netflixed

If you're a fan of the documentary Hearts of Darkness, you should check out Burden of Dreams. Francis Ford Coppola's awful experiences in the Philippine jungle just might pale in comparison to Werner Herzog's in Peru.

While shooting Fitzcarraldo, Herzog indeed seemed to be cursed. When a huge portion of shooting was complete, he lost his star Jason Robards to a punishing amoebal infection. Robard's co-star Mick Jagger had to part due to Tattoo You tour obligations, and Herzog was forced to go to his backers and beg for more money and time. He was so impressed with Jagger's performance that he had to cut his character from the film and re-write entirely, replacing Robards with his "best fiend" Klaus Kinski and starting from scratch. These problems were only the beginning.

Herzog contends with intertribal politics, rumors that he wants to repeat earlier German racial atrocities in the Amazon basin, Catholic priests who advise him to provide whores at his camps, three rusty river steam boats, environmental catastrophes, oil and mineral and logging companies, the Peruvian military, plane crashes which wipe out crew members, arrow attacks, sickness, insects, serpents, a flat soccer ball, engineers who think his plan will kill dozens of natives, a Brazilian TV star, and Kinski. He tells his backers that if he can't complete this project, he will be a "man without dreams. I refuse to live my life that way."

Of course Herzog maintains his jolly disposition for half a decade in the jungle, giving cheerful pep talks about Art and Beauty and Meaning:



I find Werner's musings endlessly entertaining. I recommend this film even if you've not seen Fitzcarraldo.

At the Charles...

A very wise film, and timely, as it focuses on an age when the world underwent financial crises and upheavals, as new technologies disrupted and derailed traditional modes of communication and entertainment and it seemed the center could not hold...

And now we're in a similar mess with many of the same troubling variables making life by equal measure more convenient and more vexing. And The Artist gives us space to reflect on what's lasting in these eras of transience; it's charming, sad, quaint, and quite beautifully shot.

Yes, there's more than a bit of A Star is Born, Singing in the Rain, Sunset Boulevard, and even some Purple Rose of Cairo in the mix--but The Artist is not derivative. I really lost myself for a while, and it felt good to sit at the Saturday matinee with a few dozen other old people.

And what rough beast, its hour come at last...

Things are no longer so lovey at the lovey dovey hippie charter school. We absorbed the 7th and 8th graders from Diggs Middle last year when we took over their building, and worked our asses off to integrate them into our system with some success. A couple of those chuckleheads are headed to City and Poly because of us! But others struggled and are now lashing out. We have only a few weeks left until the last of those students are gone. They want to graduate 8th grade as Diggs students, and they're acting out against the SBCS system. One put a boulder through the Science teacher's windshield and got suspended for two weeks. A few of the more charismatically thuggish boys have gone to some $5 tattoo dude and had their names inked crookedly up their forearms in a neo-Gutenberg Bible script. This of course sends electric charges down the spines of the 7th grade girls, who are drawn to bad boys. Once the 7th grade boys see the 7th grade girls drooling over thugs, they have to step up their street game, and suddenly the sweet sheltered lovey-dovey charter school kids are running gang initiation fights behind the skatepark next to our building after school.

So now I'm running around jazzed and edgy pulling kids apart and getting between kids about to throw down again. I've had a couple years off from that shit and it is not making me happy to be thrust back into it. Especially when I see my former students at the March attending another candlelight vigil.

My Old School

...is in the news a lot recently, and not for good reasons.

I didn't teach Monae, but I taught the older brother and cousin of one of the boys arrested for shooting her. That's a very rough corridor over East, and I often think of the kids over there. Too many of them end up on the news.

At the end of this year, all the sixth graders I taught at the March will (I hope) graduate the 8th grade and get the hell out somehow.

TV

Hooray for my school. The Governor dropped by today to kick off our new library renovation! You can see some of my co-workers and a few of my 7th graders in the background!

Video here.

Dayzed and Confused

The last period sixth grade class went off the rails today. Within the first half hour I'd sent a third of the class to complete behavior reflections in Student Support. There was a lot of street drama; girls were fuming and threatening to get their crews and stomp someone or other. I was breaking up a fight between 4 foot 2 inch boys when the Big Cheese strolled in my room just as another fight was breaking out behind me--a girl grabbed a boy by the hair and pulled his head down while kicking him viciously in the shins.

After school I was commiserating with some other staff in the math teacher's room. We shared horror stories. "All I accomplished with the sixth graders today was getting them to copy three questions on a piece of paper. That took an hour and 15 minutes!" the math teacher said. Another teacher, from Cameroon, had been called a "black African monkey" by a young African American who threatened to kill this wonderful human being. The Big Cheese walked into our impromptu gab fest. "Take a big breath y'all. It's the long stretch between Xmas break and Spring Break, it was a delicious warm day, and the kids are bonkers. It's totally appropriate at this time to step back and hand out workpackets if they are not available for learning. You have my support!"

To complicate things a semi-autistic student of mine found a dime bag on the floor of my room after school as I was cleaning up. He and another student were marveling at it and saying "I think it's weed" when the autistic kid turned it over to me. A bunch of thoughts burned through my head, primarily among them the idea that both of these students had very active PTO parents who were going to hear about this immediately. So instead of ditching the evidence, I had to turn it in to the Big Cheese, who was like "just flush it--or smoke it," until I told her the kids who'd found it, and then she was like "OMG I have to file a police report just so I can tell those parents that I did something!" Baltimore's finest were bemused. "You should have just flushed it," they said. And then I had my formal observation debrief, which went swimmingly.

Tomorrow the Gov is visiting our school. I'ma hug him for signing the Gay Marriage law in MD!

Day #112

I might teach at a lovey-dovey hippiefied charter school, but we're still a Title I institution in a rugged urban area. A few weeks back some 8th graders smashed out a teacher's car windshield with rocks. Over the past couple weeks we've had some kids from other schools roll up and start fights with our students over Facebook bullshit. Students have been busted giving fellatio in the project room, laptops, phones, and wallets have been stolen, etc, etc.

Today after last period I went down to the main office to pick up a package, and immediately my sixth sense started beeping. I stepped around the corner from the stairwell right into a whirlwind. Girls were banging each other in the face outside the front door and the conflict had spilled over inside the lobby. Parents were screeching at and threatening one another, there was blood, and I just kind of put myself instinctively between combatants. Things were cooling off by the time I arrived.

The fight was centered around T. Woody and her wanna-be thug shenanigans. She kept messing with an 8th grader who's typically on the straight and narrow, but who finally had enough and stood up. T. Woody popped her nose and bloodied her lip for her before the parents got involved and the staff got between them.

T. Woody lives to create problems. Her soul purpose in life is to sow dissension and strife. She's stout, surly, unattractive, and reads on a 2nd grade level in 7th grade. She has no charm or grace or wit, and yet she has a posse of much more intelligent girls who pay court to her and do her evil bidding. I don't have the intelligence network that I used to have over East or back at the Book--I need to find out what Woody's got that makes her so powerful. She got the hookup for dime bags? She is always at the root of every girl fight or conflict, and typically she's got much smarter girls punching each other for her sake. Today she actually threw down herself. It will take days to cool this situation down.

Day 110

It's ok to be in a funk. Sometimes you'll do an efficient, adequate lesson without all the glamour and glitz--it can be effective. Not everything needs to be exciting and inspiring or some combo of the two.

If I could accept this my life would be so much easier.