the first experience in a public school setting where I have really had an opportunity to engage with the students. It is not the same world that it was when I was in high school. These kids know and do a lot more than they should at fourteen and fifteen years-old! I was sitting in on the supervising teacher's morning classes for a couple of weeks. They are her AP Honors classes and they will be the ones that I will be teaching my unit to at the end of the month. These two classes are a great and motivated bunch of kids. I was impressed with them. She then informed me that I needed to come back after lunch one day and see the third period class in order to get a reality check. The third period class is a general education class with some learning disabled students who have been mainstreamed. They are a whole different can of invertebrates. They come in like they have been sucking straight up sugar through straws for lunch. They have very little respect for the teacher's authority and position. The sad part is most this comes from less than ideal home lives and some really messed up situations outside of class. The supervising teacher had to send one student to the office after he refused to back down and obey her. It was a last resort. After class she told me: "You know, every day that we can not reach these kids in a positive way we have failed them." So true in many ways but you also can not let them take instructional time away from the other kids with misbehavior. So many Catch 22s in our public education system.
After a parent complaint the school board had to pull the novel The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy from the twelfth grade AP Honors class cirriculum. The sad part about the whole situation is that one parent is getting to control the intellectual freedom of a whole class of students. I was really impressed with the student's reaction. The student's came to school wearing protest t-shirts with a play on words of one of the themes from the book. This tells us three things as English teachers:

A. They actually read the novel (which is a miracle in itself sometimes)
B. They understood the themes and are actually engaging them in their thought.
C. They are taking an interest in how censorship can have both positive and negative impacts on our institutions.

In plain speech, they are actually using their brains and considering how a situation is affecting them.
Censorship of literature in the school systems is always an interesting and complex issue so I am really excited to see how this turns out. On one hand parents should have some control over their children's educations but on the other hand should we allow one person to make a decision for a whole group. Seeing that the ALA just wrapped up banned books week this is very timely.

In other news, my doctor has turned me into a walking pharmacy. What started out as a mild sinus infection with a sore throat grew into a less than mild infection complete with vertigo, puking, chills, inner ear involvement and all kinds of fun stuff. I am popping an antibiotic, an anti-vertigo pill and an anti-nausea pill this week. Hooray for drugs! Moral of the story: if you know that you are getting sick proceed to the doc's office before the room starts to spin and you think you see John Lennon and Elvis riding a flaming pie around the room.

Good news-I received a promotion at work--bring on the higher hourly wage! Yay me! I hope that my rambling has been both enjoyable and comprehensible.

Sleep

Can't sleep. Won't sleep. Brain will not shut down. Hate this. Nervous. Restless. Some one slip me a valium so I can go to bed. Have to be up again in two more hours. Up again? Have not been down yet.

Jesus at Work

In my adult life I have worked a lot of jobs in the service arena. This has been contrary to my educational background (literature and writing) and my personal aspirations. By this point in life most of us have realized that we may not land that perfect dream job, but we still have to eat. I have had more than one job that I would like to forget, more than one person yelling at me and/or calling me rude names for circumstances that I did not cause, and I have gone home in tears from more than one work day. Some days I just want to tell people: Please, this isn't what I want either, I'm just trying to make ends meet. I have also had days when I could have handled a situation better, could hace been kinder or more patient with some one, and could have gone to bed with a little more peace in my mind and heart.

