matching tracksuits

Open House

Tuesday 17 September 2019

Written in sevneth period.

Last night we had open house here at Hughes. In some ways, I really don’t enjoy that, but that’s only because of how long it makes the day. It’s a small price for what actually occurs. I got to meet several students’ parents, and while it’s no different in some ways from Meet the Teacher night, the real difference lies in me: I know the kids now. They’re not just names on a roster. I know how they act, how they think (to a degree), what makes them laugh, how well they do with this or that skill. They’re no longer just names on a paper but people with whom I work. An odd thought: my students as my coworkers. Not an odd thought–an unconventional thought.

Tuesday

Tuesday 17 September 2019

After all day at school yesterday, I was not all that eager to head back this morning. I left yesterday morning at 7:15 in the morning; I returned home at 8:00 in the evening. At 7:15 I was leaving again. “I feel like it should be Wednesday, ” K, who had just as long a day, said this morning as I art the tea to steep and she prepared everyone’s lunch. “More like Thursday,” I thought.

The day as almost always flew by. With my planning periods at the start of the day, my five classes pop by one after the other. Soon I’m picking up the Boy, and then we’re off to soccer practice.

In a way, there’s nothing special about the day. The trick to a life well-loved is to find the special in such tiring days.

Open House

Monday 16 September 2019

We have Meet the Teacher night before the school year gets started, but all the students are still just unknown names on rosters. By the time tonight rolls around, when parents come to ramble through the school and follow their children's schedules, I have faces to go with the names. And personalities. And fears. And excitements.

I got a chance to talk to C's parents. She's new to the school, having changed schools just at the start of the final year of middle school. A tough time to make that switch. "She's having a tough time," her mother confided in me. She misses her friends; she misses her teachers; she misses not having such a strict dress code -- all the worries of a thirteen-year-old, I suppose.

I got a chance to talk to I's mother and tell her what a powerful leader she can be in class. "She was making sure everyone in the class stayed on task today, really taking a strong leadership role," I told her. Both I and her mother smiled.

I got a chance to talk to A's parents. A is, in his mother's words, "a diamond in the rough." All parents see their kids like that, I know, but I think that's really an accurate description of A. He displays flashes of brilliance in his comments and performance at times, but they're often couched in moments of apparent apathy. Or insecurity. It's hard to tell with eighth-graders. I think it's hard for them to tell sometimes.

I got to meet K's mother. K is in the same class as I. They're real gems. K has made it to the 100% club every week (i.e., 100% positive behavior as recorded in Class Dojo). Her mom saw that and whipped out her phone. "I'm getting a picture of this!" K laughed and tugged on her arm. "No! No! This needs a picture!" If only every child could have a parent that supportive.

I didn't get to meet other parents, parents I really wanted to talk to because of genuine concerns that are growing. Sure, I can call them, perhaps email them, but talking to them in person is always so much more productive. I try not to judge -- maybe they had to work or had prior commitments -- but I can't help but see a correlation.

Last Swim

Sunday 15 September 2019

Our kids have grown up swimming in the pool at Nana's and Papa's condo complex. More often than not, we were the only ones there, and the kids really came to think of it as a private pool for us. "Oh, someone's here," was the common moan when we pulled up to find that someone from the complex was already there. In all the years we've been going there, I can think of exactly one time when it seemed crowded: at most, there were half a dozen other swimmers there every other time.

Most often, Nana and Papa would meet us at the pool, and we would try to entertain them by entertaining ourselves. Lately, though, say in the last two years, Nana and Papa made it less and less frequently. With the problems she had with polymyalgia rheumatica, Nana had greater and greater difficulty walking, and they came less and less frequently. And then Nana passed away, and all the changes that came with that...

Now we're getting ready to sell the condo, and so this season will be our last season swimming there. Which meant today was our last day swimming there.

It's not the loss of the pool that has drawn me into a thoughtful mood but what it means -- the end of an era of our lives. Nana's passing was, of course, the most significant, the most painful, but since then, the door to that era has remained slightly open. The apartment was still there, still filled with furniture, dishes, clothes, and all the memories attached. After the estate sale, most of the furniture was gone. A few trips to a local charity and almost everything else is gone. The apartment is empty except for a large dresser that Nana and Papa bought in 1979 from a family in the apartment complex where we lived. They were going through a split up and everything had to go.

In 1979, I was six, so this dresser was a constant presence in my life, the one piece of furniture connected to the time when I was E's age. We've been trying to sell it for ages. We've dropped the price again and again until it's now almost free, and still no one is interested.

That seems somehow sadly appropriate. Who wants someone else's 40-year-old memories?

Through all this, though, we kept going to that pool this summer. Somehow I was unconsciously thinking, perhaps, that continuing ritual kept everything from changing for good.

I guess what it is, is simple: that pool represents my kids as kids. It will bookend a period when they were both kids, for L at nearly 13 is no longer a little kid. She's nearly as tall as K, and her interests are maturing to match: she's started watching Grey's Anatomy on Netflix because so many of her friends have been watching it, and she wants to keep up with them. When we go to the store, she's asking to buy makeup instead of toys. The thought of going to Starbucks for some iced coffee drink nonsense thrills her. Our Daddy-L time is no longer playing with this or that but practicing volleyball. She's getting braces soon and will likely not find boys disgusting for very much longer.

