On Sunday I was 30 feet up in a tree, minimum. It could easily have been 40 or 50. I had spent the half hour from 5:30 to 6 sawing limbs and slowly aggrandizing my altitude, as it were. It had been dark the whole while, so by the time I stopped (and the sun came up), I was higher than I'd realized. At that point, I turned around in my climbing stand, unfolded the vinyl cushion attached to the upper harness, looped the cushion's elastic-and-clips around the tree, and sat down. Grabbing hold of the rope tied to the lower harness, with much deliberation I pulled my .30-06 into the stand with me.
At 6:50 I saw my first deer. My stand was situated so that I was on the edge of an oblong clearing, stretching from far-left to near-right. Behind me was a ridge-line, lain fallow. Around me was a tenuous cusp of trees, only diaphonously separating the ridge from the clearing.
I am looking straight ahead. The sun is still low enough on the horizon to keep the birds quiet and the air frigid. I've sunk into a sort of stupor, where I can receive sensory input but not easily cogitate nor analyze. The clearing is an undefined gloom, where the hay bales and the grass and the tree-line are impressed on a single canvas, without depth or definition. Even the colors slouch together toward a uniform grey.
I almost catch a movement to my right. A good-sized doe is at 2 o'clock and at good speed. The hunting instinct takes over, the adrenaline rushes, and as my mind is active again, thoughts pile on one another: she's moving fast, almost too fast; I've got to get my gun up, but I can't have her see me; I need to check her with the binoculars first; no time for binoculars, she's on the move; the gun's up but my heart is violently concussing; crank the scope up to 9, there's enough light for it; alright, she's in the sights and---she's a spike.
According to Mississippi Law, legal deer are: non-yearling does and bucks with at least 4 points on their antlers, a point being defined as any antler protuberance which would hold a wedding ring. A spike--as the name would tell you--is a non-legal buck.
At 7:20 I hear a rustle-and-crunch behind me and to the left. More squirrels, right? They'd been at it all weekend, charging and jumping throughout the woods. But something's off: whereas squirrels will make an unholy racket, the noise I hear now is modulated and restrained, as if resulting from a lean movement, with no energy wasted. Most of the last two years I'd spent hunting deer either in early fall, when leaves were still on the trees, or mid-winter, when everything is bare. I associate deer with silence. As well adapted as the animals are, they have to touch ground--and when the ground is covered with dead leaves, they've got to make some noise.
I am in the tree line, and it separates the ridge from the clearing, but behind me the trees have made one tumescent advance up the ridge. In that cropping is a buck carefully stepping between skinny maples and over logs. Sometimes deer will size up a log, pause, and jump, but this buck's movement is deliberate and incremental. Too many deer have been harvested over the last three days for him to make himself untowardly known.
My binoculars are in my hands and he is not a spike. I can't tell how big, but I can see that his antlers don't stick straight up but bow out--minimum four-point, maybe six-point, who knows? My binoculars are down, my gun is up, but I can't find him. He's left the forest out-growth and is in the ridge's waist-high grass. He appears, he disappears, he's slowly climbing the ridge. For some reason, I'm having the damndest time coordinating my real-world view and the tiny sliver viewable in my scope. In an instant, the deer is again in the clear, twenty yards from the ridgetop. This is my last chance. If he moves again he'll be covered by another clump of trees and then he'll be over the ridge. The gun is up, I find him in the sights, the safety is off, for some cosmically-obscure reason the deer has paused, back to me, and arched his head high, showing me as good a profile as I'll see, I pull the trigger.
I don't feel so much as hear the gun. With no conception of anything outside myself, I immediately refocus the scope on where the deer was--nothing to be seen. In itself, that's not unusual. In all likelihood the deer has been shot and will spend his last moments in mad flight.
Earlier in the morning I'd dropped my cell phone from the tree, so I climb down to text-message my uncle and my father. I get back up in the tree to position where the deer had been with any local landmarks. I am down the tree and in the ridge, climbing to the spot where the deer had been. The grass is depressed--obviously, I say, this is the reason why I'd suddenly seen him; he'd entered a clear spot.
And the spot is clear still. No blood, no fur, no deer. My dad arrives, so does my uncle. I get back in the tree to direct them. I'm back down and staring at the ground again. We ponder a little while longer and finally decide that the altitude had something to do with it.
