English Well Speeched Here

(If you're not familiar with that book - a collection of signs from around the world about ladies with nuts and suchlike - you should check it out; it's quite hilarious. As is Anguished English, a history compiled from student writing, in which Socrates dies of too much wedlock.)

There are two parts to this whole English language thing I'm thinking about: one has to do with making English the national language, and the other has to do with how well native speakers speak (and write) it. I'll start there, because it's more clear to me what I think, which is: spelling matters! And commas! And apostrophes! And knowing how to use them correctly! I laugh at all those cartoons and books with funny examples, but really it makes me sigh inside. I tell my students that all those other traits of writing they're taught - organization, content, voice, etc. - have to do with what people think of their writing. But the conventions affect what people think of them. I am incredibly judgmental of restaurant menus offering "onion ring's" or a van with painted sides promising to Get Your Windows "Clean"! (Is that code for something?) And especially newspapers with errors. They actually have people who are paid to make sure there are no errors, even if they're just typos that spellcheck missed. Do your job! Yes, I make what are probably unfair assumptions about the intelligence of people who make these mistakes. Suck it up and learn how to write right.

My favorite example of why commas are important: Let's eat, grandma! Leave that comma out and we're suddenly talking to Hannibal Lecter. The kids always get a kick out of it. That said, I support poetic (mis)use of the language. It's like what I was taught about painting: you have to learn the rules before you can break them. Once you can draw a good still life, you can go nuts with your spatter-painting and call it art.

The other part, the idea of making English the national language, well, it's a little more complicated for me. My initial reaction to the folks who propose that is that they are prejudiced and backwards and generally can't speak English all that well themselves (have you seen the signs at Tea Party rallies?). But once I get over it and start to think about the idea, I find that I'm not so sure. When I travel, or if I live abroad, I don't expect people to speak English to me. Yes, the reality is that in a lot of places people do, but that doesn't mean they should have to. Maybe folks in the tourist industry, but not the general public. I consider it my responsibility to figure out how to communicate with them, to learn the local language, even to say my name differently. I wouldn't expect to be able to get a job if I couldn't speak to the natives. So why wouldn't that be the same for people coming here?

And yet. It doesn't feel right to force people to live a substandard life because they can't understand English. To have a hard time getting good medical care. To be labeled stupid because they fail a test at school. To be unable to feed their kids because nobody will hire them. I don't know. I'm running up against my socialist libertarian tendencies again. Isn't there some kind of compromise that allows people to live decently and hold onto their own culture while also assimilating and acknowledging they're in the good ol' US of A? Can we celebrate our diversity and communicate clearly?

Of course this issue is tangled up in the immigration issue, which I won't get into except to say: when I taught in New Mexico, my students didn't realize there was such a thing as legal immigration. They'd only ever heard of illegal immigration. That kind of blew my mind.

Now I'm off to join Lynne Truss and her posse of guerilla grammarians, ninja mask on and sharpie in hand. All ye who err, beware!

Hmm.

I had a conversation yesterday about feeling unmoored now that school is out, even though I was only teaching two afternoons a week, and how it's important to have something to hang my days on - if not a job, then a yoga class, or a baby date, or a women's circle, or something. Something on the calendar, to anchor the otherwise aimless space. It's not aimless, of course, it's filled with the most important work of all: raising my boy. Nevertheless, especially after 7 months (!) of it, it feels like time to get out and do something else. I'm starting to hit my wall of going round and round with the baby toys, how can we entertain you now, what can I do to get that heart-melting grin and giggle, constant energy and attention. It's exhausting. And when it's nonstop, it stops being fun, and I don't want to stop having fun with my baby. So the time has come to bring in the babysitters and work out a balanced parenting schedule (I always wince using that as a verb. Well, a gerund here, I think, but still) and go dancing.

The other piece of it had to do with working and how we undervalue the work of being at home and raising a kid. (and I get the double hit, with my "real" work of teaching being undervalued too! Oh sure, we say education is the most important thing, but we don't walk the walk.) As I live it, even in an enlightened and progressive area, I feel how unfair it is. If you can't define yourself with money, you don't count. You don't get the benefits of being retired (think palm trees and daiquiris) and it's almost like you're not a real person. Yes, I know this is not news, but it is new for me to feel this way, to feel like I have to justify what I'm doing somehow, to fight for the recognition that I am working more now than I ever have before. No, it's not a "job" that pays me money, but I don't have a union guaranteeing me a coffee break every 4 hours either. (Sorry, kid, you can't get up from your nap yet, it's not time for me to clock back in) Ok, this isn't totally fair, a lot of people celebrate this time in our life and clearly do value it. They're not the ones I'm talking about. (I get a lot of props for teaching, too, but my microcosm isn't matched on a national level)

I don't know exactly what I'm trying to say; I'm not feeling particularly articulate at the moment, but that conversation has been bubbling around in my mind and I needed to get it out somehow. And I may not be getting drinks from the cabana boy, but I do have something way better, a most incredible little man that lights up my life and lives up to all the hype. So there, world.

