TAW

It's teacher appreciation week and this year my students have been very thoughtful. On Monday I got flowers and candy; yesterday one nice girl baked cookies, and today someone added to my flower arrangement, another presented me with a gift card, and then I got what will probably be a once-in-a-career gift. A cheese souffle.

Seriously.

Now that's appreciation.

Pizza Culpa

"Where's our pizza?" I growled over my stomach. "I'm starving!"

So hungry in fact was I that I picked up the phone without hesitation and dialed. (Those who know me will immediately recognize the significance of this gesture.) When a polite voice answered, I did my best to curb my crankiness. "I placed an online delivery order an hour and a half ago and I was just wondering where it was," I whined [slightly, very slightly].

She took my name. "We have that as an online pick-up order," she informed me sympathetically, and I realized with horror that the mistake was all mine. But before I could even let out the gigantic sigh that filled my lungs all the way down to my diaphragm she added, "Would you like us to remake it and deliver it as soon as possible?"

"That would be great," I whimpered [slightly, very slightly].

Please hurry up pizza.

Springcasm

With itchy eyes and scratchy throat, and amidst the prediction of billions of cicadas about to emerge and outnumber us humans 60 to 1, I swept another eight ounces of woven weeds and muck from the eaves of the porch this evening.

Ahhh, spring! What other joys might the season bring?

Darwin's Agent

There's a robin who has been trying to build a nest in the eaves of our porch for several weeks. We have a rule that once there are eggs in a nest, the bird family gets to stay until the babies fledge, but a bird's nest in that small space is a mess and a nuisance to everyone; I don't believe the birds really like having two humans, a dog, and a cat so near by. They just don't know it yet because the weather's been so yucky.

As such, we practice a form of avian contraception around here, knocking the sticks and grass down every day before anything gets established. Even so, this particular robin has shown considerable perseverance, returning day after day with blade after blade of dry grass. Until yesterday, I watched the mess she was making from the comfort of the living room, but early May is a good time to clean up the deck and start hardening off my seedlings, so I grabbed a pair of gloves, a broom, a roll of paper towels, and some 409 spray.

It was kind of gross out there; clumps of mud and strands of grass littered the area. The Adirondack chair in the corner looked as if had been shat upon by a billion birds, not just the one, and the cushion was a total loss-- first item into the garbage bag. Still I cleaned on, and it wasn't too long before the porch was a welcoming area of agriculture and relaxation.

This morning? That damn robin was back. I let the cat out there and chased her away personally several times, but I knew we would be knocking a nest down this evening.

When I got home tonight, though, I was unprepared however for the sheer amount of debris that was on that chair. It was covered in an entire range of miniature mountains of muck. Of one thing I was sure: no bird could possibly excrete so much in so little time. Had she have brought her whole freakin' flock for robin's revenge? Calling Alfred Hitchcock...

Turns out that when the soil is wet, as ours has been, female robins begin their nests. In addition to the obvious grass and twigs, beakful by beakful, they also carry approximately half a pound (half a pound!) of mud from the ground to the construction site. It takes your average robin hundreds of visits to build her nest, and we just happened to have one sloppy mud-bearer who dropped more on the chair than she placed in the eaves.

Of course all her hard work is gone now, swept away with the flick of a broom. I do feel a little bit guilty, but I comfort myself with the knowledge that, surely, natural selection is on my side.

And there it Is

We have a nice strawberry bed in our garden. When I first put the plants in two years ago, all the literature I read suggested not picking the fruit until the second year in order to help strengthen the plants and their subsequent crops.

I thought that was the dumbest idea ever, and I would have picked every single berry from those vines last year except that they all rotted on the ground side before they completely ripened. Having been forced into following the directions, my next dilemma was how to keep my berries from doing that every year.

The answer? Why, it's in the name. Straw. You're supposed to mulch the plants with straw, or even better, pine straw, and then the STRAWberries can ripen on a soft little bed. I did that today, and I have high hopes for lots of berries in June.

Be Still My Vintage Heart

I heard yesterday that starting next week and continuing into the next season, Patty Duke and Meredith Baxter are going to play a long-committed lesbian couple on Glee.

Let me animate my reaction to this news about a couple of my childhood icons:

spit take
slide whistle
jaw drops to the floor
boing boing sound
eyes pop out
goofy grin

If Only

I think I've mentioned how the writing club kids like to give each other prompts when we meet. I'm sure part of the appeal is being allowed to write on the white board, and most of the time the assignments are so silly that it is kind of challenging to get anything on paper in the 5-10 minutes we allow. (But... I guess our students might say the same thing for many of the tasks we set for them.)

Really, though-- Write about pandas and turtle cup cakes? The Bermuda triangle, without pickles? Using the words, "before", "daffodil", "cocoa puffs", "converse" and "soccer"? You see what I mean, but let me tell you, those kids put out some crazy good writing on that kind of dare.

Yesterday, though, someone posted the following challenge: Write three paragraphs arguing against standardized tests, and it wasn't either one of us teachers.

Trying to remain neutral, I asked the assembled students what their objections to these tests were. "I'll scribe," I volunteered. "You talk."

"They're not fun!" someone started, rather predictably.

"It's boring," another student added.

We adults shrugged sympathetically. "What else?" I asked.

"Well," one kid started earnestly, "all that review cuts away from learning new things."

"And they create a lot of stress!" the girl to his right chimed in.

"Stress? Why? None of you guys are going to fail," I said, because it was true.

"All those signs everywhere about how many days until the test can really freak you out," she told me. "And what about the announcements?" she continued.

"SOL Boot Camp! SOL Boot Camp" they all started to chant.

"What is that even about?" she asked.

"One of our teachers told us that how we do can affect the economy," a boy said. "Test scores impact property values."

"One of your teachers told you that?" I repeated, a little incredulously.

"He was just being honest," the student answered, "but the tests aren't a fair way to evaluate you guys either. I mean you can't control how every single student is going to do on them, right?"

More shrugs from the teachers.

"Okay. Do we have enough?" asked the student who had posed the prompt. "Let's write a letter to the school board and get rid of these tests!"