February: Burn Out Season February 16, 2008
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It was Valentine’s Day, and Karla, a seventh grade girl with a loud laugh and a sharp wit, was staying after class. She had been talking during the warm up, and her punishment was to spend ten minutes with me after school working on her reading log. Finally her time was up.
“It’s Valentine’s Day, Mister.”
“I know,” I said. “And I gave you the gift of knowledge.”
“Did you keep the receipt?”
Touché.
The next day she was working on her warm up and she stopped me while walking around the classroom.
“Hey Mister, when are we going to get those papers back? The ones we did on the computer?”
I have had those papers for almost a month now, and they don’t seem to be getting any closer to being graded. There are over 150 expository essays to read, comment on, grade, and return–and frankly I hope they get lost in an unfortunate accident involving matches and kerosene.
“I’m taking my time with them,” I said.
A few minutes later I came back to find that she had not completed the warm up and was painting her nails instead.
“Where’s the warm up?” I asked.
“I’m taking my time with it.”
That’s the spirit of the age. I’ve been sick for about two weeks straight, and my speeches about determining the mood of a poem or analyzing setting are frequently interrupted by long bouts of hacking up phlegm. It’s burn out season, and I’m feeling the heat. As our two-year Teach for America commitment draws to a close, some of my friends are planning on leaving the profession next year. I probably won’t, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t many, many days when I want to. Teaching seventh and eighth grade can be very draining, and my energy is running low. Who signed me up for this? Did they keep the receipt?
Is it warm in here, or is that just Obama Fever? February 3, 2008
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My first period journalism class always starts the same way: I play a 3-5 minute video clip off CNN.com, and we talk about world events. My students have been following the primary season pretty closely, and some strong opinions have emerged. If my 28 journalism students determined the outcome of the presidential race, the democrats wouldn’t have much to worry about in November—here’s the current classroom poll:
Mitt Romney: 0
John McCain: 0
Mike Huckabee: 0
Hillary Clinton: 4
Barack Obama: 24
If I polled their parents, the Hillary count would be much higher, but the democratic tilt would remain. Very broadly speaking, the community’s view is that Republicans represent powerful people who have little interest in the issues they care about. According to a recent poll, the Latino community’s top political priority is education, followed by the war and health care (immigration comes in fourth). My students have studied the issues, written profiles of the candidates, and even tried to contact them. We sent out an email with students’ questions to each of the candidates. Here are some of the questions students asked:
“What makes you different from previous presidents?”
“How would you help people without papers?”
“Would you give health insurance to illegal immigrants?”
“Have you ever been discriminated against?”
“What is the first thing you would deal with when elected?”
As expected, we did not receive any personal responses to the questions, but each of the democrats at least sent us an email encouraging us to give them money. The Republicans, apparently, had no interest in our filthy money, since not one of them even sent a form response. Mitt Romney even went so far as to limit our query to 500 characters before ignoring it.
I will vote for Obama on the 5th, though I haven’t told this to my students explicitly. I joined a friend who works for the campaign on a 500-person city-wide canvas today during which I knocked on the doors of 138 democrats in central Los Angeles. We introduced ourselves as Obama volunteers and asked if they had made their decision for February 5th. If they said they were going Clinton, we just marked it on a clipboard, thanked them for their time, and left. If they said they were going Obama, we put them on the list of people to call on the 5th and remind to vote, then gave them a thumbs-up, high-five, chest bump, etc. And if they said they said they were undecided, we just told them why we were voting for Obama. All very non-confrontational, friendly, and fun—much more so than I had expected. Even though the area we were targeting theoretically favors Hillary, a healthy majority of the people we talked to planned to vote for Obama, and it really seemed to make an impact when we told them we were inner-city teachers. There were a number of odd encounters: an older gentleman with poor balance chastised us for supporting “a Muslim.” Another guy, after we asked who he was voting for, winked at us inappropriately and said “that’s private, like my sex life.” But people usually smiled and wished us luck regardless of their political views. I think it’s always refreshing to see the political process off the airwaves and back on the streets.
I don’t mean to turn this into a stump speech. Hillary might be okay, though I dislike her polarizing effect. And McCain is better than you-know-who. But the groundswell of support surrounding Obama’s campaign, especially in historically under-represented communities, is very inspirational to me. I don’t agree with everything he says, and I’m sure that if he’s elected he’ll do a few things I don’t like, but he would definitely be a step in the right direction.
I’m Tim Schlosser, and I Approved This Message
