Thursday, July 10, 2014

Everything Happens

           One of my favorite quotes from Dr. Horrible's Sing-a-long Blog is when Penny tells Buddy, "Everything happens..."
          "Don't say for a reason," Billy interrupts her.
          "No. Everything happens," Penny clarifies.

And sooner or later everything does happen.  Everything good, and everything bad.  Today, good things happened.  My wedding day started showing up on the long range weather forecast.  I picked up my wedding dress.  Today, bad things happened.  I woke up with a sore throat. I had to make cider using a longer process than usual.

But most importantly, today I lost my first student.

I've been teaching for six years now, and have taught around 1200 students between the ages of 12-15.  My first 350 students have graduated from high school (or not, depending on the student).  Some of them are probably scattered across the globe at college, or on missions, or working, or in jail, or wherever they are headed.  Some are probably already married.  A few are probably parents.  Working with the flood of humanity that I do, sooner or later, everything happens.

But the inevitability of losing a student doesn't matter at all when you find out which one it is you've lost.  When I checked the news this morning and found out that they had identified the body of a 14-year-old drowned in Hyrum reservoir as one of my students from the past two years, I sat crying in the kitchen for a long while.  A month and a half ago, I was saying hi to this kid in the halls and watching him grow up from the 12-year-old he was last year to a fully-fledged teenage boy.  He drove me crazy, he failed my class, and he was one of my favorites.  He had a smile that could light up a whole classroom.  I'd go out of my way to talk to him when I saw him because his green eyes and up-to-no-good smile always gave me a lift.  And yesterday he drowned.

More than once I have sat in on discussions among veteran teachers recounting all of the students they have lost.  And I've known that someday I would begin a list of my own, and that the longer I teach, the longer it will get.  Sooner or later, everything happens.  But today, I'm just so sad that it happened to Tucker.

http://www.ksl.com/?sid=30653153&nid=148&title=teen-drowning-victim-identified&s_cid=queue-14

http://www.gofundme.com/bbchp8

Monday, April 7, 2014

The Stationary Vault From Prone Position

Source

I give myself a 7 for my execution of this tricky move.  However, the score is mostly for my effort, since I still landed painfully on my knees and tripped over the bed, which would have been very unpleasant for L had he still been in it.  Still, I think my score is fair, given the circumstances.  I went from deep asleep to flying through the air in a matter of about two seconds.  I would have landed better, too, had my legs not gotten tangled in the covers during my mid-air rotation.

It was about one thirty when I heard it, a definite and important sounding WHUMP! It was a new whump, not one of the usual ones that happen so frequently in our old house (the whump of the washer as it thumps the pipes the sheer force of it's sucking water through them, the whump of the furnace turning on, but only sometimes).  This whump had a loud, percussive quality that sent my eyelids flying open in the dark.  @#&! I thought.  It must be the heat exchange on that 18-year-old furnace!  It blew!  I heard L say "uh-oh" and I began my execution of the Stationary Vault From Prone Position.


I threw the covers off and launched into the air simultaneously.  The launch was necessary, because I needed to get the door and down the hall and to the living room to turn the heat off immediately, and there was simply no time to bother with walking all the way around the bed to the door.  Despite being not fully conscious yet, I performed several important calculations about the trajectory of my Vault: First, we had rearranged the entire bedroom that day in preparation for a new bed to be delivered so I would need to jump not just to the floor by the bed, but over L to the far side where the door was.  Second, the mattress was on the floor, so I only need to throw one leg out to the side to get enough leverage to launch myself toward the door.  So up into the air I flew, rotating 90 degrees mid-air so I would land facing the door, thereby saving precious seconds that would keep our house from exploding (that's what happens when the heating exchange cracks, right?).  So far so good.  But this is when I tangled my legs in the covers and fell on my knees on our hard wood floor.  I assumed I had just nearly belly-flopped on poor L, so I mumbled a hurried "Oh sorry!" as I got one leg under me and lunged forward at a sprint.  Down the hall I charged, reaching the living room and flipping on the light switch to better see the thermostat.

The light flashed on, revealing L, not in our bed having just been pummeled by my flying heels, but groggily sitting up on the sofa.  I paused in confusion.  He must have had trouble falling asleep and decided to internet on the sofa and fallen asleep there (happens pretty often).  What brought my dash to a halt was that he was reaching to recover his laptop computer that was lying upside down on the hardwood floor.  It must have slid off his lap when he shifted in his sleep.  Slid to the floor with a definite and important sounding WHUMP!

"Oh," I said, "That was you."

Then I went back to bed contemplating my own clumsy athletic prowess and my nearly successful Stationary Vault From a Prone Position.  Maybe it can be in the Olympics someday.  No doubt it has been performed by countless homeowners and parents over the decades who have heard some mysterious WHUMP! in their homes or from their children's bedrooms and found in necessary to launch into the airspace above their beds and hit the ground running.  We should perfect it and get sponsors.