Relentless_Pursuit_Of_Acronyms

Mister Brown, when you get a free moment, please head up to the office. Thank you.It really doesn’t matter how old you are. Whenever you get called up to the Principal’s office, you get a little uneasy. My administration never calls me up for idle chit-chat. Did I forget to file another piece of important paperwork? Am I going to be formally observed soon? Do I have another unscheduled parent visit? Good things rarely happen in the Principal’s office, even as a teacher. You can forgive me then for being a little uneasy when my intercom crackled another beckoning last Thursday.

When I stepped into that trailer though, my stereotypes were shattered. Sitting next to the desk, grinning…no, it couldn’t be…she lives in Ohio…was my girlfriend. The secretary was absolutely beaming, as though she had personally set the entire thing up. “I think you have a little surprise visitor.” I might have had a brief moment of acting like less than a Serious Professional out of sheer joy.

My students are at PE during the last hour of the day, so me and my girlfriend thought we would be alone in my classroom (so I could quickly finish my lesson planning and paperwork!). Schools are terrible places to keep secrets though, and as soon as we walked out of that office, every single teacher, staff member, and 70% of the students knew that Mr.Brown’s girlfriend was in room 128. I had barely set my manuals on my desk when the receiving line started to form around my door.

The first people to enter were the adults. We had all the 4th grade teachers (ah, we figured you were his girlfriend! We haven’t seen Mr.Brown smile like this in weeks), support staff, and even an extremely enthusiastic cafeteria worker, who unfortunately was under the impression that we were engaged (Y’all gonna have SO MANY PEOPLE AT Y’ALL WEDDING! EVERYBODY IN NEW ORLEANS IS LIKE ONE BIG FAMILY AND I CAN HARDLY WAIT and oh…I’m sorry, I figured y’all was…whoops). Dee was a remarkably good sport about all the attention, which was about as much as my sister got when she *actually* got married.

I’m not sure how, but eventually the news reached my students out at the PE pavilion.  One by one, EVERY SINGLE ONE of my female students “forgot” a textbook or something important in their desks, and decided to pay Mr.Brown and his special guest a visit. Their reactions were some of the funniest moments in the classroom. One girl waited until Dee’s back was turned, then turned and gave me a thumbs-up and a Borat-esque “Very niiiiiice”. That girl is ten by the way.

Other, one of my very favorite students, breathlessly whispered “she’s pretty” to one of her classmates. After I introduced them to Dee, the student turned to me and said “Oh Mr.Brown, she’s much too pretty for you!”

Another, with a perhaps more challenging personality, was a little less subtle. She barged into the classroom, basically yelling “SORRY TO INTERRUPT YOU TWO LOVEBIRDS, BUT I NEED TO GET MY MATHBOOK. She then proceeded to empty out the entire contents of her desk onto the floor, while loudly pondering as to the location of her text. After deciding that she had caused enough of a commotion, she turned to my girlfriend and asked her what her name was. After she said “Deanna”, my student turned and gave me a devious look…as if she had just learned some very important dirt about Mr.Brown that could be exploited at a later date.

Readers recall, this is the same student who wrote me a note imploring me to “Get my face out of the way” of oncoming Tetherballs, and continues to demand that I “Go back to Hawaii” when she’s upset.

I’m quite curious to see what my students will say when I go back to school tomorrow. Elementary school kids, I have learned, have an absolutely amazing capacity to notice and remember the tiniest, mundane facts about their teachers. Many struggle with their times tables or weekly spelling words, but all notice when I haven’t shaved, if I accidentally wore the same shirt twice in a week, that I’m not wearing a wedding band, and that I tend to put my left hand on my chin when I’m thinking. I can’t help but wonder what they’ll do after a fairly big event…the mythical Mr.Brown’s girlfriend, traveling 1,000 miles from The Ohio to see their teacher. I was pretty sure a few of my male students thought that Dee didn’t exist…like she was the “girlfriend from Canada” that maybe some of us made up in middle school to sound cool (not me though…I certainly wouldn’t have done something like that at 13. Not me.).

