Orange and Red Persians, from the Persian Series, 1988, Dale Chihuly
“Thirteen days, not that anyone is counting”, was Anne’s answer to my question of how many more school days that she has left this year. If you ask me, it won’t come a day too soon either. Today’s theme in school was drama. There is nothing quite like the Master Class in drama that first grade drama queens can hold forth with, although their emotional range does seem a bit limited, what with every dramatic turn ending with waterworks. They cried when they got a question wrong. They cried when another student took a bead off of their Mother’s Day card and they cried when they got in trouble for taking a bead off of another student’s Mother’s Day card.
Still today’s first grade must have been better than yesterday’s kindergarten. The theme yesterday seemed a little more fundamental, more biological, everyone seemed to have to go to the bathroom all of the time. You see with kindergarteners you can never really be sure if they really, really have to go or not. Still it is better to err on the conservative side and let them go, because if you are wrong and it really was an emergency, then you have a real mess on your hands.
Today Anne was just a frontline first grade teacher, but yesterday, she was the school’s Seed to Table teacher. Seed to Table teaches the kids about nutrition and where their food comes from. Anne didn’t get to do any gardening, unless watering plants counts, but instead was assigned a classroom curriculum. She was a little perplexed about the watering assignment, because all it said was “water plants”. Anne is used to her mother’s much more detailed watering instructions. In the periods when she didn’t have and kids, she was also assigned a bunch of clerical tasks, which she grumbled about last night, when I asked her how her day had gone. Today she bumped in to the regular Seed to Table teacher who exclaimed, “You are the best substitute ever! It looks like you tried to tackle every assignment. Most substitutes don’t do anything.”