Epicenter

Every quarter I do a little map-making activity with my reading class. When asked if he had any advice for young writers, Newbury award author Jack Gantos suggested the following:

The first tip is to get a good journal or small notebook—not too big as you want to be able to slip it into your back pocket. Then get a decent pen. Then I want you to draw a map of your house, or a map of your neighborhood, or map of your school and I want you to draw where everything funny, serious, insane, unexpected, heroic, lousy, triumphant and tragic took place. And then I want you to think about your life as the best material in the world, and each one of your small drawings where something interesting happened will be the opening material for your story.

And so we do. I share a map of the neighborhood where I lived from the ages of 4-10, and every student creates a map of someplace special to them. Having looked at over 200 maps, I've concluded that it's human nature to place your place in the middle of the action, and so every time we look at my map I make the joke that my house just happened to be at the center of the neighborhood, and probably the universe, too.

So I wasn't surprised today as I circulated through the room while the students worked to see that most of them had started in the center of their paper and worked outward, not surprised at all. That is until one student noticed my gaze. "What?" she asked.

"Nothing," I shrugged. "I like your map-- it's great!"

"Thanks!" she answered, "But did you see? My house really is the center of the neighborhood! All the other houses are around it."

"I did see that!" I told her. "What a coincidence!"

Travel Arrangements

We were talking about field trip transportation at leadership team today. Forgive me if I'm repeating my dismay, but it really is appalling that there are no more buses available unless we charge the students for the ride. "We should call Uber," the person next to me whispered when administration encouraged us to consider the subway.

"Or maybe Schoober," I answered her. We laughed quietly as the conversation turned to cost analysis. Three hours for a rented school bus would be cheaper than taking 50 kids on the metro, and more convenient, too. 

"That's only if you have a full bus," someone pointed out.

Riding with a full bus? Looking around, that seemed unlikely, if you know what I mean.

Wait. What?

Today, here in Virginia, the time came when I could have risen from my desk, gone down the hall to get Heidi, and taken off for the courthouse to get a marriage license.

It didn't happen, today, but it could have. And it will.

No! Just No

Sunday night already?

Oh, weekend, I had so much more hope in you.

The Torch Has Passed

My dad was a big baseball fan, and so when I was growing up there was usually a game on in the background from April to October. Back then, if I watched at all, I associated the guys on the field with my dad or my uncles; Brooks Robinson? Tom Seaver? Reggie Jackson? To me, they were grown ups playing a grown up game. 

Later, when I had graduated from college and was living with my father again, the background became foreground, and we all became fans of the New York Mets. Those guys seemed more like older brothers, or cousins, and we celebrated right along with Lenny Dykstra, Mookie Wilson, and Keith Hernandez in 1986 when they won the World Series.

It's been years since I've followed baseball that closely, even though my town has been a MLB town for the last eleven years. People here love their baseball, and with both the Orioles and the Nationals in the playoffs, now seems like a good time to tune in. So tonight as I cooked dinner, I watched the Nats hang on to a tenuous one run lead into the top of the ninth. Oh, we're on pins and needles here, but all I can think about is when did the players get so young? Any one of them could have been a student in my class not so very long ago-- Ryan Zimmerman? 1996. Stephen Strasberg? 2000. That cute Anthony Rendon? 2002.

Go get 'em kids!

Children, Behave

If I were to file one complaint about my students this year it would be that so many of them find that annoying prank of hiding a classmate's pencil, paper, eraser, book, etc. to be so very entertaining. Upwards of 5 times a day I am called to solve the case of the missing whatever, and the culprit is nearly always the student in the next seat.

It was the last class of the week today when I had had quite enough of such shenanigans and so plaintively addressed the group, "Can we all just agree that we're not going to waste each other's time anymore by hiding the things we need to get our work done?"

My request was met by silence and downcast eyes, and several pencils were quietly slid across the table in return to their owners. One student, however, was not in total agreement, and although he did turn over the pencil in his possession to the boy who brought it to class. "How much time do you think it takes?" he asked me. "30 seconds?"

I shrugged. "That's 30 seconds of your life you'll never get back," I answered in rebuttal. "And 30 seconds of mine, too, since I had to resolve the situation."

"Yeah," he said, "but my thirty seconds were FUN!"

Critical Success

Today's lesson involved a "poetry sort." The kids in my classes were given a collection of action poems written by former students. The task was to read all of them, select a couple, and answer questions about them. The next step was to brainstorm lists of 20 of possible topics for their own action poems.

Here's the part I loved-- in every class, without exception, several students asked if they could keep the copies of the model poems because they liked them so much.

That's validation!