Temps Perdu

Arriving home after our weekend at the beach I sorted through my treasures. We had spent a great deal of time speculating about the things that we had found on the beach and carefully comparing them to the fossil guide that was at the house. There is something indescribably powerful about finding part of an animal that lived millions of years ago and physically holding it in your hand; it's almost as if somehow the spatial connection transcends time.

One of the things in my collection is a fossilized chard of what I'm sure is bone. There's a texture to the surface and broken edges that I recognize. This knowledge may come from cooking, but my thoughts are drawn back to a day when I was no more than nine. I was on a weekend camping trip with my girl scout troop in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. We were on a hike and we entered a clearing that was nearly perfectly circular. I have no idea why we stopped, but as the adults talked, we girls started to poke at the oddly curved sticks that littered the ground. When they turned their attention to us, the leaders were horrified to find us playing with pig bones. It turned out that we had stopped to rest on the site of some colonial slaughter house.

Last night, my brother and I sat side by side on a sofa at our rental house. Behind us the Chesapeake Bay darkened as the sun set. In the next room we could hear Treat and Josh trading witticisms and wry observations over the sound of a Harry Potter movie. My lap top was on my knees, and as we talked the screen saver started spinning out pictures from my photo library. Many were of the boys, snapped on past adventures much like the one we were on now. We marveled at how quickly the time has passed and how much they have grown.

I know from questioning them that the boys remember only a fraction of all we've done, but when we dropped Josh off tonight, I asked him if he had a good time. "Yup," he answered, and I believed him, and that was enough.

Relieved in Two Acts

 Act I

Just when I was nearly convinced that I would never ever find a shark's tooth on the beach today, I paused at a heap of small shells right above the water line and raked pessimistically through it with my fingers. Finding nothing I sighed. Then ready to rise and comb my way dejectedly down the shore I turned to my left and spotted a perfect tooth lying prettily on top of the midden. Pocketing the treasure, I was able to relax a little and enjoy the walk.

Act II

Just when I was sure that this would be the night that I had nothing to post about to my blog, I considered the heap of treasures I had collected earlier today. Fingering the fossilized shark's tooth, I still couldn't believe that I had found it. Then, ready to close my lap top and face the evening with an uncompleted task hanging over my head, I spotted a bit of a message and began to type.

Seeing in the Dark

We're staying at a funky beach house on the western shore of the Chesapeake this weekend. When we arrived this evening with Bill and Emily and Treat and Josh, we found a sort of nautical villa if you will: it has granite counter tops, stainless steel appliances, stone fireplaces, archways in the place of doors, crown molding, and geese, fisherman and sea gull decorations. It's nice, but it definitely suffers from a confusion of styles. We pulled up in the deepest of dusks, practically night, and the combination of stars in the crushed violet sky and the lights reflecting off the black water was wonderful. "What a cool view!" Josh could not help exclaiming, and it was hard to disagree even in the dark.

Imagine what the light of day might bring.

Sweet Inspiration

 The citrusy smell of a peeled clementine always makes me think of the winter holidays. It doesn't seem that long ago that the season for these tiny tangerines was limited to the months right before and after Christmas, but these days you can get the mini-mandarins almost year-round, now that they are grown in California, as well as imported from not only Spain, but also Morocco and Chile.

When my oldest nephew was five, he was at my house when he enjoyed the first clementine of the new season. After eight months of deprivation, the intense flavor of it rocked him to the core. He devoured three more and then asked for paper and pencil. "How do you spell cwementine?" he asked, and once I told him, he wrote this ode:

clementine oh clementine 
all the world of clementines
clementine oh clementine
all the sea of clementines
clementine oh clementine
all the universe of clementines

Twelve years had passed when he borrowed my iPhone one evening last December at the holiday table, and launching the same app that artist Jorge Columbo has used to create several covers for The New Yorker, he painted this:

All the world of clementines...

