What I Love About Minneapolis

Well, one of the things I love anyway: The dog park.

Today, Buddy and I walked for almost two hours, taking the high ground over our flooded paradise. Below us, a boat of fisherpeople floated past the point where we usually walk.

I clutched a rope to drag myself up a muddy hill to the bluff trail, and instead of trying to make our way down to the mucky bottom land where the waterfall falls, we walked above the falls and past them to a part of the park we rarely visit.

I caught proof of the approaching spring on film (or pixels anyway), and despite knowing that Minnesota expects snow on Monday, my soul lifted to see blue, blue skies between branches covered with small buds. Soon, soon, friends, we will be able to say that we have triumphed over another winter here in the great white north. And this year was the first one in a long time whose winter really earned us our spring.


Oh, we also did not molest any government property. Even though that government property was totally asking for it.

Thank God That's Over

Now, let's see if March can snap me out of the funk that February has wrought.

I will begin the month with some thorns and roses, something that I just heard that the Obama family does every night. Thorns are bad things that happened to you during the day. Roses are good. This of course smacks of bigotry, since thorns are only bad if you're not the rose, but who am I to judge?

A thorn for me today has been a stack of tests. I put them off until the last possible moment, and they are taking a long time, because my progress is hampered by feeling like a bad teacher (and by wasting time on the Internet). We had a bad February, my class and I. I spent too little time on solids. They spent too little time on their homework. And the result is a pile of tests on which I have to stretch to hand out partial credit (and I feel as though I should be stretching because I'm the one who spent so little time on the topic.) Also, why oh why do I always procrastinate?

A rose today came in the form of leaving Buddy home when I ran. Free from the leash, I ran all the way to Nokomis. My plan was to run only around the small part of the lake, but the unshoveled walk forced me to take the whole loop around the lake. Also, since no one else was running in my direction, I felt fleet of foot, faster than the walkers I passed. The six miles cleared my head, which has felt muddled and cloudy all weekend.

And now I'm sitting down to grade. I appologize for the boring post. I'm trying that Nanoblopo thing again. If I'm going to write every day, maybe I should mark the ones that are worth reading with a giant star or a slab of bacon...

Hate Mail

Dear February,

These are the days that try men's souls. I blame you, entirely, February, with your grinding cold, your soul-sucking dark, and your cruel joke of a snowstorm.

There are good times of day to snow, February. Midnight is a great time for snow, when we're tucked in our little beds. The alarm clock goes off in the morning and we wake up to a world transformed. It feels like Christmas when it snows at Midnight. What did Santa bring us in the night? A whole new world.

Midnight snow just isn't your style, though, is it February? Oh, no. Not you.

I'm not complaining that it snowed. We all knew it would snow again, and it will probably snow again and again all through next month. (All together now, Minnesotans. We know the drill. "March is the snowiest month.") So, yes, it would be nice to see green stuff and growth. It would nice to be able to run. But, it's not the snow that gets to me, it's the lousy, crappy timing. For crying out loud, February, you are just the kind of month who would dump that kind of pile on us when we're all trying to scramble home to our dogs and families. Rush hour snow. Thanks a lot, February.

This is why we don't give you any more days. You'd just use them to make us even more miserable. You're lucky we even let you have 28 days. It's more than you deserve.

Love,
Alex

The Cycle

There's a teaching graph. The first time I saw it it was called "First Year of Teaching" or something similar. Later, I saw it with a more generic label, which meant that I'd have to suffer through it year after year, and not just that first year. It's a graph of happiness vs. time.

The happiness is pretty high in September, when you're optimistic and hopeful and you have all sorts of great ideas. I, myself, am a wonderful teacher during that week before school starts. I always call parents when I should and I know exactly what to do with all of the behavior problems (at least until the kids show up). The happiness starts to dip a bit in November, as the daily grind catches up to you, you miss a few warning calls home and the behavior escalates, as papers pile up on your desk and you stop getting eight hours of sleep at night.

It continues to slide downward until it hits a very deep trough in January and February. I think it was labeled "despair" on the graph I saw. My principal calls is the "Bataan Death March". This is where I am right now. In the trough of despair, marching with my eyes barely open. And Rachael asked me why I wasn't posting...

Do you really want to hear about how there are 3 to 5 kids who won't pass each of my classes and I can tell you exactly how far each of them are from that magical 59.5%? Do you want me to tell you how I haven't called all of their moms recently to tell them that they won't pass? Should I regale you with the rage I feel when I hear words that sound so innocent in September: "Can I borrow a pencil?"

I go through a pack of pencils a day. It makes me insane. I wonder how I can "lend" the same kid a pencil day after day, and he still comes to class the next day without one. It's not like the little twerp gave it back to me. It makes me even more insane to watch him sit there watching his education pass him by because he can't write ("I forgot my pencil and she wouldn't lend me one, so I'm just going to turn into a piece of wood until the bell rings.").

