KENTUKIANA 9. 'Like All the Crazy Ones'

Dear passengers, at cruising speed and after continuous turbulence, I am pleased to announce that we are beginning our descent toward the end of an unforgettable and all the more revealing school year. Behind us lie the seven months of trenches and rearguards, and only two remain before the closing of the journey and its mission (June 3: last school day). What's more, in just one week we will descend into a layer of low clouds, gentle and fairly extensive (about nine days: from April 6 to 14): the so-called ‘Spring Break‘, our Easter week. But here, none of those processions and funereal events (I did send Nick, the music teacher — and let the record show it was with all the best intentions in the world — a few samples of what the bands play during our Holy Week, and he asked me: –Who died?-). Suddenly, I felt a rush of secondhand embarrassment that almost gave me away.

Behind us lie the seven months of trenches and rearguards, and only two remain before the closing of the journey and its mission

Here at Easter, the fashion runs more toward flower festivals and more jovial welcomes for spring, with dances, concerts and other events, as if, just for a moment, we imagined ourselves strolling through ancient Greece, or through one of those Woodstock festivals. All of it accompanied by those delicious, beguiling, eye-catching chocolate eggs and bunnies. It's a fairly common custom, widespread all over this country, to offer its childish student body all manner of sweets and additives. And only because I've grown used to it, but it no longer surprises me to see those little open mouths with metal teeth and cavities in progress. Later on, added to the effects of a poor diet based on junk food or fast food, adulthood will bring them the consequent illnesses of possible diabetes and/or cancers, without even touching, here and now, on the delicate matter of obesity and heart attacks, as revealed in the documentary The BBC experiment on the effects of ultra-processed foods. And I ask: -A country that doesn't take care of its people — what kind of country is that?

it no longer surprises me to see those little open mouths with metal teeth and cavities in progress.

Fittingly, on the last Friday of March we celebrated the ice cream party, where, and only as a reward, the students who finished their reading and math lessons on time through the computer program iReady, and earned good marks both for their behavior and their participation, were the lucky ones to receive a big cup of ice cream topped with all kinds of sweets: gummies, candies, cookies, chocolate shavings, jellies and every other genre of sugary enchantment.

Then all week long more chocolate eggs and bunnies will keep coming, since we're on the eve of the holiday; and before this came the party of the red-and-white candy canes, and the skating-rink party with banana, chocolate and strawberry muffins and donuts, or the circus-style Carnival party, with its cotton candy and popcorn in a multitude of flavors.

And if not, something will be arranged to keep them ‘sweetened up‘ and with their hands and tongue blue, green or red, thanks to those colorful and aromatic little ‘worms’ called Takis (which even come in ‘fuego’ flavor). Long live the food coloring and the stabilizer! The additive and the addictive! Behold my ode to such an operation:

Candy for the morning,                                                                                                                                       candy for the lunch,                                                                                                                                               candy in the soup now,                                                                                                                                                  candy, give me more!                                                                                                                                                             Candy I am sorry,                                                                                                                                                      candy for my dinner,                                                                                                                                                      candy in the glass now                                                                                                                                                         in the wee small hours! 

They even use them as a sort of appetizer during lunch itself, and that's how they walk into my class afterward, so fired up they're running at full throttle. Good luck stopping them or getting them to sit, for, as in a board game, the little meerkats will pop right back up. And who calms them down? Who controls them and endures them? I'll tell you: patience and stamina, mental health, and my energy bar, as if this were a video game by now — we could call it Pressing School Cath!, where only through endurance do you make it out alive and all the way to the end.

On the other hand, it's the fastest, easiest and cheapest way to keep them happy and spellbound, as happened with the little chocolate house, with its sponge cakes and sugar windows, that so ‘blindly’ left the siblings Hansel and Gretel in the tale by the Brothers Grimm. Parties are needed, yes, but with this much candy? These keep them cheerful and distracted, for we all know that for kids any activity of letting off steam and revelry is always convenient and necessary, all the more so in a school where they spend over seven hours a day, most of that time sitting down. So it's no surprise that fights and altercations break out, rebellions and aggressions, with insults and dirty looks: Fuck you!, or Go back to Spain!, as I was told, the other day, by a certain student who holds me in great esteem. I apply soap so it all slides right off me, for they are kids (and even if they weren't). There is an important lesson to be learned through these outbursts — at the very least, to not identify with anything: not even with oneself. You have to keep them happy and lively, for at this point in the year they are like sticks of TNT, hair-trigger and explosive; and there's no point stooping to their level, or playing their game (since that's exactly what they want: to ‘play‘).

