The Line

I’m sitting at lunch with one of the worst slackers in my entire team of students—he’s in to make up a quiz from three months ago. Bright, gangly; often out of school during the first day of any given hunting season. The words “You’re so gay” are about as prevalent in his vocabulary as, well, nouns.

He has a kind and ironic sense of humor, though, and it is this that has me laughing like an idiot about a story he’s relating about a sub, who apparently cemented his power structure in the class by introducing himself as “King Johnson.”

“And then we started talking about rainbow t-shirts, you know, tie-dye,” says my student, “and then I said I didn’t like them, and he called me homophobic.”

He pauses.

“Like, what does that MEAN, Ms. S?”

I have struggled with nearly every aspect of teaching in this first mainstream year, but one of the things I can manage to do with kids is navigate fairly sensitive topics. We start a very matter of fact conversation about what people mean these days when they say colloquially that someone is homophobic. I wait for the putdown, the expected profession of revulsion, the unthinking spitback of adult conservatism. Silently I start marshalling my defense of treating everyone with dignity, regardless of whether one agrees with their choices.

My kid pauses again, now for a long time.

“But one of my family members is gay,” he says. “And some of my neighbors. And they’re fine.”

And now it’s my turn to pause.

“Then you’re not homophobic, Jack,” I finally tell him.

He squares his shoulders. Shakes his hair out of his eyes. Looks at me.

“No,” he says. “I’m not.”

Read this and weep.

Update: This morning (Sunday 3/30) NPR profiles a non-profit lender who fills in the gaps by having their officers walk the streets of New Orleans, seeking out small businesses and their owners personally. A study in contrast if there ever was one.

So I tried to write about New Orleans.

About what it was like to see azaleas blooming in March. About the rich muddy waters of the Mississippi, who “ain’t never gave us no trouble,” said one lifelong resident to me, as if the river is a quiet neighbor who keeps the grass cut. About the cabby who recommended a local’s restaurant so far out of the tourist center that it amazed the second cabby who picked me up there. And about the feeling, as tangible as breath, that emanates from the citizens who talk about Katrina– every last one. It took me until the flight home to realize why I felt like it was familiar to me. It is the exact feeling that comes from European family members when they speak of surviving World War Two.

I was nursing a seven month old baby and managing a toddler when Katrina hit in 2005. My sympathies were abstract, my mind elsewhere. My lip service didn’t do it then, and it doesn’t now.

So I gave up on writing about New Orleans. This came out instead.

It’s my first experiment with digital movie making, so any clumsiness, glaring errors or omissions are only mine. It is intended for a local audience– for example, the Blue Cross Arena is a local landmark. Most of the photos after the initial segment are ones I took myself.

There is no criticism implied in it of the good intent or expertise of Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod. In fact, Scott himself generously located and shared the music from “Do You Know 2.0″ for this project.

However, I also cannot deny that for me, the experience of New Orleans, and the questions it raised about the responsibility our society has to answer the basic needs of its people before anything else, do stand in stark ironic contrast to the juggernaut spread of “Do You Know?”.

I have seen “Do You Know?” four times in unrelated contexts in the past year and a half, one of them at the ASCD conference itself. And while the questions it asks about the technological proficiency of schools are useful ones, I also can’t help but pin them up in my mind against whole streets of storm-ravaged gutted homes, where schoolchildren no longer live.

Thus my choice to model the video after “Do You Know?” is deliberate.

Here is the original, for comparison.

Chris Lehmann is. Joe Henderson is. And after returning home from New Orleans, where the race divide draws blood in your mind, it is so sharp, and listening to this speech by Obama this morning: so am I. I cannot remember, in my near 20 years of political awareness, a speech that so moved me with its compassion, intelligence, and courage.

I’ll be writing more about New Orleans very soon. But for now, let this story lay out the ground for the stories I encountered there. Please: listen.

My father, fondly recalling sultry days spent strolling in New Orleans with my mom, tells me I am bound by law to have a sugar-bombed beignet and chicory coffee on Sunday morning at the Cafe Du Monde this weekend. I’ll be “live” guest blogging the ASCD Conference at their blog Inservice the rest of the time, attending sessions based on input from edubloggers Dy/Dan, Eduwonkette, Clay Burell, Ben Baxter, Tom Woodward,  Joe Henderson, and other kind folks. Currently up at Inservice is a brief interview and an old geeky picture –although you can’t even tell I’m eight months pregnant in it, can you? School cafeteria tables are very slimming. Unlike beignets.

I think I share TMAO’s negative correlation between blogging and struggles at school. Posts are fomenting– at last count twelve topics in the Draft folder, and I’ve been tagged for the Passion Quilt besides (thank you, Linda…)

And I can’t write any of it right now because I’m so backed up on grading essays. Let the truth ring.

While I get my life in order, enjoy this. On its home album, Trailer Park, Beth Orton couples trip hop and Appalachian-type folk with mixed, but admirably brave results.

Putting out the call one more time for your suggestions as to which sessions I should attend at the National ASCD Conference, New Orleans mid-March.  I’ll be serving as the guest educator blogger for the conference on the ASCD’s blog, InService, and registering for sessions at the end of the week. The ASCD folks say I might get a “PRESS” badge…what’s that you say? Something about absolute power?…

I’ve got some great ideas from you, but the more the merrier– it’s important to me to choose sessions to cover that relate directly to the educational stuff we’re mentally chewing on in those quiet moments before sleep, in our dreams, and during breakfast the morning after. You know what I’m talking about.

Here’s the list of sessions. Don’t let closed sessions deter you. Apparently I can get in with my MultiPass. Um, Press Badge.

Contact me or leave a comment.

I will choose the brown spicy goo and dripping icing anyday. (OK, so this has NO-thing to do with the fate of American education, but so be it…)

I have a desperate, dare I say compulsive, need for transparent symmetry between my blogroll and my subscribed feeds. I also note carefully every diverse approach to blogrolling… and feel like all of them stink in one way or the other.

I’m not going to subject you to the gluttonous horror of a Carl Saganesque blogroll list (read: “billions and billions”) that only mean something in my little world. At the same time, having made it onto a couple of folks’ blogrolls recently, I am so deeply conscious of the honor that I feel like I have to take an all or nothing approach on my own site, to be fair. Had the same problem about fifteen years ago when constructing my wedding invitation list…

Overthinking? No one cares? Probably. But the roll’s coming down, in favor of a del.icio.us account, I think. Don’t cry, Argentina. You’re all in my heart. Or my Google Reader.

(How do you handle this?)