Mcteachers

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bandarq terpercayaDid you see that Windham teachers and PTO members raised funds for their school by working at the Mansfield McDonald’s?  It was called McTeacher’s Night.  A principal, several classroom teachers, and members of the PTO flipped burgers, scooped fries, and manned the drive-through window for two hours at the end of the day, with some of the proceeds going to the school.  Now don’t get me wrong.  I think it’s great that the local chain owner wanted to do something to help Windham teachers raise funds for their school, but honestly, is this what we’ve come to?  McTeachers?  Is this even a profession any longer?

I was on the phone tonight with a representative from the Parthenon Group, a private consulting firm hired by the National Writing Project to survey site leaders for information about the future of the organization, particularly the future of funding in the wake of the loss of direct federal funding.  The guy I spoke with was nice, but he got a little snarky with me when I told him that I was uncomfortable with the direction the National Writing Project seemed to be forced into.  Increasingly, the national office is looking at private sources of funding, such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (which seems pretty close to The Parthenon Group, several of whose members have worked for the Gates Foundation and other charter-friendly education groups), and even Wal-Mart.  And I told him that I have deep reservations about this direction.

My objection is not so much that I disagree with the vision or values of the Gates Foundation or the Walton Family Trust, which I may, but that I object to the fact that these organizations are being put in a position to define the mission of the Writing Project or other professional organizations for teachers.  No longer are we as an organization in a position where we can define what we do, ask the federal government to provide funding, and then prove the efficacy of our work.  Now, with private donors as well as with current competitive grant funding structures at the state and federal levels, it is the funding agent who gets to define the work we are to do, after which we customize a anjuran to conform to their demands, and only then can we receive funds.  This is, to say the least, troubling.

We have seen this sort of thing many times over the decades—notably after Sputnik and after the publication of A Nation At Risk—where the federal government has taken it upon itself to reform public education from the top down, but this time seems worse.  This time around, we’re seeing even greater involvement from the private sector, and we’re seeing much more effort from the private sector to exert control.  Even though, as I wrote last week, financial firms and the president of New Alliance Bank simply aren’t qualified to reform education.  (By contrast, when the Aetna Insurance Company endowed a chair of writing at UConn back in the 1980s, there was no attempt by them to tell the university what to do with the money, other than to trust the faculty to fund programs that promoted writing and the teaching of writing.  The teachers and professors were the experts on that, and so were entrusted to use their expertise).

In a March 20 opinion column in the Willimantic Chronicle, Eastern Connecticut State University Professor Emeritus James Lacey offers an alternative anjuran to corporate reform and privatization.  Professor Lacey urges us to “[turn] the system upside down.”  He suggests that we abandon systems with “a top-down hierarchy” and replace them with “a democratic, bottom-up approach” that values the experience and expertise of teachers, first and foremost, with input from parents and students.

Interestingly, the original charter school act of 1996 made frequent mention of  community interest and both teacher and parent approval.  Many at the time hoped, in fact, that applications to establish charters would come from coalitions of teachers and community members.  And some did.  But that’s not what we’re seeing now.  Now, we’re seeing hedge fund management firms and large corporations pouring millions of dollars into the establishment of charters.  This is anything but democratic, public, or community based innovation.  This is, what, investment?  Speculation?

What we have more and more now is a corporate model where competition rules and democracy takes a back seat. Where 34 literacy programs competed for Title II SEED grant funds, and only three received them.  Where students have to participate in a lottery to go to a school with adequate funding (and if you’re in New York, this might be merely different floors of the same school building!).  And where programs and schools have to hold bake sales, auctions, and cabarets in order to acquire funds that are not ensnared by someone else’s agenda.

Is this the choice we have been pushed into?  On the one hand, degrade ourselves with begging and performing song and dance routines, flipping burgers on second shift, or capitulate to the demands of the wealthy corporations that have the money but might not share our educational beliefs?  And on top of that to possibly offer up our academic freedom by relinquishing tenure?  Ugh.

Television And Other Guilty Pleasures

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For years I have been trying to locate this interview with Norman Mailer in which the author defends television.  I don’t recall where I read it, but Mailer’s main point was that television was just a new form of story-telling.  His only real objection was to commercial interruptions.  Otherwise, TV was just a new medium for the ancient art of narrative.

