Wherein I Reveal "Mystique"

I might have mentioned the neighbor girl who comes in to see me every now and then. She's named after an off brand of soda and she's got some serious home problems. She lives with her grandma; her mom hasn't contacted her in a couple of years, her dad's a deadbeat -- at one point they both had a "do not contact" order on them regarding her. She hasn't had parents in her life since she was three. I think her grandma doesn't feed her right. I know they fight. I' m sometimes conflicted as to whether to report it. Currently, their electricity is out for the next two weeks because the grandma didn't pay the bill and it was cut off. My personal nightmare with her is that one day she'll show up at my door in tears telling me she's run away from her grandma's house, and can she stay with me. I'm not sure what I'd do.

She seems to love me dearly. I don't know why, but I do know that I'm something of a stand-in mom for her. She comes over and plops down on my couch to tell me about school or the drama with her friends or how she's head over heels for Twilight. She likes Cleopatra eyeliner and bright blue eyeshadow. She's 14 years old. She tells me about her boyfriend and her drama with him. She came to me about the talk on periods and tampons. She hugs me several times in a row whenever she's here. She asks what I cook for dinner, why I load the dishwasher the way I do, what I buy at the grocery store. There's a sense of female responsibility that she seems to be looking for clues on. Sometimes she'll end the conversation by turning over her shoulder and saying "My grandma hit me in the arm yesterday." Other times she'll say, "Maybe I should have been your daughter." And she'll laugh, like she's trying to take the seriousness out of it.

I respond by trying to play the tropes she's looking for, because I really think she's just looking to play a role sometimes. Yes, I think she'd like to move in and have a "mother-daughter" relationship, whatever she thinks that means. But mostly, I think she just wants to pretend. She wants to rehearse the script. She'll grab my grocery bags out of my arms and take them up for me. She wants to put things away on the shelves, maybe so she just feels like she knows where it is. Sometimes she goes through my bathroom drawers -- not because she wants to steal anything, but to solve the mystery of what I'm about, what grown women keep in their makeup bags. So when she tells me she thinks she should've been my daughter, I say, "You know, I always wanted a daughter. I'd want her to be just like you." She comes in the door and I'll ask her, "So, how was school? How are you doing in math?" Or something like that. Once early in the morning when I was getting ready to go somewhere and I had my front door open, I heard her voice floating up as she was walking down the little alley to the bus stop: "Byyyyyeee Jooooooy...". I called back, "Have a good day at school, honey...". Because I don't believe she really ever hears that in her life. I don't think anyone ever told her to have a good day at school.

So, it probably shouldn't have surprised me when she came over on Thursday talking about her Spring formal dance this weekend -- tonight, actually, in about fifteen minutes. We were talking about her boyfriend, and what a flake he was for breaking up with her only to get back together just before the dance, so he could go with a date. Then she said, "I wish I had a flat iron, I want my hair to be straight for the dance."

Everything is code with her. She says "Oh, you like that kind of ice cream? Neat." That means, "Can I have some?" She's weird about food. But she also has evolved this way of feeling out whether you'll do something for her or not before she asks directly, probably so as not to get her feelings hurt. So, the proper answer to her "wish" was of course to say, "Well, I've got a flat iron. Do you need to borrow it?" And she told me that she would love to, buuuut, she doesn't really know what she's doing and she doesn't do a very good job. and of course the proper response is, "Well, I could do it, if you wanted me to." She jumped up with a big grin, OH YES, that would be great! And so we planned to meet on about 5:00 on Saturday to give her enough time with everything.

And then I realized that I'd basically formally contracted to do her hair and makeup. JP, please stop laughing now.

I wonder why she picked me, honestly. I rarely wear makeup. I don't have elaborate hair. Most of the time, it's pulled back. I do not look like the obvious choice to get this immense job done, the results of which buoy a young girl's fantasies about dances and looks and boys. I realized, frankly, that I had squarely put my foot right on top of a landmine.

Here's the even more hilarious part: I actually can do hair and makeup. I can do it quite well. I can do the edgy, runway type stuff and I can do the "natural" look (which involves even more product than the edgy stuff). I'm obsessed with fashion. I have a Vogue collection. (And W, and Allure...) I am one of those people who Keep Up With Things. I just happen to also live in jeans and a white t-shirt. For added guffaws, I even sold glamour for a while. I was a Mary Kay sales rep (yes, keep laughing), and I broke even in my business the first year (rare, normally it's three years to break even, turn the corner and turn a profit), was team leader and my unit's "Rookie of the Year." Yes, like the baseball card. I could make myself look like one of the women in the pages of the booklet that hawked our product. Trouble is, that's a lot of fucking work, and I just didn't want to. It makes me feel fake. These are not things that my girl could've known.

