I Speak American

"Why are there two words for 'friend,' ami and copain?"​

It's Friday, and I'm feeling ornery. "I don't know. Why do the Alaskans have eight different words for snow?"​

"They have eight different words for snow? What are they?"​

"I don't know. I don't speak Aleut."​

"People in Alaska DON'T SPEAK ENGLISH?!" A general outcry, which quickly disintegrates into multiple animated dialogues. "So Eskimos aren't American?" "I thought that was illegal!" "What about Sarah Palin?"

This is beyond the scope of my job description, I think as I draw a crude map of North America on the board and prepare to explain the relative size of Alaska, our reasons for acquiring it and a history of the people who lived there long before our ancestors made the treacherous journey across the Atlantic.​ 

But here I go anyway.​

The Perils of Modernity

As part of my music organization project, I went through boxes and boxes of books given to me by a friend from church when she moved to a retirement community.  Stuck between them was a paper she had written for an English class in 1960:

Living in the middle of the twentieth century seems to be characterized primarily by one factor: Speed.  Everyone is in a hurry to do things, see things, go somewhere, or run away from something. Often one who merely sits and meditates is considered to be slightly wacky because he is not “on the go.” Everyone seems to be consumed by a feverish desire to go so that it has been increasingly difficult for people to relax and to learn to relax.

Having a sense of humor and being able to recognize and enjoy good humor is a primary asset in coping with the speed, pressures and tensions of modern life.  Therefore, it is important for every teacher to do what she is able to do in developing a sense of humor in her pupils.

True then and now.  Bravo, Miss Mary.

Fun with Words

At the Convention, sitting in yet another fascinating seminar.  (Not sarcasm there.  I am really enjoying it.)

Thought you might like to play around with this new tool, which apparently has already made the rounds among the cool English teachers: it's called Wordle.

Basically, you just type in a bunch of words -- a story, some ideas, etc. -- and the program randomizes the arrangement, but uses the frequency of repeated words to determine their size; thus, a common word will appear larger, while a less common one will be smaller.  I used the Gettysburg Address for mine:

Gettysburg



You can play around with the arrangement, colors, fonts, etc., and ask it to ignore certain words (it automatically leaves out conjunctions, articles, etc.)

The teacher who presented this explained that it was useful as a character mapping tool.  Each student would list three descriptive adjectives for a character -- the narrator of Rebecca, for instance.  Many used the obvious "wife" and "sad."  Some said "plain" or "replacement."  It was a great way to do a character analysis without even breaking a sweat.  A fun program, too!

Remember the Ladies.

So said Abigail Adams in her famous letter to her husband, the President: "Remember all men would be tyrants if they could."

As husbands are wont to do, he laughed her off, saying, "We know better than to repeal our masculine systems."

My American Lit class read this the other day, and rather than take it as an opportunity to talk about women's rights (the obvious answer, and one I am frankly sick of hearing about) I wanted to discuss the honorable tradition of speaking out about a cause, even if it's nearly hopeless that anything would happen.  I assigned them a brief reflection: write a letter to the President asking him to remember the __________, inserting the name of a group they thought needed an advocate.

Their answers were fascinating.  They wrote about abused children and animals, teenagers ("We get a bad rap -- give us a break!") and the middle class ("Some of us are just trying to make a decent living.")  They shared their outrage and despair quite willingly.  It was a good discussion.

I didn't answer the question in front of them; I prefer not to let my opinions influence the direction of their thought, even though we frequently disagree.  But I'm sure you know what I would have said.  Remember the Armenians.  Because you promised to. Because genocide will not go away.  Because I'd really like to prove Hitler wrong.

Field Trip: The Newseum

They're a lot of work.  I mean, a LOT of work.  Finding substitutes, preparing lesson plans.  Researching transportation, costs and rules.  Collecting money, submitting purchase orders.  The sort of menial busywork I detest more than anything.

But.  BUT.  Meeting in the school lobby early on a Friday morning, and then wickedly, gleefully, walking OUT.  Waiting for the train in the crisp fall air.  Talking to your students about their college plans, favorite football players, your shared love of pulled pork and dislike of overzealous air-conditioning systems.  Letting slip a sympathetic, "That sucks," and not realizing it until four or five sentences later.  Feeling not like teacher and student, but like humans -- just humans out for a day of fun.

The Newseum is incredibly well-designed and boasts more than a dozen interactive, dynamic exhibits.  My students said gleefully, as we left, "That did NOT feel like a museum!"  We played a game about ethics; they got to get in front of a live camera and read the teleprompter; we watched countless short and long film segments, read gripping accounts of reporting as it merged with personal lives, searched databases of Pulitzer Prize-winning photographs and journalists killed in the line of duty, and more than once were overcome by emotion while reading about or re-experiencing a historical event.  Case in point: watching a documentary about sports coverage, I got choked up hearing the TV announcer squalling, "The RED SOX are WORLD CHAMPIONS!"  And we all know how I feel about sports.

