What Now?

Health update

Thanks for your well-wishes after my medical misadventure last Saturday night. I limped along all week, feeling slightly heroic that I was going to school each day like a trooper, although I was feeling more and more myself and thus less and less heroic as the week went on. The only things I missed all week were a department meeting on Tuesday so that I could go home and sleep after school (because that first day back, with four classes and a few student meetings, really did wipe me out), and one class today so that I could go see my doctor, plus a student event this evening I really should have gone to but was just too tired ater the doctor's appointment and the cumulative stress of the last week. I feel a little bad about this last omission, but I keep reminding myself to give myself a break because, seriously, it was perfectly reasonable to duck out of it under the circumstances.

So, here's the update from the doctor today. Fortunately, having staples taken OUT of one's scalp, while no picnic, doesn't hurt nearly as much as having them put INTO one's scalp. The doctor said that the wound was healing nicely, so no worries there.

They drew blood and are going to run anemia and other tests; when the results come back in next week, I'm probably going to wind up on iron supplements, which I'm not really looking forward to since iron tends to upset my stomach, but I'll learn to deal with that. The anemia levels that I had last week in the ER aren't enough on their own to cause the fainting, but I also tend to have low blood pressure, which means that I'm more than usually susceptible to feeling fainting (which has been true of me for years), so that means it's extra important for me to stay well-hydrated and have enough sodium and continue my usual practice of eating every few hours. So last Saturday, the combination of slight anemia and slightly low blood pressure could have combined with not quite enough food and water that day to make me feel light-headed.

Plus, she suggested that I go on birth control pills or a hormone IUD to reduce my periods, which have gotten extremely heavy in the last couple of years, such that they are probably a major contributor to my anemia. But first she wants to do an ultrasound to make sure that I don't have uterine fibroids, which are benign but do cause heavy periods and could be treated or even removed surgically. So I have that ultrasound scheduled for late March. The word "surgery" scared me a little, but then I looked up fibroids online and saw that it can be done as an outpatient procedure, so not such a big deal.

I've also been having weird shortness of breath from climbing stairs over the last couple of months, even though I exercise and think of myself as in reasonably good shape for a non-athletic middle-aged person. And that, too, can be a symptom of anemia, so I'm hoping that the iron supplements that I'll probably start taking next week will take care of that shortness of breath problem in reasonably short order; apparently anemia, especially when it's pretty mild, can be treated pretty quickly.

As far as last Saturday goes, the doctor said that if I had just thrown social convention to the wind and gotten down on the floor right away at Costco as soon as I felt faint instead of trying to soldier through it, I probably wouldn't have fainted, and thus obviously wouldn't have hit my head. (Well, actually she didn't say any of the stuff about social convention -- that's me -- but she did say I should have just lain down.) Certainly my experience of feeling faint in the past has been that if I can at least sit down and getting something to eat and drink and some cool air or a cool cloth, I'm fine. I still can't quite picture how that would have worked out in Costco that day, but of course it's not like I was more socially acceptable by fainting dead away than I would have been if I had just abandoned my cart and sat down on the floor somewhere! And quite frankly, I think that's what I would have done if I hadn't already been in line to check out when I started feeling cold and clammy.

So the good news is that (a) nothing serious is wrong with me, and everything that is slightly amiss can be treated easily, and (b) none of this in any way interferes with my South Africa trip, which starts two weeks from today! Yay! I am going to make sure that I have snacks and water with me at all times on the trip, since my experience of traveling is that one can't necessarily control when and under what circumstances one is eating and resting, and I assume that will be especially true when traveling with such a big group that is being run by an educational tour company. I want to make sure that I enjoy the trip thoroughly, so that will mean I need to take some initiative to maintain my own health and comfort -- no problem.

And on that note of self-care, I'm going to publish this and go to bed. One of the good things to come out of last week's medical misadventure is that I've been making sure to get plenty of sleep this week and have really scaled back on the amount of work I'm bringing home in the evenings. That does mean I have a shit-load of grading to do this weekend, but that probably would have been the case anyway since it's the end of term and also since, quite frankly, I'm not very efficient in the evenings even when I do bring work home. So in the spring term, I'm going to seriously commit to only doing reading and class prep in the evenings (since that's the fun stuff), and keeping the grading to my free periods and right after school and a few hours on the weekend, when I work much more quickly and efficiently. In fact, since Ash Wednesday was this week, I decided to make this my Lenten discipline -- not a traditional discipline, of course, but there will be no fasting for me, lest I faint away again!

An overexciting Saturday night

Last night D. and I were gearing up for a typical Saturday night, which is to say that I decided to run to Costco and buy, among other things, a pizza for that night's dinner, which we would eat while watching a video. Because that's how exciting our lives are here in Adventure City.

