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I am very excited to see that this blog has been successful so far. In anticipation of other changes, I went ahead and bought a domain name, and moved the website to wordpress.org

at any rate THIS IS THE NEW WEBSITE PEOPLE

www.somedayallblogs.com

New updates will be THERE. CHANGE YOUR BOOKMARKS and PLEASE TELL YOUR FRIENDS

Mr.Brown, I have TEN girlfriends!

One thing that really helps transitioning back to the daily grind (and it is a grind) of Institute is a good, cute student story.

I was eating breakfast with a few of my boy students this morning, when “Sadie”, a first grade student in our class, walks past our table to sit with her friends. The boys sighed, and one made an offhanded comment about how cute she is. The kids started to talk about crushes and whatnot, and my heart, which was becoming dangerously hard from the mountain of TFA-related paperwork and acronyms, began to melt again. There is nothing more pure in this world than a 1st grade crush.

After some hushed whispering, one of my students, “Carlos”, racked up the nerve to ask me a question. “Mr.Brown…do you have uh…have uh…do you have a Girlfriend?“

I hesitated for a second, wondering if perhaps I was about to cross some teacher-student line, but then decided to plow on through anyway. “Yeah, I do. But she lives in Ohio so you won’t get to meet her.”

My breakfast mates were incredulous. “She lives in Ohio?!? Isn’t that…like really far away?”

Don’t I know it Carlos. “Yes, it is very far away.”

Carlos fidgeted with his toast, then looked me in the eye. “It isn’t good to have your girlfriend live so far away Mr.Brown” he declared. I started to smile. You don’t know the half of it Carlos, but I appreciate your empathy….

But then he continued. “I think you should get another girlfriend here”.

I had to physically restrain myself from laughing out loud, although Carlos and his two compatriots saw nothing funny or unusual with this statement. “Carlos, that isn’t how it works. You only get one girlfriend at a time. You don’t get to have girlfriends in different states”.

The three boys wrinkled their noses. “That isn’t true Mr.Brown!” Then Carlos declared triumphantly “I have TEN girlfriends!” His seatmates, not to be outdone and lose important street cred, made even wilder pronouncements. “I have 12 girlfriends!” “I have fifteens!”

“Carlos, do these ten girls know that you are their boyfriend?”

Carlos finally became quiet for a moment, then took a drag from his orange juice. “Not all of them.”

Just then, the bell rang, and my students threw away their breakfasts and headed to class, saving me from having to a discussion that I am ill-qualified for. Course, it might be better for them to learn about monogamy now when they’re seven…might save them a slap in the face when they’re 17. Dammit, Mr.Brown was right! You’re only allowed to have ONE girlfriend!

Speaking of slaps though, not every story from my kids causes  aww, how cuuuutes. I get just enough of the cute stories to stave off the frustration and bouts of self-loathing (why are you getting 40%s on your assessments? What am I screwing up?!?)…but they are all also sprinkled with hair-pulling moments.

Consider the ending of my math lesson today. By most metrics, it was going pretty well. My kids were super invested in the game we were playing, and my kids could recite the steps to solve an addition word problem in their sleep, even when that word problem was HARD MATH, and had two double digit numbers. However, one girl, Nikki,  decided to take advantage of the goodwill the class had generated. In the few seconds that I had my back turned to erase the chalkboard, she proceeded to tell a joke to the boy sitting next to her. The joke went like this:

What did the five fingers say to the back of the head?

??

SLAAAAP! I’M NIKKI BIIIIAATCH!

That joke is a lot funnier when this guy tells it. When your 1st graders retell it in class, it loses a little something

When I turn back to the class, I see a little girl crying (the hitter), and two very confused boys (the hitee, and a witness). I had no idea what the hell happened, and nobody was in any hurry to talk. I frantically tried to take care of our end of lesson assessment as soon as possible, then whisked the three kids away for interviews.

Nikki, did you hit Hector? ….No…..

Hector, Ceasar….did Nikki hit Henry?……..Yes Mr.Brown. She hit him because Hector was slow going up to the whiteboard (I know, I’m confused at this point too).

This is when I quit the “good teacher” routine and go all Law and Order on the girl.

Look Nikki, I want to help you here, but you've got to help yourself. Either you admit that you smacked Hector, and we can move on with our lives, or you take your chances at the Principal's office. No, you can't go to the bathroom, and you don't get a phone call

Tears were shed, and chaos reigned. I was upset. By all indicators, it should have been a great lesson. My class average on my assessment was over an 80%, which is outstanding. My kids clearly understood the material, and loved the game. But one errant slap when my back was turned undermines the key idea that my classroom is safe. Plus, what are they going to remember from that lesson…how to solve a word problem, or the fact that a girl threw a punch? I hope that my swift discipline after the fact will nip this behavior in the bud, but I’m sure this is going to happen again in New Orleans.

