Friday, June 30, 2006

Bragging Rights


Fellow-ette needs to take some time to CROW. Her life-partner is well on his way to his first byline in a national glossy, her brother absolutely destroyed that test of tests, the LSATS (and he also won a huge scholarship to study literature in Scotland), and her bloggin' buddies are taking the world of daily print journalism by storm. And we ain't talking about their campus daily, that old rag!


So yes, fellow-ette is swelled with pride. And she's said goodbye to her massive and nasty school in the Bronx, which ended with two crowning moments.
The first moment:
When one of her students came in on report card day and was told she passed the regents, the first thing she did was turn to her teacher and say "THANK YOU, MISS!"
She didn't say "yo, I rock," or "I'm the best." How un-teenagery can you get? Fellow-ette almost cried on the spot.
The second moment was a comment from her AP that a particularly humiliating encounter involving him, her classroom, and a deranged student hiding behind a portable white-board "made his memoirs."
Ok, I'm switching to first-person here to better express myself. So this was his final passive aggressive fuck-you, a pathetic reaction to my unceremonious departure, and you know, I hope my memoirs of my time in "the system" come out before his do. But I don't really care. Because as one of my students emailed me (and this is a direct quote):

"Ha! school is finnal [sic] over, which means one thing. FREEDOM!!!"

I couldn't agree more.


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Tuesday, June 27, 2006

The Life Pursuit-- (I always cry at endings)

...except when i score freee tickets after a mere two hours online!

So my pursuit ended up being more like a 10k than a marathon. So shoot me. Anyway, today's hooky-ticket=buyin' spree was delightful.

My latest trauma: I'm now working three jobs, at least until tomorrow, and the guy I'm trying to interview for the first freelancing gig is a big corporate hotshot whose PR rep is leaving me hanging.
Still, I'm thrilled to be earning my stripes as a writer. So I won't complain.
Yet. Until the next blog: scribblin' gone wild! with its clever creator and author, "journalista."

Over and out.

/Fellow-ette

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The Life Pursuit-- Hour two

Dear Catastrophe Waitress...

So the kindly frenchman who was taking a ten minute break hasn't been back in an hour. My guess is he has abandoned the life pursuit.
I took a ten minute break myself to run to barnes and noble, pee, and pick up what i thought was a simple veggie wrap and cranberry juice.
Not so.
The incompetent servers at teh B&N cafe stuck the thing in a panini maker and seemed totally unfazed by my nercous pacing throughout the entire cafe.
When it was finally ready, they took a lesiurely stroll around the behind-the-counter area to find the proper holding container for the sandwich while i jumped up and down like there were living coals beneath my feet.
At last, food in hand, bodily needs attended to, i dashed back to find the line just as I had left it. I opened my sandwich, prepared to take a delicious bite.
It was a greasy, inedible mess.
And they forgot to give me a napkin.

___________________________________

there are a bunch of really loud and poser indie kidz in front of me in line. The clear center of their crew is a couple; he is wearing a tie-dyed shrit, orange pants, and a large jewfro/beard convo. He clearly wishes this were a phish concert.
She on the other hand, is more hip than hippie-- long red hair, chic shades, birkenstocks, and the loudest, most obnoxious mouth I've heard, as she drapes herself around her laddie and they debate the difference between emo and indie.
Shoot me,

Meanwhile, the other hippie high-schooler behind me are discussing how when you drop acid, "like, greens are SOOOOO green."
Fellow-ette wouldn't know. But she does know that magic mushrooms actually make the trees talk to you.


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The Life Pursuit

LIVE BLOGGING from the sidewalks of new york, as i sit, butt on the sidewalk, stealing wireless, at the beginning of a five hour wait for free-ass belle and sebastian tickets. In honor of the occasion, i wore cut-off jeans, a velvet underground t-shirt, and a detached, moody demeanor.
Upon arrival on line, the shirt was immediately complimented by a nice, waif-like young lad with flowing locks and mediocre skin. "Hey, man, I love your shirt."
I knew you would.