I'd like to think she saw my Vogue collection, including the Italian, French and now Spanish ones. Or maybe the Allure magazine sitting out in the open talking about "sculpting" with your normal shade of foundation and one two tones darker. I'd like to think she went through my bathroom drawers and found the massive stash of crap I have. But I don't think any of that is what happened. I think she thinks that there is some feminine mystique that older women have, that they know all the secrets, and that they will share it with you when the time comes.

I think she got lucky I read a lot -- which extends itself to fashion -- and that I didn't turn her into Tammy Faye.

She showed up at about 4:20 instead of 5:00. Her hair was still wet. My bet was still on "mystique" and trading secrets, so I planned to feed into that. I pulled out everything I owned. Every piece of makeup, every pomade, all the heavy equipment. When her eyes lit up, I knew I'd guessed right. I put everything down on the kitchen table, turned on every light and lamp in the kitchen. I had Miles Davis playing from before she came in, and I'd lit a really smelly candle -- you've got to have atmosphere for getting ready for something important, but she would've probably preferred Fergie, or something. I let her paw through the makeup, which for reference's sake covered the whole freaking kitchen table, who knew??, while I actually sorted through the things I thought were important. We did make up first, and I always presented things as a choice. I might think she looks good one way, but ultimately it's about what she thinks is good on her, and I was prepared to execute whatever Twilighty-vampire look she decided she wanted.

To my surprise, though, she took my suggestions. Of course, it helps to be skilled in rhetoric. So, when you tell a 14 year old their eyes would look "awesome" with this color, you plop down a bag of cotton balls and eye make up remover and ask if they'll let you put some on just to see what it looks like, she'll probably say SURE. As I went along, I told her everything I was doing. Makeup is artisanal. It always looks better when it's done with the hands or with really high quality brushes, like painting a picture. I put three colors on her eyes -- antique gold on her lids, framed with a nice shade of jade in the crease of her eye and then a thing called Moonstone on her brow bone, which is sort of a creamy white color. I explained how the jade in the crease will sit on top of her eyes when they're open, like a picture frame, and how you wanted some kind of deeper neutral on your lids, and it almost doesn't matter what, because anything makes your eye color seem more intense, and you wanted a really light color on your brow bone because it's the "highlight." Then I blended everything with a brush so it looked smooth. Her reaction in the mirror was one that I'll probably not forget as long as I live. She was, quite simply, delighted. I told her we could do anything else with any color I had (which is basically every shade of everything), as long as we followed that pattern. But she didn't want to touch it.

While she put on mascara, I asked her if she wanted to do bronzer or if she wanted to do foundation. I figured she wanted the pale look -- she was really pushing hard for that a few months ago; you know, vampires and everything. She picked bronzer, probably because of how it looked. Oh, and because she was jealous of the rich girls in school who'd been going to the tanning bed for the past six weeks in preparation for the formal. So I told her how to use bronzer, and I showed her how to tap it off the brush, to sweep it over her forehead, cheeks and nose, and her chin, how you wanted to put some down your neck, too, so it looked real. She loved it.

I did her hair while she was drinking a pop. I blabbed about everything I was doing there, too, putting some serum in it for shine, because when it was flat ironed it could look dull. I rubbed that in. I put in something to keep down frizz; I let her play with the bottles while I put it in. I blowdried her hair, told her she couldn't just hit it with a flat iron unless it was dry, that would extra-fry it. I did exactly what she told me to do with her hair. Normally it's really curly, and she doesn't like it. She's also dyed it black (vampires). So it was a glossy straight "do" now, thanks to a few products and a flat iron. I sprayed it with some styling wax, sprayed my left hand fingers with the wax to put it on the ends of her hair. She seemed fascinated with the hands-on stuff, but that's really where the trick is. I explained to her how it was different from hairspray. It smells great, so I was sure she'd like that. There's something about going off smelling great from a salon that keeps you perked up all the while you can smell it.

Last, we decided what to do about lipstick. She loves gloss, which she should for her age. I had glosses, of course. But I also offered to "make" a gloss out of a lipstick I had, if she wanted to. She was fascinated by that, so that's what we did. She picked out a lipstick in "shell", which is the only thing I have close to a girly-pink color. So I took the lipstick, rubbed it all over the side of my hand (highly fascinating) and put a few dabs of a clear lip gloss on top. Then I took a small brush and sort of mixed the whole thing together on my hand. I brushed the solution onto her lips once, and asked her to check it in the mirror to make sure she liked it first. Then I layered it on.

She grinned the whole time. We checked the mirror front, back, sideways to make sure she liked everything. She seemed really happy. We like salons because of the human touch, because of the art of dressing up. She looked like the young teenager I've always seen her as, rather than the new-goth she likes to dress up as. I told her I thought she was beautiful. I took her picture:



Her grandma just swooped by to let her hop out of the van and show me her dress. It was a beautiful, long navy halter dress with silver shoes. Both her and her grandma were smiling. I'm glad I did it. I don't have a daughter, and I'll probably never get the chance to do that again. When Dante has his formal, it will be a matter of getting his braids done and getting the Man Uniform that the tux represents.

