Ode

Marianthelibrarian's Blog

https://ischoolblogs.sjsu.edu/info/professormarianthelibrarian/

Pedagogy, Politics, & Professional Practice

Build the Future, Fund the Fight

By this time, I hope you heard your union right!
Right? Public education under attack
You know it’s always time to fight back
Never with guns or knives
Cause teachers know what makes us wise
We use intellect, boycotts, and strategize
Sometimes do a dance
For critical thinking
Because everyone learns differently
But we all want the same thing
Collective bargaining, not begging
Health benefits, retirement
A profession!!!
It doesn’t matter what you win
If they always take it back
History of UTLA
There should be a test
But we are all inclusive
Even if you don’t score
We don’t show you the door
Cause we are in this together
Join the scene
The second largest school district in the nation
Is no vacation
But it is a party of rigor and learning
Equity and access
Vote yes for our dues
Think of it as a monthly tithe
To bridge the gap between rich and poor
We appreciate you and so much more
Remember you are the union
The students are the future
This is 2016
Marty McFly, Hollywood, it’s all here
Let us not forget the American Dream
Is not always what it seems
But we strive for a better place
Other than outer space.
Rodda Act you are alive and well today
Let’s keep it that way.

The Unicorn

For Jose

When I was young,
I loved unicorns.
Those horns contained magic:
the power to render poisoned water potable
and to heal sickness.
I collected them~
a stuffed one from our local dime store,
so large it took up my bed.
My Little Pony had an array
of purple and pink
unicorns to collect.
I lost my unicorns years later
when my mother lost her foot to diabetes,
chopped off from infection,
Julie decided to
dump talismans I held dear
from our childhood home.
We lose things,
but new things come in.
A student in a wheelchair
is hesitant to use the assistive technology,
which sits on his head
so he can type what is on his mind
to the computer screen.
A unicorn among horses,
he does not want to stand out.
How can I convince him of the truth
of Mandela’s words,
“Even in prison
a man can be quite free.”
We are not limited to this
physical form.
When Lara was killed in a car accident,
our family changed forever.
Two horns down to one~
her mortal coil shuffled off while mine still spun.
Let us support you,
my unicorn,
for we all have horns
which seem out of place,
but which hold magic,
holding space for the next step here on earth.

Cracker

Isaiah asked, “What is that bag on your desk?”
I replied, “My lunch.”
“Can I have one of your assorted crackers?”
In Elizabethan times, “cracker”
described braggarts.
Are you a facebook braggart???
The root of the Middle English “crack”
means “entertaining conversation.”
I told Isaiah I was not his mother.
In his speech “The Ballot or the Bullet,” Malcolm X remarked,
"It's time for you and me to stop sitting in this country,
letting some cracker senators, Northern crackers and Southern crackers,
sit there in Washington, D.C., and come to a conclusion in their mind
that you and I are supposed to have civil rights.
There's no white man going to tell me anything about my rights."
Pejorative connotation?
I didn’t know what a cracker was in high school
until my best friend told me I was a cracker
and he was a spic.
Raymond Carver wrote Soda Cracker, an ode to teach.
I brought Isaiah
a bag of crackers to eat at his own risk.
My mother used to feed me stale crackers~
I feed my students etymology,
hoping they will digest
the ambiguities, complexities, and nuances of vocabulary,
my satire,
in context.

Eulogy for Mom

From growing up in our Church:

They drew a circle that shut me out —
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But Love and I had the will to win:
We drew a circle that took them in.

When I was little, I asked my mom if there was a heaven and she said she didn’t know. But that she would like to see her mother again. She died on her daughter's birthday, as I was born on the day her mother died many years later. God works in mysterious ways with life and death, the crucifixion and resurrection.

One of my favorite stories she used to tell me was when she was little. She told her younger brother, “Come eat these mud pies. They are so delicious and I just baked them in the sun. He came and gobbled them up. Hours later, he was pooping out rocks and crying on the toilet. Her mother said, ‘What made you do such a thing?’” She laughed when she was little and she laughed when she was older, telling me the story to my horror that my dear mother had such mischief in her.

