I Came to Bring the Phunking Pain

Halfway Sucks

This past monday was halfway through the entire recovery time for my leg. The last time I put my leg down was six weeks ago this past monday. The next time will be in six weeks. There's a scatalogical joke about lifting my leg in there somewhere.

In college I was a psych major for a couple of years. I learned that if you want to make lemonade twice as sweet, you can't just double the sugar. You actually have to triple it. And if you want to double it again, it's close to seven times as much sugar. It's a perceptual incongruity. I am more than halfway to walking again, and, come on, it's only six weeks, but it feels like I've just started. It feels like I have the whole way to go.

I'm starting at work tomorrow. I'll be limping for five weeks, but the schedule is strange, and it only really means three weeks in front of students. I'm going to spend most of the day in a wheelchair, which is a slight improvement from the couch, I think. Actually, I have a couch at work. A teacher last year offered up her futon to anyone who needed it. I claimed it for my classroom, and sat it front and center under the blackboard. It was a mixed-blessing. On the one hand, the teacher who gave it to me was, er, well, she had a reputation. She was proud of that reputation. And she used the futon as her primary bed for some time, though not immediately preceding its donation. Also, the kids would try to sleep on it, or touch each other on it, and I had to put a stop to that. I implemented a sleeping=lifetime ban, and 3-person maximum with no overlapping body parts.

It also meant I was the teacher with the couch in his classroom. That was cool, but cool is not what you are going for as a high school teacher. I don't ever want to be the mean teacher, the strict one, but I also am very wary of being the cool teacher. When a student says I'm cool, or I'm their favorite, my first thought is usually: 'what am I letting you get away with that other people aren't.'

Amanda left yesterday. She's my sister. She's not only a trained gourmet chef, she's also a famous writer at the SF Chronicle. It was very fun having her, she was a great diversion, and I think I helped her relax a bit as well.

Your homework tonight: come up with a scatalogical joke about not putting my leg down for 12 weeks.

Duck Testicles

It is not the taste of duck testicles that makes me so curious. It is the consistency. I mean, unless they are really pungent, I don't imagine that duck testicles taste like anything specific. Probably just like duck. I just want to know how large they are, how chewy. Is the dish mentioned in the link dominated by the chicken liver, or by the duck testicles?

I broke my leg, my fibula near my ankle. I am holed up in bed at the moment, and for many moments to come. I broke it a couple of weeks ago, but I had to wait until the swelling went down before I could have surgery. So, this past monday, I had some pins and a plate inserted, and now the whole enchilada is being held together by staples. I wish that I had gruesome pictures, but thanks to computers, you don't even get x-rays to take home anymore. I don't even know what it looks like down there, under the splint (cast in 2 weeks).

I do know what it feels like. Did you ever see Dune? The one with Sting and the guy from Blue Velvet? Remember when the guy puts his hand in the box and he can't see what's happening to it but we see all of his flesh is burning and melting off until its just raw bone but then he pulls it out and its intact but he has failed the test? That's what my leg feels like when the drugs wear off.

So I'm taking time off from teaching. I don't want to nail down an amount of time. I'm having staples removed in two weeks. My doctors office has given me an excused from work for 10 weeks from my surgery. It will be in that range.

If you get tired of my blog, you can turn off automatic notices. Figure it out.

My movie recommendation for you is Primer. It's a movie about time travel completely devoid of special effects. It's not expertly acted, it sort of feels like an early Kevin Smith version of Donnie Darko, but I enjoyed it. If you'd like to be on my Netflix friends list, I just joined, and I'll have a lot to review.

Next blog will be about Dilauded..

Your homework is to connect Kyle McLachlan and Kevin Bacon in 6 degrees or less.

Teaching

I took the day off today. It was legitimate, which is rare, but all of my legitimate absences happen for the same reason: lack of sleep, which is sort of like saying that all deaths happen due to a lack of blood to the brain. It ignores the root causes.

I am the faculty representative to the Disciplinary Hearing committee, a job I acquired because I was the first to respond to the e-mail, but it is the most compelling thing that I do at my school. No lesson, no unit, no single conversation can have as much of an impact on the life of a student as the disciplinary hearing, where we discuss keeping or expelling students. We don't vote, the Principal makes the final decision herself. We just discuss. In all the hearings of which I've been a part, on only two occasions has my opinion been off from my Principal's. Once, I was wrong. The other time, we just disagreed. Once, of the four non-voting adults in the room, I was the only one who thought we should expel, and we did.

Yesterday I was sick, but I came in to school to be at a hearing I felt was important. The girl's behavior is sinister. She is a bully, a true female bully. She teases the fat kid for being fat, the speech-impeded kid for his impediment. She teased the lesbian girl first about her hair, then about her sexuality, and the girl left our school to get away from the bully.

I overheard her in the halls Friday before Thanksgiving calling someone a "fucking faggot," and it was my report that broke the straw and earned her the hearing. Earlier in the day, I had joked with her advisor about trumping up charges to get her sent home, but I didn't need to.

Her life, as you would expect, is a wreck. She lost her father last year, and her coping mechanisms are broken, at best. She was heavily teased herself her freshman year, more than two years ago, and when those who bullied her were transferred out, she came out swinging. I was not predisposed to expulsion before the hearing, but I was prepared to ask difficult questions that required thoughtful answers.

There are two ways students behave in a hearing. Either they are loquacious, or silent. The talkative ones come back. The silent ones better have a shining heart of gold on their sleeves, or they get transferred. The bully, for once, was silent. That is a difficult place to be to answer a question like: "How have you been a positive influence on others at this school?" Was the question a trap? Can any 16 year old identify how they were a positive influence in High School? Maybe I could think of something. I knew a girl who could clearly answer that question, but she transferred out of our school to get away from the bully. Maybe the question I really wanted to ask was "how will you replace what we have lost because of you?"

Of the four regular members of the committee, I was the only one who voted to expel. One of the Dean's voted to bring her back under a discipline contract, but said he wouldn't lose sleep if she was expelled. Her advisor was clearly moved by her tears, her situation, the desparation in her mother's voice. Or maybe he sees potential in her I haven't seen. Or maybe he's just seen worse.

I did lose sleep over her. I didn't realize it until it was too late, and I was in no state to come in to work today, but I'm still having a hard time wrapping my mind around it. I don't think the Principal decides based on what I think, but I do believe that my thinking is aligned with her decisions. My feelings are insignificant, of course. For me its simply a night or two of sleeping. For her, it could be the rest of her life overcoming the ramifications of the decision. We are all simply pebbles in the river.

I don't know yet if the girl was expelled or not, I would have found out if I went to work today.

What irony.