Last night my head was full of crazy weird symbolism. It's probably just the end result of a very intense week - a good one though. I have a pretty neat group of students in my English 11, and we are already rolling along, and picking up momentum.

Which doesn't explain why I dreamed about cleaning up hand grenades in the Egyptian dessert, nor pulling a whale out of the ocean to rescue endangered angel fish from its stomach. I also saw the stars forming patterns around the moon, and had a field of grain ripen as I walked through it, which is what reminded me of where the title of this post comes from - my grade 3 production of Joseph and the many coloured coat. As you may know, stars and grain featured in his dreams too. I can't be the only one who's enough of a freak to remember lines from a play they were in more than 16 years ago, can I?

Finally, I dreamed about getting a tattoo of Nefertiti. I was told by the old man who gave it to me that you must wear the faces of those you dream of, and they will act as armour and watch over you. As a little girl, I used to have Nefertiti dreams quite regularly, so he tattooed her visage on my back. Ever since I woke up, the idea has stayed with me. Tattoo?

but I guess there's a first time for everything. I've been here (and at the school up the street) since 9am and it's almost 8 now... only another half hour to go (these are the joys of not teaching in a "regular" school - crazy mad hours sometimes) but my brain is mush, so this won't be the crisp, articulate prose it would have been. Nonetheless, I think the idea is worth sharing.

It all started with this fantastic class I was subing in this morning. Just the greatest bunch of students you can imagine, and so appriciative of my being there to work with them. Dreamy. And smart as all hell too. The students were talking about the whole heart-breaking tragedy at Virginia Tech during thier break, and they roped me in. Specifically, one student roped me in.

She asked how long I thought a person had to live in a place to be considered OF that place. I knew right off from the way she spoke that her issue was about the way the race card has come into play with regard to the gunman. Since the brake was just ending, I opened the question to the class, who all chimed in their two bits about the importance of where you spend your childhood, adolesence, go to school, and so forth. Next, I asked them if they thought that race had anything to do with what went on.

When I saw the newsies start playing up the race element, you know I was pissed. I can't believe that any one race or group could have a monoploy on violence, and from all I'd read and heard about what happened in Virginia Tech, I was convinced that this crime could have been committed by anyone, race irrelevant. School shootings (shiver) have been planned and carried out by members of a whole lot of different ethnic and cultural groups.

Of course, as is so often the case, the students were smarter than me. Back track - this whole class is ESL students (though it's not technically an ESL class, oh the joy of the institution), from all over the place - China, Malasia, Japan, Iran, Romania, Argentina, just to name a few. That's only relevant because it suggests why some of the students had such clarity about this issue. What they told me was, essentially, this: one of the immigrant groups who currently face the most discrimination (aside from those from the middle east, a whole nother tangent waiting to happen) are Koreans. This is mostly due to the substantial recent increases in immigration from Korea to North America. They've become the latest groups who is "taykin' awr jawbs" and other such nonsense.

The shooter in this case had been in America for by far the majority of his life (making him American, by any measure I can justify) but it is entirely possible, as these students helped me see, that he continued to experience marginalization and discrimination for the crime of wearing his background in his skin. And it's entirely possible that that kind of treatment contributed to the young man's mental health problems and ultimately to his actions.

The bottom line: I'm not saying feel sorry for the guy, by any wild stretch of the imagination. What I am saying though, is that if race is a relevant consideration in this whole mess, it's not in the usual "people who aren't like us are scary and want to hurt us sense," but rather in terms of the message for the rest of us. Racist, bigoted, and discrimanatory behaviour, over the course of a lifetime, are enough to make anyone sick in the head. If we want to keep living in a safe society, we have to stop pushing people to the margins - it's a dangerous practice.

New jeans today, I'm thinking. The old favs have more holes than I can count, and while that only makes them comfier, they're not exactly wearable in public any more. Maybe I'm just unwithit (yes, one word now), but I've had them same favorite style of jeans for like 5 or so years. Sure make shopping easier.

After that, it's back to course planning.

"German liberals faced a dilemma: which did they value more punctuation here unclear - the goal of nationhood or the principles of liberty?" (sic) (SICK!)

Nobel, Thomas F.X. et. al. (2005) Western Civilization: The Continuing Experiment. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Anyone who has followed my adventures over the past year or so probably already has a good idea of what it takes to be a new teacher. Ask any of the friends I haven't had time to catch up with in ages and you'll understand that it means pretty much having no social life. Peer into my book bag at all the folders of papers and you'd see how many hours are devoted each week to marking and planning and organizing. Check out the groove I've worn into my couch by coming home and collapsing at night and you'll get a good idea of how much energy gets poured into all my students and projects every day. These are the intangibles.

What I don't talk about as much are the tangibles, but they just make my head spin. Five years at university for the two degrees required means that my monthly student loan payment are more than my bloody rent. More than my rent and I live in Vancouver - nuff said. And this for the privilege of teaching some of the most marginalized and disenfranchised students in our city. It's a good thing I know what I do is valuable and needed, or it just wouldn't be worth the costs.