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Dec. 1st, 2007 09:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
philenaBrooke, the director of the Camfed USA office where I work three days a week, has asked me to work full-time, which would mean quitting the bakery (which means no more yummy goodies), and also no longer tutoring. I can see myself no longer working at the bakery--it doesn't pay very much, and there's really no prospect for significant advancement in any important way. What you see me doing is what I do, and that is selling cake. But at Camfed*, although I largely do things like get the mail, send faxes, format documents, send form thank-you letters to donors, and other less interesting things with no direct correlation to the guiding mission, the office is so small that I can see what other people are doing, and I know that because they don't have to do things like spend two hours addressing envelopes, they can do other things like arrange meetings with filmmakers who can create movies for social change that have a tremendous impact in Africa. Also, the director of the US office told me that I would start working on more important tasks, too, like help generate reports of progress and perhaps even grant proposals, and that's very tempting.**
This is all very exciting--I'm delighted that 1) I'm doing a good enough job that they want me more (especially because when Brooke asked to see me Thursday I was half-paralyzed by that instinct that generates extreme apprehension when someone in a position of authority asks to see me privately: Oh no, what did I do wrong?) and 2) that our office is growing fast enough that they'll need me that many hours. (And 3) that it would pay almost 50% more than I get at the bakery.) However, I'm extremely hesitant to give up tutoring. I don't have any real pretensions to being one of those life-changing, self-betterment-inspiring people whose former pupils say elegiac things about in newspaper articles (although I have entertained the fantasy in my head some days when things go well.) But I'm struggling with one of those "charity-begins-at-home" dilemmas: yes, impoverished orphan girls in rural sub-Saharan Africa deserve the chance to have an education, and in much greater numbers than impoverished inner-city kids in America, who usually have at least indoor plumbing and can take a bus to school instead of walking 5 miles one way every day (yes, really!). But on the other hand, their futures are equally bleak, whatever their access to toilets might be, and I like having a direct influence on the Oakland kids' lives, even if that is not as life-changing as Camfed's involvement is for the girls in Africa.
Also, I really like tutoring, especially when I've been working with the same kid for a while and we know each other and can relax a bit. For a while I was working with this kid named Anthony, who had the most difficult time thinking deeply about literature in order to get at the messages that must be inferred, and an even more difficult time absorbing new information. If literature was bad, learning about the three branches of government was torture. But he was always engaged and friendly good-humored and trying very hard to understand. But he stopped coming two weeks ago. (which makes me sad: I really hope it wasn't because he felt stupid or that the exercise was futile, but I'd much prefer it be that than other things that might make a 17-year old black kid from a dangerous inner city neighborhood suddenly stop coming to class.) So now I'm working with a different kid, named Calvin, and he's much quicker than Anthony, and although he also has great difficulty analyzing fiction, his background experience is great enough that he can sort of understand, in theory at any rate, how one must approach literature. And he really, really likes poetry and drama, which I only discovered today. Apparently he and his sister both write poetry, or used to, and his sister in particular would go to poetry slams and hypnotize the audience, he said. Judging from the difficulty he had with Sylvia Plath's poem "Mirror", I doubt the poems he and his sister wrote were particularly subtle or, dare I say it, good, but he gets really engaged with the medium, and even though often I have to tell him things ("The terrible fish image means that this woman is getting old and hates to see it every day in the mirror."), because I can't elicit the right answer from leading questions, he still gets really excited when it becomes clear. One of my favorite things about yesterday's session was that he asked if we could skip the GED practice questions that come at the end of every poem and just read the poetry and talk about it. Since I'm really tutoring him to pass the GED, I said we would need to go over the questions, because he'll need to have experience with them, but I plan on next week to bring in some other poems for him. Probably Robert Frost ("The Road not Taken," of course), and maybe Edna St. Vincent Millay ("Bluebeard," which might be tricky if he doesn't know the myth, but it's such a wonderful poem, and so applicable to the estranged, private soul.*** But the real reason I'm excited about next week is that Leonard Pitts, Jr. wrote a column in today's paper that was so passionate and poetic and accessible to someone whose reading skills are not particularly strong that I really look forward to showing Calvin how people can write and read texts that are not just "identify the metaphor"-type poems, but have a real connection to real life. That column, actually, is what got me fired up to sit here and write about it in lj instead of working on my grad-school applications.****
I think I'll quit the bakery and work four and a half days a week at Camfed. It's no less money than I make working full time between Camfed and the bakery, and it allows me to continue tutoring and I would get a full weekend! Working on Sundays is a real bear. I never get to read the paper!
In other news, Daniel and I watched Ирония Судьбы a few weeks ago, and there are some fabulous songs in it. One is a poem by Marina Tsvetaeva, and another is just a really touching song whose author I couldn't find online (or else I'm not sure enough of my Russian skills to be certain that a name I connect with it is the author and not the performer. Maybe some nice reader will tell me). I was going to translate them, but I've written enough and I should get to work. Remind me to translate them in my next entry.
