I wasn’t going to blog about this but I read (still am reading) a heated debate on Fark.com about teachers and performance and salaries and firing and … the age old stuff. I can’t really weigh in on the subject considering I’ve never been directly employed by the BoE, never had to work within the “system”. that being said, I’ve been teaching / tutoring for 8 years, in martial arts (2.5 years), computer science (4 years), and highschool math / English (2 years)

I gave a student a promotion test on Wednesday for his orange belt in Tae Kwon Do. I’ve only ever given 1 other promotion test and that was to a 3rd / 4th grader who had me for 1.5 to 2 years. this was a high school student who had me for 1.5 years already. it was a pretty intense test, up to the caliber of the promotion tests I took under Master Orlove. (perhaps my memory distorts the truth; maybe my tests weren’t that hard, maybe they were). about 50 minutes into it (I was aiming for about a 60 or 70 minute test), he says “Mr. Chin, I don’t feel so good. I feel dizzy.” I had him at a stationary fighting stance; I was pushing him physically pretty hard and decided to give him a “rest”; asking questions and testing him on his intellectual knowledge before continuing his physical testing. most students get winded like that and I thought it was a minor thing. it wasn’t. after a minute or 2, I wised up, walked over to him (I had spent the entire 60 minutes behind a desk, scribbling notes, being unattached, academic, and intimidating, like I how I had been tested), and inquired further. I told him to take a knee and when that didn’t help much, to lie down on the floor.

he pushed himself so much to meet my expectations that he put himself in physical harm. he committed. what really made my day was after a while, I asked if he wanted to continue. he had been doing phenomenally up to this point, banging out his pushups, his kicks, and his Korean language without complaint and pretty much flawlessly. I was ready to cut the test short, continue a few days later. I was proud when he said yes, he’d like to continue. I was even prouder when, after literally 3 minutes of continuing, he admitted he can’t continue. it showed that he is determined but also honest.

he propped up against a wall, I ran to grab a bottle of water for him, and spent the next 15 minutes telling him horror stories about my own promotion tests. how I was basically crippled after running the Law Tower my first time but pushed on anyhow for the 2nd day of testing; how 1 time, close to my black belt test, I felt dizzy just like him, excused myself to vomit, rinsed out my mouth, and continued the test. I gave him a flyer for my Tae Kwon Do club at Brooklyn College; he’s graduating this year (everyone in the school is, it’s being closed down) and hopefully will be going to college next year. he didn’t apply to BC but to a lot of CUNY schools.

it means a lot to me, a marker / reward of my ability to teach. his neighborhood is not a good 1. there are gangs in the school, probably worse things I don’t know about. I went on a field trip with his classmates 1 time and I learned that 1 of the students is an expecting father. he was 17, didn’t know water came free in restaurants. that’s the kind of environment my student is in and to think I inspired him so much to commit so hard to something that, in the scope of his academic education, doesn’t matter much, is … bewildering.

his grades are not the best. he’s struggling with math; he blames it on his math teacher, which I don’t think is completely a cop out, because he goes to after school math tutoring very regularly. I’m considering, in the last few months, that instead of teaching Tae Kwon Do, I would help him with his school work. I’d have to brush off my high school math, but that shouldn’t be too hard. as a graduating senior, he’s doing work I was doing my freshman year. (I know I got lucky and went to a good high school. I don’t take that for granted.)

I am a good teacher. back when I was tutoring computer science in Boston, I turned uneasy 75’s into sure 90’s. the tutoring service was free for students but I was so effective that a few students paid out of pocket to get extra time; that people were recommending me to their friends. I remember 1 girl, 1 of the first I tutored, who started out as a complete technophobe. by the end of the semester, I got her so interested in computers that she wanted to take a computer apart and poke at the internals. for fun.

more recently, last year when I was also teaching poetry at my high school, we did workshops 1 class. poetry was never really popular so my classes were always small (3 to 6 kids) but this was a particularly small day. 1 student. I spent the entire period workshopping his work, as my (outstanding) teachers taught me how to workshop. at the end of the period, he didn’t want to leave. he ditched his English class to stay while I taught him English. it wasn’t to get out of doing work, etc., but because I was giving him sincere and quality attention.

