Didgeridoos and "Dencher" Glue

When the students came into class on the second day, this Quick Write was projected on the board:

In order for me to monitor who finished when and to get to know them a bit better, I had them write their favorite piece of advice on a sticky note and post it on a piece of chart paper.

There our collective advice sits - ready for tomorrow's Meet the Parents night. I'm pretty sure their folks are going to go wild when they see what they wrote.

(Note - I tried to maintain their original spelling/punctuation. Do forgive us. It's early in the year.)

We are dealing with middle schoolers here, so oftentimes their advice touched on the theme of "Lookin' Fly". You know -

  Keeping up Appearances:

"And if you don't wear your braces prepare not to have a wife. My teeth are so jacked up, when I smile, I scare every woman I see."

"One more thing, don't play bingo, you'll get bingo wings."

(...bingo wings...)

"Don't bathe and bake in your own self-made puddle of oil sheen and UV rays - you have been warned. You WILL be pale and wrinkly like a sun bleached raisin - dry and shriveled."

(She took Creative Writing last year, and it shows.)

"Use wrinkle cream so the 50 year old men will like you."

"Enjoy having no wrinkles, and eat as much candy as you can before you get diabetes or lose all your teeth."

Another common theme was 

Love and Marriage:

"If you ever feel drawn to cats ignore it."

"Ohh!! and don't get married, all they do is nag all day everyday."

"Don't ever have kids."

"Make sure you have a cat or some kind of animal as a backup plan just in case your husband does get tired of our shananigans."

And finally, like middle schoolers, much of their advice defied any sort of categorization whatsoever...

Grab Bag:

"Don't quit your job to fofill your lifelong dream of becoming a didgeridoo player. You didn't make it in the business. Now I live on the side of highway 51 and have a pet racoon names Chester."

(Note: Kid...how do you know how to spell didgeridoo, but not "fulfill" or "raccoon"? Also, this child started his letter with something to the effect of, "That bachelor party in Vegas seems like a good idea. It's not.")

"Always! Always! Remember your dencher glue!"

Translation:

"Make sure you know hoe to play checkers and bingo. That's about all you can do with a bad hip!"

"Your gonna get put in the crazy house."

(Note: With handwriting and spelling like that, YOU'RE going to put Ms. P in the crazy house.)

"Do me a favor and don't be lazy."

"When you get a chance to buy a library, please do. Because it turns out the library can be a pretty snazzy place to live, and there's only things like Early Arthritis to read here."

"By now technology has taken over. I'm sitting beside by holographic Border Collie hovering in my elevated chair."

And my personal favorite.....

"When the lady that drives the nursing home bus drops you off at Kroger...

Make a run for it."

Love and prune juice,

Ms. P

P.S. Any advice you'd like to give my middle schoolers? Please share.

Are you digital or tangible?

       Matthew Glover, who maintains a digital library for a living and just happens to be my real-life, down-the-street neighbor, wrote the perfect blog post to juxtapose against my recent post, "I Believe in Real Books".
        You can view it here at his tumblr. It's entitled "Digital Books are Real Books, Too". I love that ten to fifteen years ago Matthew and I, two voracious readers, would not even be having this conversation.
         Though we both love reading in equal amounts, we have different preferences about how we do it. I love spines and pages. He loves eReaders and digital libraries. What about you?

Are you digital or tangible?

I believe in real books.

        

This post isn't directly about teaching, but it is about something that made me the teacher that I am.

         I believe in real books. 

Do you remember the kind I'm talking about? The ones with the spines and the pages. The ones that smell of ink and basement. The ones that you can dog-ear, even if it feels a little rebellious. Even if you hear the librarian, mother, teacher in your head blurt, "Use a bookmark, missy! That book didn't buy itself!"

        Admittedly, from birth to present, I have held seventeen different residences. My uncle has called me a gypsy, and on each of those moving days, the back-bending labor of lugging cardboard boxes spilling with stories has nearly driven me to a Kindle or Nook. 

