Omorka's Lair

Their names are Billy Lucas and Tyler Clementi, and they could have been my students.

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We all froze for a moment on Tuesday, me and the other teachers at the school. The shooting at UT ended up being one person's tragedy, but we didn't know that at the time, and any one of us has dozens of former students at the main campus - especially the honors teachers. And there's that moment when you think, are my kids okay?

Because that's what they are - our kids. Not "former students," not "alumni"; they're our kids, the ones we worked with and struggled with, maybe fought with, maybe triumphed with.

None of mine died, and the one that did doesn't seem to have left much evidence of why he thought taking a Kalashnikov to a college library was the best response to the world he lived in.

Other kids died this week for whom we know why.

Their names are Billy Lucas and Tyler Clementi, and they could have been my students.

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I lost a kid my first year teaching ever. It was effectively a suicide - he stepped out of the back of a moving bus - although it's never been clear if he intended to die, or if he just didn't understand physics, didn't realize it would be fatal. Ultimately, it didn't matter. It left us all in shock, especially his friends, of course, but the whole school. He wasn't bullied any more than normal, didn't seem to be under any particular pressures. We never knew why.

He was a year older than Billy Lucas.

The school being blind to the bullying Lucas was suffering - yeah, I believe it. Fundie teachers somethimes turn a blind eye to this sort of thing, and those of us who do intervene can't always be there. Worse, before it gets physical, sometimes we only see a tiny slice of what's going on - not enough to stop it, barely enough to offer the kid a safe space. This does not always help, either, since they eventually have to leave. And the kids themselves sometimes beg us not to do anything - they don't want their parents to know; taking refuge with us makes the other kids act that much worse when we're not around, and "teacher's pet" gets added to "fag" or "dyke".

When I was teaching Geometry those first two years, how many kids like him drifted through my class and never showed anything? He could have been one of mine.

---

The bullying doesn't always happen in school. There's not much a teacher can do to stop bullying by text, by e-mail, on Facebook.

Tyler Clementi got it via Twitter, via webcam. Expectations of privacy are different for Millennials than they are for 13ers, but they'd still assume that a closed door was a reasonable indication that This Is Private. Why his roommate thought what he was doing was okay, I don't pretend to understand.

Clementi was a freshman in college. I teach seniors; because of what I teach, I teach an unusually large proportion of band geeks, orchestra nerds, and theatre geeks. A violinist for theatrical productions? He could have been one of mine, one of the ones I teared up for as he crossed the stage in May.

Another one of him could be sitting in my class right now.

---

At least someone is trying to use the Internet for good. It's only YouTube, but - they need to know. They need to know that it gets better, that the Hollywood ending of the dead gay isn't what lurks in their future. They need to know it gets better.

I try to tell them. It would be easier if I could be out to them, if it wasn't mildly freaking me out to make a work-related post public, if it didn't possibly mean my job. But - it gets better, kids. It does. We love you. Hang on.

So my department head asked if I'd be interested in piloting the new math course next year.

And being a fool, instead of saying "No, I think I have about all I can handle on my plate right now," I said "What new math course?" Which is not quite the same as saying "Sure, hit me," but the distinction is minimal. (The DoI called me a "pitcher-in" earlier this week, and I'm afraid to say he's got me there.)

The answer is this new math course. Advanced Mathematical Decision Making, developed by the UT Dana Center (and other partners, but this is mostly the Dana Center's baby, to be proposed to the Texas Legislature as a full mathematics course - that first link is essentially the proposed TEKS (that's Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, the state curriculum, for those of you who are out-of-state or who haven't set foot in a school since the '90s or before).

If they actually teach it to the intent outlined here, this is a Good Thing. It means that kids who are not necessarily ready won't be funneled into Precal just because they need a fourth math course to graduate and weren't scheduled into Math Models; one of the things that's been freaking us out this year is that in two years we're going to have an incredible influx of kids into Precal whose math backgrounds won't be any better than the half of the senior class that stopped after Algebra II this year and will need to pass it to graduate. I refuse to water down Precal. It also means we'll finally have a course in the high school curriculum other than AP Stats that does probability and statistics! I have been arguing that, for just basic media literacy, the vast majority of our kids need prob & stats much, much more than they need to know how to find the zeroes of a polynomial function.

