I Don't Get It

“Nothing could be as hard as middle school.” –Zooey Deschanel

There are many things I don’t understand about middle school—things no one really understands like why they smell the way they do, why some of them are haven’t started to grow yet and some are over six feet tall, and exactly why they react to things the way they do.  But there are two really strange things I don’t understand about my specific kids, and they are as a different from one another as the populations they represent.

The first is something that at first really annoyed me.   Many, almost all, of my minority students—my Hispanic students and my African American students—call me “Miss.”  Not Ms. Short, just Miss.  And often times it’s “Miss! Miss! Miss!” in rapid succession.  I thought at first that they didn’t know my name and that they were saying the first part of my name until they could locate my last name in their brain.  But after asking in what I’m sure was an annoyed voice—after all I was annoyed—what my name was, they could all say “Ms. Short” almost immediately.  So it wasn’t that they weren’t sure of my name.  It’s that they think that the appropriate and respectful way to address a teacher or an adult is to just say “Miss.” And if they really want my attention it’s “Miss! Miss! Miss!” because then they’ve asked three times for my attention.  They aren’t stuttering or struggling, they think they’ve called me to them thrice.  Which I suppose I’m learning to deal with, but still strikes me as odd and I really wish it weren’t uber-respectful in their minds.  At least I don’t have any of them who call me “Teacher” the way that some kids over the summer did to friends of mine.

The other issue is just weird and doesn’t have anything to do with being respectful to me; it’s just strange.  I have a few boys—not a ton, but definitely a consistent few--who wear a special kind of shorts almost every day.  Friday, one of them was wearing a light, pastel pink version of these shorts.  They’re called Chubbies and they are perhaps the most ridiculous fashion statement a man could make.  So on a middle school man-child, they are even more absurd than usual. 

If you aren’t familiar with the short-shorts known as Chubbies, they are intended to come to about mid-thigh on men and they have elastic waistbands and they also are generally made in noticeable colors or prints.  One of the most famous ones are the ‘Merica shorts that are an American flag (see them here http://www.chubbiesshorts.com/collections/the-originals/products/mericas).  The entire concept of them visually is strange, although I suppose if you’re an adult male and you want to spend a lot of money on these shorts, I suppose that’s your prerogative.  The really strange thing to me is that middle school boys own them. Which means their parents are purchasing them for them. 

Why do men wear these shorts?

The part that really sets me over the edge is looking at the website where one could purchase a pair of these shorts.  The culture they represent seems to be future, current, and former frat boys.  The worst stereotypes of frat boys.  If you look at the website you’ll find that these shorts are designed to help you get laid and it outright states that any sexual relations you have after purchasing a pair of Chubbies are directly related to said ownership.    So truthfully, harmless enough in general among stupid adult males who think they are being funny and embodying a certain culture that (hopefully) they will someday grow out of.  But why on earth are there several 13 year old boys who not only know about them, but own multiple pairs of these shorts?  They don’t actually even get the reference of why these are called chubbies, and when we told them to look it up on urban dictionary at home, rather than being scarred by it, they didn’t really seem to care all that much.  And even as it’s getting cold outside (it was in the 30s this morning) they are still wearing them.  Apparently on Fridays they wear Chubbies.

Kids are crazy.  They will always do things I just don’t understand.  They’ll do things that they look back on and think, “What was I thinking? That was stupid!” At least I hope they will.  

Forty Days of Yoga: ¼ of the Way Through!

I totally look like this during yoga. Always.

“Exercises are like prose, whereas yoga is the poetry of movements.” –Amit Ray

Day 10:

I hurt.  Everywhere pretty much, but especially in my arms.   I’ve taken nine Baptiste yoga classes in ten days and I feel stronger and cleansed in a I’m-drinking-a-gallon-of-water-a-day-sweating-a-lot kind of way.   And I love it.

I sort of fell in love with Dancing Mind Yoga, the only Baptiste yoga studio in the Metro area (okay, the only one I’ve ever heard of ever) a little over a year ago, but I couldn’t afford to do more than the Groupon deal for a month and they don’t let returning students take advantage of Groupons after that first time.   But I didn’t forget about the studio either.

Baptiste Yoga is regular yoga, in a pretty hot room (95 degrees or so), on speed.  It’s not the traditional hot Bikram yoga which is 104ish degrees and involves standing in the same (generally sort of crazy) positions for long breaths.  It’s a flow class that involves most of the popular yoga poses like Chair Pose, Warrior 1, and High-to-Low Plank.  Low Plank, also known as Chaturanga Dandasana, is the pose that’s causing my arms to become stronger, but also to hurt like crazy.  If you don’t believe me, you try hovering just off the floor in plank, with your elbows close to your side.   Just hang out there for awhile.  Do it two dozen or so times in the next hour.  You’ll be sore too.   But this sort of yoga doesn’t just encourage these normal poses, it also goes all crazy and has people doing headstands and side-crow and splits frequently.  And most of the class is done at an extremely rapid pace.   Until that moment when you’re in Chair pose, just squatting deeper and you realize everything has slowed down.  And at that moment I always want the rapid-fire instructions back.   It kicks my ass every time.  I totally love it. 

