Introducing Kyle 3.0 (100th post)

There was a time, a few short years ago, where my goal for this blog was to be a completely changed man by the time I got to my 100th post. In my mind there was this big weight loss reveal where I held up a pair of my fat jeans and then tossed them aside to reveal the new svelte Kyle Hadley. Well, I'm still wearing my fat jeans. I am not svelte. I am not new. Nope, on the surface, I am the same obese Kyle. Nearly 100 pounds less obese, so maybe I downgraded from morbidly obese to plain ole obese. But, let me clear about something, beneath the surface, beneath the obesity, I am a new man.

It is strange to think about the guy I was before I started this journey nearly four years ago. That guy expected to fail at everything, so he rarely did anything. That guy was so disgusted with himself he never stopped to look in a mirror. That guy never brushed his teeth because it didn't matter. He bought clothes with holes in them to save a few bucks because he hated the way he looked, so what did it matter. That guy could not make a relationship work. That guy never stood for himself because he feared people would eventually just make fun of him for being obese. That guy walked around afraid all of the time that everyone was whispering about how gross he was. That guy is no longer in charge here.

He still exists, but he stopped running the show. He was replaced by a new model. The new and improved me (Kyle 2.0) who has lost nearly 100 pounds because he actually, you know, tried some shit. I ran/walked a 5K. I stopped drinking soda. Now I eat chicken and vegetables in the place of Carl's Jr. I pay attention to the food the I eat. I spend time in the gym on a weekly basis. I missed the gym last week when I was too sick to function. I wrote a novel a few years ago because along with those nearly 100 pounds I have shed thus far, I shed a ton of the fear. I walk around now without thinking about being laughed at. I stand up for myself. I have this awesome functioning relationship and am working on shedding the bad people I have let hang around too long.

So my dream of tossing the fat jeans away has not arrived yet, but I can toss away the metaphorical fat jeans and reveal another new model, Kyle 3.0. Kyle 3.0 is studying to get his Master's because he does not want to be complacent. Kyle 3.0 is pursuing publishing the novel that Kyle 2.0 wrote. This newest model wakes up most days looking for the good, even through a tough school year. (he fails some times, but he is trying.) I am logging calories, tracking steps, reading up on proper ways to lose weight. Until the sickness and the broken treadmills I was in the gym 5 days a week. I am reading poetry every day. Kyle 3.0 is doing a better job of taking care of the whole person, and he realizes the number on the scale is a fraction of what the journey was meant to be about.

My newest goal is stop dwelling on Kyle 1.0. It is time to let him go and forgive him. I have to stop thinking about all the time I lost, and focus on taking advantage of the time I have. I am on my way. I hope you'll all stick around and continue this journey with me. And to everyone who has ever read, passed along nice things, told me to keep fighting, or told me how much my journey has inspired, I love you and you all rock.

Kyle's Favorites: (500) Days of Summer

I saw this movie five times in the theater. I saw it in four different cities, that is how much I loved it. The poster for the film hangs in our apartment. I have seen the movie on DVD over 50 times, easily. I took this movie with me as a sub and showed it in classes where I was not left a lesson plan. During my students teaching I taught the movie during a short one week film unit. I have shown the movie to my yearbook class as a reward for finishing the yearbook, and this year I added the movie to my junior curriculum as part of a bigger film unit. The love I feel for this movie is deep. I think it is brilliant, and I try not to throw that word around loosely.

(500) Days of Summer concerns the relationship between Tom Hansen (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Summer Finn (Zooey Deschanel) which spans 500 turbulent days. There is an omniscient narrator who tells us right off the bat that "This is a story of boy meets girl, but it is not a love story." From the very start of this film, we realize this is not going to be a traditional romantic comedy and it definitely is not. Tom believes Summer is the one from the moment he sees her. Summer very clearly states she is not interested in a relationship, and they become friends. Summer knows that Tom is into her, but he never fully says it because he just wants her in his life and because of that, it gets tricky when they start kissing, going on adorable dates to Ikea, and start having sex. Are they a couple or are they not a couple? Who knows? Clearly neither of them know. Tom believes they are, Summer maintains that they are just friends. This back and forth could get old quickly, but the great thing about the script is that the story unfolds in a non-linear fashion. We get the good mixed with the bad. We get the humor followed by the sadness. The film never lets us wallow in the sadness for very long and it never lets us celebrate the happiness for too long. It creates this wonderful blend of emotions and it is not afraid to smack us around with them. My favorite transition is from the morning after the first sex to the first day post break up.

