Friday, April 27, 2007

The knitter

My current job is to help teachers transition through the changes in the special education laws and to support students who are below grade level. From what I've seen at this school, everyone works pretty hard. People stay late, everyone participates in school activities, in general people just look busy. That is, except the knitter.

Since I came to the school mid-year, I work on a section of a long strip of desks occupied by myself, two other teacher's assistants, and a Title One (poor school support) teacher. The knitter is the Title I teacher who sits next to me. She's a rounder woman in her late 50's with an expression that makes you want to offer her some stool softener. Officially, her posted schedule looks very full and busy. To the untrained eye, it would appear that she works with multitudes of students with a few prep times blocked in. Um hmm. Well, in reality her times with groups are quite often cut short because "it's a good stopping point" or the student seems "a little off task and unproductive". And her prep times? Her teaching includes setting students up on the computer or teaching from a very perscriptive program. There is no preparation needed.

So my desk neighbor spends her days knitting. She puts on her reading glasses, pulls out her latest project, and knits. She's finished an entire sweater this week. No joke. One day, her supervisor was here and asked the knitter to look over something he was writing. As she sat there knitting, she told him it was her break time, and she doesn't let other people make her work during that time; it would never make a difference to anyone anyway. The supervisor just sat there with the most flabbergasted look on her face.

So as kids fall further and further behind in school (and come to me for help), she knits. She knits scarves, gloves, sweaters, hats and who knows what else. Maybe her knitting will eventually make it to one of the kids she should be helping. Maybe in some homeless shelter an undereducated guy who used to go to this school will be given a hand-knit hat and be kept warm. He'll probably be thankful to have it, never knowing the irony.

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Who runs this house anyway?

This past weekend Mark and I took the daring domestic leap of deciding to reseed our backyard in attempts to turn our mudpit/dustbowl into something that resembles the lush green carpet on the fertilizer bag. After unsuccessfully attempting to kill our field of weeds, Mark rented an aerator and was dragged all over the yard by the machine with a mind of its own. He then spread the seed and fertilizer, and gave the whole thing a final coat of peat moss. Then we watered the hell out of it.

Besides having to constantly water, you'd think such a project wouldn't have much of an impact on our daily life. That's where you're wrong. See, we have our dog Winston who thinks the backyard is his domain. But we know he'll destroy all of our painstaking work if we let him out to patrol. So we tie him to a tree in the front when he needs to go outside. He doesn't get it. He goes outside, looks around, wants to come back in, and makes a beeline for the back door to show us what he really wants. He whines and whines, not understanding why he can't go out. Monday we were finally able to calm him down by taking a walk. He did pretty well after that.

Tuesday was a different story. Colorado is a pretty fickle weather state in spring, so those mountains decided to send us buckets and buckets of rain Tuesday. Great for the growing grass, not so great for the dog. Winston didn't want to go outside and pee in the front because it was raining and he hates to get wet. After finally forcing him outside because we were so sick of the whining, Mark and I made several attempts at putting Carter to sleep (more on that in another posting) and finally got him down.

We let Winston back in the house and were reminded just how wound up he gets when he's wet. He covered us with wet dog spray. Then he ran laps around the living room, setting off half of Carter's toys with lights and music, and created an all-out ruckus. Between the disaster of a backyard, Carter who has us wrapped around his adorable pudgy finger, and the crazed dog, Mark and I looked at each other and asked, "Who runs this house anyway?"

What's a blog?

Less than a year ago I remember reading in Newsweek something about blogs they recommended, and I thought, "What's a blog?" Well, I finally found out that it's a weblog but then wondered, "What's the point? Who really sits around reading other people's blogs? And who thinks their life is important enough that other people will read their musings and misadventures?"

But I find myself reading my good friend Amy's blog quite often. I look forward to her learning about her latest trips and how much fun moving isn't. Today I even clicked on some of her links and started reading the blog of one of her friends, a girl I've met a few times but don't really know on any intimate basis. And then it started to click. Who reads blogs? I do. Whose life is worth reading about? Everyones, maybe even mine.

So, with a fear of commitment, I begin my first blog entry (if that's what it's even called.) Will I really be able to keep up with it? What if I quit? I'm already afraid of my writing not being good enough, of my topics being boring, but most of all, of it becoming something that will creep onto my to-do list. And I do not need anything more on that list of endless tasks. But I'm willing to take the oh-so-mighty risk of beginning to blog.

Can blog be used as a verb? Maybe I'm not ready. I don't even know how to use the word.