Sabbatical Schmatical!

I had the week off this week. My school divides up our school year differently than a traditional school. We work the same days as other teachers in our district, but the original intent of our schedule was that the kids didn't go for more than two weeks at time without school. With recent summer school cuts, this doesn't really work anymore, but it does cut down on their down time. Idle hands...

The longer I work at this job, the more time I need away from it. It's not physically demanding nor is it particularly educationally demanding. The kids rotate through so quickly, I can easily repeat projects twice, three time or even more during a year. There is some bookkeeping (grades, reports, etc.) involved, but I know it's a fraction of what other teachers have to do. And, believe or not, there are few behavior problems. Few major behavior problems, I should say.

So why, oh why, do I feel so burnt out?

It's the dang kids. They are SO needy. They may not be acting out in a behavior problem kind of way, but they are a bottomless pit of neediness. All of us teachers, all of their security staff, all of their case workers and counselors and parole officers and transition specialists and lawyers and judges can't make up for the fact that wherever they've come from...is a giant hole that none of us can fill. All this time and money trying to replicate a decent family, it never works. So the kid who can play Chopin like a concert pianist will probably go back to using heroin when he gets out. And the kid who always surprises me in class with his creativity will probably violate his parole again by drinking on the job.

But, enough about them! I really wanted to talk about having time off work. For me, a week really isn't long enough. I spent it doing a whole bunch of nothing. Ok, so I did a few chores, made a few cards, spayed a few cats, but really most of time was piddled away on the computer and various incarnations of Law & Order. With a sprinkling of Monty Python.

I really need a good month off. One week to decompress, three to enjoy. I'm all about year-round school with shorter, more regular breaks. It's good for the kids, it's good for me. Three months off in the summer is so 19th century.

Maybe one day I can be like this guy. Take one year off every seven years. I wouldn't even have to move to Bali.




BTW, my knock-knock joke is "South Pacific" related.

Knock-knock?
Who's there?
Sam and Janet
Sam and Janet who?
Sam and Janet Evening.

Sing it like Harry Connick Jr.

I Love The Smell of Turpentine In The Morning

I did a lot of driving this past week. Tuesday, all of us teachers had to go to
Golden for training. It was stupid and a waste of time. I won't bore you with details(they're stupid and boring), let me sum up by saying that was 12 hours of my life I'll never get back. But I carpooled with Carla and Janie and we laughed and gossiped in the car and most of us had a picnic lunch out on the lawn of the facility where we were. It was a golden day in Golden and all of us sharing our lunches in the warm autumn sun was the high point of the day.

This weekend, I went the Colorado Art Educators Association fall conference in Breckenridge. Carla was s'posed to go with me, but she had some family stuff that came up suddenly and she had to stay in town. Bummer.

I don't mind the drive to Breckenridge at all. It's a pretty drive. Across the wide flats of South Park (yes, THAT South Park), turning at Fairplay to head up Hoosier Pass and then down the hairpins to Breckenridge.

The conference was pretty good this year. They had some issues last year and I think enough people complained and they seemed to do better. One of my favorite vendors wasn't there this year, Kozo Papers, but they had a nifty coupon in the schedule book.

I think the best workshop I went to was the Solar Plate printmaking. I've never done this before so it was fun to learn. I can't do it with my kids cuz the plates are metal and have sharp edges and you need turpentine for one of the steps. Oh well, sucks for them. I like the smell of turpentine and I still have some black ink under my nails.

I finished reading "How I Became A Famous Novelist" while I was there. This book made me laugh out loud and was the perfect counterbalance to "The Hour I First Believed". I have two books now from the library "Juliet, Naked" by Nick Hornby and "The Wordy Shipmates" by Sara Vowell. Not sure which I'll read first.

So it was good to come home to Don and Lila and the crazy kitten. Even though the bed I had in Breckenridge was bed and poofy and had 4 poofy pillows, it's not my bed. It was good to be home and have the crazy kitten, like a couple of little girls before her, sneak into our room to sleep in the big bed.

Haiku

Clear night, full moon night.
Even with the leaves changing,
Haiku evades me.

The Hour I First Believed

I finished this book Friday night, long around midnight. Regretted it the next day, but I slept for a good 10 hours last night.

Since it's almost October, there's a good chance this will end up being That Book for 2009.

It was a hard book to read. It was for me anyway. Might not be for somebody else. A very few of the plot lines end up in what could be interpreted as a happy ending. But the others do not. And yet, I wouldn't call it a tragedy. Not in a Shakespearean way where everybody is dead at the end except for the fool narrating from off stage. There is tragedy for every one of the characters; some survive it and some don't. And some just survive and others are able to live on the other side it. This is where the story is. When you can't undo it, when you can't unring that bell, when the ripples go out across time...even generations...and get into every nook and cranny of your life: How do you live with something really, really bad?

Such is life. And where the good stories live.

New Books

These books are in my shopping cart on Amazon:

How I Became A Famous Novelist by Steve Hely

Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger

The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver

The Year Of The Flood by Margaret Atwood

They're not all released yet. Hopefully one of them will be That Book. That Book that keeps you awake at night, That Book you think about all day long. That Book. I hope for one of those a year. Haven't had one yet. "The Hour I First Believed" is close to being That Book. It's so filled with trauma, though. Unless Wally Lamb can pull off some miracle...but then that'll make me angry to have all that trauma that rips your heart out and have it tied up with a pretty rainbow at the end. He wouldn't do that. Would he?

All I've Got Is A Photograph

Well, sports fan, I think I'm going to take a break from the epic photo project. I think I got up to 2004-2005? Somewhere in there. I found two CDs with photos from my early digital that I need to go through and put them in the right year. The photos from there out are on my laptop. They are fairly organized by year, but I've printed some in random spurts so I need to go through the albums I've created on the Walgreens site and get them all together. I will eventually print everything.

Add to this, all the really old photos I have from my family, Don Coil's family and Don Clifford's family. I need to get them all off of those awful sticky film pages and onto archival pages.

There's still gobs to do. But I've been working on it pretty steady since Dhyana went home. Which means all my stamping stuff has been put away. I think I need to stamp for a while. This will give me time to work on the photos just on the computer, getting albums organized and ordering batches of prints. Yea, that's the ticket!

I'm Not Crying, It's My Allergies!

I'm reading "The Hour I First Believed" by Wally Lamb. I wasn't going to comment on it until I finished it, but it's breaking my heart.

It's fiction, but the main characters are a husband and wife. The husband is a language arts teacher at Columbine H.S. and his wife is one of the school nurses.

The Columbine shootings happened on April 20, 1999. This was about 8 months after Don died and I wasn't watching any news during this time. The whole Bill and Monica thing is lost on me. Another staff from school called me to tell me about Columbine. I did turn on the news to see, but only for a minute or two. I couldn't watch the trauma nor could I watch the vultures in the media. So I've known about the general event, but not many details.

Until this book. Yes, the character's experiences are fictional, but they could so easily be the truth. And Wally Lamb is such a good writer. It's a well known fact I don't cry easily at movies. I've never cried reading a book. Not even Time Traveler's Wife. This book is making me cry and I can't even think about it during the day without going there. So I try not to think about it during the day even though the characters are written so you want to think about them and wonder what's happening to them when you're not there.

I think another reason why this is getting to me is, again, the writing. Wally Lamb does such a good job of building the time and environment of the story that it takes me right back to that time.

And that time is here again. 11 years this Labor Day weekend.