Crazy talk…
There is a hibiscus growing in front of my house in my neighbour’s garden…
This tree puts on a spectacular show in the Summer…
And the way the sunlight plays upon her hair…
Every second person stops,
to remark upon it,
and then pauses again,
to remark upon,
the contorted filbert,
which grows in my garden…
Both trees are a hotbed for snails…
I don’t remember seeing snails very much when I was growing up…
In fact my only memory of seeing a live snail as a child,
was on a trip to Germany,
when I was four…
It was a giant,
and someone ate it,
for appetizers…
Snails often wander up my front porch,
and hang out on the side of the house…
One day,
as I was running out the door,
to get my children to daycare,
and myself to school,
I stopped to pluck twenty,
or more snails,
off the snail trees,
and put them into a Tupperware…
Sticking the Tupperware into my schoolbag,
with no plans,
other than an intention for mystery…
After lunch that day,
I couldn’t get my class to settle down…
So I invited all my students,
to sit in a circle,
with their eyes closed…
I said,
I have a surprise for you…
But you have to be very, very quiet…
Each child held out their hand,
and in each small palm,
I gently placed a snail…
Even though some of the children screamed,
when they opened their eyes,
they quickly calmed down,
under this snail spell,
and their disgust turned,
into pure delight…
Thrill me to the marrow…
Snails teach us about balancing protection and trust…
They remind us that the childlike sensitivities and energies of heart,
and feelings that are often discouraged,
or ridiculed,
early in life,
are still there within us,
and need to be protected…
Snails are hermaphrodites…
When mating,
snails stick together,
and shoot a love dart carrying sperm,
into the other snail,
then they can both,
lays eggs…
My class played with those snails for weeks…
They wrote about the snails,
they made homes for the snails,
they made up games,
and they read to their snails…
Sometimes when I watch hockey,
I wonder if people forget,
that play is an important part,
of the warrior’s demeanor…
Under the pressure of analysis,
and production,
fun gets lost…
And we need to find our way,
back home to it…
Beaver action…
This weekend both Starshine (1o) and Little Gem (7) each lost a Chicklet in honour of Kyle Wellwood and his second goal of the season…
Earth to Kyle: Take your magic on the road…
Now to business…
When you drive by a school you should always assume that there is a lot more going on behind the stucco walls of the physical plant than you can see from outside…
As a teacher, if you’re clever, the first person you make friends with when you are assigned to your post in a school is the custodian… one shouldn’t waste time in this department…
Nowadays it is rare for a school to have a daytime custodian… when I resigned from my district it was not only my contractual duty to teach the basics of reading, writing, arithmetic, responsibility, nutrition, personal safety, physical fitness, time management, emotional literacy, assessment, evaluation, parenting, nose wiping, jacket zipping, shoe tieing, anaphylactic shock and epileptic seizure responsiveness ETC… but also blood and vomit removal…
This is the fine print of being a public servant…
And unlike the Sedins, teachers do not make $62.50 per second when they are on shift…
(thanks to Prudence for working the real figures on her solar powered calculator)
Back in the old days, when I drove a horse and buggy to school, there was such a thing as a day time custodian and he was my friend… it didn’t take anything more to create and sustain this relationship than showing interest in his life as a father… inviting him to our classroom potlucks… expressing gratitude for the little things he did in my classroom… and apologizing for my mistakes (classroom rabbit destruction)…
A little goes a long way in a world that is generally consumed with itself…
When I was nine months pregnant Quinton fainted from the pain of a pinched nerve in his back while moving tables around the school, and I caught him before he hit the floor…
This cemented things for the remaining eight years we worked together…
Quinton worked beyond the call… my students liked him because he was fun, so I could always count on him to translate the truth for me, out of Cantonese, whenever a group of five and six year old boys had been hauled in from recess by the noon hour supervisors for getting caught during a collective exposure and urination ritual into the storm drain… I already understood why they did it… I would have done the same thing if I’d had the same equipment… but I relied on Quinton to let them know that although what they were doing was okay they should try not to get caught next time…
One rainy Fall… on a day very similar to today I went out into the pod outside my classroom and in the corner of my eye saw a brown furry creature lumbering along the parking lot…
my school was in a suburb… not wilderness… and the creature was a young beaver…
I had to watch my class so I called Quinton and asked him to keep an eye on the beaver while I tried getting a hold of some wildlife experts…
The next thing I knew Quinton was running around in the subdivision out behind the school with a few grade sevens and a Rubbermaid Roughtote…
A few minutes after that he was at the door to my room with a big proud grin on his face and an announcement…
The beaver has been secured in the boys’ washroom…
I said, “I asked you to watch the beaver not to trap it…”
When a beaver feels threatened it can turn on itself and chew off a limb in an act of self-annihilation… we weren’t getting a response from Wildlife services so the administrator, all in the name of restoring order in the house, called the RCMP…
for immediate pick-up and relocation…
The same story that went down in history…
Bird language…
It is what it is... Todd Bertuzzi…
In my last two years of teaching, at the school I worked at for thirteen years, I experienced the gift of a group of children who are off the charts…
regular classroom…
suburban school district…
And after Winter break, in came another student from out of the blue…
Elijah is the oldest of three brothers… all of them incredibly beautiful and sweet…
As soon as I met him I knew he came for a reason..
His mom told me the next year, when I kept him for grade two, that she was really struggling with him at home…
He was asking too many questions…
She said, “You should have been his mother…”
I said, “He chose you to be his mother… he wanted me to be his teacher…”
Elijah loved to work on special projects… he especially loved to draw maps…
In his year of grade two we had a student teacher working with us…
Any chance he got he would ask her to sit with him while he drew… and the two of them would discuss the world…
He liked me to read with him… he would chose books and as I read he would make lists of questions that came up for us on the white board…
At first it was just him and I while the other students worked together during Quiet Reading,
after every lunch hour…
Eventually our Big Questions group grew to include the whole class…
One boy wondered, “Where do camels go when it is windy on the desert???”
But he already had his own answer up his sleeve…
He said, “I think they go to a temple…”
Another boy asked, “Why do aliens always say… We come in PEACE???”
Elijah also wrote pages and pages of bird language…
I never asked him to translate for me because somehow I understood it too…
without needing words…
There are eagles that nest in my neighbourhood… in the downtown Eastside…
For the last couple of years I haven’t seen them much because they switched things up and moved to another tree at the back of the park by the tennis courts…
Working undercover…
But I’ve recently heard reports that there is new activity… at the old nest…
The male eagle has been spotted dive bombing the cottonwoods… snapping off bare branches with his talons which he brings over to re-build the nest…
No rest for the wicked…
I always wonder about birds that mate for life…
How do they know that this is the one???
Does an eagle ever come home to its mate and say, in bird langauge,
“Sorry but my needs aren’t being met here… I was on auto-pilot when we made that egg you’re sitting on… and I’ve found another bird…”???
Somehow I don’t think so…
From what I can see there is no question about what each one is supposed to do…
It’s clear…
and they get it done properly…
Giving new meaning to the vow…
Until death do us part…
I will know you by your easy way...
Canuck'd 