Holy Crap It's Late!
Okay, so I take a sabbatical and THEN get sucked into a vortex created by a tear in the space/time continuum...? Not buying that one, eh? Okay, fine. I've been busy. Really REALLY busy. (Which is NOT to be confused with GETTING busy....dammit) Anyway, this update is way overdue so I may as well dispense with the excuses and such and get on with it.
June:
The school year ended as did my career as an elementary Art teacher. I spent the following couple weeks cleaning up and OUT my classroom. It's remarkable how much stuff one can accumulate. [Note to self--try not to integrate your own personal stuff too much with that of the schools; it only makes it that much more time consuming to separate it all when you leave.] I then spent the next couple weeks teaching a creative summer workshop for 4th graders at the Columbus College of Art & Design. Aside from a minor encounter with a spoiled little girl and her critical mother (who complained to the Art office that her daughter wasn't "having fun", but that I shouldn't take it personally; while at the same time her daughter announced to me and the entire class that if she didn't have fun that day her mother told her she didn't have to come back the rest of the week--sure lady, I won't take it personally. Oh and please God let the door hit her on the way out.) the whole two weeks went rather well. Which leads us to...
July:
Immediately after my final creative summer workshop class, I packed up, grabbed the folks and went up to my brother's house outside of Cleveland where we hopped on a plane and flew to San Juan, Puerto Rico (via a brief connecting flight outta Atlanta) where we boarded a Carnival Cruise ship for a week long excursion celebrating our parents' 35th wedding anniversary. We had an incredible time and everyone made it home (no one even came close to tossing anyone else overboard--well, okay, my mother considered doing it to the woman singing in the nightclub on the floor below her cabin, but who could blame her, apparently the woman's warbling could pierce steel because we could hear her through the floor of the cabin, not the musical accompaniment, just her.) After visiting St. Thomas, Dominica (not to be confused with the Dominican Republic), Barbados and Aruba, we returned to port in San Juan, flew back to Atlanta and then languished in the airport for over 6 hours because Hurricane Dennis caused our original flight to be canceled and the next possible flight (5 hours later) to be delayed an hour. [What is it with me and returning home from trips?] I took the next couple weeks off although I did have to finish clearing out my classroom---of which I got delayed again and had to finish out my summer semester of grad school. Which brings us to the final week of July where I agreed to help an old college friend and Art colleague in overseeing an Art Camp for the week. Although I think I dove into the pool without really looking first because this looks to be a very VERY long week. We arrive at 8am, the kids get there at 9am. We lead structured Art activities until 4:30pm and leave some time around 5:30pm---it's a LONG day for everyone, kids included. Oh and the kids range from 7 to 11 which isn't really much chronologically, but developmentally it's enormous in places. So it's pretty exhaustive stuff keeping everything going and managing to make things not too complex, but yet not too simplistic either. My friend asked me if I wanted an advance in my pay for the week and I declined thinking---"If I take the money, I might not come back....LOL"
August:
Looks to be just as packed full of stuff. My buddy Chad is gonna be visiting from Minnesota...[I bet he doesn't run into a blizzard on HIS return home--Ha!]and hopefully we'll get up to Cedar Point (it's the BEST amusement park in the country for those of you not familiar) while he's here. I have to start cleaning up and organizing my NEW Art room at my NEW school and preparing lessons for the fall. I have to hold a barbecue and an Art critique at my place for the artist group I'm part of (which also means I need to work in some time to actually produce a piece to be critiqued)and then the new school year begins. I know I'm gonna look back and wonder where all the time went, but at least this year I can list all of the stuff I managed to do and not feel like the time slipped by wasted.
June:
The school year ended as did my career as an elementary Art teacher. I spent the following couple weeks cleaning up and OUT my classroom. It's remarkable how much stuff one can accumulate. [Note to self--try not to integrate your own personal stuff too much with that of the schools; it only makes it that much more time consuming to separate it all when you leave.] I then spent the next couple weeks teaching a creative summer workshop for 4th graders at the Columbus College of Art & Design. Aside from a minor encounter with a spoiled little girl and her critical mother (who complained to the Art office that her daughter wasn't "having fun", but that I shouldn't take it personally; while at the same time her daughter announced to me and the entire class that if she didn't have fun that day her mother told her she didn't have to come back the rest of the week--sure lady, I won't take it personally. Oh and please God let the door hit her on the way out.) the whole two weeks went rather well. Which leads us to...
