Summer 2010 Commentary

Overview

I was no longer a Breakthrough summer teacher, but I still came back to resolve a few last things. I continued to dance throughout the summer down in SoCal. I concerned myself with my ability to change as a person.

General Comments

This was a small season; I only wrote eleven entries. I wouldn’t say that this was like what happened during Winter 2010. A lot of shit happened in my life during that winter, but I just never had time to write about it (which made it necessary to tell it through flashbacks in the following season), but during Summer 2010, just not a lot of shit happened. Basically, besides the stuff with Breakthrough, I took summer school classes and I danced a lot. Interesting stories never arise from school, and as I’ll later discuss in this entry, there’s not a lot of interesting story material with the subject of dancing anymore.

Select Entry Commentary

“The French Teacher” & “You Are My Best Friend”

The two previous seasons, Fall 2009 and Spring 2010, all you heard about was how I wasn’t coming back to Breakthrough. The fact that the last entry about Breakthrough in the present storyline for Spring 2010 was titled “Breakthrough” gave the entry a sense of finality, and I really thought that that would be the final Breakthrough entry. I didn’t count on coming back to guest teach for Summer 2010, but I did, and these two entries set up for what became the conclusion of one of my blog’s main story arcs.

It’s amazing to see the contrast in everything between these two entries and the “That’s Just the Way It Is,” series. I didn’t intend this; the events of “That’s Just the Way It Is” hadn’t happened yet when I wrote these two entries. But in retrospect, you could say that these two entries began setting up for the idea that my students needed me, and that I needed them.

“Drive”

I only occasionally use figurative language, and when I do, I either use it subtly (something more beginning writers need to learn to do) or use it to exaggerate. I feel like “Drive” has some of the best subtle imagery that I’ve ever written, my favorites including “circuit of city lights” and “pretending to catch the fireworks in our hands as if they were confetti strewn about the night sky.” And usually my entries are heavier on description and narration, but this one combines both all that with a good amount of exposition too. I refrain from a lot of exposition and writing out my inner thoughts in most of my entries (as a stylistic choice), which is the opposite of what every blogger does (they write about their thoughts and feelings but never really include concrete stories from their lives). This entry shows that when I want to, I can write my thoughts and feelings too, and that I do it better.

“This is not a Phone Conversation”

This is a purely thematic entry that reinforces one of my blog’s long running themes: the perception of reality through a logical lens versus an emotional lens—logic vs. emotion, basically. I represent the logic, and Trung, emotion. I’ll probably delve more in-depth into this theme and all the entries in which it appears once my blog reaches its end at the finish of Winter 2011.

“The Gummy Octopus”

Honestly, I regretted writing this entry the minute I posted it. It was a terrible entry. Well, maybe if I had posted it a year ago, it might had been fine, but by this time, I had really run out of refreshing and interesting stories for my dancing story arc. Being self-conscious about my dancing, having small successes and small losses—those stories pervaded my blog during Summer 2009 and Fall 2010. I knew that the only way to really make dancing stories interesting anymore was to combine them with another plot arc on my blog, as seen in “Slave to the Machine.” I just really needed to write this entry so I could set up for the next entry, “Weeds.” (Though I think I could’ve set up for it in like a quick paragraph at the beginning of that actual entry itself.)

Not to mention that the flashback story was utterly useless. Like the present storyline, this flashback could’ve worked if it was still last year, but no, it was Summer 2010. At this point I had already written more than eighty flashback stories. A story about how I didn’t get some gummy octopuses for my terrible spelling tests wasn’t necessary or really illuminating.

“Weeds”

I knew that I would eventually write about the crying-over-Ranier story as a flashback somewhere down the road. This felt like the most appropriate time to do it. The flashback finally confirmed the (surface) reason Ranier and I broke up: I chose to be able to call special ed kids stupid over keeping our relationship. “...[Y]et you broke up with him! And for what, Brian. For what?... It was so you could continue calling special ed kids stupid! So that you could make fun of students with mental disabilities for not being as smart as other kids their age.”

In the previous season it had been heavily implied in entries like “Deficit” and “Look Back, Let Go, and Move On,” probably to the point where you could be 90% sure. But maybe you held onto that 10% because of what Trung said in the flashback for “Deficit”: “You’ll break up over other things, but not [calling special ed kids stupid].” Nah, unfortunately I only threw that quote in there for irony.

Confirming what was already pretty obvious wasn’t the main point of “Weeds” though, obviously, as the present storyline heavily focuses on whether or not I’m going to smoke weed. In this entry, we’ve got the logic vs. emotion theme in play again, but now we’re seeing something different: the desire within me to change, to hop over to the side of emotion.

I realized that by always being so logical, I torched a relationship. I sacrificed a boyfriend so I could remain secure in the logical way I perceived reality. While I did eventually realize the morally wrong way of my thinking, I still feared that I was still the same logical thinker. I definitely wouldn’t break up over the ability to call special ed kids stupid in my next relationship, but what if I broke up over something similar just because I wanted to maintain my logical perception of reality?

I didn’t want to be logical anymore, so I smoked some weed in hopes that I could escape my logical reality. Did it work? I’ll actually detail the outcome of that night in a flashback in Winter 2011.