I hope she has a good time. I hope for that one moment at the kitchen table, at least, everything was perfect.

-- DV

Justice is Blind -- and Right the First Time

I was asked recently to look over a few grade reviews. Overall, I'm impressed both at the care taken with the process and with the gall some students seem to have.

After I agreed to be a blind reviewer, I got the packets in my office box. I get the entire portfolio, and one of the office secretaries has whited out most all instructor's comments and grades. I'm literally getting it like it's just submitted. Sometimes I get information like what the instructor gave for class participation grades -- that's not something I could know by looking at a portfolio. But if I wanted to know what the first teacher had given it, I'd have to guess. There is no way of telling. In the cases I looked at, I was also the second blind reviewer. I got no notes on what the first reviewer thought. The dude in charge basically averages our scores together to see if that average differs significantly from the instructor who gave the original grade. The process is very solid, at least based on my experiences with it. If only 3% of appeals are approved, we must be pretty in sync grading-wise.

Or it could be because people who submit grade appeals are largely stupid.

Of the three reviews I did today, two of them were abysmal attempts at writing and the third was a pretentious attempt to get an A when the student was lucky to get that B. One student was simply ... incoherent. There really isn't another way to explain it. He wrote about Cartman and South Park as being the formative experience in his life. At least I think it was. It was hard to figure out what he was saying. His final project was a bunch of movie reviews. Our final project for that class involves creating multiple genres based on research. He wrote a bunch of very simplistic and poorly spelled movie reviews. I found myself wanting to write WTF in the margins quite often. Which I probably could've done, it's a blind review. Another student went off on a tear about Bush, and it wasn't even a particularly factual tear. S/he wrote an entire paper about the wrong interpretation of a cartoon. The final argument paper was about why we should lower the drinking age to 16 years old because it's hard for bartenders to make more than $120 a week. If that wasn't his or her intention, that was certainly the point I got out of it.

Good lord. As I said in a previous post, there were more grade appeals than normal this semester, probably because of the recession. There will probably be more in the next few weeks. But those three certainly will NOT be part of the 3% triumphing over the system.

-- Dante's Virgil

Where'd They Go?!

I just realized the Appalachian Greens are gone. Their blog is in my sidebar, but you can't get to it anymore. What happened, people?!

Not like I have time for more blogs, or anything, but .... I just might have to do something about that.


-- DV

THE Movie

The hot movie of the moment is not the new Star Trek movie or Will Farrell's new movie or the follow up to Night at the Museum. No, according to Dante, the hot showing this season is THE movie. You know: the one they show you in the fifth grade or so. THE movie. THE movie has a great buildup before its showing, because it's talked about for weeks before it's actually shown. "Do you know what we're seeing in health class next week? THE movie!!"

Possibly the only thing more interesting than THE movie itself is its viewers. According to an inside source, the movie-goers are either giggling hysterically or they're sitting there trying not to look interested, as though they, you know, already know all this stuff, already. Most viewers' nerves are pretty frayed by the time they're ready to watch, because no one is really sure what's on the video -- and what that means is they're not really sure how much it will actually show. So everyone is a mess of nervous titters. It probably didn't help that there was more or less an animated penis achieving erection. That shattered whatever composure all moviegoers had.

Per Dante, it wasn't a very good rendition.

Needless to say, Dante had a keen interest in this movie. He knows all about the mechanics of sex, and he's known from a very young age (I think he was 4 1/2 or 5 when we first covered the mechanics, and he's asked more involved questions ever since). He asks me lots of things and he seems very comfortable doing so, probably because I've worked really hard at appearing to be comfortable telling him anything. This movie covers the mechanics in passing, but it covers one thing that most kids don't really start asking about until the age they are in Dante's class -- puberty. They all have a keen interest in puberty. Dante has an embarrassing habit of walking around saying, "Mom, my balls hurt, is that puberty?" at the most interesting of times.

As a "goody bag" for attending THE movie, Dante brought home a sample deodorant, which he is in love with, and a booklet about puberty changes, which is on his nightstand. His growing pains are really kicking in. He's eating everything in sight. He's about four inches away from being as tall as his dad. He turns 12 this summer. Gad. He's brewing some hormones, as he enjoys hanging around the neighborhood girls but isn't really sure why. To be fair, they like being around him and seem equally confused. He's developing a bit of an attitude. My new name is God Mom. As in, Gawd, Moooom!

He's starring in his own version of THE movie right now; we're turning a corner. He's going to Florida for the summer to stay with his grandparents. I wonder who will come back in August? I wonder if I'll still know him.

-- DV

News -- Flash!

Today is the first day of my summer writing project. I'm sort of scared.

