now, even though that's just a way of talking because now is always, and in
that sense, we are always expressing ourselves from the same place, and
that is the here and now, the present moment, where live and exist in the
reality. It's Thursday, October 13, 2005 and tomorrow I'll try to get a sub job
in Santa Ana. You see, I sub in two districts now, Santa Ana and Compton.
Perhaps you've heard of Compton. It has the most murders than any
California city. It's not that I feel in danger or threatened in Compton, because
I don't. Most of my students are Hispanic or Black, and most of the teachers
and administrators are Black because when Compton had a mostly Black
population, the school system was run by Blacks and now that many
lacks have moved out, Hispanics have moved in, but the school system is still
run by the Blacks who got their positions years ago. I suppose eventually,
Hispanic teachers and administrators will take over many of those jobs.
Anyhow, the reason I haven't worked all week is because my R.V., which I
drive to work had a hole in the radiator and it had to be replaced.
The mechanic, Bruce, said it would be done Tuesday, and here it is
Thursday, so I had to wait and wait, getting more and more annoyed.
Then he overcharges me, and I was so tired, I just accepted it because I didn’
t have the energy to fight with him. Then when I got in the vehicle to drive it
away, it didn’t work right. The transmission seemed to slip and wouldn’t
power the vehicle, so I drove it back again. Seems they had to disconnect a
transmission line to take out the radiator and some fluid must have leaked
out. Of course the owner lied and said it was just air that would work itself
out. I could have ruined the transmission if I had driven it a long way. He
didn’t want to admit that he didn’t check the trannie before he let me take it
out. This was all very stressful.
Meanwhile, I added two new elements to my website: Art Consultant, and
Spiritual Advisor. Did you check them out? It took a lot of effort to get my
poems and music on my website. The sound didn’t seem to work, so I had to
call Yahoo for help. The problems is that a pop-up blocker won’t let me
preview sounds in the browser. I didn’t know how to disable it so I couldn’t
hear the music before I put it on the site.
And then, the songs take so long to load that people, you, may not have
the patience to wait. Soon I’ll get the new Yahoo Sitebuilder and will able to
put MP3’s on which should load faster. I’ll have to see.
Today is October 25, and for the last two days I taught second graders
at an elementary school. There’s something very pathetic or tragic going on in
the classrooms. Many of the students are just not interested and some seem
to immature to sit and learn anything.
There are two separate worlds in the classroom, the one where the teacher is
doing what he/she is supposed to do - teach required material, and the realm
of the students and their interests and drama.
The two worlds meet a bit here and there for some, very little for others, and
a very few stay with the teacher and follow the assignments. The others, most
of them look around the classroom, sit with glazed over eyes, draw, and tease
and torment each other. There is a constant parade of “he hit me,” “she took
my pencil” and sometimes, “somebody stole my dollar for lunch.”
I have this book Open Court that is used by most teachers in many
school systems. It’s hard to describe what exactly it is, but it pretends to be
the complete, total and comprehensive education system. It’s really deadly,
boring. It tries to make education out of ordinary, very dull stories. It takes a
simple kids story, then operates on it attempting to squeeze every possible
educational bit of juice out of it and it goes on in the same way from story to
story. Each story has a group of accessory books that goes with the main
story text for writing skills, grammar, phonics, etc. It tries to be so complete
and thorough, that it is just oppressive. And many of the kids, just stare at
the walls. It objectifies many things that kids just learn as they go along like
the sounds of certain letter groups that are part of phonics.
I see these kids, many are the boys, who just will not try and will not make an
effort because it is sooooo boooring. Yet the minute the recess period
comes, they jump up like a zombie come to life and run out to have a good
time jumping and zooming around outside.
October 26.
I’ve been mostly going to elementary schools for my teaching days, but last
night I forgot to set my alarm clock and woke up at 6:30 instead of at a
5:00 a.m. I got ready to go and waited for a call. I must have fallen asleep,
because when I woke up to was 9:00 so I didn’t think I’d have a job today. But
at 9:30, I got a job call to go to the Community Day High School. When I
arrived and went into the classroom, I felt rather shocked. I had been here
before, but it had been awhile.
It’s like some kind of an alien transformation had taken place. Those kids
I had been with in first, second, and third grade had transformed into some
kind of odd life form, that was radically different from where they began. Like
a caterpillar that had wound itself into a cocoon, they were transforming into
something disagreeable, bizarre and eccentric in its shape and behavior. They
had introverted themselves into their own self-contained life form that had little
relationship to the academic environment around them. They had formed into
a cultural group of behaviors and attitudes that give them a strange and
foreign appearance. They didn’t look like open eager students who wanted to
learn, they had become alien and alienated from the realm of books, the
teacher, the whole culture of the school. They were a gang, an introverted
self justifying culture of their own with its own jokes and humor, its own inner
dynamics of personality and self-identity, it’s own clothing and style, a peer
group that was disconnected from the intentions and purposes of the school.
There was a meanness about them, a mocking, ridiculing sense of attitude
that was like a barrier in which they maintained their own self value and self
worth.
These students, young men mostly, were those who had for years struggled
along in the regular system and for years had to bear the brunt of being at the
bottom of the pile, the losers, the ones who didn’t fit into the regular program,
who couldn’t or didn’t learn with the majority of students. They got in trouble
all the time for not listening, for bothering others, for hitting, pushing, running
and creating problems at recess and in class for year after year, and now,
here they were, all jumbled together, birds of a feather, one of a kind, all
gathered in this so-called alternative school where the state was still trying to
fulfill its mission to educate them. The total futility of the situation was
overwhelming. Their peer-group cohesiveness was much stronger than their
relationship to the process of education. There was one girl who was studying
while the rest were just laying back and talking, joking and involved with each
other. I guess it is the result of the years of school experience of being the
losers and bottom of the pile that developed into this kind of self-protection
cocoon to preserve their sense of self-integrity and self-worth, because the
school experience had stripped them of dignity by giving them years of
negative feedback about themselves. They couldn’t or didn’t want to submit to
the school regime over the years, and everyone knew they were the bad guys
and girls, the bum, the lowest class in their classes.
November 6, 2005
Tomorrow is Monday and I have to go to Compton to try to make up for the
lost day because of the short week with no school on Friday for Veteran’s day.
I won’t go back to Dominguez High School again because of the really bad
experiences I had there last week. The behavior of some of the students was
outrageous.
This weekend, I got to enter some of my new poems and songs into my
computer, and that was very pleasant. I also started to lay out my first movie
script. It’s about someone who realizes that their death will start a chain of
terrible events that will result in the deaths of millions of people, and he tries to
commit suicide so he can change the future. But he fails to kill himself, and
instead starts the deadly chain of future events.
I continue to send out pieces of my poem, Christian Nation to Unitarian
Churches. My emails have really annoyed some of them who asked to be
taken off my mailing list.