Frozen pipes as a metaphor for education blockages....

Our pipes are frozen. Again. For the ten hundreth time. And the sewer line from our trailer is also frozen. About five guys have been out there working on it for over a week now. Shockingly FEMA trailers designed for New Orleans don't hold up well in South Dakota winters. Who'da thunk?

So I'm not very happy. Because I couldn't shower this morning and still can't now. And there was a bomb threat at school today. I'm not sure what went on exactly, they had the drug dogs in the school which they've done a few times this year. But this time after the dogs went through the made us all leave and get on buses and go sit in a parking lot half a mile away for about 30 min. Fun Fun. Tomorrow there are two different assemblies going on and we have some kind of crazy schedule where we only have 3rd and 4th period- or something, it's kind of unclear at this point. Between that and low attendance, kids leaving for basketball games, and being kids pulled out for various things, I don't feel like I'm doing all that much teaching anymore. I'm quickly losing motivation to spend much time planning lessons for kids who aren't there. Today I had 0,6, 7, 11, 2, and 3 students respectively in my six periods....

We're reading The Most Dangerous Game in Literature. So that's fun. Practicing lots of predicting. And finding details that create mood or characterization. Next week we'll get into plot mapping- woo! Literature is more fun than composition I think. The students would probably say they are both equally boring though I'm sure. Sigh.

Colorado last weekend was great! Check out pictures of the finished snow sculpture. It was good to see my parents and meet/see all my dad's snow sculpting buddies, plus I got in some really excellent cross country and downhill skiing.

Next weekend I'm off again- to Chaimberlain! For a "Take One" professional development weekend of some sort. I haven't even looked at all the materials they've sent me yet... hmm.

All for now- Think warm thoughts for me and my pipes please!

I've been meaning to post these for a while. So, here are some pictures from a walk around St. Francis before christmas. Our teacher trailer neighborhood
Trail
Hay bale
The sprawling metropolis of St. Francis

In other more recent news... we went skiing this weekend! I love that over half of our entire corps was up in the black hills this weekend splitting two cabins. SoDak is the best. I'm looking forward to many more ski weekends in the near future.

The next couple weeks are kinda nuts. This week I'm leaving for Colorado on Thursday after school to visit my parents and see my dad's snow sculpture this weekend. Weee!

Tomorrow we don't have school and I fully intend to spend the day in my classroom catching up with life and figuring out what I'm doing for the week and for the semester. When I actually have time to plan strategically I really love teaching and planning and creating a long term vision for my class.

Any new '08ers reading this-- you're in for an adventure! It'll be great :)

Whatcha gonna do?

Love this poem today:
****************************
The Wind Doesn't Know what to Do But Be Blue.

by Simon Ortiz from his book "After and Before the Lightning" written during a residency here at Sinte Gleska University on Rosebud.


The wind is blue
this morning
so blue, ooooing
at a lonely corner
of the house.

Look at the sun.
Look
at the sun.
But pays no mind.
Just so blue, it says,
just sooooooo bloooooooooooo
loooooo
blue.
Blooooooooo oooooo oo ue

Whatcha gonna do.
I don't know.
Whatcha gonna do.
I don't know.
The blues are blue.
The blues are blue.
The wind is blue.
It goes oooo.
It goes oooo.
Whatcha gonna do.
It goes oooo.
The blues go oooo.
I don't know.
That's what I'll do.
That what I'll dooooo.
****************************

I still have one section of Comp I that I'm re-teaching this semester for a few students who weren't enrolled in it last semester but should have been (don't even get me started on scheduling insanity around here). This semester I'm starting with descriptive writing and I'm cutting out all the get to know you/ goal setting/ what is writing? crap that I did at the beginning of last semester so we can get strait to writing and producing finished pieces asap. I'm thinking that the best way to get kids to think of themselves as writers is to treat them as such rather than spending lots of time talking about what writing is, why it's important, blah blah blah. So I just cut to the chase on day 1, gave them their notebooks and we started writing. Descriptive writing is definitely a good place to start. It has so far been far more successful than starting with memoir/ personal narrative. Memoir is too personal to start on with these students, they don't trust easily, especially not teachers and white people, so naturally they don't want to share much about their own lives just yet.

