What do you think it means that the meetings of the Science/Math department are harmonious and efficient, and the meetings of my Humanities department are incredibly long and seem to take hours to reach consensus on every little thing? Clearly there is an imbalance somewhere when I keep looking over (longingly) at the laughing chat going on in the dining room and we are always the last to leave our work for the day. I don’t necessarily think the dynamics are a bad thing — in fact, I think it’s going to be an incredibly interesting year with four such passionate and intelligent people on a team. It’s very exhausting, though, and if today was any indication, our conversations tend to give me a headache. Hardly surprising considering all of the ideas bumper-car-ing around in there whenever we talk.

Which is why I would rather tell a funny story about one of my favourite new colleagues than think about what I’m supposed to be thinking about right now, which is the scope and sequence of the 5-8th grade Humanities curriculum (what we want to teach and when). I’m also supposed to be writing a self-introduction for a new teacher mentor group listserv, and punching holes in and filing my papers, since I have a purple folder from which articles and vital-documents-which-affirm-my-legal-status-in-this-country are falling out at an alarming rate. But those things can wait. Because of the funny story.

………………………………………

Okay, I just tried to tell the funny story, but it totally isn’t working, because it’s a really short story and the names I made up to replace the real names of the people involved take so much time to read that the story itself gets lost. So call me, and I’ll tell you the funny story. Or, maybe I’ll just ramble incoherently because I’m so tired.

Clearly, I need to figure out a way to work hard during the day and still save enough mental energy to write reasonably interesting entries here at night, because otherwise all of my posts will look like nlaaaaarrrrrrrfghh. If you have any suggestions, please let me know. In the meantime, send me your good vibes and keep checking for the latest updates. Don’t be discouraged if I seem to have disappeared; we’re going to be cancelling our DSL line here at the old house and will probably be without an internet connection for a little bit. But never fear!

For like an old sock that you thought was gone forever, one day I will show up inside the sleeve of your shirt.

I ran into Sean yesterday in Harvard Square, about thirty seconds after I had said goodbye to Peter post-dinner at Hong Kong (Hee. A cold can of Chef Boyardee). I was very, very tired from work and maybe a little drunk on scallion pancakes (ok, so you probably can’t actually get drunk on scallion pancakes. Maybe it was the scallion pancake sauce), and so I was reeling a little bit from exhaustion. I lurched into Sean and berated him for moving to Boston and failing to get in touch with me, while his sister and friend looked on in bemusement. And when I got home, I was so giggly and punchy from weariness that Ross asked me if I had had anything to drink.

I tell you this in order that you will understand the full extent of the following statement:

I thought I was tired yesterday, but in fact I was practically bubbling over with enthusiastic energy compared to how pooped I was after work today.

Here is how tired I was at 5:30pm….

I wanted a bottle of Half and Half, but when I picked up a bottle of iced tea from the cooler by mistake, I was too tired to put it back and pull out the right kind. I looked at the bottle, thought about reaching down to make the switch, and decided that if I did that I might faint. So I just drank iced tea instead. This may not sound like much, unless you know how much I like Half and Half.

Fortunately, I’m tired for a really wonderful reason — I’m tired from using my brain in interesting ways all day long. Today’s session of teacher bootcamp was sort of surreal because it required so much intellectual effort. More than most of my graduate classes. It was also surreal because every single one of my colleagues is incredibly smart, well-read, and provocative. Every one. No one was bored or boring, no one didn’t do the reading, and no one said a single stupid thing. That never happens in my graduate classes. We spent two hours this morning discussing a section of Plato’s Phaedrus and an article that attempted to describe the history of narrative by analysing three child-authored stories. The conversation bounced from person to person for the entire two hours, I was wide awake and listening to every comment, and I can’t remember when I last had that much fun thinking about complex ideas with other people. It was a little bit like being in heaven (heaven for people who enjoy erudite conversations, anyway).

The best thing about it is that I also feel like as a team, we can switch from that kind of dialogue to cracking totally silly jokes, and back, in a second.

