Surrender, Dorothy

Rita Talks to Ninth Graders: A Tale of the Career Fair

Today I spent some time at Johnson County Community College talking to ninth graders from the Olathe school district about being a writer.

One of the first kids who came up to me asked me if spelling was important. I considered it for a while, then said YES, BY GOD, IT IS. Then he asked if I write things out longhand, and I said, "No," then heard myself uttering, "Although I did when I was your age. We didn't really use computers then."

This kid looked at me as though I were fossilizing before his very eyes.

A series of flat-ironed blond girls streamed past. "What's the demand for your field?" one asked, popping her gum.

"Well," I said, "By the time you're out of college, I think we'll have that all figured out. Right now, it's pretty bad, actually." I paused. "But writing will never be outsourced to another country. Think about that. And corporations aren't really as evil as you'd think." Gah gah gah gah gah

At this point, I looked at the arborist sitting next to me with a giant chainsaw and asked for some of his Purell. All I could hear was the blood pounding in my ears.

DON'T TOUCH YOUR FACE. DON'T TOUCH YOUR FACE.

As I waited for more kids to approach, I heard one large boy ask the arborist, "Why would you need a chainsaw that big?"

An alert-looking girl ambled over. She skipped the questions on the preprepared form and went straight for the blogging. "How do you build your following?" she asked. "How long did it take to get one?"

I thought back to 2004, when I had a good day with 30 hits. "It took a long time," I said.

"I have a huge following on DNL," she said. I think that's what she said. I have no idea what DNL is. It must be something the kids are doing these days.

"I push a lot from Twitter," I replied. One of the other girls flipped her hair.

"I don't know how to make Twitter work," said the other girl.

You and most of America.

A teenaged boy came up. "I'm sorry," he said, before he'd said anything. Then he looked nervously at my sign, which said "writer."

"I like to write," he said, "but I don't think I'm very good at it."

"You know what? Nobody's very good at it in ninth grade. If you like it, you're probably better at it than you think. Keep going."

I got into a conversation about Ray Bradbury with an earnest-looking wanna-be reporter. Most of the kids looked through me at the window beyond.

The organizer kept getting on the loudspeaker.

THERE'S NO WAITING AT GARMIN!

The crowd began to rustle.

THERE'S NO WAITING AT THE EDUCATION BOOTH!

No shit. They're in ninth grade. Educators are still "other."

I sat back and listened to my thoughts:

• I had those same elf boots when I was in ninth grade.
• These girls are so lucky they won't regret their high school hair later in life, unlike us unlucky schmucks who came of age in the eighties.
• DON'T TOUCH FACE! DON'T TOUCH FACE!
• Why is your field not in demand? Why don't more people pay you to write?
• Their feet look so BIG.
• Why are these girls so good at liquid eyeliner? Could I learn?

Another girl approached my table. "So, um, how many things have you written?" she asked, looking bored. She scanned my portfolio, flipping the tear sheets and the Sleep Is for the Weak coverage.

My computer hard drive flashed before my eyes -- thousands of individual pieces. How many posts are in this blog? 1,296. I just checked.

How can I tell her the volume of words it takes to get better?

It's overwhelming how much work it takes to get good at something. What should I say?

So I said nothing. I smiled and signed her Career Fair form.

"Hey," I called as she walked away. "Go to school for what you want. There are a lot of great-paying jobs that'll kill your soul."

She smiled, flipped her hair. "Thanks," she said.

And then I flipped back through my portfolio, remembering every single piece.

The Nutcracker and Tiny Purses: Yes, There Is a Theme

And the theme is school kids who can't afford stuff.

I'm doing publicity for a local performance of The Nutcracker. One of my jobs is to call metro schools and ask if they'd be interested in bringing their kids in for field trips (some of the performances are designated for schools and held during the school day). When I called the KCMO school district a few weeks ago, the very nice woman there told me so many of the kids are on the reduced or free lunch program they probably couldn't afford the $4 ticket price. Considering I had to send $5 to school with the little angel last week so she could eat a doughnut, this statement almost made my head pop off with the injustice of it all.

