What Now?

Dracula (Sabbatical day 27)

I just finished reading Bram Stoker's Dracula, and I liked it very much! I'm planning a new AP English Literature course for next year on the theme of the monstrous and the humane (a few years ago the FGS English Department started offering a couple of AP Lit courses each year on different themes -- it's worked very well), and I'm thinking about this for summer reading.

There's obviously a ton to say about gender and sexuality in the novel, but I found myself even more interested in technology. Lots of emphasis on typewriters (including travel typewriters), phonographs, Kodak cameras, electric lights, and trains. But I also increasingly thought about the technology of vampirism and of salvation. There are a lot of rules for vampires and what they can and can't do (and I think I'd give that my students the project of coming up with a list of those rules as they read). There's a strong distinction in the novel between the soul and the body, and the vampire hunters' goal is to destroy the body so that they can save the soul. Mina Harker's potential damnation -- even though she is the essence of good Christianity -- was entirely about the technology of vampirism. The blessed communion wafer scorches her forehead, marking her as "unclean" before God, and it is only when Dracula dies and that scorch mark disappears that she can be holy again; her salvation has nothing to do with anything she herself does or believes or says. Fascinating.

I was reading this while visiting my mom, and she wisely asked me, "But do you want to spend your sabbatical preparing for a course? Aren't you supposed to be doing things that aren't all about school?" She is, on the one hand, totally right, and that's the very reason that at first I wanted to wait for another year before offering this new AP Lit course, so that I wouldn't spend my sabbatical doing course prep. But at the same time, summer reading does actually have to be decided before March, and I also actually enjoyed reading Dracula, so I'm happy to do the fun part of school while I'm on sabbatical, as long as I avoid the hard work of grading.

Sabbatical day 1: The Hate U Give

I woke up this morning, the first real day of my sabbatical, with a terrible headache and zero energy. No big surprise; I usually have a day like that at the start of each school break. I decided to just give in and let myself be as tired and grumpy and fretful as I needed to be; clearly I needed to rest, and so rest I would.

And then, by afternoon, my headache was gone, but I was still feeling wiped out, so I decided to spend the afternoon in bed and read the last two-thirds of Angie Thomas's The Hate U Give. Damn. What a powerful novel. I had been a bit reluctant to pick it up again, after I cried my way through the first third of the novel, but I figured since I was already emotionally drained, I might as well read the rest of the novel today. But actually the second half of the novel is more complicated and less emotional than the first half. Here's what I loved about the novel: nuanced characters, every single one (except possibly King) three-dimensional and complicated; real conversation about politics and race, which means no easy answers; thoughtful and complex intra- and interracial relationships; a likeable and engaging narrator/protagonist. So, so smart and important. One of my colleagues decided over the summer to add this to her freshman English reading list, and then the other two folks teaching that course decided to follow her lead. Apparently it taught very well, and I'm really glad that they took this step. And I'm glad now to have read the book myself. I'm going to mail my copy to my 11th-grade niece as a New Year's present.

It feels a bit ridiculous not to have even stepped outside today, especially since it was sunny even though cold. But sometimes one needs a hibernating day, or at least I seem to need one at the start of every break. The plan for the rest of the evening is to eat leftover Thai food and do something -- haven't quite decided what. I have about a million books that I'm partway through reading, and one of my goals for the next couple of weeks is to finish up a number of them so that I can balance a reasonable number of books-in-progress, but I'm not sure I'm up for reading anything else tonight. Maybe it's a podcast-and-cross-stitch sort of evening.

Same time next year

Torah study this morning was a delight as usual. (Not "as always" -- every once in awhile someone is stuck on some unhelpful idea and won't shut up about it, but that doesn't happen often.)

Simchat Torah was this past week. I had thought I'd go to the celebration service, but instead I stayed at home and worked, which was very unspiritual of me. But on Friday afternoon I read the final two chapters of Deuteronomy and then the first chapters of Genesis, so I made my own little Simchat Torah service. Of course, I did this in the waiting room of my dermatologist (they were running really late), so as Simchat Torah services go, it was pretty dull.

One of my sabbatical-inspired projects is to read each week's parsha ... and, moreover, to do it during the actual week it's assigned. Week One, Bereshit, done!

But here's the point of this blog post: This morning during Torah study, the rabbi said something that I found so helpful. We were focusing only on a couple of paragraphs in chapters 1 and 2, and of course there are so many things to talk about that we always run out of time. And the rabbi always looks back over his notes ahead of time to see what the group had talked about the last couple of times they studied this parsha, so we can talk about something different this time around. As usual, we only made it partway through the handout that he put together with relevant quotations from various scholars over the centuries.

