Quote of the Day

My student J. came in today to (finally) take his midterm. He started joking around and said something in Spanish that sounded so thoroughly Dominican, that I whirled around and asked this Puerto Rican / Italian kid: "Where'd you get that Dominican accent?!"

Apparently it comes from the barber shops: "Miss, you can't talk Rican to them or they'll mess up your hair."

Oh, J....

Quote of the Day

"Miss, do you put your clothes together yourself?"

Apparently, this is a compliment which should be taken to mean, "You dress well" and not, "You look like your mama dressed you".

Thanks, Y. I do, in fact, put my clothes together myself.

Quotable

I've been meaning to post something like this for a while, but I haven't gotten around to it until now.

My students are hilarious. Sometimes on purpose, and sometimes unintentionally, and they give me enough fodder to tell stories for days and days, so here are some of my favorite student quotes from this year.

1. L. (after wiping black marker off a white board with her hands): I'm all black.
B. (an African-American student): It's a privilege.

2. E.: Miss, you too serious. Do you have any friends?
Me (sarcastically and dramatically): No. None at all.
E.: Do you have any pets?
Me (Still dramatic and sarcastic): Nope.
E.: Do you have a husband?
Me (Even more dramatically): Nope. I go home and I don't talk at all until I come to work the next day.
Y. (looking concerned): For REAL Miss?!

3. While working on an example of a poem that they would have to write in class -
Me: What's something I might do over the summer?
Student: Swim!
Student: Go outside!
L.: Sell hotdogs!
Whaaaaaaa?!

4. C.: Miss, do you talk about us when you go home? Do you tell stories about us?
Yes, kiddies. I tell the Internet.

5. The day of parent-teacher conferences - J: Miss, my dad is coming; he's going to hit on you. (For the record, he did, but at least I was prepared! I flashed my ring like crazy.)

6. K.: Miss, you look nice today.
Me: I'm always scared when students tell me that. Does that mean that I don't look nice most days?
K.: Naw, Miss. You know how to dress; some teachers don't.
On a related note, I had parent-teacher conferences last night, and parents are funny, too:

1. Me: S. is doing really well; he has an A, but he talks a lot in class, and I had to give him two days of detention because he was disrupting class.
S. Sr.: I thought he had detention; he told me he was cleaning for community service hours.
So busted!

2. Me: C. has brought his grade up from an F to a C. He's been coming in for tutoring and is working really hard. I'm really proud of him.
C.'s mom: Me too. He's getting a milkshake!

The best part, though, was the mom who told me that her daughter hated speaking Spanish before my class and now she goes home and wants them to speak to her in Spanish. "She wants to send texts in Spanish and she watches movies in Spanish with her dad." I will not lie, I teared up.

The kiddies

I volunteer twice a week in a fourth grade class and tutor two girls on Tuesday evenings and lately I've been wishing I had a tape recorder with me to document all the craziness they say. A few gems from this week:
1. D: Miss, you got a daughter?
Me: No.
D: You got a son?
Me: Nope.
D: You don't got anything?!
Me: Nope.
D: (Looks at me like I have grown a second head and says with some degree of disappointment) Miss, I heard you were twenty-five!
Me: I'm actually twenty-six.
At this point, she just looked at me again and shook her head. In other words: What is wrong with you, woman? Go pop out some babies!

2. The teacher explains how to use "I" and "me" correctly, and then mentions that there is a character on Sesame Street who always uses "I" and "me" incorrectly. She asks the students to guess who it is.
The students correctly guess that it's Cookie Monster, and then proceed to talk about some of the different characters. One of the boys looks around at his classmates and says: "Are we really discussing Sesame Street?"
I mean, really. Fourth grade is so far from the days of discussing Sesame Street.

3. With the girls I tutor:
M: Do you ever talk to imaginary friends when you're bored?
Me: (Pick my jaw up from the floor) Um, no. Maybe when I was little, but not in a long, long time. Do you?
M: Yep.
For the record, I don't remember ever having an imaginary friend, and I don't think my mom has ever said anything about me having one, I just had a feeling she needed to know it was okay if she did. Also, her sister, J. asked what her imaginary friend's name was and M. said she didn't know.
Mad props to J. for being a supportive older sister; I would've teased C. mercilessly.

