My least favorite day of the school year is Valentine’s Day. It is supposed to be a day of love and friendship but inevitably turns into a day of sugar highs, worse sugar crashes, meanness, name calling and exclusion. Someone always cries. Not always, that someone is me.
The fact that Valentine’s Day is on a Sunday this year makes no difference. It only stretches the holiday over more days. Today, we have a party in the afternoon, the only party of the year when I will allow students to have candy in class. Some of them will get soda after school-I do draw the line at cans of sugar in the classroom-from their crushes who pay 2 bucks to send a can of soda to them, usually anonymously so what’s the point really?
After school, we have a Parent’s Night function that was added mid-year to the teacher workload with nary a peep from the staff who suddenly have to work an extra 6 hours per school year (there are 3 of these nights planned). In Portland there would have been an immediate outcry and union protest. Here, staff just thought it was a great way to pull parents up the hill to meet their children’s teachers, many for the first time. We are serving ice cream, opening the gym to all, showing a family friendly movie and insisting that kids cannot attend unless their parent or guardian is with them. No free ice cream this time, kidlets!
I am running the coloring table. I have pages of hearts and butterflies and a million ways to spell "love" in addition to pages copied from the Art Masterpieces of the World coloring book and from the snowflake coloring book my mom gave me for Christmas. I thought about including some from my new Game of Thrones or Harry Potter coloring books but, selfishly worried that photocopying them would destroy the bindings too much.
From my classroom supplies stash, I gather that the former teacher, Miss Jill enjoyed doing art because she has more than one huge pack of markers and top of the line coloring pencil sets. I considered bringing scissors and some of the construction paper she squirrelled away so we could do folded and cut paper art as well, then considered the mess I would have to clean up later and decided, again selfishly, to keep it simple.
I took up coloring myself last summer as a way to kill time waiting for outdoor plays to start. It has evolved into a full time hobby. I have more so-called adult coloring books than I care to admit. I got three for Christmas this year. I have spent what I consider a considerable sum, for me, on pencil sets and cool markers now that I have a steady job in a place where a hobby in the long winter is a good investment to keep from going crazy. My dear friend Ruby took me to one side before I came back to Togiak to make sure I understood the gravity of having a creative hobby in February and March.
In Portland, they have adult coloring nights in bars with great music and fancy cocktails. I am super curious to see if any adults join me tonight to color. Maybe it’ll become a "thing" here too. I can see adding a coloring table to Open Gym, providing papers and crayons. Maybe once basketball season is over and I can do Open Gym again, I will.
Update: I would call Parent Night a success. From before the official start time, I had kids at my table coloring, and a fairly good crowd turned out. Too bad the bus hired by the school to ferry people up the hill was so late, the people on the bus only had about 30 minutes to enjoy the party. The game of the night was clearly the 100 cup stacking challenge. Students were given 100 cups to place in a tower, a prize given to the student who built the tallest one. The winning tower was over 3 meters tall!
Among the colorers last night, were a few parents who bashfully asked if they could color too, seeing that I was happily working away on a heart-mosaic piece that came out pretty well, if I do say so myself. I brought my personal coloring set in the cool wooden box that turned out to be a fascinating hit with the kids, even though the materials inside were less than stellar. (I'm thinking of writing a scathing revue of it on Amazon-the crayons are mostly wax and the oil pastels have no oil in them but are the same as the crayons. So cheap!) But in talking with the adults, I think I may be right that a coloring club might be a good addition to Open Gym.
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