(Okay, not much of one)
I admit that a very small (teensy, really) part of my liking for the boy’s name we have mostly settled on is that it would sound great if an NFL sportscaster were announcing it as part of the Broncos starting lineup. What can I say — I have a sickness.
Have been grading papers all day — only four left, so I was browsing the Interwebs for Shit the Baby or I Might Need, and I found this:
Holy hellballs, people. Knowing what these were for would have kept my virginity intact a good ten, fifteen years more.
The essay my student plagiarized nearly word for word (and seriously, when you’re a C student, at least disguise your plagiarism!) came from a sample essay in a book about how to win college scholarships. And the subject was No Child Left Behind.
I mean, my brain’s circuits fried with all the irony (oh fine, it may be pop irony instead of literary irony, but still it’s stronger than coincidence) in those two facts. No, child, you will not be winning scholarships to college with plagiarized writing. You will be left behind.
Damn shame, too. Good kid.
me: ohmygod, how are we going to know what to do with it when the thing gets here?
soon-to-be-father-of-our-child: y’know, awhile ago in a moment of angst i asked you the same thing. you said all we have to do is feed it and change its diaper, and as it grew more complicated, we’d learn what to do.
me: …
me: well…don’t throw my words back in my face!
father-to-be: obama’s a muslim!
Apparently the best way to make your students misbehave is to brag about them to the Internets. I wonder if the reverse is true.
You see, one assignment is to watch a documentary and then to analyze its rhetoric in a paper. The students voted on the documentary they’d most like to see, and although “Super High Me” came in first, it was rated R which is generally not approvable, plus my research into it didn’t seem like it would present an argument per se, so we went with the runner-up, An Inconvenient Truth. To be clear, while it wasn’t their first choice, it was still their choice.
Oh. my. gawd.
Such wailing and gnashing of teeth — you’d think Al Gore personally done them all wrong what with all the whining and death wishes directed his way. And what kills me is how this film – that they voted to see — is so irrelevent that they see the idea of human-caused climate change as boring, yet they all want to see 2012. Um, guys? Srsly?
On Wednesday we’re going to talk about ad hominem logical fallacies and evaluating an argument, not a person. In the meantime, I wish aspirin were good for fetuses (feta? fetii?). Or alcohol.
I seriously don’t understand how we can go over summary, quotation, and paraphrase for HOURS and students still don’t use quotation marks for words taken from another source “because it’s paraphrase.”
NO IT’S NOT. The SOURCE may have paraphrased, but YOU did NOT.
*tearing out my hair*
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Update: Have fixed typo in title. Now am considering live-blogging Meltdown to Baldness 2010. Ugh.
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Those faint screams are the sounds of me checking my students’ sourcework.
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I must speak a different language when I teach. It’s the only explanation for a couple of these research papers.
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It’s really only three out of twelve papers (and two of those weren’t my students in ENGL 101) that are so awful, but they’re THAT AWFUL. (And this is one benefit of teaching at the pen: my students will never know I liveblogged my hairloss.)
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I think the key here is to not read all the good papers first. Stupid, stupid planning.
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Remember copyediting? That was a nice, stress-free career with regular hours….
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The delusions are getting stronger.
I was sad to hear last week that Daniel Schorr had died. Like many journalists of his era such as Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow, his voice carried that memorable white male gravitas that perhaps only Brian Williams of NBC still effects, and that palely.
Anyway, despite earning a trophy in second grade for perfect spelling and an erstwhile career as a copy editor, I was surprised when reading Schorr’s obituary to see his name spelled “Schorr;” I had always, in my head, spelled it “Shore,” not only because it seemed appropriate phonetically, but also metaphorically by the way his voice washed over me as a listener. And it occurs to me that, over the years, I have been surprised to learn the true spellings of many of my favorite NPR personalities:
And the biggest disappointment thus far, because I remember him from early childhood when my mom listened to NPR during breakfast before school:
Rest in peace, Mr. Schorr, and long live the rest of NPR’s phonetically challenging staff.
I’ve decided to answer your questions about teaching at the pen in installments, partly because I’m lazy and mostly because …
WTF, I think the neighbor just drove his motorcycle across our weeds. I mean lawn. But still!
…anyway: mostly because some of my responses will be longer than others. Like this one.
Question 1: I’d be curious to hear more about the roadblocks I remember you talking about (limited access, pencil trading, obnoxious bureaucracy, etc.) and how you’ve learned to work with or around them. I’m also curious about what they are writing about, if you have received any particularly interesting papers, etc.
