Amy Loves Books

My mother's day gift:


(I got it early because I found it at the Inman Park festival and said that I really, really needed it.)

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Second period today, a child peed in my classroom.

I did not witness the act itself (thank God for small miracles), but evidently, he whipped it out and peed in an empty soda bottle. IN MY CLASS.

I was at my desk distributing laptop computers from the portable computer cart. When I finished, pee boy asked to use the restroom and I said he could - because I don't have a no-bathroom policy. If they ask to go, I let them go. No questions asked. I consider it their own private business.

As soon as he left, the boys sitting in his small group told me that he had peed in a bottle and thrown it in my classroom. I just gave them my best "yeah right" look and shook my head. No, they insisted. He had. They told me to look in my trash.

I did and beheld a tropical punch bottle full of urine.

And I was speechless.

I am hoping that this means I have seen it all.

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I finished one of those
books that you read and just know it will be one of your favorites forever.

Since then, I've been wandering in front of my bookshelves, looking for the book to read next. I pull one out, weigh it in my palm, and then return it to its space on the shelf. I find myself wanting to go to the bookstore, and I've printed a coupon for Borders just in case. Last night, I had a moment of inspiration and I went on Amazon to see if any of my favorite authors had a book coming out soon enough to have a listed release date. They did not.

I'm restless. I keep going back to the shelves and looking at all the books I really wanted to read. I pause over the bindings and examine the covers. Nothing fits.

This next book I read is a doomed book. I will not like it as much. It will always be the book that came after. The one that just was not as good. I'll be unfaithful to this book. I know I will. My mind will wander, and I will be thinking of the book I left behind.

So, I keep pacing between my shelves. I start a stack of potential next books. I tell myself that this one or that one looks really good, then I pause do something else. I consider watching television for the first time since September. I figure that CSI will probably be on, because I've heard that it's on just about every night now. I postpone the inevitable.

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Outerspace and dinosaurs were my always favorite part of Saturday morning.

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My eight year old son was running at school. Without permission. He had to write an essay as punishment.

Arden's Essay

It is bad to run because your focus is on speed so you might trip and bust your head open. Also you could be in a city and be runninh and you wouldnt know where you were. You'd be punished if your lucky. The others DIE or serious injury. Also if your running on a 2 story building and you're running its distracting. Very very distracting and damaging to painted walls. So therefor I will not run until further notice. Until then I will walk on all school periods.

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I admit. I love my Gymboree. When the kids grew out of Baby Gap, (The clothes in Gap Kids look way too teenage. I'm not ready for that. Yet. ) Gymboree was there for me.

I shop at Gymboree alot. Maybe too much (but look - the kids are so cute when they match!) As a result, I am on the "Friends of Gymboree" list, and I get a special coupon a few times a year. If you have kids, the discount is good this weekend, and works on previously marked down things. Just print it out.

Gymboree Friends and Family

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Among the subjects that were not covered in my ethics of teaching seminar: the proper response to have when a student chooses to create a symbolic representation of a character that looks an awful lot like a penis.

At the beginning of the semester, I gave multiple intelligence tests to my tenth graders. I keep the results of the tests on a list of their names that I have taped to my podium. I was surprised to find that the vast majority of my students are visual/spatial and mathematical learners. I threw out the introspective journaling assignments and added in drawing, graphing, and power-pointing assignments.

Yesterday, I gave them a test on Act II of Othello. The last part of the test required them to create a shape that symbolized one of the main characters in the play. They had to write an explanation of the symbolism and back it up with a quote from the text. I got some wonderful shapes: a square with multi-colored corners and a cross in the middle, and a two-faced figure for Iago, a diamond for Desdemona, a fish for Roderigo.

And then, there was the penis.

It was brown. It had "OTHELLO" written across the shaft. It was artistic enough to strongly suggest a phallus without being overly graphic. I paused and controlled the immediate urge to write the kid up. While a construction paper penis is, without a doubt, inappropriate for display in the classroom - it is also a legitimate symbol for a play that is all about sexual jealousy. Still, I could not allow him to turn it in as it was.

"I'm sorry", I said. "I can't accept that. You have to make it into a sword."

The student tried to assure me that it was not what I thought it was. It was just Othello's "symbol". It was "long and powerful".

The giggles of the other students confirmed the truth. He tried to make it "better" by adding sequins and feathers, but, to be honest, this just made things worse.

"Make it a sword", I warned, "or I won't accept it."

And so, "long and powerful" lost its curvature and became a sharp-edged sword.

After the bell rang, I checked the rest of this student's quiz. He had not missed a single multiple-choice question. His defense of the symbol, (which he referred to simply as "long and powerful"), was insightful and, I had to admit, valid. His quote was, "The Turks have gone down and are defeated." I was grateful that the room was empty, because I laughed out loud.

He came back at the end of the day to check on his grade. I handed him his test. "I tried and tried to think of a way to dock points for being inappropriate," I said, "but I could not argue with your defense of the symbolism."

He made an "A".

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My mother called me at 7:20 this morning to inform me that she heard on NPR that it is National Stoner Day today. She was very nervous. She warned me that All the kids get stoned all day long!!!! This was followed be an equally emphatic All the kids are doing it!!!! They all know about it!!!

She thought I needed to be aware, and I should make the teachers aware. So, here is my public service announcement. For all you educators out there - um - knowing is half the battle.

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In the summer, we drove six hours south in an unairconditioned, wood-paneled station wagon to spend a week with my grandparents in Gulfport, Florida. I dreaded everything about these trips. My grandparents lived in a tiny, white stucco bungalow with windows that cranked open. I spent most of the time laying on the floor in the living room, turning a small buttermint yellow pillow over and over trying to find a cool side, and watching game shows.