even more recently, I had a student in my Pace class come up to me. she has only been taking Tae Kwon Do for a month so far. we’re really only now moving on from the basics. she told me that her schedule next semester will be overloaded and that could she still audit the class for free (I, of course, said yes). this is phenomenal considering so many things. (A) it’s more of a recreation class than anything. (B) she’s not only thinking a semester ahead, but an academic year ahead. she basically said that 7 months from now, she still wants to be taking Tae Kwon Do. (C) I haven’t taught her anything other than the basics yet. it made me smile (wide) and when she thanked me for letting her audit, I thanked her for her dedication.

twice, in my kids classes at NYU, of which I have only taught 6 or 7 classes so far, a kid has said “Tae Kwon Do is a pretty fun sport.” the first time, it took me by surprise because it was a student who had trouble focusing, who acted out. he was particularly bad 1 class but at the end, he stood there, in his uniform, and said it completely unexpectedly. him and his father stopped by my class last week; said they were taking a break, trying out new sports, but might come back next year. the second time was a different kid, both of them were about 6 years old.

I am a good teacher; I think I want to teach for a long time in the foreseeable future. I do want to work in the public schools, where good teachers are needed. preferably with high school or middle school students; I can do more with them than the K-5. I’m willing to accept the stress and poor public view. I do want to teach college level courses also but feel (or intuit) that a few years in high school or middle school will teach me quite a few things I won’t learn anywhere else. I want to teach Tae Kwon Do less (my body just can’t handle 6 to 8 hour days of teaching and training). I’d love to teach poetry; also love to teach English, though that’s scary cause I’ve never taught a class like that, where we discuss novels and such. it’s weird, but I would LOVE to teach math or computer science.

I’ve been reading the article on Fark for an hour and a half. been writing this post for an hour. there are a lot of issues tacked on to the Board of Ed, the system for hiring / tenuring teachers, unions, etc. I have my own views that I’m not going to share, partly because I don’t feel qualified and partly because my views include that all sides are right to some degree and arguing won’t change anything.

1 last thing I want to say about teaching: it’s scary. often, 10 or 15 minutes before teaching a class (especially the first class of the day), I have panic attacks. when a student fails to learn or when I teach something incorrectly or when I don’t teach something in the most efficient and effective way, I feel like it’s an act of betrayal. sometimes I dream about an easier job, like stock boy or something.

Advice for Haitian Boys
“Something like 40 to 50 percent of the population at Port-au-Prince is kids.”

Girls’ skirts will open for nothing, for a song
just loud and long enough to minus out
the scratch of zipper teeth and second thoughts.
Don’t bother with names. By morning, you should be gone.

When brothers die, drink more rum than you can afford.
Cry, if you need. Piss circles around the bodies
and brawl anyone who abuses your right to grieve.
There are no excuses to outsurvive the adored.

Sometimes loss comes vaster. Whole cities fall,
bloodlines sever. There will always be some stranger
to shoo away the dust and flood paint thinner
on the stains. You won’t have to do a thing at all.

O that a man’s reach should not exceed his grasp.
Don’t plan ahead, don’t think it through. Don’t ask.

Advice for Haitian Boys
“Something like 40 to 50 percent of the population at Port-au-Prince is kids.”

Go chase the skirts of women down;
tell each she is the crown you have to have
to raise whole kingdoms up from barren ground
but while she sleeps, search out tomorrow’s love.

When your best friend and blood sworn brother dies
throw flowers and a prayer upon his head
then turn around and drink until you’re blind.
There’s no excuse to outsurvive the dead.

And when you lose a city or much vaster,
dance wildly in the absent space it left.
Trust me it only looks like a disaster;
it meant to carry you from this life to the next.

The moon shows 9 faces and then repeats.
Why waste our time with what we saw last week?

Jitters

I daydream the same
thing before each class:
I’m scanning groceries
and the prices look
familiar: $23.58,
$24.16, $39.81.
Fibonacci or
geometric sequences.
Easy life, pushing buttons.