When I was growing up, I used to use her sewing cutting board as the walls to my tea cafe. We would go to the mall and have Hot Sam’s pretzels. She taught me to be a feminist, to always earn my own money so I could spend my own money--that’s how she bought the pool and the pianos. I have inherited her love of catalogue shopping, celebrity biographies, and make up. She told me about Red Dye Number 9, how it was the best lip stick color, but they discontinued it because it was poisonous. Thank God for government/consumer regulations, because I think even knowing it was poisonous, she still would have used it. She is a character out of a Tennessee Williams play. She always loved Elizabeth Taylor for her beauty, but she always wrote the dialogue of my plays with her witty lines. I used to talk to her as she would put on her white panty hose for work and her perfumes. She taught me to be a career woman with her own life and friends who went for a margarita after a long shift. I always wanted to be a doctor or lawyer to make her proud, but she told me, “I’m just glad you are alive--all I want is for you to be happy.”

She has been my warrior. When Handley Elementary was being converted to a school for the gifted and talented when I was in kindergarten, she insisted I be tested even though my teacher had not recommended me because I was quiet and shy with a speech impediment. In fourth grade, word was out among the teachers that you don’t say anything negative about her daughter. She fought for me to be in theatre because she wished she would have majored in music and wanted me to do what I loved. She used to tell me when you got really mad, she would see red. Maybe that’s why red roses and Valentine’s Day were her favorites. She is a woman of pure passion.

Mom, I will miss your daily messages. I will miss being annoyed at you when you called me too early and I will miss how you put up with me when I was crabby after a day of teaching in the inner city. There is part of me which lived for you. I am so grateful you were here this past fall and you called me every day to make sure I was okay. I will miss your one-liners. I know you are always with me, inside my heart and head, these cells you have given life to. When I feel lost, like the Runaway Bunny, you are always there to find me.

When I was catering in NYC, someone said, “No one loves you like your mother.” I told her this and she said, “That’s true.”

When I put her on speaker phone, told her I was trying to convince the guy I was seeing to marry me and move in, and she said, “I don’t think that’s a very good idea.” Later, when I told the story to my best friend, we were laughing because he knew she wanted what was best for me. I will miss not having my mother to know what is best for me.

When she came to visit me in California, my students hung on her every word...she just has that star power, the life of a party. She befriended a stranger at my graduation who helped her find Audrey in a crowd among thousands because although she might not know how to use a cell phone, she could charm anyone she met. That day proved my faith that there is a force looking out for us and it all works out.

She carried our pictures in her purse with her everywhere she went. That’s how much she cherished us. Once she told me she never felt cherished. My prayer for her is that she now feels cherished. I know that I am not alone in the memories that I cherish with her.

How The School System Taught Me To Have Hard Hope

When I first read How School Taught Me I was Poor by Jeff Sapp, my cynical nature judged the author for his victim mentality. We are adults. We should be beyond our childhood traumas. But I related to the article, his writing triggering my own memories of hand-me-down corduroys from my sisters which were worn out in the knees. I tried to remember when I shopped for my first pair of new pants, but I couldn’t. I only remembered the pair of Easter pants my mother wanted me to wear which made me look and feel like a boy when I was already mistaken as a boy due to my pixie short hair.

In elementary school, the popular girls in fourth grade, who I thought were my friends, told me how they had discussed taking me into the bathroom and forcing me to strip like the scene in Judy Blume’s Blubber. Some higher force never had them actually carry out their plan, they just told me about it.

My mother made brownies for some fundraiser and wrapped them in tin foil. When she sent me to school with them, I was too embarrassed to give them to my teacher because they weren’t in plastic wrap like the other kid’s mothers used. I wanted to fit in. I came home with all the brownies, lying to my mother, saying the teacher didn’t accept them.

In junior high, my mom took me shopping. I tried on a pair of designer jeans which I really wanted, but couldn’t reconcile the cost.

Now that I am a professional, I can afford to buy my own new clothes. Diane told me that she and Carole wanted to submit my name for the show “What Not to Wear.” When she told me laughing, I felt that same teasing of the bullying chanting of other children as I approached the morning line in elementary school. Michele, my sister’s friend, yelled, “Leave her alone.” On “What Not to Wear,” they buy you a new wardrobe, but you have to throw out all your clothes. I tried to explain to Diane that I had spent many years and a lot of money shopping for my wardrobe through Victoria’s Secret catalogue. Just last year, I was able to bring myself to buy a pair of corduroys, after never wanting to wear them after childhood. A colleague once called me, “the patron Saint of the misfits.” Perhaps if you have never been an outcast, you just don’t know what it is like not to fit in.

Someone once said that they thought I would have been a very cute little kid. I didn’t show them my first grade picture with the lump in my hair. There was a picture of me in The Saginaw News making a valentine for Valentine’s Day. When my sister threw out all my childhood memories which were stored in a box under the bed of the room I grew up in, I mourned losing that picture, like I mourned losing all the good memories of a childhood I wanted to honor within a family who didn’t.

