Last night I saw Big Head Todd and the Monsters perform. Great live band playing with special guest guitarist Ronnie Baker Brooks who lit up the stage every time he played, outdoor amphitheater on a warm evening in late June, over two and a half hours of music. A really enjoyable night. I went with my cousin’s wife who agreed to go on a whim, just looking for a fun night out and came away from the show liking a lot of what she’d heard. On our way home afterward, she commented how interesting the people-watching always is at concerts. I had noticed the same thing for most of the night, and as I thought more about it I realized there are certain types of people I’ve seen at just about every concert I’ve ever attended (and we’re talking about a lot more than two or three of them here). In acknowledgement of the current Internet trend of certain sites like Buzzfeed that make unusually specific and randomly numbered lists, I’ve decided to compile these categories of the concert-goers I’ve encountered over the years:
1 - The Dancing Queen. No matter where you sit in the venue, there is always one girl or woman within sight who gets up and dances like the band is only playing for her. She usually makes a big scene about this so everyone else in her section, especially the unfortunate souls in the row behind her, understand what a good dancer she is (or at least thinks she is after her second or third drink).
2 - Captain Air Guitar. The male counterpart of the Dancing Queen.
3 - Mr. Three Beers. This is the guy you always see carrying three plastic cups filled to the brim in some tight-fingered triangular grip. Somehow he miraculously doesn’t spill a drop, until he gets back to his seat and passes the drinks to his friends, after which wet seats, laughter, and token apologies ensue. Probably even more common at sporting events.
4 - Employer of the Babysitter’s Club. This thirtysomething person, usually but not always female, is very obviously enjoying a rare night out away from the kids. They’re usually dressed a little nicer than the rest of the crowd and accompanied by a large group of friends, and will get up and dance and scream often enough you know they have a lot of stress to unload.
5 & 6 - The Handsy Couple. You know who they are, and you don’t want to look their way during the slower songs.
7 - The Documentarian. This person holds their phone up as often as not, shooting video of what I can only assume are their favorite moments. I’ll admit to having been this guy before, until I realized I had a phone full of concert video that I never, ever watched.
8 - The Flash. This person you usually notice at a distance, because regardless of the number of signs posted saying that flash photography is prohibited, someone always decides that sign isn’t meant for them. A second way of earning this title was demonstrated by a woman at a U2 show several years ago, who, while sitting a number of rows in front of my cousin and me, peeled off her shirt and waved it around like a flag in some kind of drunken display of political theater during “Sunday Bloody Sunday.”
9 - The Perpetual Requester. There are several acts who will entertain requests from the audience during the show. I’ve seen both Bruce Hornsby and Bruce Springsteen collect notes and signs with requests from the audience and go straight into those songs. But it doesn’t happen often. Not everyone in the crowd understands this though, especially the one person who hopes to hear their favorite song and will cup their hands around their mouth and scream the title at least thirty times, regardless of how far they are from the performers and ignoring the monitors everyone on stage has in their ears.
10 - The Frequent Flier. Drinks, bathroom visits, t-shirts, snacks, next round of drinks. This is the person you have to keep leaning back or standing up for during the show because they have so many other important places to be. They always apologize to everyone they pass, which does little to minimize my frustration with them. Seriously people, you paid a lot of money for those seats. Use them.
11 - The One Hit Wonder. You encounter this person on the way out, after the show has ended. Regardless of how long the show was, or how deep into their library of music the performers went, or how effective and moving any unexpected live arrangements were, or how transcendent the overall concert experience was, this person won’t stop talking about how great it was to hear that one big radio song the band is so associated with they’re probably tired of playing it.
I’ll stop at eleven, but as anyone who has been to enough concerts to recognize these people knows, I could go on and on....
Saturday, June 28, 2014
Tuesday, June 24, 2014
My Second Job
A couple of years ago I read an interview with one of my favorite writers, Justin Cronin, just as his most recent novel THE TWELVE was being released. When he was asked about his writing habits, his answer resonated with me so I wrote it down to remember it: “I’m a workmanlike writer. I show up every day and treat it like a job. The old rule that writing is like any other job, the first rule is that you must show up. I’m at the keyboard from 9 to 4 every day.”
As recent as a few months back when writing was just an obsessive hobby for me, it could come and go in waves. If I had a story that owned me, every available moment would be devoted to bringing it out. If I had a book to read or a game to play or some ridiculous time-sucking project related to school going on instead, the writing was something I could pause. I’d take care of the other thing knowing full well the story would be waiting for me where I’d left off.
