Stranded in Saigon

Our travel misadventures in Vietnam continue.  Update at Fraudster's Musings.  Link in sidebar.

Cheers, sort of, again.  Fraudster.

First world problem in the third world.

So teachers get all these holidays they don't deserve? Well, I'm paying for it now. Lost credit cards, passports and cash in Vietnam about ten days ago. Read about it at Fraudster's Musings. Link in side bar. But hey. It's not life threatening. Cheers. Sort of.

Last gasp pre Christmas

Interested in what tired teachers get up to at their end of year break up? At a lawn bowls club for pity's sake?

At least it was different from the usual contrived knees-up with bad karaoke singing that almost drove me to take up smoking again.  (That way I could hang around the entrance with the other escapees from death by off key singing.)

Read about it at Fraudster's Musings .

Season's Greetings from bad fairy, Fraudster.

A Glut of Junior Students

Making a big production number of it, I walk to the whiteboard.  Detention, I write on the top right hand corner.  The ruckus continues.  Raising my eyebrows in mock surprise at the foolishness of youth, I slowly underline the word; turn to face the class.  I quietly exude the appearance of calm.  Some students nudge other kids to get them to stop whatever they’re doing.  ‘SHADDUP!!!’ someone yells, adding to the racket.  After about a minute the group settles.  I start to mark the roll.  Someone, I can’t tell who, ‘blows a raspberry’.  Raucous laughter.  I wait.  I return to the whiteboard with my marker. 2 mins, I write under Detention.  To no effect.

‘I will keep certain people in at recess for fifteen minutes,’ I pronounce. 

Brief silence.  Then dramatic nose-covering.  Girls have pulled the fronts of their dresses over their noses and mouths.  Boys roar with laughter; fall off their chairs.

‘P-PHWAWWW!’  Don’t know how to spell that sound people make when they’re exaggerating how they feel  because someone’s farted. 

And someone had.  It was snaking its tendrils right out to me at the front.  Hard to quell that sort of disruption when you don’t know any of the students.

Giving up on settling the class, I turn to write the absent teacher’s instructions on the board.  Some girls start mocking my name.  Can’t tell who.  Try not to emotionally engage with them.  If I follow my ‘discipline plan’, I’ll cope.  Five minutes later I evict a belligerent girl who’s screaming at me.  Fifteen attempts at the ‘broken record’ technique – acknowledge the kid’s grievance then repeat assertive statement – failed to achieve anything.  Clearly, she hadn’t read the book

For the next sixty minutes, the first fifteen having been wasted, I pace the room, assisting here and there – it’s a science lesson on light - and putting out ‘spot fires’.  I have a heightened sense of anxiety for the duration.

At recess, I detain four students.  I release one because she’s threatening to physically assault one of the other detainees, who’s called her a lesbian.

Twice each day since early November, this has been my reality.. 

A glut of junior school students.  Not a bad collective noun for thirteen year olds one doesn’t know with whom one must interact.  What I’ve failed to capture in the above scenario is the abject rudeness of these students.  They are nasty.  They treat me like shit.  And they don’t even know me.  This seems to be the default setting for so many teenagers these days.

Why the glut?  I taught two year 12 classes.  When they finished in November, the reward for all that extra-curricular preparation and marking is that one takes replacement classes.  Fair enough.  Junior and middle school teachers are still teaching and I’m swanning off. 

When I tell non-teachers about replacements/extras/supply teaching they say things like ‘they wouldn’t do that to me’ or, ‘if you don’t like it get another job.’  

And then I get defensive.  Secondary teaching has been hard work, but mostly a great career.  Or has it?  It’s been manic, occasionally depressing, regularly bowel twistingly boring – that’s meetings – and joyous.  A bit Ground Hog Day.  I hope I’m still learning what I need to know.

Next year I’ve swapped my two year 12s for two year 8s. 

Dropping the C bomb

Don’t know much about Mireille, a girl in my year 7 Creative Writing class, but thirteen years ago, someone thought to give her a pretty name.  Her mother, perhaps.  Her mother who now, for whatever reason, lives on the other side of the country.

Mireille is short, physically mature and overweight.  Her permed bleached blonde hair hangs kinkily around her face and shoulders.  There’s a darker row at the parting where the roots are growing out.  Her facial features are regular, and could be considered attractive, if you catch her at the right time.  When she’s not sneering at you.

Mireille is at that point in the discipline handbooks where the ‘goal of her behaviour’ is revenge.  Which translates into doing whatever the hell she wants.

