Contrariwise

I got the key to my classroom yesterday. I had to swipe the key to my closet on Wednesday because I needed an immediate solution to classroom theft, but I plan to copy it and give it back.

My students are only allowed to write in blue or black ink. I tolerate some unusual shades of blue and erasable pens, but anything written in pencil got a zero. It was harsh, but “don’t use a pencil” is a basic instruction. However, they are still children, so I buy cheap black pens at Wal-Mart and sell them to my students for 25 cents each. I point out whenever they buy pens that they could buy them themselves much cheaper, or borrow them from classmates for free, but they continue to come to me.

When they leave their textbooks behind (or say they’ve been stolen from their lockers) and I find them, I put them in my drawer and charge $1 per book to give them back. There are about fifteen textbooks in my drawer right now; my class requires two books, which are loaned to students as if they were in public school.

All of this added up to an envelope with around $20 cash in my top desk drawer. Tuesday night was the first home basketball game, so when I left around 5:30 p.m., there were still dozens of students running around the unlocked building. When I arrived Tuesday morning, the envelope was gone. I mentioned this to my housemates, who encouraged me to report it to my principal and ask for a key to my room. I did.

I got the key to my classroom yesterday.

Last week, I reviewed my tenth-graders’ homework on adverbs. One of my relatively talkative girls said, “Miss W., this is the first time I haven’t been bored in your class.” I was excited about adverbs, as I always am about grammar, but that made my day.

Tonight, I’m grading vocabulary quizzes I gave while preparing for our ridiculously early standardized tests. For part of the quiz, the students had to choose any word from the word bank to write in a contextual sentence. I didn’t call them “contextual sentences,” but most of them got the point. One of my ninth-grade boys wrote, “In class today I could not erudite what the teacher was teaching because of all the distractions.” I read it to my housemates, and responded in writing, “Nice try, but it’s still incorrect.” Then I drew a smiley face. He also wrote, “My friends were to drunk to drive so I was the designated driver since I don’t drink.” I corrected his spelling and reminded myself that he can’t legally drive, either.

My kids are ridiculously badly behaved, but at least there are some moments that make me glad to do what I do.

Over winter break, I read Wendy Shalit’s Girls Gone Mild. I meet with the lovely ladies of the CSC once a month to talk about the issues Shalit discusses in her book. It’s a very well-written book, and our meetings have been great. Part of our goal is not just to sit around in our Catholic bubble, talking about things, but to do something. Kaitlyn and I collaborated on our something: a guest column for the campus newspaper, The Diamondback. If it gets published, it will be one of the boldest, most terrifying, most exhilarating things I’ve ever done, but I am confident that I’m doing it for all the right reasons.

Update (4/22/08): It was published today! The responses have been about half positive, half negative. I’ve been called some interesting and profane names, but I don’t regret submitting it at all.

To all girls: You are beautiful. You are not gorgeous because of your hot body or sexy clothes. You are so lovely because you are the crown of creation. To all guys: Help us realize our dignity as women by being real men. We know we’re not blameless, but you can show strength by living up to the challenge of showing all women that they are loved—and by ignoring the alleged Skirt Day. We are all human beings, not just human bodies. When we’re inching toward middle age, and the minis start to look ridiculous, shouldn’t we be assured that love will remain?

Those are sweet sentiments, I know, but words are worthless compared to action. It’s spring. The sun has returned, the cherry blossoms are at their prime, and the girls’ clothes are getting smaller. With warm weather comes the return of super-skimpy clothing. Here at Maryland, where we’re all trying to learn something, eventually get degrees, and have some fun along the way, we’d like to think we’re building a respectful culture. Maybe the women are even finding empowerment, The Vagina Monologues notwithstanding. But when a girl can’t take more than two steps without pausing to pull down her skirt and cover a little more leg, that doesn’t signal power. It signals defeat.

We live in the aftermath of the sexual revolution. Our mothers fought long and hard for the right to wear the micro-minis their moms wouldn’t let them leave the house in. They felt free, but that freedom has been twisted back on our generation. The new oppression makes young women, especially on college campuses, feel compelled to wear immodest clothing. The new feminism emphasizes the innate, dignified, and unique roles of men and women. It is more interested in a cute skirt from Old Navy than a feathered thong from Victoria’s Secret, bought to peek over low-rise jeans accidentally-on-purpose. The detractors against modesty remain, and they don’t even realize they’re complicit. “It’s what in the stores,” says my own mother about my 16-year-old sister’s tight tank tops. “That doesn’t mean you have to buy it,” I think, “and if you keep buying it, they’ll keep making it.”

Don’t think guys play no part in the new oppression. If a guy turns his head after you because you’re not wearing enough clothes, then it’s his fault, too. But if he told you that your modest clothes made you look pretty, wouldn’t that be infinitely better? Guys, who would you rather date: the girl who respects herself—and you—enough to cover up, or the girl that doesn’t care, and won’t care even when your friends start to check her out? Don’t encourage the wild girls. Show the mild girls that you respect them, you want to protect them, and you still desire them.

