"How old are you?" asked a cheeky first grader when he sat down next to me at the literacy center I was observing.
"How old are you?" I asked in return.
"Six," he answered with a slightly insolent chin nod.
"I'm ten and a half times that," I replied.
"So you're a hundred?" he said.
Fortunately, it was not a math center, so I ignored his miscalculation. "Why don't you get started on your word family assignment?" I suggested.
"Just so you know," the teacher whispered to me as I slipped into my observation chair, "there's going to be a fire drill at 8:30."
I laughed and shrugged, but when that high-pitched intermittent siren went off? I jumped. Then I got up, joined the line of quiet first graders, and exited the building through the door in their classroom. As we stood in the chilly February morning, I surveyed the school building. Built in 1952, it had the sprawling design of the elementary schools of my childhood: single story, brick on the outside, cinder block on the inside, with rows of hopper windows.
At least we can go right back in, I thought, eying the blue door as a cold wind cut through my sweater. But that was not to be. Although the school seemed unchanged since it was built over 70 years ago, there was actually an obvious security upgrade.
The classroom doors could no longer be opened from the outside. So we all walked silently down the sidewalk and in through the front entrance.
The teacher had given the directions.
"It's simple," she assured her students. "You know that one of the five requirements for a sentence is that it starts with a capital letter, so you just need to correct the first letter of these sentences," she pointed to the worksheet, "and then write them on the line below."
After asking if there were any questions or concerns, she moved to the focus group table and called a student over to work. The rest of the class settled into their task, and it wasn't long before a little girl slipped her paper into the green basket next to where I was sitting. "Can I see that?" I asked.
She shrugged and walked away, and I plucked the worksheet out of the bin and flipped it over. It appeared to be blank, except for her name.
As she bustled about her desk, pulling out her device and preparing to do the next task, I caught her eye and waved. "C'mere," I mouthed, pointing at the paper.
She sighed and reluctantly returned.
"You were supposed to do this!" I said in mock surprise.
She pointed to lightly scrawled pencil marks at the beginning of each sentence.
"Are these the capital letters?" I asked.
She nodded.
"You were supposed to write the sentence, with the capital letter, on this line," I pointed.
She took the worksheet from my hand and put it back in the basket.
"You're probably going to have to do it again!" I whispered.
She shrugged and returned to her seat.
Meanwhile, our quiet conversation had caught the kids at the nearest table's attention.
"What the heck?!" said one to the other with a look of utter disbelief on his face.
"She said it was easy," his friend shook his head, "but it's impossible!"
"Did you hear Ellen is retiring?" I asked Mimi about our dear mutual friend at bowling this morning.
Mimi was the assistant principal at our school when Ellen started there back in 1992. She was also a mentor when Ellen moved from the classroom to admin, and a colleague when Ellen was hired as the other assistant principal at our school. As it happens, Sharon, our principal from that time, and Susan, our Director of Counseling, are also in the bowling league; reconnecting with them has been one of the top reasons I've enjoyed bowling so much.
Mimi's face lit up at the news. "No!" she answered. "I'm going to have to give her a call and congratulate her!"
A little while later, I heard her talking to Sharon and Susan. "We could have our whole admin team here!" she beamed. "Wouldn't that be something?"
Their smiles were as wide as hers.
I spent my entire teaching career in a compact, self-sufficient school district. For most of that time, it seemed like we didn't care how anybody else was doing anything; we had our own way. It didn't matter, for example, when neighboring school districts started, scheduled breaks, or called off for weather; our central administration made their own calls. We were relatively small, affluent, and independent.
All that changed gradually over the decades I worked there. Starting at the turn of the century, with the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind Act, there was a big push toward standardization, and individual schools and their policies became more centralized at all levels —nationally, statewide, regionally, and within the district. We were all supposed to be doing pretty much the same thing and measuring our success with high-stakes tests.
But I digress. I sat down to write about how I used to only have to check one district to see if my day would be affected by school cancellations or delays, but, ironically, now that I'm retired, I have to check three: one for my wife's schedule, one for my bowling league, and one for my consulting gig. Some things can't be standardized.
I thought that was kind of funny, but now I see I still feel some kind of way about NCLB and all its unintended consequences. All these years later, I still resent the loss of responsiveness and independence that came with uniformity for uniformity's sake.
I can't even remember why I wanted it.
Something made me think a button that randomly pulls a post from my blog archive would be a fun addition, so I put an AI site on the task and asked for the HTML code I needed to create such a widget.
Oh my lord! What followed was an hour or so of cutting, pasting, saving, and testing. I will say that AI is a cheerful, confident collaborator. In addition to reassuring me that I wasn't at fault after every failed attempt, it offered a perfect "final solution" (its words, not mine) at least seven times.
I almost believed it would work before I ran out of free queries, but alas, no such button currently exists. According to the chatbot, the breakdown is a result of several factors-- the sheer number of posts in the archive, the clunkiness of "Blogger being Blogger," and some sort of indexing issue with Google.
By the end? I almost expected it to say, Reply hazy, try again later.
Maybe it was the fact that, in the next breath, after telling us that Lucy barks for hours when we're not home, our neighbor offered, "It could be ghosts, though. We have at least two down here," that I did not believe it.
"When is she ever even alone?" I asked Heidi, indignantly, "I'm here almost all the time."
"That could be part of the problem," my reasonable wife suggested. "If it's the separation anxiety we've seen in the past, the fact that someone is here most of the time makes the times when she's alone worse."
I was still very skeptical. So much so that I found an app and downloaded it to both my phone and my iPad, turning the iPad into a bark monitor. "Now we'll see about this," I said firmly as I locked the door behind us on our way to see the Oscar Shorts.
The barking started on my phone before we even got to Bill and Emily's to pick them up, and throughout the movies, I received dozens of silent notifications on my watch that Lucy was barking. Even so, I held out hope for false positives, but when we got home, and I checked the activity log, it broke my heart to hear Lucy barking almost constantly, and often desperately, for close to an hour on two occasions.
Assuming it's not ghosts triggering her, our attention turns to solutions. Stay tuned.
