Summer School

Summer School:
Biology
Edison High, Inner City Philadelphia

1. Noel pinky-sweared me he start coming to class on time. He's kept his promise.
2. Yanina realized shes smart. Shes been acing her assignments ever since.
3. Zuliema decided she wants to pass biology this summer. She's stopped sleeping and wants extra tutoring.
4. Hector and Luis gave me their emails so they could make up the extra work they missed when they were absent. Out of their own volition.
5. Alexia realized shes good at biology and has been on time every day since.
6. Erica was worried about failing again. She has a 93% in our class.

Despite some of the horrible lessons I've given, the hours I haven't slept, and the long road ahead before I can actually call myself a good teacher - these are some of the victories.

I love these kids more than life.

Reason 21 Why I Love My Major

God's Grandeur

- Gerard Manley Hopkins THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings. Black Sand Beach - Kaikoura, New Zealand

Spring

is starting to peek through.
winter ash skies leak light
anxious buds crack open (if only a hair)
and the first brave flowers creep up from frosty soil.

subtle hints,
but soon
Ohio just won't be able to contain herself.

meet hint one.
Ohio's first Spring Wildflower
the most dauntless of them all

Symplocarpus foetidus
aka Skunk Cabbage.

This strangely beautiful, albeit smelly, flower is the first to usher in Spring each year.
It blooms mid February - warming its flowers by producing and trapping heat within its hooded spadix.
And sitting snug, cozy in their enveloped fairy colonies, these flowers experience renewal long before the frog thaws and emerges from mud soaked sleep, before the pussy willow opens its first velvet bud, before the first underfur is loosed from the foxes coat.
Alone and content, they'll patiently wait for their neighbors to arise, and join them in greeting the equinox sun.

Pennies

"It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won't stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you will have with your poverty bought a life-time of days."

- Annie Dillard

Phytoplankton!

so after a long conversation with the ever wandering and ever loved christopher rubadue today, this is what he had to say to me:

"allison, i went to an aquarium today.

and more than once i said:

'i don't know what the heck that cool thing is, but i bet allison mcclain would.'"

and it made me happy.

a) to know that i am perhaps in my friends' thoughts as much as they are in mine
and
b) that strange sea creatures make people think of me.

so in honor of all of my ohioans that i miss so dearly, here are some of the cool things in aquariums you can't see that i also happen to love (and research) a lot:










aren't they AWESOME.

the phytoplankton taxonomist in my lab, sherry, gets to spend her days identifying and compiling databases of these things - in addition to rocking out to irish folk music with me of course.

so, if you so desire you can see more right here : )

enjoy!

It's Been a Strange Day

I thought about driving past the old house today and decided against it. Decided against it for the lack of people inside, the absence of the ivy that used to cover the lawn and bay window, the knowledge that I would never again enter and smell the must of old cloth or homemade spaghetti sauce again, never fish in the tiny pond in the backyard for frogs.

The old house I speak of is my Nana’s – or was my Nana’s before she grew too ill to live in it alone just a few years ago. I thought to drive by because I dreamt about her last night. Or perhaps I dreamt about her because I knew I would be driving through her old neighborhood today. Or maybe I’m trying to tell myself something.

I’m not quite sure.

But thinking about it brought back memories of all the Christmas Eves, crab feasts, and Redskins games spent gathered with family, crowded on plaid couches with my aunts and uncles or under dining room tables coloring with my cousins.

Made me think of sifting through trunks of antiques and clusters of memories, sitting crouched on the floor with my mom wiping dust off old photographs and tools, talking about her life as a child and the insignificance she sometimes felt. Talking until the shadows cast from the windowpanes grew long across the wooden floors.

Made me think about the water colors hanging in the downstairs foyer, the graceful lines stroked by a grandfather I never knew, stroked as he sat confined, dying of emphysema some thirty years ago.

My grandfather was in my dream last night too.

I saw he and Nana share a sideward glance at a soda shop in 1938, saw them stroking sandy feet at the beach summer of 1940 on their honeymoon, just a year before Pearl Harbor. But it was my Nana envisioning these things in my dream – not really me. I was just a spectator, somehow granted the honor of sharing in her nostalgia as she lay dying on a hospital bed in an empty, sterile room. She slept fitfully with a vague smile at her lips, dying not at all like she really did - sitting in her chair in nursing home, eyes closed gently with her head laid back to sleep, never to awake again.

She was happy in her dream – she and my grandfather Harvey. And as she dreamt she wondered, wondered what things would have been like had things stayed this way. What it would have been like had the war not sent things so awry. Had she not fallen in love with Ray, a boy she’d known since childhood, a man who'd married another only to find himself forever at Nana’s side – dying just two weeks before she in the nursing home room next door.

And I sometimes wonder too. Wonder what my grandfather would have been like - if I would have had the chance to meet him. If he would have cared more for my mother. And I wonder how my mom would be different. How I would be different.

But as it is I sit staring beyond my computer at a desk half covered with tales of thwarted love, Nana’s Bronte collection - mostly various copies of Emily’s Wuthering Heights.

And I sit thinking of Catherine and Heathcliff, my Nana and Ray. Sit thinking of the stories of the people surrounding all of them.

I’ve been sitting a while.



And I really don’t know how this story should end.