Tappity Tappity Tap...Snap

My infamous 6th period is a class of tappers, I realized today. They send out waves of energy and they tap. If you saw them in a cartoon, they would all have those little vibration signs around them. And they would all be tapping their pencils constantly. It's not intentional, it's not malicious, they just vibrate with energy. It wouldn't be so bad if they all tapped in unison, but they all have their own beat. It makes it frustrating and incredibly difficult to concentrate. But things are better than last week, and better than the week before that and it will keep improving.

Old AND Single...

Highlights from today include -

a kid in my first period thought I was 40
a kid in my 4th period thought I was 22

I like 4th period better than 1st period

My emergency contact information was rejected because I had only put my parents down. When I pointed out that I had no one else in the area that I was related to or really close friends with, I got an unsympathetic "um...find someone." REALLY? Thanks for the suggestion - I'll get right on that.

my new principal came in to observe me randomly... positives, I was assidiously helping a student at the time, negatives, there were 4 kids talking and not working (I had told them to get to work twice already)

Last night, I was making the bed and Emma came in all excited because she LOVES it when I make the bed. She's pretty sure that's her favorite time of the week. So she laid all over every layer, spreading her fur all over the place, and then refused to get up when I was putting the blanket on. Believe me, she just LOOKS cute and innocent...she's pretty feisty.

I also tried to get pictures of this spider web for like 10 minutes today. I could not get the angle right to get the spider, the web, and the shadow without getting my hand or shadow in the picture. Argh! But it still looks kind of cool, especially after I played with it a little bit in photoshop express. I am obsessed with getting a good picture of a spiderweb. It is much harder than I would have expected.

Book Reviews

I realized that I had not posted the last two book reviews from the class I took, so here they are:

Someone to Run With by David Grossman is a GREAT book. It is interesting, engaging, and just a fun read. It is a book about a girl, a boy, and a dog named Dinka in Israel (but it has nothing to do with Palestine at all). It is somewhat hard to explain the story line, but it is essentially the story of a girl named Tamar trying to rescue her brother from drug addiction and the boy named Assaf who tries to return her lost dog to her. When you start reading it, for the first half of the book you feel like you are only getting half of the story, which is true. But about halfway in, things start to fall into place and it becomes one of those books that you simply cannot put down. To put it another way, it is a book that my low-performing students would like so much they would be willing to read a "long" book (it's about 350 pages).

Istanbul by Orhan Pamuk is not a novel, like the other books I read for this class, but it is still interesting. It is the description of Istanbul by someone who lived there for pretty much his entire life and it is very good. He writes somewhat "stream of consciousness" so some people would find it hard to read, but I really liked his descriptions of the city

Scheherazade Goes West by Faterma Mernissi was recommended during this class, and I got the chance to read it this weekend. It is an absolutely fascinating look at the differences in the perception of women in the west and women in the east - but it's not what you might expect. Mernissi places a distinction between how women in the east are valued and women in the west. She points out that western men have an ideal women who is beautiful, silent, and not as smart as they are. Eastern men, on the other hand, idealize women who are intelligent and can match wits with them. She uses as an example the fact that harem women, who constantly compteted with each other for attention from the pasha, could only stand out from the rest and keep his attention if they were well-read and literate and able to mentally spar with him. She uses as an example of Scheherazade and the 1001 Nights, where the only way Scheherazade is able to stave off death, and in fact end the reign of terror instilled by the sultan's practice of marrying virgins and then killing them, was to tell 1001 consecutive stories, by which point the sultan has fallen in love with her mind, not her body. Mernissi says there is a difference between the way western men confine women (with time) and the way eastern men confine women (with space). For example, eastern women are expected to wear veils in public. "Public" is public space - which is how eastern men confine women. Western men have a certain expectation of how women are supposed to look (young and beautiful), which is how they confine women with time. If you aren't a certain age or look a certain way (usually tied to age), you are no longer good for anything. I took it a step further and thought that this might be why western women are drawn to eastern men - who traditionally (although possibly unconsciously) value the mind rather than the body. I highly recommend this book.

Reflections

Today was the last day of the class and while it is fresh in my mind, I thought I would reflect. I did learn a lot, but I also became frustrated at times. I disliked the fact that there was no outline for reading, meaning that it was hard to know what to look for or pay attention to when I was reading the books. I feel overwhelmed with information and am struggling with being realistic about how much I can actually use next year. It is a little like I felt after AP training, but in this case I don't feel that I got as much useful information. On the positive side, I got 8 free books and made some friends outside my own school, which is also nice. I think I just need time to process it a little. I am glad it's over, and I am glad that I don't have to drive 23 miles each way anymore, but I explored a new and very cool part of Seattle and I am glad I had the experience.