One of the things I love about the movie is the narrative tricks. First off, the movie is told out of order, so we see the 500 days of this relationship as it jumps around in time. Happiness flips to sadness and back all in the span of a few minutes as we get cutaway shots showing what day we are about to watch. Then we have a droll voiced narrator weaving his way in and out of the story. He does not seem to care much what happens to the protagonist, but exists just to help us understand what it going on. The movie has a devastating animated sequence, black and white sequences, characters talking directly to the camera,and a full dance number. All of that is great, but there is one scene that sort of drives this movie to my favorites list. It is a scene to which every person can relate, I believe. As Tom goes to a party hosted by Summer, the film goes to a split screen and on one side we see Tom's expectations and on the other side we see the reality. This is after the break up, and after months of not seeing each other outside of a attending the same wedding, which led to the protagonist's renewed hope. His expectations and the reality are so grossly different that it hurts to watch them side by side. I have seen movies press forward with the expectations only to pull back and reveal it was in the character's head and then go forward with the reality, but to see them side by side just hurts. It is an achingly brilliant move on whomever decided to go that way. It is like that in the shooting script, but who knows if the director had input there. That scene will crush you because we have all done it. We have all seen what we want to happen in our heads, only to see reality go in a completely different direction. In a movie full of hilarious moments and sad moments, this scene is easily the most crushing. The scene even ends with the protagonist no longer a human being, but a sketch in one of his architectural creations as all of his surrounding are being erased to a sad poignant song.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel are the leads, and share a breezy, yet commanding chemistry that leaves me wishing they would team up more often on film. Marc Webb was a music video director before this and the duo of screen writers, Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber have gone on to write the screenplay for the John Green YA adaptations. The supporting actors all add to both the humor and heart of the film.

Another thing I love about this movie is the way it deconstructs not only the romantic comedy genre, but also the idea of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, I know there are people who I think misread this film as being wish fulfillment from Tom's POV, but it shows how POV is skewed. Summer is a full blown character with hopes and dreams, and Tom mistakenly looks for meaning through her. She is clear with him from the beginning, but he only sees what he wants to see. The film shines a light on how we construct our own narrative, and how we filter everything through our own lens, often times forgetting the people in our stories, are actually living their own stories. The film is as much about how we tell a story, as it is about telling the story. It is almost metatextual in that way.

The film also uses music to perfection. In a tranquil scene The Temper Trap's "Sweet Disposition" plays, then later in the film, when Summer and Tom reconnect, the song plays again, giving us the impression that things just may end up going well for the young couple. Many of my students even said they did not believe the narrator when he said it was not a love story because of this scene. They wanted to be believe because of how the mood was set up by the music, the lighting and how the two young people were framed together with the sunset in the back and flowers in the background. The movie features other great moments driven by music, but this is the one I come back to time and time again.

(500) Days of Summer will frustrate you, make you cry and make you laugh. I think, though, in the end, it gives you hope. It makes you believe in the search for true love, even though it hurts when it does not go your way. it deconstructs our idea of what a romantic comedy is supposed to be and it perfectly deconstructs the character tropes of the genre. It has a kick ass soundtrack that is made more kick ass by how each song is used in the film. The non-linear narrative technique serves the film in a variety of ways, but mostly it keeps the film from feeling too sad in the second half. The performances, direction, script and editing are all top notch. It does not over stay its welcome at a brisk 95 minutes and it leaves you feeling something. I will not say what you will be left feeling by it, but I do not know anyone who did not feel something when the film was over. half of my students hate me for playing it for them because it felt too real, but that was kind of the point. This is a movie that I know in twenty years I will still watching and enjoying, and I hope that if you have not seen the movie, this make you want to see it and I hope that if you have seen it, this gives you something new to think about.

This school year has been an utter failure

Two weeks ago I played a Spoken Word poem about depression for one of my classes, at the request of two students. The poem is a young girl trying to explain her depression to her mother, and I was deeply moved by the piece. When the poem ended, I looked around and saw that multiple students were crying. As we talked about the poem, I found myself overcome with emotion. I broke down and cried a little bit in front of my class, which was a first.

I have four sections of the same class this year, on top of AP Lit. AP Lit has been a blast mostly because I have had some sort of relationship with nearly all of the students in it for a year or two. Of my four sections of junior English, I have one that is so good at class discussions. This is the class that got something out of the spoken word poem. We also get a lot from each other, because of the discussions. My class is at its best, when discussions play a big role. A big part of my job is to help students learn how to think for themselves, and learn how to articulate those thoughts.

