parents: what the fuck?

There’s no image or symbol to represent the everyday

To delve into the profundity of what lies at the surface:

How does a fish explain water or a snake the heat of the desert?

This is my problem with talking about my mother

A women who has been a part of my life in a way that

The sun has—dependable, strong, the reason why

My world continues to exist. Yet always expected:

Do you ever really doubt the rising of the sun? Or that

It will fail to keep you alive?

And what about a father—the steadfast love, the constant

Need to show him the man I’ve become. A father’s love for

A son is never easy—we blame fathers for not loving us the right

Way. But as a father myself now, I realize there is no right way. We

Love as best we can, as we see it will best fit our offspring,

to make him Tough and loving and all the things

that mean manhood.

Ultimately we fail

But in failing we get closer. And as I’ve learned

From my father, so my son will learn from me.

Mother-son, has it easier.

She doesn’t have to teach me about manhood,

And doesn’t feel responsible to teach; she just teaches

what it means to be merciful, loving

And I see a different strength there.

How those elements fit together and feed each other,

I don’t always understand--

to be loving doesn’t mean

You are weak, but are strong enough to be honest

With yourself, with others.

I wish I had learned to be stronger in my own life.

I’m both doomed and blessed.

Teachers vs. Students Part I

The other day in class, I was sitting in the back as the students were muddling through an open mic session, reading their pieces, commenting on others’ and sitting very still, hoping I wouldn’t notice the fact that they were not taking a risk and getting up in front of the class to read a poem or essay they wrote and hope is good enough for others to hear. On this day, as the class period was winding down and those slouching, hoping-to-be-invisible students were feeling better by telling themselves there wasn’t enough time for them to read, a student strode up to the front and prefaced her piece with, “no offense, Trovato.” I figured she had improvised a story with me as a character and an absurd plot making me out to be either the villain or the foolish hero. Instead she read a rant. Against me.

As a sophomore struggling through a geometry class, I remember my teacher, though I can’t remember his name. He was a short, red-haired, green-eyed leprechaun of a man. Even his voice was a bit high pitched. He thought himself a comedian and spent much of the class time gently poking the students with his wit. I remember one day he took out a baseball and tossed it to each student as a signal for them to answer his query. It was a unique move to me at the time and I thought it was clever, and since I liked baseball, I enjoyed that day, even though I was a disaster at geometry. And I wasn’t the only one, lots of students were struggling in the class. One day I remember we were reviewing for a test later in the week and a student asked the teacher a question which the teacher did not answer but made a joke. I don’t remember if the joke was on the student or about the material, but I would guess it was a about the student not knowing the answer, because after the joke, the student gathered his books, got up from his desk and walked towards the door. Talk about cognitive dissonance! I watched in complete disbelief, not sure of how to make sense of what was happening. And to add to my shock, as the student walked out of the room in the middle of class, he said to the teacher, “you’re a real jerk, you know that?” I was shocked, and I’m pretty confident the whole class was. None of us were ready to believe that a student could talk like that to a teacher, let alone walk out and not be sent to the dean. I have to believe that even the teacher was shocked and as I watched his face when the boy told him that, I could see a brief moment of pain, as if he didn’t mean to hurt the boy and felt bad that he did. My sophomore self was in silent shock and I didn’t know how to respond or what to think, but I did feel bad for the student, and bad for the teacher, who I didn’t think meant to offend him. But I was also introduced to righteous anger—he had every right to be angry, and though he didn’t have to walk out or call the teacher a jerk, there was a justification to those things and a respect I felt for his courage in doing both.

