eleven.

Monday, March 28th, 2005
Time: 8:45 pm.

horizontal rain won.



Saturday, March 26th, 2005
Subject: e-mail.
Time: 5:36 pm.

yo ms d whats good its ralphy i was just wondering if u have n e work i can do to atleast pass your class with a 65 if you do holla at me ight



Friday, March 4th, 2005
Time: 7:40 pm.

Cold was the night, hard was the ground
They found her in a small grove of trees
Lonesome was the place where Georgia was found
She's too young to be out
On the street.

Why wasn't God watching?
Why wasn't God listening?
Why wasn't God there for
Georgia Lee?

Ida said she couldn't keep Georgia
From dropping out of school
I was doing the best that I could
But she kept runnin away from this world
These children are so hard to raise good

Why wasn't God watching?
Why wasn't God listening?
Why wasn't God there for
Georgia Lee?

Close your eyes and count to ten
I will got and hid but then
Be sure to find me. I want you to find me
And we'll play all over
We will play all over again

There's a toad in the witch grass
There's a crow in the corn
Wild flowers on a cross by the road
And somewhere a baby is crying
For her mom
As the hills turn from green back
To gold

Why wasn't God watching?
Why wasn't God listening?
Why wasn't God there for
Georgia Lee?



Saturday, February 26th, 2005
Time: 10:44 am.

vacation is almost over. school is almost over. less than four months.

please recommend any cheap vacationing spots for two, for the summer months.



Wednesday, February 16th, 2005
Time: 7:32 pm.

NEW YORK—Teach For America, a national program that recruits recent college graduates to teach in low-income rural and urban communities, has devoured another ethnic-studies major, 24-year-old Andy Cuellen reported Tuesday.

"Look, the world is a miserable place," said Cuellen, a Dartmouth graduate who quit the TFA program Monday morning. "All people—even children—are just nasty animals trying to secure their share of the food supply. I don't care how poor or how rich you are, that's just a fact. I'm sorry, but I have better things to do than zoo-keep for peanuts."

Just one of the 12,000 young people TFA has burned through since 1990, Cuellen was given five weeks of training the summer before he took over a classroom at P.S. 83 in the South Bronx last September.

"I walked into that school actually thinking I could make a difference," said Cuellen, who taught an overflowing class of disadvantaged 8-year-olds. "It was trial by fire. But after five months spent in a stuffy, dark room where the chalkboard fell off the wall every two days, corralling screaming kids into broken desks, I'm burnt to a crisp."

Cuellen said his TFA experience "taught him a lot about hopelessness."

"The cities are fucked. The suburbs are fucked. The whole country is fucked," Cuellen said. "And there's not a goddamned thing you or anyone can do about it. Anyone who says otherwise is selling something. Or trying to get you to teach kids math."

According to Dartmouth literature, as a member of the ethnic-studies department, Cuellen learned "to empower students of color to move beyond being objects of study toward being subjects of their own social realities, with voices of their own."

Teach For America executive director Theo Anderson called ethnic-studies departments "a prime source of fodder."

"Oh, I'd say we burn through a hundred or so ethnic-studies majors each year," said Anderson, pointing to a series of charts showing the college-major breakdown of TFA corps members. "They tend to last a little longer than women's studies majors and art-therapy students, but Cuellen got mashed to a pulp pretty quickly. It usually takes ethnic-studies majors another year to realize that they're wasting their precious youth on a Sisyphean endeavor."

Continued Anderson: "Of course, we don't worry about it too much. Every year, there's a fresh crop to throw in the grinder. As we speak, scores of apple-cheeked students are hearing about TFA for the first time."

According to Anderson, a small portion of these students will lose interest after hearing horror stories from program alumni.

"But the majority of them will march on like cattle to the slaughter, thinking that pure determination and hope can change young lives," Anderson said. "I can hear their footsteps now, marching toward our offices like lemmings to a cliff. And believe me, we're ready for 'em."

Cuellen said he applied to TFA in search of a "character-building experience."

"I knew that teaching in a severely under-funded inner-city school would be challenging, but I wanted to get out into the real world," Cuellen said. "Well, breaking up fistfights between 8-year-olds all day long, I got a real ugly view of reality. Do you want to know reality? Look at a dog lying dead in the gutter. That's reality."

