april 27, 2001. This is my first day off since Easter (I suppose it hasn't been that long, really). I was supposed to go to a regional in-service (what they used to call Professional Development in my youth), but there were enough trifling logistical problems with the whole plan that I decided not to bother. Isn't it funny that when you imagine your days off, you never quite picture the reality of the situation? I always imagine myself sitting in the sunlight with a cup of tea and a really fascinating article or novel, occasionally petting the cat. The reality is more like my current situation: slouching in front of the computer in my bathrobe, surfing sites I'm not terribly interested in and listening to old CD's (currently "Peepshow" by Siouxie & the Banshees). My hair is in knots & I'm in terrible need of a shower - if I was a cartoon character, stink lines would rise up from my body. Fortunately, I am alone in my smelliness. (Except for the cat, who doesn't care. I could be the rankest human on the face of the earth as long as I kept her bowl filled with kibble.) Not quite the civilized picture of relaxation, is it? But I need to be here. I need to write everything down. I also need to clean my house, but I'll get to that today. Eventually. There's all kinds of little things that need to be done around this place. Our only mirror is part of the medicine cabinet so we obviously need a reflective surface that will show our bodies below the collar bone. I can't believe that I've made it through 10 weeks of teaching with a hopeful spirit...I really have no idea how my outfits hang on me until I visit the school washroom, and by then it's way too late. I try not to think about it for the most part. But I really should look in the mirror more often. Two weeks ago I taught a 40-minute lesson with my fly undone. Yeah. You just don't have moments like that in technical writing. My second field experience ended yesterday. Once again it filled me with huge emotions that baffled me. Sometimes I say that I can't deal with a situation because I feel bad, but I couldn't deal with these feelings because I couldn't really understand them. They were just there, huge storm clouds on my internal sky. My last day of actual teaching was Wednesday. It went quite well: I made up a poetry lesson based entirely around listening to music & talking about lyrics, which was very relaxing. The students were very well-behaved, and for the most part mature enough to discuss the music in an artistic and interpretive way. They didn't like Leonard Cohen very much and they thought that Tom Waits' voice was hilarious for the first few minutes. That didn't really bother me, though. With lessons like this it's really important to emphasize the art aspect rather than the music aspect, or they spend too much time evaluating the songs based on their own likes & dislikes. Which is a massive waste of time, I think. But maybe that's because I always choose music that I like...and one eccentric English major with a closet full of trashy black club clothes simply can't be wrong. ;) We did "China Girl" together and I mentioned Velvet Goldmine to illustrate the relationship between David Bowie & Iggy Pop. They immediately tried the classic "we have to watch the movie" offensive, something I've become all-too-familiar with this year. "We cannot," I said. "Why?" they bleated back, looks of mock sadness on their little teenaged faces. "Because this is my last day." At which point they tried the also-classic "we should have a party" offensive. No sale, although I let them visit the cafeteria halfway through class to purchase cookies for themselves. Two boys in the front began giggling & shoving a piece of paper back & forth. I noticed it, but decided not to bother with the situation - last day, who cares? I was rewarded for my apathy at the end of class, when it turned out to be a card for me. "Tomorrow you're leaving, away from our school, / It's too bad, because you're very cool, / Evan and Corey will truly miss you, / And the rest of the class will too." "ROSES ARE RED / VIOLETS ARE BLUE / TOMORROW YOU'll LEAVE / BUT WE'll MISS YOU." I was truly touched. In my second run through the material (I have 2 sections of Grade 11 English to teach), my co-operating teacher and Petra hung around to join in the poetic fun. We talked about the Tom Waits song, "Back In the Good Old World," and as we discussed the line "there's a rose upon her breast / where I long to lay my head" the students told me that it was about a woman in a coffin with a rose on top. This interpretation truly surprised me, for I had always thought that the line had to do with a rose tattoo. I shared this confusion with the class. "I guess it's because I have a rose tattoo," I added. My co-operating teacher piped up, "What a coincidence! I also have a rose tattoo" in this broad joke voice, which I thought was absolutely hilarious. It