In that it has a lot of construction that doesn't seem to be moving very quickly.
In fact, I wouldn't even call it construction.
New Orleans has a lot of houses that need some work done to them to make them liveable again.
On St. Claude Street, on the route I will drive to my school, a few of those houses have an simple word of encouragement to those driving by--READ.
Like most things here, each example is handpainted. God bless sign-makers and wherever they do their business, but here in New Orleans people would rather lay paint on wood.
READ being the first name of this blog, the rest might need a bit of clarification.
I've come to New Orleans as part of a high stakes movement to work towards providing every child in the Union with the same caliber of education. It would make sense, to a thinking sort of person, to believe that the experience we had in school was similar to everyone else's--yet seems that's not the case. Sounds like some kids don't even get to have teachers.
So that's what I'm here to do. To teach students in New Orleans just about the only thing I know on a professional level--Chemistry. Well I'll be teaching that, Physical Science, and a GEE Preparation course to help students graduate with diplomas.
But this blog is going to have very little to do with any of that.
I am just beginning a new stage of life 3,000 or so miles from where I was raised.
I'm in one of the most beautiful, storied, and unique cities on the planet--and am already starting to find its charms to break and fill the stereotypes of southern living.
Like, in an Orientation speech for Tulane University Law School one year (this story being re-told third-hand), the dean stood up and remarked, "growing up in New Orleans, I always dreamed of moving to America someday," to the general assent of the locals in the audience.
If someone put a bag over my head and threw me in the back of a car, then dropped me off in the French Quarter, with the narrow stone streets and apartments with front stoops you can trip on walking down the road, I'd swear up and down that I'd been let off in a major European City.
Or if that car landed in parts of Mid-City I'd think I was somewhere in a different part of the Carribean.
Then there's the Garden District and Uptown, that look all the world like they're culled from an old Southern novel--which would fit the bill.
At this point, those three neighborhoods are all I've explored--but there's more to come.
To come back to the title of READ, I have to confess that I'm coming to this city with projects. One of which is to read as many novels of the English literary canon as I can get my hands on, and while this teaching business gives us remarkable ability to set and follow-through with goals, this one is going unplanned. But it starts with Les Miserables.
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