Saturday, November 25, 2017

Four

My eldest leaves on a Friday night redeye to work a Saturday morning shift at a busy Chicago caterer. We are not sure when he will have more time off to spend with us but we make the most of his 48 hours. Spuds is here still until Monday and we have a busy art and food agenda planned. It's been a long time since it's been just the four of us. There are no spats nor gushy professions of familial ardor. We laze on the couch struggling to find TV that no one has seen and that everyone will like. The kids make the vegetables and mashed potatoes and I make an abridged version of the usual stuff.  There is no enthusiasm for yams but otherwise, it's the same menu in dinky portions.


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I have a week off from teaching but I spend two days on campus in a workgroup trying to revise promotional testing materials. I am left alone for my own 1B level and am given approval to create a digital version when I assure the powers that be that it is also printable. The previous iteration is created over twenty years ago and assuming that what we're creating will also have a long shelf life it seems a waste not to prepare for classes full of digital natives. But, most of the teachers work weird split shifts. We're all underpaid and mandated to perform tests and teach from outdated materials that are not in the students' best interest. I'm at it for only a couple of months but I imagine that if I'd slogged through a couple of bullshit laden decades I'd be on automatic pilot.  I wouldn't want to be bothered with implementing a big change.

Many of my students from my current and previous class send Thanksgiving greetings. Lesson planning is always at the back of my mind and creates an undercurrent of anxiety. If a lesson fails to make the imprint I'd intended, I chew it around for days and days. I struggle to duplicate things that have worked and fret about keeping forty plus students of wildly varying educational levels engaged. But I miss having dinner at home with Himself and curling up with a book or bingeing on crap TV. I wonder for how much longer I'll have the stamina to keep doing this thing that I love.

The kids and I visit two small museums in Pasadena. An exhibit of Mexican art from the 80s and 90s at The Armory doesn't blow me away but reminds me how I yearn to spend time in Mexico. The Pasadena Museum of California Art has impressionistic landscapes, mainly of the Monterey Bay area and some stunning liturgical pieces by the woman painter, E. Charlton Fortune. There is correspondence referring to the artist as “Mr. Fortune,” as the cagey moniker disguises the artist's gender. I am enchanted by a display of Cuban silkscreen posters made to promote screenings of American films, smuggled in somehow to subvert the U.S. embargo.

Browsing the bookstore we discover a book of photorealistic paintings called 100 Not So Famous Views of L.A. by Barbara Thomason. The Shakespeare Bridge, the old Van DeCamp's building, Western Exterminators...iconic images painted from strangely poignant angles. My eldest thumbs through it tenderly. “I'd like to have this when I'm homesick.” I lived out of Los Angeles briefly as a college student but otherwise, I am a native and I've stayed. Once in a while on a longer trip I feel a strong yearning for home but I know that I can and will return. My children have made their lives far away. They are happy exploring their new surroundings but sometimes wistful in knowing their roots are thousands of miles away.

With girlfriends coming and going and time marching I wonder when again, if ever, it will be just the four of us. I have no desire to sequester my little family from others who love us but there is an ease like no other when it is just four. We manage in our short time together to cobble out times in different permutations. It's been a long time since it was just me and the kids. Or the kids together. Or Himself with one or both of his sons. I guess it would have been a comfort through exhausting childhood and fraught adolescence to know how very much I would like who they would become. I do the dance befitting my age. Mortality. Fatigue. Turning off lights. Berating myself for not filling the car before the gas light comes on. Clipping coupons. There are so many fewer days ahead of me than behind but they are infused with warmth. Perhaps oldness is wasted on the old.

Saturday, November 18, 2017

Jubilee

I have a business event to attend in Studio City. My sojourns to the Valley are infrequent. And weird. I know the streets. Some familiar landmarks remain. The deco DWP building on Laurel Canyon. The Oakwood School on Moorpark with a huge banner touting the annual fund raising drive. Dupar's. But Quigley's Five and Dime, Maxxon's Drugs and Joseph Magnin are long gone. When I grew up, most of the residential streets didn't have sidewalks. Until I was about ten, Fulton Avenue was a rustic country lane. Now all is concrete and crammed with dense traffic. Acres of huge condos with an occasional vestige of low slung Valley ranch houses dotted between them. The confluence of intimate familiarity and eerie strangeness overwhelm me. The fraught Valley reminds me not only that I still frequently feel like a fake adult but also how much closer I am to the end than the beginning.