Nobody mentions that my 91-year old grandfather had killed a deer on Friday in the same spot where his 23-year old grandson had missed one.
After a time, my grandfather comes back to our minds--at ninety-one, to be alive and to have killed a deer. As we say, it's a thing worth remembering.
My approach to hallway chaos, if it can be called a planned approach at all, is an ad-hoc plan. If the noise sounds like the beginnings of a fight, I will usually enter the hall and try to break it up. If someone is hailing someone else/themself/a teacher/a substitute/an imaginary friend/an alumnus/a stray dog, it's 50-50 whether I say something or not. If someone bangs on my door, the odds are 3 to 1 that I open the door and try to identify the backside of the perpetrator as he hustles away.
Here's the crucial point: how I deal with things in the hallway really depends on my mood. If I feel good about my job and my role at school, I'll be more likely to enforce discipline; if I am questioning my existence and examining the futility of banging one's head against a wall, I'm less likely to bother with the whole charade.
Now the twist: The days where I'm more likely to hate my life are exam days, program days, hold-classes-for-hours days, and the-principal's-not-here-and-there's-been-a-fight-and-we-in-the-office-have-no-idea-what-to-do-so-we'll-just-sit-on-our-hands days. On these same days are students the most likely to misbehave. So for better or worse, on the days when I'm most needed to enforce discipline, I'm the least motivated to do so.
You should probably join the Teacher Corps because you want to; it's hardly ever a good idea to--for two years--do a thing that's against your will.
You should probably join the Teacher Corps because you're looking for a change; make sure this is the change you're looking for, though.
You probably shouldn't join the Teacher Corps because you're looking to force a change in yourself; however you were before MTC, you will be the same way during, except more so.
You probably shouldn't join the Teacher Corps if you don't like black people; this job has plenty of potential to unbalance you, and if you start too far from the center you might slide off the board altogether. You can repeat the same advice for "rural areas," "white people with Southern accents," "the Lost Cause," and "very tepid and marked support for the president-elect."
So I started a garden outside my house. It's a raised garden, with cinder blocks lining the edges and a soil-fertilizer mix poured and spread inside. I built two plots, a smaller and larger one: the smaller plot is about 16x32 inches, with two tomato plants on opposite corners. Between the two tomatoes are two red bell peppers, staggererd to provide extra room for the plants to grow. The cinder blocks are turned so that the holes in the blocks face upwards. I've filled some of the holes with soil and planted mint, basil, a crookneck squash, and a geranium cutting. I've also put two full-size geraniums immediately outside of the plot across from the tomatoes since geraniums are known to keep nematoades (about whom I cannot expound) out of a garden.
The larger plot is around 32x48 inches. It is planted with collards, broccoli, and romaine lettuce. Three rows of three, staggered to provide more space to each plant, in order of collards-broccoli-lettuce from left-to-right. I planted these as small transplants, so I may need to expand this plot and move some of the vegetables as they grow.
The first plot had a rough start to life. I built it during my first sick day, on a Friday in late August before a storm. It was a dead-time for the vegetable market, after the late summer plantings and before the early fall season; Lowe's vegetable section was ragged. I found the least-bedraggled squash, tomatoes, and peppers and hoped for the best. Almost immediately after the planting, my garden was infested by little white flies, the sort that hides on the underside of leaves and slowly leaches the plant of its vital energy. My tomatoes had contracted either a leaf-mold or fungus at Lowe's and were struggling to fight both insect and fungal threats. The peppers were slow to grow, and shed leaves more quickly than they grew new ones. The squash were close to death; the white flies loved the squash, and their large leaves wilted and browned.
I called my mother, who had just completed a Master Gardener program in Texas. During July, she told me she had chased off some white flies by spraying them with a water/soap mix. I didn't have a spray-bottle, so I took the house's most powerful handsoap dispenser, mixed the water with the soap, and took to the flies. It's a little known fact, but hand-soap dispensers are very accurate at distances up to 1 inch, but wildly inaccurate outside of that. To save further embarassment, I will say only that the white flies weren't discouraged.