In the book, Wall of Fame by Jonathan Freedman, I read aloud the quote, “But as the gap between rich and poor widened in the 1990s, I spiraled downward into despair about the future of America’s children.” The chapter is called Hard Hope. It is so hard for me to have hope. A ninth grade student asked me, “Do you have children?” I told her that the man I had been involved with for many years had been through chemo and radiation for Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. “What’s that?” she asked. “Cancer,” I said.

I haven’t written with my students for quite some time. The demands of the profession have not given me space as a creative writer. “Everybody blamed everybody else: Administrators blamed teachers, teachers blamed students, students blamed families, families blamed the system, the system blamed society, society blamed race, race blamed history, history blamed human nature….Nobody accepted responsibility.” (Freedman, 4) When I saw Angie’s blog from 2009-2012, I decided to keep writing with my students. Through hard hope, maybe we can all heal.

Flat Stanley

Flat Stanley and I have had quite the busy weekend. I wish every house guest was this easy to travel with and this cheap to entertain! He arrived Friday afternoon in Santa Monica, California where it is always sunny and nice. But you must have sent Michigan weather with him, because no sooner than he arrived, it started to rain! Now usually rain stops all outings for people in Los Angeles, but since I am from Michigan, a little rain never slows me down. We joined my friend Audrey who had complimentary tickets to David Ives play New Jerusalem at the West Coast Jewish Theatre. I had just shown my tenth graders the documentary, The Power of Forgiveness, with Elie Wiesel.

On Saturday, it was pouring rain, but we walked through the campus of UCLA for my National Board Certification class. After working, we decided to drive to Hollywood to the Director's Guild of America to see Mirror, Mirror. I loved it! I strongly suggest you and your friends see it, based on the story of Snow White. I didn't think it was quite literary merit with the stereotypical gender roles, but you can't be an academic snob every minute of the day.

Sunday it was still raining, so we streamed the service of Agape through my Mac laptop. Thank god for www.agapelive.com! Nothing like a little technology on a rainy day. After it stopped raining, we went for a walk on the beach after seeing the film Take Shelter from Netflix. This dvd selection was very ominous with the storm winds, almost foreshadowing! Michael Shannon, the actor from Take Shelter was nominated for a Spirit Award, which are the independent film awards which take place right here at the beach.

Monday it was back to work. I was so impressed by your teacher's assignment, I thought I would give my own version to my tenth, eleventh and twelfth graders! We'll see if they dazzle me with their brilliance. My students are Salvadorian, Mexican, Honduran, Guatemalan, Nicaraguan, Kenyan, Ethiopian, Senegalese, Creole, Korean, Native American and Irish. In fact, while I was not at Grandma's this Christmas Eve, I was with my adopted Salvadorian daughter's family eating panes con pollo.

Last on our list, was a USC event with Jamaica Kincaid, an author from Antigua who grew up in New York City. (I lived there too, but that’s another letter.)

I decided to make you your own flat Ms. Erudite so you can take me on some of your adventures. You can write back and tell me all about them.

Shakespeare in Song with Story

Personification Piece-The Computer Cart

I was purchased as a stand-in for a computer lab. Somehow, when the school was built, a computer lab where students could go type papers wasn’t factored into the plan. There were computers in the library, but when the cuts came, the librarian went, so now the library is closed and the computers are dark in silence.

I am made of metal. I have nine shelves which house three laptops each. The cords are wrapped tightly so if the laptop runs out of juice, it is impossible to unplug and plug back in. If a student’s laptop dies, the student camps out by the cart to finish typing their thoughts.

I have seen it all. The pot screensavers, the misogynistic images of half-naked women sprawled out on cars, the jellyfish which symbolize used condoms. The adolescent mind has its own sense of humor.

Now I’ve got a nest of roaches living in my corner. The wire holes make for a perfect aperture. I’m counting my blessings they are not mice? Rats have been seen scampering through the auditorium at other schools, so I am lucky the vermin have spared me.

Someone came in today and took laptop #3 while no one was looking. They turned the key while the teacher was in the bathroom and now I am short one of my set. Two years ago, someone with a key stole $30,000 in Mac desktops from a room. We made the nightly news. That’s what happens when one room gets the computers and won’t share them with anyone else in the school. Karma.

The teenagers were steering me like a bumper cart when my power strip hit the doorway, bent the three-prong plug and short circuited. A few brazen teens tested their machismo by plugging in the damaged goods until the spark of electrical shock gave them a current of warning. One boy’s hand was charred from the burn, a scar of bravery living in the inner-city. But a lawsuit in any other school, which probably has a computer lab.

