Pep Talk

In the last class of the day today there were a couple of kids absent and several who were pulled for a meeting with the Gifted Coordinator. That left me and seven sixth grade boys. Tomorrow we are administering a reading test, the results of which will help determine whether kids take a foreign language next year, or continue on with reading, and I gave them the same spiel I had delivered to all of my classes. "A standardized test is like a snapshot..." I started.

My point to the kids was that there's no shame in doing their best on the test and finding out that it would help them to postpone taking another language for a year, but it would be a shame for them to blow off the test and miss out on the chance at a high school credit. I also reminded them that if they did take a language, then their grade would be important when they applied to college.

This group was confused. "What do you mean "apply"?" asked one.

"Well," I answered, "colleges don't have to let you go there. They get to choose who they want based on an application that you fill out.They look at a lot of things, but they definitely look at your grades."

"Whaaaaaaat?" said another student. "You can't just go somewhere?"

I shook my head.

"Did you go to college?" somebody asked.

"You can't be a teacher without a college degree," I shrugged.

They were unusually quiet for a moment, but then the silence was broken. "Let's get to work!" one guy suggested, clapping his hands in encouragement, and it was a very good class.

The Easy Part

I just can't shake the sense that as a culture we over-burden ourselves. As an example, what does it say about us and the way our lives are organized that it's quite common to hear folks say that they need a vacation after their vacation? It seems that we put so much time and energy into relaxing, that we miss out on the down time. I know I'm guilty of that; in fact, I'm feeling it right now. Fortunately, as a teacher, I have considerable time off in the summer, and not surprisingly, knowing that I don't have to go right back to work after a trip makes everything much less stressed.

I wish I knew the solution, but for now, I'm going to have to content myself with identifying the problem. I'm too busy to do anything else!

Resilience

I like to think of myself as a pretty positive person, steady in the face of crisis, even, but time and again, it's the little things that can get me down. Today I stoically bid my family good-bye and drove 9 1/2 hours through terrible traffic, only to arrive home and find my refrigerator not working. Sigh.

Yesterday at the beach I counted six iPhones, three iPods, an iPod touch, and an iPad in our group. Apple must have seen our family coming. Earlier in the week, my sister and I met the next door neighbor and his dog, a cute, nine-year-old, golden retriever-chow mix. Later, while walking with our mom, we saw the dog out in the yard, and my sister and I spoke of her in very familiar terms. "How do you know that?" my mother asked.

"We did genetic testing on her," I joked.

"We scanned her with our iPhones," my sister added.

"Yeah, there's an app for that," we laughed.

Eventually we explained about meeting the owner, but we were off and running on all sorts of app ideas. (Who Shat That? is still my favorite.)

Personally, I believe there is not only an app for most things, but a poem, too. Here's mine for the broken refirgerator:

Meditation on Ruin

by Jay Hopler

It's not the lost lover that brings us to ruin, or the barroom brawl,
           or the con game gone bad, or the beating
Taken in the alleyway. But the lost car keys,
The broken shoelace,
The overcharge at the gas pump
Which we broach without comment — these are the things that
           eat away at life, these constant vibrations
In the web of the unremarkable.

The death of a father — the death of the mother —
The sudden loss shocks the living flesh alive! But the broken
           pair of glasses,
The tear in the trousers,
These begin an ache behind the eyes.
And it's this ache to which we will ourselves
Oblivious. We are oblivious. Then, one morning—there's a
crack in the water glass —we wake to find ourselves undone.

Fair to Middlin'

Tonight was our last dinner at the beach, and as we gathered around the table, someone proposed that each person share the highlight of the week for them. Next it was the low point, which was sort of negative, but still interesting, and then five-year-old Richard suggested that we tell the middle of our vacation.

We asked him what he meant by that, and he explained that it was something kind of good, but kind of bad, too. He went first. "My middle was when a wave hit me in he face," he said.

Fifteen-year-old Treat was skeptical. "That was the mid-point of your week?" he asked. "Half of the week was worse than getting a face full of salt water? You couldn't have had a very good time."

The adults around the table wanted to jump in and defend Richard, but we were silenced by his explanation. "Treat," he said, "that was my middle because I was a big boy when the water hit me."

His answer clarified the task for us, and next Treat told us about the horseshoe crab tail that he carried all the way back from his bike ride only to discard it in disappointment when he found that everyone else had left the beach to go home.

Emily paused a little before she started. "What was my bittersweet moment?" she wondered aloud, and that word, bittersweet, really helped the rest of us get it. As it turned out, there was much more discussion about those in between times that each of us described than of any of the the highs or the lows, and those stories somehow seemed a lot more revealing and true, too.

What a good question, Richard!

Southern Fried!

This afternoon we were treated to a good old coastal thunderstorm. With the thermometer pushing the upper 80s earlier in the day, it sure felt like summertime, and even though that's why we chose this place for this vacation, I was reminded of what one of my students posted just a few days ago: Are you ready for summer? I need some spring first. Let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Anyway, the boomers passed through, and we ran around the house closing all the windows. Unfortunately, one of them was not securely latched at the top, and as I pulled it down, it swung in and smacked me squarely on the bridge of the nose. For a long moment all I could do was loosely cup my palms over my face and hope that nothing was broken. I barely had the ice pack applied before there was a loud crack, and Treat and Richard raced wide-eyed down the stairs to report a bright flash of light and the faint smell of smoke in one of the upstairs bedrooms. Next came Jordan out of the downstairs bedroom with the tale of a laptop power cable that had just popped and flamed. As the smoke alarms screamed, we checked the unfamiliar house for signs of hazard or catastrophe.

As best we could figure, lightning had struck very near. The TV was down for the count, and a few power cables were fried, but it seemed like it was only the things that were drawing power at the time of the surge that were damaged. Even so, I considered how quickly things can go south-- that window, like the lightning, hit hard and without warning, but when it was all over, it could have been so much worse.

Southern Fried

My grandmother was from Mississippi and her fried chicken was legendary. Whenever we visited her, she would make it for us to have on the three hour car ride back home. Once, she ran out of time and sent my grandfather to KFC to buy the chicken. Family tradition has it that the four-year-old me knew something was amiss from the first bite. "This is not Grandma's chicken!" I reportedly exclaimed.

I don't have any memory of the incident, but I always thought of it as a testimony to remarkable chicken rather than a remarkable palette. My grandmother died 39 years ago, long before I started cooking, and her chicken recipe was lost to me for about twenty years, until I had the occasion to ask her youngest sister about it on one of her rare trips up north. She told me how she made hers, and how their mother made hers, and that she reckoned my grandmother's recipe was somewhere close to in between.

It was almost another 19 years until I put her method to the test. Skillet frying a chicken just always seemed like a lot of trouble. But on this family vacation to South Carolina, we planned to celebrate my brother's birthday, and making fried chicken the way my grandma did seemed like a perfect menu choice.

My original idea was to use a deep fryer, but I left the cord at home, and so I was forced to fry it on the stove, just as she did. Honestly? I'm glad I did, because it turned out really well, and it wasn't the hassle I always thought it would be. In fact, I may not wait another 19 years to try it again.

Believe It or Not

I gave my students the option to keep posting throughout our spring break, and I was curious to see if they would and what they might say. I told them all it might be fun to check in with the group, especially since we wouldn't be seeing each other every day. It has been interesting-- kids have posted from Arizona, Florida, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Utah with tales of their journeys. Other kids have written about the adventures they've had at home, but it only took until today, Tuesday, for an underlying emotion to come to the surface. "I miss school," one person wrote, and after that, every kid who went online replied with how much they missed it, too.

And the best part is that I have it writing.