April "Vacation"

And so faithful English 099 Blog reader, you are no doubt wondering what has been going on in English 099. Although I am not Catholic and have never even been inside a confessional, I often find myself in these situations muttering to myself, “ Forgive me, readers, for I have sinned; it’s been three weeks since my last post..” Or however long it’s been. I am not currently in a location with internet access, so I can’t check, and am writing this post into a Word document which I will later transfer to the blog as a post, which is where you are no doubt reading it at this very moment.

I am in Borders, safe again. Safe from interminable yearbook production and cat-tastrophe’s, from critical elements of basement renovations, hasty home organization necessary for company that does nothing towards the cause of true, helpful organization. I am safe from Seder preparation, tax preparation and the accompanying hunt for each, finding necessary documents among the proliferation of boxes which were thrown, just prior to the seder, into my bedroom, rendering it unusable for anything but sleep, which I haven’t had the opportunity to do much of for a long time.

It is Friday. The last day of public school vacation. The last day of my special, frantic week from hell, during which I taught, corrected papers, and designed, produced, and solicited sponsors for, the yearbook of the Diloreto class of 2007. I had never made a yearbook before, though I could easily produce another now. Which perhaps bodes well for a segue into the real novel from my “practice” novel , aka the Writing a Novel in 30 Days (As if. Let’s call it 60 days) project.

For the past four years, the yearbooks for the elementary school my children attend have been—to my way of thinking---lame, hideous, and grim in their black and white scissored and collaged chaotic arrangement of photos.

It had seemed like an excellent idea in September, when I confidently informed the PTA that I would head the yearbook committee, produce a color yearbook and subsidize the extra cost by soliciting sponsors to enable students to purchase the books for the same ten bucks the amateurish black and white ones had cost. My kids are graduating this year, and though we have many, many, many photos of every event that has taken place at Diloreto since 2002, I wanted them and their classmates to have a nice keepsake of the years they spent at the school.

I have gotten to know the kids who attend school with my children, and I feel close to them. New Britain offers many options for middle school; consequently, the fifth graders will not be attending school all together next year, but spread out between at least four public middle schools in town, plus two magnet schools in Hartford.

Ah, yes, I have left out the part about being finally safe and squared away for middle school next year, relieved of the burden of exploring options for my kids, and trying to find the best fit. Except for two of the public schools, each school requires applicants to enter a lottery. One, the so-called “Gifted and Talented” middle school, requires academic testing which is not even available to students who haven’t been recommended by their teachers. My agonizing over where my kids would go to school next year has been a separate, time-consuming, dilemma compounded by my belief that ten year olds should be in an elementary school, not one in which a teenage mentality prevails.

I have just dropped the mocked up and proofed pages at Kinko’s, where the Fedex center has promised to unite the last 20 pages with the first 28 by noon tomorrow, which will make the book complete and ready to be turned into yearbooks—colored yearbooks---for the fifth graders at Diloreto to purchase at ten dollars apiece. I have pulled all-nighters, I have had my kids home all week. The deadline to submit the pages has inconveniently coincided with April vacation, so not only have I not been alone and able to concentrate this week, but school was not in session and the principal, who neglected to include both a signature and a photo to accompany her address to the graduating class, could not be reached, not could parents of the 111 fifth grade students be contacted in order to solicit photos and dedication line sponsorship. Extending the deadline, unfortunately, would not have enabled the finished books to reach us until three weeks after the end of the schoolyear.

I will not discuss the all-nighters or the angry rantings of my kids’ dad when pressed into service to accommodate yearbook meetings, nor the tantrum my daughter threw a few night backs when I, maxed out beyond belief, told her to please make her own dinner, that there was Beefaroni or oatmeal or aging matzoh that could be spread with peanut butter. Though her brother offered to make dinner, my daughter needed mom to make it, apparently equating food preparation with mother love, neglecting to realize that the goddamned yearbook production was a much showier, more stressful and lasting example of just that.

And of course, there was the second cat-tastrophe. Readers of this blog might well remember the kitten trapped 35 feet up in a tree for nine hours in the wind and cold, necessitating the canceling of my classes in order to find someone who would consent to get her down. The evil little thing has since gone into heat for the first time, been fixed, and continued to boss around the big boys—her six pounds against their combined 35. “You have ee-vil eyes, Junie B.,” my son told her one night and I realized that it was true, and that it was she who had made poor Gus an outcast in his own house, left to skulk lonely and alone, spraying the laundry, the closets, anywhere he could lay claim, for his buddy Bruno has abandoned their friendship to care for Junie B, allowing her to suck on his nipples while he patiently lay on my bed licking her head.

Gus is an emo cat. We found him in the bushes during my kids’ sixth birthday party, abandoned by his own mom at two weeks old, and of course my kids talked me into keeping him by earnestly proclaiming him “a birthday present from God, Mommy.”

A few weeks back, Gussie started looking very crummy. Though only four years old (roughly equivalent to 28 in human years,) he wasn’t grooming himself and his fur began looking like that of an old, old cat. An emotional eater who had gained quite a bit of weight in the months which followed Junie joining our household, Gus suddenly began to lose weight. He lost so much weight so quickly that the vet told us his liver was failing—a situation specific only to cat anatomy—and that he needed to be hospitalized in the Kitty ICU where he would be forcefed through a tube implanted in his esophagus through his neck.