Anyway, the point of all this rambling is that today we read several poems from Simon Ortiz's book and then we all went outside and sat in the medicine wheel painted bowery (pow wow grounds) outside my classroom. The temperature today was about -5 with wind chill. They were not very happy with me. But it was super fun. I love being a crazy teacher sometimes. They did some pretty good writing too:

"My ass is cold sitting on the yellow of the medicine wheel.
I see the white on the ground.
I see the brown of the grass dying as I sit out here on the cold.
The noise of white cracking as I walk through the cold.
The sun shining down on me as I write in the cold.
My hands are going to fall off as I write through the cold."

"With a depressing look the the tree branches move back and forth from the force of the wind"

"It feels like I'm at a wake. Too cold to write so laters.

"I think I'm getting old with the weather that's so cold.
Wind blowin', just last night it was snowin'.
So it creeped up on us like a mole.
Up is dark, dark as coal.
Down is hard, crunchy, white, blowin', but it's only snow,
but it's still flows from up high and rolls down low.
I sit and shiver
the branch on the tree quivers as I shiver
my liver has never been so shivered."
(Elias is a rapper-- he can't write without rhyming)

Happy 2008

Why does going back to school tomorrow after two and a half weeks feel like the first day all over again? Only worse than the first day because there's already a stack of uncorrected papers and unfinished work to be dealt with. I don't feel like a teacher right now. I expect that I won't until first period tomorrow when I'm alone with a room full of 15 year olds once again. This is such a strange profession...

Break was nice. Too short for me, but probably too long for the kids. Driving away from Minneapolis was a little tough, it's hard not to imagine the other lives I could be living right now- one of which would be in MN and filled with family and old friends- not to mention Caribou Coffee, preppy Uptown bars, and other perks of city life!

I'm very glad I decided to drive back to SoDak on Friday, however, so that I could look forward to getting here and socializing with lots of familiar faces for a couple days instead of just dreading work on Monday.

Work. Not just work, Teaching. I'm trying to find a renewed sense of possibility right now. I think mine is sick. Students are dropping out left and right, scheduling for second semester is going to be just as nightmarish as it was for first, and everyone seems to think this is normal. So I need to remember that I can still do good things in my room and that I can expand my circle of influence to help my students. I need to remember that I'm not just here to make it through two years so I can be a TFA alum with an impressive resume. I need to be here for the students. I need to work harder for them. I need to be as idealistic and determined every day as I was on the first day.

How's that for a New Year's resolution?

Anyway, going back to work will be fun. I'll be happy to see my kids safe and back in school. I'm excited (and overwhelmed) to plan and start new classes next semester including Literature and a new ACT prep course. Also I'm excited about the brand new pack of colorful white board markers I bought over break :) Sometimes its the little things....

Teacher Christmas List

Inspired by a few other teachers posting Christmas lists and one of the most frustrating days of my life, here are some things I would like for Christmas:

Schedules for my students and rosters for my classes next semester that make sense
Just a little bit of appreciation and positive feedback
A stronger professional community (TFA and beyond) and much more help with what I'm doing
Graded papers and an updated tracking system
Some organization in my life and my classroom
Enough make-up work returned to me to pass a few key students
A long term plan for next semester
Increased productivity during prep time and after school
A list of books to read next semester, plus many copies of the books themselves
A qualified special ed and literacy teacher
An endless supply of white board markers
A silent pencil sharpener (or self sharpening pencils)
"Because" "would" "should" "just" "kind of" "probably"-- all spelled correctly all of the time
Students who love to read
Students who are safe and loved in and out of school
A much bigger house
A Starbucks/coffee house with wireless internet that I can walk to


That all said, in the spirit of not focusing on all negative things, here's a few things I'm thankful for.
I'm thankful that I don't feel anxious every morning and that some days I actually have fun with my students.
I'm thankful that I have pretty much absolute power to make curriculum decisions in my classroom.
I'm thankful for my classroom library
I'm thankful for students who come to school and want to learn and make me laugh
I'm thankful for other teachers who blog
I'm thankful for new friends who feel like old friends
I'm thankful for old friends on G-chat and in person
I'm thankful that I'm here and have the opportunity to be a part of this movement
I'm thankful that I am able to share my experience with you (and I promise to keep it up and increase frequency and quality in the future)

test bias

How's this for a classic example of tests written to favor middle class suburban students:

"The city council is considering an ordinance banning cycling on all sidewalks. Consider the effects such an ordinance would have, and decide whether you support or oppose the measure. Then, write an essay in which you express and support your opinion on the issue."


