I was going to let this blog go dormant again until I felt inspired, but then today happened. It was the first day of the new term, a day of professional development so bad I’m still tempted to believe I was Punk’d. Multiple people got professionally angry at each other. A vocational teacher compared the district to an abusive husband. Not a single one of us became a better teacher.

It was the kind of day that makes you lose hope because it reminds you how much is out of your control. But it was also the kind of day that reminded me part of the reason why I came down here in the first place: to satisfy a journalistic impulse, to see what’s actually going on and document it. You can’t make days like today up. Having taught for a semester, I’m not naive enough to believe that I’ll actually have time to write extensively about my job while I’m still doing it. But I need to be keeping better track of my day to day, and this blog seems like a pretty good place to do it.

One last note: a conversation with a very important mentor figure in my life over break strengthened my resolve to be here more than any other encounter since I first drove down to Mississippi in June. It reminded me that I have more emotional capital than any of my students, because I’m neither (a) a teenager, (b) impoverished, or (c) from a broken home. Were I to quit, it would be a tacit admission that the kids are stronger than me, and that’s not fair. I’ve led a charmed life; it’s my turn to take some shit.

“They say you have to harness your personal strengths to become a great teacher. My personal strengths are all relentlessly individualistic in nature: I’m smart, I write really well, I’m fairly well spoken. On the other hand, I have chronic disorganization/ADHD problems, I got through college by procrastinating and staying up all night and being brilliant, and I don’t often find it easy to relate to adults, much less teenagers. I am trying and failing to envision circumstances where those strengths can outweigh those weaknesses, and I’m starting to feel like my personality is somehow wrong for teaching. […] Even now, I’m hesitant to send this email out; I pride myself on being kind of stoic. But I want to put it out there so that whenever we meet next I’m not tempted to act like I’m feeling better than I am. That’s another bad habit of mine.”

So yeah. It’s been… “challenging” isn’t even the right word. Running a marathon is “challenging” (and make no mistake, I couldn’t do it), but there are clear, proven, effective ways to prepare yourself, to succeed. Teaching in the Delta is more like banging your head against a wall all day, every day, hoping the wall breaks before you do. It’s not “challenging;” it’s hard.

I always knew it was going to be hard. That’s part of the reason I signed up. But it’s hard to visualize “hard” when your life hasn’t been especially hard. I’ve struggled mightily, if not always nobly.

There’s my absence, in a nutshell. As I said in my (perhaps ironically dramatic) aforementioned email, I’m not one to throw a pity party for myself, and had I written in here during one of my rough patches, it would have been in the voice of, like, a narcissistic Edward James Olmos: “How can I reach these keeds?” No one wants to read that. I don’t even want to write it.

The good news—though my optimism is probably bolstered by the fact that I don’t have to work for two weeks—is that the emotional roller coaster has evened out considerably. I think I’ve figured out how to live, at least temporarily.

The very first day of school, I posted a quote from Joan Didion’s “The White Album” on the wall behind my desk: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” It’s still there, now joined by nuggets of sometimes downbeat wisdom from Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, David Foster Wallace, and others. (My thinking is that if I can still remember some of the stock inspirational crap plastered all over my high school classrooms, at least one student of mine will take “Nothing disturbs the feeling of specialness like the presence of other human beings feeling identically special” to the grave. But that’s another post.)

I think Didion was being cynical when she wrote that, but I treat it like a mantra anyway. All of it—my job, my kids, my town; the petty theft, the drug busts, the segregation (still); the choir concerts, the holiday parades, the earnestness—all of it seems easier to take, easier to believe in, when it’s part of a greater narrative. In New York I could get by on nihilism. Here I need a dramatic arc, forced or not. The problem I had in November wasn’t that things had stopped mattering. It was that I had stopped telling the stories that made them matter. Sometimes plot is more essential than truth. For the first time in months, I’m excited to find out what happens next.

My “absolute center” has shifted. I spend 50-ish hours per week at school. I live with teachers. I work with teachers. I play with teachers. I don’t mean to suggest that I “live to teach” (I don’t), but teaching is very clearly the sole focus of my life in a way that nothing else ever has been. It’s kind of isolating; my absolute center is so specific and consuming that I sometimes forget no one else shares it.

