This week, after someone else commented that he is taller than I am, my student who lacks even “the memory bank of a dead toad” (that’s according to a colleague) asked me how tall I am.
My former colleague D just called me, which is unfortunate only because yesterday I wrote him a note–I’d even stuck a stamp to the envelope already–wishing him well and telling him about our impending move. But he beat me to the draw, and the stamped envelope is now in the desk drawer awaiting further notice.
“I hear you’re leaving the area,” he said, and then offered not his own down-hip help, but his large pickup truck with a livestock trailer (“We keep it relatively clean,” he said) and the help of his son-in-law, who attends a church in our destination arena.
After I thanked him profusely, he asked me one more question.
(Now, I need to mention here that before ending his final year of teaching early, to have hip surgery and ride out his sick leave, D stuck his head into my room and said, in a spirit of good-natured gloatation, “Let’s see now, I have two days of school left, and, if my calculations are right, you have… about 5,450.” Funny. Very funny.)
“Are you going to school tomorrow?” he asked me.
“Yes, I plan to,” I said, innocently–after all, my students take the state reading test tomorrow, and they need my (stern) moral support.
“Well, I’m not,” he said sweetly. “I think I’ll sleep in. You have a good day!”
In several weeks or months, or maybe after we move, I think I’ll send him a big thank-you note for his trailer offer–and for his refreshing sense of humor. The envelope is already ready to go.
My colleague Old Fart gleefully told me today about my school’s fairly out-of-it assistant principal’s observation of the Spanish teacher, G.
It seems that because of the ongoing state testing scheduling wackaroos, all of the school’s ESL population (the vast majority of which are native Spanish speakers) had ended up in G’s classroom for the afternoon. Apparently without noticing the class demographics, the assistant principal watched as G conversed with his students in Spanish.
“You’ve done a really good job with these students,” the principal told G later. (“I’ve never seen anything like it,” I imagine him thinking. “Fluent Spanish speakers produced in a middle school elective!”)
Last Wednesday I had two interviews. At the first, I performed well, I thought, but then received the kiss of death, anyway: “We have many highly qualified applicants for this position.” The last time I heard those words in an interview, I didn’t get the job–and this time was no different.
At the second, a callback from an earlier interview, however, I received better feedback: “I liked you the first time, and this time I like you even better.” To make a long story much shorter, today I met with that principal’s system’s personnel director and signed a contract.
On my hour-long drive back to my current job, I paused at a rest stop to eat my lunch, calm my nerves, and avoid the classroom for a few minutes longer. An older couple joined me on the park bench–the less wet one, under a tree–and I listened to their conversation.
“That’s a Toyota,” he said, indicating the car parked next to their Camry. He sounded like he had a British accent. Their license plate was from New Jersey.
“What kind?” she asked. She had the same accent.
“I don’t know.” He ambled to look it over.
“That’s a Toyota, too,” she said when he came back, and pointed at another car.
“It’s a Highlander,” he said, accenting “land.”
“Is that your car?” she asked me.
I shook my head and pointed to my truck.
“Oh, another Toyota,” she said.
We finished eating and left at about the same time, but I pulled out first. A few miles later, they passed me–and when I looked over at them driving by, the woman was straining around in her seat to wave back at me.
Tonight, then, I’ve had the pleasure of calling friends and family to tell them of my new job and bemoaning to all that I will be taking a pay cut.
“But only $1,” I add. They snort.
After I explained the full picture to my sister, though, I received a call back, from her husband. “You have fuzzy math,” he said. It appears that once health insurance benefits are added into the mix, I come out nearly $900 ahead.
My sister-in-law H had an additional thought–that if we end up living close to my school, commuting savings will further prove tremendous.
Not bad, I say. Not bad at all.
My sister-in-law gave me, for my prize drawer, a box of her old high school trophies: several music trophies, a marble piano award, a couple plaques, a couple field hockey trophies, and even a student of the year trophy. They all have her name on them, and the year awarded, which was when my students were all about three years old.
Earlier this week, after an intense practice of the keyword reading strategy that I teach, several of these (among other) prizes were claimed:
The student whose parents unbelievably stick up for him through all of his wildly inappropriate conduct grabbed the hugest of them all, the 1997-1998 Student of the Year trophy. “I’m going to show this to my mom,” he said.
One little girl snatched up a field hockey trophy. When I asked her, today, what she did with it, she said she took it home and put it on her trophy shelf.
And then there’s my Honors student who hasn’t gotten her act together for much of this year. She took the “Annie” Director’s Award plaque. “I showed it to my mom,” she told me, “and before she read it, she was all excited. But when she read it, she was like, ‘Uhh…'”
I might be getting an award soon, I hope I hope I hope. Another student of mine, whose dad once summoned me to court and who on Monday donated his aluminum foil “intellect magnifier” (most other students called it his “thinking cap”) to my prize drawer in exchange for a pottery cup, asked me today, “What’s your favorite kind of pie?”
