Right wavelength

I’ve had a number of Thai students, but so far they’ve been female, and so Darius is exceptional, insofar as he is not only a conformist but hasn’t quite gotten the message that our English teacher from Rhode Island is close enough to retirement that he doesn’t stick around after formal working hours, which means that when Darius looks for him in his office around 330, he’s never there and more than once I’ve had to pick up the slack, but I don’t think he minds, because it’s the one-on-one attention|approbation he needs.

Anyway, today was one of my best teaching days ever, in part because of the synchronicity and vibe that was going on, a shift from “conceptually challenging mathematics” to more “centric” instruction—what my students are interested in in their neighborhoods, the types of questions they can mathematize, even though we’re short of criticality. But this is about Darius: today in class, after I had read his homework about various things in his community, I’d picked up on Sripraphai, truly the best Thai restaurant in the Metro area, a restaurant I frequent and re|commend to anyone willing to come to Queens, doing my best to point out the recent doubling in size, the take-out ratio to dine-in, the types of people who go there, the adjoining businesses, the types of orders, and all the other quantifiables.

But part of why we’re able to connect is because earlier, having seen his desire to get 100 on everything he does, I’d made the joke, “Do you want a grade or a radio station? 103.5!”

Playing three boxes.

My friendly neighborhood Korean buddy is doing laundry and calls me while I’m still at work but luckily it’s just a fifteen minute walk back, although I’m quick to shuck the woolen workpants for shorts and flipflops, then heading out to the laundromat I haven’t been to in some time mostly because my complex has its own room. Not finding him there, I text him and he turns up, from the bar across the street, the civilized way to do laundry. He rages a little as he loads the wash into the dryers, and his quarters buy us 24 to 32 minutes to go back to the bar and reunite him with his Heineken, my Guinnesses to come.

Anyway, it’s at the bar that things get interesting. My buddy is an actor, and we are chatting about this monologue he’s memorizing, the benefits of transcribing longhand writing we’re trying to internalize (slows it down, make it feel like you’re the writer making choices, provides a sense of ownership and a physical texture to the text), and I’m feeling a bit off because it’s not the sort of Happy Hour where people are very happy at all—who would be, watching World News Tonight? Just when I think we’re going to get kicked out, the friendly bartender lends us a cigarette, and after we come back from our garden detour, my buddy starts engaging the bartender in a conversation about her accent—it’s remarkable, really, how skilled he is at being simultaneously intense and disarming, how much he builds upon, jokes with, reveals a little knowledge to gain a little more, and is ultimately totally engaged and committed without smacking of the touristical or ethnographical air that I fear I emit in such situations. I can’t compete, although in my limited math teacherly ways, when the bartender shows me the “boxes” I can play, I’m engaged—for Monday Night Football (I originally misunderstood this to be the Euro-football), one can purchase, at $2 a piece boxes going from 2 to 100. These numbers represent the target total of both teams’ scores. There are two prizes--$75 for halftime, $125 for the final. I pick the middle range numbers still left: 54, 61, 66. I know that instead of talking to people, I’ll end up typing this up on Excel. We drain our beers and proceed to folding laundry, eating dinner, and practicing our surprisingly adequate Spanish.

I still don’t know if I’ve won.

Sparring, outside of class

My new schedule is odd, in that I have an earlier lunch by an hour, but I share that period off with kids and have the room free, so there is time to hang out—much like last year, come to think of it, Alfred decides to linger; I’m glad because earlier in that period he’d almost gotten into a verbal altercation with one of the taller Bangla students, perhaps over his dimunitive stature or some other sort of macho posturing I didn’t quite catch. At registration we’d had an extended conversation about what he’d done over the summer—he started working at a florería on Horace Harding and I asked him the typical math teacherly questions, such as which flowers are the most popular, how much do they cost, et cetera. From last year, my image of Alfred is as a student who’s interested and engaged but also conscious of his own image in the eyes of his classmates, but altogether a responsible kid who happily and affectionately juggles his baby sister at parent-teacher night.

