Jennifer Lauren’s blog

No, it doesn’t have to. No matter how constrained a teacher is, I’ve determined that school does not have to be a creativity killer. To apply some ancient, wise words (2 Corinthians 4:8-9): “We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; … struck down, but not destroyed.” In other words, NCLB and the obsessive, accountability-driven administrative directives it begets cannot single-handedly kill creativity in the classroom. Sure, state tests “stigmatize failure,” as Ken Robinson states. Teachers, though, do not have to stigmatize failure.

Take a measure as simple as rewarding students for non-academic feats, for instance. Awarding Student of the Month to the most spirit-lifting comedian in the classroom validates him as much as a good grade. Teacher-initiated rewards address and negate Robinson’s contention that school only the intellectual successes at school are the winners. He contends that “the whole purpose of public education …is to produce university professors. … We shouldn’t hold them up as the highest form of achievement…they live in their heads.” Nay! The purpose of school is to make something productive out of young peoples minds and hours. Sure, there are ugly class wars circling around how those minds and hours are spent. But ideally, school is for producing more productive (emotionally, spiritually, vocationally --- not merely intellectually) members of society. School is where students have training wheels for how to function as adults. It’s a mini-society. I think Robinson would be a huge fan to Rousseau’s anti-social, child-centered vision of education. Unfortunately, as pastoral and sweet as this vision is, it falls short of what humans were created for: to serve and better each other.

No, schools do not “squander” the innate creativity in children wholesale, as Robinson overconfidently asserts. Schools are the environment in which time is set aside for creativity to be required. Without the structure of school, creativity wilts. Robinson is right to point out the paradoxical nature of creativity, such as that we do not mature into creativity, but rather we outgrow it, but he misses this important paradox about it: creativity needs structure just like fire needs oxygen. Without the push and the constraint to fuel creativity, or the probing questions of the teacher, or the small encouraging remarks along the way to the final creative product, a child’s creativity will be stifled. Also, in a school functioning properly, in which reading aloud and extolling reading should be a daily activity, the imagination will find no lack.

As to Robinson’s allusion to Picasso’s quote that we grow out of creativity, neither do I fully agree with this. Older children (teens) can use colors, tweak words, arrange sounds, plan projects and papers and speak more eloquently and purposefully than their younger counterparts. Who has the authority to say that creativity with more direction and eruditeness is somehow weaker than the innocent creativity that streams from a little mind? Classifying creativity in an hierarchy (eerily akin to what NCLB test standards do—classify schools and student achievement) and judging creativity as “the production of something both original and useful” (paraphrase) is rather utilitarian itself. Robinson defines creativity to uptightly, I’m afraid. 

I was very excited to find this post. I’ve been meaning to read Khon’s “Homework Myth” ever since my 6^th grade teacher, with whom I am still in touch and who now teaches high school math, mentioned it to me. She agrees with his thesis.

I, on the other hand, can’t help but believe that homework is helpful for the college-bound. Without the gradual build-up of homework, how will a student know how to handle the outside-of-class investment that is expected at that level? I guess the question that remains is, is homework worth it for the non-college-bound?

Using the rationale that kids hate homework and put it off as long as possible is not reason to believe that homework is unbeneficial. Many things that are popularly hated, such as exercise and financial prudence, are good for us. As for the argument that homework does not develop a work ethic, I disagree. With time to do whatever they please, my students will not be kindling their innate curiosity by reading a book of choice. They will be watching TV. For the argument that rigorous amounts of homework in middle school is not correlated with higher high school achievement, I suppose the counter argument would be, has any research shown that not doing or not assigning homework raises achievement? I think there is some spurious intervening variable that is making the research appear to suggest that homework is impotent as yielding great educational gains, when really home/neighborhood environment or family dysfunction/stress may be accountable for educational outcomes, not the assigning of homework.

