I Just Work Here

For the past couple of years, planning our homeroom activities has been taken out of our hands. The practice is a mixed blessing, designed to both ensure consistency among teachers and to save us the time it would take to plan a daily 30 minute activity, some of the stuff they give us to do kind of misses the mark. I like to think that I can teach the hell out of almost anything, but when I can't?  I just shrug and remind the students that it's not my activity, I'm just the messenger. It was a little like that this morning.

"You guys have a bazillion surveys to do this morning," I told my homeroom.

"Literally?" one kid asked in alarm.

"Well, no" I laughed, "but there are two."

"Two???" another kid said, "I thought there were going to be at least five when you said a bazillion."

"I guess I was thinking cumulatively," I confessed. "It seems like you have to do a  couple of Google forms every day."

The students compliantly clicked the links I had provided, but they soon had a lot of questions. "What does it mean to give a quote?" someone asked. "Do I have to search a quote?"

"Does the person I vote for ever know if they don't win?"

"What the heck! How did I get a zero on that question? I thought it was asking my opinion! How can it be wrong to say I like my homeroom?"

"What if my favorite teacher isn't on this list?"

I did my best to field their inquiries, but obviously, they had a point. If your target audience doesn't understand what you are asking, you're not going to get the information you want. I wanted to roll my eyes at the ineptitude, but I shrugged my shoulders instead.

"It's not as easy as you might think to design a good question form," I told my class. "Teachers might make it look easy, but we have some skills!"

If You Read This

For a couple of years, our CLT has been kicking around the idea of moving our second unit to be our first, but it's hard to make a change like that when being swamped by the extraordinary extra demands of teaching in a pandemic. But as I sat at my desk today, contemplating the 2 week break in our current unit and how to make it work, I thought again how these lessons and activities might be much better suited for earlier in the year. 

Earlier in the day I had serendipitously found a small choose-your-own-adventure book that a student had written for me about ten years ago. Then, the activity right before winter break was called "Gifts of Writing" and the concept was to draw a name of someone in the class and create a piece of writing of any genre for that person. We all filled out little information forms beforehand which were passed along to the writers to use as they created their gifts. We took a class period to have a little celebration and present them to each other. If they had time, students had the option of creating gifts for people outside our class. It was wonderful.

I thought we could do something like that in November and December, or perhaps encourage students to try NaNoWriMo, or enter some writing contests. The title of the unit could be "Writing for a Specific Audience" or something like that. And of course I remembered all the years we participated in the Library of Congress's Letters about Literature contest. The object of that one was to write letters to an authors, either living or dead, to tell them what difference a piece of their writing had made in our lives. It seemed like a natural fit with this nascent unit, so I gave it a search and discovered that it had ended, as a national competition, in 2019.

The news put me back on my heels a moment, and I took some time to process one more loss among the so many of the last couple years. We had moved away from the contest when we adopted the essay unit that we are teaching right now, the one that might be a better fit for earlier in the year. It was the right thing to do, but for that real world audience piece. 

What's missing from my class is that feeling of using writing to connect with a real person or real people, and I think the kids sense it, too. Just last week when I mentioned that the fiction writing project is a children's book and that we were going to try to arrange for them to read their final stories to the kids at the elementary school next store, the students in my class literally cheered.

Word.

Hallmark Moment

I had heard vague reports.

Even so,

I was a little surprised when one of the three sisters, main characters in the (see yesterday's post) Hallmark Christmas movie we had on TV as we finished decorating our tree this morning, was openly gay. Her new romantic interest did not quite receive equal treatment of that of her sister's husband and her other sister's male longtime best friend who becomes her soulmate, but that inequity was almost, almost, offset by the fact that no one even mentioned her sexuality; it was treated as an established character trait, never judged either negative or positive.

And of course, they didn't get it all right. 

But there it was.

And that is something.

Holiday Indulgence

I'm a salty snack kind of a gal, and if I'm not careful, I can down a whole bag of chips or Cheetos or popcorn or Chex mix or, well, you get the picture, in a single sitting. One crunchy, salty bite just leads to another, and it can be awfully hard to stop. I've found the best prevention is abstention, and it's rare that we even have those things in the house. That way, I freely enjoy them whenever they are served elsewhere, like a party or the movie theater.

Oddly, that's the way it also is for me with, of all things, Hallmark movies. Despite (or perhaps because of?) knowing how everything will turn out within the first five minutes, two hours later I'm up for another one! As with salty snacks, a little self-discipline goes a long way with saccharin flix, and indeed, we rarely have the TV on for more than a couple of hours in the evening, and it is never tuned to the Hallmark channel.

