The other day, the Boy had a bit of difficulty getting out of bed.
Getting Out of Bed
Month: August 2016
How Many?
They always seem a little surprised that I can do it. I strike up a conversation with a student before school, someone unknown, someone who's caught my attention. We chat a bit, and then I ask the question: "If it's not too forward, can I ask you how many referrals you got last year?" Today's student, E, raised his eyes to the ceiling as he began count, but I didn't let him continue. "It's okay," I explained. "The number is not the point. The question is the point." He looked at me with a bit of confusion. "Did you notice I didn't ask you, 'Did you get any referrals last year?' but rather, 'How many referrals did you get?', which is a different question entirely." I paused. "Do you want to know how I knew you'd gotten referrals even though I've never seen you before in my life?"
Later, when E is in class with me, I recalled for the class, with his permission, the conversation. They were intrigued and asked if I could do it again.
"Really? You want me to put you on the spot like this?"
"Yes, we don't mind!"
I pointed to a boy who had already been quite chatty. "You've gotten a few." I pointed to a girl who, despite her best effort to hold it in, had displayed a bit of attitude. "You got a few." I mentioned two or three other students, and I was not wrong with a single one of them.
"Do you want to know how I do it? Do you want to know why I can confidently say that I could walk down the all on other team and tell you who'd gotten referrals, that I could go up to the sixth grade hall and make bets on who would get referrals within a few weeks?" They all wanted to know, so I explained the simple fact: "You are constantly, constantly communicating. With everything you do." I glanced around the classroom and created a list on the fly: "The way you're sitting in your desk communicates," I said to a young man who was slouched in his desk. "The way you carried on at the beginning of class, before we really got started, communicated," I said to the girl who was arguing loudly at the start of the period. "The way you wear your clothes," I said to a girl who obviously takes a great deal of pride in her physical appearance.
"Every little thing about every one of you communicates, some of it positive, some of it negative. Some of it you're aware of; most of it, I would guess, you're not aware of." And so many of them are not. They don't see that they're communicating disrespect with their body language and get upset when a teacher calls them on out on it. They don't see when they're communicating apathy by the simple way that they hold themselves. They think they're riddles wrapped in mysteries, but so much of it is just so obvious.
"Are you saying you know everything about us?" one girl asked.
"Certainly not. I'm only making inferences based on what I see, inferences based on past experiences. I don't know why you all do the things you do." That was a bit of a lie: I don't know about the specifics for this or that student, but I know many of the contributing factors.
Every year, I have this same conversation. Every year, I have the same hope that I can help them change.
New Start
Dear Terrence,
Tomorrow is the first day of the new school year, and I’m assuming I’ll meet you tomorrow, but sometimes you don’t really show up until the second or third week. That is to say, your behaviors don’t show up until then.
I’ll be honest: I’ve talked to your administrator from last year, and I have a pretty good idea who you might be, but that of course is never certain. The move from seventh to eighth grade works wonders sometimes, and you disappear into the crowd and become just another student. Still, you sometimes like to come out swinging, letting me know that very first period who you are with your disruptive and sometimes disrespectful behavior.
I would just remind you of a simple fact: you don’t have to go that direction this year. You can choose to make a different path for yourself. You don’t have to play the same part with the same actors as last year, possibly the year before. It can be different. It can be better. All you have to do is meet my smile with one of your own, and when in doubt, don’t speak. Don’t get me wrong — I want to hear what you say, but what you say can sometimes be disruptive, so just keep the burner on low for the first week and let’s see how things go.
With hope,
Your New Teacher
Dozen
A dozen years ago K and I wore these clothes to make a commitment to each other in front of our friends and family.
These pictures represent what that commitment was all about.
Saturday Ritual
Saturday is for the house, and while we’ve spent an inordinate amount of time and money on one part of the house — namely, the kitchen, we’ve neglected other parts of the property. With all the rain of the last few weeks, the yard had gone absolutely crazy, and there was much cleaning and rearranging still to be done in our downstairs.
K started with some final painting — the baseboards in the living room. The Boy, of course, just had to help.
“Daddy, you can’t touch this paint because it will just hurt you, okay?”
I tackled the yard.
It was finally not all that hot, but the humidity was stifling. Despite the discomfort, the Boy came out to help mow. This means he walked beside me for a few minutes, pretending to mow the steep section near the ditch.
After a shower, I checked out our oven.
The burners work, but the oven doesn’t ignite. In the end, the Boy and I decided that we should just call the experts who sold us the equipment and let them decide if it’s something I just didn’t do or there is some defect in the appliance.
Cooking in the Rain
Just a few more days of this. The backsplash goes in tomorrow, so the stove will follow shortly after that.
Breakfast
New and Old
Slowly, we’re returning to the old within the new. The grandparents were over for lunch yesterday, eating in our new kitchen at our old table a meal that was cooked in our soon-to-be-outdated field kitchen.
Afterward, we had quiet a rain — unlike any we’ve had this summer. The ground was so hard and dry that puddles formed immediately, giving me a chance to walk around the house and see how our filled in trench from our unexpected sewer renovation was draining. A few problems there, but the rain didn’t last quite long enough for those problems to actually materialize (i.e., start to flood the crawl space). Which means we still don’t know how our sump pump works, whether or not it takes care of the problem.
Moving In
Three, maybe three and a half weeks ago, we reached a point in our kitchen remodel project that everything more or less looked like a kitchen. The counters and tops were in, and while the floor wasn’t finished yet, it was installed and looked like a floor. And yet there was so much to do — trim around the windows and doors, baseboard trim, final plumbing (including fixing problems the sewer line in the front yard and with the newly-installed gas line), lights, and the like. So it looked like we were almost there, but we were still so far away. All the changes from that point on were so small in comparison to ripping out a window and door to rebuild the header.
Finally, we’ve reached a point that we’re almost to the point that we can say, “We’re almost done.” “Almost done” because the under-the-cabinet lighting installation has been put off for some time, as has the final venting of the microwave through the room (right now, it’s just popped into the attic). So even when the back splash gets completed next week, and we finally move in the stove — the final appliance — we still won’t be complete done. And then there’s the new dining room furniture we’ve ordered so that every little thing in the kitchen, except for the coffee maker and toaster oven, will be new.
So today we made the final little adjustments and started moving in. L and I filled all the trim nail holes with spackling while E and K cleaned all the windows. Then I set out with the caulk gun to caulk the trim before it gets a coat of paint.
K, in the meantime, prepared all the new shelves with liners and began running all our dishes through the new dishwasher. We quickly discovered the enormous difference between the old dishwasher and the new: the old sometimes cleaned; the new is so powerful that it knocked the finish off a couple of items that we’d put in the bottom.
Tomorrow, the table migrates back to the dining area, where it will stay for a few weeks until the new furniture arrives, and we begin moving food to the kitchen, reverting our basement to just that. We’ll tear down the field kitchen in the backyard, move the grill back onto the deck, and begin to forget the work of the summer and just live.