For Goodness' Sake

There was a bit of fracas in Heidi's social skills class today. One of her students was very cranky with another. "Why? What did I do?" asked the offending kid.

"You said there was no Santa!" answered the other student with a snarl.

It was true; he had said that, back in December. 

Even though these students are all in 7th and 8th grade, they have developmental delay in common, and so some of their families still keep the myth of Santa alive. Some obviously do not, though, and there has been some contention simmering for months because of this disagreement as to Santa's existence.

The renewed conversation today agitated one of the other kids so much that he couldn't keep his anger in check. "God dammit!" he exploded. "He is a saint! Everybody knows saints are real!"

Fraught

I decided to give the new CDC masking guidance a spin yesterday at the mall. As we entered I was wearing my mask, but I scanned the crowd intently eying each person walking toward me to see if I could read the overall mask vibe. 

As of Friday, our area is now considered "low risk" according to the new metrics the CDC has adopted. As such, anyone fully vaccinated is not recommended to wear a mask. The crowd was mixed, perhaps 60-40 in favor of masks; more white people than others unmasked, but a fair share of all shoppers were mask-free. 

I tapped Heidi's arm, and with broad gesture unhooked my mask from my ears, folded it, and put it in my pocket, momentarily relieved to be without it in public. But that feeling was short-lived. I couldn't relax, and I was anxious and worried. 

Worried that I was being premature, that the CDC was overly political in its decision-making process, that I was making others uncomfortable, that masks were a small price to pay for avoiding even the slimmest chance of COVID. Any sense of liberation I felt vanished, and I pulled my mask out of my pocket and put it back on.

Surely You Are Mistaken?

 We ran a few errands this afternoon: grocery shopping, dropping donations at the local thrift shop, that sort of thing. When we reached the last item on our list, I punched LL Bean into the map app on my phone to find the fastest route. I was irritated when it returned a location 35 minutes away when our trip should have taken no longer than 10. I x-ed out of the app and started again. 

"Bethesda?" Heidi said, looking over my shoulder. "What?" 

I gave up and entered "Tysons Corner" instead. "We know where it is when we get there," I shrugged, and Heidi agreed.

And it wasn't until we were actually approaching the shopping center that it occurred to me that the store might have closed. It had been many months since last we had ventured to any mall, let alone this enormous, ever-crowded one. Even so, we parked and walked inside, making our way around to where the first LL Bean outside the state of Maine had been since 2001. 

Of course we were confronted by an empty store front. It was only then that I bothered to search the internet to discover that the place was shuttered on January 17. Apparently, retail real estate is at a premium these days: all that shopping online during the pandemic has given consumers a new appreciation for brick and mortar, while subsidies and bail outs have driven bankruptcy down. In short, everybody wants a physical presence, so when Bean negotiated with the mall owners to downsize their huge operation, the two sides couldn't come to terms.

The article said that the company is actively looking for another location in the area, and that for now they are directing customers to their Bethesda location.

Just as my map app tried to tell me.

Long May You Run

I like to think I'm pretty flexible when I'm teaching: interruptions rarely bother me, and teachers, administrators, counselors, and students are usually welcome to come in and out of my classroom as needed. That's why I didn't miss a beat in the directions when a couple of folks from our technology team slipped in this morning. As they made their way over to my desk, I walked that way, too. "What do you guys need?" I asked.

With big grins, they waved a computer at me. 

I must have looked confused. "It's yours!" one explained.

"It's finally here," agreed his colleague.

I saw then that they had a brand new MacBook Air, and it was true that my school computer was a couple years past its replacement date. But I also looked at the set-up I had put in place connecting the old workhorse to an extra monitor and a really old SMART Board. I knew the new computer would, at the very least, require adjustments. 

"I can't have it right now!" I told them wide-eyed. I still had 2 more classes to teach.

"No worries," they reassured me, just sign in and we can configure it for you." 

Regaining my composure, I sat at my desk and began to navigate the slightly unfamiliar device. Then I looked up, gave the students their next directions in my booming teacher voice, grabbed the mouse for the other computer, and clicked over to the next activity. I scanned the new screen, and entered my user name and password again, ticked the Trust button, handed the new laptop over, thanked the tech team, and stood up to continue the lesson.

As promised? My configured MacBook was delivered to me a little while later. I needed to figure out a few things, but it's a pretty nice machine, and I'm enjoying using it right now. Fingers crossed, the transition to my teaching set-up will be seamless, and I'll hand over my old lap top on Monday. 