I suppose one of the main reasons I was excited by that interview was that I grew up a television junkie.  I watched tons of TV.  I loved cartoons and sitcoms.  I was addicted to Happy Days at one time.  I remember it always came on right after my cub scouts den meeting at Trevor Hill’s house.  We’d have the meeting in his parents’ finished basement and then run upstairs to huddle up in the TV room to watch the show.  My grandfather used to love watching wrestling, which I never really got into, but my grandmother loved crime shows, courtroom dramas, old black and white thrillers, and old comedies.  She loved Perry Mason, Columbo, Barnaby Jones, Murder She Wrote.  With her I watched all the Sherlock Holmes movies with Basil Rathbone as Holmes, or Robin Hood with Errol Flynn as Robin and Rathbone as Guy of Gisbourne.  She and I watched a lot of Abbott and Costello movies, I Love Lucy episodes, and Agatha Christie films.

When I was in eighth grade I had a huge crush on this seventh grade girl that I considered way out of my league.  One day on the bus home from school, she made my day when she confessed that she loved old movies and asked if I’d ever heard of a movie called Some Like It Hot, which was perhaps my favorite movie of all time.  (I still love when Jack Lemmon describes Marilyn Monroe’s walk as “Jell-O on springs”).  Suddenly I forgot all about my preconceived notions and we fell into a great conversation about old movies.

Years later, in college, I went through a phase where I shunned television and aspired to be one of those hip, literate adults who doesn’t own a TV.  But then I read Robert Probst’s Response and Analysis, in which he has a chapter titled Visual Literacy, where he defends TV in much the same way Mailer does.  He challenges teachers to drop their pretensions, admit they read sufficiently trashy beach novels every summer, and accept TV as just a new media.  In that chapter, Probst suggests we assign a show to our students that the whole class can watch as homework and then discuss and analyze as a text in class.  He argues that this will prevent TV from becoming a bad influence upon students’ literacy because it can teach them to be critical viewers of visual texts.

These days I openly watch TV.  Some nights I read in the quiet of late night, after everyone else has gone to bed.  But many nights I want to just chill out and watch a show.  I like to watch DVDs or programs in Netflix so I can avoid commercials.  My favorite shows all have cool anti-heroes and often deal with the supernatural, which strikes me as odd since I’m not a religious believer of any variety.  (I like to tell my son that there’s a lot of mystery in life and that I’m cool with the mystery).

Amy and I have been making our way through the early seasons of Mad Men.  We blew through the first four seasons of Californication.  On my own I’ve been watching Weeds, but lately my real favorite has been Supernatural.

The one thing all these shows have in common that appeals to me is the cool anti-hero:  Don Draper, Hank Moody, Nancy Botwin, Sam and Dean Winchester.  Kinda dark and edgy, conflicted, contradictory, but essentially good people.  I like how their flaws make them sympathetic to other outcasts, kind of like Hester Prynne.  I liked how in season one of Weeds all the messed up high school kids gravitated toward the Botwin residence because Nancy was the only adult who seemed to get them and accept them.  (Though the producers seem to have decided to move away from that angle).

Supernatural appeals to me for a variety of reasons, but I especially love all the literary allusions sprinkled throughout the episodes.  (Californication does this too, perhaps since Duchovny was ABD in English at Yale).  Sam and Dean are basically Sal and Dean from On the Road, and the whole series is a modern take on Paradise Lost, which I think can be said of Kerouac’s novel, too.  Remember that scene toward the end of On the Road when Sal Paradise says, “Suddenly I had a vision of Dean, a burning shuddering frightful Angel, palpitating toward me across the road, approaching like a cloud, with enormous speed, pursuing me like the Shrouded Traveler on the plain, bearing down on me. I saw his huge face over the plains with the mad, bony purpose and the gleaming eyes; I saw his wings; I saw his old jalopy chariot with thousands of sparkling flames shooting out from it; I saw the path it burned over the road; it even made its own road and went over the corn, through cities, destroying bridges, drying rivers. It came like wrath to the West. I knew Dean had gone mad again”?

The only thing is that in Supernatural the characters have their roles reversed, so that Sam is the demonic one and Dean is the Michael-like angel.

So these shows are my guilty pleasures, my late night escapes from jadwal reports and budgetary crises and attacks on the teaching profession.  Some day maybe I’ll even get to teach a course on TV anti-heroes.

