Picture this!

It's 11 am and break time.  Four young ladies are leaning on the rail of the second story porch smoking cigarettes.  Below them is a young African-American man.  One of the ladies asks him for a song.  He stands in the parking lot and sings to them--and to me!  I stop and listen and postpone my usual visit to the child care area.  The song is beautiful and delivered in great style! 

I played a CD called "Bach for Breakfast" for the last two mornings.    So I shared my music.  And later in the morning they shared their music.  We all wondered if he could come by and serenade us daily at break time.

So I will hang on to that visual image--the five of us, four young and black, one old and white, listening to a "dude" singing as if he were on a stage at a nightclub.

That will try to wipe out the image of my being on the phone for 15 minutes yesterday and again today wondering why students were not picked up by the bus.  Apparently it is a time of transition between the temporary bus driver and the permanent one who bid on the route.  Meanwhile no one picks up the waiting families.  One young lady said that she was going back to bed.  I said no, she wasn't and the bus was on its way for her.  Once again two families got started over an hour late, but we did get them there and work was accomplished.  It just takes so much effort. 

Another joy for today was looking at the Met Artwork of the Day site and seeing gold jewelry from Mesopotamia and 18th century BC.  I knew the students would think it looked like something they would be willing to wear today.  We gleaned six vocabulary words from the description.  We worked on what was essentially a subtraction of negative numbers problem--how long ago was 18th century BC?  And we found the present day site of Mesopotamia in Iraq on the globe.    All of this took time as I worked with two students at a time and my volunteer kept the others going in the classroom,  But one of my goals is to give the students a sense of other times and places and this was an enjoyable way to do just that.