Farewell to Security

In a poem I've quoted before, Emily Dickenson wrote:

Parting is all we know of heaven,

And all we need of hell.

Parting is heaven because it means opportunity, change, adventure, and the first day of the rest of my life, etc. It's chance to pursue dreams delayed, forgotten, or eclipsed. It's a purposeful striding into the unknown, casting about for a course, unshackled by bonds of any kind.

Parting is hell because it means change, danger, and farewell to all that is safe. It's losing the anchors and mores that have kept you in one place long enough to put down roots and enjoy life. It's stepping into darkness from light, cutting the ties you lovingly wove and tended, and then watching the edges bleed as you stumble into the darkness, casting about for a course, no safety line of any kind.

For a year and a half I have been together, and now I am parted. For 18 months I have been found, and now I am lost. It doesn't matter whether I stepped away of my own free choice or not. I've lost something precious and now there is a hole where it was that I have to fall into before I can climb out. As I fall I rotate quickly through fear, excitement, daring courage, longing for what is behind, and panic over my choice to step forward when I was so happy where I was. So, I'm not ready, but here I am: it's time to fall, crawl, grope, grow, and change. Good luck me.

Generation Chasms

My 7th grade classes are starting to read The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton this week. The novel is set in 1967 and that is, I explained to them, one year after my dad graduated from high school. We went through a powerpoint of 1960s pop culture and slang, and then ended on a list of things you wouldn't have seen in the 1960s. We talked about the lack of pull-tab soda cans, the internet, any form of video or arcade game, and finally, no CDs, DVDs, or even cassette tapes. Then I pulled a record out and explained how it worked (Thank you Dad for explaining that to me when I was little, my kids were impressed), and passed it around so they could all see. Some kids were familiar with records, but others were clearly fascinated. I heard them telling their friends about it in the hall.

They also have no concept of when things developed. I had one student raise his hand and say, "Didn't they have something called a 'walk...man' in those days?" I laughed and told him he was 20 years off.

Then I had other students swear that Atari was around in the 1960s. To these kids, the 1980s are retro. The 60s and 70s are history. Which makes sense; they're 15 years or so behind me. To me, the 1960s and 70s were retro, the 40s and 50s were history.

We also had a brief confusion as my students stated with authority that Nintendo was around in the early 1960s. Confused (I had just told them there weren't even arcade games in the 1960s, not even Pong), I asked why. It turns out that many of my students thought that the Nintendo 64 had come out in 1964 and were surprised to learn that they were, once again, 20 years off.

My students did, however, show a remarkable knowledge of 1960s TV shows. I guess I Dream of Jeannie will never die.

Legos, Fishtanks, and Vomit

I spent nearly five hours today planning a single lesson. The lesson itself will last little more than an hour and I'll teach it twice and then not again for a year. At least it was an important lesson: how to write a good paragraph. Writing a good, coherent, and smoothly written paragraph is one of our department goals for seventh graders this year, so it's important to teach it write. I'm insanely proud of the lesson, so much so that I'll be greatly disappointed if it turns out less than wonderfully. It involves, like many of my lessons, powerpoint and a random analogy. I've compared five paragraph essays to legos and vomit, and now a well written paragraph is a fish tank. I wonder if all these analogies help me teach more clearly, or if my students think I speak in riddles. Sometimes I feel like the Guru from the B.C. comic strip. If they climbed up the mountain and lay gasping out their question, "What makes a good paragraph?" I would stare out over the mountains for a few moments, contemplating my vast stores of wisdom, before replying with a sarcastic quip or a bizarre analogy: "A paragraph is like a fish tank my friend..." "Preparing to write an essay is like digesting food...." "This Lego model represents the five-paragraph essay, let us meditate together on the lessons it can teach us..." "Personal pronouns are like the bridge crew of the starship Enterprise...." "Indefinite pronouns are like power rangers, the black power ranger in particular....." "8th graders are a lot like chickens...." etc. I lose track of all the different analogies I've used to explain things to my students.

You see, analogies are like my appendix. I've always had one everywhere I go and no matter what I talk about, but I'm still trying to figure out if they're good for anything.