jumpingfish

Two grasshopper moments from this past week…

1. Sharpening Pencils

He came to sharpen his pencil. There is an electric sharpener sitting on a low table by the wall just below the whiteboard, and the students know that they may come up at any time to sharpen their pencils. A student who wants an effective writing instrument is a cause of celebration, not a reason to take offense at the interruption. (Although I confess that even I will roll my eyes mockingly if the interruption is particularly ill-timed and long.)

So there he was, bending over the table trying to sharpen his pencil.

They are not particularly good at this, these students. The world is too much with them. They push into the machine, and it jams. They are in a rush and do not wait long enough, and their pencils don’t get sharp, causing them to spend far more time at the machine than is warranted. This kid was no exception.

He jammed the pencil in. The sharpener stopped. He pulled it out and repeated the process with the same result. His frustration at failing to sharpen his pencil while the teacher quietly waited for him was evident. So I walked over to the table.

He looked at me. I reached out and without saying anything, I took his pencil, held it gently, and slid it into the sharpener which began to grind and whir. In a few seconds, a perfectly sharpened pencil emerged. I handed it back without saying anything and returned to my document camera.

He looked at me with a smile on his face — a smile somewhere between, “Yes I have learned the lesson” and “I see what you did there.”

2. Rolling and Unrolling Posters

She was struggling with a cardboard tube, trying to get something out. After watching her fiddle for a while, I walked up.

“Having trouble?” I asked.

“I can’t get the pictures out of this tube.”

These were panoramic photos of the graduating class taken the week before. The school hires a photographer, prints the photos and gives them to the seniors as a graduation gift. She wanted to see the photo.

I reached for the tube. She raised her eyebrows doubtfully but handed it over. Everyone in the room stopped to watch.

I took the tube in one hand and put two fingers from the other hand into the tube. I turned my hand a few times, and then I slipped the pictures out of the tube.

“Where did you learn to do that!?” she said.

They were great photos. The entire graduating class was arrayed on the bleachers in the gym wearing blue robes. She unrolled the prints and showed them to the other kids. Then she tried to put them back. After a moment, she looked at me.

“I can’t put them back.”

Everyone stopped to watch.

I rolled up the prints loosely and took the roll in one hand and put two fingers from the other hand into the roll. I turned my hand a few times, tightening the roll. I slipped it into the tube and handed it back.

A student came into my classroom one day after school last week. She wanted help going over some problems. She found a spot to sit and took the chair down from the desk. We started working problems.

I would help her a bit and then suggest that she see how far she could get while I worked on the other side of the room packing up my teacher stuff for summer. After a while, she would ask for help. We would work together, and then she’d work alone again.

We spent much time in this back-and-forth. At least an hour, and then she came back the next day to continue. She was patient, even when the problems were difficult. I’m not sure how deeply she absorbed the material, but then ask yourself how deeply you absorbed algebra when you took it.

When we were done, she packed her things and got ready to leave. She turned and looked at me.

“You know, Mister, today is Teacher’s Day in Mexico.”

“It is?” 

“So…” she said, searching briefly for the words, “…Happy Day!”

I smiled broadly and said thank you. Then she went to catch her ride.

It was a rainy day. On days like that, the ag classes which are in the portables stay inside, scrounging for space in rooms where teachers have a planning period (and so no students). This is why, during fifth period, they came into my room.

One of the students was working on a project. She asked for something (tape or a stapler, maybe). I do have tape. And I do have a stapler. Whatever it was, she borrowed it, thanked me sincerely, and returned to her chosen spot in the back of the room.

“Do you want to use my colored pencils?” I asked in jest, holding up the box.

Now, you must know that a few weeks before, on another rainy day, she had indeed used my colored pencils. The room that day was full of the sound of her rattling through the pencils looking for just the right color. So, recalling that day and that sound, I held up my box of colored pencils with my eyebrows raised, suggesting, “Here they are, if you need them.”

The ag teacher chuckled. 

“No thank you,” the student said, not quite sure how to react to a teacher with a thing about colored pencils.

I frowned in mock disappointment, and we all returned to whatever it was we had been doing.

A few minutes later, she walked up and confessed that she would indeed like to use the pencils. And so we all sat there in the waning moments of that rainy day fifth period with the sound of rattling pencils as she again searched for just the right color.

Sometimes I get distracted. I will be talking about something like, I don’t know, something like direct variation. And then I will stop mid-sentence and look at the class. I will look at them and change gears — tell a story.

When this happens, they set their pencils down. They have learned to see it coming.

So last week I was talking about something like, I don’t know, I think it was solving rational equations. And I stopped mid sentence and looked at them. And changed gears — really changed gears. Somehow I was talking about the design flaws of the pens that I use, specifically, the failings of the visual design of the pens which led me to buy a pack of medium point pens when I really wanted fine point pens.

This is more significant than it might appear at first glans. With medium point pens, there is a limit to how cleanly I can annotate my diagrams and equations. With fine point pens, I feel like a draftsman. With medium point pens I feel like I’m writing with jumbo crayons. And the design flaw in all this is that there is no clear annotation on the pens to differentiate them. No annotation, that is, except for a dim gray “Fine” vs. “Medium” written on a dark gray band at the bottom of the otherwise identical black pens (identical, mind you, to the extend that the packaging for these pens does not say “Fine” or “Medium”).

To demonstrate my point, I walked out to Jasmine’s desk with one of each of the pens.

“You tell me,” I said. “Which one is fine and which one is medium?”

She looked at the pens and with no hesitation said, “This is the fine pen.” She handed it to me.

In shock, I squinted at the dim gray text at the bottom of that pen. I could not see what it said. I squinted harder. I saw an ‘F’.

“You are right!” I said. The class laughed.

That’s sixty year-old eyes for you.

The Bluebonnets have come and gone. Their seed pods are beginning to dry, preparing to spew seeds for another generation down the line. And the Indian Paintbrush have come and gone, too. At their peak, a dusty orange-pink lined my 30 mile drive to school, taking my breath away at the beginning of every day.

And now we have the annual onslaught of yellow.