More Adventures in Education (and Growing Old)

Last week, in my senior English classes, we read the last page of Joan Didion's masterpiece about the counterculture in San Francisco in the late 1960s: "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" -- I was showing them an excellent example of descriptive writing with minimal intrusion from the author-- the subtext of the scenarios are enough to get the point across-- and I learned something: the vast majority of my students know NOTHING about the counterculture movement in San Francisco in the late 1960s . . . when I got the feeling that this passage needed more context, I asked them what was going on in San Francisco back then and one kid said, "The gold rush?" and I had to explain he was a century late and reminded him of the name of the football team and all that-- and the students had never heard of The Grateful Dead and hadn't heard the term "acid" for LSD . . . it was eye-opening because back in the day, high school students knew about the Grateful Dead because it had something to do with marijuana-- but now marijuana is legal and the Grateful Dead are no longer in this generation's popular mythology-- a few kids vaguely knew the term "hippies" but they did NOT know about communes and acid parties and jam bands and orgies and the Summer of Love or any of that . . . and when I asked what band was associated with this time period, from two classes I got the same answer: The Beatles . . . and then we went over that the Beatles were from England and there was one girl (I taught this girl's mom) that was able to name three of the Beatles (she couldn't recall George Harrison) and when I asked if anyone knew the fourth Beatle, a senior boy said, confidently, "Michael Jackson" and I had to more stuff . . . and the moral of the story is that I am getting old (but I was pleased to learn that Ariana Grande has a music video that is a tribute to my favorite movie, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind).

Dave Dreams of Sophomores Past

I recently heard the phrase "row forward looking back" as a metaphorical attitude for heading into the unknown-- and that's how I feel about teaching this year: I have a sophomore class for the first time in many many years, so all my sophomore lesson plans are in manila folders, handwritten-- and while I head into a pedagogical future featuring computer-driven, AI-powered, digital learning models, I am reminded of the school days long ago when I used to teach the sophomores-- when we read novels and out of thick anthologies, took our tests on paper, and relied on human connection and the occasional VHS tape for entertainment-- and I'm trying to instill some of that in my current classroom as I pull on the oars, against the current, the prow of my dinghy headed who knows where, into some technological morass, my gaze searching over the waters I have traveled, my mind borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Useless Podcast Trivia

The largest banana port in the United States is in Wilmington, Delaware and once they arrive there, the bananas are loaded into gigantic ripening rooms, which are pumped full of the highly flammable gas ethylene, which makes the bananas ripen faster so they can be shipped out to grocery stores and restaurants?

Bring da Noize

I was glad to see the back of our old ironing board-- which hung on a hook, folded flat, on the back of our bedroom door-- because whenever my wife opened this contraption (no matter how much WD-40 I used) the hinged legs would produce a piercing "sssskkkrreeeeeek!" sound that perforated my eardrums and penetrated deep into my synapses, tearing loose and deleting core memories,  impeding fine motor functions, and generally disrupting my consciousness-- so we put it to the curb and some unlucky soul grabbed it and it will now be screeching in some other house . . . but yesterday my wife opened our brand new ironing board and it produced the same "ssskkkreeeeek" so I'm going try a tip I read on the internet and spray the legs with PAM or some other cooking spray-- or try to convince my wife that wrinkles are fine (and always shake out because of the Jersey humidity).

Typical Tuesday Butt-kicking

Tuesdays are tough-- I dragged myself out of bed for Tuesday AM basketball-- now that our school doesn't allow non-district employees to play, it's vital that I make it so we have ten-- and when I made the left onto 27, I saw flashing lights and my first thought was: who me? but, of course, it was me-- I guess I ran a red light-- I truly didn't see it, but the cop let me go, perhaps because I was in old man basketball gear and wearing a school ID; or perhaps because I apologized; or perhaps because he graduated from East Brunswick High School-- who knows?-- but I made it to school on time, shot quite well from deep, covered some very young people, and totally overdid it . . . then I quickly showered, threw on my sandals, raced to class, and graded a buttload of college essays and some sophomore timed writings while my students watch Grosse Pointe Blank . . . and I think I read too many essays in the dark because by noon I had a splitting headache, the kind where it feels like there's a spike in your head, right above your eyeball-- but the nurse gave me some Tylenol and I ate some enchiladas and then Stacey provided me with a gluttonous amount of Swedish fish, and that seemed to mollify the headache-- then I taught a couple more classes in a post-headache-haze, drove home, accompanied my son to the Post Office to mail seven packages of Lladró ceramic statues that he sold on eBay-- but we had to leave the Post Office line several times because he got a zip code wrong and he didn't write return addresses on the boxes-- lessons learned-- and then I went to acupuncture and Dana really zapped my neck and calves with a bunch of needles and now I'm sore and tired but I've still got to cook dinner and scrub off some mold that Ian noticed on the ceiling in the shower . . . typical Tuesday.

