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It started with a student request. She wanted to start an anime club, but needed a room and an adult to supervise. Would I do it? she asked. Most of my afternoons are already filled with meetings and other commitments, but I have a hard time not supporting kids who want to create something on their own. Such initiative seems like the most authentic application of the lessons we are trying to teach. Even so, it was reluctance that I agreed, and only in the event that they could find no one else to take on the responsibility. Plus, I don't even like Anime that much.

And so it was that on Friday afternoons from 2:30 to 3:30 I found myself at the epicenter of 15-20 tweens eating chips, texting their friends, and watching Yuri on Ice or My Hero Academia or the like, and SCREAMING!

"Guys! Guys! Guys!" I tried to shout over them, putting the video on pause. "It's cool that you love this so much! It's not cool for you to scream!"

In response, they screamed more quietly. And at 3:30 this afternoon as the Anime Club literally screamed out my door, several of my colleagues stopped by.

"What a crew!" said the first. "Bless your heart!"

"Look at you!" said the next. "Kids that never say a word in class are screaming and laughing in here!"

"Are they driving you crazy?" asked the third.

I smiled weakly, and the throbbing in my head ebbed with the kinder, gentler company. "It's their club," I said, "I just give them the space and my adult presence." Then we laughed.

It used to be that Friday afternoon was a quiet time for me to either look ahead to the coming week, or quietly reflect on the week that has just passed. Now it's just a good time to recover from the Anime Club.

That Rascal

It's the final push for the end of the quarter, and I had one student ask if he could miss PE and electives to stay and finish his essay outline. Usually I would have encouraged him to come back after school, especially since he hadn't really used his class time productively, but he had a wrestle-off to see if he could win a spot in the meet next week. So I sent him to his teachers with a pass and a request. He was back before too long, shaking his head in mild dismay.

"What did they say?" I asked.

"What's a scoundrel?" he replied.

"Why?" I asked in return.

It turns out that his tech ed teacher dismissed him without prejudice, but his Spanish teacher was another story.

"She yelled at me!" he reported. "She said I probably didn't do my work, and she called me a scoundrel!"

"She called you that in English?" I questioned him.

"No! In Spanish!" he said.

"What word is that?" I asked.

"Sinvergüenza," he told me. "I looked it up on the way back, and it means--

"Scoundrel," we said together.

"Yeah!" he said. "What does it mean?"

"It means someone who is kind of mischievous and gets into trouble sometimes for breaking the rules."

"Oh," he shrugged. "I guess that is me."

A Civilized Hour

"Wouldn't it be nice if we went to work at this time every day?" Heidi asked rhetorically as I shuttled her to school a little before 9 yesterday morning. Our district had called a 2 hour delay because of the extreme cold. I was off anyway for my annual physical, but since I was up I offered to give her a ride. "The sun is shining," she noted. "I feel rested," she continued, "ready for the day."

I thought of that conversation this morning as we dragged ourselves out of bed at the usual 5:30 alarm. Heidi had been up most of the night coughing, and neither of us had gotten much sleep: another two hours would have been welcome.

"Heart conditions and sleep deprivation are correlated," my doctor told me yesterday. "Now that you're over 55..."

One Year Over the Speed Limit

I really didn't feel any different after my last birthday; I personally like to think I'm aging both gradually and gracefully. But after my annual physical today, I'm beginning to wonder about that, especially considering the number of times I heard the phrase, Now that you're over 55...

Auntie Up

We haven’t seen Josh since he returned from his world travels. Understandably, he’s been working extra hours to catch up on the time he missed while in Africa. Even so, we have been exchanging texts with him, looking for a mutually convenient time to get together and catch up. Tonight he initiated the contact:

hey hey guys im free on thursday! still down for dinner?

Yep, we answered, how about 5?

yeah! is it ok if i bring my girlfriend?

Of course, we said, but it was a bit of a surprise, considering we didn’t know he was seeing anyone. He must like her, though, if he’s ready for her to meet the aunties!

But Who's Counting?

I had a four day weekend last week because of the snow; this week a combination of the MLK holiday and my annual physical provide another short work week, and the following week there is a teacher work day and a CLT retreat resulting in one more 3-day teaching week.

Who knows how I'll feel when February dawns that Friday promising a couple of full weeks ahead? (Unless, of course, it snows again before Presidents Day and our family Oscar holiday.) In any event, I'm confident that those 6 weeks to spring break after that will fly by in a productive blur, as will the nine weeks left in the year when we return.

This is the point in the school year when the teeter totter tips toward seventh grade for my students. The second quarter is ending, and soon they will select their courses for next year. Fortunately, they don't realize it, but I sure do.

They Say So Much

"Do you like sad songs?" a student asked me yesterday.

"Yes," I answered without hesitation.

"Then you should hear Train food," he told me. "It. is. sad." He looked me directly in the eyes, and I believed him.

I handed him one of the post-it notes I was carrying around as I helped students clarify the claims for their essays and find evidence to put in the outline. "Write it down and I'll listen to it," I said.

"It might have bad language in it," he warned me.

"I've heard cussing before," I assured him taking the pink square of paper and tucking it in my pocket.

I wondered what this child who pushed everyone away and had already lived such a hard life could find so sad.

When I checked out the song I found that it was by a young rap artist named XXXTentacion who was killed in a robbery attempt early last summer at the age of 20. Train food is a track on his posthumously released album and tells the story of a young man kidnapped by death and left on the train tracks to die. It has haunting background sounds and ends abruptly with what is presumably the death of the narrator. It's almost too sad to be sad, but it is pretty eerie, especially given the artists early death.

More importantly, I could see why my student found it so moving, and I'll be glad to have something to talk with him about. Who knows? Maybe we'll even find a connection.