I'm Back

Okay, so my blog hiatus is over. I needed a break, but I'm back, literally and figuratively.

I finally feel like myself again. Adjusting to my new life as a 5th grade teacher in NYC public schools has been by far one of the hardest things I've ever done. But, I'm finally at a place where a ridiculous day at school does NOT mean that my whole life is in a chaotic, emotional, ridiculous state along with it. I've been able to separate the emotions of work from taking over my emotions and my life post-work, and that in itself is a huge milestone. I'm making time to be with my close friends (who I could not survive any of this without), to work out, and to do some of the things I love most about New York.

January has been the best month of this crazy journey so far. It has been a great psychological victory to have a month like this one under my belt, and June finally doesn't seem an eternity away.

Highlights of the month include:

-Finally signing up for a gym
-An epiphany about education after speaking with a mentor
-My kids taking the ELA state test (two standardized tests down, one to go)
-Witnessing the INAUGURATION of President Barack Obama
-Seeing some of my favorite people in DC.
-Lost nights with Ms. Corey
-In The Heights with my TFA girls
-Tarot card night with the best girls alive (sans that tarot cards...)

In two weeks, I'll be off to Puerto Rico for a very needed vacation with KG.

Hey, I'm worth it.

Our President Finally Embodies the Complexites of America

In First Family, a Nation’s Many Faces
By JODI KANTOR

WASHINGTON — The president’s elderly stepgrandmother brought him an oxtail fly whisk, a mark of power at home in Kenya. Cousins journeyed from the South Carolina town where the first lady’s great-great-grandfather was born into slavery, while the rabbi in the family came from the synagogue where he had been commemorating Martin Luther King’s Birthday. The president and first lady’s siblings were there, too, of course: his Indonesian-American half-sister, who brought her Chinese-Canadian husband, and her brother, a black man with a white wife.

When President Barack Obama was sworn in on Tuesday, he was surrounded by an extended clan that would have shocked past generations of Americans and instantly redrew the image of a first family for future ones.

As they convened to take their family’s final step in its journey from Africa and into the White House, the group seemed as if it had stepped out of the pages of Mr. Obama’s memoir — no longer the disparate kin of a young man wondering how he fit in, but the embodiment of a new president’s promise of change.

For well over two centuries, the United States has been vastly more diverse than its ruling families. Now the Obama family has flipped that around, with a Technicolor cast that looks almost nothing like their overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly Protestant predecessors in the role. The family that produced Barack and Michelle Obama is black and white and Asian, Christian, Muslim and Jewish. They speak English; Indonesian; French; Cantonese; German; Hebrew; African languages including Swahili, Luo and Igbo; and even a few phrases of Gullah, the Creole dialect of the South Carolina Lowcountry. Very few are wealthy, and some — like Sarah Obama, the stepgrandmother who only recently got electricity and running water in her metal-roofed shack — are quite poor.

“Our family is new in terms of the White House, but I don’t think it’s new in terms of the country,” Maya Soetoro-Ng, the president’s younger half-sister, said last week. “I don’t think the White House has always reflected the textures and flavors of this country.”

Though the world is recognizing the inauguration of the first African-American president, the story is a more complex narrative, about immigration, social mobility and the desegregation of one of the last divided institutions in American life: the family. It is a tale of self-determination, full of refusals to follow the tracks laid by history or religion or parentage.

Finito

Sayonara, Blog. It's been real.

Half empty? Half full?

The Bad

-There are 6 whole instructional days left until break.
-My patience for children is d-w-i-n-d-l-i-n-g.
-There is not enough time to explore the city.
-I have had no hot water in my apartment since YESTERDAY MORNING.
-NY can feel lonely and scattered.
-My good friend is moving off of our couch.
-My real roommate is crazy and a downer.
-Grad school is a waste of my life.
-They didn't tell any of us we'd have to pay for grad school until we'd already started.
-I have zero money to pay for said grad school.
-I am emotionally exhausted...almost to the point of numbness.

The Good:

-I have all my limbs (thanks Zoe)
-I can dance.
-It was 60 degrees and sunny out today (December 15th)
-My kids and I walked to a show at the Apollo theater today.
-I WAY lucked out with my school relative to others.
-I don't live in Madison anymore.
-I don't live anywhere near my family anymore.
-It is not November 2007.
-I finally live in NY.
-There are only 6 more instructional days until break.
-My brother is visiting me.
-BECCA is visiting me.
-This year is almost over.
-LOST starts on January 21st.
-I have plans a-brewing for a wonderful summer.

