Teaching with Tim

Visage of the Chosen One. Photo Credit: Liz

 One of the original versions of this now-ubiquitous image is located in my neighborhood, Echo Park.  I sometimes wonder if the mural was originally intended to be ironic; the red color scheme and North-Korean-scale suggests a cynical commentary on people’s  messianic hopes for Obama’s presidency.  I saw a variation of the mural on the Echo Park entrance to the 101 that looked just the same, but used the word “OBEY” instead of the word “HOPE”. Still, I know that the picture is not, in fact, supposed to be tongue-in cheek.  The democrats have worked up quite a head of self-righteous steam about Obama, and the image is now used by the campaign itself.  But I’ll try to steer clear of election commentary.  I know that I have imbibed unhealthy quantities of election news over the past several months, and I’m sure that you have, too.  McCain suspendeds his campaign, Obama calls Palin a pig, McCain awkwardly subdues a racist at his rally, Obama launches a new campaign spot, blah blah blah.  I’m tired of it, yet I can’t get enough.  I compulsively check the election news online during my lunch break, wanting to just sit back and enjoy my microwaved Trader Joe’s veggie burrito, but somehow incapable of taking another bite without knowing what Sarah Palin said this time.  I’m going to vote for Obama, I hope he wins, I’ve gone door-to-door for him, and I think that he’s the political voice of our generation in a way that makes JFK comparisons totally legitimate. But I just want him to be president already so that we can take this over-the-top adoration and cut it down to something more reasonable, a  good-natured skepticism, a ”what-did-that-Obama-do-this-time?” attitude towards the U.S. executive branch.  This perspective seems more palatable than building-sized murals and teary-eyed testimonials. 

    Whatever ideological flaws it may have, the Obama mural is perfectly representative of the Echo Park gestalt, which I should tell you more about.  Echo Park is just north of Downtown Los Angeles, and it’s a strange economic and cultural potpourri.  The neighborhood was famous for drugs and crime in the mid-80s, but has seen some serious gentrification over the past decade, and now has million-dollar homes next to decrepit 50s-era high-rise apartments.  The population is mostly Latino families, but there is a sizeable young-white-hipster contingent as well (I suppose you could loosely throw me into that category, minus the “hip”).  Coffee shops, clubs, and bakeries staffed by well-pierced twenty-somethings abound, and there’s even a gas station right below my building, “The Magic Gas Station,” that doubles as a coffee shop and concert venue: 

And another location that fits right into Echo Park’s hip, socially-conscious vibe was the spot I took my 8th Graders on a field trip Friday: The Echo Park Time Travel Mart.

  This is one franchise of Dave Eggers’s nationwide network of writing tutoring centers, “826″.  826-LA features a time-travel theme, and the front half of the “store” sells dinosaur eggs, robot parts, dated Time Magazines, and a wide variety of other gizmos and doodads along those lines.  The Seattle 826 is outer-space-themed.  Anyway, the idea is to get kids’ imaginations pumping and then shuttle them into the back, where the center offers free tutoring and workshops.  In the workshop my group of 30 8th graders did, the students created their own “Choose Your Own Adventure” story with 6 local volunteers.  Initially, after the bus dropped us off on a busy, unappetizing stretch of Sunset Boulevard, the kids gave me befuddled “why did you take us here?” looks. But they were hooked from the moment they spotted the Neanderthal mannequin battling a giant cardboard robot in the front window of the Time Travel Mart. At the end, each kid got a copy of the book they had created.  The volunteers did the typing, but the kids came up with the ideas.  Here’s a notable excerpt from their collaborative literary production, which ended up being called Disaster in Alaska (no political subtext intended): 

“..you immediately nearly trip over the remains of a dead polar bear.  It has terrible gashes and bite marks to its neck.  you see Antonio shaking with fear at the side of the path.  You slap him several times across the face.  “Pull yourself together, dude!” Antonio screams that he has claustrophobia and flees off down the passageway.  Seconds later, there is a terrible roar, and then a scream and then… deafening silence.  Drawing your weapon, you tip-toe down the path until you come upon Antonio’s lucky necklace on the ground.  When you pick it up, you find it is dripping with blood.  You wonder if the blood belongs to your friend or to the vampire yeti.”

What next?  Advance hardcover copies available for $19.99.

I’ve got to say that it was a little bit strange bringing my students to within two blocks of where I live.  It was like two previously mutually-exclusive spheres of my life were suddenly colliding.  Eleven miles of asphalt and a significantly wider psychological chasm usually separates my Home Life from my School Life.  I mentioned to one of my kids, Carlos, that my apartment was right up the street.  “Oh, Mister, can we go to your place and whip up some pancakes?”  The mental image of Carlos and thirty other eighth graders with eggs, batter, and burners in my one-bedroom apartment was pretty surreal. ”Maybe next time,” I said.     

Look closely: can you find the metaphysical meaning in this image?

