Bookroom Discovery #1

As mentioned earlier, I’ve been helping out with an intersession class being taught in our school’s bookroom – a cavernous wonder of boxes, dust, and occasional cockroaches.

Mr. Carlson and I have found a few noteworthy discoveries during our time in the room. I will be highlighting two or three of them here.

The first discovery of note:

Yes, that’s 100 copies of The Making of the Rugrats Movie. It’s out of print, so, unless you’re at Manual Arts, you’re going to have to score your copy second hand. In any case, with a cover price of $25 each, I wonder what the story is behind these books (that are now 11 years old and never even taken out of the boxes). Often book publishers throw in extra reading books when our school makes a large textbook order, so these could have been such a situation. However, while I think we can find value in most books being available in our classes, could we have gotten a better use out of $2,500 in book value?

Outdated, severely below the age range of our high school students, and forgotten in the back of the bookroom, here’s yet another example of lack of communication and allocation of resources.

Work in Progress: A Few Words about Narrative

Life is a series of stories.

We are long unpredictable strands of narrative – here we intertwine and mesh, there we crosshatch and dither in little checks, we are not a uniform pattern or even a patchwork quilt. We are intersections that occasionally knot and collapse and move in dissonant trajectories.

What do we tell other people of the stories we’ve lived?

We do not quest for narrative, it is simply what we are. We take a left and the unseen narrator makes a note: Francine made a left up the hill, her steps guiding her to the park, to the reunion, to the funeral, to another day, to her escape.

We can’t force narrative into a thread it isn’t supposed to mend. We can’t imagine some natural order to the messy haphazard way life unfolds. We are a narrative, not a plot in three or five, neatly crafted acts – that’s for the birds and for the Hollywood editors mercilessly chopping what isn’t and what is into a nonsense parable that guides some toward foolhardy steps.

And again, to return to the question: what do we tell other people of the stories we’ve lived?

In some ways such a question is moot – we do not tell because our lives are their own, natural telling. The arrhythmia of life and its unexpected bouncing – from phenomena to tragedy to moment of dullness to fleeting urge of irresponsibility – is spoken in and of itself, we cannot change such tellings except in only the falsest of senses.

A book on the shelf next to me tells us that history is typically written by those that dominate, that conquer, that oppress others with their willful power. But even such a statement is a prologue to the counter narrative of a dominated people

That said, every story is a finality. Sure, it is a multifaceted story and one that cannot be viewed without the pink laser-tubed vision of someone other than us, but it is still narrative.

And so, again, what do we tell other people of the stories we’ve lived?

Again, we do not. We let the stories speak for themselves. Our retellings smooth the sharper edges, they warm the colder nights, and they grasp with greater strength at the tenuous frailty of loss that we hope cannot be.

Perhaps more importantly, we are not without agency in this narrative paradigm.

You, even as you read or type or be a part of this missive, have strength and willful power to move your thread. Try it – move it closer to someone nearby. Go ahead, I’ll wait. You have the strength to live the parable you want or to approximate the rom-com you wish you were. You cannot go back, but don’t worry about that. We are a large people – our threads feel seemingly endless, don’t they? We can be confirmation and refutation at once. We can be contradictions and illogical beings and not have to suffer any consequences but our own. We are the viceroys of our own rules.

And narrative is not some magic trick to change what we do or change what one sees as relevant or the life choices we make.

Narrative is simply the way we move about – by becoming story we are inculcated into a world bigger than just ourselves. That should be comforting.

We wish we were tied to only those choices that are easy. However, those narrative steps that create provocation, those steps that might be outright tendentious are the moments that define who we are.

And does love play a part in narrative?

Sure. But only in as much as work and play and death and creation and ineptitude and bureaucracy and wonder are also the natural ingredients of narrative. We may stare in eyes and furrow brows and assume that that is what one’s narrative is about, that it is what gives purpose.

But we forget.

Narrative is purposeless.

Narrative is without plot.

Narrative is not guided by an invisible hand or the kind of meant-to-be talk that elevates only illusorily.

And this is not without relevance to our classrooms. They are the natural extension of our own narratives. What story am I helping weave for students each day? What stories do they guide my narrative toward? How am I inspired by the work in my classroom – the love that burgeons in our classes – to better guide my actions?

What are the narrative hopscotch flip-flops that will define your area of the non-patchwork weaving your thread becomes?

“It only jelps me which is very important. !!!”: On Blogging

If you have a spare moment, please check out the blog a group of intersession students is currently contributing to. All posts (aside from the sporadic teacher post from Mr. Carlson or myself) are written and (possibly) edited by the students. Yes, there will be occasional typos, grammatical, and spelling errors  – isn’t that part of the blogging experience?

In any case, the goal here is for these students to practice documenting and reflecting on the world from their own perspectives. Taking ownership over the news, literally creating the importance for the outsider to the Manual Arts world is a heavy burden. And the students are taking it in stride.

Teaching an intersession elective course at Manual requires overcoming significant challenges, three of which I want to address here:

Significant Intersession Elective Course Challenge (SIECC) 1: Getting the Class Funded

Although students are regularly offered classes when they go “off-track” on our year round schedule, the classes are primarily to make up failed classes. This year, in particular due to budget restrictions, LAUSD did not fund any intersession classes other than the bare minimum of graduate requirement make up classes. Though an intersession class isn’t expensive (a teacher is compensated for 60 hours of work per intersession course) – getting Manual Arts to offer this “Broadcast Journalism” course required the approval of our School Site Council. As a result, Mr. Carlson is able to teach the students for two hours a day over six weeks (I’m helping out a few days each week, but kudos go to Carlson for steering the class).