Its hard. I’m becoming a little bit of a perfectionist. When I made a mistake at my old jobs, oh well…it usually only impacted me, or maybe a few other professionals. When I make a mistake here, I’m impacting over a dozen little kids, most of whom are already very behind, so the stakes are huge. I’ve only been teaching for three weeks, which means that mistakes are going to happen…but I’m having a harder time shaking them off than some of my peers. The stakes are too high to just write off screw ups as “something that happens”…and time is so short to fix them.

I leave Institute in a week or so….obviously a much better teacher than before I came, but also acutely aware of my many flaws, and a little worried about how I’ll fix them in time for my kids.

Its times like this that I wished I had ten girlfriends to comfort me.

PS-If you want to friend this blog on facebook, I think the link is here

Everybody Look At Me Cause I’m Standin’ On A Rock

We’re past the halfway mark at Institute, and everbody is starting to get more than a little bit  crazy. Its been almost a month since any of us have watched anything other than  TFA TV in the cafeteria (BREAKING NEWS…KENNEDY ELEMENTARY SCHOOL IS LEADING THE DATA OLYMPICS…..6 MORE DAYS UNTIL 10 AT 10….CORPS MEMBERS, I KNOW YOUR JOBS ARE HARD BUT REMEMBER THAT ARIZONA STATE IS A DRY CAMPUS…etc). We call up our friends and tell them all of our cute teaching stories, and then when they ask us Thats nice…but how are YOU doing? we stammer and realize we have nothing to say. Jokes about relentless pursuit and acronyms get funnier and funnier.

Man was not meant to live like this forever. So with this in mind, I hopped in a rental car with some friends and drove up to have some non teaching adventures in Northern Arizona.

I actually only knew one of my co-adventurers (a fellow ex-operations coordinator from last year. Remind me, next post, I’m going to write a list of TFA vocab words so ya’ll can follow along) before the trip, and a lot of our itinerary was rather impulsive, but that just made the trip even more refreshing. I have a little excel spreadsheet in my room telling me when I can go to the bathroom, when I can call my girlfriend, and of course, when I need to lesson plan (right now, it says: Sunday S-12:15-3:00. Relax…go to the gym and blog). The idea of just getting in a car and driving, without telling anybody what we were doing and for how long, was a beautiful release. Screw you Action Plans. I’m going to sit on some rocks.

Abour an hour outside of Phoenix, we saw a sign that said “Montezuma’s Castle Exit Here”. Nobody had any idea what the heck that was, but it sounded cool, so off the highway we went, searching for this mysterious castle. Turns out, Motezuma’s Castle is a kind of ancient dwelling carved into a face of a mountain. Absolutely worth the five bucks. Plus, we were all wearing our Teach For America shirts (we’re cool like that), and the Park Rangers happen to love TFA. We got special directions to all the best spots to check out the Grand Canyon.

Next stop was scenic Sedona (a hippie/tourist town deep in the Red Rock Canyons), and the Slide Rock State Park. There is some kind of algae or something on the rocks at Slide Rock that create a natural water slide. The water is also about 7 degrees, and sliding onto rocks isn’t the more comfortable thing in the world, but the place is still amazing.

After jumping off cliffs, sliding down rock slides, and getting our butts completely kicked in by Mother Nature, we headed back to town. Sedona has some great restaurants and shops, but it is also a haven for the profoundly weird. I have never seen so many  psychics, crystal stores, new age centers and the like in one tiny town. Plus, we found conspiracy theory stores, and shops dedicated to aliens. It was like weird had reached critical mass. It made for some interesting conversation that was totally unrelated to teaching though.

That was actually a problem, since the only thing we really had in common at first was teaching. Spending the weekend talking about TFA and “our kids” kind of defeats the purpose of getting away in the first place. I have a sneaking suspicion that despite my best efforts, its going to creep up in my conversations for a long time. Of course, thats all part of Teach For America’s diabolical plan.

We spent the night in a somewhat sketchy hotel in Flagstaff (which is seriously cool town by the way). The highlight of that experience was early Saturday morning, when me and two of my newfound friends were trying to scavenge the remains of their “free breakfast” (I think i got a piece of toast, but the butter was long gone). I was reading the newspaper, and saw that Sarah Palin was resigning, presumably to focus on running for President in 2012. I told my friends that I was thrilled, since making fun of Palin helped launch my career as a freelance writer. Hunter S. Thompson had Nixon, Garry Trudeau had Reagan, I need Palin, etc.

Then the hotel manager, a woman whom I had mentally written off as uninteresting (she’s managing a crappy hotel in Flagstaff) spoke up. Apparently, she also worked in the news media, and was trained by some of the bigwigs in DC to be a network anchor. She quit because she was frustrated by the rigidness of reporting, and left to work in the music business. Basically, she lived a bizzaro-version of my own life…if my life was 100 times more interesting. I never interviewed KISS.

