Four classes of final exams are finished - taken and read and scored (i am no god no good no god). Tomorrow I will put the grades into the system and do a few things to the classroom. I hear that I'll have a different room in August. Jim's room across the hall. Others had wanted it, but I think I got it as minor recompense for accepting four preps for the next school year. It has four real walls, so music and movies and some classroom activity can be a touch louder. The English department has taken a hit here at the end of the year. We're losing some fine teachers to retirement and moving on. This touches upon my summer plans to take time to reorganize, spin a web of action. I need to be a better teacher. Some things slipped this past year.

Our weather is gray and chilly - not what we'd hope for here at the start of summer. Finished with the exams, I jumped into Monster by Walter Dean Myers and Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson, both just out in paperback. Monster echoes my end-of-term obsession with movies.

In Anderson's Speak I read

I know my head isn't screwed on straight. I want to leave, transfer, warp myself to another galaxy. I want to confess everything, hand over the guilt and mistake and anger to someone else. There is a beast in my gut, I can hear it scraping away at the inside of my ribs. Even if I dump the memory, it will stay with me, staining me. My closet is a good thing, a quiet place that helps me hold these thoughts inside my head where no one can hear them.

I haven't finished the book, but I think I know where this plot and character is headed. But that's beside the point. This passage is not typical of the book's tone. Who could read a hundered pages of this unrelieved anguish? Anderson's narrator is an observant, funny, withdrawn kid with an ironic edge that's clearly a bandage and a buffer against some real pain. The book paints the social landscape of high school that we've seen often enough since The Catcher in the Rye - a world of insiders and outsiders. (If you're on the outs, you'll do anything to get in - or you'll have none if it because you've spotted the flimsy lie of "popularity".)

Now I am done with Speak. I liked everything except the next to last chapter. Everything else was fine. It would be good to read in tandem with Catcher. In some important ways, the scene hasn't changed that much in fifty years. P. J. Harvey's latest was a good soundtrack for the second half.

Other summer plans. I have more books to read. Some for school, some for fun. I have some jogging to do and a few flowers to plant. I have a two-week summer school gig in July - something called "Creative Computing," a writing class for 7th and 8th graders. I have a regional Carmelite gathering mid-June up at Benet Lake.