The Challenge

Why are political leaders assassinated?
Write a claim, assertion, and/or thesis and use supporting evidence from the background reading.

The Ambassador

R.F.K. is the school today
Where Bobby Kennedy was blown away
Why? Why? Why!
Did political assassination prevail,
leaving behind a bloody trail.
No one discusses conspiracy theory;
Sirhan Sirhan's mental disability-
another Arab hate crime on Jew,
but this is not so simple as black and blue.
Now stands U.S.C. New Media Literacy~
Students who question their place in history.
The Ambassador was the setting,
now LAUSD has a the netting:
Teachers silenced revolutionaries
who speak out, pointed pistols
still trying to defeat the confederacy.

The Background Reading

The Murder of Fred Hampton
The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy

Rise Above Plastics Found Poem

On a Saturday morning in Marina Del Rey,
A motley group of teachers took to the beach
Cleaning up trash for art
Winchell’s Styrofoam coffee cup
Taco Bell Border’s Sauce FIRE
“Help! I can’t tell where I am. It’s dark and I can hear laughing.”
Dubble Bubble in a corporate misogynist society
With Heineken Beer, Party Time, Thank you for choosing TOP tobacco products
Disney Chip the cup starts ‘em young
This is our idea of fun
But plastic rings are strangling Mae the turtle in half
Disposable plastics which never go away
Because where is away?
After World War II,
Plastics took over for Rosie the Riveter
“We Can Do It”
Women stuck back in the home
Tired of washing dishes
After working in the factories while the men were away
So depressing
Our environment in decline
Feminism a buzz word like a dime
My incomplete hanging over my head in time
Shipping water bottles to China
The bottom line
Money and greed
Why did I even go into teaching
To fill a need?
The state thinks we’re disposable
While our governor’s love child
Is exposed
Distraction from the real issues
The people have been sold.

Now it's your turn! Service learning opportunity: http://www.plasticsareforever.org/learn/youth-presentation/

Macbeth Feminist Essay

It is all too convenient, for a misogynist society to point the finger to Lady Macbeth as the woman responsible for Macbeth’s downfall. She is considered manipulative, mentally ill, the impetus behind the murder. As readers, however, we must remember the context of women’s roles in Shakespeare’s day. Women were not allowed on stage, so young boys played the female roles. Within this patriarchal, historical system is blatant sexism. There is also a layer of homoeroticism within the historical context of young boys playing women’s parts. It is well know that Shakespeare had male lovers in addition to his wife. Therefore, we must look at who is writing the play, just as we must look at who is directing the film, in order to deconstruct layers of meaning behind the character. Perhaps, Shakespeare intended Lady Macbeth to be a literary device to facilitate the murder of Duncan. Perhaps, it was not acceptable to have a male lover urge the killing of a king. Perhaps, it was all too convenient to make Lady Macbeth the scapegoat, fulfilling men’s fantasies of how women are, the actions they take, the role they play mirrored on stage as in their society.

The misogyny begins at the beginning of the play with the (female) witches as opposed to warlocks, spewing the prophecy, “All hail, Macbeth! Hail to thee, Thane of Cawdor!” (I.3. 49) By calling him Thane of Cawdor, the witches are implying he will rule Cawdor and “that shalt be king hereafter!” (I.3. 50) In Shakespeare’s day, the actors were only given their sides of their lines. There were no stage directions. Therefore, we are reading through an editor’s lens (McDougal Littell) when we read, “She is determined that Macbeth will be king. However, she fears that he lacks the courage to kill Duncan. After a messenger tells her the king is coming, she calls on the powers of evil to help her do what must be done.” When looking directly at the text, Lady Macbeth asks, “Come, you spirits/ That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,/ And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full/ Of direst cruelty. Make thick my blood./ Stop up th’ access and passage to remorse,/ That no compunctious visitings of nature/ Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between/ Th’ effect and it. Come to my woman’s breasts/ And take my milk for gall, you murd’ring ministers) (I.5 37-45) Lady Macbeth is actually asking for her emotional, feminine nature to be removed in order to replace her maternal sense with a murderous one.