So I’m being sincere when I ask: is Occupy Wall Street a real thing? Are they being serious? Do people—normal people—care?

That was a leap. Let me back up.

I don’t have a ton of time to read the news during the week and just spent a couple hours catching up with my buddy The New York Times. I’m riveted by this Wall Street business. It feels like a parody of a protest, a formless, shapeless mass of people concerned with injustice who have categorically failed to notice the inherent irony of having the free time and resources to “occupy” one of the most expensive cities in the world. Their discontent is one of the luxuries capitalism affords.

It’s not that their message lacks merit. The only things I know about economics are what The Economist tells me, but the system’s clearly not working right for many, many people in America. I reject and resent alarmism, but we can all agree we’ve seen better days, right?

My enormous problem with Occupy Wall Street, then, is that the overlap between the people having a hipster pow wow in lower Manhattan and the people who the system is actually harming is minimal. I’m not sure the protestors realize this. Rather than fighting for the rights and dignity of the truly down-and-out (like, oh say, the 37% of Marianna, AR, living below the poverty line), Occupy Wall street is infused with a dismaying narcissism and an even more depressing glamour. That inaugural poster had gorgeous art direction.

It’s the work of aimless people, in other words. Which is beautiful! Be aimless! Enjoy your aimlessness! Revel in it! Every young person deserves a time in his or her life when feeling aimless feels right. Hell, one of the reasons I decided to join Teach for America is because I think all children in America are entitled to the privilege of feeling as aimless as I do. The flip side of aimlessness is opportunity.

But there are ways to channel aimlessness. I’ve chosen to work long hours for low pay in a job with an insanely low retention rate. Others are taking time off, traveling, working, living, waiting. All of these options are valid. I mean that. One of the things that most bothers me about Teach for America’s tenor is that it implies everyone is obligated to join or at least help the organization, which is crap. TFA was right for me; TFA would be wrong for many others. Let it be.

It’s not an issue of occupation; it’s an issue of perspective. My “absolute center” has shifted, yeah, but I never want to lose sight of the fact that I chose to shift it. I am the master of my own aimless fate. This is the fatal flaw with Occupy Wall Street: the group’s refusal to acknowledge its own privileged agency, its failure to consider that most people can’t just up and “occupy” a stretch of mega-wealthy land indefinitely. They’re not defending the American dream; they’re living it.

Two good friends from college started an online magazine a couple of months after I left New York: Handlebar. It’s fun, it’s interesting, it’s nice to look at. A+ work all around.

I’ve written for the site three times now: first about legendary Mississippi juke joint Po’ Monkey’s; second about why Kanye West’s self-absorbed exceptionalism is good for America; and last week about the new, awesome, violent movie Drive. Here you go:

Po’ Monkey’s: http://www.handlebarmagazine.com/2011/07/from-four-til-late/

Kanye: http://www.handlebarmagazine.com/2011/08/why-kanye-west-is-good-for-america/

Drive: http://www.handlebarmagazine.com/2011/09/the-verdict-drive/

I posted all of these on Facebook and Twitter as they were published, but I know some of y’all aren’t in the social networking game. (You’re better off for it.) Nothing too exciting, but I said way back at the outset of this blog that I wanted it to serve as a hub for whatever writing I end up doing down here. A month and a half into the job, it’s clear that free time for writing will be scarce, but cranking out 600 words on Drive last week was, honestly, more cathartic and refreshing than the lesson plans I should have been working on instead.

So that substantial post is going to have to wait a little bit longer. Before I go to sleep tonight, I need to pack a bag for my Labor Day weekend in New Orleans, pay some bills, and, oh yeah, finalize what I’m teaching tomorrow.

For now, know that teaching is going well, all things considered. There are highs and lows, but more than anything else it feels sustainable, which is something I had worried about a lot. Overall, I think I weathered the Teach for America Institute storm pretty well, but it wasn’t something I could maintain for 2+ years. The real thing is better, more intuitive, less draining. Although I have to teach more hours during the day, the schedule is more forgiving, and I’m given the space to actually build relationships with my 100-ish students. Even on days where I’m handing out lunch detentions like candy and calling the assistant principal to literally pull students out of my classroom, there are moments of levity: a shy girl wordlessly presenting me with samples of her surprisingly good poetry, an impromptu round of after school quiz bowl.

