Intellectualism and Teaching

For my second post, I need to start with a Public Service Announcement: the preview of upcoming attractions I blurbed out at the end of my last post will no longer be a featured attraction for this standard of blogging excellence. It was late, I knew there would be more interesting events cropping up to talk about, but I did it anyway just in case. I apologize to all my fans, domestic and worldwide.

What, pray tell Mr. Jones, could be more interesting than more thoughts on the first week? Could it be that I'm simultaneously nervous and anxious about teaching my first real lesson to the entire class tomorrow? Could it be that I'm absolutely going crazy with paperwork and really can't wait to visit my school in Jackson on Friday? Could it be that one of my summer school students told me quite nonchalantly that she was getting married next weekend with nary a mention of a baby? (What?! I was ready for pregnancy news. But marriage? Well, good for her I suppose.) Could it be the fact that my high school juniors, whom I'm attempting to teach English III, can read standard English but do not comprehend a word of it until I explain in very dumbed-down terms that a passage from Washington Irving is funny because Rip Van Winkle taking an extra pull that led to another from his flagon means he got completely hammered, to name a minor, minor example? At least that's better than most of the kids at my volunteer teaching program at Notre Dame. Comprehension is only slightly more irritating to teach kids than phonetics. Or, last but not least, could it be that a sequence of three is good rhetorical style but including my remarks in parentheses and this sentence I've used a grand total of eight (8) question marks? Never mind that now, I'm the English teacher here.

I will say before I get to the meat and potatoes of my entry today (or perhaps meat and three is a more palatable dish for readers down here... so oblige me and consider this paragraph the fried pickle appetizer...) that I feel a little misplaced in this program, being here to teach Latin and Mythology and one of the top high school in the state. I feel like I'm cheating the purpose of the program, but I'm justifying my existence with the small comforts that I've wanted to be a Latin teacher for years and good high won't remain good high school without good teachers. The point is, I've been told that I'm probably one of approximately three (3) Latin teachers in the Mississippi secondary school system, and I'm genuinely curious about that. (Wink, wink, Ben of "I Love Statistics" fame.) This means that I'm building a Classics program from scratch with no state guidelines. That means I can't fail with no one checking up on me, right? No way, Jose! It means that I need to get these kids ready for national competitions all on my own as well as scooting them right along until the eventual need for an AP program rears its ugly head. Oddly enough, I really want to do this. Optimism is just sooooo cute!

The "three" portion of this entry is the issue of evolution in schools. (For all you avid readers north of the Mason-Dixon line, when one orders a "meat and three" one receives a choice of chicken, beef, or pork with three deliciously over-fried, over-salted, over-awesomed vegetable sides. If one is on a diet, of course, there is the almost-as-popular "meat and two.") I'm glad I'm not going to be coming close to touching this issue, not because I'm afraid to make a moral stand and get behind it but because sadly any fundamentalist who might hear of this shocking new discovery would not only get me fired but entrench himself even more in his beliefs against the Evil Enemy. Naturally, being an educated person, I have to 'believe' that evolution is more or less correct scientifically speaking. (And please, don't get me started on the intellectual subtleties of this issue, having been a student of Darwin's texts and the issue of faith and science at large. And I fully realize I'm being a huge snot now.) Just as sure as we're taught Euclidian geometry like the Absolute Truth until we encounter this odd creature Riemann, we should also be taught Darwinian evolution until the brightest among us can study Greek, Hebrew, and make some headway into the Bible. My new motto in life is "I Hate Ignorance." But enough of this. I'm not a biology teacher. I'm a Latin, English, and Mythology teacher, and I'll be giving kids who deserve more than a common high school education. If I was a biology teacher though, I would be damn sure to teach evolution and not anything else. So can we please just not talk about it during our graduate class anymore? Wax philosophic on your time. I'm more than happy to oblige.

I'm getting worked up now, which is probably not a great occurence now that I'm arriving at the "meat" of the entry: corporal punishment. A moment of silence please. Just listen to it. Corporal punishment. If you're not from the South, it just stuns you to hear about its legality. Coming from where I have in New York, I've never even heard of corporal punishment. I say that about a lot of issues, like when I claim that I didn't know what racism was until I learned it in textbooks. That's an exaggeration. This is not. It's not that I even know where I stand on it, much less know whether I think it to be a Categorical Evil (like those damn Evolutionists...), but can we please not talk about it in class? Please? Like I said in class today, we should all take a cue from the Reluctant Disciplinarian book and realize that we are not here tobe heroes like in Dangerous Minds or Dead Poet's Society. We're here to be teachers, and that's what we need to do. So you want to be a Moral Crusader? Fine. But if you don't mind, could you please oblige your own teachers, the rest of us, and your future students and become a teacher first? Again, I'll wzx philosophic any time outside of class. But we've been explicitly told that social reform is to be modeled and implicit over the next two years, and quite frankly the MTCorps is giving us a free education and job security to do what they want us to do. If there's a problem with that, then leave. You don't need to be here taking their scholarship. I want to make a difference too, but here's why I'm not with those who think we need immediate change. Drumroll, please.

We are a bunch of white Northerners. While the point may be to change a culture that is morally wrong, we are still outsiders in the system and we must integrate ourselves and elicit change from within, not from without. First of all, this is an issue that is not universally acknowledged as wrong. Second of all, issues that are universally acknowledged as wrong in the Occident include segregation and every form of government that isn't democracy. Who's heard of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and President Bush? King was a very educated man and though he called for immediate change, he called for immediate change after having been a victim and student of the situation for many years. He was an insider. Bush of course is failing miserably in Iraq with his own revolution from without and imposition of peace through martial law because he knows nothing about anything and just needs his ten gallon hat and a couple of pistols to solve any culturally divided issues. I Hate Ignorance. It kind of brings us full circle, right? The whole point is to get an education, integrate yourself, then change the system. Two years is hardly enough time to learn how to teach effectively enough to pass high school students, so let's please take this one step at a time if we're serious abut our moral crusades?

I feel like I'm rambling and getting disorganized now, so before I start name dropping philosophers, I'm putting together a lesson plan.