Thursday, May 06, 2004
A quick snapshot from my crazy-ass school:
Community meeting day. We gather together in the commons every Thursday morning, the entire school (all 450 or so of us ) sitting on the worn carpet, packed in together so tightly that students lean back on the knees of the student behind to find a place to rest. But today, the seniors were gone, so there was an anomalous sense of spaciousness in the room.
Today was Drop Everything and Read. I had just been discussing Chronicle of a Death Foretold with my juniors, another fabulous forty minutes. (In it, I read my favorite passage from the book: "I dreamed that a woman was coming into the room with a little girl in her arms, and that the child was chewing without stopping to take a breath, and that half-chewed kernels of corn were falling into the woman's brassiere. The woman said to me: 'She crunches like a nutty nuthatch, kind of sloppy, kind of slurpy.'" You try to do an exegesis of that one.) But at 9:40, we left our cold classroom to wander into the commons. And flop down onto the floor and read. Once a quint, we give over the community meeting time to DEAR. Every person in the school is reading something, including the assistant head of school (who sat tall and proper in a chair by the trash can) and the receptionist. We turn off all the phones and don't answer the door. We read.
I'm reading Middlesex, by Geoffery Eugenides, and I'm so utterly besotted by it that I'm slightly resentful that I have to do anything else but flop down in the sunshine and read for hours. The narrator is a hermaphrodite named Cal, who used to be Calliope, who comes from an epic, Greek tragedy of a family. And mostly, the voice is sprawling and precise, wonderfully tragic and ironic, mostly filmic, some poetic. God lord, I love this book. And I'm only 136 pages in.
So I read, in my camp chair (brought in for my back, months ago, and now I just like sitting in it, like the queen above her dominion), along with everyone else in the school. Students filtered in after half an hour, because it was time for announcements. Reluctantly, I stopped reading.
Most of community meeting is listening to students and teachers make announcements. I lost my cd player; has anyone seen it? Yeah, I have it, right behind you. There's a dance performance at the Broadway Performance Hall, my friend and I are in it. Please come to see us dance. (This from a beautiful junior boy who is proudly out already, and beloved.) Don't forget to compost in the lunch room. You should really clean your plate, so you don't waste any food. But if you do have to throw food away, remember to put it in the compost can! The seventh grade was best at cleaning their plates, so the entire class will win a prize. Basketball camp this summer--sign up now. Thank you for coming to the first Asian food festival. The international students are so proud, even though there were a few mistakes. And we raised lots of money for the migrant farm workers trip. I did this internship with the peace and reconciliation fellowship last summer, and I want to recommend it to everyone else. They pay you to work, and they teach you how to bring peace to the world. And make public speeches.
In the midst of this, today, a ninth-grade girl raised her hand, was recognized, and stood up. She's gawky, has enormous black glasses, and an ironic smile. I'm Trina, and I'm a freshman. And then she pulled out a little red accordion, started to play it plaintively, and sang the first verse from Soft Cell's Tainted Love. "Sometimes I feel I'd like to get away, I'd like to run away..." And with no abashment, she tugged at the accordion, back and forth, and sang this broken-hearted love song in a quavery voice. And when she was done, she sat down, and everyone applauded, thunderously.
These are my days.
Community meeting day. We gather together in the commons every Thursday morning, the entire school (all 450 or so of us ) sitting on the worn carpet, packed in together so tightly that students lean back on the knees of the student behind to find a place to rest. But today, the seniors were gone, so there was an anomalous sense of spaciousness in the room.
Today was Drop Everything and Read. I had just been discussing Chronicle of a Death Foretold with my juniors, another fabulous forty minutes. (In it, I read my favorite passage from the book: "I dreamed that a woman was coming into the room with a little girl in her arms, and that the child was chewing without stopping to take a breath, and that half-chewed kernels of corn were falling into the woman's brassiere. The woman said to me: 'She crunches like a nutty nuthatch, kind of sloppy, kind of slurpy.'" You try to do an exegesis of that one.) But at 9:40, we left our cold classroom to wander into the commons. And flop down onto the floor and read. Once a quint, we give over the community meeting time to DEAR. Every person in the school is reading something, including the assistant head of school (who sat tall and proper in a chair by the trash can) and the receptionist. We turn off all the phones and don't answer the door. We read.
I'm reading Middlesex, by Geoffery Eugenides, and I'm so utterly besotted by it that I'm slightly resentful that I have to do anything else but flop down in the sunshine and read for hours. The narrator is a hermaphrodite named Cal, who used to be Calliope, who comes from an epic, Greek tragedy of a family. And mostly, the voice is sprawling and precise, wonderfully tragic and ironic, mostly filmic, some poetic. God lord, I love this book. And I'm only 136 pages in.
So I read, in my camp chair (brought in for my back, months ago, and now I just like sitting in it, like the queen above her dominion), along with everyone else in the school. Students filtered in after half an hour, because it was time for announcements. Reluctantly, I stopped reading.
Most of community meeting is listening to students and teachers make announcements. I lost my cd player; has anyone seen it? Yeah, I have it, right behind you. There's a dance performance at the Broadway Performance Hall, my friend and I are in it. Please come to see us dance. (This from a beautiful junior boy who is proudly out already, and beloved.) Don't forget to compost in the lunch room. You should really clean your plate, so you don't waste any food. But if you do have to throw food away, remember to put it in the compost can! The seventh grade was best at cleaning their plates, so the entire class will win a prize. Basketball camp this summer--sign up now. Thank you for coming to the first Asian food festival. The international students are so proud, even though there were a few mistakes. And we raised lots of money for the migrant farm workers trip. I did this internship with the peace and reconciliation fellowship last summer, and I want to recommend it to everyone else. They pay you to work, and they teach you how to bring peace to the world. And make public speeches.
In the midst of this, today, a ninth-grade girl raised her hand, was recognized, and stood up. She's gawky, has enormous black glasses, and an ironic smile. I'm Trina, and I'm a freshman. And then she pulled out a little red accordion, started to play it plaintively, and sang the first verse from Soft Cell's Tainted Love. "Sometimes I feel I'd like to get away, I'd like to run away..." And with no abashment, she tugged at the accordion, back and forth, and sang this broken-hearted love song in a quavery voice. And when she was done, she sat down, and everyone applauded, thunderously.
These are my days.
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