Booknook

Teaching:
Not much actual teaching happening right now. This week was rough--everyone is done, but there are still two weeks left! Luckily the eighth graders officially finish next week. The ninth graders finished the little independent learning project thing; next week they'll do some reflections and that'll be that. I'd say the results were pretty mixed: a handful of kids really locked in and really seemed to engage with it in the right spirit, and seemed to really enjoy the process. A few were semi-engaged, but dragged their feet. And a few phoned it in. To be expected! Anyway, I know that in theory this kind of student-centered, project-based learning is supposed to be way more effective and engaging than the alternative, but I remain kinda skeptical. 

Learning:
A little Duolingo Romanian everyday, that's it. It's weird, I feel like my Romanian has kinda backslid in the past couple weeks--I'm struggling to articulate myself, and I'm glazing over a little when I try to read things. I find that reading Romanian books and listening to Romanian podcasts helps a lot, but I haven't been doing that lately.

Listening:
Didn't really listen to any new music that really grabbed me, and only listened to a couple podcasts, neither of which were especially memorable.

Reading:
Finished If We Burn, which I wrote about yesterday.

Read/listened to The Dream Thieves, the second book in the Raven Cycle. This book felt very summery, and I'm glad I read/listened to it this week, when we had our first blast of heat for the season. I think I liked this book better than The Raven Boys, or maybe I'm just more invested now. I like Stiefvater's writing style, and I love the blend of the magical and the mundane. I also like the way she engages with the class dynamics between the characters...though I still can't take any of them seriously as teenagers, except maybe Blue, who feels a little more developed in this book than she did in the first.

Also, I kinda hate Substack, but this week I subscribed to Cristian Lupșa's newsletter. He was the editor of DoR, a really great Romanian magazine that unfortunately shut down a couple years ago. I recently revisited a couple back issues, from the height of the pandemic, and was really moved by some of the the things Lupșa wrote in the introductions. This week I read his post reflecting on the recent Romanian election, and in a way, it felt like it picked up right after those Covid-era essays: "One of the ideologues of this far right movement, a lawyer, actually posted something on his Facebook profile the day of the vote, which summarizes the pain points Simion, Călin Georgescu and other authoritarian figures promise to address: the pandemic nightmare, war, climate craziness, abandoning faith and family, a ban on Christmas and Easter, being blocked from entering churches, masks, forced vaccination." Sometimes I forget just how radicalizing Covid was for so many people, and how so much of the far-right surge we're living through now can be traced back to that period. Anyway, this post acknowledges that yes, Romania dodged a bullet, but that doesn't mean the far right isn't already reloading...and if nothing changes to address the issues that led so many people to vote for Georgescu and Simion, there's a good chance they or their ilk could be even more successful next time. It's not enough to just laugh at these guys, or fact-check them--people need to be offered a better story than the one they're telling. What's scary, Lupșa says, is that Dan, the guy who won the election, "doesn’t really tell stories. As someone living in Bucharest, his inability to do so has been the most frustrating thing. In a way, he is admirably disrupting the personality driven political industrial complex because he (largely) refuses to play the narrative game. He said he is firmly pro-EU, pro-Ukraine, and knows the hardest job in front of him is fixing the economy. He hasn’t articulated a vision, or a promise, he’s just promising to get shit done." In a way, this kind of reminds me of Kamala Harris, who I think focused more on policy than personality or narrative in her campaign. But obviously that wasn't really enough; as a ton of liberal/progressive election post-mortems put it, the Democrats again and again present themselves as the party of the normie status quo, defenders of institutions, even though so many people (in some cases rightfully, in other cases misguidedly) distrust or hate those institutions. Not a compelling or inspiring story, obviously. Because Romania is what it is, the two "stories" on offer here are neoliberalism on the one hand and some form of reactionary Christo-nationalist sovereigntism on the other. When it came down to it, I think a lot of people voted for Dan just because they were afraid of what a Simion win would mean for the country's relationship to the E.U. and NATO. That worked this time...but what about next time?  Anyway, this was a good article, and I'm looking forward to reading more.

Watching:
Still just Big Bang Theory. It's...kinda growing on me? But yeah, some of the "humor" is just so...eeerrrggghhhh. I think we're both approaching saturation point with it.

Writing:
I feel like I didn't write a whole lot this week, though one of my RP posts accidentally turned out to be 5,000+ words. I've also been sort of tinkering with a poem I had an idea for a month or so ago.  

Other stuff:
Another pretty anti-social week, but I have a few things in the calendar for next week.
I meditated and danced a couple times this week, which is a couple times more than I have for the past few weeks.