OIK Tuesday: Is 200 a big number or a small number?

It's Day 2 of the new school year and Post 200 on this blog.  I realize that both these numbers are rather paltry relative to the overall number of school days I have taught (oh my, do the math:  24 years x roughly 180 days + camps and tutoring and a whole year of student teaching + 2 = 4502) and relative to the number of posts some of my favorite bloggers manage (daily! imagine!).

But Day 2 of a new year of school is an Important Day, a day on which you find out if you taught those children anything memorable on the first day of school, a day on which you test your initial hypotheses about each child's style and substance, strengths and weaknesses.  I had kind of a hairy first day yesterday (might have something to do with spending it in a classroom with a heat index of 90*), so I was really glad to find that, from their point of view, there were good reasons to come back today. 

It's hard work, though:  today I Overheard in Kindergarten the following exchange (at the end of a long and busy afternoon):

Arden:  "Do we come to school again tomorrow?"
Me:  "Yes, we have five days of school in a row this week."
Bertrand:  "My big brother told me that school goes on forever!"

And Post 200 is nothing to sniff at either, I reckon--that makes practically forever!  If I blog to record what's happening in the life of my mind and to stay in touch with a poetry-loving, kid-friendly community, then my usual two-posts-a-week is working.  This is where I build the box, where I construct a container however many cubits long and wide I need, not according to anyone else's specifications.  I use this box to contain my strings and chains and clouds of ideas that stretch and link and bounce and accumulate--kind of like the Large Hadron Collider, that 27-mile tunnel under Switzerland that the physicists use to crash particle beams together--only my LHC is seriously low-tech, a lot more like the Ark.

Thanks for coming on board!