Gonna Make It
Gonna Make It . . .
I am thinking about how much there is to do, how far I am from getting it done, how little time I have left to do it, and I am thinking about Three Amigos, my favorite movie as a child, a film I still view with fondness. I still know most of the lines. I am thinking of Lucky Day in the cell at El Guapo’s compound, struggling against his chains to reach the levers that will free him, grunting “Gonna make it. Gonna make it. Gonna. Make. It.”
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The end of the fall semester is within sight, and I know I’m gonna make it, even though it feels like I won’t. Too much work, too much grading, too much planning, too much progress data to put in, three IEPs to turn in.
I was frustrated last week. We’re reading The Canterbury Tales in my senior classes, but our textbook only has the preface, none of the stories, which is maddening. Thinking it would help break it up, I assigned a jigsaw activity where each student would get one character to analyze, and it went okay, but not as well as I’d hoped—and I can see now where I went wrong, things I should do next time, etc.—but a few kids copy-pasted from the internet, and that bothered me, mainly because I asked them to redo it and they just didn’t. So we’re going back to paper/pen for the rest of the semester, possibly the rest of the year, I don’t know. I like paper/pen, but the laptops give us more space on some assignments. Anyway, it’s not like it ruined my entire weekend or anything, only part of it. Half-joking.
But this week is better. I found a nice copy of “The Pardoner’s Tale” (or most of it) that comes out of a different textbook, so it’s got lots of notes and definitions and stopping points built in, and we’re reading it, together, and just going through it old school. I’m telling them where to stop, where to make annotations, breaking things down. We’re discussing, predicting, relating it to modern life. I told them about the first time I ever got hustled. I was in a park in Chicago, seventeen years old, on a college visit. This guy stopped me and complimented my shoes and before I could say thank you he said he wanted to show me something and he got down and shined one of my shoes. They were Adidas, worn and dirty, but now one of them was very clean and shiny. He offered to shine the other shoe for $20. Hustled. I’m not saying this guy was as bad as the Pardoner, of course, but they’re both hustlers. That’s the point. Not terribly exciting, but things are clicking where last week they were not. I think they’re getting more out of Chaucer this way than with nothing but the prologue. I don’t know; I imagine a lot of teachers feel this way, but some days I feel like I’m gonna make it, and some days I don’t. A lot of days, in fact.
Is this the best way to sell books? Will rambling about my teaching insecurities in between making dinner and answering my kids’ questions and letting the dog in and out and in and out convince people to pledge to our Kickstarter? I don’t know. The thing is stagnant. Ever since Thanksgiving we’ve gone from “Gonna make it. Gonna make it. Gonna. Make. It.” to “Never make never make it never make it never make it.” It’s my fault, of course, for timing it during the holiday season, for using a fundraising platform with an all-or-nothing model. We’re 36% of the way toward our goal. We have 36 days left to get there.
Come on, as the Pardoner says, unbuckle your purse. We’re gonna make it.