And then, at the end of our session, the rabbi said, "There's so much more to talk about, but we're out of time. Fortunately, it will come up again next year!"

That is not a new or unexpected comment -- I'm sure he says it at the end of many Torah study sessions and that I've just never noticed -- but it struck me profoundly this morning. It's such a forgiving approach to textual study, to say that you'll get what you can from the text now but will clearly need to return to it again and again to really understand it. There will always be more to learn and to know, but the very structure of the parsha schedule is set up so that you just move on next week no matter what you did or didn't figure out about the parsha.

It reminds me of Henri Nouwen's Genesee Diary, about spending a year a Trappist monastery. The monks supported themselves by making bread, and everyone had their regularly scheduled times to work in the kitchen. One day Nouwen was sorting raisins for the monastery's raisin bread, and he made a mistake -- I can't remember the details, but the raisins were going to have to be resorted. Nouwen was going to stay in the kitchen and redo the botched job, but his fellow monks told him that the point was to work during his work session and then to stop work even if the job was not done. The work would never be finished, and it was spiritually important to show up and do the work and then to stop working when the time came. Of course, this approach was only possible because they lived collectively; when one person stopped working, the next person started, and so on. But it occurred to me that one could think of Torah study in the same way -- the work is never done, but we are all contributing to it, so we can put a parsha aside at the end of the week even though it's not done.

All of this reminds me far more of teaching than of writing. When I am writing about a work of literature, I need to feel reasonably confident that I've got a really good handle on it. I'd never assume that I know all of there is to know about it, but I feel like an expert. And then I finish that article, and I move on to an entirely new work to tackle. But my teaching is far more about working my way through a work of literature on an annual basis. I know that we're all supposed to say that we learn from our students, but that rarely happens for me, I'll confess. But I do learn something about a novel or a play every time I read through it, even if I've taught it a bunch of times. This year, I'm listening to audiobooks of the novels I'm teaching, and I'm discovering new things just by this different way of taking in the text.

Anyway, Bereshit -- same time next year!

Reclaiming ownership of my reading life

I've read a lot this spring, but I haven't been that happy with a lot of the reading because I've felt trapped into doing it. But I'm reclaiming ownership of my reading life:

A friend convinced me to join Goodreads in January, and I'm really liking it, not least because it's pushing me to finish books that I would probably just never quite get around to finishing, not because I didn't like the book but because I just got busy and lost energy. So for the most part this has been good for my reading life, but I was feeling burdened by a couple of books that I had lost interest in, but they kept showing up in my "currently reading" page, and I was feeling a bit trapped. And then, last week, I suddenly decided that I could just delete them! Freedom!

My school library did a special program this year, asking people to "read their way around the world." We got a little passport and got stamps in it if we read a book written by an author from each continent. They also included Antarctica and outer space, which obviously could be written by someone from any continent. I got a little obsessed and decided that I had to get all of the available passports. I was going to ditch the project at one point, because I wanted to read what I wanted to read without worrying about where people were from, but then I learned that our new head of school was almost done with her passport, and I somehow got it in my head that I had to finish the whole thing as well so that I would earn her respect. Stupid, but there it is.

Fortunately, I finished the last book I needed last week, and it feels so good to have that burden lifted. Sad that it had become a burden, but that's the way I was experiencing it.

I had to teach Julius Caesar this spring to my 9th-graders, because a performance was coming to town, and we got permission to take the entire freshman class to the play. That was a great reason, and I'm glad we had this opportunity, but I don't really like this play. But now I've finished, and it was a stretch for me to "sell" the play to my students when I don't love it myself. It feels good to be done with it.

I had been invited to join a reading group, and I seriously didn't want to, but I like the woman who invited me, so I went to the first, organizational meeting. And I really liked all the women who came, and I was convincing myself that this would be fun after all. But then it took forever to find a day that everyone could meet, and we wound up settling on May 30, which is the last week of classes, and I.just.can't. And my friend who invited me said that the first novel they chose was just okay. And I have enough reading that I need to do for class that I finally decided to just gracefully bow out of the reading group and read whatever the heck I want.

As summer is beginning to appear tantalizingly on the horizon, I'm becoming really protective of my reading time! I'm going to have lots of books I need to read -- for an NEH seminar (yay!) and for a new course I'm potentially taking on in the fall (yay!) -- and so I'm not going to let anyone tell me what else I need to be reading. It's going to be all Reader's Choice!

