Open letter to this past week.

Dear This Past Week,

You and I sat down and had a conversation awhile ago, wherein we planned that you would be completely wall-to-wall, and we both agreed that it would be fine: sometimes immersion in a task is just the thing, a task like conferring with students about their midterm portfolios, and in fact, it could be transformative, changing the tenor of the student-teacher relationship, what with the individual attention and the reams of comments. We actually planned on transformation, This Past Week. It was on our agenda.

However, This Past Week, things didn't exactly follow as we had envisioned them. When we announced to the students that their portfolios needed to be posted by midnight Monday, we thought they would comply. Writing these words--"we thought they would comply"--how absurd they sound! How many years have I been teaching? Couldn't you have reminded me, This Past Week, that such an expectation would be naive? in the extreme? You could have at least laughed at me, affectionately or even derisorily. It would have saved us both a lot of grief.

Only you know, This Past Week, how I died just a little when the students did not show at their appointed hour. Just a little, but still. I'm middle-aged, This Past Week. I can't afford to be dying all the time.

If we were doing this again, This Past Week, how would we correct for this risible failure to envision the world as it really is--that students, even having written things down, forget, or postpone, or don't think of you the writing teacher as the sun (with them the writing students as the moon, like Juliet and Romeo) and thus blow you off like a bad date? What would we do differently? Punishment? threats?

And now, This Past Week, you are spilling into the new week, because I have had to reschedule appointments like mad. I have always been the apostle of "Just One More Chance," which, frankly, I should find a new religion, because Just One More Chance basically doubles my labor and makes me feel a little bad and a little mad. Also, there's that whole dying a little thing, which, let's face it, does no one any favors.

yours,

lisa b.

TAGS: gospel, dying by degrees, expectations, teaching, plan

Found.

Today, because I couldn't find it in me to do serious work, at least not up until the time I finish this and post it, I started going through a big pile of magazines and whatnot in our bedroom. This included old issues of the New York Times Sunday Magazine, issues of the now sadly defunct, except on the web, Premiere, the New Yorker, The Nation, sundry fashion magazines, College English, and who knows what all else. Here are some things I found that might be useful to you all (also, a couple of things from today's paper and the newest Nation):

from an old New Yorker:

Walter Benjamin smoked hashish and also wrote about it.
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from today's New York Times:

(headline:) "Farmyard Stills Quench a Thirst for Local Spirits"
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(headline:) "Tightening the Beltway, the Elite Shop Costco"--an article about how lots of Washington, D.C. parties basically use Costco food to do it. I think there might be an extra fancy Costco, though: "We knew that we would attract government, we would attract ambassadors, we would attract military personnel, we would attract the parties and embassies," said Joe Potera, the chief operating officer, referring to the Pentagon City store. "We have thousands of sheet cakes during all the major holidays for Pentagon parties, for ambassador parties, for staff parties in the capitol. It's kind of a destination." Costco also has a chocolate shop that produces molds of the Capitol as well as the Pentagon.
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In the Op-Ed pages, an article about human "hibernation," reports that in the 19th century, French peasants in the chillier provinces would often basically sleep through the winter. This was particularly true in, say, the Alps, where they used to say "Seven months of winter, five months of hell," meaning the "unremitting toil" of the spring and summer. After that, they'd settle in with the animals and eat only a little to lower their metabolic rate.

Another excerpt: "But the French seemse to have been particularly sleepy. They 'hibernated' even in temperate zones. In Burgundy, after the wine harvest, the workers burned the vine stocks, repaired their tools and left the land to the wolves. A civil servant who investigated the region's economic activity in 1844 foudn that he was almost the only living presence in the landscape: 'these vigorous men will now spend their days in bed, packing their bodies tightly together in order to stay warm and to eat less food. They weaken themselves deliberately.'"
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Slash, whose guitar playing is featured in the game "Guitar Hero," reports that though he likes to play the game, he "stinks at it."
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Katha Pollitt, in The Nation, "The Atheist's Dilemma": "There's no question in my mind that horror at militant Islam and fear of Muslim immigration lie behind at least some of the current vogue for atheism--you don't make the bestseller list by excoriating the evils of Lutheranism or Buddhism. The problem is that the more scorn one feels for religious belief, the less able one is to appreciate 'reformed' or 'moderate' variants of the faith. After all, pro-gay Episcopalians and liberation theology Catholics still believe in Christ, the afterlife, sin; reformed Jews still find wisdom in the Old Testament. Strictly speaking, an atheist should have no truck with any of it. But if all you can offer people is reasons to quit their religion--which often means their community, their family, their support system and their identity--you're not going to have many takers. For every brilliant angry teenager you strengthen in doubt, there's a mosque- or churchful of people who'll choose the old-time religion if the only other choice is nothing."
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Sunday is better for reading and being desultory than for buckling down, in my opinion. Also: good for a little light napping.