The Tree
g
The Letter
We just started Romeo and Juliet, and a lot of the kids are quite excited about that.
I found this waiting on my desk at the end of the day. (“TDA” is a “text-dependent analysis” — the district requires us to give a couple of practice TDAs in preparation for the state-mandated one at the end of the year. No one really likes them…)
Growing and Writing
My classes are growing. More specifically, they grew today — doubled, in fact. Today was the first day we had all students back at the same time. Sixth grade has been doing it for a couple of weeks now; seventh grade began last week; this week was eighth grade’s turn. So each class had 18-24 students in plexiglass-enclosed quad-desks, each six feet apart. “Remember,” I said countless times, “these plexiglass shields only serve as protection for you and your neighbor if you have your masks on.” This mean that it was the first day for everyone wearing masks all day.
How long will we stay like this? What effect will the Thanksgiving surge, now in full swing, have on it? I really don’t know.
As part of my promise to K about my beard (“I’ll get rid of it when we’re back in school 100%.”), I had the Boy shave me last night.
That was how we had some of our Daddy-E time. Tonight, it was writing: the Boy has discovered fountain pens,
and that discovery has inspired him to write short stories. We’re working on a tag-team zombie story now.
First Impressions
“They actually kind of make me dizzy.”
It wasn’t what I was expecting when I asked Ms. Butler about how things were going in her newly-podded classroom with each student seated in a little box of plexiglass. Perhaps I was expecting something more like, “It’s even more difficult to hear students,” or “It’s weird seeing students through so many layers of plexiglass,” or even, “It’s just weird.” But not dizziness.
“What do you mean,” I asked.
“Well, with all these panels of reflective plastic,” she began, feeling her way through the explanation carefully as if she hadn’t really hadn’t tried to put it into words before. “There’s just all these weird reflections that shift and move as you move around the room.”
“That sounds awful.” I get dizzy easily, and it had me a little concerned about how I might react to it myself.
When I got into the classroom this morning and started placing name tags on everyone’s seat, I saw immediately what she meant. The clear plexiglass that divides students into little almost-self-contained cubes reflected images from around the room. These reflections were, in turn, reflected off the black plexiglass bases on which the whole dividers sat, and the play between these reflections and reflections of reflections had me feeling a little woozy within seconds. It was as if everything were somehow in the matrix film, with solid reality turning into liquid, flowing reflections of reality. What’s worse, the whole broad clear barriers reflected again their own reflections from the black bases and also refracted the images of other tables so that we had reflections of reflections of reflections, all moving and shimmering at different speeds and frequencies.
I felt like I was in a hall of mirrors, a corridor of reflections that caved in on themselves, like waves riding on waves that then crash into other ripples, transforming all of reality into a dancing mirage, a dizzying visual cacophony.
“Dear God, what if it’s always like this?”
As I walked around the room affixing the place holders to their right locations, I realized it wasn’t an issue if I didn’t pay attention to it or even think about it. Like baffles in a large gas tank, I thought that perhaps having people in those seats might draw more attention than the reflections themselves.
As the first period with students began, I apologized for some of the changes the new format necessitates — no real…
Written in creative nonfiction class as students worked on their own accounts of the first days in the new pods.
The Challenge
I texted a picture to K this morning: “This is what my classroom looks like now,” I said.
“Wow — no more rearranging rooms, I guess,” she replied.
I know a lot of teachers are concerned about the impact this will have on their teaching style, on the types of lessons they can do. I for one am not terribly worried about that because this year I’m teaching only honors classes, and most honors students are relatively mature and somewhat adaptable. There are some things that will take getting used to — not as much motion, more teacher-based lessons, etc. — but overall, I think they’ll do fine.
When I got home, I noticed a little paper with Shakespearean insults on the table. Remembering that L’s class has just started Romeo and Juliet, I thought it might have been from her, but the Boy filled me in when he got home from swimming lessons: “The kids in challenge today were working on Shakespearean insults,” he said. He told me about how funny it was when his friends who went to challenge shared it with him, and I’m assuming he got K to help him find a list of insults on the internet and print them out.
It was only then that I realized: E didn’t get an invitation to join challenge when he started this year. The invitations are based on standardized test scores from second grade, and I immediately thought that the Boy must feel a little left out, a little, well, stupid compared to the others.
K had the same concerns, and we talked about it in the evening when the Boy was sound asleep. “He wanted to know if we could sign him up,” she said forlornly, “and I had to tell him you don’t sign up for it; you get an invitation.”
