The devil and James Dean

I must be old and old.

I was watching East of Eden after reading the book. LOVED the book. The movie irritated the heck out of me. It doesn't seem to have nearly anything to do with the real story, it is just this vehicle to promote treacherous tortured adolescent idiocy portrayed a la James Dean

I got so tired of watching his teeth gnashing soul squirming and puling and pouting I turned it off. I didn't like the female lead either, she was annoying.

So then I started to read about James Dean, him dying at 24 driving a race car and that everyone wondered if he was gay or bisexual or what.

Who cares? And the thing is that he is this icon. For being this annoying whiny, kid who can't really even act except for to exude angst and misery and all variety of flaky and tormented behavior.

Wikipedia has him referenced in something like 50 songs. All referring to this notion of his "mystery" and his "badness" and his sexual experimentation and dying young. Like all this is a good thing.

Let's go kill ourselves now in a car crash while we are young so we can be cool like James Dean.

Because everyone knows that that is cool.

Kids believe this crap.

What about living a happy long life where we do good stuff? Things that help the people around us? Nah, that's too boring. But it seems to me that that's where the real rebellion is, to recognize garbage like idolizing James Dean and opting for something better.

What a stupid rant.

Silly Heroes

When I was about oh, young, my mom the seamstress made me my coveted and much awaited Wonder Woman costume for Halloween.

Well, she almost did. She told me I couldn't wear the underpants as tight as that and go prancing around the neighborhood, because it would surely be cold. And I would have to wear a sweater, because she was not sending her young daughter out in anything that was strapless. I was under 10.

I was really disappointed. I had envisioned me, a little like a cross between "Little Miss Sunshine" and "Napoleon Dynamite" because I had me some ferocious buck teeth, lassoing people with my magic truth lasso and I had practiced dodging bullets with my silver bracelets.

So instead of being the Wonder Woman that I was inside, I was a shmaltzy cheerleader, which I had never wanted to be, but at least I was warm. And my costume kicked booty over the witches, all 3000 of them in our small neighborhood that Halloween.

Except for LH. When we arrived at her house to pick her up, she was a very big parka with the fuzzies and the hood and everything. She had little rosy cheeks.

"Lynn, what are you?"
"I'm Admiral Byrd!"
"Whozzat?"
"He discovered the South Pole,"
"Oooooh." K and I said in unison.

Poor Lynn. She was brutally made fun of all through school, particularly when she went goth in high school. But I digress.

Wonder Woman. I am glad they gave the little girls a few superheroes. Wonder Woman was beautiful and strong and she made people tell the truth! I can be the first two, but I will never be able to dodge bullets, fly around in a glass plane (which I always thought was very hokey, but I still believed) and make people tell the truth. Now that's a superpower.

I never thought much of the Bionic woman, until I met Anna. Anna worked at a large coffee retailer with me in the college years. She had a self confidence as a young person that I wished I could have manifested. Anna had grown up in South Africa, and she was always hip and stylin. She had the most phenom ugly shirt collection. I have been tempted many a time to start one of my own, but couldn't afford one in the early years, and now can't make myself do something so frivolous. Maybe I will do it if I have a midlife crisis, rather than buying a Maserati.

Anyway, Anna was pretty amazingly obsessed with the Bionic Woman. And she was a fount of Bionic wisdom. She knew every detail about Oscar, the Bionic Woman, her teaching and her amazing abilities. She made a fanzine about the Bionic Woman (because she was dating a Kinko's employee and so it was all free, except the amazing amount of time she poured into the stupid, er, interesting thing). I bought one. I read it too.

But Anna went a little far for me when she started getting tattoos of bionics on her arm and stomach and stuff. I started to wonder if she was dropping acid or something. Seemed like alot of the folk at that coffee retailer were kinda kooky like that.

Anyway, I grew in my knowledge and general awareness of the Bionic Woman through this Anna and so the Bionic Woman also make the list. She seems pretty cool, a teacher and all. After all, Lindsey Wagner did graduate from the high school where I been teaching, so she must be pretty alright!

So, readers, who is your favorite silly superhero?

sick, but not in a good way.

So my charges have taken to saying things that are really good or crazy or something, these things are "sick". Not all of them do it.

So I found something that was not really sick in a good way in reading an article on Salon.com.

Some of you might remember about how I wrote about the retail youth culture at the mall initiation that I had with my neice when we went shopping. Usually, to avoid feeling old I avoid stores that dress 13 year old girls like disco hussies. I avoid stores that hustle brands that are almost meaningless, but their mere presence on a shirt or cap gives that item a new improved "identity" that is desireable. (I go in more for the shirt without the identity and I give the shirt the identity because I am wearing it and I am so inherently cool. Ahem. Haha)

Anyway, I kinda spoke about Hollister. About how totally slimy the place felt to me. And then I read this article about the MAN behind these marketing gimmicks.

