Month: February 2024

Sick Days

Second semester started with days of absent students. Some didn’t understand that the semester began in the middle of the week. Some thought the first few days were “kind of useless” and decided to stay home. Two were out of the country indefinitely. Lots of students were changing their timetables. Of course, most students were there, so I focused on the ones in the classroom, tried to make clear assignments for those who were out, and continued along.

By the end of the first full week, classes were well underway, but students seemed to be coming and going at an unusual rate. I chalked it up to, well, I don’t know what – but weird things happen in small environments, and schools are no exception. So, a lot of students were missing class, such is life, and talk at the teachers’ table at lunchtime suggested that this was true in many classes. Worse, some kids were getting sick and then were gone for days – days! None of the normal “sick for a day and then back” that usually happens. We couldn’t figure it out.

Then, last week, my youngest got sick. He doesn’t love school, so I often look askance at any request to stay home, but on Tuesday, he was visibly unwell, so we let him stay home – and there he stayed for three full days. Three days! He’s 13! 13-year-olds bounce back ridiculously quickly; they don’t stay home for days because of a nondescript cold. (It wasn’t covid.) But here we were. By the time Friday rolled around, he’d missed the annual ice skating outing, pizza day, and more. He was ready to go back.

So I shouldn’t have been surprised when I started feeling sick on Saturday. I was gentle with myself, but I figured it was just a cold. Just a cold… and here I am, four days later, still at home. I am sick. It’s not Covid, but I was sick enough to check with the doctor on Monday. They shook their head and said, “there are some nasty viruses going around.” Indeed. Them they x-rayed my chest to see if I had pneumonia – I don’t. I’m just sick. Last night I slept 13 hours. I’ve spent most of the last three days sitting on the couch. My throat is a hot mess. I’m sick.

When I check class attendance, I see that the students are still sick, too. To date, only 6 of my 26 grade 9 students have perfect attendance; only 4 of the 21 grade 12s. No wonder I’ve been spending so much of my afternoon literacy block trying to simply find the students I need to work with. Whew.

I’m out again tomorrow – and I really hate being away from school. If I’m lucky, I’ll be better by Thursday. At least I’ve solved the mystery of all the missing students – they’re sick!

A call from the teacher

The phone rang after dinner. I warily checked the caller ID, then perked up when I saw my sister’s name. Ah, exactly what I needed! But just as we settled in to a nice chat, I heard a beep.

Call waiting. I didn’t even know we still had call waiting. We’re already the odd family out because we still have a landline, but I can’t even remember the last time two people tried to call our house at the same time. Odd. (For what it’s worth, our reasoning for the landline is complicated, but the crux of it is that one of the kids still doesn’t have a cell phone AND we want them to be able to answer the phone in a general sort of way – you know, like if their grandparents call.)

Even odder, the tiny screen displayed the school district’s phone number. Someone was calling us from a school at 8:15pm. I asked my sister to hold on, and clicked over. My younger child’s teacher chirped a cheery hello. Quickly, I hung up on my sister (sorry, sis) and devoted my attention to this unusual caller.

I was a little concerned. I mean, when was the last time we had a not-automated call from the school? We got his report card last week and nothing looked terribly amiss. And he was already at home, playing video games & chatting with his friends, safely in one piece. More than that, when I’d asked, “How was your day?” he had pleasantly replied, “boring” as he does virtually every day. Everything seemed fine.

But his teacher was talking. I calmed my racing mind and paid attention. She was just calling to say hello and see how things were going. She was impressed with his math work. She knows about his dyslexia and complimented his writing. We talked about this and that. Finally, I asked if she was calling everyone. Yes, she was. She had decided to call all of her students’ families just to check in after report cards. After all, she said, it’s really too bad that the students who are doing well don’t get this sort of attention. We had a very pleasant conversation, and I hung up in a good mood. Judging from her voice, I bet she felt pretty good, too.

Before I called my sister back, I realized: I have done this. I have called home to say something nice. I have called home to check in. I have been the chipper voice on the other end of the line, the teacher saying that things are going well. But, I have never been the parent who got this call. And you know what? It felt nice. It felt like the sort of thing I might want to do for the families of this semester’s students. In fact, maybe I’ll start again this week.

