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“Sledding”

Thursday 13 January 2011

We live in the South: two things we do not have but would have come in handy this week:

  1. Snow shovel
  2. Sled

The former is easily enough fixed. A good square-point shovel gets the job done, albeit very slowly. The latter took some thinking. Eventually, we settled on a design: enormous Zip-Lock bags encasing a few carefully folded blankets. It’s soft; it’s durable; it slides — almost.

It needs a little motivation to go the first few times — a little momentum from an old body that now cringes looking at this picture. Still, for the good of God, country, sledding, and all that.

K has a bit more success, but Baby, strapped to a paper plate, glides along the frozen snow like a pro.

L herself, though, is a little more reluctant. She needs a few more observational sessions to get comfortable with the idea of sliding down ice on a pile of blankets tucked in a bag. (Would a proper sled allay her fears any?)

In the end, the most fun for L is “cleaning” the streets: taking large chunks of frozen snow she finds and breaking them gleefully.

“I’m helping our neighbors,” she explains in utmost seriousness, dumping another load of snow back into the road as she talks. “It’s hard work.” And wet.

So is hauling a heavy chunk of growing girl up and down the icy streets on an improvised sleigh, but like L, K doesn’t complain.

Hard is sometimes a pleasure.

Dancing

Wednesday 12 January 2011

The Girl loves dancing. We’ve known that for some time, and made videos and photos several times.

It’s such an odd thing for me, a complete non-dancer. She can hear music that she likes, and she’ll jump up and start dancing — in the kitchen, in the living room, in her room.

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I imagine if any of her favorites came on the radio while we’re out shopping, she’d dance about there as well.

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She dances to anything. K puts on Polish folk music and within minutes, the Girl has burst into the living room and is dancing. Anything by Chopin gets her swaying almost majestically.

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Elvis Costello can get her feet moving so fast it looks likes she’s running in place.

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It is the ultimate sign of a love of music.

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Our hope is that it will last and deepen over the years.

Snow Day(s) 2011, Day 2

Tuesday 11 January 2011

A snow day was always an unexpected blessing when I was growing up. They were so rare that it was hard believe it when they actually occurred. As a teacher, I’ll admit that one snow day a year is just about the best thing that can happen. I know that we’ve lost a make-up day, but three are built into the school calendar — not a big price to pay. Having two snow days gets to be irritating. Having three is simply annoying. After that, we’re in the hole: we have to make them up some other way.

So while the first day is all fun and games — playing in the snow, taking walks, just enjoying the snow.

I went for a walk, watching how Southerners drive in the snow, wondering where such misplaced confidence comes when they have so little experience driving in such conditions. At least one individual seemed to think that because he had a SUV normal rules of physics didn’t apply to him.

Others thought that somehow the laws of physics increased their stringency in icy conditions, barely going much faster than I walked. The majority managed to meet some happy medium.

Others were enjoying what the drivers were avoiding. “A day with dry, powdery snow does not present the best condition for a sled with runners,” I wanted to tell them. They were figuring it out for themselves, though.

As I trudged through the snow, I thought of all the countless walks I took in the snow while living in Poland. I was enchanted every winter: snow on the ground for weeks, months at a time. In the South, we’re lucky if it stays for a couple of days (the present conditions excepted). My first year in Polska, there was snow on the ground from early December to March. I went for a walk almost every day, exploring just how deep the snow in the fields could be in mid-January, after several snow falls.

Tramping around with a camera brought about some wonderfully nostalgic moments. My whole story of my photographic hobby unfolded in my memory: I arrived in Poland with a point-and-shoot Canon and quickly bought my first SLR — a Russian Zenit (Зени́т‚ in Russian), a solid, heavy metal-bodied camera with a manual focus and manual metering. I learned more about photography wrestling with that beast than I’ve learned since.

I continued my walk to the main street of our hamlet and slipped into an open CVS. By the door, the Southern storm staple: bread.

“Did you put that out for the storm?” I ask as I pay for the lighters I bought.

