whitey's family biker bar

patient friends:

i am very sorry that i have abandoned you and this project.
i lost my way in the fall ... and i devoted my energies to daily status updates on facebook.

i have received a few notes of inquiry and today's posting from miri combined with the outing of the day encouraged me to write.

so much to type to catch allyall up. there's really no point in rewinding and reflecting. so how about some time over beers i can explain what's been going on?

today, i taught my two classes. and i only had one real outburst and no bad bad gaffes. good news! i think that this university has adapted rube goldberg's principles to higher education. it is so frustrating. i arrived early to my 11 o'clock class only to find the AV cabinet locked up tight. this is the fourth week of school and this is the first time everything was on lockdown. evidently, i need to have a key for the classroom. i learned the hard way that i needed a key for my other classroom (at 1 o'clock). i guess i should have realized that i should have asked whether i would ever need a key to this room. i ranted a little with the students and complained to them about how much i would like to have one single day in the classroom when everything went right. i also would like to have one day when all the students come to class. i am working hard on building a learning community with the 201, but their attendance is so spotty that it makes it hard to have a sustained conversation over several periods. it's so maddening.

anyway. miami has three campuses. i teach on the posh one. for better or worse. this afternoon, as part of black history month, one of the other campuses, a decidedly non-posh one, hosted the speaker lealan jones. fans of david isay and sound portraits may know joneses' name from his radio documentary series: ghetto life 101 and remorse (ca. 1993). he and his childhood friend lloyd newman produced "our america" the monograph (and later a tv show). jones and newman grew up in and near ida wells public housing in chicago; their pieces were critical examinations of their lives in the 'hood. i have taught with our america repeatedly. i think that he is a pretty amazing and fresh writer. so, i scared up some oxford students to go along to the other campus to hear his talk. he laced the lecture with a handful of platitudes, but it was pretty good.

on the way back to our campus, i asked the students if they wanted to get a beer. our destination: whitey's family biker bar. no joke. it is a family biker bar just by a railroad crossing in trenton. we were for sure on the wrong side of the tracks. i have never seen an 8th grader sidled up a stool with his adopted father sipping a beer; each with his pack of marlboros and lighter stacked in front of them.

we got a couple of pitchers and tried to fit in. when we met dirk, the jujitsu instructor who recently got out of jail, i realized we weren't exactly blending in.




every single day is an adventure in the rural rustbelt.