Stockhom Syndrome and the ACT Prep Intensive

My class takes the ACT today and I feel like the Stockholm Syndrome is reaching critical; I’ll miss them, but I’m glad the cops are coming to free us all from each other. I have one student who has been handing in incomplete practice exams all through the class. If she would a) stop writing the perfect seven sentence intro and b) start with and stick to an outline she’d be through much more quickly and efficiently. There are another couple of students who have such amazing words and language problems that correcting them all puts more of my writing on the page than theirs. I want to use the fact that they originally spoke languages other than English as an excuse, but they are actually caught at a more profound level since they both speak English better than they write it. I’m not sure what it is about writing that makes them “write” (scrawl, scribble, or “tag”) convoluted words that they would never utter. There are, of course, the students whom I can’t imagine why they didn’t pass the damn test. I feel a special twinge of sadness for them because had they learned the tricks of the ACT they’d have passed easily, but they probably thought about the question outside of the (training wheel) ACT paradigm and were punished for writing a thoughtful and balanced essay. There we are, all locked in the vault together. But just for today. Just for one more day.

Update and a Quiz

1/26/2008 6:23 AM (sorry, this is a long one)

Yesterday, Friday the 25^th of January, 2008, Lennox came home with a flier about the upcoming 100^th day of school (2/7/8). She is encouraged to bring 100 objects: “Please help your child to choose 1 item and count 100 pieces of that item.” So last night Lennox was counting out 100 pennies from the penny jar and insisting on a “bigger, the biggest ziplock bag, because there are 100 I need to fit in here,” with characteristic eye-rolling, intensity and sarcasm. (The bag she wanted and got is big enough to fit her head in and use as a space helmet.)

I wish that 100 pennies still meant as much to me as they do to Lennox. I fear that Even Mason and Chandler have relegated the copper penny to the economic trash-heap, not worth bending over for unless they are heads’ up. Sigh, I remember when you could get three peach pits for a penny from the (unsanitary) jar on the counter of the corner store kitty corner from the Rice school on Appleton and Dartmouth Streets. A nickel would sugar up all of your friends for a game of baseball or ring-alevio (all-ee-all-ee-in-come-free). They have new and wondrous things in their childhoods, but my kids, trapped in this new city and new apartment, who haven’t discovered their peers and places, lack the independence that we had in 19-and-sixtey-nine. (God, I sound like Abraham Simpson!)

(MMMM-excellent coffee this morning)

Chandler is just loving her school. Everyday she comes home with another anecdote –that can’t wait- about the antic in her classroom. I wish that I had paid closer attention so that I could tell you of the antics of Abla, Chewmaka, Andrew, and Aniqa (accuracy). Mr. Binyaris had them write a poem in Math Class (so the “no-child” tests must be safely in the rear-view and they must be back to their usual talented and gifted antics). Rarely does Chandler come home when she is not excited about the day’s goings-ons, whether it is her latest 90-something exam, some difficult (and interesting) word problem, or some logical ditty that a teacher tossed to the class at the end of the day to keep them busy. So when I meet her, with her 30 pound back-pack (and I don’t think I am exadurating) I take the bag from her shoulders and the stories from her day and walk home in paternal bliss.

Mason is, I think, bored to tears by PS150. He listens to Chandler’s after-school update with seeming blasé-ness, but can always recount the characteristics of the players in her stories if asked. He can often answer the brain teasers that Cha-Cha has brought home, and he usually responds with stories of the incompetence and knuckle-headed-ness of his classmates. He is so ready for a school that challenges him that I can see it like an aura (or the curly half-fro he declines to cut that shoots tendrils towards heaven like a vine thirsting for knowledge).  He’s been home, sick with a fever, for the last two days and we’ve been keeping him from watching the Disney Channel the whole time.  I caught him reading The Outsiders in front of a tivo’d repeat of Zack and Cody (the one where they cut school and end up in a rock video).  When I came in the room he hid the book and pretended to be paying attention to the TV.  I need to remember this when I rag on them about watching too much Cathode Ray.

