candy

Shligityshlog almost tricks you into thinking a swear word is on the horizon, no?

Pig Candy is a favorite holiday delight.  For those of you who aren't familiar with this simple recipe, you're a mere twenty minutes from rapture--and a heart attack.  Take a pound of bacon and lay it in a cake pan.  Smash a bunch of brown sugar on it and bake at 350 for twenty minutes.  There are many variations of Pig Candy, I have discovered, but none appeals to me so much as the original recipe.  You can add pecans or use honey or maple syrup in place of brown sugar.  But come on.  Brown sugar.  How come you do taste so good???

Every year I try to think of a way to thank my boss for putting  up with me.  I can be pretty challenging.  So can he.  We struggle as former friends and equals who have changed over to a boss/employee relationship in which he is a football coach and I am an academic, and in which we don't always see eye-to-eye about the priorities of a given situation in the school.  We have a shared a lot of wonderful and heartbreaking moments, including the births of several of our children and personal tragedies such as the death of a parent and the development of autism in a child.  We've developed from relatively inexperienced young toughs into tried professionals and we've shared a lot of happiness and sorrow over the same kids in our building.  Because of the small size of the building, our entire staff shares in the victories and losses of our kids.  There have been some funny moments, such as being scared witless and unthinkling punching him in the gut (when we were equals of course) and watching him stand up and bang his head into a locker so hard that little birds and stars flew around his head in a circle so that I stifled a laugh and he said through gritted teeth, "No, go ahead."  (Never mind the funny moments involving my embarrassment.)  There have been scary moments when a kid was threatening suicide, when a staff member was suffering and when someone was hurt in the building.  The grossest moment of all was seeing him put on a plastic glove and peel the tip of a kid's finger from a door that had pinched it off and then drive away with it to match it up with the fingerless kid who was already at the emergency room.  There are so many stories, but where was I?  Oh yes, Pig Candy.  This year we cemented our relationship with the whopperest whopper of a yelling match we've every had.  Things were thrown and one of us, (though not until he left) actually crumpled to the floor.  Still, it is only the heartiest of boss/employee relationships that bears one of those and is willing to meet for a mending session three days later, where both parties feel sorry and are quick to move on. 

Let us depart from this homage to such a long and well-tested relationship here to speak of something much more shallow.  That would be the two new teachers in the building this year.  Both have taught officially less than a year and one has already been part of a rumor about my impending pregnancy (much exaggerated) and therefore not made a good impression with me.  The other is a perfect gentleman of 24.  If I were to guess, raised Catholic, with the manners any mother would be proud of (and these are pretty high standards right here) and meticulous work habits.  Furthermore, work ethic is beyond reproach and his wardrobe is certainly more savvy than any coach in the building.  I saw him walking out in a 3/4 length wool coat recently and was frankly, stunned, to witness such fashion sense in a gentleman this far north. It's been my role with this young man to think of him as rather a boy since he is so new to the profession and because he looks extraordinarily young, even for his age.  Yet over the past months, he has really grown on me as so few men in the building actually have...grooming habits...and read regularly...and so on.  It was just a couple of weeks ago that he showed up on a Friday with a bit of stubble and it occurred to me that if he took off his shirt and leaned into the shadow with his hand to his chin just so, he'd make a nice Abercrombie and Fitch model.

How can I ever appropriately thank my boss for placing such a nice man and coincidentally delicious piece of eye candy right across the hall from me?

Get out the bacon and brown sugar.

it's been a while

and so much has happened that I barely know where to start.  I decided the color of the blog, though deep and rich, also too much brought to mind something rotten in Denmark.  I kept thinking of Lady Macbeth and needing to go wash my hands.  Further, I decided to lighten up with titles and airs and such, and while there is no version of "bloggetyblog.blogspot.com" remotely available (must not be an original thought), there certainly was http://www.shligityshlog.blogspot.com/ and that's where you'll find me from this point forth.  Perhaps it will help me keep the tone a big lighter.  I haven't felt a bit light these days, what with Minnesota winter bringing on my typical blues, weight gain, missing my mother, a teen pregnancy, staff spats, neighborhood house fires, and a pre-pubescent son apparently going full-blown pubescent.  A week or two ago, he went from the child who had been born seemingly out of a storybook (excepting long and painful labor and delivery) who had transformed into a full-on jerk.  Am I allowed to say that?  I wasn't going to until he broke up with his perfectly sweet girlfriend by sending her a (private) message on facebook.  Now, before I air any further dirty laundry, let me just say that the only person more protective of this boy than me is his father, who has lately been protecting him from me.  The boy and I bonded early and deeply and yet, of late, he's done to me exactly what seventeen years worth of weeping mothers could not have prepared me for.  He's tossed me away, emotionally speaking, with nary a word nor glance, and along with me, apparently any consideration for my professional environment since 53 minutes a day he is one of my students.  Topping it all off, he decided to split his English homework with his best friend last week and then exchange answers.  In his opinion, this was sharing the burden.  In my opinion, this was cheating, and he was promptly sent off to Saturday school and poked with sharp stick until his gall bladder became visible.  Skip the gall bladder part; I called his father from school, panicking.  "You be the teacher this time; I'll be the parent."  That night, I was torn when I heard his dad lighting into him.  As angry as I was at my son, I also wanted to protect him from his father's anger. The classic Clash of the Titans has begun: a boy and his father in their power struggle as a boy asserts his independence toward becoming a man, a man struggles to mold his son into a safe and moral man with a standard-of-living better than his own.  How predictable could we be?  This was my first week of being forty, his last month of being twelve.  If he were seventeen, I'd feel so much better about this.

