Love Medicine

Well, school is out and I just returned from the Independent School Experiential Education Network (ISEEN) conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I feel fortunate to have met so many educators from around the United States, as well as teachers from Canada and South Africa. Professional development helps me connect with the inspiration and passion I felt as a student about learning, which is what I strive to help students feel every day. This blog is the direct result of my fellowship with the Southern California Writing Project (SCWriP) which encourages educators to see themselves as writers and researchers. Action research was also the focus of the last class I took to earn my Master's in Teaching at Portland State University. This blog documents these three things: my development and growth as a teacher; my own practice of reading and writing; and the connection between the former and the latter: How do reading and writing make me a better teacher? Ever since I started teaching, I've kept a teaching journal to record the good days and the bad days. I do this so I can avoid past mistakes and continue effective practices. I have to say, one part of keeping an effective teaching journal has to do with re-reading it every now and then. So I may post some entries from that journal over the summer and reflect on them as I consider how I want to improve next year. Speaking of next year, I will no longer be teaching British Literature, and instead be teaching World Literature. I am excited about this change and also nervous, as it is a new curriculum that I have not taught before. I'm starting to read a few things over this summer in preparation for that class, including The Kite Runner, Oedipus Rex, Siddhartha, The Life of Pi, and The God of Small Things. Some of these are choices for the summer reading assignment and some are books we will read during the school year.

Before getting into my reading for this summer or reflecting on how the school year went, I want to finish appreciating the books I read last summer. Here is a remarkable passage from a pivotal point in the plot of Love Medicine by Lousie Erdrich. This novel immerses readers in the lives of several Native American families between the years of 1934 and 1983. Different characters narrate chapters set in a non-chronological order. For example, the first group of chapters takes place in 1981, and the next group of chapters takes place in 1934. This chapter, "Love Medicine" (same title as the novel), is narrated by Lipsha Morrisey, who is also the protagonist of Erdrich's story, "The Bingo Van." Lipsha is something of a healer. He was born with these powers, but occasionally struggles to use them. At this point in "Love Medicine", Lipha's grandfather has just choked and died on a turkey heart which Lipsha and his grandmother have tried unsuccessfully to sneak into his food. The turkey heart was supposed to cause Lipsha's grandfather to fall in love (again) with Lipsha's grandmother but Lipsha was not able to convince the priest or nuns to bless the turkey hearts:

     "Grandma got back into the room and I saw her stumble. And then she went down too. It was like a house you can't hardly believe has stood so long, through years of record weather, suddenly goes down in the worst yet. It makes sense is what I'm saying, but you still can't hardly believe it. You think a person you know has got through death and illness and being broke and living on commodity rice will get through anything. Then they fold and you see how fragile were the stones that underpinned them. You see how instantly the ground can shift you thought was solid. You see the stop signs and the yellow dividing markers of roads you had traveled and all the instructions you had played according to vanish. You see how all the everyday things you counted on was just a dream you had been having by which you run your whole life. She had been over me, like a sheer overhang of rock dividing Lipsha Morrisey from outer space. And now she went underneath. It was as though the banks gave way on the shores of Matchimanito, and where Grandpa's passing was just the bobber swallowed under by his biggest thought, her fall was the house and the rock under it sliding after it, sending half the lake splashing up to the clouds.
     Where there was nothing.
     You play them games never knowing what you see. When I fell into a dream alongside both of them I saw that the dominions I had defended myself from anciently was but delusions of the screen. Blips of light. And I was scot-free now, whistling through space." (251-2)

The existential crisis, the feeling that one is hurtling through space on an unknown voyage, frequently follows the death of a loved one. Having lost my mother five years ago, I know what this is like. I do not relate to Lipsha's image of his grandmother as "a person you know has got through death and illness..." because my mother was sick before she passed, but I do relate to, "how instantly the ground can shift you thought was solid." Maybe this even goes back to my own first realization of my mortality when I had a brain aneurysm in 2001 and just survived by luck. Life is pure chance. We think we are in control but control is an illusion. The rules all vanish when we have this insight. Everything seems petty and meaningless compared to the reality that all beings are mortal and will one day die. And love is the antidote to death. So what does it mean that Lipsha's grandfather dies when he is given love medicine? That is one of the questions at the heart of this book. What does love do to us? Does love heal us or curse us? Does it do both?