My dad, as I've remembered here far too many times, held my kids on has lap. He'd tell them about seeing an airplane for the first time and watching as his neighborhood movie theater was converted for sound. Then, he'd ponder how new wonders would change the boys' lives. The bittersweetness of my dad's excitement for what was in store for his grandchildren coupled with the certainty of his own inevitable and encroaching doom wafts around me as I drive these familiar strange streets of my childhood.

My last piece expresses compassion for Louie CK. I can imagine a world without Louie, but Al Franken? Really? I'm sure we're just at the part that is circumcised from the iceberg. I've been thinking about why it's so different with people that I like. Louie CK, Mark Helprin and now Al, come to mind. All three if not entirely full-throatedly, have admitted culpability. But they were just doing what guys do. Young Liberal Arts Spuds is shocked at the lewd comments made by warehouse workers. It is a much bigger deal for him than it is for me. How good that an evil I've just taken in stride is so glaringly unacceptable to the younger generation. The accused who don't deny their actions or impugn their accusers are catalysts for a major moral recalibration that we're witnessing.

Cosby, Weinstein, Roy Moore are black and white cases. Many of the allegations that are breaking news are more nuanced. While sexual abuse is never acceptable, it is only recently that it is being considered as far from the norm. We are all looking at this differently now. Having taken a moment to confront the ramifications, of even the most subtle sex/power move, many of us of a certain age are having an “Aha!” moment. “It was wrong. I see it now so clearly but I didn't get it at the time as this behavior was essentially normalized.” I think that a lot of men are having a very painful “Come to Jesus” moment, even if their victims don't go public. The conversation nevertheless, is an important one, but needs to include the proffer of forgiveness. The flaunting of money and power as an entitlement to hanky panky dates back thousands of years. Given that this is a largely unquestioned norm for generations I believe that 2018 might be a year of amnesty for abusers to take stock of their actions and reach out to victims, acknowledge what it has finally dawned on us is despicable behavior, and make efforts towards atonement.

To be eligible for parole an inmate must behave properly and express contrition. When you do some good time and have thought about the consequences of your behavior and owned your guilt, you're released, having paid a debt to society. Those who don't obfuscate and squirm but accept their role in shaping our cultural destiny should be permitted back into the fold.

The Valley sojourn is for a luncheon of stock footage librarians, an annual event I've attended for nearly half of my life. Most of the people I e-mail with regularly and chat with one the phone once in a while. We see each other age from one year to the next. We're grateful for name tags. And rue, this year, the lack of open bar. Waze takes me, via an interesting city street route, from my Studio City lunch to the other life I lead, my school Workgroup, meeting at Washington and Crenshaw in 42 minutes.

There is a race for assembly in my district and we receive a negative campaign mailer. The candidate, Luis Lopez quotes his opponent Wendy Carillo as saying something to the effect that teachers are mostly behind the times technology-wise and too burned out to be effective. Lopez interprets this as an insult to teachers but it wins this teacher's vote. For the opponent. Fairly, I will note that my classroom is equipped with two laptops and a projector that I can switch back and forth from a computer and an overhead. Having easy access to Google images is a great tool. My classroom has Internet but only for staff. When I play phone games with students it depletes their data plans. I feel bad but they love the games so much and already the new class, having played once, is bugging me to play some more. I've informed the technical person that the bulb on the projector is dim and there has been no replacement. We have to turn off a light. Still, it is a great improvement from my previous teaching situation.


We are working on re-writing competencies and promotional tests. There is a morning group and an evening group and stuff is being cobbled together higglety pigglety. We are replacing a battery created over twenty years ago. There is a paper test taken with a Scantron form. There is no consideration of digital natives which now comprise the lion's share of our population. I fantasize about my own list of competencies, evaluating and promoting students for reaching specific milestones instead of administering six tests within a 13 week trimester. No matter how much I assure them, the tests make students nervous and makes it challenging to lower their affective filter to promote language acquisition. The current curriculum fails to allow any wiggle room. Spanish speaking students rarely encounter forms without Spanish versions yet we work a lot on filling out forms. Many students use digital translators and acquire vocabulary at sonic speed. But ESL is “one size fits all,” and doesn't account for what the students themselves bring to the table. I'd love to teach a curriculum that acknowledges the big digital shake up. Like offering some electives so students can better tailor their own experience.