“I don’t think so,” replied the attendant. “But I didn’t work this weekend. I can’t remember if we had it out last time I worked.”

As I headed back home, I saw a fitting message.

Everyone had taken it to heart: the streets were virtually empty.

“Who would get out in this mess when there’s no where to go?” I muttered to myself. The whole state shut down yesterday: schools, state offices, everything but the DMV and their salt/brine-spreading, snow plowing devices.

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In the meantime, we kept ourselves busy.

Snow Day 2011

Monday 10 January 2011

Sunday was clear — sunny, with a blue sky and the cool air typical of a Southern winter. The storm was coming, though, and everyone knew it.

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Officials canceled school Sunday night, around 9:45, before a single flake fell. Local news outlets carried stories of empty store shelves as residents bought milk, bread, coats, boots, shovels — the signs of a population generally unprepared for such snow.

We woke to white, something so rare here that it makes us simply awestruck.

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We’d grown used to seeing one snowfall a year, usually with two inches accumulation maximum, disappearing by the afternoon. To wake up to four inches, with more falling — almost unheard of in the South.

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Everything stops — no one’s going anywhere, and so unexpectedly, we have a family day.

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Morning in the snow, maybe a movie in the afternoon, more snow before the sun sets — a perfect day.

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Journals

Wednesday 5 January 2011

Frustration Bliss
Image via Wikipedia

Reading eighth-graders’ journals is like jumping in a time machine: all the angst, all the broken hearts, all the frustration with school. I see myself a thousand times over. Bored with this. Frustrated about that. Irritated with him. In love with her.

“Nothing new under the sun.”

They’ll find this out for themselves. But when I leave comments in their journal, how can I say this without being dismissive? It’s a fine line.

First Day Back

Monday 3 January 2011

Returning to school as a student was always something of a mix. There was a little relief because, let’s face it: free time can get a little boring when you’re a teen. At the same time, there was the return to dreaded classes and dreaded teachers. There were classes we didn’t feel were worth our time (sometimes rightly, often not), but this was not the real problem.

The true problem was in the personnel: the teachers.

Though they were few, there were teachers gifted at turning interesting subject matter into drudgery because of their inability to share their enthusiasm or (probably more likely) their complete lack of enthusiasm. Such teachers often complained about the end of break, relied heavily on sarcasm in their interactions with students, and generally made no effort to hide the fact that they really didn’t want to be there, that they really didn’t enjoy working with us, and that, given any other options, they would choose just about any job over being a teacher. (This is certainly not to say that any teacher who complains about the end of a break or uses sarcasm is such a teacher.)

Those were the classes we endured when going back to school after a break. Was it best to have such a teacher first period, fourth period, or seventh? That was the only question. First period meant getting the dreaded class over with from the beginning. Seventh period meant capping a potentially great day with a sure disaster. Fourth was always good for me: not early enough to put me in a sour mood for the rest of the day and not late enough to leave a bad taste in my mouth before heading home.

I know there are still teachers like that. I suspect that if I snooped around a bit, I’d find one or two in my own school. Most teachers would say the same of their schools, I’m sure.

For such teachers, being in class is just as much drudgery as it is for the students. Neither wants to be there; all are counting the minutes to the end of the class. Such teachers drag themselves out of bed every morning and breathe a sigh of relief when the day is done. And so the first day back for them is sheer torture. It’s a return to work.

Along the lines of the old adage, I’ve never worked a day in my life as long as I’ve been employed in education. Going back to school today was a pleasure. Indeed, I couldn’t get to sleep for the excitement last night of trying some new lessons in old units. I walked down the hall this morning with an enormous smile on my face, and I greeted everyone — students, teachers, administrators — with a genuinely goofy cheerfulness. I told students that I’d missed them, that I’d been looking forward to returning, that I was a little bored without working with them.

Perhaps this helps explain why I have no behavior issues in my classroom beyond the talkative nature of thirteen-year-olds.