That would defiantly be my friends whose names start with the letter P.
My 1st friend with whom I have a tendency to do crazy things is my best sister friend Pam.
We had adventures in college and have over the years become like sisters. However the craziest thing we've ever done was the time that we nearly died of stupidity.
Did you know you could die of stupidity? Neither did I until Pam and I tried it.
We went to Enchanted Rock and after going up to the top of the rock bubble and back down we decided to hike around it. We left our water, our maps, and our cell phones in the car and took off. We got lost and our ideas about how to get unlost didn't exactly line up.
Pam's way was to go straight up and over the moon scape and back to the car. My way to wander around sticking to the brush and cactus.....We only ended up hiking about 4-5 hours longer than we intended, but mercy! I was glad to see my car.... we went back to the motel and watched movies which was much safer.
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| Pam and I at her rehearsal dinner for her wedding a few years ago |
My 2nd friend with whom I tend to do crazy things is Pablo. However, with Pablo the definition of crazy changes from slightly stupid to improbably inspired.
The craziest thing we ever did was work together for 7 years. During our second year of teaching together one of our students while speaking of their homeroom teacher exclaimed, "That MAN!", he make me work!". That's how I feel about Mr. O - he made me work much harder than I would have if left to my own devices.
Before I worked with Pablo I didn't know that you could stay late at school, I thought that if it couldn't get done by 4:00 it wasn't going to happen..... Especially during the first 3 years of the fine arts grant we both regularly worked until 10:00 or 11:00 p.m. for weeks at a time. It seemed crazy..... I've never worked on anything that hard..... ever...
I also didn't know that you could spend a month arguing over variant definitions of words that all mean the same thing...just to get a grant application just right...... but you can. And although it sounds crazy, that word haggling is one of the reasons that the grant we authored and then executed was something we could accomplish.
Before I worked with Pablo I didn't know that you could actually provide costumes for each student in a grade level, or expect parents to participate in the preparations for a show. It made things crazy, but we did just that... and we had the best parent help I've ever had before or since. Then during the year when I lost my mind and decided that not only do all of our students need costumes but I need to sew them, well guess who learned how to cut out patterns? Pablo ! That was CRAZY!
Pablo taught me to invest in the families at our school to the point that it became somewhat common place for us to provide music for funerals for families who attended our school. That kind of "crazy" service really brought our community together.
Everything I've mentioned is what Pablo regularly does outside of the classroom most would call crazy but that I called a challenge. In the classroom with students, he is not crazy at all, he is just brilliant.
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| We started a choir that met on FRIDAYS after school without buses We would wait for FOREVER for parents to pick up their kids.... we had better ideas later that didn't involve organizing transportation :) |
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