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By Corinne Flax
April 6, 2006
Spring Break 2006
In just a few short hours I will be getting onto a shuttle bus and heading for LaGuardia airport. I’m headed out to Oakland to see my darling aunt’s Ellen and Carol, their son Ari, and their dog Olive (who I’ve never met before!). My excitement knows no bounds. My love for the Bay Area is unlimited.
When I was four I visited Oakland, then I went again when I was 9. It was at the age of 9 that I decided I would someday live forever in Oakland or Berkeley. The weather is better on that side of the bay, San Francisco gets all the nasty cold fog and rain. The combination of gorgeous, perfect, beautiful, and delightful that the Bay area packs is just irresistible to me.
I spent a summer out there when I was 19 and all the thoughts and feelings I had at the ripe age of 9 were completely validated by that one sweet summer. I haven’t been back since then, so I’m unbelievably excited.
Strangely? Predictably? I’m fighting this odd feeling of panic on leaving NYC. It’s not as if I’ve been here that long, nor am I going to be gone for very long, but there’s something about this city. It sucks you in and makes you not want to miss a moment. There’s a gallery opening and a birthday party I would definitely go to this weekend if I was going to be around, and the fact that I’m missing them gives me this strange discomfort in my stomach. Of course there will be other parties, other openings, but what if these are the ones not to miss? What if these are the make or break gatherings that could decide my future?
What a load of crap!
I totally need to get out of here if that’s how I’m thinking, right?
Last night I made it a point of going out and having a ‘big’ night on the town. Which means I shared calamari and wine with a friend and wandered around Union Square late at night, trying to soak up a little bit of what I’ve come to think of as ‘city’. That way I’ll know what I’m getting away from, and what I’m excited about coming back to. While eating calamari we talked about what pulls people into the city, what the bug is that makes you want to live here, make your way here etc.
There’s a particular drive that brings people into a place as difficult as New York. Equally there’s a drive that pushes you out. Right now I can’t think of anywhere else I’d rather live but Harlem. I believe that someday I’ll be ready to leave, and that when that day comes I won’t regret going, just as I won’t regret arriving.
While I’m in Oakland I’m going to go to San Francisco to see a friend who recently moved out there from Manhattan. I can’t wait to get her perspective on the whole leaving/staying/arriving thing. This week off is going to be so great, and then when I get back I get to slam out some serious work, and register for summer classes.
March 30, 2006
And The Beat Goes On
It’s Thursday, the one fabulous day of the week when I don’t go to school, don’t go to work, don’t have to go anywhere at all if I don’t want to. Of course this makes Thursday a wonderful day for getting stuff done. Stuff like buying new shoes for work, paying my rent, finally sending my Creative Zen Touch to Texas to be refurbished. What I’m really looking forward to doing today is bringing a blanket and a book down to Central Park and just laying out, maybe even falling asleep in the sun.
I promised to write more about my projects, so I will now. I’m doing one group project in my much hated literacy class, and one in my beloved arts workshop. I hate literacy class because the teachers, yes the teachers who I met with, are just totally blind to the fact that everything they are trying to teach me is falling into a deep dark well of incomprehension. The two women who teach this class seem like very lovely ladies who have been teaching for at least ten years each, and who have completely forgotten what it’s like to not be a teacher. When I ask them questions they do not answer with words I understand, they answer with jargon. When I tell them I don’t understand they tell me I do. How do you even argue with that?
At any rate I’m doing a project for them developing a five week curriculum fifth graders based around fantasy/science fiction stories. I loved fantasy and sci-fi when I was younger, and still like it, so I’m definitely enjoying contemplating all these books. My group looks to me as the arbitrator of all that is fantasy so that’s kind of cool too. It’s actually sort of weird; I spend the entire class feeling totally clueless, lost, and bored, but when we break into groups I talk like I know what’s going on. What’s up with that?
My other group project is a mask making workshop in arts workshop. I’m making a paper-mache crocodile’s head, replete with white pointy teeth and a barbarously red mouth. It seems like everything I make for that class has pointy teeth. One of my classmates said “Why so angry Corinne?” I said “Maybe I’m just hungry.”
Here’s how this is a group project: at the end we’re all going to have to perform with our puppets and masks. Have I mentioned I go to a progressive and excessively liberal school? The paper-mache turned my hands green on Monday night, and then I had to go to work. No matter how much I scrubbed my hands wouldn’t turn back to their normal peachy pink color and I got a lot of funny looks.
Literacy class is the bane of collegiate existence right now, and that sucks. I really have been trying so hard and it’s very frustrating to feel clueless and unable to do anything about that. At the same time I’m trying to look at it as a challenge. A lot of things in life aren’t worth anything unless you have to fight for them. If I can actually get anything out of that class at all it will be a miracle. Last night (which is when I had the class last), we spent an hour looking at different types of assessment tests that the state gives teachers to give their students. We were shown how to give them and talked about the pros and cons of each test. Do I understand what was useful about this? No! Did I almost fall asleep? Yes!