Regarding Christine Hendricks’ letter to parents explaining her school’s experiment with no homework for a semester, I think this innovation would work well so long as there is reason to believe that families will support their children with the five responsibilities she bulleted in the letter. It would be more accurate for Hendricks to say, “we are implementing a ‘new’ homework this year: intense parental involvement.” This is not a truly no-homework policy! There are still things for the kids to do at home; parents are the new facilitators. In areas without this assurance of reinforcement from home, schools ought to lengthen the school day, so that all of that gets done in caretakers’ hands before reporting home at 6 p.m.

One thing I’ve thought about is whether homework is worth assigning when half of students do not do it, and it becomes a nuisance to teachers who cannot let more than half their kids fail due to excessive zeros produced by MIA homework. I’ve decided that it is worth assigning, as it will pull the borderline students who will do their homework up to proficient level on the state test. In other words, assigning homework is likely to help improve those kids who will do it; and if the teacher makes homework worth only a marginal amount, then for those who don’t do it, no excessive harm is done. So long as the teacher completes the independent practice during class time, and homework serves only as a reinforcement of skills learned, then homework is appropriate and will only strengthen the stronger students. They are not psychologically bothered by homework; in essence, homework is a “NR” for them (science shorthand for No Reaction). 

For honors kids, however, those who are definitely college-bound, the teacher’s assigning of and close monitoring of/feedback on homework is very important. These students especially cannot afford anything that will set them behind other students at their level who attend competitive private schools or suburban schools where the majority of the student body is vigilant about homework. I do not foresee these types of schools of privilege backing down off homework any time soon, and so for cricital needs schools to do so would be a mistake, giving the others yet another upper-hand in being prepared to succeed in college.

I think the real concern here is what is assigned for homework. If it is busy work, or over students' heads, or not sufficiently explained, or students do not have resources (parental, material, technological, or time) to do it, then yes, homework is terribly ineffective and even harmful. If a teacher gives homework as a good doctor proscribes the right antidote, however, homework remains a worthwhile component of schooling.

I really enjoyed the product of this assignment -- even if the process wasn't enjoyable. Isn't that the way research is? View a pdf of the document here.

As faculty, if I worked at a school that closed in fear of the pandemic of the swine flu, I would find it to be an overreaction. I would be upset to have to stretch out the school year at the behest of city officials and decision-makers who are oversensitive to “moral panics” – those outbreaks of terror catalyzed by the press, but hardly validated by numbers or magnitude.

After reading about the school in Alabama that closed everything down for 51,000 students because of two cases of flu, I believe that, rather than preventing infection, long school closure would simply spread panic. The NYC Mayor, Michael Bloomberg, sees right through the irrationality of the panic. His comment that the eight cases confirmed at a city school were mild – and only a small fraction of the 100-some students who thought they had swine flu actually did – further buttresses my stance that school closure is unnecessary and unwise in this instance.

The tone and language of the SCUCISD press release – “The state health department is urging that the district’s staff, faculty, students and their household members to avoid contact with others” – is overly fearful. Add to the dictin of the edict the extent of time schools will be closed: until May 8^th or 11^th? What arbitrary reasons do the decision makers have for prolonging closure to that late date?! Decisions like these only contribute to the general brokenness of school systems. What students need is stability in times of uncertainty. Sick students, or any students whowent to Mexico recently, ought to be sent home, not everybody.

 

 

 

As I heard Savannah from Arizona tell about how one day at school brought on stomach ulcers, her reluctance to return to school for months, and the loss of her friends because they were embarrassed of her, I couldn’t help but think of my own soft-spoken, sweet, honor-role female students. Imagining any one of these female students of mine getting strip-searched because of an administrator’s alleged probable cause darkens my view of schools as pro-social institutions. No matter how strong a school official’s belief that a student had drugs on her and posed a threat to the student body as a distributor, there is no situation in which dehumanization and “traumatization” should be seen as appropriate protocol.

 

Institutions are adulterated when bureaucratic terms like “from a policy stand-point” permit such practices. A drug-free environment should not come at the cost of dehumanization. The injustice done to Savannah is two-fold: the stigma that is attached to a student in an incident like this is penultimate to the violation of a young person’s body. What I mean by that is, schools should never be in the business of turning a good, decent youth into a delinquent based on mere suspicion. Whether the student really does behave like a delinquent, or merely her self-concept is turned upside-down by such an event, has a profound impact on her identity and immediate future.

