When the brilliant Jennifer Acker first took over as director of Eclectic Music, I probably did a lot of annoying things I wasn’t even aware of.

However, one thing I was aware of and had to really try to tamp down was a tendency to meet any idea with, “Yeah, we tried that back in [year] and it didn’t work.”

I had to get my head around two things:

One, maybe Jen could accomplish something I couldn’t; and

Two, maybe now we had the resources to be successful with something that had once failed.

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I can lump my middle school students into two brutally overgeneralized categories: those who crave drama and those who enjoy life without it.

Amusingly and frustratingly, a student of the first type almost always pretends to be the second. “I just don’t want all this drama, you know? But I just can’t seem to escape it.”

When it is pointed out to him that he could choose to associate with classmates who are drama-free, he will retort that everyone is full of drama and there is no alternative.

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I will never forget the night I realized that the pandemic was going to ruin life as we knew it.

It was March 16, 2020. Having made the decision on that notorious Friday the 13th that we would bring our two Atlanta schools online, my team and I had successfully done it. I had just completed a series of exhausting Zoom meetings when my husband got the word that his apprenticeship program, which had closed for the day as a precaution, would be closed all week.

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Sometimes, on a typical day when the The Little Middle School is in session, we’ll split the group: Whoever would like to go to the park can do so, and whoever wishes to stay and work can do that.

Inevitably, the park-going children are exuberantly loud when they return unless we take a moment to help them recalibrate before reentering the building. They’re still using outside voices and taking up a lot of space. The kids who stayed to work will look up in dismay and shush their noisy, boisterous counterparts. They had settled into the zone, and they find the disruption jarring.

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As I look over my misspent life — in those moments when it feels like I’ve had a misspent life — I can come up with a long list of things I wish I had done, and nagging regrets about the things I did.

Some of these things are impossible to do anything about (damn biological clock), but some of them are things I can begin to resolve today, if I would stop being so morose.

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