Monthly Archives: April 2006

This past Thursday in my Creative Writing class, we listened to a segment from NPR on Sufjan Stevens. For those who don’t know, Sufjan Stevens is a musician whose recent album, Illinois, was the most critically-acclaimed of 2005. It’s hard to describe the music. I guess it’s folky rock, but it’s full of varied instrumentation and choir singing. when I first heard his music months ago, it just struck me as strange. But he came highly recommended by my friend John, who’s my musical soul mate, so I got the Illinois album and it grew on me. I now think Sufjan Stevens is a genius, but I haven’t fully articulated why.

His songs have long titles, like “The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades Is Out to Get Us!” which hint at an ironic or kitschy quality, but the music is sincere. His voice is intimate; it sounds like he’s trying not to disturb someone in the next room — perhaps some sleeping children or an ailing grandmother. And in his lyrics, he frequently repeats lines, like “I made a lot of mistakes/I made a lot of mistakes,” which drive home the sincerity.

He often throw in some archaic language, which should end up having a laughable effect on the poetry — misplaced hallelujahs and grandiose Os initiating lines. But somehow the effect isn’t mockery, satire, or mockable material for satire; instead, it’s very sincere. In the afore-mentioned “Predatory Wasp of the Palisades,” whose subject is boyhood friendship, there are a pair of lines that illustrate this incongruous sincerity. The first line of the pair states, “O, how I meant to tease him.” But then just as you’re about to laugh at the mismatch between the “O, how,” and the teasing, the next line makes you think that maybe the emotions here are genuine: “O, how I meant no harm.” Isn’t that accurate to child intentions? You simultaneously meant to tease and meant no harm.

Anyhow, I’m getting carried away. Despite my admiration for Sufjan Stevens, my lesson plan on Thursday really had little to do with him. The NPR segment in question was a piece on Brinkley, Arkansas. Apparently, Sufjan Stevens has announced the intention to create an album for each state. He’s already got Michigan (his home state) and Illinois (where he’s never lived). So some radio producer put together some interviews of folks in Brinkley, Arkansas and asked Sufjan to write a song. And I decided I’d ask my students to do the same: listen to the interviews and write a story, poem, or essay inspired by the interviews.

You can listen to the segment here. It’s about the town, which has recently undergone a transformation with the discovery of an ivory-billed woodpecker, previously thought extinct. The bird is known as the “lord god bird,” or the “great god bird.”

As we listened in class, we took notes. Then we took about ten minutes to jot down ideas. Here’s what I wrote:

“The first time hearing this, I didn’t hear that the sewing machine company Singer had come to Louisiana and had had such an impact on the region. You gotta wonder if industry — “what makes America great” — caused the initial extinction of the bird, and no that he’s back, they’re making an industry out of him. But the bird is deified because he can be exploited, not because anyone respects him. In fact, one guy says he’s a little ticked off at first; another guy calls it the yellow-billed woodpecker.

“We’re fickle with our gods. We worship whatever will get us a better life. Maybe I could have a phone conversation with a girl who has graduated and left town (one man said that graduation is a sad event because young people leave –they want to escape), and she calls home but gets a wrong number (at one point, an interviewee said that in this town, you can call a wrong number and talk for five minutes).”

Now, the trick is to see if I can stay inspired by this premise and write something from it. I’m assigning myself the same exercise.

This past week was like, Boom! Summer. Temps on Friday got into the 80s. If it doesn’t get cold again, the next two months of school are going to be miserable because a) my classroom is about 10 degrees warmer than the outside temperature, making even the 70s too hot, and b) students have a hard time staying focused when it’s nice outside. All week, I heard, “Can we have class outside?” On Monday, I relented and took my creative writing class out, since it didn’t disrupt the day’s plan to respond to various prompts in journals. Unfortunately, twenty minutes after settling in at a nice location, some doofus started yelling out the 3rd-floor window, “Alex Murphy is gay!” Alex is in my class, though that’s not his real name, and to his credit, he didn’t respond, but 3rd-floor dufus kept it up, yelling out his very witty “Alex Murphy is gay!” revelation about ten more times, so we left and moved to a different location.

I think I’ve decided on going part time, though now rumor has it that we’re losing a lot of teacher allocation in the English department next year, so class size is going to go way up. If my request gets granted, I wonder if that allocation will just be lost, further burdening the rest of the English department. If so, I’m tempted to resign so the have to replace a full 100% teacher rather than lose 30% of one.

If these education budget cuts continue, the coming years will be even worse: more teachers will be “surplussed,” as they say, pushing class sizes above 30 and thereby affecting the quality of instruction because individual teachers will have to deal with more behavior issues (which increase with class size), and individual attention will become more difficult. And since grading essays takes about 15 minutes per essay (at least), an addition of 7 students per class will up the grading time by hours per week! I’m pissed.

On Thursday night, there was a wonderful electrical storm off in the distance in the western sky, clearly visible through our open bedroom window. Eileen and I had just gone to bed and we were watching the show when it started to hail. I put on my glasses and approached the window to get a closer look. Golf-ball-sized hail was thumping onto the grass and I said something like “Holy Cow” upon seeing the things, which provoked Eileen to sit up and look out the window too. “Oh my God!” she said. “They’re the size of tennis balls.”

“Uh, no,” I replied. “I think you’re looking at tennis balls,” pointing out that with her glasses on, she might notice that our dog’s outdoor stash of numerous fetch toys was a different thing altogether.

She put on her glasses and we had a good laugh over that one. If only it were so easy, when people don’t see the world like you do, to just say, “put your glasses on.”

I’m coming to the realization that the process of writing may currently be more important than what I actually write down here. Most of my recent ruminations have been about my teaching career and whether or not it’s something I’ll continue. I’ve put lots of thought into it and I’ve even written about it, but because it’s not one of those this-is-an-amusing-thing-that-happened-to-me-today-type things, I haven’t posted here. But such a pattern has resulted in a disappointing two-posts-per-month batting average recently. Even Brian’s beating me.

So I’m going to try to start posting whatever tidbits I can, even if they appear a little mundane at first.

I’m in the midst of deciding whether I’m going to request a part-time teaching schedule for next year or a no-time schedule. No-time would allow me to say “I’m between jobs” at parties, which would be funny. But it would also make Treasurer Storm (aka, my wife) a little grumpy.

Part time would allow me to have a little more time to try to write and submit some manuscripts or to possibly start exploring some real grad school options more seriously. It would also keep me from burning out entirely, which is what I’m headed toward. I like being immersed in intellectual pursuits; it’s inspiring to me. What’s not inspiring are the infrequent parent complaints I get, the equally infrequent discipline problems I have, and the occasionally oppressive load of papers to grade. And I get pissed off at how absurd it is that as an English teacher, I have no time to write or read on my own.

Part time would also earn me some money and benefits, so there’s that.

Anyhow, the post below is a dialogue I had with myself spurred by reading The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. The book chronicles the clash between Western medecine and Hmong cultural views. It does a pretty good job of illuminating how both sides think they’re right. At points in the book, I found myself siding with the doctors, whose expertise was being completely ignored/brushed aside (something which happens to teachers all the time). But at other times, the doctors were so ethnocentric it was disgusting. And I’ve seen first-hand how much guesswork, incompetence, and error-making goes on in American hospitals. The dialogue was my way of mulling over the balance between ethnocentrism and cultural relativity.