Which brings me to why the department head asked me. I have pointed out before that I teach The Fourth Course. Among other things, this means that I can do mathematical modeling and prob & stats. While the stuff isn't hard, and anyone on the math faculty should be able to do it, I'm the only one who has anywhere-near-current experience, due to having taught AP Stats. And I like teaching seniors.

The problem is I'd have to go up to the Dana Center several times over the course of the year - up to 6 different times - and that introduces travel issues and, more importantly, the IB Math Studies kids potentially missing me for 6 days of class. I don't think I can do that. If those days are negotiable, or can be done on Saturdays, then it's all good, but I can't jack the IBMS kids for six days of class and still feel like they'll be really ready for the exam.

So - any thoughts? Should I do it? Do I have the right to bitch if I don't, and someone else does it poorly?

I have three picture-postcards.

I need to write three different people.

I'm not sure if I should deal the cards out randomly, or if I should try to match the pictures to the recipients, or if the fact that I'm thinking about this is itself a sign that I'm taking this too seriously.

--

I need to re-watch David Tennant's performance in Potter Movie IV. (Please don't ask why. It involves an accident with a magic wand, a time machine, and a cat macro.)

I have absolutely no desire whatever to watch most of that film again. I was hoping that one of the Tennant-luv sites would have a list of what chapters on the DVD he appears in, but I am so far not having any luck.

--

Received my two pendants from chimera_fancies today. They're gorgeous! Now I need to think of an appropriate way to display them. One will be easy - it wants copper and chunky beads in brown and green. The other is being coy, either because it wants something more subtle than I'm coming up with or because it can't make up its mind between a nice slim leather cord with little adornment or something tasteful in silver and peridot.

There is something immensely thrilling about the idea of jewelry whose focal point is text . . . I feel a little bad adding anything to the pendants at all, as they're just gorgeous as they are, but I need to string them on something more substantial than the ribbon they come with, and while I'm doing that I might as well add my own setting for the pendant. They're already one-of-a-kind; might as well treat them like proper treasures.

There's a small cluster of kids who sit in the breezeway that connects the West building (where the floater's office is) to the North building (where most of my B-day classrooms, and, more importantly, the elevator are) every morning. I have accidentally hit them with my little rolling cart a couple of times. I'm detouring around a girl sitting right in the path from one door to the other when I hear "No, dude, they're going to lock Kyo up on confinement when he graduates."

I look to my left, where a young man is holding a copy of Furuba #8 (I think; It was hard to read the number with his hand in the way, and I could only see the spine), and, as I'm hauling the door open, say, "no, I don't think so."

The girl sitting on the ground rolls her eyes and huffs, "Miss, it's only a book." I glance in her direction and respond "I know, hon." Then I return to the guy with the manga and follow up with "I think Tohru will figure out how to fix it, don't you?"

His first expression communicates something along the lines of "I cannot believe those words just came out of this woman's mouth." Then he breaks into a huge grin. As I pull my cart through the door, the girl on the floor shouts "Holy crap! You read this stuff?" While I'm tempted to respond "well, yes, but I prefer the anime," instead I flash her the peace-sign-as-OK-marker, smile, and haul my roller cart on down the hallway.

Okay, so the workshop I went to today was called "Motivating Students Who Don't Care." That, by the way, is one of the two Big Problems of public education in a district like mine. If we can get the students to care about their own achievement, even somewhat, the vast majority of our full-time problems evaporate and we can worry about other important issues like language issues, gifted education, and the AP program. (The other Big Problem is the standardized testing system and the vast and stinking accumulation of cruft that comes with it. The two are complexly interrelated.)

The workshop, as previously mentioned, sucked. ( Continued Behind the Cut )

"Maybe one last time is all we need . . ."

It's Spring Breeeeeeeaaaaaaak . . . .

This doesn't thrill me nearly as much as it should.

Much to say. Far too incoherent to say it. Wish I had more than one bottle of decent mead - I'd be tempted to open one. A glass or two would be a welcome muscle relaxant.

"How you gonna ever find your place, running at an artificial pace . . ."

So damn proud of these kids. One more quarter, and then half of them are gone, maybe forever.

