Today my computer broke. We are issued MacBook Pro computers at work. Each teacher and student receives the same device, with the exception of sixth graders, who are participating in an iPad pilot program this year. I have had my computer about eight months. We are issued replacements every three years. I hadn’t had any problems with it until today.

I closed my laptop to walk across campus, and when I opened it to take some notes, all my apps were unresponsive. I couldn’t even get to a point where I could force-quit them. So I shut the computer down using the power button—a last resort. When I tried to boot it up again, the progress bar got about halfway and then quit. It happened again. When I tried to boot it up in safe mode, same deal. Twice. So I decided not to try to troubleshoot it anymore. Last time I did that, I lost all the data on my hard drive. I took it to our tech office. My own most recent backup was a bit too long ago to try to restore from, and to be honest, I’m not sure how to do it when the computer won’t even boot up.

Sure enough, our technician had the same results trying to start my computer. He believes there is something wrong with the operating system, so he is backing up my data and doing a clean OS install. I borrowed the computer I’m currently using to make this post, but I don’t have access to any of my documents or other files. Our technician is very good at fixing these types of problems, so it’s not likely I’ll lose anything, but I’m still frustrated.

If you’re like me, perhaps your life is on your device, too. I know where everything is on my laptop. Navigating this temporary computer is a bit like the learning curve I’m experiencing learning to drive my new car. This morning, for instance, I learned I had been driving my car in S-mode, which is really more used for slippery conditions. Oh well. Wish me luck with the computer. I would hate to lose my data.

Aside from that issue, it was a good first day back after break. The students will return tomorrow. I’ll be glad to see them.

Slice of Life is a daily writing challenge during the month of March hosted by Two Writing Teachers. Visit their blog for more information about the challenge and for advice and ideas about how to participate.

I’m feeling spring. I changed my browser theme to cherry blossoms, which are my favorite harbinger of spring after living near Macon, GA, for so many years. Washington, DC gets a lot of press for their cherry blossoms, but Macon has its own Cherry Blossom Festival and a number of gorgeous Yoshino cherry trees as well.

Tomorrow I go back to school after a two-week spring break. We didn’t do any traveling. We usually don’t, as my children’s spring break doesn’t coincide with my own, but that’s okay. I read three books and finished one I had been working on before the break. You can read my reviews on my book blog if you like:

• The Boys in the Boat, Daniel James Brown (started before break, finished during break)
• Euphoria, Lily King
• The Hours, Michael Cunningham (a re-read)
• The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien

I was lazy. I kept up with this writing challenge. I bought a new car—the first time I’ve bought a car in, oh, I forget how many years, but it’s got to be nearly ten if not more than ten, and the first new car I’ve owned since the Saturn I bought in 1999 (I think—or 1998).

It has been a lot of fun having a zippy, brand new car. I’ve got 98 miles on it now, in case you are interested.

Today was, of course, Easter. When my sister and I were little, my mom used to make beautiful, elaborate Easter baskets for us. She loves making Easter baskets. We probably got baskets each year until we moved out. I am not going to lie; I always saw creating Easter baskets as a huge, expensive burden. I have not kept up the tradition, at least not the last couple of years, and my kids seem okay with that. They are probably the least acquisitive kids you’d ever meet. I’m lucky.

My sister and I also dyed and hunted Easter eggs, though I’m sure we stopped doing that before we got too old. My own children haven’t wanted to hide eggs in years, and we haven’t dyed them in a while.

When we were little girls, especially, my grandmother used to make us Easter dresses every year. It was more a tradition than a necessity. We rarely had occasion to dress up much, but I think it made my grandmother happy to make us pretty dresses. I hunted through my pictures today to see if I could find one of my sister and me in our new Easter dresses, but I must not have any.

I had a terrific, relaxing break with a little bit of excitement. I was able to do some much needed unplugging from work. I had a lovely little taste of summer. I’m really excited to see what we can do this summer now that we can travel a little. I really looking forward to the summer.

I will be happy to see my students again and hear about their break adventures.