Appended 10:15 AM 6/27/2018:

I didn't promote this post at first because it seems more "personal" than "professional" and I want to be sensitive to my family members. However, I am struck by how closely love and death are intertwined. I remember looking for wedding poems when I was getting married. All the love poems I was finding were ultimately about death as much as they were about love. Perhaps this is because love is the force that holds us close to each other as we gradually or quickly move towards that inevitable, final separation. Love is the knowledge that our lifetimes are just a passing phase. Love is the attraction to and desire for life. I think that is what Bjork means when she sings, "All is full of love."

Lastly, I want to add a note about Erdrich's diction when she writes as Lipshaw. She really uses a specific syntax when speaking as Lipsha ("You play them games...") which is what some linguists might call "marked speech" indicating a lower socio-economic status. This reinforced by his reference to "living on commodity rice..." Finally, the use of the second person, the word "you" helps the reader connect with this passage. I don't think it would be as powerful without inviting the reader to inhabit Lipsha's perspective so directly.

What do you think? Have you read Love Medicine or any other books by Lousie Erdrich? Are you inspired to read her now?

More summer reading

It has been a long time! The school year started and I entered the cycle of planning and grading that never seems to stop. It is important to step out from this ever-turning wheel and look around at the big picture from time to time and ask the important questions: Are my students developing as readers and writers? Am I challenging them? I try to do this by introducing them to new genres of literature and giving them a variety of writing assignments. We've also worked to develop our speaking and listening skills through Socratic Seminars. I won't go into all we've done this school year, but I've been wanting to document the rest of my summer reading after my previous post (from three months ago!):

Tenth of December by George Saunders.

George Saunders is one of my favorite writers. This collection of short stories is less bleak and dystopian than his previous collections. The opening and closing stories both feature two alternating narrators who have rich inner monologue and fantasies taking place in the midst of the real world action. It reminds of "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," the short story with the narrator who continually lapses into a daydream. Saunders has a strong sense of each character's voice; it is easy to tell all the different speakers apart. He writes with a healthy dose of suspense: in "The Semplica Girl Diaries," the reader doesn't realize what the Semplica girls are until well into the story. I suppose Saunders uses stream-of-consciousness narration to immerse the reader into the character's world with very little explanation. An extremely short two-page story describes a seasonal scarecrow a father habitually decorates throughout the years as a type of outsider art piece. His art eventually mirrors his own mental unraveling and despair.

Ten Little Indians by Sherman Alexie

I wanted to think there were ten short stories in this collection but there are only nine. All of the protagonists are Native American and they all defy stereotypes, living in the modern world. The characters are lawyers, poets, basketball players, public speakers, drunks, and teenagers. I taught "What You Pawn I Will Redeem" to my juniors this year and they enjoyed it. I discovered some new insights to the story with the help of one of my classes during one of the above-mentioned Socratic Seminars. We tried to apply John Locke and Chief Seattle's theories of ownership to the story as well. All of the characters in these stories are searching for lost pieces of themselves. Alexie uses humor as medicine for sadness.

Love Medicine by Louis Erdrcih

So yes, I am trying to build up my knowledge of Native writers in order to properly represent Native people in the American Literature class. This novel follows a group of characters from several interrelated families between the 1910's and the 1980's. Readers see how the love interest from a character's teen years plays out decades, and even a lifetime, later. Readers also get to see radically different parts of a character's life: school, marriage, parenthood. Lastly, readers can see the same event through different eyes as Erdrich switches perspectives and narrators. This novel features Lipsha Morrissey from the short story "The Bingo Van." I think Lipshaw is my favorite narrator and he gives us a stunning passage when his grandmother dies unexpectedly and his whole world seems lose its center of gravity. This novel also features cars going into rivers and houses going up in flames, along with lots of secret love.

Whistling Season by Ivan Doig

This is a book my Mom wanted my Dad to read. She read it when she was dying from ovarian cancer. In it, a widower hires a housekeeper who is a beautiful young woman who brings her brother with her. The story takes place in Montana and the narrator is a school superintendent presiding over the closure of the one-room schoolhouses he once attended as a child. The narrator tells us about his childhood with his two brothers and father, who eventually marries the housekeeper, who turns out to be not quite who she seems by the end of the book. Her brother also has a secret past but is well-loved in the small rural community as the new teacher of the one-room school house, serving students in grades one through eight. He makes Haley's comet  the center of their curriculum for quite some time. I think my Mom wanted my Dad to read this because she wanted him to move on with his life after she was gone. This book also has some spectacular passages that I would like to go into detail about later in this blog.

I also read Book Love by Penny Kittle, For Colored Girls Considering Suicide by Ntotzake Shange, and I re-read Fences by August Wilson and Twelfth Night by Shakespeare in preparation for teaching this year. I've been taking my time through The Shadow of Sirius by W.S. Merwin and I'm currently reading White Teeth by Zadie Smith. I hope I can finish it before she speaks at UCSB at the end of this month.

