The Asthma Attack and the Last Days of School

The Quiz Bowl trip to Chicago went well. We only won four of our ten preliminary matches, but that's okay, because it certainly could have been worse and it gave us an extra day to tool around Chicago. We visited the Art Institute, the Magnificent Mile, Gino's East, the IMAX theater to see Spider-Man 3, and took a Ferris Wheel ride while watching the fireworks at Navy Pier. And kudos to Zach for bringing the best board game ever, Settlers of Catan. The kicker was that we stayed at a ridiculously nice hotel by O'Hare airport, the kind that normal people can't afford and I'll never stay at again unless it's free. I know the kids had the time of their lives and so did I.

But then, of course, there was the headache of returning for end-of-the-year activities and sorting out the finances. It seemed to be going well, except for the kid who spent all the cash we gave him (because he couldn't afford to go) at vending machines and dindn't save any receipts. When his mother informed me that basically he had scammed both her and us for the money in the first place, I couldn't believe it. Nasty conversations ensued. Apparently I turned out to be the liar in the end, after having decided to give the kid the cash to go out of my own pocket and been wronged in the end. I'm nto quite sure how that happened, but I'm glad I'm done with that place, and I'm glad I don't have the energy or desire to care enough to bitch about it properly here.

The kicker, however, was what will always be in my mind, quite unfortunately, the infamous asthma attack that ended my teaching career. My colleague and I were in a meeting with the principal the day after the trip when she just started whooping and coughing out of nowhere. Never having seen a real bad asthma attack before, I was stuck like a deer caught in the headlights. The girl's inhaler had expired, and before I knew it, she was hunched over choking to death, unable to breath, and handing me her cell phone. By this time, I luckily had recovered my presence of mind enough to call her mother, who told me to find some cold water and rags. I ran out of the office, literally ran, darting through the halls just yelling for somebody to find an inhaler and help me get some water for her. The whole time, the principal sat at his desk watching, nto even attempting to help, just staring at me scared to death not knowing what to do. Our conversation went like this:

"Jesus, I don't know what to do! Waht should I do?"

(Throwing his arms up in the year in feigned ignorance and speaking in a disinterested voice.) "I don't know. She never actually said I'm having an asthma attack so I don't have any liability."

"Should I call 911? Is asthma that serious?"

"I wouldn't, Dave, it'll cost y'all $750 to get an ambulance here. She'll be okay."

Luckily, the woman moving into my old classroom had a daughter with asthma and took over, finding an inhaler and helping me pour water on the poor girl. The principal was still just sitting there watching, except that he had a crowd now of others just standing around watching, completely ignoring it to finish more paperwork, or waiting in line to turn in textbooks and such. The health teacher even stood around and completely ignored me when I asked if she knew what to do. Eventually she calmed down and I left her with one of the secretaries in the principal's office so I could grab her bag and my car keys to take her home. Not five minutes later, I returned to find the office doors locked and there she was floating around by herself, not knowing what to do. The principal had decided he needed to go to a meeting and she needed to get out of the office, at which point the secretary decided she had her won work to do that was more important than this girl whom everyone may very well have watched die or atl least leave blue-faced in an ambulance if I hadn't been around. I can't imagine myself as a hero by any means, and I don't, but I've never been so disgusted by such a pure and immediate lack of concern for fellow man I witnessed that day.

Fortunately, that wasn't my last memory. My star Latin student, Quiz Bowl team captain, devoted Jim Hill Civil Rights leader, and perfect scorer on the ACT gave me a copy of his senior picture telling me how much he admired me. Thirty years from now, I'll still have that picture, and hopefully I will have trained myself to forget the awful memories of the money issue and asthma attack.

Notes To Remember This Summer

I just spoke with the mother of a student who recently transferred from St. Andrew's towards the end of this school year. She was worried - at St. Andrew's she always had plenty of homework to do - about the academic quality of Murrah, given that her daughter seemed never to be studying for anything and was playing down to a much diminished minimum standard in most classes. I was flattered, however, to learn that the student had actually been complaining about the fact that I give quizzes and homework every night. This came as a shock, since I had always assumed that my classes probably weren't as rigorous as those of a 'normal' Latin class elsewhere. It turns out that in some ways I've been far more rigorous than I realized. It's a funny feeling, knowing that I've spread myself way too thin this year and didn't do nearly all I could for my students, that I'm receiving all these flattering remarks on my way out the door. I'm always hard on myself, so to hear from others that I've gone way above and beyond the call of duty puts me in an awkward mental state. Hooray again for Catholic guilt and self-deprecation!