Mike Jeffries is just over 61, has OCD, way too much fake tan and blonde hair plus a WHOLE lotta plastic surgery to make himself look like the iconic image that he sells. He is a grandpa in ripped jeans, flipflops and a muscle polo, a walking advertisement for the "casual superiority" that his brand sells. Moodiness, cynicism are not allowed in his realm. Everyone is happy. Even if he does have to walk through the revolving door 2 times every day when he arrives and wear his lucky shoes when he reads the financials.

Stores, marketing that portrays the sort of superficial, "only valuable if enjoyable" type of valuable system is common enough. I suppose where it gets really nauseating is in selling this "image" to people who really don't know what BS it really is: young people. Some youth see it as the all sucking vacuum that it is, but others want this sort of vicarious credibility and coolness so badly that they BUY it, in more ways than one.

I remember walking into an Abercrombie in Seattle in like 93, and being so bored because all the store sold was like golf preppie clothes for old men. Fast forward 13 years and this place is smokin hot. But with what? Some day, maybe, being smart, well read, informed and realistic might be cool in America, but for now, it is much cooler to be a featherweight, because it is so much more "accessible". In other words, not too smart is cool in the A & F "persona".

Mike Jeffries, the 61-year-old CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch, says "dude" a lot. He'll say, "What a cool idea, dude," or, when the jeans on a store's mannequin are too thin in the calves, "Let's make this dude look more like a dude," or, when I ask him why he dyes his hair blond, "Dude, I'm not an old fart who wears his jeans up at his shoulders."

This fall, on my second day at Abercrombie & Fitch's 300-acre headquarters in the Ohio woods, Jeffries -- sporting torn Abercrombie jeans, a blue Abercrombie muscle polo, and Abercrombie flip-flops -- stood behind me in the cafeteria line and said, "You're looking really A&F today, dude." (An enormous steel-clad barn with laminated wood accents, the cafeteria feels like an Olympic Village dining hall in the Swiss Alps.) I didn't have the heart to tell Jeffries that I was actually wearing American Eagle jeans. To Jeffries, the "A&F guy" is the best of what America has to offer: He's cool, he's beautiful, he's funny, he's masculine, he's optimistic, and he's certainly not "cynical" or "moody," two traits he finds wholly unattractive.

This is what teens clamber for. Girls bite their fingers at "dudes" in this garb and proclaim him "hot", regardless if he does talk like a boxer who has had a few too many blows to the head.

I know this isn't new, I know I am not "discovering" this. It just makes me irritable when the "desireable" is so consistently embarrassing, shallow, and dumbs down youth to paper doll status.

rant over.

Tired of that ladies bottom, before cellulite, after cellulite

Note to Yahoo!

I have been a faithful user of yahoo mail since 1997. That's ten years I have had the same email address. In the internet world, that is some crazy brand loyalty.

But lets just pretend for a nanosecond that you, upon your pile of vast wealth, care about me as your mail user, one lepton.

I hate the ads that are on my mail page. I have been looking at them for so long I have finally decided I hate them enough to leave both my yahoo mail accounts in the dust. I don't mind ads, because I understand that I am utilizing a free service, but the mortgage ads with the dancing idiots and the lady before cellulite, after cellulite, before after before after ...they have grown offensive, irritating and kinda gross to have this woman's bottom, a huge picture of it there, omnipresent, in my email box.

I hate the lady who is old, now young, now old, young etc, if only she bought this cream. If this poor hag had spent one year in an undergrad program she would know that most all these creams are basically glycerin that won't do anything anyway, but if she took care of her nutrition and habits, she wouldn't look so miserable and be so desperate to spend a crazy amount on some inert cream that will DO NOTHING FOR HER. Tell her to go eat a carrot for crums sake!

Bye Yahoo! With joy, with glee, with total satisfaction. You and your 800 septillion users won't miss me, let them look at that stupid ladies bum.

m. snippy

Hipness factor

Ugh already pleeeze.

Moms who lament this loss of "hipness" or long for their foregone "mosh pit" days or whatever. Ladies, when you grow up you will realize that you missed nothing in this "world of hip"while you raised your kid. Prioritize well. The world of "hip" is as vapid as a smell, as meaningful as a puddle and as important as a piece of spacejunk. Go buy some flippin Pumas already if you are "missing something". After all that is the American way, to BUY whatever we feel we need (then over time realize nothing we bought ever really made us happy, anyway)

Over and out

-miss snippy

Privacy

One of the things that ever gave me pause about this blog was privacy. J sent this to me. It is from the ACLU. Scary! Go check this out!!