"So what the Hell now, we've already been forever damned!"

Yeah. I never really did believe in salvation anyway. Only the Wheel, and its Judgment, and then the leap back into the World.

I SLEEP NOW.

The number of stuffed animals at school this year was up by about 150%, but the number of big ugly red mylar balloons was down by about a quarter of two years' ago's total (last year V-Day was on a weekend, so it can't really be directly compared).

I got chocolate from three students and RR.

Spouse brought me roses when he picked me up. :) I didn't get him anything special - now I feel guilty.

We went to our special-occasion semi-cheap Italian place. It was good - better than last time. And the waitstaff has gotten back to its usual level of cuteness, too.

I really am not much for V-Day - it's a saint's day, after all, and I have Imbolc and the Spouse's and my cryptoversarry bracketing it, and those are both far more meaningful to me. But the kids are rabidly cute, and it's nice to have a day to celebrate sexual attraction, for once (instead of condemning it or trying to sell stuff with it).

--

The restaurant was full of red balloons. This, plus Flyboy's having a minor freakout on Friday about the North Korea situation and my totally realizing how new this was for him, has led me to my newest playlist, to be entitled "In the Shadow of the Bomb." I have a half-dozen songs in mind (leadoff is "99 Luftballons," of course; penultimate is "1999," and the anchor will be "End of the World as We Know It") - any suggestions?

. . . Well, not really tinctures. Oils. But it alliterated.

Went to the Twain tournament today. We were supposed to take 30 students plus an alternate. 5 (including the alternate) flaked on me, although three of them were at least together enough to let me know ahead of time. This morning, I only had 23 on the bus. Normally, this would mostly be irritating, but the missing ones were our Salutatorian-To-Be (who is also my Mu Alpha Theta President this year), China Doll, and Hyper. The students flipped out their cell phones and began punching numbers. ( Remainder of the day behind the cut )

( Puttering in perfumery )

So that week was . . . not entirely unlike having to run a marathon while up to one's ankles in blackstrap molasses. Exhausting, frustrating, sticky, and vaguely unpleasant-smelling, but at least it was different.

( The week that was behind the cut )

I have a staff development in freaking Rosenberg tomorrow. Why are the G/T Co-Op sessions never in HISD?

So, today:

1) Inadvertently said something that may have semi-outed me to Debate, Choir, and Drama in 3rd period (D'oh!). I think Debate caught it and didn't care. The other two may have caught it or not. In any case, none of them reacted badly. Choir seems like the type to write it off as a joke, anyway.

2) Continued having an amusingly bizarre conversation in Stats with one of the Hastings kids, who is a freaking goofball in a mostly-good way. Let him be known herefore as "Random." Random is perhaps best described as a Weirdness Magnet in the GURPS sense - not only does he say semi-irrelevant things on a regular basis, but odd things seem to happen around/to him. He has determined that I am one of those odd things . . .

3) A different kid in the same Stats class - henceforth "Half-Strike" - found out last class that I'm an anime fan, and asked me if I'd seen That Ninja Show Everyone Keeps Going On About. I told him that I liked my anime licensed, TYVM. Today, he asked me (in an exaggeratedly causal way, which makes me suspect he actually does care what I think) if I really thought stealing unreleased anime was wrong. I told him "for sufficiently broad values of 'wrong,' yes." He then said, in a slightly disappointed tone, "So if I brought you a CD with the first few episodes of "Full Metal Alchemist," you wouldn't watch it?" We then had a little talk about why fansubs are not always better than licensed properties; I didn't have the heart to tell him that if I hadn't taken it from either Hyper or memeslayer, I surely wasn't going to take it from him.

4) I discovered that one of my kids in my 5A class had been assuming I was a lesbian, mostly because I insist on referring to the Spouse as "the Spouse." When I mentioned "my husband" in a response to a question someone else had asked, he did a double-take.

5) I think things are well and firmly patched up with Debate. He's come by my room several times as the forensic society has been putting together their middle-school tournament for this weekend. While he's had official stuff to do, it also seemed like he was sticking his head in to say hi; certainly I can't imagine him being this casual and talkative if he were still pissed off.

Bending the dominant paradigm to my Will, one set of perceptions at a time . . . :)