Anyway, for some reason the conversation turns to why he’s tired—I offer that perhaps the flower shop is wearying, but he says no—he was at TaeKwonDo practice the night before; unsure as to whether he’s aware of my own association with the martial arts, I start asking him some questions—where is the dojo, what is practice like, how long have you been doing it, how old is your Sabhuhim, how many other people are there, how many times do you go a week, and so on. He reveals that in his three months he’s gotten a few stripes, that classes are leveled, and that last night was the first time that he’s stayed for the more advanced class, sparring as a brand new and kind of threatening experience. I draw some contrasts, discussing some of the salient differences with the kendo I do. It now makes more sense, why he was fronting against his rival, but it’s good I nipped it in the bud—TaeKwonDo is pretty fierce.

I’m glad that eventually I’ll be able to more deeply share a very important part of my life with one of my kids.

Hanging Out

It’s registration day, which is rather lazy, and there are no regular classes and students file in according to alphabetically rearranged blocs in order to receive their schedules and be recruited for various other activities or schedule modifications. One of the early arrivals is Hugh, a Vietnamese sophomore, who has been always eager and bright, although he’s still a little young, and tends to stick out his tongue a little bit between his lips when he’s surprised or amused. The anecdote I’ve been shopping around about him is long ago I noticed this medallion he wore around his neck, a skull with some sort of radial compass design—I’m Asian too, but I figured this might be some sort of sacred Vietnamese relic, some touchstone of his culture which I should be sensitive toward not stepping over. One day, however, the conversation turns toward it, and I ask him what it means. Hugh says, ‘You know Pirates of the Caribbean? This is the medal from there.” I too am a fan…

Anyway, Hugh shows up early (he’s a ‘T’), and sits down at the table. We chat. I give him a math problem—which integers can be expressed as the sum of (more than one) consecutive integer? I help him through some examples, pose some pointed problems, go over some of the vocabulary, clarify how many integers can be in the list, and he makes some headway, but doesn’t get as far as a general solution. He doesn’t have any books on him, so I show him the Ed Policy book of the week, Political Spectacle. At this point, his friend Ado shows up, and we read the first line together, “Sometimes, the book writes you.” I proceed with my set piece about Yakov Smirnov: "In America, you watch television; in Soviet Russia, television watches you!” We try to come up with more jokes like this, but it is difficult—we get as far as analyzing how “book writes you” is an example of this antimetabolic schema. I go as far as to tell the joke about that one time at math camp when one of our delinquents decided to microwave a watch. This incident led to the joke, “What’s the difference between Derrick Gurdy and a person making popcorn?” A person making popcorn watches the microwave, but Derrick Gurdy microwaves watches. After some thought, this is funny.

So Hugh (who’s changing his name to something more ‘American’) eventually tires of this educative humor and excuses himself to register before all of his choices are completely exhausted—his number is almost up.

Reasons to Strike

Late last night I am schlepping to my friend’s place in Northern Woodside, but since I’m carrying a lead crystal vase with flowers, I don’t feel like walking the entire way, so instead I hail a cab on Queens Boulevard: the Cabbie, who’s some sort of Indian/Pakistani/Bangla. I do my best not to spill the water which I’ve already topped off, and he doesn’t seem to be a native of Queens, so I’m doing my best to navigate, although I only know the route by foot and there is a labyrinth of one-way streets which make things rather difficult.

Anyway, aside from the redirections, our small talk begins when I ask him about the impending taxi strike over GPS. He remarks that he thinks the objections are overblown, that he finds GPS helpful, that a lot of people are trying to be dishonest and shave, that although this cab doesn’t have GPS, it would be a great help, and that it’s really not that big of a deal. I try to challenge and probe a little bit, and I ask him if there are indeed things worth striking for—he says, yes, there are, but this is not one of those things—besides he doesn’t think that enough people will strike to ultimately make a difference. I am barely aware of the actual issues, but I was interested primarily in the ways in which he reaches his opinions—the role of peer opinions, and how he makes sense of the struggle.

As he drops me off, he compliments me on the flowers (I have dropped the baby’s breath by now)—in response to his question about what they are, I say they’re lilies.