Old Dog, New Tricks

My fingers hurt a little from practicing my ukulele. Where's my treat?

What a Difference a Week Makes

We are all ready to show off our cushy new theater to our guests from out of town today, but things did not go quite as expected. As before, I booked the tickets online and chose our seats in advance. We were running a little late, but entered the theater just as the previews started. "Isn't this awesome," I whispered before stopping dead in my tracks. There were people in our seats.

I am not a confrontational person, but this time I didn't really have a choice. I made my way to the center of the row and stood before the reclining couple. "I think you might have the wrong seat," I started, but the woman there would hear none of it.

"I'm sure they gave us these seats," she told me firmly.

"I have my tickets," I showed her the stubs in my palm. "Do you have yours?"

She squirmed defiantly. "I know these are our seats."

People were looking on in annoyance and the four other people in our group were standing in the aisle. I scanned the theater for empty seats but then realized that there was every chance that someone else had reserved them, and then we would be the interlopers; that could turn into vicious chain. We had to go to the manager.

Five minutes later several people were firmly moved and a few were actually removed. We settled into our seats to enjoy the show, but the reclining seats were cold comfort. Somehow, it just wasn't as fun as I'd pictured it.

For You

I don't want to brag, but generally our dog is pretty well behaved. Set aside pretty much any cat in the world (she just wants to love them) and a squirrel or two here and there and my mom (she loves my mom) and she's damn near perfect.

You can imagine my surprise then, when tonight as Heidi's mom was browning the ground beef for tacos, Isabel almost knocked her over.

She never bothers me in the kitchen, I thought. Then it hit me.

When she was a wee puppy and before we put her on a raw diet, she had a lot of, shall we say, digestive issues. One remedy for such conditions was a mixture of hamburger, rice, and pumpkin, and so I cooked up batch after batch of the stuff to keep our puppy happy and well.

Even today, nine years later, our senior dog smells ground beef frying and her inner puppy is sure it's for her. Somehow? That doesn't annoy me at all.

By Any Means

So we've been working on this writing samples ALL WEEK, and today by the end of class was the drop-dead deadline. Still, there was one particular student who early on had been moved to the desk RIGHT next to me, but even with constant encouragement and redirection had yet to write a single word of his final draft. Twenty minutes into the class period, we were reaching crisis stage, and I was grasping for motivational tools.

"Your mom is going to be REALLY mad," I whispered.

He fidgeted. "I know," he said, but it wasn't that convincing.

"She won't believe you didn't finish," I said, shaking my head. He was loving the sympathy. "I think I better get a video of you so she can see what happened."

His eyes widened as I pulled out my phone and started recording. "No, no," he pleaded.

I have him a what-can-I-do? shrug and kept the phone pointed straight at him.

He picked up his pencil desperately and began to write, and can you believe it? He finished the essay by the bell.

Overcast with a Chance of Sun

"You didn't explain that very well," the student standing by my desk told me.

"I'm sorry," I apologized. "I'll try to do better next time."

"I thought we were supposed to bring our drafts for you to check," she continued.

I nodded sympathetically. "Normally, you would," I replied, "but because this is kind of a test, I'm not commenting on drafts-- you have to revise on your own. I would be happy to answer any specific question, though."

She frowned and then brightened a bit. "Actually, I do have a pacific question," she said.

"What kind of question?" I asked.

"Pacific," she repeated.

"Well," I said, "I'm afraid if you have a Pacific question, I can only give you an Atlantic answer."

She giggled. "Oh forget it! I'm going to go fix my draft."

What Blah

More tales of quadruple teaching a lesson:

Today, I used the white board to record a student-generated list of writing tools we've used this year. During the last class of the day, a student raised her hand and repeated one of the ideas, verbatim, from the class before. I caught on right away. She could read the ghostly shadow of the erased writing. "Good one!" I said. "What else do you see?"

She reeled off another one, and we laughed. "Anything else?" I asked.

"What..." she started and then frowned and squinted. "Blah." She couldn't read the rest.

"What blah?" I repeated. "Very good!" And I wrote it down on the list.

The students who were paying attention giggled. (I'd like to say that it was all of them, but I teach sixth grade. I knew I'd have to circle back and pick up the stragglers another way.) "What blah!" one of the focused kids exclaimed. "I must have been absent that day!"

We joked about it for a minute or two and then went on to complete the list. The assignment was for them to write the first draft of an essay and then use the list to revise. A while later a student approached my desk. "I'm finished my draft," she said quietly.

"Did you use the list on the board to revise?" I asked.

"Yes," she confirmed, "and I have everything except what blah. I must have been absent that day."

Minty Fresh

I'm not sure how it came up at lunch today, but I found myself confessing that, when I was in kindergarten and first grade, I ate the paste. I think I must have assumed that everyone did that so I was a little surprised that I was the lone paste-eater. I felt it necessary to explain.

"Seriously? You never tried it?" I asked. "But, it was so delicious-- all sweet and minty. I wonder what kind of paste that was? I wonder what was in it?"

I thought back 45 years in time. "My teachers used to cut little squares of paper," I recalled, "and the paste came in these giant tubs, so they would take like a tongue depresser thing and scoop a glob onto each square and then student helpers would bring one to each of us," I continued. "We had to use our fingers to rub the paste in, so of course you could taste it, and it was good!"

For a second, I was my present adult teacher self standing in that long ago classroom. I considered the routine from a professional perspective as I tried to describe it to my colleagues. What did we do next? I tried to remember.

"Hmmm... Now that I think of it, I'm not sure how we were actually supposed to get the paste off our hands... did they send us to the bathroom? Did we have a sink in the room?" I shrugged. "Who knows? For me, that was never a problem!"