Funny

Seattle is a city of pedestrians (it's a defense mechanism to combat gas prices and horrible traffic) and in an effort to get people to slow down in areas where the pedestrian count is exceptionally high, these signs are posted. There is one on my drive to UW every morning and I finally was stopped at a light in front of it... I love the flying bodies.

Gloom and Despair

I have become somewhat frustrated with this class I'm taking. I feel like the other people in the class with me are one of two things:

1. have such a higher level of education that they are talking about things that I can't even comprehend what's happening, meaning that we are actually talking about the books and I'm not aware of it

2. already know so much about literary style and Arabs that they are just asking questions about finer points of Arab thought and it is pointless for me to ask questions about the books because they already have it.

There is a third option, which I don't think is even remotely possible, that everyone else is as frustrated with it as I am. They all seem to take copious notes and look incredibly earnest at all times, and usually I am designing a new bag, thinking about what's for lunch, or drawing hand turkeys all over my notes.

We have a new addition to our class, a Moroccan professor who teaches at the same highly prestigious and unbelievably expensive school that my AP instructor does. I know this shows my apparent idiocy, but it never occurred to me that a Moroccan would be white. I know it's stupid, but it just never occurred to me. He is white (with light skin and hair), Muslim, and Moroccan. Of course, he speaks at least three languages fluently (French, English, and Arabic) and I am assuming he speake Farsi or something, because his doctoral thesis was on something having to do with India. He has a cool, not quite British, not quite French accent and is fun to listen to, except when he and the original professor make asides to each other in Arabic, at which point I subside into stupidity because I have no idea what they are saying.

The book we are discussing (Cities of Salt) is ok, but we didn't get that into it because we kept getting sidetracked by talk about women (who are nonexistent in the book) and the politically correct term for Berbers (Amazigh...also not present in the book, which is about the Persian Gulf). At this point, I am just hoping that some kind of lesson plan will inspire me, because at this point, I am supposed to have one by Friday and I am totally stuck and uninspired. I am just waiting it out, knowing that it will all be over on Friday. Yea!

Number 100

Post number 100....I'm pretty sure that's a sign I have too much to say. Someday I'll learn to shut up. But not today!!!! =)

So the class at UW is going fairly well. We have talked more about this second book, Palace Walk than we did about Leo Africanus and I feel like I understand it more, but we keep getting sidetracked onto random discussions and disagreements between one woman and the professor about the differences in Pakistani and Egyptian culture. Well, of course they're different, one is in Asia and one is in Africa, and possibly the only similarity they share is that they both happen to be mostly Islamic. And most Americans could tell you that not all Muslims agree about MOST things. So it all seems rather pointless. This same woman has the irritating habit of only saying half her sentence before starting on the next one or trailing off into nothingness. So I doodle a lot. I actually did math today...I figured out the equation to tell me how many sashing strips and squares I need to make any t-shirt blanket.

When we are on topic, I learn interesting things, like how Egypt and Britain handled the transition of power in the 1920s and 1930s, marriage and divorce traditions, inheritance procedures, and the private attitude of many Arab nations towards Palestinians. This last one was especially interesting. One of the major themes in Palace Walk is the attitude of the men about the women. See here for my take on it. The professor pointed out that this is an attitude that is somewhat apparent throughout all the novels we are reading and also is an attitude that is more or less apparent to Westerners as well. We talk a lot about giving freedom to Afghan women and how terribly the women in Iran are treated and so on. We are very concerned with the treatment of women in other places, especially places where women are treated differently than in the US.

It is true that women in most Muslim countries are generally treated very differently than women in any "western" nation. I would hesitate to use the word "cruel," at least not as a generalization, but that is the perception that we have about the treatment of women in places like Iran and Afghanistan. What is less clear to us is that those specific examples are somewhat extreme. In many places throughout the Arab (and Muslim) world (which, by the way, neither Iran or Afghanistan are considered Arab...by themselves or by others) women are looked on as people that need to be protected from the world. They are the outward manifestations of a man's character. They are his crown, his wealth, his status, and the reason that he is respected. This is a hard concept for us to grasp. Here, women are valuable in their own right and for their own reasons, which they work hard to attain. There, women are valuable because they make a man successful. It is through his children that a man gains worth, and a man cannot have children without a woman's presence in his home. His home is considered incomplete without a woman in it and it is through the women in his life that he gains prestige and respect in his community.