This brings me to thought about the Savior that has been on my mind a lot the in the last week or so. Aside from his early childhood, Gospel accounts only give us about three years of Jesus Christ's life on Earth. Jesus began his ministry at the age of 3o. At 33 he was crucified, resurrected and ascended back into Heaven. Those three years are fundamental to the faith, but one wonders what his adult life was like before his ministry? Jesus held a job. In his book Jesus, Seeing Him More Clearly Bill Hybels reminds the reader that Jesus spent more time working in the marketplace than he did any where else during his life on earth. It was probably a hot, smelly marketplace that was full of rude and disgruntled people. The Savior was a carpenter and I think that he enjoyed work. He dealt with difficult people on a daily basis. Maybe the part of him that was human woke some mornings and wanted a few more hours of sleep before going into work. Maybe he even had a few days that he was glad that business was light. We know that Christ was God as well as a man, but I wonder what his daily human life was like. When he was my age he was getting up and going to work every day. He worked a long, hard day and come home tired. He may have gotten the shorthand of the financial stick on occasion. He knew what it was like to work hard for the public and listen to their complaints. He handled it with perfect grace and calmness. I wonder how much I reflect and emulate him when my work has me feeling exasperated, tired, insulted, or hurt?

Pornography

Nothing works like an attention grabbing title, hey? Sorry, but this is not about the commonly understood definition of the term. My latest gig in the work force is at a video rental store and it has amused and disturbed me how much people are willing to take in images that would disgust them in real life. The public's idea of entertainment is quite often like pornography in another form. This is the ability to sit wide-eyed and admiring in front of pure, unadulterated garbage for about two hours (not to mention that we actually pay for the privilege).
Mr. Webster, your friend and mine, defines pornography as "writings, photographs, movies, etc. intended to arouse sexual excitement, especially such materials considered as having little or no artistic merit." For a moment, let's drop the word "sexual" from the definition. Yes, I know that good students of the English language are not supposed to monkey with definitions but -my blog. With the sexual connotation aside, this definition is an accurate depiction of the sort of movies people go home happy with every night. These baser preferences of the American consumer provide me with a paycheck so criticizing their habits makes me a hypocrite, but once again-my blog.
People like to watch a lot of violence, action, and dumb comedy with very little story line and nothing of any merit. As long as characters die bloody deaths while sleeping with various partners, it is a "good" movie. One of the more recent films that customers have clamored for is a gem titled The Hills Have Eyes, Part II. The plot of this film follows the adventures of a tribe of people who have been mutated by atomic tests in the Southwestern desert. They live in caves and cannibalize stranded travelers. The resounding question here is: Why? Why would some one make one film on this subject, that long a Part II? Why does the public need two installments of bloodthirsty, evil cannibals in the desert? I have thought of several witty responses to the request: "Hey, you got any of The Hills Have Eyes, Part II in?" No, but I hear that the hills have spontaneously sprouted ears and nose this week. Not the most intelligent comeback but let's see you do better after fielding this request 25 times in a single shift.
These little nuances of my job have also caused me to stop and consider how much of this sort of stuff I take in. How much gruesome violence, explicit sex, and poor taste humor have I sit through in my adult life? What effect has this had on my attitudes towards these type of events in real life? Am I becoming desensitized to images and ideas that I would normally find offensive? Does any one else notice that the sort of things we find the most entertaining in movies would horrify us in real life? I am also a little nervous that my entertainment choices may be reflective of a shorter attention span. Occasionally the human brain needs to be entertained without having to exert itself but how much of this is a series of action sequences without a plausible story line? How many action movies are the equivalent of pornography in the exploitation of violent images? We don't like watching coverage about people being shot or dying in military activities on the news or reading about it in the newspaper but we rent movies like Shooter and the Bourne Identity. War casualities make us sad and discouraged but films like 300 are exciting. Take the reality factor away and it becomes entertainment. Very strange.

Because I Needed A Laugh

My apologies to all of my conservative pals out there but I just couldn't resist and this did give me a chuckle after the afore mentioned day!

