okay. it’s more like “empty cubicles” . . . but having had three former phone company colleagues and friends die within a two-week period, yeah, this song is on my mind a bit.
that Ms. Mona was almost four months pregnant already in this picture?
and have I mentioned that it’s been a lonnnnnnnnnngggggggggg week?
and even though it’s Friday night, I’m going to back-date this because then my saying, “have I mentioned it’s been a long week?” in the post I wrote tonight and back-dated to Thursday will make sense.
(do you feel cheated, dear 2.75 readers out there?! if so, I am deeply sorry.)
Here’s the crazy thing, though. I wrote a while back about my decision to not pursue the NYCTF thing. At the time, it seemed clear that this was not the path I was to take, at least not right now. But this week, I found myself back on the emotional roller coaster of indecision because of two incidents that led me to two completely opposite conclusions.
First, lunch on Monday. I had the joy of sitting with the wife of my favorite new CRWM staff member, who is a teacher, as well as with another new missionary who is a social worker and will be in a school setting in the country she and her husband are moving to. Somehow the conversation turned to charter schools, NCLB, etc, and I was instantly engaged . . . doing that typical “lorraine” thing of practically jumping out of my chair because I just had so, so, SO much to say.
The thing is, I have strong opinions about the whole charter school thing (which I’m sure you didn’t notice), and my passion for racial justice is so inextricably tied up in my passion for public education that serves ALL of our children, and perhaps especially those who don’t have parents who are able or willing to fight for what they need. (This is mostly Jonathan Kozol’s fault.) So then, am I *meant* to be a teacher? What am I to do with all of this passion?
Then there was today. (try not to think about the fact that “today” is really two days ago as I’m writing this–we’re pretending it’s Wednesday, remember?)
There was an hour’s gap in our childcare schedule at the last minute, and my supervisor, knowing how much I love kids, suggested that I be the one to fill in that hour. Now, the thing is, I love kids, but I think that I tend to enjoy them much more on a one-on-one basis. I also don’t do quite as well with rambunctious and/or disobedient kids . . . basically, I’m a sucker/pushover/wimp, and kids can smell that the minute they look at me. I make all of these feeble attempts to set limits and boundaries, and yet I end up letting too many things slide, and chaos ensues. This hour, with this particular group of kids was no exception.
(this is what the room looked like while I was in charge)
I did have their attention while I read a few books, and was able to re-focus them for the most part during that part of it. But then there I was, trying to extract profound conversation from them, and I really got nowhere.
Worst of all, however, the teenager who was there to help for the day told me at lunchtime that, “as soon as Mrs. Z got there, they were all very well-behaved.” In other words, Mrs. Z took control of the classroom and was able to “manage” it. Me, not so much. So I don’t communicate very well with groups of children, am not good at engaging them, and have NO classroom control whatsoever. Any of the “maybe I SHOULD do this” thoughts that I’d had a few days before flew out of the window with that one observation from an objective observer. As anybody can see, I don’t like meting out discipline, and I am NOT a good teacher. I’m not even sure I really relate/connect to kids in any meaningful way . . . maybe they all just think I’m nuts, who knows. (wouldn’t be the first time . . . )
(this is the classroom restored to order and sanity once the “real” teacher arrived.)
Then I think, “well, I could go into administration . . . have some role like that . . . train educators . . . ” but of course, none of this makes sense because I can’t see any path to training educators that precludes my having first BEEN an educator.
So yes, we are back to square one. Thanks for reading! We have some lovely parting gifts for you . . .
Okay, so I’m easily amused . . . but I was excited that Tar-ghay now offers a 90-day supply of certain generic meds for $10. (cheaper than my mail-order!)
And Target has the cutest prescription bottles anyway, right? But I couldn’t help thinking of that old Looney Tunes cartoon when I saw the bottle my 90-day supply came in . . .
Here’s the “regular-sized” bottle:
Sure, that’ll suffice if you just need a little bit of happiness . . . but if you need to call out the big guns, you’ve gotta have this:
(did I mention I’m easily amused?)
ugh, ugh, ugh.
I don’t think I ever watch Faux news (except occasionally my local version), but I hear enough about it across the blogosphere to know that it’s a bunch of crap that I don’t WANT to watch.
However, as you may know, I’m pretty passionate about making sure that people understand that Black English (whether you want to call it by the greatly maligned, mocked, and misunderstood term “ebonics”, or use the more descriptive phrase, “black English vernacular”) is NOT merely a matter of ignorance, but is an actual dialect with its own grammatical rules and structure. So when I see a black man on Faux News whose stated mission is to de-ignorantize (there’s some Lorraine-bonics for you!) those poor, “ignorant” inner-city black kids, it just boils my biscuits.
Don’t get me wrong . . . it’s not the fact that he’s teaching these young people to cope in the predominant culture that bothers me . . . it’s his ATTITUDE about it, and his obvious lack of understanding of linguistics (not to mention history!) that makes me angry.
In the video linked above (I was so pissed off that I didn’t even want to embed it), we hear at least one young black woman buying into the lie as she says, ”in the area I grew up in . . . we don’t talk proper English”. Way to teach people to hate themselves for a language pattern that has a long and complex history that can be traced back to slavery and before!
The Faux News piece even conjures up Bill Cosby, in effect implying that McClendon is getting flack, just like Cosby does, for trying to improve the lot of ‘his people’.
did I mention, “UGH!!!!!!!!!!”??? Field, (who I have to thank for calling my attention to this) would definitely have a name for Mr. McClendon (and perhaps the rest of his family, although I’m not sure what to make of the greater (and seemingly very random) “corporation”).
It’s surely no coincidence that I just heard a very wise man whom I greatly admire talking this week about the language that white North Americans use to label languages and cultural traditions that are not their own. “North Americans have ‘ethnicities’, he said, “whereas Africans have ‘tribes’; North Americans speak a “language”, whereas Africans” (and surely this applies to native American people groups across our own continent as well!) “have ‘dialects’.”
If you want to know how I feel about ebonics BEV, then you should read this. In case you’re lazy, here’s an excerpt:
Labov’s point was that speakers of BEV weren’t simply making random grammatical mistakes when they spoke. They were following rules that their community of speakers had developed, and which they had learned from being immersed in it. What they were speaking, he argued, was not a flawed and failed attempt at standard English, but a particular version of English that was just as expressive and fluent as standard.
Better yet, watch this video . . . it will cleanse your heart and soul of the BS that Mr. Garrard “H.N.*” McClendon is dishing out . . .
(*yeah, I don’t feel like I’m allowed to use that term, and you know that I can barely say that word to begin with, but hopefully you get the idea.)
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