So it’s not that Dancing Mind has suddenly become more affordable to me.  It’s a treat I gave myself, sort of a I have a real job now and can take part in a special offer they’re running.  It’s 40 Days to Personal Revolution.  Honestly, I’m not sure how much of a revolution I need in my life right now, but 40 days of unlimited yoga was the selling point for me.  It’s a 40 day challenge I want to take, and I wanted to see if I would get stronger as a result of yoga every day.  No cardio or weights or P90X, just damn warm yoga. 

I love it enough that after every class I wonder if I can afford to continue to have a membership there.  At $99 a month for unlimited classes, it’s not a small financial commitment, certainly more than any other gym that offers a much wider variety of options for classes and equipment. (If anyone would like to privately fund my continued classes at Dancing Mind and end my internal after-class struggle, just let me know J.)  But it’s the best full body workout I’ve ever gotten, it’s so much fun, and I feel so accomplished when I leave, having almost done a headstand, or doing Bird of Paradise for the first time.  And so I go back and forth every time.

The other part of the personal revolution—the coaching on Wednesday nights is actually a lot harder for me to deal with than I thought.  Most of the time whenever we’ve done meditation or deep relaxation, it’s a time of prayer for me.  So even though I know some people who are anti-yoga because it is part of an eastern religious way of life (love you Ben!), I’ve never felt like there was anything wrong with it.  My sister called me a post-modernist recently, which I’ve never thought was true about me (and by most people’s standards, I’m not at all).  I believe in absolutes too much.  But I do think that the command to “Be still and know that I am God,” can be achieved, even in a sweaty studio, lying on a yoga mat. 

So I didn’t expect to struggle with the other parts of the 40 Days program.  But as we sat there on our mats in a studio that was slightly cooler than normal, our coach, the owner of the studio, was encouraging us to realize that though things “seem” difficult in your life, they only seem that way and all the power to fix those problems is already within us.  We can fix any problem by believing in ourselves. 

I’ve heard this sort of thinking before, but for some reason I really struggled with hearing it now.  Maybe it was because of all these people, who truly want something to change in their life putting their faith in themselves.  I know there are people who’ve had some sort of success with this way of thinking, but I am not one of those people.  If it was up to me, if I had everything within me for strength and understanding and power I would be more terrified than anything else.   It’s liberating to know that it’s not all up to me.  That I can just be the clay rather than being the potter.  It’s a freedom that takes some getting used to and there are a ton of days where I’m determined to be the potter.  But I’m not supposed to be and honestly, when I try, I fail.  Utterly. 

I knew I probably wouldn’t agree with everything that they said in this 40 Day journey.  I just didn’t really expect to want stand up and say, “With Jesus,” after almost everything that our leader said was possible for us.  I didn’t say it, but the fact that I wanted to, sort of intensely, was pretty weird for me.  And maybe that’s an unexpected road for me in this journey.  Which I suppose is sort of the point—trying new things, seeking stillness, and desiring God in that stillness.

 I think I’m going to go back to the coaching session tonight.  Not necessarily because I think I’ll get anything life changing out of it, but because I think it’s worth trying things more than just once.  Also, because I somehow made a friend last week and I want to try to honor that friendship and get to know her more.  But after tonight, we’ll see.  Between getting there, practicing yoga, a short break, the coaching session, and driving home, it’s a four hour weeknight commitment.  So it may not be a thing I do for the next five weeks, but as I remember my almost headstand, I realize there are a lot of things that have been unexpected in the first ten days of the forty, and there might be many more to come.

Composed upon Watching Penn State and Indiana

"Life is filled with adversity. The way you travel through life is how you handle adversity, and that is how you're defined as a man." –Bill O’Brien

I love basketball enough that I’ll watch it alone.  It’s not my all time favorite—given the choice I’ll watch it with people everyday of the week, but I haven’t managed to convince many roommates they want to watch it with me very often.  It might have something to do with the way I yell at the screen or spontaneously add more items of Carolina blue as some games progress.  (To be clear, I know they can’t really hear or see me, it’s just a habit that makes me feel better.  Also, despite some fears, I would never actually throw anything at the screen.  It had never even occurred to me.)  So the only times I really know I’m going to watch the game with someone is when I go home for the weekend and when the game is a late one since Dad usually works weekends through tax season, which corresponds with the best part of basketball season.   I don’t know how much Dad loves it when I come home to watch the game because I talk during sports.  Not incessantly.  Not about nothing.  And ever since 2009 it’s substantially less because I finally got a taste of my own medicine and hated it when Andrew and I were trying to watch the second round UNC/LSU game in March.  The guests over at my parents’ house to celebrate my dad’s birthday didn’t seem to even realize there was an important game on TV and I suddenly realized what I had been doing to Dad for years. 