I'd been rolling the whole Nutcracker thing around in my head for some time when I saw Kelly Wickham's post about her kids (she's a vice principal of a school) not being able to carry big purses or backpacks but not being able to afford yet another purse for their lady things.

I'm going to sort through my closet to find a few small purses to send Kelly's girls so they can carry their tampons with dignity through the halls of their big-purse-and-backpack-banning school. If you're decluttering this year, please think about throwing a few tiny purses in a box and mailing them to Kelly. The P.O. box is in the link above.

And I'm going to ask you to consider approaching your employers or yourselves or your families about sponsoring a few KCMO school kids to see a very inexpensive ballet production this holiday season.  If you donate above $50, your name will appear in the program (I have details about levels of sponsorship for companies and individuals), but also, if you donate anything, we can designate it for KCMO kids if we get enough to bus in a few classes. 

Is Virginity Necessarily Good?

Last night I taught my last class for a while.  Well, I didn't really teach. I proctored my final exam.  They did really well - this is the hardest-working group I've ever had.  But that isn't what I want to talk about.

Two weeks ago, they handed in their final paper.  A bunch of them wanted me to grade them right away, so they'd know how well they needed to do on their final exams.  In my first semester, I would've just told them that of course they should always study hard and reach for the stars for any test.  Two years in, I just told them to talk quietly amongst themselves or study while I graded in the last hour of class, if they really wanted to know so bad.  I was secretly grateful for the chance to do it in class, as opposed to after putting the little angel to bed when I could be doing other great things, like reading The Bitch in the House or watching Big Love on HBO on Demand.

While I was grading, though, I couldn't help but eavesdrop. 

Student 1:  "So your daughter ran into the fireplace with her head?"

Student 2:  "Yeah - she's only two, but she's already a handful, just like her daddy."

Student 1:  "You'd better be careful.  You're going to have to sit at the door with a shotgun when she's sixteen."

Student 2:  "Nah.  I hope she dates a lot."

Student 3:  "You don't want that.  She'll come home pregnant."

Student 2:  "No, she won't.  I'm going to teach her all about that stuff."

Student 1:  "But then she'll just have sex!"

Student 2: "Exactly."

At this point, I couldn't pretend to not listen anymore.  I chastised them for distracting me with such a conversation, but I, like the other students, wanted to know why any hardcore father (he is hardcore - he even stayed home from class the night his daughters' dog died) would throw his baby girl out to the wolves that are teen-aged boys.

Student 2:  "The only reason I'm still married is because I had a lot of sex before I met my wife."

We were flabbergasted. We asked for MORE, MORE on this subject. 

Student 2:  "I know so many people who got married young, sometimes to the first person they'd slept with, and then ten years down the road,they wonder if they're missing something.  I am happy where I am because I know what I'm missing, and I'm just fine with missing it.  I want my daughters to go into marriage with their eyes wide open, and sometimes you have to kiss a few frogs along the way to get that perspective."

I went back to grading my papers, but part of me was thinking about my own premarital sexual escapades.  I did some really dumb things, and some even dumber people. It's true.  I also had my heart broken, stomped on and driven over with a Jeep Cherokee.  I did learn what worked and what didn't, how to switch it up, how to ride out the plateaus, and when to cut ties and bail...before I got married.  It is true. 

That said, I can't bear the thought of the little angel going through what I did, physically or emotionally.  I know she's going to have her heart broken.  I know she's going to like someone who doesn't like her back, maybe even love someone who doesn't love her back.  I hope she is pretty, but I don't want her to be too pretty.  I hope she is sensitive, but not as sensitive as I am.  I hope that by the time she gets married, she knows what she wants in a traveling companion and understands that no man can ever fulfill a woman. The woman, the person, has to do that for him or herself.

I'm not sure what my position will be on sex when the little angel is hanging around the condom basket in high school health class (she won't be going to school in Kansas, no sirreee).  I'm not sure how forthcoming I'll be about my own experiences, but I won't lie to her if she asks.  I hope she doesn't have to grow up too fast, but I'm not sure how she can avoid it, unless we move to a bubble.  Small towns are no safer, folks.  I grew up in a very small town.

