Reliving Those Magic Moments

I highly recommend to all homeroom teachers out there, to film a video of some sort with their class.
I did so myself in an effort to foster teamwork in my homeroom. In a glorious burst of what I now know to be asinine misunderstanding of seventh-grade social norms, I decided (spur of the moment, while allowing them to watch music videos on YouTube) that I would try to bridge the canyon-like rift between the sexes by forcing them to work together on a common project in which all had a stake of some sort.
I thought it would be fun.
Yes, my initial goal may have been incredibly misguided (what ended up happening was a deepening of the initial rift due to the various melodramas that occur when insecurity rears its ugly, 13-year-old head) and I was glad when other end-of-year projects relieved it from its spotlight in the classroom. Not only this, but towards the end I had no choice but to acknowledge that the few workable scenes in the footage I did manage to film were no doubt lost beneath such an avalanche of shouting-arguments, mid-scene interruptions, and general horseplay, that I would never finish editing the damned thing before the end of the year. Thus, during my final homeroom meeting I was forced to declare the endeavor a failure before the eyes of God and the Israeli school system.
'I will try to edit it over the summer, but I can't promise we have enough good footage,' I told their skeptical faces. Many of them said 'good riddance', having themselves become aware - due not only to their insecurity upon facing the camera lens but also to my, often exasperated, tone - that the video would certainly win no distinctions, and may even come out objectively 'bad'.
This, of course, was my failure far more than it was theirs. But I had already given them so much of myself over the course of the year, that I felt unequipped to waste any more life-energy on regret over this particular enterprise, chalking it up to an unsuccessful project to be archived among its counterparts in a mental folder called 'Never Again'.
And now that I have no doubt caused all teachers heretofore considering taking up my recommendation to regard it with adequate suspicion, I will tell you why it is that I still recommend it (though not to the faint of heart, or, for that matter, those with actual lives).
You see, the fell swoop of summer, which descends upon one with the swiftness of the guillotine, alters the life of a teacher with the speed in which newly released students race headily through the school gates to freedom. One is used to waking every day with the weight of eighty-some children on one's shoulders. Atlas-type responsibilities - to them, to their parents, to other teachers, to the school system as a whole - trouble the mind at every waking moment, and often continue to do so in sleep. Then, in the split second it takes to uncuff a prisoner, all of this is gone.
And although there is, of course, an overwhelming sense of liberty infusing both mind and body, the immediacy with which it occurs is somewhat unsettling. One must have some sense of continuity in order to narrate one's past, otherwise it slips away as does a nightmare upon waking.
The editing of the video has provided me with this necessary sense of continuity. Not only do I now chuckle at all of the hijinks that so aggravated me at the time of their performance ('Look how cute they are,' I gushed as two students performed a cat-and-mouse chase through the scene I was filming, causing the participants to bellow curses and halting filming for a full ten minutes) but I also, thanks to the fact that I was the only one filming, get to glimpse the POV of a frustrated but still hopeful first-year teacher trying relentlessly to tack a positive ending onto a very trying year. That the viewpoint is my own is at times vindicating and at times edifying (though it's true that hindsight is always 20/20, we can still attempt to learn from our mistakes), but what I found most exhilarating was simply to watch without passing judgement, to laugh at what is funny only in retrospect (like the fact that every 5-second scene took at least twenty minutes to film), and to appreciate the incredible talents of the skater to whom I dedicated endless hours of tutoring and mentoring, the rollerblader who talked and sang ceaselessly in class, the dancing ability of a girl whose mouth I would have paid grand sums to clamp shut, and the choreography skills of two girls whose sense of maturity and responsibility well surpasses their years.
I realize that these are some very rosy glasses I have donned, but I also think the activity I rather naively selected is precisely what allows me to do so. In editing a film we choose only the best shots, the ones in which the camera captures utter perfection, that which adheres to the script. The shots in which the actors have been filmed at their very best angle, these are the only ones that participate in the final product. All the rest are disregarded, wiped clean from the public eye and therefore forgotten.
It may not be the best take on life, but it certainly makes a teacher feel that it was not all for naught.

