Tumbling

At daycare they had some kind of water station activity they did with the older pupils in the infant room. The kids got so wet that the teachers had to strip them and let them run around in diapers for half an hour while their clothes tumbled in the dryer.

I'm trying to decide if this could somehow be a metaphor for teaching high school English, but I've got nothing. My students peer-evaluated literary analysis papers on The Great Gatsby today. Create a Venn diagram of Lyla's day in school and theirs, and there might not be anything at all in the middle section.

Now that Gatsby is done, we're onto Our Town, a play that reminds us that we humans are terrible at noticing the beauty in our lives until it's too late. The days of running around your classroom in a diaper while your clothes dry--those days are over. And if you have kids, then there will come a day, if it hasn't come already, that those days will be over for them, too, never to return. It's not fair.

So I try to notice. And then I try to write.