Fall, as experienced from inside a classroom

Perhaps because it is so fleeting, I love Fall.  I always want it to last longer, to delay winter as long as possible, and I want to do all of the things.

I want to go outside and throw myself into leaf piles, but that's just a fantasy I can generate while sitting at my desk surrounded by teenagers, and taking in everyone's needs until it's too dark to see colors anymore.

As we school-folk know, though, these months are stupidly busy times.  Some days it feels like I'm barely afloat: I plan a lesson and execute it, and somehow it takes all of the day's minutes to do only that.  

One of the things I do is note the awesomeness of the tree outside our classroom window every few minutes.  Sometimes I stop mid-sentence to point it out.  Last week, I even interrupted a student in the middle of her sentence, which meant interrupting the whole class and risking losing the balance of the classroom universe, forcing all of the students in the class to stop listening for a second and just LOOK AT THAT TREE!

It's the best I can do on the weekdays.  The classroom tree.