Mr W teaching in STL

Or maybe weird neighbors. I was off school for Easter break - my strange task for the day: work out where our property line is. We are considering getting a new fence and oddly the property line is not the same as the fence line. You see we have been in our house for a little more than 20 years and for first ten years or so we complained bitterly about our neighbor who was not maintaining his trees, nasty "junk trees," locusts with thorny branches that overhung our back yard. Well, it turns out that those three troublesome trees were our trees after all - it's just they were on the outside of the fence in a vacant lot. Logically enough the fence had been placed away from its optimal position because otherwise it would have to go directly through the several trees. Now, some years later, those never-especially-healthy-looking locusts have been removed and the backyard fence is looking really ragged. A sorry excuse for a wooden fence; the horizontal supports are all warped ...

 At school, I’m moderator of the monthly school newspaper and this was a production week. It was all a bit frenzied but the boys "done good" and have produced a very solid 24-page paper, whereas most of the others this year have been 16-page issues. One of my favorite recurring parts of the paper is called Heard in the Hallways, a series of verbatim out-of-context quotes heard around school. It is hard to edit because of the older boys’ love of risqué jokes (and this is a conversative Catholic school) and, by design, the snippets come from a wide variety of sources with minimal context to understand what is being said.   Anyway, here are some highlights from the March issue of Heard in the Hallways: Basketball coach giving advice to players on defense: Someone needs to be touching him! He’s just standing there unmolested!   Teacher standing next to a doorway on a hot day: Wanna crack? Students: Yeah! Teacher: Alright, let’s crack.   Student inter...

Funny interaction of the day #2: In my creative writing class with seniors, I’ve been pretty happy with how things have been going so far. I’ve rejigged the course this year and am using shop-worn wisdom from the creative writing world to structure things: “Activate the Senses” and now “Show Don’t Tell.” Cliches, certainly, but inarguably very good advice for a novice creative writer. I am trying to give the students space and time to write a pretty sustained piece of fiction - a short story that they could complete in a two-to-three-week timeframe, but it could possibly be a short play or movie script, if that where the student’s interest lies. Yesterday for the small number of kids who didn’t have a solid idea emerging from the last two weeks of writing prompts, I called them out in the hallway one by one to draw out their ideas. Me: “Any pieces you liked from the previous assignments that have some potential? Is there something you’ve started that you can expand on?” Student...

Funniest interaction of the day: I'm teaching A Raisin in The Sun and Joseph Asagai, the charmer from Nigeria, shows up. He refers to Beneatha sweetly with the nickname "Alaiyo," a Yoruba word that the audience is not supposed to understand until Asagai explains it a few lines later. He haltingly translates it as "One for Whom Bread is Not Enough" - the perfect nickname for Beneatha who is never satisfied and is striving to better herself by going to medical school. So, I asked the class, what does Asagai's nickname "One for Whom Bread is Not Enough" symbolize? Why is it a good nickname for her? Student (knowingly): She's fat.

My goodness - the break in rhythm with Spring Break has really thrown me for a loop. A commitment to write daily quickly became "daily except at weekends" which quickly became "daily except for when I'm not at work." Anyway, I've been thinking A LOT about how I choose to spend time on things. During the working day, it's fairly simple: teach my classes, prepare to teach the next class, show up to meetings, do some grading. If there's time left over: run an errand, go to the gym, make a phone call. But when it's time off from work, it is sadly not simple reversal of that, with home-related tasks taking precedence over work. Miscellaneous work-related tasks still jostle for attention, alongside the grocery store run, enjoyable jobs in the garden, life-sapping jobs in the house, such as paying bills. (Most aggravating task of the life-sapping kind: our bank has terminated how it does automatic bill payments to utility companies so I need to set ...

Over the weekend, we drove from St. Louis down to northern Arkansas for a short Spring Break trip. In the three-and-half-hour drive, we saw the familiar signs of early spring that you might expect – the pink blossoms of magnolia trees blossoming in Tower Grove Park and whites of Bradford pear trees, lining many roads, both major and minor, when all the other trees appeared to be still dormant. Given the long drive and the sheer number of Bradford pears, we noticed an interesting phenomenon – given it’s so early, many trees were actually only half in bloom, prodigiously blooming on their south-facing sides, while still looking quite wintry on their north side. And an even more marked phenomenon in our springtime journey (which was heading directly south for 200 miles): the trees were incrementally more in bloom in southern Missouri than in the central part of the state, and even more in bloom in Arkansas compared to Missouri. During a lunch stop in a park in Poplar Bluff, Mo. (20 miles ...