A woman without a man is someone to be taken care of, to be sheltered, to be protected. If a woman is not taken care of or if she chooses to live outside the traditional role of daughter or wife, then she is on her own. If she is not taken care of, it reflects shamefully on the husband or father who has abandoned her. If she chooses to live outside this role, then whatever happens to her is her own fault. So...how does this tie back to Palestine? Much like an Arab community would hate the actions of a rapist but blame the woman for being in a position to allow herself to be raped (she was outside the home, she was not with her husband, etc), the larger Arab community hates the actions that Israel did in conquering Palestine in 1948, but blames the Palestinians for allowing that action (the rape) to happen. Consequently, although there will always be talk from the larger Arab community about punishing Israel, it is very unlikely that anyone will ever do anything about it. Hence the reason that Palestinians have been in refugee camps for 60 years.

Anyway....I hope I don't horribly offend anyone by this, it was just a fascinating aspect that I had not considered about the likelihood of involvement in the Palestinian issue by other Arab nations.

By the way, I set the odometer (tachometer?) this morning before I left the house and it is 23 miles from my house to UW. I watch my gas level fall on every trip...**gulp**

ARGH

I really thought that this class would be more about discussing the book and we keep going off on random pointless tangents that have little to no value for me as a teacher. Also, I woke up with a headache.

Here are some random samplings from my notes today:
*"This class makes me feel stupid!"
*"Why are we talking about random crap?"
*"Find some book about Chocolate???"
*several doodles of elephants - the only animals I can draw with any semblance of reality
*an entire page of scribbling

Since there are only 5 people in the class, this might have been more obvious than intended. I have no issue with the incredibly knowledgeable and literate professor, but there is a woman in class that insists on going off on tangents and arguing with the professor. She thinks she knows a lot because she lived in Pakistan. Since we are discussing the Middle East and not South Asia, it's mostly pointless, but that doesn't stop her.

Today's class started with a headache and ended with a larger one, so I took a nap when I got home. It was supposed to be like an hour long and it ended up being 3 hours...so no sleep for me tonight! Oops.

Class in Session

Today was the first day of my class, "Teaching Middle Eastern History Using Arab Fiction," and as usual on the first day of any class I have ever taken or any new situation I find myself in, my stomach was in complete knots as soon as I got up this morning. To start off with, I wasn't totally awake. I have been going to bed late and sleeping in late for the last week or so, and getting up at 6:45 was somewhat grueling. But I made it up, dressed, and out, and then remembered that I had to have $12 to pay for parking (!!!!!!!!!!!) so I had to stop by the bank. I finally got on the freeway, and while traffic was not great, it was SO much better than when I had to go to AP training that I will just deal with it. I was going to a different part of Seattle that I had never been to before, so I went back and forth between 2 different maps at traffic lights and finally made it. I'm sure the parking attendant thought I was a complete moron, as I hassled her with questions, but she was very nice, and I eventually made my way to the building I was supposed to be in. Now, some of you went to ACU and some did not, but UW is so pretty! The buildings are old and some are gothic looking, and of course, none are air conditioned, but it is just beautiful. It sits right on the banks of Lake Washington, and you couldn't ask for a more beautiful campus.

Except....there are about 15,000 sidewalks going evey possible angle and direction. If there is a space of grass, there are also 8 sidewalks dividing it in every possible way. I know it is wet here, and I'm sure they do it to keep the grass looking nice but still. And then, in the middle of campus, is about an acre and a half (nope, not kidding) of solid brick. It's a giant courtyard paved with red bricks. Now I like red bricks, but wow...there are a lot of bricks. And it is right in front of the aforementioned gothic-looking library with these flying buttresses and spiky things all over it, and it just.....doesn't match. I know that's a weird thing to say, but that is the best way I can describe it. You can see the outside of the building in this picture, and a little bit of the courtyard in front of it.

I continued walking, and made it to class. There are only 5 people in this class, and I am not sure how I made in into the class. Everyone else seems like they know a whole lot more than I do, and I'm the youngest by at least 10 years. I do know I'm not the awkward one though, there is a lady there who taught in Pakistan for 8 years (now that's brave) and it seems like she has some odd ideas about Islam and the Quran and stuff. She kind of sometimes argued with the professor. Awkward....=)


We discussed Leo Africanus by Amin Maalouf (still my favorite of the books we read) and mostly just sat around and talked about wherever our discussion took us. We talked a lot about marriage and the difference between marriage in Islam and Judaism (contract between 2 men or 2 families) and Christianity (three way contract between God, man, and woman) and how that affects divorce in the different societies. Very interesting and not something I had considered before. It is nice that the professor, despite being a professor specializing in mideast studies, specifically Egypt, is very respectful of Christianity. This is not something that happens very often here. Anyway, the discussion was interesting, the people in class are knowledgeable, and I think this will be a great couple of weeks!