I found K.'s perspective on sex education rather interesting, though. As a good Lutheran, I believe we should try as hard as we can not to sin - we should not plan to sin.  At the same time, as a good Lutheran, I believe in grace.  I hear the argument that preaching anything but abstinence is like encouraging your kid to fornicate.  But I also believe that the kids will be a fornicatin', and I don't want my child to get any horrible diseases or have a baby when she's still a baby, if it can be so easily avoided with a little education. Which is the worse sin?  Discussing fornication or withholding information that could save your child's life, literally and figuratively?

I'm also fascinated by this concept of playing the field in your youth as marital aid.  I can see his point.  I was just talking to my girls yesterday about how I would've liked to have been a younger mother in theory, but in practice, I was sooo enjoying the road trips on $50 and the beer-soaked parties and the roller blading and the sleeping late of my twenties.  In my twenties, I did not know what I wanted in a man - that was clear from my persistent pursuance of loner types who were long on sultry glances and short on phone calls.

I do know that I would never have clicked as well with my beloved if I hadn't learned the hard way how to recognize a good man, a kind man, a man who would treat me with respect and make me laugh instead of cry when he could.  You can't learn that stuff in school. You can't watch it on television and have it translate. You can't buy it in a store.  You have to live your bad kisses and your heartbreak and your mismatched priorities and your boxers-or-briefs and your morning breath to KNOW WHAT YOU WANT, hopefully before you walk down the aisle.  And you have to have lived all that stuff to remember that that's what's out there when you're tempted to stray or bored or just sad or mad or hormonal.  Remembering you chose your spouse because he was the best match for you out of all those many people you did date, you did audition, those other people who just did not make the cut, because your man was the best for you.  You hope.  You hope you chose best, because you had choices and you knew what was out there.

Or maybe not.

Thoughts?

A Time To Give Up

I had a bit of a nervous breakdown last weekend.  My ability to hold down my corporate job, write for my magazines, teach my class, parent my daughter and exist as a functioning member of society petered out like a garden hose.  As I cried to my husband on the ride home from my parents' house, he (just as my mother had when I snotted all over her in the parking lot of an upscale strip mall in Omaha) asked me What. Can. You. Cut. Out.?

People are always asking me that.  And I usually want to throttle them, because they always suggest I cut out the "extracurricular" stuff, like getting a master's degree, writing fiction, writing magazine articles, writing my blog, teaching my class, seeing my friends, traveling. In other words, the things I like to do.  No one ever suggests quitting my day job, because We. Need. The. Money.

I know, everyone has to work.  My family is often shocked I would question my need to earn.  It's not that I don't want to work, though - I love to work!  On my writing! I just don't! Love! To! Work! In! An! Office! Doing! Stuff! That's! Not! Writing!

Still, I know he has a point. I need to be doing this now, while he builds his business.  So I've been looking for a job that will allow me to at least work sane hours and not make me want to drive a nail into my eyeball every time I attend a meeting with more than two people around the conference table.  That's a project in process.

He also brought up that of all of my "extracurricular" activities, teaching offers me the least emotional return on investment. I spend up to ten hours a week driving to and from class, teaching the class, grading papers and doing the administrative things. For this, I get only enough money to make us owe taxes every year.  I did it initially because I thought that some nice community college would hire me for a full-time teaching job eventually, allowing me summers off and hence more time for the writing.  It always went back to how can I get more time for the writing without having to go all Toni Morrison and get up at four a.m. to write.  I know she did that. I bet her kid didn't wake her up every morning at two, though. This morning I got up at two, fell asleep on her floor, got off her floor and went back to bed at four, then got up to get her some milk at 5:30 and finally gave up on that sleeping thang and got in the shower at 6:30. This schedule of naps that I like to call "my nighttime sleeping" is not so conducive to early-morning inspiration.

I'm bitching to you, aren't I?  (sigh) I'm trying really hard not to be so negative.

Anyway, I decided that my beloved did, in fact, have some good points.  Something had to go. Time with the little angel is the nonnegotiable constant in my life.  Everything else lines up in a little row, including, unfortunately, my beloved and myself.  So in order to not just be a ship passing in the night forever, I decided to get real about finding a more manageable day job and stop with the teaching.

