1/31/2007

I don’t know if there are any parents out there, but if there are, just let me start by saying I’m so, so sorry.

I have corrupted your children’s minds with the disgusting filth known as “literature.”

As I mentioned yesterday, we’ve spent the past day or two collecting “Holdenisms,” as we try to nail down what it is that makes Holden sound like Holden. We’re trying to define what it means to have “voice” in writing.

Well, today we took our lists of Holdenisms and set out to describe our weekends in the voice of Holden Caulfield. This, predictably, led to a lot a bizarre accounts of trips to the Fashion Place mall and teenage girls’ sleepovers, all told through the eyes of a depressed, snarky 16-year old in the late 40’s. It was a lot like that scene from Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure where Socrates and Billy the Kid and Napoleon go out for ice cream.

This was some pretty bad stuff, but that wasn’t the corrupting part. If you’ve ever read Catcher, you know that the mother of all Holdenisms is the word “goddam”(sic). Last semester, in Matt Thomas fashion, I figured I’d just give the writing assignment and see what happened. Well, what happened was a “goddam” mess. Many students profaned right past the spirit of Holden and instead channeled the voice of an old drunk pirate with Turrett’s syndrome. I’ll just let you imagine the old guy talking about his trip to the mall, and all the divinely cursed things he saw there.

So this semester I wrote up on the board that there was a limit of 5 “goddams” per writing, and exhorted the class to use them wisely and to the maximum effect. Judge for yourselves the “effect” in the following passages:

“This weekend I slept and played Insane Aquarium on Yahoo!, but the goddam aliens killed all my goddam fish.”

“I slept through the last 5 minutes of church. Then I went home and watched some more goddam movies.”

Ugh. I’ve got more, but I think you get the idea. Anyway, everyone seemed to really get into the spirit of the activity and it was great. We’ve got a whole bunch of li’l Holdens running around the school.

After writing and sharing, we read Catcher up to page 61, leaving 16 year-old Holden alone and depressed in the Edmont Hotel, which, he says, is full of morons, perverts, and “screwballs.” If this isn’t uplifting literature, I don’t know what is.

Yeah. Maybe I don’t know…

Mt

Quote of the day: “This book is pointless and profane, but it teaches us a lot about life.” Matt Thomas

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1/30/2007

I can never tell if it’s tension or boredom.

The reading we did today in Catcher is very intense, but in a quiet sort of way. Today’s reading reveals for the first time how obsessive Holden really is. He says he gets so worried about things that he needs to go to the bathroom, but he’s too worried to go. That’s clinical. And he spends all of today’s reading being nervous about what his roommate Stradlater (“a sexy bastard”) is going to do with Jane Ghallagher in that “damn Ed Banky’s car.”

Were students nervous for Holden, or bored? I’ll tell you, this whole part makes me nervous. Not only were guys back then all too willing to ignore any protests a girl put up (like that’s changed…), Holden reveals just enough of what he knows about Jane’s past to make us think that she might be particularly vulnerable to the overpowering advances of a jerk like Stradlater. And it would do her some real emotional damage, too.

And I also happen to know, since I’ve read the book 6 times, that Holden’s fear of what might have happened to Jane that night is a big part of what keeps him from ever getting in touch with her through all his adventures after he leaves school. In some ways, she seems like the only person that could really help him (at least, he might think so), but in his mind she could only help him if she’s still the Jane who keeps all her kings in the back row–not the Jane who is forced into some kind of degraded maturity by a jerk in the back seat of a car.

This is pretty important stuff that happens today, under the surface. Were students feeling the tension, or was it boredom that weighed their heads down? Comments, you guys?

Anyway.

Today we took a quiz on the parts of speech. If you missed class today and are reading this, come see me during project period and you can take the quiz.

After that, we reviewed yesterday’s discussion about voice, and talked about how we might apply some of those terms to writing.

I suggested that one way to start talking about voice would be to make a list of “Holdenisms” while we read. These would be words, phrases, mannerisms, etc., that Holden uses again and again in his narration of the events in Catcher. So while I read (to page 46), students used a two-sided ledger sheet to write down phrases from the book on one side, with their comments about Holden’s attitude or emotional state as revealed by his language on the other side. This is one way to start getting at “voice” in the written word.

Tomorrow, we’ll swap Holdenisms, and then the class will get to try their hand at writing a little story from their own lives in the style of Holden. We’ll have a whole “goshdarn” class of little Holdens. Hold onto your hats and glasses.