My father thought the entire situation was hilarious.  My father had been a policeman, but might as well have been a fundamentalist Baptist.  He literally witnessed the worst outcome of everything that can go wrong with a teenager and was determined to keep his own children safe from it.  This was not cool when he pulled over my own boyfriend, his future son-in-law, riding three-wheeled ATV's illegally in town; now Dad could laugh as his former nightmare received his just desserts.  Yet my hairdresser also found my dilemma comical and I was laughing too as I described it to her.  She then told me that she was caught cheating on her eighth grade math final and was horrified later that spring when she attended a party with her parents and her math teacher was there!  Would the teacher tell?  I nearly rose out of the chair and ran out of the salon with my hair half-colored.  Who dares cheat on a final?!  And why hadn't the math teacher ALREADY called home???  Because of a parent like me, perhaps?  Sigh.  It's time to dig out that old classic that got me through my most painful professional cheating scandal, Why Kids Lie.  It will help me put my son's behavior in perspective.  And then I need to get on with life, mine.  Clearly he needs guidance, but maybe this umbrella parent needs to shelter herself for a little while.

My Bitches, Part Two

A friend of mine told me she really liked the title of my original post, "My Bitches."  Instead of thinking of it as "My Complaints," "My Nasty Things I've Done," or "Other Bitches I Know and Hang Out With," she told me she had a funny image of three slightly shorter versions of myself that worked as sort of henchman--or women.  I've been running with this image as far as I can go.  The Bitches are definitely the three witches from MacBeth and they are going to become regular characters on this blog.  "Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble," they chant over their special brew before doom visits the castle.  I haven't yet  mentioned that I am such a fan of Shakespeare that I become embarrassingly teary-eyed at the beauty of the language all too frequently when reading "Romeo and Juliet" each spring.  If, right about now, you're think Shakespeare is too high-minded and cerebral or to put it in more potent language, just for nerds, I would argue that he's worth the work.  Look, people, the greatest writer the language has ever seen should present a challenge.  Don't be like a sixteen year old, all too unwilling to sweat a little.  Get some notes to help you through and if your high school English teacher did you the disservice of not being passionate enough about ole Will to impart ye with some enthusiasm, follow this recipe:

Round about the couldron go:
In the poisones entrails throw.
Toad,that under cold stone
Days and nights has thirty-one
Sweated venom sleeping got,
Boil thou first in the charmed pot.
Double,double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the cauldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog,
Adder's fork and blindworm's sting,
Lizard's leg and howlet's wing.
For charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
Double,double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and couldron bubble.

I am pretty sure that was a fenny snake in a hell-broth reduction I had as the Soup of the Day down in the cafeteria today. 

Scale of dragon,tooth of wolf,
Witch's mummy, maw and gulf
Of the ravin'd salt-sea shark,
Root of hemlock digg'd in the dark,
Liver of blaspheming Jew;
Gall of goat; and slips of yew
silver'd in the moon's eclipse;
Nose of Turk, and Tartar's lips;
Finger of birth-strangled babe
Ditch-deliver'd by the drab,-
Make the gruel thick and slab:
Add thereto a tiger's chaudron,
For ingrediants of our cauldron.
Double,double toil and trouble,
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

Gall of goat is pretty sick.  I've seen it.  We once had a dwarf goat suffering from an unknown digestive ailment whom one over-zealous emergency veterinarian took too much to heart.  After running the required series of (expensive) tests in the middle of the night, she thought little of tubing our little darling and sucking the yellow and green offending fluid out of the animal's gut with her mouth, spitting it into the lawn, sucking and spitting repeatedly until the goatlet's tummy was empty.  The beast rallied, but passed later that night.  That vet is one bitch I would recruit. I would have her collect goat gall in a cup for me to sneak into Mrs. Puff's coffee.

What is a tiger's chaudron,  I wonder?  Sounds dirty to me.  Unfortunately duty calls, so I'll have to get back to you on that.  You may have noticed that entries are coming less often.  I've managed to pick up a side job, as teachers and many other people are finding necessary these days.  I'm grateful for it and a little busier.  Until next time, be a good knave and try Sonnet 29.

