To drive one mad

I'm beginning to see why the hierarchy in schools is enough to drive a teacher crazy.

Teaching Sunday School is fantastic, but I feel like it is also a bit of a circus. I'm trying to identify what the problem is, and of course it isn't the students at all. I would say that there are too many people involved, but that isn't true. Having a number of community members involved is a great thing. It must be the way in which they are involved, or some gap in communication, organization, or responsibility.

Here is the cast and the way that they fit in:

The Rabbi - Shows up occasionally and talks with the students.
Jen and I - the teachers, who are responsible for coming up with lesson plans and implementing them.
The students
Leah - Co-runs the sunday school and is always there. Meets with Jen and I to plan events.
Nicole - Mother of a student. Co-runs the sunday school and is always there. Meets with Jen and I to plan events.
Marty - A temple member who comes occasionally for the adult Torah study and sometimes does an activity with the kids.
Margie and Willie - My in-laws, who show up half the time to help me teach Hebrew and offer their perspectives in class.
Lauren - An aide who is often there to help Jen or me.

I have been given a goal and constraint by Leah, Nicole, and the Rabbi.
(G) Ensure that the students bond with the other students.
(C) Half the time (out of 2 hours) should be spent learning Hebrew and half the time should be spent teaching from the Torah.

My own goals are:
(1) Use lived experiences.
(2) Ensure the discussion is meaningful and not wasting students' time.

I usually choose a theme related to ethical issues students face in life that comes up in the Torah portion and we spend the hour telling stories or discussing that topic. Sometimes the students will sum up the torah portion if it is a well-known story and they will come up with the interesting thing to talk about.

Margie and Willie have a lot of opinions on what we should do in the future, which would be great if I had the time or if they fit it in with the Torah, since that is the constraint I'm working under. I agree with many of their inclinations because they stem from the students themselves.

Leah and Nicole want to celebrate all of the holidays, often with activities, crafts, and games combined with the younger kids. It is important because for many of the students, this is the only time that they will celebrate the holiday or understand the history behind it and the importance it now plays, but there are a lot of days dedicated to the holidays given that we only meet two times a month. Here is the schedule for spring:

Jan 31 - holiday
Feb 7th - regular class
Feb 21st - holiday
Feb 28th - holiday
Mar 7th - regular class
Mar 28th - holiday
Apr 4th - holiday
Apr 25th - holiday
May 2nd - possible holiday
May 9th - holiday
May 16th - last day of class.

The Rabbi comes sporadically without me knowing when he will come. When he does come, he does something with the students for a half hour or so. So my lesson, loose as it may be, flies out the window. He also shares ideas for things we should do.

Today, I heard from Leah and Nicole that on the next class we will bake hamentaschen and rehearse a spiel during the non-Hebrew hour. I also heard from Margie that we should talk about the 10 commandments more because we didn't finish today and it is important. Then I heard that we should talk about some of the different issues that come up around race, ethnicity, and religion. The students have a lot of questions and thoughts on this issue because of everything they are exposed to now as youth. The Rabbi said that he wants the students to write letters to Jewish soldiers in Iraq, and I expect that we are combining our class of 10-15 year olds with Jen's class of 7 year olds because of the holiday activities. Oh, and my students want to make a board game about tzedakah (charity) next week after getting the exciting idea in class today.

All of these things are good ideas, but they aren't all going to happen and they certainly won't happen in the hour that we have class on the 21st. It's impossible to make an overarching framework for the semester when we only have two or three regular classes and this many ideas coming at me. It is enough to drive me crazy, and the students are having good discussions, but they could be better if I had the time to make a schedule where each week had a topic of interest relating to the Torah portion for that week. The students could look ahead then and think, "I don't need to talk about this now. It's coming up two weeks from now."

I appreciate working with a team of people who want to be involved. I just wish that it was a proper instructor team which met regularly and was on the same page. I feel like I have 5 coloring book pages stacked on top of one another and I'm expected to color within the lines and create an idenitifiable picture. I wonder what it looks like to the students.

Here is what my picture is shaping up to be:

- I'll work around the holidays because that is really already decided and out of my control.
- March 7th we will make the tzedakah game.
- I'll work with Lauren, the quiet teacher's aide to start a temple group for any students or members who want to talk about identity and ethics outside of class. We'll see what happens.
- Our discussions and Torah study are pretty much over inside of class since the rest of the semester is holiday activities. Why are there so many Jewish holidays in the Spring?