        It would certainly make more sense for a semi-nomad to condense, but once I settle into the new apartment, dorm room, or house, the first thing I unpack are my books. It's a sacred ritual. I run my fingers along their spines, flip through dog-eared pages, and am transported back to the first, second, third time that I read that story. Inevitably, a memento or two will fall to the floor as I scan the text - a note from a neighbor in 10th grade English, my sister's posed picture at a Sadie Hawkins dance, a receipt for twenty dollars worth of gas which used to fill up my car, or one of the bookplates that my grandmother gave me. 

When I see oily stains splashed across the recipe for Nutty Apple Loaf in my Hummingbird Bakery cookbook, I think of Sarah. She was my college confidante who once sat beside me on London's Portobello Road as we stuffed our faces with two Hummingbird Bakery cupcakes each - embarrassing our country and validating the "gluttonous Americans!" stereotype.  

       I remember when she called me crying from graduate school, four states away because of the suicide of her close friend. In a rush to comfort her, I grabbed the cookbook off the shelf, and quickly baked Hummingbird apple bread to send in the mail - a reminder of better times. In the hasty process of greasing a loaf pan, I spilled oil on the pages - a reminder now, to me, of our friendship and how long distance has yet to stain it. My collection of "real" books preserves my scattered personal history. Each one of them holds more than the author's original text. It holds my yesteryear. Though to uninformed on-lookers, they're merely marked with smudges and chicken scratch. 

Last week, I moved into house number seventeen after the burglary at house number sixteen. Of all my worldly possessions, the crooks only deemed one worthy of their time - my computer. I laughed to myself as I noticed that, although they had lugged most of our belongings on the floor, they hadn't laid a finger on a bookshelf - where my most treasured effects are housed. Hidden in plain sight. 

        Now, a Nook might have peaked their interest, but the joke's on them.  What I've learned from those books has made me, as my Dad reminded me, "grateful that I'm not the one having to do the robbing."

When I glance at my collection on the green built-ins in the living room of house number seventeen, I see a timeline of my life that no one else can see. Once when stepping back after arranging them in an order that would make Dewey's head spin (summer reads, expatriate authors, cookbooks for carnivores), I was interrupted by my housemate who asked me my favorite question, "Can you recommend a book for me to read?" I turned around, sized her up, then furiously went to work. Me Talk Pretty One Day? Check. She's Come Undone. Perfect. Sandra Cisneros? Amy Hempel? Malcolm Gladwell? Of course. At seven books, she interjected, disrupting my literary fervor, "Okay, okay! I said a book. A book." 

I just know it will happen one day. It might be a birthday or Christmas, but someone I know who did not read this essay is going to give me an eReader. I'll smile, thank them, and I might even use it when I travel. But I will never deny my loyalty to the real books. When I crawl in bed at night, I want to pick a book out of the stack of them that teeters on my nightstand - threatening the lamp in a contest of height. I want to walk through a library and judge them by their covers. I want to shove off one too many novels on my friends. I want to grab my copy of One Writer's Beginnings by Eudora Welty that I bought at her birthplace - two blocks down from house number fourteen - and read the words I've highlighted: 

        "Yet regardless of where they came from, I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them - with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself."

Ms. Welty's home library

The Hiding Place, part 1

       Much to my dismay, teachers don't stop working in the summer. Especially the summer before  they start teaching new subjects. Especially the summer before they work towards National Boards. Especially the summer before they start teaching Common Core. Especially the summer that they participate in a National Writing Project summer institute. 

No, I'm not stressed at all. Just tired after typing all that nonsense out.

       But, there are blessings that come from all this hard work. One being that I'm reading and writing about teaching on a daily basis. What follows is part one of a narrative piece about my middle school experience, and more importantly, one of my most influential teachers. Do enjoy, my dears.  

