We’re in Ohio for the weekend, visiting some of our best friends on the planet. Here’s a sneak peek at what we’re up to:
Meet Polly.
Weekend Preview
Author Archives: Keely
Hard Work
On Saturday, Sean and I got up and started working at 8 am. We didn’t quit until 4, unless you count a break for lunch and to entertain some guests. We cleaned out the chicken house (think Augean stables) and set up the little chicken family in their new digs.
This wire cage is partitioned, so the chicks can move freely between the halves (chick food and water go in the covered half) but the big chickens can’t. The idea was that Freckles could come and go through the open top, but the chicks would have half the cage to themselves so that they could be safe from the big birds. Unfortunately, Freckles shoved her big chicken self through the tiny doorway, so now it’s just kind of a tiny cage for the silly bird.
We built trellises for the peas, started planting a flowers and forage project in the chicken yard, tilled and weedwhacked around the upper garden, washed, dried and folded two loads of laundry, and planted salad. We’re just sitting here now, trying to study up what we can do now to show the world that we ain’t afraid of hard work.
Sean made a pork sirloin roast for lunch. It’s from the pig’s lower back, just above the hams. 
I don’t know how that man does it, but I will never let him go. With the pork we had our first garden salad of the year and some sweet potato fries with sriracha mayo. We ate on the porch, enjoying the breeze and the quiet, drinking in cool water and the pleasant, quiet shade.
check out the cool garden to-do board Sean hung for us!
Days like Saturday, I wouldn’t trade this for anything. Sweat was beading on the sunscreen behind my ears and the plane just above the unscratchable spot on my back was sunburning anyway. I’d been working since I woke up and could have worked until I dropped and not finished everything, but I was splitting my dimples all day.
We left home around four to head to the Juke Joint festival in Clarksdale, Mississippi. I loved it last year and I loved it this year. There aren’t a lot of events that celebrate Delta culture and heritage, so Juke Joint is special. The way Clarksdale lights up one night out of the year reminds me of the Magic Toy Shop pop up book I had when I was a kid. There’s a lot more beer, crawfish and guitar at Juke Joint, but the mood is the same. ‘Nuff said.
In a total change of scenery, on Sunday, we went to the Orpheum to see Ballet Memphis’ Peter Pan. The Orpheum is a beautiful old theater in Memphis; it’s all chandeliers and gold and silver paint. The show was magical. The ballet and the flying were seamless, and the fantastical, dreamlike mood of ballet suited the story perfectly. I’m still working on understanding the language of dance; a dance party will go on for a while and I’ll lose the plot, fail to understand what the dancers are saying with their movements. I’ll get there, or maybe I won’t, but I’m trying.
On the way home, there was an emergency weather alert on the radio. It’s that tordado-ey time of year again. Sean asked “do you think they make these announcements crackly and use that creepy automatic voice to give these announcements a scary, doomsday kind of quality?” I’ve never heard them that way at all. I grew up thinking that the robot voice was a guy named Noah. When I hear weather radio, I just assume I’m on a boat adventure and that Dad is there, looking out for me. I might be about to get wet, but I feel safe and exhilarated and salty. Thanks for bringing me up on boats, Mom and Dad.
The sand bar at Little Pickering, summer 2002? The Larson was my favorite boat, or maybe we just had my favorite adventures in it.
Off Pond Island, summer… uhh… 2002?
Community
Tonight we had a truly kickass meeting at P-W. This was a TFA-mandated thing, but it was meaningful because we had the opportunity to make it our own. Shoutout to my awesome MTLD for that. Tonight’s was easily the best session I’ve ever attended.
Three of our seniors came, one with a parent. Our principal attended, and several veteran teachers spoke. The students spoke passionately about feeling unprepared for college, betrayed by and suspicious of the revolving door of young teachers, and unaware of the realities of a world outside of our community. We heard teachers speak about feeling uninspired, unsupported and isolated.
I have never felt like a part of a professional community at P-W. We don’t have vertical alignment meetings and we’re not actively encouraged to plan across content areas. Expectations for students aren’t consistent among classrooms, staff meetings are always perfunctory, and most of us do not feel empowered to make changes to the way that our district operates. The students and the one parent present echoed the sentiment that something is missing, that they don’t feel involved.
We discussed a variety of plans to build community and involvement. I loved the idea of a mentoring program. In my vision, this is a program that assigns each student (or targeted students) a teacher with whom they are required to meet once a month to discuss their aspirations, accomplishments, and challenges. I’d do this during lunch, and require students to keep a portfolio or a video log chronicling their growth throughout high school. Each mentor would be limited by time to a few students, but I think we could find ways to build our capacity to do this. In other folks’ visions, mentoring took a very different form with seniors mentoring freshmen. Maybe some combination of the two ideas would work best.
Someone suggested polling teachers and students to determine interest levels in clubs or extracurricular classes or events to provide the enrichment that our small size prevents us from providing. One of our seniors brought up the idea of a student government, which would kick ass and feed wonderfully into my scheme for community meetings (like the one we had tonight! The student council could present…) before parent-teacher conferences. This would happen only twice a year, so it wouldn’t require much additional effort for anyone, and would probably increase attendance and candor at our conferences astronomically.
Regarding improvements within the teacher community, we discussed the need for vertical alignment and new teacher mentoring. This stuff needs to happen: these are simple improvements that could have big impacts.
I felt so clueless when I started teaching at Palestine last year. I didn’t know any of the procedures, expectations or norms, I was in over my head just planning lessons, and I didn’t have anyone I felt comfortable confiding in or asking for help. I heard rumors that any field trip requests or after school club ideas would be nixed, and I felt discouraged and isolated and stressed. I feel all of those things much less now, and after tonight I’m feeling ready to take on some additional responsibilities.