When I had just graduated college, I began working on a set of short stories with Appalachian themes. It took me about two years to "finish" them. There are twenty in total. These stories were something I'd wanted to do for a very long time. Every fiction I've read about Appalachia is always so nostalgic, so backwards looking; nobody wants to move past 1943, when everybody hoed a garden and quilted stuff. I was always more interested in what happened to those people's grandkids -- you know, the drug problems, the lack of jobs, the rift we feel between the culture we're in now and the culture of our grandparents, how we raise our kids, what values we think are important, religion, our frustration with people who want to romanticize where we live or keep seeing us as the culture of canning tomatoes and telling "Jack tales." etc. I don't think anyone is really interested in those issues besides us children, but really, they're our stories.

So, I wrote and I wrote and I wrote. I went to the flea market and sat there scribbling at people. I hiked up on mountains and took pictures and later just stared at them for a long time, asking myself "But what does it mean?!" I wrote a few things that made me cry. My best friend back home read two of my stories and she cried. "This is us," she said. And that meant more to me than getting a story published -- which has yet to happen. And it won't happen for a while, because publishing is a matter of A) skill B) connections and C) luck. Mostly C. I don't really want to be a "famous" writer. I just want published -- I want to share it. But that won't happen until the stories are a lot sharper. Talking about your skill (or lack thereof) as a writer is an uncomfortable thing, at least for me. My experience with writer's workshops and being around people who take themselves Very Seriously about writing makes me feel like it's one big pissing contest of who does it better. It's really hard to judge yourself, when the obvious measure would be to answer the question Have you published yet? But even publishing is really just a matter of luck and persistence topped with connections. Sometimes it's not a very good measure of talent at all. I'm comfortable enough admitting that I do have some raw talent -- but I'm also not a "master" of writing, and I'm not so egotistical that I can't admit that. I don't spend eight hours a day on it -- not even two or three. If I want to be good and not just "sometimes clever," that has to change. You have to approach writing like you do a job. You get your supplies together, you sit down, you start writing. Every single day, or damned close to it. Even if it's an exercise for practice. You just have to keep doing it.

I don't think blogging counts, but maybe it does.

I said earlier the stories were "finished" -- because nothing is ever really finished. I wrote as far as I could, I tried a limited run of sending what I thought were my best stories out to creative journals and magazines (which included an interesting return letter from an editor), and then I put them aside. I just couldn't look at them anymore, because I couldn't see the forest for the trees. So, four years later, I'm back to them again. And I'm terrified. I'm not sure why.

I've been writing ever since I can remember. The earliest thing I wrote I don't even remember doing. My grandma kept it and showed it to me years later -- it was a story about some creepy veterinarian who was busy bugging all the local animals so he could keep tabs on his neighbors and blackmail them. A brave and clever little girl found him out. I was under ten. Don't ask me how I knew about bugging and blackmail when I was under ten and we didn't have cable TV. I don't remember. I do remember that I wanted to be an international spy when I was about five years old and carried that dream all the way to third grade, where I traded it in for being President of the United States instead. I loved mysteries and short stories. When I was 12 going on 13, I spent the whole summer in front of my mother's heavy, gun-metal gray typewriter banging out stories where a clever and brave girl in her early twenties solved mysteries ranging from murder to kidnapping to embezzlement. They come with pictures provided by a 12-year-old illustrator as well, with her new set of colored pencils. All the faces have very large eyes. When I was actually in my early twenties that little collection, all bound in a pink binder, embarrassed the hell out of me. Now I think it's hilarious and I'm glad I didn't throw them away. Lots of little stories and books happened in between then and now. For my creative writing project in the tenth grade, we had to do kids books, and I made one in the shape of a bone about a puppy who runs away from home because he thinks he's all grown up, only to run into a wolf. Doing his puppy tricks is the only thing that allows him to escape and return to his suburban home a more appreciative puppy. It's a study in domestication and middle class values. LOL. Now, of course, kids books in various shapes are pretty popular. There wasn't anything like them in the stores when I was a kid. I wrote a Canterbury tale about WalMart when I was a senior in high school that won a prize.

But as an adult, I suddenly developed some weird notions about writing in my twenties that have been hard for me to get past. The stakes somehow were raised and things seemed more serious. Mistakes meant something more than they used to. As a 12-year-old, I could just rip the typing paper out of the typewriter and wad it up, call it "stupid," and throw it in the trash. As an adult, wadding the paper up somehow meant I was stupid, not the idea. Or that I had stupid ideas. Or that it had to be perfect the first time, or clearly I wasn't meant to be a writer. And then thinking of myself as a "writer" makes me really squeamish. When do you get to call yourself that? When you're published? When you're doing it as a full time job? When you forwent the rent so you could buy more notebooks? I've been writing stories since I learned how to write, but that doesn't seem "legitimate" anymore. Writing was For Real now. When I was a kid, it wasn't about publishing. It was about translating this awesome moving picture I had in my head onto paper. My head was full of little short films. I wanted to write them down on paper to keep them forever. As an adult, it seemed like I had to write them down just right so that other people would buy them. And if it didn't happen by the time you were 30, it was obviously never going to happen at all. After all, didn't Keats publish at 18 years old?! And speaking of publishing, my adult writing was wa-a-y too short for conventional short stories. An editor in a return rejection letter & email to me basically told me I was cramming too much in too small a space, that I needed more "development" and that the stories needed to be longer. I didn't want to do that, because to me, the stories were like little snapshots. Like photography. Here's the picture. You read into it what you want to. I didn't know how to make them longer without watering them down. So I did the best I could, took them as far as I could go, and then I put them down.