So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell

This is not turning out as I planned. But as my brother says, "life is what happens when you're making other plans." I had planned on keeping up with the summer reading journal that I had assigned my students, writing once a week about what I am reading. Now I am doing what perhaps some of my students are doing: writing all the entries at the end of summer. There were about eleven weeks in our summer vacation, which is pretty long. I don't think I will make all eleven entries before school starts in about ten days. That is not a positive attitude. If I am going to catch-up, then I will have to make one entry each day between then and now and on one day, make two entries. Let's see if I can do it.

This first book I read this summer was So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell, who was the fiction editor at the New Yorker between 1969 and 1972. I wonder which writers he chose to publish during that time period? This book was generously given to me by a parent of one of my beloved students. First the parent e-mailed me to see if I had heard of the book. She was reading it with her book group and was enthusiastic about it. Then the book showed up in my mailbox at school one day. 

I've always wanted to keep up a pleasure reading habit during the school year, but it is difficult when every night I am preparing for class the next day by reviewing what my students are reading or I am reading student writing. The time simply isn't there. Unless I make the time. And that is what I started to do with this book. I put aside everything else, on my day off, or before bed, and read it, maybe just a few pages at a time. It was slow going at first and the book took a beating: First a water bottle tipped over on it in the seat well of our car, soaking the pages. Then I dropped it when I dozed off in the bathtub. So the the spine and pages of this slim paperback are now warped by water and sun.

 Nevertheless, I persisted (now I can't say that without thinking of Elizabeth Warren). I found Maxwell's writing mesmerizing and mysterious. He writes sentences like this:

"What strange and unlikely things are washed up on the shore of time" (16)

I don't need to put such a short quote up there, separated from the rest of the paragraph (according to MLA format) but I want to draw attention to it. "What strange and unlikely things..." These "things" are memories. Maxwell's narrator creates an image of himself wandering along the shore next to the ocean of his memories. He is obviously far along in his life to have memories "washed up on the shore of time." He compares memories to the destroyed and dessicated flotsam and jetsam of the ocean: random, enigmatic, of unknown origin.

Throughout the narration, the narrator doubts and second-guesses his memory:

"I very much doubt I would have remembered for more than fifty years the murder of a tenant farmer I never had lain eyes on if (1) the murderer hadn't been the father of somebody I knew, and (2) I hadn't later on done something I was ashamed of afterward." (6)

Early on, the narrator introduces and emphasizes his own faulty subjectivity into the very narrative he is constructing. He doubts he would have remembered. The story is about a tenant farmer who he had "never lain eyes on." Then he introduces the narrator own personal connection: he knew the son of the murdered man; he was ashamed of something he did afterward. His connection to the story is personal and emotional.

Despite this element of ambiguity and doubt, Maxwell creates variety and surprises the remember with powerful declaratory statements that establish a wizened tone:

"The reason life is so strange is that people have no choice..." (21)

The narrator has been alive for long enough to have developed a theory about why life is strange. Again, Maxwell establishes this idea that remembering one's own life is something like solving a mystery, that our own lived experiences, through the perspective of decades, can become strange and unknown. And, he adds, this is all because "people have no choice..." Beneath what appears random is an undiscovered logic, a set of circumstances depriving individuals of choice, and thus pre-determining their actions. Maxwell draws readers into a montage of seemingly random memories by stating that there is an underlying system of facts that causes events to unfold as they do. This is a belief about life: that there is a reason for everything that happens. The human experience is the attempt to interpret life by attaching causes to effects, to use the word "because," to ask the question, "why?" I think that question is at the core of this book. The narrator is asking himself why certain things happened in and around the periphery of his life. He can't even answer these questions himself.

In the third chapter, "The New House," Maxwell creates a powerful metaphor for the narrator's search for the underlying causes of events, by having the narrator recall wandering around, exploring, and playing on the scaffolding and frame of a house under construction that he will soon live in:

"And I had an agreeable feeling, as I went from one room to the next by walking through a wall instead of a doorway, or looked up and saw blue sky through the rafters, that I had found a way to get around the way things were." (25)

Able to walk through walls and look through what will soon be the ceiling, the narrator has "an agreeable feeling... that [he] had found a way to get around the way things were." This recalls Plato's allegory of the cave: the idea that life as we perceive it is simply an illusion: the walls and windows all obscure the frame that lies beneath it. In the same way, effects somehow, through time, obscure their very causes. Everything disappears in the sand of time, the fog of memory. And this narrator, heroically, is searching through the sand and fog.