Mt

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1/29/2007

So, what was up with this? I had been reading Catcher out-loud to the class for about 15 minutes this afternoon when I finally noticed the piercing hiss of the Ipod turned up to eardrum massacring levels. I managed to look up long enough to identify a student in the front row just sitting there, plugs in ears, staring back at me. Why the ‘tude? (That’s short for “attitude.” In case you’re old and don’t know, that’s how kids these days talk.) So I got immediately enraged, but for some reason instead of my usual incredulous and hurt yelling, I just calmly kicked the kid out and told him I would mark it a truancy and we’d talk tomorrow. Of course, I can’t mark a kid for sluffing if he’s there. I mean, I kicked him out. He wanted to be there, for some reason. But I keep wondering–what must the rest of the class think of my bizarrely calm show of force? I don’t like to be that way, and it goes against all my better instincts (and own attitude about school) to treat being in class as some sort of a “privilege,” but that’s what it must have seemed like this afternoon. Weird. Will this kid or anyone else push me like that again? Will my lack of apparent emotion make them think I don’t care? I guess I think the appearance of calm, combined with the relative severity of kicking a kid out, is freakier than a mere show of anger.

My inclination is to believe that that this kid’s behavior is a reaction to something crappy going on that probably has nothing to do with me. As a teacher, is it wise for me to add the embarrassment of getting kicked out of class to all the other crap the kid might be experiencing? Or could it be that this kid is simply an attention-starved jerk?

Well, what can I say. I was mad. I get mad sometimes. I’ll apologize and ask for an apology tomorrow. At least there were only three minutes of class left when all this went down. Ha–some punishment! Being forced to leave class three minutes early… Pitiful. (My discipline regime, that is.)

Anyway.

Today was all about “voice.”

Okay, we did spend 5 minutes reviewing parts of speech–see last week’s posts for that info. That stuff was SO last week. Except that we’re having a quiz on it tomorrow. Know your parts of speech!

But we spent most of our time talking about actual voices, listening to several different songs, and discussing several aspects of voice, including:

• Pitch (high or low?)
• Texture (rough or smooth?)
• Rhythm (fast or slow?)
• Volume (loud or soft?)
• Tone (does ithave tone?; is it simple or complex, “poly-tonal”?)

We listened to a wide variety of music, each song featuring a singer with a highly distinctive voice. Here are a few of the songs we listened to:

“A Rose for Emily,” by The Zombies

“Unison,” by Bjork

“Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” by The Beach Boys

“Between the Bars,” by Elliott Smith

“Hoboken” by Operation Ivy

“No Surprises,” by Radiohead

“Lowside of the Road,” by Tom Waits

For each of these songs, we analyzed the voice for the qualities listed above, and tried to answer the questions: What emotion or message is the singer trying to convey with their voice? How do pitch, texture, rhythm, volume, and tone affect the emotional content?

Then we started to connect these aspects of literal voice to the figurative sense of voice each writer has in their writing. Whether young writers know it or not, they all have a voice, and can use some of the tools listed above to control the emotion and message of their writing.

The Catcher in the Rye is famous for its strong sense of voice, coming from its author, J.D. Salinger, through his protagonist, Holden Caulfield. We’ll be analyzing Holden’s voice as we read it, starting tomorrow when we make a list of “Holdenisms”: words, phrases, structures that Holden uses again and again in his narration. With that list in hand, we’ll all be able to write like little Holdens. Hopefully by imitating another voice, we’ll learn something about our own authentic voices.

FYI, we read to page 32.

Mt

Quote of the day: “Would you like to leave?” Matt Thomas

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1/26/2007

Yesterday I went to a fast food restaurant for lunch. I patronize this particular establishment not for its food, nor its ethical stand on the treatment of animals being raised for human consumption, but rather for its comfortable furniture. See, I don’t go to lunch to eat; I go to lunch to read. So it’s all about the furniture.

As I was sitting there drinking a soda and reading Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner (which is super good), I couldn’t help but be distracted by a rather vigorous discussion happening between two young punks at the table next to me. One of the young men, his 10-inch purple hair spikes trembling with enthusiasm, spoke forcefully about how judgmental and closed-minded “society” has become; how old people look at perfectly respectable youths such as themselves and judge them to be hapless, drug-addled so-and-so’s. (Okay, I’m paraphrasing.)