Then the bell rings.
I take attendance, begin.
Every second is either
a betrayal when I fail
to be perfect or a moment
of naked openness
when someone smiles
real hard because they learned
something new and then blush
because of how hard
they’re smiling.

Some Day, When I am Brave

I’ll tell her she’s a Muslim angel,
the kind without the wings,
who squats above a blade of grass,
packing her hips between the hips
of other living tasks of God
attending their own blades of grass,
all whispering seductively to “grow, grow.”

Gumji

I never spoke Cantonese.
I knew the words for rice,
bath, homework, hurry, go, late;
for give, thanks, big and little brother;
for masturbation and porn and salt
(they’re all the same)
but I only mapped the shapes of their sounds.
I couldn’t produce them with my New Yorker tongue.
Damn, dad must have been the same
except reversed. Somehow, our babble worked.

But then, in parts, we grew apart.
I pretended to forget our code.
We didn’t talk, didn’t leave notes,
walked the same hallways in silence,
and soon, with college abroad,
I forgot his language whole hog.

These days, he’s lost it all.
We watch the news the 2 Saturdays
a month I visit. There are only bombs,
new strains of flu, angry parents
complaining about the sorry state of our schools.
He asks for the … …
I can see his hand form the mold,
his thumb jab at his palm for imaginary buttons.
“Remote?” I ask but really tell.
I wish I remember Cantonese
so I could say “gumji”;
that instead of giving him what he can’t find,
I could restore what once was there
but now is gone.

The Whole Expressed in Its Parts

I breathe in the East River’s air. It’s thick with mist and chilled in November. My body is a dam to heat; its reservoir of warmth meets the nor’easter and condensation coats my throat like beads around a glass of gin.

It rains inside my lungs. The drops first cling then slide and fall, collect within a pool of last breath’s rain. They ding the water’s surface, wringing circles expanding outward. Infinite. A model of a galaxy or a yawn radiating around a classroom.

The walls are green. A watermelon seed I inhaled last week took root against my lungs, grew leaves, spread wild like weeds. It drinks the rain and breathes the air that I bring in. It has its own cycle of respiration.

I breathe out. The puddle and lung-soil shake a little. I pause and hold the world in a vacuum as it prays for the next breath; my act of dominion I relive a dozen times a minute.

The Dining Philosophers Problem

We talked how fresh new dancers talk: code words
unlocked the unvoiced sentiments that were
too large to fit between our shorted breaths.
My father never made me learn Chinese
and always left his English back at work
but still our ears had found an easy peace
although his golden wisdom passed like sand
through the pinched middle of an hour glass.

For years this slow art worked out well for us
until I went to college out of state.
My need for token talk had come apart
like ants that spiral and who march too far.

His mind, the battered gate, is worse today.
He will forget the name of common things
like dinnerware or children whom, now old,
he leans against to lead him back to home.
We talk how wintered dancers talk: no words
at all or to each others collarbones.

The Chopstick Paradigm

We channeled dancers in our dialogue.
We developed a playbill of token talk,
a flow chart keying what we heard
to what we knew. Our antonymic
views grew a sustained ecology on the tips
of our tongues: the gatheredness
of a veteran of fatherhood wars
with the smelting heat of youth.
Then like ant marches we spiraled apart
and lost our secret shorthand
how we lost Phoenician that once
was on that market place stone
that once was whole and unfractioned.
Worse, his mind is addered with age;
he often forgets the Chinese word
for things. So we talk
how dancers talk: none at all
or only into each other’s shoulders.

Vita Nuova
–Oscar Wilde

I stood by the unvintageable sea
Till the wet waves drenched face and hair with spray;
The long red fires of the dying day
Burned in the west; the wind piped drearily;
And to the land the clamorous gulls did flee:
‘Alas!’ I cried, ‘my life is full of pain,
And who can garner fruit or golden grain
From these waste fields which travail ceaselessly!’
My nets gaped wide with many a break and flaw,
Nathless I threw them as my final cast
Into the sea, and waited for the end.
When lo! a sudden glory! and I saw
From the black waters of my tortured past
The argent splendour of white limbs ascend!