Teacher Summer

I walked out of school last Thursday pleased to have finished my last day. That’s right; while the rest of you have visions of teachers chilling on beaches during their summers, we’re actually at school planning our curricula for next year, interviewing teachers to join our department, and boning up on content so that we’ll have what to teach when our students roll through the door in the fall.

I left the school fairly ecstatic that my vacation is starting. I imagined a summer that looked entirely like this:

And this:

And lots of these:

Instead, it’s shaping up to look like this:

I’ve got a new prep next year. Psychology, regular and IB. As every member of my family has helpfully reminded me, in high school I stomped up to the Social Studies teacher and told him that psychology was a bunch of new-age gabble-babble, and he should offer AP Euro instead of Psych. But now that I’m preparing to teach it I find a new enthusiasm coming over me. People and the decisions they make are so darn interesting.

My spare time, when I’m not poring through psychology books, planning units and finding sources, are spent on my three summer masters classes in teaching, and writing a curriculum unit on human agency for my Charlotte Teacher’s Institute fellowship. That’s right, most of this summer is actually going to be a welter of research and writing. Teachers have helluva lot of homework. Like the kids, I think I should get paid for doing it, but hey, nobody listens to students—why should they listen to teachers?

Lest that not be enough to keep me occupied, I just had gum surgery. Last summer, while living in Hell, Oklahoma, undergoing the psychological manipulation that TFA calls “Institute,” I picked up the nasty habit of grinding my teeth to siphon off stress. One year away and a blissful two semesters among schoolchildren who have much better human sensibilities than the the TFA Institute staff, I have kicked the stress, but the tooth-grinding habit remains. (Y’all TFAers who’ve told me you share the tooth-clenching quirk, see a periodontist pronto). So now I’m hopped up on pain meds, hoping that my postings in my masters class forums are not in any way exaggerated or psycho.

So, to sum up my summer:

·      New psychology preps

·      Master’s classes

·      Curriculum writing

·      Gum surgery

If one more person tells me how lucky teachers are to have summers off, I will kick them in the face. No worries, I can recommend a good periodontist.

I Know Who the Bad Guys Are

At the start of every semester, in the first week of launching our Greek unit, my students evaluate Alexander the Great’s leadership qualities. They read about his military prowess, his pragmatic promotion of racial equality, his murderousness, his love for his mother, his alcoholism, and that he thought he was a god. The purpose of the exercise is twofold. Not only do they amass a great deal of information about Alexander the Great, but they also come to the understanding that history is complicated, that no person in it is wholly good or wholly evil, that as much as they ask me, throughout the semester, whether it was Louis XIV or Robespierre or Napoleon who was really the bad guy, I will not have an answer for them. Because neither history nor good and evil are quite so accessibly decidable.

Yet, if school was still in session, and my students came to me and asked about the three Israeli teenagers (Eyal, Gilad, and Naftali) who were kidnapped by Hamas on Thursday on their way home from school and whose families are awaiting their return, I would have an answer. The bad guys are obvious.

Many seem undecided. The Germans are still trying to ascertain whether it is a kidnapping (one of the boys placed a call to the police saying he'd been kidnapped, you morons). The EU is keeping a careful feeble silence. The New York Times is upset that the “growing search for them [the boys] and their captors [will] further destabilize Israeli-Palestinian relations,” which would make perfect sense if it wasn’t the kidnapping itself that was causing the search—that’s like blaming firemen for dumping water on your house instead of the arsonists who lit the fire. Impeccable logic. Oh, how embarrassing to be American!

Interestingly, it’s the IDF’s own website that provided me with the most pause. They posted how Palestinians see kidnapping as their only strategy to seek the return of their relatives who sit in Israeli prisons and have celebrated the kidnapping by passing out candy. Now, let’s put to the side the fact that it’s representatives of Hamas, a terrorist organization that has as its stated purpose the destruction of Israel, in prison, and that three high school students, boys who never committed a crime against anyone, who have been kidnapped. The Palestinians in jail are somebody’s sons, somebody’s brothers, and they want them free. That makes sense. But instead of continuing with their hunger strike, instead of attracting world opinion to their cause, or working through legal channels, their answer is to kidnap other people’s sons, brothers, family. 

