And it's all small stuff

Whenever we hold on to our anger, we turn "small stuff" into really "big stuff" in our minds. We start to believe that our positions are more important than our happiness. They are not.

(Don't Sweat the Small Stuff; Richard Carlson)

Made it to Winter Vacation!

It was a rough week, but I'm home free! Now, the only thing standing between me and the Puerto Rican beaches is a glorious weekend in NYC.

Dream a little dream

I've had the most intense dreams I've probably every had in the past few months, and when it happens, I'm generally jolted awake with a very strong emotional reaction, and not a good one.

I'm thinking that my subconscious is attempting to tackle emotions that I've managed to conveniently tuck away in the daytime. Needless to say, it's making my few hours of rest more intense than necessary.

Has anyone written down their dreams before?
I'm thinking I might try this out.

Ooooh, we're halfway there!

Oooh living on a prayer
Take my hand, and we'll make it I swear
Oooh, living on a prayer!


I'm officially more than halfway done with the school year.
And Wednesday is the 100th day of school.
Booya!

Puerto Rico in 8 days

I'm Egyo...my skin is not meant to be this white.

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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