Graduation!

How can this year be over already, and what took it so long? Yep, that's how I feel. The year seems to have flown and yet... there were times I wasn't sure I'd make it through the week, let alone the year. At the end of it all, this class selected me as their most influential teacher, said nice things, and gave me pretty flowers. The senior who spoke was well-chosen. G has had a rough time with her family: alcoholism, abuse, multiple divorces. We spent hours talking through many issues. She made it, did very well, and will attend a great four-year university in the fall. Some of the other students counted on my help when dealing with other teachers. One came and confessed a very serious disorder because she was in trouble, needed help, and knew I would contact her parents and convince them to get her into counseling. Counseling led to a critical decision to commit her to an institution that will give her skills to live a new life; at least she'll have a life! It was touch-and-go there for a while. Teaching is about life adjustments, not just growing the brain, but altering a student's perspective on life and learning. I tend to preach as I teach but it works. Through it all, I told these students the same thing I told my first class in 1973... You will change the world; make it better!

Here are two of my best writers: Savannah and Kay.

Summertime!

Officially summer doesn't arrive until the end of next week, but school is out, tonight's graduation. I think this will be one of those summers that flies by at the speed of light. Next week is all the time I have to get ready for a very special trip: to France! In celebration of our 40th wedding anniversary, ours sons bought us plane tickets to France where we will spend two lovely weeks with our younger son and his family. Whenever people talk of going some place, the dialogue seems to turn to things to see and do. It's very different for me; I just want to be, to read to grandchildren, to sit still, take in their presence, breathe the same air, watch emotions expressed on small faces, laugh at silly stuff. I know there are historical sites, educational and cultural opportunities... I don't care. There are three smallish people, living in a French country home with their parents, who mean the world to me. I just want to be... with them.

Nora - May Birthday

It has been WAY too long since I have even signed on to this blog. I mean, really, November? Since then Christmas has come and gone as well as our birthdays and one very important birthday. Little Nora had her first one! She is a really happy baby and we are so excited to see her in July. Our sons have given us tickets to France for our 40th wedding anniversary. We can't wait!

What a difference!

A month in the life of a little boy makes such a difference. So does a haircut. Just check out my Bow Tie Boy and his previous birthday photo. It's hard to believe Eliott has grown up so much.

Two-Cute

This little guy is now two years old. He has discovered that he has opinions that are not the same as the rest of the world. He found out that he loves to do what he loves to do, and he detests doing what he does not love to do. And the truth of it is, I just love him. Happy Birthday Eliott Ray. May you be a voice to be reckoned with in this world. You are dearly loved.

Banned Books Attract

An English teacher whose blog I follow posted this letter from Pat Conroy, author of The Prince of Tides and many other works. I just had to repost!

To the Editor of the Charleston Gazette:

I received an urgent e-mail from a high school student named Makenzie Hatfield of Charleston, West Virginia. She informed me of a group of parents who were attempting to suppress the teaching of two of my novels, The Prince of Tides and Beach Music. I heard rumors of this controversy as I was completing my latest filthy, vomit-inducing work. These controversies are so commonplace in my life that I no longer get involved. But my knowledge of mountain lore is strong enough to know the dangers of refusing to help a Hatfield of West Virginia. I also do not mess with McCoys.

I’ve enjoyed a lifetime love affair with English teachers, just like the ones who are being abused in Charleston, West Virginia, today. My English teachers pushed me to be smart and inquisitive, and they taught me the great books of the world with passion and cunning and love. Like your English teachers, they didn’t have any money either, but they lived in the bright fires of their imaginations, and they taught because they were born to teach the prettiest language in the world. I have yet to meet an English teacher who assigned a book to damage a kid. They take an unutterable joy in opening up the known world to their students, but they are dishonored and unpraised because of the scandalous paychecks they receive. In my travels around this country, I have discovered that America hates its teachers, and I could not tell you why. Charleston, West Virginia, is showing clear signs of really hurting theirs, and I would be cautious about the word getting out.

In 1961, I entered the classroom of the great Eugene Norris, who set about in a thousand ways to change my life. It was the year I read The Catcher in the Rye, under Gene’s careful tutelage, and I adore that book to this very day. Later, a parent complained to the school board, and Gene Norris was called before the board to defend his teaching of this book. He asked me to write an essay describing the book’s galvanic effect on me, which I did. But Gene’s defense of The Catcher in the Rye was so brilliant and convincing in its sheer power that it carried the day. I stayed close to Gene Norris till the day he died. I delivered a eulogy at his memorial service and was one of the executors of his will. Few in the world have ever loved English teachers as I have, and I loathe it when they are bullied by know-nothing parents or cowardly school boards.