Writing this, something about this story now stands out to me as remarkably privileged. How nice it is to say, "oh life is such a mystery, how did it get this way?" Many people know exactly how their lives got to be the way they are: through slavery and genocide. But even in these cases, there is so much unknown in the details: everybody has mysteries in their past; memories they can't explain. But the idea of pursuing minutiae seems like a luxury when others must struggle to simply survive.

Maxwell's narrator continues to remind us of the falability of memory with passages like this:

"I seem to remember that I went to the new house one winter day and saw snow descending through the attic to the upstairs bedrooms. It could also be that I never did any such thing, for I am fairly certain that in a snapshot album I have lost track of there was a picture of the house taken in the circumstances I just described, and it is possible that I am remembering that rather than an actual experience." (27)

Maxwell keeps the reader engaged by giving the reader very little to hang on to and lots of reasons to doubt the narrator. All we know is that the narrator remembers this image. That is all there is: memories. So ephemeral is life. This is a timeless theme in literature and the human experience: Geoffrey Chaucer made the same observation in the end of Troilus and Cressida "[t]his world, that passeth sone as floures faire." All life is passing before our eyes. The very world we know is only as temporary as Spring flowers. Now there's a cosmic perspective: To God or a higher consciousness, our world, and solar system are appearing and disappearing in an instant. How much nicer it is to be small and petty, to be human, concerned with material things, to be ignorant, believing that all of this will last forever?

Maxwell's narrator is so honest that he lets us in on his human fallability, just as the characters in So Long, See You Tomorrow also fail morally, giving in to their human passions and appetites, ultimately destroying themselves and (nearly) everyone else around them, regardless of the bonds of love or marriage. Throughout the narrative, Maxwell makes us aware of the fact that we are reading, that we are imagining the story, telling us, "[t]he reader will also have to do a certain amount of imagining." (56) However, rather than causing the reader's belief in the narrative to evaporate, these statements make the reader more aware of their participation in the construction of the narrative with the writer, that writing and reading are a give-and-take between writer and reader, and that not only is the writer giving that story to the reader, but that the reader is also giving to the writer by believing in or imagining the story at all. Therefore, when Maxwell writes the following:

"The water in the China pitcher comes from the cistern and is rainwater and rust-colored. He fills the bowl and the water immediately turns cloudy from the soap and dirt on his hands." (66)

We are made doubly aware that all these rich details are constructed by the writer, and that the image in our mind is a gift.

Summer reading

I'm looking at the photo of my summer reading stack and thinking, "why are there so many men?" Out of ten books, only one is by a woman. I have another photo of even more books I want to read this summer, so I will have to compare them. However, it is disconcerting that I read so much "male literature" since half the people on Earth are female and three out of four people living in my house are female. Two books not pictured that I've read this summer are by women: Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich and Book Love by Penny Kittle. Anyway, here is my list of books I want to read this summer:

Books I've Already Started But Not Finished (Yet)
1. So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell
2. Book Love by Penny Kittle
3. Tenth of December by George Saunders
4. Ten Little Indians by Sherman Alexie
5. The Shallows by David Carr
6. Habibi by Craig Thompson
7. Write Like This by Kelly Gallagher
8. The Shadow of Sirius by WS Merwin
9. Essays After Eighty by Donald Hall
10. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
11. Girls To The Front by Sara Marcus
12. A Language Older Than Words by Derrick Jensen
13. Our Band Could Be Your Life by Michael Azerrad
14. Zazen by Vanessa Veselka
15. The Flight of the Iguana by David Quammen
16. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
17. How Children Succeed by Paul Tough

I have to admit it: I'm one of those scattered, idealist, benevolent-to-my-own-detriment souls: I give too much attention to every book, starting a new one before I've put the last one down. It is difficult for me to abandon a book I've already invested in and begun reading. I live by the words, "lost time is never found." However, I do seem comfortable abandoning a book once I've utterly lost the narrative thread. A few examples: Habibi by Craig Thompson which is so long with so many plot lines and times lines but a lack of investment in the mysterious characters. Also: Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. After reading Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake, I thought I could plow through a text of any density regardless of my fading comprehension, just reading for the sensation of language. But I knew Gravity's Rainbow was going somewhere. I just didn't know where.

