Week One: The D-Chinstrap

Pre-week:

Introducing...the D-Chinstrap. So suggested by a man who knows his beards--Chuck--who really wants me to call it the Douchy Chinstrap.

This is week one's winner. Keep this look in mind and project forward to imagine what I might be able to grow, and what you would like the look to be next week. Only five voting days remaining...all beard polls close at 4 PM on Sunday, September 12th!

Week in Review: With the D-Chinstrap in place, it was only down to the reactions from the various factions I encounter each week.

First, there were the students: they shared about their weekends on Monday morning and at the end, I tried to skate by with nary a word about my personal life (all the better for keeping up the mysterious Batman-like visage) but one girl exposed me by asking, "And what did you do?" When I brushed her off with some non-descript replies about "much of the usual" she countered by saying, "Well, that's not true, you shaved!" Suddenly, my facial hair became the topic of the moment. They ogled it and cooed over it, wondering how I could shave it, why I shave it and any and every other question to avoid the fact that I was just about to ask them to work. Nice try. The rest of the week, they asked me sporadic and spontaneous questions about my facial hair: why it was reddish; why it was several different colors; and why there were some white streaks in it. The last of those I reassured them it was probably just blonde.

My own children, having survived my face in all its permutations both charged me at the door Tuesday afternoon and claimed they liked my new "chinstrap." Have to love your own kids even more when they recognize the motif without you naming it. I take that to mean we possess a very advanced three year-old; I don't know about you.

As for adults, well, not surprisingly, no one said a word about it. But, in the category of yet another thing I probably should have thought through a bit more before doing it (which most people would argue is all of the things I do) I did capture this D-Chinstrap forever in school photos on Picture Day (to be proudly displayed in the yearbook as the Second Grade teacher most kids want to forget....) Good plan.

Beard Democracy: Humble Beginnings

And away we go with this year's beard challenge...

For this year's Beard Blog, I have decided that I will open up the beard-dom to any faithful followers (all one of you) who would like to influence my weekly facial hair motifs. My original plan was to teach my new Second Grade students (yes, I have moved down a few grade levels) all about good citizenship and voting by having them vote on weekly beard designs. But, I thought better of it, and not least of which because I am likely to get some grief about hogging the learning airspace with my beard fanaticism.

So, for those of you who would like to participate, here are the ground rules:

(1) You must post a suggestion in my comments section or you may e-mail me with your suggestion for the following week's beard theme.

(2) All beard suggestions must meet the deadline posted with each new beard.

(3) Each new beard must be built using the raw materials from the previous week--I cannot work facial hair miracles here, folks. (See the current facial sporting above.)

(4) All beards must be clean, and you know what I mean--keeping in mind, again, that I teach at an elementary school.

Other than that, have at it. I will take suggestions for Week One's beard until 4 PM on Monday, September 6th. I will choose the weekly winner. Don't be discouraged if yours is not selected, there are many beards ahead!

So, have at it. Come on, let's be realistic, how many times will you get the chance to tell me what to do and I might actually listen?

Week Thirty-Eight: May 24th

And now we come to the final week: the final week of the school year, the final week of my weekly beard experiments and the final week of this blog. Thirty-eight weeks and thirty-eight beards does a school year make.

In response to last week's "Question" (especially in response to those wondering about my possible move to teach Second Grade next year) comes "The Answer!" It is a bit strange walking the halls of any place--a school, a store, one's own house--sporting a number two scrawled from the ever-changing facial hair around one's mouth.

Perhaps because they were watching the clock and counting the days, minutes and moments until summer, my students did not seem phased by the giant two on my chin. That didn't stop me from having them grab armloads of books and boxes to help me cart them across the school, up a few flights of stairs and past several classrooms also in the latter stages of closing down, to deposit them in my new Second Grade classroom. My Fourth Graders, some of whom are nearly as tall as me--which isn't saying much, really--could not get over the diminutive size of the kids, the chairs and the desks. They felt like twenty Gullivers in a foreign land, even if some of them are not much taller than the current crop of ascending-Second Graders.

In the end, they might actually suspect this to be the reason for my move: so I will most assuredly be taller than all the kids in next year's class. While I do have height-challenged issues, I no longer make decisions based on them. I rarely notice when my former students return to visit me (even as soon as 5th/6th Grade) and already tower over me. When they reach high school and I am only up to their shoulders they shake their heads, wondering how I ever appeared a giant to them. As do I, as do I.

