Things I Learned Last Week

I'm reading "Living the Questions: A Guide for Teacher-Researchers".  (Don't worry, it's way better than it sounds.)  And no, this isn't another post about teaching.  Anyway, I'm responsible for reading chapter 4 in the next couple of weeks.  I had every intention of just skipping ahead to chapter 4, but in the same way that I can't jump into a novel at chapter 4, I can't just skip over the first 3 chapters.  The authors put them there for a reason, right?  So this afternoon I was reading the first chapter and stumbled across this odd little poem:

 

 

Things I Learned Last Week

by William Stafford

Ants, when they meet each other, usually pass on the right.

Sometimes you can open a sticky door with your elbow.

A man in Boston has dedicated himself to telling about injustice.  For three thousand dollars he will come to your town to tell you about it.

Schopenhauer was a pessimist, but he played the flute.

Yeats, Pound, and Eliot saw art as growing from other art. They studied that.

If I ever die, I'd like it to be in the evening. That way, I'll have all the dark to go with me, and no one will see how I begin to hobble along.

In The Pentagon one person's job is to take pins out of towns, hills, and fields, and then save the pins for later.

 

Naturally, I had to stop reading chapter 1 and create one of my own because if I didn't, I'd never get the image of ants passing on the right out of my head.  And then there would simply be no chance of ever making it to chapter 4 because I'd be thinking about those darn ants all day.

 

Things I Learned Last Week

by: Alicia McCauley

Birds automatically empty their waste before taking off in flight, so it's nothing personal when I leave my front door and the birds living in my Morning Glory let fly as I run in terror.

Sticks and stones may break bones, but words can pierce the heart.  And there's no cast to fix that kind of injury.

The kid who one day only produces a title and two words of the first sentence is the same kid who will crank out two pages the next day and run up to me beaming, "Mrs. McCauley, you just gotta read this!"

The old movie theater now only costs $1 on Tuesdays.  Tuesday nights just got a whole lot more interesting.

Splitting and doubling down are not the same thing.  At all.

For the bargain price of $900, 24 friends and I will be spending the night at the planetarium and environmental camp.  This is the same camp I attended in 5th grade where I was mistaken for a boy.  Let the PTSD flashbacks commence.

Before you go, I'm curious to know what you learned last week.  So go ahead and drop some nuggets of newfound knowledge in the comments section.  Now I have to go make a sugar trail in my kitchen and observe the traveling etiquette of ants.