Sunday Guest
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Faith Over Family
House Call
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New Gutters
(Not) A Drill
A student hands a teacher a 9 millimeter hollow-point bullet on the way out of the classroom with the simple comment that he “found it on the floor in the classroom.” Within a few minutes, people from the district office and the police department start pouring into the building. All the eighth-grade students are ushered back to their homerooms. Each homeroom takes its students to their lockers, instructs them to take all their materials with them, and walk through one of the the weapon detectors that district personnel and the sheriff’s office rotates throughout the schools.
In the meantime, the kids sit for an hour in my homeroom, waiting for our turn, talking about what’s going on.
“Mr. Scott, is it true someone found a bullet?” a girl asks.
“Can we just jump out of the window if we have to?” another girl asks.
“I’m low-key worried, Mr. Scott,” a boy says.
I tell them that there’s nothing to be scared of, that we’re taking these precautions to make sure we’re safe. “If this were a situation with immediate dangers,” I reassure them, “I would not be this relaxed.”
In the meantime, a charismatic young man begins reassuring everyone that Jesus will protect them. He’s doing it half in jest, half in seriousness. I tell him to bring it down a level. He does for a little while, then decides he wants to read Bible verses to everyone. I call him over to my desk.
“I know what you’re going to say!” he reassures me.
“Just come on over here, please.”
He steps to my desk, and I explain: “Not everyone in here is Christian.”
He smiles: “Got it.”
I’m sure he’s thinking of our two Muslim students, but I’m sure there are a couple of students who are of the skeptical bent.
New Patio Furniture
Ramadan Reading
Four sweet, dark-haired, dark-eyed girls crowded around me and asked, almost in unison, “Can we go to the media center during lunch?” It’s Ramadan, and my four Muslim students (three are from Afghanistan and one is from Syria) are eager to avoid even the sight of food while they are fasting. They cluster together throughout the whole day: the guidance counselor purposely made their schedule so that they have almost every class together since they feel safest with each other.
Of course, I agreed for them to go to the media center: growing up in a strange Christian sect that borrowed all the Jewish festivals, I had to fast one day a year during Yom Kippur, though our sect preferred the translated name, the Day of Atonement. I have a slight sense, then, of the challenge my Muslim students face, though only a very slight sense: we didn’t go to school or work on the Day of Atonement, and it was only one day. I can’t imagine what it would be like to fast all day and to go about one’s regular schedule at the same time, so I’m certainly sympathetic to the difficulties they face this month.
When we got back from lunch, the girls were waiting at the classroom door. They came into the room and immediately asked if they could go pray. “If we don’t pray while we’re fasting,” one girl explained, “it doesn’t count.”
I looked at them quizzically: “Why didn’t you pray while you were in the media center during lunch?”
“It was too early,” another of the girls explained.
The skeptic in me wondered if they will start asking questions at some point. Would a truly good god be so upset that you prayed a few minutes early? Would a fair god be obsessed with females’ modesty in clothing while ignoring males’ modesty? Would a wise god really be all that worried about what animal you eat? These were the same kind of questions I asked myself years ago, and when I dallied in Catholicism a few years ago, I didn’t find resolution to these issues; I just temporarily stopped thinking about them. But once they’re there…
Rain
One of our local landmarks, Table Rock park, has been on fire for over a week now. Over 10.000 acres have burned.
And today it finally rained.
Saturday in the Yard
Friday
A week of working with thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds comes to a conclusion. Three thirteen: the announcements are about to come on, and an almost palpable sense of relief comes over me. Twenty class periods of laughter and frustration, of hard work and hard moments of disorder or even disrespect — all come to an end, and the two days of freedom from all these stresses shimmer like a mirage that I’m only now starting to think might not be a mirage after all.
