Greetings!

I know I haven’t posted in a very long time, but there’s a very good reason for that. My current bus route, carried over from last year, is the easiest, quietest, smoothest, most drama-free route I’ve ever had. I have two schools; one in the morning, and one in the afternoon. They are both magnet schools. The students worked very hard to get into these schools. They’re focused on saving the planet or taking over the world, and don’t have the time, interest, or bandwidth to raise hell on the bus. My morning school is all girls, middle and high school age. In the afternoon I have high school.

While it is a very pleasant route, (the kids are kind, polite, courteous, etc) it lacks blogworthy material. I miss the loud and lovely chaos of the little ones. My current groups are far too advanced for my quiz time. How do you spell HEB? What is the phone number for 911? They wouldn’t even bother to scoff at questions like that, although I did stump a few students with, “What is the square root of all evil?”

One crafty young chap came up with 25.8069758. You’ll have to figure that one out on your own time.

My afternoon school allows bus drivers to come in from the heat as we wait for the school day to end. They have couches and chairs in the halls. One day I was sitting on one of the couches, playing my guitar. My friend Juan was sitting across from me. We were wondering out loud about the students carrying large objects down the hall.

Where is he going with that kayak paddle?

Why is she carrying a globe?

Is that a replica of a reptile?

We asked some of the kids about these oversized objects. They said they were hall passes.

Juan and I watched in amusement as kids carted broom sticks and beach balls down the hall. One student turned to me and said, “Nice guitar!”

I said, “It’s a hall pass.”

Sometimes we have to move to another hall because our regular hallway is packed with students rehearsing lines for a play, debating, or solving problems. These young folks are studious and very much into their school work, unlike Yours Truly way back when…

(Rewind to the previous century)

I was usually the first kid to get my boom box confiscated on the first day of school. I slept through social studies and English classes to the point where I had to retake them in the summer. More than once. As far as book reports were concerned, I flat out refused to do them. I didn’t see the point in reading a book and writing a report on it. I would not have graduated on time, had the principal, Peter K. Lynch, not plucked me from the hall one day to ask me what was going on. I went to his office every day after school where he helped me create outlines and guided me in writing the papers I needed to turn in.

In 9^th grade, I had an assignment to write a report about Shakespeare. My friend Brendan (the kid who taught me my first guitar riffs – Whole Lotta Love and I Ain’t Got You) and I decided to write a parody of an Iron Maiden song. We transformed The Trooper into The Writer. We cranked up the practice amp and hit record on the old Panasonic shoebox tape recorder. We blasted through the opening riff and jammed out as we shouted, “He wrote a poem and he wrote a play, he always knew just what to say…”

When it came to turn in the paper, we brought the Panasonic to the teacher at the front of the room.

She hit ‘Play’ as the whole class listened. The teacher was impressed. We got an A on our ‘paper’!

One year, they took me out of my regular English class and put me in a tiny room with 5 or 6 other kids and a teacher named Joe Teta. One of the kids in class was my old friend Rob Healy. We’ve known each other since we were toddlers and we’re still close today. It was a creative writing class, which I never knew existed. Our classroom was little more than a maintenance closet. I wonder if it was even in the school’s blueprints.

Mr. Teta gave us assignments that were very different from my other class. He gave a list of topics or prompts. He said we could choose one or make one up and write about it. No outlines, no forms or structure.

I could write whatever I want?!?! I wrote and wrote. I was really into horror movies and heavy metal, so my stories had a gory edge to them. Mr. Teta said that if he didn’t know me so well, he would be very nervous. When I didn’t feel like writing I would draw a picture. I had so much fun in that class. I’m not sure how Rob got into that class, but his warped imagination made him a perfect fit.

I was able to kick my writing game up a notch, thanks to my dear friend Sue, who was my girlfriend in high school. Sue not only “helped” me with some of those papers, she also gave me assignments from a book called Six Weeks to Words of Power. I learned a plethora of fancy words.

Well, I really went off on a tangent there, didn’t I?

That’s okay because it’s My Blog and I can write whatever I want!

peace