Shout-outs and Sorries

Student: I wanted to give a sorry to ____ because I said his pimple look like Rudolf. And I wanted to give a shout-out to Ms. Sadek because she look hot today

Me: ...uhhhhh....Okay! Next?!

Class: (fits of laughter)

Soooo awkward.

Making Changes

My kids have started the popularity game. And it's a mean game. We finally tackled it as a class yesterday, but the two kids who have been the meanest weren't ready participate.

I gave one of them the day to let it sink in, and then we had a heart to heart this morning about her behavior. Here's her free-write in response:

I feel like someone opened a Door in me, and it's a nice door. This is my rule. If you see me being mean to someone you give me detention. I am going to say sorry to the people I have been mean to right now.

Sometimes they blow my mind.

Pragmatism

In the words of this girl:

Emotion is taking a backseat now, and strength is riding shotgun.

I am willing this into reality.

A Journey of Sorts

The past two months, I read a sequence of books that have begun to lead me through the process of untangling my thoughts, making sense of this past year, and solidifying beliefs on feminism and spirituality.

This list is more for my own memory than for anything else...


The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd

Standing Alone: An American Woman's Struggle for the Soul of Islam by Asra Nomani

The Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman's Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine by Sue Monk Kidd

A Thousand Splendid Suns By Khaled Hosseini

Girls of Riyadh by Rajaa Alsanea

This has been the hardest year of me life, no question. The next year definitely won't be a walk in the park...but let's hope I come out stronger and with a lot of tough questions answered come June.

Lesson planning is like...

An endless stream of all of the work that went into planning an @ conference or Retreat...

...With none of the fun that comes with the conference itself.

Two and a half weeks til winter break.

On Soulmates

Assignment:
Free-write about an issue you care about

Student writes:

Girlfriend

My girlfriend and I are soul mates. But we fight about EVERYTHING. Like, what are we going to name our kids?

Walk on, Walk on, Walk on

The only steps that matter are the ones that you take all by yourself.


Thank you Katy.

Stopped me in my tracks

For women particularly, but not exclusively, the restrictions and repression breed not always compliance but rather conflict and dissonance. I know this because I lived this way myself for a decade, from my late teens into my late twenties. I lived a double life, secretly satisfying my curiosities about men while lying to my parents because I knew that I was crossing boundaries that weren't supposed to be crossed. I couldn't live with the lies, deceit, and hypocrisy after my marriage fell apart, when I realized that we aren't meant to suffer so deeply just to deny our true selves and realize societal, parental, and external expectations for ourselves....

In any society governed by oppression and rules that don't make sense, there will be rebellion, even if it's expressed privately. To express such rebellion publicly is to me the sign of a mature individual and a mature society.

(Standing Alone by Asra Nomani)

Truth be told..

I'm feeling kind of lousy. I hear that's kind of how you're supposed to feel around November as a first year teacher. That doesn't make it any easier. It's a bit like culture shock. The honey moon's over, you're far away from the finish line and now it's all just painfully real.

I get up and its dark. I get out of school and its dark. Sometimes I see sunlight through windows in a classroom that smells like non-deodorized pre-teens and dead mice.

Sometimes my kids are lovely. Sometimes they're not lovely at all . But always, their stories are emotionally draining and make it impossible to separate work from home and home from work.

They are literally years behind in school, and they don't even realize what that means for their lives. Sometimes I just want to scream: YOU'RE ELEVEN AND READING AT A SECOND GRADE LEVEL! YOU DON'T KNOW YOUR TIMES TABLES! WAKE UP!!!!! Sometimes it's like running on a treadmill and not getting anywhere.

Today, June seems awfully far away.

It's happened...

One of my students called me mom today.

I don't know how I'm feeling about this.

History through my students' eyes

As I walked through Harlem on the way to school this morning, up Amsterdam and past the Apollo theater, the world felt different. Only a few hours before, this same path that I was walking was filled with jubilant chanting, marching, and ecstatic celebration.

My students described their experience living in Harlem during this historic event:

All of a sudden people just started banging pots and pans up and down the halls of my building chanting OBAMA! OBAMA

It was so crazy in my building. People were banging pans together and even shooting guns into the air to celebrate

The streets were so loud I couldn't sleep!