That’s why we challenge our biases boys and girls. Interesting people are everywhere.

Finally, we drove up the Grand Canyon, which is so amazing it is beyond the scope of any superlative. It is so majestic that seeing it is almost a spiritual experience. I can see why the Native Americans were so in to it…I wanted to pray when  I first saw it. (The irony, by the way, of me stomping on former native american land, chomping on Mexican food, wearing my Brazilian soccer jersey…ON THE 4TH OF JULY was not lost on me. I love America so much).

We spent the afternoon hiking, climbing over rocks to get better pictures (anything to make my mother nervous), and enjoying the amazing physical splendor. God did a bang up job with the Grand Canyon. It is more than Grand. It is amazing. It is awe-inspiring. We should think of a better name than Grand (maybe if we filled it with beans and sour cream, it could be a Supreme Canyon).

We rolled back into town last night (thats why I’m a day late)…sunburned, sore, but totally rejuvenated. TFA tells us to strive for balance, then gives us another stack of lesson plans and worksheets to do. We’re supposed to take care of ourselves, and also devote ourselves to our students. We speak a second language of buzzwords and chants.

Sometimes you need to get away for a bit, and recenter yourself. Sometimes you need to stand on a rock before you can be one for your kids.

Why yes, I can shoot rainbows out of my hands. That's why I Teach For America

You can never have too many pictures of the Red Rocks.

Sedona is weird man.

This canyon is more than Grand.

Boom Boom Pow- a few pictures from Institute

Work with me here, I’m going to try and throw up a few pictures I’ve taken. I *just* bought the camera, and I’m a pretty lousy photographer, so don’t expect anything awesome here…just the facts.

The rest of the pictures are on the facebook “fan” page for Someday All Blogs. Feel free to add me. It would make me feel loved.

Forget schoolbuses, we travel in style here at Teach For America...we take a coach bus to school every morning

This is our class motto. Can't you just feel the investment? Man, just looking at that thing makes me want to buckle down and do some extra subtraction worksheets. WORK HARD GET SMART WHOOP WHOOP

A shot from my classroom. It is a little small, and doesn't always have AC, but I love it.

(thats me blowing off some steam by shooting a nerf gun in the computer lab)

More on the facebook page!

Significant Gains

Sometimes, Institute sucks. There is no nice way to say it. Maybe you are stuck in a time wasting seminar while you have a dozen lesson plans to write. Sometimes your friends from home call you and ask why you’ve gone totally AWOL for a month. Maybe you had to use the little kid toilet and you drop down so far your ears pop. Sometimes, you’re up until 2 AM making copies of reading books…and you’re wondering why you deferred graduate school for two years. It isn’t always cute stories and stickers. You run on a nearly perpetual state of exhaustion and rapidly swinging emotions.

But it isn’t always bad. Some days, if even for brief moments, you get reminders why you put up with everything. Some days, you get a little reminder why you signed up for Teach For America. Today was one of those days.

Today marked about the halfway point for Institute instruction (I know, its a pretty short program), so we gave our students a test to see how many objectives they had mastered. Our kids were pretty calm and collected, but I was more nervous than when I took the SAT. If these kids bombed the test, not only are they not mastering critical skills needed for 2nd grade (and well…forever), but it means that I failed as a teacher, and my hard work was for naught. Obviously, the first part there is way more important.

My students are going to enter 2nd grade in the fall, but most of them haven’t mastered all the math skills for first grade. A few of my students weren’t even technically ready for first grade math. We have a lot of ground to make up, in a very short time.

I gave my students a quick pep talk (Ok boys and girls, please try your very best on this test. It’s a great chance to show us what smart superstars you are and how much you know….and also, I made a bet with Mr.Steele that you guys would do better than his students…so don’t let Mr.Brown down), and left them to take their test. After 30 excruciating minutes, I came back in, picked up the tests, and walked to the cafeteria to start grading.

The tests were excellent. Almost everybody passed, and many with flying colors. Every student got the first 8 questions right. They grew by dramatic leaps from their pre-institute test. One kid improved by 170%…from not having a total mastery of Kindergarten math, to knowing about half of the 1st grade objectives. I couldn’t believe it. I grabbed his test and celebrated like I did when Lebron hit his buzzer beater against the Orlando Magic last month.

We still have a long way to go as a class to get these kids ready for second grade, but I couldn’t be prouder of the excellent work of my fellow teachers, and the hard work of my class.

At the end of the day, still with high spirits, came by second pick me up. I just finished up playing a game with my students, and they were getting ready to leave the room. Suddenly, one of my kids came up to the front of the room and gave me a big hug. After the other kids noticed that I wasn’t pushing my student away, just about everybody swarmed me in a big, spontaneous group hug. I almost cried.

