Messing Around with "The Help"

The Help.  And no, it's not about making babies with former governor Schwarzenegger. 

Have I read the book?  Do I have plans on seeing the movie?   Now the mere fact that my mother-in-law likes The Help should have been damning enough.  But I digress. Let me explain, in a very roundabout way, why I will not see The Help.

Truth be told, the issue of whether or not someone can opine about whether or not they'd see a film based upon a book they've not read is moot, in my opinion.  But it's not easy for anyone who is a teacher to readily dismiss either, simply because in some respects, the movement of source material from book form to movie form is something that, at times, we deal with in classrooms each and every year.  If you think about the "Harry Potter" films, the recent release of "Mr. Popper's Penguins" this summer, or last year's "Where the Wild Things Are", inevitably, for teachers, there is the struggle between trying to work between literature appreciation of the source material and a student's understanding of it, and then, how it competes with the movie version of the story--particularly if an author's vision of a specific character runs up how a film chooses to portray a character on film, especially given the actor chosen.  Think this versus this.

A "U" Grade

While procrastinating in the middle of working on another blog post that I swore I would eventually post, I took advantage of a rare chance one morning this week to actually read the morning paper in the AM hours.  I have been paying only ancillary attention to the murder trial in Chatsworth regarding a middle schooler's murder of his classmate in Oxnard in 2008.

Yes, a nightmare for these two families that I couldn't even begin to fathom.  But of greater concern to me, what caused me to react beyond the simply recognition of pity for the circumstances, was this note from the article:

One teacher after another has testified in the murder trial about their deep worries that King's feminine attire and taunting behavior could provoke problems — and that E.O. Green Junior High administrators ignored them.

It wasn't just that King, 15, had begun wearing makeup and women's spiked-heeled boots, witnesses testified. It was that he seemed to relish making the boys squirm at his newly feminized appearance and was taunting them with comments like "I know you want me."

"They wanted to beat Larry up for what he was doing to them and they came to me because I wanted to keep them out of trouble,'' E.O. Green teacher Jill Ekman testified. "I told them that I would work on getting assistance from the office and we would work this out."

Things that make you go "awe"...

This cartoon appeared in the L.A. Times' comic section last week:

Dan Piraro's comics have forever amused me, with a number of them actually gracing our refrigerator, despite my wife's professed dislike of a cluttered fridge.  I found it, to make the point of this post, "awesome".  Wow, that was profound, as adjectives go, no?

Admittedly, bringing Kate (shown below) was enough to engender a sense of "awe" in me, as I began to consider what becoming a father was about to entail.

But this post, despite the gratuitous baby photo is not about becoming a Dad...let's get some things immediately out of the way.  It's about being in "awe" or finding something "awesome".  At various points during the early part of the school year, I will revisit this topic.  But first off, definition time:

awe |ô|
noun
a feeling of reverential respect mixed with fear or wonder : they gazed in awe at the small mountain of diamonds | the sight filled me with awe | his staff members are in awe of him.
• archaic capacity to inspire awe : is it any wonder that Christmas Eve has lost its awe?
verb [ trans. ] (usu. be awed)
inspire with awe : they were both awed by the vastness of the forest | [as adj. ] ( awed) he spoke in a hushed, awed whisper.

-some
suffix forming adjectives meaning:
1 productive of : loathsome.
2 characterized by being : wholesome.
• apt to : tiresome.

awesome |ˈôsəm|
adjective
extremely impressive or daunting; inspiring great admiration, apprehension, or fear : the awesome power of the atomic bomb.
• informal extremely good; excellent : the band is truly awesome!

But it wasn't just becoming a father that was the only thing in my life which caused me to feel truly "awed". 

Buying some peanuts sans Cracker Jack...

Jered Weaver, if only he sold the cotton candy...

When I first considered even sharing out about taking my daughter to a baseball game, I had to think about how I wanted to even tell the story.  For me anyway, it was unavoidable that I began to consider how much I should bash on Arte Moreno, the Angel owner, and his irrational belief that Orange County is a part of Los Angeles.  (If you're not familiar with what I'm specifically making reference, this is, more or less (because it is Wikipedia) an unbiased summary...) Of course, if you believe this man, he wants nothing to do with Los Angeles.  Which, incidentally, sets up a New York-style situation wherein a major league sports team's metropolitan market resides in another state, but now I'm digressing...


It is worth noting however, that on the day of the game, the local paper was running Angel stuff below the fold--even while the Halos were battling to stay within reach of the Texas Rangers AND after a huge comeback win, while the Dodgers, in the midst of a terrible year, was getting all the attention by declaring bankruptcy while their owners were divorcing.  Oh yeah, Anaheim is definitely LA, Arte, and the Angels are gonna replace the affection for the Dodgers all across Southern California, right? 