I think the rest of the class feels the way I do because just about everybody goes to the bathroom at least once during class. I don’t know about the rest of the class but I save up my bathroom break for when I just can’t take it anymore, and then I stay there as long as is seemly, just to avoid being bored out of my skull.
March 24, 2006
Sore Stomach
Yesterday was AA’s birthday. To celebrate I baked him a batch of black and white cookies. Black and white cookies are more difficult to make then other types of cookies. Unlike regular cookies black and whites are more like tiny cakes, and like cakes you have to ice them. Icing things is difficult. Also difficult is using a website as a cookbook, because I tend to get food all over cook books, and right now there’s sugar in between the keys of my laptop. Needless to say (but I’ll say it anyway), the cookies were a smash hit.
Now I’m procrastinating about writing a paper for my Art Workshop class. It’s all about the different stages in artistic development that children go through. I feel very little desire to write it, or in fact anything. I basically had to whip myself to just get this blog out. Partially this is because I am feeling kind of sick from all the fried food I ate last night, and just want to sit on the couch and watch documentaries.
AA, who claims birthdays aren’t important to him, got together a bunch of people to go out for dinner last night. We went to The Chip Shop, a fish and chips place in Brooklyn Heights. The fish and the chips aren’t what’s got my stomach roiled up, it’s the damn fried candy I had afterwards. So decadent, so delicious, so fried. Who would have thought a fried Twinky could be so good? Apparently the British. I feel like all that food is still in my stomach, sitting on top of my small intestine like a bowling ball. Saturday night AA gets another party, this one without all the fried food. This time it’ll be wine and pizza from Grimaldis. I’m looking forward to that pizza already.
What I am not looking forward to is writing this paper. It’s not as if I’ve been doing tons of school work, I’ve been more or less keeping things up at a steady pace. If I were to try and use a metaphor to describe my scholastic output I would say that I my work has been consistent and smooth, like a placid river or mill-stream. As the semester draws ever closer to its end I can feel the headwaters building up behind me. Soon my placid river is going to be a raging monster of white froth and torn up trees.
Finals are coming, and while there will be no tests there will tons of projects. Horror of horrors there will be tons of group projects, my least favorite. I’ve got enough trouble getting myself to work alone and now I have to work with other people. I feel like saying to my teachers, look at me, I’m a mess. I eat fried Twinkies and stay up too late. The only reason I’ve been able to keep up this far is because I’ve been trying hard. Now you want me to work with other people, don’t you see the mistake you’re making?
Anyway whatever will be will be. More on my projects next time.
March 15, 2006
Some Serious School Work
In my experience the mid-year evaluation is a meaningless piece of paper which I have been forced to fill out in every college course I have ever taken. Sometimes I filled them out positively, sometimes there was a negative slant to my answers. Never has anything actually happened based on my mid-year evaluation. A positive evaluation did not get Professor Progressive tenure back at Drew, and an extremely negative one did not get Professor Know-nothing fired either. It has been my belief that the mid-year evaluation was a time waster devised to give our teachers a moment to reflect.
That was what I thought before Bank Street. Before my extremely negative evaluation of my Introduction to Literacy class. I wrote on my evaluation that I didn’t feel like I was getting anything from the class. For me that class is an exercise in futility. I sit there on Wednesday nights, dutifully attempting to take notes, to absorb some kind of information. Thus far I haven’t been able to get anything.
In my opinion the class is too unstructured for me. It seems as if we’re being given a whole bunch of different methods for teaching reading and writing comprehension, known as literacy at Bank Street. Unfortunately for me these methods are rolling of my back like so much water off the proverbial duck’s back. I feel like I’ve been handed a jumbled bag of differently shaped objects that I’ve never seen before, after which I’ve been thrown into a pitch black room and been told to sort them and decide which one will help me get the lights on. Essentially I find this task somewhat impossible.
Have I tried as hard as possible in this class? No I haven’t. I started off giving everything that I could but the more perplexed and dissatisfied I’ve become the harder it’s been to really take the class seriously or to get myself to work hard. What makes the class worth anything to me at all right now is the tutoring that goes along with it. I love meeting with Jamie and working with her on her reading and writing. At the same time I am unsure of what exactly to do with her and so even this aspect of the class is leaving me cold, because I don’t know how to approach the tutoring or the evaluations I have to write about it.
Which brings me back to my negative evaluation. I didn’t want anonymity on my evaluation, I wrote my name on it. Yesterday I got an email from my professors (it’s a two teacher course, not my favorite approach in the world), and today I’m meeting them in the cafeteria at school to discuss the problems I’ve been having. Never have I received this kind of reaction from teacher’s. Of course I do go to a school for educators, and if they are failing to reach me then it does follow that they should attempt to work with me in finding a way for me to learn from class. Still though, it’s amazing to get that kind of support and reaction from teachers who could just as easily not do anything and keep giving me mediocre marks.
Am I nervous? Of course! However I am going to try and keep my self open and calm. Not let myself fall into defensive behavior or unrealistic expectations for this meeting. It could be one of the best things that has happened to me thus far at Bank Street.
Send comments to: corinne@college-admission-essay.com
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