Having run through my ad hoc solutions, I went back to Lowe's and bought an insecticidal soap in a honest-to-god spray bottle. Unfortunately, the soap burned my plants and did nothing to discourage the white flies. Moreover, the soap bottle was emptied after two days' spraying. Left with an empty bottle, burned plants, and a burgeoning pest population, I was back at Lowe's a day later. I bought a two-gallon plant sprayer and a concentrated bottle of Neem Oil. I don't know what a neem is, but Mississippi State University's agricultural website (www.msucares.com - a fantastic website) had recommended the oil as an effective organic full-service pesticide (fungicide, micticide, and insecticide). My garden wasn't planned to be organic, but I didn't want to use heavy chemicals but as a last resort.
Two weeks later, the garden is fully healthy and pest free. The neem oil has run off the white flies and freed the plants to grow without impediment. One tomato, whose main stalk had endured severe trauma, has now sprouted a new stalk from the plant's base. My bell peppers have formed pre-pepper buds. My favorite tomato plant (the one that always looked like it was trying, even during the lean times) has put out the beginnings of flowers (and thus the beginnings of the fruit). One squash died early on, but the other has begun to take over the garden: it was planted originally in a cinder-block hole, but has grown out of that and snaked itself across the main garden.
With the second plot, the collard-broccoli-lettuce plot, it's too early to tell. The lettuce is doing well, but the weather has been too warm for these leafy greens, even with last week's cold snap. Caterpillers have proved themselves both resistant to the neem oil and enamoured of the collards. The battle never ends, right?
This year, I am more honest with my students: Their grades this year more accurately reflect their achievement than did their grades from last year (last year their grades were--during the first semester--too high); I communicate directions and instructions more clearly. More than either of these, however, I tell my students when their performance is unacceptable and what the results of this performance will be; if a student's lack of effort foreshadows failure, I don't hesitate to let him know. It takes a certain level of security within your school, intimacy with your student body, and confidence in your own ability to chastize a lazy student and tell him that if he doesn't improve, he will fail and remain in English I in the same room with the same teacher next year. Last year I couldn't say this. This year I can.
It's half motivation for the student and half catharsis for me.
I hate to say it, but I can't remember much about Day I of Year I. I don't consider myself one to repress memories, but I cannot tell you what happened.
However, since this is a required blog, I'll have to give it another go. If there was any difference between my first days two years running, it was in my tone of voice and stature. I only realized this year that 14-year-olds instinctively submit to adults in authority. Granted, many 14-year-olds will end up malcontents, and some are already past repair, but (for most) some innate deep-seated primal carburetor chokes off resistance in the presence of an old person with a dominant voice.
Last year, I didn't know who I was; this year, that old person was me.
It's an accomplishment to have gotten this far. It really is. But as Jon Z. says, "It'll only get harder." With that in mind, I want to take the road less traveled in order to give you some advice:
-----
So the first week was tough. You're drained, mentally and physically, and you've got to get up and do it again.
This job ain't really easy, but you didn't sign up for easy, right? Enough people have given you enough good advice. You need to remember that if you put your head down you'll get through this shit. Perseverance is your only card in this game. And you don't really have an alternative, do you?
It isn't Iraq. It isn't Georgia. You may feel miserable and worn out, but feeling sorry for yourself won't get you ready for tomorrow. I understand how tough it is, but you have to compartmentalize, and work, and grind out another day.
Another piece of advice is to remember that, for all your righteous indignation, you are a guest and a visitor to this part of the world. What's right in your district is RIGHT, whatever you or more enlightened people may believe to the contrary. Don't stick your foot in your mouth because you think you know how to do something better than someone who possesses more authority than you.
Your first job is to serve your students. Your second job is not to get your ass fired, so that you can continue to serve your students. Your third job is to represent MTC with class and dignity, so that we are allowed to place a new teacher in your position once you have moved on to a job where you're rewarded and recognized for your work.
One Conversation:
1.
-Well, I was in a relationship with a boy, but I think he was gay.
-When did you figure this out?
-During the aftermath.
-The aftermath? After you had sex with him?
-No. We didn't have sex.
-Without sex, there is no aftermath. It's just pre-algebra.
One Success and One Failure Story from the First Year
I am so oversaturated with reflection requests that it is now impossible for me--without some external and unrelated stimulus--to once again dredge up last years' memories. I read a Eudora Welty story about a husband who found a suicide note from his wife; she said she'd drowned herself in the river. He and a pack of friends borrowed a net to dredge the Pearl River, though it quickly became apparent that no one (least of all the husband) believed that the girl had really drowned herself. For some reason, they followed through with the charade, I guess because it was something to do. They enjoyed themselves, perhaps, but the idea of "getting together to do something" didn't justify their action, nor did it give it any meaning. They were just a set of folks doing a rather useless thing, but doing it nevertheless. On with the blog, right?
