Last Days of Summer
We’re really trying to wring the last possible drops out of summer around here. Right now I’m blogging on the couch, listening to my girls and their friend Emma operate a Play-Doh bakery in our kitchen while ABBA plays in the background. Only in the summertime is a midweek playdate-sleepover possible, so Emma will be our guest till tomorrow afternoon. We also had KFC for dinner and are contemplating watching a movie with the kids around 8, which means they’ll be up till 10 PM or so. But it’s summer, right? Our pool closes for the summer on the 7th of September, so I’m hoping to squeeze in some evenings next week.
Things at school are humming along, right on track for the students to come back exactly one week from today. I did my bulletin board, with a pretty chinoiserie-influenced wrapping paper in shades of blue and purple and a bunch of magazine illustrations and literary quotes– I try and stay English-related on my board, but also, I like to think of it as a calming influence for me, and maybe my students, in a hectic school year. I started a round of meetings today, followed by more each day till Wednesday, and collected many pages of paper with important dates and information, which hopefully I won’t lose before I plug it all into my Outlook calendar. I saw old friends and colleagues and met some new ones, and tomorrow I’ll see a list of student names for my classes who will soon become faces, voices, and presences indelibly embodied in my life.
Finally, in a feeble attempt to wrap up a disjointed post, I would direct you to a wonderful and clear-sighted Bitch PhD post eulogizing Ted Kennedy and opening a great discussion and defense of privilege. It’s a topic that’s been on my mind a lot in the past few years as I adjusted from teaching primarily at public institutions to now teaching at a private school with students who are, on the whole, incredibly privileged. In one life, I spent a lot of time teaching students about the actions and oppressions of privilege (and the lack thereof) in their own lives; in the other, I hope, in some ways, to help my privileged students feel the same kind of empathy and compassion that many of the Kennedy clan seem to have felt towards those who need it most.
- Posted in: all about me ♦ conversations
I love your last point here, and I like Bitch PhD’s point that privilege creates security from which one can take certain kinds of actions. As you say, Ted Kennedy can be a model we hold up for our privileged students, about the privilege of making the world a better place for others.
Yes– I like the idea of a “privilege of making the world a better place for others.” Empathy and compassion are part of that, I think, and one of the greatest tools in developing those qualities can/should be literature, as well as modelling it in our behavior and words.
I’m with you on the wringing the last dregs of summer out of the waning days of August. If only it were going to be nicer this weekend, so we could go to the pool!
ladismom, I know– we got rained out today and have a birthday party tomorrow, so it’s going to have to be evening pool time for us next week. This is our first year at our pool, and it was such a great experience, I’m really going to miss it!