My Students

I'm doing my best to come up with practical and emotional strategies that will help me to get through the school year. A little bit of disengagement helps -- once you realize what a situation is and that you're not going to change it, you can concentrate on what you do and not over-invest in caring about the rest. Caring is a positive value, of course, and I am prone to it, but putting your emotional chips down on outcomes you can't control is like playing roulette with your own well-being. The odds in roulette are famously poor.

My students are interesting to observe. They say they like my classes, and I believe them. I work hard to interest them without watering down the material, and I'm not a harsh disciplinarian. But the classes suffer from a kind of collective Attention Deficit Disorder. Even when, say, I show a grabber of a film, 50% of the students will compulsively talk during the entire movie -- they cannot seem to turn off the "socialize" button at any time whatsoever. Although they can engage with the subjects to some extent during class and even make insightful comments, the vast majority will not do outside reading or written assignments or think about the material outside of class.

What makes that refusal more striking is that most of them are not "busy." Not a single one of my 50 students has a legitimate job -- there are almost none to be had hereabouts, and adults occupy most of the teen-type jobs such as fast food. Only a few have cars, and many don't bother to get their licenses (that surprised me), or can't pass the written exam. They are not involved in sports (with the exception of one cheerleader, one equestrienne, and two rodeo boys) or the arts (with the exception of one rock musician, and two fiction writers). Yet they will mostly all tell you straight up that they are far, far too busy to do any homework. A more genuine reason is that many of them have very stressful home lives, which is why we provide them two hours per day in school to get work done in our "Project-Based Learning" room. They use that time to socialize, too, of course.

"It is what it is," as they say. So this student profile is one of the factors I've allowed myself a level of emotional disengagement from. I cannot make Nevada into Massachusetts, and I cannot re-write these students' histories. I have to be content with the fact that what I do doesn't harm them, and probably benefits them slightly. I'll see little glimmers now and then. In movies about teachers those glimmers always turn into a big bonfire, but that's Hollywood, of course.

Hooky

I played hooky from work today, since it was a "professional development" day, and, as earlier mentioned, I strongly dislike our teacher trainer. It felt good to get other things done, and to get a hint of what the area might be for me once I can breathe again. There is life after every job, and there will be life after this one. Unfortunately, the best part of many jobs in contemporary America is quitting them. Johnny "Take This Job and Shove It" Paycheck was exactly on the money about that.

The Myth of Western Good Looks

They people our imagination of the American West: tall, tan, handsome cowboys and lithe, beautiful cowgirls. There is only one slight problem. They don't exist.

On the historical photographic evidence, they never did. But lest I seem too definite, I will admit that some (not many) contemporary young Nevadans (to pick on my new home state) may indeed hit a moment of visual appeal in their late teens and early twenties. It is instructive how quickly it passes, though. Hard living, hard partying, and hard substance-using, combined with a lack of self-care foreign to us preening urbanites, insure that the moment is but a moment. It's quickly downhill from twenty-five.

In my three months in northern Nevada, I've seen exactly six men who, on looks and presentation, merited a second look (and my pulse, I assure you, is not that tough to quicken). Two of those fell in the early twenties category, although neither of those was remotely "Western"; I haven't seen a single good-looking man in a cowboy hat, despite my being partial to that look. I think all the good-looking cowboys these days are actually singers (Clint Black, Brad Paisley, Keith Anderson, Jason Meadows). As Daniel Akst comments in his brilliant essay "Looks Do Matter," we've outsourced the business of looking good and dressing well to celebrities.

One of the six "lookers" I've seen is a local celebrity, a thirty-something Democratic politician who ranks high in state government and certainly knows how to wear a suit; Carson City residents will have no difficulty guessing who I mean. He has an absolutely picture-perfect family, too, and I fully expect him to be Governor of the state, or a U.S. Senator, within ten years. I have no doubt he expects it, too.

But in general, I must look to the manifest beauty of the natural landscape here to make up for the lack of beauty in the human landscape. You can't have everything.