Ode to PGH

Oh, Pittsburgh!

You continue to delight me. You are so unassuming, and so pleasant. When the department store anchoring your nascent waterfront destination shopping district closes, you open a maker's market full of cool, local, handmade stuff. Parking for your downtown Christmas Market is cheap and so convenient to the stalls loaded with authentic, traditional items imported from Europe.

One merry block over the skating and holiday decorations of the PPG Plaza twinkle day and night. And just inside the towering glass castle of No. 1 PPG Place, the Wintergarden Atrium has been transformed to a gingerbread neighborhood of over 400 houses, churches, schools, and stadiums made by real people, and children play carols on the grand piano for the assembled crowd.

And your bridges! Soaring, beautiful, and functional! They span your rivers and and link your ridges with pride. No longer are you an isolated, frontier boom town built on coal, steel, and grit, or an anonymous blue collar city on the threshold of middle America.

Today your history and culture are open to all who are willing to go west on the turnpike, and oh! How much you have to offer to any who make the trip!

The Journey

Over Rivers and bridges and through rain and tunnels and under mountains and...

Christmas Lights!

Let the holiday shopping begin!

Peanuts

It started out as an easy set of lessons to coast into the Thanksgiving Holiday. My classes were working on literary essays about character, and The Peanuts Movie seemed like an engaging and accessible common text, loaded with familiar characters that would give some students a little scaffolding. With a running time of just over 90 minutes, showing the film episodically would easily fill the last three days before the break.

I owned the movie, and I had used the first 15 minutes for an activity I did last year, but I had never seen the whole thing. Even so, I was not concerned about inappropriate content, and I was confident that I could make it work with the assignment. And so there I was, watching most of it for the first time right along with my first period class.

For those who are not familiar, the plot revolves around Charlie Brown and his crush on the little red-haired girl who moves in across the street. Many of the well-known features of both the comic strip and classic animated shorts are present. The movie opens on a snow day where all the characters ice skate around an unsuccessful attempt at flying a kite by Charlie Brown. Sally is his adorably self-involved younger sister, Linus, his sincere and intellectual best friend, Lucy, the brutally honest kid who runs the neighborhood, and Snoopy, his wildly eccentric pet beagle. Woodstock, Peppermint Patty, Marcy, Schroeder, Patty, Violet, Pigpen, Shermy, and Franklin are all in the movie, too.

Although the story starts out formulaically, the tone is a little bit warmer than that of past Peanuts shows. When the kids return to school and meet their new neighbor, a smitten Charlie Brown vows to capture her attention. What follows is a refreshing string of near successes. He puts together a terrific magic act for the talent show, but then sacrifices it to save Sally. When he notices that the little red-haired girl likes to dance, Snoopy teaches him to dance and he practices well enough to actually win a contest, only to accidentally set off the sprinkler system before he gets to dance with her.

The streak continues when he gets a perfect score on the standardized test, and at last everyone recognizes him as intelligent and knowledgeable. Sally guides tours through their home, and kids pay to watch him sit in his chair and read. When book reports are assigned, he gets the little girl as his partner, and because she is out of town, he reads War and Peace in its entirety and writes a book report which Linus calls insightful and “beyond reproach”.

Oh, his luck doesn’t last long, but as I watched I realized how anxious Charlie Brown has made me all my life. Those kids scrape and scrabble through their lives without adult supervision or support. Their words and actions reveal the tension between civilized society and brutish self-interest, and Charlie Brown is the perpetual goat. Witnessing him win for a change was amazingly cathartic, and healed something in me that I didn’t even know was broken. At the very end, when the little red-haired girl acknowledges all he has accomplished throughout the movie (in perfect claim-evidence form) there was a huge lump in my throat, and I would have wept openly had I been watching it alone.

I think kids love Peanuts because it represents a world they know well, harsh but true. I love The Peanuts Movie, though, because it represents a kinder world; one I hope is also true.

As I Do

The final class of students had left for the day and my co-teaching team breathed a sigh. We took a few minutes to debrief and finalize planning for the next day. The task is for students to use a protocol of question stems to explore passages from a short story we read together. As we talked, I brought up some of the details that I had noticed and shared some of the thinking and writing I did using the thought prompts we gave the students. We spent the next 15 minutes dissecting the text and the motivation of the main character.

“Wow!” said one of the other teachers. “That was deep!”

I pointed to the learning target on the board: I can think, talk, and write to explore the details of the text.

“Bullseye!” I cheered. “Now let’s see if we can get the students there, too!”

On My Shoulders

I love the light this time of year.

The angle of the sun is so long that it casts warm, gorgeous gold on even the coldest afternoons which subsides to fiery orange, smoldering red, and then cool silhouettes of purple and black. Even on cloudy days, the light finds a way-- igniting billowing stacks of cumuli in a last blaze before darkness, or casting dark pink rays up and under the somber gray dawn.

It was just such a light I saw this morning, painting the buff underwings of a pair of hawks rose and coral as they circled on the warming air.

And a New Building on the Side

They've been building an elementary school about 20 yards from my classroom window for the last year or so. The building is scheduled to open next September, but right now it's a fascinating tangle of steel beams and back hoes, which are way more captivating than the ginormous hole in the ground that was the site last school year. The work also invites a daily parade of colorful construction crew members and their unusual tools and tasks right by my window the entire time I'm teaching.

My co-teacher pulled the blinds on the show this afternoon, and I understand why he did that, but I'm also of the mind that if children are never distracted, they will never learn to focus. Plus we have plenty of distraction in the classroom, too: we can't block it all out for them.

Even so, the adults that gathered in my room for our semi-monthly leadership team meeting were drawn to the spectacle, too. When the last two teachers left after the meeting, one turned to me with a mock bow. "Thank you for letting us meet in your room," she started. "You are always the host with the most..." She paused, looking for the perfect compliment. Just then the room shook from some epic construction task.

"The most activity outside my window?" I supplied for her.

Nothing New

I was walking in to school behind a bunch of kids this morning when I noticed one of my students dipping a candy pacifier into some weird blue powder and eating it. "It tastes like chemicals!" he cried, "but I like it!"

"Candy in the morning?" I shook my head as I passed them by.

"Twenty-first century breakfast!" he answered.