super8mama

what exactly do we do?

2008-09-29T05:46:35Z

In my 10th grade English classes we have covered a respectable distance.

Texts taught so far:

Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut
flash fiction pieces: Bullet, Traditional Style Indian Garage, In the Likelihood of Murder
Short stories: Eleven by Sandra Cisneros and The Jacket by Gary Soto

Skills practiced:

Talk to the text/annotation
Complex sentences
compare and contrast
tons and tons of writing - informal, creative, poetry
Inferences
CAHSEE evaluation (California High School Exit Exam)

Most importantly, I have gotten to know each student, read samples of their writing, and assessed their skill level (to one degree or another). I will use this info to craft the following 6 week grading period.

I believe the theme will be inferences: how do you know what you know.

I can't picture it

2008-09-29T05:26:38Z

I found someone musing on her blog, a friend of a friend whose blog I enjoy immensely.

She wrote:

There is a certain safety in just focusing on an established body of work, and being productive in a measurable way. sometimes process and exploratory work is not productive in the way that is easy to value- having a piece of artwork at the end of the day. Sometimes it just goes into the trash can, or sometimes nothing material comes of it at all.

I've been stuck in process and exploratory work ever since I left art school. I have never - except for the short, yet blissful, two years at SFAI - had an established body of work.

I'm having an ah-ha moment here. An established body of work. That's exactly what sets successful working artists apart from someone spinning their wheels.

I ask, for myself, what might that look like? And this, my friends, appears to be precisely the problem.

has anyone read these?

2008-09-27T06:06:30Z

Current book pile:
White Teeth
The Hummingbird's Daughter
Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch

I'm trying to find a collection of books that I can use for book clubs in my English classes. These are some books I bought but haven't read yet. Not sure if they'll be appropriate or compelling.

I have torn through graphic novels Maus I & II and American Born Chinese, the books I'll be teaching next. Also a series called Y: The Last Man not for my students but because it's a great read.

you say Mia I say Mea... let's just check on Snopes.

2008-09-26T03:38:44Z

Typical family email exchange

Dad wrote a short email apology for breaking netiquette:

...look at the link below and click it.....SNOPES is a site that picks up things like this, often called urban legends...in the future fact check BEFORE you forward to everyone.

to my contacts, Mia Culpa. Sorry!

Brother replied to all:

Dad, 6 yrs of Latin and several bumper stickers tell me that it's actually "Mea Culpa." I believe Mia Culpa is a Swedish porn star, but you should check Snopes to verify.

uh doi!

2008-09-26T03:32:52Z

A parent just had to point out that in my Ethnic Lit class, I'd put Ethic Lit on the white board just below, "welcome to 10th grade English!"

from Rachel:

2008-06-10T04:44:54Z

whiteness as an ethnicity:

http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/

big big pile

2008-06-06T04:49:44Z

Summer reading pile:

For teaching American Ethnic Lit:

Maus by Spiegelman
Never Drank the Kool Aid by Taure
Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie
Bless Me Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya
Third and Indiana by Steve Lopez
Woman Hollering Creek by Cisneros
several educational anthologies: Coming of Age in America, The Language of Literature, Tapestry, the InterActive Reader
a few "how to be a good teacher" tomes: Designing Groupwork and Dreamkeepers

For my own reading pleasure:
Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson
Love in the Time of Cholera by Marquez

I still haven't signed a contract, so I'm starting with the books that are solely for my pleasure. After I'm sure I'll be teaching in the Fall, I'll start in on the others.

someone else's list

2008-05-23T04:14:30Z

I'm working on compiling suggestions for curriculum. This is someone else's list. I will be teaching Ethnic Lit to 10th grade next year. I'm open to suggestions. I don't know a lot of this genre - too bad I got bumped from teaching European Lit. I guess it's always good to be stretched from the comfort zone.

Thank you to: http://solipsismsaves.livejournal.com/

A Constantly Updated and Edited List [Mar. 31st, 2008|09:05 pm]
of poems, short stories, essays and novels for the English curriculum I am writing:

Jorge Luis Borges:: Tlon, Ugbar, Orbis Tertius and Funes, His Memory
Ray Bradbury:: The Fog Horn (thx Davi!)*
Harold Brodkey:: First Love and Other Sorrows
Ian Buruma:: The Freedom to Offend
Albert Camus:: Selections from The Myth of Sisyphus
Raymond Carver:: Cathedral (thx Calder)
Julio Cortazar:: Axolotl* and Letter to a Young Lady in Paris
Don Delillo:: White Noise
H.D.:: Heat
Fyodor Dostoevsky:: Notes From Underground
Annie Dillard:: Total Eclipse*
Dave Eggers:: Theo*
Gretel Ehrlich:: The Solace of Open Spaces
T.S. Eliot:: The Waste Land
Jeffrey Eugenides:: The Virgin Suicides (short story version)
William Faulkner:: A Rose For Emily*
Gabriel Garcia Marquez:: A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings
Nathaniel Hawthorne:: Wakefield
Henrik Ibsen:: A Doll's House
Denis Johnson:: Car Crash While Hitchhiking
James Joyce:: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Heidi Julavitz:: Judge Gladys Parks-Schultz*
Miranda July:: The Swim Team* and This Person*
A.L. Kennedy:: Frank*
Edouard Leve:: Autoportrait
Kelly Link:: The Faery Handbag and Stone Animals
Louis Menand:: Name That Tone
Steven Millhauser:: The Next Thing
Daniel Orozco:: Shakers*
Fernandoa Pessoa:: Selections from The Book of Disquiet
Sylvia Plath: Mirror, Mushrooms, and Elm*
Edgar Allen Poe:: William Wilson* and Man of the Crowd
Michael Pollan:: Why Bother? and Power Steer
Karen Russell:: Lady Yeti and the Palace of Artificial Snows and St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves
William Shakespeare:: As You Like It, Hamlet, and Antony and Cleopatra
Richard Siken:: Scheherazade and Seaside Improvisation
Peter Singer:: Famine, Affluence, and Morality and What Should a Billionaire Give--and What Should You?
John Kennedy Toole:: A Confederacy of Dunces*
Walter Van Tilburg Clark:: Hook*
Virginia Woolf:: Kew Gardens*
Wiliam Butler Yeats:: The Second Coming

*ones I have taught

drawing: high wire act

2008-04-01T07:25:41Z

highwireact
Originally uploaded by super8girl.

if i can't paint, I'll post my painting on the interwebs

2008-02-29T19:12:29Z

Join Art World Tapestry!

Milo and I visit the Moma

2008-01-06T07:21:24Z

Milo and I visit the Moma
Originally uploaded by super8girl.

snapped by my mom at Yerba Buena just before we went inside the MOMA to see Olafur Eliasson's exhibit for the 3rd time. We thought it would be a good idea to introduce Mimi, PopPop, and Milo's papi to the show before it left town.

Milo's Christmas Present to All

2007-12-25T00:57:41Z

Blues for Doby

2007-11-05T04:56:05Z

I a pink dragon

2007-11-04T17:36:48Z

Milostones

2007-10-22T17:59:36Z

Milo and Vilma are heading to the park.

Milo: are you sad because I leave?

And he walked over to me and planted a big kiss right on the lips and waved goodbye. He has business to attend to.

Reminder

2007-10-11T07:50:39Z

A theory of "great writing" seems to find agreement between the two French writers (Cixous and Bachelard), that what makes writing truly great is its proximity to a place before language. That as a reader, when we begin to approach that place where meaning in language slips, that it is then that we can "feel the comfort afforded us in the house we are all born into and the original warmth that we still find there upon returning," that we might get a glimpse of something that resonates as authentic.

The Sheer Joy

2007-10-11T07:06:38Z

From Yatima's sworn promise to herself: "I'm going to write like I have started to run; just for the sheer living joy of it."

I've been thinking a lot about joy. One of the required readings for my class at State is about student motivation. It's aligned neatly with a lot of discussion on the Bernal Parent's email list about the value of the praise/reward system in child rearing. It seems that the old Skinner-style behaviorist model doesn't help youngsters find it within themselves to activate their desire to learn. Turns out it's also not good for for the brain. The anxiety triggered under the reward system releases neurotransmitters, which can inhibit creativity, problem solving, and recall.

You see, coinciding with my diminishing blogging are such things as diminishing sunlight, diminishing thoughts, diminishing motivation. Concurrently is a new art studio to call my own nearly across the street from my house. I've been painting. I sit there silently painting these strangely obsessive and somehow abstracted paintings. I keep looking at them and wondering what they have to do with me at all. I have become that removed from my own creativity.

I can't really describe what's happening. Mostly, it feels like a great disappearance. Maybe because I'm over extended? Let's see, I teach 5 different classes a week - so that's 5 different lesson plans a week. Then I'm in school two nights a week - with all the homework that entails. Milo and I take a trapeze class on Wednesday mornings and on Monday mornings, I have a workshop. I keep the house and try to maintain friendships and my marriage. I wanted to paint 4 mornings a week but recently conceded that 2 mornings a week minimum might be more reasonable. All this running isn't good for my thinking, I'm not sure if it's joy or simply hyperactivity that compels me to keep moving.