When Dr. Monroe asked for volunteers to run the summer clubs, I quickly volunteered to head up a Holly Springs Chess Club. My Simmons High Chess Club had been a big success during the year. Anywhere from 5-10 students stayed after school for two hours every Tuesday and Thursday to learn the game. At the year's start, maybe 2 people at Simmons High knew how to play chess. By year's end, 30-35 could move the pieces with some degree of authority, and 4 or 5 had become real, honest-to-god chess players. State chess competitions were always on these kids' minds--a thing which we weren't able to attend this year, but next year will be able to. The experience, as a whole, was a success (thus the blog).
The summer revealed the Holly High version to be something far different than I'd imagined: during its first incarnation, the club was 5 teachers, 1 student, and a hell of a lot of fun. Mr. E spent the 45 minutes whipping my ass, and the other teachers played each other and mentored our one student. After P.E. club was (rightly) canceled, we wound up with 7 more students and a bunch of checkerboards. The club became something I grew to hate: the students were not interested in playing chess, but in wasting my time, in leering at any females who entered, and in cursing under their breathes. It's the sort of adolescent shit that my chess club during the year did not have, because I kept the jackasses out; also, none of the jackasses would stay two hours after school to learn a white man's game from a white man. Being in a maladjusted chess club made me realize how much I missed MY chess club and how proud I was of my students who put in the time to learn the game.
Now to the failure story:
I've been told that the Delta's chemical fertilizers seep into the water supplies and into the peoples of the Delta, the effects of which supposedly explain the monstrously high early mortality rate. While the land does effect its citizens, I think this wive's tale goes wrong by using chemistry to explain the Delta's influence. There IS, though, a sort of gravitational pull that the Delta effects on its inhabitants, which changes mindsets as much as it does metabolisms.
After the last day of summer school, X, Y, and I visited a juke joint in Holly Springs. Driving east from the school, we took a right and left, drove under a (working?) railroad track, and parked in gravel to the left of the juke joint, to the left of the road. I was driving; I didn't pull into the juke joint the first time we passed it. I drove past, flipped a u-turn, and on the way back pulled into the parking lot. The shock of my first impression made me drive by and hope that, on the return trip, the joint looked different from south-to-north than it did from north-to-south.
It didn't, though. Ever read Dickens? Ever read Riis' "How the Other Half Lives"? Well, neither have I. As best I know, it's one of those books that shows up in history books ("The Jungle", "Bleak House", "Paradise Lost") but no one's ever read, though particularly influential people will have bought and displayed it for dramatic and social and political effect.
Nevertheless, I don't have a desire to read the book after having been in this juke joint (and after having taught in H-dale this year). A fat black man exhausted by sitting sitting out front; a passed out black lady in an easy chair ; pooltable, jukebox, stove, and cooler strewn inside. Ubiquitous roaches--when you move a stool, when you pull a napkin, when the black lady drops her purse on the table to make change, the damn things scamper in all directions.
They weren't the cigar-sized roaches that fly and buzz and scare the dickens out of you. They were the small, half-cigarette sized buggers that are too fast and too unobtrusive to physically represent the decay which they should symbolize. (Ever read Moby Dick? Where Melville extemporizes on the genus and species of whales?) The big roaches, while disgusting in appearance, are mostly harmless. 9 times from 10 you will catch sight of them outside, scurrying away from light or flying into your glass windows. They live primarily outside and eat decomposing plant matter. For all their girth, they're harmless and probably helpful. The little roaches, however, spell trouble. They, as best I understand, have hitched rides with migrating tribes since the Crescents became Fertile. If you see the big roaches in your house, you've left a door open too long; If you see the little roaches inside your house, you'd best check your Cheerios, chips, and sink cabinet corners. The little ones are signs of infestation, and feast on irresponsible human cleanliness practices. They're also nearly impossible to eradicate. Once you've erred in leaving week-old leftovers on your counter-top for a fortnight, the roaches will eternally remind you of your mistake (kind of like the Clap).
The little buggers were everywhere in the juke joint. We bought a couple of 24oz bottles from our strung-out hostess. The juke box ate 75 of my cents. I couldn't knock a billiards ball in a hole to save my life.
