research project, soon I’m not coding but am searching for children’s summer camps or pricing plane tickets to visit family during the winter holidays. Yesterday, I was getting estimates on repairing our in-ground swimming pool which was built in the 1960s and needs replastering. My brain is associative, not linear. My own high school English teachers required that we recite Shakespeare. I doubt they thought much about what they wanted their students to accomplish with these recitations, but I can report that the effect can be long lasting. Here we are, a quarter of a century later, and I can still unspool Hamlet’s innermost struggle as if I were sitting in the recitation chair next to Mrs. Schroeder’s desk:
To be, or not to be, that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them. To die: to sleep; No more; and by a sleep to say we end The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation Devoutly to be wish'd.
Hamlet’s soliloquy has braided its way through my mind’s murky caverns, bumping into my rising ineptitude and my struggles to stay on top of things.
I long to be free from the thousand natural shocks .
I pity these students that I am their teacher for lesson planning. I can barely arrive to class on time, let alone pass as someone who is a sequential thinker who can help them write the perfect lesson plan. One of the primordial rules for lesson planning is that a teacher should abandon a plan when circumstances dictate it. A plan for students to paraphrase Hamlet’s speech must be tossed if a snow delay dramatically shortens the class period. Or maybe a plan should be abandoned if planes fly into buildings on a bright September day . . . The future teachers and I begin our lesson on lesson planning. As typical, at 9:30 am we take a bathroom break. I stay in the classroom. Students begin to come back in. They tell me something happened. The Dean’s secretary is listening to the radio. A plane has hit one of the Twin Towers. I imagine the confused pilot of a single-engine Cessna—what a stark ending to a life. No, two planes have hit the Twin Towers. Perhaps a deliberate attack. Planes attacking? A version of a Charlie Brown comic strip comes to mind—Snoopy as the Red Baron dodging rounds of flak, wearing his aviator cap, goggles, and windblown scarf . . .
“No,” my students exclaim. “These are big airplanes, jets. A big explosion.”
HVWP COMMONPLACE 13
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online