Once I put the stories aside, I took a deep breath -- four years' worth, actually. I'm on a sort of middle ground now, a grown-up place to be about writing. I still have those short films in my head, and they still need to come out on paper. But I also want to share them with people. I don't care if they buy them or not. But I do want to share them. And I figured out that I was sending the stories to the wrong publishing genre. I do flash fiction -- I didn't even know there was a name for it when I was busy doing it, and that's what tells me it's what I need to be doing. When I look for the "conventions" of successful story writing, I start getting nervous. When I do what I enjoy, I don't have problems. Flash fiction is a story under 1000 words. 1000-2500 are considered "short shorts," and I have some of those, too, although they rarely go past 1500; 2500 words are considered a minimum standard length short story. I don't want to say 2500 words (this blog post is a little over 1800 words). I like my own stories at 1000 words or less -- that's about two and a half pages, more or less.

And I realized why I always very much liked that old saying "A picture is worth 1000 words."

For me, writing is about making a picture. The beauty is in what is not said, in what your mind can do with the image you were just given. That's what I like, and that's what I'm going to do.

So, I pulled out six stories from my little collection for this summer. The first one is called "Darlene's Basement," and it's about a cable access religious service, the kind of born-again basement preacher you see all the time. The story reads in the rhythm of a born-again sermon. I like it. A lot. Four years later, it needs a lot of work, work I didn't see at the time. It's at about 755 words so far. It'll get reworked, and it might hit 1000 or a little above.

And I'm excited about it; but I'm also a little nervous, because I don't want to load the process with false expectations and demands. I'm blogging right now, because I just made a bunch of edits and I'm sort of scared of looking at them. Little girls grow up and become adults who have jobs; adults who want to "be" writers have to start approaching writing as a job. But a big part of me wants to get back in touch with that little girl who spent that summer eating cucumbers while banging away on that typewriter and illustrating the stories out on the porch with her new colored pencils.

-- Dante's Virgil

Insulated From Science--But Conducting Ourselves Well!

For reasons best known only to Dante, I am dubbed as the science and math "master" of the household.  Those who know me, we'll just wait until you stop laughing before continuing.  Ready?  No?  How about now?  OK.  El Hijo is the history go-to guy -- and he really deserves that title.  But as far as I can tell, the only talents I have in the math and science department are two things:  1)  I can explain in kid terms what's going on (after I've already cussed and snorted around about how it actually works myself) and 2) I am the Mistress of We Shall Never Give Up, Dammit.  The last one applies mainly to math.  Dante loves science, and it is never hard to get him to work on it.  Math he hates with a bloody raging passion, much like most other schoolwork.  So, part of my task as Math Mistress is to make sure I stay on him to get it done.  Sometimes I want to give up, because it's a real pain in the ass to make somebody do something day in and day out that they just don't want to do.  But a few things I read recently made me glad I did.  

Malcolm Gladwell's new book Outliers is a fantastic work of statistics and science applied to everyday life, in the same scope as something like Freakonomics.  Gladwell looks at success and what makes a person truly successful, and the results are part common sense and part, well, astonishing.  He finds, for example, that intelligence is only so useful; it's more of a threshold rather than a cumulative advantage.  So,  you only need so much intelligence to be a successful person, and that measure is about the IQ it takes to get into college.  More IQ after that is practically negligible when it comes to successful invention.  What kicks in after the intelligence threshold is creativity and emotional/people skills, along with the kind of environment and parenting you had as a kid.  Then it gets even more interesting, because he proves very conclusively that successful people in school are successful because of their birth date -- you need to get the book to see the data charts, etc -- but in a nutshell, the cut off dates for school entry favor students whose birthday is soonest after the cut off date, because they mature far more quickly than those "summer babies" ever do.  Then what kicks in next is cultural conditioning to practice.  He proves that children from cultures where emphasis is on staying with a task much longer do far better in areas like math, which requires you to really work through sometimes very abstract concepts and not give up.  It's an incredible read.

