south hadley hodge-podge

It's been hard for me to conceive of blogging about this experience, mostly because the majority of it hasn't been that pleasant for me, and I've been loathe to blog the hard times. "Hard times is a daddy and a mother, livin in a mansion and hating each other....We ain't got no hard times, at all." I'd say 10 cents if you can name the reference, but little moose knows Lacy J.

Eveyone here is obsessed with foosball. I want to throw myself into the obsession, and have that little mini-bliss which can happen when something unexpected takes over your world. Only I'm embarassingly bad at foosball, in the way that it's possible to be when you haven't played since 1984 in Georgia with your cousins Mike and Amanda in their rec room. Man. Because, also, there's a tournament going on. And of course, all the admin staff, who spend the day playing foosball in the campus center, are the only ones left in the finals.

Yesterday my students had a wonderful conversation about empathy and literature. J was so frustrated that we keep reading disturbing stories/plays ("The Lottery," "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?," "The Glass Menagerie," "A Doll's House," "A Rose For Emily") that she asked if the publisher was still in business so she could write to complain about their anthology. And K said she didn't like to think about the sad sorts of things the stories made her imagine. But someone else referenced a line from "The Glass Menagerie" to make the point that it's important to educate oneself about unpleasant events in the past so that one can make the present different. And then P brought up how WWII might not have happened if Germany had been treated differently after WWI. I'm glad I can have these conversations with 10 year-olds. Sometimes I feel as though my 20 year-olds at IU couldn't do it.

Tonight's second activity was child labor in the guise of fun. Seventy kids signed up to wash the staff members' cars. I couldn't get my kids to do that when I was nannying, but these "gifted and talented" kids were totally into it. It was amazing. Almost as good as the activity which consisted of everyone playing Simon Says and me dumping buckets of water on anyone who made a mistake.

I think I need a little distance before I can blog about the real frustrations: the pedagogy issues, the qualms I have with the particularly elitist bent of this program, the persistently bizarre social climate. The 100 degree room (4th floor, no a/c). But I've been feeling my silence and not liking it very much. So there's something, at least.