The tentative new competencies are just an abbreviated version of the old. There is no digital literacy component. We will still teach how to write a note to tell your boss that you need time off instead of how to send a cogent text message. The new promotional tests are being assembled by eliminating particularly bad items on the original. The three part test will remain a three part test and the assessment instrument is largely unchanged. We match up items on a sample test with the numbers from the original competencies which are bad copies of spreadsheets in a five point font. None of my committee mates knows how to print the spreadsheet in a larger font. My kids rag on me consonantly about digital ineptitude. There are actually a handful of teachers at my school who are way more savvy than I am but with the rank and file I still feel pretty Geek Squad. I am in the median age wise on the faculty. A handful of the youngest teachers are in their forties, another, my age plus or minus 5, is like me a new hire. I don't know why there are no younger teachers. One of my coworkers is surprised and skeptical when I indicate that all of the students have Smartphones. Every student in my class for both terms has one. For the most part, lessons with a digital component are better received and enrich the learning process for a thirteen week session where we are most testing on material that we haven't had time to teach. I appreciate the commitment to improving antiquated course outlines and evaluation instruments but I am disappointment that there is little consideration of the present and none for the future.

I'm already in love with the new class which is so large that the custodian has to drag in more chairs every night. There are two Ethiopian students who I use to keep the rest of them from prattling away in Spanish. I give them each a welcome bag with a name tag lanyard, a “Welcome to Layne's ESL class,” pencil, a little booklet about the books and apps we use, some questions to answer and tell me about themselves and a piece of candy. I take photos of all of them and print them out. We mount them in frames on which they neatly write their name, favorite color and birthdate. Most of them don't listen or watch when I demonstrate how to write their favorite color in the same colored ink. I make them erase and find the right gel pen and we tack the final version on my newly installed bulletin board.

The composition of this class is a bit different. In addition to the Ethiopians, there are two recently arrived Cubans. It is interesting to watch them interact with their fellow Spanish speakers. Like the last class,the men are gardeners, construction workers and janitors. There are also a lot more women than last year. A couple of the women are cooks, cashiers and there's a parking attendant. Most of them are housekeepers. There are a bunch of young women that are quick and smart. For the first time, the three top winner's of the online phone game are women. I do a couple of lessons gushing about Thanksgiving. They aren't really enthusiastic. The men will mostly have an unpaid day or probably two, of work. The women will work their butts off assisting their employers.

My sons are returning for Thanksgiving. It is the first time we've had the holiday all together in a number of years. I often lie in bed and think about my dilettantism and the little I have to show for it. Struggling to run one of the last family businesses in a field that's now mostly fully automated and multinational and feeling satisfied when the personal attention, mom and pop vibe pays off. And devastated when a company tells me that they can license the same material for half the price from one of my Walmart-like competitors. Returning to teaching after a 20 year sabbatical provides astounding fulfillment, but also hopelessness at a mire of bureaucracy seemingly designed to hobble students and instructors with a morass of paperwork and meaningless tests. Teacher. Small business owner. It's too late for a reset and I am immersed in two professions that provide satisfying relationships and for the most part bring out the best in me. But there are road blocks at every turn that leave these choices in constant question.

The kids sometimes go days without contacting me. They are making their own lives and perhaps it will be many years again when all four of us are together for Thanksgiving. I speak to both of them for menu consultation and to remind them to allow extra airport arrival time for the most busy travel days of the year. For all the Mom stuff I lay on these two young adults, both are buoyant in anticipation of a few days at home. There's not a lot of certitude about my life's direction and while intellectually I know it's futile and destructive, I do a lot of “If only I'd...” Being with Himself and the two spawn is the only time when the doubt and regret fully subside. And I happily trade all my self recrimination for this one facet of my life that is purely right and for which I am immeasurably thankful.



Sunday, November 12, 2017

All You Can't Eat

Louie CK's last HBO special opens with a bit about abortion that is so repulsive that I turn it off. Yet, CK produces Tig Notaro's One Mississippi and Pamela Adlon's Better Things. Both shows are outstanding and no matter what, his mentorship of these two landmark series boosts Louie's feminist cred. Furthermore, CK's own work is very personal and addresses his own conflicted sexual issues. Whereas Ray Moore preyed on a fourteen year old by taking advantage of a fraught custody battle, CK's accusers, while unnamed, are likely not as vulnerable as Moore's victim. It seems to me that women in CK's orbit are more enlightened as to acceptable behavior. I have no proof but my instinct is that the women accusing CK of misconduct endured it in order to advance their careers.