The students are still awesome, by the way. And last week Anthony asked me to write him a letter of recommendation. I was really honored and did my best. I think they all appreciate how we spend our time, even though one of them gripes about everything. One of the youth made a comment today about how meditative learning Hebrew was for him, and they really come alive during the discussions and offer all sorts of observations and interesting questions.

Pictures from December and January

Everything is going well here. I just got back from Illinois. The trip was great. Here are some pictures from before the trip.

Snowshoeing at Zimmerman Lake. I saw several cutthroat trout, which was neat.

Ben and I at the Butterfly Pavilion, where we bought our new tarantula, Helmet.

We bought a live tree for Christmas, and it is growing new shoots now.
Ben is decorating the tree for the first time.

Our Hannukiah.
We let the wax melt all over, because playing with fire never stopped being fun.

Christmas Day.

a new way of looking

Yesterday, unexpectedly, my old friend Sonya called me up. I hadn't spoken to her in a year or two, and she was too busy to respond to my occasional letters. I was surprised to see her name on my telephone screen (it is odd to write the phrase 'telephone screen'). I picked up immediately.

Sonya works with housing issues in D.C. In her spare time, she participates in organized anti-racism efforts. She was just given the task of managing a new community center. She has too many parking tickets and too few hours in the day. Ayumi says that she needs a hobby that is "fluffy."

For a long time, the building for the community center wasn't completed. Several months passed. With each month, she would hear from above that the center would be completed soon and she should begin setting up the programming needed. The next month would pass without any change, and so she could never get started. Sonya told me that for those months her work was in a permanent holding pattern.

Those words struck me -

A Permanent Holding Pattern.

Wasn't my life in a permanent holding pattern? And what am I to do about it?

Have I posted this list before?

My new attitude is awesome. It is sunny outside, and I am sitting in a coffee shop that is totally new to me. I found it in an alley near CSU. There are a lot of windows and plants, and it reminds me of Hard Times. The guy behind the counter gave me a free pot of tea because I told him that it was my first time here.

Yesterday I finished up the final step in getting my substitute teaching license. Now I just have to wait for the gov'ment to process my fingerprints so I can start. Don't get too excited, though. This takes 8-12 weeks.

I taught sunday school today, and the Torah portion is a section of Exodus in which the Israelites are enslaved and Moses is born. The Pharoh has the Israelites perform work without purpose, building cities on sand so that they will crumble immediately after being constructed. It struck me that we perform a lot of this work in our own lives, so I focused on it for the hour. We also discussed the difficulty in differentiating between work without purpose and work in which we cannot yet discern the purpose. I remember struggling with this a lot in grad school, especially with a friend in logic class. Anyway, the discussion was good.

We also shared New Year's resolutions, which you may know that I take very seriously. The boys had some good ones. One person is often depressed and negative, and he resolved to have more fun. I thought it was a very good resolution for him and one that he would have to work at, so I was amused when another student decided that it was such a good resolution that he would adopt it too. Funny how the same actions take different significance depending on our places in life.

I'm working on an application for Eagle Rock, which is a non-traditional high school out here in Colorado. Answering the application questions has forced me to go back through some of my writing stemming from my teaching reflections, and I came across this list which I wrote as I was finishing up grad school. I don't think I posted it at the time. They are things that I wanted myself to remember if I went back to teaching. Perhaps you will disagree with some of them, but they are the lessons that I took away.

1. It is important to get to know your students as individuals. It is important to allow students to get to know you.

2. Teach to the body as well as to the mind.

3. If you want to teach to empower students, you have to make the classes bear on their personal lives.

4. Combat apathy. Figure out how you can do this or you will fail as a teacher.

5. Grading is not conducive to learning. However, if you have to grade, take some time to reflect on what you should be grading. Then think long and hard about what you are actually grading. They are often not the same.

6. Learn to listen.

7. Create space for questions and discussion. Don't answer all of these questions yourself.

8. Teach democratically at every possible opportunity. Let students decide how they would like to grow and what will help them do it.

9. Laugh a lot. Share jokes.

10. If you are deciding what to do, make sure that you consistently get feedback and follow it.

11. Students will remember the way that things are done more so than individual facts. Remember that when thinking about what you are modeling.