SIECC 2: Getting the Class Filled

Because students at our school aren’t regularly offered extracurricular off-track opportunities (especially B-Track, since summer internships and programs are offered while these students are just beginning their school year), retention and getting committed students is a challenge. The commitment comes with having an engaging class (again something that deserves a tip of the digital hat to Carlson). The students are mainly coming from my 11th and 12th grade English classes. Because most of these students are enrolled in my class and have likely had Mr. Carlson in the past, we have a strong group of students with a good rapport – the class is filled and rolling.

SIECC 3: Getting Space

Because of our large student population, getting funding for a class isn’t the end of our headache. We needed a room we could routinely use to teach the class. In the past, I’ve taught intersession courses off campus at heavily discounted fees, subsidized by our school’s network partners. This year, we found that a room was available because most teachers would rather travel than use it. In a small upstairs nook in our bookroom, the students are properly ventilated (thanks to the two fans Mr. Carlson bought and the one larger room fan I “borrowed” from the math lab), the students are able to get online (thanks to the numerous laptops we bring in as well as the three desktop computers working at glacial paces), and the students are able to use the space in a timely manner (discounting the lengthy walk to the back of the campus due to construction detours for a long overdue senior quad redesign project).

Before becoming our bookroom three years ago, the room was used as an industrial (“Manual”) arts or auto shop classroom (I get mixed reports). Photos below detail the classroom setting.

A view from our room, looking down on the rows of books.

A view from our room, looking down on the rows of books.

Looking up to our classroom from the back of the book room.

Looking up to our classroom from the back of the book room.

Oh, all those unopened boxes? Those are just leftover books from when our administration brought in Talent Development without School Site Council approval. No biggie.

Oh, all those unopened boxes? Those are just leftover books from when our administration brought in Talent Development without School Site Council approval. No biggie.

Of course, I’m not mentioning other, structural challenges such as difficulties with students accessing the campus while off-track or the constant technology headaches (thanks to Daye for amazing WordPress expertise!), but those will trickle through the more regular posts to come.

As our students continue to gain confidence in their reporting skills, you are encouraged to question and comment on their posts. In the coming weeks students will be podcasting reports on lockdown procedures for schools as well as distributing DVD news reports for local South Central events. Stay tuned!

p.s. Does anybody know what this is? It’s bolted into the book room since the book room wasn’t always a book room. But what is it??

“But the girl I knew/Would see right through you”

I spend much of my time in the classroom breaking down and analyzing that “hard English stuff” that many of us geeked out over as undergrads. Sonnets and pantoums and villanelles and odes and god knows what else. It’s fun and I see sparks as students begin flexing their own critical analytical muscles.

And yet, when it comes time to flick through the playlist or slide in a CD, invariably it’s the most standard of pop cuisine. Endless verses of rhyming couplets stacked comfortably within blankets of gooey choruses strung together by sappy chord changes; pop at its very heart. Sure, I’ve gotten my fair share of albums from Amoeba’s “unusually experimental” aisle (now sadly displaced to the back of the store alongside Jazz and Blues … hmmm there’s something that needs to be deconstructed!). However when it comes to long-drive listening and I don’t have the energy for Ira Glass & Company’s company, it’s typically the “unpopular pop” of Jon Brion and his cadre or something else of equally shiny pop veneer.

It may look brittle and flimsy compared to Ashbery, Walcott & Plath (the most awesome literary law firm since Silverblatt’s crew), but there is something eternally, inextinguishably human about the way pop can creep into your brain and whisper to yer heart.

From Digital Naiveté Toward Digital Nativity

I facilitated a PD last week on technology use in the classroom. The hour-ish session was a whirlwind run through of research behind technology use, various forms of technology, critical media literacy, and a plea for further exploration of site-based cell phone and social networking use. Along the way, I presented how I use Flip cameras, why I hate PowerPoint (even as people followed along with my Google presentation!), how to literally plug in an LCD projector, defined wikis and blogs, how to show YouTube videos even though the site is blocked, and explained that – sadly – I cannot fix the school’s myriad nonfunctional printers.

Though it was entirely too fast, my goals were to highlight the expertise already present in my attendees’ classrooms and to present as many different ideas that they could use as possible. Several tips seemed to resonate most strongly with the group; the use of PowerPoint as a rudimentary film making tool, for instance, was thrilling for some teachers (and I’m thankful to Jeff Share for being able to adapt this example from him). My hope was that the group would identify areas they would like to more intensely focus on in the future. Feedback was quite positive afterward, so I’m hoping I’ll be able to find a site-based collaborator to further highlight the technology wizardry springing up in our classrooms.

I Hate Sounding Like I’m Using Hyperbole But …

I’m currently reading through Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli and I’m just staggered by how good this is; content, design, layout, color, everything. I’m halfway through and frankly haven’t had this feeling about a book’s contribution to its genre since reading Jimmy Corrigan (sadly, I suspect this will be the go-to comparison in upcoming reviews precisely because  they feel like such strong “statements” despite being worlds apart thematically).

I realize how snobby the above thoughts sound. However, I literally put the book down every five or ten pages, reach for my computer and then decide I need to go back and make sure about what I’m reading. This being the halfway point, I feel confident in stating this book is a product of genius. A pure, precise effort that also has enough nuanced details to reward multiple readings (check the juxtaposition of assumptions of the first few pages with a major turning point later in the book, for instance).

The only other work by Mazzucchelli I’m familiar with is the superb adaptation of Auster’s City of Glass – something I almost taught as part of the Black Cloud curriculum last summer.