School is so silly sometimes. Today, on the infamous two-day week before Thanksgiving, the campus was pretty lonely. Most of the folks in the office took the day off, or had closed doors, and there just didn’t seem to be that immediacy and energy the campus usually has. When I left school at 2:57, a mere seven minutes after the final bell, it was like leaving a ghost town. It was like walking along the beach a week or two after summer has ended and the weather starts to cool.
However, mixed in with the curriculum, was APNsgiving. A simple explanation would be that students in APN brought food in a pot luck fashion and we ate it at lunch. A longer explanation would be along other lines–students wanted to get together with both APN classes, bring many different foods, hang out with each other, and orchestrate a kind of Thanksgiving inside school walls. I’m not sure anyone said “grace,” but there was more food than any group of students was going to finish, plus kids playing silly games, talking, listening to music, and just being decent people for an extended lunch period.
Gillian Hart, the Government teacher of APN, did way more than I–she bought two dozen empanadas. I didn’t do a thing except bring my microwave over to her class. The rest was all done by students, from the initial idea to the feast itself. It’s not the greatest empowerment of them, but it has to start somewhere, and it’s all about green-lighting ideas that offer positive outcomes.
And, while all this was happening today, in the midst of students having a good time that they created, I thought about how this year almost didn’t happen for APN. Gillian Hart and I, who have taught this 43-yr-old program since 2002, had to battle for months to keep it in existence. Just writing that line makes me want to stop writing about the battle, and I will.
I’ll end positively. APN still exists, and today it existed well.