Out of date, but worth telling

It's time to sneak in a little out-of-date stuff that I've been too busy to write about. The Old News item for today involves decorations on my office door for my birthday last week, placed there by some of my current methods students.

Mary O., Michele, and I share methods students each semester, and I teach three of the courses that are part of the methods block. We had a small and particularly fun group of students this spring. Michele and I share the same birthday (but I'm 30 or 40 years older than she is), and our dear students decided to honor us with personal tributes. Michele has been teaching about monarch butterfly migration in science methods for several years, so the students each made a brightly-colored paper butterfly for her, and dangled them from individual ribbons hanging down from a wire stretched across the classroom. Sweet, pretty, springy, and festive, wouldn't you say?

Apparently the same delightful students who created lovely and gossamer creatures to waft gently in our classroom for Michele couldn't think of anything equally artsy and celebratory for me, because their tribute to my share of the birthday was this:
What is it, you ask? Why, exactly what it looks like. A door filled with masking tape loops. Every older woman's dream come true. Every semester I share a teacher pet peeve with my students--that I detest, I've always detested, and I will forever detest making masking tape loops to hang up posters, papers, and other student display-o-bilia on school walls and in school hallways. When we have items to hang up in our Mattson Hall classroom, the students have the task of making their own tape loops. It's good practice, and eventually they figure out that a half-inch piece of masking tape does not a sturdy loop make. Moreover, I get out of the icky, sticky, annoying job of masking tape loop production.

And so, while a gift certificate from my own personal children for Guthrie tickets will add to my cultural je ne sais quoi, the lifetime suppy--or at least career-time supply--of pre-looped masking tape loops from my methods students is a rather practical runner-up birthday present.

Stay tuned for more out-of-date stuff soon.