 

The impacts of such physical invasion and humiliation on a teen would alter his or her trajectory with curriculum and instruction because, as Savannah did, they would be inclined to become a truant. After all, the school sees them as a criminal already; why go to a place where the adults do not approve of you, and your peers have turned from you? Indeed, this one strip-search, one gloomy morning or afternoon, had a life-altering effect on Savannah.

 

A better practice would be to hold the student in the office and require her to be sent home. I suppose the school would rather have the incriminating evidence to brandish over the parents, instead of vehement parents defending their children’s innocence. If school administrators aren’t trained in the dangers of pharmaceuticals, as the district spokesperson defended, then they shouldn’t get so over-involved. Let me reiterate myself: it is not the job of a school to turn a youth, who needs all the protective factors she can get against adolescent risks, into a delinquent. Schools ought to administer corrective punishments, rather than punishments that cripple youth. Of course, chronic suspension is an instance of this that gets iffy for a teacher who cannot teach anytime that unruly child is in the room. But in this instance, we are speaking of those wallflower students, who may indeed pose some threat to the student body by being involved with drugs, but who need an education as bad as – or worse than – their peers.

 

I actually can think of a student in a situation like Savannah’s. J.R. was actually once my student of the month. His classwork was oh-so-meticulous. He was respectful and calm-spirited. Last term, the administrators nailed him with a 9-day suspension for having found large sums of cash on his person. J.R. returned to school with the wind totally knocked out of him. He was depressed and I could literally see the ruin and approaching disaster in his face. “They think I’m so bad,” he said. He stopped coming to school for two months. Then he either withdrew or dropped out. I never saw the boy again. This is a instance in which his culpability and involvement in drugs is more blatant than Savannah’s ever was, and I still believe the school did him wrong. My heart breaks that the “system” – this institution intended to equip, enable, educate – removed his last chances, his few remaining protective factors. He’s been left to the hands of risk, when a good punishment ought to eliminate risks of an offender to re-offend. That would be true restorative justice.

 

 

Assessment in my classroom now has evolved to a good balance of authentic and traditional assessment. In the last term of this schoolyear, I have made a point to have equal amounts of each in my gradebook. For authentic assessment, I have done creative vocabulary card projects, and have led my students through the entire writing process (planning, drafting, revising, editing, publishing on computer), and have put these in as test grades. I definitely believe that these two long-term projects qualify as what the video called “fun tests” that tests students’ abilities, because students can ask questions while they do them, and the quality and depth of input into the final product is wholly in their hands. Thus, these authentic assessments evidence the students’ determination to get it right, which traditional, multiple choice tests cannot possibly capture.

            As for the traditional tests in my classroom this year, they have been (as mandated by my administration) multiple choice followed by an essay portion. I design the multiple choice off of the SATP question style, but make sure that the language used in the questions comes strictly from either the novel we are reading in class or terminology we have reviewed in those weeks preceding (i.e., diction, oxymoron, author’s purpose, etc.). I like the multiple choice questions I give, but agree that authentic, live, original products measure a students’ capacity and illustrate his/her understanding better. As I see it, authentic assessment proves that a student has internalized the information, whereas traditional assessment can, at best, show that that knowledge has touched the surface of the students’ mind, but not necessarily penetrated or become permanently incorporated in it.

            Next year, for assessing my students, I hope to develop: (1) more precise and fitting scoring guides for performance-based tests; (2) a way to incorporate more presentation into the assessment, so that peers can learn from each other; (3) one-on-one, 5-minute book discussions with each student, as the Urban Academy in NYC does, assigning student to chat extemporaneously with a ‘perfect stranger’ about a book they’ve read independently); and (4) some way to build-up to more independent, self-driven, self-monitored work from August through May.