There are still plenty of roadblocks. We still have librarians do the research part of research writing, which is frustrating in that the students should be doing it, but I am working on getting us to buy access to a database specifically designed for teaching in prison situations that we can load onto some of the computers in my classroom so students can find journal and magazine articles related to their topics (so much research is online these days, something I have trouble explaining to bureaucrats whose last research paper was written decades ago!). I am trying to get more books for the fledgling library, but no one wants to spend money on books (the sarcastic part of me says, Yeah, let’s give these students an education but god forbid they read books! *sigh* I do understand budget constraints, but there are so many cheap, used books out there that it seems preposterous not to buy them). I do think I have an in right now to get a series of books, which I am hoping for, but I find that doors open and shut here with little warning.
You may recall my minimeltdown over whether or not students could use highlighters. Last quarter there was a clamor for highlighters, and I was able to procure both the highlighters and permission forms for students carrying them. (Yes: Permission forms to carry highlighters. It kind of makes those fucking dorm hall passes they required in boarding high school pale in comparison.) That said, there has been no such clamor this quarter, so I am not worrying about it right now, but it’s nice to know that there are workarounds for some difficulties. I guess learning to be a grownup/bureaucrat and pose my requests with potential solutions is working.
I think sometimes there is unnecessary harassment of students; for example, one student got a disk to use to save his Word documents on and took it back to his cell not knowing he wasn’t allowed to have it there. He was taken out of class and remonstrated for having done this. He came back angry and embarrassed, and I thought it was unnecessary. I mean, where the fuck is he going to use this disk, anyway? I’m pretty sure the dinosaur computers in our classroom are the only ones that still have a disk drive. But this is why I teach instead of guard: I don’t have to worry about how a disk could be broken down and fashioned into some sort of weapon, which was probably the concern. But still — humiliation is not an effective form of punishment or correctional education, in my opinion.
Other little things that might be of interest: I can only give my students one pen and one pencil — and the pens are closely guarded in a locked supply room (pencils are more freely available). The reason for this, as you can probably guess or already know, is that the pen ink is used for prison tattoos, and therefore pens can become objects of barter and trade instead of tools for education (huh, grad school flashback). And let me just say this: I love my students, but some of them have some seriously ugly-ass tattoos: all manner of skulls and flames, barbed wire, naked women; lots of knuckle tats (you know, the type where you put your fists together and it spells out a word); a surprising number of facial marks, such as teardrops. You can tell the difference between a prison tat and an outside one: prison tats are black/blue and sometimes either very artistic and thin, or very poorly done and blunt, depending on the artist; outside ones are full color or deep black (no skimping on ink). I don’t ask the guys about their marks, but I’ve really wanted to. One guy obviously has the name of his dead child on his arm, which makes me sad every time I see it.
To the second part of this question, what they write about, I would answer that I gave them more latitude to write about what they wanted in the first couple quarters. Seriously interesting shit, but I found myself getting so into their stories that it was difficult to assess their writing, and anyway, I’ve changed the direction from personal writing to topical writing to better fit the course goals as laid out by the English department. Some would write about why they were in jail (it surprised me how many cited alcohol and/or drug addiction as their downfall, which generally led to whatever they did to go to prison); many wrote more idealistically and nostalgically about times and places they enjoyed before prison, or, somewhat depressingly, between prison stints. What I find particularly interesting are the guys who write about their ethnic heritage: one of my favorite papers was from a student who wrote about learning the language of his heritage when he was an adolescent; another wrote about male patriarchy in his native culture and how language was actually a tool for male dominance and female subservience — the women aren’t allowed to address or speak to men the way they would speak to women — wow! I probably enjoy these essays more because they are born from research writing, not just experiences, which when woven together are particularly more compelling to me than experiences alone.
Another aspect of research writing in my classroom is how many students are interested in prison reform: when we had to decide on a topic for the first research paper, prison reform was second only to the oil spill in popularity, and several students are doing it for their individual choice paper. I know it’s probably an interest that comes from their frustration, but I hope that it is also educational/enlightening to them to find out how to get out and stay out. This topic sometimes gives me an opening to tell them, Hey, learn this stuff, and don’t repeat your mistakes; I don’t want to see you back here. (Some students are open about how they consider themselves career criminals, which is depressing and probably self-defeating, but I am not always in a position where I can say anything. And I will say that I think my ethos to challenge them on these things is growing — I can say things now that I couldn’t and wouldn’t've said my first quarter, but some classes, and students, have different chemistry than others.)
Many students, despite their inability to vote, are politically aware, though sometimes I think there is an odd disconnect between the politics they support and the politics that would benefit them. But it makes for interesting discussions and papers. One student wanted to do his research paper on why social progressivism was a bad form of government (bet you’d never guess how he feels about the president), whereas another is doing his paper on what type of government structure is closest to utopia.