Go To Hell (Novelistically)

If you want to read a totally fucked up book about a disgraced knight trying to protect a sanctified child in the bleakest of settings-- plague-ravaged France in the 14th century-- but that's not enough fucked-uppededness for you, and you also need Book of Revelations style monsters and a war between earth and heaven (plus some historical corruption . . . the Avignon papacy scandal) then Between Two Fires, by Christopher Buehlman, is the novel for you . . . I enjoyed much of it, but parts of it were beyond my comprehension and the story did get a bit tedious towards the end-- I had to skim some until the action picked up again-- but this is an incredibly visceral, incredibly researched, and fantastically conceived literary project, and worthy of a better, more patient reader than me.

Old Friends, OLD Friends

I caught up with some old friends this weekend-- the operative word being old-- but we managed to stay up until 1 AM Friday night, regaling each other with (mainly) the same old stories and then we had an A-plus October beach day on Saturday-- the water was warm enough for swimming and the sun was strong enough to sunburn Mose's shins-- and then Neil cooked us some very fresh tuna his buddy recently caught . . . thanks for hosting Neil and a good time was had by all (and I'm taking John L. up on his Metamucil rec, we'll see what happens tomorrow morning with that but I am not taking Johnny B. up on his minor league baseball and 70s Italian comedies recs).

 

Think It Off, Think It Off

I'd like to lose ten pounds (but I don't want to alter my eating habits, alcohol consumption, or exercise routine).

The Students Take ONE of My Suggestions

This morning I had to proctor the PSAT for my sophomore honors class-- the test itself, after the usual technological and logistical shitshow-- lasted until 11 AM, and then the teachers were given two pieces of posterboard and we were supposed to persuade the kids to make two banners for homecoming . . . one of them was to be Disney-themed and the other was supposed to reflect school spirit . . . so MY suggestion for the Disney themed poster was to feature Steamboat Willie scratching, deleting, erasing, and defacing drawings of other notable Disney characters-- while reminding the audience in a caption that he was the only Disney character that existed in the public domain and the only one that could be used without permission-- I thought this would be a good lesson on staying, as Shakespeare's Fabian puts it, "on the windy side of the law" and keeping our class from being sued by the Disney legal machine-- but the kids ignored this brilliant suggestion, in the same manner, that they ignored this suggestion last year . . but they humored me and filled the blank space in our other poster with the chant, "We got spirit, yes we do, we got spirit, how 'bout you?"

The Coffee Is Coming From Inside the Cup!

One of the most satisfying moments of Tuesday morning 6:30 AM basketball-- especially after a miserable shooting performance-- is drinking the morning coffee that I forego before the game (so as not to defecate in my shorts) which I leave on my desk in my classroom and I enjoy while I teach my first-period class-- the coffee tastes good, of course, and the caffeine keeps me from getting a headache . . . but this morning my Contigo brand coffee mug was giving me problems, and I couldn't figure out why-- it was leaking from the top . . . coffee was oozing out from under the lid for no apparent reason-- and I tried taping some paper around it, but-- much to the amusement of my Creative Writing class-- this did not work (as evidenced by the photo) and so I gulped down what I could and then after a short discussion, the class convinced me to throw it out . . . normally I would bring something like this home and put it back in the cabinet and avoid that cup for a month or so, then forget what happened, or watch my wife suffer the same problem and then think: oh yeah, that cup leaks . . . but not today . . . today, in a much more accurate manner than I shot my morning threes, I tossed the leaking cup into the garbage-- good riddance!-- and next week I will bring the new mug that my wife bought me and things will be less damp.

Ce vin est splendide, formidable, merveilleux !

I must be a little bit French (because I can only cook dinner if I'm drinking wine).

Choices, choices . . . Neither Palatable

Stuck between a rock and a very boring place tomorrow: do I attend the 7 AM faculty meeting or the 2:50 PM faculty meeting?

I'm Talking 'Bout Mexican Jell-O, Jell-O o o

Who knew that Mexican jello is far superior-- more rigid, firm, and flavorful-- than American Jell-O?

Can't Get There From Here

If you're looking for podcasts about strange stuff happening in small towns (and you've already listened to S-Town and taken an audio tour of Woodstock, Alabama) then you can't do better than these two:

1) Hysterical . . .  this one investigates a spate of oddball symptoms-- tics, verbal outbursts, twitching, spasms-- that spread virally through the girls in an upstate New York high school in the town of LeRoy-- and the question is: was this mass hysteria, otherwise known as conversion disorder? or was it due to toxic chemicals or something environmental? a great one if you love The Crucible and the Salem Witch trials;

2) Cement City . . . two journalists stumble into a dying Pennsylvania town-- Donara, home to the Donara Smog Museum, which memorializes the Donora Smog of 1948, an air inversion containing fluorine that killed twenty people-- and they buy a house? a house made completely of concrete? and  they get caught up in town politics and what it's like to live in a place with no bank, no grocery store, and no school, but a whole lot of camaraderie;

and while I recognize that these podcasts are presenting a very thin sliver of what it's like to live in a place that does NOT feel like it's the center of the world, and these podcasters have cherry-picked extremely interesting narratives of truly oddball events and these small towns just happen to be the setting, it's still really interesting to inhabit places like these, places that I will probably never truly understand, because I live in a fast-paced, densely populated, and expensive region of the country, with all the amenities and conveniences and ethnic restaurants and parks and high-end grocery stores and sky-high real-estate prices and even if I were to move to an out of the way rural kind of place, I'd never be able to pass as a local . . . you can take the guy out of Jersey, but you can't take the Jersey out of the guy.