Assimilation

I just heard this quote on a documentary about Puerto Ricans: "Assimilation is a curse because it forces you to give up your identity".

I'm still trying to figure out how I feel about this documentary, probably because it was done by Rosie Pérez and her Spanish is a more than a little rusty. (I have seriously got to get over my discrimination against Latinos who can't speak Spanish well.) The quote, however, got my attention because I've been thinking about how much I've given up simply because I live here in the US. I'm a speaker of Spanish in public places; I like resisting expectation, if that makes any sense. But my question is, is assimilation even a choice? I mean, we're here, we live here. How much can you avoid becoming something else? You retain what you can, but you give up a lot anyway. You give up and you adopt and adapt.
I've been thinking about this assimilation thing a lot. I know I've assimilated, but I know I haven't completely lost myself - that piece of my people that I carry around. I don't know if that makes sense to anyone else, if anyone else feels that they carry their people inside, but I do.
I don't know, I don't know.... I wonder what happens next, you know? With the next generation? What do they lose? What do they gain? I don't know.
I
Don't
Know

Notes on a (vicariously taken) Latin American Journey

I finally got a copy of "The Motorcycle Diaries" last Thursday, which I have been meaning to read for ages. I finished it on Tuesday - it was better than I'd expected it to be. I mean, the movie was magnificent: the story and the breathtaking landscapes of Latin America are the kinds of things that stir my heart. That, and the brilliance of Gael García Bernal.
But the book! There's so much in it about that connection with the mestizo and indigenous heritage of Latin America that I fell in love with. I do feel a connetion and affinity for my Taíno heritage. I've always been interested in it, even as a kid. Anyway, there's this rediscovery on his part of the origins of Latin America - the part that so many have tried to erase over centuries of colonization and oppression. Now I'm sounding a bit radical - which I'm not, not really.

But there's this beauty in the connection of Latinos, and in the sophistication of the tribes that were originally found in México, el Caribe, Central and South America, that I love. And that's what spoke to me as I was following Che before he was Che from Argentina to Chile, through Perú, and onward to Colombia and Venezuela (with an accidental detour into the Brazilian Amazon).
This has always been my favorite part of the movie, and it's the thing that sums up the book for me: Ernesto's toast on his final night in the lepers' colony in Perú:

"Although our insignificance means we can't be spokespeople for such a noble cause, we believe, and after this journey more firmly than ever, that the division of America into unstable and illusory nations is completely fictionalal. We constitute a single mestizo race, which from Mexico to the Magellan Straits bears notable ethnographical similariteis. And so, in an attempt to rid myself of the weight of small-minded provincialism, I propose a toast to Peru and to a United Latin America."

Yes, there's staggering diversity in Latin America, but the truth is that our shared history and our common language and that commonality of mixed blood unites us as well. Not, of course, that I'm advocating some new "Bolivarian" revolution a là Huguito (Chávez of Venezuela), but that I do believe we should, as nations and as individuals, help one another. We are, in a sense, brothers and sisters.

Voces Inocentes

First off, I don't care what anyone says: I love Alejandra Guzman. She's crazy, dresses like a fool, and could impale someone with those hipbones, but she's written some pretty fantastic stuff. Such a rockstar!

Now, something a bit more substantial:
I was watching Voces inocentes in class this week and last, and was once again struck by the beauty of the priest's words as he stands outside his church, after the attack on the school, after his church has been shot at, after he's been beaten by the soldiers. The whole village is standing outside the doors of the church, and he tells them they won't have Mass that day, but that he'll speak to them there so that those who haven't found faith yet can also hear the Word of God. And what he says there has always been the most amazing thing to me. I wish that I could transmit the whole speech, but this is the part that most gets to me:

"Los escépticos dicen: 'Si Dios existiera, no habría guerras', y yo les contesto que si los hombres obedecieran las leyes de Dios, entonces no habría guerras....Cuando se vive en la gracia de Dios, no existe la guerra.... Es el momento de que alcemos nuestra voz....Ya no basta con rezar."

"The skeptics say, 'if there were a God, there would be no war', and I respond, if men obeyed God's laws, then there would be no wars....When we live in God's grace, wars cease to exist....It's time to raise up our voices.... It's not enough to pray."