In the Name of Accountability

A big word in education these days is accountability. I heard outgoing chancellor of NYC schools Joel Klein use it at least 10 times in a five and a half minute interview tonight. To me, the problem with accountability-- like the statistics that are its handmaidens-- is that more often than not, it is in the eye of the beholder, even while pretending to be otherwise. Ironically, Klein spent the largest part of the interview re-interpreting this summer's negative test numbers in an effort to convince us that he has earned an A during his tenure. Maybe he's right; his boss likes the job he did, even if many parents and teachers do not. Is that accountability?

In my district, our superintendent, now in his sophomore year, has also placed accountability at the forefront, unfortunately without specifically defining it. Along with Excellence, Integrity, Diversity, and Collaboration, Accountability is one of our proposed "Core Values," as in we take responsibility for our progress and are transparent in evaluating student success and our use of the community’s resources. Okay. I can be accountable by that definition. I think.

Not surprisingly, this vague notion of accountability is filtering down and being bandied about in all sorts of settings. For example, today I was in a meeting where another teacher insisted that she wanted the units she was required to submit to come back with comments, even after acknowledging that she wouldn't necessarily find the comments valuable, all in the name of accountability. Where's the accountability? she asked, over and over. She wanted evidence that somebody was doing something even if it wasn't necessarily of value. Hmmm. Accountability for accountability's sake is not a very responsible use of our community's resources.

Of Two Minds

Just last Wednesday I posted about the relatively minor importance of most spelling and grammar errors when it comes to communication. My question was simple: If the message is clear, then why do conventions matter? I do enjoy tipping the sacred cows.

Today at school we were doing some standardized testing. During such times, each teacher receives a bin of materials that we we are required to sign for. It contains test booklets, answer documents, pencils, and forms. It also usually has a sign to tape to the door so that nobody interrupts the class in the middle of the test, but those were missing today. When the testing coordinator came around to check on the session, I asked her if she had one, especially since my group had already been bothered once for an errant lunch box. No problem, she assured me, and a little while later she slipped a green sheet under the door. Testing in Progress, it read, Due Not Disturb.  As an English teacher, I could not, in good conscience, hang that sign on my door, despite the clarity of meaning.

I know our language is evolving, and maybe, as I wrote last week, such an error will be irrelevant in a hundred years. On the flip side of this issue, I heard a piece on the radio on my way home tonight about a website dedicated to words that have been dropped from the dictionary because of their lack of usage. Savethewords.org gives people the chance to adopt one or more of these words and pledge to use them in speech and writing in an attempt to revive them so that they will not be lost forever.

I want to do that! Despite my volgivagrant inclinations, it would misqueme me greatly were our language to languish. That would be an erratum teterrimous. Consider this paragraph my attempt to resarciate. Forgive me, English.

Then Again...

This morning I had just settled at my desk and turned on the computer when there was a sound at the door to my classroom. "Will you come to my room for a minute?" one of the teachers on my team asked. There was a note of anxiety in her voice that made me uneasy as I headed next door. "Do you smell anything?" she asked as I stepped into the hall.

I sure did. It was the unmistakable stench of death. We exchanged knowing grimaces-- there was a dead mouse somewhere in there. We walked around the room sniffing, and it wasn't long before we realized that the odor was strongest by the entry. She dropped to her knees and peered under a large rolling cabinet. "Oh God," she whined and stood up, unable to move. For whatever reason, my usually level-headed, no-nonsense, very competent colleague was totally undone by that rotten rodent this Monday morning. No matter-- I was not.

I asked someone to call maintenance while I opened the windows and borrowed a fan. We added her homeroom kids to mine for the morning, and I lent her the Zen air freshener that I keep at my desk for those random stinky moments that occur all too often in middle school. By first period the room was back in commission, no big deal.

"Wow," said the director of counseling who just so happened to witnessed the event. "What a great team leader!"

If only that was all it took.