If I am going to get really ambitious in thinking about next year, I think it’d be amazing to bring in local experts, so that, as Gary Wiggins said in the video, high-quality, local assessment would play out before my students’ eyes. If geometry students can be evaluated by local architects, English students can be evaluated by local authors or poets… imagine the possibilities! I heartedly agree with Doug Reeves, author of the 90-90-90 studies (esteemed by Ron Sellers), that assessment should be ‘for’ something, not merely ‘of’ something. In this case, being evaluated by an expert would be for the purpose of “assist[ing] educators to improve instruction and advance student learning,” rather than merely to quantify how well students caught on to a concept (from Reeves’ “Forum on Assessment”). Assessment should assist, buttress, support instruction, not be its hated pest.

My hopes for assessment this summer are to transpose the composing-process project I did with my classes this year. I find that evaluating students’ writing step-by-step, and affording students individual instruction throughout, is a good approach to performance-based, authentic assessment. Students can control their achievement if they are determined to produce the best product possible over a period of time and work. This might be a good time to experiment with presentations, since class sizes will be low and manageable.

The main roadblock in reaching my assessment dreams will be me entrusting students’ progress into their own hands. Letting students do long-term projects requires that the teacher give student time and space to create an original product. But my inclination, based on experience, is to expect students to get off task and never come prepared with what they needed to scout out on their own. Maybe if I do part of the leg-work, such as pluck out a group of books for students to work from in their research instead of setting them free in a vast library, for instance, the prospect of allowing them the freedom to create on their own will be less frightening to me.

My vision for summer school 2009 builds off a few lucid points made in the article “Summer School: Unfulfilled Promise.” In light of the article’s sidebar “The Summer Slide,” and what sociologists David Stark and Annette Lareau have found, I concur that summer school is the best possible “alternative support program” available to struggling students. Seeing what enormous ground mandatory, fully-funded summer schools in Chicago and Delaware have gained gives me hope for what significant educational gains Holly Springs Summer School may one day equip its students with. I advocate for three major, new steps in particular for HSSS this summer: first, for the installment of a school-wide, cross-grade, cross-subject reading program embedded within the curriculum; second, for the summer to culminate in an official retake of the state test which was failed by the student to begin with; and third, for the extra-curriculars to culminate in an end-of-summer concert/showcase/performance. Whereas the first vision stems out of sociological research, the second springs from my belief that the bureaucratic management of student proficiency is too slow in Mississippi – and from inspiration at what states like IL and DE have done about that dilemma. 

Regarding the centrality of reading during the summer: Reading belongs in the limelight of summer school because it is the centerpiece around which the student’s future performance will hinge. Sociologist David Stark writes in his textbook for undergraduate sociology, and sociologist Annette Lareau in her study “Unequal Childhoods” has chimed in, that summer is the key time when achievement gaps between privileged and underprivileged students widen – especially in the area of reading levels. The reading program should incorporate intensive reading skills tutoring by teachers to students whose fluency and comprehension are lagging.

Regarding what HSSS can do to compensate for the MDE’s lethargy in giving timely feedback on standardized tests: Other states manage to get their test results back to students in a timely manner, within a time frame in which the results are still meaningful and relevant. Since HSSS cannot control state-level functions, the next-best thing it can do is equip its students for the state exam. That is why each state-tested subject should have a full-length state test as its final. If there were any way to make this test official, I believe that would highly motivate our students to “get ‘er done” during the summer, and be on-track with their peers come August.

Even so, the survey points out that only a minority (4%) of summer schools exist only to help students pass a particular test (p. 8). There must be more of a heart to the program for it to be appealing to students. We should ask ourselves as HSSS teachers whether extra-curriculars might be the trick to providing the summer curriculum with the flexibility, innovation and creativity its students need, since implicit in re-teaching is the implication that the students “need help that goes beyond simply re-teaching the same material in the same way” (p. 15).Therefore, keeping extra-curriculars as an exciting and rewarding part of the summer school day will be important. This is an outlet through which subjects can be extended into realms which actually appeal to students in ways that English and history class can’t – in drama club, for example, where students may find themselves almost accidentally enjoying what they learn about characterization and historical time periods.

