Saturday, December 23, 2017

Better People

I read an essay by Ann Patchett about how Trump shock reduces her to compulsive on-line shopping. I spend hours scouring the Internet for signs that the Russia investigation will bring down the administration. When there's no pay dirt I too drift over to Zulily or Etsy just for some eye candy and maybe a couple of cheap garments. I've not only changed my Internet habits but I eat just as compulsively as I look for signs of Trump's demise, so some cheap blousy blouses augment my wardrobe. CNN blares for most of my waking hours except when I'm in the car listening to the political podcast Pod Save America. Teaching snaps me out of it to some extent but as my students present me with a gift card for Christmas I ache thinking that they are constantly being bombarded with immigrant-hateful verbiage. I will remember 2017 as being cloaked in a pall. Even after nearly a year, I see Trump on the tube and become physically ill and there remains too a strong sensation of unreality.

It is inevitable I think that it will be proven that the con-artist in chief is being blackmailed by Putin. Former CIA director Jame Clapper referred to Trump as being Putin's “asset,” Despite Fox labeling the efforts to uncover the relationship between the Trump administration and Russia as a “coup,” I suspect that even the dwindling base will forsake the liar-in-chief when the extent of his corruption becomes clear. My fantasy for 2018 is the Mueller bides his time and digs up more dirt. Pence is discovered to have been fully aware of the Russia thang or caught en flagrante in a men's room. At the beginning of 2019 the House and Senate will have regained a Democrat majority. The first priority is to dump Trump and Pence and then appoint the Dem speaker of the house as president. Then the nation can concentrate on undoing the damage. And I'll win the lottery too.

This I'm sure is too perfect a scenario. It's going to be a lot more messy with lots of palace intrigue. I suspect that soon we'll know if Trump is going to sell out Don Jr. and Jared. Advanced adulthood has diminished revenge fantasies and generally I don't wish anyone unhappiness. For years the exception to this mature compassion has been a palpable hatred for Clarence Thomas, Joe Arpaio and Sheldon Adelson. Since Trump, the list has gotten longer and I've particular animus for the Trump spawn and spawn-in-law. I never thought I'd whoop and holler about a special senatorial election in Alabama. I hope to have another opportunity for celebration with the arrests and indictments of some of the ickiest characters on the political scene since Joe McCarthy.

While my capacity for hatred is way amped up since the election, I am also more engaged than I've ever been. While I disliked Reagan and the Bushes I never sensed grave jeopardy. The current administration makes it impossible for me not to engage. And I am not alone. In January of 2017 I march along side of 20% of my fellow Angelenos and I will march again on January 20, 2018, carrying the same sign. “May these times make us better people.” I will skip teaching summer school and commit these months to working on behalf of ousting Congressmen Steve Knight and Darell Issa.


I wake up every morning and Trump is still president. Spuds graduates from college and we have a few glorious days in the Hudson Valley. John Lewis speaks inspiringly at the ceremony. A few days later Trump bashes Lewis with mean spirited Tweet. Trump has an uncanny way of disrespecting those who've made the biggest sacrifices for our nation Khizr Kahn. John McCain... When called out for this and asked about his own personal sacrifices Trump cites sacrifices made while building his business (with only a measly million dollars of seed money.)

After graduation Spuds and I drive from New York to Los Angeles. Long road trips are one of the great pleasures of my life and I am grateful to have two weeks with my freshly minted college grad. But at every gas station and diner I am aware that unlike in Los Angeles, the midwest is crawling with Trump voters. We will be analyzing their motives for generations. I happen on a quote by Lyndon Johnson that comes pretty close. "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."

The kakistocracy will end. As the social safety net erodes and borderline (or maybe not even borderline) treason becomes apparent, Trump voters will regret the decision. The progressive movement becomes more cohesive and active in response to the catastrophe and I hope this steam lasts far beyond Trump being only a bad memory. Perhaps I'm being a Pollyanna but I really do believe that these times will make us better people.