'Thrift Shop' is the song my students chose for their video

Let's Talk about Sex

Vacation is like a dream. A time for the mind to sift through the tangled and complex experiences it had stored away due to its inability, at the time, to fully acknowledge them. Like a housewife cleaning out her attic, it roots through its storage bins, torn t-shirts and ancient magazines contemplated then rejected, great-grandmotherly heirlooms and old photographs scrutinized and placed in piles - this to keep, that to throw out.
For Freud, dreams were a soapbox of sorts for the return of the repressed, but Freud lived in a time of repression.
We, on the other hand, live in a time of expression, a time in which not a single thought is cherished in the privacy of one's own head, but rather ejaculated thickly onto self-aggrandizing monuments to the wonder that is me - Facebook, Twitter, Google+, what have you - where it (the thought - now a status, tweet, comment - whatever) writhes unattractively in that worldwide slush-bucket that is the Web, like a hooked worm in water too muddy to entice any fish.
What a hypocrite I am, for writing this in a blog.
But to the return of my repressed, now to become the expressed, and how fitting that it be sexual:
My memory is of a class in which one particular young man of the most utterly "dorky" classification - small puckered eyes framed by giant spectacles, downturned and perpetually spit-oiled lips overlooked by dark fluff reminiscent of a dead caterpillar more than it is of a mustache - stood up as I was in mid-sentence and revealed, from between an oversized old t-shirt and ugly, stained sweatpants, a rather statuesque and impressively large 'boner'.
The split-second it took him to notice the mishap and tug the t-shirt over to hide it was enough to cause me to falter, mid-sentence, and completely lose track of whatever it was I was saying. Like an impassive boulder, it derailed the train of my words for a good thirty seconds, during which I was left stuttering in the manner of that Looney Tunes character Porky Pig (Bdee bdee, bdee bdee, That's All Folks!)
What is most confusing now, and what I feel sure must have caused my mind to delay homing in on that moment for analysis - due to the complex conclusion I feel now this analysis must inevitably come down to - is that this stuttering was not merely the effect of embarrassment. Language, as Lacan explains in his theory, had become inaccessible due to my approach of its core, a thing he called 'trauma'.
I mean to say that at that, yes, extremely embarrassing and utterly confounding moment, I must have - as I see it now - connected somehow to that boy. On a sexual wavelength one usually reserves for other adults, or, in the case of a married woman such as myself, one other adult (although I would have found it far less 'repressible' to relate in such a manner to any other man of adult age, probably just sweeping the matter aside as a slight mental indiscretion, of which my husband is probably guilty at least four or five times a week).
I would like to state that I was, by absolutely no means, attracted to the boy, who is, as I have described, objectively ugly and in all probability highly unattractive, at this point in his life, at least, to anyone of the opposite sex. As a matter of fact, if I thought I could - in any way, shape, or form - be attracted to 13-year old boys, I would immediately quit my job and seek professional help.
The problem is that the feeling was visceral, vehemently so, and totally apart from any logical understanding of the person to whom this thing belonged. The 'boner' was so completely out of context, to my mind, from the framework of the classroom that it was like coming face to face with Zeus in a parking lot. I was drawn to it, awestruck, it was magnetic, but totally detached from the boy himself. It belonged at once to all men, it was my husband's and it was my father's, and my response was attraction and repulsion in equal parts. It was the phallus, not the penis, as Freud would have it. The phallus being the locus of Lacanian trauma, making language impossible.
It does not seem to matter, then, that I tend to view myself as a sexually open and uninhibited woman in general (placing aside, for a moment, the fact of one's being a thoroughly unreliable witness as to oneself). I think my response overrides both inhibition and any lack thereof. This was an experience of archetypal female responding to archetypal male in whatever cave they were first engendered, first broken apart into two different sexes. Embarrassment does not enter into this equation, nor does attraction.
Of course, to try to signify this event with words is somewhat of a moot point, when I have already defined its essence as the "Real which denies signification". Perhaps the trauma seems more approachable when it is entombed in flowery language and thus seemingly laid to rest. However, upon its publication here, this particular trauma has been preserved in a transparent mausoleum, through which all the world may peruse it. I leave my analysis of the reasoning for this (or lack thereof) for a later time, at which I hope the unwinding summer will have gifted me with greater clarity.