A boy skips down the corridor into the neighboring academic team’s area of the hall (something I’m charged with preventing), and instead of calling the kid back, I let him go. It’s Friday — I’m exhausted and not looking for a confrontation. A girl yells up the hall to a friend, raising the volume of the hall noticeably: I should say something, but I don’t. A kid out of dress code walks by me, but it’s three fourteen, so what’s the point even if the kid has managed somehow to make it through the whole day in dress code violation. A girl chases a boy down the hall, screaming after him to give her phone back: they’re not supposed to have their phones out until after announcements are concluded, and she shouldn’t be screaming and adding even more to the eighth-grade cacophony, but it’s Friday and easier to ignore this.
Friday Evening Walk
Through the Blossoms
Cherry trees are blooming in the courtyard between the seventh- and eighth-grade halls. The other day, I walked the kids that way to lunch: it’s out of our way, but I thought I might enjoy some fresh air. Perhaps they would, too.
“Mr. Scott, can we walk through the blossoms to lunch again?”
Now, we do it every day. At their request.
Senior Night Track Meet
Fishing
Monday Return
Monday after break is always a bit of a mystery. No one really knows how the kids react; for that matter, nobody really knows all the adults are going to act. Some of the kids are reluctant to go back to school. and it shows in the apathy some of the adults are more reluctant to go back and it shows in their snarkiness having spring break. This relatively late in the year is also tricky. We’re into our final quarter, but with benchmark testing, in the beer, testing, access testing, probably some math testing for some students field trips, field days, half days, and like we really only have about seven weeks or so of school after having a week off it’s difficult to get motivated for seven more weeks. It feels like an afterthought
For me, with this being my last year at Hughes, it hits a little differently. Some of the kids were routing; some of the kids were focused; most of the kids were somewhere in between. The day slipped by relatively uneventfully and I returned home a quarter as of course 45 days long. I closed my car door and said aloud, “44.” 44 more days in Greenville County schools 44 more days these kids. 44 more days to wrap up 17 years. So both a little sad about it and quite excited at the same time.
It was, of course, the first of many last, and I’m glad that I am aware at this point that this is the last time I’ll be doing some of these things. The honors kids are finishing up little roaming and Juliet papers for all. I know that may be the last time that I run through the particular assignment with a group of students. After next year, I will have the option of going back to English, but if things go as well as I’m hoping, I don’t know that I’ll want to. In English 8, we will soon be starting The Diary of Anne Frank, and that would be the last time we run that unit. We read the play, and we act out most of the first act in class. While I’m not sure how much they learned about English and how they learned a lot about the holocaust a lot about the horrors of living under Nazi occupation, and since they are the same age, they learn a bit about themselves as well. It’s always been one of my favorite units to teach.
So today was a bit of a mixed bag. It was fun and exciting: it was so exhausting.
This final quarter is also another last for our family, and this is much more significant: this is the last quarter Lena will be living with us during the school year. That ending has come all too soon. It’s a parental cliche to wonder where the time went, but when you’re living at it it’s not a cliche anymore.
Sunday
Meet
First and Second Steps Done
There are some projects that just seem to grow as you get into them.
Our kitchen remodel almost ten years ago (has it been that long?) was just such a project. We unexpectedly had to rebuild an entire part of the exterior wall when we discovered the door header stopped midway through the door. We had to build two supports in the crawlspace to deal with a sagging floor in the dining area. It just grew and grew and grew.
Our latest landscaping adventure was not such a project. I knew just how much work would be involved. I knew there would likely be no real surprises. But I also knew just how much backache-producing work it would involve. First, we had to get rid of those holly bushes. That took a good long time: hollies very aggressively cling to their perch on life, and they will resprout from the slightest bit of root left behind. So getting rid of the main holly trunks was only part of the process: E and I also spent a day digging out roots. And we didn’t even get them all. Several large roots went so deep into the ground that we knew we could never get them out, so we made fresh cuts, drilled holes into them, and slathered root killer on them. All that was step one.
Step two: build a new landscaping border around the area. This took a couple of days and a couple of trips to Home Depot, but today, we finished it.
Tonight, we went back to get the components for part three — at least some of them.
More Spring Progress
Scholarship Information
