Jefferson Road

It's hard to believe that, tomorrow at 3:30 (or as soon thereafter as Eve hands me my final pay), I am done with Ruby, Eve, and the branch. I intend to go out singing "Go Tell It on the Mountain," or some similar song of joy and liberation--Mi KaMokha comes to mind---just to make even clearer the point that they can do nothing to me and that I go out of this to better things.

The curious thing is, do to scheduling issues, by the time I leave, I will have had to start teaching two classes this week I was not teaching before. Well, sort of. One was a class of two boys I was supposed to start teaching the day of my most recent visa run, but showed up for half an hour into their lesson time.

The other was a private student named Mickey, a thirteen year-old boy in what we call our "CJ" (roughly, junior high) program.

Last week, I would have started teaching Mickey on Wednesday, but was given insufficient notice of the class having opened (surprise, surprise). I was told that, under the circumstances, I could decline to teach that class, which I did, and the school would attempt to find cover staff. They couldn't find any and ended up having to have the class taught by our Chinese Teaching Assistant, Cecilia. Last Friday and Saturday, I was out sick with a bad cold and so taught neither Mickey (who comes Wednesdays and Fridays in the early evening) nor my Saturday classes.

I sort of feel bad starting something like this. I know there could not have been any perfect timing for my departure, so that I wouldn't be leaving halfway through the term for at least some of my students, but with respect to Mickey and this class I will teach for the first (and only) time tomorrow, the timing really is truly awful. To me, this is another example of how Eve and Ruby mishandle things. In their place, I would have called the families involved and said classes would begin when a new teacher was hired, or similar. But I suppose, given how shaky their finances often seem, that they had no real choice--or at least, no choice that would not have resulted in egg all over their faces.

Mickey's textbook is called American Hotline, and attempts to teach partly through a bad soap opera called, I kid you not, Jefferson Road. I guess this is someone's idea of what a typical American street would be like--though I notice from its cast of characters that the street is more racially and ethnically diverse than probably any American street not located in Jackson Heights, Queens. The "plot," such as it is, revolves around a girl overhearing her new neighbor calling her bossy, and getting her revenge by setting him up on a date with a girl whose boyfriend is one of the local toughs.

The thing I notice most in this textbook is how dated everything is. This is a weird feeling for me, because the period it's dated to is not a far-off time like the '70s or the '30s, but the early '90s. This book has pre-O.J. America stamped all over it, and to make even clearer how dated it is, it used not a CD, but a cassette tape.

Man, how did I get old enough for there to be a period in my life that seems dated?