Undocumented

I have a recurring dream that I am at the airport to catch some international flight and I realize that I have forgotten my passport. Beyond that, the details change: sometimes I'm trying to fly to Paris, sometimes London, sometimes other places, and I always try to make it home to get my passport, by car or taxi or even bus, but the dream changes before I do. 

Last night I had a dream where in the dream I actually dreamed I forgot my passport, and so I remembered it for the trip. I'd like to think that's progress.

I actually had a real experience that might be partially responsible for the dream. When I was in high school in Switzerland a lot of us took the 3 AM train to Zurich at the end of the fall term. The timing was right to make our mid-morning flights to the States, or Libya, or Tehran, or Algeria, or Nigeria, or, in my case, Saudi Arabia. A train full of teenagers in the middle of the night was pretty much a big party-- there was no sleeping, of course, and a lot of moving from one compartment to another, and some drinking, and we all were pretty bleary-eyed by the time the train pulled into the Zurich Bahnhof. 

I got my plane ticket and passport out and set them on the small table beneath the window in the six-seat compartment, and pulled my orange backpack from the overhead rack. Shouldering the pack, I turned and followed my friends through the sliding door, into the narrow corridor, and down the folding stairs onto the platform. It was only when I reached in my pocket for the 5 franc coin I needed to pay for the airport shuttle bus on the other side of the station that I realized what I had left behind. I waved good-bye to my friends (they had planes to catch!) and ran back to the track we had come in on, but the train was gone. 

What followed was a lot of me explaining my plight in English to people who spoke German. I finally ended up in a stuffy office within a cavernous luggage storeroom. A very stern looking man frowned at me as he punched the buttons on a putty-colored phone and held the receiver to his ear. He spoke at length, in German of course, to the person on the other end, as I fidgeted with my watch and wondered what I would do if I missed my flight home. "

Zey haff it," he told me when he hung up, "and zey are sending it on ze next train." 

"What time?" I asked him, pointing at my watch. 

"Drießig minuten" he answered.Thirty minutes.

It was tense, but I made the plane, and I had almost forgotten about the whole ordeal when we landed. My dad, who worked for the airline, used his badge to meet me on the tarmac, and as we walked toward the terminal he said, "What happened to your passport?"

I stared at him, speechless for a moment. "I left it on the train! How did you know?" I asked.

He just squeezed the back of my neck and shook his head. I was so tired, I let it drop. And to this day, I have no idea if he really knew what I had done, or if it was just a lucky vote of no confidence.

Kid Stuff

Recently I have taken to calling my students “Kid” as a casual alternative to using their given names. It is friendlier to the gender sensitive than Dude! or Girl! and for the most part they tolerate it, I think, especially since I keep my tone light and friendly. 

 “Kid!” I said today to a chatty young man, “get your assignment done! 

 “I will, Grandma,” he answered cheekily. 

“Grandma!” I said, shaking my head at this guy who borrows sporting equipment from me every day at lunch. 

He laughed, unabashed. 

“I guess you can forget about using Grandma’s football tomorrow,” I threatened. 

His eyes widened. “Sorry miss,” he apologized. 

Now that’s more like it!

Oh No! Our Table- It's Broken

 The custodian tapped on my door a few minutes ago. "Are you still having trouble with your table?" he asked.

I tilted my head in confusion. "I don't think so," I said with a frown. 

"It was this one over here," he pointed and walked toward the table by the window. "There was a note or something on it, but I accidentally wiped over it and then I couldn't see exactly what it said."

His description jogged my memory. "I think I did see a post-it over there yesterday," I told him, "but you know what? I think it was just something silly that the kids were joking about."

He jiggled the table. "Well, I tightened it up," he said, "but I wanted to make sure everything was all right. Just let me know if you ever need anything like that."

I thanked him, and as soon as he left I Googled, Oh no the table is broken, the phrase I remembered hearing some students laughing about. A ridiculous meme from 2018 popped up along with hundreds of parodies, many of them recently popular on Tik Tok, and a couple even with Squid Game theme. 

Mystery solved-- that table's been broken for years, and it's not even in our school. But I do appreciate that conscientious custodian.

A Feast for Spitters

In general, spelling is much less of a problem for students now that it was in the early days of my career. The explanation, of course, is the judicious use of the autocorrect feature on the devices we supply each student with. 

Not even 10 years ago, we had to encourage students to run spell-check, and extra step many were unwilling to take, but now their iPads give three options even as they are typing, and some students only key in a couple of letters before tapping the word they want and moving on. 

I doubt I will ever compose like that: most of the time I don't even see the words at the bottom of my screen when I'm texting; my brain filters them out as unnecessary information to bother with. I also wonder what the long-term impact will be on a person's writing who doesn't even form whole words. Maybe research will show that there is no harm at all; that it's kind of like reading all those passages with missing and transposed letters, generally pretty easy for the fluent speaker. 

But the question of fluency brings up another consideration, too. My students who are not native English speakers like to use the suggested spelling feature as they write, but they do not always do so accurately. Take today, for example. Kids were asked if they considered spiders to be good or bad and to provide three facts and some reasoning to support this mini claim. 

Spitters are bad to the bone, one writer started with animation, because they can be Venmo's.

But, countered another, they do eat misquotes.

Late Aughts

Recently the events of 2007-2009 have been intruding on our consciousness. Britney Spears' trouble with conservatorships and the like all started back then and were the subject of a podcast that Heidi was fond of listening to on road trips. Just over 10 years ago, times were different: Homeland Security and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were dominant; iPhones and social media were only emergent; the Great Recession, President Obama, and skinny jeans were right around the corner.

And Brittany Murphy was alive. Last night we watched a documentary about the sad ending of her life in late 2008 which reminded us of nothing so much as the fragility of young woman as they face the relentless expectation of our culture. And for the final show of the night? Well, recently the creator of The Sopranos (sort of) confirmed that the famous black out was indeed the end of Tony, as many have speculated over the years, and since I was already in a late 2000s frame of mind, why not revisit Tony Soprano's swan song from 2007? 

Too Soon, Not Soon Enough

A TV show we have been watching made the optimistic choice to frame its return to production after the COVID hiatus of 2020 as "Sometime in the future when COVID is behind us." Even so, the show, which is a medical drama, portrayed in flashback what the characters and the hospital in which it set went through starting in March 2020, when a sick man who has recently traveled from Seattle infects an ER nurse, and moving on to her fight for life, even as the ER and ICU are overwhelmed.

And although the story is no more harrowing than any of the dramatized illnesses and injuries that the show depicted in the episodes before the pandemic, for me? It was too much, too soon. But the fact that when the show was produced in late 2020 and aired in early 2021, its creators were looking forward to a time in the near future without the specter or even the consequences of COVID-19, made it even more painful to watch knowing how far off they were.

I didn't realize how traumatized I still am from living through the last 20 months.

Transparency

"Do you like spending all day around kids?" one of my students asked today.

My eyebrows shot up in alarm. "Yes! Can't you tell?"

"Good point," she conceded. "Just checking."