Forgive me Internet, for I have slipped: it has been 2 weeks since my last blog. It’s been a pretty interesting two weeks: Parents’ Weekend, trustee meetings, an accreditation visit… that didn’t happen because of a hurricane. Perhaps I could be forgiven for not indulging in random, wireless musings while more practical and meteorological things were happening.
But a person in schools can’t really be forgiven for any kind of disconnection from the classroom. After about 40 consecutive years of daily (at least September to June) experience in the classroom as either a student or a teacher, I discovered to my horror that it was almost November, and I hadn’t really been in a classroom yet.
Now, that’s a real confession!
But I’m happy to say that I remedied that situation within the last week. Now, strangely enough, one of my first classroom visits happened on Halloween, so I was in the peculiar situation of sitting between a Teletubby and (Where’s) Waldo while learning about mythological representations through puppetry. And I learned about the background of escalation in Vietnam around the Kennedy assassination in the company of a firefighter and someone who appeared to be Axl Rose from Guns n’ Roses.
But the old energies of the classroom were still there, and I was impressed and happy to see the exercise of young men and women learning to think like artists and historians. As Halloween reminds us, if you act like, think like (and occasionally look like) a particular thing, you might be rewarded with some developmental treats at the end of the day. By the way, I was a Spartan, though I had to surgically modify a He-Man Masters of The Universe outfit to be so.
