TGIF

Lots of people bust out of work as early as possible on Friday afternoon to get an early start on the weekend. I totally get that, but when they leave, it's so nice and quiet that I find I get a lot of work done if I just stay a little later than usual. Friday is a time to clear my desk and get my gradebook up to date. I also try to have everything ready to go, so that I needn't worry about it on Sunday night, or worse, Monday morning. I've found that if I spend a little extra time on Friday afternoon, my weekend is a lot more relaxed.

Oh, those school wheels still spin, for sure, but they do so with a lot less anxiety and a bit more balance.

My Fair Rat

So, today the students took those freewrites that they did on Tuesday and cut 'em down to the first draft of a free verse poem. How lovely some of their images were, and how poignant some of those poems. One of my favorites was an elegy to a pet ferret. Although very rough, this draft showed much sophistication, too. In it, the poet explained how he thought of his pet "pherret" as more of a "fair rat." He proceeded to write three great similes comparing his pet to a fair and then ending each stanza with, and she looks like a rat. A collective sigh of sympathy rose from the class when that fair rat met her maker, because the grief in the poem was genuine.

Quick Question

Who likes back to School Night? I mean really?

Coming Out

Back in August, I wrote about the cautious reaction I received from my colleagues to the sexual minority material in my part of the online Adolescent Development course that we were developing for teachers in our district. Last Monday, we met in person, after working remotely all summer, to finalize the details of the course. The other three teachers again expressed some reservations about that piece. They also said that we should be careful how we present the information so that "we don't offend anyone."

I pointed to the statistics about the difficulties that many gay and bisexual kids face in school, and the lack of support we currently offer them in middle school-- we act as if it's not an issue for kids so young. After some gentle debate, the group decided to send the course forward, as it was, for the assistant superintendent for instruction's approval.

Imagine how pleased I was to read the cover story of the NY Times Magazine this week, Coming Out in Middle School. It raises many of the same concerns and issues that we're only now tip-toeing up to in our school system. I'm hopeful that such broad exposure will push the conversation further out into the open.

Nice to See You Again

Today was one of my favorite homeroom activities of the year. At our school, all the students create an IB Binder: a two inch record of their time in middle school. It has sections for reflecting on exemplary work, service and the community they are part of, and character, also a scrapbook, and some nuts and bolts information about the IB Middle Years Programme.

As sixth grade teachers, we work with the students to set their binders up and guide them as they begin to use these notebooks as portfolios. When the kids leave at the end of the year, we hold on to their binders over the summer until that designated day when all seventh graders come back to their sixth grade homeroom for a few minutes to collect their work and move it to their current homeroom.

After three weeks with my new homeroom students, we've begun to establish our own rhythm and pace. The kids I have this year are easy to get along with, and I'm already enjoying them a lot. As teachers, it is our job to look forward, and after sixteen years on the job, I've learned to let go of one group and throw all my energy into the next. But... today, when those dozen kids that I spent every morning with last year came back to collect their portfolios, I knew how much I missed them by how happy I was to see them and how sorry I was when they grabbed their binders, and, with a cheerful wave, went off to their new homerooms.

One Highpoint of the Weekend:

Singing Sugar Mountain with Treat on our road trip up to Hershey for Josh's birthday... who could resist such an awesome song as we drove past Sugarloaf Mountain? Plus, I liked the way our voices sounded together.

Thirty-five Thursdays

The other night my writing group had our monthly meeting. The four of us have been writing together for three years. We're all teachers, and the start of the school year has been supper-hectic for all of us. Rather than crank out something for the sake of the meeting, we agreed to re-visit the first pieces we wrote for the group.

I was really interested to take a look at our early work and compare it to what we've been writing lately. Sure enough, there were some significant details and differences. Two of us wrote about events and people that would be fictionalized to become major parts of the novels we're playing with. Three of us wrote much longer and more detailed pieces than we've written in over a year. There wasn't any noticeable growth; in fact we laughed about how our increasing comfort with each other has allowed us to become kind of slackers.

I remember working on that piece for our first meeting; I was coming off my Writing Project summer, and my writing fluency was good. I was also really into the self-examination and discovery that the personal narrative genre can provide. I wanted to bring a piece I could share with confidence, too. All of those things added up to a thousand pretty well-crafted words, and I was pleased to find that the writing held up three years later but sorry that I haven't written anything quite like that lately.

And so, our meeting gave me some things to think about in respect to myself as a writer, just as I knew it would. Thanks you guys.