Well, my attempts to update more frequently have clearly been thwarted, by a combination of my own wretched laziness and an extremely exhausting last couple weeks at school. However, as of yesterday at 12:49 PM PST, (when the kids got out, maybe 1:47 when I got out is a better number) I have finished my first semester teaching. Please celebrate with me... come on, I'm not seeing much celebrating. Given that I have 7.5 hours until my flight leaves (or about 5 hours before I leave my house... love LAX) and most of my packing is done, it's been suggested that I use this time in a TFA-approved manner- reflecting on the semester. Now, a week and a half ago I went to JZ's house for a TFA sponsored "corps reflection dinner" where I assumed we would go and hang out and try our damndest on a Thursday night not to talk about teaching. Hah. One of the TFAista leadership arrived and immedately began posting chart paper and nudging us all into a big circle so we could answer touchy-feely questions. Well, after snagging another beer to make the entire thing even possible to sit through (though I was yelled at once for "elevator talk" when I leaned over to ask RW if she agreed with me that having an enormous copy of Plato's Republic in your living room seemed pretentious) I did take away one useful thing from the shindig- I am having way, WAY more fun than most of the other folks. People were complaining about not liking anyone at their school, about being incredibly stressed, about going home and having to physically pry themselves away from grade books. When it came my turn to say how I dealt with stress, I recieved (received?) numerous death stares for saying something like "well, I try to laugh at things... when the kids say after 3 weeks on Islam that Mohammed founded the religion on a hunting trip, I show it to my roomates, we all laugh, then I go on and try to make it better." This apparently is not the way other folks handle it.

I'm not sure if my fingers have the capacity at this point in time for full-fledged reflection... so much has gone on over the course of the past 4 months (6 if you count Institute) that I surely couldn't recount it all (plus it should be all here floating around in the archives- thanks to JD for braving all of it and for your comments). However, I could probably break it down into some basic lessons learned, in no particular order-

-Assume they know nothing. I have been burned more times going into a lesson with the assumption that the kids had some kind of prior knowledge of what the hell it was I was talking about. Not so much... many had never heard of Islam (despite sept. 11), samurai, continents, and various other things I thought I could gloss over.

-Break it down. The only way I've found to get around kids being absolutely baffled at what I'm saying is to break everything down into tiny bite-sized chunks of information, repeat them ad nauseum, and break down tasks the same way ("Okay, everybody put your name on your paper. Now hold it up to show me you have it written down. Now copy the sentence from the board. I'm coming around to check that you're copying the...")

-7th graders are amazing / 7th graders are horrible. Some absolutely fantastic kids thus far this year, many of whom I would have been pleased to have as friends back in the day...

okay, I'm sick of this lessons learned thing. If you have particular questions, talk to me and ask something other than "how's teaching going" because you'll get the answer "it's going" or some other drivel. I'm out-

After some prodding from various folks, I'm going to try to update more frequently. I think tonight may be the first time I've realized how insular my life in LA is. I see all these folks at work, and ostensibly have a corps of 200 LA TFAistas to chill with, but because RH and BL are doing architecture work, and JY and RD are out with their respective girlfriends, and I just took JZ to the airport to fly to San Fransisco, I effectively have nobody in this entire metro area of like 15 million people to hang out with. Thus, it's 8:36 on a Friday night and I'm at home IMing people, heating up a frozen pizza and updating this blog. Lest I sound overly pathetic, usually Fridays are good times at Sharkeez happy hour with the crew, followed by a group trip to the fabled "Tavern on Main" (oswego folks think Old City, Ham Tekkers The Rok with no TDX meatheads) for some pool, positouch, and discussions with the local racist former coal miner... good times generally, but tonight... not so much.

Thanksgiving break is over- it was really nice to have a break. We went to RD's parents' place in Orange County for the big Turkey Day itself, and had a really nice early meal there. Following that up, I went with RH, BL, RD, and BW to a go-kart place near Irvine and spent the rest of the day riding go-karts and playing arcade games and mini-golf. It was a fairly bizarre day, altogether, very different from more family-oriented Thanksgivings that I've had in the past. Although the go-karts were a decent substitute for riding four-wheelers at Uncle Tom's place. Missing Thanksgiving at home 2 times in the past 3 years has definitely been pretty odd. Both times that I've missed it, I've come pretty close to the "urban tribes" model that I hold so dear to my heart (taking 3 hours off from work on the campaign in 2000, go-karting with friends this year) and had some Eggers-like moments that I'll certainly cherish, but both times I couldn't help but wish I was back in upstate NY with the fam.

