While washing dishes with my rinsing help, my nephew J noted that it was an “agreeable task.”

I think I’ll start calling my classroom assignments that, at school (when we get back, after all this snow): “Alright, students. Our next agreeable task is….”

I can hear the groans already.

On our way into town midday Monday–the snow remnants from Saturday’s storm hadn’t yet dissipated, so I had the day off–we passed a biker looking rather regal in his purple biking outfit. He was checking his watch, and not in any little discreet sort of way, but again and again, looking at it.

We stopped at the post office to mail off our tax paperwork (a snow-day sort of thing to do). Even though it was 1:28 and I could hear the workers banging around inside, I jiggled the locked door only gently and took a few deep breaths, hoping that they would remember to open back up after their 12:15-1:30 lunch break.

They did, finally, and we continued on into town, again passing the biker who was again checking his watch rather ferociously.

We made a couple stops, at the lumber store for closet-building supplies, the farm coop for gardening seeds, and were nearing the grocery store when we saw a runner (Can you guess what she was doing?) checking her watch.

Usually I end up checking the computer more than a clock, especially in this time of tumultuous weather. (Actually, schools around here close if it’s too cloudy, sometimes it seems, anyway.)

Monday night’s weather-from-Saturday payoff was an announced two-hour delay Tuesday, but when I saw the weather forecast of more snow Tuesday afternoon, I had a good feeling. Sure enough, Tuesday I had the whole day to build a lot of closet, play with N, and make pizza.

And last night, in the midst of the ongoing winter storm warning and falling inches of snow, they called off school for today.

And there’s more snow predicted on Friday–as in 3-6 inches, through the day.

Closet, here I come!

As an instructional team leader, I often begin team meetings with a brief “professional learning report.” Last week I had us read a snippet from a legal bulletin about students’ right not to say the Pledge of Allegiance. A school was sued for its policy of requiring a parent note in order for a student to be excused from saying the Pledge, a policy that, according to the ruling court, violated students’ own rights to free speech.

“Yes, but,” said one of the math teachers who never makes any sense unless you figure out for him what he means to say, “You know, it comes down to, and kids will–you know, you can’t, just, I don’t know.”

Another math teacher said that he once had a student so religiously opposed to anything flag-related that when a passage about the flag was part of the state reading test, she wasn’t sure she could complete it. The principal and teacher frantically tried to contact her dad to give her permission, but couldn’t reach him and so told the student that it would just have to be her own decision. She read the passage and passed the test.

The other remaining math teacher, a proud Marine, spoke emphatically and fiercely: “I fought for this country so that people could choose not to say the Pledge. I’m sick of religious bigots who insist on Pledge saying but who’ve never fought.” (He also said that a few years ago he was upset at a student for not saying the Pledge but then learned of the student’s rights and apologized to the student for forcing him to do something that people had had to do under Nazi rule. The next day, the student started saying the Pledge.)

After the meeting, the proud Marine came back to my room. (He does this in every conversation: He’ll finish what he’s saying, walk away, remember what else he wanted to say, and come back–three or four times, usually.)

“Your position on saying the Pledge would surprise a lot of people,” I said to him.

“I volunteered to go to Vietnam twice,” he told me, “even though I thought the war was wrong. I remember sitting in tent in Vietnam arguing that we shouldn’t be there. I figured that anyone can fight a war they agree with, but it takes a true patriot to choose to fight a war they disagree with.”

But then what’s the point of having free speech, I didn’t ask him, if it isn’t to encourage action based on higher morals than even the State offers?

Throughout the morning’s discussions, I did not mention my own quiet standing by while the pubescent patriots among my homeroom students muttered the Pledge along with the principal every morning, but I imagined how the conversation would go:

“I don’t say the Pledge, for religious reasons,” I would say. “I only pledge myself to my peaceable God and to my wife.”

“That’s a right hard won through battle,” would be the inevitable reply. “The ‘peaceable God’ part, anyway.”

To which I could say only that I appreciate my freedoms, but that–and I know this is easy to say in light of those freedoms–I can only have integrity in my non-Pledgiance and nonviolent leanings if I also genuinely would choose not to have these freedoms instead of those battles having been fought.

Surely they still exist somewhere–but I haven’t seen a good youth-based fund-raising scheme for a good while.

Back in the day, when my youth group needed money, we did stuff to earn it even if we did market our “wares” to our parents and home church. My sister headed up–once–a day-long hard-tack candy-making operation in our church basement to raise money to go to a winter retreat. And every year we cooked a “souper bowl” meal of spaghetti and soup for Super Bowl Sunday and asked for donations for the eats.

Thankfully we never had a “slave auction,” a horrible flashback to our country’s slavery days, in which members of a youth group are “auctioned” to church members to do work for them for a day or several hours. But a “slave auction” would have at least had a leg up over today’s fund-raising trends, the leg being that the money-hungry, auctioned youth actually would have had to work for their funds.

