I’m writing this on Friday afternoon, the day after parent-teacher conferences, which means I’m writing this on a Friday following an 11-hour workday most of which involved talking to people, which means I’m writing this when I am really tired.

I’m writing this on the second day of Ramadan which is not a part of my religious tradition but is a part of many of my students’ religious tradition which means many of them are fasting and this is only the second day and they say the beginning is the hardest which means I’m writing this on a day when my students were really tired.

I’m writing this on a Friday afternoon, the day after parent-teacher conferences, the second day of Ramadan and the end of the first week back from March Break, a week which has been gloomily gray and chilly. Snow is predicted for tomorrow. We are all tired.

And yet…

Yesterday, a grade 9 student wore a frog headband during the parent-teacher(-student) interview, so today I shared thirty translations of Basho’s frog haiku and then we wrote haikus even though not everyone knew what a syllable was and lots of students shared and it was pretty great.

Yesterday, the grade 12 students mostly didn’t write at all during the time I’d set aside for them to work on the assignment due Monday, so today I gave very specific instructions and used a five minute countdown timer with very enthusiastic music and – guess what? – they all wrote through several rounds and many left class with 200ish words done and it was pretty great.

And then, the reading class finished our decoding work early and we switched to word games and somehow they asked for a spelling bee even though they are, frankly, terrible spellers, and they all stood at the whiteboard trying to spell words like degenerate and altruism and wheelwright and then, when I said, “Oh, this one is waaay too hard, I’ll skip it,” the kids insisted that they wanted to try it and kept insisting even after I admitted that I didn’t even know it and then, shocking everyone, even her, Sarah spelled glaucescent correctly just before the bell rang and it was glorious.

And now it’s the weekend and we’re all tired, but you know what? I think we’re going to be ok.