But instead what happened is that, as I was standing in line to checkout, I suddenly started feeling very bad indeed -- cold sweat, clamminess, feeling like I was either going to throw up or pass out. I crouched down, holding onto the conveyer belt, and the cashier asked me in concern if I was all right (since I clearly wasn't!), and I asked if she could get me a cup of water. I stood up to take off my jacket since I was feeling so clammy ... and the next thing I knew, I was lying flat on my back, with a ring of concerned faces around me.

Yep, I passed out, falling straight back and hitting my head very hard on the concrete floor -- and possibly on the cart behind me, although no one could say for sure whether that was the case. I was apparently out cold and twitching a little for about 6 seconds and then came to. Costco employees called 911, stayed with me until the EMTs took over, called D. twice to let her know what was going on -- I'm definitely writing the store a thank you card!

And then I had my very first experience with EMTs, ambulances, the whole nine yards. They put me in a neck brace and strapped me to a backboard, just as a precaution since I'd hit my head, and I've now had my first ambulance ride, which made me a little carsick but was otherwise interesting. The EMT who was working with me in the back was really nice and reassuring and kept calling me "honey," which is the kind of thing that might annoy some people but made me feel very safe and cared for. (I'd love to know what they call men, since I'm assuming they wouldn't call them "honey.") After I got admitted to the ER, the EMTs stopped by to say goodbye and "hope you feel better" before they left -- very nice men indeed. In the store and in the ambulance, they kept asking me all sorts of questions to assess my cognition -- my birthday, what day it was, did I know where I was, etc. -- and then they asked me my age, and I said "43. Wait, no, 44. I think. Hmm, let me do the math -- yes, 44" and then assured them that my uncertainty on this point had nothing to do with hitting my head but simply with having reached the age where I don't tend to keep track of my age so much.

And then I was at the hospital for hours and hours because they wanted to check everything and monitor me for awhile. Fortunately, D. had brought all sorts of things that she thought might make me more comfortable (especially if I'd been admitted), so I had a little neck pillow that made those hours more comfortable than they would have been otherwise. Folks were very nice to me, but it was a long night, and my head was bleeding and hurt, and I was really cold despite the warmed blankets they kept putting on me (at one point I had a serious shivering attack, which I think was maybe an aftereffect of the adrenaline from the whole experience, as were my tears once D. arrived in the ER and we were alone for a moment), and mostly I just wanted to go home. Plus, the nearest hospital, which is the one the EMTs took me to, is a Catholic hospital, which I didn't realize until I put my glasses on and realized there was a crucifix on the wall, which gave me an unpleasant St. Martyr's flashback, such that when the intake person asked my marital status I hesitated for a moment before saying "married." But in fact they were all totally cool and treated D. as the spouse she is in this state (which was another one of those moments when I realize that, although I'd love to live closer to my family, I don't want to give up the status of being legally married to my spouse, which significantly limits the number of states I'm willing to live in).

I got a catscan, and everything looked fine, so they eventually released me after 11 p.m. that night. They don't know exactly what made me pass out, but I was slightly anemic, so I'm supposed to follow up on that with the doctor. My blood sugar was really high when they brought me in, which is weird since normally when I feel kind of faint the problem is low blood sugar and I eat a little something and am fine, but apparently the stress of the whole experience could have made my sugar spike after the fact, so they can't really tell what my blood sugar was at the time I fainted. I'm also supposed to follow up with the doctor about possible diabetes, although that's more of a "ruling things out" issue, since the doctor didn't think that was what was up.

I also wound up with a skull laceration from the fall and now have 9 staples in my head, which I'll get removed on Friday afternoon when I go to see the doctor for all of this other follow up. Getting those staples put in was far and away the worst part of the whole experience -- "you'll feel a slight pinch," my ass! Plus, getting the wound cleaned out hurt like hell -- not just the stinging but also the whole area is terribly bruised -- and in fact I threw up from the pain, another little bonus of the experience.

The whole evening pretty much sucked, of course, but I'm kind of jazzed at the possibility that it was all caused by anemia, since that might explain a few other symptoms I've had lately: terribly heavy periods in the last couple of years; and in the last few months, shortness of breath just from going upstairs, even though I'm in reasonably fine shape, and a general lack of energy such that I'm pretty much always wiped out. It looks like anemia is pretty easy to treat (and D. went out today and bought me Cream of Wheat and blackstrap molasses for iron-rich breakfasts), and I'd be quite pleased to discover that these other symptoms that I assumed were just about aging are instead about a lack of iron in my blood that could be taken care of fairly quickly. Of course, I would just as soon have made that discovery without fainting and hitting my head, but I guess beggars can't be choosers.

