“Hurt”

I just finished reading Johnny Cash, Robert Hilburn’s biography of The Man in Black.  For anyone who is a music fan, I highly recommend this, and I mean fans of any American music genre because Cash’s influence and legacy extends in all directions.  He embraced music, lyrics in particular, that spoke to him, and he recorded the writing of singer/songwriters from old time gospel and blues to U2 and Nine Inch Nails.

His last recordings were done with Rick Rubin, a real surprise to everyone in the industry since Rubin was associated more with rock artists, but they became close friends and Rubin was an incredible advocate for Cash’s final work.  When they were recording the album “The Man Comes Around” in what is known as the American Recordings collection, Rubin wanted to do a music video of Cash’s version of the song “Hurt,” by Nine Inch Nails front man Trent Reznor.  Mark Romanek, who had done videos for the likes of NIN, Michael Jackson, and David Bowie, was all but begging to make it.  It turned out to be what most in the industry consider the best music video ever produced.  I intend to attach a YouTube link to this so you can see and hear the song.

Cash didn’t change much with Reznor’s lyrics, just a word or two.  What is most different is that his version becomes much more universal in its description of a person in great pain and suffering from personal loss.  Reznor had written about the agony of drug use and abuse—this was shortly after Kurt Cobain OD’d—and Cash had lost several family members and close friends simply to age.  When Cash recorded the song, he and June both new their days were numbered.  As I read Hilburn’s account of the recording sessions and the descriptions of what was going on in John’s and June’s lives, and then went back to think about Reznor’s lyrics, I thought about how the song reflects the pain and hurt I often saw sitting in front of me in my classrooms.

In my four decades as a teacher I dealt with losses of several students and colleagues and their family members.  Teachers are human beings.  They have feelings like everyone else, but like many professionals, when the alarm clock goes off on a school day, they suit up, put on a smile, and do their best for their students.  Many times no one knows they’re ill—physically or mentally—or that they’re grieving or just worried, sometimes frantically.  I’ve seen a colleague I knew was in her own tremendous emotional pain drop everything to help a student deal with breaking up with her boyfriend, offering a consoling shoulder and calming advice.  Then I took a box of tissues to my friend and closed the door on her classroom so she could pull herself together in the five minutes left before the next class.

The most difficult part of a teacher’s day, however, is managing the emotional rollercoasters of all of the students she faces.  Not just one carnival ride.  Usually twenty or thirty.  In each class.  Every day.  Teachers prepare academic lessons and plan means for organizing and controlling the learning environment, but being prepared to deal with the trauma students face on a daily basis is probably the single most superhuman feat educators perform.  Every one of those students, from the most likely to be depressed to the one who seems bubble-headed and unaffected by everything, all go through the same kinds of adolescent nightmares.

Think back.   Remember the pain of broken promises and relationships?  The skin eruption twenty minutes before you went out with your biggest crush?  An embarrassing faux pas in the hallway or cafeteria?  Your perceived ineptitude at one thing or another…that was laughingly pointed out by the class bully?  Or maybe the crushing solitude that made you consider the world a better place without you?  How about the physical abuse in some relationships?  I’ve seen sixteen year-old girls in pancaked makeup and long sleeves who were hiding the bruises from their boyfriends.  And I’ve spoken with students about the abuse they’ve received from their parents or family “friends.”  Over and over they come to class, while dealing with illness and death in their families.

I can’t even list all of the possibilities or the examples from my career because I saw them in those seats.  They were seventh graders, freshmen, seniors, college sophomores, even graduate students.  We teach them all.  We try to reach them all and then help them learn whatever subject we’re responsible for delivering.  And these days get them through the state tests.

Watch the video.  Listen to the song.  Watch Johnny.  He would lose June just a few months later.  When he did this shoot, his eyesight was so poor that they had to tell him where the camera was, and the vocals are spliced together bits and pieces of multiple recording sessions because his asthma wouldn’t let him finish a phrase.  He couldn’t walk, either, except to be helped into a wheelchair.  He hurt, but he was Johnny Cash.  He was human, and he got up every time and went on with living.  Remember, too, that he didn’t do it alone.  No one can.

“Hurt”  http://youtu.be/3aF9AJm0RFc

The Party's Over

(A new iteration of comments originally written in 2002)

It’s the last day of American Education Week.  Time to bring the celebration to an end and get back to work!  Put away the balloons and treats and party hats.  Tell the well-wishers from the community that we have jobs to do.  Can you believe the lines?—the employers bringing gifts because they so appreciate the skilled workers they’ve hired from among our graduates, the parents with their thank you notes and flowers because we’ve been the only ones who could reach their teenage sons and daughters to teach them the social skills and responsibilities they’ll need, the college recruiters looking for their own students and athletes and artists . . . .

