new rain

driving home from oxford tonight - shifting from tom waits to dave van ronk to dr. dre to kanye - i was fixed to the lingering issues of today's classes. ari, sarah, jake and i crammed fits of tired argument in between our respective debt to slumber or the highway. plenty of frustration, conflict, and sadness - at least on my part.

but this is how it's supposed to be, or at least how i'd always choose to have it. worried about the things we'd seen today. fixed to them, and there endless surface. thinking about our children. more importantly, not obsessed with the captive's urge to drink away whatever it was i'd just been subject to for six hours (this was last semester's theme); rather obsessed to keep pressing in my affinity to previous engagement.

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notes on jake's assertion that our level of training at the teacher corps is somehow sufficient for what we need to do in the classroom (i.e. giving us a lesson plan model as something to fall back on, and turning us loose to figure it out on our own) - and that the more pressing issue is to keep on getting competent people into these school buildings, people you can trust to take care of themselves:

- whatever level of success i've developed in the classroom, i can easily numerate stresses and hurdles that could have easily been dealt with through reflection, information, or simulation during the months previous (e.g. gradekeeping and the corollary secretarial work; comprehensive knowledge, engagement, and analysis with both the high school curriculum of my subject area and rigorous engagment with common teaching practices used to employ this curriculum). this would have enabled me to (a) pear down predictable and managable stresses, easing assimilation to the classroom environment and boosting my proficiency level once things started to click, (b) given me a head start on figuring things out on my own, seeing that my desires for self improvement are nearly identical now to what i had worried they would be, and i barely have time or energy to do serious development in these areas on my own right now.

- our preparation is akin to telling a trial lawyer that there is something called an "argument," that he or she must have, that this argument must have "points," and these points must have "supporting evidence," that supporting evidence has certain definable qualities, and that there is a formal order to actualizing this argument in a court room. then, assuming that since this young, excited person must have some detached knowledge of what it means to be a lawyer (and basing one's theory of teaching on half-ass meta-reflection on how one was himself teached is just as credible as claiming that we know how to be lawyers because we've seen them on tv), sending him/her into the fray, with the head-patting assurance that it'll be difficult in the beginning, but he/she will adjust.

- regardless of the sufficiency of the aforemention training, and extending the undoubtedly soon-to-be flattened lawyer comparison: there is no Lexis-Nexus for teachers, no OED, no Wikipedia. there is no autonomous hub of fluent and necessary industry information and data. almost across the board, even if we do figure out how to survive in a classroom, we have little breathing room - outside of whatever contract-locked materials or industry trend program we're tied to - to self-improve. to figure things out.

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starting soon, i will try and profile some of my kids. but i'll probably continue to do whatever it is i do when i intend to talk about my classroom, and end up talking about my classes.