Try to Remember

I was talking up the teacher-for-a-day activity this morning, trying to encourage more kids to design a fun lesson and take over the class during the last couple weeks of school. In the past it's been a great way to end the year, novel, engaging, and very student-directed, but this year concurrent learning has put a bit of a damper on the project and fewer kids have stepped forward. So there I was, really pitching it, giving examples of past lessons. 

"There was a great one on bottle flipping!" I said. "I know that was a thing a while ago, but it was fun." 

 "A while ago?" said one kid incredulously. "Try five years!" 

 "Was it really that long ago?" I marveled. "Well, it doesn't seem like it to me!" 

 "Five years was a looooooong time ago!" he insisted. 

 "To you, sure," I conceded, "but to me? Not so much."

"How can time be different?" he scoffed.

"Think about it," I said. "I'm about five times your age." And there I paused, because that itself seemed impossible, even to me. Then I pressed on. "So, to me? Five years seems like one year seems to you." 

I thought it made perfect sense, and I had actually had a similar conversation with a student in the class before. She was contesting my suggestion that she add more information about her current life to her letter to her future self. "I think I'll remember everything about myself," she shrugged. "It's me! And it's only six years in the future."

Really?" I said. "Six years ago you were six. Do you remember everything about that?"

She swallowed and lowered her eyes. "No," she admitted. 

"That's all I'm saying," I told her. "Trust me: you'll appreciate the detail."

And I know that she will, because there are times when I read back over my own little time capsule that this blog has become and have no recollection either of the event I documented or the people I was writing about. In fact, in a few years, I'm sure I'll have no idea which kids these were.

Best of the Best

Noon today found me telling my homeroom students how much I appreciated them. They were willingly working on an activity where they imagine that one of the United Nation Global Goals had actually been achieved; the task was to describe that world in poetry, essay, narrative, or visual art. I played John Lennon's Imagine as they worked on descriptions of a world without poverty, social injustice, pollution, economic disparity, limited education and health care. "You guys are definitely one of the best homerooms I've ever had!" I told them, and I meant it. "You always give the activities a chance, and you usually see their value. It's amazing!"

"What were your other TAs like?" someone asked.

"Oh, I've had some good ones-- we have sung and danced and crafted and created and worked hard, but what's really amazing is that our TA has never even al been in the same room, and we've had a great year."

"How many TAs have you had?" asked another student.

"Twenty-nine!" I answered, and they were duly impressed.

"What about me?" one kid joked. "Am I the smartest, best student you ever had?"

"You are definitely in the top 3000!" I told him.

Generations

"I found out today that Julia Child is one of my student's great-great aunt!" my friend Mary told me today.

I was impressed, but then I started questioning how closely they were actually related. "So she was his great-grandmother or great-grandfather's sister?" I mused. "By blood or marriage?"

Mary told me she would investigate further, but we both agreed it was pretty cool. 

As luck would have it, I have a picture of my own great-grandmother on the desktop of my computer. I recently came across it while browsing the hints on my genealogy website. A stark black and white photo, she had it taken for her passport in 1919. Her head is tilted and the entire left side of her face is in shadow, but it is the first image I ever recall seeing of my father's grandmother, who died just 4 years before I was born, and I'm pretty sure I never met any of her siblings. 

These days, great-grandparents are quite common; almost all of my mother's friends had "great-grands" as they called the children of their grandchildren. I suppose it wouldn't be uncommon for those little ones to know the brothers and sisters of their great-grandparents, especially in a close family. And when I consider myself as a middle generation, rather than on either end of this familial spectrum, great-great aunts don't really seem so distant. My older nephews are both in their mid-to-late twenties, and were they to have any children, then my own dear Aunt Harriett would be their great-great aunt, not such a vast span at all.

Have Them Your Way

Just as surely as the cicadas emerge every 17 years, so, too, do the recipes for them. Most articles and interviews profile chefs, nutritionists, and scientists in a quest to normalize insect eating and thereby improve life on the planet by adding a more sustainable protein to everyone's diet. 

Described alternately as soft shell crab like or nutty, cicada tacos, sushi, brownies, and dipped in chocolate dominate the food press, just as I remember happening in 2004 and 1987. 

I wonder: Will 2021 be a true turning point toward greater insect consumption or just another flash-fried cicada in the pan?

Non-Billable Hours

I started the call a couple minutes early, at 11:58, but I really didn't expect anyone to be waiting. In the waning days of this weirdest school year, office hours have become even less of a thing than they ever were. As sparsely attended as these Monday support sessions have been, today even my heart wasn't in it. Instead of checking through and checking off completed assignments, I flipped through a couple of magazines and read the NY Times online, all the while keeping that channel open in case somebody needed some help or guidance. But the empty black box in the lower right-hand corner of my screen stayed quiet, except for the minutes counting up. Next Monday? Is a holiday, and I think my office might just be closed the last two Mondays after that.

Act of Attrition

It's been a cool May in these parts, and the arrival of the 17 year cicadas was so delayed that many folks who were either too young or too far away to recall 2004 were beginning to doubt that anything out of the ordinary involving large, flying insects was actually going to happen. "I just don't believe it," I heard from several, but after a week in the 80s and 90s, they understand the fuss. An eerie hum straight out of any UFO episode of vintage TV fills the air, and there are so many smushed cicadas all over the street and sidewalks, that it seems impossible that very many of the brood are fulfilling their life's purpose to get up a tree, mate, and lay some eggs. But that is the cicada's survival strategy: defeating predators and pavement with their sheer number. Even when the ground is littered with fallen members of the brood and every bird and squirrel and rat and whatnot has had its fill of protein-rich biomass, they keep coming, and hundreds of millions make it aloft and find an arboreal perch and a willing partner to spin the lifecycle wheel forward for another 17 years.

Priceless

The second day of the millionaire question did not go like the first. Most of these students wanted stuff, all the stuff, or even more money, and spending for college was a rare consideration. Of course, there was the random awesome reply like buy a tarantula ranch or have my own Chipotle, and one student said he just didn't think it was right for anyone to have a million dollars. And I guess that was kind of the crux of the situation-- 12 year old kids don't really have any idea what a million dollars is, even the brightest of them. Take for instance this exchange:

Student: Tax evasion.

Me: What do you mean?

Him: All millionaires evade taxes. 

Me: No they don't. 

Him: How do you know?

Me: There are a lot more people who have a million dollars than you might think. Especially here where real estate is so valuable.

Him: If it's so easy to be a millionaire, then how come you aren't one?

Audible gasps from the other students both on the call and in the room.

Me: How do you know I'm not?

Other students: Oooooooooooh (Now there's a sound I haven't heard in a year or so.)

Him: You're a teacher. Teachers can't be millionaires.

Me; Oh, we can, too. Now what would you buy with that million bucks?