The smallest footsteps sometimes carry the greatest weight. What emotional torment must a child be in to ask me if I would fight a chimpanzee? Yet that is what U.S. History first period wanted to know. The answer is in fact no, as I have no desire to alienate myself from our ape brethren. However I did once fight a monkey at the mall when I was four. I didn't start it, but it was good practice for the "petting zoo incident" that would follow the next year. Both of these event

Trees rise from the earth in slow turns of the stars. Each branch reaches skyward to pull in the sun and breath green life into the space we inhabit for too short a season. It is this verdant life that has captivated us for millennia, and once we called the forest canopy home before moving onto the earth and into proper homes. I think that was a mistake. BECAUSE I STILL CAN'T GET INSURANCE BECAUSE OF THE TREE THAT GREW WITHOUT ANY ENCOURAGEMENT FROM ME TOO CLOSE TO MY ROOF! I

So tonight is open house and soon I will get to see the people that have to live with you. "You" being my students. My life has obstacles, but your parents are truly saddled. I guess. Once again the spontaneous "Mr. Petraitis" portrait contest season has begun. I overheard such things as "no, too much hair" and "more like a watermelon with glasses". Remember, nothing hurts self-esteem like a grade you just missed by one point... Below are the entries in today's contest. I'll

The ants in my classroom think I am a god. Probably. Everyday I come into my classroom and I open my coffee machine to find them floating in the reservoir like tiny sacrifices in a Central American cenote. Are they hoping for a better corn harvest? Do they need more rain? Less rain? Why are they doing this? I wonder if I am actually an ant god, but I'm just not good at it or at least not a very caring one. Do they feel I've abandoned them? Have I forsaken them? Do they raise

Winter frost slows the inevitable rise of tree sap to the leaves, turning them red and orange. They eventually fall. In the process the tree produces sugar to sustain itself through the cold. It is then that men with drills and buckets come and steal the very lifeblood, so that no one has to eat a tasteless waffle. Syrup is just a maple tree crime scene and we are all guilty. Once, when I was in first grade, my teacher made maple syrup in class. It took the entire week and th

No one noticed my haircut. Today was just another day of being treated like a human dolphin. Would a dolphin look more regal with long silky plaits, and would said plaits not slow them down? When I retire I am moving to the ocean to live amongst my people. The only thing keeping cetaceans from conquering the world is their lack of opposable thumbs and I have two of them. Our time is coming.

Each morning the blue jays gather outside my windows and call out to each other in blue jay language. I have little idea what they are saying, but I imagine they are taking some sort of blue jay Cambridge class (AICE Preening or something) and the one, old and sad looking blue jay that is being screamed at the most is probably the instructor. Why do I bring this up? No reason really. One of my students asked me why she was never mentioned in my blog. The truth is I will never

Not only glaciers melt, but they carry mountains to the sea in parcels the size of sand. As long as this slow erasure of earth occurs, time continues. Until U.S. History Honors enters class and then it stops abruptly. It is the paradox of time. Time ceases to exist in an eternity as it no longer has value and yet eternity is made entirely of time. U.S. History, which paradoxically is the study of change over time seems to exist within this frame of existence. Just as a colloi

Today I was asked a simple question. The assistant principal stood at my door at the end of school and asked "Are you the one into human trafficking"? Where was this conversation going? What did he suspect? What might he ask me to do...? I thought about asking a follow up question. "As a hobby?" No, that seems like a guilty thing to say. Perhaps I should just ask him why the concern. He held up a student's paper, discarded from the floor. "I found this paper on human traffick

Surely each new relationship is an opportunity for disappointment. As the school busses vomit out the sticky fingered vulgarians, and the bicycle coral fills up with e-bikes (the proof our elders truly despise this generation) I am overwhelmed by the solitude that has been my chrysalis. I must now slowly crawl out and spread my wings, splendiferous and fragile and flutter ever so gently on the warm updraft of the futility of youth and the sighs of the defeated. Each student,