Saturday, December 16, 2017

No Way Out


Like my last class, the current students adore the Kahoot! game. I create questions and they play a game on their phones. There's a group of women who do particularly well. Students play the game with nicknames and recently someone logs on as “Ganjah.” He's giving the girls a run for the money. I ask every time when the game is over, “Who's Ganjah?” and the students explode with laughter but no one cops to owning the moniker. I notice however a marijuana leaf etched onto Daniel's name tag. I'm pretty sure that I've outed “Ganjah.”


I bring in some art supplies and we make Christmas cards. A handful of them haphazardly slap on a few stickers and call it a day but many are rapt, skipping the coffee break to pour over their creations, cutting and glueing and pasting. I hang the finished creations on a rope above the whiteboard and we all admire them. We practice writing possible greetings and some of the more advanced students compose their own. As neither of my children is capable of addressing an envelope, it doesn't surprise me that my students are largely clueless. We do a few practice envelopes. The advanced students are bored and the lower level students manage to write them upside down and confuse the sender with the recipient. We go through a whole box of envelopes. After everyone produces a practice envelope that wouldn't vex the U.S. Postal Service, they draw from a hat and pull the name and address of a fellow student. The envelope is addressed to their secret friend and they choose from my selection of Christmas stamps. I'll mail the cards off right before Christmas. Yolanda, probably my smartest student, sits across from from Pedro. Yolanda is wary and sniffs out irony. My best jokes rate her grudging grin but Pedro cracks her up. I cheat to insure that Pedro will receive Yolanda's card and vice versa.


I tell them that if they're sending a card to someone who might not celebrate Christmas to say “Season's Greetings” or “Happy Holidays.” “But everyone celebrates Christmas Teacher.” Given time limitations I don't tell them about the Jew thing but I tell them that there are indeed some people who don't celebrate Christmas. “Really?” “I don't celebrate Christmas,” I tell them. Some are befuddled by this but a few of them look me up and down and nod knowingly.


Caleb, one of the two Ethiopians sometimes gets stuck in traffic and rushes in, late. He performs the high-five/half-hug bro greeting thing with some of the Hispanic guys. The other African immigrant is Zala, a portly attractive woman in her forties. She works at a Burger King. She doesn't like it and sometimes she's assigned overtime causing her to miss class. I make a lesson about Ethiopia. Himself actually writes the copy and finds some art and photos. Caleb delicately points out that there's a spelling error. Himself defensively objects to the correction, as the word is TRANSLITERATED.

The night of the lesson I am sad when Zala texts me that her husband is in the hospital, for the second time in the last few weeks. I hand the yardstick I've taken to using as a pointer over to Caleb and he tells them about his country and writes the Amharic alphabet on the board. Then we watch a glossy short travelogue. Caleb is proud but there's lots of stuff you wouldn't show in a travelogue. Caleb says emphatically that if money were no object he would choose to stay in the U.S. and not return to Ethiopia. When I ask my Hispanic students the same question, many of them indicate that they'd prefer to live in their homelands.

To the astonishment of my fellow teachers, I take my students on a field trip. I arrange a Spanish tour of an exhibit of Martin Ramirez' paintings and drawings at the Institute of Contemporary Art. Ramirez left his family in Jalisco in the early 1930s to find his fortune in California. He worked sometimes for the railroad and bummed around. Finally, apprehended by police and unable to communicate in English, Ramirez is admitted to a psychiatric hospital. The diagnosis is schizophrenia but some biographers posit that he suffered mainly from cultural displacement. Ramirez died in 1963, having spent thirty-three years institutionalized.

Field trips apparently aren't the norm at my school but a form exists so I fill it out. Students have to sign a waiver and provide their phone numbers and the name and number of an emergency contact. I resort to explaining the thing in Spanish and a lot of them still don't get it. I attempt to prepare them with a Powerpoint that starts with pictures of 35,000 year old Indonesian cave paintings. I explain that art has existed for just about as long as man. Then I ask them if art is only for the rich and some of them think it is. I ask if someone can be an artist without a formal education in the arts. Most believe that training is essential. I talk about the compulsion to create and project a photo of a jewelry box woven out of Kool Cigarette wrappers made by prisoners. We talk about how satisfying making our little Christmas cards has been for most of them. We finish with a level 1B appropriate biography of Martin Ramirez and a slideshow of paintings.