Last night, my shining star student told me her twin sister was going to take composition from me in the fall. Then the guy who's my age and hates school told me I'm the only teacher he likes.  It was kind of like when you finally decide to chop off all your hair, then it looks AWESOME on the way to the salon.

Here's the thing, though: I know I'm good at teaching composition. I like doing it.  It is with not a small amount of wistfulness that I sent the e-mail yesterday to my dean telling her I'm not available except to sub in the fall.  I also like biking, but we've decided we're not going to go on RAGBRAI (a bike ride across Iowa that my beloved and I both love to do) this year, either, because we don't really have time to train for it, and we just can't handle any more pressure right now.  I like to sail my twelve-foot AMF Puffer, but we didn't do that at all last year, and I want to make time to do it this year. I like to see my friends. I like to go on dates.  I like to do a million things that I'm not doing much of right now.

In retrospect, letting go of teaching was good in that it made me sit down and list all of the things I like to do.  I'm a really interesting person.  Whee!  I hate having to cut things out, though.  My father-in-law once told me the hardest thing about having kids is having to give things up.  I thought he was just being negative and old-fashioned. I thought I would be able to bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, make cookies and write novels, all without skipping a workout.  I've been humbled by this parenting thing.  But rather than giving things up, I'm trying to look at it as forced prioritization. I'm actually writing more than I have in years, simply because I've had to give up so many other great things to do it.  So maybe this whole exercise hasn't been a total loss.

Next week is my final exam.  I wonder if I'll ever give another?

The Wild Dogs of Mexico

I really thought that after the discussions of heroin, body piercings, c-sections and Jamaican pre-operative transvestite prostitutes, there was nothing my students could say to surprise me.

Ha.

Last night after a lengthy lecture on grammar and a depressing discussion of MLA style, I turned the conversation to considering the source.  I told them my father always said to make sure I knew who sponsored the study before I spouted the statistics.  I know from working at Large Corporate Tax Prep that the glass is half-empty or half-full at fifty percent - it just depends on whose budget it's coming out of.  To drive home the fact that we're all good liars, we played "Two Truths and a Lie."

Usually this is a drinking game, but since I could tell some of my students were minutes away from a drink anyway, I decided we should abstain.  One of them is about to have a baby, after all.  It turned out that we actually knew a lot about each other from the random class conversations we'd already had.  One student, a girl that I knew was originally from Mexico, gave as her list she was a) twenty years old b) a native of Chihuahua, Mexico and c) the owner of a Chihuahua dog.

She is only eighteen. I knew that, so I won this round.  However, I went ahead to ask where Chihuahua is in Mexico.  Feeling ignorant as usual when confronted by an at-least-bilingual immigrant to this country (I used to work with a whole lot of them, me, paltry monolingual idiot that I am), I mentioned I didn't know there was a city named Chihuahua.  Probably not, because apparently it's a state. Oops.  Then L. went on to say that Chihuahuas are from there.  Makes sense, right?

Then she told me there are wild packs of Chihuahuas that live in the hills in caves.

I pondered this. In my mind's eye, I was visualizing wild packs of rat dogs terrorizing old Mexican ladies wearing black lace veils over their gray hair.  Old men waving specially-shaped guitars in anger at town hall meetings held near a church with an adobe steeple and belfry repenting the day some idiot decided the feral Chihuahuas should be a protected species.  Osama Bin Ladin sharing a meager crust of bread with his only cave-dwelling friend, a wild Chihuahua named Jose Ricardo Gonzalez III.

I think she might've been yanking my chain.  L. knows I don't know Jack about Mexico.  I actually just tried to play it cool, considering I would do frantic Internet research later.

I spent about ten minutes today Googling Chihuahuas in the hopes of finding pictures of cave-dwelling ankle-biters to post here for you, but I came up really dry. There is a school of thought that they descended from the fox, though, just so you know.

Woof.

Finally

Two years of my daughter's life.

Four semesters.

Four hundred and fifty-one hours of second-job labor.

One thousand, seven hundred and fifty-five pages of grading.

Five hundred and eighty-five rubrics filed and recorded.

