A critical teacher-skill is welcoming students as they enter your class each day. According to instructional leaders and classroom-management experts, you should stand in the doorway, greet them with a big idiot’s grin on your face, call them by name, if you can, and shake their hands if you can, pulling them into your classroom as if they are certainly doomed to be there even if they accidentally walked into the wrong classroom. I realize now that I am retired, how much I miss that ritual.
“Good morning, Sasha. How nice to see you this wonderful day.”
“Hi, Mr. B. Are we going to learn anything today?”
“Of course we are! Wonderful things! You are going to learn the most important lesson of your life today.”
“What lesson is that?”
“That we need to learn something each and every day.”
“Oh, great… yeah.”
“Ola, El Gongie, kay-paw-so, my dude!”
“Ay, vato… remember, you gotta address me like the OG I am. If I gotta respect you, you gotta show proper respect for me and my reputation, dude.”
“Oh, sorry. I thought that’s what I was doing. What did I get wrong?”
“Nothing, my dude. I am jes messin’ wit you. Gotta remind you to do it right.”
“Marissa, good morning! So nice to see you and your smiling face.”
“Don’t talk to me, Beyer. I’m mad at you right now.”
“Oh? What did I do now?”
“You didn’t do anything, but I’m not talking to you today.”
“So, you’ll yell at me about something later?”
“Yeah. But I won’t yell. I just need to talk to you… later.”
“Okay, right after class, just stay put when the bell rings.”
“In front of your next class?”
“No, they can wait outside the door for a minute or two.”
“Ruben! Good morning!”
“Hello, Mr. B. I read that book you lended me yesterday.”
“All in one evening?”
“It was only 200 pages. I read five times that in a week.”
“Well, that’s good. What did you think?”
“It was awful. No way it shoulda ended the way it did. It made me laugh, it made me cry, and then I reached the last ten pages, and I almost threw it out the window. Except I still had to read the last nine pages.”
“So, you didn’t like the book?”
“I loved it. It’s now my new favorite book!”
Now that I am retired and can’t even substitute teach anynore, I don’t have that excitement of greeting them and never knowing what I’m going to get in return. But i am saying hello to everyone I meet on the walking path. And sometimes I get an answer.
“Hey, I like your beard! You really need to be wearing a red hat this time of year.”
“Oh, I know… I get confused with him all the time around Christmas. And I don’t even own any flying reindeer.”
Living in the Spider Kingdom
Life seems to be getting harder and harder. And I realize that a big part of that perception is the fact that my health is deteriorating quickly. This is a humor blog, but it has been getting more and more serious and more and more grim as the grim reaper becomes more and more a central character in my own personal story.
My perception of reality, however, is best explained by a passage in a novel that spoke to me in college. It comes from the novel, the Bildungsroman by Thomas Mann called Der Zauberberg, in English, The Magic Mountain. In the scene, Hans Castorp is possibly freezing to death, and he hallucinates a pastoral mountainside scene where children are happily playing in the sunshine. Possibly Heaven? But maybe not. As he goes into a stone building and finds a passage down into the ground, he sees wrinkled, ugly, horrible hags gathered around a child’s corpse, eating it. And this vision explains the duality at the center of the meaning of life.
For every good thing, there is an equal and opposite bad thing that balances it our. There is no understanding of what perfection and goodness mean without knowing profanity and evil. Just as you can’t understand hot without cold nor light without darkness. And you don’t get to overturn the way it is. You try your hardest to stay on the heads side of the coin knowing that half the time life falls to tails.
So, what good does it do me to think about and write about things like this? Well, it makes for me a sort of philosophical gyroscope that spins and dances and helps me keep my balance in the stormy sea of daily life. I deal with hard things with humor and a sense of literary irony. I make complex metaphors that help me throw a rope around the things that hurt me.
We are living now in the Spider Kingdom. Hard times are here again. The corrupt and corpulent corporate spiders are spinning the many webs we are trapped in. As metaphorical as it is, we wouldn’t have the government we currently have and be suffering the way we are if that weren’t true.
But no bad thing nor no good thing lasts forever. The wheel goes round and round. The top of the wheel reaches the bottom just as often as the bottom returns to the top. So, it will all pass if we can only hold out long enough.
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Filed under commentary, empathy, feeling sorry for myself, humor, metaphor, Paffooney, philosophy