Never Before

Today we told our students what we expected should schools close. We're lucky that they have all been issued personal devices, and we have been given time to plan for tele-learning opportunities.

As for me, my students are deep into the 100 Day writing Challenge, and my main expectation is that they will continue to write and share their work daily on the discussion board of our online learning platform. "It will be nice to hear from you every day!" I said, "and it's kind of lucky we can all stay connected like that."

Kids were generally positive about the plan, but today the mood had shifted a bit. It seemed like the gravity of the whole situation finally hit them. Gone was most of the gleeful excitement that surrounds unexpected school cancellations, replaced by some genuine anxiety and overall uncertainty. Of course they look to us for reassurance. They've only been on the planet for 12 years or so, and everything is still new.

"You've been teaching here a long time, right?" one boy asked me this morning.

"Yep," I nodded, "27 years."

"How many times has school been canceled for a disease?" he asked.

No Looking Back

Like my friend Mary at Scattered Thoughts did yesterday, I stopped by the grocery on my way home today. In general, I feel we are well-provisioned to stay at home for a while if need be, but it never hurts to stock the pantry a little bit more. At 4:30 in the afternoon, it was rather quiet, and aside from the sanitizers, most everything else was on the shelves or being refilled as I shopped.

The big news for us was running into a good friend who is also a teacher, buying lobster dinners and steak, seeing a current student and his mom, shopping for cereal and milk, and then being stopped by a tall young man in his mid-20s.

"TJ?" he asked, using the nickname of our school.

I looked closely at him, and somehow the last 13 years faded from his adult face so that for a minute I could see the boy he was in 2006-7. "Philip?" I said, and he smiled wide.

"I can't believe you remember me!" he said, but then cast his eyes down. "Well, I guess I can," and I knew he was thinking of some of the trouble he had gotten into in middle school.

"What are you doing now?" I asked, changing the subject.

He told me he had been in the army and was now training to be a firefighter. I thanked him for his service, and he filled me in on some of the guys he kept in touch with.

"You should come by school one day to see if it's changed," I invited him.

"No way!" he said.

"You know you're welcome anytime!" I laughed. "If you change your mind... or the place catches on fire."

I Didn't Even Know He Was Sick

The whole sixth grade went on a field trip to George Washington's Mount Vernon today. It's an excellent field trip that for us consists mostly of a self-guided tour of the estate. As such, small groups of students tour the mansion and then roam the lawn and ramble the trails down to the wharf, sixteen-sided barn, gardens, and out buildings, ending up in the education center, which has lots of interesting interactive exhibits.

It's only about a half hour from our school, and some kids have been there before, but others haven't. I tell the former group that I have been there at least 25 times, and every time I learn something new and really cool. Today it was the demonstration on colonial cooking. Who knew that wealthy early Americans refused to eat yellow cornmeal? White? Sure, but yellow corn was animal feed to them. Ptooey!

In that way, Mount Vernon is always a fun and novel experience to me, but maybe not quite as new as it is to some of the kids. "I can't believe George Washington died!" one little girl told me today. "It's just so sad."

Maybe Not

Our students are writing children's stories as the summative task for the fiction unit. After giving them the tools and knowledge to analyze plot, setting, and character, we have them create their own character and give him or her a problem to solve. They might also invent an antagonist or a sidekick to hinder or help the hero.

In order to have a solid start, there is a character questionnaire based on one that Nancie Atwell uses in her writers workshop, and today was the day when students started to flesh out their protagonists.

"Can I have my character be on one of the planes from 9/11?" a young writer asked me.

I frowned. "It's supposed to be a children's story," I reminded him.

"It's history," he replied. "Kids need to know history."

I looked at him doubtfully.

"It will definitely be a children's story," he assured me.

I raised my eyebrows quizzically.

"I'm going to make it rhyme!" he promised.

Maintaining the Status Quo

I think DST has finally won. Despite my past annual rants, I don't really miss my hour at all, and I am rather resigned to dragging around for a few days before I get used to the...

Wait a minute!

get used

to the

obnoxious,
ridiculous,
pointless,
no good

time change, which only burdens those of us who are forced to rise early, and only benefits those people who have the luxury of sleeping late by providing extra daylight when their work day is over?

Never!

If they got up with us, they would have plenty of light at the end of the day!

Cures for the Cold

There was a chill in my bones that no number of steaming mugs could banish this morning. At 9 AM I blew into my hands, stamped my slippers, and still shivered in my layers.  I figured I had a choice: I could warm up through activity, or I could build a fire and pull up a fuzzy blanket. Outside my windows the sky was blue and the sun was bright, but the bend of the bare branches told another tale, one of biting breezes from the north.

Once a cheerful little blaze was burning in the fireplace, I stepped out to the wood rack to stock up on firewood before I got under that blanket. We were a bit low on small logs, so I began to split wood. As I swung the sledge, I remembered what my friend Rob used to tell me in college. Some people build small fires to stay warm. Other people build big fires and stay warm by chopping wood. I laughed, because I did feel warmer, especially out in that blue sky and sunshine.

Back inside, the cats and I enjoyed that fire for an hour or so, and then I took the dog and went hiking.

In Formation

I heard the clattering honks before I saw them. It was impossible to ignore the raucous spectacle, and so I stopped to appreciate the ragged vee of fifty or so geese flying over my head this morning. As they flew, three or four of them detached from the rear at the same time the others slowed the pace to first swallow and then follow the new leaders. In the brief time they were in my line of sight this exchange happened twice.

Flying seems like hard work; how could it be otherwise?

I wondered why human beings don't use such a method more often. We are so focused on specialization that leadership has become a thing of its own, rather than a shared responsibility for the good of the group. And instead of being fluid, our hierarchies are often so rigid.

Soon enough, the geese were gone, efficiently winging their way to their common destination, and I returned my attention to earth.