Long distance relationships are hard for anybody. Anecdotaly speaking, I suspect TFA-long distance relationships have an even harder time than most, since the job demands so much time and emotional investment. I felt like you couldn’t go more than a day or two without somebody getting dumped during Institute, and then again around Thanksgiving. I’m a lucky guy, in that I not only have an understanding girlfriend, but one who cares enough to pull off an elaborate surprise visit. Many of my CM friends have not been so fortunate.

I may be subject to all manners of embarrassing interview questions, from staff and students alike tomorrow. I plan to be as much of a Serious Professional as possible, directing all inquiries back to our quest to learn Math and Reading. Thats a small price that I’m willing to pay for the best week ever though. Mardi Gras and a girlfriend visit in the same week?

Man. I bet I’ll even be a little less nervous if I have to go to the Principal’s office this week.

As I’m sure you all know, the long suffering New Orleans Saints beat the Indianapolis Colts 31-17 on Sunday to win the Super Bowl. Much ink has been spilled describing what this means to the city and for professional football. Many sportswriters much better than I have already covered that story, so I won’t waste your time with it. Instead, I’d like to offer up how the Black and Gold’s march to the Super Bowl has impacted me and my classroom.Growing up near central Ohio, I had the misfortune of being a Bengals fan. From 1993 (when I was 6) to 2004, the Bengals failed to finish better than 8-8. I blew my meager allowance on a Peter Warrick jersey and Carl Pickens football cards. I lived too far away from Cincinnati to actually go to a game, but I dutifully watched as many as I could from TV. Times were tough now, but I knew eventually the Who Dey nation would have their day.

That day never really came though. In 2005, my senior year in high school, the Bengals finally broke through, winning the AFC North and booking a trip to the playoffs. On the 2nd play from scrimmage, star QB Carson Palmer took a shot to the knee, and never recovered. The team fell into a spiral of defeats, and more embarrassingly, increasingly serious criminal charges. By 2007, after more Bengals were appearing in the police blotter than the box scores, I decided I had enough. The Bengals jersey was folded up and placed in a dark corner of my apartment closet. I declared myself an NFL vagabond, searching for a new team.

The hit that ruined my Bengals Fan-dom

I moved around the country a little bit, trying out the local team, but the Redskins and the Raiders didn’t really feel right. I didn’t have the right emotional attachment to the team. I took a few seasons off from serious NFL devotion, and decided if I couldn’t latch on to the team in my next city, me and pro football might be done. As luck would have it, TFA placed me in New Orleans, so I decided to pick up the Saints.

We love football in Ohio. High School’s of only a few hundred students often draw several thousand for Friday night games, and Ohio State packs in over 100,000 every home game. I’ve never really witness such passion for a pro team though. What New Orleans’ has for the Saints dwarfs whatever is going on in Buffalo, Cleveland, San Fransisco…everywhere except perhaps for Green Bay. it is impossible to not be swept up in it. By week 5, once a serious buzz was starting to gather around the team, I couldn’t help but let myself get swept up in Saints fever.

Me and my students have had a hard time getting on the same page. We don’t seem to have very much in common…in interests, life experiences, background, or even values. When I came here, I couldn’t tell a crayfish from a crocodile, and they couldn’t find Ohio on a map (some stubbornly still insist I’m from Hawaii). We had very different ideas about what we wanted to get out of school. We shared few common interests (I wanted to teach multiplication, they wanted to ask about my girlfriend. I wanted to teach them how to pass the LEAP, they wanted to show me the correct way to Moonwalk, etc). About the only common ground we were able to establish was a love of football, and by extension, the Saints.

We used the Saints in class as much as possible. There is a huge poster of Drew Brees in our makeshift gym. BLESS YOU BOYS, and headlines from every Saints victory adorn our cafeteria trailer. My students sometimes write WHO DAT instead of their name on assignments, and lately, have insisted that I call them by certain player’s names instead of their own (Reggie Bush sits next to Darren Sharper, who sits next to Pierre Thomas, who sits next to Nancy. She didn’t want to participate in the name changing). Like many other teachers in the 504, I tried to incorporate the Saints into as many lessons as possible. I think that is the only way my kids learned about averages.