made me think about how much I'll miss sitting in a funny English class. Often he would make literary jokes that only I would laugh it, and I knew that it didn't bother him one bit that the class didn't get it. And it's not like he's pedantic or tiresomely literary, it's just that he has a deep & true love of English literature. When I think of all the "it's just a job" English teachers I could've been placed with, I'm deeply grateful that I spent my first year in such a literary place. This year I learned that it's okay to really love academic literature, which makes me very comfortable with my own talents and feelings. Yes, I'm rambling. I've been feeling this way for months, and now I need to put it into coherent sentences. That's hard. But not, I suppose, as hard as it is to read the result. I gave evaluation forms to the students, which is a completely nerve-wracking experience. There were a couple of articulate writers who hated my teaching this time, and that really bothered me. For instance, one student wrote: I found you a little uptight. You didn't seem relaxed. And your lack of humour is annoying. You seem to argue someone's opinion, not really giving someone a chance to express their opinion. Also you seemed to have an air of arrogance to your voice. Another student wrote that I was too passive and didn't command the respect that a teacher should get. Receiving those comments was difficult for me, because they swell up and become inordinately important when compared to the neutral or positive comments. And then I'm trapped with those feelings until the day is over: I don't want to talk to my colleagues because all the other teachers think I'm an idiot for caring so much. But. There were quite a few positive comments. One girl wrote that I did an incredible job and that she considered me a role model for her future teaching career. Quite a few of my grade 11 students liked the multi-media poetry unit and a few remarked on my ability to draw out differing opinions without making anyone feel embarrassed. And my formal evaluations were great, so there's no worry professionally. I think that my favourite comment came from one of the class stoners: The material was appropriate to the grade level/course No! Curious George is for babies, and Star Wars is for nerds. I think I'm going to cut around the positive comments and make a collage of fish shapes. I can put the few negative comments on shark shapes or jellyfish shapes or electric eel shapes, swimming through the pleasant fish. I can make a fishing rod & reel hang down into the sea. The title for the whole will be the cheesy-but-oh-so-appropriate "Fishing for Compliments." Because that's more or less what I was doing. I told everyone that it was in the interests of professional development, but I think I can see through me. Queen Narcissa strikes again. At the end of the day we got word of an important staff meeting that we "had to attend." This, of course, set my spidey sense tingling...after a year of wondering if every room held a surprise wedding shower, I feel pretty confident in predicting these sorts of things. Sure enough, the staff meeting was nothing but an excuse to present the secretaries with bouquets (secretary's day) and give us student teachers a good hazing. Well, actually we were presented with carnations and a mug emblazoned with the high school crest. Each of our co-operating teachers spoke briefly about us, and it was all very sweet...except I unaccountably felt incredibly uncomfortable with all the attention. So I blushed & mumbled & tried not to act like a complete & utter ass. You would think that a drama queen like myself would love being the centre of attention. You would be wrong. That night I chaperoned my first school dance. Let's wait awhile and let the implications of that statement sink in, shall we? whoh. Petra, Poly, Josie & I all did it together, so we had student-teacher solidarity. We dressed as sheriffs, wearing big cowboy hats and tinfoil badges. This was our idea; instead of dressing as students or dressing as teachers, we chose a third option. For awhile it worked really well. The height of the crown made it really easy to pick Petra out of the crowd if I wanted to talk to her. But the others quickly stopped wearing their hats, leaving me the only cowgirl in the place. You know that's a fucking drag. But the night went very well despite. At first we worked the door, insisting that students leave jackets & shoes in the cafeteria. I didn't really feel like a jerk about it, it just seemed reasonable: you can smuggle booze in a jacket and shoes mark up the gym floor. Some of the senior girls were really pissed about the shoe rule, which I didn't really understand...I think a room full of bare feet is sexy. But what do I know; I'm part of the establishment now. For the first half-hour upstairs I acted like an over-eager bouncer, wandering everywhere at a slow steady pace - through the dance floor, through knots of people, whatever. 