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.