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.

…Ugh. That’s it. I am starting my own country and it will be totally anarchist and I will be the only person there, so I will have total freedom. Total freedom and total control. I’ll have it both ways, too.

For today’s Opinion, I’ll start with Doug Batchelor’s recent sermon on women in not in the ministry. This was fucking appalling, and I’m ashamed that people weren’t walking out of his sermon in droves. There is no excuse for misogyny. None. Doug Batchelor needs a restraining order to keep him away from pulpits, and his ovis-audience needs to check their cud before they chew it. (Although I suppose these people seem like the type who blindly swallow, but that may not be the best metaphor….)

Chiefly amongst my uncharitable toughts toward the mallustrous preacher man is that I hope purgatory is real, or that hell is temporary, but I also hope that purgatory/hell is individualized per a person’s sins. My hell, for example, would be full of engineers who dam rivers and that abomination of imitation chocolate, carob. And from that experience, I expect I would learn to respect others’ work and not be so quick to stuff what appears to be chocolate in my mouth. Doug Batchelor’s hell, I hope, would be full of women who are more intelligent than he is, and not only preach but are fucking preachERS. I also believe, in this imaginary purgatory/hell, that close-minded people will take longer to learn their lessons, and in doing so, be there longer. Batchelor’s going to steam for awhile, I think. Though I prefer not to conjecture on the length of my interment.

Hell.

Teaching three writing classes is not doable, or at least not for me. The only way I have a single nostril above water right now is because my research writing class is in the research phase; even that is slated to end this week as the annotated bibliographies come in. Of course part of the stress is teaching two new classes, where I have to devise new lesson plans (oddly, it’s the daily grammar lessons that are sapping my will to live…hmm, tangent:

I learned this teaching ESL learners: if you don’t teach grammar, students complain that they don’t learn grammar. If you do teach grammar, students either don’t apply what you’ve learned (because writing is more complicated that sample sentences on an overhead projector), or they don’t care, or they believe they are the exceptions who may abuse grammar because they think they know better. Which they don’t. In my experience, the only way to learn grammar is to use grammar, and revise until you learn how to use it correctly. I don’t know how to teach this effectively.).

Anyway. This is week five, I think, so we’re nearly halfway through. That does not, however, in any way help me get started on what needs to be done this week. It’s a strangely paralytic feeling, knowing how much needs to be done and not being able to actually summon the strength to do it, then stressing about the mounting stress, then imagining my dad saying, “Quit fiddling around and get started,” which only further stymies my will to live.

And the water, I can feel it seeping into that last remaining nostril.

###

Edit: five hours later, I have more or less gotten my shit together, have quit feeling quite so sorry for myself, and am … er, don’t remember how this sentence was going to end, as I’m not fixated on whether “gotten” is a word. Okay, it is. Life can go on.

###

Edit No. 2: six hours later, I am finished; better yet, the last few papers were great!

Well, that may be, but I don’t think so. I’m beginning to see climate science not as a science with a defined (or definable) truth, but rather as a developing and evolving truth, much like a wiki. To take that metaphor further, imagine that the “climate change” Wikipedia article is just beginning to be written, and there are an awful lot of smart people involved. But, like all people, they have biases, beliefs, and politics that come into play, even though most strive to leave them at the door. The point we’re at is the nasty editing wars where accusations are hurled here and there, where people feel the dichotomous pull to one side or the other, even though there is a large and poorly defined area in the middle. There is not Truth, not yet, even though we’re working on it. Some of us feel we can dimly see where it’s leading, and others boldly plunge down that path, blind to obstacles and Reason and so forth. Others dig in their heels and refuse to budge. You see where this mangled metaphor is headed.

Remember when J Harlen Bretz thought the Pacific Northwest had been formed by catastrophic floods and everyone laughed at him? Truth wins out, if given time and energy. We’re just not to the point where we can quite see what that will be.