Sixty grades given or in progress.

Five episodes of classroom narcolepsy.

Two guest speakers, one video, one shot boyfriend, one fiance in a hospital, five children in a hospital, two unexpected pregnancies, one suicide attempt, one dead dog and one torched house.

Twenty dropped students.

Tonight, one of my students said he wanted to be a writer.

Success.

On Being Invisible

Last night I had my students read "Marrakesh" by George Orwell.   It's an essay I read when I was in graduate school that has always stayed with me.  It speaks of streams of urine running down roads and donkeys who work diligently for a decade, drop dead, then are eaten by wild dogs before their bodies grow cold.  Mostly, though, it talks about Orwell's sudden awareness of the "brown people" who labor there.  He writes about seeing bundles of sticks walking by each day and only realizing later they were carried by old women.

I'm teaching the class to go beyond just a book report or a reaction paper to forming a solid thesis in response to a literary text.  It's a concept none of them seem to have been taught before, though they are the brightest class I've had in four semesters.  I could tell I was losing them when I began the lecture by waxing nostalgic on the fun in trying to invent a thesis that had not been done before, but when I had them read "Marrakesh," I could tell they were shocked I would introduce such an inflammatory work, especially since so many of them were brown or black and the essay speaks of the invisibility of the inhabitants of the city and the Senegalese army.  I reminded them that Orwell was writing in the late thirties, a time when Jews were accused of owning the world, even though in Marrakesh, they made only pennies a day.  I also reminded them that the world was not always so politically correct as it is now, and back then people just said the things that unfortunately I believe so many still think but do not say today.

The students all recognized what it is to be marginalized, but this new vocabulary and forum for discussion seemed new to them.  I take for granted that academia is a place to examine without emotion and bring to the forefront the things in society of which no one is proud.

On the way home, I was listening to the replay of "This American Life" on NPR.  They were talking in Act Three about Elizabeth Smart and how she walked the streets of Salt Lake City with her captors and nobody saw her.  She went to a party.  People talked to her.  Someone she'd known since she was four saw her at a gas station.  Nobody recognized her - partly because she was wearing a veil, and partly because they were so used to seeing her homeless captors that they ceased to see them, even when two became three there by the Burger King or Blockbuster.

Many who were interviewed for the story said that even though the third person in a veil was young, they never assumed Elizabeth was their daughter - they all assumed she was a second wife.  Those who were interviewed attached no judgment to their assumptions about polygamy.  The story went on to say that many in Salt Lake City have polygamous ancestors, and they accept it without supporting it with a combination of recognition and shame, not wanting to acknowledge what is so hard to understand.

Heather Armstrong of Dooce had a great entry the other day about her thoughts on polygamy and the new show on HBO.  I read the entry with interest and remembered it last night when I realized that the mixed emotions she describes are what enabled Elizabeth Smart to be invisible - not on Heather's part, necessarily - but on the part of those who were interviewed for "This American Life."

In much the same way, the Moroccans were invisible to Orwell.  People who clean office buildings are invisible to the white-collar workers. The homeless are invisible to commuters.  I think one section from "Marrakesh" on the topic of invisibility is the most disturbing:  "For several weeks, always at about the same time of day, the file of old women had hobbled past the house with their firewood, and though they had registered themselves on my eyeballs I cannot truly say that I had seen them. Firewood was passing-that was how I saw it. It was only that one day I happened to be walking behind them, and the curious up-and-down motion of a load of wood drew my attention to the human being underneath it. Then for the first time I noticed the poor old earth-coloured bodies, bodies reduced to bones and leathery skin, bent double under the crushing weight. Yet I suppose I had not been five minutes on Moroccan soil before I noticed the overloading of the donkeys and was infuriated by it."

See people today.

Teething Cures As Taught in Composition One

The class this semester, they crack me up.  To follow up last's week's tattoo-and-piercing conversation, we took on the subject of teething this evening to blow off a little steam before their midterm grammar exam.

