A Rock To Tie A String Around

Okay people. This is serious. I have painful, crippling and hopefully short-lived blog writer’s block. I have started no fewer than three blogs today only to do the virtual version of balling up the paper and tossing it into the trash.

Maybe it’s stress, maybe it’s excess houseguests, maybe it’s because I start school next week and my brain is atrophied from my two-month vacation.

I don’t know.

However, my disorder will work to your gain. I’m hosting my first ever contest. Here’s the skinny – and remember, I’m a teacher, and very serious about rules:

The objective is this: name my next blog topic, tell me what to write about and I will pick the best topic.

Here’s what you win: In addition to a hearty thank you and a shout out on the blog – I will send you one randomly chosen item from my house. It might be big, it might be small, it might have claws and need a litter box, it’s a surprise, like a virtual grab bag.

RULES:

I can’t think of any rules, it’s anarchy. Know this though, the winner will be chosen arbitrarily, and under the influence of box wine. Think accordingly.

Respond here or on Facebook or Twitter – I judge all entries equally.

Give me a challenge people!

Like most teachers, I can’t stand teacher movies, or books or inspirational quotes. As a teacher, I get flooded with all sorts of things that my well-meaning family and friends think will inspire me. I hate it all.

Yesterday I watched ‘Dangerous Minds’ with Michelle Pfeiffer. Not really out of choice, more out of laziness. Okay, if they’re trying to recruit new teachers with that movie, the producers are going the wrong direction. The lessons for new teachers that can be garnered from ‘Dangerous Minds’ are this:

1. Your first year will be horrible on a nightmarish scale
2. All administrators are evil dream-smashers who will go out of their way to stomp your ambitions and creativity
3. If you want to break through to your kids, you need to spend money. Lots and lots of money – money on candy, money on amusement park tickets, money on fancy, shmancy dinners.
4. You must spend every waking minute of your time away from school on your students, this means going to their houses, taking them out on the town.
5. You must be willing to sacrifice your personal life – dating, spouse, kids, etc…if you are to be successful

It’s true across the board for inspirational teacher stories. Since all the top hitter teacher books and movies are based on real-life people, I can only assume that I’m doing something wrong.
Ron Clark (The Essential 55 and made for TV move played by Mathew Perry) and Jaime Escalante (Stand and Deliver) both nearly killed themselves in their attempt to teach the masses. Clark nearly died of pneumonia, and limped back to school just to make sure his kids passed the test. Escalante had a massive heart attack and instead of staying put in the hospital, drug himself back to the classroom to prep his kids for AP exams.

I have no intentions of doing either. I stay home if I get sick, if I have pneumonia, I will do my best to leave a coherent lesson plan, but then I’m breaking out the hot tea and the Nyquil. I will not be worrying about my students. Does this make me a monster? Maybe….

Erin Gruwell (The Freedom Writers) worked several second and third jobs during her first year just so she could buy her kids books out of her own pocket. She also spent every waking minute at school, and as a result ended up divorced – at least according to the movie. Nope, not for me either. I will fight tooth and nail at my school to get my kids books, but I’m not going to be folding bras in a department store all night just so my kids can lose a copy of Siddhartha that I bought with my own debit card. Callous? Maybe….

Louanne Johnson (Dangerous Minds) came up with brilliant, innovative ways of teaching Bob Dylan to inner city kids to get them to connect to poetry, she visited the student’s homes, she bought them everything her teacher salary couldn’t afford. So what’s the problem? Well, the real Louanne Johnson did come up with a brilliant way to get her kids into poetry – by using rap lyrics. Why did the producers change rap to Dylan? I don’t know. ‘Dangerous Minds’ has been accused of whitewashing, I think it’s a pretty fair accusation, all things considered.

I’m partial to ‘Lean on Me’. You know, the story of Crazy Joe Clark, the principal of Eastside High. I like the scene where he suspends the basketball coach for picking up a piece of trash during the school song (in the real history, the coach was suspended for walking around during song – still pretty hard core), I’ve often wished that we had a principal with the balls to walk around campus wielding a baseball bat.

The problem with Hollywood Joe Clark vs. Actual Joe Clark is the question of accuracy. In real life, Eastside High was never under threat of state takeover, and while violence decreased, there was no major increase in test scores.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_on_Me_%28film%29

My first year teaching, I spent too much money out of my pocket on stuff for my kids, I stayed late at school every night; I went full throttle Freedom Writers ahead. Until that is, I realized my approach was all wrong. I was looking at my kids as somebodies that needed saving from their lives. They don’t need saving, they need knowledge, they need skills and tools, not another missionary disguised as a first year teacher.