When the people around me would first find out I was a writer, they’d react with the surprise you’d expect from someone discovering an amusing novelty. Eventually the natural question of whether or not I’d published anything would come up, and I’d always feel myself getting protectively defensive when it did. How was I supposed to justify the amount of time I spent on this hobby, or the decades I had invested in it without anything tangible to show for my efforts? I’d try to explain away the absence of published material by describing the process as successfully jumping through a series of increasingly smaller hoops while sparing the details: Actually writing a book is no small feat; accounting for rare exceptions, you really need an agent representing you to be taken seriously at a professional level; having an agent doesn’t get you published overnight, or even guarantee it; the number of rewrites and edits that happen along the way only end once the manuscript gets locked down as a book, which can take months or years after the initial deal is made. More often than not I’d just say how I kept working at it because I thought someday it would be nice to walk into a bookstore and see something I’d written sitting on the shelves. That would usually satisfy their curiosity.
During those times when the story I was working on demanded my attention, I’d feel a strange self-aware emotional mixture of feigned arrogance and subsequent guilt if I told someone I was busy writing or I had to work things around the writing time I had scheduled; I’d imagine their internal monologue responding with, “Oh, really.... You have to make time to WRITE, then, do you? Whatever you say, Artist Boy.” I know most people wouldn’t really think that way, but it was hard not to imagine it from beneath the landslide of rejected query letters and manuscript passes pouring from my inbox.
But everything changed this spring when my agent (a two-word phrase that still feels surreal to use) tapped me on the shoulder, and it didn’t take me long to start calling writing My Second Job. At first it was just my attempt at something clever to say, reminding people how excited I was to have an agent when it came up in conversation (or -- if we’re being honest -- if I saw an opportunity to wedge it into the conversation). But I'd think back to that Justin Cronin interview and the idea of a Second Job became more serious. This wasn’t just me playing around at the keyboard anymore, amusing myself by making up little stories and hoping I could convince my friends and family to indulge me and read them before I worked up the humility to throw myself at the mercy of the querying universe. This was next level stuff going on. This was someone in the industry putting faith in me and my work, and I desperately wanted to prove that faith was deserved.
Even with the demands of the school year, I still made time each day to work on edits and revisions. Progress was gradual when I could only get in an hour or two of work during early mornings or weeknights, with more concentrated work on weekends. And I won’t sugar coat it: Knowing I was working with a new level of accountability and the potential of reaching an actual audience someday was a bit intimidating at first. Eventually I got past that by telling myself enough times to put it out of my head and just keep doing the same things that got me where I was. Soon the effort became habit and I saw tangible progress being made, and the story began evolving into its newest and most drastically different (and fully realized) version. When that happened, the sense of excitement that would always capture me when everything clicked into place came back. And when it did, it came back huge.
I’m just shy of two weeks into my summer break now, and I’m already so embedded into my summertime writer life that when I see the names of people from school appear on my Facebook news feed, it literally feels like it’s been months since I’ve spoken to any of them. I have to force myself to maintain some kind of summer routine to make sure I still work out in the morning, and buy groceries, and keep the house clean, and pay bills, and all of those other things that during any other summer I would’ve addressed without a second thought. Right now life is most definitely first and foremost about the writing. One evening last week I was winding down in front of the TV, and it occurred to me I’d had a great day. I thought back over what happened to make me feel that way and realized I had spent something like nine hours in front of the computer working on edits and revisions and outlining. And I’d barely noticed it had been the whole day. Is every day like that? No. But it's great to have that kind of time for the days when I need it.
My writing life has been going on for a long, long time, but my writing career is still pretty new. I’m not in a position to show up every day and treat it like a job for the whole year, but I'm fortunate enough to get a couple of months of living like that. And as for being able to work like that rest of the year, and have writing go from being The Second Job to The Job? I’m not holding my breath. But if I had been asked in the summer of 2013 if I thought I’d be working with revision notes from my agent in the summer of 2014? I wouldn’t have been holding my breath back then, either. So who knows what the future has in store? Life happens the way it does.
But for now, break time's over, and I only have so much time before that day job starts intruding again. Time for me to get back to work.
As recent as a few months back when writing was just an obsessive hobby for me, it could come and go in waves. If I had a story that owned me, every available moment would be devoted to bringing it out. If I had a book to read or a game to play or some ridiculous time-sucking project related to school going on instead, the writing was something I could pause. I’d take care of the other thing knowing full well the story would be waiting for me where I’d left off.
