Uniform
growing
Meetings and Homework
As a teacher, I've been in a number of meetings. I'm fortunate to say that I can't make a claim like, "Not a day goes by that I'm not in some meeting or another," but I suppose that's possible.
We have grade-level meetings every Friday. We sit around and talk about what's going well with the logistics of our grade -- moving from class to class, getting materials out of lockers, going to the bathroom, going to lunch, heading back from lunch, getting to related arts classes. All these things and a million more. We talk about students who are showing bad behavior in multiple classes and make a plan for dealing with the kid, hopefully with more positive outcomes for the kid than he is currently experiencing.
Every Tuesday we have professional development. We learn about new websites, new methodologies, new laws, new tools, new books, new paradigms. We go over how to accommodate children with mental and behavioral challenges in ways that are productive and in accordance with the documentation (IEPs/504s) in place for them.
Lately, we've been learning about the new way the district requires us to write our lesson plans. It's tempting to think that since the lesson plan is a tool primarily for the teacher that the district would allow a great deal of flexibility in this endeavor, but that would be a faulty assumption. Verbiage, formatting, pacing, sequencing -- all of this is decided for us. And when the district decides that it wants to make a change to this or that element of our lesson plans, we, as far as I know, have little to no input into the changes and are simply told, "This is how you do it now." Perhaps some select few teachers get to attend those meetings where such matters are decided, but I've never met anyone who's had a sense of having any input into these issues.
On altering Wednesdays after school, we have faculty and department meetings. These usually just turn into information-dissemination sessions, and I'm sure many participants find themselves thinking, "If you could just give me this in writing, I can read it on my own time." Sometimes department meetings provide professional development as well.
While sometimes there's a distinct feeling in the room that everyone would like to be doing something else (planning lessons? assessing student work? recording grades?), many of these meetings are indeed helpful. A large organization has to have meetings.
Today, however, I attended a first in my meeting-strewn career: we had a meeting about upcoming meetings. A meta-meeting.
Scout
First Day 2018
A lot of new things this year: first, we have homeroom classes for the first time since I’ve been teaching at this school, which is about eleven years now. The new schedule takes some of the time after lunch (or rather, all the time after lunch) and moves it to the beginning of the day. It’s odd: I have several students in my homeroom that I don’t teach at all for the rest of the day. Then I have two students in my homeroom class as well as one of my English I classes and my journalism class.
Another big change: I have not two but three English I Honors classes this year. That means about 80 well-adjusted, well-behaved, hard-working students, and that’s a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing for the obvious reasons: there will be few if any behavior issues, and they’re all fairly motivated. The curse is connected to this: they’ll almost all do their work, which means an increased workload. I control how many assignments I give, so I control my ultimate workload. Still, what I’ve done in the past works, and I’m inclined to do the same thing even if it means more work.
The kids had a good first day as well. E’s worries about school turned out to be for naught: he loves his teachers already, and this evening he declared that his school is surely the best school in the world. L’s worries about the uniform disappeared as soon as she saw everyone else in a uniform — she suddenly didn’t feel like she looked so stupid.
Getting Ready
We’ve been getting ready — getting the Boy’s room ready for the reality that he’s a little boy and deserves a little boy’s room (as opposed to a hand-me-down toddler’s room, which he had), getting the Girl’s desk (and room, but mainly the desk) ready for the new school year and all the work that comes with being in middle school.
The room took 200% longer than we thought it would: instead of three days, it took ten. Through it all, the Girl helped like a real adult — very little fussing, very little complaining.
“L, come on — it’s time to work,” I would say, and she would simply reply, “Okay.”
Her desk looks as new as E’s room. She’d created a real mess of it — fingernail polish from playing, magic marker from art endeavors, and mysterious stains from who knows what. With the help of a paint scraper and a lot of muscle, she got it looking almost new.
“I had a couple of accidents,” she began explaining, and I thought she’d perhaps cut herself with the paint scraper, but in fact, she had simply removed a bit of the finish from the desk.
As should be the case, not all the work was work — some of it was quite fun.
Lake Jocassee, Day 3
I don't remember how the idea came about, but somehow we got into our heads to get up in time to watch the sun rise over the lake. We knew that either the small beach or the rock (or both) would provide an excellent view, so we got up just as the sky was brightening and headed to the beach. L, deep asleep and unresponsive to most everything, stayed behind.
We first went to the beach, but that was a mistake: a small rise on the other side of the lake blocked the view of the sun breaking over the horizon so that by the time it was visible over the rise, it was relatively high in the sky. It took some work in Lightroom to make the shot look like a sunrise when in fact, it looked like this.
