Reading Check # 2

Post date: Apr 23, 2013 11:34:33 AM

Chapter 2

Banal Summary: Stephen tries to teach, but it's futile. Stephen has empathy for his students and he often drifts off into reveries about his mother. Later during recess, he listens to the screeds of a senior colleague who is a terrible racist, misogynistic, anti-Irish, English nationalist, anti-semite, pompous jerk.

Quotes:

• daughters of memory

• Thought is the thought of thought

• The soul is in a manner all that is: the soul is the form of forms. Tranquility sudden, vast, candescent: form of forms.

• [When he pities a student he sees]: Ugly and futile: lean neck and tangled hair and a stain of ink, a snail's bed. Yet someone had loved him...

• Like him was I, these sloping shoulders, this gracelessness. My childhood bends beside me. 43

• world without end--44

• [Hearing the kids score a goal]: Again: a goal. I am among them, among their battling bodies in a medley, the joust of life.--49

• History ...is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.--52

• the bullockbefriending bard

Word of the Day:

• joust

• bullockbefriending

Reflection:

This chapter strikes a personal chord in me as a teacher. I struggle with many of the same reflections Stephen writes about: frustration with students' inabilities, the poor conditions many come from, contending for classroom management, colleagues who are on very different wavelengths, feeling compassion/empathy/connection with students--to such a degree that it makes me nostalgic for my own past childhood and a deep yearning to join them in what Stephen calls the "joust of life" (49). As he sat there listening to the rambling prattles of his moronic colleague, I certainly can understand commiserate with him...c'est la vie.

I must end this entry...time for class to start. Haha.