Am I?

Some years? The kids at school don't even know break is coming? They're like, Wait, what? We're off next week? This year is not one of those years. There's a lot of energy in the air and the sixth graders have been nutso all week: more talkative and less productive, and wearing holiday sweaters, socks, pajamas, and hats. But tomorrow will be proof that nothing is permanent; this crazy week will come to an end and we will all go our separate ways to enjoy a couple of weeks away from school. 

Today I asked kids what they were most looking forward to over break. Sleep was a big answer, and games, holiday gifts, family gatherings, and travel were all also well-represented on the list. "What about you?" one student asked. 

"I'm looking forward to all of those things, too," I replied.

"But you're going to miss us, right?" he said, without a trace of irony.

I scanned the room of 11-year-olds hopped up on holiday spirit and raised my eye brows, but when I turned to answer, his attention had already moved on.

Bingo

The folks who planned our staff holiday party this year had a few fun games for us to play in between eating, drinking, and socializing with our friends and colleagues in the outdoor space they booked. Personally, I was engaged in conversation and so missed out on guessing the administrator, but as I moseyed over to Heidi and the teachers she was talking with, someone handed me a Bingo card. "Can you check off any full rows?" she asked.

I scanned the card. "That I have done personally?" I clarified, making sure it wasn't the Bingo where you try to find someone else who fits the square.

"Yes, YOU!" she answered.

Give detention, go to a boy's basketball game, attend a tennis tournament, I read. "Is there a time limit?" I asked. "Like should I have done these things this school year?"

"I'm not sure," she replied. "I don't think so."

"Well," I said. "If time is no object, I've got most of these. But I can honestly say I will never get this one."

"Is it the Tiktok video?" she guessed.

"Nope," I shook my head. "It's Be mistaken for a student."

"I guess I can see that," she agreed.

"Yeah," I nodded, "but it's really okay."

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!