I have to admit that my own modesty kick is a recent development. I remember the way my ex-boyfriend and male classmates looked at me in miniskirts and low-cut tops. The only reason I felt good was because I knew they were looking at me instead of the other girls, so they had to pay attention to my thoughts and words…when they looked up. Men are inherently visual. Women know this; that’s why the girl is bothering to pull down her skirt instead of moving right along and blaming the men for their lack of self-control. She knows that the spring breeze shouldn’t be hitting that part of her thigh. She doesn’t want to dress that way, but what else can she do?

Rebel! It’s as simple as putting on a t-shirt under that tank or buying a longer shirt for those jeans. You don’t have to ignore your heart when it reminds you that you’re more than a bunch of body parts. You have more to offer than skin. If you don’t want to be treated like an object, don’t give the world a clear view of the objects you want it to look beyond. Grab some leggings for that mini; the 80s are in right now. No one’s saying you have to grow your hair into long pigtails and find dress patterns from Little House on the Prairie. Try some modesty on for size. You might be surprised at how beautiful you become.

It figures that right after I had the biggest moment of my blogging life, I got so busy that I couldn’t even post. Now isn’t really an exception. There are so many things I could and should be doing that I have to be quick. I’ll go with one-sentence updates on the past two weeks.

Independence Day: I was productive in the morning, then tried to go see the fireworks on the National Mall with my roommates and friends, but we bailed when the storm warning came in and wound up missing everything.

Last week, my car refused to shift out of park, so I was humbled by taking the bus.

Matt W. and I have started planning our section of HONR 100 for the fall, which makes me very excited about getting to teach again.

Some people think the story behind The Wave is a hoax, which is unsettling because Matt and I are teaching it this fall regardless.

Fr. Bill’s last Masses at the CSC are this weekend, and I’m going to miss him so much!

I saw Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix at midnight on Tuesday with Sara, Guy, and Guy’s roommate James, and though it could have been a little better (even considering the chasm between books and film adaptations), I was pleased.

Archbishop O’Brien, formerly of the Archdiocese for the Military Services, who confirmed me, is coming to Baltimore.

I am crazy busy, but I feel right with God again, and I’m keeping things under control.

More extensive posting later, I promise.

The Holy Father gave an address to a convention of the Diocese of Rome. (Why is it not an archdiocese?) Seeing ZENIT’s title for it (”There Is Talk of a Great ‘Educational Emergency’”) immediately drew me in.

This is an inevitable emergency: in a society, in a culture, which all too often make relativism its creed—relativism has become a sort of dogma–in such a society the light of truth is missing….

So how would it be possible to suggest to children and to pass on from generation to generation something sound and dependable, rules of life, an authentic meaning and convincing objectives for human existence both as an individual and as a community?

For this reason, education tends to be broadly reduced to the transmission of specific abilities or capacities for doing, while people endeavour to satisfy the desire for happiness of the new generations by showering them with consumer goods and transitory gratification. Thus, both parents and teachers are easily tempted to abdicate their educational duties and even no longer to understand what their role, or rather, the mission entrusted to them, is.

Yet, in this way we are not offering to young people, to the young generations, what it is our duty to pass on to them. Moreover, we owe them the true values which give life a foundation.

However, this situation obviously fails to satisfy; it cannot satisfy because it ignores the essential aim of education which is the formation of a person to enable him or her to live to the full and to make his or her own contribution to the common good.

As a teacher, a godmother, a Confirmation sponsor, and a Catholic, I find this fascinating. My classmates last semester who graduated in May had to interview for admission to the master’s degree program. Vanessa mentioned that, during the interview, she was asked what her (English) teaching philosophy is. (Mine is that all people love reading once they find the right book.) Thursday on Life on the Rock, a former Notre Dame football coach insisted that football prepared his players for life. After Remember the Titans, I can understand that. My task as a teacher isn’t just to get my students passing test scores, but to help them understand literature and language, why they matter, and their significance in their lives (and not get fired in the process). All the popular movies about great teachers (Stand and Deliver, Music of the Heart, and more recently, Freedom Writers) have little to do with test scores. Those teachers changed their students on a personal, relational, spiritual level. The Holy Father is talking about an educational philosophy.

An essential priority of our pastoral work [is] to bring close to Christ and to the Father the new generation that lives in a world largely distant from God.
…
In practice, this guidance must make tangible the fact that our faith is not something of the past, that it can be lived today and that in living it we really find our good. Thus, boys and girls and young people may be helped to free themselves from common prejudices and will realize that the Christian way of life is possible and reasonable, indeed, is by far the most reasonable.

I experience this every time I encounter Catholic youth. Our task as Christians is to “make disciples of all nations” (Mt. 28:19). The youth are part of those nations. I even experience it when I talk about faith with fallen-away or non-Catholics. I love Christ so much, with every part of my being, that I am bursting to share him with everyone I can find.

This is what makes me want to try teaching Catholic school. Is it possible to be too Catholic for public school?

Knowing that B16 and JPII were both teachers explains their grace at relating faith to education. It also gives me hope that my teacher’s mind will help me as I make up for a good decade of lost catechesis in my own life.