But anyway, Moreno would have been too easy of a mark for me.  Despite his insistance upon a geographic impossibility, not to mention a total ignorance between the relationship between denizens of LA County versus those of the OC, in the end, did I want to write about someone "geographically ignant" or about what really mattered--my girl?   I mean, even at her age, Katelyn's natural geographic curiousity (she loves to read a Disneyland map, and she can pick out California on a U.S. map), she intuitively knew that we weren't traveling to Los Angeles by heading south on the same freeway we used to get to Disneyland.  So, deciding that I wanted to take Katelyn for her first *real* (explanation to follow in a moment) major league baseball game was never really that much of an issue.  Nor was it a question of *where*.  After all, this has been the season of this sort of stuff going on in the Dodger Stadium parking lot.  While, in many respects, I've come to prefer the Dodger Stadium experience (at least before it turned into a John Carpenter film.  But again, I'm digressing...the bottom line is that I felt more comfortable, given present circumstances, taking Katelyn, by myself, to an Angel game. 


Now then, despite my own preference of baseball as my fan game of choice (or college football, depending upon the season), trying to share that relationship with my preschooler has been a checkered effort, to say the least.  But to say the most, this past week's (3-game series, with a Thursday day game) match-up between the Texas Rangers and Anaheim Angels of Arte Moreno was meant to be my daughter's first trip to a Major League ballpark--or, at least, the trip that she was supposed to remember.


As opposed to our first trip, that the wife and I are still trying to forget... (insert flashback screen effect here)

While Phineas & Ferb are at it...

What I tend to call "the silly season" is upon us, now that summer school has ended for me, and I actually get to settle into an unfamiliar pattern of trying to figure what the hell I plan on doing with myself, and, more importantly, my preschooler.  The wife, as a 12-month employee, is working.  Either way, my days promise to be busy, but nevertheless, thoughts never stray too far from what lies on the other end of the summer months.

Summer school this year has nonetheless caused me to have to periodically check my district e-mail.  Along with the summer school traffic regarding required lesson planning and test results, comes a usual e-mail from my boss, asking if any of us wants to take on a student teacher.  It wasn't always thus;  I can recall my first few years as a teacher, when only a select few got student teachers.  At the time, in addition to student teachers from CSULB, Pepperdine, among others, were also able to get placements in our school.  As a Pepperdine graduate, eventually I was deemed worthy, and I was lucky to have 4 student teachers from their Orange County campus in my classroom.  After my last student teacher 4 years ago, Pepperdine somehow stopped using my school for a student teaching location, and, in retrospect, I was somehow happy.  (1)  I had become good friends with my final protege but (2) becoming friends with my student teachers after they left made their struggles to find jobs quite painful.

The job market for teachers right now is not the best, and it hasn't been for a while.  As I type this, I am awaiting the fate of one young teacher with whom I've become acquainted, whose job prospects are completely dependent upon another teacher friend who was student teaching at my school around the same time my own protege was finding her way in my classroom.  Honestly, becoming close to and working with young teachers was a lot like rooting for players on some perverse form of the TV Show Survivor.  On the other hand, these are education's future, and in a couple of cases, I strongly feel that these teachers have the potential to be far better a teacher than I can ever hope to be.  I worry for the profession if these folks are lost to the classroom because of a political climate where education is seen as some form of luxury and drain upon state budgeting. 

What I am sharing out now is something that I wrote 3 years ago, as piece for the UCI Writing Project.  I've removed names of the people involved, as I am close to all of them still, but the rest of the piece is intact.  Perhaps it's cheating to use something I've written previously, but the mere fact that I got that e-mail about student teachers this fall, coupled with the hand-wringing I'm doing waiting to hear if a friend will get her job back, has me in the same frame of mind now, as I was then...

Found: Poem

A common evening activity at our hourse is always bathtime, at least when I'm running it.  (The wife tends to be more of a "turn & burn" type of gal with respect to Kate's bathtime...)  On my nights, Kate gets unfettered free time to indulge her LIttle Mermaid fantasy, athough when she's playing with her baby bath doll "Chimbodes", she sounds more and more like Ursula.  Either way, since my work desk abuts the bathroom, one of the things I like to do is play my usual random music for Kate to have a listen.  Usually this involves such masterpieces as Butterpants (from Shrek 4) or Baby Monkey (Riding Backwards on a Pig) (which, not surprisingly became my 6th graders' theme song the final two weeks of the school year just past).