When the people around me would first find out I was a writer, they’d react with the surprise you’d expect from someone discovering an amusing novelty. Eventually the natural question of whether or not I’d published anything would come up, and I’d always feel myself getting protectively defensive when it did. How was I supposed to justify the amount of time I spent on this hobby, or the decades I had invested in it without anything tangible to show for my efforts? I’d try to explain away the absence of published material by describing the process as successfully jumping through a series of increasingly smaller hoops while sparing the details: Actually writing a book is no small feat; accounting for rare exceptions, you really need an agent representing you to be taken seriously at a professional level; having an agent doesn’t get you published overnight, or even guarantee it; the number of rewrites and edits that happen along the way only end once the manuscript gets locked down as a book, which can take months or years after the initial deal is made. More often than not I’d just say how I kept working at it because I thought someday it would be nice to walk into a bookstore and see something I’d written sitting on the shelves. That would usually satisfy their curiosity.
During those times when the story I was working on demanded my attention, I’d feel a strange self-aware emotional mixture of feigned arrogance and subsequent guilt if I told someone I was busy writing or I had to work things around the writing time I had scheduled; I’d imagine their internal monologue responding with, “Oh, really.... You have to make time to WRITE, then, do you? Whatever you say, Artist Boy.” I know most people wouldn’t really think that way, but it was hard not to imagine it from beneath the landslide of rejected query letters and manuscript passes pouring from my inbox.
But everything changed this spring when my agent (a two-word phrase that still feels surreal to use) tapped me on the shoulder, and it didn’t take me long to start calling writing My Second Job. At first it was just my attempt at something clever to say, reminding people how excited I was to have an agent when it came up in conversation (or -- if we’re being honest -- if I saw an opportunity to wedge it into the conversation). But I'd think back to that Justin Cronin interview and the idea of a Second Job became more serious. This wasn’t just me playing around at the keyboard anymore, amusing myself by making up little stories and hoping I could convince my friends and family to indulge me and read them before I worked up the humility to throw myself at the mercy of the querying universe. This was next level stuff going on. This was someone in the industry putting faith in me and my work, and I desperately wanted to prove that faith was deserved.
Even with the demands of the school year, I still made time each day to work on edits and revisions. Progress was gradual when I could only get in an hour or two of work during early mornings or weeknights, with more concentrated work on weekends. And I won’t sugar coat it: Knowing I was working with a new level of accountability and the potential of reaching an actual audience someday was a bit intimidating at first. Eventually I got past that by telling myself enough times to put it out of my head and just keep doing the same things that got me where I was. Soon the effort became habit and I saw tangible progress being made, and the story began evolving into its newest and most drastically different (and fully realized) version. When that happened, the sense of excitement that would always capture me when everything clicked into place came back. And when it did, it came back huge.
I’m just shy of two weeks into my summer break now, and I’m already so embedded into my summertime writer life that when I see the names of people from school appear on my Facebook news feed, it literally feels like it’s been months since I’ve spoken to any of them. I have to force myself to maintain some kind of summer routine to make sure I still work out in the morning, and buy groceries, and keep the house clean, and pay bills, and all of those other things that during any other summer I would’ve addressed without a second thought. Right now life is most definitely first and foremost about the writing. One evening last week I was winding down in front of the TV, and it occurred to me I’d had a great day. I thought back over what happened to make me feel that way and realized I had spent something like nine hours in front of the computer working on edits and revisions and outlining. And I’d barely noticed it had been the whole day. Is every day like that? No. But it's great to have that kind of time for the days when I need it.
My writing life has been going on for a long, long time, but my writing career is still pretty new. I’m not in a position to show up every day and treat it like a job for the whole year, but I'm fortunate enough to get a couple of months of living like that. And as for being able to work like that rest of the year, and have writing go from being The Second Job to The Job? I’m not holding my breath. But if I had been asked in the summer of 2013 if I thought I’d be working with revision notes from my agent in the summer of 2014? I wouldn’t have been holding my breath back then, either. So who knows what the future has in store? Life happens the way it does.
But for now, break time's over, and I only have so much time before that day job starts intruding again. Time for me to get back to work.
Sunday, June 15, 2014
A Father's Influence
I wasn’t a bad kid when I was young but I was a hyperactive little snot, and I had a couple of fights in elementary school. Back then that kind of thing only got me a stern talking to in the principal’s office, even though today shenanigans like that would easily earn me a few days of suspension. It’s fair to say that growing up in the 70s worked in my favor more than once.
