Thursday, August 25, 2005

The Good Things

1. These guys. Oh, very good. And the swing dancers who come around midnight.

2. The yellow arrows filling my neighborhood, pointing to places and things that you might walk by without seeing, or might have seen and wondered about every day. I heard an interview with the artist who created the wood & toy sculpture in the Sixth St. & Ave. B Community Garden; some people love it, some people hate it, but he keeps adding to it, and city agencies have declared it safe. I think it looks like a junkyard version of the big tower inside FAO Schwartz - maybe the people's version...

3. Fontina & hot pepper pizza, and white russians, and salad, and slices of heirloom tomatoes with salt and pepper...

4. Coming home to find all the dishes done.

5. Getting a phone call from a former student, who just wants to chat about his summer and his upcoming entrance into high school. He said he has to read 4 out of 5 books to prepare for a Humanities class: Night, 1984, Roots, To Kill a Mockingbird, Hiroshima. I said those are all great books, and smiled inwardly because it sounds like his high school will be rigorous. He said that another student from our school had skipped high school orientation and wasn't going to read the books and didn't care about losing points. I said to tell him that his old teachers said to read the books. He said that he had to write an essay about the setting of the books, and whether the setting was necessary to the story, or whether the plot could have taken place elsewhere. He said he thought it was easy for Night, because it really happened during the Holocaust, so obviously the setting was important. I asked whether he thought similar types of things had ever happened anywhere else, at any other time, and could they happen today. He said, "Oh," and I knew we'd just had a moment. I asked about his science teacher; he said, "She's tall and thin and young, you know, kind of science-teacher-looking."

6. Having finished all my coursework for Confratute & gifted ed certification.

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