I remember seeing the challenge kids leave — our district was a little worse in their naming: it was the “gifted and talented” group, which makes everyone else feel less gifted, less talented, and that’s exactly how I felt. I watched them troop out of the classroom in elementary school, wondering what they do there, wondering why I wasn’t a part of it.
I got an invitation at the end of fifth grade and spent sixth grade with the GT kids who’d been doing it for several years by that time. I didn’t feel any different, really, and I don’t really recall doing anything all that spectacular. Of course, that was over 35 years ago, so I can justifiably be a little fuzzy on the details, I’m sure.
Throughout high school, I was most decidedly average. I was in the “advanced” classes only insofar as I was not in remedial English or remedial math. I didn’t take algebra until ninth grade; I never took a single AP course; I had no “Honors” affixed to my class names; I didn’t graduate anywhere near the top 10, and I highly doubt I was even in the top 10%. And yet for high school superlatives (how I loath to this day that idea), my peers voted me “Most Intellectual.” (I was tempted to refuse the award during the senior luncheon, but my mother convinced me it would be rude to do so.) So the recognition for my academic achievement was a mixed bag — conflicting signals. In the end, I just didn’t put much stock into what people thought of my intellectual abilities.
But somehow, when it comes to my kids, I feel a little differently. I want them to be geniuses, above and beyond even those who are above and beyond. What parent doesn’t?
The Boy is starting to realize some people work faster than he does, maybe a little more accurately, K and I concluded. And that’s fine. We’re all different. We all have different gifts. But still, I felt the Boy’s sting just a bit, so I went back to his bedroom and cuddled with him a little more.
“You’re very gifted in many ways,” I told him.
“How?”
“You’re a very good reader. You’re an excellent drawer. And you’re very kind and sensitive to other people’s needs and emotions.”
A pause. “Thank you.” He snuggled in a little closer and went to sleep.
Mikołaj 2020
This morning, Elfie made his first appearance:
I was a little curious about E’s reaction this year: at the end of last year, he figured it out. “You guys just put Elfie out there, don’t you?”
“What makes you think that?”
And then he discovered where I’d hidden him the week after he disappeared last Christmas season.
“See! You did it!”
But this year, his class is doing Elf on the Shelf, so he either pretended to forget about it because of that, or he actually did forget about his conjectures last year.
Tonight, Elfie decided to do a little web browsing while he had the opportunity.
Previous Years
The Tree
Cleaning
It’s that time of year — spring Christmas cleaning.
I’ve written before about K and the level of Christmas cleaning she requires:
The window is not dirty; it’s fogged from the gas in between the two panes doing something funky.
That required level of cleanliness now drives the Girl mad. “Why are madre’s standards so high?” (She’s been calling us madre and padre for about a year now. Why? Because.)
“Because they are.” We try to reassure her that it’s good practice for “real life.” “You might get a boss with impossibly high standards. You’ll be used to it.”
I don’t know if she buys it.
Critical Santa
During dinner tonight, the topic of Santa came up. “I don’t believe in Santa Claus,” the Boy said confidently, “but I believe in Saint Nicholas.” I thought he might be thinking of the Polish version of Santa, Mikolaj, who comes on December sixth, or perhaps just he was just thinking of the actual Saint Nicholas of the Catholic church — you know, the bishop from Turkey.
“I knew this time was coming,” I thought. I’ve always felt a ting of guilt about the whole Santa thing: I knew perfectly well that Santa doesn’t exist, but I kept playing along, telling our kids that Santa does exist. Eventually they figure it out, but it just left a bad taste in my mouth.
Soon, though, he kind of back-tracked: “Well, I’m not sure.”
“What evidence do you have that Santa exists?” I asked him.
“What kind of evidence do you have that Santa doesn’t exist,” L jumped in like a typical thirteen-year-old who just wants to be contrary. (Is it only thirteen-year-olds that are like that?)
“No, sweetheart. Whenever people are making a claim, the burden of proof is on them. They have to provide evidence, not the skeptics who doubt the story,” I clarified. I thought about going into what it means to beg the question, but I didn’t, turning instead back to the Boy: “So what evidence do we have?”
He listed the toys, the imagery in movies, the stories.
“Can we explain those things with other methods? Is there a simpler way to explain the toys appearing under the Christmas tree?” Did I tell him we were applying Occam’s Razor? Certainly not. But we were shaving away.
“Well, you and Mom could put the toys under the tree,” he responded after some thought.
In the end, though, when pressed, he decided that he leaned toward a belief in Santa.
We’ll see how he views it next year.