One of my two fights happened on the school bus. I usually shared a seat on the way home with one of my best friends, and for whatever reason we both decided one day -- pretty adamantly in fact -- that we both wanted to sit on the aisle. He was in the seat first and wouldn’t slide over when I got on (which, in my defense, was standard school bus etiquette and still is today) and instead turned sideways to direct me in toward the window. I wasn’t having any of this, and started leaning on him to nudge him over. He leaned back and soon the leaning became pushing, which then became angry pushing, which soon became me pinning him to the seat and him clawing at my face until the bus driver pulled us off of each other and hauled us out to the sidewalk, where our teacher was on bus duty. She expressed her grave disappointment and ominously promised that phone calls home would be made that evening. Our regret was so instantly palpable that we’d repaired our friendship and agreed on a seating arrangement before getting back on the bus, much to the surprise of all the other kids who’d witnessed us going after each other.
As promised, our teacher called our parents that night, and mine were none too happy. Whenever I got in trouble, I knew one of two things was going to happen: If I did something stupid, my dad was going to yell. If I did something historically stupid, my dad was going to sit me down in my bedroom and we were going to have A Long Talk. A call from my teacher merited A Long Talk.
I really didn’t mind the Long Talks so much. They weren’t always pleasant since they usually happened after I screwed up, but they weren’t a punishment themselves. Punishments would typically follow Long Talks and they were almost always deserved, but by the time we reached that point he and I had discussed the problem thoroughly, so I had a new perspective on what I had done wrong and was more prepared to handle similar situations differently.
One Long Talk that stuck with me came after that school bus fight. My dad was shocked and angry it had happened, because the other kid was one of my best friends: We played together at recess daily, we’d shared tents on Cub Scout camping trips, we played soccer together in the summers, and we’d been to each others' birthday parties. When I tried to explain how our back-and-forth pushing had escalated into a full-blown smackdown, I couldn’t.
“What if you had a big heavy chain at the bottom of a hill, and you needed to get it to the top?” my dad asked. “Would you push it?” No, I answered. That wouldn’t make any sense. “No, it wouldn’t,” he said. “If you want to get that chain up the hill, you have to pull it.”
Two things crossed my mind as he said this: (1) Why is my dad talking about chains? And then it hit me: (2) This isn’t really about chains or about me pushing another kid. This is a life lesson. When I finally connected those dots, it was perfectly clear what he was saying: You can’t force people to do what you want. You have to convince them to agree with you. If you want to lead, you have to give people a reason to follow.
Any skill I have now as a teacher when it comes to helping students process their behavior issues, I can attribute to when my father recognized he needed to invest the time in straightening me out. Whatever reason I’ve ever given people to see me as any kind of a leader didn’t come from some miraculous staff development experience, or some generic educational leadership book, or any particularly resonating professional examples, or any number of redundant inspirational platitudes. For me, it’s always come back to finding the best way to get that chain up to the top of the hill.
So thanks for that, Dad. And Happy Father’s Day.
One of my two fights happened on the school bus. I usually shared a seat on the way home with one of my best friends, and for whatever reason we both decided one day -- pretty adamantly in fact -- that we both wanted to sit on the aisle. He was in the seat first and wouldn’t slide over when I got on (which, in my defense, was standard school bus etiquette and still is today) and instead turned sideways to direct me in toward the window. I wasn’t having any of this, and started leaning on him to nudge him over. He leaned back and soon the leaning became pushing, which then became angry pushing, which soon became me pinning him to the seat and him clawing at my face until the bus driver pulled us off of each other and hauled us out to the sidewalk, where our teacher was on bus duty. She expressed her grave disappointment and ominously promised that phone calls home would be made that evening. Our regret was so instantly palpable that we’d repaired our friendship and agreed on a seating arrangement before getting back on the bus, much to the surprise of all the other kids who’d witnessed us going after each other.
As promised, our teacher called our parents that night, and mine were none too happy. Whenever I got in trouble, I knew one of two things was going to happen: If I did something stupid, my dad was going to yell. If I did something historically stupid, my dad was going to sit me down in my bedroom and we were going to have A Long Talk. A call from my teacher merited A Long Talk.
