“Mr. Hasan?”
An algebra student was walking from the doorway to the front of the room, where I was standing at my desk.
“Yes?”
“Would you like a ham and cheese croissant?”
“What!? Yes! What’s the occasion?”
“Valentine’s Day, Mr Hasan!”
“Oh gosh. Thank you.”
I so needed something like that.
There were two students in the back of the room talking. Loudly. Furiously. It was fine.
You see, a couple weeks ago we had a class retrospective: List one thing that you thought went well last semester and one thing that we could do differently. The responses were varied, but the most frequent suggestion was for more practice time. Accordingly, today we had 30 minutes of practice time at the end of the period (more than usual, enabled by block scheduling).
Our room is laid out in 4-desk pods. Over the course of the year, the kids have gradually migrated from the initial seating chart to groups of their own devising. On a good day, their work is productive. On a great one, the room is filled with academic conversation, and they teach each other. Today was a great day.
The pods were at work factoring polynomials and then solving equations. Factor on the left, solve on the right. Rinse. Repeat. All the way down the page. And those two kids in the back were discussing one of the problems near the end. It was a difficult one (as they tend to be toward the end). There they were, the two of them: factoring, solving, leaning into each other. Scratching their heads. Each asking what the other was doing. Then one of them spoke.
“Wait,” the first one said to the second one there, shuffling papers on the desk between them. “Where’s your work?”
Oh be still my beating heart.
At the door, we ran thru the checklist. Lunch? Keys? Coffee? Phone (required for logging in)? I have been known to forget things.
“Brain.” I mumbled.
Trudy smiled and gave me a smooch. “Pretty morning,” she said, pointing at rose-tinted clouds in the west.
“Pretty morning,” I dutifully repeated.
…
I must tell you, the morning commute has been an unexpected bonus of teaching at Austin High. Not only is it brief, but there’s only a single lane change, and that into a sparse exit lane at the very end. Not hectic.
I turned on cruise control, leaving two car-lengths ahead for the speeding tech bros weaving to work in their Teslas. I turned up Roberta Flack. I took a sip of hot coffee and settled into the lusciously warm seat
Half-way there.
…
On the far side of Barton Creek, the highway climbs upward, and the north- and southbound lanes diverge around a few modest hills of Juniper and Oak — one of the few unbulldozed vestiges of the “parkway” originally promised to Austinites as part of the development compromise in the 80s. The tree trunks were cloaked in shadows thrown across the highway from the margin of trees on other side. I did a double-take. Their canopies were glowing bright pink.
At the crest of the hill, the towers of Oz rose up on the north side of the river, flashing in a spectacular morning light. Electric magenta glinted off their eastward faces. The rising sun blazed in the east.
“Pretty morning,” I thought to myself, recalling the smiling face of the fair and industrious Trudy as she pointed at the clouds.
She sees these things.
The hot chocolate was comforting — keeping the biting cold of that arctic blast at bay. (I mean, I think it’s 39 degrees out there!)
Anyway… I’m at the sink in the kitchen rinsing out the dark cobalt-blue mug when the fair and industrious Trudy comes back from the living room at a brisk pace.
“I have towels to dry before I sleep.”
Somewhere my grandmother is smiling.
The two tropical milkweed plants in the corner of the backyard had a good year, growing tall and pushing out long slender leaves and orangish-yellowish blossoms and recently many milkweed pods. Then there was this, which in truth did not accurately capture things, as there are ten very hungry caterpillars.
They have eaten almost all the leaves and begun devouring the seed pods. And so as a consequence of the consequences of milkweed, there is no more milkweed.
Just what is their plan, anyway?
It’s December, and although we’ve had a shockingly warm winter so far, there are plenty of weeks of cold ahead. This is no time for butterflies to be unfolding. Yet there will soon be chrysalides hanging around and after that what?
Don’t say it.
© jumpingfish by David Hasan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