Hey, friends

Long time no see! Clearly my "I'm back" of a month ago was premature. It hasn't been a bad autumn at all, just one that has taken all my energy and left me little left over to do anything fun, such as blogging. 

But the good news is that D. got a positive update from the surgeon on Wednesday and is doing well. She started PT this week; taking her to appointments is going to be yet another thing for me to do twice a week, but my experience this summer was that I actually got work/studying done during her appointments, so I think it will be fine. She'll eventually be able to drive herself to appointments, but only once she can go down the front stairs unassisted.

In the meantime, here has been one really good outcome of her surgery: It has led to a restructuring of my personal priorities such that school has receded in importance in my life. I'm not sure how long that will last, but it has felt good to have other things on my mind besides school! This has also meant that I care way less about the inevitable little dramas at school, which has been nice.

My classes are humming along now, which feels great, although I'm completely wiped out on Tuesday and Thursday nights, since I have five classes in a row those days (four in a row on Tuesday mornings, which is pretty brutal).

I'm in a Hebrew study group that's meeting every other Monday night; I think we've dwindled to three die-hards, which is way better than when I was trying to be a cheerleader for folks who weren't into it. But I'm still not in the habit that I should be, of doing 10-15 minutes of study every day. See above re: not much energy.

I'm also only exercising on the weekends, which isn't good. Again, see above re: not much energy, although I know full well that exercising regularly would help my energy levels.

I honestly think that some of my low energy is about this damned election, and I'm hoping that we'll all be more cheerful when we (hopefully) don't have to think about Donald Trump any more.

So that's life at the moment. I've got several things I want to blog about, but first I needed to break through my own blog silence!

Learning Hebrew, redux

I know that I grumped and groaned an awful lot about learning Hebrew in my bat mitzvah class over the past year. Plus, you know, all the tears I shed.

But here I am, diving in again!

I really don't want to lose the Hebrew that I so painstakingly gained, so I talked with the rabbi and then proposed to my mitzvah-mates (a lovely term coined by one of my fellow bat mitzvah folks) that any interested folks could perhaps get together a few times over the summer and read an easy-Hebrew-for-adults storybook. I was amazed that most of the folks in the group said "yes" enthusiastically!

So today one of my mitzvah-mates and I and the rabbi had a little field trip to our local Jewish bookstore to select the book for the group. We settled on a book of Jewish parables. Each of the stories is 2-4 pages long, which will give us a frequent sense of accomplishment. I've already figured out that the first story features a blind man, so I think I'm doing well.

We also needed a Hebrew-English dictionary, of course. My rabbi recommends the Oxford, but the type was too small for me, so I got the Bantam, which is his second choice. I'm now going to have to spend time singing the aleph-bet song, since it turns out that, just as in English, one actually has to remember the order of the letters in order to use a dictionary!

And then, just because we're go-getters, we also bought a much more expensive book that is a language self-study course for English speakers who are traveling to Israel. Hebrew & Israel First Steps has lots of vocabulary and grammar, and each chapter is about a different place in Israel, so there's interesting content as well. It's modern Hebrew, as you'd expect, which means it begins by including all of the vowels but then gradually drops them away. I've been studying my Hebrew vocabulary without vowels for the last two or three weeks, and I'm sort of excited to push myself in this way.

It's perhaps weird that I'm so jazzed about studying Hebrew this summer when I was literally weeping over it last summer, but here is the difference, self-aggrandizing though it may be: The bar/bat mitzvah group's Hebrew teacher was a wonderfully generous woman who was doing the whole thing out of the goodness of her heart but isn't an especially good teacher and who kind of wanted to show off her own Hebrew skills. This summer, on the other hand, I am the de facto leader of this little unofficial group, and I feel confident that I can create a more positive learning climate in which we're all working at our own pace and ability and supporting one another. We shall see if that claim actually bears out.

My move in the game of "Humiliation"

So, you know that game of "Humiliation" that David Lodge invented, in which English academics confess the canonical works that they've never read?

Well, here's my confession: I've actually never read John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.

Oh, sure, I successfully answered a question on it during my comprehensive exams.

I even discussed it in a discursive footnote in my dissertation.

But neither of those things means I've actually read it!

But my colleague who's been teaching AP English Language for the last couple of years included the novel in her course and said it went really well. And next year I'm going back to AP Lang (which is seriously my favorite course, so I'm so happy to be returning to it!). And I'm always looking to give myself a challenge.

So I took a deep breath and put The Grapes of Wrath on my syllabus for next year. My desk copy has now arrived. So all that's left to do is, you know, actually crack it open and read it this summer.