I really didn’t mind the Long Talks so much. They weren’t always pleasant since they usually happened after I screwed up, but they weren’t a punishment themselves. Punishments would typically follow Long Talks and they were almost always deserved, but by the time we reached that point he and I had discussed the problem thoroughly, so I had a new perspective on what I had done wrong and was more prepared to handle similar situations differently.
One Long Talk that stuck with me came after that school bus fight. My dad was shocked and angry it had happened, because the other kid was one of my best friends: We played together at recess daily, we’d shared tents on Cub Scout camping trips, we played soccer together in the summers, and we’d been to each others' birthday parties. When I tried to explain how our back-and-forth pushing had escalated into a full-blown smackdown, I couldn’t.
“What if you had a big heavy chain at the bottom of a hill, and you needed to get it to the top?” my dad asked. “Would you push it?” No, I answered. That wouldn’t make any sense. “No, it wouldn’t,” he said. “If you want to get that chain up the hill, you have to pull it.”
Two things crossed my mind as he said this: (1) Why is my dad talking about chains? And then it hit me: (2) This isn’t really about chains or about me pushing another kid. This is a life lesson. When I finally connected those dots, it was perfectly clear what he was saying: You can’t force people to do what you want. You have to convince them to agree with you. If you want to lead, you have to give people a reason to follow.
Any skill I have now as a teacher when it comes to helping students process their behavior issues, I can attribute to when my father recognized he needed to invest the time in straightening me out. Whatever reason I’ve ever given people to see me as any kind of a leader didn’t come from some miraculous staff development experience, or some generic educational leadership book, or any particularly resonating professional examples, or any number of redundant inspirational platitudes. For me, it’s always come back to finding the best way to get that chain up to the top of the hill.
So thanks for that, Dad. And Happy Father’s Day.
Sunday, June 8, 2014
The Compendium of 5th Grade Zen
5th Grade Zen comes from things happening or said in my school day that are so head-scratchingly odd or layered with unexpected wisdom that all I can do is step back and appreciate the moments... then later share them as Facebook status updates. To commemorate this being the final week of the school year (and likely my final week as a 5th grade teacher), I’ve put together a list of all the Moments of 5th Grade Zen that have occurred in the past year. Read, enjoy, and perhaps learn:
**********
"Fruit Smiles are the best fruit snacks because they don't taste like fruit."
"This grocery bag smells like a grocery bag."
During a lesson on bus safety we discussed how unsafe it is for students to stick their arms or heads out of the bus windows. Someone raised the point, "But dogs stick their heads out the windows of cars all the time." The only response I could think of: "And that's why dogs aren't allowed to ride the bus."
During a small group discussion, someone in class mentions Roman numerals. One student's response: "Those are great! I love Ramen noodles!"
Generally speaking, ten-year-old boys haven't mastered the subtleties of applying the Axe Body Spray discovered in their older brother's bedrooms.
While switching classes today one little girl had her arms so full of books she felt she had to carry her paper drinking cup in her mouth. While doing this, she sneezed right into the cup. To her credit she didn't drop it, but I hope she found a new one by the next time she was thirsty.
A girl came up to my desk during a test today. She asked me to read one of the questions to her. I did. "Okay," she said. "I just thought it was kind of a tongue twister. I wanted to see if you could say it."
The winds were strong this afternoon, and my windows were open to keep the room temperature down. Predictably, this distracted a lot of kids. To bring them back I said, "Okay, yes. It's windy out. But you've all spent your entire lives on Earth and you've seen wind before. It's nothing new." To which one little wisenheimer scientist replied, "But you can't actually *see* wind."
After I finished giving directions to the class about how to complete their next activity, I asked if anyone had any questions. One student raised her hand. "Yeah. Did you get a haircut?"
As I'm doing some incidental planning with another teacher in the back of the classroom, a student walks up with a question about a project. I answer the question. The student stands there looking at us for a few unnecessary seconds before finally narrating to himself, "Okay. I'm going to walk away now." And then he did just that.
"I never have any lucky days!... Well, except for yesterday."
This morning as the students were arriving, one of my boys walked right up to me and said, "I had to take the garbage out last night when it was snowing, and it was really cold. But it was so beautiful I just stood there and looked at it for awhile."
We conducted a survey about favorite after-school snacks for a data collection/graphing activity this afternoon. Instead of just raising her hand for the ‘other’ category, one girl loudly announced her choice: “Chocolate-covered popcorn, baby!”
A group of students made a poster to represent themselves. So of course one of the drawings they included is a volcano with birthday cakes erupting from it.