One of those moments of levity came today during my 10th grade English class, a rowdy but generally lovable bunch. Trying to hammer home the point that in terms of literature, “mood” is how a reader, not the author, feels, I gave the example that the author of a laugh-out-loud funny book probably wasn’t cracking himself up at his writing desk. Then I extended the example to sad books, explaining that just because a story is tragic doesn’t mean its author was depressed while writing it.

Then, stupidly, I asked the class for an example of a really, really sad book. A young man sitting in front raised his hand and said, “You know, that one girl’s diary.”

“You mean The Diary of Anne Frank?”

“Yeah!”

“Okay… Well… Anne Frank probably was actually sad… Because she died… In the Holocaust…”

Then I started laughing, tiredly. Maybe the 10th graders understood the absurdity, maybe they just felt bad for me, but they joined in too, and we shared a nice moment of comic relief. Over the death of Anne Frank. I never said I was a role model.

When I left New York and came to Illinois for that fleeting week in June, I spent most of my free time steeling myself for the grueling Teach for America Institute experience ahead of me. Well, that and drinking downtown. But mostly steeling.

I haven’t spent much of this past week and a half steeling myself. Having lived through Institute and finding it in most ways manageable—ridiculous but manageable—I’ve arrived at a sort of Zen acceptance of the TFA (or teaching in general) cycle. At some point in the near future, I’ll want to die, I’m sure. But clouds part, horizons broaden, dreams come true, and so on and so forth and vomit.

My biggest takeaway from the whole arduous Institute experience (which I’ll tell you about in person sometime, if I haven’t) is that being dedicated and genuine can overcome a whole lot. I was not born to teach. I’m okay at it and getting better all the time, but I’m not holding my breath for my Golden Apple award, or whatever the Arkansas equivalent is.

Instead I hold onto my ability to care. That’s an Oprah word, but I mean it in the least touchy-feely sense possible. I studied journalism in college, which means I value stories, narratives. In Marianna, AR (and Mississippi, and impoverished America in general), there are a wealth of stories to be told that very few people are specifically looking for. That doesn’t mean the stories aren’t worth telling, and what got me through the rougher days of summer Institute was my firm belief that all of those kids had something constructive to eventually share with the world. But first, me.

Most of those kids won’t share those narratives. I have no delusions about that. But Institute was only four weeks. By comparison, the school year feels infinite, which is great but terrifying. Teach for America is kind of a silly organization, but I feel so, so strongly that this is the best thing I could possibly be doing with this fertile, unfocused, post-undergrad stretch of my life. That’s probably not the ringing endorsement that TFA was hoping for, but it’s not something I say lightly.

I got this. But wish me luck.

-I have a job. I will be teaching high school English in Marianna, Arkansas, alongside a crew of 20 or so other Teach for America members in the surrounding Forrest City/Palestine/Marianna region.

-I do not have a house. But I probably will by Wednesday of this week. Stay tuned.

-I’ve finished TFA institute, which is essentially teaching boot camp. It was hard. I taught 14 7th graders at Margaret Green Junior High School in Cleveland, Mississippi. I was lucky. My institute school was literally down the street from my dorm; some friends had to teach an hour or more away. This means I could generally sleep until 6 a.m. or later every morning while others had to be on their buses by 5:55 a.m.

-7th graders are tricky. Institute was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. This all merits its own post, but know that if I haven’t talked to you in six weeks, I had very good reasons.

-I will be in New York for some portion of the next week (TBD) to move out of my apartment (RIP, Ridgewood). I want to see you. Probably.

Reflections on institute, Harry Potter, Kurt Vonnegut, Joan Didion, life after New York, and the achievement gap are all forthcoming. Once I have free time. So maybe not until 2012. Sorry.

I was going to post something snarky like that on Facebook earlier this week but decided against it. One of my post-graduate resolutions is to automatically reject snark if it threatens to obscure an otherwise important point. And I think I may have stumbled onto one of those.