  

When I taught in Norway for a year, I spent a morning discussing capital punishment with two of my ninth grade Norwegian students. One of them lost several close friends in the shooting at Uttøya a month before. The other survived the shooting by hiding in a bathroom and mourned friends who had been there with her. They were both positive that killing Breivik, the shooter, would be a horrible thing to do. That it would somehow compound the evil of his massacre. Though he was evil, they would not become evil. The lesson they learned from their suffering was compassion. 

This is the same lesson that Jews who walked out of the gates of Auschwitz spread: Never Again, for anyone. This is the lesson we relive every Passover when we think back to our national formation and remember how we were slaves in Egypt—as we were oppressed, so shall we be compassionate. This is the lesson that terrorists count on to keep us from giving them what they deserve-- that we will use a disproportional restraint because of our memories of oppression and fears of being the oppressors. Every time I hear that Hamas leaders in Gaza have been arrested, a trickle of fear goes through me-- did our soldiers dehumanize them at all, and thus themselves? Did little children watch their fathers be arrested? Are they sure it was the right men --Hamas leaders-- they took to jail? Did they follow the IDF protocol of being attacked before they are allowed to shoot (what other army in the world would dream of that?!)? Even the photos of Palestinians eating candy to celebrate our boys' kidnapping cannot erase these thoughts from my mind, and right now, I oughtn't to have the luxury of compassion for them-- I ought only to have prayer for our boys. But compassion remains because it is not, in fact, a luxury. It is a necessity.

Students of mine, I cannot teach you about this event next year. It will not be in our contemporary unit, because I cannot teach this without bias. I can let you make up your own minds about whether Alexander the Great was great and whether the Industrial Revolution had more pros than cons, but not this. Right now, in this day and age, the kidnappers of three innocent high school boys are the bad guys. Those who take their own misery and try to spread and multiply it, to share it among the innocent, are evil. If freshman high school students who have survived a terrorist attack in Norway can figure that out, so can Palestinian adults. The lesson of morality, of taking one's struggles and using them to become a better person, are what makes us human. 

Students of mine, I know who the bad guys are. And I'm so frightened. Because three high school students, just your age, are in their grasp. So as I sit in the school media center, planning your curriculum for next year and hitting refresh on Haaretz every thirty seconds, all I can think about is the one message I want you to learn: It doesn't matter one whit whether Alexander the Great loved his mama or killed his own men. What matters is that you are the good guys. That you become able to take your hardships (and life has dealt you a deep stack of hot mess, I know) and turn them into compassion; that you take your struggles and use them as a moral compass. Be the good guys. Be the good guys. 

Please, if you pray, pray for these boys: Yaakov Naftali ben Rachel Devorah, Gilad Michael ben Bat Galim, and Eyal ben Irim Teshurah. 

Don't Ever Let Go of the Thread

All my life, since I was first aware that I was aware, I’ve held the exquisite beauty of the world cupped in my hands. Sometimes I bring it close and inhale the scent of life, sometimes I lap it up fiercely, and sometimes it’s enough just to know it’s there, sliding back and forth between my palms. But at one point, deep in the awakening that comes in those years of middle school epiphany that I’m not the only person on the earth, came the compulsion to share it. To scatter the zest of living to a world that seems sleepily, leisurely interested in licking its own wounds instead of celebrating its existence.

There are many ways to do this. I’ve experimented with several. But right now teaching seems the best. It lets you spread the beauty, share the beauty, and also experience the beauty. 

We watched the buses roll out today with a weird mixture of exhilaration and nostalgia.  Our kids are gone. Yesterday we administered their last exams. I was responsible for a class of fifteen twelfth graders, laboriously struggling through a James Joyce excerpt that some jerk of a testing official thought would be funny to put on the English 12 exam. Asshole. One of the kids kept turning the pages of his exam and then fluttering his hand in front of his face, saying “oh my” in a breathy little voice. Every time I caught his eye, I grinned—couldn’t help it. Another kid had a little gas problem mid-exam, but for the most part they behaved well, especially when they saw that I was un-interested in their shenanigans.