Until, oh, about 6:53 a.m. this morning I thought the class was from 7:30 to 9 a.m. Fortunately, I guess, it’s always been a nightmare of mine, missing the first day of class as a teacher, so after sleeping in a bit, making a cup of coffee at 6:45, and sitting down to print off a roster, I happened to notice the class time: 7 to 8:20 a.m.

WTF.

I said some bad words and there was a great flurry of coats and scarves and keys and papers and running, and it is very fortunate that we live on this side of town. I made it with about a minute to spare.

Always good to start things off on the right foot, I say.

Well, I probably will make it: I’ll probably meet the challenge, if barely, because that’s what I do: when I was taking three graduate school classes and teaching two and commuting from here to there, I managed. But last quarter, teaching only one class — it almost kicked my butt. Not because it was hard, but because it was so different, and I had to start anew on so much pedagogy. This quarter is the first time in my entire three-year teaching career where I’m finally teaching the same class twice in a row, and I hope to reach the point where my class prep is at an absolute minimum — reusable assignments made ahead of time — and I can instead focus on my students and their writing.

Here are my goals for the quarter:

• Minimal daily assignments — less busywork and less for me to grade
• Return to rubrics so students have clear goals and I have a clear framework for assessment
• Delve more deeply into readings
• Focus on pragmatic writing skills, including grammar (oh, I can imagine the gnashing of teeth from some comp people!)
• Convey the idea of research to a population unable to actually conduct research

I say the following honestly: I am often a mediocre teacher, and I want to be a good teacher. I will never be inspirational, I’m sure, because that gene doesn’t grow on my family tree, but if I can provide clear, straightforward instruction and advice that my students use, and if they go on to write well and think clearly, then I will have done my job.

For example, I recently read of a person who died that she was now “sleeping in Jesus.” I get it, but I don’t like it. Looking at that literally, it’s (a.) creepy and (b.) impossible, as if one regressed Benjamin Button-style to reimplant as an embryo on someone’s uterus. The phrase I think was meant was that she was “sleeping in Jesus’ arms,” which to me is a lot more peaceful and sensible (in a metaphorical way, anyway), the way many would like to imagine falling asleep and awakening.

Yet the prepositional disturbance that is “in Jesus” is prevalent in much religious rhetoric: meant to calm and assuage, it instead sounds eery and mindless. Take, for example, the following phrases:

Victory in Jesus: Would you ever say “Victory in Napoleon” or “Victory in George W. Bush”? Probably not, and not just because the latter was a dismal failure. “Victory over death through faith in Jesus” would perhaps be more accurate, so why not say it? Does the shortcut help anyone not already persuaded to understand?

Joy in Jesus: this is just incomplete. Joy in Jesus’…what? Life? Death? Sacrifice? Pick your object. Or better yet, rephrase your sentence: “Jesus gives me joy.”

New life in Jesus: Again, creepy, suggestive of pregnancy. Rephrase.

Of course, the problem with clarifying your rhetoric so that it makes sense grammatically and to a constituency less familiar with traditional religious verbiage is that you may end up making yourself less clear to the constituency that is educated “in Jesus.”

Well, to plagiarize that one singer, no one said it would be easy.

So I sit down and take about ten minutes to compose a brief, professional e-mail to Jane — whom I’ve never met — about this missing document, telling her where it is and when I sent it. And then, because I used to work in customer service, I say to let me know if she is still unable to find it, and I can get her a new one (even though doing this will cost me time and money,  but I don’t say that). I sign off with a professional close and signature.

Liar, liar?
Three weeks after sending this e-mail, I finally get a terse, one-line, unpunctuated reply:

These were not included in your packet

Wow. It’s quite one thing to say, “I cannot find it in your file,” and quite another to say, “This was not included in your packet,” dig? I remember printing off the files, and I remember writing a note in explanation for one bit of information, and I remember double-checking the list of materials I had to send before I sent it. I know it was originally included, so it’s not out of line for me to feel a bit affronted.

The thing that galls me here: Jane’s job is, by nature, a people-person job. Shouldn’t she know better? In this brief exchange, she sounds like a dick: rude, lazy, unprofessional, incompetent, and unlikeable, even though if I met her face-to-face I might find her to be a positively lovely person, inside and out.