Speaking of seconds, my department (Humanities) spent approximately a billion trillion of them in the latter half of the day working on coming up with benchmarks for our subject (skills or standards kids have to achieve in order to be promoted), talking about our accountability plan (which is the list of promises we make to the state of Massachusetts about what our students will achieve. If we don’t keep our promises, we lose our charter) and trying to figure out how we can actually assess progress that kids are making towards our accountability goals, through the benchmarks. Yes, I know how boring and meaningless that last sentence was. But it’s vital stuff for us to work out now, and I think it’s quite astonishing that four people were smart and caring enough about these things to spend three hours arguing about them this afternoon.

Okay — now I’m officially done gushing about my job. You have permission to remind me of my gushiness in a month, when I am actually teaching and scared out of my mind.

P.S. Hi, Barb! Happy to have you in Boston for the next little bit!

Part of me doesn’t want to write about my first day of work….

… in the way you sometimes want to keep a really wonderful secret all to yourself, because it’s so sweet you’d ruin it by trying to tell someone about it.

In other words, I had a good first day — thanks for asking! I love my boss, my new colleagues seem very smart, and the entire experience was like going through the first session of a class that you know is going to be interesting, exciting, and kind of mind-blowing. It really doesn’t seem like I should be getting paid for this (I wonder how long that feeling will last).

Part of me also generally doesn’t want to write about work here in much detail, at least not personal detail, because I’d hate it if I ever said anything incendiary (or even just mildly flammable) about a teacher or a kid and someone ran across it — so I guess the only other thing I’ll tell you is that I now know I am the only one of my co-workers who has a tattoo (there was an ice-breaker thing, I didn’t go around lifting up people’s shirts). Frankly, I’m somewhat surprised. Almost everyone seems to be between 25 and 35 (although I am a terrible one for guessing ages), so it just seems sort of odd, statistically speaking. To make up for this and to show team spirit I think we should all have the name of the school tattooed on our biceps (this will also make us look really tough, which is important because ten year olds can smell fear).

So, since I’m not going to say much about my day, and since I know you all set aside at least an hour every eve to read my entries, you can spend that time reading this, which is a (very good) short story we read and discussed today as part of our attempt to get to know each other. And if anyone really loves me a lot and wants to buy me this, I won’t complain. ;-)

Friends, I am not exaggerating when I tell you that I felt my heart start to beat a little faster and my mouth go dry when I rounded the turn at the top of the stairs on the Mezzanine floor of the Boston Public Library this morning at 11:30. I was like a hunter on the prowl, a girl who’s just seen her crush. They were having a book sale at the Copley Branch, and for several weeks now I have been obsessed with getting hold of books for my new classroom library. I already had about sixty volumes before I went, thanks to Goodwill, the sale shelves at the Brookline Booksmith, and the wonderful gifts I received from Susan, Kristin, and the Goffin/Schumacher family. I was so excited about their donations, by the way, that I made little stickers to put in all the books they gave me:

The sticker with Alec’s name on it appears in a copy of Where the Red Fern Grows, which judging from the scrawl on the inner left cover used to belong to him when he was little. Thanks, Alec!

After I got over my adrenaline rush it took me about half an hour to fill a shopping basket with forty-some books from the children’s section of the booksale (I didn’t even look at the adult books, because then I would undoubtedly have had to call Ross and make him come get me with the car), which it turned out were discounted a further fifty percent. So I spent a grand total of fourteen dollars for three lovely, lovely bags of books. A copy of Chuck Close, Up Close! Two copies of The Friends! It was quite the haul.

Currently, the collection of books that is going to take pride of place in my classroom and be devoured (I hope) by a bunch of 5th and 6th graders is sitting on my living room floor. It looks like this:

It’s enough to make me cry with happiness. Although I’m almost crying already, because NPR was just airing a program about what kind of musical note-combinations make people sad, and they played a very limpid Rachmaninov that is practically guaranteed to turn on the waterworks.

I also want to mention that next to the books, although you can’t see them, are the tremendously lovely rocking chair and lamps that we got at Elizabeth and Alec’s yardsale this morning. It’s good to be friends with people who have fabulous taste.

And, finally…. you wanted more AAM? You got it!

What a look of frowning concentration. A babe after my own heart.

I’m off to New Haven for the weekend, to go hang out with the cool kids. Back Sunday with more, by which time Ross will be in L.A. at the world’s biggest international computer graphics conference, where his poster will appear. Yay, Ross!