Cleverly Disguised as a Responsible Adult

That's what a magnet on our fridge says, and it feels pretty true. Sometimes I just get overwhelmed by the things we're supposed to do, as dishes and dust pile up around us. Isn't there some cleaning gene that kicks in when you reach a certain age? I don't seem to be any better about it now than when I was a teenager with a messy bedroom. But it seems to come naturally for the adults I know. The real ones, that is, not like me. Maybe it's a generational thing. All I know is that we'll finally get so frustrated (or the smell gets bad enough) that it motivates us to spic'n'span the place, and then there's this optimism that it will stay that way, and it does for a few days, and suddenly the mess creeps back in. Then we swear we'll never cook again, and that will fix it! I hold on to a notion that if everything just had a proper spot, it would end up there and stay clean. But it expands to fit the place, filling whatever surface area is available; we're equally messy in a 1600-square-foot house as we were in a tiny campervan. Actually, I think we were better about it in the van, so maybe we need to downsize again. I also thought moving into a new house would make it easier to keep it clean - you can't blame the crud in the corners of the bathtub on the last residents - but no. I'm reminded of the argument I used to use against making my bed: it's just going to get messed up when I sleep in it tonight, so why bother? I just swept - how is there dog fur all over again? Why bother? Well, actually, unless we want to star in a Hitchcock film about deadly dust bunnies, that's worth doing. Especially now that the boy is starting to scootch around and get his face in it.

I'm looking at a pile a foot high of newspapers that I haven't (or have) read. Why is that still there? And the bag of outgrown baby clothes to take to the consignment store that's been sitting there for a few weeks? Who even knew that you had to dust your window blinds and stair railings? And your plants?!

One of my students tried to sell me a plant for a fundraiser, and I told her I have enough things to keep alive these days. Ice cream for breakfast, anyone?

It's A Small World After All

[This is an excerpt from a "personal statement" I had to write as part of an application for a seminar on teaching about Asia. I wasn't really prepared to write it and had to take advantage of naptime, so it's just what came to me in the moment.]

My first foods were rice and dhal, and my first bedtime stories came from the Ramayana. I spent half of my childhood overseas, in India, Kenya, and Sri Lanka, and have since traveled to more than 30 countries. My experiences define a strong undercurrent in my teaching: I want to expand the horizons of my students and introduce them to the world they live in. It's a little simplistic to say I think this is the way to saving the world, but I kind of believe it. So many of the problems we face stem from a lack of understanding and awareness - it's easy to destroy or ignore something (or someone) you know nothing about.

When the tsunami hit in 2004, I was living in Santa Fe and teaching 7th grade Social Studies. We were studying New Mexico history that year. My students didn't usually pay too much attention to the news if it wasn't an assignment, but of course they heard about the disaster and were horrified in an abstract way. However, it didn't really mean anything to them; some of them couldn't even locate it on a world map. One day I brought in pictures of myself at their age in Sri Lanka, and suddenly it became real. These were real people who had died, lost their families, their homes, their livelihoods. We looked at maps and followed the news. Students who had never left town were engaged in the lives of people half a world away.

That kind of cultural crossover, of making someplace abstract and exotic into a reality, is powerful. I want my students to be interested, to care, to believe in the possibility that these are places they can go and people they can know. The world these kids are growing up in is changing so fast and getting smaller all the time. They can hop online and watch video taken from a cellphone in Beijing. They can follow instant updates from a kid their age in Korea. It's easier than ever to travel. While growth and technology blur borders, stereotypes and insularity are growing too.

I want to teach kids to be fascinated by other cultures, not scared of them.

Milking the Signs

I've been signing more and more with the boy, not just baby books and songs, but reviving my college ASL days and signing what I can, when I can. I pulled out my sign language dictionaries to help, since it's been a lot of years and although I'm surprised at how much has come back naturally, I am far from fluent or even really conversant. When I was looking up the sign for "milk" to see if it was different than what they teach in baby sign (it's not), I happened to notice the sign for menstruation on the same page. This particular dictionary has little memory aid descriptions for each sign. Here's the entry:

"Menstruation, Period: Tap the right cheek twice with the palm side of the right "A" hand.
Memory Aid: The cheek can suggest the cavity of the uterus and the action can suggest the loosening of material for the discharge of the menses."

Really, Perigee Visual Dictionary? Really? Because, yuck. I'm all for oneness with our bodies and finding joy and power in the natural womanly cycle, but come on now. That seems unnecessary.

