A Reprieve

Up at 4am, anxious about the work day. Dreamed all night about kids and class and behavior problems anyway. Lay in bed for an hour, trying to get back to sleep, failed, went on the City Schools website via my iPod at 5:30am and saw that schools were closed.

There was much rejoicing.

Today is Cha's 39th birthday. Hard to believe I've known her since she was 15. Hard to believe she's put up with me for so long!

Day #74

"Mr. Geoff!" she gasps excitedly in class while I'm getting ready to teach using motivation to analyze character. "I believe that school is pointless. I have to explain it to you."

"Ok, Stacha, but you'll have to wait until after class."

"I can't wait," she whines. "You don't need to teach because it's not important. The world is Hell. We're all in Hell right now!"

I convince her to wait and teach the next step of my lesson. As annoying as Stacha can be, she's also brilliant and awesome, and I can't wait to hear what she has to say. And at lunch I'm not disappointed. I share my tangerine with her as Stacha outlines a truly amazing Gnostic theory of existence: the Earth was created by Satan or a false God, and things like school and jobs prevent us from following God's true Will. Only those who wake to the truth of this, who try to drop out of the rat race and "walk the Earth in peace," will have a chance at redemption. Adam and Eve didn't have jobs, after all, and they were happy.

I tried a few meager stabs at her belief system, just to see what she'd say: Would you rather live in Paradise and know nothing, or live in Hell and have a chance to learn? etc. I also told her that she is not alone in her belief. I asked where she got her ideas and what her mother thought about it: mother doesn't know, and would be shocked! But the ideas came, according to Stacha, from reading too much.

I know the feeling. I suppose I should encourage her to write them all down. Maybe she can print them up in a pamphlet and distribute it anonymously around the sixth grade. Maybe our own little Gnostic splinter group will form?

#2

I don't recall who turned me on to Mr. Constance's excellent little tome, but it's fantabulous. Constance was an intelligence officer working for the English who occasionally got locked away for extreme manic depression. His descriptions of the states is certainly the best I've read--I liked it much more than either Darkness Visible or An Unquiet Mind. To be fair, however, I should point out that Madness, Wisdom, and Folly is not simply a memoir of madness. Its subtitle is, after all, "The Philosophy of a Lunatic."

And what a philosophy! The opposite poles of his disorder, combined with the crisp intelligence and far-ranging knowledge of a true intellectual, gave Mr. Constance a unique and entertaining take on not only his disease, but the cycles of history and the troubling duality of existence.

Readers of Aldous Huxley or Jung or Spengler might find much which is familiar here, but Constance argues clearly his belief in a sort of Negative, feminine unitive consciousness associated with the Unconscious, and its contrary Positive, masculine divisive consciousness associated with the modern Western mindset, and he succinctly explains these ideas and their influences on individuals and civilizations.

Then things go a bit haywire with his prophetic visions--but they're great and entertaining, even though they were to come to pass in the '60s, and let's just say he either misinterpreted them or they were (as he suggested might be the case) simply the ravings of a certified lunatic; as far as I know Stalin was not arrested and tried for crimes against humanity in Vienna following an atomic holocaust. But as Constance writes in his philosophy, it doesn't matter if things are really real, so long as they are Actual to someone they are true.

Day #73

The kids were loud and rowdy, raising a Monday ruckus and I had to scream at them, which we're not supposed to do in the lovey dovey charter school--but from time to time I get tired of the cacaphony and now that I have my voice back after a month of upper respiratory woes it's nice to be able to bellow a bit. My boss was off sick today so I felt able to let loose a bit.

Some of the kids have been so excited about the Poe stuff that they've secretly read "The Tell-Tale Heart" or downloaded copies of "The Raven" off the internet. These they pass around like contraband, mixed in with dirty lyrics from Nikki Minaj. They think I don't know but I have snitches in the 6th grade who come to me at lunch and tell me EVERYTHING. I wonder what they make of Poe's stuff, un-mixed and raw in the rather difficult for today's middle schoolers original English? I suppose I'll find out in a couple weeks when we move from social studies considerations about Poe (how his life affected his work, what his life can tell us about B'more in the 1800's, etc) to literary considerations.

#1

"A man is supple and weak when living, and stiff and hard when dead."

There's a hundred-odd pages of this stuff, riddled with asterisks footnoting doubts about textual authenticity and thee accuracy of translation. I'll have to seek the Tao elsewhere.

Day #72

Missed a couple days this week. Was sick going into the winter break with a cold. Wednesday before Xmas I thought I was out of the woods and feeling fine, then Wednesday night got clobbered and spent the rest of the week in misery. Monday I went to work and realised too late that that was a terrible idea. Ended up in an urgent care facility Tuesday, diagnosed with acute sinusitis and an ear infection. Got a Z-pack and doctor-ordered extra day off. Back today with more energy but not much voice: kind of hard to rein in obnoxious behavior when you can barely talk. But I managed. The kids are digging Poe, and digging the little clues we're picking up as I unveil the expedition to them bit by bit via background knowledge chunks about which they make notes and generate questions.

Some of the kids have already made the inferential leap from E.A. Poe living in Baltimore and being the writer of the Raven to the Baltimore Ravens...one of them jumped up in a kind of Eureka moment today and said "That's why the team is named the Ravens--the mascot's name is Poe! I never knew it!"

We haven't even read the poem yet. Can't wait to show them the Simpsons version.

Gearing up to teach Poe

Night of the Demon was a Xmas gift from John, who relied on a review in the Fortean Times. I loved it, and had a great time thinking of all the later horror films which borrowed heavily from it, including the recent Sam Raimi fear fest Drag Me to Hell, which frankly more than "borrowed" from Night of the Demon; I think Raimi ripped off the entire plot and made only minor changes to assuage a guilty conscience.

Yes, there are a couple moments where the special effects are too gratuitously bad a la Godzilla, but these are short-lived and involve close-ups of the demon's latex face and furry suit. There is shortly before the demon's manifestation a wonderful effect with sparks and smoke. Had the director chosen to halt the effects there and allowed the viewer to imagine the demon's face, it would have been even more frighteningly effective.



Another documentary-style horror flick, and the worst yet. A punishingly stupid movie, with a ridiculous Young Goodman Brown/Helter Skelter finale.

Back to Work

10 days off, during which I'd hoped to recover from my cold and get some rest. Instead, the cold got much worse and I head back to work aching, hacking, and diminished. But I shan't feel sorry for myself. I'm teaching Poe this trimester, and being tubercular and of melancholy bent will suit me. This is the 200th anniversary of Poe's birth, after all, and his grave and the house he shared with Muddy and Virginia are very close to my school. I'm excited!

After Poe we move into stories of the underworld from various cultures, which is a cool way to do social studies and literacy combined. The kids are going to research different ideas of hell and then write stories about spending time in the underworld of their choice.