“That’s Just the Way It Is: Part 1,” “Part 2,” & “Redux”

I think something that has made my Breakthrough entries strong in the past was that I approached each one thinking, “This is going to be my last entry about Breakthrough, ever,” ever since “Never-Ending Story,” which I wrote at the end of the internship back in August 2009. Three or four more Breakthrough entries followed. But this time, writing the “That’s Just the Way It Is” series, I knew that this was really, REALLY it. I figured there still might be minor Breakthrough flashbacks later on, but this was going to be the last Breakthrough entry in the present storyline. I had to make it special. And for some reason, “special” on my blog always seemed to mean “tragic.”

First, I want to clarify a few background basics, for those who might’ve not been reading my blog since I started it (and for those who couldn’t catch all the contextual clues in these three entries): I taught as a middle school English Language arts teacher for Breakthrough summer 2008 and summer 2009. I didn’t come back to teach the summer of 2010, but I did visit as a guest teacher during the second week, and then I came back again to visit at their celebration night the sixth week. The present storyline of the “That’s Just the Way It Is” series deals with this last visit.

The flashbacks in Part 1 set up this idea that the Breakthrough students needed their teachers. That idea is then explored in Part 2 and Redux. These two entries’ flashbacks (which are presented in reverse chronological order) show instances where my students needed me. Patty would rather talk to me then hang out with her friends on the last day of Breakthrough (August 2009). Timmy needed someone he could relate to with dancing (June 2009). Rosalina, Cil, and several other students needed a place they could go to in the morning, and they needed a dance teacher that they didn’t hate (July 2008).

All of these flashbacks are juxtaposed with scenes from the present storyline, scenes in which none of these students clearly needed me anymore. An role reversal is most apparent in these two lines:

Flashback: “Brian! Slow down!” Patty caught up to me as I rushed through the hallway to the staff room to get my lunch.”

Present: She turned around and started running, but I called out her name. “Patty!” I caught up to her. “Need someone to accompany you to your parents’ car? Y’know, just in case the forest monsters come out of the tree and try to grab you.”

Instead of Patty running to catch up with me, I’m now running to catch up with her. I still need them, but they don’t need me anymore.

When I first started teaching at Breakthrough in 2008, I was told that the students “needed” their teachers. I took this a little too close to heart. What eventually happened through my two summers teaching at Breakthrough was that I grew to need them, but not only did I need them, I needed them to need me.

[Fernando] and his family started to make their way toward the exit, so I got up to intercept. I was ready to run toward him, ready to shout his name and to wave my camera around in the air. But my feet didn’t take more than two steps before I slowed to a stop. I didn’t have anymore energy to lift my legs. My eyes followed Fernando as he and his family walked out the door...No more students. Clangs rang through the gym as teachers began folding up chairs.

And I think it’s here in the above paragraph that it really, really hit me that my students had long moved on. They didn’t need me anymore. The present story line ends with this scene of me just standing there, hopeless, heartbroken, and empty. I am defeated. Cut to the final flashback.

The very last flashback (June 2008), I don’t know what to say about it. It’s a flashback to my very first day of teaching at Breakthrough, the very first time I met my students. I’ve written twenty-six entries about Breakthrough leading up to “That’s Just the Way It Is.” It’s surreal to read about the very first day after knowing all the things my students and I went through during our sixty days together (thirty days in Breakthrough summer 2008, and thirty days in Breakthrough summer 2009). The irony, the awe, the emotions, I think they’re all captured with this one line:

“I glanced over my students and took turns locking eyes with each and everyone of them, and they’d timidly smile back as I smiled at them, all of us unaware of the kinds of relations we’d form, the struggles we’d go through, and the breakthroughs we’d make together.”

I don’t know what readers think about my entries about teaching. I imagine that more people tend to pay attention to my family entries, my relationship entries, or even my dance entries, probably because those are more relatable for my audience. And those entries can get pretty intense. My blog’s teaching story arc however is probably one of its more significant story arcs. My first entries were about teaching. They gave my blog its initial plot momentum. And, with no entries about teaching in Fall 2010, you can say that the teaching story arc has finally come to a close.

“Symphony”

Sometimes I get a little misty eyed when I write entries reflecting on the past relationship between Trung and me. (I never cry though.) This entry in particular was a huge tear jerker—I don’t about you guys, but it was for me. I think what made it especially powerful was that I took you from one end of the spectrum (happy) to the other (sad), instead of just starting in the middle (neutral) and going to one end (sad). The entry starts with a flashback to probably one of my happiest moments in our relationship (my amazing Christmas present to Trung), and the entry ends with a flashback to the saddest moment in our relationship (the breakup).

This entry also serves to remind you of something: It’s been one year since the so-called breakup entry, yet you still don’t know why we broke up. (I didn’t intend to remind you guys of this though because I didn’t know the question would be answered within the next few months.) You have the conversation we had immediately after the breakup, but not the actual conversation of the breakup. It’s a tease, isn’t it?

“How to Beast an Interview”

Summer 2010 was kind of a short season and I didn’t have much of a season finale in mind. Preferably it would’ve been the “That’s Just the Way It Is” series, but that wasn’t close enough to the end of summer. And then “Symphony” would’ve been pretty good. But I wanted to set up for the next season, to have myself working a job by the beginning of Fall 2010. With Breakthrough ending (and effectively, the teaching story arc too), I needed something new starting up for some plot momentum. So, I wrote “How to Beast an Interview.” At least it’s a pretty funny entry compared to the last several really dark entries, but it’s not quite a season finale on the same levels as my previous three.

(Too bad the “Promod” story arc didn’t really go anywhere in Fall 2010.)