I looked out my window and one guy was yelling OBAMA! He saw me and said, "Hey girl why aren't you celebrating?!" So I started yelling "OBAMA" out my window too.

My dad just kept on hugging me, screaming and crying, and yelling, "I can't believe it!"

My classroom broke out into chants and cheers as we watched Obama's speech today. "It's Obama's day!" said my AP to my students. "You will remember this day and tell your children and your children's children about this day."

When talking about what the are feeling about this very moment:

I was just thinking that Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation to free slaves in the country and about how now we have our very first African American president. A lot has changed.

Why do people keep saying he's black? He's not just black he's also white because his mom's white. So why is everyone calling him just black?

I'm sorry but slavery, that's trash. What did slaves do to anybody except be forced to live here and work without any rights?

Now that we have our first African-American president, it makes me think that I can be the first Dominican president.

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Elections

Picture from huffingtonpost.com

Last week, my students made their voices heard by casting their votes at our PS. 161 mock elections.

The results:

In the 5th grade, 89 students voted for Obama. 1 voted for McCain.
In the 6th grade, every student voted for Obama.

Today, I cast my vote for Barack Obama.
Have YOU voted?

Less than 2 months in the classroom...

and my kids beg to dance to "numa numa."

Let's see how many more @ dances they'll know by heart by the end of the year.

If you want to cause a corps member meltdown....

Yesterday, after surviving possibly the worst day of school so far-complete with not one, but two temper tantrums, both of which involved screaming, crying, and kicking things-I came home to my apartment at about 7:30 pm ready to crank away on my work.

I was feeling good, on top of things. Ya, there were two ridiculous tantrums, but I survived them. And, I'd had an incredibly productive Sunday! I had actually created all of my lesson plans for the week-first time all year. All I needed to do was get home and plan for my yearly one-to-one meeting with my principal that was happening the next day. Should be a piece of cake...I have my data, I have my tracking tools, I know where I want my students to be...I just have to type it all out, print out all the beautiful excel trackers I've created...it'll be great.

So I come home and am chatting it up with my roommate as I'm looking for my beautiful laptop with all of my beautiful pre-created lesson plans and beautiful pre-created trackers...and then I ask..."Hey do you know where my computer is? It was sitting right here on the coffee table"

She stops, turns around, and quickly goes to her room saying, "you know what I think happened...I think my friend took your laptop by mistake earlier today."

"Where does she live?"

"...Brooklyn"

2 hours, a nervous breakdown, and 20 missed calls to the poor girl who stole my laptop later, my computer was back in my loving arms.

Moral: Don't ever fucking steal a corps member's laptop.

A fifth grader's thoughts on Social Security

My second priorities is socials security, I pick this prioritie because we don't want people to get hurt and stuff like that, we don't want people to do bad things. For example, what if a person go's in your house and you don't have social security, so the person steels from you and you can't do nothing about it. What are you go to do?

A Milestone

A lot of folks have been asking me to blog or talk about life as a teacher. The truth is, most of the time I don't know where to begin. I spend 10 plus hours in my classroom every day, and could probably write novels about each day and the feelings that I have to unpack and sort through when I get home, that is, in between creating my lesson plans and grading papers. Without having time to properly reflect on each day in my own head, it's a challenge to try to articulate any of it in blog form and to friends.

Forgive me.

But, today it is time to blog about something incredible that happened.

A bit of background. Every few weeks, I give each of my students a reading test to measure their reading progress. The first round of these that I did felt like someone was perpetually slapping me across the face. Yes, I had heard over and over that my students may be well below grade level, but to SEE it and HEAR it in MY students is something very very different.

The first week of school, one of my lowest-level reading students tested at a "K" level. A K is equivalent to about an early second grade level?

And yes, I teach 5th grade.

So her and I had a reality check conversation, set our end of the year goals, and set our daily goals for what exactly she needed to do to reach her first of 6 benchmarks in order to meet her goal.

Today I tested her again. She whizzed passed the K, proudly read through the L, and confidently read at a solid M level until our time ran out, and I had to tell her that we'd have to wait to try the N tomorrow. She looked like she was about to cry, grabbed her goal tracker and ran out the door (with permission) to show the principal all of the growth that she was able to make in one month.

Today was the first day that I saw, heard and felt the tangible results we achieved together for all of our hard work this past month.

It has made why I do what I do so much more real.