It also means that being Queen of the Mixed Fractions is critical for Dante's success.  It means I'm doing a good job when I make him sit down for that extra practice and drill every goddamn day of the week except Saturday, because I'm teaching him among other things to stick with the process.  Now, Dante does not have exceptional grades, in spite of how much extra parent involvement he has -- and he has a lot.  I'm not bragging so much as I am complaining, I guess!  LOL.  But he's surrounded by books and reading material on everything from luchadors to dinosaurs, we practice spelling with him every night, math drill, extra practice for tests, reading and vocabulary comprehension -- hell, we're basically still part time homeschooling.  And he honestly doesn't have the grades to show for it, partly because he likes to rush things, partly because he's mildly dyslexic, which when combined with rushing through things produces fascinating words made out of numbers and letters that don't seem to exist in the English alphabet.  But it makes me wonder what life would be like for him without all that parental involvement -- I suppose it would be like the time he nearly failed the third grade because his dad decided to not have that much involvement.  But it also makes me wonder how many other parents with kids in public schools are doing the same thing as we are.  

Maybe it's just because public school forums are not really the way Dante learns best.  Maybe it's easy for other kids, I don't know.  But I know it's hard for me as a parent just trying to keep up with what he's doing in school.  Trying to remember the rules for multiplying mixed fractions when you haven't done that since the fifth grade yourself, lo these many twenty-one-ish years ago, it's like I'm teaching myself stuff all over again.  That was especially true for science tonight, and the whole reason I got around to writing this post.  Tonight he had to bring in examples of conductors and insulators.  OK, I know what that is, but trying to explain it to an eleven year old is always kind of hard.  And then where the hell am I supposed to get copper wiring?  Rip it out of the phone?  So to the internet we go for a list of these things.  We spent a big chunk of time talking about what those examples were and why they worked, putting little samples in ziplock baggies.  Even though the teacher just wanted samples, we made a list, because there are things like "dry air" and "the human body" that obviously present baggie problems.  We talked about why radios and TVs shouldn't be near people taking a bath because of the conductivity issues with water and wet bodies.  We talked about the time one of his older cousins got shocked because he was playing the electric guitar on a concrete floor while it was wet.  But it's not like I could just pull all this stuff out of my head.  I forgot concrete was considered conductive.  I had to look it up.  So I make looking it up one of the things we do together.  And in spite of just how very much I have to look up, he still considers me the Ruler of All Things Science-y.  

And I really wondered just how many parents were doing that tonight.  Not because I want to feel special or "better" than anybody, but because it's a lot of hard work to teach a kid something, and I know there are plenty of times that I just want to quit because I'm tired or frustrated.  But it scares me to death to think of life without an education, because I've worked with people who had little to no education, and it's just such a dead end.  Not only because of your job opportunities and your income, but more importantly because of the quality of your life.  Your ability to enjoy culture and to pay attention to what people are trying to sell you or who want to govern you, all that is dependent on education.  So to me, it's not about grades, even though I wish they were higher.  It's about the process.  Because people with a good educational process have a far greater chance at a good life -- something that goes beyond an "A" in spelling.

-- DV

P.S.  To all the homeschooling parents out there -- or the "part timers" like me who put in the hours after public school is over -- hang in there.  It's worth it.

Breaking Economic News: Recession Hits Grades!

Finally done with all my grading -- now time to move on to all the wonderful administrivia that comes with the end of the year. Ah, the seminars to assist with, the teaching portfolio to update, the academic articles to hammer out, the lesson planning to prepare for! Smells like my vacation time swirling down the toilet. Before I launch into this summer's work, though, I have noticed a new trend during this last week of school; not sure what to make of it.

Students are bitching about grades more than usual. Not my students, although I have had two bitching so far (I expect 2-3 more, they're just too lazy to come figure out what they've gotten yet). Every student of El Hijo has bitched about their grades. Yesterday, the main day for returning portfolios, students were cursing in the hallways, marching down to the main office, and in what looks to me like unprecedented numbers -- filing grade appeals. Some left the main office crying with their parents. WTF is going on? We've not really been grading any differently than the last semester. We don't have a new crop of students with different academic backgrounds who would be more inclined to bitch.

I think it's the recession/depression.

No, honestly. I think that the situation with the economy is probably causing students to tense up about losing scholarships, to worry about having to repeat classes (and spend another semester or more here), and it's most definitely probably causing their parents to take a greater interest in their grades. I would say money is the deciding factor here. Grades can cause you to lose scholarships, but I bet for the first time (for many students), they're paying attention to the implications lower grades will have on their transcripts as well. Job markets are tight in most fields -- suddenly it makes a difference if you're a "C" engineer or a "B" engineer. It always made a difference, of course, but getting students to realize it made a difference was another story. So, this is a new academic development, at least at my university.

Too bad student work ethic isn't really catching up to the problem. El Hijo and I had a protracted argument at lunch about what the core of the issue for grade appeals is. I maintain that it's about student selfishness and misconceptions, especially when it comes to a class like writing or rhetoric. Students already think that essay judgment is subjective, and in a way it is -- if you miss a math problem, you obviously got the wrong answer. If you are illogical with words, it takes a few more steps to point out why. I'm not saying that writing is more complex than math (because Meg will Internet Kill me); but rather, it is just as complex as math. And just like you have some profs who will give you partial credit for at least working the math problem but screwing up the answer, you have some profs who will give you partial credit for doing most of the work that arguments take, but screwing up your logic. Just as there are chem profs who will fail the whole problem, even if all you did was screw up the last step, because it's WRONG, dammit, there are English profs who will fail your whole paper, even though all you did was screw up one part, because it's WRONG, dammit. So there is subjectivity, but students I think tend to process it differently. They see that kind of subjectivity more as the whim of the prof doing the grading.

