Work...

...said the man raking the leaves on the corner..."it sounds like a swear word."

We laughed. We were walking the dog. It was raining, or just starting to. Day 27 of rain. No end in sight. We all had on our raincoats, even the dog. The man was clearly "special" as he wasn't talking on a cell phone or one of those stupid cell phones that hangs from your ear. He was raking leaves with fury and talking loudly...to himself. "Work, it sounds like a swear word" and the rake just kept scraping across the sidewalk, fingernails on a chalkboard.

It's a three-day weekend and I'm glad. My work, teaching, is exhausting. Parent conferences were on Friday. All day. Straight through. 9-7. A half-hour for lunch. And me, trying desperately not to be "too direct" as my Dean of Faculty says I can be. Me, trying desperately to remember, "five positive comments to every negative one" while I talk with the parents of some kid in my class. (I'd mention names here, but I can't and even if I create fake names, they are most likely names of students I've taught in the past...so no names. Hell, it's even hard to name my pets...they can never be named after people because chances are I've had a student named that and there will always be some kind of connotation that just doesn't fit the dog or the cat or the hamster...though I'd never own a hamster...still, you get my point...no names).

"She's very kind," I'd say and then my brain would swim for more..."...and artistic and she really seems to enjoy math"...though I don't teach math, my teaching partner does, but I know I need to come up with five things before I say, "...and she can be a bully at times" though generally, I don't say it like that even if the kid really is. Instead, I try to get the kid to say or at least describe something she did or said that illustrates that she is a bully.

Which I have to coax out of the kid slowly...hard to do as I only have 30 minutes per conference (though they never fit into that time frame...more like 45 minutes and then the next one walks through the door before I have a chance to get to the bathroom and pee).

And most of the time the kid doesn't want to be coaxed so I have to "help" them remember, which sometimes they do and sometimes they don't.

But I make it all sound awful. It's not. It's just exhausting because parents either think their kid can do no wrong or they think their kid is all wrong and there is no happy medium and that's what I want to talk about...that happy medium...how to get their kid there in the classroom, in life...how to help them find that happiness so when they leave 5th grade and go into 6th and then 7th and then into the lost continent of high school they have something to hold onto that helps them survive.

But parents just want to know if I'm 1) challenging their kid or 2) if I'm aware of how special they are or any other number of "worries" they might have...

...and the whole time I'm thinking how odd it is that I get to see their kid separate from them for about 7 or 8 hours a day in a large group situation and they, the parents, never get to see that. And I'm thinking how different this kid is in the classroom than they are at home, most likely, because they aren't comparing or competing or worried about their social status at home like they are in the classroom so they do and say things that the parents would never expect and then I have to bring it up at the conference and the parents, well, you can imagine, they can't believe their child would do such a thing or say such a thing and then it all comes back to ME...perhaps I'm really not understanding their child or I don't have the "big" picture...and they're right...I don't, but neither do they since they don't see their kid in large group situations and I rarely see their kid any other way.

Which is to say...

...it's all work...

...and it sounds...

...like a swear word to me, too.