Busy

My latest and last residency of the year began this past week. I’m teaching personal narrative to four classes at a high school: two 9th grades, one 11th grade, one twelfth grade. Having taught only 7th and 8th graders so far, this was a new experience.
The school is in a temporary home near the heart of downtown Buffalo. The building itself is fascinating; it’s an old foundry, and in the basement halls the old rails that carts ran on are still embedded in the flooring. The demographics are more mixed than the other schools I’ve taught at—though as I write that, it strikes me that above a certain level, there’s an absence of students of color, and male students of color. In the senior class there are at least two girls with children.
Their writing is better than at the junior high school level, which is a huge relief. Some of it is frankly impressive. I’ve been encouraging them to write about someone they know. Some hide behind silence and outright resistance, but with a little prodding they each still manage to produce a few sentences. It isn’t the quantity that I’m after anyway; it’s the personal quality. Even if they’re writing about a friend or a parent or a boyfriend or someone else in the class, they are still expressing themselves through written language. Several of the kids, though young, have been touched by real life, and not simply in the form of a pregnancy carried to term. One of the juniors lost his mother only very recently; the best friend of one of the freshmen was recently murdered. They write of siblings or friends who drink too much; they write of sisters who have become pregnant.
This all makes me very grateful for the relative simplicity of my own high school years. My mother always said she and her sisters and friends were not the most popular, not the prettiest, not the wealthiest, but had the most laughs and the most fun. She tried to pass that on to me and my siblings. Looking back, I had a lot of fun in high school. It was later that life got real, got challenging.

The benefit I’ve been organizing for my brother’s company is two weeks away. I will be so glad when it’s all over. We have done a lot of work, and are quite ahead of schedule in terms of planning. I’d like there to be about 50 more reservations than we have right now, however; we’re somewhere in the vicinity of 75 to 100. We discovered yesterday that between the caterers, the bartenders, and the performers, we will have about 45 people on staff that night in various capacities. So the venue is going to be full, which is good. I just would like there to be about 50 more people, preferably with deep pockets. I’ve enjoyed the work involved but don’t know that it’s something I could do all the time. Once a year or twice a year at the most. It’s good, productive work and I enjoy bringing my experience in the hospitality business to the meetings. And I have enjoyed the chance to get to know the larger Buffalo community as a result.