Institute will surely suck again later in the week, and my kids will surely struggle with their behavior or with the lessons again at some point this summer. But today, I got another great reminder why I packed my life away in a little Kia and set off to help close the Achievement Gap.

Planning for the UnPlannable

So I’ve taught now for a whole week, and already I’m starting to pick up some of those very important teaching rules…like remembering that no matter how hard and diligently you plan, a kid can always throw a wrench into your lesson.

(you might not think the following story is funny, but it made me crack up pretty hard)

So I’m in the middle of a phonics lesson on Thursday. I worked really hard on planning it, and my kids were pretty engaged. My class typically struggles with a lot of reading concepts, but they were sounding words out and blending like a bunch of little pros that morning. I was feeling really good about everything, until little “Sadie” rose her hand. Sadie is the closest thing my class has to a smartalec (to the extent that you can really have one as a 1st grader..she isn’t really a smartalec at all), but she’s also very bright…so I just assumed she knew how to spell VAN when she raised her hand.

Instead, she said “Mr. Brown, your tie is very stupid. Why is your tie so stupid?” The rest of her table snickered and agreed.

What do you do when you get totally called out by a seven year old? I wasn’t even wearing a stupid tie. It was the tie that I wore to my Senior Formal, and one of my favorites. More importantly though, I risked losing control of the classroom and the lesson, as my students became much more interested in debating the merits of Mr.Brown’s fashion choices than learning how to spell words that end in A-T and A-N. Can’t say I blame ‘em actually.

Lucky for me, Teach For America instincts kicked in. After moving Sadie’s clothespin from Great Green to Warning White on our class behavior chart, she settled down and order was restored. It was a close call though…all of that planning could have been for naught, had I failed to drop the hammer.

And we do a *ton* of planning here at Institute. When you factor in the hours spent at after school seminars, and the time we spend doing our “homework”, I’d say we work 13 hour days on average (and several people work longer than that), so getting the most out of our time is critical. On my corkboard in my dorm I have a daily “action plan” hanging, that details what I’m supposed to do every work day, in little 15 min segments. It doesn’t just say stuff like “2:00, go to Lesson Planning Clinic” or 6:20 AM eat Breakfast….it says stuff like 9:00 PM-Shower. I bet you stink, or 7:30 PM-Call your girlfriend, and 10:45-goof off on the internet before going to bed.

The only other time in my life where everything has been so planned out and scripted was when I served a mission…but even then I was a pretty lousy planner. Looking back, I think several of my daily planners were filled with entries like “1-4:00. Ask Elder Roth because I have no idea what I’m doing” 3:30 PM-Being Christlike and 6:15 PM- We’re going to wing it here but I’m pretty sure it’ll be good. Maybe it was a good thing i hurt my knee and had to go home.

So yeah…learning to plan like that and manage all of my time has been a difficult adjustment. Actually, now that I think about it, most of the things I’ve struggled with here have only been tangentially related to the classroom. I love being in front of my kids, and Sadie’s feelings about my attire notwithstanding, my kids seem to think pretty highly of me as well.

One of things that has been a little difficult is going back to “dorm life”. I don’t have too many fond memories of the last time I lived in a dorm, at American University. The quarters were cramped, the rooms uncomfortable, and other than my high school girlfriend who also attended AU…I didn’t really know anybody. I was practically knocking on doors going “Hi, I’m Matt. Will you be my friend?”

I missed induction, and the first day of institute, so I missed out on some of the critical “clique building” parts of institute. Plus, drinking is a pretty significant part of Corps Culture. After a long week with high stress, low free time and bad food, basically everybody wants to unwind at the neighborhood watering hole. This means that the new Mormon kid has a slightly harder time bonding with everybody.

But thats okay, because I still have staff members from last year that I’m friends with, so I’m certainly not bored. Maybe I’ll just get a little more time to plan this way.

And with my class, I’m going to need it.

First Days and Pep Talks

By the time you read this, I’ll have had three days of teaching under my belt. Its already been quite an emotional roller coaster, full of highs, lows, a bit of nausea and a few lost shoes. Surely I have enough thoughts and stories from just my first few classroom sessions to fill many a blog.

But where to begin? We’ve been teaching our kids that most stories start with the Beginning, so why don’t we start there.

Lets rewind to the night before my first day in the classroom. By the bad luck of the draw, I was assigned to teach the largest block of the day, a 90 min reading session, where we were supposed to read two books together, and discuss the concept of Setting. The week before, just about every staff member, and maybe a quarter of my fellow teachers, asked me how I felt about going into the classroom on Monday. I, of course, dutifully answered “I’m so excited!”, but in real life, I was maybe 30% excited and 70% completely terrified. I had not been a good student back in the day. I was actually expelled from preschool (long story). I feared Karma was going to be get her revenge on me…and quite frankly, I deserved it.