I didn’t put in the 43 years of suffering that the locals did…but I hope the church of the Saints takes converts, because I burst into euphoria like everybody else after Porter returned that interception.

There have been some wonderful, exciting experiences since I moved to New Orleans…but if I am being totally honest, most of it has awfully rough. I was unemployed for a month and a half, my classroom has mostly been a mess, my car has flooded, and I’ve been terribly lonely. There has only been one thing that has consistently been good since I moved here…The Saints. I knew that no matter how bad I was professionally beat down during the week, and no matter how sad I got on the weekends, I could count on Sunday afternoon to pick me back up. I know thousands of people in New Orleans felt the same way.

Thank heavens for the the Saints, for giving me something to hang on to and believe in, when everything else seemed to fall apart. That season is why I follow sports, and I hope that everybody who passionately follows one can enjoy a season like it. Everybody should get a chance to sprint outside like I did Sunday, embracing random strangers on Magazine Street and screaming WHO DAT at the top of my lungs. Everybody should get to see a victory parade.When the winds blew and the rains fell, Believing In Dat helped keep me and my students going.

Believe Dat. Its whats its all about.

traffic kept me from actually getting to the Quarter after the victory (although I later learned some of my students were there…they’re 10 btw) but it looked a little something like this

Blog reader Rebecca asked me to elaborate on my classroom economy. Today seems like a good day to talk about it, especially since the economy of Room 128 is reeling like a debt-laden 3rd world country right now.I set up the system after Christmas break as a way to increase lagging classroom investment and reinforce our class rules. My students were not impressed by my previous attempts to get them to follow the rules (good grades, choice of learning activities, fear of punishment, screaming,  and in the case of one student, allowing me to change his name in class to Darren Sharper). I was hoping that a good ol’ bribe external incentive might help.

The kid went all out with this alter-ego business. He writes Darren Sharper on all of his tests, only answers to Mr.Sharper, and even wears a strip of electrical tape on his chin to simulate a beard. All of that is 100% true. At least now he listens in class.

Here is how the system ideally works. Students earn $3.00 in Mr.Brown bucks a day. They can lose money for breaking class rules, and can earn bonuses by doing all homework, transitioning to another activity quickly, winning a class game or doing extra class jobs. Students are given a paycheck twice a week, and can shop at our class store on Fridays. Students are required to keep a ledger showing their deposits and withdrawals.  Classroom store goods included school supplies, stickers and candy, as well as special privileges, like eating lunch in my classroom.

I knew this was going to be a complicated process, so I tried to do as much frontloading as possible. We did several model balance sheets together as practice. I spent an entire Social Studies lesson explaining (and practicing) the procedures and expectations for money time. I felt like I did a pretty good job following all those steps for expectation-setting they teach you in certification class.

Our first payday actually went pretty smoothly. I erred on the side of giving more generous paychecks, and the kids were excited about their possible prizes. Our first “payday” took a lot of classtime, but I figured that investment was going to be worth it if it we had few behavior disruptions during our lessons. It is not unreasonable to think I waste nearly 30 min a day just trying to get my student to be quiet long enough for me to give directions. That is as long as I get to teach Writing every day.

After a few weeks though, I think I need to start making some changes to the system. First, after over 3 weeks, we’re still taking nearly a half hour to pass out paychecks, update our balance sheets, and make our purchases. As soon as the checks are passed out, all students immediately begin to shout out how much money they have (or don’t have)…sometimes to me. MISTER BROWN!! MISTER BROWN JUST WROTE ME A CHECK FOR SIXTEEN DOLLARS?? Really? You don’t say! Students have also been fudging the numbers on their balance sheets on purpose, which led to the creation of Mr.Brown’s IRS, which audits their bank accounts. One student has been “arrested” for writing bad checks. I’m waiting for somebody who is good at math to try and sell a Ponzi scheme to his classmates.

Ponzi likely got his nefarious start by cheating 3rd graders out of their juiceboxes at lunch.