Should I tell you about how I spent the day cleaning up the messes left behind when kids were jerks to the substitute? Do you want to hear about iPods in class, or would you rather hear about how freaking obvious it is when kids text their friends with their phones in their pockets?

So, this graph thing? It goes up in March or April. It's happened to me four times, now. I know it will happen again. It just doesn't seem quite possible, but that's the magic of the school calendar. Too bad this Death March happens right when the temperature outside makes me want to curl up into a little ball anyway, but I'm not so sure that's a coincidence, either.

Buddy hates it, too. That's why he's secretly planning his next Bad Thing.

There Might As Well Be Snow

If it's going to be cold anyway...if the ground will be hard with frost and the grass will be gray and dormant...if the sun won't shine after 4:00 in the afternoon...if I'm paying for all this heat to leak out my 97-year-old windows...well, then there might as well be six inches of clean, white snow on the ground. I don't know if I'll ever learn to be the type of person who loves the winter, but I am the type of Minnesotan who gets all edgy and nervous when we live through all of the symptoms of winter with no snow.

Last year, for example, there was hardly any snow far too late in the season, and we'd also have strange warm days mixed in with our cold ones. I used to watch the grounds crew at the local park try to make ice. It was the saddest ritual. It'd be 5:45 in the morning while I walked past with Buddy, and they'd be bundled up so many layers thick with Carharts that you couldn't identify them by gender. Morning after morning they'd stand there in the cold darkness, watering the ice. At 5:45 in the morning the water would turn slushy as it hit the ground. Then, by 10:00, the sun would come out, the thermometer would hit 40 degrees and the slush would turn back to water, so they'd have to try again the next day. All through December they tried. It was into January, and the ice still wouldn't stick. I began to see it as a portent of evil, a sign of the apocalypse. No ice in Minnesota in January. We really fucked up the planet this time.

This year, though, their first layer of ice is already laid down on the ground, and it's surrounded by mounds of fresh snow and it's only the first days of December. We are back to where we belong. All is right with the world. The kids can sled and skate, and I can tromp through snow with Buddy on my morning walk. I don't love the winter, but I do appreciate it when it behaves as it should.

PS If it happens to be your birthday today, then give yourself a big hug from me, and give me a shout so I can buy you dinner.

The Dark

It's starting. The sun barely rises just as I arrive at work. It sets long before I get to leave. Little things, like filing papers, answering phone calls, and planning for class seem overwhelming. I can't force myself to do laundry because I still haven't put away the clean clothes from last time, and I can't put them away because they aren't even folded yet. This is the season when I most need to get my ass outside for a run, but it's also the season my ass is least likely to want to go outside. "It's dark out there," says my ass. "And cold. Leave me alone. I'll make microwave popcorn, and we can watch TV. It's much easier than all of that running."

My house, buried in newspapers (I can't recycle them because I haven't read them. I can't read them because there are too many of them) groans under my neglect. Buddy's footprints cover the floor. His hair finds its way into all of the corners. I'm cold even in my sweatshirt. It would be so much easier to just crawl back into bed. Why do I always have to clean? I'm never even home to enjoy it.

But I'm wise to this business, and I know it means two things. #1 I have to suck it up and clean, or I'm going to beat myself up for living in squalor and #2 I'd better start taking care of myself before the I get to that God-awful crying stage. Crying for sunlight never seems to produce it. It just gives me another reason to beat myself up (weakness, you know, so unattractive).

What Happened to You Over the Summer?

I ran into a former student in the hallway today. She was the kind of student who made me want to tear my hear out in big clumps. She didn't have basic skills, but she had a strong desire to do well, rivaled only by her desire to have a good time. The two desires didn't coexist well, and she wound up failing my class with some miserable percent I try not to remember. Along the way, there were tears and calls home to her mother and screaming fits at other students. In short, she was the kind of student I loved, but also the kind of student I sometimes wanted to be absent so that the class would get a day-long vacation from her drama. When she was absent (or suspended) the class always ran much more smoothly. It also had much less "personality", as Youngster calls it.

Anyway, now that she's not my student, but just a kid in the hallway, it's all love between us. She asks me where I teach, because she wants to visit my class. She always greets me by name, loudly, and with great affection, even when she's standing in the middle of her crowd of cool kids. And I see her personality as the wonderful asset it is, rather than the reason I can't get my class to shut up after lunch.

Today when she saw me, she yelled my name across an empty hallway to stop me, and then said, "I barely recognized you."
"Yeah," I said, shrugging, "'cause I'm getting old."
"No," she said, seriously. "You look younger and happier. What happened to you over the summer? Did you get married? Did you get a boyfriend?"

I just laughed. I'm not a hugger, but some kids make me wish I were. And the truth is, it's not a husband or a boyfriend that makes me look younger: I just finally bought some pants that fit.