Mr W teaching in STL

As I sat down to write this blog post on the last day of March, and the last day of the Slice of Life Writing Challenge, the phrase used to describe March’s typical weather “in like a lion, out like a lamb” came to mind. Well, I don’t think there was anything especially big-cat like with how I personally started my efforts, the collective efforts of Slice of Life network arguably does have some of that majestic nobility. And if there’s any resemblance between this tiny blog to a lamb, it’s pretty sickly lamb that once in while catches your eye and looks cute. I only managed to blog on 12 of the 31 days of March. Not great.  BUT   in fairness, as March 1 approached and I needed an actual concrete concept to tie it all together, I decided to take “Slice of Life” phrase at face value. I wanted to be it to be a series of vignettes, primarily written during afternoon downtime to reflect on the school day; it was not something I was ever planning to devote a lot of time to at home...

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 ...

In the run up to Spring Break, I fantasized that I would power through all my work with absolute efficiency and manage to slip quietly away from school on Friday afternoon and head straight into Spring Break. Alas, I was deluding myself and had to spend yesterday morning (Saturday morning) doing various small piles of grading, a burst of grade book updating, and other work-related miscellanea. But I got it done. Spring Break is here at last! A three-day trip to a state park in Arkansas, staying in a cabin, beckons. The food is packed (thank you, Katy). The car is gassed up. I have plotted the meandering scenic drive, which adds only 45 minutes to the 3-hour 30-minute journey. I've no idea if I'll have internet access as it's pretty rural. I'm sort of hoping we don't and sort of hoping we do. Either way, it's time to unplug and unwind. I'll work on the assumption that I'll be offline until Wednesday... and will check in with my fellow bloggers then.

An amusing moment at school. Starting a new project with 7 th graders, I was a little unsure how it was going to go as I asked each student to nominate any U.S. city other than St. Louis that he would be interested in researching and then to list the defining qualities of a “livable city.” I’d been agonizing for days about whether to assign the groups and topics or whether to let students choose their own. I eventually went for the latter, and made it part of the process they had to canvas for support based on the merits of the city. We did it caucus-style with kids making their way around the room until each student was in a group of three and committed to a topic. I encouraged them to think broadly about cities. I’d pushed them to consider not just New York, Boston, Miami, San Francisco etc. – but to also think about access to nature, variations in weather, affordability – all kinds of factors that would favor smaller cities and more offbeat choices. So it was perhaps a twist ...

An artsy photo that I snapped in a bathroom at school. This is in a newly renovated part of the building, where I am only occasionally. The last time that I was there construction work was still going on and the window was covered in butcher paper. Could make a good design for wallpaper or a frieze...

Fascinating discussion in class today. This was a creative writing class with seniors. For the last couple of years, I have started the course using a provocative piece by Ryan Knighton called “ A Blind Man’s Trip Will Change the Way You Think About Safaris .” It’s an incredible piece of writing and it does exactly what it says on the tin.   I then ask students to write about “any topic of your choice, with the only requirement being that you describe things in exquisite and excessive detail, activating all five senses.” Today we moved on to imagine if you didn’t have one of your senses, or if it were greatly impaired, how would that experience would be different. I hope the students’ writing – which I won’t see for a few days yet - turns out as well as the discussion. Some questions that came up during our discussion: - What does a cathedral smell like? - What does a hockey game sound like? -  Does a blind musician make music differently from a sighted musician? - Is a de...

Two p.m. Finally, a quiet moment. This is the start of a new term at our school, and it’s been an unusually chaotic one. Of 60 staff members, 17 are away for various reasons – there’s a major conference for educators going on downtown and many people are attending that; then a senior retreat that requires a lot of staff; plus sundry seasonal illnesses taking a small handful of people out. Because of this, in addition to my regular classes, I’ve subbed two classes yesterday and two today. Subbing can feel burdensome but mostly it’s interesting because you get to see how other teachers set up their classrooms and their assignments. In addition to a regular fine arts classroom, we have a medieval arts classroom at school and I got to see some almost-complete heraldry projects done by seventh graders (who I also teach with my English teacher hat on). In short, design a coat of arms that represents your family; make a slideshow that explains the different elements. Then an English cla...