Dreaming of Wishing Wells

Here's some of what I've been up to lately: I took these two lovely ladies to Chick Fil A for a Halloween party. It was the first time I've done something fun with my students outside of school, and it was really nice. Yes, it made for a very long day. But it was totally worth it to see how much fun they were having. Plus they're both very quiet in class, so it was great to see them come out of their shells. They were very giggly! Friday we had a school-wide Harvest Festival. Each class painted a pumpkin. I had a lot of fun painting the pumpkin with my class. Somehow everyone got along and no one argued about how the pumpkin should look. We named ours Benjamin, after a student who was on my class roster the first day but then never came. So we sometimes talk about him, cause I made a cubby and nametag for him and stuff. The day I wore my glasses to school (and apparently looked like Harry Potter), I kept taking them off and calling my students Benjamin, which they thoug...

It's a quiet Friday night, and I'm waiting for a new recipe to finish baking in the oven, so I thought I'd sneak in a blog entry. This recipe is not very impressive or exciting (like the black bean and sweet potato chili I made for dinner), but I am expecting it to be delicious. Quick caramel rolls...yum. I'm making them cause I have a squeeze bottle full of caramel syrup and nothing to do with it. It's mostly just caramel and Pillsbury crescent rolls. This is the first blatantly unhealthy thing I've made this year, and I feel OK about that. So I'm just sitting here smelling my caramel-y delicious treat and thinking about my week. It was a big week of changes at Urban Promise School, namely the departure of two teachers, which when you only had seven teachers to start with, is a big deal. They were the two first year teachers. One left for another job in a public school district, and one is going to be doing a different kind of work with the ministry. So jus...

I saw Waiting for "Superman" yesterday. Kristin offered to go with me, and she was great person to go with. I really liked the movie. David Guggenheim did a great job of making you care about the children that the movie follows as they try to get into a charter school. And I liked how he illustrated the statistics with little cartoon people. Honestly, I was expecting the movie to be more controversial. I'd heard different groups (especially teachers' unions) were boycotting it. I left the movie feeling really sad that people were refusing to see it or saying it was evil. Because really the message of the movie was that we need to work together to make sure children get a better education. I guess some teachers are angry because the movie didn't say much about parents who need to do their part and be more involved in their child's education. True. But the movie gave examples of schools that are being very effective at education children from low-income families...

I've still been extra busy with school stuff, and I've been thinking about school a lot, so I feel like writing something that's mostly not about school. Let's see...this might not be too exciting. Yesterday the girl who cut my hair asked me what I like to do for fun, and I literally said, "Uhhhh..." until she asked me another question. I hate answering that question. Yes, I do things for fun, but I never feel like they are exciting enough to say to someone to answer the question. Like I like reading (even though I don't do it too much) and watching my TV shows and going for walks. I feel like that sounds kind of lame. I feel like I should say I like rock climbing and going clubbing and writing bestselling novels or something like that. Speaking of haircut...I got my hair cut. All my hairs. I'm expecting at least 1 kid will tell me I look like a boy tomorrow. But I like it, and it's been a couple years since I last got lots of hair chopped off, whi...

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...