Those worries didn’t subside that night. I awoke at 3:00 AM in a terrified cold sweat, completely convinced that I had slept through my first bus, breakfast duty AND the first hour of my lesson, and it was only a matter of time before the Teach For America police entered my dorm room and carried me off to uncertain doom (and certain unemployment, which I guess is kinda the same thing). I eventually went back to sleep, only to awake every half hour from a new nightmare. I dreamt I finished my entire 90 min lesson in 15. I dreamt a kid peed on my shoes. I dreamt I caught Turrets and yelled George Carlin’s Seven Dirty Words bit at my first graders when they forgot the line up procedure.

Finally, my cell phone began to play Bruce Springsteen’s Livin In The Future, letting me know it was now 6:00 AM, for real, and I better get my butt out of bed and into the shower if I was going to make it to school on time. I hoped that my fear and self doubt would somehow dissipate between my shower and when I stepped in front of 16 eager first graders, introducing myself as Mr.Brown.

Oddly enough, that’s exactly what happened. As soon as I saw my first kid at school, my terror and uncertainty were instantly replaced by excitement and energy. My students were totally psyched to be in school, and they were ready to learn..how could I not match that intensity?

I have to admit, the first lesson went better than I could have possibly expected it. Not only do I have a class full of adorable little heart breakers, but for a gang of squirrel-y seven year olds, they’re quite well behaved. I marveled at their ability to become totally pumped over even the most mundane things. When I told them I was about to draw a name from our Student Leadership Jar to find out who was going to help me pass out books, they got more excited than a bunch of middle aged moms at an Opera taping (now YOU get a car! And YOU get a car! WE ALL GET CAAAAAAAARS!!). If they get this jazzed up over passing out pencils, just wait until we get to spelling.

The first day wasn’t totally perfect. My class still struggled with the actual definition of the word setting. Okay boys and girls, where are the characters on this page? IN THE MUD!! And when is this happening? DURING THE DAY! So if we know where the characters are, and when the characters are, we know the….what? Crickets. Crickets. I might have stuttered a few times, like I am wont to do when I get nervous, and a few students hadn’t mastered the idea of raising their hands before blurting out a completely unrelated story. Mister Brown!! Mister Brown!! Can I tell you a secret? I can’t swim!

I also have one particularly devious student, whom we will call Maria (note: her name isn’t actually Maria. All names in this blog have been changed to protect the innocent. And the extremely guilty), figured out that she can get out of class if she says she has to go to the bathroom. Over the course of my 90 min lesson, Maria tried to go to the bathroom roughly every four min, so either she has a bladder the size of a marble, or she is trying to escape reading time by hanging out by the toilet. According to my co-workers, she tried the same shtick in math as well. Well Maria, I’ve been around the block a few times, and I’m getting wise to your Reindeer games. No more going to the bathroom 11 times a class. I’m watching you.

Later that day, after all the children had gone home, I was sitting in the library, working on a later lesson plan, and talking to my CMA (Corps Member Advisor, or one of my mentoring teachers). I remarked that I was glad I had a pretty well behaved class, so I could focus on the more academic parts of teaching.

My CMA agreed, and told me that was going to be an stark contrast to New Orleans. When I pressed her for details, she said that a hugely disproportionate number of elementary kids in New Orleans suffer from behavior disorders. The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina left many little kids with some kind of post traumatic stress issues. According to her and others, New Orleans is still, in many respects, an unsafe city. Many kids hear gunfire every night. Gang violence is rampant, and several gangs target small children in some way for part of their initiation rituals. Police forces are undermanned. Poverty is rampant. Every social problem you can think of exists in the area in spades, and the kids are left holding the bag.

I suppose my mouth might have literally hit the floor after hearing all this. I almost cried. What, I wondered aloud, have I possibly gotten myself into?

My CMA said teaching is a profession of failure. You will almost never come home and say “I had a perfect day with a group of challenging students”. You will always wonder about the things you could have done better, and you’ll always be tweaking. It won’t be easy.

But, she added, you will have the chance to quite literally save the lives of some children. The State of Louisiana uses literacy scores for the 3rd grade to determine how many prison beds they will need. The stakes couldn’t be higher for those kids.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, which I warn my students not to do in their class reading. Our story is still just in the beginning. We have many more chapters left.

Work Hard, Win Lobsters, Whoop Whoop!

So I’ve been at institute a week now, and I’ve already had one of the most profound discoveries in the history of man. I have located the exact location and description of Heaven.

It is off of Rural Road in Tempe Arizona. Its an In N Out.