Slice of Life is a daily writing challenge during the month of March hosted by Two Writing Teachers. Visit their blog for more information about the challenge and for advice and ideas about how to participate.

“I didn’t even open my pencil case,” she said waving it at me a little bit at the end of class. It was an indictment. I can’t really remember what we did in class that day anymore. I just remember her response. Clearly, class time was not used well if she didn’t have to write down something at least once. She was tough. She used to watch me in class, and her eyes seemed to say, “Go on, then.” It was a challenge. She was skeptical that I would meet it. After all, her experiences in school had been very different until she came to America to study. She was from Vietnam.

She was one of a larger number of international students at my school. They are brave students. They come to America, many thousands of miles away from home, live on campus and study in a second language. This girl in particular was one grade above most of the students in my English class. The year before, she had been in our English language learner classes, and her teachers thought she would benefit from a full year in World Literature II rather than going directly into American Studies in Literature, which eleventh graders typically took. She wasn’t very happy about being in my class. Not at first.

It’s funny how a few years on, some of the details are so fuzzy, but I remember she found an assignment particularly challenging, and for some reason or other, she didn’t do as well as she wanted to do on it. I can’t remember why anymore, but I didn’t want her to re-do it or revise it. She was pretty upset. There were a few tears. But after that happened, she started visiting me in my workspace. Sometimes she came to work in the library, which is where my workspace was at the time. Sometimes, though, she wasn’t there to work in the library. She would sit down at the table next to me and work on homework. Sometimes she asked questions. Sometimes she just worked in silence. Sometimes she asked me questions about Americans. She was completely flummoxed by capitalism, and we talked about it quite a bit.

Her favorite book that year was Things Fall Apart. It wasn’t a typical favorite. Most students enjoyed The Catcher in the Rye most of the books we studied. But she was thoughtful, and she saw interesting things in that book that the other students didn’t see. Her classmates will never forget during a Socratic seminar discussion of Ikemefuna’s death, that she connected the issue to a problem she said is a fairly substantial one in her home country—that if you hit a pedestrian with your car, you are responsible for their medical bills, which can stretch to a life-long responsibility. She has heard horror stories of drivers backing up and hitting the pedestrian again to ensure they are dead to avoid the responsibility. However, this story appears to be mainly urban legend, and it’s likely something that she heard from family and friends who wanted her to be watchful and safe when she was out walking in Hanoi. Still, it left an impression on the other students in class, as you might imagine.

Towards the end of the year, we were friends. She had worked very hard in my class, and I recommended that she try to take an AP English class for her senior year. She did take the class, and she excelled. She used to visit me to run her practice SAT essays by me. She had a real gift for attacking those types of prompts. I remember one essay was about following your dreams versus practicality, or a similar subject, and she wrote eloquently about her dream of becoming a chef, even though her family didn’t see it as a practical occupation. I said, “I didn’t know you wanted to be a chef.” I was very surprised to learn of her passion for cooking. She looked me dead in the eye and said, “I don’t. I just wrote about it for the essay.” Her ability to bluff her way through those SAT prompts with fake personal examples was unlike anything I’ve seen. She could thoroughly convince a reader of her passion for just about anything.I have to confess, it made me wonder what she really thought about, well, anything.

As she was preparing to graduate, she brought me a gift. “From my country,” she said.

My dad was in Vietnam when I was born. He missed about the first six months of my life while he was stationed in Cam Ranh Bay.

She and I might have been unlikely friends, but I think we were friends, despite her ability to bluff her way through SAT prompts (and perhaps a lot of other things). She might not have had to open up her pencil case in my class as often as she thought she should, but eventually, after a little while, I think she opened up her mind and her heart.

We all have students we will never forget for one reason or another. She’s one of mine.

Slice of Life is a daily writing challenge during the month of March hosted by Two Writing Teachers. Visit their blog for more information about the challenge and for advice and ideas about how to participate.

