overheard on the salt marsh

Shawn is finished back in Alberta and he's coming back to me later tonight. He said that the new house is really nice but that they've made some mistakes. The wrong faucets were attached and the garburator forgotten. He also said somehow they forgot to sand and paint the tops of the doors. Odd, that. The worst part, he says, is that the concrete for the driveway still hasn't been poured which means that the house's owners will not be able to park in their garage until, mostly likely, next summer when it next becomes warm enough to pour concrete. In some ways I'm glad we never lived in this house because these little things would irk me, particularly the lack of driveway. We'll have to nag the builder to correct the mistakes and hope, meanwhile, they don't slow down the process of selling the house.

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Shawn's youngest brother was beaten up last night by a large group of young men while waiting for a bus. For no reason, just sitting there minding his own business on his way to work. It's impossible that he said or did anything to provoke this attack because he is truly the shyest human in the world. It's sick that something like this should happen to someone innocently awaiting a bus... We saw pictures and his eyes are swollen closed and blackened, and he has actual tread marks on his forehead from some disgusting creep's shoe. Poor poor kid. We're buying him new glasses to replace the ones that were smashed and probably going to have to subsidize him while he is recovering and unable to work. I hope his already lagging self concept won't suffer too much from this awfulness. The world is so brutal sometimes.

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I have one spare block each day, a whole hour and twenty minutes with which to organize my life, and I can't express how much easier it makes things. Next semester there won't be this luxury, but for now I am feeling a lot less frazzled than I normally would by the end of September.

During this prep time, another teacher comes into my room and teaches a class of grade eight Drama. I try to stay out of his hair so he won't feel watched or judged in any way, but I can hear his class through the office walls even when I close the door.

Yesterday I heard him introduce an assignment on fairytale retellings, and I thought, Good luck with that one buddy, eighth graders are too old for fairytales. They won't enjoy it, they won't get excited about it.

Today his class performed those fairytales and they were fabulous. Why? I've tried this (years ago) with my eighth graders back home and was met with blank stares and passive resistance.

I thought about it a lot and then suddenly it hit me. I'm in a different kind of community now. Different demographics. These kids have parents who read stories to them when they were small. Mine, back there, didn't.

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