I teach first period two days a week, and on those Monday and Friday mornings, I typically (and gratefully) find the classroom much cleaner than I left it the day before–thanks to Joanna, Room C’s Morning Jobster Extraordinaire. In the appreciation engendered in me, that neat-and-tidiness is matched by other ephemera: magnetic poetry gifts on the board. Teenage id energy being what it is, I’ve had to remove a few words from the sea of little magnets over the years–you can probably guess pretty accurately what those potential offenders might be. (Context, of course, is everything.)

But mostly, I’m greeted by lines that make me laugh out loud, or puzzle a little, maybe just nod in sympathy with an impulse or view of the world. The fact that there are actually three sets of words up there–one for kids, one “regular” version, and one cowboy, no punctuation–makes the offerings all the richer, because I know that these “writers” have intimate knowledge of “dirt” and “critter” and “wrangle.”

So today, I read

street dinosaurs dally on the prairie

imagine night fly ing

leave behind my delicate angel mother

And wishful thinking: school let me sleep

All proof that putting words together is as irresistible for some as messing around with numbers and formulae and testing out dance combinations and basketball plays is for others. It–the home/school we have here–takes all kinds.

Before I head over to rev up the SmartBoard, I see one more, nearly lost in the muddle, a subject that perhaps needs no verb or direct object:

darn manure