About the novels your county just censored: The Prince of Tides and Beach Music are two of my darlings which I would place before the altar of God and say, “Lord, this is how I found the world you made.” They contain scenes of violence, but I was the son of a Marine Corps fighter pilot who killed hundreds of men in Korea, beat my mother and his seven kids whenever he felt like it, and fought in three wars. My youngest brother, Tom, committed suicide by jumping off a fourteen-story building; my French teacher ended her life with a pistol; my aunt was brutally raped in Atlanta; eight of my classmates at The Citadel were killed in Vietnam; and my best friend was killed in a car wreck in Mississippi last summer. Violence has always been a part of my world. I write about it in my books and make no apology to anyone. In Beach Music, I wrote about the Holocaust and lack the literary powers to make that historical event anything other than grotesque.

People cuss in my books. People cuss in my real life. I cuss, especially at Citadel basketball games. I’m perfectly sure that Steve Shamblin and other teachers prepared their students well for any encounters with violence or profanity in my books just as Gene Norris prepared me for the profane language in The Catcher in the Rye forty-eight years ago.

The world of literature has everything in it, and it refuses to leave anything out. I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language. Because of them I rode with Don Quixote and danced with Anna Karenina at a ball in St. Petersburg and lassoed a steer in Lonesome Dove and had nightmares about slavery in Beloved and walked the streets of Dublin in Ulysses and made up a hundred stories in The Arabian Nights and saw my mother killed by a baseball in A Prayer for Owen Meany. I’ve been in ten thousand cities and have introduced myself to a hundred thousand strangers in my exuberant reading career, all because I listened to my fabulous English teachers and soaked up every single thing those magnificent men and women had to give. I cherish and praise them and thank them for finding me when I was a boy and presenting me with the precious gift of the English language.

The school board of Charleston, West Virginia, has sullied that gift and shamed themselves and their community. You’ve now entered the ranks of censors, book-banners, and teacher-haters, and the word will spread. Good teachers will avoid you as though you had cholera. But here is my favorite thing: Because you banned my books, every kid in that county will read them, every single one of them. Because book-banners are invariably idiots, they don’t know how the world works—but writers and English teachers do.

I salute the English teachers of Charleston, West Virginia, and send my affection to their students. West Virginians, you’ve just done what history warned you against—you’ve riled a Hatfield.

Sincerely,

Pat Conroy

Heavenly

Someone recently posted this photo on facebook and I snagged it:

Does it look like heaven to you? 

Yeah, me too.

First Week Finished

What a beautiful week for the first week of school. Temps were in the 80s and the sun shone constantly. September is that kind of month for the Northwest. Even though the trees begin to change color, it's warm and sunny. Makes it difficult to stay in class and teach! Oh well... I love the cool mornings, sunny days, and beautiful evenings in our back yard.

The first week would have been perfect if Ms. Senior Class Officer hadn't come to me on Wednesday afternoon to tell me she was leaving next week for ten days. I was so irritated! Of course she wanted her work and expected me to have it ready for her by Monday. So instead of enjoying this beautiful weather, I spent my evenings preparing lessons. I usually work a week ahead but not the first couple of weeks of school. I need to get a feel for my students, a sense of their abilities, establish a pace. Friday morning Ms. SCO brought me flowers... nice touch. 

Another nice touch was having the Back to School Bash on Friday. Instead of working on that beautiful 85* day, we started with chapel then went to a local lakeside park. Unfortunately students couldn't swim because of a supposed bacterial rating, something that was quickly proven to be isolated and no longer existent, but the lake had to have two clean ratings in a row to be approved for swimming. I guess we should be glad as that meant we didn't have to deal with skimpy suits and raging hormones! Everyone had a great time, playing games, swinging, just hanging out. And because I had worked like a fool on Wednesday and Thursday evenings, I didn't have to work late Friday night, so we barbecued chicken and just relaxed at home. 

All in all, a good start to school. Hopefully it will continue; we will grow in knowledge, relationships, and numbers! I'm praying for that.