Advent links

Yesterday we played on this website:

http://www.stnicholascenter.org/pages/stories-legends/

Today we are looking at this one:
http://www.metmuseum.org/metmedia/interactives/adults-teachers/the-christmas-story

Worthy distractions from grammar.

The semester winds down

I am in the midst of grading finals for my classes this semester. It is partially by intent that I have not written much about teaching and partially by default because teaching (and preparation and grading) has consumed a great deal of time. I taught two classes this semester, Freshman Composition and Introduction to Literature.  After teaching for four semesters now, I’m beginning to see the benefits of experience – and to see how much more experience I need.

For the first two semesters at MGCCC, I felt like I was floundering, as I’ve mentioned before. The second semester spent teaching World Literature went much more smoothly, but the first semester flopped.  Never having taken Freshman Composition, I had no idea how to manage the class time. The students looked perpetually bored. Since I was a replacement for a teacher who left unexpectedly early in the semester, I didn’t have time to prepare, nor did I have a firm concept of goals or capabilities. A number of the students failed, mainly because they didn’t turn in their assignments, but I can’t help but feel I failed to teach any of them how to write a college paper.

I still question my ability to teach analytical writing, but after scouring the internet for some teaching ideas and devising a syllabus that divided up the work into small chunks, I found a groove that seemed to work.  Class began with a short writing prompt, after which we read and analyzed sample essays. Then the class worked on applying some technique or other to their own writing – writing a hook for their introductions, crafting thesis statements, adding transitions, varying sentence length.  Sometimes I brought in a grammar worksheet to review, and sometimes we did group critiques to fill out the hour and a half of class time. 

I struggled a bit to find readings and prompts. Their text needs to be tweaked for this island audience, a mixed age group, most of whom work and have families. One student came from the prison through the study-release program. Finding essays that appealed and applied to their lives was more difficult than I anticipated. Their text contains a decent selection of essays, but many seem chosen for college students who live in dorms off their parents’ pennies – what may be relevant for many students just seemed vacuous here.  A friend mentioned that his freshman writing class was taught by a film professor and the whole semester focused on writing about classic movies. Perhaps choosing a theme for the semester would help unify my teaching and help the students with invention.

Another hurdle was been adjusting expectations.  MGCCC required 5000 words of written work over the semester. GCC doesn’t have a set requirement, so I assigned 3 papers instead of 5, based on the recommendation of another teacher.  I ended up adding three shorter papers, which I'll do again next year, although I definitely won't do a literary analysis first and a process paper last. I tried to be somewhat systematic about what needed to be included in their essays, but I can see how it would have been helpful to break down the assignments even more and to spend more time on generating ideas.

Ideas might have come easier if I weren't so determined to stay away from current political issues.  I just didn’t want to get into gay marriage and abortion in class, although a few students chose those topics for their papers. I recommended they chose topics that applied to their majors or to their work or to the local community (for instance, in preparation for their argument papers, we had an in class debate about the proposition on the ballot here to legalize for-profit bingo), but invariably a third or so chose generic political topics that they treated superficially. I suppose this is every composition teacher’s bane. How to encourage critical thinking without getting into a debate?  The thought of tackling anything political made me feel rather cynical and curmudgeonly.  I am so thankful to have only experienced the periphery of politics this year.

Surprisingly, a couple of students thanked me as they turned in their finals. But I'm sure a few who didn't show up to the final will curse me...

***

The literature class went more smoothly, mostly because I feel more comfortable with the material and how to present it, but also because I had a lively and engaged group of students, even though we met late in the evening – 8-9:30 pm. All credit for their liveliness goes to food.  We ate, then we talked. Starting about a third of the way into the semester one of the older students brought in fresh donuts.  They were devoured, and a tradition was started.  Some student or other usually brought snacks, and I’ll occasionally brought in something – shiu pao when we read “A Pair of Tickets,” teas and coffees when we read “The Things They Carried,” which makes me thirsty, and chocolate chip cookies with southern pecans for “Everyday Use.” 

One of my students was a grandmother who delighted in bringing soups, noodles, rice – nearly full meals. After I mentioned that my husband liked the pickled papaya her husband made, she brought in a large bag of it. And after her nephew’s wedding, she brought homemade lumpia for the class, plus a huge bag for me to take home.  She had a colorful life experience to match almost all of our stories.  I especially was curious about a love potion she was talking about during the class we read love poems. A few other students confirmed that there is some local spicy potion that makes women stay with their dead-beat husbands, and makes men fall in love with homely girls.

On the last day of class, we had a veritable fiesta: red and white rice (mandatory at every celebration), short ribs, shrimp kelaguen, spam kelaguen, baked spaghetti, brownies and blondies (my contribution), oreo cake, cheese cake, grilled eggplant in vinegar that was super yum, pan de sal, tea and soda.  Did I mention that there are only 10 people in my class?  Even though they were talking about class, I had to make them stop eating with about 45 mins of class left so they could take their test, and everyone hung around after the test to talk and eat more.

