Everytime a Bell Rings

As I've mentioned before, the Tolerance Club at our school sponsors a movie each month. This December we're showing It's a Wonderful Life. It fits with our spotlighted IB learner profile trait, Caring, and it also reinforces our core concept that one person can make a huge positive impact on many lives.

On Monday, we had planned to show a clip to our student members and have them do the advertising for our show tomorrow, but that plan went awry with the inclement weather. (Not complaining!) So, it's been left up to us adult fogies to promote an old black and white movie and encourage a school full of tweens to show and hopefully grow.

It's usually my job to find the trailer that will play on the morning announcements, and so it was with more than a few sighs that I looked at what was available on the internet this afternoon. As a die-hard fan of the film, some of them were certainly sighs of appreciation and even anticipation to share this great movie with a new generation, but there were sighs of consternation as well. Most of the clips were much too anachronistic to draw our students in.

I was about to despair before I found this one:

(If you can't see the image click here. It's really worth it!)

The Wolf of Bedford Falls?

Oh. Yeah.

Private Word Parts

I handed out the weekly word parts to my class today. As is our routine, they received a chart with five Greek and/or Latin word parts, a definition, and an example word. Their job is to look up the exemplar, figure out how the word part definition works with it, and then find another example of their own.

The five word parts for this week were aqua, port, circum, geo, and narr. Soon after receiving it a student approached my desk, his face cloaked in concerned confidentiality.

"Can I use the word "circumcise" for my example?" he asked, sotto voce.

"I wouldn't," I answered him, honestly.

"I know what it means," he told me.

I nodded, but before I could reply, he continued.

"AND, I know how it fits the word part. Circum? Means "around," and cise means "cut"!"

"Very good," I said, and I meant it-- his response was a paragon of word study precepts-- "but imagine the conversations we'll have to have if you put that word on the board."

"I'm mature," he assured me. "I can handle it."

Not me! I inwardly cringed, and in the end we agreed that it could be his private example.

Off Season

Evidently, most people don't care to go to the doctor in a snow storm. That must be why both Heidi's and my doctors' offices called this morning to bump up our pre-existing appointments to today, if possible. School was cancelled, but to be honest, the roads were fine when I headed out for my 10 AM, and they continued to improve by the time we left to go to Heidi's noon time slot.

Ordinarily, such a visit requires either making sub plans or a mad dash out at the end of the school day only to tap your toes for a while in the waiting room, but today we were in and out in record time in both offices with no wait at the labs either.

Afterwards, we stopped by a similarly deserted Barnes and Noble and then went out to lunch.

Oh, we'll be back to school tomorrow, for sure, but this pre-holiday holiday has been a measurable blessing-- both of our blood pressures were way below their usual marks.

Like a Little Miracle

No school today, and maybe, just maybe, no school tomorrow, either? Wouldn't that be something?

P.S. Enjoy the snow!

Sixteen Shopping Days

I couldn't have ordered up a better day: snow falling, fire crackling, phone ringing, and internet blazing. Christmas here we come!

A Kindness of Strangers

Pride of lions, school of fish, murder of crows-- what can we call a group of people?

We were rushing this evening to get our weekend errands done; snow and ice are predicted for tomorrow, and we had spent the day at a workshop at school. It was nearly dark when I slipped the car into a space on the far aisle of the parking lot at Target.

Our tree was at home falling in the stand, and I reckoned I could consolidate grocery and sundry into a single stop. The air was cold, but the good kind of December cold that kind of smells like smoke and wakes you up like a friendly little clap on the cheeks, and a pretty yellow crescent moon lounged in the eastern sky, and so our spirits were high, a spring in our steps even at the end of this long day.

A young woman pushing a cart with a little girl in the toddler seat approached us. She, too, seemed happy that her shopping was through and we exchanged smiles with her. A few paces later, she called to us. "You should have these," she said, thrusting a couple of slips of high gloss paper into my hand. We thanked her and continued on our way, and when we got inside we saw that they were coupons for 20% off everything we bought today.

At the end of our visit, it rang up to a 25 dollar savings, and we still had one coupon left. "Give me that," Heidi said, and went off to find someone to share it with.

Hunting and Gathering

A long time ago, when I was younger and had much less stuff, I used to like shopping a lot more than I do now. In those days, it was almost like a sport, and I could spend hours prowling the mall, and a visit to the big warehouse store near us to scope out the possibilities was at least a biweekly event. Nobody there ever asks you if you found everything you needed, because it's understood that that's your job.

But times have changed for me and I couldn't tell you the last time I was at the mall, much less Costco (which I still insist on calling Price Club). Well, I couldn't tell you before today, because through a series of events, I left school early this afternoon. I was in my car by 1 PM, and on my way home I did stop at Costco.

Maybe our school canned food drive was on my mind (for the first time ever, no students in my homeroom have contributed a single food item), or maybe I was thinking that we needed snacks for both Tolerance Club and Writing Club, or maybe it was some sort of phantom holiday habit, but whatever it was, I suddenly believed it would be a great idea to go there.

There had been some changes since my last visit. If possible, I think the carts are even larger, and there were some tall refrigerated units near the back that were kind of new. Otherwise, the place seemed the same, but that is not why I went there. Like in the old days, I went to see what new quarry awaited this consumer. What huge things could I track down and fill my huge cart with to wait in that huge line and pay a relatively huge amount of money for, given the bounty of bargains I usually bag?

And, in the hour I was there, I walked every aisle and looked at hundreds of items. I almost bought many of them, too, but in the end I left behind the fleece pajamas, the fold-flat hand truck, all the boxed sets of books my students would borrow and probably never return, the 30 pack of neon post-its, the new phones, the 60 white cleaning cloths, and the ten pound bag of grapefruit, and in addition to the 29 food items I purchased for the drive, and the 108 snacks I bought, I only got 2 big jars of Dijon mustard, a pound and a half of assorted Lindnor truffles, A big thing of toasted coconut cashews for Heidi's brother, two pounds of grape tomatoes, 600 generic benadryl, and 350 extra strength Tylenol.

Hopefully, that Tylenol will last a while.