Author: Erin

Z

Posted on by Erin
This post was originally written on October 4, 2006 and posted to facebook.  My goal with this little site is to post mostly new stuff, but there are so many memories hiding on my facebook account that I kind of can’t stand to leave them there, all alone.  You may have already read this back in ’06.  Consider it a blast from the past.  Or maybe you can compare it against newer posts and see how far I’ve come…or where I’ve just sat and stayed for the past four years…hhmm…nevermind.  Read on.
 
There’s a kid in my reading group that I alternately adore and want to toss out a window. We’ll call him Z. Z’s family is of Samoan descent. Z is not a tall kid, but he is large. He doesn’t even really make a fist because his palms are so puffy. All Z wants to do is have fun, and if class isn’t fun, then he isn’t havin’ it. He likes to unbend paper clips and put them in his mouth like a hick would chew a piece of hay. He likes to climb over the protective grate and put his booty on the radiator. He likes to pull markers off my desk and write his name on the board, or other kids names on the board. Today he wrote on the board with a sharpie before I could stop him. Luckily I wiped it off as soon as I noticed so there’s just a little smudge left. We practice writing the sounds we learn in phonics practice on each other’s palms, and it tickles Z’s chubby little palm so badly that he giggles hysterically with little high pitched hee-hee-hee’s so his whole body shakes.

As you may have read in previous notes, my class is a circus. I lose my voice everyday at about 1:45 because I’ve just spent the last 90 minutes saying things like, “Put your shoes on. Get off your neighbor. Get off the radiator. Stop talking. Keep yourself to yourself. Stop talking. Mind your own business. Are you bleeding? Then I don’t want to hear about it. Stop talking. Am I talking? Then should you be talking? Stop talking.” Really, what I want to do is grow 12 more sets of arms, take them all by the shoulders, and yell, “SHUT UP EVERYONE!” That doesn’t go over well with parents, administrators, other teachers, the world, etc., so I’ve never actually done it. Plus, needing 12 more sets of arms makes it kinda tough.

Today we were saying our sounds. We were looking at pictures, saying the word, and then isolating the beginning sound. We do it everyday. Some kids were really into it, which always cracks me up. Its not that cool. But there was that constant hum of kids chit-chatting and pinching each other and putting their feet on each other that makes me feel like my brain is going to ooze right out of my skull. (There’s one girl who refuses to talk when its noisy like that, or even if someone else is breathing loudly. She’ll raise her hand, be called on, and then someone will cough and she’ll shoot ’em the stink eye. Then she says my favorite line of the year: Please give me the respect. But it doesn’t sound like that when she says it. It sounds like “Pweez give me the westhpect.” And the kids all just look at her like, are you nuts? And she’s the only one who says it, so I have no idea where it came from. I just nod my head and go, “She’s talking guys, give her respect.”)

I start giving the kids who are participating in the sound-saying checks on the board next to their names and slowly they start to quiet down. It happens one by one. Have you ever seen that improv game where people make a machine and they build it up one by one, each person adding a motion and a sound? Then once they’re all in, they start leaving one by one until just the first person is left, waving their arms around and yelling, “Whee!” or something. This was like that. And the last person left was Z. And he was singing. I hadn’t even noticed it with everyone else making noise, but he was singing R. Kelly “I Believe I Can Fly” with all his heart. His eyes were closed. He was reaching for the sky. “I believe I can fly! I believe I can touch the sky!”

I laughed so hard I had to cover my face with the teacher’s guide I was using so the kids wouldn’t see. And then they did see, and they wanted to know who farted, because obviously if you’re in first grade the only thing that could possibly be funny enough to make a teacher laugh is somebody farting. Farting is high humor to this crowd.

Pigeon Saga

Posted on by Erin

First of all, everyone needs to know about this: Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus. 

It is one of my absolute favorite picture books of all time.  It came as a part of a set of picture books I ordered on QVC (yes, I’m a home shopper–don’t hate) about 6 years ago.  The rest of the set were classics–Madeline, Paddington, Babbar, etc.  I read it for the first time out loud to my mom and had to stop reading several times, I was laughing so hard.  It’s just the silliest. I’ve started reading it to some of my kids for their social skills times and make them break it to the pigeon that he can’t drive the bus.  It’s fun when the pigeon gets all oppositional and wigs out.