Back in the saddle after the weekend, looking forward to Thanksgiving vacation, and then the mere 2 weeks of actual teaching after that, followed by a week of showing videos and playing jeopardy or something since grades are already in and kids aren't allowed to bring backpacks and nobody does any work. We had a meeting just to show new teachers how to waste that week by playing 7-up in class. Given that I have kids that can't write a simple declarative sentence without seven grammatical errors, it's kind of nauseating to think of using the week that way... I'm hoping at least to play some review games and maybe watch movies and write about them. I guess most of my time will be taken up getting everything ready for going off track, a process that sounds only vaguely less intimidating than prepping for a moon launch, but apparently is doable, given that hoards of incompetent LA teachers do it regularly.

Meetings meetings meetings. Last week, out of a 4 day week at school, I had a meeting immediately after classes 3 days in a row. The only meeting-free day was Friday. Consequently, I had to postpone a whole pile of detentions, tutoring, and other stuff until then, when nobody in their right mind actually wants to stay after school. Highly annoying. Tomorrow, I get to go to the king of all time-wasting meetings: my district pre-intern program 3.5 hour afterschool bullshit. I have to do this 5 Mondays in a row, until the end of the semester, so they can give me test prep (likely doled out by some district hack with a cal state dominguez hills degree in adult education) on taking the secondary social studies content exam. I think of all the things that I could use assistance on in the teaching realm, social studies content is not one of them. Frankly, I've only found about one of the formal professional development sessions to be at all useful so far.... most of them refuse to treat teachers like reasonable professionals- making us do stupid icebreakers and draw posters like we were at RA training for college or something. I think i'm going to bring something to read and sit quietly in the back tomorrow.

Honestly it's pretty difficult to teach when all your after-school time gets sucked up with administrative garbage, and you have zero time to stay after to talk to kids who've been absent, or who haven't turned in their homework, or who are there every day paying attention but still think that Islam is a place. Speaking of which, about time to start grading my Islam final projects- grades are due Wed. and I have a stack of portfolios to look at. I'll post some of the more entertaining snippets.

The viewing of "The Circle" I talked about below was an amazing success. I was pretty thrilled that the kids sat still to watch a movie in Farsi (Farsi!!!) with subtitles, but things went really well. The kids were absolutely appalled at the depictions of how women are treated in Iran, and many of them were really pissed that Bush doesn't do anything about it ( I certainly did little to quell that). In my honors class, we even got into cultural relativism- trying to see things from the eye of the Ayahtollah (if you'll permit me the lousy pun) and look at our marriage/divorce rates, abortions, babies out of wedlock, billboards for the Spearmint Rhino gentleman's clubs, sexual harassment, etc. seems from their POV. Best of all, 3 of the kids (of varying skill levels) all have borrowed the movie from me to finish watching at home.

Weekend was exceptionally nice.

by the way... election right now is too painful to talk about.

Going to try my first multimedia presentation tomorrow- and maybe I'm aiming a little high? The movie I rented is in Farsi with subtitles - The Circle, about the plight of Iranian women - but I was encouraged when one of my students watched it when I suggested it (she was writing about the role of women in Islamic society) and said she really liked it. Hopefully the rest of the class can at least abstain from raghead jokes so I don't have to throw too many of them out of class (As I found when we covered "Niger" in geography warmup, lowbrow racist humor is certainly their forte). Also coming up tomorrow is my first Parents' night. I hired/bribed one of the honors kids in my homeroom to translate for me, just hoping he shows up. Will attempt to explain to parents why their kids are failing (because, parents response to "He doesn't do his homework and is disrespectful in class" is often "he's lazy and disrespectful at home, too" well, shit.)