HOUR ONE:
The nice french man next to me and I are agreeing to watch each other's stuff for intervals of ten minutes. My ten minutes are going to be a dash to the pizza place across the way and the astor place barnes and noble.
My butt is getting numb.

The girl next to me is patronizing me all the way. MY enthusiasm for our street-camping adventure is very un-hip, je sais. I just tried to make a joke about the dorky guy who asked me about belle and sebastian. "What are y'all waitin' for?" "Who are THEY?"
She didn't get it.


More updates to come.

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Sunday, June 25, 2006

The End of the Road

Many teachers become teachers because they want to change the world, lower the achievment gap, make a difference, and give back. But let's face it; a lot of teachers who stick it out really enjoy both the power and the pedantic pulpit they feel entitled to due to their position.

Perhaps that's why my departure, and the departure of other rookies, is so rankling to those who have stuck it out--it's seen as an abdication, a de-validation, if not a miserable retreat. It's none of those things, though. It's just a choice, the right one for me, and I'm quite happy about it too.

I'm not sorry I did this this year. In the end, my time was not soooo horrible, even if I did come to my blog on all the worst days. I am weatherbeaten yes, yet I feel anything but defeated-- particularly after fantastic regents results for my students (almost half of my sophomores who sat for the test passed). I am eternally grateful for the lessons I've learned this year, which were from the teens I taught, not from the administration, beaurocracy, or veteran teachers. And that's more than okay, because I do believe (and perhaps this was my downfall) that the younger we are, the closer we are to certain truths and insights. Never is our sense of justice and injustice stronger than when we are adolescents, but never is our frank understanding of the world's petty transactions and cruelties stronger either. It's an awesome thing to witness even from seven or eight years down the road.

And yes, those of us children of the ivory tower who spend a year or two in the inner city before re-entering the rat race--cliche that we are--have that much more understanding of injustice and cruelty. We learn viscerally just how tall the walls our society has built around its ghettos are, just how the same all groups of people are when one comes down to it, and just how arbitrary the idea of privilege is anyway.

The only people I am thankful for within the BOE system though are my fellow first-years, who didn't begrudge my leaving for a second and simply said they'd miss me (or left at the same time), who downed Daiquiris and beers with me at the Bay Plaza Applebees and various Jerome avenue dives and diners, who watched Youtube videos with glee during our lunch breaks, and who fell over backwards with laughter as we strove to imitate our kids. In short, they rock, and should really keep rocking. Fo' Sho.

Over and out for today,

The ramblin' and rantin'...
Fellow-ette

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Wednesday, June 14, 2006

All good, bad and ugly things must come to an end.

My teaching career ended yesterday with a slam. A body-slam, that is. Four of my more rambunctious students spent the last fifteen minutes of class demonstrating a coordinated imitation of WWF wresting, down to the homoerotic holds, the coordinated slapping-off to demonstrate partner-shifting, and the melodramatic body slams. I almost cried, I was laughing so hard (and I prayed very loudly that no one get hurt).

And that was the end. There was no, "Miss, you've changed my life" or "Miss, I'm never going to give up thanks to you." There were lots of "I'll miss you this summer"s and hugs, and smiles, and grins at the funny awards I gave out (including the "stop beastin'" award, the "it's cause i'm black" award, and the "fashionably late" award).

Anticlimactic, to say the least, though we did play a killer game of bingo which demonstrated that they'd learned something. And some of my special kids really have ...for lack of a better word, blossomed this year. I even cried last night at the thought of one particularly adorable freshman whom I might not see again.

But the hijinx at my school remain the same. I arrived headachy this morning to a day of being a "reserve" proctor, and discovered five minutes before the global history exam that I was needed to cover a room. Of course, this was conveyed to me via a nasty announcement on the loudspeaker that I was ten minutes late. Late to what, might I ask? My psychic appointment?

None of the kids in my test room had pencils; and after I was "relieved" no one knew where i was supposed to be, and so i spent a good three hours post-proctoring sitting in a classroom I knew to be testing=free, watching an interview with Paul Krugman online and gmail chatting shook with the repeated 'I am borrrrreeeed".