Before I do, though, I will thank it for its service; it has seen me through a lot in the last five years and change. I have planned hundreds of lessons and graded countless assignments on it, learned how to use our Learning Management System with it, and took it to Minnesota in 2019 when my mom was sick and used it to send my lesson plans while I was away. I posted asynchronous lessons with it every day when we went out for COVID in 2020, and of course I taught all my classes from it, first remotely, and then hybrid, for the entirety of the 20-21 school year. And in addition to all of that, I have probably written close to 2000 blog posts on that keyboard. 

That's a lot of work! At least one of is retiring.

Something for Everyone

I promised snacks for our commercial film festival, but when I went shopping the cost of single-serve bags (enough for 80) seemed a little too dear. What to do? I stood in the snack aisle pondering my options, looking at the sale items and trying to figure out a COVID-safe way to serve them without breaking the bank. 

I remembered how, in college, we used to toss the leftover chips and pretzels together at the end of a party and eat the mix all week. I had done the same thing earlier in the year after my homeroom had brought snacks for the early release movie day. So I tossed popcorn, potato chips, Cheetos, kettle corn, Fritos, and caramel corn into the cart, along with a sleeve of paper cups. 

At school this morning, I mixed them all together in a big bowl, added a scoop, and set one stack of cups and another stack of napkins on the table beside it. As the first students entered the room, their eyes widened. Taking in the big bowl, they called out each ingredient they saw, and eagerly took their seats. Before I cued up the commercials, I filled a cup with the assorted snacks for each of them. As we dimmed the house lights, they were enjoying their snacks, slipping a piece at a time under their masks. 

It was a good solution, festive and frugal at once. And? It was also gluten-free, so everyone could enjoy it together.

Inspiration is Where You Find It

This afternoon I attended the required in-person first aid and CPR training that, since July 1, 2017, teachers in Virginia must have to renew our licenses. It's been at least 40 years since I took the course, and although the basics are the same, a lot of the guidance has changed. So has the equipment; the heavy life-sized mannequins have been replaced with stylized practice figures that consist of little more than a head and torso. They get the job done, though, and they pack neatly into large duffle bags for on-the-road training, despite their distinctly unrealistic appearance.

Even so, when we knelt to demonstrate our resuscitation skills, I heard another participant across the room ask, "Annie are you okay?"

I laughed, because I had forgotten that the old dummies were fondly known as "Resusci Annie", and the second step of CPR practice, checking for response, was always phrased that way. The words also caught my ear, because in the time since I had last heard them, Michael Jackson's single, Smooth Criminal, rose to number 7 on the charts in 1988. The song has a very catchy refrain: "Annie are you okay? Are you okay Annie? Annie are you okay? Are you okay Annie?"

And according to Wikipedia? The lyrics are no coincidence. They were inspired by a first aid course that Michael Jackson took around the time he wrote it. 

It Was Personal

Once we collected our suitcases at the baggage carousel we whooshed through the sliding glass doors and out into a warm Washington evening. Rather than cross to the median and call for a ride share, we did what we have been doing at DCA for years: turned right and got into the cab line. It seemed quicker and at least comparable in price to Uber or Lyft.

The attendant put us in a Virginia taxi as soon as we made it to the front of the quick-moving queue, and we were on our way home in a just a few minutes. The driver did not have any navigation app; it was just an old-fashioned meter, ticking away the miles. He asked us where we were going and what we thought the best way to get there was. Once we were nearing our exit ramp, I gave him more detailed directions to our house. "Oh I know it!" he exclaimed. "There's a 7-11 there."

He was right, and that got him talking. He had come to the US in 1992 and worked in our neighborhood as a delivery driver for a couple years. After that, he became a cab driver in DC for 26 years, but the pandemic and the rise of ride share apps had left him unemployed. Last year he started driving again in Virginia, and with six 12-14 hour days a week, he can support his wife and four children, the oldest of whom is in medical school. 

Throughout the conversation he seemed cheerful, despite the hardships he had endured, marveling more at the passage of time and the change in the area as more and more people have moved here. When we pulled up the hill and into our complex it was dark, and a couple of inconsiderate drivers were blocking the narrow way, one slowly backing into a parking space, and the other rolling down the center of the drive right at us. 

"That guy has his high beams on," our driver reported with some agitation. "That makes it very hard to see if there are any pedestrians. It's also bad for old drivers or very young ones."

We nodded in agreement and with sympathy, because the lights were blinding even in the backseat.

As we rolled slowly past the offending car, our driver hissed. "He's an Uber!" he spat. "Fuck him! What an asshole!" And he rolled down his window and flipped the guy off. 

Our house was just down the way, and his professional demeanor had completely recovered by the time he pulled up and unloaded our bags. The fare was less than our Uber ride to the airport had been, and I tipped him and thanked him.

"Well, that took an ugly turn!" I said to Heidi as he drove away.

"Yeah, it did," she agreed.