Ambition In The Afternoon

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I used to enjoy having the same breaks as my wife and kids but now we are on different schedules.  Nonetheless, when Amy and the kids are on break, even though I still have to work, the pace of life and work changes.  Yesterday, for instance, I only went in for some afternoon meetings and then my late afternoon class, and since the day was so nice, I actually walked to work.  (It takes about 35 minutes from home to office).  On the way home after teaching, I bumped into a student on his way to the dining hall.  We walked and talked about class, his writing, the approaching end of the semester.  On the verge of graduating, he just won a nice award.

Today I took the day off, sort of.  Amy and I have a good friend from college who now lives and teaches in Paris.  We hadn’t seen her in years before last summer, when we spent a terrific day walking around New Haven, where I grew up.  As fate would have it, our friend has a beloved student who will be attending Yale this fall, and Amy also has a student who will be there.  To make a long story short, this week was Bulldog Days at Yale, a sort of incoming freshman orientation, and Amy and I—with the kids in tow—headed to New Haven to meet Helene and Kevin (and their mothers), introduce them to each other, and spend the day touring the campus.

Both students were incredibly excited to start this next phase of their lives.  At one point, Kevin and I were crossing Wall Street near the Beinecke Library when he pointed to a bench and said to me, “Just yesterday I sat on that bench to people watch, and some kid sat down at the next bench, broke out his violin, and just started playing.”  Kevin was enthralled by this simple but beautiful experience.

Later, over coffee in Claire’s Cornucopia, Helene said to me that one of the main reasons she was excited to attend school in the United States was because she’d get to live on a campus where students congregate and socialize, and where everyone pursues at least two years of liberal arts courses.  She pointed out that in France there are no campuses, and students make career-oriented decisions about education much sooner, so that you only see students studying the same thing as you, and you only see them for classes.  There are no quads or dining halls where students toss Frisbees or where a pre-med student like Kevin can listen to a music major play his violin.

Both Kevin and Helene were drunk with the possibilities that lay before them, but Helene was perhaps even more so.  Kevin was clear that he wanted to study neuro-science and ultimately go to med school.  Helene, by contrast, had considered a pre-med major, but when I asked her what she was considering now, said, “I think I would like to double-major, perhaps something like math/philosophy [she said this as if it were a unified major] and literature.”  When I asked what literature, she said, “Well, I could do French of course, or British or American, but I’d really like to learn Russian and be able to read Tolstoy in his own language.”  Truly, her height of her dreams were only matched by the breadth of her ambitions.  Not that she couldn’t do it.  Her English was impeccable and colloquial.  She said she learned it in school but also from watching every episode of Friends over and over again.

The other thing that was sweet to see was the reaction of Helene’s mother, who will be sending her only daughter to school thousands of miles and an ocean from home.  Sophie was clearly delighted and contented to know that her daughter was happy and excited, that she was meeting people already, and that there were adults here who were good friends of her daughter’s favorite teacher, and that we could be available in some sort of unforeseen and unlikely emergency.

At the end of the afternoon, the two soon-to-be freshmen walked off together toward an orientation class of some sort.  Kevin’s mom headed home.  Amy and I and the kids walked Sophie up Chapel Street to the British Art Museum, where she wanted to buy things in the gift shop to bring home to her youngest, a seventeen-year-old boy.  And then Amy and I met up with another former student of hers, about to finish his sophomore year.  He’d just gotten out of the last English class of his first year.  He walked us past the library, chatting about his plans for the summer, till it was time for him to head to the dining hall and us to head home.

Crawling To The Finish Line

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The end of the semester insanity is upon me at UConn.  Do you remember those monster.com commercials from about six years ago?  They were shot in black and white and featured children talking about their dreams—except these kids all said things like, “When I grow up I want to file all day,” or “I want to climb my way up to middle management.”  The end of the semester often makes me feel this way.  (Actually, administration often makes me feel this way, in general, but it is worse at semester’s end).  I sometimes joke that I feel like Bartleby, and if you have ever been to my office, you know why.  Don’t get me wrong; some folks don’t even have windows, but I have this funny little office at the back of an office with a window that looks out onto a small enclosed courtyard.  Thank god there is a Japanese maple in the courtyard that is vibrant green through spring and summer and a brilliant red in fall, because otherwise I look out onto a brick wall with oblique sunlight and blue sky coming from four floors above.  That and it’s everyone’s smoking lounge, which is great for redolent ambience.