That’s partly why she called me the c word today.  (Weird.  I can’t even bring myself to type it here, although I typed it out in the obligatory discipline report.)  She said it under her breath, but I heard, and I couldn’t let that one go.  Now she’s on a two day suspension.  Dad’s been advised to find her another school because she’s just this side of expulsion.  Very serious.  Not my fault that she’s now at the expulsion stage.  Swearing at me was just the last straw. 

Mireille arrived late to class, ‘announcing’ herself by wearing a livid red cardigan, against the strict uniform rules of the school.

‘But it’s co-old!’ she declaimed, for the benefit of the other twenty-four students, when I asked her to remove it.  School rules require a note, or a detention for uniform transgressions.  ‘I didn’t have anything else to we-ar.’  A loud affronted whine. ‘I stayed at my friend’s last night, orright!’

It wasn’t cold, but I didn’t want to have that centre stage fight over something I didn’t really care about.  I decided to let it go and didn’t issue a detention.  She wouldn’t have cared anyway and probably already had one with a different teacher.

Mireille is fearless, confrontational and powerful.  She has no respect for my teaching status.  ‘I hate all teachers,’ she brags.  It's as if she has no decent, ‘better’ nature to appeal to.  I’ve goaded her into working occasionally but it’s been a waste of time praising or encouraging her.  She wants to be bad; she thrives on disrupting.

Once she wrote a terrific piece.  She’s a natural.  Surprisingly neat – beautiful, careful handwriting, each paragraph in a different colour pen.  Error free.  She’d nailed the writing task, albeit in an abbreviated way.  Of course, eager to encourage her, I was like a seagull on a chip.  Great writing; terrific details, I wrote on her work. Can’t wait to read what happens next!  

‘Nothing happens.  It’s finished.  Why should I bother writing more?  I know how to write already.  I’m really clever.’  This is yelled in my face, in response to my exhortations that she should keep writing because she’s good at it.  And watching her while she wrote it, it was obvious that she enjoyed writing.

‘I don’t want to learn.  Why would I want to be a goody-goody like them?’ She waves a hand towards a row of neat, enthusiastic, well-behaved students.  ‘It’s more fun being bad.’ She’s unafraid of offending them, or anyone

Once she turned up to school with her school skirt hitched up under her large breasts, her school shirt splayed open and knotted at the midriff to showcase her black lace bra.  Like a hooker, really. 

It hasn’t been terrible having Mireille in my class.  Just avoid cornering her; avoid the fight, which she’d inevitably win because she’s no holds barred, like many students these days.

But yesterday, this late in the year, I was under pressure to get the students to complete their ‘Individual Learning Plans’; to reflect on their personal learning goals – what a joke, but that’s another story.  The kids were a bit loud and unfocused as I moved around the room trying to get the job done.

‘I haven’t got any goals.’ Mireille was loud and ostentatious, boldly defying the task, summoning her audience.  Again I decided it wasn’t worth it.  The ILPs are a crock anyway.  So what if she doesn’t have one in her report?  Move on.  There were books she could read but she was happily drawing love hearts and silly pictures with a felt pen.  As long as she wasn’t drawing on the desk I was happy to let it slide.  Twenty-four other students needed my attention, including several other ‘discipline problems’.

Towards the end of the 75 minute period, Mireille was flagrantly breaking rules.  Sharing headphones with another student, she was doing some exaggerated dancing motions, hands in the air, fingers twirling.  Treating me like a fool.  Challenging.  I walked up behind her and her hapless, half-asleep side-kick and plucked the headphones out of their ears.

Mireille, outraged, turned in her seat.  ‘You have no right to touch my property!  If you’ve broken them, I’m suing you!’  This was screamed at me.

‘Hand over the phone, Mireille.’  My voice was calm, assertive.

‘It’s not a phone.  It’s an ipod.’  One to Mireille, but stand back, for I am an expert in the ‘broken record’ technique.  (Thanks, Lee Kantor.)

‘I hear what you’re saying, but hand it over.’

‘No, it’s brand new, you can’t take it.’  She’d zipped it into her uniform pocket.

‘Okay, it’s new, but hand it over.’  Reluctantly she surrendered it.  Feeling pleased that she responded to my third request, I put the device in my office drawer.  She was furious and let fly with the c bomb.

If only she’d called me a bitch.  Could have let that one go through.  Hate my part in this sorry mess which seems so pathetic written down, twenty-four hours later.

