This is the Notre-Dame de Montreal Basilica in Montreal, Quebec. The collage of eight (I think) images was done during the summer of 2001.
by James Brush
Year: 2006
While watching summer vacation fade to black and digging out all my classroom stuff to get ready to head back to the salt mines this week, I stumbled upon this little gem. I wrote it back in 2000 at the end of my first year of teaching as the closer to the portfolio I had to submit as part of my alternative certification process.
The Ten Phases of the First Year Teacher
Phase 1: I’m going to change the world.
This stage is filled with excitement and anticipation for the school year to come.
Phase 2: No I’m not.
This stage is characterized by frustration, anger at self and children. Kids know you are a first year teacher and they take advantage of the fact. At this stage, the first year teacher feels more like a cop, circus ringleader, babysitter, animal tamer and judge. One does not feel like a teacher, whatever that is supposed to mean. At this point, the first year teacher eats less, drinks more and watches too much TV on the weekends.
Phase 3: What the hell is a predicate?
The first year teacher now realizes he has forgotten much of the esoteric details of what he is supposed to teach. Many basics have gone beyond memory and entered unconscious awareness. The first year teacher must dredge this back up, relearn it and find ways to make it interesting.
Phase 4: Who do I think I am?
Self-doubt. I don’t even have a degree in English. I am the author of an unpublished book and several unproduced screenplays. Is this just a dodge? Am I qualified? What if I ruin English for 120 people who will never ever learn to write and will fail miserably in life before being flushed out the bottom of the fast food industry.
Phase 5: You were listening?
One day, around late October one student will write or say something that shows insight and awareness of herself and her abilities as a young writer. It takes one’s breath away. Maybe it will be a call from the parents, or a note from a student, but the first year teacher realizes he has touched someone. This is a profound and humbling experience.
Phase 6: The third or fourth paper.
Late one night, the first year teacher finds himself grading papers. He notices that some of them are good. Fewer run-on sentences and misplaced modifiers pollute the landscape of the page. Maybe a simile pokes out of the dense undergrowth of words like a nervous rabbit on an autumn morning. The first year teacher realizes that the writing of most students has improved.
Phase 7: I can do this.
As the giddy rush of the holiday season approaches and all the VACATION time looms like the Seven Cities of Cibola on the horizon, the first year teacher smiles. All is not lost. It is already late November and he has survived. There are fewer problems in the classroom. Most students are learning. Things are going well.
Phase 8: This is fun.
During the December holidays, while having a beer for breakfast and watching his wife go off to work, the first year teacher experiences a strange feeling. He realizes he loves his job. It is not just a job. It is a calling. He realizes he does not love it for the vacation time or any of that (which is a major plus, especially when one has literary ambitions), but for the fact that teaching kids how to use words is fun. In a perverse sort of way, he cannot wait for January.
Phase 9: I am a teacher.
The first year teacher returns to the classroom confidant. He knows what he is doing. He is eager to continue and excited by the prospect of pushing the kids to continue to strive for their best work.
Phase 10: I am going to change the world.
Maybe not this year or even next year, but someday. It will occur 120 kids at a time. 120 x 1 lifetime of teaching (call it 30 years)= 3600 lives. Wow. What an awesome responsibility. How many live will those 3600 children touch?
We got back from Camp Periwinkle (a camp for childhood cancer patients and their siblings) on Saturday afternoon and have spent most of the time since recovering. I’ve been going to Camp every summer since 1990, which is possible since it’s only a week long.
The underlying philosophy of camp is selflessness. All the counselors and staff are volunteers, the kids go for free, everything there is donated. For one week, and sometimes for the last time, the kids at camp get to feel normal, and they get to have fun, and they have the time of their lives.
The smiles and the laughter at Camp Periwinkle are things that keep those of us who’ve been doing it for so long coming back year after year.
It’s typically one of the high points of any given year. It’s a chance to spend a week living in a perfect world, a world of patience, selflessness, love, compassion, understanding. It’s a chance to see kids and adults truly be their best selves. Where else can you see kids in a relay race cheering on the kid in a wheelchair who will cost them the race, yet no one cares about who wins or loses? Where else can you see adults put aside every aspect of their own comfort and convenience so that kids will feel special?
I’ve never been anywhere or done anything else that focuses what life should be about and how we should interact with one another more clearly than Camp Periwinkle. It’s a place where no expense is spared, no opportunity missed, to make kids whose lives are a daily struggle feel special, feel normal. It teaches kids that they can do what no one thinks they can. It helps them survive.