Books I Have Bought But Not Read (Yet)
1. Long Walk To Freedom by Nelson Mandela
2. The One-Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka
3. Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder
4. The Unsettling of America by Wendell Berry
5. March by John Lewis
6. Fishgirl by David Wiesner
7. Are You My Mother by Alison Bechdel
8. The Floodgates of the Wonderworld by Justin Hocking
9. The Most Dangerous Book by Kevin Bermingham
10. The Crossover by Kwame Alexander
11. The Whistling Season by Ivan Doig
12. A Separate Peace by John Knowles

I'm just disclosing the type of reader I am as well as my relationship with books. I fetishize books as objects. I lament their disposability and tendency to be discarded. I hoard books. I buy them and I don't read them and feel ashamed. I spend too much time on my phone not reading. However, this summer I am going to change all that. I will donate many of my old books and books I've bought or inherited in my classroom library to our school library, if they are books we lack, need, or that other teachers have requested.

I've also put reading at the forefront of my goals this summer, trying to put in at least an hour if not more every day. It is not easy because I have two toddlers (twin girls) who demand a lot of attention, food, love, discipline, and all those good things children need. But I am not a single parent. However, my wife and I spend time together, not reading, but planning our schedule, finances, and future together. I tend to wake up at six a.m. when my kids get up because I am afraid one of them will climb the kitchen counters looking for chocolate chips or marshmallows and fall off and get hurt. This morning I intercepted her right as she was grasping a sack of chocolate chips and she threw a fit. I compromised by making chocolate chip pancakes. They were more like cookies than pancakes. This is what some teachers do on a Monday morning in the summertime. When my wife and I went to Baja, my saintly mother-in-law watched our girls and forsook their naps in lieu of putting them to bed earlier. The genius of this idea is that a caretaker only puts the children down once, rather than twice (which takes hours), and has more "adult time" since the children are tired and ready for bedtime earlier, having missed their naps. However "adult time" (AKA free time) is a dubious myth because adults are frequently exhausted by caregiving and immediately fall asleep right after the children do.

In any case, here is one more list concerning my progress reading over the last two months:

Books I Have Read So Far This Summer (June and July)
1. So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell
2. Book Love by Penny Kittle
3. Tenth of December by George Saunders
4. Ten Little Indians by Sherman Alexie
5. Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich
6. The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
7. Fences by August Wilson

Currently Reading
1. The Whistling Season by Ivan Doig
2. Literary Theory by Terry Eagleton
3. AP English and Literature Teacher's Guide

I will be lucky if I reach my goal of twenty books this summer! I'll have to cheat and read some graphic novels!

Baja

Two weeks ago, my wife and I went to La Bufadora, just south of Ensenada in Baja California. I have never been to Mexico before and I almost feel like this doesn't quite count because Mexico has such a rich history and culture and we hardly scratched the surface. This town in particular has a large number of ex-patriots living in "Rancho La Bufadora" where my wife grew up spending the summers with family and friends who would drive down from Los Angeles and stay here in trailers they parked on the cliffs surrounding the bay. Today many of the trailers are decript and decaying. Our electricity, which comes from a car battery, allows us to the flush the toilet. The non-potable water from the bathroom faucet and toilet comes from a tank that is filled by a guy who drives around in a truck with a huge water tank. My mother-in-law calls it "camping" and it basically is since all other electricity comes from batteries or the sun. 

When the sun sets, we use cheap litle solar-powered lights outside and flashlights inside. We cook (mostly boiled water for coffee) with a small propane camping stove. Our drinking water comes from bottles we brought with us. My main project was using a machete to cut away iceplant that had overgrown some stairs and a walkway. Of course there are numerous other "projects" related to electricity, carpentery, plumbing, fishing, and other trades I know very little about. I can tell when people came down here more often that it was an active, busy place. However, I just chose to sit and read for most of the time. Tourists buses arrive every few days so people can see "la bufadora" or "the blowhole" on the other side of town. A pair of seals followed a large group of kayakers and the bay, and far off, I saw a whale spout. We brought our small black dog, Edie and visited the vendors and restaurants. I also ate the best fish tacos I've ever had.

