Posts Tagged ‘love’
Nearly as soon as I joined the veterans’ band, I had a dinnertime conversation with an exceptionally loquacious saxophone player, whose lips become all the more loose the more wine he sips. Though I was sober, I take after my father as argumentative and a little pedantic — we were matched. Being musicians, our first concern was music.
We started our discussion by arguing about the finer plot points of My Fair Lady — mainly, was it in character for Prof. Higgins to “fall in love” with Miss Doolittle? I submit that it was not, considering that’s what an annoyed George Bernard Shaw believed — and we kept talking music from there. He told me the story about a recalcitrant daughter and her horrible taste in music; he talked about his collection of music, and how he has excellent taste in music.
I wanted to test his assertion, and add a fair share of jazz and baroque to my iTunes. We arranged a handoff of my hard drive sometime in the next month.
At the next rehearsal, of course, I forgot to bring my hard drive. He said:
You liberals are all the same. You’re always doing stuff like that.
I laughed, because not only am I not a liberal, that was a pretty obtuse assumption — because I’m young, and, by implication, foolish, I’m a liberal? Because I reneged on the deal, I’m a liberal? I wasn’t offended, but I took it he meant it as a playful insult, but an insult nonetheless, so I remembered.
What should happen on the next rehearsal but he forgets to bring back my hard drive?
You liberals are all the same. You’re always doing stuff like that.
He laughed — eventually. I will, however, remember forever the expression of shock and awe on that existed on his face for a just few split seconds.
Believe-you-me, he did not like them apples.
I’ve been loosing the pursestrings a little, lately, as much as my reputation as a miser had pleased me. It’s a bit of an experiment. This has been a rather successful experiment, by any appropriate measure.
One of my new coworkers needed a ride back to the office from the school we were training at. He seemed trustworthy, and a decent sort of chap, so I gave him one.
My instinct was to charge him gas money, prices being what they are, but, for whatever reason, I swallowed the impulse. This ride was on the house.
It exponentially blossomed from there.
The next day, I forgot my wallet. He paid for my half of a Grande Meal from Taco Bell, out of the same stores of goodwill I had only a day earlier traded to him. Another day, we were about to buy a pizza, but because it turned out that he didn’t have cash, only card, I paid and shared. He needs a ride most days, so we carpool regularly. He slipped me a $20 bill the other day, without my asking, because of it.
There’s enough back-and-forth that, financially, we’re even, or close enough that I can fairly call it a wash. To boot, we’ve each gained quite a bit of goodwill, at no cost to either of us. We each genuinely like the other’s company, or have grown to.
If I kept better track of my money, — say, down to the very last nickel — I’d have fewer friends. To think: I always believed that because money can’t buy friends, it doesn’t affect them, either.
So very wrong.
Part Four of Four in my series on my two master teachers.
My master teacher consoled a fellow student teacher, and I overheard him:
Never live too close to where you teach, especially when you start out. You sometimes need that drive back home to decompress.
I need the drive home, too. Teaching his classes is regularly frustrating. It’s an uphill battle against some students who never show up. Against some who do, rarely. Against those who are there every day, and immediately enter their 55-minute coma. Against those who are awake, but insist on avoiding work at any cost.
Against some of the rest, who know I’m nothing like my beloved master teacher.
He writes his lessons on the fly, and without much preparation. He knows which copies to make for which week, and he doesn’t usually put together handouts. He believes: Keep It Simple, Stupid; work smarter, not harder.
Students might do a textbook inventory, looking for people, events or vocabluary in the book and placing it in the appropriate spot on a timeline. Students might read from his copies of the TCI curriculum, and do the TCI activities. Students, given their parents’ permission, might watch Schindler’s List as half of the Holocaust unit.
These plans are easy to write, and they’re effective.
I don’t know if his compliments have any perspective: He hasn’t had a student teacher before. He did tell me me that I’m ahead of where he was as a student teacher, at least in terms of knowledge of the material.
Hanging out with the kids was the easy part for me. It was the subject that gave me trouble.
My skills are inverted from him, and so I have a long way to go.
