To London!

So I'm supposed to take my speech and debate class into London tomorrow for a fun-filled day of experiential learning, which is ideally going to be related to speech and debate but will probably also involve lessons like what to do when you get caught in a downpour or separated on the Tube or peed on by a drifter. Last year, we made it through the entire day and then Maria got pickpocketed on the Tube on our way back to the bus. This year, I'm lowering my standards and saying that if I get the same number of kids onto the bus with me that I arrived with in the morning, I'm going to call it a success. They do not even necessarily have to be the same kids. I'm not picky.

All I Want

My first week of teaching ends tomorrow, and I'm marking the occasion by teaching my class and then dropping off the map for the next twenty-four hours to spend quality time holed up with David and not thinking about lesson planning, writing articles, packing and canceling everything for my return to the US in less than a month, or putting the last wheels in motion to get started on a DPhil. I forgot that teaching eats my life. And I've been listening to Jay Brannan's new cover of Joni Mitchell's All I Want, and I'm pretty much at the point where I'd kill whoever stood in the way of making cookies and having a sleepover.

My Last Twelve Hours of Being the Likable Teacher

Tomorrow, we're trying impromptu speaking. About half of my class is going to hate my guts after I make them stand up in front of the class to argue for or against smoking bans, then ask the next person whether they would or would not choose to be invisible if it meant they had to stay invisible for the rest of their life, then ask the next person about trickle-down economics. My winning streak ends here.

Teachable Moments

1. Do not wipe up a coffee spill with a sock. It is impossible to wash coffee out of a sock, and that is why I look like I'm wearing some sort of cowhide on my left foot.
2. Do not let students pick the topics when you're trying to challenge the idea that some things are simply undebateable. I let them pick the things that their opponents would have to try to defend, and they fired off things like genocide and child prostitution. It seemed for a minute like we were going into Lord of the Flies territory, and then they made it as classy and inoffensive as an exercise like this could possibly be. It doesn't change my suspicion that they would emerge as the rulers if this program was put in some sort of state of nature scenario, but I was still impressed.

Those Who Can't

Urg, I forgot how much teaching high schoolers kicks my ass. I figured that teaching a speech and debate course in addition to my pop culture course wouldn't be that bad, because I debated in high school and whatever, I can decently structure an argument. I took Expos, what more do you want? And then today, I found out that three of my students are from the US, and the others are bringing the forensic traditions of Pakistan, Cyprus, China, Northern Ireland, Germany, and Taiwan to the table. So now I have to find some kind of common ground and find a bunch of snappy examples that have nothing to do with American politics, and pray that we survive to Week 2, when I'm going to make them recite monologues from Clueless and I'm back on solid ground. If the past three hours of studying up on Thucydides is any indication, I'm get the feeling that this month is going to be as educational for me as it is for them.

The Last Weekend of Freedom

I woke up today with a killer sunburn and a massive headache after spending all of yesterday visiting David, who's in London for a long weekend of Marxism 2009 and Pride. We spent the morning with a speaker who covered anticapitalism ten years after Seattle, then I dragged David to David Harvey (swoon!) who I thought was brills but I think David found totally boring. We fled from there to the parade route along Oxford Street and got free juice boxes, and I realized that the two things that were totally absent from Pride in London were a) any sort of political message and b) beer companies, which basically own Pride in the US. We stuck out the whole parade, and I think the highlight was when one of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence came over and asked if we were together and gave us a condom and told us to go have fun, because being targeted by globally famous sex-positive drag nuns was one of the higher items on my Bucket List and now I've checked that one off.

We then trucked to Trafalgar Square to see a special show from the cast of Avenue Q and nicked as much free stuff as humanly possibly, which is why my room for the summer now looks like a gay flea market. And then we went to Leicester Square, where Boy George did three songs somewhat enthusiastically but didn't stick around for an encore, and I was happy because he sang Karma Chameleon and that's basically the only song of his I know anyway. The only thing that could make the day better was food, so we went to GBK and I got a shockingly good puy lentil burger and a cup of hot chocolate from Apostrophe that was the consistency of pudding. And then we saw Zizek and I would have peed with excitement, except that I was saved by the fact that that hot chocolate moves through your system about as fast as molasses and will probably hit my bladder sometime in October. And then I sprinted to Paddington, because I had to be up at the crack of dawn to collect all the students for this summer program from the airport.

The highlight of the afternoon was when I realized that I had to check out Modern Art Oxford today if I was going to take my kids there on Tuesday, and thought I'd swing by to check the hours and make sure there was something neat going on. And there was. Except it is a Robert Mapplethorpe retrospective.

So that's a dilemma.

On one hand, the first week of my pop culture course is structured around a fieldtrip to the museum and debate about aesthetics, so I can't really delete it from the syllabus without totally upending the narrative arc of the class. On the other hand, photos of naked men and bondage. My compromise has been to sit at my desk and map out a very careful route through the gallery and hope that they only look at the walls that I steer them across, until class ends and I tell them that I'm leaving but that there's a whole gallery of material upstairs that is inadvisable for children. Knowing the seventeen year olds I'm teaching, that should about do it.

Quotable Quotes

This is precisely why I love Lily Allen.