On a related note, I've decided to study the allegory of the cave with all my students to end the school year as a sort of swan song to cap these last two years off appropriately. If I can leave these students with one lasting impression or moral imperative it would be to climb as far out of that cave as possible and lead the examined life and blah blah blah. I'm pouring my heart into it, and to my surprise, one of my classes today actually applauded my performance, they were so enraptured by my whirlwind of thought and delivery. I was stunned. And so again, I must remind myself to consciously stay humble.

The first of the following links will bring you to an article written about my quiz team that appeared on the Ole Miss NewsDesk. I'm told that the story should be picked up by the Clarion-Ledger and that it's being pitched nationally, whatever that means. Awesome. The second link brings you to one of my Facebook photo albums, to which I've just added a snapshot picture of the Ole Miss homepage that has the article and my picture as the featured news article. I hope I get another fifteen minutes someday...

http://www.olemiss.edu/cgi-bin/news2000/display.pl?id=6149&mode=full

http://nd.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2044621&l=97dde&id=5601686

The Importance of the Written Archive

Perhaps I was a bit hasty in deeming my lost post my last blog. I can foresee at least a few more entries that pertain to the whole Mississippi thing and even beyond that when the gray area of my transition between Mississippi and Notre Dame fades, I will at some point create another blog I think. I’ve always wanted to be one of those people who relax by keeping a journal anyway, and the thought of stress relief combined with creating an open forum for sharing my thoughts in dialogue with others are two very appealing aspects of the blog I can’t ignore.

One of the more practical reasons that I’m continuing to write is that a certain Jake Roth, who delivered an absolutely beautiful farewell speech at our Teacher Corps banquet, has proposed that several of us Teacher Corps party people contribute to a text of our unique experiences. Molina is some ways is correct, that nothing happens unless it’s recorded and written down. In his own words, Jake wants Couzo, Robbie, Molina, and me to write a non-academic narrative over the summer that can be compiled with an introduction into something publishable, even if it never makes it beyond the Teacher Corps network. It’s an exciting proposal – worthy for its own sake besides the vanity involved in fancying myself a real writer and the challenge of actually trying to make some sense of this whole mess I got myself into in a well-written narrative. At this point, I need to keep posting even the most mundane of details so that I comb through this blog to recall my own source material; it is striking how much I’ve been through, how my thoughts have evolved, and how much of all that I’ve already forgotten. In short, it’s a perfect summer project in between attending class in the morning, working part-time at my old Phone Center job in the afternoon, and studying my Greek in the evening. I hope it works out, and I hope the others involved feel similarly engaged by the proposal.

So in other news, my field trip to Mobile, AL to see the Pompeii exhibit at the Gulf Coast Exploreum went splendidly. All my students have given me rave reviews, and it’s quite rewarding to say the least that it was such an enjoyable time after all I had to go through to make it happen (collecting money from 40 students, properly handling that money with the business office, fighting with the highly inefficient and bureaucratic transportation department, getting approval for other teacher chaperones to go, being in charge in general and making decisions about where to go and what to eat, etc.). In the end, though, it truly did all come to fruition, and it reminded me of why I wanted to put it all together in the first place, those unforgettable and soon-to-be-sorely-missed students.

Likewise, I’m beginning to reap the rewards of the Quiz Bowl trip already, even though we haven’t yet gone. It will be a similarly amazing time, I’m sure, spending a day downtown in Chicago and competing all weekend, and since I put out my rock-bottom plea about the funding issue, money has been pouring in from wealthy donors through the Parents for Public Schools network in Jackson to the KIPP school in the Arkansas Delta to as far away as Murrah alumni from the ‘60s now living in Texas. We now have more than enough money to go, I’m pleased as pie to be writing thank-you notes rather than making phone calls begging for money, and the story has gained momentum in the media. I’m currently trying to track down some students who may have a decent photo of our team because the major local papers in Oxford and Jackson are picking up our story and I just received an e-mail explaining that the story is being pitched nationally, whatever that means. I’m now quite humbled by the whole experience- do I really deserve that much attention? All I really wanted was enough money to take some good students to Chicago to try our best in an academic competition and see the city, but even if the attention is getting overblown, at least it is well-deserved for the students’ sake if not my own. This is a hectic month to be sure (I’m still juggling AP prep and homebound tutoring along with my move to Notre Dame that will occur exactly three days upon returning from the Chicago trip) but the results of everything I had planned for it are way above and beyond what I initially had imagined.