Hey, I know what you’ve been doing when you should have been planning lessons and grading papers.  I’ve seen you at 6:45 AM or 9:00 PM—marching, running, dancing; tutoring, guiding, prepping; phoning, writing, worrying.  I’ve overheard you between classes and over lunch, advising the gifted artist about how her talents can provide her with a career and where to go to make the most of it.  Or the frustrated young man who needed help because he just couldn’t make it through the day without a drink or a toke and didn’t know where to turn to save himself.  And the girl with the haunted eyes who, when in your concern you touched her shoulder, flinched because of the terrible bruises left the last time her boyfriend beat her up.  You saw to it that she got help when you really should have been teaching about World War II again.  And what’s with all the time you’ve spent with just that one student—the kid in your class of 30 who goes to the Resource Room once in a while but really wants to figure it out himself if you’ll explain it one more time.  Or the one who challenges you every day to find some way to teach her more than the other kids because she already knows all of that . . . and you are sure that someday you’re going to feel so proud when you’re reading her best-selling novel or she calls to tell you about the terrific research grant she’s received or stops by to show off her beautiful new baby or suddenly she’s the teacher in the room next door.

On top of all that, I’ve peeked in your classroom doors and seen that you’ve spent ninety minutes three times a day making sure that the 25-30 or more students you have each block, every one of them, gets the best you have to offer.  You’ve arrived at school every day and stopped thinking about making a living, and seeing that your own kids have more than you did, and paying the bills that seem to be larger each month—including the school loans you accumulated eight or nine years ago—and all the other personal interruptions, so that you can focus on the students who are depending on you to get them ready for life.

If you want to know why we’ve been celebrating this week, don’t read the newspaper.  Read the daily events of your life as a teacher.  Give the noisemaker one last toot.  Then get back to work.  The week’s over.

And thanks for being my friends and colleagues.  I’ve never been more proud to be a teacher than I am to be an American teacher and share the work with you.

USS (Ultimate Secondary School) Enterprise

Someone once asked me to describe my perfect classroom. As a science fiction/fantasy fan (I love special effects, for one thing), it is easy for me to wish I had as a classroom the holodeck from Star Trek's USS Enterprise. Remember that room? Not only do the walls, floor, and ceiling generate 3 (and 4) dimensional images but everything has substance--you can sit on a chair or climb a tree.

What an amazing place that would be. Imagine reading about Olaudah Equiano's frightening voyage on the slave ship and being able to drive home his terror and helplessness with firsthand experience of the stifling darkness, the nauseating stench, and the incessant, surrounding sounds of despair. His narrative may be a primary source document, but his 19th century style requires a good deal of imagination.

Maybe that is actually an argument against this type of instructional environment, though. If we experience literature literally on a holodeck and not virtually in our imaginations, do we lose our personal reaction to the literature? It's an interesting reversal of circumstance since the holodeck experience is truly virtual reality! At the same time, is our imaginative recreation of a scene or experience literal or virtual? I think I should have paid more attention in my philosophy class!

In my literal classrooms, however, I do try to help my students approach their reading from both directions: First, to appreciate the details of imagery in the writings so they can imagine what the author is describing; and second, to go beyond the words, to learn more about the situation being described, to understand the cultural, political, social, as well as physical environments.

Even though we don't have holodecks available, technologies change rapidly and teachers continue to use whatever we can get our hands on to help our students learn. Since I first sat in a school desk over 50 years ago, the world has become much more immediate in classrooms. Sometimes schools put up barriers because no one can figure out how to "protect" children from the improper uses of new devices. Carbon paper was once an evil thing, but so once was the lead pencil. Now we have to block instead of embrace smart phones and miniature movie cameras.

I'm still waiting for my Dick Tracy "wrist radio/TV" (How many remember that futuristic device?), but my iPhone has even more features!

In the beginning....

I have always been interested in the available and current technologies that could and should be used in teaching/learning. This year the state of Nebraska succumbed to the federal pressure it's exerting on all 50 states and "revised" all the state standards. They do, finally, address students' need to know how to use technology, including social networking software. So...here I am blogging; I have a MySpace page, a Facebook account, and an iPhone. OK. I'm a Mac Addict, so it was a no-brainer that I'd get an iPhone. I'm working on revising my curriculum (we also adopted new textbooks this summer) to incorporate some of this. Unfortunately, the district's tech policies block social networking sites. I'm not even completely sure that my students will be able to log into this blog site. At least we're trying.

I'm also trying to make this a successful endeavor for myself as both a teacher and a writer. From here I hope to post my own work--poetry, essays, short stories--and have a version that gets my students writing about our classroom conversations and their responses to literature assignments. Teaching is always an experiment...collections of experiments, actually. Some of them are successful. Others...not so much. We'll see how this goes.