Standing room only

As we speak up for Flint.

_

The Beginning of the Alma Season...

Her family makes these ornaments,

and the awesome student 

(whom I've never had in class)

gave me one.

Aw!

I turned into an embarrassing 

blabbering mess of gratitude.

Gah.

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So Much Finals Craziness...

But as one of my students who colors for relaxation, reminds me:




I appreciate how Rosie is especially BROWN in my honor :).

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Meet the Parents

Student event this evening, and the stories they've shared hang around my interactions with their families.

The man with the twinkly eyes lost a child to cancer.

The woman so proud of her daughter's accomplishments is herself a daughter struggling to help her elderly mother stay independent.

 So awed by how wonderful and brave people are.

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In the name of

"Friendship musical chairs"

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Encircled

We drew a lot of circles in class today because of Martha Nussbaum and the Stoics.

But it reminded me of another Greek:
Euclid

(Vachel Lindsay)

Old Euclid drew a circle
On a sand-beach long ago.
He bounded and enclosed it
With angles thus and so.
His set of solemn greybeards
Nodded and argued much
Of arc and circumference,
Diameter and such.
A silent child stood by them
From morning until noon
Because they drew such charming
Round pictures of the moon. 

Schooled

I was just browsing Shakespeare's Sister on a break and literally had my life interpreted for me.

In an article about high-heels, Melissa McEwan explains that for fat women, heels (which have been criticized by some feminists as a form of self harm) may seem a necessary defense:

Fat women have all kinds of narratives about sloppiness, laziness, dirtiness to overcome. Sometimes heels are a crucial part of looking "put together" in a way that sufficiently convinces people that we care about ourselves, that manages to counteract pervasive cultural narratives that fat people don't care about ourselves… I get treated completely differently at a $20 hair salon if I'm dressed up or dressed down. Two totally different experiences. I get treated differently at the doctor's office, and at the emergency room. I can't go to the ER in sweatpants, because I'll get shittier treatment. In an emergency, I have to worry if I am dressed up enough to prove that I deserve respect and care.

All round horrible. Points I completely empathize with without having experienced them myself. (Or so I think.)

And then the part that changes the way I count my life. Melissa McEwan continues:
I am speaking to my own experience here, but many women with other marginalized bodies have the same experience. Women of color, trans* women, women with disabilities, and other marginalized classes of women may strongly relate to the idea of having to be "put together" in order to be treated as human beings.
That would totally explain why after years of dressing in jeans and homespun tunics and putting a lot of thought into looking like I didn't care how I looked in India, I've become--after years of living in the West--consumed by fashion. Because looking like a vagabond* is cute only if people know that you're playing and know you're not really one.

*(as the nuns at my private school may have said)

_

What she made for her teacher...

 Go and play!

(or--presumably--I'll spank you with a spatula?)

In Other Are You F*&^%ing Effing With Me News

I know you must feel terrible. I know I do every single day I drop my kids off at school. But Newtown people, it doesn't make any sense to raze your elementary school so another elementary school can be built on the same site. 

Over and over again at the link, the rhetoric is so that "we can bring our children home." I'm sorry. I'm sorry about it every day, but those children cannot come home.

Can you not use your resources on public health and education services instead and show the rest of us how to deal with and prevent those tragedies from happening?

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Déjà vu / Rétrospective

I remember sitting in an undergraduate poetry class, not really paying attention, wondering if my acceptance and scholarship letters would come that day, watching the treetops rearing and bucking into the wind and thinking my happiness would be as elemental as theirs.

Of course, there's this:

Coloniality continues, in fact, whenever bright young men and women from all over the world decide to cap off their educations by going on pilgrimage to pinnacles of Western civilization; when they dedicate themselves to the Western canon and walk in the shadows of gothic cathedrals and imperial facades, and learn that this is the good life. 

It continues whenever anyone anywhere in the world walks down a street and sees a billboard on the modern cathedral that is a shopping mall, and sees in that conjunction of power, wealth, and beauty an image of desire. In other words, it happens these days not by the strength of arms or the power of states, but by the captivation of the eyes, the training of the taste, by unwritten rules of thumb – that we all learn everywhere, without even knowing it. Coloniality is far from over: it is all over. It is perhaps the most powerful set of forces in the modern world.