But I digress.  My little office is all right.  What I was really complaining about was end of semester and end of year administrative tasks.  There’s the personal merit report we each have to complete.  Not that there’s any money for merit, but we still have to complete the form.  And the kegiatan report for the department.  And the data mart report for the dean and provost.  And the pembinaan session for using the new digital data mart system.  And we must provide an up-to-date CV for the upcoming departmental review.  (Thankfully mine was pretty up-to-date).  And a report to the Aetna Advisory board, with a budget request for the coming year.  And a no-cost extension form for the federal government.  And new grant application deadlines, and a rebudgeting.  You get the point.  These are mostly due between April 30 and May 4, though a couple have more extended deadlines.  My students’ selesai is May 3, and grades are due before the May 6 graduation ceremony. So, I will be spending an inordinate amount of time at my computer, writing and submitting one thing or another for the next two weeks.

No sooner are these report done then we have the CWP’s 30^th Anniversary Reunion Celebration May 11, the Connecticut Student Writers Recognition Night May 15, and the Summer Institute Orientation May 19.  All those things are cool and exciting, but having to organize them makes a part of me eager for them to be over, just because I will worry about their success until they are past.

And then there are the stressed out students coming to office hours.  The very sweet girl who broke down in tears and couldn’t explain why.  The desperate email from the young man who doesn’t think he will be able to get the courses he needs to graduate.  The student who just realized he never filed his plans of study for graduation back in January when they were due.

I really had to exert a great deal of self control a couple days ago when I got an email from University Information Technology Services detailing the elaborate procedure I was going to have to perform on all the networked computers in my office in order to update their network security software.  The email stressed that this needed to be completed before next week or my computers would be denied access to the university servers.  I thought that maybe this was a phony email—we get a lot of those—but it didn’t look like it.  So I called UITS and was told that, Oh yes, that email was for real, and I really did have to drop everything and upgrade my computers or be denied access to the servers.  Well, don’t let anyone ever tell you that being an agitating jerk doesn’t pay off, because after a couple of phone calls and a couple of terse conversations, I received an anonymous but otherwise apologetic email from someone in UITS that also granted me permission to upgrade my computers later this summer.

Anyway, I feel like Andy Rooney ranting like this, but it helps prevent ulcers.  That and red wine.  I hope your end of semester involves less paperwork than mine, and eases you gently into summer.

Teacher Appreciation Week

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About this time of year, Amy and I both receive lots of thank you cards from students.  Amy got a beautiful note from a father the other day thanking her for all she did for his daughter.  Earlier this week, I got two very sweet handwritten notes from former students for whom I wrote letters of recommendation for graduate school.  I have kept all such notes over the last, well, 21 years if you count student teaching and three years teaching as a grad student at Humboldt State.  I have a very swollen folder in a file cabinet in my office at home, and many of the most recent notes are propped up or affixed somewhere in my office at UConn.  I also have several tchotchkes and other gifts, like books, that I have been given lining the shelves of my office.  One very considerate former student sent me a Spanish-language edition of Moby-Dick this year for Christmas and a very nice copy of Dos Passos’ U.S.A. trilogy for my birthday.  Another from my first year teaching in Connecticut just sent me a signed copy of her first novel. 

Of course social media has changed this dynamic, and often I now receive emails and Facebook posts or messages to thank me, and of course Facebook lets me keep in touch with so many of these former students.  Just today I wrote a happy birthday message on the wall of a beloved former student I named my daughter after.  I love being able to stay in touch with so many former students this way.  They send me articles they think I’ll find interesting, or write me with funny classroom stories.

I’m also really amazed and pleased to see how many of my former students have become not just teachers but English teachers!  The same is true for Amy.  Many of her former students have gone on to study languages, travel and study abroad, and go into teaching.  The last two Outstanding Scholars in Spanish at UConn were Amy’s former students.  And at this point, I’m starting to see more and more former students come back to take graduate coursework with me in the Summer Institute.  Four of this year’s participants are former undergrads!

I, too, have managed to locate and be in touch with several of my favorite former teachers, like my high school Spanish teacher Kathy Bonn or my English teacher Joe Miata, both of whom are still teaching.  But there are so many, especially from elementary school, that I have completely lost touch with.  One former teacher I’d love to locate is Mr. Brucker, my second grade teacher at what was then High Hill Elementary School in Madison.  Mr. Brucker was an amazingly kind and gentle man who softened a difficult year of transition for me after my family moved from Hamden to the shore line.