Scroll down to the second song. If you click on "Прослушать" you can hear this song being played here. I liked the version in the movie better, but I just can't navigate the Russian net well enough to find it.
Я спросил у ясеня,
Где моя любимая.
Ясень не ответил мне,
Качая головой.
Я спросил у тополя,
Где моя любимая.
Тополь забросал меня
Осеннею листвой.
Я спросил у осени,
Где моя любимая.
Осень мне ответила
Проливным дождем.
У дождя я спрашивал,
Где моя любимая.
Долго дождик слезы лил
За моим окном.
Я спросил у месяца,
Где моя любимая.
Месяц скрылся в облаке,
Не ответил мне.
Я спросил у облака,
Где моя любимая.
Облако растаяло
В небесной синеве.
Друг ты мой единственный,
Где моя любимая.
Ты скажи, где скрылася,
Знаешь, где она.
Друг ответил преданный,
Друг ответил искренний:
Была тебе любимая,
Была тебе любимая,
Была тебе любимая,
А стала мне жена.
And the second song. But it's a poem first, so I haven't tried to find a recording.
Мне нравится, что я больна не вами,
Что никогда тяжелый шар земной
Не уплывет под нашими ногами.
Мне нравится, что можно быть смешной -
Распущенной - и не играть словами,
И не краснеть удушливой волной,
Слегка соприкоснувшись рукавами.
-Марина Цветаева
*By the way, Camfed has been selected for the Financial Times's seasonal appeal this year. Read about us! This is what we do!
**I think I really impressed Ann, our executive director and founder, when I was helping her format a grant proposal and after she asked me for a good synonym for "terrible," I suggested "egregious," which she had never heard of before. She ended up choosing "appalling," but she mentioned the incident to Brooke, who had heard the word but had no idea what it meant. So there you go, high-schoolers: brush up on those SAT vocab words and it will advance your career!
***Although that might not apply to him. I mentioned that Sylvia Plath is very popular with teenagers who think it's cool to be depressed and suicidal, and he was completely baffled by people who act like that, mentioning that he had seen a few Goth girls and they really scared him. Then he said it was sad that Sylvia Plath had killed herself rather than continuing to write so that other people would feel comforted and not kill themselves. What a sweet kid!
****I'm not procrastinating too much. I've got three professors (and Brooke) who've agreed to write me letters of recommendation and have the addresses they need to send them to, and I've already arranged for my GRE scors and transcripts to be sent to the right places, so at this point it's really just a question of writing the bloody statement of purpose. And I still have ten days to do that.
This is all very exciting--I'm delighted that 1) I'm doing a good enough job that they want me more (especially because when Brooke asked to see me Thursday I was half-paralyzed by that instinct that generates extreme apprehension when someone in a position of authority asks to see me privately: Oh no, what did I do wrong?) and 2) that our office is growing fast enough that they'll need me that many hours. (And 3) that it would pay almost 50% more than I get at the bakery.) However, I'm extremely hesitant to give up tutoring. I don't have any real pretensions to being one of those life-changing, self-betterment-inspiring people whose former pupils say elegiac things about in newspaper articles (although I have entertained the fantasy in my head some days when things go well.) But I'm struggling with one of those "charity-begins-at-home" dilemmas: yes, impoverished orphan girls in rural sub-Saharan Africa deserve the chance to have an education, and in much greater numbers than impoverished inner-city kids in America, who usually have at least indoor plumbing and can take a bus to school instead of walking 5 miles one way every day (yes, really!). But on the other hand, their futures are equally bleak, whatever their access to toilets might be, and I like having a direct influence on the Oakland kids' lives, even if that is not as life-changing as Camfed's involvement is for the girls in Africa.
