rock you like an overused cultural metaphor

e-mail cut-and-paste session, dealing with katrina's effect on jackson, and returning to school after the storm.

here's a post-katrina status e-mail i sent on sept 5:

when katrina made its way to jackson on its trek north through ms, it was still a level 1 hurrricane. fortunately, jackson was on the western side of the eye, so - while we did get hit by a hurricane - we were spared the brunt of the storm. i had the rare opportunity of sitting on my porch and staring in awe as 60-80mph winds tested the trees in our neighborhood.

in the aftermath, 97% of jackson was without power (mostly due to fallen trees), and about 2,500 structures withstood some sort of damage (again, mostly due to fallen trees). strangely, my friend ari's house was in the lucky 3% with power, so my roommate and i bagged up our refrigerator and headed over to his place for a lot of trivial pursuit and air conditioning. within 2 days, our house got its power back (right now, about 20,000 jackson houses are still in the dark) - and this morning the boil water alert was lifted for the whole city.

as for the schools, all of last week was cancelled - as no one had power, and the roads were littered with fallen trees, power lines, etc. this week, we'll start on thursday if we're lucky, but we've got to deal with the gas shortage (no gas in jackson for a day or two last week, then 4+ hr lines at the stations that were open, and now a little easier), the fact that the district lost a lot of food when the cafeteria freezers/refrigerators lost power, and the perhaps thousands of gulf coast refugee children that need to be accomodated for the near future.

as for post-post-katrina status, sent this evening (sept 18):

the thursday-friday school week after the hurricane were my two worst days of teaching, by far. students had been out of contact with classroom behavioral norms for quite a while, and it was like day 1 - but with less direction/preparation.

things calmed last week, and i'm getting closer to having systems that work: systems for classroom management, systems for planning lessons, systems for conducting class. at this point, it seems absurd that we as a culture romanticize the incredible burden of teaching as a "vocation," or "calling," instead of restructuring the teaching culture/process so as to not nearly kill young teachers, and/or desensitize a large number of those that survive. that is, i'm not particularly convinced that the honorableness of my intentions or actions eclipses the intensely uphill battle i'm facing on nearly all fronts. it seems more reasonable that this situation gains a lot of its mythic value as an act of cognitive dissonance - which may go a long way in setting up the widespread reluctance to change or self-criticize that is observed in many areas of education, and is a wonderful counterbalance to teaching's strange cultural currency: as an afterthought of a profession [do we honestly think of teachers as professionals?], as a low-priority economic space in the public sphere [look at the state/local/national budgetary struggle and/or dismissal over education; look at salaries], and as a highly feminized social performative [agreeable, primary and middle school teaching is most strongly seen as a women's job space, while post-secondary education is seem as a more masculine sphere, with high school is somwhere in the middle. yet, even at the level of the post-secondary, the analytic and creative intellect are vastly de-masculinized when divorced from property-accruing production. consider the social concept of a nerd, or the effeminate poet, which are stigmatizing agents more or less meant to protect the physical, unthinking/feeling predominance of the phallus (thinking being something above and beyond the effort level of "common sense"). an interesting historical enacting of this is the late-19th century struggle to establish the study of literature (i.e. not classics) as a respectable academic pursuit (i.e. a man's work), which resulted in a highly rationalized/scientified approach to the value of a poem or novel. this was enhanced in the post-wwii g.i. bill world, where a bunch of all-american boys wanted their god-given bachelor's degree, and a bunch of tweed coat/dandy professors had to teach them percy bysshe shelley and jane austen. and along came gertrude stein...]

(i imagine the citizens of "anonymous" will jump on me for the above. i'll start you off: "how dare you ____________")