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I think my mother's reaction to this would have been, “So what? That's the way it has always been and always will be.” I was taught to exploit this for advantage. Up until the recent news about Cosby and Trump I don't give it much thought and pretty much accept men flaunting money and power for sexual conquest as the norm. Now however it's “me too” time and we are forced, at last, to confront this often more subtle, but rampant, form of sexual abuse. But the sea change is going to require an enormous reckoning and I think a lot of rich and powerful men are mighty frightened.

Spuds works for the summer in an art storage warehouse and after growing up in a progressive area and attending a liberal arts college he is astonished by his co-workers vulgar and hostile patter about women. “Do they shut up when a woman enters the area?” I ask. When he assures me that indeed they do, I tell him to consider this an improvement over when I first entered the workforce. Still, I wonder about the stubborn endurance of “locker room talk,” and how many men, if blessed with wealth and fame would consider this valid currency for sexual favors.

Remembering the players from Duke University LaCrosse team who were falsely accused falsely of rape, I imagine that there will be women who suffer a deficit of moral character who will lie or exaggerate for five minutes of fame or a tidy settlement. It is likely though that those speaking up will prove more forthright than the rich and powerful men who consider transactional sexuality a normal perquisite of their position. This appears often to be a serial thing and in many cases, there are a number of women with similar stories. And stories that are excruciatingly uncomfortable to recount. This lends the accusations far more credibility.
Louie CK admits now, in lurid detail, to having exploited his status but he refused to address rumors in the past and has chastised one accuser for going public. Roy Moore, when asked if the had sexual contact with minors, replies (and not as cagily as he thinks) that this would be “out of my usual behavior.” Still Moore stands an excellent chance of serving in Washington, along with the Abuser in Chief, and Louie likely faces career ruin. Maybe Louie's brutally honest confession is just a hail-Mary but given given his body of work that mines the black depths of his psyche and his support of two fantastically feminist comedies, he might deserve some slack.

I have not been fired and students are registered now for a new trimester. The groadieness of my classroom has long offended me. Now that I know I'm not a one-term-wonder I decide to take down faded, tattered bulletin boards and empty a cupboard crammed with out-of-date textbooks. I inquire of an administrator about the disposition of the books and am told that I'm welcome to bring some boxes from home. On the penultimate day of class I have the students rip out the raggedy bulletin boards and install new ones. I ask the boys to do the heavy lifting and assign the ladies more delicate tasks, like sorting desk supplies. The women ignore my assignment and start hoisting loads of books. How etched into me is the notion that women are less strong than men. A sense of differentness is perhaps a requisite of sexual frisson. It's for my kids' generation to figure out how this can exist without a power imbalance.

The last week has been fraught with batteries of tests to determine if students are worthy to ascend to the next level. Accommodations are made. Don Gonzalo is promoted. I present him with a certificate of merit for his excellent effort and attendance. I tell him the night before the party not to bring paper cups or plates because there are a bazillion of them in the cupboard I've cleaned out. Level 2 Gonzalo arrives with big trash bag full of Styrofoam cups and paper plates enough to take up another entire shelf in the cupboard.

Donna wafts in, fully made up, in a sleek fire engine red sheath and high heels. She's just bit younger than I am, but the boys sense her heat, and loom in her orbit. We Facetime with her son and baby granddaughter in Guatemala. I wave and they wave back. Back during my first foray at teaching, abuelas were stooped and wore aprons and not stiletto heels. They didn't have boyfriends or move thousands of miles from their children and grandchildren. Donna also gets a merit certificate. Hers is for “fearlessness.” When I present it, her classmates look up the word on their phones and hoot in agreement.