They also gave me presents: a story board, a hat, a mug, a beach towel. . . I was so touched, and felt cheap for having nothing for them but a card.  Their generosity was overwhelming, considering one of the older ladies was homeless for a couple weeks, and a couple of the younger students are living on their own, going to school, and trying to live off minimum wage jobs. I was tempted to give them all A's; at any rate, I know they at least will remember their literature class with fondness, and perhaps come back to some of the stories and remember how much fun they had making up skits for their poetry projects. 

About the class: initially, I thought I would stay with the stories and poems I had picked for MGCCC because they were by famous authors or I liked them. But after multiple complaints about all the death in the stories we were reading (almost everyone disliked “A Good Man is Hard to Find”), I tried to pick stories with more upbeat endings. (They loved “Gift of the Magi” and “A Pair of Tickets.”)  For the poetry unit also, I tried to incorporate some more contemporary poems – so often a bit melancholy - in addition to the poems I felt were “significant.” But some of these were too inaccessible. Autumn and Spring are simply concepts, not experiences, for most of the students.  “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” was received with complaints and incomprehension. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “How do I love thee” sonnet, which I thought to use to illustrate hyperbole, was received with sighs and praise.

But why not enjoy poems to appeal to popular sentiment? Dana Gioia’s essay “CanPoetry Matter” critiques poetry that only speaks to other poets or to the critics in academia.  If I want my students to enjoy poetry, to come back to it, they need to read some poems that resonate with their lives, poems that are fun, poems that don’t require footnotes. So I wish Gioia as editor of our literature text had included even more happy poems that weren't Shakespearean sonnets.

I don't think I want to be like Yvor Winters teaching corrosion and distrust . . . 

On Teaching the Young

BY YVOR WINTERS

     The young are quick of speech.

     Grown middle-aged, I teach

     Corrosion and distrust,

     Exacting what I must.

       A poem is what stands

      When imperceptive hands,

     Feeling, have gone astray.

     It is what one should say.

     Few minds will come to this.

     The poet’s only bliss

     Is in cold certitude—

     Laurel, archaic, rude.

Yvor Winters, “On Teaching the Young” from The Selected Poems of Yvor Winters, edited by R. L. Barth. Used by permission of Ohio University
from www.poetryfoundation.org

Happy Thanksgiving

Our thanksgiving feast for 12 has become a party for 24 in the last six hours. A couple days ago, I was feeling a little sorry that we weren’t a bigger crowd, since I bought a 28 lb turkey, but we found some friends to feed, and now my husband is afraid he won’t have leftovers.

And I’m sitting at the computer… The turkey is brining (an experiment – I hope no one gets e. coli), the rolls are rising, the flavors in the cranberry sauce and relish are marrying happily in the refrigerator. Pie crusts are chilling, and pie fillings are cooling. The house could use a swabbing down, but the kids are working on their rooms, I’ll do the potatoes, bathrooms, and floors in the morning, and that’s about all I’m going to concern myself with.

That’s the joy of living on this island – standards are relaxed. People are just happy to have somewhere to hang out together and eat.

Of course, tomorrow morning I may be pulling my hair out and doing the crazy dance when I realize how much I’ve forgotten to do…

For now, though, I’m taking a moment to recollect, to remind myself to be thankful, and to share one of my favorite poems which we read in class last night, even though a few days ago I was feeling sorry for myself for not being with extended family, for failing students, for having a son who just took a driving class, for calling someone I should know the wrong name, for having to pick new schools for kids who don’t want to move. There’s always something to get you down. 

But now I’m looking forward to a housefull to feed and to sitting on the porch drinking wine while the kids play streetball and to eating pumpkin pie and pumpkin cheesecake and to having plenty.

Love Calls Us to the Things of This World

BY RICHARD WILBUR

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,

And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul   

Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple   

As false dawn.

                     Outside the open window   

The morning air is all awash with angels.

 .....

Yet, as the sun acknowledges

With a warm look the world’s hunks and colors,   

The soul descends once more in bitter love   

To accept the waking body, saying now

In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,   

    “Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;

Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;   

Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,   

And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating   

Of dark habits,

                      keeping their difficult balance.”

See The Poetry Foundation site for the whole poem

Always learning

Remember Able Baker Charlie? The little mouse in the Richard Scarry books who bakes up white, fluffy loaves bigger than himself? In one story Charlie accidentally bakes a babydoll who says “mama” inside a loaf so that all the critters think the loaf is talking.

I just learned that his name is a reference to the phonetic alphabet used by the US from 1941-1956.  The current words for “ABC” are “Alpha, Bravo, Charlie,” but before the international code was determined, the US used “Able, Baker, Charlie” when they wanted to transmit messages clearly. Were I older or a WWII history buff, I probably would have known this, but learning it even now gave me a brief burst of mimetic pleasure. Aha, Richard Scarry, I know what you are up to!