I am new to this teaching thing, but have been doing it long enough to know this year has been a complete bust. I cannot seem to get a majority of my students to care about learning, about thinking, about reading, about anything, really. Every day is a new struggle. I am doing everything I know how, and nothing is working. I took out my Into the Wild unit to put in a film unit in hopes it would get them moving in the right direction, and even a film unit did not work. I got rid of all non-reading homework. This year all parts of the essay writing process are happening in class, including giving class time to type up final drafts because they do not do homework. In some ways I have liked it because it has allowed me to figure out exactly what is the most important material that I absolutely must teach. The problem is, none of it has worked. Even if I circulate the computer lab for the entire 70 minute period, I still end up only getting about seventy-five percent of essays turned in. What little reading I have assigned has gone mostly unread. Most work is not being done, and when a majority of the classes will not contribute to class discussions on top of that, I have no way of knowing if anything I am teaching is working. Do you have any idea what it feels like to feel totally helpless in your job? It sucks. I have never, in my entire life, felt so ineffective at anything.

It would be so easy to quit on them like they have quit on me, but that is not how I do things, so I listen to them, figure out what they want, what they like, and I try to incorporate those things into my lessons. With The Great Gatsby we have talked a bunch about money, and if it matters where it comes from, and we compare Jay Gatsby to rappers who started as drug dealers. The Great Gatsby is the first unit that has somewhat worked this year. Students appeared to dig reading the book. They like the mystery of this super rich guy. Money is important to teenagers.

Because I am trying to do anything I can to get them engaged, I played that poem. It rattled me. It rattled that one class, but it was just one class, on one day, and we quickly moved on, except the poem lingered with one particular student, and this week I got an email from a parent that reminded me that if I am making a difference in one life, I am doing my job well. The email mentioned that poem, and how I handled the tough subject matter. The mother, who was an English teacher at one point, also wrote "Being a good teacher with high expectations yet remaining approachable and vulnerable is a hard balance to achieve. Thank you for being that kind of teacher."

I have been thinking about that all week because I had worried that I had lost my high expectations this year. I so desperately wanted my students to just turn in anything, I worried that I forgot what it means to have high expectations. This was such a great reminder. It didn't hurt that she CCed my principal in the email.

I have these students for another three and a half months. This wonderful email reminded me that I can do this. I can be effective. I can maintain my high expectations, and till find a way to relate to these kids, and maybe, just maybe, we can all learn together.

Teaching is such a roller coaster.

Kyle's Favorites: Taylor Swift's "New Romantics"

As I get my blogging feet under me, and, as I deal with the realities of my busy life, I have found that I need concrete things to write about. I also need deadlines. Because of these things, I am trying to set up a blogging schedule as well as things to write about.

This is what I have decided. I am going to update this blog two times a week. Once on Tuesday or Wednesday, and once on the weekend. The mid-week post will be a series of posts about popular culture things I love, or Kyle's Favorites. These things may be songs, movies, books, television shows, albums, etc. I want something that will help me keep my analytical skills sharp, but without the heady academic writing I will be doing in my Grad program. As I am doing my best to make 2016 a year of positivity, I want to focus on talking about why I love the things I love. As my time is relatively impacted, I might not write about movies as often as I have in the past, simply because I am not watching as many movies as I have in the past.

My first entry into this new category is my second favorite Taylor Swift song off of her massively successful 1989 album. Except, that it's not actually on the album, unless you got the special deluxe edition. It will forever be a mystery why this song was left off the actual album, as it is, simply put, a dope ass pop song.



Check it out. Swift's album is named for the year she was born, and the 1980s were a rich landscape of cheesy pop music, but most of her album is strictly modern. It is a celebration of who she is now, not of the era in which she is born. Perhaps that is why this track was left off. The synth poppy track would sound pretty close to home as a Duran Duran or Adam Ant song, who were products of the New Romanticism movement of music in the late 70s and early 80s. Of course, the song, like most of Swift's greatest hits, talks about her life. This is her greatest weapon, her ability to frame her own narrative through music. Whereas most of her earlier work took love deeply serious, and she wrote like a lovesick teenager, 1989 as a whole takes on a less romantic view of love. In fact, the title of the this particular song, is part of the new satirical Swift. The New Romantics are not romantic at all, in terms of what we traditionally consider to be romantic.