I had hoped that this activity could teach a few of those important life lessons that aren’t Grade Level Expectations for the LEAP test. I wanted my students to gain some basic financial awareness…how to write a check, how to budget and save money, work towards a goal, and have a little responsibility and autonomy in an environment where admittedly, they don’t have that much.  Right now though, the project has been a bit of a time and (real) money sink, and has fostered some bad blood with my students. The poorly behaved students get a numeric reminder every Friday of how far behind they are compared to their peers, when all they could afford is a pencil or highlighter. Instead of helping them strive to earn the bigger rewards, they just sulk.

Finding motivational tools is hard, when nearly every time I try to step outside the textbook, or the proverbial “box”, I’m met with fighting, cursing and hostility. Lately, those attacks have been getting even more personal. My kids know how excited I was about our new classroom library…so when they get upset at me, they try and destroy a book. Racial references have become a little more pointed and digging…much more so than I would have expected from ten year olds.  They have even taken to walking with a wildly exaggerated gait, ever since they noticed I am bowlegged.

C’mon guys. You know I don’t walk like that.

The money system may not be hopeless yet, but it likely needs to be restructured. In order for it to work, it cannot be a huge boondoggle of paperwork for me, but I think the students need something more than twice a week to help keep them on the straight and narrow. No matter how exciting, aligned and differentiated my lessons may be, it won’t matter if I can’t get my kids to be quiet long enough to hear the INM or the directions. It won’t matter how well I track our data if I can’t collect quality data in the first place because my student refuses to even attempt an assessment (I had a kid simply refuse to take a super important practice LEAP, simply because I wouldn’t let him take the scantron section in orange pen. They are fickle fellows). In the end, not very that I do in our classroom will matter if I can’t get my students…and me…to buy into our goals and our mission.

So I guess in that sense, Carville was right. Developing a working class investment system is critical for our student achievement. It really IS the economy….stupid.

http://relentlesspoa.wordpress.com

Hello again TFA blogging universe! Now that I’ve been teaching for several months, and that the 2010 CMs have exploded onto the TeachFor.Us scene, I thought it was time to bring back the ol’ blog.

Well, it never actually left. The real website is at relentlesspoa.wordpress.com, but I’m going to start double posting the content, so I can link to other TFA blogs more easily.

Hopefully I can figure out how to change the ol’ username too.

Congrats to my new compatriots!

Well, I think it is just about as official as it gets now. I finally moved out of the stinky dorm room at Tulane University, and into my own place here in New Orleans. I am sleeping on my own bed (for 45 bucks via Craigslist…with a toaster and a bookshelf thrown in for an extra 10), and am holding my first piece of mail sent to my new address (a Chase bank statement that basically says I hope you get that job soon because you don’t have nearly as much money as you think you do). My stuff is mostly out of the boxes and tupperware, and my room is finally looking like…a real room.

For better or for worse, this is my new home, in Uptown, New Orleans, Louisiana.

It feels weird to say that doesn’t it? It feels equally weird to type it, or even read it. I live here. Last year, who would have thought that I, a sushi-eating, New York Times reading, import-driving Mormon would be living in the Deep South? It boggles my mind. I figured I would likely have moved out of Ohio by now, but I never thought I would be living in Louisiana. Not as unlikely as say, Provo Utah, but up there.

Not that I’m not glad to be here. Quite the contrary. Despite her well documented flaws, New Orleans has a very captivating charm to it that isn’t easily explained. Certainly it is more colorful than any other place I’ve lived, and I mean that literally (there is a bright teal school by my house) and figuratively.

Lemme give you guys an example. I was driving down Claiborne Ave yesterday, which is a fairly busy 3 lane road. A man was sitting on a cooler next to one of the stoplights, trying to sell Jumbo Shrimp (which are freakin HUGE by the way). This did not register as very unusual to me. I grew up in Ohio Farm Country, and folks would sell sweet corn or whatever out of their trucks off the side of the road all the time. The unusual thing here was the man’s sales pitch. Instead of relying on say, a sign ( Jumbo Shrimp. Affordable Prices. Retailer member of the BBB. FDA Approved), the man went for a more straightforward approach. He hooked one of these shrimp on a fishing pole, and dangled it over the road into traffic. I guess he hoped somebody would be sitting at a light, see a giant  crustacean bobbling in front of his windshield, and make an impulse purchase (Roll down the window honey, I suddenly have a craving for shrimp).