Summer projects

What do teachers do in the summer? They work. Two years ago I took a job teaching 11th and 12th grade at a small college prep boarding school in the Santa Ynez valley. Previously I held several other teaching positions in public schools. What is the difference between working at a public school versus a private school? Where do you begin? A colleague at public school once told me, "I know a few people who've gone to teach at a boarding school. It sounds like a completely different job." In many ways it is. As a boarding school student, nearly twenty-five years ago, I appreciated seeing my teachers inhabit the multiple roles an adult human plays in real life: professional, parent, coach, advisor, host, colleague, driver, handyman, artist, editor, welder, carpenter, etc. I knew my teachers were not "just" teachers, but also human beings. Ironically, as many students see teachers as one-dimensional beings who must "live" at school, all my teachers did indeed live at school, as did I. Allegedly, boarding school teachers also work longer hours. This seems especially true since we work six-day weeks and also have a weekly duty of checking students into their rooms at night. However, it seems most k-12 teachers in public school arrive at work early, stay late, grade in the evenings, and prepare for classes over the weekend. I am still at the early stages of my craft, so this is certainly my case as well. Another supposed difference is that private school teachers may be stretched to fill more roles. I have a friend who spent his first year teaching at a remote charter school where he taught five different classes (social studies, music, Spanish, and a few others.) However I also take issue with this: At one of my public school positions, I was hired at 0.8 time, so I was not quite making full-time salary and I had a family to support. To make up the difference, I was the Associated Student Body advisor, and a lunch-time supervisor. Many public school teachers also coach sports or lead extra-curricular clubs like Gay-Straight Alliance. At boarding school, I coach, and have morning and evening check-in duties once a week. Recently, I've taken on managing the school archive, acquisitions for our school library, and I hope to have some responsibilities over the student store as well.

Am I trying to work myself into the ground? I care about the place where I work. Sometimes, I love it so much, that it doesn't even feel like work. This brings me to my first two summer projects:

1. Writing for the school paper

The summer issue of our school paper, which is really like a cross between a magazine and a newspaper, because it features long articles written by students, will have an "alumni news" section, highlighting the classes that graduated during my time as a student. The reason for this is purely coincidental: In the last issue, a younger member of our board of directors collected alumni news from the classes that graduated when she was a student. I was in the class that graduated right after she arrived as a student, so it preserve reverse-chronological order if I gather news from my former classmates.

Reconnecting with long-lost classmates brings back feelings of nostalgia and pride: Some of them are in far-flung corners of the globe: Mozambique, China, Vietnam, Japan. Some are single parents with full-grown children of their own. Their careers range the gamut from plumber to professor. 

I also wrote an article about the 1956, '57, '58 class reunion. I oringinally wanted to interview an alumnus from one of these classes who wrote the novel, The Graduate, which became an Academy Award-winning film. However, said alumnus did not attend, so I collected anecdotes and cobbled them together. As students, these alumni had held school jobs like "sharpshooter" for carrying the headmaster's bb gun or "pig-boy" for feeding slop to the pigs or "dam master" for opening the pipe to the reservoir after it rained. None of the buildings in the yard where they boarded are still standing, but their stories remain.

2. Facing-out books on the shelves in the fiction section

Our school is small, so we do not have a full-time librarian. This means that students, faculty, spouses, and faculty children check books out of the school library by writing their name on a check-out slip with the date and putting that slip in a box. A student has the job of taking the check-out slips and marking those books as "checked-out" in the school library database. However, there are no overdue notices that go out (at least as far as I know) so all books are returned entirely on the honor system. What this means is, like a teacher's personal classroom library, many of the books go missing. We have no magnetic strips in the books, no theft-prevention system, and people tend to lose and forget things, including library books. Sometimes they forget to check the book out and just walk off with the book. When this happens, the school library database shows that the book is still on the shelf, when in fact it is not. This has been happening for awhile so I am going through the fiction section with a printed copy of the fiction titles in the library database, making sure that what is in the database is actually physically on the shelf.

Sounds fun? It is! What makes it all worth it? Facing books out! I mean, how else do you get people to realize we have a copy of The Fault in Our Stars or The Secret Life of Bees? Twilight, Harry Potter, and Stephen King books have thick enough spines that a patron can see them from across the library. I personally love facing out titles that have been adapted into films like The Life of Pi or Bourne Identity. I can also highlight books from non-White or LGBT perspectives such as House of Spirits, The House of Mango Street, Stone Butch Blues, or Annie On My Mind. And of course we have a corner facing-out Joseph Heller, Hemingway, and Herman Hesse. So you see, going through the fiction collection allows me to indirectly forward my literacy agenda.

I am also forwarding my cleaning agenda by blowing dust off the books and wiping down the shelves. Our school is very outdoorsy, rural, rustic, and experiential, so everything gets very... dirty. Of course by September all the dust and cobwebs will be back, but such is life.