What??? Some of my students have probably never SEEN a sidewalk! And kids around here to not have/ride bikes. This is strait out of our brand new language arts text books. You'd think they'd be getting better about this by now. Something else that kills me about these books is that is comes with a separate soft cover book called a "Multicultural Reader". As in, "we think literature from other cultures is so important that instead of putting it in the text book we put it in a flimsy little separate workbook." jeez. What worries me is that the text books are written by the same company that writes the test.

Looking for a little Gemütlichkeit in South Dakota

I miss this...So, to satisfy the craving for Glühwein that I've been having since the end of November, I'm having a little Weihnachtsfest in my trailer on Wednesday. I even made Lebkuchen, or attempted to-- it's pretty close if not exactly the real thing, I think it will adequately compliment the wine at least.

It's winter here. How did that happen so soon? There are inches of snow on the ground. My nose is always running, my lips are always chapped, and last week I fishtailed my car into a ditch. It doesn't get much more winter than that.

My students are either more subdued because of the weather or more out of control, depending on the student and the day. Classes are going fine. Kids seem to be disappearing into thin air, however. I'm not sure where they go, but they aren't in school. My classes are tiny, sometimes 3 or 4 students in a period. The average the last week or so has been a total of 24 kids spread across four class periods, that's out of about 46 originally enrolled. That's little. Too little. I feel crazy saying that I want bigger class sizes, but I do! It's just not fun with four kids, there's no energy, there's no discussion, there's no group work. It's basically tutoring. Plus I'm bored teaching the same lesson four times to five kids when I could just teach it once to 20 kids and be done with it. I've requested fewer sections of my classes next semester. We'll see if I live to regret my whining here ;)

Other stuff at school....

Basketball season has started and it is a HUGE deal. I'm not sure that I can convey to you what a huge deal basketball is out here, but let's just say- it's huge. Tons of my students are on the team and I'm hoping that that's going to motivate them to get their work done and keep their grades up for the season. Meanwhile, I'm going to be attending a whole lot of b-ball games in the near future.

Also, Christmas is apparently a pretty huge deal too. I wasn't quite expecting this since, I don't know, it's a federally run school! Not to mention that it's an Indian school. How the over the top cheesy Christmas decorations mesh with that I'm not sure, but everyday when I walk into school there is some new garland or tree or lights or inflatable snowman in the commons, it's weird. I guess being PC doesn't apply out here.... Anyway, there will be no Christmas in my classroom. We're working on a unit on writing assessments, so all they're getting from me for Christmas is a test! ha!

Today they put up a real pine tree and I couldn't help but smile at the thought of a European pagan tradition being Christianized, brought over here, and making it's way into another native culture, it makes a nice circle in a way!

Only six school days until Christmas break! And boy am I ready. I like teaching and all, and it's not like I'm generally THAT stressed out, but I do feel very very ready for a break about now. It's going to be so nice to spend two weeks at home to see friends and family and get some planning done for next semester. I'm ready to rock my literature classes- or I will be by the end of break!

Happy Holidays!

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/12/us/12international.html?ref=education


Whoa! They actually mention NAFSA by name!!! props to KCISSS

This article makes me miss my old job a little bit....

http://www.nytimes.com/pages/education/edlife/index.html

That and at least at that job I didn't get ten people telling me they wish I would just not show up so they could have a good day.

I'm not a fan of 14 year olds today.

Week 10

Can I really have been teaching for 10 weeks now? Was I ever not a teacher? I feel like I can't remember a time when I didn't go by Ms.