As this young squire made his worthy points, I suddenly noticed someone was staring at me. In fact, there was a madly-grinning face two inches from mine. Our cheeks would probably be touching if not for the plate glass window between us. I turned my head and was staring straight into the beaming eyes of a little girl. Okay, not exactly “little.” Despite her very young face, she must have been about 5 feet tall, although she was stick-skinny, a fact emphasized by her skinny/ wide bell-bottom pants. It took only a moment or two–maybe it was something about how long she held the gaze, how widely she smiled, or something else–but it suddenly became obvious that she was mentally handicapped.

I’m not one of those people who praise Jesus for sending oracle-like retarded kids to us “normals” to make us feel humble and grateful. I feel bad for mentally handicapped people, and I sort of feel like I want to try to make them feel happy and protect them. But I have to admit that there was something striking and profoundly beautiful about this girl’s smile. It seemed to me to be a perfectly genuine and simple show of joy. It moved me.

Then her “handler” ushered her along with an apologetic look. Following behind was a long line of about 12 more handicapped kids with about 25 adults to keep them “contained.” As soon as the glass door opened you could hear all sorts of excited exclamations and joyful hoo-hooing.

My attention immediately turned to the punks, curious to see how they would react. Something I wonder almost every day here at East Hollywood is why kids are so conventional and, well, conservative. I know a lot of you kids and adults out there are wondering, how I can look at the East Hollywood crowd and call it conventional? Well, it is, in its own way. A standard of appearance and behavior is set by a few powerful thought leaders at this school, or perhaps a plurality of the semi-cool kids, and then everyone else is judged by those standards. The vast majority of kids are happy to adopt the standard and judge themselves, and others, by their adherence to it. That sort of top-down definition of cool is as conservative and conventional as it gets. TRUE weirdness, which, in my mind, is the weirdness of those who can’t or won’t control how weird they are, is shunned just as much by the “counter-culture” crowd here as it is by conservative adults in the suburbs.

So I turned to the philosophical punks to see what they would do. Would they laugh in the sad/happy faces flashing them those too-broad smiles? Would they vocalize a few sarcastic hoo-hoos? Or would they embrace, even celebrate, this pure show of weirdness?

The loud, spikey punk stopped talking and watched as a few of the kids came in. One kid in particular escaped the cordon of adults and ran over to look at the punk’s interesting hair. The punk, getting his hackles up a little, looked him full in the face, and the handicapped kid returned his gaze without a flinch. After a full 15 seconds, they both broke into a smile at the same time. I looked around to see if the fast food restaurant was filming this for a feel-good commercial to be aired during the next O-lame-pics, but they weren’t. This was real. The punk let the kid touch his hair, and yelled “Back off!” at the adult that tried to wrangle the kid back into the fold.

It was nice. Thank you, non-judgmental punks. Kids of EHH, learn from them, and from the attitude (or lack of attitude) of the handicapped kids. There are many truly weird kids among us. Get to know them! Embrace them! Learn from them! They may not be oracles from the gods, but they know something about authenticity that you should learn. Because you are one of the weird kids–we all are–you may just be afraid to show it.

ANYWAY.

Today in class we refreshed our memories on the parts of speech. Here are our working definitions:

– Noun: person, place, or thing

– Verb: action words; what the subject “does”

– Adjective: describes stuff (nouns)

– Adverb: describes verbs (and often ends in –ly)

We went kind of deep into the discussion of why words mean anything. What we’re trying to do right now is to build up some ideas about words that can help us understand and perfect sentences, paragraphs, and essays. In particular, we talked about VERBS. We noticed that verbs can be conjugated according to time and subject. (For example, the1^st-person, singular, present tense of the verb “to be” is “I am.”) We also noted that the un-conjugated form of a verb in English always starts with “to,” as in “to sleep, to dream, to die.” This basic form of the verb is called the “infinitive.”

Then we played the game “What am I,” in which each student got a part of speech pasted to their forehead and had to go around the room asking “What am I?” A very profound question indeed. The other students had to give an example of their part of speech until the asking student figured out whether they were noun, verb, adjective, or adverb.

After that we read Catcher in the Rye, to about page 20.

We’ll be having a couple of Catcher quizzes next week, and don’t forget that the reading list is due on Monday.

Happy weekend,

Mt

Quote of the day #1:

“What am I?”

“You are yellow.”

