A friend is getting married tomorrow afternoon. Her wedding day also happens to be the 20th anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the hijacking of Flight 93. Tonight, as friends and family gathered around a roaring bonfire within sight of the wedding and bar tents glittering with thousands of fairy lights, the topic of the date inevitably came up.
"I googled the etiquette of planning a celebration on 9-11," our friend confessed, "and it pretty much said that there's never a problem with creating happy memories, even on a sad day." She shrugged. "The 11th worked."
She's right, of course. Every day is the anniversary of something sad, but it is also the anniversary of something amazing.
"That's not for you!" I reminded my class when he bell rang four minutes before lunch in my 5th period, A Day block. That particular class is split into 2 45-minute sessions by lunch. Bending their 11-year-old minds even more, yesterday was an A-Anchor Day, but today is an A Day Block, and so 6th graders went to the same "alternating" PE/Language class two days in a row. Third period is a single class every day, and first or second is a true block, but fifth and fourth are always divided by lunch.
So I wasn't surprised even a little when one student stopped five minutes later on her way out the door to lunch. "I just have one question," she said. "Why. can't. we. just. have. the. same. schedule. every. day?!"
I nodded sympathetically. "That's out of my hands," I told her. "But if you're not used to it in a few weeks? I'll be happy to help you prepare your message to the people who make those decisions."
She rolled her eyes and sighed and then headed off to lunch.
As the hook for a lesson on standards-based grading, I asked the students to give middle school a grade so far. They were free to use number scales, percentages, or letter grades, as long as they could justify their rating.
After 4 days in and 5 days off, (not to mention a year and a half of disrupted instruction), middle school did pretty well, earning a solid 3.3 average. In the plus column was seeing friends, nice teachers, moving independently through the building, longer lunch, and a really big library. Drawbacks were a confusing schedule, a big building, having to carry heavy backpacks, and the predictable repetition of early instruction.
And despite my directions, some kids came up with their own rating system. "It's bread!" wrote one.
"What's your scale?" I asked, confused. "The food pyramid?"
"I love bread!" she replied, "and school is great so far.
One of her classmates agreed, refusing to give any other rating than Wunderbar! "It's German," he confided.
"Ja, Ich weiß," I told him. "Ich weiß."
When I first started teaching, the preservice week was four days, Monday through Thursday, then there were four days off before the students began on the Tuesday after Labor Day. Then, it was nearly impossible for me to enjoy the time off because I was so anxious about the time on coming up. All I really anted was to go to school.
After a while, schedules changed, and I did, too, and a long weekend was a long weekend, but this year? Although I sure do appreciate the extended holiday weekend we are coming off of, especially because five days in a row is a luxury usually reserved for the big three: Thanksgiving, Winter, and Spring Break, here in Year 29 I'm feeling a little return-to-school anxiety.
Fortunately, I learned the best cure for that in Year 1:
Get your ass back to school.
I gasped as two dark figures dashed furtively across the trail not 50 feet ahead of us. We were taking advantage of this fine fall day by walking the several miles of wooded trails at Teddy Roosevelt Island, just across the river from our nation's capital. In the many years we have been visiting this national memorial, we have seen egrets and herons and turtles and deer and even a beaver and eagle or two, but never
a wild turkey!
Until today.
"Did you get squash blossoms?" our neighbor asked when we rejoined our group at the farmer's market.
"Yep!" I answered.
"I did too," she told me, "but they were definitely an impulse buy. How are you going to make them?"
"Stuffed and fried," I said. "What about you?"
"With ricotta?" she asked.
I nodded.
"That's what I was thinking, too" she replied, "but..." She shrugged. "The last time I bought them they went bad."
"Frying them can be involved,' I said, "but they're good on pizza or sautéed with pasta, too."
"But frying them seems really appealing," she sighed.
This evening, as I was stirring together ricotta, locatelli, burrata, and fresh basil, I asked Heidi to text our neighbor and let her know that I had filling and hot oil ready if she wanted to bring over her blossoms, because making 12 is no harder than making six.