Other projects:

3. Put loose photos in photo albums

4. Alphabetize my zines into magazine holders

5. Print and delete photos off my phone

6. Write

7. Draw comics

8. Fix speaker wire (-$)

9. Sell records (+$)

10. Sell books (+$)

11. Donate kids' clothes

12. Get rid of my ripped clothes

13. New battery for my laptop (-$)

14. Get Subaru towed to the mechanic (-$)

15. Take stuff behind our house to the dump (-$)

16. Build drum kit (-$)

17. Read!!!

18. Go to the beach

19. Go to La Bufadora

20. Go to Minneapolis to see my brother

Okay that is enough! Pretty boring isn't it? As you can see, getting rid of stuff is a big goal of mine. I have so much junk after four decades of collecting books and records. It's like I am constantly acquiring and discarding. But I barely have time to deal with it until summer. Summer is here: time exists. The items followed by (+$) indicate that income might follow and are more likely of being completed. The items followed by (-$) indicate an expense and are less likely to be completed. The items followed by nothing are most feasible. On that note, my next post will be about #17: Read!!!

The 2016-17 school year in review

Summer is here, so now that I have some time again, I can pick up on this old project of keeping a blog. Before I dive into my long list of summer plans, projects, and books I'd like to read, I think it will set a nice foundation for future entries if I review the school year that just ended. After all, it has been a year (almost) since I wrote anything:

This year, I was eager to apply the lessons I learned last summer at the Southern California Writing Project (SCWriP) at UCSB. I had my juniors and seniors write about their hopes, fears, and dreams, draw neighborhood maps, and create literacy timelines. These are all projects I learned about at SCWriP. Now that the year has ended, I realize we never returned to our hopes, fears, and dreams to see if any of them actually came true! But I can do this with my former juniors, who will return as seniors. I also don't think my former juniors ever wrote a "neighborhood story" based on their neighborhood maps. Well, next year they can do that too. Maybe it will be material for a future college essay?

In September, juniors read a smattering of poems, articles, amd stories designed to lay the groundwork for American Literature. Much as I would have liked to, we never really returned to these themes. I even wrote assignments that I never used around them. The first poem was, "Where Is My County?" from the poetry anthology Unsettling America. This poem is about the speaker having her ethnicity mistaken by many different people and I thought it would establish a pluralist frame to the idea of "American Literature" by showing that being American means being many things to many people. There is no single definition or single canon of American literature. After that we read an early chapter from The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. I love this book. This chapter is a mentor text showcasing Cisneros's masterful use of rich sensory imagery and a literary devices. It also describes a house right after the juniors finished drawing their neighborhood maps. Their homework after reading this was to write about a house. So we did do some writing based on neighborhood maps. Next we read the short story by Salman Rushdie "At The Auction of the Ruby Slippers" which discusses the value of home, not just as a place, but as an idea, a destination where one is perpetually arriving. This idea takes me back to my days as an undergrad at UCSB in a Chicano Studies class on Postcolonialism when we read Y No Se Lo Trago La Tierra (And The Earth Did Not Swallow Me) by Tomas Rivera. In this book, the author realizes finding home is a perpetual struggle. I believe that is what the experience is for many Americans. I would like to lead my students to that idea or have them get there on their own.

After reading these pieces, as well as a chapter from Trickster Makes This World by Lewis Hyde and a few Native American legends (which we acted out) about Coyote, we dove into The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Now one thing about The Scarlet Letter that I feel I have never properly set up as a teacher is the influence of Transcendentalism. The Scarlet Letter takes place in a Puritan colony hundreds of years before Transcendentalism. We read it first for this chronological reason. However, Nathaniel Hawthorne lived among many Transcendentalists and their ideas play out in multiple ways in The Scarlet Letter. In the future, I would like to go out of chronological order, by introducing students to Transcendentalism before reading The Scarlet Letter, in order to better set the stage.

In any case, Hawthorne's masterpiece provides many opportunities to teach various literary devices and I still feel it supports multiple readings and interpretations, making it a book worth keeping in my curriculum.

I know I should not be teaching the curriculum around books, but rather around "big ideas" such as American Exceptionalism, American Optimism, or Racism, Classism, Sexism, and more abstract concepts or essential questions. But I am still stuck in this mindset of "which book to read" which can limit the curriculum to literary analysis -- a mode I need to step out of as a teacher. But before I get too far afield, I want to refocus on reviewing the year:

The next book we read was The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald. Now, this involved leaping ahead 250 years from the Puritans. Why such a dramatic leap? Well, we were trying to get to Steinbeck because the junior teachers were planning an interdisciplinary field trip to Monterey which would include The Steinbeck Center in Salinas. This field trip was scheduled for January or February, so I had to have students reading The Grapes of Wrath by then.