Many of the people in my class, men and women alike, ranging in age from nineteen to probably early forties (my best guess - they have aged well), have children. Two, in fact, have four children each.  Another women is pregnant with her second child, and she found out today it is a second son.  She was mulling baby names for her in-utero offspring when another student, a bright young twin who was home-schooled her entire career up until now, brought up that her boss at Famous Dave's has sixteen children. We pondered the issues involved with that many children.  The youngest was an aunt before she was born.  They have a bus to get around.  And how the hell does anyone afford sixteen children when gas is over $60 a barrel?  I haven't heard of any hybrid buses lately. Obviously, the people with whom my students associate know more about money management than I, who bemoans the cost of the Emerald City at any turn to anyone who will listen.

My students know that the little angel is not what you'd call "a sleeper" and has been having some nocturnal rehearsals for toddler Romeo and Juliet lately.  They asked if she'd slept lately.  I told them she has been saying "owie" and pointing to her mouth. This confused me, because I (not so much a dentist), thought that she had all of her teeth.

Pregnant Student:  "Oh, no.  Those molars, they go all the way back, Ms. A.  You're in for it.  M's kids never had a problem, though.  She knows a secret."

Student Two (the one who had a belly-button ring through an entire pregnancy, which we discovered in last week's tattoo-and-piercing conversation):  "I have four children.  You need to put a little whiskey on the gums."

Student Three (M, who runs a daycare center and is now entering the classroom, late - a dockage of three points, but I overlooked it just this once, because we all wanted to hear her secret):  "WHAT?  You can be arrested for that."

Student Two: "Well, no one's come for me yet."

Me: "What's your secret, M?"  (all lean forward eagerly)

Student Three:  "Potato necklaces."

Me:  "WHAT???"

Pregnant Student:  "She does this all the time.  She's insane."

Student Four: (home-schooled twin): "I guess I could see that. They could chew on it, then."

Student Three:  "No, they don't chew on them.  They're just little babies. The potatoes have nutrients that just soak in and those teeth come right out.  None of my three babies had so much as a whimper."

(I consider giving extra credit to whoever can figure out the basis for such an odd practice, but decide that is probably unethical.)

Student Three:  "In a few days, they turn brown.  Then you just switch them out."

Me:  "Doesn't that attract, oh, bugs?"

Student Three:  "My mama did it on my and my sisters.  She also rubbed diapers on our faces to cure yeast problems."

Student Five:  "I heard some people rub the diapers on their tongues to cure thrush.  But you have to do that when they're really young."

(I begin to wonder if these people have little voo-doo dolls of me at home for when they get bad grades.  My palms begin to sweat just a bit.  My midterm is sort of hard.)

Pregnant Student:  "Yeah, I guess.  I've heard that.  Well, she does the potatoes.  Me, I just use Oragel."

On Tattoos and Piercings

First of all, I got a new contract job (and there was great rejoicing).  Today I'll have the pleasure of quitting my displaced, weird, old job and beginning to prepare myself mentally and physically (where the hell did I put all my office clothes, again?) for the three-month contract that starts on Monday.  What am I going to do AFTER the three-month contract, you ask?  Ha ha - you must be under the mistaken impression that I know what I'm doing with my career.  Silly Internet.

On to other things.  Last night I taught my class at the community college.  One of my students had just gotten a new tattoo (or really, SERIES of tattoos) on her foot.  It looked like dragonflies or really more like regular flies, but I thought it might be rude to point that out.  I told her it is actually illegal in some states to get a tattoo below your ankle - I know, I have one on the inside of my left heel.  That launched a lot of tattoo talk, and so many of my students were so knowledgeable that I ended up polling them by a show of hands to see how many of them had tattoos.  Ready?  Out of fifteen people aged 18 to probably around 50, NINE had at least one tattoo.  If you count me, ten out of sixteen.  We are a Tattooed Nation, people.

I knew we were hopelessly off-track, but the conversation was fascinating.  One guy (the cage-fighter), said his buddy got a tattoo and they used a machine with 36 needles in it to do the shading.  Some students said they regretted the unfortunate placement of their tattoos, now that they were out trying to get jobs and such.  A slight girl mentioned that her friend had a bunch of biblical stuff tattooed on his body, but he wasn't necessarily religious - he just thought it looked cool.  Considering I've been reading John Irving's Until I Find You, in which the main character's mother is a tattooist, I've been thinking about tattoos more lately than I have in years.

