The Smile Stash: Copycat

I meet with my manager every morning and give him updates on what I have been up to. Generally that leaves not much for my weekly 1:1s with him. Last week's meeting was an exception. We were seriously discussing solvent pumps, valves and flow rates. The whole time, my boss kept moving his index finger up and down to indicate the brisk opening and closing of valves. One minute, two minutes, five minutes. The index finger kept moving. He kept talking. I was paying attention to what he was saying. I was also paying attention to his finger animations and was extremely amused and distracted. Somewhere around six and a half minutes in this state, I lost it. I burst out laughing. He asked me what was funny. I said 'nothing', apologized, and tried to pretend as if nothing indeed happened. Five seconds later, I burst out laughing again. This time I apologized again and came out clean. My face must have looked like a swollen red tomato from all that embarrassment!

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At back to school night a couple of weeks ago, Raaga's second grade teacher said she will be sending home progress reports every Friday. It includes the kids' own assessment of how she did with homework, classwork, listening to instructions and how they behave with friends. For each category, they get to rate themselves E (Exceeding Expectations), S (Satisfactory) or I (Improvement needed). The teacher of course has the veto power in case she does not agree with the kid's own assessment. So, two Fridays ago, my freshly minted second grader brought home her first weekly progress card. I saw Es for 3 out of 4 categories. For one category however, there was evidence of the kid choosing E first and the teacher getting involved and changing it to S afterwards. Under the comments section, teacher wrote: "There was a lot of giggling at her table while I was talking".

It instantly reminded me of the incident my kid narrated in the car the previous day on way home. So her table-buddy, Lingesh, is new to the school, moved from New Mexico recently. Apparently he is super funny. He used the word 'speeder' in a sentence when intending to use the word 'faster'. Raaga and Cora (sits at the same table) burst out laughing when they heard 'speeder'. Lingesh was excited to see the girls laughing so he kept repeating the word. The girls continued to giggle uncontrollably. Teacher apparently was not amused and she promptly took notes.

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Two different situations. Two different generations. Same problem. What's a girl to do if her genes were made to be the exact copies of her mom! Of course, she would turn out to be a copy! Anyway, I was completely smitten by her teacher's idea of sending a weekly progress report home. I shamelessly copied that idea and started sending progress report home with my Telugu students. I had to improvise a little to suit my class but I was never more proud of being a copycat! Maybe I should do it for my Sanskrit class as well! That might make me a serial copycat!