Chillin

The sun was brilliant and almost warm as it cut through the 20 degree air at nine o'clock this morning.  My step was light, and, well-prepared against the elements in cashmere scarf, mittens, and sun glasses, I admired the icy blue of the cloudless sky and the icy clouds of my breath as I walked toward school. No Polar Vortex here, yet, just a cold day in January, the kind that makes me happy to be alive and outside.

We'll see what tomorrow brings.

Just Doing My Part

With slushy snow expected later this afternoon and plummeting temperatures overnight, our district called an audible and scheduled an early release for today. Students and most staff left the building an hour and 20 minutes ago leaving me in the quiet of my classroom to look over a few things for the lessons tomorrow and later this week, send a couple of emails, and work on finalizing the Quarter 2 grades that are due at midnight. I've let it be known that I don't expect to be here tomorrow, but my friend Mary said the best way to insure that the weather cooperates is to be ready to go; Leaving things undone with the presumption of a snow day always backfires, so here I am.

Full Court Press

Co-teaching definitely has its benefits, especially when there 131 of anything to grade and comment on. Such was the case this weekend when the big assignment for the quarter came due right before grades were due. In the end, I probably graded a few more than half, with my colleagues and student teacher filling in the rest.

Go team!

Smells Like Home

True confession: we do love our friend Sarah's dog Beckett, who happens to be 1-year-old today. She is also our dog walker, and so Lucy and Beckett are fast friends as well. He started spending time at our house back when he was only a 10 week old 2 pound bundle of fluff with icy blue eyes, and he would be still be welcome here anytime, too, if it weren't for his unpleasant habit of marking things that smell a little less or a little too whatever to his liking. The shag rug in our living room is an inviting indoor lawn to him, and it is more than aggravating to watch him every second only to have him piss on something the minute your attention wanders.

But today is his birthday, and Sarah is working all weekend at the dive shop where she is an instructor, so it seemed a little harsh to leave him home alone. After a long walk on the National Mall, we brought him back here. "Maybe he's outgrown it?" I suggested hopefully, but 30 seconds later he was peeing all over a basket of tennis balls that many, many dogs had drooled on.

As I cleaned up the mess, Heidi researched our dilemma. "They say to soak a bandana in his urine and then put it around his neck," she reported. "That way, everything will already smell like him to him." I clapped my hands and laughed, delighted by the elegance of the solution, and fished the paper towel I had just used to clean the basket out of the trash. After wrapping it around his collar, we sat back to watch. Was it only our imagination that he relaxed and stopped frantically sniffing? In moments he was engaging Lucy in play, and the need to make this place smell like his place seemed to vanish.

A little while later we went out to run errands, and at the top of the list was a birthday gift for the Becketty Boy. "How about this bandana?" I asked Heidi.

Winter White

I do love a winter walk, and one of our favorite places to go is about 30 minutes from home. It's a national wildlife refuge with a wooded path that winds down and around a wetland before looping back. The place is known for its eagles, but right around this time of year there are often hundreds of Tundra Swans raising a ruckus on the Great Marsh. We were a little early today; only a half dozen or so swans dozed among all the ducks on the bay.

One year we were also ahead of the flock, but as we made our way up the last 50 yards to the parking lot, the sky was suddenly filled with white wings and an incredible racket of honking and flapping. The hullabaloo continued overhead even after we reached our car and headed home under a cloud of swans.

Members Only

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."