I haven’t felt this inspired in a long time. On my ride home, I actually considered asking Sean to move closer to my school so that I could be more involved next year. I love my homestead on the ridge, but the 45 minute commute is draining and I don’t feel like a part of the social community that the P-W teachers have. I usually decline invitations to go to dinner or to hang out because I carpool with my partner, and I can’t leave him without a ride. I can’t make it home and then back to school before events, so if I have commitments after five, I wind up working 12 hour days with no dinner (this is because I’m picky and don’t eat Subway). Sometimes, I think that if Sean were more a part of my school community or I were more willing to sacrifice my time with him, I’d have a totally different experience and I’d be better at my job.
I’m probably not going to move. This place is my home for now, and I have put a lot of work into making it awesome, but I want it to speak to the excellence of this meeting that the thought crossed my mind. I will find other ways to be more present in my work through the end of this year and into next year, starting with tomorrow.
Big thanks to everyone who came out tonight, you’ve got me feeling excited about school!
Farm Chores Friday
High five! You made it to Friday!
Tomorrow night is prom night (roaring 20s themed) so all of my students were wild to be in the cafeteria “helping” to set up. It didn’t help that the weather was perfect for languor at a picnic table, and all I could think about was napping in the sun. During my 8th period prep, I had several students just wander in and start chatting. Their classes were doing prom prep or their teachers had given up on accomplishing anything and let them roam free. I have a page-a-day bananagrams puzzle calendar, and A challenged me to a race to see who could finish a puzzle first. I took him up on it, since I have a considerable backlog of puzzles. I love seeing kids focused on hard problems just for fun, so A made my day. We tied. After the race, I showed him my post about Freckles and the chicks, and we talked about blogging.
“What is a blog?”
“Well, you write stuff, and other people can read it”
“Do you only see stuff that your friends post, like facebook?”
“kinda, but it’s more about writing than reading, like a cross between facebook and a journal”
“could I have a blog?”
“anybody can have one. It’s easy.”
“What do you write about?”
“I write about school and my garden and critters”
“You write about school?”
“You would too! You spend all your time here! You’d probably write about your horse, too, snap a picture and be like ‘check out my horse'”
Meanwhile, a couple of other kids came into my room and walked out with the pizza boxes that were sitting on my desk from the reward party earlier. They walked out again with the big stack, marched over to the gym and announced “hey y’all, we got the refreshments.” They retreated at a dead run when their deception was discovered.
A, if you’re reading this, because you totally heard me tell Erwin the name of my blog, you should totally start your own. You are an awesome guy, and I’d like to read about whatever it is that you think about life and school in Palestine, Arkansas.
When we got home, Sean and I decided to move the pigs. This involved taking down and setting up the electric fence, carrying the heavy and bulky shelter, and chasing a rolling metal water container down the driveway. When it was all ready, we had to catch the pigs. The first one, Daisy, was easy. We corned them just outside of the chicken house, and Sean was able to grab her as the other two ran away.
Daisy screamed bloody murder for what felt like hours as I tried in vain to corner one or both of the other two, who were becoming more and more agitated and wary as the screaming continued. Sean was afraid to leave Daisy in the new pasture because of Raccoon-Eyes’ escape attempt last spring. I chased the pigs around and around the chicken yard, lamenting the use of piggy calories for galloping instead of bacon. Sean finally had to trust Daisy to stay put and come help me: Levi and Sizzle refused to be cornered.
I had tried the flying tackle and the sneaky step. I had tried soothing talk and herding them into the enclosed chicken vestibule. Nothing was working. Finally, Sean thought of a hog panel, and I grabbed one of the metal gates that was left in our carport when we moved in. We were able to use that in conjunction with our cunning and speed to capture the other two. I ate some dirt.
I am not nearly as serene in this victory photo as Sean is above, but that’s because I probably ran a mile chasing those critters while he was babytalking Daisy down in the pasture. Humph! At least poor Sizzle isn’t screaming her head off in my arms.
All three pigs are now happily snurfling in a fresh green pasture, and the chickens are grateful to have their yard back. So far, they seem to be doing fine with the electric fence.
We watered the garden today, and I can’t believe how big everything is already. The brassicas (left) have grown enormous almost overnight, and it won’t be long before we’re eating garlic scapes.
Check it out! Strawberry shortcake, here we come.
We decided to leave the chicks in the nestbox tonight to give Freckles one more day with the fourth egg. Chicks can survive a day or two without food or water on just their yolk juice, so they’ll be okay until morning. We’ll move them down tomorrow to the enclosure that I devised. I’ll explain it with a photo in my next post. 
Mother of Chickens!
When we came home, I reluctantly hauled my tired self out back to check for eggs. When I peeked under Freckles, to make sure all her eggs were still whole, they weren’t! This is what I saw:
I hollered for Sean, and he came running to see them. The yellow chick is already dry, while the striped chick is still damp. They’re unspeakably precious! Hopefully they are all Cappy’s babies. The last thing we need is some little Spot-spawn, since we’re hoping for a few more layers or at least some edible-sized roosters.
We have to figure out some hen-and-chick-friendly digs for them while they’re small. Some folks recommend moving them indoors for a few weeks, but I’d like to have Freckles do the heavy work of motherhood this time. Right now she’s in a nest box several feet off the floor, so the chicks will need to be moved to somewhere less clifflike and more spacious so that we can fit little containers of food and water. Our chicken house floods when it rains, so a box on the damp floor might be unsuitable for the little birds. Any thoughts? We’ll have to figure something out for them in the morning. Note to self: plan ahead next time. 
chasing piggens 