We all arrive late at the museum, caught in traffic. Everyone's flushed. I've dragged Himself along. The staff greets us warmly, even though we're about 45 minutes late and it's fifteen minutes until closing. The students take to the guide and the art immediately. They hang on Eddie's every word. He's a handsome Chicano whose college internship has led to a permanent job working on community outreach and education. I do my best with the Ethiopians. They get that the art reflects the immigrant experience. We note how similar some of elements of Ramirez' work are to the Ethiopian art we'd looked at the night before.
Most of Ramirez' early drawings are made with scrounged materials. Saliva is the main ingredient of his homemade ink. His work fuses folk-art style elements with wildly modern composition. The artist draws and paints endless railroad tracks, horses, tunnels. Motion and stasis. A psychiatrist with an art degree is struck by Ramirez' work and provides art supplies. The later works are more colorful although mostly painted on paper bags or the brown paper of discarded examining table covers. A collage/painting of Ramirez' hometown Tepatitlan highlights the exhibit. It's been compared to a photograph and Eddie describes how vividly and accurately Ramirez remembers his home, even after decades of absence.

When the tour's over Eddie asks the students to share opinions. Stony silence. “They don't speak for me either,” I assure him. Ice broken, they start saying that they like the paintings. Daniel, the pothead, steps a bit forward. “This is our lives. We leave our families. The railroads...long tunnels you can't get out of. We're not locked up, but our lives are on the edge The paintings show how hard it is to be away from our homelands even though we know that it's much harder back at home. It's important to remember our countries and our cultures, and keep this close in our hearts, even if we can't return.” The museum director and I tear up. Ganjah indeed. But Teacher likely does the same thing that you do after school. Do you need to flaunt it on your chingada name-tag? Just be cool.

After the museum we walk over to Farmer Boys. Eliza, from Cuba, hopes that they have milkshakes. I stupidly leave the coupons I've carefully clipped in my car. Tables are moved and we all sit together. Eliza works packing airline meals and it is a busy travel season so she's missed a lot of school. She's hit it off with a bunch of the girls and they tease each other about their funny accents. I interrogate Eliza about Cuba. The economy suffers since Trump. Everyone expects things to get worse. Most people don't have cellphones. There is scattered Internet service. She tells me how much she misses home. I tell her that I'd like to go see the old two-toned American cars and she laughs. I teach her to say “homesick.” We walk back to our cars, around the corner from the Greyhound station. We navigate around huge piles of reeking trash. The destitute set up camp on the sidewalks. I ask Eliza if there are homeless people huddled on the streets of Cuba. There are not. We both shrug.

Zala doesn't want to eat. We offer to buy her something but she declines. I hope that she was full or on a diet. She sits with Caleb. They laugh and laugh. I realize that they sit on opposite sides of the room and that they've never spoken.

Octavio is the gorgeous boy who does all my tech stuff and installs apps on the students' phones. I've never seen a sweeter, more earnest smile. He's flirtatious, in a shy way, with both boys and girls. He probably could have hacked the next level. I am on the fence and I ask him about it. He asks to stay with me and I admit that his technical prowess likely influence me when I relent. Octavio is twenty two and works at famous chicken stand. He has a five year old daughter in Guatemala. Octavio arrives for our Christmas party hoisting vats of chicken and rice.

A few students show up for the Christmas party with their kids. I'm surprised that some of the young ones are parents. Natalie, a Madonna-like serene beauty, arrives with her three year old son. The boy, like everyone else, is drawn to Octavio. They color pictures together and play with a toy car. Maybe Natalie and Octavio are dating. They seem kind of familiar. I wonder about the mother of Octavio's daughter back in Guatemala. Octavio leaves, beaming, with Natalie's little boy on his shoulders. I don't know how long it's been since he's seen his own little girl.