For my burger-deprived midwestern friends, In N Out is a famed fast food chain located in Arizona, Nevada and California. The menu is spartan (just burger, cheeseburger, or double cheeseburger) but they also have a large, secret menu for those “in the know”. The staff is almost eerily friendly, and after taking a few bites of the divine burgers, everybody else is too. I hadn’t seen such friendliness in such a packed place since I covered the Obama Inauguration. Plus, everything is white and super clean. If I’m lucky enough to get to Heaven, and they don’t have In N Out burgers, I’m looking for a different eternal residence.

A big, tasty burger was just what I needed after an exhausting first week…and what was without any real teaching. It seems weird trying to describe Institute as a really physically exhausting place, since you basically just sit in seminars all day, try to trade your three sugar cookies for somebodies baked Doritos, and write (and rewrite…and rewrite) lesson plans until the wee hours of the morning. Maybe its that Arizona heat that wipes you out so much. Maybe its the stress. Maybe its the fact that I graduated college on sunday and haven’t had a real moment to catch my breath since March. Regardless, I have been a whole different kind of tired, and its nice to finally chill a little bit on this warm Saturday.

The seminars kind of try to squeeze a four year teaching degree into about a week. We learn about classroom management, how to teach phonics, how to effectively plan, and an entire language full of acronyms and buzzwords. I’ll try to define them as best I can in this blog, but be warned, a few random CMAs, ICs, APs, DIOs, OCs, and OMGWTFs are going to slip in there.

I’ve also noticed that an awful lot of them would make excellent band names. I think, once I get to New Orleans, I’m going to start a Corps Member band called Justin Meli and the San Diego Quick. Our hit single is going to be “Work Hard, Get Smart (Whoop Whoop).”

Its funny how the buzzwords become such a part of you so quickly. Granted, I’ve been making Student Achievement (and student achievement) jokes since last year, but now everybody is talking about relentless pursuit at the gym, and having a sense of possibility for the Chicago Cubs. The best was when we went out to a bar last night, and some grizzled teachers were yelling WORK HARD, GET DRUNK, WHOOP WHOOOP!!

Actually, there was something else noteworthy about that bar. So, lots of bars have little bar games…darts, pool, pinball, Golden Tee, whatever. This place in Tempe had one of those little claw games…you know, where you stick in a dollar, and try to maneuver the claw to grab a stuffed bear or something. Only it didn’t have stuffed bears. It had something way, way, cooler. Try to guess.

Give up? They had LOBSTERS. Like, real, live, lobsters in a tank of water. We all decided that we absolutely HAD to win one, ‘specially after somebody offered to write lesson plans for whoever won one. Sadly, not only was this machine rigged like every other claw game, the damn lobsters move whenever you get the claw on top of them. You need a way to stun them first. You may have won this round lobster…but I’m on to you and your games.

Part of the money went to benefit Arizona schools, so I guess its all okay in the end. Even at the bar, at Institute, its all about Student Achievement.

BTW, I am going to try and update these every Wednesday and Saturday. As we say in the biz, that is my Big Goal.

Institute Diaries Volume I

So I’ve been at the Phoenix Institute for over 24 hours now, and I haven’t failed out or died of heat stroke yet. I thought I’d send out a little sample day by day schedule, so you guys can see what life is like out here so far, and what I’m doing on my quest to become a teacher.

5:55 AM-My alarm goes off, and I stumble out of bed, tangled in sheets, and fall on the floor in the darkness. My dorm building, like just about everything at Arizona State, is brand new (and also under construction). However, somebody forget to mention that overhead lights would be a good idea….so once that sun goes down, my little room is pitch black, besides the faint glow from my laptop and my cell phone. I’ve gotten pretty good at using that light to get me dressed and out the door in the morning.

6:20 AM-time to head down to the dining hall for a big, hearty hot breakfast before a day of seminars. As dorm food goes, ASU’s is excellent, I have to admit. I load up on Pancakes, Muffins and fruit, while watching a little bit of sportscenter on the flatscreens. It appears the Indians blew another lead in the 8th inning. Great.

6:42 AM. After breakfast, I need to grab my boxed lunch before I head out to the bus. Getting a good lunch is critical. If its lunchtime, and you open that box, and you get crappy chips, or a soggy sammich…well, you’re going to have a bad day. Its amazing that I’ve barely been here, and already my requirements for a good day have already been rapidly changed. For example, today, my lunch had two cookies. Automatically…it was going to be a good day, no matter how many lesson plans I had to do. Its all about that boxed lunch.

6:50 we head out to our coach buses (take that other institutes. You guys have to ride school buses….ours have plush seats and TVs….also they also insist on piping in Kenny G in the morning, so maybe you have the advantage after all). The buses take us to our elementary school sites. Today, I will spend most of my school workday in seminars to help prepare me to teach 1st grade. Today, I’ll also be meeting a few of my students for the first time to give them a reading diagnostic test.