Treble Clef
Today the Boy had music for his related art class in school. They’re working on the treble clef.
“I took the after-lesson quiz,” he explained, “and I got 3 out of 20 right! I took it again and only got 4 out of 20 correct!” His frustration was mounting to the level I’m sure it achieved when he was struggling with the material in class.
After dinner, I printed out the old methods of memorizing the treble clef: “Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge” and “FACE.”
We went through his work together, and he made a perfect score. “That was easy,” he decided.
He noticed, though, that there are two D notes on the treble clef: one just beside middle C, and one almost up at the top of the clef.
“Two Ds?!”
So we went to the piano and started poking around. We talked about the patterns of the black keys and used that as a way to show which keys corresponded to which note.
“This is D,” I said. “See how it’s between the two black keys? Now show me another D.”
Advent 2020 Begins
Today is the first day for the Advent calendars K has kept under wraps in the basement. L made sure to label hers to ensure the integrity of her 24-treat treasure, only to find that the first treat had an almond in the center of it.
“I can’t eat almonds,” she sighed.
Don’t worry — someone took care of it.
Testing, Again
I guess it could be worse. Shoot, it was worse just a few years ago. We had MAP testing and Iowa Basic Skills testing and some other test that I can’t remember, all piled up in the first half of the year, with the MAP test repeated in the spring along with state-mandated testing. Now we’ve lost the MAP testing (the only really useful test for me) and the Iowa Basic Skills (Is that what it was called? I could look it up, but I don’t care enough about it to check), but in their place, we have district-mandated benchmark testing every quarter and two practice TDA tests.
What is a TDA test, you might ask? Text Dependent Analysis. An essay question based on a text, in other words. That’s how we spent today, working on this essay question:
“Inventor Martha Coston” focuses on Martha Coston’s night signal invention. The author claims that it was Coston’s “desire to provide for her family and her determination to succeed [that] made the Coston night signals a great success.” Write an essay analyzing how the author develops and supports the claim. Use evidence from the text to support your response.
If you read that carefully, you’ll see that it’s really just asking students to summarize the argument in the piece. Today, I helped students see that; I’ll do the same tomorrow, as I have to do this in person, and we’re only meeting a given student every other day. Is that teaching to the test? Or rather teaching the test? I don’t know. I don’t care. But I wasn’t about to just toss the test at them and say, “Here, do this.” And I was also not about to let the know, through implication, that I really didn’t want to spend time with this test. “Now, as you look at this district-mandated test…” “If you look at the prompt for the district-mandated test…” “Do you have any questions about the district-mandated test?”
Trying Coffee
The Boy is often eager to try new things.
Today, he tried a sip from my coffee.
It wasn’t a hit.
Forbidden Island
Out of the blue this evening, the kids decided they wanted to play Forbidden Island. At least that’s how I understood it by the time they made it down to the livingroom with the game. I’d wager it was more L’s initiative than the Boy’s, but they were both excited about it when they came down.
I was less excited. About playing the game, that is. I don’t understand the game. It just seems to be a bunch of randomness pawned off as a prize-winning game. “How many drugs did they do before coming up with the arbitrary rules that make up that game?” I laughed with K once the Boy was in bed and the Girl had retreated to her friends on Facetime.
But none of that really mattered — here we were spending time together without any fussing, without any arguments. The kids are at a tough age: E is young enough to derive joy from irritating people and the Girl is not quite old enough to be patient with it all. These moments, while increasing in frequency as the kids grow up, still feel relatively rare some days. So we make the most of them when they are here.
The Day After
“Friday, it’s going to be beautiful — warm, sunny, inviting,” K proclaimed earlier this week. “We are going on either a hike or a bike ride.” We headed to Dupont State Forest, which has 40 miles of cycling trails. Off-road trails. I currently have 25mm tires on my bike for commuting (ask me how many times I’ve ridden this year…), which can make any offroading a bit of a challenge, to say the least. What I’ve found is that it’s not a problem going uphill: I can power through most things, and the tires are not that slick (even though they would appear to be so), so keeping up is not a problem. Going downhill is a different story, though. Our nearly-fourteen-year-old leaves K and me behind; our eight-year-old does the same.
I blame it on the tires.
Thanksgiving 2020
Previous Years
The Day Before Thanksgiving
The day before the big day, which will be a small big day this year, started off with a little bit of a change: flu shots. I’ve never really been one for getting a flu shot, not because I don’t believe in their efficacy but because I just never took the time. And I so rarely get sick that I think I’d lulled myself into a likely-false sense of security. But no more. Covid changes many things, my sense of security among them.