In fact, if anything, Lady Macbeth cleans up the mess which Macbeth has started. “Go get some water/ And wash this filthy witness from your hand.—Why did you bring these daggers from the place?/ They must lie there. Go carry them and smear/ The sleepy grooms with blood.” (II. 3. 44-48) If it weren’t for his wife, Macbeth would have the bloody weapons of the crime scene in his possession. She also keeps it together in the banquet scene when Macbeth losses it when he sees the ghost of Banquo. “Sit, worthy friends. My lord is often thus/ And hath been from his youth. Pray you, keep seat./ The fit is momentary; upon a thought/ He will again be well. If much you note him/ You shall offend him and extend his passion./ Feed and regard him not.” (III. 4. 53-58) Once again, if it weren’t for his wife, Macbeth’s criminal insanity would be transparent to the entire group. But all too often, Lady Macbeth is interpreted to be the one mentally ill.

In Roman Polanski’s film, produced by Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner, Lady Macbeth is naked while saying the speech, “Out, damned spot, out, I say! One. Two. Why then, ‘tis time to do’t. Hell is murky. Fie, my lord, fie, a soldier and afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account? Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?” (V. 2. 28-33) One might wonder the auteur’s choice in making Lady Macbeth a nude sexual object during the scene, but then one might also consider the source from which such a choice was made. Polanski, whose parents were killed in the Holocaust, whose pregnant wife was slaughtered by Manson’s clan in 1969, who was accused of sodomizing a 13-year-old girl in 1977 may just be a brilliant director with some deep seated issues regarding women.

Explode the Moment

My cousin and I were pushing a baby carriage down the dirt road when everything went blurry. Dance club disco ball spins in my vision and consciousness, only I was too young to disco. It was 1980 and disco was not yet retro, but at five, who even knows what retro means. These things become prior knowledge at thirty-five, but back to the dirt road. Surely I felt pain, but the initial shock of a bee sting on your eye lid, instinctively shutting to protect the pupil. The swelling came later.

Aunt Chris said I would live. I didn’t have allergies like my cousins that I knew of, but I haven’t thought of that bee sting for years. Bzzzz. Onomatopoeia. That’s not how it sounded at the time. Can’t remember a rhyme. Give me a dime. Or a dollar to holler. Seemed like a lot to a kid, this brush with death, this dance of pain, brushing the brain—schema from long ago.

Uncle Tom is now dead as of July. Cancer rotted through his eye of life with Aunt Chris, now alone, connected by phone to Michigan. Dreamt about him just this past week, blurry like the bee sting that summer day. Disco balls of consciousness clouding my brain, hurting to remember this strain.

Every Day Is A Holiday

One day at a meeting a few months ago, I was telling Ms. Redd about how I was hiring someone to put new floors in my abode. She asked, “Why don’t you do it yourself?”

I said, “I have no clue how to put in wood and tile floors.”

She said, “It’s easy. You just mix the grout, cut the tile, and lay it down.”

I said, “Cut the tile? How do you cut the tile?”

She said, “Don’t you have a tile cutter? I thought everyone had one.”

It was at this moment that I began to see just a glimpse of the genius of Ms. Redd, the modesty in which she conducts herself, and the vast many talents which make her a Renaissance woman. She continued to talk about some of the home improvements she has done. In awe, I said, “I want to see your house. Maybe I can come for dinner some time.”

She said, “How about Christmas?”

I hit the jack pot! Christmas at Ms. Redd’s house. It was too good to be true.

I had thought about going home to Michigan over the break, but Christmas in California with the Italians was an option I couldn’t let slip away—I may never have this opportunity again. Ms. Redd had told me stories about her parents who were born and raised in Italy, but until I experienced the Italian Christmas dinner, I didn’t understand the authenticity with which she spoke. Ms. Redd has a garden in her backyard, which she grows her own tomatoes and herbs. We started with anti-pasta—mozzarella, tomato basil, artichokes. Our salad had feta, prosciutto, salami. Then the lasagna and the fresh bread. By this time, I’m pretty full. Shockingly, there still comes flank steak, rosemary potatoes, balsamic green beans, meatballs, pork…Ms. Redd said, “Everyone slows down by this time. We leave the food out and people snack through the night.” There is cannoli, chocolate layered cake, espresso. She even gives me Glad to-go containers and I eat for days!

Ms. Redd and her daughters have decided to make gifts for each other. She brings out this amazing light fixture made of colored plastic cups and Christmas lights, which looks like it should be the center piece at Studio 54. I told her she could be a millionaire marketing her ideas at shops on Abbot Kinney in Venice.

After seeing her bathroom cabinets she painted to match the sink she bought in Mexico, the tile work she laid in her bath tub (along with the plumbing!), the perfect pottery she made the first time at the wheel—I thought, is there nothing this woman can’t do?

The Crucible

Be sure to post your essay for your classmates to read.

Newspaper Article Turned Musical