It was fun to talk to seniors, before and after the exam; one of my favorite kids from my homeroom is in the class and went haywire with excitement when I walked through the door. He gave me a good rep—the class is notoriously difficult, and he had everyone turning in their phones and eagerly hushing each other so I could read directions. We also yeeted a little to blow off steam before the test. Afterwards, as I was getting ready to leave, a group of three seniors came up to the desk, led by the boy who went “oh my.”

“Are you an angel?”

“What?”

“Are you an angel?”

“Why are you asking that?”

“Because how you came in, when you walked through the door you were happy, and smiling, and you keep smiling, and how you look… you must be an angel.”

I took stock quickly: I’m wearing a pencil skirt and a faded blue blouse that’s at least three years old. My hair is up in a messy bun and I’m nursing bruises down my left leg from where I decided to run into my stairwell. My bag is stuffed with books and folders, and I’m leaning on the desk to keep it from ripping. I’m certainly not angelic-looking.

“Huh?!”

“You just, you must be an angel. Your smile.”

Kids, I smile for you. You make me smile, with your earnestness, your silliness, the way you furrow your brows when you concentrate, and the stupid things that make you laugh. And outside this school, people smile all the time. They just do. Not to be angels, to be humans. Welcome to the world.

As I was walking back to my ninth graders, I passed the veteran teacher who’d proctored for me on Friday. He’s intimidated me ever since the first week of school, when he caught me making 60+ copies on the copy machine (I didn’t even know the word Riso then, let alone what it was to be used for). He stopped me by the bathrooms.

“Ms. W, I just wanted to say, I was really impressed by your control of your classroom on Friday. You told them to hush and they all hushed. Great classroom management. Are you going to be back next year?”

Oh, yes! Yes I am! And thank you, veteran teacher, for bolstering my confidence.

In my class, we sat and watched Olympus has Fallen, and I bemoaned the fact that multiple children asked whether that was actual footage. Yes, kids, this is exactly like that time the White House was captured by the North Koreans, but luckily Gerard Butler was there to save the day.

At the end of the day, I told two kids they could rip the paper coverings off the windows—big mistake. They began ripping everything they could find (luckily most of my classroom was already dismantled). My MLK poster, proclaiming the necessity of love and light, is now in two pieces. Some might call that ironic.

Today, only about a third of students came to school. In my classes we watched Valkyrie or The Croods and played Two Truths and A Lie and sat around chatting. I pulled kids in from the hallway where they were running around and disturbing people, and made them sit in my class. By the end of the day, half the students that were leaning forward, watching The Croods and sucking the last of my candy hoard, weren’t even mine. But those who were mine jumped to my desk at the end to take selfies with me and trade hugs and promise they’d visit me next year. 

So, my first year teaching is over. It doesn’t feel dramatic enough. At the end, the kids swarmed onto the buses just like every other day, and I waved and watched them go with a mixture of triumph and heartbreak. Everything they learned, everything they taught me is jumbled up in all our brains, and I hope poignantly that some of it sticks. If not, at least I taught them, and they taught me, to smile.

The Way It Is

There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.

-William Stafford

In Pursuit Of God

My first class took their first exam. Immediately as I passed the tests out, half the class went to sleep. One plugged her thumb in her mouth. Another snored gently. Two others engaged in flicking each other off by rubbing their middle fingers casually across their heads and ears as though scratching. One star pupil decided to take off both his sneakers and clean them. I walked around the room, desperately tapping on desks—it’s the only way I’m allowed to wake the kids up. One girl cocked an eyebrow at me the second time I did it, and when I gestured to her test, she sat up. My grin must have cracked my face in half, and she set to work with a good will when she saw how happy it made me. She, and the industrious, attitude-filled student up front who quietly went about the test, underlining phrases and looking over her work with such a solid attitude it made me joyous, got me through that exam, until the point of half an hour left when my kids all set to with a good will. Afterwards, my proctor told me he thought my kids probably did really well, based on the amount of attention they gave the exam.

“All except that one fellow with the shoes. He didn’t take it seriously, not at all.”