PS...On the way out, I got my $12 parking fee back because it is paid for by the people offering the class, but how it works is I pay $12 when I go in, and I get $12 back when I leave. You'd think there would be an easier way of doing it.

Lazy Days

I am kind of enjoying my few days off between visits from friends and the class I start on Monday. Today I read about half of my second to last book for the class (it's really good, but I'll do a review later) and then met a girl who wanted me to make her a bag. She was fun. She is the kind of person that not only looks at someone's nametag, but also then uses their name when she talks to them. She seems like a very fun person to be around, so therefore she kind of freaked me out. Very energetic=very draining. She liked everything, but wanted me to make her a bag out of dragonfly fabric, and a lanyard as well, but wasn't sure what fabric she wanted to use or where to get it. We met at JoAnns and she found some purple fabric she wanted for the lanyard (and was super excited that it was only 45 cents for 1/8 yard) and she gave me an old curtain with dragonfly print and told me to make any bag I wanted to and she'd pay me for it. Since she had admired my purse (which I also made), I decided to make her a duplicate out of her fabric and I am pretty proud of how it turned out. I do NOT like the fabric, but most of the stuff I've made for other people is from fabric I do not like, so that's not a big deal. I made some changes to the pattern, including adding pockets on the inside, and now that I have a camera I can post pictures of the completed project. See more pics here...

AP

I just finished a week of AP training, which went really well, but at the beginning of the week I had an 8" stack of books and papers I wanted to go through this summer in preparation for next year, and we got so much free stuff that now I have two 18" stacks instead. But I got a lot of great ideas and between this and some of the books I have read so far, I want to totally reorganize the way I teach world history next year. Instead of teaching it in units such as "Scientific Revolution," "Enlightenment," and "Age of Exploration," I would like to reorganize it one of two ways: either the AP way, which is to divide history up into groups of years, such as 800-1300, and teach everything happening between those years, or the Arnesto way, which is to label eras like "Contacts and Conflicts," Global Enlightenment," or "the Frustrations of Progress." The Arnesto way is a lot like the AP way, but the units are smaller and have better names, in my opinion.

There were a lot of people in these classes from all over the world, including a woman in my section who teaches at the international school in Shanghai and people from all over the US, including South Dakota and Arizona. I learned so much and the woman teacher was amazing. I hope that someday I know 10% as much information as she does and can do 10% of the cool things that she does in her class. Of course, her kids are freaking amazing and apparently all overachievers, whereas my kids fall in a somewhat different category.

Anyway, I need to process this information, while it's still fresh in my head...so until tomorrow...

AP for the commoners

AP stands for "Advanced Placement" and is a high school class which can get a student college credit. Having been in both high school and college at various times in my life, I can tell you that the class is more strenuous than any basic college level class, and most of my upper level college classes as well. It is pretty rough, and asking a 16 year old kid to do what they are expected to do on the AP test is pretty impressive. So I am doing the training to teach the class, even though I have no intention of teaching AP. It is interesting to learn the information and teaching methods, even though sometimes I thought, "there is no way my kids could ever do what this woman's students can do..."

Also...I previously posted reviews of two of the books that I have to read this summer. Here are the next two. The first book is called Origins of the Modern World by Robert Marks, which I had to read for this AP training, and the second is called Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih, which is one of the seven novels I have to read for the Teacher's Institute.

Origins of the Modern World is really interesting. The book is about the rise of the West, and in short, Marks states that the West got lucky. He talks about how Eastern civilization, especially India and China, was equivalent, and even more advanced that Western civilization until the start of the Industrial Age. But with the invention of coal-powered machinery and factories, England suddenly gained the upper hand since their tiny, natural-resource depleted island just happened to be sitting on the world's most accessible source of coal. In addition, Marks states that Indian Ocean trading societies such as the Indians, Chinese, Arabia, and East Africa saw the benefit to peaceful (free) trade, and this is the reason that for the most part, these societies were not particularly imperialistic while at the same time they were powerful. He states that because Western European societies were more likely to fight with their neighbors, they carried that attitude over into their dealings with the East when they found their way through the Indian Ocean, and at a time when most Western European powers were actually weaker than their African and Asian counterparts, Western Europe was able to easily conquer Asia and Africa. I like what he has to say, especially the first section of the book, which deals with the world pre-1400. He points out that there was no dominant world power, and in fact there were 8 centers of power that slightly overlapped each other, with the outlying areas providing support to the more powerful and urbanized centers. I do recommend this book for world history teachers, and anyone interested in history in general.

