Dreaming of Wishing Wells

Yes, I did email Oprah this week. I didn't hear back. Which is fine. Ever since I was an intern in Camden for Urban Promise, I've thought it would be cool if Oprah found out about UP and wanted to give us lots of money. But I never did anything about it. On Monday I was at the gym and caught the beginning of her episode about the new documentary "Waiting for Superman." It was really good and lots of my favorite education people were on it, especially Geoffrey Canada. I had to leave before the episode was over unfortunately, because I had to speak at the Urban Promise board meeting. But when I got home I got on Oprah's website to see if there were any clips I could watch or anything. And it said she was doing a reaction show on Friday and there was a link for you to click on if you were a teacher or parent who had a response to the show. So I figured this was my chance to tell Oprah about Urban Promise. I tried to make it relevant to what had been on her show, but ...

Well, I have successfully completed two days of school. The weekend/beginning of the week was really busy with classroom setup and trying to get everything just right for the first day. There are still a few things I didn't get to, but they don't really affect the kids or anything we've done yet, so I'm going to try to go in Saturday to finish it. Like I finally got around to organizing my classroom library into book bins (I didn't want to spend money, so I used random shelves and bins that were around the office, so it's not the most beautiful thing), but I haven't put labels on all the books yet so the kids know how to put them away. But I feel good about how my classroom looks and about the activities I've been doing with the kids so far. I have 8 students this year: 3 boys and 5 girls. I've never had more girls than boys, and it's pretty different! I have a few students that are really, really cute. So far everything's been going smoothly...

So I gave my blog a look more appropriate for fall (Yay! Fall is almost here! No more heat and humidity and fleas!). In a lot of ways, this summer really flew by. A lot happened, too. It's hard for me to believe it's over and that it's time to start another school year. Starting school is pretty daunting; it's kind of like diving into the water and knowing I won't be getting out for ten months. Yes, I'll come up for air along the way, and hopefully I won't drown, but it's still the start of something big. And long. We had inservice this week, and it went really well overall. It's so nice to be with all the teachers again. Of course I miss Linda and Kaitlin a lot. There's no one for me to debrief with after a really long and funny/boring/unexpected/heated/bizarre meeting, whatever the case may be. But that's ok; I can silently laugh to myself, and maybe it's even better that way, although it's definitely not as fun. Everyone was in goo...