This week has been pretty good. And pretty bad. Kinda like all of my weeks. I'd say mostly good on this one though. Kids have been making me laugh a lot lately and I've been having fun joking around with them. I'm starting to feel that some of them at least genuinely like me. At least I'm assuming that the girls who come hang out in my room after school even when they don't have work must like me a little bit. Persuasive writing is turning out to be more fun than expected. What made it for me anyway was a student, trying to incite me, saying that he was going to write his essay about how only native teachers should be aloud to teach at our school and I said, "Yes! That's a great topic. I totally agree." The look of disappointment and shock on his face was priceless. Then we had a short discussion about why there aren't enough native teachers, but I don't think I managed to convince any of them that they should become teachers. Not yet anyway.

On Monday a TFA program director came and observed my classroom. I mentioned in my last post not really feeling like I was being supported by TFA, I should probably explain. It isn't their fault, the person who should be my program director was in a roll over car accident toward the beginning of school and has been back and forth to her home in St. Louis getting treatment for back injuries. South Dakota is a very tiny TFA corps, and only has two program directors, so now we're down to one. Meeting with him on Monday was a very good thing. I needed a big push in the right direction in my teaching. A lot of it was stuff I knew I should be doing, but wasn't. I needed someone to be there to hold me to high expectations as a teacher because my school definitely does not.

So I'm trying. I'm tracking data and unveiling big goals the way a TFA corps member should be. We'll see how much it helps my students. For now the TFA teaching model is the only one I know, so I may as well try to do it as best as I can.

Last weekend we had a TFA professional development meeting in Pierre and there were a couple recruiters there from the national office to give a presentation on working for them after the corps experience. For a non-profit, TFA is absurdly corporate. Basically their plan is to take over the country and then the world. And that is hardly a hyperbole. Don't believe me? Check out their growth plan. And their plan to take over the world. It's a pretty incredible organization whether you think it's a good organization or not, you have to be blown away by the strategy and efficiency. I have vague ambitions of working for TFA Minneapolis, or better yet, TFA Berlin sometime in the future.

As for life outside of teaching.... hahahahahaha, as if.

Just kidding, there's a little more than that. There was a pretty rockin' TFA Halloween party a few weeks back. And I went on a very spontaneous weeknight try to Rapid City to see a production of Evita with some other teachers last week. This weekend I'm going to Omaha and Lincoln and I cannot tell you how excited I am to see the inside (or outside) of a shopping mall!

I hope you're all doing well and that this post at least somewhat satisfies your burning desire to know what life is like out here on the rez, feel free to comment if you have questions or there is something you want to hear about!

So about that teaching thing...

Have you reached the disillusionment phase yet? asked a friend who recently completed her 2 years as a corps member in NYC. Yeah, I'd say I may be just about there. I'm not sure. I am sure that I need some kind of boost in my classroom really soon. The end of this week will be the end of the quarter and finally the end of my memoir unit that really should have ended a couple weeks ago. I'm hoping that the accomplishment of completing a final draft of a piece of writing will motivate my students and me. I'm also hoping that they actually complete a final draft this week....

For whatever reason I am required by my school to teach one semester of composition followed by one semester of literature. This seemed like a fine enough idea when i was planning and struggling to break down state standards, but in practice i am struggling with the separation. It's hard to be excited about writing when you aren't reading any good writing. The two just go hand in hand. And these kids have so little exposure to any kind of writing, much less good writing that they have no context for what their own writing should look like. The first time i asked them what they needed the most help with to become a better writer the vast majority of them said "writing neater" or "spelling". Which, if you know me at all you could probably guess are the two things i am absolutely least concerned about in writing. I'm not sure that i've managed to teach them very much about writing so far, but i consider it a step in the right direction that when i asked the same question last week i got responses like, "Thinking of good topics", "Knowing where to begin and end my sentences" and "organizing ideas in my writing". So maybe at least they have a better idea of what we're shooting for. I think that a lot of things are going to change when I reteach this course next semester. Next year I may even ignore the course title and teach an integrated language arts reading/writing class all year. No one is actually keeping track of what I do in my room anyway. Most days I feel like I could be teaching underwater basket weaving in my room and no one would know or care- that's about the level of support I feel like I have from my school or TFA right now.

