Bash
g
Difficult
Dear Terrence,
It’s difficult to respect you sometimes because you so disrespect yourself by disrespecting everyone around you. It’s hard to be pleasant with you because your attitude and demeanor so often are so very unpleasant that I quite frankly would rather not even see you during the day. It’s difficult to care about you because no one, it seems, has really cared about you, and you have internalized all that and decided that you’re going to make sure that no one cares about you by being so terribly disrespectful and rude to everyone around you.
I can handle your daily disrespect of me: you’re just a child, and quite honestly, what you say to me has come to mean nothing because you never say anything that’s not disrespectful. You’re just like a toddler, forever pitching a fit. The problem is, when you do that, you do it in front of others, thereby challenging my authority, and that forces me to do something. I know, I know, you don’t care about referrals. You don’t care about suspension. You don’t care. But your apathy now affects the rest of the class, and by being so disrespectful and disruptive, you simply take away from them their opportunity to get the education I am offering. That is why, even though your words mean little to nothing to me already (Isn’t that sad? It only took seven weeks for you to completely alienate yourself and turn any potential adult allies against you, or at the very least make them apathetic to your obvious plight — tragic.), I will write those referrals and pursue those suspensions because we do better without you in the room.
I would hate if someone who was trying to help me said that about me. I would feel utterly miserable about myself. But if I were to say this to you, I know your shoulders would shrug, your lip would curl into its customary sneer, and you’d suck your teeth.
I can see your future, Terrence. And unless you change 180 degrees, it’s difficult.
Exhausted and sadly somewhat apathetic to your problems anymore,
Your Teacher Babysitter
Water
The key is to keep things in the proper perspective, as it is with most things in life. We just came out of a mini-drought, with very little rain at all for weeks, and the rain of the last week has replenished our water supply.
As the forecast worsened, I was confident. I'd just redone our basement work space that had flooded twice before, putting heavy-duty waterproof paint on the floor and up to the ground line and sealing the previously-unsealed holes in the concrete that were evidence of some previous owner's battle with termites. We were ready with a pump in case it did flood. I'd redone the draining system, the failure of which had caused the first two floods. We were ready.
Sunday morning, though, we found water in the basement. Not much, but a bit. By the time I had gone back upstairs to change into more appropriate attire and had returned, there was noticeably more water. Significantly more water. I scanned for the source, but it didn't seem to be coming from corner that was the usual source. I soon discovered the breach: one of the termite-poison-injection points had been compromised: water was literally bubbling out of the small hole as if it were a spring. I plugged it with a wine cork and set up the pump, only to discover that the two or so inches of water was not enough to trigger the pump. No fear: we had plenty more water in the crawl space and a shop vac. In the end, I pumped probably seven or eighth hundred or so gallons out of the crawl space at about two hundred gallons out of the work room.
The nicely-painted floor, though, was a wreck. But the overall damage was minimal, and the situation could have been much worse:
- We had power.
- We had a working pump to empty the crawl space.
- We had a working shop vac to suck up the water that's too shallow for the pump to draw up, which was basically all the water in the basement -- but still.
- Even if it totally flooded the basement, nothing down there was critical to daily living or irreplaceable.
- The living area living of our house was highly unlikely ever to flood at all.
By the time we got the basement situation under control, the only real concern was the forest in the backyard. With such saturated ground and such relatively strong winds, everyone was saying that the compromised root systems of trees wouldn't hold indefinitely. But they all held, and we escaped with no damage to speak of.
Throughout the day, the routine was the same:
- Grade some papers.
- Check the water level in the basement.
- Hang out with the kids a while.
- Repeat.
We all knew that the situation was worse the closer one got to the shore. When the pictures of the damage started appearing on the Internet, though, it was far beyond anything we'd expected.
So today, we went about our normal routines, and I'm sure I wasn't the only one thankful for the ability to go to work this Monday morning.
Last Night
Performance
After Dinner
If you get enough Poles together to fill a private room in a restaurant, there will surely be some after-dinner activities.
And if you get enough of those Poles to congregate in one home afterward, there will surely be some singing.
Nuclear Guests
Playing and Destroying
"Daddy, will you play with me?"
Some day, I know, I will regret not taking as many opportunities as I could have to play with my children. It's certainly a regret most parents have, I would say, no matter how much time they actually spent with their children.
This weekend, with the rainy weather keeping us inside, we were together most of the time. But I spent a large amount of time grading papers. Late Saturday morning, I sat with E on my knees, grading papers online as he played with cars and shoved various items in my way. Saturday afternoon, I headed to the basement for more grading and fewer distractions. And Sunday morning, it was a mix of grading papers and hanging out with the kids -- mostly the former. Sixty papers graded in one weekend. And the price?
I justify it with the realization that it's just the unit my English I Honors kids are working on now. Lots of writing -- lots of it -- to form the foundation for the entire year. Once we finish this unit (about a week to go), everything will calm down. But there will always be something I could do for school, so perhaps I'm just fooling myself.
But I smart enough to realize that when E asks me point blank, "Daddy, will you play with me?" that I'd be a fool not to. (I'm a fool occasionally.)
So we built a few things with blocks and knocked them down again. Which was more fun? The knocking down, of course.
Rainy Saturday
Lake Jocassee
