It's Been a While...

So, it's been a while since I wrote on this blog.  You could check my school blog which I update daily, but I suspect you'd find little interest in the journal prompts I give my kids and the sentence long summaries of what we did in class each day.  Today I had them write about whether if they could choose an age at which to stop aging until their death at the end of their regular life span, they would, and if so which age and why.  After that I read Howl by Allen Ginsberg aloud to them, and had them write their responses.  Almost none of them actually did it.  Mostly they just sat there and looked bored.  I think that says something about my school and my kids.  I can read Howl out loud without fear of parents and administration freaking out.  But it's more.  It doesn't get a rise out of the kids at all.  Oh well.

Maybe it was my reading.  I'm really sick with a cold and I was hacking my life out the whole time.  Now I have a lovely sinus headache. 

I'm listening to Elliot Smith right now.  Needle in the Hay.  I tried playing it for Nicole, the Special Ed administrator today.  She was sitting in her office playing guitar during lunch, and I ambled in and played a bit with her.  One of our students came in and played about a thousand times better than either of us.  He just came back after being kicked out for a semester for getting caught with pot.  He never did a single assignment when I had him during first trimester.  He just sat around drawing pictures of drum kits.  But Nicole says he's a lot better now since he's back on his medication.

Since I last wrote I have finished with my tenth graders, and am teaching the eleventh graders their second trimester of English.  I had them all in two periods, but they were overpacked, so I moved my yearbook class down to the media center during one of my library hours, (I also took over the media center since I last wrote) and opened another english class.  

The media center is fun.  I've changed things around a fair amount.  It is starting to reflect my personality.  I'm making everything more basic.  I rearranged the collection, moved all the couches into one area, and started weeding.  The first thing on the chopping block were the many harlequin romances that were choking our fiction section.  I have no idea why they were there.  I checked to make sure that they weren't ever checked out before first, which they weren't, and started pulling them.  The other English teacher and I are having a Read-a-Thon on Wednesday, and we're going to run little contests and games, and I think the harlequins are going to be prizes.  Last time we did it the prizes were just bits of garbage out of our desks, so maybe this is progress.

Anyway, I was thinking yesterday as I was coming home from church, (I've been going pretty regularly again) that it's not inconceivable that I've been pretty intensely depressed for the last couple of years and haven't really been able to see it.  I mean I pretty much shut down all my relationships but two, I haven't made even an acquaintance, at least not outside school, and I have been relatively happy to spend ninety-nine percent of my free time alone.  I think if indeed I have been depressed generally that I haven't noticed it that much because I can't.  I can't really seem to do anything about it, so I think I've come to not let it intrude in my daily life that much.  I mean there have been short periods where I was really acutely depressed.  The whole Christmas holiday was really obviously awful for me, for example.  But what I mean is that although it kind of directs the course of my life, I don't let it spoil my day.  If I did I'd just be a wreck all the time.  I think instead I just shut down all non-critical systems in my life, anything that isn't really necessary to the continuation of it, and just continue on.  And although I'm depressed, I'm not really unhappy.

Anyway, I was just thinking yesterday as I walked that I couldn't really decide whether it was a good thing or a bad thing.  Maybe its neither.  Maybe it is just a thing.  Maybe it's part of what Hamlet designated as neither good nor evil, but thinking makes it so.  Hamlet was the last thing I did with my tenth graders.  Whatever.

I'm going to bed.