Some days I feel like my class is a huge waste of my time and my students, or even worse, that I'm doing more harm than good and just confusing them or making them feel worse about their writing or something equally awful. I'm sometimes not sure that I have the patience, energy, and passion necessary for this job. I've discovered that my level of excitement and engagement with the material needs be be at minimum 100% to get even 10% engagement from my students, and a lot of days I'm just not there, especially when I'm scrambling to come up with the material day to day without always having a bigger vision of where this fits or why it's important. There have been plenty of times in my life when I have felt like I'm not doing the best job, but it's never been as deeply upsetting as it is here. What's more upsetting is that a lot of the time I just don't know what else I could do to improve. I should be working harder I guess, reaching out and seeking more resources.

The bigger difficulty is maintaining the drive to want to work any harder. Lately I'm feeling more content to settle with how i'm doing now and the amount of work that I'm doing now. I'm just not sure that a whole lot more work on my part would make much more than a little difference for my students. It's very emotionally draining to care deeply about them and feel like I'm constantly failing them. It's much easier to step back, get by with minimal planning, and say- well at least I'm doing more than the awful teacher they had last year, and leave it at that. I think that there must be some balance in there somewhere where I am able to care about them and work hard, but still get 8 hours of sleep and not have nightmares about students and lesson plans. I've sort of swung from one end the other, and am not sure where I will land. I want to be a good teacher and a stellar corps member. I also would like to preserve some part of myself out here and not be too burnt out to even consider teaching as a profession beyond these 2 years.

I think that I am somewhat confident that I will be able to do this. At least that I can continue to oscillate without getting stuck in either extreme. I'm writing a blog at least, so that's a step in the right direction! I hope that I will find inspiration and get excited about my curriculum again. I'm worried that it won't happen until next semester when I get to teach literature, but we'll see. Persuasive writing can be exciting too, I just haven't put enough thought into that next unit yet, I need to start reading more essays and editorials.

Part of the difficulty with the whole life balance thing out here is that it feels much of the time like there isn't any life other than school... It's either school, the inside of my tiny trailer, or staring at cows and hills.... Ok, that may be a little extreme. There are the other corps members out here who are pretty fantastic, I just wish that we saw each other more often and that everyone was less stressed and exhausted.

There is also the Lakota culture and the modern culture of life on the Rez which is continually fascinating/frustrating to me. I think this post is to long to write all my thoughts on that right now. Part of the reason I haven't been blogging is the overwhelming amount of stuff I am thinking about and encountering every day that I feel very strongly about. I hardly ever know where to begin.

But I'm teaching writing now, so I should be writing more, not less. I will endeavor to write much more and be more specific and less abstract than this has been.

In the Badlands

Freshmen Warriors Homecoming Float

DSCN1226
Originally uploaded by annieswims05

Week 1: 9th Grade Counts!!

I'm kind of in love with my classroom....































Which is a good thing because I spend just about every waking hour in it right now. Teaching is fun! and hard! and scary! and I might be messing up everything and failing them completely, but I love them and right now I kind of want to spend every minute of every day trying to figure out how to teach them. Except that I also want to sleep, and catch up with friends, and do my laundry.... Thankfully God made weekends. Sadly however this one is just about over and I have so many stories to tell, but no energy to tell in here just yet.

I'm about to start a new week- week two of their Freshman year of high school, what is that cooky new English teacher going to make us do this week? Stay tuned...

1st Day Eve

Almost there... Tomorrow there will be students in the new high school building for the very first time!!! woo!!! There will be orientation activities and dedication ceremonies going on all day, so I don't have to actually teach, just go over the handbook with a small group. BUT there will be kids. This past week has been a mad dash to get the building ready. It's still kind of far from it, but oh well I guess. We were finally able to start moving in on Tuesday and spent every day hauling stuff from storage to the new high school. Teaching is a lot more manual labor than I expected.

I managed to stay late in the evenings and get my own room put together as well. It's wonderful :) Having a classroom is the best feeling. In service had been getting me kind of down, but my mood has improved dramatically since getting into a room. I'll take some pictures this week so you can all share in the magic. I have a classroom library! I scrounged up some really cool shelves out of storage and spray painted them. I was completely bright orange for a day, but it's totally worth it. It looks awesome. I still don't exactly know what I'm doing... I have a lot of things to work out systems for. There is going to be bit of controlled chaos happening for a while, but I think I can figure it out as I go. I don't really need to sleep EVERY night anyway.