Think It Through

Covering detention today for Mrs. Puff, I found myself alone with Duke, an academically unmotivated and quite likeable freshman.  "I don't have a thing to do," he grinned.

"You can get a jump start on the first draft of your persuasion paper," I grinned back.  This week we had chosen topics, written thesis statements and collected notes on opposing arguments.

About twenty minutes later, Duke asked if he could change sides on his topic.  "Sure," I said, thinking to myself how bright I am for putting flexibility ahead of structure.  After all, changing one's mind based on evidence is so...sensible and educated.  "What was your topic again?"  I asked absent-mindedly.

"2012.  I was going to argue that all these theories are bogus.  But after I collected all this information, I'm convinced the world really is going to end in 2012."  He went back to his work, absentmindedly bobbing his head to the tune on the imaginary ipod playing in his ears.  At the end of detention, he packed up his papers and grinned, "Thanks, Mrs. Chatham."

This is what it means to be fifteen, I realize: in the frame of one hour to go from planning a long and rich life, to believing the world will end in two years and being okay with just planning the weekend.    

Pause

Let me put "My Bitches, continued" on hold.  Trying to find really good examples, I have very few I am able to share.  They are either too petty, too typical or not really bitchy, some even too funny.  Trying to conjure up memories of really nasty, mean actions has brought more pranks to mind than anything.  I've thought of a lot of bad behavior, but none really so much worse than what "normal" people do.  I do think teachers have their own hang ups and are solitary, competitive, lonely and disfunctional, but otherwise essentially good creatures and I guess, lovely and merry little pranksters.  I can't wait to share a series of fun memories with you, but first a word from the Insight Center for Community Economomic Development which this year released a report called "Lifting as We Climb: Women of Color, Wealth, and America's Future."  According to the Utne Reader, the information in this report was picked up in one NPR story, two opinion columns and one newspaper article.  Yawn.  I did as I read this, sleepily dozing in my bed one night this week.  Shortly before my eyes popped out of my head. 

Wealth--as defined in this survey--is not income, but assets minus debts.  Says the article ("Wealth Gaps Yawn--And So Do the Media"; Utne Reader, September-October, 1010; unattributed):

In the United States, single black women have a median wealth of just $100, while Hispanic women come in at $120.  The median wealth of black men is $7,900; white women and men are better off ($41,500 and $43,800 respectively).  Looking at people in their chief working years, ages 36-49, the gap grows even more cavernous: White women own about 60 percent of white men's median wealth, which surges to about $70,000.  Women of color, meanwhile, have a median wealth of $5...(which is) .05 percent of  the wealth owned by men of color in the same age group ($11,000.)

Discussing these facts with upperclassmen today, my mostly white class was astounded.  One student raised his hand to state that black women have $5 median wealth because they list all their assets in their husbands' names, "like my mom does." 

"That could be," I tried to smile but I knew it was stiff. I was struggling. "What about the possibility of the single mother with multiple children whose boyfriends have left her to raise the kids?"

"Bingo," responded the only black student in the room.

"Oh," said one.

"I never thought of that," said another.  They are saying this, even as many of them have experienced it themselves.

"She might graduate from high school if she is lucky but she most likely won't make it to college.  If she can get a job, how will she work with 2 or 3 or more children?"

"She'll get child support," answer two different students at the same time.

"Will she?  Will the boyfriends pay child support?"

We continued to discuss the Five Dollar Woman for quite a long time.  We acknowledged that we were making grand generalizations and that stereotypes are dangerous.  We talked about what a median is and what we might find on both sides of it and how individuals vary.  But we were also forced to acknowledge the Five Dollar Woman.  Significantly, the students didn't seem to need to assign blame. We know she might be on welfare; in fact, the "w" word came up.  No one seemed to be jealous of her welfare check.  We didn't discuss whether she smokes cigarettes, drinks too much or shoots heroin.  No one said she shouldn't have babies or have so many, and no one said she shouldn't have sex if she can't afford babies, and no one said she should use birth control.  No one said it is $11,000 Man's Fault or $70,000 Peoples' Faults or President Obama's Fault or those damn Republicans' faults.  They didn't say it was the fault of public education or Five Dollar Grandma. 

Maybe it was because we'd just finished reading If the World Were a Village.  Students had been shocked to learned that in a mock up of the global village scaled down to 100 people, 50 of them are hungry part or all of the time.  They gasped audibly when I read the next line: "At least 20 more are significantly malnourished." I knew a few of them would go hungry tonight. 

They do not judge or pity Five Dollar Woman.  They feel compassion.  They find it unacceptable that she exists and they wonder why they haven't heard more about her.  I've been wondering about this myself. 