Quote of the day #2:

“On this earth, there is time!”

“Uh, Matt? Your clock’s frozen.”

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1/25/2007

How do people find out what their interests are?

I mean, for people who don’t just naturally know what they are interested in, what makes the lights turn on?

A lot of adults get by with no real interests. They don’t hunger for information about a particular topic, and they have no desire to hunt through fiction looking for personalities and events that unlock some aspect of their own imaginations.

But kids. They’re supposed to be interested in stuff. They’re supposed to exist in a wonderful fairyland of dreams and fancy where dull actuality carries precious little influence. Isn’t that why they forget to do their homework and leave their coats on busses and get to work late and and and…

Today in class we started the most important assignment I give all year: A worksheet that guides students in the creation of their own personal reading lists–a list of books that contain the information and stories that each individual student most wants to read about. A list of books the individual student is interested in. It’s amazing to watch students who have no apparent interests (or who don’t realize what their interests are) attempt to complete this assignment. They contort themselves this way and that way, they complain that the instructions are confusing–which they are, to people who aren’t hungry for knowledge. What every student in my class most needs are interests. Will this activity help with that? A young teacher can hope, I suppose…

Even though the activities on the worksheet are pretty limited, if combined with human resources (me, our school librarian, the excellent YA librarian at the SLC public library), any student who goes through them all should have a pretty nice list of high-interest stuff to read for the next 3 months.

For you students out there, this class will require an outside reading book to be completed about every 2-3 weeks. If you weren’t here, download the handout and go through it step by step, paying close attention to the instructions for each section. Email me any questions you have.

If you were here, and just happen to be checking out the blog today, I’d really like to know what you thought about all of this. Did you learn any new ways of finding books? Did you feel excited to be able to find books that you would like? Was the whole thing confusing and pointless? Do you have any interests? If not, what are you going to do about it?

My experience so far here at EHH is that students generally like to read on their own. This might surprise a lot of adults. I hope this list will help you guys find even better stuff that rewards your reading efforts over the next few months.

The completed worksheet is due on Monday. We also started reading Catcher in the Rye. Most classes got to about page 10. If you weren’t here, take a trip to the library, pick up the book, and stay with us.

Mt

Quote of the day: “I’m interested in gore.” Dylon M.

Downloads:

Personal reading list worksheet

1/24/2007

Today is my lovely wife’s birthday. Celeste, we salute you and wish you many of the happiest possible returns.

Today in class, after we finished reminiscing about Celeste and her birthday, we got to work with the serious business of getting to know each other. Everyone got to read their community-effort introduction survey, and there were many hilarious and informative results. Many thanks to students, both dull and witty, who made my day with such utterances as:

“If I had a thousand dollars, I would buy a thousand cakes.”

“If I had to pick a favorite barnyard animal, I would have to pick the puppy.”

A running theme to our introductions seemed to be the students’ overwhelming preference for Arbor Day over all other holidays. Go figure. And God bless you, John Denver, wherever you are. You were a beautiful man with a thin piercing voice, flowing golden locks, and an eclectic taste in eyewear. Plant a tree, indeed.

For most of the classes, after we finished getting to “know” each other, we went over my disclosure (attached) and I sent it home. Students must return the disclosure signed by a parent or guardian by tomorrow for 10 points.

Tomorrow, we’ll get along with the serious business of learning by completing what I seriously consider the single most important assignment of the students’ high school careers: the creation of a reading list. We’ll also start reading The Catcher in the Rye. If you’re not excited,you should be. Trust me. I’m a teacher.

Until then, enjoy the disclosure, and ponder the quote of the day.

Mt

Quote of the day: “My friend says he wants to be an author. He wants to be famous, but not known. I said, ‘Like J.D. Salinger?’ And he said, ‘Who’s that?’” Jeremy H.

Downloads:

9th grade disclosure document

10th grade disclosure document

Hello! and Day 1

My name is Matt Thomas, and today is the first day of our new term here at East Hollywood High School where I teach Language Arts to 9th- and 10th-graders.

East Hollywood High School is a small charter school (“charter” school: No district, yeah! No access to millions of dollars of property taxes, boo!) located in…wait for it…Salt Lake City, Utah. Okay, Sundance started last weekend, so–for this month at least–situating the nation’s only high school focused on training film professionals on the shores (some might say “coast”) of our nation’s largest inland sea (shut up, geographers–I know I’m wrong in my facts, but I’m right in my heart) isn’t as absurd as it might seem.