I have not read everything by Steinbeck, but I have read East of Eden, Cannery Row, Tortilla Flat, The Wayward Bus, and Of Mice and Men, so I have read a few of his works, and I can say this: The Grapes of Wrath is by far his best book out of those choices. When am I going to assign a book for all my students to read, I want to pick a text with multiple levels. Students must be able to interpret the text in a nearly infinite number of ways, or else why read it? I want to teach active reading so students can support their particular interpretation of a text with evidence. Why read a text that only supports one meaning? The Grapes of Wrath has so meny elements to it (class, gender, nature, violence...) that students can take it in any direction they please.

The problem at this point is that we are only reading books by White men. Our school year is divided into five six-week terms. It took me all of last year to learn this, but I can basically teach one whole-class novel per term. The Scarlet Letter was term one. The Great Gatsby was term two. The Grapes of Wrath started in term three, but, due to the length of the novel and given a few interruptions (including the field trip itself), ended in term four. After this, we only had one term to read a text by someone who was not a White male.

Students were looking forward to reading Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut but I just could not go through a year exclusively reading books by White men when the course is titled "American Literature" and obviously should include so much more than one perspective. So I split the class up into reading groups, which was a first for me, but I think many students enjoyed the change in format to the course, and I think some also appreciated the change in the author's perspective. Students read Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, Beloved by Toni Morrison, The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (or some of it), Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston, and some still read Slaughterhouse Five. It wasn't exactly "choice reading" because students were assigned to groups based on their top three choices.

Generally, students wrote an essay about each book they read. They also wrote a few creative pieces: One about a walk, based on Thoreau's essay "Walking" and a travelogue about their trip to Monterey. They researched an American poet who they then wrote a paper about, but I did not give them a proper introduction to analyzing poetry, which is a difficult skill, and one that will be worth further developing next year. The assignment was meant to assess and develop their research skills. I did see where they needed help in creating a Works Cited that corresponded to in-text citations.

So looking back, I would like to have more diversity in the texts we read, as well as a better introduction to Transcendentalism, and more thorough demonstration and practice of analyzing poetry. Lastly, I would also like to help my students develop their listening and speaking skills. Ninth graders and tenth graders give a chapel talk to the rest of their class. The chapel talk is something all seniors do before the entire school. It is a ten-minute speech and the topic is determined by the speaker. It is a wonderful reflection of the trust in our community: students and faculty alike share and speak their truth. The ninth and tenth grade English teacher has siezed a brilliant opportunity in bringing this to her students, and I need to bring it to the eleventh-graders as well. Furthermore, seniors make announcements, lead job crews, and are prefects, so they need to practice those public-speaking skills.

That is a lot to focus on for next year! But there's more: Seniors will need help with college essays. Juniors and seniors will need more opportunities to practice research skills, citing sources, and creating a Works Cited. They need to evaluate their sources and revise their theses.

On top of this, I have student evaluations to respond to. My number one priority is to establish a coherent grading system, and discuss it with my students. I think I will give separate rubrics for expository, narrative, and argumentative writing. My second goal is to increase the depth of analysis we go into in class. Students feel that we just barely scratch the surface of each text. Does this mean leaving more time for discussion and processing a text in class? I think it means being more intentional and focused in those discussions. After attending a training on Socratic Seminars, I came away with some new ideas and applied them in class to get a deeper discussion, but I did not do this consistently throughout the year. So next year, I will do at least one Socratic Seminar with each class per term. Part of this desire for a greater depth of analysis, is the fact that my students want to feel more challenged in my classes. When thinking of ways to do this, I remembered overhearing students discuss terms like "intersectionality" which are pretty advanced but are not taught in my class. I think my students are ready for more than what I have offered them. To push them further, I could bring in some literary theory, which is really just a higher level of rigor in reading. So that is a summer investigation topic as well. My third and last goal, is tied into the second one: to develop better classroom management. I have classroom management systems in place. But how consistently do I enforce them and how often do I offer consequences when students don't follow through? Not often enough. This means next year, I will try to be consistent and firm in my expectations and in the consequences I give students. But I will also be calm and compassionate: I will be myself.

I don't really know if I am writing this for anyone other than myself, but if anyone has constructive feedback or suggestions, I would love to hear it!

Writing this reflection and these goals for next year, will hopefully help me realize these goals. Putting dreams and desires into words may help them come true. At SCWriP, we were reminded that as teachers, we are also writers and researchers: we are creating new knowledge out of our personal experiences, and by sharing that knowledge, we may be able to generalize certain truths that have escaped us.

Future topics I will try to write about include my summer reading list, summer reading progress, summer projects, and reflections on reading. I assigned my students a weekly reading log over the summer, so I am going to try to keep one myself. I am already behind!