My Blog

Intermission

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 17:46:12 -0700

We’re going to start the Don Quixote Book Club up again this coming Friday. One student’s mom told me she ordered her the book and they are reading it together starting from Chapter XXIX, so actually the Club has already started up and I think that’s just as it should be.

I’m excited because my class and other class from school are heading to the Latino Film Festival in Hollywood tomorrow. The kids are going to take in a movie and then talk to the filmmakers. This is an experience rousingly endorsed by this guy I met on the tennis court this morning. He just showed up there for the first time and didn’t have much to say until I mentioned this field trip and then he just got on a tremendous roll about how he had just signed up for film courses at West LA College and this was his dream and he was going to do all he could to make it come true.

I think the connection was that he felt it would be beneficial for our school’s fifth graders to gain an experience of the film industry at their young age, and I have to agree.

What I Wish I Didn't Know about Sancho

Thu, 28 May 2009 18:44:01 -0700

It’s becoming a trend, now: finding a passage in Don Quijote that I initially feel like skipping because it’s impalatable. This time, it was Sancho’s decision that it would be okay for Don Quijote to become emperor by marrying the Princess Micomicoma, even if her subjects were all African, because then Sancho would just sell his African vassals into slavery. I read that and thought, “Man, and I always liked Sancho, too. But if he’s ready to sell people into slavery, then I don’t know if I even want to finish the book.”

So I pondered it for a while and then decided, as it seems I always do, to just talk with the kids about it and see what they had to say. As it turned out, come to think of it, they didn’t really say that much. I rushed the activity on them: draw Sancho’s face, draw a line down the middle, and write down what’s “good” about him on one side and what’s “bad” on the other. I was in such a big hurry to condemn his slave-mongering that we never actually had the conversation. Note for next time!

They did surprise me with their reasons as to why the rescue party decided to make up the whole story about Princess Micomicona, when they had a perfectly good damsel-in-distress right there in Dorotea.

“It was more creative,” suggested Stephen.

“Maybe Don Quijote know Dorotea and didn’t like her and wouldn’t help her if he knew she was the damsel,” Rafael proposed.

It made it more interesting... Don Quijote wouldn’t believe something that wasn’t made up... they had all kinds of perfectly sensible reasons to explain it. Maybe that’s because they acted out their own rescue mission before we read this passage. That probably helped them see things from the characters’ point of view.

The most fun thing we did today was knock a faithless shepherd into a precipice. We did that on Dorotea’s behalf a couple of times. Pix in the gallery if you wanna see.

Raisinette

Thu, 14 May 2009 16:32:21 -0700

As is so often the case, whenever there is something that seems radically inappropriate to read with the kids, I always just go ahead and read it with them and they handle it just fine.

In this particular case, it was the seduction of Dorotea by Don Fernando. She is rightly concerned that he is going to make an assault upon her virtue, so she locks herself into her room. But then, he just shows up, rendering her blind and mute with shock:

“...en la soledad de este silencio y encierro me le hallé delante, cuya vista me turbó de manera que me quitó la de mis ojos y me enudeció la lengua...”
(Book 1, Chapter XXVII)

We acted out being struck speechless with fright. The kids had fun popping out of the closet and terrifying each other. But they were not blind to the situation in the story.

“What’s going on?” I asked them.

“He’s using her,” Rafael answered. He got to take a home run lap around the room for that. Later, when Dorotea defended her honor, I asked them again what’s going on, and Rafael answered, “He’s using her, but she doesn’t want to be used.” Another home run lap. We had to guide him which direction to run, and he bumped into my bike, but he eventually touched all the bases. (I’ll put some pictures of that & other shenanigans in a photo gallery.)

Anyway, poor Dorotea finally gives in when Don Fernando swears by holy images that they will be married in God’s eyes. I had some trepidation about us drawing holy images, but the kids were all for it and they were brandishing them aloft during the passage where Dorotea relents. She is shook up by the whole experience, and Don Fernando’s pre-dawn exit is not reassuring. After a few days, Dorotea begins to wonder if what happened to her was good or bad.

“What do you guys think?” I asked.

“I think he used her like a Raisinette,” Cris said. “He sucked off the chocolate part and spat out the raisin.”

What do do about lamentation

Fri, 8 May 2009 06:43:33 -0700

I had the most unaccustomed thought during DQ class a week ago; namely, “Do I really want to keep doing this???” I was feeling sparkless. The sentence, “You know what kids, this has been great, but I think we’re done,” kept lining up in the getting-ready-to-say-it zone at the back of my mind.... but it never made it to the tip of my tongue because:

Experience has taught me that it’s not beneficial to mental health to throw away years of work for no particular reason except that you’re feeling tired one day.

That’s what naps are for.

So, we perservered.... until I was further deflated while doing lesson plans Tuesday night to discover YET ANOTHER depressed person bewailing his or her fate in the Sierra Madres where Don Quijote was last seen doing naked cartwheels it seems endless chapters ago. I really did not feel able to handle another character looking for a good place to drop dead:

-- Ay Dios! Si será posible que he ya hallado lugar que pueda servir de escondida sepultera a la carga pesada de este cuerpo que tan contra mi voluntad sontengo!

And yet, there it was. So I made a decision that we would keep trucking through the Sierra Madres because

Fiction provides alternative feelings that you don’t necessarily have in your own actual life; and

* It is good practice to keep on trucking through depressions because there’s inevitably something illuminating on the other side -- and I want to find out what that’s going to be in the Don Quijote Book Club.

I knew the bride

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 06:34:11 -0700

It felt good tearing the latest issue of Modern Bride into pieces. We were making collages depicting the sad, twisted, cruel marriage of Luscinda and Don Fernando. There is so much passion both expressed and unexpressed in that scene, it’s a wonder the pages of the book don’t blow up. I think the kids got the idea that there was a bride, a groom in street clothes, and Cardenio hiding behind the curtains, but did they REALLY GET.... what? The conflicted feelings that lead Cardenio to just stand there watching while his beloved whimpers “I will,” then faints? I dunno. Something for us to talk about next time. I’m very curious what they think will be written on the mysterious note produced from Luscinda’s bodice. The note that gives treacherous Don Fernando such pause.

Meanwhile, we did a table read of “The Treacherously Deceiptful Friend” and everyone enjoyed its particular brand of Pop-Tart driven insanity. I sense a video coming on with that.