After I got the kids off the bus this afternoon, we drove up to the car dealership. Our sales associate had called to let me know the registration for our new car was ready, and I could come down and get the sticker inspection.

I haven’t driven a lot around Worcester because I detested driving our old car. It was gripping-the-steering-wheel-anxious-hoping-not-to-be-stuck-on-the-side-of-the-road-again kind of hatred. As a result, despite the fact that I’ve lived in Worcester for almost four years, I don’t know my way around all that well. I managed to get to the dealership just fine with our GPS navigator. However, driving back, I got off on the wrong exit and continually found myself turning the wrong way and getting confused. I eventually found myself near my school. I can’t say I was ever really lost, just not able to get going in the right direction. Dylan was in the backseat telling me, “You’re going the wrong way!” We managed to get home fine despite my inability to follow the GPS directions, but it was a little adventure.

My new car has Bluetooth, so I can connect it to my iPhone. I love this feature. I have been listening to my iTunes music in the car. I was playing my U2 playlist on this trip. U2 is one of my all-time favorite bands. “Where the Streets Have No Name” came on, and lo and behold, my fifteen-year-old daughter Maggie was singing along! Who knew she was familiar with that song. Of course, she does tend to like 80’s music, which is as “vintage” to her, I guess, as 60’s music was to me. So it comes full circle.

We had a fun little adventure on the ride home, and quite possibly were in the car long enough to hear this song together when we might have arrived home before it came up on my playlist. Not quite driving around where the streets have no name, but we managed to get a little bit lost and found anyway. I’m looking forward to more adventures in the new car.

Slice of Life is a daily writing challenge during the month of March hosted by Two Writing Teachers. Visit their blog for more information about the challenge and for advice and ideas about how to participate.

I was thinking of traveling today because I have been doing family history research all day, and one feature of the software I’m using allows me to attach geocode tags with longitute and latitude for places that crop up in various family events. It was interesting to see the westward movement of some members of my family. Others remained more or less within the confines of a small area their entire lives. Nowadays, that kind of movement is so much more rapid and frequent. In the 1800’s, when our ancestors traveled west in covered wagons, that was it. You were staying, and you were not going to be able to go back for visits. It takes a matter of hours for me to cover the same ground, and if pressed, I can go there and back in less than a day.

It’s strange, but one of my fondest travel memories is driving from Cape Fear, North Carolina, where I was living at the time, to Aurora, Colorado with my then husband and young daughter to visit my grandparents. We didn’t plan very well and assumed (you know what happens when you do that) we should be able to stop the first night in Tennessee. I think we had planned to stop in Nashville. No room at the inn in the first place we tried. We kept going. No room. We kept going. Finally, I decided to keep going while my husband slept, and then we could trade off. I felt somehow like I was all alone. There were no other cars. The family was sleeping. I was cruising down I-24. My husband woke up when I got on I-57; he felt the vehicle slow down. I think he might have volunteered to drive. We made it through St. Louis in the wee hours and stopped at a rest area on the western side of the city to nap for a little while. I remember crouching in the floor of the car and resting my head on the seat. There’s no way I could sleep like that now. After a little while, we got back on the road and drove across Missouri and Kansas, finally stopping in Goodland, Kansas, not far from the Colorado border. It was probably only 5:00 P. M. Or maybe not even that late, but we were exhausted, and the weather looked threatening. I’m pretty sure it could have produced a tornado if it had wanted to. We drove into Aurora the next day. It was probably only about four or five hours before we were there. It’s funny how indelible and strangely happy that memory is to me now, that feeling of being alone with just my road trip music on in the car, the whole road wide open to me. I couldn’t do it now. I had so much more energy in my 20’s.

Even going 1,800 miles across the country was something I could do, at least when I was in my 20’s, in two days. I know we take this miracle of travel for granted. Certainly, I do. As long as we have a little money for gas and food, we can go virtually anywhere, and we can come back when we’re ready.

Slice of Life is a daily writing challenge during the month of March hosted by Two Writing Teachers. Visit their blog for more information about the challenge and for advice and ideas about how to participate.