When I first sat down to write this evening, I debated whether or not I wanted to rail against Malloy’s reform proposals, or promote some of the CWP’s May events, like our 30^th Anniversary Reunion or Recognition Night for Connecticut Student Writers magazine (the 11^th and 15^th, respectively, in case you’re wondering).  But then I got thinking about the thank-you’s Amy and I received this week, and I also realized that Teacher Appreciation Week is coming up next week, and it made me think about the teachers I appreciate most, not just the good teachers, of whom there were many, but the ones who made more than just an intellectual impact.

I know from the stats page that Blogger provides that many more people read this blog than ever post responses.  (I might get only two or three posted responses but a typical post gets about 125 views).  We’re all so, so busy, but if you can find a moment, please post something brief about your favorite teacher or about a student whose appreciation made you feel special.

I imagine most of you have read the reports about how demoralized teachers are these days, so let’s all give ourselves a boost by celebrating our profession.  Use this space (or my Facebook wall, which often times gets more posted responses to the blog than within the Blogger account!) to share a good anecdote, or even shout out a name.  Who do you appreciate for their teaching?

OK, so this is the last week of the semester at UConn, and I’ll be taking a break from this blog for the summer.  Do check out the CWP’s website for upcoming events, and think about us next year for PD in your school or maybe a recommendation for the Summer Institute.  Have a good last few weeks.  Enjoy your students, read some good books this summer, do a little writing for yourself, and I’ll see you in September!

What I Did For My Summer ‘Vacation'

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            As soon as finals ended the first order of business was the annual Recognition Night for Connecticut Student Writers magazine.  This year was successful, with a little more than 1,000 submissions, 150 students published or honored, and about 450 students, parents, and teachers in attendance at Jorgensen.  Next year will be the 25^th anniversary of the magazine.  Wally Lamb has agreed to be the keynote speaker, and we are still waiting to hear if we have received a grant from Pitney-Bowes to help fund the event.  Mark May 14 on your calendars!

            From there we dove right into the Orientation for the 30^th Invitational Summer Institute.  We had a great bunch of teachers representing third grade through college—and we even had a science teacher.  Three of my former undergraduate students attended, and two more former undergrads of mine attended the CWP-Fairfield’s Summer Institute, which is very rewarding to me.

            No rest for the weary as a few days later we held an anniversary celebration for the CWP-Storrs, attended by 75 Teacher-Consultants, UConn faculty and grad students, local children’s authors, and a handful of teacher-friendly elected officials, including Susan Johnson, Greg Haddad, and Mae Flexer.  Got a nice proclamation from Governor Malloy (had mixed feelings about that), a nice certificate from the legislature, a nice certificate from Senator Blumenthal, a letter from Representative Rosa DeLauro and another one from UConn President Susan Herbst.  Representative Chris Murphy’s education aide Linda Forman actually flew up from DC to attend.  She also accompanied me on a site visit to EO Smith High School to observe the Writing Center we helped establish there, and to observe Denise Abercrombie’s creative writing students.

            At that point I switched hats and departed for Florence, Italy, where I organized and ran an international literature conference for the members of the Nathaniel Hawthorne Society, Ralph Waldo Emerson Society, and the Edgar Allan Poe Studies Association.  We had great weather, great food, and 110 scholars from 19 different countries, including Brazil, Israel, India, Japan, Russia, and Taiwan.  I even got to spend some time with friends and family while I was there.  And I was elected to be the next president of the Nathaniel Hawthorne Society, which sounds prestigious but I think will be less work than organizing an international conference.

            Returned to the states just in time to run the Summer Institute, which went extremely well.  My son and daughter attended four weeks of summer day camp while my wife took her own vacation, thanks to points on our credit card and the generosity of friends who let her stay with them.  I ran around like a mad man playing single parent.

            The Summer Institute ended July 20, and on July 23 I was driving a 19 foot U-Haul with faulty steering as we moved for the second time in ten months.  Our new home is exactly 1.5 miles from the place we were renting.  We have a two year lease, maybe an option to buy, poor cell phone service but a lovely wooded yard, and the kids get to stay in the same school district.

