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MELISSA LEIGH GIBSON, PHD
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    • SS Curriculum Review
    • Big Questions, Big Issues
    • Getting Proximate
  • Home
  • CV
  • The Present Tense
  • Teaching
  • Writing
  • Presentations
    • SS Curriculum Review
    • Big Questions, Big Issues
    • Getting Proximate

the present tense

A collection of writing.
​
​​​​Part personal, part academic. ​
​Always a work in progress. 
​
Blog Home

On Wisconsin

5/15/2014

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Photo by Ross Freshwater | All rights reserved
You, Wisconsin, with your lime green leaf buds, with your sun heating my hair and your wind chapping my cheeks, with your crowds of Badger red that break up the dull palette of wintery grays, with your lakes that glitter and freeze, with your rains that never stop and snow that always falls and summers that always bake.
You, Wisconsin, with your ice quakes and thunderstorms, with your beer fests and freak fests, with your hippies and hunters and hipsters, with your bipolar politics and bipolar weather, with your locally cured bacon and organically ground bratwurst and sustainably caught bluegill, with your moody North Woods music and marching polka bands and banjos thundering the Capitol, with your blaze and your black and your cardinal.

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school days

6/14/2013

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I know schools. I spend my life in schools. I study schools, I work in schools, I pretty much live in schools. And school here in Mexico…Well, it’s different.

My head swims with a constant stream of, “Wow. In the States, it’s like X, but in Mexico, it’s like X.” Some are improvements, some are infuriating, and some are just baffling cultural differences. But different nonetheless. Never mind that I am teaching at an “American” school. This place is definitely not American. Plus, I get the added benefit of Anna being in a local Montessori program, a non-Americanized (but still private, so relatively affluent) school. And man! These schools are just…different.

Here are just a few of the things that just don’t match up between American and this little sample of Mexican schools (with the full acknowledgement that my n=2 sample is skewed heavily toward upper-class Mexico).

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Tuna Town & Other Unexpected Adventures

7/1/2006

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On my last day in Tokyo, I finally found the Japan of my imaginings. In the back streets of Old Tokyo near the Sendagi Metro shop, there is a Japan that is devoid of neon signs and brash, beehive-haired girls and punk-rock boys. This Japan comprises winding cobblestone streets, temples and bathhouses on every block, and shop purveyors who offer you tea and green tea cookies if you so much as glance their way. It is to this Tokyo that I lost myself on my last day, during a much-needed break after a morning of lectures and presentations. It’s difficult to get alone time amid a group of 200 teachers, but I managed it on Wednesday when I snuck away for the 30-minute metro ride to Sendagi. My first stop was a small Shinto shrine, perched on a rock island in the middle of a koi pond also home to turtles. A little Japanese boy was running back and forth on the red bridge screaming, “Hi! Hi!” (not a greeting, but Japanese for “Yes!”) while trying to nail the turtle in the head with his slingshot. His obaasan was sound asleep on a nearby bench, oblivious to the havoc her grandson was wreaking on the otherwise peaceful garden. From here I got lost in the back streets of old Tokyo. The sounds of cars disappeared and were replaced by twittering birds; skyscrapers were replaced by rice-paper sliding doors and bonsai trees lining pathways.
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Letter to New Corps Members

9/1/2004

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Dear Future Chicago Teachers,
Congratulations on your acceptance to Teach For America’s Chicago corps! Now that the application and waiting process is over, you are about to make a life-changing decision. Being a teacher is simultaneously exhausting and awe-inspiring, and teaching in Chicago—the country’s third largest school district and once deemed “the worst in the nation”—is rife with its own particular struggles and successes. But I am writing to tell you: the decision to join our movement is absolutely worth it. It’s the best decision I’ve ever made.

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

7/20/2004

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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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Namaste

7/8/2003

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So I have safely–if sweatily–been in India for four days now, and I am overwhelmed.
Of course, there is the heat. Or rather the humidity. Our arrival brought the monsoons, which are refreshing once they fall, but for the day-long build-up, it is sweltering. I try not to think about it too much (or the multiple ice cold showers I crave, but alas, Delhi is in a severe water crisis), but it definitely defines our experience. What’s remarkable is that Delhites don’t sweat. Ever. Well, that’s not true. Today was record humidity, and a Kashmiri woman who runs a school we visited was whining about the heat. But I’m not sure she counts…after all, she’s from the Himalayas. This is all brutal to her.

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Ubuntu

3/28/2003

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Our last day in Cape Town and I’m left noticing all the things I will miss about this city,this country, this experience: the smells of African spices; the musical welcomes everywhere we go; all of the South African children who are eager to talk to and hug us; finding an excuse to say “yebo” as much as possible each day; the animals who pop up in unexpected places (cows wandering the townships, geckos falling on me in the shower, wildebeest roaming a field in the middle of Cape Town); Table Mountain magnificently orienting us to infinite bays and neighborhoods; our own students finding song mid-way through the trip and then peppering each day with selections from The Lion King and The Prince of BelAir. Just about the only thing Iwon’t miss is pap, a cornmeal mush that’s been served to us a few too many times.

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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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    Like what you see? That's mostly Ross Freshwater. Check out my talented partner-in-life's photo gallery.

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melissa.gibson [at] marquette.edu
office | 414.288.1421

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Photos used under Creative Commons from tedeytan, Stig Nygaard, Matt From London, shixart1985, Ted Rabbitts