As I see it, success for my summer school students in English I/II will be their demonstrated aptitude to pass the English II state exam. We gave this exam to our students at the end of summer school last year, and few passed. My expectations, or at least hopes, are higher this year. The evidence I will need to see to identify their overall success is 80% mastery among our students after each weekly exam. If 80% do not pass our teacher-made exams, then success is not being reached. I also believe that success is being reached if returning students – either ours from last summer or the middle school teachers’ students – demonstrate higher reading comprehension and composition levels than they did before. Fostering autonomy in our students, expressed in the self-monitoring they need to know when and how to ask for help and to be self-starters, will be a goal I bring to our class this summer. Thus, a secondary indicator of success will be the visible proof that the students can work more independently by the end of the summer than they were able to do at the beginning.

To ensure this success, I will encourage our team (the Sophomoric Studs) to implement individual, regular tutoring for the students (since we are fortunate to find ourselves in the luxurious, multiple-teacher set-up) and also to embed mini-lessons within our lessons on how to study and how to be a successful student – and hopefully not in the form of a corny, ineffective lecture, as I recall getting in middle school.

The recommendations on page 18 strike me as agreeably attuned to instituting greater equality into our public schools. I heartedly agree that summer schools should be provided free of charge to students who need the reinforcement and greater attention. Many of these students, I am sure, got to this point because other students (through their distractions and poor conduct in classrooms during the traditional year) robbed them of attention from their teacher, who is overburdened with discipline and other tasks at that time, to give the quiet strugglers the attention they need. So it is still owed to them. So long as summer schools enforce extremely strict conduct expectations, that indebted attention for those students can be protected. Timely catch up, instead of overdue remediation, IS an integral part of the schooling process that rests on the state’s shoulders to deliver. Overdue remediation is about as effective as creek water on an open wound. Though the idea of having state-mandated standards for summer schools at first rubbed me the wrong way (recommendation #4), but in fact, that might be the key to (a) enforcing strict discipline standards at summer school (low tolerance for chronically disruptive students) and (b) ensuring that summer school is intensive, rigorous and tight, and not merely an impotent, aimless, sloppy attempt at overdue remediation.

Recommendations 5 through 7 are great – requiring highly qualified faculty, the call for rigorous evaluation of the program and providing students with innovative alternative teaching styles – but implementing them will require ample professional development and support from state resources. This can be done; the resources simply need to be delivered to the schools themselves (i.e., state evaluators and curriculum specialists from the state ought to do school visits with the mission of helping and equipping teachers). I think these are the most problematic to institute because of the sluggishness that bureaucracy brings whenever delivery of human resources is involved.

My favorite recommendation was for incorporating summer school as a term that can be avoided by performing at proficient achievement levels during the three other quarters of the year. This strikes me as a fantastic motivator for our students to bring it upon themselves to strive. A puzzle piece perennially missing from our discourses on how to address low student motivation levels is what motivators we as educators can offer them, since those that exist for them already (the freedom and fun of college, instead of premature motherhood, for example) are often outside of their immediate vision.

Quality communication, curriculum renewal, coordination among the body of educators – all of these are the ideals teachers yearn for, and which Heidi Hayes Jacob believes are tenable when teachers commit to the when that is implicit in calendar-based curriculum mapping. What she says about the walls that exist between teachers who share one building, and the essential disjunction between primary and secondary schools, seems accurate to me. In my school, team teaching was suggested and adamantly opposed; if I survey my students’ long term curriculum map, it looks rather like a dilapidated old road to me (like Fortification Street here in Jackson, overrun with treacherous potholes and neglect).

Jacobs reaches for simplicity to resolve this unwieldy dilemma. Will a calendar prove to be the harmonious, flexible, welcoming endeavor she illustrates?  In my own school district, at my own campus, vertical mapping is completely nonexistent, while horizontal planning has gone up into flames. The two freshman English teachers resigned at Christmas break (before then, 9^th and 10^th grade English instructors haphazardly planned together); now  there is little budding in relationship to the new teachers, who have stepped into a chaotic world and are scrambling to just survive it. To be well-planned and coordinated with other levels and subjects? That’s what teachers do in heaven! they likely think.

