Sandra Rose Hughes

The AMPM downtown 7/11/11 I have refined the "don't ask me for money" look. After trips to Paris and Istanbul and Oxford where beggars wait for dumb Americans, I have learned a curt headshake and frowning distant eye look that clearly says, "don't ask me." I try not to go to the AMPM in downtown Bakersfield because I'd rather just avoid the streetpeople or the conmen who make up convoluted stories about why I should give them my money. And who treat me like I'm cheap if I give them less than a five. "I just need enough gas money to make it to Riverside where my sister has a job roofing her house for me." "Don't you have any more? Come on, I just need a little more." But sometimes gas is cheaper there and it's more convenient to stop there, so I go. And there is this young man who looks scruffy and unkempt and perfectly healthy enough to get a job and I see him approaching out of the corner of my eye as he mumbles somethin...

Try to avoid teaching what you love. That's my advice to other high school teachers. Because when you really love something, like a book, or a poem, or a play, to the point that it's a part of who you are, it hurts too badly to have it spit on or criticized. I learned that my first year teaching, with the book Jane Eyre , by Charlotte Bronte. I love that book. I first read it in middle school and from that time, I have related to Jane on almost every level of my being. I want to BE her. The book launched my entire interest in Gothic Female literature, which I have read voraciously since that time. I wrote my senior thesis on Gothic Female Literature. And it all started with Jane. So when I taught it to high school seniors...I was excited to share Jane with them.>.And devastated when they were bored, when they didn't get it, when they didn't care. When they said it was "stupid." Of course, you can teach things you like. I like Shakespeare. I have taught Ro...