There is a school dance with a DJ. Some of the students dance gaily and others stand on the sidelines and watch. I shoot a little video and then go back to the room to pack up all of the leftover chicken into little bags for them to take home. Half of the big tray of brownies I've baked remain. After several attempts, I've figured out that Hispanic people, for the most part, aren't interested in brownies, although mine are particularly excellent. Cookies, I'll remember are always a bigger hit, although Himself is happy with the leftover brownies.

I take down the Christmas decorations from the classroom and get stuff set up for returning in January. A file drawer is stuffed with tests, test prep materials, forms and memos, evidence of the ceaseless impediments to the actual instruction of English. I dump a lot of disorganized paperwork into a carton to take home and sort over the holidays. There will be additional testing when we return which I'll have to plan lessons for and hope I'll make up for the instructional time I've wasted making Christmas cards and taking them to the museum.

Donna, from last semester, pops up as I'm getting ready to go and dreading all the crap I'll face when I return in January. Donna's styled out for the dance. She babbles confidently in barely intelligible English. We embrace tightly. “Me missing my teacher. I loves you.” I lock up the room and sign out.





Saturday, December 9, 2017

More Blather about Trump and Teaching

My nose is running and I attribute it to days of smokey air. I take an antihistamine. By the time I get to school I feel a fever coming on and I use up half of the single box of Kleenex that the district allots me for a school year. I go on teaching, attempting to discreetly step out the classroom door to blow my nose and stuffing soggy tissues in my pocket. Recounting this I remember to empty the pockets of my jeans before throwing them into the wash. There are two pain in the ass tests that have to be administered in a single week and one class session is slashed by two hours for a teacher's meeting. It would be too late to get a sub and the deadline for the second test would be blown. I try to handle the test materials as minimally as possible. It's been ages since I've had a cold and I realize how infrequently in my pre-teaching life, that I am crammed into a small room with 40 people who don't get flu shots. I'll stay home next time I'm sick but even with the best sub a setback is inevitable. Like most of my students, I have no sick leave or benefits. But of course, if I miss a few hours of work, there will still be food on the table and my phone will stay connected.

I expect to lose a lot of students after Thanksgiving vacation but most of them come back. I am still smitten with the Ethiopians and am recognizing a handful of the other students with that certain glint. There are always students I particularly like and a few whom I'm a couple degrees below being not crazy about. In a “too many tests and too little time” week I've reacted slightly harshly to a rather churlish young man who is slightly fucking with my administration of tests. Perhaps if I pay him a bit of extra attention when he's not showing off it might satiate his need of attention.

I am being observed by an administrator on Tuesday night which is a cause of slight agitation but otherwise the coming week is light, with only two full nights of instruction, a museum visit on the third night and a school dance to celebrate the holidays and the three week vacation. I am told that it is expected of the teachers to dance and I actually dread this more than having my teaching evaluated.

This phase of my life will be associated with feeling stretched, as my daytime hours are consumed by CNN and clicking from the New York Times, Washington Post, Politico, The Guardian, Huffington Post...while I work at my office and prepare lessons. Then at night my world is a group of mostly undocumented students. Housekeepers. Cooks. Gardeners. Custodians. Mechanics.  
There are always a couple of entrepreneurs, in their thirties and forties. Their spoken English is pretty good and they're eager to hone their grammar and learn some basic writing. They run small businesses and have skilled trades. They exude a trustworthy earnestness. The older male students are courtly. They pick up things that I drop and rein in the occasional rambunctious younger student.

While it's a hotbox, I'm with people I admire. I try to make sure they know that here in California, they are welcome. Perhaps the location makes them somewhat less vulnerable than in other parts of the country with regard to being undocumented, nevertheless the atmosphere since the election is changed. The city would come to a halt without the labor of immigrants, largely undocumented. My students get this. Despite being vilified and disrespected, my students know that their cheap labor keeps things humming along. When I'm not with them I obsess on Trump, and delight at every new sign that his demise is inevitable. There is certainly personal gratification as the Russian onion sheds more skin but it is particularly comforting when I look out at my students and know that it won't always be like this.

