"I'll be fine,"

were her last words.

“Goodnight Mr. M.,” I said as I left the building via the door that is always his dismissal post. “By the way, don’t you think we need a handrail here?”

The steps are large, steep, marble, and to someone with bad depth perception due to severe farsightedness, dangerous. I am scared of them every day and wait until most of the kids have left to exit so it’s safer.

“Thank you for reminding me,” he replied. “It’s on my list of things we need to get done.”

“I think they probably aren’t up to code,” I said, trying not to sound like a regulatory agent.

“They probably aren’t, but a lot of things in old buildings are grandfathered in. Like how we don’t have an elevator.”

As a person who goes up and down between the three floors between almost every class period, I’ve noticed this. It’s terrible when the kids or adults have injuries or truly can’t do those stairs, but it’s been wonderful for my fitness.

However, I was anticipating a climb down these steps in front of the principal who is fifteen years my junior that would make me look even older than I am and perhaps worry him. So I said, “For someone like me who has extremely bad vision,” and I held up my glasses for him to see through, a trick I do with the kids all the time, “They are a bit scary.”

“Be careful stepping down, Ms. Smith,” he said.

“Oh, I’ll be fine,” I replied.

He said: “Were her last words.”

We had a good laugh and I climbed safely down the steps and walked my way on home.

Interactions like this are a big reason why I love working in person. It’s just fun to create some dialogue that could go in a book or a play simply by having a conversation. And it’s delightful to have chats that aren’t strained, aren’t deep, are a bit funny, and that no one walks away from wondering if they’ll get sued.

Well, that’s because I didn’t say that if I fall down the steps I do plan on collecting workers’ comp. That would come from my agency, not the school, anyway.

Today was filled with both the good and bad things of urban teaching, but I’ll skip any detail because one does not in anyway compromise student privacy. I will say that the kids were having a Day of Silence to raise awareness about racism, and it was the best idea anyone ever had. Tons of eighth graders were… silent. This is a miracle up there with the parting of the Red Sea.

Since they aren’t allowed to use their phones (or supposed to), and they couldn’t talk, I passed out paper and taught them the fine art of passing notes! They caught on immediately and wrote each other tons of notes! I think they got a bit of the feel of passing a note in class. The tactile nature of having a friend hand a piece of paper to you, with their real handwriting. The hurried scribbling when you want to get that message back as fast as you can. There is something magical about handwriting, in more ways than one.

I told them that we used to pass notes all the time when I was in eighth grade because we didn’t have phones. Then I had them guess what year that was. One guessed 1990, and she was only 2 years off! It was 1988. I told her teacher to give her extra credit, as I was subbing a history class and that’s a history question!

It really does demonstrate an ability to think chronologically, which tends to appear at seventh and eighth.

So we passed notes, no one was defenestrated (every day that I teach the vocabulary word instead of throwing something out the window is a victory) and we all went home for the weekend. I now have two days when I don’t have to talk like Mary Poppins!

I wish I had the energy to go to yoga tonight but I don’t. I’m going to take a hot shower and probably get in bed with a book or a movie and definitely a cat. Can do yoga on my mat at home to work off some of the pain of standing on those concrete floors all day.

I need more things that bring joy into my life. It’s not good to only enjoy your work. I used to go to the art museum all the time. Life used to be more than a slog from work to home to sleep to chores to worry about the future to work.

When the voices of the kids ring through the halls yelling, “You got stickers?” I sometimes hear Captain Von Trapp saying, “You brought music back into this house."

Then I think: I gotta get out more.

Maybe I’ll take up swing dancing. Or chess. Or a combination thereof.

Is there such a thing as swing dancing chess?

If you can write it, you can do it.

Tulips on my walk home from school today.