The song begins "We're all bored/we're all so tired of everything." These are not the lyrics you expect to hear when the track starts. It only gets better from there. A personal favorite line of mine comes pretty quickly after the opening "We show off our different scarlet letters/
Trust me mine is better." Obviously I enjoy a literary reference more than most, but I also love how apt this is for her, specifically. To the the public eye, hoping to shame women for being, well, women, Swift has had her fair share of public shame. Each relationship scrutinized, each decisions met with think piece after think piece. The shame the public forced on her is *better* than anything we could imagine. Her sarcastic tone, as she tosses this line out, is perfect.

The New Romantic sings out their heartbreak, dances it out, fills the sadness with friends, the emptiness and boredom of life are shared with those other Scarlet-letter wielding people. Once the chorus hits, Swift become impenetrable surrounded by her girls, tossing boys aside, tossing criticism aside, grooving to the 80s synth pop, and finding the definition of who she truly is.

between the cool vocal, the lyrics that hit like little daggers, the brashy hook, and the fact that it is a super exclusive track, what is not to love? Swift spends most of 1989 reframing her narrative from teenage quirky country-pop girl into a full blown pop star. Lyrically the album changes who we have been conditioned to think of Taylor Swift as. No longer is she the girl worried about tearsdrops on her guitar. Now she's building castles out of the bricks the world has hurled at her. This album was her coming out party, and what better song to close it out with than a song that goes "We need love, but all we want is danger."

Being frank with students

Two years ago I wrote a post about a student who asked me a lot of questions about weight loss, and obesity and how I dealt with my own obesity. For a few weeks after I wrote that post, I was receiving messages telling me I made a mistake being so honest with a student and other messages applauding me for my honesty with that student. It never entered my mind to not be honest with him, just as it never occurs to me to not be honest with all of my students about most things.

If you want teenagers to be honest with you, they have to respect you. I do not deserve their respect just by being their teacher. I have to earn it on a daily basis, or I am not doing my job. I have found, in my brief time as a teacher, that students respond to honesty. They like to see it in their teachers. Because I am honest with them, usually they are honest with me. They tell me when what we are learning is interesting or useful, or when they are not learning. They are great at letting me know the difference between boredom and exhaustion. We have built a relationship based on being honest with each other. Pretty much the only off-limit topic is my sex life. I have been asked a few times how old I was when I lost my virginity, and it is the only thing I refuse to answer. If they want my political beliefs, they have to come up and ask quietly after class because I do not want to appear as if I am forcing my beliefs on them, but generally I will answer any questions they ask.

I teach many students who are overweight, I think all teachers do. We are an unhealthy nation. By being honest about my struggles, my triumphs, or my fears, these students see someone they recognize. It has given a few of them power to take back control of their own lives. When I told my students that I worked out before school, I had a student come up a week later who told me that knowing I was getting up at 4:30 to work out, made it easier for him to get up at 6 and work out. On any given day I have students coming in to tell me about what they did at Crossfit the night before, or the new vegetables they tried (I might talk about spaghetti squash and cauliflower a lot), or even better, little snacks they like that are healthy. They also ask me for updates on my journey and we commiserate together about how hard working out is, but how rewarding it is, and we all need to remember how good it feels when we complete our work out.

But, when I fail, I tell them. When I go a long time without working out, I am honest when they ask. They understand how it goes. It actually makes them more likely to tell me that they forgot to do the homework, instead of creating some elaborate bullshit excuse. They understand failure is a part of life because I am unafraid to let them see my failure. Some teachers do not want their students to see them make mistakes, but I think it is good. They need to know that mistakes are a natural part of life.

I write about this today because a particularly obese former student of mine emailed me today to tell me that he was able to run a mile without stopping for the first time in his life. He told me that he conquered his fear of the gym and with running in places where people can see him. Occasionally I overshare. Occasionally we get so far away from the topic about which we are learning because we talk about why I didn't drink or do any drugs in high school, or I pause to tell the story of how my stupid masculinity convinced me I could put together a bookcase on my own, which left Martina and I with a leaning bookcase. Sometimes these stories add nothing to the lives of my students, but there are days where something we talk about helps students change habits, or allows them to feel comfortable forming and expressing their own opinions on things, and they get excited when they do new things, and want me to know about it.

So, yes, my students feel comfortable talking to me like I am a person, not a teacher. They say things to me they might not say to other teachers. I am okay with them knowing more about my life if that is what I get in return.