The Five (#10 Slowly Getting Later Edition)

1. The Iditarod is happening right now. When I started at my current job, eight years ago, I worked with several classes that studied the Iditarod and I became a fan. One of the ways I supported the classes was by curating the videos posted on the website so that students got to see the ones that highlighted some particularly unique aspect of the experience or some detail that the students had learned/read about. (Also, I was able to weed out any in which the mushers used language that wasn't quite fit for middle school.) We had a school "insider" subscription which gave us access to all the posted videos as well as GPS tracking of the race and all kinds of other details. The curriculum has changed since then, and classes no longer spend time studying the Iditarod in particular. I, however, am a fan for life, and now pay for my own "insider" subscription so I can watch the videos and keep up with the race. Once in a while I will share a particularly interesting update with one of the teachers. The whole thing is utterly fascinating to me. It has been especially interesting to watch the race evolve through the COVID pandemic - it was in the middle of the race in 2020 when things started to shut down. The website, even without a subscription, is pretty interesting and full of information. Learning about the race is a great tie-in for children who love adventure stories and have read some of Gary Paulsen's accounts of survival, both fiction and nonfiction. I would love to go to Alaska someday and see the places where the race takes place, but I don't know that I'm hearty enough to actually travel to any of them!

2. Do you ever suffer from book panic? Every once in a while I will feel myself working into a crisis when I think about how fast books are being published and thinking about all the books I know about that I've never read and all the books that will be published in the future that I will want to read. It's not an exaggeration to say that my "to be read" pile is several lifetimes long. When my hormones aren't in attack mode, I am able to think of it from a more delightful angle: I know I will NEVER run out of things I want to read. 

3. Are you ever disappointed that you still need to work on things like regulating your emotions as an adult? No, just me? Having two teenagers (delightful as they are) of my own, and working with hundreds of middle school students (delightful as they are), I am no stranger to frustration and hurt feelings. I'm a super emotional person...Do I think you're upset with me? Then I'll probably cry. I can't seem to help it. But I do try to keep in mind that, most of the time, the decisions the teens and tweens in my life make have almost nothing to do with me. Sometimes they are upset about circumstances that I have nothing to do with and I just get in the way of their emotions. I'm 100% inclined to meet them where they are and get just as worked up as them - but I continue to learn, a little more each year, to separate that knee-jerk emotional reaction from my actual response. I don't have to throw fuel on whatever fire is in front of me. This is easier with my students than my own children, but I keep working on it. Sigh.

4. This past weekend I drove to St. Louis to pick Harper up for her exciting spring break in Ohio. There was some kind of backup on the interstate so my GPS rerouted me onto rural country roads to avoid whatever the situation on I-70 was. I was driving between cornfields when a HUGE bald eagle swooped low over the road right in front of my car. Don't worry, I did not hit it! I wish it had been safe and/or possible to take a picture in that moment because it was magnificent. I don't think I'd ever seen one so close, and definitely not with its wings fully spread. It took my breath away. 

5. Speaking of driving to pick up Harper, we finally secured a vehicle for her to drive. So she'll head back to school on her own after this break. I'm glad we worked it out that she could have a car - our jobs just aren't flexible enough to always be able to drive back and forth when she needs to be picked up. This will make life much, much easier. It is a little bittersweet though, because we've had a lot of good time in the car together the last several years, especially driving back and forth to visit colleges. I'm not going to be sorry not to drive six hours two days in a row, but I am going to miss those little bubbles of time with my girl. 

The Five (#9 Citrus Sherbet Edition)

1. A couple of weeks ago we ran into the fancy grocery store near us (not where we usually shop) and I saw this rainbow sherbet in the freezer. It is one of the only times I've ever seen lemon, orange, and lime sherbet in any of the grocery stores in Ohio. This is my absolutely favorite flavor combination, which I fell in love with at The Chocolate Factory - where my dad used to take us as kids. I don't even think they carry the flavor any more. When I'm visiting family in Wisconsin I can often get the Cedar Crest version from a local grocery store, but that brand hasn't made it's way to Ohio yet. I have sometimes considered trying to get dry ice so I could bring the Cedar Crest variety home to Ohio, but now I don't have to!

 

If you are a certain age, you probably remember the food fight scene from the movie Hook, which I always think of when I eat rainbow sherbet (even the inferior type w/ raspberry instead of lemon).

2. I get served a lot of teacher content on social media and this post from Bored Teachers made me laugh out loud this past week:

I 100% remember classmates' desks being emptied out like this. I also remember the satisfaction of cleaning/reorganizing my own desk. I don't think my desk ever got dumped, I would have been mortified. And I do have a hard time imagining anyone doing this in 2024. Public humiliation was much more common in the 80s.

3. For the second year in a row we had late February tornadoes in our area. Fortunately there was no damage for us, just a lot of little branches/twigs all over the place. Our weather radio/phones/sirens went off around 4:45 a.m. last Wednesday, which was an interesting wake up call. Lots of blurry students at the middle school that day. Michael's bedroom is in the lower level of our house so we just let him keep sleeping. Basement bedrooms might see more spiders than the upstairs variety but at least you're already in your tornado safe space! (If it had been really close to us we would have relocated him to the basement bathroom, for what it's worth, but we were on the edge of the area of concern.)

4. This quarter the teacher next door to the library is teaching a first period theater elective. This past week groups were running lines/learning scripts in the hallway outside the library and in the library itself. There are several convincing actors in the group because I kept hearing them and thinking I needed to jump up and see if everyone was okay, they sounded so distressed! It is absolutely fascinating to see which students excel in those situations because it isn't always who you'd imagine. Same goes with watching the students play sports.

5. It is JUST THIS YEAR occurring to me that presidential elections in the US coincide with leap years. Obviously I can just look at a calendar/Google to figure out whether a year is a leap year so it wasn't as though I was spending a lot of time fretting about how I struggled to keep track of which type of year it was. I'm not sure how that never occurred to me before now. Am I fretting about the future of our democracy? Must be a leap year!