The rest of the day went by in a relative flash — butternut squash soup, playing with the kids and the dog on the trampoline, a quick shopping trip to pick up last-minute items and a cigar for tomorrow evening (what’s Thanksgiving without a cigar to put a bow on the day?), dinner, and then some family baking.
As we made pumpkin spice baklava, the Boy regaled us with select passages from Fox in Socks.
The Unknown
I first heard the rumor when the Monday night phone call from E’s school’s principal came through. He began explaining how it is theoretically possible that we might not be back in school next week and might instead go back to 100% elearning for everyone through Christmas break. Then today, the teacher in the room next to mine said that there’s a rumor bouncing around Hillcrest High that everyone should take all their materials home for the weekend because it might last until after Christmas break. In the afternoon, no word from the principal about that, and he’s always very good about communicating things like that to us. No word from the district, who is often not the best about communicating things like this. (They should address the fact that there are so many rumors roiling around like this. And I would think if an elementary school principal were to include such a comment in his weekly phone blast that there is some legitimate basis for it.)
So we all go home in uncertainty…
One Art
Today, we finish up our poetry unit, going over my all-time favorite poem, Elizabeth Bishop’s villanelle “One Art.”
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
Every year I teach this, after we read it and define the unknown words (“vaster” is always in that list; “fluster” and “realm” are there from time to time), I have the kids jot down questions at the bottom of the page. “What strikes you as odd about this poem? In some ways it seems really simple, but there a few things that just seem out of place. What are those things?” The same questions appear every year — the same questions I want to appear:
- Does she mean she really lost houses? How are we to understand that?
- What does she mean, she lost cities? And a continent? What does that mean?
- What’s up with that parenthesis in the last line?
- And why is “Write” in italics?
- Why does she begin that final stanza with a — what is that? A hyphen?
I get them working in groups after I point out a few more things:
- I give a brief refresher on imperative voice and the implied “you” subject they contain.
- I suggest they might want to consider who this “you” is.
- I point out that there is a “you” in the poem later and ask them to consider if it’s the same “you” as earlier in the imperative mood sentences.
- I help them see that there is another imperative in the final line. “Do you think it’s the same implied ‘you’ as the first imperative passages?”
- I remind them that there are often patterns in poetry. “I’m not just talking about rhyme schemes,” I clarify. “There’s a pattern in the meaning of the poem.”
They break into groups to work. Soon enough, someone notices the pattern: “Everything she loses keeps getting bigger and more significant.” Exactly.
At this point, I add a new twist I saw in the poem. (Great poetry is always revealing something new about itself.) The first word of the final stanza is deceptively ordinary. “Even.”
“Think about how you use ‘even’,” I suggest. “You might say something like this. ‘We’ve all finished the test. Even Steve is done.’ What does that mean?”
“That we’re surprised Steve finished,” someone answers.
“Why?”
“Because we don’t expect it.”
With some more group work, they figure it out. And then someone always states the obvious: “Oh, I see, Mr. Scott. It’s a break-up poem.”
Exactly. But such an exquisite break-up poem…
Murder Mystery
E and I were heading back down the driveway Wednesday night after taking the garbage cans out to the side of the room for morning pickup when we heard the most awful screaming coming from the woods behind our neighbor’s house. We thought it might be a cat fight, but it quickly became clear that it was only one animal screeching. I remembered when Clover encountered a raccoon on the other side of the fence this summer and the sounds it was making, and I told E, “It’s most likely a raccoon.”
Today, we decided to go out for a little adventuring in the creek behind our house. We hadn’t been for quite some time. I guess we just overdid it this summer, and the Boy was just tired of it. Still, today I talked him into it. We didn’t get very far before we found out what happened to the raccoon:
“There’s a dead raccoon in the creek!” E exclaimed with a mix of fascination and disgust in his voice. We talked about what could have killed it. “We’ve seen blue herons in the creek, but I don’t think one of them would attack a raccoon,” he reasoned.
“No, they’re not going to do anything like that, especially at night,” I confirmed.
“Perhaps it was a … ” His voice trailed off. He really didn’t know what to think. “It’s the second one we’ve found,” he recalled, and then remembered what we’d reasoned about that raccoon: “Maybe it was a copperhead! Or maybe a snapping turtle.”
“I don’t think it would be either of them,” I explained. “They’re both cold-blooded, and it’s cold these days. They’ll be tucked away somewhere hibernating.”
“But Dad, we’re wearing shorts today — it’s not that cold.”