I teach at a school that could have very well come out of one of these movies, it’s inner city, south central, gang-ridden, low income – my kids come to school with terrible stories, more crap on their plate than I’ve seen in my lifetime. Yet, my days at school are pretty normal. At the heart of it all, they’re kids. They don’t want to turn off their ipods, they chew gum even though they know I hate it, they make fun of me every time I have to wear my glasses to work. They’re just kids. They don’t want me sucking up to them with presents and amusement park tickets, they want someone who honestly wants to be there.

When I was in eighth grade, my track coach put me on shotput. To comprehend the true absurdity of this decision, you would had to have seen me in eighth grade – I hadn’t quite broken 5’0 yet, I was just teetering on 4’11, and I weighed somewhere around eighty-five, maybe ninety pounds. My hair was permed in an attempt to look like Jennifer Gray ala Dirty Dancing, the result was definitely more Beaker than Baby, and, I had giant metal braces on my teeth. I was hawt, and overwhelmingly unathletic.

The coach had literally tried me on every, single event and having failed to find anything I could do, decided on shotput. Looking back I can see his logic. He couldn’t kick me off the team, and most of our competitors didn’t even have a female shotput, so the event was usually ceded to me without my ever having to lift that impossibly heavy metal ball off the track field. On the few occasions that I was faced with competing, he would pull me off the event, citing some kind of fake injury. I think he was just being preemptive, predicting the ensuing injury if I had ever had to throw a ball that was about half my body weight.

I can’t put this event in a book. Why? No one would ever believe it. You don’t believe me now do you? I don’t blame you. You’re saying to yourself, why didn’t he just make you run, or better yet, cut you from the team altogether? I don’t know. I can guess though that it had something to do with the fact that my run moves mostly at the same pace as my walk, except with slightly more knee. But, that’s really just a guess, I’ll never know.

That’s the problem with the truth, it often sounds so improbable that it makes lousy fiction. I frequently read blogs written by book and magazine editors and they all echo the same sentiment. Writers who rely on their truthiness to move their fiction come off looking like amateurs. Their insistence ‘but it’s the truth!’ doesn’t make it any more readable.

‘Mommy Dearest’ is a good example of this. I have no doubt that Christina Crawford had a crap time of it, beyond crap time. Joan Crawford was a crazy person with a capital C. I have also never known anyone who could keep a straight face all the way through that movie. I find myself wondering if the wire hangers and chopping down of the rose garden in the middle of the night was a child’s exaggeration of events. If in reality the wire hanger scene went something like this:

Joan Crawford: “Hey, Christina, honey, can you try to pick up your clothes? Your closet is a mess!”

Christina Darling: “Whatever Mom, you suck.”

Joan Crawford: “Is that any way to speak to you mother? Oh man, what did I tell you about the wire hangers? Can you try to use the wooden ones on your nice dresses from now on?”

Christina Darling: “You better be nice or I’ll write a hugely exaggerated version of this scene in a scathing tell-all memoir in a few years.”

Joan Crawford: “Where did you learn the word ‘scathing’? You’re only eight years old?”

As a child, my mom used to threaten that she was going to get us these matching outfits...now that's scary.

Something like that anyway. Of course, it probably did really happen and I’ll now start getting hate mail from Christina Crawford fans…. My point is this: no one wants to hear the truth, no one will believe it. There’s nothing more frustrating then telling a totally true story and having people call you a liar. We call you a liar because we can’t believe how horrible, funny, and/or witty you were in that moment. It would make our lives look downright drab.

Sometimes the truth doesn’t stick because it makes no damn sense. Like the time back in sixth grade when I was the only kid cut from the volleyball team. Somewhere around fifty kids tried out, I was the only one they cut. They wouldn’t even let me be Watergirl #2. The school counselor called me into her office everyday for a month to talk about my feelings, so I could tell her if I was disappointed, rejected, bitter, cynical. To be honest, I was none of those things, I was relieved.

I didn’t really want to play volleyball, volleyball terrifies me to this day. I can totally see why they cut me from the team, why I was the only one who got cut from the team. I was also the only one who ran screaming from the ball every time it got within a five-foot radius of me.
Still though, it doesn’t make any damn sense why they would cut just one kid and not even allow me the self-confidence boosting sense of joiner-inner that serving water and clean towels to my forty-eight other teammates would have brought me. I know it had to have been a point of discussion among the coach and teachers, how else did I get on the school counselor’s radar? Why were my teachers so darn nice to me for the rest of the year? Why? I’ll never know.