Fuck you!, or Go back to Spain!, as I was told, the other day, by a certain student who holds me in great esteem. I apply soap so it all slides right off me, for they are kids (and even if they weren't).

On blowups and explosions I could go on for a while, though more than theirs, about the one in my own head. While it's true that they're starting to spin out of control (they always have been), I can say that ever since the school year began in August, good manners, good upbringing and decorum have been conspicuous by their absence. In fact, in the long run, that is what has taken the greatest toll on me. I've sprouted an extra gray hair or two — don't they say those come from stress? — and it's not that I look like the wizard Gandalf the Grey just yet, but I do feel my strength helpless, waning — though ‘strength’ it still is — and I don't know if it will carry me through the two months.

Here the more fault-finding reader might think: -Of course, that's what you get for not giving them motivating and entertaining activities-. And they may be right; maybe I also need to put on a clown nose to better capture their attention, because when I dream up and innovate with simple origami activities — with masks, glasses, or paper puppets, drawing, coloring, cutting and pasting — I usually hit the mark, for you see them there almost in silence, absorbed in their creation. However, you wouldn't believe how bored they get with the activities and proposals of the new curricula, which according to their creators are designed for teaching Spanish in American schools, like the latest one to land on my desk, ‘Sonrisas Spanish‘ (recently acquired by the school and worthy of a whole new article in itself). I laugh at all its sprawling verbiage, for its activities convince neither me nor the students. It's as if they had been made by people who have never taught a class in their lives. I use them as a test, so the kids adapt to differentiation and accept with good grace whatever their teacher gives them — or are we going to encourage them, at such an early age, to believe that life is an à la carte menu? I don't know whether the flaw lies in me or in the type of activities; the fact is you have to offer them something so practical, motivating and on-target that at the slightest misstep, it's hit the deck and watch the enemy fire come in.

when I dream up and innovate with simple origami activities — with masks, glasses, or paper puppets, drawing, coloring, cutting and pasting — I usually hit the mark, for you see them there almost in silence, absorbed in their creation.

Above, the activities from the new curriculum: plain and boring (I had to complete and customize the drawing of the bus, since they fell short even on that). Below, a more motivating activity.

Whenever they tear up a drawing or crumple a sheet of paper into a ball, I repeat to them that this paper comes from a tree that was sacrificed so it could arrive smooth and white at their desk. That is how I try to raise their awareness. Awareness? But that's the very first thing they should be learning at home! We all lack awareness — awareness of being and of being present, whether in a classroom or anywhere else.

Then there's the rudeness exercised and projected everywhere (at home, on TV, on the internet), which must be reversed, for that malpractice of the ignorant who know they are ignorant and who misinform is passed down to the small, innocent ignorant ones who don't even know yet that they are ignorant. How could they, when they're spellbound by the deliberate sorcery of the bad internet and its villains. In fact, it will become ever harder to correct, for the trunk of ignorance will keep on growing. The entire educational community must GET INVOLVED to begin to reverse the spiral. That is why it hurts so much to be a teacher these days, especially when you must face, daily, a whole arsenal of ill-mannered, uninterested children whom you have to redirect, motivate and then teach (if you ever get that far). But that is what these kids already come with, as standard equipment and straight from home, dazzled by the ‘stupidization‘ of phones and tablets, above all by social media, and by the degradation that sugar, in turn, also produces in their brains.

The entire educational community must GET INVOLVED to begin to reverse the spiral. That is why it hurts so much to be a teacher these days, especially when you must face, daily, a whole arsenal of ill-mannered, uninterested children whom you have to redirect, motivate and then teach (if you ever get that far).