A Head Full of Choices (and Ghosts)

A Head Full of Ghosts, by Paul Tremblay, is a genuinely scary (and very transparent) pastiche of Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle, The Exorcist, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" . . . with some modern touches (including a very entertaining blog, written by the lone survivor from the family, Merry-- who mistakenly poisoned her family, while being manipulated by her possibly possessed or possibly mentally ill sister . . . or was the poisoning a mistake? or was Merry possessed? or was the whole family possessed? or was it all a stunt for reality TV? you'll have to read it-- if you dare-- and then decide for yourself).

Dave Does Holden Caulfield Doing Dave on Selling Sunset

Today in my sophomore honors English class, we are having an "emulate Holden Caulfield's voice but write about something modern" but I don't think anyone will write anything as perfect as my model-- in fact, the kids might be so dazzled by it that they might not write anything at all, for fear of not living up to the high standard that I have set-- anyway, my wife likes to watch a reality TV show called Selling Sunset, wherein a bunch of hot ditzy real estate agents flirt and drink and occasionally sell multi-millionaire dollar homes-- and even though I know the show is totally stupid, sometimes I sit down and watch it with her, fully realizing that the tactic used by the agency-- using sex to sell-- is not only working on the people buying houses inside the show, but it is also working on me . . . so here is this topic, from Holden Caulfield's perspective:

The thing that gives me a real pain in the ass is reality TV. If you weren’t aware, it’s not real. It’s phony. But people pretend like it’s real. And if you tell them it’s phony, then they get all touchy and offended, even though deep down they know it’s phony. So if you want to stay alive, you can’t tell people that. And all summer, my mom sat on the couch and smoked cigarettes and watched this show Selling Sunset. My mom has been very nervous since Allie died, and the cigarettes and the TV calm her down. Selling Sunset is about two brothers, twins, Jason and Brett and they run a very high-class real estate agency in Hollywood. They sell very expensive houses to very rich people. It would make you sick to see these houses. Some people don’t have a house at all, or even an apartment, but other people get to live in a mansion. It’s not fair, for chrissakes, but these people don’t seem to realize that state of affairs when they pay twenty million dollars for a house. 

But that’s not even the worst part of the show. The phoniest part of the show is that these twin brothers, they employ very sexy women to do their selling. I have to admit, they are very sexy– and very flirtatious too. But they’re kind of stupid, or maybe worse, they’re pretending to be stupid. But people like to buy houses from these women because they act stupid and flirtatious and wear very tight dresses. They dress like burlesque dancers, because they’re always on camera, but they work in a professional office. And the two brothers, Jason and Brett, they treat this as normal business. And the worst part is that their method works. It works on the guys buying houses and it even worked on me. I’d see my mom watching this show, flicking her ashes into the glass ashtray on the end table, and I would sit down and watch it with her, even though I knew it was stupid and phony, but I’d watch because the women were so good-looking and they were wearing such tight outfits. The only good thing is I think my mother liked having me there, watching the show, even though she knew it was stupid. That was part of the reason I would watch it with her. But it wasn't the only reason, it was also for those women showing off in their tight dresses, good-looking women kill me, they really do.

Stupid Lunar Calendar

We finally have off from school for Rosh Hashanah . . . and it's about time.

Hey Kid, You Know About Google?

My son Ian spends plenty of time on his phone, but I'm not really sure he understands its capabilities because he's always asking me oddball questions-- questions about furniture restoration, amplifiers and subwoofers, and-- today-- how to preserve a crayfish in a jar . . . I usually humor him for a moment and say some bullshit before I'm like: "I have no fucking clue . . . why don't you Google that?" and he gets a definitive answer (and so I take no credit for the fabulous job he did restoring this old cabinet he procured for free on garage sale day).

What's on the Menu? Pain

A rainy miserable Sunday and a rainy miserable Jets game, so my wife and I decided to watch The Menu- a satirically horrific haute cuisine film in which a bunch of rich people gets their just deserts . . . or perhaps they're just desserts-- typographical pun intended-- which is exactly what they deserve . . . the film is beautifully shot: a crisp, lavish, and grotesque send-up of the upper class, an amalgamation of The Bear, Triangle of Sadness and Saw-- Ralph Fiennes is compelling and tortured and you can't help rooting for Anya Taylor-Joy . . . a messy but satisfying meal.

Dave = Mr. Green?

Despite the wet weather the past few days, I've continued my greenery project: removing dead and unsightly maple and Leyland cypress branches; planting clover in the backyard; cultivating moss along the borders of the yard; and transplanting some clumping bamboo to the spots I cleared out with my buddy Connell's little chainsaw . . . so I think I've earned the title Mr. Green and no longer have to suffer as Mr. Orange (but we'll see if I can convince my recalcitrant student).