Cheek uteri aside, it's really fun to get back into ASL and think back to the good times we had at school. It's such a good way to express yourself, and so often feels totally intuitive to me. For years I've used a handful of signs in my everyday life and at school - yes, no, I don't know, who, all done - things like that. I always eavesdrop when I see people signing, but have never been very good at keeping up with signs at speed, just like with any new language. But it's so pretty to watch, and it makes me feel good when I recognize a sign in the flurry. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival incorporates ASL into their productions frequently - most recently a deaf actor played the ghost in Hamlet, so those interactions were all in sign. That worked really well, but sometimes it seems more forced. I like watching it anyway.

It's one of those forking paths on the timeline of my alternate lives. I was thinking pretty seriously about getting involved with the National Theatre of the Deaf, which was just down the road in Hartford and put on some beautiful productions. I loved watching the synergy between voice and sign and body - it was a beautiful dance, and I wanted to be a part of it. (another one of those alternate forks was doing light design for dance - I was going to go work at Jacob's Pillow the summer after graduating, but took a road trip across the country instead. Which is a whole 'nother blog post or several. Did I already write about the hairy pits? I"ll have to check.)

Alrighty, then. Signing off.

Lost Art of the Mixtape

Kind of like Lost Wax casting, only not really at all. I was waxing (ha!) nostalgic to my teenage students the other day about mixtapes, and realized I was totally dating myself* when they didn't get it at all. "But you just make a playlist, it's so easy!" Exactly. It's so easy. And therefore it loses something. Yes, you still have to choose just the right songs, and can work on making the perfect cover, but it's not quite the same. Making a mixtape was a big deal. You had to spend hours cuing up the tapes and knowing exactly how long the songs were and waiting to hit stop at just the right moment. And all that came after poring through your music and your friends' music, tapes scattered on the floor all around, popping them in and out of the player to hear the songs, and hear if the transitions worked... There was that in-between period, of using cd's to make a mixtape, before you could burn it onto a new cd, which wasn't quite as involved but was still a very hands-on kind of process. Something about the tangibility of it all was magical. It meant something.

Mixtapes were the love letters of my youth.

That said, I totally dig the easy access to music these days, and those same students make me cd's, which is a great way to hear new stuff, and the internet brings its own magic. But I still miss the true mixtape.

*I love myself, I think I'm grand. When I go to the movies, I hold my hand. I put my arm around my waist, and if I get fresh, I slap my face. --Ogden Nash

UPDATE: a couple days after I wrote this I was reading Sherman Alexie's new collection, War Dances, which includes the poem "Ode to Mix Tapes." "...the last track/ Was the vessel that contained/ The most devotion and pain/ And made promises that you couldn't take back." As always, it's a book that hits you where it matters. He is such a powerful writer.

Twinkle Twinkle Little Vagina

So you know how every language has its hilarious faux pas, leading to mortified teenagers who grow up with the same funny story to tell? In French, if you say "Je suis pleine," meaning literally "I am full," you have just announced that you are pregnant. Ha ha! Or in Spanish, similarly - "embarazada" means pregnant, not embarrassed, though you will certainly be blushing if you make that mistake.

Well, I just learned about one in sign language that tops those. I was at a "Babies in the Library" group (for the first time, and possibly the last, because: chaos! And the hormones that make me care about my baby crying don't work for other babies, so they're just loud and annoying) and we were learning to sign some stories and songs. We made it through "Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?" with no problems, but when we got to "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star," one of the women stopped the lady teaching us (who teaches baby sign, so oops - how embarazada for her! But this other woman works with deaf kids and actually uses ASL, so she wins). She was trying to be gentle about it, all "doesn't that have another meaning?" Blank response. She had to lay it out: "I'm pretty sure it means vagina."

There we were, more than a dozen men and women holding our thumbs and fingers together in a diamond shape, waving our vagina hands above our babies as we sang to them. It was fabulous.

It's true that baby signs are often simplified, because they can't quite manage the grownup version - just like when they talk, they simplify words - but that's a far cry from mixing up diamond and vagina. Although kind of funny if you think about all those ads for diamond rings being swapped out. They're irritating enough with their message that men can buy forgiveness and love because all women are so shallow that they only care about the bling. But now I'm getting sidetracked.

And yes, we are starting to use some basic signs with the boy, in the hopes that he'll learn to recognize them and start using them in a couple months. We'll see how it goes, but I'm all for expanding our communication.

Also, my title was kind of misleading, so here's how the new version of the song really goes:
Twinkle, twinkle, little star
How I wonder what you are
Up above the world so high
Like a vagina in the sky...

Try it, it's fun!