Although Cuellen quit the program early, his mother said he was with TFA long enough for it "to crack open his bones and suck out the marrow inside."

"Andy is a ghost," Beverly Cuellen said. "Those [TFA] people beat the idealism out of him, then they stomped on him while he lay there gasping for air."

TFA regional coordinator Sandra Richman said it is common to blame the TFA employees for the organization's high plow-through rate.

"Should I have said something to wake those kids up sooner?" Richman said, crushing out her seventh cigarette. "Probably. But listen, no one can tell you that you can't make a difference. It's something you have to figure out for yourself."

"You can only do so much," Richman added. "After a couple years of trying to teach our applicants about how difficult and depressing their lives will inevitably be—no matter what they choose to do for money—I just got burnt out. In the end, you've gotta resign yourself to failure and move on with your life."



Saturday, February 12th, 2005
Subject: is wangster a word?
Time: 10:24 pm.

wow. so i was hired and trained to teach this ninth grade ramp-up to literacy class, which is prescribed to almost every junior high school and high school in new york city. if you have not a clue as to what it is, it is a course designed to "ramp-up" students to higher reading levels. if little jorge joins the ninth grade community with a fourth-grade reading level, my job is to get him to a higher reading level (not necessarily that of a ninth grade reading level). our mantra is the seven habits of the proficient reader: activating schema (text-to-self, text-to-text, text-to-word); creating images/visualizing; asking questions; making inferences; making predictions; monitoring for meaning (using fix-up strategies); and summarizing, synthesizing, and retelling.

with this mantra, i am to read-aloud, yes, read-aloud to my youngsters as they follow along with their own copy of whatever text i push on them.

so.

i've ditched the program for a bit to teach my little flowers poetry and the fundaments of writing a research paper.

i've created a "poem a day" project for my little roses, and boy o'fucking boy do i have some neat poems to share with you in the days to come! here is a little sample:

(background info: theme, individuality (me, myself and i). purpose, to inform. audience, young adults. mood, serious. form, eight lines with some sort of rhyming pattern)

i like math class
alot of girls got fat ass
i am the master
anything he write i do it faster
i sometime get in trouble
but i always have a double.



Monday, January 31st, 2005
Subject: this just in.
Time: 10:04 pm.

i hate english teachers.



Saturday, January 22nd, 2005
Subject: HA!
Time: 10:41 am.

[insert picture of young ashley judd]
[insert picture of young erica dow's acting i.d. card]



Friday, January 21st, 2005
Subject: i just want to say.
Time: 6:43 pm.

i'm one lucky gal.



Saturday, January 8th, 2005
Time: 6:23 pm.

i felt better! i went back to teaching. but now, i feel shitty again. i cannot shake the heats. i'll blame the kids.

adam and i forfeited a trip to peekskill because of the weather. so today was full of naps and mopping. as he tinkers around on his computer, burning away copies of cds, i am getting my sunday work load in now.

guh ( i'm pretty backed up in grading.

save me.



Wednesday, January 5th, 2005
Subject: delirious.
Time: 2:33 pm.

is it the flu that makes me feel this way? or all the medicine.



Wednesday, November 17th, 2004
Subject: Patience, and lack thereof.
Time: 7:00 pm.

That is my summation. I feel like my patience is waning because it is perpetually tested every week, day, hour, minute, and second. Where once I found myself pliable I now find myself stiff, somewhat hardened to the environment around me. Sometimes I can hear my own bones creak and my hair shooting at the root freezing to white.

Today I asked a fellow art academy teacher this:

“Do they get better?”

He replied as follows:

“No…”

Followed by the longest, most dramatic caesura I have ever encountered, and then:

“…but you will.”

Gah! That’s not what I wanted to hear. I wanted to hear that my students would eventually yield, that they would lie down and play dead at the demands of their teacher. What the hell is this anarchy?

Is anarchy so pure that those that possess the quality therein don’t even understand the meaning and concept and history? What the hell do they need to rebel against? All I’ve shown them has been tough-love, tolerance, and guidance. And what do they do? They make me feel sad, too often, at the end of the day.

