Bless My Heart

Tonight the way the November light drains slowly from the sky pleases me. The black, black silhouettes of phone poles, power lines, and lately bare trees against the yellow-washed horizon and the silver nail of the moon in the indigo dark above is almost too good.

Not So Super

My classes have been competing in "Super Sentence" tournaments the last couple days. The premise of the activity involves finding sentences we love, breaking down their components, and then composing our own sentences that somehow rise above the norm.

The competition itself is head to head brackets where the winner goes through to the next round. The judges are the other students in the class, with a reminder every round to vote for the sentence not the person, along with random debriefs where kids have to justify their votes based on our agreed upon menu of criteria. I never vote, unless it's a tie.

It's a fun and engaging activity for most. I do my best to keep the stakes low and to pad the disappointment of defeat by praising each sentence myself. Still, there are always bruised feelings, which I also try to turn into teachable moments about writing and audience.

Even so, today, I totally screwed up. In the last round of my last class, I mentioned that should the male student win, he would be the only boy champion of the tournament; all the other class winners were girls.

Was it any surprise then, when all the boys voted for him and all the girls voted for his rival? Of course it was a tie.

And since it was up to me? It remained so.

You Dirty Rat

There's a pivotal scene in the latest Bond movie where the villain describes how his grandmother rid her island of rats. She lured them into a barrel, and then rather than killing or releasing them, she left them until inevitably they turned on each other.

Was anybody else at our department meeting today?

A Different Stripe

I have a lot of striped shirts, mostly because I prefer to wear t-shirts and pants to school, and plain t-shirts sometimes seem a little more casual than what I'm going for. It might be hard to tell that I'm going for anything at all, and it probably should be, because I don't give my wardrobe a lot of thought.

Evidently, there are some who do, however. This year, for some reason, my students have been commenting on my clothes. They talk about my shoes and my tie-dyed socks, but more than anything, they want to know what's up with the striped shirts.

Shrugging it off only adds fuel to the fire, and I confess to becoming a little self-conscious about it-- one kid even put stripes on the fish that was supposed to be me on her team t-shirt design.

Lately, though, I've had a little luck in turning the tables. When someone asks why I wear so many stripes, I tell them it's because stripes are awesome. "Who's with me?" I ask, looking around, and I can always count on 3 or 4 others wearing stripes, too, to give a little shout out.

Today the whole thing took a turn. As I was getting the kids settled after lunch, one student came up and threw her arms over my shoulder, wagging her finger back and forth between our shirts. "Stripe club!" she said.

"Who's with us?" I added, and just like that, stripes were much cooler.

Call Me Skyfall

I saw the new James Bond movie today, and at the risk of seeming egocentric, it was clearly all about me. The franchise and I have something in common: this year is the 50th anniversary of our entrances into this vale of tribulation. As much as I'd like to think we both have aged nicely, thematically the movie addresses staying relevant in a changing world, a challenge that faces Bond, M, and MI-6 itself, with the central question for all of us being how to balance the benefits of experience with the inevitable ravages of time.

Perhaps Tennyson, as quoted by M, said it best:

We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Nothing Wrong with a Good Head Scratch

There are awkward moments in certain conversations when someone mentions an idea or a person or an event that is unknown to you. What to do? Do you interrupt the speaker and declare your deficit, or do you nod knowingly hoping you'll be able to make some sense of the reference in context?

This dilemma might be intensified when another person in the discussion admits to not knowing the particulars and so asks to be brought up to speed. In order not to be enlisted in the tutorial, you must avert your eyes, but not so much as to reveal your ignorance.

Or, so I've been told.

These days, I'm not too proud to admit it when I read or hear a word I'm unfamiliar with. Such was the case today when I read Maureen Dowd's op/ed piece in the NYTimes. The starting point of her essay was the throw-back nature of Mitt Romney's popularity among white guys of a certain age; Mad Men was used as an exemplar, but then Dowd noted that that particular TV show "seems too louche for a candidate who doesn’t drink or smoke and who apparently dated only one woman"

Louche? Cool word! And the best part is I know it now.

Chicken-headed Folk on Penny-farthings

When you pay to stay at other people's homes you are hostage to their taste for the duration of your rental. For the most part, the place we are staying this weekend has been beautiful at its best and inoffensive at its worst. That doesn't rule out bizarre, though. You decide where on the spectrum this particular piece of art falls.