That's part of what goes into student selfishness when it comes to grades. Set aside for the moment how some of them view grades as a transaction -- I pay money, you give A. Unless you've been really aggrieved (like the prof said "Sleep with me", you said no, s/he failed you), grade appeals are inherently based on the fact that you think you know better than the prof -- someone who spent years and years in the field -- about how to judge your own work; work that you didn't know how to do before you took the class. Grade appeals say that you're the expert, not the actual expert. Most students who do a grade appeal have a massively overinflated sense of the value of their work. A stands for superior, after all, and B is "above average." C's are average. C means "average college student work". College students themselves might be "above average" in terms of academic potential compared to everyone else in the country, but put against a roomful of themselves, they are not all going to be above average, obviously. This reality is matched by the statistics of grade appeal success -- only 3% of grade appeals are actually ever approved. You could say that there is probably some institutional bias going on; but universities take great measures to ensure that the review process is blind and impartial. I'm sure some profs go into it thinking they're going to side with the prof. But based on the people who are appealing, I have to say they just have no idea -- or refuse to believe -- that their work is just that sub-par.

So the answer to your grade woes, people, is not to put pressure on the prof; it's to get in and work harder. Maybe if you didn't have 13 absences (in a two day a week class, no less), you might have pulled better than a fail. When you've missed seven out of fifteen weeks of class, there's probably a reason you didn't have a quality piece of work. Just like some people are looking for part time jobs, you might need to make studying your part time job -- one you don't go in to do for only a few hours, say midnight to 3 a.m., before your deadline. Just a thought.

-- DV

Book Meme

It's been a while since I've done a Meme, and this one over at Meg's looked interesting.

1. To mark your page you: use a bookmark, bend the page corner, leave the book open face down?
I do all of the above. Mostly, though, I bend the corners down. I usually have several books going, and I can't remember exactly where I leave off; it's easier to just turn the corners down. But if it's somebody else's book, I don't do that.

2. Do you lend your books?
Yep. All the time.

3. You find an interesting passage: you write in your book or NO WRITING IN BOOKS!
Yep. I write all over them sometimes (as long as they belong to me). There are whole graduate classes devoted to studying people's marginalia, actually. I usually just write on what I consider "academic" books, though. There have only been a few fiction books I've actually underlined passages in -- and that was because they were favorite passages and I wanted to remember where they were.

4. Dust jackets - leave it on or take it off.
Most of the time I take it off. They get in the way.

5. Hard cover, paperback, skip it and get the audio book?
Mostly paperback. Hardbacks cost too much money. If I want the book to hold up longer, though, I'll spend the cash to get a hardback.

6. Do you shelve your books by subject, author, or size and color of the book spines?
Mostly by subject. We have shelves that are early American lit, philosophy, history, good literature, pulp (although we tend to give that away and not hang onto it), I have two shelves full of Vogue magazines, some Brit lit, science type stuff. Yeah. Mostly by subject.

7. Buy it or borrow it from the library later?
Mainly buy it. I'm trying to get better at doing the library thing, mainly because the university can get me pretty much whatever I want. Our public library is a sad little thing.

8. Do you put your name on your books - scribble your name in the cover, fancy bookplate, or stamp?
Yes, I write my name in the cover and usually the year I got the book, too. I don't know why. I usually only do that to "work" related books, though.

9. Most of the books you own are rare and out of print books or recent publications?
We have a really old complete set of Cooper novels that was given to us by a prof who wanted the shelf space. That particular set is probably out of print. But we can't afford rare and out of print books in principle, who are you kidding?!

10. Page edges - deckled or straight?
Deckling books sounds like an illegal activity. Or a sexual orientation, given its position next to "straight". I guess I like queer books?

11. How many books do you read at one time?
It depends. I try to do only one at a time, but that rarely happens. Right now I have five sitting on my night stand in various stages of completion.

12. Be honest, ever tear a page from a book?
Yes. Because I wanted to keep it with me always. :)

If you choose to do the meme, let me know.

-- DV

I Always Feel Like...Somebody's Watching Me

Meg has asked me a number of times to join Facebook, and I remain strangely silent on the matter.

In fact, numerous people have asked me to join Facebook, including powerful administrators who insist I make a Facebook page for my at risk students to join. Because they like to be on the forefront of technological trends, or at least appear to be. I remain super hesitant.