Yolanda is one my favorites. She has the highest test score in the class and, but for a reticence about speaking, she would be in a much higher level course. Once in a while I pass out a word search at the beginning of the class. I never both to print the key because I don't waste time with them solving the puzzle. I say, “Take it home and finish it.” They hover over the puzzles, rapt and they require no attention from me while they try to solve them. I'll attempt the puzzle myself just to see how hard it is. Yolanda is a machine. She solves the entire puzzle before I've found only a few words. She marks student papers more scrupulously than I do. Her eyebrow arches slyly when she's amused and she's one of a very few who gets all my jokes.

Most of my fellow teachers teach two classes. They grunt at me when we pass and watch the clock and squirm at meetings. My classroom is used in the morning by a friend of a friend. I pick up after him and he helps me navigate the idiosyncratic administration. I attempt to initiate collaboration with others who teach in the low levels but my overtures are largely ignored. The advisor who could potentially be the most helpful is curt and officious. I do appreciate the quick maintenance and repair of classroom technology but I am hobbled by the lack of support and surprised that there is so little sense of community.

I am looking forward to a three week vacation. I still think all the time about quitting. And then some lesson I've slaved over will go right and they'll actually demonstrate that they've learned something. How could I not do this? The verdict now is that I'll soldier on until I'm too burned out to be effective. The bureaucracy is so dispiriting but so many of my students model persistence that will likely buoy me indefinitely. As will witnesses the inevitable downfall of POTUS, his sleazy family and cronies.




Saturday, December 2, 2017

The End of the Beginning


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John Oliver, speculating about pending indictment, pleads, eyes twinkling, “Let it be Jared! Let it be Jared!”  I scream, “Yessss!” at the TV. The dumb Trump spawn are too easy although Ivanka in Orange is the New Black is a pretty picture. But, Jared's doughy-faced smugness makes me want to slap him around. The next three years will be rough. But I am optimistic that for the nation that elected Obama twice, the pendulum will swing back. Perhaps the shame of being duped by a conman will engender an ultra-scrupulousness and sense of urgency to return dignity and integrity to the highest office. With both parties on life support it is important to get it together and ferret out squeaky clean potential candidates. Let's hope.

It is obvious that Trump is beholden to Russia in a big way. I have no crystal ball but my gut tells me that Flynn's plea deal will lead to revelations of dirt beyond our wildest expectations. As Trump's sheer buffoonery becomes more and more evident, it looks like he's been selected and groomed by Putin and that the process is in play long before the trip down the gilded escalator. I imagine it will also come to light and become commonly accepted that cyber interference absolutely determined the results of the 2016 election.

Plain spoken Lindsey Graham states clearly that the pending tax boondoggle is designed only to appease rich donors. When the hoi polloi lose their health coverage and suffer through other cost cutting measures that this giant Christmas gift to the uber rich will require, anyone one who has anything to do with passing it, and every politician who holds his nose and supports Trump, will be ruined. Let's hope.

These times will be fodder for artistic inspiration for eons. I try to visualize the mini-series. Farce? Arrested Development comes close but the show is anchored by a likable, reasonable hero and there are no likable characters in the White House. Atramentous black comedy? While Walter White in Breaking Bad evolves into a despicable character, his back story of being screwed over, engenders some compassion and, with feelings of guilt, the viewer ends up rooting for him. Political satire? At least the corrupt politicians in Veep and House of Cards are smart and witty.

Perhaps the angle I'd take is to chronicle the debacle through the eyes of one of the children, maybe Barron or that little girl of Ivanka and Jared who's such a hit with the Chinese based on the video of her singing a song she learned from a nanny. Here is the real collateral damage. The underage offspring will inevitably be scarred by the unraveling of the family-wide malfeasance that may even ultimately result in charges of treason. It is only the children that muster an iota of compassion for the folks who brought on one of the greatest con jobs in history.