Here's the clip, sans subtitles. Fast forward to about 7:57.... Unfortunately it cuts off the very end of the speech, so click on the second video to catch it.

Yakkety Yak

This is why I love teaching:

JS, as he gets some more pretzel chips at the GC meeting: "This is how I keep the six pack." He then pats his belly and eats up.

H during a skit in which he portrays Rosaura from Como agua para chocolate (In response to ¿Cómo estás?): "Pues ahí más o menos, sólo que mi hermana me quiere quitar el marido." (Well, I'm alright, just that my sister wants to steal my husband)

T singing a slightly edited version of "Baby got Back": "Oh wait, you know that song?"

X in a discussion comparing Santiago Nasar from Crónica de una muerte anunciada to Julius Caesar: "Yo, Julius Caesar was a triple OG; he was like Tupac and Biggie."

D: "You know we're your favorite class, Ms. S."
Me: "Everyone thinks they're my favorite class."
D: "Yeah, but you know it's really us."
JZ: "Yeah, you know it is."
Pause.
JZ: "No really, who's your favorite?"

Kids are so funny. I wish I could remember all the other fabulous quotes I get from them, because they really do make my day....

Good read

I finally had time to read last weekend when I travelled to NYC (remind me to blog about that later....) and I had a book that came highly recommended. It's a big fatty, but I made time to sneak a chapter here and there throughout the week. I finally finished in on Friday.

So good.

So, so good.

The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak, is brilliant. He has a way of writing that makes you see the world differently. The verbs he uses seem a little unusual, and then you really think about it, and you're like: "YES! That's exactly what it does!" On point.

It's billed as a young adult book, but believe that it doesn't feel that way as you're reading. There's a toughness to it, a depth, that I don't usually associate with the schmaltz most of my students read.

Loved it.

Here are a few of my favorite lines:

"I have hated the words and
I have loved them,
and I hope I have made them right."
(page 528)

Brilliant, this one.

Read it.

Loosely connected

I've been kicking around a few ideas lately. I probably have enough material for a week's worth of blog entries, so I'm trying to figure out which topic to go with or whether I should put together a mish-mash of everything I've been thinking.

First there's this:


Don't be fooled by the happy merengue rhythm - there's a sharp social criticism in there. The sad thing is how still relevant it is:

"El costo de la vida sube otra vez
el peso que baja, ya ni se ve
y las habichuelas no se pueden comer
ni una libra de arroz, ni una cuarta e café
a nadie le importa qué piensa usted
¿será porque aquí no hablamos inglés?
....
Y la gasolina sube otra vez
el peso que baja, ya ni se ve
y la democracía no puede crecer
si la corrupción juega ajedrez
a nadie le importa qué piensa usted
¿será porque aquí no hablamos francés?"

In English: "The cost of living has gone up again/the dollar falls so low.../we can't even eat beans/nor a pound of rice, nor a fourth of coffee/ and no one cares what you think/ Is it because we don't speak English?//And gas goes up again/ the dollar falls so low.../and democracy can't grow/if corruption plays chess/ and no one cares what you think/ Is it because we don't speak French?"

Second, I spent most of Friday thinking about MLK Jr. Not even kidding. I'd be running copies or teaching or grading and pieces of "I've Been to the Mountaintop" would pop into my head. It helps that NPR was doing a special on Dr. King all week, but there was something about those words, that prescience in those final lines, that gives me goosebumps. The thing is, and it's kinda like the song above, in a sense, that these words could be spoken RIGHT NOW, and they'd pull at me. I'd understand that urgency, the need for change and justice. We've come a long way, yes, but there's a long road still to be walked. This is my favorite part:

Be concerned about your brother. You may not be on strike. But either we go up together, or we go down together. Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness.

It's the kind of phrase that echoes in my skull. I'm far from dangerously unselfish, but I want to get there. The context, the gist of his speech, reminds me of my favorite MLK quote, from "Letter from a Birmingham Jail":

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

I believe that. Believe it with everything in me. There is injustice in this world, and as I sit by and watch it, I'm putting my treasured liberties and rights at risk. I've come away with this clear conviction that there has be more that I can do. It's not enough to complain and pray and vote. It's not enough. There needs to be a movement of people working to break these patterns of injustice, this institutionalized injustice. I'm not saying revolution, but maybe. Maybe...