So that’s a small overview of bureaucracy and the topics my students write about. Coming soon: Part 2 — why my job rocks and I could never go back to working at a desk.
Every day I come home from my rockin’ ENGL 101 class totally exhausted (haven’t even gone to 102 yet…that’s in the evening) and yet totally exhilarated. I want to write about it, but don’t know what to say that would be interesting to others. So I thought I’d toss this to my readers (all two of you, of which only one is probably interested in education): What do you want to know about teaching English comp in a prison now that I’ve got about a year of it under my belt? I won’t disclose my students’ identities (obv.), but if you’re curious about anything, let me know.
By now you should’ve seen the update and at least one ultrasound photo — we’ve posted liberally on Facebook, Twitter, and this blog, so yeah: it’s a boy. And seeing as how most people we know have one, if not two, girls, we’re pretty stoked to do what we do best: things differently. It prevents us from having to ask, much less take, others’ advice.
Anyway — back to the title. When we scheduled the ultrasound, I was a little consternated when they told me to come with a full bladder. You know coffee? That delicious, delicious beverage I’ve been drinking for nearly as long as I could breathe? It has wreaked wonders on my bladder, the type I’ll pay for when I’m fifty and am wearing diapers to my child’s college graduation. But dutifully, this morning, I drank four tall glasses of water (about 15 oz each), the last three of which in the hour and a half before the appointment.
Hospitals, let me say this: It is NOT NICE to tell a pregnant woman to have a full bladder AND KEEP HER WAITING. Ten minutes to do paperwork may be on time for hospitals, but all I could think of was taking that cheap ballpoint pen and fashioning a shunt for my bladder. It was another achingly painful ten minutes before the ultrasound tech deigned to take us into her lair. But the powers of observation were strong with this one:
“Are you uncomfortable?”
YA THINK, LADY?
“Um, I really have to go to the bathroom,” I said. The jury conferred briefly before handing me my Understatement of the Year trophy and a sash, which I’m still wearing.
“I could see it in your eyes,” she said. Because they were five feet in front of my head? “Let me just take a quick peek and see if you can empty some of that,” she said.
Yeah, right, ‘some of that,’ I thought, pondering that when a dam breaks, it doesn’t just empty some of the reservoir behind it.
She got me on the table, put that ooey gel on my belly, and set the transducer against my skin. On the screen, all you could see for miles was an ocean of bladder. There was a tide and current and everything, even a faint Coriolis effect in the lower hemisphere.
The ultrasound tech deemed it acceptable for me to evacuate part of my bladder, and duly fished out a disposable coffee cup and sent me along to the bathroom. “You can let out a cup, no more.” Right. And you can breathe, but please, just once a day.
Fast-forward (you’re welcome) to the scan: Internets, we have a very active little boy. Of the two times we’ve seen him, he has not been still for an instant. The does not bode well for Ye Olde Mother-to-Be, but we’ll see how it goes. Fetus spent most of the hour-long scan banging his head against his placenta, kicking about, and stubbornly facing away from the tech.
Tangent: My 100% Scandinavian mother married my recalcitrantly Scottish-and-whatnot father, and lo, their genetic material met, found each other to be suitably obstinate, and mated. The net result is Me, and if stubbornness were an Olympic sport, I’d be a medal contender every year.
So really, I’m just reaping what was sown before my time.
Most of the scan went well, although there were a few uncomfortable moments: one, when I was squinting at the screen, wondering why the vertebrae looked triplicate: does the baby have three spines? The tech explained something about “facettes,” which sounded like mispronounced “facets” to me, but whatever. Another odd moment was when the tech decided to perform exploratory surgery in my lower right quadrant with the transducer, trying to find an ovary, or perhaps that quarter I swallowed when I was four. I was pleased when the baby kicked at the wand. That’s my boy.
However, the worst part was when the tech was exploring the other side of my abdomen for whatever its Bermuda Triangle had taken from her. Evidently she found it, or didn’t find it, and scanned back towards the baby’s spine. I saw the image appear on the screen, and she exclaimed something that was the Old Conservative Adventist version of “Fucking hell!” (it was actually “Oh my goodness!”), and time stopped.
About ten hours later, him gripping my hand so tightly they’d have to surgically unfuse the pair, Matt asked, “Um, is that good or bad?”
“You get what you want if you wait for it,” the tech said triumphantly. Either the baby had a momentary lapse of stubbornness and we finally had a good profile shot, or else she is very good at covering up a verbal gaffe.