Afterwards I showed Freedom Writers, and kids started rapping along with Tupac. They leaned into the movie. They were very proud that they know what the Holocaust is.

Shavuot was lovely, perhaps my favorite holiday with its focus on cheesecake and Torah learning. The parts of Judaism that really matter. I had several of the young Jewish community over for dinner, and our conversation took a fascinating plunge into the intricacies of rabbinic guidance. It left me cogitating upon the ways my spiritual outlook has shaped itself over my adult life, from Israel, to Norway, to Toronto, to here.

This year in North Carolina has many things in common with the year I spent in Norway. In both places I ventured outside my regular rounds, met people with lives wildly different from my own, stretched my abilities and challenged myself, and learned more about what kind of world I want to make than ever before. However, as the year winds down, I find myself thinking about how powerfully G-d entered both places, both parts of my life.

To be fair, Norway and North Carolina were bookended by cities on my personal timeline that couldn’t help but make G-d look good elsewhere. Toronto is lacquered with a hard, shiny materialism that leaves no place for G-d to get a purchase. The synagogues were full of stylish atheists; the university of intelligent agnostics. In Jerusalem, on the other hand, G-d is spread thin by a population that voices Him so often, the city is suffocated in a meaningIess membrane of divinity, with gaping holes in it where children poked at Him too hard as they do with a ball of silly putty stretched tight and clear.

After Israel, it was muvan maalav that I find Norway charged with the grandeur of G-d. Not a moment passed without a heady sense of heaven. G-d gave Norway so much beauty, there is little left in comparison for the rest of the world. Nothing can approximate the allure of the country. Dahl’s paintings are faint eldritch echoes of the landscape; Tennyson’s lines hang scantily across the mountain ranges; Grieg’s symphonies ring tinkling next to the roaring power of fjord and fosse. There was little left but to praise G-d with every breath, to salute work well done with every step, to wonder how it is possible to live other than with the exaltation and simply pleasure in life that the Norwegians so encapsulate.

North Carolina is not as gaspingly gorgeous as Norway. It does not impress one with the sheer necessity of G-d at every look. One does not breath in a blend of salt spray and mountain breeze that comes from Elysium. Yet, G-d is persistent here. 

Here where a student focuses on her work despite the chaos around her, unbendingly and stubbornly pursuing a path to college despite pregnant friends, a drunken father, a school with more weed available than books. G-d is here with a teenage boy who fears every day that he will be deported, but nonetheless rises through halting English to the top of the class. G-d is here with the gang member who smiles boyishly as he explains his tattoos and offers to stay late to reset the desks in the classroom. G-d gives strength to the girl whose father was shot before her eyes just a month ago, sending her into school to succeed. G-d watches the one who has spoken of suicide, the one who’s scared of bullies but nevertheless comes to learn, the one with a learning disability who’s made friends with the child who can coach him through. At every second, in the children’s laughter, in their politenesses, the way they ask to clean the board and ring out cheerfully in morning greetings to their teachers and hold each other tight when something has gone horribly wrong, there is some divinity at work, holding us all through and bringing us out the other side. In a year filled with the most difficult moments, I have never been so aware of finding grace.

I Step Outside Myself
I step outside
myself, out of my eyes,
hands, mouth, outside
of myself I
step, a bundle
of goodness and godliness
that must make good 
this devilry that has happened. 

-Ingeborg Bachmann

Teach Ten Thousand Stars

I sat in the social worker’s office, doing some final grading. I was the official “regular ed teacher” who  obediently signed off on the papers that were handed to me as one by one, seniors sat through their exit meetings from our school’s “Exceptional Children” (read, in NCspeak, Special Ed). Three different counselors emptied their caseloads and each adjured me to take out some work, I didn’t have to pay attention to the proceedings. But I did.