12. Respecting them means having high expectations.

13. Ears close quickly to criticism. There are always other ways to change things.

14. Avoid the lecture.

15. Be creative in the classroom just as you would in life.

16. Work with others when possible. Figure out what and how others are teaching and use this knowledge to see where your teaching fits into the bigger picture.

17. Talk about what is going on in the community, the nation, and the world. If it isn't the focus of the class, it should be. If it can't be, find a way to bring it into the classroom. Think again about apathy and agency.

18. Never get complacent. Never teach the same way twice. Everything is contextual.

19. Be willing to meet outside of the classroom with students who want more of your time. Create spaces and present yourself so that students will want to meet with you. Office hours are beasts of a different nature.

20. Don't let students run your life. Set boundaries.

21. Share stories, and let your students share stories too.

22. Use visual aids. The classroom is sterile, and this isn't good.

23. Help students understand that learning is something you do your whole life, not just in a classroom.

24. Encourage and model reflection and critical thinking.

25. Very few things are impossible. You can change the way you teach if you'd like to. You can do things that aren't conventional.

26. Bridge the gap between the classroom and the community; to do it right, make sure that both sides are crossing the bridge.

27. Tell it like it is. Be yourself. Don't dull yourself down.

28. Be flexible. Do what helps the students grow, knowing that your plans can go awry.

29. Reconcile the tension between believing in what you do and never getting too certain about how you are doing it.

30. Teaching is one of those things where it is worse to do it poorly than to refrain from doing it entirely. It may be immoral to teach toward the wrong goal or in the wrong way.

A Change in Attitude

Things are going to start happening. I'm going to make them happen. Enough with this 2009 crap. It is time to clean house and get things in order.

I was reading about Ian's miserable year, and it reminded me of my own trajectory. I'm selling sweaters and living with Ben's parents, which is really all that I need to say. I'm also sick, which puts me in a bad mood. So, it is time for things to change.

I'm going to continue looking for jobs, but this time I am going to get one that rocks. I am also going to figure out what discipline I should pursue when I go back for a PhD. I'm going to get my own place (with Ben), wear cooler clothes, and utilize Ben's cd collection more (since mine is boxed up). After I get my own place, I am going to adopt another turtle and buy a kiln. Take that! All of this is going to happen in 2010.

Thanksgiving

The unbaked apple pie. I made the filling. Ben made the leaves around the crust.

Ben: attempting to eat my pumpkin layer cake. Hands off - it isn't finished.


Ben made a walnut and an apple empanada out of the leftover pie filling. They were better than the pies themselves. Highly recommended.

Freddy.

Zander.

Willie, Phoebe, and Clint. Phoebe is getting her first Spanish lesson.

Willie, Ben, Sarah, and Janie enjoying pre-dinner refreshments.

Sarah, Todd, and Kate. Todd is going to show me how to brew beer one of these days.


Pre-dinner. Ready to go.

We brought in reinforcements to help with the desserts.


The Desserts: Chocolate-Amaretto Cheesecake, Chocolate Tort of Doom, Bourbon Pecan Tort, Apple Pie, Pumpkin Cake with Maple Walnuts, and Pumpkin Pie. I'm pretty sure that's all of them.

Buffalo on a pecan plain.

The Finished Apple Pie

The Aftermath.

Cake. With secret tofu filling.

To Feel Under-dressed: The Penguin's Lament

I have a job. In fact, I now have three jobs. Good deal. I can start looking for an apartment.

You are already familiar with my first profession: Hebrew Sage.

My newest jobs are both seasonal retail positions. One is at J.Crew and the other is at Victoria's Secret. I hope that they last longer than the season. I'm also convinced that that the most important things in the interview are the way that you dress and your body language. Emphasizing the importance of listening and being enthusiastic about their quality products also helped, I'm sure. But interviewees take note: dress for the part.

Today I trained at Victoria's Secret along with 5 other girls (for two stores). We all wore black, and I still felt like the most under-dressed person there. Everyone else wore sparkly eye shadow and mascara, and they could go on and on about their products. I wear VS stuff. I'm just not that beauty oriented. I guess it is time to bust out the make-up, head into the fitting rooms, and start learning.