11:40-Somewhere around this time, we start eating. We don’t really get a formal lunch break per se, so we chomp away on our apples and cookies in the middle of a seminar on classroom culture. 22 year old college graduates silently participate in the underground economy of lunchboxes, swapping fruit, chips, and everything else. I’m still on Ohio Time, so my body thinks it should be eating lunch around 9 AM. Needless to say, I pretty much annihilate my food.
12:30-The time has come…I leave the music room where I was eating, and get ready to pick up one of my future students, so I can give her a diagnostic reading test. The reading test is a somewhat complicated endeavor that we just learned about late last night, so naturally most of us are nervous. I do my best to put a confident face forward. If I remember anything about my tenure as a 1st grader, I remember that little kids can excellently smell three things
-when somebody brings a new and exciting bit of junk food to lunch
-when somebody farts in class
-when a teacher is afraid. Oh, how they can smell fear.
My fears melt away when I first enter my classroom. My first grade is class is a group of 22 heartbreakers. They are absolutely adorable. I lead one of the girls to the cafeteria to give the test, and along the way, we have a spirited discussion about her new Hanna Montana backpack. I think over the course of the thirty min we spent together, I learned more from her than she did from me. I suspect this won’t be the first time this happens over the summer.’
3:30-After some more seminars and data tabulating, we end a little early and get on another bus. Today is a special day, since we have our Institute Opening Ceremony today. We’re going to be shipped along to a spiffy theatre in downtown Phoenix, and we’ll hear journal entries from previous corps members, a speech from a famous alumni, and a speech from Wendy Kopp herself, the founder of TFA.
While we’re waiting for the presentation to start, the various school groupsings and corps begin to yell their chants. Despite having the most members, the Greater New Orleans chant was outclassed by Phoenix and South Louisiana (prob because I wasn’t at induction to help craft it…I’m sure). My personal favorite goes to the New Mexico corps members, who yelled NEW MEXICO IS BESTICO. My budding teacher instincts remind me that Bestico is not, in fact, a word. MS word just threw a little red line underneath. A for effort though.
The presentations were great…some were funny, some were heart-wrenching, but all of them (with the possible exception of Wendy Kopp, who, while obviously brilliant, suffers from a bit of a charisma gap. Great information though) helped reignite our fires, and reminded us why we decided to join the corps to begin with. We are passionate about bringing educational equality to this country. Nobody said it was going to be easy, but surely it will be worth it. I feel like I’ve heard that phrase in my life a lot lately.
6:30 PM. We finally get back to campus. I change out of my shirt and tie, throw on an APO shirt, and head down to dinner, where I promptly eat way too much. Normally, I take a little time out here to chill before I do my homework, but I have a lot of lesson plans to do tonight, and I’m not a great lesson planner, so I head out to the computer lab to meet with some of my fellow teachers shortly afterwards.
10:00 PM. After some careful time management, it looks like our homework is just about done. I planned three lessons for next week. If all goes well, my 1st graders will learn how to find the setting, and the problems in a book. It was difficult to find a good text, because most 1st grade level books don’t exactly have dramatic tension. Apparently, they are basically just lists of nouns. However, we eventually find out about going on a bear hunt.
10:15-Time to go for a run. At 10:15, it’s around 85 degrees, so just cool enough that I can run my two miles without being surrounded by buzzards. I made the mistake of running in the morning last time I lived in Arizona. It was like running inside an oven set to “Shake and Bake”. Never again.
11:00 Time for a shower, a few min on the internet to read the news/email, and then head to bed. I gotta have energy for tomorrow..my kids are coming soon.
Its intense here, but going pretty well. We’ll see how my attitude holds up once I actually start *teaching*.

Oh Come, Lets Sing Ohio’s Praise

Columbus isn’t Washington DC, or Chicago, or New York. It may have some tall buildings, but if you look out their windows, you can still see farms. It may have a professional hockey team, but we’re a college town at heart. It may have over 700,000 people, but nobody would ever have it confused with “the big city”.

But thats okay. Its familiar, warm, full of tradition and a great place to grow up. All in all, I’d say Ohio State and Columbus in general are quite underrated. Here are some of the things, in particular, that I’m going to miss in New Orleans…

-Buckeye Doughnuts. The actual food at Buckeye Doughnuts is pretty good, but it isn’t exceptional…certainly nothing that a non stoned or pregnant person would cry out for in the middle of the night. Its more of the *idea* of Buckeye Doughnuts that makes it so exciting. It is one of the few places in the neighborhood that is open 24/7, and the place is almost always full; be it with homeless people, drunkards, students cramming for tests, or the city’s small but very visible bohemian weirdo population. BD has a bench along the window, so its the perfect place to nurse a cup of coffee and a doughnut and just people watch. Many of my notes were penned, at different hours of the day, at Buckeye Doughnuts.

