"Did you burp that thing, or what?" Heidi asked when she came down this morning. She was practically holding her nose. "It smells really strong."
She wasn't wrong. My lacto-fermented veggies were somewhere between half-sour and sour, and I was scooping them out of the pickling jar and into smaller containers.
"It is kind of vinegary," I agreed.
"That doesn't bother me," she said, sniffing the air.
"Is it the garlic then?" I asked.
"Maybe" she nodded, "it's still kind of early!"
"What's that thing?" a student pointed at the VCR/TV tuner I use to project our morning announcements on the SMART Board. It sits on top of a bookshelf, and she hadn't noticed it before. "Is it a DVD?"
I realized that most kids today have no idea how to watch any media other than the streaming or broadcast type. "No," I answered, "It plays VHS tapes."
"Are they white?" she asked.
I thought about it. "Not really," I replied, "but I think I have some around here, if you want to see one." I unlocked a filing cabinet in the corner and opened the bottom drawer. Inside were four video cassettes neatly labeled by class period, and dated April '96. "They look like this," I showed her and the other students who were listening to our conversation. "Have you ever seen one before?"
"I think my dad has some of those," another student reported. "Do they have plastic tape you can pull out?"
I nodded, and he laughed. "I pulled a lot out of some when I was little, and he was really mad."
I popped one of the tapes into the VCR and hit play. On the screen a student was presenting a book project about The River by Gary Paulsen. He had created a game based on the story and was explaining the rules and how they related to the plot.
"Where is he?" the kids asked.
"He's standing right there," I waved to the interior windows. "My room was a little different then, but look, there's the clock across the hall."
I didn't remember the kid in the video at all, which was a little troublesome to me, so I fast-forwarded to see the next student, who I also did not remember. One more fast forward, and I was still lost. For a long time, I could remember every student I ever taught, but now it looks like that memory drive might just be failing. Even so, I set the video on my desk to watch again another day when my brain was a little more focused.
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.
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."
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!"
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.
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.