What I do know is that scene will never make it into a book. Too bad really, guess I’ll have to go make something up.

I’m confused by the term ‘mommyblogger’. Mostly, because I’ve been called one lately, by more than a few people. By the very most raw definition, I suppose it’s fitting – I am a Momma, and proud of it. However, if you read back through my archives, I rarely blog about anything to do with my genius son, who at a mere two years old can say his alphabet (most of the time) and count to ten, sometimes eleven. Not to mention the fact that he can spot a kitty at a hundred yards and frequently freaks out passing strangers by shouting “Hello! Howru?” He’s a genius, cute too, but that’s not my point.

I think in order to be a true mommyblogger, you have actually blog about your child with some passing frequency, and I also think there must be some kind of prerequisite that you offer parenting advice and/or crafty tips. I do none of these things. I suck at crafts; my parenting advice is limited to a shrug of the shoulders and a profound ‘Huh, no idea, good luck with that.’

I suppose I could start offering up some of the advice that I get from family and friends….that’ll land me in social services land pretty quick. For the record, I never take this advice – it’s just offered to me on a regular basis by my outstandingly Scottish mother and neighbors. I’m actually amazed that any Scottish children live to adulthood.

For example, my son, Mr. Adorablepants, is doing this really cute thing where he smacks and headbutts us. Precious right? Sometimes it’s because he’s frustrated that I want to comb his hair, sometimes it’s because I am being totally unfair and making him put on shoes, sometimes I think he’s just channeling his own internal Tyler Durden. So I asked my Scottish neighbor, she’s in her sixties, has kids and grandkids, reminds me of my mom in many, many ways.

Her advice? Bite him. Yes, you heard me right, bite him. As I tried to scrape my jaw off the sidewalk, she told me this fascinating anecdote about raising her kids and how when they’d hit or kick, she’d just reach over and give them a little nip on the arm, like a dog. They’ll stop right away, she said, laughing and cooing at Adorablepants who was staring at her in horror.

In the early months when Mr. Adorablepants was colicky and attempting to set the world record for straight hours of screaming, I called my mother to see what I should do. Her advice? Rum. Yes, she advised rum. A little sip of rum will quiet the baby right down. I shouldn’t knock it, not like I haven’t heard the drunken baby solution before – the advice is the same the world over, it just seems to depend on your geographical location as to what flavor of alcohol. My husband’s Russian/Jewish family advised Vodka for the same purpose. I’m not sure where my mom got Rum; it doesn’t seem like a particularly Scottish brew….

Not the actual Adorablepants - he's more of a Guiness kind of guy

The Scottish seem to have a more free-range approach to child raising. It makes sense when I think of my childhood. I grew up in the mountains, and my sister and I would literally run in the woods from sun up till it was cold and dark outside. The other day Mr. Adorablepants made a beeline down our driveway and was headed straight for the middle of the street where a giant, filthy mud puddle was beckoning him. I yanked him back to safety before he made the asphalt. My Scottish neighbor shook her head at me in a way that said ‘oh you poor dumb girl’ and said, “You young women are so over worried, how’s he ever going to learn?” Learn what? What it’s like to get hit by a car? Or what it feels like to contract malaria from puddle water?

In terms of crafts I fail at mommyblogging as well. For Christmas this year I decided that because we are chronically cash-strapped, that Mr. Adorablepants and myself were going to make the presents for his grandparents. Mr. Adorablepants happens to be a champion finger painter; he’s like Jackson Pollack with a dash of Picasso with just a taste of Magritte – a genius. Anyhow, I decided that Adorablepants would paint the canvases and I would make frames for them and tada! Presents.

Disclaimer: Not the actual Adorablepants, all stunts were perfomed by a stand-in

Personally, I thought they turned out pretty darn all right. Downright okay. The reviews I got from the grandparents were this: “It was so creative, really, unlike anything else we’ve ever seen….” In my experience describing something as ‘creative’ is a euphemism for ‘ugly and weird’.

So there ya go folks, this is my one and only mommyblog. No product endorsements included and no usable advice either – please, for the love of all things holy, don’t use the Scottish parenting advice.

But here’s a few mommyblogs I would recommend:

http://sarcasticmom.com/

http://undomesticdiva.typepad.com/

www.redbrownblondeandbald.com

So read away, and stay away from the Rum.