We decided that we should check out the rock outcropping with the idea that we might try again the next day. It was clearly the better location of the two.
The Boy was with us, but he wasn't really interested in the sunrise. He wanted to fish. I'd mentioned the previous day that early morning efforts lead to greater fishing success, so when he heard us talking about going out to watch the sunrise, he was eager to take his fishing pole with him.
I talked him into heading out onto the rock outcropping and he cast his line. I positioned myself so the sun was just out of the frame and clicked off a picture. I didn't really think anything of it, didn't really think it would be an image of much more significance than all the other pictures I took, but when I got it home and in Lightroom, I had one of those rare experiences as an amateur photographer: I thought, "I took that picture?!"
Definitely, it's in my top five all-time best pictures.
Morning we spent on the small beach. We weren't the only ones with that idea, though.
That could have been a bad thing, but camping brings out a certain type of family, generally speaking, and we all were getting along famously soon enough. One of the families had small, child-size kayaks, and we asked if E could try it out.
He was instantly hooked. "We have to get one of these."
He enjoyed kayaking with adults as well, but not nearly as much. That independence, once he got a taste of it, was incomparable.
Finally, as we were getting dinner ready, the Boy noticed a young man in a neighboring tent site.
"Mommy, can I go play with him? He looks bored." We went over what he should say, had a little practice session with him ("Hi, my name is E. Would you like to play?"), and sent him on his way.
The Room Grows Up
The final project for this summer is the Boy's room: it's time we make it his own instead of just a hand-me-down room from big sister. Truth be told, it's been that way for entirely too long, but we just keep bumping it down the priority list. But he's not a toddler anymore, and the room just had too much toddler in it, among other things.
Today was the prep day: we got everything into the center of the room with the exception of the bookshelf as K would have to go through the Polish books herself to determine what to keep and what to pass on.
Today's theme, then, was letting go.
We cut the stuffed animal count to seven or eight. We took three bags of toys to Goodwill and prepared a bag of books to take tomorrow. It was a time of sentimentality fighting practicality.
"But Daddy, I love that!" was a common refrain.
"But you never play with it," was the common answer.
"That's true."
He and the room grew up a bit today.
Approaching
School is coming. The Girl is starting middle school. A middle school that has a fairly strict dress code. The school where I teach has a dress code as well, and I often hear kids complaining about how that stifles their sense of individuality. I always tell them, "It's not the end of the world. Most likely, you'll always have a dress code. Just learn to live with it."
Now that my own daughter is chaffing under the thought of having all her outfits chosen for her, complaining about her impending loss of freedom, have I changed my response? Not really.
It's not the end of the world.
But she made up for it with her school supplies.
Graduation
As of tomorrow, L will officially be done with elementary school, but it was all over and done with today for all intents and purposes: tomorrow is a half-day, and today was graduation.
How in the world did six years go by so quickly? How did she jump from kindergarten -- that first Meet the Teacher evening when she was enthralled with the reading pit in the library -- to the end of her fifth-grade year when she looks more like a teenager than a kindergartener?
She's no longer dependent on us for every little thing. She no longer seeks reassurance for every little thing. She no longer plays with toys or watches cartoons, except when she's watching something the Boy has selected.
She has a sense of things that embarrass her when she once was, like most young children, virtually shameless. (And that sense of embarrassment is sometimes skewed in a distinctly teenage fashion -- things that would never embarrass an adult, like taking a change of clothes in a small bag. "They won't even notice," I insisted. "They notice everything," she insisted. I doubt it, but in that case, her perception is all that counted.)
It's the end of a long chapter in her life, the end of elementary school, the end of childhood in many ways.
Visitor after a Ride
The Boy, for Tata/E time, chose again to go for a bike ride, and we began the ride in a similar fashion: the big downhill in the neighborhood across a couple of streets, the downhill that I keep encouraging him to turn into an uphill.
“I can’t ride up this hill!” he explained with exasperation. “It’s huge!”
But we rode up other hills, which are often as steep as The Hill but not as long. On one, the gave out quickly. With some encouragement, he got back on his bike and continued the climb.
“Remember: lean into the climb,” I advise as we churn our way up.
“Remember: forget about how far it is to the top. Pick a point in front of you and make it to that point. Then pick another point. And another.”
We made it to the top, and the Boy exclaimed rather stoically, “That wasn’t bad at all.”
When we got back home, we discovered some visitors have returned.