KO-ed

"How many times have you been knocked out?" I overheard one student as another the other day.

"Knocked out?" his friend replied. "Do you mean actually unconscious?"

The other kid shrugged. "Yeah. That's what it is."

"Um, never," said his buddy.

The other kid looked bemused. 

I stepped over to them with a bit of concern to investigate. "How many times have you been knocked out?" I asked.

"Just twice," he replied, and he seemed relieved that someone understood that such things happen from time to time. "Once I went over the handlebars of my bike and landed on my head, and the other time I was skateboarding and I crashed into a pole," he willingly elaborated. 

His friend and I nodded thoughtfully.

"You know that doesn't happen a lot," his friend said.

Again, there was confusion in his face. Then he turned to me with a help me out kind of a look. "How many times have you been knocked out?" he asked, perhaps confident that a person of my age must have hit her head a little too hard a few times.

"Never," I told him.

He sighed in disappointment.

"Dude!" his friend said. "You probably should be a little more careful."

School Rules

As the warm-up for a lesson on Freeverse Poetry, I asked students if they could be free from one school rule, which rule would they choose. Predictably, many wanted to be able to use their phones at will, but none could justify their desire academically. Some wanted to carry their backpacks, some to eat in class, and others to chew gum.

To this last group, I simply said, "Look under the table."

"Ewwwww!" was the common reply, because their illicit gum-chewing peers have left wads on the underside of almost all of the tables. Jerks!

One kid wanted to bring her dog to school, which is a sentiment I could behind, but not as enthusiastically as I could support the suggestion that we should allow cussing. "Hell yeah!" I agreed, before taking it all back.

"You know I really love the rules," I told each class.

"That's easy for you!" one kid responded. "You get to enforce them."

Slow on the Uptake

I've been reading Hang the Moon by Jeannette Walls, and it wasn't until Eddie, the frail, young heir to the larger-than-life, red-haired, and bearded Duke Kincaid, died, and his eldest sister Mary and her husband Philip came to town to take over the business that I got it. 

The story is set in rural Virginia during Prohibition, and it just so happened that Mary's mother was briefly married to the Duke's older brother before he died, and then later Mary and her mother were sent away by the Duke so he could marry his second wife, Annie. 

Now Annie is the mother of the main character, the Duke's second daughter, and rumor had it that the Duke killed Annie for infidelity, and shortly after that, he married, Jane, Eddie's mother.

Do you see what I missed?

Maybe the fact that one of the epigraphs is a quote from Queen Elizabeth I is a hint I should have caught. Or perhaps knowing the Duke's given name was Henry? Or that his next wife after Jane died was Katherine? 

Don't worry, though, I've got it now, and spoiler alert! I don't think Mary is long for this world.

Better than Best

Our principal likes to tell the students that "We are the best of the best, better than all the rest." While I don't appreciate the idea that quality must be comparative, her turn of phrase is catchy and memorable, and the kids often chant the ending with her in assemblies.

Today and yesterday as the hook for a lesson on hyperbole, I asked students to post something they thought was the greatest thing ever. On Monday morning, it was hardly surprising that many kids mentioned sleep and food as it got closer to lunch. But other kids also mentioned the sound of Christmas carols, or birds singing in the morning, video games (of course), talking to their friends, going to Chik-fil-a on Friday after school, the moon landing, science, the beach, and the 100-day writing challenge. 

Then there was the kid who simply posted "You guys" meaning all of us in her English class. "Awwwwwww," was the collective reply, and for me, her words cast a much warmer light on what it means to be one of the best.

User Error

 More often than seems possible, a student will be working furiously on some writing assignment they need to post online using our LMS when a loud cry of distress rings through the room. "I just lost everything I wrote!" they will groan. 

I confess that I am not always very sympathetic in these situations. For one, I always advise them to use the browser version of the site rather than the app, because it has more functionality including an autosave feature. For another, they usually don't have that much to write, and it seems like little more than an aggravation to have to recreate their thoughts.

Yesterday, I was pushing an end-of-month deadline to get some professional learning done when I was interrupted by something. I returned to the task, a couple paragraphs written in response to a book I had read, after dinner and carefully crafted my reply. When I clicked the post button, I got a message that I had been logged out of the site because of inactivity. 

You guessed it! I lost all my work.

Maybe I'll be a bit more empathetic with the kids in the future.

Whither the Weather

I woke up to a crack of lightning and then a boom of thunder. Outside it was pouring; at 7 am we were having the first thunderstorm of the season. I rolled over and checked the weather, expecting the forecast to be for rain all day. I was pleasantly surprised to see on the hour-by-hour prediction that sunshine was expected by midday, and I was just about to swipe the app closed when I noticed Alpharetta on the map. 

I had been looking at the weather in Atlanta, a location I have bookmarked because my sister lives there. Navigating to our actual weather I saw that it was indeed likely to rain all day. I sighed and checked in on Rejkyavik, where my oldest nephew is. It was only 32 degrees up there, but there were clear skies on a long spring day where the sun would not set until 9:40 this evening.

Clocked Out

I started the day strong. Around 10:30, Treat and I headed over to a big box home improvement store where we picked up 10 bags of raised soil, along with a few other plants and such. 

Back at the garden, we carried the bags from the car to our plot, a fair distance to be sure. Then we finished building the raised beds, including sawing some old composter boards in half and pounding them into the ground. We dumped all the soil and compost and manure into the improved beds and then filled and hauled over several wheel barrel-fulls of mulch. Then we acidified the soil in one of the beds and planted a couple of blueberry bushes.

When we were done, we still needed a bit more topsoil, and I promised Treat I'd take him to lunch and out to another big box place that carried the tiered herb pot he needed. It was nearly 4 by the time we made it back to the car with our final flatbed cart loaded with bags of dirt. 

"Do you want to lift them together?" I asked Treat.

"Why don't we do it fire brigade style?" he joked. "I'll just toss them to you and you can put 'em in the car."

"I think I've reached the end of my usefulness for today," I said. "How about if I just put these two pots of herbs in?"

"Sure," he agreed and loaded the bags in the car. What an excellent nephew!