It's all inevitable, but that doesn't make it any less bittersweet.

Train Show

Saturday 14 September 2019

“We’ll just go in for a little,” the Boy insisted.

“Ten seconds for each thing.” He’d been reluctant to go to the train show. Why? I have no idea.

We were there for considerably longer.

Montressor

Thursday 12 September 2019

We had one of my favorite lessons in English I today. I love that moment when everyone has the realization that Montressor is receiving the sacrament of Last Rites. It always kind of frustrates me that no one has ever gotten the importance of that one word, that little “You” that gets the ball rolling. I sometimes think that if I could set things up with some background knowledge, get them reading some texts that deal with the idea of confession, that they might figure that out. But still, how to do that without giving it to them immediately? As I told Emily A, the struggle is almost more important than the right answer. The struggle is where we build our mental muscles.

All classes have gone fairly well today. I’m exhausted, yawning and longing for a cup of coffee, but that is always a good sign. But still, on this end of seventh period, feeling the heaviness in my head, wishing I could just lie down and take a little nap, I wish I wasn’t quite so tired even if that means lessons didn’t go quite so well.

9/11 Anniversary

Wednesday 11 September 2019

It’s odd that today is the anniversary of the most significant and deadly terrorist attack in US history and I’ve heard almost nothing about it and I’ve read almost nothing about it in the press. Eighteen is a somewhat odd anniversary. Ten years, fifteen years, twenty years — these are significant because, well, I guess they’re half decades. But eighteen? Doesn’t have the same kind of significance — doesn’t feel that way, anyway.

It’s difficult to believe it’s been eighteen years. I’d just moved back to Poland, and for me, that’s what’s more difficult to believe: it’s been almost twenty years since I moved back to Poland after those two wonderful yet horrid years in Boston. That’s such a central period of my life, so significant, and I tend to organize my life around that as a milestone — when I had the courage to follow my inner voice, to do what seemed like the crazy yet right thing to do. I had a girlfriend; I was engaged; I had a great job making great money in computer programming; I lived in arguably the best city in the States, a city that feels small but has everything a big city has to offer. And I gave it all up and went back to Poland — what a crazy thing to do.

The attack itself — what a strange day. I remember coming back from school and trying to figure out what Pani Barnas was saying, something about a plane hitting a building, some kind of terrible accident. It was around four o’clock in the afternoon, so that made it 10 in the morning here. That would have been sometime between the two towers getting hit. I have a memory of watching the second plane hit the tower on live TV. Karol had stepped into the other room and I called him back: “Popacz,” I said, as if there were any other reason to call him back.

These kids were still four or five years from being born. What a thing to make you feel old. The kids I teach now weren’t even alive: I can’t ask, “Where were you when 9/11” happened. “Not even born yet,” they answer. That makes it like something that happened in, say, 1967 for me. I can’t think of anything significant that happened then. Was that when Israel was fighting one of its many wars of the 60s? Was that the Six Day War? Can’t remember.

Band

Tuesday 10 September 2019

I stopped and listened to the band rehearse a little while after my morning duty, and I realized how much I love the fact that Hughes has a band. It teaches kids a lot of valuable lessons — above all, teamwork. It is the ultimate group project because no one can slack if it’s to sound right in the end, and unless it’s a concerto or something, there are no stars so to speak. Everyone has their little part to play, and often those things don’t even sound all that good by themselves — a bit plain, a bit boring, a bit repetitive — but in the end, it all comes together to create something greater than the sum of its parts.

Other benefits: the self-control (one cannot play what one wants as loud as one wants), the discipline (practice, practice, practice!), and the simple value of learning music, which improves cognitive abilities and creativity among many other things.

I played sax in the band in fifth and sixth grade, but once I got to junior high (we didn’t have middle school, just junior high — seventh and eighth grades), I quit. In eighth grade, I talked my folks into letting me sell my sax and use the money to be a CD player. CD players weren’t brand new then, and that’s why my father agreed to let me buy one: it was clear it wasn’t just a fad, something that would disappear in a couple of years like Beta Max tapes did. Still, thirty-some years later (I was in eighth grade in 1986, I guess), they have proven to be little more than a long-lived fad.

Down at the Swing

Monday 09 September 2019

Afternoon at Conestee

Sunday 08 September 2019

The Boy has been begging us for family time. I must admit: he's sometimes the driving force that finally pushes K and me to plan some time for the four of us together. He really wants us to take a bike ride together, but right now, my back wheel has a broken spoke, and the Girl is not the easiest person in the world to convince to go on a ride. So we settled for a walk in our favorite local park.

We took a long line for the dog and let her play in the river. She's gone from being terrified by the water to loving it. Well, maybe not quite loving it: She doesn't really like actually swimming, but she does enjoy splashing about.

The Girl managed to get Clover to realize, at least for today, that when she tangles her leash around a tree, she just has to go the opposite way to unwrap the leash. A simple thing, and yet not so simple.