I’m counting down the most memorable moments from my teaching career leading up to the one year anniversary of the day I moved on from my life as an educator.
Let me tell you about the paper cranes…
I don’t remember what year it was that it started. I remember the class that started it. And I remember that because of the boy on whose desk I found the first paper crane.
For context, this is a paper crane, this is what will be the focus of this particular moment/memory:
So, one day (while I was teaching middle school) I found a little paper crane sitting on a student’s desk. Jokingly, I held it up and “ranted” about how this is what was keeping the boy distracted during my lesson. I told him since it was so important to him, I was going to put it on display for everybody to see. So I put it on the top ledge of my white board.
I don’t know what it was about me doing that, but all of a sudden, that one paper crane started the “paper crane hide and seek” game that lasted for years!
The kids would make paper cranes before class (or during class for all I knew) and they would hide them around my classroom so that I would find them and add them to the collection on top of the board.
They got very creative with the hiding places. Sometimes the places were obvious, like on top of the classroom phone, on top of books on our shelf…other times, they were not immediately obvious, like this one they taped underneath the lid of my water bottle.
Some of the cranes even had a message for me. And eventually the ledge of my white board got full:
The cranes soon spread to other surfaces on either side of the board.
Like I said, this game continued for years! Even after the original instigators graduated, their little siblings took on the challenge:
The kids kept telling me that I should learn how to make one myself. I told them that I refused to learn because that would take the magic away from them making them for me. I didn’t want to know how to make them myself. I remember I did humor them once and accepted their “homework” assignment and made one. But then I promptly forgot how to do it.
When I left the classroom, these cranes filled up a paper grocery bag. During my year as principal, that bag sat in a closet at home. I could not throw them away. But I didn’t know what to do with them. My husband suggested I thread them into strands and hang them like a beaded curtain.
I didn’t end up doing that, and to be honest, I really did throw them away. But not before laying them all out for one last group photo. I really should have counted them, but in the end, there simply were too many to count.
I don’t remember which one was the OG, but I remember it was red.
“Alice” saw these pictures on Facebook when I posted them recently (remember, she was the girl I helped after school one day and the reason I’m not cutting my hair)—not working in a Catholic school anymore means that I can now be friends with her on social media. This is what she had to say about my collection:
All I’m saying is, I will never look at a paper crane the same way again. (Also, legend has it, there’s still a crane in one of the cabinets in my old classroom that I never found).
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