  Although the family didn’t go to Tinian this past weekend, we let our 12 year old son go with his friend and his friend’s dad.  The three of them toured the island and saw where the Enola Gay was loaded up with the nuclear warheads to drop on Japan. They also saw the four remaining runways from the second world war, which are named Able, Baker, Charlie and Delta. Although the island is small, during WWII it was the busiest airbase in the world. Thousands of fighter jets took off and landed from these four runways built by the Marines during the War in the Pacific, and 40,000 troops were living there at one time (now the population is about 3000). Our son regaled us for several hours with his new knowledge about Tinian, and I felt worse about not going. (Except that it turned out that the special fare was actually only a one-way fare, so our family would have had to spend about $1000 more than we thought.)

Richard Scarry was not one of the troops on Tinian. He served at the Allied Forces Headquarters in North Africa and Italy as an editor, writer and art director for the Morale Services Section. His career as author and illustrator of children’s books took off after the war.

It is always rewarding to find an allusion where you never saw one before. The world is so full of a number of things. 

The plane to Tinian from Guam. Seats for 8.

My son's view from his seat.

I think this is part of  one of the runways.

A spout creating by a wave crashing into a cave.

A nuclear bomb pit, now filled in.

The view from Suicide Cliff. The story is that Japanese propaganda led some
military and civilians to jump to their death rather than be captured and tortured
by Americans. Several thousand Japanese were killed in the Battle of Tinian. Only 314
were captured. Meanwhile, only 1500 or so Americans were killed. Are the numbers high for the
Japanese because of the suicides?

The boy took several photos of this sign, one of 2 gas stations on the island. I
think he was impressed with the cost.

The crust crumbles

It’s been a short week, full of activities. In addition to the usual sports and classwork, there’s been a fortieth birthday party (one of several this year?) and a baby born. I finally was able to pay forward the favors I’ve received as a parent of multiple children and babysit for kids whose mom was having a baby. 

Since we’ve rarely had family close enough to stay with our kids when a baby was born, we’ve had to call on neighbors and friends to watch our other kids while my husband and I ran off to the hospital.  (A by-product of military life and the general diaspora of modern life - you are always calling on new friends for favors that used to be the job of extended family.) Once my mom and dad were on their way home from vacation and were able to make it to our house before we had to go to the hospital. That one time my dad babysat while my mom, a labor and delivery nurse and the best birthing coach ever, and husband took me to the hospital. Providentially, that was the only time I had a baby in the middle of the night. The rest of them were born during the day while the kids happily played with friends. 

One other time, I was going to watch our next door neighbor’s toddler during the birth of her sister, but when the neighbors tried to call us and even banged on the door in the middle of the night, we never woke up.  I felt so bad about that moment that I went and bought a new phone for our bedside, even though up until then, I didn’t want a phone in our room. Now we continue the phone by the bed because we anticipate the call in the night that someone has died, although we’re down to one great grandmother.

So I was glad to be able to feed and put to bed someone else’s children, who all went down obediently, although they kept asking when their sister would be born.  We met this family because they home school also, and although they are not Catholic, this is baby number 5 for them.  Stepping into someone else's home is always an opportunity to compare.  These kids were all well behaved, and I envied their bookshelves and neat home school workspace, and their maps on the wall. Our efforts looked weak in comparison.  It was hard to turn off that inner voice of self-criticism.

As I tucked the kids in, I told them that their sister would probably be born by the time they woke up, but I anticipated spending the night on their couch. But this baby wasn’t waiting. I don’t think the parents were at the hospital more than an hour before she was born. So I got to sleep in my own bed.  And a new baby was welcomed lovingly into the world.

****

The other event of the week was a nonevent.  When I came home from class late Thursday night, my husband announced that we were taking a trip over the weekend.  Some of his work friends were going to Tinian, the next island over, famous for being the launching site of the Enola Gay, for a mountain bike race. The mayor of the island had arranged a half-price airfare to attract racers.  The biggest (only) hotel on the island, the Chinese-run casino, was offering a good rate, also. My husband wanted to take our whole family on a last minute three day vacation. 

I couldn’t get my mind around it.  On Friday I had to take a kid for a hearing test in the morning, then had to prepare for and host company for lunch, and had to shoo my company out to leave for a cross country meet.  The thought of packing in the evening for a trip to an island where I would be sitting at a casino with the kids while my husband struggled through a six hour or more bike race was not appealing. 

