Romeo, Romeo...

So picture this: It's Thursday afternoon, and you've just had two fantastic days in the classroom, introducing Romeo and Juliet to your freshman, preparing hard for the regents listening passage with your sophomores, being uninterrupted by fights and disruptions thanks to the suspension/cutting of your favorite delinquents, you're felling misty-eyed about the bonds you've made with a couple of precocious, emotionally self-aware students, and you sit down at the end of your school day and pour it all into a blog entry that includes the word "fuck". You put the finishing touches on it, check for typos, press "send" and suddenly you get your favorite message: "Access Denied; the site has exceeded its tolerance of questionable words." Just like that all your writing and emotion vanishes into cuberspeace, irretrievable despite back clicks galore.


Somehow it's a metaphor for the whole experience of working for the BOE... those of you who share an employer with me will understand the metaphor without my having to go into it.


Anyway, lost are those reflections, but I will try to recapture them briefly:


Listening passage prep: We practiced for Regents Task 1 all week and took a quiz on Friday. It was really fantastic to actually watch my students' minds and their skills grow. And then there was this: one passage was hardly relevant to my kids' lives. It was Virginia Woolf speaking about “The Angel in the house,” the voice of Victorian propriety that haunted her when she tried to write. As the angel warned her to mask her mind behind art and deceit, one of my students, unable to contain himself, shouted out, “but that’s racist!” Then realizing his mistake, he said “I mean, I mean, umm, sexist.” It was totally brilliant.

Romeo and Juliet: a mixture of success and failure. The kids are entranced by the story and the format of reading a play in class, but they hate the language. Plus, everytime there's a "what, ho!" they dissolve into giggles. I'm looking forward to playing them scenes from both Luhrman and Zeferrelli, not to mention playing them the Indigo Girls singing "Lovestruck Romeo..." and Lou Reed singing "Romeo had Juliette" as the weeks go by.

Getting rid of "bum-ass you know whats"-- the success I've had in my 10th grade classrooms minus two or three superpunky ADHDers just confirms my belief that certain students need to have their sorry arses hauled out of the mainstream classroom and into somewhere where they can have individualized attention.