There are about thirty-five students and all chip in for pizza, which I order. They all beg for Hawaiian, which just seems wrong, but it's their money. I order six extra large twelve slice pizzas and six dozen chicken wings, thinking it will be way too much but that they can take the leftovers home. For Spuds' bar mitzvah we have a taco truck in the driveway. We invite our Mexican neighbors, who happen to have cousins visiting. They clean the truck out. My kids have grown up with meals that are always too much. Not having leftovers is considered on my part a personal failure. A student asks how much pizza he can take and I tell him that there's so much that he can take what he wants. Then I notice that the boxes are emptying quickly. Students have plates piled with four or five slices of pizza and mounds of wings. When a couple of latecomers arrive to find empty boxes, students share from their own plates. How strange it seems to me to have to limit portions.

When I interview them for the speaking test, many of my students tell me that they come from families of ten, or twelve or in one case (with two different women, but still...) twenty-one. “All you can eat,” has never been an option. Interestingly, one student has three children herself but none of the others have more than two. Across cultures, the roles of men and women are being redefined. It's a long road but ultimately I think that women will lead better lives and families will be smaller and better fed. While the analogy is hyperbolic, the Germans had an epiphany after the Second World War and reinvented itself as one of the world's most socially progressive nations. Perhaps the times we're enduring now will result in similar enlightened atonement. Still, I'm going to order more pizza next time. Even Hawaiian if that's what they want.

Saturday, November 4, 2017

Forgetting and Remembered


The deadline for giving two weeks notice before the start of the new trimester passes and I have not submitted my resignation. There is an earthquake drill that night. We have endured a meeting, the week before, cutting into class time. An administrator stands before us and reads the instruction sheet we've received printed, in our mailboxes and also via e-mail. Our classroom wastebasket can be repurposed as a toilet, in case of lockdown. The students are to duck and cover under their desks for two minutes but I show them a YouTube video about earthquake survival instead. Then, teachers are to carry a flashlight and don yellow hardhats and day-glo safety vests and lead the students across the street to the parking lot to wait for the “all clear.”. Subliminally I guess, flirting with getting fired, I wear neither vest nor hat. I do carry a dim flashlight. A monolingual administrator, using a megaphone, issues inaudible instructions. In the event of a real earthquake, I am legally bound, as an L.A. Unified employee, to act as a disaster point person. Were there a real trembler, I'd get 'em under the desks and I'd wear the hat and the vest. I hope they get the megaphone thing straightened out and designate a Spanish speaker for translation.

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Only a few of my students are Dodger fans and, unbidden, they keep showing me their phones with the score. Tomas is perhaps the smartest student in the class and one of a handful I call upon for demonstrations and occasionally, to help settle a rowdy class. Tomas is an Astro fan. During the final game Tomas sticks his phone, with the heartbreaking score, in my face about twenty times and chuckles malevolently. I warn him I'll get him back on the promotional exam. I make a dummy score sheet for him. It indicates that he's failed every test and I've written, in giant blue letters “GO DODGERS!” I'll let him sweat a second before I replace it with his 99% passing score.

There are only four more meetings with my current class as the 13 week trimester winds down. I finally know all of their names and we're finishing up the final tests. For many, the speaking test is particularly onerous. Ordinarily poised and confident, Marina perspires and shakes. “It's just me,” I remind her. She soldiers on. When I ask her about her daughter, a freshman at UC Santa Barbara, her anxiety abates and she passes the test easily. Other students are barely able to open their mouths and I have to prod them to even grunt.

I am teaching a lesson at the whiteboard and I hear the students tittering. “What? What is it?” Finally, Donna grabs a pair of scissors and snips off a price tag from my sweater. Ever confident Donna, despite the remarkably bad (for having lived in the U.S. for fourteen years ) English remains an effective communicator. She tells me about her three adult kids in Guatemala. A boyfriend, with a cat, has moved in with her. Donna hates cats. She is disgusted when I tell her that I have three. Apparently Donna's in ultimatum mode and the boyfriend isn't primo enough for her to endure the cat.

Most of the students settle down once I get them speaking for the promotional exam but the acrid aroma of fear-sweat wafts through the classroom. I like the part of the test where I can get them to talk about themselves. A sweet guy is the oldest of eight with seven sisters. He's twenty-one. The three older sisters, a twenty year old and seventeen year old twins live with him. He supports them. The rest of the family is in Guatemala. One student works at a meatpacking plant. There are a couple truck drivers, a few mechanics and a number of gardeners. Three of my students have domestic positions with incredibly famous Hollywood personae. A couple of the women clean houses and some work in restaurants. Not a single student has reported unemployment. Most of them do physical labor yet manage to drag themselves to school for ten hours a week. A handful have green cards but I assume that most are undocumented. While there are a couple of drips in the class, most of the students are very likable. Some buzzwords used to assess the generation coming up are “lacking grit.” I realize that the segment of population that is so committed to self improvement might not attest to the character of all of the undocumented. But my students coming from where they come from, mostly not highly educated, leaving family and friends and managing to eke out a life in this strange, vast foreignness are grit personified. There is no one else to do the work that they do and the news in Spanish or English blasts constant reminders that by a large swath of the U.S. population and its chosen leader, immigrants are unwelcome.