Muck-up

“Will you miss us, Miss?” Doe-eyed Year 12 student, Leesha, is all expertly applied foundation and eye-liner, a somewhat sexual Dorothy from Wizard of Oz, spangly red shoes included.

“Yes and no,” I say too quickly.  This is my character flaw; the weakness for which people either love me or hate me.  Don’t mean to be nasty.  I blame my early childhood and my dad who used to scare all the kids in my street.  I do the same, without even trying.  I’m the witch.   

Should have said that of course I’d miss her.  But thirty two years of teaching has taught me that she won’t ‘take’ in my long-term memory.  Some students will, but not the normally shy Leesha.  And I'll read this and wonder who she is.

Leesha isn’t that interested in my response anyway.  She’s bursting with the excitement of  another muck-up day and friends who might be heading out the door without her. She’s glancing surreptitiously at them, perhaps regretting her decision to speak to me.  But her politeness wins out  and she lends half an ear to my response.  I keep it brief, and it’s along the lines of 'as one class leaves, another one begins'.  Started to ask her if she was familiar with To Sir With Love, but saw her young brow furrowing and thought better of it.

After form assembly in the VCE ‘lounge’, Leesha and I walk through the school together and she’s happy to explain that she’d bought her costume ages ago, just for this occasion, on Ebay for $20.  Wish they’d put as much forethought into preparing for SACs and exams as they have into preparing for this “muck up week”.  It’s not one day of mayhem at our school.  It’s three.  Kids are supposed to attend classes.   What a joke.  It’s three days of harmless pranks, or vandalism, however you want to look at it.  Shaving cream, eggs, flour, silly string, noxious substances sprayed from water pistols and fart bombs.

And a bit too much near nudity on the boys’ part.  About six years ago, we had our first almost nudie ‘run through’ at assembly.  A skinny arsed, athletic young man donned a mankini and ski mask and at Monday morning assembly, charged past the principal on the podium, down the steps and out into the incredulous mass of students.  A senior teacher gave chase, but he wasn’t quick enough.  It was hilarious, but we all agreed that the student had gone too far.

Good old days.  This ritual has grown.  Yesterday, as I headed for assembly, I passed the First Aid room where the principal, grinning, had corralled about ten oiled, buff, near naked young men.  During assembly, on cue it seemed, they charged past the principal on the podium, down the steps and out into the unconcerned mass of students.  No one gave chase.  The boys raced one way, then they sauntered back in their g-strings, and stood in their groups, affording the year 7s a cracking view.

Today, I genuinely flinched when a black-hooded, bare – waxed – chested marauder barged into my classroom, where I was reminiscing with a group of students, and held a gun – imitation – in my face.  Tad intimidating, until he handed me his exit form to sign.  It’s the first class he’s attended all term.  “I’m going to get a B for English, Miss,” he says.  Hope he does.  Hmm.

Mixed feelings about this time of year. 

Anger.  Hate some of the punitive vandalism that occurs at this time. 

Frustration.  GAT scores indicate many of our kids could achieve higher marks than they do.   If they’d work harder.

Nostalgia.  Wheels go round and round. 

Loss.  Because I am very attached to many of this year’s students, some of whom I’ve taught for four of their six years of high school.

Freedom.  Because having taught year 12 for all but two years since 1981, I’m not doing it next year.  And, depending on how it feels on the other side focusing on middle school – and whether I can live without the masses of extra marking incurred with year 12 – I may never teach year 12 again.

On The Waterfront and Family Loyalty

It's the pointy end of the VCE year now. Just marked a pile of On The Waterfront essays, as I've written in the previous post, and discovered that many of my students wrote expository essays, appropriate for Creating and Presenting, instead of analytical text response essays. I've been spending a bit of class time, trying to remedy the problem, as one does. We worked on the topic from last year's final exam paper: How important is family loyalty in the film?

Have to concede that initially I found this a little obscure, as did my students, some of whom were freaking out. After showing them a way to deconstruct the essay topic, I decided to have a go myself. In doing so, I found that the topic wasn't obscure at all.