This is why writing is so important
People judge based on first impressions, whether electronic or face-to-face. So folks, if you work in public relations, marketing,  human resources, and related jobs, you should be neither deliberately rude in nor ignorant of the tone of your message. Even just a professional greeting and close can make up for multitude other sins. And by all means, punctuate it. It really is the least you can do.

“Nu-uh,” I said, holding up a hand. “One at a time.”

“Since when?” one of them demanded.

“Since always. It’s a rule,” said She Who Hates Rules Probably Nearly As Much As They Do and who enforces them nonetheless.

They’d been abiding by the one-at-a-time rule all quarter until now, so I suspect this was one of those times when they were just testing me to see what they could get away with. It’s unfortunate, though, that it puts me in the position of having to wield power. I don’t like to, and I’m not good at doing it in a way where I don’t come across as a major bitch. Usually it’s not a problem, but last night — I blame the full moon, because I can — was a bit of a trial.

And other rules seem designed to frustrate all of us: that in order to get a new pen or pencil, they have to turn in the old one; to get more paper, they have to turn in the cardboard backing of their old notepad. They know this but often “forget.” And because not all teachers enforce these rules, it puts me in an awkward position when I do: what am I going to do, tell my students they can’t write because they lost their pencil? No, of course not.

What I understand, though, is that these are minor frustrations that come with being new. And hey, with time and practice, hopefully I’ll become the type of instructor who’s able to engage students enough that they aren’t running like packrats to the bathroom.

I haven’t persuaded my freshmen that the ability to persuade is an important skill. …[P]ersuasion — reasoned argument — no longer holds a favored position in university life. If [students'] professors — feminists, Marxists, historicists, assorted other theorists — belong to suspicious, gated intellectual communities that are less interested in talking to each other than in staking out territory and furthering agendas, then why learn to debate? Despite having endured endless faculty meetings, I can’t remember the last time anyone changed his (or her!) mind as a result of reasoned discourse. Anyone who observed us would conclude the purpose of all academic discussion was to provide the grounds for becoming further entrenched in our original positions.

Although I publicly espouse the tenets of argumentation — because it worked on me and for me — I privately agree with Russo here, at least as regarding the majority of people.

1. Summarize someone’s opinion of something you read or watched.

2. Respond to it with your opinion of what you read or watched.

For whatever reason — and I’m sure it’s due to my inability to explain things in a way that makes sense — this idea is breaking their world.

Then sometimes, because I try to be nice and helpful and extend the benefit of the doubt, I get drawn into really, really stupid power plays, like when one student usurps ten minutes of class seeming like he’s trying to understand how a hook, summary, and thesis all go in the introduction. When I finally caught him smiling as I tried to explain for the fifth time that the HOOK, the SUMMARY, and a THESIS STATEMENT ARE ALL COMPONENETS OF AN INTRODUCTION, I got pretty mad (inwardly) and told him to get to work on it and we’d see how it goes.

Another student simply refused to try, so I had to coach him: “Well, what does the author say here? Okay, then, what do you think about what he said?” Once we had that figured out, I said, “Write it down.” He said, “I’ve already forgotten.” I actually picked up his pencil and handed it to him, and we went through it again.

The complicating factor is that my students have such a broad range of skills — from fifth-grade drop-outs who somehow wrangled GEDs to experienced, albeit drop-out college students. One student put his head down, did the entire lesson and wrote his paper during the two-hour class; another got maybe five sentences.

It is so incredibly frustrating some days. I love teaching — I love teaching at the pen more than anywhere else I’ve taught. I want my students to learn this stuff, to challenge themselves, and to write successfully and think critically. But I’m not sure they are.

9. Relatedly, I get a refresher on what cursive looks like. Some of my students quit school in fifth grade and think that cursive is how everyone writes. (Seriously, cursive still exists?)

8. I don’t have the problem of Blogger marking my students’ blogs as spam. Yay?

7. When my students lose interest, it’s because I’ve genuinely bored them — not because they got distracted by texting under the desk. (BTW, traditional students: it is so totally obvious when you’re doing this. That’s why I call on you when I do.)