Fortunately, this is a long weekend, so I've got a couple of days to rest and recuperate before going back to school on Tuesday. I'd be perfectly willing to call in sick if I had to, but I don't think that will be necessary. I get to take a shower tomorrow morning (I'm supposed to keep my head wound dry for 24 hours), and I've done a little reading and a little grading today and am feeling okay, so I see no reason that I shouldn't be just fine for Tuesday morning. But none of this is exactly how I was planning on spending my long holiday weekend!

Jane Eyre in pictures: A day in my life with sophomores

My classroom has become a hangout for a group of sophomores whom I adore -- kids I taught last year, a couple of whom are now my advisees. There's a decided fabulously-nerdy streak among the group; many of them are Nerdfighters of the "DFTBA" stripe. All of which is to say that these are my people!

So the sophomores have now finished reading Jane Eyre, and it has been quite the exciting journey for them and their teachers. On Valentine's Day, more than one whiteboard in the school was adorned with a big heart and "Jane + Rochester."

Yesterday I came back from lunch to find my room full of sophomores, doing some sort of dance to a song playing on one of their computers. Quite the festive atmosphere prevailed. And clearly they had been hard at work in the visual arts before turning their attention to the performing arts, for three pictures were drawn on my board. (Click to enlarge.) This first drawing is of the engagement chapters of Jane Eyre, in which Rochester keeps treating Jane as a doll, wanting to buy lots of stuff for her, and she's holding him back. Then, one of the girls suggested to the girl who was drawing (these are, respectively, the Holly and Nezzy whose names appear here) a cross-over special of Mean Girls and Jane Eyre. And then, my favorite: a picture that I imagine is influenced by the opening chapter of Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, which they're beginning to read now. (In all of this I detect the influence as well of Kate Beaton, especially her fabulous "Dude Watchin' with the Brontes.")

    

Today, same thing. I came back from lunch, and they'd been at it again, with two more pictures, plus a note reading "We love you, Dr. Now!" Just exactly what one needs on a Friday afternoon after a long, hard week -- heaven!

I do so love this particular class of sophomores! Here's hoping that this year's current 9th-graders, who are a much flatter group, manage to get their dander up a bit before they're sophomores next year (especially since I'm now slated to take a year or two off from the 9th-graders and focus my energies on 10th-graders and AP Comp 11th-graders instead)!

Just how mean and irrational am I?

My 9th-graders have been getting short, 5-point reading quizzes throughout the term as they've been working their way through The Odyssey. The quizzes are unannounced, although they know that they could have one of these quizzes any time they've had a reading assignment. The point of them, obviously, is to provide a little additional incentive to keep up with the reading, since it would be all too easy to fall behind, and they also often provide the opening for the post-quiz class conversation.

The end is now near -- not in an apocalyptic way but in a finishing-the-epic way, which is good since the term ends next Friday. (Stupid trimesters!)

I've been reassuring the girls all along that I'll drop the lowest quiz grade, recognizing that we all have days in which we're just not entirely prepared. (And believe me, I've had more than a few of those myself this term.) These quizzes collectively are worth a tiny portion of their grade, but they do add up a bit once you realize just how long the darn epic is.

This week, after listening to me say all term that I'll drop the lowest quiz, one of the kids raised her hand to ask, "What exactly does 'dropping the lowest quiz' mean?" I looked at her, puzzled, wondering what else it could mean besides, you know, what it means.

Finally, the truth came out: All term, she's been assuming that I will take her lowest quiz grade and drop -- i.e., lower -- the grade! As in, "Hmm, this kid's lowest grade is a D. I'm going to make it an F!"

I laughed immoderately once I realized her misapprehension, as did she and the other kids, and we had an amusing few moments in which I made declarations such as "And everyone who's wearing blue today gets a C! And if your name is in the first half of the alphabet, I'm raising your grade 10 points!" I don't normally laugh at students, of course, but her relief was so palpable upon realizing the actual meaning of "drop your lowest grade" that she kind of started the laughter, so I think it was all okay.

But later, after chuckling even more over the story, I started thinking more about the underlying sense of the world that would allow a student to assume that I was going to, as a matter of policy, reduce everyone's grade and give them fewer points than they had earned. Do teachers really seem to her so mean-spirited and so irrational? Do grades really seem to have so little bearing on actual performance?

I'm afraid that the answer is clearly "yes." Yikes.