     Another strange element of the whole thing was driving to school, riding the bus to Echo Park, being within a few blocks of home, taking the bus back to school, then driving home again.  Seeing the same stretch of freeway six times in a single day served to emphasize to me, yet again, the unholy percentage of my life that I spend in transit.  Since moving to Los Angeles, it must be at least two hours a day, on average.  At first, after a long day at work, getting into my car and just listening to the radio, fiddling with the AC, pumping some CO2 into the atmosphere, is a nice relief.  But there’s a point–maybe about twenty-five minutes into the drive–after which I start becoming self-conscious about it.  Start thinking that maybe I should restructure my life so that I don’t spend so much of it switching between re-playing the same old CDs and listening to NPR talk about the Dow. 

Still Looking.

 I remember going on a kick for a while where I just drove in silence.  No radio chatter, no audiobook, no nothing.  I tried to follow the Dalai Lama’s advice and just be in the present.  Looking into the eyes of the drivers making left turns in front of me and trying imagine their life stories.  Analyzing how billboards  reflected American culture.  Listening to the car’s engine and wondering if there were car junkies who could tell how close I was to needing an oil change just by the sound.  Estimating how long it would take to get from the 105-110 interchange to the 110-101 interchange by horsedrawn carriage.  Theorizing that maybe a good mass transit system really wouldn’t be that great, since then I wouldn’t have all this quality time to myself.

Needless to say, this kick didn’t last long.  Driving alone up and down L.A. freeways on a daily basis is lonely, wasteful, and mind-bendingly boring.  Dehumanizing, almost.  I find myself in fits of irrational Angelino rage when I’m stuck behind a slow out-of-state driver, and only rarely do I stop to ask myself why it really matters if I get home at 4:21 or 4:24.  Or if maybe this “slow” driver just likes to drive the speed limit.  Is L.A. sapping me of my humane Seattle Spirit? 

But, speaking of mind-bendingly boring, that’s probably enough for one blog entry.  I blame this meandering, classically self-absorbed-blogger style on too many hours sitting in traffic and stirring my thoughts around and around like lumpy pancake batter.

   Teaching and life continue.  Mike Fricano, one-time newspaper reporter and current editor of L.A. Youth, visited my journalism class last week.  The kids found him high-energy and engaging. He spent most of the period regaling them with stories about life as a reporter.  He alluded to “hot-headed” battles with editors, described the sometimes tedious world of day-to-day reporting work, and ruminated on the bleak future of newspaper journalism.  He also gave practical advice for working in the field.  “What do you do during an interview if the person is talking too fast?” he asked.  The students gave one another blank looks, then started shooting in the dark: “Record it?”  “Write faster?”  “Listen better?”  Mike paced up and down the room with a wry smile on his face, and it was obvious why he now works with kids.  “No, no, no.  Ask them to slow down.  There’s nothing wrong with that.  Just ask them to slow down.”  He also reminded them to make eye contact during interviews—a skill that none of my aspiring Chungs and Bernsteins have mastered.  “You don’t want them to think you’re a weirdo.”   

       My life as my alter-ego, “Mr. Schlosser,” continues to be generally satisfying.  Last week I did my traditional “egg lesson.”  It is the only lesson I can think of that I have executed exactly the same way all three years of teaching.  I use it to teach figurative language—metaphors, similes, analogies, etc.  It involves giving the students a variety of sensory experiences that they must describe using figurative language.  It is called the “egg lesson” because it ends with me literally hurling a raw egg at the whiteboard (which I surreptitiously cover with chart paper beforehand), then giving the students a series of prompts they use to describe what they saw and heard.  I don’t really know how much instructional value this lesson has, but I do know that I like doing it and that students never, ever forget it.  This year my classroom has an ant problem, and the tiny traces of raw egg that I missed when cleaning up drove the insects into a frenzy.  I came to school the morning after to find that my whiteboard tray looked like something from a National Geographic insect special.  I picked a kid with a homicidal streak and asked him to go at the ants with whiteboard cleaner and paper towels, but it didn’t work.  I once heard that the ancient Romans believed ants were divine because they spontaneously regenerate. They may have been on to something.          

   Now for my traditional whining and cogitating about the future. 

   In her commencement address at Sarah Lawrence college (thanks, Aunt Gay), Ann Patchett said that “…writing a novel and living a life are very much the same thing.  The secret is finding the balance between going out to get what you want and being open to the thing that actually winds up coming your way”.  My TFA commitment is complete, I don’t know whether I want to remain in L.A., and I have been revisiting the post-college decision-making morass. What now, what now, what now?  My mom offered me pragmatic advice: throw a lot of spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks.  So I registered for the GRE in late October, I’m investigating Seattle teaching jobs, and I’m continuing to consider the possibility of remaining in my current situation.  More than anything, I guess I’m waiting for some kind of divine nudge.  Maybe I get something published, I hear about a high school English job in Rainier Beach, or Liz gets into the UW architecture school and I follow her to Seattle.  Or John McCain is elected, gets sick, puts Sarah Palin in charge, and leaves me with no choice but Canada—I guess I always prefer the right decision that is effectively made for me.