I’m not sure if this was ever a good idea in theory, but in practice, it was even worse. The man didn’t have much of a steady hand, so instead of seeing the shrimp harmlessly bob in front of you, it would smack the front of your car like an unlucky bug on the interstate. I had my car pimpslapped by a shrimp while trying to drive home. This rarely happened in Columbus.

See, that looks pretty tasty. Under my windshield wiper? Not as much.

Some people might think that sort of thing is a nuisance. Those people might be right, but they are interesting nuisances. They are different. They are weird. And you know what? I’m weird too. Maybe we’re a good match New Orleans.

What else have I been doing, besides dodging flying seafood along the highway? Surprisingly, not that much. I had been occupied to unpacking, running around the city and hitting sketchy garage sales and Craigslist postings trying to find crappy furnishings, and turning my apartment into a home. My new place has a porch, a washer/dryer, and maybe twice the space of the last apartment I lived in Columbus. I’m also pleased to learn that it is near the highest point in New Orleans, making it slightly resistant to flooding…but I suspect that is like being the best player for the Pittsburgh Pirates. Whoopie.

What I haven’t been doing very much of lately are teacher things. I still don’t have a placement yet. I had three job interviews last week, and all were canceled at the last second. Over 70 of my fellow corps members are still without jobs, and the first day of school is creeping closer. Without knowing my grade level, it is really difficult to plan for the coming year or buy supplies, and there isn’t anything I can really do personally to speed up the process. Thoughts of “what happens if I don’t get placed” have started to creep into my head, but that is such a horrifying idea that I can’t bare to dwell on it for more than a few seconds.

However, because I am still technically unemployed, and thus trying to save every little penny I can, I am limited as to what I can do with my time. I’ve been doing a lot of reading, writing, and rediscovering my unhealthy addiction to those little Fla-Vor-Ice things that my mom used to buy by the pallet when I was little.

Ingredients: Ice, Blue, Sugar, and Crack Cocaine.

I have a job interview this week, so hopefully when you hear from me again, I actually have a job, and can get my teacher ‘mo back again. Institute feels like so long ago already, and if it wasn’t for this blog, I might forget that I’m a teacher sometimes….I just feel so isolated from everything right now. Here is hoping that changes soon.

Institute: Before TFA Teachers begin working in their assigned region, they go to a 5 week long summer boot camp called Institute. My Institute, here at Arizona State University, houses teachers who will be working in New Orleans, Southern Louisiana (Baton Rouge area), Phoenix and New Mexico. While at Institute, corps members teach a few hours of summer school, and then spent the rest of their lives lesson planning or attending workshops and seminars. On the weekends, they either explore the natural splendor of Northern Arizona, or drink heavily. After the first weekend, most opt for the latter option.

Most of my writing so far has been about my experiences here at Institute. It ends this week, and then (after a quitck stopover in Columbus to get my car and my stuff), I head to New Orleans to start the real thing.

CMA- Stands for Corps Member Advisor. CMAs are typically TFA Alumni who come back to advise and mentor new corps members (henceforth referred to as CMs). Typically about 10 CMs work with a CMA. They grade your lesson plans, observe and critique your lessons, and give you a dirty look when you complain about your workload because they work twice as long as the teachers. Apparently, many CMs hate their CMA with a burning passion, but I really like mine.

CM- Stands for Corps Member…aka, a Teach For America teacher, aka another liberal arts major who has no freakin’ idea what they have gotten themselves into.

OC- Stands for Operations Coordinator. Behind every successful teacher at Institute is a wide-eyed rising college senior, who is more than happy to do all the dirty work in hoping that it increases their chances of getting into TFA. OCs run the computer lab, fix broken copy machines, clean up dorm rooms, get up at the buttcrack of dawn to point CMs to the buses, and tell CMs where to get more toilet paper. Teach For America doesn’t like to admit it, but they’re really just interns.

I was an Operations Coordinator last year at Phoenix, and while the work was often boring, I enjoyed my time there. It also helped me get into TFA the next year. Me and my other ex-OC friends have mentored this year’s crop a little bit.