This blog is primarily intended for you, my students currently enrolled in Language Arts 9 and 10, as well as the occasional web-surfing grad student from Finland or Shanghai housewife looking to improve her English. We welcome you all. Be warned that I am a first-year teacher and also have a somewhat “perverse” sense of humor; many of the activities I plan and conduct in class are created with the intention of precipitating amusing situations for me to write about, and are therefore frequently retarded. I apologize to the nation’s youth and to their parents.

But then again, if I were really sorry, would I keep doing it?

Oh yeah–the site might also provide any interested observers with a snapshot of life in an “alternative” school. Our school has about 350 students and 15 or 16 full time faculty and administrators. I know the names of about two-thirds of the students at this school. My class sizes range from 9 to 25. With its reduced scope and size, this school is a real alternative to the massive feedlots of education that surround us.

But what difference does it make? Well, read for yourself.

To all students, welcome. Here’s what we did today:

1-23-2007

We started with a little guided meditation which took us deep into our primitive lizard brains to formulate a vision of the perfect classroom. Students got comfortable, pictured their typical morning, and then saw themselves entering this class on the “perfect” day. I had them imagine what activities we did in class, what we read, what we talked about, etc.

When I snapped my fingers and the students awoke from their stupor, I quizzed them on what they had “seen.” I’m not quite sure why we were doing this, although I’m quite certain it was a good idea. Superficially, I was hoping to get some ideas about what the class would like the class to look like. I had my last class fill out evaluations on the last day of the term (last Friday) and they had some really good ideas, which made me wonder if it might make a little more sense to get the feedback earlier in the semester.

Most of the suggestions had to do with providing a high-continental style breakfast with gourmet coffees. I appreciated and shared these pipe dreams, but was unable to make any promises. Other ideas included “laughing a lot,” talking about “stuff,” and using cell phones. Hmm. Aim higher, nation’s youth. You could have had it all , but you sold your birthright for a mess of cell phone requests.

Anyway, then I led masterfully into a discussion of how we might attain some of our dreams for this class, specifically, what RULES might be required. There were a few heartfelt pleas for respect, which I appreciated. In second period, Adam and Richie led a wonderfully comprehensive discussion about whether to allow nocturnal handstands. (That’s not a euphemism–don’t ask me how it came up.) At first I didn’t really understand how the issue related to our Language Arts class, particularly because our class does not convene “after hours,” so to speak. But they resolved the issue in a civilized manner (no offense to the savages) and we were able to negotiate a compromise (the rule was stricken from the record and Adam, who had suggested it, was publicly humiliated).

Then I presented my own rules: No cell phones (multi-tasking is bad for English class); specific words that are too offensive for classroom discussions (although sometimes appropriate for creative writing); and of course the whole “respect” thing. It’s kind of weird how many students know this word “respect” and have obviously heard it uttered on countless first days of school. It has definitely sunk in for some kids, but others regularly sacrifice “respect” for other behaviors that must satisfy personal needs for attention or something. I don’t know. Anyway, we talked a little about that, how it’s not really a rule but a principle that informs all we do.

(On a side note, Sonia, the delightful Salvadorian woman who cleans the school after the kids are gone, stops by my room each evening for a little Spanish chat, the running theme of which is how disrespectful kids in this country are, and what she would do to them if they were HER kids. These chats always make me re-evaluate my own natural inclinations to “understand and excuse,” and I think I’ve actually become more of a hard-ass disciplinarian in class thanks to Sonia.)

Finally, we began our “get-to-know-you” activity, which consisted of a questionnaire I crafted in 12 parts (attached) which we filled out in a curious, totally counterproductive way: A student would answer one question at a time and then pass it along to the next person. The first question asked for the student’s name, so each individual questionnaire became a group effort at creating a new identity for the first student who responded. None of the classes got to the point of sharing them yet, much less to the psychological point of understanding the purpose of the activity, and I don’t blame them. If anything, the main point of doing stuff like this is to introduce kids to the idea that most things in life and English class have no point, and that’s actually a good thing. I’m hoping that students took many liberties with the “truth” and produced hi-lariously absurd pieces of collaborative writing. The students will use the sheet with their name on it to “introduce themselves” tomorrow.

Quote of the day: “Gilligan gives me my answers.” Dylon M.

Download:

1st day questionnaire