I'm both looking forward to it and also kind of dreading it, in that way that books that one's avoided for decades become larger than life.

Is there a name for this?

You know when you need to use two different prepositions because you have a pair of overlapping prepositional phrases with the same object? As in "hope for and denial of intimacy"? Or "thinking about and wishing for something or other"?

What's that construction called? Anyone know?

 

What else I'm not reading, at least for now: Pedagogy

I went on a bit of a pedagogy-reading kick last spring and summer, and I totally enjoyed it. With colleagues, I read and talked about Grant J. Wiggins and Jay McTighe's Understanding by Design and Ron Ritchhart's Creating Cultures of Thinking. Also, in preparation for the week-long seminar I took on race and inclusion and independent schools, I did a lot of reading about the development of racial identity, especially Beverly Daniel Tatum's Can We Talk About Race? and Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? Plus, my 9th-grade English teachers and I got together over the summer and significantly revamped a major component of our shared course, and in doing so revamped a bunch of other parts of the course as well.

And this was all good, and I'm glad for the reading and the experiences.

Also, I'm exhausted. I changed things about my teaching and my courses, and I added some new components, and I feel really good about these changes. But it's been lots of work.

So one of the things I did for myself when I didn't get the academic dean position was to promise myself that I could take things a little easier. Today I returned yet another pedagogy book to the library, unread, and it was quite a relief.

Here's the thing: I'm a really good teacher. That doesn't mean I can't be better, and I think it's the responsibility of all teachers to keep honing their craft. But that doesn't mean I need to be doing this honing constantly; rather, I'd like to have seasons of such professional development, and other seasons in which those ideas take root. And, if we keep going with this new metaphor, maybe even other times when I'm letting my craft lie fallow for a bit.

So I'm declaring that this spring -- and maybe this summer and next year as well -- as a time for not continuing to push myself pedagogically but rather letting myself relax into and absorb the changes I've already made. I feel myself unwind even writing those words.

(Sorry for the conglomeration of mixed metaphors in this post. I'm way too lazy to go back and make them all cohere.)

What I'm reading and not reading

What I've read lately:

Book #4: Charles Todd, An Unwilling Accomplice -- I love Charles Todd! This one was a Bess Crawford mystery; she's a nurse in WWI. It was okay, but I really like Todd's Inspector Ian Rutledge mysteries better. They're set immediately post-WWI, and Rutledge returns to Scotland Yard trying to keep his PTSD a secret. 

Book #5: Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half -- Love, love this. I was a devoted fan of Brosh's blog by the same name, and I'd been meaning to read her book for ages. So funny and sad and raw and honest.

Book #6: Ngaio Marsh, A Man Lay Dead -- the first of the Roderick Alleyn mysteries. I had a momentary inspiration to delve into the classic Queens of Crime -- Ngaio Marsh, Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and Margery Allingham. This mystery was okay but not fabulous, but worth reading more to see if the series picks up. I read some of these when I was young, but the only one I remember is one in which a performance of Macbeth goes horribly badly when, at the end of the play, the actor Macbeth's head really does get cut off and put on a pole.

What I've ditched only partially read:

I decided that, since I'm not going to be academic dean, I didn't have to finish reading Jim Knight's Instructional Coaching. A fine book, but I'm not going to be an instructional coach, so I returned it to the library as a sign of my realigned priorities.

I was continuing with the Ngaio Marsh project and started reading Death in Ecstasy ... and wow, Marsh really hates gay men. I've read a lot of 19th- and early 20th-century novels that have the prejudices of their time (indeed, without such books I wouldn't have had a dissertation!), but the sheer disgust in the tone of this novel is too unpleasant for me to continue. Color me not surprised to then learn that Marsh never married and had female "companions" throughout her life. Protesting too much, hmmm? Anyway, after a few chapters, I decided that there was no point in getting through all of that vileness just for a mystery novel, so I ditched it.

I also had checked out Dorothy Sayers's Nine Tailors and started reading it. I generally like Lord Peter Wimsey novels, but this one has as its central conceit the ringing of church bells, which is described in such technical language that it's really quite tedious. Plus, in the first few chapters there have already been two maps, one a blueprint of the church and one a map of the village, and I know from experience that any mystery that relies on maps so that one tries to figure out who could make it from one building to another in how much time is just no fun for me. I haven't entirely made up my mind to ditch it, but I'm pretty close.

Today is the first day of spring break, so I'm determined to read only books that make me happy! (with the exception of Edwidge Danticat's The Dew Breaker, which will be super depressing but must be read because I assigned it to my AP Lit students)