Wendy Kopp- Mrs. Kopp is the founder of Teach For America. She came up with TFA as her undergraduate thesis at Princeton, and formally founded the group shortly after graduation.  Kopp founded what has become one of the largest and most prestigious non-profits in the country when she was 21. I’m 22. What have I done with my life?  Ugh. Depressing.

Kopp is obviously a very impressive person, and has done a lot of wonderful things for TFA. She is, however, tragically boring. I guess that is a good thing, because it wouldn’t be the same organization if it was all about Wendy instead of say, fighting the achievement gap…but if somebody says they have tickets to see Wendy Kopp speak…go watch TV instead and read the transcript. In TFA-lingo, we’d say she suffers from a “Charisma Gap”.

In fact, I’d like to see _____ Gap be a part of all TFA’ers vocabulary. The food isn’t awful, it just suffers from a “Taste Gap”. I’m not short, I’m just a victim of the “Height Gap” in this country. Spread the word.

At 5-3, Muggsy wasn’t short. He just suffered from the injustice of the Height Gap.

Barack Obama- Approx 73% of Teach For America CMs worked for the Obama campaign in some capacity.

Buzzwords: If there is one thing Teach For America loves more than teaching underprivileged children, (and perhaps scoring some sweet sweet grant money), it’s buzzwords. In addition to all of the vocab words above, here are some other favorites:

Relentless Pursuit of Results

Sense of Possibility

Data!!!! There is no organization more obsessed with data than TFA. Every tiny little thing is tracked, from the number of people using copy machines at every hour, to how we feel about our turkey sandwiches in the morning (hint: we think they suck). We fill out a zillion surveys on how we think our institute is going…and it won’t be a stretch to think that soon, we’ll be filling out surveys on the surveys (on a scale from 1-5, what did you think of the Mid-Institute Survey?)

Work Hard, Get Smart, Whoop Whoop!

Big Goals

Own it.

Coupled with the massive amount of acronyms associated with TFA, and these buzzwords…you can have an entire 10 min. conversation with somebody speaking only TFA-eese. There is a big poster near my dorm room where you can write inspiring messages to other CMs. Some guy wrote TFA: RELENTLESS PURSUIT OF ACRONYMS. If I wrote a book about this experience, that is what I would call the book.

Improvement Plan: Two words that strike fear into any CM…perhaps more so than any phrase besides “uh, we hired you before the economy tanked, and we have no job for you.  Wanna be a Janitor For America?”

True story, Janitor was supposed to be an 08-New York Corps Member before the economy forced him to look into other career paths

Every time a CM is late, or screws up a lesson plan, or forgets to turn something in, or pukes on his CMA at Dos Gringos when he was trying too hard to drink away his frustration, he runs the risk of getting “tracked”. Being “tracked” is a little negative check mark next to your name…or basically, the same thing I do for my first graders. If you get Tracked enough, you get put on an Improvement Plan, which means your CMA talks to you more about what you’re struggling with…and you get the scorn and shame from your other CMs. If you don’t improve, you get kicked out.

In real life, it isn’t *that* big of a deal.

There are many more TFA-words, but this should serve as a good basic primer. Set a Big Goal to learn all of them before the next update.

www.somedayallblogs.com

I’ve never appreciated weekends as much as I do now, as a teacher. My fleeting 40 or so hours of freedom (I tend to do a little work after school on Friday and Sunday after church) are worth their weight in gold. Without them, even the most mentally strong would be reduced to weeping fools, possibly in front of a class of wide-eyed first graders, which would surely be a traumatic experience for all. I now wish I had a time machine, so I could go back and visit myself throughout the years, and tell 10 year old Matt to squeeze every last drop from those weekends and summer vacations…because you have no idea how good you have it.

I’ve needed every weekend at Institute, but this one was needed the most, as this last week was awfully rough, but not for the typical teacher reasons. My kids have been nothing but good, they have mostly done well on their assessments (so either they are actually learning my material, or they are exceptionally good guessers on my multiple choice worksheets). My relationship with my mentor teachers, my CMA and my fellow co-teachers is also quite strong. Considering I studied sarcastic journalism in college, and I’ve been a teacher for roughly three weeks, I should be ecstatic about the way things are going.

