Fried Green Tomatoes

It's the end of the season for our garden, although the nightshades and okra did not receive the memo. We went to dig our sweet potatoes and do some cleaning up today, and in addition to the potatoes, we came home with several pounds of eggplant, a few ripe tomatoes, a quart of okra, and a whole bunch of green tomatoes. Who could fail to appreciate such unexpected bounty?

Threefer

I have never claimed to be perfect... well, at least not since I turned thirty. What I do claim is that I do my best in the majority (can I just say the vast majority? I'll feel better) of situations, but since I am an adult living in the world today, that can be challenging. Fortunately for me, I have back up.

Today I had breakfast with one of my favorite friends. She's going through a bit of a rough spell common to people of our age-- she's not very satisfied at her job, her father-in-law recently died, and they lost their dog not too long ago. In addition to all of that, one of her two sisters is suing the others for mismanaging their parents' finances. The three siblings are embroiled in a nasty court case at the same time they are trying to provide the best care for their 85-year-old mother.

Tonight I spoke to both my brother and sister. We lost our dad almost 25 years ago, but we are lucky that our mom has been a big part of our lives. Our family is spread from Washington, DC, Charlottesville, Minneapolis, and Atlanta. It's a long way (too long if you ask me), but we make it work because we work together and we wouldn't have it any other way.

By ourselves, we are definitely not perfect, but together? It's so much closer.

Lost and Found

I keep a classroom library of roughly a thousand volumes and every year it operates at a loss of books and money out of my own pocket. Over the years, I've tried various borrowing procedures, but the truth is, I want books in the hands of my students, especially the more reluctant readers, and I don't really have a lot of class time to devote to administering a tight lending system, and so I don't. I implore students not to take my books without signing them out, but somehow many, many go missing, and nobody knows where they could possibly be.

Or do they? Every now and then, a book will mysteriously turn up in my school mailbox, and I am always grateful. On the second day of school this year, a student returned a book that her brother, now a senior in high school, borrowed six years ago. I thanked her, profusely.

And so it goes. As a result, in addition to buying the latest popular books, I also try to resupply my collection on the cheap, and that's what I was doing today at our school's annual book swap, when several of the titles started to look kind of familiar. "Some of these are probably mine!" I said, only half joking, to my friend Ellen. Less than a minute later she laughed out loud and handed me a book. Sure enough-- on the inside front cover was my name.

Surprised By Loss

How sorry was I when I heard about Steve Jobs death last night? Completely, unexpectedly sad-- and all the media coverage today of his life and legacy, along with his relatively young age, and the fact that I am unashamedly a "mac person" (I bought my first Apple computer the minute I could almost afford it), just made me feel worse.

It was kind of nice to know of someone in the world we could count on for perfectionism in both design and function.

Which Child Left Behind?

We had dinner tonight with a teacher friend from another middle school, and the subject of high-stakes testing inevitably came up. Despite the affluence of our district, none of the five middle schools made AYP last year. When you drill down the data, particularly for the subgroups, you can come to some startling conclusions. For example, our friend's principal told their staff that if one more African American boy had passed the math test, they would have made it. Of course, there were other kids who failed, but the way the results are disaggregated and the data is delivered, their success becomes less important to the school, which is the exact opposite of the intention of the law.

As Clear as Mud

In case you haven't heard enough about the new technology upgrades and other changes in our school system this year, indulge me a little more. The report cards that we send home have never been very informative beyond the obvious letter grade and limited teacher comments: O for Outstanding, S for Satisfactory, and N for Needs Improvement, in six areas-- Responsibility, Participation, Following Directions, Initiative and Effort, Work and Study Skills, and Homework.

This year, we have revised our grading scale to differentiate between a B and a B+, a C and a C+, and a D and a D+. There are neither minuses nor an A+, because one is negative and the other is unnecessary-- according to our top students, an A is an A is an A.

In addition, the old O, S, N scale has been replaced by the ostensibly more flexible Exceeds, Meets, Approaches Expectations or Needs Improvement. But those are not noted on the report card by letters. Rather there are symbols beside the letter grade and beneath the already somewhat inscrutable column headings of RS, PT, FD, IE, WS, and HW. So a student's report card may appear like so:

                               RS   PT   FD  IE  WS HW

English               A     #    X    #   X    #    #
Science              C+     ^    ^    #     #   #   N
Math                  B     #    #   #    #    ^   X
Reading             B+    #    #    #   #   #    #
Am History        C    ^    ^    ^   #   #    N
Band                 A    X   X   X   X   X   X
PE                     B    #   #   #    #    #    #

Today in order to prepare my sixth graders for their student-led conferences, I gave them printouts of their current grades, the first they've ever received in middle school. "What is this!???" one child exclaimed in extreme confusion, but in an instant his face calmed as he answered his own question. "Oh! It must be some kind of teacher-language."

By the Numbers

Glancing at the time a little while ago, I was reminded of the many cool new things in the world when I was a kid in the early 70's, and how two of them intersected for us, children of an airline family: the ultra-modern wide-body Boeing planes and the amazing digital clock. Back then, the clocks didn't even have any kind of crystal display, they were literally just tiny mechanical shingles that dropped every minute, ten minutes, and hour, but it sure was exciting when that display read 7:47.