Here's my essay:

Near the exposition of On The Waterfront, Edie Doyle, kneeling at the side of her dead brother, cries “I want to know who killed my brother!” Her family loyalty, her relentless quest for the truth about corruption on the waterfront, initiates Terry’s moral dilemma and his eventual transformation to ‘contender’. Furthermore, Terry’s relationship with his brother, Charley, is central. On The Waterfront is also very concerned with unionism; longshoremen paying a corrupt union that they unfortunately rely on for their survival. The union could be considered a family, of sorts, albeit one subjugated by a tyrannical leader who dispenses ‘largesse’ according to his own ends. The longshoremen must remain loyal to this union to ensure their survival, or so they think.

On the Hoboken wharf, the union could be considered a family upon which the longshoremen depend for survival. Betraying this collective, as Joey Doyle (and Andy before him – ‘that’s like when they called out my Andy’) discovered, is punishable by death. The ironically named Friendly, lurking in his low-shot union quarters, with his well-dressed adherents, rules this family. The longshoremen seem entangled in his system, their tenements seemingly trapped behind a matrix of fire-escape stairs. They are dependent on his dispensing work to them each day, desperately scrabbling for work tokens on the dock. They pay their extortionate dues; accept loans from J.P. Morgan, Friendly’s loan shark. They know they are powerless against Friendly’s corrupt rule. Their loyalty to this union is unwilling, born out of fear and survival needs. This is seen in Pop Doyle’s return to work immediately after his son’s death – ‘I gotta work to pay for the funeral’. With no work token he is forced to borrow from Morgan. Pop Doyle detests the union but pays his dues nonetheless. After thirty years on the wharf he sees no other way.

Perhaps though, it is the loyalty between members of these Hoboken families that is so compelling in this film. Edie Doyle, often filmed in pure, clear light, is almost an avenging angel, defying the constraints of her gender in her pursuit of the truth about her brother’s murder. She galvanises Father Barry to take up the cause – “What kind of a saint hides in a church?” – prompting him to see the longshore as his parish and fight for justice. Further, her burgeoning friendship with Terry which stems from this loyalty to her brother, triggers Terry’s moral development. This is revealed in the cafe as Terry wrestles to understand Edie’s sorrow. “Whatsa matter with you?” he asks, struggling to fathom why she can’t leave the subject alone. Her words, “You would [help] if you could” and her touch, deeply trouble Terry, forcing him to grapple with his conscience. [Brando’s acting is sublime at this point., I think!!] Edie’s loyalty to her brother and her subsequent relationship with Terry is thus a catalyst in his moral transformation.

Moreover, Edie challenges Father Barry to involve himself in the waterfront fight; to care for his people. In this way he connects with Terry, initially when Terry is ‘stool pigeon’ for the union at the meeting at the church. Later, after K.O.’s death, when Father Barry delivers an impassioned sermon from the hold, his words prompt Terry to take a stand, punching Tullio for his interjections and drawing the ire of Friendly, watching from above. Father Barry becomes a paternal guide for Terry, hearing his confession – “I swear I thought they was just going to talk to him” – urging him to confess to Edie and later testify to the Crime Commission. Perhaps, like a father, Father Barry is able to rebuke Terry, knock him to the ground, when Terry tells him to go to hell. Furthermore, he is able to quell Terry’s anger – “I’m gonna take it out on their skulls” – leading him to fight Friendly in court, rather than “like a hoodlum on the docks”. (Ironic, as it turns out.) After Charley’s death, Terry’s respect for Father Barry greatly assists in Terry’s redemption.

Ultimately, though, Terry’s relationship with his brother, Charley, is central to the film. Charley is supposedly Friendly’s ‘brain’, trusted with the financial dealings of the union. He is one of Friendly’s acolytes and has pledged allegiance to the union boss. Initially, he seems to have an easy relationship with Friendly. He was instrumental in ensuring Terry ‘took a dive’ to win a bet for Friendly, “for the short end money” for Terry sadly, when he “coulda been a contender.” Thus he has facilitated Terry’s lesser existence, on the rooftop, hanging out with children in their Golden Warriors jackets. So often Terry is filmed behind chicken wire, highlighting his sense of restriction and entrapment. He is caged like the homing pigeons. He envies them their freedom to feed and fly around, albeit at the mercy of the hawks, hanging around on rooftops ready to pounce. Terry is at first portrayed as an errand boy, a follower, a dupe. This is revealed in the mise-en-scene as he follows Friendly and his men out of their lair on the docks prior to calling Joey out and inadvertently luring him to his death. Yet at this stage Charley has shown some loyalty to Terry, ensuring he gets easy work on the docks as long as he remains ‘D and D’.