Anxiety set in. I told my husband in the morning that I didn’t want to go.  He tried to convince me. In the afternoon, panic started to set in. While we didn’t have a lot planned for the weekend, we still had soccer, had to serve at Church and to teach CCD, and had papers to grade.  I didn’t want to make time Friday to make calls for subs.  I had entertained visions of addressing a few items on a list of niggling things to do that keeps growing. We are talking about taking trips over Christmas and Spring break – we should be saving up and planning for those vacations.

I have no sense of adventure, no flair for spontaneity, I guess. But this didn’t sound like an adventure. It sounded like work. The younger kids didn’t want to go. I set my heels in. My husband made me call the airline to let them know we wouldn’t be making our last minute reservation, which I did with a sense of relief.

 ****

As so often happens, after a good night of sleep, I woke up feeling differently. Why am I so rarely at peace with my decisions? I saw clearly that I had been driven by selfishness. My resentment about going was all because my time was being threatened.  I didn’t want to deal with the work of packing and unpacking, with the rush to get caught up afterwards on everything that didn’t get done over the weekend.  I like staying home.

But the older boys were disappointed. My husband was disappointed.  And on Saturday morning, I could see what I couldn’t see Friday night: that the initial discomfort would have been forgotten in the rush of adrenalin from taking off on a tiny plane across the ocean.  The wonder of being in someplace new would have offset the irksomeness of extra laundry.  The memories would have been worth the money spent on tickets, hotel, and food.

So in my guilt over not going, I’ve been trying to be entertaining all weekend, although a dark cloud of regret keeps coloring my mood gray. We checked off some of the items on that to-do list: errands and yard work Saturday morning. My husband repaired a couple car problems, which gave him a sense of accomplishment. I made dinner for the family with the new baby, and we had friends over Saturday and Sunday night, one night a family whose dad was gone, and the other, a doctor friend who just returned from a deployment to the hospital in Afghanistan (another story). My husband and I went on a long bike ride and swim early Sunday before church. We fit in a dive Sunday afternoon with the older boys, and my husband and the older boys went diving again early Monday morning before going on their scout hike, which was the other event that would have been cancelled if we travelled.  

Our busy life has continued.  But all weekend, I’ve felt choked by the sense that I let the family down.  Had we gone to Tinian, we would have spent the weekend together as a family. Instead we’ve gone our various ways, one kid here, one kid there.  I’ve already failed at what I announced a couple weeks ago I was going to do: be led by faith.

This regret and guilt is just one more piece of evidence at how weak my faith is. I find it difficult to let go of my failures. Even though on Friday my reasons seemed strong enough for NOT going that I was nearly in tears at the thought of leaving, I can’t be confident in the purity of my intentions.

Lay it down, lay it down. 

My decision means nothing in light of eternity. If nothing else, the emotional turmoil of decision making and regretting has succeeded in chopping away at the crust of complacency, making me little yet again. 

How to Feel 19 Again:

Make an unscheduled stop after Mass downtown in the middle of the day.  See a handsome man in uniform walking out of restaurant straight toward you. Realize, with a flutter in your chest, that that man is your husband leaving a business lunch.  Get swept up in his arms for a big smooch as the cars rush by. 

Day of the Dead

In honor of All Soul's Day: photos of the souls in my prayers, my beloved grandparents. I realize that All Soul’s Day is a day for praying for the souls in purgatory, but I’d like to believe that my grandparents shortened their time there with all the love they gave us. I couldn’t imagine any better grandparents.  They were all involved in their grandchildren's lives. They were generous to us and interested in us, and their homes were like sanctuaries, especially in our turbulent teen years, when we viewed our parents as our adversaries.  

All Soul's Day is a day of celebration here in Guam. A newly arrived neighbor commented with incredulity about the man buying $250 of ugly silk flowers at the Exchange. The cemeteries are all cleaned up and decorated with these silk arrangements, which really aren’t especially lovely, except that they represent the fact that someone took the time to go to a gravesite and say a few prayers. We went to Mass in the chapel, not in the cemetery on base, where the chaplain said Mass in the morning. It is a small town graveyard that got incorporated into military property after WWII, but the base is open to descendents of the people buried there on this day, and our priest mentioned how these descendents bring their folding chairs and sit next to their mom or dad or auntie during the liturgy.  Some of them will go on over to another cemetery for another Mass with another family member.  Not surprisingly, this is a tradition that may die out; few of the people out decorating graves when I drove by one of the larger cemeteries looked younger than 50.  But I hope it survives. There is something comforting in the thought of spending a little time with the bodies of our dearly departed.  I have to credit my grandparents for taking us to cemeteries on Memorial Day to decorate with peonies the graves of my great-grandparents, at least the ones who died in town. 

I scanned some of these photos last spring after my grandmother’s funeral. I love the peek into my grandparents' lives as young people, full of vim and vigor, which is how my grandmother described her own grandmother. I miss knowing them as they were then. I wish my children could have known them as I knew them. And I hope that my children view their grandparents with the same unconditional, overflowing love I felt for these four people.