Will it, if not them or I, get better?
_________________________________

I will refer, again, to the time when a colleague told me, flatly, to “Just stop caring.” And later in the day hearing a similar resonance of fucking idiocy from another peer: “Teachers aren’t going to change the world.”

Fuck you. Fuck the both of you. Fuck your dim-witted lack of ideals. Why the fuck are you teaching? Leave the miserable to wrestle with the ethic and morale of teaching and get a fucking telemarketing job if you don’t care. Push papers across desks if you don’t want to perpetuate change in the world of [academic] complacency.
_____________

If this is the disillusionment phase, I have hit it. And hit it hard. I think some good teas and a nice Thanksgiving break will pull me out of this sluggish lull of the winter blues and the poisonous waters of my buckled patience.



Monday, November 15th, 2004
Time: 5:33 pm.

in my twenty five years i have never experienced a day like sunday. i mean it when i say it was the best birthday that i've ever had. sugar-free chocolate cheesecake with sugar free whipped cream. beer and wings at croxley ales. photobooth pictures at seven b. ballooned kitchen floor. shiny birthday banner. they say it's your birthday. on repeat. unicorn plates, napkins, cups, and mostly importantly, hats. pin the tail on the donkey. kerplunk.

sound special? it was. and so is he.



Sunday, November 14th, 2004
Subject: merry christmas!
Time: 9:12 am.

[insert broken image of something i don't remember]



Saturday, November 13th, 2004
Subject: also. this is fucking amazing. hello wallpaper.
Time: 12:27 pm.

[insert awesome perry bible comic indicating unicorn power]



Time: 11:33 am.

yesterday was the sort of day that made me question just about everything in my life.

i stepped away from it all with a cigarette in the rain.

why does this kid* make me angry? how does a child make me angry?
______________

this always makes me feel better:


you're the pincard, you're
the lifeguard, you're the
information guy, but things
look much bigger on the
knees, on your knees.
miss the signal, miss the
signpost, lose the access to
it all. and all of a sudden
you are one with the freaks.



Tuesday, November 9th, 2004
Time: 6:29 am.

chan marshall, you make me want to die.



Sunday, November 7th, 2004
Subject: owned.
Time: 9:40 am.

[insert image of lacoste dunk type sneakers called turbo]

they are a smidgen too big. but my feet are happy. my wallet on the other hand...



Saturday, November 6th, 2004
Subject: a list. edited. and updated.
Time: 10:19 am.

hi. built by wendy.
old school (cheaper) ipod.
cheap ass digital camera.
pedicure.
paul brown nike air trainer ones, size seven.
target gift certificate.
adopted boxer.
hi black and gum nike air force ones, size six and a half or seven.
built by wendy vintage demin jeans, wrangler edition, size twenty seven or twenty eight.
underwear, size five, small, or extra small.
socks, with strips. three, not two.
mittens with the finger flap.
arm length mittens.
unicorn earrings.
bird wall decals.
unicorn bag.
cheap ass all-in-one printer.
nike lucky sevens. size seven.
simply basic lotion from wal-mart.
peanut butter and company peanut butter.
yankee candle. storm watch.
monday.



Wednesday, November 3rd, 2004
Subject: Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher...
Time: 7:27 pm.

ALL you are doing and saying is to America dangled mirages,
You have not learn’d of Nature—of the politics of Nature, you have not learn’d the great amplitude, rectitude, impartiality;
You have not seen that only such as they are for These States,
And that what is less than they, must sooner or later lift off from These States.
__________________________________________

WHY reclining, interrogating? Why myself and all drowsing?
What deepening twilight! scum floating atop of the waters!
Who are they, as bats and night-dogs, askant in the Capitol?
What a filthy Presidentiad! (O south, your torrid suns! O north, your arctic freezings!)
Are those really Congressmen? are those the great Judges? is that the President?
Then I will sleep awhile yet—for I see that These States sleep, for reasons;
(With gathering murk—with muttering thunder and lambent shoots, we all duly awake,
South, north, east, west, inland and seaboard, we will surely awake.)