Okay, so I know I should start by apologizing for not updating in a very long time. However, this year was brutal. Brutal. I ended up teaching during one of my prep periods for extra money, which was fine in theory, but it meant I had more to grade and plan with less time to work on it at school. Not my best idea ever. I won’t do it again. Plus, I didn’t really get paid very much. So, while I am sorry that none of you got to read my thoughts, I’m not sorry letting my updates lapse—school came first, and second, and most of the time third this year.
So, to try and give an overview of this school year, I’ve come up with a list of the top ten moments from the 2006-2007 school year. Some are funny, some aren’t, but It’s what I’ll remember from this year. And they aren’t really ranked in any sort of order except the one I thought of when coming up with them, so number one might not be the most amazing.
10. student hitting on me through email. Sometime in late may, I got an email from a former student. The body of that email is included here:
What's up Ms. Nolan, it's Luke, as you can see... cuz it says my name. I was just watchin the Colbert Report and I thought about you haha. I saw you outside your class the other day but didn't say hi cuz you looked busy. I was just gonna say you were one of my favorite teachers and a cool person. So I don't mean to sound wierd or anything if that's what you're thinkin but yeah. Anyways heyyy. How's it goin. You should like send me an email or something. LukeMafia7@aol.com or LukeMafia7@yahoo.com I mean everyone says I'm like a 24 year old cuz I'm so mature or somethin. I'm almost graduated so I don't see why we can't talk. I'm havin a house warming party in like July or June and there won't be many kids from school cuz these kids are all dumb. Anyways I was just droppin by to say hey cuz I couldn't forget about when you came to El Burrito and said you tried messaging me and I felt bad cuz I never got it, but anyways... Ummm welp, see ya later.Definitely the most awkward moment of the year.
9. end of the year evaluations. Most of these were par for the course, but on one of the evaluations, in the general comments spot, one student admonished me to “try to stop being such a fat miserable person, and mabye try to get laid.” Now, yes, I am overweight ( I do own a mirror), but I wouldn’t consider myself miserable. In fact , I’m one of the least miserable people I know, I think. As far as trying to get laid, I’ve been working on that for several years at this point (it’s more difficult when one qualifies the “getting laid” with a wedding ceremony.)
8. annoyatron. In my fifth period, there were about five boys who sat in the back and were generally good kids, but were goofy and always made comments in class. Some of those comment s were funny. As a result of this, I always got them mixed up, even though none of them looked remotely similar. I would always say the wrong name or think the wrong person had spoken. One day they called me on it, and I told them it was because they all just sat back there and annoyed me and so my brain lumped them together. At this point, i made up a name for them—annoyatron. However, at the exact same moment, one of those kids said it completely in unison with me and it was terrifying for the both of us. I threw up in my mouth a little bit, and he might have needed therapy.
7. ghetto love note. This story requires a little big of exposition. I had one sophomore class this year, who drove me crazy. They were immature, as sophomores are wont to be, and I didn’t like the curriculum, and it’s really hard only teaching one period of something. I was never quite able to get ino the grove of teaching them. They always had a carefully crafted seating chart to keep certain students away from each other, and one day, this girl, mary, gets up and walks across the room to her friend gia’s desk. I wasn’t lecturing or anything, but it was still not really an appropriate time to get up and walk across the room. When she got to gia’s desk, gia gave her a note, which I immediately confiscated. Gia protested, saying that she wasn’t passing it to mary, but that someone had given it to her and she wanted mary to read it. i told her that was fine, but she should have waited until after class. Now, our administrators encourage us to read notes we confiscate, because it’s a good way to find out if there are any fights coming up, if someone is dealing drugs, etc. I told gia I wouldn’t read it to her class, because that’s not what I do, but I did read it, because we’re supposed to. Plus, they’re usually hilarous and informative. (I’ve discovered several stuents who hate my clas this way) this was no ordinary note though. First of all, the words you, to, and for were always delineated as u, 2, and 4. Good start. The author had used three different colors of sharpies to write it, so it was extremely colorful, and it was the cheesiest thing I have ever encountered, which is saying something, because I love saved by the bell. He explained how he had liked her for some time but he didn’t want to mess up their friendship so he hadn’t said anything and then he went on to explain in some detail how much he liked her. My favorite quote is “I’m not talkin just 2 talk, I’m 4 real.” If I had the note with me, I would transcribe it here, because that’s how awesome it is, but unfortunately, I’m on a plane, and the note is at my house. Rest assured though that sometime this summer, I will type it up on here. The note was so amazing that I read it to the rest of my classes, all juniors and seniors. I didn’t say who I got it from and I couldn’t read the name of the person who wrote it, but it was a huge hit. This happened in april and I still had kids talking about it in june.
