Fri, 29 Mar 2024, 09:01 AM (-06:00)
“Mister,” she asked. “Can I go to the bathroom?”
“Sure,” I said. “Sign out. I’ll write you a pass.”
The students were working on a radical expressions worksheet that day. The room was quiet (which means that this wasn’t third period — the bane of my schedule this year).
When she knocked at the door and came back in, she sat down and continued working along with the others. And then she turned and waved me over.
“Did I do this right?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Let’s check the answer.”
We walked over and checked her answer against the answers that I always post on the wall. She got it right.
“Look at you,” I said. “You take a break. You come back in. And you get the problems right.”
She smiled.
“Maybe I should take a bathroom break more often!”
Thu, 28 Mar 2024, 02:09 PM (-06:00)
“Mister,” she asked after she finished the test. “Can I use your charger?”
When they ask this, I say to hook their phones to the cable that’s plugged into my laptop. The unspoken implication is that they have to leave their phones on my desk — far from where they sit. After they squirm for a few seconds, I show them my chargers.
“Take one of these,” I say. “You can plug it into the socket under your desk.”
That is what she did. But then a few minutes later she came back. “Thank you, Mister,” she said, setting my charger on the desk.
“That was fast,” I said. “I thought my charger is slow.”
She smiled slightly and walked back to her desk, where one of her friends reached into their backpack and pulled out a different charger. A faster one.
“I see how it is,” I said, laughing.
Old man. Old charger.
Wed, 20 Mar 2024, 12:08 PM (-06:00)
She used to be a student of mine. She struggled with the class. A few times she came in for tutorials, but the amount of material she hoped to make up was just too much.
She had a really hard time. Still, every day she would smile when she came in. But it must have been miserable, the kind of thing that people have nightmares about well into adulthood.
What do students think of their teachers in classes like these? It can’t be good, right?
But today during lunch, she pokes her head in the room and says hello. She is smiling as usual. I call out her name. She takes long strides across the room.
“Mr. Hasan,” she says as she walks toward me. “I remember you were in aerospace. I got accepted into fight school. I’m going to be a pilot.”
I guess the smile on her face was genuine.
Mon, 18 Mar 2024, 08:50 AM (-06:00)
First day after Spring Break.
They have a test on Wednesday, so they’re reviewing today and tomorrow. The room is quiet with a murmur of some of them working together, leaning over the worksheet, sharing the Desmos graphs of the functions they’re studying.
There’s a picture of our campsite at Ratcliff Lake in the Davy Crockett National forest on the monitor at the front of the room just to the left of a student’s rendering of my mother chasing her boys with a wooden spoon in her hand, a story which seems to have sunk in with at least one of them.
There are three boys chatting up some non-math chat on the other side of the room, as these three often do. But hey, it’s the first day back. No need for me to harass them. The test will be the ultimate judge.
Sat, 16 Mar 2024, 09:03 AM (-06:00)
Years ago the fair and industrious Trudy gave me a Giant Spiderwort on my birthday.
“How long ago was that?” I periodically ask her.
“Oh. I don’t know, a long time ago,” she says, drawing out the word long. We find ourselves reflecting on time this way frequently. Fugit irreparabile tempus.
In March each year, her generosity returns. And here we are.
The Spiderwort has spread. The yard is a purple splendor that glows in the morning light.
Fri, 8 Mar 2024, 11:14 AM (-06:00)
First period on Friday before Spring Break. As usual students are trickling in late. I mean what’s going on that the same kids are so consistently this late — for a math class even. I know, I know. Teenage brains. Early in the morning. I’ve was there once. But every day?
Francis gets up from his chair as he always does and opens the door. Stephanie walks in smiling as she always does, except that she’s not in this period. I don’t understand her mumbled explanation. Is she giving me late work? Is she leaving early today? Does she want to sit in on first period today? No, she says. No. No. She’s waiting for Lisa and Ariadne who sit at her table during eighth. She coyly won’t say why.
Time passes. She stands inside the door as the other students work on what they started yesterday. More time passes. She texts her friends. Eventually she steps into the hall, and I hear whispering. They peek around the door. They tell me not to look. And they walk up to my desk and hand me a cake.
I open my eyes wide.
“A cake!?”
“Read it, they say.”
I laugh out loud. Yes, they were indeed very talkative yesterday afternoon.
“Can we get a picture of you holding it?” they ask.
I pick up the cake, sliding my left hand under the platter so that I can also hold up my coffee with my right. I tilt the cake slightly so that the top will be readable in the picture.
The cake starts to slide. Instinctively, my right hand jerks to catch it. The cake slides faster. My hand and my mug of coffee mash into the side of the cake, preventing the disaster that is about to unfold. It was a near miss.
The cake is a mess. My hand and my mug are covered in frosting. But at least the cake didn’t end up on the floor.
The girls ask for passes so that they can go to their first period classes. They promise they’ll see me in eighth and will not talk as much. They disappear down the hall, leaving me with a slightly damaged cake to explain to the students for the rest of the day.
Wed, 6 Mar 2024, 03:38 PM (-06:00)
Last night was teacher appreciation night for the girls soccer teams. One varsity and two JV girls evidently appreciate Algebra 2 despite the challenges. They invited me to the pre-game ceremonies after school — JV at 5:00, varsity at 7:30. I typically leave home at 7:00am. And so with the 30 minute drive home included, that means it was a long day.
The girls gave us personalized mini-soccer balls, annotated in various unique ways, most with colorful designs, some with math puns. And we got to go out on the field with them before the game started where they introduced us as each girl’s name and number were announced to the fans in the stands.
It might have been a long day, but I got three mini-soccer balls out of it. I’ll take the trade.
Wed, 6 Mar 2024, 02:47 PM (-06:00)
1. Uttered Words
In the excitement of a moment — Getting a problem right? Getting a good test score? I don’t remember precisely what the moment involved. In that moment, Joe uttered a profanity. The class looked at him and then looked up in unison at the Be Nice poster on the wall, bullet six of which says Speak as if Nani is here.
“His grandmother!” someone said. “What about Mr. Hasan’s grandmother?”
Joe looked at me with an obvious grimace of shame on his face. And he folded his hands and bowed his head.
“I am sorry, Nani. I am sorry, Nani,” he said.
2. Thrown Grapes
Days later I found a couple grapes on the floor. I almost stepped on one as I was wondering between the tables as the kids were working on inverse functions.
“Wait,” I said loudly. They looked up. “Whose grape is this?”
It was Joe’s. He fessed up.
“I was trying to throw it in the garbage,” he said. Except that the grape was in the middle of the room and garbage was on the far side.
“Can you throw it out for me, please?”
Of course he did, and then later he came up and put a sticker on my hand. It came from a tangerine he had just eaten. It said, Sweetest Grandma.
He takes Nani’s presence to heart.
