my thoughts exactly

Thank you, Mr. Buckles.

not delightful

Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglass is a decidedly less pleasant read. Stomach ache.

delightful

I really can't imagine a better afternoon than the one I'm having, curled up in the armchair by the window, thinking about maybe making some French onion soup for lunch, and reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera. I love this book. When I read One Hundred Years of Solitude, it took me about a month. I liked it a lot, but I could only get into it for short amounts of time. I think that there's something intimidating about Marquez's super-long chapters. But I started this book Friday and I only have forty pages left.

I mean, there's something absolutely compelling about a passage like this, in which the perpetually-constipated protagonist shits his pants because he's so surprised by the sudden responsiveness of the object of his fifty-plus years' unrequited love:

Florentino Ariza thanked her, bid an urgent farewell with his hat, and left without tasting the coffee. She stood in the middle of the drawing room, puzzled, not understanding what had just happened, until the sound of his automobile's backfiring faded at the end of the street. Then Florentino Ariza shifted into a less painful position in the back seat, closed his eyes, relaxed his muscles, and surrendered to the will of his body. It was like being reborn. The driver, who after so many years in his service was no longer surprised at anything, remained impassive. But when he opened the door for him in front of his house, he said:
"Be careful, Don Floro, that looks like cholera.

I really lead a charmed life.

whoa

No matter how many times I hear this part of "Go Go Gadget Flow," I'm still amazed at the very rhyme-iness of it all. And at the connectedness of it, to itself and to other people's stuff.

They race in circles like they raisin a gerbil
I race in a circle like I'm raisin a horse
I'm racin a Porsche while they racin in place
They race in a cage I race on a course

That case in the court did not defer the dream
I am still a raisin in the sun ragin against the machine

Plus, Lupe dances like I dance.

"Professional protestors"

From Time's "Church Politics: Why the Pope Is Side-Stepping Notre Dame":

"It is clear that Notre Dame didn't understand what it means to be Catholic when they issued this invitation," said Cardinal Francis George, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). The conservative Cardinal Newman Society organized a petition calling for Notre Dame president Father John Jenkins to disinvite the President. Professional protesters such as Alan Keyes and Randall Terry have descended on the South Bend campus, pushing blood-covered baby dolls in Spongebob strollers and getting themselves arrested. And Cardinal James Francis Stafford, one of the highest-ranking Americans at the Vatican, has declared Obama an unfit honoree because his statements on abortion reflect "an agenda and vision that are aggressive, disruptive and apocalyptic."

Obama on abortion:

"I think that most Americans realize that this is a profoundly difficult issue for the women and families who make these decisions. They don't make them casually. I trust women to make these decisions in conjunction with their doctors and their families and their clergy, and I think that's where most Americans are. Now, when you describe a specific procedure that accounts for less than one percent of abortions that take place, then, naturally, people get concerned, and I think legitimately so... There's a broader issue, though. That is, can we move past some of the debates around things about which we disagree, and can we start talking about things we do agree on? Reducing teen pregnancy, making it less likely for women to find themselves in the situation where they've got to anguish over these decisions. Those are areas where I think we can all start mobilizing and move forward rather than look backward."

Now, remind me, who's the one who's got a point? The bloody-doll-pushing, apocalypse predictors, or the guy who wants to mobilize to reduce teen pregnancy and other issues that cause women to have to choose? I mean, the good thing for pro-choicers like me is that the pro-lifers seem to be making our job pret-ty easy.

Who the f are you.

You know what's weird about teaching? When kids who I don't have and never have had as students address me as "Ms. Dahlke" and I have no idea who they are. I mean, I know that as one of about one hundred persons "of authority" in the building, I'm probably more conspicuous than any of the thirteen hundred students. It's still odd.

On a related note, the yearbook came out this week, and in the collage on the cover there is a photo of me looking a hot mess. My hands are up in the air, I'm kinda making my dance face, and I'm standing in front of the vent so my hair is blown up. I'm gonna try to snap a pic of it with my cell next time one of my students has it with them and I have a free second.

honestly

I don't think I have patience enough to work *kindly* with my actively (albeit, I think, unwittingly) racist students to be the kind of antiracist teacher I would like to be.

I can't BELIEVE I forgot that I love reading.

I'm an English teacher for Chrissakes. It's just so easy to not read books when I spend all day reading emails, worksheets, student essays, blogs, news articles, message boards, my Google reader, Facebook, body language in my classroom.

In the last two weeks, though, I've read this:(Holy cow.)

this:

(Tres compelling.)

this:

(Kinda dumb and kinda awesome.)

this:

(Inspiring.)

and this:(Challenging. As in I feel like I better do something.)

Now I'm getting started with this:(Required reading for my summer course!)

All excuses accounted for, I seriously don't know why I let myself get out of the practice of reading all the time. Shameful. These last two weeks, I've found that my books have woven into my thought processes even when I'm not reading; I'm making all kinds of connections between what's on the pages I'm reading and what's being said, written, performed, resisted in my classroom.

I mean, duh. This is what I ask my students to do all the time. Why the f did I think I was exempt?

not surprising

From Chancellor Herman's recent email about the vandalizing of an anti-racist art display in front of the cultural houses on Nevada:

We need to begin thinking of these crimes differently. First, let us not view this as happening to someone else. What threatens one member of our community threatens all of us. We are all diminished in the wake of such an act. Indeed, Illinois is diminished and that should concern our
community.

Who's we? By we-ing in a way that excludes us from the targeted "group," even, ironically, as he asks us not to do so, Herman assumes Whiteness, or at least not-American Indian-ness, of his readers. Which I guess is fair assumption since someone once told me there are 12 American Indian students at U of I.

star struck

I just got to see my *favorite researchers* Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey present.

Douglas said:
"I don't understand why we have all of our computers in one place. We would never have a pencil lab. Why do we have a computer lab? Computers should be everywhere."

Nancy said:
"Every time I make a rule for my students to follow, I check it against this question: Does this rule make their world smaller?" She went on to explain that if schools' consistently make rules that protect students from the world instead of rules that prepare them to make decisions about how to be critical consumers of that world, we're in a sense following the lead of institutions like prisons that minimize the world for their constituents. Huh.