Unforgettable

"When were you in sixth grade?" I asked a former student who was all grown up and accompanying her younger sister to the open house this afternoon. "Was it 2005?"

She thought for a moment and then laughed. "No! It was 2004. Remember? My mom was in labor during our conference." She nodded her head toward her sister. "And look who showed up the next day!"

Every Soul a Star

The sixth grade counselor poked her head into my door this afternoon. "Hey!" she said. "Can I ask you a favor?"

Our counselors loop with their students, which means that at any given grade level you only work with any given counselor every three years, or less, when there's turnover in the department. So, even though this is Erin's third year, she's new to our team.

"Of course!" I told her. "Name it!"

"I need to know how many gifted students you have in each class," she said. "The system is kind of glitchy, and it's waaaay easier if you just tell me."

My gradebook was already open and with two clicks I was able to see the information she requested.

"The gifted students have a star by their pictures," she told me, unnecessarily. I nodded, because any teacher who's used the platform before knows that.

"How many stars do you have?" she asked.

"They're all stars!" I answered, messing with her. "In their own ways!"

She laughed.

We're going to get along just great!

The Twain

This year one of my students is the son of one of the other English teachers in our school. Oh, I like her a lot, and I'm really looking forward to teaching him, but it's going to be a little bit of a trip.

For example, this morning in a department breakout session, we were wrangling with how to align the IB MYP with the TCRWP (yeah, they pay us for that!). A main objective for my first writing unit is for students to recognize that their experiences and voices are important, a valid, but hard-to-measure goal. Beyond that, we want to meet the students where they are in terms of skills and crafts and individualize instruction and assessment as much as possible.

Such targets are hard to quantify working with the language and the unit planners we are required to use, but bless her heart, our facilitator was determined to find a way.

"But what do you want the students to learn and know?" she repeated.

Finally I looked at my colleague and smiled in exasperation. "I want Edwin to know his story matters!" I told her.

Please, Tell Me More

Ironically, I never saw Gene Wilder's version of Willie Wonka, but the first R rated movie I ever saw was Blazing Saddles. To be honest it happened by accident: on a hot summer day when I was 12 somebody's mom dropped us off at the Fox Theater down at the Plaza, the outdoor shopping center in our area. In those days, nobody had air conditioning and the nearest mall was half an hour away, so the movies was the only alternative to the pool for cooling off.

I guess someone else picked the movie, and I just followed the crowd and settled into my scratchy red seat with my Goobers, lemonade, and popcorn. When the lights went down I had never heard of Mel Brooks, Cleavon Little, or Gene Wilder, but 93 minutes later I would never forget them.

It wasn't just that the humor and language was so obviously inappropriate for our group, although it really, really was, it was also hilarious. From that day forward, that crazy hair and those pale blue eyes would be instantly recognizable to me, and even in the dumbest movies with the broadest humor, he made me laugh.

Singing Along with the Me Decade

Earlier in the week Heidi discovered she had a stress fracture in one of her feet, and so she has been relegated to a "boot" for at least three weeks. Never one to allow such a thing to slow her down, she has been clunking all over the place including around the Tidal Basin yesterday and all the way to the farmers market and back today.

That last journey must have been a bit challenging, because when we got home she lay down on the floor. "If I have to, I can do anything!" she said through gritted teeth. "I am strong!"

I nodded and frowned. Where had I heard those words before? "Did you mean to quote Helen Reddy?" I asked her.

We laughed when she admitted it was unintentional, and then through the miracle of music streaming we listened to I Am Woman.  It had been about thirty years, and the tempo is slower than I remembered, but the words are pretty powerful for such a catchy tune. We did not stop there, however. After listening to Delta Dawn, Angie Baby, Leave Me Alone, and You and Me Against the World, we put it in I Am Woman radio mode and were treated to an algorithm-curated playlist of songs of the seventies, many of which I hadn't heard since then, but nearly all of which I could identify by artist and sing along with.

I'm talking to you, Mac Davis and Rita Coolidge.

10-4 Good Buddy

Our staff spent several hours on Thursday and Friday in a workshop teaching us cooperative learning "structures" that we are expected to use with our students to keep them interested in our lessons. Some of the strategies were sound, but I have objections to this commercialization of education that pushes artificial bells and whistles to manipulate and trick students into learning rather than genuinely engaging them in meaningful content.

Sigh.

One of the most onerous aspects of the program is the page in the manual (just $36.66 on Amazon) devoted to cheers. Ranging from the literally cheesy (hold an imaginary cheese grater in one hand and an invisible block of cheese in the other; making a grating gesture call out grate, grate, grate!) to the ridiculously complex, I would never ask students to praise anyone in that way.

We were sitting out front a few days ago when a new neighbor stopped to introduce himself. His name was Marty and not only was he a high school English teacher, he also presented us with some cards from his website. "Check it out," he told us. "I'm pretty sure it will exceed your expectations."

Curious, I visited the site after dinner and found a number of videos of Marty in cafes and other open-mis venues riffing in sort of a hybrid slam-poet-performance-artist way on a number of topics. Since I didn't really know what to expect, it's hard to say if what I found exceeded my expectations, but it was kind of interesting in a contemporary expression sort of way. We English teachers seem to work hard at that.

We ran into Marty again this afternoon on our way out to run errands. "Did you have a chance to check out my stuff?" he asked right away, clearly no stranger to assessment.

"Yeah, I did, " I told him, no stranger to accountability myself. "I watched the clip of you riffing about eating. I think it was recorded in Fredericksburg? Good stuff!"

He beamed, pleased with the evidence that I had watched with attention. "I'm going to spend some time this weekend working on new material," he said.

I nodded and then asked him about a local open-mic night that is within walking distance. "I'm going to check that out soon," he smiled.

"Let us know when you do," I shrugged. "Maybe we'll come down and support you!"

Or, I could have pulled on an imaginary trucker horn and cried HONK HONK HONK, and then grabbed my invisible CB radio and squawked, "Great job, Marty!"

Case in Point

This afternoon my friend Mary and I gave a ride to a new teacher at our school who has just moved to the area from Wisconsin. "This place seems so big!" she told us as we made small talk on the way to our county-wide department meeting.

"I know it does," I laughed, "but it's really much more of a small town."

"Especially teaching middle school," Mary agreed. "You'll be surprised at how many people you know in a year or two."

"So no honking or flipping off people," I warned her. "You never know who it might be!"

A little while later, the facilitator of one of my breakout sessions directed us to form groups of three with people around us. "Make sure you pick people you don't know very well," she told us firmly.

I looked to my right and made eye contact with a high school teacher I know slightly. He happens to be married to a former colleague, and both of his daughters went to our school. The two of us formed a group with a nearby teacher from another high school.

We introduced ourselves, and through the course of the conversation we discovered that not only had I taught both of their daughters, the other guy had taught my nephew and was a current colleague of the first guy's wife.