Now that I’m a teacher, I’ve had my share of dealing with angry students. There are those that have had a bad time throughout their school career and just don’t buy in to the game of school. These are difficult to deal with because it’s almost impossible to get them to buy into it and there is no way to change their behavior unless they do buy into it. The one way I’ve been partially successful with these students is to get them to buy into me as a person, and then into the class. But that can be a long process and it’s not always successful and rarely lasting. The other type of angry student I’ve encountered is the one that does buy into the idea of education and schooling but not into my idea of it. While this is difficult, it’s also the most rewarding because it forces me to reconsider my assumptions about what teaching means. In the past 10 years, I’ve been called an asshole, a bitch, I’ve been told students learn more when I don’t talk, I’ve been told that my class sucked, that it was too easy, too hard, too boring, too laid back, too planned out. Over the years, I’ve learned to take these criticism in stride, I’ve learned not to take too personally what students say about me or my class, because the relationship between teacher and student is naturally adversarial. I mean teachers are judgers, and while we purport to only evaluate what the student produces, and not the student, the student, caught in the grips of adolescence ,feels judged and will inevitably strike back. And most often they strike the soft spot. It’s amazing just how perceptive teenagers can be. For as much as they seem so wrapped up in their own insecurities that they notice nothing about the world around them, they are pros at sniffing out the insecurities of others and attacking them with pinpoint accuracy. And no one is spared, not even teachers.

Dissonance

Dissonance: when sounds collide. If dissonance is a collision of sound can it move beyond sounds to what those sounds mean, in other words is dissonance not just a clash of vibrations that do not mesh, do not converge but a clash of sounds that represent opposing meanings, can it be the content, and not just the medium that clashes and creates dissonance.

Several days ago I was sitting on the beach, it was a Sunday afternoon, many beachgoers were frolicking on the sand and in the water. The sounds of children screaming and girls laughing as boyfriends splashed them with water and mothers yelling at children to come back to shore all filled the air and created a dissonance with the sounds of the waves and the wind. The natural vibrations fought against the human ones. I listened to the sounds and the thought about the idea of chaos in sound waves—no logic guided the human voices as a whole. Each voice had its own logic, but all together, when listened to as a whole, there seemed to be no principle behind the sounds, they were discrete and offered no transitions, no logical relations to other sounds, they existed in their own right, within their own rules and did not mingle nicely. This is the idea of chaos, the idea that is represented in the story of the tower of babble and repeated to different affect in the story of Pentecost. Chaos is each person or entity operating in apathy of others, without regard to the motion or intention of others around it. And yet, something happened upon that beach that Sunday afternoon. As I lied there observing this cacophony of sound and sight, there seemed to occur some strange convergence, as if the sound that was on the surface dissonant and chaotic, became intertwined. Suddenly there seemed to be harmony, as if all the sounds worked together to form a coherent pattern. And I began to wonder is this a natural occurrence or is this a human need to form order from chaos. Is this my brain creating an overlay to create this harmony, because to the human chaos is unacceptable. The story of creation is a story that makes this clear to me. God can’t abide the chaos, He must bring order to the disorder. Harmony to discord. We might hear dissonance, but we try to find a harmony behind or within it. It’s like a scene from High School musical, one repeated in countless films and television commercials, where busy kitchen workers making dissonant noises with their tools, suddenly hear the music, the harmony, and play along, creating music from the noise, order from chaos.

Perhaps, I am being too simplistic, too religious in my approach to the word. As if dissonance doesn’t exist, but is only imaginary, as if chaos is only our misunderstanding, our failure to see order. Chaos does exist, and perhaps it’s only our failure to recognize it, our forcing order over it, that stops us from seeing it. I believe we have an underlying, irrational fear of dissonance. We try to crush it wherever we see it, find ways to avoid it—through institutions and civilized rituals, through ipods and cell phones and normalized communication. The music industry is an example of how much we eschew it. Listen to local rock stations—they all try to have a distinct identity, but the music they play all sounds the same. Anything that is different, employs a different set of standards is labeled indie or alternative, as if it is the other, some foreign object. It is a form of dissonance. Same goes with film and literature. Anything in discord with what we consider normal is pushed away. Eschewed with apathy, with indifference