Today’s trends? How about many sports teams’ “buy this card for $10 and these businesses will give you 10% off” deals? How about Girl Scouts’ cookie sales? (They don’t even make the cookies, dammit). How about my school’s band’s fund-raising auction? Any band members working that magic show where the auctioneer turns your donated junk into I’m not sure what–Epcot Center tickets?

For school and youth-group fund raising that supports peripheral, luxurious, or inflated lifestyles (Do they really need to go to that theme park…again? Or to fly to Africa for a missions week? Do football teams really need to….uh, to exist?), I don’t see these “just give them a reason to give” campaigns as respectable, appealing, or worthy of my hard-earned coinage.

After all, there are plenty of wholly legitimate causes to donate to, if people are in the market for giving money to people who haven’t really done anything–not even schemed–for it but really need it anyway.

This morning I lowered my biking minimum temperature experiential requirement. Previously 25 degrees, it has now bottomed out at 22, although I didn’t feel too uncomfortable this morning, so I’d now venture down to 19 or so without sweating it too much.

I broke my bottom limit because I did nothing for the past two weeks but sit around and eat. Almost literally. I became so accustomed to eating lots that I was able to continue eating lots.

“Like some people become able to hold their liquor,” M said.

So I had to ride today, to work off my vacation’s bounteous excesses–and to make today’s lunch fully worthwhile.

See, my colleague who while out for a walk this summer was attacked by a pit bull (Speaking of pit bulls, one of my students said to me yesterday, “I got a pit bull mix for Christmas.” “I hope you have a fence,” I told her.) and recovered only to fall off a swing and severely shatter her foot or ankle a mere two weeks into the school year, is finally back on both feet to teach once again. Today my team of teachers had a welcome-back party for her, for which I ordered plenty of pizza (some of the leftovers are in the fridge at school, awaiting my lunchtime tomorrow).

You see what I mean? I wanted to be hungry.

To make sure that the colleague being celebrated wouldn’t eat her lunch before the team “meeting,” I stopped by her room this morning right as students began arriving.

“I want to eat lunch with you today,” I said. She seemed delighted.

After securing her inadvertent assurance that she didn’t know about the party and that she would attend it, I pranced back to my room, where a homeroom student asked me for a pencil for the day.

“Okay,” I said wittily. “But bring it back at the end of the day.” I spotted the nickel on my podium, money given me weeks and weeks ago by yet another student who’d needed a pencil and offered the nickel as guarantee of the loaned pencil’s return, which never happened. “And take this nickel, too, to help you remember to bring the pencil back. I want the nickel back, too.”

I haven’t seen him, the pencil, or the nickel since, but the party was nice–and the pizza was delicious.

“I’m glad you’re back,” I told my colleague. “Thanks for giving us a reason to have pizza.”

Last week our drummer learned that due to his job he wouldn’t be able to make our gig yesterday. I was very disappointed, as he really holds things together and makes us sound real.

So we did a next-best thing: we roped in two middle school boys. The gig was part of a school fund-raising night at the local Barnes and Noble, so we figured it was fitting that Q, an eighth-grade percussion star and B, a seventh grade rock star wannabe joined us.

Q took the CD we’d recorded of our most recent practice and learned several of the songs, and B downloaded the song he would play with and played along with it “like 20 times, on the boxes I set up that have different tones, and my bed.”

Q’s parents beamed through the whole 30 minutes, and if B’s dad were the beaming type, he would have, too.

This next-to-last full week of school before Christmas break hasn’t been too bad, really. In fact, it’s been downright good–even though the snowstorm that hit us hard on Saturday didn’t make the school system miss a beat yesterday or today.

One struggling student, with only a little help from me, actually came up with this terrific simile yesterday: “as hungry as a paper waiting to be written on.” (I’m ignoring M’s claim that it doesn’t work because it’s a mixed metaphor.)

Another student, who came up with “waddled like a penguin with a wedgie,” today brought me a Christmas card and a basket of homemade sweets (chocolate covered Oreo crumbs, chocolate covered pretzels, etc.). I think maybe she gave me all her leftovers from the day, since I heard another student say, “You’re giving all of them to him?” (which is, by the way, exponentially better than “You’re giving all of them to him?”).

After class, though, my gifter said, “You know, you could give me one of those chocolate covered Oreo things, just, you know, since….”

“What?” I said, and she melted back to her seat there in the back corner beside the boy who she frequently competes with in silence contests.

Earlier in the day, after I invited everyone to my band’s gig on Monday, another student offered to join my band.

“No,” I told him. “You have to be an old fart and ugly to be in my band, so you don’t qualify.”

Finally, a student I taught last year last week offered yet again to be a teacher’s assistant for me for a class period or two. Today she followed up her offer with this message commented onto my classroom blog: “Hello >.< How are you today? I am doing well, We did an assignment and I have a 93.4% chance of working with cpu's when I am older. Let me know when you have work for me okay. Talk to you later then~ Just let me know ^_^"I’ll do just that.

In my classes’ brainstorming discussions about students’ persuasive letters to a leader, one student said she would write about our little town becoming its own state.

“That would be, like, four miles wide,” another student said.

Yet another added, “That would be smaller than Rhode Island…I think.”