Dull-looking children sat opposite me, staring at me instead of at their counselors. I was less threatening, I suppose. I gave them encouraging smiles and whispered “congratulations!” when the counselor read off in a dull voice that they were being exited out of the program and out of high school, nervous that I was interrupting the proceedings. As the counselors informed student after student that they were now 21 and being timed out of the benefits of the program, and indeed out of high school, or that they'd scraped through their diploma and could now move on to an uncertain future, I felt a mounting hysteria build. She asked each kid, “do you have plans for after?” None of them did. “Well, hopefully you’ll find a job.” Hopefully. I wanted to stop the proceedings, insist that these children not sign until more help was given them in figuring out the next step. But I signed, and signed, and wondered whether I am content to be a cog in an evil machine instead of the thinking, justice-seeking human being I wish to be.

The last counselor was different. For each child, she built them up. “This is your exit meeting… legal blather, legal blather… and guess what?” The children looked up, anticipating. “You are graduating high school with a diploma, and exiting the Exceptional Children’s Program! That means you don’t need our help anymore? How does that feel?” These children smiled, nodded, lit up. Several reached over to shake my hand of their own volition as they exited the office. They had summer jobs, or had applied for them with her help. Note to self: always spin positive.

 

I passed out goodbye notes to two of my classes. It’s a step up from last semester, when one class was all I could find it in my heart to write heartfelt goodbye notes to. I know these kids slightly better, too—have gotten better at finding out who they are and what makes them tick. They looked up, one by one, to say thank you as I passed among them. As my shining pupil in my last class walked out, he muttered, “I’ll miss this class.” So will I.

Did I teach them anything this year? As I wobbled back and forth, finding my teaching philosophy? As I learned world history and struggled to come to grips with the real, not the textbook facts, well enough to teach it? Can they write better now? Can they read better now? Do they want to? Do they know themselves a little more than they did at the start, have a slightly better sense of their ability to make themselves over, to bring joy to the world and kindness, too? With all the testing, state standards, TFA data dumps and school requirements, did I kill their joy for learning, or help them see around that to the keen edge of knowledge’s horizon? The state exams next week will not prove any of that, but I must have, a little. Still, the adage that teachers learn more than ever their students do, is forever true. And it’s okay. Because it will come back to the students.

I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.

-ee cummings

The People I Love Best

Today during my planning I lingered in the doorway of the gym, to watch the senior award ceremony. The seniors wore their maroon and gold caps and gowns and tall heels that shook the floor of that poor gym as they crashed up the steps. Detached, unknowing administrators blandly read off prize amounts and casually shook sweaty palms with beating pulses before they exited the gym, guffawing loudly and importantly at their authority to interrupt the ceremony with noise.

Halfway through the awards, the senior choir rose to perform. In their long robes, they swayed like a church choir, the ladies carefully shifting their weight silently from heel to heel. A boy in the front conducted, shaking back his robe sleeves and waving his hands in the air ecstatically. He was the best performer. In front, a couple shared the microphone back and forth, crooning into it above the wails of the choir.

Their chosen song was “My Testimony,” by Marvin Sapp. Eyes filled as the seniors mournfully sang, “I’m so glad I made it through / In spite of the storm and rain, heartache and pain…” The song was not your usual graduation lullaby about missing one’s childhood. These kids' childhoods were tough, and they’re proud that they survived them to stand it on the stage. I got chills as I listened. It was utterly foreign and utterly appropriate.

Today was a maelstrom of getting ready for the end. Students went through practice tests on last year’s exams. Third and fourth block were inspired by my speech, “this is your time to study. You are lucky.” Second was not so convinced, and a roar of “No!” greeted me when I told them it had just become an open-notes quiz. Unlike my other classes, they haven’t quite gotten the love of learning for the sake of learning down yet.

The blur of grades, paperwork, recovery-tracking and roster-checking and equipment-labeling that comes with the end of the year has me a serene whirlwind. I like this kind of thing, though it gives me but a few moments to myself. I paid two of my kids ten mini-chocolate bars each to carry school supplies out to my car, and my walls are already stripped and bare, my grades already nearly all chalked up, just waiting for the last day’s worth and any lucky kid who ignored my timeline and tries to turn in late work. There’s something wonderful about these last days, about the hard straight rain pouring outside my window right now and thundering down my chimney, as determined to blast through its purpose as I am at the moment, when everything has crystallized into a clear mountain to be climbed before me.