This is going to be fun...

horses in mist

field
Originally uploaded by mistubako

Once again, not my picture. But there are five horses that have been hanging out around school campus lately that look like these horses except there is one extra white one usually leading the pack. The other morning as we were walking to in-service they came galloping out of the mist toward us and veered off across the football field. It was strangely dreamlike.

One of these days I'm going to make friends with someone around here who will let me ride their horses. For those of you who don't know me well, I was mildly (ok, very) obsessed with horses around 5th-8th grade. I haven't actually ridden since then, but my pipe dream out here is to become an amateur barrel racer- I'll let you know how that goes ;)

Rosebud Fair

This picture is not actually from Rosebud Fair, but I can assure that the children there were equally adorable. The Tiny Tots portion of the pow wow involved tiny little guys like these in full regalia running and jumping and dancing their little hearts out, it was too precious for words. I am sooooo jealous of the little girls in Jingle dresses. It's like the dream I never knew I had as a small child to wear a fancy dress that jingled when I danced. The older dancers are pretty awesome too, and the drumming and singing is amazing. I still can't quite believe that I'm here.

The whole fair was really fun, I kinda wish it were every weekend. People were there from far and wide. I was a little sad that I don't know any of my students yet, because I'm sure most of them were there. It was kinda like county fairs back home, only not at all. There is a carnival with rides and games, rodeos, and an arena for pow wows surrounded by stalls selling delicious food like Indian Tacos and fry bread. Mmmmm.

We had Friday and today off of inservices for the fair- I'm not exactly sure why we needed today off since the fair ended yesterday, but I'm not asking questions. I would like to say that I was especially productive this weekend and did lots of planning... but clearly that is not the case. We did have our first "Professional Learning Community" meeting on Saturday and it was actually good to go to a TFA type session again. I never thought I would miss CS sessions at institute, but oh I do. Everyone else now has a week of teaching under their belts.... I want to teach! I'm going to be super good about getting my act together and planning the first few weeks of school so I can not be quite so stressed out once I start. I hope.

Blue Eyes

Today in in-service we watched the video Blue Eyes about Jane Elliott, a teacher who divided her class by eye color back in the 60s to teach them about discrimination and now does workshops for adults around the same idea. I'm sure lots of you have seen it before. Anyway, this was followed by a round robin sharing of everyones reactions and personal experience with prejudice. I've watched/read similar things and had similar discussions before, but this was the first time I had that discussion in a room where I was actually in the ethnic minority. Still not by much, the room was probably 1/3 white, 2/3 native. It was interesting and I have lots to say about it, but I'm sleepy and all talked out, for now I just wanted to share this story that one man told us and I thought was great-

A native man was traveling around the country and came to a city where he went to a diner that had a sign on it saying "No colored people allowed". He went in, sat down and ordered coffee. The manager said to him, "We don't serve colored people here." The man looked around and saw that he was the only brown skinned person in the room and continued to sit there and order his food. The manager said again, "No colored people allowed in here." Finally the native man went up to the manager and said, "When I was born, I was brown. When I am angry, I am brown. When I'm cold, I am brown. When I'm sick, I am brown. And when I'm dead, I'll be brown. When you were born you were pink. When you are angry you are red. When you are cold you are blue. When you are sick you are green. When you are dead you'll be purple. And you think that I am the colored person??"

Hehe. clever.

Settling in

The teacher in-services continue this week and are increasingly dull and frustrating because we can't get into our classrooms still. The positive side is that we have so long to get to know other teachers and the school community before we have to start teaching. It definitely takes some time for people here to warm up to newcomers, they seem to be feeling us out and watching us carefully, but we're all getting more comfortable with each other bit by bit. I can certainly see now that it's going to take the first several weeks for my students to get used to me and even begin to respect and trust me.

Most of the other schools on Rosebud had their first day today. ah! They only had a week and a half or so of training stuff so they haven't been out here that long. It's nice that we have time to settle in and get to know our surroundings a bit more. Our trailer is beginning to look downright homey. Katie and I took a little three hour trip to the nearest Target (where am I????) on Saturday and bought one of just about everything there. Book cases, curtains, frames, a fantastic red couch cover. Here's a
little collage of our trailer:

There's still plenty to be done, mostly painting, but I like it so far. It's good to have a place to come home to that feels normal and livable and less like the crazy alien planet I otherwise feel like I'm living on.