Week Thirty-Seven: May 17th

As I have said, for many weeks, the rumor mill has been stoking about my possible move to Second Grade. The intrigue surrounding the whole event is funny to me and it is so baffling to almost everyone who ponders it that I felt I must fuel the fire with a bit of well-times facial farce. Thus, I bring you "The Question." No surprise what next week's final entry might be called....

Then, when the time came for the annual storytelling I do at my elementary school, they somehow saw fit to dub it (no joke), "An Evening with the Mysterious Mr. Chisholm." I thought it was hilarious, even if it was only because no one believed my actual theme and title when I told them. (It was called "Writer's Block.") So, the question mark beard did double-duty. Of course, with only a week-and-a-half of school remaining when I showed up with this one, the kids took little notice. Their brains are elsewhere, even if I continue to be one of those mean teachers who expects work right until the end.

Week Thirty-Six: May 10th

I wish I had a pencil-thin mustache....

Well, not anymore. Aside from my overwhelming desire to cheese-it-up over these last few weeks (of blog and school) there was actually a good cause for this lip caterpillar. On Tuesday I had to perform in a concert alongside our 4th/5th grade Orchestra (Strings) players. Their teacher hatched this plot early in the year, and approached me during the second week of school to see if I would be interested. Would I? She admitted, which later became clear to all, that she did not know me that well.

For this concert, we were to be the concluding act in their lengthy recital of the early-instrument-mastering classics "Go Tell Aunt Rhody," Twinkle Twinkle Little Star," and many, many more. Nothing out of the ordinary there. As a grand-finale, a few staff members were to take on parts in a play called "Aunt Rhody's Appetite" as the kids played accompaniment. There was a narrator (our principal, who really didn't want to be in it at all), Aunt Rhody (another 4th grade teacher), the Old Gray Goose (our assistant principal, who feared making a fool of himself) and Pierre, the French Chef (me.) So, this 'stache was a method 'stache.

A funny thing happened on the way to the finale: the other 4th grade teacher got sick and we were left in a bind. The Strings teacher who by then had decided this kind of thing was "clearly within (my) realm of ability," acquiesced when I suggested that I rehearse on the final day as both Pierre and Aunt Rhody. She thought I was crazy at the time, but allowed me to do it. About halfway through the first rehearsal, she decided I should do both (prompting our assistant principal to say I should do all four!)

That is how, in our afternoon assembly before our 2nd-5th graders and that evening, before all the parents and families, I came to be dressed as half of a French Chef and half of an old woman, as I spoke, mostly to myself, and did any other manner of ridiculous things I never get to do at school. I don't agree with many of the parents who told me "I missed my calling," which I am not sure is an indictment of my teaching or a testament to the quality of acting they have seen.

At the least, I could not take myself at all serious (and rarely do anyway) as I glanced in any mirror throughout the week and saw this terrible 'stache grinning back at me.

Week Thirty-Five: May 3rd

Following our team's resounding Kickball Tournament win (for the second consecutive year) I felt the need to show school spirit with the "H House." The "H" is in reference to our school name, Henry.

The district is doing a great deal of work on mission and vision this year and they talk a lot about this business model featuring a "house." In it, the foundation is the mission and vision, and the rest of the house rests on that foundation. Every school has its own personality so, to fit them all into one "house," would be rather difficult in a non-Partridge Family-meets-Brady-Bunch kind of way. Our school shares its own common vision about what is important--the kids--and why we are there--for them.

Plus, this look gave me the chance to sport a partial 'stache, thinking ahead to next week's design.

Week Thirty-Four: April 26th

About one month before the end of the school year, so it's natural that my thoughts would turn toward the summer, and my time at the zoo. "The Skunk" is in honor of those thoughts, and the meeting I had at the zoo on Tuesday night, a semi-official kick-off to the summer.

By now, most of my students have clued in to the ever-changing beards. (That only took 34 weeks.) Of course, they think each one is a new animal and, except for the Stingray, many months ago, they would be incorrect.

But, "The Skunk" has an ulterior motive: the rumors began to fly this week that I would be leaving the safe and familiar confines of my fourth grade domain and testing the pastures of second grade. My students have begun to pester me about it daily, and the current third graders have already been casting me looks shot-full of evil, so they have fully bought into it.

Not a day goes by without some e-mail or phone call from a concerned parent (of a current second or third grader) about this potential move. All want me to disconfirm this rumor or give some sort of validation to what they fear may be the truth. Of course, I have yet to satisfy these queries, preferring instead to remain "ignorant" of the entire situation. So, maybe my cryptic responses and artful dodging of inquiries does paint me as the skunk in this situation, but, it gives everyone something to do as we round out the year.