-- 

High

The memory of a plane
crawling before flight
the tires tearing grief
a captured sigh of air

the first possibilities
of the night-mare are
gold-tipped at dusk
needy as a pilgrimage

I follow legs of furniture
to the crotches of trees
light bleeding from clouds
coming down, bringing it all down


___

Perhaps it is true. Yesterday, a student blamed his dream--of a gray mold that crawled up his toothbrush--on the Gabriel Garcia Marquez we've been reading in class...

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So Sari

Unusually for me, I turned up to work in a sari. ( A special sari that my Chelli gave me back in May last year!)

 I took an accidental selfie while I was documenting student PowerPoints, and so I even have proof.

Thanks for the sari, Chells!!

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Misspeak

Stew
a head
of cabbage garbage
in-certitude
curtained disdain.

Yellow is gold
is lemons
yellow is pages
is journalism
is cold Englishman's lyric

she says
planes, and trains
--not kind to my migraines
it rhymes, write the poem
I say

elastic-electric
forced
forged faked
shudderin' end
ex-tension
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That's a Ten (Ten!)

By Kevin Moore over at Mooretown.

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Mindful Embodiment

Spent yesterday in a wonderful workshop on embodied pedagogy with Jen McWeeny, learning and brainstorming ideas on how to enable students to allow experience to count as learning. I want to use more of her work in class, especially the witness circle as a way of getting everyone in class to speak (feel invited to speak).

Today, wished my parents a happy wedding anniversary and brought out the old joke about how I was born a full six days before it. Mindful embodiment, indeed.

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Mid-term Break: Embers

Almost at the end of the midterm break and I'm still struggling to finish Sándor Márai's highly-acclaimed novel Embers. A very sweet (also assiduous) student gave me their copy because they "knew" I would love it.* It's only fair that I try hard to finish it, because I impose my tastes on those poor students all the time, after all.
_________________________________________________________
*Not to be confused with the student who, throughout his final paper, used my name instead of the name of the protagonist in the novel he was writing about. We weren't able to decide if that was ironic or ignorant or obsessive.


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A Taste of the Future

Today at 7:30, I was nearly the first one at the Farmers' Market and it looked completely different from when I typically show up with the kids a good three hours later after breakfast and dilly-dallying around. I must try to do this more often, although the only reason I was there instead of under covers was because I had to drop Li'L A off so he could take the school bus to a cross country meet. The hours vary, but he's usually gone most of Saturday.

We putter around, Baby A and I, doing Saturday toddler stuff, Big A not back from work yet, and it was a reminder that soon, this will be us: Big A at work as usual and Li'l A away at college, making a life. If those are the worst separations fate has in store for us, I won't complain--although they sound chillingly lonely.

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Race, Class, and Gender

There's a lot of yammering about race, class, and gender in most of my classes, but that didn't stop me from being surprised by stuff people I really like have said lately. Friend X and I were talking about some other random stuff when he said:

Your parents must respect you because you married a white guy. 

It bugged me immediately that he would think that
(a) Race: Marrying a white person (like him!) is means of obtaining respect? And we're not talking people who might find me less alien because I happen to be married to one of their own. We're talking about respect from my own parents!
(b) Gender: Marrying "well" is the only way to earn my parents' respect?

I was fuming so I went home and told my mom, who proceeded to unleash the class bomb:

Nevermind, she said. Forget it. What does he know? He doesn't even have a good education, he's just a shopkeeper.

Mortifying.

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Sneaking into Greek Life

So I've been showing Jean Kilbourne's latest installment of Killing Us Softly to undergraduate writers and being touched about it when yet another student wants to talk about "how I never thought of it that way before."

I've suggested that they bring it up at their next sorority/frat meeting.

Jean Kilbourne is genius. I bring the evil.

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About Things

I waited and waited for a CSB caseworker to show up with my CASA child and his mother newly released from prison and currently in a halfway house and working at a Subway franchise and unable to complete court-ordered drug testing or to find a stable house. She plans to fight for custody. Depressing. From any angle. And also, since they never showed (or called): irritating.

I edited the photos on my phone while I waited (no book) and found that apart from pictures of my kids or weird vanity plates (so that's a surprise theme too), there were so many pictures of things that--at some point in time--I had wanted to buy. Apparently, I take pictures of things I want to buy, but never get around to actually going back and buying anything. Win win?

Speaking of things, we had lots on hand to make Baby A's "Red Display" for nursery school. A Sith light saber (from her older sibling), a copy of Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, a little Red Riding Hood puppet, her hand weights (2 lbs) that she uses in our basement gym when we're down there, a spirit level, a newly bloomed Hibiscus...