"How was your day?"

[KRB] on Friday, January 20, 2006 at 2:28 PM -0800 wrote:

Dear [Pelagic],

How was your day?

Love,

[KR]

I JUST sent my last interim report in.

Today felt good despite the interims craziness.

We had our MLK Day assembly today -- my favorite meeting of the entire school year. Of course, I cried. I need to process everything, and I am not sure I want to right now. I need to look into how come I cried so much this year -- was it really that much about the content of people's narratives, or was it more about where I am right now? I know it's both. There is so much pain in these stories people share 40 years after MLK's speeches. I know there is progress, but there are a lot of steps backwards, too. One of the speakers today, my friend Tommy, who is the Project Coordinator, did a spoken word piece he just wrote in response to last night's decision to shut down some public schools. His elementary school, where he stood in front of his whole community 16 years ago in a play and acted the part of MLK, which, incidentally, was the first time he started making the conscious commitment to doing the work that we do now around fighting for social justice, was one of the schools that got "cut." With it and several others have gone the public education in the neighborhood (in Western Addition, "Fillmo'") where Tommy grew up.

These meetings give me hope and make me feel a sense of pessimism at the same time. They make me feel proud and ashamed at once.

Then, I go into class and talk about Othello and his multiple identities in Venetian society, how he kills himself like a soldier defending a Venetian against "a malignant and turbaned Turk," and all sorts of things come up for me emotionally. I try to get the students to realize the complexity of Othello without spelling things out for them, and it's a vulnerable place to be. Painful and fulfilling at the same time.

In "The Theater of Ideas," we talk about what it takes to connect with another human by talking about a character who achieves (?) it through an act of violence.

It's a good day. Intense topics, exhausting, draining, but at least meaningful. At least I have not been sitting in a cubicle. At least at the end of the day, I get an e-mail from a graduate asking me how my day was, and I write this.

tk
_________________________

The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers.
:: James Baldwin ::