Down to the very items purchased at the store?!

Madness

It is that time here. Standardized tests.

I teach second year ESL kids. Some of them are in an American school for the first time. They are required to take the same reading test as kids who have been in the US all their lives. This isn't really even amazing to anyone anymore. The chance that they will pass the state score at this level is 0.

So it is little to no surprise that (shhhh!) most kids just click through the test and say "I'm done!"in 15 minutes. They have learned the secret. Never mind that they read at a first grade level (at best), and the test is for 10th graders, and many 10th graders cannot pass. Never mind the nearly 50 questions with intense reading. Never mind that they don't usually know the word for "scroll bar" before the test but our monitors are so small that they have to scroll all over the place in 2 different windows to take this test. Just never mind.

I only heard this anecdotally, but another teacher, understandably shrill and about to go crazy, complained about putting having to administer a 70 question computer test to kindergartners, with headphones. Can anyone even imagine this?

It is just confirmation to me that those who make education policy (read: NCLB) just have no idea what kids are like, what schools are like or what will really work.

And by way of qualification, I am all about high standards, and I can even get behind some standardized testing. But agreed with a coworker this year, who when we saw the testing schedule said "Phew! With all this I won't have to write more than 3 lesson plans this year!"

It is true, our ESL kids have to take 3 and a half standardized tests just for their english proficiency annually to comply with state and federal standards. They are not short tests.

In other news, Addy said for the first time tonight "I love you!" over and over and clapped each time. It was awesome. I know she will be pulling it out of her pocket now when she gets in trouble. I can see it now:

"No Addy, you cannot hula dance on broken glass on top of the chair with bare feet while you reach across to pick up a knife on the kitchen counter. Naughty."

Addy continues reaching only now she is looking at me saying "I love you mommy!" thinking that if she is cute enough she may be able to avoid the inevitable impending repercussions of her decisions to do the opposite of what I ask.

Jeff got the tile in the laundry room down, and we will sleep for a second night with no door on the laundry room because we will just have to take it off again tommorrow for the washing machine delivery (I begged him to put it on, every bump in the night makes me wake up with a door off, I wonder why). I was rebuffed firmly. I have heard that robbers don't come when there are people in the house, but if they do come, I just might say "I told ya so", though I have sworn I would never say it. Still J wins the official stud award, he was not excited neither about tiling nor about the washing machine, but it is all over now, and he even painted the laundry room. It was a room we were both pretending it didn't exist. But now it looks decent, new trim, new paint and new tile. No fancy tile though, just cheapest of cheap since this was his first go at tile, though now he is kind of getting into it, looking at fancy tile jobs and making plans.

Fight Valentines Day

Every now and then, there are fights in high schools. (a huge understatement)

Today there was one right outside my classroom door.

A latino boy who got popped in the nose. Blood was everywhere. Other teachers said that the kids who assaulted him were huge. Other kids said that one kid was down and another kid was just wailing on him, kicking him in the stomach, then walked off.

I didn't see any of it.

What I saw was a kid in the hall who I pulled into my classroom. I loaded him up with tissue to abate his nose (this is all after I called security), had him sit down. Waited for security. The principal came and ushered him off.

I took a Clorox wipe and used my shoe to take blood off the floor, then kicked the wipe in the corner. Bloodborne pathogens training. Still the custodian was irritated that I used "the wrong thing" to clean up the blood.

Security hung in the halls. The nose popped had a blue spiral notebook left in my class. A gang color. I furtively read his entries. They were short, like a person being sort of required to do something that did not come naturally. His last entry, for Valentines Day, was about marrying his girlfriend, who I know he has dated this school year.

Many thoughts. Fighting is an inevitable part of school, especially for boys. They will be suspended, without exception. Gang problems in our community.

Since I started teaching I have changed alot. I remember the first time a kid told me to F*** off. I was really surprised! I did a ride along with my brother the policeman once, I hate going into places where bad things are happening. I hate rubberneckers at traffic accidents. I don't want to be at the scene of the crime. I am not a first responder by nature. But sometimes life puts us here.

I have improved. It doesn't make me nervous, like it used to. I am still not "good" at it.

So what about you? Have you ever been put on the spot to help someone? Ever had to break up a fight? Ever responded to an emergency? Ever had to be in that tense situation and make those fast decisions and hope you weren't going to get mowed down in the process?

In our household, we have a sick toddler who has hurled all over hersheets and our washing machine, of course, as you know, is dead waiting for pick up and drop off of the newbie which will not happen till Monday. She has messedup both of her sheets, and all her blankets. Oh well.