Then, one summer, we visited and found a black box with a twist dial on top of the television. Cable television arrived and brought with it the wonder of Nickelodeon. For one week, my brother and I were in kid television heaven. Almost.

In the early days, Nickelodeon's offerings were, shall we say, limited. There was no Nick Jr. for preschoolers; instead, the morning hours were devoted to a show called Pinwheel, which was a marathon of short animated cartoons from Europe. They ranged from slightly artistic, to boring-as-hell, to outright bizarre. Still, it was kids television, and we had never seen anything like it, and we were amazed.

In the afternoon, we watched The Tomorrow People and You Can't Do That On Television. It was the second show that introduced us to green slime. Slime was cool. Slime was what set kids apart from adults. Years earlier, they had sold green slime in little plastic garbage cans. We could not get enough. We spun the cans around on their tops, counted to thirty, then opened them and were rewarded with a loud farting sound. The little garbage cans were eventually banned from the campus of Astoria Part Elementary School. Slime was improved. It began to come in glow-in-the-dark versions, or with optional plastic eyeballs or worms. We loved it all.

When Nickelodeon arrived, it spoke our slime language. Slime was everywhere. Buckets of it. It was poured on top of kids, and they screamed with shock and awe and delight. There were even contests where the winner was flown out to get slimed. We went home from that week in St. Petersburg, Florida and begged our parents for cable. We had to have Nickelodeon. We had to know what happened to the Tomorrow People. We had to have our daily You Can't Do That visits to Barth's Burger shop. In just one week, Nickelodeon had become essential.

Last week, we took our kids to Orlando so they could spend two days at Universal Studios. I did this grudgingly. I am a Disney girl, a Florida girl who was born the year that Walt broke ground on the Magic Kingdom. I went for the first time after my brother was born, a trip alone with my parents to ease my transition from only child to big sister. I went when I graduated from high school, and on my honeymoon, and many times in between. To me, Orlando=Disneyworld. But my kids wanted to see Universal Studios, and so we went.

As we entered the park, an employee asked me to answer a few survey questions. One of the questions asked why we decided to visit Universal Studios. I had a one word answer: Nickelodeon.

The weather was beautiful, and I cried on the E.T ride. My daughter asked me why I was crying and I told her because it reminded me of my childhood. It all reminded me of my childhood.

At the end of the day, we went to the Nickelodeon Studio show. We entered the television studio and the Nickelodeon folks separated the kids from the adults: kids on the red and blue bleachers on stage; adults on the silver bleachers in the back. The kids were ecstatic. The lights came on and screamed and stomped. The host of Game Lab picked two kids to be team captains, and Arden got picked.

His team won. He got slimed.

Afterwards, on the way home, we called all the relatives and let Arden share the exciting news. At church Sunday, the children's minister greeted him with a heartfelt congratulations, because he had heard about the sliming. I told Arden that I think this means he can go ahead and grow up. He has had the ultimate kid moment. Nothing will ever compete with his shining moment as a slime star.



For video of Arden Slime and Lily singing Y.M.C.A. (she learned the dance at a stage show at Universal) - click here

And answers to F.A.Q:
1. it appeared to be made of applesauce, cornstrach, and food coloring - but we did not allow him to taste it.
2. they have a special dressing room and shower to clean you off afterwards
the slime shower:

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When I remember being a child, almost everything is vague and liked to photographs up until a certain age. There are a few vivid images: the raggedy ann colors of the patchwork shag carpet in my first bedroom, the feel of my small teeth sinking into the edge of a styrofoam cup. I remember the words to Jelly Man Kelly, and the mineral mud taste of fresh oysters on saltine crackers. These memories are like flashes, illuminated for a second and then gone. I can picture the square pink box and plastic wrist strap of a Barbie transistor radio, but I don't remember where it came from, or why I had it, or how it got lost. I have only a vague sense that it was lost quickly, and that I was sad. I remember textures and sounds and smells, but I don't remember being.

Then, at some point, I begin to remember differently. I remember how I felt, and what I thought. There is no longer a sense of brief but vivid photographic sensory imagery. All the images I remember after this point are filtered through the lens of me. The sensory details no longer exist independently, they are a part of a narrative I was aware of creating at the time. I remember my thoughts about things first, the physical experience of them is only a shadow.

As a child, I tended to save little scraps of things and write letters to my adult self. I wrote lots of these letters. I put them in wooden boxes with dried flowers, cards, photographs, and ticket stubs. When I became sufficiently grown, I started to read these letters and I found them horribly embarassing. I wanted to shut the younger version of me up. I was ashamed of her - of how transparent, and hopeful, and needy she was. One letter said something like "I know that you are the only person who can truly understand", and I remember reading it and thinking Please, Go Awayand I am so glad I'm not you . Then, I felt guilty. I stopped reading my letters to me.

As I write, these later memories are the ones I lay out like collected stones. I move them around and try to make sense of them. In some way, I suppose I am writing a letter backwards.

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Thanks for checking in. We are home. It was a lovely trip.

I'm working on a essay with video about the trip and the ambivalent emotions that were stirred up with the realization that my children have entered the stage of childhood where they are experiencing things that I vividly remember experiencing myself.

In the meantime, check out the very, very beautiful art that asia mathis makes. I saw her work at the Atlanta Dogwood Festival and brought home a poetry pod.



(It has stars stamped across the top and green trees in the center. The poem reads: "a comfortable addition to her voice")

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We will be traveling and I'm not sure if there will be internet access. I'll be back towards the end of the week.

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Recently, my daughter's Sunday school teacher stopped to tell me about my daughter's contribution to the lesson on Jesus turning water to wine. She asked the class if anyone knew what "wine" is.

Lily raised her hand and answered, "It's a special drink for grownups and my Daddy gives my Mommy a glass when he runs her a bath."

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