Wednesday, August 29, 2012

First days of school

Jonathan went back to school one week ago.  We bought new notebooks, colored pencils, crayons, scissors, rulers, and pencil boxes.  

I went back to school yesterday, for my first day. 

Out in the back yard, the bind weed has been growing.  It grows up and over the other plants, wrapping around them and burying them in a pile of green leaves, white flowers.  I got behind on the weeding sometime in late June, which was really only a few weeks ago.  I stopped trying to catch up sometime in early August, which was just the other day.  During the past couple of evenings, when Jonathan has needed to be away from glowing screens, we've been in the back yard and I've been exploring the hidden territory under the bind weed.  When I pull it back, I find that the pretty ground cover with the yellow flowers has been spreading, along with the wild strawberries.  Did you know that gardens could grow under all those weeds?

Jonathan has been pulling the summer bind weed from his brain.  Multiplication.  Spelling.  French.  It seems that it doesn't take more than a few nights of weeding to find all that knowledge buried underneath the weed growth.  All that information is still there where we left it at the end of third grade, late May.  

I feel like I've been pulling bind weed from my brain, too.  I kept changing my mind on how I wanted to teach my new course up until just a couple of days before the class began.  And then I rearranged the schedule the day after we met the first time.  But I'm not as scared as I was last weekend.  Having met my students, and having spent an hour in front of them, I feel like we will be friends.  Or at least reasonably polite fellow travelers in our semester long journey.  I'm so glad it's only a semester.  Wish we were on quarters.


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