6. I save my back the pressure of trudging around with a laptop.

5. My students can’t instantly fact-check me with their BlackBerrys and iPhones.

4. There aren’t any hard-drive-ate-my-homework stories.

3. I don’t catch them turning Safe Search off and “accidentally” “running across” porn while doing “Internet research.”

2. Three words: No fucking ringtones.

1. I don’t have to worry about what they say on RateMyProfessor.com.

Yea = “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…”

Yeah = “yes,” but casual/slang

Yah = NOT A WORD, unless you want to sound like you’re saying “Ja” in German, and you continue with “das ist gud,” and then you chug a beer and eat a sausage at the same time

Yar = “yes” in Piratespeak

Yup, yep = “yes” in Redneck

Yuppers = “Yeah, I am an idiot”

Go ye therefore and not be stupid.

I don’t particularly want to blog about work in any way that might jeopardize my job, but I’ll say a bit about the sensory experience of working at the pen.

Before that, however, I want to tell you something a student told me last night. We had five minutes left in the period, so I asked my students about what life at the pen was like. They told me what their cells were like, how they might spend a day. As the gate call sounded, they got up and left. One student lingered and said, “It’s better being ignorant.” I asked what he meant. “You really don’t want to know,” he said. “I’ll write it all down and you can read it, but you really don’t want to know.”

I’ve been pondering that. Thanks to my abundant curiosity, and excluding lurid details of others’ sexual lives and escapades, there’s rarely anything I don’t want to know. I find it hard to believe anything here, and I wonder if that’s true for my students as well.

However, I imagine there are things some of you might want to know — not about their lives, because I wouldn’t divulge that — but about my working environment, so here are a few details.

After parking my car, I walk up to the main complex, lock my keys and wallet in a lockbox, and continue through a maze of hallways and into the education wing. In total I go through ten doors, none of which I have the key to. Not all of them are locked: some are normal doors, and others are guarded and I have to show ID to get through. Sometimes I have to go through a metal detector, and my bag — which has to be of a cloth material — is always scanned. I’ve already been fingerprinted and background-checked in order to work here, so I guess Big Brother is getting to know me pretty well.

Everything is beige: the walls, the ceiling, the painted iron doors, the newly waxed floor in the education wing. I imagine but do not know this to be done with purpose: white would be jarring, might even drive you crazy with its starkness; black, I suppose, could connote dark thoughts and ideas; but beige lulls you into a state of somnolence, of mindlessness. I really don’t recommend it for educational settings. I think I’d prefer a nice green — neither hospital green or Forest-Service green, but maybe a thoughtful deep avacado color.

My students wear khaki pants and white t-shirts; I wear business attire, including my nemesis, closed-toed shoes; all of us wear badges on the left side of the front of our shirts.

Truthfully, the prison doesn’t smell a particular way. However, I was up once when they were cleaning and I could smell bleach, and now I always think I smell it, even when I don’t. I also sometimes think I can smell the beige walls, which is a muddy mix of concrete and paint, and somehow the smells seem to offset in my mind: bleach vs. paint and concrete. Maybe that’s why I smell nothing, because amidst the hallways of brick and beige, there isn’t a lot of anything.

The floor security guard is there before I arrive and after I leave. She seems to jangle when she walks, but I don’t know if she actually does or if I just imagine that with all the keys she has, she must. She’s a very nice woman who could no doubt beat the shit out of me with her earlobe. I bet her earlobe was always picked first for team sports in grade school.

Class lasts between two and two-and-a-half hours, depending on when the gates open and close. It’s a long time, and last night I found myself thirsty, but I’m pretty sure I’ll need to blink first in a staring contest with Death before I’ll drink from the lonely fountain outside the students’ bathroom.

The air temperature was warm last night, and I was tempted to remove my blazer since I was wearing a pretty conservative blouse under it, but trust me — there is not enough antiperspirant in the world for this job.