The tattoo conversation then lent itself, as tattoo conversations generally do, to a discussion of piercing.  One of the students in the back, a middle-aged father of two who works at Large Corporate Telecom, joined the discussion of tongue piercing by sticking his pierced tongue out.  It turns out it had been pierced for sixteen years. I'd certainly never noticed. He mentioned most of his back teeth were chipped from him playing with it.  Then we discussed how quickly a tongue piercing can grow shut. One student mentioned his had grown shut when he went to jail. 

Next came the belly-button discussion.  One woman, a mother of four, had kept her belly button ring in all throughout her first pregnancy.  When she had her C-section, they took it out, and apparently the hole grew closed before she could get it back in.  Three kids later, she says she'll get it pierced again in a heartbeat as soon as she gets her figure back.

I had to end the conversation and ask the students to please open their books to page 91 when one student then started to carry the piercing conversation into previously uncharted waters.  I do not want to know EVERYWHERE my students are pierced.

Ahem.  Community college - it's not for amateurs.

The Glory of a New Semester

I taught my first class of the spring semester on Tuesday night.  It's my fourth semester teaching composition at a local community college, and the first semester I have gone into the first class really feeling confident about what I'm doing.  Not surprisingly, I was happier about doing it than I have ever been before.

I had 18 students on the roster and was excited about the prospect of a not-full class, but then of course two extras showed up.  However, there were about four no-shows, so my hope that I might end up with around 15 when it's all said and done may still be realized.  Twenty students at five essays (each with one revision), two tests and five in-class assignments each on top of my day job can be a wee bit tiring.

After I handed out the syllabus and geeky "ten tips for the successful college student" hand-outs, explained the grading rubric and tried to scare the shit out of them with my plagiarism speech, we played one of those "getting to know you" games.  I handed out one question to each of them, and they had to go around the room telling the class their name, their year in school (tricky with community college - can you be a fifth-year sophomore?), why they are in the class, a personal fact, and answer the question.  Every single one of them said they are in the class either a) because they have to be (community college as prison torture), b) because they had already used up all their electives and had to start taking core classes (if you ask me, same as "a") or c) one person said "because I want to be." When I pressed him on that, he did admit that he wanted to be different and everyone else had already said "a" or "b."  This is not as disappointing to me as you might think, because hell, it's Comp I, not Creative Writing or Advanced Bullshit For The Future Millionaire.  Who wants to take Comp I?  NO ONE. 

I do try to position the class as "win friends and influence people" as well as "don't look like a friggin' idiot when you type an e-mail" as opposed to "the glory of good grammar."  Sometimes they get the message, sometimes they don't.  I suppose those who are in college to go on to a career in police work or nursing may not, in fact, write a lot of memos in their professional lives.  I do so feel that the world is kinder to those who can string together a proper sentence.  Unless you're George Bush.  But I digress.

Two personal facts I enjoyed:  one guy said he was back in school after four years of "kickin' it."  I asked him if "kickin' it" had paid well, and he laughed and said no, that's why he was there.  The second guy said his hobbies included cage-fighting, which then launched a long class discussion of what the hell that was and why anyone in their right mind would want to do it. Apparently there is actually a cage involved. I'm not sure how much more I want to know about that, but he may very well turn in an essay on it, so I guess I should prepare myself.

After all that, I made them write for forty minutes about what they wanted to accomplish in the next ten years and why.  I decided to instill this weeder exercise this year because I do want them to understand what is involved with a writing class:  writing.  A lot of writing.  About half of them looked pained and spent a lot of time staring at blank paper, the clock, blank paper, their pencil, blank paper, then finally deteriorated into playing with their cell phones.  The other half, to my amazement, wrote for a solid forty minutes.  I did notice they tended to be the nontrads, the older students, those who had probably had a lot of time to think about what they did or didn't accomplish in the previous ten years of their lives.  One in particular thanked me afterward for the exercise.

It's a proven fact that if you write down your dreams, you're much more likely to accomplish them.  Have you written down yours?