Public Service Announcement

If anyone would like to propose, I am accepting applications on the condition that they are mailed attached to this ring:

Available here for approximately half of my next year's salary.

Meet Your Teacher

As part of the celebration of the end of the school year, the students are given time to go to their new classroom, see their new classmates, and meet their new teacher. The veteran teachers assured me that it was something that wasn't given much thought to, but my inner greenie-teacher was nervous. What if they hate me? What if they're crazy? What if they throw desks at me, rip up all the papers, and escape out the back door???

Thankfully, they filed in quietly and took their seats at the very back of the classroom, filtering their way forward as the seats were filled. A third of my students were missing (with peer-offered excuses ranging from "absent" to "he cut his leg real bad and it was bleeding and he had to go home" to "he disappeared a few months ago... but we think he'll be back next year!"). We talked for a bit about the things they'll be learning next year and their suggested summer studying. Most of them seemed excited about math and science so I'll have to spend the summer looking up experiments for them. One little boy, who immediately earned the mental nickname Pop Quiz, was very disappointed that I wouldn't engage in an immediate lecture on "the little exclamation point that goes by numbers" and later showed concern that we wouldn't be studying factorials.


I then opened it up to them to tell me a little about themselves and what they thought would make their fifth grade year perfect. My favorite responses:

The boy who put "micro-engineering" as his favorite subject and wants to "blow stuff up in chemistry". He also wrote some of his answers backwards and the other side of the paper said "Why Santa is Dead. Ho Ho KaBOOM. Bye Bye Santa."

Another boy also wants to "destroy stuff" but he's willing to fix it too.

Two girls wrote that they were interesting because they were "flexible". Surprisingly, not the same girls that want to hold singing and dancing contests in class.

The overwhelming majority of them just want to "be involved in class". Can do!

The Lanyard- Billy Collins

This has been playing on repeat in my iTunes. It's worth a listen if you can-- his tone tends to add more humor to his poems than you might pick find in the text alone-- but the full poem is below. Happy Almost Mother's Day!

The Lanyard - Billy Collins

The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly—
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light

and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the worn truth

that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.