I've been thinking about motivation - extrinsic versus intrinsic - for my son (picking his preschool for next year) and for myself (reflecting, "what if my parents had chosen a better preschool for me"). When I rode horses, it was for the sheer joy of it. I center my life around my son for the sheer joy of it. Yet, while I do all the things I do, I carry around that internalized audience - the rewarding/punishing audience who scrutinizes my ability, sincerity, effectiveness, skin, clothes, and hair. A compendium of voices from teachers and parents, my own doubts, and people who I imagine disdainful of my pedestrian attempts.

In my mind, I'm sitting in my studio, writing and painting. There is fabric and sewing materials that I turn into dolls and horses. I spend hours on end there, alone. There is music or it is silent. I'm working. I'm driven to work. This is the studio I had in graduate school. What about my life now makes me so removed from my studio even when I'm sitting in there painting? Was it only the deadline, the critique, my audience, that motivated me? If not a single person sees what I'm working on in my studio, I know I still want to do it. Yet, for two weeks I've unturned every dirty dish and hamper to find another excuse to avoid the studio that day. Where is the joy in that?

Marriage

2007-09-05T03:03:38Z

Your spaghetti is comfort food to me.

When I'm alone in my studio working late at night and I'd rather be at home with my menfolk, I open the Tupperware container you packed for me. Just the sight of the Trader Joe's veggie meatballs haphazardly sitting in a circle around your kalamata dotted angel hair brings a tear to my eye.

This is the truth.

How's your facial hair

2007-09-01T02:33:23Z

Milo examining a five dollar bill: "that's Scott!"

i don't want to talk about it

2007-08-27T07:09:14Z

I start back to work and school tomorrow.

milostones

2007-08-21T00:17:26Z

Milo pooped in the potty.

I'm at a loss for words.

Milo pitched his first film idea

2007-08-14T02:35:52Z

Milo made the following request: "Battlestar Nemo!"

2007 - 2008 school year

2007-08-13T20:02:13Z

My principal called last week and said the English position still wasn't filled and I might need to teach the classes after all. This morning I got the final word - the position was taken by someone who taught the other creative writing class at the school. So, no English classes this year.

The roller-coaster ride of expectations and unknowing has been a hard one. I am someone who HATES uncertainty. This has been a good exercise for me, spending an entire summer unsure of what the fall will look like. When I entered college, I remember sitting down with the bulletin and planning all 4 years of my education - which classes I'd take and when. I hadn't accounted for changing interests, changing majors. But it had comforted me when I was going away to college to think I knew what I was going to be doing for the next 4 years.

I guess I'm comforted knowing that I won't be teaching English (unfamiliar territory) and that I will be teaching media and creative writing (familiar territory) just like in previous years. I will also be at SFSU finishing my credential.

As of right now, I also plan to sign up for a printmaking class 2 mornings a week, since my tuition allows me to take up to 12 credits. This fall is intaglio and in the spring is monoprinting. That's the plan as it stands, today at 12:59 pm. I'll also be working with SF Art and Film's Film Workshop on Sunday afternoons - that will pay for some art supplies or even a small art studio. That is, if I still like art in October, when the job starts.

Preschool

2007-08-12T17:40:26Z

I've begun the preschool search. For some of the preschools you have to make appointments in September to tour the school in October/November to apply by January to get accepted/rejected by February for the following September. It's enough to make me not want to have anything to do with those schools.

I also think that for the majority of the schools, they do mostly the same things: circle time, play with art supplies or "science" supplies (like water and sand), read books or "work" with the "manipulatives" which I think is just a fancy way of saying "play with toys."

There are 3 or 4 schools that stand out to me, however. One is a co-op in the canyon in Glen Park. The highlight: a lot of the curriculum is out doors in the canyon: NATURE! This would be a preferable experience to the urban playgrounds that all the other schools have to offer. I won't belittle the urban playground, Milo spends every day in one. We went yesterday and ended up in a pickup game of baseball with a few local families - kids ranged in age from 2 to 6 and it was one of the most fun times I've ever had in a playground. However, this can't compare to the daily experience of hiking in the canyon, turning over rocks to see the bugs, walking to the canyon's garden. It's these out-of-door experiences that I recall most richly from my own childhood and have lamented Milo missing out on them. So, this preschool is in the top 3 on my list.

The other ones are a Spanish immersion school, two Montessori schools - which I also see the merits of early Montessori education, and the Chinese American International school - which is both Montessori based and Mandarin immersion.

I'm sure I will be confused, frustrated, and fascinated through this process. And then in the end I will question whether or not it was the right decision.

German Woman

2007-08-07T08:15:24Z

German Woman
Originally uploaded by super8girl.

I finally finished this painting. I started it when I was pregnant with Milo and have had it staring at me - unfinished business - for 2 years.

Sipping sake and some oil paint was decidedly the perfect ending to a good day.