Swing and a Miss

"I really like this pen," one of my students told me, grabbing it off my desk without permission. "Can I have it?"

I was hardly surprised by his impulsivity and boundary-bending, and I decided to use the situation as leverage. "Do you solemnly swear to use this pen for good?" I asked playfully. "Use it to complete your assignments thoughtfully and neatly and work hard for the rest of the class period? So help you--"

"I do!" he told me seriously.

"Then you may have it." I bestowed the pen upon him with a cheerful flourish and a smile. "Get to work! I'll check in with you in a few minutes."

As he headed back to his seat purposefully it almost seemed like the pen might do the trick, but when I touched base with him, he was off-task with nothing written.

"Hey!" I said. "You promised you were going to get some writing done!"

He looked at me, confused. "I was lying!" he explained.

I frowned, discouraged.

"I thought you knew!" he said, and handed me the pen.

Counterclaim

I moved a student's seat closer to where I was working with another student so that the first student might be less distracted. The first guy did not appreciate my support.

"I didn't do anything!" he declared indignantly.

"I promise if that were true, I would have left you where you were," I told him. "I'm too busy to bother with false accusations."

He insisted he had been doing exactly as he was expected, and to save both of us some time I outlined why I had moved him. "1, you weren't doing the assignment," I started.

"I was getting ready to," he said.

"2, you were talking to people around you, preventing them from doing their work."

"They were talking to me!" he claimed.

"3, you are argumentative. You don't listen to me when I redirect you, instead you argue with everything I say, even when you know I'm right."

He paused. He knew he shouldn't say a word, and I could see the struggle on his face. In the end it was too much for him, though. "No I don't!" he insisted.

I raised an eyebrow.

He got to work.
Briefly.

Unpredictable

The day did not go as I pictured it.

I never imagined that on the first morning back from break one of the first people I would see was that oppositional student walking down the hallway with a quart of Mountain Dew in his hand, just itching for someone to tell him it wasn't allowed in school. And I certainly didn't anticipate that my cross-century VCR-Smart Board hook-up would fail, so that my homeroom and I would be unable to watch the morning announcements. And I never saw it coming when the boy who used to refuse to take off his coat but had been quite cooperative before the winter holidays would return to his former stance: Yeah, I'm just going to have to say no to following that rule, he told me.

"Wow!" I confessed out loud to my homeroom, "This year is something else already!"

But, 18 days off does have some restorative power, and each of those snafus was resolved with patience and a little outside grace. And not all the surprises today were bad. When asked to pick one little word to capture what he wanted more of in his life, a student known for his negativity chose "kindness" because there just isn't enough of it in middle school. And he ended his paragraph with, I can be nicer and so can everyone else.

HBD Bob

The meal gets a little less time-honored over the last 30+ years: first I substituted green beans for the peas; next the mashed potatoes became just a little lighter; now, the biscuits are sweet potato; the chicken is free-range and mostly white meat, and there is even a vegan version for Heidi. Even so, tonight on what would have been my dad's 84th birthday, we will sit down to chicken with white gravy and biscuits, and I will think of him, as I have all day.

Hold Outs

Tomorrow is 12th Night, the Epiphany, and the day when many pack up and put away their holiday decorations for another year. And when the sun came out unexpectedly this afternoon after a considerable stretch of gray skies and rain, it became clear that the days are indeed growing longer, even in just the two weeks since the solstice. Holiday clearance tables have given way to streamlined aisles, bins for organization, and Valentines Day candy. It's impossible to find parking at the gym, and school is back in session on Monday.

Christmas is over.

But not at our house!

Of course, we'll return to work as scheduled, and already our meals are a little lighter, and saving is the new spending. All the cookies are gone, but taking down the tree can wait a few more days, and the candles that light each window at dusk will stay until spring. So will the lighted sign that simply reads JOY, because some things transcend the season.

Get off the Couch

I've been taking it easy since my scooter mishap a week ago. It turns out I bruised a little bit more than just my ego. My hand is getting better, but I also banged my chest on the handle as I went down, and that injury has been painful and slower to heal. Ibuprofen, the heating pad, breathing exercises, but most of all, rest, are the recommended remedies for my condition, and I have been using them all.

There may have also been some collateral damage to my self-image. "Are you going to scooter again?" Annabelle asked after the accident. "Of course!" I answered without hesitation, but I've definitely lost a little of my sense of invincibility: I feel more fragile, and life's dangers have been brought into sharp focus. Gone is my unwavering love for scootering, invalidating at least a half-dozen blog entries, and everything seems a little more scary now.

You are pushing 60! I think sometimes, as I inhale 1-2-3-4, Why would you do anything so risky? hold 1-2-3-4-5-6-7 Stay on the couch and read! exhale 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8. Do some writing! Take some Advil!

And it was on the couch with the heating pad on high that I was lying as we watched the finale of Survivor Season 37 the other night. The show actually had its traditional live wrap-up episode a few weeks ago, but we were busy with the holidays and missed it. Gone are the days when discovering the winner of this granddaddy of reality shows was a huge media event, and it wasn't even hard to shield ourselves from spoilers. So, we slogged through the three hour conclusion with a minimum of fast-forwarding, although I confess to always finding that ultimate tribal council tiresome and even boring.

This is the part of the show where the final three survivors are questioned by the jury, which consists of the last seven contestants voted out. The finalists have to answer for their game play and explain how they outwitted, outplayed, and outlasted their competitors, but to me it's just too much talking. It seems doubtful that anything they say can really influence the votes at that point, especially since they are still playing the game.

More interesting for me is the reunion segment at the end, where everyone is interviewed in hindsight, after the winner has been announced. The former survivors are often nearly unrecognizable, having had several months to recover from the 39 day ordeal and always so carefully dressed and groomed for TV. To be sure, the spotlight is still on them, but with the game so far behind them, their comments ring more true and insightful. They talk not just about their strategy, but also about how the experience changed their lives: what they wanted, what they got.

It was in this context that Mike White reminded me of something I know, but sometimes forget. A successful actor and writer, White seemed neither surprised nor dismayed by coming in second in the million dollar competition. When Jeff Probst asked him about his desire to play the game, he said, "As a writer you don't want just spend your whole life observing life. You want to just live it... and for me, I don't want to spend all my creativity on my work; I want to spend it on living, even if it means embarrassing myself in front of millions of viewers. It means you have to take a chance and live the adventure-- get off your computer."

He's right of course, and his advice holds true, not just for writers, but for aging scooterers, too. 

Tall Order

We started our first-of-the-year movie marathon with a short sprint of 2 movies in 2 days. Yesterday it was Vice and today we saw The Favourite. The acting was terrific, but both were ultimately unsatisfying to me.

Each bio-pic was an interesting meditation on power, exploring in particular strategies that women have historically had to resort to in order to gain power. As such, Amy Adams, Rachel Weisz, and Emma Stone portray characters who are ruthless and manipulative, understandable, but unlikable. Although they approach power acquisition differently than an equally ambitious male counterpart might, all three women still define power in the traditional, zero-sum way, where to have power you have to take it from someone else and hold on to it.

It's fair to argue that all three characters were simply making the best of a bad situation, but I guess that's where the movies fell short for me. I prefer my heroes to fight injustice by reimagining the corrupt status quo.