During class I announced there were five more minutes for the students to finish their warm-up problems. One student said, "Five minutes?! Can I have a little time to work? I'm not Jimmy John's!"
A student approached my desk with a wrapped gift and said, "My mom wanted me to give you this." Then he set it down and walked away without another word.
I gave a math test that had questions where student to answer with "greater than/less than" inequality symbols, like this: <. Students will often draw jagged teeth in these symbols to make them into mouths. But today, one girl went further and turned her symbol into a detailed, violently hungry-looking shark.
I recently gave an assignment in which students had to find a way a man could time 30 minutes using newly-purchased 9-minute and 13-minute sand glass timers. One student answered, "He could just set a real timer for 30 minutes like everyone else, and not waste his money on junk like that."
This Conversation:
Student: "I'm not very happy today."
Me: "Why is that?"
Student: "Because nobody laughs at any of my jokes."
Me: "Well, you know, not everybody is going to laugh at the same things."
Student: "I know. But these jokes are FUNNY!"
I'm grading tests today. One problem asked the students to write a real-world situation to match a mathematical expression. One student wrote a situation about a teacher named "Miss Anthrope."
One of my girls spilled some guacamole she'd brought for her snack on her pants. She wiped it off the best she could but left behind a small stain. She brought this concern to me. I looked down at the pants she was wearing -- camouflage leggings overlayed with some kind of indecipherable flower pattern. "I really don't think anyone is going to notice," I told her. She looked down at her pants for a moment, looked back up at me and said, "Good point."
In today's math lesson I was introducing surface area. After I gave a brief preview of our activities, one of the more clever girls raised her and said with a noticeable grin, "So we really are thinking outside of the box today, aren't we?"
During my prep time today I was in my room with the door locked and the lights off, enjoying the natural daylight coming in through the windows. My door handle starts shaking, hard. I open it and see two of my girls needing to get something they forgot. "It'd work better to knock," I said.
"But the lights were off," they replied. "We didn't know you were in the room!"
"So if you didn't know I was in here," I asked, "why did you think shaking the handle that much was going to do anything?"
They had no response.
At the end of the day I walked into the media center to pick up the class and noticed the room was filled with a certain smell. Our media specialist sees me scrunching up my face at it and says: "I love the smell of 5th grade in the afternoon. It smells like... attitude."
I gave a test today. The kids have been repeatedly coached to take their time and check their work. About half an hour into the test, one boy decides he's done. Immediately after he hands it in the dam breaks wide open and fourteen other students, none of them wanting to be the first one done, hand their tests in as well.
Two kids are playing a game when one tries to sneak around the rules for an extra turn. "You already played, you liar!" says his partner. The sneaky kid grins and replies, "I didn't lie. I just didn't tell the truth."
Today was Historical Character Day. One boy walks in wearing a white and green "Cat in the Hat" style hat and a long, thick white wizard beard. I asked him who he was dressed as. His answer: "Abraham Lincoln."
**********
Happy summer, everyone! May your upcoming school year be filled with inordinate amounts of accidental wisdom.
**********
"Fruit Smiles are the best fruit snacks because they don't taste like fruit."
"This grocery bag smells like a grocery bag."
During a lesson on bus safety we discussed how unsafe it is for students to stick their arms or heads out of the bus windows. Someone raised the point, "But dogs stick their heads out the windows of cars all the time." The only response I could think of: "And that's why dogs aren't allowed to ride the bus."
During a small group discussion, someone in class mentions Roman numerals. One student's response: "Those are great! I love Ramen noodles!"
Generally speaking, ten-year-old boys haven't mastered the subtleties of applying the Axe Body Spray discovered in their older brother's bedrooms.
While switching classes today one little girl had her arms so full of books she felt she had to carry her paper drinking cup in her mouth. While doing this, she sneezed right into the cup. To her credit she didn't drop it, but I hope she found a new one by the next time she was thirsty.
A girl came up to my desk during a test today. She asked me to read one of the questions to her. I did. "Okay," she said. "I just thought it was kind of a tongue twister. I wanted to see if you could say it."
The winds were strong this afternoon, and my windows were open to keep the room temperature down. Predictably, this distracted a lot of kids. To bring them back I said, "Okay, yes. It's windy out. But you've all spent your entire lives on Earth and you've seen wind before. It's nothing new." To which one little wisenheimer scientist replied, "But you can't actually *see* wind."