I’ve been teaching an API (ACT Prep Intensive) for seven days now.  It runs (or crawls) from 9:15 to 12:45 everyday.  I have given an ACT practice exam each day, and we are all really tired.  INTENSive is the right word.  They are so sick of writing body paragraphs, introductions, elaborations, re-writing criterions and examples that I hope none of them has access to guns.  And the worst part is that every time I give them a practice ACT Exam, which gives me an hour that I don’t have to drill, cajole, entertain or teach them, I have to grade it.  It is like a western, where the good-guy is forced to dig his own grave.  Practice exams are good, they teach them how to write a passing essay (or that they are not yet writing at a passing level), and they show the student what is missing from their essays.  But they all need to be graded.  I need to grade them.  I am paid to grade them.  Everyday I go home with 19 ACT Exams to grade.  Now I know the shortcomings of each of the writers six exams in, but I still have to read and mark all of these problems in the hope that they will start to stop making those mistakes.  I like to think of it as erosion, or the _____ (insert non-white-ethnicity here) water torture, but I’m not sure whether it is their compositional defects that are being eroded, or my sanity: drip-drip-drip.

 I spend so much time with them that I feel like we are all victims of the Stockholm Syndrome. I think we all have an unhealthy identification with each other over the stress of this exam and the 4 hours a day we spend together. I am even rooting for the students who don’t “play nice” (do as I say) to pass this exam. The plus side is that we are functioning like a cult; we are the fraternity of true ACT-Test-Takers (Western Queens Council). On Wednesday they will take the test and we will all miss our bank-vault-prison and the captors that put us there.

Today I was working on the Black Literature Series Committee’s Scavenger Hunt: Here is one of the questions I’ve composed:

 

Frederick Douglass wrote in his 1845 Narrative

Were I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery, next to that enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me. For of all slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst. I have ever found them the

(Choose one to complete the passage)

a. most hypocritical and avaricious, in the south.

b. meanest and basest, the most cruel and cowardly, of all others.

c. greediest and neediest of all Americans.

d. generally most Christian and charitable in all of this, God’s land.

 

I think I’ll try and exercise a bit before the kids and Linda wake-up, thanks for reading (and drop me a comment).

Feeling Whistful @ 48 (Whittier Poem)

Read ’til the end, where you get the payoff: For of all sad words of tongue or pen,/The saddest are these: “It might have been!

Maud Muller
John Greenleaf Whittier
Maud Muller, on a summer’s day,
Raked the meadows sweet with hay.
Beneath her torn hat glowed the wealth
Of simple beauty and rustic health.
So, closing his heart, the Judge rode on,
And Maud was left in the field alone.
But the lawyers smiled that afternoon,
When he hummed in court an old love-tune
He wedded a wife of richest dower,
Who lived for fashion, as he for power.
Yet oft, in his marble hearth’s bright glow,
He watched a picture come and go:
And sweet Maud Muller’s hazel eyes
Looked out in their innocent surprise.
A manly form at her side she saw,
And joy was duty and love was law.
Then she took up her burden of life again,
Saying only, “It might have been.”
Alas for maiden, alas for Judge,
For rich repiner and household drudge!
God pity them both! and pity us all,
Who vainly the dreams of youth recall;
For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: “It might have been!“

Offspring Update

Mason’s Cameraphone Portrait

The kids have been on my mind lately, as much as I have anything on my mind. Chandler, Mason and Lennox are growing and developing in wonderful and exciting ways as they refuse to go out into their new neighborhood and make friends.

Mason was confident after the Hunter Entrance examination test. He was excited and amped up after being such a good young man, following instructions and orders, making it through a Board of Ed (Bored of ed?)  hazing gauntlet.  Sitting the exam with over 1000 kids, he was gripped -I think- by his growth since he moved to NYC as a suburban Cali boy.  He is a great kid and wanted to talk all about it, though he is narratively challenged; most of the explanations and anecdotes he shared didn’t make too much sense.