In the past seventeen years, I’ve seen kids laugh, smile, dance, and play who might never otherwise have found a place to do those things. I’ve watched kids crawl out of wheelchairs to climb a wall on the ropes course. I’ve seen kids fresh from brain surgery lean on their crutches and dance.
It’s a powerful place and it changes a person’s way of thinking. It reminds me of how special life is, how lucky I am, how important it is to work everday to make the world a better place for everyone.
It’s a chance to see what life could be like in a world ruled by love, where nobody ever wanted for anything.
Did I say it is a perfect world?
* * *
Note: This was republished as a guest editorial in the Nov/Dec 2006 Journal of Pediatric Oncology Nursing under the title “A Perfect World.”
Folded clothes. Suitcases. Travel-sized toiletries. What could it mean?
Yup. It looks like the girls (and their cat) will be taking a little vacation while their people go off to Camp Periwinkle for the week.
[saveagrey]
This was taken in Round Rock, TX in the vicinity of I-35 and McNeil Road sometime around 1989-1990. I think it’s a church again these days, but I always thought the idea of a Church of Karate was kind of funny.
If they celebrate Festivus, it would certainly make the ‘feats of strength’ portion of the holiday especially interesting.
Shortly after posting last week’s installment of Weekend Cat Blogging, Morrison hopped up on my wife’s lap where she noticed to her horror that his chin and lower jaw were so swollen that he looked like Santa Claus.
Now, the old guy is diabetic so whenever anything weird happens we pretty much have to get him to a vet asap, so off we went to animal emergency where they know us pretty well.
It turns out that Morrison was stung or bitten whilst defending us from a gigantic (foot long if it was an inch) scorpion or perhaps some kind of spider (one of Shelob’s children, no doubt) that may have been lurking in some dark corner.
The vet at animal emergency shaved his chin to look for a wound, and then started him on benadryl. He had to stay for a few hours on Sunday night and then he was released back to us with enough lower jaw to build a second cat.
I had to give him benadryl tablets every eight hours. We had some fine times in the nether hours of the night in which I chased him around trying to ‘pill’ him only to watch him spit the pill out. It was a good game that we played every 2am for a few nights this week.
Finally, during a trip to Petsmart I learned that there is such a device that will allow one to shoot a pill down the back of a cat’s throat. With my new weapon in hand, Morrison was no match for me, and I am happy to report that his swelling has subsided.
He now looks like a normal cat. Normal with a shaved chin, that is. Still, he wears his battle scar proudly, a reminder of what a fierce beast he is.
Update: Upon coming back to town (after abandoning Morrison in his hour of need) I learned that his bravery has earned him the Feline Theocracy’s Legion of Feline Merit Medal with Catnip Leaf Cluster. The award was presented at the 123rd Carnival of the Cats hosted at The Scratching Post.
One of the first shows I ever saw in Austin was at the Back Room. The Godfathers (of “Birth, School, Work, Death” fame) were playing sometime either in ’88 or ’89. I had just moved here and was only starting to realize that Austin was a place where I could easily see some of my favorite bands and discover new ones.
The Godfathers show was pretty fun. They were shooting a video and let the first few hundred fans come in early for the shoot. We were near the front of the line and got to participate. They played one song several times and asked the crowd to really get into it. We did. Then they let the rest of the crowd in for the real set and we rocked out with the Godfathers in all their pinstripe-suited punk rock glory.
Over the years, I caught the occasional Back Room show and when I lived in South Austin, it was only a short walk away. The last show I saw there was Spindrift sometime in the mid ’90s. It was an off night for them, but the beer was, as always, cold and cheap.
The Back Room was mainly known as a metal club, and that really wasn’t my scene, so I never got to know it as I did the other late greats: Liberty Lunch, Electric Lounge, Steamboat, but it was part of my introduction to the world of Austin music and so I’m sad to read today that it will be closing its doors.
L Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is a fairly simple children’s tale, but it’s also a fascinating political allegory about the populist movement in late nineteenth century America. I enjoyed reading it, but in this case, I think the movie is better.
Much has been written elsewhere about Wizard‘s political message, but briefly: Scarecrow is the farmer lacking the brains to use his political power; Tin Woodman is the industrial worker who cut off from the land has lost his heart; Cowardly Lion is William Jennings Bryant, a populist pol who was all roar and no bite; the Yellow Brick Road is the gold standard; Wicked Witch of the East is the big eastern banks that enslave the common man (The Munchkins) until savior Dorothy (backwards thy-o-dor, as in Roosevelt) comes to crush the Eastern robber barons and unite the farmers and factory workers in a magnificent populist revolution; Wicked Witch of the West represents drought and difficult environmental conditions; Flying Monkeys are the American Indians, rendered powerless by Westerners; Oz is Washington DC; and the Wizard is the president, a politician who is all things to all people, but really nothing more than a sham who offers fake solutions to real problems.
