carpet guy, you picked all the wrong answers. That gold runner is going to look ridiculous. No, says Louise, you’ll never be able to walk us. Can I reinvent myself? I want to be able to. But what if I can’t?
I want to be able to handle all of this. I want my dogs to respect me and listen to me when we go out for walks. I want my son to see me as a strong matriarch. Years from now I want him to say, “When I was growing up, you didn’t mess with my mom.” But can this happen? Can I be this person that I have never been before?
The Great Gatsby
ends with “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Previous to this year I always asked myself, why does Fitzgerald use the word
we
, as if this is something we all do? This isn’t something we all do. Not everyone wants to go back in time. Not everyone sees only the past as the happiest times of his or her life. And the word
we
almost sounds like it’s Fitzgerald talking and not really the narrator at all.
When I read this now I know what he’s talking about. This is my life. This line is my whole life, right now at this moment. A boat against the current of time. I know full well that I should be going in one direction, but subconsciously my mind is in the other. I come home from work, another day on the calendar, but all I can think about are the days of months before. I sit in the driver’s seat and all I can think about is what my life was like when I was in the passenger’s seat. I can’t reinvent myself if all I want to do is go back. Unlike Gatsby, I know I can’t repeat the past. But like the Stewarts, like Ashley, like Suzanne, like Gatsby, like so many other people, today, all I want to do is go back.
october
There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet.
— RALPH WALDO EMERSON,
NATURE
today in my ninth-grade English class we are practicing how to make an outline. I thought I would be on maternity leave by the time we got to the nonfiction unit, but here I am, nine months plus, getting my kids started on how to read informational texts and take quality notes. Because everyone is researching something different, I give them a sample set of notes that we can all use as a class. We read through the sample notes and talk about what common themes we see throughout the research. We have to think of three categories and we have to use ten facts from the notes for our outline.
The sample notes happen to be about how and why teens succeed (and don’t succeed) in high school. These notes discuss how to be a successful high school student. In one part theresearcher found an article about what holds students back from achievement. There are several lines about how low-income students are statistically low achievers because they get to school with a lower vocabulary than their higher-achieving, higher-income peers. Now let me remind you, it is eight o’clock in the morning. Hands usually don’t go up this early. But this morning something has struck a chord in a few students.
“First of all,” I ask, forcing the class to be active readers, “what does it mean to come from a ‘low-income’ home?” Easy question, but I ask to make sure we are all on the same page. Matt Davis raises his hand. Matt did his summer reading project on a book called
The Cheat
, where a group of students try to cheat on a standardized test. During his presentation he said he did relate to the book because when he was in the second grade he cheated on a spelling test. He said that he used to think that all kids who wore glasses were smart, so he copied off of a kid who wore glasses. He got every word wrong. That was the last time he cheated.
“ ‘Low income’ means that the parents don’t make a lot of money. It means that they can’t afford certain things.” I nod. If we had more time, I would press his answer. I would ask, what does a lot of money get you, what
I want to be able to handle all of this. I want my dogs to respect me and listen to me when we go out for walks. I want my son to see me as a strong matriarch. Years from now I want him to say, “When I was growing up, you didn’t mess with my mom.” But can this happen? Can I be this person that I have never been before?
The Great Gatsby
ends with “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Previous to this year I always asked myself, why does Fitzgerald use the word
we
, as if this is something we all do? This isn’t something we all do. Not everyone wants to go back in time. Not everyone sees only the past as the happiest times of his or her life. And the word
we
almost sounds like it’s Fitzgerald talking and not really the narrator at all.
When I read this now I know what he’s talking about. This is my life. This line is my whole life, right now at this moment. A boat against the current of time. I know full well that I should be going in one direction, but subconsciously my mind is in the other. I come home from work, another day on the calendar, but all I can think about are the days of months before. I sit in the driver’s seat and all I can think about is what my life was like when I was in the passenger’s seat. I can’t reinvent myself if all I want to do is go back. Unlike Gatsby, I know I can’t repeat the past. But like the Stewarts, like Ashley, like Suzanne, like Gatsby, like so many other people, today, all I want to do is go back.
october
There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet.
— RALPH WALDO EMERSON,
NATURE
today in my ninth-grade English class we are practicing how to make an outline. I thought I would be on maternity leave by the time we got to the nonfiction unit, but here I am, nine months plus, getting my kids started on how to read informational texts and take quality notes. Because everyone is researching something different, I give them a sample set of notes that we can all use as a class. We read through the sample notes and talk about what common themes we see throughout the research. We have to think of three categories and we have to use ten facts from the notes for our outline.
The sample notes happen to be about how and why teens succeed (and don’t succeed) in high school. These notes discuss how to be a successful high school student. In one part theresearcher found an article about what holds students back from achievement. There are several lines about how low-income students are statistically low achievers because they get to school with a lower vocabulary than their higher-achieving, higher-income peers. Now let me remind you, it is eight o’clock in the morning. Hands usually don’t go up this early. But this morning something has struck a chord in a few students.
“First of all,” I ask, forcing the class to be active readers, “what does it mean to come from a ‘low-income’ home?” Easy question, but I ask to make sure we are all on the same page. Matt Davis raises his hand. Matt did his summer reading project on a book called
The Cheat
, where a group of students try to cheat on a standardized test. During his presentation he said he did relate to the book because when he was in the second grade he cheated on a spelling test. He said that he used to think that all kids who wore glasses were smart, so he copied off of a kid who wore glasses. He got every word wrong. That was the last time he cheated.
“ ‘Low income’ means that the parents don’t make a lot of money. It means that they can’t afford certain things.” I nod. If we had more time, I would press his answer. I would ask, what does a lot of money get you, what
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