-This one really comfy chair in Stillman Library. Finding a good place to sit and read is always a challenge. My apartment, even with the TV off and all other stimulations muted, was still “too loud” for me to ever get any reading or writing done. I may have spent so much time in SEL that my mail was being forwarded there, but it was never really comfortable, in part because most of the chairs looked like they were built out of balsa wood and sticky tac.

Stillman Library is different. It is much smaller than SEL, and always less packed. I suspect because people actually still go there to use the *library* part, instead of just the computer labs and study desks. Right next to the big spiraling staircase in the center of the library, along the windows that look over High St, rests a collection of big brown comfy chairs. When I want to do leisure reading, or hammer our some work on the laptop, I make a beeline for one of these chairs.

-The Indianola Woods. Did you know that the largest off campus neighborhood actually has a name? It’s true! Or at least, I read about it on Wikipedia. If Wiki is correct, the Indianola Wood is the neighborhood east of High St, between the Short North and Clintonville…or basically, where most of us live.

On the surface, the neighborhood isn’t anything special. Most of the houses and apartment complexes are old, and without distinction in their architecture. Most of the fun bars are on High St. It can be a little bit dangerous at night if you aren’t careful, and there is never a good place to park.

But it is also the place where so many of us first found our independence. The first apartment I ever really paid for was in “the woods” (on Chittenden Ave to be exact. That street now goes by a different name in my household). While nobody would compare the area to the Hamptons, it isn’t without a unique charm. Many people go to great lengths to put funny decorations up, and parties and outdoor get togethers happen ever few doors. Walking around Indianola Ave during a warm May night is like walking into a giant block party, with dozens of people tossing beanbags and frisbees, sharing stories and jokes, and playing music. It was a warm, friendly, carefree atmosphere…and sometimes made me forget  the fact that my door didn’t always close right and my shower had a funny stain.
-Jumping in Mirror Lake. Come Michigan Week, thousands of Ohio State students jump into frigid Mirror Lake, sometimes while it is snowing…because nothing says “I hate Michigan and everything they stand for” like getting hypothermia. Whatever we’re doing though, its working, because we haven’t lost to that team up north since I got a BUCK ID.

I jumped in the lake twice. The first time, I went with a high school friend and her roommate. Before I jumped in, I handed my hoodie, shirt and other clothes to one of her sorority sisters, and asked her to watch them for a few seconds. After I jumped in (holy balls that water is cold), I sprinted over and asked for my clothes. Somehow, in that 5 min, my clothes had vanished…leaving me to run from the lake to Chittenden in just my swim trunks and flip flops (it was about 10 degrees out). That led to this memorable convo with a police officer.

Cop- “Son, I really hope you’re drunk right now”
Me- “No sir, I’m just a Mormon who has made a terrible life decision”.

I was smarter the second time around, bringing extra clothes and a more reputable crowd to guard my gear (my APO brothers). That night of frigid debauchery was one of my favorites of my entire college experience. If somebody as straight edged as me and muster up the nerve to jump, there is no excuse for any other Buckeye to not take the plunge at least once.

-The RPAC. The RPAC is the Tah Majal of college rec centers. You should all google a picture of it…it is a tower mass of glass and steel that rests next to the crown jewel of our campus, Ohio Stadium.

The RPAC isn’t just a typical gym. Sure, you have rows and rows of all kinds of weight machines and cardio equipment, but that is just the first floor. We also have two swimming pools, a ping pong center, a boxing area, racquetball, 3 basketball courts, volleyball, dance classes, martial arts, a daycare, a store and a driving range. Seriously. The RPAC prob has its own zip code. Ohio State had three other gyms on campus, which include an indoor soccer field and a climbing wall. You would think that just walking around this place would be a workout enough, but the school generously supplied more toys than we could ever hope to use.

-Carmen Ohio. Our Alma Mater is sung to the tune of one of my church’s hymns, “Come Ye Children Of The Lord”. Thats fitting I suppose, because Carmen is certainly the closest thing to a hymn in the Ohio State experience. After all university events, total strangers will link up arm and arm and sing this song. I’ve seen 300 pound tough guys shed a tear during Carmen. It melted every recess of my cold, cynical heart.

-A life of  comparably little responsibility, and boundless academic opportunity.

To my friends who are just starting college, join everything and try everything you can. Soak it all up, and enjoy it while you can.

To my fellow graduates, good luck and God Bless. To my fellow Buckeye Brothers, I will miss you terribly, but I will see you sooner than you think.

My fellow corps members are at Induction in New Orleans right now, and I will join them at Arizona State for Institute on monday (My graduation ceremony is on Sunday). More updates to come once I get to Institute.