Bright

Difficult to get one’s head around school puzzles on the morning of the second snow day in a row. It’s all a bit abstract when there’s a significant chance of a power outtage, which would be more a power outrage, what with how majestically the blue and red LEDs in the holly tree glow through the heavy snowflakes falling. I would prefer just to sit in the front room, in the gray white glow of the sky’s unknowable depth, and make a list of the best songs of 2013 (the Preatures, Vampire Weekend, Chance the Rapper) and let my kid show me clips of One Direction’s appearance on SNL. These aimless mornings are few, and tomorrow will dauntlessly come, and I will again be striding the classroom carpet, wondering, wondering, how it all will get done, wondering if my students will ever have enough opportunities to make and do and to show, and I will be anxious as ever. Tomorrow. Today is the type of day to remember breath and bread and blankets. Stay warm, little children, put down your phones, tug on your boots, and go tumble in the giddy bright.

Tree

The entire school day was a descent: from morning where I was able to run in shorts through the orange pre-dawn mist all the way to the evening’s mud trudge through an oily cold downpour. There were some lovely moments–lunch with friends, the way the students inhaled the poetry, a bit of a midday workout–but all along we were focused on the day’s great shift. The students were to be rushed through a stunted schedule of 28 minutes classes. (Is it just me or do all teachers automatically talk faster, with an edge of panic, on half-days?) Then it would be time for the staff to come together as a group. I say this with dread because most of us know that we are not very good at coming together as a group. There is something about the acoustics, the tile floor, the lack of agency, the uncertainty of how much is expected of participants, the anxiety that some horrible news of change in policy or procedure will be delivered, the sudden switch of roles from host to audience. And always there is the troubling matter of the matter of the meeting. Yesterday, my colleagues and I spent a portion of our half-day inservice discussing intervention scenarios. Small table groups engaged and raged over the fictitious conundrums, slicing them with wit, jokes that masked real frustration. Some of us even poured actually expertise and care into these discussions and some brilliant ideas were born–remedial classes led by the elective teams, those most expert in making learning active and fun, or reading sessions in the content areas. And, then, after the meeting, all those ideas, all that chatter, all those solutions, evaporated. Here’s a sweet little constant to consider: fictions are forgotten when there is real work waiting to be done.