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Flying Chairs, Angry Stares, & Lessons (Not) Learned

7/20/2004

It’s Takeima and Larry that worry me. Larry worries me because of his exhaustion. When it’s my turn to teach, Larry puts his head on his desk and declares that it’s naptime. Takeima also shuts down…she sits there, stony-faced, unwilling to speak to me or her classmates. They worry me, but mostly because they are the two students who make me visibly frustrated. I try all that I can with Takeima and Larry—I use positive reinforcement, I encourage them, I give them choices. I am also stern and dole out consequences and stop their behaviors in their incipient moments. I try everything I can think of, but nothing seems to work with Takeima or Larry. I am worried because they do not respond to me, and by the end of every period I am flush with frustration and helplessness.

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Learning to Teach (Again) in Watts

7/10/2004

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There is truly power in numbers, I’ve learned this past week.

I knew the Teach for America movement was big, and I knew it was ambitious, but I didn’t really understand how big and how ambitious it was until Monday morning. Walk with over 500 other people, carrying the same red TFA lunch pail and wearing the same blue TFA key holder, and you feel the enormity of your movement and your mission. It was our own march for educational equality on Monday morning as all 500 corps members swarmed out of the Long Beach dorms to a fleet of yellow school buses, waiting to cart us off to some of Los Angeles’s most infamous neighborhoods. At 6am on Monday morning when I left the dining hall, I was exhausted and nervous and introspective. But at some point I looked up from my feet, and my breath was taken away. Do you know what 500 people looks like? It is nearly two Lake Forest Academies, it is twelve busloads, it is a sea of eager faces filling up a parking lot. 500 people here to do the very same thing as me. 500 people committed to the same ideas of social justice as me. 500 people as eager to teach as me.

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About

While living in Mexico, I joked that speaking Spanish forced me to be far more Zen about life: Since I could only speak in the present tense, I was forced to just live in that present tense.

This blog began as regular travel emails when I was a naive undergrad exploring the globe, my meditations on wherever I was on that school break (or break from school). It has since grown into something more, a record of parenting, teaching, politicking, community-building, struggling, healing, exploring, growing, and laughing -- a record of my present tense.

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Flying Chairs, Angry Stares, & Lessons (Not) Learned

Learning to Teach (Again) in Watts

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