Icky Bickies

Dear colleague,

I've been wanting to write about the term icky bickies for almost 10 years now, so I guess you could say that writing about icky bickies has become an icky bicky for me.

Let me back up.

It was early 2018, and I had just finished writing These 6 Things. I was knee deep in end-of-semester stuff as a teacher, and my brain was still sort of melted from the preceding months of teaching while writing a book. My editor at Corwin Literacy at the time, the great Tori Bachman, was sending me yet another list of detail-ish things that needed to get done for the book to become a book. Its content was finished, but we still needed an author photo and the inside back cover text and the finalized acknowledgments section and the list of student release forms and a few permissions requests and so on.

So Tori was about to send me this list (I imagine her wincing before clicking send), and then she decided to add a line sharing with me that her mom used to call these things icky bickies. They're those final details in an endeavor that aren't fun but are necessary.

• It's the day of the party, and you've got a list of final things to do to get ready. Or the final party guest has just gone home, and now you've got to clean up.
• It's the end of the semester, and you've got a list of things to do to close out your gradebook.
• It's the month after you turned in your final book manuscript, and you've got to do all these minutiae things for the final book.

Icky bickies are things that aren't a big deal to most people, are often invisible, and are almost always thankless. Typically, they land on your plate at the moment of greatest exhaustion.

I don't have any solutions for you today on how to make icky bickies go away. But calling them that might help just a little bit.

It did for me.

Teaching right beside you,

DSJR