Teach

NEA Today magazine ran a special about teacher blogs.

This is sort of a teacher blog except for the fact that I rarely talk about my teaching.

Which is strange because it is really a huge part of my life. When I come home, stopping thinking about school is my first item of business. Sometimes I have a hard time with it.

I teach ESL. The majority of my students speak either Russian or Ukrainian or Spanish.

I teach Health. Am I a health major? No, but I am a bit of a post graduate student of paying attention to the decisions related to health that I make. I used to never think about this and wonder why anyone would. This is where my students are now, so I feel some level of success at having reached them because so many respond positively to the class.

Because I have taught this subject for five years now I have actually had the chance to improve the curriculum and come to know what is reasonable to expect, what will bore them to tears, what they will do, what they will do if I teach it right, and of course, what they won't do because either they aren't capable of it, or they just don't see the point, or they flat out don't get it. I can't say I have had as much success in my reading class, though it does get better and better.

This semester I have a student named Steven. He is the brother of another kid I had who was a sparkling standout. So, it is hard for me to not feel some level of comprehension of Steven and his family, I know his dad, his mom, his uncle and two of his brothers. They are sincere, smart, fun and funny as a family.

Steven however, though he is 18 and should probably have graduated last year, has really low written and speaking skills in English and often just sits more than he gets down to work. This finals I think was hard on him, though he won't say it. I can tell when he writes the vocabulary sentences, they all revolve around other people's opinions of his intelligence and work ethic and his refuting of their judgement of him as lazy or not very smart.

I know Steven is smart. I know he is a good person. And because I know his whole family, I actually think about what I could say to him to drive home the fact that his future is at stake here. Something inside me is seeking these perfect golden words that will change his life. If only, I think.

And another, larger part of me knows that like how I was at that age, Steven has his own choices to make. But I remember wishing that someone could have spoken to my heart to keep me from making the wrong choices. But who would that have been?

I think, in my soliloquoy (you spell it, then) to Steven I would tell him this, and pretend I had his ear.

I know you feel like you cannot see how these little things we do all day long connect to the bigger picture that is your future. But your future, which only you will live, depends on seeing that connection. It depends on it because your education, your english, will direct what kind of work you have. What kind of work you have will be how much money you have each month. To survive, to put food down for a girl you love, or whether she will support you. Whether or not you will be able to afford that winter coat for the child you will have some day. What food you eat, where you live, whether you can afford to have vacations, or even enjoy your work...all that will depend on your job. And your job will depend on your education, and that will depend on what you do now, every hour you spend in these doors.

I know that high school isn't for everyone. Maybe you should go take some classes at the community college and see how that works for you. Will you understand enough? You're smart, will you pick it up over time? Possibly. But if you aren't working here, what will motivate your passion enough to work? If this isn't the place for you, then go find where it is that you feel is a useful way to spend your time.

Basically I want to say poop or get off the pot. I feel for Steven, I have been in his shoes. I think alot of young men are where he is. Making a connection between learning cancer vocabulary and why it is important enough to actually work on it, well that might as well be the Grand Canyon.

In the end, I lose no sleep over Steven. I have had enough Stevens, I know it is his life, and I don't need to be a savior. I guess sometimes I just challenge myself with a mind game of "what could I say to get them to change." It is a futile game, but alas. It makes me a better listener, actually, if you can believe it.

Finals over, in my fifth year I am so glad because I stress about 5% what I used to in my first year. I was perpetually in fear of being canned then. Not that I did anything wrong, but because I was so happy with my job I just figured that it would only stand to reason I would get canned. So much for my optimism, there. The longer I teach the more I know where I will be lenient and where I won't budge. The less I worry about everything because I know that every day is a new chance to forget stupid little mistakes, or really stupid big ones.

I recently had a former student come back and interview me for a final project. The interview went horribly. I was in the middle of administering test makeups, and there was a club meeting also happening in my room at the time. Plus I had to prepare for the next class, and it was lunch and I was starving. Her questions were very, very good. My answers were mostly me rambling thinking about too many things at once and trying to find something that wouldn't get me in trouble and still rang a little true. I wished I could have seen the questions beforehand, I respect the girl and her family alot, I have had two of her brothers as well in my class. Good people. I was disappointed in the quality of the interview. I had no pearls.

So teaching. I suppose it isn't for everyone, but I do love it. I guess my greatest aspiration would be to have an answer to all of those really hard situations...I know there is alot that is up to the students and how they feel about the teacher. So I guess it is being the teacher that they won't mess with, not out of fear, but out of respect.