Except at Christmas! When it's time to decorate the tree, I always power on the television, flip the channel to Hallmark, and enjoy a little predictable holiday hijinks as I string those lights and find the perfect place for each ornament. 

Maybe this year? I'll make popcorn, too.

Twinsies

 What to do when you and a student have made verrrry similar wardrobe choices?

Laugh and take a picture, of course!

   

Wisdom of Three

“Who dat guy, NiNi?” I asked Heidi this morning on our way to work. 

Heidi didn’t even answer. The phrase was shorthand for us, meaning something like that fellow looks a bit sketchy, if you ask me. The person I was referring to was no threat at all, just a man in a sloppy flannel look shirt with messy hair and a sour look on his face in the 3 seconds it took us to drive past him, but I did notice him, and I had the language to report my reaction thanks to our niece, Annabelle, who originated that expression one morning when she was about three years old. She was watching The Lion King with her nanny, Monique. “Who dat guy, NiNi?” she asked when the villain, Scar, showed up. 

“You know who he is,” Monique told her.

“That’s Dar;" Annabelle affirmed, "he's bad," because narrating the scary parts of the movie helped her to manage her anxiety about them.

Heidi and I often laugh about how many phrases we have appropriated from the children in our lives over the years. “I can and I will,” is a common affirmation for us, coming from the time when 3-year-old Treat had to be moved away from the Christmas cookies he was trying to filch. Sitting in a chair next to a mirrored chifferobe he gave his reflection an angry little pep talk. “I can and I will have those cookies,” he avowed, shaking his fist. 

When Riley was almost three and the center of our attention as the only child in our lives, he shocked us all by padding over to our naughty black cat, Silly. When they were nearly face to face, Riley swung his right leg back as far as he could, winding up to give Silly a big kick, but losing his balance instead and landing on his own diapered butt. “Why did you do that?” we asked in shock.

“I just wanted to kick him over,” Riley explained.

“He can be annoying,” I agreed, and so an expression of irritation entered our vocabulary, and there are definitely times when just kicking something over sounds pretty good.

Once, when Josh was three, we drove up to visit him and his mom. He was excited to see us, and even more excited to show us his new stuffed hamster. As he cuddled it proudly, I heard a rustling in the corner. "What's that?" I asked.

 

"That's my other hamster," Josh said. He shook his head sadly. "She's not a hodin' hamster."

 

"She bites," explained Michelle, Josh's mom. Years later, we would use the description to explain why our rescue cat, Penelope, was so skittish: she just wasn’t a hodin’ kitty, and that would have to do.

Like many three-year-old boys, Richard was truck-obsessed, and he loved all the construction vehicles that were doing work in the neighborhood. One morning we were out on the front porch when a digger rattled down the hill at a pretty good pace for one of them. Richard ran along the railing as it rolled by then came to a jump stop. “That guy is moving,” he cried, pointing both index fingers after it. Later on I put together a little plate of carrots, hummus, cheese, and turkey for him, he paused with admiration. “Well! Isn’t that a healthy lunch!”  Around our place, both of those catchphrases come in handy all the time.

When Kyle was three, he was afraid of our dog Isabel. He had never had the chance to be around dogs, and so he would run away whenever she got anywhere close to him. To help him get used to her, Heidi would hold Kyle on her lap and call Isabel over. “No! No!” he resisted. “Her will get me!” which is the perfect terminology for many imagined threats. And later, when he grew to love our dog, Kyle called her Lisabel, and that  was one of our favorite nicknames for her.

Of course all of these words, so funny and true, were elevated by the light of the three year old speaking them, and so we heard and remembered.

Earning It

In response to the numerous reports from teachers that they were feeling overwhelmed by the countless demands, both expected and unexpected, of returning to full-time school after 18 months interrupted by this global pandemic, our system made the kind gesture of removing requirement from this afternoon, which was planned as a professional learning day following an early release for students. We were free and encouraged to leave our professional concerns behind and exit the building as soon as our students were safely on their way. 

It was a generous gesture for sure, but at our school we chose to schedule the day in an inordinately stressful way involving staff assigned in arguably inequitable ways. I'm afraid our plan took its toll-- as I walked down the hall near the end of the day, I saw a colleague standing in her classroom doorway, clearly exasperated. I have no idea what was going on, but as I passed by we made eye contact. "Wow," she sighed, "they must really want us to appreciate our break this afternoon!"