I feel a little like El Che, stringing together my own motorcycle diaries, putting together these moments of injustice, this collage of faces - the faces of every social sin and political issue that has ever crossed my mind - these moments where the world is completely at odds with the Kingdom of God.... This is the pain I think modern Christianity has cast aside: the pain for our fellow man, the pain of seeing selfishness and arrogance reign, masquerading as faith....

I'm coming to my conclusions.

That said...
Third: Every day I feel like I'm seeing myself a little more clearly. I've always said that the better you know God the more you realize how hopelessly inadequate you are, and that's becoming clear to me. I'm selfish, arrogant, blinded. I'm guarded, hiding behind walls that have been built, knocked down, and rebuilt countless times. I'm not the person I'd like to be. But I guess that's the point:

For the foolishness of God is wiser than man's wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man's strength. Brothers, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him. It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption. Therefore, as it is written: "Let him who boasts boast in the Lord."
1 Corinthians 1:25-31

Boasting only in Him, and letting Him work....

This...

saying seemed appropriate for this week:

Yo no soy monedita de oro para caerle bien a todos.
I'm not a gold coin so that everyone can like me.

It's been tumbling in my head for days, and has been appropriate in so many occasions thus far (with the fam, at GC, at work, with other people....) I am what I am. I'm far from perfect, and I'm the first to admit it. I don't want to be put on a pedestal, nor do I want to be viewed as less than. I'll admit I've got some stuff going for me.

I'll never agree with everyone on everything and I'm okay with that. All I ask is that you do the same. The sooner we accept differences, the better off we are. There's no use in wanting to conform the people we care about into the people we wish they were. If that's all you're trying to do, then the depth of your caring for that person has to be questioned.

Here's another one:

No le pidas peras a los olmos.
Don't ask elms to give you pears.

Things are what they are; people are what they are; life is what it is. Don't ask it to be what it's not. Go to the right source for what you need. If you need perfection, look to God. You'll never be satisfied looking for it in your fellow man. We are all beautifully flawed. And guess what? That's how we're supposed to be. It's how God set things up: so that He could be glorified in our shortcomings; so that everyone would know how utterly incapable each individual is without Him.

One more:

Don't ask for what you can't give.

Love it

"I'm selfish, impatient, and a little
insecure. I make mistakes, I am
out of control, and at times hard
to handle. But if you can't handle
me at me worst, then you sure as
hell don't deserve me at my best."
-Marilyn Monroe


That's why I love her. It seemed appropriate.

La belleza cotidiana

This is the quote from Sojourner's Verse and Voice today:

Christ moves among the pots and pans.

- Teresa of Avila

This is my view on faith: it's that hanging on in the everyday; that hoping for something better, in spite of; that ordinary grace that we receive and extend daily....
I hate when people talk about their "secular lives" - it's all colored by faith and belief. It's all spiritual life. The good, the bad, the ugly, the sublime - it's all spiritual life.
I see Christ moving subtly when I get a wake up call in the morning when I might have otherwise been comatose in my bed. I see Him moving subtly in an email from a student who moved away. I see Him moving subtly in my baby steps towards progress. I see Him in the faces of my students - even the ones that are a little less loveable.

Anyone can believe when everything is wonderful, or when the world is crashing down. Christ is even more lovely in that everyday, though. It's a quiet security, a nudge forward - that stumbling beautifully through the mess that is life.

Love it....

PS the title means "Everyday Beauty"

And as an after thought, there's this song:

Even though the quality sucks, Maná rocks my world:

Tú me salvaste del infierno
Volví a nacer
Cuando no creía en nada,
Volví a creer.
Sanarás mi pesar
Tu amor lo va a vencer
Me salvaste del infierno

Gracias por llegar a mí
Gracias por estar aquí
Yo juré que era mi fin
Gracias por amarme así
Gracias por estar aquí
No sé qué haría sin ti

A rough translation:

You saved me from hell
I was reborn
When I didn't believe in anything,
You restored my faith.
You will heal my pain
Your love will prevail.
You saved me from hell

Thank you for coming to me
Thank you for
being here
I swore it was the end for me.
Thank you for loving me
Thank you for being here
I don't know what I'd do without you.