Cause for Celebration

I was sitting by the fire enjoying the darkening sky. Josh's graduation party was entering its ninth hour and going strong. In many ways it had been an idyllic day of family, friends, and fun. A gang of cousins and neighbor kids ran through the yard in their swimsuits, playing in the wading pool and squirting each other with pump guns. Folks came and left for other graduation parties and came back, floating inside and outside, eating and drinking and eating some more, tossing bean bags at the corn hole boards. Guitar, ukulele, harmonica jams popped up here and there mingling with the laughter and shouts of the kids, now with ice pops, now roasting hot dogs over the fire for their dinners. And now here I was, enjoying a tiny bit of quiet in the continuing whirl. Two small boys slammed out of the house and ran my way. They were on a mission to find an adult to supervise s'more making. In the dark, they didn't see me until they were almost there. "Look," cheered one to the other, "there's an old lady by the fire! Yay!"

Snark Attack

You might think that an educator, any educator, would be one to appreciate the ceremony, symbolism, and pomp of a graduation ceremony, but I can tell you that you would be wrong.

And yet, people graduate, people you really care about, and there you are, at the ceremony because you wouldn't miss celebrating their accomplishments for the world. But there is still that part of you that really doesn't like graduations, and so you might find yourself fidgeting in a scratchy theater seat making small talk with one of your godson's other aunts while idly flipping through the lengthy program until you happen upon a roll of faculty that includes not just the high school teachers, but the middle and elementary school, too. You sardonically wonder out loud why they have all those people listed. "Well," says the aunt, "I guess it's like they all worked together to get these kids where they are."

Not so crabby now, are ya?

The Measure of All Things

After a long couple of weeks of standardized testing that kicked off with reading, the sixth graders finally took their last test, math, today. At the height of testing madness this morning, after successfully defending my computer cart from others and feeding the students breakfast since they would be quite late to lunch, but when no hall proctors could be found to escort the full-bladdered kids in my group to the restroom, and neither could the testing coordinator be reached to restart a test that failed to submit because the lap top switched wireless networks mid-test, I met the principal on my way to find help. "Are all your students finished already?" she asked.

"Yes," I told her and stepped forward, intent on my mission.

"Oh, by the way," she said.

I turned.

"Congratulations!"

I stopped, mentally groping for the accomplishment she was referring to. She must have seen my confusion.

"On your reading test scores!" she clarified. "Great job!"

I know I managed a smile. "Thank you," I replied and continued on.

Respite

It's the busiest time of the school year, and I worked wall to wall all day with a big pile of work on my desk when I left and some more in my bag to work on when I got home, BUT at 5:30 when I drove past the garden I did not resist the urge to stop. After just fifteen minutes outside in the fresh air weeding and watering, mulching and marveling at the amazing progress my plants make even when I am not there, I felt restored and I continued home to work some more.

Doppelganger

Twilight Zone:

Tonight I shall talk to you about glorious conformity... about the delight and the ultimate pleasure of our unified society... you recall, of course, that directionless, unproductive, over-sentimentalized era of man's history when it was assumed that dissent was some kind of natural and healthy adjunct to society.

We know now that there must be a single purpose! A single norm! A single approach! A single entity of peoples! A single virtue! A single morality! A single frame of reference!

Wikipedia article on PLCs:

When teams learn together there are beneficial results for the organization. It becomes the team, not the individual, that is viewed as the main learning unit. High-quality collaboration has become no less than an imperative.

It is time for everyone to be pointed in the same direction and working on the same agenda! None of us know what all of us know!



Or is it the other way around?

That's a Thing?

This time of year is a bit of a Sargasso Sea of television for us. Regular season shows have had their big finales, but summer shows have yet to debut. Oh, in a week or so, our TIVO will be full of more options than we could ever watch, but I confess to doing a bit of channel surfing my way out of the doldrums over the last few nights.

I was surprised by the several things of interest I found... Anthony Bourdain, the 1960's (!), and Morgan Spurlock on CNN alone. But the most intriguing show of all was the one about tree houses on Animal Planet.

Forgive me if I'm way behind on this, but Pete Nelson and the other Tree House Masters have stolen my TV heart! 

Seek and Ye Shall Find

I can't think of a better way to spend a beautiful Sunday afternoon than zig zagging through DC chasing the answers to a series of goofy puzzles with my nephew, Treat. He and I were among the folks who attended the first ever Post Hunt back in 2008, and it's been an annual tradition since.

Say that the puzzles were easier this year if you must, but we actually solved the end game, and we were only a couple of minutes behind the winners. The weather was gorgeous; the company was great, and so despite the crowd (that neither one of us likes at all), it was a very good day.

In fact, it was everything I was looking for.