And think of me while you work on your tan, and my skin turns an unsettling shade of schoolmarm beige.

"The Hiding Place," part 1

       You haven't lived until you've been crammed into a 25-square-foot bathroom with fourteen of your 7th and 8th grade classmates.  

       It was the most ridiculous thing any teacher had ever asked any of us to do. But that's what we had begun to expect from Mrs. Morris. The unexpected. In retrospect, she actually had even more gall to tell us that, while in the sardine can that was the preschool bathroom, we were not to talk, cough, laugh, sneeze, or even whisper. That is, not if we wanted to remain "hidden." If you've ever met a middle schooler, you know that their silence - especially when the situation demands it - is as elusive as a Mississippi snow day. 

      Furthermore, upon leaving our classroom to hole up in the bathroom, we were expected to squirrel away all traces of our previous presence there. No math worksheet or lunch box left behind. Which, yet again, if you've ever met a middle schooler, you know that they normally trail more debris behind them than a fleet of floats at a Mardi Gras parade.

There I found myself with a frizzy bob and I'm guessing, if I had to bet money on it, wearing a sweater vest, in the darkness of the preschool bathroom with fourteen remarkably silent adolescent confederates - long after its three-year-old rugrat residents had gone home to juice boxes and naps. I squeezed my eyelids closed, then open, closed, then open again - willing my pupils to adjust to the darkness. With my back pressed to the cool tiles that lined the wall, I surveyed the scene. Miles took this unchaperoned opportunity to perch in the sink "to make room, of course". Kevin was crossing his eyes - his sole mission to force someone, ANYONE, to break Mrs. Morris's command of "No laughing." Sandy and Claire were dangerously close to fulfilling his wish - their shoulders bouncing up and down in silent, girlish giggles. Jonathan, the too-cool-for-school type, stood nonchalantly against the wall - well, as nonchalantly as one can stand when relegated to two yellow bathroom tiles of personal territory. The rest of the class filled in the rectangle of space that was beginning to smell of the quintessential pre-teen odors - too-sweet perfume, Chap Stick, Teen Spirit deodorant, and the sweat of those who had forgotten to apply it. Which is understandable, as it was a new hygiene habit for the bulk of us.

In an instant, our thoughts and antics were halted by urgent voices. We had been warned that this might happen. When Mrs. Morris reviewed us on the protocol of the activity, she said that sometimes our hiding would pass without disturbance. And then, as if nothing had ever occurred, we would return to the classroom and resume the math, science, or history lesson that it had interrupted.  But on the other hand, she said, we couldn't rest in the fact that the hiding would always be that easy. Sometimes we might actually be found. 

So, in a way, we expected what happened next. But, none of us expected it to affect us like it did.

_____________________

Stay tuned for "The Hiding Place", Part 2. Truth be told, I haven't even written it yet. So I'll be tuning in as well.

25 of the World's Thinnest Books

Today we were like hipsters. Thin and ironic. Perhaps I should explain further...

Currently, my kids are chest-deep in some pretty heavy narrative writing. The natives were getting restless, so today I decided to let them step away from their memoirs to play around. This "quick" write turned into a day of laughter, wit, and irony that we all greatly needed.

"A thin book is a book the author has no authority to write or that is an oxymoron. It's thin because there's nothing to put in it. Come up with 10 titles for books that would have to be thin."

Below are 25 of my favorites from the day. Enjoy!