Chandler called me the other day to explain where the car was as they led me down and out by a few minutes and her instructions were more confusing than the IRS instruction booklet. Her directions had a bout six sentences, none of which told me where the car was, though I could have followed them and gone “out the door to the left, but not all the way to the left, the one with glass, but not just a window of glass, but the whole door.” I would have found it if I had walked out either door because the car was right in front of the building, but the instructions were one of the first times she spoke to me since my Friday Transgression where I failed to pick her up after school.

Lennox has taken to qualified sycophancy. “Dad, you’re the best cook in the world,” she says earnestly looking up from her chocolate chip pancakes. As she finishes chewing that bite she continues, “and I’m not saying that just to be nice, I really mean it.” Variations on this like,  “you’re handsome,” “you don’t look like you are 48,” and other such heart-warming-trifles come out whenever she is warm, well fed and well rested.  And each compliment, with sincere eye contact, slightly raised brows and her trade-marked too-little-teeth-smile, she always adds the caveat , “and I’m not saying that just to be nice, I really mean it.”

In this little qualification or explanation she is showing her awareness that her utterances might be manipulative and be discounted as such.  It’s like she’s read pillowbook and doesn’t want to be grouped with R***r, “the unreliable narrator.”  This meta-awareness is a sigh of her new self-awareness.  She has obviously seen someone use sycophantic flattery and loose credibility somewhere in Kindergarten or after care when the flattery was challenged.  She sees the resultant cost of being tagged an “unreliable narrator” so she uses this catch phrase to inoculate herself against the harsh judgment of the adult world.  Even as she puts on chapstick and holds her lips in a self-conscious kissable partition so as not to “remove the gloss” in a pure naïve princess innocence, she is also aware of truth, accuracy and perception as perishable commodities that must be nurtured, supported and protected.  I wish her father was as good at reading quotidian political situations.

Kiko Learns Pack Procedure

Here’s more of Kiko’s Tale.  He’s back, our delivery guy, (if only your intrepid scribe was as dedicated and regular as Kiko). Here Kiko meets another aspect of the City Cycling world, a singular character named Croak. There’s more the pipeline.

And of course, if you want to start from the beginning, go here.  IF this link doesn’t work you can search “Kiko” on this blog and feel yourway back to the beginning by hitting “previous entries” two or three times.

“Kiko, this is Croak,” Mike said gesturing to the chest of the hard 40-something man there by the side of the highway. It was a strange place this road between leafy houses and the trench the LIE was in, and it seemed stranger with Croak there. They all hopped on their bikes, Kiko having locked up Sra Choi’s bike and taken off the baggy jeans and t-shirt he’d worn over the kit. With his street clothes removed Croak and Mike both saw the broad chest and shoulders of Kiko’s Indian ancestry looking like a barrel of muscle barely contained by his mule-like ribs.

The three of them set off with Mike leading to start. As they hit the city limits in about 20 minutes Croak took over and it was not so easy for Kiko to keep up. Mike pulled 20 inches off their line and pedaled more slowly so that Croak and Kiko passed him and he fell back into their slipstream. Croak , a narrow man, rode hard and pulled them at a pace that Mike had not. Inside of Kiko there was a smile on his heart because he was finally being challenged. Kiko dug deep and kept up with florescent advert without much trouble, but he was riding harder and he knew that they were covering a lot of road in a little time. The smile in his chest was his pride at going so fast and working so hard as a team.

20 minutes alter Croak jumped out of line, fell back two places and clicked back into the line like a safe’s tumbler. Kiko kept the pace, maintaining his rhythm and cadence in perfect tight circles. He felt the extra resistance of being in front so he dropped the gear one level and spun away. After a time he felt he was spinning too much and he shifted again, increasing his speed. He didn’t know this but behind him mike had to dig much deeper to keep up and Croak’s face broke into an ear-to-ear grin as he clung to mike’s wheel for every jewel of energy savings that Mike’s big Irish draft offered.