Teaching is, in a word, dispiriting. This is not an admission of defeat or a cry for help. I came into this without an idealistic bubble to burst and, thus, am holding up pretty well, comparatively. But where being one of the few Type B personalities that slipped through the cracks into Teach for America was, at first, something close to blissful, it’s becoming a drag. The legion of Type As that surrounds me is, if nothing else, easily consolable. They cry in the copy center (like, every night), sure, but they also leave our “Diversity, Community, and Achievement” sessions soothed and buoyant. I leave with a distinct sense that, as TFA uses them, “diversity,” “community,” and “achievement” are non-symbols, shorthand for a unique, inspiring language that I can’t understand because it never existed. The Type A folk are on an emotional roller coaster, but those peaks and valleys might be preferable at this point to my own constant, subtle, eminently manageable sense of dread.

Anyway, when “Debaser” came on shuffle in my car Monday morning, I laughed a little, cranked the volume, and drove to school feeling refreshed and cynical. I listened to the song again on the drive home that day—a rough day—and started projecting.

Catchy in an abrasive, not entirely pleasant way, “Debaser” is three glorious minutes of guitar-heavy, antisocial surrealism. The lyrics lean heavily on references to the 1929 Salvador Dalí/Luis Buñuel short film “Un Chien Andalou” (watch it now if you’ve never seen it, but don’t eat first), but the song’s chorus is original, and perfect: “Wanna grow/Up to be/Be a debaser!”

In my previous life (haha) I related to the song the same way every young, white, liberal arts major relates to self-consciously rebellious music: shallowly. “It’s subversive! Neat! Who wants a PBR?” While I’m not going to float some contrived, “my-four-weeks-in-the-Delta-have-changed-my-life” narrative past you, I do think that a song like “Debaser” resonates more deeply when you realize that some things are really, truly worth debasing.

I just wrote a paragraph about all of the odds my students have to beat, but it was very freshman-political-science-major-at-Berkeley, so I deleted it. Long story short, the American education system is actively hurting large swaths of children, and instead of grappling with this in any realistic, painful way, we as a culture still seem to be peddling a version of: “Black kids. Lazy. Amirite?”

The system has failed them. I want them to get an education, grow up, and debase the shit out of it.

But things are happening. Institute is brutal but manageable. My first day of teaching—this past Monday—was fine. Not great, but not a trainwreck either, so I’ll take it. These kids need so much help, and I’m almost certainly not going to be able to give them all they need. But I knew that going in.

It’s been kind of a rough week for TFA morale: student assessments keep rolling in and the enormity of the achievement gap is getting all tangible. I’m doing better at coping with this than most, I think, probably because I’ve always been a cynical bastard. What I struggled most with this week was how alienated I felt from my kids. I’m confident in my ability to keep doing this really hard job even without “saving” everyone, but I’m less confident in my ability to keep doing this without being able to interact with my students on some gut level.

Wednesday was better for a lot of reasons, but mostly because of one student, a typically awkward 7th grader who approached me during a class break to ask if I liked zombie movies.

Of course I do.

In a conversation that lasted maybe two minutes, he told me that he “prefer[s] the original Dawn of the Dead to the remake” (seconded) and sternly corrected me when I said 28 Days Later was one of my favorite zombie movies:

“Mistuh Kennedy*, there aren’t really any zombies in that movie, that’s a virus.”

In little asides he’d deliver to me every time I passed by him the rest of the day, he told me his favorite director is zombie auteur George Romero and he wants to go to film school in New York or California some day. Never mind the fact that no 13-year-old should have seen half of the movies he considers his favorites: I’ll get him into college or die trying.

*Yep, in deep southern it’s “Mistuh Kennedy,” and it’s just as adorable as you’d imagine.

Tonight I’m going to a catfish fry in Greenville and a B.B. King concert in Indianola, but in the meantime I should probably go outside because I haven’t driven my car in daylight since move-in day. But I’ll leave you with my favorite southern story thus far: last night a bunch of us ended up at Backdraft, the classiest of the three local bars, where a middle-aged man at the bar asked if we were with Teach for America. We said we were, and he bought us a round of Wild Turkey shots and walked over to spout pure gold for maybe ten minutes. Lecturing us for coming to Mississippi in June, he said, “In the summertime you gotta go north, in the wintertime you gotta go south. Don’t you know shit about the monarch butterfly?”

At some point in this conversation we found out he’s in the Mississippi House of Representatives. Beats the hell out of Sidney Mathias.