Howard Dean for prez- check this out: www.dean2004.blogspot.com (if I remembered any HTML I'd have this encoded for ya)

Spent the evening protesting commercial "Holiay Compression" by giving trick-or-treaters candy canes from the big display of Christmas candy available at Ralphs, which this afternoon took the place of all the Halloween candy that was there yesterday. And responding "Merry Christmas" to each "trick or treat". I think the local parents think i'm some sort of crank.

Ahh, back from a fantastic weekend in San Fransisco. Drove up Friday w/ roomates RD, RH, and BL and crashed at RD's girlfriend's place in San Jose. Sat. morning got up and tourned around the Bay Area, saw the houseboats in Sausalito, drove on the touristy "really windy street", almost bottomed out RH's Intrepid on the steep hills, etc., and basically killed time until the Bridge School Benefit concert Sat. night. Amazing lineup- Vanessa Carlton, Foo Fighters, Tenacious D, Ryan Adams, LeeAnn Rymes (no idea how to spell that... not a big fan of hers) Thom Yorke, James Taylor, and Neil Young. All accoustic. Highlights were Thom Yorke playing radiohead tunes from Amnesiac plus 2 new songs on Neil Young's old upright saloon piano... pretty amazing. Also, Neil and James dueting on "Heart of Gold", which I think is one of the best musical moments I'll ever have a chance to witness.

Back in the grind today, was initially reeling from a rotten Friday, where my ineptitude with the school's grading program caused all of the kids to get the incorrect grades on their report cards, which fortunately was remedied quickly by some really fantastic folks in the counseling office who saved my sorry ass. Passed out the corrected report cards today and had to give the "I didn't give you the grade, you earned it" speech about a million times in response to kids who didn't do so well because they didn't, say, turn anything in. Fortunately things went pretty well today despite not really having much planned out before about 5:39am this morning. I'm learning to use my drive-time very productively.

Today's fun moment- Stopped for the first time to get gas in the neighborhood where I work, realizing at last that it's $.20 cheaper than it is in El Segundo. Went inside to pay instead of getting hosed paying at the pump (note- many gas stations put a $50 hold on a debit or credit card you use if you pay at the pump and hold it up to a couple weeks... this has involved me needing to beg gas cards from RH to get home from Buffalo) Anyway, strolled inside and was looking around while waiting to pay, first thought about grabbing some beer, which is a thought that usually occurs to me any time I see it for sale, then noticed that they also had a very competitive price for condoms, a product not oft used in these parts, but something that generally seems way too expensive for what you're getting. A quick check of my wallet, however, lead me to scotch those plans due to lack of liquid funds. Very fortunate, because as I turned around after paying for the gas, I ran into one of my students, who was buying those damn spicy cheetos that all the kids eat. Probably would've been hard to face my class tomorrow, knowing that all of them would have certainly been throwing around stories regarding what Mr. Williams was up to with beer and condoms... very good reason not to live where you teach.

Grades due tomorrow (well, i guess today at this point) and I finally got them all inputted (is that a word?) using LAUSD's ridiculously overcomplicated proprietary grading program "Bubbler", which seems more like something my idiot younger brother would use than a grading tool for 45,000 teachers. With a broken disk drive - one of the few remaining portions of the classic fall-1998 computer finally cashed out - i had to fiddle with burning a CD and network connections on 4 computers to finally get everything right, and it's still a crapshoot as to whether they'll be the way the school wants them. Such is life I suppose.

Well, you're reading the words of United Teachers of Los Angeles' Political Action Committee member. Elected today out of 6 candidates (they took 4) I managed to have the second highest tally of votes by using my one-minute speech to say something other than "i've been in the union for a long time and give a lot of money to it," namely "I actually have political experience." The rest of my first union meeting seemed to be mostly about trying to get people who have obviously been there for a long time to remember how parliamentary procedure works (ie: you can't have a motion that just has a whole bunch of "since the district does this..." complaints and no actual action). Why is it that, no matter if it's teachers with masters degrees or plumbers, all union members look the same? Do they all buy their satin too-small baseball jackets from the same union-bug textile manufacturer? Also, somewhat disturbing in a district where about a quarter of teachers are in their first or second year, that I was the youngest person there by 10 years.

great weekend.

New classic line from student's work:

"America would solve the problems that Rome had by asking the people that could give $.05, $.10, $.24, $1 for earnings and email it to the Navy to pay the army."