After I finished giving directions to the class about how to complete their next activity, I asked if anyone had any questions. One student raised her hand. "Yeah. Did you get a haircut?"
As I'm doing some incidental planning with another teacher in the back of the classroom, a student walks up with a question about a project. I answer the question. The student stands there looking at us for a few unnecessary seconds before finally narrating to himself, "Okay. I'm going to walk away now." And then he did just that.
"I never have any lucky days!... Well, except for yesterday."
This morning as the students were arriving, one of my boys walked right up to me and said, "I had to take the garbage out last night when it was snowing, and it was really cold. But it was so beautiful I just stood there and looked at it for awhile."
We conducted a survey about favorite after-school snacks for a data collection/graphing activity this afternoon. Instead of just raising her hand for the ‘other’ category, one girl loudly announced her choice: “Chocolate-covered popcorn, baby!”
A group of students made a poster to represent themselves. So of course one of the drawings they included is a volcano with birthday cakes erupting from it.
During class I announced there were five more minutes for the students to finish their warm-up problems. One student said, "Five minutes?! Can I have a little time to work? I'm not Jimmy John's!"
A student approached my desk with a wrapped gift and said, "My mom wanted me to give you this." Then he set it down and walked away without another word.
I gave a math test that had questions where student to answer with "greater than/less than" inequality symbols, like this: <. Students will often draw jagged teeth in these symbols to make them into mouths. But today, one girl went further and turned her symbol into a detailed, violently hungry-looking shark.
I recently gave an assignment in which students had to find a way a man could time 30 minutes using newly-purchased 9-minute and 13-minute sand glass timers. One student answered, "He could just set a real timer for 30 minutes like everyone else, and not waste his money on junk like that."
This Conversation:
Student: "I'm not very happy today."
Me: "Why is that?"
Student: "Because nobody laughs at any of my jokes."
Me: "Well, you know, not everybody is going to laugh at the same things."
Student: "I know. But these jokes are FUNNY!"
I'm grading tests today. One problem asked the students to write a real-world situation to match a mathematical expression. One student wrote a situation about a teacher named "Miss Anthrope."
One of my girls spilled some guacamole she'd brought for her snack on her pants. She wiped it off the best she could but left behind a small stain. She brought this concern to me. I looked down at the pants she was wearing -- camouflage leggings overlayed with some kind of indecipherable flower pattern. "I really don't think anyone is going to notice," I told her. She looked down at her pants for a moment, looked back up at me and said, "Good point."
In today's math lesson I was introducing surface area. After I gave a brief preview of our activities, one of the more clever girls raised her and said with a noticeable grin, "So we really are thinking outside of the box today, aren't we?"
During my prep time today I was in my room with the door locked and the lights off, enjoying the natural daylight coming in through the windows. My door handle starts shaking, hard. I open it and see two of my girls needing to get something they forgot. "It'd work better to knock," I said.
"But the lights were off," they replied. "We didn't know you were in the room!"
"So if you didn't know I was in here," I asked, "why did you think shaking the handle that much was going to do anything?"
They had no response.
At the end of the day I walked into the media center to pick up the class and noticed the room was filled with a certain smell. Our media specialist sees me scrunching up my face at it and says: "I love the smell of 5th grade in the afternoon. It smells like... attitude."
I gave a test today. The kids have been repeatedly coached to take their time and check their work. About half an hour into the test, one boy decides he's done. Immediately after he hands it in the dam breaks wide open and fourteen other students, none of them wanting to be the first one done, hand their tests in as well.
Two kids are playing a game when one tries to sneak around the rules for an extra turn. "You already played, you liar!" says his partner. The sneaky kid grins and replies, "I didn't lie. I just didn't tell the truth."
Today was Historical Character Day. One boy walks in wearing a white and green "Cat in the Hat" style hat and a long, thick white wizard beard. I asked him who he was dressed as. His answer: "Abraham Lincoln."
**********
Happy summer, everyone! May your upcoming school year be filled with inordinate amounts of accidental wisdom.
Thursday, June 5, 2014
The Old Guard
There was a retirement party at my school this morning. Two people on our staff are leaving when the school year ends in another week. I've had good working and personal relationships with both of them that go back well over a decade each, and for several reasons I'm sorry to see them leave. As would be the case with most retirement parties, a lot of faces from the past showed up to help celebrate. Some of those visitors were people I hadn't seen in months, if not years. It was good to see so many familiar faces, and I'm glad I had a chance to catch up with how they are and what they're doing, whether they had retired themselves or had just moved on to different things.