In JPS, we have a district-created pacing guide. It has one column for dates, one for objectives to master, and one for suggested resources. It spreads the objectives (skills) out like tomato-paste on a pizza crust over the year, divided into neat two-week chunks. Indeed, I have always viewed this document as, as Jacobs articulates, “rigid and lock step …giving the impression that all is under control” (2).  It really does feel lie a “lifeless inventory of isolated skills,” whereas a calendar-based curriculum map should really be like a skeleton, giving structure and movement and strength to the “skill sets” we’re to deliver.

After reading Jonathan Kozol’s Letters to a Young Teacher, I became more convinced than ever that the unquestioning submission to the “objectives-tacked-to-a-date” (that is, pacing guide) approach to curriculum mapping knocks the joy out of learning for students. Kozol suggests that teachers post the objectives but keep teaching in a passionate way whatever it is that her students are ready for, regardless of the pacing guide’s lifeless strictures. He goes so far as to implore new teachers to withstand irrational insistence on following such a verbose bureaucratic document which complicates simple lessons children must learn: to read and to write. For Kozol, planning and mapping are just that simple – more simple than Jacobs’ calendar. And yet, I have trouble denying that he would discourage the intentional big-picture preparation that calendar mapping would hopefully produce.

 I think the pacing guide ought to be renamed the SATP calendar (state tested subject areas), which map out what students ought to be covering every year in the four core subjects, from 7^th-12^th grade. Currently, there is too much spontaneity and repetition in the solo approach to curriculum mapping (each teacher to her own). Without merging different subjects together, cantankerous departments that do not work well with each other split into solo-mode, at the cost of not just horizontal but also vertical mapping. If teachers across subjects could plan together, I believe less personality clashes between small departments would occur, thereby determining mapping failures.

My plan for planning the summer 2009 English I and II class is to adopt some of the strategies second-years last year used- i.e., one block per day devoted each to one of the three English competencies in the framework (literature, grammar and essay writing). But I would like to integrate the syllabus by centering it around a novel study, of Sandra Cisneros’ House on Mango Street. I taught it this fall and it was effective for capturing such a large potion of the skills, and the students responded positively to it. Pitfalls I forsee is me being too domineering in having my way in the planning. I don’t want to force my co-teachers to teach a book they hate! And I know that I am setting mysef up for disappointment if I get too attached to a particular plan too early, without trying to align myself first. Also, I think it will be hard to get ourselves to vertically integrate with other subjects, or to connect to the lower and higher level English classes. It can be done, however; thus, it is now an ambition of mine, since Jacobs suggests that such exchanges breeds renewal in the (caliber and rigor of the) content, quality in teacher communication (especially integral in our cooperative –teaching/group planning approach at the MTC summer school!), and efficiency (synonym, productivity?) in scaffolding/building students’ skills.

Works Cited

Jacobs, Heidi Hayes. "The Need for Calendar-Based Curriculum Mapping." Mapping the Big Picture:Integrating Curriculum and Assessment K-12.

Kozol, Jonathan. Letters to a Young Teacher. New York: Random House, 2007.

 

Now would be the time for me to practice what I preach – that is, how to write with the purpose of persuading an audience. I teach my students how to do this mode of writing. Now I shall “utilize” it myself. Shall I defer to ethos (an appeal to ethics), logos (an appeal to logic) or pathos (an appeal to emotions) in my reasons to join MTC? How about one of each:

 

Ethos- I look to my hero, Jonathan Kozol, to articulate why one who is considering teaching to seriously consider teaching through MTC:

 

“But for the children of the poorest people we're stripping the curriculum, removing the arts and music, and drilling the children into useful labor. We're not valuing a child for the time in which she actually is a child. […]

Instead of seeing these children for the blessings that they are, we are measuring them only by the standard of whether they will be future deficits or assets for our nation's competitive needs. […]

Nationally, overwhelmingly non-white schools receive $1,000 less per pupil than overwhelmingly white schools.  […]

Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win. […]

So long as these kinds of inequalities persist, all of us who are given expensive educations have to live with the knowledge that our victories are contaminated because the game has been rigged to our advantage.”