Nineteenth century populist politics and debates about the relative merits of the gold vs the silver currency standards aren’t really issues central to Lost, but thematically, The Wizard of Oz is a story of peaceful social change and looking inside one’s self to find the things one needs to live a fulfilling and successful life.
Throughout the story, the Scarecrow clearly has brains; the Tin Woodman, heart; and the Cowardly Lion, courage. They just need to be shown, and ultimately it is the wizard who shows them that they already possess what they thought they lacked. With these tools, they now have the capacity to change the world.
The journey down the Yellow Brick Road ultimately becomes one of self discovery similar to what the characters on Lost experience during their adventures on the island. They too have what they thought they lacked ultimately allowing them the ability to change themselves and find redemption. The Wizard of Oz is about reaching one’s potential, a concept we see time and again on Lost, and also an apparent goal of the Hanso Foundation.
The example that springs to mind first is that of John Locke who finds within himself the strength, the ability to lead, and the conviction that he never knew he had. It’s worth remembering that Henry claimed to be coming for John because he was “one of the good ones.”
The Wizard of Oz does not actually make an appearance on Lost, but it is referenced in the name of Henry Gale. Henry’s name alludes to Dorothy’s Uncle Henry from the Wizard of Oz, and like the wizard – who let’s not forget is really a charlatan – Henry claims to have arrived in a hot air balloon. Or, at least he says he did.
The Wizard of Oz also brings us to the “Lost Continent Theories” in which we are meant to wonder if the survivors are actually on the remains of Lemuria, a Pacific Ocean version of Atlantis. This is implied by the four-toed statue that Sayid sees in the season two finale and by the fact that psychic Edgar Cayce (worth looking into since so many of his ideas correspond to what we see in Lost) “confirmed” the existence of Lemuria (and Atlantis).
Cayce believed that the citizens of Lemuria had psychic abilities and were both technologically and spiritually advanced. He also referred to Lemuria as Oz.
Considering the amount of psychic phenomenon on Lost and the number of Lost books that involve psychic phenomenon including prophetic dreams and spirit projection (Watership Down, Turn of the Screw, Lord of the Flies, A Wrinkle in Time) and the religious themes that appear on the show, it would not surprise me at all if the writers of Lost were using some of Cayce’s ideas as source material for the show.
So are the survivors of Oceanic 815 in another world, an enchanted land like Oz, or the remains of a lost continent? It would explain why Desmond couldn’t sail away. It would explain why everyone seems to have arrived by accident.
Of course, how does the Hanso Foundation know about it? If they can find it to drop supplies from the air, why doesn’t it show up on Google Earth? Is the Dharma Initiative an attempt to exploit a found Lemuria or to recreate it based on some kind of scientific/psychic discovery?
Check out the rest of my Lost book posts at The Lost Book Club.
We actually went to a theater!
Lady in the Water (M Night Shyamalan, 2006)
Perhaps I’m the only one, but I really liked Lady in the Water, the latest offering from M Night Shyamalan. Reviews of Shyamalan’s films tend to begin with praise for the Sixth Sense and then a comment about how it’s all been downhill from there. Frankly Sixth Sense, while good, is not my favorite of his films. That honor goes to Unbreakable.
Lady in the Water is a bit of a departure for him. It does not have the Big Twist that is the hallmark of his films (especially Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, The Village) in fact, it’s pretty straightforward as to what is going on.
Cleveland Heep is an apartment manager trying to find out who’s using the pool after hours. He falls in and is rescued by the midnight swimmer: a water nymph straight out of an old bedtime story. She’s here to help save humanity, but she doesn’t know how and so Cleveland must help her before she gets killed by a scrunt. It sounds silly and we know all this before the credits even roll, so where’s the fun?
For me it’s that once Lady gets past a slow start, it’s really very funny. Most of Shyamalan’s films have moments of quirky humor, but Lady in the Water is full of it. It’s a funny movie that is at once beautiful and whimsical, not meant to be taken too seriously, and yet it speaks eloquently to the unseen potential that we all carry around with us and are often too blind or afraid to see.
Sometimes to get a good picture one has to get between a fierce beast and his prey food dish.