I visited about a month ago in preparation for the trip, took copious notes, and made up a four-page handout with trivia to collect during the trip and writing prompts to respond to for homework.  Between that visit and yesterday's, about four hours each, I think I saw just about everything, though I barely scratched the surface of the wealth of information in each exhibit.  I'm seriously considering a membership.  (For families, that's the only way it would be affordable, at $20 a pop for tickets.)

My colleague and fellow chaperone took a photo of us at one of the exhibits, a story about the Berlin Wall that included several sections of the actual wall.  The East German side was bleak and blank, but the West German side was filled with angry, playful graffiti.  I wish I could publish it here, but for privacy reasons I don't want to put photos of my students up.  You'll just have to imagine it: we stood, smiling, relaxed, having a great Friday full of ideas and freedom.  That's what field trips are all about.

Terror, Infamy and War

Today classes ended early because of a special schedule.  Restless, I decided to drive to DC to visit the Newseum, a museum dedicated to journalism.  I wanted to take my students there, but after looking at the website, I decided I should plan the visit to help them make the best use of their time.  Rob, slammed with work this weekend, declined my invitation, so I set out on my own, in the rain, my wiper blades slashing as my thoughts fumed along a parallel track.

Suddenly, in the distance, I saw movement on an overpass.  As I approached, I saw a tank and several servicemen in uniform, one of them waving a huge American flag.  All around me, a symphony of horns shouted a greeting, accompanied by flashing lights.  A flood of recognition washed over me: how could I have forgotten?  I wanted to hug those servicemen, or at least to wave to them, but I knew I was moving too fast for them to detect the motion.  So I honked instead, adding to the glorious cacophony.

My memories of that awful day are so intense, so clear, it could have been a week ago and not eight years.  Shock, pain, confusion -- and fear, fear so real it twisted deep into the pit of my stomach, where it would sit for weeks afterward.  We didn't know what was happening.  We didn't know when it would end, or if it would end.  We only knew how fundamentally our existence had been altered.  Nothing would be the same after that day.

I spent most of September 11th in the company of some complete strangers.  I was at school, checking e-mail between classes and trying to piece together a logical proof for the existence of God.  I'm not kidding, I was this close to it when another student ran over to my kiosk and grabbed my arm.  "The President has closed down the school," she said.  "The Twin Towers are down."

Annoyed, I tried to make sense of her words.  So, classes were canceled? And why did it matter to me if lower Manhattan was out of communication?  She ran off to another table, and before I finished my sentence I skeptically opened a new window and clicked to the front page of the New York Times.  That image will never leave me.

They herded us out of the library and into the chapel, where they were starting a mass.  The college of Cardinals had been assembled at the theology school across the street, so the Basilica was packed full of important people.  This frightened me, especially after I had called my friend Tim, the only person I knew in DC, and he didn't mince words: "I think this is an all-out war.  They could be dropping bombs any moment.  We need to get out of here."  The campus was officially locked down, but I slipped away and over to the house of a couple he knew, where we stayed all afternoon watching TV and praying and drinking vodka.  These strangers quickly became friends: sitting on their roof, Colette shyly told me she was pregnant, a tiny miracle amid the ugliness of the day.  We toasted their unborn son.  Three years later, when their newborn daughter was pulled from the waters of baptism, slippery and wriggling and wet, they would put her in my arms, and we were officially family.

There are more memories: hours later, finally getting to talk with my dear friend in New York after a day of lost and busy signals; days later, celebrating my twenty-first birthday in the bleakest of years; weeks later, going out for dinner with a group that included a young man named Rob.  The fear started to fade; the bonds between strangers fell away along with it.

When I began teaching, I used to spend a few minutes at the beginning of each class on the 11th talking about what the day had meant, sharing memories and praying for the lost and the survivors.  But last year I realized my students were too young now to remember much of anything on that day.  They had only been six or seven years old.  They remembered their parents being sad, but they did not feel the earth shudder beneath them as their parents did.  As I did.  It was too far back for them.  And for me, it is still so clear.  It might have happened yesterday.

I know, I know . . .

It's only an MSNBC survey.  But seeing these statistics just galls me.  Please vote for the just recognition of the genocide that inspired Hitler to ponder extermination of the Jews with the famously chilling question, "Who, after all, remembers the Armenians?"

If you really want to know what happened to the Armenians, there is plenty of historical evidence out there, in addition to memoirs and movies that have powerfully portrayed the disastrous results of sweeping these events under the rug.  I take comfort in knowing this President will do the right thing.  But still, ignorance continues to spread.  An entire generation of young Turkish men and women have been raised to believe the death of more than a million people was justified; when I visited the country a few years ago, they all said, smilingly, "We have no problem with the Armenians!"   A nice thought, but pretty depressing, considering how few are left to live out this problem-free existence in their former homeland.

My greatest hope, for all the children God puts in my life?  That they will have the courage to acknowledge evil wherever they see it, regardless of the political or social implications.  That they won't let us remain silent for a century after the next atrocity takes place.  Because, unfortunately, I'm sure there will be a next atrocity.  There always is.