Update on Wakeifield.... and other stuff.

It's amazing how time flies. "The weeks, they pass like seconds, but the days all pass so slow."

Here I am again. Trying to write a post. This time, I have put on some Modest Mouse, hopefully increasing my motivation to write. It always seemed to work in the past. I'd turn the lights down low, burn some incense, and put on Modest Mouse in my room. The words just flowed out easily from there.

I don't know where to start. It's intimidating to know that I haven't written in so long. It seems like there is an incredible amount that needs to be written about. Let's start with something simple.

I've been trying to write some music lately. The same old process still applies - I write something, spend a couple days loving it and thinking it's awesome, and then think it's absolute crap. I'll come to appreciate it eventually.

There are so many reasons to begin writing in this. First of all, I feel like my writing abilities have diminished horribly. I'm scared of that. I notice when writing essays or prompts for school, that I have trouble creating a definite thesis. Organizing my thoughts to the point where I can write them all down in a compressed, coherent way without jumping all over the place. Perhaps I've grown reluctant to give the whole picture, because I don't think it will be accepted well. My problem in writing used to be over-explaining things, because I wanted every aspect of my points crystal clear and understood. Now I avoid that, intentionally censoring myself to give a more simple, easy-to-understand answer. Grr. This is frustrating even to think about. It's still fuzzy in my head, even now.

Wakefield is... coming along. It is what it is. That is more or less what I tell people when they ask the frustratingly general question "How's Wakefield?" I say there are some good things and some bad things, which is the simplest way to wrap up my thoughts on the school without going into a long monologue.

My teachers are, for the most part, very good. Mrs. Zanchettin, the English teacher, truly knows what she's doing, and I think I'm doing well in that class. Mostly because I'm actually putting forth great effort to read the required materials. I feel more compelled to. I'm sick of bullshitting, which is what I did much of the time in English class back at RCHS.

I led a discussion on Robert and Elizabeth Brownings' poetry the other day, which went pretty well. We just wrapped up reading A Tale Of Two Cities. It was difficult to commit myself to it, but once I got into the book, I found it very interesting. We're studying the end of Victorian literature now, which is where the Browning poetry came from. In the other English class, we're reading the graphic novel, Persepolis, which I'm also enjoying. It's a serious matter presented in a humorous, easy-to-read way.

Latin is also going fairly well. I suppose I should be spending this time studying the new concept we're learning. Psh. I don't even remember what it's called. But, yeah. It's not nearly as hard to assimilate myself into the class halfway through like I thought it'd be. Mr. McMahon, the teacher, has grown on me. He's no Mr. Sharpe, but I like him.

Singing lessons, which take place Monday and Tuesday during first period, are also going extremely well. I'm starting to really learn how to conceptualize the shape of a tone, and apply that to the way I sing. For instance, puckering the corners of the mouth produces a much darker, rounder tone than otherwise. Thinking in vowels (a strange concept) without actually mouthing them improves the overall musicality of a piece.

The class is taught by Mr. Knisewski, who graduated from Shenendoah University. He's young, but not as young as Deboer. We're both instrumentalists, him on the clarinet, me on the French Horn, so we can often draw analogies and understandings relating to instrumentalist and singing, which is useful. Every day, I grow more and more respect toward him. He has beautiful vocal technique, which I've been waiting to learn about for many years. He's been having some pretty serious health problems lately, though. Not quite sure how to describe it, but his insides have holes in them. He says it's mostly because of stress lately, but also due to his malnourished childhood. Hardly anybody in the school knows about his condition, except for the Chorus class that I have eighth period. He trusts us with it, and also he wants us to know why some days he feels less able to teach than others. Yesterday at the end of class, while I was still packing up my things and everyone else had left, he asked me if I'd help him carry his stuff out to his car, since he was feeling particularly weak. I did, which he appreciated greatly. He didn't want me to wait in the front office for him, though, as he went to the teacher's lounge to grab something, presumably because he didn't want anyone to know about his condition.

Physics class is also going well. The teacher is named Mr. Popkin, and he's delightfully nerdy to the point where it's laughable. He's also a very good teacher, and, like Latin, I'm not having as much trouble as I anticipated entering the course halfway through the year.

The only class that truly frustrates me is AP US History. At RCHS, I had no idea how lucky I was to have a teacher as proficient and knowledgeable as Mr. West. After teaching for something like 30 years or more, he truly knew how to form an effective curriculum and how to make class time as productive as possible. The fact that it was a small class full of Juniors also helped.

The history teacher at Wakefield, Mr. Day, is young, and in his second year of teaching history. It's partly because the class is in a room packed to the brim with loud and obnoxious sophomores, and partly due to his inability to explain anything clearly from start to finish in a linear and interesting way that I feel I'm not getting anything useful out of the class. His questions on tests are pathetic, factual-driven questions that don't stress critical thinking and don't accurately prepare the student for the official AP US History exam at the end of the year. But I'm not blaming it completely on him. He's really trying, and just the other day he checked up on me alone to see how I was doing in the class, if I felt I was learning to the best of my capacity, and if there was anything he could do in his teaching to help me along. It was a hard question to consider. I couldn't exactly tell him that his ability to explain things sucks, more or less, and I couldn't suggest a complete curriculum that I was used to at RCHS. That would be horribly inappropriate. So I didn't say much.

And a great deal of what frustrates me about the class is the other students in it, who, to put it bluntly, are immature and disruptive. Whenever we are set up in groups to talk about things, much of the focus of the conversation is directed at Mr. Day's teaching inabilities, which is somewhat justifiable, because they are very frustrating. But the class brings their own ignorance upon themselves when they constantly talk during Mr. Day's lectures, and consistently make stupid comments while the class is actually discussing material. Mr. Day hardly even chastises these students for this, which makes it even worse. Gah.