“Strawberry rhubarb,” I told him.
I would consider that kind of gift quite a prize.
When I was exercising the other morning, watching the clock, I wondered if the measured minute was diminishing in front of the second hand or expanding behind it.
I’ve been learning about time, how it passes slowly and quickly all at once, and how in a flash plans so long anticipated vanish into wafting memories. I gear up for the long weekend, for the trip to visit friends and family, or for the break from classroom routine, when all of a sudden, I’m back in my usual place. Or I dread the house cleaning, or jogging, or some other cumbersome cumber, and then just do it anyway, and flash! it’s over.
Young students, too, have a hard time comprehending time, particularly when it comes to adult time. “You’re 49, right?” one asked me last week.
“Yes,” I told him.
My colleague D, about whom I’ve written several times, is now up against time. Thinking with his head screwed on the whole way, he figured he’d schedule his hip replacement just before retiring, to use up his accumulated sick leave, which if unused would benefit him little.
Then he got a call from his surgeon. He needed to reschedule for two weeks later. Then he got another call from his surgeon. This time, it appeared, the operating facility was being remodeled, and so he would have to postpone the replacement for several more weeks.
“I think the surgeon is related to one of your students who doesn’t want to see you go,” I told D.
But D is a jovial character (in the photo he’s the pope, making rounds on a cart pushed by a student), and so he chuckled when he bemoaned his condition: “So I thought I had two weeks left, but now I have six!”
This past Thursday, D came into my room before school with two dozen eggs from his hens. “These will be in the fridge. If you want them, they’re $2 a dozen.”
“I’ll look to see if they’re still there before I leave this afternoon,” I told him. “I’d like to buy them.”
Minutes later, however, D was back. “I’m really bad at retail sales,” he said. On the way to the lounge, he’d crossed paths with a teachers’ aide who has fallen on hard times. “She didn’t have any money, so I just gave them to her,” he said.
As it may be said, carpe the diem, D.
He doesn’t cling to her anymore, since I told him that the next time I saw them touch it would be a writeup, but the kid constantly lurks around his girlfriend, apparently indelibly in love. I didn’t even know his name, or hers, since they are both students on the adjacent team, but I sensed subversion all the way, maybe in part because his hair comes way down over and hides his eyes.
Frankly, I was tired of their hang-in-the-halls-between-every-class puppy loviness, but I wasn’t sure what to do about it until inspiration struck. I called him over to me.
“On the green bookshelf behind my door are some dictionaries. Could you bring one to me?”
“Am I in trouble?”
“No, I just want you to look up a word. ‘Lurk.’ L-u-r-k.”
“What does it mean?”
“Look it up.”
By that time, two of his friends had gathered, and they hovered over him as he flipped pages.
“Are you in trouble?” they asked him.
“No, I just have to look up a word.”
He barely found the word before I sent him on his way, almost late for class. “I’ll have you read the definition next time,” I said.
After the next class, he was back. “Where’s that book?”
I handed it to him, still open to the word.
“A teacher told me it means ‘stalker,'” he said. “But we’re going out. I’m not a stalker.”
“OK,” I said. “What does the word mean?”
I helped him read the definition to me and his friends.
“Thank you,” I said. “Now, listen. Every time I see you hanging around down here, I’m going to have you look up another word.”
He hustled off to class.
The next day, I saw them gazing adoringly at each other again. I motioned him over.
“What do I have to look up this time?” he asked.
“‘Clingy.’ C-l-i-n-g-y.”
Again, he ran out of time before actually reading the definition, but after the next class, he was back. “I need to look up that word,” he told his friends.
After he read the definition (I’d helped him find it, under “cling”), he said, “Why is that bad?”
“I didn’t say it is,” I said. “Now, find ‘indelible.’ It starts with ‘i-n-d.'”
He hasn’t finished that one, yet. Maybe next week.
Today was prize day again, for my students. Two of my classes had spent over three whole class periods racking up check marks, which are converted into tickets, and which are then tossed into my cardboard oats container.
I was going to just draw three winners, in first period, but the desire for the white cloth with yellow tie-dye (at least I guessed that that’s what the yellow was; I told a couple classes it was dog pee) was running pretty high, and so I said, “If someone buys me a cookie, I’ll draw a fourth ticket.”
Nobody up and said, “I’ll buy you a cookie,” but I went ahead and drew for the prize anyway–and there went the cloth.
Other notably hot items chosen from my selection: a plastic, three-compartment box, empty, which used to house paper clips; a cardboard box of post-it-like notes (unfortunately, I think it had one last piece of paper in it, and so the winner had to be content with the spring inside); a plastic diamond ring; a book of wise sayings (the boy had been begging for it for weeks, and finally his ticket was pulled); and a clear plastic folder that had been left in a locker at the end of last year.