My Bitches

I have a host of personal issues.  I want to preface this entry by saying I am okay with that.  I have compared notes with a lot of people on this topic and the general statements I am about to make are not unique to me.  Sure, I need medication, I come from a messed-up family, I'm probably part of a messed-up family right now (although I'd like to think it's pretty cool actually,) and I've got a skeleton or two hanging next to my now way-too-small (but too-expensive-to-give-away) lucky sage green Talbot's interview suit with coordinating silk paisley vest, size 6.  Sometimes I just look at the waist on that baby and think, "Damn."

Today's topic is Bitches in the Profession.  And there are a lot of them.  Educators are people who start out wanting to help others, most rarely waivering from that goal, I believe.  We come from families where we were needed an inordinate amount and thus, we feel most comfortable being needed.  We are also people who thrive on attention.  We need to find it somewhere: on the field or track or court, through positive feedback from our bosses, or in Hollywood.  Since all of our bosses are authentically too busy to baby us through the day, that leaves only the coaches feeling fulfilled.  The rest of us are left to compete for the boss' tiny bit of attention and then to make ourselves feel better by tearing each other down.

Well, this is one of my philosophies.  I am not entirely sure if it's our profession or human beings in general, but outside of the time we spend with children (and I am 100% sincere about of our devotion to kids) we seem like an unusually competitive and snarky bunch. 

The meanest thing I've ever done is yell at Mrs. Puff in front of her class and make her cry.  (See previous post called "1984")  Not cool.  I don't know another teacher who has done that.  I did get a hearty pat on the back from the tech guy, but I'm really not proud of it.  I've walked out of a couple of meetings and I don't feel sorry about that.  I walked out on principle, and only after exhausting every other possible avenue of communication, reasonable and unreasonable.  I got in much more trouble for walking out of those two meetings than for yelling at Mrs. Puff.  Other things I've been in trouble for were total missteps or even what I consider not bad form at all.  For example, once I had a student who was so high as to literally be delusional in my classroom.  The A.D. and I had her in the office with the exact amount and identity of what she had ingested within ten minutes.  My principal gave us both a potent tongue-lashing since we had locked the door of the small office we were in while we talked to her and kept saying, "Just a minute," while various people knocked and interrupted.  She was talking and we weren't about to stop long enough for the principal to come in and spook the shit out of her, at which point she would freeze up and probably pass out.  "This was a chemical situation," he spoke slowly and clearly as if I were leotarded.  "What if she had a medical reaction?  What if she had needed an ambulance?"  I looked back at him, dazed and exhausted from the passing rush of adrenaline and wondered if he was leotarded.  Yes, I thought, in shock.  I had genuinely expected to be praised.  She was 500 yards closer to the door and you would have been able to tell the EMT's exactly what she had taken and when.  Apparently basic CPR training and a college diploma still left me unable to recognize a heart attack behind a closed door.

Alas, it's dinner time.  Children can't wait until bedtime snack for nutrition.  My own Vengeance Bitchiness will have to wait several days, but let's talk about someone else's nasties tomorrow.  One of you could be a priest, after all, and I might accidently be saying confession.  I don't want to break my twenty-seven year guilty streak.

A Kohn that Hits Home

I'm looking at a blog called Yellow Songbird and feeling very underwhelmed by my small attempt here in the blogosphere.  I wonder why everything I write or try to enter has to be in the center section and I can't put anything along the sides?  I wonder if my entries are too long and/or sentimental.  I wonder if one has to know the people in them to really appreciate the stories.

I find truth truly stranger than fiction and the real difficulty with writing about it is that it is so strange as to be barely believable.  All those crying mothers at conferences, carrying on about their seventeen year old sons who won't talk to them anymore, they are so cliche...until one sits across from them and have to construct a response.  At least they are cliche enough that one can polish an answer until it gets to be respectable and a little comforting.

I read a wonderful article by Alfie Kohn today that summarizes my feelings about the "Education Crisis."   I heard Alfie Kohn speak 15 or so years ago, and I was a little disenchanted when I followed up with his book No Contest.  Sure, a less competitive atmosphere would be healthier, but he didn't seem very grounded in my reality.  The world sure is competitive.  He seemed very Ivory Tower, this fellow.  It didn't matter how well-reasoned his arguments; they couldn't argue with rural Minnesota.  In any case, as I read his article today, and the embedded article by Maja Wilson, all my frustration with easy answers and labels and formulas and benchmarks and general lack of faith in education are explained.  I really don't think my union is that great but I do think it's necessary and I know it's not the problem.  If you have doubts, please take a moment to read one of these articles with an open mind.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alfie-kohn/operation-discourage-brig_b_777148.html

Finally, I'm putting out a call for topics.  What did you always want to know about your teacher, behind-the-scenes in a school or the profession in general?  If you could be a fly on the wall, what would you ask?  Since I am writing anonymously, the sky is really the limit.