I have to rush the groups through their presentation as there is so much testing. The Lions are supposed to read some statements about a picture and then ask the class questions. Don Gonzalo, as the students call him, has taken charge. He ignores my instructions. The Lions just read the questions and then answer themselves, losing the participatory element but they hold their heads up and speak loudly and clearly. All of their writing is more legible now and they use capital letters, periods and question marks correctly, more often than not.

The Pandas are to write a story, a conversation and a description. The group is the largest and no matter how much I encourage them to collaborate, they work independently for the most part. Between them they come up with three passable stories and a lot of incoherent crap so we bag the conversation. I flesh out the stories a bit and the Pandas take turns reading them aloud to the class. They sound pretty good and the class is responsive to their questions. Next term, if the class is just as large, I'll divide them into five groups instead of four.

The Tigers are to model some commands like “put, give, take” as preparation for the speaking test. Poor attendance has taken a toll on the Tigers and their plans to make a little movie are shelved. They nicely demonstrate a good variety of imperatives. I ask them, no little avail, to make sure that other students participate, but their demonstration is well executed.

The Bees are the highest level group and require little supervision but, they too are plagued by rampant absence. They take turns as server and receive each other's orders from a restaurant menu. Then they distribute copies of the menu (from the local Masa) and take orders from individual students. They're very enthusiastic about the menu, choosing Echo Park burgers and deep dish pizza. There are complaints about the prices being a bit steep, but the extensive menu abounds with vocabulary opportunities.

The final week is spent on make up tests and ESL computer games. On the final night they will register for new classes and there will be a party. There are a few who are hoping to be promoted to the second level but just aren't ready. I know that they will feel bad but they would be completely at sea in the next level. The hard workers will get little certificates of merit in 99¢ Store frames. Some of them just need a bit more work before moving up and some need so much literacy remediation that they'll likely never make it.


The class of eighteen months ago was small. It's takes me longer to get to know this larger class. But, now that it's only a few days more, I know that I'll feel bad when most of them go. I still don't have a rhythm down and am often ineffectual. Sometimes I happen upon something that really clicks. And there are times when I fall flat and waste an hour or so. The other teachers don't talk much to me. Many of them teach an early morning class and then drudge back with their rolling carts six hours later to teach nights. I suspect that they're just too tired to interact. I imagine that most perk up and teach energetically, but for me, even going for three hours is exhausting. It's no wonder that those who teach ESL 20 or 30 hours a week are too wiped out for small talk.

I know that if I teach a few more classes it will become more automatic, a job and less some grandiose moral atonement. For all my passion, my memories of my class of 2015 are hazy. I struggle to remember names and faces of people who for thirteen weeks are the center of my life. While I pretty much think about nothing else, the current large group too will fade I'm sure. A year from now and three classes later Martina, Don Gonzalo, Donna and all the rest, will likely become memory shadows.

I remember the name and can see the face of every teacher I ever had from kindergarten through college. I recall a few wounds, mostly pertaining to my backwardness at mathematics and handwriting, but mostly it's moments of revelation and epiphany that these instructors proffered that remain remarkably vivid, still in my mind's eye. While I am destined to forget most of my students I suppose that I will be remembered. The onus of this, particularly in these times of Trump, overwhelms me. To the best of my knowledge I've not been fired. The new trimester starts next week. I worry that being effective, even as I have a bit of experience to work with, will require too much of me. I dream about coming home from work, making dinner and tv binging instead of forty five minutes of rush hour traffic and gulping a quick sandwich a few minutes before being on my feet for a three hour class. I may well lack the grit to persevere. Still, the Pandas are speaking and writing much more clearly. The rest will likely thrive in the next level and more and more will better navigate the strange vastness, essential yet reviled.