'I feel like a fucking narc,' I mumbled to myself. 'Wait a minute-I am a fucking narc!' After this I relaxed. It was a damn good dance, really. The music was far better than at the Acadia bar, and everyone was dancing and enjoying themselves. Several girls danced on the speakers, which I thought was hilarious - a little bit of Electric Circus thrown into the middle of Nova Scotia. Very early on I realized that I had a problem: I really wanted to dance. I wanted my friends to be around me, I wanted to be wearing a black dress and I wanted to dance my little heart out to the techno pumping out of the dj booth. But there's just no way to keep your dignity as a chaperone if you dance to "Baby Got Back," so I kept it to myself. That is, until "YMCA." I was standing with the other student teachers. We all looked at each other and we knew...we had to dance. There was just no way around it. What was amazing and hilarious was that as soon as we started to twist & shimmer, a knot of students rushed away from the main crown to dance with us. From then on we just danced whenever we felt like it. I had several conversations with former students whenever I went to the chill-out room, which was nice. Us student teachers can only talk to each other so much; it's nice to speak to someone outside your carpool. We talked about music, movies, songs, Nic, bands...kid stuff, but fun kid stuff. At one point I got sucked into swing dancing with one of my students from last term - the one I had pegged as my brother's childbride, in fact. I know I made an ass of myself, but it was fun. And that, basically, was the way the whole night made me feel. I know I was a narc, a lame example of authority, badly dressed and uncool...but it was fun. As much fun as is possible in that school, at least. That is, as much fun as possible until the spring festival the next day! I don't know what there is to say about the spring festival. It was Twelfth Night in an education context; it was safe bacchanalia. There was a Miss HighSchool competition composed entirely of boys in drag spouting ridiculously raunchy philosophies. There were fake tattoos and a hypnotist and a series of inflatable games. There was a battle of the bands and a "humorous" song sung by the teachers (blech). And there was a cotton candy machine set up in the parking lot. Little wisps of sparkly ethereal candy floated & danced through the air, choreographed by God & Chaos. They landed in my hair and I spent an enjoyable 5 minutes trying to catch the wisps in my mouth as they flew by. Stacy would have had the time of her life. Petra, Josie, Poly & I spent our lunch hour in the excellent local restaurant, which wasn't nearly as relaxing as I wanted it to be. I think that it had something to do with the fact that we had just spent 10 of the last 18 hours in each others' company, and we were a bit tired & emotionally weighed down. But maybe that theory only works for me. All I know is that the afternoon was very frustrating for me, as I felt like my peers were always walking away from me. Anyhoo. So we were walking back from the restaurant when I saw 2 of my grade 12 students walking down the street, waving & grinning. I knew exactly where they were going at this point, as I had seen them in the morning and they had warned me that they wouldn't be around for the spring festival because she was getting her ultrasound done that afternoon. (When we spoke in the morning, I expressed regret that I wouldn't be able to see the ultrasound. She promised to bring it in on Monday, but I, of course, will not be there on Monday. "Miss ****!" she said with a mixture of surprise, humour and indignation. "I'll have to email the picture to you.") I've known that she was pregnant for about 2 weeks, but it's not terribly freaky for me...you can only hear so many stories of 7th grade girls impregnated for the second time by eighth graders before the spectacle of a pregnant 18-year-old starts to look reasonable and mature. Besides, I like her and her partner a whole lot. They sit at the back of the room, are usually very interested in the material and are extremely pleasant to be around when I'm sitting in the back of the room, observing the procedings. I'll always remember that her first words to me were, "Miss ****, would you like a Worther's Original candy?" She's a total sweetie & I think she'll be a great mom. Like the girl I refer to as my brother's future childbride, this girl is the kind of student every teacher secretly wants but is too sensible to actually hope for. I've been very lucky this year to meet so many wonderful boys & girls. I just don't know what I'm going to do when Monday morning rolls around. I feel now that I could've easily taught a couple more weeks. Oh well. There's technical writing to be done and I can't shirk. But oh, how I want to shirk.