Frustration, Irresolution, Worry and Everything in Between

Today was not a good day. My best friend from college was having surgery today. I knew that there would be very little information today but I just wanted to stop by the waiting area and check with her husband and family to make sure everything had started according to plan before going into work. I went up to the hospital and found the surgery waiting area but could not locate any of her family. The desk clerk insisted over and over again that this was the only surgery waiting area in the hospital and that this was where she would be. I wandered around the floor a bit longer and finally found another employee who told me the same thing. I told her a really didn't think it was correct. Where ever my friend was in situation like that her husband and family would be and I hadn't been able to find any of them. It was getting closer to the time I needed to be at work so I left and headed home. As I was getting dressed for work I made a last ditch effort and called her husband's cell. "Kara," he said, "we are on the third floor!" I had been lost on the second floor! I had been so close to the one place I wanted to get for the whole day and couldn't manage it. I had to be at work in twenty minutes and there wasn't time for a trip back up to the hospital. I was worried at work, I am worried now and will probably be worried in my sleep --when ever that happens.
To put another layer on the day I had a situation arise with the car that I really needed Dad for and he is out of the reach of phone contact for the weekend. This is where I have to be honest and state that I often defer to Dad on problems I could solve myself (we drive each other nuts, but I am the baby girl even at this advanced age). This was a bona fide Dad emergency, however, since he is co-owner of the vehicle. So I handled it and then phoned my aunt for a little emergency situation spell check. I suppose this is where I would have to mark "pathetic" if I was doing a self-evaluation on my coping abilities.
Circumstances fly at me so fast some days it seems as though I do not have time to resolve one issue before another blind sides me. Whole weeks and months drag by without a single event and then one random day is like being trapped inside a batting cage with one of those baseball pitching machines (I was always bad at baseball). I despise the phrase "just one of those days" because it sweeps everything under the proverbial rug when what you really need is to acknowledge that the events of the day were miserable, think them through, talk to some one who can give you some wise empathy, pray for God to forgive me of any part I had in making the situations worse and take comfort in the certainty that it will never be in my power to resolve everything. Um, that is a comfort? In the strangest way sometimes it is the best comfort one gets.

Generations of Objectors

As I grow closer to thirty and my Dad grows closer to sixty I have more and more moments when I am certain that we have very little in common. Last summer I found myself in the defining state of my age group: over-educated and very under-employed. After taking a realistic look at my finances and options I decided that moving home with my family and returning to school for a teaching certificate in English Education was my most viable option. Mom passed away at Christmas 2006. While we are all devout Christians my family members and I all have a little different take on politics and social issues. The household now consists of Dad, a very conservative and fundamental baby boomer, and yours truly, his spinister daughter who seems to become more and more left-leaning with every passing moment. Needless to say, he and I have had a few "discussions" on church doctrine, post-modern society and the competency of our government. All of that, of course, falls behind the most popular topic: when and how I plan to achieve stability in my lifestyle and profession. I love my Dad.

I thought that commonalities between us were becoming even more sparse until recent global events (plain English translation: that quagmire in Iraq that our "fearless leader" just can't stop stirring with his big stick) have become more frequent topics of conversation. A couple of evenings ago I was sitting at the bar in the kitchen reading the paper while Dad was cooking dinner. In case you don't pay attention to the papers most of the dailies have a small box some where on the front page with the number of the U.S. war dead in it (maybe they like to make it as inconspicuous as possible). I was reading the numbers and telling Dad about a story that I had read last week about an army reservist who was suing the U.S. military to stop his FIFTH deployment (www.kirotv.com/news/13677999/detail.html). Dad rolled his eyes, shook his head, and said "This war is a mistake and a mess." We have had a couple of conversations about whether or not it was necessary to send a generation into this conflist and they always end with the same sad conclusion. Mom once told me that our generation would pay dearly for the misjudgments of our government. They both knew what they were talking about. My parents lived through the Vietnam Era. Dad missed the draft because of a bad eye and a student wavier but he saw the effects in a couple of men in his fraternity house that had returned from the war. Mom's older brother did not return and her family has never received his reamins. They both saw the aftermath of bad judgement in high places in the communities around them. Eight years ago I found my uncle's name on the Vietnam Memorial in DC and made an etching of it for my Mom and aunts. I felt ambiguous about the experience-you can not look at that wall and regard it as an entirely proud object. When Dad and members of his generation say "this was a mistake" I think that there is experiential wisdom in that statement. I also think we may have a little more in common than what I find in my normal evaluations.