Our classroom is a fairly long room with about 15 desks and 10 computer terminals. It is divided lengthwise by an iron mesh see-through wall that locks us out of the library, if you can call it that, seeing as how it only holds about a hundred books, most of which appear to have been written mid-20th century. It’s a library that would make a librarian sob over its orphaned books and empty shelves; as a writing teacher, I’m not quite that hardcore and I merely feel revulsion.

The teacher’s desk is one of those heavy metal kinds. I think it’s olive in color, and I’d like to find and hang out the window by his toenails the guy who made this ubiquitous institutional style. Then I’d like to make him be solely responsible for moving the behemoths every time a department relocates or is remodeled.

My students’ desks are individual small tables, and we all have comfortable swivel chairs on rollers. It’s very obvious where budget allowances have been made, and I’m thankful for good chairs, even though I spend a lot of the time on my feet.

So, that’s a little what my job looks and feels like. If you have questions, feel free to ask.

[...See, I wrote that ironically, but then couldn't bring myself to delete it, which means that I believe it to be true, at least to a significant degree. ]

Anyway, shows I like get canceled, and there’s nothing like getting 18 episodes into Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip on Hulu before bothering to look it up on IMDB, only to find that, yeah, I’ve got four more episodes and that’s it. The end. Kaput.

I’m sure you could lump any five shows together and find commonalities, and other bloggers who are more in touch with current culture could weigh in with more credibility, but I find a couple of these shows — Veronica Mars and Studio 60, at minimum — to be the types of shows that deal with current cultural issues in a way that is more relevant than any print or television entertainment news. Veronica Mars hit on an uncountable number of issues, not limited to teen sexuality and virginity, racism and being Arab in America, class warfare between the haves and the have-nots, underage drinking, binge drinking, Christianity, and much more; Studio 60 took those same issues and gave them a primetime adult venue. Moreover, Studio 60 attempted to put a right-wing Christian in a starring role, a fabulous setup for culture war plotlines between her and her left-wing co-stars.

Both critically acclaimed shows? Canceled.

Unless you’ve been backpacking the Appalachian Trail for the past 12 months (euphemistically or not), you’ve noticed that America has entered another culture war — or perhaps our ongoing war has deepened; one that is flamed by intolerance and bigotry. Shows that attempt to confront the crazy — which is on both sides, albeit moreso on the right these days — don’t succeed because they’re up against mindless blather and reality television that showcases humanity at its worst. We are a tabloid civilization and only a few people are willing to think about the issues dividing us.

Consider the following NBC breakdown of Studio 60’s viewers (bolding is mine):

“Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” is averaging a 4.0 rating, 9 share in adults 18-49 and 9.8 million viewers overall (through November 6) and has increased its rating week-to-week in 18-49 with each of its last two telecasts. “Studio 60″ has consistently delivered some of the highest audience concentrations among all primetime network series in such key upscale categories as adults 18-49 living in homes with $75,000-plus and $100,000-plus incomes and in homes where the head of household has four or more years of college.

I am not making the point that people who with more education are “smarter” than people with less education, but I have found that people with more education tend to be more willing to confront issues like racism and classism to find out why the exist: what feeds them, what drives them, and treat the problem, as opposed to people who would rather either ignore the issues altogether and pretend they don’t exist, or treat the symptoms instead of the underlying condition. So when I see that Studio 60 had a relatively educated audience, I wonder what it would take to get less educated people to consider the culturally divisive issues of our day. And somehow, I don’t think the answer is reality television, whose producers prefer the lurid to the thoughtful and the pithy 20-second tearful endings to any investigation or real discussion.

*

I suppose you could dismiss this as the rant of an overeducated English major who’s bitter that her shows get canceled, but I hope you won’t. We’re seeing more and more evidence that America’s divide is growing, and although I am loathe to give credibility to feelings (emotions can be stupidly misleading), I can’t help but feel that this build-up isn’t going to be solved by presidential speeches; if at all, it’s going to be deflated with water-cooler conversations. A catalyst for this could be intelligent television, if only we could have some.