I.
I’ve been thinking a good deal about historiography lately - for reasons that will become obvious momentarily - and more specifically about the way we choose to document our lives. There is much and more to say about the ways in which humans decide to commemorate and explain what has come before them, and people much smarter than I have spent their lives studying and exploring these obsessions (of course, studying and commemorating history through your own writing becomes an ironic sort of closed loop which must get very confusing: how do you choose, for instance, to write about your past attempts to chronicle attempts to chronicle the past?)
In particular, the cloying nostalgia of the ten year anniversary of 9/11 - an event which for us all is inextricably bound up in our own particular lives at that time, which for me was a Catholic high school - has linked up in a very odd way with a certain moving forward or new chapter in my life. This coming together of foggy memory and uncertain future has led to a definite sense of unsettledness.
Interlude:
Yesterday as I rode the train from California to Lasalle I noticed at several stops in a row the presence of canine unit policemen. “Those puppies are so cute,” I thought to myself, “but I wonder why they feel the need for so many drug sniffing dogs in the loop today?”
Of course the most marvelous thing about the human mind is its ability to surprise itself with unforeseen data that somehow drifts from one part of our consciousness to another. How does a thought enter one’s head? It’s often said that children best appreciate the wonders of the world because everything is novel, but I find that as an adult those genuine moments of clarity and newness are altogether more satisfying.
The non-drug-sniffing bomb sniffing dogs were there because humans are forever trying to blow each other up. The jolt of realization and the flood of sickening 9/11 “remembrances” put my psyche, already in a state of semi-confusion, in a very odd place.
II.
You see, I am a teacher now. Not the fake kind - but the real kind. Only, there appears to be no difference in how that resonates mentally and emotionally, only in the real world manifestations of responsibility and money.
After trying to parlay my AmeriCorps experience into a job at the school I worked at unsuccessfully, I struck out to be a normal American with a service industry job, something I last played at freshman year of college before deciding to spend the next four years unemployed and poor rather than having to exert myself for money. I had tried to become a full time sub, to avoid the rigor of lesson planning, but in the end the school didn’t have enough money to hire me at that position.
One day into my new restaurant job I received a phone call from my former Vice Principal. She informed me that, in fact, she was now Principal of the school. Furthermore, one of the kindest and most intelligent teachers I worked with last year had had a completely unexpected stroke - a terrible brain aneurism - and oh, by the way, would I like to teach 10th grade social studies?
And here is one way in which history is written, because this story is about me, and not its more deserving subject: him. I was given, after consultation with several parties, four days to prepare a brand new course, not being qualified to teach Economics. Four days with the expectation that the course would be implemented flawlessly and show trackable and immediate growth in student reading scores. Needless to say, it’s been a very strange first two weeks of school. The course I’m teaching focuses thematically on protest movements throughout United States history, with the goal being increased literacy and critical thinking in my students. Instead of learning names and dates we are focusing on multiple points of view and the idea that historians always have a bias, a reason for writing what they do.
And so, I’ve been thinking a lot about history, the study of it, the teaching of it, the ways in which we engage with and manipulate it every day. At the end of this rambling there is no conclusion. Being a teacher in charge of two hundred children is constantly challenging and bizarre. 9/11 has been fetishized in ways that I don’t think any of us can fully understand. The world marches on and we try to remember it in ways that make sense only to ourselves.