If you could talk to your younger self

I was tidying the copying area in our office when a sheet of lined paper, adrift amidst the abandoned photocopies, caught my eye. A quick glance told me this was not my writing prompt, not my student. Still, I couldn’t help but read the words – and my heart broke open. Oh, how I wish I could tell this anonymous student about the poetry he has created, tell him that he is so much better than he knows.

If you could talk to your younger self what would you say

I would tell him
not to turn out like
me tell him to get good grades
and go to school dont skip
or anything Be good everything
like that if He turns out like me His
life will suck

My response (quickwrite)
If I could talk to the student whose paper was left behind

I would tell him
not to give up on
himself, tell him to hold on
and keep doing what he can. Be kind, everything
that I wish he could hear. If he knew the power of his
words, he would be stunned.

New shoes

During exam week, as semester one wound down and semester two loomed on the horizon, I bought myself some new shoes. Fluevogs were on sale and I decided to splurge, telling myself that the black and white pair were practically every day shoes. Mostly, I just thought they were awesome.

The Fluevogs, just waiting for me to buy them.

Days later, I wore the shoes for the first day of second semester. Right away, before period one even started, one of my new grade 9 students told me that she loved my shoes. Over the course of the morning, students and teachers complimented my shoes. I don’t think of myself as wildly fashionable, so I quite enjoyed the attention.

After the lunch bell rang, I spent a few quiet minutes in the classroom, straightening the desks and generally tidying. I know that each new semester brings both excitement and nerves, and I suspected I might have a few drop-ins. Sure enough, one of my regulars showed up to run down his classes so far.

I can’t get over how much I enjoy this young man. We spent two years in a row in English class together, and there were times when I wasn’t sure we were both going to make it. Somehow, by the time the second class had ended, we’d muddled through some actual reading and several pieces of writing that involved more than a few hastily scribbled sentences. We had even discovered that he is secretly an incredible teacher – and got him a peer tutoring placement in some ESL classes. Now, in grade 11, he is thriving (still challenging – but thriving).

He knows that I keep a blog – “are you famous yet, Miss?” – and thinks it’s ridiculous that I read so much – “do you even sleep?” He tells me he’s a “baller” and once spent a significant amount of class time explaining why Kobe is better than Michael Jordan. And yes, I tricked him into writing an opinion essay on this. He also likes to mock my “secret crush” on Jason Reynolds. I regularly book talk Long Way Down, the Ghost trilogy and Miles Morales. All the kids know I love his writing, but when I showed a video of Reynolds talking about how he didn’t read much in high school, this student was shocked. Reynolds is a Black man with impressive dreadlocks; I am a middle-aged white teacher with what this student called “the same haircut as all the other teachers” (ouch. And for the record, he is wrong.)

He took my crush pretty seriously. For weeks he came back to it. “But you’re married,” he said. “Does your husband know?” Yes, yes he does. “But for real, if he asked you out, would you go out with him?” I suggested that it was unlikely that I would ever meet Reynolds, much less have dinner with him. “But what if you did?” this student worried. I said that I would go on an author date with him, an English teacher date – we would talk about writing and books. “That would be the most boring date ever,” he said and though I insisted that this would, in fact, be interesting for me, he was unconvinced.

But on this day we were talking about his new classes, not about books or writing. Then, after a minute of boasting that he was going to change a class because it was “way too much work” (“It’s day one,” I said, “you have no idea if it’s too much work.”), he suddenly stopped and said, “Miss, those are some fancy shoes.”

I was startled, then started to thank him, but he interrupted me. “Miss, if Jason Reynolds saw you in those shoes, he would definitely ask you on a date.” He paused. “Yeah, those are your Jason Reynolds date shoes, for sure.”

Though I expect that I will never, in fact, wear these shoes on a date with one of my favourite authors, I’m pretty sure I will call them “Jason Reynolds date shoes” for as long as I wear them. I mean, they are pretty cute.