The one highly desired item, or at least the item for which one boy pleaded, that was not selected was a plastic storage box for 3.5″ floppy disks. (M’s comment: “Do they even know that computer disks actually used to be floppy?”) Better luck next time, kiddo.
At lunch, though, a first period student brought me the requested cookie–and he hadn’t even been one of the winners! It was delicious.
I hadn’t been having such a hot week. Too little sleep, not enough time for personal projects, a car in the shop for allegedly leaking oil, and uncertainty about how I would keep our tiny yard mowed this summer (our reel mower is dully kaput) were leaving me grumpy, and I found myself taking it out on students.
But today, my spirits changed. In first period, a teacher sprang into my room with her bucket of reward candy, looking for the color-of-the-day wearers, in vain.
“There’s no one here, Mr. Jacobs,” she complained at my full classroom of unspirited students. She’s old enough to be my mom, and she was drinking coffee from a Dunkin’ Donuts cup.
“We‘re here!” a student protested.
“You don’t count,” she fired back.
Now, I must explain that this is Mrs. Generous Herself’s common demeanor. “Aw, Mr. Jacobs,” she always moans as if in great agony, whenever she sees me. But it’s in fun, all of it. After all, she is the coordinator of our sunshine club; she’s responsible for putting together the school’s many baby showers (that’s where N got her car seat and much more).
Somehow, it appears, she has connected me with cans of mixed nuts, because whenever I RSVP to any sort of upcoming sunshine club event, she accusatorily replies, “You’d better come–how else are we going to have mixed nuts?” She herself generally makes homemade cakes for the parties–wonderful pound cakes, carrot cakes, and other delights. And this picture of N shows the blanket that Mrs. Generous Herself made for her.
So I didn’t mind her interruption. Instead, I merrily scolded her and told her to bring me coffee next time she barged in–and a donut wouldn’t be unwelcome, either.
Later in the morning, I wrote this email to M: “I hope you’re having a good day. Apparently the car is ready…I guess they just needed to tighten the seals; they didn’t say anything on the message. This morning [Mrs. Generous Herself] came into my room to check for the colors of the day, and made a big fuss about interrupting me. She was drinking Dunkin’ Donuts coffee. I told her she can come back again when she brings me coffee and a donut. She was back in about an hour–with a coffee and donut for me. Yippee! My second period was mad that I ate it in front of them. Now I’m typing so fast that my wrists hurt.”
Actually, I tried to be nice to my students by ducking my head under my podium before taking a bite of donut, but they still wailed, one girl something about her “tummy.”
The coffee did the trick, and gave me a much-needed kick.
After forgetting to attach a promised attachment in an email to my team, Old Fart wrote back, “Attachment? Attachment? We don’t need no stinking attachment.” Referring to an earlier email of his in which he had promised an upcoming variety of vegetable plant starts but emphatically stated that orders would not be taken before May 1, I replied, “Sorry, attachment disorders will not be accepted until after May 1.”
Even at the beginning of my planning period, the last period of the day, I was still kicking. I called in one of my gifted and talented students who had been showing off her “beach bum” artwork the other day. I’d confiscated her art notebook, which also contained a few other inappropriate works.
“Look,” I told her. “You’re a good artist, and you’re probably more aware than most students of what’s going on in the world.” I went on, teary eyed at my eloquence, to say that she should use her art as social commentary.
Before leaving for home, I emailed a thank-you to Mrs. Generous Herself: “Thanks tons for the coffee and donut! They provided the kick that improved my day gloriously!” She couldn’t resist replying, “You kicked kids today?? Good for you!!”
After I retrieved the car from the shop (with its new oil plug washer and new oil–all for no charge, since they’d done my last oil change) and sputtered home, I was still kicking. M and I decided to take N for a walk in the park. We drove to a nearby plaza, parked the car and shopped at the drugstore, and then crossed the parking lot to the hardware store.
We love hardware stores. I bought a Toro 15″ weed eater, the plug-in kind, for $45, and a green, 80-feet-long extension cord.
“At least it’s not orange,” M said. “That will help you not look like a dork.”
“I’ll still look like a dork,” I said.
We never made it to the park, since it was getting to be time for a late supper when the hardware store spewed us out.
As I carried M’s purchase, a bag of potting soil, into our house from the car, the neighbor teenager said, “Did you get a new tattoo?”
A new tattoo? Maybe he saw a mole on my arm, or something.
“You’ve never seen my tattoos before?” I asked him.
“Huh?”
“Just kidding. I don’t have any tattoos.”
I went inside, snapped the plastic pieces of the Toro together, and plugged it in. I think it will work quite nicely.
At least it did in the kitchen.
“I have a boyfriend! I have a boyfriend!”
I don’t know whether to say it was a squeal, or a screech, or a squeak, or the sound of a machine its creator swears will drive cockroaches into the sea. Whatever it was, it was piercingly seventh grade.
But her friend’s comeback was delightful: “Yeah–my brother. Eewwww!”