Gus was in the ICU for five days that coincided with the children’s vacation AND the yearbook production deadline. While he was in the hospital, I visited him and stroked his cheek with my own, the way mother cats do, the way I did when he was a baby and we fed him with a bottle until he could eat on his own. Without that care, he had been failing, retreating into cat depression behind the glaze of his third eyelid.

Once home, he needed to be fed through the tube which had been implanted and sewn into place, jutting out 3 inches and bobbing as he walked, looking as though he were in a Halloween costume, the kind where its wearer appears to be walking around after being shot by an arrow or stabbed through by a knife.

His protocol for care included pills and liquids and the mixing of high protein cat food with water before infusing it, a milliliter every five minutes, into his body through the tube, the entire process taking more than an hour several times a day.

But of course, everything I’ve mentioned above is mere digression, justification for having not made English 099 a priority in my life. Interestingly, however, class has been going fairly well. I had third meetings with students, during which we discussed their argument essays and I gave them an opportunity to redo the poor essays. I don’t need to mention here how I was forced, at the last moment, to cancel an entire morning of individual meeting due to last minute notification of an award ceremony where my daughter was to be honored, nor do I need to discuss the opening of baseball season and the drafting of both kids into the majors of Little League and all the chauffering and game attendance it entails.

And so, against this backdrop of the convergence of nearly every element that could possibly make demands on my time, I have been teaching 099. The yearbook is in the mail; the taxes are done. The cat had a follow-up appointment and seems to be recovering, for which I am very grateful. Passover has passed by; my children are quite unexpectedly two of the 1000 or so fifth grade students in the city who have been accepted into the 50 member sixth grade class of the Gifted and Talented middle school, which will be moving next year—remarkably-- to a location three blocks from my house.

And the classes are gelling. Even the early morning one. We are in the home stretch. I have removed some assignments; the weather is nicer, the students better prepared. We know what to expect from each other now and digress frequently in class about our lives. During their vacation this week, my kids have accompanied me to class, as they have since they were back in pre-school and all my students thought they were cute. It is interesting to watch the ten year olds interact with the eighteen year olds. They are of sibling age now, and everything is changing. My kids are graduating into middle school; my students are beginning to think of themselves as on the cusp of adulthood. They write about these thoughts in their essays, about how strange it is suddenly, to find themselves considered adults.

I well remember those years, both the ones I spent on the cusp of adolescence and the ones on the cusp of adulthood when I thought I was waiting for my life to start. Neither was an easy transition for me, and I don’t imagine the transition from ten years of being the mother of young children to the mother of less-young children will be easy either. Kids, cats, class, me. All in flux, always in transition.

If I ever get the opportunity to prioritize my own schoolwork again, I will be on track to graduate from the MFA program in December, and for that to happen I’ll have to write a book. The book I’ve been promising to write since I was 8 and vowed to complete one before I hit double digits, a scary age, a non-kid age, the age of my own children now.

midterm bombed by all

Well, nearly every student in both classes bombed the midterm, which I find disconcerting, but have attempted to view as a teaching oppportunity. I handed back the corrected exams today and we reviewed them. Hopefully this will enable everyone to take a new exam which I will administer the week after next. Since there were only two marks in the 80's and 3 in the 70's, I view it as a failing on my part to successfully teach the students how to identify and correct illogical shifts, faulty parallelism, misplaced and dangling modifiers, and run-ons and comma splices. I used as the test a combination of materials provided by the writers of the text book we are using. I think I will create my own questions for the next version of the test on those issues.

In a related issue, I've decided to utilize new teaching materials next semester. I am going to go with a program from Newsweek, hoping that the students will actually want to read the articles, many of which are written in formats I teach. Newsweek provides each issue at .59 per week, accompanied by a number of teaching resources, including hard copy guides and online materials. To teach grammar, I found a book at Borders that costs 12 dollars instead of the 40 or so for a used paperback textbook. This particular book, whose name escapes me at the moment, provides online tests and essay correction for people buy it and get a code to use for log-in. The book is very concise and written for regular adults, not students and is billed as learning grammar in 20 minutes a day. A departure for me. We will see what comes of teaching with these materials next semester.

Post Spring Break

Everyone agrees that after the break, the end of the semester should be much closer than it actually is. We still have an additional 7 weeks to go. Most of my students are actually in class, however, probably because we are reviewing for the midterm next week. I give them more difficult review material than I plan to include in the test. Better that than the reverse, I learned the hard way.

For fun, in my sleepy early class, I let the students form a union and outline a list of their demands from management (me). It was kind of fun. They asked for things like kegs of beer, I offered to bring in iced tea. They asked for no homework on Thursdays and I did away with one of the essays on the syllabus. They asked for field trips, movies, music, beer pong, a buffet and various other items on which we compromised, agreeing, for example to provide the first three items in the above list, which I will manage to use to their educational advantage.

Two of the girls in my second class have been systematically ten minutes late to nearly every class. On Tuesday, the other students and I agreed during the first ten minutes before the two lategirls arrived that they would have to submit only the final proofread draft of the next essay due, while the tardy two would have to submit all drafts as was originally assigned, because they had arrived too late to hear the amended assignment.

On Thursday, the two were on time.