6. nolan vs. nolanator. Last year, I had a student give me the nickname “nolanator.” I adore this nickname and encourage it’s use at all times. I had two girls in my fifth period who realized early on in the year that I never heard them when they adressed me as “Ms. Nolan,” but that I always heard nolanator. As a result, they would wait until I was talking to another student and then start calling my name at a fairly normal level. After they said it a few times, which I would never hear, they would say nolanator, and I would respond immediately. It never failed to send them into fits of giggles.
5. inappropriate awkward. There’s one student each year, usually a boy, who doesn’t quite understand what is appropriate in a teacher student relationship. This year it was a kid named ryan. He always wanted to give me a hug, and I always refused because I teach high school to avoid hugs. He would ask me for a hug about once a week or so. I saw him at the school’s dance recital and he followed me back to my seat without me notcing then stood about three centimeters from me and started talking in my ear then asked for a hug. The whole thing was disturbing.
4. key club murals. Usually my job as key club advisor is the bane of my existance, but we painted a couple murals this year that were actually really good times. One was a transportation theme at a daycare entitled “Cars and Trucks and Things that GO!” the other was a series of old las vegas marquis at a senior center.
3. pigtails in the yearbook. One thing we do for key club each year is take a trip to six flags in california for what we call fall rally. It’s where the different divisions cheer and scream and try to win the spirit award. The whole thing is pretty fake, but this year I decided to get involved and cheer and scream as well. At some point, my key clubbers decided that it would be a good idea to put my hair in pigtails and I decided it would be a good idea to let them do that and then let them take pictures. A few weeks later, one of my student who was on the yearbook staff asked if I had any key club pictures and I gave her the ones from fall rally, which included me with the pigtails. Do you see where this is going? Fast forward to may, when the yearbooks came out, and a student inormed me that on page 129 there was a picture of me with pigtails. Quite possibly the worst picture of me EVER, immortalized in the pages of Palo Verde High School’s yearbook. But it gets better. A different student, who was also involved with yearbook told me that when they first got them back, the yearbook staff was looking through them and another student saw the picure of me and stated (quite maturely, I might add) that she “couldn’t beleve some of the kids at this school.” My student responded by telling her that that wasn’t a student, but his english teacher. She then amended her statement and said, “I can’t believe some of the teachers at this school.” Her judgment of my immaturity had made me completely re-evaluate all my actions and attitudes, thus leading me to become an extremely image-conscious person who worries at all times when someone is thinking of me in an effort to look supremely cool and grown up and never make a fool of myself. Not really.
2. senior research project. I love teaching modern literature. I love the fact that I’m the only one who teaches it, so I can prety much do whatever I want. The downside is that there’s no one who’s been teaching it for 30 years to give me guidance, leading me to some pretty incredible blunders. Like the senior research project. All english classes are required to assign a research project of some sort each year. There are two senior english classes: british lit and modern lit, and the students get to choose which they want to take. Previously, modern lit was seen as a really easy english credit because the person who taugh it before me made it really easy. It’s not easy anymore. When I was trying to come up with a research project this year, I looked to the british lit class, so I could try to model mine on theirs. Their assignment is to read a play by shakespeare, and write a critical analysis on it. they give the kids about four cricical theories to choose from (psychoanalytic, historical/biological, jungian, and feminist) and the students go to the library and look through the literary criticism set and find articles about their play and their critical approach. I thought that was a really good idea, but I didn’t have a huge figure like shakespeare, so I decided to have them choose a modern poem and write a critical analyis on it using the literary criticism from the library. Sounds good? It wasn’t. my students had trouble finding criticism on their poem that matched up with their critical approach, and these kids aren’t advanced enough to perform their own criticism. For the most part, it bombed spectacularly. A few really cool things happened though:
· One student who had done a poem by allen ginsberg decided that she was really into beat poetry and read a bunch of it, and then brough it up when we were discussing existentialism.