July:
Immediately after my final creative summer workshop class, I packed up, grabbed the folks and went up to my brother's house outside of Cleveland where we hopped on a plane and flew to San Juan, Puerto Rico (via a brief connecting flight outta Atlanta) where we boarded a Carnival Cruise ship for a week long excursion celebrating our parents' 35th wedding anniversary. We had an incredible time and everyone made it home (no one even came close to tossing anyone else overboard--well, okay, my mother considered doing it to the woman singing in the nightclub on the floor below her cabin, but who could blame her, apparently the woman's warbling could pierce steel because we could hear her through the floor of the cabin, not the musical accompaniment, just her.) After visiting St. Thomas, Dominica (not to be confused with the Dominican Republic), Barbados and Aruba, we returned to port in San Juan, flew back to Atlanta and then languished in the airport for over 6 hours because Hurricane Dennis caused our original flight to be canceled and the next possible flight (5 hours later) to be delayed an hour. [What is it with me and returning home from trips?] I took the next couple weeks off although I did have to finish clearing out my classroom---of which I got delayed again and had to finish out my summer semester of grad school. Which brings us to the final week of July where I agreed to help an old college friend and Art colleague in overseeing an Art Camp for the week. Although I think I dove into the pool without really looking first because this looks to be a very VERY long week. We arrive at 8am, the kids get there at 9am. We lead structured Art activities until 4:30pm and leave some time around 5:30pm---it's a LONG day for everyone, kids included. Oh and the kids range from 7 to 11 which isn't really much chronologically, but developmentally it's enormous in places. So it's pretty exhaustive stuff keeping everything going and managing to make things not too complex, but yet not too simplistic either. My friend asked me if I wanted an advance in my pay for the week and I declined thinking---"If I take the money, I might not come back....LOL"
August:
Looks to be just as packed full of stuff. My buddy Chad is gonna be visiting from Minnesota...[I bet he doesn't run into a blizzard on HIS return home--Ha!]and hopefully we'll get up to Cedar Point (it's the BEST amusement park in the country for those of you not familiar) while he's here. I have to start cleaning up and organizing my NEW Art room at my NEW school and preparing lessons for the fall. I have to hold a barbecue and an Art critique at my place for the artist group I'm part of (which also means I need to work in some time to actually produce a piece to be critiqued)and then the new school year begins. I know I'm gonna look back and wonder where all the time went, but at least this year I can list all of the stuff I managed to do and not feel like the time slipped by wasted.
posted by Chris at 7:29 PM
5 Comments:
Little girls whose mothers complain about having fun in school have obvious disciplinary issues and should be shipped off to military school immediately. Along with their fun-loving mothers. School should be difficult, painful, and embarrassing. How the hell else are they supposed to produce well-balanced, interesting adults?
Yeah, I mean school should be run like boot camp and I'm the in your face tough as nails drill sergeant that's not above debasing all semblence of individuality and self worth.
Truth be told, I truly DO subscribe to the notion that learning should be fun when and as much as logistically possible without losing the integrety of the learning involved of course. And I probably would have taken the "not having fun" comment a bit more to heart and amped up the entertainment value of my lessons; however, I felt that it (amping up the entertainment quotient) wasn't necessary since everyone else was enjoying themselves and this particular little girl seemed to be the type of of kid that could have easily been cast as one of the little girls in either of the Willy Wonka movies.
It's a damn fine line that must be walked in this situation between entertainment value and credible instruction as well as between protecting your child's self esteem and pulling back a bit allowing children to learn some potentially harsh lessons. Sadly, I think this girl's parents are doing her a disservice by either imposing overly high expectations upon her by expecting her to be an artist like her Dad (she really didn't show a desire or innate affinity for Art production, so I question whether it was her choice to take the course in the beginning) and by making it easy for her to quit when the going gets a little bumpy rather than helping her to develop tools to deal with difficulties. This girl will always have a fragile and to some degree false sense of self esteem because she's never really had to learn how to face reality or overcome adversity. I think in many ways we as a society have been doing our future generations a disservice by over protecting our children's self esteem. Now that doesn't mean I'm a heartless bastard and take pleasure in crushing my students' feeling of self worth, not at all, but I also don't lie to them and fill them full of false pride in mediocre accomplishments.
Life is harsh and sometimes cruel and I feel in order to survive in this world we need to develop in our children the tools to reflect upon themselves and their achievements, to recognize their faults as well as their triumphs, and have the courage and the will to strive to better themselves. Otherwise all we're gonna be doing is propogating generations of progeny whose first instinct is to give up when the going gets tough or to pass the buck of responsibility rather than accept that maybe they didn't do something well.
i remember a time when you enjoyed your summers in a small fertile valley in Pennsylvania, shaping the youths of small boys with huge egos, and trying to curtail rampant homoeroticism.
LMAO---That's how you remember it eh? I recollect it more along the lines of spending my summers being challenged to the point of larnyx damaging fits by privileged boys, who oddly enough I bonded with and had the opportunity to watch evolve into young men. Aside from their penchant for perverse behavior from time to time and for their almost reflexive need to push the boundaries of reason, regulations and my own sanity...I came to care about them as if they were somehow my own little brothers. I was fiercely protective of them and it really hurt me to not go back for their final summer, but I had to be selfish that year and put my own needs first. I'm guessing the previous poster is either Kessler or Dickstein. What up?
On second thought...Fruchtman? Was that you??
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