Faking and Making

One of my homeroom students asked if he could "stay after class" to talk to me. When all the other students had left the call, he said that he was having a situation with one of his teachers. "Part of the problem is that she's not good at technology," he explained. 

"We're all doing our best," I told him sympathetically.

"I know," he admitted, "but she's not professionally trained or anything, like you."

"I'm glad you have confidence in me!" I laughed. "Now let's see what we can do about that misunderstanding."

Left to Carry On

We spent a little time last weekend watching the new bio-pic about Helen Reddy. Telling the tale of her hardscrabble journey from a single mom scraping by in New York City thousands of miles from her family to a pop superstar of the seventies, it featured every one of her greatest hits in a context of both time and narrative. The film ended with Reddy coming out of retirement to perform I Am Woman at the Women's March on January 22, 2017. 

It was a pretty good Saturday night movie, and although I sang along with every. single. song. You and Me Against the World was still stuck in my head yesterday when the news broke that Helen Reddy had died. 

After watching the movie, I read that she was in a memory care unit, but there was something a little comforting about knowing that Helen Reddy, that radio icon of my childhood, was still out there somewhere. Her passing made me sad to lose another link to those days.

Coincidentally, in one scene of the movie, she was recording I Believe in Music, which was originally to be the A side of what would become her first top 40 hit, I Don't Know How to Love Him. 

"Who sang that song?" I asked Heidi, but she shrugged.

"You know, it goes Music is love and love is music if you know what I mean," I sang. "People who believe in music are the happiest people I've ever seen! I think it was Mac Davis." A quick search of the world wide web confirmed my rusty memory. "I bet I could play that song on my ukulele!" I continued, and another search brought up the tabs for the song. 

And so it happened that I was also singing I Believe in Music when I found out that Mac Davis had died, too. I know the 1970 was 50 years ago, but it doesn't really feel that far away, except for all the people who are gone.

Little Data

Once a colleague told me that, in an effort to help herself make an important decision, she created a one question Google form for herself that she filled out everyday asking how she felt about making the change she was considering. 

"How's it looking?" I asked her.

"Right now?" she replied, "It's 50-50."

I Laughed when she told me, both at the quirkiness and the genius of her approach, but in the end she collected months of data and was able to analyze the trends and aggregate record of her thoughts and feelings and use them to help her make a decision that she was happy with.

I thought of her today as I was sliding into a mid-week trough of online teaching. After a pretty good day yesterday, today the same lesson was less effective, and after a meeting during my planning time, it took me much longer than I expected to prepare my next set of lessons for tomorrow and Friday. Now that they are done, I'm feeling a little bit better, but who knows how tomorrow will be. Writing about the challenges and small victories of this time will offer a record, no doubt, but as we go through? I think a daily check in might be a good idea, too.

Cue the Google form!

So Close and yet so Far

A colleague turned her camera on in a meeting this afternoon. Behind her I saw an orange umbrella, a patio, and brick buildings beyond the open gate of her wooden fence. It was all so familiar, and when I asked, it turned out she lived not 1/2 a mile from here. Another colleague on the call lives just a little past that, and another about a mile in the other direction. Just then, yet another colleague who lives only about a block or two from me joined the call. All told, five out of the six of us in the meeting were within a circle with a radius of just a mile or so. 

But it didn't really matter. We were still all stuck in our houses staring at the glow of a computer screen.

More of the Same

For just a moment this afternoon I thought our luck had turned. 

Caught off-guard by a sudden downpour despite sunny skies, I pulled Heidi and Lucy under a big Pin Oak to wait out what surely couldn't be a very long storm. And, almost as if on cue, the rain stopped and we stepped out from our shelter, completely dry,  and back into the muggy afternoon. Not far from home, we continued on our way, laughing at the close call. 

Until the skies opened again, and this time? 

We

were

drenched.

To Do Someday

One of our young neighbors was sprinting through the courtyards this afternoon with his mom. We made this little family's acquaintance at the pool this summer, and since his mom is a teacher, too, we've been spending a little bit of outdoor time with them whenever 7-year-old Elijah zips down to our end of the complex. 

He has lots of energy and imagination, so these short visits are always entertaining. Today it was Truth or Dare, only-child style, where Elijah told us both what we would have on our turn, and what we would have to tell or do. The game was pleasantly wacky, with his questions and directions ranging from kiss your dog on the lips to what do you do when nobody is looking? and go to Mexico and drink ghost pepper milk. 

Eventually we renamed the game "To Do Today" although the tasks did not get anymore doable, much less today. Even so, it was a fun little while, and despite the fact that I couldn't make armor with a silver shield and sword and then travel the world looking for adventure, the thought of adding it to my to do list was unexpectedly appealing.

Keeping Our Distance

One of the few benefits of the COVID crisis has been the accessibility of the National Mall to us. With most offices and all the museums closed until recently, parking has been a breeze and the wide walkways and lack of visitors have made social distancing easy. It's been a joy to put Lucy in the car and go for a long walk through and around some of the most monumental real estate in the world.

I guess that's what I was expecting when we headed down there around 4:30 today, too. Sure, it was a weekend, but the weather had been muggy and overcast, threatening drizzle all day, and it was getting late. As soon as we approached the mall from 14th Street, though, it was clear something had changed. Throngs of people milled about, and loud music was playing from a brightly lit stage flanked by two JumboTrons. My jaw dropped; clearly this was a festival of some sort. 

Traffic was slow, but moving, along Jefferson Drive, and as we rolled along, I couldn't help but stare. It was a scene from another time-- lawn chairs, picnic blankets, children playing, food trucks lined up along the cross streets, with very few face masks to be seen. 

"I guess we won't be walking around here this evening," I said to Heidi, stating the obvious.