jumpingfish

After the test, a student came up to my desk. He was holding a homework assignment that was due that day.

“Do you have the answers, Mister?” 

I generally provide answers to the problems so that they can check their own work. It’s reassuring when I see them checking, since it suggests that they are sufficiently engaged to want to know if they got the problems right. This isn’t always the case.

I opened a binder and flipped to the previous days lesson and that days homework. I clicked the rings open and took out the answers and handed them to him.

He glanced briefly at his work and the answers and then handed the answers back to me.

“How’d you do?” I asked.

“Ok… but I’m a little unsure about the quadratic formula. I need more practice.”

That made me smile. Then he walked to the table where they may charge their phones. He picked up his phone, sat nearby, and sank into that oblivion that we all recognize.

So much for more practice.

It was a warm weekend evening. Acorns were falling from the Oak trees, banging onto car tops, crunching underfoot. Izzy was pulling at the leash.

I dialed my cousin. “Hi, David!” she said.

We spoke about school. We spoke about the kids. She asked about my progress in year two. I asked about her recent trip to Frankfort and her plans for the future. And I told her about a dream I had.

It was a dream in which the kids were posing in a photograph. They were all there, the whole family and some others, but what stuck in my mind was Jack’s pose. The look on his face. The angle of his shoulders. And the silver-grey suit he was wearing that made him look like a model in a high-end men’s clothing catalog.

She was silent for a moment. “You mean the photo Bette sent?” 

“No,” I said. “This was a dream.” I described how I remembered nothing from the dream itself. How I just remembered that image. But it was from a dream.

“Hm,” she said. “That’s weird.” But she said nothing else. And we returned to talking about other things.

The next day, when trying to stitch together the remaining pieces of my blog/email setup, I looked at my inbox and saw an email from Bette. And I only then recalled having reading it. And I only then realized that my dream wasn’t a dream but rather the memory of the photo Bette had sent.

So here is the point of this story…

This year teaching is admittedly much, much better than last year (especially at this point in the year). But it is still consuming me. I get home and collapse for a while to read, and then we eat, and then I sit at the computer and work on upcoming lessons late into the night. And evidently this is consuming enough of me that memory and dream have mixed together in a jumbled mess.

“Hm,” she said. “That’s weird.”

Indeed.

Yes, yes. I know. You might guess, so don’t ask.

But now I’m here, and all sorts of technical glitches are making this enterprise somehow … difficult. My brother is out buying truck tires at the tire store next to his office. And here I am, trying to get the blog and the laptop and the desktop and my (various — wherein lies perhaps a cause of some grief) emails to talk to each other. I think I would prefer truck tires, even though I have not truck and never will.

What else would I want to be doing? Oh, maybe working on how to teach quadratic inequalities.

But here’s the point: please bear with me if I send some administrative messages as I try to put the pieces together again.

For the most part, students like seeing teachers outside of school, although they don’t always know quite what to do. Some are enthusiastic (“Mr. Hasan!”). Some are nervous (“How are you?” “Ok… I guess. I mean…”). And some just pretend you’re not there.

In no particular order…

1. Fast Food

The guy behind the cash register at the burger joint was one of my students. We both smiled when he noticed me in line. He and I had previously talked about where he worked, and he had declined to be specific. (“Oh, I work at a place.”) Now I knew his secret: working fast food in high school — a fine American tradition.

After he ordered, he joked with me. “You took my phone today. I won’t accept your money. … Just kidding!”

But his demeanor was nervous, and it was hard to make conversation. He kept ending his sentences with “… I don’t know…”. Which is just fine with me. He was smiling and joking and talking, and that’s more than enough.

But then he said, “I’ll give you my employee discount, Mr. Hasan.” 

He punched up a couple buttons and my total went down by four dollars.

“Now you need to give me a good grade. … Just kidding!”

2. Trainers

Those must be your students, Mac said, pointing at the sidelines.

Intermingled with jugs of water, misting fans, a training table, and football players milling around, there was a group of student physical managers/trainers. They were looking in our direction. Several were students from last year. Others were students from this year.  They started shouting and waving.

“Hi, Mr. Hasan!” 

I waved my hands back and forth. They all laughed.

3. Four Feet Away

We were sitting in the parent section, one block over from the students. These were parents who clearly knew the kids well. They shouted hellos to the kids in the stands next to us and to other kids along the sidelines.

Around halfway thru the game, a student walked up to talk to the parents in front of us. She gave them hugs. She answered their questions. She had been in my class last year — easily one of the brightest students. 

She stood just below us facing up the stadium, looking directly in our direction. I smiled, expecting to make eye contact with her. She intentionally avoided me as she answered questions that the other parents were peppering her with. 

It was a bit odd. Her face was about four feet in front of mine. She certainly knew I was there. She couldn’t avoid seeing my smile, even if out of the corners of her averted gaze. But there was no break in the conversation when I could say hi to her. Then she sat down next to the parents with her back to us, dove into an animated conversation, and then got up and quickly left.

I know. I went dark. But that’s the prerogative of a teacher, right? To go dark in the summer.

There is much to tell, and perhaps I might get around to telling some of it. But school has begun so for now, some things the kids said today…

1. Band

I was talking to a student who missed a test. She looked over her shoulder to another kid and said something about playing an instrument.

“Are you in band?” I asked. I had stopped by the field last night to watch them practice, and I didn’t remember seeing her.

“Yes, but I was gone yesterday.”

“I stopped by to watch practice.”

“Yes,” she said, “I heard.”

Um… what? She heard that I stopped by to watch them practice? I guess I earned points.

2. Smooth

I haven’t figured out the whole hand-shaking/greeting thing. Although as for that, I never figured out the hand-shaking protocol in high school, either.

I’m walking in the hallway before school. I see two of my students from last year. I say hi and reach out to slap hands with one and then the other. Just kind of winging it with the whole “what comes after the hand slap” thing. With one of them, the slap transitioned into a loose finger grip. With the other, it transitioned into a fist bump.

“Ooooh,” said the first kid. “Smooth.”

“Yeah, smooth Mr. Hasan,” said the second.

Smooth? Um… wait what was it I did, again?

3. Penmanship

I use colored pens in class. I write in my notebook that’s projected on the screen, and they write along with me. I draw red circles and blue arrows. I highlight multistep procedures in blue and math rules in red.

Today I was starting a new example, and I turned to the kids to have them talk to their partners about something.

One of them looked at the screen and said, “Mister, your handwriting is so neat.”

Okay! I explicitly told them on day one that our three objectives for the year were to learn to (1) think clearly, (2) communicate well, and (3) do some new math. I might have checked off #2 with them. And it’s only week three.

Um… of course there’s that “do some new math” thing. The year’s only just begun.