Also, Frantic, my co-teacher, took amazing pictures of the whole department. In my classroom, the kids posed adorably, but with their hats and do-rags on (what did I care, they took them off after the photo sesh was over?) and this message was relayed to Frantic from an administrator:

>Also, you especially don't want to post pictures of kids wearing hats and
>dew-rags [sic]. It appears that [our school] is lax in following this rule in the
>classroom. While there might be some laxness [sic] in the halls due to the shear >[sic]volume of kids and the minimal number of adults, there should be zero
>laxness of this rule [uhhh...laxness(?) OF this rule?] in your class [actually it was Ms. Fellow-ette's class. Sorry, buddy].
>

Speaks for itself, no?

It looks like my career as a freelance writer might be taking off (slowly) in the near future. If so, what are my readerships' recommendations? What should I do with this blog?
I await responses eagerly.

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Monday, June 12, 2006

Another email...

Dear Ms.[Fellow-ette],

Can i please ask you for a tiny favor? It will be really appriciated...
If you say yes keep reading. If not, erase this message. (decide after reading the whole thing)


I please ask you for a page with all the literary elements that may appear in the regents with it's definiton. You don't have to write the definitions, I can do that by myself. I ask you this because im having problems having to remember all this vocabulary words that we used a long time ago.

Thx for taking your time to read this,
Att: [student's name]

PS: If you think you wasted your time by teaching this year at [school name], well you are wrong. I couldn't have a better english teacher. Also I didn't trew away my review sheets, in fact! I have it folded on my binder, thx for it :-

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Saturday, June 10, 2006

Correspondance avec les etudiants

Here are some emails I've received from students recently:
_________________________________________

[in response to an email reminding some of them to finish an essay]

From:[student a] ladykiprich@redacted.com (kiprich is a reggae star)
To: "Ms. [fellow-ette]" <[fellowette]@gmail.com>
Date: Jun 7, 2006 8:02 PM
Subject: Re: finish your essay!

ok ms.[f,]do not forget to buy the harry potter tape/dvd

_________________________________________

From: [student b] t_bone@redacted.com
To: fellowette@gmail.com
Date: Jun 8, 2006 8:43 PM
Subject: RE: finish your essay!

Dammit, [fellow-ette's FIRST NAME]. I can't find the Essay i hardly worke on... Can i send it to you friday afternoon? cause i have to rewrite it >.< It's a pain in the ass... God im gonna have them by sat afternoon or sunday morning. Hope it's not too late

_________________________________________

during class, after finishing a test, student c emails this to me:


From: [student c] ladyseductive130@redacted.com
To: fellow-ete@gmail.com
Date: May 26, 2006 10:11 AM
Hi ms [fellow-ette], its [student c], [student d] gets on my nerves!!!


NOTE: student d gets on my nerves too.

_________________________________________

And lastly:

From: [student e]
To: [fellow-ette's REAL, non-teach email address]@gmail.com
Date: Jun 9, 2006 1:21 PM
Subject: u wack

u a loser, u wack, u a geek lol
_________________________________________



Oh, the adorableness of it all...

two days and counting til I stop being an authority figure and remain merely a cog in the state-test grading-slash-proctoring wheel.

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Thursday, June 01, 2006

It's Too Darn Hot-slash-stormy

..so, fellow-ette is sort of semi-retired these days, for avariety of reasons. The first is that school, and teaching, are fine, and that even when they're not fine (like when my students are in denial about their upcoming state mandated exam) it's all very ho-hum and funny and handle-able.

I'm having a blast with my co-teachers at lunch, mocking our students and selves, proving that the summer is going to our heads too.

Today there was a power outage at my school due to the massive thunderstoms, and then an evacuation and pandemonium. It was perverse fun. After a mad dash to the subway, and a long ride to dry off, i was thrilled to exit in manhattan to dry skies. But a block later, that same storm caught up to me, and doused me again. Meanwhile, my boyfriend who was headed up to our apartment in washington heights slipped through the storm in minutes. It sits here, and I'm waiting it out.

Much love to the remaining readers of this dying blog.

Fellow-etta
altruism gone wild.
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