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who stand in the line and haul in their places,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

Marge Piercy

So I chose to work with teachers.

Phenomenal Woman

 Today, driving home from work, the radio announcer shared the news, and a deep indigo tear welled up in my soul. A woman who taught me the pride of beauty died today. The stride of my step, the curl of my lips are forever indebted to her. I spent many a solitary high school hour reading and re-reading her poem, until I’d memorized it and could stride down the street with joy in my feet, the sun of my smile beatifying the empty driveways, reciting it.

Earlier this year, I reread I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings and pictured my students in her place at one or another chapter, myself wavering on their edges trying to guess and gauge and give. I sat on my southern porch and dipped into the child’s mind with a keen recognition. The selfhood she brought to it gave life to racist experiences far outside my own.

I drove along today, letting the radio’s appropriately chosen The Lark Ascending flitter through my emotions, musing on how a woman so many people have never met can have such a profound effect on their lives. The monolith of her personality emerges from her writing a hazy, solid purple triangle, as defined as any literary symbol of womanhood, jutting into meaning. So many writers lose themselves in social justice, a call to arms so strident it deafens the personal touch. May Angelou gave both. I love her for allowing me to find myself inside her writing and for teaching me of the outside.

Tomorrow my children will read:

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may tread me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
'Cause I walk like I've got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I'll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops.
Weakened by my soulful cries.

Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don't you take it awful hard
'Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines
Diggin' in my own back yard.

You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I'll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I've got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history's shame
I rise
Up from a past that's rooted in pain
I rise
I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.

I have faith that the children, too, will rise.

OrNaw

Today I went to verify my rosters before final exams. As I walked into the testing center, the testing coordinator groaned.

“You have more students than any other teacher. This is going to take forever. Buckle up.”

Maybe I'll ditch my crowded classroom and move to China.
... ornaw.

What?! I’m glad I only found that out with six days left of school. It does confer a nice distinction.

This article says that teachers spend, on average, $500 of their own money on school supplies for their students.

Sounds a bit low. My kids really breeze through pencils.

The kids are writing skits for trials-- they're all putting various violent groups (IRA, Tamil Tigers, Weathermen Underground, ANC, etc) on trial, and the jury (the rest of the class) must vote on whether it's terrorism or freedom fighting. I introduced it with the line "You guys will have to decide, are they terrorists ornaw?" and the classes went crazy each time. It's so easy to make them happy. Our new class logo: #terrorismOrNaw?

------
Some days, I just don’t know what to say to my kids. I usually end up with "oh."

One of my students who has struggled with motivation and behavior all semester has really been on point the past few weeks, and scored above an 80 on his last test. We’ve been getting along—he answers me with more than a grunt, and favors the class discussion with insights and grins. Yesterday I asked him, towards the end of class, what he’d be doing this summer.

“Going to see my mother. In Puerto Rico.”

“Puerto Rico! Cool.”

“Or Connecticut. I’m not sure which.”

“Oh.”

“She has breast cancer.”

“Oh… how is she doing?”

“Stage three.” Jesus. What… why? Remember, you don’t like me. You don’t share with me.

“You know, they’re getting a lot better at treating it. I hope she’s okay. I’m glad you get to see her.”

“Yeah, I haven’t seen her in seven years.” Oh.

Me with confiscated chocolate

A girl’s mom came in to watch her behavior during fourth block today. I had no head’s up, so when I saw the young woman walk in beside her daughter, I asked, “hi, can I help you?” rather interrogatively. I thought it was a student skipping to be with her friend. Eek. In honor of the watching mom, my kids put on an all-out freak show of misbehavior. One student came in and promptly lay facedown on the floor in the front of the class. He scampered up as soon as I took out my computer to get a picture. Glorious. I'm turning into one of my kids-- don't deal with it, photograph it. On the bright side, I now possess a jumbo chocolate bar previously used for hitting people, and a new phone that is well-tested in the art of selfies. Just kidding. I gave them back. But next time I hawk them on the school black market… gotta pay for those $500 of school supplies somehow. I'd probably get more for the chocolate than the phone, the way those move around.