How to Hit Puberty by Justin Bieber

How to be Social by Boo Radley

Rick Ross's Healthy Cookbook

Natural Beauty by K. Kardashian

Emergency Exits by the crew of the Titanic

Freeing Slaves 101 by Joseph Kony

How to Dress Casually by Lady Gaga

Loving People by Jaws

How to Teach Math by Ms. P

Taking Life Seriously by Buddy the Elf

How to Keep a Girl Safe by Chris Brown

World Peace by Al-Qaeda

10 Tips to Be Tan by Edward Cullen

A Happy Place by Satan

How to Keep a Shirt On by Taylor Lautner

A Guide to Crying by James Bond

How to Grow a Full Mustache by Hitler

Dressing to Please the Lord by Christina Aguilera

Get over your Break Up by Bella Swan

Drama-Free Household by the Kardashians

Intelligence by Mike (The Situation)

Days of the Week by Rebecca Black

What to do When There’s a Terrorist on your Plane by Osama bin Laden

The Bright Side of Life by E. A. Poe

How to Be a Responsible Mom by the cast of MTV’s 16 and Pregnant

Yours truly,

Ms. P

Bonus points? Contribute to our list of thin books in the comments section.

"Whatever you do, wear underwear."

Earlier this week, I assigned a quick write that required my students to write a letter of advice to their future dates - particularly advising them on how to survive meeting the family. They didn't hold back. 

Below are some of my favorite excerpts from their letters - just the tip of a very humorous, awkward iceberg. Enjoy!

Out of the Mouths of Babes

“My mom would want you to make right choices and not act like a hooligan. My dad would just like the fact that I got a date.”

“Whatever you do, wear underwear.”

“Don’t let other people tell you you’re not beautiful.”

“My parents aren’t going to let us sit on the loveseat.”

“My brother Chris will be pretty disgusting, so bring a gas mask in case we have beans.”

“You may deny it now, but as soon as I hit five foot, you won’t be able to resist me.”

 “If you break my heart, I’ll be out for blood. Good luck.”

“I hope that you exist. Few people get my jokes, but I hope you would if you exist.”

“Dear please – be – a – Hollister – model boyfriend,”

 “Before I begin, I just wanna let you know that my family is in fact normal. Some of us.”

“Future date, you go on the list along with unicorns and non-stick glitter. So yeah, you’re pretty rare.”

“If you hear us speak in Russian, it’s probably about you…or the food.”

“If, and that’s a very big IF, she lets me date at 16 or 17, she’ll insist on knowing A: Your life’s history, or B: Your entire future.”

“Watch out for flying knives.”

“Don’t share anything with my mother. If you do, she’ll use it against you.”

“My father will probably ask you if you know anything about guns. My grandfather will ask you if you have ever been threatened by a gun. Then tell you that you have just been threatened by a gun as he holds it out in front of you.”

“If my mom asks if I kissed you yet, say no. Or she won’t shut up.”

“My dog will try to protect me from you, but after she gets to know you, she will leave you alone.”

“Don’t get discouraged if my step dad yells at you. That’s just the way he talks.”

“My mom will have you brain dead by the time you leave. She might even give you a math sheet to complete. She might even give you a physical.”

“Your personal bubble will be invaded.”

“You will leave with some kind of animal hair on you.”

“Dear Beyonce, since you are rich, you are paying for dinner. So be ready to spend a lot of money because I like to eat a lot.”

“I want to take you on a fancy date, like to the movies.”

“You might see my mom dancing. She watches Ellen.”

“There might be kitty litter down the hallway. Watch your step.”

 “My mom will just probably stand there and look at you, and it will be weird.”

“I’m writing to make sure you understand the terms of agreement in our relationship. Usually, I just click, ‘I have read and agreed to these terms of agreement’, but you actually need to read these this time.”

“My dad…he already hates you, but we might can change that. If you don’t eat his deer sausage, he’ll be offended. Just do it.”

“Dear Snooki, We will have to escape to Cuba to get away from my dad. We will have to change our names to Chico and Maria. I will be Maria.”

“Meet me at Hooters!”

“If my dad sees a strange guy in the house, he will not hesitate to shoot.”

“If you feel a sharp sting, my brother just shot you with an airsoft gun. He will keep doing it, so grab his arm and twist it. If he says he’ll stop, twist a little more – then he might actually quit.”

             And to sum it all up....

 “You need to take into account that you will have the worst time of your life meeting my family.”