A student picked a little spray of white lilacs outside the school door and gave me them.
In art class, a different student asked to draw a Mother’s Day card, so we used the lilacs as inspiration.
He wanted to write “flowers”—I added the l.
singing a new toon
In art class, a different student asked to draw a Mother’s Day card, so we used the lilacs as inspiration.
He wanted to write “flowers”—I added the l.
^ drawing the ‘how-to-zine’ zine
A young woman who'd volunteered at BOOK's at the thrift store friended me on FB recently--I hadn't seen her since Covid, and she's moved out east.
Her beautiful spirit was always grace in the grind, and I was glad to meet her again. She emailed asking for a copy of the How to Darn a Sock zine, and I wrote back.
I'm putting most of my email to her here, as a record of where I am at this moment:
Hello, Akiko [not her real name]!!!
It was so nice to see you pop up on FaceBook a while ago! Thank you for friending me there, and all those years ago (five?) at the store too.
You were actually just the tonic that I needed a few weeks ago.
See, about 12 weeks ago, I started working as a Special Ed Assistant (SEA) with autistic students at W High School.
I've had nothing to do with public education since I left it myself, forty-plus years ago.
I remember high school un-fondly, as being like mind-control prison.
I was surprised to discover that it's not changed much!
There aren't dress codes, so that's better;
but the doors are locked from the inside and outside, and that's worse:
"Let's give up freedom for the illusion of 'safety'."
Is that a good trade?
I don't think so.
"We have to lock the doors because of shooters," everyone tells me.Anyway---I was feeling down about this the day you popped up, and I was heartened:
???
"Uh-huh," I say. "Haven't you seen the movie? The call is from inside the house.
Like, it's quite likely a shooter would be a student like at Columbine who brought guns INSIDE the school. And now everyone's trapped inside."
Side note: OVERHEARD in the student lunchroom “…her and her piranha-looking ass”.
(School is sometimes more colorful than the thrift store, even.)
BELOW: I made this zine, “How to Make a Zine like this”, partly for English class where the students will make their own graphic memoir.
I’ll demonstrate in person—the zine is more of a reminder.
Zine-making instructions were harder to illustrate than darning a sock.
They used a roll of birch bark as a sledge to convey the mouse to burial site (w soft ground)…
A spoon to dig the grave in a soft spot
… and they said the heart sutra—“gone, gone,
utterly gone beyond —
yay!”
Copies of my zine is out for free in the library! It was the librarian’s idea—he’s one of my favorite people in the high school.
[This morning I copied all the posts (as an xml file) from this blog and exported them into my old blog, l'astronave -- https://gugeo.blogspot.com. I miss having all my history in one place. I turned comments off, there. (But people can gmail me at frescadp.)]
I'll keep writing here, I think, and then reposting... a happy work-around for me.
_________________________
"Tiny Things, All the Time"
The sort of things I do at work:
One of the students was sad and upset toward the end of the day yesterday. He had ripped his classwork paper into tiny pieces and was pacing outside the classroom in the hallway.
The teacher asked me to go and stay with the student. I went and asked the student if he’d like to go for a walk around the halls.
He did want to.
We passed the room where the copier is, and I got an idea.
I went in and I got several pieces of printer paper, and I asked him if he would like to rip up some more paper.
One by one, he ripped up five pieces of blank paper. We went back to class, and he was okay, calmer until school bus time.
Then he said, "I need your help again", and held out his arm, bent at the elbow, to link with mine. We walked arm in arm to his bus.
"I'm sad you're sad," I said. "Some days are sad days. I hope your weekend is better."
And I hope your weekend, blog reader, is okay too, or that you have some paper to rip up if it's not.