Summer reading, and thinking about an introduction to essays

The FGS English department assigns summer reading to our students, on the theory that reading a couple of books will keep their brains alive during the summer months. (Many of them read quite a lot, of course, so this is about those who would prefer not to open any book covers between June and September.) We've usually required one book for the course they're going into in the fall (it's been The Count of Monte Cristo for the 9th-graders for ages; recently we switched to The Kite Runner for the sophomores; as of last year, it's The Crucible and Fences for the juniors; and The Picture of Dorian Gray for the seniors), and then they choose a couple of books off a long list of recommendations that are geared to their age level. It works pretty well. (Last year we dropped the number of free-choice books to one since the head of school added a "community read" book, an experience that had its pluses and minuses. But I digress.)

For my AP Comp class, however, I get a completely free hand about the summer reading requirement. The first year I just had students read Malcolm Gladwell's What the Dog Saw as their required book and then had them read two free-choice books, but last year I went a little crazy and required Gladwell, plus Simon Winchester's The Professor and the Madman, plus the Old Testament part of Timothy Beal's Biblical Literacy: The Essential Bible Stories that Everyone Needs to Know. Based on my experience of the first year in the course, I was trying to send a message that AP Comp is serious business -- hence a lot of reading -- and I also wanted them to wrap their heads around nonfiction as the dominant genre of the course, which of course makes it different from any other English class they've ever had. But piling on the work was not the way to do either of those things. This year I'm aiming to hit somewhere in between the past two summers but still accomplish both of those goals.

And I suddenly realized yesterday that I have to make up my mind in the next three weeks what I want students to read this summer. Yikes! This deadline has been completely off my radar, which means that I now have some hustling around to do. (Gee, how fortunate that these three weeks should happen to coincide almost exactly with the last three weeks of the term. Aargh, stupid trimester system!) So here are my current thoughts, and I'd certainly love any brilliant ideas you may have (or, heck, not brilliant ideas are welcome too!):

• I love the Timothy Beal book, and a modicum of biblical literacy is sort of becoming this extra goal I have for my AP Comp class, since there's nowhere else in the curriculum that they're going to get it right now. But I assigned way more to them than they could really take in -- since, after all, all of these stories are completely new to most of them! -- so I think this year I'll require them to read just Genesis during the summer, and then we'll read other parts of the book during the school year (as I did this year, having them read Beal's excerpts of the gospel of Matthew before they read Frederick Douglass, for example -- it made a world of difference in their understanding of his narrative! And, as I did last year, I'm going to do a week on the Exodus story and its rhetoric in later speeches.)

• Many of the students weren't wild about The Professor and the Madman, so I won't be requiring that. But what I might do -- something that many AP Comp teachers do -- is give them a list of book-length nonfiction (maybe mostly narrative nonfiction?) and have them choose one to read. So I could include The Professor and the Madman but also add other well-respected nonfiction, memoirs, etc. and let them decide what appeals to them most. (Please give me your top nominations in the comments -- it would be so helpful to know what nonfiction you all have found most interesting in recent years!)

• I really like Gladwell's essay collection -- he's definitely at his best in the short essay, I think, rather than the full-length book -- but I wonder if there's something better I could be using to give students an introduction to the essay, which is essentially a new genre for most of them? I want a collection that includes essays other than (although perhaps including) personal essays -- pieces in which an author is grappling with ideas in an intelligent way. But I also want essays that students who have never seriously read essays before could read on their own during the summer and not feel that their vacation was being ruined because it's all too hard! One possibility is to go with the annual Best American Essays collection, which would probably be fun for me as well since it would be a new collection every summer. The 2011 collection was edited by Edwidge Danticat and has great reviews on Amazon, and of course this would be exposure to several different essayists. I also thought about giving them some master of the craft, like George Orwell, and having them read only specific essays, with the expectation that we'd read other of the essays during the school year. Or maybe I should go with some au courant essayist? I'll confess I haven't read anything by either Jonathan Franzen or Zadie Smith, but maybe something along those lines would work well?

• Plus, the head of school is still on her "community read" kick, so we'll all be reading one of the novels that she's choosing. The top three current possibilities include not one but two novels set in Nazi-occupied Europe, so I'm not expecting a lot of kicks and giggles from whichever book she chooses. But all of this is out of my hands.

As I look at these four bullet points, I realize that this isn't actually looking like less than last summer. But if I drop WAY back on the biblical material they read and I give them a lot of choice in their full-length nonfiction book, I think I'm still making the summer options less onerous, and hopefully more fun.

Although, in many ways, I just don't need this task right now, there is definitely something to be said for planning for the future as a way to distract myself from the huge amounts amounts of grading that are my lot in the next couple of weeks. It's a form of productive procrastination that reminds me that, despite all of the mistakes that I've made and will continue to make this year, there's a shiny brand-new year waiting out there on the horizon. It's like the thrill of a new notebook in curriculum form.

I'll look forward to hearing any suggestions you have -- for either essays or nonfiction books -- and I'll definitely tell you all what I finally decide!