Once that was done, we were off to Maine to spend one week in a somewhat rustic cabin on a lake with two other educator couples and our collective brood of children—eight kids ranging from four to 14.  Lots of swimming, bickering like siblings, and trips to Hannaford’s.  Seems like every day ended with marshmallows over the fire pit, and then lots of alcohol after the kids were asleep.  Between camp and occupational therapy, both of our kids are now swimming and biking independently, just in time for me to strap four bicycles onto the back of Amy’s car and pray they didn’t fall into the highway and cause a multi-car pile-up.

            Back in Connecticut, it was just the mad rush to be prepared for the start of the school year.  The CWP was awarded two SEED grants, one for Teacher Leadership and one for Professional Development in a High-Need School.  We were honored with a literacy award by the New England Reading Association, and I have a new course to teach, one for freshmen and sophomores interested in becoming high school English teachers.  Plenty of preparatory work to go around.

            And then, on the first day of school for my kids, they were put on the wrong bus and I drove around town trying to locate them.  Elsa thought it was a big adventure.  And so the new year begins.

           

Am I Ready To Parent A Teenager?

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Sunday, I became the proud father of a teenage girl.  I said this to my colleague Doug yesterday as we walked together to our offices, and I believe he thought I was confessing that I had fathered a child out of wedlock seventeen years ago and she had just emerged from the recesses of my shady past.  But no, in fact, the truth is simpler and less shady.  Amy and I have taken in an American Foreign Exchange student for the year.

I must be crazy.

Or I just can’t resist my wife when she comes to me with the look of a kid asking if he can bring home a puppy.  Amy and her siblings all studied abroad (as did I) during high school, and they had a great experience hosting a student for a year.  Jose and Amy are still close more than twenty years later.  Amy has visited him and his family a couple times in the recent past, and he and his wife and daughter came to visit us just two years ago.  So when AFS contacted Amy, desperate to find a few more families in the Storrs area to host students, she came home ecstatic.  Now that we have moved into our new home and we have a finished basement with a bedroom and private bathroom, etc, etc …  Of course I said yes.

Originally we were going to host a boy from Bolivia, but he withdrew from the kegiatan suddenly, and I thought that was it.  Amy was pretty crushed.  But then AFS sent us several packets of students to review and select from.  It was oddly like buying a car.  You look at the photos, check out the specs.  Really.  I’m only being slightly facetious.  One student jumped out at us as a good fit.  Maria’s from Remini, Italy, not far from where our friends and my cousins live.  Amy speaks and teaches Italian, so that will make communication easier than if we accepted one of the German kids they offered us.  She has a little sister about my daughter Elsa’s age.  She likes to read.  She loves American movies and music.  Classic rock and Johnny Depp are favorites.  She studies languages and law at her high school, and her grades are fantastic.

So suddenly I have all the typical responsibilities of being a father to two elementary school children—monitoring Cormac’s homework, driving Elsa to gymnastics, making breakfast, packing lunches, screaming “Go brush your teeth now like I asked ten times already!  We’re going to be late!”  That sort of thing.  And I have added teen issues.  (I’m trying to avoid the word drama).  In one week, we have had to change one teacher because the first one had the social skills of an inanimate object and neither introduced Maria to the class nor spoke to her, for that matter.  We have pushed the envelope for getting to school on time each day because of hair drier issues.  We’ve encountered pickiness with food (no onions) and funny cultural differences with food (the Italians pour the milk first and then scoop the cereal into the bowl).  We went shopping for posters for the walls of her room (Pink Floyd, the Beatles, James Dean, and Audrey Hepburn—at least she has good taste).  These now adorn the walls of an incredibly messy room.  She brought one suitcase, but from the looks of the clothes strewn everywhere, I swear she had four more brought in under cover of dark.  And we went shopping for cleats for JV soccer, which turned into a shopping spree at Dick’s where she purchased several cute outfits, shorts, tops, and a new swimsuit, all of which prompted her biological Dad to declare, “How did you spend $500 already?!”).

In all seriousness, however, Maria has been a delight.  She and Amy have bonded like big and little sister.  She’s been terrific with Cormac and Elsa, playing with them, reading to them at night, and showing them affection.  She and I have bonded over shopping but also over school work.  We spent an hour last night reading and discussing the first 400 lines of Beowulf, which I haven’t read or taught in years.  She’s also very excited to take classes at EO Smith that she can’t typically take in the Italian system, like art classes.  She’s going to try her hand at painting and sculpture.

We’re all still adjusting to the newness of everything, but I think we’ll make it to June.