Season of Migration to the North is a novel, and I neither liked it or understood it (and I know, those two facts are definitely related). It is about a man in the Sudan during the 1930s or so (it never says for sure) who returns to his village after traveling to England to study for several years. When he returns, there is a new and mysterious stranger in the village, who no one knows much about. The author feels drawn to the stranger, especially after a night of drunkenness when the stranger begins reciting modernist poetry in flawless English. The stranger finally tells the author his story, which involves the stranger also studying and eventually teaching in London, and along the way feeling compelled to seduce several women, who all then commit suicide. Then comes one particular woman who refuses to fall under his spell, which of course means that he can't stop pursuing her. She drives him crazy, they eventually marry, and according to him, she convinces him to stab her to death (I think, this is where things get a little fuzzy for me), and he is put on trial for the previous suicides and the homicide. The book is written a little bit "stream of consciousness" and so it is hard to follow sometimes. Meanwhile, the stranger disappears after telling the author his story, and leaves his wife and children under the care of the author. An older man in the village, who has been repeatedly married and divorced, wants the woman, but although her father has agreed, she refuses to marry him, until he forces her to do so. She won't let the old man touch her, until one night he insists, and both she and the old man end up dead - she stabbed repeatedly through the heart, he because she cut off his penis and he bleeds to death. Of course, all of this is accompanied by quite a bit of extraneous description of the actual sex process throughout the book. I was mostly confused by the book and not very impressed. I know I am a history teacher and not an English teacher, but I still am not sure why we were supposed to read this book. I do not recommend it, although after we study it in class, I may update this post with a modified review.

Knee Deep in Words

A few weeks ago, one of the higher echelon people at school sent everyone in the social studies department an email listing a bunch of classes available around Seattle this summer. There were several interesting prospects, including one through the Seattle Art Museum and one through the national archives. I, of course, was looking for something free. So I picked out one class that was titled "Teaching Middle Eastern history using Arab Fiction," and applied, and got accepted. Cool.

I began to get emails from a woman at the University of Washington about this class, which apparently is part of a series that is offered to high school teachers every summer. It is a two week class in July, 3 hours a day for 10 days. I thought that it would involve short stories, and older literature, from the 1700s or 1800s, but then last week I got a box.

In that box were 7 novels, all written in the 20th century, all dealing with various areas of the Middle Eastern world, and all but one between 300 and 400 pages. My first thought was "holy COW this is a lot of reading, even for me!" Also included was a syllabus, and I got another syllabus a few days later. I started reading last weekend, and so far, the first two books have been pretty good.

I really liked the first book, called Leo Africanus by Amin Maalouf. It is about a Muslim guy who was born in Spain just before the Spanish kicked the Jews and Muslims out of Spain (1480s and 90s, for you non-nerds). He talks about Granada, and then Fez (Algeria), Cairo, and Rome...all places he ends up living over the course of the first 40 or so years of his life. It is a novel, so it is fiction, but I thought it was absolutely fascinating, and it was definitely a different point of view than I had ever really considered before. Generally we think about the Spanish Inquisition either from the Protestant point of view or from the Native American point of view, but I have never consciously considered it from the Muslim, Jewish, or African point of view. I really, really liked the book.

The second book I read was called Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz and is part of a trilogy about an Egyptian family that is set between 1917 and 1952. Palace Walk is the first book and is about Egypt at the end of World War I, and the events that take place while Egyptian nationalism is growing. Again, I had never consciously considered the post-war British occupation from the Egyotian point of view and while I did find that part of the book intensely interesting, I did not really like this book. The father is an extremely strict Muslim who confines his wife and daughters (and later his daughter-in-law) to the house. His wife has not been outside the front door in 25 years. He has absolute authority over the house, to the point of forbidding his family to laugh at his daughter's wedding. He takes pride in his devotion to God and his blameless life, as evidenced by his family's conservativeness. But this same man is considered the life of the party to his friends, goes out drinking every night, and has had multiple affairs. Despite this, he actually kicks his wife out of the house because she went to the mosque one day without his permission, and threatened to divorce her for being "wanton." I did not particularly care for this book, it made me angry at times and made me want to yell at the characters to stand up for themselves and fight back! However, as I previously stated, this book is part of a series, that apparently follows the same family through three generations and maybe it gets better or makes more sense as a trilogy. The history part of it was absolutely fascinating, however.

I haven't read the other books, so when I do I will post a review, but they are Season of Migration to the North by Tayyib Salih, Cities of Salt by Abdelrahman Munif, The Yacoubian Building by Alaa al Aswany, Someone to Run With by David Grossman, and Istanbul by Orhan Pamuk.