Instead, after every lesson, I have felt terrible. My lessons haven’t been engaging. Most of my kids, while still physically presant (well…mostly. Every so often a kid tries to jailbreak and run to the bathroom) , completely tune me out. I have become the dreaded “Dead Audience” teacher, which might be a little surprising given my personality. My lesson planning has regressed as well too.

Honestly, this week, I kept everything together based on sheer force of personality. For some reason, my kids seem to really like Mr.Brown, so they refrain from throwing chairs or instigating a coup of respect. Don’t ask me why…my CMA thinks I walked off the set of Nick Jr, and I guess my kids do too. But if I don’t know why that is, I can’t transfer it to New Orleans. And if my lessons don’t get better, not even a Co-lab with Mr.Robinson and Big Bird could save my class from anarchy.

Of course I jinxed myself as soon as I typed the above paragraph. Watch, one of my normally well behaved girls is going to try and shank me down during a reading diagnostic test.

It hurts to fail like this. Obviously, when you’ve only been teaching for three weeks, you aren’t going to do everything perfectly…but like virtually all TFA Corps members, I’m not used to doing something poorly. This is an organization of ass-kickers. I often feel intimidated, because I went to a pretty average college, and was a fairly average student (although I had had many accomplishments outside of the classroom). My peers went to elite colleges in cities I have never visited, taught orphans in Africa, wrote speeches for Ted Kennedy, or worked for The Onion. Whatever insecurities I have about being compared to my peers are completely magnified every time I leave the classroom without having taught my lesson perfectly.

Which is to say, every time.

I doubt these peridotic feelings of intense self-loathing and doubt are uncommon though, and I also doubt they will be perminant. Now that I’ve had some time to step away from the classroom, realy reflect, and have a great talk with my CMA, I’ve come to realize intellectually that I don’t suck at everything, just a few particiular things which are seldom fatal, and can be fixed. I might not have completely internalized that yet, but I’m sure I will soon.

Getting the time off to think about things unrelated to the < > symbols and fact families is invaluable, even if I don’t really *do* that much during my weekends. Institute culture, with the exception of my trip to the Grand Canyon, is very much centered on two things.

1) Drinking. Usually a lot.

2) Hooking up.

Which means if you happen to be Mormon…well…you’re just SOL. Go read a book, or do a puzzle,  or get married, or whatever it is Mormons do these days.

Dos Gringos, a popular bar near ASU. Inside, about 200 teachers are drinking to forget their lesson plans.

It isn’t like I’m one of those guys who is completely repulsed by the idea of booze. I used to play in a Blues band. I don’t have a problem with bars. But when I’m broke as a joke, it just is not any fun to squeeze myself into an already way overcrowded bar and awkwardly sip a coke (that I paid 2.50 for. In Ohio, I would just say “I’m driving”, and I get all the pop I want. Arizona charges me. Lame). The piped in music is WAY too loud, so I can’t possibly have a conversation with anybody, and there is never a live band. Whats the point? I’d rather save my six dollar cover and get some taco bell or something.

Looks like another EXCITING FRIDAY NIGHT for Mr.Brown!! I hope he doesn’t go too crazy and use the Fire sauce.

So my weekends are spent mostly alone here, which is okay. I go to the gym a lot and try (futilely) to work off the 5,000 calorie food we eat at the ASU dining hall (only college dorm kitchens can find ways to make veggies life-threateningly unhealthy) . I practice my ugly three point shot. I read books.

And thats okay. I’m an adult now (or something), and I don’t need to do the same things I did when I was 18 to take a load off after a busy week. Sometimes, sitting here in my air conditioned dorm and just blaring Bruce Springsteen from my laptop speakers can be enough to get me though another day.

I’ve only got a few more days here in Arizona before I fly back to Columbus, and then to New Orleans for the real thing. Hopefully I can pull myself together in time to end on a high note for my students.

Maybe I’ll teach them to value their weekends.

www.somedayallblogs.com