One of the most memorable scenes in On The Waterfront is that shot in the back of a car involving Charley and Terry. In this scene, where Charley has been asked to hand Terry over to Jerry G if he threatens to ‘go canary’, we begin to see Charley’s real love for his brother. Charley is charged with taking Terry for a ride to buy his silence. We see Charley’s turmoil as he pulls a gun on his brother. This is emphasised by the disturbing lighting heightening the sense of confused loyalties that Charley faces. As Charley reconciles himself to the ‘bum’ deal he has bequeathed his brother, the soaring legato score underlines his love and emotional pain as Terry reminds him “It was you...you should have taken care of me a little more.” Charley knows he cannot give up his brother to the mob. Charley’s allegiance to Terry and his own consequent sacrifice is pivotal in Terry’s later stance. Indeed it could be said that until he lifts his brother from the hook, almost in an embrace, he does not fully comprehend the magnitude of Edie’s loss.

These family loyalties are central to, and drive the narrative of, this film. Kazan seems to suggest that such relationships override mob rule; that grappling with one’s conscience and seeking moral truth is imperative. Perhaps this aligns with the choices Kazan made: his vindication of ratting out his friends to the HUAC.


Interestingly, I handwrote this essay in between parent interviews. (It was my first parent-teacher night as a part-time teacher, and oh, what a difference. I only saw fourteen families, as opposed to about sixty. How did I do it before? How did my full-time English, Maths and Science colleagues do it last night? Teachers deserve more pay. But I digress.)

Hope the essay was of some use to you. I'm getting my students to identify the three main points in the introduction, then link these to the topic sentences and links - as per TEEL formula - in the body paragraphs. They'll have a hard time doing this in the penultimate paragraph because it's more or less an extension of the previous one.

Think I'm blathering now.

Fraud.

Procrastinate? Moi?

Whilst procrastinating today - avoiding marking again - I achieved the following:

- 9.30 am. With the erudite curiosity of a PhD student, read the small print leaflet in a packet of "Menopause Harmony";
- wrote an email to a cousin in France, who I haven't contacted for sixteen months;
- encouraged, via Edumail, a teaching friend to read several blogs and start her own;
- discovered that T2 Earl Grey tea, brewed in a pot, keeps piping hot and at perfect strength for hours in a thermos, thus obviating the need for a tea cosy, boiled water and forty seconds in the microwave on the second and subsequent cups;
- Googled correct use of the term 'albeit' to confirm that it isn't a replacement for 'despite' but a rather for 'despite being'. (Felt the need to find an appropriate website to share with a Year 12 student who keeps misusing the word);
- discovered, in the Narnian depths of my wardrobe, a cardigan, bought in Italy in 1985. Furthermore, found that said cardigan, worn over a Bonds hoodie, with hood up, precludes the need for a heater in my kitchen while I'm marking, thus saving on heating costs;
- read the side of a packet of Ferro-F-Tabs to realise I shouldn't be taking an iron supplement for more than twelve months without seeking medical attention. Stopped short of Googling, again to find out why;
- put head to one side and with a bemused expression on my face, pondered my need to record all this, thereby further interrupting my marking;
- counted my 'marked' pile - 6 in two hours - and my 'unmarked' - 21;
- devised a numbered checklist so I could cross off a number every time I completed marking an essay to stop myself obsessively counting through the pile - did it anyway to see if I'd forgotten to cross any off;
- considered the tenuous similarity between marking and knitting given that I count off knitted rows in much the same way, except faster;
- visited the furthest rather than the nearest lavatory in the house several times;
- remarked on the curious nexus between the drinking of a litre of piping hot tea from a thermos and the frequency of micturition;
- thought longingly of champagne as I gazed at the flutes in my kitchen dresser. (12.05 pm. Nineteen essays still to mark.)
- Googled, unsuccessfully, to see if a student had cheated on his essay. Quite sure he didn't write it but Google wasn't letting on;
- Experienced an almost orgasmic rush when I realised I had forgotten to cross off essays on my list. I had eleven, not fourteen to go. ('Menopause Harmony' must, as promised, have restored my libido.)
- Made second litre of tea;
- wondered whether I was perhaps overdosing on tea, but congratulated myself on denying another Google opportunity and resuming my marking;
- assigned 'blues' ringtone, on my iPhone, to my son;
- went for two k walk;
- organised my laundry.

Finally completed marking twenty-seven On The Waterfront essays at 4.43. Now I can whinge about having spent my whole day off marking. Sort of.

Fraud.