No Vespers Here

This morning my principal stopped in to utter words that public employees so often find frightening: “A parent called. I didn’t take the call; [the assistant principal] did.”

I tried not to look concerned. “Oh?”

“They said you were teaching from the Bible in class. I’m assuming that if you were, it was directly related to the literature, right?”

“Yes,” I breathed a sigh of relief.

I explained that in the novel Blue, which I recently read to all of my students, Imogene tells Ann Faye that God has a tear bottle for each person’s tears. Ann Faye enjoys imagining God’s windowsill full of multi-colored bottles; Imogene says that Ann Faye’s is blue because she is a true-blue friend.

So I showed the Bible verse to my students: “You number my wanderings; Put my tears into Your bottle; Are they not in Your book?” (New King James Version). The NIV says, “list my tears on your scroll”; The Message says, “Each tear entered in your ledger, each ache written in your book”; Dette er Biblen pÃ¥ dansk says, “Gengæld du dem det onde, stød Folkene ned i Vrede, o Gud!”

“How many bottles?” I asked my students. We agreed that Imogene was wrong; there is only one bottle for everyone all together, not one per person.

I then made students cut out a bottle shape and fill it with their tears using colored pencils, to remain uncollected and graded, just for themselves.

“Do you think I should have done that?” I asked the principal. (I also mentioned as we talked more that the assistant principal was actually in my room performing a formal teacher observation during that very lesson. I did not bring up, though, that she evaluated me with across-the-board “meets expectations”–the highest possible rating.)

“Absolutely,” he said. “I just wanted to be sure you weren’t leading vespers or anything.”