I am sent a new student. He arrives toting some well worn plastic bags. Pedro is my age. There is an address on his registration form but it looks like he hasn't lived indoors for a very long time. His long, graying hair is matted and dull. His eyes are so bloodshot it's hard to tell the iris from the sclera. Pedro communicates a bit in English with a sandpaper rasp. He sort of keeps up with the class. There are no overt signs of mental illness. He doesn't reek of alcohol. But he reeks. Pedro smells bad. The seats around him are the last to fill. I stand at his desk and help him practice a conversation or check his written work but then, on some pretense, open the classroom door and grab a lungful of fresh air. When we work in groups or with partners the other students are compassionate and good sports. They nod at me, (It's OK Teacher.”) sensing my reluctance to stick them with Pedro. I dream of a social worker swooping into my classroom and getting Pedro sorted out but our social services and safety net are pathetically underfunded and not getting better in the near future of the congress has anything to do with it. For now, Pedro's treated like any other student. Perhaps learning a bit more English will improve his life somehow but inevitably in a much smaller way than I would deem ideal.

There are two Ethiopians in my class. Except for eating on Fairfax I haven't had any contact with Ethiopians. I know it's not right to assess a whole culture based on two students, but both of these students are particularly warm and the other students truly like them. The groups with an Ethiopian member accomplish so much more. The students are all friendly and do their best to communicate in English with their non-Hispanic classmates. They don't fall back to Spanish. The conviviality of being in the same boat makes it less threatening than when I'm grilling them and breathing down their necks. I wonder if I would get in trouble if I requested enough Ethiopians so I could have one in every group.

Once in a while I have to shriek, “Speak English” at them, which breaks them of the habit for a while. Their phones ring sometimes. They have fancy rockin' ringtones. A phone rings and the students grouse. A student, in a shrill mocking voice pipes up, “Donde estas?” The room explodes in laughter. I cannot help myself and there is another round of laughter when the students, except for the Ethiopians, see that I too get the joke.

I use a worksheet from the last trimester. I vaguely remember that there'd been something wrong with it but it looks pretty good so I run it off again. There are three apartment ads from Craigslist and questions. like which apartment has a ceiling fan and which one has a laundry. I've labelled the apartment ads using numbers and the question option using letters. I have a bunch of early birds. It gets dark earlier and it's chilly outside so I open my door a half hour early and they come in and grab a worksheet. Then they finish before class even starts and I have to make up things on the fly for them to do. When I discover the number/letter disaster with my homemade worksheet, one of my students grabs a pen and hand corrects the stack of xeroxes. I am embarrassed by this stupid oversight. “It's OK Teacher.”

I find a great website that has a wonderful collection of short films accompanied by lesson plans for use with ESL students. There is a beautiful little film about colors that actually gives me an opportunity for some vocabulary drilling. I plan a nice little lesson. One night I have to dismiss early to attend a meeting. Another night I have to do a power point presentation for orientation and then have them fill out a very complicated two-sided form with four places they have to initial. Some of it is school rules and one is a release for appearance in photos and video. It is a bitch to get them all filled out properly so I don't get to the movie that night either. Wednesday, there's time for the little movie. I turn off the lights and then notice a strong burning smell. I kick the students out before I can run the film. They still don't know what the cause is, but the room is fine on Thursday. I think they like the movie.

We are on the chapter that describes different rooms and household furnishings. We are working on “There is” and “There isn't.” We all describe our dream houses. The girls say “There is a big kitchen.” “There are big closets.” The boys says, “There is a three car garage.” “There is a gym and a media room.” I ask them whether their dream house is in the USA or their home countries. The Ethiopians don't hesitate. They're here for good. The Hispanic students are split down the middle.

I expect a backlash, the darkest hour before the dawn. Men's attitudes about women are changing. Perhaps, after a dangerous spate of nationalism, women will edge towards political parity. Maybe I'm fooling myself but it seems that female leaders might demonstrate more compassion and remind us that ultimately, we're citizens of the world. Poor Pedro I'm afraid is beyond hope but for the rest of them, I hope they're able to build their dream houses in the land of their choice.