Skip to main content

The Platypus Reads Part XXIV

It's funny, but it's true; during the school year I have to shut half my brain off so that I can teach.

Bare me out on this one. You can't walk into a room full of eighth graders and say: "Modern America can only be understood in terms of Nietzsche's understanding of the creative man, or "over-man," as the maker of values via his will-to-power perversely democratized so that all of us can become value-generators." Well, you can, but they'll just look at you funny and roll their eyes. That's not to say that teaching teenagers doesn't require any real mental effort, quite the opposite, but that it uses certain mental faculties to the limit while demanding that others be temporarily suspended. You have to figure out how to communicate complex information in a way that they can grasp and run with. When you're mentally sparing with them, you still have to keep one hand behind your back. The goal is to help them develop their abilities, not to crush them with your massive brain. The part of my brain devoted to navigating those tricky waters gets worked to exhaustion during the school year. The other half, the half that desperately wants a long jaw with an Oxford trained mind, has to lay dormant.

Summer is when the other half of me gets let out of the basement. Practically, this means that I read about five books at once. The closer to the school year, the more difficult the fair. This summer, I've already long since exhausted my projected reading list, and so I'm having to make up more as I go. Sometimes it feels like my brain is on over-drive.

So what does all this mean? Well, for one thing, it means that my list of posts under the heading of "The Platypus Reads" is growing at an alarming rate (and I'm not posting on all the books I'm reading). Secondly, it means that I understand why teachers get that time off during the summer. Summer is your chance to remember that you're an adult again. It's a time to let out those parts of you that you have to stifle during the year in order to get by. Don't get me wrong, I love teaching, and I care about my students, but it comes at a price. Summer's reminding me of that fact right now.
Labels:

Comments

Linds said…
You put it entirely perfectly! I've been trying to figure out why my poor li'l brain is so sluggish when it comes to the two papers I have due at Stanford next week - that's it exactly. I think I'm having unusual trouble shifting gears from breaking complexity into bite-sized chunks to rebuilding complexity in my own argument.

Well, that and it takes awhile to start using four and five syllable words again without defining them with smaller synonyms immediately after saying them. :)
12:08 PM
James said…
Oh good, it's not just me. I was talking to one of our fellow chums the other day, and he's actually cutting down to 3/4 time so that he can do some real professional development and writing. His theory is that if people want better high school teachers, they should treat them more like college profs and less like cogs in the machine.
2:40 PM
Linds said…
I fully agree with our fellow chum! I've often wistfully contemplated what good I could do with a sabbatical. Or enough time to actually write a good paper for grad school. My kids would have twice the teacher they do now. Maybe three times.
11:48 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane: The Platypus Reads Part CCLII

I needed a break from A Treasury of Modern Fantasy (too many authors and too many styles coming in too fast) so I decided to turn back to an author whose work I've enjoyed exploring: Robert E. Howard.  This time, however, I decided to skip over Howard's famous Conan yarns and instead take a look at one of his earlier creations, Solomon Kane.  The idea of a puritan occult detective was too intriguing to pass up.  I have the whole collection of Kane's tales and I do intend to blog them all.  Right now, my little literary detour has only encompassed the first two short stories so I'm going to record my thoughts on them right away and get back to the rest as I have time. Skulls in the Stars Solomon Kane makes his debut with this classic bit of English Gothic including a haunted moor, a vengeful ghost, and a solitary miser.   Howard's Kane fits the portrait of the archetypal puritan: grim, principled, metaphysical, with an iron sense of right and wrong.  I h...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Treasury of Modern Fantasy (Cont.): The Platypus Reads Part CCLI

Wow, it's hard to read anthologies at anything other than a slow crawl.  The change from author to author and style to style is exhausting.  Slowing down is a good thing, though, if it makes time for reflection.  That seems like one good reason to create an anthology: to force readers to slow down and reflect. With that as a preamble, let's move on to today's selections. The Black Ferris by Ray Badbury I didn't expect to see this Sci-Fi heavy hitter in a Fantasy collection, but there you go.  I've tried to get into Bradbury once or twice and failed.  His Martian Chronicles , in particular, resisted all my best efforts.  This short story, however, worked like a charm.  The sense of atmosphere in particular is masterfully done (a sort of Tom Sawyer strays into Edgar Allan Poe).  My only complaint is that there isn't more of it, but apparently Bradbury already fixed that by expanding the story into Something Wicked This Way Comes. This raise...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Platypus Reads Part XXVII

Thoughts after reading the "Iliad" to prepare a Greece unit for my students: -Hector is a jerk until he's dead. He even advocates the exposure of Achaean corpses and then has the cheek to turn around and ask Achilles to spare his. He rudely ignores Polydamas' prophecies and fights outside the gate to save his pride knowing full well what it will cost his family and city. After he's dead, he becomes a martyr for the cause. -Agamemnon has several moments of true leadership to balance out his pettiness. In this way, he's a haunting foil to Achilles: the two men are more alike than they want to acknowledge. -We see that Achilles is the better man at the funeral games of Patroclos. His lordliness, tact, and generosity there give us a window into Achilles before his fight with Agamemnon and the death of Patroclos consumed him. -Nestor is a boring, rambling, old man who's better days are far behind him, and yet every Achaean treats him with the upmo...
15 comments
Read more