For one thing, I don't like my internet life and my IRL to intersect. If I were on Facebook, I couldn't be Dante's Virgil. I'd have to be First Name, Last Name. I'm pretty sure with Facebook, I can't be wonderfully psuedonymous, which is what I want to be. I like saying what I want to say when I want to say it. Under the guise of my Internet ID, I can do that. I just have to not give too many details. It feels like Facebook would somehow set me up to "get caught" or something. It creeps me out.

Then there is the issue of what to do with students who look you up on Facebook. I have to maintain some sort of professionalism (what little there is left) with them. Some profs I know won't "friend" them, but will let them add on in some other way (I have no idea how this works, so just consider it secondhand information, or something). Students ask me about Facebook all the time. I just don't feel like I could be "real" if I felt they were always watching. I guess. I don't go have a beer at places I know they'll be. This feels like the same thing to me. I don't know what's sadder, that I'm "hiding" from students, or that I consider the internet to be like a bar.

Facebook also has noteriety as one of the fastest rising ways for the university to check up on you. Go google it and see how many stories you turn up about the university using Facebook to expel college students for various reasons. Some of my students are in trouble for posting pictures of themselves drinking beer in their dorm rooms -- one just got kicked out of the dorms for it. Their floor leaders are busy snooping their MySpace and Facebook pages and writing them up. I would feel terrible if they were linked to my page and then somehow somebody else (like an administrator, who definitely would be looking at this "at risk" group page) followed them over to their page and busted them for something. It really gnaws at my sense of personal rights, I guess. I'm loathe to do even the group page.

So, I won't be on Facebook any time soon. My co-worker, on the other hand, the new guy, is totally into a Facebook page for them. So, I might have him set it up so that I can also run the page. But my own personal one? Nah. Not happening.

-- DV

OK, because consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, I've actually changed my mind. I'm on there as Dante's Virgil. I can't promise how active I'll be, though. Gah. I am NOT mixing my internet life with my personal name. Not yet, anyway.

I Can Soon Add "Baker" To My Resume

OK, without properly thinking it through (yeah, I know, when does that ever happen??), I've ended up with a teaching assignment this summer that is probably going to warp my brain to the point where it breaks. Because I teach an at risk group of college students as a mentor-teacher, and because I did such a good job this year, one of the people in the Upward Bound program asked if I'd be willing to teach English to the Upward Bound kids this summer. UB is a program that takes high school kids and tries to prepare them for college in a few key subjects, English being one of them. They come from local high schools, stay in the dorms while they're here, eat on campus, have "classes" and take field trips. It's supposed to get them excited about college, basically, so they'll have more motivation to go. There is a girl in one of my sections now who is in college because of the UB program; she says it makes college seem like a natural next step, and you stop thinking of it as an "option", but rather start thinking "How can I make sure I get there." The kids also tend to be from that same at risk group I teach in the Fall anyway. It seemed like a natural fit.

I actually need a little summer work to help us get through the lack of a paycheck until Fall. We have an emergency fund designed for this problem, but I don't like bleeding it down so much. So, I said yes. I figured since this was college prep, I'd have high school seniors. I love teaching college freshmen, and while I wasn't exactly too keen on getting high school seniors, as they tend to have a bad case of I'm-not-in-school-anymore-itis, I figured they were close enough to my preferred demographic it wouldn't really matter. Turns out, no.

I'm not getting the high school seniors. They're taking other courses for credit. I'm getting the underclassmen. Sophomores and Juniors. And something they call "fast rising ninth graders," which makes them sound like a batch of yeast muffins. Oh, God, no. That was not the plan. I don't want to teach yeast muffins. I wanted to teach kids who were relatively close to college age. I don't want people still freaking out on hormones! I got the sheet of paper a few days ago with the list of my people on it -- one has the number "8" under her listed grade. EIGHT?! Does that mean she's considered a fast rising muffin, or does that mean I've been duped into taking an eighth grader??

I have no training in dealing with high school kids. I mean, granted, most of my freshmen are 18 years old, and a few of them have been 17 when they come in for fall semester. But it's different. They're not eighth graders. What the hell am I going to do? Hell, I won't even be able to say "hell" anymore? What jokes will I tell them? How on earth will we bond, if I can't cuss?!

Imagine, if you will, all the pains of trying to get 18 year olds to discuss gender roles in our society, or race issues or, *gasp*, equal rights for gays. Now, imagine these readings presented to fast rising muffins, who've likely never thought of this before in their entire lives. GAH. I knew I was going to have to cut down what I was doing for them, make it a little easier. But I do readings and we discuss them. It's a critical part of the process. I'm probably going to have to rethink my whole approach to that now.

What I think I'm really bitching about is that when I said yes, I thought it would be less work. I'm quickly realizing it's going to be more. Much more. What the hell have I gotten myself into? This can only end poorly.

-- DV

After some online discussion of this matter (what better way to get advice??), I have decided to replace every curse word I would normally say with "smurf." I'm going to introduce myself by declaring, "Since I'm not allowed to curse in front of you, I've decided to replace every curse word with 'smurf.' So let's check the smurfing attendance roll, OK?"