If you live in or near New York City, you should go tomorrow to Amy Bennett's art show opening. It's at the Miles McEnery Gallery, at 525 W 22nd St. I would go, but I live in Kansas City. It's hard to get to places like New York from places like Kansas City. It can be done, but it’s not easy. I had the tremendous pleasure of writing an essay to accompany Amy's show, which is included in a digital catalog that you can access here. The nice thing about something being digital is that you can make it available to lots of people. So follow the link. Read my essay. Marvel at Amy Bennett's paintings. See the show in person if you can. Exits Exist, and Not Enough of ThemI should warn anyone reading this that partway through this section of the newsletter it gets pretty dark, and addresses the subject of school shootings. I was a substitute teacher, yesterday, at the luxury high school, which is my preferred subbing location. When I see on my substitute teaching app that someone needs to go there and fill in for a real teacher, I scramble to claim that eight-hour job for myself. I want to spend the day at the luxury high school. I want to make a little money supervising its well-behaved teens.You might be asking yourself what’s so great about the luxury high school? What makes the high school luxurious?It’s not a private high school. It’s not like that. I don’t think I’d want to go there if it were private. Those places tend to attract the wealthy, and while plenty of wealthy kids are lovely people, the ones who aren’t are worse than the not-lovely kids of the middle and lower classes. Or the rich ones bother me more, at least. The luxury high school is one of the public high schools in our district, and I don’t know how it works exactly, but apparently students can elect to attend the luxury school instead of one of the other two that we have. People tell me the luxury high school is “more project-oriented” than the other schools, but no matter how many times I hear those words, I can never seem to figure out what they mean. I nod and say, “Yeah, that makes sense,” but I don’t know what anyone is talking about. The thing I like most about subbing at the luxury school is that the students there are for the most part calm and focused. They do their work quietly, which means I can work on my own stuff. I take my laptop over there and do what I would do at home, except in this other location, and I get paid to be there. I have to stand up and walk around the room, and make it look like I’m a real authority figure from time to time, but mostly I can just sit and work. I get more done there than I do at home. Everybody wins.The luxury high school is more relaxed than other schools. When I’m in the room with students, the noise level increases from time to time, but it has not yet reached a point where I feel I need to tell everyone to quiet down, to focus on work. I can let them be. I may not love that they’re talking to each other about stupid b******t; maybe I would prefer it if they did their work. But they talk about stupid b******t at acceptable volumes, and years after I graduated high school, I remember the stupid b******t conversations more fondly than I recall any work I did there. Why not let the students generate those memories, when their usual teacher is away? Why not give them a couple hours off? It’s not like the teachers leave me instructions that forbid the formation of fond memories. It’s not like if the students did their work they would solve climate change. Having conversations with one’s peers is itself a kind of education. Everything you do in a school is part of your education—which is something that took me many years of schooling to really understand. The little things are as important as the big things. It all accumulates.The luxury high school is more like a college than the other schools, in that students have a little more freedom than they have elsewhere. Throughout the building are small rooms with glass walls and conference tables. You can walk past and see what’s going on inside, and make sure no one is making bombs or solving climate change when they’re not supposed to. These “flex spaces” are where students can get away from their peers, if they work better in isolation. They can work in one with a student from another class.I’m impressed with the architecture of the place, with the building itself and the atmosphere it makes possible. About a third of the classrooms don’t even have doors, they’re large recesses in the hallway with comfortable seating. I heard from someone that the luxury high school was supposed to be an office complex when it was built, but was then repurposed as a school. I don’t know if that’s true, but it would explain why, unlike most schools, it’s not a death trap.I’m impressed more than anything by how many exits the luxury high school has leading out of it. I thought of this yesterday when I ...