I won't dig deep, here and now, into the incoherent drivel and nonsense broadcast on platforms like Youtube, Tik Tok, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and an endless list of other names that, without any control whatsoever, peddle their indoctrinating and conditioning content of maximum imbecility, which brutalizes and transforms our sleeping, malleable young (and not so young) society; all day long with a finger on the little screen, finger up, finger down, back all ‘hunched‘ and attention lost who knows where by now. Videos of animals dressed like humans; cruel and violent images that some unscrupulous people upload as a joke, just because. In short, videos and images devoid of the slightest value, full of inanities and idiocies (pardon my language), which disable, dull and alienate the very intellectual capacity that by right belongs to us. This is by now a robbery of the very condition of being as an entity.

all day long with a finger on the little screen, finger up, finger down, back all ‘hunched‘ and attention lost who knows where by now.

In short, videos and images devoid of the slightest value, full of inanities and idiocies (pardon my language), which disable, dull and alienate the very intellectual capacity that belongs to us,

Is anyone still reading Borges, Kafka, Cervantes or Lorca? Who remembers the value of reading the classics? Such an agreement is urgently necessary, as Spanish professor and philologist Lola Josa affirms in her article Why reading the classics makes us smarter, in order to “think well, (and) not merely to use language well. (For) thinking well allows one to speak and write with precision, and whoever masters a language holds the greatest power, which is none other than the creation of reality.”

Is anyone still reading Borges, Kafka, Cervantes or Lorca? Who remembers the value of reading the classics?

“whoever masters a language holds the greatest power, which is none other than the creation of reality.”

And yet we are passing through an era in which falling into the bottomless pit of ignorance and apathy, into laziness and lack of judgment, is as quick and easy as pressing a single ‘click‘. We now believe and accept almost everything by the mere fact of its appearing on a screen (the new God of the 21st century), without granting it even the right to the slightest doubt. A piece of fakenews arrives, a fakevideo? Why question them, why put them on trial if we're losing our judgment anyway. We forward it left and right, thus continuing the tumorous chain of disinformation and the terrible consequences it brings with it, spreading through the minds of the weakest, festering in the form of ‘irrational beliefs‘, producing in turn universes as sickly as they are false chimeras, in which the slightest spark is enough to declare war on the neighbor, be it the one on the fifth floor or the country next door — call it white/black, Barça/Madrid, Ukraine or Gaza.

We now believe and accept almost everything by the mere fact of its appearing on a screen (the new God of the 21st century),

Your Honors! What is happening to us? Where are we headed with all this? I'll tell you: toward school failure, toward sick leave for depression, toward bullying, toward suicide, toward the lack of attention and of professionalism, toward the shortage of emotion and of hope, of affection, of humility, of empathy. -Your Honors! Is no one going to do anything?

Every day I see the faces and gestures of the more than 320 students who pass through my classroom each week. Most arrive with a dimmed gaze, a faded smile, with no verbal or bodily response when, every morning, whether in the cafeteria or as they walk into class, I greet them effusively: –Good morning! Hello, my friend!, hello, my dear friend!,-. Few are those who answer, while from the majority I receive by way of reply something harder and colder than silence: indifference.

Your Honors, parents, students, institutions, inspectors, politicians! If each of us contributed just our own humble grain of sand, things would sing a very different tune — and how they would sing. But yes, these words, like this article, will crash against that thick wall of the very same indifference my students show. An unmistakable sign of the challenge our society must face starting right now. ‘Being a teacher’ has become a trade that is by now even poorly paid, of low recognition and high risk — the risk of ending up, at the very least, bedridden with depression or anxiety, like the panic attack I had last Monday, after living through the repeated rudeness of certain students, themselves products of an educational system in need of constant reform, call it American or Spanish.

Your Honors, parents, students, institutions, inspectors, politicians! If each of us contributed just our own humble grain of sand,

Ladies and gentlemen, we are beginning our descent. Fasten your seatbelts, for this article is going to crash. I repeat: this article will crash against the walls of indifference. Few will file it into the dossier of their conscience, to GET INVOLVED (like the hens do), and put it to work for the necessary and urgent change this world already requires. And those who commune with what they've read here will, I know, do little more than tell me I'm right and give me a pat on the shoulder — at most a ‘heart‘ emoji (❤️), or a ‘like‘ (👍), of the kind so in fashion these days, like all the crazy ones, like everyone.

this article will crash against the walls of indifference.

Above, my own self after writing this article.

– Next post in 15 days, Sunday, April 14, 2024. Kentukiana 10…