I noticed something about the dynamics of the room I thought was interesting: Not unexpectedly, the tables were incredibly segregated between the newer and/or younger members of the current school staff and the people coming back just for the party. Those returning were there to acknowledge the retirement of two people they had known for so long and shared so many experiences with, and they showed a real joy about being back together. For much of the younger crowd though, who are all so far from the concept of retirement, it seemed more of a general celebration with an underlying theme. They shared their genuine best wishes with the retirees, but they spent most of the time talking and eating with each other while these other people they only peripherally knew at best mingled and caught up.
It felt odd at first to notice that, because I generally feel that even though I'm now one of the staff members with the most seniority in a school that is undeniably skewing younger than it has in decades (and remarkably so), I still like to think I'm active in what happens in the building. And there are only a handful of people who'd fit into that same category I do, the people who have been around long enough to have shared history with those returning visitors and each other, and who are also still (hopefully) seen as vital and contributing members of the current staff.
I can remember ten, fifteen, twenty years back when events like this took place in my younger days, and the veterans of that time would get back together to relive a part of their friendships they didn't have anymore. In those moments I tended to seek out and bond more with the people closer to my age and experience (not that there were many of us back then). But now I'm one of the people that has a foot in both camps, and it leaves me feeling somewhat displaced as I try to picture where I fit in with all of these dynamics. Does my seniority earn me any credibility with people, or is it a filter they use to placate me and write me off? Am I still seen as playing catch-up with the generation ahead of me since I don't have pictures of grandchildren to share or month-long winter vacations to talk about, or am I being slowly disregarded out to pasture because I pull away from the loudly-cackling, offensive-joke-telling end of the happy hour table? I honestly don't know. And even though I decided to blog about it tonight, I'm not sure I'm that concerned about where people see me inside of that dynamic. I suppose it's been my experience that people will see what they see from whatever perspective they bring, and will either accept or not accept people or things or ideas based on that. There's little any of us can actively do to change that, other than present what we hope to be the best versions of ourselves and move forward with whatever weight that carries.
If I really do have a foot anchored in both camps as much as I'd like to think I do, it still comes down to what I do with whatever situations that presents. I guess that's part of the reason why this chunk of life is called "middle age."
I noticed something about the dynamics of the room I thought was interesting: Not unexpectedly, the tables were incredibly segregated between the newer and/or younger members of the current school staff and the people coming back just for the party. Those returning were there to acknowledge the retirement of two people they had known for so long and shared so many experiences with, and they showed a real joy about being back together. For much of the younger crowd though, who are all so far from the concept of retirement, it seemed more of a general celebration with an underlying theme. They shared their genuine best wishes with the retirees, but they spent most of the time talking and eating with each other while these other people they only peripherally knew at best mingled and caught up.
It felt odd at first to notice that, because I generally feel that even though I'm now one of the staff members with the most seniority in a school that is undeniably skewing younger than it has in decades (and remarkably so), I still like to think I'm active in what happens in the building. And there are only a handful of people who'd fit into that same category I do, the people who have been around long enough to have shared history with those returning visitors and each other, and who are also still (hopefully) seen as vital and contributing members of the current staff.
I can remember ten, fifteen, twenty years back when events like this took place in my younger days, and the veterans of that time would get back together to relive a part of their friendships they didn't have anymore. In those moments I tended to seek out and bond more with the people closer to my age and experience (not that there were many of us back then). But now I'm one of the people that has a foot in both camps, and it leaves me feeling somewhat displaced as I try to picture where I fit in with all of these dynamics. Does my seniority earn me any credibility with people, or is it a filter they use to placate me and write me off? Am I still seen as playing catch-up with the generation ahead of me since I don't have pictures of grandchildren to share or month-long winter vacations to talk about, or am I being slowly disregarded out to pasture because I pull away from the loudly-cackling, offensive-joke-telling end of the happy hour table? I honestly don't know. And even though I decided to blog about it tonight, I'm not sure I'm that concerned about where people see me inside of that dynamic. I suppose it's been my experience that people will see what they see from whatever perspective they bring, and will either accept or not accept people or things or ideas based on that. There's little any of us can actively do to change that, other than present what we hope to be the best versions of ourselves and move forward with whatever weight that carries.
If I really do have a foot anchored in both camps as much as I'd like to think I do, it still comes down to what I do with whatever situations that presents. I guess that's part of the reason why this chunk of life is called "middle age."
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