Friday night we went out in Valentine, Nebraska- about 50 miles away, but also the nearest bars. There had been a rodeo earlier that night and the bar was packed full of cowboys. No kidding honest to goodness cowboys wearing white hats, wrangler jeans, boots, and wild colored shirts. I kept saying I felt like I was at a bar in DC that was having a cowboy theme party-- except that it was real! So crazy that I'm living here, and yet so great. The male/female ratio out here is probably something like 5/1 which makes for lots of uncomfortable situations with the opposite sex (of all ages) who seem to have been waiting for a fresh batch of young teachers to come to town so they could have their pick. yikes. It's going to be an interesting year...

Saturday night was a TFA party at a house in Mission which felt considerably more normal and similar to most parties I have attended. Once again, teachers are great people :) I'm looking forward to meeting more second, third, and fourth year TFAers and of course more time hanging out with the greatest '07 corps.

This coming weekend is Rosebud fair, a huge Pow Wow/ Rodeo/ Carnival. We have off Friday and Monday for the festivities. Which means I only have to make it through three more days of training before the weekend! woo!

Teacher In-Services

Ever wonder what your teachers did in the last few weeks and days before school started? Well now I know. They sit through endless all day in-service meetings about test data and school policies and state standards. I have so very much to do, it's kind of frustrating to have to sit through so many meetings. But I'm going to stop being negative. There is some good information. Certainly knowing about testing and where the kids and they school is at is very important, and this school as got some serious work to do. And it's exciting to meet all the teachers and administrators and start getting to know the people I'll be working with every day. It seems to be a good bunch. It's very mixed between native and non-native. One thing people around here are good at is laughing a lot. Humor is a huge part of the culture, so at least long boring power points are occasionally interrupted with jokes poking fun of people and laughing all around.

Everything is a little bit chaotic right now. There's no class schedule. They're still missing some teachers (if you have any interest in teaching P.E. or Industrial Arts in South Dakota let me know). Oh, and we can't get into the new high school building yet because it didn't pass the final inspection and they're doing more work on it. So all of the desks, tables, books, computers, and materials that belong in the high school are currently still in the gym of the elementary school. yikes! And there's still no word on when we will be able to get into our classrooms to set up. But I'm going with the flow.

Meanwhile I'm supposed to be planning my classes... setting goals, making long term plans and assessments, writing the first Unit plan and lessons for the first weeks. Ah! I'm not quite freaking out yet because there is still nearly four weeks. But I see a little bit of flipping out in the near future.


I'm also beginning to realize now the things that I took for granted at institute. Don't get me wrong, institute was a mildly painful process, but there were hundreds of people there with a common mission to constantly remind each other what we're working for and why we're doing this. Being here is much more isolating and while all the teachers at the school clearly want what's best for the students, they come from a variety of education backgrounds and have drastically different mindsets. It's very easy to be overwhelmed with sudden attacks of "What the heck I'm I doing here???? I have no idea what I'm doing!!!" Although, in many ways it's nice to not be constantly labeled as TFA. Here we're just first year teachers who need lots and lots of help.

So that's my teaching rant, now to back up a little to life in general- The trailer is nice. I'm not feeling faint or nauseated or anything like that. We're pretty squished with three of us and zero storage space, but we're managing. We have central air!

Last weekend a large group of us went camping at Lake Angastora. It was fun. We went and saw the Wind Caves and went swimming in the lake and were ridiculously silly I love it. I love teachers.
On the whole I'm very happy to be here. I've been going running with my roommate Katie in the evenings and it is so beautiful and peaceful and... open here. I love the space. I will try to take some pictures soon. We're going to make a trip to Rapid City this weekend to buy some shelving and paint and fabric to cover the somewhat hideous sofa we inherited. I'll post pictures once it's all put together and cozy.

I'm ready to push through the next few weeks of meetings and preparations so I can make it to the good part- teaching the kids! It's going to be great.