 

Logos- If you are a person who loves to sink her teeth into hard work, to drink in the satisfaction that comes when you invest in someone, and to apply her love of school and learning to the work-a-day world, then you are a person who ought to join Teacher Corps. If you desire to make a contribution through your job, to find endless outlets for creative ability in your daily job requirements, to discover the joy of getting through to even just a few youths, then you should be processing the possibility of travelling here and taking root here for two years to do so. If you have long watered bright hopes of having a classroom and students to call your own, and if you want to see your dreams (if they resemble these I have written about) become reality please, begin the online application.

 

Pathos- The more I reflect on it, the more I realize that my deepest dream ever has been to be a teacher. I was raised by a born teacher, my father, and have, since third grade, drank (have drunk?) in lessons and the chance to be creative in school like a feeble little leaguer slurps up water. There is no place that makes me feel more alive than a classroom. I gravitate toward schoolwork and it returns every minute I put into it with this inexplicable reward of internal growth. School, learning, and relationships with my former teachers have always been a great basis of my happiness. As a Christian, I follow the words of the greatest Teacher, Jesus. In my life as a worker and in my life as a believer, I find joy and energy in the act of learning.

 

The point I am making here is, my very heart beats today because of the education I have pursued and been blessed with. I continually find my passions in the classroom. Why on earth would I let this marvelous miracle end?! For those who enjoy school, there really is no more natural bridge than right back into a school when emerging from college. Today, I am proud to call a school my work environment. Being in my classroom makes me feel more like me than almost any other activity I choose to do. At my very core, I am a student. Being a teacher allows me to keep up that identity, except to an even deeper degree now. Now others count on my sound understanding of concepts and on my own curiosity to deliver them the clarity of facts and abundance of internal resources they need to succeed.

 

My community, Belhaven, is like a Wendy's Frosty: delightful, energizing, and my first pick. Every morning, its pleasant residential streets and heart-calming autumn air (that smells faintly of fireplaces, yawning their last sighs from burning through the night to take the chill off -- or so my poetic mind imagines) greet me as I go for an early-morning run. It's then that I am stunned with gratitude that I get to live in this place. "She's wierd," you're thinking. Maybe so. "You're happy anywhere," my quasi-mother (family friend) tells me on long-distance phone calls.

I love living here. I feel like I have settled in and have discovered my niche; now it's a matter of carving it out, day-by-day, by connecting with my church family and by loving my MTC family better than I do now (I am guilty of neglecting them--even my own roomies sometimes, b/c I get so caught up in Ms. Nelson-universe.).  My efforts to contribute to and get involved in my community can be summed-up through church. It is my outlet to connect.

I have befriended two teachers at my church who have been enormously supportive. I joined a Presbyterian church in the neighborhood, and go to functions there once per week (last night it was to prepare for the Fall festival), a family's house in my neighborhood twice per month for Bible study, and also service and Sunday school. Last night I met a college student, Lindsay, who goes to Blehaven College (as do about 20% of my church's members!) It felt so good to talk to a peer and reminsce on what being a college senior is like, and the different world of responsibility that stage of life carries. She hit it off immediately.

I also look forward to seeing Cassie at church. We became acquainted about one month ago. She used to teach middle school English in North Carolina and is so generous to provide resources and the time and patience to listen to my lesson-planning queries. The family who hosts Bible study and dinner is a light to me as well. They have reached out and made be feel like I am family and have extended an open invitation to me for dinner/visits. The father is a teacher at a private high school, and the mother, like Mrs. Wilson, is an inspiration to me. I want to be a mother like her one day: witty and intelligent and capable and still pretty. When I think I've got a lot to do, then I think about teachers who have spouses and multiple children on top of that (actually, before that).

My goal is to become more of a leader/contributor to the church, to find some capacity in which I can lead and apply my spiritual and/or practical gifts. What Dani said in her recent blog about how church involvement clears and refreshes the mind, is so, so, so very true.