· Another student (whose name is Colby Bryant—yes similar to the basketball player) came in to ask a question about his poem and we spend the next twenty minutes talking about it and sharing ideas about meaning. I found some references to the october and bolshevic revolutions, the cold war and he had some ideas about how the author was torn between his homeland, russia, and new home, the US during the cold war. It was one of those really great teaching moments. The downside was that he ended up being 15 minutes tardy to his next class (he didn’t tell me he had a class to be in)
· Several students told me that it was the best paper they had ever written (before they got their grades back) and that they had worked harder on it than anything else in their high school career and that they didn’t know they could write that well or work that hard or think of things that difficult.
I ended up grading those essays quite leniently, because I knew how hard the assignment was, and that there hadn’t been a lot of research readily available. That ended up working out better for many of them, especially those who worked really hard, because they got good grades and saw that they could do well on an essay, and that confidence booster will probably be more beneficial for those who are college-bound than any amount of comments or corrections I could have made. Those kids who got A’s were so proud of their A’s. they were still talking about it a month after they got ther papers back.
1. dante’s inferno. This is another sophomore story. Sophomores read Julius Caesar by shakespeare almost all of second semester. Most of the sophomore curriculum is crap, and we’re working to fix that, but one thing we changed this year was having the sophomores read parts of dante’s inferno. The reason the sophomore curriculum is crap is because it’s way too easy. Conversely, the sophomore honors curriculum is incredibly challenging, and that’s where we pulled the inferno from. For those of you who haven’t read the inferno, it tells the journey of a man named dante through hell. There are nine levels, each one for a different type of sin, where the sins get progressively worse, as do the punishments. In the inferno, the bottom level of hell is called cacystos (prety sure I spelled that wrong—I’m doing this from memory) and it’s the punishment for those who betrayed their benefactors. These people are frozen in a mix of blood, mud, tears, and other general ick that flows down from the other levels of hell. At the center of this level is satan, who in this version has three heads. Each head has a mouth (which makes sense) and each mouth is chewing on a sinner. The center head chews on judas iscariot (also spelled wrong), because he betrayed jesus. The center head/mouth chews on judas for eternity, and he never dies, because then the punishment would end, and hell is pretty much just about eternal pain and suffering. The other two heads/mouths chew on Brutus and Cassius from Julius Caesar, so it’s a nice tie in for my class. My students got really into it (and sophomores don’t get into anything because they’re too cool for school) and we actually had discussion about whether they deserved to be there. Some students said cassius didn’t, because Caesar wasn’t his friend or benefactor, so he just deserved to be with the murderers or the violence lovers, or even with the self absorbed flag chasers on level one. I even had some kids say Brutus shouldn’t be there because he was doing what he thought was right and was trying to save rome. That was the cool part, and that discussion was with my more advanced kids. My paste eaters had more trouble with the inferno because they couldn’t grasp that it wasn’t real. It’s just a story. The fact that the author made himself the main character in the story was just about too much for them to handle. The othe problem was that they had trouble understanding that the inferno is dante’s depiction of hell and isn’t necessarily real. They wanted to know where hitler was (like I had a special copy of the book that had those answers) and why God set it up that way, etc. It pretty much drove me crazy, but overall, it was fun.
So those are my top ten moments of the year. Most of them are from the end of the year, because that’s what’s freshest in my mind. I’m sure I’ll think of others as time goes on, and I’ll share those too. Here’s one thing I learned this year: students seem to think that I have some sort of “director’s cut” of any story or novel we read that give me more backstory and information than what’s in the novel. Examples: when we were reading Huck Finn, they kept asking what happened to Huck’s mom. I don’t know. My book has the same words as yours. I would always make jokes about having a séance to contact the ghost of Mark Twain and ask him. Unfortunately, no one ever had a Ouija board in their backback… weird.
I think this is sufficiently long. Adriane, I’m sorry for sucking at life. I’ll try to suck less in the future.