And I was viscerally uncomfortable the whole time I was in the juke joint. But it wasn't the filth, or the roaches, or the wrecks of humans serving us, or the hungry juke box, or my ten-thumb operation of a pool cue that bothered me.
After we left the joint and I had time to think about it, I realized that I was uncomfortable because I felt out of place. I was a white boy in a black joint. I had my culture, they had theirs, and I had no business pretending that the two of them intersected.
A year ago, the idea of being a white boy in a black joint would have exhilarated me; last summer's teacher corps visit to Club Ebony was a culmination of what I imagined the Delta would be about ("I played guitar on the same stage as BB King!!!" etc.). Myself especially, but many people I believe when they are in college pretend to live in a post-racial world; they (and I) not only make the mistake of thinking that this post-racial ideal can be exported, but also delude themselves into thinking that the ideal IS the real world. (is it any wonder that Barack Obama's support is strongest and most virulent on college campuses?) In college and covering blues standards with like-minded folks, a perfect pilgrimage for me was to rub shoulders in Mississippi with the black folks I'd read and sung about and listened to. What an idea, huh?
A year's reality in the Delta changed me. I don't know when, and I don't know how, but I have come to see and feel the Delta's racial demarcations. This life was for me; that life was for my students and my students' parents. Part of this is understandable: I have no business hanging out in a disreputable (even for black folks) juke joint in the same town where I am to represent the paragon of respectable education, culture, and restraint. As a teacher I know that the life I can live is circumscribed by my responsibilities to the community. In a way, we're like NBA players--I remember Charles Barkley saying, "I'm not a role model" after he'd thrown a man through a plate-glass bar window, but no matter what he said, kids looked up to him. No matter how young I am, or how I feel about it, I have to present an image consistent with...well, "the Man", if that means respectable moderation. I have no business being radical or paradigm-shifting; my actions, if emulated, need to produce results in the business world.
But the respectable/disreputable dynamic doesn't explain why I was uncomfortable in the Holly Springs juke joint. I was uncomfortable because I was crossing a racial/cultural line that I felt like I had no business stepping across. I was bucking a racial reality that I wanted to succumb to. The separate-but-equal, emphasis on "separate", had impressed itself upon me.
This is a failure story for me because I cannot cogently wrap my head around the experience. I don't know if I should be abhorred that the Delta's (and Mississippi's) racial status-quo has infiltrated my consciousness, or if I should be proud that I am no longer acting like a sight-seeing ignorant Yankee who would visit for a day to rub shoulders and flippantly ignore the painfully complex racial history of the state. And if there's a third way to see it, I don't see it yet.
I simply don't know.
Evaluating My Performance During the Year:
1. Select a "learning goal" where the students were successful. Tell why:
Participles. By the end of the year most of them could identify participles and participial phrases. Why? Because I labored with it; I spent hours and days and weeks on participles, incorporating them into a thousand different lessons in a thousand different ways. Eventually the repetition effectuated some learning.
2. Select a "learning goal" where the students were not successful. Tell why:
My students were not any good at higher-order thinking skills. Why not? Because I have not found a good way to teach those sorts of things; in order to effectively teach skills like this, one of two things has to occur. You either have to:
1. have a school that encourages outside-the-box thinking
or
2. know what the hell you're doing as a teacher.
Neither one is true in my case, so teaching integration and analysis is still not easy. I guess it's all about repetition, the same way it is with participles.
3. Give a general overview of your year in order to make sure you don't get a bad grade. Tell why:
By the end of the year I was teaching things; It took a while to establish my classroom in such a way to allow me to do my paid job. At the end, I was teaching "Romeo and Juliet", and I was (no small accomplishment) teaching it. Everything you need to know about the English language (and about interaction between people) is found in Shakespeare. To (semi-)effectively teach a real masterwork gave me the feeling that I was inching towards being a real teacher and not just another jackass sitting in a classroom to serve some ulterior motives.
Now, with my freshmen, I didn't get anywhere close to teaching Shakespeare. We were still remediating during the 4th 9 weeks: phrases and clauses? plot and setting elements? having students say, "We didn't know there was more than nouns and verbs"?
I don't really know what else to say. I've already had to write another "end-of-year" evaluation blog. I'm sort of tired of talking about my last year. I'd like just to teach another.
