Midnight's Children's Soporific Powers

School ended (finally) on June 1st. For such a busy, stressful year, school always peters out on a long, anti-climactic note. Regular instruction ends the last week of April, when all non-AP classes have finals; we head into AP review weeks, which allowed me plenty of time to quiz and drill and chill with the sophomore AP Lit kids; then the students take their APs and we move into "Projects," which this year was two weeks long.

I don't know the reason for Projects week(s) at the end of school, and though I've been told that it's a time to reward the students for having studied hard all year with fun, hands-on activities, I suspect it has something to do with state-mandated number of school days. Since our calendar revolves around the AP schedule, we try to get all instruction done before that time, and the remaining days are left for play.

Misha's projects are clever and relaxing (once she's figured out the logistics, which take her hours upon hours in the last weeks of school) arts and crafts. Ali does something with either musicals or electronics. And I have done the AmeriCorps Volunteer Project for two years now.

For AmeriCorps, I partner up with the Volunteer Center of Arizona and hoodwinkle some poor young AmeriCorps volunteer into contacting all the agencies and organizing the dates. My job is to coordinate drivers ... which is rather agonizing and impossible. This year I was responsible for shuttling 36 students around Tucson for 8 days, including up a mountain and back, and making sure they did not throw cans at each other at the Food Bank, poke out an eye while clearing brush on the mountain, or sand-off a finger with the electric sander at the cat shelter.

The two most exciting events of those weeks were the day when little Anthony--a 6th grader--pulled out a tooth while at the cat shelter and asked permission (!) to go use the bathroom to clean the blood off and out of his mouth. He returned to tell me that there was a giant cat in the sink and he couldn't get to the water. The second event was when Carolyn -- who had generously loaned me her SUV that seats 8 - called on Saturday to ask me who had vomited in her car. Apparently somebody had gotten sick on the way up or down Mount Lemmon and neglected to mention it.

I love that AmeriCorps gets the kids out and volunteering -- I think it is one of the most important things for me to introduce to the kids. At the same time, they are still kids and need a fair amount of supervision.

So school's over and I'm still in recovery mode, so tired I take naps every day and can barely see through the fog in my head. Maybe it's not school stress recovery; maybe it's the Valley Fever (a fungus whose spores I apparently inhaled) or maybe it's that I am also doggedly plodding through the 500-plus pages of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, which has sent me to sleep so many times that Misha's lost count. I would have given up on this wandering monsterous book a long time ago if I hadn't had to finish it for my summer course, Varieties of Modern Indian Prose.