But it’s not basketball season yet.  It’s still football season and even though it feels like summer outside today, it’s autumn and that means Penn State games.  Maybe it was because I was at home for the first game of the season this year and heard my mom trying to pronounce Stephen Obeng-Agyapong’s name and listen to her think aloud through who her favorite players are going to be this year for various reasons.   It might even go back to last season when I happened to be home for the last game of the season—the one where Sam Ficken redeemed himself as a kicker by winning the game in overtime with a field goal against Wisconsin after failing to successfully complete field goals against Virginia in a 17-16 loss for PSU.   Maybe it was seeing the raw emotion from Bill O’Brien—whose face on the sideline was the strangest part about last season---after the final game was over when during his interview he may have called his players “fighters” (or something far less PG… http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/24/bill-obrien-curses-f-bomb-penn-state-wisconsin_n_2185860.html).  Whatever the reason, I’ve been trying to watch Penn State games whenever possible this season.  I’m really not a fan of watching football alone—I’m not as used to it and I don’t love Penn State like I love Carolina—I won’t plan my day around making sure I’m home for the game.  It makes me miss my dad when I watch it alone.  Partly because I don’t understand the subtleties of football quite as well since I’ve never played it.  Partly because I think sports are really meant to be watched communally—otherwise you end up doing things like writing blog posts about your philosophical views on watching sports. 

           But maybe the point is I’m willing to not only make an effort to watch Penn State again, but to admit that I’m a Penn State fan at all.  It wasn’t an easy thing to say for awhile.  To admit that I still have some love for the now-deceased Joe Paterno.  To say that I still have anger and frustration about most of the aspects of the Penn State scandal.  But that I’m still a fan of the Nittany Lions.

This year college football has a new rule about players targeting with their helmets and there are severe consequences, with the intention being to keep the players safe.  It’s a rule that seems to make a lot of sense—if you are doing something that could cause possible harm—you, the person who committed the foul—are penalized.  This should have the effect that it will happen less often and the college football game should then be safer as a result. 

This is not what happened in the sanctions delivered by the NCAA to Penn State.  There are so many ways I feel about the whole situation.  Sickened that people didn’t do enough, didn’t make absolutely, 100% sure that children were safe.  Angered that a clearly sick and disgusting man had the continued ability to interact with children who couldn’t protect themselves against him.  Annoyed that said sicko continues to try to appeal what seems to be a very just prison sentence.

There are only a few things I feel good about—that the victims have justice, finally.  That Sandusky can’t hurt any more children.  That the money Penn State is paying in a fine is going towards child victims of sex abuse.    

It also makes me sad that a legendary coach who taught so many young men good things about football, and hopefully about life, has died not a legend, but a tainted figure.  It makes me sad that he died at all.  It’s unscientific but a big part of me thinks this whole situation was really why he died.  It also makes me sad, as a person who also works with young people, that he didn’t understand his real job was to protect those who couldn’t do it themselves.  That he didn’t go further than just the minimum.  That he didn’t do any and everything that was necessary.   

If you look at the Penn State football team today, you see they are led by true freshman quarterback Christian Hackenberg.  He wasn’t even old enough to walk when the events of the scandal began and yet he won’t be able to play in a bowl game until his senior year of college.  If you look at the sidelines of the players, coaches, and people involved in Penn State football you won’t find anyone who was there when Sandusky was doing unspeakable crimes.  Those people have been fired, or jailed, or have died.   But you do see the players who are feeling the greatest impact of the NCAA sanctions—no bowl games which means they won’t be ranked.  Not as many scholarships, which means they aren’t playing with the highest caliber players like they could have been.    Dad and I have talked about—it doesn’t make sense to punish people who have absolutely nothing to do with crime.  It doesn’t make sense that a body like the NCAA which has no authority in criminal cases is punishing a football team for something that criminal that a former football coach did, even though that coach has finally been punished by the criminal system. 

I understand intellectually that this is just the way it works—the current team gets punished for mistakes those who have come before them have made.  It’s not the ideal situation, but it’s the only solution they’ve come up with the to the problem.  It reminds me a lot what I’ve said about standardized testing—it isn’t good, but it’s the only solution they’ve found so far to the answer of accountability.  If you don’t know me well enough to know this already, this is not a compliment. 

I’m glad the day has come where I can admit to watching Penn State again. I hope that soon there will be a day when I can watch a Penn State football game without thinking about all these things in the background.  I hope there will be a game where the announcers don’t mention Sandusky, the sanctions, or any of the whole mess.  I hope that day will come soon.