This past weekend, however, Katelyn became enamored with this "mash-up" from the 2009 Pixar film, Up, called Upular.  More information can be found here.  Here is a link to the artist involved, Pogo.  Watch for yourself:

Pogo, as he describes his own process, "Video for my track ‘Upular’, composed using chords, bass notes and vocal samples from the Disney Pixar film ‘Up’. The track also features a small number of percussion samples, including an obvious kick drum, crash cymbals and hi-hats."  I does help, I will admit, that he had an Academy Award-winning soundtrack with which to work his magic upon.

Pogo has done others that I've inevitably introduced to Kate, and they're some I thought she'd enjoy.  But for some reason, she's quite taken by a tune that has Wilderness Explorer Russell "singing".  She has asked me to download the song, to go alongside, for instance, more mainstream fare from the soundtrack of Disney's "Tangled".

Now, to be honest, the lyrics to this "Upular" aren't immediately sonically apparent.  But they are drawn from the film's screenplay.  In essence, it represents a sort of "found poem", wherein the work of a particular author is reconfigured into a new piece.  Interestingly enough, I was exposed to the concept of found poems while working in the California HIstory-Social Science Project and later in the UCI Writing Project.  

For whatever reason (and with me, there always tends to be...), I finally tapped into the experience that I had in the UCIWP, while struggling to figure out how in the hell I was supposed to teach 3 rotations of English-Language Arts at my school.  I had my students create found poems from literature that they were reading at the time.  I have a number of examples now, that I can use when I revisit the project come this Fall, but where "Upular" comes in is that in addition to my little girl's affinity for the song, what I like is that it now gives me a teaching tool to use as a way of introducing the assignment to this year's crop of 6th graders, to go along with what I culled last year.

The idea of found poems, therefore, are not new and unique, but they involve an understanding of the parent text that does force students into comprehension beyond the surface.  In popular culture, they are achieving a certain cachet.  In one instance, Sarah Palin's recently released e-mails from her time as Governor of Alaska were given this treatment.  Even more striking is how another artist, while not going the poetry treatment, used Barack Obama to create this. 

Force it! It's OK...

I still can't get over that this news reporter actually had the huevos to try this joke out, for real, on the man.

I often share a particular joke on my students, the majority of whom are Spanish-speakers.  The past week, in my Summer School class, as we delved into a lesson on words in context, I shared the story yet again.  Delivered in Spanish, in a nutshell, it involves a recent Mexican immigrant who is looking for a place to stay in L.A.  Walking down a residential street, he stumbles across a house with a sign that says "For Sale / No Lease".  As this is written blog, I can't phonetically get the words to sound as they would as they would being spoken, but translated, it means:  "Force it, don't worry!"  And, therefore, the immigrant breaks into the house to spend the night.  He's later arrested, and has to explain to the police officer the how and why of the sign he read. 

In Spanish, the joke is funny. (Or at least I think so...) But without the context of language, it winds up sounding a bit weird.  It's context, it's colloquialism, it's the very nature of language used in a way to bring about a humorous set of results.  As a teacher, I'm surrounded by it constantly.  In the televised fiasco above, the Aussie broadcaster obviously overestimated the amount of colloquial English the Dalai Lama had in his background, hence the embarrassment above.  In my classroom, there are times each and every day where the amount of context can determine whether or not a student is even understanding whatever the hell it is I'm trying to explain, teach, or whatever...

This has been a consideration at my school site for some time.  As I've matured as a teacher, I've been even more cognizant than I have ever been regarding context because a common mistake we make while teaching is assuming that loquaciousness will equal background knowledge.  Some kids will talk quite a bit, and even talk over themselves and myself, and, as a result, will miss the crucial link and background they need to understand what's really being said.  I'm forever shaking my head at how kids will laugh at a sound, but fail to respond to real humorous stuff, simply because they can't quite understand what they're really supposed to laugh at.  Not surprisingly, later on, when they're in a situation where they've got to be following the classroom discussion, they're understandably lost.   

On the other hand, another mistake that gets made is underestimating what the students do know.  I've often seen other teachers (and an administrator) fail to give the kids credit for the things they're expert about.  That's often where I have to go to reach them, in order to do the usual teacher thing of "going from the familiar to the unfamiliar".  It's frustrating to hear, as I have had occasion to observe this past year, that the lower kids won't get it anyway.  

Well, dammit, then maybe we shouldn't be claiming that *all* kids can learn when we just admitted that they can't.  In effect, these kids have learned, they've established context, but it's my job to try to find the key to unlock that.  Amazingly, the look on the Dalai Lama's face in the video above, is remarkably similar to the look my ELL's give me when I've said something, and they're trying to polite and look like they're trying really hard.  The worrisome part comes when they still don't get it, and yet they're being singled out for a failure to understand.  Sadly, who is the joke really on?