Anywho…thought you needed some background on my love of pigeons before I launch into the epic, tragic, and all-together bizarre story of a real-life pigeon I “met” this September. 

So there I was…escorting one of my little darlings out to recess.  It was me, a student teacher, my student, and a girl from his classroom who was late to recess because her faux pony-tail had fallen off.  We were headed out to the playground which is about ten steps up from the school building.  There, standing at the base of the stairs, was a pigeon.  And he literally was just standing there, chillin’ out. 

Typically birds don’t just stand around.  They’ve got places to be, worms to eat, lives to live. And usually they flit away pretty quickly if kids start yelling at them, which is what happened to this poor dude.  “PIGEON!  PIGEON!  ARE YOU OK?”  My little friend bent over the bird, got right in his face. “I WILL FIND YOU A WORM!”  And the bird just sat there.  Blinking at us.  Well, half blinking.  Homeboy only had one eye. 

One eye and one dry socket.  Like he should have been the pigeons’ own pirate king, but had left his patch at home.  I made the kids back away slowly and promise to bring back some pigeon doubloons if he’d only spare us our lives. 

Yeah, so there’s that.  And that’s creepy.  Then, early the next week, I’m in my classroom with the same kid who’d yelled at Cap’n Pidgey.  We were standing in the middle of the room when it suddenly sounded like someone had thrown one of those huge, institutional-sized sponges full of water at the window.  It sounded dense, and somewhat liquid-filled. The whole thing rattled.  I looked up in time to see a pigeon flying in a weird curly motion toward a little decorative tree that’s out front, crash through the tree scattering blossoms all over, and then land on a totally different tree across the parking lot. 

My kid said, “Whoah…was that a pigeon?”  Yes, friend, I’m pretty sure it was.  “Was it him?”  You know, there’s not a way to tell, really.  (But I’m pretty sure it was.  It only makes sense that Cap’n Pidgey might have been hitting the pigeon rum a little hard and lost control of his flight-pattern.) 

Also, he’d left these behind:

Little pigeon-piracy calling card?  They’re stuck on there really well, too.  That must have been the window-slam of his life.  I took this picture mid-October and he hit the window mid-September. It’s now the first week of November and one feather remains. 

Thursday afternoon of the same week, I’m stopped in the hall by our principal’s son who is in one of the upper grades at our school.  He said, “Tell my mom there’s a dead bird on the playground!”  

I said, “Excuse me?” 

“Tell her! It’s on the ground out there! The kids all saw it today! It’s over by the blah-blah-blah-blah-blah!”  For some reason, I knew. I could just feel it. 

“Hey, was it a pigeon?” 

Yes, he was pretty sure it was.  I went straight into the office.  I explained the situation to the office manager who remembered that she was supposed to have called the custodian about that earlier.  “Do you know, by chance, if the bird only has one eye?”  Fully knowing there was more than a slight chance that question would label me as a giant weirdo, I asked it anyway.  I just needed to know if Cap’n Pidgey, Pigeon-Pirate King, had met his end.  (I’m also fully aware that giving one-eyed birds pirate names is something that could make people think I’m a giant weirdo.  I’m cool with that.)

Our fabulous and indulgent office manager called the custodian and reported the dead bird, gave it’s location, and then asked if he’d make sure and check if the guy only had one eye because “one of our teachers thinks she knows him.”  Good news is he was a substitute custodian and wasn’t coming back the next day.  I didn’t have to worry about whether the thought of freak show teachers building relationships with mangled birds weirded him out.

Sure enough, dead homeboy only had one eye.  I grabbed the kid who’d been with me on both other occasions and we swiped one of those little paper boat things used for nacho day from the cafeteria, padded it with napkins, set it on fire and sent the little guy adrift in the Puget Sound.  I realize that send-off is more Viking than pirate, but it seemed a fitting way to bid farewell to the only pirate king I’d ever met. 

That’s not true.  Really the custodian put him in a ziplock in the freezer and called the health department.  A few years ago they’d torn down a smelter a few miles away so whenever you find things like tweaky one-eyed pigeons who run into windows and drop dead out of trees, the authorities like to know.  It could be a mutant.  Or it could be some weird bird disease about to morph into a form that infects humans.  Or it could have just been a freak swashbuckling accident.  I know which way I’m leaning.