Also, I really like tutoring, especially when I've been working with the same kid for a while and we know each other and can relax a bit. For a while I was working with this kid named Anthony, who had the most difficult time thinking deeply about literature in order to get at the messages that must be inferred, and an even more difficult time absorbing new information. If literature was bad, learning about the three branches of government was torture. But he was always engaged and friendly good-humored and trying very hard to understand. But he stopped coming two weeks ago. (which makes me sad: I really hope it wasn't because he felt stupid or that the exercise was futile, but I'd much prefer it be that than other things that might make a 17-year old black kid from a dangerous inner city neighborhood suddenly stop coming to class.) So now I'm working with a different kid, named Calvin, and he's much quicker than Anthony, and although he also has great difficulty analyzing fiction, his background experience is great enough that he can sort of understand, in theory at any rate, how one must approach literature. And he really, really likes poetry and drama, which I only discovered today. Apparently he and his sister both write poetry, or used to, and his sister in particular would go to poetry slams and hypnotize the audience, he said. Judging from the difficulty he had with Sylvia Plath's poem "Mirror", I doubt the poems he and his sister wrote were particularly subtle or, dare I say it, good, but he gets really engaged with the medium, and even though often I have to tell him things ("The terrible fish image means that this woman is getting old and hates to see it every day in the mirror."), because I can't elicit the right answer from leading questions, he still gets really excited when it becomes clear. One of my favorite things about yesterday's session was that he asked if we could skip the GED practice questions that come at the end of every poem and just read the poetry and talk about it. Since I'm really tutoring him to pass the GED, I said we would need to go over the questions, because he'll need to have experience with them, but I plan on next week to bring in some other poems for him. Probably Robert Frost ("The Road not Taken," of course), and maybe Edna St. Vincent Millay ("Bluebeard," which might be tricky if he doesn't know the myth, but it's such a wonderful poem, and so applicable to the estranged, private soul.*** But the real reason I'm excited about next week is that Leonard Pitts, Jr. wrote a column in today's paper that was so passionate and poetic and accessible to someone whose reading skills are not particularly strong that I really look forward to showing Calvin how people can write and read texts that are not just "identify the metaphor"-type poems, but have a real connection to real life. That column, actually, is what got me fired up to sit here and write about it in lj instead of working on my grad-school applications.****
I think I'll quit the bakery and work four and a half days a week at Camfed. It's no less money than I make working full time between Camfed and the bakery, and it allows me to continue tutoring and I would get a full weekend! Working on Sundays is a real bear. I never get to read the paper!
In other news, Daniel and I watched Ирония Судьбы a few weeks ago, and there are some fabulous songs in it. One is a poem by Marina Tsvetaeva, and another is just a really touching song whose author I couldn't find online (or else I'm not sure enough of my Russian skills to be certain that a name I connect with it is the author and not the performer. Maybe some nice reader will tell me). I was going to translate them, but I've written enough and I should get to work. Remind me to translate them in my next entry.
Scroll down to the second song. If you click on "Прослушать" you can hear this song being played here. I liked the version in the movie better, but I just can't navigate the Russian net well enough to find it.
Я спросил у ясеня,
Где моя любимая.
Ясень не ответил мне,
Качая головой.
Я спросил у тополя,
Где моя любимая.
Тополь забросал меня
Осеннею листвой.
Я спросил у осени,
Где моя любимая.
Осень мне ответила
Проливным дождем.
У дождя я спрашивал,
Где моя любимая.
Долго дождик слезы лил
За моим окном.
Я спросил у месяца,
Где моя любимая.
Месяц скрылся в облаке,
Не ответил мне.
Я спросил у облака,
Где моя любимая.
Облако растаяло
В небесной синеве.
Друг ты мой единственный,
Где моя любимая.
Ты скажи, где скрылася,
Знаешь, где она.
Друг ответил преданный,
Друг ответил искренний:
Была тебе любимая,
Была тебе любимая,
Была тебе любимая,
А стала мне жена.
And the second song. But it's a poem first, so I haven't tried to find a recording.
Мне нравится, что вы больны не мной...
Мне нравится, что вы больны не мной,Мне нравится, что я больна не вами,
Что никогда тяжелый шар земной
Не уплывет под нашими ногами.
Мне нравится, что можно быть смешной -
Распущенной - и не играть словами,
И не краснеть удушливой волной,
Слегка соприкоснувшись рукавами.
Мне нравится еще, что вы при мне
Спокойно обнимаете другую,
Не прочите мне в адовом огне
Гореть за то, что я не вас целую.
Что имя нежное мое, мой нежный, не
Упоминаете ни днем, ни ночью - всуе...
Что никогда в церковной тишине
Не пропоют над нами: аллилуйя!
Спасибо вам и сердцем и рукой
За то, что вы меня - не зная сами! -
Так любите: за мой ночной покой,
За редкость встреч закатными часами,
За наши не гулянья под луной,
За солнце, не у нас над головами, -
За то, что вы больны - увы! - не мной,
За то, что я больна - увы! - не вами!
-Марина Цветаева
*By the way, Camfed has been selected for the Financial Times's seasonal appeal this year. Read about us! This is what we do!
**I think I really impressed Ann, our executive director and founder, when I was helping her format a grant proposal and after she asked me for a good synonym for "terrible," I suggested "egregious," which she had never heard of before. She ended up choosing "appalling," but she mentioned the incident to Brooke, who had heard the word but had no idea what it meant. So there you go, high-schoolers: brush up on those SAT vocab words and it will advance your career!
***Although that might not apply to him. I mentioned that Sylvia Plath is very popular with teenagers who think it's cool to be depressed and suicidal, and he was completely baffled by people who act like that, mentioning that he had seen a few Goth girls and they really scared him. Then he said it was sad that Sylvia Plath had killed herself rather than continuing to write so that other people would feel comforted and not kill themselves. What a sweet kid!
****I'm not procrastinating too much. I've got three professors (and Brooke) who've agreed to write me letters of recommendation and have the addresses they need to send them to, and I've already arranged for my GRE scors and transcripts to be sent to the right places, so at this point it's really just a question of writing the bloody statement of purpose. And I still have ten days to do that.